The repression of the Myanmar military junta grows after a year and a half of the coup
The war in Ukraine is sheltering actions that are difficult to confess, and not only by its main protagonists. One of them, cornered by the conflict, is the growing repression of the Myanmar military junta after a year and a half of the coup (February 1, 2021). Since then, all the news that arrives from the distant Asian country is dramatic and dire. Destruction of homes and towns that have forced more than 800,000 people to move to other places, indiscriminate arrests of thousands of people, murders of more than two thousand civilians, systematic torture included in United Nations reports, etc., have turned the country in hell for opponents of the regime.
Meanwhile, and as occurs in innumerable conflicts, the international community is limited to ‘condemning’ such actions with a small mouth. Contextualizing the Burmese situation and without equating it to the Ukrainian one, we contemplate little pressure and sanctions on the military junta that tightly controls the country, although the atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity that are being committed there are recognized.
The world watches the massacre with indifference, while those who illegitimately overthrew the elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy consolidate power with blood and fire. That the adviser to the US State Department, Derek Chollet, calls the ruling military a “bunch of thugs”; that ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) harshly criticize the recent “official” executions of four people, two of them political activists convicted in January of terrorism (Phyo Zeyar Thaw, former MP of the National League for Democracy, and Kyaw Min Yu), and that the rest of the democratic world condemn the brutality and violence of the regime against its own citizens, do little to end the Burmese military regime. Let us remember that there are more than a hundred people sentenced to capital punishment since February 2021.
The coup has plunged Burma into a deep political, social and economic crisis, and has opened a spiral of violence with new civilian militias (People’s Defense Forces, the armed wing of the Government of National Unity loyal to San Suu Kyi) They have exacerbated the guerrilla war that the country has been experiencing for decades, and that are facing the Army, the Police and the clandestine squads called “blood drinkers” that support the Military Junta presided over by General Min Aung Hlaing. Myanmar faces a tense and bleak future in which the suffering of the population will continue to increase.
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