Myanmar Talk

31/05/2026

How to Prevent the Next World War
A Conversation With Thant Myint-U
May 28, 2026

The world today is more dangerous and more violent than it’s been at any time since 1945. States everywhere have jettisoned commitments to cooperation and opted for aggression. The so-called rules-based order seems to have come apart. Yet the international body founded after World War II with the charge of preventing World War III finds itself increasingly on the margins.

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the historian and former UN official Thant Myint-U considered what it would take for the United Nations to regain a meaningful role in preventing and managing global conflict. That question is particularly relevant as the UN begins the process of picking its next secretary-general. Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Thant about the past and future of the United Nations, and about how the pillars of global peace can be reinforced before they collapse.

A Conversation With Thant Myint-U

31/05/2026

❌ India: End complicity in the Myanmar junta’s international crimes

Min Aung Hlaing’s trip to India is part of a deepening pattern of complicity.

India provides arms, equipment and training to the Myanmar military as it slaughters civilians and causes mass displacement.

India helps provide the junta with a lucrative source of foreign revenue through state investment in the Shwe gas project and Myanmar-China pipeline.

And with this deplorable visit and past engagement, India provides false legitimacy to a junta that has been rejected by the Myanmar people, who continue to sacrifice and courageously resist.

We demand India end this complicity now, stop legitimising the illegal junta and stand with the Myanmar people.

✅ Read our 2024 investigation into how the Indian air force and public sector undertakings (PSUs) provide military equipment, infrastructure and training to the illegal Myanmar junta, aiding and abetting its ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity 👉🏽 https://buff.ly/dGttpRa

Narendra Modi India in Myanmar (Embassy of India, Yangon)

31/05/2026

Myanmar’s Military Has Stolen One More Thing: A Revolution’s Song
✍️ by Nyein Chan Aye | May 27, 2026

Myanmar’s military has a long record of looting. For decades, soldiers have raided villages in ethnic areas, taking food, money and whatever could be carried away. After the 2021 coup, people in major cities witnessed soldiers and police seize motorcycles, mobile phones and other belongings from civilians in broad daylight.

Now the military has looted something it cannot carry away in a truck: a song.

On May 24, military-owned Myawady TV broadcast a music video titled “Sit Thar Thway Ni, Shae Tho Chi” (“Soldiers’ Red Blood, March Forward”). Myanmar listeners did not need a musicologist to recognize it. Its melody, some lyrics, structure and instantly recognizable refrain belonged to “A Yay Kyi Bi” (“The Time is Critical”) — also known as “Thway Thitsar,” or “Blood Oath”—the revolutionary anthem written by Htoo Eain Thin and sung by Mun Awng, two legends of Myanmar’s contemporary music. The song has historically been closely bound to the anti-dictatorship struggle that followed the 1988 uprising.

The Myawady production did not merely borrow the tune. It changed and inserted lyrics, turning a song of resistance into a salute to soldiers. Then its producer, Ko Win Maw, also known as Shwe Than Zin, offered an explanation worthy of the regime’s propaganda machine: Htoo Eain Thin’s song, he claimed, had actually drawn from a military song written in the 1960s by someone called Zarni Sit Thway.

So the generals are no longer satisfied with arresting elected leaders, bombing villages and renaming stolen power as “stability.” Now they want the Myanmar people to believe that one of their best-known songs against military dictatorship was really military property all along.

There is just one problem: the public knows this song’s history.

Mun Awng has spoken about it for years. After the 1988 uprising, he and Htoo Eain Thin were among those who reached the Thailand-Myanmar border. At a resistance camp near the Thaung Yin River, Htoo Eain Thin composed “A Yay Kyi Bi.” Mun Awng later sang it on his album “Battle for Peace,” recorded in Bangkok in the early 1990s. Many other former student fighters have also written about the night Htoo Eain Thin composed the song and later sang it as an anthem of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, the student armed resistance force. It later passed into the hands of new generations—including students who sang it during the 1996 protests and young people who revived it again after the 2021 coup.

