Myanmar Spring Chronicle – October 31 Overview
(MoeMaKa) November 1, 2024
The UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to Myanmar met with the leader of the military council.
On the 29th of this month, during the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York, UN Special Envoy to Myanmar, Julie Bishop, spoke about her engagement regarding the country’s armed conflict and humanitarian crisis. She disclosed that she had visited Myanmar and met with the leader of the military council, representatives of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and various ethnic political party representatives.
Appointed as the Special Envoy to Myanmar in April this year, Julie Bishop, the former Australian Foreign Minister, has been fulfilling this role for about seven months and visited Myanmar during this period. She confirmed meetings with military council leader Min Aung Hlaing, NLD officials, and other ethnic political figures.
The visit to Myanmar was publicly revealed during her report at the UN General Assembly. Bishop emphasized that as long as armed conflicts continue, meeting public needs will remain unattainable. She urged stakeholders involved in Myanmar to move beyond a win-at-all-costs mindset and take steps toward overcoming the current situation.
The only path to ending violence, she stated, is through facilitating reconciliation. The UN’s primary focus is on humanitarian assistance rather than political support, making their push for peaceful negotiations a natural priority.
Organizations involved in the conflict typically act in self-interest, aiming for victory and maintaining their positions, and are often resistant to any reconciliation efforts. The UN’s humanitarian mission is more limited in internal conflicts, where its role involves monitoring and reporting human rights violations and war crimes rather than peacekeeping, such as in cases like Lebanon in the Middle East.
In Myanmar’s ongoing conflict, the UN’s humanitarian reach has been restricted, particularly in areas controlled by armed groups, especially the military council, which often block the free distribution of aid.
Since the military takeover, there have been three successive UN Special Envoys: Christine Burgener, Noeleen Heyzer, and currently Julie Bishop. Before the coup, the number of internally displaced people was in the hundreds of thousands, but post-coup, the country’s civil war has displaced over 3.2 million people, making Myanmar’s crisis among the world’s largest, ranked second or third in terms of scale.
Long-standing armed conflicts tend to become protracted, with no decisive victory for any side, leading to prolonged instability where displaced citizens cannot return home or resume livelihoods like farming and other economic activities.