YANGON: Myanmar President Htin Kyaw pardoned 83 political prisoners on the country’s traditional New Year Sunday, a spokesman from his office said, as the fledgling civilian-led administration seeks to cast off the shackles of nearly half a century of military rule.
The new government, steered by veteran democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, has spent its first weeks in power freeing scores of political activists prosecuted under the country’s former military leaders.
“All of the 83 prisoners that the president gave amnesty to today are political prisoners and prisoners concerned with political cases,” Zaw Htay, the deputy director of the president’s office, told AFP.
A presidential pardon published Sunday morning said the amnesty was granted to “make people feel happy and peaceful, and (promote) national reconciliation during the New Year.”
The former junta’s routine jailing of dissidents was one of many repressive policies that garnered support for the democracy struggle led by Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), which swept historic polls in November.
The party is stacked with ex-political prisoners who were jailed for their activism under the former military regime.
Suu Kyi, who spent some 15 years under house arrest during the dark junta days, oversaw her government’s first amnesty push earlier this month, when authorities dropped charges against nearly 200 political activists ahead of the New Year holiday.
The former quasi-civilian government that replaced junta rule in 2011 also freed hundreds of political detainees, but oversaw the detention of scores more.
Local media aired joyful reunion scenes as released prisoners left jails across the country, carrying small bags of belongings and joining loved ones in song outside the prison gates.
Among those pardoned Sunday were five journalists handed 10-year sentences in 2014 over a report accusing the military of producing chemical weapons, which the government denied.
The journalists’ sentence, which was later reduced to seven years, was slammed by rights groups as “outrageously harsh.”
“We have been looking forward to hearing good news from this new government,” Yarzar Oo, one of the reporters from Unity Weekly News, told AFP by phone after his release from Pakokku Prison in Magway region.
The group was greeted with flowers by their relatives, who gathered at the prison the night before after learning of their release, he said.
Others seen released in local media reports included Htin Lin Oo, a writer and former NLD information officer, and Htin Kyaw, a well-known democracy activist who shares the president’s name and spent more than a decade in and out of the country’s notorious prisons.
“The release is welcome, but the NLD needs to release more political prisoners as soon as possible” said Bo Kyi from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a watchdog group that tracks information about the country’s prisoners of conscience.
There are still dozens of political prisoners and hundreds of others facing trial, he told AFP.
In a New Year speech Sunday, President Htin Kyaw, an ally and close friend of Suu Kyi, stressed his administration’s determination to free all political activists facing prosecution.
Suu Kyi is banned from the presidency by a junta-era charter but is guiding her party’s government through her seats in the cabinet and a newly-fashioned role as state counsellor.
The novice administration is carrying the hopes of millions of voters hungry for greater freedoms and economic rejuvenation after decades of military strangulation.
But many challenges lie ahead, including a deeply flawed legal system, the military’s continuing clout, high poverty rates and civil wars in several ethnic minority states.
Political prisoners pardoned in Myanmar
Political prisoners pardoned in Myanmar
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
