The Coup And The Crisis In Myanmar

OWP
The Organisation for World Peace
Evelyn Elliott
August 14, 2021

Myanmar, a nation whose young democracy began only a decade ago, is currently facing a threat it may not recover from. On February 1st of 2021, the military of Myanmar staged a coup d’état in the Southeast Asian country, overthrowing the democratic government and issuing a year-long state of emergency. Orchestrated under the idea that the nation’s November election was fraudulent, a claim that lacks any substantial evidence, the armed forces took control and arrested senior members of the elected National League for Democracy (NLD) party. The situation was exacerbated by the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy activist and Nobel Prize winner, who led the NLD. The country’s state of emergency has been extended for another two years under the direction of Min Aung Hlaing, a leading army general who declared himself to be the nation’s prime minister at the beginning of August. Now, after months of violence and oppression, Myanmar is confronted with the same military regime that it suffered under previously.

New ASEAN Envoy to Myanmar Pledges to Meet With Opposition, Detained Activists

THE I DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
August 10, 2021

The envoy’s mission relies on good faith commitment on the part of the junta, but this remains unlikely.

ASEAN’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar says he will insist on meeting with jailed politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, in line with the Five-Point Consensus agreed by the Southeast Asian bloc in April.

Second Foreign Minister of Brunei Erywan Yusof was formally appointed by ASEAN last week, after protracted negotiations among the bloc’s 10 member states. Speaking to reporters on Saturday in his first public remarks about the role, he said a plan to visit Myanmar was “in the pipeline,” and would be confirmed once he had consulted with all countries and actors concerned.

Asean too late for Myanmar?

Bangkok Post

EDITORIAL
BANGKOK POST EDITORIAL COLUMN

The appointment of Brunei's Second Foreign Minister Erywan Yusof as Asean special envoy to Myanmar last week is better late than never.

The special envoy's appointment is part of a five-point consensus that was agreed upon by Asean leaders during an April 24 meeting searching for a solution to the Myanmar crisis following the Feb 1 coup that ousted the elected civilian government under Aung San Suu Kyi who has been detained together with other civilian officials.

The delay in the envoy's appointment is described by the international media as due to internal wrangling within the group; with Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines opting for a proactive approach; while the rest, including Thailand, preferring quiet diplomacy which is almost synonymous with sitting on the problem while violence is being committed.

ASEAN countries urged to help expedite Rohingya repatriation efforts

UNB

UNB NEWS
DHAKA
AUGUST 08, 2021, 

It's crucial to maintain regional peace to attain full potential, Momen says,

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen on Sunday urged the ASEAN member states to intervene in the Rohingya issue and help expedite their repatriation to Myanmar.

"For the last four years, there is no violence in the Rakhaine State, yet none of the displaced people of Myanmar returned to their homes mostly because of fear of uncertainty and trust defect," he said.

Read: Bangladesh receives $590 million World Bank financing to tackle Rohingya situation

New ASEAN envoy to Myanmar says he wants full access when he visits

Reuters
August 7, 2021

Brunei's Second Minister of Foreign Affairs Erywan Pehin Yusof addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City, New York, U.S., September 30, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Aug 7 (Reuters) - The Brunei diplomat appointed by a Southeast Asian regional bloc as its special envoy to Myanmar said on Saturday he should be given full access to all parties when he visits the strife-torn country, where the military overthrew an elected government.

Speaking days after his appointment by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Erywan Yusof gave no date for his visit to Myanmar, whose civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other officials have been detained since the Feb. 1 coup. read more

ASEAN’s humanitarian aid to Myanmar must not legitimise military junta: Progressive Voice & FORUM-ASIA

TOC

The Online Citizen
Asia, Civil Society
04/08/2021

“ASEAN and the international community must recognize and engage with the NUG, and disengage with the junta in provision of humanitarian assistance to prevent them from weaponizing humanitarian aid."

 Protesters hold a banner supporting the National Unity Government (NUG) during a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon on 11 July 2021 (Source: AFP)

The Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the rest of the international community must provide humanitarian assistance through the COVID-19 Task Force set up by the Ministry of Health under interim government of Myanmar – the National Unity Government (NUG) – and Ethnic Health Organisations, as well as through cross-border channels, local humanitarian networks, ethnic service providers, and community-based organisations, said Progressive Voice and the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) in a joint statement on Wednesday (4 Aug).

ASEAN urged to address Myanmar crises, as special envoy named

Aljazeera
4 Aug 2021

Rights groups call on regional political bloc to work with shadow NUG, local health organisations to deliver urgent humanitarian aid.

