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Commander in Chief of the Myanmar military, Min Aung Hlaing, meets with IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot during a trip to Israel, September 9, 2015. (SF Min Aung Hlaing’s Facebook)
"The message that the world was silent during the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust is routinely cited by the State of Israel and its Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. And yet, Israel itself is complicit in silence surrounding a present-day atrocity: the crimes committed by the Myanmar military junta, which Israel is supporting with weapons, training, and political backing. Although legal, media, and public pressure has forced some change in Israel’s defense export policy to Myanmar, political support for the junta has remained strong."
Source: Myanmar’s genocidal military is still a friend to Israel (972mag.com)
Freed Japanese journalist tells of prisoner abuse in Insein
- MAY 15, 2021
On arrival in Japan, Yuki Kitazumi says he was “extremely frustrated” at being deported from Myanmar and that he had collected harrowing testimonies from his fellow inmates in Insein Prison.
By AFP
Originally published by Frontier Myanmar
A Japanese freelance journalist arrested while covering the aftermath of the Myanmar coup arrived in Tokyo on Friday, after charges against him were dropped as a diplomatic gesture.
Yuki Kitazumi, held in Yangon’s Insein Prison since his arrest on April 19 at his apartment in Yangon, was one of at least 80 reporters detained during the junta’s crackdown on anti-coup dissent.
Security forces have killed more than 780 people since protests erupted following the February 1 coup that ousted the civilian government, according to local monitoring group the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
“I am in good health, both mentally and physically,” said Kitazumi after landing at Tokyo’s Narita airport.
But he admitted he was “extremely frustrated” at being deported from Myanmar.
“I am a journalist and I wanted to convey what was happening in Yangon,” he said, adding that he had collected harrowing testimonies from his fellow inmates in prison.
“Some are deprived of meals for two days, others are questioned whilst being threatened with a weapon, or beaten if they try to deny [the allegations].”
“Thanks to my Japanese nationality, I was able to escape this type of treatment, but the reality is that many Burmese are being tortured.”
Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said earlier that Tokyo had used “various channels” to press for Kitazumi’s release and that it had been “tough work”.
“As a result of those efforts, yesterday the Myanmar authorities announced that they would withdraw the indictment,” he told reporters in Tokyo.
$4 million food aid
The minister also announced that Japan has offered Myanmar $4 million in emergency food aid via the World Food Programme.
The support is expected to help 600,000 people.
“Food supply to the impoverished population in Yangon region is rapidly deteriorating amid this situation, and they are facing difficulties in even maintaining the most basic living conditions,” the Japanese foreign ministry said in a statement.
In late March, Japan had announced it was suspending new aid to Myanmar in response to the coup.
“We have continued our calls on Myanmar to immediately stop violence, release those who are detained [political prisoners] and return to the democratic political process,” Motegi said.
Myanmar state broadcaster MRTV announced Thursday that the charges against journalist Kitazumi were being dropped “in order to reconcile with Japan and improve our relationship”.
State media said an earlier investigation found that Kitazumi “supported the protests”.
He was charged under Section 505A of the Penal Code, a provision revised by the junta shortly after the coup that criminalises spreading fake news, criticising the coup or encouraging disobedience among soldiers and civil servants. Those convicted can face up to three years in jail.
Kitazumi, who had previously been arrested in February but released soon afterwards, was the first foreign journalist to be charged since the coup.
A Polish photographer arrested while covering a protest in March was freed and deported after nearly two weeks in custody.
As well as arresting reporters and photographers, the junta has also banned several media organisations from publishing and ordered regular internet outages as it seeks to suppress news of the anti-coup protest movement.
On Wednesday, a reporter for independent media outlet DVB, U Min Nyo, was sentenced to three years in jail for criminal mutiny.
Ko Aung Kyaw Oo, a former reporter for Tomorrow Journal, was arrested on Thursday afternoon, his son confirmed to AFP.
Forty-five journalists and photographers remain in custody across Myanmar, according to monitoring group Reporting ASEAN.
Will the UN hold Myanmar’s Military Accountable for Its Crimes against Children?
By Yanghee Lee
OPINION
Originally published at IPS here.
