Drop call for Myanmar arms embargo, say 9 Asean members

THE STRAIGHT TIMES

Nirmal Ghosh
US Bureau Chief
MAY 29, 2021

Military personnel in a parade on Armed Forces Day in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, on March 27, 2021. The military seized power in a coup on Feb 1. PHOTO: REUTER

WASHINGTON - Nine out of the 10 members of Asean want a draft UN resolution to drop a call for an embargo on arms supplies to the Myanmar military in the wake of its Feb 1 coup d'etat and the ensuing brutal crackdown.

A key reason for this is Asean's need to keep open channels for dialogue with the military.

Asean Seeks Drop of U.N. Call for Myanmar Arms Embargo

Bloomberg

Lilian Karunungan

30 May 2021,

A soldier stands guard along a road in Yangon on May 7. Photographer: AFP/Getty Images

Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbors are seeking a watering-down of a U.N. General Assembly draft resolution which includes dropping a call for an arms embargo against the country, Reuters reported.

The nine other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, said in a May 19 letter that the draft “cannot command the widest possible support in its current form, especially from all countries directly affected in the region,” Reuters said on Friday.

Myanmar coup: ‘No sign’ of end to brutal crackdown on all fronts

UN News

Peace and Security
11 May 2021

Unsplash/Gayatri Malhotra, Protestors calling for democracy in Myanmar.

One hundred days since the Myanmar military seized power, the "brutal" repression of protesters has continued, despite all international efforts to end the violence, the UN rights office (OHCHR) said on Tuesday.

“The military authorities are showing no sign of letting up in their brutal crackdown on opponents in a bid to consolidate their hold on power”, spokesperson Rupert Colville told journalists at a media briefing.

Myanmar army says no ASEAN envoy visit until stability restored

Aljazeera

8 May 2021

At least 774 people have been killed and more than 3,700 detained in the military’s crackdown on opponents as army raids against ethnic rebels surge.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the coup, which unleashed anger amongst a public unwilling to tolerate a return to military rule [Stringer/Reuters]

Myanmar’s ruling military, which is facing nationwide protests against the coup that removed the elected government three months ago, has said that it would not agree to a visit by a Southeast Asian envoy until it could establish stability, prompting concerns that it would carry out more deadly violence against demonstrators and ethnic minorities.

ASEAN Chair, Secretary General to Visit Myanmar

THE IRRAWADDY
8 May 2021

The ASEAN special meeting on Myanmar in progress in Jakarta on April 24.

Three weeks have elapsed since the historic special meeting of ASEAN leaders at the organization’s Jakarta-based Secretariat, and the bloc’s chair and chief now plan to have their feet on the ground in Myanmar after the end of Ramadan next week. They are scheduled to hold further talks with the military regime leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and concerned senior officials.

The visit comes amid growing calls for more assertive ASEAN action in implementing the five-point consensus agreed in Jakarta on April 24. Some critics have interpreted the lack of immediate tangible action as the bloc’s effort to buy time for the military regime.

Burma, Moral Character And ASEAN – OpEd

eurasiareview

Kanbawza Win

May 5, 2021 

For the religious adherence of the world, one might be wondering of whether the people residing in Southeast Asia, ever has a moral obligation, just by witnessing the treatment of Burmese given by the group known as ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). It can be witnessed that Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, are staunch Buddhist countries, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei are Muslim countries, Philippines is Christian and the Singaporean believes in Confucianism, a traditional philosophy of humanistic, rationalistic religion, and yet not a single aspect of all the world’s religious teachings are ever applied to the current Burmese crisis. Instead, they are all cocked eyed looking for how to exploit Burma’s vast natural and human resources, as they have done since 1988 under the so called “Constructive Engagement Policy.”

