Biden announces US will sanction Myanmar's military leaders following coup

CNN

By Jennifer Hansler,
February 10, 2021

Washington (CNN)President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that the United States will sanction Myanmar's military leaders after last week's coup in the country.

In brief remarks, the President said he had approved a new executive order allowing the United States to "immediately sanction the military leaders who directed the coup, their business interests as well as close family members." He said they would identify targets of those sanctions this week.

"The US government is taking steps to prevent the generals from improperly having access to the one billion dollars in Burmese government funds held in the United States," Biden noted.

Rohingya children too deserve a meaningful future

Financial Express

Rezaul Karim Chowdhury
February 08, 2021

While visiting a few Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar recently, this author met a young man there. He used to go to a Bangladeshi university a few years back but had to leave studies due to financial constraints when a new influx of Rohingya refugees took place in August 2017. The youth is currently working in Rohingya camps with hundreds of others of his age through a network to educate the Rohingya children.

We found a few Rohingya girls who can speak English quite well and are working to protect rights of Rohingya girls and women in the camps where their compatriots have been provided with shelter.

Throgh activities on Twitter,we have been in regular contact with 10-15 well-educated Rohingya youths. They live in the camps and regularly post updates on the current situation. This author also knows a few Rohingya youths who can take pictures like professional photographers. Some even write poems and stories that are published in international magazines.

Rohingya Continue To Suffer Even After Escaping To Supposed Safe Land – OpEd

eurasiareview  

Bahauddin Foizee
February 9, 2021

Displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

The horrible scenes of hungry, tired and almost lifeless Rohingya refugees entering Bangladesh shocked the world in 2017. Even today, many Rohingyas are attempting to make the journey from Myanmar to Bangladesh, believing that a foreign land (Bangladesh) would be safer than their homes (Myanmar). Although they aren’t migrating in large numbers now unlike what they did in 2017, their journey today is as unsafe, horrifying and terrible as it was three years earlier.

It is important to remind the international community, global civil society – as well as those human rights groups and humanitarian organizations not associated with the Rohingya crisis – about how horrible and terrible the journey was.

Singaporean Withdraws From Myanmar Military-Linked Tobacco Venture

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio
February 09, 2021

A week on, the military coup is exacting an increasingly steep economic cost.

The Singaporean businessman Lim Kaling has become the latest foreign investor to cut his ties to Myanmar’s military following the latter’s coup d’etat on February 1.

Lim, the co-founder of Hong Kong-listed gaming group Razer, was a minority shareholder in Virginia Tobacco Company through RMH Singapore Pte Ltd, which owns 49 percent of the Myanmar firm. The rest of Virginia Tobacco is owned by Myanmar Economic Holdings (MEHL), one of two tentacular conglomerates run by Myanmar’s military, or Tatmadaw.

In a statement issued Tuesday, Lim announced that he would divest himself of his holding in Virginia Tobacco because of “grave concern” over the political situation in the country. He added that he was “exploring options for the responsible disposal of this stake.”

Why Burma matters

philStar Global
Veronica Pedrosa
(The Philippine Star )
February 9, 2021

Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people are gathered and marching in towns across Burma/Myanmar as they did in 1988 and then in 2007. They did not succeed in their protests then, and they may not succeed this time, but they are here, now.

Perhaps, by the time this is published, the situation will have been resolved in some way. What began with a coup by the head of the military has rapidly developed from a few demonstrations calling for a civil disobedience campaign into a nationwide uprising, spreading wider with more and more people joining the crowds that are bringing together people of all backgrounds and professions.

They demand the release of all those detained; they reject the military coup; to achieve true democracy they demand the establishment of a federal democratic union and the abolition of the 2008 constitution that was supervised by the military as a step towards the so called “roadmap to democracy.”

And so in war-torn Kachin state which borders with China’s Yunnan province, young people are marching, dressed in black to signal that the movement isn’t only about the ouster of the National League for Democracy (the party of ousted State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi), but also the need for a radical change to the political system itself.

စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းမှု နဲ့ နိုင်ငံ့ရှေ့ရေး

VOA 

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန) 
ဦးကျော်ဇံသာ
10 ဖေဖော်ဝါရီ၊ 2021

A police officer (C) aims a gun during clashes with protesters taking part in a demonstration against the military coup in Naypyidaw on February 9, 2021. (Photo by STR / AFP)

ဒီတပတ်မြန်မာ့အရေးသုံးသပ်ချက်အစီအစဉ်မှာ အခုတလော မြန်မာနိုင်ငံမှာ ဖြစ်ပွားနေတဲ့ စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းမှု နဲ့ ပတ်သက်ပြီး မြန်မာနိုင်ငံဆိုင်ရာ အမေရိကန်သံအမတ်ဟောင်းလည်းဖြစ်၊ အမေရိကန် NDI (National Democratic Institute) ခေါ် ဒီမိုကရေစီဗိမာန်ရဲ့ အကြီးအကဲလည်းဖြစ်တဲ့ Derek Mitchell နဲ့ ဦးကျော်ဇံသာတို့ ဆွေးနွေးသုံးသပ်ထားပါတယ်။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးၾကီးမင္းေအာင္လွိဳင္၏အာဏာသိမ္းမိန္႔ခြန္း

ၿမဝတီမီဒီယာ
08.02.2021

Blinken holds first call with Chinese counterpart

THE HILL
Tal Axelrod -
02/05/21

CARLOS BARRIA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with his Chinese counterpart Friday, the first conversation between the two diplomats amid an adjustment in the relationship between Washington and Beijing.

Blinken had a phone call with Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi to extend his best wishes for a happy lunar new year, according to a readout of the call from the State Department. The secretary of State pushed Yang on reports of human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and the crackdown of civil rights in Tibet and Hong Kong, among other security-related issues.

Resistance to coup grows despite Myanmar's block of Facebook

 abc NEWS

The Associated Press
5 February 2021,

Myanmar’s new military government has blocked access to Facebook as resistance to Monday's coup surges amid calls for civil disobedience to protest the ousting of the elected government and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi

YANGON, Myanmar -- Myanmar’s new military government blocked access to Facebook as resistance to Monday's coup surged amid calls for civil disobedience to protest the ousting of the elected government and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Facebook is how most people access the internet in Myanmar and the company urged that it be restored.

The military seized power shortly before a new session of Parliament was to convene on Monday and detained Suu Kyi and other top politicians. The takeover has been criticized by President Joe Biden and others internationally who are pushing for the elected government to be restored.

Indonesia, Malaysia seeking ASEAN meeting on Myanmar after coup

REUTERS

By Maikel Jefriando, Stanley Widianto
February 5, 202 

JAKARTA (Reuters) - The leaders of Indonesia and Malaysia on Friday said they were seeking a special meeting of Southeast Asian nations to discuss the situation in Myanmar, where an elected government was overthrown in a coup this week. 

Throwing a wedge in Myanmar’s transition to democracy, the military took power on Monday, alleging irregularities in a November election won in a landslide by the party of Aung San Suu Kyi.

After meeting visiting Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said their foreign ministers had been asked to talk to Brunei, the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to try to set up the special Myanmar meeting.

Muhyiddin referred to the coup as being “one step backward in the process of democracy in that country”.

How America could build global opposition to the coup in Burma

THE HILL

By George Lopez and David Cortright,

opinion contributors —

 02/04/21 

 

President Biden is in a difficult position as his team develops options to respond to the military coup in Myanmar. Strong condemnations of the coup have been timely and a solid first step. But the options to impose punishing sanctions are limited. The United States already has targeted financial and travel sanctions on the generals who led the coup because of their atrocities against the Rohingya people. The painful bite of more sanctions has been rendered toothless as American security assistance and efforts with the Burmese military has slowed to a trickle.

Blinken Presses China Diplomat on Human Rights, Hong Kong

Bloomberg
Bloomberg News
February 6, 2021,

Antony Blinken Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg

The U.S. and China’s top diplomats sparred on democracy and human rights in a phone conversation which was the highest level of communications between the two countries since the Biden administration began.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken “stressed” to Yang Jiechi, who sits on the Communist Party’s 25-member Politburo, that the U.S. will keep standing up for human rights and democratic values including in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, the State Department said. Yang told Blinken the three regions are China’s internal affairs, and foreign forces shouldn’t interfere, according to a statement from the Chinese foreign ministry.

UN condemns Myanmar coup

THE WEEK

February 06, 2021

The has sent shock waves across the country  

In a first contact between the UN and Myanmar Army since generals seized power in a bloodless coup, the Secretary General's special envoy Christine Schraner Burgener on Myanmar spoke with the country's deputy military chief and expressed strong condemnation of its action and called for the immediate release of all detained leaders.

