Myanmar is not the next Syria

In recent weeks, I have heard people suggest that Myanmar will devolve into “the next Syria.” It very well may devolve, but it will not turn out like Syria. Every dictatorship is repressive in its own way, and the foremost factor that dictates what that way will look like is demography.

Syria and Myanmar are different in many ways, but the most critical distinction lies in the distribution of ethnic and religious groups across their lands.

• Syria is run by members of a small, regionally concentrated sectarian minority group called the Alawites, who before the war were less than a sixth of the country’s population. Syria’s government exists to serve and protect the Alawites and other minority groups—Christians, Druze, etc—who fear what majoritarian Sunni Arab rule would mean for them.

• In Myanmar, both the regime and the pro-democracy protesters hail from the dominant and centrally located Burman majority, who comprise nearly 70% of the country’s population. The military exists, at least in its own mind, to serve that Burman majority and suppress ethnic resistance to its dominion. It has been in continuous warfare against various peripheral ethnic and religious minorities for more than 60 years, basically for the country's entire post-independence history.

Syria was a war between a minority regime and a majority population, and between their respective regional and great power backers. It was a zero-sum ethno-sectarian death match that only one side could win, and only at the total expense of the other side.

Myanmar won't be like this. It will be a war between a Burman majority population who wants democracy and a Burman military junta that wants to preserve its role running the state. Regional and great powers—ASEAN, China, the US, the UK, India, Bangladesh, etc—may get involved to varying degrees, but mostly to keep things stable and/or to protect any business interests they may have. The democrats and the ethnic rebels may team up, but only out of mutual loathing for the military, not out of any shared vision of what a future Myanmar should look like. And the only party existentially wedded to military rule are the members of the military themselves. In Syria, the regime’s collapse would have been a death knell for minorities. In Myanmar, the minorities never had control and are screwed no matter what; no matter who wins, the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar aren’t going home.

What will follow will be bloody. It may turn Myanmar into a failed state. It may cause massive refugee outflows and regional instability. There may be terrorism and organized crime. But it won't be Syria. It will be Myanmar.