EAI Conference “The Military Coup and Future of Democracy in Myanmar”

YouTube 링크 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV0UblevOYk

The East Asia Institute (President Yul Sohn) invited you to the conference titled “The Military Coup and Future of Democracy in Myanmar.” The military seized control of Myanmar on February 1, 2021 following the November 2020 general election which resulted in huge victory for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party. The military claimed that the election was a “fraud” and executed the coup, while the citizens of Myanmar have continuously organized resistance against the military. In this context, with the experience and knowledge gained through operating the ‘Strengthening the Civil Society Organizations in Myanmar’ project for seven years, EAI invited Myanmar and East Asian Studies specialists based in South Korea and discussed the future of democracy in Myanmar.

[Video Timeline Information]

00:00:30 Opening Remarks

00:07:07 Session I Presentation on the Post-General Election Survey in Myanmar

01:11:15 Session II Challenges of Myanmar's Democratic Transition and Possible Ways for International Community to Preserve Democracy

영상 스크립트

ladies and gentlemen we will now begin the military coup and future of democracy in myanmar before we begin we will have the introductory message of president sonya of eai good afternoon my name is from eai thank you once again for your participation despite your busy schedules all of the distinguished guests the panelists as well as mr lee senior fellow and of course our audience online and offline we also have some audiences that are joining us online from overseas so thank you very much so we are now looking at the military

coupe and future of democracy in myanmar eai was looking into this subject from 2015 onwards it's been six years in order to build the capacity of the civilian society in myanmar we have been conducting various different projects and with five ngos in myanmar we have been supporting them as a think tank sharing our experiences and know-how and through that we were building their capacity and then further forward we supported the growth of the civilian market for democracy in myanmar we have been

cooperating with them on various different levels so that's what we call democratic cooperation not only did we share our experiences of democratization in korea but from last year and this year we also wanted to share experiences of participation of the people after the election or the general election in myanmar so for that program we were working with people in myanmar teaching them statistics as well as survey tactics and skills and after the civilian government stepped in we conducted the survey

we were preparing the presentation of the post-general election survey but the february first coup broke out so it was very difficult to have a joint seminar so that is why we are looking into looking into possible ways for the international community to preserve democracy and to work together so this conference is the first in that direction presentation on the post general election survey in myanmar 2020 we are looking into challenges of myanmar's democratic transition and possible ways of the international

community cooperation korea along with the international society are seeking for ways to support myanmar and i believe that we will be able to have fruitful discussions shed a light on the overall status of myanmar and it has been now placed on the chopping board and we will be looking at how to sustainably continue on with the democratization in myanmar not only that but also looking back at our democratization process with the hurtful event movements and it will be a way for us to reflect back on

our past as well based on this prospect our conference will be talking about the post general election survey as well as thank you once again for your participation and i believe that our panelists will be able to provide their insight and knowledge and i hope that it will be conducive to progressing on the discussion let's begin with our three fingers up and uh saying save myanmar thank you very much president capacity building program that the eai has been doing for the past seven years and it will be focusing on the final

post-general election survey our moderator will be mr the president of eai foreign good afternoon everyone i am i'm saying hello to you once again so i'm serving as a moderator for the first session first session is about the presentations on the general election survey in myanmar and we'll have discussions after a presentation as i mentioned in the opening space we will make a presentation on the post general election survey and the survey was conducted along with the five organizations in myanmar

uh and avoidably we are the only one who is able to deliver the presentations on the survey at the moment and as you may know um today's speaker um for the presentation is uh professor chinzo and there are other professionals that we have invited for a discussion and uh those discussions along with the presenter have been working with five organizations in myanmar concerning uh the post-general election survey and they have had 12 rounds of seminars with them and as a result today was they were able to conduct a

post a general election survey however in the meantime the coup took place and uh right after the coup uh the uh some of the members of the organization did contact us and the results of the survey uh were completely different from the allegations made by the military authority of myanmar and a few days later and also we got a contact uh once again from partnering organizations in myanmar and uh they said that actually it is desirable for us to make a presentation on the results of the survey and that is

the best way to promote democracy in myanmar so as a partnering organization we are more than willing to disclose the results of the survey and have a discussion so based upon the request by myanmar organizations the first briefing about the survey results was made as of uh february 16.

and um today's meeting is a kind of a follow-up meeting but i would like to present the results of the survey in a full swing so as i mentioned the presentations will be made by professor chin sao pay of kyong national university so about 20 minutes will be spent by the presenter and professor pei we'll make a presentation online that will be followed by mr hanu zhang senior research fellow of han research and he will spend about 10 minutes and that will be followed by mr professor of hong kong university of

foreign studies probably at the end of those sessions we'll have about 15 minutes left so during the time i would like to get some questions online or would like to share uh the feedback that we have so received like to give the microphone to uh professor chinzon hello professor so about 20 minutes will be given to you for your presentation i hope that you will understand that i am delivering the presentation online before i begin my presentation i would like to pay my respects to all of the people in myanmar who have been

sacrificed during the coop so now i would like to share my screen for the powerpoint presentation they want to check out my video so the contents of my presentation will be divided into three parts first of all president sun also mentioned the capacity building project of the eai i will briefly touch on that and then i will move on to the post general election survey of 2020 how that was prepared and implemented and i'm sure that this is the subject that everyone is curious about i will look into the coup of myanmar how

the citizens are seeing or what kind of opinions they have and then moving on to the forecast of democratization as was introduced this is the capacity building project for the civilian society and eai and it's been seven years so we started in 2015.

we started back in 2014 but then in 2015 we had around 30 different workshops and conferences at the time had started this off as uh eai's civilian think tank i'm sharing our experiences with the and i also have various different experiences from that period i did learn a lot and it wasn't just about spreading our experiences but we also learned a lot from myanmar because it's very authoritarian and if you think about the social activists in those kinds of countries how to perform networking activities trying

to share our experiences also try to relay web services as well as other capacity building aspects we also looked into the methodology of the survey and how to write up a report data analysis as well as the survey itself so these were some areas that we studied so now moving on to the actual survey and the presentation of that survey result this was led by the civil society of myanmar and it was the first survey of its kind led by the civil society in myanmar for the past seven years eai had been

preparing for this and we also had two major election surveys and we looked into the best way to conduct the survey we thought that it should be led by the civil society in myanmar they had to be able to stand up on their own two feet and look into their own internal problems so we wanted them to take the lead of course there were various different structured um surveys but this time around it was more about the post-general elections and then the second one was more about the overall process of

starting the elections and then engaging the sentiment after the election so there were three major parts in terms of the theory it was about the policy theory the act of voting itself as well as the election uh and then second it was more about capacity building of the survey how to build the survey itself the methodologies sampling data analysis and then the lastly we also looked into the survey and the questionnaires itself they were most curious about the forecast of democrat democracy in myanmar so that's why they had

drawn up those questions themselves i went into the website at the home page and looked into what kind of different subjects we had been looking at for the workshops last year in january and we had the workshop in myanmar and then afterwards because of covet 19 we had to transition the workshop online as you can see this is a lesson about the sampling and how to build the statistical analysis program and career research also had provided us with much support and thank you once again for your efforts

