Unchecked Power: How Did Myanmar’s Military Stage A Coup D’Etat?

The Organisation for World Peace
March 1, 2021

On the 1st of February, Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw, planned a calculated coup d’état to overthrow Myanmar’s ruling political party called the National League for Democracy (NLD). The Tatmadaw arrested Aung San Suu Kyi who is the leader of the NLD, president Win Myint as well as other government officials. Their whereabouts are unknown at this point of time. The military has declared a one-year state of emergency and has transferred all legislative, executive and judicious power to the military’s commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing, mastermind behind the 2017 genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The Tatmadaw have blocked access to the busiest cities in Myanmar, Naypyitaw and Yangon. The military has cut internet connections and blocked domestic and international channels from being broadcasted. In a show of resistance, the people of Yangon have paraded to the streets at night, banging their pots and pans, staging a carcerolazo against the military. Al Jazeera described it as a “nocturnal cacophony” pulsing through the city.

'You Always Keep Worrying': Rohingya Refugee In Milwaukee Says About His Family In Myanmar

WUWM ( nrp)

By SIMONE CAZARES & JACK HURBANIS • 

MAR 1, 2021

Anuwar Kasim and his three children in their Milwaukee home.

EMILY FILES / WUWM

WUWM's Simone Cazares speaks with Anuwar Kasim, the president of the Burmese Rohingya Community in Wisconsin about the coup in Myanmar.

On Feb 1., the democratically-elected government of Myanmar was taken over in a military coup. The southeastern Asian country, also known as Burma, has dealt with political instability since 1948, when it declared independence from British rule.

This is the same military which for decades has been persecuting a Muslim ethnic minority in the country who call themselves Rohingya. Since the 1990s, over a million Rohingya have fled the country and become refugees around the world.

Facebook Takes a Side, Barring Myanmar Military After Coup

The New York Times

By Paul Mozur, Mike Isaac, David E. Sanger and Richard C. Paddock
Published Feb. 24, 2021

Continue reading the main story

The move puts the social network squarely on the side of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement after years of criticism over how the military has used the site.

Soldiers set up barricades in Yangon, Myanmar, this month as tens of thousands gathered to protest the coup that ousted the civilian government.Credit... The New York Times

Facebook said on Wednesday that it had barred Myanmar’s military from its platforms, weeks after the country’s fragile democratic government was overthrown in a military coup.

The move, which also bars military-owned businesses from advertising on Facebook, plunged the social network more directly into Myanmar’s post-coup politics. The decision left little question that the company was taking the side of a pro-democracy movement against a military government that had abruptly seized power.

Facebook acted after years of criticism over how Myanmar’s military has used the site, including to incite hatred against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority group. Since the coup early this month, which ousted the civilian leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and returned Myanmar to full military rule, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites.

Photos From Myanmar: A Street-Level View of Coup Protests

The New York Times
By Richard C. Paddock
Photographs by The New York Times
March 1, 2021

Family and relatives mourning the death of Ma Daisy Kyaw Win, 32, on Monday in Mandalay, Myanmar. She was shot in the head when security forces opened fire on a crowd a day earlier.

As a civil disobedience movement entered its second month, the military rulers added charges against Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Her death came without warning. The single mother, Mah Daisy Kyaw Win, went to buy snacks for her 6-year-old son in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, and stopped to watch anti-military protesters fleeing from the police.

As she stood there, a bullet struck her in the head, and she dropped dead on the spot. Ms. Daisy Kyaw Win, a 32-year-old hotel cleaner, was buried on Monday, a day after her death, in keeping with Muslim tradition. 

Burmese Scholar: Military Junta Using Terror Against “Entire Population” to Keep Power After Coup

DEMOCRACY NOW
MARCH 01, 2021
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Burma Protests Military

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Maung Zarni
Burmese scholar, dissident and human rights activist.

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Maung Zarni on Twitter
Forces of Renewal for Southeast Asia (FORSEA)

In Burma, mass protests continue after at least 18 people were killed in anti-coup protests, marking the deadliest day since the February 1 military coup which deposed and detained de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Police fired live ammunition into crowds as Burmese forces steadily escalated their crackdown. One local group says 1,000 people were arrested, including journalists and medical professionals. “The coup group and the entire security sector … have essentially terrorized the entire population,” says Maung Zarni, a Burmese scholar, dissident and human rights activist. “I have seen absolutely nothing like what is happening.”

