Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on Friday issued a strong call for fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to take new measures to pressure the government of military-ruled Myanmar to end what he called “atrocities” against its own people.
Anwar, on a two-day official visit to Thailand, said in a speech to the Malaysian-Thai Chamber of Commerce that ASEAN members “have to be courageous enough to try and resolve” the crisis in Myanmar, which some U.N. experts have described as a civil war triggered by the army’s seizure of power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, AP reports.
Security forces have killed thousands of civilians and army sweeps through the countryside have displaced more than 1 million people from their homes.
In 2017, a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Muslin Rohingya minority drove more than 740,000 to flee across the border to Bangladesh, where they remain in refugee camps.
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