Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has reportedly said he will assure an ASEAN special envoy that he can meet with all parties involved in the country’s political turmoil, including armed ethnic minority groups, according to Kyodo News.
The pledge was included in a joint statement issued after a meeting between Min Aung Hlaing and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in the capital Naypyitaw during the ASEAN chair’s visit which ran from January 7 to 8.
Many groups and commentators have expressed concern that Hun Sen’s visit, together with his foreign minister, would help strengthen the Myanmar’s junta’s standing internationally and its position within the Association of South Asian Nations (ASEAN), given the regional body has been cold-shouldering the junta, blocking Min Aung Hlaing from attending an ASEAN Summit in October 2021.
What was unclear from the statement is whether the ASEAN envoy could also meet with opposition figures or with Aung San Suu Kyi, the former state counsellor now facing numerous criminal charges brought be the junta.
The junta previously rejected requests from ASEAN for such contacts, claiming those incarcerated facing charges could not be visited according to the 2008 Constitution.
Although Min Aung Hlaing reportedly pledged support for the five-point consensus reached at a special ASEAN summit he attended last April in Jakarta, one that included a call for an immediate end to violence in Myanmar along with a plan to appoint a special envoy named by the 10-country bloc, he rebuffed calls to put it into action.
Hun Sen said Friday, on the first day of his visit to Myanmar, that he supported efforts by Myanmar’s military leadership to seek a solution, saying complete peace and national reconciliation cannot be achieved without participation and agreement from all parties involved. He mentioned the lessons learned from the Cambodian peace process that took place from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
Hun Sen appears proud of the role he played back then to end the Cambodian conflict.
Given the growing brutality of the Myanmar junta – including incidents in which its troops massacred civilians – fear have been voiced that the crisis could worsen. As one analyst noted, Myanmar now has its own “Killing Fields” – a reference to the brutality of the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia in the late 1970s.
