Myanmar’s implosive war with itself has now come to South Asia in a manner a few of us predicted a year ago, but many discarded as being fanciful even with mounting evidence that this war is steadily rewriting the political and security architecture of eastern south Asia.  The war between the military junta led by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army, and what often seems like the rest of Myanmar, has inevitably come to the borders with China, India, and Bangladesh.

The conflict in Myanmar threatens China’s energy security, has disrupted its trade and investment, and weakened border management along the 2,000km-plus border with Myanmar. India’s plans to secure an energy and transhipment foothold in north-western Myanmar is up in the air. Its 1,600km-plus border with Myanmar is now a headache both on account of spreading conflict and ethnic pressure: several groups like the Naga and Kuki-Chin-Zo ethnicities have homelands on either side of the roiled border.

And Bangladesh’s increasingly plaintive pleas for global help to repatriate a million-plus Rohingya to Rakhine province in Myanmar, now a major geography of conflict, is firmly relegated to the diplomatic twilight zone with near-zero chances of repatriation in anything but the fuzzy long-term. Bangladesh’s new foreign minister admitted to just such an eventuality -- although not with such bluntness -- in public remarks earlier this week.

How things are panning out

As we know, in October 2023 a coalition of three ethnic armed groups of the Three Brotherhood Alliance of rebel groups, or “3BHA”, comprising the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Arakan Army operating in Rakhine, launched attacks on junta bases and strategically important towns in the Shan areas. This linked a strategically important swathe from the country’s northeast in Shan State along the border with China to the west-central Rakhine and Chin States, which share borders with Bangladesh and India.

The attacks by 3BHA led to their controlling or influencing key towns, roads, and trading hubs. This does not count the more than the estimated 500 PDFs or People’s Defense Forces militias and citizens’ groups across Myanmar ranged against the Tatmadaw since the military coup of February 2021. PDFs increasingly began to operate in tandem with the so-called EAOs or ethnic armed organizations.

In early January 2024 in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, representatives of 3BHA and the Tatmadaw agreed to a ceasefire zone along the border with China and Myanmar’s Shan State. China officially acknowledged facilitating the meeting and its outcome. That ceasefire is now undone with fighting resuming in the past week. China’s word is now the rebels’ word.

It has actually gotten worse in China’s neighbourhood. The Irrawaddy reported on January 26 that the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, which holds sway in the Kachin region to Myanmar’s north, claimed it “captured another Myanmar junta base in northern Shan State on Wednesday [January 24] after defeating” an infantry battalion. In a repeat of similar incidents across Myanmar’s north, centre, and east in recent weeks and months, Tatmadaw forces surrendered to rebels -- in this instance, KIA.

This base, as KIA explained, is “crucial” to control the road from Lashio to Muse on the Chinese border, and is a major route for border trade with China, far and away Myanmar’s biggest trading partner.

Does China have anything to worry about?

On the same day, news arrived that the United Wa State Party (UWSP), the political arm of another major ethnic armed group, the United Wa State Army, began administering Hopang, a town in northern Shan State it overran earlier in January. The group runs the government -- “People’s Government” -- in Wa areas adjacent to Shan State.

Perhaps most worryingly for China, several reports indicate the battle has come to the vicinity of Sittwe, the capital of coastal Rakhine state to the west, with the Arakan Army controlling all exits from the town; the airport remains for now the only safe way out for residents.

Two pipelines not far to the south of Sittwe contribute to China's energy security. The Myanmar-China crude oil pipeline runs 771km from Madé Island off Kyaukpyu in Rakhine across Myanmar to Ruili in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, in the process traversing the heart of Rakhine State, the Magway Region, Mandalay Region, and Shan State. A 300,000 ton crude oil terminal has been built on Madé Island, with an annual capacity of storing and moving 22 million tons of oil. State-run China National Petroleum Corp, or CNPC, runs the pipeline as a joint venture with the state-run Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise or MOGE. This helps China transship oil from West Asia and elsewhere and reduce dependence on the Strait of Malacca.

The second pipeline, the 793km-long Myanmar-China Gas Pipeline begins at Ramree Island, also in Rakhine just to the west of Madé and, running mostly parallel to the oil pipeline, also ends at Ruili in China's Yunnan Province. This pipeline delivers gas extracted from nearby offshore fields. The fields and the pipeline were launched with a mix of investors, from CNPC and MOGE -- which also ensured offtake for Myanmar's own gas needs -- to Posco-Daewoo and KOGAS of South Korea, and Indian energy majors GAIL Ltd and the overseas exploration arm of ONGC Ltd.

Besides securing its large mining interests in central and northern Myanmar, this potential squeezing of its crucial energy pipeline, a part of the vaunted China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, will be keeping Chinese negotiators at work 24/7.

A policy in tatters

Equally, with its energy and transhipment interests centred around Sittwe, India’s security and foreign policy establishments will be greatly concerned with the fall of Paletwa earlier this month to the Arakan Army. Paletwa, on the Kaladan river which is also used by the Tatmadaw to ferry supplies to and from Sittwe, is a key node for India’s planned Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project to link the Indian Mainland to its North-eastern states via Myanmar. It is designed to ease pressure on the 22km choke point of the Siliguri Corridor -- the so-called “Chicken’s Neck” between Nepal and Bangladesh that now links India to its northeast.

This plan, along with the “via Myanmar” aspect of India’s Act East Policy, is in tatters.

Perhaps even more than China, India signed up for the primacy of the Tatmadaw. Since October 2023, both countries have had to rapidly, repeatedly reconfigure its approaches for a future that looks to be that of a multiverse. As this column discussed in mid-January, the large to-do list in Myanmar will need to prioritize the de-escalation of the countrywide conflict, and a power-sharing concord with the Tatmadaw as a possible transition to an uneasy, coalition-driven civilian rule.

But the path to that de-escalation and power-sharing will not be possible without taking on board all the ethnic armies of Myanmar, who will inevitably want greater autonomy than that accorded ethnic groups after Myanmar’s independence in 1948, and several subsequent accords and peace treaties guaranteeing many of them various degrees of autonomy.

There also remains the extremely tricky issue of de-mobilizing and de-weaponizing the estimated 65,000 members of various PDFs, besides cooling down the estimated 100,000 or so members of ethnic armed groups.

Everybody will want a share of the future Myanmar. Only the surest, nimble-footed oversight by regional and global superpowers, with the oversight of the United Nations, Asean, or a new multilateral monitoring agency could ensure even the slimmest chance of stability in Myanmar. The question is: will China permit such intervention in its geopolitical backyard? Or will it be compelled to -- with an eye on securing its energy, trade, and investment pipelines?

In any case the alternative to this cobbled together stability is an Afghanistan between South Asia and Southeast Asia, a country of warlords playing deadly chess with each other with the help of their neighbourhood proxies.

What about the Rohingya?

As for the Rohingya and their repatriation from Bangladesh, it’s no-go. Besides the blockade caused by ongoing conflict, the failure of repatriation was pre-destined. For more than a decade, the Tatmadaw collaborated with ultra-nationalist, extremist-fringe Buddhist clergy like Ma-Ba-Tha and that group’s subsequent avatars to legitimize the demonization of the Rohingya as foreign to Myanmar’s ethnic and religious ethos.

 Once that atmosphere was created, they were systematically robbed off their rights, made stateless, and then a majority ejected from Rakhine with the leverage of violence.

There cannot be an effective atmosphere for repatriation of the Rohingya unless the effects of military-mandated poison, which was then seamlessly co-administered by the subsequent National League for Democracy government, is diligently reversed.

This is unlikely to happen for several years.

Displaced Rohingya are largely on their own. And, in the foreseeable future, Bangladesh will largely be on its own with the Rohingya.

(This article was first published by Dhaka Tribune, Bangladesh).