Myanmar has arrested almost 100 dissidents since it promised a UN envoy there would be no more detentions, Amnesty International said.
The junta, under international pressure, told the UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari in November that it would hold no more activists following its deadly crackdown on protests in Yangon two months earlier.
But in a statement Amnesty said the military government continued to hold people, including members of democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party.
"Four months on from the violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, rather than stop its unlawful arrests the Myanmar government has actually accelerated them," said Catherine Baber, director of Amnesty's Asia-Pacific program.
"The new arrests in December and January target people who have attempted to send evidence of the crackdown to the international community," she said.
Among 96 people arrested were members of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy as well as a Buddhist monk and a labor activist, Amnesty said, citing its own figures.
Monks spearheaded September's protests, which snowballed into the biggest anti-government demonstrations against the junta since 1988.
At least 31 people were killed and 74 went missing in the September suppression, according to the UN.
Amnesty said on Friday that at least 700 people arrested in connection with the protests remain behind bars, adding that Myanmar was still holding 1,150 political prisoners detained before the demonstrations.
Friday's statement comes as the EU's special envoy to Myanmar prepares for a three-day visit to its neighbour Thailand for discussions on efforts at prodding the junta towards reform.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962, while Aung San Suu Kyi, a 62-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, has spent 12 of the past 18 years under house arrest at her rambling lakeside home in Yangon.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS