This video grab released by the Arakan Army shows burning buildings in the headquarters of the army’s western command in Ann township, Rakhine state, Myanmar, Dec. 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Southeast Asian Foreign Ministers gathered Sunday (January 19, 2025) for their first meeting this year under the regional bloc’s new chair, Malaysia, seeking a breakthrough over Myanmar’s drawn-out civil war and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

The retreat on the idyllic northern resort island of Langkawi was the first major meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations hosted by Malaysia. Officials said it aims to chart the bloc’s direction for the year as it tries to resolve Myanmar’s deadly four-year crisis and tensions over China’s increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said ASEAN must bolster unity and make economic integration a top priority amid global uncertainties and the U.S.-China rivalry in the region. He said the second term of incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has also raised questions on how it will shape dynamics in the region.

“There is much to prepare for. Above all, what we need to anticipate are the potential challenges to ASEAN centrality,” he told the opening of the meeting. “We must ensure that ASEAN remains our central go-to platform for solution seeking… We are the speakers and not the spoken-for. We must drive our own path forward.”

The crisis in Myanmar has emerged as one of the bloc’s biggest challenges since a military coup ousted an elected civilian government in February 2021, plunging the country into conflict. It has sparked an armed resistance movement, with rebel forces now controlling large parts of the country. The war has killed tens of thousands of people, and displaced millions.

ASEAN’s peace plan and other efforts to seek a solution have been futile as Myanmar’s junta has not been compliant. ASEAN banned Myanmar’s military leaders from formal ASEAN meetings but the bloc’s non-interference policy has hampered its role. The military government plans an election this year to legitimize its rule but critics say polls are unlikely to be free or fair.

Malaysia, which brought Myanmar into ASEAN during its chairmanship of the bloc in 1997, is expected to take a more proactive stance as the Myanmar crisis has led to the flourishing of criminal activities, online scams and human trafficking along Myanmar’s border.

Hasan last month said Malaysia had appointed Othman Hashim, a former foreign ministry senior official, as its special envoy to Myanmar to engage various factions in the country to find a way forward.

Tensions in the South China Sea, one of the world’s vital shipping lanes, are also high on the agenda Sunday following violent confrontations in the waters last year. ASEAN members Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei along with Taiwan have overlapping claims with China, which asserts sovereignty over virtually all of the South China Sea.

Chinese and Philippine vessels clashed repeatedly last year. Chinese forces also assaulted Vietnamese fishermen and Chinese patrol vessels ventured into areas that Indonesia and Malaysia claim as exclusive economic zones.

The Philippines has pushed for negotiations between ASEAN and China for a code of conduct in the waterway but talks have stalled over disagreements including whether the pact should be binding and its scope of coverage. ASEAN has not openly criticized China, which is the bloc’s top trading partner.

As chair, Malaysia is likely to push for quiet diplomacy as it balances security challenges with economic gains, analysts say.

“It would be pragmatism on Malaysia’s side, as the country — as well as ASEAN as a whole — lack the diplomatic and military heft to confront China on the South China Sea,” said Muhamamd Faizal Abdul Rahman, a research fellow at Singapore’s S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Soldiers from the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) patrol on a vehicle. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A Myanmar ethnic rebel group said on Tuesday (December 17, 2024) it had recaptured its headquarters from the Myanmar military, almost 30 years after it was forced out.

Karen National Union (KNU) fighters had seized Manerplaw on the Thai border following days of fighting, KNU leader Saw Thamain Tun said.

Myanmar junta troops “still want to take it back and they used drones and tried to bomb our troops,” he said.

“But, our troops took the base already,” he said.

For years Manerplaw was the headquarters of the KNU’s decades-long armed struggle for rights for the Karen minority and home to other dissident politicians opposing Myanmar’s then-junta.

Following a split within the Christian-majority KNU, the junta and a breakaway Buddhist faction captured the base in 1995, sending thousands fleeing into Thailand.

After the fall of Manerplaw, the junta renamed the area Kayin state and put the Democratic Kayin Buddhist Organization, an allied armed group, in charge of it.

The KNU has clashed repeatedly with the current junta following its latest coup in 2021 and has provided shelter and training to other opponents seeking to topple the military.

Manerplaw “was a historical place for the Karen”, said Saw Thamain Tun, with around 100 of its soldiers buried there.

“We need to rebuild the area to pay respect to all of them,” he said.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the 2021 coup, which sparked renewed fighting with rebel groups such as the KNU and birthed dozens of pro-democracy “People’s Defence Forces” now battling the military across the country.

More than three million people have been displaced by the fighting according to the United Nations.

