By Human Rights Watch

May 8, 2017

Protect Religious Freedom, End Restrictions Targeting Minorities

Rangoon – The Burmese government should immediately reopen two madrasas, or Islamic religious schools, that local authorities sealed off in Rangoon on April 28, 2017, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should publicly commit to protecting the right to freedom of religion for all religious communities in Burma, including in worship, observance, practice, and teaching.

In late April, a mob of about 50 to 100 Buddhist ultranationalists put pressure on local officials and police in Rangoon’s Thaketa Township to close the two madrasas. The ultranationalists alleged Muslim community members were using the schools to conduct prayers, which they claimed violated an agreement signed by the schools’ leaders last year. The authorities carried out the mob’s demand and have not reopened the schools, denying a reported several hundred students their education.

“Burmese local officials’ craven capitulation to mob demands to shutter two Muslim schools is the latest government failure to protect Burma’s religious minorities,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director. “The government should immediately reverse these closures, end restrictions on the practice of minority religions, and prosecute Buddhist ultranationalists who break the law in the name of religion.”

Claims by Buddhist ultranationalist groups that the shutdowns were lawful because madrasa leaders had signed a document in October 2015 agreeing not use the schools for prayer provide no justification for their closure. Even if the agreement was not signed under duress, as evidence suggests, it would be an infringement on the Muslim community’s basic rights to religious freedom. The media reported that Buddhist ultranationalists had previously pressured local officials about whether prayers were being said at the two madrasas.

Tin Myo Aung, 45, a security officer at one of the schools, told Human Rights Watch that a crowd of Buddhist ultranationalists appeared at about 4 p.m. outside the school he was guarding. As they grew more agitated he became worried, before the police arrived. At about 6 p.m. the police padlocked the schools to prevent anyone from entering. An altercation between some Buddhist ultranationalists and a reporter from the Associated Press did not escalate. A school committee member told Human Rights Watch that the authorities said the closure was temporary but gave no timeline for the schools’ reopening.

Human Rights Watch visited Thaketa Township on April 29 and observed dozens of police outside both schools. Just after 11 a.m., local authorities and school representatives, along with individuals identified by local residents as Buddhist ultranationalists, entered the schools to examine them. After they emerged, the officials replaced the locks and put yellow tape and barricades around the entrances. Police outside the schools have since refused to allow Muslim community members, including those whose children attend the schools, to enter.

The school committee member told Human Rights Watch that the schools immediately sent a letter to the Rangoon Region chief minister’s office requesting to have the schools reopened. However, so far they have not received a response. Tin Myo Aung said that several hundred children between the ages of 5 and 12 ordinarily attend the two schools. The closures deny children their right to an education.

Wunna Shwe, 54, joint secretary general of the Islamic Religious Affairs Council, said that closures like this are not uncommon in Burma, and that they also affect other minority religious groups, such as Christians.

“According to our experience, madrasas that are sealed or closed almost never open again,” Wunna Shwe said. He added that since violence in Taungoo, Bago Region, in 2001 caused the government to seal ten mosques, only four have since been reopened.

Human Rights Watch repeatedly telephoned the Rangoon police information committee, but no one was willing to comment on the incident.

“Burmese authorities and police have repeatedly shown they are unwilling to confront Buddhist ultranationalists inciting violence against Muslims and other religious minorities,” Robertson said. “In doing so the government has failed to protect the rights to freedom of religion and education and provide basic security to all of its people. Burma’s leaders can’t sit back and wait for the next round of violence against a minority group; they need to take proactive steps to address religious tensions and disputes so that all can practice their religion peacefully and safely.”

Muslims in Burma

During the British colonial period and early years after independence in 1948, Muslims held high positions in Burma’s government and civil society. They were in the forefront of the fight for independence from the British. After independence, Muslims continued to play a prominent role in the country’s business, industrial, and cultural activities. Many were public servants, soldiers, and officers. After General Ne Win seized power in 1962, he initiated the systematic expulsion of Muslims from the government and army. No written directive bars Muslims from entry or promotion in the government, but that has long been the practice. In 2001, Human Rights Watch documented anti-Muslim violence in various parts of the country that left dozens of mosques and madrasas destroyed.

According to government census data collected in 2014, Muslims make up just over 2 percent of the population of Burma, which is about 90 percent Buddhist. However, that figure does not include more than one million Muslims who are Rohingya, a largely stateless ethnic group living primarily in Rakhine State. Christians make up just over 6 percent of the country’s population.

Burma is obligated under international human rights law to protect the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including the right to express religious belief in worship, observance, practice, and teaching. Protection of this right must be done in a nondiscriminatory way. The right is subject to limitations for the protection of public safety, order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. However, those restrictions must be prescribed by law, narrowly tailored to prevent a specific threat, and proportionate to the threat. Burmese officials have provided no information or evidence to suggest that the two Islamic schools posed any imminent threat.

Successive Burmese governments have repeatedly allowed Buddhist ultranationalist groups to prevent minority religious communities from choosing the places they worship, practice, or receive religious education. In its 2017 annual report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom again found pervasive discrimination against both Muslims and Christians in Burma.

Government regulations on venues for prayer and constructing religious buildings are opaque, often only explained orally by local officials, and have onerous requirements. Wunna Shwe told Human Rights Watch that there are no official written rules or regulations proscribing prayer at religious schools or restricting the construction of religious buildings, though some religious schools have been required to ask for permission to conduct prayers over limited periods of time. Burmese government authorities also prohibit construction of new mosques, and make it extremely difficult to get authorization to make repairs to existing religious buildings. Such restrictions have been in place since the early 1960s, and as a result there are many mosques in Burma that have fallen into severe disrepair, while others struggle to support growing Muslim communities.

For example, a leader at a mosque said that local authorities recently forced the mosque to tear up a concrete floor built to keep out rats. Officials had said the construction was illegal because the mosque did not receive permission before undertaking the project. Mosque leaders said this approval process involves no less than six approvals from nearly every level of local and regional governmental office – from the ward-level up to the Rangoon regional administrative office.

The forced closure of the two madrasas in Rangoon is part of a broader trend of pressure, intimidation, and violence perpetrated by Buddhist ultranationalist groups against Muslim communities. The most prominent such group, Ma Ba Tha, or the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, has been actively promoting discriminatory policies and fueling anti-Muslim sentiments. These have included a successful campaign to have enacted four rights-abusing “race and religion laws,” signed into law in May and August 2015, which inordinately target Muslims and other religious minorities, violate women’s rights, and encourage Buddhist ultranationalist groups to pressure local officials to enforce the laws.

Successive waves of violence against Muslim populations in various parts of the country, but particularly against Rohinyga Muslims in Burma’s western Rakhine State, have left many mosques razed and communities without places to worship. Violence in June 2012 between Buddhist and Muslims in Rakhine State was followed in October 2012 by coordinated attacks against the Rohingya by Rakhine Buddhist mobs backed by the police and military. Human Rights Watch found that the assaults on Rohingya communities in October amounted to “ethnic cleansing” and crimes against humanity. Thousands of buildings were burned, displacing over 140,000 people, most of whom were Rohingya and Kaman Muslims.

In 2013, clashes between Muslims and Buddhists in Meiktila, Mandalay Region, resulted in dozens killed and over 800 buildings destroyed. Further attacks against Muslim communities over the course of the year occurred in April in Okkan village, Sagaing Region; in May in Lashio, Shan State; in August in Htan Gone village, Sagaing Region; and in October in Thandwe Township, Rakhine State. In July 2014, a Buddhist mob attacked a Muslim house in the city of Mandalay.

In late June and early July 2016, mobs destroyed two mosques in the same week, one in Bago Region, the other in Kachin State.

In October 2016, after a Rohingya militant group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked three border posts in northern Rakhine State, Burmese security forces engaged in a campaign of arson, torture, extrajudicial killings, and rape. In March 2017, the United Nations passed a resolution to dispatch a fact-finding mission to investigate these attacks and other abuses, which a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said very likely amounted to crimes against humanity.

By Sally Kantar

The Irrawaddy

May 8, 2017

Activists and refugees demonstrated as State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was presented with the Freedom of the City of London award on Monday, calling the recognition “disappointing” in light of ongoing abuses against ethnic and religious minorities, journalists and rights activists in Burma.

“I’m so disappointed. She needs to stand on her moral ground—people have been dying, people have been raped,” said Ko Aung, an 88-Generation student activist and former security assistant of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who, before moving to the UK nearly 20 years ago, spent seven years as a political prisoner in Burma.

