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Something Is Iffy In Myanmar – Only Ten Days After The Coup There Is Already A U.S-Style Color Revolution Countering It
On February 1 the military of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw, launched a coup d'état. President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi were detained, along with ministers and their deputies and members of the parliament. They were accused of some minor crimes and will be kept off the streets for some time. Aung San Suu Kyi party, the NLD which had widely won the latest election, will be prohibited.
All that was not astonishing and is unlikely to make a big difference in the politics within and towards the extremely complex country:
There’s no smoking gun, of course, but it’s virtually impossible that Beijing had not been at least informed, or “consulted”, by the Tatmadaw on the new dispensation.
China, Myanmar’s top trade partner, is guided by three crucial strategic imperatives in the relationship with its southern neighbor: trade/connectivity via a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridor; full access to energy and minerals; and the necessity of cultivating a key ally within the 10-member ASEAN.
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None of that will change, whoever runs the politico-economic show in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Aung San Suu Kyi, locally known as Amay Suu (“Mother Suu”) were discussing the China-Myanmar economic corridor only three weeks before the coup. Beijing and Naypyidaw have clinched no less than 33 economic deals only in 2020.
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Yet this is not all about China. The Tatmadaw coup is an eminently domestic affair – which involved resorting to the same old school, CIA-style method that installed them as a harsh military dictatorship way back in 1962.
The NLD and Suu Kyi had simply become to assertive and threatened to touch the commercial businesses the military runs. That could not be condoned.
There are several ethnic insurgencies ongoing in Myanmar. There is are a lot of warlords and off the record drug and weapon business. The NLD did not care about that nor will the military:
The [election] end result privileged the NLD, whose support is negligible in all border regions. Myanmar’s majority ethnic group – and the NLD’s electoral base – is the Bamar, Buddhist and concentrated in the central part of the country.
The NLD frankly does not care about the 135 ethnic minorities – which represent at least one third of the general population. It’s been a long way down since Suu Kyi came to power, when the NLD actually enjoyed a lot of support. Suu Kyi’s international high profile is essentially due to the power of the Clinton machine.
If you talk to a Mon or a Karen, he or she will tell you they had to learn the hard way how much of an intolerant autocrat is the real Suu Kyi. She promised there would be peace in the border regions – eternally mired in a fight between the Tatmadaw and autonomous movements. She could not possibly deliver because she had no power whatsoever over the military.
Without any consultation, the electoral commission decided to cancel voting, totally or partially, in 56 cantons of Arakan state, Shan state, Karen state, Mon state and Kachin state, all of them ethnic minorities. Nearly 1.5 million people were deprived of voting.
While Suu Kyi once had 'western' support, they gave her a Nobel Peace Prize, that has long been lost:
Suu Kyi’s biggest mistake was believing that she could, through her brand of nationalism, dismiss accusations of genocide directed against the Rohingya. In the process, she lost Western support. From that point, she has been on borrowed time, and the military barely hid its distaste for her.
To be sure, the military anticipated the impact and the reaction from the international community and took into consideration the new US administration’s preoccupations with domestic issues. Myanmar doesn’t even figure in the top 10 priorities of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
Given the above it is astonishing to see that only a few days after the coup happened the country is already experiencing a U.S. style color revolution.
Just consider this ABC News 'Explainer' which is typical for color-rev reporting:
EXPLAINER: How are the Myanmar protests being organized?
For the most part the protests have grown organically.
“This movement is leaderless — people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will,” said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a prominent activist.
Activist groups, professional work groups, unions and individuals across Myanmar have all come out in opposition to the coup, as has Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.
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Health care workers also started a protest campaign, wearing red ribbons, holding signs and urging other medical staff to not work at state-operated health facilities.
Street protests over the weekend featured the heavy presence of unions, student groups and other groups representing professions as diverse as park rangers and book printers.
Yangon residents have voiced dissent by banging pots and pans together across the city at night.
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Making the rounds have been copies of safety protocol information sheets, some of them originally from Hong Kong, with instructions on how to encrypt communications and how to stay safe during protests.
"The movement is leaderless," said one of its longtime leaders who is well known to this 'western' reporter. …
The highlighted points are all standard attributes we have seen in other color revolutions around the world. This type of reporting by Reuters is also quite typical:
Myanmar's anti-coup protesters defy crackdown with humour
Protesters returned to the streets of Myanmar on Wednesday despite the shooting of a young woman the previous day, with some deploying humour to emphasise their peaceful opposition to this month’s military takeover.
