Are formal interactions with China helping legitimise Myanmar’s junta in the eyes of the world?

SCMP

Pei-Hua Yu
10 Jun, 2021

• A recent Chinese embassy statement referring to coup architect Min Aung Hlaing as the ‘leader of Myanmar’ is among the exchanges decried by the shadow National Unity Government
• But analysts say while there are concerns over Beijing’s actions, they should not be over-interpreted – and Asean’s next moves could play a significant role in how the regime is perceived

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right) bumps elbows with junta representative Wunna Maung Lwin at a June 8 meeting marking the 30th anniversary of formal relations between China and Asean. Photo: Xinhua

Recent formal interactions between Myanmar’s junta and officials from China have raised questions about whether the generals who staged February’s coup are garnering international recognition as the Southeast Asian nation’s legitimate executive authority.

Why the National Unity Government’s Statement on Myanmar’s Rohingya Is Important

THE I DIPLOMAT

Angshuman Choudhury

June 09, 2021

The shadow government’s formal pledges to offer a persecuted minority justice and rights could help shape Myanmar’s future.

On June 3, Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) – a shadow government formed by civilian lawmakers deposed by the military in its 1 February coup – released a historic position paper on the country’s Rohingya community. The three-page document formally lays down a set of pledges and positions that mark a clear break from the past in the relationship between the Myanmar state and the stateless Rohingya Muslim community.

Welcomed by many as a progressive declaration, it sets out with the premise that “everyone in the Union has full enjoyment of fundamental human rights” and that the NUG will “not tolerate any form of discrimination.” It asserts that “all ethnic groups who are native to the Union have full enjoyment of individual rights held by individual people and collective rights held by ethnic groups.”

New friends, old enemies: Politics of Ethnic Armed Organisations after the Myanmar Coup

new mandala 

SALAI SAMUEL HMUNG
10 JUN, 2021

CADETS OF THE KACHIN INDEPENDENCE ARMY (KIA) PREPARING FOR MILITARY DRILLS AT THE GROUP'S HEADQUARTERS IN LAIZA, KACHIN STATE, MYANMAR. PHOTO CREDIT: PAUL VRIEZE AT VOA (PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Myanmar is still in turmoil with more than eight hundred civilian deaths and five thousand imprisoned since the military (Tatmadaw) overthrew a democratically elected government on 1 February. After the evaporation of dialogue and political solutions, the role of groups with armed forces became more prominent. The post-coup stances of Myanmar’s nearly two dozen ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) that have fought against the military regime will be a determinant in the country’s future.

The Arakan Army, Myanmar Military Coup and Politics of Arakan

tni
Authors: Kyaw Lynn
Programmes:Myanmar in Focus

A Myanmar Commentary by Kyaw Lynn

In the aftermath of the November general election the intense fighting between the national armed forces (Tatmadaw) and the Arakan Army came to an unexpected halt. Since the February coup of the State Administration Council, the situation has remained delicately poised. Political sentiment is very high. But Rakhine nationalism is presently on a different cycle to political movements in other parts of the country. In this commentary Kyaw Lynn outlines why the coming months will remain a time of high tension and uncertainty in Arakan politics.

Arakan Army troops in forest training / Photo credit JG

When political analysts in Myanmar and beyond discuss the role of ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) in the struggle against the military coup in February, the Arakan Army (AA) becomes one of the key political forces in shaping their dialogue and perceptions. The AA, the military wing of the United League of Army (ULA), is the only armed group that can challenge the power of the national armed forces (Tatmadaw) on Myanmar’s western frontiers. This became especially evident during the 2018-20 period when the ULA-AA demonstrated its sharp resistance against the power of the centralised Myanmar state. Behind the ULA rise, there were three key features: popular support among the Rakhine population, well-trained soldiers, and a younger leadership that read the evolving mood and political situation in the country perceptively well.

