Dedicated to the memory of David I. Steinberg, longtime “dean of Burma studies” in the USA, who died on 5 December 2024 at his home in Bethesda MD at the age of 96.
Parami University is Growing
230 Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior students are taking their final exams and submitting their required reports as the Fall Semester of this academic year winds up. The admissions process for the Class of 2029 is beginning with the expectation of obtaining another 100-strong intake. Achieving the planned 4-class enrollment of 400 students, however, depends on building a stronger financial foundation. Please consider contributing to our year-end annual giving campaign. Donations to Parami U produce exceptional “bang for the buck”. Giving options can be found by clicking on the Donate button of Parami U’s website: https://www.parami.edu.mm
Earlier this year, Parami U was pleasantly surprised by the volume of applications for the Class of 2028 and the quality of the applicants. It is a testimony to the attraction of the Parami program that there was very little attrition among applicants admitted in the Spring before their classes started in August, despite the chaos inside Myanmar.
An important Parami benchmark was the graduation ceremony in June for the 40-odd students who successfully completed their first two years of study and received Associate of Arts degrees. The ceremony was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where our Faculty Dean resides and where much of our administrative team is living.
Arguably Parami’s biggest success of the year was the new program that brought nine rising Juniors to the USA for 8-week internships at top organizations in Washington DC. The sponsoring organizations were: ACCION, Cassidy Levy Kent, C4ADS, CSIS, East-West Center, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, The Asia Foundation, the US-ASEAN Business Council, and the US Institute of Peace. The students, five men and four women were welcomed into the homes of four host families. The performance reports received from supervisors at the end of the summer were extremely favorable, meaning that Parami should be able to bring a comparable group of students to Washington DC for internships in the summer of 2025.
Naturally, Parami could not send the nine interns back to Myanmar to face being conscripted. Fortunately, Parami has been able to make arrangements for them to continue their studies in Chiang Mai through cooperative arrangements with two of the Thai universities there. During the summer, other Parami students were able to engage with students in Taiwan, meet with a group of Japanese students in Thailand, and attend summer courses at Bard College and Central European University in Vienna.
More than 200 of our 230 students are living within the borders of Myanmar. About one-third of these students are staying at “learning hubs” Parami has established in two cities in Myanmar and three in Thailand. In each learning hub, Parami provides generators to maintain internet access during frequent power outages, study rooms, cooking facilities, and dormitory accommodations. One of the biggest challenges now is to find more safe areas in which to establish learning hubs as the fighting gets closer to the cities held by the military junta. Several Parami students are in the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and one of them is in a refugee camp in Kenya. All of Parami’s students benefit from being able to take courses at other members of the Open Society University Network. Parami U’s foundational and formal relationship with Bard College in Upstate New York continues to provide essential support.
[I have been a member of Parami University’s Board of Trustees since September 2020.]
The Military Junta Continues to Lose Control of Territory
While the trend continues to favor the armed opposition, there do not appear to have been any major breakthroughs in defeating the military junta since the June Update.
The biggest gains by the opposition seem to be in Kachin State in the North and in Rakhine State on the Andaman Sea. Key contested areas are the city of Lashio in Shan State, the city of Myawaddy in Mon State, and the townships in Sagaing Region where the opposition may be threatening Mandalay.
The military conscription of men and women is continuing, with plenty of horror stories about forced conscription, bribery to escape conscription, and seizure of the property of families with conscription-age members who have fled.
The Myanmar economy continues to weaken, producing greater suffering among the country’s 50 million-plus population. The suffering seems to be greatest in Rakhine State, both among the Muslim Rohingya minority and the Buddhist Rakhine majority. Humanitarian assistance from the outside is trickling in, with the neighboring countries putting obstacles in the way of delivering assistance to people in townships controlled by the opposition.
The opposition continues to be fragmented with little evidence that a unified alternative government is ready to govern the country.
The ASEAN Community remains guided by the “Five-Point Consensus” for stopping the conflict in Myanmar, while the junta ignores it. There have been some reported efforts by ASEAN to engage with opposition parties. China is still supporting the military junta, more visibly in the past few months but more by words than deeds. One encouraging action was recently taken by Thailand: cutting internet and power connections to some of the scam centers in Myanmar on the Thai border. The government of India seems to be under more pressure to withdraw its support of the junta. Russia is the junta’s “best friend”, but its ability to help is constrained by the demands of its war against Ukraine and more recently its support of the Assad regime in Syria. The Biden Administration in the USA continues to add targeted sanctions against junta personnel and its supporters, but the expectation is that the incoming Trump Administration will have no interest in the conflict in Myanmar.
On November 27, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court submitted a request to the court for the arrest of junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing “for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of Rohingya”. While the Court may grant this request, no one expects that it will lead to the General’s arrest in the foreseeable future.
For granular information about the conflict, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) publishes a “Myanmar Conflict Map” that can be found by following this link:
Even more granular information is updated every week by the Vimutti Women’s Organization, which can be found here:
The International Crisis Group provides some of the best analysis of the conflict in Myanmar. Here is the starting page for this conflict:
On October 15, ICG posted an interesting commentary suggesting that the end of the junta is approaching and focusing on how the EU and its member states can alleviate the suffering of the civilian population:
The Stimson Center recently published a piece directed at the incoming Trump Administration that recommends taking a more proactive approach to counter China’s influence in Myanmar:
Comments