Myanmar

Despite Myanmar’s recent transition to civilian leadership, the military has retained significant power and is most to blame for the sectarian violence against the Rohingya.

At the UN Security Council yesterday, both the UN Secretary-General and a number of UNSC members called for tough pressure on the Myanmar government, as the crisis in Rakhine State—and the exodus of refugees into Bangladesh—continues with little let up. U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Nikki Haley called for all countries to stop providing weapons to the Myanmar military, according to reports in Reuters. She said, “Any country that is currently providing weapons to the Burmese military should suspend these activities until sufficient accountability measures are in place” to ensure that the ethnic cleansing stops and commanders who oversaw the Rakhine operation are removed from their posts. This is a commendable stance, and may be an important step to convincing the Myanmar armed forces that they could pay for their ethnic cleansing operations. Meanwhile, during the discussion on Myanmar, Security Council members repeatedly mentioned commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing, who runs the Myanmar armed forces. He, even more than any other figure in Myanmar, is ultimately responsible for the army’s actions in Rakhine State. Yet his name has been barely mentioned in the international press as the crisis in Rakhine has escalated. (I will hopefully have two more pieces on Min Aung Hlaing next week, in The National and The Atlantic.) Although Aung San Suu Kyi certainly bears a significant part of the blame for the Rakhine crisis, Min Aung Hlaing needs to be front and center in discussions of Myanmar at the United Nations. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also has taken an increasingly tough rhetorical approach toward the Myanmar government. He seems to be getting increasingly frustrated with Myanmar’s stonewalling on letting in UN rights investigators, and Naypyidaw’s refusal to even acknowledge that there are serious rights violations going on in Myanmar. The Secretary-General has forcefully called on Myanmar to allow in UN investigators and to halt the army’s actions in Rakhine State. This week he called the Rohingya crisis “the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare.” But the UN’s actions, though welcome, are more than a bit late. Although the crisis has grown exponentially since August, Rakhine state has been wracked with violence for nearly five years. For five years, the military and vigilantes have laid waste to parts of the state. And for five years there have been massive refugee flights into Bangladesh, as well as large numbers of internally displaced people inside Myanmar. Indeed, multiple reports, including by the BBC, have shown that the UN mostly avoiding taking serious action on the Rakhine crisis over the past five years. The BBC reports that, until the crisis that began this past August, “the head of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) [for Myanmar], a Canadian: tried to stop human rights activists travelling to Rohingya areas attempted to shut down public advocacy on the subject isolated staff who tried to warn that ethnic cleansing might be on the way.” The United Nations has “strongly disagreed” with the BBC report. Other reports back up the BBC reporting on the UN’s go-slow approach to Rakhine. Last year, Vice obtained leaked documents which showed that “UN officials on the ground [in Myanmar] disregarded multiple recommendations on the rights and security of the [Rohingya].” The Vice documents further showed that an internal UN report had noted that the United Nations was focused mostly on “emphasizing development investment [in Rakhine State and Myanmar generally] as the solution to the problems in Rakhine State.” Although Rakhine certainly could use development, investment and growth is hardly going to stop an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. What’s more, as some of the Vice documents showed, many UN officials accurately recognized that development in Rakhine State actually might be further fueling the conflict. Finally, the Vice documents noted that the United Nations’ coordinator in Myanmar had repeatedly “discarded or simply ignored information that underscored the seriousness of the [human rights] situation” in Rakhine state. So, the United Nations’ actions this week on Myanmar are to be acclaimed. But they should have come much sooner.

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is authored by Mayesha Alam, a Soros New American Fellow, Yale Law School Global Health Justice Partnership Fellow, and Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University.  She is the author of “Women and Transitional Justice: Progress and Persistent Challenges in Retributive and Restorative Processes” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

The following is a guest post by Megan Roberts, associate director of the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations. The pace and scale of the violence currently unfolding in Myanmar is difficult to comprehend. Since August 25 this year, 430,000 Rohingya—more than a third of the ethnic minority’s population—have fled the country and an estimated 1,000 have died in a scorched earth campaign that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In his previous role as head of the UN’s refugee agency, Secretary-General António Guterres would no doubt have been seized with the task of responding this rapidly spiraling crisis. Perhaps this in part informed his decision to appeal directly to the UN Security Council earlier this month, imploring the body to act in the face of a mounting crisis. Guterres’ official letter, the first sent from a secretary-general to the Council in nearly 30 years, amounted to a rare, if implicit, exercise of Article 99 of the UN Charter, which gives the secretary-general the authority to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” The Rohingya, often referred to as the world’s most persecuted minority, have faced decades of oppression and discrimination in Myanmar. The current crisis began when a group of Rakhine State insurgents launched attacks on security forces, killing approximately a dozen people. The attacks came just a day after former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered the final report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State. Myanmar’s security forces responded with indiscriminate “clearance operations,” razing hundreds of villages. Because the government strictly limits access to Rakhine State, details of the extensive destruction come from the hundreds of thousands streaming over the border into Bangladesh, though satellite images confirm that thousands of homes have been burned. Facing scathing criticism for her failure to take action, Nobel Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi skipped this year’s UN General Assembly high-level meetings, but in a major speech on the crisis, she equivocated on the role of the armed services, saying there had been “allegations and counter-allegations.” The Rohingya crisis has sparked a change of tone from Guterres, who has been criticized for failing to shine a light on human rights abuses and atrocities, relying instead on quiet diplomacy to forge peace. He has spoken several times with Suu Kyi, imploring her to act. He has also made a series of escalating public calls for action, including during a recent press conference, where he highlighted the crisis as an issue at the top of global concerns. When asked whether he thought the violence amounted to ethnic cleansing, Guterres responded, “When one-third of the Rohingya population had to flee the country, can you find a better word to describe it?” Fed up with a lack of action by Myanmar authorities, a frustrated Guterres lamented that the government “has been completely deaf to our requests.” He also drew attention to the crisis in his first General Assembly address as secretary-general. Guterres’ official letter called for the Security Council to send a strong political message both to halt the current crisis and to support a strategy to “help end the vicious cycle in Rakhine.” He warned that it “risks degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe with implications for peace and security that could continue to expand beyond the borders of Myanmar.” Though the letter did not directly reference Article 99, the secretary-general noted in a later press conference that it was an exercise of exactly these powers. Guterres himself noted that his letter was the first such official appeal to the Council since 1989, when then Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar asked it to meet to discuss Lebanon. The letter was one of the earliest instances that a secretary-general had ever used such powers, either officially or informally, during their tenure. Moreover, as Loraine Sievers and Sam Daws note, Guterres went beyond previous invocations of Article 99 in that he implored the Council to act rather than simply to meet. Appealing directly to the Council is not without risk: Myanmar is a complex agenda item. China has long shielded the country from the Security Council’s spotlight, arguing that its security challenges are internal issues and therefore do not fall within the Council’s purview. By imploring the Council to act on Myanmar, Guterres risks drawing the ire of one of the Security Council’s permanent members early in his tenure. This comes not long after he warned that China would occupy any space the United States created by a global retreat in an “America First” era. In taking this action, the secretary-general is fulfilling commitments that he made in his campaign for the role. In the process to select Ban Ki-moon’s successor, Guterres focused on the importance of prevention, pledging to use all opportunities to bring matters of international peace and security to the Security Council’s attention. The more open selection process revealed that, at least rhetorically, many member states sought a strong leader for an institution that appeared paralyzed in the face of intractable challenges, from the devastating war in Syria to famine risk in the horn of Africa. After carefully cultivating productive working relationships with member states, most notably with the US, since his election, Guterres was hoping to expend this political capital as many of his bosses descended on Turtle Bay for high-level meetings of the General Assembly. Political momentum for action, spurred in part by Guterres’s letter, appears to be building, even if it still pales in comparison to the scale of the crisis. On September 13, after briefings from Guterres and his under-secretary-general for political affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, the Security Council agreed in a closed meeting to release a press statement condemning the violence. Although many observers had hoped for a stronger statement, it was the first time in nine years that the Council had come together to issue one on Myanmar. The crisis also commanded leaders’ attention during the opening week of the General Assembly, including during two high-level events and in a number of member statements seeking to shine a light on this crisis. Seven members of the Security Council have requested a public briefing from Guterres on the crisis, and several council members have also suggested openness to further action if the situation continues to deteriorate. Here, China’s attitude is likely to determine the extent and pace of such progress. None of this activity immediately ameliorates the dire conditions of the Rohingya living in temporary camps in Bangladesh, or those displaced within Myanmar who are not receiving any international support. And observers are right to criticize the UN’s outdated toolbox for responding to such crises. But amidst the tragedy, it is at least encouraging that the secretary-general has dusted off a long-underused instrument for focusing international attention on the plight of the Rohingya. This article originally appeared on the International Peace Institute's Global Observatory.

Although the tragedy of the Rohingya people has been unfolding for decades, the latest exodus of refugees to Bangladesh, fleeing violence in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, has become front-page news due to the sheer scale of the trauma. The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) puts the figure at 415,000 Rohingya who have fled their homes for Bangladesh in just the past three weeks. While struggling with its own development needs, Bangladesh is providing the last place of refuge for a stateless people often called “the most persecuted minority” in the world. To put the past month’s developments into historical perspective, Bangladesh—in the southernmost tip of the country, south of a port city named Cox’s Bazaar—began hosting Rohingya refugees in the 1970s. The first wave of around 200,000 refugees came in 1978. A second wave of around 250,000 fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in 1991–92. Although the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and international aid groups provided assistance for the refugees, Bangladesh long sought for the refugees to repatriate to Myanmar, rather than become permanent residents. A repatriation phase in the late 1990s saw some 230,000 Rohingya return to Myanmar. But in the summer of 2012, renewed religious violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state resulted in another influx to Bangladesh. Some Rohingya also attempted to reach Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand that summer, tragically, by boat. Bangladesh is a poor country by any measure. Using International Monetary Fund gross domestic product per capita data (purchasing power parity), it ranks among the poorest fifty countries in the world, illustrated by this chart. For this reason, Dhaka for years feared that the existence of refugee camps and settlements served as a “pull factor,” bringing more Rohingya to already-stressed Bangladesh. In the summer of 2012, Bangladesh prohibited three international aid organizations from assisting Rohingya who were not officially registered as refugees. In other words, Bangladesh has not always been a welcoming host. The problem has always been that however bad conditions may be in Bangladeshi refugee camps or makeshift settlements, the Rohingya are running from worse, often forced to leave whatever they possess behind, likely forever, and trudge for miles through mud and across a river to reach refuge in Bangladesh. That’s the backdrop for the events since August 25. According to the latest figures tracked by the Inter-Sector Coordination Group (a coalition of humanitarian agencies assisting with Rohingya relief in the Cox's Bazar area), a total of more than 197,000 “undocumented Myanmar nationals” had been resident in refugee camps, “makeshift settlements,” and “host communities” in this region of Bangladesh prior to August 25, 2017. Since that date, more than 420,000 have arrived in these same refugee camps, makeshift settlements, and host communities—with at least six new “spontaneous settlements” now housing more than 200,000 of this enormous population now totaling nearly 620,000. It is a tripling of the total number of refugees now in Bangladesh in under one month, all of whom need emergency medical attention and basic sustenance. Yesterday, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which she said, “We have 160 million people in a small geographical land. But if we can feed 160 million people, another 500 or 700,000 people—we can do it.” But she has also clearly called for Myanmar to take back the Rohingya, consistent with Bangladesh’s longstanding position. As this tragedy continues, short of a sea change in Myanmar’s willingness to accept the Rohingya as their own citizens, the situation is unlikely to improve. That will mean continued existence as refugees, with the great bulk of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. And the refugees will continue to need international assistance to meet the most basic medical care and food security needs. The IOM just issued a fundraising appeal for $26 million to cover the coming three months. This crisis can only be solved through a political solution. But one appears nowhere in sight. My book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, will be out in January. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa. Or like me on Facebook (fb.me/ayresalyssa) or Instagram (instagr.am/ayresalyssa).

In a major address to the Myanmar public, and the international community today, Aung San Suu Kyi gave her first significant speech about the ongoing crisis in Rakhine State. This crisis has now become probably the worst humanitarian catastrophe in East Asia. Reports suggest that people have been fleeing Rakhine State at a faster rate than in any refugee exodus since 1971. Over 400,000 people have fled Rakhine State into Bangladesh in recent weeks. The UN has referred to the crisis as ethnic cleansing, and there seems to be no letup in the Myanmar military’s offensive in Rakhine State. Although President Trump did not mention the Rohingya in his address at the United Nations, Secretary of State Tillerson called Suu Kyi about the crisis. Other countries that historically have been strong backers of Suu Kyi, including Britain and Sweden, have expressed growing concern, and called private UN sessions about the crisis. Suu Kyi decided not to come to this week’s United Nations General Assembly, and instead gave a major speech in Naypyidaw about the crisis. The speech confirmed much of what has already become evident about her approach to Rakhine State. That approach, reflected in this speech, is one in which she downplays the crisis, focuses instead on her other domestic priorities, refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens of Myanmar, plays to overall public opinion in Myanmar, and mostly defers to the military. Suu Kyi sees her major priorities as addressing insurgencies in the north and northeast of the country, as I mentioned in a recent Washington Post article; she views the Rakhine crisis, however horrific, as just one among many challenges in border lands. The speech reflected these priorities. She, like many ethnic Burmans, seems to view the Rohingya as outsiders—she referred in the speech to “Muslims” in Rakhine State but did not refer to them as Rohingya. She also seems to understand the political calculus in Myanmar; most of the population, as well as the army commanders, probably are supportive of the army’s scorched earth approach to Rakhine State—or at least do not mind it. Crowds rallied in central Myanmar to hear and cheer Suu Kyi’s speech; the domestic context of how her approach to Rakhine is viewed is vastly different from the international context. Although Suu Kyi did indeed intend the speech for international audiences, and spoke in English, she only generally condemned all rights violations. She suggested that Naypyidaw did not understand the causes of the refugee outflow, basically pardoning the military for atrocities that are largely to blame for the exodus. She also seemed to suggest that the situation on the ground in Rakhine was becoming more peaceful and that many Rohingya were not fleeing—a dubious claim—and this might be because the situation in Rakhine is not as dire as the world believes. There is little evidence to support the idea that the armed forces are creating peace in Rakhine. She further added that Myanmar did not fear investigations into the crisis, even though journalists and aid workers have largely been kept out of northern Rakhine. There is political calculus by Suu Kyi in this speech. The military commander-in-chief dominates security policy, and she may feel she can little sway what the armed forces do in Rakhine anyway. Most of the Myanmar population probably is uninterested in Rakhine State—at best. But the speech was still even less than Suu Kyi perhaps could have said to an international audience, and it understates her own influence both domestically and internationally. Though the military has control of security policy, Suu Kyi’s immense popularity at home means that she could use the bully pulpit to change minds and indirectly influence the armed forces—and demonstrate that the civilian government is not totally prostrate to the army. She did not try to do any of those things today.

Myanmar is essentially run by one of the world’s most lauded humanitarians. Yet since her party took power last year, Aung San Suu Kyi—the country’s de facto leader, though not its official president—has stood by and watched the slaughter and flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya. In a speech earlier today in Myanmar, Suu Kyi again mostly ignored the plight of the Rohingya. For more on why Suu Kyi has shied away from confronting the issue, see my Washington Post Outlook article.

As the Myanmar military attacks the Rohingya minority, the country's female leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has done little to stop the violence. The harsh lesson from it all: women leaders do not always promote peace.

In recent months, considerable ink and pixels have been spilled chronicling the growing humanitarian crisis in western Myanmar, and castigating the government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar security forces for their scorched earth policy toward Rakhine State in the west. But less has been written about possible actions that Naypyidaw, and outside actors, can take. In my new piece for Aspenia, I outline some potential immediate steps that could help stem the crisis. The piece can be read here.

Every day seems to bring worse news about the spiraling conflict in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. A top UN human rights official recently announced that the violence in Rakhine State is a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” As the Guardian reported: In an address to the UN human rights council in Geneva, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein denounced the “brutal security operation” against the Rohingya in Rakhine state, which he said was “clearly disproportionate” to [Rohingya] insurgent attacks carried out last month. Over 300,000 Rohingya have now fled into Bangladesh in recent weeks, straining the camps along the border. Camp aid workers are reporting desperate shortages of many essential supplies. The Myanmar military this past week also rebuffed a supposed month-long ceasefire offered by Rohingya militants. Meanwhile, journalists from organizations like the BBC who were taken on government-monitored trips to parts of Rakhine State this past week—heavily controlled trips, mind you—still managed to see massive devastation and what they believed were more villages “being put to the torch” by security forces or vigilantes. Rights organizations have confirmed these massive burning operations, while other reports suggest that the Myanmar military may have laid mines along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. In this climate, is the U.S. Senate really going to go forward with the part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would expand military to military cooperation with Myanmar? This expanded cooperation would include more trainings for the Myanmar military on a range of issues. The long-term impact of such trainings and military-to-military cooperation can be debated. But why expand cooperation now—right now, as the world is watching the ongoing strife in western Myanmar? That seems a serious question.

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan suggested that, in this period of uncertain governance by the White House, Congress should take a much more forceful approach to governing, as it did in the 1860s and, to some extent, in the 1920s. He noted that Congress already has defied the president on Russia policy and, to some extent, on health care, and he outlined ways in which Congress could become the central policymaker in Washington. Among others, Kagan suggested that: “on matters where [Republicans and Democrats] both see a threat to the nation’s interests … Congress can wield the power of the purse … [like] a joint national security committee headed by the chairs and ranking members of the foreign relations, armed services, and intelligence committees, for instance.” It seems hard to believe that the current Congress, split among GOP factions, with little experience legislating, and unsure how to approach a president who enjoys high popularity with the GOP base, will take on broad governing powers the way Kagan suggests. What’s more, congresspeople in both parties have, over the past twenty years, gotten used to an increasingly so-called “imperial presidency,” in which so much of the policymaking process is driven by the executive, especially on foreign policy issues. However, on one region of the world—Southeast Asia—the possibility for Congress to take the lead, to be the driving policy actor, actually exists. As I noted in an earlier blog post, over the past two decades Congress has played a central role in determining Southeast Asia policy. In many respects, Congress has dominated Southeast Asia policy more than it has any other region of the world; several top House and Senate leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have significant interests in Southeast Asia policy. For years, the region was largely ignored by multiple U.S. administrations, and Congress was free to craft sanctions policy on Myanmar, to shape policy toward Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and to weigh in significantly on U.S. policy toward Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. Now, not only has the White House paid relatively little attention to growing crises in mainland Southeast Asia but those crises are quickly spiraling out of control. In just the past two months, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen has shut down the National Democratic Institute’s operations in Cambodia, cracked down on top members of the opposition CNRP party, shut a range of press outlets, and seems prepared to potentially close the CNRP for good, in the run-up to next year’s 2018 national elections. Cambodia was never a true democracy, but this intense repression goes far beyond the political situation in Cambodia during the 2000s and early 2010s—it is a dramatic increase in the level of repression, one that puts Cambodia on the verge of becoming a full dictatorship. Hun Sen is only growing bolder; this week, he vowed “to continue leading his impoverished Southeast Asian nation for another 10 years,” according to the Associated Press. The White House has seemed mostly uninterested in the Cambodia crackdown; the State Department has said it is “deeply concerned” over Hun Sen’s actions. With the offices of Senator Mitch McConnell and several other top congressional leaders long interested in Cambodia, the opportunity is there for Congress, rather than the White House, to develop a tough approach to the growing climate of repression in Cambodia. Similarly, in Myanmar the situation in Rakhine State has in recent months spiraled from bad to worse. Some 120,000 people have fled into Bangladesh in recent weeks, after a spate of attacks by Rohingya insurgent groups and a brutal Myanmar army campaign in Rakhine State, which reportedly has included widespread burnings of homes and swaths of land. Official figures state that around 400 people have been killed in the latest spate of fighting in Rakhine State, but it is hard to know if that number is accurate—it could be wildly understated. The military is stepping up its force presence in Rakhine State. The BBC today reported that Myanmar may be mining the border with Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of government, has downplayed the severity of the crisis, earning international condemnation. Yesterday, in a call with Turkey’s president, Suu Kyi reportedly blamed “terrorists,” for what she dubbed “a huge iceberg of misinformation” about the crisis in Rakhine State. She previously has downplayed the scale of the crisis and the army’s role in it, and there is little indication that Suu Kyi will or can restrain the military from a scorched earth policy in Rakhine. Again, the White House has taken a low-key stance toward the crisis, as it has in Cambodia. Politico’s Nahal Toosi reported this week that the “Trump admin – including the State Department has been silent re: killings of Rohingya” but that after significant prodding from Toosi, the State Department issued a comment to Politico that “expresses ‘deep concern’ re: Myanmar violence. But it doesn't name Rohingya.” Congress, again, should take the lead. The letters sent this week to Suu Kyi and her government by Senator John McCain and Congressman Edward Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were important first steps. But Congress could do more. It can revisit the possibility of extending IMET to Myanmar, and call new hearings on the Rohingya crisis, before the visit of Pope Francis in November, to expose the potential atrocities and help people understand the situation in western Myanmar. And if the situation in Rakhine State gets worse, Congress should consider even sterner measures toward Myanmar—despite the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi in theory now runs the country.

The National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government in Myanmar has now been in office for more than a year, with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto head of government. Suu Kyi certainly wields sizable influence. In fact, Suu Kyi has often been criticized, by commentators and members of her own party, for keeping too tight-fisted control of actions by the government, so much so that NLD members of parliament seemingly have little to do. To be sure, on some policy areas, Suu Kyi does not have the level of control that leaders of other, more established democracies enjoy. The military remains an extraordinarily powerful actor in Myanmar, and one apparently capable of operating, in outlying areas at least, without even clearing policy through the Cabinet. The military retains its percentage of seats in parliament, essential control over its budget, and its strong resistance to any constitutional change. Proponents of constitutional change that might reduce the formal powers of the armed forces, like former NLD lawyer U Ko Ni, have been murdered. Nonetheless, there are areas of policy over which Suu Kyi should enjoy significant influence, and freedom of the press is one of them. Suu Kyi was a longtime opposition leader, at a time (mostly) when Myanmar’s media was tightly controlled, the security forces regularly detained reporters, and state media outlets used their pages to mock and condemn her. She could use her bully pulpit to promote independent media, greater freedoms for journalists working throughout Myanmar, and an end to media monopolies. She could step in strongly if journalists were detained, and call for greater transparency in government— transparency that might actually work in her favor, since a more vibrant Myanmar press could well expose abuses by the armed forces and, indirectly, apply pressure for constitutional change. But Suu Kyi has not taken this approach. Instead, over the past year, press freedom in Myanmar seems to have regressed. In some respects, press freedom in Myanmar now seems more restrictive than it was in the final years of the former Thein Sein government. The Suu Kyi government has not tried to change existing laws that are major barriers to a free press. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Shawn Crispin notes: “Chief among those laws is section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, a broad provision that carries potential three-year prison terms for cases of defamation over communications networks. While the law was used only occasionally against journalists under military rule, politicians, military officials, and even Buddhist monks are increasingly using it now to stifle online and social media criticism.” The Myanmar chapter of the PEN press freedom group has estimated that over 55 cases have been filed, under this law, just in the year since Suu Kyi’s government came into office. Meanwhile, late last month three journalists were arrested in Shan State, under a different Unlawful Association law. These reporters included one from The Irrawaddy; they had been covering one of the country’s ethnic insurgencies as well as allegations of abuses by the state security forces. “The return of a climate of fear is very disturbing,” wrote The Irrawaddy’s editor-in-chief, Aung Zaw, after the publication’s reporter was arrested. As with the rising toll of defamation cases, Suu Kyi has said nothing about the arrests in Shan State. A spokesperson for her party told the New York Times, “For media personnel, press freedom is a key need … For us, peace, national development and economic development are the priority, and then democracy and human rights, including press freedom.” Meanwhile, Suu Kyi’s government has enacted other restrictions on press access.  It has made it nearly impossible for journalists to cover parts of Rakhine State in the west. The Suu Kyi government also recently refused to provide visas to UN investigators tasked with analyzing the situation in Rakhine State and allegations of abuse by Myanmar security forces in Rakhine State. In some ways, the Suu Kyi government is looking more and more like its predecessors.  

Roughly one year after Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party took control of Myanmar’s parliament, and Suu Kyi became de facto head of state (Myanmar has a president, but Suu Kyi is widely known to control the government), the euphoria of last year has melted away. When the NLD won a sweeping electoral victory in November 2015, the country’s first truly free and accepted national elections in decades, it gained a massive majority in the lower house of parliament, as well as control of most of the country’s provincial legislatures. Myanmar citizens swept onto the streets of Yangon and other cities to celebrate. The military, which had ruled the country as a junta or a quasi-civilian regime between 1962 and 2015, publicly affirmed that it would accept the results of the election---and, in theory, a transfer of power to a civilian, Suu Kyi-led government. Suu Kyi, the democracy icon and Nobel Peace laureate who was kept under house arrest for years under military rule, had offered a broad slate of promises to the Myanmar public. She had vowed to aggressively push for a lasting peace deal with the country’s many ethnic insurgencies, some of which have been fighting the government for decades. “The first responsibility of the next government is to build peace,” she said in an address in January 2016. She had promised to protect threatened minorities, such as those Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State. She had promised to build a developed country that did not rely on handouts of foreign aid, telling people on the campaign trail in 2015, “we don't want to be a country which needs to ask other countries for help.” Yet in the past year, most of these promises have seemed hollow, and Myanmar’s stability, always fragile, appears to be disintegrating even more rapidly than it was in 2015. For more on my assessment of Suu Kyi’s first year in office, read my new article in The National.

