Thursday 29 December 2011

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ အက်ဥ္းသားဘဝမွန္ မေတြ႔ခဲ့

2011-12-29

အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ကိုသြားၿပီး ေလ့လာခဲ့ရာမွာ ေထာင္တြင္း ႏွိပ္စက္ညႇဥ္းပန္းမႈ မေတြ႕ရသလို အက်ဥ္းသားေတြဟာ က်န္းမာေရးေကာင္းေနတာ ေတြ႔ရတယ္လို႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးစစ္ၿမိဳင္က အာရ္အက္ဖ္ေအနဲ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ ေမးျမန္းခ်က္မွာ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။


အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ကိုစစ္ေဆးၾကည့္ရႈဖို႔ အထူးဧည့္သည္ေတြ လာတဲ့အခါမ်ိဳးမွာ ေထာင္အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ ေဆးသုတ္တာ၊ အက်ဥ္းသားေတြကို အခန္းထဲပိတ္ထားတာမ်ိဳးေတြ အျမဲေဆာင္ရြက္ေလ့ရွိတဲ့အတြက္ အျဖစ္မွန္ကို အထူးဧည့္သည္ေတြ မသိႏုိင္တာေၾကာင့္ ဒီလိုေတြ႔ခဲ့ရတာလုိ႔ ျပန္လြတ္လာတဲ့ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းေတြနဲ႔ အက်ဥ္းသားမိသားစုေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေတြထဲကို ျပည္တြင္း ျပည္ပအရာရွိေတြ ဝင္ေရာက္ေလ့လာစစ္ေဆးတဲ့အခါ ေထာင္တြင္းမွာ ျပင္ဆင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ထားေလ့ရွိတာေတြနဲ႔ အက်ဥ္းသားေတြ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ရတာေတြကုိ အာရ္အက္ဖ္ေအ ဝိုင္းေတာ္သား ကိုေနရိန္ေက်ာ္က စုစည္းတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

အက်ဥ္းက်ေနသူ မိသားစုေတြကို အားေပး

2011-12-29
၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ေတြက အက်ဥ္းက်ေနသူ ၈၈ေက်ာင္းသားေတြရဲ့ အိမ္ေတြကို ဒီကေန႔ မနက္ပိုင္းက သြားေရာက္ၿပီး မိသားစုဝင္ေတြကို အားေပးစကား ေျပာခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။


သြားေရာက္သူ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ အမ်ားစုဟာ မၾကာေသးခင္က အက်ဥ္းေထာင္က ျပန္လြတ္လာတဲ့ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ ျဖစ္ၾကၿပီး၊ စုစုေပါင္း လူ ၅၀ ေလာက္ ပါဝင္တယ္လို႔ အဖြဲ႔မွာ ပါ၀င္သူ ကုိကုိႀကီး (စမ္းေခ်ာင္း) က ေျပာပါတယ္။

သြားေရာက္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႔မွာ ပါဝင္သူ လ႔ူအခြင့္အေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူ မစုစုေႏြးလည္း ပါဝင္ပါတယ္။

ကုိမင္းကုိႏုိင္ရဲ႕ မိဘေတြဟာ အသက္အရြယ္ အလြန္ၾကီးရင့္ေနၿပီး ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ အက်ဥ္းက်ေနသူ သားျဖစ္သူ ေထာင္တြင္းက ျပန္လည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေအာင္ အားမာန္ အျပည့္နဲ႔ ေစာင့္ေမွ်ာ္ေနတာကုိ ေတြ႔ခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း၊ အလားတူ က်န္အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားရဲ႕ မိသားစု၀င္ေတြကလည္း ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ အားမာန္ေတြနဲ႔ ေစာင့္ေနၾကေၾကာင္း မစုစုေႏြးက အာရ္အက္ဖ္ေအကုိ ေျပာျပပါတယ္။

ဒီကေန႔ မွာ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကိုမင္းကိုနိုင္၊ ကိုကိုႀကီး အပါအ၀င္ စုစုေပါင္း အက်ဥ္းက်ခံေနရသူ ၈ ဦးရဲ႕ ေနအိမ္ကို သြားေရာက္ခဲ့ျပီး မနက္ျဖန္ ဒီဇဘၤာလ ၃၀ ရက္ေန႔မွာလည္း သြားေရာက္ဖို႔ က်န္ရွိတဲ့ အက်ဥ္းက် ၈၈ေက်ာင္းသားေတြရဲ႕ ေနအိမ္ေတြကို သြားေရာက္မယ္္လို႔ ကိုကိုၾကီး(စမ္းေခ်ာင္း) က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒါ့အျပင္ ဒီကေန႔ ညေနပိုင္းမွာ ရန္ကုန္ ေဆးရံုၾကီးမွာ ေဆးကုသမႈ ခံယူေနရတဲ့ မဂၤလာေတာင္ညြန္႔ ရပ္ကြက္ မီးေဘးဒဏ္ခံရသူေတြကို သြားေရာက္အားေပး စကားေျပာၿပီး လူနာတဦးကို က်ပ္ေငြ ၅၀၀၀ လွဴဒါန္းခဲ့တယ္လို႔ မစုစုေႏြးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

Indonesian FM Calls for More Democratic Reform in Burma

By THE IRRAWADDY Thursday, December 29, 2011

Indonesia's Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa has urged the Burmese government to hold free and fair by-elections as part of its program of democratic reform.

At a press conference at the Sedona Hotel in Rangoon on Wednesday, Natalegawa urged Naypyidaw to allow a free and fair by-election, to make peace with ethnic minorities, to release all remaining political prisoners, and to continue further its democratization process.

“We support the democratic reforms made by the Burmese government,” said Natalegawa. “But it is necessary to continue on this path. We must hold them [the Burmese authorities] to their word,” he said, noting that the measures are linked to Burma's chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Nations (Asean) in 2014.

Natalegawa told reporters that Indonesia can help Burma strengthen its democratization efforts in the same way that his country has achieved over the past decade.

He said Indonesia can help ensure the "irreversibility in the democratization process" taking hold in Burma. He added that the two countries have agreed to strengthen bilateral cooperation and ways to increase trade, which reached US $300 million this year.

According to their latest figures, Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners -Burma has said some 1,572 political prisoners are still being detained in Burma.

With regard to ethnic tensions, Naypyidaw has dispatched negotiating teams to hold talks with ethnic militias, but conflicts in Kachin and Karen states are ongoing.

Natalegawa met with his counterpart, Burma's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin, other officials and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday.

Natalegawa also visited Burma in late October when he met President Thein Sein. After returning from his previous trip, Burma was granted the 2014 Asean chairmanship at November's Asean summit in Bali.

Tuesday 27 December 2011

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ အစာငတ္ခံ ဆႏၵျပမႈ စစ္

2011-12-27

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ဟာ ျမန္မာ့အေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူေတြက အျပည္ျပည္ ဆိုင္ရာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကို တုိင္ၾကား ထားတဲ့ အင္းစိန္ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္အတြင္း အစာငတ္ ခံ ဆႏၵျပမႈကုိ ဒီကေန႔ သြားေရာက္ စစ္ခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြနဲ႔ မေတြ႔ခဲ့ဘူးလို႔ အက်ဥ္းသား မိသားစုဝင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

PHOTO: AFP

နာမည္ဆိုးႏွင့္ ေက်ာ္ၾကားေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အင္းစိန္အက်ဥ္းေထာင္၏ အုတ္ရိုးအျပင္ဘက္တြင္ အေစာင့္တဦး လွည့္ပတ္ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနပံု ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ (PHOTO: AFP)

ဒီကေန႔ မနက္ ၈နာရီက အင္းစိန္ေထာင္မွာ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔က အက်ဥ္းသားေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ႔ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြထားတဲ့ တိုက္အမွတ္ ၁၊ ၃ ၊၄ ၊ ၅ စတဲ့ တိုက္ေတြကို ပိတ္ထားၿပီး လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခ်ိန္မွာေတာင္ အက်ဥ္းသားေတြကို အျပင္ ထြက္ခြင့္မေပးခဲ့ဘူးလို႔ ဒီကေန႔ ေထာင္ဝင္စာ သြားေတြ႔တဲ့ အက်ဥ္းသား မိသားစုဝင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒီကေန႔ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ကို ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း ကိုကိုႀကီး (စမ္းေခ်ာင္း) က ခုလိုေျပာပါတယ္။

“အမွန္က အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အက်ဥ္းသားေတြ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္။ ေနာက္ဆံုး ၁၁ နာရီထုိးတာေတာင္ ထမင္းမစားရလုိ႔ ဆုိၿပီး ေျပာၾကဆုိၾက ျဖစ္ၾကတယ္။ ေနာက္ ဒီလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားေတြနဲ႔႔ မေတြ႔ရေအာင္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားေတြ ေနတဲ့ တုိက္ေတြကို ပိတ္ထားတာ။ အဲဒီမွာ ၂ တုိက္ကိုေတာ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အဖြဲ႔က ဝင္သြားတယ္လို႔ သိရတယ္။ ၂ တုိက္မွာက်ေတာ့ ေသဒဏ္ ကေန ကၽြန္းေျပာင္းထားတဲ့လူေတြ ထားတာ၊ အဲဒီမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမား ေတြ မရွိဘူး”

ဒီကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကို ဆက္သြယ္ ေမးျမန္းတဲ့အခါမွာ ဒီကေန႔ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ကို သြားေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ အဖြဲ႔မွာ ပါဝင္တဲ့ ေကာ္မရွင္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးစစ္ၿမိဳင္က ပုဒ္မ ၅ည၊ ၁၇-၁ ပုဒ္မမ်ားနဲ႔ က်ေနသူ ၃ ဦးနဲ႔ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

“က်ေနာ္တို႔က ၅ (ည) တို႔၊ ၁၇ (၁) တုိ႔ ပါရင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားလို႔ ေျပာရမွာ။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား ဆုိတာေတာ့ အဲဒီလို ပုဒ္မေတြနဲ႔ပဲ။ ဒီေန႔ေတာ့ အဲလို ပုဒ္မနဲ႔ဟာ ၃ ေယာက္နဲ႔ေတာ့ ေတြ႔ခဲ့တယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ မနက္ျဖန္ သြားဖုိ႔ ရွိေသးတယ္ဗ်။ မနက္ျဖန္ၿပီးမွပဲ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ wind-up လုပ္ၿပီးေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ရဲ႕ conclusion နဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ရဲ႕ view ေလးေတြ comment ေလးေတြက မနက္ျဖန္မွ ထြက္မွာ”

အခုလို လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္က ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအမႈမ်ားနဲ႔ အက်ဥ္းက်သူ သံုးဦးဟာ သီးသန္႔ တိုက္မ်ားမွာ ထားရွိတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြ မဟုတ္ဘဲ အေဆာင္မွာ ထားရွိသူေတြထဲက ျဖစ္ႏုိင္တယ္လို႔ ႏိုင္ငံအေရးအက်ဥ္းသား မိသားစုဝင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

Refugees in Thai camps waiting for peace

Tuesday, 27 December 2011 12:50 Jude James


(Mizzima) – The Nu Po refugee camp in Thailand has a feeling of permanence. Nestled in the Thai hills tight on the border with Karen State, the camp is a six-hour dirve south of Mae Sot in Umphang District in Tak Province.

The Mae La refugee camp is located about 90 kilometres from Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border. Photo: AFP

The Mae La refugee camp is located about 90 kilometres from Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border. Photo: AFP
But, set up in 1997, it is now threatened by changes in Bangkok and Naypyitaw.

Tawin Pleansri, the secretary-general of Thailand's National Security Council, said in April, “I cannot say when we will close down the camps but we intend to do it”. Only months later, the new President of Burma, Thein Sein, publicly invited exiles to return home.

But whether the refugees feel they can safely go home may ultimately lie in the hands of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her work with Naypyitaw’s “Peace Committees,” which are engaged in working out a comprehensive peace deal with various ethnic armed groups.

Despite the call by Thein Sein for exiles to return, most refugees in Thai camps are sitting tight.

Underlining these realities, the first official trip to Burma by the new Thai Prime Minister included a focus on economic cooperation including the countries energy interests.

“Maybe I'm more realistic than optimistic,” said Zulu, who has a bright smile and warm, open demeanour. She gives no hint of the five years she spent as a political prisoner in Burma's notorious prison system.

Speaking at a NGO office in Mae Sot, she said: “For this question, it is too early to judge, but how we can measure the changes... there are three things; If they release all political prisoners, also internal peace between ethnic groups and Burmese army... and how they give the space to do politics. We must measure these areas.”

The sustained news of the changes coming out of Burma has generated much discussion in the media, diplomatic circles and within the camps.

“The people in the refugee camp don't have much work to do... so they have much time to listen to rumours, so they've heard a lot of rumours and are worried,” said Zulu, who spent a year in the Nu Po refugee camp.

Sitting down with two of the camps residents over a cup of coffee, I ask what they thought of the changes. Khin (names change at their request) smiled and pointed to his friend,Thet. “He thinks it's a trick, but I think there are little positive changes”. Both have been in the camp for four years after fleeing their homes in Rangoon.

The camp is really more like a small city. Unable to work in the outside world, camp residents have created everything from beauty salons to bike shops and tea stalls. Churches, mosques and Buddhist temples dot the area. With little to do but wait, schools offer the chance to learn English or skills like hairdressing.

Khin's brother was a member of the National League for Democracy and fled Burma after spending eight years in prison. He fled to the Thai border and after extensive screening, he resettled in America.

Almost 70,000 refugees have already chosen to go to a third country, with another 9,000 leaving this year. A similar number are expected to leave next year, but that will account for nearly all the registered refugees. The last official registration took place in 2006.

A number of the people I spoke to pointed out that while the resettlement is good for individuals who leave, it has negative impacts for the wider camp, often taking skilled people like teachers and nurses away from the community.

The current international climate is also challenging. Rations in the camps, and the yearly allotment for building materials have both been cut.

A recent report, which noted the U.S. has accepted the lion’s share of refugees, is a further point of concern. The report compiled by researchers at San Francisco State University and the Burma Refugee Family Network (BRFN) and released this week found that nearly 60 per cent of the Burmese refugees in Oakland are living in extreme poverty. The Karen and Karenni are most at risk due to added language barriers and lower rates of education but even taken as a whole, Burmese refugees “are at risk of becoming a permanent, poverty-stricken underclass.”

When another official screening will start no one knows, Khin said, “but it depends on (the) Thai government.” A number of people said they though the lack of official screening was an attempt to discourage more people fleeing to the camps.

In an interview with Karen news, the Secretary of Nu Po refugee camp, Saw Thoolei Doh Soe, said “The people who want to resettle are around 50 per cent, and another 40 per cent want to still remain as refugees. Not even 1 percent of people want to go back to Burma now.”

There are good reasons for this. Karen State is one of the most mined areas on earth. Forced labour is still endemic and woman across the state are at risk of rape and sexual assault from government soldiers.

Since the 1980s camps along the Thai-Burma boarder have been home to refugees fleeing the world's longest running civil war. They have also been home to the political activists forced to flee waves of repression.

While the officially registered number of refugees in the camps is 90,000, the Thai-Burma Boarder Consortium (TBBC), which provides humanitarian aid inside the camps, last month fed 148,000 in the 10 camps that hug the boarder.

Inside Burma, TBBC estimates at least 112,000 have been forced to flee their homes in the past year. This is the highest yearly number since TBBC “and partners started documenting displacement in 2002”, and is an indication that if anything the situation in ethnic areas has got worse over the last year.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's trip to Burma marked the highest level of engagement between the U.S. and Burma in 50 years and comes only weeks after Burma was named Asean chair for 2014.

Some refugees think the international community may be moving too fast to reengage with Burma.

“I'm not surprised by them, but I'm surprised with the international community, and how come they don't know these peoples games,” said Naw Htoo Paw.

To illustrate her point she described trying to help negotiate for around 100 villagers who fled “from active fighting”, after the election, to stay in Thailand. “We tried to say the fighting has not stopped yet” but the authorities maintained it had.

After sending back the last boatload across the river “another mortar landed” and the boat wanted to return. But the authorities said “it’s only mortar shelling, we have to wait for more fighting… the population was mainly woman and small children... and this was only one boat so this is the Thai relations to refugees, they don't want more.”

She understands the dangers. At age 11, she witnessed a man from her village killed on suspicion of being an insurgent.

Such doubts will only be put to rest by a lasting peace in the ethnic areas and the unconditional release of all political prisoners.

Without lasting peace in the ethnic regions, Thailand seems unlikely to find an acceptable way to close the camps. No matter how much it wants to or how much the refugees wish to return home, without a stable peace, the camps will remain in the unenviable position of being between a rock and a very hard, unforgiving place.

Suu Kyi Urges Japan to Promote Democracy in Burma

By WAI MOE Tuesday, December 27, 2011


Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has urged Japan to strengthen Burma’s democratic institutions as Tokyo launches a fresh engagement initiative with Naypyidaw that promises more investment for economic and social development.

“If democratic institutions are strengthened in the country, economic development will be stronger too,” Suu Kyi told reporters at a press briefing after she met Japanese Foreign Minister Kocihiro Gemba at her lakeside house in Rangoon on Monday evening.

“Therefore, I hope Japan will consider strengthening democratic institutions in the country while it aids humanitarian works as well as social and economic development,” she added.

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, left, at a press briefing in Rangoon with pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. (Photo: AP)
The Nobel Laureate also emphasized the importance of national reconciliation, resolving civil wars and maintaining peace for the development of democracy in the country. And she added that humanitarian aid and development should reach all ethnic minority areas equally.

Gemba held a meeting with President ex-Gen Thein Sein in Naypyidaw and Suu Kyi in Rangoon, indicating that the East Asian superpower is looking for investment opportunities in Burma.

He said that Japan wants to help Burma fight poverty and that the two nations agreed to discuss a treaty to protect Japanese investments in the country.

Apart from investment and help combating poverty, Japan will also provide aid for Burma’s health, education and agriculture sectors, claimed Gemba.

Gemba also met his Burmese counterpart Wunna Maung Lwin in Naypyidaw on Monday before flying to Rangoon.

“This visit will be a big turning point for Japan-Burma relations,” Gemba was quoted by Kyodo News Agency as telling Wunna Maung Lwin.

On the meetings between Thein Sein and Gemba, state-run newspaper The New Light of Myanmar reported: “They cordially discussed matters related to bilateral multi-faceted cooperation, including strengthening of bilateral friendly ties, bilateral economic cooperation, seeking of ways and means to render assistance by Japan, encouragement and assistance for Myanmar’s democratization, national reconciliation and bilateral culture exchanges.”

Gemda is the first Japanese foreign minister to visit Burma since 2002. His visit came after a Japanese delegation, led by Kimihiro Ishikane, deputy director-general of the Japan Foreign Ministry’s Southeast & Southwest Affairs on Official Development Assistance (ODA), last month.

Both sides talked about the new Naypyidaw government's development policies and Japan’s assistance programs through ODA for sustainable economic development in Burma, according to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Although Japan is keen to invest in Burma and cooperate with the Burmese government to achieve development, Burma’s tentative moves towards democratization and protecting human rights have also been significant in Tokyo's policy of providing assistance.

“Japan believes that it is important for Myanmar, having just recently shifted to civilian rule, to become a democratic nation based on a market economy and social stability,” said a statement from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Nov. 28.

“Therefore, Japan intends to implement economic cooperation while watching for improvements in democratization and human rights situations.”

Burma is one of the areas in which Japan has used “ODA diplomacy” effectively. From 1960 to 1988, Japan was the main contributor of development aid to the Southeast Asian nation—a value totaling US $2.1 billion including compensation for the Japanese occupation during World War II.

However, Japan stopped ODA to Burma in 1988 in reaction to the military junta's coup and brutal crackdown on the democracy uprising. But Japan still assisted Burma in less direct methods—such as loans for Rangoon International Airport and the Baluchaung Hydropower project in Karenni State.

From 1991 to 2003, Japanese aid to Burma totaled over 900 billion yen and was closely aligned to democratic reforms.

Tokyo decided to approve the airport loan following Suu Kyi's release from her first house arrest in 1995, and the hydropower project aid was offered after her subsequent release from house arrest in 2002.

Japan once again suspended ODA to Burma in July 2003 after Suu Kyi and her convoy were brutally ambushed by pro-junta thugs in Dapayin, Sagaing Division, in northern Burma.

But using ODA diplomacy to engage with the Burmese regime was perhaps also a counterbalancing act against China’s influence in the country. Japan’s ODA to Burma was 876 million yen in 2004, 1.2 billion yen in 2005, 640 million yen in 2006 ad 468 million yen in 2007.

Following the killing by security forces of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai in Rangoon while he was covering the monk-led mass democracy protests in September 2007, Tokyo also temporarily suspended aid to Burma.

Sunday 25 December 2011

Burma's Zarganar Off to the US

By RICHARD S. EHRLICH / ASIA SENTINEL Saturday, December 24, 2011


Burma's famous dissident comedian, who said he had survived "electronic shock" torture during eight years in prison, has been allowed out of his Southeast Asian country for the first time. He is traveling to the Clinton Foundation in America -- while requesting that US economic sanctions on Burma be lifted.

The satirical Maung Thura is popularly known by his stage name Zarganar -- "Tweezers" in Burmese. He was remarkably upbeat after having emerged from his fourth stint in a Burmese prison, this latest one ending on Oct. 12 in Myitkyna Prison, 900 miles north of Rangoon, as a result of the Thein Sein government’s initial amnesty of more than 200 political prisoners. More than 1,000 political prisoners remain in custody.

Arguably one of the most famous of Burma’s long-suffering political prisoners, Zarganar is the third son of two writers. Following graduation from college and dental school, he began performing full time, forming his own comedy group and delivering satire against the Burmese junta, which was not amused. In 1988 after the junta refused to recognize the results of elections that would have brought Aung San Suu Kyi and the National Democratic League to power, he joined a pro-democracy student movement and became a leader. He was quickly jailed for six months.

As an indication of his isolation in Burma, the 50-year-old comic described his surprise at seeing Thailand’s progress.

“When I saw the airplane I got a shock!” he said. “When I saw the airport I got a shock! When I saw good roads and big bridges I got a shock! And seeing big buildings I got a shock!” he told a news conference on Dec. 19 at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in Bangkok.

"This is the dawning era of our country, this is the start of change," Zarganar said, describing Burma's tentative new shift from harsh military rule towards some civilian administration and fragile political freedom.

"You should support us. Now improvement starts," he said on arriving from Burma. "This afternoon, I already met with the World Bank. They want to give some aid, or some help, some humanitarian aid. So if they lift up the sanctions, we can get many aid for our people, not for our military."

After decades of dodging sanctions by establishing economic ties with China, India, Thailand, Singapore and other friendly nations, Burma has started to allow some media freedom and political activity, while asking the US to lift its boycotts.

"Now I can say, 'I am here.' This is improvement. Many times [earlier], I didn't get a passport. I hadn't gone to any country. This is my first trip."

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy recently re-registered as a political party to run in a promised but unscheduled 2012 by-election for the Burmese Parliament, which is dominated by the military and pliant civilian politicians.

Zarganar, however, made it clear he has no intention to enter politics.

“I don’t want to go to Naypyidaw, and I don’t want to participate in the by-election,” he told the packed crowd. “Aunty is aunty, Zarganar is Zarganar,” he said in reference to Suu Kyi.

He expressed positive words for Suu Kyi, whom he met with after being freed, but said her National League for Democracy (NLD) party lacked intellectuals.

"Our country has no intellectual people in the political area. For example, in the NLD. Where are the intellectual people in the NLD?"

In 1988, during Zarganar’s first months in jail, he said, an army major "tortured me" in Insein Prison. "He beat me. He kicked me many times. He gave electronic shock to me. The second time I was arrested, in 1990, that experience was very terrible...I was in solitary confinement for five years. I had no friends. No cellmates. No paper to use as toilet paper. So I used the leaves to clean my feces.

"There was no window in my cell," he said, describing his punishment for voicing satirical political jokes. Although best known as a satirical comedian, he is also a poet, filmmaker and writer.

After a three-week jail sentence in 2007 for helping Buddhist monks stage anti-government protests, he was sentenced to 35 years for "public order offences" for cracking jokes about government mismanagement of the relief effort to aid the victims of Cyclone Nargis, which killed 140,000 people in May of 2008.

Prison conditions improved slightly during his recent stint in Myitkynia after being moved from Insein Prison, he told reporters.

"I had a chance to read a lot of books. For example, 'On China' by Kissinger," he said, referring to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's insight into China, published in May.

Zarganar plans to visit America starting on Jan. 30 and to remain for three months, during which he will "study in the Clinton Foundation," he said.

Wednesday 21 December 2011

More aid needed for Kachin refugees: HRW

By DVB
Published: 21 December 2011The Burmese government’s decision to allow UN teams into rebel-controlled territory in Kachin state is promising, but unless pressure from international aid groups is ratcheted up, tens of thousands of refugees will continue to struggle for basic support, Human Rights Watch has warned.

The admittance of the UN to the town of Laiza, where some of the 50,000 people estimated by HRW to have been displaced since fighting began in June have fled to, came after months of negotiations. The government had initially blocked international aid to refugees in Kachin Independence Army (KIA) areas, but recent weeks have seen tentative signs of an opening.

Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at the New York-based group, said in a statement today that the early steps need to be developed into “long-term commitment from the government and foreign donors alike.

“The government and Kachin forces should ensure that the tens of thousands of displaced people in remote camps get the food and shelter they need.”

A number of local aid groups working close to conflict zones in Kachin state, which borders China, say supplies for refugees are running low. HRW contacts in the region said that children and pregnant women were in danger of malnutrition. “The sources also expressed concerns about the physical security of the camps and the camp communities, particularly those located nearer conflict areas,” it said.

“In recent weeks, local relief efforts reported dwindling supplies and limited capacity, compounded by an absence of direct international aid and support.”

Earlier this month the government-formed National Human Rights Commission warned in a letter published in the state-run New Light of Myanmar that thousands of children had been deeply affected by the fighting.

“The children appear to be suffering from psychological trauma and the adults seem to experience a sense of insecurity and diminished confidence,” the letter said. “From individual interviews, it was evident that almost all wanted to return to their own villages.”

The likelihood of that happening anytime soon appears slim – despite an order from President Thein Sein that Burmese troops end offensives against the Kachin, fighting is reportedly ongoing.

The KIA announced yesterday however that it had been approached by the government over the resumption of ceasefire talks. Past stabs at peace-building have not met with success, but a new committee formed by the government is tasked with dealing specifically with the Kachin conflict, now in its sixth month.

Suu Kyi Says Becoming an MP Will ‘Enhance Cooperation’

By THE IRRAWADDY Wednesday, December 21, 2011


Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi said her decision to compete for a seat in the national Parliament is aimed at enhancing cooperation and understanding among the stakeholders in the country.

She made the remark in a meeting in Rangoon on Tuesday with a group of political activists representing the 88 Generation Students' group, which publicly declared in a recent statement that its members will not participate in the coming parliamentary by-elections, for which a date has not yet been set.

Suu Kyi said that politics inside and outside the parliamentary system will continue to exist even after she joined the Parliament, according to Soe Tun, a leading member of the group that met with Suu Kyi.

Soe Tun is a former political prisoner who had been in hiding inside Burma since the violent government crackdown in 2007 against monk-led pro-democracy protests. He recently joined public political events following overtures to the opposition by Burma’s new quasi-civilian government.