Along with the Kachin National Organization (KNO), Burma Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), and the charity Restless Beings, Ko Aung helped organize Monday’s demonstration in central London. It was attended by around 40 people who opposed the award, citing reports of abuses in Burma which they say have continued since the elected National League for Democracy-led (NLD) government took office more than one year ago.

Chanting “Aung San Suu Kyi, shame on you,” they stood on the chilly London street corner for nearly three hours, holding signs calling for a release of political prisoners, a halt to religious hate speech, and an end to military violence against different ethnic nationalities, including the Kachin, Ta’ang (Palaung), Rohingya and Shan.

“We have a chance to cooperate here. In Burma, we had no chance,” said Ring Du Lachyung, chairperson of the KNO, regarding the attendance of demonstrators from various religious and ethnic backgrounds. “We are the same victims of military perpetrators,” he added.

The Freedom of the City honor, which dates back nearly 800 years, was awarded to Daw Aung Suu Kyi in a private ceremony in London’s Guildhall, to which a spokesperson for the city of London confirmed to The Irrawaddy that no media was invited. Fellow Nobel Peace laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have also received the same award.

Ring Du Lachyung told The Irrawaddy at the protest that he objected to the State Counselor receiving a “freedom” award from the city of London, when, “in reality, they don’t recognize the freedom of the Kachin.”

“The UK government should stand with us, but they stand with her,” said Daw Khin Hla, a former schoolteacher from conflict-torn Buthidaung Township in Arakan State and current member of BROUK, on why she had decided to protest the event, adding, “they aren’t accepting our suffering.”

The State Counselor has come under increasing international criticism for a stalled peace process with ethnic armed groups, continued military clashes and displacement of civilians in the country’s north, and increased arrests of journalists under the country’s defamation law. At an EU press conference on May 2, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also said that she would “disassociate” from a United Nations fact-finding mission mandated to investigate recent reports of rape, extrajudicial killings, arson and torture by security forces against the Rohingya community in Arakan State in late 2016 and early 2017.

In an April interview with the BBC, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi rejected assertions that crimes against the Muslim minority in northern Arakan State amounted to ethnic cleansing, and her government has repeatedly described the issues as an “internal affair.”

Two counter-protesters at the London demonstration echoed these sentiments and said they had come to “support Daw Aung San Suu Kyi” and to “condemn” the protest.

“Aung San Suu Kyi is our legitimate leader,” said Htein Lin, who came to London as a refugee in 2007, but denounced the Rohingya who have also sought asylum in the UK, saying, “they are not a real nationality.”

‘Screened From Criticism’

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arrived in London on Friday night—after previously visiting Belgium, the Vatican and Italy—and, according to Burmese state media, was met by a delegation at Heathrow airport, including U Kyaw Zwa Min, Burma’s ambassador to the UK.

When The Irrawaddy contacted the Burmese embassy in London to inquire about the State Counselor’s visit, this reporter was told that the embassy knew “nothing” of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s schedule or public engagements during her trip.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is reportedly staying at The Dorchester hotel for the duration of her time in the British capital. It is the same establishment in which her father, the late independence leader Gen Aung San, and his delegation stayed in January 1947 during the trip in which he negotiated an agreement with then Prime Minister Clement Attlee guaranteeing independence for Burma by within one year. Weeks later, he signed the Panglong Agreement in Shan State, promising ethnic nationalities equality and autonomy within a federal Union.

It is said that during his weeks at the establishment 70 years ago, Aung San invited members of the Burmese community in London to The Dorchester to share meals, music and memories of their homeland.

Activists have noted that his daughter’s trip—her third to the UK in the last five years—has been considerably more guarded.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is scheduled to meet “select” members of the Burmese community on Tuesday, but at the time of reporting it remained unclear who would be attending the event.

Not invited, said those at the protest, are members of the Burmese Muslim and the Kachin communities in London.

Ko Aung, who remembers “working tirelessly” for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s release when she was under 15 years of military-imposed house arrest, met her during her trip to the UK in 2012, but will not be attending Tuesday’s gathering.

Mark Farmaner, director of advocacy organization Burma Campaign UK (BCUK), which was not involved with Monday’s protest, confirmed to The Irrawaddy that his organization had also not been invited to any events relating to the State Counselor’s London visit.

“[The Burmese embassy] is not making official approaches to community organizations,” he said in an email. “She won’t be meeting a representative group and is being screened from criticism.”

BCUK published ten questions in a statement for British officials to consider during the State Counselor’s trip to London. It highlighted the continued detention of political prisoners, restrictions on aid to communities displaced by conflict in Arakan, Kachin, and Shan states, an increase in prosecutions under the country’s Article 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, the continued use of a visa ban list affecting diaspora activists, and the rejection of the United Nations fact-finding mission.

Reuters reported that the State Counselor met the UK’s Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace for lunch on Friday, and that they were joined by other members of the British royal family.

By AFP

May 8, 2017

London -- Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the honorary freedom of the City of London on Monday, as a small group of demonstrators protested outside about the treatment of minority Rohingya Muslims.

Myanmar's de facto leader received the award at the Guildhall, after meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and heir to the throne Prince Charles on Friday.

The award was in recognition of her "non-violent struggle over many years for democracy and her steadfast dedication to create a society where people can live in peace, security and freedom", the City of London said.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi is on a tour around Europe that has already taken her to Belgium, Italy and the Vatican City.

On Monday around 40 demonstrators protested outside the Guildhall, with signs reading "Free All Political Prisoners in Burma" and "Please Stop Military Burning of Rohingya Villages".

They chanted "Suu Kyi is lying; Rohingyas are dying" and said that people who had once supported her now opposed her.

"We believed that she would be a champion of human rights but she has been complicit with... the junta murdering innocent Rohingyas," one speaker said.

Last week Suu Kyi rejected a decision by the UN's rights council to investigate allegations of crimes by Myanmar's security forces against Rohingyas.

Myanmar is scheduled hold peace talks this month aimed at ending decades-long ethnic wars that have intensified since Suu Kyi's party took power a year ago.

Earlier on her Europe trip, she met Belgium's King Philippe and Prime Minister Charles Michel.

She also met European Council president Donald Tusk and European Commission foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini while in Brussels.

She then met Pope Francis and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni while in Rome on Thursday.

By David Nakamura

The Washington Post

May 7, 2017

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson welcomed officials from 10 Southeast Asian nations this week, a Burmese representative handed him a personalized letter. 

The author was Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and de facto leader of the nation’s civilian government, who wanted to express her regret for being absent due to a scheduling conflict, U.S. officials said.

The note represented rare direct communication between Suu Kyi and the Trump administration. As President Trump has made a flurry of calls to foreign leaders, he has yet to speak with Suu Kyi, who twice welcomed Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, to her lakeside villa in Rangoon as a powerful symbol of U.S. support for Burma’s slow, fitful transition from authoritarian military rule to fledgling democracy.

The Burma project remains fraught — political reforms have ebbed, and Suu Kyi has faced international criticism for failing to speak out more forcefully against ethnic violence directed toward the Muslim minority. And China continues to exert economic and political pressure on the neighboring nation of 54 million, also known as Myanmar.

From Capitol Hill to Rangoon, the question is whether the Trump administration will continue to nurture Burma’s transition or turn its back at a crucial juncture.

“The country wants it. It gives them a sense of confidence,” Derek Mitchell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Burma from 2012 to 2016, said of political support from Washington. “But the focus on things we care about, such as values and democracy and human rights, they don’t feel that with Trump. There’s a cost in losing all of that.”

Behind the scenes, Burma’s ambassador to Washington has been pressing the White House for more attention from high-level officials, a sign of Suu Kyi’s uncertainty about Trump’s public silence.

Trump aides emphasized that the president’s failure to contact her is not intended as a slight. On Friday, national security adviser H.R. McMaster hosted the Southeast Asian officials, including Burma’s representative, at the White House. Trump aides said the president, who was away at his estate in Bedminster, N.J., would have stopped by had he been in town.

The questions over Trump’s approach to Burma come as the administration is starting to formulate its broader policy stance toward Southeast Asia and what role the countries there may play in the U.S. effort to further isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically. Administration officials pointed to several signals in recent days that were intended to reassure the region that the White House would maintain a focus there even as it scrapped the Obama administration’s “Asia rebalance” policy aimed at deepening U.S. security and trade ties.

In Indonesia last month, Vice President Pence announced Trump would attend a trio of security and economic summits in Vietnam and the Philippines this fall.

Tillerson emphasized to the Southeast Asian officials that the administration would make a “sustained commitment” to the region, said W. Patrick Murphy, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Southeast Asia.

In a conference call with reporters, Murphy added that the administration’s relationship with Burma would be “enduring.”

In a separate interview, a senior White House official was more emphatic, emphasizing that Trump views Southeast Asia as “the most exciting component” in an emerging administration strategy for the broader Asia region.

This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s thinking, pointed to the combined population of more than 600 million among the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their fast-growing economies as key reasons for sustained U.S. engagement.

The Trump aide jokingly referred to the countries as the “swing states of Asia.”

“This is a region that is fairly firmly rooted in a liberal order,” the aide said. “Some of those countries have — I wouldn’t call it a Jeffersonian democracy, but they’re facing in that direction. Burma is an amazing success story that we want to build on.”

Yet the administration’s failure to produce a coherent foreign policy strategy has alarmed members of Congress who fear Burma will be neglected or mishandled as the White House focuses on containing North Korea’s mounting nuclear weapons threat.

In his first meeting with Tillerson, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told him, “Don’t forget about Burma,” according to people familiar with the conversation.

But McConnell, who helped shepherd the U.S. economic sanctions that prodded Burma’s military regime toward reforms, has been left trying to piece together where the administration is headed from scant public or private signals.

A Senate Republican leadership aide said that as the administration attempts to coax Beijing to do more to change North Korea’s behavior, it is unclear where Burma, whose opening to the West was once viewed as a hedge against China’s economic and military muscle, fits in.

“It’s a work in progress,” the Senate aide said. “It’s going to be slow going.”

Experts said Southeast Asian capitals remain wary of Trump’s motives, even as they were encouraged by his commitment to attending the regional summits.

“There’s a lot of concern over the way they’ve been engaged,” said Ernest Z. Bower, a Southeast Asia analyst and business consultant affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Officials in the region view Trump as “very transactional,” Bower added, and they fear Trump is wooing them solely to build international support for his administration’s push to further isolate North Korea.

Murphy, the State Department official, said the Southeast Asian representatives proactively raised the issue of North Korea in their meeting with Tillerson.

“We have heard from countries that they are taking steps, looking at the size of North Korea’s diplomatic presence and activities and commercial transactions,” Murphy said. “North Korea’s provocations threaten the peace and prosperity of the entire region. . . . We think more can be done.”

But some experts said the risk is that the Trump administration would reduce the emphasis on free speech and human rights as it pursues security cooperation. For example, Trump invited President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose administration has overseen a ruthless extrajudicial campaign that has killed thousands of suspected drug dealers, to visit the White House.

In Burma, the military, which retains 25 percent of the seats in parliament under the constitution, has long had ties to North Korea, including buying arms from Pyongyang.

Erin Murphy, a former State Department official who accompanied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a historic visit to Burma in 2011, said the Trump administration could seek to boost ties with the Burmese military as leverage against Pyongyang, an effort that could set back democratic reforms if not handled carefully.

“If you want to put the screws on North Korea — and the Trump administration has declared that a policy priority — you’d look at countries that are partners,” she said. “And if you look at that list, you would see Myanmar.”

By Reuters

May 5, 2017

Myanmar's government has warned the public that false news and rumors are being spread by unidentified people wishing to cause "political instability" during the tenure of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state-run media said on Friday.

Nobel laureate Suu Kyi took power in April 2016 as part of a transition from military rule.

Her first year in power has been beset by bureaucratic inertia, ethnic and religious tensions, and conflicts that have displaced tens of thousands, including an estimated 75,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh amid a military crackdown late last year.

Rumors emerged in recent days that President Htin Kyaw - who Suu Kyi picked for head of state - would step down. Suu Kyi directs the civilian administration in the specially created role of state counselor because the constitution - drafted by the still-powerful military - bars her from the presidency.

Police said they would prosecute those responsible for the information, which has spread quickly on online social networks that have grown in popularity amid expanding freedoms and internet access in Myanmar.

"False news regarding the president and the state counselor have been spread on purpose by using accounts with false names," Suu Kyi's office carried in the government's Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper on Friday.

It named two Facebook accounts that it said had published "fabricated news".

"It has been found that these acts are being done intentionally to cause political instability during the tenure of the incumbent government," Suu Kyi's office said, adding that the perpetrators wished to "create a situation among the people to live in fear and anxiety due to the spread of rumors".

Police Colonel Myo Thu Soe, national police spokesman, told Reuters an investigation was being launched and anyone intentionally spreading false news would be brought to court.

“We will conduct a focused and intensive search for those responsible for this,” Myo Thu Soe said.

(Reporting by Simon Lewis and Wa Lone; Editing by Robert Birsel)

By Asian Correspondent

May 5, 2017

FIREBRAND Buddhist-nationalist monk Ashin Wirathu has sparked concerns of religious clashes as he visits Burma’s troubled Rakhine State.

The ultranationalist anti-Islam campaigner, who has compared himself to Donald Trump and is labelled by some as the “Burmese Bin Laden”, arrived in the state where a million Muslims live on Wednesday.

“We are concerned about his trip because he always spreads hate of Muslims,” a Muslim leader in northern Rakhine told Reuters.

During clashes between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslim residents in 2012 which displaced 140,000 people, Wirathu went to Rakhine and delivered incendiary sermons, blaming violence on Muslims and calling for their deportation.

He is a senior figure in Ma Ba Tha movement of nationalist monks, which calls on its followers to boycott Muslim businesses in the name of “protecting race” and Theravada Buddhism in Burma.

Maungdaw police said they would provide security for the monk and his entourage during his visit, which the group claims is to “make donations” to Buddhist Arakanese villages. Wirathu’s party did not specify how long they intended to stay in the Rakhine.

The trip has stoked fears of emboldening hardline nationalists against the Rohingya, who they consider illegal immigrants and refer to as “Bengalis,” advocating that they be “returned” to Bangladesh despite living in Burma for centuries.

In March, the Arakan National Party led a rally against suggestions the Rohingya might be granted Burmese citizenship.

Under the country’s 1982 citizenship law, the minority group are not currently recognised as one of the national races.

Last Friday, Wirathu joined a group of around 100 monks and Buddhist nationalists who forcibly shut down four Islamic schools in Thaketa Township near Yangon.

The monk is also the head of the anti-Islam 969 movement. Wirathu told TIME magazine in 2013 that “you can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” referring to Muslim Burmese.

The UN has claimed that more than 1,000 Rohingya have been killed in the army’s operations in Rakhine, and at least 70,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh since late 2016.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

5 May 2017

London: On May 8 (12 noon-2 pm), UK-based rights activists and multi-ethnic refugees from Burma will be holding a rally at the Guildhall to protest the City of London honouring the Myanmar State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, with its Freedom of the City award. 

The “Freedom of the City” award was first recorded in AD 1237 and connected to the ancient trade associations. Honourees are “enrolled in a ceremony in Guildhall, when they receive a guide to conducting their lives in an honourable fashion”. 

The protest organizers say Aung San Suu Kyi has discarded her oft-touted Buddhist principles of compassion and truthfulness or universal human rights since entering into a partnership with the country’s most powerful military a year ago.

In its editorial on 3 May, the Guardian wrote, “when Aung San Suu Kyi was finally able to collect her Nobel peace prize in 2012, the committee’s chairman described how her “firmness of principle” in the struggle for human rights and democracy had made her “a moral leader for the whole world”. Since taking power in Myanmar, the former political prisoner’s moral credibility has been vastly diminished by her failure to even acknowledge the brutal persecution of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. A dozen fellow Nobel peace laureates have lamented her inaction in the face of “a human tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

Ring Du Lachyung, Chairman of the Kachin National Organization - UK, a well-known Kachin diaspora group, accuses the former Burmese human rights icon of “being complicit” in the Burma army’s war crimes against his Kachin people in Northern and Eastern Burma. “Since her first ever return to London in 2012, she has adamantly refused to condemn the Burmese military’s indiscriminate violence against our civilian communities including rape, air strikes, and shelling of churches,” said Ring Du. He stressed that “Suu Kyi chooses to ignore the fact that her military partners are the aggressor, who are attacking our (Kachin) communities in our ancestral homeland adjacent to India and China, in order to control our jade mines, fell our teak forests, extract hydropower from our rivers for generating and exporting electricity to China, and take over strategic border trade routes – without giving anything back to our Kachin people.”

Ko Aung, a prominent Burmese exile and former political prisoner, who has known the Burmese leader since he was a young university student activist during the country’s nationwide uprisings in 1988, said, “Suu Kyi has betrayed the cause of human rights in the name of political pragmatism. Her pragmatic politics have ruined her reputation without ushering in any tangible improvement in the lives of ordinary people or improving the general human rights conditions for democracy activists.”

Under Aung San Suu Kyi’s watch, human rights conditions are worsening not just for ethnic and religious minorities but also for Burmese human rights activists and journalists.

Despite the allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in ethnic minority regions and the persecution of journalists and rights activists, British companies are eager to expand their business ties with the Aung San Suu Kyi government. Reuters reported that the Anglo-Dutch consumer good maker Unilever (ULVR.L) (UNc.AS) just signed an expansive deal in Myanmar in order to triple its current annual sale revenues of 100 million euros (84.75 million pounds) by 2020.

Ring Du Lachyung, Kachin National Organization UK, 077 9235 7887

Tun Khin, Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, 078 8871 866

Marbur Ahmed, Restlessbeings, UK, 075 0610 0785

Ko Aung, Burmese dissident in exile & former Burmese political prisoner, 077 6209 4562

Rohingya refugees, displaced by violence in Myanmar, at a camp in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: UNHCR/Saiful Huq Omi

A boat off the coast of Myanmar’s Rakhine province. Photo: OCHA

CRUX

May 4, 2017

By Azeem Ibrahim

Al Arabiya

May 4, 2017

In late April, Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar Defense Services, General Min Aung Hlain, was received with much pageantry by his opposite numbers in both Austria and Germany during a good-will tour of the European countries. There were guard-of-honour, inspections of the troops, and then extensive introductions to senior military figures in both countries in turn.

It was not a typical exchange, but, as Myanmar continues to open up to the world, Western countries, especially European countries, have generally taken the view that the rulers of Myanmar, of which Gen Aung Hlain remains probably the most influential, despite the transition to civilian government in the country under Aung San Suu Kyi, should be encouraged to continue on the current course. And rewarding particular individuals in this way might be a sensible way to offer a carrot for the progress the country has made so far.

Or at least, this would all have been quite reasonable, were it not for the fact that Gen Aung Hlain was invited to a number of arms manufacturing facilities in both countries. There is currently still an embargo in place on the sale of armaments to Myanmar, but it is expected that this embargo will be lifted soon. So this was not just a diplomatic event. It was a business meeting.

But it may interest the Austrian and German officials to know who they are proposing to sell armaments and military training to. And if not the officials in those countries, it should certainly interest their citizens what their leaders are getting themselves into.

Gen Aung Hlain is in charge of the security services who are overseeing and are currently largely responsible for perpetrating one of the most serious abuses of human rights going on at the moment in the world: the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority from Myanmar.

‘The enemy within’

The dark-skinned, Muslim Rohingya have been the preferred “enemy within” of the succession of military juntas who have ruled the majority light-skinned, Buddhist country since the 1960s. Whenever the authorities needed to distract the people from the ways in which they were mismanaging the country, they used to instigate another conflict with the Rohingya, or with other minorities in the border regions.

But the Rohingya have been uniquely targeted for discrimination, most have been stripped of legal citizenship, they have severe restrictions imposed on them regarding travel, marriage and family size, movement within the country of Myanmar, restrictions on worship, and so on.

Yet the current level of outright violence, and especially of direct abuse by the authorities themselves, are at least as bad as they have ever been. Rapes and extrajudicial killings are routinely carried out by the military and police forces directly under the command of Gen Aung Hlain, as 70,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in just the last 6 months.

What is more, the move toward democracy and the opening toward the West of the country in the past couple of years has not alleviated the situation of the Rohingya at all. Quite the opposite. The Rohingya in Myanmar have never been in as precarious a situation as they are now in the entire history of their community. Despite what the West hoped would happen with the rise to power of Aung San Suu Kyi, the situation has only gotten worse.

And yet, Germany and Austria are proposing to arm the perpetrators of these human rights abuses, and to train them too. Even as they show no movement towards ending the current wave of abuse, nor any acknowledgement that their “handling” of Rohingya situation is in any way inappropriate.

Germany and Austria are thus not just rewarding the opening of the country toward the West. They are also implicitly condoning the abuses that Gen Aung Hlain and the Myanmar security services are perpetrating right now. If they pursue this “business opportunity”, both Austria and Germany will become complicit in this humanitarian catastrophe. Are a few tens of millions of dollars worth this disaster?

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Azeem Ibrahim is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Policy and Adj Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a World Fellow at Yale. Over the years he has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He tweets @AzeemIbrahim.

UNHCR

May 3, 2017