More than three and a half years since launching a coup deposing Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularly elected National League for Democracy government, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is struggling. While he has concentrated decision-making authority in his own hands, the military under his command is suffering humiliating defeats to its adversaries. In the process, it is losing control of most of the country’s borders. Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly reshuffled the military’s top brass, while also prosecuting senior officers for ostensible command failures or insubordination – perhaps in part to head off potential plots against him amid rising criticism. The only exit strategy from emergency rule that he seems to have contemplated is the one he set out at the time of the coup but has so far failed to act on: holding elections. In theory, elections would assuage elite discontent with his autocratic rule by returning to the constitutional framework and thereby diluting his power. But while growing elite criticism of his performance in recent months has prompted him to talk about the polls in more concrete terms – with some officials indicating they will take place in 2025 – it is hard to imagine how even a performative electoral exercise could be conducted under current circumstances.
Meanwhile, the regime is losing ground. Unable to turn the tide on the battlefield, the military is responding to its territorial losses by ramping up airstrikes in the urban and rural areas its opponents have seized. The combination of retributive violence and armed conflict is displacing large numbers of people. More broadly, the coup’s aftermath has triggered an economic crisis that is affecting the livelihoods of millions across the country. This crisis has been compounded by the regime’s grave violations of freedom of association, including violence against union leaders and suspension of civil liberties, highlighted by an International Labour Organization (ILO) commission of inquiry in 2023, which make it more difficult for workers to organise and negotiate pay and conditions with their employers, in violation of Myanmar’s treaty obligations. The state’s delivery of social services, including health care and education, is in disarray. The situation of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State and in refugee camps across the Bangladeshi border continues to be particularly precarious. Rohingya have been subject to abuses by both the military and the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine armed group that now controls large parts of the state.
The European Union and its member states can help address the crisis in Myanmar by:
- Maintaining and expanding targeted sanctions on the regime, the military and their business interests, and ensuring that these measures are rigorously enforced, while avoiding actions that would mainly affect ordinary people or cause systemic damage to the economy. In particular, Myanmar’s access to the Everything But Arms (EBA) trade preferences scheme, which supports the jobs of hundreds of thousands of garment workers (most of them women) but provides little benefit to the regime, should not be revoked;
- Continuing to leverage its presence in Myanmar and its influence within the ILO to help ensure that this organisation’s threat of measures against Myanmar results in the regime taking concrete action to address the worst freedom of association violations, including imprisonment of trade unionists. If the ILO adopts punitive measures under Article 33 of its constitution, these should not be seen as a justification for revoking EBA preferences, as such action is unlikely to influence the regime’s behaviour on labour rights and would instead harm the very workers the measures would be aiming to support;
- Providing greater support to the people of Myanmar. Beyond humanitarian aid, which remains essential, the large cuts in the EU’s development assistance to Myanmar have diminished its diplomatic relevance and reduced its capacity to support essential health and education programs, in addition to initiatives to improve livelihoods and promote better governance. These cuts should be reversed, including for programming in areas outside regime control. Support for Rohingya living in Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh is particularly important at this time, given that they face increasing hardships and human rights abuses;
- Using its influence with neighbouring states, particularly Thailand, Bangladesh and India, to encourage them to adopt more realistic policies that reflect the military’s loss of control in border areas and the needs of populations in ethnic armed group-controlled parts of Myanmar, as well as pressing them not to endorse or support flawed elections that may be held in 2025;
- Using its influence within the UN, via its member states, to push for the appointment of an experienced permanent in-country resident and humanitarian coordinator.
A Failing Regime
More than three years after Myanmar’s 1 February 2021 coup, the country’s military leader is consolidating his political power at the same time as regime forces are losing control of the country’s territory. Regime decision-making is dominated by Min Aung Hlaing, who has now arrogated to himself all Myanmar’s peak positions of formal power. He appointed himself acting president in July, in addition to his existing roles as regime chairman, prime minister and commander-in-chief. But Min Aung Hlaing is also widely seen in elite circles as incompetent and indecisive, and it is increasingly clear that the coup he led was a major strategic blunder – one that has triggered unprecedented armed resistance from the country’s Burman majority as well as a deep economic decline, while driving state fragmentation.