'India Will Play Vital Role In Return Of Rohingyas From Bangladesh To Myanmar': Tirumurti

REPUBLICWORLD

Written ByGourav Mishra
28th February, 2021

India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti observed that India has a significant role to play in early return of the displaced Rohingyas, who fled Myanmar due to what was being called 'ethnic cleansing'. He was speaking at the informal UN General Assembly meeting on the military coup in Myanmar that killed at least three and injured several.

Over 1.1 million Rohingyas fled the Rakhine state and crossed borders in 2017 seeking shelter in Bangladesh, after troops in Myanmar burned several Rohingyan homes, raped their women, and killed several of them. All Rohingyan 'refugees' have since camped in the Cox Bazar of Bangladesh. Referring to the displaced Rohingyas, Tirumurti acknowledged "India will continue to work with the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar so the return of displaced persons to their shelters in Rakhine in a manner that is safe, speedy, and sustainable can be initiated."

China role in Myanmar coup under scanner

THE FREE PRESS

By Agencies
Monday, March 1, 2021,

Different charges claim that Chinese soldiers were being transported into the country on flights, or that ‘Chinese-looking’ troops have been spotted around Myanmar's cities

A policeman points his weapon at people in Taunggyi, a city in Shan State, on February 28, 2021, as security forces continue to crackdown on demonstrations by protesters against the military coup. AFP

Naypyitaw: With most nations condemning military takeover in Myanmar and arrest of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, there have been reports that China has been supporting the coup.

Different charges claim that Chinese soldiers were being transported into the country on flights, or that "Chinese-looking" troops have been spotted around Myanmar's cities, The Taiwan Times reported.

MEDIA STATEMENT – UN Human Rights Office urges military to halt violence against peaceful protestors across Myanmar

Comment by UN Human Rights Office Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani on Myanmar

Geneva, 28 February 2021

“We strongly condemn the escalating violence against protests in Myanmar and call on the military to immediately halt the use of force against peaceful protestors.

Throughout the day, in several locations throughout the country, police and military forces have confronted peaceful demonstrations, using lethal force and less-than-lethal force that – according to credible information received by the UN Human Rights Office – has left at least 18 people dead and over 30 wounded. Deaths reportedly occurred as a result of live ammunition fired into crowds in Yangon, Dawei, Mandalay, Myeik, Bago and Pokokku. Tear gas was also reportedly used in various locations as well as flash-bang and stun grenades.

Thai marchers link their democracy cause to Myanmar protests

New York Post

Lauren Tousignant
March 1, 2021

Myanmar people living in Thailand, with a picture of Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi (C), take part in a gathering with Thai anti-government protesters at Victory Monument, before a march rally to the prime minister's residence during a protest in Bangkok, Thailand, February 28, 2021.EPA

BANGKOK — A new faction of Thailand’s pro-democracy movement staged a protest march Sunday, linking their cause with that of demonstrators in Myanmar battling that neighboring country’s coup-installed military government.

Marchers sought but failed to go to Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s house, which is on an army base in Bangkok. Shipping containers were situated to block them and police using water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas barred the way.

The demonstrators abandoned their plan several hours later after taking an online vote of their supporters.

စစ်ကောင်စီကို နိုင်ငံတကာ ခုံရုံးတင်မယ်

 B B C

ဘီဘီစီမြန်မာပိုင်း
2 မတ်လ 2021

                                          သွေးတစ်စက်အတိုင်းအတွက် အပြစ်ပေးနိုင်ရမယ်

လွှတ်တော် ကိုယ်စားပြု ကော်မတီ CRPH ရဲ့ ကုလသမဂ္ဂဆိုင်ရာ အထူး သံတမန် ဒေါက်တာဆာဆာက စစ်  ကောင်စီ အကြမ်းဖက် အဖွဲ့ကို နိုင်ငံတကာ တရားရုံး ရှေ့မှောက် အရောက်ပို့မယ်လို့ ဆိုပါတယ်။

CRPH ရဲ့ တရားဝင် စာရွက်စာတမ်းတွေကို နိုင်ငံတကာ ဥပဒေ ပါမောက္ခတွေကတဆင့် ICC ရုံးတော်ထံ တင် သွင်းမယ်၊ မြန်မာပြည်သူတွေ အပေါ် ကျုးလွန်တဲ့ အကြမ်းဖက် လုပ်ရပ်တွေ အတွက် ဥပဒေအတိုင်း အရေးယူ မယ်၊ ကျခဲ့တဲ့ သွေးတစ်စက်အတိုင်းအတွက် အကြမ်းဖက် အုပ်စုဖြစ်တဲ့ တရားမဝင် စစ်ကောင်စီကို အပြစ်ပေး နိုင်ရမယ်လို့ ဒေါက်တာဆာဆာက ဆိုပါတယ်။

