News & Articles on Burma-Friday, 04 February, 2011

News & Articles on Burma
Friday, 04 February, 2011
--------------------------------------


Burmese parliament selects ex-general as president
Equal opportunity abuse in Myanmar
Myanmar picks junta insider as president: official

--------------------------------------------------------------------



THE NATION:
Burmese parliament selects ex-general as president

Rangoon - Burma's parliament on Friday elected former army general Thein Sein as the country's president, giving him the power to select a cabinet and head a powerful new security council.
Thein Sein, 65, is also chairman in military-run Burma of the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which won 77 per cent of the contested seats in the November 7 elections, the first to be held in 20 years.
His two rivals for the presidency, ex-general Tin Aung Myint Oo and Dr Sai Mauk Kham, both of whom belong to the USDP, became vice presidents, government sources said.
Thein Sein was deemed the favourite of Senior General Than Shwe, Myanmar's junta chief since 1992.
Thein Sein is empowered to choose the next cabinet, to be approved by parliament, and he is to chair the powerful National Defence and Security Council, a new entity that is to have far-reaching powers over both the government and the military. //DPA
--------------------------------------------
ASIA TIMES: Feb 5, 2011
Equal opportunity abuse in Myanmar
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK - When independent researchers fanned out across military-ruled Myanmar's mountainous Chin State to catalogue human-rights abuses, they expected to hear the usual disturbing stories of ethnic minority women being raped by government troops. But the research uncovered an unexpected new trend of abuse: Chin men were also being sexually violated by male soldiers in the country's remote northwestern corner.

"It was not something that we expected to find," said Vit Suwanvanichkij, co-author of a new investigative report released


by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a US-based non-governmental rights lobby. "This abuse - rape of males - has not been reported before and it shows what life is like in militarized [Myanmar]."

The 63-page report, entitled "Life Under the Junta: Evidence of Crimes Against Humanity in Burma's Chin State", says that the male head of five different households were among 17 people who claimed to have been raped by Myanmar troops during a 12-month period spanning 2009 and 2010. Among them was a father of five children who, according to the report, the "[Myanmar] military sexually assaulted and threatened to kill him on July 20, 2009."

The rape of men, as well as women and children, are part of a numbing list of human-rights violations committed by Myanmar troops in their quest to assert control over the remote Chin region situated near the Indian and Bangladeshi border, according to PHR's research. Male victims quoted in the report said that they believed they were targeted by predominantly Buddhist Burman soldiers because of their different religious and ethnic identity as Christian Chins.

Forced labor was documented in 92% of over 600 households surveyed in nine different townships, with tasks ranging from building roads, to portering military supplies, to sweeping for landmines. However, the prevalence of male rape may have been underestimated in the report, due to difficulties in gathering accurate information.

Parveen Parmar, another co-author of the report, says that sexual violations rank among the most difficult rights abuses to chronicle, even when, as was the case during the surveys conducted by PHR's 22-member research team, the interviews were done in private and confidentiality was guaranteed.

Myanmar's abysmal rights record is extensively well documented. Forced conscription, torture, arson and the confiscation of land and food stocks have all been used by the Tatmadaw, as the over 400,000-strong Myanmar military is known, to quash a myriad of ethnic rebel movements that have been active for decades across the country.

The use of rape as a weapon of war was first exposed in "License to Rape", an investigative report published by the Shan Women's Action Network in 2002. The account documented 625 cases, including instances of gang rape, showing how Myanmar's army systematically targeted women and girls from the ethnic Shan minority.

However, there was no hint at that time that Shan males were also targeted, according to SWAN researchers. "We documented what the community revealed happened to them from 1996 till 2001," says Charm Tong, a member of SWAN's advocacy team, during a telephone interview. "Rapes were widespread and committed by high-ranking military offices and soldiers."

In 2005, Charm Tong, 29, had an audience in the White House with then US president George W Bush, lending credibility to her advocacy group's findings. SWAN's reporting on the junta's human-rights abuses helped to harden Washington's position towards Myanmar, including an expansion of the US's sanctions regime.

PHR's revelations come at an awkward moment for the European Union (EU), which maintains its own sanctions against Myanmar for its poor human-rights record, but is now under pressure from some member governments to reconsider this position after last year's military-rigged general elections. The EU is expected to review its "common position", as the regional groupings policy on Myanmar is known, in April.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is under growing pressure to establish a commission of inquiry into the junta's human-rights abuses - a move US President Barack Obama has endorsed. Any such inquiry would now likely need to include investigations into the systematic sexual abuse of men as well as women.