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“We cannot stay quiet,” youth leader Esther Ze Naw told Reuters. “If there is blood shed during our peaceful protests, then there will be more if we let them take over the country.”
There were no reports of violence on Wednesday and in many places protests took on a festive air, with bare-chested body builders, women in ball gowns and wedding dresses, farmers in tractors and people with their pets. Some set up a protest line in inflatable rubber tubs.
Thousands joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon, while in the capital, Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign.
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Earlier, soldiers took over a clinic that had been treating wounded protesters in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, a doctor there said.
The teenager was shot when police fired, mostly into the air, to clear the protesters.
Another sign of a color revolution are dedicated protester fan accounts which post pictures of people carrying English language signs. These are clearly color-rev public-relation efforts aimed at a 'western' public.
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So this is evidently a color revolution effort against the military.
What is irritating with it is the speed with which it took off. Color revs usually require years of group building and leadership preparation. They need monetary and communication support as well as political directions from 'advisors' in 'western' embassies. Here it took only ten days to launch it.
In 2005 the Bush administration cultivated the Myanmar 'civil society' and Suu Kyi, who was then under house arrest. It popped up in the 'Saffron color revolution' in 2007 and with Cyclone Nargis in 2008 when the Bush administration tried to use Responsibility to Protect (R2P) nonsense to get a military foot on the ground.
But that all is a long time ago and after Suu Kyi had come to power there was no necessity to keep those efforts alive.
Then again – under Myanmar's 2008 constitution the military was still effectively in charge. Together with Suu Kyi's large win in the latest election there may have been an long planned 'western' attempt underway to finally unseat the military from its privileged position and to pull the country out of China's orbit.
But the chance for that eventually to happen is practically zero. Some 70% of Myanmar's population lives in rural areas. The protests occur only in the three big cities Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyitaw and are relatively small. The military is ruthless and will have no trouble to take the protesters down.
Whoever launched this nonsense should be held responsible for endangering those people.
A side trip into the provinces of Myanmar and the drug trade presented by Asia Times:
Why Asia is losing its war on drugs
Myanmar’s Shan state has emerged as a de facto special economic zone for the industrial-scale production of illicit narcotics
By ANTHONY DAVIS
NOVEMBER 19, 2020
. . .
The unprecedented seizure [over 11.5 tonnes with a street value of close to US$1 billion] threw into stark relief two overarching realities of a narcotics crisis that governments across the region are already well aware of but can never afford to publicly admit.
The first is that Myanmar’s Shan state, that country’s largest administrative division, has emerged as a de facto special economic zone (SEZ) for the industrial-scale production of a smorgasbord of illicit narcotics. Shan state’s spiraling drugs industry operates mostly securely beyond the reach of local or international law enforcement.
The other is that behind an impressive facade of well-funded national counternarcotics bureaucracies, feel-good international conferences and pro forma commitments to stepped up cooperation, Asia’s war on drugs is being comprehensively lost.
. . .
Thai authorities of the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) already possess megabytes of data, much of it shared with their international counterparts, mapping the forensics of narcotics types and signatures of drug-producing “labs” across Shan state.
According to the regional offices of the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Bangkok, the rising tsunami of Shan-centered illicit production is now estimated to involve cash flows of $61.4 billion annually — up from around $40 billion in 2017.
Surging volume, growing diversification and the increasingly standardized purity of narcotics production all reflect sweeping changes in the Shan state trade.
The 1990s era of insurgent-run heroin and yaba production using hand-cranked presses in temporary jungle huts has transformed to large-scale industrial facilities run by sophisticated criminal enterprises catering to expanding and increasingly globalized markets.
. . .
As the UNODC’s peripatetic Bangkok head Jeremy Douglas argues, the rise of cartel-run production in Shan state was initially triggered by a sweeping and concerted crackdown on meth production across southeastern China dating back to 2014.
“Before that, China was the biggest producer of meth in Asia and drawing international attention,” he notes. “We then see a sharp drop in China and a steady rise in Shan.”
Not by coincidence in the years that followed, seizures of meth labs declined across Southeast Asia, notably in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, as production in the far more secure hills of northeast Myanmar was ramped up.
Amid the chaotic military and administrative fragmentation of Shan state, a zone of anarchy that meets virtually any definition of a “failed state”, East Asian drug syndicates are broadly invested in two categories of local armed protection.
The first consists of ethnic armed organizations typically based east of the Salween River and in stable ceasefire arrangements with Myanmar’s national military, or Tatmadaw.
Controlling a wide swath of territory between the Salween River and the Chinese border, the United Wa State Army (UWSA) ranks as the largest and militarily most powerful such group.
With a standing army of some 27,000 trained and well-equipped regulars, its armed forces have achieved a level of deterrence that for the foreseeable future precludes any government action against it.
[MAP] https://i0.wp.com/asiatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/UWSA-Myanmar-Shan-State.jpg?w=1400&ssl=1
Sources also noted that over the past two to three years the Wa have branched out into trafficking and possibly even producing precursor chemicals – potentially a hugely profitable business that obviates current efforts to stem the flow of precursors moving into Shan state mainly from China but also from Thailand and other countries.
The sources noted that over this period there has been confirmation that the Wa area had imported significant quantities of “unique and very sophisticated chemicals.”
Given that there are no known industries in the region that might require these chemicals for any legitimate use, the imports “in volumes that are inexplicable” appeared intended either to produce precursor chemicals required for meth production or possibly to manufacture other synthetic drugs.
The supposition in intelligence circles is that these specialized chemicals – imported from both China and Laos via other countries in the Lower Mekong region – are being used to produce precursors.
That notion has been reinforced by analysis of regional data and intelligence that reflects, on the one hand, the staggering increase in crystal methamphetamine production in Shan state, and, on the other, the fact that seizures of traditional precursors ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine have declined.
“This potentially puts the Wa in a broker role for precursors being used in other parts of Shan state,” noted one official. “And bear in mind that these precursors can be worth more the drugs themselves in Shan state.”
This is the first in a two-part series on Asia’s losing war on drugs.
Blind eyes and payoffs fuel Asia’s drug boom
Myanmar’s military looks away while militia and border guard forces under its nominal command wheel and deal in drugs
By ANTHONY DAVIS
NOVEMBER 20, 2020
BANGKOK – As drug take-downs go, it was a long way from the “kick in the door and round ‘em up” operations celebrated in the movies.
Beginning in February this year and finishing only in early April, it lasted a full 40 days, covered over a hundred square kilometers, and required several battalions of troops from a crack Myanmar Army division.
By the time it was over, the rolling series of sweeps through the Kaunghka area southeast of Kutkai in Myanmar’s northern Shan state had disarmed hundreds of local militiamen and seized 18 tonnes of methamphetamine and other drugs along with huge stockpiles of precursor chemicals.
Raising eyebrows across the region, the operation also saw the first and potentially ominous seizure in Myanmar of a quantity of methyl fentanyl.
A dangerously potent opioid analgesic produced industrially in China, fentanyl mixed with heroin or cocaine caused the deaths of over 30,000 users across the United States in 2018 alone, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adding another toxic accelerant to a Sino-US relationship in freefall.
Spearheaded by high-purity crystal methamphetamine but fast diversifying into newer product lines, the post-2016 explosion of narcotics production in northeastern Myanmar has hinged crucially on powerful ethnic armed groups in ceasefire deals with Myanmar’s military, notably the UWSA and NDAA.
But adding fuel to the fire is a second category of local groups that provide protection to new super-labs financed and staffed by international crime cartels: Border Guard Forces (BGFs) and People’s Militia Forces (PMFs) supervised by Myanmar’s armed forces, or Tatmadaw.
Invariably former ethnic insurgents themselves, the militias are typically loose bands of a few hundred armed men whose putative loyalty to the state has been purchased by the Tatmadaw in exchange for the right to keep their weapons, move into business and make their own deals – no questions asked, brown envelopes welcome.
Scores of them operate across Shan state. Commanded by Tatmadaw officers, BGFs are better trained and equipped, but when it comes to business the same rules evidently apply.
Controlling far smaller areas than larger ceasefire groups, Tatmadaw-aligned militias are mostly based west of the Salween River in northern and central Shan state.
[MAP] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Salween_River_basin_map.svg/220px-Salween_River_basin_map.svg.png
But since 2015 some groups have thrown in their lot with professional players from outside Myanmar who have transformed a cottage-industry with an altogether new level of technical sophistication and financial investment.
A rare insight into the fruits of such cooperation came with the Kutkai take-down, which revealed for the first time the full extent and specialization of the production facilities protected by the Kaunghka PMF.
An ethnic Kachin outfit that traces its roots back to the insurgent Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the Kaunghka militia has more recently been bolstering local “security” on behalf of the Myanmar Army’s Lashio-based Northeastern Command, while extending its business services to protecting the smooth running of narcotics super-labs.
For local Tatmadaw commanders, militia business ventures have translated into extra revenue from at least the 1970s when the military first began approving local paramilitaries.
Indeed, one of the region’s worst kept secrets has been the extent to which regional commands in Shan state have for years padded their books and bank accounts by looking the other way as militia trucks loaded with illicit drugs head south towards the Thai border or west towards India.
But strategic compulsions have also played a role. The Tatmadaw’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the “business” activities of the militia auxiliaries supposedly under its supervision turns on a military mindset that has prioritized territorial security above all else.
[MAP] https://i1.wp.com/asiatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Shan-State-China-Drugs-Narcotics.jpg?w=1137&ssl=1
Perennially overstretched by chronic manpower shortages, the Tatmadaw is locked into a Faustian bargain that precludes reining in errant militias it must rely on to maintain a fig-leaf of central government control and stability in insurgency-prone ethnic minority areas.
Measured against area security and extra income, Tatmadaw enthusiasm for counter-narcotics campaigns will likely remain carefully selective. Cynical observers saw the February-April Kaunghka operations as reflecting less concern over drugs production and far more the need to discipline a militia that had crossed hard security red-lines.
. . .
One well-placed source with access to intelligence noted that no senior militia commanders had faced prosecution after their arrests and were actually released in late June, while most of the narcotics that might have been used as evidence had been burned. What happened to the crucial precursors remains far from clear.
“The Kaunghka were punished: they lost money, drugs and guns. But these guys are not about to do time,” said the source. “It looks more like they’re being rehabilitated: the Tatmadaw still need them as a buffer.”
The generals in Naypyidaw are even less likely to bring to heel ceasefire groups as powerfully entrenched as the UWSA and NDAA. Potential counter-narcotics measures against major ceasefire factions that might conceivably involve drone strikes on identified narcotics labs would, however limited, inevitably risk wider conflict.
In the case of the 27,000-strong UWSA that could – and likely would – spill into protracted war across much of Shan state, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into China, Thailand and central Myanmar with catastrophic social, economic and diplomatic consequences.
In fact, as the Tatmadaw struggles to contain the escalating insurgency in western Rakhine and simmering hostilities in Kachin and northern Shan states, the overridingimportance of maintaining peace with the UWSA effectively guarantees that the joint ventures between the Wa and others with major international cartels based in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan will continue to operate with impunity.
. . .
Indeed, the Shan state-centered illicit drug industry that currently feeds the region’s burgeoning addictions is not only certain to continue business as usual but will also likely expand its operations and output.
“When it comes to meth and other synthetics, the region has arguably surpassed Mexican and Central American production,” says United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) regional head Jeremy Douglas.
“It is emerging as the global epicenter of synthetic drugs, as organized crime continues to expand and diversify the market on the back of the chemical trade and potential to push more and more product.”
Despite turbo-charging transnational organized crime and official corruption, the Asian narcotics crisis is nowhere near exacting a social toll on the scale of the fentanyl crisis in America that might demand its being made a political priority.
. . .
Unable to bring themselves even to criticize brazen war crimes committed by Myanmar state forces against the Rohingya Muslim minority, the regional bloc of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has proved characteristically flaccid in confronting the narcotics tsunami with an integrated regional response commensurate with the scale of the crisis.
“They don’t want to really tackle the problem from a strategic point of view,” adds Quaglia. “A lot of people in government are making a lot of money legitimately and illegitimately from this, and there’s certainly no appetite for arresting (corrupt) generals.”
To the north, China faces its own constraints. At one level, it has been largely unable or unwilling to bring hard-knuckle pressure on ethnic armed groups along its border on which Beijing relies for geostrategic leverage as it pushes forward with its Belt and Road ambitions in Myanmar.
It is equally apparent that Chinese authorities are simply unable to exert a level of control over a sprawling chemical industry that might choke off the flow of still crucial precursor chemicals smuggled into Shan state.
. . .
The upshot is an escalating crisis best addressed by a business-as-usual approach that avoids ruffling diplomatic, bureaucratic or political feathers and which serves to conceal the awkward reality of a well-funded war already all but lost.
And the massive, near-daily drug busts celebrated by law enforcement as local victories merely underscore the scale of their defeat.
