How Transnational Corporations are rendering Myanmar’s Sanctions Ineffective

Asia Portal

4. Mar 2022
By Zac Goldfinch, MA Graduate in Global Development from University of Leeds

1 February 2022 marked a full calendar year since Min Aung Hlaing’s Tatmadaw (the Myanmar military) stormed the Presidential Palace, citing dubious claims of election fraud and reinstated stratocracy in Myanmar. Back on 18February 2021, the UK, in tandem with the US, EU, New Zealand, and Canada, issued a set of sanctions intended to limit the capacity and strength of the junta following an onslaught of violent suppression of protests fighting for the reinstatement of National League for Democracy government. The sanctions included freezing assets of key military officials and barring key Tatmadaw businesses from trading. In an interview with me, British Minister Mark Garnier, PM Johnson’s trade envoy to Brunei, Thailand, and Myanmar, explained the sanctions were decreed following the coup to restore the process of democratisation through diplomacy and minimise the economic impact upon citizens. To make the sanctions more effective, leading individuals were targeted in order to ensure they did not flee the country or have access to offshore accounts.

Putin has a history of atrocities. Just how far will Russian forces go in Ukraine?

THE GUARDIAN
Kenneth Roth
Thu 3 Mar 2022
Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch


We have already seen indiscriminate use of cluster munitions, and the firing of ballistic missiles and rocket artillery

 

What can be done to stop a worsening spiral of indiscriminate warfare that would endanger countless Ukrainian civilians?’ People shelter from Russian attacks in a Kyiv underground station on Wednesday. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA


As Russian forces invading Ukraine confront stronger and more effective resistance than the Kremlin probably anticipated, the big question is: what comes next. The Russian military has a history of meeting such resistance with serious violations of the laws of war, including deliberately targeting civilians and subjecting them to indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.

ပူတင်ဟာ ရက်စက်ကြမ်းကြုတ်တဲ့ သမိုင်းကြောင်းရှိတယ်။ ယူကရိန်းမှာ ရုရှားတပ်တွေ ဘယ်လောက်အထိ ရောက် သွားမလဲ။

THE GURDIAN
Kenneth Roth
Thu 3 Mar 2022

Kenneth Roth သည် Human Rights Watch ၏ အမှုဆောင်ဒါရိုက်တာဖြစ်သည်။

အစုလိုက်အပြုံလိုက် ခဲယမ်းများကို ခွဲခြားမှုမရှိစွာ အသုံးပြုခြင်းနှင့် ပဲ့ထိန်းဒုံးကျည်များနှင့် ရော့ကက်အမြောက်များဖြင့် ပစ်ခတ်ခြင်းတို့ကို ကျွန်ုပ်တို့ တွေ့မြင်ပြီးဖြစ်သည်။  

မရေမတွက်နိုင်သော ယူကရိန်းအရပ်သားများကို အန္တရာယ်ဖြစ်စေမည့် ခွဲခြားမှုမရှိသော စစ်ပွဲများ၏ ပိုဆိုး လာ ခြင်းကို ရပ်တန့်ရန် အဘယ်အရာလုပ်ဆောင်နိုင်မည်နည်း။' ကိယက်ဗ် မြေအောက် ဘူတာရုံတစ်ခုတွင် ရုရှားတို့ ၏ တိုက်ခိုက်မှုများကြောင့် လူများ ခိုလှုံနေကြကြောင်း သိရသည်။ ဓာတ်ပုံ- Roman Pilipey/EPA

 

မျှော်လင့်ထားတာထက် ပိုအားကောင်းပြီး ထိရောက်တဲ့ ခုခံမှုကို ထိပ်တိုက်ရင်ဆိုင်ဖို့၊ ကြီးမားတဲ့ မေးခွန်းကတော့ နောက်ဘာဖြစ်လာမလဲ ။ ရုရှားစစ်တပ်သည် အရပ်သားများကို တမင်တကာ ပစ်မှတ်ထားပြီး အချိုးမညီဘဲ အချိုး အ စားမမျှသော တိုက်ခိုက်မှုများ အပါအဝင် စစ်ဥပဒေများကို ပြင်းထန်စွာ ချိုးဖောက်မှုများဖြင့် ခုခံတိုက်ခိုက်သည့် သမိုင်းကြောင်းရှိသည်။

