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Suu Kyi’s party wins majority in historic Myanmar vote

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Nobel laureate’s party captures two-thirds majority – enough seats to choose the country’s next president.

Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has led her NLD party to a majority in parliament [Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters]

Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has led her NLD party to a majority in parliament [Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

Yangon: Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party won a majority in parliament on Friday in the Southeast Asian nation’s historic election.

With votes still being counted, the Union Election Commission said the National League for Democracy (NLD) party had crossed the 329 threshold of seats needed for an outright majority in both houses of the 664-member parliament.

The country’s first free election in 25 years took place on Sunday.

“The people of Myanmar have been dutiful and it is time for the NLD to try to fulfill the wishes of the people,” senior party official U Tin Oo told Al Jazera outside of its headquarters. “The NLD has to try hard to change.”

Phil Robertson from New York-based Human Rights Watch said it was time to move on from the country’s bloody past.

“Obviously the people of Burma have had their voices heard,” Robertson told Al Jazeera. “I think it’s important we know who has won this election, and now the very hard work of moving beyond the human rights abuses of the government comes into play.”

NLD captured 21 lower house seats on Friday, the election commission said, taking its total to 348 seats with 82.9 percent of the vote now confirmed.

The ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party has won 140 seats so far.

The party holding a majority is able to select the next president, who can then name a cabinet and form a new government.

Suu Kyi won the last free vote in 1990, but the military ignored the result. She spent most of the next 20 years under house arrest before her release in 2010.

Friday’s majority announcement came exactly five years to the day when Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest. Al Jazeera’s correspondent Wayne Hay was there.

“I had to sneak into the country to cover the 2010 election,” recalled Hay. “On this exact day five years ago, we were here outside the home of the NLD’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi as she was released from her last period of house arrest.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is barred from taking the presidency because she’s married to a foreigner under a constitution written by the then-ruling generals to preserve their power.

But Suu Kyi has said that may change once her party is in power.

On Thursday, the country’s powerful military rulers – who have dominated Myanmar’s politics for decades – congratulated Suu Kyi on her electoral win and pledged a peaceful transfer of power.

While election observers have said the vote was for the most part free and fair, some people from minority communities – in particular the Muslim Rohingya  – were denied the right to vote and others were disqualified as candidates.

Myanmar’s government has denied the Rohingya citizenship. Hundreds died in clashes between Rohingya and Buddhists, the religious majority in the country, in 2012.

About 140,000 Rohingya live in squalid camps while thousands more have fled by boat, leading to a regional migration crisis.

While campaigning, Suu Kyi addressed allegations of “genocide” targeting the Muslim Rohingya saying “it is very important” not to “exaggerate the problems” in Myanmar.

“I promise everybody who is living in this country proper protection in accordance with the law, and in accordance with the norms of human rights,” she said.

 

 

Myanmar’s Suu Kyi wins seat, demands military meeting

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Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi re-elected on Wednesday as her NLD party continues to dominate the ballot box.

Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech during a campaign rally [Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP]

Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech during a campaign rally [Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP]

by Al Jazeera

Yangon: Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was officially re-elected to her seat in the lower house of parliament on Wednesday as her National League for Democracy party continued to steam towards victory in the country’s historic elections.

Suu Kyi called on leading members of military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) to meet and discuss what she said would be a decisive win for her opposition party.

The Union Election Commission (UEC) said on Wednesday the Nobel peace laureate had won her seat, and that the NLD had now captured 135 lower house seats in the national parliament out of the 151 officially declared. The opposition has also taken 29 out of 33 seats announced in the upper house.

With the NLD saying it expects to win about 80 percent of the seats up for grabs, Suu Kyi called on President Thein Sein, Shwe Mann, the speaker of the house, and General Min Aung Hlaing to meet with her to discuss the outcome of the elections.

“It is important to implement the people’s will in a peaceful manner for the sake of the country,” she wrote in letters addressed to the three men.

A spokesman for the USDP said on Wednesday that Myanmar’s president and the military would respect the results of Sunday’s vote, but added he would meet Suu Kyi only after those are announced by the election commission.

The military government handed power to a semi-civilian government in 2011, but the army still dominates politics after decades in power. Twenty-five percent of seats in the parliament are reserved for the army.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, expressed concern that the election commission was taking so long to announce final results.

“It’s worrisome that the results are taking so long to dribble in, and of course, we’re looking closely at what this means,” Robertson told Al Jazeera. “But far more concerning is the fact that the UEC has the power of investigator, judge and jury in assessing and deciding any election complaints.

“Given the size of the apparent NLD victory, I’m assuming that the military and its allies in the USDP are going to be scraping to hold on to every seat… So it’s entirely plausible to expect more games as this counting process drags on,” he added.

The Associated Press, citing an NLD statement, reported that President Thein Sein congratulated Suu Kyi and promised a peaceful transfer of power. It said a message was received Wednesday from Information Minister Ye Htut on behalf of the president.

The president is quoted as saying: “In accordance with the Union Election Commission’s election results announcement, I would like to congratulate you, the NLD, for leading the race for parliamentary seats.”

Even with a win for her party, Suu Kyi cannot become president under the country’s constitution as she is married to a British citizen and her children have UK passports. Suu Kyi has said that may change.

The Rohingya – Adrift on a Sea of Sorrows

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Rohingya

by Eric Margolis

When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no wants or cares about – Burma’s Rohingya.

Their plight has finally commanded some media attention because of the suffering of Rohingya boat people, 7,000 of whom continue to drift in the waters of the Andaman Sea without food, water or shelter from the intense sun. At least 2,500 lucky refugees are in camps in Indonesia.

Mass graves of Rohingya are being discovered in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). Large numbers of Rohingya are fleeing for their lives from their homeland, Burma, while the world does nothing. Burma is believed to have some 800,000 Rohingya citizens.

This week, the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Burma and its much ballyhooed ‘democratic leader,’ Aung San Suu Kyi, to halt persecution of the Rohingya. They did nothing.

The Rohyinga’s persecution has been going on for over half a century, totally unobserved by the rest of the world. Burma’s government claims they are descendants of economic immigrants from neighboring Bengal who came as indentured laborers to the British colony of Burma in early the 19th century.

Interestingly, the British Empire created a similar ethnic problem by bringing large numbers of Tamils from southern India to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to work the British tea plantations.

But Bengalis have been on Burma’s Arakan Coast for centuries. What sets Rohyingas apart is their dark skin and Islamic faith. Burma seems determined to expel its Muslims for good, treating them like human garbage. It’s the kind of brutal ethnic cleansing, racism and genocide that we recently saw unleashed against Albanian and Bosnian Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I’ve been watched the steady rise of a weird form of Asian racism among some militant Buddhists in Burma and Sri Lanka. The first sign was anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka a decade ago led by fiery Buddhist monks.

But wait a minute. I have always been very attracted to Buddhism as a gentle, sensible, human faith. My first book, “War at the Top of the World,” was inspired by my conversations with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I like to meditate in Buddhist temples whenever I’m in Asia.

So from where did all those screaming, hate-promoting Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Burma come from? Clearly, from deep smoldering fires that we knew nothing about. The bloody Sri Lankan civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils was largely initiated by militant monks. One also remembers Vietnam’s self-immolating monks.

The same phenomena erupted in Burma, a nation rent by violent regional and ethnic tensions that have raged since 1945. But who initiated a campaign of hate and pogroms against the Arakan Muslims who were quietly, minding their own business and eking out a living? As soon as Burma’s military stepped back from total rule, the anti-Muslim violence went critical.

The triple-sainted (at least in the Western media) Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to hear foreign pleas that she do something. Burma will hold elections in November and she wants to avoid antagonizing Buddhist voters – even when her nation in practicing genocide.

I stood in front of her in Rangoon years ago when she was still a prisoner of the military junta, listening to her platitudes about human rights and democracy. I thought then and now that like all politicians, her words were not to be given too much credit. Maybe those fools on the Nobel Peace Prize committee could revoke her Peace Prize and, while they’re at it, Obama’s.

Thailand wants no Rohyingas; Indonesia says only a few thousand on a temporary basis. Australia, which is not overly fond of non-whites, say no. Bangladesh can’t even feed its own wretched people. So the poor Rohyingas are a persecuted people without a country, adrift on a sea of sorrows.

What of the Muslim world? What of that self-proclaimed “Defender of the Faith. Saudi Arabia?” The Saudis are just buying $109 billion worth of US arms which they can’t use, but they don’t have even a few pennies for their desperate co-religionists in the Andaman Sea. The Holy Koran enjoins Muslims to aid their brethren wherever they are persecuted – this is the true essence of jihadism.

