Shownotes Transcript
In the hours after a devastating earthquake struck Myanmar last month, locals organized to desperately search through the rubble for survivors. Since the 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck on March 28th, the number of people killed has risen to more than three and a half thousand. The relief effort's been complicated by the ongoing fight between the military junta and rebel groups.
On this special episode of Reuters World News: The political aftershocks in Myanmar. How the deadliest earthquake in nearly a century affects the country's politics and the ongoing civil war. I'm your host, Christopher Waljasper, in Chicago. Crystal clear waters. White sandy beaches. Tropical drinks with little umbrellas. Stress doesn't exist here, but it could back at home, where an undetected water leak can turn into costly water damage.
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At an ancient temple in Mandalay's ancient city of Inwa, Mar U, a local guide, breaks down as she describes the devastation not just to buildings and infrastructure, but also her very way of life. Myanmar's recovery from this deadly earthquake is made even more complicated by its political landscape, which has been mired in civil war since 2021.
Now, to help me understand this complex situation, I called up Poppy McPherson. She covers Southeast Asia for Reuters and has been covering Myanmar for more than a decade. So, Poppy, how have the last few weeks compared to your previous coverage? Yeah, I think it's a similar time in a way to after the coup in this sense of complete devastation, very rapidly unfolding events here.
huge numbers of deaths. One of the places that have been worst affected is Mandalay, which is the country's second biggest city. So a lot of people have connections there and have family there, have friends there. It's really a profound shock and a tragedy for the people in the country. I mean, Myanmar is
sort of didn't have much capacity in this area before, but the military coup has strained resources across the country and impacted infrastructure tremendously. People in Mandalay and other areas are sleeping on the streets because there have been a lot of aftershocks. Conditions are very poor. There have been some sort of semi-unseasonal rains, which have brought kind of further misery and UN sanctions
officials are warning about outbreaks of waterborne diseases, the kind of diseases that follow natural disasters quite commonly. So cholera and things like that. That's a big worry, I think, going forward. It's, I think, important to note, Myanmar has been in a civil war since the military overthrew the democratically elected government back in 2021. What was the situation on the ground before this earthquake hit? Sure. So Myanmar's
facing kind of multiple crises and has been for a few years since the military took over. Myanmar's had civil war raging for a few decades, but it's mostly been confined to border areas. And it had been sort of slowing down in some respects in recent years before the coup. But since the coup, that's kind of exploded and spiraled
because what happened was the military brutally cracked down on protests and a lot of the protesters went and joined existing ethnic armed groups that have been fighting for more autonomy and rights for their people for a long time. And so now you have armed groups all across the country, including the central parts of the country, not far from where the earthquake struck. And at the same time as this civil war, you've got economic collapse
caused by the situation after the coup and the military's policies and also forced conscription. So the military is forcing lots of young people to join the military to try to fight this in their multiple wars. So it's a very complicated situation. There's not just one rebel group or one united front.
It's kind of from various sides and various locations. Exactly, exactly. And not all the groups want the same thing. I mean, you have a lot of groups who are fighting for democracy, they want to overthrow the military, but there are lots of different perspectives. And so it's a very complicated landscape. But they've really been making gains and seizing a lot of territory in the past few years. And the armed groups have seized, you know, vast swathes of land.
So it's, yeah, it's a really kind of tumultuous situation. So how has the earthquake sort of changed the dynamic in these conflicts? So the earthquake hit in areas of the country that the military largely controls. Some areas affected are out of its control or are contested. So it was a little bit unclear how that was going to affect the conflict. Some of the big armed groups came out very shortly after the earthquake hit.
and said that they were implementing a unilateral ceasefire. But the military rejected that initially, and the main kind of parallel civilian government, which controls some of the armed groups, they also declared a ceasefire. The military initially rejected and then announced their own ceasefire, but what we've seen is that actually military airstrikes have continued. So the United Nations has criticized the junta for that.
Here's Raveena Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office. At least 14 attacks by the military have been reported since they announced a temporary ceasefire, which was due to take effect on the 2nd of April.
How has the junta responded to these allegations from the UN and others that they've continued striking rebels after the earthquake? The military says that it has to continue to protect the country. It wants to preserve the security. It needs to protect its territory. So that's the military's response. I don't think that they've denied outright that they've been doing these airstrikes, but they say that the opposition groups are also continuing to fight.
So they're saying that they need to protect the country. So where does that leave Myanmar? It's not clear what's going to...
happen from here. The military capital was hit by the earthquake and that has affected the military's capacity in some ways but it doesn't seem to have been a knockout blow that would have severely impaired the military's capabilities. And kind of in the longer term it's still very much an open question as to how this is going to affect the dynamic or the fighting but it certainly doesn't seem to have stopped it.
How difficult is it to get aid into Myanmar, given this conflict? I think what would be shocking to outsiders, people who aren't familiar with Myanmar, is the idea that the military has not been assisting with the disaster relief. You know, people that we speak to on the ground have told us when this happened, they didn't see soldiers assisting with rescuing people from trapped buildings.
And, you know, you didn't see visible efforts from the military to help people. The military does say that they are assisting survivors and they regularly kind of post updates on their social media and the state media of the military leader, Min Aung Hlaing, kind of doing various visits.
But what we hear from the people on the ground is that soldiers were not helping people in the aftermath. And what happened was that communities just had to organize by themselves with absolutely no tools whatsoever, just rummaging through the wreckage and trying desperately to pull out
friends and family who were trapped. It was a really horrific situation. You saw the junta's closest allies, China and Russia, send in rescue and recovery teams, disaster experts, along with some other countries, India, which is increasingly allied to the junta.
but also Malaysia, Singapore, they all sent people in. But the military immediately after the disaster said, "We welcome all international aid," which was met with some skepticism, I think, by aid workers in the country because of the history of blocking aid, particularly to rebel areas or resistance areas, opposition areas. But I think that it's still... The big question was, are they going to allow assistance to go to the areas that they don't want prioritized, resistance areas?
Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office, called out the military for withholding aid from rebel parts of the affected region.
a pause in hostilities by both the Myanmar military and the National Unity Government must be followed by immediate and unrestricted access by rescue and humanitarian workers to all those in need. How is the junta responding to that criticism? We've reached out to the military for comments on this and they haven't responded. In the past, they've denied blocking humanitarian aid in similar contexts. Now,
It's notable that traditionally in a major disaster like this, the United States is also a large source of humanitarian aid. But it seems like that has been a little more complicated. Tell me about what Myanmar has seen as a response from the U.S. Yeah, I think that's been a theme of coverage for us. I've been speaking to former USAID employees who, you know, they would have been overseeing a response to this disaster because
Because of the Trump administration's massive cuts and dismantling of USAID, they no longer have jobs, they're no longer involved in humanitarian response, and what they say is that there is nobody to coordinate a US response to this. All those people have been fired.
So normally the US would send in a very specialised team of disaster response experts, probably dozens of people, if not hundreds, who have a lot of experience in dealing with natural disaster response. There are some questions about whether the military would allow that in the case of Myanmar. What the US did do is they sent a three-person team in to assess the humanitarian needs and they announced
They first announced they would donate 2 million, and then they've subsequently announced a further 7 million. And this three-person team has been deployed to the earthquake zone and is sleeping on the streets, along with residents because they're afraid of aftershocks, in really difficult conditions. And while they were in the earthquake zone, they received notices of their terminations. So they have been told that they're being fired as well, which really raises questions about what the US's response is going to be long-term.
So how has the U.S. responded to criticism that these cuts are having an impact on disaster relief? Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the cuts are not having a substantial impact. But he also said that the U.S. can no longer be the government of the world. The U.S. doesn't have the capacity, he says, to continue bearing the brunt of disasters.
humanitarian assistance on the level that it's been doing. It was the world's top humanitarian donor and what he's saying is that it simply can't play that role anymore.
Now, Myanmar is vulnerable to natural disasters. Have they influenced the politics in the country in the past? Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I think that there has been a relationship between natural disasters and Myanmar's kind of political path. In 2008, there was a massive cyclone that did incredible damage across the country. More than 100,000 people were killed, vast areas completely flattened and devastated. And
That cyclone happened during the time of the previous ruling military junta. And they sort of played down the extent of the problem and were heavily criticized for that. But the devastation was so great that they did end up letting some international aid in. And analysts believe that that may have been the beginnings of what were eventually democratic reforms in the country. It kind of opened this chink.
in the isolation of Myanmar. A few years later, the military began these democratic reforms and ended up holding elections that led to the democratic government of Aung San Suu Kyi coming into power in 2015. It's hard to draw a straight line between the cyclone and that, but that is a theory that may have been a key factor in Myanmar's political change in that time.
The earthquake appears to have strengthened the position of Myanmar's military leader, at least outside its borders. Is that right?
So, Senior General Milan Lang was an international pariah, even to some extent before the coup, because of his oversight of massive military operations against the Rohingya Muslim minority that pushed about a million to flee into Bangladesh in 2016-2017, and led to accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, which the military strenuously denies. They say that they were targeting insurgents.
who attack police boats. He's wanted by the International Criminal Court prosecutor in relation to the Rohingya purge. And this earthquake is something that he's managed to reconnect with people. I think that some of that process was maybe starting before the quake. They've held power without any elections for four years. They've announced that they're going to hold some elections in December and some countries in the region
have signaled that they're going to support that process, including India, which is calling for inclusive, incredible elections. So he was kind of already on a bit of a pathway to recognition by a lot of countries, or some countries particularly in this region. But the earthquake has definitely bolstered that case.
How has the return to military rule affected the economic opening up that we saw over the last decade under democratic rule? It's such a stark change, isn't it, from the period of democratic reform, economic liberalization that we saw, you know, from 2011 until 2021, really, where there was this massive investment in Myanmar.
In the early years, it was a very exciting time. Things were happening that had never happened before. The country was suddenly coming online. There was a lot of opportunity, a lot of investment coming in. And now it's gone back to this military junta who have a very opaque decision-making process, very confusing decisions.
way of communicating their economic policy. And, you know, it's the UN saying the country is facing economic collapse, basically. All the young people are leaving in their droves because they don't want to be caught up in the military's war machine. So what future does the country have without its young people? Very difficult to say.
Now, you brought up Aung San Suu Kyi. That's probably the name that most folks around the world know and associate with Myanmar, right? She is the Nobel Prize winner who spent years in prison or in house arrest under the previous military rule. But then she rose to power in the late 2000s and served in the democratic government until she was ousted in 2021.
Now, she also received some scrutiny for her government's handling of the atrocities inflicted on the Rohingya ethnic minority. But a lot has happened since then. How do the people of Myanmar look back at those allegations and her ouster? How is Aung San Suu Kyi viewed in Myanmar today? The situation with Aung San Suu Kyi and the Rohingya was...
was, yeah, it feels like a long time ago now, but obviously at the time it was incredibly controversial. She came to power as this human rights icon and then it was under the nominal rule of her government that the military carried out these operations that were so violent and a lot of people were killed, people driven from their homes, villages torched. And her government denied what was being
seen on the ground, what was reported, they played down the allegations. Members of the government said that the Rohingya were burning their own homes down or participated in the perpetuation of that narrative which was coming from the military. But then after the coup happened there was to some extent
I think a reassessment by a lot of people of what had happened to the Rohingya. The military was coming in and carrying out this incredible violence in the cities, so if the military was capable of carrying out this kind of violence against the majority ethnic, mostly Buddhist group, then what would it have done to the minority Rohingya who were already persecuted? The military under says that they took power because they allege election fraud,
by Aung San Suu Kyi's party, that those allegations have never been backed up with evidence. And that was the reason that they gave for seizing power. So I think there was a reassessment by a lot of people and then people started their own armed groups and there was this massive upheaval in the society. I think Aung San Suu Kyi remains popular to some extent, but the country has also changed
so dramatically in the time that she's been locked up and a lot of new faces and actors have emerged in that time. Where is Aung San Suu Kyi now? And I guess what's left of her party?
So Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested after the coup and charged with multiple offences, election fraud, corruption and other charges and she's been in detention, military detention ever since. There's often rumours about her being moved, where she is exactly and the military isn't upfront about her condition and where she is. The last we heard from her son was that she was
that he understood she was being held in solitary confinement in Napier Prison. But again, there's often rumours, so it's very hard to say with certainty anything about her condition. So the National League for Democracy, her party, was formally disbanded by the Jinta. But some of the senior members are in prison. One of them died in prison. We don't know how they're doing after the earthquake, the political prisoners.
Others have joined the opposition groups, including the opposition armed groups. Some of her former allies are senior in those organizations. Some of them are in the jungle now, you know, with the rebel groups. But the party as it stood before the coup four years ago no longer exists. And the junta is planning these elections for December, but presumably the party won't be able to compete.
A big thanks to Poppy McPherson, as well as Shun Nang, for all their reporting on the earthquake in Myanmar, as well as the ongoing conflict. The Reuters World News team includes Kim Vanell, Sharon Reichgarson, Jonah Green, David Spencer, Gail Issa, and me, Christopher Waljasper. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmins. Lelida Kretzer is our executive producer. Engineering, sound design, and music composition by Josh Sommer.
We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show. To make sure you never miss an episode, follow along on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.