As the junta’s State Administration Council (SAC) marked the eighth anniversary of Myanmar’s 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), is it worth reflecting on the obvious failures of the peace process over the past 12 years? Not really, and not when the gathering of current and former generals, some regional diplomats, and several leaders of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) was a farcical mockery of anything resembling peace, especially as the Sit-Tat continues its campaign of terror against civilians.
Yet it is important to reflect on what may have worked and how possible lessons can be incorporated into revolutionary mobilization moving forward. There is so much written about the peace process in English, but it is of mixed quality. One of the best analyses is the Institute of Strategy and Policy (ISP) report on International Actors in the Myanmar Peace Process by Aung Thu Nyein in late 2020, which should be at the core of any canon on future peace lessons. And a major retrospective report on the NCA was produced earlier in 2023 by the always reliable Transnational Institute (TNI), one of the few international groups who have maintained a clear moral compass during the past decade.
The entire international engagement with ‘transitional’ Myanmar was a scramble from 2011 onwards, with multiple economic, governance, election, developmental, and peace processes, overlaid with the crisis in Rakhine State in 2012 that resulted in the 2016-2017 campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Armed conflict continued in multiple areas, the countryside was riven with heavily armed insurgent groups, and the Myanmar military was brazenly unrepentant: and yet terms such as ‘post-conflict’ were used with casual flippancy. The main layers of NCA failure have been outlined, perhaps not as exhaustively as they should be, but sufficient for a new generation of diplomats and donors in 2023 to ignore all the problems and use it as a vehicle to animate a new peace process.
The central canard of the NCA was that it was a ‘homegrown process.’ This is hogwash. With over US$250 million in funding from the multi-donor Joint Peace Fund (JPF) and Japan and sundry others, China selling weapons to multiple belligerents, and, according to the Lowy Institute Southeast Asia Aid Map, $17.2 billion in aid projects between 2015 to 2021, it was a wonder any progress was achieved on peace at all.
Unfortunately, many Western donors thought they could program their way out of systematic social cleavages by imposing what were evidently misplaced methods. As filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola said about the production of his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, “We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” Simply replace ‘jungle’ with Naypyitaw and it’s not too far from the NCA situation.
But two important realities shouldn’t be shortchanged. The first is that there was an overwhelming desire for peace, stability, development, and legal and economic justice. That was as evident in Sittwe as it was in Sanchaung, or Hpa-an and Hlaing Thayar. There was a widespread belief in the dedication of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to achieving peace and development, but this faith was not uniformly shared, nor did the actions of her National League for Democracy (NLD) seek to consolidate alliances with multiple political and social forces. Nevertheless, the NLD won a second term in 2020, driven as much by support for Suu Kyi as opposition to the military returning. Yet by then, hope in peace had waned, and trust in the NCA had all but collapsed.
Secondly, there were significant advances in social development on multiple fronts, including freedom of speech, organized labor and local peacebuilders seeking to challenge armed groups of all kinds. The majority of credit for these gains goes to Myanmar individuals and organizations. But it must also be acknowledged that foreign support enabled a fair share of this progress, from multi-donor development to humanitarian organizations and partnerships on everything from agriculture to education. Criticism of foreign peace support shouldn’t tar the good work achieved, or the contributions of foreign taxpayers. This shouldn’t let bad-faith actors off the hook, but it is necessary to discern what worked and what failed.
Any ‘lesson learned’ processes that have a chance of being useful must adopt a future perspective, not a retrospective, angst-ridden cover-up for failure. The anti-SAC resistance, including EAOs, the NUG, civil society, intellectuals, and activists can learn a great deal from the failures of the past, but predominantly to design a viable future. Below are eight (and a half) very general ideas.
Lesson 1: Understand Underlying Grievances
There was not much deep reflection on what kept people in open resistance to the central state, or drove ‘start-up insurgencies’ such as the Arakan Army (AA) and the Ta-ang National Liberation Army (TNLA). Western jargon would call them ‘conflict drivers’, but a more honest articulation is why people continued to struggle even amidst a peace process and greater openness. Many people in ethnic areas distrusted the military as an abusive institution. Intense militarization was thwarting development and driving emigration. Landmines, forced labor and predatory checkpoints didn’t much look like peace.
Longer-term grievances also included a wide range of long-term factors related to natural resource governance, land grabs and displacement, environmental degradation and agribusiness projects, Chinese investments, gold mining, and deforestation. The stark reality of climate-change effects was injected into the peace process late: it must now be a central feature of future processes.
The current resistance and revolutionary action, from the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) to armed revolt, illustrated strongly in 2021 and since that ‘intersectional’ struggles can coexist and work to strengthen each other. It is not about simply removing the military from political power, but establishing a new and more just society. The NCA process was molded by elite interests and old-man thinking and not considerate of a generational change. This revolution is all about a new Myanmar.
Lesson 2: Embrace Plural Perspectives
People in cities cared less about peace in ethnic conflict zones than people in Kachin State or Kayin State did during the NCA. This is understandable if you haven’t been touched by war. But all of Myanmar can be termed ‘conflict affected’ now, and there are multiple lived experiences that must be factored into any peace discussion, without exclusion. Narrow discussion designs merely privilege special interests and create silos of enmity. There are multiple perspectives now to be considered and included in a meaningful way, and innovation for future federalism to be considered.
Gender inclusion was one of the most glaring deficiencies. Consider the “Women Contributing to Peace” exercise in 2019 that found that over 670 women from 383 organizations were working on the peace process, but that actual high-level formal representation was low. Look at the ‘manels’ phenomenon, subject of a unique and powerful Women’s League of Burma (WLB) exhibition in Bangkok in October, that shows male dominance of debate and narrative still thrives, and must be challenged.
Lesson 3: Military Reform Matters
Think of the lesson of the scorpion and the frog crossing the stream. The Myanmar military was always a violent institution that would do anything against its own interests and that of the entire country. The failure to bring it under full civilian control will go down as the NLD’s greatest shortcoming and the one significant core failure of the NCA. The NLD was less a gullible frog than a haughty sloth that simply didn’t perceive the residual menace of the military. The future challenge is daunting: how to end the Sit-Tat’s stranglehold on the body politic once and for all, but also approach how to end multi-generational insurgencies? There needs to be more practical research and modeling pursued in reducing militarization in Myanmar, especially given the explosion of armed actors since the coup: the new generation of think tanks and intellectuals must be adequately supported to pursue this new thinking.
Lesson 4: Foster Multiple Processes, Reject Rigid Timeframes
One of the canards of the NCA was that the process was a train leaving the station; you didn’t want to miss your chance at a seat. But I always thought, “What if it’s the Yangon Circuit Line?” You can jump on any time. The peace architects who created convoluted flow charts and processes have a measure of the responsibility for the dead-end process. But the reality demands that flexibility for multiple approaches, uneven timeframes, and deviations from rigid clauses are essential in Myanmar’s future reality. One of the major gripes amongst NCA ‘signatories’ in late 2019 and up to the coup was how smaller EAOs were holding back larger EAOs. It was blatantly obvious then as now that a rigid NCA approach comes with restraints. This led to constant slowdowns in negotiations, and EAOs being rewarded for continuing to talk with the military or NLD despite the damage to long-term trust these forced engagements often resulted in.
Lesson 5: Size Matters
Peace processes can be a slave to inclusion, losing sight of reality. It was manifestly ridiculous to see micro-EAOs sit at a table on an equal footing with larger groups who had several thousand soldiers, access to conflict commodity chains, and entertained broader if by no means perfect (at times brutally repressive), social representation. It permitted questionably representative ‘ethnic leaders’ to take an oversized seat at peace talk tables. Many articulate Chin leaders colonized NCA discussions, but their actual security threat to the central state was almost non-existent.
Powerful northern EAO groups in Kachin and Shan State, which before the coup had the highest troop numbers, were often aloof to formal proceedings beyond strained affairs in Naypyitaw, because of the crucially constraining China factor, but also because they disdained and distrusted Western peace entrepreneurs, almost as much as they did the Myanmar army and the NLD.
