By BosNewsLife Asia Service with reporting by BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos

YANGON, BURMA (BosNewslife)– Burma was under pressure Sunday, June 30, to halt violence against the predominantly Christian Kachin minority after at least two civilians were reportedly killed by government troops.

Rights group Christian Solarity Worldwide (CSW) identified one of those killed as Zahkung Lum Hkawng, 45, who it said was “tortured, beaten and shot dead by the Burmese Army” in the Asian country’s Northern Shan State on June 14.

The attack shortly after the Burmese government and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) signed an accord aimed at ending hostilities between the two sides.

CSW investigators said that Lum Hkawng’s ordeal began as he was taking his turn as security guard for his village, Nawng Hen, when Burmese troops entered the area, demanding that the village head provide a guide for them.

Lum Hkawng was allegedly forced to accompany the troops to Mung Ya Hka Zup village where they clashed with the Kachin independence Army (KIA), the armed wing of KIO.

By Associated Press, Published: June 30

SITTWE, Myanmar — From inside the neighborhood that has become their prison, they can look over the walls and fences and into a living city.

Stores are open out there. Sidewalk restaurants are serving bottles of Mandalay beer. There are no barbed-wire roadblocks marking neighborhood boundaries, no armed policemen guarding checkpoints. In the rest of Sittwe, this city of 200,000 people along Myanmar’s coast, no one pays a bribe to take a sick baby to the doctor.

But here it’s different.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is part of “Portraits of Change,” a yearlong series by The Associated Press examining how the opening of Myanmar after decades of military rule is — and is not — changing life in the long-isolated Southeast Asian country.

        Petition by

        Rokhaya DIALLO Sophie ANSEL Mahor CHICHE

        Paris, France
     

President of Burma, Thein Sein, has announced his visit, mid of july, in Britain and France. In view of this visit, his UK and french homologues: David Cameron and François Hollande, have the responsability to adress a dramatic reality of Burma : The ethnic Cleansing and a state of apartheid. Those issues have been largely neglected by world leaders since a year. Together with silence and laxity, they no longer can be tolerated.

In the spring of 2011, the military junta withdrew from Burma. The former generals swapped their military uniforms for civilian clothes. They have promised reforms, releasing Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and icon of democracy and human rights, now an elected member of  parliament. Since then, the country gives signs of genuinely embracing the process of democracy. Much as Burma’s top-down political liberalisation needs to be welcome and supported, we must not gloss over the grave on-going injustices, crimes against humanity, segregation and ethnic cleansing.

        Petition by

        NY Kogyi

        Queens, United States
     

Innocent Muslims are being killed while police are watching and do nothing!
To:
Presidents and Prime Ministers of the world’s community of nations:
John Kerry, U.S. Department of State
Barack Obama, President of the United States
William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
José Manuel Barroso, European Union (EU)
The violence and atrocities against Rohingya and Myanmar Muslims in Burma, committed by the radical Buddhist 969 groups backed by the Burmese Government forces have resulted in gruesome deaths of thousands of Rohingya and Myanmar Muslims in Burma. Additionally, the group’s terrorist attacks have resulted in destruction of thousands of homes and properties and displacement over 140,000 Rohingya and Myanmar Muslims in Burma.

Recently, the 969 group’s terrorist activities have spilled over to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, and currently it is building momentum and likely going to further spread in the Southeast Asia region.

Reuters
Manuel Mogato 22 hours ago PoliticsReligion
By Manuel Mogato

(Reuters) – Malaysia urged Myanmar on Sunday to take stronger action to prevent persecution of Muslims and bring the perpetrators to justice, the latest sign that the inter communal violence is straining ties in Southeast Asia.

Thousands of ethnic Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to escape the violence and worsening living conditions, many of them making their way by boat or overland to Muslim-majority Malaysia.

Anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar erupted in western Rakhine State last year and has spread into the central heartlands and areas near the old capital, Yangon.

“Myanmar has to address the problem,” Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman told reporters at a meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ministers in Brunei, making a rare intervention in another member’s internal affairs.

Prominent Myanmar nationalist Buddhist monk Wirathu on Friday said the media has wrongly labeled him the “Burmese Bin Laden,” rejecting claims that he is responsible for a recent surge of communal violence against Muslims.

Wirathu, 46, from Mandalay’s Masoeyein Monastery, is the leader of the “969” Buddhist movement— the name of which refers to the various virtues of the Buddha and which calls on its followers to boycott Muslim businesses and social circles after deadly violence erupted in the middle of last year.

Wirathu said his group was not responsible for the violence and rejected claims—including one recently made in the July issue of Time Magazine—that he was a self-proclaimed terrorist waging a holy war against Myanmar’s Muslim minority.

“[Time] referred to me as the ‘Burmese Bin Laden’,” Wirathu told RFA’s Myanmar Service, referring to the name several media organizations say the 969 leader has himself used in the past.

Raihan M Chowdhury

Myanmar government has invited a Bangladeshi expert to set up the first commodity exchange in Myanmar.

According to a letter, the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration under the Ministry of National Planning and Economic Development of the Government of Myanmar has granted a permit to launch Myanmar International Commodity Exchange Limited, an initiative by Bangladeshi expert on capital market Wali-ul-Maroof Matin.

Mr Matin is currently the Managing Director of Dhaka-based Alliance Capital Asset Management Limited. Mr Matin left Dhaka Friday for Myanmar.

Once operational, this would be the first commodity exchange in Myanmar, a resource-rich Southeast Asian country of about fifty five million people and which is preparing to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2014.

The New York Times published a rather one-sided article about the growing anti-Islam movement in Myanmar. Muslims are a minority there and the country’s Buddhists monks are voicing a growing concern about the Muslim residents.

    ‘You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,’ Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.

    ‘I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers,’ Ashin Wirathu told a reporter after his two-hour sermon. ‘I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist.”

The Times describes Ashin Wirathu as having a “rock star” following and goes on to describe:

    But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.