The shift is already visible in who is doing the talking. The one foreign leader to visit Myanmar’s generals since the coup is Cambodia’s Hun Sen, who landed in Naypyidaw in early January 2022 and sat down with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. The five-point plan that ASEAN thought would end the crisis is the reason he went. Months after the junta chief agreed to it in April 2021, little of it has happened.
The plan asked the military to stop the violence, to open dialogue with every party, and to let humanitarian aid through. Reuters reported in October that the junta had done none of these things, a failure that had “tested the credibility” of ASEAN. An ASEAN special envoy was meant to visit. He never got in, because the generals refused to let him meet the detained Aung San Suu Kyi, who is on trial on a string of charges.
The cost on the ground
Nearly 1,500 people have been killed since the coup and nearly 11,500 arrested, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, quoted by Al Jazeera. AFP, citing a local monitoring group, put the death toll at more than 1,400 shortly before Hun Sen’s trip. In December security forces were accused of killing and burning more than 30 civilians, among them two Save the Children staff.
Prak Sokhonn, Cambodia’s foreign minister, was blunt about where this leaves the country. “We feel that all the ingredients for civil war are now on the table,” he said, pointing to two rival governments, several armed forces and guerrilla warfare around the country.
A bloc that cannot agree
ASEAN did take one hard step. In October it kept Min Aung Hlaing away from its annual summit, which the AFP called a rare rebuke from a group often accused of toothlessness. But the bloc works by consensus and prizes non-interference, and Myanmar has divided it since it joined in 1997.
Hun Sen’s own line has drifted. When he announced the visit on December 6, a day after the junta’s foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin, called on him in Phnom Penh, he argued that the bloc was incomplete without Myanmar. “We cannot call ourselves ASEAN if we only have nine of our members,” he said. Prak Sokhonn rejected the claim that the trip would legitimise the junta and said Cambodia was working to let its leader return to ASEAN meetings.
Critics were not persuaded. Amnesty International’s Emerlynne Gil called it “rogue diplomacy” and urged him to cancel. Hunter Marston of the Australian National University described the visit as a rushed trip driven by Hun Sen’s do-it-myself attitude. Protesters burned his poster in Depayin, and similar protests were reported in Mandalay, Tanintharyi and Monywa.
Other members pulled the other way. Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, told Hun Sen by phone that without significant progress Myanmar should be represented only at a non-political level in ASEAN meetings. Cambodia has said Hun Sen will meet Min Aung Hlaing. Reports say he will not be allowed to see Suu Kyi.
Sources
- Protests, anger as Hun Sen visits Myanmar's military leaders (Al Jazeera)
- Cambodia warns of Myanmar civil war (AFP, Taipei Times)
- Hun Sen taking Myanmar matters into his own hands (Asia Times)
- ASEAN Ministers Meet to Discuss Stuttering Myanmar Peace Plan (Reuters, VOA Khmer)