Clashes regularly send thousands fleeing across Myanmar’s 2,400-km border with Thailand.

This photo taken on September 10, 2024 shows recovering drug addicts from Myanmar attending classes during a rehabilitation program run by the non-governmental organisation DARE Network (Drug and Alcohol Recovery and Education) at an undisclosed location in Mae Sot along the Thai-Myanmar border.
| Photo Credit: AFP

In a drug treatment centre in a wooden stilt house deep in the Thai jungle, young refugees from Myanmar wait patiently for the prick of an acupuncture needle.

They are among the thousands who have become addicted to methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs that have flooded camps housing those forced to flee their homes by Myanmar’s civil war.

Myanmar’s military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in a February 2021 coup, igniting a conflict that has killed thousands, displaced nearly three million people and triggered a boom in drug production.

Also read: A closer look at Myanmar’s discontent

A rehabilitation programme across the border in Thailand, run by former addicts, is trying to help stem the rising tide of addiction among young people living in the camps.

“Youths from the camps are hopeless… they don’t know what to do. They have no guarantee for jobs and no future,” said Marip, a counsellor and former addict, using a pseudonym because of the stigma associated with addiction.

“They end up taking drugs. Drugs are easy to find in the camps,” the 34-year-old told AFP at the camp in a remote forest location in Thailand’s western province of Tak.

The Drug and Alcohol Recovery and Education (DARE) rehabilitation centre, funded by the UN and other aid agencies, uses acupuncture as part of its regimen, along with massages to reduce drug cravings and yoga to help manage intense withdrawal pains.

The group operates in five refugee camps, as well as more than 40 villages in Myanmar’s Karen state, and claims a 60% success rate for its 90-day treatment programme.

It did not allow AFP to speak to any of its patients or former cases, saying doing so would violate its treatment principles.

‘Cheaper than beer’

More than three years of conflict in Myanmar combined with the easy availability of drugs have created a “perfect storm”, Edward Blakeney, a director at DARE, told AFP.

“You have two large problems, trauma from people who fled their homes and saw their relatives killed and an abundant supply of drugs and a sense of hopelessness,” he said.

The junta led by General Min Aung Hlaing is battling multiple armed groups opposed to its rule across the country.

As well as death and displacement, the conflict has also seen law enforcement wither, enabling drug gangs to ramp up production.

The “Golden Triangle” region where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet has long been a hub for the illegal drug trade.

But the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report this year that methamphetamine production has “significantly increased”, sending wholesale prices of the drug’s crystal form crashing from over $10,000 a tonne in 2019 to $4,000 a tonne in 2023.

On the streets and in the camps, a tablet of “yaba” — a potent mix of methamphetamine and caffeine — can be bought for small change.

“They are so cheap at this point, it is really easy for people to buy drugs,” Benedikt Hofmann, the UNODC’s Southeast Asia and Pacific deputy representative, told AFP.

“Right now, in most parts of the Mekong, getting a tablet of yaba is cheaper than buying a beer.”

Drug-funded groups

The displacement camps are in border regions of Myanmar mostly controlled by ethnic minority armed groups — many of which fund their activities by making and trafficking drugs.

One senior anti-drugs police official in Myanmar told AFP that many new trafficking routes had opened up around the country due to the fighting.

“We face many difficulties in cracking down on the drug trade,” the official who asked not to be named told AFP.

“The problem is severe, as many armed groups are involved.”

The costs fall on those who have suffered most, and counsellor Marip told AFP : “There is no price that compares to the freedom from drugs.”

Gutted buildings, vacant windows and blocks bombed to rubble show the price paid by the western Myanmar town of Pauktaw for victory against the junta in the country’s civil war.

Fighters from the Arakan Army (AA) ethnic minority armed group took control of the fishing port of 20,000 people in January, as the conflict sparked by the military’s coup entered its fourth year.

Pauktaw was one of a string of losses suffered by the junta across the country at the time, leading many to hope its decades-long stranglehold over Myanmar’s politics could be broken.

Four months later, the Arakan Army remains in control but Pauktaw is mostly empty of residents, who are living on the outskirts and fearful of a repeat of the junta’s heavy artillery attacks on the town.

“We are frightened of them (the military),” one man told AFP from his temporary home just outside Pauktaw, asking for anonymity for security reasons.

“We don’t know what will happen or what kind of weapon they will drop on us if we go and stay back at home in the town.

“We can’t detect their air strikes or bombs and we will be killed if they attack.”

Video taken by locals this month and obtained exclusively by AFP shows streets silent apart from birdsong and the sounds of AA soldiers sifting through piles of debris and sheets of corrugated iron.

