Who gets to call it democracy?

To the world’s surprise. In a TIME interview published on September 23, Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader who became Myanmar’s president, said he had been “extremely lenient” toward Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader detained by his military since the 2021 coup.

It is hard to square the ex-General's “lenient” with the five years since the coup: civilians killed by forces under his command, villages burned, opponents imprisoned—and Suu Kyi still in detention.

Only a day before the interview went public. The New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch said in areportunderlining ‌the chronic ill-treatment of thousands of detainees after the 2021 military coup. It states that more than 6,600 women, including Aung San Suu Kyi, and 640 children are among the more than 30,000 political prisoners detained.

By granting his first interview to a Western news outlet since the coup, Min Aung Hlaing appeared eager for something his new title alone could not give him: wider international acceptance.

Perhaps he also hoped it would help ease the sanctions against him and soften international scrutiny of allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity.

But we may be mistaken if we take this presidential move as a sign that Myanmar is changing. Beneath the civilian appearance, captured in hisportrait in a neat silk longyi, Min Aung Hlaing says, “The military is an integral part of the nation". His words suggest he still sees the army at the center of the country’s political future.

Following a 2021 coup d'état, which has since provoked widespread resistance, at least100,000people were killed in the fighting up to July. 2026. Displacement in and out of the country has reached5.2 million, andone-thirdof the population is experiencing extreme food insecurity.

One of over a dozen Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in Kachin State/Kannikar Petchkaew

Like it or not, TIME is not the only publication offering Myanmar international recognition.Guinness World Recordslists its civil war as the longest of modern times—a distinction no country would want.

The civil war is now approaching its eighth decade since ethnic armed factions first took up arms against the central government in 1948. Neither the short democratic opening under Aung San Suu Kyi nor the almost six decades of military dictatorship that preceded it ever succeeded in halting the fighting—the conflict simply morphed, moving from border insurgencies to today’s fractured, national war of ethnic armies, resistance fighters, and a junta holding on to power.

Not only has the conflict's duration set Myanmar apart, with more than20established ethnic armed organizations, over600post-coup resistance armed groups commonly described as People’s Defense Forces, an array of military-aligned militias, and the remaining Border Guard Force units, Myanmar has also become one of the world's most fragmented conflict landscapes.

Why has this country, after nearly eight decades of fighting, never established a political process that can accommodate the opposing claims to land, authority, and self-determination?

You can blame the military’s grip on power.

Since independence in January 1948, Myanmar has spent roughly 56 of its 78 years under military-led rule—well over two-thirds of its history as a nation. Even during its later transition to civilian government, the constitution reserved political power for the army.

But military rule is not the whole explanation. Even during periods of civilian administration, Myanmar never achieved lasting peace nationwide; the conflict changed form rather than disappeared.

The world mostly saw Myanmar’s violence when the Bamar-majority heartland revolted against military rule—the 1988 uprising, the 2007 Saffron Revolution, and the mass protests following the 2021 coup.

Meanwhile, the country’s ethnic minorities had suffered repeated army offensives, forced displacement, and cultural suppression, their suffering happening far from international cameras long before it became a “crisis” the world recognized.

Roija, my Kachin student in her mid-thirties, recalled with dark humor how in her childhood she ran for her life whenever a military operation reached her village.

“I was a master of grabbing my sandals and carrying them with me wherever I ran," she said. "I never lost them, never once." She never had time to put them on before she had to run.

Today, Roija has nowhere to return to. “My village has just disappeared from the map,” she said. “It was burned down."

I spoke with a veteran Burmese journalist in exile back in the day, after the NLD's landslide victory in 2015. I congratulated his country and thought things would get better after a long period under dictatorship.

He shrugged. “The killing will go on anyway."

I know what he means.

After almost eighty years of conflict, Myanmar’s war is about much more than battles or territory. Ongoing fighting has broken political authority, weakened civilian institutions, and made impunity common. This has led to many overlapping crises—displacement, destroyed villages, trafficking, illegal economies, environmental harm, and humanitarian emergencies.

School of 500 students destroyed by airstrike, Northern Karen State/Kannikar Petchkaew

Many of these problems have long gone beyond Myanmar’s borders. Many go beyond weak regulation and fuel the war economy.

That spillover may help explain why Thailand welcomed Myanmar’s new president to the table in August despite criticism of the visit.

Myanmar’s eight decades of armed conflict have continued not just because its armed parties cannot agree, but because successive governments and peace procedures have yet to find a mutual answer to the fundamental question:

Is Myanmar a centralized state where ethnic minorities have little autonomy or a voluntary federal federation in which its peoples share sovereignty?

Saw Nimrod, the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Karen National Union (KNU), one of Myanmar’s oldest ethnic resistance organizations, told me the answer was once close.

The author (middle) in one of the resistance group’s camps. /anonymous.

That, he means, is Part III of the Union Accord signed by the government, the military, and representatives of armed organizations in August 2020. promising to establish a democratic federal union and the withdrawal of the army from politics and conflicts.

Five months later, the military overthrew the government with which it had signed the accord.

Nimrod is now working on another initiative, hoping for the final answer Myanmar people deserve.

In March 2026, KNU, together with the NUG, the parallel government formed by former NLD party house members, found the new bloc called the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union, which brings together the organization of the Burmese legislative body in exile—CRPH—with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), and the Chin National Front (CNF). It is attempting to establish a common national political position among anti-junta forces.

“If we can bring ten people together and come up with a clear direction, then you can negotiate with anybody. It also makes you stronger in negotiations," said Nimrod.

He said another major armed organization, the Arakan Army (AA), shared the council’s vision but said its priority was to “liberate their state,” and that the council could work with groups through an alliance or another form of association without requiring membership.

But Myanmar’s fragmentation extends even to a peace pathway itself.

Several armed groups joined the junta's own bloc—the National Solidarity and Peacemaking Negotiation Committee,the military’s preferred framework for talks with selected ethnic organizations.

Some, including the strongest armed organizations, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), stick with their distinct bloc—the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee, formed in 2017.

Even a small fraction prefers its own bloc and approach. Less than a month after the KNU, the Karen National Army (KNA), with its close ties to the military, initiated the Karen National Peace Building Committee.

According to Colonel Saw Chit Thu, the KNA leader, it is a Karen-centered initiative. The bloc formed together with organizations outside—or opposed to—the KNU-led camp.

International actors have repeatedly been urged to help stop Myanmar’s war. But any intervention immediately confronts the country’s fundamental fragmentation: which parties should be brought to the table, who has the authority to negotiate, and whose consent would make an agreement legitimate?

No armed organization or political bloc can credibly claim to speak for the entire country, even the government, which now controls less than half of the country.

The unresolved question, therefore, is not only who can deliver peace, but also who has the right to define it for Myanmar’s people.

Is Myanmar moving toward negotiations—or merely producing more competing bodies that claim the authority to negotiate?

The 2021 coup turned the struggle into a much wider national insurrection. It led to greater cooperation between pro-democracy groups and ethnic organizations but did not erase their differing geographical goals, political histories, or ideas of federalism. Or complete independence.

Life of the IDPs near the China border. /Kannikar Petchkaew

The question is not simply whether ASEAN or the UN should step in, but whether the parties to the conflict would trust either as a neutral facilitator.

Even deciding who counts as a party—and who has the authority to speak for them—is contested.

Let’s go back to the TIME interview.

“There are various forms of democracy,” Min Aung Hlaing says with a thin smile. “There is American democracy, and there is European democracy. I will ensure that Myanmar achieves a democratic system that truly aligns with our own culture, customs, and traditions.”

To me, that is the most frightening line in the interview.

The man who overthrew an elected government now claims the authority to decide what democracy should mean for Myanmar.