The World Ignores Myanmar’s Plight at Its Peril
Nearly two years on from a brutal military coup, the country has slid into civil war. A failed state in the heart of Asia benefits no one.
Still fighting.
Photographer: Andre Malerba/BloombergAt the end of a conversation with a Ukrainian official a few months after Russia’s invasion, I asked what her greatest worry was. She replied without hesitation: “That we will be forgotten.”
That will sound only too familiar to the opponents of a brutal regime thousands of kilometers away, in Myanmar. Nearly two years after a coup and increasingly out of global headlines, one of Southeast Asia’s poorest nations has slid into an intractable civil war. By announcing plans for an election later this year — on its own terms, of course — the military is gambling it can project just enough legitimacy to ease outside pressure. The wider region and the West must crank it up instead.