A season for summits and elections

KUALA LUMPUR: Last week, we reviewed here a number of coups d'état that had taken place around the globe in this year from Myanmar in our neighborhood to Guinea and Sudan in western and eastern Africa. These were, of course, somber and dismal affairs with normal folks ruthlessly killed in the process and mercilessly persecuted in the horrid aftermaths.

Of more immediate concern to this part of the world is, of course, the continued recalcitrance of the Myanmar junta. For the first few months after the Myanmar coup, other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) were patient with the junta. They even invited the junta chief to the special Asean summit that was meant to deal with the Myanmar crisis. And perhaps with the rare exception of this author, many observers pinned high hopes on the Five-Point Consensus on the Myanmar crisis reached at the special Asean summit. And indeed, the junta has since then, been deliberate to frustrate the consensus more egregiously in not granting access to the Asean special envoy to meet with the incarcerated senior opposition leaders.