The Military, the Three Brothers, and the Revolution

Since February 2021, Myanmar has been ruled by General Min Aung Hliang, who has appointed himself prime minister. Before the coup, he commanded the Tatmadaw junta, which has controlled Myanmar since the 1962 coup that followed independence from British colonial rule in 1948.

In the twentieth century, the Communists (dominated by the Bamar ethnic group) and ethnic armed organizations fought the military dictatorship, often at odds with one another. Communist resistance held out against the Tatmadaw until 1989 before imploding. In this sense, today’s insurgency did not start in 2021 but is the culmination of a decades-long underground struggle for democracy.

A brief attempt at democratization saw a new government from 2016–2021 led by the liberal National League for Democracy. But the military never relinquished its hold on power. The democratic constitution of 2008 still reserved 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the Tatmadaw — enough to veto constitutional changes.

The military remained a state within a state, without any oversight by the civilian government, retaining extensive powers over the education sector and civil servants, and a monopoly over “national security” matters. This also provided the military with emergency powers to overthrow even the limited elected government, which it exercised on February 1, 2021. As a display of the junta’s control over the judicial system, in December 2022, Myanmar’s former elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison on fabricated corruption charges.

The spark that ignited the Arab Spring is often traced back to December 2010, when Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the seizing of his vegetable stand. In Myanmar, a similar story unfolded when the regime committed a massacre in mid-March 2021, slaughtering dozens of women shop floor leaders in Hlaingthaya, the factory district of the country’s largest city, Yangon. This sparked an unprecedented eruption of anger across the countryside, where most people still live: for the first time, the rural population rose up in support of workers from Yangon. This has formed the basis of a popular uprising — also helping to explain the intensity of the fighting.

“Hundreds of thousands of workers streamed out of the cities and returned to their native villages to organize the revolution there,” Sladnick explains.  “When the regime tried to replicate the suppression tactics that had previously worked in the cities, the masses immediately began to take up arms and fight back. In the center of the country, a new generation emerged that directly supports the People’s Defense Forces (PDF).”

Three of the largest organized resistance groups joined forces and formed the Three Brotherhood Alliance. They are composed of large, more centralized rebel groups amongst a patchwork of local autonomous forces. Their power is strongest in the eastern region of Shan State, where the junta must also contend with both rebel forces and powerful drug cartels. The UN estimates that 25 percent of the world’s opium is produced in Myanmar, and 80 percent of that comes from the Golden Triangle in Eastern Shan State.

Shan State is also home to the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, two of the three “brothers” fighting to topple the junta. Other ethnic Shan militias, previously backed by China and Thailand, paint an even blurrier picture of internal power struggles and a maze of different factions. When the third brother, the Arakan Army, launched an insurgency in Rakhine State in 2019, Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government initially tried appeasing the military by siding with them against the demands of the armed ethnic organizations. Past mistakes like these still strain the relationship between the Brothers and the National Unity Government’s forces in the PDF. But for now, they stand united against General Min Aung Hlaing.

In Sagaing, on the other side of the country bordering India, the struggle has taken on a different character. Here, Sladnick sees a movement that is more reminiscent of a mass revolution supported by the exiled National Unity Government and its armed wing. Sladnick says,

The People’s Defense Forces in Sagaing has universal support. Myanmar’s urban working class expanded greatly in the 2010s but come from the rural mass of the population. They provide much of the funding for PDF groups by sending money back home to their villages. The insurrection in the countryside that started in 2021 was sparked by anger over the massacre of women leading protests in the textile factories of Yangon.

The military used to be able to suppress dissent through punitive expeditions, with whole villages burned to the ground. The most brutal massacres included the Tatmadaw’s retaliatory actions in hundreds of villages like Let Yet Kone and Tar Taing, which were razed to the ground. At least six thousand civilians — 160 of them children — are estimated to have been killed by the junta in 2022 alone, with millions displaced since the 2021 coup.

This adds to the millions already displaced from the military’s decades-long war against ethnic and religious minorities, which culminated in the Rohingya genocide of the 2010s. But the military has now been worn down to the point where local PDF militias have been able to take control of small cities virtually unopposed.

As modern-day Myanmar contains a wide variety of ethnicities, many foreign observers have been quick to label the ongoing insurgency as “ethnically motivated.” Two-thirds of the country’s fifty-five million inhabitants are of Bamar descent, while Shan (9 percent), Karen (7 percent), and Rakhine (4 percent) people are significant minorities. Adding to this impression of a “melting pot” are people of Chinese and Indian descent, Mon people from the south, and the harshly persecuted Rohingya people. But framing the conflict as ethnically motivated is too simple, Sladnick explains.