Rachel Brown, Sherry Cho, Larry Hong, Gabriella Meltzer, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. Park Geun-hye impeached. South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled unanimously on Friday to uphold a parliamentary vote that impeached Park Geun-hye in December, decisively ousting her from office and igniting violence from pro- and anti-Park demonstrators that led to at least two deaths in Seoul. Park’s abbreviated term, serving four years of a five-year term, has been marked by controversy and criticism of her apparent aloof and autocratic governing manner. For example, despite the court’s seventeen hearings on the matter since the impeachment vote, Park failed to ever appear personally in court for questioning. Park is the first South Korean president to be impeached despite the scandal-ridden terms of Korea’s past presidents. Her impeachment has left her open to prosecution on criminal charges for her alleged role in the corruption and influence-peddling scandal that has roiled South Korea since last year. The allegations against Park center on Choi Soon-sil, a close confidante of Park’s, and allegations that Park allowed Choi to edit speeches, install appointees, and secretly make policy decisions. Together, Park and Choi are accused of pressuring South Korea’s major chaebol conglomerates, such as Samsung and Hyundai, into giving millions to nonprofit organizations started by Choi that were used as personal slush funds to benefit Choi and her family. A snap presidential election has been triggered by the court decision, and is expected to be held in early May. South Korean opinion polls thus far favor the leader of the opposition party, Moon Jae-in, as the next president of South Korea, which has led to regional uncertainty due to his party’s markedly less hawkish North Korea policies and ambivalence toward U.S. deployment in South Korea. 2. Violence in Myanmar drives 20,000 into China. Early on Monday morning, armed rebels of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) launched a surprise attack on a hotel and Burmese military and police buildings in Laukkai, a town in northeastern Myanmar just miles from the Chinese border. The ensuing violence, which was the deadliest conflict in the area since early 2015, left at least thirty dead, including five civilians. The MNDAA, one of the many ethnic rebel groups active in Myanmar, claimed its most recent attack was to protest “continued military pressure” on four minority armies that have not yet joined national peace talks. As a result of the fighting, as many as 20,000 local residents, many of whom are ethnically Chinese, have streamed across the nearby border to China’s Yunnan province seeking safety. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson stated that China was providing humanitarian assistance to the displaced persons and urged for the combatants to negotiate “an immediate ceasefire.” The new clash puts a damper on the Burmese government’s ambitious deal begun in August 2016 that aims to broker nationwide peace between the government and Myanmar’s array of ethnic groups. 3. ZTE to pay $1.19 billion fine in U.S. sanctions case. The U.S. Department of Commerce announced this week that “the games are over” and Chinese telecom giant ZTE will pay $1.19 billion in fines to the U.S. government for violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran. The sanctions were in relation to ZTE’s 283 sales made to North Korea and its purchase of electronics components in the United States for products eventually sent to Iran. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of components for ZTE products come from the United States. Last year, the United States government placed restrictions on ZTE that required U.S. firms to obtain an export license before selling the company supplies. In addition to the violations of sanctions on Iran and North Korea, the U.S. Commerce Department also disclosed ZTE documents discussing how to evade U.S. commercial restrictions on other countries including Cuba, Syria, and Sudan. Despite the fine’s large size, the price of ZTE shares actually rose following the announcement. The company reported strong earnings last year and some analysts attribute the rally to ZTE’s willingness to reshuffle leadership and implement reforms in the wake of the scandal. Although the ZTE case may be wrapping up, the worries aren’t over for Chinese telecoms: Huawei is reportedly under investigation for sanctions violations as well. 4. Compassion International closes its doors in India. After a forty-eight-year presence in India, Colorado-based Christian charity Compassion International is being forced by the Modi administration to cease its operations in the country. The Indian parliament passed the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) in 2010, which strictly regulates monetary foreign donations given to nonprofits operating in India. However, since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, over 20,000 nonprofits’ FCRA license renewals were cancelled. Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party hopes to “curtail[s] the flow of foreign money to activities it deems “detrimental to the national interest.” Compassion International, suspected of engaging in religious conversion, receives foreign donations through a $38 monthly sponsor-a-child child program, which are dispersed at church-affiliated service centers. The organization’s executives strongly deny the government’s accusations. 5. China’s “Two Sessions” set annual benchmarks. Meetings for China’s highest legislative and advisory bodies, the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, kicked off last week. Premier Li Keqiang’s government work report, the centerpiece of the two sessions, shows that China’s focus for 2017 is maintaining the stability of the Chinese economy rather than radical structural reforms. The GDP target for 2017 was set to “around 6.5 percent, or higher in possible in practice,” a reduction from last year’s 6.5 to 7 percent goal; the consumer price index target was set at 3 percent, the same level as last year; and the M2 money supply growth target was reduced to about 12 percent from 13 percent. These targets are in line with China’s stated goal of pursuing a “prudent, neutral monetary policy in 2017.” Mr. Li’s work report also focuses on dealing with China’s growing debt levels as well as controlling the risks associated with “nonperforming assets, bond defaults, shadow banking, and internet finance.” While U.S. President Donald Trump was not mentioned by name, some analysts suggest that the issue of how China should deal with the Trump administration over a wide range of issues secretly looms over the two sessions. Bonus: Controversy over Chinese sex-ed textbook heats up. This week, thanks to one Chinese parent’s Weibo post, a Chinese sex-education textbook used by eighteen elementary schools in Beijing went viral online, attracting both praise and criticism. The textbook series, published by Beijing Normal University, was the product of nine years of testing and depicts a wide range of sex and relationship issues in remarkable depth and with exceptional candor. Many parents are shocked and embarrassed by the radically honest education materials, even going so far as to call them pornographic comic books. On the other hand, a teacher who participated in writing the textbooks defends them: “We decide to teach [students] in the first and second grade of their elementary school, because we think that students will learn about [sex education issues] anyway. It is easier to learn about them earlier than later, because sex education is harder to teach at a later stage, and teaching them earlier can help avoid things we all worry about from happening.” China is often criticized for its lack of adequate sex education, so the discussion around these textbooks may lead to a wider discussion about the role of sex education in the country.

