Urge the UN to intervene in Myanmar with a peace keeping force

The US Government should urge the United Nations to rapidly send a peacekeeping force to Myanmar to protect the people of that country from the violence and repression currently being imposed by the military dictatorship (Tatmadaw) that has taken control. As you may have heard, the current political situation in Myanmar has not de-escalated since the military coup on February 1, 2021. Actually the opposite has happened - there is now an active low-intensity civil war. Reports from Myanmar show that the regime is prepared to use lethal force against its own population, especially its ethnic and religious minorities. Every day, we see increasing numbers of civilian deaths and injuries carried out by the self-imposed dictatorship. The military regime has maintained a campaign of burning down villages in the Myanmar countryside. The junta has even been emboldened enough to arrest a US Citizen in May 2021, who was working in the country as a journalist. The journalist, Danny Fenster, is currently detained in a notoriously brutal political prison infamous for its mistreatment of its prisoners. If the military and police forces in that country are not forced to exercise restraint, then the situation is likely to get rapidly and drastically worse. We cannot allow the situation to develop into a full-scale civil war, or genocide, or ethnic cleansing. Firm decisive action is required now. This is what the UN Peacekeeping force was meant for. If no one else, then who? And if not now, then when? During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then-U.N. secretary-general, asked 19 countries to contribute troops to a U.N. force to go in and stop the carnage. All 19 countries turned him down. President Bill Clinton said of the dilemma: “We cannot dispatch our troops to solve every problem where our values are offended by human misery … we are prepared to defend ourselves and our fundamental interests when they are threatened.” Yet, as the secretary-general has said, “I swear to you, we could have stopped the genocide in Rwanda with 400 paratroopers.” We cannot allow Myanmar to be the Rwanda of the 2020s. We must urge the international community to intervene and stabilize the situation now, or else more innocent lives will be lost due to our inaction. Therefore, I call upon our government to urge the United Nations to deploy its peacekeeping force to Myanmar for peacekeeping operations, and for the US military to give a miniscule fraction of our millions of servicemen and servicewomen as UN peacekeepers to any peacekeeping mission undertaken.