Mun Awng’s answer to Myawady was as simple as it was devastating: if this is really a military song from the 1960s, let the public hear the original recording.

The request is reasonable. The military has published songbooks and official histories celebrating its marching songs. Yet this supposed original, now suddenly useful for discrediting a resistance anthem, was not identified in any of the well-known military music histories, including the marching-song compilation published for the golden jubilee of Armed Forces Day in 1995.

Before Myawady’s May 24 broadcast, the only supposed “evidence” for this military origin story appeared to be an amateurish YouTube video circulated online around the time of the 2021 coup by an apparent military supporter. Even its handwritten-style thumbnail contained a spelling error. It is hardly the lost archive of a 1960s military classic.

The claim has also been rejected by musicians who understand not only the politics of the song but also its musical construction. For example, Austin Xavier, the veteran former lead guitarist of The Aces, a prominent Myanmar band of the ’60s and afterwards, said in a public Facebook statement that a song supposedly written in the military-music world of the 1960s would not have the guitar-chord structure and stereo-era style heard in “Thway Thitsar.”

There is a further irony. The military itself has a history of singing borrowed tunes.

The early army, formed under Japanese sponsorship during World War II, inherited more than just military training and authoritarian habits from Imperial Japan. Songs later presented as part of Myanmar military tradition included “Let’s Fight Together,” adapted from the Japanese “March of the Beloved Horse,” and “Will Defend Myanmar,” adapted from “Hohei no Honryō” (“Specialty of Infantry”), and there are many more.

An institution whose early marching-song tradition borrowed from its fascist patrons is now trying to accuse Htoo Eain Thin and Mun Awng—two artists revered for original Myanmar music and songs of resistance—of borrowing from the army. Even by the standards of Myanmar military propaganda, it is a performance of remarkable shamelessness.

But this is not only about musical ownership. Nor is it merely another argument between supporters and opponents of the military. Myawady’s remake is an act of historical vandalism.

“A Yay Kyi Bi” was not a love song lifted for a television entertainment program. It was born from the wounds of the 1988 uprising, carried by students, exiles and resistance fighters, and revived by young people facing the same military institution three decades later. The military is trying to take a song written by the resistance and make it sing for the oppressor.

It has done the same with national history. For generations, Myanmar’s generals have taken public struggles, removed the public from the story and stamped a military badge on history.

For instance, March 27 originally commemorated the anti-fascist resistance against Japanese occupation: a struggle joined by political organizations, armed forces, ethnic resistance fighters, students and ordinary citizens. But the military later recast it as Armed Forces Day, reducing the people’s resistance to an annual military parade and presenting the army as its sole owner.

The generals have repeatedly attempted to make the Myanmar people forget who fought for freedom, who built the country’s democratic hopes—and who has repeatedly destroyed them. They have tried to turn resistance into military glory, dictatorship into guardianship, and now an anti-military anthem into a barracks song.

But the Myanmar people are not as forgetful as the generals need them to be.

They know that “A Yay Kyi Bi” did not come from a military parade. They know why it was sung, where it was born and whom it opposed. The military can rewrite lyrics, produce a music video and fill its television channel with footage of marching uniforms. It cannot make the stolen version true.

As the famous poet Dagon Taryar once said of the deterioration of history under the military dictatorship: “Lies written in ink cannot cover history written in blood.”

Neither can a counterfeit marching song broadcast on Myawady TV.

———
Nyein Chan Aye is a Burmese journalist based in Washington, DC, who previously worked for the BBC and Voice of America and writes on Myanmar, the US, China and regional affairs.

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31/05/2026

31/05/2026

May 30, 2003. Depayin. Twenty-three years ago, yet a name that still carries a chill through Myanmar’s modern history — a day of devastating loss, when the regime revealed, once again, what it was willing to do to silence the democratic movement. A convoy carrying Aung San Suu Kyi and National League for Democracy supporters was ambushed, dozens killed, many more wounded, in an attack designed not only to destroy bodies, but to extinguish hope itself.

The Depayin Massacre was meant to be a warning: that even peaceful political organizing could be met with clubs, blades, blood. That the military’s grip on power would not loosen through ballots or speeches, only through fear.

Nic Dunlop, a foreign journalist and photographer, spoke to us about this horrific event in Episode 416, “The Doors of Repression” (https://insightmyanmar.org/episode-416-the-doors-of-repression). His recollection is not only of the massacre itself, but of the atmosphere it created: the impossibility of access, the way truth becomes something you have to chase through back roads and whispered testimony.

Dunlop tried to reach the site, but was unable. “I couldn’t get to Depayin because it was too difficult… quite far away from the corridor of access that foreigners were allowed.” Even witnessing was restricted. Even documentation was treated as a threat.

So he found another way. He interviewed a monk in Thailand who had been there. He obtained a photograph of the scene shortly after the massacre, and then, in a gesture that feels painfully symbolic, “photographed the photograph.” Evidence at a remove. Horror filtered through distance. “There were ways around it,” he says, “but it was difficult.”

Dunlop reflects on how events like Depayin leave behind more than bodies. They leave behind a climate — an omnipresent intimidation, a conspiratorial hush. He describes a simple tea shop scene, ordinary on its surface, but shadowed by propaganda billboards across the road, the sense that people are always speaking under surveillance, always aware of what cannot safely be said. “This sort of omnipotent, kind of Big Brother kind of feel,” he calls it.

Depayin was not an isolated rupture. It was part of the long architecture of repression — the same architecture Myanmar lives under today. The massacre was meant to crush the movement. Instead, it became a marker, a scar, a rallying memory that echoes forward into the present moment, where violence still answers the people’s yearning for freedom.

It is recognition: that the darkness has been here before — and that Myanmar is still fighting to outlast it.

31/05/2026

Timor-Leste’s leader floats idea of retired South-east Asia general to guide Myanmar peace talks

Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta said such a move would alleviate the human suffering in Myanmar.
Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 | May 30, 2026, 09:56 PM

SINGAPORE – Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta has a rather unusual fix for Myanmar’s long-running civil war: Put a retired South-east Asian four-star general in charge of guiding the country’s warring sides “under a tent” to seek a humanitarian solution.

“They all need to come together – the Tatmadaw, all the leaders of the ethnic armies, and the democratic opposition – under a tent, with no pre-conditions, no agenda,” said Mr Ramos-Horta, in response to a question from the audience following his address to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Tatmadaw is the local term for Myanmar’s armed forces.

“All of this could be guided by a prominent South-east Asian individual – I would say a four-star general, a retired four-star general,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner proposed. Such a move would alleviate the human suffering in Myanmar, including by “allowing unrestricted access by humanitarian agencies”, he said.

The proposal comes as ASEAN’s newest member state is itself embroiled in a bilateral dispute with Myanmar, which in February ordered the head of Timor-Leste’s diplomatic mission in Naypyitaw to leave the country.

The diplomatic row was sparked by a criminal complaint filed with Timor-Leste’s justice department by Myanmar’s Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) against the Myanmar military.

The rights group filed the complaint in Timor-Leste as it was seeking an ASEAN member state with an independent judiciary, as well as a country that would be sympathetic to Chin state’s majority Christian population, Reuters quoted CHRO executive director Salai Za Uk as saying.

In his speech, Mr Ramos-Horta called the Myanmar civil war “a stain on ASEAN’s otherwise impressive catalogue of successes”.

“It is a war of exhaustion, ruining the whole country, the economy and the people. Ordinary people, farmers, students, youth – they are the ones suffering,” he added.

Timor-Leste became ASEAN’s 11th member on Oct 26, 2025. The island nation of 1.3 million people, of whom about 97 per cent are Roman Catholics, suffered decades of conflict and foreign occupation before its independence in 2002.

