Can Myanmar's Many Parts Make It Whole Again?

British policies accentuated divisions among the country's communities. Allegiances have shifted since then, but the schisms haven't healed. The junta is taking advantage now.

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

In February 1, Myanmar completed four years of military rule. On this day in 2021 General Min Aung Hlaing ousted the National League for Democracy government, which had won the November 2020 election, on the charge the election was fraudulent. The coup, however, failed to be a swift usurpation of power, as the Myanmar armed forces or Tatmadaw had expected. Instead, it has thrown the country into anarchy amid strong resistance from an overwhelmingly large section of the people.

Myanmar is not new to such crisis, having faced them time and again ever since its independence from the British on January 4, 1948. At the time of independence, other than the Buddhist Bamar, who now constitute over 68 percent of the country's 5.46 crore population, a few other ethnic communities began fighting for their own independence. Shelby Tucker's Burma: The Curse of Independence profiles this chaos convincingly, as does Bertil Lintner's Burma in Revolt: Poppy and Insurgency Since 1948.

The post-independence turmoil is best illustrated by the fact that two divisions of Kuomintang soldiers entered Myanmar's Shan state and stationed themselves there without consent for a decade starting 1949, preparing for counter-offensives against Mao Zedong's Communist regime assisted by the CIA. Tucker says it was the Kuomintang soldiers who started systematic poppy cultivation to fund themselves after the US withdrew support in order to befriend China, taking advantage of a fissure that had appeared between China and the Soviet Union. When the Kuomintang soldiers finally left Myanmar for Formosa (now Taiwan), the drug infrastructure they built were inherited by local warlords such as Khun Sa. Thus was born the notorious Golden Triangle between northeastern Myanmar, northwestern Thailand and northern Laos.