ASEAN, Myanmar and Rohingya crisis

Prothomalo

M Sakhawat Hossain
05 May 2021,

I was speaking at a digital seminar at the Bangladesh Institute of International Strategic Studies (BIISS) on 21 April. The topic of the seminar was ‘Rohingya Crisis: Response of the International Community and Repatriation Process’. My presentation was on ‘ASEAN, Myanmar and the Rohingya Crisis’. In other words, I discussed the stance of the ASEAN member states on the Rohingya crisis and Myanmar.

BIISS is better known as the foreign ministry’s think tank and so naturally the ministry’ s Myanmar desk director was present at the seminar. State minister for foreign affairs Shahriar Alam, as chief guest, gave the concluding speech. The issue was discussed quite openly and the general consensus was that Bangladesh would have to actively step up pressure on Myanmar. While keeping the doors open to continued bilateral talks and repatriation, diplomatic efforts would also have to be increased in the international arena.

5-Point consensus for stability

NEW STRAITS TIMES

Muthanna Saari - 

May 4, 2021

ASEAN leaders met to discuss the Myanmar crisis. - EPA pix

Lasting peace, security and stability have always been the core tenets of Asean from the outset. It is with great belief that the objectives can be attained through a non-interference principle and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states.

In the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on Asean 2025 adopted in 2015, leaders of all Asean member states reiterated the ZOPFAN concept of Southeast Asia as a zone of peace, freedom and neutrality. The idea was agreed upon by the five founding member states of Asean, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, in November 1971.

အာဆီယံသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ NUG နဲ႔ ထိစပ္အ ေကာင္ အထည္ေဖာ္ဖို႔ SAC-M တိုက္တြန္း

VOA
ဗီြအိုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)
30 ဧၿပီ၊ 2021

ျမန္မာ့အေရး အာဆီယယံအစည္းအေဝးႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေျပာဆိုေနသည့္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားသမၼတ Joko Widodo ။ ဧၿပီ ၂၄၊ ၂၀၂၁။

ျမန္မာ့အေရးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွႏုိင္ငံမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ (ASEAN) ရဲ႕ အခ်က္ငါးခ်က္ပါ သေဘာတူညီ ခ်က္အေပၚ အာဆီယံနဲ႔ ႏုိင္္ငံတကာအေနနဲ႔ ၾကားကာလ အမ်ဳိးသားညီၫြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ (NUG) နဲ႔ ထိစပ္ၿပီး ခုိင္မာတဲ့လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈနဲ႔ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ရမယ္လုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အထူးအၾကံေပးေကာင္စီ (SAC-M) ရဲ႕ ဒီကေန႔ရက္စြဲနဲ႔ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မွာ ေျပာထားပါတယ္။

Fighting erupts in Myanmar; junta to ‘consider’ ASEAN plan

Reuters

April 27, 2021

 

Ethnic minority Karen insurgents attacked a Myanmar army outpost near the Thai border on Tuesday in some of the most intense clashes since a military coup nearly three months ago threw the country into crisis.

The Karen National Union (KNU), Myanmar's oldest rebel force, said it had captured the army camp on the west bank of the Salween river, which forms the border with Thailand.

The Myanmar military later hit back against the insurgents with air strikes, the KNU and Thai authorities said.

ASEAN Leaders Tell Burma Coup General to End Killings

NTD

ASIA & PACIFIC

The Associated Press 

Apr 25, 2021

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (C) delivers his press statement as, (L-R) Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto, and Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung listen, following ASEAN Leaders’ Meeting at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 24, 2021. (Muchlis Jr, Indonesian Presidential Palace via AP)

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Southeast Asian leaders demanded an immediate end to killings and the release of political detainees in Burma in an emergency summit Saturday with its top general and coup leader who, according to Malaysia’s prime minister, did not reject them outright.

The leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations also told Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing during the two-hour talks in Jakarta that a dialogue between contending parties in Burma (also known as Myanmar) should immediately start, with the help of ASEAN envoys.

Analysis: On Myanmar, ASEAN pushes boundaries of "non-interference"

REUTERS
Panu Wongcha-umKay Johnson
April 27, 2021

A woman prepares a placard out of crossed out portraits of Myanmar's junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during protest against the military coup in Myanmar, in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24, 2021 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Dhemas Reviyanto/ via REUTERS

Few had high hopes that a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which counts Myanmar among its members, would produce any serious initiative to end the bloodshed after Myanmar's coup, with the junta leader himself in attendance.

Yet the summit's concluding "consensus statement" - accepted by all member states including Myanmar - did stretch the bounds of ASEAN's longstanding principle of non-interference in members' internal affairs.

It called for an end to violence and a dialogue among all parties - interpreted by some as an attempt to broker talks between the junta and Myanmar's parallel National Unity Government (NUG) - as well as the naming of an ASEAN envoy and a humanitarian aid mission.

Pan-Southeast Asian Agreement Aims to Stop Spillover of Myanmar Violence

VOA

By Ralph Jennings
April 24, 2021

President Joko Widodo, center, accompanied by other Indonesian officials, delivers a press statement following a meeting of ASEAN leaders at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24, 2021. (Courtesy Indonesian Presidential Palace)

TAIPEI - Saturday's strongly worded call from a bloc of 10 Southeast Asian nations for an end to post-coup violence in Myanmar moves the region a step away from unrest infecting other countries and a step toward peacemaking, analysts say.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued a five-point consensus calling for “immediate cessation” of violence in Myanmar, “utmost restraint” by all actors there and the start of peace talks. An ASEAN envoy will help mediate dialogue in Myanmar, the consensus said, and the group will offer humanitarian aid. Myanmar is a group member.

Summit: Burmese military open to ASEAN delegation visits

Thaiger

Neill Fronde
Saturday, April 24, 2021

Today’s ASEAN summit in Jakarta has yielded progress regarding the situation in Myanmar with Burmese junta leader Min Aung Hlaing stating he’s not opposed to a special envoy being created and dispatched to Myanmar. The military leader also said he would consider several other steps proposed by the leaders of the Asian nations. With leaders or representation from most countries of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, today’s meetings carried high expectations to work towards some sort of resolution.

Chance for Asean to stop Myanmar military rulers

NEWSTRAITSTIMES

April 24, 2021

This handout photo taken and released by Dawei Watch on April 23, shows protesters holding signs calling for the arrest of Myanmar armed forces chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration against the military coup in Dawei. -AFP pic/Dawei Watch

LETTER: Southeast Asian leaders must unite to push the Myanmar junta to end horrific abuses against ordinary people and ensure it does not recognise the military as the country's legitimate rulers.

Asean is holding a Special Summit on Myanmar in Jakarta, today, to discuss the crisis brought about by the Tatmadaw's (military) coup in February. Junta leader and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who stands credibly accused of being one of the chief architects of the genocide against the Rohingya, is expected to attend the meeting.

The People of Myanmar Have Rejected the Generals. ASEAN and the World Must Do so as Well

TIME

BY ALEX AUNG KHANT
APRIL 23, 2021

A poster showing de-facto leader of Myanmar's military government, General Min Aung Hlaing, is torn in half on railings outside the country's embassy, on 8th April 2021, in London, England.

Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images

Myanmar’s political turmoil started much earlier than the coup d’ état that took place on Feb. 1. For the past ten years, the military has put on a grand show of relinquishing its power, and certainly appeared to do so when Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD) won elections five years ago. But all of that was merely superficial, as the military-drafted Constitution of 2008 reserved a quarter of parliamentary seats for military officers, and gave the generals control of three key ministries—Defense, Border Affairs and Home Affairs.

