Myanmar needs a lasting humanitarian ceasefire and the establishment of Myanmar Fund for Earthquake Relief and Reconstruction

 

The 28-March earthquake that struck Myanmar at 12:50 pm local time, left a number of cities, towns, villages in the heartland of ethnic majority Burmese or Bama, severely damaged. Sagaing, the closet to the epic centre, is reportedly 80% destroyed. And large segments of Mandalay, the second most populous city with roughly 2 million residents, are left in ruins.

The earthquake didn’t spare the junta’s neo-totalitarian, fortress-capital, fitted with N. Korea-designed underground tunnels, said to be large enough to conceal fighter-jets. The head of the military junta, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, admitted to the local media, that he had to crawl under his office desk during the earthquake. And Vice Senior General Soe Win and other cabinet members including the Foreign Affairs Minister Than Swe have been rendered office-less by the earthquake.

The land-locked capital was built out of Myanmar military leaderships’ twofold-signature of xenophobia and paranoia: then ruling dictator Senior General Than Shwe feared the landing of the US marines in the old capital Rangoon situated by the Gulf of Martaban.

Hand-picked by Than Shwe to lead the Armed Forces, the diminutive general named Min Aung Hlaing has pursued a self-fulfilling paranoia by staging the unnecessary – and universally unpopular – military coup against the re-election of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian leadership, already rendered severely impotent within the framework of the 2008 Constitution of, for and by the military. When virtually every constituency throughout the vast land of Southeast Asia’s mainland country waged peaceful but determined anti-coup protests in February and March of 2021, the diminutive general – not known for his battle field courage or military leadership even against the poorly armed ethnic resistance troops responded by ordering his troops to sniper and slaughter young protestors, men and women in their teens and early 20’s, who felt their relatively bright future in a slowly democratizing society and opening economy – if not the military-controlled politics – was taken away from them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/world/asia/myanmar-quake-aid.html

The result is the 4-year-old ferocious armed uprisings throughout the nation, as the urban and rural ethnic Bama youth from all walks of life took up arms to fight the national armed forces. That the majoritarian ethnic Bama society itself is engaged in armed revolt has completely demolished the raison d’être of Min Aung Hlaing’s national armed forces officially known as Tatmadaw (or royal military).

For whom does the Tatmadaw exist?

In the eyes of the majority ethnic Myanmar public, the Tatmadaw and its leadership no longer represent either Myanmar as a state or a nation of Myanmar or Bama.

Thousands of these men and women have significantly been assisted, in terms of sanctuary, guerilla training and arms supplies, by half-dozen seasoned ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) such as the Karen National Union, the Kachin Independence Organization, the Chin National Front, Karenni National Progressive Party, the Arakan Army and the United Wa State Army.

This combination of the EROs and the multi-ethnic youth armed uprisings have been able to deal a blow after a blow to Min Aung Hlaing’s poorly-led national armed forces.

But the protracted civil war looms large.

Myanmar Junta Foreign Affairs Ministry staff holding a meeting with the Ambassador from China in a make-shift tent in the quake-devastated capital Naypyidaw.

In my view, the Zero-sum out-and-out defeat of Min Aung Hlaing regime is not possible – simply because it is fully backed, with arms, money, technology and political patronage by powerful neighbours such as China and India, and a distant global power such as Putin’s Russia. However, to their credits, the multi-fronted resistance movements have wrested control of more than 50% of the country’s vast territories, from the coastal region of Rakhine and Taninthari to parts of the earthquake-hit Dry Zone regions of Mandalay, Sagaing and Magwe to eastern and northern regions of Kachin, Shan, Karen and Karenni states.

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing himself has a judicial target on his back: he is wanted by a magistrate court in Argentina and the International Criminal Court is likely to issue an arrest warrant in the foreseeable future – both, for his command responsibility, as the Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar national armed forces, in the genocide and crimes against humanity of 1 million Rohingya people in 2016 and 2017.

Unless he is able to keep himself in power, until death, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is being confronted with three distinct scenarios: first, a probable summary execution by the resistance forces, should the junta ever collapses like a house of cards; second, permanent exile in Moscow, like Assad of Damascus; or third, former Philippine President Duterte scenario of being handed over to the ICC in the Netherlands by whoever takes the reins of Myanmar’s next government.

Against this backdrop of shrinking safe space, both inside his own country and internationally, Min Aung Hlaing and his accomplices in the junta are choosing to continue with their war of paranoia over the people’s need to return to political negotiations as the only sensible way to bring the country’s civil war – now in its 78th year.

Despite the un-resolvable crisis of political legitimacy abroad and the universal rejection at home, by even the ethnic Bama majority, Min Aung Hlaing and his State Administration Council have been able to hang onto power – particularly large commercial cities such as Yangon, Mandalay, Taunggyi, Mawlamyaing, Pegu and so on – if only by the skin of their teeth.

The generals’ desperate attempts to cling to power for decades have come at an immeasurable cost to the society at large.

Since the first military coup in March 1962, Myanmar people have not only been pauperized but also been severely repressed by the successive military leaderships, all incompetent and failed, for more than six decades.

On top of these seemingly intractable internal military conflicts, cooler heads could, and should, seize Myanmar’s natural calamity as an opportunity to break Myanmar’s vicious cycle of violence, repression and civil war ala the Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia.

However, the Min Aung Hlaing junta seems to be doing the opposite: imposing 10-pm curfew in the earthquake-hit regions, hampering the needed 24/7 rescue efforts, restricting media and relief teams’ access to the sites of rubble, including the capital Naypyidaw where the officials of the junta ministries are forced to work in make-shift-tents, and firing on a local red cross convoy bringing China’s team of rescuers into Myanmar by the overland route controlled by the anti-junta resistance organizations.

Nonetheless what needs to be said must be said, without fear or favour.

Maung Zarni
FORSEA

Banner: Earthquake Damage Mandalay, 2025. Wikipedia Commons

FORSEA’s Dr Maung Zarni tells it like it is:
For activism is not a popularity contest but about speaking truth to power – and mobs.