Internationally condemned elections in Burma on Sunday could signal the start of military regime offensives against armed ethnic groups, according to Reuters and analyst reports this week.

In a pre-emptive move preparing for possible war, six major armed ethnic opposition groups formed an alliance against the Burmese Army at a meeting on November 2 in Mae Hong Son, on the Thai side of the border, Mizzima reported on Wednesday.

The six groups are the Karen National Union (KNU), Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), Chin National Front (CNF), Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the Shan State Army North (SSA-N), which joined to “assist each other if attacked by the Burmese Army. We believe the Burmese Army will attack one of the groups after the November 7 election”, a participant at the meeting said.

The Shan State Army South (SSA-S) has refused to join the alliance of fellow armed ethnic groups, but spokesman Sai Lao Hseng indicated yesterday that the group had not ruled out the idea.

“After discussing [the matter] with all of these groups and reaching an agreement with them all in terms of being a member of this alliance, we will consider joining the said alliance,” Sai Lao Hseng said.

He added that SSA-S opposition to the military regime until now meant that it had already aided the other armed ethnic groups in fighting the junta indirectly.

Junta offensives against the armed groups could lead to further destablisation of the border areas and thousands more refugees fleeing the country.

Win Min, a Burmese academic living in exile and an expert on the Burmese military, told Reuters that state military would wait until a new government was formed after the elections before attacking the ethnic militias one by one. They will supposedly attack the groups in that manner to limit the effects on China, with which Burma has a relationship based mostly on energy exports and weapons imports.

When the Burmese Army attacked Kokang rebels in Shan State in August last year, some 37,000 refugees fled across the border into China. Beijing had supposedly also been coercing the Burmese military into avoiding conflict because of the US$3.5 billion construction of oil and gas pipelines from the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan province in southwest China, Reuters reported.

A source with close links to the armed ethnic groups, who requested anonymity, told Mizzima that he thought that the far-flung and most isolated groups would be in the most danger of being attacked by the junta’s army; namely the KIO and the NMSP.

He said that armed ethnic groups had in the past synchronised attacks from different areas in Burma against the Burmese Army, and that this might be possible after the elections.

The KIO’s armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), had started training volunteers for stints of eight weeks, the Asia Times reported yesterday. A recent female volunteer told the online news journal: “I was summoned by the KIA to leave my village and attend training.”

A KIA general corroborated the claim that the armed group were preparing for conflict after the elections: “We can survive, so a return to guerrilla warfare is the most likely tactic.”

However, KIO spokesman James Lwan Daung told Mizzima that he felt conflict was not so imminent for the armed ethnic groups: “I don’t think that as soon as they [the Burmese junta] have finished the elections they plan to invade or attack. There are a lot of preparations they’re going to have [to make] and a lot of problems they’re going to have in future [depending on] what they do.

“In case they attack at the same time, there are many preparations that haven’t been well taken care of and they’re going to find themselves in trouble … Even if they do, it will take some time [to prepare], not one month or two months, it will take quite a long time,” he said.

The controversial 2008 constitution has predestined that large segments of the post-poll Hluttaw (parliaments) in Burma will be occupied by military personnel. The current military has been assigned 25 per cent of all legislative seats, and the rest will most likely go to candidates from the state-backed parties; the Union Solidarity and Development Party – formed from military generals recently turned civilian politicians – and the National Unity Party.

The latter was formed by the military junta and members of the Burma Socialist Programme Party to take part in the general election of May 27, 1990. It was trounced by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, which gained more than 80 per cent of seats.

The institutionalisation of militarisation in the post-election arena in Burma will unlikely lead to peaceful times for the states in which the armed ethnic groups have struggled for decades to hold on to autonomy over their respective territories, several observers say.