Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing criticises ASEAN, sets out his own agenda

Nearly four months after his inauguration as Myanmar president on April 10, regime leader Min Aung Hlaing on Friday criticised the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Five Point Consensus, the regional bloc’s peace plan for Myanmar, and outlined his own pro-military administration’s plans for ending the crisis since the military coup on Feb. 1, 2021.

Myanmar was plunged into turmoil in 2021 after then-military Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing led the coup that ousted an elected government ‌led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, sparking protests that expanded into a protracted civil war, killing some 100,000 people and displacing millions.

At the turn of this year, the military engineered a widely criticised election won by ​the military-proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which had been devastated in the two previous “free and fair” elections in 2020 and 2015 by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party.