there's a lot of debate uh regarding the fairness of the general elections in 2020 so it was really about the conflict between the myanmar military and usb dp there were allegations that the list of eligible voters that amounted to about 860 counts were non-conclusive and that they were not the same as the list and that is why there were allegations of manipulation of the election and last year in december and this year in january there was a watchdog there were watchdog organizations at home and abroad did confirm that

there were some discrepancies in the lists and the voters but then it was not significant enough to overturn or overhaul the election itself nevertheless even with these announcements uh the coup arose on february 1st and then afterwards i'm sure that you are well aware of what has happened with the people in myanmar with civilians going to the streets of course we get a lot of information through the media about their fight and the struggle however we wanted to really listen to the voices of the people and what they

thought about the general elections so this is right after the general election and right before we made the decision that our survey will be able to gauge the overall understanding of the myanmar people's thoughts on the general election so let me just briefly go through the process and the analysis we were going to do a nationwide survey however due to coven 19 it was realistically difficult to do so so we only looked into the mandalay region and the kachin state so these two were the focus of our survey

and of course the first city yangon was part of the survey and there were certain issues with the sampling so that is why we focused on the mandalay region and the catching state so we did an interview analysis and through a sampling method we had a structured outline of the survey so for the mandalay region we had 450 and for kachin state we had uh 758 respondents the mandalay region is the central uh administrative region of myanmar so it's known as the second largest city in mandalay and there's a lot of

influence of the nld from the house of representatives they have 35 seats out of and for the upper house they take 12 seats out of the 12. so the majority of the myanmar people are buddhist and so it has high influence of the burmese as well as buddhism so the pro-nld is the mainstream of uh mandalay regions it's in the northern part of myanmar and it's on the borderline with china relatively speaking uh there's less of an influence of the nld party 13 seats out of 18 are taken by the nld and the lower house or the house of

representatives and of course there's also very influenced by uh the opposition party after the sean state which has the majority influence of the opposition party it's kachin state is the second one after the shan state that has a lot of influence by the opposition and there's a lot of variety in terms of the people as well as the religion so you can see that the kachin state is mostly dominated by uh anti-nld party members as well as the non-mainstream groups under the circumstances in which we

cannot have a nationwide survey we looked into these two different areas and of course the support rate of the nld candidates if you look at the responders and the portion in mandalay about 77 or nearly 80 of the respondents had supported an nld a candidate for kachin it was a 45 to 50 percent of respondents supporting nld party members or the candidates from there so you can see the dressed uh contrast drastic contrast between the two regions now let's take a look at the matters whether the election was fair or not

so as you see uh the slide uh in both regions uh respondents uh positively evaluated uh the election and uh most of them they evaluated that the recent 2020 general elections uh gave equal opportunities to all voters and it was a democratic election based on a multi-party system but also actually can uh it is applied to the cotton state let's take a look at the results more in details and nearly 90 of the respondents in the mandalay regions at the election was free and fair and there were some respondents who gave

a neutral answer however the majority of them answered positively about the election and what about the conscious state we can figure out the same trend here and uh so we asked our questionnaire items like there was no pressure at the polls and we asked questions related to the process of election and uh so we also figured out how much they are satisfied with the election results so regarding these items more than 90 percent of the respondents said they think that actually there was no pressure at the polls and they are satisfied with

the election process uh how for example regarding status uh satisfaction level of the results of the survey about 77 of the respondents in the cutting state they said they are satisfied but as i mentioned um uh in the earlier slide about just 50 of respondents uh supported the nld despite so their evaluation of the recent general election was quite positive as you see the numbers and figures here the results of the survey for the cutting state and this is the breakdown of voters by different for party

those who supported the nld um most of them actually they answered that they were satisfied with the election process but what attracted our attention was the numbers and figures concerning voters who vote for who support for uh who support the opposition party so we asked them questions uh how they thought of the election process and also we looked at supporters for usdp usdp is the opposition party so we trying to figure out what are the differences between uh these uh two different or three different kinds of

voters and you can make a comparison between blue and pink um so out of 780 respondents about eight uh 180 respondents were the supporters of the kspp but uh more than 88 of them decided they were satisfied with the election and uh also sixty-two percent of them they mentioned they were they trust the results of the election and the same trend went to the usdp supporters and 63.5 percent of the usdp supporters they said that they are satisfied with the election process and uh 68.3 of them they said they trust other

results of the election as shown in these slides so when it comes to the results of the election um most or the majority of the citizens in myanmar they are satisfied satisfied with the election process and also when we take a look at the respondents whose support for lnld um most of them they said they were satisfied with the election process and also they trust the results of the election this indicates that the allegation made by the military is a complete is completely different from the public sentiment of myanmar

yes that's right the election was fair however so i'd like to uh sh uh give highlights on uh some of the characteristics of the uh public sentiment concerning myanmar so uh one of the uh questions that we wanted to tackle in the survey was uh is myanmar going into the right direction so we made a comparison between the two regions in case of but the mandalay region about 85 percent of them they answered that myanmar was going into the right direction and about two percent of them a small percent of them they said no to that

statement and the rest of the respondents said um either they don't know or they did not respond and so let's take a look at the results of the survey of the kachin stage so about 44 of the respondents said that actually myanmar was going into the right direction uh and uh 41.9 of the respondents they said they don't know what does it mean most of the supporters of nld in mandalay region actually they think that actually uh yama was going into the right direction but in case of uh the kaching state more than 40 percent of

the respondents actually they had some reservations about this question so about eleven percent of them they said uh myanmar was not going to the right direction so given these results we could see that the elected new government might have many challenges to overcome and also we can find uh these findings also through the other kinds of questions there uh answers so there are different portions for different questions but um those in the content state actually they gave positive evaluations as you see on

the slide but um regarding the questions uh whether they think that the new government will be able to revise the constitution about 40 or less than 40 percent of the respondents said that they believe that the new government would do so looking at these results the second the civil government before the coup even before the coup actually they had several challenges to overcome ahead of them and lastly so we tried to figure out how the myanmar citizens are perceiving about the need to need for the international communities

intervention so as you know minority groups issues have attracted the attention of the global community and as you see here there are different respondents uh evaluation about the questions and but most of them they thought that there was a need for the international community to make interventions and this has much implications on what needs to be done by the international community so to sum up uh many of the yama citizens thought that the 2020 general election was fair and free and this indicates that the

military's allegations about election fraud was groundless but and regarding the question whether yama was going into the right direction or not and many of the respondents said yes and also regarding the intervention of the international community many of the citizens said that they need the international communities interventions however there are stims there still there are some reservations among some of the respondents so this is the end of the summary of the survey results and so i'd like to conclude my presentation

