Myanmar: Shock over executions of activists
Myanmar’s brutal military regime “has once again delivered an affront to the entire population,” said The Irrawaddy (Myanmar, published from exile) in an editorial. In a horrifying display of “inhumanity,” the ruling junta executed four people this week, including the veteran protest leader Ko Jimmy, 53, and the former lawmaker Phyo Zeya Thaw, 41. Two less-prominent activists, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, were also put to death. This was the first use of the death penalty in the country since 1988, yet the regime hanged the four men “without giving any notice to their families.” It then refused to release the bodies. This outrage will only inflame the people even more against the junta. The Myanmarese have wholeheartedly rejected the 2021 military coup, which ousted democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and installed military rule. They protested peacefully for months, but after those demonstrations were met with bullets, our youth began an armed struggle. The “unforgivable” hangings will surely spur the fighters “to intensify their efforts.” Will they also inspire the international community to support our cause?
The activists leave behind a grieving nation, said Grace Tsoi in BBC News (U.K.). Phyo Zeya Thaw was not only a close ally of Aung San Suu Kyi but also a pioneering hip-hop artist and youth activist who founded the group Generation Wave. They “sprayed pro-democracy graffiti and distributed stickers and pamphlets” during the protests of 2007 known as the Saffron Revolution. Ko Jimmy was a translator and author as well as a veteran democracy activist who spent more than 20 years in prison for leading protests against the previous military regime in the 1980s. Both men had “called for a people’s mobilization for a mass uprising,” said Nirupama Subramanian in The Indian Express, which led to their arrests last year on terrorism charges. Their deaths show “the regime’s defiance” of the international community and even of its own backer, China, which had implored it not to carry out any executions. Ever since the coup, the junta has been pushing the country back to the time of the military dictatorship that Aung San Suu Kyi first struggled against. “The executions have confirmed that the regression is complete.”
That’s why the U.S. is urging China to rein in its client state, said Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian (U.K.). State Department spokesman Ned Price said this week it could no longer “be business as usual with the junta.” He said the U.S. had already held in-depth discussions with Beijing on how to nudge Myanmar back toward democracy. But there’s no sign that China will help, said Andrew Landen in Mizzima (Myanmar, published from exile). Beijing hesitated after last year’s coup, worried about the infrastructure deals it had made with Myanmar under Aung San Suu Kyi. But once the junta leaders “demonstrated they controlled the fate of Chinese investments,” China sided with them. Now “anti-China sentiment” is spreading among the militants, and Chinese-built infrastructure, including oil pipelines, is being attacked. In Myanmar’s civil war, China is on the wrong side.