Myanmar has agreed to release some 70 political prisoners, an official said Tuesday, after President Thein Sein vowed to free all dissidents by the end of the year. …read more
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A leading international rights group is accusing authorities in Myanmar, including senior Buddhist monks, of organizing a “campaign of ethnic cleansing” against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
Human Rights Watch on Monday described a series of bloody attacks last year that killed hundreds of people and forced 125,000 from their homes as crimes against humanity that the government of President Thein Sein has yet to punish.
The New York-based group says ethnic Rakhine nationalists from a powerful political party in western Rakhine state, along with senior Buddhist monks, encouraged coordinated attacks on Muslim neighborhoods.
The rights group says that while state security forces sometimes intervened to protect fleeing Muslims, more often they either stood idly by or participated directly in atrocities.
A Rakhine state government spokesman denied the allegations.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/yk9QDntXnos/
Asia’s action really picked up in April as the electoral ground began to shake in Malaysia, President Thein Sein sought to calm the troubled sectarian waters of Burma/Myanmar and the spectre of bird flu grew more ominous in southeastern China. But, even more prominent than those developments, two aggressive players in North Asia sought to achieve shock and awe: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-eun and Japanese central banker Haruhiko Kuroda. …read more
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is expressing concern over a recent upsurge in sectarian violence in Myanmar.
Carter spoke Friday during a visit to the Southeast Asian country, where dozens of people were killed last month when unrest between Buddhists and minority Muslims shook the central city of Meikhtila.
Buddhist mobs ransacked and burned mosques and Muslim homes during the violence. It spread south from Meikhtila but has since subsided.
Carter said he told President Thein Sein during a meeting Wednesday that “mutual respect, compassion, tolerance, and empathy are the basis for a democratic society.”
Carter also said he was disturbed about “reports of hate speech by some prominent people, even religious leaders.”
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Few imagined Myanmar would embrace democracy when the U.S. began its historic engagement with the military regime. The country’s rapid changes were lauded by visiting Western leaders, and the nation’s president was hailed as a hero. But spasms of spreading, communal violence show the reform path is bumpier that expected and have taken the sheen off a foreign policy success of the Obama administration’s first term.
While Washington says the country’s overall direction is still positive, some experts worry Myanmar risks backsliding toward military rule that ended two years ago.
In the past two weeks, violence between Buddhists and Muslims has left dozens dead. Thousands of refugees of an earlier spate of sectarian bloodletting are fleeing on rickety boats. And in a key concern to U.S. policymakers, the country’s murky military ties with North Korea continue.
Washington has been at the forefront of international efforts to encourage the country also known as Burma to open up to the world and ease controls on its 60 million people. Thursday marks the anniversary of the historic U.S. announcement that it was normalizing diplomatic relations — the first in a series of diplomatic rewards in response to reforms. That culminated in the suspension of economic sanctions and in November, the first visit to Myanmar by a U.S. president.
The benefits of reforms have been clear. President Thein Sein‘s government has released hundreds of political prisoners, eased restrictions on the press and freedom of assembly and brokered cease-fires with most of the nation’s ethnic insurgencies. After years of house arrest, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been elected to parliament, which is performing its role with vigor.
But the rapid pace of change has also been accompanied by chaos, as ugly sectarian tensions have surfaced.
Human rights groups and a U.N. envoy have criticized the Myanmar government‘s failure to prevent attacks mostly on minority Muslims by majority Buddhists. Sectarian violence in western Rakhine state last year killed hundreds and drove more than 100,000 Rohingya Muslims from their homes, intensifying long-running persecution of the stateless minority group. In an ominous development, Muslim-Buddhist violence spread in March to central Myanmar, killing dozens more.
The government‘s emergency response has been slow and some fear the unrest could spiral.
“If the new government and opposition can’t fashion an effective response to this violence that brings justice and accountability, then it seems likely …read more
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Myanmar’s decades-long state monopoly on daily newspapers will be broken Monday as four privately owned dailies launch.
