Day: September 24, 2022

Nearly 20 months after the military coup in Myanmar, amid a rapidly intensifying conflict, People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary groups are turning to drone technology to level the playing field as they engage with better equipped junta troops.

When the PDF formed in the months following the Feb. 1, 2021 military takeover, it’s members were forced to fight Southeast Asia’s second largest army using only slingshots and the same crude flintlock “Tumee” rifles their forefathers used to fight off British colonizers in the 1880s. As the network grew, the groups began to use homemade landmines to target their enemy’s convoys.

The latest addition to the PDF arsenal are civilian drones, refitted to drop explosives on junta troops. PDF sources told RFA Burmese that the drones are safe, accurate, and require little manpower to operate during clashes.

Boh Lin Yaung, leader of the Khin-U Support Organization (KSO) in Sagaing region’s Khin-U township, said his group took civilian drones used for shooting video and upgraded them to drop bombs on specific locations.

“Drones have lots of advantages, so we started buying them,” he said.

“Right now, we are working with small drones used for photography, and therefore can only carry small payloads – around half a viss (24 ounces). The main reason we use them is because it’s the safest way for us to engage the enemy.”

Boh Lin Yaung said his group had previously sought to obtain automatic rifles, but decided to use drones instead because of how effective they are for such a low cost point against the junta’s advantages in modern military equipment, training, and supplies.

Members of Sagaing Region PDFs also reported success using drones, although they acknowledged that they are susceptible to being shot out of the sky. They noted that the junta has been using reconnaissance drones to determine their locations and engage them with heavy weapons and airstrikes.

‘Our drones dominate the skies’

In Kayin state, where the intensity of fighting rivals that in Sagaing, PDFs are using large-scale drones with six propellers that can carry heavier loads.

Myo Thura Ko, the information officer of the Cobra Regiment, said PDFs have been using combat and patrol drones in Kayin since December 2021.

“The enemy can be easily defeated because the drones unnerve them … They get scared when they hear the sound of the drones flying,” he said.

“They carry out a lot of airstrikes, but their planes just drop bombs and leave. For the rest of the time, our drones dominate the skies. Our drones also have the ability to scout at night, so they have become a nightmare for the enemy troops.”

Myo Thura Ko said a drone can be equipped with up to five bombs and patrol in dangerous areas using less manpower.

PDFs said the junta has recently begun deploying radio frequency jammers to prevent drones from flying near their camps.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Major General Zaw Min Tun about the military response to PDF drones went unanswered. However, at a Sept. 20 press conference in the capital Naypyidaw, he told reporters that anti-drone guns have been installed in strategic locations to protect against attack.

Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the Thayningha Strategy Studies Group, a group of former military officers, said PDFs are limited in their ability to attack using civilian drones because of their need for technical support.

“The drones used for spraying chemicals in agriculture called ‘Hexacopters’ have six propellers. They can carry a larger payload and are now being used to drop bombs from the air. But if we look at it from a technical standpoint, the triggering mechanism isn’t simple to operate,” he said.

“In order to overcome this problem, they require support. So this is not a normal development. It’s not something they can do themselves. It’s obvious that someone else is providing the technical know-how.”

Shadow govt drone unit

The Ministry of Communications, Information and Technology (MOCIT) under Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) recently formed a “Federal Wings” drone unit manned by tech-savvy youth. The Federal Wings’ social media page claims that the unit has already participated in operations on the battlefield using drones.

The NUG Ministry of Defense also said it is seeking funding to consolidate PDF drone attack forces into an armed force.

Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, said he expects both sides to increasingly add drones to their arsenals.

“Using drones not only for scouting, but also to deploy weapons, is a development that has come about mostly since the coup,” he said.

“Drones are a widely available technology that can be used by both sides. The role of drones is of growing importance to modern warfare.”

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

The U.N. Security Council has not taken serious action to remedy the situation in post-coup Myanmar, Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said Friday, adding that the elite body’s five permanent members make it impossible to resolve conflicts by often misusing their veto power.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Ismail Sabri also said that the Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN needed to scrap an agreement it made with Myanmar to return that country to democracy because the junta has done nothing to implement the accord.

