“Today Myanmar, torn by conflict, and tried by weeks of violence against innocent people, needs a strong message of justice, peace, and reconciliation. The mass that we will celebrate at St. Peter’s with the Holy Father, Pope Francis, on May 16 is a powerful sign of spiritual communion.
We invoke God and the protection of the Virgin Mary so that people return to smile and look to the future with hope in our beloved nation”, says Father Maurice Moe Aung, a Burmese Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Faith, present in Rome, to Fides and among the animators of the Eucharistic celebration that Pope Francis will preside on May 16, at St. Peter’s, with the Burmese community and the faithful of Myanmar. There will be priests, religious, nuns, laypeople, and Burmese Catholic students from all over Italy, as well as Burmese citizens of other religions.
Father Maurice Moe Aung tells Fides: “The situation in Myanmar is critical. We hope and pray that it does not degenerate into a civil war”. Today, in this context, “the Pope’s words and prayers are a great sign of hope and peace. Pope Francis shows once again that he is close to the Burmese people, who suffer from injustice, repression, indiscriminate violence”. The Burmese are seriously worried because the peaceful protest, with the military coup on 1 February last, which resulted in the birth of a widespread civil disobedience movement, risks turning into widespread violence and civil war across the territory. The peaceful protest movement, vast and without political, ethnic, or religious distinctions, which has crossed the entire Burmese society, is being put to the test. The military junta has responded with violence and blood and which today bears the weight of a toll of over 780 people killed and almost 5 thousand arrested, of whom over 3,800 people still behind bars. In over three and a half months of protest, there have been many efforts to try the path of dialogue.
The Catholic Church, Christian Churches and Buddhist leaders in Myanmar have done everything possible to foster negotiations with multiple appeals, meetings, and prayers, which are still held outside the country, where it is forbidden to meet. The same effort has been made by international diplomacy and by many sectors of civil society around the world. ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), which also includes Myanmar, also invited the junta’s chief Min Aung Hlaing to Jakarta last April to try to unblock the situation. The organization asked the generals to stop the violence and allow the arrival of a special envoy, but the 5-point roadmap, drawn up by ASEAN, was neither accepted nor followed. The junta slowed down the violence immediately after the summit but then resumed the repression.
The newly formed Government of National Unity, which is in hiding, instead criticized the ASEAN meeting, rejecting the idea of negotiating with the junta. In the meantime, the executive abroad has promoted civil defense units (People’s Defense Force-Pdf) and launched the idea of a new federal army to oppose Tatmadaw (the Burmese army). The resistance army is being formed with the recruitment of young Burmese and the union of the various regional armies of ethnic minorities, the so-called Ethnic Armed Organizations. This scenario outlines the specter of widespread civil war. Meanwhile, the military has branded the new civilian government as a “terrorist”: the parliamentary commission that appointed it and the Popular Defense Forces (Pdf) are considered “terrorist groups” and anyone who has anything to do with them risks years in prison. The military also refused to accept a special envoy from ASEAN or other international organizations.
