Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
A Journey into Rebel-Held Myanmar (noemamag.com)
83 points by jprohov 78 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



A very interesting article about a conflict I know allmost nothing about. With the intention to figure out, how to effectivly help people, under oppressed governmen, by helping the local community structures directly.

"I was making the trek into Myanmar to get a sense of how communities were organizing themselves in the vacuum created by the retreating Tatmadaw"

"The restrictions placed by Western governments on engaging with pariah regimes limit the ability to negotiate access to communities and peoples in desperate need of assistance."

"or however dramatic and intense the conditions ordinary people confront in such contexts, their community structures continue to function. It is on such local governance structures that any international effort in contested political settings should be built."

"What I discovered in the course of the five-week trip was a country in the midst of a profound transformation. The struggle against the Tatmadaw has morphed from a fight by ethnic groups to control territory into the emergence of a new form of participatory governance. This governance model has been created organically by a new generation of activists"

But meeting the goal here concretely is not so easy, as traditionally international help goes to strictly civilian organisations only, to not participate in the war. But here there is no seperation.

"I mentioned to Arkar Min Tun, one of the founding members of the group, that in order to receive international support it could be in the organization’s interest to clearly separate the military and civil components of KA-Zero’s activities, he told me it was not possible for as long as the fighting continued. The country was in the midst of an all-encompassing revolution; any separation of activities would be artificial and would undermine the legitimacy of the movement in the eyes of the population"

All in all, the rebels sound quite nice:

“When you give a soldier a gun to fight, you need to tell him that he needs to know that he will have to give it back.”

But there are also dark sides, for sure:

"Sometimes this creates challenges. Marwi explained to me that many of his backers exhort him not to take prisoners."


If it wasn't for Rambo 4, I wouldn't even know about this conflict, and I'm not entirely ignorant of world events.


Why this article focuses on a small rebel group I don’t know. I am pretty sympathetic to them, but unfortunately they don’t really have a lot of power. The larger ones, like the United Wa State Army, the Kachin Independence Army, the Arakan Army, and the Karen National Liberation Army control a much larger part of the country.

And let me tell you, they don’t care about democracy or community lead activism. They will only tolerate absolute independence, which is why fighting happens until they get it (see KIA until ceasefire broke, MNDAA, UWSA, etc). This is because they are involved in running and taxing illegal jade mining, illegal gold mining, cyber scam, and meth operations, and all that money goes away if a functioning federalized system is established. There are literally KNU and Shan State Army leaders under indictment in New York for trying to sell $40 million of heroin in return for weapons. This is part of why the US has been very hesitant to offer aid to these ethnic armed groups.

It is so sad how dysfunctional Myanmar is. If they had a government at least half as functional as Thailand they could be so much better off. The country is so messed up there are literally articles about how criminals have worked out deals with police and judges to send paid substitutes to prison so they wouldn’t have to go. Not to mention the regular reports of ethnic cleansing and massacres.


Hi Charles, I can't read your devex article about interfacing with local governments unfortunately due to some sort of login wall.

What if, instead of struggling to acknowledge local pariah governments, aid organizations ONLY recognized local governments?


[flagged]


While this is rather off -topic, it would be more productive to look at the situation in the US when talking about that. For decades, the supreme court and politicians have taken away more and more rights in the name of security. But these "second-amendment-fetishists" have mostly been quiet about it, since the party doing most of the taking away of rights likes to court them by leaving their favourite right for last, like in the famous Niemöller quote.

So it seems that the usefulness of civilian gun ownership is rather limited when resisting a slow but constant slide into tyranny, like project 2025.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Myanmar is ranked 179 out of 230 countries ranked by gun ownership rate


> Myanmar is ranked 179 out of 230 countries ranked by gun ownership rate

IIRC, the only guns that were legal there for civilian ownership there were single-shot hunting rifles. If you read the reports, the resistance to the junta had a lot of problems until they could acquire more semiautomatic rifles of the kind many people in the US claim would be useless against a professional military, which is obviously not true due to this counterexample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Defence_Force_(Myan...

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/2/3/myanmars-rebels-...:

> Under Phoe’s command are about 70 men and four women of mixed ethnicities. Many are from the cities. Wielding a mix of rifles and semiautomatic guns, they form a line and salute every time a car enters the camp.


Not by any strong computation method. It is based on method 3 which is "analogous comparison" which just say that we will compare it to a country with near circumstances (and Wikipedia doesn't specify how this is done. It is based on small arms survey [1]. I wouldn't take these numbers to a great length. It is even estimated before this conflict erupted.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: