Dropping bombs by hand: Inside the ‘end of Myanmar’
Myanmar’s brutal junta has largely lost control of the borders with criminals churning out drugs and scams at an industrial scale. What comes next could depend on how its neighbours, western nations like Australia and donor agencies respond.
On the frontlines of Southeast Asia’s forgotten war, an overstretched Myanmar military that has lost control of the country’s borders is throwing everything it has at anti-junta forces.
In recent weeks that is said to include hand-lobbing bombs out of ageing cargo planes and – so some resistance fighters claim – pelting rocks at ground targets when it runs out of artillery.
“They’re dropping bombs by hand out of planes that don’t even have pressurised chambers,” a drone engineer with one of hundreds of People’s Defence Force armed resistance units who goes by the nom-de-guerre Crow tells The Weekend Australian on Myanmar’s Kayin state border with Thailand.
“It’s like a World War II plane. Very old technology. Sometimes they use old North Korean guns. There have even been times they’ve thrown big rocks out of the plane if they run out of bombs.”
While most Australians are focused on conflicts far from our borders, Myanmar is being consumed by a dramatically asymmetric civil war in which the military is trying to bomb its people into submission and a crowdsourced resistance force is fighting back with homemade guns and weaponised commercial drones.
Now a succession of military defeats at the hands of resistance-aligned ethnic-armed groups, who have long fought the Buddhist-majority central government for autonomy, is raising serious questions about what comes next and how that might affect Australia.
Regional experts are urging a radical rethink of the international community’s approach to the conflict, warning it can “no longer be predicated on the fiction of a central government” now that so many Myanmar citizens live in “mini-statelets” controlled by ethnic-armed groups and resistance forces that need help to govern.
With the junta no longer in control of border areas – home to millions of needy civilians and criminal syndicates churning out drugs and scams at an industrial scale – Australia and other nations may have no choice but to work with the forces who do now hold the periphery to prevent a complete disintegration of governance and a steep rise in transnational crime.
“It’s really quite shocking how weak the military as a fighting force has become,” says Richard Horsey, a Myanmar specialist with the Crisis Group, who predicts non-state administrations run by powerful ethnic armies will only “expand and become more durable as Myanmar’s political centre sinks deeper into chaos”.
“If they (military) don’t control the borders anymore, then holding your nose and dealing with the junta on border security doesn’t make much sense.”
A new Crisis Group report urges the UN, donor states and agencies to engage with Myanmar “as a collection of subnational units rather than as a state entity if they wish to have a positive impact on the lives of the people who live there”.
A recent Lowy Institute analysis by Morten Pedersen, a former Australian government and UN adviser turned academic, comes to a similar conclusion; supporting “parallel state-building” would be more effective than sanctions.
Instead of a futile wait for a new central authority to emerge, Australia and other countries should start working with the fragmented states that exist and likely will be a “permanent part of the future Myanmar”, Pedersen argues.
“Across Myanmar, new political authorities are claiming jurisdiction to govern significant territories and populations, establishing new government institutions, pronouncing better laws and policies, and providing security, health, and education for millions of people.
“By supporting these emerging local governance structures, Australia could help the resistance by increasing its relevance to the daily struggles of local people. It could also help vulnerable communities by expanding humanitarian assistance and basic social services. And it could help the country by supporting longer-term institution-building and establishing the basis for a new federal democratic union.”
Left unsaid is that supporting these statelets could also free up money for the resistance.
‘The end of Myanmar’
Both reports are believed to be under discussion in Canberra and in the office of the new UN Special Envoy to Myanmar, Julie Bishop, whose job it is to find a way to deliver international aid and government assistance to the Myanmar people, and help to end the fighting.
Bishop was appointed in early April but has declined to speak publicly.
Meanwhile, junta losses are piling up notwithstanding a professional fighting force equipped with Chinese and Russian hardware and its own ammunition factories – albeit ones clearly not keeping pace with escalating airstrikes averaging 100 a month.