ျမန္မာ့အေရး အာဆီယံထိပ္သီး အစည္းအေဝး သေဘာတူ ညီခ်က္အေပၚ အျမင္မ်ား

ဧရာဝတီ

25 April 2021

စစ္တပ္က အာဏာသိမ္းၿပီးေနာက္ အလြန္ဆိုးဝါးေသာ အေျခအေနမ်ားကို ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရသည့္ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို တစုံတရာ ကုစားနိုင္ရန္ဆိုေသာ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ႏွင့္ အာဆီယံနိုင္ငံက ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား စုေပါင္းၿပီး အေျဖရွာရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းသည့္ ျမန္မာ့ အေရး အာဆီယံ ထိပ္သီးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား အစည္းအေဝးကို မေန႔က အင္ဒိုနီးရွားနိုင္ငံ ဂ်ကာတာၿမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။

ယင္းအစည္းအေဝးတြင္ အာဆီယံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္တဦးခ်င္းစီက ျမန္မာျပည္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ၎တို႔၏ သေဘာ ထား အသီး သီးကို တင္ျပေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကသလို အာဏာသိမ္း စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး မင္းေအာင္လွိုင္ ကိုလည္း ျမန္မာျပည္ အေရး နာရီဝက္ခန္႔ ရွင္းျပခြင့္ေပးခဲ့သည္ဟု ၾကားသိရသည္။

ယင္းအစည္းအေဝးၿပီးေနာက္ အာဆီယံ၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အေပၚ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ား၏ အားမလို အားမရအသံ မ်ားကိုလည္း ၾကားေနရသည္။ အာဆီယံက ျမန္မာျပည္အေရး အေျခအေနပိုမိုတိုးတက္ေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ ေပးနိုင္မည့္ အေျခအေန ရွိ ေနပါၿပီလား။

Do or die moment for ASEAN in Myanmar

ASIA TIMES
By NILE BOWIE

APRIL 23, 2021

Bloc's extraordinary Myanmar crisis meeting on April 24 could be the last diplomatic chance to prevent a regional catastrophe

Milk Tea Alliance Indonesia in action during Solidarity for the Myanmar People in front of the ASEAN Secretariat building in Jakarta on March 12,2021. Photo: DasrilRoszandi / NurPhoto via AFP

SINGAPORE – When Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders meet in Jakarta to discuss the worsening political crisis in Myanmar on April 24, it will mark the first time that the regional organization holds a highest-level meeting to address a specific situation of concern involving one of its members.

Non-interference in domestic affairs has traditionally been one of ASEAN’s basic operating principles, along with decision-making by consensus. As such, Saturday’s summit is seen as a test of the grouping’s code of constraint as regional leaders find themselves under mounting pressure to engineer a workable, face-saving resolution before the crisis spirals further out of control.

ASEAN Won’t Save Myanmar

FP

BY OREN SAMET |

APRIL 23, 2021,

The organization isn’t designed to solve problems—particularly not one as thorny as the post-coup unrest in Myanmar.

Protesters take part in a candlelight demonstration against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar, on April 3. STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Ever since Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, staged a coup against the country’s civilian government on Feb. 1, leading to a seemingly irrepressible popular uprising, foreign-policy experts have continued to search for potential international solutions to the deteriorating situation. With major Western powers like the United States possessing limited leverage over the Tatmadaw, and China and Russia stymieing a robust response at the international level, many have looked to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to play a more significant role.

ASEAN urged to consider Myanmar’s expulsion over coup abuses

Aljazeera
23 Apr 2021

Analysts and former diplomats say Saturday’s summit in Jakarta could be the most consequential in the regional bloc’s 54-year history.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), an activist group, says 739 people have been killed by Myanmar's security forces since the coup and 3,300 people are in detention as of Thursday [Stringer/Reuters]

Rights groups and activists are urging the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to deny legitimacy to Myanmar’s coup leader and even consider the country’s expulsion from the regional bloc over rights abuses by security forces, as leaders of the member states prepare to attend a summit in Jakarta.

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who led the February 1 coup that deposed Myanmar’s democratically-elected government, is expected to participate in Saturday’s summit of the 10-member ASEAN alongside seven head of states.