A major alliance of ethnic armed groups in northern Myanmar has announced a unilateral one-month ceasefire to allow humanitarian relief efforts to proceed in the wake of last week’s devastating earthquake.
In a statement published late yesterday in Chinese, Burmese, and English, the Three Brotherhood Alliance said that in light of the widespread destruction, it wished for local and international relief organizations “to carry out their work with peace of mind.”
“In areas where fighting is ongoing between our Three Brotherhood Alliance and the military council, we will not initiate offensive operations – except in cases of self-defense – and hereby declare a unilateral humanitarian pause for one month to ensure that post-earthquake rescue operations can be conducted swiftly and effectively,” it stated.
The announcement came three days after the opposition National Unity Government (NUG), the titular head of the resistance to military rule, declared a unilateral two-week ceasefire in earthquake-affected areas.
The 7.7 magnitude earthquake, which hit on March 28, has caused chaos and destruction in large swathes of central Myanmar. The destruction appears to be particularly bad in Mandalay, Sagaing, Magwe, Naypyidaw, and Bago regions, as well as adjacent parts of Shan State, where countless homes, businesses, government offices, and religious buildings have collapsed. The death toll from the disaster has now risen to 2,719, according to the country’s military junta, and is expected to continue rising in the coming days, as more bodies are pulled from beneath the rubble.
The Alliance’s “humanitarian pause” speaks to the seriousness of the situation in the quake zone. The NUG does not have direct command of military forces, and so its ceasefire announcement is best seen as a symbolic act and a pitch for international recognition as Myanmar’s legitimate government. But the Three Brotherhood Alliance, which includes the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and Arakan Army (AA), has struck some of the most significant blows against the military junta of any resistance groups.
The Alliance’s Operation 1027 offensive, launched in October 2023, made stunning gains against the junta. The MNDAA and TNLA gained control of large swathes of territory in northern Shan State, including the regional capital Lashio, the location of the military’s Northeastern Regional Command, and several important border crossings with China, while the AA made rapid gains in Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s west.
While the MNDAA and TNLA have since both agreed to open ceasefire talks with the junta, after coming under considerable Chinese pressure to do so, the AA has remained on the offensive in Rakhine, much of which is now under its control.
A Catalyst for Political Change?
These unilateral ceasefires raise the question of whether the scale and magnitude of the destruction might act as a catalyst for political change. So far, the military junta has shown little sign of moderating its position toward those opposing its rule and is prioritizing political control over earthquake relief efforts – or at least working to ensure that relief efforts do not loosen its control over the regions of the country it still controls.
Reports from inside Myanmar suggest that the military has been missing in action in many affected areas, and that search and rescue efforts have been coordinated by volunteers, who have been forced to use rudimentary tools – including their bare hands – to shift rubble and locate survivors.
“The military has the resources – they have helicopters, trucks. But in the last three days, we haven’t seen any of that being used to help people in areas like Sagaing,” Khin Ohmar of Progressive Voice, a human rights group, told ABC News. Added Ye Myo Hein of the United States Institute for Peace, “The earthquake has exposed the regime’s near-zero capacity to provide emergency aid to victims.”
At the same time, the military has reportedly continued its air attacks on resistance-held areas of Myanmar. Ye Myo Hein alleged that “airstrikes continue daily across the country,” and that his organization had confirmed at least 16 attacks in the four days after the earthquake, targeting resistance areas in Sagaing, Magway, and Bago regions, as well as Shan, Karen, Rakhine, and Kachin states.
The military also has a long track record of withholding aid from populations that resist its rule. Yesterday, the NUG called on international donors to ensure that earthquake aid bypasses the junta authorities, worried that it might be used to strengthen its control.
As I’ve noted before, all of this represents a striking parallel to the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which swept across the Irrawaddy delta in May 2008, causing a swathe of destruction. At the time, the military government was accused of prioritizing a constitutional referendum over rescue efforts, and obstructing aid deliveries to affected regions. The cyclone ended up killing more than 100,000 people.
At the same time, however, the damage from Nargis was so extensive that it confronted the military junta with its shameful lack of state capacity and helped catalyze the (albeit limited) political and economic opening that unfolded over the course of the 2010s.
As historian Thant Myint-U noted in his 2019 book, “The Hidden History of Burma,” Nargis “revealed clearly the weakness of state institutions.” In the aftermath of the disaster, the generals, while initially hesitant to allow foreign assistance to affected areas, “began to give both local and international charities far more room to operate.” Sean Turnell, a former economic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi, wrote this week that Nargis “hastened that brief period when military rule was forced into something of a retreat.”
There is also the case of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the political impacts that it had in Indonesia’s Aceh region. Around 130,000 people were killed when the tsunami washed across Aceh, a region on the western tip of Sumatra. More than half a million were displaced. But in its very lethality, the disaster forced a halt to the prolonged civil war between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian military, and led to renewed efforts to end the conflict. The two sides went on to sign a peace agreement in August 2005.
Could the devastation in Myanmar lead to similar changes? It is probably too early to say, and there are also important differences between Nargis and the Sagaing earthquake. In 2008, at the time that Nargis scythed down out of the Andaman Sea, Myanmar’s generals had already initiated a process aimed at transforming Myanmar into what they termed a “discipline-flourishing democracy” – a process that later partly escaped their control and snowballed into a more substantial process of political and economic reform. While the exact causes of the reforms are complex and contested, it is clear that by the late 2000s, many members of the military high command, led by Senior Gen. Than Shwe, had begun to grow ashamed at their country’s economic backwardness and international pariah status, and were willing to cede some political ground to remedy this.
The political situation in the rest of the country was also much more stable. Myanmar was by no means at peace in 2008, but the current civil war is taking place on an altogether different scale – and, where the military is concerned, has much higher stakes. Over the past two years, the Tatmadaw has sustained losses that it has not experienced since the immediate years after independence, and is currently locked in a struggle for its very survival.
Finally, while the past generals were ashamed by what their country had become by 2008, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, by seizing power from Myanmar’s civilian government in February 2021, willingly took a step that he must have known would return his country to the bad old days of economic dysfunction and Western sanctions, even if the nationwide opposition to his move was harder to predict. And so, while resistance groups may be willing to put down their weapons, the most likely outcome is that the military will use the earthquake as a political opportunity to gain the upper hand over those opposing its rule, either through military operations or the manipulation of aid and relief supplies.
If the current devastation leads somehow to a political opening, it will be against the will and intention of the current ruling military clique.
