Matthew Charles "Matt" Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American online social media entrepreneur and web developer living in San Francisco. He is best known for developing the free and open-source web software WordPress, now managed by The WordPress Foundation.

After dropping out of the University of Houston, he worked at CNET Networks from 2004 to 2006 until he quit and founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com (which provides free WordPress blogs and other services), Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy, and more.

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Internet philanthropy... 

At first glance, the prospect of reporting on Myanmar's public transport system seems like a pretty innocuous editorial move.

• Arrest of three journalists this week follows sentencing of two Reuters reporters
• Journalists facing mounting legal threats under Aung San Suu Kyi's Government
• Press freedom has declined across several South-East Asian countries

But this week, Eleven Media's pursuit of a story that criticised the funding behind Yangon's bus network led to the arrest of three journalists after one of Aung San Suu Kyi's closest confidants was seemingly portrayed in a bad light.

Executive editors Kyaw Zaw Lin and Nayi Min, along with chief reporter Phyo Wai Win, are now facing up to two years in prison after their newspaper accused Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein of mismanaging the city's bus finances.

"I didn't write anything wrong," Phyo Wai Win told Reuters as he entered the police station on Wednesday.

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-13/how-aung-san-suu-kyi-dashed-hopes-...

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Amnesty International is stripping Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of its highest honour, the Ambassador of Conscience Award.

The politician and Nobel peace prize winner received the honour in 2009, when she was living under house arrest.

The rights group said it was profoundly dismayed at her failure to speak out for the Rohingya minority, some 700,000 of whom have fled a military crackdown.

This is the latest honour in a string of awards Ms Suu Kyi, 73, has lost.

• Aung San Suu Kyi: The democracy icon who fell from grace
• Blow by blow: How a 'genocide' was investigated
• Could Aung San Suu Kyi face Rohingya genocide charges?

"We are profoundly dismayed that you no longer represent a symbol of hope, courage, and the undying defence of human rights," Amnesty's Secretary General Kumi Naidoo wrote in a letter to the Myanmar leader.

"[Her] denial of the gravity and scale of the atrocities [against the Rohingya] means there is little prospect of the situation improving," Mr Naidoo said.

The organisation, which once feted her as a beacon for democracy, announced its decision on the eighth anniversary of Ms Suu Kyi's release from house arrest.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46179292

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A few short years ago, Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi was an international human rights icon.

During her last trip to Western Europe, she was revered for her peaceful fight for democracy against Myanmar's military. 

This week, she returns to Europe to defend her country against accusations of genocide.

She will face the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alongside the army she spent much of her life fighting against.

It is the latest move by the former global peace leader to catch the international community by surprise. 

She is accused of turning a blind eye to violent atrocities committed against Myanmar's minority Rohingya population.

Last year, Amnesty International was one of seven high-profile organisations to strip her of honours, awards and titles over the Rohingya crisis. 

She has been criticised by the United Nations and by US Vice-President Mike Pence.

Canada has withdrawn its honorary citizenship and Malaysia's Prime Minister has described her as a "changed person" who has lost his support.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-10/aung-san-suu-kyi-defends-myanmar-...

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THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING A NEW WAR IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA

(article published 3 OCTOBER 2017)

Political Islam against China

by Thierry Meyssan

You are probably aware that you are incompletely informed about what is brewing in Myanmar, and you probably haven’t heard about the military coalition that is preparing to attack that country. And yet, as Thierry Meyssan reveals here, these current events have been in preparation by Riyadh and Washington since 2013. Don’t take sides before you read this article and digest the information.

Pursuing its Grand Strategy of extending the theatre of war [1], the Pentagon is at the same time preparing the instrumentation of the Kurds in the Greater Middle East, a civil war in Venezuela and a war of attrition in the Philippines. However, these conflicts will have to wait for the implementation of a fourth theatre of operations – namely Burma, China’s next-door neighbour.

During the meeting of the UN Security Council on 28 September, the US ambassador and several of her allies accused Myanmar’s coalition government of « genocide » [2]. This loaded word – which, in European law, designates the massacre of a great number of people, but in US law applies to a method of killing, even if the criminal kills only one person - is enough for Washington to justify a war, with or without the backing of the Security Council, as we saw in Yugoslavia [3]. The meeting of the Security Council was held at the request of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

In order to make the facts correspond to their narrative, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, which had celebrated Aung San Suu Kyi and the Buddhist monks for their non-violent resistance to the dictatorship of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) during the « Saffron revolution » in 2007 [4], simply redefined the Burmese army, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi [5], and all the Buddhists in the country [6] as “the bad guys”.

Burma has not known civil peace since the days of foreign domination, first British and then Japanese [7]. It has become easier to destabilise since the SLORC junta agreed to share power with the National League for Democracy (NLD), and together are trying to resolve the country’s many conflicts in a peaceful way.

By a geographical coincidence, Burma allows the passage across its territory of the pipe-line linking Chinese Yunnan to the Bay of Bengal, and houses the Chinese electronic surveillance posts for the naval routes which near its coasts. Making war in Burma is therefore more important for the Pentagon than blocking the two « Silk Roads » in the Middle East and Ukraine. An inheritance of British colonisation, there are also, among the distinct Burmese population, 1.1 million descendants of the workers that London had displaced from Bengal to Burma – the Rohingyas [8]. It happens that this national – not ethnic – minority is Muslim, although the great majority of Burmese people is Buddhist. Finally, during the Second World War, the Rohingyas collaborated with India against Burmese nationalists.

In 2013, when the Pentagon and the CIA had deployed the jihadist hordes in Syria and maintained a war of position, Saudi Arabia created yet another terrorist organisation in Mecca, the Faith Movement (Harakah al-Yaqin). This group, which declared that it was an assembly for the Rohingyas, is in reality commanded by the Pakistani Ata Ullah, who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan [9]. The Saudi regime housed the largest community of male Rohingyas, after Burma and before Bangladesh, with 300,000 male workers without their families.

According to a report by the Benagli intelligence services, before the current crisis, the Faith Movement had been working for a year with a spin-off group of the Bengali Jamat-ul-Mujahideen around the slogan « Bengali Jihad in Baghdad ». This tiny group pays allegiance to the Caliph of Daesh, Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, and has gathered in the same coalition the Indian Mujahideen, Al-Jihad, Al-Ouma, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Pakistani Harkat-ul Jihad-al Islami (HuJI). The group is financed by the foundation Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) in Kuwait. When, less than a year and a half ago, in March 2016, the SLORC accepted to share power with Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the United States attempted to use the Nobel Peace Prize-winner against Chinese interests. Knowing that it would be difficult to manipulate the daughter of the father of Burmese independence, the communist Aung San, they encouraged the Faith Movement - « …you never know … ».

In September 2016, Aung San Suu Kyi represented her country at the UN General Assembly [10]. Naïvely, she explained the problems faced by her people and the means she was setting up to resolve these difficulties progressively, beginning with the question of the Rohingyas. Once back home, she realised that her former US supporters were in reality the enemies of her country. The Faith Movement launched a series of terrorist attacks, including the attack on the Maungdaw border police station, where 400 terrorists plundered the arsenal, killing 13 customs officers and soldiers.

Resolute, Aung San Suu Kyi pursued the implementation of an advisory committee tasked with analysing the Rohingya question, and ending the discrimination under which they suffered. This committee was composed of six Burmans and three foreigners – Dutch ambassador Laetitia van den Assum, Lebanese ex-Minister Ghassan Salame (in reality representing France), and ex-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, acting as President of the committee.

The nine committee members began work of a rare quality, despite the Burmese obstacles. Political parties failed to have the committee dissolved by the National Assembly, but managed to force the adoption of a motion of no confidence against the committee by the local Assembly of Arakan (the state inhabited by the Rohingyas). Nevertheless, the committee members handed in their report on 25 August - it contained genuine recommendations which could actually be implemented with the true goal of improving the living conditions of all concerned [11].

The same day, the Saudi and US Secret Services gave the signal for the riposte - the Faith Movement, renamed by the British the « Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army » and divided into commandos, attacked army barracks and police stations, causing 71 deaths. For a week, Burmese troops waged an anti-terrorist operation against the jihadists. 400 members of their families fled to Bangladesh.

Three days later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began to telephone all the heads of state of the Muslim countries to alert them about the « genocide of the Rohingyas ». On 1 September, the day of the most important Muslim holiday, the Aïd al-Adha, acting as serving President of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, he gave a vibrant speech in Istanbul calling to save the Rohingyas and support their Salvation Army [12].

However, the jihadists have done nothing to defend the Rohingyas, but have systematically intervened to sabotage the attempts to improve their living conditions and end the discriminations under which they suffer.

On 5 September, the President of the Iranian Expediency Discernment Council, Mohsen Rezaei, proposed joining the forces of all Muslim states to create an Islamic army to save the « Rohingya brothers » [13]. A position which carries all the more weight since General Rezaei is an ex-Commander of the Revolutionary Guard.

