Nobel laureate Suu Kyi to miss Canada as she tours U.S.

By The Canadian Press - Monday, September 17, 2012 at 5:45 PM - 0 Comments

OTTAWA – Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will bypass Canada as she kicks off a marathon 17-day visit to the United States.

Suu Kyi, known around the world as a symbol of peaceful resistance, is visiting the U.S. six months after Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird travelled to Myanmar to personally confer honorary Canadian citizenship on the Nobel laureate.

Suu Kyi arrived in Washington today for a tour that will include high-level meetings and visits with members of the Burmese diaspora in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Louisville, and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

A visit to Canada, however, is not on her itinerary.

The group known as Canadian Friends of Burma is disappointed Suu Kyi won’t be making it to Canada, which has conferred honorary citizenship on only four other people.

Baird’s office said Suu Kyi is “an amazing woman” with a busy schedule, and that another mutually convenient time will be found for her to come to Canada.

Myanmar’s Suu Kyi granted honorary Canadian citizenship

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments

On International Woman’s Day, Foreign Minister John Baird personally presented Myanmar’s iconic opposition figure, Aung San Suu Kyi, with honorary Canadian citizenship while visiting the southeast Asian country. The Nobel laureate is the first woman, and fifth person ever, to receive the honour.

Baird is in Myanmar (sometimes called Burma) to acknowledge the glimmer of democratic promise being shown by the country’s military rulers as they allow Suu Kyi and opposition figures to run in by-elections scheduled for April 1. Suu Kyi, who has been campaigning ahead of April’s vote after spending much of the past two decades under house arrest in Rangoon, won a landslide election victory in Myanmar in 1990, but the country’s military blocked her from forming government. The military junta ruled in classic authoritarian fashion until recently, when leadership was transferred to a civilian government headed by President Thein Sein, with whom Baird also met on his visit. Under Sein, the government has released hundreds of political prisoners and allowed increased media freedoms.

The CBC reported that “in a way” Baird is “making history” as the first Canadian foreign minister ever to visit Myanmar. The Conservative government in Ottawa ramped up Canada’s long-standing sanctions against the country in 2008, but Baird said he is visiting “with an eye to re-evaluating the measures that we’ve taken against the government here.”

Myanmar has much to gain by continuing to loosen up its authoritarian ways, but based on Suu Kyi’s popularity—both at home and abroad—its current rulers might have a lot to lose. And if history is any indicator, Myanmar’s supposed march to democracy should be regarded with a hefty measure of skepticism.

Clinton: Not ready to lift sanctions against Myanmar

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:07 AM - 0 Comments

“We’re not at the point where we could consider lifting sanctions,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned on Thursday during a historic visit to Myanmar. “The United States is prepared to walk the path of reform with you if you keep moving in the right direction,” Clinton added, according to the BBC, in a veiled hint that Washington wants to see further progress towards democracy before lifting the tight sanctions it imposes on the country’s senior leaders. Clinton met both Myanmar’s President Thein Sein in the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in the main city, Rangoon.

BBC

Clinton to visit Myanmar

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be visiting Myanmar next month, marking the first time in over half a century that a secretary of state will set foot in the country, the New York Times reports. The news came as pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi said on Friday that her party was ready to register for future elections, underscoring the opposition’s confidence in recent political changes in the country. “After years of darkness, we’ve seen flickers of progress in these last several weeks,” Obama said, acknowledging reforms recently undertaken by Myanmar’s ruling military junta.

The New York Times

Is real change on the horizon in Burma?

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lai Seng Sin/AP

In Burma, rumours of reform are best taken with a pinch, or more, of salt. Hints of liberalization tend to trickle out of the closed-off nation every few years. But in nearly 50 years of military rule, little changed in the country sometimes known as Myanmar. Today, a nominally civilian government reigns in Rangoon, but the military remains dominant, if not all-powerful.

There are increasing signs, however, that real change may be in the offing. Public outcry recently forced President Thein Sein to put a temporary halt to a massive dam project on the Irrawaddy River. The development would have flooded a huge expanse of sensitive wetlands and forced thousands of villagers from their homes. In the past, none of that likely would have mattered. But this time, for whatever reason, it did. Whether the dam decision triggers deeper democratic change, however, remains to be seen. As democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC: “I think I’d like to see a few more turns before I decide whether or not the wheels are moving along.”

PM invites Burmese pro-democracy activist to Canada

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 2:53 PM - 3 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has invited Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi to personally visit Canada to accept the honourary citizenship which was granted to her in 2007. Suu Kyi was made an honourary Canadian because of her incessant attempts to have free elections held in Myanmar (Burma). Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won the 1990 general election but a military junta led by Than Shwe prevented the party from taking power. The military has ruled ever since. Suu Kyi spent 15 of the past 21 years imprisoned. This November, she was released from her most recent year-long house arrest. The military junta’s party claimed victory in last month’s election, the first in two decades.

Halifax Chronicle-Herald

Myanmar considered buying ManU during cyclone crisis

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 6, 2010 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

Than Shwe, the head of Myanmar’s military junta, considered bidding $1-billion for a controlling stake in the Manchester United football club in January 2009, just months after cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people in the country, reports The Guardian. Shwe concluded in a cable obtained by WikiLeaks that such a bid “might look bad,” so he ordered the creation of a new multimillion dollar national soccer league instead. Another Burmese cable stated that the football league may be “a way to distract the populace from ongoing political and economic problems or to divert their attention from criticism of the upcoming 2010 elections.” In those elections, which the UN condemned as fraudulent, the military junta’s party won 76 per cent of the vote.

The Guardian

Aung San Suu Kyi vs. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 5:23 PM - 4 Comments

Aung San Suu Kyi

When, on the evening of Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi suddenly appeared from behind the red iron bars surrounding her house, her lonely prison for most of the past two decades, her ecstatic supporters erupted into cheers; many were reduced to tears. Thousands had rushed to Suu Kyi’s crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake after security forces began taking apart the compound’s barbed-wire barricades: a clear signal the world’s most famous political prisoner would finally be freed from house arrest.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

“I am a sinner,” a woman wrapped in a black chador told TV-watchers in Iran in a public broadcast on Nov. 15. It was the second TV “confession” for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two who faces death by stoning for adultery and by hanging for complicity in her husband’s murder. While Ashtiani’s circumstances are not unique in Iran, it was the image of her iconic pale face framed by the black chador that galvanized human rights activists across the world, from Laureen Harper to topless Ukrainian feminists.

Back to the contest bracket

Burma sets its sights on online critics

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Burma’s Saffron Revolution, which saw massive monk-led protests against the military junta and a crackdown that left at least 100 dead or missing. Now, it seems the state has turned its attention online—the junta has reportedly launched a series of Internet attacks on dissident websites hosted outside the country.

Just before the anniversary, at least three websites run by Burmese exiles were crippled by “distributed denial-of-service” attacks that jammed them with fake traffic, reported the Thailand-based newspaper Irrawaddy, one affected outlet. Websites for the Burmese-language newspaper Khit Pyaing (New Era Journal) in Thailand, and the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma, which runs radio and satellite television stations, were also affected. The attacks coincided with increased surveillance at Rangoon’s Internet cafés, and a slowdown of Internet service within the country that rendered it impossible to upload photos or videos, noted Irrawaddy, which continued reporting through a mirror site and blog.

Irrawaddy came back online Monday, but some are fearful that similar attacks could follow. “If the military government has well-trained computer technicians, the exiled media may be targeted again,” said Irrawaddy office manager Win Thu, who supervised the efforts to get back online. “It doesn’t cost very much to carry out such attacks.”

For many Burmese, the Internet is a crucial link to the outside world—for which it also provided a window into the country last year as protests and escalating violence unfolded. “Internet sites based outside the country are one of the few remaining sources of reliable news for Burmese people,” Irrawaddy founder and editor Aung Zaw recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Now it appears not even those sites are safe.” Zaw worries this latest cyberattack could be a sign of things to come: “Over the past 20 years, the battle between Burma’s regime and pro-democratic forces has shifted from the streets to the jungle and now to the computer.”