After five years of war, armed resistance groups still challenge Myanmar's military across much of the country. But the generals are now stemming losses and reclaiming some territory.
https://p.dw.com/p/5D7nDMin Aung Hlaing took over as Myanmar's president last month, claiming the country had entered a new chapterImage: Aung Shine Oo/AP/dpa/picture allianceAdvertisementSince toppling a democratically elected government over five years ago, Myanmar's military has lost control over swaths of land to armed resistance groups across the country.
It has severely damaged the economy and left the regime internationally isolated, facing numerous allegations of war crimes.
Over the past year and a half, however, the military has reversed some territorial losses and mounted new offensives on several fronts, aided by thousands of drones and new conscripts.
As it regains ground, the military regime has also begun to make carefully calibrated political gestures.
Against that backdrop, the country's former leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been moved to house arrest, authorities disclosed on Thursday. She has been detained since February 2021, when the military seized power from her elected government.
UN chief Antonio Guterres described the move as "a meaningful step toward conditions conducive to a credible political process," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
However, Burma Campaign UK's director Mark Farmaner said Aung San Suu Kyi's transfer "isn't about change or reform, it's about public relations designed to preserve military rule," reported Reuters news agency. "No one should be fooled."
Myanmar's recent elections, while widely dismissed as rigged, opened the door for the regime to inch its way back onto the international stage.
"I don't know that I would characterize it as winning," said Steve Ross, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a US think tank. However, the analyst added he believes "momentum has definitely shifted towards the military over the last 18 months or so."
With dozens of parties barred from running — including the ultra‑popular National League for Democracy (NLD), whose government under Aung San Suu Kyi was ousted in 2021 — the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party secured victory in the December and January polls.
The new parliament duly elected coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, who had just stepped down as the military's commander-in-chief, as president, fulfilling a long-held ambition of the ex-general.
Many Western countries rejected the elections as a sham and dismissed the new government as the same military regime in all but name, with little interest in steering Myanmar back onto the democratic path it was on before the coup.
Even so, some countries are lining up to welcome the new government into the global fold.
"The elections have enabled Min Aung Hlaing and the regime to tiptoe [their] way back into the international arena in ways that would not have been possible a year and a half or two years ago," said Ross.
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The foreign ministers of Thailand and China have already paid official visits to President Min Aung Hlaing, which Ross described as a "slippery slope" likely to lead more countries to reengage.
Thailand is lobbying hard for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has barred Myanmar from the bloc's top-tier meetings since the coup, to restore full privileges.
On the battlefield, armed resistance groups still control or contest most of the ground they seized since the coup that sparked a civil war.
But the military is retaking more and more of it, including important trade routes with neighbors China and Thailand that had been cut off.
China has played a role by pressuring a few of the larger armed groups to hand back some of the ground they had seized, and to stop fighting the military or selling their weapons to other groups that are still fighting.
Just as helpful for the military has been the "accelerating collapse" of the People's Defense Forces (PDFs), argues Amara Thiha of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
The PDFs sprang up after the coup in the hundreds in communities across the country, taking up arms against the regime. They have done much of the fighting since, often alongside Myanmar's older and larger ethnic-minority armies.
Amara Thiha said his own field research, however, has found more defections from PDFs in recent months than in the past few years combined, with some PDFs now "too small to mount coordinated operations."
Even two of the ethnic-minority armies that had been making some of the greatest gains against the military of late, the Arakan Army and Kachin Independence Army, are now struggling, he added.
Overall, Amara Thiha said, the immediate path ahead for Myanmar looks to be of a resistance "in structural decline" facing a regime that is "stabilizing," especially in the ethnic-majority Bamar center of the country, the military's traditional power base.
"The conflict is not over, and the regime faces its own structural vulnerabilities, including elite bargaining tensions with the USDP, governance deficits outside core urban areas, and an economy that has not recovered," he added. "But the military is no longer merely surviving. It is, for the moment, incrementally prevailing."
Htet Shein Lynn, a program associate with the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, another think tank, says the military is not winning so much as no longer just losing.
He says it has won back only a fraction of the ground it has lost over the past five-plus years, and is still losing ground on some fronts.
"The Myanmar military isn't winning," he said, but "has reached a point where it is no longer in a state of continuous defeat."
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During the resistance groups' Operation 1027, in late 2023 and early 2024, the military lost two regional command headquarters and hundreds of battalion bases — its heaviest string of losses of the civil war.
"They have now managed to leverage Chinese assistance to prevent further military losses and begin stabilizing their position," said Htet Shein Lynn.
He and Ross say Myanmar's myriad resistance groups are too fractured and divided to pose a fatal threat to the military, but nor are they likely to face a definitive defeat any time soon.
"The seeds for a durable counter-insurgency in Myanmar have been laid for an extended period of time," said Ross, adding that widespread access to weapons and deep public anger over the coup mean armed resistance to military rule is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.
While the overall level of fighting since the coup has waned a little after peaking during Operation 1027, it is still far higher than it was before the civil war broke out. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died, and more than 3 million people are still displaced.
"You look at where the country was in 2020, before the coup, and where it is now, and I think any honest, reflective military leader would tell you that from a military perspective they are in a much weaker position than they were at that time," said Ross.
"They are a lot more confident than they were two years ago, but I don't think that they are so confident that they would honestly say that they are winning."
