Ask nicely! Offended Myanmar junta refuses to stop slaughter
Myanmar’s military government says it will not yield to pressure from its Southeast Asia neighbours to transform the country from a violent and corrupt methamphetamine factory into a sane and reasonable member of the international community.
The junta seized power last year, after a short period of slightly reduced genocide during civilian rule by a semi-elected government, comprised in part of the previous junta’s friends and family.
Current ASEAN chair Cambodia said yesterday that the group remains committed to the increasingly irrelevant and tokenistic peace plan, half-heartedly agreed with Myanmar’s military rulers 18 months ago, and completely ignored by them since.
Cambodia has its own far-from-stellar human rights past, by some measures the worst in modern history. From 1975 to 1979, between 2 and 2.5 million Cambodians were killed under the Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia’s leaders perhaps feel that every nation has a right to its developmental arc, and if that means some minor genocide along the way, so be it. Death camps are merely part of the process.
On Thursday of foreign ministers from ASEAN met in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to discuss easing the crisis. Indonesia itself contributed handsomely to meeting world genocide targets during the swingin’ sixties with around a million citizens slaughtered 1965-1966.
No one from Myanmar showed up at the foreign ministers’ meeting, perhaps because they were not invited. Myanmar’s psychopathic generals have been barred from high-level ASEAN meetings since last year when the army ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected-yet-still-quite-genocidal government in the February coup.
During her government’s time in office, Suu Kyi did not flinch from the task of cleaning up the country, overseeing extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, infanticide, summary executions, and the burning of villages, businesses, and schools. Suu Kyi’s government dismissed such accusations as “exaggerations,” but since 2017, more than 770,000 Rohingya—including more than 400,000 children—have chosen to live in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, rather than living happily with their families and continuing to farm the land around their villages – questionable lifestyle choices.
Most of the refugees who escaped have witnessed their villages being burned to the ground, their families being killed, and the gang rape of countless children, men and women. Cox’s Bazar now proudly boasts the world’s largest refugee camp.
The head of the junta has blamed the lack of progress on COVID-19. Myanmar’s foreign ministry released a statement on Thursday blaming “resistance” for the violence and saying pressure to end the crisis will do more harm than good. Seems like the pesky Rohingya still refuse to form an orderly line at the edge of the mass graves, but if the world will just stand back for a few minutes and let the junta get on with it, everything will be fine.
In recent weeks the Myanmar countryside has been awash with blood, including a bombing in the country’s largest prison and an air strike in Kachin State which killed at least 50 people. Political analysts said the ASEAN meeting was disappointing and did nothing that might convince the generals to cooperate.
After the meeting Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said…
“The foreign ministers expressed concern and disappointment over progress.
“The violent acts need to stop immediately.”