ျမန္မာအေရး အထူးအႀကံေပးေကာင္စီ တစ္ရပ္ ဖြဲ႕စည္း

B B C

ဘီဘီစီၿမန္မာပိုင္း
2 မတ္ 2021 

ယန္းဟီးလီနဲ႔မာဇူကီဒါ႐ူစမန္

 

ဒီေန႔ဟာ ၆၂ တုန္းက စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းတဲ့ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ေန႔ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အႏွစ္ ၆၀ နီးပါး ၾကာခဲ့ခ်ိန္ ဒီကေန႔ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စစ္တပ္ရဲ့ ေနာက္ေၾကာင္းျပန္ အာဏာသိမ္းမႈနဲ႔ ၾကဳံေတြ႕ ေနရၿပီး ျပည္သူေတြဟာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈကို အသက္နဲ႔ရင္းၿပီး အံတုေတာ္လွန္ ေနၾကရဆဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

စစ္ေကာင္စီကို အျပစ္ေပး အေရးယူနိုင္ေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး နိုင္ငံတကာမွာလည္း လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြ ေတြ႕ျမင္ေန ရပါတယ္။

Statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Violence Against Peaceful Demonstrations in Burma

The White House
STATEMENTS AND RELEASES

FEBRUARY 28, 2021 

The United States is alarmed by the Burmese security forces’ violence against peaceful protestors. The killings today represent an escalation of the ongoing crackdown on pro-democracy protestors since the February 1 coup. I offer my heartfelt condolences to the families of the courageous protestors who have lost their lives while peacefully demonstrating in support of democracy in Burma.

The United States stands in solidarity with the people of Burma, who continue to bravely voice their aspirations for democracy, rule of law, and respect for human rights. We will continue coordinating closely with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world to hold those responsible for violence to account, and to reinforce our support for the people of Burma. To that end, we are preparing additional actions to impose further costs on those responsible for this latest outbreak of violence and the recent coup. We will have more to share in the coming days.

Link : Here

SHOCKING SCENES OF VIOLENCE ON STREETS OF MYANMAR PUT AT RISK LIVES AND WELL-BEING OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

STATEMENT

28 FEBRUARY 2021 - MYANMAR

Save The Children

Following news of casualties among demonstrators in Myanmar, a Save the Children spokesperson said:

“The shocking scenes of violence on the streets of Myanmar today put at risk the lives and well-being of children and their families. Save the Children condemns the use of lethal violence and other excessive force against peaceful demonstrators. World leaders must come together and act in unison to protect the lives and liberty of people in Myanmar against the brutal force being shown by the security forces. Many of those arrested, injured or killed today are students and young people. Demonstrators must be allowed to raise their voice to call for the reinstatement of democracy and the release of elected leaders. Save the Children calls on the security forces and other authorities to refrain from violence and to respect the rights of their own citizens, including their rights to freedom of assembly and expression. The world is watching and will not look away.”

Link : Here

Milk Tea Alliance' activists across Asia hold rallies against Myanmar coup

REUTERS

By Fanny Potkin, Patpicha Tanakasempipat
FEBRUARY 28, 2021

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Activists across Asia held rallies on Sunday to support protesters in Myanmar fighting against a military coup, showing the growing influence of cross-border youth movements pushing for democracy with the rallying cry “Milk Tea Alliance”.

Myanmar citizens shout as they join a Thai an anti-government protest in Bangkok, Thailand February 28, 2021. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

Following a call for help from Myanmar pro-democracy campaigners, around 200 people in Taipei and dozens in Bangkok, Melbourne and Hong Kong took to the streets waving #MilkTeaAlliance signs and flags.