Things are quickly reduced to ethnically motivated struggles in Western media. This overlooks the fact that all the large rebel factions have declared their offensive to be part of a united Spring Revolution. The common denominator is agreement that the regime needs to be pulled up by the root in favor of a federal democracy. This is the shared vision of the movement that’s gaining traction and spreading from Shan State to the rest of Myanmar — including the Bamar-dominated Burma Valley in the central part of the country.

Protests even started spreading in Rohingya refugee camps, which resulted in the junta specifically targeting Muslim activists during their bloody crackdowns in the cities. This divide-and-conquer approach was met by huge crowds from all backgrounds, who attended their funerals in shows of solidarity.

China’s Shadow

That the deeply unpopular junta has been able to stay in power for three years is in no small part thanks to China. The superpower to the northeast views Myanmar as a strategic partner, even amidst deteriorating relations with many other neighbors. For now, Beijing has been holding off on military intervention — a somewhat surprising move, explains Sladnick.

“Since our revolution started, I have feared that China would directly intervene, and save the Tatmadaw like Russia and Iran did for [Syrian dictator Bashar] al-Assad. But China seems to have somewhat accepted the resistance,” he says.

In Myanmar, rumors even circulated at one point that the government in Beijing had given up on the junta as a stable, long-term partner and started backing the rebels. But this is probably wishful thinking, and may be premature, explains Sladnick:

If China actually backed the rebels, we would have won by now. The insurgency has had some major achievements, not least in Shan State, but the rebellion has yet to reach the largest cities. One of my comrades from a local militia in Loikaw City [in central Myanmar] told me the other day that they have plenty of guns, but not enough ammunition or medical supplies.

In truth, the Chinese intervention, or lack thereof, can be seen through a more pragmatic lens. China has been tacitly allowing black-market weapons to enter Shan State, thus enabling the Three Brothers to seize control of large parts of the region. Some view this as punishment for the government’s inability to clamp down on Myanmar’s notorious scam centers, which have generated billions of dollars for Chinese underworld crime syndicates. A recent crackdown saw numerous centers shut down. It is no coincidence that the weapons also stopped flowing into the hands of the Shan State rebels once this problem was dealt with — pressuring the Brothers into a cease-fire agreement with the government.

“China has given the rebels a lot of leeway, then uses this to force concessions from the Tatmadaw,” Sladnick explains.

This is also evident in the junta’s increased focus on maritime trade. From China’s perspective, one of the strategic benefits of a friendly government in Nay Pyi Taw is access to trading routes in the Bay of Bengal. This is also why the government in Beijing has been pressuring the junta to speed up the construction of a new deep sea port in Rakhine, despite objections from local fishermen who fear it will wipe out their livelihoods.

The same dynamic is on display in the western province of Sagaing, where the Chinese-operated Letpadaung copper mine in Salingyi has been shut down by dissatisfied workers. Like hundreds of thousands of teachers, train workers, and other public servants, the miners have been on a continuous general strike since the 2021 coup. According to one of the miners’ leaders, the junta is now applying pressure to restart work there to appease China.

“If you ask regular people in Myanmar, they have a very clear understanding of this relationship,” Sladnick says:

Everyone sees that the cease-fire in Shan State was necessary because China demanded it. What else could the militias have done? They have been fighting alone for decades, and if they had refused to sign the deal, China would have cut them completely off from the weapons supply. The hope now is that they will continue to fund other resistance groups.

A Desperate Gambit

While things have recently calmed slightly in Shan State, albeit through an uneasy truce, the pressure on the junta remains intense. The Arakan Army has agreed to a cease-fire in Shan State, but has made no such promises in Rakhine, where the fighting continues.

Adding to the Tatmadaw’s woes are new resistance groups jumping into the revolutionary fray. A few weeks after Operation 1027 ended in a temporary cease-fire, the Kachin Independence Army, which has been fighting since 1960, launched Operation 0307 in Kachin State, rapidly seizing control over scores of towns and bases in similar fashion to the Brothers’ Shan State offensive last fall. The Pa-O National Liberation Army (PNLA) has broken the cease-fire in Shan State, while the New Mon State Party has split in Mon State to the south, resulting in large numbers of people joining the resistance. PDF is also making gains in the ethnic Bamar regions, while Kalay on the border with India has been almost completely overtaken by insurgents.