These perceptions have only grown since October 2023, as ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State and Rakhine State, together with allied post-coup resistance forces, have inflicted a series of humiliating battlefield defeats on the military. The most recent is the loss of large parts of northern Shan State, including the Kokang enclave along the Chinese border early in 2024, and most of the rest of the area in July, including the main town of Lashio along with the north-eastern military command. It was the first time in the military’s history that it has lost a regional command headquarters. The regime now seems about to lose a second one, in Rakhine State, where another ethnic armed group, the Arakan Army, is on the verge of conquering the entire state. While the military has had some battlefield successes, such as reclaiming the Kayah State capital Loikaw in June and July, which had been partly seized by resistance forces, in other parts of the country further regime losses seem inevitable.
The military has responded to its defeats by launching air attacks on the urban and rural areas it has lost, indiscriminately bombing civilian populations and infrastructure. These operations are designed to punish and displace the populations under non-state control by destroying the towns they fled from, partly in revenge and partly to try to deter future attacks, although the country’s ethnic armed groups and post-coup resistance forces show few signs of being discouraged.
The humanitarian impact of the state’s post-coup economic and political crises has been enormous. More than three million people are now displaced across the country, and many millions more have fallen into poverty. While post-coup violence has affected many ethnic minorities, Rohingya in Rakhine State are particularly vulnerable, as many have long been reliant on international humanitarian assistance that is now more difficult to deliver because the areas they live in are affected by conflict and a regime-imposed blockade targeting the insurgent Arakan Army. With the Arakan Army on the offensive, Rohingya are regularly caught in the crossfire between the group and the Myanmar military, and often subject to grave abuses by both. Both sides have forced young Rohingya men to participate in the hostilities. Rohingya armed groups active in both northern Rakhine State and refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh have also forcibly conscripted Rohingya into their ranks.
Against the backdrop of these huge military and economic setbacks, political pressure on Min Aung Hlaing has grown, including from within military ranks. Yet there is no formal mechanism for removing him, and he appears determined to hang on to power. Other than maintaining the status quo, his only exit strategy from the crisis appears to be elections, as announced in the vague post-coup roadmap he outlined within a week of seizing power, but which he has seemed in no rush to follow. China has reportedly been pressing Min Aung Hlaing to move ahead with elections as soon as possible – apparently because it believes these will lead to a reduction in his power, which it would like to see because it views him as incompetent as well as harbouring anti-Chinese sentiment. Neighbours India and Thailand have offered electoral support to the regime, as a way to keep good relations with the military, and perhaps considering that polls can somehow shake up an unsatisfactory situation.
With criticism mounting in elite circles that he cannot afford to ignore, Min Aung Hlaing has been increasingly talking about elections, although it remains possible that he could postpone the polls. While his officials have recently said they will take place in 2025, the regime’s election commission has yet to make a formal announcement, and there are other reasons to be cautious. The National Unity Government – formed by members of parliament ousted in the coup along with ethnic minority and civil society leaders – as well as resistance forces have condemned the notion of a military-run vote and the generals are widely reviled. The regime’s local officials are regularly targeted with violence, and it has lost control of large parts of the country. It is thus hard to see how Naypyitaw could organise even Potemkin polls. Moreover, for Min Aung Hlaing, elections are a political gamble that could result in diminution of his power, given that under the military-drafted 2008 constitution he would have to choose between being president or commander-in-chief. He will likely put himself in this position only if he feels that his current situation has become untenable.
Responding to the Crisis
Like most of the rest of the world, the EU and its member states have limited leverage over how events unfold in Myanmar. They therefore need to play the few cards they do hold carefully, because some of the punitive actions at their disposal, while perhaps tempting in the absence of other good options, can have counterproductive impact – potentially harming the population of the country, while failing to influence regime behaviour and diminishing the EU and its members’ influence. The optimal approach is therefore to impose costs on the individuals and entities most responsible for the crisis; engage more closely with anti-regime forces including the National Unity Government, ethnic armed groups and civil society; and find innovative ways to support the population at a time of growing vulnerability. The EU should also encourage regional states not to endorse or provide support to regime-held elections, slated for November 2025, which have no chance of expressing the will of the people and will likely be conflict-inducing. That has largely been the thrust of the EU’s diplomatic posture since the coup, but Brussels can do more to strengthen each of these objectives and to prevent contradictions in its approach.
The best way to impose a cost on the generals is through the kinds of targeted sanctions that the EU has in place on the military regime as a whole, individual members of the regime and security forces, and businesses associated with them. At present, the EU has levied sanctions on 103 individuals, including Min Aung Hlaing, and 21 entities, including companies controlled by the military or the armed forces and departments of the Ministry of Defence. Although their impact is limited, they are a signal of the EU’s values, and constrain the regime’s ability to secure the resources and foreign exchange needed to support its war effort and political agenda.
