New massacres in Myanmar
Min Aung Hlaing, the military commander who led a coup against Myanmar’s elected civilian government two months ago, celebrated Armed Forces Day last month 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.
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.
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.
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.