After evening prayers on Sept. 18, the abbot of a small monastery in Myanmar’s largest city convened the roughly 30 Buddhist monks in his charge. The bonds between secular and religious authority had broken, the abbot said. Then he gave the monks his blessing to take to the streets in protest.
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The military junta on Tuesday rejected proposed three-party talks that would have included pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, saying it refuses to bow to “big power bullies.”
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A U.N. special envoy will meet Myanmar’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday, the last day of his frustrating mission to try to ease the country’s political crisis, diplomats said.
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The Burmese military government has told the National League for Democracy that three central executive committee members can meet with UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari on Thursday in Naypyidaw, according to the NLD.
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Myanmar’s junta is ready to “endure” being on the United Nations Security Council’s agenda but warned the UN that it would “also have to handle the situations of the nations similar to or worse than Myanmar’s,” state-run media reports said Wednesday.
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In yet another act of defiance, groups of activists have begun to distribute anti-junta pamphlets in Rangoon, sources said.
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Myanmar’s ruling junta will “take action” against 91 people detained during pro-democracy protests whom it accuses of being involved in “violent and terrorist acts,” state media reported Wednesday.
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Nine Burmese Muslims from the former capital Rangoon who supported the monk-led protests in September have been arrested and charged with inciting state unrest, said family members.
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Following the mass protests in Burma spread over August and September, several Burmese ethnic communities along the Indo-Burmese border have fled Burma. They have only added to the already huge undocumented migrant Burmese refugee population in India’s northeastern state of Mizoram.
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The son of a Burmese general and his friends have duped a group of Chinese businessmen. The businessmen were promised the military junta’s permission to work jade and gold mines in Kachin State. The Chinese are livid, a source close to the businessmen said.
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Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein will attend a key Southeast Asian summit later this month, with the junta’s crackdown on dissent expected to top the agenda, an official said Wednesday.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed his concern on Tuesday over the “lack of progress” made on the latest mission to Burma by his special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.
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Only six weeks after Burma’s generals brutally suppressed pro-democracy protests, international outrage is fading and, with it, political and diplomatic pressure for change. Campaigners say the unrelieved plight of the Burmese people is again in danger of being forgotten. In some ways, repression has actually grown worse. Theirs was the “saffron revolution” that never was.
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United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari’s latest trip to Myanmar wholly failed to yield any results in pushing the ruling junta towards conciliation with the country’s democratic opposition. With the UN’s impotence, the international community will now look even more towards China to nudge the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) towards democratic change. (more…)

Officials of Asean will sign a charter designed to turn the loosely structured regional body into a rule-based organization at the 13th Asean Summit in Singapore this month.
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