The Decibel - Life on the border of Myanmar’s civil war

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

The Myanmar civil war has been raging on for over three years now. Over 50,000 people have been killed, including 8,000 civilians, as the military junta that took over fights a multitude of militias. Recently, an important area along the Thai-Myanmar border changed hands.The Globe’s Asia Correspondent, James Griffiths, traveled there and explains how resistance forces have gained so much ground, what happens now that the military junta doesn’t control the border and how China is involved.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Towards the end of May, I flew to Western Thailand with the intention of crossing over into Myanmar. And I knew these types of crossings took place all the time, but I didn't know exactly how informal and how kind of easy it would be to make it across the border. That's The Globe's Asia correspondent, James Griffiths. You know, I was kind of imagining there would still be some kind of checkpoint or some kind of guard that we would need to bypass or maybe even be waved through by someone that doesn't care. And in the end, it was as simple as driving across a bridge that went across a river. And at one point you're in Thailand and one point you're in Myanmar. This is the border?

Yeah. the river and at one point you're in Thailand and one point you're in Myanmar. This is the border? Yeah. Wow. So we're driving across a bridge, wooden bridge, into Myanmar now. Myanmar has been in a brutal civil war for over three years now, after the military overthrew the civilian government. The junta has been fighting a multitude of pro-democracy and ethnic militia all over the country. But recently, there's been a shift in the war that's been happening along the country's borders, specifically the one with Thailand. And this has been one of the most important border regions when it comes to the Myanmar

civil war, both because the Myanmar junta, the military government, has not really been able to control much of it for much of the war, but also because it's been such a key area for resistance groups to operate in and operate out of. Today on the show, I talk to James about what he saw in Myanmar and across the river from Thailand, as well as what happens when a country's borders are no longer controlled by the government. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, James. Thanks for coming on the show. Hi, Cheryl. Thanks for having me. So, James, to start, can you talk about why this border with Thailand is such an important

piece of land in the Myanmar civil war? So since a February 2021 coup plunged Myanmar into all-out civil war, there has been intense fighting in a lot of the country. And one of the most important regions and part of that fight has been along the country's border with Thailand. So this is 2400 kilometer border, much of it in jungles and rivers. And that is home to a number of ethnic groups which have been fighting consecutive Myanmar governments for decades. And their headquarters are in the border regions. And then also the fact of the border enables them to operate and exist in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do so if they were in kind of central Myanmar. You know,

they're able to kind of retreat across the border if the government is advancing or, you know, trying to conduct airstrikes against their positions. They're able to kind of retreat across the border if the government is advancing or trying to conduct airstrikes against their positions. They're able to bring in supplies easily from Thailand. They're able to cross into Thailand and meet with other groups easily in a safe environment. And they're able to get all kinds of things across the border. They need money, weapons, human personnel. And you specifically went to this spot along the Myanmar-Thai border that has two towns across the river from each other. One's called Mae Sot and the other is Miawadi.

What's the relationship like between them? Mae Sot, which is a Thai town and Miawadi on the Myanmar side, they sit literally facing each other on either side of the Moe River. They're connected by these two friendship bridges, as they call them. One is mainly used for people, one's used for cargo. And this has been, for decades, the most important trading point between Myanmar and Thailand. And it's where huge amounts of consumer goods enter Myanmar from Thailand. You mentioned trade there. How much trade are we talking about? So according to Thai industry sources, the cross-border trade is worth, you know,

around three to four billion US dollars a year. So, you know, this is serious amounts of trade going through. And that's even with some of the disruption that we've seen in recent years. This has largely continued this trade because it's just so important to everyone in both countries. So the resistance took over Miyawati in April of this year. How exactly did that city fall? In April, we saw the Karen National Union and their armed forces, which is one of the major ethnic resistance organizations, they advanced on Miyawati. They were able to storm a government military base nearby. The government forces retreated. A lot of them retreated across the bridges into Thailand.

Some of them fled into the jungle. And then the KNU were able to raise their flag over Miyawadi, albeit quite briefly, because they then had to retreat from the town because it was clear that they couldn't hold it. And we're in this kind of strange status quo where neither the KNU nor the government is holding it. But there's this third group, this pro-government militia, which is in nominal control of Miyawadi, even though the government has completely failed, the junta has completely failed to retake the town or mount any kind of counterattack against

the Miyawadi region. And while fighting is still happening west of Miyawadi and the KNU is trying to stave off a government counterattack against the region. There has been a lot of reluctance to take the fight to the BGF in the town proper, both because of the destruction that this would inevitably cause to an incredibly important town in this region and a lot of civilians who live there, and because there's a kind of unwillingness to see Curran fighting Curran. So, you know, these people share an ethnic group. They're from the ethnic group in that region. And then also because of this strange situation And obviously Thailand doesn't recognize any of the resistance groups, doesn't recognize the umbrella national unity government or any of the smaller ethnic armies. And so if you're trying to run this town, which is dependent on trade and dependent on people crossing the border, you need to be able to issue passports, you need to be able to issue visas. And so for the moment,

this kind of strange status quo has persisted where the BGF has remained in control of Miyawadi. There's a handful of Myanmar government officers still there doing things like passports and visas. And the trade has continued, the flow of people has continued, even though once you step outside of Miyawadi, it is in pure resistance control. And that resistance control goes for many kilometers past it. So what you're saying here is really interesting, James. So the resistance holds all the land around the town, but not the town itself. Yeah. And this is something everyone's very conscious of that the K&U obviously would like to seize the town, but they are very wary of

any disruption to trade. There's a huge amount, I mean, 3.7 billion a year. There's a huge amount of trade that's coming through this region. Any disruption can be catastrophic very quickly. And obviously, you pretty quickly lose the support of local populations if you are disrupting trade this much. So we're talking about Miyawati. This is one place. But I'm wondering how emblematic is Miyawadi to other places where the resistance has taken over? Miyawadi is perhaps the most important, but it's one of a number of towns and cities that have fallen to the resistance, or at least been extremely threatened by the resistance in the last few months. That's since Operation 1027

was launched, and that refers to October 27th last year. And that's when three major ethnic armed organizations in northern Myanmar, which had mostly sat out the conflict, suddenly took part. They suddenly mounted a surprise attack against military positions in their parts of the country and had this major advance, which went far better than anyone expected. And they suddenly gained a load of territory. The military was on the back foot. In other parts of the country, I think armed resistance organizations and other resistance groups were incredibly emboldened by this, launched their own offensives. Those have also been very successful. It's difficult to gauge actual levels of control on the ground. But a recent report by a panel of former UN special

rapporteurs, they estimated that the Myanmar hunter may control less than 20% of the entire country at this point. And we can see for sure that they don't have control of most of the borders. So they don't control the border with Thailand. They don't control the border with Bangladesh. They don't control most of the border with China. Like with Miyawadi and Mesot, all of these border regions have important border trading towns. So this is a loss of a lot of revenue and a lot of really important parts of the country. But these gains by the resistance come at a cost because we're over three years into this conflict now. And James, can you just remind us about the scale of destruction and death

that people in the country have experienced? Since the coup in February 2021, United Nations estimates suggest around 50,000 people, including 8,000 civilians, have died as a result of this conflict. Those figures are probably a massive underestimation, given how difficult it is to tally this type of thing during a really intense conflict like this, and especially when a lot of it is playing out in very rural, very jungled parts of the country. But as well as the 50,000 or so people that have died, about 2.6 million people have been displaced, many of them internally and are living in refugee camps inside Myanmar. Others have fled to Thailand, fled to other neighboring countries. Or if you kind of had a passport, people hopped on a plane and left as soon as they could. So this has been really devastating for Myanmar in terms of the loss of life, in terms of the loss of human capital. The economy has been completely devastated. It's collapsed.

