NEW DELHI: Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with India’s prime minister and foreign secretary yesterday as part of a trip to establish closer ties between the countries.
Suu Kyi, who arrived Tuesday for a five-day visit, met separately with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai. Details of the meetings were not immediately available.
In the 1980s and early ‘90s, India was a strong supporter of Suu Kyi in her struggle against the country’s military junta for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize. But in the mid-1990s, India changed tack to engage with the junta, resisting pressure from Western democracies that had imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar.
New Delhi insisted it had to follow a pragmatic policy because it needed its neighbor’s help in cracking down on Indian rebels who had built hideouts in the jungles along the India-Myanmar border. The new policy also underscored India’s quest for energy supplies and concerns about China’s strong influence in the Southeast Asian country.
In an interview published Tuesday in an Indian newspaper, Suu Kyi said she hoped her visit would bring India and Myanmar closer. “I feel that perhaps in recent years we’ve grown apart as peoples, because India took a road which is different from ours, or rather we changes routes. I’d like to see a closer relationship between our two peoples,” she said in the interview.
Suu Kyi also visited the memorials of Indian independence leaders Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru yesterday.
Singh invited Suu Kyi to deliver the lecture when he met with her in Myanmar’s main city of Yangon in May.
Her visit is an emotional one because Suu Kyi spent several years in India as a student in the early 1960s while her mother was ambassador to India. Her itinerary includes a visit to her old college in New Delhi on Friday.
“I’d like to see the old places, the places where I spent time as a teenager,” she told the newspaper. She last visited India in the 1980s.
Suu Kyi is to meet Today with Vice President Hamid Ansari, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid and Speaker of Parliament Meira Kumar. She also is to visit Parliament and travel to southern India to see rural development projects and women’s empowerment programs, according to India’s Foreign Ministry.
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Suu Kyi urges Indian support for democracy in Myanmar
Suu Kyi urges Indian support for democracy in Myanmar
US immigration agents’ training ‘broken’: whistleblower
WASHINGTON: A former US immigration official said Monday that training for federal agents was “deficient, defective and broken,” adding to pressure on President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown.
Ryan Schwank resigned this month from his job teaching law at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) training academy in Glynco, Georgia, after he said he was instructed to teach new recruits to violate the US Constitution.
The fatal shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January reignited accusations that agents enforcing Trump’s militarized immigration operation are inexperienced, undertrained and operating outside law enforcement norms.
The administration scaled back the deployment after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight by officers sparked mass protests and widespread outrage.
Schwank told a forum hosted by congressional Democrats on Monday that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”
“Never in my career had I received such a blatantly unlawful order,” he said.
He said that ICE cut 240 hours from its 584-hour training program, curtailing subjects such as the US Constitution, lawful arrest, fire arms, the use of force and the limits of officers’ authority.
“The legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective and broken,” he said.
As a consequence, poorly trained, inexperienced armed officers were being sent to places like Minneapolis “with minimal supervision,” he said.
The lawyer’s comments coincide with the release of dozens of pages of internal ICE documents by Senate Democrats that suggest the Trump administration cut corners on training, the New York Times reported.
Schwank said he resigned on February 13 after more than four years working for ICE, and that he felt duty-bound to report inadequacies with the new training program.
Ryan Schwank resigned this month from his job teaching law at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) training academy in Glynco, Georgia, after he said he was instructed to teach new recruits to violate the US Constitution.
The fatal shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January reignited accusations that agents enforcing Trump’s militarized immigration operation are inexperienced, undertrained and operating outside law enforcement norms.
The administration scaled back the deployment after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight by officers sparked mass protests and widespread outrage.
Schwank told a forum hosted by congressional Democrats on Monday that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”
“Never in my career had I received such a blatantly unlawful order,” he said.
He said that ICE cut 240 hours from its 584-hour training program, curtailing subjects such as the US Constitution, lawful arrest, fire arms, the use of force and the limits of officers’ authority.
“The legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective and broken,” he said.
As a consequence, poorly trained, inexperienced armed officers were being sent to places like Minneapolis “with minimal supervision,” he said.
The lawyer’s comments coincide with the release of dozens of pages of internal ICE documents by Senate Democrats that suggest the Trump administration cut corners on training, the New York Times reported.
Schwank said he resigned on February 13 after more than four years working for ICE, and that he felt duty-bound to report inadequacies with the new training program.
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