The military has gotten away with decades of human rights violations from extra-judicial killings, torture, rape as a weapon of war, to illegal detention meted out in ethnic states.

The UN and the West had condemned and sanctioned the successive military regimes for decades also. When the quasi-civilian-military government came in just a few years back the West was overjoyed and readily lifted the sanctions.

And look at what we are witnessing today. Over 600,000 refugees flee in a time span of a few week, due to the military’s area clearance operations in Rakhine State; heightened military offensives in Kachin, Shan, Chin and Rakhine States against ethnic armed organizations; and oppression of the media to cow the journalists into either self-censorship or totally refraining from critical investigative reporting.

On top of this, the general mass has been fed with narrow nationalism with racial hatred indoctrination. All this undertakings are leading the country into moral abyss. It is not a wonder, when the NLD is also trying to cover up the military missteps and crimes against humanity either out of fear to upset the military or seeing eye-to-eye with what the military has been doing.

And this latest stage-managed Reuters journalists’ arrest is also part and parcel of the military’s scheme to stay on top of its political contenders and should be seen as such.