Myanmar faces European push at U.N. to condemn coup

REUTERS

Stephanie Nebehay
APAC
FEBRUARY 10, 2021

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations’ top human rights body is to consider a resolution on Friday drafted by Britain and the European Union that would condemn Myanmar’s military coup and demand urgent access for monitors, a text seen by Reuters shows.

Myanmar citizens hold placards as they take part in a protest against the military coup in Myanmar at Bangkok's shopping district, Thailand, February 10, 2021. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha

However, diplomats said Human Rights Council members China and Russia - who both have ties to Myanmar’s armed forces - are expected to raise objections or try to weaken the text.

Procedural wrangling began on Monday, with Beijing and Moscow raising objections over virtual voting as officials met to plan both the council’s four-week session from Feb. 22 and Friday’s special session on Myanmar.

The U.N. Security Council last week called for the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others detained by the military but stopped short of condemning the coup.

Myanmar’s Generals Reshape Regional Political Dynamics

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Luke Hunt
February 10, 2021

Min Aung Hlaing’s seizure of power in Myanmar has shaken up the region’s diplomatic balance.

The third coup d’etat in Myanmar since the country’s independence in 1948 has installed a leader who is already named for an alleged genocide and a long list of atrocities linked to the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya four years ago.

Sen. Gen. Aung Min Hlaing is the type of leader ASEAN can do without. Hearings into the atrocities at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are continuing and this is just one factor regional leaders are struggling with since his rise to power through the barrel of gun.

Promises that this junta will be “different” from its predecessors and that multiparty elections will be held in a year just don’t cut it. New Zealand has already suspended high-level contacts and imposed a travel ban on its military leaders.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is demanding the coup be reversed.

Only ‘following orders’, no defence for any Myanmar atrocities: UN expert

UN News
10 February 2021

Peace and Security

UN News/Nyi Teza,A scene of Yangon, the commercial hub of Myanmar.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar on Wednesday said that security forces in the country must “stand down before there are more casualties” among protesters, amid reports of use of lethal force against those demonstrating against last week’s military takeover. 

There are unconfirmed media reports that at least one individual, a woman, was shot in the head during protests on Tuesday. She is said to be in critical condition at a hospital in Yangon.

PH backs 'complete restoration' of democracy in Myanmar

CNN

CNN Philippines Staff
Published Feb 9, 2021

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 9) — The Philippines called for the "complete restoration" of Southeast Asian neighbor Myanmar's democracy following a military power grab that sparked a series of demonstrations.

"The realization of this democratic process can only be achieved through the complete restoration of the status quo ante," Foreign Affairs Secretary Teddy Locsin Jr. said in a statement.

Locsin said the Philippines has been supportive of Myanmar's progress towards a fuller democracy, recognizing the military's role in preserving its territorial integrity and national security, as well as the "unifying role" of detained State Counsellor and democracy icon Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

Remarks by President Biden on the Administration’s Response to the Coup in Burma

THE WHITE HOUSE
SPEECHES AND REMARKS

FEBRUARY 10, 2021 

South Court Auditorium

Eisenhower Executive Office Building

BRIEFING ROOM

1:22 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you for being here on short notice. I’m going to be very brief, but I — because the Vice President and I are heading over the Pentagon for an extensive briefing and to make some comments, as we did at the State Department. So I’m going to be going from here to there, and you’ll get me there as well.

I want to say good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to give you an update on the latest regarding our response to the military coup in Burma.

As you know, the assault on Burma’s transition to democracy remains an issue of deep bipartisan concern. We’ve consulted at length, for example, with Senator McConnell, who’s had a very keen interest in this, and his team. And we welcomed their helpful insights.

U.S. Can Impose Substantial Costs on Those Responsible for Coup in Myanmar: State Dept.

U.S News

By Reuters, 

Wire Service Content 

Feb. 10, 2021,

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - The United States can impose substantial costs on those responsible for the coup in Myanmar, the State Department said on Wednesday after President Joe Biden said he approved an executive order that will pave the way for sanctions.

State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that the continued demonstrations in Myanmar after the military detained elected leaders and seized power on Feb. 1. indicates the aspirations of the people of Myanmar for democracy.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Doina Chiacu and Daphne Psaledakis, Editing by Franklin Paul)


Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.

'You messed with the wrong generation': the young people resisting Myanmar’s military

openDemocracy

Judith Beyer

11 February 2021

Since the coup, social media has become an essential tool for exchanging knowledge and experience between generations

A family displays the three-fingered salute used by protesters in Myanmar against the military's recent seizure of power | Anonymous

When Myanmar’s military announced on 1 February that they had taken control of the country, civilians of all ages began to coordinate their resistance. Within a remarkably short amount of time, a new social movement was born, and people were soon pooling resources online under hashtags such as #civildisobediencemovement, #hearthevoicesofMyanmar and #rejectmilitarycoup.

