Myanmar junta revokes UN envoy's credentials, escalates diplomatic standoff

Five years after seizing power in a coup, Myanmar's military government has moved to formally strip its own UN envoy of diplomatic credentials — a man who has spent those years bearing witness to the junta's abuses before the world's highest deliberative body. The act is less a bureaucratic formality than a declaration: that the military intends to control not only the country's territory, but the story told about it. In the long human drama of who gets to speak for a people, this moment places Myanmar's crisis at a crossroads between legitimacy and force.