SEOUL, May 13 2021 (IPS) - In one particularly bloody day in March, Myanmar’s security forces shot and killed at least ten children, some as young as 6, in violent crackdowns against peaceful protests. Since the military seized control over the country three months ago, more than 50 children have been killed, countless others injured, and more than 900 children and young people arbitrarily detained across the country.
Security forces have also occupied more than 60 schools and university campuses, exacerbating the education crisis for almost 12 million children. This week, as we mark 100 days since Myanmar’s military seized control of the country, the chaos and devastation show no signs of slowing.
The Myanmar military’s blatant disregard for children’s lives is nothing new. Known as the Tatmadaw, they forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya civilians into Bangladesh, the majority of them children, in 2016-2017. I had called this “the hallmarks of genocide”.
As the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar and a founding member of a new Special Advisory Council on Myanmar, I have seen first-hand the devastating consequences of the Tatmadaw’s brutal tactics on children’s lives
The UN secretary-general has documented the Tatmadaw’s grave violations against children across the country year after year, including killing and maiming, sexual violence, and attacks on schools and hospitals. Currently, many schools and hospitals have been seized by the Tatmadaw. And at least three high schools were bombed last month, according to groups in Karen state.
As the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar and a founding member of a new Special Advisory Council on Myanmar, I have seen first-hand the devastating consequences of the Tatmadaw’s brutal tactics on children’s lives.
I have seen children who survived being thrown into fire by the Tatmadaw. It sent chills down my spine when a mother told me she had to leave behind her baby who had been thrown into a river, because she had to see to the safety of her other children in their exodus into Bangladesh. I heard many more similar testimonies.
Since 2003, the secretary-general has included the Tatmadaw for recruitment and use of children in his ‘list of shame’—an annex to his annual report on children and armed conflict where he names those responsible for grave violations against children. Listing is an important accountability tool since it names the perpetrators, draws the UN Security Council’s attention, and opens the door to engagement with the UN to end abuses.
But in June 2020, Secretary-General António Guterres removed the Tatmadaw from his list for recruitment and use of children, even though in the same report, the UN had documented 205 cases where the Tatmadaw had recruited or used children in its ranks in the preceding year.
Having reported on human rights concerns in Myanmar for many years, I can say with certainly that despite Myanmar’s pledges to stop recruiting and using children in conflict, the Tatmadaw never ceased the practice. It was also a known fact that in order to leave the Tatmadaw, a regular soldier had to recruit two children to replace him, as term limits for service were vague.
At the time, the secretary-general said he delisted the Tatmadaw due to “continued significant decrease” in recruitment and ongoing efforts to prevent new recruitments and release any remaining children in its ranks. He also said that the delisting was conditional and that failure to end recruitment and use would result in relisting. Prematurely removing parties like the Tatmadaw from the list—and this was not an isolated case—threatens the credibility of the list, a critical mechanism for protecting children and holding their abusers accountable.
Being removed from the list seems to have emboldened the Tatmadaw to commit even more violations. In the first half of 2020, the Tatmadaw used 301 boys in support functions such as military camp maintenance and digging trenches. And in October 2020, two boys were killed after a Tatmadaw unit allegedly used them as human shields, in an incident that the UN publicly condemned.
As protests across Myanmar continue, armed conflict is escalating between the military and ethnic armed groups. Children will face even greater risk, so the Security Council must urgently act to stop the military in its tracks. Instead, the Council seems hard pressed to reach consensus due to China and Russia’s opposition to strong measures such as an arms embargo.
The 2020 delisting of the Tatmadaw was inexplicable and unjustifiable given the military’s conduct. Now Secretary-General Guterres has an opportunity to set the record straight. In a few weeks, he will release his 2021 report and list of perpetrators.
He should return the Tatmadaw to the list for its recruitment and use of children. In light of the military’s total disregard for children’s rights, this is a concrete action he must take to hold the Tatmadaw accountable for its crimes against children.
Yanghee Lee is Professor in the department of Child Psychology and Education at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. She is former chair of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and former UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.
NEW YORK TIMES
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
Ma Thuzar Wint Lwin hopes to use her international platform as a pageant contestant to criticize the country’s military coup and support the pro-democracy movement.
“They are killing our people like animals,” Ma Thuzar Wint Lwin said of the junta in Myanmar.Credit...Ysa Pérez for The New York Times
By Richard C. Paddock
May 14, 2021
Miss Universe Myanmar Arrives in Florida With a Message for the Junta - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
As a girl, Ma Thuzar Wint Lwin would watch the Miss Universe pageant and wish that she could be the one onstage representing her country, Myanmar. She entered her first two contests last year, nervous and excited about what to expect. But she ultimately walked away crowned Miss Universe Myanmar, and this week is competing at the global pageant in Florida.
But now representing her country has new meaning. With the military seizing power in a Feb. 1 coup and killing hundreds of protesters, she hopes to use her platform to call attention to Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement and to appeal for international help in freeing elected leaders who have been detained.
“They are killing our people like animals,” she said in an interview before leaving Myanmar for the competition. “Where is the humanity? Please help us. We are helpless here.”
In a dramatic moment on Thursday during the pageant’s national costume show, she walked to the front of the stage and held up a sign saying, “Pray for Myanmar.” The final competition will be held on Sunday.
The military takeover in Myanmar sparked widespread protests with millions of people taking to the streets and a civil disobedience movement and general strike that have largely shut down the economy. The Tatmadaw, as the military is known, has responded with a brutal crackdown, killing more than 780 people and detaining more than 3,900, according to a rights group that tracks political prisoners.
In the early weeks of the protest movement, Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin, 22, joined the demonstrations, where she held signs with slogans such as “We do not want military government,” and called for the release of the country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest since the coup.
She handed out water bottles to protesters in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and donated her savings to families whose loved ones were killed. She also expressed her opposition to the junta on Facebook, posting black-and-white photos of herself blindfolded, with tape over her mouth and her hands bound.
The military’s onslaught has left the country living in fear, she said.
“The soldiers patrol the city every day and sometimes they set up roadblocks to harass the people coming through,” said Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin, who also goes by the name Candy. “In some cases, they fire without hesitation. We are scared of our own soldiers. Whenever we see one, all we feel is anger and fear.”
Every evening on television, the military announces new arrest warrants for celebrities and others who have been critical of the regime. Some of those named have been people Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin knows.
Before leaving for the United States, she watched anxiously to see if her name had ended up on the military’s wanted list. She saw reports of well-known people being detained as they tried to leave the country, so she decided to wear a hoodie and glasses to keep from being recognized at the Yangon airport. “I had to pass through immigration and I was so scared,” she said in an interview from Florida.
In criticizing the junta from outside her country, Miss Universe Myanmar is not alone.
U Win Htet Oo, one of the country’s best swimmers, said from Australia that he was giving up his dream of going to the Olympics and would not compete under the Myanmar flag until the regime’s leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, was removed from power. And the mixed martial arts fighter U Aung La Nsang, an American citizen and one of Myanmar’s most famous athletes, has urged President Biden to help end the suffering of Myanmar’s people.
Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin says she believes that it will not be safe for her to return to Myanmar after speaking out against the regime; she does not know where she will go after the pageant ends.
An English major at East Yangon University, her path to the pro-democracy movement can perhaps be traced back to her childhood. She grew up in a middle-class household. Like many parents, her father, a businessman, and her mother, a housewife, dared not discuss the military government that was then in power.
One of her early memories was walking with her mother near Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon in 2007, when monks led nationwide protests against military rule. She was 7. As they neared the pagoda, soldiers broke up the protest by shooting their guns in the air. People started running. She and her mother ran, too.
“We were very scared,” she recalled. “We went to a stranger’s house and we were hiding.”
Soon after, the military crushed that protest movement by shooting dozens of people. But by 2011, the military began sharing power with civilian leaders and opening the country, allowing cellphones and affordable internet access to flood in.
Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin is part of the first generation in Myanmar to grow up fully connected to the outside world, and for whom a free society seemed normal. In 2015, the country seated democratically elected officials for the first time in more than half a century. “We have been living in freedom for five years,” she said. “Do not take us back. We know all about the world. We have the internet.”
November was the first time she was old enough to vote, and she cast her ballot for the National League for Democracy, the party of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, which won in a landslide only to have the military overturn the results by seizing power.
