Myanmar coup: Indonesia tries a difficult mediation

ASIANEWS.it

Ati Nurbaiti
04/07/2021

President Jokowi calls on ASEAN to intervene to ensure the safety of the people of Myanmar whose generals are more interested in Thailand’s military coup than Indonesia’s model of democratic transition. In Indonesia there is little empathy for protesters in Myanmar.

Jakarta (AsiaNews) – Indonesia needs to continue efforts to open communication channels with Myanmar’s military, which carried out a coup against the civilian government of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

To stop the crackdown against the anti-coup protest movement, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has called for an emergency meeting of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN). Such a move, which Malaysia supports, has met with opposition by some ASEAN nations, which usually insist on non-interference in the domestic affairs of the group’s members.

Myanmar crisis: Asean's next moves

Bangkok Post

PUBLISHED : 6 APR 2021

Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin takes part in a virtual meeting of Asean foreign ministers in Nay Pyi Taw last Friday. AFP

The recent call by Indonesian President Joko Widodo for a meeting with his colleagues on the Myanmar crisis is gaining traction. It is now possible to say that the proposed leaders' meeting could take place at the end of this month, after the Songkran break and the Muslim Ramadan festival.

Senior Asean officials will have to decide tomorrow whether to have the physical meeting either in Bandar Seri Begawan or the Asean Secretariat and the preferred date. Both places have their own merits in discussing the Myanmar crisis. Therefore, the right timing is imperative for a face-to-face rendezvous. Asean has learned to its cost that a teleconference on the Myanmar crisis could cause harm and bitterness due to the lack of clarifications and personal rapport in virtual meetings. This time, the Asean chair wants to ensure that all Asean leaders, including Senior Gen Min Aung Hlaing, join the meeting.

Thailand unlikely to join ASEAN in pressuring Myanmar junta to stop bloodshed

Thaiger

Ann Carter

Monday, April 5, 2021

Thailand’s government is unlikely to join other members of ASEAN in calling for Myanmar’s junta to stop the bloodshed. Fears over receiving a flood of refugees across the Burmese border and damages to its military ties may be of more importance to the Kingdom, despite the government’s recent claims that it is “gravely concerned” over the situation in Myanmar.

If Thailand refuses to join increasing calls for Myanmar’s junta to step down, it could, however, place it in a unique position as a mediator. Political scientist, Panitan Wattanayagorn, at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told Reuters that Thailand may be in a unique position to act as a mediator if it doesn’t join sides with the ASEAN community.

ASEAN leaders to meet over Myanmar, chair Brunei says

REUTERS
Reuters Staff

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Brunei, the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, on Monday threw its support behind a regional leaders’ meeting to discuss developments in Myanmar and said it has asked officials to prepare for a meeting in Jakarta.

FILE PHOTO: Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah attends the opening session of the 31st ASEAN Summit in Manila, Philippines, November 13, 2017. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha

Myanmar has been in crisis since a Feb. 1 military coup that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Activists say at least 557 people have since been killed in a crackdown by security forces on protests and strikes across the country, where the junta has restricted internet access.

Indonesia has led efforts by members of ASEAN, of which Myanmar is a member, to encourage a negotiated solution, despite a longstanding policy of not commenting on each other’s domestic problems.

When Internal Becomes International: ASEAN’s Role in Myanmar

CSIS

Diego Lingad

April 1, 2021

All eyes are on Myanmar following the country’s February 1 coup d’état. The international community is calling on The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to help find a solution. But ASEAN members are far from agreement on what role the grouping should play. Escalating violence in Myanmar, meanwhile, is pushing member states to make uncomfortable decisions.

Following the coup, Brunei, as the grouping’s current chair, quickly issued a statement calling for a return to “normalcy” in Myanmar. But Indonesia has emerged as the most vocal member of ASEAN, convening others to discuss the crisis. Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei have appeared to support these efforts while others were more muted. Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam initially called the situation in Myanmar an internal affair. And Laos has taken a wait-and-see approach, calling for stability while expressing support for ASEAN. Myanmar itself, represented in ASEAN meetings by the new junta-appointed foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin, further complicates the discussions. The group failed to produce a joint statement on the coup at an informal ministerial meeting on March 2. The best it could do was a chair’s statement calling for “all parties to refrain from instigating further violence” and saying the group is ready to assist with reconciliation.

China to support ASEAN mediation on Myanmar crisis

AA

Riyaz Ul Khaliq 

ANKARA

01.04.2021

China on Thursday said it supports the idea that leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) hold a “special meeting as soon as possible to mediate” in Myanmar, which is witnessing mass demonstrations against the military coup launched last on Feb. 1

“Myanmar is a member of the ASEAN family, and a close neighbor to China. We all hope different forces in Myanmar can start a dialogue as soon … to solve divergence under the framework of the law and the constitution and promote hard-won democratization,” Wang told a news conference alongside visiting Malaysian Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein in China’s eastern Nanping city.

ASEAN on Myanmar’s Coup: Revisiting Cold War Diplomacy on Cambodia

new mandala

DEEPAK NAIR - 

22 MAR, 2021

A battle for international recognition between Myanmar’s junta and Aung San Suu Kyi’s deposed civilian government is underway. The opposition in the incarnation of the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) has urged the international community not to recognize the junta, while the junta has charged the CRPH as “illegal” and guilty of “high treason.”

The battle lines have been drawn with the extraordinary address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) by Myanmar’s Permanent Representative U Kyaw Moe Tun. In his speech, Kyaw Moe Tun broke ranks with the junta and delivered a message from the CRPH that urged international condemnation of the coup and denial of recognition for the junta-led State Administration Council regime.

Myanmar Junta Expects Asian Nations to Keep Investing After Coup

Bloomberg News
22 March 2021,

Myanmar’s military junta expects investments from Asian countries to continue despite growing condemnation over its coup last month and the violent suppression of ensuing pro-democracy protests.

While the U.S. and its partners are taking actions such as sanctions against the military, and some regional companies have scaled back operations, Asian neighbors largely have refrained from turning away from the country and the current leadership sees long-term regional partners staying engaged.

Indonesia president urges halt to Myanmar violence, wants ASEAN talks

THE Star
Friday, 19 Mar 2021

FILE PHOTO: Indonesian President Joko Widodo gestures during an interview with Reuters at the presidential palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, November 13, 2020. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan/File Photo

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Friday called for bloodshed to be halted in military-ruled Myanmar and for Southeast Asian leaders to hold a high-level meeting to try to find a way out of the country's escalating crisis.

In some of the strongest comments yet by a regional leader on Myanmar's violent crackdown on anti-coup demonstrations, Jokowi, as the president is best known, said he would immediately call Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, the current chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and press him to call an urgent meeting.

Myanmar Buddhist Association Signals Possible Break with Military Junta

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio
March 18, 2021

The opposition of the country’s main Buddhist authority would undermine the military government’s already shaky legitimacy.

Myanmar’s influential Buddhist monks’ association has urged the country’s military junta to end violence against protesters, accusing an “armed minority” of responsibility for the killing of unarmed civilians protesting the February 1 coup.

According to a report in the local news outlet Myanmar now, the 47-member State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, a government-appointed body of Buddhist abbots, decided Tuesday to suspend its activities, calling for an immediate end to the junta’s violent attacks on anti-coup protesters

Myanmar Coup: Asean, once again, don’t look away

The Daily Star

Raudah Yunus , Gideon Lasco

March 11, 2021

Anti-coup demonstrators spray fire extinguishers over a barricade during a protest in Yangon, Myanmar, on March 9, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

The military coup in Myanmar that overturned its election results and put the country's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in house arrest is a shocking, if unsurprising, reminder that even as the Covid-19 pandemic rages, political strife continues around the world and the pandemic itself is used to enact and perpetuate authoritarianism. As the harrowing scenes unfold, we can only express outrage over this turn of events: No country deserves to be ruled by force, and no country deserves to be deprived of their elected leaders.

ASEAN Members on Myanmar: Agreeing to Disagree

IRRAWADDY

KAVI CHONGKITTAVORN 

3 March 2021

An informal meeting of foreign ministers of 10 ASEAN member states on March 2.

It is clear that the ASEAN foreign ministers hold different views on the situation in Myanmar and this has attracted global condemnation. However, when they joined up and aired their disagreements, they agreed to disagree. For the time being, that will be the modus operandi. But this platitude will not last very long. Depending on the junta’s behavior, ASEAN will make necessary adjustments as it responds to the level of pressure and measures on its peer.

Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have been vocal about the military junta in Naypyitaw for obvious reasons. The island republic’s sharp criticisms were well timed and internationally exposed, reflecting its political vision for Myanmar. Singapore still retains its leadership role in ASEAN in setting forth the grouping’s trajectory. In tandem, both Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Foreign Minister Vivien Balakrishnan have done well in outlining their positions against Myanmar and earned praise for their democratic aspirations.

ASEAN to tell Myanmar military it is ‘appalled’ by violence, says Singapore minister

CNBC

REUTERS

MAR 1 2021

• Southeast Asian nations will be frank in telling Myanmar’s ruling junta they are appalled by violence in the country, and the region needs to bring together ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the military to find a way out, Singapore’s foreign minister said.

• Foreign ministers from Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbors were due to hold talks with its ruling military on Tuesday in an effort to quell deadly violence and open a channel to resolve its escalating political crisis.

• The talks will come two days after the bloodiest day of unrest since the military removed Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government a month ago.

Protesters defend themselves with makeshift shields during clashes with riot police on February 28, 2021 in Yangon, Myanmar.Hkun Lat | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Foreign ministers from Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbors were due to hold talks with its ruling military on Tuesday in an effort to quell deadly violence and open a channel to resolve its escalating political crisis.

The talks will come two days after the bloodiest day of unrest since the military removed Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government a month ago, unleashing anger and mass street protests across Myanmar.

Protesters, many wearing hard hats, began marching in the biggest city Yangon for what they said would be another big demonstration. Several shopping malls have closed because of the unrest.

China ready to ‘work with Asean’ to ease Myanmar coup turmoil

South China Morning Post

Laura Zhou in Beijing
20 Feb, 2021

• Chinese foreign minister tells Indonesian counterpart that unrest not in interest of Myanmar or region
• Beijing hopes all parties will ‘continue the process of democratic transition’

A man takes part in a protest against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar, on Saturday. Photo: Reuters

China has said it is willing to work closely with Asean to ease political tensions in Myanmar as pressure mounts on Beijing to condemn the military coup in its Southeast Asian neighbour.

In a call with his Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi on Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said a peaceful and stable Myanmar was important to both China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Indonesia, Malaysia seeking ASEAN meeting on Myanmar after coup

REUTERS

By Maikel Jefriando, Stanley Widianto
February 5, 202 

JAKARTA (Reuters) - The leaders of Indonesia and Malaysia on Friday said they were seeking a special meeting of Southeast Asian nations to discuss the situation in Myanmar, where an elected government was overthrown in a coup this week. 

Throwing a wedge in Myanmar’s transition to democracy, the military took power on Monday, alleging irregularities in a November election won in a landslide by the party of Aung San Suu Kyi.

After meeting visiting Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said their foreign ministers had been asked to talk to Brunei, the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to try to set up the special Myanmar meeting.

Muhyiddin referred to the coup as being “one step backward in the process of democracy in that country”.

Joint statement from INGO's: ASEAN must prevent another “Rohingya boat crisis”

NORWEGIAN REFUGEES COUNCIL
Published 11. Nov 2020

 

Southeast Asian leaders must do everything they can to protect refugees and prevent a repeat of this year’s “boat crisis” when some 200 refugees lost their lives at sea, 16 humanitarian agencies said today ahead of the 37th ASEAN Summit.

Signatores on the statement are ActionAid, CARE, International Rescue Committee, Lutheran World Federation, Médecins du Monde France, Médecins du Monde Japan, Médecins du Monde Switzerland, MOAS, NONGOR, Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, People in Need Myanmar, Plan International, Save the Children, Solidarités International, World Vision International.

 

Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis exposes ASEAN weaknesses: Report

Aljazeera
20 Oct 2020

Regional bloc’s response has fallen short because of lack of leadership, failure to grasp gravity of rights abuses.

A police officer stands guard in Maungdaw township in Rakhine State after the mass exodus of Rohingya in 2017 [File: Nyein Chan Naing/EPA]

 

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has failed to respond effectively to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar thanks to a lack of leadership and the 10-member organisation’s inability to grasp the scale of the human rights abuses, a report from a group of regional lawmakers said on Tuesday.

ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights said ASEAN had been hampered by its own institutional structure, which allowed member state Myanmar the space to “set the parameters of ASEAN’s engagement”.

Vietnam FM On ASEAN Talks, ASEAN Chief On Rohingya

REPUBLIC WORLD
Associated Press Television News
12th September, 2020

Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh said on Saturday that ASEAN will continue to pursuit the bloc's neutral position to avoid being stuck inbetween rivalry among major powers.

အာဆီယံ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား ရခိုင္အေရး ေဆြးေႏြး

VOA
ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)

13 စက္တင္ဘာ၊ 2020

အြန္လုိင္း ဗြီဒီယိုကတဆင့္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ အာဆီယံ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား အစည္းအေဝး။ (စက္တင္ဘာ ၉၊ ၂၀၂၀)

အြန္လိုင္းဗီြဒီယိုကတဆင့္ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၄ ရက္ၾကာ အာဆီယံ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား အစည္း အေ ဝးမွာ ကို႐ိုနာဗိုင္းရပ္စ္ကို တုံ႔ျပန္တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရး ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကဖို႔နဲ႔ အျငင္းပြားေနတဲ့ ေတာင္ တ ႐ုတ္ပင္လယ္ကိစၥ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲေတြ အရွိန္ျမႇင့္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ဖို႔ ကတိကဝတ္ ျပဳခဲ့ၾကတဲ့အျပင္ ကိုရီး ယားကၽြန္းဆြယ္ လုံၿခဳံေရး၊ ျမန္မာက ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ကိစၥ အပါအဝင္ ဆိုက္ဘာလုံၿခဳံေရးကိစၥ၊ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရးကိစၥ၊ နယ္စပ္ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ ရာဇဝတ္မႈခင္း စတဲ့ ကိစၥရပ္ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကိုလည္း ေဆြးေႏြး ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဗီယက္နမ္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Pham Binh Minh က ေျပာပါတယ္္။

Rohingyas lack confidence in Myanmar govt, FM tells ASEAN

Prothum Alo------  

 Prothom Alo English Desk

Published: 12 September 2020, 

Weary Rohingya trudging from Myanmar's Rakhine state to Ukhia, Bangladesh.Prothom Alo file photo

Bangladesh has once again conveyed to the international community that the displaced Rohingyas are not returning to their homeland primarily because they do not trust their government on the issues of safety and security, reports UNB.

In order to reduce trust deficit and confidence building, Bangladesh suggested Myanmar to engage non-military civilian observers from their friendly countries like ASEAN, China, Russia, India or other friends of their choice. 

Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen conveyed it to the foreign ministers of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) on Saturday adding such initiative may reduce trust deficit for a sustainable return.