Myanmar people’s army aims wishfully at Tatmadaw

ASIA TIMES

DAVID SCOTT MATHIESON
JUNE 8, 2021

National Unity Government will be hard-pressed to form a force that can credibly challenge the 350,000-strong Tatmadaw

A screen grab from a video provided to AFPTV from an anonymous source and taken on May 23 shows a People’s Defense Force fighter shooting during clashes in Moebyel in Shan state, in which dozens of Myanmar security force members were killed and a police station seized, according to rebel fighters. Photo: Handout via AFP

If Myanmar’s security landscape was devilishly complicated before the February coup d’etat, the growing national-level armed resistance to the military-formed State Administration Council (SAC) junta has rendered it almost incomprehensible.

In recent weeks, veteran ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) have ramped up attacks on the military, or Tatmadaw. Peasant revolts using flintlock rifles and muskets in the hills of Chin state have likewise seen locally raised defense forces inflict major casualties on army units.

US Welcomes Pledge by Myanmar Shadow Government to Help Rohingya

VOA

VOA News

Updated June 07, 2021

FILE - Rohingya refugees, who crossed the border from Myanmar, walk toward refugee camps, in Palang Khali, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Oct. 19, 2017.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed a pledge by a shadow government in Myanmar to address discrimination and human rights abuses against minority Rohingya Muslims.

Blinken said in a tweet Sunday that the pledge by the National Unity Government (NUG) is "an important signal to all those working for an inclusive, democratic future."

ရိုဟင်ဂျာအရေး NUG မူဝါဒအပေါ် ရိုဟင်ဂျာဒုက္ခသည် တဦး ရဲ့အမြင်

VOA
ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
တိုက်ရိုက်လေလှိုင်း
ကျော်ကျော်သိန်း
08 ဇွန်၊ 2021

ကုတုပလောင် ဒုက္ခသည်စခန်း မြင်ကွင်းတခု။ ၆ အောက်တိုဘာ၊ ၂၀၂၀

ကြားကာလ အမျိုးသားညီညွတ်ရေးအစိုးရ (NUG) က ရိုဟင်ဂျာ မွတ်ဆလင်လူနည်းစုများဆိုင်ရာမူဝါဒ ထုတ်ပြန်လိုက်တဲ့အပေါ် ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရှ်နိုင်ငံ၊ Cox's Bazar ဒေသက ဒုက္ခသည်စခန်းတခုအတွင်းမှာ နေထိုင် နေတဲ့ရိုဟင်ဂျာဒုက္ခသည်တဦးက ကြိုဆိုတယ်လို့ ဗွီအိုအေကိုပြောပါတယ်။

Rohingyas urge anti-coup gov't to repeal controversial citizenship law

DAILY SABAH
BY ANADOLU AGENCY
DHAKA ASIA PACIFIC
JUN 06, 2021 

Myanmar's State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi (L) stands before U.N.'s International Court of Justice at the start of a three-day hearing on the Rohingya genocide case at the Peace Palace, The Hague, the Netherlands, Dec. 10, 2019. (AFP Photo)

Members of the Rohingya community issued a cautious response to a declaration of Policy Position on the Rohingya in Rakhine State by the National Unity Government (NUG), an anti-coup shadow government in Myanmar.

The exile government that was formed in April issued the policy Thursday. It proclaims to restore citizenship rights to Rohingya, starting long-stalled repatriation of the persecuted people and repealing a controversial 1982 Citizenship Law and the deceptive National Verification Cards system.

Global rights defenders hailed the declaration and recommended that it include Rohingya representatives in anti-coup and pro-democratic processes.

ASEAN ကို အယုံအၾကည္ မရွိေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာ စစ္အာဏာ သိမ္း ဆန္႔က်င္သူမ်ားေျပာ

ဧရာဝတီ
7 June 2021

ဇြန္လ ၄ ရက္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ASEAN အထူးကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ၂ ဦးႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္း ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး မင္းေအာင္လွိုင္ ေတြ႕ဆုံစဥ္

အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွနိုင္ငံမ်ားအသင္း (ASEAN) အထူးသံတမန္ႏွစ္ဦးႏွင့္ စစ္ေကာင္စီအႀကီးအကဲ မင္းေအာင္ လွိုင္တို႔ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ေတြ႕ဆုံခဲ့ၿပီး တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံ ခ်ဳံခ်င့္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ASEAN-တ႐ုတ္ နိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား ျမန္မာ့အေရး ေဆြးေႏြးေနစဥ္ ေဒသတြင္းသံတမန္ေရးအားထုတ္မႈကို အယုံအၾကည္ မရွိေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာစစ္ အာဏာသိမ္းမႈ ဆန္႔က်င္သူမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။

ASEAN သည္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအက်ပ္အတည္းမွ ထြက္ေပါက္ရွာရန္ အဓိကက်သည့္ နိုင္ငံတကာ သံတမန္ေရး အားထုတ္မႈကို ဦးေဆာင္ေနသည္။ တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံကလည္း ASEAN ၏ သံတမန္ေရး ႀကိဳးပမ္းခ်က္ကို ေထာက္ ခံေၾကာင္းေျပာသည္။

NUG ၏ မူဆလင္အေရးေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနမႈ ALP လက္မခံ

နိရဥၥရာ
Monday, June 07, 2021

အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ (NUG) ၏ မူဆလင္အေရးေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနမႈအား ရခိုင္ျပည္လြတ္ ေၿမာက္ေရးပါတီ (ALP) က လက္မခံေၾကာင္း ယမန္ေန႔ ဇြန္လ ၆ ရက္ေန႔က ေၾကညာခ်က္ထုတ္လိုက္သည္။

NUG အေနျဖင့္ လက္ရွိ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္း အာဏာသိမ္းကိစၥရပ္မ်ားအား မေဆာင္ရြက္ဘဲ မူဆလင္အေရး ကိစၥအား အဘယ့္ေၾကာင့္ အလ်င္စလို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနရသလဲဟုလည္း ALP မွ ဒုတိယဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး ခိုင္ေက်ာ္ လွိုင္က ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ေျပာဆိုသည္။

“NUG ေပၚလာတာ ရွင္းရွင္းေျပာရရင္ ႏွစ္လေလာက္ပဲရွိေသးတယ္။ သူတို႔သုံးသြားတဲ့စကားလုံးသည္ ရိုဟင္ ဂ်ာျပည္သူမ်ား၊ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာလူမ်ိဳးအျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳတယ္ဆိုၿပီး သူတို႔သုံးသြားတယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ သူတို႔ NLD အစိုးရလက္ထက္မွာလည္း ဒီ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဆိုတာကို မသုံးခဲ့ဘူး။ အစိုးရအထက္ထက္ကလည္း မသုံးခဲ့ ဘူးျဖစ္တယ္။

NUG အစိုးရရဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ မူဝါဒသေဘာထားအေပၚ ALP ပါတီ ကန႔္ကြက္

ဇြန္ ၇

အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရး (NUG) အစိုးရရဲ့ ဇြန္လ (၃) ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ မူဝါဒသေဘာထားအေပၚ ကန႔္ကြက္တယ္လို႔ ရခိုင္ျပည္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးပါတီ ALP က မေန႔က ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထုတ္ျပန္ထားပါတယ္။

ရခိုျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေမာင္ေတာ၊ ဘူးသီးေတာင္မွာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ အေရးကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး သက္တမ္းႏုနယ္ ေသးတဲ့ NUG အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ အလ်င္စလို မလုပ္ေဆာင္သင့္တဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔လည္း ALP ရဲ့ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မွာ ဆိုထားပါတယ္။

NUG ရဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမူဝါဒသေဘာထားကို အေမရိကန္ ႀကိဳဆို

မဇၩိမ
7 June 2021

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံမႈနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈေတြကို ေျဖရွင္းဖို႔ အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရး အစိုးရ NUG ရဲ့ ကတိကဝတ္ေတြကို ႀကိဳဆိုတယ္လို႔ အေမရိကန္နိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ Ned Price က သူ႔ရဲ့တြယ္တာမွာ ဒီကေန႔ ေရးသားထားပါတယ္။

“NUG ရဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံမႈနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈအား ေျဖရွင္းဖို႔ ကတိကဝတ္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ကို အေမရိကန္က ႀကိဳဆိုပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္ုပ္တို႔ဟ ျမန္မာလူထုအားလုံးအတြက္ ဆက္လက္ ေထာက္ခံအားေပးလၽွက္ ရွိပါတယ္” လို႔ ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ Ned Price က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရး ရခိုင္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား မစိုးရိမ္ရန္ NUG ေျပာ

Myanmar Now
Published on Jun 5, 2021

ေခတ္အဆက္အဆက္ ေျဖရွင္းမရသည့္ ျပႆနာကို အလ်င္စလိုလုပ္လၽွင္၊ ေဒသအတြင္းအတူေနထိုင္ရမည့္ သူမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးျခင္းမရွိဘဲ ဆုံးျဖတ္လၽွင္ ဆိုးက်ိဳးသာျဖစ္ေစမည္ဟု ရခိုင္အမ်ိဳးသားပါတီက သတိေပး သည္။

၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္က ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံဘက္ျခမ္းသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္ေနေသာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားကို ေတြ႕ရစဥ္။ (ဓာတ္ပုံ − EPA)

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးသြားရသူမ်ားကို ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဟု အသိအမွတ္ျပဳေခၚဆိုျခင္း၊ နိုင္ငံသားျဖစ္မႈဥပေဒကို ျပင္ဆင္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းျခင္းမ်ားအေပၚ ရခိုင္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား မစိုးရိမ္ၾကရန္ အမ်ိဳးသား ညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ (NUG) က ဆိုသည္။

“ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳျခင္းက ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွာရွိတဲ့ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို ေစာ္ကားႏွိမ့္ခ်ဖို႔မဟုတ္ပါဘူး” ဟု NUG အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕၏ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္မ်ိဳးမင္းက Myanmar Now ကို ေျပာသည္။

NUG အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕၏ ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲကို ယမန္ေန႔ (ဇြန္ ၅) ညေနပိုင္းက အြန္လိုင္းမွ တစ္ဆင့္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ရာတြင္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးရပ္တည္ခ်က္ႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍လည္း NUG တာဝန္ရွိသူမ်ားက ထည့္ သြင္းေျဖၾကားခဲ့သည္။

Myanmar: ASEAN’s Empty Diplomacy Is Costing Lives

THE ASEAN POST
Monday, 7 June 2021

This photo shows military training conducted by the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) ethnic rebel group in Kayah State. (AFP Photo)

The regional bloc must support the growing calls for a global arms embargo on Myanmar. Words alone have failed to persuade the Myanmar military to stop killing and jailing its civilian opponents.

Both the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have called on the Myanmar military to cease its use of violence. The military defies these calls, and the killing spree and arbitrary detentions continue.

ASIA/MYANMAR - The Burmese Government of National Unity recognizes the rights of the Rohingya

agenzia fides
Saturday, 5 June 2021

New York (Agenzia Fides) - The Burmese Government of National Unity (Nug), the "shadow executive" created abroad last April to counter the February 1 coup, has formalized a new policy towards the Rohingya, the Muslim minority expelled, between 2016 and 2017, from the Burmese state of Rakhine across the border, in Bangladesh. The new government policy, which continue sto recognize Aung San Suu Kyi as its leader, was made official yesterday, June 4, and bears the name of "Policy Position on the Rohingya in Rakhine State". The new position, which overturns the attitude of all previous governments, was explained to the international press by Deputy Foreign Minister U Moe Zaw Oo and NUG spokesman, Salai Maung Taing known as "dr. Sasa".

