Hun Sen — Cambodia’s acting head of state — has offered to negotiate with General Min Aung Hlaing — the head of Myanmar’s junta, which has suffered a series of battlefield defeats at the hands of the ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and the People’s Defence Force (PDF).
The offer to meet via video conference was delivered after Hun Sen met with Kyaw Soe Min, Myanmar’s ambassador to Cambodia in Phnom Penh on April 8, shortly after the Karen National Union (KNU) captured the key town of Myawaddy.
Myawaddy straddles the Thai border with Mae Sot and its fall to the EAOs-PDF was the latest in a series of unprecedented victories over the junta in a five-month dry season offensive.
Hlaing and Hun Sen would meet “to engage in discussions and idea exchange aimed at resolving the crisis in Myanmar,” government mouthpiece Fresh News said. The pair first met in early 2022 when Hun Sen was prime minister and chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The official Agence Khmer Presse (AKP) added that Hun Sen was prepared to hold talks “at any appropriate time before or after the Sankranta,” Khmer new year, which falls next weekend.
According to a Reuters dispatch, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has said that now is a good time to open talks with the military as the regime that seized power in a 2021 coup is weakening.
“Maybe it’s time to reach out”
“The current regime is starting to lose some strength,” Srettha said in an interview on the Thai resort island of Samui, adding, “but even if they are losing, they have the power, they have the weapons.”
“Maybe it’s time to reach out and make a deal,” he said.
No mention was made of the 20-odd EAOs, like the KNU, or the PDF, the armed wing of the opposition National Unity Government (NUG) which has isolated the Myanmar military around the Yangon to Naypyidaw corridor.
They also share a dislike of Hun Sen who emerged from his last meeting with Hlaing as a ‘god brother’ to the general but would be politically embarrassed by the junta when it executed four pro-democracy activists ahead of an ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh in mid-2022.
Hun Sen was also forced to apologize in November of that year after the junta failed to release the Australian economist Sean Turnell, who was charged with spying, as expected.
“Hlaing and Hun Sen are two of a kind, they’re both dictators and we don’t want to have anything to do with either of them,” a PDF soldier told UCA News. “ASEAN has not done anything to help us although Western nations keep saying they should.”
Of the 10 members of the ASEAN only Indonesia and Singapore were acceptable given their previous efforts to negotiate peace, he said.
Meanwhile, 438 civil society organizations have urged the New Zealand government to back down and not include the official representatives from Myanmar’s junta at two ASEAN meetings being held on April 18-19 in Wellington.
“The military has committed massacres, indiscriminate airstrikes, artillery shelling, sexual and gender-based violence, mass torture and mass arson,” said an open letter sent by the Progressive Voice of Myanmar.
“As a result of these crimes, over 2.8 million people are now internally displaced.”
Credit: Source link
