Stand and Deliver
Coming Soon…
“There’s always been a Burma network in the Norwegian parliament,” says Ola Elvestuen. An MP for Norway’s Liberal Party since 2013, Elvestuen has devoted his political career to environmental and societal issues that affect us all. He served as Minister of Climate and the Environment from 2018 to 2020, and has held several high-ranking positions in local and parliamentary politics, including vice mayor of Oslo and vice chairman of the Liberal Party.
As a young man in the late 1980s, he witnessed a rapidly shifting global landscape: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the 8888 Uprising in Myanmar. Since then, he has engaged with global challenges to promote peace, fairness, and sustainability, and has worked on issues involving Belarus, Iran, Eritrea, Tibet, Taiwan, and beyond. With authoritarianism on the rise, he believes countries like Myanmar are central to reversing this global trend.
Looking back to Myanmar, Elvestuen recalls how the 1988 demonstrations and coup embedded the Burmese struggle deep into Norwegian politics and foreign policy. In 1992, the Norwegian Burma Committee (NBC) was established following Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize win the previous year, and around the same time the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) began broadcasting into the country from Oslo.
Fast forward to 2021, and Elvestuen says the contrast could not be sharper. He argues the international community should have responded immediately—and forcefully—after the military seized power. Instead, he points to weak global media coverage and Western governments’ passive stance as reasons the crisis has escalated. “The demonstrations that were held were incredible,” he says, “but they did not get the support they should have gotten in the early days.”
Elvestuen remains firm that the National League for Democracy (NLD) was the legitimate government following the 2020 elections, and that formal recognition of the National Unity Government (NUG)—by the UN and individual countries—should have happened immediately after the coup.
That clarity of conviction is rooted not only in policy but in his own experience in Myanmar. In 2014, during its democratic opening, Elvestuen joined former Liberal Party leader Arne Fjørtoft on a trip focused on environmental cooperation. He remembers a beautiful country with friendly people, but also meeting families in extremely difficult circumstances. Together, they distributed solar panels to homes without electricity and planted mangrove trees in the Irrawaddy Delta—work Elvestuen still recalls fondly.
During Myanmar’s democratic opening in the 2010s, Norway became an active player, pairing diplomatic support with investments in key industries such as hydropower, oil and gas exploration, and telecommunications. Elvestuen notes that throughout this period— and even after the coup— Norway too often defaulted to a neutral, “problem-solver” posture rather than taking a clear, public stand for democracy, a tendency he believes diluted its influence. A major example was Telenor, the majority state-owned Norwegian telecom company, which significantly expanded Myanmar’s mobile network infrastructure from 2014 to 2021. Following the military takeover, however, Telenor was forced to sell its Burmese operations—a decision widely condemned for effectively handing sensitive user data to the regime.
This took place in 2022, when Telenor was transferred to the Lebanese investment company M1 Group and Burmese businessman Shwe Byain Phyu, as a joint venture. Shwe Byain Phyu has strong ties to the military junta, and many activists, experts, and citizens expressed grave concern over the transfer of sensitive customer data. Elvestuen notes that while the Norwegian government has no direct role in running a majority state-owned company, it should have recognized from “day one” of the coup that the situation had fundamentally changed. He believes Telenor should have destroyed the data rather than surrendering it to the regime, even though employees in Myanmar—who were reportedly willing to take that risk—might have faced serious consequences. The issue was raised publicly and in Parliament, and Elvestuen calls it “an enormous mistake” that damaged Norway’s once-strong reputation in Myanmar. “We should now take a clear stance to regain a better position again,” he says. Elvestuen further stresses that the failure to act decisively in those first days reflects a broader problem in Norway’s response to the coup—moving too slowly, trying to preserve business as usual, and ultimately making choices that had severe consequences for activists and citizens on the ground.
As to why there has not been a more coordinated global response to the coup, Elvestuen suggests that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 drew international attention away from Myanmar. Even though the enormous post-coup demonstrations revealed how little public support the military actually had, the West mustered only limited political will to respond. Elvestuen partly attributes this to lingering damage to Aung San Suu Kyi’s international reputation after the 2017 Rohingya crisis, which, he believes, made some governments less inclined to rally behind Myanmar’s elected leadership “The reaction should have been far stronger from day one,” he says. “That cannot be undone, but we must now start building strong support and a much clearer position for Myanmar, and not let it be anything less than one of the major conflicts in the world. Myanmar is not a small country — this is important.”
As Kyungmee Kim stressed in a recent episode, Elvestuen also sees the climate crisis as one of the key issues that could help draw Myanmar back into international focus. He links global warming, biodiversity loss, and the struggle for freedom and democracy as “closely interlinked” challenges that must be tackled together. A strong environmental policy in Myanmar, he argues, could bring wide benefits — from protecting ecosystems and livelihoods to undermining the military dictatorship. Drawing on Norway’s experience partnering with rainforest nations in Latin America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia, Elvestuen says Myanmar’s rich biodiversity makes it a natural candidate for similar large-scale, results-based cooperation once democracy is restored. Such efforts, including mangrove restoration and deforestation prevention, could have far-reaching impacts well beyond Myanmar’s borders. The challenge, he acknowledges, is integrating this vital environmental agenda with the immediate struggle for democratic change.
Elvestuen also raises the growing crisis of online scam operations in Myanmar and the wider region, which he sees as directly linked to the broader fight for democracy. Myanmar has become notorious for these sophisticated criminal enterprises, which rely on the forced labor of civilians from around the world and rank among the most lucrative illicit activities globally. These operations are closely tied to other major criminal trades, including narcotics and illegal natural resource extraction. He sees them as one of the many devastating consequences of the military dictatorship and ongoing civil war.
Ola Elvestuen is certain that Myanmar will be a core foreign policy debate during Norway’s election in the fall of 2025. He restates his position that the National Unity Government is the legitimate government of Myanmar, and that Norway must be open in its support and collaboration with them. “That is what we had to do with Ukraine, and that is also the position that we should have with the revolution, with the NUG, in Myanmar.”