‘Get out Russia, get out China’ said the placards of Civil Disobedience activists in Myanmar as they continued to defy the crackdown by the junta. A deadly death count with more than fifty men, women and children mowed down by security forces and counting, has not deterred Myanmar’s professionals from joining the protest movement; ‘our aim is to halt the very day to day running of the bureaucracy, without us, the military can do little’ said a medical health professional who was one of the first to get onto the streets.

‘Perhaps we may die, the country may die but to live like this, under the heel of a military jackboot is no living at all’ he said. Public servants, engineers, teachers and academics echo that sentiment. Amidst the perception that Russia and China are blocking effective international action against the junta, apart from unilateral sanctions by some states and (typically?) ineffectual pleadings by the United Nations, angry sentiments run high. Elsewhere in the land, a Catholic nun knelt down in front of armed army officers pleading with them not to kill children. Regardless, shots rang out and people died.

Meanwhile random arrests of journalists, lawyers and public servants, some of them ruthlessly kicked and beaten while kneeling on the ground, have captured global attention. Myanmar’s story is yet being written, in blood as it seems. Its human losses may well be frightful. Yet, notwithstanding the escalating violence, there is no doubt that the resolute strength of the resistance has given its swaggering generals pause for thought. Iconic civil disobedience images and the passionate defiance of citizens despite ‘shoot to kill’ orders issued to the army have evoked the sympathy of the world.

Blunderbuss approach to foreign relations

These are not people who take affronts to that passion lightly. Witness the unseemly row that Sri Lanka got itself into after asinine mandarins in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Myanmar’s purported ‘foreign minister,’ a military man, to attend an Asian meeting of ministers later this month. One might very well soon see, ‘get out, Sri Lanka’ as well on the banners of Myanmar’s protesters. Indeed, there seems to be no end to one grievous faux pas after another which this Government commits on the international stage with all the happy sangfroid of a child amusing herself on the banks of a river teeming with crocodiles, quite oblivious to the dangers thereof.

An extraordinarily important point

Sri Lanka’s citizens are meanwhile left speechless and tongue-tied as this blunderbuss approach to foreign relations continues. It is simply no defence to this asinine act to say that the invite did not impute recognition of the junta-led regime. The larger point is moreover that the exemplary courage of Myanmar’s citizens in standing up to the junta pose warnings for would-be military rulers. These include, I may say with emphasis, rulers in civilian guise but with a military hand. Myanmar’s turmoil is not solely due to a simplistic assessment that its citizens had tasted democratic freedoms during the past few years and are now resisting those freedoms being taken away by brute force.

An extraordinarily important point emerges from these struggles; once human beings realise that there is nothing left to loose, there is no limit to which they will not go to in protest. This lesson, the Narendra Modi Government is also learning quite evidently from the months long protests of Indian farmers blocking agricultural laws that they say, will benefit corporates and leave them destitute. Protesting farmers are now planning to build brick houses on the Delhi highway to sustain their struggles in the months ahead.

Indeed, Sri Lanka’s farmers are following the lead of their Indian counterparts, in the Rajapaksa heartland of Hambantota no less as they protest against the failure of the Government to gazette a Wildlife Management Reserve in Hambantota. For close to two months, farmer groups in Hambantota, Ampara and Sooriyawewa with farmers from other areas joining in, have been calling for the gazetting of the reserve so that elephant corrridors may be preserved to prevent wild elephants coming to their villages, destroying cultivation and killing humans.

Cautionary signals for the Government

They argue that this is being delayed to allow lands in the allocated reserve to be cleared and parceled out to favoured businessmen having links to ruling party politicians. These protests have been going on for years as villagers face maurading elephants who have lost their habitats as a result of unplanned development. But the collapse of Sri Lanka’s economy in the wake of the global pandemic has invested these struggles with a new urgency and palpable desperation. ‘We have nothing to lose, we have no produce to sell, our homes are destroyed,’ said a farmer to a television reporter, ‘they give us some small amount of money to live and reduce us to beggars while the rich in Colombo get richer,’ he said.

For a Government and a Presidency which came into power on the backs of the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority, these are cautionary signals. As one may recall, it was the singular gap between Colombo’s profiteering super-rich and the hoi polloi in the rest of Sri Lanka that crucified the ‘yahapalanaya’ regime. White collar criminals continued to run amok with public funds deposited in the Central Bank and Ministers of the day brushed off potential political consequences of the scandalous loss to the coffers saying that villagers will not know the Central Bank bond scam from James Bond. An airy explanation was offered that only a small ‘conflict of interest’ issue was involved on the part of the then Governor now hiding in plain sight overseas.

Other Ministers prescribed fuel formulas that became the laughing stock of the citizenry. Now, at the level of comparable idiocies, we have the sugar tax scam with the Secretary to the Treasury effecting wonders in logic if not commonsense by arguing that the sixteen billion loss to the revenue as a result of reducing the commodity levy on sugar (which did not benefit the public but only corrupt businessmen) did not result in the public loss of money but was only a ‘policy.’ Then again, we have the Minister of Trade snapping at a journalist when asked about the intolerable cost of living and unwise economic policies, asking him not to question him on a ‘contract.’

Rumbling public discontent getting louder

True enough, the ‘family business’ of the Rajapaksa led Government knows to a well grooved turn on how to massage the electorate on the ‘majoritarian’ ideology. As articulated by the President this week, ‘this is not a family that breaks easily.’ But as its own constituency, which the Hambantota farmers exemplify, fall on exceedingly desperate times, majoritarian fairy tales may not suffice as people sink into starvation and see the country being sold down the river, so to speak. And all this in the face of a looming economic crisis which many would say, has already arrived.

That was a lesson learnt once during the Mahinda Rajapaksa Presidency, despite the tremendous personal popularity of that President and absent the current pandemic woes. His Government was ejected from power precisely due to this. Certainly the myth that only Sri Lanka’s minorities voted against the President in that electoral rejection in 2015 is nonsensical. Sizeable portions of the majority electorate also turned its back on the Rajapaksa collectivity. The return to the Medamulana fold in the form of a two-thirds majority in 2019/2020 came only as a visceral and infuriated reaction to mis-governance by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition.

Rumbling public discontent from its once uncritical bastions should give this Government pause. Myanmar’s point must be reiterated; desperate human beings have no limit to their defiance.

Statement: 14 March 2021 : On 1 February 2020, the Myanmar military forcibly took power from the elected government in a military coup by arresting the de facto head of state, Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior officials from the ruling political party, National League for Democracy (NLD). The same day, the Commander-in-Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing announced a one year state of emergency. Internet and phone lines have also disrupted in some parts of the country. Since then, elected civilian officers, political activists and human rights defenders have also been arrested across the country. On 3 February, Aung San Suu Kyi was charged for the possession of illegally imported walkie-talkies, a crime which has a maximum three year sentence, and the President of Myanmar, Win Myint, has allegedly been charged to violating COVID-19 election campaign guidelines.

Since the coup, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to peacefully protest the illegal power grab. They have been met with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, and in some cases, live ammunition and machine guns. As of 11 March, at least 70 peaceful protestors have been murdered by security forces who are said to be following ‘shoot to kill’ orders. At least half of the are reported to be under the age of 25.

In this context, we are shocked to learn that our Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena has written an invitation on 2^nd March 2021 inviting the military appointed Wunna Maung Lwin (the current Myanmar Foreign Minister for 17^th Ministerial Meeting of the Bay of Bengal initiative for Multi – Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) to be held on 31^st March 2021 virtually in Colombo.

While the entire world is criticizing the Myanmar military for toppling an elected government and killing citizens on the streets, the Sri Lankan government’s invitation legitimatises this military coup, serving as an insult to the people of Myanmar and its elected leaders.

Sri Lanka should immediately withdraw the invitation and declare that the Sri Lankan government does not recognize the military led government, and that democracy should be restored in Myanmar. The Sri Lankan government must also make an appeal to release its Myanmar’s elected leaders and stop violent attacks against the protesters immediately. These calls must also be echoed at the At the BIMSTEC meeting, to be held later this month.

Burma Solidarity Group in Sri Lanka.

The Sunday Times

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