Myanmar's military government yesterday said a recent US government report on human-rights abuses in the country is "riddled with errors" and fails to note steps Myanmar has taken toward democracy.
"Regrettably, the US has lost its credibility on human right issues," a government statement said, citing alleged abuses by the US in its global war on terror.
The US State Department said in its annual report on the state of human rights worldwide that the situation had worsened in Myanmar during 2003.
It cited a May 30 attack by government-affiliated forces on a convoy led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Several hundred pro-democracy supporters and activists were missing, under arrest, wounded, raped or dead from the incident, the report said.
"The State Department's report on Myanmar is poorly researched, riddled with errors and ignores the many positive developments that have taken place in the past year," said the statement, seen in Bangkok.
One glaring omission, it said, was last year's announcement of a "road map to democracy" that would eventually give Myanmar a constitutional government.
It said the State Department had failed to note that American economic sanctions had created great hardships for ordinary Myanmar citizens, especially women in the garment industry, and lacked credibility because of America's own human rights abuses such as torture of prisoners taken in Afghanistan.
Myanmar, under military rule since 1962, has been widely criticized for imprisonment and torture of political dissidents, repression of the pro-democracy movement and violence against ethnic minorities.
Critics say the road map gives no time frame for achieving democracy and note that Suu Kyi, who heads the opposition National League for Democracy, remains under house arrest.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS