Foreign News
Nepal gets first female PM after deadly unrest
Nepal’s former Supreme Court chief justice Sushila Karki has become the country’s interim prime minister after deadly anti-corruption protests ousted the government.
Karki, 73, was sworn in during a brief ceremony, becoming the first woman to lead the impoverished Himalayan nation after a deal was reached with the protest leaders.
More than 50 people were killed in clashes with riot police during this week’s mass protests sparked by a ban on social media platforms.
The ban was lifted on Monday – but by then protests had swelled into a mass movement. Angry crowds set fire to parliament and government buildings in the capital Kathnabdu on Tuesday, forcing Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to resign.
Earlier on Friday, President Ram Chandra Poudel’s press adviser confirmed to the BBC that Karki would take the oath of office in the evening.
The agreement between the president and the protest leaders was reached after days of consultations. Legal experts were also involved.
Parliament was dissolved late on Friday and it was announced that general elections would be held on 5 March next year.
Karki is expected to appoint ministers in her cabinet within a few days.
She is widely regarded as a person of clean image, and is being supported by student leaders from the so-called “Gen Z” to lead the interim government.
Her cabinet will face multiple challenges – restoring law and order, reconstructing parliament and other key buildings that were attacked, as well as reassuring the Gen Z protesters who want change – and others in Nepal who are fearful its young democracy and constitutional order could be derailed.
Another key task will be to bring those responsible for violence to justice.
Karki’s appointment is a result of compromise in the talks this week that were brokered by Nepal’s army chief. Elated Gen Z supporters are expressing their happiness on social media and many see this as the next step in the new political course they want the country to take.
On Tuesday, Karki visited the protest site in Kathmandu where 19 people were killed in clashes with police the day before. She also met some of the injured who were being treated in hospital.
Karki was born in a family with close contacts with the Koirala political dynasty from the country’s largest democratic party Nepali Congress, and later married the then leader party Durga Subedi.
She has said that her husband’s support played a major role in her journey from a lawyer to Nepal’s chief justice in 2016.
But Karki has not been free from controversy, having even faced an impeachment incident during her nearly 11-month tenure as chief justice.
Nepal’s army is still patrolling the streets of Kathmandu, as the country reels from its worst unrest in decades. Restrictions were only briefly lifted to allow residents to buy essential items.
The protests were triggered by the government’s decision last week to ban 26 social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – but they soon widened to embody much deeper discontent with Nepal’s political elite.
In the weeks before the ban, a “nepo kid” campaign, spotlighting the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children and allegations of corruption, had taken off on social media.
And while the social media ban was hastily lifted on Monday night, the protests had by that stage gained unstoppable momentum.
[BBC]
As of Wednesday the Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi will have spent a total of 20 years in detention in Myanmar, five of them since her government was overthrown by a military coup in February 2021.
Almost nothing is known about her state of health, or the conditions she is living in, although she is presumed to be held in a military prison in the capital Nay Pyi Taw. “For all I know she could be dead,” her son Kim Aris said last month, although a spokesman for the ruling military junta insisted she is in good health.
She has not seen her lawyers for at least two years, nor is she known to have seen anyone else except prison personnel. After the coup she was given jail sentences totaling 27 years on what are widely viewed as fabricated charges.
Yet despite her disappearance from public view, she still casts a long shadow over Myanmar.
There are repeated calls for her release, along with appeals to the generals to end their ruinous campaign against the armed opposition and negotiate an end to the civil war that has now dragged on for five years.
The military has tried to remove her once ubiquitous image, but you still see faded posters of “The Lady”, or “Amay Su”, Mother Su, as she is affectionately known, in tucked away corners. Could she still play a role in settling the conflict between the soldiers and the people of Myanmar?
After all, it has happened before. Back in 2010 the military had been in power for nearly 50 years, brutally crushed all opposition and run the economy into the ground. Just as it is doing now, it organised a general election which excluded Aung San Suu Kyi’s popular National League for Democracy, and which it ensured its own proxy party, the USDP, would win.
As with this election, which is still underway in phases, the one in 2010 was dismissed by most countries as a sham. Yet at the end of that year Aung San Suu Kyi was released, and within 18 months she had been elected an MP. By 2015 her party had won the first free election since 1960, and she was de facto leader of the country.
To the outside world it seemed an almost miraculous democratic transition, evidence perhaps that among the stony-faced generals there might be genuine reformers.
So could we see a re-run of that scenario once the junta has completed its three-stage election at the end of this month?
A lot has changed between then and now.
Back then there had been many years of engagement between the generals and an assortment of UN envoys, exploring ways to end their pariah status and re-engage with the rest of the world. It was a more optimistic era; the generals could see their South East Asian neighbours prospering through trade with the Western world, and they wanted an end to crippling economic sanctions.
They also sought better relations with the US as a counterbalance to their dependence on China, at a time when the Obama administration was making its celebrated “pivot” to Asia.
The top generals were still hard-line and suspicious, but there was a group of less senior officers keen to explore a political compromise.