Posted by: pogohere | Feb 11 2021 2:14 utc | 51
NLD had 80% of the votes in the aborted 1990 elections, right after the 8888 protests and bloody repression – when the military was in full control of the country and the elections. NLD had 80% of the vote in 2015 – when the military controlled the government and organized the elections. NLD had 81% of the vote in 2020 when it was actually in power and controlled the elections.
There’s been basically no difference for the last 30 years, with 80+% of the people wanting the military to stick to its role of defending the country and not running and looting it. So, obviously, accusations of fraud were a massive joke. Another massive joke was the military basically saying “We will review the election results because we don’t trust you” – and they basically stated 10 mio ballots were fraudulent. As if 1/3 of ballots would be fake, when there were basically the same amount of votes cast than in the previous election – the one the miliaty had set up and badly lost.
What this also means is that it’s no surprise there are mass protests. When a party that has 80% support is ousted from power, expect its voters to be pissed off and rally. I’m not surprised at all by what’s happening there – massive protests were a matter of days, once the coup happened. People have had some glimpse of freedom, it was a given that they weren’t going to go down lightly – only a military so utterly braindead that it actually believed its BS about electoral fraud could hope to get away with such a coup without massive consequences.
Actually, I was surprised by the coup, because it was foolish from the military. They only had a half-assed democratization process, the military directly nominates 1/4 if parliament and key ministries, and controls some big business. The coup only ensures that they will lose these advantages when they’ll lose power. And they will have lost power before the decade is over, for good – they might lose it this year, depending on how things go and on China’s position.
Besides, people should keep in mind we’re not speaking of a governing communist/socialist party that took power thanks to a popular revolution. We’re talking about a military junta, like the Greek colonels or Pinochet. And the current constitution is a silly system that sounds close to the Turkish one during the 1950-1980s, with military having basically veto power “or we just make a coup”.
I don’t think China is amused, because it was very busy developing and investing across Myanmar, way more than before the 2015 NLD victory. This might not be tied to NLD as such and just be BRI, but the fact is, NLD was happy to join Chinese projects like BRI and RCEP and China was quite fine with working with NLD and Suu Kyi on these projects.
Then when it comes to protests, English is still used by many, specially in the cities. It was an English colony for decades after all. Most signs I’ve seen were obviously in Burmese, but some were in English, because obviously they’re hoping for some international help, though I wouldn’t count on it. There’s no way Western countries would send troops there – wouldn’t work at home, wouldn’t go well there with the locals either. Frankly, the main foreign pressure that might be effective would actually be China.
Bottom-line: this clusterfuck looks to come mostly from internal causes, because neither side is hostile to China. Heck, if we’re looking into it, it’s the military that tried to get closer to the West in the 2000s, and China who then reduced its support to the junta. So, it’s silly to accuse the military or the NLD and protesters to be manipulated by China, as it’s silly to assume either of them are manipulated by the West. There might be a bit of Western interference, as usual, but Myanmar as a whole has always been firmly in China’s sphere, and this is not going to change – not with the military in full control, and not with NLD in full control. Both have good relations with Beijing; and if the power in place decides not to be that friendly with China anymore, mere economic actions would be enough to force it to reconsider.
Last but not least, I’m not surprised to see the US back to their usual sanctions bullshit. Well, Myanmar people have been under sanctions for decades. They want to get rid of the generals in power, not be sanctioned. They know well that the military won’t suffer a bit, but the people will be massively hurt by US sanctions. The ones I’ve heard were quite vocal that they don’t want any sanction this time, they’ve had enough. US going that way won’t get them any point from the people of Myanmar, quite the opposite – heck, they might end up considering the non-committed stance from China to be preferable, since it means China still deals with Myanmar and people can work, export stuff and get money.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Feb 11 2021 2:20 utc | 52
“This movement is leaderless — people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will,” said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a prominent activist.
Pure lies, as always for colour revolution ops. On 6th February printed papers were dropped on the pavements all over Yangon, specifically calling for protests in the Hledan district of Yangon on 8th February. And by the way, the crowds that came that day were not small. I saw a video taken from a high viewpoint (probably about 8th floor or something, and with a good view), showing all the sreets jam packed with protestors as far as could be seen. That particular location is a junction of 5 very wide roads (the widest of which I think 8 lanes). The video was claiming over a hundred thousand in that protest, which was a plausible figure for the numbers that could be seen. But the viewpoint couldn’t see far along the roads in any of the 5 directions. Obviously I don’t know how far the protest extended beyond the area covered by the video, and by calling all the protesters in Yangon to that one site it would have given the impression of a really massive demo, and that was probably the intention of choosing that location.
