LANGKAWI, Malaysia, January 21 ------ Southeast Asian foreign ministers told Myanmar's military government to prioritize a ceasefire in its civil war over fresh elections during a meeting in Malaysia. Myanmar's armed forces seized power in February 2021 on unsubstantiated claims of massive electoral fraud in 2020 polls won resoundingly by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy.
The junta then unleashed a bloody crackdown on dissent and, as fighting ravaged swaths of the country, it has repeatedly delayed plans for polls that critics say would be neither free nor fair. "One thing that we know, they want to have an election. But we told them that election is not a priority at the moment," Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan told reporters after the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) meeting of top diplomats on the western Malaysian island of Langkawi. "The priority now is [for a] ceasefire and everybody to stand down. It's very simple," Mohamad said.
Malaysia is this year's rotating chairman of the 10-member Asean, which has been long derided by critics as a toothless talking shop. Myanmar was represented on Sunday by Aung Kyaw Moe, a senior civil servant in its Foreign Ministry after the regional bloc barred junta members from its meetings.
Mohamad said Aung Kyaw Moe briefed the ministers about the junta's plans to hold an election without giving any dates. The Asean has led diplomatic efforts to end the conflict but has struggled to implement a five-point peace plan agreed by all bloc leaders, including Myanmar's junta, in April 2021. The junta has several times pushed back a timetable for polls as it struggles to crush widespread opposition to its rule from allied ethnic minority armed groups and pro-democracy "People's Defense Forces."
The United States has said any elections under the junta would be a "sham," while analysts say polls would be targeted by the military's opponents and spark further bloodshed. More than 3.3 million people in Myanmar have been displaced by the conflict, the United Nations said. Asean Secretary General Kao Kim Hourn said some of the foreign ministers on Sunday also "called for the release of Madam Aung San Suu Kyi," the prominent pro-democracy figure who has been detained since the 2021 coup.
Source: manilatimes.net
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