Prosthetics marketed by I-Walk at an event marking resistance to Myanmar’s military coup of five years ago. The enterprise has a waiting list of over 3,000 people. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS

By Guy Dinmore
MYANMAR & THAILAND, Feb 4 2026 (IPS)

Five years of conflict since the military seized power have reduced Myanmar to a failed state and taken a huge toll of lives lost and destroyed. But with all sides seeking total victory, there is no end in sight.

Levels of medieval brutality enhanced by modern technology have enabled the military junta, with help from China, to swing the fortunes of war back in its favour, often through air strikes and drone attacks on civilian targets. Torched villages are deserted.

Kyaw Thurein Win, on the anniversary of the military’s February 1, 2021, coup against the elected civilian government, watched his village of Shut Pon burning in the southern region of Tanintharyi – through satellite imagery.

“Today my village is witnessing the cruelty of the military. They set the fires and ordered that they not be stopped. This is beyond inhuman and beyond cruel. Watching this happen from afar is unbearable,” he wrote on Facebook.

While the strength of anti-regime defiance and determination is undeniable among many in Myanmar, there is also a growing realisation – especially among former combatants — that the resistance will not win this war so soon, if at all.

“It is a stalemate. Nobody can win,” said one military defector, saying that cries of total victory by both the regime and the resistance ring hollow.

A young woman who runs a safe house for former child soldiers as young as 13 says she joined the People’s Defence Forces of the resistance that sprang up against military rule in 2021. But she soon came to realise that, for her at least, war was not the answer and started taking in children forced by poverty and displacement to become fighters against the regime.

She rails against the “whatever it takes” mentality and the toll it takes.

“The civilian suffering is ignored or exploited,” she says, attending a coup anniversary event – a mix of politics and culture and foodstalls –  organised by anti-regime civilian activists in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. She shares a picture of ‘Commando’ in uniform, armed to the teeth. He was 12 at the time.

Sayarma Suzanna, fundraising for her school in Kayin State, the Dr Thanbyah Christian Institute for displaced and local children, said she and her 97 students spent all of November hiding in the nearby forest because of air strikes.

“You have to understand that when the students don’t listen to you during lessons, it is because of their trauma,” she said, recounting how one student lost seven family members in air strikes on their village.

At a nearby stall, the manager of I-Walk displayed an array of quality prosthetic limbs made by his enterprise as affordable as possible. He has a waiting list of over 3,000 people.

Myanmar is the most landmined country in the world with the highest rate of casualties. It also ranks as the biggest producer of illicit opium and a major source of synthetic drugs. Networks of online scam centres run by criminal gangs and militia groups close to the regime have trafficked tens of thousands of people from multiple countries, scamming billions of dollars.

The UN says 5.2 million people have been displaced by conflict inside the country and across borders. Cuts by rich countries to aid budgets have had a crippling impact. Some clinics are reduced to dispensing just paracetamol.

This year’s coup anniversary coincided with the conclusion of parliamentary and regional elections tightly orchestrated by the regime over the scattered and sometimes totally isolated areas of territory it controls, which include all major cities.

The three-phase polls – endorsed by China and Russia but slammed by the UN and most democracies except notably the US – excluded the National League for Democracy, which won landslide election victories in 2015 and 2020.

NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been held in prison since the coup. There is speculation that Senior General Min Aung Hlaing might move her to better conditions of house arrest after the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party, led by former senior officers, forms a nominally civilian government in April.

The USDP is cruising towards its managed landslide victory, according to almost complete results released last week.

The UN said it had reliable reports of at least 170 civilians killed in regime attacks during the month-long election period. Other estimates put the figure considerably higher.

One airstrike in Kachin State in northern Myanmar reportedly killed 50 civilians on January 22. Long-running attempts by the Kachin Independence Army and resistance forces to capture the nearby and heavily defended Bhamo town from the military have been costly. Some analysts ask, for what gain?’

Kachin State’s second biggest town is strategically located on a trade route to China but most of its 55,000 or so inhabitants have long since fled. The military would surely respond with heavy air strikes to any occupation by the resistance.

Data gathered by ACLED, a nonprofit organisation that analyses data on political violence, indicates over 90,000 total conflict-related deaths since the coup. The military, reliant on forced conscription, has borne the brunt of casualties, but civilian deaths are estimated at over 16,000.

“The military has carried out air strikes, indiscriminately or deliberately attacking civilians in their homes, hospitals, and schools,” said Nicholas Koumjian, head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, adding that there is evidence that civilians have endured atrocities amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes since the military takeover.

The IIMM is also investigating a growing number of allegations of atrocities committed by opposition armed groups, over which the parallel National Unity Government set up by lawmakers ousted in the coup has little or no control.

Former combatants say rogue People’s Defence Forces are also extorting money from local populations and holding people to ransom.

“Myanmar remains mired in an existential crisis – measured both in human security and the state’s shrinking sovereignty as rival centres of power harden on the ground,” the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, a think-tank, stated in its recent annual review.

“The regime is meanwhile trying to break the current stalemate by accelerating counter-offensives on three fronts: military, diplomatic and political,” it said. The military-staged elections of 2010 led to a process of political and economic reforms but this time the regime intended to impose its own terms, the think tank said.

It warned of the risk that ethnic armed groups controlling swathes of border territories with Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand would end up – not for the first time – negotiating bilateral ceasefires and “rent sharing arrangements” with the regime. These would “consolidate the power of armed elites and reinforce central control rather than advance democracy, human rights or the rule of law.”

On Sunday, a panel discussion featuring anti-regime politicians and activists hosted by Chiang Mai University reinforced the sense of an opposition fragmented along ethnic and geographical lines, even if speakers upheld the principles behind their shared goal of a democratic federal union.

There was the customary rhetoric of “taking down this junta” and “whatever it takes”, but barely a mention of the National Unity Government that is struggling to knit together these diverse forces under the umbrella of a “Federal Supreme Council”.

On the panel, Debbie Stothard, a Malaysian democracy and women’s rights activist long involved with Myanmar, said the resistance needed two more years for victory, as the generals had “bought” one more year with their sham elections.

“Hang in there. We have to keep on going for at least two more years,” she said.

But in the big cities where the regime is starting to try and foster a sense of normality against a dire economic backdrop, the mood on the street appears more of resignation than defiance.

“When we started protesting against the regime in the streets in 2021, I told my husband we would defeat the military in three months,” an elderly Chin activist told IPS in Yangon, the former capital. “He replied it would take five years. Now I am afraid it will take another five years,” she said.

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Aung San Suu Kyi, Union Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, attends the opening of Myanmar's first round of oral observations at the International Court of Justice in 2019. She has since been jailed by the generals she defended at the ICJ. UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek

By Guy Dinmore
YANGON, Myanmar, and CHIANGMAI, Thailand , Jan 16 2026 (IPS)

Held incommunicado in grim prison conditions for nearly five years, Aung San Suu Kyi quite possibly does not even know that this week the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened a landmark case charging Myanmar with committing genocide against its Rohingya minority a decade ago.

If news did filter through from the world outside her cell, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and ousted leader of Myanmar’s elected government would surely be reflecting on how it was that the generals she steadfastly defended in The Hague in preliminary hearings in 2019 are now her jailers.

The case before the ICJ, brought by Gambia, levels charges of genocide against Myanmar dating to the offensive in 2016-17 by military forces and Buddhist militia against the mostly Moslem Rohingya minority. Thousands were killed, villages torched and women raped, culminating in over 700,000 refugees forced across the border into Bangladesh.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputation was already badly tarnished in the west even before she went to The Hague. In 2017 Oxford University’s St Hugh’s College, her alma mater, had removed her portrait from public view, and in 2018 Amnesty International joined numerous institutions and cities revoking awards they had bestowed, dismayed that she had not even used her moral authority as head of government to condemn the violence. Her 1991 Nobel prize remained intact—there were no rules to revoke it.

Separately, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court last November requested an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya.

To add salt to those wounds, her leading of Myanmar’s legal team to the ICJ may in fact have sealed her fate with the generals rather than preserve their difficult power-sharing arrangement.

“At that point her credibility was shattered and she lost the West,” commented a veteran analyst in Yangon. “It was at that point that the military decided to move against her and started plotting their coup,” he said, explaining how Senior General Min Aung Hlaing calculated that the international community would not rally behind her.

Aung San Suu Kyi turned 80 in prison last June and this week marks a total of some 20 years she has spent behind bars or under house arrest since her return to Myanmar from Britain in 1988. She has not seen her lawyers for two years and is serving sentences amounting to 27 years following an array of charges, including corruption, that her followers dismiss as fabricated.

Largely forgotten or deemed as irrelevant outside her country, in Myanmar “Mother Suu” remains widely popular, even revered—at least among the Buddhist Bamar majority—and her fate still has a bearing on the course of the country’s future.

Although the junta’s staging of phased elections, now underway in areas it controls, is dismissed by many in Myanmar as a total sham, people dare to hope that General Min Aung Hlaing, possibly the next president, might release Aung San Suu Kyi and the deposed president Win Myint, among other political prisoners. The expectation is that the military’s proxy party might make some form of gesture after the nominally civilian government takes office in April.

Very few signs remain of Aung San Suu Kyi in junta-controlled areas. This poster hung in a Yangon cafe in 2024 but is no longer there. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS

But resistance fighters and members of the parallel National Unity Government (NUG) operating in areas beyond junta control remain skeptical.

“The release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi remains tightly constrained by the current balance of power. For Min Aung Hlaing, her freedom would fundamentally undermine the regime’s authority, giving him strong incentives to keep her isolated as long as the military remains ‘in control,’” David Gum Awng, NUG deputy foreign minister, told IPS outside Myanmar.

The “credible pathway forward,” he said, is to seize the capital Nay Pyi Taw, where Aung San Suu Kyi is believed to be incarcerated, and dismantle the military regime while reaching a broad political agreement or coalition among resistance forces.

“This would demand tremendous collective effort, large-scale coordination, and a much stronger political and military alliance and pact,” he added, referring to the NUG’s struggle to forge agreements among disparate ethnic armed groups that have been resisting successive military regimes and sometimes fighting between themselves for decades.

A former military captain, who defected to join civilian resistance groups outside Myanmar, told IPS that he liked “Mother Suu” and that his whole family had voted for her National League for Democracy in the 2020 elections when her government was re-elected by a landslide only for the generals to annul the results in their 2021 coup.

“But now it’s very hard for her to be a leader. We don’t see any changes happening. Ming Aung Hlaing will detain her for as long as possible. I worked with him and know his personality and based on that, he won’t release her. He is a vindictive man,” the former soldier said.

For the younger generation who paid a heavy price in mass street protests crushed by the military in early 2021 and then fled to join resistance forces springing up across the country, it seems time to move on from the era of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“It is time for a new leader. She is old. Gen Z will not listen to her,” was the comment of one hotel worker who also praised her legacy.

The NUG and the new generation are starting to acknowledge the historic abuses and wrongs committed by successive Myanmar leaders against the mostly stateless Rohingya community.

Some are following news of the ICJ hearings this week and openly say Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in 2019 in defending the military against charges of genocide was morally wrong and that she had ended up weakening her own position.

“She’s not there to defend them now,” commented one young man who was forced to flee Myanmar as the military hunted down his father, a prominent activist.

People who have known her for years seem to disagree over what really motivated Aung San Suu Kyi in taking that fateful step in The Hague.

Was it pride in defending her country as the daughter of Aung San, independence hero and founder of the modern military? Or did she wrongly calculate it was her only way forward while trying to introduce political and economic reforms that would curb the power of the generals?  Or was she simply like one of them—a Buddhist nationalist of the Bamar majority who remained skeptical about real federalism and saw the Rohingya as migrants who did not “belong” in Myanmar and were a threat to its dominant religion?

In a country where one powerful force remains committed to a past that is rejected by a large majority of its people, such questions over the shape of Myanmar’s future remain highly relevant, as does the fate of one woman.

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A man walks past a campaign poster for the military’s proxy party USDP ahead of strictly controlled elections in Myanmar. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS

By Guy Dinmore
YANGON, Myanmar and BANGKOK , Jan 6 2026 (IPS)

With thousands of civilians killed in years of civil war and over 22,000 political prisoners still behind bars, no one was surprised that early results from Myanmar’s first but tightly controlled elections since the 2021 coup show the military’s proxy party speeding to victory.

“How can you hold elections and bomb civilians at the same time?” asked Khin Ohmar, a civil rights activist outside Myanmar who is monitoring what the resistance forces and a shadow government reject as “sham” polls.

The junta had already cleared the path towards its stated goal of a “genuine, disciplined multi-party democratic system” by dissolving some 40 parties that refused to register for polls, which they regard as illegitimate, with their leaders and supporters still in prison.

These include the National League for Democracy (NLD) and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won a landslide second term  in the 2020 elections – only for the results to be annulled by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, a coup leader and self-appointed acting president. Mass street protests were crushed in early 2021 and war spread across Myanmar.

Although these elections will deliver just a façade of the legitimacy craved by some of the generals, they did succeed in projecting a power and authority that was quickly slipping away just two years ago as long-standing ethnic armed groups and newly formed People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on the junta.

“The tide has turned in favour of the military,” commented a veteran Myanmar analyst in Yangon, crediting China, which reined in the ethnic groups on its shared border, fully embraced Min Aung Hlaing and, along with Russia, delivered the arms, technology and training needed to peg back the resistance.

Campaigners for the pro-military USDP canvas residents and check voters lists in Yangon ahead of the December 28 parliamentary election that excluded major anti-junta parties. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS

The regime’s air power and newly acquired drones have been deployed to ruthless effect, often hitting civilian targets in relatively remote areas where the resistance has grassroots support. Air strikes were stepped up as the elections approached. Major cities like Yangon were calm; people subdued.

Bombs dropped on Tabayin township in the Sagaing Region on December 5 killed 18 people, including many in a busy tea shop, AFP reported. On December 10, air strikes on a hospital in the ancient capital of Mrauk-U in Rakhine State were reported to have killed 10 patients and 23 others. The regime accused the insurgent Arakan Army and PDFs of using it as a base.

“I don’t think that anyone believes that those elections will be free and fair,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated while visiting the region ahead of the polls. He called on the junta to end its “deplorable” violence and find “a credible path” back to civilian rule.

In contrast, the Trump administration declared in November that the junta’s election plans were “free and fair” and removed Temporary Protected Status from Myanmar refugees in the US, saying their country was safe for them to return to.

“I’ll be jailed if I don’t vote,” said Min, a Yangon taxi driver, only half-joking on the eve of voting in Yangon, the commercial capital. “And what difference does it make? We are ruled by China and Xi Jinping, not Min Aung Hlaing,” he added.

With the polls spread over three stages, the first 102 townships voted on December 28. Others will follow on January 11 and January 25 to make a total of 265 of Myanmar’s 330 townships scheduled to vote for the bicameral national parliament and assemblies in the 14 regions and states.

Residents in downtown Yangon check their names on the electoral register and then cast their votes in a polling station on December 28. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS

No voting is to be held at all in the remaining 65 townships that the election commission deemed too unsafe.

Voting in the first round in Yangon, an urban and semi-rural sprawl of seven million people, proceeded calmly and slowly on a quiet Sunday – despite intense efforts, and sometimes threats, by the regime to boost the turnout.

In 2020 and 2015 – when Myanmar arguably held the region’s most open and fair elections and the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was soundly defeated – people gaily posted images of their ink-stained little fingers on social media as evidence of their vote after weeks of packed rallies and vibrant campaign rallies.

But not this time. Social media posts hurled insults, some comic and vulgar, at the regime. Those eager to support the resistance’s boycott but who were afraid of reprisals were relieved if they found their names had been omitted by mistake on electoral lists. Electronic voting machines in use for the first time made it impossible to leave a blank.

But as in past elections, a solid core of people close to the military and its web of powerful economic interests turned out to vote for the USDP.

“We are choosing our government,” declared one man exiting a polling station in central Yangon with his family, apparently USDP supporters. One proudly waved his little finger dipped in indelible ink.

How can you hold elections and bomb civilians at the same time? - Khin Ohmar, civil rights activist
Turnout for the first round was put by regime officials at 52 percent. This compares with about 70 percent in the past two elections. China’s special envoy – sent as an official observer, along with others from Russia, Belarus, Vietnam and Cambodia – praised the elections.

On January 2, the election commission unexpectedly issued partial results: the USDP, led by retired generals, had won 38 of 40 seats in the lower house where votes had been tallied to date. No one blinked.

The USDP campaign message focused on two main elements – get out and vote with all your family, and back a USDP government to restore stability and progress to Myanmar.

Its underlying message was a reminder that the last USDP administration, led by President Thein Sein introduced socio-economic and political reforms and ceasefire negotiations with ethnic groups after securing a large majority in the 2010 elections when the NLD and other opposition groups were also absent.

Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest, was released just after the 2010 polls and went on to contest and win a seat in a 2012 by-election ahead of the NLD’s own sweeping victory in 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi governed in a difficult power-sharing arrangement with the military for the next five years and was thrown back into prison in the coup.

For now a large proportion of Myanmar’s population lives in areas under junta control, including all 14 of the state and regional capitals, swollen by an influx of people fleeing conflict.  The military also holds major seaports and airports and – to varying degrees – the main border crossings for China and Thailand.

But in terms of territory, over half of Myanmar is in the hands of disparate ethnic armed groups and resistance forces. Alliances are fluid and negotiable.

The shadow National Unity Government is trying to establish its own authority over liberated territory, looking to cement a consensus around the concept of a democratic and federal Myanmar free of the military’s interference – something that has eluded the country since independence from British colonial rule in 1948.

Front lines shift back and forth as the military struggles to regain control over the Bamar heartlands of central Myanmar, once considered their bastion, while stretched elsewhere after losing vast tracts of border areas since the coup. Several million people have fled the country or are internally displaced.

Once again there is some speculation that a “smooth” election and the formation of a USDP government in April will lead to a gesture signalling the military’s confidence, such as a possible ending of forced conscription and the release of some political prisoners. Project power, then collect legitimacy.

“Political prisoners are used as bait,” said Khin Ohmar, the civil rights activist in Bangkok. “The world would at least have to applaud.”

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Maung Sawyeddollah, Founder of the Rohingya Students Network, addresses the high-level conference of the General Assembly on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2025 (IPS)

The international community convened for a high-level meeting at UN Headquarters, this time to mobilize political support for the ongoing issue of the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar.

On Tuesday September 30, representatives from Rohingya advocacy groups, the UN system and member states convened at the General Assembly to address the ongoing challenges facing Rohingya Muslims and the broader context of the political and humanitarian situation in Myanmar.

UN President of the General Assembly Annalena Baerbock remarked that the conference was an opportunity to listen to stakeholders, notably civil society representatives with experience on the ground.

“Rohingya need the support of the international community, not just in words but in action,” she said.

Baerbock added there was an “urgent need for strengthened international solidarity and increased support,” and to make efforts to reach a political solution with unequivocal participation from the Rohingyas.

“The violence, the extreme deprivation and the massive violations of human rights have fueled a crisis of grave international concern. The international community must honor its responsibilities and act. We stand in solidarity with the Rohingya and all the people of Myanmar in their hour of greatest need,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In the eight years since over 750,000 Rohingyas fled persecution and crossed the border into Bangladesh, the international community has had to deal with one of the most intense refugee situations in living memory. Attendees at the conference spoke on addressing the root causes that led to this protracted crisis—systematic oppression and persecution at the hands of Myanmar’s authorities and unrest in Rakhine State.

Muhammad Yunus, Chief Adviser of the interim Government of Bangladesh, addresses the high-level conference on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

The military junta’s ascension in 2021 has only led to further unrest and instability in Myanmar and has made the likelihood of safe and sustained return far more precarious. Their persecution has only intensified as the Rohingya communities still residing in Rakhine find themselves caught in the middle of conflicts between the junta and other militant groups, including the Arakan Army.

At the opening of the conference, Rohingya refugee activists remarked that the systemic oppression predates the current crisis. “This is a historic occasion for Myanmar. But it is long overdue. Our people have suffered enough. For ethnic minorities—from Kachin to Rohingya—the suffering has spanned decades,” said Wai Wai Nu, founder and executive director of the Women’s Peace Network.

“It has already been more than eight years since the Rohingya Genocide was exposed. Where is the justice for the Rohingyas?” asked Maung Sawyeddollah, founder of the Rohingya Student Network.

For the United Nations, the Rohingya refugee crisis represents the dramatic impact of funding shortfalls on their humanitarian operations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres once said during his visit to the refugee camps in Bangladesh back in April that “Cox’s Bazar is Ground Zero for the impact of budget cuts”.

Funding cuts to agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) have undermined their capacity to reach people in need. WFP has warned that their food assistance in the refugee camps will run out in two months unless they receive more funding. Yet as of now, the 2025 Rohingya Refugee Response Plan of USD 934.5 million is only funded at 38 percent.

Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, addresses the high-level conference of the General Assembly on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

“The humanitarian response in Bangladesh remains chronically underfunded, including in key areas like food and cooking fuel. The prospects for funding next year are grim. Unless further resources are forthcoming, despite the needs, we will be forced to make more cuts while striving to minimize the risk of losing lives: children dying of malnutrition or people dying at sea as more refugees embark on dangerous boat journeys,” said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

As the host country of over 1 million refugees since 2017, Bangladesh has borne the brunt of the situation. Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus said that the country faces its own development challenges and systemic issues with crime, poverty and unemployment, and has struggled to support the refugee population even with the help of aid organizations. He made a call to pursue repatriations, the strategy to ensure the safe return of Rohingyas to Rakhine.

“As funding declines, the only peaceful option is to begin their repatriation. This will entail far fewer resources than continuing their international protection. The Rohingya have consistently pronounced their desire to go back home,” said Yunus. “The world cannot keep the Rohingya waiting any longer from returning home.”

Along with the UN, Myanmar and Bangladesh, neighboring and host countries also have a role to play. Regional blocs like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are also crucial  in supporting the Rohingya population as well as leading dialogues with other stakeholders across the region.

“In my engagements with Myanmar stakeholders, I have emphasized that peace in Myanmar will remain elusive until inclusive dialogue between all Myanmar stakeholders takes place,” said Othman Hashim, the special envoy of the ASEAN Chair on Myanmar. “For actions within Myanmar, the crucial first step is stopping the hostilities and violence. Prolonged violence will only exacerbate the misery of the people of Myanmar, Rohingya and other minorities included.”

