Day: November 13, 2022

U.S. President Joe Biden said Sunday that Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s reelection victory in Nevada that has secured Democrats’ control of the U.S. Senate will give him a boost as he heads into a highly anticipated Monday meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“I know I’m coming in stronger, but I don’t need that,” Biden said responding to VOA’s question following remarks in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Sunday.

Biden spent the weekend in the Cambodian capital to participate in the ASEAN and East Asia Summit with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their dialogue partners.

The U.S. chair was empty as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen delivered his opening remarks at the EAS summit as Biden delivered his brief remarks in front of American traveling press to congratulate Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“He’s got a majority again,” Biden said.

Xi’s circumstances

Biden acknowledged Xi’s recent reelection as the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary, securing his term as the country’s leader for a precedent-breaking third term.

“His circumstances have changed – to state the obvious – at home,” Biden said.

The Biden-Xi meeting, their first in person since Biden came into office in 2021, will happen in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of a G-20 summit of the world’s major economies.

Stakes of the summit are high but expectations are low for the two great powers locked in an intensifying rivalry.

Beijing and Washington disagree on major issues, including Taiwan, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, trade practices and control of advance technology following U.S. export control rules on semiconductors, launched in October that will restrict China’s ability to produce and purchase high-end computer chips.

Biden said that he and Xi know each other well and have “very little misunderstanding.”

“We just got to figure out where the red lines are and what we — what are the most important things to each of us going into the next two years,” he said.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

U.S. President Joe Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea met in Phnom Penh, where they vowed a united stance over threats posed by North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

The three leaders held talks on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Cambodia where regional leaders gathered for the first in-person talks since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For years our countries have been engaging in trilateral cooperation out of a shared concern for the nuclear missile threats that North Korea poses to our people. And North Korea continues provocative behavior. This partnership is even more important than it’s ever been,” Biden said after the talks.

North Korea has launched a record number of missile this year, some of which have flown over Japan, alarming leaders in Tokyo.

“North Korea’s provocations continue at an unprecedented level. With possible further provocations [by North Korea], I think Tokyo’s summit with the United States and South Korea is happening at the right time. I would like to further strengthen cooperation with the United States and South Korea to deal with North Korea resolutely,” said Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The East Asia Summit is a grouping of the Associated of Southeast Asian Nations and its dialogue partners: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, and the United States.

On Saturday, Biden addressed a U.S.-ASEAN summit, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to “ASEAN Centrality” — the principle that regional engagements and processes are driven by the 10-country bloc instead of great power rivalry.

“ASEAN is the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy,” Biden said. “And we continue to strengthen our commitment to work in lockstep with an empowered, unified ASEAN.”

Biden – Hun Sen

Biden appeared to misspeak as he thanked “the prime minister of Colombia” for his leadership in ASEAN, referring to Cambodia’s authoritarian leader Hun Sen. At the start of the summit, the president held a bilateral meeting with the region’s longest-ruling leader who has been in office since 1985.

Activists have urged Biden to hold Hun Sen accountable for the country’s democratic decline.

Biden pressed Hun Sen to reopen civic and political space ahead of the 2023 elections and called for the release of activists detained on politically motivated charges, including U.S.-Cambodian dual citizen Theary Seng, according to a readout of the bilateral meeting provided by the White House.

With Phnom Penh firmly in Beijing’s embrace, however, there may not be much that Biden can do.

“Whenever there’s pressure from the Western country, especially from the U.S., China will be at the back of the Cambodian government providing support,” said Bunna Vann president of The Thinker Cambodia think tank. “When the U.S. has put a sanction to the Cambodian government, China will provide the economic support to the Cambodian government.”

During his meeting with Hun Sen earlier this week, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged $27 million in development aid for Cambodia.

The U.S. is also concerned that Cambodia is secretly allowing Chinese warships to dock at its Ream Naval Base in the Gulf of Thailand.

“The President raised concerns regarding the situation at Ream Naval Base and underscored the importance of full transparency about activities by the PRC military at Ream Naval Base,” the White House said in its statement.

Earlier this year, Beijing provided funds to revamp the base, heightening fears among some ASEAN members concerned about Chinese expansionist ambitions in the South China Sea.

Biden ended his first day in Cambodia at a gala dinner with summit leaders. He continued meetings at the East Asia Summit on Sunday before he traveled to Bali, Indonesia, for the G-20 meeting of the world’s 20 largest economies.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

Renewed fighting in Myanmar’s far west between the military and a powerful rebel group is opening another deadly front in the country’s post-coup chaos, piling pressure on a junta still struggling to consolidate power.

The military’s February 2021 coup and subsequent crackdown on peaceful protests set off a wave or armed resistance across Myanmar that has been stretching the junta’s forces thin. By some estimates they now hold effective control over less than half the country.

