Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Indian troops poised to enter Myanmar

However, US fundamental interests in developing better relations with India are the necessary containment of China, and New Delhi's help in the war against militant Islamic groups - a need that is growing stronger due to the unstable political landscape in Pakistan.

Now it seems that India-Myanmar counter-insurgency cooperation could shift from coordination to joint operations on Myanmar territory.

If India who is falling more into the U.S. sphere of influence as a necessary means by which the U.S. might contain China manages to move from coordination to joint operations on Myanmar territory this I believe to be a recipe for some heavy problems.

China views the Andaman Sea off Myanmar's coast as an important source of oil to fuel the economic expansion of China's western provinces.


Another pipeline, though still being studied, has moved a step closer towards fruition.

This would link Myanmar's Akyab port to Ruili in China's south-west Yunnan province, conveying mainly oil shipped from the Middle East and Africa.

According to Professor Wang Chongli of Yunnan's Academy of Social Sciences, China is keen on the project because of Yangon's recent agreement to revive an old trade route that linked Yunnan to the Bay of Bengal.

Recent reports said that a group of Chinese engineers was at Myanmar's Irrawady River surveying the Bhamo port, which will be rebuilt into a transit point for goods headed for China or the Bay of Bengal.

'It's the attitude of the Myanmar government. Now they agree to have discussions. Previously, they refused,' Prof Wang told the media, suggesting that Beijing had put the pipeline on its drawing board.
#msg-4186355

-Am




Indian troops poised to enter Myanmar

By Sudha Ramachandran

Jul 21, 2005

BANGALORE - Cooperation between the security forces of India and Myanmar in countering anti-India rebels based in Myanmar is poised to enter bold new phase, with the countries discussing joint counter-insurgency operations inside Myanmar - a move fraught with pitfalls.

The Myanmar military's operations against Indian insurgents in the mountainous region between the Arakan range and the Irrawady have by all accounts reached a dead-end. Apparently, the ill-equipped Myanmar army has not been able to withstand the superior firepower of the insurgents.

According to reports in the India-based Public Affairs Magazine, Myanmar's military ruler General Than Shwe has requested the Indian government for emergency military supplies for his beleaguered troops. Than has reportedly asked for helicopters, helicopter gunships, heavy rockets, navigation equipment and global positioning system devices.

While India is willing to supply the equipment, it is concerned that Myanmar's security forces are not trained to use the equipment. India apparently has communicated this concern to Myanmar and, as a way to overcome the problem, suggested that the equipment be deployed in joint operations with the Indian military.

Cooperation between India's and Myanmar's security forces in counter-insurgency operations has grown dramatically in recent years, especially since late last year when Than visited Delhi. During that visit he assured Delhi that he would not allow his country to be used by anti-India militant groups active in India's restive northeast, which is a cauldron of ethnic and tribal conflicts and secessionist insurgencies.

About 40 armed insurgent groups with a collective strength of over 15,000 are fighting Indian security forces here. Inter-group bloodletting is sometimes as serious as the fighting against the Indian forces. Several of these insurgent groups, such as the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang faction (NSCN-K) , have set up bases and training camps in neighboring Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan.

India has been trying to get its neighbors to close down the camps and flush out the militants from their sanctuaries. In December 2003, under considerable pressure from India, the Royal Bhutan Army launched military operations against camps in southern Bhutan along the India-Bhutan border. Some 30 camps belonging to the ULFA, the NDFB and the Kamtapur Liberation Organization and others were closed down and about 600 insurgents were killed. While the actual operations were carried out by Bhutanese forces, India played a quiet role planning the moves, supplying weaponry, helping transport casualties and so on.

India's requests to Bangladesh to deny anti-India militants sanctuary on its soil have evoked no cooperation from the Bangladesh government. India is said to have provided Dhaka with details of the location of 194 training camps, but the latter has simply denied their existence.

Myanmar's response to India's requests for action on insurgent camps falls somewhere between that of Bhutan and Bangladesh. It has not denied the existence of anti-India insurgent groups on its soil. But its relations with India are not as warm as those between India and Bhutan, so it has been less willing to accept India's overtures for joint operations.

