Progress lies beyond pre-coup order

From Tuesday until Friday, Laos will host a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) leaders. The event will also bring Asean partners from around the world to the capital Vientiane. Its agenda will be weighed down by complex and potentially divisive issues. One of them is the situation in Myanmar, which has been on the agenda since April 2021.
Myanmar’s crisis and Asean’s limited progress in dealing with it go to the heart of questions about the organisation’s ability to deal with serious crises in its own member states, even if their actions have major destabilising cross-border effects in terms of economic decline, refugee flows and the increase of organised crime.
After a military coup in February 2021, Asean agreed to a so-called Five-Point Consensus, which includes an immediate end to violence in the country and dialogue among all parties. But the day after it was adopted, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing made clear that he would not implement it until his regime’s own roadmap had been realised. It amounted to an outright rejection of Asean’s stance.
Since then, Asean has made little progress. It has been constrained by its modus operandi that decisions must be based on consensus. As a result, successive Asean chairs have had little room to manoeuvre. Moreover, only two of Asean’s 10 members, Thailand and Laos, are land neighbours of Myanmar. Myanmar’s other land neighbours, China, India and Bangladesh, were not engaged from the start.
Even though Asean’s weakness was obvious from the very beginning, many members of the international community have consistently thrown their weight behind the organisation. With Asean in the lead, they felt absolved of the need to explore other options to resolve the crisis, even after it became clear that Asean’s approach was not yielding the desired results.
It is now clear that Asean, preoccupied by its internal constraints, has missed two important developments: 1) the growing strength of Myanmar’s resistance and 2) the increasing involvement of non-Asean members in the resolution of the crisis.
Over the past 12 months, major shifts have taken place in Myanmar. These have been due, in large part, to the extraordinary progress made by resistance groups. They turned out to be much stronger and better organised than initially expected. As a result, the regime — or the State Administration Council (SAC), as it calls itself — lost control of vast swathes of land. In many parts of the country, regime troops failed in their role as occupying forces. In its fight against highly motivated resistance troops, the SAC has become increasingly reliant on devastating indiscriminate air strikes. Weakened, it felt forced to resort to ill-conceived measures, including enforced military conscription which led to the flight of many young people.
China has long been a major player, often hedging its bets by supporting both the SAC and Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) along its border. But since the 2021 coup, its engagement has not been consistent. It has evolved based on developments in Myanmar: from support for Aung San Suu Kyi, to the SAC, to EAOs along its border and back to the SAC. After a visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in August, China now appears keen to find a way out for the SAC, and it probably considers the SAC’s proposed 2025 elections as a serious option.
Since 2022, Thailand has increased its bilateral engagement with the SAC. With its 2,416-kilometre-long border with Myanmar, it shoulders a burden of proximity. The bond between the security forces of the two countries has always been strong, but it now remains to be seen how Thailand’s engagement will develop as SAC’s control declines and Thai domestic political pressure for change increases. Will Thailand reach out to other Myanmar actors who now control large areas of Myanmar or can count on significant support from the population, like the parallel National Unity Government (NUG)?
Thailand apparently will be hosting an Asean Troika Plus meeting, scheduled for mid-December in Bangkok. For this meeting, Asean is said to seek common ground for all stakeholders in the Myanmar crisis. Such an effort is welcome, but the time it has taken to put it together since it surfaced in early 2024 indicates lack of a real sense of urgency.
Asean should also take account of the efforts of other neighbours. India is now seeking to engage some of Myanmar’s EAOs, such as the Arakan Army, as well as the NUG. Bangladesh’s leader Mohammad Yunus has indicated willingness to discuss the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
Right now, in the face of Myanmar’s formidable domestic hostility, an imploding economy and the worst floods and landslides in decades, the SAC has been signalling that it wants political solutions. In a statement issued in late September, it called on resistance groups to “contact the state to resolve the political issues through party politics or electoral processes”. This call came as the SAC was starting up its controversial pre-election census from Oct 1 to Oct 15.
Resistance groups and the NUG immediately recognised this as part of the military regime’s old playbook and rejected the offer. The SAC wants to use the census data for national elections in November next year. But the census is widely rejected as an effort to gather personal information for a mass surveillance system the SAC is developing. By their very nature, answers to census questions should be anonymised. In Myanmar they are not. They are directly attributable to individuals, making them useless for credible elections.
There is growing recognition that a solution to Myanmar’s crisis must be based on an inclusive approach, one that gives voice to the vast majority in the country that has resisted the illegitimate coup. But many in the international community still find it difficult to shift away from state-centric thinking, ie: looking at states primarily as territorial entities with centralised control and not considering other, de facto forms of effective governance. If the international community does not change this perspective, peace and stability will remain out of reach.
At its summit in Vientiane, Asean will have an opportunity to make a difference if it uses a new lens to look at Myanmar: one that does not put the SAC at its centre but accepts that de facto authorities with proven track records should not be marginalised by international diplomacy. Many of these authorities hold significant regional and local legitimacy, not in the least as providers of governance and services that the SAC no longer delivers.
The change Myanmar needs is not about a return to the pre-2021 political order. It is about much more. The current conflict dynamics have brought to light the need for a new political system, one based on the understanding that an ethnocratic state and the continued marginalisation of ethnic minorities have no place in a future Myanmar. The national uprising that followed the 2021 coup has laid bare the crisis of the post-colonial state that the SAC and its predecessors have kept in place for decades. If it is not addressed, change will remain elusive.
Some commentators are expressing fears of Myanmar’s Balkanisation, the fragmentation of the country into smaller and hostile units. Surely, the changes sought are wide-ranging and complex and building a new nation will take considerable time. At the same time, the efforts already underway and the degree of cooperation between EAOs, other resistance groups and the NUG are reason for optimism.
Laetitia van den Assum is a former ambassador of the Netherlands and former member of Myanmar’s Rakhine Advisory Commission. Kobsak Chutikul is a retired ambassador of Thailand and a former elected member of parliament.