While the Burmese army had ceased all activity against the terrorists, Rohingya villages were burned, and the Rakhine population of Arakan lynched Muslims, who in their eyes were all accomplices of the terrorists. According to the Rohingyas, it was the Burmese army who burned the villages, while according to the Burmese army, it was the jihadists. Progressively, all the Rohingyas from the North of Arakan took to the road seeking refuge in Bangladesh – but, curiously enough, not the Rohingyas from the South of the State.

On 6 September, an official Turkish delegation went to Bangladesh to distribute provisions to the refugees. It was led by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and by the wife and the son of President Erdoğan, Bilal and Ermine.

In the Muslim countries, a vast campaign of disinformation claimed, with photo support, that the Buddhists were killing Muslims en masse. Of course, none of these photos had been taken in Burma, and the fake news reports were debunked one after the other. But in countries where the population is poorly educated, the photos were deemed authentic, while the denials were hardly mentioned. Only Bangladesh voiced reservations about the role of the jihadists, and assured Myanmar of its cooperation against the terrorists [14].

On 11 September, the serving President of the Islamic Conference Organisation (ICO), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spoke before the Organisation’s scientific committee meeting at Astana (Kazakhstan) - which is not competent in the matter - « to save the Rohingyas ».

On the following day, 12 September, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took position. Very worried about General Rezaei’s proposition, he was careful to delegitimise the religious war which was being prepared - the « clash of civilisations » - even if it meant blaming the presence of a woman at the head of a State. He was therefore careful to close the door on a military engagement by the Revolutionary Guard. He declared - « It is quite possible that religious fanaticism may have played a part in these events, but this is a completely political question, because it’s the government of Myanmar which is responsible. And at the head of this government, there is a cruel woman, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner. In reality, these events have signed the death notice of the Nobel Peace Prize » [15].

In Teheran, President Sheikh Hassan Rohani immediately called on the regular army to participate in the conflict which was being prepared. On 17 September, the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian and Pakistani armies made contact in order to unite their forces in the crisis [16]. This is the first military initiative, but it concerns the Iranian army (which is already working with its Turkish and Pakistani counterparts to defend Qatar) and not the Revolutionary Guards (who are fighting alongside the Syrians against the jihadists). Iran is also providing massive aid to the refugees.

On 19 September, ignoring the explanations of Aung San Suu Kyi [17], and profiting from the UN General Assembly, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gathered the ICO contact group in order to request that all member States suspend all commerce with Myanmar, and to ask the UN Security Council to rule on the matter [18].

Finally appearing from the shadows, Saudi Arabia affirmed that they had been discreetly helping the Rohingyas for 70 years, and had already offered them 50 million dollars’ worth of aid during that time. King Salman also added a gift of 15 million dollars [19]. The Saudi ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Abdulaziz ben Mohammed Al-Wassil, mobilised the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Forgetting the wars they have been waging against one another - in Iraq, Syria and Yemen - Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in other words the three main Muslim military powers, joined together by simple communitarian reflex [20] and took position alongside the Rohingyas. All three of them named their common enemy – the coalition government of the Burmese army and Aung San Suu Kyi.

This total about-face in the Middle East has already seen a precedent – namely the wars in Yugoslavia. In Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-95) and in Kosovo (1998-99), the Muslim countries and NATO fought side by side against the Orthodox Christians linked with Russia.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, President Alija Izetbegović worked with US representative Richard Perle, who advised him on the diplomatic level and directed the Bosnian delegation during the Dayton Agreements. He also benefited, on the media level, from the advice of French representative Bernard-Henri Levy, according to Levy himself – and this has never been denied. Finally, on the military level, he relied on the advice of Saudi representative Oussama Ben Laden, who organised the Arab League on his behalf and received a Bosnian diplomatic passport. During the conflict, supported in secret by NATO, Izetbegović publicly received the support of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia [21].

The Kosovar conflict began with a terrorist campaign against Belgrade by the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK). The combatants were trained by German Special Forces on a NATO base in Turkey [22]. The current head of Turkish Secret Services, Hakan Fidan, was the liaison officer for the terrorists within the NATO military staff. He is today the head of MIT, the Turkish Secret Services, and the number 2 of the régime. At the beginning of the war, in the space of three days, 290,000 Kosovars fled Serbia to seek refuge in Macedonia. Western TV channels showed numerous clips of the long lines of refugees walking along railway tracks. However, according to several million Macedonians who welcomed them, there was no objective reason for this migration, which was carefully supervised by NATO. Nonetheless, this displacement of the population was used to accuse President Slobodan Milošević of disproportionally repressing the terrorist campaign affecting his country, and NATO declared war on him without the authorisation of the Security Council.

The dirty work currently in preparation will extend the theatre of operations towards the East. The Pentagon is unable to impose an alliance between Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but in fact, does not need one. In Yugoslavia, these three states were coordinated by NATO when they were not in direct contact.

However, the fact of fighting side by side in Burma will force them to find arrangements in Iraq, Syria and Yemen – perhaps even in Libya. Considering the devastation of the Middle East, and the tenacious resistance of the populations there, the Pentagon can leave the region to lick its wounds for a decade without fear of seeing the emergence of the slightest opposition to its policies.

The day after the Security Council meeting which laid the foundations for the future war against Burma, the State Secretariat informed President Barzani that the United States would not support the independence of an Iraqi Kurdistan. Of course, the Pentagon can not mobilise Turkey and Iran in South-East Asia while betraying them at their frontier. Consequently Massoud Barzani, who had engaged himself unequivocally for the referendum on independence, will soon have to retire from political life. Particularly since the display of Israëli flags at Erbil, massively relayed by the Arab, Persian and Turkish TV channels, has alienated every one of his neighbours.

If the Pentagon’s scenario continues to play out as we may anticipate, the war against Syria should soon end due to the lack of combatants, who will have gone overseas to serve the « American Empire » in a new theatre of operations.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 

Pete Kimberley

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article198141.html

THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING A NEW WAR IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA? .... What's new?

The Pentagon justifies itself by making wars, not by making peace. In the long run we might have been disappointed with Aung San Suu Kyi for the wrong reasons. The art of deception in the West is massively powerful... and our media are always (often) one-eyed. All this crap of course was started under the "peaceful" Obama little-shit president and his acolytes, Madam Clinton and Sleepy Joe... Did we hope better from Obama? Not really... Gitmo is still operational...

We now need to plant those seeds and see... read from top....

The Southeast Asian country of Myanmar continues to suffer from ongoing political violence which began in February 2021 after the nation’s military ousted the government of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

Remnants of the ousted government are now reorganized as the exiled “National Unity Government” (NUG). The NUG claims to control a network of armed groups calling themselves “People’s Defense Forces” (PDFs) utilizing war weapons and carrying out attacks on military, government, and civilian targets. Together with armed ethnic groups who have pursued Western-sponsored separatism on and off for decades since Myanmar gained its independence from the British Empire in 1948, the country remains divided and destabilized.

Despite the Western media’s claims that this is an internal battle between “pro-democratic” forces and a “dictatorship,” it is in actuality a conflict driven from abroad and whose impact is meant to be regional rather than local.

Washington’s Helping Hands 

Washington’s role in Myanmar’s ongoing conflict is central. It stems from Washington’s extensive support of Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD party for decades including at one point hosting the party on US soil in the state of Maryland just outside of Washington DC, as reported by The World in 2012.

The US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds programs and organizations involved in virtually every aspect of Myanmar’s internal political affairs. A vast network of media organizations propagating pro-opposition narratives are funded by the US through the NED including The Irrawaddy, Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), Myanmar Now, and Mizzima. NED support coupled with USAID funding bolster armed ethnic separatists along Myanmar’s borders with Bangladesh, India, China, Laos, and Thailand – giving them just enough resources to perpetuate their armed struggle against the central government, but not enough to establish peaceful, sustainable autonomy.

The goal of this US interference is not only to aid in reasserting Western hegemony over the former British colony, but to also target China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Ports, pipelines, and roadways have already been built by Chinese companies to connect not only remote areas of Myanmar to the central economy, but also connect Myanmar to its neighbors including China itself. China’s benefit is its ability to move goods and energy from the Bay of Bengal, across Myanmar, and into China without having to pass through straits and seas currently menaced and made vulnerable by the United States Navy.

Severing China’s BRI, eliminating one of Beijing’s regional partners, and setting a precedent to repeat the process across the rest of Southeast Asia are all key contributing factors behind Washington’s enthusiastic and continuous involvement in Myanmar’s internal political affairs.

India’s Role in Myanmar’s US-Sponsored Conflict 

Myanmar’s neighboring states also play a role – sometimes willingly, sometimes not, and sometimes with a complicated mix of both.

