Thailand yesterday hosted the first of two days of meetings aimed at breaking the political deadlock in war-torn Myanmar. Yesterday’s “informal consultation” was attended by foreign ministers and high-level representatives from Myanmar’s military junta and its five neighbors: Laos, China, India, Bangladesh, and Thailand.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Thai Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa said that the gathering was important because it was the first time that Myanmar and all its neighbors had met in the same room.
The six nations attending yesterday’s meeting “agreed that direct engagement with Myanmar is critical and necessary,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “They see the value of meeting regularly. And they share the same understanding, more so than other countries, because they are direct neighbors directly impacted by the situation in Myanmar.”
According to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “participants had frank and constructive exchange of views on common challenges including border security, combatting transnational crimes, and water resource management.”
Than Swe, the foreign minister of Myanmar’s ruling military council, also briefed his regional counterparts about the junta’s political roadmap, which will culminate in a long-planned election sometime next year.
According to the Thai foreign minister, Than Swe outlined the junta’s progress on election preparations, which have included a population census and registration of 53 political parties. “He said there is an intention to invite foreign (election) observers, such as from neighboring countries,” Maris said.
The reaction of Myanmar’s neighbors to the junta’s election plan was “positive overall,” Thai Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nikorndej Balankura added, stating that all five countries wanted a resolution to the country’s crisis. “The foreign minister of Myanmar said that it has an open door for inclusive political dialogue,” Nikorndej said.
Yesterday’s meeting, and a second meeting today that will be attended by representatives from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), are a sign of the Thai government’s attempts to play an elevated role in resolving Myanmar’s conflict, which has raged since the military seized power in a coup in 2021. So far, most regional attempts at solving the crisis have stalled. ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus peace plan, formulated at a special meeting in April 2021, calls for an immediate cessation of violence and “inclusive dialogue” involving “all parties” to the country’s conflict. But Myanmar’s military junta has refused to heed the injunction to stop its attacks on resistance forces, let alone engage in political negotiations with them.
While Thai officials insist that ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus will remain central to regional efforts to end Myanmar’s conflict, its diplomatic offensive appears to diverge considerably from the terms of the Consensus. As Aaron Connelly of The Economist wrote in a thread on X earlier this week, the purpose of the Thai talks was to “normalize the junta by creating a diplomatic track parallel to ASEAN which includes the junta but not other armed groups, and ensure that any eventual negotiated settlement is favorable to the Tatmadaw.”
This appears to be driven by a skepticism that the resistance to the junta can prevail, as well as some degree of fear of the power vacuum that might open up if the military administration were to collapse. It also reflects the divide between the mainland ASEAN member states, led by Thailand, who have generally been in favor of closer engagement with the junta, and the maritime states, particularly Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, who have advocated a more forceful approach and have previously criticized Thailand’s efforts to engage the Myanmar military.
In these respects, Myanmar’s immediate neighbors appear to be aligning their approaches with that of China, the only outside power that has taken significant steps to shape the trajectory of the country’s conflict. Over the course of 2024, as the Three Brotherhood Alliance of resistance groups has seized large territories close to the Chinese border and in Rakhine State, the location of important China-backed infrastructure projects, Beijing has pressured members of the Alliance to halt their offensives and return to the negotiating table. It has also expressed strong support for the junta’s election roadmap, viewing it as a possible means of resolving the conflict, and pushed for permission to deploy private Chinese security forces to the country to protect its investments and personnel there.
Myanmar’s neighbors now appear to be gambling on a phased return to a limited and partial stability under a new civilianized military-backed government, rather than backing the forces of the “Spring Revolution,” which seek a more comprehensive solution to Myanmar’s ethnic and political problems. In time, these parties hope that individual armed groups can be induced to come to understandings with a new “civilian” government in Naypyidaw, perhaps on the basis of ceasefire agreements that grant them considerable autonomy, while the military eliminates the remainder of the resistance to its rule. “Those hoping for a real revolution in Myanmar will be bitterly opposed,” Jonathan Head, the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent, wrote on X yesterday, “but this is where diplomacy is heading.”
Whether this approach will work remains highly uncertain. Despite yesterday’s meeting being billed as a consultation on border security and transnational crime, Myanmar’s military no longer has control of significant stretches of its international borders, including most of its border with Bangladesh. It is similarly unable to assert the control necessary to hold its “elections” in large parts of the country; even in those areas where junta officials may be able to open voting stations, the regime is broadly despised and a popular boycott of the process is likely.
This more conciliatory approach is premised on the eventual acquiescence of a majority of the country’s ethnic armed groups, and a majority of the Myanmar public, to a deal that leaves the military’s core powers and privileges intact. But over the past four years, the armed resistance to the junta has taken on a revolutionary character, and many of those opposing the military say they are fighting to extricate it permanently from Myanmar’s social and political life. For these factions, the military is the sole cause of the conflict and instability that Myanmar has experienced nearly constantly since its independence in 1948, and any settlement that leaves the military intact will merely guarantee further rounds of conflict.
At the same time, the fact that Myanmar’s neighbors have chosen this junta-first approach reflects the dearth of options for a negotiated solution to what in essence is a zero-sum conflict. If the only remaining alternatives are to stand aloof or to throw their weight behind the “Spring Revolution,” with all of the uncertainties that would entail, Myanmar’s neighbors seem more inclined to back the familiar devils in Naypyidaw, in the hope that they can reestablish a partial degree of stability.