Myanmar's Resistance Needs A Zelensky-Like Charismatic Leader

The previous day, another airstrike killed at least nine people in Chin state.

“These violent attacks further underscore the regime's disregard for human life and its responsibility for the dire Political and humanitarian crisis in Burma (Myanmar) following the February 2021 coup,” a US State Department spokesman said in a statement.

But the latest in a growing number of murderous attacks on civilians by Myanmar junta forces is unlikely to result in
more than tough rhetoric from the West.

More than two years on from a military coup that ousted a popularly-elected government, there is little enthusiasm from the rest of the world – including among Myanmar's neighbors in Southeast Asia that are supposed to be steering a response to the civil strife – for anything other than stern words.

Tom Andrews, the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, tweeted:“The Myanmar military's attacks against innocent people, including today's airstrike in Sagaing, [are] enabled by world indifference and those supplying them with weapons. How many Myanmar children need to die before world leaders take strong, coordinated action to stop this carnage?”

According to Andrew, Myanmar is the world's“forgotten war.”

Indeed, there is an obvious double standard as Myanmar's disparate rebel forces have been repeatedly rebuffed in their appeals for military and financial aid while, at the same time, Western democracies are propping Ukraine with the latest munitions in its defense against Russia's invasion.

“While the two conflicts are not completely analogous, it is nonetheless striking how much Ukraine has galvanized the international community, while Myanmar has almost completely been ignored,” Nicholas Farrelly, of the University of Tasmania, argued recently in an essay.

One reason, he suggested, has to do with the lack of a visible, iconic leader leading the resistance in the name of democracy.“With ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other public figures locked up, Myanmar's resistance forces have no recognizable public face,” he wrote.

Likewise, The Economist, in an article published on January 31, noted“This new resistance lacks a charismatic leader.” According to Frontier Myanmar, a newspaper,“the lack of an easily recognizable figure equivalent to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has arguably made it harder to rally international support.”

The anti-junta National Unity Government (NUG)'s acting president is Duwa Lashi La, who is almost unknown outside of Myanmar.

Several resistance leaders have risen and fallen in popularity. In the months after the coup, Dr Sasa, a Chin medical doctor and a National League for Democracy (NLD) campaigner, became one of the main spokespeople for the anti-junta movement, but his pedigree has fallen since last year.

“Dr Sasa's role in the NUG has visibly diminished. Although still its minister of international cooperation, he is no longer featured so heavily in the administration's press conferences and events, and he attends fewer meetings with foreign governments,” Frontier Myanmar reported in November.

The newspaper noted another pro-democracy figure, Min Ko Naing, a longtime activist, also rose to prominence in the immediate months after the coup but he deliberately retreated from frontline activity soon afterward.

Analysts reckon that potential leaders are wary of making themselves too well known, as this makes them more of a target for the junta's forces. There are also claims that many in the civilian PDFs and ethnic militias, those doing the fighting, are quick to mock“armchair activists” and attention seekers.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's long-time pro-democracy icon since the 1990s and whose National League for Democracy-led government was toppled in the February 1, 2021 coup, could have played a Zelensky-like unifying role if she were free to operate.

On the day of her arrest, she called on Myanmar's people“not to accept a coup” and warned the international community that a military coup would return the country“back under a dictatorship.”

However, she is only rarely able to convey public messages from detention, which are relayed by her proxies and often cryptic in nature. Last April, she apparently called on her compatriots to“stay united and hold discussions on different views.”

Scot Marciel, an author, analyst and former US ambassador to Myanmar, told Asia Times that“a unifying, charismatic figure would certainly help a great deal, as would a highly professional public communications campaign.”

One can only speculate what would have happened had Suu Kyi managed to escape capture and fled abroad before the coup.

Perhaps, like Zelensky, she would have been invited to deliver speeches to the US Congress and parliaments across the Western and wider world. She would have also been a regular on rolling news.

