On Oct. 9, a devastating late-night airstrike by the Myanmar military on Laiza, a Kachin town bordering China under the administration of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), tore through a camp for internally displaced people, killing numerous civilians including 12 children.
This appalling incident adds to the litany of heinous crimes the Myanmar military has committed against civilians throughout its sordid history.
According to a recent report issued by the parallel national Unity Government, which is spearheading the pro-democracy resistance to the junta, the military has committed at least 144 massacres since its 2021 coup, killing 1,595 civilians across the country. This is the same military that committed what the UN called genocide against the Rohingya minority in 2017, driving over 750,000 individuals into Bangladesh in a harrowing exodus.
Yet the international community has failed to hold Myanmar’s criminal generals accountable for their repeated crimes against humanity.
To the contrary, some global actors have engaged the military, facilitating its impunity, under the ill-informed and shortsighted premise that immediate engagement offers the only path to stability. It doesn’t.
A striking example is the recent US$3-million agreement between child rights protector Unicef and the Myanmar junta, which has killed hundreds of children since its illegal coup. There are numerous other examples of international organizations openly engaging with the junta under the guise of humanitarian relief and neutrality. Diplomats and aid actors continue to visit Naypyitaw to shake the generals’ blood-soaked hands, while others invite them to international training sessions, meetings, and diplomatic events.
They claim that their engagement is either unavoidable or a necessary precondition to delivering aid. However, these actions are just further examples in the international community’s long history of enabling military impunity – spitting in the face of the Myanmar people and the movement that fights for them.
Advocates of such engagement often argue that they have no choice. The more honest regional brokers openly say they must engage the junta if they want to achieve their strategic interests. Others say that they do so to bring about stability or provide crucial aid to conflict-affected communities. None of this is true.
The delusional international ‘peacemakers’ who thought that engaging or strengthening the junta’s State Administration Council (SAC) would bring stability or serve their interests are now hopefully acknowledging their ignorance. In fact, the military regime is the primary source of instability and chaos in Myanmar, consistently perpetuating suffering among its people and undermining regional stability and the interests of neighboring countries.
As international players are busy engaging with the regime, the communities most affected by violence or natural disasters continue to go unsupported.
Some in the international community have made numerous concessions to achieve these hollow objectives. Each engagement provides more false confidence to the generals that they can survive in power – and abuse the Myanmar public in whatever way they want to achieve that aim. This approach only exacerbates people’s suffering, emboldens the genocidal dictators, and prolongs the civil war.
A new narrative has emerged recently that is being used to undermine support for the pro-democracy movement and justify junta engagement. This one argues that both sides – the junta and the pro-democracy forces – are unaccountable violent actors committing violence against civilians.
This ignores the primary incentives and motivation driving armed stakeholders. The junta’s sole objective is survival. Having lost its domestic constituency, its primary survival strategy is to inflict mass suffering. Granted, some pro-democracy forces are unaccountable, but this remains a minority, and thus far resistance actors have endeavored to address any such wrongdoings as they arise. Most of them genuinely serve the Myanmar public. This is why they took up arms in the first place. The public is their source of power, funding, and legitimacy.
The difference in motivation and incentives explains why it is the junta that is responsible for the vast majority of civilian killings. The UN Human Rights chief said, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the military and its affiliated militias continue to be responsible for most violations, some of which may constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
In the context of asymmetric warfare in which the Myanmar military has deployed jet fighters and multi-launch rocket systems, it is dishonest and cruel to equate the actions of the brutal military with those who are defending themselves. This disingenuous narrative aims to rationalize inaction or self-interested engagement with the criminal generals.
The both-sides argument ignores this incentive structure and the core dynamic of this conflict. This is a national uprising that is broadly supported by the public – after more than two years – because it serves the public’s interest. More specifically, it aims to dismantle an unaccountable, violent and illegal military dictatorship that has been a dominant source of suffering for the Myanmar people for more than 60 years. My colleagues at USIP and I have conducted extensive and systematic research that supports this conclusion.
At the height of the military’s brutal post-coup crackdown on peaceful protests, the people of Myanmar pleaded for the international community to intervene and halt the onslaught so that they would not have to take up arms. The international community did nothing, leaving the people with no choice but to take up arms in self-defense.
The actions of the Myanmar military are not unique to this post-coup period. They are deeply ingrained in an institution sustained by impunity and international apathy. It is the same people who gunned down peaceful protesters in 1988 and 2007, committed a series of war crimes against ethnic minority communities for decades and conducted genocide just six years ago.
We hear repeatedly that the Myanmar military must be engaged because its domination of Myanmar politics is inevitable. It isn’t! It is a product of the system of impunity that is enabled by the international community.
The international community has fallen into the same pattern since the 2021 coup – falling back on an engagement strategy that provides impunity for the Myanmar military and deepens its delusion that it can defeat the national uprising. This betrayal of the Myanmar public only perpetuates the conflict.
In his book Imperfect Partners, former US Ambassador to Myanmar Scot Marciel highlights the challenges of dialogue and engagement with the Myanmar military. Despite his persistent advocacy for enhanced US engagement across Southeast Asia in his book, Marciel emphasizes the futility of dialogue with the Myanmar military. He argues that their brutality, widespread unpopularity, and unwillingness to participate in dialogue or any form of compromise in good faith make engagement difficult.
In reference to Neville Chamberlain’s policy appeasing Hitler, Italian leader Benito Mussolini once famously remarked that it was akin to “giving a wild beast a taste of blood.” The international community should be acutely aware of the dangers of emboldening a barbaric junta through such engagement. Even if they are unable to actively support the people’s struggle for their own future, they must refrain from providing the generals with false confidence to maintain their grip on power, thereby prolonging the conflict and perpetuating the suffering of the people. Any such engagement would inevitably be recorded in history as complicity in the regime’s heinous crimes against the people of Myanmar.
Ye Myo Hein is a visiting scholar at the US Institute of Peace and a global fellow at the Wilson Center.