"Sexual violence cases have mainly focused on women. Even human-rights people documenting this abuse have not paid attention that it could possibly happen to men," says Aung Myo Min, director of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, a non-governmental think-tank run from Thailand's northern city of Chiang Mai.

"It is a kind of intimidation for the victim and they often don't want to talk about it because of the shame," he said. "But the recent revelations should prompt human-rights researchers to investigate this ignored area of abuse. There could be more cases."

Myanmar's military rulers have denied previous allegations of using rape as a war weapon. They deflected SWAN's report as a "fabrication" and have denied the findings of various human-rights groups who have chronicled the regime's abuses. That remained the junta's line last week during the first-ever universal periodic review of Myanmar's rights record, including in ethnic areas, at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

Win Min, a Myanmar military expert based in Chiang Mai, claims that in frontline areas of the conflict prisoners of war are seldom treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and many have been summarily executed because officers believe it is too complicated or costly to bring them to justice through court proceedings. That culture of impunity, he suggests, has fostered an environment conducive to sexual violence.

"I have never heard of serious action [taken] by the military following reports of rape cases in ethnic areas," says Win Min. "There has been no mechanism to file such cases in the military."

Marwaan Macan-Markar is a Sri Lankan journalist who covered the South Asian nation's ethnic conflict before becoming a foreign correspondent for the Inter Press Service news agency in 1999. He is based in Thailand where he covers Southeast Asia.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MB05Ae01.html
--------------------------------------------------
Myanmar picks junta insider as president: official
Published on 4 February 2011 - 8:03am

Myanmar named a key retired general as president on Friday, an official said, as the military hierarchy retained its stranglehold on power in the country's new political system.

Thein Sein, who shed his army uniform to contest controversial elections last year, "was elected as the president with a majority vote," a Myanmar official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The former junta prime minister had been tipped for the post even before the electoral committee vote, supporting fears that the regime has engineered the political process to hide military power behind a civilian facade.

A key ally of junta strongman Than Shwe, the 65-year-old became a civilian to contest the November election as head of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which claimed an overwhelming majority in the poll.

One of the president's first jobs will be to appoint a government, and he can be confident of little resistance from a parliament dominated by the military and its cronies.

Sources said he was likely to retain his position as prime minister in addition to his new role.

Under complex parliamentary rules, the upper house, lower house and members of the military each nominated one vice president.

A select committee then chose the president from the three candidates, all of them members of the USDP as Myanmar's military, which has ruled the country since 1962, continued its domination.

The two vice presidents are Tin Aung Myint Oo, another retired top general and Than Shwe ally, and an ethnic Shan, Sai Mouk Kham.

Though Than Shwe, who has ruled Myanmar with an iron fist since 1992, has not taken the top political role, many analysts believe he will attempt to retain some sort of control behind the scenes.

Maung Zarni, of the London School of Economics, said the country's power structure was "classic dictatorship".

"The good guys do not get promoted," he said.

But Myanmar expert Aung Naing Oo said the very fact that Than Shwe was taking a back seat could present a small opportunity for change.

"Anything is possible if Than Shwe leaves. Maybe now Thein Sein is considered a very loyal 'yes man' but soon he will have to find his own way," he said.

The formation of a national assembly in Naypyidaw, convened for the first time on Monday, takes the country towards the final stage of the junta's so-called "roadmap" to a "disciplined democracy".

A quarter of the seats were kept aside for the military even before the vote, and the country's first poll in 20 years was marred by the absence of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and claims of cheating and intimidation.

USDP lawmakers bagged 388 of the national parliament's 493 elected seats, leaving little room for dissenting voices.

The opposition National Democratic Force (NDF), which split from Suu Kyi's party in order to contest the election, has a total of 12 seats in the legislature's two chambers, and the Democratic Party (Myanmar) has none.

Thein Sein's rise to president comes after the United States said it was "disappointed" with Myanmar, adding it was "premature" to consider lifting sanctions.

Suu Kyi, released from seven consecutive years under house arrest a few days after the vote, also downplayed the impact of political changes in a Financial Times interview published last weekend.

"I don't think the elections mean there is going to be any kind of real change in the political process," she was quoted as saying.
© ANP/AFP http://www.rnw.nl/english/bulletin/myanmar-picks-junta-insider-president-official-0
-------------------------------------------------