Rebels Gain As Myanmar Marks Coup Anniversary, EU's Ukraine Aid Challenge, Kenya’s Pending Mission to Haiti, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Myanmar marks three years under military junta rule, Ukraine seeks greater continued EU support, and Kenya's high court decides on whether a peacekeeping force can be sent to Haiti. It's January 25th, 2024. Time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins. So Bob, let's start with Myanmar. Next Thursday marks three years since the military junta seized complete power. It wasn't like they were not pulling the strings from behind the scenes. This is a hugely repressive, even genocidal regime. However, its control may be weakening since last October, something called the Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is a coalition of three armed ethnic groups has been attacking military bases and they're gaining real territory. Is the junta's days numbered?

MCMAHON:
Well, it would've been really farfetched to even ask that question not too long ago, Carla, but it is looking really bad for the junta for all sorts of reasons. The first thing it should be said, whenever you get into the thicket of Myanmar, is it is incredibly complicated. It is incredibly ethnically diverse country. It always astounds me when I start poking around in Myanmar just how diverse a country it is. But the military has been this, for want of a better term, a glue for the country or at least a force of some stability over the decades, despite the cost of that, which has been, as you said, this repressive rule, not just recently, but over many years and many cycles. They are a particularly pernicious regime and recently have lived up to that with reports of torturing opposition, opponents and demonstrators, even using snipers to pick off people demonstrating against them.

But they're really challenged right now. And in a big reason for that is what you referred to, which is known as the Operation 1027 kicked off this latest round of attacks, and it's these three ethnic armed groups focused in the northern state and the northern Shan State, which borders China. They attack military outposts. They were able to seize some towns. They cut off important routes to China, and they are really sending a shudder to the military regime. And then combined with other armed ethnic groups that have formed a loose alliance, it's not necessarily part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance, but they are, for want of a better term, brothers in arms against the military regime. And this includes members of the ethnic majority that are in opposition, and a whole bunch of other ethnic groups that have been off and on at war with the military led government for decades.

And so the government forces are stretched thin. They have high levels of attrition, they're performing poorly, their governance is frayed considerably so that you're even seeing talk of almost a failed state in the works. And one of their primary backers, and at least interlocutors over the years has been China. China seems to be playing different sides of the conflict at the moment because they might be unsure about where this is all going. So to answer your question, we could be seeing the early phases of the end of this particular military junta.

ROBBINS:
So this alliance, what is it they want? Are they breakaway? Do they just want to control this province? Is this all about ethnicity or do they perhaps want to restore democracy?

MCMAHON:
Certainly some of them would be content with their own bit of autonomy, but it's not like it's a movement to break up Myanmar into thirty different states. A number of them are united over the fact of the federalized Myanmar in terms of providing a good amount of local control in a federal state and democratically elected and having some buy-in and having some say on how their own affairs are governed, as opposed to a centrally imposed writ. And certainly centrally imposed writ in which the ethnic majority is able to sometimes commit acts of atrocity against ethnic minorities. And that's the case of what happened to the Rohingya recently or in the not too recent past.

So it does seem like, again, that there could be the early vestiges of a knitting together of all these disparate groups into a different kind of Myanmar. But a lot has to happen still, and it's not going to be easy to completely topple the military regime. And there's nothing to say that some of these groups might turn arms against each other. However, some of the reporting coming out of the region, certainly the area of the Three Brotherhood Alliance is that they would be trying to make common cause and willing to make common cause seemingly with these democratic forces that are looking for a national unity government.

ROBBINS:
So for years and years, whenever we talked about politics inside of Myanmar, it was all about Aung San Suu Kyi and limited number of opposition leaders. There's no identifiable opposition leader in this. It seems to have nothing to do with anything with democratic structures at all?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's a really good point. There's a government in exile that speaks up. Aung San Suu Kyi herself was the victim of the coup, her forces continually poll well whenever they hold anything close to regular elections in Myanmar. But there's not that figure, that rallying figure, certainly an individual or even group of individuals at this point, which is why some experts have concern that if you do have... Let's just say that central government falls or there's a further eroding of power, of central power in the country, it's not to say that there could not be some sort of chaotic situation in which further bloodshed of a different sort happens. So it's a perilous moment. It's a moment in which there are many wishes that the military regime steps down or in some way cedes power, but it's also a pretty fraught moment. And I would just like to add for more on dynamics in Myanmar in this role about what the rebels are looking for. There's a new piece up on foreignaffairs.com by Avinash Paliwal that really gets at a lot of these issues. So please check that out.

