The next year could be decisive for Myanmar. After bringing the country into civil war following a 2021 coup, the military is weakening, and resistance groups are gaining ground. Only 14% of the country’s territory and 33% of its population are under stable military control. The humanitarian crisis is worsening as the military resorts to bombing civilians, and genocidal acts against the Rohingya people are again escalating.

The UN’s response to this series of crises has been criticized as “woefully inadequate.” Among those who have criticized the UN response is the Special Advisory Council on Myanmar (SAC-M), a group of independent international human rights experts that was formed in response to the 2021 coup. In this interview, SAC-M member Chris Sidoti, a former member of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, provides recommendations on how the UN could improve its efforts to deliver humanitarian aid, politically engage, promote accountability, and protect civilians in Myanmar.

The interview was conducted by Albert Trithart, Editor and Research Fellow at the International Peace Institute.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the current state of the war and humanitarian crisis in Myanmar?

Three and a half years after the coup, we have passed a tipping point. The military is retreating to and fortifying major cities like Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw. Various resistance groups are now in control of more and more territory. The military will lose, but when that will happen is hard to predict. It’s conceivable that it could collapse completely by the first half of next year, or this could go on for another three to five years.

As the military loses control on the ground, it’s resorting more to air power. They have a “scorched earth” policy to take vengeance on the Myanmar people, which brings a whole new scale of destruction to civilian property, villages, farms, and infrastructure and will increase the humanitarian crisis. The humanitarian situation has also been made much worse by the impact of the cyclone in 2023, which killed hundreds of people and caused enormous destruction.

The challenge is getting aid to the people who need it most. UN agencies and other international actors will only deal with the Myanmar military, which means that aid has to go in through Yangon airport, which the military still controls. The military is allowing the provision of aid only to those areas it controls in and outside the major cities. But the majority of the people in need are not located in military-controlled areas, so aid is not reaching the majority of the people.

You’ve said that the UN should stop treating the junta as the de facto government. What would that look like in practice, considering that the junta still controls Yangon and the capital?

Primarily it would mean the UN would have effective official relations with the National Unity Government (NUG), which is the institution that most reflects the will of the people. The UN country team should also develop closer relationships with the ethnic organizations and the Bamar democratic organizations. And it needs to negotiate with neighboring countries to start the mass provision of humanitarian aid by land across borders into the resistance-controlled areas. Many of the ethnic organizations have called for that and are prepared to facilitate cross-border humanitarian aid and to guarantee the safety of UN personnel providing it. These are the absolute priorities.

Have you seen any shift in that direction from the UN? If not, what do you think is holding them back?

We know that there is more informal contact than there used to be. What’s holding them back is that the UN country team is prioritizing presence over effectiveness. They fear the military expelling their international staff from Myanmar and closing their offices in Yangon and Naypyidaw. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) already does not have a presence in Myanmar; it’s been excluded because of its strong and supportive stance for human rights. Yet this hasn’t been a detriment, because OHCHR has been able to fulfill its mission far more effectively than other UN agencies, primarily because of its distance from the military.

Do you think there’s any validity to those concerns about being kicked out of the areas controlled by the junta?

If they were expelled from military-controlled areas, it would be another strike against the military’s record in human rights violations. So there would be a negative impact, but it would be a small impact compared to the benefit of providing more effective assistance to the majority of people in need.

Turning to the UN’s political engagement: Nearly a year passed between the departure of the previous UN special envoy to Myanmar and the appointment of her successor. The previous envoy was also only able to meet with the military authorities one time in her tenure. Do you think the UN needs to be playing more of a political leadership role in Myanmar? What more do you think they could be doing?

The UN certainly needs to play more of a political role, and this is one of our major criticisms of the way the UN has acted over the last three and a half years. We have seen very little political interest in what is going on in Myanmar either from UN officials or from UN organs like the Security Council.

The appointment of Julie Bishop as special envoy in April gives rise to some new hope. She has been very active in this region for a long time, and she knows Myanmar well. But without unequivocal public and private backing from the top of the UN system, her hands are tied and she can’t be as effective as she should be. The UN secretary-general hasn’t gone to the region to try to deal with the situation in Myanmar and has shown very little public interest.

The Security Council has managed to pass only one resolution on Myanmar, in 2022, since it was admitted to the UN in 1948. Almost two years have passed, and the resolution has been totally ignored by the military. If the Security Council is serious, it has to provide leadership and follow-up.

The problem for the UN has been its determination to hide behind the skirts of ASEAN. We do not contest that ASEAN is central to the resolution of the Myanmar crisis, but ASEAN can’t do it alone. When we look at ASEAN, we see an organization that does not know what to do next. It adopted the Five-Point Consensus in 2021, but it has not known what to do next when the military refused to observe the consensus. ASEAN needs help to identify what can be done next, and it needs international political and economic support to carry forward an effective program to resolve the crisis. The UN has to get out from behind the skirts of ASEAN and start providing effective global political leadership, working hand-in-hand with ASEAN.

The UK circulated another draft resolution on Myanmar in the Security Council in August. What do you want to see in that resolution, and what are its prospects of passing?

The last resolution was more of an expression of the Security Council’s views and a call for the parties to end the violence and move towards a democratic state. A new resolution needs to contain effective measures for dealing with the situation. Those measures need to include an arms embargo on the Myanmar military. They also need to include action to cut off the supply of money to the military. The Myanmar economy in areas controlled by the military is hurting because of economic sanctions put in place bilaterally by some states or collectively by the European Union, but the Security Council should also impose both arms sanctions and economic sanctions.

Lastly is accountability. The International Criminal Court (ICC) can deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the expulsion of the Rohingya, but it’s not able to deal with the Myanmar situation generally. The Security Council can refer the matter to the ICC and enable the court to act across Myanmar as a whole.

Passing a new resolution is going to be politically difficult. We know that China and Russia historically have prevented Security Council action on Myanmar. It seems that the Chinese position is shifting, however. China wants a secure, stable, and friendly Myanmar to advance its economic interests and secure some geopolitical advantage in having access to the Bay of Bengal, and I think it has come to the realization that the military will never be able to provide that.

Russia is the spoiler. Russia has no clear geostrategic policy other than messing things up for everybody else. I can’t see Russia’s position in the Security Council changing. What that means is that other members of the Security Council, including the other permanent members, need to find ways around Russia.

If a resolution can’t make its way through the Security Council, I suppose that leaves the General Assembly?

A General Assembly resolution doesn’t carry legally enforceable authority the way a Security Council resolution does, but the decisions of the General Assembly are very important. The General Assembly adopted a strong resolution on Myanmar in 2021 immediately after the coup, but since then it has not looked generally at the situation in Myanmar by way of a resolution. It has dealt with human rights violations, and it deals each year with the Rohingya, but we are calling for another comprehensive resolution out of the General Assembly during the session being conducted from now until the end of the year.

What do you see as some of the most promising avenues for accountability for human rights abuses in Myanmar?

We are all anxiously waiting to see the ICC act with the limited jurisdiction it has. So far as we are aware, arrest warrants have not been issued for the military leadership and others who were involved in the serious crimes committed in Rakhine state in 2017. We would like to see arrest warrants coming out of the ICC very quickly.

We looked at alternative international accountability mechanisms, including a special tribunal to be established by either the General Assembly or the Human Rights Council to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the situation and conduct trials. It would work with the UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), which, since the end of 2019, has been collecting evidence on the crimes that have been committed across all of Myanmar, particularly related to the 2021 attempted coup and the fighting that has taken place since then. Having a tribunal that can deal with the evidence collected by the IIMM should be the priority, and if that can’t be done by the ICC, then it will have to be done by a special tribunal.

Another area for accountability is the exercise of universal jurisdiction by national courts. There is a case going on in Argentina that is slowly progressing. It would be good if countries closer to Myanmar with more influence on it also started looking at the possibility of universal jurisdiction cases in their national courts.

Finally, the case against Myanmar is continuing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and there is a timetable for evidence and argument next year. The wheels of international justice turn appallingly slowly, but we are hopeful that there will be a decision out of the ICJ on the genocide case before the end of next year.

Are there any actions the UN could be taking to protect civilians in Myanmar?

One of the saddest things I have ever seen was the huge demonstrations in Yangon, Mandalay, and elsewhere in the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup. Young people were carrying signs saying “R2P” outside the UN headquarters in Yangon. These courageous young people honestly expected the UN to be serious about the responsibility to protect. But it never was.

Now, I would be reluctant to support the forcible entry of a UN military force anywhere. But the failure to deal with the arms supply, financial supply, and other forms of support is a failure of the UN’s responsibility to protect. The sad consequence of this international failure is that the people of Myanmar no longer look for anything out of the UN. They have zero expectations, and that’s entirely understandable. This does not mean, however, that the UN can walk away from Myanmar. The whole legitimacy and credibility of the post–World War II international system is at risk because of several situations where we see the UN’s abject failure, and Myanmar is one of them.

In a report last year from the Special Advisory Council on Myanmar, you wrote that “the UN system has failed Myanmar before and it is doing so again.” Has anything changed in the year since then?

There have been small changes around the margins, but not much. Our bottom-line assessment would be the same. One change I referred to earlier is the appointment of a new special envoy. That has yet to produce any significant impact, but Julie Bishop has certainly been active already in going around to neighboring states, including China. Her priority has been discussing what can be done with all interested actors and states rather than meeting with the military and being photographed shaking hands with the senior general. This is good, but we’re yet to see an impact. So there has been some minor change, but at this stage, the verdict is still failure.