By-Elections Must Not Be Seen as Benchmark of Reform

The international community, including many western governments, has indicated that it views the upcoming 1 April by-elections in Burma as a key benchmark in the country’s reform process and many have argued that a successful process should lead to the lifting of economic sanctions. However, free and fair balloting alone is insufficient to demonstrate that the by-elections have moved Burma into a period of true democracy because the process has been structured to maintain the military’s grip on power.

Only 48 seats in the Parliament, 7% of the total available parliamentary seats, are being contested in the by-elections. Those seats being contested are open predominantly because the individual originally elected to fill them, all of whom are members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was appointed to a position in the executive branch. Thus, only a small fraction of the country will be participating in this election and the vast majority of the people of Burma will continue to be represented by the individuals who supposedly won the 2010 elections, which were nothing more than a sham […]

Irregularities Tarnish the Credibility of Upcoming By-Elections

“The Special Rapporteur is concerned at continuing allegations of campaign irregularities and attemps to limit campaign activities,” stated Tomás Ojea Quintana in his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council released on Friday. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma further stressed that “the credibility of the elections will not be determined solely on the day of the vote, but on the basis of the entire process leading up and following election day.”

This report comes at the same time as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been alerting the Union Election Commission and the international community about the obstacles and restrictions that the NLD is facing on the campaign trail. Speaking after a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird on Thursday, Daw Suu said that official voter lists for next month’s by-elections include dead people and open the possibility for fraud […]

ASEAN Leader’s Visit to Burma Unwittingly Shows Many Needed Steps

This past week, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan traveled to Burma where he met with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, President Thein Sein and Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin. While ASEAN and its leaders tend to view developments in Burma through rose-tinted glasses, several of Surin’s comments during and after his visit illustrated just how many more steps are actually needed for there to be genuine reform in the country.

At a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand following his trip, Surin said, “If Myanmar is going to carry out its chairmanship successfully, many things need to happen within the next two years.” He elaborated that the country will need to invest in roads, telecommunications, hotels and internet systems for the thousands of national leaders, delegates and journalists that will attend […]

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ (၂/၂၀၁၁) – အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆံုးေဆြးေႏြးေရးျဖစ္စဥ္

၁၉၈၈ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပံုၾကီးအျပီး ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႕ စစ္အစိုးရတို႕ ထိပ္တိုက္ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တာ ၂၃ႏွစ္တာကာလ အတြင္းမွာ ၁၆ၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ ရွိလာခဲ့ပါျပီ။ ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တဲ့ မွတ္တမ္းေတြကိုၾကည့္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၂) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၂ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၁) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၃) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၃) ၾကိမ္၊ […]

NLD Statement No-16/09/11 Released on its 23rd Anniversary

During the unprecedented uprising in 1988, the monks, laity, students and other people of Burma, by sacrificing lives, blood and sweat, demanded human rights and democracy for the country and the people. It is now 23 years since the National League for Democracy (NLD) was formed […]

Aung San Suu Kyi Named Chatham House Prize 2011 Winner

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese democracy campaigner, has been voted the winner of the Chatham House Prize 2011. This annual award is presented to the statesperson deemed by members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year […]

Asean to Listen to Suu Kyi as Burma Seeks Chair

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations will weigh the opinion of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi as it considers whether to invite Burma to chair the regional grouping in 2014, Indonesia’s foreign minister told The Associated Press.

Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa also said Indonesia’s own transformation from its authoritarian regime to democracy in a decade could offer lessons to Burma, one of the world’s most sanctioned nations because of its poor human rights record […]

Heightened Expectations and Hopes for Real Change in Burma Can Only be Realized with Coordinated International Pressure

Derek Mitchell, the United States (US) Special Representative and Policy Coordinator for Burma, made his first visit to Burma from September 9-14. Throughout his visit Ambassador Mitchell consistently expressed his belief that now is a time of opportunity for Burma. He stated in a press conference before leaving the country that “[a]mong both the international community and the Burmese people, it is clear from my visit that there are heightened expectations and hopes that change, real change, may be on the horizon.” However, Amb. Mitchell recognized that while there is opportunity for change, the human rights situation in the country is clearly still problematic. He stated of his meeting that “I was frank about the many questions the US – and others – continue to have about implementation and follow-through on these stated goals…I raised concerns regarding the detention of approximately 2,000 political prisoners, continued hostilities in ethnic minority areas accompanied by reports of serious human rights violations, including against women and children.” […]

Commissioner Georgieva discusses ways to step up support for the most vulnerable people in Burma/Myanmar

Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, has just completed a two-day humanitarian mission to Burma/Myanmar. In Nay Pyi Taw and Yangon the Commissioner discussed the challenges of managing disasters and humanitarian problems

Calling for the Release of All Political Prisoners Towards National Reconciliation in Burma

We, members of the Indian Parliamentarians’ Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB), would like to remind you that even after the General Elections in November 2010 and despite hopes that the newly-formed government could tackle the issue of political prisoners […]