By DAVID SCOTT
MATHIESON
YANGON, MAY 1, 2017
Myanmar’s military
Commander in Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, returned to Yangon on
Sunday after a week-long visit to Austria and Germany. The general’s trip ended
just as his political rival, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, departed for a
tour of Italy, the United Kingdom and the European Union’s headquarters in
Brussels.
The two tours
coincide with rising international criticism of Myanmar over the continued
persecution of Rohingya Muslims in western Rakhine State, where a brutal
military operation since October 2016 against suspected militants has pushed at
least 80,000 civilians fleeing for their safety into neighboring Bangladesh.
The military “area
clearance” operation has resulted in arson attacks on an estimated 1,500
houses, hundreds of killings and instances of rape and torture, according to
numerous independent and United Nations reports. Armed conflict in Myanmar’s
north, meanwhile, is at its most intense in decades, with the Myanmar army, or
Tatmadaw, battling several ethnic insurgencies. Over 100,000 civilians have
been displaced in the fighting amid regular reports of military abuses.
These reports were
the impetus for a European Union-sponsored resolution in the United Nations
Human Rights Council in March that called for the establishment of an
international Fact Finding Mission to “establish the facts and circumstances of
the alleged recent human rights violations by military and security forces, and
abuses in Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine State.”
For European Union
(EU) members to simultaneously facilitate a visit by the Myanmar military
commander likely to be a key target of any international investigation is both
cognitive dissonance and effective exculpation. Min Aung Hlaing has already
publicly defended his forces’ performance in the Rakhine State operation, and
Suu Kyi has rejected calls for an investigation as “not suitable.”
The commander in
chief toured arms companies and met with senior military and defense officials
in Austria, even reportedly taking a spin in a DA-62 light aircraft.
In Germany, he was
hosted by his counterpart General Volker Weiker and feted at a dinner put on by
Gieseck and Derrient (G&D) Security Printing company, which has since the
1970’s provided technical assistance for Myanmar’s currency production.
The senior general
also toured Germany’s GROB aircraft factory, looking particularly at light
aircraft for reconnaissance and training.
A weapons window
shopping trip after the recent violence in Myanmar was indecently ill-timed at
best, and at worst indicates an indifference to continued military impunity in
Myanmar that is an impediment to enhanced military engagement with foreign suitors
such as Germany.
While the EU
scrapped most of its sanctions on Myanmar a few years ago, it still maintains
an arms embargo which expired on April 30 (it is not clear at the time of
writing if the embargo has been extended).
In November, during
the most intense period of the violence in Rakhine State, Min Aung Hlaing was
visiting Brussels to attend a European Union Military Committee.
To be sure,
German-Myanmar military ties are not new. The Fritz Werner Company supplied
Myanmar’s military with weapons throughout then military dictator Ne Win’s
Socialist period in the 1970s and 1980’s, manufacturing small arms including
the Heckler & Koch G-3 assault rifle.
Germany has recently
sought closer defense ties with Myanmar, moves that have largely escaped the scrutiny
of international activists and media outlets that have strongly criticized the
preliminary and limited efforts by the United States and United Kingdom to
re-engage the Tatmadaw.
To host Myanmar arms
factory visits, as Israel also did in recent years, puts Germany and Austria in
the same company as Russia, Pakistan, China, North Korea and other major
suppliers of weapons that are being used daily against ethnic insurgents in the
country’s north and are having disastrous impacts on civilian populations in
the area.
Min Aung Hlaing’s
relatively criticism-free visit will probably not be matched by Aung San Suu
Kyi’s tour, where she will likely continue to receive the brunt of
international outrage over the persecution of the Rohingya, while largely ignoring
the military leadership’s complete autonomy in directing and executing recent
operations.
To excoriate a
democratically elected leader with no constitutional control over the military,
while tacitly exonerating the principal perpetrator of recent abuses,
demonstrates how skewed international comprehension of Myanmar’s transitional
complexities.
Rather than being
feted with factory tours and luscious dinners, Min Aung Hlaing should have been
pressured to account not just for the alleged abuses perpetrated in recent
months, but his continued blocking of proposed constitutional reforms that
would bring his military under civilian control.
David
Scott Mathieson is a Yangon-based independent analyst