There have been no privately owned dailies in the country since it came under military rule in the 1960s.
President Thein Sein took office in March 2011 as head of an elected civilian regime. Political and economic liberalization were at the top of his agenda, in an effort to boost national development.
The government announced in December that any Myanmar national wishing to publish a daily newspaper was welcome to apply and could begin publishing on April 1.
There were approvals for 16 papers, including dailies to be put out by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party and Thein Sein‘s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party.
Myanmar’s government on Saturday rejected remarks by a U.N. human rights official suggesting that the authorities bear some blame for recent mob attacks by Buddhists on minority Muslims that killed dozens of people.
The U.N. official, Tomas Ojea Quintana, urged Myanmar’s government on Friday to investigate allegations that security forces watched as Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims. He also said the government needed to do more to protect the country’s Muslims.
Deputy Information Minister Ye Htut said on his Facebook page Saturday that he “strongly rejected” the comments by Quintana, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar.
Ye Htut, who is also the presidential spokesman, wrote that it was “saddening that Mr. Quintana made his comments based on hearsay without assessing the situation on the ground.”
He added that such remarks amounted to ignoring efforts by the government, security personnel, religious leaders and civil society organizations trying to restore order.
The state-run Kyemon newspaper said Saturday that 43 people had died and 86 were injured since rioting first flared on March 20 in the central town of Meikhtila. It said there were 163 incidents of violence in 15 townships in the country, with 1,355 buildings damaged or destroyed.
It reported that a few attacks against “religious buildings,” shops and houses continued Friday, a day after President Thein Sein declared that his government would use force if necessary to quell the rioting, which was sparked by a dispute between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers.
The report said soldiers and police had to shoot into the air to disperse the mobs Friday, though no casualties were reported.
Thein Sein warned in a televised address Thursday that efforts by “political opportunists” and “religious extremists” who tried to sow hatred would not be tolerated.
Quintana welcomed Thein Sein‘s public call for the violence to stop, but said authorities “need to do much more” to keep the violence from spreading and undermining the reform process.
“The government has simply not done enough to address the spread of discrimination and prejudice against Muslim communities,” Ojea Quintana said in his statement. He also called on the government to look into allegations that soldiers and police stood by “while atrocities have been committed …read more
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When Myanmar’s post-junta government took power two years ago vowing to bring democracy to one of the world’s most repressed nations, Da Shi Naw was under no illusion his own life would improve any time soon. But the 61-year-old farmer never dreamed it would actually get worse — a lot worse.
First, a 17-year cease-fire between the army and ethnic Kachin guerrillas relapsed into fighting that tore through his family’s fertile rice fields, forcing him to flee into the mountains on foot. Then, after a year in a packed displaced camp far from home, war edged close once more.
Government troops began pounding rebel positions near the Kachin stronghold of Laiza with artillery and airstrikes that shook the ground here until late January. The battles triggered such a panic, authorities took the extraordinary step of urging people to dig their own bomb shelters.
And so, one cold day when camp administrators began handing out shovels, Da Shi Naw, humbled by fate, began plowing the ground a few steps from his tiny hut. He dug a rectangular cavity into the earth, a simple, makeshift hide covered with bamboo poles just big enough to climb into with his wife and their two-year-old grandson.
“We have nowhere left to run,” he told The Associated Press, “We have begun to lose hope.”
Two years into President Thein Sein‘s historic term as Myanmar’s first civilian president in half a century, this Southeast Asian nation has moved closer to democratic rule than any other time since a 1962 army coup. Although few initially believed that Thein Sein, a former general, was sincere about reform when he took office on March 30, 2011, his administration has since orchestrated a top-down revolution that has stunned the world and given hope to millions of people, allowing freedoms unheard of just a few years ago.
Yet even as Myanmar basks in world praise and foreign investors rush in, some parts of the country have taken phenomenally tragic turns for the worse — plagued by explosions of ethnic and sectarian violence so grave, the government has acknowledged they threaten the very process of reform itself.
Here in the north, where the army is still battling rebels of the Kachin Independence Army, residents do not speak of the country’s newfound freedoms. There is no talk of economic liberalization, of the end of censorship or the suspension of western sanctions. There is no discussion, either, of opposition leader Aung …read more
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The day San Zaw Htwe was arrested he tried to chew through the leg of the wooden chair he was shackled to. He could hear a river outside. He figured he could swim away and escape the little room and the big men and the terrible certainty of years in prison.
The former student activist holds up a bony finger. “There was only this much left,” he says, breaking into a toothy smile at the memory of the chair leg. “They kicked me. My chair and I fell over.” Then his interrogators shackled him to a log. He would serve 12 years for distributing anti-government leaflets.
San Zaw Htwe will turn 39 on Saturday, the second anniversary of the day President Thein Sein took office and pledged to transform Myanmar from a military dictatorship into a free-market democracy. Thein Sein‘s administration has made remarkable progress toward that goal, but at a price that San Zaw Htwe knows only too well: forgetting the past.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is part of “Portraits of Change,” a yearlong series by The Associated Press examining how the opening of Myanmar after decades of military rule is — and is not — changing life in the long-isolated Southeast Asian country.
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Two years into Thein Sein‘s four-year term, reform in Myanmar has taken on an enchanting momentum. Released from house arrest, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a seat in parliament. The media censorship office is shut. Most Western sanctions have been lifted, and foreign investors are pouring into this once-shunned Southeast Asian nation, eager to build hotels and airports, drill for natural gas and sell cars, beer, soda, medical devices and mobile phone connections.
Lost in this great forward movement is a reckoning with the past. For half a century, Myanmar was ruled by one of the most repressive governments in history. Torture was common. Thousands of political prisoners were jailed without fair trial. And a handful of men, both military and their friends, amassed fortunes, sometimes brutally and often dishonestly.
Myanmar’s ongoing transformation has been largely managed from above, by some of the very men and institutions implicated in abuses. Many fear that dredging up the past could imperil reform. For now at least, silence seems the best way to shore up progress.
Soldiers have pulled more bodies from the wreckage of a riot-hit city in central Myanmar, bringing the death toll from recent sectarian violence to 40.
The New Light of Myanmar newspaper said Tuesday that eight more bodies were found in Meikhtila as soldiers continued to clear devastated areas set ablaze by anti-Muslim mobs during three days of rioting last week.
Amid fears of spreading violence, shop owners in the largest city, Yangon, were told to close Monday evening by 8:30 p.m. or 9 p.m.
The fears appeared unfounded but most Yangon shops remained closed Tuesday due to a national holiday.
The upsurge in sectarian unrest casts a shadow over President Thein Sein‘s administration as it struggles to make democratic changes after a half-century of military rule.
The New Light of Myanmar newspaper is seeking joint venture partners as it gears up for competition. The newspaper for decades has held a monopoly on Myanmar’s English-language daily press.
A notice from the Information Ministry published Monday in state newspapers solicited expressions of interest from foreign and local partners for joint venture operation of the publication. The newspaper has a reputation as a stodgy government mouthpiece.
At least eight newspapers have been given permission to print daily editions starting next month for the first time since 1964.
President Thein Sein‘s elected government has significantly relaxed media controls since taking power in 2011. It lifted censorship in August last year, allowing reporters to print material that would have been unthinkable during the five previous decades of military rule.
Anti-Muslim mobs rampaged through three more towns in Myanmar’s predominantly Buddhist heartland over the weekend, destroying mosques and burning dozens of homes despite government efforts to stop the nation’s latest outbreak of sectarian violence from spreading.
President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in central Myanmar on Friday and deployed army troops to the worst hit city, Meikhtila, where 32 people were killed and 10,000 mostly Muslim residents were displaced. But even as soldiers imposed order there after several days of anarchy that saw armed Buddhists torch the city’s Muslim quarters, anti-Muslim unrest has spread south toward the capital, Naypyitaw.
A Muslim resident of Tatkone, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Meikhtila, said by telephone that a group of about 20 men ransacked a one-story brick mosque there late Sunday night, pelting it with stones and smashing windows before soldiers fired shots to drive them away. Speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, he said he believed the perpetrators were not from Tatkone.
A day earlier, another mob burned down a mosque and 50 homes in the nearby town of Yamethin, state television reported. Another mosque and several buildings were also destroyed the same day in Lewei, farther south. It was not immediately clear who was behind the violence, and no clashes or casualties were reported in the three towns.
The upsurge in sectarian unrest is casting a shadow over Thein Sein‘s administration as it struggles to bring democratic reform the Southeast Asian country after half a century of army rule officially ended two years ago this month.
Two similar episodes rocked western Rakhine state last year, pitting ethnic Rakhine Buddhists against Rohingya Muslims in bloodshed that killed hundreds and drove 100,000 from their homes.
The Rohingya are widely denigrated as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and most are denied passports as a result. The Muslim population of central Myanmar, by contrast, is mostly of Indian origin and does not face the same questions over nationality.
The emergence of sectarian conflict beyond Rakhine state is an ominous development, one that indicates anti-Muslim sentiment has intensified nationwide since last year and, if left unchecked, could spread.
Sectarian and ethnic tensions are not new in Myanmar.
Muslims account for about four percent of the nation’s roughly 60 million people, and during the long …read more
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Deep in the lawless mountains of the Golden Triangle, sloping fields of illegal poppies have just been scraped dry for opium. This is the peak season for producing drugs here, and in Myanmar’s nascent era of democratic change, the haul has gotten only bigger.
Opium, its derivative heroin and methamphetamines are surging across Myanmar’s borders in quantities that the United Nations and police in neighboring countries say are the highest levels in years.
Two years after replacing a long-ruling military junta, the civilian government is still struggling to get a foothold in its war against drugs. The trade is centered in a remote, impoverished area where the government has little control and where ethnic armies have waged civil wars for decades — wars financed with drug money.
The Associated Press was granted rare access to Myanmar’s drug-producing hub in the vast, jungle-clad mountain region of northeastern Shan state, deep in a cease-fire zone that was closed to foreigners for decades. It’s a land dotted with makeshift methamphetamine labs and tiny, poor villages where growing opium is the only real industry. The trip was part of a U.N. mission allowed only under armed police escort.
President Thein Sein has signed cease-fire agreements with a patchwork of rebel groups in the region, but the peace is extremely fragile and sporadic fighting continues. Cracking down on drug syndicates or arresting poor opium farmers risks alienating the ethnic groups he is courting for peace talks.
“To stop the drug problem, we need peace. And that is what the government is trying to achieve now,” said police Col. Myint Thein, head of the Central Committee for Drug Abuse and Control, which controls the country’s drug policy. “But that is just one of so many challenges. This is a very difficult task. It will take time.”
Foreign aid that could help combat drugs is just beginning to trickle back into the area, which is rife with corruption. But the toughest task may be transforming the destitute rural economy, filled with poor farmers who view growing opium as the best way to provide for their families.
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Dozens of those farmers live in Thon Min Yar, a village in southern Shan state that is far in every sense from Myanmar’s postcard-perfect pagodas and colonial relics. So obscure it does not appear on maps, it is an image of dirt-road squalor and government …read more
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The top UN envoy to Myanmar on Sunday toured a central city destroyed in the country’s worst explosion of Buddhist-Muslim violence this year, calling on the government to punish those responsible for a tragedy that left dozens of corpses piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition.
Vijay Nambiar, the U.N. secretary-general’s special adviser on Myanmar, also visited some of the nearly 10,000 people driven from their homes after sectarian unrest shook the city of Meikhtila for several days this week. Most of the displaced are minority Muslims, who appeared to have suffered the brunt of the violence as armed Buddhist mobs roamed city.
Nambiar said he was encouraged to learn that some individuals in both communities had bravely helped each other and that religious leaders were now advocating peace. He said the people he spoke to believe the violence “was the work of outsiders,” but he gave no details.
“There is a certain degree of fear and anxiety among the people, but there is no hatred,” Nambiar said after visiting both groups on Sunday and promising the United Nations would provide as much help as it can to get the city back on its feet. “They feel a sense of community and that it is a very good thing because they have worked together and lived together.”
But he added: “It is important to catch the perpetrators. It is important that they be caught and punished.”
Nambiar’s visit came one day after the army took control of the city to enforce a tense calm after President Thein Sein ordered a state of emergency here.
Late Saturday, the government put the death toll in the violence at 32, according to state television, which reported that bodies had been found as authorities began cleaning up the area.
The bloodshed marked the first sectarian unrest to spread into Myanmar’s heartland since two similar episodes rocked western Rakhine state last year. It is the latest challenge to efforts to reform the Southeast Asian country after the long-ruling military ceded power two years ago to a civilian government led by retired army officers.
There are concerns the violence could spread, and the bloodshed has raised questions about the government‘s failure to rein in anti-Muslim sentiment in a predominantly Buddhist country where even monks have armed themselves and taken advantage of newfound freedoms to stage anti-Muslim rallies.
Burma‘s president declared a state of emergency Friday in a central city shaken by sectarian bloodshed that has killed at least 20 people, as thousands of minority Muslims fled and overwhelmed riot police crisscrossed the still-burning town seizing machetes and hammers from enraged Buddhist mobs.
Black smoke and flames poured from destroyed buildings in Meikhtila, where the unrest between local Buddhist and Muslim residents erupted Wednesday — the latest challenge to Burma‘s ever-precarious transition to democratic rule.
Little appeared to be left of some palm tree-lined neighborhoods, where whole plots were reduced to smoldering masses of twisted debris and ash. Broken glass, destroyed motorcycles and overturned tables littered roads beside rows of burnt-out homes and shops, evidence of the widespread chaos of the last two days.
The devastation was reminiscent of strikingly similar scenes last year in western Burma, where sectarian violence between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya left hundreds of people dead. More than 100,000 people are still displaced from that conflict, almost all of them Muslim.
Human rights groups had warned that unrest in the west could spread to other parts of the country, and last year, prominent Buddhist monks rallied against Muslims in the central Burma town of Mandalay. The clashes in Meikhtila are the first reported outside of western Burma since then.
It was not immediately clear which side bore the brunt of the latest violence, but terrified Muslims, who make about 30 percent of Meikhtila’s 100,000 inhabitants, stayed off the streets Friday as their shops and homes continued to burn and angry Buddhist residents and monks prevented authorities from putting out the blazes.
Trucks of police stood guard outside the blackened, empty hulk of one aqua-colored mosque, one of at least five torched this week by Buddhist gangs.
Win Htein, a local lawmaker from the opposition National League for Democracy, said he had counted at least 20 bodies. He said 1,200 Muslim families — at least 6,000 people — have fled their homes and taken refuge at a stadium and a police station.
An unknown number of Buddhists, meanwhile, sought refuge inside the city’s shrines.
“The situation is unpredictable and dangerous,” said Sein Shwe, a shop owner. “We don’t feel safe and we have now moved inside a monastery.”
The government‘s struggle to contain the violence is proving another major challenge for President Thein Sein‘s reformist administration as it attempts to chart a path to democracy after nearly half a century of military rule that once crushed all dissent.
Thein Sein took office two years ago this month, and despite ushering in an era of reform, he has faced not only violence in Rakhine state, but an upsurge in fighting with ethnic Kachin rebels in the north and major protests at a northern copper mine where angry residents — emboldened by promises of freedom of expression — have come out to denounce land grabbing.