This would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. Myanmar has had one of the fastest-growing telecom markets worldwide, which went from virtually nothing in the 2000s to a penetration rate of about 125% in 2020. While there was only one local operator in the beginning, with pricey SIM cards sold through a lottery system, several domestic and international companies now offer products. Within only five years, mobile phone signals have come to reach 90% of the country’s territory.

ၿမန္မာ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြအေပၚ အေမရိကန္ ဒဏ္ခတ္ ပိတ္ဆို႔

VOA

ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)
10 Feb 2021

အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ဂ်ဳိးဘိုင္ဒန္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ သူ႔အစိုးရရဲ႕ သေဘာထား ကို ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔၊ ဝါရွင္တန္ ေဒသစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ မြန္းလြဲ တနာရီေက်ာ္မွာ ေျပာၾကားသြားသည့္ မိန္႔ခြန္း အျပည့္အစုံ

"ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေနာက္ဆုံးျဖစ္ေပၚခဲ့တဲ့ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး က်ေနာ္တို႔ရဲ႕ တုံ႔ျပန္ခ်က္ ေနာက္ ဆုံးအေျခအေနနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ ေျပာၾကားလိုပါတယ္။ အားလုံး သိၾကတဲ့အတိုင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အ သြင္ကူးေျပာင္းမႈအေပၚ တိုက္ခိုက္ျခင္းဟာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ပါတီႏွစ္ရပ္စလုံးက အေလးအနက္ထားတဲ့ကိစၥ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းအုပ်စုပေါ် ကန်အ ရေးယူတဲ့သက်ရောက်မှု ကြီးမားနိုင်ကြောင်း ခန့်မှန်းချက်တွေထွက်ပေါ်

VOA

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
မေခ
11 ဖေဖော်ဝါရီ၊ 2021

မြန်မာနိုင်ငံမှာ အရပ်သားအစိုးရကို ဖယ်ရှားပြီး အာဏာသိမ်းလိုက်တဲ့ စစ်တပ်အပေါ် အမေရိကန် ပြည်ထောင် စုက အရေးယူ ဒဏ်ခတ်ဖို့ ကြေညာလိုက်တာကြောင့် ကြီးမားတဲ့ သက်ရောက်မှုတွေ ရှိလာနိုင်တယ်လို့ တက် ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူတွေနဲ့ အကဲခတ်တွေ ခန့်မှန်းနေကြပါတယ်။ စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းမှုကြောင့် နိုင်ငံတကာ ဖိအားတွေ နောက်ထပ် တိုးလာနိုင်တဲ့အပေါ် အမြင်တွေကိုတော့ ဗွီအိုအေမြန်မာပိုင်း သတင်းထောက် မမေခက စုစည်း တင်ပြထားပါတယ်။

ၿမန္မာစစ္တပ္ကို ဒဏ္ခတ္မယ့္အစီအစဥ္ သမၼတ ဘိုင္ဒင္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုအေၾကာင္းၾကား

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
2021-02-11

■ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈအေပၚ အေမရိကန္အေရးယူဖို႔ သမၼတအမိန႔္ ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္တဲ့အေၾကာင္း လႊတ္ေတာ္ ၂ ရပ္က တာဝန္ရွိသူေတြကို သမၼတ ဂ်ိဳး ဘိုင္ဒင္ (Joe Biden) က အေၾကာင္းၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ အမ်ိဳးသားလုံၿခဳံေရးနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးမူဝါဒအေပၚ ႀကီးမားတဲ့ ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈအျဖစ္ သမၼတက အ မိန႔္ထုတ္ျပန္ၿပီး အာဏာသိမ္းမႈမွာ တာဝန္ရွိသူေတြကို အေရးယူသြားမယ္လို႔ သမၼတ ဘိုင္ဒင္ က အထက္နဲ႔ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ဥကၠ႒ေတြဆီ ဒီေန႔ပဲ စာေပးပို႔ အေၾကာင္းၾကားလိုက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္မွာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈ ကို ရႈတ္ခ်မည့္စကားလုံးအစား ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့သုံးႏႈန္း

