ASEAN ever had a chance to assert itself in favour of democracy and the rule of law it was this day’s meeting in Jakarta. The day showed
ASEAN having as much strength as a wet tea-bag soaking at the bottom of the South China Sea,” said Sandra Ellingsworth, a RINJ Foundation humanitarian worker in Myanmar.
Ellingsworth reports that protest organizers and human rights activists in Myanmar are also unhappy with the outcome of the conference on the Myanmar Tatmadaw coup d’etat and the slaughters of getting close to 750 civilians plus the imprisonment or disappearance of nearly 4,000 persons including journalists and officials.
Hotel Rwanda’s Rusesabagina Deserves Prison
The beliefs Rusesabagina has sought to hold to the very end are moral equivalency, genocide denial, megalomania, and support for terror.
On November 9, 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan hotelier, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rusesabagina “bears witness to an evil of the 20th century,” Bush said, as he repeated the story made famous by the Hollywood film “Hotel Rwanda.” Today, Rusesabagina sits in a Rwandan prison, facing trial on charges of terrorism, arson, kidnap, and murder charges. While Rusesabagina deserves praise for his 1994 actions, such good deeds cannot trump the reality of what Rusesabagina has become. In effect, he has become the Rwandan equivalent of Burmese politician and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. While many in the West once praisedAung San Suu Kyias a democrat, such past praise cannot erase her subsequent apologia for the Rohingya genocide.