As the world looks on, seemingly helplessly, the Myanmar military – Tatmadaw – continues its campaign of violence to repress protests aimed at restoring the country’s fledgling democracy. Despite a proposed pause, with the Tatmadaw saying they will only respond to events that undermine broadly conceived security, the protests are likely to continue and the […]
Tag Archives: Myanmar
Myanmar’s recent military coup was a shock, especially for subscribers to the view that democracy is inevitable. But it was not, for anyone who has watched the country, a surprise. The country’s National League for Democracy (NLD, headed by the revered Aung San Suu Kyi, recorded a strong, 60 per cent, majority in the country’s […]
When I awoke before dawn on the day of Myanmar’s 2015 elections – the first more or less free elections in over five decades – my sense as an election observer team leader was the day would unfold as a happy occasion helping transition the country towards a better future, or there would be a […]
In July 2015, the then still relatively new Australia Myanmar Institute held an international conference at Yangon University. It was the first time that an international conference had been held at that university and the first time that politics had been openly discussed there since 1962. It was a great moment, before the elections which […]
When Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy was elected to government in November 2015, there was a wave of relief across Myanmar, and the world, that, after decades of repression, things would change for the better. For many citizens of Myanmar there has been positive change, if most of it occurring prior to […]
On 8 July 2015, Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) government announced that Myanmar would go to elections on 8 November. This raised the prospect of whether Myanmar’s process of reform and liberalization – what US President Barak Obama had earlier called the country’s ‘real but incomplete’ process of democratization – would continue. In […]
Just having Myanmars pro-democracy icon and Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, in Australia is a lovely thing. She is one of those few international figures, along with Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Xanana Gusmao, who seem to be all but universally admired in the West. But despite Daw (to use the polite honorific) […]
Just having Burmas pro-democracy icon and Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, in Australia is a lovely thing. She is one of those few international figures, along with Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Xanana Gusmao, who seem to be all but universally admired in the West. But despite Daw (to use the polite honorific) […]
Myanmars transition from authoritarianism has been given a boost by the announcement at the World Economic Forum meeting in Naypyitaw that Aung San Suu Kyi run for the presidency in 2015. Yet despite this unsurprisingly news and the worlds increasing acceptance of this once pariah state, deep structural problems look set to challenge the countrys […]
Myanmar’s reform program is being challenged by continuing anti-Muslim rioting, which has left 43 dead and hundreds injured in the past two weeks. The rioting has now extended beyond Rakhine State across central Myanmar (formerly Burma), with “well-organised” anti-Muslim riots in 11 Burmese cities and towns, including its second city of Mandalay, where a state […]