- Myanmar
Election 2020: Arakan National Party says it will keep dominant position in Rakhine despite conflict, pandemic
The party won the third largest share of the national vote in 2015 and is confident Rakhine nationalist sentiment will secure similar results this year
- News
Tatmadaw officer stabbed as private taken captive in Rakhine
The men were on their way to a market in Ponnagyun in civilian clothes when a group attacked them, the military said
- In-Depth
Aung San in Kayah State: inside the political storm
LOIKAW — One night in 2012, in the Kayah State capital of Loikaw, a group of ethnic Karenni youths were engaged in clandestine activity. In advance of Martyrs’ Day, 19 July, they crept around the town putting up posters of General Aung San, the Independence hero assassinated along with eight of his colleagues on that date in 1947. They also cleared the weeds around a stone monument for the nine martyrs in a central park, and 50 youths marched on the street to commemorate them. Over the last four years, Martyrs’ Day has become a major public event. The veneration of Aung San is being actively promoted by a civilian government led by the man’s daughter, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Formerly, the ruling military suppressed or downplayed the memory of Aung San, fearing it would bolster popular support for their political nemesis, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Karenni youths were making a defiant, and potentially dangerous, act. However, six years on, the same Karenni youths and local ethnic groups who wish to promote their own histories and heroes are resisting the public veneration of Aung San, whose memory they…
- News
Settlers in northern Rakhine’s burned-out villages ordered to move
The government has ordered ethnic Rakhine people who recently settled in burned-out villages in northern Rakhine State to relocate, and has hit the founders of the new settlements with criminal charges. The Maungdaw Township administrator, who conveyed the order, blamed it on international “pressure” on the government. The villages were largely deserted after their Muslim Rohingya residents fled a sweeping military crackdown on Rohingya militants that started in August last year. Buddhist Rakhine from Rathedaung and Thandwe townships, further south in Rakhine State, had built new settlements in at least three deserted villages in Maungdaw Township, close to the border with Bangladesh, where around a million Rohingya are now in refugee camps. The settlers say ethnic Rakhine people originally lived in the area. Settlements in Thin Baw Gwe village, housing around 200 Rakhine settlers, was the first to be dismantled under the orders of the township’s General Administration Department. The status of the other new settlements is currently unclear. The township administrator told a meeting of government officers, residents and state parliamentarians on 8 July that “international organisations” had “put pressure” on the Myanmar government to demolish newly built settlements to leave room for refugees returning from Bangladesh, according Rakhine…