Well, Carla, like Myanmar, Ukraine is about to reach another grim milestone. This is the mark of the start of the third year since the Russian invasion of 2022. As this is being marked, additional U.S. aid, crucial U.S. aid is stalled on Capitol Hill, but there's also another major party, which is the European Union. Next Thursday, European Union leaders are holding a special summit to discuss a new economic aid package. Previous package foundered because the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán refused to consider it. And so they are dialing this back up on the calendar for February 1st. What should we expect from this meeting? Are we going to see a change in the Orbán approach to this?

ROBBINS:
The Orbán hostage taking, which seems to never end. This is really a nerve-wracking tale and let's start it back in Washington. On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hosted his monthly meeting with representatives of dozens of the countries that provide military support to Ukraine. And at this meeting, U.S. officials were really blunt. They said The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition on the front and that the U.S. cupboard is bear and it's going to stay that way unless Congress gets its act together.

And it looked like Congress might, at the Senate at least, might get its act together. But the news on this is pretty awful because now, former President Trump is weighing in and he's pressing Senators to not move ahead with the deal because he apparently doesn't want a deal on immigration because he's going to campaign on it. And even Senator McConnell, who was a big supporter of aid for Ukraine, seems to be backing away for the sake of the, "nominee." Of course in the House, the hardliners appear to be completely dug in, so doesn't look great there.

So all this puts an even greater premium on the EU to step up, and the Europeans have their own politics to contend with. And much of what the EU does requires consensus, as you know. And Viktor Orbán is an unabashed Putin backer, and he's been holding the alliance hostage ever since the war began. In December, to get Orbán to agree to opening EU accession talks with Ukraine, the commission unfroze more than $10 billion worth of Euro payments to Hungary, which had been suspended because of Orbán's utterly horrible civil liberties track record. And even to get that happen, Orbán left the room. There's lots of, "Did he go to the loo? Did he go on a coffee break?" It was a face-saving issue.

MCMAHON:
It was a very convenient departure, yes.

ROBBINS:
Right. But he blocked this $50 plus billion worth of economic aid then. So now they're going to revisit it next week on the 1st, and it's not the only issue, they have several issues to wrestle with. First of all is this four-year $50 billion economic aid package that Hungary blocked in December. Then there's a discussion about a new $22 billion Ukraine military fund that would use EU funds to reimburse countries for some of the military assistance they give to Ukraine while encouraging more joint military production and procurement, which seems pretty important. And then there's also going to be a discussion, but likely no resolution of the issue of whether to use frozen Russian assets. There are $300 billion just from the Russian Central Bank out there, or more likely the earnings from those assets to help finance Ukraine's war efforts.

So there's a lot of things to be discussed here having to do with Ukraine and all of them require a consensus decision. So they're going to need Orbán sign off. He has been sending mixed signals. Nobody knows what his price is and there are a growing number of people who were saying, "How do we do an en run to run Orbán?" Members of the Parliament were talking about, "What can we do to suspend his voting rights?" People are really fed up with him. If I had to bet in this game of chicken, there's going to be another payoff to Orbán in the end.

MCMAHON:
I was going to say, there used to be what had been dangled out there was pretty effective leverage against Orbán, which was the unfreezing suspended aid, for example, that had been suspended because of governance issues or things that Hungary had violated under EU terms. Is that the type of thing that we should expect to happen? Are there any other major champions of Ukraine ready to speak up and move this process?

ROBBINS:
Well, that's what they did in part to get the accession talks to move forward. But there are also people who were really furious about that because he hasn't improved his track record. And their members of the parliament who are saying they want to move forward once again with this Article Seven, denying him his voting rights. The Slovaks are saying they're going to protect him on it. These rules make it almost impossible in the EU to punish anybody, particularly if you have another friend to protect you. Looked like Poland was no longer going to protect Hungary, and then the Slovaks came along.

It's really hard in the EU to punish anybody, which makes them even more problematic. So people are questioning the rules, questioning the payoff issue, and knowing the desperation of Ukraine, they're probably going to talk about what the price is and what other way they can pay off Orbán. But it's pretty grim, but comparably grim in Washington. But the Europeans seem more determined to move forward than we seem able to move forward right now.

MCMAHON:
And there's also the late great EU member, the United Kingdom that has continued to show it's interested in supporting Ukraine. Can they bring any kind of meaningful assistance or it really has to be in tandem with other European partners?

ROBBINS:
Well, they're certainly committed and they've been making very strong statements and it seems less politically fraught in Britain than it is in the United States certainly. And in Europe, it doesn't seem particularly politically fraught for most of these countries. They seem to get it. It seems to be really a problem of just a few countries. But when you compare the numbers, the numbers are small, $22 billion when we're looking about $60 billion would be the commitment if this could get through on the Hill. And this is $22 billion over several years.

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
The numbers are just a lot smaller from Europe.

MCMAHON:
And again, this is mostly so-called softer aid or an economic aid focus and not military army,

ROBBINS:
No, the $50 billion would be economic aid.

MCMAHON:
$50 billion is economic aid, yeah.

ROBBINS:
But money is fungible.

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
And certainly they don't want the Ukrainians printing money because the last thing they need is even more economic instability there and financial instability there. The $22 billion is to make up for and to move forward to replenish stocks and countries that are already providing aid, and also to move forward European defense industry so that they can fill in gaps and do joint procurement, addressing lots of problems there. But the scale of this, by comparison, the U.S. has been the main contributor on the military front and rallies it forward, which is what made this meeting with Austin so grim, in which they said two things. One is at the front, they're running out of ammunition, and our cupboard is bear because of American politics.

So you've got Orbán, they're tied up a knot because of just the rules of the EU. And we're tied up in knots here because of the dysfunction of American politics. And the Ukrainians are tearing their hair out, not surprisingly.

MCMAHON:
And back on the front lines, you've got the stalemate seem to be in a little bit of a lull at the moment, but Russians are dug in almost 20 percent of Ukrainian territory they occupy, occasionally launching really devastating attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure and so forth. So Ukraine obviously could really use this support and also some sort of sense of momentum going into the spring where one assumes they'll be ratcheting up and fighting.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, let's pivot to Haiti where chaos has reigned since July of '21 when President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. Some 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the capital, is under gang control. And the Haitians have been pleading for outside help to restore order, but no one has been willing to come in and bell the cat. Now, Kenya's President William Ruto has proposed that his country will lead a multinational peacekeeping force to Haiti. And this Friday, we're taping on Thursday, Kenya's high court is going to decide if it is constitutional to send this force. Kenya's received a lot of international praise as well as economic support from the U.S. for its proposal, and Haiti's in dire need of help. So why is there any legal question about this?

MCMAHON:
Well, I should also note in terms of things happening on the ground that as we are taping this podcast, the UN Security Council is supposedly meeting to talk about the broader scope of the UN mission in Haiti of supporting what's known as the Multinational Security Support Mission. And they're really keen on Kenya coming up with this support, even though as is widely acknowledged, it's a bit of a drop in the bucket, but it is something. It is some sort of an international gesture to pacify a situation in which gang situation is getting truly alarming.

Now, Kenya though, it must be noted, it's certainly been controversial as a proposal. You have some opposition politicians, including the ones who brought this to the court, basically saying, "We've got a lot of problems of our own here, including even problems of insecurity. Why are we sending an expedition halfway around the world to get involved in this adventure where we have seen time after time failure happen?" So this Kenyan debate has ended up in this court hearing. It's expected that regardless of how the court rules tomorrow, 26th of January, it's going to be challenged, which will then further delay it. The Kenyan government and the parliament, which have approved this, had wanted to get first batch of these soldiers, several hundred, over to Haiti as early as February. I'm not sure if that's going to happen now, Carla, and Haiti cannot really bear too much else on this front.

We've talked about before, not only is it just a terrible situation domestically, but you cannot ignore what it means regionally. Haitians who have any means at all or any sort of path at all are pouring out of the country. A lot of them are going through this perilous passageway known as the Darien Gap to get into Central America to start a path to get to the U.S. border. You're seeing increasing numbers of Haitians declaring or trying to declare for asylum. So there is a through line between what happens in Haiti and in its increasingly vulnerable state and what it means for other countries, including the United States. The Security Council, again, will discuss this mission, but also the broader political spectrum of Haiti, which includes another looming deadline to provide a plan for a political transition. There is a lot of domestic unrest aside from the gang issue, but the gangs are stepping into this growing vacuum and it just gets worse and worse in Haiti.

ROBBINS:
I know you're not a constitutional scholar for Kenya.

MCMAHON:
I'm not.

ROBBINS:
Much to the disappointment of your mother, I'm sure, who wanted you in law school to study Kenyan law. But do we understand why this is even in the court? Because you've got the president who committed to doing this and the parliament that approved it. So do we understand the legal issue here?

MCMAHON:
Well, you raise a good point because the officials who want to make this happen, including the president, are saying, "The court doesn't have the right to step in here. And in fact, we are allowed to in our purview to be able to assign such a mission." And that actually could become an issue too. We should keep our eye on that, whether or not they go ahead and just say, "Sorry, high court, but we're going to go ahead with this." That again, has unknown ramifications in Kenyan domestic discourse.

So I don't know, and it'll be interesting to see whether the high court tries to finesse this or not, or whether again, if it does approve and say the government does have the right, then how much of a pushback is there? How much does do things get gummed up further there? And whether the Kenyan part of this whole piece further just delays any sort of sense of movement on Haiti, but it is a question that seems to be a little bit up in the air constitutionally.

