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Posts Tagged ‘Burma Partnership’
President Thein Sein’s US Visit Branded by Broken Promises
For the first time in nearly fifty years, President Thein Sein will visit the United States and meet with President Barack Obama today, 20 May. This follows the historic visit by President Obama to Burma six months ago. The visit is an opportunity for the White House to pressure Thein Sein to continue the reforms that have been taking place and highlight some of the concerns the United States, the international community and particularly the citizens of Burma have. The visit also represents the more troubling view that there has been a relaxing of the US policy of rewarding positive reforms with increased engagement and that there is more interest in the economic and geo-political benefits of the relationship than addressing and solving the very large problems that the people of Burma are facing inside their country today.
When President Obama visited Burma, Thein Sein made a series of pledges; he agreed to create a commission to review political prisoner cases with the aim of releasing all political prisoners from custody, to allow the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to open an office in the country, to adequately address religious violence, more specifically to hold those guilty of violence against Rohingya people accountable and address resettlement and citizenship issues, and finally to allow humanitarian organizations access to conflict areas [...]
Development Projects Fuel Conflict in Ethnic Nationality Areas
“Local communities and internally displaced persons are concerned that the dam plans will lead to increased militarization, human rights abuses, environmental destruction and loss of local livelihoods,” said the environmental lobby group, China Dialogue, talking about dam construction on the Salween River earlier this week. In recent weeks, there have been several examples of development projects directly contributing to armed conflict and militarization in ethnic nationality areas.
Fighting renewed between the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) and the government-backed Border Guard Forces in late April after the Burma Army ordered the DKBA to leave the area near the Hat Gyi hydropower dam site in Karen State. The DKBA refused to comply. Clashes have ceased but tensions remain high with the Karen National Union Brigade 5 also opposing the construction of the dam [...]
Advances and Challenges to Media Freedom in Burma
World Press Freedom Day was held on 3 May, marking an eventful year for media freedom and freedom of expression in Burma. There have been both advances towards increased freedoms, but also serious challenges.
Most notably, the government ended pre-publication censorship and the disbanded the censorship board, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD). Independent organizations such as the Myanmar Journalist Association, Myanmar Journalist Network and Myanmar Journalist Union, have been permitted to form in order to promote the rights and welfare of journalists, replacing the government affiliated Myanmar Writers and Journalists Association. The Ministry of Information and Communications granted permission for 16 privately owned journals to publish dailies for the first time in 50 years starting on 1 April, with an additional 10 journals granted permission at the end of April. Many exiled journalists have returned to Burma and foreign news agencies, such as Associated Press, NHK and Kyodo News, are opening offices in Rangoon.
Despite these positive steps, there remain many challenges to the freedom of expression of journalists and publications. One of the largest threats of repression is that the Printers and Publishers Registration Act (1962) and other restrictive laws remain on the books, providing legal grounds for the government to repress critical voices [...]
Burma: Human Rights Groups Condemn Ongoing Crackdown on Protests and Peaceful Assemblies
Report Highlights Violations of Freedoms of Expression, Peaceful Assembly and Association
The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), together with its member Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB), and Burma Partnership, called on the Burma government to respect the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association [...]
Government Uses Political Prisoners as Bargaining Chips Yet Again
On 23 April, Burma’s government announced a presidential amnesty for 93 prisoners. Media originally reported that this included 59 political prisoners, however, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has confirmed the names of 63 released. Among those released were 40 Shan soldiers, reportedly from the Shan State National Army, and former majority shareholder of the Myanmar Times, Sonny Swe.
In yet another illustration of the government using political prisoners as bargaining chips, the release happened the day after the European Union decided to lift all sanctions on Burma, except an arms embargo. Previous political prisoner releases also coincided with decisions made by the international community or visits by key international figures, such as US President Barack Obama’s visit last November.
