Myanmar: China Gets the Wrong Answer

Jul 23, 2016 | Strategy Page
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There is general agreement that there should be a major effort to expand the 2015 NCA (nationwide ceasefire agreement) to include all rebel groups operating along the northern and eastern border areas. To that end another meeting of all groups involved (government, army, most rebels) will be held in August. The NCA effort has been going on since the 1990s but has had problems with finding ceasefire terms that everyone can agree to and, more importantly, that the army can be trusted to abide by. Decades of military rule ended in 2011 but many of the rebel tribes didn’t believe it meant soldiers would behave in tribal areas. They were right because in the border areas the military still did as they pleased. The elected government has made some progress in curbing the military misbehavior and the August NCA meeting is supposed to take advantage of that. This is not a sure thing as there have been NCA meetings in 2012, 2013 and 2015 and none of those deals were completely effective. That said, since 2011 there has been more peace and less army misbehavior in the border areas where lawlessness was long the norm. This is costing corrupt army officers a lot of money as they got rich by “taxing” or controlling a lot of illegal activities (mining, lumbering, smuggling in general). The corrupt officers also arranged for the illegal removal of tribes on land that had been “sold” to the Chinese for major development projects (mines, hydroelectric dams, pipelines). A new and improved NCA doesn’t make the Chinese happy either but officially they can’t express that because the official Chinese attitude is that they are doing everything legally.