The national currency is in absolute freefall. About half the population is living below the poverty line and it shows no signs of turning around. It's important to note that while this is a civil war and there are two sides, it is the junta which is blamed for the majority of civilian casualties. It's the junta that has an air force and conducts bombing raids against civilian areas, has bombed even hospital camps in the jungle and things like that,

and has a long, long, ugly record of human rights abuses and disdain for civilian casualties. We'll be right back. James, I want to zoom in for a moment and talk about the people. How has life changed for people along this border, like in the town of Miyawadi? People's lives in Miyawadi and in the border regions have both been changed dramatically and to a certain extent are kind of continuing as normal. It's quite strange. So Miyawadi has not had any electricity in three years. People are relying on generators or they're going to centralized locations to charge their phones

and things like that. The fighting has come incredibly close at multiple times, including obviously in April when there was fighting in Miyawaki itself. So they definitely have not been unaffected by the war. But what's remarkable and kind of showing the importance of this town to the wider Myanmar Thai economy is that it has continued to function as a training post. The trucks continue to flow every day. The bridges were shut for two or three days during the worst fighting and then reopened and then the goods were coming back in. But as the fighting grows and the potential for the city to fall or for there to be outright chaos in the region has occurred, people have started to leave. A lot of people in Miyawati have kind of fled into Mae Sot across the border.

A lot of people from the wider region either live in Thailand or are kind of poised to flee to Thailand if the fighting comes too close. So this is a community which is very, very used to crossing the border, both legitimately and illegitimately. And so they have this kind of sanctuary that is just a river crossing away. And so they are ready to use that when they need to do so. I'm wondering, James, how do people feel in the Awadi about this change of control? They're not exactly happy that the BGF is now in full control of the town. There is low level extortion by BGF troops. There is a lot more concern around them than the Myanmar military. And the Myanmar military does not have a good reputation. So that maybe shows you just how bad the BGF reputation is.

You mentioned that there have been over 2 million people displaced during the civil war. James, what do we know about the refugee situation? The refugee situation in Myanmar is incredibly dire because a lot of these people, the majority of these people are internally displaced. So they're in the country itself. They've not been able to flee to other countries, though hundreds of thousands have gone to Thailand and elsewhere. And obviously when you're internally displaced in the middle of a war zone and a moving war zone, that's an incredibly dangerous situation to be in. And so when I was in Myanmar, I went to a refugee camp near the Thai border and I spoke to people, a number of whom had moved four or five

times from various hoped for sanctuaries to another because the conflict kept moving and it kept catching up with them. But even this refugee camp I visited, which felt very safe and was relatively well built up and people said they felt okay. You know, they regularly hear fighting. They heard the fighting in Mirwadi. I was in the camp and I asked, oh, can I go up to this hill overlooking the camp so I can take some photos? And one of the camp leaders was like, oh, no, because there's a government base just across the next hill and they're able to see you and they'll probably shoot at you if they see someone walking around on the hill. And I would say that the place where I visited, I think, was hopefully pretty safe and that they will be able to kind of live there for a while or as long as they need to.

Because it's so close to the border that you kind of flee into Thailand. There is a kind of guaranteed level of safety just across the river. Thailand deserves to be commended for the way it's helped so many refugees from Myanmar and the authorities tend to kind of have a very turn a blind eye when it's during periods of fighting and people run across the river and then they encourage them to go back when things calm down. I'm curious, James, how do the Thai people feel about this whole situation? It's complicated because especially in border regions where there's a lot of links between communities on either side of the border, you know, one person said to me, oh, the current

