Asean summit starts with Myanmar junta excluded for ignoring peace deal

the Guardian
Reuters
Tue 26 Oct 2021

In a rare show of anger from neighbouring nations, Min Aung Hlaing has been shut out of the regional sitdown

Leaders gathered on Tuesday for the virtual Asean meeting hosted by Brunei, but from which Myanmar was excluderd. Photograph: Reuters

A summit of south-east Asian leaders has begun without a representative from Myanmar after its junta leader was excluded for failure to follow a regional peace deal and the ruling military refused to send junior representation.

Neither Brunei, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) chair, nor the bloc’s secretary-general made a mention of the no-show in opening remarks at the virtual meeting.

ASEAN must reaffirm commitment for rights of Rohingya refugees -- Syed Hamid Albar

BERNAMA

28/10/2021

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 -- The 38th and 39th ASEAN Summits that will be wrapped up today is a watershed moment for ASEAN to re-affirm its commitment to human rights, particularly the rights of the Rohingya who were forced to flee Myanmar, said Chairman of the Malaysian Advisory Group on Myanmar and former foreign minister Tan Sri Dr Syed Hamid Albar.

Syed Hamid said that while he appreciates ASEAN's necessary – or bold as said by some – decision to exclude Myanmar's Senior General Min Aung Hlaing from the summit, “the summit must recognise that (the) Rohingya will remain displaced for years to come and begin coordinating contingency planning.

Why ASEAN finally took a stand on Myanmar

ASIA TIMES
BERTIL LINTNER
OCTOBER 18, 2021

Regional bloc has a bevy of good reasons to block junta representatives from attending this month's summit meeting

The Myanmar national flag (C) is seen with flags of member countries attending the 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Bangkok, November 2019. Myanmar's junta chief will be excluded from an upcoming ASEAN summit, the group said on October 16, 2021, a rare rebuke as concerns rise over the military government's commitment to defusing a bloody crisis. Photo: AFP / Romeo Gacad

Has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the first time foregone its longstanding policy of “non-interference” in the internal affairs of one of its ten member states by blocking a representative of Myanmar’s junta from attending the bloc’s upcoming summit in Brunei? And, if so, why?

EU Parliament Voices Support for Myanmar’s Opposition Government

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio
October 11, 2021

Despite the motion, Western support for the National Unity Government is likely to remain informal and unofficial.

The European Parliament has voted to support Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) and its parliamentary committee as the legitimate representatives of crisis-hit Myanmar.

In a resolution adopted late last week, the European Parliament expressed its “support for the people of Myanmar in their struggle for democracy, freedom, and human rights.” It said that it “supports the CRPH [Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw] and the NUG as the only legitimate representatives of the democratic wishes of the people of Myanmar” and called on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other foreign governments “to include and involve them in genuine and inclusive political dialogue and efforts aimed at the peaceful resolution of the crisis.”

Myanmar has been in a state of severe crisis since the coup, which immediately prompted a nationwide movement of protests and work stoppages, which have been complemented in recent months by growing armed resistance.

ASEAN may exclude Myanmar junta chief from upcoming summit

THE SCOOP

Ain Bandial

October 6, 2021 

With little progress on an agreed roadmap to restore peace, ASEAN's special envoy says Myanmar's inaction is "tantamount to backtracking" 

FILE PHOTO: Brunei's Second Minister of Foreign Affairs, YB Dato Erywan Yusof, speaks during a press conference in Bandar Seri Begawan on Aug 7, 2021 following the wrap-up of the ASEAN Regional Forum. Photo: Rasidah Hj Abu Bakar/The Scoop

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN – Southeast Asian countries are in talks to bar the head of Myanmar’s junta from the ASEAN summit later this month, due to a lack of progress on an agreed roadmap to restore peace in the strife-torn country.

The junta’s inaction on a five-point plan reached with ASEAN last April was “tantamount to backtracking”, YB Dato Erywan Yusof, the bloc’s special envoy to Myanmar, told a news conference Wednesday.

ASEAN could bar Myanmar general from leaders’ summit

Aljazeera
7 Oct 2021

Regional envoy says the military has made ‘no progress’ on the peace plan agreed in April, as Malaysia says it could open dialogue with shadow administration.

ASEAN invited Myanmar's armed forces chief to a summit in Jakarta in April - at which a so-called consensus towards peace was agreed, but the group's special envoy says 'no progress' has been made since [File: Courtesy of Rusman/Indonesian Presidential Palace/Handout via Reuters] 

 

 

Countries from Southeast Asia are discussing not inviting the head of Myanmar’s military regime to their leaders’ summit later this month, after the generals failed to make progress on an agreed road map to restore peace after their February coup plunged the country into chaos, a regional envoy has said.

ASEAN ‘disappointed’ with Myanmar military’s peace commitment

Aljazeera
4 Oct 2021

Indonesia FM says country’s military rulers have made no significant progress in implementing the group’s peace road map.

The military leader has pledged to hold fresh elections in two years and cooperate with ASEAN on finding a political solution. [Reuters]

Myanmar’s military has made no significant progress in implementing a Southeast Asian roadmap for peace following their coup or given any feedback on the work of a regional envoy in the country, Indonesia’s foreign minister has said.

China Doesn’t Want Myanmar’s NLD Dissolved: Informed Sources

The Irrawaddy

27 August 2021

Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and Myanmar’s detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (left) at the launch ceremony for events to mark the 70th anniversary of China-Myanmar diplomatic relations in Naypyitaw in January 2020. / Myanmar State Counselor’s Office

China has voiced concern over the Myanmar military regime’s plan to dissolve the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party that won the junta-annulled 2020 general election in a landslide, several informed sources told The Irrawaddy. Chinese officials have conveyed to the regime’s leaders Beijing’s message that it wants to see the NLD continue to exist as a political party, they said.

Politicians close to the NLD and several China-Myanmar watchers said the Chinese recently told Myanmar officials that China will continue to support Myanmar and maintain border trade and infrastructure projects on one condition: that the junta keeps the NLD alive.

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.