New massacres by Myanmar’s military demand a tougher U.S. response
By Editorial Board,
MIN AUNG HLAING, the military commander who led a coup against Myanmar’s elected civilian government two months ago, celebrated Armed Forces Day on Saturday with a lavish dinner, a fireworks display and a drone show. Meanwhile, his forces were killing more than 100 civilians in more than 40 locations around the country, including children as young as 5. The military had announced beforehand that it would deliberately aim to shoot anti-coup protesters “in the head and back,” and that is exactly what it did. In the city of Mandalay, troops burned a street vendor alive.
Faced with an extraordinary movement of civil resistance that has shut down most of the country, the Myanmar military is betting it can shoot its way out of it. According to local groups, troops have killed more than 400 people since the military seized power on Feb. 1. More than 2,000 have been arrested, including deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The resort to indiscriminate force is a familiar tactic for the Tatmadaw, as the insular Myanmar military is called: The same regiments that carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, and that wage endless wars against insurgencies in other parts of the country, have now been dispatched to Mandalay, Yangon and other cities to assault students, workers and middle-class professionals demanding that democracy be restored.
Such ruthless repression ended mass protests in 1988 and 2007 in Myanmar, also known as Burma. But this time, the consequence could be a Syrian-style civil war in a country of 54 million, with far-reaching consequences for neighbors such as Thailand and China. A report last week in the New York Times said students and activists had taken to the forests for military training and that members of the former parliament had called for the formation of a new federal army. “The sense of rage is palpable,” wrote exiled scholar and activist Maung Zarni in a Post op-ed. He said resistance leaders from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy were repudiating the deposed leader’s former policy of seeking accommodation with the Tatmadaw.
The outside world should have a shared interest in putting a stop to the ongoing atrocities, which ought to trigger the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Over the weekend, defense ministers from a dozen countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia and Japan, joined in condemning the military. But, as in the case of Syria, other regimes are cynically exploiting the chaos: China and Russia dispatched representatives to the Armed Forces Day celebrations and are likely to block any action by the U.N. Security Council.
There is nevertheless more that the United States and its allies can do. Last week, the Biden administration sanctioned two large conglomerates controlled by the Tatmadaw and on Monday suspended a trade deal. It should also target Myanmar’s hard-currency revenue from exports of gas, jade and timber. Foreign partners in the energy business, such as Chevron and Total, should be pressed to cease remittances to the government, and banks should freeze accounts the military uses to launder profits from resource smuggling. Myanmar’s people are putting their lives on the line to resist the coup; they deserve concerted international support.
Read more: Maung Zarni: The Myanmar military is destroying its public image. Politics won’t be the same. Frida Ghitis: Myanmar’s people are fighting back — even as the military guns them down The Post’s View: The people of Myanmar have been robbed of their democracy. But they aren’t giving up. Josh Rogin: Biden is doing the right things on Myanmar. But will it matter?
