For years, Myanmar’s army chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has been treated like a pariah on the global stage.
General Min Aung Hlaing has made few overseas trips, other than to Russia and China, since he seized power in a coup in 2021. Long the subject of Western sanctions, he has been barred from attending meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member, because of his military’s failure to implement an agreed peace plan in the country’s civil war. An arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court last November accusing him of crimes against humanity was supposed to isolate him further.
But on Friday, General Min Aung Hlaing began talks in Bangkok at a regional summit of a group of seven countries around the Bay of Bengal that also includes India and Thailand. He had planned to discuss ways that other countries could provide relief for the March 28 earthquake in Myanmar that killed over 3,000 people.
On Thursday, the day of his arrival in Bangkok, his military launched multiple airstrikes in Kachin State, Karenni State and the Sagaing region in Myanmar despite his call for a cease-fire, according to a spokesman for the Kachin Independence Army rebel group, an activist in Sagaing and an aid worker in Karenni.
Myanmar’s military has come under fierce criticism for continuing its airstrikes in the ongoing civil war and impeding the flow of aid in the days after the quake.
For the general, the Bangkok visit — his first to a Southeast Asian nation since April 2021 — will give his regime the international attention it has long desired. For the Thai government, which is already sheltering tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar in camps along the border, stable relations with the military government could be aimed at trying to manage the flow of new arrivals.
But critics say the visit is the latest indication that Bangkok views human rights as irrelevant in foreign policy.
“They don’t care,” said Kasit Piromya, a former Thai foreign minister.
“It’s an insult to ASEAN — that’s what it is all about,” he said, referring to the 10-member Southeast Asian regional grouping by its acronym. “It’s the fear of the Burmese army, the greed, and because all of them are not democratic.”
Thailand has said little about General Min Aung Hlaing’s visit beyond confirming that it was taking place.
Justice for Myanmar, a watchdog group, and 318 other organizations called on Thailand to disinvite the general, saying he had no legitimacy to represent the people of Myanmar. When foreign governments and international organizations engage with the military junta, the organizations said in a statement, it “causes significant harm for the people of Myanmar” by legitimizing the junta and assisting it in its war against its people.
“Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is grandstanding with Asian leaders in Bangkok following a devastating earthquake because he doesn’t care about Myanmar’s people,” Elaine Pearson, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “What he cares about is garnering some legitimacy through high-level visits because ever since the February 2021 coup, he has been rightly ostracized by most of the international community.”
Leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal were scheduled to attend the summit, along with those of Thailand and Myanmar.
On Wednesday, the Myanmar military declared a 21-day cease-fire to support relief and reconstruction efforts, a day after it fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy trying to deliver food and medicine to desperate survivors.
The military launched an airstrike in Karenni State on Thursday, according to David Eubank from the Free Burma Rangers, an aid organization in Myanmar. Soldiers targeted a checkpoint run by the Karenni rebels, killing one person and wounding four others, he said.
In Kachin State, the military dropped bombs with jet fighters. “Since they are the ones attacking, we have no choice but to fight a defensive war,” said Colonel Naw Bu, a spokesman for the Kachin Independence Army.
“They claim that armed groups should not take political advantage, yet they are the ones exploiting the situation for their own gain,” he added. “They are breaking the very rules that they set.”
Later on Thursday night, the military used heavy artillery to shell the towns of Monywa and Chaung-U in Sagaing, near the epicenter of the earthquake, according to Ma May, an activist based in Sagaing. It also targeted Kani township in the Sagaing region with airstrikes, she said.
General Min Aung Hlaing, a deeply unpopular leader, became even more disliked after he overthrew a democratically elected government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in the coup.
Since then, the country has been at war, with groups of armed protesters and powerful ethnic armies fighting the junta. In response, the military launched a scorched-earth campaign against its own citizens with multiple airstrikes, killing thousands of people. At least three million are displaced. Myanmar’s economy has been wrecked following the coup, with millions of people thrown into extreme poverty, and criminality, such as the online scam centers that are flourishing in the country, has been exacerbated.
Verena Hölzl contributed reporting.
