Elections In Myanmar Are Undemocratic Without Rohingyas – OpEd

 eurasiareview

Arakan Rohingya National Org
November 9, 2020

Displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

The people of Myanmar and the international community as a whole want a democratic Myanmar, after long military dictatorship and anarchism for more than half a century, in order to restore human rights, equality, peace and sustainable development in the country.

The international community had a strong reservation to call the 2015 elections ‘free and fair’ for all as the Rohingya, who had participated in all elections held in Burma/Myanmar enabling at least some of their representatives to run for public office until 2010 elections, were excluded from voting without any justification.

Dhaka expects Biden govt engagement in Rohingya, CC issues

NEWAGE

Diplomatic Correspondent
Published: Nov 08,2020

President, PM, BNP greet Biden, Harris

The government on Sunday expressed its hope that the new US administration under president-elect Joe Biden would engage with Bangladesh on issues of climate change, migration and forced displacement including the Rohingya crisis.

President Md Abdul Hamid, prime minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party congratulated the US president-elect Joe Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris in separate messages on Sunday.

Aung San Suu Kyi in line for second term as Myanmar votes counted

Aljazeera
9 Nov 2020

Early election results are expected on Monday as voters thronged polling stations despite pandemic.

The elections commission expects to announce early official results on Monday [Shwe Paw Mya Tin/Reuters] 

Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to win a second term in office when authorities in Myanmar release early election results on Monday.

Sunday’s general election was seen as a referendum on the government led by Suu Kyi’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), which remains popular at home but has seen its reputation collapse overseas amid allegations of genocide against the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.

 

Aung San Suu Kyi expected to keep power in Myanmar election

The Guardian  

Rebecca Ratcliffe
South-east Asia correspondent
Sun 8 Nov 2020

‘Mother Suu’ remains popular despite coronavirus, conflict in Rakhine state and genocide charges

Voters wearing protective face masks line up to cast their ballots at a polling station in Yangon, Myanmar. Photograph: Thein Zaw/AP

Voters across Myanmar have gone to the polls for an election that is expected to return to power the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains hugely popular at home despite allegations of a genocide that have destroyed her reputation abroad.

Queues of people waited in line, in some cases for hours, to cast their ballots on Sunday in the country’s second general election since the end of full military rule. Most were wearing masks as a precaution against the coronavirus. The country has confirmed more than 60,000 infections, the majority of which were reported since mid-August.

Myanmar ‘undermining lifeblood of democracy’ before polls

Aljazeera

Andrew Nachemson

7 Nov 2020

 

Anti-Muslim sentiment intensify across the majority Buddhist country ahead of November 8 vote, threatening to disenfranchise minority groups. 

 

 

 

In 2015, the National League for Democracy won Myanmar’s first democratic election in decades in a landslide, catapulting Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to de facto head of state and heralding a new era of anticipated democratic reforms.

The heady optimism all came crashing down in 2017, when some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven out of the country in a brutal campaign of arson, rape and murder which has since been described as a genocide. Shockingly, to some, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to condemn the atrocities and even defended the Myanmar military.

UN chief hopes Myanmar elections to help return of persecuted Rohingya Muslims refugees

Associated Press of Pakistan
Sat, 7 Nov 2020

General Assembly Seventy-third session Informal Briefing by the Secretary-General on his Priorities for 2019

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 07 (APP): UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has expressed hope that the November 8 general elections in Myanmar would open the door for the return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees “in safety and dignity.”

In a statement issued here on Friday, he also hoped that the elections would help “advance inclusive sustainable development, humanitarian action, human rights and democratic reforms.”

US to boost ties with Bangladesh considering its geopolitical importance: FM

UNB

UNB NEWS
Update- November 08, 2020

Bangladesh expects that the Biden Administration will strengthen Bangladesh-US relations on core issues considering Bangladesh as a very powerful country geopolitically.

"We hope the US (under the new leadership) will boost its ties with us accepting Bangladesh as a very powerful country geopolitically and as an emerging nation," Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen told reporters on Sunday.

Referring to genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, the Foreign Minister said the US will become more vocal on Rohingya issue as the US focuses on human rights issues.

Dr Momen expects positive approach from the Biden administration on climate, immigration, trade and investment issues.

Rohingyas Brace For The Worst During Myanmar’s Election As Suu Kyi Takes The Lead

Transcontinental Times
By Tanbirul Miraj Ripon
November 8, 2020

The future of democracy and the fate of the Rohingya refugees hangs in the balance

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

MYANMAR. Yangon: The country’s general election took place today. Due to COVID-19, voting has been completed in accordance with health regulations. Because of this, voting is still going on in some areas. A majority of 322 seats are needed to form a government. The National League For Democracy (NLD) and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) have received the majority of the votes so far. Early results show the NLD have already secured 13 Seats, with 33,677 votes, and the USDP with currently zero seats, but 12,133 votes.

“Wir spielen keine Rolle”: Rohingya wurde bei den Wahlen in Myanmar der Stimme beraubt.

Writeschaftsblatt

By RAINER PROKSCH
on November 8, 2020 

Hunderttausende von Rohingya-Muslimen, die in Bangladesch Zuflucht gesucht haben, beklagen ihren Ausschluss von den Wahlen.

Mohammad Yusuf stimmte von 1974 bis 2010 bei fast allen Wahlen in Myanmar ab – das letzte Mal, dass ethnische Rohingya in dem Land wählen durften, das er nach seiner Flucht vor drei Jahren nach einer brutalen Militäroffensive immer noch zu Hause anruft.

ျမန္မာ့ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ လြတ္လပ္တရားမၽွတမည္မဟုတ္ဟု အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအဖြဲ႕ ေဝဖန္

DVB

By DVB 

8 November 2020

နိုဝင္ဘာ ၈ ရက္ ဒီကေန႔မွာ က်င္းပေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံရဲ့ ပါတီစုံဒီမိုကေရစီအေထြေထြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ လြတ္လပ္ၿပီးတရားမၽွတတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္လာလိမ့္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား အ ဖြဲ႕(Refugees International)က ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ အႀကီးတန္းေရွ႕ေန ဒန္နီယယ္လ္ ပီ ဆူလီဗန္က ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံရဲ့ ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြး ေကာက္ပြဲကို နိုင္ငံရဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းမႈမွတ္တိုင္တခုလို႔ ကမၻာက ရႈျမင္ခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း၊ ဒါေပမဲ့ အ ခုႏွစ္ရဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကေတာ့ နိုင္ငံရဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ကတိကဝတ္ေတြကေန ဘယ္ေလာက္ထိ ေသြဖယ္ သြားခဲ့ သလဲဆိုတာကို ေဖာ္ျပေနေၾကာင္း နိုဝင္ဘာ ၇ ရက္က ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္ထဲမွာ ေျပာလိုက္တာပါ။

ျမန္မာေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အခင္းအက်င္း Refugees International အဖြဲ႔ ေဝဖန္

VOA
ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
08 ႏိုဝင္ဘာ၊ 2020

ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွာ အသက္ ၆၀ အထက္ လူႀကီးမ်ား မဲေပးၾကတဲ့ ျမင္ကြင္း။ (ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၉၊ ၂၀၂၀)



ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ျပည္သူ ၁ သန္းေက်ာ္ဟာ မဲေပးခြင့္ ႐ုပ္သိမ္းခံရတာ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ အိုးအိမ္စြန္႔ခြာ ျပည္တြင္း ဒုကၡ သည္အျဖစ္ တိမ္းေရွာင္ေနရတဲ့အတြက္ ႏုိဝင္ဘာ ၈ ရက္ ဒီကေန႔က်င္းပတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြဟာ လြတ္လပ္ၿပီး တရားမွ်တတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ျဖစ္လာမွာမဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ Refugees International (RI) ေခၚ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကူညီေရးအဖြဲ႔က စေနေန႔ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာ ျပစ္တင္ ေဝဖန္ လိုက္ပါတယ္။

Bangladesh Will Wage a Quiet Battle with China and Russia Over the Rohingya

THE NATIONAL INTREST
by Anders Corr
November 6, 2020

Dhaka could diplomatically distance itself from Beijing and Moscow for insufficiently supporting it on critical issues such as refugees, trade, water and climate change.

Two of the most important political figures in Bangladesh, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen and Ambassador Muhammad Zamir, did a remarkable thing on Oct. 31. They indicated publicly that Bangladesh could diplomatically distance itself from China and Russia for insufficiently supporting Bangladesh on critical issues such as water, refugees, trade, and climate change.

 

Bangladesh - Rohingya Crisis Response Plan 2020

reliefweb
published6 Nov 2020

 

Link : Here

If elected, Biden likely to focus on human rights

The Daily Star

Porimol Palma
November 07, 2020

Experts believe he will give priority to Rohingya issue, strengthening democracy across the globe

Potential US President Joe Biden's foreign policy will emphasise on strengthening democracy and human rights globally -- a shift from that of incumbent President Donald Trump who focused on trade, said international relations analysts at Washington, DC.

As part of that, Biden will also put pressure on Myanmar, which has a bad human rights record, especially in its treatment of Rohingyas and some other ethnic groups, they said.

Why 1.5 million won’t vote when Myanmar holds its 2nd election since end of military rule

The Print
Pia Krishnankutty
6 November, 2020

Union Election Commission of Myanmar has cancelled voting in several places, including in the Rakhine State, home to the Rohingya Muslims.

 

File photo of Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi with supporters | Common

New Delhi: Myanmar will hold its general elections on 8 November for the second time since the end of military rule in the country in 2011.

The last general elections were held in 2015, in which State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a landslide victory in what was considered the first relatively free election in the country in 25 years.

'As though we are dead': Unable to vote, Myanmar poll robs Rohingya of hope

Dhaka Tribune  

Thomson Reuters Foundation
Published at 1November 6th, 2020

Photo: MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

When Myanmar holds its second democratic election on Sunday after decades of military rule, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims deprived of a vote

Mohammad Yusuf voted in almost every Myanmar election from 1974 until 2010 - the last time ethnic Rohingya were allowed to vote in the country he still calls home after fleeing three years ago.

 

In Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Trust in Armed Group Grows as Election Hopes Fade

Pulitzar Center

The New Humanitaria

Kyaw Hsan Hlaing and Emily Fishbein

November 05, 2020 

 

Conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine State has uprooted some 227,000 people since late 2018. Aid access is restricted in many areas. Illustration by Thu Ra Kyaw/TNH.

Many Arakanese in Myanmar’s Rakhine State were optimistic in the lead-up to the country's first openly contested elections in a quarter of a century, in 2015. There’s a stark difference five years on, as 8 November polls are clouded by an escalating civil war and voting cancellations across most of the state.

Facebook shuts dozens of Myanmar pages over ‘inauthentic behaviour’

KFGO
Fargo, ND, USA / The Mighty 790 KFGO | KFGO
Thomson Reuters
Nov 6, 2020

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Facebook said on Friday it dismantled dozens of accounts and pages run in Myanmar by commercial operators because of what it described as inauthentic behaviour, including some it said were using fictitious people to back a political party.

More than half of Myanmar's 53 million people use the social media platform, which for many is synonymous with the internet.

As Suu Kyi Denies Genocide, Opponents Up Anti-Rohingya Rhetoric

Courthouse News Service

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
November 5, 2020

“The party runs the risk of losing its main prop.”Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi makes a hand gesture while wearing a face shield, mask and gloves during a September 8 flag-raising ceremony to mark the first day of election campaigning at the National League for Democracy party’s temporary headquarters in Naypyitaw. Myanmar holds a general election on November 8. (AP Photo/Aung Shine Oo)

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar (AFP) — As Aung San Suu Kyi is vilified internationally for denying genocide against the Rohingya, her opponents in Sunday’s Myanmar election are ramping up the rhetoric against the Muslim minority.

There was global revulsion at military-backed operations in 2017 that saw hundreds of thousands of people flee burning villages into the squalor of refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

We don’t matter’: Rohingya deprived of vote in Myanmar elections

Aljazeera
Al Jazeera English
Nov 6, 2020

Myanmar is holding its second general election on Sunday since it ended military rule. The government has cancelled voting in areas where there has been fighting between the military and ethnic armed groups. Al Jazeera's Florence Looi reports.

Read related News : Here

 

Link : Here