Last month, the Christian Conference of Asia held a four-day international conference on Myanmar. There were 57 participants representing various ecumenical groups, Christian organizations, NGOs, universities, government agencies, and so on. I represented Mennonite Central Committee at the conference and moderated a couple of sessions. The goal of the conference was to develop a communique outlining a new set of advocacy points representing the current situation in Myanmar instead of repeating the same points that have been repeated since the coup.

The topics discussed included:

• Legacy and the Conundrum of the Conflicts in Myanmar: Role of the Military, External Influences, and Geopolitics
• People’s Security in Myanmar: Challenges Within and Beyond Borders
• Challenges to Peace in Myanmar: Border Criminal Activities, Armed Conflict Stalemate, and Widespread Violence
• Ethnic Diversity, Ethnic Strife, and the Future of a Democratic and Federal Myanmar
• Myanmar’s Civil War: Foreign Policy in Relation to Russia, China, and ASEAN
• Peacebuilding in Myanmar: Role of Civil Society and Faith-Based Organisations
• Human Dignity and Human Rights in Myanmar: Reflections from Inter-Religious Perspectives
• Towards Policy Solutions for a Peaceful and Democratic Myanmar: Alternative Prospective Pathways
• Role of Ethnic Communities in Ensuring Peacebuilding
• Roles of the International Community and Multilateral Organisations in Peacebuilding in Myanmar’.

The conference followed the Chatham House Rule so there will be no attribution.

I’ll share the communique below but here are a few of the lessons learned that I noted. There are more but I’m excluding them here because they would present a security risk or are too long/technical for the blog.

• The majority of humanitarian relief to Myanmar is being focused along traditional routes on the Thai/Myanmar border or being delivered to junta supporting communities in Myanmar. There is extremely little work being done in high need conflict zones of the Northwest and MCC’s work there is a critically important witness. Several participants were shocked when they heard where we’re working.
• Interfaith peacebuilding initiatives face headwinds in Myanmar because many Buddhist and Christian leaders took public stances supporting the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Rakhine state during the late 2010s. Distrust and resentment are difficult to overcome as religious leaders who excused or supported violence now call for interfaith peacebuilding.
• Transnational crime syndicates operating online scam centers present significant threats to human security and peacebuilding. There is significant risk that Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar will become “scam economies” dependent on these criminal activities. This revenue benefits political elites and the crime syndicates but has an adverse effect on local populations. This practice originated with Chinese crime syndicates but has been adopted by various armed groups in Myanmar. People of all ethnicities and nationalities are being targeted by human traffickers for this (for example, one compound on Thai border has captives from 66 different nations). Once trafficked people arrive at the compounds they are forced by torture to conduct online scams, especially the kind known as “pig butchering”. Cryptocurrency is a key tool for the practice.
• The longevity of the conflict was noted as one of its challenges. As one presenter said, “All sides want an end to fighting but often our trauma controls us.” The need for trauma healing, including among soldiers on all sides of the conflict, was emphasized. MCC has worked with Eastern Mennonite University to train partners in Myanmar on trauma care and resilience, but there are many challenges and more needs to be done. Especially since the first step in most trauma care frameworks is “find safety” – which is impossible for many people in Myanmar.
• The participants and presenters repeatedly expressed that Myanmar has been forgotten by the international community. This has concrete ramifications, such as reduced funding for community mediation and civilian protections, as well as social ramifications as the people feel forgotten and abandoned.
• Myanmar is experiencing a severe and underreported disability crisis caused primarily by armed violence, landmines, and unexploded ordnance. We’ve heard about this on a local level but didn’t fully realize the scale of the crisis.
• Western donors and diplomats are increasingly shifting to be junta-adjacent or junta-positive due to cynical political calculus, limited knowledge of the situation outside of Yangon, or neocolonial diplomatic adventurism to advance their career by “making progress on the Myanmar problem.”
• Massive amounts of international funding is being allocated to top-down “peacebuilding institutions” that have contributed to advancing expert careers – cynically referred to as “peace entrepreneurs” by one presenter – but which have not adequately given voice to community-level concerns and which have contributed to misinformation about the conflict due to an overreliance on academic knowledge (example: there have been so many Western-funded institutes and centers with “experts” on Myanmar who are not from Myanmar and who have only been to Yangon or the Thai/Myanmar border region). It was repeatedly noted that there is a great need for bottom-up peacebuilding that starts in the community and this affirms MCC’s ongoing work on the community level.
• International and junta-affiliated media are promoting misinformation and disinformation that do not reflect the situation on the community-level. This includes Western media such as the New York Times which published a dramatically incorrect map of areas of control in Myanmar that made the resistance look stronger than it is on the ground. Independent Myanmar-based media which does report on the community-level is being defunded, which is undermining access to quality information on the situation.