Whether the air force really has lobbed rocks in lieu of bombs – possibly apocryphal, given aviation fuel costs – the military is desperately overstretched, fighting simultaneous fronts countrywide and relying heavily on its air fleet to atone for a rapid attrition in ground forces through deaths, surrenders and desertions.
The tide began turning against the junta in October when a trio of armed ethnic groups, the Three Brotherhood Alliance, launched Operation 1027 and seized control of lucrative trade routes and towns in northern Shan State on China’s border. The operation had Beijing’s tacit support because the group promised to crack down on scam centres there.
Since then, the regime has “lost meaningful ground access to the majority of townships on Myanmar’s international borders and 55 cities and towns were taken by resistance forces”, the pro-democracy Special Advisory Council for Myanmar reported last week.
Other provincial capitals – including Sittwe in Rakhine State and Myitkina in Kachin – are now on the verge of falling to ethnic armed groups, leaving the junta in full control only of the capital, Naypyidaw, Yangon and Mandalay. “This is the end of Myanmar as a state-like entity,” Horsey says.
Western governments may baulk at military assistance for Myanmar’s anti-coup forces, but there is a good argument for helping ethnic armed groups provide social services, establish police and courts, and promote human rights values in areas outside military control, given the potential for Myanmar’s problems to be exported elsewhere in the region, he adds.
“These big armed groups now control urban areas more or less for the first time so it’s not just about how to get basic food, health care and school support to those populations. It’s now about more robust forms of governance; urban planning and sanitation systems, and about how you govern.
“How are these emerging statelets going to fund themselves?”
In border areas with a long history of illicit economies it isn’t hard to imagine where they might turn for money if they can’t find help elsewhere.
Drone battle
At 31, Crow is already a veteran of a war triggered by the February 2021 military coup that ousted the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Many of his fellow rank-and-file PDF fighters are in their early to mid-20s.
The bespectacled former defence academy student joined one of the first PDFs after the coup and was a frontline drone operator and weapons producer until he lost his leg in an explosion in 2022.
Doctors told him they could save it “but it would have taken years of post-op treatment so I decided I didn’t need that leg”, he tells the Weekend Australian.
Eleven resistance fighters died in that battle, including Crow’s younger brother, while he lay on the battlefield with half his leg blown off.
He now leads a team of drone scouts that gathers intelligence for resistance forces and footage for the information war being waged alongside the physical battle.
PDF fighters and their ethnic-armed group allies have been using drones bought from online shopping portals in battle against a vastly superior military since the beginning of the conflict, modifying fixed-wing and agricultural spray drones to carry homemade bombs and captured 60mm shells.
Resourceful drone engineers – many of them former IT students and gamer geeks who have turned to the internet and Ukrainian fighters in online chatrooms for tips – are producing bigger wings on 3D printers in the field, or cutting them out of polystyrene, to make them fly higher and longer.
“The drones are very effective. Because we don’t have enough missiles we use drones instead to directly hit targets,” Crow says.
Drone swarms have been used to devastating effect against junta forces in Shan State and elsewhere to neutralise superior military firepower, including armoured vehicles.
But with the military facing its own resource challenges, it too has turned to drones to strike back at revolutionary forces.
“It’s becoming more of a drone war,” Crow confirms. “Now we are also taking drone strikes from the military.”
Some 5233 civilians have been killed since the coup, and more than 20,500 are being held in jail, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
Three million people have been forced from their homes and 18.6 million more require humanitarian help as a result of the junta attacks and junta blockades on aid.
The majority of those in dire need are in areas outside stable junta control, where the junta has limited capacity to address the humanitarian crisis it has deliberately created, the Special Advisory Council to Myanmar said in its latest report last week.
The SAC-M, an advisory group to the parallel National Unity Government of ousted Myanmar MPs and ethnic minority leaders, says the junta now has full control over just one of 51 towns with international land borders, while its military proxies hold just four.
