EDITORIAL
Min Aung Hlaing has been thrown a lifeline by China and is now under pressure to show results, but his planned election is growing less feasible by the day.
The rule of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has been one big improvisation. A fresh election will happen in a year, he said on the day of the 2021 coup, later calling his new junta a “caretaker” administration. Yet, he has spent the last four years playing for more time.
The language of the military’s own constitution has been twisted to the point of absurdity to justify repeated six-month extensions to the state of emergency, which provides the junta’s dubious legal basis. Min Aung Hlaing may have thought that time was on his side in a war against a crowd-funded, volunteer-led resistance movement that lacks the resources of a conventional state.
However, the junta is entering its fifth year with dramatically less territory, money and resources than it started out with. In the last year it lost two regional military command centres and swathes of strategic territory on the Chinese border in Shan and Kachin states, and along the Bay of Bengal in Rakhine State. The regime has also surrendered control of mines, forests and other natural resource sites that have financed military rule for decades.
Meanwhile, the gas is running out at the offshore Yadana field – formerly Myanmar’s top foreign currency earner – and the junta has overwhelmingly failed to secure fresh investment in the country’s energy sector. As a result, the lights are going out all over Myanmar, and we may not see them on again in the junta’s lifetime.
Yet, the senior general has some cause for cheer. After weathering China’s disapproval for many months over his administration’s failure to clamp down on cyber scam centres, he was thrown a lifeline in August.
Beijing seemingly panicked when the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army overran Lashio, the northern Shan town that straddles a key highway to China and hosted the military’s North Eastern Command headquarters. The loss of Lashio cast doubt on the survival of the junta, whose leader appears to have few real fans in Beijing, but which remains China’s preferred national counterpart.
While attracting plenty of sympathy, the rival National Unity Government was always a tough sell internationally. Operating largely in exile, while the junta occupies the halls of Nay Pyi Taw, the NUG may have reminded Western leaders of the disastrous offshore cabinet of Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó, whose international legitimacy ended up counting for little in a world where possession is nine tenths of the law.
However, the NUG’s limited engagements with the West were seemingly enough to put off Beijing, which views Myanmar as part of its backyard. Thinking it was better off with the devil it knows in the form of Min Aung Hlaing, China threw heavy fetters on the MNDAA and its fellow Three Brotherhood Alliance member, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army. These came in the form of crippling crossborder trade blockades and ramped up military aid to the junta.
These measures were enough to redraw the battle lines. In August, the Brotherhood seemed poised to march on the major city of Mandalay, but in more recent months the MNDAA and TNLA have made peace overtures at Beijing’s behest. The MNDAA has gone on to agree a truce with the regime, which according to some sources requires the armed group to gradually withdraw from Lashio. Although the regime continues its losing streak elsewhere in Myanmar, it has been relieved of a possibly existential threat.
Yet, this reprieve may be short-lived. After extending the junta a lifeline, China likely expects results – and it has been clear about what that means.
Beijing’s envoys have become champions of Min Aung Hlaing’s planned election, where the opposition will effectively be banned and basic freedoms curbed. Some analysts say China is hoping Min Aung Hlaing will be replaced as leader after the election or at least have his power diluted, due to the bar in the constitution on the same person being both president and commander-in-chief. Regardless, it has likely grown tired of the junta chief’s emergency rule and wishes to see Myanmar put on a superficially sounder constitutional footing.
But while there are many ways to rig elections, they are still mammoth practical exercises that require well-staffed polling stations to be rolled out across hundreds of towns and thousands of villages. Their preparation also requires the assistance of ward and village-level administrations that have been steadily uprooted by resistance attacks since the coup.
There has been a flurry of independently produced maps that purport to show the relative territorial “control” exercised by the regime and resistance groups. These maps tend to run roughshod over the nuances of guerrilla conflict, and are more works of advocacy than analysis. A more convincing measure of the junta’s slipping control was provided by its census late last year. The count could be fully conducted in just 145 of Myanmar’s 330 townships. Meanwhile, 127 townships were only partially covered, while census takers were unable to set foot in the remaining 58 due to “significant security constraints”.
The population count was meant to provide the basis for a new voter list. However, with the census enumerating only 32.2 million people out of an estimated national population of 51.3 million, the voter list will be highly incomplete. This is awkward for a regime that has hyped up the intended rigour and accuracy of the list, after dismissing the National League for Democracy’s 2020 election win on the spurious basis of massive voter registration “errors”. Moreover, if townships are too unsafe for a census, they would surely be out of the question for the far greater logistical challenge of an election.
The junta has intimated that it would hold the vote later this year, pending greater “stability and peace”. However, several months into the annual dry season, it has failed to mount a serious counteroffensive to reverse its biggest losses in Rakhine, Kachin and northern Shan states, while the powerful Arakan Army is pushing beyond Rakhine into central Myanmar. Although the regime has regained some ground elsewhere – for instance in Kayah State and southern Shan – the broader trajectory points towards its terminal decline.
In recent days there have been anonymously sourced reports that Min Aung Hlaing is considering a further postponement of the election to early next year, which could push the limits of Beijing’s patience. These reports await official confirmation, and should be treated with caution until then, but they match Min Aung Hlaing’s overall predicament. Too proud or blinkered to admit to the catastrophic run of mistakes that began four years ago, and therefore unwilling to make any meaningful political concessions, the senior general is quickly running out of road and nearing the edge of a precipice.
