The Rakhine state of Myanmar, which was the scene for 2017’s brutal military crackdown against Rohingya Muslims, seems to be inevitably heading towards more armed ethnic conflict, but this time involving the state’s nationalistic insurgents and the ruling Myanmar government. After the country’s recent November elections (the second since the creation of the new democratic government in 2015), there has been much controversy among the native Rakhines as to the government’s active suppression of nationalist votes. Roughly two-thirds of the state’s population were unable to vote in the election because of early poll shutdowns in the state; the Myanmar government claims that this is because of skirmishes between nationalist insurgents and the Myanmar army around electoral sites. Despite this, the NLD still lost most of the seats it won in 2015, as many of the Rakhine population who initially supported the ruling NLD party in 2015 have since turned in favor of the more nationalistic, ethnically Rakhine opposition party. Such people do not think the majority ethnicity Bamar NLD as representative of Rakhine interests.
Undoubtedly the greatest threat to the ruling party of the young Myanmar democracy is that of the Rakhine insurgents. As previously mentioned, the Rakhine state has already been the host of Myanmar’s greatest ethnic turmoil in the last decade, particularly involving the Rohingya Muslims. These ethnic conflicts of the previous decade within the state have further ramped up its ethnic divisions by several magnitudes. As time goes on, it seems that more violent conflict between the Rakhine and Burmese sides is inevitable. The western Rakhine state, which is surrounded by mountainous jungle, has always held a sort of detachment from the rest of Myanmar. As such, the ethnic rebel movements within the region are fighting for autonomy or independence from the ethnically Bamar (Burmese) government. In their efforts to stop the Rakhine insurgencies, the NLD-ruled Myanmar government has been accused by the United Nations of several war crimes, including extrajudicial killings of civilians. The government denies these accusations, but still vows to crush the Rakhine insurgency.
As nationalist sentiment continues to dominate the Rakhine political scene and the NLD continues to carry out its campaign against Rakhine opposition, the ethnic and political tensions are starting to reach untenable heights. Sadly, an armed ethnic conflict seems to fast approaching from the horizon.