Fighting from afar to run Myanmar

(From left) Moe Zaw Oo, Zaw Wai Soe and an unidentified man at the group’s headquarters in Washington. — ©2023 The New York Times Company

THREE blocks from the White House, at the end of a fluorescent-lit hallway on the sixth floor of a coworking space for “business nomads, freelancers and energetic entrepreneurs”, sits the American headquarters of the National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar.

This pro-democracy government was formed after a military coup in Myanmar deposed civilian authorities in 2021. Although Western nations condemned the putsch – and the massacres and mass arrests that followed – no national government has formally recognised NUG as the legitimate leadership of Myanmar.

But Washington attracts political refugees from all over the world who hope proximity to power will draw attention to their national plights.

A pair of owls in Moe Zaw Oo’s office. — ©2023 The New York Times Company.

Aye Chan Mon and Moe Zaw Oo of the unity government remain optimistic they can get the world to care about Myanmar, despite the destructive forces of apathy and ignorance.

“They don’t even know how to pronounce Myanmar,” said Aye Chan Mon of the reception she often receives in Washington. “They think it’s Yemen.”

“It’s not Yemen,” she added.

Fortified by her mother’s curries – enlivened with roselle leaves and shrimp paste – Aye Chan Mon, 26, spends her days trying to arrange meetings with anyone willing to listen to her recount her homeland’s desperate present situation and its history of military tyranny and civil war. In September, she testified before Congress.

An image of Myanmar’s deposed civilian leaders at the National Unity Government of Myanmar headquarters in Washington.

In December, President Joe Biden signed the Burma Act, which refers to Myanmar by a name discarded by military rulers. The legislation calls for sanctions on those who quashed Myanmar’s reforms and for non-lethal aid for pro-democracy forces. Its passage was a triumph for NUG’s Washington representatives.

In late October, the United States announced targeted sanctions on Myanmar’s state-run oil and gas enterprise.

But any actual spending for Myanmar must be authorised though separate appropriation Bills.

“After the Burma Act was enacted, the people of our country and the resistance movement had very high expectations,” said Moe Zaw Oo, who is the unity government’s deputy foreign minister. “But we have not seen any tangible results.”

Myanmar has never been a foreign policy priority for the United States.

During the Obama administration, the South-East Asian nation of slightly more than 50 million people seemed to offer a hopeful narrative: a military dictatorship peacefully giving way to an elected government. Barack Obama visited twice. That gauzy tale, though, proved a mirage.

The military never relinquished true power. Its soldiers continued to persecute ethnic minorities.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate-turned-civilian leader, declined to forcefully condemn the army’s brutality against Rohingya Muslims. The United States soured on her and labeled anti-Rohingya violence, which reached a frenzy in 2017, ethnic cleansing.

Now, she and nearly her entire Cabinet are imprisoned. Vast tracts of the country are at war, as civilians refuse to submit to the junta and armed ethnic groups expand their territory. At least 1.7 million people are internally displaced, the United Nations says, with another million or so having fled the country.

The unity government’s Washington office opened a year ago, joining branches in six other countries, including the Czech Republic and Japan. Almost all its meetings are virtual.

“Sometimes, we joke that meetings online are good because we are not facing each other, so we can argue without the threat of a physical fight,” Moe Zaw Oo said.

The entire office is barely larger than a cubicle. There’s little else besides a sign proclaiming the government’s name – strategically placed as a backdrop for online meetings – plus four portraits of government leaders (two of whom are imprisoned in Myanmar) and three tables.

Cappuccinos for visitors are sourced from a nearby cafe. An unplugged air freshener occupies one corner.

Moe Zaw Oo bought the air freshener, and Aye Chan Mon chose its floral scent, although she says no bottle compares to Myanmar’s tropical bouquet: the night jasmine or the golden padauk of the hot season.

“I can get everything here, like beautiful clothes and food and a car,” she said of Washington. “But it’s not home.”

Those in exile from Myanmar have faced numerous hardships.

Kyaw Moe Tun was Myanmar’s envoy to the United Nations at the time of the coup. He refused to submit to the military and kept control over his post. In July, a Myanmar man was convicted in a New York court of conspiring to injure or kill the ambassador on behalf of Myanmar’s military leaders.

Lead in the paint of the ambassador’s residence has poisoned his son, causing developmental delays, Kyaw Moe Tun said. But the family remains so as not to relinquish a valuable asset to the junta.

“Every one of us here in the United States for the Myanmar resistance, we are fighting our own wars,” Kyaw Moe Tun said.

In some parts of Myanmar that are successfully resisting army rule – and such areas are growing with recent battlefield gains – the unity government is providing health and education services, supplementing what ethnic armed groups have done for years. Funding comes from housekeepers in Bangkok, sushi sous-chefs in New York and tech entrepreneurs in Singapore, among others.

Dr Zaw Wai Soe, the unity government’s health and education minister, oversees schools and clinics, some camouflaged with foliage to avoid airstrikes. Once an orthopaedic surgeon for Myanmar’s top generals, Zaw Wai Soe now dispenses telemedicine to unity government fighters in the forest, squinting at the screen to examine war wounds.

“I was very rich,” he said. “Now, I know, we have to try something new. We need federal democracy. Otherwise, we cannot live together.”

But the unity government, working with other groups, has yet to produce a federal constitution to protect Myanmar’s diverse ethnicities. Various drafters have walked away from the process.

The billions of dollars in US aid and weapons dispatched to Ukraine – and now promised to Israel – is almost inconceivable to the unity government’s leaders.

“As a refugee, I stand with the people of Ukraine,” Aye Chan Mon said. “But sometimes I think, if we got even a little bit of the money Ukraine gets from the US, then our revolution in Myanmar would succeed.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company