Burmese State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday launched a major push to end decades of fighting between the military and myriad rebel groups with an appeal to the country’s ethnic minorities to overcome their differences to achieve peace.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also Myanmar’s minister of foreign affairs, has made the peace process a priority for her administration, which faces sky-high expectations at home and abroad after sweeping to power in an election in November last year to end more than half a century of military-backed rule.
Delegates in elaborate ethnic costumes, sporting silver necklaces and hats adorned with peacock feathers, mingled and took photographs with military officers, mainstream majority Bamar politicians and diplomats at the start of the conference.
Photo: AP
“If all those who play a part ... in the peace process cultivate the wisdom to reconcile differing views for the good of the people ... we will surely be able to build the democratic federal union of our dreams,” Aung San Suu Kyi said. “Only if we are all united, our country will be at peace. Only if our country is at peace, will we be able to stand on equal footing with other countries in our region and across the world.”
Myanmar has been torn by fighting between the military, which seized power in a 1962 coup, and ethnic armed groups almost without a break since the end of World War II.
The focus yesterday was on the symbolic, with few concrete proposals likely to emerge from this week’s talks.
Delegates expect to meet every six months to discuss issues ranging from security, political representation, language and culture to control of Myanmar’s rich mineral resources.
“It is the Tatmadaw members and our brethren members of ethnic armed groups, who have been directly suffering from ... the lack of peace in the country, sacrificing their limbs and lives,” Myanmar Armed Forces commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing said. “I firmly believe that we will be able to accomplish this great process with our unity and efforts.”
Myanmar is home to more than 100 ethnic groups with distinct traditions and cultures, and some representative performed a folk dance on the conference stage celebrating the nation’s ethnic diversity.
Among those absent from the conference, however, were any representatives of the 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims, who face persecution and human rights abuses at the hands of their Buddhist neighbors in northwestern Rakhine State.
A day before the conference started, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Myanmar to improve the living conditions of the Rohingya, underscoring the challenges facing Aung San Suu Kyi in tackling all the country’s ethnic divisions.
However, the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi has been able to bring the vast majority of the rebel groups to the negotiating table only five months after taking power is a sign of progress, experts say.
Powerful armed groups from regions bordering China, including the Kachin Independence Organization, who refused to sign a ceasefire in October last year under the previous military-backed government, are now taking part, partly owing to Beijing’s tacit support for the talks, observers say.
As Myanmar’s economy opens up, China is vying for influence with the US. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) pledged his country would play a “constructive role” in the peace process when Aung San Suu Kyi visited Beijing last month.
Casting a shadow over the talks is a recent flare-up in fighting in northernmost Kachin State and clashes in northeastern Shan State, which is home to several large groups operating close to borders with China and Thailand.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion