Politics
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Eleven Media journalists defiant after facing down incitement charges
Yangon’s chief minister has promised further legal action if Press Council negotiations are unsuccessful.
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USDP By-Election Winner Accused of Bribing Voters With Low Interest Loans
In the months leading up to the November 3 poll, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) candidate for Seikkan township helped voters to secure micro-loans from an obscure company that has a USDP party official on its board of directors. Phyo Thiha Cho reports.
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Army chief praises pro-Tatmadaw demonstrators, calls for more rallies
(Yangon)—The head of Myanmar’s armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has praised nationalist protestors who took to the streets last month in a show of defiance against international condemnation of the military. In a speech at the Myanmar War Veterans Association (MWVA) in Naypyitaw, the general said the nationwide rallies showed that the “Tatmadaw and the people are on the same side” and encouraged more protests in the future. The demonstrations, which were organised by MWVA members and Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar’s major cities, come amid growing calls from abroad for members of Myanmar’s military, including Min Aung Hlaing, to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. The speech will fuel widespread suspicions that the military itself orchestrated the rallies. Protestors shouted slogans and waved placards condemning the United Nations, whose investigators have accused the military of mass murder, rape and forced deportation amounting to genocide during last year’s crackdown, which sent over 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. Min Aung Hlaing on Wednesday told a major gathering of top officials from the MWVA, which is closely affiliated with the Tatmadaw, that foreign nations and organizations were interfering in Myanmar’s internal affairs and disrespecting the country’s sovereignty. He praised “patriotic members…
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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…
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Police pressured Reuters journalists to bury report on Inn Din massacre, says Wa Lone
YANGON — Jailed Reuters journalist Ko Wa Lone told a Yangon court on July 17 that during a police interrogation, which included sleep deprivation, police officers tried to induce him and his colleague Ko Kyaw Soe Oo not to publish an investigation into a military-led massacre of 10 Muslims in Inn Din village of northern Rakhine State. The 32-year-old journalist was describing their time at the Aung Thabyay police interrogation centre in Yangon’s northern Mayangone Township in December, after he and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in what strongly resembles a police set-up. This was the journalists’ first time testifying in the Yangon Northern District Court, though they have been detained in Yangon’s Insein Prison since their arrest. They have undergone six months of pre-trial hearings, where prosecution witnesses were presented and cross-examined. If sentenced, they face 14 years in prison. On July 9, the judge accepted the charges against them under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly holding classified government documents relating to security deployments in northern Rakhine State, where the Myanmar military has displaced close to 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh in a crackdown on Rohingya militants. Wa Lone testified that police interrogators told them that if…
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