CEBU, Philippines (AP) — A peace plan agreed on by Southeast Asian leaders five years ago has failed to end Myanmar’s civil war but it could still serve as a basis for working with the new government that will emerge from recent elections there, Thailand’s top diplomat said Friday.
The nationwide violence that followed the Myanmar army’s forcible seizure of power from Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021 has become one of the biggest challenges and sources of embarrassment for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The 2021 army takeover was met by widespread protests which were violently put down by the army, leading to armed resistance and brutal fighting all over the country.
Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow told The Associated Press in an interview that ASEAN’s “five-point consensus” plan has failed to halt the violence in Myanmar.
ASEAN, however, could try to re-engage with Myanmar's new leaders who would emerge from recently held elections, which could be a "new starting point for continued efforts on dialogue, reconciliation and as a part of a broader peace process,” Sihasak said.
“We don’t seek to isolate Myanmar,” he said. “We seek to bring Myanmar back to the ASEAN family.”
The peace plan — agreed on by ASEAN heads of state in April 2021 — called for an immediate end to fighting and hostilities, dialogue among all parties that a special envoy of the bloc would help initiate, and the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Myanmar’s military government has allowed limited humanitarian aid on its own restrictive terms but has not complied with the other terms of the plan.
If there would be moves to deescalate the tensions and violence, “we can re-engage with Myanmar more,” possibly by gradually lifting a restriction on the attendance of its political delegates to annual ASEAN meetings, Sihasak said.
“Maybe to some degree, they can start to deescalate the violence. First, avoid attacks against civilians and also avoid the use of air attacks, which really affect civilians … these are the benchmarks for us,” he added.
On Thursday, ASEAN’s foreign ministers, in their first major meeting this year in the central seaside city of Cebu in the Philippines, decided to stick with the peace plan.
“We all reaffirmed that the five-point consensus remains the basis of our collective efforts to address and resolve the crisis in Myanmar,” Sihasak said. “We don’t seek to isolate Myanmar. We seek to bring Myanmar back to the ASEAN family.”
The still-unofficial results of the new polls give the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party a large majority of the seats contested, and assure the military, which is automatically granted 25% of the legislative seats, retains control over the government.
Although imperfect, the elections could serve as a new opportunity to encourage change in Myanmar, Sihasak said.
ASEAN has not recognize Myanmar's elections, the first since the army’s 2021 takeover, Philippine Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro said Thursday. The Philippines is this year’s ASEAN chair, giving it the most influential voice.
Lazaro told reporters Thursday that ASEAN “has not endorsed the three phases of the elections that were held”over December and January in Myanmar and did not explain what could change the bloc's stance.
Critics say the election was neither free nor fair. Opponents were arrested and Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, which won a landslide victory in 2020, was dissolved by the military government in 2023 for refusing to register under conditions it rejected.
Sihasak told The AP that in a recent meeting with officials in Myanmar, he renewed a proposal for Suu Kyi, 80, to be moved from detention to house arrest to give her more access to doctors.
“It’s a good humanitarian gesture that will be well-received by the international community,” Sihasak said.
Suu Kyi is serving a 27-year prison term on charges widely viewed as spurious and politically motivated. She has been kept in isolation and reportedly has not even seen her lawyers since December 2022.
CORRECTS ID OF THAI FOREIGN MINISTER - From left, Myanmar's Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hau Khan Sum, Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow and Vietnam's Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung walk together after the group photo during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers' Retreat in Cebu, Philippines Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (Jam Sta Rosa/Pool Photo via AP)
CORRECTS ID - Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow, center, attends the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers' Retreat in Cebu, Philippines Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Hernandez, Pool)
BEIRUT (AP) — When the Israel- Hezbollah war broke out in early March, Hussein Shuman fled the heavy bombardment of the southern suburbs of Beirut, but he didn’t bother trying to rent an apartment elsewhere.
In areas deemed “safe” because the Lebanese militant group has no presence, he feels that Shiite Muslims like him are not welcome. Residents regard them with suspicion as potential Hezbollah members, and landlords charge exorbitant prices to rent to displaced families.
Instead, the 35-year-old, who works at a perfume company, headed to central Beirut where he set up a small tent where he has been staying, along with his wife, 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.
Shuman even rejected an offer from a friend who invited him to bring his family to the Christian mountain town of Zgharta. He preferred to remain in his tent, even though it has flooded twice in the past two weeks.
“By staying here I have my dignity and respect,” Shuman said, sitting on a chair near his tent as a barber gave him an open-air hair cut. “We will not stay in a place where we are going to be humiliated.”
In a country full of suspicion, the more than 1 million people — most of them Shiite — displaced as a result of Israel’s evacuation orders and airstrikes have limited options.
Some landlords in Christian areas refuse to rent to Shiites. Others demand inflated rents and deposits that few can afford. Fatima Zahra, 42, from Beirut’s southern suburbs, said she and her sister sold their finest jewelry to pay the $5,000 the landlord charged up front for two months’ rent.
