By Priscilla Clapp
The turmoil on Myanmar’s border with China has potentially significant implications.
The recent turmoil in Myanmar’s Kokang province on its northeastern border with China, while minor in scale compared to past ethnic conflict in the country, nonetheless has ominous implications for prospects of achieving a national peace agreement in the near future and for Myanmar’s relations with China.
Fighting in Kokang broke out on February 9, after the leader of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army returned to Kokang from five years of exile somewhere nearby. Seeking to regain control of its lost territory in the Kokang autonomous region and recognition by the Myanmar government, the group’s leader has found wide coverage in Chinese media but has received a cold shoulder in Naypyitaw, Myanmar’s capital. The conflict quickly escalated into a fierce battle for control of the Kokang state capital of Laukkai. Following the deaths of dozens of fighters on both sides, President Thein Sein placed the region under martial law for a three-month period.
The stakes in the conflict are high, and they go well beyond Kokang’s borders. Officials in Naypyitaw and the leader of the Kokang group have both asserted that more powerful armed ethnic groups, such as the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), joined the battle in support of the Kokang. (The KIA has been training some of these other groups at their cadet facility in Kachin state, which was bombed recently by the Myanmar Army.) If this is the case, it raises new problems for the Myanmar government, because it suggests a determination by certain ethnic armed groups to form a united front against the Myanmar Army, taking their case for a federal army from the negotiating table to the battlefield. Preventing military cooperation among ethnic rebel groups has long been a priority for Myanmar’s military leaders in the past and undoubtedly rings loud alarm bells now.
Read the full story at The Diplomat