YANGON: The number of displaced people in Myanmar has reached three million, the United Nations said, the vast majority forced to flee their homes by conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup. Around 2.7 million have fled since the putsch that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi’s government after a short-lived experiment with democracy.

The coup sparked renewed clashes with established ethnic armed groups and birthed dozens of new “People’s Defense Forces” that the military has failed to crush. “Myanmar stands at the precipice in 2024 with a deepening humanitarian crisis,” the UN’s resident coordinator in the country said in a statement released on Monday.

An estimated one-third of those displaced are children, according to the statement. Around half of the three million have been displaced since late last year, when an alliance of ethnic armed groups launched an offensive across northern Shan state, the statement said. The offensive seized swathes of territory and lucrative trade crossings on the China border, posing the biggest threat to the junta since it seized power.

Myanmar’s borderlands are home to a plethora of ethnic armed groups, many of whom have battled the military since independence from Britain in 1948 over autonomy and control of lucrative resources.

The UN said a severe funding shortfall was hampering its relief efforts, particularly ahead of the May-June cyclone season. Last year cyclone Mocha smashed into western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, killing at least 148 people.

More than 355,000 people are currently displaced in western Rakhine state, which has been rocked since November by clashes between the Arakan Army (AA) and the military, the UN said.

Meanwhile, Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen said Tuesday he has asked the head of Myanmar’s junta for a video meeting with jailed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Hun Sen, who ruled Cambodia for nearly four decades before stepping down last year, held video talks Tuesday with Min Aung Hlaing as the Myanmar military struggles to quell widespread resistance to its rule.

Nobel laureate Suu Kyi is serving a 27-year sentence imposed by a junta court after a trial condemned by rights groups as a sham to shut her out of politics. A post on Hun Sen’s Facebook page said the veteran leader used the call to “again request Min Aung Hlaing to consider organizing a video meeting between him and Aung San Suu Kyi with the aim of saying hello to her”.

The 78-year-old has largely been hidden from view since being detained when the generals seized power, and any meeting with Hun Sen would be a significant step. Since her detention in February 2021, her only known encounter with a foreign envoy came in July last year, when the then Thai foreign minister Don Pramudwinai said he had met her for over an hour.

Hun Sen, now serving as the head of Cambodia’s senate, was the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar after the coup, travelling there in 2022. Min Aung Hlaing pledged to consider the request to speak to Suu Kyi “with the highest attention”, Hun Sen’s Facebook post said.

Up to now, the junta has rebuffed numerous requests by foreign leaders and diplomats to meet Suu Kyi, including from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional bloc. ASEAN has spearheaded efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the escalating conflict in Myanmar, with little success. More than 4,900 people have been killed in the military’s crackdown on dissent since its coup and more than 26,000 others arrested, according to a local monitoring group. – AFP