NUG အစိုးရရဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမူဝါဒကို ALP ကန႔္ကြက္

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
2021-06-06

 ရခိုင္ျပည္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးပါတီ(ALP) File Photo - ALP/FB

အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ (NUG) ရဲ့ ဇြန္လ ၃ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမူဝါဒေတြကို ကန႔္ကြက္ ေၾကာင္း တနိုင္ငံလုံး ပစ္ခတ္တိုက္ခိုက္မႈရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာတူ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးထားတဲ့၊ ရခိုင္တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္အဖြဲ႕ တစ္ဖြဲ႕ျဖစ္တဲ့ ရခိုင္ျပည္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးပါတီ (ALP) က ဒီကေန႔ သေဘာထားထုတ္ ၿပန္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

ျပည္ေထာင္စုအတြင္းက ပဋိပကၡေတြနဲ႔ အရင္းခံျပႆနာေတြကို အၿပီးသတ္ခ်ဳပ္ၿငိမ္းေစဖို႔ ဖက္ဒရယ္ျပည္ ေထာင္စု တည္ေဆာက္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ NUG ရဲ့ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ကို ႀကိဳဆိုေပမယ့္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းက အေ ရးကိစၥေတြကိုေတာ့ အလၽွင္စလို မကိုင္တြယ္သင့္ဘူးလို႔ ALP က ဆိုပါတယ္။

Myanmar Shadow Government Pledges Citizenship for Rohingya

THE I DIPLOMAT

Sebastian Strangio
June 04, 2021 

The National Unity Government has called for the besieged community to join in the “Spring Revolution” against the military junta

In a move designed to burnish its claims to international support and recognition, Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government (NUG) has promised to grant the country’s beleaguered Rohingya minority population citizenship.

In a policy statement released yesterday, the NUG, which was formed to oppose the military junta that seized power in February, said that the Rohingya are “entitled to citizenship by laws that will accord with fundamental human rights and democratic federal principles.”

It added, “We invite the Rohingyas to join hands with us and with others to participate in this Spring Revolution against the military dictatorship in all possible ways.”

The NUG statement promised to repeal Myanmar’s problematic 1982 Citizenship Law, which is underpinned by a complex taxonomy of 135 “national races,” from which the Rohingya are excluded, complicating their ability to gain citizenship. It said that whatever law replaces it “must base citizenship on birth in Myanmar or birth anywhere as a child of Myanmar citizens.”

Rohingya Citizenship: Myanmar’s NUG to draft new charter to ensure it

The Daily Star

Porimol Palma

June 05, 2021

In a significant development, Myanmar's National Unity Government has announced drafting a new constitution and committed to ensuring citizenship and fundamental rights of all ethnic groups, including the Rohingyas.

It also pledged to repatriate Rohingyas from Bangladesh and other neighbouring countries, revoke the controversial 1982 Citizenship Law and National Verification Card, and invite them to join the shadow government in overthrowing the military junta.

"We invite Rohingyas to join hands with us and with others to participate in this Spring Revolution against military dictatorship in all possible ways," said a statement by the National Unity Government (NUG) Thursday.

The NUG, Myanmar's shadow government in exile, was formed by the ousted parliamentarians of National League of Democracy (NLD) in early April, more than two months after the military took control of the Southeast Asian country, alleging gross anomalies in the November 2020 elections. The NLD had won the election and was in the process of forming a government.

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အေရး မူဝါဒနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး NUG ရွင္းလင္း

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
2021-06-05

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးနဲ႔ ပက္သက္ၿပီး NUG အစိုးရရဲ့ မူဝါဒ ထုတ္ျပန္ထားတာနဲ႔ ပက္သက္ၿပီး၊ မေန႔က ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ သ တင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲမွာ NUG အစိုးရ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္မ်ိဳးမင္းက သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြကို အ က်ယ္တဝင့္ ရွင္းလင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Ousted Myanmar politicians call for Rohingya to join fight against junta

the Gurdian

Rebecca Ratcliffe 

Fri 4 Jun 2021 

NUG says it will scrap law denying citizenship, in ‘notable step forward’ for rights of Rohingya people

A demonstration against the military coup in Monywa, Sagaing region, in April. The NUG statement said: ‘The solidarity of the entire people is now at its best.’ Photograph: Facebook/AFP/Getty Images

Myanmar’s parallel government has urged Rohingya to join with them in fighting the military junta, promising to offer justice and citizenship to the persecuted minority.

The statement has been welcomed by rights experts as “an important and notable step forward” in the movement for full rights for the Rohingya, who have faced decades of discrimination and violence in Myanmar.