The hashtag, which originated as a protest against online attacks from nationalists in China, was used millions of times on Sunday. Its name originates from the shared passion for the milky drink in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.[L4N2FJ12F]

Anti-coup crackdown takes fatal turn

Bangkok Post

LARRY JAGAN
A SPECIALIST ON MYANMAR
PUBLISHED : 1 MAR 2021
NEWSPAPER SECTION: NEWS

Protesters run to contain tear gas fired by security forces in an attempt to disperse them during a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon yesterday. AFP

Myanmar's security forces have unleashed a concerted crackdown on the country's peaceful protesters leaving 23 dead and thousands injured throughout the country in the last two days. In planned pre-emptive strikes, the police moved ruthlessly to disperse and arrest protestors preparing to join yesterday general strike. "They used teargas, stun grenades and fired live ammunition indiscriminately into the crowds," said Soe Soe, a young university student at a protest site told the Bangkok Post.

Down but not out

Bangkok Post
NEWSPAPER SECTION: NEWS
WRITER: ANUCHA CHAROENPO
PUBLISHED : 1 MAR 2021

NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained since Feb 1 but her whereabouts are still unknown. (Photo by Chanat Katanyu)

Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) par­ty, and tarnished de­mo­cracy heroine of that country, hit the headlines on Feb 1 when she was arrested and deposed by the Myanmar military, aka Tatmadaw, in its coup.

Ms Suu Kyi along with other members of her party was accused of taking part in the Nov 2020 general election "fraud". Myanmar police have pressed several charges against her following the coup led by armed forces chief Min Aung Hlaing, including breaching import and export laws, and possession of unlawful communication devices.

Don't isolate Myanmar

Bangkok Post
NEWSPAPER SECTION: ASIA FOCUS
WRITER: BRAHMA CHELLANEY
PUBLISHED : 1 MAR 2021

Directly or indirectly, the military has always called the shots in Myanmar. And now that it has removed the decade-old façade of gradual democratisation by detaining civilian leaders and seizing power, Western calls to punish the country with sanctions and international isolation are growing louder. Heeding them would be a mistake.

The retreat of the "Myanmar spring" means all the countries of continental Southeast Asia -- Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar -- are under authoritarian rule, like their giant northern neighbour, China.

Myanmar Military Fires U.N. Envoy Who Spoke Against Its Coup

The New York Times

By Richard C. Paddock
Feb. 27, 2021

The regime fired the ambassador, U Kyaw Moe Tun, who called for international help in restoring demo
cracy and gave the three-finger salute of the protest movement.



An image released by the United Nations shows U Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmar’s ambassador to the U.N., pleading for international action in overturning the military coup in the country.Credit...United Nations Tv, via Reuters

BANGKOK — Myanmar’s month-old military regime fired the country’s ambassador to the United Nations on Saturday, a day after he gave an impassioned speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, pleading for international help in restoring democracy to his homeland.

The ambassador, U Kyaw Moe Tun, ended his speech with a three-finger salute, a gesture from the “Hunger Games” films that has become a symbol of pro-democratic defiance for protesters in Myanmar and, before that, in neighboring Thailand.

State television announced his firing, saying he had “betrayed the country and spoken for an unofficial organization which doesn’t represent the country and had abused the power and responsibilities of an ambassador.”

Bangladesh urges Biden Administration to play a leading role in resolving Rohingya crisis

IBG News
By Suman Munshi
February 28, 2021

Bangladesh urges Biden Administration to play a leading role in resolving Rohingya crisis

 

 

Bangladesh urges Biden Administration to play a leading role in resolving Rohingya crisis:

Foreign Minister has requested the new US Administration to play a leading role, both bilaterally and multilaterally, to bring about a durable solution of the Rohingya crisis, during his interaction with the US Think Tank ‘Newlines Institute on Strategy and Policy’ yesterday.

Director of the Institute Dr. Azeem Ibrahim moderated the event. During the discussion Dr. Momen reiterated that the only durable solution is the repatriation for the persecuted 1.1 million Rohingyas temporarily sheltered in Bangladesh. Among others, dignitaries, including former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Commissioner from the US Congress on Religious Freedom, and prominent journalists, Members of Congress, State Department officials, UN personnel, and senior leadership of the OIC attended the event, both physically and online. The event was live-streamed on YouTube.

Bangladesh refuses to shelter Rohingya stranded in Andaman Sea

PRESS TV

Saturday, 27 February 2021

A Rohingya refugee woman is seen on the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Teknaf, Bangladesh. (File photo)

Bangladesh says it has “no obligation” to shelter Rohingya Muslim refugees who have been stranded in the Andaman Sea for weeks, as it is in talks with India for their rescue and return.

India’s coast guard found 81 survivors and eight dead on a boat crammed with the refugees adrift in the sea.