2015 ခုနှစ်မှ 2016 ခုနှစ်အတွင်း ရုရှားနှင့် ဆီးရီးယားတို့၏ ဗုံးကြဲတိုက်ခိုက်မှုများ သည် နိုင်ငံ၏လူဦးရေအများ ဆုံးမြို့ဖြစ်သည့် Aleppo အရှေ့ပိုင်းရှိ အတိုက်အခံများ ထိန်းချုပ်ထားသော အစိတ်အပိုင်းများကို အကြီးအကျယ် ပျက်စီးစေခဲ့သည်။ အောက်တွင် နေထိုင်သူများ ပိတ်ဆို့ဒဏ်ခတ်မှု အပြင် အစုလိုက်အပြုံလိုက် စည်ဗုံးများ ၊ လောင်မီးလက်နက်များနှင့် ပြင်းထန်သော ပေါက်ကွဲစေတတ်သော ဗုံးများဖြင့် အတိုက်အခံအင်အားစုများက နောက် ဆုံးတွင် လက်နက်ချအညံ့ခံခဲ့သည်။

 

Addressing healthcare needs of Rohingya in Bangladesh

Financial Express
Hasnat M Alamgir
Published: March 02, 2022 

Refugee populations represent one of the most marginalised groups in whichever host country they come to settle and this is clearly the case with Rohingya population, a majority of whom are now living in Bangladesh. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defined a refugee as someone who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".At the end of 2020, there were more than 82 million forcibly displaced people worldwide as a consequence of violence, oppression, war/conflict, human rights abuses and serious public order-disturbing events.

 

The Rise of Muslim Millenarianism in Malaysia

THE I DIPLOMAT

Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani

March 02, 2022

Eschatological or “end-times” narratives have become increasingly popular among Malaysian Muslims.

Economic uncertainty and a fractured political landscape may be triggering a new wave of Islamic resurgence in Muslim-majority Malaysia. In the 1970s and 1980s, various strains of Islamist discourse penetrated civil society and the already identity-based political scene. During that period, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) declared the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) kafir, while the latter co-opted the Islamist youth activist Anwar Ibrahim into its ranks and expanded the country’s religious bureaucracy.

Serbia Sold Arms to Myanmar Junta After Coup

The Irrawaddy

25 February 2022

NORA A 152mm howitzers manufactured by Jugoimport-SDPR, which were viewed by coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during his visit to Serbia in 2015

Serbia has continued to supply arms to the Myanmar military since the coup, despite the fact that those weapons are being used to attack and kill civilians, including children.

Tom Andrews, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, identified Serbia, along with China and Russia, as UN member states that are continuing to sell arms to the junta in a report issued on Tuesday.

On the same day, the independent rights group Myanmar Witness also issued its own report revealing that air-launched rockets were exported by Serbia to Myanmar after the February 1, 2021 coup.

ICJ’s fresh hearings into Rohingya case bring fresh hope

The Daily Star
Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The world must come together for the Rohingya cause

File photo of a court proceeding in a case filed by the Gambia against Myanmar over allegations of genocide against the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Netherlands, on January 23, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Eva Plevier

We welcome the International Court of Justice's initiative to start a fresh round of hearings into the Rohingya genocide case filed by the Gambia over two years ago. The hearings will be held in two rounds starting from today. The Gambia, on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), filed the case in November 2019 with an aim to bring Myanmar to account for its genocidal actions against the Rohingya. The court, after holding a preliminary hearing, found the claims to be substantial and ordered Myanmar to take provisional measures to prevent further acts of genocide in the Rakhine State. Two years have passed since then, but Myanmar has not taken any such measures yet. It has not taken any initiative to grant citizenship or ensure other basic rights of the Rohingya.