Before the coup, Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin’s biggest ordeal came when she was 19 and had surgery to remove precancerous tumors from each breast, leaving permanent scars. She decided against having laser treatment to improve their appearance as a reminder of her success in preventing cancer.
“It’s just a scar and I’m still me,” she wrote in a recent post with photographs of the scars. “I met self-acceptance realizing nothing changed who I am and the values I set for myself. Now, when I see those scars, I feel empowered.”
She began modeling when she was in high school and, after her father’s retirement, helped support the family. She is one of fewer than a dozen contestants from Myanmar ever to compete in the Miss Universe pageant, which was founded in 1952. During the period from 1962 to 2011, when the Tatmadaw first ruled, Myanmar sent no contestants at all.
When Ms. Thuzar Wint Lwin arrived in Florida on May 7, she was told the suitcase with her outfits for the competition had been lost by the airline. Most contestants had already arrived and were busy rehearsing, making videos and having photo shoots. As the week wore on, the bag still hadn’t arrived, but the pageant organizers were helping her with her gown, and other contestants were lending her outfits.
Her national costume was among the missing items. People from Myanmar who live in the United States provided her with a stunning replacement of ethnic Chin origin. She wore it on Thursday to the applause of many in the crowd.
Soon after landing in Florida, she posted an autobiographical video on Facebook that would be unusual for any beauty pageant contestant: It shows her wearing formal gowns mixed with scenes of people fleeing tear gas and a soldier shooting a man who rode by on a motorbike.
“Myanmar deserves democracy,” she says in the video. “We will keep fighting and I also hope that international communities will give us help that we desperately need.”
Richard C. Paddock has worked as a foreign correspondent in 50 countries on five continents with postings in Moscow, Jakarta, Singapore and Bangkok. He has spent nearly a dozen years reporting on Southeast Asia, which he has covered since 2016 as a contributor to The New York Times. @RCPaddock
An Axis of Evil: Why Russia and China Protect Myanmar’s Military Regime
MAUNG ZARNI
May 14, 2021
Originally published at Politics Today.
China and Russia are enabling and protecting the criminal regime in Myanmar that resorts to terrorism against its own people.
I join @NOW4humanity and ask the @G7 to create a #LeagueOfDemocracies to safeguard our #freedom and #democracy.
Join me! Speak up!
Together!
"Ha… Truly! Truly! The Burmese fighter just got shot down!” exclaimed a young village woman as she videotaped an attack aircraft which flew high above her wooden house in the ethnic Kachin State on the morning of May 3. Her 41-second clip, which captured the very moment the Russian-made Mi-35 Phoenix transport/attack helicopter got hit by a rocket fired by the Kachin Independence Army ground troops and went down, has since gone viral on Burmese social media platforms where it is widely and wildly celebrated by anti-coup protesters.
The attack helicopter was hit by what must have been a surface-to-air shoulder-launched rocket fired by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) troops. To the wild delight of eyewitnesses in Eastern Myanmar and Burmese social media users alike, the Russian attack helicopter went down very fast without any sign of the pilots having been able to eject from their cockpit.
To generations of politically conscious Burmese, the initial shine of the classless, raceless utopia of the USSR of the 1930s has long worn off, decades before the collapse of what the late Ronald Reagan memorably dubbed the “Evil Empire.” In the early years of the first military dictatorship under General Ne Win, the word “Moscow” was the popular Burmese slang for the country’s notorious jails where thousands of dissidents were locked up in appalling conditions.
Read: Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation
Ever since the Myanmar Tatmadaw, the country’s armed forces, acquired sophisticated, Russian-made attack helicopters, ethnic armed resistance organizations have been known to entertain the need for military hardware which could protect their ethnic minority communities – and the troops which usually control the country’s highlands – from airstrikes by these “beasts.” The morale and combat capacities of Naypyidaw’s ground troops are extremely low, despite the observations to the contrary by foreign armchair experts on Myanmar.
Even many lay persons among the Burmese public with rudimentary understanding of military affairs are acutely aware of the game-changing role Stinger shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft, surface-to-air rockets played in turning the tide of war in Afghanistan. Stingers were used by fighters who attempted to repel the occupying Soviet troops.
Ever since the Myanmar Tatmadaw, the country’s armed forces, acquired sophisticated, Russian-made attack helicopters, ethnic armed resistance organizations have been known to entertain the need for military hardware which could protect their ethnic minority communities.
I don’t know the exact weapon that the KIA fired to bring down the first Russian attack helicopter since the resumption of the intensifying civil war in Northern Myanmar. In the country’s eastern region along the Thai-Myanmar borders, where the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) troops have been battling the coup regime’s troops, the Myanmar military has been launching airstrikes against ethnic villages of Karen resistance fighters, using sophisticated attack aircraft – fighter jets and helicopters – capable of carrying out radar-guided night attacks.
Since the coup of February 1, 2021, much has been written about China’s role in the military’s coup, while Russian support for the coup regime of Min Aung Hlaing has been covered or discussed less.
The Burmese public opinion has categorically turned anti-China as a result of Beijing’s unmistakable backing of the coup regime. But Russian support has been no less consequential, in terms of the supply of military hardware, veto-protection at the Security Council, and the training of Burmese military officers in weapons engineering, information technology, and other military sciences.
Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy
Ten years ago, the significant Russian – and N. Korean – involvement in Myanmar military’s arms procurement and military training hit world news headlines, and specifically the Burmese’s quest for nuclear and missile technologies. One of the major Myanmar policy concerns on the part of the Obama administration was the resumption of Myanmar – N. Korea ties towards this unsavory tech-acquisition.
But neither the Burmese military regime’s collaboration with Pyongyang nor the attempts to acquire advanced Russian technology produced any yield in terms of nukes and advanced weapons systems. In spite of this failure, over the last 20 years, the Myanmar military has kept up its military-to-military ties with Moscow.
Around 2010, I interviewed several Myanmar army defectors in temporary hiding in Thailand and the Philippines, who, as weapons engineers, were sent in the early 2000s to Moscow and St. Petersburg for PhDs and other advanced training in military engineering. The Myanmar Ministry of Defence Department of Military Training has established a Russian language department at the country’s military academies – the Defence Services Academy (DSA) and the Defence Services Technological Academy (DSTA) – where thousands of young Burmese men between the ages of 16 and 21 undergo 4-year-long officer training. Over at least the last 20 years, hundreds of graduates every year have been sent to the Russian Federation for further studies.
Members of human rights organizations gather to show solidarity for human rights, freedom and democracy in Asia in Tokyo, Japan on May 09, 2021. Protesters carrying East Turkestan, Myanmar, Cambodia and Mongolia flags, shout "Stop the Uighur massacre", "Freedom to East Turkistan", "Release Suu Kyi", "Help Southern Mongolia" slogans. Demonstration Japan protest Tokyo Turkmenistan Uighur Photo by David Mareuil. Anadolu Agency.
Some Myanmar observers have already pointed out how Russia has been a major arms supplier for the regime in Naypyidaw. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia and China account for 31.6% and 56.34% respectively in Myanmar’s arms imports over the last decade (2010-19).
Alongside China, Putin’s Russia has also proven to be a fully reliable veto-protector at the United Nations Security Council when it comes even to non-binding resolutions around the egregious and pervasive human rights crimes of the Myanmar military, from war crimes and crimes against humanity in the ethnic minority regions of Northern and Eastern Myanmar to the full-blown genocide against Rohingyas in Western Myanmar. Even in the midst of the genocidal killings of Rohingyas, the Russian representatives at the United Nations typically echoed and amplified the justificatory polemic of Myanmar’s military, falsely framing Rohingya Muslims as a security threat to the country.
Even in the midst of the genocidal killings of Rohingyas, the Russian representatives at the United Nations typically echoed and amplified the justificatory polemic of Myanmar’s military, falsely framing Rohingya Muslims as a security threat to the country.
Ideologically, Putin’s Russia operates from this antiterrorism space. Moscow used the same rhetoric against the independence-minded breakaway majority-Muslim republic of Chechnya, where the Russian military used its overwhelming might to crush popular independence aspirations and armed revolt against Russian rule.
In addition, the fact that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (2008-2012), a Putin ally who is considered more liberal and outward-looking than the ex-KGB killer, failed in his attempts to adopt democratic reforms and create a high tech-based, and a diversified modern economy has forced Russia to fall back on its economic dependence on selling off natural gas and arms.
Geostrategically, Russia has few allies in Asia as India, its former ally, is now increasingly tied to the United States via the Indo-Pacific (military) alliance known as The Quad, or the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an informal strategic alliance of USA, Japan, India and Australia Therefore, protecting the Myanmar military unconditionally is protecting both Moscow’s pocket and its strategic toehold in mainland Southeast Asia.
Even the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), not known for defending human rights or promoting democratization, apparently found the Myanmar military’s post-coup slaughter of unarmed peaceful protesters and its terroristic methods in quelling the nationwide uprisings indefensible.
Alas, Moscow viewed these barbaric acts of its Southeast Asian arms customer differently: Russian Deputy Defence Minister General Alexander Fomin was the only high-ranking foreign representative to attend Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Day on March 27 – all the others were low-level officials from seven Asian neighbors. The day before, Fomin received the highest military honors from Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader, accused of committing genocide against Rohingyas. A report by the Financial Times on April 2 reminded readers that Fomin’s presence “echoed (Moscow’s) 2015 decision to lend military support to President Bashar al-Assad’s pariah regime in Syria, helping turn the tide of the civil war in the dictator’s favor.”
For increasingly expansionist China, Myanmar with its 1,400-miles Sino-Burmese borders, is geopolitically too important to let any domestic actor friendly to the United States, and conversely hostile to Beijing’s core interests, come to power. In an unprecedented manner, Chairman- for-Life Xi officially invited Myanmar’s iconic political leader Aung San Suu Kyi to Beijing in 2014 and feted her as the country’s leader even though at the time she was only the leader of the opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD).
As both the Myanmar military leadership and Suu Kyi received international condemnation for their respective roles in the Rohingya genocide by Western governments – particularly the United States – China was not wrong to deem either party, be it the generals or Suu Kyi and her once pro-human rights NLD, as acceptable.
Suu Kyi’s presidential predecessor, ex-general Thein Sein, cancelled the largest Sino-Burmese hydropower project in Northern Myanmar, the mega-dam project at Myitsone, the confluence of the two riverlets which form the country’s main artery, Irrawaddy River. This was done in part to cement his attempts at renormalizing the Burmese military’s ties with the West, in general, and the Obama White House with its (anti-China) “ Pivot to Asia” or “Rebalancing” towards Asia and, in part, to register the unhappiness of the Myanmar military with regard to Beijing’s tacit support for anti-Burmese ethnic armed resistance organizations along the Sino-Myanmar borders such as the Kachin Independence Organization, the ethnically Han Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) of Kokang and, most substantively, the Mandarin-speaking United Wa State Army, Beijing’s local proxy in Eastern Myanmar.
Ironically, once considered as “pro-American” by Beijing Suu Kyi inked the bilateral Sino-Myanmar agreement to allow Beijing to build its single most important geo-economic project in Myanmar: the 800-kilometer-long gas and oil twin pipeline which originates at Ma Dae, the Western Myanmar coastline of Rakhine State and snakes through Burma until it reaches the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.
Read: Genocide as a Label of Choice: Why Some Genocides Are More Equal Than Others
Additionally, China has gained Myanmar’s official concessions to build a deep-water port on the same Rakhine coast of western Myanmar, which serves as one of only two major access points to the Indian Ocean for Beijing – the other is Gwadar in Pakistan, China’s key strategic ally. In addition, Beijing also pursues the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor project, which is in turn an integral part of its Belt and Road Initiative, increasingly seen as an economically colonialist project throughout Asia.
Of these projects, the Chinese pipeline is the single most strategically important project for Beijing in its quest for energy security. Until this overland pipeline’s completion, China was exclusively dependent on Middle Eastern gas and the oil transported through the narrow Straits of Malacca in the South China Sea. The latter was already volatile and tension-filled, thanks to Beijing’s unlawful projection of its sovereignty beyond its exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles from the baseline shores) in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982.
Emphatically speaking, China views this 800-kilometer-long twin pipeline as its “sovereign asset” which is integral to its long-term “Grand Strategy” to remake its fairy-tale “Middle Kingdom” as the “Center of the New World Order” wherein China replaces, it is fervently hoped, the USA as the global hegemon.
Against the backdrop of the early slaughter of unarmed, peaceful protesters by the Myanmar coup regime of General Min Aung Hlaing, according to the secret memo (dated February 24) leaked by anti-coup diplomats inside Myanmar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Naypyidaw, Beijing’s top foreign policy planners held a 45-minute confidential Zoom meeting with Myanmar police chief and other senior bureaucrats in Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry. The sole focus of the discussion was how best to protect China’s pipeline and, to a lesser extent, other economic projects such as the notorious Letpadaung Copper Mine and some Chinese-owned factories in the old capital Yangon.
Against the widely shared images of the anti-coup protesters in Myanmar burning effigies of Chairman Xi and the Chinese flag, China’s official English-language mouthpiece, The Global Times, has run editorials unveiling the open threat that China could send troops across the borders to protect its assets and interests. The same Global Times editorial board also attacked well-known Myanmar cyberactivists such as Nay San Lwin of the Free Rohingya Coalition for spreading anti-China sentiments in social media.
China has always spun its Myanmar policy as “non-interference” in the sovereign affairs of its southern neighbor despite the fact that it consistently protects the military perpetrators in power in Naypyidaw. The Burmese publicly and openly mock China’s indefensible rhetoric of treating the slaughter of unarmed Myanmar protesters – and the genocide of Rohingya in 2017 – by its client Burmese regime as an “internal affair” by presenting the popular desire and strident calls for blowing up the Chinese pipeline as an “internal affair” of Myanmar.
Over the last three months since the coup there have been documented accounts of Chinese security personnel physically stationed in Myanmar providing advisory and technical assistance to the coup perpetrators as they commit crimes against humanity such as forced disappearances, summary executions, murder by snipers, night raids and abductions, the detention of over 4,000 activists, and the slaughter of 750 unarmed Myanmar civilians and activists alike.
Of all the external players with varying degrees of concerns regarding the Southeast Asian country’s all-out civil war, Russia and China have the greatest leverage vis-à-vis India, ASEAN, the USA, the EU, and Japan. So far, Moscow and Beijing appear to think that their arms customer and/or geopolitical client, namely the Burmese military, will kill its way out of the corner which it has put itself in.
Nation states, and particularly the ones with expansionist projects, typically pursue their hardcore material and strategic interests. As perpetrators of international state crimes themselves, there is no sign that either Xi’s China or Putin’s Russian Federation will review and amend their shared anti-human rights and anti-democratic orientation, at home or globally. Bearing great pain for the 54 million Burmese of all ethnicities and faiths, these two global powers are an axis of evil, enabling and protecting the criminal regime that resorts to terrorism against its own people.
Myanmar’s genocidal military is still a friend to Israel
(972mag.com)
Originally published here at 972 Magazine.
Public pressure has forced Israel to halt arms sales to the brutal military junta, but the state’s political support remains strong.
By Eitay Mack April 23, 2021
The message that the world was silent during the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust is routinely cited by the State of Israel and its Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. And yet, Israel itself is complicit in silence surrounding a present-day atrocity: the crimes committed by the Myanmar military junta, which Israel is supporting with weapons, training, and political backing. Although legal, media, and public pressure has forced some change in Israel’s defense export policy to Myanmar, political support for the junta has remained strong.
Since the end of British rule in Myanmar in 1948, different parts of the country have been rocked by relentless civil war. The military junta took over the government in the 1960s, and in the early 1990s, the United States and the European Union placed an arms embargo on Myanmar due to its security forces’ involvement in severe human rights abuses. The embargo remains in place to this day, driven by both the junta’s suppression of Myanmar’s democracy movement, as well as its crimes under international law in ethnic minority areas.
In September 2015, two months before Myanmar’s elections, which were expected to expand the country’s democratic space, a Myanmar delegation that included senior war criminals arrived in Israel to visit the defense industries and air and naval bases. At first, the visit was kept secret in Israel, including, unusually, from Israeli military reporters. But Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing decided to publicize the visit — which included a trip to Yad Vashem — and post photos of it on his Facebook page.
Read the full text of the article here.