‘No chance’: in Myanmar, Asean’s pleas for peace fall on deaf ears

Despite Asean’s call to prioritise peace over a sham election, Myanmar’s military rulers appear bent on clinging to power no matter the cost

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A man stands amid burning rubble at the site of a suspected air strike carried out by Myanmar’s military in western Rakhine state. Photo: Arakan Army / AFP

Published: 12:00pm, 22 Jan 2025

Myanmar’s military junta has made one thing clear: power comes before peace. In yet another snub of diplomatic overtures, the regime has shown no sign of prioritising a ceasefire over elections – despite a renewed plea from Asean to end the violence that has ravaged the country since the 2021 coup.

“There is almost no chance the junta will follow this line of action,” Hunter Marston, a Southeast Asia researcher at the Australian National University, told This Week in Asia.

“The junta will continue to ignore Asean preferences and place regime survival above all other interests. For [junta leader] Min Aung Hlaing, that means fighting until the last man to quash the resistance.”

At the Asean Foreign Ministers’ Retreat in Langkawi on Sunday, Malaysia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mohamad Hasan said that Myanmar’s military government should focus on restoring peace, not pressing ahead with elections that threaten to deepen existing divisions.

“Elections have to be inclusive, and cannot be done in isolation,” Hasan said. “The priority is to stop the violence, reinstate peace in Myanmar.”

Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing presides over a military parade in Naypyidaw in March 2021. Photo: Reuters

Observers warn that the junta’s planned elections – promised for November – will do little more than consolidate military power. With vast swathes of the country under the control of ethnic armed groups and most opposition lawmakers jailed or threatened, any vote would be, as Marston put it, “completely flawed from the start”.