Myanmar's junta and detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to be paving the way toward talks, as the two fiercely opposed sides took cautious, conciliatory steps to end a two-decade-long deadlock.
Suu Kyi's party said it was prepared to make "adjustments" for the sake of dialogue and the junta has appointed a relatively flexible Cabinet-level official to coordinate contacts with Aung San Suu Kyi, adding it had yet to hear from the junta.
Small groups of riot police yesterday patrolled key road junctions and sites where the most intense protests had erupted, including the Shwedagon pagoda and a junction near the downtown Sule pagoda.
But soldiers were not visible on the streets and Yangon seemed generally normal. Some rumors circulated that a small protest might be staged.
ARRESTS
Despite the conciliatory steps, reports of more arrests and one death, continued to emerge yesterday along with a drumbeat of attacks on Western powers and the international media, which the regime accuses of fomenting the recent uprising.
An activist group in Thailand said a member of Aung San Suu Kyi's party died while being interrogated in the central Myanmar region of Sagaing after he and five other colleagues were arrested on Sept. 26.
Authorities in recent days informed the family of Win Shwe, 42, that their son had died and his body had been cremated at the detention center, said the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, an organization of former Myanmar political prisoners.
The group said at least five more people had been arrested in Yangon in the last two days. The reports could not be independently verified.
ACCUSATIONS
The state-owned New Light of Myanmar newspaper said 60,000 pro-government demonstrators had gathered on Tuesday in Paan to support the junta's own "roadmap to democracy" while denouncing the US and foreign radio stations.
"It is very important for people not to be misled by killers on the airways from some countries. A handful of internal destructive elements are to be exposed," Saw Nyunt Thaung, a department head at Paan University, was quoted as saying.
The National League for Democracy on Tuesday called for talks with the junta, but urged it not to set conditions for any meetings.
"The success of a dialogue is based on sincerity and the spirit of give and take," the party said in a statement, which was based on her past speeches.
"The will for achieving success is also crucial and there should not be any preconditions," it said.
In its first comment since the regime held up the prospect of talks, the party appeared to be trying to encourage negotiations without abandoning its platform.
The party emphasized past statements by the opposition, but also said it could make "adjustments" for the sake of dialogue.
`ANOTHER IRAQ'
Meanwhile, in Jakarta, Indonesian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said yesterday that Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition movement was not a credible alternative to the junta, warning that a rush to democracy could create "another Iraq."
Juwono Sudarsono said in an interview that early democracy in Myanmar, ruled by the military since 1962, would prompt a power struggle between its ethnic minorities.
"Instant democracy on the lines of Western democracy, that's not on the cards, that's not possible," Sudarsono said.
"It can even lead to another Iraq because if you have instant democracy in a state of confusion," he said.
"We'll have the Shans and the Karens and the Kachins all fighting for authority like we have seen in Iraq and parts of Afghanistan," he said.
Sudarsono said he would not support a ban on arms sales to Myanmar, adding foreign sanctions were ineffective and were more about making foreign governments "feel good."
"This is the lexicon of the liberal press and the liberal media everywhere," he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS