Earthquakes are devastating for those who have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods, but for military dictators clinging to power, such disasters can also bring opportunity.

Myanmar’s military rulers have spent the past four years waging a brutal civil war across the Southeast Asian country, sending columns of troops on bloody rampages, torching and bombing villages, massacring residents, jailing opponents and forcing young men and women to join the army.

The junta is headed by a widely reviled army chief who overthrew the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and installed himself as leader.

But like with most aspiring strongmen, Sen. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s rule is precarious. He and his cronies have been sanctioned and spurned internationally, the economy is in tatters, and his military is losing significant territory in a grinding, multi-front war against a determined resistance.

By some accounts, he barely controls 30% of the country.

So when a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar on March 28, killing more than 3,700 people and causing widespread devastation, the general moved rapidly to bolster his position with a rare plea for international help.

“Min Aung Hlaing is leveraging the earthquake for regional engagement and electoral legitimacy,” said Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, a PhD student in political science at Cornell University.

“The humanitarian crisis gives him a pretext to open channels he’d long shut.”

Those openings included a face-to-face meeting last month between the junta leader and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, which currently holds the rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The regional bloc had shunned high-level talks with Myanmar since the coup, to avoid legitimizing the junta.

Following the meeting in the Thai capital Bangkok, Anwar said he had a “frank and constructive discussion” with the general, focused on humanitarian assistance for quake-hit communities and the extension of a military-declared ceasefire to facilitate aid deliveries.

“For Min Aung Hlaing, securing even a veneer of regional legitimacy now lays political groundwork: He can argue ‘Look, neighbors trust me enough to talk,’ even as democratic leaders and exile groups remain excluded from the table,” said Kyaw Hsan Hlaing.

Specter of elections

Some say now is the time for countries to engage with Myanmar’s military rulers, to push for dialogue and peace.

Four years of war has ravaged the country; 3 million people have been displaced by the fighting and the earthquake has only deepened an already dire humanitarian crisis in which at least 20 million people need aid.

“The main concern is the humanitarian situation. Sometimes, when we have this kind of crisis, it’s an opportunity for all the parties to try to come together, to think of the interests of the people… maybe it could lead to some kind of dialogue process,” said Sihasak Phuangketkeow, a former deputy foreign affairs minister of Thailand who has been part of his country’s efforts to engage the State Administration Council, the junta’s official name.

In recent months, Min Aung Hlaing has enjoyed a series of diplomatic engagements.

As bodies were still being pulled from the rubble of the quake, the general was shaking hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of a regional meeting in Bangkok.

Rights groups and civil society organizations said his presence at the BIMSTEC summit amounted to the gathering lending legitimacy to a war criminal.

India said its bilateral meeting, set up to facilitate disaster relief, provided an opportunity to push the junta for “inclusive dialogue” and underline that there could be “no military solution to the conflict.”

That meeting came a month after Min Aung Hlaing’s high-profile state visit to Russia to boost cooperation with President Vladimir Putin, his longtime ally and main arms supplier.

Above all for the junta leader, domestic legitimacy is key in order to maintain his regime. And regional support for his planned elections, slated to be held later this year, is the first step in securing that.

Since seizing power, Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly promised elections.

But with most of the democratic camp in exile or jail, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy dissolved, and the military’s widespread repression of the people, such a vote would never be considered free or fair, observers say.

Min Aung Hlaing’s March invitation to election observers from Belarus – Europe’s last dictatorship – appeared to underscore their point.

“We have to make it very clear that for the election to be credible, it has to have inclusive dialogue,” said Sihasak, who is now secretary-general of the Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council.

“It is not a blank check,” he added. “It’s an opportunity for us to engage, but not engage in a way that supports legitimacy, but to impress upon the regime that they have to also make concessions.”

Stopping the violence

Some observers say the junta cannot be trusted to make concessions, when the military’s history is littered with false promises masking an unending stream of atrocities.

Even as Malaysia’s Anwar was touting the military’s so-called ceasefire to help quake-hit communities, the junta was restricting aid and intensifying its deadly campaign with airstrikes in opposition areas that have reportedly killed dozens of civilians.

Analysts warn that the military will use greater engagement as a pretext to normalize diplomatic ties and entrench its authoritarian rule.

“If you negotiate with the devil without red lines, that is complicity,” said Adelina Kamal, an independent analyst and member of the Southeast Asian Women Peace Mediators network.