In some Beirut neighborhoods, displaced people who can afford to pay high rents are only allowed to take the apartment after landlords inform the security agencies to check on whether the family has any links to Hezbollah.
Sectarian tensions are a sensitive issue in Lebanon because the country fought a 15-year civil war ending in 1990 that largely broke down along sectarian lines.
Social frictions have worsened since Israel’s targeted airstrikes killed Hezbollah officials or members of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in predominantly Christian, Sunni and Druze areas, raising fears among the hosts that Hezbollah members are mingling within the civilian population.
The Lebanese are deeply divided over Hezbollah’s wars with Israel, with many in the small nation blaming the Iran-backed group for dragging the country into a deadly conflict that has so far left more than 1,300 people dead and over 4,000 wounded. Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel two days after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, triggering the ongoing Middle East war.
The renewed war has caused widespread destruction and paralyzed the economy at a time when Lebanon is still in the throes of a historic economic crisis that broke out in late 2019. The country has not yet recovered from the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024.
In mid-March, an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in the town of Aramoun killed three people, prompting some local residents to call for the displaced to leave the area.
Days later, an airstrike on the nearby town of Bchamoun also killed three people, including a four-year-old girl, who were displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
In neither case did Israel announce the intended target of the strikes, but neighbors assumed that someone in the targeted apartments was a Hezbollah member.
“Had we known that they were linked to Hezbollah, we would have kicked them out,” an angry man who owns an apartment in the building in Bchamoun said at the scene.
In late March, a missile exploded over the predominantly Christian Keserwan region north of Beirut, with debris falling on different areas. Although the Lebanese army later said that it was an Iranian missile passing over Lebanon that fell, many initially assumed that it was an Israeli airstrike targeting displaced people.
No one was was hurt by the missile debris, but a group of young men attacked displaced Shiites in the district of Haret Sakher near the coastal city of Jounieh, calling for their eviction, before local officials intervened.
“We don’t want them here,” shouted a Haret Sakher resident shortly after the strike. He said that some of the displaced refer to their hosts as “Zionists,” accusing them of being aligned with Israel because they criticize Hezbollah for dragging the country into the conflict. He added: “We don’t want national coexistence.”
George Saadeh, a member of Jounieh’s municipal council, told The Associated Press that he had called on Haret Sakher residents to avoid any reaction “so that we can preserve civil peace.”
In a predominantly Christian area just north of Beirut, plans to house displaced people in an abandoned warehouse near the port were suspended last week after drawing backlash from lawmakers and residents.
“The Israeli targeting campaign has created a lot of paranoia,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. “If you see a displaced person, maybe you wonder, ‘What if this person is a target?’”
Fearing the tension could slip out of control, the army has beefed up its presence on the streets.
Last week, army commander Gen. Rudolphe Haikal toured Beirut and the southern city of Sidon and told troops that they should be “firm in the face of any attempt to undermine internal stability,” the army said in a statement.
Police forces, including a SWAT unit, were deployed at major intersections in the capital to preserve peace and prevent any friction between the displaced and locals. Police patrols pass through the tent city by Beirut’s coast where Shuman and his family are staying.
An official at the municipality of the predominantly Sunni town of Naameh, just south of Beirut, said that they have received thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon.
The official said that in order to avoid tensions, they opened a school in one district for displaced Shiites and another in a different neighborhood for people displaced from Sunni border villages.
“There are concerns among people,” that conflict could break out said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
With the Israeli airstrikes and ground invasion mainly targeting Shiite areas, U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a Lebanese-American, was criticized for stoking sectarianism. He told reporters in late March that the U.S. had asked Israel for a commitment that Christian villages in southern Lebanon will not be attacked.
“We have asked the Israelis to leave Christian villages in the south alone and they told us that they will not touch Christian villages,” Issa said. However, he added, “They (Israelis) said that they cannot guarantee” that the villages would be left alone “if there is infiltration into these villages” by Hezbollah members.
Several Christian villages in southern Lebanon have asked displaced Shiites who were sheltering there to leave, fearing that their presence might trigger Israeli attacks.
Legislator Taymour Joumblatt who is the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, the largest Druze-led political group in the country, said that the biggest concern in the country now is “strife.”
“The most important thing is to reduce sectarian pressures on the ground,” Joumblatt said. “Our Shiites brothers are part of this country and our humanitarian duty is to help them.”
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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre contributed to this report from Beirut.
FILE — A displaced woman who fled Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, carries her belonging as she moves to a better spot to shelter from the rain, past an Arabic anti-war poster that reads, "Sacrificing for whom? Lebanon does not need war," in Beirut, Saturday, March 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
FILE — A child walks past tents sheltering people displaced by Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, along the Beirut waterfront in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
File — Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
