The Illegible Nation
Burma or Myanmar? In microcosm, this question and its implications captures the central challenges of this project and the political challenges of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. Particularly, this question highlights the varying and lack of standardization of names of places in the country. In this project, I have mapped fighting and violence between the Tatmadaw (the Burmese military) and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) from the start of the military coup on February 1 and May 14 as reported by local news outlets. The inability to find the villages where fighting has occurred in or near on Google Maps illustrates not just the illegibility of Myanmar to the international community, but also arises from the incomplete state and nation-building that is fueling the unfolding civil war.
Data-collecting
The purpose of this project is to map conflict and violence between the Burmese military and EAOs since February 1st. If major international news covers Myanmar at all, they have focused primarily on the protests in the cities of central Burma. Thanks to the efforts of local news media, one can understand that the protests are half of the struggle against the military. The other half is unfolding in Kachin, Shan, and Kayin states. To document these instances, I created a spreadsheet with columns including location (name), location (longitude/latitude), date, belligerents, news source, outcomes, and comments. I compiled this information from the following news sources’ English articles: The Irrawaddy, Myanmar NOW, Frontier Myanmar, The Shan Herald, Karen News, and Kachin News Media Group. From each article relating to violence between the military and the EAOs, I sorted the article’s contents into the spreadsheet columns.
The data possesses considerable limitations because of my own constraints as a researcher and the limited reach of Google Maps in Myanmar. These articles were translated from Burmese, Shan, Kachin, and Karen; these languages do not have consistent translations in English in terms of spelling. Both The Irrawaddy and Myanmar Now are Burmese-language publications. With my rudimentary grasp of the language, it is potentially possible for me to skim the Burmese-language version of these articles to approximate different spellings of place names, most of the villages named in Kachin, Shan, and Karen states are transliterated from their local languages rather than Burmese on Google Maps (if Google Maps has them at all). To achieve some degree of geographic approximation, I instead mapped according to the next jurisdiction up: township. For the most part it was possible to find and map these townships with some exceptions (To denote that a pair of longitude/latitude coordinates corresponded to the township rather than the village level, I underlined the name in the spreadsheet). I frequently mapped on the township level coordinates in the process of mapping as it was difficult to find many villages. Nonetheless, the location of the townships still provides a localized heuristic for understanding where precisely conflicts are occurring. In the conclusion, I will return to how these limitations are significant areas of improvement for further work and research.
In approaching data collection, I made specific decisions to limit the scope of this project. First, the data here clearly does not include the violence exchange between the military and members of the Civil Disobedience movement/Spring Resistance in urban centers in the Bamar majority divisions. Second, the focus of this dataset is violence between the EAOs and the Tatmadaw. At face value, organizations like the Chinland Defense Forces (CDF) fulfill the criteria of being an ethnic (Chin), armed (increasingly), and organization (at a localized guerilla level). For the purposes of this project, EAO refers to ethnic political organizations operating since before the coup that have administered territory and waged war against the Burmese military. In the dataset, the most prominent EAOs are the:
· Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIA/O),
· Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA),
· the Restoration Council of the Shan State/Shan State Army-South (RCSS/SS-S),
· the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army-North (SSPP-N),
· the T’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and
· Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA).
Third, the term Tatmadaw in the dataset includes the Burmese army, air force, and police (the police a branch of the military). Fourth, unilateral violence inflicted upon villagers in the ethnic states as Tatmadaw airstrikes or artillery bombardments are included because of historical counterinsurgency tactics: “Since it was impossible to determine to determine which Shans, Karens, or Arakanese were rebels… the main goal of the Tatmadaw in these regions was simply to depopulate them” (Callahan 223). Fourth, violence among EAOs (notably in Shan State) is included because of the intersection between their struggles against each other and the Burmese military.
Methods/Design
To map incidents of conflict and violence, I imported the Folium package in python, centering the map of Myanmar on the city of Mandalay. With this map I wanted to convey where, when, who, how and what kinds of violence and conflicts are happening. To accomplish this goal, I relied completely on the features of Folium’s map markers. I chose map markers because of their ability to convey the locality of each reported incident when viewed on their own and the larger patterns formed when viewed alongside other makers. Each marker also featured a popup feature in which if the user clicks on it a popup with text appears. I transferred the information from the spreadsheet’s names, date, belligerents, and comments columns to the popup. The markers are color-coded to the week in which they happened in the period between February 1st and May 13th.
· 2/1–2/7: Dark purple
· 2/7–2/14: Purple
· 2/15–2/21: blue
· 2/22–2/28: Blue
· 3/1–3/7: Dark Green
· 3/8–3/14: Green
· 3/15–3/21: Light Green
· 3/22–3/28: Dark Red
· 3/29–4/4: Red
· 4/5–4/11: Light Red
· 4/12–4/18: Pink
· 4/19–4/25: Black
· 4/26–5/1: Gray
· 5/2–5/8: Light Gray
· 5/9–5/15: White
Ethical/Representation concerns
While drawing upon local voices in the writing of this paper, I took considerable authorial license in determining what information to include in the marker pop-ups. I made these decisions for the argumentative purposes laid out above. Therefore, proceed with the knowledge that the most accurate way of understanding the local perspective would be to explore the links embedded in the spreadsheet.
The Coup
Under the pretense of investigating voting irregularities, the Tatmadaw declared a yearlong state of emergency in Myanmar and detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and democratically elected leaders on February 1st. The military sought to prevent the formation of a new National League for Democracy (NLD) government that triumphed in 2020 elections, winning 396 of 498 contested parliamentary seats. Analysts ascribe the coup to the military’s increasing weariness of Aung San Suu Kyi’s growing power in tandem with Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s personal political ambitions.
Instead, General Min Aung Hlaing has established the State Administrative Council (SAC), returning Myanmar to junta rule. Originating with nurses and doctors, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) challenges the SAC and military’s legitimacy. CDM is not a monolithic organization; rather, it is a grassroots movement encompassing almost all sectors of Burmese society. Encouraging all sectors of Burmese society to refuse working, CDM intends to shut down the economy to starve the Tatmadaw of finances. The CDM, however, is not the only component of the unfolding turmoil in Myanmar. It is mostly concentrated in the Bamar-majority areas of central Burma. To understand the full picture of the country’s future, the insurgencies on the peripheries must be understood as well.
The Insurgencies
British colonial administration drew the outline of what today is present-day Burma, incorporating a range of ethnic groups that had not coexisted in the same polity in the precolonial era. As of 2014, Burma is made up of 135 recognized indigenous ethnic groups. The main groups are the Bamar (68%), Shan (9%), the Karen (7%), the Arakanese (4%) and the Mon (2%). Fresh from the British divide and rule strategy that exploited ethnic differences and being buffeted by the waves of 20th century nationalism, Myanmar collapsed into civil war months after independence. In the 1950s, the Tatmadaw emerged as the only institution capable of (mostly) extending state authority to the national borders inherited from British colonialism. The increasing ineptitude of the civilian government in eliminating secessionist threats led to the 1964 coup which would inaugurate varying degrees of Tatmadaw rule from 1964 to 2012 (First under the rule of the dictator Ne Win from 1964 to 1988 and then under the military junta from 1988 to 2012) (Callahan 221). While the Tatmadaw succeeded in driving the insurgents to the Chinese and Thai borders, it neither eliminated them on the field of battle nor forged a lasting peace.
The Tatmadaw’s failure undergirds the two central political issues of Myanmar: state and nation-building. The inability of the military to defeat the EAOs and bring their territory within the ambit of centralized state control is a failure of state-building (Callahan 13). The longevity of the EAOs and their creation of parallel state structures and de facto independent enclaves in Kachin, Shan, Karen, and Rakhine states contests centralized state-building with localized state-building. The Tatmadaw’s rejection of meaningful political reforms to accommodate calls for greater autonomy in the ethnic states constitutes the failure of nation-building. After 7 decades of conflict most major EAOs and the military’s conceptions of the Burmese nation have diverged such that they are irreconcilable.
Main finding
Much of the data gathered from Karen News illustrates the incomplete or contested state and nation-building that made even approximating the location of villages by township challenging. For example, several articles detailed fighting in Luthaw Township. A general Google Search as well as a Google maps search yields no results that indicate where Luthaw Township is. Upon searching “Kayin State Townships” in Google Images, I came across several maps. Most of the maps did not have a Luthaw Township on them; however a KNU map found in an Asia Foundation report includes Luthaw.
The reason why Google did not yield results for Luthaw Township is because Luthaw Township is a name given by the Karen National Union to that Township, not the Burmese government. To amp the point in the general vicinity of the Township I had to mentally note some defining features, like the fact that Luthaw Township is tucked into the curve that Kayin state appears to be carving through Kayah State to the north. Furthermore, in reporting airstrikes on Karen villages, most Karen News articles used Karen names. In sum, the contested nation-building between the KNU and the Burmese central state in Kayin state made it difficult to find Luthaw Township.
Areas of Improvement
Going forward in this project, I see data examination, compilation, and presentation. In terms of examination, I hope to collaborate with Burmese friends to see what further insights can be gleaned from the Burmese-language versions of these articles. In terms of compilation, the Excel Spreadsheet is a mess. Regarding presentation, I would like to find a way to highlight the state/regional level boundaries while using the Folium package.
Conclusion
Returning to the question of “Burma or Myanmar,” legibility is meant not just to capture the political dynamics of the country but also the nature of the Western gaze toward it. The illegibility of the country in its nation and state-building processes renders the country an ill-suited fit for the morality plays that Western media looks for from abroad. The fight for democracy in predominantly Bamar areas in central Myanmar registers in the common narrative of democracy against dictatorship, but also obscures that the struggle between democratically elected predominantly Bamar politicians and mostly Bamar Tatmadaw generals is a battle for control over the central state. Whether under total military control, or mixed military-civilian as from 2015–2021, a nation and state-building project was imposed upon ethnic minorities inimical to many of their political interests and aspirations. For this reason, the west was blindsided by the apparent betrayal of democratic values by Aung San Suu Kyi. The western narrative’s fixation on her and her Bamar-centric political party’s push for democracy missed how that democracy would also involve state and nation-building projects like those of the military. Essentially, this narrative failed to reckon with how the autocratic generals and the democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi could share the same Bamar-Buddhist chauvinism in dealing with the country’s ethnic conflicts. With this in mind, I hope that this project can keep the conversation alive surrounding not just the protests but also the conflict between the military and the EAOs which will play an equal role in determining the fate of the country.
Works Cited
Callahan, Mary P. Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma. Cornell Univ. Press, 2005.
