The head of Myanmar’s military junta will reportedly attend a regional summit in Bangkok early next month, his first visit to an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member state since April 2021.
Citing a “highly placed source,” Thai PBS reported yesterday that Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing will attend the upcoming summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), which will be hosted by Thailand on April 3-4.
BIMSTEC is a regional organization that aims to promote economic growth and cooperation among the seven countries – India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Thailand – surrounding the Bay of Bengal. Thai PBS reported that the summit will also see member states “hold a series of bilateral meetings to strengthen diplomatic and economic relations,” some of which will presumably involve Min Aung Hlaing.
The visit would mark a significant diplomatic win for Myanmar’s military junta, which is seeking to rehabilitate its international image and gain recognition as the sole and legitimate government of Myanmar, despite controlling less territory than at any time since the military coup of February 2021. Since late 2021, political representatives of the military junta have been barred from attending high-level ASEAN meetings, a decision that was upheld at a foreign ministers meeting in January, and Min Aung Hlaing has made few trips outside the country.
His most frequent destination has been Russia, where he has made four trips since the coup, reflecting the important role that the country has assumed as an economic lifeline and source of arms and materiel since the coup. The most recent of these was earlier this month, when he met with President Vladimir Putin. In November, he also visited China for the first time since the coup, capping off a busy year of diplomatic exchanges between the two neighbors.
However, Min Aung Hlaing has not made visits to any other ASEAN member state since April 2021, when he attended an emergency summit in Jakarta, which produced ASEAN’s stagnant Five-Point Consensus peace plan for Myanmar. No Southeast Asian government has since hosted Min Aung Hlaing on a state visit. While ASEAN has not formally barred individual member states from doing so, such a restriction is well within the spirit of ASEAN’s chosen approach.
The reported invitation for Min Aung Hlaing to attend the BIMSTEC summit, when it could just as easily have invited a career Foreign Ministry official (as at recent ASEAN meetings) or the junta’s foreign minister (as at recent BIMSTEC meetings), reflects the willingness of the past several Thai governments to breach this regional norm and engage directly with Myanmar’s military junta. In December, Thailand hosted two separate meetings focused on Myanmar, one of which was appointed by the junta-appointed Foreign Minister Than Swe. The meetings, which addressed border security and transnational crime, and the course of Myanmar’s civil war, were also attended by China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh.
In its own defense, the Thai government would likely argue that no country has been as affected by the civil war in Myanmar, with which it shares a porous and meandering 2,416-kilometer border, and that such engagement is necessary to help deal with shared challenges such as the epidemic of online scamming operations in eastern Myanmar. It is also true that BIMSTEC has introduced no such bar on the attendance of representatives of Myanmar’s military administration, and has invited the junta’s foreign minister to its most recent meetings.
However, Thailand’s willingness to go its own way on Myanmar may end up widening the internal ASEAN divide toward Myanmar and complicating the bloc’s already limited ability to alleviate, let alone resolve, the country’s crisis.