“Countries hosting refugees need sustained support. Cooperation with UNODC [UN Office of Drugs and Crime], UNHCR, and IOM [International Organization for Migration] must be deepened,” said Sugiono, Indonesia’s foreign minister.

Supporting the Rohingya beyond emergency and humanitarian needs would also require investing resources in education and employment opportunities. Involved parties were encouraged to support resettlement policies that would help communities secure livelihoods in  the long-term, or to extend opportunities for longterm work, like in Thailand where they recently granted long-staying refugees the right to work legally in the country.

“Any initiative for the Rohingya without Rohingya in the camp, from decision making to nation-building is unsustainable and unjust. The UN must mobilize resources to empower Rohingya. We are not only victims; we have the potential to make a difference,” said Sawyeddollah.

As one of the few Rohingya representatives present that had previous lived in the camps in Cox’s Bazaar, Sawyeddollah described the challenges he faced in pursuing higher education when he applied to over 150 universities worldwide but did not get into any of them. He got into New York University with a scholarship, the first Rohingya refugee to attend. He reiterated that universities had the capacity to offer scholarships to Rohingya students, citing the example of the Asian University of Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where it has been offering scholarships to Rohingya girls since at least 2018.

The conference called for actionable measures that would address several key areas in the Rohingya refugee situation. This includes scaling up funding for humanitarian aid in Bangladesh and Myanmar, and notably, pursuing justice and accountability under international law. Türk and other UN officials reiterated that resolving the instability and political tensions in Myanmar is crucial to resolving the refugee crisis.

Kyaw Moe Tun, Permanent Representative of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar to the UN, blamed the military junta for the country’s current state and called for member states to refuse supporting the junta politically or financially. “We can yield results only by acting together to end the military dictatorship, its unlawful coup, and its culture of impunity. At a time when human rights, justice and humanity are under critical attack, please help in our genuine endeavour to build a federal democratic union that rooted in these very principles.”
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Four-year-old Ma July Phyo sits in a makeshift shelter in Mandalay with her mother, Ma Khin Phyo Kai, on April 2, 2025, five days after the deadly earthquake that struck Myanmar. Despite a ceasefire announced after the earthquake, the Tatmadaw continued its aerial attacks on local villages in its fight against armed resistance groups across the country, which continues to have deadly consequences for civilians. Credit: Maung Nyan/UNICEF

By Naomi Myint Breuer
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 29 2025 (IPS)

In Myanmar, airstrikes occur almost daily. The phenomenon has become common since civil war broke out following the 2021 military coup that replaced the democratically elected National League for Democracy (NLD) with the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military. Several human rights organizations report that these airstrikes are disproportionately targeting civilians and harming lives.

The Tatmadaw uses airstrikes to fight armed resistance groups, such as the People’s Defense Forces (PDF), and regain control of areas from these groups, who control about 42 percent of the country’s territory, according to a BBC investigation published December 19, 2024.

After the March 28 earthquake, the Myanmar military and other groups involved declared a ceasefire, but attacks continued. Myanmar Witness reported 80 airstrikes occurred between March 28 and April 24, including in emergency-declared areas.

The Karen Human Rights Group reports that airstrikes are part of a broader attack on civilians in the country. Human rights groups and the UN found that the military disproportionately targets civilians with not only bombs but also mass executions of detained people and large-scale burning of homes.

Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric said these strikes are part of a pattern of attacks across the country.

“There are frequent reports of people being killed, injured or displaced by violence—as well as increasing attacks on civilian infrastructure,” he said at a July 16 press briefing.

Recent airstrikes, such as a July 11 strike on a monastery in Lin Ta Lu village, which killed 23 and injured 30, have redrawn attention to the country’s ongoing conflict. The Lin Ta Lu attack came weeks after the military began an offensive to reclaim territories controlled by resistance groups.

Public and religious sites have become targets. Myanmar Witness, a Centre for Information Resilience project investigating human rights in Myanmar, reported a trend of military operations hitting large civilian gatherings, with 109 cases of airstrikes damaging religious sites in 2024. A wedding held in a monastery in Magway Region was bombed on Feb. 25 after an invitation was posted on social media. They estimate that 11 people were killed.

“These trends highlight that religious and cultural sites are becoming increasingly at risk of complete destruction as a result of internal conflict in the country,” Myanmar Witness reported.

Dozens of schools have also been attacked, resulting in deaths and injuries of children. Many children have stopped attending school due to safety concerns. An aerial attack on a school in Oe Htein Kwin village in the Sagaing region on May 12 killed around 20 students and wounded dozens.

A Karen Education and Culture Department (KECD) school principal told the Karen Human Rights Group that all four of the school’s buildings were destroyed by bombs in a March 23, 2024 airstrike in a village in Doo Tha Htoo District. The cost of rebuilding is expensive, and they did not know whether anyone would be able to help rebuild it.

“I am sad to see the destruction of my school and worry that children will not be able to go to school…” the principal said. “I do not know how to describe my feelings of extreme fear. My whole heart breaks when I see the destroyed school. I cannot do anything now.”

Yadanar Maung, spokesperson for Justice For Myanmar, an activist group, accused international governments and corporations that fund, arm and train the Tatmadaw of empowering the military’s violent actions.

“The Myanmar military’s escalating violence against civilians, including through the intensification of airstrikes that target children, is not happening in a vacuum,” Maung told IPS.

Maung praised Airbus’ recent divestment from AviChina Industry & Technology Company Limited due to its links to the violence in Myanmar.

“Others must follow,” Maung said. “Governments must also act with stronger targeted sanctions on the military, its businesses, cronies and partners.”

The UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar is investigating whether the Tatmadaw’s actions can be classified as crimes against humanity. The Mechanism called for information on aerial attacks for its investigation. They are prioritizing investigating attacks on children.

“Airstrikes that are indiscriminate or which target civilians may be war crimes or crimes against humanity,” the Mechanism wrote.

The airstrikes make it difficult for the UN to deliver humanitarian assistance to people in need. Currently, one in three people in Myanmar face acute hunger, according to Dujarric.

“We urgently, and once again, call on all parties to respect human rights and international humanitarian law,” he said.

Myanmar receives far less attention than other regions undergoing conflict and distress. Without the same level of attention, the war cannot end and the humanitarian situation will not be alleviated. Myanmar Witness said that it is important to continue reporting on the situation in Myanmar so as to keep other nations updated. They said the situation is complex and can be difficult for foreigners to understand.

“The international community isn’t as aware of this continuing internal conflict due to other important conflicts taking media attention, particularly in Western news outlets,” Myanmar Witness wrote to IPS. “It is important to continuously push to get news about Myanmar out to the international community as much as we can.”

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Teacher U Aung San standing in the ruins of his classroom, which was destroyed by the March 28 earthquake that left millions across Myanmar in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Credit: UNICEF/Minzayar Oo

By Naomi Myint Breuer
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2025 (IPS)

“Myanmar cannot become a forgotten crisis,” Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), has said. “This country has faced cyclones, war, conflict, violence, climate and now immense suffering.”

Three months after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar, humanitarian groups warn that the international community is failing to respond. Despite the scale of need, only 36 percent of the USD 275 million requested for the earthquake response has been disbursed. Almost halfway through the year, the 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP), which guides aid efforts throughout the country, is just 12 percent funded.

Da Silva was speaking at a press briefing on June 24 following his visit to Myanmar. His views reflect those of others involved in bringing humanitarian aid to the country.

“The dangerously low funding for response efforts in Myanmar remains our greatest challenge,” former UN Humanitarian Coordinator Marcoluigi Corsi said in his June 20 outgoing statement.

The ongoing armed conflict and political turmoil following the 2021 military coup are also making humanitarian assistance more difficult to achieve.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk reported in a June 27 briefing to the Human Rights Council that the military’s attacks rose again, despite initial ceasefire announcements after the earthquake.

Since the earthquake, the military has launched more than 600 attacks, 94 percent of which were in areas where a ceasefire had been announced. Over 500 civilians were killed, and 1000 were injured. Türk said that attacks have restricted humanitarian access. WHO reports that 6 attacks have led to 48 health workers killed and 85 injured. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has urged that groups in these areas respect international humanitarian law.

“Every day, we face barriers that prevent or delay assistance from reaching those who need it most,” former UN Humanitarian Coordinator Marcoluigi Corsi said in his outgoing statement on June 20. “I call on all parties to ensure unrestricted humanitarian access—without conditions, without delays.”

The March 28 earthquake killed 3,800 people and injured more than 5,000, according to UN estimates. Tens of thousands were newly displaced, adding to the 3.2 million displaced since the coup. The UN now estimates that 3.5 million people, 6 percent of the population, are displaced, and more than 6 million are in need of urgent assistance.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Myanmar office estimates that 19.9 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance before the earthquake, and now 2 million more are.

“Myanmar is one of the countries most in need of humanitarian assistance in the Asia-Pacific region,” the ICRC reports.

So far, 61 percent of the target population in need of humanitarian health services have been reached, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). With the monsoon season underway and active fighting restricting humanitarian access, organizations are warning about the urgency of the situation.

“We have faced many crises, including armed conflict and flooding, and now we have again been hit by the earthquake,” Daw Khin Po, who was displaced by the earthquake, told the ICRC.

The ICRC has been working with the Myanmar Red Cross Society (MRCS) and local partners to assist over 111,000 people in Mandalay, Sagaing, Bago and Shan State. They have provided clean water, food, tarpaulins, solar streetlights, essential household items, cash and emergency health care, as well as training, agricultural and livestock materials, support for small businesses and risk awareness training. These organizations have also been supporting existing hospitals and community health centers.

“However, the scale of needs is beyond what any single organization can address,” the ICRC reported.

OCHA is currently working to respond to Myanmar’s humanitarian crisis through “coordination, advocacy, policy, information management and humanitarian financing tools and services.”

“Amid these shocks, the security environment continues to deteriorate, people are facing grave protection threats, and coping capacities are stretched to the limit,” the OCHA Myanmar office wrote.

Humanitarian partners assisted around 1.5 million people between January and March 2025, which is 27 percent of the annual target, according to the OCHA Myanmar office. These efforts have targeted internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees, resettled and locally integrated IDPs, and non-displaced stateless people. The office said that local organizations are the “backbone” of the response to the humanitarian situation, especially in areas of conflict.

Without funding, though, Corsi said more people will be at risk as organizations are unable to provide necessary support.

“The world cannot look away. The international community must step up their support,” the ICRC’s head of delegation in Yangon, Arnaud de Baecque, said.

The monsoon season creates further threats to the population, who risk disease, flooding and displacement, and adds more urgency to the situation. WHO is currently working to improve access to clean and potable water, provide health services and prevent disease outbreaks. They are collaborating with the Red Cross, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Food Programme (WFP) to improve water safety systems and disseminate health information.

But WHO reports that people living in makeshift structures due to the earthquake are subject to extreme health risks.

Türk emphasized that the situation in Myanmar must receive continuous attention.

“Amid the turmoil, planning for a future with human rights front and center offers people a sense of hope,” he said. “We owe it to the people of Myanmar to make that hope a reality.”

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The aftermath of a Russian attack on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. Credit: Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 19 2025 (IPS)

The international community must take action to uphold international humanitarian law, say healthcare and rights advocates, as attacks on healthcare in war zones reached a record high last year.

A new report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) released today (May 19) documented more than 3,600 attacks on doctors and health care workers, hospitals, and clinics in zones of armed conflict in 2024—up 15 percent from 2023 and 62 percent since 2022.

The report’s authors say attacks on healthcare in war zones are not only more numerous but are also more destructive and involve heavier weapons—there was a growing use of explosive weapons in attacks against healthcare, rising from 36 percent of incidents in 2022 to 48 percent in 2023. Perpetrator use of drones against health care facilities drove much of the increase, as their use nearly quadrupled, according to the report.

Meanwhile, more than 900 doctors were killed last year—a rise of 21 percent from 2023—and almost 500 were arrested. More than 100 were kidnapped.

However, the report suggests attacks on healthcare in war zones may be even more widespread, as the collection of data on violence is impeded by insecurity, communications blockages, and the reluctance of some entities to share data on violence.

It also says the rise in attacks has come alongside attempts by perpetrators to limit legal protections for health care and civilians in war.

It highlights how Israel has “sought to dilute legal requirements of precaution and proportionality during conflict” while “campaigns to delegitimize the International Criminal Court (ICC) are underway,” with US president Donald Trump imposing sanctions on ICC staff and their families for having charged Israelis with war crimes, Russia criminalizing cooperation with the ICC or any foreign court seeking to hold Russians to account, and other countries announcing plans to leave the ICC.

The authors say regimes around the world are increasingly flouting international human rights laws, and action must be taken to bring actors behind these attacks to justice or risk a proliferation of military targeting of healthcare.

Christina Wille, Director of Insight Insecurity, an SHCC member, told IPS that the international community has a role to play.

“International humanitarian law, which says that healthcare in conflict must be protected, is not being respected. The international community should come together to ensure that there is accountability for these attacks and the people responsible for them are brought to justice. But if nothing is done and this continues, other states may see the targeting of healthcare as a tactic that they can use in conflict without risk of censure or sanction and will go ahead with it,” Wille said.

While the report documented more countries last year reporting attacks on healthcare, the majority of recorded incidents occurred in a handful of states.

By far the largest number of attacks on health care—more than 1,300—took place in Gaza and the West Bank, but there were also hundreds of attacks in other countries that have seen brutal conflicts, including Ukraine (544), Lebanon (485), Myanmar (308), and Sudan (276), where there has been evidence of systematic targeting of local healthcare facilities and workers by attacking, or both attacking and opposing, forces.

The results of these attacks have been dire, not just in terms of the immediate casualties among healthcare workers and civilians from such strikes but also the knock-on effects on the local civilian population from the destruction of facilities, as in some cases even the most basic of medical services subsequently become unavailable.

The report points out that in Gaza, every hospital has been hit, and many multiple times, with dire impacts on their capacity to address the massive number of traumatic injuries, treatment for chronic and infectious disease, and safe childbirth.

“The health system in Gaza has collapsed. Hospitals and clinics have been completely destroyed, like the of the civilian infrastructure. Today, only 22 out of 36 hospitals are partially functioning, and that can mean only being able to treat a few patients a day. Most of the labs are not running, there is very little material available, the staff is exhausted, and some are still detained,” Simon Tyler, Executive Director of Doctors of the World, the UK chapter of the international human rights organization global Médecins du Monde network, told IPS.

A charity organization working in Gaza, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said that devastating attacks on two hospitals – the European Gaza Hospital (EGH) and Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza—in the last week had worsened the situation.

“The attacks put the EGH out of service and increased the pressure on services at Nasser, as well as destroying parts of the hospital, including the burns unit. EGH was the only hospital in Gaza providing cancer services following the destruction of the Turkish Friendship Hospital in March,” MAP communications manager Max Slaughter told IPS.

Israeli forces have often claimed that hospitals in Gaza were being used as bases for Hamas military operations.

But the UN has said Israeli forces’ attacks on healthcare in Gaza are a war crime.

Doctors in Myanmar who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity for security reasons said the intensified use of drones by government forces fighting rebel groups in the last 18 months “posed grave threats to the provision of humanitarian aid and healthcare services.”

“Deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities, including hospitals, rural health centers, and other related infrastructure, have resulted in severe damage to health facilities, injuries, fatalities, and, in some cases, permanent disabilities among healthcare workers,” one said.

The doctors added that a combination of people being afraid to travel and frequent displacement of healthcare service sites has significantly disrupted access to essential medical care, and drone attacks targeting group activities, such as the provision of humanitarian aid, hinder effective delivery by deterring gatherings of people and creating logistical challenges.

Meanwhile, the risk posed to humanitarian workers by these attacks has reduced the presence of organizations on the ground, diminishing aid availability for affected populations.

In Ukraine, the healthcare system has faced similar widespread destruction.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s Health Ministry said that Russian forces had damaged or destroyed more than 2,300 medical infrastructure facilities since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In some areas near the line, healthcare systems have all but disappeared, with people having to either rely on local aid groups and NGOs for basic care and essential medicines or travel long distances in difficult conditions to facilities that are still functioning.

But it is not hospitals that have come under attack, as Russian troops regularly target ambulances—since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 116 ambulances have been damaged, 274 destroyed, and 80 seized.

But hospitals and clinics in areas far from the fighting have not been spared. In one of the worst attacks on healthcare since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, was hit by a missile on July 8 last year. Two adults were killed and at least 34 people, including nine children, were injured.

Despite initial denials by the Kremlin that its forces had hit the hospital, evidence showed the building had been deliberately struck with a hypersonic missile.

Another problem faced in many conflict zones is how attacks on other infrastructure, such as energy facilities, are impacting healthcare.

Volodymyr Hryshko, Senior Legal Counsel with Ukrainian group Truth Hounds, told IPS more intense Russian targeting of energy infrastructure in 2024 had had a devastating impact on healthcare. In a survey by the group, 92 percent of doctors reported such attacks had experienced power cuts at work, and 66 percent said medical procedures had been affected. The attacks had led to deaths from oxygen deprivation as life support systems failed and staff at some hospitals were forced to work in complete blackouts.

“But the impact is not only immediate risk to patients but also long-term system degradation, staff burnout—reported by over 80 percent—and psychological trauma among both patients and healthcare providers,” he said.

However, despite the death and destruction caused by such attacks, the report shows they are increasing in number.

Wille said the reasons for this are varied and that not all strikes on medical facilities documented may be deliberate.

“Weapons may not be as accurate as believed, and heavy weapons can also have a ‘wide area’ effect—attackers may not have been aiming to hit a hospital, but the impact of the strike still damaged it,” she said.

However, she pointed out that militaries are aware they can gain an advantage in conflict by targeting healthcare systems.

“Health systems are often seen by conflict parties as a system that can help keep the enemy going—treating injuries, helping them recover, and providing a place for them to rest and recuperate.

“Attacks on health systems can also damage morale significantly because health facilities and workers supply the services the population, especially very young and old people, desperately need,” she explained.

But groups working to provide medical and humanitarian help in war zones believe the fact that the regimes behind these attacks are carrying them out with seeming impunity is fueling continued attacks on healthcare in war zones.

“The principle that civilians and aid workers should be protected is being violated time and again. In recent times, we’ve seen clinics bombed, convoys attacked, and our colleagues targeted simply for doing their job in Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine. We can no longer rely on or guarantee protection for our staff and services. Civilians, humanitarian workers, health workers, and infrastructure should never be targets. We firmly condemn all attacks on healthcare and call for independent investigation and accountability for the perpetrators,” said Tyler.

“The continued inaction of… some of the most powerful governments in the world in the face of the Israeli authorities’ deadly blockade is indefensible—and could be judged as complicity under international humanitarian law and human rights law. We must hold all responsible for violations accountable to ensure justice for victims, deter further violations, and prevent future escalations,” he added.

MAP’s Slaughter warned that Israel’s “… deliberate blockade of aid and continued attacks on healthcare, all with no real accountability or impunity, are setting a precedent that the international community will permit such atrocities to be committed with no recourse.”

The SHCC report calls for UN states to take action to ensure healthcare is protected in conflicts, including ending impunity by encouraging investigations, data sharing, prosecutions through the International Criminal Court and empowering monitoring bodies.

Wille admitted, though it may be difficult to get a powerful international consensus that would lead to such attacks being stopped, or at least significantly reduced.

“I have little optimism that governments can prevent such attacks in the current climate. When major powers that should uphold the rules-based international order instead question its legitimacy—and even erode the rule of law at home, as in the US—it becomes nearly impossible to build the international consensus needed to enforce those rules,” she said.

“Yet it remains essential to keep calling for these attacks to stop and for perpetrators to be held accountable because even a fractured international order can be repaired, and justice demands persistence,” she added.

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A monk and other victims of the March 28 quake are treated under shelters outside Mandalay General Hospital. Credit: IPS

By IPS Reporters and Guy Dinmore
MANDALAY, YANGON, LONDON, Apr 11 2025 (IPS)

Two weeks after a devastating earthquake hit central Myanmar, the military junta is directing flows of international aid to urban centres it controls while bombing civilians in areas held by resistance forces, breaking a ceasefire.

With the confirmed death toll from the March 28 quake approaching 4,000 people, foreign aid efforts are picking up, led by regime ally China and joined by other neighbouring countries, including India, Bangladesh and Thailand, as well as major relief agencies and the European Commission.

But the extent of the disaster, affecting an estimated two million people, has revealed the junta’s limits of resources and manpower after four years of civil war and with state structures around health and education severely weakened by the non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement.

“We have not received any assistance from the authorities. Assistance is almost non-existent. The authorities’ capability for rescue is very limited. Rescue groups reached affected communities very late, and so we’re seeing more losses than should have happened,” said Ko Soe, whose two-storey house in Myit Thar town in Mandalay Region is no longer habitable.

The ruins of a residential building in Pyinmana Township near the capital Nay Pyi Taw. Credit: IPS

“We’re hit with a huge financial burden because we cannot afford the money to repair our house. It hurts me to see other people who have lost their loved ones and their houses, and I feel guilty not being able to help,” he told IPS.

He and other survivors have accused the regime of not allowing healthcare workers who quit the state sector in protest against the 2021 coup to treat the injured. Private clinics and hospitals staffed by former state doctors and nurses had been shut down before the quake and are not allowed to reopen.

Prices of food, fuel and other essentials are rising, and people fear crime and looting. “With all these challenges, the military is also conscripting people against their will,” Ko Soe said.

In many areas the relief effort is driven by local individuals and charities, helped by donations and also money sent by the parallel National Unity Government (NUG), which was set up by lawmakers ousted in the coup and partly operates from outside Myanmar.

Destroyed bridges, roads, power supplies and telecommunications have already hampered relief efforts and the junta is exercising what controls it can.

Deputy military chief Soe Win declared on April 5 that aid organisations were not allowed to operate independently and required the regime’s authorisation. Many have been forced to abandon their missions. Unknown numbers of volunteers have been arrested, and some conscripted.

By April 6, with no hope of digging out more survivors, foreign search and rescue teams were leaving, including those from Singapore, Malaysia and India. Some donated equipment to the Myanmar fire service. Red Cross societies in various countries, including the UK, are mostly working through the Myanmar Red Cross, which is effectively a wing of the junta.

The regime’s State Administration Council, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has prioritised relief and aid efforts in Nay Pyi Taw, the military stronghold and showcase city declared the capital in 2005, and Mandalay, the country’s second largest city, as well as Buddhist temples and monasteries.

