UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced Monday, October 25 in a statement that he had appointed Singaporean Noeleen Heyzer, 73, as the new envoy for Burma, where she succeeds Swiss Christine Schraner Burgener.
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This sociologist has already held positions of responsibility at the United Nations, in particular between 2007 and 2014 at the head of an economic and social commission for Asia and the Pacific and between 2013 and 2015 as special advisor for East Timor.
As part of her duties in the Economic and Social Commission, she had worked closely with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as with the Burmese authorities on the development and reduction of poverty, specifies the press release from the UN chief.
Read also Myanmar: Asean diplomacy at an impasse
Since the coup d'état of February 1 in Burma, which put an end to a ten-year democratic parenthesis, the UN and ASEAN have tried in vain to influence the military junta to relaunch a political dialogue and to free civilian officials arrested during the putsch.
Neither Christine Schraner Burgener, who is leaving her UN post after three and a half years to enter the Swiss government, nor Brunei's deputy foreign minister, Erywan Yusof, appointed asean emissary in August, were unable to surrender. in Burma where they wanted to meet in particular the former civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
