In the wake of the three-day visit by UN humanitarian aid chief Martin Griffiths to Myanmar, democracy activist Igor Blazevic has called on the international community to get serious about providing aid, with the suggestion of a significant proportion to be funneled through the National Unity Government (NUG) and civil society organizations (CSOs).

In a Facebook post on 18 August, Blazevic – who wrote earlier about the agenda of the recent UN visit – calls on the international community for a new approach to the Myanmar crisis – both the response to the post-coup humanitarian needs and the dire situation for Cyclone Mocha victims, many still waiting for aid.

Blazevic repeats his allegation that the “visit of the UN aid heavyweight Martin Griffiths to Myanmar is all about fundraising for the UN agencies and about getting visas for international staff, Letters of Agreement (LoA) and Memorandums of Understanding MoAs. This is now confirmed by the own press statement of OCHA. Lack of sufficient funding is highlighted as the most serious problem, together with the lack of access.”

In essence, the UN needs the paperwork from the Myanmar junta to secure its position, and positions of its representatives, in the country, and is making a call for countries around the world to fund an under-funded programme of aid to Myanmar.

As he notes, one of the fundamental problems of international humanitarianism which becomes “big business” and a “career model” for a number of well-entrenched players - both the UN agencies and many INGOs - is that they claim that they are “the solution” and that all that is needed is to give them more money.

But Blazevic says the reality is that the causes of man-made disasters - such as the current disaster in Myanmar caused by Min Aung Hlaing and the military junta - are always power-related and political. Solutions can only be achieved with the proper application of power and politics.

Humanitarian efforts make sense, but as a complement to politics and re-balancing of power dynamics between aggressor (main perpetrator of atrocities, destruction and repression) and those who are defending themselves. Not as replacement for politics.

As he notes, another thing that humanitarianism does not want to admit is that even when international humanitarian effort is well-funded and big scale, it covers just a fraction of the needs. Conflicts and the war of rogue regimes against the segment of population (like Rohingya and ethnic nationalities before) or against the whole population (what we have now in Myanmar) always, in every single moment, create multiple times bigger and more dramatic needs than any humanitarianism can address and match.

“In my (time in) Sarajevo, during the siege, one of the biggest international aid efforts that existed, has been delivering a little bit food once in a month or two (few kilos parcel with few items inside, rice, oil, old cans and cottage cheese from overdue food reserves of rich countries). The rest of the time, my family has been hungry and surviving by depleting all possible ‘reserves’. In one moment, that meant cutting the parts of furniture to make fire to warm for a while in an extremely cold nights or spending all money and valuable things we had to buy food on black market,” Blazevic says.

“Even more importantly, huge international humanitarian effort which included airlifts bringing aid to besieged Sarajevo, did not stop the shelling of the city and sniper fire. People were dying almost every single day. With certain regularities terrible massacres have been taking place. Sometimes when people were standing in queue for bread or aid. Over 14,000 civilians have been killed in four years in a city of just 350,000 citizens.

“The whole airlift to Sarajevo did not stop systematic ethnic cleansing, ugly massacres and genocide in other parts of Bosnia which has gone for four years. That has stopped only when Bosnian army, which build itself from zero, managed to create some level of power-balance and when the West provided limited military assistance to Croatian and Bosnian army to launch few major offensives,” Blazevic notes.

It is completely the same situation in Myanmar right now, he says. Extremely limited international aid which the junta will allow sometimes to be delivered to some part of the country and only when it serves junta's own interests to divide opposition to its rule. Most of the time, most of the people in most of the country will continue to suffer and to survive through its own self-help. And killing and atrocities and cleansing operations and burning and bombing of villages will not stop. Targeting civilian population is the core of the junta's military strategy against the nationwide uprising and resistance.

This is what international humanitarianism does not admit and does not say. That they are not solution and will never be, Blazevic says.

“Something else is needed to stop dramatically worsening of the situation in Myanmar, not more money for the UN agencies to deliver limited aid (sometimes) to Rakhine State and to people in need in Yangon, Mandalay and few other places that are still under junta control. And just a very small trickle of that will go – rarely – to conflict areas where resistance to the junta is strong. Places where international aid will trickle in completely insignificant amounts is 2/3 territory of the country. That is the territory where over 70,000 houses have been burned and where the majority of the 1.7 million people that has been expelled from their villages by the junta are,” he adds.

Blazevic feels a new approach is needed. He says a simple solution would be to funnel a third of the international aid money through the current mechanisms of aid agencies that have signed LoAs and MoUs with the junta.

Then two-thirds of the aid money should be channeled to the country through existing public services that are affiliated with the NUG and ethnic revolutionary organisations (EROs) and through local civil society CSOs and charities operating in liberated and mixed control territories and which operate without an MoU with the junta and in explicit opposition to junta.

“I can hear chorus saying that is not possible,” says Blazevic. “I have worked in enough ‘crisis spots ’and enough ‘conflict areas ’that I know that it is possible when there is a political will.”