Recognition Is What Myanmar’s Regime Craves Most—The UN Must Not Grant It
On February 26, 2021, three weeks after the generals seized power, Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations stood before the General Assembly, urged the world not to legitimize the coup, and raised three fingers to salute the resistance. Five years later, the junta is pushing hard to take his seat.
On September 13, the military regime declared that it had revoked U Kyaw Moe Tun’s diplomatic status, charged him with high treason, and said it would pursue him through Interpol and U.S. law enforcement. It is the latest step in its campaign to dislodge him from Myanmar’s UN seat and replace him with a regime loyalist. The UN Credentials Committee will meet later this month in New York to decide who will represent Myanmar.
The regime in Naypyitaw has spent the past year trying to recast military rule as a political transition. It staged a sham election, gave civilian titles to military rulers, and secured Xi Jinping’s backing for the junta’s recognition at the UN and in ASEAN.
The regime, which staged a coup in 2021 and has virtually no political support, should not be rewarded for its brutality. Conflict deaths since the coup have passed 100,000. More than four million people are internally displaced, on top of the one million Rohingya who were driven into Bangladesh by the Myanmar military. Myanmar ranked worst of 193 countries in the 2025 Global Organized Crime Index and is a global hub for cyberscam operations that have stolen billions from Americans. Opium cultivation rose 17% in 2025 to more than double pre-coup levels. The country recorded the most landmine casualties in the world, and 2025 was the deadliest year since the coup for children. Seven million school-aged children, more than half, are out of school. The formal economy has lost $93.9 billion and most of the population now lives below the poverty line. The UN Special Envoy for Myanmar, Julie Bishop, said in June that Myanmar is “setting records for all the wrong reasons.”
Some governments have misread the junta’s election, which banned the political parties that dominated the last fair election, as a replay of 2010 when a military-managed vote initiated a decade of reforms. The current military leadership does not seek reform except to consolidate its power.
ASEAN has observed the military’s intransigence close up. Min Aung Hlaing agreed to the bloc’s Five-Point Consensus peace plan in April 2021, but has ignored it ever since. Despite daily airstrikes on civilians and continued imprisonment of roughly 22,000 political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, the regime now argues that its sham elections make the Consensus irrelevant. It is courting ASEAN members, with Thailand by its side, to grant it readmission without making a single concession. The regime is attempting something similar in New York.
The General Assembly has never accepted the junta’s claim to represent Myanmar. The UN’s own protocol list still has Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi as the country’s leaders, whom the military overthrew in the 2021 coup. Kyaw Moe Tun is loyal to these leaders and has refused to represent the junta at the UN. Each year, the Credentials Committee has deferred the decision on competing claims for the seat, leaving him in place.
Rather than speaking for the junta, Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun has continued to give voice at the United Nations to the people of Myanmar who rejected the coup. Working closely with the National Unity Government and ethnic resistance organizations that make up the broader anti-coup movement, he has used his position to represent their aspirations for an end to military rule and a democratic future. At a time when millions living under repression in Myanmar have little opportunity to make their voices heard internationally, his presence at the UN provides them with a rare and important platform.
The National Unity Government responded to the junta’s charges against the ambassador by arguing that Myanmar’s UN representation cannot simply be revoked by military decree without the acceptance of new credentials. The Credentials Committee should uphold that principle, refuse to allow diplomatic recognition to legitimize the coup and defer the competing credentials again.
Recognition is what Min Aung Hlaing seeks most, making it an important point of leverage for the international community. Squandering that leverage now would get Myanmar no closer to peace. The regime is bombing civilians every day, the political crisis it created remains unresolved, and the generals have offered no concessions toward a negotiated solution. Granting recognition under these circumstances would do more than reward intransigence. It would tell a military that has used violence and repression with impunity that it can continue doing so without jeopardizing its place in the international system. Rather than creating an incentive for compromise, recognition would remove one of the few incentives the generals have to change course, pushing Myanmar farther from a political settlement and prolonging a bloody conflict that has already lasted more than five years.
Handing over the UN seat would establish that international legitimacy can be secured without effective control of the country, constitutional legitimacy or electoral legitimacy. It would also undermine ASEAN’s peace framework, which requires a halt to violence as a prerequisite for diplomatic normalization.
The seat’s significance extends far beyond protocol. Myanmar is host to one of the world’s most intense—yet underreported—violent conflicts. Kyaw Moe Tun is one of the few voices on the global stage speaking for the people of Myanmar, whose own voices have been silenced by the regime’s crackdown on independent media, internet access and free expression. Installing a regime appointee in his place would close one of the last channels through which the plight of Myanmar’s people can reach the outside world.
The Credentials Committee should hold the line when it meets this month. Seating the junta would mean seating a regime led by a man whom the ICC prosecutor asked judges to arrest for crimes against humanity, even while the International Court of Justice weighs whether his military’s campaign against the Rohingya amounted to genocide.
Myanmar’s war will be settled inside Myanmar, but the world controls one thing the generals want and cannot take by force, and they should have to earn it.
YE MYO HEIN is a Senior Fellow at the Southeast Asia Peace Institute and a former visiting scholar at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
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