OP-ED: Democracy without rights

Dhaka Tribune 

Md Jahid Hashan
Published : October 26th, 2020 

A call for postponing the elections was confidently dismissed by the ruling NLD REUTERS

The 2020 Myanmar general election is already shaping up to be fundamentally flawed.

The 2020 Myanmar general election is scheduled to be held on November 8. This election is a significant landmark, as Myanmar’s second general election is based on a multi-party democracy. It is also a crucial litmus test of the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) ability to rule properly.

Myanmar Genocide Lawsuit Is Filed at United Nations Court

The New York Times 

By Marlise Simons

Updated Jan. 23, 2020

Continue reading the mai

Gambia, on behalf of Rohingya Muslims, opens an international dispute with Myanmar in an effort to have the country’s leadership tried for genocide.

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar after crossing into Bangladesh in September 2017.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

PARIS — An arsenal of international laws has failed to confront the impunity of Myanmar’s government and security forces for their deadly purge of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee a campaign of rape, arson and killing.

But on Monday, Gambia filed a lawsuit accusing Myanmar of genocide, summoning the case before the United Nations’ highest court in an effort to open a legal path against the country’s authorities.

We Cannot Condone the Myanmar Government’s Lies with Silence

JUST SECURITY
Kerry Kennedy and Angelita Baeyens
October 21, 2020

Myanmar soldiers’ confession shows the moment is now to give the Rohingya justice and accountability. 

Of course, the details never added up. But now, with recent confessions from two Myanmar Army soldiers, the truth hangs in the open air, exposing the blatant lies that government officials have told about their genocide against the Rohingya.

That truth was already clear to the dozen of us—human rights lawyers, activists, documentarians, former members of Congress and political aides—who took part in a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights expert delegation trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh in 2018. We arrived in the country hoping to gain a detailed and updated understanding of the Rohingya crisis.

China-linked Myanmar businessman debarred from November Parliamentary polls

The Economic Times 

Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury

Oct 19,2020 

Since entering Myanmar from China in 2013, Michael Kyaw Myint has purchased several buildings and land plots in Yangon, Naypyitaw and Pyin Oo Lwin

NEW DELHI: Michael Kyaw Myint, till recently chairman of the United Democratic Party (UDP), which was set to field more than 1,130 candidates in Myanmar’s November’s general election—almost as many as the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), is well connected to Chinese transnational organized crime syndicates signifying Beijing’s major attempts to influence politics in the SE Asian country.

Myanmar Calls Off Polling in Rakhine, Shan Conflict Zones

THE I DIPLOMAT

Sebastian Strangio
October 19, 2020 

 The cancellations were expected, but some say the decisions were selective and benefit the ruling National League for Democracy.

On October 16, Myanmar’s Union Election Commission (UEC) announced the cancellation of the upcoming national elections in conflict-ridden regions of the country, including swathes of territory in Shan and Rakhine states.

Rohingya’s suffering continues in Bangladesh

ASIA TIMES  

Opinion

by Sabria Chowdhury Balland 

October 19, 2020 

While Bangladesh is rightly commended for granting Rohingya refuge, more should be done to respect their rights 

Rohingya at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Photo: AFP

“Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.” – Pope Francis

The Rohingya have been subjected to persecution, discrimination and torture for decades in Myanmar. In 2017, almost a million of them had to leave their homeland because of fierce human-rights abuses. Consequently, Bangladesh welcomed them. However, three years down the line, the Rohingya are still suffering, still not able to speak up for their rights and still marginalized.

Why Bangladesh Must Let the Rohingya Speak for Themselves

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Saad Hammadi
October 16, 2020

 

Any durable solution for the Rohingya will not come through more restrictions on their lives.

People shop for vegetables at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Credit: AP Photo/Shafiqur Rahman

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh drew the attention and concern of the world when they fled deadly violence in Myanmar in 2017. Three years later, they are among the most disempowered people in the world, with the least control over their lives. Recent events have accentuated this, and it is time for change.

Responding to Genocide half a world away

UVIC

University od Victoria
Law
Jonathan Woods
October 15, 2020

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, March 2018. UN Women set up a centre in the Balukhali refugee camp to provide a safe space for Rohingya women and adolescent girls. Photo credit: UN Women/Allison Joyce

Virtual roundtable results in calls to action in seeking justice for the Rohingya

“Canada must take immediate, robust action on justice for the Rohingya people” and must fully address gender-based sexual violence and other gender-based atrocities that have been “central in the genocide against the Rohingya.”

Suu Kyi’s tainted policies alienate foreign investors

ASIA TIMES 

by Rory Wallace
October 15, 2020

YANGON – Aung San Suu Kyi’s government is putting off foreign companies that emphasize human rights in their investment decisions, as Britain’s CDC Group, Norway’s Telenor and international mining groups struggle to navigate her administration’s controversial policies and their associated reputation risks.

That’s holding back the underdeveloped nation’s economic and business potential, significantly at a time the de facto national leader is running for national re-election amid a moribund economy. 

For Young Rohingya Brides, Marriage Means a Perilous, Deadly Crossing

The New York Times 

By Hannah Beech
Oct. 17, 2020

Girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh, promised to men they have never met, are undertaking the dangerous journey to Malaysia to join them.

After months at sea, hundreds of ethnic Rohingya refugees, most of them women and girls, landed in the Indonesian province of Aceh in September.Credit...Zik Maulana/Associated Press

BANGKOK — Haresa counted the days by the moon, waxing and waning over the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Her days on the trawler, crammed into a space so tight that she could not even stretch her legs, bled into weeks, the weeks into months.

“People struggled like they were fish flopping around,” Ms. Haresa, 18, said of the other refugees on the boat. “Then they stopped moving.”

Don’t be fooled. Myanmar’s ‘democratic election’ is a sham.

The Washington Post 

Opinion by Tun Khin 

Oct. 14, 2020

Tun Khin is president of the Burma Rohingya Organization UK.

 

What a difference five years can make. In 2015, many of my fellow Rohingya people cheered as the party of the famed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory in Myanmar’s first democratic elections of the 21st century, bringing an end to decades of outright military rule. Euphoria reigned. We hoped not only for a new beginning for the country, but also for an end to the oppression against us.

Today, as Myanmar gears up for another general election on Nov. 8, the situation is starkly different. Three years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi, now the country’s de facto head of state, stood by as military leaders launched a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that killed thousands of Rohingya and drove more than 700,000 across the border into Bangladesh, where they now languish in immense refugee camps. The roughly 500,000 who remain in the country have been effectively disenfranchised. They are denied access to Myanmar’s democracy simply because of who they are.

Can a Lawsuit Stop a Genocide?

COMMONWEAL

By Paul C. Saunders

October 13, 2020

 

The case against Myanmar 

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Alamy/Mahady Hasan Riad)

On January 23, 2020, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, informally known as the World Court, rendered a historic judgment. The decree ordered the government of Myanmar to comply with several directives: to take measures to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people; to ensure that its military refrain from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention; and to preserve evidence and submit a report to the court within four months, detailing compliance with the court’s order. The unanimous decision by the fifteen-judge court represented only the third time that the Genocide Convention has been invoked before the World Court in a contentious case—and the first case ever to consider the claims, under the convention, of non-contiguous, non-warring countries.

Bangladesh-Myanmar: Rohingya Conundrum – Analysis

eurasiareview

By S. Binodkumar Singh*
October 13, 2020

Rohingya's in Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Photo taken by John Owens/VOA, Wikipedia Commons.

 

On October 6, 2020, four people were killed in clashes between two groups of Rohingyas over establishing supremacy at the Lombasia Camp in the Kutupalang area of Cox’s Bazar District. 20 persons were injured in the violent clashes.

OPINION - Myanmar's colonial policies and crimes trigger renewed liberation struggles

AA

Maung Zarni 

LONDON 

09.10.2020 

Lack of action from UN and world community encourages Myanmar to commit atrocities against ethnic communities

Maung Zarni, Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition and a fellow at the Genocide Documentation Center in Cambodia

The writer is a Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition and a fellow at the Genocide Documentation Center in Cambodia.

Almost three decades ago the UN had established the mandate of Special Rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation in Myanmar, under the Commission on Human Rights Resolution number 58 of 1992.

But the UN-mandated human rights missions have not deterred Myanmar’s successive governments from perpetrating human rights crimes against dissidents, government critics, and national minorities.

Rohingya Trapped by 'Apartheid' Regime in Myanmar, Says Human Rights Watch

VICE

by Anthony Esguerra

08 October 2020

 

More than 130,000 Rohingya Muslims have been in internment camps for eight years in Rakhine State. 

Rohingya people who were arrested at sea in December walk on a beach after being transported by Myanmar authorities to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, 2020. 173 Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar were arrested at sea in December by Myanmar's navy and were escorted back to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, authorities said. PHOTO: STR / AFP

A major human rights group said Myanmar is carrying out a policy of apartheid against Rohingya Muslims languishing for eight years in internal displacement camps, accusing civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi of complicity in their persecution weeks before national elections.