For decades, insurgent groups like the ULFA, the NSCN-K, the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), the People's Liberation Army and the People's Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak have run their operations from bases and training camps on Myanmar's side of the 1,664-kilometer India-Myanmar border. For many years, the military junta in Myanmar supported these insurgent groups, partly because it saw them as useful to pressure India, which was openly supportive of Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy movement. Besides, there have been accusations in the past that sections in the military have strong interests in the lucrative arms-narcotics trade in the region, and have thus been reluctant to act against the insurgent groups as they are vital parts of the narcotics network.

In the mid-1990s, Delhi, driven by concerns over China's growing influence in Myanmar, began wooing the generals. This was also prompted by a realization that it needed their cooperation to fight the insurgencies in its northeast. It was only after India corrected its tilt towards the pro-democracy movement that the military junta signaled its willingness to address India's concerns. And the junta has made it more than obvious that its help in countering insurgents would depend on the extent to which Delhi moved away from backing the pro-democracy movement. This was evident in the mid-1990s when India and Myanmar launched Operation Golden Bird. Troops from the two countries trapped scores of northeastern insurgents in a pincer movement on the Mizoram border. About that time India conferred the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding on Suu Kyi. An enraged junta struck back quickly. It called a halt to the operations and even released scores of insurgents it had rounded up. Since 2000, relations between the two countries have stabilized, with India extending Myanmar economic carrots in return for cooperation from the junta in dismantling insurgent bases in Myanmar. Counter-insurgency cooperation has grown over the years. It has involved exchange of intelligence on location of insurgents and co-ordination of operations on either side of the border.

"When India launches operations on its soil, it alerts the Myanmar military, which then steps up combing operations in the western hill tracts," an intelligence official based in Imphal told Asia Times Online. "When the Myanmar army smashed ULFA bases long the Chindwin River late last year, India sealed the border in that area. Indian troops in turn have hunted down and evicted hundreds of Myanmar insurgents from Indian territory. Last month, at least 200 rebels of the Chin National Army were flushed out of Mizoram."

Now it seems that India-Myanmar counter-insurgency cooperation could shift from coordination to joint operations on Myanmar territory.

The shift would come only if the Myanmar military, which has so far resisted getting into a tighter embrace with India over counter-insurgency operations, concedes Delhi's reported demand that the equipment India supplies Myanmar be deployed in joint operations.

There is a question, too, of whether India should go in for joint operations inside Myanmar. Unpleasant memories of India's deployment of troops in Sri Lanka (1987-90) continue to cast a long shadow over India's policy towards involvement in conflicts in its neighborhood. There is concern that deploying Indian troops in Myanmar to oversee the use of weaponry could escalate into them doing the fighting, that this could find Indian soldiers fighting not just ULFA and other Indian insurgents, but slowly their allies among Myanmar's warring ethnic and tribal groups. There is a danger of India getting drawn more and more into Myanmar's internal politics and conflicts. India could end up in a quagmire that it could have well avoided.

But this is not something India can avoid at this juncture, say proponents of Indian deployment. "This is not an option any longer," argues a retired Indian army officer, pointing out, "If India wants to quell the insurgency in the northeast, the bases in the neighboring countries have to be shut down, and if Myanmar does not have the equipment and the expertise to do that on its own, then India should step in. Parallels should not be drawn between the situations in Myanmar and Sri Lanka as the circumstances are in no way comparable. In Myanmar, India would be deploying its soldiers to eliminate insurgents who are a direct threat to India's security and territorial integrity," the retired army officer told Asia Times Online.

Indeed, in Sri Lanka, Indian security forces went in to do Sri Lanka's dirty work with regard to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In Myanmar, if India goes in, it will be doing so to assist the Myanmar military to do India's dirty work, to do what is in India's security interests.

Senior officers in the Indian armed forces say they are confident that they will not be stepping into a bottomless pit in Myanmar. They say that unlike the Sri Lankan situation, where intelligence input was lacking and where deployment was not planned, in Myanmar the entry of Indian forces - should it happen - would be gradual and well calibrated.

Meanwhile, India is waiting for the junta's invitation.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GG21Df04.html