“She explained that her joining the Parliament is because she believes it will further increase friendship and cooperation among all of us and also speed up the process of dialogue leading towards national reconciliation,” said Soe Tun,

The overtures, which included a private meeting between Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein, resulted in the decision of the NLD to join the by-elections despite the fact that it boycotted last year's parliamentary election, which observers condemned as widely fraudulent.

The 88 Generation Students group was formed by student activists involved in the country's popular democracy uprising in 1988.

The group previously said in a statement that it will not consider joining the election until group leaders such as Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi, both influential dissidents who began serving 65-year prison sentences in 2007, are released.

The statement was announced following the decision by Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) to participate in the parliamentary system.

“We explained to Daw Suu that our group will not field any candidate for the coming elections as long as our leaders are not released. But we have no objection whatsoever to any one joining the elections on an individual basis. And Daw Suu said she has an understanding of it,” said Soe Tun.

He added that Suu Kyi still invited them to join the election workshops and training which the NLD will conduct. The purpose of the events will be to educate the public so that people can vote in the election with an awareness of election issues such as the suspicious advanced ballots that helped the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party win a dominating majority in the current Parliament.

A group of exiled dissident Buddhist monks also issued a recent statement saying that it would not support elections until political prisoners in the country, which include Buddhist monks, are released.

Meanwhile, government sources reportedly said that the Burmese government will release all the political prisoners on Jan. 4, marking the 64th anniversary of Burma's independence from British colonial rule.

၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ ႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေတြ႔ဆံု

ထြန္းထြန္း | ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂၁ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၈ နာရီ ၂၇ မိနစ္


နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ အတိုက္အခံေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႔ ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ ေန႔လယ္ပိုင္းက ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးတြင္ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၅ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္ “လက္ရွိ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အခင္းအက်င္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္
ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္” ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္မ်ားက ျပန္လည္ ရွင္းျပခဲ့သည္။

ယင္းေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအပါအဝင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုး မလႊတ္မခ်င္း
ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ား၌ မည္သည့္နည္းႏွင့္မွ် ပါဝင္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း ပါရွိသည္။

ယင္းေၾကညာခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္း ဝင္ေရာက္ေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ႏွင့္ ကြဲလြဲေနသည့္ အတြက္ ေဝဖန္သံမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚခဲ့သည္။

ႏွစ္ဖက္ေတြ႔ဆံုမႈအတြင္း NLD ဘက္မွ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ၾကီးေဟာင္း ဦးဝင္းထိန္ ပါဝင္ကာ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္မ်ားဘက္မွ ကိုစိုးထြန္း၊ ကိုထြန္းျမင့္ေအာင္၊ စမ္းေခ်ာင္းကိုကိုၾကီး၊ မမီမီလြင္၊ မႏုႏုေအာင္အပါအဝင္ ၁ဝ ဦး ပါဝင္ခဲ့သည္။

တနာရီေက်ာ္ ၾကာျမင့္သည့္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ေဆြးေႏြးမႈအတြင္း ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့သည္မ်ား၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္း၊ ျပင္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အေျခအေန၊ ပူးေပါင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ တုိင္ပင္ခဲ့သည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ပါဝင္သူ ကိုထြန္းျမင့္ေအာင္ကို မဇၥ်ိမ သတင္းေထာက္ ထြန္းထြန္းက ဆက္သြယ္ ေမးျမန္းထားသည္။

အခု ေတြ႔ဆံုမႈက ဘာအတြက္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့တာလဲ။

“အဓိက ကေတာ့ တိုင္းျပည္ထဲမွာက ႏုိင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ေတြက တအားကို အေျပာင္းအလဲ ျမန္တယ္ေလ။ ေနာက္ တခ်က္က ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြနဲ႔ လိုက္ေလ်ာညီေထြၿပီးေတာ့ေပါ့ေနာ္။ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအေနနဲ႔လည္း လက္တြဲလုပ္ႏုိင္မယ့္ အေန အထားေတြကိုလည္း က်ေနာ္ တို႔ ေဆြးေႏြးၾကတယ္။ ေနာက္တပိုင္းက က်ေနာ္႔တုိ႔ ငါးရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေလးေယာက္လက္မွတ္ထိုးၿပီး တာဝန္ခံၿပီးေတာ့၊ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႔ကို တာဝန္ခံၿပီးေတာ့ လက္မွတ္ထိုး ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္ ကိစၥလည္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ အေသးစိတ္ ရွင္းျပတာေတြ ရွိတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္”

“ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ ဒီလိုဗ်၊ အပိုင္းက ႏွစ္ပိုင္း ရွိတယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ငါးရက္ေန႔က ေၾကညာခ်က္နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး
ေတာ့ ရွင္းလင္းေျပာဆိုသလို တပိုင္းမွာလည္း ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးအပိုင္းေတြကို ညွိႏႈိင္းၾက တယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ Statement ကိစၥကေတာ့ ဒီလိုဗ်။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြရဲ႕ ႏုိင္ငံေရးရပ္တည္ခ်က္ အခင္းအက်င္းကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ေျပာျပခဲ့တယ္။ အဲဒါနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၾကားထဲမွာ နားလည္မႈ လြဲေနသလို၊ ကြဲေနသလို။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္ရဲ႕ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲလမ္းေၾကာင္းကိုပဲ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ဆန္႔က်င္ေနသလို၊ အဲဒီလိုမ်ဳိးေတြ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အသံေတြ ရွိတယ္ေလ။ ဒါကိုလည္းက်ေနာ္တို႔က ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို တင္ျပတယ္”

“သူက ဒီအေပၚ နားလည္၊ ဒီေၾကညာခ်က္ကိုလည္း သူဖတ္ၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ဒီကေန႔လည္း အဲဒီေၾကညာခ်က္ ထပ္ေပး တယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဒီေၾကညာခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္တာနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ သူ ဒီအေပၚမွာ ရွင္းရွင္း လင္းလင္း နားလည္ တယ္။ ဒါ ျပႆနာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အဓိကေျပာခ်င္တာလည္း ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြအားလံုး လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးဟာ သိပ္အေရးၾကီးတယ္ဆိုတဲ့က႑ကို က်ေနာ္တို႔က၊ က်ေနာ္ုတိ႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ အေနနဲ႔ ရပ္ခံၿပီး ေျပာခဲ့တာ။ SNLD ကလည္း ရွမ္းတုိင္းရင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ က်န္ေသးတဲ့ အတြက္ေၾကာင့္မို ႔လို႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို မစဥ္းစားႏုိင္သလို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအေနနဲ႔လည္း ၈၈ ေက်ာင္းသား
ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ ေထာင္ထဲမွာ ရွိေနတဲ့အတြက္ ေၾကာင့္မို႔လို႔ ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို စဥ္းစားႏုိင္မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ စဥ္းစားဖို႔အတြက္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔မွာ အခက္အခဲေတြ အမ်ားၾကီး ရွိတယ္”

“ဒါေၾကာင့္မို႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ပါဝင္ႏုိင္မွာ မဟုတ္ေသးဘူးဆိုတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေျပာတာ ဗ်ာ။ အဲဒီေျပာတဲ့ေနရာမွာ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီးေတာ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။
ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ဝင္ခ်င္တယ္ဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္ တသီးပုဂၢလအေနနဲ႔ ဝင္တဲ့အေပၚမွာ ဘာမွ မေျပာစရာမလိုဘူး။ ဒါဟာ မိမိတုိ႔ရဲ႕ တဦးခ်င္းသေဘာဆႏၵအရ လြတ္လြတ္လပ္လပ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ဆံုးျဖတ္လို႔ ရတယ္ေလ။ အဲဒီေၾကညာခ်က္နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ရွင္းျပပါတယ္”

“ဒီအေပၚမွာ သူ ေကာင္းေကာင္းနားလည္တယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြကိစၥ အေရးႀကီးတယ္ဆို တာကိုလည္း သူသေဘာတူတယ္။ ဒီလို သူေျပာပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔အေပၚမွာ ဘာမွကို၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ၾကားထဲမွာ ဘာမွ ဝိဝါဒကြဲျပားတာ မရွိဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔အေနနဲ႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေတြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မဝင္ရဘူး လို႔လည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ မေျပာထားဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္ ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသား အင္အားစုႀကီး အေနနဲ႔သာ ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီး က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဝင္မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူးဆုိတာကို ေျပာတာ။ အဲဒါ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆုိရင္ အဲဒါ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ လြတ္မလာေသးလို႔။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က စဥ္းစားဖို႔က လံုးဝ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေသးဘူး”

အကိုတို႔က Statement နဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ရွင္းျပတယ္ဆိုေတာ့ အန္တီစုကေကာ ဘယ္လိုတံု႔ျပန္သလဲ။

“ဒီဥစၥာဟာ သူဖတ္ၿပီးသြားၿပီေပါ့ေနာ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဒီကေန႔လည္း ထပ္ေပးတယ္။ ေၾကညာခ်က္ကို ထပ္ေပးတယ္။ ဒီဥစၥာကို သူ နားလည္ပါတယ္တဲ့။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ရွင္းျပသလိုပဲ ဒီႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအတြက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြေကာ ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ကိုမင္းကိုႏုိင္တို႔ေကာ လြတ္လာဖို႔ တအားအေရးၾကီးေနတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ကိုမင္းကိုႏုိင္တို႔ လြတ္လာမွ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္စဥ္ အပါအဝင္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ အားလံုးကို စဥ္းစားႏုိင္မွာ ျဖစ္တယ္။ အခုအခ်ိန္မွာ စဥ္းစားဖို႔ အခက္အခဲရွိတယ္။ အန္တီက အဲဒါေတြကိုလည္း နားလည္တယ္”

“အက်ဥ္းသားလြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးဟာ အင္မတန္အေရးၾကီးတယ္ဆိုတာ ဒီအေပၚမွာ ရပ္တည္ၿပီး ေျပာတာကိုလည္း သူ သေဘာတူပါတယ္တဲ့။ ဒါကို သူ နားလည္တယ္။ ဒီေၾကညာခ်က္နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဘာမွ မရွိဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဆက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔ဥစၥာေတြကိုသာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ညွိႏႈိင္းခဲ့ၾက ေသးတယ္ေလ”

ညွိႏႈိင္းတယ္ဆိုေတာ့ ဘယ္လိုကိစၥေတြမွာ ပူးေပါင္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ဖို႔ ညွိႏႈိင္းတာလဲ။

“ေျပာရရင္ေတာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကို ၾကိဳးပမ္းမႈေတြေပါ့ေနာ္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဆက္လက္ၿပီး
ေတာ့ ၾကိဳးပမ္းသြားမယ့္ကိစၥေတြမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ညွိႏႈိင္းခဲ့တယ္။ သေဘာထားေတြလည္း အျပန္ အလွန္ေျပာဆိုၾက တယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ေျပာခ်င္တာက သူ ဘာေျပာသလဲဆိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ထဲက တေယာက္က ေမးတယ္။ ဒီ ဒိုင္ယာေလာ့ခ္က၊ အေနအထားက ဘယ္လိုရွိသြားမလဲေပါ့ေနာ္”

“သူက လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္းႏုိင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္တခု ေပၚလာသလို ဒီ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပမွာ ဒီႏိုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပ မွာ ဒီ ဒိုင္ယာေလာ့ခ္က ဒီအတုိင္း ဆက္ရွိေနမွာပါပဲတဲ့။ ေနာက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အသြင္သဏၭာန္က ဆက္ရွိေနသလို၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္ႏိုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ကလည္း ရွိေနမယ္။ ဒီႏွစ္ခုဟာ ေပါင္းမိ သြားတဲ့အခါမွာ ပိုၿပီးေတာ့
ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ဟာ က်ယ္က်ယ္ျပန္႔ျပန္႔နဲ႔ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာလိမ့္မယ္လို႔၊ တိုးတက္လာလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ သူက ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ တယ္ဆုိတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကို ေျပာပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအသြင္သဏၭာန္ကိုလည္း သူ ပစ္ပယ္ ထားတာကို မေတြ႔ရဘူး။ ဒီအေပၚမွာလည္း သူ အာ႐ံုစူးစိုက္ထားတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္ဆုိ ဒိုင္ေယာေလာ့ခ္ဟာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပမွာလည္း ရွိေနလိမ့္မယ္။ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲကေန သြားတဲ့ပံုစံကလည္း တမ်ဳိးျဖစ္မယ္လို႔ သူ ေျပာပါ တယ္”

“ေနာက္တခုက သူေျပာတာ သိပ္ေကာင္းပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ ဒီလႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္း၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္ပ အင္အားစုေတြ ဒီလို ေပါင္းလုပ္႐ံုနဲ႔တင္ မကဘူး။ တပ္မေတာ္နဲဲ႔ပါ လက္တြဲပူးေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္ဆိုတာ အဲဒီလိုလည္း
ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒါကိုလည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔အားလံုးက သေဘာတူပါတယ္။ ဟုတ္တယ္။ တို႔တိုင္းျပည္ တိုးတက္ဖို႔အတြက္ အင္အားစုေတြအားလံုး ေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ရမယ္ဆိုတာ က်ေနာ္တို႔လည္း သေဘာတူတယ္။ ဒါ တခ်က္ေျပာတယ္
ေပါ့ဗ်ာ”

“ေနာက္တခ်က္က ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးကိစၥေတြ ေျပာေတာ့ ဒါကေတာ့၊ သူကေတာ့ လြတ္လာမွာ ပါတဲ့။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အန္တီ ဒီေလာက္ပဲ ေျပာပါရေစဆိုၿပီး သူကေတာ့ အဲဒီလို ေျပာတယ္”