Kamal said the international community risks being “deceived into the military’s stage performance,” where elections would be “an illusion of democratic transition.”

In 2008, when parts of the country were ravaged by powerful Cyclone Nargis, the military regime at the time pushed ahead with a constitutional referendum that paved the way for a semi-civilian government but cemented the military’s influence on the country’s politics.

With a new military-drafted constitution in place, the regime – called the State Peace and Development Council – held elections in 2010 widely regarded as a sham.

Today’s junta is “taking a page from the SPDC’s playbook to assert and retain its political role,” said Moe Thuzar, coordinator of the Myanmar studies program at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

“The people of Myanmar have made it amply clear since 2021 about their mistrust in the military’s statements about elections, and view elections in the current situation as potentially leading to more violence.”

Those who have firsthand experience of that violence say actions speak louder than words.

“Talking to Min Aung Hlaing will not bring any political solution and satisfy what the majority of people want,” said Khun Bedu, chairman of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, which is fighting the military in the country’s southeast.

The Karen National Union, which has been fighting the military since independence from Britain more than 70 years ago, said inclusive dialogue cannot happen without first a ceasefire and the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

There is hope, however, from some quarters that progress could be made this year.

Following his talks with the junta leader, Malaysia’s Anwar also held a widely praised virtual meeting with Mahn Win Khaing Than, prime minister of the National Unity Government, in ASEAN’s first public face-to-face with Myanmar’s shadow administration of lawmakers deposed in the coup.

The NUG, which considers itself the legitimate government of Myanmar, has repeatedly insisted on engaging all stakeholders to solve the crisis.

“I see 2025 as the year, with the election coming in and with this crisis, that we can either win the peace or we can lose the peace,” said Sihasak, the former Thai minister.

To get there, international partners should “tie any dialogue to verifiable steps” including “genuine humanitarian corridors, release of political prisoners, and binding guarantees of inclusive talks,” said Kyaw Hsan Hlaing at Cornell.

“Otherwise, engagement simply extends the junta’s lifeline at the expense of the Burmese people’s aspirations for democracy,” he said.

Singapore is holding an election on Saturday almost certain to perpetuate the unbroken rule of the People’s Action Party, in a test of public approval for its new prime minister as the city-state braces for economic turbulence from a global trade war.

The election is a bellwether for the popularity of the PAP, which has ruled since before Singapore’s 1965 independence, with attention on whether the opposition can challenge the ruling party’s tight grip on power and make further inroads after small but unprecedented gains in the last contest.

Though the PAP has consistently won in landslides with about 90% of seats, its share of the popular vote is closely watched as a measure of the strength of its mandate, with premier Lawrence Wong keen to improve on the PAP’s 60.1% in the 2020 election – one of its worst performances on record.

Wong, 52, became the Asian financial hub’s fourth prime minister last year, promising continuity, new blood and to lead Singapore his own way.

He took over at the end of the two-decade premiership of Lee Hsien Loong, the son of former leader Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore.

Polls opened at 8 a.m. and will close at 8 p.m. (8 a.m. ET), with a result expected in the early hours of Sunday.

Living costs and housing availability in one of the world’s most expensive cities are key issues for the 2.76 million voters and a continued challenge for Wong, whose government has warned of recession if the trade-dependent economy becomes collateral damage in the war over steep U.S. tariffs.

Lopsided contest

The PAP has long had the upper hand in politics, with a big membership to draw from, influence in state institutions and far greater resources than its untested opponents, which are each running in only a small number of constituencies.

The election will be a lopsided affair, with 46% of all candidates representing the PAP, which is contesting all 97 seats compared to 26 for its biggest rival, the Workers’ Party, which won 10 last time, the most by an opposition party.

But though a PAP defeat is extremely unlikely, some analysts say the election could alter the dynamic of Singapore politics in the years ahead if the opposition can make more headway, with younger voters keen to see alternative voices, greater scrutiny and more robust debate.

“It is to be expected that (its) overall electoral support will gradually, gradually dip from general election to general election,” said National University of Singapore political scientist Lam Peng Er.

“Would Singaporeans be that surprised if the PAP’s electoral support were to dip to 57% or 58%? It will surprise nobody. I don’t think it will even surprise the PAP at all.”

The PAP for its part is keen to avoid upsets and warned voters of the consequences of seat losses for key cabinet members, whom Wong said were critical to balancing ties between the United States and China and navigating Singapore’s highly exposed economy through potentially choppy waters.

“I have backups … sure. But everyone knows that the team cannot function at the same level,” Wong told the 1.4 million-strong labor union on Thursday.

Sitting inside her new apartment in kibbutz Tzora, a leafy community just west of Jerusalem, Almog Holot ran her fingers over a bowl of crystals as the wind chime on her balcony blew in the breeze.

Eighteen months ago, she spent 12 hours gripping the handle of her safe room door in kibbutz Nirim as she, along with her mother and her children – then 6 and 8 years old – hid from Hamas militants, who threw grenades at their house, ransacked their home and terrorized their community.

Five people were killed and another five were kidnapped from Holot’s kibbutz on October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other militant groups launched a coordinated terror attack on Israeli communities and military posts, killing 1,200 and kidnapping 251 people.

Holot and her family survived. But her belief in peace did not.

Holot and her ex-husband, who is from Nirim, a kibbutz about 2 kilometers (approximately 1.2 miles) from the Gaza border, had decided to raise their family there, believing it was the best place for their children.

“Kibbutzes are like paradise on earth in many ways,” she said. “You live in a community where money is not the most important thing… people know each other, people care about each other, and people help each other.”

While her children grew up “in a reality in which in every single second of every single day, a rocket might hit them,” Holot said that before October 7, such attacks were rare.

“Most of the time it was really peaceful,” she said. “My children knew to answer people that the people who threw rockets were just Hamas, and most of the people in Gaza are good – just like them.”

Like many residents of kibbutzim – or communal settlements – located near the Gaza border, Holot says she holds left-leaning political views. And like many so-called kibbutzniks, she too believed in, and advocated for, peace with Palestinians.

People from outside of her kibbutz used to tell her that her views were “naïve,” she said. Now she believes they were right.

“I can no longer say that 95% of them (Palestinians) want to live in peace,” Holot said, adding that many in her community were “surprised” by the attacks, but not because of the actions of Hamas.

“We thought (Gazans) were like us. And it turned out, no, they’re not,” she said, alleging that “common people of Gaza” were involved in the looting of October 7 and expressed support for the attacks.

It’s an attitude that Avida Bachar, from nearby kibbutz Be’eri also shares. Bachar lost his wife, his teenage son and his right leg in the attacks, in which 100 of the kibbutz’s 1,100 residents were killed.

Prior to October 7, Bachar believed that Palestinians and Israelis could coexist.

Now, he believes that Israel should raze Gaza and take complete control of it.

“We have to take the border, to move the border, and put potatoes and peanut fields there (in Gaza), until the sea. That is a different system, and we have to do it,” he said, acknowledging that his support of such an extreme idea would have surprised him prior to the war.

Such shifts in attitudes aren’t surprising for survivors of extreme trauma, said Merav Roth, a Haifa-based clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst.

“It takes most of your energy just to survive mentally. And that’s why they don’t have spare energy to think of ‘the other,’” Roth said, adding that they are often in “fight or flight” mode and react in “binary, primitive ways.”

“When you’re in chaos, when you’re intimidated, when you’re threatened, you split the world into two: total good and total bad… and revenge is an illusion of becoming strong,” Roth said.

So, by operating with a mentality of “I don’t want to think about them. I don’t want to solve anything,’” Roth said, survivors are able to create a sense of protection for themselves.

It’s the type of protection Holot seeks for herself and her children, who both suffer from PTSD.

While Holot said that she does not support US President Donald Trump or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu politically, their call to relocate Palestinians in Gaza to third countries – a “voluntary” emigration plan approved by Israel’s cabinet in March that critics say could amount to ethnic cleansing – has given her pause.

“Would I want to get up tomorrow morning, wake up and see that all the people in Gaza disappeared and everything is peaceful? Yes. On the same note, I would like to get up tomorrow morning and find out that all the people in Gaza want peace,” she said, before adding: “But do I think (either) is possible? No.”

A shift to the right

In the 1990s and 2000s, the conflict was a dividing line between left and right, split 50-50 along political lines, according to Tamar Hermann, a public opinion and polling expert at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a Jerusalem-based think tank.

Holot and Bachar’s views mirror a wider shift in attitudes among Israeli Jews to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the idea of a two-state solution since October 7.

But over the years, Jewish Israeli society has made a significant shift to the right, with only 13% of that population now self-identifying as on the left, compared with 30% in the center, and 55-60% on the right, Hermann said.

While the right remains staunchly against a Palestinian state, a view that has only hardened since the war began, the center is now much more aligned with the right than it used to be, she said.

But the major shift has been among those on the left, who used to support a two-state solution but now see a Palestinian state as unfeasible anytime soon, she said.

Meanwhile, across all political lines, very few Jewish Israelis (5%) believe that Hamas would end its struggle against Israel even if there was a Palestinian state, according to an IDI opinion poll conducted 13 months ago.

Holot, who still identifies as on the left, said she believes left-wing activists outside of Israel who demonstrate for a “Free Palestine” do not fully understand Hamas’ ideological stance, instead only focusing on images of Palestinian suffering.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 52,000 people since October 2023 – among them 16,000 children – according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. 2,100 Palestinians have been killed since Israel reignited its aerial and ground campaign last month, breaking a two-month-old ceasefire.

“I’m very sad for this reality, but I’m very stable about knowing that it’s not our fault and their leaders brought it upon them,” Holot said, echoing a wider national sentiment. Nearly all Jewish Israelis (94.5%) believe that Hamas bears a great deal of responsibility for the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, according to the IDI poll.

“Murderousness is infectious, aggression is infectious,” Roth said of the vicious cycle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But Roth, who believes in a two-state solution, still has hope for peace. She said some of the returned hostages and survivors she’s worked with have told her: “’I will fight for the two-state solution. We still need peace.”

“They are amazing, and it’s inspiring,” Roth said. “They keep their higher selves, even after all that they went through.”

‘The only reality I knew’

In between lectures, 21-year-old Gili Avidor walks under trees on the perimeter of the Tel Aviv University campus. Like the survivors – and much of Israeli society – she, too, has undergone a profound personal and political transformation since October 7.

But her story is very different than most.

“I remember telling my sister that I want everyone in Gaza dead,” said Avidor.

“Now I am ashamed and frightened of the fact that these words came out of my mouth,” Avidor, who describes herself as being from a right-wing family, said: “I was completely inside the Israeli narrative. That’s the only reality I knew.”

As Israel escalated its war on Gaza, Avidor said something changed for her.

“I thought, there is probably some other girl on the other side of the gate in Gaza that is feeling exactly what I feel, that someone she loved got killed, and revenge is the answer…(but) revenge is what makes such things to happen in the first place.”

Avidor began to engage with left-wing activist groups that support Palestinian self-determination and volunteered as a “protective presence” for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who have suffered an increasing number of attacks by Jewish settlers since the start of the war.

It’s hard to stand up to your own society, she said, adding that individual and collective trauma has been weaponized to empower extremists to perpetuate the conflict and dehumanize Palestinians.

Still, she remains committed to a different way forward, saying that it is her “duty” to advocate for “human beliefs in this very dark time.”

Avidor acknowledges that she did not experience the first-hand trauma that many kibbutzniks did, and expresses deep sympathy for them.

“I can understand that people who endure such a trauma (flips) their life upside-down,” Avidor said.

But she pushed back on the idea that October 7 is a reason for them to stop seeing a path forward to peace with Palestinians.

“I mean, they say: ‘Okay, we were the the good Jews who helped you and took you to the hospital when you’re sick…’ but now they strip them from their humanity,” she said.

“The notion that human rights is something that people need to gain and to be thankful for? That makes me angry. And I think they’re hypocrites,” Avidor added.

Not every survivor has faltered in their vision for peace.

At her father’s graveside at kibbutz Nir Oz several weeks ago, Sharone Lifschitz read one of his poems to friends and family attending his headstone-setting ceremony, as the sound of bombs exploded a mile away in Gaza.

Oded Lifschitz, a lifelong peace activist, was kidnapped age 83 from the kibbutz on October 7, along with his wife Yocheved, who was freed weeks after her capture.

She and her mother continue to embody Oded’s ideology, saying that peace with Palestinians is the only way forward.

Roth, the psychologist, believes Israel’s most “severe danger as a society is if we become the atrocity we experience.”

“This will be really the victory of Hamas, if the Israeli people will lose their values, their higher selves, their morality, (capacity for) seeing the other,” she said.

Back in kibbutz Tzora, Holot says she still holds liberal values, and is focused on healing herself and her children.

“I don’t want to teach them bad things about humanity. So, I prepare them to keep thinking that Hamas is bad and the people are good… even if I don’t feel it myself,” she said.