So another village has been erased. Dozens of souls, snuffed out in what passes for a news cycle these days. Myanmar, that unfortunate patch of earth where the 21st century meets the 18th, has provided us with the latest exhibit of man’s inhumanity to man. The details are predictably grim: a massive blast in a rebel-held village, the dead pulled from rubble, the wounded carted to makeshift clinics. And the UK, ever the conscientious spectator, has called for a UN investigation. How noble. How utterly, exquisitely pointless.
We have seen this script before. It is a tired, well-worn performance. The United Nations will convene. Resolutions will be drafted. Sanctions will be threatened. Condemnations will echo through the halls of Geneva. And then what? Will the junta in Naypyidaw tremble? Will the rebels lay down their arms? History, that cruel adjudicator of human folly, offers a clear verdict: no. The UN is not a force for justice; it is a stage for moral vanity. It provides the West with the comforting illusion that it is doing something, while the real powers – China, Russia, the arms dealers – continue to fuel the fire.
But let us not be naive. The tragedy in Myanmar is not a failure of international diplomacy. It is a feature of the postimperial order. We carved up these nations with the casual arrogance of a colonial cartographer, drew lines on a map with no regard for the tribes and tongues that lived there, and then feigned surprise when the bloodshed began. The Burmese conflict, like so many others, is a legacy of our own making. We sold the guns, we trained the generals, we propped up the despots. And now we wring our hands when the inevitable happens.
The current crisis is but a chapter in a longer, darker story. Myanmar has been a byword for brutality since the 1960s, when the military first seized power and plunged the country into a paranoid isolation. The Rohingya genocide was a global disgrace, yet the world did little more than tut and turn the page. Now the civil war grinds on, with neither side deserving of our sympathy. The junta is a gang of thugs; the rebels are often little better. And caught in the middle are the peasants, the eternal fodder of history, whose only crime is to be born in the wrong place.
As I write this, the bodies are being counted. Parents will bury children. Children will wander, orphaned. The world will briefly glance, offer a prayer or a tweet, and then move on to the next outrage. This is the cruel calculus of chaos: we have only so much indignation to spare. The explosion in Myanmar will compete with a school shooting in America, a famine in Sudan, a terrorist attack in Europe. Our attention is a scarce resource, and the dead must jostle for their moment of recognition.
And what of the UK’s call for an investigation? It is a ritual, a tribal dance. It signals that we are on the side of the angels. It allows our politicians to look stern and resolute. But let us not mistake the gesture for policy. An investigation without enforcement power is a sop to conscience. It is the grown-up equivalent of telling a child to ‘say sorry’ without meaning it. The junta will ignore it. The rebels will use it for propaganda. The dead will remain dead.
What would I do instead? A question unasked in polite company. I would confront the uncomfortable truth: that in the game of great powers, Myanmar is a pawn. China needs the junta for its Belt and Road projects; Russia needs arms markets; the West needs to maintain a facade of moral leadership. Until we are willing to pay the price of real intervention – boots on the ground, the risk of casualties, the financial cost – we are just spectators. And spectatorship, however well-intentioned, is a form of complicity.
But that is too harsh for a public that prefers its tragedies sanitised. So we shall have the investigation. The UN will issue a report. The Foreign Office will express grave concern. And the bodies will keep falling, perhaps in a different village, but with the same dull thud. That is the pattern. That is the world we have made. And we call it civilisation.
