Akbayan’s Rep. Walden Bello began a campaign tour of Filipino American communities to raise support for his party and President Benigno Aquino III’s common reform agenda in the coming May elections.
Southeast Asian leaders on Tuesday called for the lifting of international sanctions on Burma after the country’s historic by-elections, a senior Cambodian official said at a regional summit here.
The Philippines congratulated Myanmar on Tuesday, describing the just concluded historic elections in the country as a “milestone in what appears to be Rangoon’s inexorable march toward democracy.”
Myanmar was making final preparations Saturday for polls seen as a test of the military-dominated regime’s reforms, in which opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is standing for the first time.
Myanmar has released more than 300 people deemed by the opposition to be political prisoners, a minister said Saturday, after the West hailed the move as a substantial sign of reform.
Myanmar freed an outspoken critic and a major ethnic rebel as it released 6,300 convicts in its latest liberalizing move, but kept some political detainees behind bars, dampening hopes for a broader amnesty.
