MOSCOW – Tens of thousands of Russians flooded downtown Moscow on Saturday to demand an end to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule, braving sub-zero temperatures to keep the protest movement alive one month before a presidential election that Putin is still expected to win.
The protest -- which drew 120,000 people, according to organizers -- was the third mass demonstration since Putin's party won a parliamentary election Dec. 4 with the help of what appeared to be widespread fraud.
The election and Putin's presumptuous decision to reclaim the presidency proved the last straw for Russians increasingly unhappy with the creeping authoritarianism during his 12-year rule. The protest rallies -- which have brought together liberals, leftists and nationalists -- are the biggest in Russia since the the demonstrations 20 years ago that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hanoi - Human rights were expected to top the agenda as the senior US diplomat on South-East Asia arrived in Hanoi Wednesday.
Vietnam is the second stop on a three-country tour for Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He arrived from Seoul and is to head to Cambodia Friday.
The visit came two weeks after Campbell called on Vietnam to improve its human rights record, saying it needed to do more to win support in Washington to expand cooperation.
A top Burmese official is promising the international community that his country's military-backed government is not done implementing democratic reforms.
Trade Minister U Soe Thane told Reuters Saturday the process of reform "is not finished yet." He said Burma's government is still looking at additional political changes as well as reforms in the economic sector.
U Soe Thane made the comments in Davos, Switzerland where he is leading Burma's first official delegation to the World Economic Forum.
Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi hit the campaign trail Sunday ahead of by-elections seen as a key test of the military-backed government's commitment to reform.
Thousands of cheering supporters lined the roads of several towns in the southern district of Dawei, as the Nobel Peace laureate made her first political trip outside Rangoon since her National League for Democracy party registered to run in the April 1 election.
As huge crowds screamed “Long Live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!” and others held banners saying “You Are Our Heart,” she promised to work to bring democracy to Burma and repeal repressive laws. She told the crowds, ''There is a lot to be done. To build the country that we all want."
A report by Human Rights Watch says Vietnam’s government has intensified repression against activists and dissidents over the past year. The U.S.-based group is calling for the immediate release of political prisoners in Vietnam. The call came as senior U.S. congressmen on a visit to Southeast Asia stepped up pressure on Vietnam's government to improve its rights record, saying it is a condition for expanded bilateral military ties with the United States.
The Human Rights Watch global report, released Sunday, says Vietnam had carried out a “systematic crackdown” that in 2011 led to the prosecution of over 30 activists, who were charged under what the report calls “vaguely-worded articles” in Vietnam’s penal code and sentenced to prison.
The report says bloggers, writers, human rights defenders, land rights activists, religious and other groups were targeted by Vietnamese authorities and faced harassment, intimidation, arrest, torture and imprisonment.
HANOI (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions on Myanmar could begin to come down if by-elections scheduled for April 1 in the former British colony are fair and open, U.S. Senator John McCain said on Thursday.
After half a century of authoritarian rule Myanmar has taken a series of dramatic steps in recent months to open up, the latest of which was the release last week of some 300 political prisoners.
The United States decided to upgrade diplomatic ties with Myanmar as a result, and President Barack Obama called the move a "substantial step" in democratic reform but stopped short of lifting economic sanctions.
Senator Joe Lieberman, speaking in Vietnam ahead of a visit to Myanmar with McCain and two other senators, said if the by-elections were "fair and open and legitimate" Myanmar could expect "some response from the United States in terms of the status quo between our countries as it exists now."
WASHINGTON — The United States on Thursday renewed calls on Vietnam to improve its human rights record, saying it needed to do more to win support in Washington to expand cooperation.
Kurt Campbell, the top US diplomat for East Asia and advocate of warmer relations with the former war foe, said lawmakers have persistently voiced concern about Hanoi's treatment of dissidents, minorities and religious people.
"What has prevented the kind of rapid development in bilateral ties that some have hope for are continuing human rights issues inside the country," Campbell, an assistant secretary of state, told the Stimson Center think-tank.
It all sounds a little too fanciful. The idea of Burma as a regional role model for the treatment and release of political prisoners requires just too much of a leap in faith in the reforms that have swept that country, even after the release and pardon of more than 600 remaining dissidents.
But the government of Thein Sein could be setting a trend and perhaps unwittingly promoting regional dialogue. As Burma again grabbed the international spotlight with its latest releases and self-described reconciliation policies, Laos and Vietnam also announced they had freed dissidents.
The numbers were much smaller. Vientiane set seven Christians free, while Hanoi said it had released French-Vietnamese Pham Minh Hoang, who will still remain under house arrest for three years for trying to overthrow the government. He wrote 33 articles criticizing his country.
China’s fast growth and sheer size have produced a meteoric rise to over 13 percent of world GDP in 2010 measured at comparable dollar prices. But during the last 18 years of China’s supersonic expansion, Beijing has chosen to attach its economy to the United States. It fixed the yuan rate to the dollar in 1994 to stabilize an economy that had just seen inflation accelerate to 30 percent. At the time, that rate reflected China’s competitiveness. Over the period 1995 to 2004, China saw ten years of falling export prices, as idle rural labor was brought into the cities and profitably employed at low wages. The United States’ modestly positive inflation moved bilateral competitiveness sharply in China’s favor.
At comparable purchasing power, China’s GDP moved from 21 percent of the United States in 1993 to 75 percent in 2011. The dollar zone created by Beijing’s exchange rate policy is no longer a tiny Chinese “moon” attached to a huge U.S. “earth”, but a near-equal pair of seriously mismatched economies. The global market values the combined entity at roughly the “right rate,” but the result has been sustained overvaluation of the U.S. arising from the deliberate continuation of Chinese undervaluation.
YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar will free many prominent political activists on Friday in an amnesty for 651 inmates, prison officials said, as one of the world's most reclusive states continues to open up after half a century of authoritarian rule.
The United States and Europe have said freeing political prisoners is crucial to even considering lifting economic sanctions that have isolated the former British colony, also known as Burma, and, over the years, pushed it closer to China.
Among those to be freed are Min Ko Naing, a leader of a pro-democracy uprising in 1988 in which thousands of protesters were killed, and Shin Gambira, a well-known Buddhist monk who led 2007 street protests, prison officials said.
Myanmar's opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi said Wednesday that her country was "on the verge of a breakthrough to democracy" as she prepares to seek a seat in parliament following reforms.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who spent most of the past two decades under house arrest before being freed in 2010, voiced appreciation for overseas support as she accepted an award presented by the New York-based Asia Society.
"Burma is on the verge of a breakthrough to democracy -- we have not yet made the breakthrough; we are on the verge of making such a breakthrough," Suu Kyi said in a taped message to an awards dinner, using Myanmar's former name.
DAOFU, China -- Shortly after Palden Choetso doused herself in gasoline, gulped several mouthfuls, and set herself ablaze in November, friends of the Tibetan nun found a list of names pinned above her bed in the small, wooden hut where she lived.
The 35-year-old nun at the Gaden Choeling nunnery was compiling a tally of Tibetans who had set themselves on fire, all in the same corner of western Sichuan province, in protest of China's policies in the region -- adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region and heavily populated by ethnic Tibetans. Among the names was Tsewang Norbu, a 29-year-old monk at the local Nyitso monastery.
The self-immolations returned to the headlines this weekend as China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported Saturday that a former monk had died and another was injured after they set themselves on fire in Sichuan. Xinhua said the men were former monks from Kirti monastery, another center of Tibetan political activism that has come under siege from police in recent months.
The US has issued a stern warning to Vietnam over a heightened clampdown on dissidents which has caused alarm among western governments and human rights organisations.
The latest high-profile case involves Bui Thi Minh Hang, a 47-year-old activist, who was sentenced to two years in a “re-education camp” near Hanoi in November after participating in a number of rare public protests against perceived Chinese aggression in contested areas of the South China Sea.
Her arbitrary detention, news of which only emerged recently, has brought renewed focus on Vietnam’s use of highly secretive re-education camps, which many observers presumed had been closed when the south-east Asian nation normalised relations with the US.
(New York) – Vietnamese authorities should immediately release the activist Bui Thi Minh Hang and stop harassing her for protesting peacefully, Human Rights Watch said today. On November 28, 2011, authorities sent her to Thanh Ha Education Center in Binh Xuyen district, Vinh Phuc province, for 24 months of administrative detention.