But the Saudis are too busy plotting against Iran, bombing Yemen, and supporting rebels in Iraq and Syria, or getting ready for their summer vacations in Spain and France, to think about fellow Muslims dying of thirst. Pakistan, which could help, has not, other than offering moral support. Neither has India, one of the world’s leading Muslim nations.

In the end, it may be up to the United States to rescue the Rohyinga, just as it rescued Bosnia and Kosovo. That’s fine with me. I don’t want the US to be the world’s policeman; I want it to be the world’s rescuer, its SOS force, its liberator.

We should tell Burma to halt its genocide today, or face isolation and sanctions from the outside world.

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.

Myanmar denies Rohingya Muslims citizenship under UN pressure

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Seventeen countries Asian countries met in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday to discuss the migrant crisis that has seen thousands lost at sea.

Rohingya migrants who arrived in Indonesia by boat are seen at a temporary shelter. Photo: Reuters

Rohingya migrants who arrived in Indonesia by boat are seen at a temporary shelter. Photo: Reuters

by teleSUR

U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar to address the status of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

“The communal situation in Rakhine and elsewhere remains fragile,” Ban said. “There are already troubling signs of ethnic and religious differences being exploited in the run-up to the elections. The reform process could be jeopardized if the underlying causes of these tensions are left unaddressed.”

Myanmar was criticized for failing to include in its census – the first in three decades – Rohingya Muslims in the list of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups, which was taken as a sign that the country still has no intention of recognizing its 1.3 million Rohingya as citizens.

Myanmar President Thein Sein launched the census and said it had been done in line with international standards.

“From the political dialogues that we will be conducting in the very near future to establish a union based on federal principles, we will certainly encounter issues of categorizing and recognizing the ethnic national races based on political agreements reached,” he said.

The Dalai Lama joined in the debate and asked Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do more to help the persecuted minority in her country. It is not the first time the Tibetan spiritual leader has pleaded to Suu Kyi, who has always refused to publicly speak out for the Rohingya.

Myanmar refuses to recognize the term Rohingya and calls the people Bengali, suggesting they come from neighboring Bangladesh. Officials in Myanmar said they would not attend the Bangkok meeting if the term Rohingya was used on the statement; which Thailand accepted by titling the conference “Special Meeting on Irregular Migration in the Indian Ocean.”

Many nongovernmental organizations have been trying to help the Rohingyas, which the U.N. describes as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. On Thursday, the Rakhine state legislature voted to shut down unregistered NGOs, arguing they had been “causing bigger problems” between Muslims and Buddhists. Doctors Without Borders was one of the nongovernmental organizations asked to stop working in the Rakhine state, where it was providing health care to displaced people in camps.

Aung San Suu Kyi's inexcusable silence

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Aung San Suu Kyi was a moral icon, a human rights champion – so why has she been silent about the Rohingya Muslims?

Aung San Suu Kyi

by Mehdi Hasan, Al Jazeera

“In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize … to Aung San Suu Kyi,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in 1991, it wished “to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

Suu Kyi, the Committee added, was “an important symbol in the struggle against oppression”.

Fast forward 24 years, and the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar might disagree with the dewy-eyed assessment of the five-member Nobel Committee. And with Gordon Brown, too, who called Suu Kyi “the world’s most renowned and courageous prisoner of conscience”. Not to mention Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has said that the people of Myanmar “desperately need the kind of moral and principled leadership that Aung San Suu Kyi would provide”.

In recent years, the Rohingya Muslims – “the world’s most persecuted minority”, according to the United Nations – have struggled to attract attention to their plight.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when thousands of Rohingya refugees began arriving in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, while thousands more believed to be still stranded on rickety boats off the coasts of these three countries, with dwindling supplies of food and clean water.

‘So hungry, so skinny’

“Fisherman Muchtar Ali broke down in tears when he set eyes on the overcrowded boat carrying desperate, starving Rohingya off the coast of Indonesia,” noted a report by AFP on May 20.

“I was speechless,” Ali told AFP. “Looking at these people, me and my friends cried because they looked so hungry, so skinny.”

These Rohingya “boat people”, however, are a symptom of a much bigger problem. As Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Researcher, has observed: “The thousands of lives at risk should be the immediate priority, but the root causes of this crisis must also be addressed. The fact that thousands of Rohingya prefer a dangerous boat journey they may not survive to staying in Myanmar speaks volumes about the conditions they face there.”

Those oppressive conditions range from a denial of citizenship to Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims to severe restrictions on their movement, employment and access to education and healthcare, as well as a discriminatory law imposing a “two child” limit on Rohingya families in their home state of Rakhine.

Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes; their towns and villages razed to the ground by rampaging mobs. In 2014, the government even banned the use of the word “Rohingya”, insisting the Muslim minority, who have lived in that country for generations, be registered in the census as “Bengali”.

Inexcusable silence

So, where does Suu Kyi fit into all this? Well, for a start, her silence is inexcusable. Her refusal to condemn, or even fully acknowledge, the state-sponsored repression of her fellow countrymen and women, not to mention the violence meted out to them by Buddhist extremists inspired by the monk Ashin Wirathu (aka “The Burmese Bin Laden”), makes her part of the problem, not the solution.

“In a genocide, silence is complicity, and so it is with Aung San Suu Kyi,” observed Penny Green, a law professor at the University of London and director of the State Crime Initiative, in a recent op-ed for The Independent. Imbued with “enormous moral and political capital”, Green argued, Myanmar’s opposition leader could have challenged “the vile racism and Islamophobia which characterises Burmese political and social discourse”.

She didn’t. Instead, she spent the past few years courting the Buddhist majority of Myanmar, whose votes she needs in order to be elected president in 2016 – if, that is, the military will allow her to be elected president, or even permit her to stand – by playing down the violence perpetrated against the Muslim minority, and trying to suggest a false equivalence between persecutors and victims of persecution.

In a BBC interview in 2013, for example, Suu Kyi shamefully blamed the violence on “both sides”, telling interviewer Mishal Husain that “Muslims have been targeted but Buddhists have also been subjected to violence”.

Yet in Myanmar, it isn’t Buddhists who have been confined to fetid camps, where they are“slowly succumbing to starvation, despair and disease”. It isn’t Buddhists who have been the victims of what Human Rights Watch calls “ethnic cleansing” and what the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar has said “could amount to crimes against humanity”. It isn’t Buddhists who are crowding onto boats, to try and flee the country, and being assaulted with hammers and knives as they do so. It isn’t Buddhists, to put it bluntly, who are facing genocide.

Risk of ‘genocide’

Is this mere hyperbole? If only. Listen to the verdict of investigators from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

“We left Burma,” they wrote in a report published earlier this month, “deeply concerned that so many preconditions for genocide are already in place.”

The investigators, who visited Rohingya internment camps and interviewed the survivors of violent attacks, concluded: “Genocide will remain a serious risk for the Rohingya if the government of Burma does not immediately address the laws and policies that oppress the entire community.”

Yet, despite the boats and the bodies, the reports and the revelations, Suu Kyi is still mute. She hasn’t raised a finger to help the Rohingya, as they literally run for their lives. Shouldn’t we expect more from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

Maybe not. The words “Henry” and “Kissinger” come to mind. Plus, the Nobel Prize Committee has a pretty awkward history of prematurely handing out peace prizes. Remember Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat’s joint prize in 1994? Ask the children of Gaza how that worked out. Remember Barack Obama’s in 2009? Ask the civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan how that worked out.

Rabin, Arafat, Obama … ultimately, of course, they’re all politicians. Suu Kyi was supposed to be something else, something more; a moral icon, a human rights champion, a latter-day Gandhi.

Sad truth

Why weren’t we listening when the opposition leader and former political prisoner told CNN in 2013 that she had “been a politician all along”, that her ambition was to become president of her country?

The sad truth is that when it comes to “The Lady”, it is well past time to take off the rose-tinted glasses. To see Suu Kyi for what she is: A former prisoner of conscience, yes, but now a cynical politician who is willing to put votes ahead of principles; party political advancement ahead of innocent Rohingya lives.

“Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless,” Suu Kyi grandly declaimed in June 2012, as she finally accepted her Nobel Peace Prize, in person, 21 years after she won it while under house arrest, “a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace”.

Forget the world. She should try starting at home, with the Rohingya of Rakhine. And if she won’t, or can’t, then maybe she should consider handing back the prize she waited more than two decades to collect.

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