A Country Collapsing Off-Camera
Myanmar’s war did not end. It simply disappeared from much of the world’s attention.
The country’s civil war is now in its fifth year after the February 2021 military coup. Today, the humanitarian scale is staggering. The UN’s 2026 humanitarian plan says 3.6 million people have been displaced by conflict and earthquake, while humanitarian agencies are trying to reach millions of people trapped in hard-to-access and conflict-affected areas.
Other humanitarian assessments and analysts place the wider need even higher, with more than 20 million people requiring assistance across the country. That is roughly one third of Myanmar’s population. This is not a small crisis. It is a national collapse happening in fragments: villages emptied, families displaced, food systems broken, and children growing up inside a war the outside world barely discusses.
The War From the Sky
The junta does not need to control all of Myanmar to punish it. By 2024, resistance forces controlled 42% of Myanmar’s territory while the junta retained only 21%. It has lost the ground war. It has not stopped the air war.
Across the country, airstrikes have become one of the military’s most brutal tools. On May 12, 2025, an airstrike hit a school in Sagaing Region during school hours. It killed 22 children and 2 teachers.
That school bombing became one of the clearest images of Myanmar’s war: children sitting in class, then the sky opening above them.
Then came another disaster. A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar in March 2025, devastating communities already weakened by conflict, displacement and economic collapse. Instead of allowing relief to move freely, the military launched more than 550 aerial and artillery attacks in the two months that followed, while blocking aid, delaying access for international emergency teams, confiscating medicine and harassing aid workers. The result was a country being hit by two disasters at once: nature from below, war from above.
The Rohingya Are Still Trapped
The Rohingya crisis never ended. It changed shape.
Around 1.3 million Rohingya refugees remain in Bangladesh, the vast majority having fled Myanmar’s 2017 military campaign. Inside Rakhine State, the roughly 600,000 Rohingya who remain face persecution from the junta and violence from the Arakan Army, which now controls most of the state.
Human Rights Watch documented one of the most devastating episodes of this persecution in a report published in May 2026. On May 2, 2024, Arakan Army fighters attacked the village of Hoyyar Siri in Buthidaung Township. HRW identified by name over 170 villagers killed or still missing, including at least 90 children. The organisation noted the actual death toll is likely much higher.
The testimonies from survivors are almost impossible to read. One woman described what happened when fighters gathered a group of villagers in a paddy field beside a mosque: “Within minutes they opened fire at us randomly, without saying anything. No one was spared. My husband was hit by a bullet. When the Arakan Army saw he was still alive, they came closer, firing at him several more times.”
Others described fighters opening fire on civilians who were waving white flags as they tried to flee.
Two years after the massacre, Hoyyar Siri remains uninhabited. Survivors cannot return home. Many remain effectively detained in a makeshift camp nearby. The Arakan Army has rejected responsibility.
Justice Reaches Jakarta
The legal front has now moved beyond Myanmar.
In April 2026, a criminal complaint accusing Min Aung Hlaing of genocide against the Rohingya was filed in Indonesia by civil society groups and Rohingya activist Yasmin Ullah, using Indonesia’s universal jurisdiction principle for serious international crimes. The complaint was formally accepted under Indonesia’s revised penal code, making it the first such case in the country and a significant legal step in Southeast Asia.
That distinction matters. The complaint has been accepted. It has not been adjudicated. No conviction has been made. But the filing itself matters because it shows Rohingya survivors and legal advocates are searching for justice wherever the law still gives them an opening.
The Gambia has also brought a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice. Cases have additionally been filed in Argentina, Turkey and Timor-Leste. Min Aung Hlaing faces an ICC arrest warrant for crimes against humanity. The man who led the 2021 coup, bombed schools, and blocked earthquake aid is now a sitting president facing genocide complaints across multiple continents.
The World Moved On. Myanmar Did Not.
Myanmar has all the elements of a global front-page crisis: millions displaced, children killed in schools, a persecuted minority trapped between armed forces, a massive hunger emergency, earthquake devastation and a genocide complaint filed outside the country.
Yet the story rarely holds the world’s attention for long.
That is what makes Myanmar so devastating. It is not only the violence. It is the silence around the violence.
A country is collapsing off-camera. Twenty million people are living through the consequences. And the world keeps looking somewhere else.
By Shizza Farooqui
SOURCES
UN OCHA Myanmar Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026 | Reuters | AP | Human Rights Watch | UNHCR | IOM Myanmar Crisis Response Plan | CFR Global Conflict Tracker | The Diplomat | OHCHR | ACLED | Richard Horsey analysis via East Asia Forum