The resistance, meanwhile, has at least 90 per cent control of 30 towns and is closing in on nine more.
If that sounds like near-victory, it probably isn’t. Most agree the military will fight to its last soldier to hold the centre.
Such is the hatred its violence has provoked, there is almost no chance of a negotiated settlement – no matter how much Myanmar’s neighbours would like to believe there is.
The recent military successes of ethnic groups such as the Arakan Army on the Bangladesh border and Brotherhood Alliance on the border with China has also raised new questions about resistance forces’ long-term capacity to win the battle.
More than a dozen ethnic-minority armies have fought alongside the PDFs, and some – like the Karen National Liberation Army – have trained and armed thousands of recruits.
But not all are as dedicated to restoring democracy and creating a federal system as the National Unity Government under whose banner the PDFs fight.
Even the most sympathetic to the cause may be reluctant to risk more blood and treasure on a potentially futile march on Naypyidaw, says Horsey, who questions the incentive for ethnic-armed groups to help install a new central government when they have largely achieved their goal of carving out autonomous homelands.
Unless something changes, a depleted military and resistance could battle on for years in an extended and chaotic end game while independent border statelets turn to the task of establishing administrations and social services.
Conscription fight
As the Myanmar military grows more desperate, its tactics have become unimaginably brutal.
Ground soldiers under intense pressure from their commanders, reviled by fellow countrymen and with little left to lose, have been waging terror against millions of civilians – setting villages ablaze, torturing and mutilating as they go.
Last week at least 51 civilians were tortured and killed in one Rakhine State village alone by soldiers who accused them of supporting the Arakan Army.
Still, many Burmese had been prepared to wait out the war until the military announced in February it was reintroducing mandatory conscription from April.
Serpentine queues immediately formed outside passport offices across the country.
Those with means have crammed airport departure lounges seeking an exit strategy for themselves and their children. Myanmar nationals are now among the largest investors in Thai property, buying up safe havens in Bangkok and Chiang Mai.
Tens of thousands of people without means have been taking buses and trucks to the closest border each week. In March alone almost a third of the 120,000 people who entered Thailand had no documents – double the number of a year ago, says the International Organisation for Migration.
At a Thai border village across the Moei River from Myanmar’s strife-torn Myawaddy, 29-year-old farmer Thein May tells The Weekend Australian he crossed illegally in April after his name appeared on a registry in Bago division, north of Yangon.
“There was a lottery in my village and my name was drawn. I was told I had to report within a month,” he says when we meet in the front yard of a home owned by a Myanmar migrant worker who has become the go-to man for new arrivals. “I never imagined I would have to leave Myanmar. I’m just a normal farmer. I’ve never even held a gun before. I don’t want to fight. Young people shouldn’t have to leave their villages.”
Also seeking help is Pyae Phyo Naing, a 41-year-old construction worker who brought his wife and four children, aged two to 18, out of Sagaing, where the military has met its fiercest resistance inside central Myanmar.
The family had fled to nearby forests seven times since the coup to escape fighting, each time returning to their home when violence eased, but conscription has finally driven them from Myanmar. They had planned to wait it out in Myawaddy but military airstrikes forced them over the border.
“When we heard about conscription we felt bullied by the junta,” says Phyo Naing. “We didn’t want to help boost military numbers so we left.”
In Mae Sot, resistance journalist Shane Awm Maung says he too knew it was only a matter of time before his name was drawn, and he left Yangon in March with his pregnant wife.
In recent weeks, however, harassment from Thai police has convinced her to return to her family for the birth.
“We were arrested by the Thai police who charged us 5000 baht ($205) and told us we need documents from the junta to stay,” says Maung who, like most Myanmar refugees in Mae Sot, already pays a mandatory 300-baht bribe every month to local police.
