The United Nations faces a serious shortfall in donor funding for Myanmar even as a military coup, an economic crisis and Covid-19 have tripled the number of people needing emergency aid, the UN’s most senior official in the country has said.
Andrew Kirkwood, the UN’s resident co-ordinator in Myanmar, told the Financial Times that the world body had as of October 6 raised less than half of its $385m emergency humanitarian appeal for Myanmar, where a deepening civil conflict has been overshadowed in recent months by the crisis in Afghanistan.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced this year, and millions more are falling into poverty as jobs are lost because of the conflict and because of Covid-19,” Kirkwood said. “Prices of basic commodities are on the rise, forcing people to go without food and medicines they can no longer afford.”
The gap in funding comes as the UN faces criticism from civil society groups and Myanmar’s parallel National Unity Government, which have accused the world body of failing to acknowledge the role the country’s ruling military junta played in creating the crisis.
The UN estimates that 215,000 people have been displaced from their homes since the February 1 coup, which comes on top of the country’s long-running ethnic armed conflicts and the economic toll of the pandemic.
“I think that this is a crisis on top of a crisis with a third crisis on top,” Kirkwood said. “I have been in the country for 17 years, and I have never seen the situation as bad as it is today.”
The post-coup unrest and economic collapse have caused prices of food and fuel to soar in big cities such as Yangon and Mandalay. “Myanmar’s rightly seen as a terrible human rights crisis, but it’s also a first-order humanitarian catastrophe in the making,” said Thant Myint-U, author of The Hidden History of Burma. “There is no scenario where millions starve and then there’s democracy a little farther down the road.”
Kirkwood said the UN had tripled the number of people it was targeting for emergency aid in Myanmar this year from 1m to 3m in a country of 56m people.
In the countryside, insurgent groups have stepped up guerrilla attacks in recent weeks on troops and police of Min Aung Hlaing’s military regime, which is retaliating by jailing or killing fighters and civilians and in some areas torching houses.
The violence has put the UN at the centre of a poisonous stand-off between the military regime and anti-junta forces backed by the parallel NUG.
“Potential donors know very well that it is difficult for international agencies to operate under the current circumstances,” said Laetitia van den Assum, a diplomatic expert and former Netherlands diplomat. “The coup has compounded the already strained delivery mechanisms.”
On Friday the NUG, formed by allies of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi operating from hiding or in exile, criticised Kirkwood for using the phrase “military takeover” to describe the coup in online remarks last week.
“What he failed to add during his discussion of the ‘devastating third wave’ of Covid-19 is that these are military-induced crises,” the parallel government said in a Facebook post.
Separately the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an independent experts’ group, claimed the UN was “on the brink of another failure” in the country.
“The UN in Myanmar needs an appropriate strategy for engaging with the junta for what it is — an armed actor employing terrorism, not a government,” the group, co-founded by Yanghee Lee, a former UN special rapporteur for Myanmar, said in a statement.
When asked whether the UN risked being seen as supporting the regime, Kirkwood said that all its humanitarian assistance in Myanmar was being delivered directly by either UN agencies or the world body’s partners — international non-governmental organisations and local civil society groups.
“I don’t think donors are concerned that the delivery of our humanitarian assistance would be compromised by having to work in ways that are not consistent with our humanitarian principles,” Kirkwood said.
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UN warns of Myanmar aid shortfall as country faces ‘triple crises’ - Financial Times
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