The UN special envoy to Myanmar met with junta leaders yesterday as he paves the way for a visit by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon next month expected to focus on the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari was expected to meet Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win in the junta’s remote administrative capital, Naypyidaw, before returning to the main city of Yangon to round off his low-key visit.
Myanmar officials said no meetings with more senior military leaders could be confirmed, nor were there any immediate plans for Gambari to see Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, members of her party or international diplomats.
The UN troubleshooter arrived in the country for talks with the military regime on Friday and is due to brief UN chief Ban on the outcome of his two-day mission.
Ban will then decide whether to go ahead with plans to visit Myanmar early next month, UN sources in New York said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS
Ban and Gambari have been trying to persuade Myanmar’s ruling generals to free all political detainees, including Aung San Suu Kyi, and to steer their country on the path to democracy and national reconciliation.
Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, is being held in jail on charges of violating her house arrest after a US man, John Yettaw, swam to her lakeside house earlier this year.
She risks up to five years in prison if convicted.
She has spent 13 of the past 19 years in detention since the ruling generals refused to recognize the landslide victory of her National League for Democracy party (NLD) in 1990 elections.
Critics accuse the junta of trying to keep her locked up ahead of elections promised for next year.
Gambari was named the top UN envoy for Myanmar in 2006 but his previous visits have produced few results.
Aung San Suu Kyi refused to meet him in August last year, apparently after he failed to secure reform pledges from the regime.
MONK PROTEST
The charges against Aung San Suu Kyi come amid a wide-ranging crackdown on the opposition that has been carried out since the ruling generals crushed protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007.
More than 2,100 political prisoners remain imprisoned, according to UN figures.
Yettaw, a devout Mormon and US military veteran, has told the trial that he swam to Aung San Suu Kyi’s home because he was on a mission from God to warn her about a “vision” that she would be assassinated.
The junta appeared to toughen its stance on the eve of Gambari’s visit when the national police chief held a press conference to show alleged links between Yettaw and exiled dissident groups based in Thailand.
The case has drawn widespread international condemnation, with US President Barack Obama describing it as a “show trial” and some of Myanmar’s neighbors breaking their usual silence on the issue.
The US and Europe have both imposed sanctions against Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, which has been ruled by the military since 1962.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema