On October 15, the Myanmar government signed the much talked about Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, NCA, with eight of its many rebelling ethnic nationalities who have been waging war against the Union of Myanmar ever since the country became independent of the British in 1948. India too was invited to be an official witness to the historic event, along with the UN, EU, and two other neighbours of the country, China and Thailand. Although many are sceptical if this peace overture will work, especially because a number of the most powerful ethnic rebel organisations, including the Wa, Kachin and Kokang have stayed away from it, there can be no doubt the development is momentous. S.S. Kaplang`™s Naga army, though on a truce with the Myanmar government, was not invited to the event, ostensibly on account of objections raised by India reportedly informing the Myanmar government it would not be a witness to a deal in which a group hostile to it was party. Other than Khaplang`™s NSCN, it is interesting, and indeed did not go unnoticed by international observers, that the other three ethnic armies which stayed away, are all immediate neighbour of China. Indeed, the Kokang are ethnic Chinese and the Wa, once the backbone of the powerful Burmese Communist Party, too are today more or less Chinese surrogates. It may be recalled there had been reports even as Myanmar was still under the military junta and the country had no mobile telephony or internet networks worth the name, the Wa territory in the north, quite outside the Myanmar junta`™s control, were already under cover of the most advanced Chinese airwaves.
There were other criticisms of the event too. As many wellknown observers have noted at the time, this peace deal virtually amounted to placing the cart before the horse or horses in this case. Under normal circumstances, the approach should have been for some kind of a peace negotiation to have preceded the deal. That is, after a certain degree of consensus has been reached on core issues and a roadmap to the ultimate goal becomes somewhat visible, a peace deal of the kind should have then followed. In the October 15 agreement the order was just the reverse. You make a deal first without knowing how or what the roadmap should be. The only two fundamental things that those who put their signatures on the deal document were, all agree not to seek to break up the Union of Burma and that the final truce will seek to build a constructive federal relationship between the states and the Union. These are very broad terms, but as they say, the devil is in the details, and although this is a big step, it can still hardly be said a final resolution is in Myanmar`™s sight just as yet. Whatever the hitches, we do hope the nation gets to resolve its insurrection problem once and for all in the near future, guaranteeing peace and justice for all ethnic groups inhabiting the country.
There are parallels between what Myanmar has achieved so far towards resolution of its internal problems and how India is doing this in the Northeast. In particular the recent `Framework Agreement` between the Government of India and the NSCN(IM) comes up for comparison. The same question of putting the cart before the horse had been posed in this case too, for it is apparent now that the `Framework Agreement`, apart from agreeing to agree on a final resolution, has no details. Here too, as many insightful critics have observed, the devil will be in the details, and already this prediction is proving to be prophetic. Nobody knows what has been agreed upon or if there has been any agreement at all, making everybody suspicious of what may have transpired. All we can say at this point is, we hope something works out to the benefit of all stake holders, and the alternate nightmarish scenario of one peace agreement setting off thousand other mutinies does not come true. There is another point of comparison, and this time in the approaches Myanmar and India have taken, and here Myanmar scored. It invited every stake holder to the negotiating table though not all responded positively. The Myanmar government therefore gained the moral high ground somewhat for it can now tell those who did not respond that they were not excluded and indeed they were still invited to join. In India, the approach was different. The government sought out the one with the biggest guns and ignored the rest, probably hoping that silencing the biggest guns will lead to the ultimate silencing of all guns. As to how problematic this can get is already beginning to be sensed in both Nagaland and Manipur in particular, but also Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/11/myanmar-peace-approach/