But the Malaysian PM reserved the most scathing criticism in his 22-minute speech for the U.N. Security Council, which he called the world body’s “biggest problem.”

“It is very saddening when the Security Council does not take any serious action in dealing with this situation. Some even see the Security Council as having washed its hands off and handing the matter over to ASEAN,” he said.

“The power of veto is often misused to favor the world powers that have it. It is not democratic and violates the principles of human rights. This makes it impossible for conflicts to be resolved by any of the permanent members of the Council.”

For any Security Council resolution to be adopted none of its permanent members – Russia, Britain, China, France, and the United States – can veto it. And China and Russia, analysts say, will prevent any strong action, such as broad, binding sanctions, being taken against the violent Burmese junta.

The junta’s security forces have killed more than 2,300 people since the generals seized power by toppling an elected government on Feb. 1, 2021. Just last week, junta forces had fired on a village school in Myanmar’s Sagaing region, killing at least seven children, in what appeared to be the deadliest incident involving children since last year’s military coup.

Meanwhile, the Burmese junta has also willfully ignored a five-point agreement it reached with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in April last year. The agreement was seen as a roadmap to return Myanmar to democracy, but junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has not implemented a single point of that agreement, known as the five-point consensus, analysts say.

The Malaysian prime minister, too, said the consensus had gone nowhere.

“Malaysia is disappointed that there is no meaningful progress in the implementation of the ASEAN ‘Five Point Consensus’ especially by the Myanmar junta. In its current form, the ASEAN ‘Five Point Consensus’ cannot continue any longer,” Ismail Sabri said.

“Therefore, this consensus needs to be given a new lease of life and refined based on a clearer framework, timeframe and end goal.”

Earlier this week Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said that Kuala Lumpur was planning to press the Southeast Asian bloc into deciding the fate of its five-point consensus on Myanmar before the ASEAN summit in November.

“If it is not working we have to decide what’s next. We cannot go in November and then start talking about it. We have to do the groundwork now,” he had told reporters after a meeting with Burmese opposition members in New York.

Meanwhile, Ismail Sabri also said that the political situation Myanmar had made the situation worse for millions of Myanmar refugees, including the stateless Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom fled from a brutal military offensive in Rakhine state in 2017 that the United States has since labeled a genocide.

“Although Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, Malaysia, on humanitarian grounds, accepted nearly 200,000 Rohingya refugees,” the Malaysian PM said.

“Therefore, it is the responsibility of all countries, including the countries participating in the convention, to take in more refugees to be resettled in their respective countries.”

Ismail Sabri said it was important for the world to address the root cause of the Rohingya crisis.

He said: “I believe that this issue will not be resolved as long as the crisis in the country continues.”

BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service.

As soon as Mongolia opened its borders following a period of COVID-19 isolation, Taiwanese national Cheng Li-yi boarded a plane and flew 3,000 kilometers to the grasslands. Her mission? To plant trees.

Cheng’s Compassion Foundation has an ambitious target: to plant one billion trees.

“We want to make more environmental contributions to the global village,” biology major Cheng told RFA from Mongolia, where sandstorms regularly turn the sky orange amid the environmental scourge of desertification.

“Seventy percent of land in Mongolia has succumbed to desertification,” Cheng said, citing growing swathes of land denuded of forests, with the fragile steppe ecosystems collapsing under unsustainable pressure.

“Back then, there were trees everywhere, but now they’re all gone,” she recalled of a trip she made to mountains near Ulaanbaatar back in 1990.

Deforestation means that when torrential rains fall, floods gather quickly, washing much of the topsoil with it. A recent flash flood wrought havoc with Cheng’s tree-planting project.

“The torrential rain fell for about two hours non-stop, and flash floods came immediately, breaking through  the [perimeter] wall in several places,” Cheng said.

“It turns out that there used to be a river passing through the area,” she said. “When it rains, because there are no more trees in the upper valleys, the water immediately gets funneled down the old river bed.”

“When it doesn’t rain, there’s no water — these are the consequences of a lack of forest regulation,” Cheng said.