The western state of Rakhine had been a pocket of relative calm owing to a late 2020 informal cease-fire between the military and the Arakan Army. The deal followed two years of heavy fighting in northern Rakhine and parts of neighboring Chin state, where the AA wants to establish autonomy over the ancient homeland of the ethnic Rakhine, also known as Arakanese.

The pre-coup détente started cracking in July, giving way to regular fighting by late August.

Figures analyzed by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank, show attacks and armed clashes across Rakhine and southern Chin jumping from two to 44 from July to August, then to 51 in September and 66 in October. The U.K.-based Burma Human Rights Network counted a dozen civilians killed by the fighting just last month.

The United Nations says over 16,000 people have fled their homes to escape the violence since August.

‘Into the fray’

With the cease-fire now in tatters, the fighting in Rakhine is poised to only get worse, said Jason Tower, Myanmar analyst and program director at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank established by the U.S. Congress.

Boasting thousands of armed fighters and support from some of Myanmar’s other powerful rebel groups, he said, the AA looks intent on defending and adding to the gains it has made cementing its control over Rakhine’s north in recent years, complete with its own police, courts and other state-like trappings. However, the military will be loath to give more ground as the AA moves farther south, he added, especially if it means giving up the area’s lucrative oil and gas resources.

“That’s very unlikely to happen,” he said. “At the same time, with the popular legitimacy the AA has, with the funding it has, with the level of troops it has, the consolidation it’s made, it really sees where the trends are in [its] favor to be able to consolidate further and to move farther. So, I … see the overall trajectory of one where you’re likely to see higher levels of conflict in Rakhine state.”

Tower said the fighting in Rakhine may also give the overall resistance movement across Myanmar a boost by forcing the military to defend yet another flank as it continues “leaking like a sponge” from casualties, defections and recruitment shortfalls.

“This does add a lot of additional stress, given that one of the reasons why the military negotiated the cease-fire in the first place was because the Arakan Army had done so well on the battlefield against the military” he said. “So, the AA coming kind of fully into the fray does present a major challenge to the military.”

Border battle

The renewed fighting in Rakhine may not put much stress on the military’s ground troops yet, as it left most of the divisions it deployed to the state in 2019 and 2020 in place after the cease-fire, said Min Zaw Oo, who runs the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security.

“However, one of the burdens could be on airstrike capabilities,” he said. “If the AA decides to go for all-out war, the Tatmadaw [military] has to reallocate some of its air assets, so that could be a potential burden to the Tatmadaw.”

The International Institute for Strategic Studies data show air and drone strikes in Rakhine and southern Chin spiking from one to 18 from August to September, and another nine last month.

The same data show much of the fighting concentrated on Rakhine’s western border with Bangladesh.

Tower and Min Zaw Oo say the AA is keen to take control of at least part of the border, both to establish a reliable supply route from Bangladesh and to cash in on taxing the cross-border trade. Min Zaw Oo said he has seen photos and satellite images suggesting the AA has even set up some bases inside Bangladesh to support its operations in Rakhine.

Tower said the AA is hoping its control of the border will also win it some international respect by forcing authorities in Bangladesh to deal with it and not just the junta. At a news conference in September, AA spokesman Khine Thu Kha even dangled the offer of helping Bangladesh repatriate the ethnic Rohingya refugees it is hosting in exchange for official recognition as the area’s “main actor.”

‘Very horrific’

More than 1 million mostly Muslim Rohingya have fled Rakhine for Bangladesh over the past several years to escape repeated raids by the Myanmar military, whose ranks are drawn mainly from the country’s predominantly Buddhist ethnic majority Burmese.

The military has denied foreign accusations of committing genocide against the Rohingya and says it has been using proportionate force in fighting since the coup to restore order.

In the meantime, northern Rakhine’s civilians are bearing the brunt of the latest violence there.

A Rohingya aid worker recounted the military’s October 25 attack on his village, Sein Hnyin Pyar, just south of the town of Buthidaung.

“When the military came into the village, the Arakan Army attacked to them, and then the fighting started,” he told VOA. “Immediately the Burmese helicopter came to attack and launched the air strike. Then the military troops came from Buthidaung and the situation became very horrific.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for his safety, the young man said he saw junta soldiers shoot and kill a farmer running home from his field, and that a bomb injured two young children, including a 5-year-old boy the villagers tried to rush to the nearest hospital, only to be blocked by soldiers at a checkpoint outside of Buthidaung.

“When checkpoints were blocked, even this child can’t be allowed to admit [to] hospital, and this time on the way the child died,” he said.

Aung Kyaw Moe, a Rohingya rights activist, said the junta’s security forces are blocking not just most humanitarian aid headed for northern Rakhine, but the bulk of food as basic supplies as well.

“In short term people are surviving in worse situations,” he said. “But in the long run there will be starvation and there will be malnutrition and there will be hunger.”

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America