Soldiers clear rubble from Mahamuni Buddha Temple, a symbol of Mandalay. Credit: IPS

“I lost my aunt and four-year-old niece when their house collapsed. Only one wall is left standing. Our town has many ancient buildings and many collapsed in the quake,” said Thin Thin from Yamethin town in Mandalay Region.

“The government [junta] is not offering us any help. Only people around the neighbourhood are assisting in clearing the debris. Everything we need to rebuild the house is now so expensive. What we need is cash assistance,” she told IPS.

David Gum Awng, deputy minister of international cooperation for the NUG, which is trying to coordinate relief efforts where possible, said the regime was restricting access to areas beyond the junta’s control, particularly in Sagaing Region, the epicentre of the 7.7 magnitude quake and where conflict has been acute for several years. Regime air strikes have continued there.

He told IPS that the NUG was collaborating with UN agencies and international relief groups to help expand their reach by providing safety, clearing routes and sharing information.

“The prospects for peace are in limbo as the junta hasn’t exhibited any sign or willingness for a lasting and positive peace,” he said.

“SAC [junta] troops are still engaged in active combat and offensives and drone attacks, making the relief efforts even more difficult,” he said. “If the junta is serious about sustainable peace, they can easily release all the political prisoners first and cease all their offensives. That would be a very good start, and it hasn’t happened yet.”

The NUG said that from March 28, when the quake struck, to April 8, the junta had carried out 92 air strikes and artillery attacks, killing 72 civilians, including 30 women and six children. Sagaing and Mandalay regions were most targeted.

The junta declared a conditional three-week ceasefire under international pressure on April 2, which it immediately broke, and has accused various ethnic armed groups and People’s Defence Forces of breaking their own ceasefire declarations. In remote western Chin State, an alliance of ethnic armed forces this week captured the military stronghold of Falam after a five-month siege, while there are reports the junta might wrest back control of Lashio, a key town in Shan State.

With the military stretched on multiple fronts and weakened by defections and casualties, the army has had little scope or appetite for quake relief.

“The far better-resourced army has, for the most part, only deployed small bands of soldiers to protect high-profile buildings, escort visiting generals and clear up debris at major Buddhist sites. Mandalay locals say the soldiers have failed to prevent looting in the city,” Frontier Myanmar, an independent media outlet, reported.

In the midst of war and post-quake chaos, the regime – which holds the main cities but only about one third of the territory – reiterated its intention to hold elections in four weeks spanning late 2025 and early 2026. A deadline of May 9 was set for the formation of new political parties. Many parties, including the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the 2020 elections annulled by the military, have been outlawed already and are sure to boycott the polls. NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains in prison in the capital.

Min Aung Hlaing, who has been able to make just a few foreign trips since he seized power, took time to attend a regional summit hosted by Thailand in Bangkok on April 4.

On the sidelines, the 68-year-old general met Muhammad Yunus, head of Bangladesh’s transitional government who has pressed Myanmar to start repatriating some of the 1.3 million Rohingya Muslim refugees, most forced into Bangladesh in a wave of ethnic cleansing in 2017.

That same day, the Bangladesh government’s press office said Myanmar had confirmed that 180,000 Rohingya refugees were eligible to return.

The repatriation process has been stalled for years. Many refugees refuse to return as long as they are denied citizenship and other rights. In the meantime, the Myanmar regime has lost control over much of the border state of Rakhine to the mainly Buddhist nationalist Arakan Army, throwing into doubt the viability of any large-scale repatriation operation.

“While the people of Myanmar mourn the dead, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is enjoying a bit of diplomatic sunshine,” commented Frontier Myanmar in an editorial, noting his first trip to a Southeast Asian country since early 2021 and his handshakes in Bangkok with Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and India’s Narendra Modi.

Junta-controlled media have highlighted the 20 or so countries sending aid to Myanmar, particularly how Min Aung Hlaing met Elliott Tenpenny, a US doctor running a field hospital in Zabuthiri Township near the capital for the International Disaster Response Unit of Samaritan’s Purse, a US evangelical Christian charity.

Min Aung Hlaing was quoted as thanking the US government and the American people for their help. No mention was made of US sanctions on his regime.

The Trump administration said it had allocated an initial $3m only for Myanmar quake relief. Reuters news agency reported that a three-person USAID team was notified while on the ground that they had been sacked under the administration’s dismantling of its official aid network.

The European Union has responded with 13 million euros of aid and called on “all parties” to grant unimpeded access. It said it had 12 European experts and two EU Liaison Officers on the ground to coordinate with “humanitarian partners”.

OCHA, the UN coordinating agency, estimates the quake added 2.0 million people to the 4.3 million in that central area already in need of humanitarian assistance. The agency estimated funding requirements of $375 million.

The NUG says it has supplied cash assistance of 1.6 billion kyat (about US$760,000 at the open market rate) to five quake-hit areas: Sagaing, Mandalay and Bago regions, southern Shan state and Nay Pyi Taw.

Even before the quake, the UN estimated that a total of nearly 20 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance and that 3.5 million were internally displaced by conflict.

International Crisis Group analyst Richard Horsey estimated that reconstruction costs will run into “tens of billions of dollars” – sums that impoverished and war-torn Myanmar can only dream of.

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A health worker in Gaza continues with an inoculation campaign. The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition has called for international action to end violence against or obstruction of health care in conflicts. Credit: UNWRA/Twitter

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 22 2024 (IPS)

Governments and international agencies must do more to end impunity for violence against healthcare, campaigners have urged, as a new report shows that attacks on healthcare during conflicts reached a new high last year.

The report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC), an umbrella organisation of health and human rights groups, documented 2,562 incidents of violence against or obstruction of health care in conflicts across 30 countries—over 500 more than in 2022.

The group pointed out that the 25 percent rise on the previous year came as tens of millions of people in conflict-affected countries were already suffering from war, massive displacement, and staggering deprivation of food and other basic needs.

But beyond the inevitable suffering such violence against healthcare causes, the report’s authors highlighted that one consistent feature of the attacks was the continued impunity for those perpetrating them.

They say that despite repeated commitments, governments have failed to reform their military practices, cease arms transfers to perpetrators, and bring those responsible for crimes to justice.

And they have now called on national leaders and heads of international bodies, including UN agencies, to take strong action to ensure violence against healthcare is ended.

“There has to be a change in how we ensure accountability for violations of international humanitarian law when the protection of health care and health workers is not respected because current mechanisms do not provide adequate protection. We need to ask some hard questions,” Christina Wille, Director of the Insecurity Insight humanitarian association, who helped produce the report, told IPS.

Attacks on healthcare have become a prominent feature of recent conflicts—the SHCC report states that the rise in attacks in 2023 was in part a product of intense and persistent violence against health care in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine.

And human rights groups have increasingly drawn attention to the deliberate targeting of healthcare facilities and medical staff by attacking forces.

Hospitals and other medical facilities are designated as protected civilian objects under international humanitarian law and it is illegal to attack them or obstruct their provision of care. Ambulances also have the same status. This designation does not apply if the hospital or facility is used by combatants for purposes deemed harmful to an enemy, but even then, an attacking force must give warning of its attack and allow for an evacuation.

But in many conflicts, forces seem to be increasingly ignoring this.

The SHCC report highlights that right from the start of two new wars in 2023, in Sudan and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, warring parties killed health workers, attacked facilities, and destroyed health care systems. Meanwhile, attacks on health care in Myanmar and Ukraine continued unabated, in each case exceeding 1,000 since the start of the conflicts in 2021 and 2022, respectively, while in many other chronic conflicts, fighting forces continued to kidnap and kill health workers and loot health facilities.

At the same time, the report identified a disturbing new trend of combatants violently entering hospitals or occupying them as sites from which to conduct military operations, leading to injuries to and the deaths of patients and staff.

SHCC Chair Len Rubenstein said that in many conflicts, the conduct of combatants revealed “open contempt for their duty to protect civilians and health care under international humanitarian law (IHL)” and specifically highlighted how Israel, “while purporting to abide by IHL, promoted a view of its obligations that, if accepted, would undermine the fundamental protections that IHL puts in place for civilians and health care in war.”

“The report highlighted a lot of disturbing trends—there seemed to be no restraint on attacking hospitals right from the start of conflicts, we also saw for instance, a rise in hospitals being taken for military use, and it was also very disturbing to see children’s medical facilities being deliberately targeted,” he told IPS.

“These trends highlight the need for leadership [on increasing accountability]. Accountability for attacks on healthcare is not a silver bullet—accountability for murder does not stop all murders, for instance – but no consequences are a guarantee of further violations,” he added.

Christian de Vos, Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which is a member of the SHCC, suggested a lack of accountability for attacks on healthcare in previous conflicts had emboldened certain forces to do the same in new wars.

“This goes back to the historical evolution of attacks on healthcare and the consequences of impunity. The patterns of attacks on healthcare that Russian forces, together with the Syrian government, perpetrated in the Syria conflict have a lot of links to how Russia has fought its full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” he told IPS.

In its report, the SHCC has made a number of recommendations to help end attacks on healthcare and hold those behind them accountable.

These include UN and national authorities and the International Criminal Court (ICC) taking new measures to end impunity, strengthening prevention of conflicts, improving data collection on attacks at global and national levels, bolstering global, regional, and domestic leadership—especially through the WHO and UN—on protecting healthcare, and supporting and safeguarding health workers.

Some of these plans would also see a key role played by local actors, including NGOs and other groups active in healthcare and human rights.

SHCC admits, though, that some of these are likely to be hard to implement.

“Our recommendations are aspirational and we accept that their implementation could be difficult in the context of the inherent difficulties of conflicts, but there are some areas where we think definite change could be achieved,” said Wille.

She explained that developing capacity for local health programmes to be more security and acceptance conscious could be strengthened.

“There is a need for training for the healthcare sector on how to understand, approach, and manage security and risk in conflict. Such support should be given to those responsible for overseeing plans for healthcare provision in conflicts so that services continue to be provided but with as much safety as possible,” she said.

She added that governments could also make a real difference by pushing to ensure ‘deconfliction’—the process by which a health agency announces to all parties who they are, where they work and what they are doing, and how it can be recognized and which in return receive assurances that they will not be targeted is adhered to by all sides in a conflict.

“Such mechanisms exist, however, at the moment, far too often they are not respected or applied in several conflicts. Governments can insist on the implementation of de-confliction, and this would also be a great help,” she said.

However, if significant change is to be made in ensuring accountability for attacks on healthcare, experts agree that it can only be done with strong political commitment on the issue.

“We have seen over the years that there hasn’t been this commitment and what we need is a strong commitment that will go beyond just words and statements condemning these attacks to real concrete action,” Rubenstein said.

He stressed that the massive, targeted destruction of healthcare seen in some recent conflicts had changed the wider political perception of the effects of such attacks.

“What has changed is the knowledge of the magnitude of these attacks and the enormous suffering they bring, not just directly at the time of the attacks but long after as well. This knowledge can stimulate the kind of leadership we need on this,” he said.

De Vos said that especially the Israel-Hamas war and the prominence of attacks on healthcare in that conflict had “shown clearly the devastation and suffering such attacks cause.”

“This might bring about the change [in will to ensure accountability] that we would like to see,” he said.

But while there may be optimism among experts around the chance for such change, they are less positive about the prospects for any reduction in the volume of attacks on healthcare in the immediate future.

“Unfortunately, the trajectory is not a positive one—there’s no ceasefire in Gaza, the war continues in Ukraine, and conflict is ongoing in the places where we have seen the most of these attacks on healthcare. It’s a pretty grim state,” said De Vos.

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A Myanmar girl, displaced by war, sells cigarettes through the razor-wired border with Thailand near the frontier town of Mae Sot. Thailand is bracing for another influx of refugees. Credit: William Webb/lPS

By William Webb
MAE SOT, Thailand, Mar 13 2024 (IPS)

The Maung family is rebuilding their lives in a foreign land. A freshly painted signboard with a play on the word Revolution declares their small restaurant is open for business, and breakfast features traditional Myanmar mohinga—rice noodles and fish soup.

Three years ago, the family of four was prospering in the central Myanmar city of Mandalay but suddenly everything changed. The military seized back power from the newly elected government, and thousands of people took to the streets in protest, including the Maungs. A brutal crackdown ensued across Myanmar, the father was arrested and their two restaurants seized.

Since the 2021 coup, the UN estimates some 2.4 million more people have been displaced by conflict across Myanmar, while 78,000 civilian properties, including homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship, have been burnt or destroyed by the military.

The Maung family was wise to leave Myanmar when they could, and fortunate to survive the hazardous journey eastwards towards the border with Thailand. After spending a year in a border camp for IDPs run by the military wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) in eastern Kayin State, the family managed to cross into the Thai frontier town of Mae Sot to start afresh, even if they exist in a grey zone of legality alongside tens of thousands of others.

More waves of refugees are following in their footsteps.

“We have 750,000 IDPs in our territory,” said a senior official of the KNU, which has been waging the world’s longest civil war against successive Myanmar regimes since 1949. “A year ago, there were 500,000 to 600,000. Numbers are rising because the military is deliberately targeting civilians,” he told IPS in Mae Sot, asking not to be named.

Myanmar refugees in Thailand pick out clothes piled in the street that have been donated in the border town of Mae Sot. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Against this background and wanting to preempt an influx, Thailand’s new coalition government announced its intention last month to open up a ‘humanitarian corridor’ into Myanmar to funnel aid to IDPs and keep them well away from the border.

Thailand’s military—the real arbiter of power in these border regions and holding sway over two parties in the coalition—is haunted by the spectre of past and present examples of chaos through conflict. In the 1980s, Thailand reluctantly hosted several hundred thousand Cambodian refugees, including remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, on its eastern borders. Today it looks west and sees Bangladesh struggling to contain in camps some one million Rohingya refugees forced out of Myanmar in what the UN special rapporteur on human rights called a genocidal campaign by the Myanmar military.

But beyond the ‘humanitarian’ aspect, what has caused anger within the various groups fighting the Myanmar military as well as rights activists, is Thailand’s own admission that its humanitarian corridor proposal is aimed at drawing the regime’s State Administration Council (SAC) into a dialogue that would lead to a negotiated settlement with Myanmar’s diverse resistance forces.

Neither the KNU nor the parallel National Unity Government set up by ousted Myanmar lawmakers after the coup were consulted by Thailand, which received a green light from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Under Thailand’s initiative, aid would be delivered initially to 20,000 IDPs by the Thai Red Cross and the Myanmar Red Cross (whose senior administrators are former military officers) and monitored by ASEAN’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management, where the Myanmar junta also has a presence.

“Aid is used everywhere in the world as a political entry point,” the KNU official commented. “This is not a pure humanitarian issue. They want to bring the SAC out of isolation. This is very problematic for us.”

A senior NUG official, also based in Thailand, was similarly concerned by the political intentions behind the proposal.  “It’s a desperate measure by ASEAN seeking a semblance of negotiated peace and dialogue,” he told IPS.

The official doubted it would get off the ground in its present form without the support of the Karen forces that control large areas of Kayin State, nor without the full backing of the US.

The US values its long-held strategic ties with Thailand and its military, and Thai Foreign Minister Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara returned from Washington last month, declaring that he had secured complete US support for the initiative, although the US public statement appeared more cautious.

Human rights activists and humanitarian workers on the Thai-Myanmar border remain highly sceptical of the initiative, denouncing it as a “weaponization of aid”.

Thailand, they note, has never officially recognized the refugee status of nearly 100,000 people living in nine UNHCR camps along the Thai-Myanmar border since the 1990s.

“This is not about providing humanitarian aid to the people of Myanmar. It is about giving a new lifeline to the junta to re-engage with ASEAN and everybody else,” commented Paul Greening, a former UN senior staff officer and now independent consultant in Mae Sot.

“Neighbours and other international actors, including the US and China, do not want the junta to fall. They do not want the junta to win but they do not want it to fall either. This is why they all want a ‘negotiated settlement’,” he said.

Igor Blazevic, a senior adviser at the Prague Civil Society Centre who previously worked in Myanmar, said a “carrot” was being held out to the Myanmar regime at a time when it was “seriously weakened and shaken” after losing large areas of territory to resistance forces both in Rakhine State in the west and in Shan State close to China.

“A political aim behind the ‘humanitarian initiative’ is the intention to treat genocidal power-usurpers in uniform as the inevitable and unavoidable key factor in Myanmar’s ‘stability’ and with combination of soft pressure and humanitarian incentives, try to force everybody else to surrender, in a soft way, to ongoing military dominance in politics and the economy,” Blazevic wrote in a commentary.

With the UN warning that nearly two million people in Myanmar are expected to fall into the “highest category of needs severity (catastrophic)” this year, the resistance is aware that they will come under intense international pressure not to reject the Thai initiative.

Recent developments indicate Thailand may rethink its proposal, however. It has opened channels with the KNU and the NUG to discuss their involvement in facilitating aid deliveries through Myanmar civil society organisations independent of the regime. Word has it that the Myanmar Red Cross is not that keen to be directly involved, knowing it is too close to the regime to be able to safely deliver aid to those who have suffered atrocities at its hands.

For the Maung family and their small eatery in Mae Sot, a dream would be to return to Mandalay and Myanmar in peace. But they have little hope of such an outcome, nor do they really want to remain in Thailand, along with over two million other Myanmar workers, classified as migrants, not refugees.

For the moment, life revolves around navigating Thailand’s complex and often corrupt system to secure papers that would give them a degree of legitimacy and enable them to move beyond Mae Sot and surrounding Tak Province. A possible lifeline is an ethnic Chinese branch of their family with members in Taiwan.

“Taiwan could be our future,” says the elder of two daughters, who still dreams of going to university. “I can learn Chinese,” she says, in excellent English.

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A selection of mostly simple food items put together in Myanmar in parcels for political prisoners, using funds raised by activists and the Burmese diaspora. Credit: Supplied to William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
CHIANGMAI, Thailand, Feb 26 2024 (IPS)

Rangoon Nights is rocking. The bar is on its feet and the cocktail shaker is shaking in abandon as the band Born In Burma starts pumping out its beat.

Except we’re not in Rangoon or Burma (officially called Myanmar), but in the northern Thai town of Chiangmai which has evolved into a hub for activists, fugitives, and those taking a break from the war tearing their country apart.

Dancing among them with a wraith-like grace is Sakura—her nom de guerre—who, like others in the bar popular with Myanmar exiles, is there both to let her hair down and to raise funds for the revolutionary movement fighting the military junta that seized power three years ago.

Sakura’s personal operation—run by a small, close-knit team—is to deliver food parcels to a few dozen political prisoners held by the regime in appalling conditions across Myanmar. More than 1,500 are documented to have died in detention by force or by neglect since the coup. Over 20,000 are known to be behind bars.

“The parcels are a message for them—that we still support you and don’t forget you,” says Sakura.

Her project evolved by accident. Sakura was in Yangon in early 2021, joining vast crowds of anti-coup protesters, when her cousin was arrested and disappeared into the prison system. Suspecting she was held in Yangon’s notorious Insein jail (built by British colonisers in the 1800s), lawyers told Sakura that if she delivered a food parcel with her cousin’s name and it was accepted at the prison, then it would signal she was indeed inside.

It worked. Sakura shared this piece of useful information on Facebook, the social media outlet favoured by the resistance, while the junta uses Telegram. Soon, she started receiving pleas for help from families of other prisoners.

Sakura’s food parcel project was born. It moved with her to Thailand in 2022 after she fled police raids on her Yangon home. “I can’t go back,” she says.

Her small but effective operation speaks volumes about the war in Myanmar—largely forgotten beyond its borders; ineffectual international institutions and humanitarian organisations; little outside aid. But juxtaposed with domestic and vibrant civil society organisations like Sakura’s that strive to make a difference, work efficiently, and give a chance for a better future.

Sakura’s parcels—assembled inside Myanmar—contain soup powder to flavour bland prison mush, instant noodles, cookies, ingredients for much-loved tea-leaf salad, anti-bacterial soap for skin diseases, soap powder for clothes, shampoo, and toothbrush and paste. Plus the all-important Premier brand of coffee mix, which acts as a form of currency among prisoners.

The team presently delivers to about 35 prisoners a month, a tiny fraction of the growing numbers that the junta is incarcerating in a prison construction boom, one of the few sectors of the economy benefiting from the civil war.

Faces of the dead. Myanmar’s non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners has a museum in the Thai border town of Mae Sot documenting the identities of over 3,000 civilians killed by the military since it seized power in 2021, as well as those killed since the first post-independence coup in 1962.

Working with a total monthly budget of some 3.0 million kyat (about USD 850 at the street rate), Sakura also sends money to sustain poor families whose main breadwinners are now behind bars. One is the mother of a Yangon hotel receptionist in her 20s who was sentenced to 15 years.

“Her crime was to have donated about USD 10 to the resistance. Police seized her phone and found the payment on the app. Her mother is ill and cannot work,” explains Sakura, who learned English in a Buddhist monastery and comes from a family of farmers.

Delivering the parcels is not a typical Deliveroo operation. Funds are sent from Thailand by various means to her small team in Myanmar, who, at the risk of arrest for ‘supporting terrorism’, buy the items and pack the parcels. They are then discreetly passed to lawyers representing the prisoners, who pass them on to family members who take them on their prison visits.

Sanitary products are included for some female detainees. “Sometimes we also get special requests for clothes and underwear. My budget doesn’t always stretch,“ she says.

On the other side of Chiangmai, Sonny Swe, a well-known Myanmar entrepreneur and publisher formerly based in Yangon, reflects on the trauma of over eight years of solitary confinement in prison, from 2004 to 2013, and the importance then of family visits bringing food parcels.

“Meditation, exercise, reading” were the bedrock of his survival, he says over a hearty Burmese breakfast of mohinga fish soup in his café, Gatone’s (Baldy’s). He was held in five different prisons and the long distances from home prevented regular family visits.

“I kept telling myself, ‘I am strong, strong. I will survive. They will not break me. I will defeat them.’ But once you come out of prison, you understand the toll, the trauma. You think you are fine and strong but you are not.”

Bo Kyi, Joint Secretary of the non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), was a political prisoner for seven years and knows well the succour provided by family and friends to those incarcerated.