ICJ begins oral arguments in Myanmar genocide case

JURIST
Pooja Mehta | Gujarat National Law U., IN
February 22, 2022 09:52:30 am

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Monday began hearing oral arguments in a case to determine whether Myanmar has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

The Gambia filed an application instituting proceedings against Myanmar concerning alleged violations of the Genocide Convention on November 11, 2019. The Gambia also filed an application for the indication of provisional measures. In the proceedings that ensued, the court granted certain provisional measures. Myanmar then made preliminary objections to the court’s jurisdiction and the admissibility of the Application.

Rohingyas at ICJ

The Statesman
Statesman News Service | Kolkata | February 23, 2022 1:32 am

While the court is yet to respond to the nature of Myanmar’s representation at the hearings, “there is little doubt that if it is the junta that is in court, this is not something that should be taken to confer legitimacy on the junta this is not something that should be taken to confer legitimacy on the junta,” is the reaction of the Global Justice Centre.

representational image /Myanmar (iStock photo) 

 

It is early days and therefore presumptuous to aver that there may be hope yet for the Rohingyas in what has come to be known as the genocide case. Gambia, a tiny country in Africa, has come to the rescue of the persecuted segment from Myanmar. It has acted on behalf of the organisation of Muslim nations that have accused Myanmar of genocide in course of its crackdown on Rohingyas.

Is ICJ genocide case legitimising junta?

The Bangkok Post

Published : 23 Feb 2022 at 04:00

Following the military-led "clearance operation" that forced 750,000 Rohingya to flee neighbouring Bangladesh, the West African nation of Gambia brought a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in November 2019 accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Secondary photo File photo dated Dec 11, 2019 shows then Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi defends Myanmar government on the alleged genocide against the minority Muslim Rohingya population, at ICJ, The Hague, the Netherlands. The Myanmar junta recently appointed replacement as Suu Kyi, has been jailed since Feb 2021's coup.

In response to the court's unanimously indicated and legally binding provisional measures to protect the Rohingya from further atrocities, Myanmar's then-civilian government filed a preliminary objection to the jurisdiction of the court and the admissibility of the application in January 2021.

 

Myanmar junta’s role in Rohingya case at ICJ is troubling

ASIA TIME

Parvej Siddique Bhuiyan
February 17, 2022

By allowing the coup regime to present a defense at upcoming genocide hearings, the court risks legitimizing the junta  

The Palace of Peace in The Hague, the official residency of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Photo: AFP

 

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently announced that it will hold a fresh round of hearings from February 21-28 into the Rohingya genocide case.

After the military-led “clearance operation” that forced 750,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, the West African nation The Gambia in November 2019 brought a case to the ICJ accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Why Sri Lanka And Cambodia Shouldn’t Support Myanmar Junta’s Defense In Rohingya Genocide Case At ICJ? – OpEd

eurasiareview

Parvej Siddique Bhuiyan*
February 17, 2022

Rohingya refugees. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

Following the military-led “clearance operation” that forced 750,000 Rohingya to flee neighboring Bangladesh, Gambia, a West African nation, in November 2019, brought a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In response to the court’s unanimously indicated legally binding provisional measures to protect the Rohingya from further atrocities, on January 2021, the then NLD government filed a preliminary objections to the jurisdiction of the Court and the admissibility of the Application. In this context, the ICJ recently announced that it will hold a fresh round of hearings from Feb. 21–28 in the Great Hall of Justice in which the regime’s leaders will be potential defendants, sparking speculation that the Court is implicitly taking a position in the ongoing civil war and legitimizing the unrecognized military regime. It is worth noting that the Junta-formed State Administrative Council (SAC) and the National Unity Government (NUG) have been struggling for recognition from the international community since the coup d’état in February 2021.

