At least two people were killed by gunfire in Myanmar Saturday as security forces used live and rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons and slingshots against protesters who were demonstrating against the military’s Feb. 1 coup.
 
Some 500 police and soldiers gathered at a shipyard in Myanmar’s second largest city of Mandalay to disperse workers and other demonstrators, sparking an hours-long face-off during which protesters launched catapults at police.
 
Security forces dispersed the crowd with gunfire and other forms of force, leaving two dead and 20 others injured, according to the Irrawaddy news website and a leader of the Parahita Darhi volunteer emergency service agency, Ko Aung.
 
Demonstrators, area residents and journalists reportedly fled the area as security forces chased after them, attacking one group of journalists with slingshots and tear gas.
 
Security forces have grown increasingly aggressive against the protesters, who have clashed with Myanmar security forces since the military detained de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other high-ranking officials of the civilian government on Feb. 1. The military declared a one-year state of emergency, citing widespread fraud in last November’s general elections, won in a landslide by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.  A demonstrator shows bullet shells during a protest against the military coup, in Mandalay, Myanmar, Feb. 20, 2021.The military’s claims were rejected by Myanmar’s electoral commission.
        
Tens of thousands of demonstrators have since filled the streets of Myanmar’s biggest cities in defiance of a strict curfew and a ban on gatherings of more than four people, holding signs with pro-democracy slogans, many of them with pictures of Suu Kyi.  They’ve raised a three-finger salute as they marched, a sign of resistance against tyranny as depicted in the popular “Hunger Games” movies.   
 
In addition to protests, government employees and civil servants are on strike, resulting in disruptions to train services throughout the country, also known as Burma. The military has ordered civil servants back to work and threatened action against them. A growing number of workers from other sectors, including medical personnel, have walked off their jobs in recent days.   
 
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who led the coup, promised last week in a nationally televised speech that new elections would be held to bring what he called a “true and disciplined democracy,” but he did not specify when they would take place. 
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Myanmar’s banking sector continues to be in chaos as mass anti-coup demonstrations saw armored vehicles patrol the streets in the city of Yangon this past week.
 
Since the military takeover at the beginning of February, professionals from a variety of sectors, led by medical workers and including bankers, have joined the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) – a strike campaign to resist the military government. Followers have insisted they will not return to work until the elected government has been given back its power.
 
“I don’t want to live under [a] military government. So, I joined CDM and fight for democracy,” one employee of Myanmar Apex Bank (MAB) told VOA.
 
Many banks nationwide remain closed, while others have scaled back their operations.  
 
Residents must deal with long lines at ATMs, while cash withdrawal has been either reduced or unavailable, and businesses are facing cash flow difficulties.
 
One employee from Ayeyarwady Bank (AYA) told VOA that although the strikes have made life difficult for ordinary people and businesses, they have made it more difficult for the military government.
 
“Myanmar’s current banking system is relying on private banks. We have to rely on private banks for the country’s cash flow and our interactions with international banks. I think the strike by the private bank employees themselves will make it difficult for the junta to manage money,” the banker said.Soldiers stand outside Myanmar’s Central Bank during a protest against the military coup, in Yangon, Myanmar, Feb. 15, 2021.Myanmar is one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, and despite the additional financial strain, the bankers said they personally aren’t being pressured to return to work, and they haven’t received any personal visits from the military, yet.
 
“Until now, from the military, no visits yet,” another AYA banker said. But the banker admitted he knows of “soldiers in civilian clothes” visiting banks and asking for contact details of the managers.
 
Myanmar, also known as Burma, was ruled by armed forces from 1962 until 2011. In 2015, leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League of Democracy (NLD) party won the country’s first open democratic election.
 
General elections in Myanmar in November 2020, saw the military-backed opposition lose heavily to the NLD, leading it to claim there was widespread electoral fraud.
 
Myanmar’s military, known as Tatmadaw, removed the NLD government on Feb. 1. Military commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing took power, announcing a “one-year-long state of emergency” and saying a future general election would be held. NLD party members were detained while Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint were arrested.  
 
Since then, widespread protests have taken place across Myanmar, with thousands demanding an end to the coup. More than 400 people have been arrested, and at least two people have died, including a protester and a police officer, local reports say.
 
The new deputy governor of the Central Bank of Myanmar has slammed the CDM movement, claiming protesters are “destroying their own economy.”
 