Importantly, these measures do not significantly affect the country’s broader economy, which would be counterproductive at a time when millions of ordinary people are struggling to make ends meet. The EU should resist the temptation to expand its approach by venturing into actions that would have systemic economic effects, to the detriment of ordinary people. In particular, it should not revoke Myanmar’s access to its EBA trade preferences scheme, which would cause economic harm to hundreds of thousands of young women in the garment sector, whose biggest export market is the EU, while having little effect on the regime.
The question of Myanmar’s access to EBA also arises in the context of the ILO, which is likely in June 2025 to call for enforcement action to be taken against the Myanmar regime for its failure to implement the recommendations of the ILO’s 2023 commission of inquiry on labour rights violations. Should the ILO issue this call, under Article 33 of its constitution, it would be only the third time in its 105-year history that it has done so. Such a step would likely lead to union and activist pressure on the EU to revoke Myanmar’s EBA privileges, which the EU should resist. There is no legal or institutional reason why an ILO call for action should trigger the revocation of EBA. As noted above, revoking EBA would be counterproductive – doing nothing to improve labour standards, while instead causing the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the garment sector. The EU has better options for promoting freedom of association, using the threat of ILO action to push the regime to release imprisoned trade unionists and end other grave freedom of association and forced labour violations. It should also work with European clothing brands that sell garments made in Myanmar to ensure they are doing everything they can to improve working conditions in the factories.
It is also essential to maintain, and where possible increase, the EU’s current levels of humanitarian assistance to meet the enormous needs of the country’s displaced and other vulnerable populations. Among those most in need of support are the Rohingya, including both the roughly 600,000 living in war-torn Rakhine State and some one million currently hosted in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh. The latter have little prospect for a safe return home or any other future outside the camps. Rohingya in both Myanmar and Bangladesh have been hit hard by reductions in overall levels of vital humanitarian assistance over recent years. In addition to arresting and reversing this decline, the EU should work with the new interim administration in Bangladesh to ease the restrictions imposed by the previous government that had hindered humanitarian operations in the camps.
The huge reduction of some 70 per cent in the EU’s development budget for Myanmar since the coup has reduced the EU’s capacity to support the population in addressing longer-term needs at a critical time, while diminishing its relevance as a diplomatic actor in Myanmar. While budget support to an illegitimate and oppressive regime should remain off the table, supporting basic needs and service delivery can be done in many parts of the country in ways that do not benefit the regime or use channels that it controls. Threading this needle, however, requires working with non-state actors, particularly ethnic armed groups, some of which now control vast territory and govern large populations.
Although the EU is for legal, historical and other reasons understandably more comfortable dealing with states, the only way to provide support where it is needed is to work through these de facto administrations. The EU should look for ways to address its constraints so that it can provide assistance to populations in need. As a policy matter, it should not withhold assistance to subnational actors over concerns that it could contribute to the fragmentation of Myanmar. That dynamic is already well under way; to some degree, it has been a feature of post-independence Myanmar for over seven decades. Development assistance is critical to building more viable systems that can compensate for the state’s retreat by bolstering civil society, supporting social service delivery and fostering local governance. Humanitarian budgets do not have the flexibility or the scale to achieve these ends.
Much of this humanitarian and development assistance could be channelled into the country from across the borders of Thailand, India and Bangladesh. All three are, however, reluctant to allow significant cross-border assistance into non-state-controlled areas along their shared borders or to engage with the ethnic armed group administrations that now have effective control of most of these areas. As it explores ways to overcome its own concerns and adapt to the new Myanmar reality, the EU should encourage these governments to work toward the same goal in parallel.
While the EU can achieve a great deal by working with national NGOs, and it should partner with them whenever possible, a more credible, effective UN presence in the country would allow the EU to have a bigger impact. The fact that the 2024 UN humanitarian appeal for Myanmar is only 28 per cent funded is not only a reflection of how overstretched humanitarian budgets are globally; it is also a reflection of donors’ lack of faith in the UN in Myanmar. The four-year absence of a permanent UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in the country has resulted in doubts about whether the UN is placing sufficient priority on addressing the needs it has identified. Although it is not a UN member itself, the EU is one of the major donors to UN agencies globally and has considerable influence within the system. It should leverage that influence directly and encourage its member states to work with like-minded governments to press the UN Secretary-General to appoint a resident coordinator and ensure that the appointee has the necessary political support and guidance from headquarters to navigate a particularly complex situation in dealing with the regime and non-state authorities.