Can Bangladesh-Myanmar military ties stabilise the region?

The Daily Star
Parvej Siddique Bhuiyan
Sun Jun 19, 2022

A power shift in Myanmar and the subsequent polarisation among major powers triggered a new geopolitical flashpoint in Bangladesh's strategic backyard, which the latter cannot afford to ignore. It seems that the US and other western countries are taking a heavy-handed approach while other big powers, such as Russia, China, India, and Japan, have started explicitly (or covertly) normalising their relations with the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military).

Myanmar always gets priority in Bangladesh's economic and security strategy. Although democratic Bangladesh has a moral dilemma in supporting the military government, it has yet to formally condemn the military coup or demand Aung San Su Kyi's release. It underscores Dhaka's careful support for the junta's "one-Myanmar government policy." So, in foreign policy circles, the immediate discussion is whether Dhaka's stance is a "well-thought-out approach or simply a premature polarisation."

မြန်မာစစ်အစိုးရသည် ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်တွင် 'လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု' လုပ်ဆောင်နေ- အစီရင်ခံစာ

THE DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
ဇွန် ၀၉၊ ၂၀၂၂ 

( ဘာသာပြန် )

 ထောက်ခံအားပေးရေးအဖွဲ့ Fortify Rights ၏အဆိုအရ၊ ပြည်နယ်၏ အထောက်အထားစာရွက်စာတမ်းများကို ဆိုး ရွားစွာ အသုံးပြုခြင်းသည် လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု၏ အ တိတ် အပိုင်းများကို ထင်ဟပ်စေသည်။

ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်ရှိ ရိုဟင်ဂျာအသိုင်းအဝိုင်းအပေါ် လူမျိုးတုံး သတ်ဖြတ်မှု လွယ်ကူချောမွေ့စေရန်အတွက် မြန်မာစစ် အစိုးရက အထောက်အထား စာရွက်စာ တမ်းများ ကဲ့သို့ သော စီမံခန့်ခွဲရေးအစီအမံများကို အသုံးပြုနေသည်ဟု လူ့အခွင့်အရေးအဖွဲ့တစ်ဖွဲ့က ယမန်နေ့တွင် ပြောကြားခဲ့ သည်။

ရိုဟင်ဂျာများ အစီရင်ခံစာသစ်တစ်ခုတွင် အပေါ် မြန်မာ အစိုးရ၏ ပြုမူဆက်ဆံမှုသည် ၁၉၉၄ ခုနှစ် ရဝမ်ဒါ လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှုဟု ထင်ဟပ်စေသည်ဟု ထောက်ခံ အားပေးရေးအဖွဲ့ Fortify Rights က ဆိုသည်။ ရိုဟင်ဂျာ အသိုင်းအဝိုင်းအား  လက်နက်ကိုင် တိုက်ခိုက်မှုသည် ကြီးမားစွာ ပြီးဆုံးသွားသော်လည်း “လူမျိုး တုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု” ကြာမြင့်နေပြီဖြစ်ပြီး ယနေ့တွင် ဆက်လက်လုပ် ဆောင်နေပါသည်” ဟု ထုတ်ပြန်ချက် နှင့်အတူ ပူးတွဲဖော်ပြချက် တစ် ခုအရ သိရသည်။

Will Rohingya repatriation ever happen?

The Daily Star
Bulbul Siddiqi
Tue Mar 29, 2022

After the inhuman ordeal that the displaced Rohingyas have suffered, they deserve a safe, dignified return to their homes in Myanmar, with their citizenship rights fully restored. File Photo: Reuters

"I can see my homeland when I gaze upon the distant hills from the top of a hill where I live in the refugee camp. I want to return to my home. Home is where I can breathe, and I can feel the smell of my country. You cannot call this a life; it's just surviving."


This is what a middle-aged Rohingya man, living at a makeshift camp in Cox's Bazar, who crossed over to Bangladesh during the 2017 exodus of Rohingyas fleeing military persecution in Rakhine, Myanmar, said when I asked him how he was. It is easy enough to see the desperation of these displaced people to return to their homeland, as well as the frustration because they are not able to. Every time I visit the Rohingya refugee camp for my research, I come across people who have not yet given up hope of returning to their home in the Rakhine state. I even met a man who, having lived in a registered camp for 35 years, has not yet lost his hope to return to his homeland. He spent most of the golden time of his life struggling to survive in Bangladesh. He would be waiting till his death to return to Rakhine.