so i'd like to have a general discussion with other panelists thank you uh so you gave us a lot of details about the overall process of the survey and what happened and what kind of questions were asked in the survey and we'll go into the discussion right away and we have invited two panelists and so regarding that matter we'll have an in-depth discussion together and another panelist is mr chun young and to be honest with you in fact it is really uh hard to find any expert concerning myanmar here in

korea despite so these two professionals actually they are dedicating themselves to uh researching into myanmar so i'd like to give 10 minutes first to mr tong and then microphone will be handed over to mr chang as was introduced i am from korea research in fact i am being introduced as hangul research but for the past 13 years i was working at the eai as a senior research fellow so i actually visited uh as the secretary general secretary director to myanmar and spoke with about 20 different organizations what was

quite impressive was great divide between the different organizations i only knew about how to do the surveys i knew that it would be conducive to some of the organizations but about half of those organizations were composed of a very young participants and so that was very well received and for a lot of the organizations that had been pursuing democratization movements for a long time they weren't very on board with these kinds of capacity building it was before the 2015 election and at the time

those elect surveys were restricted by the military so they knew that it was very skeptical or they felt that it was very skeptical to conduct these kinds of surveys so the younger generation had a different perspective whereas uh more conservative organizations were opposed to it after the 2015 elections and after a won by a landslide a lot of different surveys just sprung up here and there and you can see also from some of the organizations mentioned like pace or one of those who looked into the surveys

mostly societal surveys there were a lot of criticisms and skepticism asking us whether a survey was actually necessary however because of the military coup in february it's quite worrisome whether these surveys will be able to be held in the future today i think that professor pei also already mentioned most of the aspects so i will touch upon a little bit of the parts where our organizations on the ground it doesn't really make sense whether we're talking about this in this situation with the military coup but i

think that we do need to look at the facts and the significance of the data the program's already been introduced so i will skip over that but let's look at some of the other details so it was the first survey was conducted in 2019 satisfaction survey in the yangon city about their public services and then in 2020 there was the second survey related to the general elections a lot of the organizations prefer governance related or policy related surveys so a lot of the survey questionnaires were regarding the

political decisions of the new party and we also wanted to expand that to diplomacy looking at the us and sino relations it was the pps or the population proportionate sampling so it was proportionate to the population and so we i wanted to look at the probability of the population or the in proportion to the population and foreign exactly in line with our initial thoughts but i believe that they were still significant results with the multi-stage random sampling so on the next page you see mandalay on the

left hand column and cuts in on the right hand column so for mandalay we had a very even base for males and females in terms of gender age as well if you look at the level of education both regions had about 20 percent for university plus or those who had a level of education above university level so you do have to consider that point that it was quite a smaller ratio for mandalay the majority of the respondents were buddhists there was there may be a little bit of a discrepancy here so after we did the

sampling uh learnings and the lectures uh i think that it was well reflected in the survey and now let's look at some of the interesting results of regarding the fairness of the election i think that professor pay also mentioned about that it's about the methodology or the action behavior about the voting itself these are some valuable uh data points that they can make use of in mandalay it was mostly about the students in their 20s who support the nld but it's not as much to be significant enough

statistically and for those who are residing the urban areas they tended to support nld and now the majority votes however you still have the usdp and the kspp that take among the university and above education level as well as white collar they were uh supporting nlds ksbp excuse me a lot of the kspp supporters were christians and uh a lot of the nld supporters were buddhists on the next page let's regarding the gap between rural areas and urban areas you have the urbanization or modernization theory

i think that that also applies here ethnicity and then on the right hand side you have the voting behaviors of each ethnicity of course a second largest group of ethnic groups is the jing bao and they tended to support ksp as for burmese it was in the order of nld usdp and kspp this is the increase or decrease being supported for nld in mandalay compared to the 2015 and 2020 elections you see a slight increase in the support for nlp and on the right-hand side for catching state the support rate of nld

tended to to decrease just looking at the election itself some of the reasons why there was a decrease in the support for nld is something that that needs further investigation so in mandalay along with the support for nld they were quite optimistic about uh democratization however if you look on the right hand side the pie chart this is regarding the cutting state they were asked to rate the stability after the elections and they responded 34 stable and 48 not stable so you can actually foresee that there was some instability

in the market and on the next page regarding those voting behaviors we also very positive perspective mandalay that um fdi creates more jobs as well as a better livelihood and next i think that this would be very interesting for people in diplomacy in mandalay they selected china with 65 as the country to be cautious in their relations so careful relations and then in kachin 61 of the respondents selected the united states over china in terms of support for uh diplomatic relations so these were some of the

data points and some of the interesting points that were not disclosed and with that i'd like to conclude my part thank you thank you very much for your presentation if you have well i think that we heard a lot of additional comments from the survey if you have any questions please use the q a time and the discussion time so i think that there were a lot of interesting results and we'll be able to talk about it during this session and next session next i will hand it over to professor chung as introduced i am

so i listened well to the presentation by the earlier discussion personally i think that actually there are not that many people who study myanmar and it's really such a great pleasure to see you studying about myanmar personally actually i conducted research in relations to general elections two times in the past and before i complete my paper my thesis i made a visit to the country to see how the local residents perceive the general elections and what are the strengths or weaknesses of nld or usdp and those kind of things were

looked into by me and still there were remaining questions in my head but much of the remaining questions were tackled thanks to this recent survey conducted by eeai i don't have any specific questions to ask but i'd like to give more complimentary content in relations to the survey first of all the kaching state and the malay region were selected for the survey but in their local language pronunciation it is nakachin they call kachin they call it cochin in case of the malay region in the past during the colonial days

there were many western missionaries uh who came in uh so about 30 of the populations are christians and as mentioned by mr zhang already there is a tribe called and in myanmar we call it about the group related to the gachin they don't call themselves the kachin tribe and the most numbers of the members of the tribe that you can see in the states where and they use uh ethnic different ethnic names and for example the there are administrative states and there are also autonomous states about autonomousies mostly include

minorities or evolutionary groups and i'd like to talk about the mandalay region and the region includes the old capital city of the last dynasty and also even now they have a capital city of the current times and they also have the region has a specific city related to the military so in terms of the demographics and in terms of the historical backgrounds the two reasons are quite different from each other so given this it was interesting to me that these two different regions or areas were chosen

for there was a one person who was in charge of uh the election polls and that person actually made a report that was running about 15 pages and that report was given to me and according to the report there was no election fraud however you know according to the authorities uh there were about 290 cases of election fraud but even before the 2020 election um general elections there were some uh fabrication related uh issues in the previous general elections and there were in custody inconsistencies in the voters register

sometimes uh regarding uh the typing of the names of the voters there were some typos and sometimes some of those who passed away were not registered on time and also the birth date registration uh is not being done in the right manner so that's why there were in constituencies in the electoral register but in fact many ngos even inside about the fairness of the elections uh in the past could have done a better job if they had paid enough attention to the suspicions raised by the ngos local ngos

and what is important is that actually there is a bipolarizations between political parties and it's not been it's not uh long since uh the political parties were established in the country so at the moment there are so many political parties and for the recent general elections there were about 99 political parties however less than 10 parties took seats in the house or upper house and the lower house and uh out of them uh two major parties are nld and usd so in the eyes of the general public no

