Bangladesh’s House Minister Salahuddin Ahmed has introduced plans to fence components of the nation’s 270-kilometer border with Myanmar. To grasp why Dhaka has arrived at this level, one should look again to December 8, 2024, when the Arakan Military (AA) accomplished its seize of Maungdaw and assumed full management of northern Rakhine State’s border with Bangladesh.
For many worldwide observers, the autumn of Maungdaw marked a milestone in Myanmar’s civil conflict – one other indication of the navy junta’s shrinking territorial management.
For Dhaka, nevertheless, it meant the disappearance of efficient Myanmar state authority alongside a lot of its southeastern frontier. Immediately, Bangladesh now not faces a functioning state throughout massive stretches of that border.
The Myanmar authorities retains little significant presence in northern Rakhine. Instead stands the AA, an ethnic armed group that now workout routines de facto management over a lot of Rakhine State, administers territory, collects taxes, regulates motion, and more and more performs features attribute of a governing authority.
This transformation has upended Bangladesh’s border safety setting — and uncovered the fragility of the establishments that after managed it.
The core downside dealing with Dhaka is a profound structural asymmetry. Myanmar’s authorities, regardless of its historic shortcomings and systemic failures, remained formally sure by bilateral agreements, diplomatic protocols, and worldwide commitments. The Arakan Military shouldn’t be.
The AA behaves more and more like a governing authority — imposing laws, administering native affairs, and asserting jurisdiction over border areas — but it’s not a sovereign state and falls exterior the mechanisms by way of which states are ordinarily held accountable to 1 one other.
For Bangladesh, which means that acquainted devices of statecraft have been rendered largely unreliable.
Communication with the AA shouldn’t be unimaginable; Dhaka has already engaged by way of casual channels, native intermediaries, and worldwide organizations to safe the discharge of detained civilians and handle pressing border incidents.
However these interactions happen with out the predictability, institutional safeguards, and reciprocal obligations that usually accompany relations between acknowledged states. Diplomatic engagement between Bangladesh and the AA, when it occurs, stays completely reactive and advert hoc.
The results of this institutional void have turn out to be starkly seen. Over the previous yr and a half, a whole bunch of Bangladeshi fishermen and Rohingya residents have been detained by the AA within the Naf River and the waters adjoining it. These incidents replicate each the AA’s unilateral assertion of management over beforehand ambiguous waterways and the entire absence of formal protocols by way of which such disputes would usually be resolved.
Concurrently, in Bandarban, Bangladeshi residents proceed to come across landmines and unexploded ordnance close to agricultural land — lethal remnants of preventing happening simply throughout the border. The frontier has additionally hardened right into a principal transit route for methamphetamine and different illicit narcotics, with regulation enforcement businesses reporting document seizures. Regional assessments point out that trafficking networks have expanded regardless of enforcement strain, shifting their routes with outstanding adaptability as Myanmar’s post-coup fragmentation continues to entrench the battle economic system alongside the border.
The proposed fence must be understood on this mild. It’s Bangladesh’s try to regain a measure of unilateral management over a frontier the place conventional coordination mechanisms have damaged down completely.
The strategy, admittedly, has substantial limitations. A fence can not eradicate the financial incentives sustaining the narcotics commerce, resolve complicated maritime jurisdictional disputes within the Naf River, or tackle the underlying political situations driving instability in Rakhine State. However assessing the fence purely on whether or not it will probably remedy these issues misses a part of its objective. Governments dealing with intractable exterior pressures should display seen, tangible motion to the general public, even when no single measure can eradicate the underlying risk. On this sense, fencing serves a vital home political operate alongside its safety function. It indicators that the state is responding to rising public anxiousness about cross-border crime and lawlessness.
Extra pointedly, the fence sends a message directed past Bangladesh’s personal borders. It indicators to the area and the worldwide group that Dhaka doesn’t intend to soak up indefinitely the prices of a disaster generated completely exterior its borders, and that duty for the implications of Myanmar’s structural collapse can not relaxation with Bangladesh alone.
Bangladesh is already managing roughly 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, a lot of whom have been within the nation for practically a decade. Bangladesh’s long-term plan for the Rohingya has all the time been repatriation, and Dhaka pursued formal agreements with the Myanmar state to that finish. But a lot of the territory to which Rohingya refugees would ultimately return is now managed by the AA — a company itself accused of genocidal violence towards the Rohingya inhabitants. The AA’s hostility towards the Rohingya is well-documented.
Questions over the Rohingyas’ elementary rights, safety, and political standing beneath any future AA-administered association stay unresolved. The AA’s advance in Rakhine State might effectively push again the already interminable timeline on Rohingya repatriation. In the meantime, the preventing in Rakhine State has pushed new waves of refugees throughout the border – an extra burden Bangladesh is ill-equipped to bear.
The deliberate border fence won’t deter future refugees, however it does symbolize Bangladesh’s sovereign place: that the refugee disaster stays a consequence of Myanmar’s inside instability demanding decision from inside Myanmar.
Bangladesh shouldn’t be alone in navigating these pressures. Thailand, India, and China all share frontiers with Myanmar territories the place ethnic armed organizations now train various levels of authority. None of those states has discovered a definitive reply to the governance issues created by Myanmar’s fragmentation, largely as a result of the broader battle stays unresolved.
But Bangladesh’s state of affairs is exclusive. Internet hosting greater than 1,000,000 displaced individuals whereas managing a border the place efficient state authority has collapsed creates a twin humanitarian and safety disaster that its regional neighbors don’t face in comparable type.
Finally, Bangladesh’s transfer towards border fencing is a telling indication of the geopolitical transformation happening throughout the frontier. It’s a risk-management software — one component of a broader effort to comprise the spillover results of a battle Bangladesh neither created nor can simply affect. And not using a complete political settlement inside Myanmar, no barrier can substitute for the bilateral establishments that after managed this frontier. However of their efficient absence, Bangladesh has little alternative however to attempt.