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား

2021-02-11

■ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ကုလသမဂၢ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မွာ အလြန္အမင္း စိတ္မေကာင္း ျဖစ္ရေၾကာင္း စကားလံုးကို ေျပာင္းသံုးလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ကုလသမဂၢ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီမွာ မနက္ျဖန္ အေရးေပၚ အစည္းအေဝး လုပ္ ဖို႔ရွိပါတယ္။ ဒီအစည္းအေဝးကေန ထုတ္ျပန္မယ့္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ထဲမွာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းလုပ္ရပ္ကို ျပစ္တင္ရႈတ္ ခ်မယ့္ စကားလုံးအစား အလြန္အမင္း စိတ္မေကာင္းျဖစ္ရေၾကာင္း စကားကို ေျပာင္းသံုးလိုက္တာပါ။အေစာ ပိုင္းတုန္းက စစ္တပ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈကို ျပစ္တင္ရႈတ္ခ်ဖို႔ ထည့္သြင္းထားေပမဲ့ ဒီကေန႔ တရားဝင္ တင္သြင္းလိုက္ တဲ့ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္မူၾကမ္းမွာေတာ့ စကားလုံးကို ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့ ျပင္ဆင္လိုက္တာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႐ိုက္တာသတင္းက ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့တာပါ။ 

Myanmar military implausibly plays the Rohingya card

ASIA TIME

BERTIL LINTNER

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

Coup regime bids to deflect rising international condemnation by suggesting it may allow Rohingya refugees to return home

Rohingya refugees scuffle as they wait to receive aid in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh September 25, 2017. Image: Agencies

CHIANG MAI – After grabbing power in a February 1 coup that has been resisted by massive demonstrations and condemned by the US, EU and UN, Myanmar’s military regime would appear to have few cards to play to win acceptance.

But one the coup-makers amazingly think they can play is the plight of Muslim Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, who were driven across the border during brutal military campaigns in 2016-17, and those who have remained behind in Myanmar.

Shortly after overthrowing Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government, the new military regime sent a letter to Bangladesh’s government through its ambassador in Myanmar to explain their reasons for the coup, namely unsubstantiated allegations of fraud at the November 2020 election Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) resoundingly won.

Myanmar: UN office expresses ‘strong concern’ at use of force against demonstrators

UN News

Peace and Security

9 February 2021

                       Unsplash/Kyle PetzerA pagoda at dawn in downtown Yangon, the commercial hub of Myanmar.

The United Nations in Myanmar has voiced strong concerns over Tuesday’s reported use of force by security forces against demonstrators protesting the military takeover and arrests of elected leaders and politicians.

I call on the security forces to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression”, Ola Almgren, UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Myanmar, said in a news release. 

“The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable”, he added. 

The UN office in the country cited reports from capital Nay Pyi Taw, Mandalay and other cities, of numerous demonstrators having been injured, some of them seriously, by security forces in connection with the ongoing protests. 

Myanmar’s Generals Reshape Regional Political Dynamics

THE I DIPLOMAT

Luke Hunt
February 10, 2021

Min Aung Hlaing’s seizure of power in Myanmar has shaken up the region’s diplomatic balance.

The third coup d’etat in Myanmar since the country’s independence in 1948 has installed a leader who is already named for an alleged genocide and a long list of atrocities linked to the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya four years ago.

Sen. Gen. Aung Min Hlaing is the type of leader ASEAN can do without. Hearings into the atrocities at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are continuing and this is just one factor regional leaders are struggling with since his rise to power through the barrel of gun.

Promises that this junta will be “different” from its predecessors and that multiparty elections will be held in a year just don’t cut it. New Zealand has already suspended high-level contacts and imposed a travel ban on its military leaders.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is demanding the coup be reversed.

Regional dynamics have changed since Myanmar’s generals enacted political reforms in 2011, backed by then U.S. President Barack Obama, and the new junta is now threatening to re-write the region’s diplomatic playbook.

Military coup in Myanmar

HAWK NEWSPAPER

Devin Yingling

February 9, 2021

What is the recent political history of Myanmar? 

After gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar, then known as Burma, was ruled by military forces until 2012. In 2015, former State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi’s, National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide election, ushering in a civilian-led government. 

Myanmar held a general election on Nov. 8, 2020, continuing the democratic electoral process. One thousand one hundred seventy one national, state and regional seats were up for election, according to the Myanmar Times. Suu Kyi’s government won in a landslide victory. The NLD’s primary opposition in the election was the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). 

How China has Tightened its Grip on Myanmar’s Economy

NEWS18

FEBRUARY 09, 2021

While China Was Rapidly Making Inroads Into Myanmar, Indian Economic Presence In Myanmar Has Been More Or Less Limited To The 2010 Trade Statistics Level, A Bilateral Trade Over 11 Times Smaller Than China.