“Family support is very important for a political prisoner,” he says. Now 59, he was jailed from 1990–93 for demonstrating and calling for release of all political prisoners, and arrested again in 1994 for four more years. He says military intelligence tried to recruit him as an informer but he refused and, in turn, demanded freedom for all political prisoners and for the regime to enter into dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi who was then under house arrest. Leader of the elected government overthrown in the coup, she is back in prison.

Bo Kyi co-founded AAPP in the Thai border town of Mae Sot in March 2000. The organisation meticulously documents identities of political prisoners and tracks their fate, as well as civilians killed by the regime. AAPP, deemed an illegal organisation by the regime, also offers training in dealing with trauma and counselling services, assisted by Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.

As of late February, AAPP has documented the names and identities of 20,147 people it defines as political prisoners, including over 4,000 women and 300 children. Sentenced to death, so far, are 15 women and 136 men. Four were executed on July 23, 2022, including well known activist Ko Jimmy.

As of January 31 this year, it had documented 1,588 people who were “killed through force or neglect” during detention by the regime and its supporters since the coup. The actual number may be much higher. “Torture is endemic,” AAPP says. A large number of those killed in detention are in Sagaing Region, “where resistance by the people is fiercest,”  says AAPP.

They are not just statistics. Speaking of the bravery of those inside Myanmar who try to alleviate the plight of prisoners, Sakura shares the latest shocking news.

Noble Aye, a prominent human rights activist, was reportedly killed in detention along with a companion, apparently after a court hearing on February 8 in Bago Region. They had been detained at a checkpoint in Waw Township on January 20, allegedly carrying weapons and ammunition, charges that the resistance say were false.

She had been jailed twice before as a political prisoner and shared a cell with Zin Mar Aung, the current foreign affairs minister in the shadow National Unity Government set up after the coup.

As it does regularly, the regime was reported to have blamed her death in detention on an escape attempt. The family says they received information that her body was secretly cremated. Noble Aye was 49 and in bad health.

William Webb is an independent travel writer

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A Buddhist pagoda towers above a teeming thoroughfare in Mae Sot, a Thai town dense with tens of thousands of people fleeing conflict in nearby Myanmar. Credit: William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
MAE SOT, Thailand, Feb 15 2024 (IPS)

The news travelled like wildfire. In the teashops, bars, and market stalls that make Thailand’s border town of Mae Sot feel far more Burmese than Thai, the feared rumours circulating at the weekend were suddenly confirmed.

Military conscription would be imposed on young men and women for two to five years, regime-controlled broadcasters in Myanmar announced on the Saturday night airwaves. Details were sparse.

Panic scrolling through social media suddenly replaced conversation in one popular Mae Sot hangout run by a Burmese activist-entrepreneur for his clientele of exiles, fugitives, and migrants. Pool players stopped mid-break. “What the ***!” exclaimed the member of a rock band. 

Myanmar’s junta has been at war with much of the country since staging a coup three years ago, but still, it has come as a serious shock that for the first time in modern history, the military will impose on young people the choice of two uniforms—army or prison.

Analysts—Burmese and foreign—interpreted the developments in various ways. For some, it was a clear sign that the military was losing this patchwork civil war and could not sustain itself. For decades, it had thrived on recruiting youngsters from poor areas of the Bamar-majority heartlands of Sagaing and Magwe. But now those same arid regions are hotbeds of resistance against the regime, its forces stretched across the length and breadth of almost the entire country, depending mostly on air power to bomb civilian areas into submission.

A Burmese woman wearing thanaka to protect her face from the sun walks through a market in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. The stall is selling the wood bark that is ground into the cosmetic paste so popular in Myanmar. Credit: William Webb/IPS

“An act of desperation,” Igor Blazevic said of the junta’s move, which follows sizeable territorial losses and a meltdown of its forces in northern Shan State late last year. Blazevic, a Myanmar expert at the Prague Civil Society Centre, predicted on Facebook that the measure would backfire because the regime was too “weakened and broken” to be able to administer recruitment on a large scale.

But on Monday night, more news was breaking that indicated the junta had got its ducks in a row—airports were suddenly requiring military authorisation stamped on tickets for even internal domestic flights. According to unconfirmed reports, some junta-controlled border posts were closing or imposing similar restrictions, and young men had been picked up on the streets of the commercial capital Yangon.

“It’s another way of terrorising the population,” was the view of one young Burmese who did not want to be named for obvious reasons.

In the Myanmar capital, Nay Pyi Taw, junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun simply said conscription was essential because of the “situation”.

“The duty to safeguard and defend the nation extends beyond just the soldiers but to all citizens. So I want to tell everyone to proudly follow this people’s military service law,” he intoned.

No way, retorted May, a young refugee whose dream of becoming a doctor was shattered by the 2021 coup and the arrest of her father.

She said compulsory military service would simply drive more young people to join the People’s Defence Forces of the resistance— despite the heavy losses they are incurring and the military’s barbaric treatment of prisoners subjected to torture, summary executions, and, most recently, strung up and torched.

May slipped across the nearby border into Mae Sot with her family after spending two years as a refugee in a camp run by a section of the Karen National Liberation Army fighting what is known as the world’s longest-running civil war dating back to 1949.

“I cannot go back to Myanmar,” she said. At 19 years old, she fits the age range of 18 to 27 for single women to be conscripted. For men, it is 18 to 35 years, rising to 45 for specialists like doctors and IT workers who quit their state sector posts in droves after the coup, joining the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of non-violent resistance.

On Sunday night in Mae Sot, large crowds of this latest wave of the Myanmar diaspora gathered for an outdoor CDM fund-raising concert, featuring dancing and music performed by several of the country’s ethnic minorities, including Karen and Chin. The concert was sponsored by an online bank set up by the resistance. Stalls sold knick-knacks and garments, and beer and hot food were swiftly ferried about by teams of neatly dressed waiters.

May and her entrepreneurial family had their properties and businesses seized and sealed by the military near Mandalay and are now rebuilding their lives, running a small restaurant among the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Burmese living in and around Mae Sot, setting up businesses, social services, and accommodation safe from predatory Thai officials and regime spies.

May remains determined to study medicine somewhere somehow, representative of a young, capable, and innovative generation of Burmese plugged into a digital world while moving in and out of the shadows of war.

Bo Kyi, a veteran activist and former prisoner who co-founded the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners in Mae Sot 24 years ago, saw the military’s conscription order as a “huge challenge” for young people, especially those who had tried to keep out of politics and war. It would become very hard to leave the country legally now, he said.

“Millions will suffer and Burma will lose its human resources,” he said.

William Webb is a travel writer who started out in Asia nearly 50 years ago

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Myanmar’s resistance called a ‘silent strike’ on February 1, the third anniversary of the military coup. This main street leading to Sule Pagoda in central Yangon was relatively quiet, but residents said fewer people heeded the strike call this year. Credit: William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
YANGON, Myanmar, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

Landing in Rangoon nearly 100 years ago, a young Chilean poet described “a city of blood, dreams, and gold” with “leprous streets”. The flourishing capital of then British-ruled Burma and its major port were a must-see staging post on an Asian tour.

Pablo Neruda’s poem from 1927 rings true today. The city, now called Yangon, with well over five million inhabitants, is bursting with life—part hedonistic and part dystopian—and both fuelled and choked by the grip of the junta that seized power three years ago.

Empty rail tracks in central Yangon. Fewer trains are running in Myanmar because rail workers quit in protest at the 2021 coup, and resistance fighters are targeting lines and trains used by the military up and down the country. Credit: William Webb/IPS

The military regime organised a rally in central Yangon on February 1 to counter the resistance’s strike call. People were transported there under heavy security and given flags and a free lunch. Credit: William Webb/IPS

The reality is that Myanmar no longer exists as a coherent country, except on maps. Three years of extremely brutal conflict between a complex patchwork of pro- and anti-military forces has left Yangon—still a vital commercial hub—a relatively calm yet deeply troubled bubble amidst a stop-start process of nationwide fragmentation.

The military that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s twice-elected government in February 2021 is losing control over large chunks of Myanmar. Armed mainly by China and Russia, the junta uses aerial supremacy and artillery to terrorise a population that, for the first time in modern history, has seen the Bamar majority turn overwhelmingly against the generals in Myanmar’s heartland.

But the war is not quite knocking at Yangon’s door yet, and the military has been emboldened to issue tourist and business visas to foreigners, no doubt welcoming their US dollars.

Yangon’s other “reality” is that despite being ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries, it is actually awash in money—the blood and gold described by Neruda. Billions of dollars flow from the expanding production and trade of narcotics, particularly methamphetamines, ketamine, and opium/heroin, and from vast casinos, brothels, and scam centres along the border with China and Thailand, populated by victims of trafficking.

Street markets in Yangon are brimming with food, but people complain vociferously about soaring prices and low wages. Despite the conflict, food is in plentiful supply in Myanmar’s biggest city. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was overthrown after a second landslide election victory, is jailed in the capital, Nay Pyi Taw. She remains popular, and her image can be occasionally spotted in the street, here with other icons. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Chinatown in Yangon is packed with people preparing Chinese New Year celebrations on February 10. Tense relations between China and the Myanmar junta have made the community nervous. Credit: William Webb/IPS

A woman with two toddlers and a baby on her lap begs outside a temple in Yangon. People say more children can be seen begging these days as the economy struggles and migrants move into the city from conflict areas. Credit: William Webb/IP

The junta does not directly control all these operations, but it takes a large slice, as do allied militias, criminal gangs, and some ethnic armed groups.

A gleaming white Bentley is parked outside one newly opened nightspot frequented by the offspring of the Yangon elite—the “cronies” whose businesses prosper in spite of, or often because of, sanctions imposed by the West. Inside the plush bar, youngsters in smart and sometimes scanty attire order expensive western drinks and truffle-flavoured fries.

“Madness prevails,” says a charity worker who describes walking through a compound and seeing a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and “even a Bugatti” parked there. Such ostentatious wealth abounds, but he cannot find a nurse to employ.

Elsewhere, the boom-boom of Burmese techno-rock and the strobe lights of the Levitate nightclub exclude conversation among the heaving dancing mass. There is “the choice of ecstasy, ketamine, or cocaine” instead, as one regular put it.

“FUCK THEM WE SLAY,” a neon sign proclaims ambiguously.

A neon sign illuminates the Levitate nightclub in Yangon, where revellers dance through curfew hours, fuelled by booze and cheap drugs. Credit: William Webb/IPS

A book seller said motivational books were popular these days. This classic by Carnegie was translated into Burmese by U Nu, a former prime minister who was ousted by the military in 1962. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Further down the social scale, Yangon’s familiar open-air “beer stations” are thriving too. Supporters of the resistance take a stand by boycotting the once popular Myanmar Beer brand owned by a military conglomerate, but more expensive alternatives exist.

And then there are the growing numbers of beggars, especially children who dodge traffic to thrust their hands through open car windows or huddle with their mothers in the shade of overpasses.

Rush hour traffic is still chokingly intense and was even quite busy on February 1, the third anniversary of the coup, when the resistance called a ‘silent strike’, urging people to stay off the streets in peaceful protest. Adherence in Yangon was patchy and less than last year.

“People are tired and want to get on with their lives,” comments one long-time observer.

And this is the nub of it. Life goes on, but it does not mean the Burmese are less opposed to the junta, as before when troops crushed street protests in 2021 with mass arrests and live bullets. Aung San Suu Kyi, stuck in prison and turning 80 next year, remains popular.

However, people do seem to be losing faith in the opposition’s declarations of the military’s imminent collapse, even if, as one businessman opined, “There’s a strong sense that things are falling apart now, that the military is overstretched.”

Some Yangon residents are also tired of feeling guilty that they are living relatively well while young resistance fighters in far-flung rural parts are dying in combat and conflict-zone civilians are being bombed in villages, schools, and temples.

A woman selling umbrellas made of waterproofed cotton. She said times are difficult. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Many are leaving the country—legally with passports, risking dangerous routes through the jungle to Thailand, or clandestinely by sea for the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority. Studying Japanese is suddenly popular in Yangon.

The city by day seems normal enough, with little visible military presence in most places, but by night it changes. Plainclothes police demand ID papers and go through mobile phones. Suspicious bank payments, perhaps to the opposition, mean arrest or demands for a bribe.

Ye, whose business collapsed in the post-coup pandemic lockdown, has sent his children back to a public school after taking them out of classes, as many did. They won’t see their mother for a long time. She has gone abroad to earn money as a care worker.

Like everyone you meet, the family frets about the soaring cost of living, especially food.

Daily power cuts, sometimes scheduled but often not, make life almost unbearable in the intense pre-monsoon heat. People are drawn to the air-conditioned cool of shopping malls, powered by giant diesel generators.

Still, Yangon’s vibrancy is irrepressible. Artists are again holding exhibitions (staying clear of controversial themes). Chinatown is a hive of shoppers ahead of the Lunar New Year, ushering in the Dragon, a symbol of good luck and prosperity, but also of power.

• William Webb is a travel writer whose love affair with Asia began 50 years ago

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Faces of the dead. Myanmar's non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners has a museum in the Thai border town of Mae Sot documenting the identities of over 3,000 civilians killed by the military since it seized power in 2021, as well as those killed since the first post-independence coup in 1962.

By Guy Dinmore
KAYIN STATE, Myanmar, Apr 17 2023 (IPS)

Food is passed around a campfire, and a guitar strums as cool night air tumbles down mountain cliffs, relieving the jungle of its heat.

A dozen or so young Myanmar activists – some having just travelled long distances evading military checkpoints, others already living in exile – have come together in a jungle camp for a training course with a difference. Instead of armed combat, their chosen role is enabling the overthrow of the military junta through non-violent means.

Conversations are animated, with talk of federal democracy and creating a country that would also give political space and freedom to ethnic minorities. They are joined by soldiers of the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) protecting the camp deep in southeastern Kayin State.

The peaceful setting of the camp belies the horrors of the civil war beyond the mountains that is breaking Myanmar apart. The generals who overthrew a democratically elected government and seized power in 2021 are increasingly responding to a national uprising by waging terror on civilians it calls “terrorists” in an attempt to break their support for armed insurgents.

The aftermath of Myanmar military air strikes on a crowd gathered in Pa Zi Gyi village in Sagaing Region on April 11, in which the anti-junta resistance says over 150 people were killed, including children, performing dances. Credit: Local People’s Defence Force

On April 11, the military carried out what is believed to be the deadliest attack of the civil war so far, using air strikes and a helicopter gunship on a village ceremony organised by the parallel and underground National Unity Government (NUG) in Sagaing Region.

At least 165 people, including 27 women and 19 children, some performing dances, were killed, according to the NUG. The regime says it was attacking the NUG’s People’s Defence Forces.

Over the past two years, artillery and bombing raids using aircraft supplied by China and Russia have targeted schools, IDP camps, hospitals, mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches across the country. Tens of thousands of houses have been torched, and more than 1.3 million people displaced since the 2021 coup, according to UN estimates.

The barbarity defies belief. In February, a unit of some 150 soldiers known as the Ogre Column were dropped by helicopter in Sagaing and went on a marauding killing spree that lasted weeks. Scores of villagers were killed. Women were raped and shot. Men and boys were beheaded, disembowelled and dismembered.

Truth about massacres in wars gone by took months or even years to fully emerge, but in this modern era of mobile phones and social media, the grim evidence is transmitted by survivors within a day or so.

Kyaw Soe Win, a veteran activist with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), which carefully documents civilian deaths, arrests and extra-judicial killings, shows IPS a picture he has just received on his phone of a man in Sagaing, disembowelled and his organs taken out.

Why do they do this? “It is to spread fear and terror,” he says.

AAPP, now based in the border town of Mae Sot just inside Thailand, has an exhibition dedicated to victims of successive uprisings against military rule since protests against the first post-independence coup in 1962. Rows of faces and names stare out from the walls, including pictures of some 30 civilians – among them two Save the Children charity workers – who were tortured and burned alive in what is now known as the 2021 Christmas Eve Massacre in Kayah State.

“This chapter is different,” Kyaw Soe Win, a former political prisoner, says of the present conflict. “The situation is getting worse and worse. The numbers of political prisoners and fatalities and houses torched are far higher. The junta is oppressing the people and is even more brutal than before.”

Sky, a resistance fighter and writer, who uses a nom de guerre, explains in a Mae Sot bar how the insurgency is also very different this time.

“After the 1988 student uprising, it took me three years to get an AK-47 and 300 bullets. Now it is much quicker. Now we are getting modified AK-47s through the Wa. They call it a Wa-AK,” he laughs, referring to an autonomous border area run by the heavily armed United Wa State Party. Their one-party narco-state on the border with China stays out of the war but makes money from both sides.

“China systematically eroded history after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, but after the 1988 protests in Myanmar, we still have the whispered stories. This generation knows what is right and wrong,” said Sky.

Despite what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently called its “scorched earth policy”, the regime is steadily losing this war in terms of territory and military casualties.

“The military is in a very, very difficult situation which is only getting worse,” says Matthew Arnold, an independent policy analyst on Myanmar with previous conflict experience in Afghanistan and Sudan. He says the regime’s forces are “atomised” and “bleeding out in a war of attrition”. In some towns, they are pinned down in police stations and barracks and cannot be reinforced or resupplied for months on end.

Because it cannot move freely on the ground over the vast distances to maintain its outposts and impose its authority, the junta is resorting increasingly to air strikes and artillery against civilian populations.

Sagaing and the neighbouring region of Magwe are crucial conflict areas.  Covering an area bigger than England, they are known as the heartland of the Bamar majority and had been, for decades, a fertile recruiting ground for the Bamar-dominated military. But no more.

“There are very few areas of Sagaing where they are not fighting on a regular basis. The junta was hit all over the place in February in Sagaing and Magwe,” says Arnold, who credits resistance forces moving rapidly “from muskets to drones and IEDS” (improvised explosive devices) in inflicting heavy losses.

Vulnerable in more remote areas in Chin State in the west and areas of the southeast, the military’s pullback is expected to accelerate as the monsoons come.

Thantlang in Chin State, near the border with India, was the first large town to fall to the rebels, although the junta’s bombing raids and artillery made sure that little was left standing. With no air defences, the resistance knows well that if it takes full control of more urban areas, then they are inviting disaster upon the civilian population.

Myanmar is, in effect, fragmenting.

The regime has a firm grip on the big cities of Yangon, Mandalay and the capital Naypyitaw – where residents say life is bustling and returning to some kind of ‘normal’ with even the makings of a property boom. But beyond, its real control is tenuous and weakening.

Fighting a war on many fronts, the regime is trying to follow its practised divide-and-rule tactics of cutting deals and ceasefire pacts with various ethnic armed groups, aided to some extent by China’s influence in border areas.

But major ethnic groups in most of the frontier states, such as the KNLA, which has been fighting the world’s longest civil war since 1949, are successfully resisting. A ceasefire with the mostly Buddhist Arakan Army also looks fragile in the western state of Rakhine, where in 2017, the military forced over 700,000 Muslim Rohingya into Bangladesh in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that has brought charges of genocide against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice.

“Sadly, a prolonged fragmentation is a possibility, but we must accept that has been a possibility in Myanmar since before the coup of 1962,” David Gum Awng, deputy minister for international cooperation for the NUG shadow administration, tells IPS.

“It is natural and unsurprising that EAOs (ethnic armed organisations) are consolidating gains, but the question is what these EAOs plan to do with their territory if and when the democratic forces win,” he adds.

The NUG, he says, aims to rid Myanmar of the “abusive and criminal military dictatorship and along with it the military’s obsession with centralised Bamar-Buddhist nationalist rule”, to be replaced by a democratic federal system offering “ethnic minorities genuine self-determination” through negotiations.

This significant shift in policy also extends to recognising and reaching out to the Rohingya, with the NUG promising justice and accountability for crimes committed against them by the military, a path towards citizenship, and peaceful repatriation for refugees.

Although the NUG is built around remnants of the old guard of the National League for Democracy government ousted in the 2021 coup, its stated intentions have set it apart from the Bamar nationalist leanings of Aung San Suu Kyi, its 77-year-old former leader now held by the junta in solitary confinement.

Strengthening but still, difficult ties between the self-proclaimed NUG and the ethnic armed groups are particularly worrying for China. Myanmar’s giant neighbour sees a threat to its long-term strategy of dominating the ethnic groups along its border while keeping Western powers out of a pliant Myanmar with the goal of developing massive infrastructure projects and a secure gateway to the Indian Ocean.

Even though it enjoyed favourable relations with Aung San Suu Kyi, China is keeping the NUG at a cold arm’s length while propping up the junta with weaponry and diplomatic protection at the UN. India’s tacit backing for the regime has facilitated its own strategic investments.

Much of the rest of Asia, including democracies like Japan and South Korea, are also working to protect their own interests in Myanmar while hoping that engagement with the regime will lead to a negotiated settlement of the war. UN agencies and the INGO aid industry also maintain a presence, mostly ineffectual, in junta-controlled Yangon.

This perceived complicity angers the Burmese diaspora, which is busily raising money for aid and weapons for the resistance. Notions of a negotiated settlement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, are far from the minds of those waging their “forgotten war”.

“Thai generals are brothers with the Myanmar military. Singapore banks hold their money. The Burmese feel forgotten,” said one US-based doctor, speaking in Bangkok after taking medical aid to the border.

While recognising that the West’s attention and resources are focused on the overriding goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine, the resistance did receive a significant boost last December with the US Burma Act passed by Congress.

The act authorises the Biden administration to extend non-lethal aid to “support the people of Burma in their struggle for democracy, freedom, human rights, and justice.” It explicitly mentions the NUG, although not ethnic armed groups.

Some Washington-based analysts argue that the legislation does not mark a major US policy shift, but diplomats and experts in the region see it as a highly significant step towards endorsing the NUG and the wider resistance movement.

“The US is now saying it wants the resistance to win and has fundamentally shifted the narrative. This is why China is getting worried. Beijing is focused on the discourse of talks and the peace process,” commented one expert in Bangkok who asked not to be named.

“There won’t be lethal assistance. The US doesn’t want to be involved in another war now. But there will be more public and diplomatic support of the resistance and pushing other actors not to engage with the junta,” he added.

David Gum Aung of the NUG is more cautious, calling the Burma Act “a significant piece of legislation” which makes funds available and opens the door to more sanctions against the regime while “recognising” the NUG.

“We can view the Burma Act as a very important document symbolically but less potent practically. Its symbolic value stems largely from the fact that it outlines that the US views the SAC and their caretaker government as illegitimate and does not recognize their authority, their right to represent Myanmar or their justification for the coup.”

