Min Aung Hlaing: Open Dialogue with the Myanmar Media and Journalists Is Far Preferable to Their “Elimination”

An intimate appeal to conscience, to the Dhamma, and to the courage to end the war on your own people

By Alan Clements

Min Aung Hlaing, before another order is given, before another journalist is made to wonder whether the next knock on the door will be the last sound of an ordinary life, I ask you to pause. Somewhere in your country, someone is sitting down to write what they have witnessed. Somewhere else, a mother is waiting for news of a child in prison. You have the power to deepen their fear. You also have the power to begin relieving it. I am writing to the human being in you who can still choose.

I write as a former Buddhist monk in your country, a friend of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and a man whose life has been immeasurably enlarged by the people of Burma. I have received no greater gift than their generosity, their teachings, their astonishing capacity to remain human under circumstances that would break so many of us. My affection has survived expulsion, separation, and decades of grief. It is from within that affection that I appeal to you, sir, and to the military leaders, present and former, who might still help you change the direction of this history.

The words now appearing in your regime’s media deserve to be read slowly. According to The Irrawaddy, Kyemon called for the “elimination of any destructive element inside or outside the country.” It declared that anyone who “disrupts peace, stability, and development, undermines national sovereignty, prestige, and unity, or obstructs the administrative mechanism must be eliminated.”

Must be eliminated.

Please sit with those words before asking anyone else to live beneath them. Imagine them spoken about someone you love. Imagine your family waiting while men with authority decide what they mean.

The International Federation of Journalists has condemned your administration’s efforts to pursue five independent outlets through Interpol: The Irrawaddy, Mizzima, DVB, Myanmar Now, and Khit Thit. Interpol’s rules prohibit political intervention; your government’s announced requests do not establish its approval. But even before any international process, the threat enters the lives of reporters, editors, and those of us who contribute to their work. It enters the room where we write. It sits beside the telephone. It asks whether telling the truth will cost someone their freedom, their family, their life.

What an opportunity to bring a radical, beautiful radiance into this darkness. To let the elevation of human dignity become the purpose of power. To discover what your country might offer you freely when it no longer has to fear you. There are forms of respect that cannot be commanded, and an affection no army can secure. You could begin creating the conditions in which such a relationship becomes possible.

And yet, what an opportunity lies before you. What an extraordinary moment to interrupt the machinery of intimidation with a question no one can answer on your behalf: how could I achieve peace? How could I bring people together? How could I make it possible for those who fear me to speak to me, and for those who oppose me to recognize that I have finally begun to listen? You could ask these questions today. Nothing in the past can prevent you from asking them. This, too, belongs to your freedom.

You know the words moha, lobha, and dosa. Moha: delusion, the obscuring of clear seeing. Lobha: greed, the grasping that makes possession feel indispensable. Dosa: hatred, aversion, the hostility that wants what disturbs it removed. The Buddha identified these as roots of unwholesome action. In the Mūla Sutta, he speaks directly of the suffering they generate through imprisonment, confiscation, and banishment in the pursuit of power. Here is a teaching waiting to be consulted before a decree is issued, before a prison door closes.

I learned in your country how intimately these forces must be known. We meet them in ourselves, in the smallest defensiveness, the refusal to listen, the delicious certainty that we are right. But give them an army, give them a bureaucracy, give them permission to decide who belongs, and their consequences enter generations. How many children must inherit the consequences of an adult’s unwillingness to examine his own mind? What would happen if the next order arose from that examination, from a moment of honest inward recognition?

Why not mettā? Why not karuṇā? Loving-kindness, the wish that others be well; compassion, the willingness to let their suffering matter enough to change our conduct. You have heard these words in monasteries. You have seen them embodied in people with almost nothing to give who nevertheless give. Bring that spirit into the places where decisions are made. Let compassion have consequences as tangible as an arrest order: a release, a reunion, medicine delivered, a village allowed to remain a village, a journalist returning home.

And why not hiri and ottappa, those guardians of the world? Hiri is the conscience that feels the shame of wrongdoing and draws back through self-respect. Ottappa recognizes the danger and consequences of harmful action. What a beautiful strength it would be to allow them to rise within you, to feel their discomfort without silencing it, to let conscience become stronger than the fear of losing face. There is dignity in the moment a human being can say: I have caused suffering, and I must stop.

Why not ask your people? Ask the political prisoners you have jailed, and give them the freedom necessary to answer you. Ask your wife, your family, what they want your name to mean when you are gone. Ask the mothers whose children have disappeared from their lives. Ask the young people who should be falling in love, studying, making music, imagining futures. Ask the monks. Ask the thilashin, the women in religious life whose wisdom is so often invited to bless a room and so rarely invited to determine what happens inside it.

Ask Julie Bishop, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Myanmar. Ask António Guterres. Ask the ambassadors, the diplomats, the leaders of the world. Ask His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Ask Pope Leo XIV. Put before them the question you have the opportunity to place before history: how do we begin again after so much harm? How do we build a peace spacious enough for people who have wounded one another, without requiring the wounded to surrender their truth?

Why not invite such a dialogue to Naypyidaw? Men and women from across your country: ethnic leaders, democratic representatives, resistance voices, former prisoners, artists, philosophers, teachers, young people, Rohingya representatives, those whose lives have been decided in rooms they were never allowed to enter. Invite monks and nuns from different traditions, Christian and Muslim and Hindu leaders. Ask Thai ministers, President Trump, and others with influence to support the work. Seek the counsel of the Dalai Lama and Pope Leo. Let the world contribute, while the people of Myanmar shape their future.

Make the invitation worthy of trust. Guarantee that people may disagree and leave unharmed. Allow independent reporting. Open humanitarian access. Give women authority in the process, not simply seats in the photograph. The Dayton Peace negotiations helped end the Bosnian war in 1995; they remind us that even entrenched enemies can enter a room and produce an agreement that stops a war. Your country needs its own process, its own imagination, its own language of coexistence. Begin by making the room possible, and by relinquishing the right to dictate every answer.

You know the story of Aṅgulimāla. The killer calls to the Buddha to stop, and the Buddha answers: “I have stopped, Angulimala. You stop.” He has stopped violence toward living beings; Aṅgulimāla has not. Across the centuries, that exchange still reaches us with its astonishing intimacy. Someone steeped in killing is addressed as someone capable of ceasing. The next act remains open. The weapon can be put down. A life can turn, even though the suffering already caused cannot be recalled.

And consider Ashoka, whose thirteenth major rock edict records remorse for the slaughter, deportation, and suffering of Kalinga, and commends conquest through Dhamma. Consider a ruler allowing the grief of those he conquered to enter the account of his own reign. What might enter yours if you let yourself hear it fully? What might become possible if you could look at the suffering and say, without an explanation prepared by an adviser, that this must end, and that you will take responsibility for beginning its end?

I am asking you to stop the continuation of akusala kamma, unwholesome action, where you have the power to stop it. No ceremony can substitute for the person released, the threatened life protected, the order withdrawn. A turn of conscience must become a turn in conduct. It must enter the chain of command, reach the prison governor, reach the soldier, reach the family who will otherwise have no reason to believe that anything has changed. Let Dhamma become something your people can experience in what happens to them tomorrow.

Imagine such a transformation eventually being spoken of in the language of a Nobel Peace Prize: a sustained commitment to ending this suffering that commands the world’s attention and opens a path toward lasting peace. Let the honor come from the work, and let the work survive without applause. The bereaved owe you no forgiveness. They deserve truth, justice, and the freedom to decide what reconciliation could mean. Give them changes substantial enough to consider, and give history a different direction to follow.

Begin with Daw Suu. Go on national television and say that you have had a change of heart, and make that announcement inseparable from her unconditional release. Imagine saying: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, you are free. Your country needs to hear you. Then listen to what she chooses to say. Restore what should never depend on your permission: her freedom to speak, to meet others, to choose her own next step. Let the encounter begin with that dignity.

Then open the doors for the others imprisoned for peaceful political expression. Retract the threats against journalists. Let the first evidence of your change arrive in ordinary homes, in the impossible sweetness of a familiar voice heard again without a prison wall between you. Imagine the news traveling through the very outlets you have threatened. Imagine their reporters verifying releases, recording reunions, asking difficult questions about how these freedoms will endure. Let them ask. Let the answers become stronger because the questions remain free.

For my part, I would welcome an openhearted conversation with you in Naypyidaw, a real encounter in which we could listen without surrendering the truth. My book, Conversation with a Dictator, imagined such a dialogue; it was fiction, written out of a conviction that conscience deserves to be addressed. I would welcome a genuine exchange, recorded and shared unedited, with the freedom and protection necessary for everyone involved. I want to understand your thinking, your feelings, what you believe you are defending, and what might allow you to let go.

Sir, I would rejoice to write about a Burma in which your decisions were helping people return to life. I would rejoice to see the media report courage in the relinquishment of cruelty, dignity in accountability, and leadership willing to be questioned. That possibility is why I continue to appeal to you. After everything, I still believe it is worth speaking to the conscience of another human being, and worth leaving him a way to answer through what he does.

End this war on your people. Look into the war within your own mind, and let that looking reach the lives held in your power. I appeal to you with love for Burma, with respect for the human capacity to change, and with mettā that does not require silence about suffering. Retract the threat. Release those unjustly held. Invite the conversation. Somewhere tonight, a family is waiting for someone who could come home if you chose differently. Let your next decision reach them as mercy. Let them hear footsteps at the door and discover, at last, someone they love.

About Alan Clements

Alan Clements is an author, spoken-word artist, and former Buddhist monk who trained in Burma under Mahāsi Sayadaw and Sayadaw U Pandita. His decades of engagement with the country encompass meditation, human rights advocacy, and conversations with people struggling for democratic freedom. He is the co-author of The Voice of Hope with Aung San Suu Kyi and, with Fergus Harlow, the four-volume Burma’s Voices of Freedom.

His books include Politics of the Heart, Instinct for Freedom, Wisdom for the World, A Future to Believe In and Conversation with a Dictator, a fictional dialogue addressing authoritarian power through an appeal to conscience. His work explores the relationship between inner freedom, ethical responsibility, and the courage to remain human in a fractured world. More information: AlanClements.com