Myanmar, Bangladesh need to boost ties

theSun

Opinion
Jubeda Chowdhury
04- 18- 2022

“ If Bangladesh and Myanmar improve their ties with each other, their dependence on China and India could be reduced and trade with other countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia could increase.”

Boats are seen carrying passengers to cross the Buriganga river in Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 16, 2021. REUTERSpix

MYANMAR and Bangladesh should bolster their ties with neighbourly spirit for various reasons.

Currently, the strained Myanmar- Bangladesh relations need to be ironed out.

Jan 13 marked 50 years of bilateral ties between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Myanmar recognised Bangladesh as a sovereign state on Jan 13, 1972, but there weren’t any seminars, discussions, statements and such between the two to commemorate the special day.

U.S. issues sanctions on alleged arms dealers for Myanmar junta

REUTERS
Simon Lewis, Chris Gallagher
March 25, 2022

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) - The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on alleged arms dealers and companies it said were involved in procuring weapons for Myanmar's junta, coordinating with similar measures from Canada and Britain.

The U.S. measures targeted three alleged arms dealers and two companies linked to them, as well as a conglomerate operating in the defense sector owned by alleged arms dealer Tay Za, who was already under U.S. sanctions, the U.S. Treasury said.

The US has declared a Rohingya genocide. Does it matter?

RFA
Radio Free Asia
Commentary by Zachary Abuza
2022.03.23

The determination has no immediate legal impact, but it has important implications, Zachary Abuza says.

Unidentified men carry knives and slingshots as they walk past a burning house in Gawdu Tharya village near Maungdaw in Rakhine state in northern Myanmar, Sept. 7, 2017.AFP

On 21 March 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a formal determination that Myanmar’s military committed genocide against the Rohingya population in 2017. He described the attacks as “widespread and systematic”, “with a clear and premeditated intention to destroy the Rohingya population.” This went beyond the U.S. government’s previous findings that the military had committed ethnic cleansing in the process of driving over 740,000 Rohingya across the border into neighboring Bangladesh.

 

Wa an early winner of Myanmar’s post-coup war

ASIA TIMES

by Anthony Davis
February 22, 2022

UWSA consolidating a new Wa state that will bring Chinese influence near Thailand and set a self-rule model for other ethnic rebels  

UWSA special force snipers participate in a military parade in the Wa State's Panghsang, April 17, 2019. Photo: AFP / Ye Aung Thu

BANGKOK – The anniversary of the Myanmar military’s February 2021 coup has briefly refocused the fickle attentions of the international media with a flurry of “one year on” reporting on popular resistance and its prospects for success or failure.

Overshadowed by this central drama, meanwhile, another major power shift has been unfolding in the remote hills of northeastern Shan state with repercussions that may prove to be no less profound.

Rohingya refugees welcome US decision to call Myanmar atrocities a genocide

THE GUARDIAN
Alex Hern and agencies
@alexhern
Tue 22 Mar 2022

Refugees ‘very happy’ with declaration, while experts say ‘concrete steps’ must follow

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have welcomed the US move to designate atrocities committed by Myanmar’s military a genocide. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have welcomed the announcement by the US that it considers the violent repression of their largely Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar a genocide.

“We are very happy on the declaration of the genocide; many many thanks,” said 60-year-old Sala Uddin, who lives at Kutupalong camp, one of the many in Cox’s Bazar district that are now home to about 1 million Rohingya.

The US Says Myanmar Committed Genocide in Assaults on Rohingya

THE I DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
March 21, 2022

The declaration is long overdue, but accountability for Myanmar’s military remains a long way off.

Yesterday, Reuters published an exclusive report claiming that the United States is intending to declare that Myanmar’s brutal treatment of the Rohingya Muslim population is a “genocide.” According to the article, which cited Biden administration officials with knowledge of the matter, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the long-anticipated designation today at an event at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where there is currently an exhibit detailing the plight of the Rohingya.

 

Blinken declares Myanmar's military committed genocide against Rohingya

CNN  

Jennifer Hansler,
March 21, 2022

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference in Brussels, on March 4, 2022.

Washington (CNN)US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday he has determined that the military of Myanmar committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the country's minority Rohingya population in 2016 and 2017.

 
The formal declaration, announced at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, is a significant step and comes after the Trump administration declined to classify the atrocities -- including mass killings, rape, and torture -- as genocide or crimes against humanity. 

 

US Declares Myanmar’s 2017 Atrocities Against Rohingya A ‘Genocide’

BenarNews

March 22, 2022
By Shailaja Neelakantan

Displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

The United States has declared as a genocide the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against the Rohingya Muslim minority that killed thousands and forced an exodus to neighboring Bangladesh, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday.

