The emergence of Harakah al Yaqin, the first Rohingya Muslim insurgent group to organise in Myanmar in decades, signals a dangerous new phase in a crisis that is increasingly attracting the attention of extremists in Pakistan and the Middle East. Myanmar policemen stand in a check point outside Rohingya refugee camp in Sittwe, Myanmar March 3, 2017.
Category: Aung San Suu Kyi
Suu Kyi urges Myanmar armed ethnic groups to sign cease-fire
Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, standing by a portrait of her late father and national hero Gen. Aung San and the Panglong monument, delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of Union Day Sunday, Feb.12, 2017, in Panglong, Southern Shan State, over 800 kilometers northeast of Yangon, Myanmar.
Gunman assassinates key Muslim lawyer for Myanmar’s ruling party at airport
Myanmar Police stand guard at the forensic department of a hospital holding the body of Ko Ni, a prominent member of Myanmar’s Muslim minority and legal adviser for Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy, in Yangon Sunday. A gunman killed a legal adviser for Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy on Sunday, shooting the lawyer in the head at close range as he walked out of the Yangon airport, the government said.
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Burma is expected to see economic growth of 6.9 percent in 2017, down 1.5 points from a previous estimate, according to the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report released earlier this month. The report said that real-term growth in 2016 was estimated to be 6.5 percent, down 1.3 percentage points from an earlier estimate in June last year, the Nikkei Asia Review reported.
Leadership change looms for armed group key to Myanmar’s peace process
Myanmar’s strongest ethnic armed group is set for its biggest leadership shake-up in a quarter century, senior sources told Reuters, raising the prospect of a period of instability in a group that is key to Aung San Suu Kyi’s signature peace process. The United Wa State Army boasts some 30,000 soldiers who control a secretive, China-dominated statelet the size of Belgium in the remote hills on Myanmar’s eastern border.
Public Consultations Precede National Level Dialogue in Dawei
Two days of discussions are being held at the district level from Jan. 5-6, with government officials, political parties, Karen and Mon ethnic armed organizations and civil society groups participating. In late December, the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee , led by State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, formed regional political dialogue monitoring committees for Karen State in southeast, Tenasserim Division in the south and in Naypyidaw.
Video prompts Myanmar to investigate police brutality against Rohingya villagers
The Myanmar government has launched an investigation into police brutality against members of the Muslim Rohingya minority after video has emerged that appears to show police beating civilians in the west of the country. The selfie-style video was filmed on November 5, according to the office of State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, and after it was posted to YouTube on Saturday, quickly went viral.
Myanmar to investigate police abuse of Rohingya
Myanmar’s government on Monday pledged to investigate a video apparently showing police beating and kicking Rohingya civilians, a rare admission that authorities may have carried out abuses against the Muslim minority. Tens of thousands of people from the persecuted ethnic group — loathed by many of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority — have fled a military operation in Rakhine state launched after attacks on police posts.
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JULY 31: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic makes an initial appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on July 31, 2008 in The Hague, The Netherlands. Karadzic was formally charged on 11 counts for war crimes commited during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, following his arrest in Belgrade last week and extradition to the Netherlands after evading capture for 13 years.
Suu Kyi has to rein in the violence
The Myanmar government and Association of Southeast Asian Nations are struggling to find adequate solutions to the Rohingya crisis, but mere diplomacy is unlikely to help the benighted Muslim population concentrated in northeastern Rakhine state. The United Nations’ Human Rights Office claims to be receiving daily reports of rapes, murders and other horrors.