“ေနာက္တခ်က္ကေတာ့ အခု အနီးဆံုးေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ လာမယ့္ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကိစၥေတြ ေျပာျဖစ္တယ္ ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဘာလို႔ဆိုေတာ့ ဒါက မၾကာမီမွာ လက္ေတြ႔လာေတာ့မွာကိုး။ အဲဒီမွာဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္လည္း ျပည္သူလူထုေတြ အေနနဲ႔
ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတရပ္လုပ္မယ္ဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ Election Law ေတြေပါ့ ေနာ္။ ဒါေတြကိုလည္း ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း နားလည္ဖို႔လိုတယ္။ ေနာက္တခုက ကိုယ့္ဆႏၵကို အမွန္အတိုင္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ရဲတဲ့သတၱိေတြ ရွိဖို႔ လုိတယ္။ အဲဒါေတြ အတြက္ကို Voter Education ေတြ ဘယ္လိုေပးမယ္၊ သင္တန္းေတြ ဘယ္လိုေပးမယ္ဆုိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းေတြကိုလည္း အေသးစိတ္ ေျပာႏုိင္ၾကတယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ အေသးစိတ္ ေျပာျဖစ္ၾကတယ္။ အျပန္အလွန္ အဲဒီေနရာမွာ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္မႈေတြလည္း ေျပာျဖစ္ ၾကပါတယ္”

ေဒၚစုေျပာတဲ့ထဲမွာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ျပင္ပႏုိင္ငံေရးကိစၥ၊ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ ျပည္သူေတြ Election Law ကို နားလည္ေအာင္ သင္တန္းေပးဖို႔ကိစၥေတြမွာ အကိုတို႔က ဘယ္လို ပံုစံမ်ဳိးေတြ ပူးေပါင္းလုပ္သြား မွာလဲ။

“သူကေတာ့ ဒီသင္တန္းေတြ ေပးတဲ့အခါမွာလည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔စီက လူေတြလည္း လႊတ္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီသင္တန္းေတြမွာ
ေလ့လာေစခ်င္တယ္။ ဒီကေနမွ တဆင့္ပြားၿပီးေတာ့ ျပည္သူလူထုေတြက အသိအျမင္ေတြ က်ယ္လာေအာင္လည္း
ေျပာေစခ်င္တယ္ေပါ့။ ဥပမာ သူက ဘာေထာက္ျပသလဲဆိုေတာ့ Constitution နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့၊ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ မၾကိဳက္ဘူး ဆိုရင္လည္း ဘာေၾကာင့္ မၾကိဳက္တာလဲ၊ ဘယ္အခ်က္ကို မၾကိဳက္ တာလဲ။ ဒီလို တိတိက်က်၊ သဲသဲကြဲကြဲ ျဖစ္ေနဖို႔ လိုတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ အရာရာကို ျပည္သူလူထုက ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း
ျမင္ႏုိင္ဖို႔လည္း လုိသလို တဖက္မွာလည္း အေၾကာက္ တရားေတြ ကင္းေအာင္လုပ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းကို
ေျပာပါတယ္”

အခု ေဒၚစုနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုၿပီးေတာ့ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲ လုပ္မယ္ဆိုေတာ့ ဘာအတြက္ လုပ္မွာလဲ။

“ဘယ္လိုေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြနဲ႔ လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ နဲ႔ဟာ နီးနီးကပ္ကပ္နဲ႔ တိုင္းျပည္တိုးတက္ ျဖစ္ေပၚေျပာင္းလဲေရးအတြက္ကို ဒီလို ၾကိဳးပမ္းေနၾကတယ္ဆုိတာကို သိေစခ်င္တာပါေပါ့ေနာ္။ ေဒၚစု ဒီကေန႔ ေျပာသလို ႏုိင္ငံေရးအင္အားစုေတြ အားလံုး ေပါင္းစည္း႐ံုတင္မကဘူး၊ တပ္မေတာ္သားေတြပါ လက္တြဲလုပ္ရမယ္။ ဒါ တုိင္းျပည္တိုးတက္ ေျပာင္းလဲေရးအတြက္ဆုိတဲ့ဟာေတြ ေပါ့ေနာ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အားလံုး ပူးေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ရင္းႏွီးခ်စ္ၾကည္စြာ အလုပ္လုပ္ေနၾကတယ္ဆိုတာကိုလည္း တိုင္းျပည္ကို တင္ျပဖုိ႔ လိုလာတယ္ေလ။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ ဆန္႔က်င္ဘက္မွာ မရွိဘူး။ အတူတကြ ပူးေပါင္း ရပ္တည္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာကိုလည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေျပာခ်င္တာပါ”

အကိုတုိ႔ ၅ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ Statement နဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေဝဖန္ေျပာဆိုမႈေတြ ရွိေနတာကို Facebook တို႔ ဘာတို႔မွာ ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။ ဒီေတာ့ Statement ကို လက္မွတ္ထိုး ထုတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ အကိုတို႔အေနနဲ႔ ဘာေျပာခ်င္သလဲ။

“ဒီအေပၚမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ မတံု႔ျပန္ပါဘူး။ ဘာေၾကာင့္ တံု႔ျပန္ဖုိ႔မလိုလည္းဆိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီး ေျပာေန တာကေတာ့ ကိုမင္းကိုႏုိင္ ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား အင္အားစုၾကီးကို ေျပာေနတာပါ။ ဒီအစု အစည္းႀကီးကို ေျပာေနတာပါ။ ဘာလို႔လဲဆုိေတာ့ ဒီေၾကညာခ်က္ေတြ ထုတ္တဲ့အခါမွာ တဦးေကာင္း၊ တေယာက္
ေကာင္းေရးၿပီးေတာ့ အဲဒီလို ထုတ္လို႔ မရဘူးေလ။ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္တို႔ ရွိစဥ္ကတည္း ကကို ဒီ အစည္းအေဝးေတြ
ေခၚေပါ့ေနာ္။ ညွိႏႈိင္းဆံုးျဖတ္ၿပီးေတာ့ အမ်ားသေဘာနဲ႔ ဒီလို လုပ္ရတာပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္မို႔လို႔ ဒါဟာ ေလးေယာက္ လက္မွတ္ထိုးတယ္ဆိုတာ ေလးေယာက္သေဘာထားတင္ မဟုတ္ဘဲနဲ႔ အားလံုးရဲ႕ တာဝန္ေပးထားတဲ့ဟာကို တာဝန္ခံၿပီးေတာ့၊ ေဆြးေႏြးၿပီးေတာ့ ေလးေယာက္ကေန တာဝန္ခံ အေနနဲ႔ ထုတ္ျပန္ရတာပါ။ ဒီအတြက္ ဒီအေပၚမွာ အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးေျပာတာဆိုတာေတြကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဘယ္လို စိတ္ထားမ်ဳိးနဲ႔မွ မတံု႔ျပန္ပါဘူး။ ဒီကေန႔ဆုိရင္လည္း
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ အေနနဲ႔လည္း နားလည္တယ္ ဆုိတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကို ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း ေျပာထားၿပီးသားပါ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က အတူတကြ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္နဲ႔အတူ ရပ္တည္လက္တြဲေနတယ္ဆိုတာလည္း သူသိပါတယ္။ အရင္ကတည္းကလည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြကို သူသိတယ္ဆိုတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကိုလည္း သူ ေျပာပါတယ္”