Ko Bo Kyi from AAPP welcomed the amnesty, although he said the government failed to carry out the decision properly: “The release of the political prisoners should be publicly announced. The government should treat them with dignity,” he said. “They are somewhat like bargaining chips, used by the government to gain some achievements” from the international community. AAPP estimates that there are still more than 200 political prisoners [...]
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EU Ignores Its Burma Sanction Benchmarks
Today, the EU is likely to lift most of the remaining sanctions on Burma allowing a glut of investment by European companies, despite the benchmarks set out last year not being met. In April last year, the EU suspended sanctions for one year and outlined conditions that must be met if they were to be lifted completely. These benchmarks included the unconditional release of political prisoners, an end to armed conflict, recognition of the status of Rohingya, and improved humanitarian access to conflict-affected zones. These conditions are being ignored.
Firstly, there remain over 200 political prisoners in Burma and those who have been released face restrictions, for example, not being issued passports. While there have been some limited steps towards the release of those remaining with the establishment of a review board to determine who is still a political prisoner and thus release them, this review board has so far lacked any substance. Furthermore, as pointed out by the Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in Burma, Tomás Ojea Quintana, Rohingya prisoners in Arakan State are being tortured and left out of the review board’s list of political prisoners [...]
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္ ဘရူႏိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ အာဆီယံလူထုေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ တက္ေရာက္ျခင္းအေပၚ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္
အာဆီယံထိပ္သီးညီလာခံႏွင့္အျပိဳင္ ႏွစ္စဥ္က်င္းပေလ့ရွိေသာ အာဆီယံလူထုအစည္းအေဝး (ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum) ကို အာဆီယံအဖြဲ႕ဝင္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ ျငိမ္ခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္လံုျခံဳေရး၊ သဘာဝပတ္ ဝန္းက်င္၊ လယ္ယာေျမ၊ အမ်ဳိးသမီးႏွင့္ကေလး၊ လူငယ္၊ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရး၊ ေရြ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမား [...]
| |More Armed Conflict, More Landmines
Last Thursday, 4 April, was International Day of Mine Awareness. While over 80% of the world’s countries have signed or agreed to the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of landmines, Burma is among the 20% who have not. Recent statistics place Burma as the country with the third largest amount of land mine causalities in the world. From 1999 to 2011, over 3,000 men, women and children have lost their lives to mines in Burma. A week and a half ago, two porters, forcibly conscripted by the Burma Army, were killed in Northern Shan State by landmines.
Mines are regularly used by both government forces and non-state armed groups. Parts of Northern and Eastern Burma have some of the highest concentration of mines in the world. The Land Mine and Cluster Munitions Monitor identifies over 47 townships in Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Arakan and Shan States that suffer from mine contamination as well as in Pegu and Tenasserim Regions [...]
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s Political Reconciliation with Burma’s Armed Forces
On 27 March, Burma’s Armed Forces Day was commemorated with its usual military fanfare. But this year, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi sat in the front row of the parade, raising concerns about her closeness to the army.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was similarly criticized for her comment on BBC’s Desert Island Disks radio show about her “fondness” for her father’s army. While Daw Suu appears to be cozying up the Burma Army as an attempt of political reconciliation in her push towards the 2015 elections, the public widely continues to see the country’s security forces as the perpetrators of human rights violations especially in ethnic nationality areas and of brutal crackdowns on civilians in 1988, 2007 and most recently in November 2012 against protesters and monks at the Letpadaung copper mine.
The Burma Army continued this week to launch offensives against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in northeastern Shan State, two weeks after the latest peace talks in Ruili, China. There have also been reports of shelling and looting of villages in Kachin State despite President Thein Sein insisting on his visit to Austria at the beginning of the month, “There’s no more hostilities, no more fighting all over the country, we have been able to end this kind of armed conflict.” General Gun Maw, deputy chief of the KIA said after the 11 March talks, “They wanted us to sign a ceasefire agreement first, but there are many issues to discuss about the peace process before we can reach a ceasefire.”
Furthermore, the military has been implicated in the violence in Meikhtila, which has left 43 dead and 12,000 displaced by UN estimates [...]
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