In March 2026, Myanmar's military chief Min Aung Hlaing became president, the culmination of an election process that the United Nations, ASEAN, and Western governments had rejected as a sham. The military and its proxy party hold 505 of 586 parliamentary seats. The cabinet is dominated by recently retired military officers. The Union Consultative Council, a five-member body Min Aung Hlaing created earlier this year and chairs, has authority over the government, the military, and the legislature, effectively placing him above every institution in the state.
On 30 March, the National Unity Government and four major ethnic armed organisations formed the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union, the most significant step toward a unified political and military leadership since the NUG was established in 2021. According to recent figures, the junta only controls roughly 21 percent of Myanmar's territory. The resistance and its allies govern or contest the rest. Myanmar's UN Ambassador wrote to the Secretary-General the same week asking member states to formally recognise the NUG and the new council as the country's legitimate government.
On the ground, the violence continued at the same pace. Junta forces killed hundreds of civilians across Myanmar in March, including in strikes on a monastery sheltering displaced people in Sagaing, a prisoner of war camp in Rakhine State where 116 of the military's own captured soldiers died, and a truck stop in Magway where 25 traders were killed. In Rakhine State, BHRN also documented abuses by the Arakan Army against Rohingya civilians in Maungdaw and Buthidaung Townships, including forced conscription, arbitrary detention, land seizure, extortion, and rape by AA soldiers, abuses that Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights, and the UN's Independent Investigative Mechanism have also been documenting. This monthly report documents those attacks, BHRN's findings from interviews with Rohingya survivors in Maungdaw and Buthidaung on Arakan Army abuses, the junta's new restrictions on the movement of released political prisoners, cuts to food aid for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and the steps the resistance is taking to build governance in the territory it controls.