Human rights activists welcomed the move as overdue and essential for stepping up pressure on the military, and making it accountable for crimes against humanity. According to American investigators, the military was responsible for atrocities including mass killings, gang rapes, mutilations, crucifixions, and the burning and drowning of children.

Why America Just Said Myanmar Carried Out a Genocide

The Atlantic

By Timothy McLaughlin

America finally used the word human rights activists had long argued applied to the campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

Four years ago, the State Department began an investigation into the Myanmar military’s brutal operation against the country’s Rohingya Muslims the prior year, which had resulted in scores of deaths and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya being pushed into Bangladesh. The report, spanning thousands of pages, was finalized when Mike Pompeo was still Secretary of State, and he ultimately opted to call the armed forces’ actions “ethnic cleansing,” a descriptive term not defined by international law.

Myanmar Rohingya violence is genocide, US to say Published

 B B C

2022-03-21

Rohingya Muslims are continuing to flee Myanmar

The Biden administration is to declare that Myanmar's military has committed genocide against the Rohingya minority, US officials have said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to make the announcement when he visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington later on Monday.


Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since the military crackdown that began in 2017.

More than 6,000 people were killed in the first month of the onslaught.

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.

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.

Myanmar Junta Asks UN's Top Court to Drop Rohingya Genocide Case at Hearing in The Hague

Irrawaddy
By AFP 22 February 2022

The junta’s delegation defends Myanmar in the genocide case at a public hearings at the ICJ on Feb. 21, 2022. / ICJ

Myanmar hit out Monday at a genocide case brought against it by Gambia for alleged persecution of Rohingya Muslims, urging the UN’s highest court to drop the claim on legal grounds.

Gambia dragged Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2019, accusing the predominantly Buddhist country of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority after a bloody 2017 military crackdown.

"အာဏာလုထားတဲ့ စစ်တပ်က မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရဲ့ အစိုးရမဟုတ် ဘူး" - DVB ICJ Talkshow

DVB TV
၂၀ ရက် ဖေဖေါ်ဝါရီလ ၂၂ ရက်။

"စစ်ကောင်စီထိန်းချုပ်ထားတဲ့ မြန်မာသံရုံးကနေ ICJ တရားရုံးက ဆက်သွယ်ဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့လို့ စစ်ကောင် စီ ကိုယ် စားလှယ်အဖွဲ့က လာရောက်ဖြေရှင်းခွင့်ရခဲ့တာ။ တရားရုံးအနေနဲ့အခုလိုဆောင်ရွက်လိုက်တာဟာ မှန်ကန်တဲ့ ဆောင် ရွက်ချက်မဟုတ်ဘူး။ ICJ တရားရုံးက နိုင်ငံကိုယ်စားပြုအစိုးရဆိုပြီး ဆုံးဖြတ်ပိုင်ခွင့်မရှိဘူး။UN ရဲ့တာဝန် မဲ့မှုတွေကြောင့် အခုလိုတွေဖြစ်လာတာ။သံအမတ်ကြီး ဦးကျော်မိုးထွန်းသည် NUG အစိုးရရဲ့ သံအမတ်ဖြစ်တည် လို့ တိတိကျကျ ဆုံးဖြတ်ခဲ့ရင် ဒီပြဿနာဖြစ်လာမှာ
မဟုတ်ဘူး။ UN မှာ ရှိနေတဲ့ ဝန်ထမ်း တွေသည် ကမ္ဘာနိုင် ငံ  တွေက ပြည်သူတွေဆီက အခွန်အခတွေနဲ့ လစာတွေယူပြီး တာဝန်တွေေ ကြအောင် မလုပ်ဘူး။ သမ္မတကိုဖမ်းပြီး နိုင်ငံအာဏာလုထားတဲ့ စစ်တပ်က မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရဲ့ အစိုးရမဟုတ်ဘူး။ပြည်သူလူ ထုကရွေးချယ်ထားတဲ့ NUG ကပဲ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံအစိုးရဖြစ်တယ်"

အောင်သူ (ဒီမိုကရတစ်မြန်မာ့အသံ)
ကိုနေဆန်းလွင် (ရိုဟင်ဂျာ လွတ်မြောက်ရေး ညွန့်ပေါင်းအဖွဲ့ပူးပေါင်းတည်ထောင်သူ)
မခင်ဥမ္မာ (ရှေ့ပြေးအသံအဖွဲ့တည်ထောင်သူ)
#DVBTV #Rohingya #ICJ #Talkshow #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar