Why the world shouldn’t ignore the brutal war in Burma

It is a bad cliché, of several decades’ vintage, to say that a given civil war is ‘complex’. Normally, this is a dodge on the foreign correspondent’s part. He either wishes to hide his lack of knowledge from you, or to pretend that without him holding the reader’s hand, they could never hope to understand the story.  

I ask you to forgive me for making use of it. The civil conflict in Burma (Myanmar, according to the regime) really is complex.  

Last week, the Burmese military, also called the Tatmadaw, excelled itself in savagery. It launched a very nasty attack at a place called Pa Zi Gyi. Awful photographs exist of the dozens of people – most of them civilian – who were killed, and of the weaponry used by the army to kill them. 

The war has been characterised by attacks on schools, village meeting halls and markets. This is the pattern of a vicious war.