I should note our colleague, Ebenezer Obadare has posted on the CFR blog Africa Unbound about this. Even whether it goes ahead, it's very dubious about what it's going to accomplish. The Kenyan mission seems to be particularly ill-suited to the environment in Haiti. The Kenyan peacekeepers have no training in a Haitian context, nor do the handful of Caribbean nations who have decided they were going to sign up to this. None of them have, for example, the ability to speak French or Creole to communicate with Haitians and understand the context there. The gangs have the ability to just melt away into the slums where many of them operate, heavily armed. And by the way, many of their arms come from the United States. So it was a question of is that an avenue in which there can be some pressure brought to bear? It seems like U.S. gun supplies have contributed to some instability in the region as well.

ROBBINS:
Are they really heavily armed?

MCMAHON:
They're loaded. They're loaded for bear, which is why this astounding figure of how much they control in the capital. And all the kidnappings, it's staggering. Again, I'm getting into a whole set of other issues, Carla, but I think it starts with a true sense that Kenya wanted to try to participate in this and be part of something bigger, and it is really fraught. And part of it is that Haiti has this sense of defying international efforts to bring it under control.

I should add, as a final footnote, Haiti itself has had incredibly tough time over the years with international expeditions. Peacekeepers have been found of committing sexual abuse for example. Other UN missions have been found to contribute to the spread of cholera in Haiti. And at the same time, without the UN, it's hard to imagine any sort of society even existing in Haiti. And it should be noted, when Haiti suffered its devastating earthquake more than a dozen years ago, the UN suffered heavily, including the leader of its mission, a high ranking UN political official dying in the earthquake. It's all the way around, Haiti is just a really, really tough problem to solve.

ROBBINS:
Yes, it is a constant tragedy, an ecological and human tragedy.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, if that wasn't enough, we've talked our way into the audience figure of the week portion of the podcast. This is the figure in which listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at cfr_org's Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience selected,  "1 Million Plus Protest Right-wing Parties in Germany." What's going on here?

ROBBINS:
Well, this is actually something of a good news story. Germans have been rightly nervous about the rise of far right party, AfD, the Alternative for Germany. This was originally founded as a Euroskeptic Party more than a decade ago, and it won 10.3 percent of the vote in 2021 federal elections. And it's now polling in second place nationally with around 23 percent. And given Germany's history, that's pretty chilling. But the most immediate cause for these demonstrations, which really are the largest in recent history, was a report from a media outlet called Correctiv, which last week reported on an alleged far-right meeting way back in November, which included representatives from the AfD and from an extremist Identitarian Movement, which discussed mass deportation of migrants, asylum seekers and German citizens of foreign origin deemed to, "have failed to integrate."

So pretty creepy discussion and really scared the pants off of people. But the remarkable thing is when you consider polling at 23 percent, you had hundreds of thousands of people coming out in the streets in Germany saying, "No to Nazism, no to this past, and never again." Germans standing up and saying, "We've seen this before and we don't want it."

MCMAHON:
No, it's worth noting that Germany has really stood out in its efforts, and I saw this firsthand when I lived there in the 90s, to reconcile with its past, to hold painful discussions about the Holocaust, about the role of Nazi Germany. I lived in Munich at a time when the main Munich local museum had an exhibit about Munich's role as the capital of the Nazi movement. And they had incredible artifacts they were able to bring out and show in this exhibit about just where the early marches were when Hitler rose to power and so forth. And it was painful, and I saw arguments breaking out in the museum amongst Germans and so forth. But the fact is they did it.

And I think many other countries have ignored this. Even U.S. allies like Japan have not reconciled with their past in the World War II era and the past abuses in this way, certainly Russia hasn't. And so it doesn't surprise me that this turnout happened and where it happened in Germany. You're even seeing calls by some German politicians to ban the AfD. I'm not sure they have the ability to do that, but it's being raised by prominent politicians. So we're seeing a very interesting debate play out in Germany that could have repercussions in other parts of Europe.

ROBBINS:
Well, one of the things also that we as Americans should find chilling is a lot of this discussion is based on this notion of the Great Replacement Theory, which has considerable resonance among parts of the Republican Party here in the United States, and certainly immigration. And this notion of mass deportation is going to be part of the political debate in our own presidential campaign. I'm not comparing our own political parties to the AfD, but anti-migrant posturing is a pretty strong through line in a lot of political debates around the world and also in our own country. And so I think we all have to be very vigilant about this sort of veering off into some very scary discussions.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, there's a violent fringe that our colleagues, Jacob Ware and Bruce Hoffman have talked about in their new book on the matter. And so that's the ultimate extreme manifestation of this. So you're right, it's something worth looking at. And again, keep an eye on Germany as it plays out there. I think it could have repercussions elsewhere.

And that's our look at The World Next Week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosts French President Emmanuel Macron for India's Republic Day celebrations and Guyana takes over presidency of the UN Security Council.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang and Sinet Adous, with the Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.