“We are still sorely in need of all manner of aid, from humanitarian to strategic… but we cannot fall into the trap of assuming that everything the Act makes possible will eventuate,” he said.

Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a democracy and youth activist who led anti-coup protests in Yangon and is now in exile, stresses that the broad-based and non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement remains the “backbone of the revolution”.

Success, she says, will mean the surrender of the junta, with the people defining what happens to the perpetrators of crimes, whether to be put on trial in domestic courts or through international mechanisms. For her, it also means a social revolution that will tackle “patriarchy, hegemony, racism etc”.

Kyaw Soe Win of the AAPP, whose grisly routine is to scroll through fresh images of the dead, says war criminals must be prosecuted to achieve national reconciliation.

“We need justice for the survivors and victims,” he says. “Without justice, there can be no reconciliation.  There was never any justice before, only impunity through the decades. No action was ever taken.”

AAPP has so far documented over 17,000 political prisoners still in detention and the deaths of over 3,100 civilians since the coup, although it knows the actual toll is much higher.

Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN-authorised Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar which is working with AAPP, says credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer”.

Back in the jungle resistance camp, the young activists gather near caves that act as air raid shelters and talk of a future without military rule that will necessitate total reform of the armed forces. Among the group, one was severely tortured in prison, one shot in the leg during street protests and a mother who had to leave her child behind.

The annual New Year festival of Thingyan is approaching, and they sing popular songs of love and separation and a homecoming they know may be years away.

AAPP is working with the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar to collect and preserve evidence of crimes against international law committed since 2011 to expedite future criminal proceedings. Nicholas Koumjian, head of the IIMM, said on the second anniversary of the coup that credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer.”

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Rohingya IDPs confined to a Sittwe camp in Rakhine State wait for international intervention. More than 1.5 million people are displaced in Myanmar. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

By Thompson Chau and Guy Dinmore
BANGKOK, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Nearly 18 million people – about one-third of Myanmar’s population – need humanitarian aid this year because of civil war and the post-coup economic crisis, according to the latest United Nations estimates.

The numbers needing support continue to rise from the estimated 14 million people needing aid last year. More than 10,000 people were displaced by fighting in southern Kayin State in early January alone, joining more than 1.5 million IDPs across the country.

The UN says it recognises the urgent need to remain in Myanmar and step up humanitarian operations, but it is caught between a hostile military junta imposing restrictions on its activities and a loose network of resistance groups accusing the world body of legitimising an illegal regime.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is also facing increasing criticism for his apparent hands-off leadership in the crisis.

“Almost 18 million people – nearly one-third of the Myanmar population – are estimated to be in humanitarian need nationwide in 2023, with conflict continuing to threaten the lives of civilians in many parts of the country,” said Ramanathan Balakrishnan, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Myanmar.

He told IPS that international and local humanitarian aid organisations are “using a range of approaches” in different areas and had reached over four million people in 2022 despite severe underfunding and what he called “heavy bureaucratic and access constraints”.

Balakrishnan defended the importance of the UN’s engagement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s regime, which has ruthlessly crushed dissent since seizing power two years ago and overthrowing the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.

“Principled engagement with all sides is a must to negotiate access and also to advocate on key protection issues. Advocacy to stop the heavy fighting and airstrikes in populated areas that are threatening the safety of both civilians and aid workers is as important as reaching people in need with humanitarian aid,” he said.

Aid workers accuse the junta of further restricting aid operations and blocking urgently needed aid from reaching millions of people. The regime admitted this month it cannot effectively administer about one-third of Myanmar’s townships. But it is able to choke access to some areas controlled by resistance groups and ethnic armed organisations that have been fighting the military for decades.

The junta is seeking to impose its authority with a new law making registration compulsory for national and international non-governmental organizations and associations and introducing criminal penalties for non-registered entities with up to five years of imprisonment.

“Civic space has been decimated in the country already due to the military’s actions, particularly its systematic harassment, arrest, and prosecution of anyone who opposed their coup,” said James Rodehaver, chief of the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia (OHCHR) Myanmar Team. “These new rules could greatly diminish what operational space is left for civic organisations to deliver essential goods and services to a population that is struggling to survive.”

Muslim Rohingya IDPs wait for aid to be unloaded in Pawktaw camp in Rakhine State, an hour by boat from the main city of Sittwe. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

Many of the more than one million refugees outside Myanmar also need help. Most are stateless Rohingya Muslims forced out of Rakhine State into Bangladesh in waves of ethnic cleansing before the 2021 coup, with many held in border camps.

The UN’s reputation was already battered before the coup over its handling of the long-festering Rohingya crisis in which it was accused by aid workers and activists of being too accommodating with the Myanmar military. And it has come under further fire since.

In a joint letter last September, more than 600 Burmese civil society organisations said they “condemn in the strongest terms the recent public signing of new agreements and presenting of letters of appointment to the illegitimate Myanmar military junta by UN agencies, funds, programmes and other entities working inside Myanmar.”

“We call on you and all UN entities to immediately cease all forms of cooperation and engagement that lends legitimacy to the illegal, murderous junta,” said the letter addressed to the UN Secretary-General. The signatories argued that letters of appointment and agreements should be presented to what they regard as the legitimate government of Myanmar – the parallel National Unity Government established by ousted lawmakers – and “ethnic revolutionary organisations.”

A Myanmar researcher specialising in civil society and international assistance highlighted the role of Burmese CSOs in delivering aid. “Local CSOs comprehend the complexity of specific local needs in the current crisis as the communities they serve struggle with security concerns and essential public services, including healthcare and education,” said the researcher, who goes by the name Kyaw Swar for fear of security reprisals.

He said that donors and foreign organisations had adopted risk aversion arrangements post-coup, referring to UN and INGO’s costs for capacity-building components and disproportionate country-office operations. “Local CSOs have fewer operations, and risk management options [and] have no choice but to channel international aid to their respective communities.”

UN officials reject the notion that they are legitimising the regime and insist that only by operating in the junta-controlled heartland and also through cross-border assistance can aid be delivered to a substantial part of the population in desperate need.

“The UN finds itself in an almost existential bind. It can’t engage with an oppressive regime without being seen to condone its actions,” commented Charles Petrie, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and former UN chief in Myanmar.

“Somehow, the UN’s senior leadership needs to convince all that engaging in a dialogue with a pariah regime is not the same as supporting it and that it should be judged on the outcome of the discussions rather than being condemned for the simple fact of engaging,” he said.

“But being able to do so successfully implies that it has the level of credibility that right now it still needs to rebuild,” he added.

Questions have also been raised about the apparent lack of hands-on leadership on the part of Guterres. The UN Secretary-General seems to have made little personal intervention beyond routine statements, such as the latest marking the second anniversary of the coup in which he condemned “all forms of violence” and said he “continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar and to support their democratic aspirations for an inclusive, peaceful and just society and the protection of all communities, including the Rohingya.”

Since the coup and despite the unfolding humanitarian crisis, Guterres is seen as having taken a back seat and delegating to two successive special envoys. This stands in contrast to his predecessor Ban Ki-moon who actively intervened during the Cyclone Nargis disaster in 2008, personally meeting then-junta leader General Than Shwe and negotiating the opening of Myanmar to aid workers.

Petrie suggested Guterres should take a page out of Ban’s book and provide much more active leadership on Myanmar and be “more openly engaged and supportive of the work done by his special envoy.”

While China and Russia lend military and other support to the junta, much of the rest of the diplomatic world has taken a step back from the Myanmar crisis, leaning instead on ASEAN to assume the lead.

But the 10-member bloc has been ineffective so far. It has coordinated an unprecedented shunning of the junta’s leadership in regional meetings, but neighbouring countries – with their own blemished democratic records – are unwilling to penalise the regime. The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre) has been charged to respond to the humanitarian crisis, but with no success.

Laetitia van den Assum, the former Dutch ambassador to Myanmar and Thailand, said the aid response would have been more effective if ASEAN had set up a partnership between AHA and experienced UN and other organisations.

“That, in fact, is what happened in the aftermath of Nargis, when under the strong leadership of Dr Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN and UN worked in tandem. It took time to put the effort together, but ultimately it took off,” van den Assum told IPS.

As with the UN leadership, Lim Jock Hoi, a Bruneian government official who was ASEAN chief until December, was barely noticed on the issue of Myanmar, in stark contrast to Pitsuwan, who helped persuade Than Shwe to accept humanitarian assistance in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis killed over 100,000 people.

“UN agencies like OCHA, WFP and UNICEF, as well as many dedicated INGOs, continue to provide assistance, more often than not under difficult circumstances, and with countless Myanmar civil society organisations playing critical roles,” Van den Assum observed.

“But until now, the SAC [the junta’s State Administration Council] has stood in the way of more effective aid,” she added. “What is missing is an overall agreement between Myanmar and ASEAN about such assistance, how to expand it and how to guarantee that all those in need are served. ASEAN and AHA have not been able to deliver on this.”

Observers point out that AHA is set up to respond to natural disasters and has no experience in intervening with aid in conflict situations.

“That had already become clear in 2018 when AHA was tasked to make recommendations for ASEAN assistance to northern Rakhine state after the enforced deportation of more than 750,000 Rohingya. The initiative died a slow death,” Van den Assum said.

“AHA was not to blame. Rather, ASEAN politicians had taken a decision without first considering whether it was the most advisable approach,” the veteran diplomat said.

No breakthrough is in sight. The junta has extended a state of emergency for another six months, admitting that it lacks control over many areas for the new elections it says it wants to stage but which have already been widely denounced by the resistance as a sham.

“Heavy fighting, including airstrikes, tight security, access restrictions, and threats against aid workers have continued unabated, particularly in the Southeast, endangering lives and hampering humanitarian operations,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in its latest update.

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People in Yangon queue for oxygen cylinders to treat COVID patients as a third wave of the pandemic sweeps through Myanmar. Credit: Sai T

By Sara Perria
ROME, Jul 20 2021 (IPS)

The third wave of Covid-19 is sweeping through Myanmar, from the high narrow buildings of the commercial capital Yangon to bamboo houses in rural areas.

Ma Ni, not her real name, caught the virus in Yangon, infected by her husband and son. But no members of the family show up in the official numbers because they preferred to buy a home test instead of going to a hospital or a quarantine centre.

“It’s been seven days with COVID now,” 34-year-old Ma Ni says. “My husband needs oxygen, but we cannot get it … I hope God will save us.”

Ma Ni’s family is not alone. According to the military’s Ministry of Health, Myanmar recorded 3,461 new cases of COVID-19 and 82 deaths on July 11 alone.

In total, since the pandemic first struck, Myanmar has reported almost 4,000 deaths. Videos circulating on social networks show a dramatic increase in the number of bodies taken to Yangon’s crematorium.

The numbers, although certainly under-reported, are far lower than they were in Europe, the US or India, but they are growing. Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 has been compounded by the aftermath of the military coup on February 1 that ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and triggered nationwide protests, resulting in more than 900 deaths and thousands of prisoners, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, an NGO based in Thailand.

As a result, hundreds of panicking citizens are shying away from testing and quarantine facilities perceived as mismanaged by the unpopular military.

“I’d rather die than go to a military hospital,” Ko Moe, again not a real name, tells IPS. “I don’t trust them, and given my work as a volunteer ambulance driver, they might arrest me for helping the protestors.”

The military is trying to stop private initiatives, even shooting to disperse a crowd queuing to refill oxygen tanks. It is also forbidding producers to distribute oxygen to ineligible citizens, saying people are hoarding it unnecessarily.

Myanmar people think otherwise. Deep inside the country, in the city of Taunggyi, Shan State, a doctor interviewed by IPS says people are organising themselves autonomously to cope with the emergency because the health system has collapsed.

“As for now, things look still normal here but … many donors and well-wishers have set up a committee to install oxygen plants by themselves to help the people in the city and the small villages around Taunggyi,” she tells IPS.

Grievances are expressed all over social networks and emotional appeals for help from the international community or obituaries of loved ones who succumbed to the virus.

But it’s also the flu season, which many, feeling abandoned by the State or unable to afford private facilities, mistake for COVID.

“The situation is pretty chaotic. There have been many outbreaks of COVID but also of seasonal flu, in major cities and rural regions,” another doctor working for a private hospital in Yangon tells IPS on condition of anonymity. “People are frustrated for not getting efficient medical care from the authorities, while general hospitals cannot operate on a full scale since the majority of civil service doctors have joined the disobedience movement and there are only a few doctors and nurses left,” he says.

Indeed, only a small percentage of citizens have been vaccinated against the virus. The ongoing protests that started in February have crammed prisons with political prisoners, turning the repression into an epicentre of the outbreak.

Following a recent trip to Russia, junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing announced the purchase of 5 million doses of the Sputnik vaccine. However, it may be too little, too late to avoid an unprecedented health crisis in a country of over 54 million people only partly controlled by the military.

The international community is also accused of not helping, having been already stigmatised for failing to do anything to support Burmese citizens during the coup, beyond statements of condemnation.

The UN special rapporteur for Myanmar Tom Andrews told the Human Rights Commission on July 13 that the junta lacks the “capabilities and the legitimacy to bring this crisis under control”. And the lack of trust in the military makes this crisis “particularly lethal”, he said.

Activists from the opposition ‘Milk Tea Alliance Burma’ expressed the sentiment of the public in a Tweet: “Last year, the pandemic was contained successfully in Myanmar because of collective efforts of everyone. DASSK (Aung San Suu Kyi) was influencing the public well, holding campaigns to make cloth masks, the public followed the instructions well, they masked up and stayed at home without complaining.”

With the population mistrustful of the military and pro-democracy protests continuing, albeit on a much smaller scale, rules are often overlooked.

A Google app tracing people’s movements shows that the situation is back to the pre-coup situation in terms of traffic and crowds in the streets. Many shops may appear to be closed from the outside but are working at normal capacity behind. Masks are usually left at home.

The military has a history of resistance to international aid despite being unequipped to deal with an emergency, as happened in the disastrous aftermath of cyclone Nargis in 2008. The junta is unlikely to change its isolationist stance now, and international help may well be limited, according to a diplomat in Yangon, interviewed by IPS.

“COVID is not going to change anything for the junta, it’s taking people’s minds off the revolution, so it’s not such a bad thing for the military,” he says, asking not to be named for security reasons.

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Protests against military coup in Kayin State, Myanmar on Feb. 9. Protestors have taken to the streets of Myanmar since a Feb. 1 coup by the military. Journalists covering the anti-junta protests have been particularly at risk of being detained, after the military amended Section 505(a) of the country’s penal code to include offences that include knowingly spreading ‘fake news’. Courtesy: Ninjastrikers/(CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 22 2021 (IPS)

Two human rights groups have called on the military in Myanmar to release journalists arbitrarily jailed and allow them to work without harassment and prosecution.

Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told IPS that they will double down on those demands until all journalists are released and the operating licenses of newsgroups are restored.

“From revoking media licenses and raiding newsrooms to arbitrarily arresting and prosecuting media workers covering the current human rights crisis in the country, the Myanmar military is desperately trying to hide from the world the appalling crimes it is committing against its own people every day,” Emerlynne Gil, Deputy Regional Director at Amnesty International, told IPS.

The calls follow a briefing by the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani who said that ‘deeply distressing reports of torture in custody’ were adding to the crisis unfolding in the country.

Protestors have taken to the streets of Myanmar since a Feb. 1 coup by the military. Journalists covering the anti-junta protests have been particularly at risk of being detained, after the military amended Section 505(a) of the country’s penal code to include offences that include knowingly spreading ‘fake news’. The amendments give the military increased latitude to arrest journalists.

“The death toll has soared over the past week in Myanmar, where security forces have been using lethal force increasingly aggressively against peaceful protesters, and continue to arbitrarily arrest and detain people throughout the country,” Shamdasani said last week.

Shamdasani told the press that hundreds of illegally detained people are unaccounted for and ‘this amounts to enforced disappearances’.

Representatives of press rights group CPJ told IPS that journalists in Myanmar are living in fear.

“They are scared that the crackdown will become more targeted against media and that the junta intends to establish a new censorship regime, similar to the harsh measures imposed on the media by previous military governments,” CPJ’s Southeast Asia Representative Shawn Crispin told IPS, adding that “at least 5 independent news organisations have already had their operating licenses revoked for arbitrary and vague reasons. Other groups fear they could be next.”

Reports of press censorship by authorities in Myanmar are not new. In 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights assessed press freedom and high-profile journalist prosecutions through 5 individual cases. The ensuing report, ‘The Invisible Boundary – Criminal prosecutions of journalism in Myanmar’, cited harrowing experiences by the targeted journalists and stated that the unlawful arrests and prosecutions created ‘an invisible boundary for media personnel, that they cross at their peril’. It concluded that freedom of expression and press freedom were under attack.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council said it was deeply concerned about developments in Myanmar. According to the UN, at least 37 journalists have been arrested in Myanmar since Feb. 1, with 19 still unlawfully detained.

“The Security Council strongly condemns the violence against peaceful protestors, including against women, youth and children. It expresses deep concern at restrictions on medical personnel, civil society, labor union members, journalists and media workers, and calls for the immediate release of all those detained arbitrarily,” a statement from the President said.

Amnesty International says a free press in Myanmar is more important than ever.

“It is all the more urgent now to ensure access to information in Myanmar amid escalating violent repression of peaceful protesters and severe internet restrictions, and all attempts to hamper the right to seek, receive and impart information must cease immediately,” Gil told IPS.

Six journalists have been charged under Article 505(a) of Myanmar’s penal code.

“We are also calling on the regime to refrain from imposing any new laws or measures that would restrict media freedoms,” Crispin told IPS.

A Human Rights Council Resolution of Mar. 12  consists of 9 recommendations of the Government of Myanmar, meant to protect journalists, freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Among other measures, the Council wants the authorities to decriminalise defamation and amend the country’s media law to ensure that the Myanmar Press Council can mediate in disputes with media outlets and journalists.

The Council also wants the immediate and unconditional release of all journalists in detention, an end to all current cases against journalists for exercising their right to freedom of expression and ensure access to restitution for the journalists who have been arrested and persecuted. 

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Excerpt:

Protests against military coup in Kayin State, Myanmar on Feb. 9. This weekend saw the bloodiest day of protests after the police and security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of protestors. Analysts fear that more bloodshed is almost inevitable. Courtesy: Ninjastrikers/(CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK, Mar 2 2021 (IPS)

Myanmar activists have called on the international community for help as security forces loyal to the military continue their draconian sweep against the civil disobedience campaign that has brought the country to a standstill since the Feb. 1 coup. The pleas come as analysts, commentators and diplomats who know Myanmar fear that more bloodshed is almost inevitable.

This comes in the wake of the bloodiest day of protests on Feb. 28 after police and security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of protestors in Yangon, Dawei, Mandalay, Myeik, Bago and Pokokku.

According the United Nations human rights office, 18 people were killed and over 30 wounded. Local rights’ groups, however, believe the figure is much higher.

Several eye-witnesses have told IPS that police are invading houses, breaking down fences, doors and windows – whatever stands in their way – to conduct searches and carry out indiscriminate arrests without a warrant. Soon after the Feb. 1 coup, military leaders changed the law to allow unrestricted search and arrest, as well as indefinite detention.

“It’s a total war zone,” Walter Khun, a Myanmar citizen and founding partner with financial advisors based in Yangon, told IPS. “Our associates throughout the country are reporting the same: junta troops terrorising civilians.”

Blistering military crackdown

Over the past two days there have been scores of reports of police systematically looting shops and homes, stealing food from markets and commandeering possessions from private homes.

“They’re turning the country into a massive battlefield,” Zaw Naing, a local Myanmar businessman, told IPS. His statement was echoed by many other sources with whom IPS spoke.

Increased troops and police are being deployed across Myanmar, with convoys of soldiers and sailors being sent in as reinforcements to the strategic towns of Mandalay, Mawlamyine, Monywar, Taunggyi and Dawei.

Ruthless police charges with rifles have been filmed and posted on Facebook. In Kalaymyo – in the Sagaing region north of Mandalay – citizens managed to push advancing police with riot shields and a water cannon back. Skirmishes have also be reported in Mandalay and elsewhere.

Today, Mar. 2, the sound of gunfire was heard irregularly throughout the city of Yangon. Eye-witnesses were unable to distinguish whether it was live ammunition or rubber bullets.

In Sanchuang, in the northern-central part of the city, security forces conducted training exercises on the footpaths with snipers lying on the ground and taking aim with their rifles. Videos of the incident flooded Facebook and other social media outlets. 

Security forces have also erected barricades and blockades at strategic roads and thoroughfares to prevent the protestors fleeing from one part of the city to another. As of today, Mar. 2, authorities have ordered all of Yangon’s major shopping centres, including Junction Square, Capital Retail Myanmar and Myanmar Plaza to close indefinitely.

Many big supermarkets are also closed. Some believe this is part of the security forces control and dispersal strategy to prevent protestors taking refuge inside shopping complexes when the police charge.

Condemnation not enough – please for international intervention

While international condemnation has been swift and strong, the protestors are demanding international intervention.

“Protestors are being shot. We are very angry, we are very upset,” Ma Myint, a 30-year-old young communications graduate from north of Yangon, told IPS. “How many dead bodies does the UN need to act?” she asked after Sunday’s deaths.

Reuters reported that today, Mar. 2, that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations held discussions with the military, urging them to release civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and leaders from her National League for Democracy (NLD).

“The UN is watching, the US is watching, the whole world is watching but when will they act? We need international intervention based on the ‘right to protect,’” young professional, Thiri Kyaw Nyo, told IPS. “The must act otherwise there will be more bloodshed in the coming weeks.”

Dr Sa Sa, Myanmar’s Special Envoy to the UN – who represents the elected MPs — called on the international community to bring the authorities to justice for “crimes against humanity”.

“It’s time for the international community to act to protect our innocent, defenceless people who dare to stand up to these thugs who now controlling our country,” Dr Sa Sa told IPS in an extensive interview.    

Fears that more bloodshed is inevitable.

Analysts, commentators and diplomats fear that more bloodshed is almost inevitable.

According to military sources the security forces standing orders and rules of engagement are to respond if attacked and the use of lethal force is permitted. 

Regional military analysts believe the security forces have been relatively restrained compared to their past practices, including the crushing of the 1988 democratic uprising. The fear is the closer it gets to Mar. 27, Armed Forces Day – the anniversary celebrations for the military — the more they will not tolerate the continued civil disobedience campaign and protests in the street. Some analysts expect the army to deploy its full military might against the protests before then.

