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New age rebels winning the fight in Myanmar
By BERTIL LINTNER is a Swedish journalist, author and strategic consultant > FEBRUARY 25, 2020.
As Myanmar’s government sues for peace, its autonomous military, the Tatmadaw, faces a new type of insurgency it seems increasingly ill-prepared to counter and combat. Myanmar’s “new” insurgents are highly mobile and, unlike the country’s older generation rebel groups, maintain few fixed positions, using instead hit-and-run attacks that have rendered the Tatmadaw’s traditional frontal assaults increasingly ineffective.
The situation is in many ways similar to the one the United States faced in the Vietnam War: an invisible enemy which strikes from the shadows, making counterattacks more likely to hit civilians than enemy combatants.
That’s all conspiring to undermine the Tatmadaw’s leverage and clout against ethnic armed groups that rely on local population support to sustain their insurgent fights. Previously, Myanmar’s myriad rebel groups aimed to control large swathes of territory protected by fixed and often well-armed installations.
The Karen National Union (KNU), long firmly entrenched on the Thai border, maintained several bases along the Moei river and a well-fortified headquarters with permanent buildings housing its civilian administration and military command units. Those positions eventually became easy targets for the Tatmadaw, causing one after another to fall under traditional assaults in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Kachin Independence Army (KIA), situated in the country’s north, once controlled most of the northern Kachin state apart from major towns, with the rebels running their own administrative buildings, schools, clinics and military bases.
When the KIA signed a ceasefire agreement with the Tatmadaw in February 1994, the camps it still maintained after losing several positions were even more fortified with an entirely new headquarters, which later became a town, established at Laiza. The once powerful Communist Party of Burma previously controlled a 20,000-square-kilometer territory in Shan state, most of which is now in the hands of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the country’s largest and best-armed ethnic army.
Myanmar’s new ethnic armies, namely the Arakan Army (AA) in western Rakhine state and the Ta’ang National Liberation. Army (TNLA), an ethnic Palaung group in northern Shan state, were initially trained by the KIA but have since opted for a different kind of resistance.
The AA and TNLA are highly mobile forces which, at least for the time being, do not openly strive to control territory but rather carry out demoralizing guerrilla attacks and then withdraw after accomplishing their missions. Neither group has any permanent military bases, operating instead through temporary hideouts, a mobility which allows them to strike targets where the Tatmadaw are often caught off guard.
The AA, now the most active and hardest-hitting rebel army in the country, has carried out attacks not only from its stronghold areas in northern Rakhine state but also as far south as the town of An on the main highway that connects Rakhine state with the rest of Myanmar.
In August last year, the TNLA, AA and Kokang rebel allies staged a surprise attack on the elite Defense Services Technological Academy in the garrison town of Pyin Oo Lwin, situated only 67 kilometers east of Mandalay. The TNLA, founded in 2009, has an estimated 5,000 fighters under arms while the AA, established in the same year, has recently grown to a strength of at least 3,000 fighters and perhaps even more.
Unlike the leaders of the “old” rebel armies who have fought state forces for decades, the TNLA’s and AA’s commanders are young, dynamic and do not carry the same baggage as battle-hardened warlords, many of whom now have substantial business interests.
The TNLA and AA first saw serious armed action in 2015, when they fought against the Tatmadaw alongside the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in Kokang, a district in northeastern Shan state populated by ethnic Chinese.
Analysts described that warfare as some of the heaviest ever seen in the history Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts, with the Tatmadaw deploying airpower and heavy artillery on an unprecedented scale.The AA later moved its area of armed resistance to Rakhine state, where it has gained considerable support from the state’s Buddhist ethnic Rakhine majority population.##