The apparent assassination of an advisor to de facto Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi outside Yangon airport last month has raised disturbing questions about the country’s stability, and about Suu Kyi’s control of Myanmar’s military and police. U Ko Ni, a well-known lawyer and advisor to the National League for Democracy (NLD), was shot at close range just outside Yangon airport on January 29, after returning to Myanmar from Jakarta. He died on the spot. Although parts of Myanmar – especially Rakhine State and parts of the north and east where the military is still fighting insurgent groups – are wracked with violence, shootings in Yangon, Mandalay, and other major cities in the country’s ethnic Bamar center are relatively uncommon. It is difficult to legally obtain a handgun in Myanmar, especially for people who have no links to the armed forces. Friends and acquaintances of Ko Ni reacted immediately with shock to the brazen killing. Although gun violence is uncommon in Yangon, Ko Ni certainly was involved in several causes that could have made him many enemies in Myanmar. He was one of the best-known Muslims in Myanmar, at a time when violent anti-Muslim sentiments have become common in social media, hardline Buddhist nationalist monks have become mini-celebrities, and violence between Buddhists and Muslims has destroyed many communities in western Myanmar. The anti-Muslim fervor has spread outside of western Myanmar; there have been attacks on Muslims in Yangon and other large cities in the Bamar heartland over the past five years. For his part, Ko Ni was involved in programs to promote inter-religious discussions and had repeatedly condemned the rising religious intolerance in Myanmar, according to Benedict Rogers of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a longtime Myanmar observer and activist. In Myanmar’s increasingly toxic domestic political climate – a situation combined with a weak rule of law – these actions could have made U Ko Ni a target. Not long after the apparent assassination, Ko Ni’s daughter told Al Jazeera, "A lot of people hate us because we have different religious beliefs, so I think that might be why it happened to him.” Ko Ni also publicly pushed for constitutional reform; the constitution that the Suu Kyi government is working under was essentially drafted and passed by a military-installed government. The lawyer had worked on the NLD’s 2015 national campaign, and constitutional changes that he advocated would have, in the long run, probably diminished the power of the armed forces. Under the current constitution, the military retains vast power over its budget, as well as over internal security and, to some degree, the functioning of the legislature; the current constitution gives the armed forces so much power that it is hard to imagine the country becoming fully democratic under this charter. The New York Times reported that Ko Ni had been working on a draft of a plan to alter the constitution to drastically reduce the military’s political powers. (It is unclear whether Ko Ni would have had any ability to convince lawmakers to push to change the constitution.) Any changes to the current constitution would almost surely be resented by many senior army leaders. As a result of Ko Ni’s advocacy for constitutional change, many Myanmar officials and commentators want to know whether there were links between some members of the armed forces and the killing of Ko Ni. The Myanmar police and army have together launched an investigation into the murder. Notably, in recent weeks there have been several arrests in the case. In addition, the Myanmar police told reporters that they believe a former military officer, Colonel Aung Win Khine, masterminded the killing of Ko Ni. The announcement of Colonel Aung Win Khine’s alleged role has only fostered greater suspicions, in Myanmar, that some elements of the armed forces might have played a role in Ko Ni’s killing. Several other suspects arrested in the case also have military backgrounds. But Suu Kyi has been relatively reticent to even speak about the killing, perhaps for fear of further alienating the powerful military. The Irrawaddy reported that, in the days after the startling killing, state-run media outlets did not feature stories about Ko Ni on their front pages, despite the fact that independent Myanmar media ran numerous stories about the shooting.