Dear Foreign Minister Gunawardena,
We write to urge the Sri Lankan government to immediately withdraw the invitation to Wunna Maung Lwin, the representative of Myanmar’s military junta, to participate in the upcoming virtual meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), due to be held on April 1, 2021. By including Wunna Maung Lwin in the meeting, the Sri Lankan government is lending unwarranted legitimacy to the junta’s State Administration Council (SAC) instead of Myanmar’s democratically elected government, which was deposed in a military coup on February 1, 2021.
As you are aware, in a national election held on November 8, 2020, the people of Myanmar overwhelmingly voted for members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, to govern the country. The NLD secured 83 percent of the seats being contested. While Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, has claimed that the November 2020 election was marred by massive fraud, no credible evidence has been produced to substantiate those claims. Both domestic and international election monitoring organizations have rejected the Tatmadaw’s claims and found the elections credible.