"Myanmar Focus" #1 (March 12-19)
Anti-junta meetings in Europe; a new campaign to end jet fuel imports; the UK's response comes under criticism; and suggestions for further reading.
The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) virtually met with the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with ASEAN on March 14. From CRPH screenshots, it appears that Heidi Hautala, a European Parliament vice-president, was present. A CPRH statement noted that the group “presented its future planned activities and urged the European Parliament to continue their support in solving Myanmar’s crisis”. A draft agenda suggests that the European External Action Service (EEAS) was represented by Frédéric Maduraud, Desk Officer for Myanmar and Brunei, Division for Southeast Asia.
On March 10, Myanmar civil society organization “Blood Money” launched a campaign to stop the global sale of aviation fuel to the country’s junta, citing the deadly impact of military airstrikes on the civilian population. Radio Free Asia published an interesting article on this. In 2023, the EU and UK imposed sanctions on jet fuel imports in Myanmar. But an Amnesty report from January showed how the junta and their businesses are working around these sanctions. A report in The Conversation last month noted how jet fuel imports typify the weakness of Western sanctions on Myanmar’s junta.
Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, in remarks to the Human Rights Council, called for stronger, coordinated international action. “The past five months have seen a marked escalation of attacks on civilians, with airstrikes against civilian targets increasing fivefold,” he said. “Now, it has launched a program of forced military recruitment, pushing young people to go into hiding, flee the country, or join resistance forces – young people who are unwilling to be drafted into the junta’s campaign of brutality.” Importantly, he also urged foreign governments to formally engage with the National Unity Government, ethnic resistance organisations, and Myanmar’s civil society. Next week in this section, I’ll be digging deeper into European engagement (or lack of it) with the ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) and why much more engagement is necessary.
The NUG’s human rights minister, Aung Myo Min, was in Europe this month, including at the United Nations in Geneva, where he met with Jérôme Bonnafont, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations Office in Geneva. Min also attended the CEE-Asia Forum in Bratislava. I participated, in the event and interviewed the minister. You can see me looking a little fatigued around minute 3 of this video, in Burmese, about his visit.
The junta’s Union Election Commission chairman Ko Ko visited Moscow to observe the Russian presidential “election” and met Russian Central Election Commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova. He wasn’t the only Southeast Asian election official to travel to Russia to observe these “elections” (I recently argued we should call these sorts of rigged elections “enfortions”) but it’s an indication of what the junta thinks elections should look like. Ranieri Sabatucci, the EU ambassador to Myanmar, tweeted: “The only reason one would want to learn from Russian elections is if you want to run elections, unopposed and under an intimidating environment”
There’s a lot of buzz around the EU about the #OurVoicesOurNeeds exhibition that will be held in Brussels between March 20-24. Billed as an exhibition about the “unseen voices of women from Myanmar”, it will be co-hosted by Heidi Hautala. It will be free. Here’s a short video about the exhibition:
Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmar’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, gave a speech at the UN in New York on March 13 during an open debate on conflict prevention. Tun clearly showed his frustration at the international community: “The people of Myanmar and I myself are already tired of appealing [to] the UN, in particular the UN Security Council, to help the helpless Myanmar people as our appeals have so far met with lack of concrete action, even serious attention from them. Even the people of Myanmar are asking a valid question, where are you, the United Nations, to save lives in Myanmar?” Importantly, too, he focused on another issue that is likely to become a bigger part of the NUG/anti-junta narratives in the coming month: the junta’s introduction of forced conscription last month. “Since early February this year, we, the people of Myanmar and the National Unity Government have kept calling for the international community to take necessary action to stop forced conscription of the military junta,” Tun said. Here’s a good primer from the Guardian on the conscription order. DW also produced a nice segment on this, too:
The European Trade Union Confederation and all European Industry Federations have signed a petition calling on the EU to respond to this, in particular the junta’s likely violation of ILO Convention No. 29, which protects civilians from mandatory military conscription that allows imposing work that is not of a purely military nature. Amongst other demands, they again called on the EU to remove Myanmar from the Everything But Arms preferential trade scheme. The NUCC and NLD have urged people to sign this petition (started on March 10) mobilizing public support against the junta’s forced conscription. It’ll be sent to various governments, including the EU. (I’d invite you to also sign the petition.)
On March 13, the UK announced a further £5.2m to support Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, at the launch of the 2024 Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya humanitarian crisis in Geneva. “Until the conditions in Myanmar allow for the refugees to return in a voluntary, safe and dignified manner, the UK remains committed to supporting the Rohingya in Bangladesh, as emphasised in our pledge at the Global Refugee Forum in December,” said the UK’s statement. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the UK’s minister for the Indo-Pacific, later tweeted that Britain has provided £379m to support Rohingya refugees since 2017.
The UK's Human Rights Ambassador, Rita French, delivered a speech to the UN Human Rights Council 55 on March 19. “We are extremely concerned by the military’s recent conscription announcement, which will only inflict more distress on the Myanmar people,” she said. “The Rohingya remain acutely vulnerable after suffering decades of systemic discrimination…We must end the culture of impunity.
Stars of Myanmar Friendship and the Burma Campaign UK took part in a demonstration outside the Foreign Office in London, against the “snail's pace of implementation of new sanctions against the Myanmar military” on March 13. “The British government has still not sanctioned key sectors of support to the Myanmar military, including jet fuel, the gas industry and state banks. Members of the Myanmar community called on Foreign Secretary David Cameron to speed up the pace of new sanctions,” Burma Campaign UK said in a statement. Justice For Myanmar, a campaign group, was less than glowing about Cameron’s response to the Myanmar crisis. Stuart Alan Becker, a former bureau chief of the Myanmar Times, had this to say: There are two reasons for UK Foreign Secretary's foot-dragging on #Myanmar: 1. some British elites are still making cash off the regime, secretly, & perhaps more importantly, he's recently been on the payroll of #CCPChina. That's public record.”
On a side note, Lord Alton of Liverpool finally got an answer from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on his question as to whether gems and precious stones from Myanmar sold by British retailers could have been used to finance the Myanmar military. Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon replied:
“We are clear that UK businesses trading with Myanmar should conduct thorough due diligence to ensure their operations are not benefiting the military regime. We have strengthened our Overseas Business Risk Guidance to warn companies of the risks associated with Myanmar’s extractive sector. We will also continue to consider a range of sanctions targets that reduce the regime’s access to finance, arms and equipment. To date, we have sanctioned the following mining companies for providing economic resources to the Myanmar Security Forces: Myanmar Gems Enterprise, Myanmar Pearl Enterprise, Mining Enterprise 1 and Mining Enterprise 2.”
A Burmese director, Sein Lyan Tun, screened his film Everybody’s Gotta Love Sometimes, about a Burmese migrant looking for love in Parism at CinemAsia Film Festival, which took place in Amsterdam this month. The film premiered last year. Here’s a trailer:
Lastly, if you’re in the UK or will be there on April 17, the Gurka Museum will be showing the documentary Forgotten Allies: the search for Burma’s lost heroes, about the Burmese veterans of the war against Japan. Here’s a trailer:
WHAT TO READ/WATCH:
David Scott Mathieson wrote an interesting review of Damned If You Do:
Foreign Aid and My Struggle to Do Right in Myanmar, a memoir by Ellen Goldstein, a former senior executive at the World Bank and who served as director of the World Bank in Myanmar in 2017.
Andrew Selth, Myanmar: What the generals hear might not be what the world means, Lowy Institute, 12 March
William Jones, ASEAN’s solution to Myanmar is at a tipping point, East Asia Forum, 12 March
AFP, Boom times for Myanmar opium farmers as coup chaos bites, 14 March
Dr. Marcus Brand, the Head of International IDEA’s Myanmar programme, conducted an interesting interview with Ulpiana Lama, the Chief of Mission of the Republic of Kosovo in Thailand. It explored how Kosovo’s experience as it transitioned to a democratic country and the role the international community played could have lessons for Myanmar.