Guest contributor
Khin Ohmar
As a lifelong Burmese democracy, human rights, peace and security advocate, I have watched successive military regimes in my birth country rewrite the meaning of “election” to serve the barrel of a gun.
What the current illegal military junta now calls an “election,” planned for late 2025, is not a democratic process—it is the final act of a brutal performance to reinstate military rule and rewrite its chauvinistic history while the world idly watches.
Let us be clear: any so-called election held by the illegal military is a weapon to reinstate its tyrannical rule and further terrorize the Myanmar people. A weapon to launder impunity. A weapon to delegitimize and sideline the people’s revolution. A weapon to restore international partnerships under the false banner of political progress.
That is why Myanmar civil society and their regional and international partners as well as the National Unity Government (NUG), ethnic resistance forces, and international experts—are all urging governments around the world to reject this fraudulent electoral charade for what it is before it’s forced on the people: a sophisticated attempt to secure global recognition that will allow the military to change its name and uniform while it continues to commit atrocities.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announced its position on July 11 that the military junta’s election “is not a priority” and “will not solve any problems, but instead will worsen conditions.” ASEAN is finally calling a spade a spade.
A vote under threat of violence and lack of legitimacy is not a vote
Let us remember who is organizing this “election.” This is the same military that attempted to seize power through a violent coup on February 1, 2021, triggering a nationwide revolution that continues to this day.
In the nearly five years since, the military junta has killed more than 6,900 democracy activists and supporters and human rights defenders. The junta has arrested nearly 29,500. Among them, over 22,000 are still detained, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma). Ill treatment and torture, including sexual torture, are routine in detention centers and prisons. Some were even executed while others disappeared.
Since January, total 16 political prisoners and 2 former political prisoners died from torture, ill treatment and medical neglect. In July alone, 2 former political prisoners and 2 political prisoners died. Among these 4 were a former political prisoner and a well known author and poet, Maung Thar Cho, and a 26-year-old young woman political prisoner, Wut Yee Aung, who was a Dagon University Students’ Union leader.
Since 2021, the junta has launched more than 5,400 aerial attacks, resulting in deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians and over 5,000 injured. More than 3.5 million people are internally displaced.
And now they say they are ready to hold a “free and fair election”?
They make such claims even as their own junta-run census last year admitted it could not collect data from at least 19 million people—nearly 40 percent of the population—due to “significant security constraints.”
Across the country, large swaths of territory are now controlled by the NUG, People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) and Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs) who have built and run bottom-up governance structures and administrations in defiance of military tyranny.
When the military lacks governing power over the majority of the country, when its electoral commission dissolves 40 political parties—including the National League for Democracy (NLD) party, which overwhelmingly won in 1990, 2015 and 2020—and when nearly four million people have been displaced by its violence and terror campaign, then what exactly is going to be voted on—and by whom?
This is not a vote. This is theater. This is an act of political terror. This is war by other means.
The “Peace Forum” is a battlefield in disguise
The junta is also using what it calls a “Peace Forum” to disguise its violence as diplomacy. In June, the illegal junta chief Min Aung Hlaing opened the 2025 “Peace Forum” in Naypyidaw with a call for armed resistance groups to disarm and join the electoral process. He described their struggle as a “misguided path” and insisted that political issues should be resolved “through political means.”
This approach has remained unchanged across successive military regimes: They passed on power from one regime to another illegitimately and through violence, treat everyone else as subordinate, and assume a legitimacy they don’t have, and declare themselves head of state.
How can anyone speak of peace with perpetrators who are bombing villages, Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, clinics and schools, killing the elderly and children, and raping women—even in time of “peace talks”?
This so-called “Peace Forum” was attended not just by military officials and junta-aligned ethnic organizations, but also by diplomats from China, Russia, and India, and armored vehicle experts from six countries.
These are not neutral observers. These are enablers, taking the side of a military that has turned indiscriminate airstrikes into daily policy.
Let us remember that while the forum was underway, the junta launched over 550 airstrikes across the country, killing at least 471 civilians, including 72 children. In Karenni State alone, air raids decimated entire communities, forcing tens of thousands to flee.
You can not build peace with bombs.
ASEAN must stop maneuvering its theater of dialogue
The ASEAN denouncement of the junta’s sham election is welcome as it is clearly a long-overdue principled step in the right direction.
Yet, ASEAN under the chairmanship of Malaysia has no time to lose before Malaysia passes on the rotating chair to the Philippines, bypassing Myanmar in 2026.
It must take the next step to work in partnership with legitimate stakeholders in Myanmar to support the people’s efforts on the ground to achieve genuine federal democracy.
Further, ASEAN needs to go beyond its Five-Point Consensus peace plan to effectively address Myanmar’s polycrisis as it has been a failure. In spite of the bloc’s promise to stop the violence, begin inclusive dialogue and provide humanitarian access, it still cannot even implement the very first point: stopping the military’s four long years of unprecedented violence and atrocities.
ASEAN must also stop pressuring or persuading revolutionary forces and civil society to come to the table with the junta, as if we are two equal sides in a political disagreement. This is not a conflict between rival factions. This is a people’s revolution against a terrorist military that has spent decades looting our resources and slaughtering our communities.
Those who still believe that this military can be tamed over some kind of signed “peace agreement” with democratic resistance movement in the presence of the international community – be it ASEAN, the U.N. or peace champion international governments through talks over tea and handshakes have reached an appalling level of intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
We are already solving the problem ASEAN claimed it would fix. If they will not help and support the people’s revolution, they must stop pressuring us to go back under the military’s tyrannical rule through such “inclusive dialogue” with the criminal junta.
And if they want to be taken seriously, ASEAN must end all diplomatic, political, military, and financial engagement with the junta. They must formally recognize and elevate their dialogue and formal collaboration with revolutionary stakeholders, including the NUG and EROs, and push for a UN General Assembly resolution to cut off sales and transfers of weapons, technology and aviation fuel supplies.
The path forward is not through appeasement. It is through principle and accountability for justice, peace and stability.
International legitimacy must be earned, not staged
Let me say this to all governments, donors, and institutions still unsure how to respond: Every time you treat the junta’s electoral plans as any possible pathway to a “transition” to democracy in Myanmar, you become part of the problem.
Every time you send a delegate or a delegation to Naypyidaw or you invite a military general or representatives of the junta, shake hands with them, or remain silent in the face of atrocities, you extend the life of this regime and the harm to the people.
The U.N., ASEAN and international governments need to stop pretending this is a situation with two equal sides and start recognizing the military junta as the criminal network it is.
We need solidarity in action—not statements. We need sanctions that bite, legal accountability that endures, and political recognition of those building a new, inclusive federal democracy from the ground up.
A final word: whose future are we talking about?
Every day, young people across Myanmar risk their lives to resist the military’s oppression and violence and build a new Myanmar that protects their lives and the lives of all Myanmar communities. They do not do this for power or for revenge. They do it for the right to grow old in a country free from fear. This is about the future.
If the international community legitimizes this electoral farce, then you are not just legitimizing an illegal junta, you are denying the future of millions who are struggling to live in peace, dignity and hope.
Myanmar’s peaceful future will not be born in the junta’s polling stations. It is already being built now, in liberated areas, displacement camps, bombed-out classrooms, online universities, and jungle hospitals by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
The world needs to stand with them. Not with the generals.
Khin Ohmar is a Myanmar human rights activist who was involved in organizing the ‘8888’ nationwide pro-democracy uprising. She is also the founder and chairperson of Progressive Voice, a Myanmar human rights organization. She developed the Women Peacebuilding Program for Women’s League of Burma and served as program coordinator from 2000 to 2006.
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