A year since the coup, ethnic armed groups are at the forefront of Myanmar’s civil war

Twelve months after Myanmar’s military seized power again, armed ethnic groups are central to the country’s continuing resistance, reports Allegra Mendelson in Phnom Penh

Members of the People’s Defence Force (PDF) at a training camp in an area controlled by ethnic Karen rebels in Myanmar (Reuters)

In the year since the military staged a coup, Myanmar has descended into conflict, with fighting breaking out in all corners of the country and the death toll climbing each day.

While Myanmar is no stranger to military takeovers, for the first time in the country’s history, a nationwide armed resistance has emerged, officially declaring war on the military regime in early September.

But while many of those who have recently picked up arms are new to Myanmar’s armed struggle, other groups, known as the Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs), have been at war with the military for decades.

“This is not the first time. The first coup happened in 1962 and then again in 1988. This is the third time. So for the EAOs, we have experience from the past,” said Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the spokesperson for the Karen National Union, the political wing of the Karen National Liberation Front (KNLA), one of the most powerful EAOs in the country.

“But this coup is different from the past – this time the military did not expect that the people would fight against them with armed struggle.”

Ethnic armed groups like the KNLA have been central to the newly-formed armed resistance movement, known as the People’s Defence Force (PDF). Located in ethnic areas, EAOs have helped shelter, train and arm the growing number of people fighting back against the junta. The influx of new recruits means many of these EAOs are the largest they have ever been, making them strong opponents to the junta as new conflict continues to break out.

Based in eastern Kayin State, the KNLA was one of the first groups to start taking in new recruits after the coup, sheltering dissidents fleeing arrest and training young anti-military protesters to pick up arms.

Tom Kean, senior consultant on Myanmar and Bangladesh at the International Crisis Group, explains that the reason the KNLA, along with other like-minded EAOs, have taken a leading role in the resistance is unsurprising, given their history and structure.

“Historically, they have had the strongest and most-developed positions on federalism and have more of a culture of human rights. There is also this need to maintain primacy and remain the top armed group in their area and so they’re responding to the sentiment within their communities which they hope to represent,” explained Kean.

“And as the resistance movement has gained momentum, it also became the sense that there’s an opportunity here to completely reshape the political system in a way that they wanted for a long time but hasn’t been possible and wouldn’t be possible if we were negotiating with the military.”

Myanmar officially recognises 135 ethnic groups in its national census, but for decades, its dominant ethnic group, the Bamar, which make up nearly 70 percent of the population, enjoyed a level of privilege while ethnic minorities were marginalised and persecuted.

The Bamar have long dominated politics, representing the majority in both the military as well as the National League for Democracy (NLD), the civilian political party ousted during the coup. With little inclusion of other ethnicities, and as more of these groups established their own militias, fighting broke out against the military, with many pushing for a more federal state.

Within the KNLA, new recruits answer to the central command of the ethnic armed group and wear the same uniforms, but are technically separate entities and are required to register with the NUG before they can begin training.

Taw Nee says they instituted this rule to deter the formation of unregulated guerrilla forces, some of which have carried out indiscriminate attacks that have resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties in recent months.

“People who are not registered under NUG, we are not allowing them to have training, because outside of the NUG, when independent PDFs fight against the military they accuse people of being military spies and they kill them and torture them, but this is not in line with international humanitarian law,” explained Taw Nee.

North of Kayin State, in neighbouring Kayah State, the local EAO, the Karenni Army and its political wing the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), have also been working closely with PDF fighters.

The Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) in training (AFP/Getty)

While the Karenni Army had enjoyed a period of relative peace before the coup, the military’s violent crackdown on civilians forced the EAO to re-engage. In the past few months, Kayah State has become one of the epicentres of conflict in the country, following a brutal massacre of at least 30 people on Christmas Eve, which included two aid workers from Save the Children.

“With the coup, we could not avoid going back to armed conflict because the [military] has been crushing down on protesters using force,” said Neineh Plo, member of the KNPP International Alliance Committee and a spokesperson for the group.

“At one point people in our state had to get up and pick up arms to defend themselves.”

However, unlike the KNLA, which was already considered a strong EAO before the coup and has retained its basic structure in the year since, the Karenni Army was previously a much smaller entity with much less manpower. In a report for the International Crisis Group, Kean explained that as more recruits have joined, the KNPP has had to treat the PDF fighters coming to its territory “more as partners than subordinates” and adjust its structure accordingly.

Given the mass influx of new recruits, the Karenni Army formed the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF), as a combined front between the existing EAO and the local PDFs that have formed within the state. There are now around 19 newly-formed battalions within the KNDF, all of which were at one point local PDF chapters, but are now under the same chain of command as the Karenni Army, according to Neineh Plo.

But, while the KNU and the KNPP and their respective armed groups are fighting on the same side as the NUG and maintain a “close working relationship” according to their respective spokespeople, both have so far refrained from formally joining with the shadow government. Instead, they have chosen to maintain their own independent structures and chains of command.

The only EAO to have officially signed an agreement with the NUG is the Chin National Front (CNF), a historically much smaller group based in rural, northwestern Chin State. Today, the group has about 15,000 soldiers under its command, about five or six times its size before the coup, according to CNF spokesperson Salat Htet Ni.

“We have the same purpose and the same vision as the NUG and we both want to fight against the military dictator. We have a policy that if we have the same vision as other political organisations we will cooperate with them and so we decided to join with them,” explained Salat Htet Ni.

However, the difference between formal arrangements with the CNF and more informal arrangements with the KNLA and Karenni Army seems minimal in practice. All three ethnic groups are responsible for carrying out their own training and acquiring their own weapons, with, so far, very little material support from the NUG.

For groups like the KNPP, that have held off signing over part of their autonomy, they are waiting to see whether the NUG holds true to its promises of peace and federalism.

“At the end of the day, a country needs to have a centralised army for national defence. But as of now, we have not yet been able to sit and discuss what kind of army it will be because everyone is busy with fighting,” explained Neineh Plo.

“But this is going to take a while, until we have enough confidence in the new system that can guarantee peace and equality.”

Kean says that this might start to change in the next year with more EAOs, especially those that have been taking on a more aggressive role in fighting the military, starting to form stronger alliances with one another.

“There’s no reason to think there will be a deescalation. And if we look at the trend, the trend is towards closer cooperation and closer relationships [between EAOs],” said Kean.

“But one important thing to note is there are at least 16 other EAOs besides these four, and some of them are to varying degrees sitting on the fence for various reasons. But for most their inclination is to oppose the military.”

Among the EAOs that have yet to engage, is the powerful Arakan Army (AA) in western Rakhine State. The AA had been at war with the central military for two years until an unofficial ceasefire was declared in November 2020.

Up until now, the ceasefire has held, but if the EAO, considered one of the strongest in the country, were to enter into conflict with the junta, this would likely alter the battlefield for both the military and the resistance force, according to Kean.

But with the resistance movement continuing to grow in size and capacity, the military is stretched thin, suffering casualties nearly every day as clashes escalate.

During a state visit from Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen in early January – the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar since the coup – the military’s commander-in-chief- Min Aung Hlaing announced that he had extended a ceasefire with EAOs until the end of 2022.

But few outside the military have given much weight to the supposed ceasefire, given how many clashes had been reported between the military and ethnic armed groups since it supposedly came into effect in October 2021. Taw Nee laughed when he heard about the unilateral extension.

”It was very funny because when Min Aung Hlaing says there is a ceasefire, you need to get ready because when you hear about a military ceasefire what it means is there will be more fighting.”