As the junta is weakened, the strategy has been emboldened. PDF forces in central Burma, still largely reliant on homemade weapons, are overrunning towns — a clear indication that the authorities’ resources are diminishing and that its casualties can’t be replaced.

So, how much control has the junta lost? While accurate information can be hard to come by in Myanmar, where internet access has been shut down in large swaths of territory, some analysts estimate that as much as 48 percent of the country is now controlled by resistance groups. Myawaddy on the Thai border was liberated in early April, while a junta push to take back the border town was more recently repelled. A large drone strike was launched against the capital Nay Pyi Taw just a few weeks ago, and while Yangon is still firmly under junta control, its authority could soon deteriorate here as well. In February, the Tatmadaw announced nationwide conscription to bolster its withering ranks.

It’s a desperate gambit,” says Sladnick.

Conscription is hugely unpopular among regular people. It also means that urban middle-class citizens, who could previously pretend everything was fine, are now forced to face the truth. The Tatmadaw has been trying to avoid this measure for the same reasons the regime in Russia is trying to keep people from Moscow and Saint Petersburg out of its war in Ukraine.

Don’t Close the Door

From his base on the Myanmar–Thailand border, Sladnick recently went on a trip to Karenni State. Here, the junta has completely cut off the internet and phones, making Starlink the only window to the digital world. This also meant that his group got to see fighting in areas of the country previously unreported anywhere.

After being delayed for three days due to junta air strikes, they were able to see the dictatorship’s decaying grip on the region. Only four junta bases are still standing outside Loikaw, where Karenni resistance militias and PDF forces are currently advancing. In some of the hill bases captured in February, fresh corpses of junta soldiers still littered the ground, while a trip to the village of Hpa Saung placed them directly in the line of fire. In the small town of Mese, twenty police officer uniforms were still lying in the rubble of the former police station, its owners presumably killed in the final battle to liberate the town. Mese has now been converted into a refuge for civilians fleeing southern Karenni.

But while the progress is steady, things could go a lot faster, Sladnick explains:

The resistance fighters all tell me that they would be able to take over the last regime holdouts in a week if only they had enough ammunition. But every time they advance, they must wait for resupplies. Things aren’t made easier by the fact that every village abandoned by the Tatmadaw forces is heavily booby-trapped, making it impossible for people to return.

This also highlights the paradox of the Myanmar struggle. Despite the continued success — five thousand square kilometers were liberated in March alone, according to researcher Thomas van Linge — the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about them.

It may be that this is a choice. Cooking oil, malaria medicine, bullets, and global attention — everything is in short supply here. There’s even a lack of rain covers for the refugee camps, which makes the seasonal monsoon a few months from now a looming threat.

“I asked one of my comrades what she wanted to tell the world if she had the chance. She said: ‘Don’t close the door on us. Open it!’ There’s enough happening in Myanmar to fill the news every night, but the internet blackout and the wealth of other conflicts around the world means Myanmar is almost invisible to the public,” Sladnick comments.

He feels that the lack of attention could also be related to antiquated notions of Myanmar.

People in the West have this image of Myanmar freedom fighters as rural peasants with an old rifle in their hands. Listen; these people are modern, connected, and acutely aware of the global struggle between fascism and democracy. They are aware of what’s going on in Gaza, Ukraine, and Syria and see themselves as fighting for both national self-determination and social justice around the world. They know that this is part of a larger struggle to prevent the spread of authoritarianism and fascism around the world.

With the looming conscription, the last pretensions of normality under the regime are fading fast. Everyone is forced to take a side — making the conflict even more intense, Sladnick explains.

“I had dinner with my wife’s former coworker the other day, a real estate agent with a very sweet demeanor and an agreeable personality. Not exactly the type of person you’d ever expect to be an armed rebel. I said, ‘The revolution is scary.’ He replied, ‘Yes, but living under the regime is scarier.’ I think this is emblematic of the current mood.”

Despite the bumpy road ahead, Sladnick and the resistance fighters in Myanmar remain optimists. “Everyone I have talked to in Myanmar believes the regime will collapse. Millions of people have already given everything to the struggle for freedom, and I’m confident we will win in the end. If we don’t get any help from the outside it will obviously take longer, but the regime’s days are numbered. It’s only a matter of time.”