ဂမ်ဘီယာက မြန်မာအပေါ်တရားစွဲထားသည့်အမှုကိစ္စ ICJ တရားရုံးက NUG အစိုးရထံ အကြောင်းမပြန်သေး

DVB
ဒီမိုကရက်တစ်မြန်မာ့အသံ
Published By DVB | 17 February, 2022

အပြည်ပြည်ဆိုင်ရာတရားရုံး (ICJ) မှာ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရင်ဆိုင်နေရတဲ့အမှုနဲ့ ပတ်သက်ပြီး မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ အစိုးရ ကိုယ် စားပြုအနေနဲ့ ကုလသမဂ္ဂ အမြဲတမ်းကိုယ်စားလှယ် သံအမတ်ကြီး ဦးကျော်မိုးထွန်း ဦးဆောင်ကာ ရင်ဆိုင်ဖြေ ရှင်းဖို့ တရားရုံးကို စာပေးပို့ထားပေမယ့် ဒီကနေ့အချိန် ထိ အကြောင်းပြန်စာမရသေးဘူးလို့ NUG နိုင်ငံခြားရေး ဝန်ကြီး ဒေါ်ဇင်မာအောင်က ဒီဗွီဘီကို ပြောပါတယ်။

ရိုဟင်ဂျာတွေကို လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု စွပ်စွဲချက်နဲ့ ဂမ်ဘီယာနိုင်ငံက မြန်မာနိုင်ငံကို နယ် သာလန်နိုင်ငံ သည် ဟိတ်မြို့က ICJ တရားရုံးမှာ တရားစွဲဆိုထားတဲ့အမှုနဲ့ပတ်သတ်ပြီး ဖေဖေါ်ဝါရီ ၂၁ ရက်မှ ၂၈ ရက် အထိ ဒုတိ ယအကြိမ်ကြားနာစစ်ဆေးဖို့ ရုံးချိန်းရှိနေတာပါ။

Rohingya Militancy: Myth or Reality?

THE I DIPLOMAT

 Shafi Md Mostofa
February 15, 2022


Rohingya refugees have so far proven surprisingly resistant to the siren call of global jihadi ideology.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya militant group, came to global attention once again last year after unknown gunmen killed Mohibullah, a prominent Rohingya leader, in one of the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Mohibullah’s brother Habibullah claimed that ARSA might have been responsible, angered by his advocacy of a peaceful non-violent approach to solving the Rohingya crisis, even though ARSA denied any involvement with the killing.

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio

February 03, 2022

Assuming responsibility for the ICJ case is a means for the National Unity Government to assert its position as Myanmar’s legitimate government.

Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government (NUG) says that it has accepted the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hear claims that the country committed genocide against the Rohingya minority group, after formally withdrawing “all preliminary objections” in the case.

Sanctions Won't Hurt Myanmar's Brutal Leaders, Activists Say. Here's What Could

TIME
CHAD DE GUZMAN
FEBRUARY 1, 2022 

Protesters hold banners and shout slogans while marching past Myanmar military soldiers who arrived to guard the Central Bank overnight on Feb. 15, 2021 in Yangon, Myanmar. The U.S. Embassy in Myanmar told Americans in Myanmar to "shelter in place" in an announcement after military movements and reports of possible interruptions to telecoms. Armored vehicles were seen on the streets of Myanmar's capital, but protesters turned out in force despite the military presence. Hkun Lat—Getty Images

The U.S. imposed new sanctions on senior leaders of Myanmar’s military junta on Monday—the eve of the one-year anniversary of their overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government and imprisonment of its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

The U.S., joined by the U.K., and Canada, announced sanctions on officials who helped prosecute Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the National League for Democracy. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was arrested in the Feb. 1, 2021 coup. Myanmar courts have sentenced her to a total of six years in prison as of Jan. 10—but she faces additional charges.

