Action will be taken against 10 members of Myanmar’s security forces in connection with the killing of captured Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, a government spokesman said yesterday, adding it was not related to a Reuters report on the incident.
Reuters on Friday published a report laying out events that led up to the killing of 10 Rohingya men in the village of Inn Din who were buried in a mass grave after being hacked to death or shot by Buddhist neighbors and soldiers.
Government spokesman Zaw Htay said that “action according to the law” would be taken against seven soldiers, three members of the police force and six villagers as part of an army investigation that was initiated before the Reuters report was published.
Photo: AFP / Myanmar Ministry of Information
The military on Jan. 10 said the 10 Rohingya men belonged to a group of 200 “terrorists” who had attacked security forces, adding that Buddhist villagers attacked some of them with swords and soldiers shot the others dead.
The military’s version of events was contradicted by accounts given to Reuters by Rakhine Buddhist and Rohingya Muslim witnesses.
Buddhist villagers reported no attack by a large number of insurgents on security forces in Inn Din and Rohingya witnesses said that soldiers plucked the 10 from among hundreds of men, women and children who had sought safety on a nearby beach.
The Reuters investigation of the Inn Din massacre was what prompted the arrest of two of its reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were detained on Dec. 12 last year for allegedly obtaining confidential documents.
In related news, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson, who is on a four-day tour of Asia, yesterday stopped off in Myanmar to press Burmese State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi on the need for an independent probe into violence in Rakhine State. They met in the capital, Naypyidaw.
The meeting followed Johnson’s visit to a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where nearly 700,000 Rohingya have sought sanctuary since fleeing Myanmar since August last year.
Johnson and Aung San Suu Kyi “discussed in an open and friendly manner the latest developments in Rakhine State, including planning for the reception of returnees who fled,” the Burmese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a Facebook post.
Additional reporting by AFP
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has