it is either nld or usdp so there is a polarization extreme polarizations in the perceptions of the general public regarding what kind of political parties they need to take in the previous elections like in 2010 in 2015 there were so many more political parties so that led to more confusion and chaos another political party came up so it means that there is a need for unifying more numbers of political parties in the future so when it comes to the level of fairness evaluated by respondents in the

past you know the satisfaction level was just 60 however uh according to the recent survey results it is more than 60 so there is an improvement and one of the major points that i want to highlight or keep highlight on is the level of credibility or the level of trust rather than political parties in most of the cases local residents actually they have a tendency to put more trust in a specific person is advocating that they are the national party however uh nld is um in fact is more um so even after the recovery of democracy

we need to address many issues so in the past even before the crew there were not that many policies in favor of the minority groups a few years ago when there was elections in the local areas in most of the cases the nld was defeated so through the results of the survey we should be able to read what would be happening in the future so what kind of measures are needed for the future of myanmar so in that given that this survey is really meaningful and significant because it can give some hints at

play out in the future so if you have a questions in the future i really hope that you can conduct surveys in other cities like sean state so in that case i believe that you will be end of you know finding more interesting stuff thank you it seems that there is no question asked to the presenter first are there any people who wants to raise questions and if you have any questions please raise your hand so that our staff member can hand the microphone to you is there anyone who has a question from the floor

um maybe you can have some time to think about it so we have received one question online let me read the question one of the discussions mentioned that there is a polarization in myanmar so it indicates that um there was a sense of crisis even before the crew for the democratic government so after the general election upcoming general elections what kind of change would happen in myanmar especially when it comes to myanmar's democracy so there may be two different sides if the military takes power

then it will be a military-ruled country and the other side would probably be the option of having a civilian democracy i think that one of the cases that they will try to benchmark is from thailand but if you look in the micro side 25 of the national assembly is allocated to the military so apart from that i think that they will try to have the proportional representation and they'll also have the minority parties or the regional parties that will be infiltrated into the central government so the military party will probably be

able to take in their those parties and in the second case scenario if a democracy is revived and restored i think that it's quite a pessimistic scenario because uh there's a lot of dependency on ms and there's no one to replace her at the moment so the current structure will probably be uh maintained if aung san tsuchi comes back into the party and comes back into the ruling power how they will overcome some of the issues that they had with aung san tsuchi and some of the mistakes and faults i don't know so even if democracy

takes place again i think that they're they will have to go through maybe an alternative party um and when there is uh a successor to that role then they will be able to really have the democracy anyone from the floor have a question this time around was it already a foreseen if you think about the overall sentiment on the ground in myanmar first of all what do you think whether it was already destiny or what was it something that it just happened and a lot of the concerns related to the coup d'etat

have they really been worried about aku in the past and if you have any um past experiences regarding this aspect i'd like to ask you about it i um can ask this to professor bae but i think that i will ask um mr pay mr tongs so in the process of preparing for the seminar whether we actually felt that there could be a coup or not i don't think that we saw any signs it was more of the concerns about a faulted election especially in the kachin state there was a lot of skepticism and distrust for fair elections

but even in january it wasn't really about um there that there will be a coup it was more about concerns over the fairness of an election so that's why i was taken aback and very surprised at the coup as well but then i looked into the analysis results but then there were some public sentiments that thought uh or were concerned about um the instability on the ground on the field so was the foregone conclusion so i'd like to tackle the question first broke out based on the personal desires of nintendo the uh the head of the military

authorities in myanmar and also there was another reason and uh as you know whenever there's a coup by the military dmitry has been citing the prevention of instability for the country as a reason for the crew so myanmar is based on the federal system so if the federal system is broken up the uh the uh the gotcha tribe may be incorporated into thailand and also the other ethnic groups uh could be absorbed into another country so that kind of argument is going on and the military authority is convincing

people based on these arguments so the crew right after the coup actually the military authority formed the fact-finding investigation committee and there was a discussion on whether or not our foreigners needed to be included to the investigation committee so that happened a long time ago so that was the times where the united nations was under kapian but in this case took place recently and uh there would be a continuous pressure uh that uh would be put on the military authorities so though even the military

authority has some challenges to tackle in fact before they took an action it is true that they had a few meetings or occasions with the democratic government or the civil government and according to the media even before the coup there was some kind of a negotiating negotiation meeting between the military authorities and the nld party but uh the coup took place uh majorly uh primarily because the nld did not accept the power of the military thank you very much for your answers now it's about uh time to end but

we have received two questions online so these two questions i believe that um would be better to be addressed in the next session but i'd like to let you know what kind of questions came up in case of a failure of democracies in myanmar what kind of implications does it have to the international politics so that was the first questions and the second question is so please um open the screen uh further so that i can see it better so how should uh the myanmar's democracy be interpreted in the regional context

so those were the questions asked online and these questions will be addressed in the next session so this concludes session one as i mentioned earlier the session one was about uh presenting the post general election survey results that was done in collaboration between the eai and several society organizations in myanmar so that was really significant and meaningful so this ends the first question and um concluding the session please hold your three fingers up standing up stand up please wishing for

saving myanmar thank and that will be followed by the second session we will now begin is in korea if you talk about myanmar a lot of the older or senior residents remember it as burma and because of the military rule for a long time for countries they gained independence in 1948 and they have 53 million in terms of population and even with the coup d'etat there's only one year of a difference compared to korea early on in the early 70s there were requests for democracy and then it was similar to the

system in korea as well they also had the fight for independence in 1988 but that wasn't relayed onto a democracy as you may know in 1987 with the new constitution we have been able to solidify our democracy so we started together but at the end of the 1980s we have gone into different directions in terms of democracy and they weren't able to get the recognition for the between the military as well as the civilian government they have a pact pacted democracy as we call it in 2015 it was a landslide victory for

nld and 2020 as well but nevertheless they have incurred a military coup in february first this year there have been a lot of casualties as of today i'm not sure what the number stands at the moment but it has gone over 700 casualties especially the younger generation and the students um so it's very heart-wrenching to hear in this section it's not really about discussing the electoral uh democracy but it's rather how to normalize the current status of the military coup and how democracies such as ours will be

able to support myanmar so we have a couple of panelists here with us i have the basic resumes of the panelists so i will just mention the name and their affiliation and what kind of theme they will be talking about transition of myanmar and its structural problems why myanmar is having such a difficult time and then the next we have senior fellow taehyung lee the asian institute for policy studies talking about military coup in myanmar and asean's solidarity to protect the people so the ten countries in asean

or nine countries apart from myanmar will support myanmar and he will be talking about how to do so and a professor kim of korea university will talk about a diplomacy of governance and democratic values and ways to support myanmar's democratization from the korean perspective and last but not least maybe it's because of the overlap with the kung ju a lot of the civil society organizations are supporting the democratization movement in myanmar so in that aspect mr lee the international program officer

at the korea democracy foundation will talk about reactions of the korean government and civil society organizations and then we have two discussants on my left hand side uh leader wayne wainway from the youth action for myanmar she's very good in speaking korean so i don't think that she will need a separate interpreter we also have mr uh from the ministry of uh foreign affairs who will be talking about his perspective so first of all i would give like to give you 10 minutes for your presentations professor park

thank you very much and thank you for the invitation for eain so myanmar is at a crisis once again the nld civilian government led by aung san tsuji had its second term and prior to that military so the military is mentioning that it's a legal transition of power based on the constitution as a result the nld or unstable marriage has resulted in an orderly transition and they had declared an end to this orderly transition the military alleged that the nld won in a corrupted elections for 2020 in november

and declared it even during the 1990 general elections they did not recognize or acknowledge the landslide victory of nld and they participated in a veto so this is another military veto coup in 30 years this orderly transition is based on the constitution and the military of myanmar refers to the pacted democratization the trigger of the agreement was back in 2011 august 18th with the then president thane sane and aung san tsuchi the leader of nld and as a result the core of the agreement was the nld providing

interruption or participation of the military and that they would accept the 2008 constitution on the other hand the military will also be able to take part in the government so this constitution passed in 2008 is actually centered on the military rule which ruled from 1988 to 2011. the constitution back in 2008 to prevent the military from losing everything as a result of a major failure from the general election night in 1990 so in 2003 according to the seven step democratization roadmap this was formed

so to this end the administration is looking at the military under the ministry of defense uh police in the ministry of internal affairs and of course the border control under the ministry of borders so you have these three agencies and 25 of the seats at the national assembly are allocated to the military so this kind of legal coup is stipulated in article 11 clause 417 and if a president declares a state of an emergency then the overall power is to be transitioned over to the military so this is what

is mentioning as a legal transition however with the president being detained and the military head declaring emergency they in fact have been violating the constitution of 2008. this legal issue is in fact just a one-sided opinion has conducted the military coup with the military hardliners an emergency committee the community representing the fact that they have violated the 2008 constitution myanmar has experienced a socialist regime and also a prolonged and inconclusive political struggle to step into democratization

the first step of transition was a political opening and it was actually going over the doorsteps of freedom or independence and then now it was concluded after creating democracy for themselves in the freedom stage political criminals were released and of course the overall censorship was alleviated and in 2012 april 1st they had the side elections and it's actually the peak of uh their freedom and at the time aung san tsuchi was elected from the nld and they took 44 seats or the majority of the

seats at the national assembly and then finally in 2015 with the landslide victory of nld this was actually moving from a restricted regulated democracy to democracy of the people and it was a critical election in their history so elections peacefully resolve a political conflicts and it's a policy that actually makes available for political negotiations so it's an essential element to create a disarmed democracy and so the loser or those who fail at the election have to succumb to the results and they look forward to the

next election samuel huntington mentioned in the electoral democracy the leaders have to internalize a democracy and trust in the politics as a zeitgeist however the myanmar military mentions the disciple discipline flourishing democracy mentioning no discipline no democracy this is a strong support to the 2008 constitution democracy road map released in 2003 is also pointing towards the regulatory democracy however the victory of the nld in 2015 and 2020 and the failure of the usdp is crumbling down the walls of the

regulatory democracy that was built by the military and also made hopes for the representative a democracy but this coup has really faced opposition to the zeitgeist of uh scaling up democracy huntington also mentioned the general clauses of democracy specific countries or their democracies is the result of those unique elements in that country what we have to focus on is that those general clauses only create the basis for democracy but it's not a critical factor for democracy so once again it's not about the causes it's

more about the causers that create the democracy such as the political leaders and the public in particular those leaders in the military rule have to reflect the zeitgeist and their critical element for democracy is this element right here so the military coup in myanmar that started in february first looking at the semi-disarmed democracy that have to control the ministry of interior ministry of defense and ministry of border control and they also have to transition into the representative democracy and it's the result of the

conflict between those who support and those who are against therefore this is about the strategy of divide and conquer ever since the 2015 uh success of the nld civil government so this is a failure of creating a military revolutionist so the strategy of creating defectors within the military is still significant in the current status of a crisis thank you very much for your comment and now moving on to our next uh presenter professor thank you for the introduction so let me first take off my mask

i don't have a good voice originally but you know if i speak with the mask on that's not going to be good to listen to first i'd like to talk about the militia crew in myanmar and asean solidarity to protect the people uh but i'd like to tell you is that actually um asean has a long history since uh 19 um oh no sorry it's been 54 years since the establishment of asean so asean has such a long history however still there is a far more distanced gap between the eu and uh so i'd like to talk about uh how

asean countries are responding to the recent coup in myanmar and what kind of efforts is being made in order to check the problem and uh so at the national level or at the individual national level and at the global level what kind of things needs to be done so the future scenarios we talked about as meaning that actually there is a principle of non-interruptions with regard to the issues any problems in other countries if they don't have the capability to raise their voice over them they apply the principle of non-interruption

so they hide themselves behind the matter and as soon as the coup took place in myanmar malaysia and singapore they responded to that matter first both of the nations called for the peaceful resolutions of the problems of the uh in myanmar and also the asean church country made an official statement asking for the peaceful resolutions of the matter and in initial stages after the crew cambodia vietnam and thailand those countries said that they would not make any interventions on the myanma crew issue

because they are not their internal matters and the second statement was issued by other countries and some of the countries even mentioned about the need to release the detained people by the military authorities and they raise concerns about violence violence suppressions against protesters however no asean country pointed out the problem that military authority is causing a problem or causing a crisis in their country but it was a meeting between foreign ministers between afghan countries that kind of diplomatic effort took

place however that did not result in any fruitful results and there was an emergency meeting in early march online meeting and according to the statement issued after the meeting so when you take a look at the statement um it is there are interesting parts so that was issued as of uh the second of march so bruno is the country of asean so the report is talking about the chairmanship of brunei and they make evaluations of the results made so far and also the report states uh the responses made by countries concerning coffee 19.

but there is a little bit of comment about myanmar but they just saying that um there are there are concerns about civilians and there's no no significant criticism against the military crew or military authority in myanmar so there was no not that much talking about victims uh the current government uh issued a statement uh as of a third of february and um the south korean government took some measures uh to go against uh the military coup in myanmar compared to what was done by korea uh the level of actions taken by

the asean countries was much weaker so to sum up it can be said that many of the asean countries are lukewarm when it comes to responding to the matter in myanmar and but this is not the first time for the asean countries to do that so back in 1980s asean countries did the same for example there was a controversy back in the old days regarding the joining of myanmar to asean but the european union resisted or made an objection about the idea making uh the myanmar join the asean but despite the criticism by the

international community community asean countries decided to accept myanmar to their association saying that it's better to bring in bring them in in order to make a change in the country and a few years later from that time um there was a plan to give asean chairmanship to myanmar but that sparked another controversy and there were a lot of countries outside of asean um sparking a controversy saying that they cannot give any chairmanship to myanmar however asean countries made a lot of discussions and negotiations with

myanmar so eventually myanmar made a decision on its own through the negotiation with asean that decision was to skip their chairmanship so as uh seen in these examples um of the past asean has never taken any active posture or stance on um the matters uh and they are not very active in dealing with the issue or what is happening in myanmar so the so-called asean way has limitations clearly so uh they don't uh voice their opinions about human rights in infringement and many other issues that are happening and also

one of the limitations that asean has is that actually they don't have a binding no means or legally binding means so it is just serving as a forum maybe that can serve as lamb excuse for them but uh in the meantime the original issues have a tendency to address their internal problems in a subtle manner not speaking up to the outside of the world so at this point or at the moment uh what seems reasonable is this for example until 2011.

have been talking together with the military museums of myanmar in the negotiating tables and even now and that was evident also in the past so after some problems broke up and just asean just absorbed the problem and they just invited the military team to the negotiating table or the dialogue table so back in the old days when the international community gave pressure to asean it seemed that that was i felt a lot of pressures and uh they were like you know trying to uh make a little bit of change however

at the uh in the end they did not make a big change so i think that this time it is uh less likely for asean countries to make a big change in responding to myanmar and now um i would like to hand the microphone over to professor hunjin kim of korea university so i have selected diplomacy of governance and democratic values and ways to support myanmar's democratization of the korean perspective in order to discuss this we have to think about the overall framework of the international politics and of course

the background there's a lot of perspectives first unfriendly and the friendly versions the first unfriendly versions include because of humanitarian issues violences and the rule of law as well as populism and in the midst of the u.s sino conflicts former president donald trump has also mentioned about the human rights issues and however there are some friendly perspectives as well with the new administration with the new biden administration there's a lot of focus on value diplomacy that places focus and

importance on human rights and democracy and for the past decade there have also been a lot of discussions on human rights accountability and transitional justice as well as responsibility to protect people the current status of myanmar i think you know very well but let's look at the diplomacy in the united states after the coup they had denounced um on accounts of human rights and uh going against democracy this is something that had been going on in the past but they have revisited these policies

meanwhile they perspective of china is a hot potato issue high stakes in it with the one belt uh one road policies with xi jinping visiting in january of 2020 and the official response is that when we the foreign minister have they have mentioned the three supporting cases and the three opposition cases he also mentioned communication non-intervention clause as well as that it is a hindrance to the u.n security council so this is actually the unjustified intervention mentioned by the u.n security council so that's why they have

officially mentioned this the third one is actually the intervention of a third party or um other countries and they were mentioning the united states a lot of the experiences and actions of the korean government will probably be dealt with uh by my next speaker so i will just try to focus on the actions decided in april so the deputy minister talked with the students and there were a lot of policies for to protect overseas koreans and the actual responses that were held out in on march 12th in 2021 were quite

substantial considering all of the actions that were made and the results that they affected as well uh we're dealt with with caution and time in a timely manner i think that you see the escalation in the response from the ministry of foreign affairs from the 2nd of february 20th 28th uh it escalates now what i would like to mention in the remaining time is what efforts the korean government and the korean diplomacy can do in the further in the future and of course our limitations some of the possibilities will

be divided into bilateral and multilateral about the upholding of democracy as well as protecting minorities there's a lot of female women and children that were affected by the coup so protection of these vulnerable members are is key the actual effects um that we can do in terms of the substantial policies regarding refugees as well as immigrants we have about this is something that needs to be monitored and especially with a development cooperation businesses we have to heighten the monitoring activities

human rights declaration and the asean human rights declaration was declared in 2012 and this is actually focusing on the protection of children teens and women in addition to the aggressive attacks on medical staff and the freedom of speech as well and now moving on to the multilateral diplomacy this is something that will become an agenda even if korea does not take part in it it will be largely voiced i believe that what's most realistic is the response done by the asean countries um pressuring the

myanmar military as well as communicating with them and regarding the restriction on information through digital authority authority is one of the things that we can voice our concerns on it's more about voluntary uh action and i think that this could sway both sides and this will reflect the voluntary participation of the civil society as well as the people i think that that would should develop in that direction of course there are some limitations and concerns where a lot of people are quite pessimistic

about the future there are three major areas the prolonging of the coup is one of them in that case the military will become very accustomed to taking power and they have no means or requirements so this kind of suppression um will continue and there will be lessened interest in the civil society secondly the economy economists also mentioned this but um talking about a failed uh economy and failed democracy especially regarding the impunity and accountability there have been a lot of requests in

this field and a lot of people are concerned that the impunity will to continue on with enforcing their power so how to respond to these areas um from the diplomacy perspective as well as uh the actual democracy perspective is some of the concerns that we have and next i would like to invite sir kanye lee good afternoon everyone i am you indeed working for the korea democracy foundation and uh here with us are many experts regarding this matter so i'm not the right person to make an evaluation of the overall

situation of myanmar but i'd like to share with you my understanding of the attitude taken by the general public of myanmar and what kind of implications that can we can figure out from those letters uh next page i got to know about myanmar back in 2010 at the time actually myanmar was not quite an open uh society or nation so i approached the nation from the border of thailand and for the first time in 2013 i visited myanmar and in the meantime i met a lot of people interviewing them in the process what i could

figure out is that myanmar has a certain kind of unique uh spirit of freedom and also they value uh basic dialogue with others that's what i thought and so as a korean who was really important quick tempered in terms of the political issues i was quite surprised to meet them and have a talk with them and i have gained experiences talking with the representatives of the civil society organizations as well as a local resident and generally speaking i would say that uh they have the similar kind of

sentiment about political politics especially after the recent responded to the protests of local residents in a viral so that's what i heard so my expectation was that actually there was a lot of there would be a lot of you know the conflict and there will be a lot of tension escalated between the civil society and the coup however what actually happened was quite different from my expectations so for example in the initial stage there were peaceful movements or peaceful demonstrations but after some time

those peaceful uh protests have gone away so as a first as of the 1st of february the crew took place and the first civilian victim was uh occurred in uh the 6th of second 6th of february and also in march in early march the current government the south korean government um issued an official statement right the is uh myanmar was a kind of a public enemy in the international community because myanmar was not fully democratized yet and the military regime received a lot of criticism over took place

of the international community including south korea of the south korean government to external issues like china's movement uh making a move uh to wage war against uh taiwan uh the south korean government this time actually made a very strong stance uh on the coup issue so south korean government has been actively engaging in responding to the issue in myanmar and especially the members of the civil society of south korea they are building up solidarity what is happening in myanmar was something close to us

and because of our historical backgrounds and we had candlelight visual uh revolution and we went through the same process for democratization just like myanmar so is well felt by the international community and emotionally uh and psychologically uh south korean people are rooting for myanmar and also there is a close link between south korea and myanmar so what they are going through at the moment uh is bringing back our memories of uh the may uh uh 18 democratization movement that we experience here

civil society members are gathering more people to speak up against the uh military coups characterize the response of the korean civil society many changes are taking place and more and more with the introduction of uh is live streamed on the social media or different uh communication channels so uh it is meaningless too atrocities or things that are happening on a real time basis so what is happening in the audience and third element or without characteristics of what is happening in myanmar is

integration convergence and one of the protests that took place and that was in line with the international women's day and so that was more integrated the character of uh running uh protest and the last typical element is interactive about what is happening in myanmar is being communicated in an interactive way today's however even the cell phones are not usable anymore uh internet connection is banned by the regime and uh the military regime is uh trying to try to trace uh back uh those who are using the cell

phones for communicating um by the international committee for the country just like what happened in the early 2000s especially korea has a lot of role to play because we have a solid foundation of the civil society and now it's time for the government and for the korean civil society society to think about what to do for myanmar thank you thank you for listening and i think that um the myanmar democracy i thank you once again for the four presenters first i would like to talk about the structural problems of the myanmar

democracy and how there are 17 national assembly members and in order for crph to be recognized and acknowledged by the international community we really need to uh pose the question of whether the federalism or federalism-based democracy is possible it took office in um the minorities had lost their power and there had been a lot of conflict among the different tribes and so how crph will be able to coexist all together and bring everyone together is the key issue and secondly a lot of people are placing expectations

on crph a lot of the younger generations believe that there needs to be an allied forces or combined forces anymore and that's why they have to join hands with crph and of course the minority tribes to contemplate whether um they have a future forward so i would like to pose these two questions and now um from the ministry of foreign affairs um hello everyone my name is peihan jin in charge of the division of southeast asian countries under the ministry of foreign affairs i was appointed to my position

in february last year and upon the apartment appointment i have been a lot of making a lot of efforts to improve the relations with myanmar and these days under the government administrations the new southern policies are priorities and as part of those policy implementation myanmar is one of the important countries so in a multi-faceted way we made an effort to improve relations with myanmar however you know all of a sudden this year in february the coup military coup happened that is heartbreaking

so under the 19 situation uh before the coup uh we shared information with each other about what kind of preparation has been done for the general election and on the day of general elections we have sent our delegates to myanmar so that the myanmar election can be observed by us as well and also we took photos of the site at the polls so we were proceeding things that are needed to build more relations bilateral relations between the two countries and uh some of the visits by high government officials were

scheduled as well since last year that's the uh kind of effort that we have been uh making however uh we could not see the military crew coming before the coup happened uh something was going on so as of uh january 29th through the embassy that we have uh in the country uh public um statement was issued in on the 29th of january and after that we our division has been in charge of overseeing the situation or monitoring the situation in myanmar so we have categorized what we have to do into three and uh

the government's official position was expressed by the statement official statement by the president and a joint statement was also issued along with other relevant parties and uh through those we expressed our uh official stance we called for the stoppage of violence against protesters and also the also had a meeting with other diplomats to talk about what needs to be done and also we had a meeting together with those who are studying people studying in korea yeah so um after that the south korean

government took actual measures so we decided to uh stop on an annual basis about 19 million dollars of oda project support uh have been uh provided but now we are under the review of uh the oda project of course we cannot say clearly what kind of things will be stopped but you know we are under the review of stopping some of the projects we will be lengthened until the uh myanmar situation can be stabilized and the next measure that we thought of is to protect korean nationals or the koreans living in or staying in

myanmar but with the worst situations in the country the korean government has raised the warning level so asking travelers but in order for them to come back to korea they need fights but since last year between the government there has been an agreement to run more um flights between the two countries so on on weekly basis we are trying to add one more flight per week so that the more koreans uh from myanmar can come back to the home country so we have a special central division in charge of the almost

monitoring myanmar situation so we will wait and see how things go it is hard to predict any things for sure so at the moment you know we are pondering over you know what needs to be done and we are contemplating uh things that are needed but uh in the international community of course south korea will make a further effort to improve the situation in myanmar so what matters most is the stability the safety and the welfare of citizens in myanmar so we need to i'd like to thank you for your insights

presented in the seminar thank you very much thank you very much we had the two discussions and the four presentations so we have uh quite a few questions on the monitor so i will try to group those questions and deliver to the right recipient first of all for professor park uh when you delivered your presentation you also mentioned that in order to for change we need to have defectors from the military is there a possibility of uh defectors trying to go against lying at the head of the military

the acknowledgment of the international community conducive to creating defectors in the military that's the second question and the third question is there's a lot of concerns over uh the militia coming out from them minorities militia will probably get calls from the military as well as calls from the democratic movement so these are the three questions for you professor park i'd first like to answer the question the same goes for uh thailand the neighboring country to myanmar one of the critical

factors is national reconciliation really spoke about the various human rights issues like the rohingya issue as well as some other violations so this was led by the admiral aung i think that using or leveraging on this situation defend and support the minority groups and create a federalism democracy and if they can create a constitution and the federalist democracy i think that that will also add to upgrading the cdn a lot of rohingyas are participating in this movement and a lot of the people

have are now empathizing with the rohingya and what they went through so i think that that will provide an impetus to crph and their global recognition so at the moment i think that it looks quite bleak but um i think we can be optimistic about a better future after gaining independence in in 1948 that national reconciliation that is required for a true democracy uh i think might be the first step to moving into uh true democracy and then i think the international community will also help in they are

those the ones that are registered under the ncaa are ten minority groups and the rebels that have acceded to nca have officially announced their opposition to the coup and like the waha tribe who have not acceded to the ncaa are closely related to china i think that there is a difference of opinion but i think it's very risky to say that they are all have a difference in an opinion among the minority groups but if you think about the crp age and it's really going to be a critical factor as to how much the government

accepts the voices and opinions of the minority groups and whether uh their voices are heard and implemented i think that that will be a critical factor ultimately i think that in 1988 there was a movement of the people power and ramos at the time who was the minister of defense he stepped down and people power uh succeeded in overturning uh the military power it won't be easy because there's um a sort of a monolithic aspect to it military power develops into an internal uh civil war then everything will be lost

it will be a lose-lose situation for all so regarding this kind of implosion scenario the international community must suggest and try to persuade uh them to return into a more favorable direction our government has been pursuing a lot of valuable efforts there's a lot of um hacking incidents that have been happening in myanmar and one of the names are pasco and pasco international pasco steele it's already been noted um among the civil society that these companies have been providing funds to the military i

think that we do need to have a specific guideline for these measures thank you very much i actually asked this question to uh is not one of the major importers or exporters uh with myanmar and so of course it is in the top ten but it does not have a lot of substantial trade with them you don't have much leverage in education but in terms of gas and mining uh we might have a substantial trade relation but i think that i would like to hand that over to mr pay package i'd like to address the questions asked

by professor pog we are aware of the issue and after the declarations by the military of the state of the crisis emergency at the ministry level communicated closely with the concerned korean companies that you mentioned there were concerns raised over those korean companies who have some engagement with military related uh the companies in myanmar and uh and uh even more suggestions are being made after the military so that's the matter that we are working on and so what i want to tell you is that