The truth about Burma’s ‘imprisoned princess’

The SPECTATOR
Francis Pike
10 October 2020

It’s as ignorant to demonise Aung San Suu Kyi as it was to idolise her

As Perseus was flying along the coast on his winged horse Pegasus, he spotted Andromeda tied to a rock as a sacrifice to Poseidon’s sea monster Cetus. It was love at first sight. Perseus slew Cetus and married Andromeda. Thus began the damsel-in-distress archetype that has been a mainstay of western culture ever since. Riffs on the archetype have been used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Wagner. Perhaps it was these examples that inspired the global liberal establishment (the BBC, Hollywood and the Nobel Peace Prize committee among others) to create, in the 1990s, the mythical version of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s ‘imprisoned princess’, the saintly spiritual heir to Mahatma Gandhi, as Time magazine described her.

အမွန္တရားရွာမွာလား လုပ္ဇာတ္ေတြကို မီးထိုးေပးမွာလား

ဧရာဝတီ
ေအာင္ေဇာ္
5 October 2020

၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ရန္ကုန္တြင္ ရခိုင္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားက ကုလသမဂၢႏွင့္ INGOs မ်ား၏ ရခိုင္အေရးအေပၚ ကိုင္တြယ္သေဘာထားပုံမ်ားအား ဆန္႔က်င္ကန္႔ကြက္ ဆႏၵျပၾကစဥ္ / ဧရာဝတီ

ကုလသမဂၢ၏ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ အစီရင္ခံစာတင္သြင္းသူသစ္ ခန္႔အပ္လိုက္သူသည္ အေ မရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု မိန္းျပည္နယ္ ပထမ လြတ္ေတာ္မဲဆႏၵနယ္မွ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စား လွယ္ ေဟာင္း ေသာမတ္ အင္ဒ႐ူးျဖစ္သည္။

သူသည္ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားနိုင္ငံမွ ယန္ဟိလီကို ဆက္ခံျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ယန္ဟိလီသည္ အေစာပိုင္းတြင္ ျမန္ မာနိုင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ခြင့္ရေသာ္လည္း လုပ္ငန္းေဆာင္ရြက္ရာတြင္ ဘက္မလိုက္မႈ သို႔မဟုတ္ ဓမၼဓိ ႒ာန္ က်မႈ မျပသနိုင္ေသာေၾကာင့္ နိုင္ငံတြင္းသို႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ေၾကာင္း အစိုးရက ၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သူမ ကို အေၾကာင္းၾကားခဲ့သည္။

Saudis Giving Bangladesh A Cause For Worry – Analysis

eurasiareview
By Syed Badrul Ahsan
October 3, 2020

In these past many months since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, as many as 140,000 Bangladeshi expatriate workers, mostly from the Middle East, have returned home. And now that conditions have eased a little, they are ready to return to their workplaces, especially in Saudi Arabia. But that does not appear to be easy, given that most of these workers have yet to come by air tickets to fly back to Riyadh. Compounding matters for them has been the inability of the Saudia airlines office in Dhaka as well as Biman Bangladesh Airlines to facilitate their departure for their places of work.

Activists Denounce Myanmar Election App For ‘Inflaming’ Ethnic Tensions

THE I DIPLOMAT
By Sebastian Strangio
October 01, 2020

By accepting Myanmar’s rigid official racial and religious categorizations, the EU-funded app runs the risk of entrenching sectarian divides.

A donor-funded election app designed to provide information to Myanmar voters has come under fire for its potential to inflame racism and religious nationalism ahead of elections on November 8.

The mVoter 2020 app, which was launched on September 29, was developed by the Stockholm-based organization International Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), under the EU-funded STEP Democracy program. The app was built in partnership with The Asia Foundation and Myanmar’s Union Election Commission (UEC).

Rohingya refugees face continuous violence

NEW FRAME 
Friday, 2 October 2020

Two Myanmar soldiers have confessed to committing atrocities against Rohingya Muslims, giving more evidence of the genocide against the minority group.

Two personnel in Myanmar’s military have confessed to “exterminating” Rohingya Muslims. Human rights defenders believe that this public acknowledgement could substantiate the ongoing international genocide investigation at the International Court of Justice against Myanmar’s military establishment.

Myo Win Tun, 33, and Zaw Naoing Tun, 30, who belong to separate light infantry battalions, claimed they were given orders to “shoot and rape villagers” while raiding “kalar” villages – “kalar” is a derogatory term for Muslim Rohingyas.