Myanmar’s future: ASEAN tries negotiation as the military junta digs in

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has deployed a new special envoy to mediate a solution to the Myanmar crisis, but their success rests on the whim of a Burmese general, writes Ben Dunant

Myanmar’s military ruler Senior General Min Aung Hlaing (Reuters)

Short, bespectacled and monotonous in his speech, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing might seem an unlikely despot. Yet the colourless general leading Myanmar’s military junta has brought the southeast Asian country to its deepest crisis since it gained independence from Britain more than 70 years ago in the rubble of the Second World War.

Before he launched his coup d’etat on 1 February this year, the country had just completed its second credible election in a row, after half a century of military dictatorship. Myanmar had also made an early start on Covid-19 inoculation – using vaccines from India – after managing earlier outbreaks of the virus without its threadbare healthcare system becoming overwhelmed.

Six months since Min Aung Hlaing’s takeover, however, Myanmar is undergoing a coronavirus catastrophe similar to India’s three months ago. With hospitals crippled by mass workplace strikes, and with many doctors forced into hiding or languishing in prison for defying the junta, severely ill people are suffocating at home while relatives and charity workers scramble for scarce oxygen canisters.