The military have been progressively ratcheting up their response – highlighted by Sunday’s tragic events.

Protests will continue

Sa Sa vowed the protests would continue despite the security forces crackdown.

“We must continue to remind the army that we are not giving up, we are not going away, and we will continue to frustrate their efforts to run the country at every turn,” said Sa Sa.

The protest movement is having a dire effect on the junta’s ability to rule. Banks are closed, government offices empty and the country’s fuel supplies are running dangerously low. Hospitals, universities and schools are mostly closed, and most factories have also been idle for the last four months.

Myanmar is virtually at a standstill.    

But Sa Sa insisted the protests must remain non-violent. “We are a non-violent movement, our weapons are our voice, our mobile phones and social media,” Sa Sa said.

“It’s the army that are committing crimes.

“These are the ones who facing real criminal charges and international justice at the Hague [at the International Court of Justice], they are the ones who should be in prison … not our leaders [referring to Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders] … they must be made accountable for their crimes.”

Suu Kyi appeared in court on Feb. 16 on charges of violating import restrictions after walkie-talkies and other foreign equipment were found in her villa compound. She and other senior leaders, as well as human rights activists have been detained under house arrest since the coup.

Protests about more than release of Suu Kyi

On the surface the protests seem to be leaderless and an expression of aspirations of the young – most of the protestors are under the age of 30.

But the civil disobedience movement encompasses more than the street campaigners.

While the movement is largely galvanised around releasing Suu Kyi, and a call for the military to abide by the election results of the November polls that saw Suu Kyi’s NLD convincingly win the majority vote, the campaign is much broader.

Myanmar’s civil servants — the doctors, nurses and health workers who initiated the civil disobedience campaign four weeks ago — are still on strike despite the junta’s threats and intimidation, according to a young doctor heavily involved in the movement in Mandalay.

The doctor, who did not want to be named, told IPS: “They are serious about protecting democracy, and have vowed not to stop till the coup commander is defeated and the culture of coups eradicated forever.”

Myo Win, activist and executive director at Smile Education and Development Foundation, told IPS: “It’s much broader: it’s about completing the transition to democracy, ripping up the 2008 constitution and replacing it with a democratic, federal state, and ending military dictatorships forever.”

The 2008 constitution allows for the military commander-in-chief to take power in extreme cases.

A cat and mouse game between security forces and protestors

Meanwhile, local community neighbourhood watch teams have cordoned off areas in Yangon’s townships, built their own makeshift barriers and mounted 24-hour guard, to prevent the police venturing into their townships and impeding their advance charges.

“It’s a ‘cat and mouse’ game between the security forces and the protestors,” said one of the 1988 protests veterans who is involved in organising logistics — communicating over walkie talkies with protestors.

At street corners in Yangon, protestors are reportedly keeping watch and warning others when police enter nearby streets. Upon alert, many take refuge to wait until the police pass before reemerging, singing songs and shouting.

“They’re organised in small groups of protestors throughout the city and are keeping the revolutionary flame alive,” Nyein Chan Aung, a veteran activist from the 1988 protests, told IPS.    

The campaigners are determined to continue irrespective of what the security forces throw at them.

“This is about our future,” said Ma Myint. “Our future is being taken away from us … we feel like that: we do not want to go back to the darkness. We were looking forward to a brighter future, now suddenly it’s gone dark.”

“I am very sad, and filled with grief for those who have died already in the struggle,” Sakura Ra, a young advertising professional who has given up her job to join the protests every day, told IPS.  “But we’re fighting for freedom and democracy – we are fighting for our future – we are fighting for our children’s future: we will fight to the end, we will never give up,” she told IPS.

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Protesters demand the release of civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The protestors remain defiant in the face of the security forces tightening the screw. They are facing daily intimidation, threats and harassment at the hands of the police and soldiers strategically station to discourage and disperse the protests. CC BY-SA 4.0

By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK, Feb 17 2021 (IPS)

Myanmar’s top generals have begun the process to prevent Aung San Suu Kyi – the country’s popular civilian leader – from ever holding political power. Both she and president Win Myint were arraigned in a closed-door court session via video link Tuesday, Feb. 16. This is the beginning of a trial that is expected to take about six months to conclude. If convicted, it will prevent Suu Kyi from standing in future elections.

Suu Kyi is charged with violating import restrictions after walkie-talkies and other foreign equipment that were found in her villa compound. They were discovered during a search of her premises on Feb. 1, the day the military launched a coup, seizing all judicial, executive and legislative power, placing it in the hands of the commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

The Nobel laureate has also been charged with contravening a natural disaster management law by interacting with a crowd at an election rally during the coronavirus pandemic. A charge that was added after her original arrest and only publicly disclosed at her hearing. Win Myint is  charged with breaking COVID-19 restrictions. They reportedly appeared without legal representation.

The coup leaders have promised elections sometime next year after the state of emergency they have imposed is lifted. The authorities are still investigation more serious accusations related to receiving foreign funds – which could amount to charges of treason.

The military commanders also seem intent on preparing a case against her party – the National League for Democracy (NLD) — in order to ban it from politics and declare it an illegal organisation. The NLD, which overwhelmingly won last November’s poll, remains a thorn in the military’s side as for the past three weeks protestors have hit the street in their hundreds of thousands, to defend democracy and reject the coup.

“The civil disobedience movement is a non-violent campaign which was started by young doctors across the country: it was a spontaneous grassroots response to the coup,” Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a prominent activist involved with the protest in Yangon, told IPS. “It has grown daily as the civil servants have inspired others to defend our democracy,” she added.   

The protestors remain defiant in the face of the security forces tightening the screw. They are facing daily intimidation, threats and harassment at the hands of the police and soldiers strategically station to discourage and disperse the protests. But troops, tanks and water cannons have not deterred the protests, which are growing daily. But the strength of the movement is that it encompasses all generations, all walks of life, civil servant and workers. All of whom support democracy, though a large proportion also support the NLD.

“This is very different from the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations when the student movement aspired to democracy but didn’t really know what it meant,” Nyein Chan Aung an 88-year-old veteran told IPS. “This time they know what they want, they know what they are losing, and they are very, very angry.”   

Meanwhile, the military are clearly on a mission to overhaul and restructure the country’s fledgling democracy, turning the clock back to the dark days of direct military rule.

For the past three weeks the new junta has rolled out a new administration: from national, provisional to district and wards. Removing the previous elected incumbents and putting in people close to the military.

The Supreme Court has been transformed, with the previous NLD appointments routed out and replaced with judges loyal to their military masters. The Union Election Commission has also been dismissed and swapped with military loyalists. Key ministries have also been targeted and military officers and personnel infiltrated, often at the highest level. This was the common practice during the previous military regime. But the public service has been largely transformed in the last ten years with comprehensive public reform.

“The militarisation of the bureaucracy is under way again I fear,” a former diplomat told IPS on condition of anonymity. “In the past it destroyed civil servant moral, civil service efficiency and expertise, and made the bureaucracy another arm of the military — stripped of initiative and think independently – making it powerless to do anything else but follow orders and recreating a truly authoritarian state.”

But the military junta has also dealt a death blow to developing democratic ideals and practices, with the worst being the wholesale changes in the laws and new edicts. Activists and human rights groups in Myanmar have condemned these measures as unacceptable and a gross erosion of basic civil and human rights, especially the changes to citizens protection and security laws.

These include prisoner’s right to a lawyer – Suu Kyi has been denied access to her lawyer since she was detained at the beginning of February.

It also includes the right to detain prisoners for an unlimited the right to arrest people without a warrant and search homes unimpeded by local administrators, carry out surveillance unconstrained, intercept any form of communications, and ask for users’ information from operators.

The government has also enacted a draconian Cyber Law which essentially allows them full access to digital information and all social media – with the right to prosecute anyone they deem has crossed the line.

“The changes in the laws amount to the removal of all rights of freedom of speech, association and liberty as well as the rights associated the rule of law and fair trial,” Stephen McNamara, a UK lawyer who has worked with lawyers in Myanmar since 2007, told IPS.

“These changes in the basic laws of Myanmar are wider than any amendments since the nineteenth century. It reflects a military that intends to stay in power for a very long time,” he told IPS.

The fact that the military launched the coup when it could not get its own way clearly reflects the army’s mentality and priorities. They could not accept the NLD’s crushing victory in the elections – and the second time in five years.

They were shocked by the extent of their electoral triumph victory and had been counting on being able to form some sort of coalition government with various parties, including their pro-military partners, ethnic political parties and even the NLD if they did not have an overwhelming victory. 

The military foresee a political future where the army is an integral part of the political setup — integrated into the power structure and administration much like the way they see Thailand.  In fact the Commander in Chief is very fond of what he sees as the model – an important role for the army, where their economic interests are protected, a self sufficient economy and ‘democratic’ outlook – which resists leftist, socialist or communist leanings. It is a concept of pluralist democracy with no interest group having the dominant role or power.

Of course the coup leaders also see former Senior General Than Shwe’s ‘roadmap to democracy’ — developed in 2003 by the then intelligence chief and prime minister — as the model to be followed. This projected the final stage before a more liberal form of democracy as a coalition government of national unity. But always the emphasis was on a ‘guided democracy’. So while they are trying to turn back the clock to when the first elections were held – they have in fact wound it back into the dark ages.

“The soldiers, police and their hired thugs come out at night and wage a war of terror against the people – targeting prominent leaders of the protest movement – and conducting their campaign of intimidation, harassment and arrests,” Nyein Chan Aung told IPS.

“But this is different from 1988, and the new generational tactics have armed the protestors with weapons that will help defeat the military in the long run. With mobile phones, the internet and social media the civil disobedience movement has a voice that’s being heard across the world. The military’s tactics are doomed to fail this time round.”

Suu Kyi’s trial is expected to proceed on Mar. 1.

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A protestor in Myanmar holding up the three-finger salute of opposition to military dictatorship from the film “Hunger Games” which was popularised by the democracy protests in Hong Kong and Thailand. Courtesy: CC BY-SA 4.0

By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK, Feb 8 2021 (IPS)

Myanmar is in a deep political crisis. Over the past week — reminiscent of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988 — Myanmar’s citizens are openly and publicly challenging the country’s powerful military, whose coup earlier this month now threatens to stifle the country’s fledgling democracy.

Since the weekend, thousands of people have come out onto the streets in most of the country’s major cities in defiance of the military authorities: noisily opposing the coup and demanding that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which overwhelmingly won the November election, be allowed to form a civilian government.

These demonstrations of support for democracy are growing daily with thousands and thousands across Myanmar voicing their rejection of the military coup.

It is like 33 years ago when millions of students, civil servants, workers and Buddhist monks took to the streets demanding democracy. Those protests provoked the military to seize power in a coup in September that year.

Again, the future of the country’s transition to democracy has reached a critical crossroads. After weeks of tension between the military and the elected civilian government of Suu Kyi, the Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing seized power in a military coup on Feb. 1 and assumed all government powers – of the executive, judiciary and the legislature – for 12 months after which fresh elections would be held and power transferred to the winner.

Protests started with noise & via social media

People spontaneously started to demonstrate their opposition to the coup by creating a cacophony of noise – beating drums, banging, blowing trumpets and singing in unison every night at 8pm. Since then the ‘banging brigade’ has got louder and louder, as the country’s main urban centres come to a standstill and all that can be heard is the rhythmic sound of the beating of pots and pans all showing their opposition to the military and support for Suu Kyi.

“Most people in Myanmar support the ideals of democracy and want the army to withdraw from politics permanently,” Shwe Yee Myint Saw, who has joined the street protests almost every day from when they started on the weekend, told IPS.

The vast majority of those who have taken to the streets are under the age of 30. “You see the youth of this country understand what we lost in 30 years of military misrule, and we can’t afford a repeat of that.”

Peaceful protest in #Myanmar . #HearTheVoiceOfMyanmar #SaveDemocracy pic.twitter.com/WN0e98ehdU

— khant thaw (@akthaw) February 7, 2021

As in 1988, the charismatic pro-democracy icon Suu Kyi – and leader of the NLD — is at the centre of the movement. She was detained last Monday, Feb. 1, when the military launched their coup and arrested her in an early morning raid. She remains under house arrest and has been charged for possession of illegally imported radios that were used without permission – six walkie-talkie radios were found in the search of her home after she was arrested. If convicted it would bar her from contesting any future elections, including those the military have promised to hold later next year.

Most of the country’s civilian leaders were also detained in these dawn raids. This included all key politicians, regional chief ministers, government ministers, the top leadership of the governing NLD, most national and local members of parliament, and hundreds of pro-democracy and human rights activists. Many of them have been released since and effectively sent home to house arrest.

In the past week the opposition to the coup has built momentum and a concerted campaign of civil disobedience grew through the use of social media.

“We have digital power, so we’ve been using this to oppose the military junta ever since the start of the coup,” human rights activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi, who is one of the main organisers of the ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’ which has taken Myanmar by storm since the coup, told IPS. “And we must continue to use it: to seek an immediate end to this culture of coups.”

Banks reopened in Yangon, Myanmar on February 2 after closing the day before. Credit: IPS / Yangon stringer

Health workers went on strike

The social media protests quickly snowballed into a civil disobedience campaign initiated by the country’s health workers. The day after the coup, the country’s health workers galvanised public resistance to the military by refusing to work under a military government.

“It isn’t that we don’t care about our patients – we certainly do — but we can’t work under a military government again,” Dr Mya Oo, a doctor at Mandalay General Hospital who went on strike the first day, told IPS. “We all feel we must do everything we can to stop this bullying and preserve our democracy.”

Support for the opposition movement has grown enormously ever since, affecting hospitals, schools and other government offices. Although the doctors and nurses in the two main cities of Mandalay and Yangon took the lead — refusing to work and gathering outside their hospital to protest against the military coup — it quickly grew to government ministries, schools and universities throughout Myanmar.

Pictures can be seen of staff congregating together in uniform, wearing the red ribbon of protest, and defiantly holding up the three-finger salute of opposition to military dictatorship from the film “Hunger Games” – popularised in the democracy protests in Hong Kong and Thailand. There has also been a flood of resignations from government posts.

Civilians on the street

It culminated over the weekend, when the campaigners took to the streets to demonstrate their anger at the coup and its leaders. Their main grievance is the army’s seizure of power has effectively annulled the results of last November’s election which Suu Kyi and the NLD convincingly won.

“We voted for Aung San Suu Kyi and now the military are trying to steal this election from us and put us under their harsh controlling power like before,” Sandar, a young university graduate, told IPS. “We won’t stand for it: we have tasted democratic freedom and we know it’s the only way for our country to develop,” she said.

In most urban centres across the country, there are massive demonstrations of support for Suu Kyi demanding the military respect the election results. More and more civil servants are joining the movement. And now there are calls for a general strike.

“The ‘civil disobedience movement’ is a non-violent campaign – started by young doctors across the country which has inspired everyone and has grown into a mass protest involving all sectors of society,” Thinzar Shunlei Yi told IPS. 

Suu Kyi is believed to have signalled her support for the movement in messages from her house arrest in the capital Naypyidaw, according to senior party officials. Late last week the NLD central executive committee released a statement supporting the current Civil Disobedience Movement.

“In order to take back the country’s sovereignty – invested in the people — and restore democracy, all the people of Myanmar people should support this political resistance movement — in a peaceful and non-violence way,” the statement read.

So far the authorities have been powerless to stem the movement. But as the momentum grows there are increasing fears of a major confrontation between the peaceful protestors and the security forces.

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Myanmar’s military has sized control of government and reportedly detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, senior members of her governing National League for Democracy (NLD) as well as human rights activists and student leaders. Courtesy: Yves Alarie on Unsplash

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 1 2021 (IPS)

Responding to reports this morning that Myanmar’s military has seized control of government in a coup on the eve of the country’s opening session of its new parliament, rights group Amnesty International said it “sends a chilling message that the military authorities will not tolerate any dissent amid today’s unfolding events”.

Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, senior members of her governing National League for Democracy (NLD) as well as human rights activists and student leaders were reportedly detained this morning, Feb. 1. The BBC reported military “was handing power to commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing because of “election fraud”” and that soldiers were “on the streets of the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, and the main city, Yangon”.

Amnesty International said in a statement today that phone lines and the internet have been cut in some areas, further stating, “the military-owned television station announced that a one-year state of emergency was being imposed under the authority of the Commander in Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing”.

The President of the European Council Charles Michel condemned the coup in a tweet this morning.

I strongly condemn the coup in #Myanmar and call on the military to release all who have been unlawfully detained in raids across the country.

The outcome of the elections has to be respected and democratic process needs to be restored.

— Charles Michel (@eucopresident) February 1, 2021

As did the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I condemn the coup and unlawful imprisonment of civilians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, in Myanmar. The vote of the people must be respected and civilian leaders released.

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) February 1, 2021

A statement from White House spokesperson Jen Psaki read the United States was alarmed by the reports of the coup and subsequent arrest of Suu Kyi and civilian officials. “The United States opposes any attempt to alter the outcome of recent elections or impede Myanmar’s democratic transition, and will take action against those responsible if these steps are not reversed,” the statement read.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also condemned the coup and called for Suu Kyi’s release as well as that of other leaders and government officials.

Guterres expressed “grave concern regarding the declaration of the transfer of all legislative, executive and judicial powers to the military. These developments represent a serious blow to democratic reforms in Myanmar”, a statement said.

Myanmar’s Nov. 8 election, which was won by Suu Kyi’s NLD which increased its parliamentary majority — taking 396 of the 498 seats — had been disputed by the military. The Rohingya population had been excluded from participating in the vote.

Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Campaigns, Ming Yu Hah, called it “an ominous moment for people in Myanmar”, stating it threatened “a severe worsening of military repression and impunity. The concurrent arrests of prominent political activists and human rights defenders sends a chilling message that the military authorities will not tolerate any dissent amid today’s unfolding events” he said in a statement.

“Previous military coups and crackdowns in Myanmar have seen large scale violence and extrajudicial killings by security forces. We urge the armed forces to exercise restraint, abide by international human rights and humanitarian law and for law enforcement duties to be fully resumed by the police force at the earliest opportunity,” Hah said.

Concern remains about the safety of the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in the mostly Buddhist country.

The Rohingya have long been persecuted by the military and according to an October report by Human Rights Watch, “have faced decades of systematic repression, discrimination, and violence under successive Myanmar governments”.  

According to the UN Refugee Agency, a million Rohingya refugees have fled violence in Myanmar since the 1990s. However, in August 2017 when violence broke out in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

In November, The Gambia brought a case against  Myanmar to the UN’s International  Court of Justice, arguing that the mainly-Muslim Rohingya had been subjected to genocide. Suu Kyi had downplayed the allegations of genocide and serious human rights violations.

Last month, Jan. 23, the ICJ ruled that Myanmar must take steps to protect its minority Rohingya population. ICJ’s orders are binding against Myanmar.

But as late as last November, Amnesty International reported it had “documented a litany of serious human rights crimes in Rakhine, Chin, Kachin and northern Shan States in recent years, including  attacks killing or injuring civilians, extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and other ill-treatment, forced labour, looting and confiscation of property”.

Amnesty International’s Hah said today, “Reports of a telecommunications blackout pose a further threat to the population at such a volatile time – especially as Myanmar battles a pandemic, and as internal conflict against armed groups puts civilians at risk in several parts of the country. It is vital that full phone and internet services be resumed immediately.”

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Rights experts say that the Myanmar government “has long shown a lack of commitment to breaking the cycle of impunity for widespread sexual and gender-based violence”. This is a dated photo of women travelling on a crowded train in Myanmar. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 28 2020 (IPS)

A legislation that aims to protect women against violence in Myanmar, while long overdue, is raising concern among human rights advocates about its inadequate definition of rape, vague definition for “consent”, and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rhetoric.

Myanmar is soon to see the latest version of its Prevention of and Protection from Violence Against Women (PoVAW) introduced in parliament. But the Global Justice Centre (GJC), an international human rights and humanitarian law organisation focusing on advancing gender equality, has pointed out that the legislation falls short of addressing violence against women.

According to GJC, the language used in the law borrows from Myanmar’s 1861 Penal Code and thus perpetuates antiquated understandings of rape, such as; considering rape as violence committed only by men, the definition of “rape” constituting only of vaginal penetration, and no acknowledgement of marital rape.

“The Myanmar government has long shown a lack of commitment to breaking the cycle of impunity for widespread sexual and gender-based violence, a problem that is exacerbated by broader structural barriers with respect to Myanmar’s military justice system, and a lack of robust domestic options for accountability,” the GJC analysis has claimed.

Last week, Khin Ohmar, an exiled human rights advocate from Myanmar and founder and chairperson of the advisory board of Progressive Voice — a participatory rights-based policy research and advocacy organisation rooted in civil society, with strong links to grassroots and community-based organisations throughout Myanmar  —  shared how sexual violence in the country is used in a “systematic pattern to target ethnic women and girls”.

Ohmar was speaking at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict, where she further reiterated how the military in Myanmar has carried out “unspeakable crimes” against ethnic minorities in the country.

Meanwhile, GJC has also published a list of recommendations that leaders can follow to ensure the law is comprehensive as well as applicable in today’s time.

IPS had a conversation with Akila Radhakrishnan, president of GJC, on the issue. Some parts have been edited for clarity purposes.

Inter Press Service (IPS): The year is 2020. How is Myanmar only now introducing the Prevention of Violence against Women Law (PoVAW)?

Akila Radhakrishnan (AK): There’s been a couple of things – I think the lack of will is a starting point. This is something consistently being pushed for by women in civil society since about 2013.

It has been raised as an issue and a part of the reason it’s such a priority is because the original laws we’re talking about date back to 1861.

We’re really talking about laws that haven’t been updated so with the political transition there was a moment when women in civil society saw the opportunity to think it’s time we had a comprehensive law on violence against women, updating progressive positions in the penal code and bring in things like protective orders or a more robust categorisations of kinds of sexual and other types of violence.

And in some ways, the military continues to perpetrate mass sexual violence. Some of the key things that civil society has been pushing for is bringing the military under a mandate of the law, which is antithetical to the military’s interest as well.

IPS: Despite Aung San Suu Kyi being the leader of the country, why are there still discrepancies in the legislation?