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There is a lot of confusion in this thread as to what is going on, and who is playing what roles. A lot of nonesense. Please see my comment on 4th February here Posted by: BM | Feb 4 2021 19:08 utc | 171.
This matter is all about colour revolutions, but the “military coup” is not the colour revolution, it is a counter-colour revolution.
The main colour revolution was the election in 2015 when Aung San Suu Kyi came (indirectly) to power, despite being banned from running in the election and banned from occupying the position of president. Her party the NLD won the election with a landslide, but because of the constitutional limitations imposed by the military, the NLD were denied absolute power. The CIA and MI6 have had large scale infiltrations of the Myanmar government and military stretching back a long way, but having the NLD in power since 2015 obviously enabled a massive increase in the level of those infiltrations.
For example, the NLD government appointed as Minister of Information Pe Myint, who had been educated in the US, and later trained by the US State Department as a pro-US propagandist.
Given the huge extent of the NLD’s emplacement of US proxies in positions throughout the entirety of the government, the military had justified cause in seeing a serious national security risk and loss of Myanmar sovereignty.
As I see it, this was a single growing (colour revolution) problem ever since the 2015 election (and starting of course much earlier), but the very large scale abuses that certainly occurred in the 2020 election – and the refusal of the NLD to permit investigations of the large number of complaints, just like in the US elections – lead to the Myanmar military calling a state of emergency under the constitution, as they had legitimate cause to do. The 2015 colour revolution – despite gaining control of the government – had never completed, because the military were guaranteed seats in that government. Therefore that 2015 colour revolution was ongoing ever since 2015 (and before) until the present; the military intervention was not a coup but a national security intervention by one arm of the then government, wholly responsible for national security under the constitution against another arm of the government which it had cause to view as a threat to national security. Just as the US has constitutional provisions to impeach a US president, and if convicted remove him from office, so too the Myanmar military had a constitutional foundation for their intervention (there the comparison ends, obviously the differences in the provisions and their context are very considerable).
The military intervention, then, was the counter-colour revolution. The protests starting on 8th February are the counter-counter-colour revolution (continuation of the original 2015 colour revolution, which gained power, but incompletely). The US wanted a Myanmar Yeltsin. Instead they got a Manchurian who resisted the most extreme of the demands of the puppet master.
The complaint What is irritating with it is the speed with which it took off. Color revs usually require years of group building and leadership preparation. They need monetary and communication support as well as political directions from ‘advisors’ in ‘western’ embassies. Here it took only ten days to launch it. is invalid. The NLD colour revolution structures had been built up over a period of decades, and since 2015 had massively consolidated and entrenched their positions. Mounting a counter offensive after 10 days (actually 7 days not 10) was trivially easy in the aspect of “group building and leadership preparation …” etc. Unlike Belarus, the NLD still do have a strong majority following in the ethnic Burmese parts of Myanmar; other ethnic groups are now strongly against Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, because of their discriminatory policies over the past 4 years – that is why they rigged the election to get a big enough constitutional majority to seriously threaten the ability of the military to fend off the colour revolution.
I would contend that once the military saw the NLD had used fraudulent means to claim a constitutional majority that posed a serious threat, and refused to investigate claims of election fraud – exactly like Biden – they consulted with their Russian and Chinese counterparts (especially Russian, with whom the Myanmar military have long had very close connections. Both Russia and China, in my opinion, would have backed action, as their strategic interests were also threatened. Hence the Russian military delegation visiting Myanmar on 22nd January, 1 week before the intervention, led by Russian Defence Minister General Shoigu. I believe the intervention was planned at that meeting, and would have had ongoing Russian strategic advice from 22nd January to the present day.
I had expected the military to announce a curfew before the 8th February, and then in the middle of the night put up road blocks all over Yangon to impede movement. That was probably impracticable, as there are too many small alleyways everywhere. It thus appears to me that the Russians – the world experts on countering US colour revolutions – see that the energy of the protests can be worn down with minimal damage by allowing them to take place. Soon the protestors will see that whilst they are allowed to protest (as long as they are peaceful), they cannot make any advances, and interest will wane. After the economic advances of recent years most of them are unlikely to take the risk of violence against the Myanmar military.
Posted by: BM | Feb 11 2021 17:43 utc | 84
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