Win Thaw is the military-backed replacement for former deputy governor Bo Bo Nge, who has reportedly been detained with his whereabouts unknown.
Win Thaw told Frontier Myanmar, an English-language news outlet in Myanmar, that long-term boycotts by employees would have a negative impact on the economy.People line up outside a bank branch in Yangon, Myanmar Feb. 1, 2021.“The banking system is needed to develop the country’s economy. Bank staff shouldn’t refuse to come to work,” Win Thaw told Frontier. The deputy governor later added that the Central Bank of Myanmar has “plans A, B and C to ensure the financial system does not come to a halt,” but refused to elaborate on what those plans were.
Zeya Thu, a Myanmar political and economic commentator, warns that Myanmar’s political crisis will lead to financial instability and that eventually “banks have to resume their services.”  
 
“The fact that banks are closed makes people feel financially insecure. Many of them are financially insecure and they are thinking they will lose their savings forever. Companies won’t be able to provide monthly salaries,” Thu told VOA.
 
Aung Wai Yan, treasurer and senior officer at Shinhan Bank, says the protests have had a “prompt impact” on the whole country, as banks are afraid to dispense cash, convenience stores have denied card payments and payments for international trade and currency are nearly at a standstill.
 
“Next week is interesting, [it is] pay day weeks for most organizations. [The] banking sector service is critical. The foreign exchange market has almost stopped. International trade payments [have] delays. Border trade has stopped. Tax payment and logistics payment has stopped. All import and export payments have stopped. Now Myanmar’s financial sector is so risky,” he told VOA.
 
According to U.S. citizen Adam Hunt, a director of ONOW, a fintech social enterprise based in Myanmar, the nation has been badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, causing an increase in digital financial services to facilitate relief and social welfare payments.
 
But since the coup, Hunt said his company is one of many facing an uncertain future under the military government and added that the CDM movement has increased uncertainty in all sectors.
 
“Even as companies of all sizes are finding ways to support their employees’ right to protest, CDM participation is causing substantial uncertainty in all sectors. Companies are making operational, or furiously developing, business continuity plans that call for cash reserves. When bank operating hours are unpredictable, and when mobile money services are threatened due to frequent internet cuts, it necessitates withdrawal of capital for both households and businesses to have physical notes on hand,” he told VOA.
 
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Jolted by a sweeping hack that may have revealed government and corporate secrets to Russia, U.S. officials are scrambling to reinforce the nation’s cyber defenses and recognizing that an agency created two years ago to protect America’s networks and infrastructure lacks the money, tools and authority to counter such sophisticated threats.The breach, which hijacked widely used software from Texas-based SolarWinds Inc., has exposed the profound vulnerability of civilian government networks and the limitations of efforts to detect threats.It’s also likely to unleash a wave of spending on technology modernization and cybersecurity.”It’s really highlighted the investments we need to make in cybersecurity to have the visibility to block these attacks in the future,” Anne Neuberger, the newly appointed deputy national security adviser for cyber and emergency technology, said Wednesday at a White House briefing. ‘Likely Russian’ hackersThe reaction reflects the severity of a hack that was disclosed only in December. The hackers, as yet unidentified but described by officials as “likely Russian,” had unfettered access to the data and email of at least nine U.S. government agencies and about 100 private companies, with the full extent of the compromise still unknown. And while this incident appeared to be aimed at stealing information, it heightened fears that future hackers could damage critical infrastructure, like electrical grids or water systems.President Joe Biden plans to release an executive order soon that Neuberger said would include about eight measures intended to address security gaps exposed by the hack. The administration has also proposed expanding by 30% the budget of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, a little-known entity now under intense scrutiny because of the SolarWinds breach.President Joe Biden participates in a virtual event with the Munich Security Conference in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 19, 2021.Biden, making his first major international speech Friday to the Munich Security Conference, said that dealing with “Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.”Republicans and Democrats in Congress have called for expanding the size and role of the agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in November 2018 amid a sense that U.S. adversaries were increasingly targeting civilian government and corporate networks as well as the critical infrastructure, such as the energy grid that is increasingly vulnerable in a wired world.Call for resourcesSpeaking at a recent hearing on cybersecurity, Representative John Katko, a Republican from New York, urged his colleagues to quickly “find a legislative vehicle to give CISA the resources it needs to fully respond and protect us.”Biden’s COVID-19 relief package called for $690 million more for CISA, as well as providing the agency with $9 billion to modernize IT across the government in partnership with the General Services Administration.That has been pulled from the latest version of the bill because some members didn’t see a connection to the pandemic. But Representative Jim Langevin, co-chair of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, said additional funding for CISA was likely to reemerge with bipartisan support in upcoming legislation, perhaps an infrastructure bill.FILE – Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., prepares the dais after he was chosen as speaker pro tempore for the opening day of the 116th Congress, at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 3, 2019.”Our cyber infrastructure is every bit as important as our roads and bridges,” Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s important to our economy. It’s important to protecting human life, and we need to make sure we have a modern and resilient cyber infrastructure.”CISA operates a threat-detection system known as Einstein that was unable to detect the SolarWinds breach. Brandon Wales, CISA’s acting director, said that was because the breach was hidden in a legitimate software update from SolarWinds to its customers. After it was able to identify the malicious activity, the system was able to scan federal networks and identify some government victims.”It was designed to work in concert with other security programs inside the agencies,” he said.The former head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, told the House Homeland Security Committee this month that the U.S. should increase support to the agency, in part so it can issue grants to state and local governments to improve their cybersecurity and accelerate IT modernization across the federal government, which is part of the Biden proposal.FILE – Then-U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs speaks to reporters at CISA’s Election Day Operation Center in Arlington, Va., March 3, 2020.”Are we going to stop every attack? No. But we can take care of the most common risks and make the bad guys work that much harder and limit their success,” said Krebs, who was ousted by then-President Donald Trump after the election and now co-owns a consulting company whose clients include SolarWinds.The breach was discovered in early December by the private security firm FireEye, a cause of concern for some officials.”It was pretty alarming that we found out about it through a private company as opposed to our being able to detect it ourselves to begin with,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said at her January confirmation hearing.Right after the hack was announced, the Treasury Department bypassed its normal competitive contracting process to hire the private security firm CrowdStrike, U.S. contract records show. The department declined to comment. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has said that dozens of email accounts of top officials at the agency were hacked.’Backdoor code’The Social Security Administration hired FireEye to do an independent forensic analysis of its network logs. The agency had a “backdoor code” installed like other SolarWinds customers, but “there were no indicators suggesting we were targeted or that a future attack occurred beyond the initial software installation,” spokesperson Mark Hinkle said.Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the hack has highlighted several failures at the federal level but not necessarily a lack of expertise by public sector employees. Still, “I doubt we will ever have all the capacity we’d need in-house,” he said.There have been some new cybersecurity measures taken in recent months. In the defense policy bill that passed in January, lawmakers created a national director of cybersecurity, replacing a position at the White House that had been cut under Trump, and granted CISA the power to issue administrative subpoenas as part of its efforts to identify vulnerable systems and notify operators.The legislation also granted CISA increased authority to hunt for threats across the networks of civilian government agencies, something Langevin said they were only previously able to do when invited.”In practical terms, what that meant is they weren’t invited in because no department or agency wants to look bad,” he said. “So you know what was happening? Everyone was sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that cyberthreats were going to go away.” 