The bilateral trade between Myanmar and China in 2010 was US$1.22 billion. China’s share in Myanmar’s imports was 19.81%, while it accounted for just 2.93% of Myanmar’s exports. Back then, Thailand was the biggest trading partner with US$3.65 billion in bilateral trade. But it was largely export driven with 35.83% share of Myanmar’s total exports, while Singapore was at number three with US$1.58 billion of bilateral trade, according to the World Bank data.

India’s bilateral trade with Myanmar stood at US$1.12 billion and it was largely import driven. Myanmar’s import share with India was just 3.32%, while India’s share in Myanmar’s export was 10.80%.

Beijing wins when democracy is extinguished

The Telegraph

 CON COUGHLIN
DEFENCE EDITOR

10 February 2021

Burma’s military coup plays into the hands of a Chinese regime intent on expanding its influence

First Hong Kong, now Burma. There is an alarming new tendency that, whenever an Asian country seeks to embrace the values of democratic rule, it invariably ends with pro-democracy activists being imprisoned and abused.

Burma’s experiment with democracy is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back only to the country’s 2008 constitution, under which the military junta agreed to permit a limited form of democratic rule. Now even these modest reforms, under which the veteran campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi held the quasi-presidential position of “state counsellor”, have been extinguished after the military, responding to her National League for Democracy’s (NLD) clear victory in last November’s elections, once again seized control of the country.

A new Biden

ahramonline

Abdel-Moneim Said,

Tuesday 9 Feb 2021 

A week ago, on her nightly CNN interview programme “Amanpour & Company”, Christiane Amanpour interviewed the director of a Moscow-based political think tank. The subject was Alexey Navalny, the political dissident who has just returned to Russia from Germany where he was treated for poisoning allegedly administered at the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Enumerating the mass demonstrations that have erupted around the country in support of Navalny, Amanpour asked whether this was a tipping point for Russian public opinion. Striking a rather aloof pose, the Russian political scientist did not deny the wave of demonstrations, but he stressed that it reflected only a small sliver of Russia’s population of almost 150 million.

Amanpour then asked his opinion on the global outcry against the Russian authorities and Putin personally, censuring their treatment of Navalny and crackdown on the opposition. Amanapour’s guest countered that the statements of condemnation did not come from the “world” but rather from the handful of countries that make up the Western coalition. In fact, he said, most other countries of the world were either sympathetic to Russia or preferred to remain silent on a matter about which, according to him, the available information is inaccurate and biased.

ၿမန္မာ အာဏာသိမ္း စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြအေပၚ အေမရိကန္ ဒဏ္ခတ္မႈေတြ ခ်မွတ္လိုက္ျခင္း

VOA

ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း
11 ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ၊ 2021

ၿမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ အာဏာသိမ္းယူခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ စစ္တပ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြအေပၚ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုက ဒဏ္ခတ္ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူလုိက္ေၾကာင္း အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ဂ်ဳိးဘုိင္ဒန္က ေဒသစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ မြန္းလဲြပိုင္းမွာ ေၾကညာပါတယ္။

ဒါ့အျပင္ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္က လက္ရွိသိမ္းယူထားတဲ့ အာဏာကို အျမန္ဆုံး ျပန္စြန္႔လႊတ္ဖို႔ကိုလည္း သမၼတ ဘုိင္ဒန္က ထပ္ေလာင္း တုိက္တြန္းလိုက္ၿပီး ၊ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ (၈)ရက္ေန႔မွာ ျပည္သူေတြက သူတို႔ဆႏၵအတုိင္း ထုတ္ေဖၚမဲေပးခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ရလဒ္ကို အသိမွတ္ျပဳ ေလးစားလုိက္နာဖို႔ကိုလည္း သမၼတ ဘိုင္ဒန္က တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။

စစ်အစိုးရအပေါ်ပိတ်ဆို့ဒဏ်ခတ်မှုသမ္မတဘိုင်ဒင်ကြေညာ

လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ ( RFA )

မြန်မာဌာန | သတင်းများ
နန္ဒာချမ်း
2021-02-10
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံမှာ အာဏာသိမ်းစစ်ခေါင်းဆောင်တွေကို အမေရိကန်က ပိတ်ဆို့ဒဏ်ခတ် အရေးယူမှုတွေ စတင် လိုက်တဲ့အကြောင်း အမေရိကန်သမ္မတ ဂျိုး ဘိုင်ဒင် (Joe Biden) ကိုယ်တိုင် ကြေညာလိုက်ပါတယ်။