Newspaper and television editors tend to prefer stories with a human touch, and Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and whose name is immediately recognizable in the West, could have been that spark to keep Myanmar in the news.

Of course, there's a problem with this wishful narrative.

Suu Kyi was a darling of Western liberals during her 15 years of detention between 1989 and 2010 for her non-violent stand to achieve democracy, and she was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for“an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

Awards and accolades followed. French director Luc Besson's feature biopic“The Lady” made her a recognizable icon in the West, spoken about in the same breath as Nelson Mandela.

But Suu Kyi's reputation was badly damaged (one French newspaper called her a“pariah” on the day of her arrest) after her NLD was elected to government in 2016 and she became state counselor, the nation's de-facto leader, in a quasi-civilian arrangement where the military maintained control of top ministries including defense, home and border affairs.

In office, she was often accused of not pressing the liberal policies she long said she held sacrosanct. Worse, her image was irrevocably tarnished after she failed to condemn the military-led“genocide” of Muslim Rohingyas in a spasm of internationally-condemned violence in 2017.

More than 730,000 Rohingyas fled to precarious, flood-prone camps in Bangladesh, while about 600,000 remain under oppressive rule in Myanmar, Human Rights Watch estimates.

“Aung San Suu Kyi completely lost all international credibility and sympathy after defending the military against charges of genocide,”
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington DC, said.

“She is part of the problem and she should have no role if there can be a negotiated settlement; she is simply too polarizing,” Abuza added.
“But her absence now, as an iconic figure who has the ear of political elites and a pedestal does hurt the NUG in terms of garnering international support.”

Yet it is doubtful whether a unifying charismatic figure, if one existed, would prompt a more coordinated response from the international community.

“I don't think that it's an issue of personality, it's rather about leadership,” a senior foreign diplomat told Asia Times.

The main problem is that the vast resistance movement is disorganized, analysts and observers say. Although the NUG claims to speak on its behalf, the movement is divided between numerous new People's Defense Forces (PDFs), most of which act independently or are aligned with ethnic armed organizations.

“There is no single charismatic leader that can represent the opposition because there is no unified opposition,” Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said.

“The National Unity Government claims to speak for all opposition forces, but it doesn't,” he added.“The ethnic armed organizations or the more important fighting forces, without which the NUG has no hope of victory, are not interested in following the NUG's political lead.”

This lack of an organized movement, some analysts reckon, is the primary reason why foreign governments have shied from wading any further into the conflict.

It isn't clear to them that greater support for the NUG would amount to anything if the shadow government doesn't command the will of the movement it claims to speak for.

“Sympathetic governments are looking to the National Unity Government to create a clear alternative to the military election agenda, which means making the concessions on federalism necessary to bring ethnic armed organizations and ethnic political parties and civil society on board to create a unified front,” Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, a lobbying group, said.

“This hasn't happened yet.”

While Suu Kyi, 77, remains popular at home, her time in the political limelight has likely ended. Many in the younger generation reckon that Suu Kyi's domineering control of the NLD was a hindrance to democratic development.

Others reckon that the anti-junta movement needed to shed the NLD's baggage in order to agree on more revolutionary solutions to the problems that have plagued Myanmar for decades, not least the question of minority groups in ethnic areas.

The NUG, for instance, now proposes a federal solution to the country's historic divisions, providing more autonomy to the ethnic periphery regions as well as greater representation of minority groups.

The anti-coup revolution has also significantly altered thinking about how to achieve peace and liberty.

Whereas Suu Kyi and several other NUG senior figures are from an older generation who saw non-violent means as the way to achieve political goals, many young PDF members clearly reckon that liberty will come more readily through violent means that result in the military junta's overthrow.

There is little chance they will accept the return of the status quo antebellum: the system of militarized politics and centralized control over the peripheries must be overturned by revolution. Suu Kyi, despite her charisma and clout, now represents the old failed ways to many in a, for now, leaderless movement.

Follow David Hutt on Twitter at @davidhuttjourno

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