Overgrazing

The land has also come under relentless pressure from overgrazing by 60 million head of livestock and extractive industries like mining.

But it’s not enough just to dig some holes and put saplings in them.

Tree-planting is a precise art that needs a localized strategy in tune with local conditions, as the authorities in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia found to their cost after sinking huge sums into planting poplars, only to find the species didn’t thrive there.

“There are many strains in the wilderness, which have both economic and health benefits, that can propagate from underground stems — these are good species for afforestation,” Cheng said.

Among the native species Cheng’s project favors are sea buckthorn and Siberian elm, which already cover an area equivalent to 10 soccer pitches at the project, where water towers, wells, irrigation pipelines, yurts and other facilities have sprung up alongside the saplings.

Cheng’s trees are planted in biodegradable reservoirs soaked in water, keeping the seedlings watered for around a month, cooling the root ball, and protecting the vulnerable seedlings from wind and sandstorms.

“The [reservoirs] gradually decompose, taking care of the trees in the process,” Cheng said, noting that current hose watering methods used in China generate too much plastic waste to be sustainable.

Livestock eat trees

But there is another hazard — livestock.

“It’s quite normal for livestock to roam freely and eat trees in Mongolia,” Cheng said. “So we are working with Renzhou Social Enterprise to develop a tree sleeve made of the same material as the water reservoirs, protecting [the seedlings] from being eaten by animals.”

While the Mongolian government is pressing ahead with its own tree-planting plan, which aims to plant one billion trees by 2030, Cheng said many of the plantations are in mining districts, and that many fail to thrive in the absence of sufficient watering after planting.

Cheng herself is thriving on the work, however.

“We are taking the initiative to change the environment through hard work, rather than passively enduring extremes,” Cheng said. “We have to work hard, take this opportunity; there’s no other option.”

“I think it’s better than becoming a climate refugee.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Chinese comedy drama film, “Give Me Five,” opened yesterday, in a limited theatrical release in North America.

 

The Mandarin-speaking film is being released by Well Go USA, with Chinese and English subtitles, in selected theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Vancouver, Toronto and a few other cities across North America.

 

Directed by Zhang Luan and starring Ma Li, Chang Yuan and Wei Xiang, the film follows a young man, who is transported back in time, where he accidentally alters his parents’ pasts. Now he must reunite the pair – or risk never being born.

 

“Give Me Five,” which was released earlier this month in China, has raked in over 288 million yuan (about 40.4 million U.S. dollars), after two weeks, according to the box office data, compiled by Maoyan, a Chinese movie-ticketing and film data platform.

 

The film currently boasts a rating of 9.1 out of 10 from over 73,000 viewers on Maoyan.

 

 

 

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

A 6.4-magnitude earthquake, struck off Indonesia’s western province of Aceh, early this morning, the country’s meteorology and geophysics agency said. More update later.

 

 

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

Timor-Leste’s President, Jose Ramos-Horta, yesterday said, he regretted the double standards in international aid, and apathy towards the poor, both within borders and beyond.

 

In the aftermath of the 2008 subprime crisis, hundreds of billions of dollars were quickly mobilised to rescue exposed European and American banks. Draconian fiscal austerity measures, in the form of cuts in public expenditure and higher taxes were forced on the workers and middle class, he noted, saying, “but rarely are we able to inspire the rich to show the same level of compassion and wisdom towards the poorer South.”

 

“I always believe that we are all part of the great human family. Yet some seem to feel that we are not really equal, we are not part of the same human family, since part of the world lives in dazzling citadels, while their billions of distant relatives live in poor global neighbourhoods,” he told the General Debate of the UN General Assembly.

 

Aid to poorer countries of the South should not be cancelled or reallocated to address the refugee crisis, caused by the conflict in Ukraine, he said.

 

“They should pause for a moment to reflect on the glaring contrast in their response to the wars elsewhere, where women and children have died by the thousands from wars and starvation. Their responses to our beloved (UN) secretary-general’s cries for help, in these situations have not met with equal compassion,” said the president.

 

 

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK