The opposition insists that the army should be reformed and removed from politics. But having already won so much territory at the junta’s expense, the ethnic rebels may be tempted to make a deal with China’s blessing rather than continue fighting to oust the generals.
AA’s victory raises more troubling questions.
The management of the group is tight-lipped about its plans. But he is taking over a state that has always been poor and has been hit hard by the intense fighting of the past year.
“Eighty percent of the houses in Maungdaw and the surrounding villages have been destroyed,” one Raginja man who recently left Maungdaw for Bangladesh told the BBC.
“The city is deserted, almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”
Last month, the United Nations, whose agencies have very little access to Rakhine, warned of an imminent famine due to the huge number of displaced people and the difficulty of getting any supplies after the military blockade.
AA is trying to set up its own administration, but some of those displaced by the fighting told the BBC the group was unable to feed or shelter them.
It is also unclear how the AA will treat the Rohingya population, estimated to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after sending out 700,000 in 2017.
The largest number of them live in the northern state of Rakhine, and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the Rakhine ethnic majority, a stronghold of AA, have long been strained.
Now they are much worse after Rohingya militant groups whose power is based in the sprawling refugee camps in Bangladesh decided to side with the military against the AA, despite the army’s track record of persecuting the Rohingya.
Many Rohingya do not like these groups, and some say they are happy to live in AA-run Rakhine State.
But tens of thousands were expelled by the AA from the conquered cities and not allowed back.
The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision of a future independent of the central government, but it has also condemned the Rohingya who have fought alongside the army.
“We cannot deny the fact that the Myanmar governments have persecuted the Rohingya for many years, and the Rohingya people have supported it,” said a Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.
“The government wants to prevent Rohingya from becoming citizens, but Rakhine people believe that there should be no Rohingya in Rakhine state at all. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the rule of the military junta.”