AK: Aung San Suu Kyi is no feminist. She has certainly in the past made stronger statements on sexual violence than she currently takes on but she’s very much seen certain types of political reform as her priority. If you look at the trajectory of the laws that were initially passed through the transition, most of the laws were really wound around issues that enabled foreign investment, for example.

There were certain laws that were due to be changed around issues such as certain types of press freedoms, many of which have been regressing in recent times in any case. There was never kind of a feminist priority set from the leadership.

There were certainly some amazing feminists who got elected, including from local women’s civil society who were elected to parliament. They even felt they’ll have the power to set what are the priorities to be passed, to be considered to be looked at in the context of a country that has a range of reforms that need to be undertaken.

Another issue is that it’s been really slow going in the part of some of the agencies that are involved in this as well such as others, such as the attorney general’s office, department of social welfare. There’s a complicated range of actors involved in the development of the law and in the pushback against the law as well

IPS: Where would you say the PoVAW law lacks most glaringly and needs to be most urgently addressed?

AK: Probably the most urgent one is the places where they continue to cling to the penal code and not really think through how to amend it. They kind of cling to the penal code definition of rape itself – it refuses to let go of rape as it was defined in the 1861 penal code.

We detail a range of issues with that specific definition. And a major part of the impetus was to say our more modern definitions of rape, that are more inclusive, that are gender neutral and have better definitions of consent and at the end of the day you’re creating this whole process and you’re clinging to something that’s there.

And related to that is issues such as marital rape as a crime that is somewhat separate from rape, it’s a lesser crime, a lesser penalty and you know that also stems out of an antiquated mindset.

IPS: Is this legislation only for cisgendered women?

AK: There’s a little bit of a tension there. The law itself is a violence against women law and that’s in the framework it’s been developed over quite a bit of time, so there’s been tension wanting to certainly to try to make the law as inclusive as possible [and] really thinking through how difficult it is to even bring this to fruition.

In this moment, it’s important to try to think of how you take an intersectional inclusive approach to this. But unfortunately we’re going to end up only with a VAW framework so we want to at least within that context — and this is really belying on the expertise of groups that do this work better than we do — to really think through how to make something like this as inclusive as possible.

IPS: There are many ethnic minorities in Myanmar, many who often flee the country. How are ethnic minorities targeted for violence and sexual violence?

AK: The military uses sexual violence as a tactic weapon in its conflict, as its violent actions against all ethnic minorities. It is a systematic pattern —  one that is met with impunity which is why legal reforms and accountability are so important. 

IPS: What are your hopes for the steps ahead for the PoVAW law?

AK: The law is an important step forward but in order for it to be a meaningful step forward it actually needs to take into account — and through the process be amended — so it meets international standards, and addresses some of the key issues with the law itself. Otherwise you get kind of a patchwork law where a lot of time and energy has been put into it, but it’s not going to achieve what it could’ve achieved to actually come in line with international standards.

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 2019 (IPS)

Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups.

Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show that, on the second anniversary of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh or are effectively interred in domestic, government-run camps.

“Rohingya people feel as though they are in limbo with no end in sight. They are alive, but merely surviving,” said Elizabeth Hallinan, an Oxfam advocate on Rohingya issues, in a statement marking the beginning of the exodus on Aug. 25, 2017.

More than 730,000 Rohingya civilians fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh amid a military-led crackdown in August 2017 that the U.N. and Western governments say included mass killings and gang-rapes.

Oxfam says some 500,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar, including almost 130,000 confined in government-run camps and where red tape often leaves them unable to send children to school or to visit a doctor.

This week, Bangladesh and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) announced plans to assess whether some 3,450 Rohingya refugees will accept Myanmar’s offer to return home, nearly a year after another major repatriation scheme failed.

Many refugees refuse to go back, fearing more violence, Radhika Coomaraswamy, an expert from the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters Thursday, as persecution continues to threaten them in the South Asian nation.   

Coomaraswamy described satellite images of what had been Rohingya villages in Rakhine state, where the government’s slash-and-burn approach had seen settlements “bulldozed” until there was “not a tree standing”.

Sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar would expose them to “near-apartheid laws”, and a government that must give approval for marriages between Buddhist women and men of other faiths, including Muslims.

“What are we sending them into, unless there’s some kind of promises being made for a pathway to citizenship that will give them rights?” Coomaraswamy asked in a press briefing in New York 

“It’s not only the issue of safety, physically, but also the fact that they should not have to live like people are living in” the displacement camps in Sittwe and elsewhere in Rakhine state, she added.

In Coomaraswamy’s report, the panel of independent investigators, set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2017, said the sexual violence committed by Myanmar troops against Rohingya women and girls in 2017 showed a genocidal intent to destroy the group.

“Hundreds of Rohingya women and girls were raped, with 80 percent of the rapes corroborated by the mission being gang rapes. The Tatmadaw (military) was responsible for 82 percent of these gang rapes,” the 61-page document said.

Myanmar’s government has denied entry to the U.N. investigators, who instead visited refugee camps in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand, and spoke with humanitarians, academics and researchers.

Myanmar’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS. Myanmar denies widespread wrongdoing and says the military campaign across hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine was in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Coomaraswamy called on world leaders and CEO’s to cut business ties with the Tatmadaw’s businesses, and said there was a small window of hope for prosecutions under a U.N. investigation mechanism in Geneva.  

The panel has gathered new evidence about alleged perpetrators and added their names to a confidential list to be given to U.N. human rights boss Michelle Bachelet and another U.N. inquiry that is readying cases for possible future trials.

By Stella Paul
SHWE THAUNG YAN, Myanmar, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

In 2015, Worldview International Foundation began a mangrove restoration project, planting saplings of the trees on about 121 hectares of land in Myanmar’s Ayyerwady region.

In this video, Aung Aung Myint tells IPS when the mangrove restoration began and elaborates on the main species that have been planted. Originally, Myint says, the condition of the soil was concerning, but has increased over the years.

Young planters stand guard by mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
SHWE THAUNG YAN, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

Htay Aung is having a moment. The 63-year-old retired professor of Marine Science sits at the foot of a Buddha statue atop a hill on Shwe Thaung Yan sub township, in Myanmar’s Ayyerwady region, almost in meditation. Below him, a vast thicket of mangrove glistens in the gold of a setting sun. For Aung, this stretch of mangroves—known as the Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park—is a symbol of joy, hope and all things good.

“We gave three years of hard work in planting these trees. Now they are growing tall. Soon, they will be the biggest assets of our people,” he says, pointing at the forest and the tiny dot of houses that appear in the horizon.

The restored mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mangroves in Myanmar
This mangrove forest is spread across an area of 2,557 square kilometres (km)—almost the size of Luxembourg.

However, in most places, the density is wafer thin thanks to rampant clearing of the mangroves for space to breed shrimps and for firewood etc. According to a recent study by Pierre Taillerdat, Massimo Lupascu and Daniel Friess, Myanmar loses about 21 square km of its mangrove forests each year.

Shwe Thaung Yan, about 185 km north west of Yangon, once had a severely degraded forest where 75 percent of its mangroves had been destroyed.

Then the story changed.

In 2015, just before the rains came, a motley crowd of a few hundred men, women and youths from the fishing villages, wearing shinny plastic gumboots and carrying sling sacks filled with mangrove saplings, gathered along the muddy swamp in Myagi—one of the three villages under Shwe Thaung Yan.

For several hours a day, they planted the saplings in the muddy soil made fertile and nutrient rich by regular tides.
By October of that year, they had planted over 700,000 trees on three square km of land.

Since then, the plantation drive has taken place each year. By the end of October 2018, the community planted six million trees in three villages of under Shew Thaung Yan, covering 9 square km of land—an area over four times bigger than the city of Monaco.

Leading the planters from the front, besides Aung were U BoNi and Aung Aung Myint, experts in mangrove research and costal ecosystems restoration. The three are currently associated with Worldview International Foundation (WIF)—a Norwegian charity co-founded by Arne Fjortoft, a former journalist turned politician and a renowned environmentalist.

“We used the satellite images, studied the images meticulously and created a map that shows the exact patches in the mangrove forest that had gone bare. We shared this information with the villagers. We also marked the areas and divided the planters in several groups and assigned each group a certain area,” BoNi tells IPS.

Before the plantation started, WIF entered into an active partnership with Myanmar’s Ministry of Environmental Conservation and two of the country’s leading educational institutions, Myeik and Pathein universities. The land area for planting mangroves—over 7 square km in all—was provided by Pathein University, which is also involved in studying marine science along the coast of Shwe Thaung Yan.

Worldview International Foundation (WIF) signboard by a mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mitigating Climate Change
Mangroves make up only 0.7 percent of the world’s forests, but they have the potential to store about 2.5 times as much CO2 as humans produce globally each year. A 2017 study estimated that the total amount of carbon held in the world’s mangroves was around 4.2 billion tonnes. If this whole amount were released as CO2, it would be equivalent to the annual emissions of China and the United States put together.

Another study said that Myanmar’s mangroves — which is 3 percent of global mangrove forests, shows “huge (blue carbon) potential if conservation can prevent further emissions from their loss and encourage future carbon sequestration through restoration.” So, blue carbon mitigation at the national scale “is well aligned with the Paris Agreement and associated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for some nations,” the study says.

Cameron Keith Richards, professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, visited Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park in 2016 to evaluate the mangrove restoration and its blue carbon stock. In his validation report, which helped the project qualify for selling its carbon stocks, Richards summarised the project saying that it was “reasonably assumed to represent an overall 4.3 million tons of C02 within a 20-year lifecycle of the current trees and additional trees to be planted in the project.”

The mangrove project has opened ways for alternative livelihoods and skill-building opportunities for the community. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Community Development
Shew Thaung Yan is primarily a fishing sub township where catching and selling of fish remain the source of sustenance for its nearly 11,000-strong community.

However, the mangrove project has opened ways for alternative livelihoods and skill-building opportunities for the community: during the monsoon when there is little or no fishing in the sea, the community members earn wages by planting mangrove saplings in the forests around them.

Women of the village have also started a clam farming collective–a first for the community. The collective which presently has 55 members, is running from a site that was earlier used as a nursery for growing mangrove saplings. The women visit the mangrove forest where they collect clams and bring it back to the farm where each of them have a 6 to 10 ft enclosure that are regularly flooded by the tidal waves. The clams have been “sowed’ into the slushy farm soil, where they will thrive and grow fat, feeding on the nutrients brought by the tides.

This is a zero-investment livelihood initiative that promises local women a good earning opportunity, explains Shwe Sandar Oo, the coordinator of the farming project. “The land is free, the clams are free and we have already connected them to buyers,” she tells IPS. The buyers, she says, are hoteliers in Chaung Tha, a beach town popular among domestic and foreign tourists. Big, fleshy clams are high in demand among the tourists and usually fetch half a dollar each.

Clam farmer Thein Thein Sein is full of happiness as she looks upon her zero-investment clam farm in Myagi village of Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Thein Thein Nwe, one of the clam farmers says that it’s the zero-investment that drew her to the collective. Earlier this year, Nwe’s eldest daughter dropped out of school at grade 10, after she failed to pass her grade 10 tests. With the income she earns from her clam farm, the 42-year-old fisherwoman now hopes to send her daughter to a private coach, so she could retake the tests.

Many in the village of Maygi have received clean cookstoves and solar lamps provided by WIF. The village has a media centre where school-going children of the village are learning various skills including basic computer operations, photography and embroidery. Run by WIF, the centre offers scholarship girl students who are promising but too poor to afford tuition fees.

Way to the Future
As 2019 begins, the planters in Shwe Thaung Yan are gearing up to plant two billion trees–their biggest plantation drive to date. Once finished, restoration drive of Shwe Thaung Yan would be complete and the restored forest would store 300 million tonnes of CO2, Uboni says. “After this, we are going to Yangon Division and also the delta division. So, in the new year, we will go to Bago and Mon state to plant mangrove,” he announces.

Aung, on the other hand, is more focused on the underwater marine life, especially conserving the seagrass and the coral bed both of which are available in the sea around Shwe Thaung Yan.

“The seagrass can stock much more blue carbon than the land trees or mangrove. It is also what feeds Dugong or sea cow—a critically endangered sea mammal. So, with the help of WIF and Pathein University, we now aim is to build a marine sanctuary around Shwe Thaung Yan,” he says.

The idea has received the approval of Daw Si Si Hla Bu, the rector of Pathein University. “I want to see our university making significant contribution to coastal ecosystem restoration,” Hla Bu tells IPS.

Arne Fjortoft tells IPS that the funding for the proposed marine sanctuary could be raised from selling off the carbon stock of mangrove forests. For Fjortoft, however, the mangrove restoration, vocational trainings, clam farming and marine life conservation are all part of a big, single picture: “The final goal here is to help bring sustainable development for 12 million people of the country’s coastal communities. And that’s the future we are hoping to see.”

Rohingya after they fled Myanmar in 2017 arrive at Shahparir Dip in Teknaf, Bangladesh. Credit: IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2018 (IPS)

Policies that allow for impunity, genocide, and apartheid are “intolerable” and make repatriation of Rohingya refugees impossible, say United Nations investigators.

While presenting an annual report to the member states at the U.N., Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Yanghee Lee expressed disappointment in Myanmar’s government under State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, stating her hope that it “would be vastly different from the past, but it really is not that much different.”

“The government is increasingly demonstrating that it has no interest and capacity to establish a fully functioning democracy for all its people,” Lee said during a press conference.  

She also added that the Nobel peace prize laureate is in “total denial” about the mistreatment and violence against the Rohingya which forced over 700,000 to flee across the border to Bangladesh, and questioned her staunch support for the rule of law.

“If the rule of law were upheld, all the people in Myanmar, regardless of their position, would be answerable to fair laws that are impartially applied, impunity would not reign, and the law would not be wielded as a weapon of oppression,” Lee said.

The Chair of the U.N. fact-finding mission on Myanmar Marzuki Darusman, who also presented a report to the U.N., echoed similar sentiments, noting that the government’s “hardened positions are by far the greatest obstacle.”

“Accountability concerns not only the past but it also concerns the future and Myanmar is destined to repeat the cycles of violence unless there is an end to impunity,” he said.

One of conditions that contributed to the atrocities committed since violence erupted in August 2017 is the shrinking of democratic space, they noted.

While the arrests of Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo gripped international headlines, the government has been increasingly cracking down on free speech and human rights defenders in the country.

Most recently, three journalists from Eleven Media—Nayi Min, Kyaw Zaw Linn, and Phyo Wai Win—were detained and are being investigated for online defamation. If charged and convicted, the journalists face up to two years in prison.

Lee and Darusman also expressed concern over the apartheid-like conditions in Myanmar that persist today including restrictions on movement and access to services such as healthcare and education.

While the government is building new infrastructure for both Rohingya still inside the country and those who fled, Lee noted they are usually segregated from Buddhist communities.

If a policy of separation rather than integration continues, atrocities will be committed yet again.

“It is an ongoing genocide,” Darusman said.

In the fact-finding mission report which looked into the past year’s events, investigators found that four out of five conditions for genocide were met: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Of those, three conditions can still be seen in the country.

For instance, in 2015, Myanmar’s government imposed “birth spacing” restrictions on women, requiring a 36-month interval between children with forced use of contraception in the interim.

The Population Control Healthcare Bill was introduced in response to a 2013 government report that saw “the rapid population growth of the Bengalis [Rohingya] as an extremely serious threat.”

Prior to this, the government enacted a two-child limit on the Muslim community in Rakhine.

And it is because of these conditions that Rohingya refugees cannot go back.

“Repatriation is not possible now. Unless the situation in Myanmar is conducive, I will not encourage any repatriation. They should not go back to the existing laws, policies, and practices,” Lee said.

She urged for the civilian government to adopt laws that protect and advance human rights for all, and for Suu Kyi to use “all her moral and political power” to act.

“Myanmar now stands at a crossroads—they can respond as a responsible member of the United Nations and take up the call for accountability or they can be on the same self-self-destructive road,” Darusman said.

Of the actions that can be taken towards the path to accountability is the pardoning of human rights defenders and journalists who have been arbitrarily detained in order to restore democratic space.

Myanmar should also allow for unhindered access for humanitarian actors and U.N. investigators, Lee added.

“I think we are at a point where Myanmar and the international community both are at [a] juncture where the right choice to make will determine the future of not only Myanmar but peace and security in the region and the world,” she said.

Rohingya refugee women in Jammu, India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
JAMMU, India, Mar 6 2018 (IPS)

In the semi-lit makeshift tent covered with strips of cardboard, five women sit in a huddle. As their young children, covered in specks of mud and soot, move around noisily, the women try to hush them down. Hollow-eyed and visibly malnourished, all the women also appear afraid.

Aged 19-30, they have two things in common: one, they are Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and two, they all live in fear of being sent back to the country they were forced to flee.“In Burma, they are still killing our people. Here, they say we are Bangladeshis. We do not even speak Bangla. Where shall we go? --Ansari

“I came here when I was 13. Now I am 19,” says Nur Kalina, the youngest. She faintly remembers running with her parents from their village in Myanmar’s violence-wracked Rakhine state.

“From Akhyep (Akyab, currently known as Sittwe) we started. We ran through rice fields, then by the river. When we came to Cox’s Bazar (across the border in Bangladesh), our fellow villagers were there. My aunt was there. They said, there is no food, no work, no future here. So my parents came here.”

All the other women in the room – Leila, Shamshida, Taiyyaba and Rahena – nod. Their stories are not very different from Kalina’s. Each one of them came to Jammu in 2012. Since then, the rows of huts in the Kiriyani Talav neighborhood of northern India’s Jammu city have been their home. They all got married here and became mothers.

Each one of them has relatives who are still living in Sittwe who call every now and then to talk about the current situation. Every time, they share news of fresh attacks and new names of relatives and neighbors who have been murdered. “They always tell us, don’t come back here,” says Laila.

Rohingyas in Jammu

There are around 5,743 Rohingyas in Jammu & Kashmir state, according to the state government. Scattered over Jammu, the summer capital of the state, and neighboring Samba district, their number is a fraction of that in Bangladesh (858,898) or Pakistan (350,000).

Yet this tiny population is at the center of a controversy with some local factions accusing them of indulging in criminal activities such as land grabs, illegal settlement and aiding terrorists, and demanding their repatriation.

One of the political parties spearheading the opposition against the Rohingyas is the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JNKPP), a Jammu-based right-wing group led by Harshdev Singh. Singh, formerly a minister in the state, would not talk to IPS despite granting an appointment, but his party has been very vocal in demanding a quick repatriation of the Rohingyas. On March 3, he led a protest march in Jammu and urged the home minister of India to send back the Rohingyas, who he described as a security threat.

“The illegal immigrants pose a threat to communal harmony and pluralism of Jammu. The Union Home Minister should personally intervene and direct the state government to take necessary action in this regard otherwise the situation in Jammu could take an ugly turn like in Kashmir,” Singh was quoted as saying by local media.

Opposition to the Rohingyas intensified after a terrorist attack on an army camp in Sunjwan, an area on the city outskirts. Right after the attack, Kavinder Gupta, a local politican, accused the Rohingyas of being involved in the attack. Although he was criticized by other lawmakers, his party members stood by him.

India, which has not signed the International Refugee Convention, asked the states in August 2017 to identify the Rohingyas for a possible deportation. The decision, however, has since been challenged in the Supreme Court of India by some Rohingya refugees.

A child plays outside a makeshift home in a Rohingya camp, Jammu, India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Fear in the air

Hazara, who asked to go by her first name only, is a 29-year-old Rohingya refugee woman living in a hut bordering the army camp in Sunjwan. Like all the other women Rohingya refugees, Hazara never went to school. With no education and no specific skills, the single mother of two was earning her livelihood by shelling walnuts for her non-Rohingya neighbors. The wages of INR 12 (less than a quarter) for each kilogramme of walnuts were not very high, but they helped the woman feed herself and her family.

However, since the attack on the army camp, it has become difficult to find work.

“The next day when I went to work, they said, ‘You are troublemakers, we don’t want you here.’ Everyone was looking at me suspiciously, as if I have done something very bad,” recalls Hazara, who is now working as a part time domestic for a Kashmiri Muslim family. This will help her pay the rent for the hut – a princely sum of INR 500 (about 7 dollars) – but not enough to feed herself and her children. Hazara is largely dependent on a Madrasa (religious school) run by fellow Rohingyas for her survival.

Mushtaq Ahmed, one of the 16 teachers at the school, says that right after the attack on the army camp, security forces entered the school to question them about the assailants. Since then, the attitude of the neighbors changed dramatically.

“Since 2017, we have been hearing things like we are collabrating with militants, helping them, etc, but this time, the attacks are more direct. Some women are still shelling wallnuts, but once the season is over, who knows what will happen?” Ahmed said.

Illiteracy, child marriage and poor health

There are 40 Rohingya refugee families in Kiriyani Talav locality. None of the women in these families has had a formal education. Uneducated and unskilled, they were married before the age of 18.

Nur Kalina was married at 14. “The elders in the community said it’s a sin to stay unmarried for long. So my parents got me married soon after I started to menstruate,” recalls Kalina. All of 19, the young woman already has three children.

“Child marriage is rampant in the Rohingya refugee community,” says Ravi Hemadri, who heads the Development and Justice Initiative (DAJI), a Delhi-based NGO that partnered with UNHCR until last month in documenting the Rohingya refugees and helping them access the aid and support they are entitled to.

At DAJI, activists have been campaigning against early marriage, Hemadri says, but the progress is slow. The refugees live in extreme poverty which drives the families to marry off their daughters early, he explains.

Laila Begum, 34, and Taiyyaba, 29, have asthma, while Taiyyaba has a 3-year-old daughter with stunted growth and weak limbs. As many as 12 women in the camp said they are suffering from respiratory diseases, while some, including Kalina’s mother Medina, 54, has tuberculosis. Kalina also has chronic lower back pain that often keeps her in bed.

None of the women gets regular medical treatment because they can’t afford it. Laila, who has visited the government-run hospital a few times for free medicine, says that the hospital asked her to pay INR 2000 (about 30 dollars) for medicine the last time.

“I don’t have so much money,” she said, adding that only the widows among them are entitled to some aid – 10 kgs of free rice each month.

Hope in the middle of hopelessness

Early this year, the UNHCR ended its partnership with DAJI in Jammu. The UN organization also advised the Rohingyas to move elsewhere in view of the growing political opposition. Since then, some of the Rohingya refugees – about 200 of them – have indeed moved out of Jammu.