uh i'd like to emphasize that for the things that we cannot um acknowledge or allow we need to make it clear to the korean companies so we are on a continuous dialogue and conversation with korean companies and for example the uh postcode as a private was privatized back in 2000 and so it's not a public company any longer and the postcode uh it's been has been working with uh the company in myanmar based on a certain contract signed in the past so i'd like to uh give a question to another panelist

in case of a democracy uh in myanmar going into a failure what impact would it have on the international scene not only not just on the original scene for example even before the recent coup there was an anti-chinese sentiment and after the coup position regarding the stance taken by china many of the myanmar citizens were dissatisfied with china so that further sparked more anti-chinese sentiment but china is in pursuit of one belt and one road and even means had close relations with china so when in the context of the international

political scene what impact would a myanma and of course um the relations between us and china even with the biden administration i think that they have difficulty in mentioning or announcing their position regarding this issue if this becomes a failure um what kind of impacts will it have on the international political scene um regarding in the past that the most realistic way is to persuade the military i mean the the general election probably will not be a completely fair and equitable election but in order to stop the

bloodshed and to follow um in the footsteps of what china has mentioned i think that there it might be the various different stakeholders regarding the democracy upheld by the us because there is no kind of vested interest it's very difficult to apply this to the u.s china relations one of my concerns is if this is protracted or it becomes prolonged or if it becomes or morphs into a civil war those are some of my immediate concerns but the silver lining is that the international discussions and various human rights protections

issues and policies that uphold accountability and a lot of the civil uh organizations voices in the united states are becoming louder then with that i think that the united states might be able to put more pressure on the situation and now next question to uh mr tayan lee and china and some other countries are saying that actually the democracy issue in myanmar needs to be dealt with among themselves and some asean countries issued a statement however you know that was not an active uh stance to tackle enough to tackle the

situations of myanmar so the question is uh in relation to the ties with thailand and thailand is the second biggest uh exporter to myanmar and in case of the refugees there are already issues between the two nations so if there are um refugees from myanmar in the futures would the thailand government accept those refugees so please express yourself uh thank you for the questions and uh there were several questions in relation to asean so um so asean is advocating for welfare and democracy however when you look at more details

of inside of asean they first put a non-interruption first for the reason of respecting other countries uh sovereignty so asean countries actually they think that um it is not in their violation of the asean charter because even though asean charter actually they advocate for the respect of the sovereignty meaning non-interrupt interruption interventions whenever there were issues and problems and one of the asean countries and they did not take any active stands or active measures to tackle those problems

rather than being concerned about their relations internal relations with asean member countries they are more concerned about their relations with the international community or the outside world so that's the limitations that asean has when it comes to relations with thailand there have been issues um in many numbers between the two countries because there were some um movements of the uh armed forces between along with the uh national borders of the two countries but the thailand government had an elections and under the talent

constitutions the military regime in thailand they took power but in myanmar the military regime they just started at the coup so for the situation in myanmar the thailand military regime cannot speak up because they are in the same club kind of same club that's the situation i have two questions for miss lee i want to help the democratization of myanmar how can i help and the next question is in the disobedience movement i think that they're naturally will morph into a violent and movement if what would be the pros and

cons of a violent movement in a non-violent movement i had no time to present this part but and according to him korean civil society is supporting myanmar and uh the myanmar people know that the korean civil society is placing more efforts they do have a lot of fear regarding the power of the military that they're wielding whenever there is a request for democracy the powers from china and russia have been avid supporters of the military power so that's why um the democratization movements always

resulted in failure and i'm sure that they're still heavily dependent on china and russia the civil movement will continue on however with more sacrifices going down the road it will become more challenging and more difficult and they also asked for the korean civil society to continue on relentlessly in their supports so that the people in myanmar will be able to continue on i also mentioned about the civil war situation of course at the moment it's not eminent but if you think about other tribes uh other

ethnicities apart from burma it is a growing concern that the different ethnicities will turn on each other it going to be continuously a non-violent protest or is it going to turn into a violent protest we cannot say for sure but the civil society will continue on to request for a peaceful uh step down if they get support i think that they will be able to regain their energy and continue on in their fight we agree with that and people of myanmar also think so but i think that everyone has the conviction in their hearts that they

will succeed and they will win over rather than having a direct uh influence or effect not sure how this is from the government perspective but focused on the civil society if we can create different funds to support the future generation for myanmar i think that that could also help out like the myanmar democracy network or solidarity for myanmar these networks and associations have been continuously supporting myanmar and their fight so you can probably join them uh to make your contributions thank you very

much this is my personal uh question for mr pay of the ministry of foreign affairs in fact against the situation in myanmar so this is really welcoming so uh i personally thought that it was a good move but my question is about multi-lateralism what about you know putting this as an agenda on on amf and but what about um malaysia indonesia japan so with these countries probably we can form a kind of multilateral system so that these countries including korea can serve as a coordinator to resolve

the issue as myanmar and another thing is that why don't we look at the other part of the world for example there is the korea as a member of the drive for democracy you know that association is involved with european countries so have you ever um thought about you know having this kind of multilateral system regarding the issue of myanmar uh with uh what kind of country should we consult or what kind of multilateralism we need to apply uh these kind of things were not you know thought out in details but

vice minister or ministers when they had to have the opportunities to talk with overseas counterparts they bring up the issue of myanmar in the context of the international scene or as well as in the context of the original scene so it is clear it can be clearly said that myanmar is one of the important agenda that we are working on and um i'd like to um take your suggestions and we will uh review your suggestions for the future so i'd like to ask questions to the luanne so this is my last question

so i would like to ask everyone on this panel living in korea whenever i go to lectures but as was mentioned there's over 700 casualties hold hands with the allied forces there's a lot of casualties and sacrifices and um recently with the rohingya issue i think that this is um something that we cannot just go over and regarding the punishment this is also a big dilemma for us and under these circumstances civil society it has been going on for about two months uh there's a question about whether it can continue and even

three are being detained against their will and it's kind of like going through a long tunnel without no end at first i was very hopeful and speaking as if we can overcome this but at the moment it seems like a closed issue without any end and so how should we overcome and how should we negotiate and i i'm kind of in despair right now but how should we become more optimistic so i'd like to ask every one of you on 40 of the 740 casualties are in this younger generation and i think that it's the younger generation that really needs to

voice their concerns and in order for that i think under such circumstances with the politics not being advanced and how the civil society is still struggling we can't really trust the vested interests so i would like to ask these two uh questions i do truly empathize with your questions i think that all standing up and raising three fingers to express solidarity with the myanmar civilians i think that will express our support so i hope that you will join me in making this gesture because today over the coup and the issues and i hope

that the violence will stop and the road to democracy will open again even under these difficult circumstances i hope that the korean government will be able to provide political support as well as solidarity from the civil society i think that this is a huge learning for us as well our value diplomacy uh democratic cooperation i think that this these are all valuable experiences for us thank you once again for your input and we will continue on in the discussion thank you very much and with this we will

conclude the conference today thank you very much you