Myanmar Anti-Junta Opposition Plays with Fire: Dangling Rare Earth Materials before Transactional & Un-Trustworthy Washington

ASIA-UPDATES ON MYANMAR ROHINGYA GENOCIDE, 18 Aug 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Myanmar’s anti-Junta opposition in the diaspora and their Western supporters are playing with fire when they reportedly dangle before Trump’s transactional administration the prospects of a fire sale of the country’s strategic natural resources for political support.

14 Aug 2025 – As a seasoned dissident in exile, I have been deeply troubled by the emerging news report – and ensuing advocacy pieces – that Myanmar’s anti-Junta opposition in the diaspora and their Western supporters are dangling before Trump’s transactional administration the prospects of a fire sale of the country’s strategic natural resources , namely rare earth materials, in exchange for political recognition, material assistance and so on for the so-called National Unity Government.

Former US marine and ex-Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jim Webb has, for instance, made the case for such support to a country seen through the American eyes as “Asia’s prize”.

I was American-educated and had lived and worked in the United States, including in “Washington swamp”, for 17 years (1988-2005). Then I “self-deported”, to borrow the current White Nationalist language of Trumpian xenophobes –from the USA for good, out of my profound disgust after the 2nd American invasion of Iraq and the resultant destruction of an entire society there.

Having studied Washington’s largely failed foreign policy missions – particularly militaristic adventures – since the start of the Cold War in the early 1950’s, I have zero confidence or trust in the US foreign policy elite. They have never really been “friends of democracy”, much less “allies in liberation struggles”. Just ask the Hungarian democrats, Czechoslovakian dissidents, South Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghanis and, as of this writing, Ukrainians.

Washington barks or used to until Trump’s second coming, human rights, democracy and freedom. But it is all bark and no bite. Worse still, the bipartisan United States is the co-perpetrator (along with its European poodles Germany and UK) in Israel’s textbook ongoing genocide in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank. Washington weaponises law to punish any opposition against crimes against humanity.

The painful truth is the people of Myanmar have no real good option.

The country is in the early stages of internal disintegration. Admittedly, the authoritarian and genocidal national military bears the lion’s share of responsibility for this spectacular failure in state building over 60-years.

But Myanmar’s ethnic regions have zero chance of emerging as new republics ala post-Yugoslavia states. Painfully, no central or real organization is in a position, politically, geographically or militarily to speak for the entire 55 million peoples of diverse ethnicities, faiths, political creeds and material interests.

For better or for worse, the junta is effectively treated by virtually all neighbouring regimes and national militaries – including India and China, as well as the Association of South East Asian Nations as the only reliable institutional partner in Myanmar. Four years after Myanmar Spring revolution rose organically in response to the military coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi government, there have emerged credible allegations that besides the junta as the usual violators of human rights and international criminal law, some of the most powerful anti-junta armed militias, for instance, the Arakan Army, have been committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide against the country’s Rohingya people.

On TRT World’s Newsmakers program today 13 August, I joined a group of foreign experts with Myanmar expertise from China, Australia and UK to discuss this emerging issue of US-China (potential) contest in Myanmar over the extraction and processing of the rare earth materials. The largest portion of China’s total processing quantity of the rare earth materials are reportedly sourced in Norther Myanmar.

I anchored my argument against the opposition group trying to draw in Washington in our civil war over power, land, revenues, and strategic trade routes, in the immutable reality of the 1,400-miles of Sino-Myanmar borders. We can’t choose our neighbours and we alienate and offend powerful neighbours at our own collective peril.

Besides, the United States has proven to be a force behind destabilizing and destroying wholesale societies all over the world including on the Korean peninsular and Vietnam. Finally, Myanmar is an integral component of China’s global vision, a fact that will ensure that Beijing responds to any American encroachment in its backyard.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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