Merkel urges ASEAN to discuss Myanmar problems
Posted: 02 June 2011 1314 hrs
Posted: 02 June 2011 1314 hrs
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 ASEAN flag and flags of ASEAN member countries. | ||||||
SINGAPORE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday urged ASEAN to openly discuss Myanmar's political and human rights problems before the country takes its turn as chair of the regional bloc.
"Looking at the discussion about Myanmar and its interest in taking over the presidency of ASEAN, I am a little bit concerned," she told a forum in Singapore, a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Merkel told an audience of government officials, foreign diplomats and academics that "the present leadership of Myanmar has not really proved that they are serious about embarking on the road of democracy."
The 10-member ASEAN rotates its chairmanship annually, with Indonesia currently presiding.
ASEAN diplomats say Myanmar is pressing to take its turn in 2014, which means holding summits in a country considered an outcast in the international community.
"We think that perhaps countries in your region ought to discuss these matters openly because standing up for democracy and for freedom, this is not only a regional commitment, it's a global commitment that we've all entered," Merkel said.
The bloc has a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of members despite criticism over the years that it is little more than a talking shop.
Myanmar skipped its turn to chair ASEAN in 2006 due to international pressure for democratic reforms, but only on the condition that it could ask to lead the group at a later time if it felt it was ready, regional officials said.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch said in May that giving the chair to Myanmar would be an embarrassment for a group that is already struggling for credibility.
"Rewarding Burma with ASEAN's chairmanship after it staged sham elections and still holds 2,000 political prisoners would be an embarrassment for the region," HRW Asia deputy director Elaine Pearson said in a statement.
"ASEAN leaders need to decide if they will let Burma demote ASEAN to the laughing stock of intergovernmental forums."
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in November shortly after an election, Myanmar's first in 20 years that led to the handover of power from the military to a nominally civilian government.
Her release was welcomed worldwide, but Western governments who impose sanctions on Myanmar want the new government to do more to demonstrate its commitment to human rights.
- AFP/cc
Thursday, June 2, 2011
ျမန္မာ့အေရး ပြင့္လင္းၾကဖုိ႔ ဂ်ာမနီက အာဆီယံကုိ ေျပာ
ဂ်ာမနီဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ အင္ဂ်ယ္လာ မာကယ္ (Angela Merkel) က ျမန္မာျပည္ နုိင္ငံေရး၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအေျခအေနေတြကုိ ပြင့္ပြင့္လင္းလင္း ေဆြးေႏြးၾကဖုိ႔ အာဆီယံကုိ ဒီကေန႔ တုိက္တြန္းလုိက္တ့ဲအေၾကာင္း AFP သတင္းတပုဒ္က ဆုိပါတယ္။
"ျမန္မာျပည္အေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆုိေနပုံေတြ၊ ျမန္မာျပည္က အာဆီယံဥကၠ႒ျဖစ္ခ်င္ေနတာေတြေၾကာင့္ က်မ နည္းနည္း စိုးရိမ္မိတယ္" လုိ႔ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္က စကၤာပူမွာလုပ္တ့ဲ ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြတခုမွာ ေျပာလုိက္တာပါ။ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမွာ အစုိးရအရာရိွေတြ၊ သံတမန္ေတြ၊ ပညာရွင္ေတြ တက္ပါတယ္ တ့ဲ။
"ျမန္မာျပည္ လက္ရိွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ပုိင္းက ဒီမုိကေရစီကုိ တကယ္ ေဖာ္ေဆာင္မယ့္ပုံ မေပၚဘူး" လုိ႔ သူက ေျပာလုိက္ပါတယ္။
"ေဒသတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတြက ဒါေတြကုိ ပြင့္ပြင့္လင္းလင္း ေဆြးေႏြးရမယ္လုိ႔ က်မတုိ႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲ ဆုိေတာ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီ နဲ႔ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး ဆုိတာက ေဒသတြင္း အေရးအရာေတြ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး၊ က်မတုိ႔ အားလုံးနဲ႔ သက္ဆုိင္တ့ဲ ကမၻာ့ေရးရာ ျဖစ္ေနပါျပီ" လုိ႔ ဂ်ာမနီ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္က ဆုိပါတယ္။
reuters photo