Rebel yell: Arakan Army leader speaks to Asia Times

ASIA TIMES
By BERTIL LINTNER

JANUARY 18, 2022

Rebel commander says military junta could explode ‘like a supernova’ and claims AA’s parallel administration is restoring stability to RakhineTwan Mrat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army, attends a meeting of leaders of Myanmar's ethnic armed groups at the United Wa State Army headquarters in Myanmar's northern Shan state, May 6, 2015. Photo: Twitter

CHIANG MAI – At just 43, Major General Twan Mrat Naing may be the youngest and most successful rebel commanders in Myanmar. The force he leads, the Arakan Army (AA), has grown from a handful of recruits when it was first established in April 2009 into one of the war-torn nation’s most powerful and potent ethnic armies.

AA first waged war against the Myanmar military in 2012 in northern Kachin state arm-in-arm with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). It later fought alongside the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in northeastern Shan state before launching an insurgency in its home state of Rakhine, also known as Arakan, where thousands have flocked to join its ranks.

ဒေါ်အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည်၏ သူရဲကောင်း ပုံရိပ် အဆုံးသတ် သွားသော နေ့ရက်များ

ဧရာဝတီ
By David Scott Mathieson
23 November 2018

၂၀၀၇ စက်တင်ဘာလ ဖိလစ်ပိုင်နိုင်ငံ မနီလာမြို့တော်ရှိ မြန်မာသံရုံးရှေ့ ဆန္ဒပြပွဲတွင် ဆန္ဒပြသူတဦးက ဒေါ်အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည်ပုံကို ကိုင်ဆောင်ထားစဉ် / Reuters

 မြန်မာခေါင်းဆောင် ဒေါ်အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည်လောက် လူ့အခွင့်အရေး ဂုဏ်ပြုဆုနှင့် ချီးကျူးမှုများခံရသည့် အာ ရှ ခေါင်းဆောင် မရှိသလောက်ပင်။ အလားတူ လူ့အခွင့်အရေးနှင့် ဒီမိုကရေစီ သူရဲကောင်း ပုံရိပ်မှ လူသားမျိုး နွယ်အပေါ် ကျူးလွန်သော ရာဇဝတ်မှုများအလယ်တွင် မာရေကျောရေရှိပြီး ထီမထင်သော ခေါင်း ဆောင်အဖြစ် ရုတ်တရက် အရာကျသွားသူလည်း မရှိပေ။

Worldly, Charming, and Quietly Equipping a Brutal Military

The New York Times

By Hannah Beech
Dec. 24, 2021

A Burmese-Irish family said all the right things, even as it helped Myanmar’s rulers avoid sanctions scrutiny in buying airplanes, defense radar and more.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military commander in chief, during a parade for the 76th Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw, the capital, in March.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock

Three years ago, the Kyaw Thaung family partied at the Pegu Club. The venerable Burmese-Irish clan had restored the teak-lined establishment to its 19th-century glory, evoking the days when gin-sipping colonialists ruled. The Pegu Club project befitted the family’s East-meets-West positioning and the optimism of a country newly engaging with the world.

Amid periodic power cuts in the rest of Yangon, the Kyaw Thaungs danced and sipped champagne among the new elite, including young entrepreneurs returned from exile, bejeweled daughters of generals, and even former political prisoners suddenly responsible for attracting foreign investment to the latest frontier market.

Is There Any Solution to Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis?

THE I DEPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio

December 21, 2021

The February coup has further complicated the potential return of more than 1 million Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.

In the 10 months since the Myanmar military’s seizure of power tipped the nation into a toxic, nationwide political emergency, another serious crisis – that facing the Rohingya refugees of Bangladesh – has largely been consigned to the margins of international attention.

More than 1 million mostly Muslim Rohingya civilians have been entrapped, limbo-like, in the rambling refugee camps that surround the town of Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh, since fleeing in scorched-earth military offensives in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2016 and 2017. While a solution was remote even before the coup, the new crisis has further compounded their troubles, complicating any resolution to the refugee emergency, while also distracting international attention away from what might be done to resolve it.