“It’s quite difficult for me to think about her leaving but I love her and can’t refuse. In my head I wonder whether I’m going to be able to be an active father for my child. I have no answer to that question yet.”
Just as the country is fracturing and fragmenting, so too are desperate families across Myanmar.
Many are sending their children far from home to keep them out of the military’s clutches.
Living in fear
At a safe house in a suburban border enclave, “Teacher Su” is wrapping up a late-night social studies class for six young adults cramming for a year 12-equivalent certificate with an eye to university.
Four of the students have arrived in recent weeks from Myanmar, sent by their parents to a woman they have never even seen, let alone met, but who had been teaching their children online for months.
The 35-year-old former Yangon school administrator is one of millions of Myanmar workers to have refused to co-operate with the junta and instead joined the Civil Disobedience Movement that provides health, education and other essential services under the banner of the NUG, or ethnic revolutionary groups.
The NUG, which claims to be the legitimate Myanmar government, now administers more than 5000 schools, 500 clinics and hospitals, and helps 400,000 internally displaced people each month with donations from civil society groups and diaspora communities. But its meagre resources are under enormous strain.
Teacher Su, a whiskey-voiced beauty in an oversized soccer shirt, is wanted on six charges by the junta and now teaches online and physical classes from her living room, which doubles by night as a bedroom for the students who roll out sleeping mats on the floor.
Like English families during the London Blitz, parents have entrusted her with their children’s lives and she takes her responsibilities seriously.
“When the conscription law came out, they sent their kids to me,” she says.
“ Because they studied online with me their parents trust me even though they have never met me.”
Though she is their teacher she is also their surrogate mother for the next year of their studies and fusses over them as they recount dangerous overland journeys from Myanmar.
One nervous 18-year-old says he was stuck on the Myanmar side of the Moei River for days in April as the air force dropped 225kg bombs on resistance-aligned, ethnic Karen forces who briefly seized Myawaddy before ceding it to military proxies that oversee dozens of violent scam centres there.
“He screams every night, dreaming that bombs have been dropped on him,” says Teacher Su as she strokes his hair.
Ivy, a young woman wearing a fluffy, loveheart-adorned headband, says she will volunteer for the resistance until she can apply to universities abroad.
She is the only student in Teacher Su’s care with legal documents. For the others, the hurdles are almost insurmountable. They will eventually have to return to Myanmar to apply for passports.
For two years the classroom has seen a revolving door of students who joined the resistance before they could finish school, and who still dream of a future that does not involve war and bloodshed.
Among her current batch are two young men from urban guerilla cells that move in and out of Myanmar to launch attacks on junta targets. Both look barely out of their teens.
Recently, 11 students returned to the battlefield.
“They wanted to stay but there was just no room for them here,” Teacher Su says.
On their return, two were swept up in a military conscription draft, their phones searched and resistance material found. Both were jailed and she has just received news one died in custody.
My young translator bursts into tears and Teacher Su wraps her arms around her, but there is little she can say to console her.
Myanmar’s forgotten war is claiming dozens of young people just like him every day, with no end in sight.
Even at the region’s own Shangri-La defence dialogue last week, Myanmar’s conflict was overshadowed by talk of Ukraine, Gaza and China’s maritime muscle-flexing.
At a Mae Sot cafe the next morning, a skinny 21-year-old PDF soldier in boardshorts and bifocals says he feels depressed that the war is pitting “brother against brother”, and that the democratic future many his age had believed was ahead of them has disappeared.
“We are the lost generation of Burma,” he laments. “Most girls and guys of my age are either fighting for the resistance or supporting it in some way.
“Most of us don’t want to kill people.
“We want to fight the junta, not our own brothers.”
He is in Mae Sot because his glasses broke and he can’t fight without them.
Others in his unit are being treated for the effects of chemical bombs dropped by the military in recent airstrikes.
With its back now firmly against the wall, Myanmar’s junta is fighting the dirtiest of wars.