For years, Myanmar’s army chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has been treated like a pariah on the global stage.

Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has made few overseas trips, other than to Russia and China, since he seized power in a coup in 2021. Long the subject of Western sanctions, he has been barred from attending meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member, because of his military’s failure to implement an agreed peace plan in the country’s civil war. An arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court last November accusing him of crimes against humanity was supposed to isolate him further.

But on Thursday, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing arrived in Bangkok for a regional summit of a group of seven countries around the Bay of Bengal that also includes India and Thailand. His visit comes less than a week after an earthquake in Myanmar on Friday killed at least 3,085 people, and even as his military has come under fierce criticism for continuing airstrikes in the ongoing civil war, in the days after the disaster.

For the general, the visit — his first to a Southeast Asian nation since April 2021 — will give his regime the international attention it has long desired. For the Thai government, which is already sheltering tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar in camps along the border, stable relations with the military government could be aimed at trying to manage the flow of new arrivals.

But critics say the visit is the latest indication that Bangkok views human rights as irrelevant in foreign policy.

“They don’t care,” said Kasit Piromya, a former Thai foreign minister.

“It’s an insult to ASEAN — that’s what it is all about,” he said, referring to the 10-member Southeast Asian regional grouping by its acronym. “It’s the fear of the Burmese army, the greed, and because all of them are not democratic.”