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A federal grand jury has indicted a Stanford University medical researcher for allegedly concealing and lying about her membership in the Chinese military.In an indictment expanding on charges filed in January, the Justice Department accused Chen Song, a Stanford researcher who it said had described herself as a neurologist investigating brain disease, with visa fraud, obstruction of justice, destruction of documents, and making false statements as part of a scheme to conceal her membership in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”We allege that while Chen Song worked as a researcher at Stanford University, she was secretly a member of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army,” said David L. Anderson, the chief federal prosecutor based in San Francisco, on Friday.Defense lawyers representing Song could not immediately be reached for comment.The new indictment alleged that Song, a 39-year-old Chinese citizen, entered the United States in December 2018, using a non-immigrant visa authorizing her to participate in work- and study-based exchange visitor programs as a Stanford researcher.In her visa application, Song said she served in the Chinese military between Sept. 1, 2000, and June 30, 2011, and that she was a student at a hospital in Beijing.Prosecutors said these Song claims were lies and that she was a member of the PLA when she arrived and remained in the United States. The Justice Department also alleged that the Beijing hospital Song listed as her employer on her visa application “was a cover for her true employer, the PLA Air Force General Hospital in Beijing.”Prosecutors said that Song lied to FBI agents about her membership in the PLA and that after learning of the FBI’s interest in her, she began deleting materials from the internet related to her military service. 
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Buckingham Palace confirmed Friday that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, will not be returning to royal duties, and Harry will give up his honorary military titles — a decision that makes formal, and final, the couple’s split from the royal family.When Harry and Meghan stepped away from full-time royal life in early 2020, it was agreed the situation would be reviewed after a year.Now it has, and the palace said in a statement that the couple, also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have verified “they will not be returning as working members of The Royal Family. “It said Queen Elizabeth II had spoken to Harry and confirmed “that in stepping away from the work of the Royal Family, it is not possible to continue with the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service.”The palace said Harry’s appointment as captain general of the Royal Marines and titles with other military groups would revert to the queen before being distributed to other members of the family.Harry, who served in the British army for a decade and has a close bond with the military, founded the Invictus Games competition for wounded troops.”While all are saddened by their decision, the Duke and Duchess remain much loved members of the family,” the palace statement said.American actress Meghan Markle, a former star of the TV legal drama “Suits,” married Harry, a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, at Windsor Castle in May 2018. Their son, Archie, was born a year later.In early 2020, Meghan and Harry announced they were quitting royal duties and moving to North America, citing what they said were the unbearable intrusions and racist attitudes of the British media. They live in Santa Barbara, California and are expecting their second child.They recently announced that they will speak to Oprah Winfrey in a TV special to be broadcast next month.A spokesperson for the couple hit back at suggestions that Meghan and Harry were not devoted to duty.”As evidenced by their work over the past year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex remain committed to their duty and service to the U.K. and around the world, and have offered their continued support to the organizations they have represented regardless of official role,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We can all live a life of service. Service is universal.” 
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The United States on Thursday said it was ready to talk to Iran about both nations returning to a 2015 agreement that aimed to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, seeking to revive a deal that Washington abandoned nearly three years ago. Iran reacted coolly to the U.S. idea, which was conveyed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a video meeting with his British, French and German counterparts gathered in Paris. FILE – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken holds a press briefing at the State Department in Washington, Jan. 27, 2021.Blinken reiterated the U.S. position that President Joe Biden’s administration would return to the accord formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Iran came into full compliance with the deal. “Secretary Blinken reiterated that … if Iran comes back into strict compliance with its commitments under the JCPOA, the United States will do the same and is prepared to engage in discussions with Iran toward that end,” a joint statement from the four nations said. A U.S. official told Reuters that Washington would respond positively to any European Union invitation to talks among Iran and the six major powers who negotiated the original agreement: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. “We are ready to show up if such a meeting were to take place,” the official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity, after a senior EU official said he was prepared to convene such a meeting among the parties to the deal. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif attends talks in Moscow, Russia, Jan. 26, 2021.London, Paris and Berlin welcomed Biden’s intention to return to diplomacy with Iran. But Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif fired back that it was for Washington to make the first move. Iran began breaching the deal in 2019 after former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal and reimposed economic sanctions. Tehran has accelerated its breaches in recent months and become locked in a standoff with Biden’s administration over who should move first to save the accord. “Instead of sophistry & putting onus on Iran, E3/EU must abide by own commitments & demand an end to Trump’s legacy of #EconomicTerrorism against Iran,” Zarif said in a tweet. “Our remedial measures are a response to US/E3 violations. Remove the cause if you fear the effect,” he continued. “We’ll follow ACTION w/ (with) action.” Uranium enrichment A French diplomatic source said Washington’s shift marked an opening for Iran but the path ahead was fraught with obstacles. “The Americans said they were available to talk to Iran” in a meeting along with the original parties to the deal,” he said after the talks in Paris. “It’s an opening.” Tehran has set a deadline of next week for Biden to begin reversing sanctions imposed by Trump, or it will take its biggest step yet to breach the deal — banning short-notice inspections by the U.N. nuclear watchdog permitted under an Additional Protocol. Britain, France and Germany, known collectively as the E3, and the United States called on Iran not to take any additional steps “with respect to the suspension of the Additional Protocol and to any limitations on IAEA verification activities in Iran.” The ministers said they were determined that Iran should not get a nuclear weapon and “expressed their shared concerns over Iran’s recent actions to produce both uranium enriched up to 20% and uranium metal,” the statement added. Refining uranium to high levels of fissile purity is a potential pathway to nuclear bombs, though Iran has long said it its enrichment program is for peaceful energy purposes only. Enrichment of 20% is well above the deal’s 3.67% limit, though still well below the 90% that is weapons grade. 
 
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Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb–e Islami (Islamic Party), has threatened to stage a large protest to topple the Afghan government if the 2016 peace agreement that they both signed is not fully implemented. The Afghan government said security forces will not allow any group to use violence for political gains. VOA’s Hasib Maududi reports from Kabul.   
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