It is not clear what finally persuaded the military leadership to open the country up, but they clearly believed their 2008 constitution, which guaranteed the armed forces one-quarter of the seats in a future parliament, would be enough, with their well-funded party, to limit Aung San Suu Kyi’s influence once she was released.
They badly underestimated her massive star power, and they underestimated how much their decades of misrule had alienated most of the population.
In the 2015 election the USDP won just over 6% of the seats in both houses of parliament. In the next election in 2020 it expected to perform much better, after five years of an NLD administration which had started with impossibly high hopes, and had inevitably disappointed many of them. But the USDP fared even worse, winning just 5% of seats in the two houses.
Even many of those who were dissatisfied with Aung San Suu Kyi’s performance in government still chose hers over the military’s party. This raised the possibility that she might eventually win enough support to change the constitution, and end the military’s privileged position.
It also ruled out the armed forces commander Min Aung Hlaing’s hopes of becoming president after his retirement. He launched his coup on 1 February 2021, the day Aung San Suu Kyi was due to inaugurate her new government.
This time there are no reformers in the ranks, and no hopes of the kind of compromise which restored democracy back in 2010. The shocking violence used to put down protests against the coup has driven many young Burmese to take up arms against the junta. Tens of thousands have been killed, tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed. Attitudes on both sides have hardened.
The 15 years Aung San Suu Kyi was detained after 1989, under conditions of house arrest in her lakeside family home in Yangon, were very different from the conditions she is being held in today. Her dignified, non-violent resistance won her admirers across Myanmar and around the world, and during the occasional spells of freedom the military gave her she was able to give rousing speeches from her front gate, or interviews to journalists.
Today she is invisible. Her long-held belief in non-violent struggle has been rejected by those who have joined the armed resistance, who argue that they must fight to end the military’s role in Myanmar’s political life. There is a lot more criticism of how Aung San Suu Kyi governed when she was in power than before.
Her decision to lead Myanmar’s defence against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice over the military’s atrocities against Muslim Rohingyas in 2017 badly tarnished her saint-like international image. It had much less resonance inside Myanmar, but many younger opposition activists are now willing to condemn how she handled the Rohingya crisis.
At the age of 80, with uncertain health, it is not clear how much influence she would have, were she to be released, even if she still wants to play a central role.
And yet her long struggle against military rule made her synonymous with all the hopes of a freer, more democratic future.
There is simply no-one else of her stature in Myanmar, and for that reason alone, many would argue, she is probably still needed if the country is to chart a path out of its current deadlock.
[BBC]
About 550,000 accounts were blocked by Meta during the first days of Australia’s landmark social media ban for kids.
In December, a new law began requiring that the world’s most popular social media sites – including Instagram and Facebook – stop Australians aged under 16 from having accounts on their platforms.
The ban, which is being watched closely around the world, was justified by campaigners and the government as necessary to protect children from harmful content and algorithms.
Companies including Meta have said they agree more is needed to keep young people safe online. However they continue to argue for other measures, with some experts raising similar concerns.
“We call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,” Meta said in a blog update.
The company said it blocked 330,639 accounts on Instagram, 173,497 on Facebook, and 39,916 on Threads during it’s first week of compliance with the new law.
They again put the argument that age verification should happen at an app store level – something they suggested lowers the burden of compliance on both regulators and the apps themselves – and that exemptions for parental approval should be created.
“This is the only way to guarantee consistent, industry-wide protections for young people, no matter which apps they use, and to avoid the whack-a-mole effect of catching up with new apps that teens will migrate to in order to circumvent the social media ban law.”
Various governments, from the US state of Florida to the European Union, have been experimenting with limiting children’s use of social media. But, along with a higher age limit of 16, Australia is the first jurisdiction to deny an exemption for parental approval in a policy like this – making its laws the world’s strictest.
The policy is wildly popular with parents and envied by world leader, with the Tories this week pledging to follow suit if they win power at the next election, due before 2029.
However some experts have raised concerns that Australian kids can circumvent the ban with relative ease – either by tricking the technology that’s performing the age checks, or by finding other, potentially less safe, places on the net to gather.
And backed by some mental health advocates, many children have argued it robs young people of connection – particularly those from LGBTQ+, neurodivergent or rural communities – and will leave them less equipped to tackle the realities of life on the web.
(BBC)
A newly married couple were killed when a gas cylinder exploded at a house in Islamabad where they were sleeping after their wedding party, police have said.
A further six people – including wedding guests and family members – who were staying there also died in the blast. More than a dozen people were injured.
The explosion took place at 07:00 local time (02:00 GMT) on Sunday, causing the roof to collapse.
Parts of the walls were blown away, leaving piles of bricks, large concrete slabs and furniture strewn across the floor. Injured people were trapped under the rubble and had to be carried out on stretchers by rescue workers.
(BBC)
From behind bars, Aung San Suu Kyi casts a long shadow over Myanmar
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