Near a deserted market that once bustled with vendors buying and selling crabs and tiger shrimp, a ragged awning advertising a mobile phone carrier flutters above the doorway of a gutted shop.

Phone and internet services have been all but cut off.

No chance

The AA has fought an on-off war for years against the Myanmar military, seeking more autonomy for the state’s ethnic Rakhine population.

As the army has faced growing resistance to its rule, from multiple armed groups — some new, some long-established — the AA has stepped up its campaign.

As the junta has lost territory on the ground, it is increasingly calling on its air power to support its ground troops.

Rights groups accuse the junta of using the strikes to punish communities suspected of opposing its rule.

When a military helicopter hovered over Pauktaw and began shooting into the town last November, many fled in panic.

“There was no chance for us to take a single thing from our house,” one woman now living outside the town told AFP.

“We had cooked a pot of rice and we were not able to eat it,” she said, also asking for anonymity.

“We had no money when we fled. We only had some gold jewellery with us. We tried to pawn that but it wasn’t easy. The interest was too high.”

The fate of Pauktaw’s residents reflects a nationwide tragedy. Across Myanmar, around 2.7 million have been forced to flee by the civil war.

Looting

The AA has not allowed residents to live back in Pauktaw, citing the danger of more air or artillery strikes on the town, although it does allow them to come and go to pick up items.

The man who spoke to AFP said he had returned to check on his house and found it partly in ruins, with the family statue of the Buddha fallen onto the floor.

His savings box — containing money for a Buddhist ritual for his children and for timber to repair a roof damaged by a cyclone last year — was gone, he said.

“I have lost all of that money,” he said.

“Everything in our house got stolen… my father’s fishing nets were stolen,” another woman said, also requesting anonymity.

“I am a tailor, and luckily, I managed to save my sewing machines.”

During the fighting, both sides looted houses and damaged buildings, according to local reports.

In March, the AA said it would “investigate” any reports of looting by its members during the fighting.

‘Decisive battle’

The AA’s offensive has seized swathes of territory in Rakhine state and along the border with India and Bangladesh.

It has said it will capture the state capital Sittwe, 25 kilometres from Pauktaw and the last major town in northern Rakhine in the military’s hands.

In April, the AA warned residents of the town, which is home to an India-backed deep sea port, to leave ahead of a “decisive” battle.

Sittwe residents contacted by AFP said the military was restricting travel out of the town by road and river and the prices of basic foods such as rice and eggs had doubled.

Those already displaced from Pauktaw fear further fighting nearby.

“I am sad that we have fled our own house and we can’t live in it,” one resident told AFP.

“I have pawned my necklace for 18 lakhs ($850) so we have money to live. I still hope I can claim it back.”

Others said they wanted payback.

“I haven’t joined the Arakan Army because I am worried about who will look after my child,” one woman said.

“If I wasn’t… I would join them and fight back. I will be satisfied only if I can take revenge.”

People flee from a village after renewed fighting between Myanmar’s military and the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic minority armed group, in Pauktaw Township in western Rakhine State in November 2023. File.
| Photo Credit: AFP

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has said he is “alarmed” by reports of ongoing Myanmar military air strikes on villages in Rakhine state, where locals told AFP more than 20 people were killed on March 18.

Clashes have rocked Myanmar’s western Rakhine state since the Arakan Army (AA) attacked security forces in November, ending a ceasefire that had largely held since the military’s 2021 coup.

Mr. Guterres is “alarmed by reports of ongoing air strikes by the military, including today in Minbya township that reportedly killed and injured many civilians,” a spokesman for the UN chief said.

Minbya township lies east of state capital Sittwe, which has been all but cut off by AA fighters in recent weeks.

The air strike hit the village of Thar Dar around 1:45 a.m. on March 18, killing 10 men, four women and 10 children, one resident told AFP.

“There was no fighting in our village and they bombed us,” he said, asking for anonymity for security reasons.

Another resident, also asking for anonymity, said 23 people had been killed in the blast and 18 wounded.

The recent conflict has displaced tens of thousands in Rakhine, where a 2017 military crackdown sent hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh.

With most mobile networks down, communication with the riverine region is extremely difficult.

Junta troops hold Sittwe but in recent weeks AA fighters have made gains in surrounding districts.

India and Bangladesh also affected

Fighting has also spilled over into neighbouring India and Bangladesh.

Last month, at least two people were killed in Bangladesh after mortar shells fired from Myanmar during clashes there landed across the border.

The AA is one of several armed ethnic minority groups in Myanmar’s border regions, many of whom have battled the military since independence from Britain in 1948 over autonomy and control of lucrative resources.