"Our special envoy today had a first contact in which she expressed clearly our position to the deputy military commander," Guterres told AFP.

Rohingya Activists Are Hoping That the Coup in Myanmar Will Be a Turning Point for Their Struggle

TIME  

Amy Gunia

February 8, 2021

   

A group of people shout slogans and hold placards during a Rohingya solidarity rally in front of the ICJ, The Hague, on December 11th, 2019.Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the week since the military overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected government, exile Nay San Lwin has been inundated with dozens of messages from his compatriots offering support.

It’s a dramatic change from 2017, when the rights activist, now living in Germany, was disseminating information about the atrocities Myanmar’s military had unleashed against his community—the mostly Muslim Rohingya, who live in the west of the country. Back then, the majority of the messages he received from other Burmese consisted of death threats and abuse.

လွှတ်တော်မတက်ဘဲ ထောင်ထဲဝင်ရတဲ့အမတ်များနဲ့စင်ပြိုင် အစိုးရ

B B C 

ဘီဘီစီမြန်မာပိုင်း
ဘိုဘို
၇ ဖေဖော်ဝါရီ ၂၀၂၁

                                                AFP ,၁၉၆ဝ နောက်မှာ ပထမဆုံးလုပ်တဲ့ ပါတီစုံရွေးကောက်ပွဲ

၁၉၉ဝ ပြည်သူ့လွှတ်တော်ရွေးကောက်ပွဲက တင်မြှောက်လိုက်တဲ့ လွှတ်တော်အမတ်တွေဟာ မြန်မာပြည်ရဲ့ ပထ မ ဆုံး လွှတ်တော်မတက်လိုက်ရတဲ့ ပြည်သူ့ကိုယ်စားလှယ်တွေ ဖြစ်ကြပါတယ်။ ဒီလွှတ်တော်ကအများဆုံးအနိုင် ရတဲ့ NLD အမျိုးသား ဒီမိုကရေစီအဖွဲ့ချုပ်နဲ့တကွ တခြား ရွေးချယ်ခံ လွှတ်တော် ကိုယ်စားလှယ် အများ အပြား လွှတ်တော်တာဝန်တွေ မထမ်းဆောင်ရဘဲ ထုတ်ပယ်အကျဉ်းချခံရတာတွေ ဖြစ်ခဲ့သလို ပြည်ပကိုထွက်ပြေးတိမ်း ရှောင်ကြတာတွေ ရှိခဲ့ပါတယ်။

What Myanmar’s coup could mean for the Rohingya and other persecuted minorities

Vox 

Jen Kirbyjen.kirby@vox.com
Feb 2, 2021

The takeover is terrible for Myanmar. It may be worse for the country’s most vulnerable. 

Rohingya refugees are relocated to the flood-prone island Bhashan Char in Chittagong, Bangladesh, on January 30, 2021. Rehman Asad/NurPhoto via Getty Images

 

The Myanmar military overthrew its civilian government in a coup on Monday, ending the facade of democratic rule and creating an even more uncertain future for human rights in the country — especially the persecuted Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.

The aftermath of the coup is still unfolding, but human rights advocates and experts told me they are increasingly fearful of what might happen to anyone who challenges the regime.

စစ်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီမှာ ပါဝင်ရေး ANP ဒေါ်အေးနုစိန် ဘာကြောင့် လက်ခံသလဲ

VOA

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
ဝင်းမင်း
05 ဖေဖော်ဝါရီ၊ 2021

ရခိုင်အမျိုးသားပါတီ (ANP) အဖွဲ့ ပြောခွင့်ရ ဒေါ်အေးနုစိန်
 

စစ်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီသစ်မှာ ရခိုင်အမျိုးသားပါတီ (ANP) အဖွဲ့ ပြောခွင့်ရ ဒေါ်အေးနုစိန်ကို ထပ်တိုးထည့် သွင်းခဲ့တာကို လက်ခံခဲ့တာက၊ ဒီမိုကရေစီစံနှုန်းအရမရင့်ကျက်သေးချိန်မှာ၊ အရင်အစိုးရမဖော်ဆောင်နိုင်ခဲ့တဲ့ စစ်ဒဏ်ခံရခိုင်ပြည်သူအကျိုးစီးပွားအတွက်မျှော်မှန်းလုပ်တာသာ ဖြစ်တယ်လို့၊ ANP ပါတီ မူဝါဒရေးရာဦး ဆောင်ကော်မတီဝင် ဦးဦးလှစောက ဆိုပါတယ်၊ ကိုဝင်းမင်းကမေးထားပါတယ်။

ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ အာဏာ စြန္႔လႊတ္ဖို႔ သမၼတ Joe Biden ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ျခင္း

VOA
ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
05 ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ၊ 2021

သမၼတ Joe Biden နိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ၾကီးဌာနမွာ မိန္ ့ခြန္းေျပာၾကားစဥ္ (ဓာတ္ပံု- AP) Feb. 4, 2021 

 

ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ ရယူထားတဲ့ အာဏာကို စြန္႔လႊတ္ဖို႔ အေမရိကန္ သမၼတ Joe Biden က ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါ တယ္။

“ရယူထားတဲ့ အာဏာကို ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္ စြန္႔လႊတ္သင့္ပါတယ္။ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းထားခံထားရသူ၊ တက္ႂကြ လႈပ္ ရွားသူေတြနဲ႔ တာဝန္ရွိသူေတြ အားလုံးကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးရပါမယ္။ တယ္လီ ကြန္ျမဴနီေကးရွင္း ဆက္သြယ္ ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမွာ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္ေတြ ခ်ထားတာကို ႐ုပ္သိမ္းေပးရပါမယ္။ အင္အား အသုံးျပဳမႈကို ခ်ဳပ္တည္း ေရွာင္ၾကဥ္ပါမယ္” လို ့သမၼတ Joe Biden က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒီမိုကေရစီစနစ္မွာ အင္အားစု တစ္ခုကေန ျပည္သူေတြရဲ့ ဆႏၵကို အာဏာသုံး ပယ္ခ်ဖို႔ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မႀကိဳးစား သင့္ သလို ယုံၾကည္စိတ္ခ်ရတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ တစ္ခုရဲ့ ရလာဒ္ကို ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ပစ္ဖို႔လည္း မလုပ္သင့္ေၾကာင္း သမၼတ Joe Biden က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာ႔အေရး လံုၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္အတြက္ တရုတ္ရွင္းလင္းခ်က္

VOA

ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)

05 ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ၊ 2021 

ျမန္မာ့အေရးကိစၥ ကုလသမဂၢလုံျခဳံေရး ေကာင္စီက ေၾကညာခ်က္တစ္ေစာင္ တညီတညြတ္တည္း ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္တဲ့အေပၚ တ႐ုတ္ ကုလသမဂၢ အဖြဲ႕႐ုံးက ေျပာခြင့္ရက ထပ္ဆင့္ ရွင္းလင္းခ်က္ ထုတ္ျပန္ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီ ရွင္းလင္းေၾကညာခ်က္မွာ ကုလသမဂၢလုံျခဳံေရးေကာင္စီရဲ့ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ေတြဟာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံတြင္း နိုင္ ငံေရးနဲ႔ လူမႈေရးအရ တည္ၿငိမ္မွ ုအျပင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ အမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရး အတြက္လည္း ဦးစား ေပးစဥ္းစား သင့္တယ္လို႔ တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံက အျမဲတေစ ရႈျမင္ ေနခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း တ႐ုတ္နိုင္ငံက အစည္းအေဝးမွာ အျပဳသေဘာေဆာင္ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၿပီး ေၾကညာခ်က္ပါ စာသား ေတြကို ပိုမို ေကာင္းမြန္ေအာင္ အကူအညီေပးခဲ့သလို အားလုံး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ တညီတညြတ္တည္း ရ ေအာင္လည္း ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့တယ္ လို႔ ပါရွိပါတယ္။

ရခိုင်နဲ့ ချင်းပြည်နယ်တို့မှာ အင်တာနက်ပြန်ဖွင့်ပေး

VOA

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာပိုင်း)
04 ဖေဖော်ဝါရီ၊ 2021

မြောက်ဦးမြို့နယ်အတွင်းရှိ တယ်လီဖုန်းဆက်သွယ်ရေးတာဝါတိုင် (ဓာတ်ပုံ-AFP)

ကမ္ဘာ့အရှည်ကြာဆုံးအင်တာနက်ဖြတ်တောက်မှုအဖြစ် ၁၉ လ အကြာ အင်တာနက်ဖြတ်တောက်ထားမှုကို ရခိုင်နဲ့ချင်းပြည်နယ်တွေထဲမှာ အဆုံးသတ်လိုက်ပါပြီ။