Volunteers in protective suits carry a COVID patient lying on a bed as they try to relocate oxygen-dependent patients from the COVID centre during floods in Karen state [Karen Information Center/Handout via Reuters]

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) urgently needs to address Myanmar’s “dire” human rights and humanitarian crises, which are being compounded by a COVID-19 health emergency and recent flooding, rights groups have said, warning the regional bloc to avoid giving legitimacy to the country’s military.

ASEAN Still Stalemated Over Choice of Myanmar Envoy

THE I DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
August 03, 2021

A candidate was expected to be announced at yesterday’s Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, but the bloc appears deadlocked on a number of issues.

As the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) kicked off a week of summitry-by-videolink, it remained deadlocked on the appointment of a special envoy to address the political crisis in Myanmar.

Alongside a discussion of COVID-19 and the South China Sea, yesterday’s 54th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting was expected in some quarters to feature the announcement of an ASEAN envoy to shepherd Myanmar’s military junta and its opponents toward the negotiating table.

ဂ်ကာတာ ဘုံသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ ျမန္မာ တာဝန္ခံေစေရး ASEAN ကို အေမရိကန္ တိုက္တြန္း

ဧရာဝတီ
16 July 2021 

အေမရိကန္ နိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး အန္တိုနီ ဂၽြန္

 

ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံတြင္ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ အဆုံးသတ္ေရး၊ နိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား လႊတ္ေပးေရးႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီလမ္း ေၾကာင္းေပၚသို႔ ျပန္လည္ေလၽွာက္လွမ္းေရးတို႔အတြက္ ျမန္မာကို ဖိအားေပးရန္ အေမရိကန္နိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ ႀကီး အန္တိုနီ ဂၽြန္ ဘလင္ကန္က ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔က က်င္းပသည့္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွနိုင္ငံမ်ားအသင္း (ASEAN) နိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီးမ်ားႏွင့္ ဗီဒီယိုျဖင့္ ေတြ႕ဆုံရာတြင္ တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္သည္။

Blinken urges ASEAN to take ‘immediate action’ on Myanmar

Aljazeera

14 Jul 2021

In first meeting with ASEAN, US secretary of state calls for action on Myanmar and rejects China’s claims in South China Sea.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed US's commitment to ASEAN centrality during Wednesday's video conference [Jim Watson/Pool via Reuters]

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed “deep concerns” about the military coup in Myanmar and called on Southeast Asian nations to take action to end violence and restore democracy in the country.

Military Junta Completes 5 Months, 800 Killed and 6000 Detained in Myanmar

THE CITIZEN
P.K.BALACHANDRAN 
5 JULY, 2021

On July 1, Myanmar’s military junta completed five months as the ruler of the country after the overthrow of the democratically-elected Aung San Suu Kyi government on February 1.

Over 800 were killed and 6000 detained in crackdowns targeting pro-democracy agitators from February 1 to June 30.

Military action is continuing against ethnic non-Bamar communities and non-Buddhist religious minorities in the North East and North West of the country.

The United Nations and the Western powers led by the United States continue to condemn the forcible take over. The US has imposed a series of new sanctions against the regime, including freezing US$ 1 billion in reserves that Myanmar’s Central Bank was holding at the New York Fed.

Myanmar: Roads to a Federal Army Are Twisted

modern diplomacy
M.D. Amin
July 2, 2021

The idea of a Federal Army for Myanmar is as old as the country’s struggle for democracy. The vision is a part of the larger picture of decentralization and democratization of the multiethnic nation of 54 million and was first seriously floated in 1988 as a counterweight to Tatmadaw and to rally the support of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) during 8888 Uprising. The idea has recently received unprecedented momentum following the ousting of NLD-led civilian government on February 1, 2021. The formation of an EAO-supported People’s Defense Force (PDF) that amalgamates the Bamar youth with anti-junta ethnic rebels has sparked new optimism in this regard. Spontaneous attacks from civilian resistance fighters and other similar groups, such as Taze People’s Comrades, Kalay Civil Army and Chinland Defence Force have also contributed significantly to this growing interest.

United Nations calls for halt of weapons to Myanmar

ABS-CBN NEWS
Michelle Nichols, Reuters
Jun 23 2021

Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Myanmar's Commander in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing walk past the honor guard prior to their talks in Moscow, Russia on June 22, 2021. Vadim Savitskiy/Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation/Handout via Reuters

NEW YORK - The United Nations General Assembly on Friday called for a stop to the flow of arms to Myanmar and urged the military to respect November election results and release political detainees, including leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The General Assembly adopted a resolution with the support of 119 countries several months after the military overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government in a Feb. 1 coup. Belarus requested the text be put to a vote and was the only country to oppose it, while 36 abstained, including China and Russia.

