The world's longest internet blockade, a "black hole" in Burma

The world's longest internet blockade, imposed by the Burmese government in the west of the country because of its conflict with the armed organization of the Arakan Army (AA), has entered its second year, creating a "black hole" that prevents the arrival of humanitarian aid and information on COVID-19.

Imposed on June 21 last year and extended until August 1 next year, the longest blackout in the world, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), has drawn criticism from international and domestic human rights organizations, and even from several Western embassies in the country, which issued a statement on Sunday demanding its lifting.

"Internet blocking has created a black hole. Basic information for the functioning of society is disappearing and makes it difficult to assess the volume of aid needed," Dutch diplomat Efe Laetitia van den Assum, who was part of a commission commissioned by the Burmese government and led by Kofi Annan to find solutions to the multiple conflicts in Arakan, told IPS.

The conflict between the Burmese Army (known as Tatmadaw) and the AA ethno-nationalist guerrilla group has intensified since January last year and has only been ongoing; so far it has displaced more than 130,000 people in the remote areas of northern Arakan and southern Chin state, where internet blockades have failed to break the insurgents.

"The Tatmadaw believes that part of the command and control of the AA is done through encrypted messaging applications. This is probably true, but there are much more specific measures that could be employed to respond to this, rather than a total blockade of the Internet," Richard Horsey, a political analyst based in Rangoon, the country's most populous city, told Efe.

The blackout, which is accompanied by restrictions on access by humanitarian aid organizations, is causing some villagers to be unaware of even the COVID-19 pandemic and to be unaware of the food and water shortages in one of Burma's most impoverished areas, Human Rights Watch reported in a statement.

However, despite the hardships of a conflict whose resolution seems increasingly distant, support from the local population for the AA, which was declared a "terrorist organisation" by the government on 23 March, has not diminished.

"There is every indication that the AA is widely popular among the (ethnic) Rakáin communities, and support seems to have increased, as the Rakáin have been politically marginalised as fighting and related human rights abuses have increased," Horsey said.

The AA, which has about 6,000 members, was created in 2009 by a group of Rakáin students, predominantly Buddhist and the majority in Arakán, to fight for state autonomy, like so many other armed groups representing the country's ethnic minorities, many of whom have been fighting the central government since Burma's independence in 1948.

The Burmese government, led since 2016 by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has been engaged in a complex peace process with many of these guerrillas for years, but the AA is excluded from it because it is considered a terrorist organisation.

However, says diplomat Van den Assum, "there is no military solution to a conflict whose roots were planted long before independence and which has been festering for as long as people can remember.

"The Rakáin people want greater autonomy. Ultimately that means constitutional reform and more autonomy within the broader peace process. But that process doesn't seem to be progressing, so in the short term there is a need to find other ways to give the Rakáin a greater voice in governing their areas," says Horsey.

The conflict with the AA is not the only one that the Burmese Army has waged in the state of Arakan in recent years; in 2016 the Rohignya Salvation Army of Arakan (ARSA) also took up arms to fight for the rights of the predominantly Rohignya Muslim minority, who are denied citizenship by the authorities and described as "Bengali immigrants".

After a wave of ARSA attacks in August 2017 in the north of the state, the Tatmadaw launched a brutal military campaign after which more than 730,000 people, the majority of the Rohingya population, fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, for which the military and the government face a genocide charge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.