Thailand, for example, hosts a large number of NED-funded fronts engaged in supporting sedition inside Myanmar. This includes the often-cited Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AARP) whose founder Ko Bo Kyi is an NED fellow and fabricates death and detainee statistics despite not being located in Myanmar but instead across the border in Tak Province, Thailand. Often, NED-funded organizations targeting Myanmar from inside Thailand link up with NED-funded fronts undermining Thailand itself.

The current Thai government has attempted to avoid directly addressing all US-funded activity within its borders – perhaps in fear of what the US would do openly if its more indirect measures were denied to it. Thai opposition parties – benefiting themselves from NED-funded activities – have openly called for measures to restore US-backed opposition groups to power in neighboring Myanmar.

Thus, US-sponsored interference inside Thailand is complicating Thailand’s ability to deal with organizations using its territory to target and destabilize its neighbors.

A similar situation is taking place in India, particularly in its northeastern state of Mizoram.

Here, armed separatists from Myanmar’s Chin ethnic group base themselves just out of reach of Myanmar and its military. They train, maintain weapons, and coordinate with fronts posing as “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) before crossing over the border to carry out armed attacks inside Myanmar.

Far from accusations made solely by Myanmar’s own government or Russian and Chinese media, India’s role hosting armed militants active in Myanmar’s current crisis has been exposed by the Western media, Reuters in particular.

Their article, “In Myanmar’s Chin state, a grassroots rebellion grows,” would contradict its own title by claiming under the very first image featured, “A Chinland Defence Force fighter poses for a photograph at an undisclosed location near the India-Myanmar border, in the northeastern state of Mizoram, India.”

If Chin fighters are based in India, it is not a rebellion based in Chin state, Myanmar,  but rather armed violence directed at Chin state. If the fighters are in India, they are there with at least tacit support from at least some elements within India’s government, security services, or foreign intermediaries with likewise tacit approval of India’s government.

This is not the first time India has played host for US-sponsored militants. During US-backed militancy in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, fighters being trained, armed, funded, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would be harbored in neighboring countries including India. Washington’s exiled Tibetan client regime was and still is based in India.

Both the CIA’s failed militancy in Tibet and now ongoing violence in Myanmar serve the overall goal of encircling and containing China while maintaining Western primacy over all of Asia. For many of India’s more hawkish political circles, this agenda is more than agreeable.

Will Myanmar Become Another Libya, or Another Syria?

India’s enthusiasm or lack thereof regarding its role in Myanmar is difficult to gauge. India is a politically complex nation with the second largest population on Earth and a nation facing many challenges both within its borders and beyond them. While many paint the nation with broad strokes and attempt to depict it as overwhelmingly “anti-China” and that its role in fomenting chaos in Myanmar at China’s expense should come as no surprise, India has nonetheless made strides in building better ties with its neighbor to the north all while this conflict unfolds.

India is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). It counts China as a major trading partner and shares with China as a major strategic ally, Russia. In reality, there is nothing India nor any other nation in Asia can gain by stirring up conflict in the region, and all nations, especially India, will benefit from a peaceful, prosperous Asia and closer, friendlier ties with China.

In terms of US-sponsored hybrid warfare it is difficult to determine how directly involved an entire nation may be in aiding this process. It is also difficult to determine how much impact this aspect of India’s involvement in Myanmar will have and whether or not other areas of effort including New Delhi’s attempts to improve ties with China can outweigh the former.

Washington’s other proxy conflicts have made one thing abundantly clear, should the US-sponsored opposition “win,” all of Myanmar will lose and along with it much of Southeast Asia. Failing to break the momentum of US intervention – direct or indirect – means that once one nation has collapsed, this momentum will be used to target the next. Myanmar itself will be rendered a permanently failed state and remain a threat to its immediate neighbors and the rest of the region for many years to come.

In recent weeks the world watched as Russia and its allies collectively responded to US-sponsored sedition and violence in Central Asia’s Kazakhstan. Myanmar does not enjoy a relationship with another nation in the same way Kazakhstan does with Russia. However, lesser action collectively committed to by Myanmar’s neighbors and partners could complicate support for opposition militants and ease the impact of Western sanctions and other efforts being made to cripple Myanmar’s economy and society.

The US leads a global, industrial-scale regime change apparatus few nations alone can resist without significant and protracted costs. It is perhaps time for nations to both collectively acknowledge this threat, and organize a collective defense against it.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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https://journal-neo.org/2022/01/25/india-s-role-in-washington-s-myanmar-meddling/

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