YANGON (AFP): Myanmar's spiralling rights and humanitarian crises risk getting "much worse" as global attention focuses on the Middle East war and aid dwindles further, the top United Nations expert on the Asian country warned.
More than five years after Myanmar's military snatched power in a coup, the junta is relentlessly continuing to attack civilians and obstruct desperately needed humanitarian aid, Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on rights in Myanmar, told AFP in an interview this week.
Andrews, whose mandate ends next month, cautioned that the war in the Middle East risked dramatically deepening the Myanmar crisis, and obscuring it even more from international view.
"Things are bad. They could get much worse," said the former US Democratic congressman from Maine, who also heads Harvard University's Southeast Asia Human Rights Project.
Even before the Middle East war started with Israeli-US air strikes on Iran on February 28, Myanmar had been affected by "a significant decrease in humanitarian aid", Andrews warned.
The aid cuts, which came amid the dramatic decline in global international funding since US President Donald Trump's return to office last year, had occurred at a time when the needs "continue to rise significantly", he said.
That aid is now likely to dwindle further as international focus and resources concentrate on the Middle East.
"In a place like Myanmar, it becomes completely hidden from view.
And support for the courageous people of Myanmar, who are risking life and limb daily, ... support for things like humanitarian aid, it's all going south," Andrews said.
"It's just a tragedy."
The Middle East war has also deepened the impression that the United Nations, which is working to protect and promote rights and provide aid in Myanmar, "is under siege", the special rapporteur said.
Andrews, who is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, condemned the fact that international relations were increasingly seen as "purely transactional".
A world where powers accept that "might makes right" is "extraordinarily dangerous", Andrews said, warning about the signals sent to Myanmar's "brutal" junta.
- Civilians targeted -
The situation in Myanmar is already dire, with attacks on civilians escalating exponentially.
In the first year of the coup in 2021, "there were nine aerial attacks on civilian targets by the military", Andrews pointed out.
"Last year, there were 1,140 aerial attacks on civilian targets in Myanmar.
"This is not just people getting caught in the crossfire of a civil war. These people are being targeted."
The expert stressed that international pressure in recent years had had a positive impact, leading to a significant reduction in the flow of weapons to the junta.
And he said international pressure was also surely behind the junta's decision to host "sham elections" in recent months, with the leadership increasingly feeling the need to portray some sense of legitimacy.
Those elections, which were beset by fatal violence and widespread rights abuses, were widely rejected by the international community and dismissed by democracy watchdogs as an attempt to rebrand army rule.
Andrews called on countries to maintain their pressure on the Myanmar junta and also reject the "civilian government" that will emerge following the vote.
"An illegitimate government follows an illegitimate election," Andrews said.
"This will be a military junta in civilian clothing." -- AFP
