birmãnia myanmar mais de 900 mortos e milhares de presos

By Ishaan Tharoor /Washington Post

with Claire Parker

Myanmar’s coup fueled a covid surge

A man sits on empty oxygen canisters outside a factory in Mandalay, Myanmar, on July 13. (AFP via Getty Images)

A man sits on empty oxygen canisters outside a factory in Mandalay, Myanmar, on July 13. (AFP via Getty Images)

More than five months since taking power via a coup, Myanmar’s military junta is pushing its country to the brink. Nearly 900 civilians have been killed as security forces crack down on dissent, while thousands more have been detained. Clashes between the army and ethnic minority militias in the country’s east, punctuated by regime airstrikes, have displaced more than 100,000 civilians, while the junta has raided villages in the country’s heartland in battles with newly formed rebel outfits.

Amid worker strikes and boycotts of public sector companies controlled by the military, Myanmar’s economy is facing at least a 10 percent GDP contraction in 2021, while the United Nations projects that half the country’s 54 million people will fall into poverty in coming months.

And then there’s the pandemic. In 2020, Myanmar, like many other countries in Asia, appeared to dodge the worst of the spread of the coronavirus. But now it’s in the grip of a full-blown surge as the more virulent delta variant sweeps through Southeast Asia.

Since registering just a few dozen daily cases in May, Myanmar’s official count crossed 5,000 daily cases for the first time Monday. The seven-day rolling average rose from 1.18 cases per 100,000 people on June 25 to 6.08 cases per 100,000 people on July 9, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Between about one-quarter and one-third of all coronavirus tests are resulting positive, a sign of a far-reaching outbreak. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of the country’s population has received a dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

“The recent rise of COVID-19 in Myanmar is truly alarming,” Joy Singhal of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told Reuters. “The very high rate of positive cases during the past few weeks points to much more widespread infections. This is fast becoming critical as many people still have limited access to hospitals and healthcare.”

According to reports, the country’s state-run coronavirus treatment facilities are at capacity. Hospital beds and oxygen are in short supply. Patients who are deemed either too sick to be saved or not sick enough are being turned away. In scenes that played out earlier this year in neighboring India — and that are also taking place in countries like Thailand and Indonesia — lines of people in desperate search of oxygen supplies formed in the major cities of Yangon and Mandalay.

The coup has made the situation worse. The civil disobedience movement against the junta drew many doctors and medical workers, many of whom now shun staffing government hospitals or have been persecuted by military authorities. Critics of the regime say it has also disrupted efforts to counter the pandemic put in place earlier by the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who alongside myriad other political allies is now in detention.

“No wise person with a good heart and a sincere desire for truth would want to work under the junta’s rule,” Zeyar Tun, founder of the civic action group Clean Yangon, told the Associated Press. “Under Suu Kyi, the government and volunteers worked together to control the disease, but it is difficult to predict what the future holds under military rule.”

“My trust in this junta healthcare system is 0%,” an ailing 23-year-old covid patient living in western Myanmar told Reuters. “The quarantine centre has nobody to provide care. There will be nobody to help in case of emergency.”

The military’s security interests appear to take precedent over those of public health. “The curfew imposed by the military also has made matters worse,” noted a South China Morning Post report. “Volunteers claim the military has been unwilling to help, instead leaving the public to fend for themselves.”

“Our ambulance was stopped on the way by soldiers at midnight and [they] warned we should have come out earlier if it was an emergency,” a 24-year-old volunteer from Yangon told the Hong Kong-based daily.

Yet the junta seems impervious to public anguish or foreign concern. This week, it emerged that the regime is pursuing four additional charges against Suu Kyi, the popular civilian leader now mired in a thicket of politically motivated cases trumped up by the junta. Sanctions from a handful of Western governments have failed to change the behavior of the country’s notoriously bunkered top brass, which has long dominated the country and appears to be steadily reversing the moderate steps taken toward political liberalization over the past decade.

Frustrated by the events, Myanmar’s pro-democracy activists are resorting to more extreme measures, with new “self-defense” units popping up in various parts of the country and carrying out violent attacks on local security forces. They have little chance of defeating the regime on their own but have still taken up arms.

“That the opposition has embraced such a radical and risky course reflects profound frustration at the failure of the outside world to act decisively against the coup,” noted The Washington Post’s editorial board. “While the United States and the European Union have adopted some sanctions, China and Russia have blocked action by the U.N. Security Council, and the response of Asian countries, including India and Japan, has been weak.”

As the world fiddles, warned Myanmar historian and commentator Thant Myint-U, the country is on the verge of becoming a failed state. Beyond the political anarchy and the junta’s repressive tactics, the economy is cratering: Tourism, the agricultural sector and the country’s lucrative garment industry are all in disarray, while a banking crisis provoked by the coup has depleted cash in circulation and scared away outside investors.

“As the stalemate continues, the economy will crumble, extreme poverty will skyrocket, the health-care system will collapse, and armed violence will intensify, sending waves of refugees into neighboring China, India, and Thailand,” he wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

He added: “Myanmar will become a failed state, and new forces will appear to take advantage of that failure: to grow the country’s multibillion-dollar-a-year methamphetamine business, to cut down the forests that are home to some of the world’s most precious zones of biodiversity, and to expand wildlife-trafficking networks, including the very ones possibly responsible for the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in neighboring China. The pandemic itself will fester unabated.”