FREE ASEAN-FREE MYANMAR | The global community has failed to provide the help that the Myanmar people so badly need in their struggle for democracy.

February 4, 2023 Contributor 0 Comment FREE ASEAN-FREE MYANMAR | The global community has failed to provide the help that the Myanmar people so badly need in their struggle for democracy.

FILE – Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing delivers his speech at the IX Moscow conference on international security in Moscow, Russia, June 23, 2021. Myanmar’s military-controlled government has enacted a new law on registration of political parties that will make it difficult for opposition groups to mount a serious challenge to army-backed candidates in a general election set to take place later this year. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool, File)

Two years after the coup d’état in Myanmar on 1 February 2021, the country has descended into a downward spiral as the junta led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing tries to consolidate its power with increasing brutality.

Amid the fog of war engulfing Myanmar, two facts have become increasingly clear: the military has failed to take over the country amid widespread popular resistance; and the global community has failed to provide the help that the Myanmar people so badly need in their struggle for democracy.

Those were two of the main conclusions that an International Parliamentary Inquiry (IPI) into the global response to the crisis in Myanmar, organized by ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), reached in a report published in November.

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The report laid bare the many inadequacies of the international community on Myanmar, in particular how it has hidden behind ASEAN, despite the regional bloc’s evident fecklessness in handling the issue so far.

Little has changed since the report came out.

On both the domestic and international fronts, 2023 presents itself as a pivotal year for Myanmar.

It is a time fraught with danger, as the junta plans to hold an election which will not serve to solve the crisis and is likely to trigger even more violence; for the time being, such plans have been put on hold, as Min Aung Hlaing extended on 1 February the state of emergency for another six months.

He even admitted that more than a third of Myanmar’s townships are not controlled by the military.