Reporting on rights and wrongs for whom in Myanmar?
Guest contributor
David Scott Mathieson
In what has to be one of the most damning headlines so far this year, the U.N. admitted its written output of activities doesn’t amount to much. “UN report finds United Nations reports are not widely read”, says a headline in Reuters published on Aug. 2.
The U.N. is strapped for cash, and after decades of dithering, is finally confronting the necessity of reform. According to a report released by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres the day before, the U.N. now has 40,000 active mandates, involving 400 intergovernmental bodies, which holds 27,000 meetings a year, and produces 2,300 pages of documentation per day, at an annual cost of $360 million USD.
Last year, the U.N. Secretariat produced 1,100 reports, a 20 percent increase since 1990. Annual report word lengths have increased 40 percent since 2005 with an average 11,300 words per report. These statistics are contained in the Report of the Mandate Implementation Review, as part of the UN80 Initiative to streamline the world body.
On page 20 of the report, it claimed that, “(d)espite the vast output, or perhaps partly because of it, most reports are not widely read. Last year, nearly 65 per cent were downloaded fewer than 2,000 times, compared to the top 5 per cent of reports that were accessed at least 5,500 times. Download statistics alone are not proof of a report’s utility: important issues may not always find wide public leadership.”
Why does the U.N. spend $360 million USD on reports very few people read?
Pathways to human rights protection
To put this paper monster into perspective, let’s analyze just one recent report on Myanmar and the human rights horrors of the junta, known as the State Administration Council (SAC), to determine the worth of the U.N.’s word maze.
Released in June of this year for the 59th session of the Human Rights Council (HRC), on the ‘Situation of human rights in Myanmar’, document A/HRC/59/57 (hereafter ‘59/57’) is in response to HRC Resolution 55/20 of April 2024 to “report on pathways to fulfil the aspirations of the people of Myanmar for human rights protection, accountability, democracy and a civilian government.”
Produced by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCRC) in Bangkok, 59/57 is a 15-page document coming in at just over 8,000 words, 3,000 admirably beneath the prolix elongated word lengths of other U.N. reports few people read.
It was researched between September 2024 and March of this year. It involved 126 in-person and online consultations with 36 groups with a total of 391 individuals “including at least 176 women.”
The report emphasizes its diversity, with a broad range of ethnic and religious communities included and “many different facets of society in Myanmar, including village leaders, students, lawyers, artists, teachers, displaced persons, political prisoners, military defectors and humanitarian, health and media workers. Consultations also involved human rights defenders, representatives of civil society organizations, including organizations promoting the rights of women and LGBTQI+ 1 persons, environmental researchers, members of the civil disobedience movement and trade unionists, among others.”
Some of the ‘case studies’ of pathways for ‘Good Governance’ include mention of the Karenni Interim Executive Council (KIEC), Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF), Chinland Council, and the New Mon State Party (NMSP). Human rights dynamics in these diverse areas are far more fluid and complex than a simple paragraph written by a group of foreigners in Bangkok can possibly convey.
Sustainable development gets seven paragraphs, including the pithy observation that “(t)he nexus between non-state armed groups and the illicit and extractive economy will need to be ended.” Easier said than done.
Paragraph 40 on the National Unity Government (NUG) could have been cut and pasted from their Facebook pages. Photocopied propaganda. The short mention of the Myanmar media includes this incisive observation: “Strong independent media will strengthen democracy and justice, promote reconciliation, and play an important role in healing society from decades of military-controlled disinformation.”
Quite right, but it’s not exactly a ‘hold the press’ observation.
In a shocking departure from the fundamentals of human rights documentation, 59/57 contains not a single quote from a Myanmar person. This analyst may come from a different human rights tradition, but failing to frontload the direct testimony of people at the heart of human rights tragedies is anathema.
At its heart the report is all about appropriation. It takes the lived experiences from Myanmar women, youth, civil society, and the media, and paraphrases them all to fit a set word count from OHCHR bureaucrats in Geneva.
The OHCHR subsequently produced a series of 16 online ‘cards’ for X (formerly Twitter) to compliment the report, which did apparently have quotes from people interviewed called “Voices of the Myanmar People.”
These were generic pictures and a short audio clip, for example an apparent Myanmar woman wearing thanaka standing in a rice field, or a mist shrouded town with the quote, “Another Myanmar is possible-rising from the ashes into a true federal democracy where every voice matters, and fear has no place.”
The suspiciously AI-generated audio voice in English adds to the general objectification. The Burmese language audio actually sounds human. These genuine voices are at counterpoint to the English language report which diminishes these voices.
Some of these Western curated homilies in 59/57, not the actual voices of Myanmar people, are so cliché ridden they could be considered for inclusion in the Cards Against Humanitarians, or Jaded Aid card game, that pillories modern aid and development work, and the overly serious people who work there.
In short, 59/57 is not just abbreviated generalities, it is at points actively dehumanizing. No wonder few people read these reports. And what discernable impact do they have? 59/57 reached its homogenized nadir with an obligatory panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) on July 7, funded by the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC).
59/57 concludes with a long list of cogent and principled calls to support the progressive realization of the democratic aspirations of the people of Myanmar. They are arguably the strongest element of the report, and contain calls for the international community to support these important initiatives. Are they feasible in the current world?
The disunited U.N. human rights reporting system
This may be heresy to some activists, but could there be too many human rights reports? 59/57 emerged at a time of unprecedented funding crises in the U.N. Financial and material support for all the positive initiatives the report outlines won’t come from the West, not before the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was battered to death by the Trump administration, and certainly not after. Should the priority be these lukewarm reports from OHCHR or lifesaving aid to communities in Myanmar?
Consider the U.N. human rights system for Myanmar. There is of course OHCHR, both in Geneva and Bangkok, that has produced over 14 of these reports since the 2021 coup, according to the office head in Bangkok James Rodehaver during the FCCT panel in July.
Reports are presented to the U.N. HRC and to the General Assembly. These are indisputably important contributions to the history of human rights in Myanmar, from the perspective and through the lens of the U.N. system. It should be constantly remembered that documentation and reporting produced by a multiplicity of Myanmar rights groups are equally important and valid.
What is rarely acknowledged is actually the degree to which Myanmar groups work contribute to U.N. reports, especially for political prisoners, conflict dynamics and free speech issues. As does the Myanmar media. OHCHR, despite employing several Western experts in Bangkok and a number of Myanmar research personnel, simply doesn’t have the ground research systems in place.
Then there is the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Tom Andrews, who was appointed by the HRC in 2020.
In the 30 years of appointing rapporteurs, Andrews has interpreted his mandate in unprecedented ways, working with Yale University to produce not just the standard two reports a year on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, but a series of ‘Conference Room Papers’ on arms sales, how foreign banks assist military rule, the gender aspects of the human rights catastrophe, children, and the forthcoming report on people living with disabilities.
This is a remarkable and valuable body of work, and has been important in the imposition of sanctions and targeting the SAC’s finances. Yet given the overlap between the rapporteur and the OHCHR bureaucrats, who are essentially reporting on the same situation, does it make sense to duplicate output?
The UN80 and the reform process should seriously consider streamlining these efforts and finding cost saving in order to direct badly needed funding directly to Myanmar causes and not unoriginal factotums in an office in Bangkok.
And there is clear evidence that Andrews and his team are needling the SAC, when they respond to his recent ‘Interactive Dialogue’ in Geneva with this rebuttal: “the so-called Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar operates as a platform for reproducing misinformation from terrorist armed groups. Creating false hope and inflaming Myanmar’s diverse society could amount to abetting terrorism.”
The third report generating a human rights body is the Independent Investigative Mechanism of Myanmar (IIMM) created in 2019 to investigate and establish case files of serious atrocity crimes.
So far the mechanism, led by Nicholas Koumjian has engaged with 1,300 “partners and sources”, has interviewed 590 direct witnesses, and produced 120 packages of information and analyses. All of this information will only be released in the future when there is a credible justice initiative in a free and democratic Myanmar (with the death penalty off the table).
The June Bulletin of the IIMM stated that the U.N. “liquidity crisis and recently introduced austerity measures have significantly impacted the Mechanism, leading to substantial restrictions in staff and other resources. Additional cost-cutting measures recently introduced by the UN80 Initiative require the Mechanism to reduce staff positions funded by the 2026 regular budget by 20 percent.”
There is no doubt that the IIMM has been hard at work on important issues. But it also produces material that may never see the light of day, with Myanmar’s justice and accountability future so uncertain.
All of these three U.N. human rights bodies are doing important work, although 59/57 is not the sterling example, but is it too much? How can the U.N. justify so many reports with nebulous direct impact on violence and accountability inside Myanmar?
The leaning tower of unread reports
More egregious even than the U.N. is the Western donor funded report generating machine on Myanmar, from the embassies in Yangon to money squandering shibboleths like the Joint Peace Fund (JPF).
There are many reports produced that necessarily must remain internal and not distributed for security of systems of aid and the recipient populations in Myanmar. Numerous reports are produced on important issues such as health care, education, aid distribution, needs assessment, cash funding flows, women’s participation in key sectors, and the important systems of assisting so many people in need in Myanmar.
And then there is the pile of wasteful and pointless internal, secretive reports. There is a potential report to be written about the anthropology of Western report writing on conflict and political developments, especially since 2021.
Priorities change over time, but not the herd mentality of trending topics that produce volumes of open and secret and semi-secret reports.
Mapping ‘effective territorial control’, enumerating and classifying People’s Defence Forces (PDFs), Sagaing Forum dynamics, discovering ‘Anya’, top-down federalism and constitution writing, towns falling into resistance hands, more mapping territorial control, re-counting PDFs, bottom-up federalism, and yet more mapping control obsessions and how many PDFs are in that particular township and what they had for lunch.
Commissioning donors often comport themselves as imperious satraps, shaping narratives that do not correspond with the reality on the ground. They seek answers to questions they conjure, not what the situation requires.
Many of the commissioned groups, with knucklehead names like Envisage or COAR, produce asinine, inane and obvious reports mostly culled from open sources and rendered clandestine for their clients.
Whereas the contours of conflict, politics, and social ills are openly documented, discussed, and debated in the Myanmar media and in highly respectable research groups such as the Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP – Myanmar).
There is also bi-weekly analysis from Burma News International (BNI) Myanmar Peace Monitor. And then there’s the research work of Nyan Linn Thit Analytica, Data for Myanmar, Center for Arakan Studies, Salween Institute, or Mosaic Myanmar and its stellar reporting on citizenship issues, especially on unofficial minorities.
There’s also the recent report from Women’s League of Burma (WLB) Speaking Truth to Power on patriarchal impunity. Consider why there is any need for piles of secretive reports to distribute amongst embassies in Yangon? Who exactly benefits from these reports?
Not average Myanmar people. This is a form of info-colonialism, and is a repugnantly corrupt racket.
There is also the question of what information can be ‘actionable.’ Myanmar’s cult of secrecy conjured by foreigners has always been juvenile and pathetic, but the post-coup conflict has sent it into hyperbolic overdrive.
So many researchers, analysts, and bureaucrats who avoided security issues or conflict dynamics prior to the coup, especially the peace industrial complex crowd, have since become retooled experts on warfare and weapons.
Some of the foreign mercenary researchers have never set foot inside Myanmar, let alone spent any time in conflict zones. Yet there is a voracious appetite for military minutiae from embassies. But what is a Western diplomat in Yangon going to do if the unit moving from Hpa-an to Kawkariek during Operation Aung Zeya Phase is not LIB 438 from Light Infantry Division 44 (LID 44), but gasp, it is elements of LIB 259 from LID 22!
Hold the phone! What do with the deeper insight that the deputy commander of the Battalion of Butalin (BOB) PDF prefers Corn Flakes to mohingya for breakfast? Details without meaning abound in these reports. And what are people in Yangon going to do? Call in an airstrike on LIB 259?
And then there is the unfortunate public distribution of cut-rate reports from international outfits who look at Myanmar through an ultra-clichéd lens.
The current front runner for the ‘Let Me Google That For You’ report writing award for 2025 is Cashing in on Conflict, released in March by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which supplies the jaw dropping observation that “any intervention in (Myanmar’s) illicit economies will be at a considerable political cost to whatever government is in power, not only in regard to the power dynamics between the various political actors, but also due to the socio-economic reliance of local communities on the illicit economies for their livelihoods and survival.”
Just as white bread inane as 59/57’s illicit economy reflection. As redundant reports in English go, per the title, it’s simply indulgent and profiteering for donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) alike. It is also only available in English, so not much use to millions of Myanmar people who have to survive the ravages of illicit economies. Talk about unread reports.
Just as the U.N. human rights system needs to consider ways to streamline reporting and documentation, so too the information ecosystem around Myanmar needs to be dramatically reformed. Priority should be given to increasing support for existing Myanmar organizations, and finding ways to foster more cooperation amongst research groups.
Excommunicating predominantly Western mercenary outfits who essentially steal Myanmar reality and transform it into make believe for dead-beat diplomats should also be a major step. As the Myanmar media fall further into decline, many of these groups will soon have no primary information to purloin.
No one should anticipate that Western donors would be willing to be this rational, or thoughtful. But consider that if the U.N. is willing to admit to generating reams of reports few people consume, then the Myanmar human rights, conflict and politics info-sphere should also reflect on their own reading habits.
