Anthony Davis
In the backwash of Myanmar’s protracted exercise in military-engineered elections, the coming months will see much media commentary on the new frontmen of the junta’s “civilian” government and the degree of warmth that greets their efforts to establish the international legitimacy they will lack at home.
None of it will reflect the bedrock reality of the crisis: the viability of the new line-up in Naypyidaw, its struggle for credibility and its efforts to rescue a crippled economy will be measured not in air-conditioned ministries and think tanks around the region, but by the course of a war waged across the country’s rice paddies and hills.
In a conflict about to enter its sixth year with few certainties beyond an unbridgeable political divide and further human suffering, daunting challenges confront both belligerents: a military, or Tatmadaw, driven by a centralized vision of praetorian governance, and a loose alliance of ethnic minority and majority Bamar factions united around a federal-democratic banner.
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