Bangladesh abstains from voting against Myanmar

Prothom Alo 

Prothom Alo English Desk

Published: 20 Jun 2021, 

The United Nations logo is seen on a window in an empty hallway at United Nations headquarters during the 75th annual UN General Assembly high-level debate in New York, US, on 21 September 2020Reuters

The UN General Assembly on Friday took a rare step of calling on member states to “prevent the flow of arms” into Myanmar, which is a part of a non-binding resolution condemning the military coup in the violence-wracked country.

The resolution -- which did not go so far as to call for a global arms embargo -- also demands that the military “immediately stop all violence against peaceful demonstrators,” reports Reuters.

It was approved by 119 countries, with 36 abstaining including China, Myanmar’s main ally. Only one country, Belarus, voted against it. Bangladesh also abstained from voting.

ASEAN’s Future Will Be Decided in Myanmar

FP

By Evan A. Laksmana,
JUNE 21, 2021,

The prospect of an open-ended mission to restore democracy in Myanmar is making the Southeast Asian bloc's leaders uneasy.

Protesters holding signs with the image of detained Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi take part in a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon on Feb. 12. SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Can the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) thrive amid worsening regional flash points, from the South China Sea to the crisis in Myanmar? Set up in 1967 to promote regional stability and economic growth, ASEAN has never coalesced into a powerful, integrated community like the European Union, nor does it seek to become one. But the bloc has nonetheless been useful: It has largely kept the peace in the region, mainly through slow-burning dialogues and confidence building among its members, which, in turn, has allowed Southeast Asian countries to focus on domestic stability and economic development.

UN proposal seeks arms embargo and democracy in Myanmar

abc NEWS
By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press
18 June 2021

Diplomats say the U_N_ General Assembly is expected to approve a resolution calling on Myanmar’s military junta to restore the country’s democratic transition and calling on all countries “to prevent the flow of arms into Myanmar.”

On Location: June 18, 2021
Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. General Assembly is expected to approve a resolution calling on Myanmar’s junta to restore the country’s democratic transition and for all countries “to prevent the flow of arms into Myanmar,” diplomats said.

The draft resolution also condemns deadly violence by security forces and calls on the junta to unconditionally release the ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint “and all those who have been arbitrarily detained, charged or arrested."

United Nations set to call for halt of arms to Myanmar: diplomats

WHBL

Michelle Nichols

Syndicated Content
Jun 17, 2021 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The United Nations General Assembly is set on Friday to call for a stop to the flow of arms to Myanmar and urge the military to respect November election results and release political detainees, including leader Aung San Suu Kyi, diplomats said.

Western states have been pushing the 193-member body to consider a draft resolution, but it was postponed at the last minute in a bid to win more support, including from nine Southeast Asian nations.

Geopolitics and the uncertain future of Rohingyas

prothomalo

Opinion
M Sakhawat Hossain
Published: 14 Jun 2021, 

Rohingya exodus from their homeland, making their way to Bangladesh Reuters

After the military coup in Myanmar, there had been talk of taking back the 1.1 million (11 lakh) or so Rohingyas who had been driven out of Rakhine (Arakan) and had taken shelter in Bangladesh. Such sentiment is no longer being heard. In fact, the military junta in Myanmar is speaking in quite the opposite tone. Their spokesperson recently said that the Rohingya issue is not on their priority list. This is because of pressure from the Rakhine nationalist leaders there.

‘A catastrophe’: UN warns of intensifying violence in Myanmar

Aljazeera
11 Jun 2021

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet says military government is ‘singularly responsible’ for violence and ‘must be held to account’.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that multiple reports indicate that armed conflict is continuing, including in Kayah State, Chin State and Kachin State [File: Denis Balibouse/Reuters]

The United Nations human rights chief has warned that violence is intensifying across Myanmar, slamming the country’s military government for being “singularly responsible” for a “human rights catastrophe”.

Myanmar conflict may bring ethnic groups together

The Daily Star
Mokbul Morshed Ahmad
June 12, 2021

Photo: Reuters

With the February 2021 military coup, Myanmar once again hit global media headlines. While the military junta continues to clamp down on pro-democracy protestors and the country is wracked with conflict and unrest, how will the changing political situation affect the Rohingya community in Bangladesh and in Rakhine State in Myanmar?

More than one-third of Myanmar's population is composed of ethnic minorities, who inhabit a vast frontier where the country's natural resources are concentrated. They have staged periodic insurgencies against the military, which has ruled the country for most of the past six decades. The National League for Democracy (NLD) is the only nationally popular political force in Myanmar, but it has a recent history of turning a blind eye to the persecution of ethnic minorities, especially in Rakhine. Although the party won a landslide re-election in November 2020, more than one million members of ethnic minorities were disenfranchised during the vote. The British, who colonised what was then known as Burma, called the country "a zone of racial instability".