But the women refugees say that despite the growing threat to their safety, leaving is not an option. “In Burma, they are still killing our people. Here, they say we are Bangladeshis. We do not even speak Bangla. Where shall we go? Why shall we leave? There is no safe place for us, so only way is to keep quiet,” says Ansari, a Rohingya woman.

Excerpt:

Rohingya people alight from a boat as they arrive at Shahparir Dip in Teknaf, Bangladesh. Credit: IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Mar 2 2018 (IPS)

Nobel Laureates Mairead Maguire, Shirin Ebadi and Tawakkol Karman met with more than 100 women refugees in camps in the coastal Cox’s Bazar region of Bangladesh this week, as well as travelling to the “no man’s land” where thousands of Rohingya have been stranded between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Shirin Ebadi of Iran spoke to IPS correspondent Naimul Haq in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka.

Maguire is a co-founder of Peace People, a movement committed to building a just and peaceful society in Northern Ireland. She and Betty Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. She is well known for her work with victims of conflict around the world.

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, former judge and human rights activist and founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women’s, children’s, and refugee rights.

From left to right (center), Tawakkol Karman, Shirin Ebadi and Mairead Maguire. IPS correspondent Naimul Haq stands behind Ms. Maguire. Credit: IPS

Following are excerpts from the exclusive interviews.

IPS: You have called for trials of the Myanmar leaders in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing alleged genocide. How do you intend to seek justice when the world seems to be so divided over the Rohingya issue?

Mairead Maguire: “The leaders in Myanmar have committed genocide and we have all the witnesses for that. We heard women [speak of] being tortured, raped and their homes being burnt.”

Maguire related the story of a woman who was raped repeatedly and left for dead.

“The unconscious woman was later picked up by an elderly woman who took her to safety. That story of that woman being raped can be multiplied many times and you can well imagine the situation. So obviously we can understand that this is a policy of the Myanmar government to terrorize and expel the Rohingya people. They don’t even recognize them as their citizens. So the international community must take steps to do something. And we must take the Myanmar government to the ICC.

“A lot of people are working on this, like international lawyers, and we will continue until this is fulfilled. The second thing that we want to do is that Aung San Suu Kyi is our sister laureate. We believe that as long as she remains silent about what the Myanmar government is doing she is complacent with the genocide. But we want to go and see Aung San Suu Kyi and we want to ask her to break her silence.”

Maguire explained that she and her colleagues wish to speak to envoys of as many countries as possible.

“We would continue to pursue this dialogue with the ambassadors and leaders of the governments. We would also contact the United Nations and the European Parliament until this is taken to the international court.

IPS: What is your opinion on the voices of the global community, especially the influential leaders, remaining silent to a large extent on the Rohingya issue?

“I think many governments have interests in Myanmar, especially economic. In Rakhine state there are lot of resources like diamonds and costly stones. It’s all about money and oil. China also has interests in Maynmar because of these reasons. Unfortunately, many governments put profits before people. It should be other way around – governments should be responsible for taking care of their people. But they don’t want to say anything on human rights and justice because of political interests. However, we have to say as leaders, as Nobel Laureates, people are important, every person is important and it is wrong because of economic and political ties to allow people to be destroyed like this. We have to speak out and move the world’s conscience.

A Rohingya woman and her child at a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Kamrul Hasan/IPS

IPS: Do you believe that the United Nations has played its due role?

“No, the UN has not done enough. Human beings have a right to life, right to security and the governments must defend those rights of their people. And we have seen what the Myanmar government has done. I was there as part of a Nobel delegation 18 years ago on the Thai border with Myanmar and witnessed Karen people living in refugee camps who had to flee Burma. I had met many women then who were raped and carrying children of Burmese soldiers. So what we have seen in Cox’s Bazar [Rohingyas] the situation is not new. The Burmese military has been doing this for a long, long time.”

IPS: How can media coverage help bring justice to the victims?

“Women told us their stories of children being beaten, women being raped and their husbands being killed and houses burnt, which were absolutely horrific. The surviving women wanted us to tell their stories to the world so that their sufferings are known and they can then seek justice. They can have their national identity and go back to where they belong. So IPS can tell the real stories because when people hear these stories they cannot ignore them. We need the media like you. Because people don’t believe. It is diabolical what the Burmese soldiers have done to the Rohingya people, thinking nobody will know – but when you bring the truth to the light of day they cannot continue like this.”

Asked about the role of Bangladesh in welcoming the Rohingya refugees, she said, “It’s a wonderful example to other countries who have refugees on their borders. You have opened doors for a million or more and Europe is closing their doors. It is indeed a contrasting situation. When we went to the camps I was so astonished to see how well-organised they were. It’s wonderful to see how the government and the NGOs were working together.”

IPS: How can Myanmar be brought before the ICC?

Shirin Ebadi: Unfortunately, Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute [convention] for the ICC. So the only way this can happen is for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to decide to send the case of Myanmar to the ICC as they did in the case of Sudan.

What has happened to the Rohingya people is indeed a crime of genocide. In fact, the United Nations, the United States, the European Union has all acknowledged that it is genocide. That is why I am very much hopeful that the UNSC will debate this case but my only concern is China as a member of the UNSC may use its right to veto because of its economic interests in Myanmar.”

Ebadi also called on the wealthy Muslim countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, to do more for the Muslim-minority Rohingya.

“They are not giving any assistance, or they are giving very little. They prefer to spend their money on buying weapons which they use for killing people. So, my message to them is come and see the plight of the fellow Muslims and how they are being treated and my message is also to the Islamic countries – shame on you for not helping.”

What message would you give to your fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi? And do you also hold her responsible for the situation?

“I am indeed very sorry Aung San Suu Kyi, a person whom I had campaigned for on many occasions when she was under house arrest to secure her release, has now become complacent in the crime against the Rohingyas. My message to Aung San Suu Kyi is you have to break your silence now. You have to stop the genocide otherwise you would be held responsible and you must answer for your crimes at the international criminal court.”

The Nobel Women’s Initiative, in partnership with the local Bangladeshi women’s organization, Naripokkho, hosted the delegation of the Nobel Laureates to Bangladesh to witness and highlight the situation of the Rohingya refugees and the violence against Rohingya women.

Tawakkol Karman was known as “The Mother of the Revolution” and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 in recognition of her work in nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work in Yemen.

Labourers urgently construct new roads ahead of the monsoon season in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong Rohingya camp. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Feb 28 2018 (IPS)

More than half a million Rohingya refugees crammed into over 30 makeshift camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeast Bangladesh face a critical situation as the cyclone and monsoon season begins in a few weeks’ time.

The United Nations and international and local NGOs, along with the Bangladeshi government, have issued emergency calls to safeguard the population, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Already burdened with the world’s largest refugee crisis, the host country and its partners remain concerned at the slow pace of action on the ground, although preparations are already underway.

The biggest threat is the terrible conditions in the camps, most of which are frail shelters made up of bamboo sticks and plastic tarpaulins unlikely to stand up to gusting winds and heavy downpours.

In mid-January, Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF Country Representative in Bangladesh, sent out a press statement saying, “As we get closer to the cyclone and monsoon seasons, what is already a dire humanitarian situation risks becoming a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of children are already living in horrific conditions, and they will face an even greater risk of disease, flooding, landslides and further displacement,”

“Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene conditions can lead to cholera outbreaks and to Hepatitis E, a deadly disease for pregnant women and their babies, while standing water pools can attract malaria-carrying mosquitoes,” he added. “Keeping children safe from disease must be an absolute priority.”

Rohingya women stand next to their partially constructed new home in Kutupalong camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Meanwhile, massive preparations are underway in the coastal district located some 350 kilometers southeast of the capital Dhaka, where storms and cyclones are common.

At least 138,000 people along the coastal regions of Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong were killed in the April 1991 cyclone, one of the deadliest of the last century.

“The UN migration agency is providing search and rescue training, setting up emergency medical centres, establishing bases for work crews and light machinery, and upgrading shelters to mitigate disasters when the monsoon and cyclone season hits the world’s biggest refugee settlement in the coming weeks,” Fiona MacGregor, Public Information Officer for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Cox’s Bazar, told IPS.

“As Bangladesh’s annual wet season approaches, IOM is also working to secure infrastructure and boost resilience among Rohingya refugees and the local community,” MacGregor added. “This includes the creation of disaster risk reduction safety committees to warn the refugees of what to expect and how to prepare for the wind and rain that are expected to bring deadly floods and landslides to the Cox’s Bazar camps.”

Most of the Rohingya refugees now live in crowded tarpaulin shelters on extremely slippery and muddy slopes. Unlike in the rest of the country, the terrain in Ukhiya and Teknaf, where the camps are located along the coast, is not flat but hilly.

This man’s strenuous journey illustrates how difficult it can be to navigate the steep terrain of Bangladesh’s camps even in clear weather. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

During the heavy monsoon, rushing water along with mud and uprooted trees play havoc, as witnessed in previous years.

Rehana Begum, one of the refugees living in Kutupalong, the biggest camp told IPS, “I experienced losing my own home in 2011. I have also witnessed people being killed during heavy rainfall. Water rushes in from upstream and spares nothing on its way. Even children are known to have been killed in such situations.”

Noor-e-Khatum, a newcomer settling in at Balukhali camp, said, “I feel unsafe at night when howling wind from the sea often blows hard on my roof. It is frightening to sleep at night with children crying for help.”

Studies prepared by IOM and its partners indicate that at least 100,000 refugees and vulnerable families in the local community face life-threatening risks from landslides and floods. Thousands more refugees are also at risk from disease and may be unable to get aid if flooding cuts off access to parts of the camps.

But given the scale of the refugee population, the lack of suitable land, and the challenging environmental conditions, it will be impossible to move everyone at risk. Rapid emergency response action will be vital to reduce loss of life, IOM says.

The government is also coordinating the efforts to safeguard the Rohingya, a Muslim minority who have long faced unprecedented persecution in their ancestral homeland in Rakhine state in neighbouring Myanmar.

A complete fatality count of Rohingyas in Myanmar is unknown, but hundreds of villages have been burned to the ground and a least 6,700 Rohingya met violent deaths in Rakhine in the month after the military’s scorched-earth campaign, according to Doctors Without Borders.

According to numerous eyewitness accounts from refugee women who arrived in Bangladesh, rape and sexual violence were also used as a widespread weapon of war and to force to Rohingya from their homes.

Ali Hussain, Deputy Commissioner of Cox’s Bazar told IPS, “We have identified about 35 percent of the refugee population as vulnerable to extreme weather and plan to shift them immediately to a nearby location on 500 acres of land. We also plan to remove all obstructions on the way of the natural drainage of water and also excavate fish ponds to catch rainwater so that the areas are not flooded.”

Hussain said that the government has sufficient food stocks for the refugees to last until end of the monsoon. Soldiers deployed around the camps are also constructing new asphalt roads to facilitate movement of vehicles coming to the camps.

An anonymous army captain told IPS, “We have massive works of constructing new roads while strengthening the existing ones to facilitate smooth movement of vehicles, especially emergency vehicles like ambulances.”

Hassan Abdi, sexual and reproductive health emergency coordinator from UNFPA, The United Nations Population Fund told IPS, “We are especially concerned about the approximately 48,000 pregnant women who live in these camps and are most vulnerable, moving them to safe shelters within a short period of time can be logistically challenging.  As part of the emergency preparedness we have identified some stable facilities that can then be used to shelter pregnant women who are on their due dates (around 16,000) or expected to deliver within a week till their safe deliveries.

“At the same time,” Abdi continued, “We are also focusing on ensuring there is enough prepositioned stocks of emergency reproductive health kits like clean delivery kits for clean and safe deliveries which will be distributed to visibly pregnant mothers in the camps. Mobile medical teams will be made available to help in screening, pregnancy check-ups and facilitating safe deliveries during the monsoon.”

To enhance resilience in face of the extreme weather ahead, at least 650 people from the refugee and local communities are receiving search and rescue and first aid training from IOM, in collaboration with local Fire Service and Civil Protection Department.

Those trained will act as community focal points in emergency situations, giving early warning messages in the event of any threats of weather disasters and also assisting in first line emergency response, says the deputy commissioner’s office.

With landslides and soft slippery mud expected to cause roadblocks and obstructions of major drains and waterways, it will be crucial to be able to clear these as quickly as possible.

Light machinery will be installed and work crews established at ten strategic points across the camps as part of the Site Maintenance Engineering Project – a joint initiative between IOM, UNHCR and WFP.

Five specialist medical centres are also being established across the district to deal with outbreaks of acute diarrhoea, which are expected due to the impact of flooding on water and sanitation in the camps. This can often lead to fatalities, particularly among children.

Meanwhile, the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed to start repatriating some 6,000 refugees, although Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam clarified in remarks on Feb. 25 that no one would be forced to return against their will.

In the meantime, the influx of refugees – which less than it was – continues in the face of ongoing atrocities, now mostly in Maungdaw province, where homes have reportedly been burned, leaving villages like ghost towns.

Rohingya refugees carry blankets at a camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Jan 16 2018 (IPS)

With discussions underway between Bangladesh and Myanmar about the repatriation of more than a half a million Rohingya refugees, many critical questions remain, including how many people would be allowed back, who would monitor their safety, and whether the refugees even want to return to violence-scorched Rakhine state.

A Joint Working Group (JWG) consisting of government representatives from Myanmar and Bangladesh was formed on Dec. 19 and tasked with developing a specific instrument on the physical arrangement for the repatriation of returnees."Three elements of safety – physical, legal and material – must be met to ensure that return is voluntary and sustainable." --Caroline Gluck of UNHCR

A high-ranking Bangladeshi foreign ministry official who requested anonymity told IPS, “The Myanmar government has been repeatedly requested to allow access to press and international organisations so they can see the situation on the ground. Unless the world is convinced on the security issues, how can we expect that the traumatized people would volunteer to settle back in their homes where they suffered being beaten, tortured and shot at?”

He says, “The crimes committed by the Myanmar regime are unpardonable and they continue to be disrespectful to the global community demanding access for investigation of alleged genocide by the regime and the dominant Buddhist community.

“The parties who signed the deal need to consider meaningful and effective and peaceful refugee protection. In Myanmar, as a result of widespread human rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country and are living as refugees in camps or settlements also in Thailand and India. The same approach of reconciliation and effective intervention by the international community must be in place.”

A human right activist pointed out that the very people who are to return to Myanmar have no say in the agreement. Their voices are not reflected in the agreement which does not clearly outline how and when would the Rohingyas return home.

Asked about the future of the Rohingyas, Fiona Macgregor, International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spokesperson in Cox’s Bazar, told IPS, “Formal talks on repatriation have been held bilaterally between the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar and IOM has not been involved in these.”

“According to IOM principles it is crucial that any such return must be voluntary, safe, sustainable and dignified. At present Rohingya people are still arriving from Myanmar every day who are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. IOM continues to focus efforts on supporting the needs of these new arrivals, as well as those who have arrived since August 25, those who were living here prior to August and the local host community in Cox’s Bazar.”

Recently, top brass in the Myanmar regime said that it was “impossible to accept the number of persons proposed by Bangladesh” for return to Myanmar.

The deal outlines that Myanmar identify the refugees as “displaced residents.” Repatriation will require Myanmar-issued proof of residency, and Myanmar can refuse to repatriate anyone. Those who return would be settled in temporary locations and their movements will be restricted. In addition, only Rohingyas who fled to Bangladesh after October 2016 will be repatriated.

According to official sources, a meeting of the Joint Working Group supervising the repatriation will be held on January 15 in Myanmar’s capital to determine the field arrangement and logistics for repatriation with a fixed date to start repatriation.

As of January 7, a total of 655,500 Rohingya refugees had arrived in Cox’s Bazar after a spurt of violence against the minority Muslim Rohingya people beginning in August 2016, which left thousands dead, missing and wounded.

Caroline Gluck, Senior Public Information Officer at UNHCR Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, told IPS that the agency is currently appealing for 83.7 million dollars until the end of February 2018 to fund humanitarian operations.

In March, the UN and its partners will launch a Joint Response Plan, setting out funding needs to assist Rohingya refugees and host communities for the 10-month period to the end of the year.

Regarding the repatriation process, Gluck said, “Many refugees who fled to Bangladesh have suffered severe violence and trauma. Some have lost their loved ones and their homes have been destroyed. Any decision to return to Myanmar must be based on an informed and voluntary choice. Three elements of safety – physical, legal and material – must be met to ensure that return is voluntary and sustainable.

“While UNHCR was not party to the bilateral arrangement between Myanmar and Bangladesh, we are ready to engage with the Joint Working Group and play a constructive role in implementing the modalities of the arrangement in line with international standards.”

She added that UNHCR is ready to provide technical support to both governments, including registering the refugees in Bangladesh and to help determine the voluntary nature of their decision to return.

“As the UN Secretary-General has noted, restoring peace and stability, ensuring full humanitarian access and addressing the root causes of displacement are important pre-conditions to ensuring that returns are aligned with international standards.

“Equally important is the need to ensure that the refugees receive accurate information on the situation in areas of potential return, to achieve progress on documentation, and to ensure freedom of movement. It is critical that the returns are not rushed or premature, without the informed consent of refugees or the basic elements of lasting solutions in place.”

Gluck noted that while the numbers of refugees have significantly decreased, their needs remain urgent – for food, water, shelter and health care, as well as protection services and psychosocial help.

“The areas where the refugees are staying are extremely densely populated.  There is the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and fire hazards,” she said. “And, with the rainy season and monsoon rains approaching, we are very concerned at how this population, living in precarious circumstances, will be affected. UNHCR it working with partners to prepare for and minimize these risks.”

She said UNHCR has already provided upgraded shelter kits for 30,000 families; and will expand distributions for around 50,000 more this year. The kits include bamboo pieces and plastic tarpaulin, which will allow families to build stronger sturdier, waterproof shelters, better able to withstand heavy rains and winds.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh wait in limbo. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Jan 14 2018 (IPS)

The repatriation of Rohingya refugees driven from their villages through violence and terror appears uncertain, with critics saying the agreement legalising the process of their return is both controversial and impractical.

Shireen Huq, a leading women’s rights activist and founder of Naripokkho, one of the oldest women’s rights organisations here, told IPS, “In my view Bangladesh should not have rushed into the bilateral ‘arrangement’ and especially without the involvement of the United Nations or consulting the refugees themselves."It is the same old story. They would move from a camp in Bangladesh to a camp in Myanmar." --Shireen Huq

“Bangladesh should have engaged in a diplomatic tsunami to gain the support of its neighbours and in particular to win the support of China and Russia. The international community has to step up its pressure on Myanmar to stop the killings, the persecution and the discrimination.”

The uncertainty deepened with Myanmar regime still refusing to recognize the refugees as their citizens, throwing the possibility of any peaceful return into doubt.

UNHCR estimates there have been 655,000 new arrivals in Bangladesh since Aug. 25, 2017, bringing the total number of refugees to 954,500.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a memorandum of understanding on Nov. 23, 2017 on the repatriation of Rohingya people who fled their ancestral home in Rakhine state in the wake of military assaults on their villages.

But Huq notes that a similar 1993 bilateral agreement to repatriate Rohingya refugees who had fled to Bangladesh was not very successful as the voluntary repatriation was opposed by the majority of the refugees.

She describes Bangladesh government’s generosity and the subsequent responsibilities as a ‘job well done’ but she fell short of praising the deal, saying, “This is going to be a repeat of the 1993 agreement where involving only bilateral efforts clearly showed that it does not work.”

“They [Rohingyas] are going to be here for a long time,” Huq predicted. “If we understand correctly, the Rohingyas will not be allowed to return to their previous abode, their own villages, but moved to new settlements. In that case, it is the same old story. They would move from a camp in Bangladesh to a camp in Myanmar. It will be another humanitarian disaster.”

She continued, “If this arrangement is implemented as it is, it will be like another ‘push back’ of the refugees by Bangladesh, unless the international community oversees the repatriation and can guarantee their safe and peaceful settlement and rehabilitation.”

While the deal has been welcomed by the international community, including the US, the European Union and the United Nations, others urged the government to involve a third party to ensure a sustainable solution to the crisis.

They say that Bangladesh has little experience in managing an international repatriation process and unless it fulfills the international repatriation and rehabilitation principles, the agreed terms may not be strong enough to create a lasting solution.

Muhammad Zamir, a veteran diplomat, told IPS that the world should not leave Bangladesh to shoulder the complex problem alone.

“It is unfair to burden Bangladesh with such a huge task that requires multiple factors to be considered before initiating the process of repatriation. The foremost issue is ensuring security or protection of the refuges once they return.”

Zamir, who just returned from a visit to the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, says, “The situation in the camps is already a humanitarian disaster and it is getting worse by the day. These people [Rohingya] are already traumatized and confused. They have suffered enough with the ordeals they have gone through. There is no guarantee that with the nightmares still fresh in their minds they would want to return so early unless there are strong and serious efforts to guarantee their protection in the long run.”

A Joint Working Group (JWG) consisting of government representatives from Myanmar and Bangladesh was formed on Dec. 19 and tasked with developing a specific instrument on the physical arrangement for the repatriation of returnees. The first meeting of the JWG is due to take place on Jan. 15, 2018.

Former army general M Sakhawat Husain, a noted columnist and national security and political analyst, told IPS, “The Rohyngas’ legitimate and minimum demand to be recognised as citizens of their native land is completely ignored in the agreement. In the face of continuous persecution still going on, as widely reported, how can voluntary repatriation take place?”

“The most damaging clause seems to be agreeing on the terms of Myanmar that is scrutiny of papers or authenticity of their being residence of Rakhaine,” he added.

“Most of these people fled under sub-humane and grotesque torture. It would be difficult for Bangladesh to send them back voluntarily. The report suggests that unless a guarantee of security and minimum demand of citizenship not given these people may not go back.”

Former ambassador Muhammad Shafiullah said, “It is quite uncertain to execute such a huge repatriation process without involving the UN system although Myanmar has outright rejected involving the UN. In such a situation how can we expect a smooth repatriation process?”

Shafiullah expressed deep concern about the inadequate financial support for humanitarian aid to the Rohingya camps.

“The UN system so far could garner funds for six month. Another pledging meeting is expected before the fund is exhausted. Bangladesh cannot support such an overwhelming burden alone for a long time. Precisely for this reason Bangladesh signed the agreement for repatriation although the terms were not favorable to her.”