By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-06-11 07:27:11 | Updated at 2026-06-18 08:41:32
1 week ago
The Philippines’ foreign secretary said yesterday that she intends to meet ethnic armed groups from Myanmar in her capacity as the ASEAN special envoy on Myanmar, marking a possible shift in the bloc’s approach to the country.
Speaking at a forum in Tokyo organized by the Japanese media group Nikkei, Ma. Theresa Lazaro said she would meet with several unnamed groups in the coming days, Reuters reported.
“I intend to meet with certain ethnic armed groups and to find out the situation and how we can really try to help,” Lazaro said, without mentioning which of Myanmar’s 20-odd ethnic armed groups she would meet, nor where the meeting would be held. “We’ll see how it works,” she added.
The outreach could mark an important turning point in the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus, ASEAN’s framework for resolving the nationwide conflict that erupted following the military coup in February 2021. Agreed at a special ASEAN meeting shortly after the coup, the Consensus intended to bring about an end to violence and to convene an inclusive dialogue involving “all parties” to the country’s many-sided conflict.
But ASEAN has made little progress in implementing the most important elements of the Consensus since 2021. Myanmar’s military junta has persisted in its attempts to crush resistance groups by force and has strongly criticized any hint that ASEAN would engage with these opposition groups directly. (Many resistance groups have likewise refused to engage in talks with the military, pushing for its permanent removal from Myanmar’s political life.)
As a result of its lack of action to implement the Five-Point Consensus, the military administration’s top leaders have been barred from attending high-level ASEAN meetings.
However, the situation is slowly beginning to shift. In April, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing was sworn in as president, completing a political transition that involved the holding of a multiphase election in December and January. In his inauguration speech, Min Aung Hlaing announced that his new “civilian” administration intends to “enhance international relations and strive to restore normal relations” with ASEAN. He also announced the release of political prisoners and the relocation of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi from prison to house arrest, and invited key ethnic armed groups to take part in fresh peace talks.
While this “transition” has been widely dismissed as a sham by resistance groups and rights organizations both within Myanmar and abroad, and ASEAN has not officially recognized the election result, the bloc and its members have been seeking ways to re-engage with Myanmar since the new government took over in April.
ASEAN member states have led the push toward normalization. The foreign ministers of Thailand and Malaysia have both visited Naypyidaw since Min Aung Hlaing’s inauguration. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono paid a working visit to Myanmar earlier this week, and is due to be followed by Lao Foreign Minister Thongsavanh Phomvihane on June 12-13. Meanwhile, Lazaro has previously stated that the Philippines did not endorse the elections, but that “we’re open to what should come up from these events unravelling before us.”
In this contest, Lazaro’s decision to broaden her engagement to resistance groups could be the necessary concomitant of a gradual shift toward welcoming Myanmar back into “the ASEAN family,” as Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow put it back in February. The fact that Min Aung Hlaing’s regime is also expressing a greater willingness to talk (whatever its real intentions) suggests that Naypyidaw will be more tolerant of the ASEAN envoy holding engagements with armed opposition groups.
To be sure, ASEAN is unlikely to normalize fully its relationship with Myanmar absent substantial efforts to implement the Five-Point Consensus. The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs continues to advocate the “full and effective implementation” of the agreement, which it presumably views as the condition for full normalization between ASEAN and the new military-backed government. What this means in practice remains unclear.
Lazaro’s move to broaden her engagement with Myanmar has been welcomed, albeit cautiously, by organizations that have generally been critical of ASEAN’s approach to the Myanmar crisis. In a statement yesterday, Mercy Chriesty Barends, an Indonesian lawmaker and head of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, said that the engagement with resistance groups “would mark a departure from the narrow, junta-centric engagement that has long undermined ASEAN’s credibility on Myanmar.”
She added, “For years, resistance forces and civil society have called on ASEAN to widen its engagement beyond the military, and this initiative signals a willingness to heed that call.”
To be sure, yesterday was not the first time that Lazaro has hinted at talks with opponents of the military. In January, she convened a “stakeholders’ meeting” in Tagaytay that was attended by representatives of “various political and ethnic groups” opposed to military rule, who shared “constructive and meaningful perspectives on issues related to Myanmar,” as the Department of Foreign Affairs stated at the time. Among the attendees, Reuters reported, was the Chin National Front, a rebel group that holds territory in Chin State close to Myanmar’s border with India.
Whether this results in substantial progress in the direction of peace and national reconciliation is much less certain. There are elements in Myanmar’s resistance movement that still view the civil war as a zero-sum revolutionary struggle to remove the military from the country’s political life on a permanent basis.
It is also likely that the armed forces will only tolerate political dialogue on their own terms. In April, the conflict monitoring group ACLED predicted that the Myanmar military, now under the control of Min Aung Hlaing’s protege Ye Win Oo, “will likely sustain or increase its pressure – particularly through coordinated ground offensives and airpower – aimed at coercing resistance groups into signing ceasefires on the military’s terms.” It is perhaps no surprise that March 2026 was the deadliest month since the coup.
Much more likely is a stepwise return to the status quo ante, in which a military-dominated civilian government plays divide and rule, pursuing ceasefires with certain resistance groups while continuing to wage war against others.