ASEAN’s peace plan for Myanmar, known as the Five-Point Consensus, calls for an end to violence, passage of humanitarian aid and the appointment of a special envoy of the ASEAN chair to facilitate the crisis’s mediation, among other conditions. However, there has been little progress since the country’s military coup in 2021.

Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro travelled to Naypyitaw in early January to meet the military government after taking over as the ASEAN special envoy that month. The Philippines, on May 6, called on Myanmar to allow the envoy to meet detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as it pressed the government for greater transparency.

Former Thai foreign minister Kasit Piromya has floated a similar idea for “soldier-to-soldier engagement”, writing in The Irrawaddy in May 2025 that ASEAN should send a military delegation led by a senior Malaysian general to “listen, assess and open the doors to dialogue”, arguing that this is one of the few languages Myanmar’s top brass understands.

On the idea of recruiting a former general to resolve the crisis, Mr Ramos-Horta harked back to his previous role of mediating for peace in Africa. In 2013, he was appointed by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as special representative to Guinea-Bissau, a war-torn nation in West Africa.

“It was not that simple,” Mr Ramos-Horta said. “The United Nations was there, countries from the region were there – everybody was involved. From time to time, I would ask the US side: ‘Can you send me a retired US general to help me talk to the military here?’ And they would do it.

“So you have to pick the right person, at a specific moment, to influence the specific people you need to have on board.”

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31/05/2026

Myanmar wants to distance from China. India offers a relationship without domination

Hlaing is set to visit Bodh Gaya, hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, participate in a business forum, and visit Mumbai for industry interactions.
✍️ By Pradeep Nair | 30 May, 2026

Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing landed in India today for his four-day official visit. Choosing India as his first foreign visit after assuming the presidency is rich in symbolism and strategic meaning. Hlaing is set to visit Bodh Gaya, hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on 1 June, participate in a business forum, and visit Mumbai for industry interactions.

Many Myanmar watchers would have expected China to be Hlaing’s first destination. Beijing remains Naypyidaw’s most powerful external partner, having protected Myanmar diplomatically, invested heavily in infrastructure, maintained leverage over several ethnic armed organisations, and is deeply embedded in its border economy.

Hlaing’s choice of India suggests that the country wants strategic space. It may need China, but it does not wish to be trapped by China. The visit is a message—to India, to China, to ASEAN and to Myanmar’s own people—that Myanmar seeks alternatives.

🇨🇳 Distancing from China
Myanmar’s military junta and people have always viewed China with a mixture of dependence, suspicion and resentment. China is useful because it provides diplomatic cover, investment and strategic support. But it is also feared because its influence reaches deep into Myanmar’s borderlands, ethnic armed groups and resource corridors. The old Burmese nationalist instinct has never been comfortable with excessive Chinese control. The military leadership, despite its present international isolation, remains deeply conscious of its sovereignty, which is why it does not want Myanmar to become a client state of China.

This unease has been sharpened by recent reports from Myanmar’s Northern Shan State, which borders China and where Beijing’s writ runs large. The Irrawaddy (an independent news organisation covering Myanmar) recently reported that Myanmar’s regime has pressured media outlets inside the country to take down stories alleging that China has erected border fences inside Myanmar territory. Local reporting has referred to possible encroachments near Chinshwehaw and Kyukok-Pansai, both Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA)-influenced areas, and Namtit, in United Wa State Army (UWSA) territory.

The MNDAA and the UWSA are ethnic armed groups widely viewed by geopolitical analysts as China’s primary proxies in Myanmar. While they operate with significant autonomy, both groups maintain deep political, economic, and military ties to Beijing, which uses them to secure its borders and strategic interests.

According to reports in Myanmar, in Namtit (Shan State), a stream that reportedly marked the boundary is said to have disappeared behind new Chinese fencing. Villagers have claimed that the fences have advanced at least 15 metres into Myanmar territory and, in some places, more than 100 metres.

MNDAA and UWSA are seen as China’s proxies because they trace their lineage to the collapse of the Communist Party of Burma in 1989.

