In a strikingly hollow performance of diplomacy this week,Myanmar’s military junta greeted a Malaysian peace delegation with smiles, handshakes, and a fresh wave of civilian massacres. Even as junta chief Min Aung Hlaing peddled a worn-out script of "peace" and "elections" to Malaysia's foreign minister, his air force was unleashing a reign of terror from the skies, slaughtering nearly 40 civilians in a series of indiscriminate bombings that bookended the visit.
The hypocrisy was staggering. Just two days before (October 9) Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan’s arrival, the junta’s aircraft conducted a horrific attack on a peaceful candlelight vigil in Chaung-U Township, Sagaing Region. As villagers marked the holy Thadingyut festival, paragliders dropped bombs into the crowd, butchering at least 26 people, including children. The carnage continued the following day, with bombs striking a school compound in Chin State, killing three students, and airstrikes murdering four more civilians in Magwe Region’s oil fields.
The bloodshed did not pause for diplomacy. Hours after the Malaysian delegation departed Naypyitaw on Thursday, having listened to Min Aung Hlaing’s cynical invitation for armed groups to join a "peace process," his jets were in the air again. This time, they targeted Mongmit in northern Shan State, killing seven more civilians and leaving a smoldering postscript on the junta’s empty words.
This coordinated campaign of violence serves as the junta's true message to ASEAN and the world: dialogue is a tool, but terror is policy. For nearly five years since the illegal 2021 coup, the regime has treated ASEAN's Five-Point Consensus with utter contempt, leaning on the diplomatic cover of its patrons in Moscow and Beijing while systematically murdering its own people.
Astoundingly, the Malaysian visit appears to have handed the junta a propaganda victory. The regime’s state-run media triumphantly announced Friday that Malaysia had "vowed to send election observation teams" for the junta's long-delayed and widely condemned sham election, a poll designed for no other purpose than to rubber-stamp military dictatorship.
By engaging with these killers as legitimate statesmen, and potentially legitimizing their fraudulent election, visiting delegations risk becoming accomplices to the junta’s brutal charade. The generals in Naypyitaw are not seeking peace; they are demanding capitulation. They ask for their seat back at ASEAN while simultaneously intensifying a war against their own population, silencing all dissent with a new "Election Protection Law" that carries penalties up to the death sentence.
The international community must see this for what it is. The handshakes in the sterile halls of Naypyitaw cannot drown out the screams from bombed-out villages and schools. This is not a government seeking reconciliation, but a criminal syndicate clinging to power through the massacre of the innocent. Any talk of peace, while the bombs continue to fall, is not just hollow,it is an insult to the thousands who have already paid the ultimate price for the junta’s insatiable lust for power.
BOB Post