Police arrested Bui Thi Minh Hang, 47, on November 27 outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Ho Chi Minh City for allegedly “causing public disorder.” She was conducting a silent protest against the arrests of peaceful protesters in Hanoi earlier that morning. The next day the police ordered her detained without trial at the “education center.”
“There is no justification for the Vietnamese authorities to pack off a peaceful protester to what is effectively a forced labor camp,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Detaining Bui Thi Minh Hang without trial shows a disturbing disregard for her human rights and guarantees for freedom of expression contained in Vietnam’s own constitution.”
A woman writer was sentenced to five years in prison in Vietnam for spreading anti-government propaganda, state media said Friday, with an activist pastor also jailed for two years.
Ho Thi Bich Khuong, 44, received three years house arrest on top of her five year term, and Nguyen Trung Ton, 40, was given a similar extra penalty of two years, the Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan reported.
Their one-day trial took place on Thursday in the central province of Nghe An, it said.
Both were arrested on November 15 for "collecting documents and writing articles which tarnished the reputation of the Communist Party and the Socialist regime", according to the report.
Last week, China's Vice State Chairman Xi Jinping was visiting Vietnam from December 21 to December 22, 2011. While his trip has been commonly portrayed as a test of his political skills to handle a neighbor's relations that have boiled to an uncomfortable level in the claims and counter-claims of the sovereignty over the Paracels and Spratlys islands in Vietnam's East Sea. However, while it is not known yet how the issue was settled in secret talks, a seemingly trivial incident but later turned out to be serious overshadowed every discussion of the trip afterwards: Vietnamese children were given a Chinese flag to welcome Mr. Xi but it had totally 6 yellow stars while China's official flag has only five. Where does the additional star come from ?
At first foreign reporters seemed not to notice this discrepancy and no one could blame them. However, when the blogosphere exploded into rancorous charges and counter-charges, AFP, BBC, and Reuters all showed that their photos indeed captured the 6-star flags. After the factual reality of the 6-star flag was confirmed, its appearance and disappearance on the state-owned web site Vietnam Net took on ominous meaning. And there was no words from the Chinese of what they thought about the affair
Fears over North Korea's nuclear bomb hide a deeper truth, writes Jared Genser.
In a strange, and some might say divinely inspired juxtaposition, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il died around the same time about a week ago.
Their lives and their impact on people's lives were extraordinarily different. It is therefore unsurprising that much as Havel was himself deeply concerned about the fate of the 24 million people of North Korea, there is little evidence to suggest Kim had much concern about anyone but himself. But what is troubling is that analysis of the impact of Kim's death by most experts and commentators has ignored Havel's observations about North Korea. Havel suffered under the yolk of oppression in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia as a dissident playwright, poet, and polemicist. His writings, actions, and years in prison inspired his people to rise up against their totalitarian government, culminating in the Velvet Revolution and his election as President. He spent 13 years in office, being one of a few dissidents who have become effective Presidents.
HONG KONG — Now it’s getting personal. After months of sniping at American policy, China has turned its fire on Washington’s senior diplomat in this former British colony.
In an unusual public rebuke, the Hong Kong branch of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused U.S. consul general Stephen Young of breaching diplomatic norms and ignoring “solemn warnings” to keep quiet about democracy in what, since 1997, has been part of China.
The scolding by China’s top diplomat here follows a series of articles in Communist Party-controlled media denouncing Young — who served in Kyrgyzstan during a democratic uprising there in 2005 — as part of an American plot to spread disorder and keep China down.
The wave of popular uprisings that swept the Arab world were as unexpected as they were cataclysmic. Long-reigning rulers fell, others teeter on the brink, and the region is forever changed.
The Arab Spring started with a death: in early January, protesters took to the streets of Tunisia in solidarity with a young fruit vendor who, despairing of the brutal system under which he lived, set himself on fire.
It was a death that gave life to a movement that was to alter the course of the Middle East and North Africa.
For decades, political life in the region was stagnant. Nominal republics were the realm of a wealthy few, with kingly aspirations to see their sons carry on the business of state. It seemed nothing would change, but then it all did all at once.
The revolt against tyranny, simmering for years, reached a breaking point. For many, there was no turning back.
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