Mike Phipps reviews Return of the Junta: Why Myanmar’s Military Must Go Back to the Barracks by Oliver Slow, published by Bloomsbury

When Myanmar makes the headlines these days, it is rarely good news. Two days ago, over 100 people, mainly civilians including many children, were killed in.an air strike by the military on an event attended by opponents to its rule. Far from being a random event, there have been over 600 such attacks since the military coup just over two years ago.

Myanmar’s latest ordeal began on the morning of February 1^st 2021. The Burmese military shut down the internet, deployed soldiers on the streets and arrested figures from the opposition, particularly Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which had just won its second successive general election by a resounding majority a few months earlier.

Almost immediately, and with remarkable unity, the people rose up against the coup, organised by a Civil Disobedience Movement that aimed to make the country ungovernable for the new junta. While the international community called for restraint, the military unleashed a bloodbath, arresting and torturing thousands, machine-gunning protesters, using snipers to kill demonstrating teenagers and subjecting entire villages to aerial bombardment.

The junta imposed a year-long state of emergency and handed all power to the head of the military, Min Aung Hlaing. He had already been accused of complicity in genocide before the coup for his role in overseeing a horrific campaign of violence against the Rohingya people in the west of the country three years earlier, in which 9,000 people were killed and 750,000 refugees fled the country.

Initial protests displayed humour and an impressive degree of ethnic unity. Even before the crackdown intensified, many young protesters understood the risks, putting details of their blood type on Facebook and asking for their organs to be donated if they were killed. As the repression increased, soldiers were given free rein to open fire from trucks on random passers-by. On one day, they killed 100 civilians.

At the same time, the regime replaced every democratic vestige of regional and local government with military- aligned figures. It dismantled the education system, pursued a policy of Burmanization against other ethnic and religious groups and used the country’s vast natural resources to make itself “devastatingly rich”.

Yet the resistance has continued, with the a parallel National Unity Government being formed by MPs elected, pre-coup, in November 2020 and enjoying huge popular support. As the international community lost interest in the country, the NUG established an armed wing and local guerrilla militias have mushroomed.

Myanmar is in turmoil. Thanks to the Civil Disobedience Movement, large numbers of workers are refusing to work until democracy is restored, and most economic sectors are not functioning. Despite the monumental brutality of the military regime, many doctors refuse to work in the official structures, preferring to volunteer in underground health clinics.

Oliver Slow lived in the country for over seven years from 2012 on. His book examines how the military grew so powerful, explores its brutal internal culture and details the hideous and frequently lethal torture it has inflicted with impunity on its detainees since the 2021 coup.

One of his concerns is the routine presence of armed soldiers in schools, over 100 of which have been attacked by the military since the coup. The longer term neglect of public education under successive military-dominated regimes has led many armed ethnic organisations operating in the country’s border areas to establish their own parallel education structures.

Slow explores the background to ethnic conflict in the country, much of which cane be traced back to British colonial divide and rule tactics, enthusiastically continued by the Burmese military post-independence. Fighting died down somewhat in the reform years but has returned with a vengeance since the coup, with the military committing repeated violations of fragile ceasefires and peace accords.

A central chapter in Myanmar’s unhappy history concerns the genocidal persecution of the Rohingya people, historically demonised by leaders of the country’s ethnic and religious majority, and brutally terrorised by the military in campaigns of mass rape, murder, infanticide and arson which intensified from 2017 on, with  tens of thousands of killings.  The military units responsible for many of these crimes against humanity have spearheaded the crackdown on civil society since the coup.

There are a few rays of hope.  Since the coup, some members of the majority Bamar community have publicly apologised for their earlier vilification of the Rohingya, saying that the military’s treatment of them since 2021 had made them realise that they, the Bamars, had fallen in the past for ethically divisive propaganda.

Since the coup the military junta has killed over 3,000 people. As previously reported on Labour Hub, tens of thousands have been arrested, and current figures indicate 1.2 million internally displaced since February 2021. By mid-2022, an estimated 14 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance, a figure that was just one million before the coup.

The shocking brutality of the military may yet unite wide layers of the population against it. One thing is certain from Slow’s analysis: the Burmese people can expect no help from the international community.

In March 2023, 160 Myanmar, regional and international civil society organizations called for the United Nations Human Rights Council to take action to protect the human rights of the Myanmar people. They welcomed the UNHRC resolution of 1^st April 2022 which acknowledged the importance of the human rights situation in Myanmar but said it failed to adequately address the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. The organisations further expressed disappointment at the weak UN Security Council resolution on Myanmar, adopted in December 2022, criticised the UN’s apathy towards the Myanmar military and highlighted decades of systemic failures in relation to the country.

Lack of action allows the military junta to continue its murderous activities with virtual impunity. This week’s massacre is unlikely to be the last.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.