RSS Feed
November 16th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda It begins on Sunday with a stop in Bangkok to meet Thailand’s King and the Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, and ends on Tuesday in Cambodia where he will attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit and the East Asia Summit.
However the president’s tour threatens to be overshadowed by controversy. His visit to Rangoon, where he will meet both Burma’s president Thein Sein and the leader of the opposition Aung San Suu Kyi, comes against a backdrop of sectarian violence.
Clashes continue between the stateless Muslim Rohingya minority and the Buddhist majority in western Burma’s Rakhine State.
Both Mr Thein and Ms Suu Kyi have been criticised for their failure to act to stop the deadly clashes in Rakhine State that have left almost 200 people dead and seen over 110,000 mostly Rohingya people displaced since June.
“President Obama should be trying to secure an assurance from the Burmese government that Burma’s 1982 citizenship law be amended so that the Rohingya can be made Burmese citizens,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s the fact that they are not citizens that make the Rohingya such easy targets.”
The Burmese government too, continues to hold an estimated 330 political prisoners, according to the opposition National League for Democracy. The release of some 452 prisoners on Thursday has been widely condemned as a ploy to court favour with Washington ahead of Mr Obama’s visit, after it emerged that none of the people freed were political detainees.
Previously, the US has made the release of all political prisoners a condition of the lifting of all sanctions against the former pariah state. However, following Washington’s decision to suspend economic sanctions in May, Mr Obama’s trip to Rangoon is being regarded as a green light for American companies to invest in Burma, as well as reducing the US’s ability to pressure the government on human rights.
Mr Obama’s trip to Cambodia for the 21st ASEAN Summit is also attracting unwelcome attention. His first visit to the country comes as violence against environmental and land activists has risen dramatically in the last year, as have restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, under the increasingly authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen.
On Thursday, eight people from 400 families facing eviction from their homes close to the airport in the capital Phnom Penh who had painted SOS signs on their roofs to attract President Obama’s attention were arrested. “We are being forcibly evicted from our homes without proper compensation. We just wanted Obama to help us,” said one villager Sim Sokunthea.
Earlier in the week, attempts by a network of local rights organisations to hold meetings ahead of the ASEAN summit were disrupted by the authorities, leading activists to call on Mr Obama to put pressure on the government to end the harassment.
“We hope that President Obama will influence Prime Minister Hun Sen to adhere to international treaties and other human rights instruments that Cambodia has ratified,” said Naly Pilorge, the director of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights.
Views: 0
Posted in 
