Trump's Peace Bell Skips Myanmar

"I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys." George Orwell wrote these words in Burma, observing how power, unchecked and unaccountable, devastates both the oppressed and the oppressor. Today, Myanmar is living proof of that dictum.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

The country has been destroyed repeatedly: first by colonial exploitation, then by military coups, and now by international indifference. No global institution—the UN, ASEAN, or the European Union—has ever addressed the structural rot in Myanmar. They focus on convenient symptoms: massacres, refugee flows, the Rohingya crisis, while the underlying mechanisms of oppression, corruption, and militarised governance persist.

Myanmar’s structural failures are deep, historical, and enduring. Under British colonial rule (1824-1948), the administration deliberately restructured the population and economy. Tens of thousands of Muslim labourers from Bengal were imported into Arakan (now Rakhine State) to work rice fields, plantations, and ports. Precolonial Burma had approximately 15 million people in 1824; by 1941, the population had more than doubled to around 42 million.

The Rohingya population alone increased from a few thousand in the early 19th century to tens of thousands by the early 1940s. This demographic engineering was used to create a labour force and later became a tool for political manipulation. After independence, U Nu deliberately resettled Muslims from neighbouring regions in Arakan to consolidate votes. These policies, both colonial and postcolonial, set the stage for decades of ethnic tension and unrest, turning demographics into political leverage rather than a basis for social cohesion.