Over dinner in Indonesia’s congested capital city Jakarta, a group of youth activists from the ASEAN Youth Forum talked to me about Myanmar. It was June 2023, and Jakarta would host the ASEAN Summit at the end of the summer. The activists hoped the summit agenda would elevate Myanmar, where civilians had been enmeshed in a civil war since the military deposed the former government and claimed control of the country in February 2021. Popular uprisings were met with swift violence. Young people fled to jungle and border regions, joining armed ethnic groups who had fought Myanmar’s military for generations.
The resistance had the numbers: Across Myanmar, people overwhelmingly rejected the military. Some took to the streets in peaceful protest. Others took up arms and joined the People’s Defence Force.
But the military had the might: By 2022, artillery and aerial assaults by its forces were near daily occurrences in resistance strongholds. Many of the attacks targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. Camps for the displaced were bombed. Schools and hospitals were destroyed and shuttered. Children were denied access to education. Malaria and diarrhoea spread like wildfire through jungle camps. Medical staff had no access to medicine and equipment.
As conditions further deteriorated, so did international interest in the crisis. Just a year after the coup, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Myanmar receded to background noise, then silence. The military was both unable to secure a hold on the country and unwilling to make concessions. Governments with influence were increasingly reluctant to lead, deferring instead to ASEAN, the regional bloc that had drafted a “five-point consensus” plan that no government showed interest in expending the political capital to implement.
Two years ago, as we sat in a traditional-style Indonesia restaurant sharing dinner, bombs were still falling on schools, hospitals, and displacement camps in Myanmar. Refugees were still streaming over the borders into Thailand, India, and Bangladesh. Children were losing years of education. Hospitals were closing. A generation of young people had fled to the jungle to join the resistance armed with 3D printed weapons. It felt hopeless.
I turned to my friend, Andreas Harsono, who had organized the dinner. Andreas has served as Human Right Watch’s Indonesia researcher for 16 years. He has tracked the rise and fall – and, recently, rise again – of a rights-abusing military in his own country. He has seen military leaders crush Indonesian civilians, and he has seen those leaders sent back to the barracks.
“What do we do?” I asked him.
“We wait for the gates of history to swing open,” he told me. “Like they did in Aceh. And we make sure we are ready when it happens.”
He was referring to December 2004, when an earthquake – the most powerful recorded in the 21st century – struck off the coast of Sumatra. The quake triggered what would be known as the Boxing Day tsunami. Indonesia’s Aceh province – which had been home to a 30-year civil war – was hit first. Hundred-foot waves carried away entire communities. The tsunami killed an estimated 227,898 people across 14 countries; in Indonesia alone, 167,540 people died or went missing.
Only two years before, in May 2003, then Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri had declared martial law in the region. She ordered one of Indonesia’s largest military operations to date, dispatching 28,000 soldiers and 12,000 police officers to secure the central government’s hold on the province. As Indonesian forces streamed in, tens of thousands of Acehnese were displaced and more than 1,300 were killed, including over 300 civilians. (Rights groups expressed concern that the number of civilian deaths was likely underreported by the military, and with little independent access, military accounts could not be verified.) Thus began what Human Rights Watch would call in their 2003 report a “secret war,” in which the military employed extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and drastic limits on freedom of movement to control the population.
When the tsunami crashed ashore, it devastated the capacity of both the independence-seeking armed groups in Aceh and the Indonesian forces who had been dispatched to the region. It also trained an international spotlight on the province. Indonesia received more than $7 billion in private and government donations, the most money at that time ever contributed to a natural disaster response. (USAID mobilised over $400 million.) Global aid organisations opened offices, and existing NGOs pivoted their operations to support relief efforts. International media swarmed Aceh. The central government set up a bureau in the province to manage funds and oversee the international and local organisations working on the ground.
The response was not without flaws. Rampant corruption diverted funds to private investors looking to get rich quick. Crude distinctions between tsunami survivors and conflict survivors – the latter a group that had been ignored by the international community for decades – solidified resentments that persist today.
But the gates of history had swung open. The Indonesian government in central Jakarta could no longer command a military operation rooted in torture, arbitrary detention, and intimidation under the cover of an information blackout. Civil society organisations made inroads and established the networks they needed to deliver aid – networks that could be used to reach remote communities and scale up political, social, and human rights work.
When I returned from Jakarta to DC, I repeated Andreas’s reflection to anyone who would listen. I talked to officers at USAID and advisors at DRL, the State Department’s human rights bureau, about what it meant to be ready: ensuring governments and civil society have access, staffing experts prepared to help, and building trust with activists who know how to build a crisis response that centres the needs of civilians. We talked about what it would look like to be ready when, after years of repression and violence, the moment comes when the gates open for a reason you can’t control and couldn’t have predicted.
In Myanmar, that moment arrived on 28 March 2025. And we were not ready.
A few hours after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake levelled communities across Myanmar, news broke that the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID would leave only 15 people at an agency that three months ago employed more than 10,000. It might seem ironic, but it wasn’t really. It was just blisteringly, unnecessarily stupid.
There will be no shortage of political analysis about what the US government’s failure means for Myanmar. People will say: That not a single resource from the United States, not a person, first aid kit, or dollar, reached the country in the critical 72-hour post-disaster window when hope still sustained for those who were trapped, badly injured, or both.
That China, as it normally does for disasters in the region, was on the ground in 24 hours. That rescue teams from other countries have brought relief to places abandoned by the United States.
That disease will spread. That the medical infrastructure decimated by the gutting of USAID will fuel the second generation of this disaster, the public health crisis sure to come.
The US disaster is not its stingy pledge of funds, its delayed response, or its ceding of space to governments willing and able to respond – those are merely consequences.
I have heard, by well-meaning people in government, that Myanmar is “so complex”. It is. This will make things more complex. The military has a long history of politicising aid to entrench the power it can’t secure any other way. It is responsible for connectivity blackouts and internet shutdowns that deny people information they need to ensure their own safety. It has perpetrated what the US government determined amounts to a genocide of Rohingya Muslims. It routinely targets, intimidates, and arrests activists and members of civil society. It has targeted doctors, nurses, and teachers. How can you mount a response to a crisis that occurs where those in power commit widespread, systematic abuses?
You can do it only because you invest years, training, and money into the people who prepare for moments like these. You have teams in place to assess the damage and find survivors, prevent the spread of disease, and provide rapid medical response to those with injuries. You also have the teams in place who understand the depths of Myanmar’s conflict dynamics and who can advocate for the civil society groups who are best placed to deliver aid equitably. You have worked with civil society and local media to build information channels that ensure fast access to accurate information. You understand that an influx of aid for earthquake survivors will require mobilisation on behalf of conflict survivors as well. You know how to provide a response that minimises the risk of creating or deepening resentment between groups of survivors.
You can do it because you recognise a singular opportunity surfacing from four years of war: the chance to demand and protect a new visibility on unaccountable leaders, cast an unrelenting light on the military and its crimes, and lend new support to people fighting to claim their own futures.
The US disaster is not its stingy pledge of funds, its delayed response, or its ceding of space to governments willing and able to respond – those are merely consequences. The original disaster is the dismantling of the grinding government work that has been, invisibly, the only thing between any of us and a brutish, violent world.
Policy work is boring 90% of the time because it is quietly building and sustaining the capacities we need to be ready for the 10%. This month, it’s Myanmar – an expectation of over 10,000 dead once they can be found, and a world-stage confirmation that the US government now lacks the interest, competence, and capacity to launch a global response to disaster.
Soon it will be the fracturing of educational institutions; the end of US-funded science and the evisceration of systems of medical care and knowledge; the dismantling of information systems that prevented fraud and kept sensitive data private; the unwinding of departments that kept our water clean and our food safe; the evisceration of social protection programmes.
If ever there is a moment to stand for institutions, systems, and bureaucracy, this is it. Did we think the emblem of US freedom was an eagle, a flag, a bombastic blast of fireworks? It was not. It was red tape and long forms. The muddling of government is the backbone of this country – imperfect, frustrating, and intoxicatingly full of possibility – the dull foundations on which people might, and often do, rise to meet their moments.
When the foundation is gone, it’s gone for everyone. The human cost is coming due all around us. Soon it will come for those of us still safe today.
But there is still a chance that, when it does, we can be ready.