The troubles in Meikhtila began Wednesday after an argument broke out between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers. A Buddhist monk was among the first killed, inflaming tensions that …read more
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By Matt Cantor 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
By The Huffington Post News Editors
MEIKHTILA, Myanmar — Burning fires from two days of Buddhist-Muslim violence that killed at least 20 people smoldered across a central Myanmar town Friday as residents cowered indoors amid growing fears the country’s latest bout of sectarian bloodshed could spread.
The government’s struggle to contain the unrest in Meikhtila is proving another major challenge President Thein Sein‘s reformist administration as it attempts to chart a path to democracy after nearly half a century of military rule that once crushed all dissent.
Myanmar’s parliament has endorsed a presidential decision to abandon the use of so-called Foreign Exchange Certificates, a special currency primarily used by tourists.
The director of President Thein Sein‘s office, Zaw Htay, says parliament unanimously agreed Wednesday with a presidential letter announcing the plan.
The Foreign Exchange Certificates were introduced in 1993 in an effort to stop tourists from exchanging currency on the black market, where the value of the dollar was considerably higher than its official rate against the kyat. It was mandatory until 2003 for tourists to buy at least $200 worth.
Last year, however, President Thein Sein‘s reformist government abandoned the two-tier exchange system that kept the official value of the kyat artificially high, and instituted a managed floating exchange rate system.
Australia plans to restore limited military cooperation with Myanmar and increase business ties with the Southeast Asian nation.
President Thein Sein on Sunday became the first Myanmar leader to visit Australia since 1974. He held a rare news conference beside Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday at Australia‘s Parliament House.
Gillard said in recognition of Myanmar’s moves toward democracy, Australia will soon post a defense attache to the Australian Embassy in Myanmar. But Australia‘s arms embargo on Myanmar will remain.
She said: “Australia wants to encourage the development of a modern, professional defense force in Myanmar, which continues to support democratization and reform.”
Thein Sein asked for Australian understanding of the political challenges facing his resource rich but impoverished country.
Opponents of a nearly $1 billion copper mine in northwestern Myanmar expressed outrage Tuesday over a government-ordered report that said the project should continue and that refrained from demanding punishment for police involved in a violent crackdown on protesters.
Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi chaired the investigation commission that produced the report, which was released late Monday night. It could pose a problem for Suu Kyi by identifying her with the pro-growth policies of the government against the interests of grass-roots people’s movements.
President Thein Sein appointed the commission after police cracked down on protesters at the Letpadaung mine Nov. 29, leaving scores hospitalized with serious burns. Thwe Thwe Win, a protest leader, said Tuesday that demonstrations will resume.
“I am very dissatisfied and it is unacceptable,” she said. “There is no clause that will punish anyone who had ordered the violent crackdown. Action should be taken against the person who gave the order.”
Suu Kyi is scheduled to travel to the mine area, in Monywa township, 760 kilometers (450 miles) north of Yangon, to talk with the protesting villagers Wednesday.
Protesters say the mine, a joint venture between China‘s Wan Bao mining company and a Myanmar military conglomerate, causes environmental, social and health problems and should be shut down.
The report said the operation should not be halted, even as it acknowledged that the mine lacked strong environmental protection measures and would not create more jobs for local people. The report said scrapping the mine could create tension with China and could discourage badly needed foreign investment.
Those seeking to stop the project contend that the $997 million joint venture deal, signed in May 2010, did not undergo parliamentary scrutiny because it was concluded under the previous military regime.
Many in Myanmar remain suspicious of the military and regard China as an aggressive and exploitative investor that helped support its rule.
“The commission should think about the welfare of their own people, poor local villagers, rather than good relations with China,” Thwe Thwe said.
Aung Thein, an activist lawyer who works with the protesters, said the assertion that the contract should be honored to maintain good relations was “meaningless.”
