Next week, Myanmar President Thein Sein will arrive in Washington, DC, for a historic visit and meeting with President Obama. It will be the first visit by a Myanmar president to the United States in nearly fifty years. Only three years earlier, nearly every top Myanmar leader had been barred from entering the United States (and most other leading democracies) due to sanctions on the country’s military-ruled government and on nearly all exports to and imports from the country. U.S. congresspeople regularly castigated Myanmar as one of the most tyrannical societies on earth, and when former president George W. Bush found himself in a room in the mid-2000s, at an Asian summit, with Myanmar’s then-leader, he essentially refused to even acknowledge the other man’s presence. Read more »

On April 22, at a packed, black-tie ceremony in New York City, the Myanmar president, represented by minister Aung Min, accepted an award from the respected global NGO International Crisis Group for the “pursuit of peace.” The award, given annually by the group, is meant to honor someone who promotes change and reform, and helps end violent conflicts, like the ones that have ranged along Myanmar’s borderlands for decades. Read more »

This week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a detailed, and devastating, report on abuses against Muslim Rohingyas in western Myanmar’s Rakhine (also known as Arakan) State. The report claims that the most heinous of all crimes—crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing—were committed against Rohingya last year. It conclusively shows that, contrary to the Myanmar government’s claims that the violence against Rohingya last year erupted spontaneously, monks and local political parties had been agitating for ethnic cleansing against Rohingya well in advance of last year’s violence, in some cases with local government complicity. Read more »

On the CFR site, I have an expert brief up on the surge in ethnic and religious unrest in Myanmar. You can read the expert brief here.

The anger seems to be building, despite some efforts by the government, Muslim leaders, and Buddhist leaders to cool tensions. (Aung San Suu Kyi, who had said virtually nothing about the violence for two weeks, did finally step forward and say that Myanmar needs to promote a stronger rule of law to prevent future violent outbreaks, a somewhat mealy-mouthed response.) One of the leading militant monks—a phrase that just sounds bizarre—this week gave an interview to the Irrawaddy in which he was essentially unrepentant about the attacks on Muslims. Read more »

Over the past two weeks, anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, which last year had seemed confined to the western state of Rakhine where the religious conflict was intertwined with issues of residency and citizenship, has exploded across the country. Mobs of Buddhists, some with ties to the militant Buddhist group 969 Movement, have attacked Muslims in Miktila, Naypyitaw, Bago, and now in Yangon. Many Muslims in Yangon, Bago, and other large towns are afraid to go to the mosque, enter shops catering to Muslims, or show displays of their faith outside their homes or stores. Aung San Suu Kyi has been notably quiet, and she is rapidly losing much of the moral and political capital she amassed during her long years in detention. Read more »

Mr. President, your first administration played “small ball” with North Korea. The policy of “strategic patience” succeeded in weathering North Korean provocations and limited exposure to the political risks that would have accompanied a high profile effort to address North Korea’s nuclear development.  However, the crime and punishment approach to North Korea’s 2009 satellite launch and nuclear test through UN Security Council sanctions, statements, and resolutions has failed to stop North Korea’s growing nuclear and long-range delivery capabilities. Read more »

When a noted American columnist wrote recently that he expected Xi Jinping to spur real reform because reform is “in his genes,” I realized just how desperate we had become. In fact, the sound of speculation around Xi has become deafening. Even though he will not formally assume the presidency of China until March, Xi’s every utterance is now being fed into an evolving Xi Jinping narrative. The reality, however, is that we know very little of Xi’s actual policy proclivities save his desire for a more informal and direct style of governance and a Communist Party that is corruption-free. Read more »

Former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal Melanie Kirkpatrick has written a compelling book describing the tortuous path North Koreans must undertake across China to freedom in South Korea and other countries in the West. The book captures the multiple paths that desperate North Koreans have taken upon their departure from North Korea through China and other countries to safety in South Korea and the West. It champions the sacrifices of a range of dedicated individuals outside North Korea who have risked their lives to assist North Koreans in their road to freedom and to provide information back to North Korea about the outside world. And it savages the policies of governments including China, the United States, and South Korea’s progressive administrations for turning a blind eye to the suffering of North Koreans who are victims of an uncompromising totalitarian political system. Read more »

Elizabeth Leader is a Research Associate for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. The author’s views on ASEAN’s human rights progress do not necessarily reflect those of Joshua Kurlantzick.

The Asia-Pacific remains the only UN-defined region that does not adhere to its own human rights treaty or possess a region-wide mechanism for the promotion and protection of human rights. Thus, there was seemingly a lot riding on the backs of the ten ASEAN foreign ministers who gathered in New York on Thursday —on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly— to review the second draft of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). Concern over the controversial draft (drawn up by the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights) has, in the international media, far outweighed any sort of praise. Read more »

Lost in the slow news of summer, the Olympics, and the conflict over the South China Sea, last week Indonesia released a report that was truly groundbreaking for Southeast Asia, in its willingness to examine serious past human rights abuses. In Thailand, the killings of 2010, in the streets of Bangkok, have not been properly examined, in a way that clearly assigns blame and ends controversy. In Myanmar, despite the promising political reforms, there has of yet been no real effort to analyze the vast abuses committed over the past fifty years by the military and the ethnic armies. In Cambodia, the Hun Sen government has for years stalled serious investigation of past crimes by the Khmer Rouge (KR). Cambodia under Hun Sen also has not included the KR period in most textbooks for Cambodian schools. Read more »