‘World sitting and watching’ Burmese politician says as Myanmar slides to war
A year after the coup, renewed calls for action against a military accused of ‘heinous’ attacks on civilians and those resisting its rule.
One year since the military coup in Myanmar, calls for international action are growing louder, notably from the National Unity Government (NUG), made up of elected politicians who were thrown out of office by the generals.
“The world is doing nothing but just sitting and watching,” NUG Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung said.
“In the past year, we have seen extreme brutality and atrocity against the population. We have also seen clear determination from the younger generation, a new generation who are saying they will not accept the regime.”
Attacks against civilians, protesters, and political activists have escalated in recent months.
What began as tear-gassing and beatings have now turned into air assaults, the burning of villages, and targeted shootings across the country.
Herself a victim of the military’s political repression, Zin Mar Aung in 1998 was sentenced to 28 years in prison for political activism. She spent nine of those years in solitary confinement and was released after 11 years.
But Zin Mar Aung says the violence today is worse than the dark decades of previous military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s much worse than what we have seen before. A lot of people used to die in prison and be tortured,” she said. “The atrocity has not lessened. Now they have escalated – they used to do it behind closed doors, but now they do it publicly. Without pragmatic and effective intervention from the international community, this will continue.”
More than 1,500 people have been killed since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which has been monitoring the violence since the start.
Rights group Human Rights Watch says the military’s actions amount to crimes against humanity and include openly shooting 65 protesters and bystanders in Yangon’s Hlaing Tharyar township, the deliberate ramming of protesters in a car in Yangon, and a Christmas Eve attack on civilians in eastern Myanmar that left dozens dead, including women and children and two staff from the non-profit, Save the Children.
Attacks on villagers are also continuing in the ethnic border regions, in an escalation of fighting that has been taking place for decades and culminated in the brutal crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017 that is now the subject of an international genocide investigation.
Having avoided censure for so long, observers say the military is confident it will continue to do so.
“Decades of impunity for the worst crimes have created a mindset that soldiers can brazenly commit such atrocities without fear of being held accountable,” Human Rights Watch researcher Manny Maung wrote recently.
SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES