An AFP article published ahead of this week’s meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Laos quotes a diplomat as saying: “The center is still solid under the junta.”
The Southeast Asian envoy who was planning to attend the event went on to warn that Myanmar could “become a failed state.”
This is the main misperception about Myanmar’s revolution that diplomats cling to, whether they are based in Yangon, Bangkok or elsewhere in Southeast or South Asia. It is not just the view of the anonymous Southeast Asian diplomat quoted in the report. It is safe to say it is a diplomatic dogma.
It seems that quite a number of diplomats, mission staff and other international workers in and around Myanmar don’t really live there. Instead, they are ensconced in their own narratives, and they feed these narratives to each other. Through various donors, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and consultancy firms, they commission “research” and “analytical reports” that echo their misperceptions and dogmas.
They sound like they live in echo chambers that completely removes them from reality in Myanmar.
None of these diplomats or international staff say much about the total incompetence of Myanmar’s junta. The State Administrative Council, the moniker the junta has given itself, has done nothing well. It has three accomplishments: mismanagement, failure and a more than three-year-long crime spree.
This does not seem to register in the echo chamber, even though the crime spree includes mass murder among its atrocities.
Diplomats and international “experts” do not talk much about the junta’s daily atrocities and other crimes. Civilians are the prime target of Myanmar’s military. In three years, over 3 million people have been driven from their homes. Most of the population has been driven into poverty.
Not a single day passes without the junta bombing a market, a monastery sheltering refugees, a school, hospital or a residential area. The sole purpose is to destroy and terrorize.
However, in the circles where diplomats and international “experts” compare notes, this is hardly mentioned, as if they accept this as completely normal.
Instead, they talk about their worries that Myanmar could become a “failed state” if the revolution succeeds and the people prevail over the junta.
The diplomats and international “experts” do not shy away from long discussions about the weaknesses and incompetence of the National Unity Government, but they avoid talking about the crimes and incompetence of the military regime, as well as the obvious fact that it is crumbling. The junta and its military are still regarded as the credible and inevitable partner of any future “solution” in Myanmar, which may be why it must be seen as “solidly in control of the center” despite all the defeats that it is rapidly accumulating across the country.
Another widely shared talking point in the diplomatic bubble is that ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) will “for sure stop fighting once they secure control over their own territory.” Every single statement or speech from ethnic revolutionary leaders says the opposite. They keep repeating that they are committed to removing the military dictatorship. For three years, EROs have been training, equipping and fighting in tandem with People’s Defense Forces. They are spilling blood together.
Month by month, allied EROs and PDF liberation forces are becoming increasingly capable and strategic in squeezing faltering junta troops from three sides: from the west and southwest, from the north, and from the east and southeast.
Since October 2023, coordinated offensives by liberation forces have been unrelenting. Once advances by resistance forces in one theater of war abate, an advance starts immediately from another direction as resistance forces elsewhere reposition themselves and build up supplies for another offensive.
If one talks with senior ERO leaders, one can hear only their deep historical experience and determination.
Here’s what one told me:
“It is not possible to trust the Myanmar military. They will always break all the promises and deals they make when they are weak. As soon as they become a bit stronger, they come back to attack, occupy, kill, rape, burn and plunder. We have had more than enough experience with them. Now, when the Bamar population is in rebellion against the junta, we see a historic opportunity to liberate the country, and we will not miss that opportunity.”
What he said was not unique.
However, diplomats and international “experts” cocooned in their echo chambers know better. Nothing can persuade them that EROs are not focused only on the narrow self-interest of taking control of territory and establishing their own states, without any care about what happens in Burma proper and without concern about who occupies Naypyidaw.
In the diplomatic bubble, the talk is about “possible future fragmentation.” This is seen as the biggest threat Myanmar faces. It is a bigger threat than the devastation Min Aung Hlaing and his junta have delivered: Three years of destruction. The annihilation of civilians, villages, towns and cities. The unrelenting attacks on the body and soul of a nation are occurring in front of our eyes.
Among diplomats, this is not a matter of concern or conversation.
Inside the bubble, the focus is on the imaginary disintegration of the country in the future, not the destruction Myanmar’s military is inflicting now.
Last but not the least, those in the bubble are behaving as if China’s electoral manipulation plan is inevitable. Many feel they need to jump on the election train so they can be well-placed in the queue to welcome the new “elected” government.
It does not matter that it is very uncertain whether any election will take place at all. It does not matter that, even if an electoral farce is staged, it will only cover one third of the territory and be completely manipulated and falsified. Still, it seems, everybody in the bubble is ready to welcome the “opening” and “opportunity that should not be missed.”
The usual rationalization of those arguing that the junta is “too strong to fall” is that appeasing the Myanmar military is the only solution to stop further fighting, achieve a ceasefire, bring back stability and reduce civilian suffering.
This argument is nothing but shamefully dishonest. It does not recognize that it is not revolutionary forces that are causing civilian suffering. It is primarily the SAC’s intentional targeting of the civilian population and civilian infrastructure that is creating civilian suffering.
Myanmar’s neighbors have done absolutely nothing to reduce the capacity of the junta to target civilians.
They have applied little real pressure on the SAC to stop it from targeting civilians. India and China are still providing the junta with weapons. Thailand is paying the junta money for gas that the junta uses to continue funding its war of terror against the civilian population.
Myanmar’s neighbors and the whole of ASEAN have not even provided meaningful humanitarian aid to millions of internally dispersed persons. They have not provided shelter for civilian victims of war, which would be adequate for the size of the humanitarian catastrophe. Instead, neighbors preferred to create an invisible but effective cordon sanitaire to protect themselves from refugees and other spillover effects.
It is much more correct to conclude that when diplomats in the bubble talk about concern for the civilian population if the war continues, they are in reality concerned about the possibility of the final fall of the military-as-regime.
Myanmar’s neighbors and other ASEAN countries are not able to imagine the Myanmar state without a military-as-regime. They think that without a military-as-regime there will be no central authority, and in their minds that means chaos and state failure (currently they call it “fragmentation” or “Balkanization”).
So they say that the junta is still “solid in the centre” (which it is not) and that the military “cannot fall” (which it can), because that is their wish. They would like to have the junta solid in the center and they do not want the military to fall.
So they create all those disillusioned, out-of-touch narratives and repeat them in their echo chamber.
The consequence is that Myanmar’s neighbors and international “experts” are not ready for the probable fall of the SAC because they fear it. They remain blinded by their denial of reality.
Igor Blazevic is a senior adviser at the Prague Civil Society Centre. Between 2011 and 2016, he worked in Myanmar as the head lecturer of the Educational Initiatives Program.
