In Myanmar, life has frozen. You do not move forward there; you remain suspended — between gunfire and hunger, between promises and graves. This paralysis has a name: civil war, sustained by the absence of democracy and the endurance of fear.

Across Myanmar’s hills and plains, life is now measured by absence. Since the 2021 coup, more than 6,800 people have been killed and over 3.5 million displaced. Nearly half the population has fallen into poverty. According to the United Nations, nearly 22 million people require humanitarian assistance. Hunger and disease are no longer byproducts of war; they are its instruments.

As if human cruelty were insufficient, nature delivered its own verdict. In March 2025, a powerful earthquake struck central Myanmar, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands without shelter. The disaster exposed what politics had already destroyed: a hollow state incapable of protecting its people.

In the aftermath of such devastation, the ongoing violence only deepens the tragedy the nation faces. Another hospital burns. Another report is filed, marking the sixty-seventh attack on a healthcare facility. Thirty-three dead. Twenty wounded. The numbers arrive already fatigued, stripped of urgency by repetition. The head of the World Health Organization says he is appalled. He must say this. The world nods, as it must. Indignation has become ritual — performed, recorded, forgotten. In a country long isolated, atrocity has become routine, and routine has become silence.

The illusion of order

This paralysis did not emerge by accident. It was engineered.

Civilian supremacy has been deferred since 2008, when the constitution guaranteed the military 25% of parliamentary seats — enough to veto any reform. Elections are not a step forward; they are a mechanism to preserve that design and block any genuine federal future.

When the generals seized power, they did not merely overturn the 2020 election; they replaced legitimacy with procedure. They appointed an election commission of former generals and prepared a vote meant not to reflect the people, but to exhaust them.

To recover the appearance of order, the generals promise an election on December 28. An election that the United Nations calls “cosmetic.” The big question is whether the world will pretend otherwise. It will take place under state-controlled media and laws so severe that dissent no longer risks prison alone, but erasure. Even then, thousands remain incarcerated for resistance. President Win Myint is still behind bars. Former State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi remains imprisoned, her party dissolved, her voice extinguished. Power, when it fears the people, does not persuade. It confines.

The cost of moral symbols

There is a private irony in this repression. Two leaders I once met — Imran Khan and Suu Kyi — now share the same fate: confinement imposed by regimes that claim stability. I remember my 30-minute interview with Suu Kyi in 2012. She was razor-focused, her eyes fixed on mine, listening with a meditation-like intensity. She was intelligent, already familiar with my country’s history, noting that her Oxford classmate was the sister of Sri Lanka’s former president Chandrika Bandaranaike, and shared reflections on Sri Lankan politics.

She asked pointed questions about our three-decade civil war. Then she asked, “How old were you when your father was killed?” I replied, “16.” She said, “I was only 2. See, we have something in common. Both our parents were killed.” She paused and then asked, “So, have you forgiven the killers? Isn’t that reconciliation?” She spoke quietly of patience and moral clarity, yet warned that reconciliation in Myanmar is uniquely difficult, especially among its fractured ethnic groups.

History answered otherwise, and her later silence during the Rohingya atrocities revealed a harsher truth: even moral symbols fracture when trapped inside the machinery of the state.

A crisis without borders

Myanmar’s democratic failure does not stop at its borders. It spills outward — into Thailand through narcotics and scam networks, into Bangladesh through the displacement of more than a million Rohingya and across the region through an instability no wall can contain.

Above this suffering, the great powers calculate. Roads, pipelines and corridors thread through the Kachin and Shan States as part of the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Geography, for Beijing, is destiny: access to the Indian Ocean and control over rare-earth minerals essential to modern technology. Much of these deposits lie in areas controlled by resistance groups such as the Kachin Independence Organization. I trace this strategic geography in my forthcoming book, Winds of Change. For China, they are a necessity. For Washington, they are supply chains. India, too, explores quiet ties with the Kachin Independence Army. Even principles bend when rare-earth minerals promise power and profit.

What peace would actually require

Yet calculation alone cannot end a civil war of this depth. A sustainable peace in Myanmar demands more than condemnation or convenience; it requires a disciplined, four-pronged effort. First, inclusive political dialogue is essential: any settlement must bring together the military, representative civilian leadership such as the National Unity Government, ethnic armed organizations and civil society. Dialogue must move beyond the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) limited consensus toward a genuine federal arrangement, anchored in constitutional guarantees and a credible framework for transitional justice.

Second, international pressure and accountability must shift the junta’s calculus. Targeted sanctions on military revenue, arms embargoes, protection for political prisoners and sustained humanitarian corridors are instruments of restraint. Accountability for war crimes is not a moral luxury; it is a condition for peace.

Third, regional mediation must be strengthened. ASEAN, supported by India, China and Japan, can facilitate ceasefires, transitional talks and confidence-building measures — if sovereignty is no longer used as a shield against human suffering.

Fourth, grassroots reconciliation and economic stabilization must anchor peace where it matters most: addressing ethnic grievances, restoring basic services, enabling the return of displaced families and rebuilding livelihoods. Federalism, tailored to local realities, remains the only architecture capable of holding this fractured country together.

The United States speaks of human rights. It sanctions, freezes funds and finances aid. Yet words without leverage resemble lamps in a storm — visible, but cold. A regime that controls only fragments of its territory and depends increasingly on Beijing is not a partner; it is a liability. Pragmatism, whether under a Trump administration or any other, may offer clarity — but only if paired with engagement.

Gregory B. Poling of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) argues that Myanmar’s best future lies in a truly federal resistance capable of toppling the military regime or forcing it to the negotiating table. To reach that future, the United States must engage rather than isolate, countering the junta’s drift toward Russia and China.

The people of Myanmar are not variables in a strategic equation. They are bodies broken by bombs, families uprooted by fear, survivors of earthquakes and artillery alike. Any policy that discounts their suffering is not realism; it is cruelty disguised as strategy.

In the ruined towns and shattered valleys of Myanmar, one question persists — quiet and unforgiving: will the world act as guardian or spectator? Peace cannot be declared in isolation. It must be built through restraint, solidarity and the refusal to exchange human suffering for advantage. If the great powers fail this test, Myanmar will stand as a monument — not to ambition, but to the world’s choice to look away.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.