The MNDAA emerged in the Kokang region of Shan State, where the population is largely ethnic Chinese with historical links to Yunnan, in China. The UWSA emerged from the Wa region of Shan and is now one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed organisations. The Wa are a Mon-Khmer-speaking people, more closely linked to groups such as the Palaung. This distinction is important because China’s influence over these groups is not uniform. In Kokang, ethnicity, language and geography make Chinese influence more direct. In Wa areas, China’s leverage is strategic, economic and logistical rather than purely ethnic.

For Naypyidaw, therefore, the China-Myanmar border is not only an international boundary. It is a zone where ethnicity, insurgency, cross-border trade, narcotics, rare earths, cyber-scam networks, armed autonomy and Chinese geopolitical influence overlap. If Chinese fencing is indeed being built inside Myanmar territory, or even perceived as such, it becomes far more than a local boundary dispute. It becomes a reminder that China’s involvement in Myanmar can turn intrusive. It follows the pattern of what Beijing is universally blamed for—salami slicing of its neighbours’ territories. That is why the regime’s discomfort with media reporting is telling. It does not want to offend Beijing, but it also cannot ignore the domestic implications of appearing weak on sovereignty.

❓ Why Myanmar is important
This is where India becomes relevant. India does not offer Myanmar the same scale of money, infrastructure or coercive leverage that China does. But India offers something China cannot easily provide: A relationship less burdened by domination.

India does not share China’s history of deep involvement with Myanmar’s armed border actors. On the contrary, India has religion and spiritualism to offer, which is evidenced by the President’s scheduled visit to Bodh Gaya, he has made the trip during his previous visits as well. Further, India has no interest in carving out zones of indirect influence through ethnic groups. It has an interest in a stable, sovereign Myanmar because instability in Myanmar directly affects India’s Northeast.

India and Myanmar share a 1,643-km land border across Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. Communities on both sides have shared kinship, clan, tribal, linguistic and religious ties. Instability in Chin, Sagaing, Kachin or Rakhine (states bordering or in the immediate vicinity of India) do not remain confined to Myanmar. It spills into Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland through refugee flows, arms trafficking, narcotics, insurgent movement and social tensions. India is said to have carried out a few drone-based attacks in Myanmar territory against Indian insurgent groups. It shows the importance of having the Myanmar military on board.

For India, Myanmar is therefore not an optional diplomatic theatre. It is central to internal security. The violence in Manipur since 2023, refugee inflows into Mizoram, the presence of Indian insurgent groups in Myanmar’s borderlands, and the flow of weapons and narcotics from the Golden Triangle all show that Myanmar’s instability becomes India’s security challenge. A fractured Myanmar weakens India’s Act East Policy. A stable Myanmar strengthens India’s Northeast.

The strategic value of Myanmar is also tied to connectivity. It is estimated that India has already spent well over Rs 1,000 crore on its two flagship projects—Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway. Both have suffered because of Myanmar’s security situation. These projects are not merely economic. They are instruments of strategic transformation. When completed and secured, they can reduce the Northeast’s landlocked nature, expand trade, provide alternatives to the Siliguri Corridor, and link India more directly with Southeast Asia.

Thus, India’s engagement with Min Aung Hlaing must be judged not only through the lens of regime legitimacy, but through the hard realities of geography and security.

⭕ A balancing act
This does not mean India should ignore the political and humanitarian crisis inside Myanmar. Hlaing’s presidency remains deeply contested. Western governments and Myanmar’s democratic opposition continue to question the legitimacy of the political process. India must therefore walk a careful path. It cannot appear indifferent to the suffering of Myanmar’s people. At the same time, it cannot afford a policy of isolation that leaves the entire field open to China. A balanced Indian policy should rest on realism with principle. India should engage the regime because it controls the state machinery, border forces, official institutions and formal channels of cooperation. But India should also maintain lines of communication with ethnic groups, civil society, border communities and democratic actors. This is not duplicity; it is prudence. A country as fragmented as Myanmar cannot be understood through one capital or one power centre alone.

Hlaing’s visit therefore carries meaning beyond protocol. For Myanmar, it is a search for balance. For India, it is an opportunity to shape events in a country whose instability directly affects the Northeast. For China, it is a reminder that influence does not automatically translate into trust.

India has thus placed this visit within the framework of its Neighbourhood First, Act East and MAHASAGAR policies. India should neither exaggerate nor waste this opening. It must engage Myanmar patiently, protect its own security interests, support humanitarian stability, and accelerate connectivity projects that benefit both sides. A peaceful Myanmar is essential for a peaceful Northeast. A sovereign Myanmar is in India’s interest. And a Myanmar with options beyond China is good not only for New Delhi, but for Naypyidaw and the world.

———
The author is the former Director General of Assam Rifles. He is currently the Vice Chancellor of St Mary’s Rehabilitation University, Hyderabad. Views are personal.

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31/05/2026

Insein police accused of inaction over brutal r**e of minor in Yangon
By Mizzima | May 27, 2026

Severe public backlash has erupted in Yangon’s Insein Township following reports that the Insein Myoma Police Station refused to register a criminal case or open an investigation into the repeated r**e of an underage girl.

The family’s formal complaint, submitted on 22 May, details a horrifying pattern of sexual assault, chemical restraint, and death threats occurring in the 10-Mile area of Sawbwa Gyi Gone.

According to a legal advocate assisting the victim’s family, the systematic abuse began in April. The accused, identified as U Soe Moe, a man in his 40s, reportedly lured the minor, drugged her by mixing ecstasy and alcohol into her drinks, and repeatedly assaulted her. Despite the gravity of the allegations and the existence of up to 17 eyewitnesses, local authorities have deliberately stalled the justice process.

Commenting on the incident, a High Court lawyer explained that under Section 375 of the Penal Code, if a man has sexual in*******se with a woman, even with her consent, it constitutes r**e if that consent was obtained by threat or coercion that causes fear of pain or death.

“Under the law, this is r**e. If justice cannot be obtained through the hundred-household head or ward administrator, copies of the complaint and supporting evidence should be submitted to the township administrator and township police chief. If no action is taken there either, the case should be escalated to the national level,” the lawyer said.

The lawyer further stated that police have the authority to accept the complaint, investigate the case, and arrest and question the suspect without requiring a warrant.

According to a person close to the victim’s family, the family decided to file a complaint at the police station after the hundred-household head and ward administrator failed to take action against the accused, U Soe Moe, a man in his 40s. However, the police reportedly told them verbally to settle the matter through the ward administrators and turned them away.

“We pleaded with them and asked them to take action, but nothing happened. Eventually, we contacted the community police officer. He came, summoned both sides, and questioned them about the incident. When he asked the man, ‘Did you threaten to kill the girl if she told her family?’, the man admitted it in front of the officer. However, the officer said that because the incident occurred within the ward, any criminal case would first need to go through the local administrator before it could be escalated further. After that, the officer went to speak with the administrator,” said a person close to the victim’s family.

The family first submitted the complaint to the hundred-household head and ward administrator on 3 May.

“The man lured her, mixed ecstasy and alcohol into her drinks, and r**ed her. There are also eyewitnesses to what happened. When we reported the case to the administrators and asked them to take action, the hundred-household head showed no sympathy at all and told us, ‘Control your own niece. If you can’t, tie her up with a rope,’” said the person assisting the victim’s family.

Although the accused reportedly admitted to the crime and there are as many as 17 eyewitnesses, no action has yet been taken to arrest or detain him.

Currently, the victim’s family is facing financial hardship, making it difficult for them to pursue the case through higher levels of the authorities.

Local residents said that since the military coup, police forces under the military junta have largely focused on tracking down and arresting politically active individuals, while being slow to take action against suspects involved in criminal cases such as robbery, theft, and r**e across Yangon Region.

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