Asean tells Myanmar to prioritise ceasefire over polls

Southeast Asian foreign ministers told Myanmar’s junta to prioritise a ceasefire in its civil war over fresh elections during a meeting in Malaysia on Sunday.

The Myanmar military seized power in February 2021, making unsubstantiated claims of massive electoral fraud in 2020 polls won resoundingly by the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

The junta then unleashed a bloody crackdown on dissent and, as fighting ravaged swaths of the country, it has repeatedly delayed plans for polls that critics say would be neither free nor fair.

“One thing that we know, they want to have an election. But we told them that election is not a priority at the moment,” Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan told reporters after the meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers on the Malaysian island of Langkawi.

“The priority now is (for a) ceasefire and everybody to stand down. It’s very simple,” Mohamad said.

Malaysia is this year’s rotating chair of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations — long derided by critics as a toothless talking shop.

Myanmar was represented on Sunday by Aung Kyaw Moe, the junta’s foreign affairs secretary.

Mohamad said Aung Kyaw Moe briefed the ministers about the junta’s plans to hold an election without giving any dates.

Asean has led diplomatic efforts to end the conflict but has struggled to implement a five-point peace plan agreed upon by all bloc leaders, including Myanmar’s junta, in April 2021.

The junta has several times pushed back a timetable for polls as it struggles to crush widespread opposition to its rule from allied ethnic minority armed groups and pro-democracy “People’s Defence Forces”.

The United States has said any elections under the junta would be a “sham”, while analysts say polls would be targeted by the military’s opponents and spark further bloodshed.

More than 3.3 million people in Myanmar have been displaced by the conflict, according to the United Nations.

Asean secretary-general Kao Kim Hourn said some of the foreign ministers on Sunday also “called for the release of Madam Aung San Suu Kyi”, the prominent pro-democracy figure who has been detained since the 2021 coup.