Given the proliferation of armed groups post-coup, a great deal of thinking needs to go into planning for layers of negotiation and inclusion: geographic, thematic, armed group size, political organizational type. There isn’t a table large enough to include every armed group in the country now: if a peace conference was convened tomorrow it would be riotous. How much are political and armed actors strategizing into the near future of what a multi-sided peace process will look like that involves large and small PDFs, urban and rural cells, large and small EAOs and those who took the SAC’s side and lost? If there is a perception that the armed conflict is deadlocked, political positions for negotiations are hurtling away from each other, and the economy and social stability are crumbling underfoot, what contingency planning is being formulated?
Lesson 6: Justice and Accountability is Crucial
It may seem impossible to people in Myanmar now that any future political solution would not involve a process of justice and accountability for the SAC’s crimes and those of the resistance forces. Yet this is precisely what happened in 2011: all military sins were swept under the rug of impunity, and the Western liberal conscience was the key enabler. Your friends in Washington, Brussels, and London will happily do it again, and your enemies in Beijing, Tokyo and Canberra will do the same, regardless of how many atrocity crimes are documented. Senior political leaders in the NUG would comply, especially if financial support for reconstruction was pledged.
Yet by now it should be clear how damaging the failure to reckon with war crimes and crimes against humanity is, both for the victims of atrocities and for the strength of political transitions and ensuring armed groups of all kinds are firmly under civilian control and genuinely rights-respecting. From the Sit-Tat to repressive EAOs, the NCA process absolved them all. That should not be allowed in the future.
There is a current trend to laud ‘rebel governance’ and bottom-up federalism as effective anti-SAC initiatives. These are undoubtedly important developments. But they are not all new. There is also a tendency to assume that all residents of an insurgent liberated area are comfortable with the mode of governance. The NUG’s foot-dragging on actual justice for murder, rape and ill-treatment in ‘revolutionary spaces’ does not auger well for future transitional justice initiatives. That is why civil society must be strengthened to openly challenge political and military elites to ensure accountability: those in power and their advisors cannot be trusted, on this issue at least. Some voices will argue that uncovering resistance abuses is destabilizing, but there is clearly a social demand for it now.
Lesson 7: Assemble Accurate Context and Conflict Analysis
A Western colleague recently observed that much of the ‘conflict analysis’ in Myanmar was simply not that: it has been largely ‘context analysis.’ There was literally a misplaced approach to understanding the patterns of armed conflict, and how they intersected with forms of social conflict. There was a missed decade of understanding the military as an institution, its ideals, internal tensions, cohesion, training, weaknesses and above all its actual behavior in warfighting. In retrospect, the study of military members of parliament voting patterns by academics and research outfits was interesting, but also an indulgence and ultimately a distraction. Numerous repurposed peace and governance INGO’s who celebrated the NCA are now ingratiating themselves with various sectors of the anti-SAC resistance as the new buzzwords of ‘governance’ and ‘cross-border aid’ turn Bangkok-based opportunists into instant experts on the Myanmar military. There must be a cleansing of all of this blatantly erroneous analysis that fits a Western donor model, replaced with the hard-nosed realities of a long war and the necessity for the development of future negotiation models.
Lesson 7.5: Study Myanmar, Not South Africa
A new generation of peacebuilders must look within, not outwards. Just stop with the study tours and pointless workshops and bringing opportunists to waste people’s time. It’s a revolution, not a nursing home for peace profiteers.
Lesson 8: Liberal Peace Building Models Are Ill-Suited to Myanmar
The international peace industrial complex utterly failed Myanmar, but it was not due to neglect, but misplaced over-enthusiasm. It would fill a large crater to name the international peace outfits who flocked to the Myanmar programming frenzy, many of whom were a mystery to foreigners, let alone a newly installed NLD member of parliament who had spent 20 years in prison, or a senior military officer who was a psychotic warfighter. It’s not useful to name these organizations here, but all future peace processes should question their utility, and perhaps invest in some retrospective analysis on what some of them actually could achieve in the future in partnership with Myanmar organizations. The NUG and EAOs need to purge themselves of any reliance on foreign advisors, especially those Western mercenaries who did so much damage to the peace process over the past decade.
The future for Myanmar is uncertain, but its prospects for peace should depend on the right mixture of historical clarity and future innovation and emancipation: all the qualities absent in Naypyitaw on Sunday.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar.