people don't see themselves crossing the border so much as the border crosses them. There's also problems, you know, having a huge amount of refugees arrive in your country and especially in kind of small towns like Mae Sot that does create issues. It creates pressure on employment. It creates other social issues. And there is, I think, a lot of sympathy within broader Thai society for the pro-democracy movement, the anti-Hunter movement in Myanmar. And there is a certain amount of frustration, even in the Thai government, for how the Myanmar government has refused to come to the table and refused to try and reach a peaceful settlement to this conflict. Even as Bangkok officially recognizes the military junta and does deal with them, I think Thailand would be quite happy to

see this conflict end as soon as possible. And I'm also wondering about other neighboring countries to Myanmar. How does the increasing resistance control affect places like China and even India? One of the biggest ways a lot of the neighbors have been affected, and especially China, has been the proliferation of scam call centers in border regions of the country, kind of in unstable, ungoverned regions of the country. And these call centers are targeting Chinese people in China to try and scam them. And those types of scams are annoying to begin with, and they are bleeding money from victims in China. But they're also being done, performed by victims as well. A lot of people are human trafficked into these call centers. A lot of Chinese people, a lot of Filipinos, Indians have been tricked by, you know, they've been told there's some nice tech job they can get in Thailand or in Laos. And then they get there

and they are ferried across into Myanmar and end up in a call center where they're forced to work for a long time unless they can pay a ransom to leave or potentially die in some cases. And these call centers are in Myanmar? They're in Myanmar. They're on the border. I was able to see one of the largest, which is an area called Shwe Kokko, which is north of Miyawadi. And this is this town which has built up over recent years. And when I say town, it really is an impressively built up area. It has a lot of high rise. It looks more developed than both Miyawaki or Mae Sot. It really does look like a small town with skyscrapers, with casinos, and with these dormitories where a lot of the

call center workers. I'll be honest, it's probably one of the darkest, bleakest things I've seen because I was standing across the river on the Thai side and there's a cafe there called the China View Cafe that people go to because it's this beautiful skyline across the river. or are happy to ignore the huge amount of human misery which is taking place in Shwekoko, which we know has been very well documented by people that have fled and by human rights groups, that this is engaged in a huge amount of criminal behavior, both in how it treats the workers and then also in what those workers are forced to do. So James, I'm wondering, has China done anything about this? So the call centers have actually played a hugely important part in the war, because while China is one of the Hunters' most important international allies after Russia, China has been incredibly angry and publicly angry about the Hunters' failure to rein in these call centers, either out of unwillingness or inability. When Operation 1027 happened, a lot of people pointed to the call centers as a reason for that, because a lot of these northern armed organizations have ties to China. And one of the first things they did was go into towns that had call centers and shut them down. And it was kind of seen that while China was likely not involved in the operation

itself, it may have given some kind of, you know, tacit green light to it because they were so frustrated about the call sensors. So James, before we go, I wanted to take a couple minutes to look ahead. We've been talking about how the resistance forces have been gaining ground and more power in this civil war. So where does it go from here? Almost everyone, and perhaps everyone I've spoken to since Operation 1027 agrees that at this point, the Hunter cannot win the war. But that doesn't mean that the resistance is on the path to victory either. We are probably headed for a bit of a standstill along new front lines, which are gradually being shaken out. And that's

because while the Hunter has lost the majority of the border areas and they are kind of confined to central Myanmar, taking central Myanmar for the resistance would be incredibly difficult. What's possible and what people are optimistic about is that the military recognizes the situation that they're in and starts to talk negotiations. On the flip side of that, this is a military which had a pretty sweet deal prior to the coup. They had hashed out this constitution where Myanmar had nominal civilian government, but the military maintained complete autonomy and had control over their own affairs and was able to do things like the 2017 Rohingya genocide without the nominal civilian government really being able to do things like the 2017 Rohingya genocide without the

nominal civilian government really being able to rein them in at all. And they threw that away in a pitch for even greater power. So it's difficult to see that they will come to the table and agree to something less than that. And resistance groups have made clear that they will never accept that kind of deal again. There is no sign that this is going to end anytime soon. James, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Eva McLaughlin, and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening.