IT IS public now. Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is not ready for the Asean five-point consensus. Truth be told: he was not ready when he travelled to Jakarta. Perhaps he will be ready when Asean gets tough. Min Aung Hlaing was there in Jakarta to make a deceitful point: that the junta is being "recognised" as a head of the Myanmar government.
De jure it wasn't but de facto it surely was, though Asean was very careful to call it an informal meeting. A safer bet would have been for Asean to have invited the government in exile and Min Aung Hlaing to the meeting in Jakarta. To be fair, we write from the vantage point of hindsight.
From here, the past almost always seems wrong. Be that as it may, Asean must repair its dented reputation. It can start with expelling Myanmar from the regional body. Or, at the very least, suspend its membership.
Harsh though this may seem, it is a necessary first step. Never house a recalcitrant member under the same roof, especially a war criminal. Keeping the junta as an Asean member means sanctioning the coup.
Perhaps this is what a few in the regional body wanted to happen. To them, the Myanmar coup of Feb 1 is an "internal matter". Let's be blunt: there is nothing internal about it. More than 800 people have been killed and thousands more injured. Global Witness, a non-governmental organisation, says hundreds have been shot in the streets and many others taken from their homes in night time raids.
More than 50 children have been killed at the hands of the junta, the youngest being only 6 years old and who was brutally shot in her home. Torture and sexual abuses are there too. No member of the international community, especially Myanmar's immediate neighbours — China, India, Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand — should let such atrocities pass for an "internal matter". History will surely judge them very badly.
Next it must get China, India and Russia to be hard on the junta. The three supply ammunition in more ways than one. Myanmar is on the road to being a failed state, if it is not already one. The trio's economic or military interests must not send the coup-damaged country spiralling down the road to mayhem.
Surely China, India and Russia know that their bullets — the trio are, in the calculation of The Economist, the largest suppliers of arms to Myanmar — are being used by the army, which never fought an external war, on its people. Complicity isn't just a legal charge. It is a moral one as well.
The people of Myanmar — 54 million of them — who are at the bayonet end of the Tatmadaw, as the army is called, will be hard put to forgive the trio. To Asean members, save for a few, what happens in Myanmar doesn't always stay in Myanmar.
The Rohingya crisis that drove some one million of the ethnic minority into neighbouring countries is a stark example. Now the new enemies of the Tatmadaw, the Bamar majority, are fleeing in the same direction.
The neighbours cannot always be Myanmar's default country. Finally, Asean must work with the international community to hit the junta where it hurts: commerce and finance. This funding tap must be turned off. Only then will Min Aung Hlaing be ready for Asean's five-point consensus.