The sentence, believed to be one of the longest meted out to a journalist in the country, cements Myanmar’s reputation as one of the world’s most profligate human rights abusers. Since the generals seized power in a February 2021 coup, sparking an ongoing bloody civil war, more than 4,000 people have been killed and an estimated 20,000 have been imprisoned for opposing the military takeover. Dozens of prisoners are missing and believed to have been murdered by the regime. About 50 people were arrested in June simply for posting anti-regime messages on social media.
At the same time Mr. Sai Zaw Thaike was receiving his unjust sentence, the leaders of Myanmar’s neighboring countries were meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, for the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. Myanmar’s leaders, known as the State Administration Council, or SAC, were thankfully not invited. It would have been the perfect occasion for the regional forum to issue the strongest possible denunciation of the Myanmar regime’s continuing atrocities, and a concrete plan of economic pressure to reverse the coup and end the suffering.
What the world got instead from the Jakarta talkfest was a glaring example of the regional forum’s impotence and increasing irrelevance. Instead of a show of unity, the summit underscored the inability of the nine disparate ASEAN members (not including Myanmar) to come together around a common policy to resolve one of the world’s worst abominations.
The most ASEAN could come up with was a statement yet again condemning the violence and urging “the Myanmar Armed Forces in particular, and all related parties concerned in Myanmar, to de-escalate violence and stop targeted attacks on civilians” and nonmilitary infrastructure. The statement asked for a return to ASEAN’s 2021 “five-point consensus,” which asks all sides in the ongoing civil war for a cessation of violence and to engage in “constructive dialogue.” Of course, Myanmar’s generals dismissed the latest statement as “one-sided,” just as they ignored the 2021 “consensus.”
The failure was not the fault of Indonesia, which holds the ASEAN group’s annual rotating chairmanship. Rather, the fault is with ASEAN itself, a mostly economic and trade grouping whose members share little in common.
ASEAN was formed in 1967 as a group of five countries — Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines — concerned about blocking the spread of communism during the Vietnam War. The group’s slide into paralysis and ineffectiveness can be traced to the mid-1990s, when it voted to allow in the three Communist-run countries of Indochina and later Myanmar, also known as Burma, which was under military dictatorship. They were brought in to give the group geographic cohesiveness, with no regard to the new members’ adherence to democratic norms or basic human rights.
Vietnam and Laos are run by two of the world’s last remaining Leninist-style Communist parties. Cambodia is a personality-run dictatorship under long-serving leader Hun Sen. Brunei is an absolute monarchy under the sultan. Thailand just had an election, but the popular will was thwarted by the military and the monarchy, which still hold sway. Singapore can best be described as a benevolent quasi-democratic autocracy. Only Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines can be called truly democratic.
ASEAN’s guiding principles are “consensus” and “noninterference” in each other’s internal affairs. Both of those precepts are a recipe for inaction. Consensus gives any single country veto power, rendering almost any joint statement bland and meaningless. Noninterference has allowed ASEAN to turn its head in the face of human rights abuses over the decades.
The question of Myanmar has divided the bloc between countries such as Thailand that have had direct contacts with the military regime, headed by Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and Malaysia and Indonesia, which have been in contact with the self-styled National Unity Government opposing the junta.
Some ASEAN members — notably Laos and Cambodia, and increasingly Myanmar itself — are economically dependent on China. Beijing has stepped up its role in Myanmar as the country has been ostracized by the United States and Europe. China’s then-foreign minister visited Myanmar in May.
ASEAN is also hampered by its system of rotating the presidency each year based on the alphabetical order of each country’s English name. Next year, the presidency falls to Laos, China’s main proxy state in Southeast Asia.
The one concrete action to come from ASEAN’s Jakarta meeting was to deny Myanmar the rotating presidency when its turn rolls around in 2026 — a slap on the wrist.
Myanmar is perhaps Southeast Asia’s least developed country. ASEAN could exert serious economic leverage through a combined embargo on oil and palm oil exports to Myanmar, sanctions on the state-owned oil company and targeted sanctions aimed at the junta leaders and their bank accounts and other assets held in Southeast Asian countries. ASEAN could also open a dialogue with the National Unity Government in exile as the legitimate representative of Myanmar’s people.
But such measures would require a unity of purpose, such as that shown by the European Union in the face of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Such unity does not exist in ASEAN. Until it does, ASEAN is consigning itself to irrelevance.
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