Layla Moran, our spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, has spoken out against the coup unfolding in Myanmar:
Myanmar’s military must step back from the brink, end this coup and release all civilian leaders immediately.
The UK should step up and lead the world in shining a spotlight on the plight of democracy and human rights in Myanmar
Democracy and the rule of law need to be respected.
The Foreign Secretary should use this pivotal moment to urge the international community to secure democratic and human rights of all citizens in Myanmar.
Today’s developments are yet another disturbing chapter in Myanmar’s recent history of political unrest, which has already caused a refugee crisis forcing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people to flee the country.
Their future now looks even more uncertain and perilous.
It is time for the UK to step up and lead the world in shining a spotlight on the plight of democracy and human rights in Myanmar, and seek peaceful resolution for all its people.
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7 Comments
Nobody could possibly disagree with what Ms Moran is saying. The problem is that the Generals are just not listening. Even when they returned to barracks a few years ago, they stayed in charge.
Resistance is beginning. Nobody wants to return to the harsh miliitary rule of the past in Burma
“The Biden administration has formally determined that the military takeover in Myanmar constitutes a coup d’état, a designation that requires the US to cut its foreign assistance to the country.”
Why don’t we do that?
Hundreds of members of Myanmar’s Parliament remained confined inside their government housing in the country’s capital on Tuesday, a day after the military staged a coup and detained senior politicians including Nobel laureate and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, meanwhile, released a statement calling for the military to honour the results of last November’s election and release of all of those detained.
https://worldabcnews.com/myanmar-lawmakers-say-theyre-confined-and-under-guard-following-military-coup/
As long as China supports Burma [ do not use the name Myanmar because the people were not asked] they will put two fingers up to us. I also expect India to help Burma because both nations are anti-Rhohinga.
The alleged genocide that is underway among the Uighur people in Xinjiang is reminiscent of what has been happening in Tibet and Southern Monglia for decades. The jailing of Nalvany in Russia on the pretext of a parole violation looks like a throwback to the Soviet days of secret police repression.
With this military coup in Myanmar seemingly bringing a halt to the nascent democratic advances in that country, there is not a great deal of good news out there as 2021 gets underway.
We have to express shock and horror at what the generals have done, in order to uphold values we and many other countries hold dear. The downside is that in doing that we are advertising our impotence, because there is little we can do to actually force the leaders of the coup change their minds.
Military intervention is unthinkable, and as has been shown many times over recent decades, trade sanctions hurt the people, not the rulers. The people of Iraq, Iran and Syria have been punished for having rulers we don’t like and they didn’t choose, causing needless suffering and death. In those cases we also gave the dictators a welcome excuse to blame western governments for everything going wrong under their regimes.
In the case of Russia we have another option – targeting assets owned by the rulers and located in our country, but if you own a few £ billion of stolen property, losing it might seem a shame, but it won’t make people like Putin throw in the towel. In most cases, those who overthrow democracy have too much to lose to peacefully hand back power. So even if we had similar leverage over the Myanmar generals it would be useless. Encouraging and aiding opposition from within sounds good in principle, but that didn’t turn out well in Iraq and Syria. We need to come up with a new way to deal with these events, because we don’t have one right now. I hope I’m proved wrong.