ဟုတ္ကဲ့။ က်ေနာ္ မေမးမိတာေတြထဲက ထပ္ၿပီး ေဆြးေႏြးတာေတြမ်ား ရွိပါေသးသလား။

“ေတာ္ေတာ္ေတာ့ ျပည့္စံုပါၿပီ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ တိုင္းရင္းသားကိစၥေတြလည္း ေျပာျဖစ္ၾကတယ္ေလ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြက မၾကာမီက ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ အထိကို သြားၿပီးေတာ့ စစ္ေဘးသင့္ျပည္သူ ေတြကို အတတ္ႏုိင္ဆံုးေပါ့ေနာ္။ ကူညီခဲ့ၾကတာေတြ ရွိတယ္ေလ။ စိတ္ဓာတ္ေရးရာ အရေကာ၊ ႐ုပ္ဝတၳဳ အရေကာ တတ္ႏုိင္ သေလာက္ေပါ့။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အားေပးၾကတယ္။ အဲဒီကို သြားရင္းနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၾကားခဲ့ရတဲ့ တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြဟာ တန္းတူညီတူရွိမႈကို သိပ္လိုလားတယ္။ အဲဒီကိစၥေတြ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ေျပာျပတယ္”

“ေျပာျပေတာ့ အန္တီက တန္းတူညီတူရွိမႈ ဆိုတာဟာတဲ့၊ ဒီ တိုင္းရင္းသားကိစၥရယ္တင္ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ႏိုင္ငံသား တိုင္း အားလုံးဟာ တန္းတူညီတူေတြ ရွိၾကရမယ္။ ဒါဟာ ႏုိင္ငံသားတုိင္းရဲ႕ အေျခခံ အခြင့္အေရးပဲဆိုတဲ့ သေဘာမ်ဳိး ကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

အခု ၈၈ နဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့မႈ တခုလံုးရဲ႕ အႏွစ္သာရဆိုရင္ ဘာလို႔ ေျပာႏုိင္မလဲ။

“သိပ္ေက်နပ္စရာ ေကာင္းပါတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ အခု အသံေတြ ထုတ္ေနသလိုေပါ့ေနာ္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို က်ေနာ္တို႔က ဆန္႔က်င္ေနတယ္၊ ၈၈ ေတြနဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ NLD နဲ႔ ကြဲေနတယ္ဆိုတဲ့အသံမ်ဳိးေတြ ဒီကေန႔က ေျဖရွင္းၿပီးသား ျဖစ္သြားတယ္ဗ်။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD နဲ႔အတူ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔အတူ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ ျဖစ္ေပၚေျပာင္းလဲေရးအတြက္ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြကလည္း အတူတကြ ရပ္တည္ေနၾကတယ္။ ကူညီႏုိင္တဲ့အပိုင္းေတြကို အျပန္အလွန္ ကူညီသြားမယ္၊ ပူးေပါင္းသြားမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အႏွစ္သာရကို ရတယ္”

“ေနာက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔နဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၾကားထဲမွာလည္း ကြဲလြဲမႈေတြ ဘာတခုမွကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ မရွိဘူး။ ဒီေၾကညာခ်က္ အေပၚမွာလည္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က သူ နားလည္ပါတယ္ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ပဲ ရင္းရင္းႏွီးႏွီး၊ ေႏြးေႏြး
ေထြးေထြးနဲ႔ကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ရယ္ရယ္ေမာေမာ ေျပာၾကဆုိၾကတာ။ အဲဒါက က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ NLD နဲ႔ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္
ေက်ာင္းသား မ်ားတင္ မကဘူးေပါ့ေနာ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ တိုင္းျပည္အတြက္ပါ အားလံုး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ေရး အတြက္ကို ပိုၿပီးေတာ့ ခြန္အားေတြ ျဖစ္ေစတယ္ဗ်ာ”

“ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ ေဒၚစု ေျပာသလိုေပါ့ေနာ္။ တပ္မေတာ္နဲ႔ပါ အားလံုး လက္တြဲလုပ္ၾကရမွာ။ ဒီႏုိင္ငံေရး အင္အားစုေတြတင္ လက္တြဲထား႐ံုတင္ မရဘူးဆုိတဲ့ဟာမ်ဳိးေတြက ေက်နပ္အားရစရာေပါ့ေနာ္”

Monday 19 December 2011

Images show scorched earth in Kachin war

By FRANCIS WADE
Published: 19 December 2011
Images have emerged that show further evidence of the Burmese army’s maligned scorched earth policy being used just days ago in Kachin state, despite calls from the president for an end to fighting and a visit to the region by UN officials.

The images were taken on Friday last week by photographer Ryan Libre, who had accompanied Kachin Independence Army (KIA) troops on a patrol near to a volatile stretch of the highway connecting Myitkyina to Bhamo.

At least two houses had been burned hours before the patrol arrived at Thingahyang village, which lies around 40 kilometres northeast of Bhamo. Embers were still glowing, and most of the inhabitants of the village had fled. One man who returned briefly to check on his belongings told the patrol that retreating Burmese soldiers were attacked by KIA troops near the village.

“[The Burmese battalion] came to deliver supplies to [a nearby] outpost when they encountered the KIA. Upon retreating slowly, they shot up the church in our village … and set two houses on fire” he told Libre in an interview obtained by DVB.

“They were firing their guns constantly as they retreated past the village but there were no KIA [soldiers] chasing them down into the village. They [Burmese troops] were just being unruly.”



Conflict between the KIA and Burmese troops has continued in spite of an order by President Thein Sein a week ago not to launch any attacks on Kachin rebels. The fighting has displaced around 40,000 people since it began in June, many of whom have fled to Laiza where the KIA and local groups have struggled to cope with the burden.

The government last week gave permission for UN teams to visit Laiza with supplies for the refugees, following a five-month ban on any international NGOs accessing rebel-controlled territory.

But the promising signs do not translate to the reality on the ground in the northern state, which has witnessed incidents such as gang-rapes of ethnic women by Burmese soldiers that clearly flout the laws of war. Indiscriminate firing into Thingahyang village continues a trend of deliberate attacks on civilians that has been widely documented by rights groups since fighting began.

An official from the KIA told a DVB source recently that Burmese troops had “burned down all houses” in Daw Hpum Yang and Ding Ga villages, also along the highway which is used by the Burmese to ferry supplies from bases in Myitkyina to the Bhamo frontline.

The incident on Friday follows a similar attack in November on the village of Aungja, where around 50 houses were razed. In October, houses in Namsan Yang village were also levelled.

The scorched earth policy is part of the army’s Four Cuts strategy, which looks to sever lines of support and communication for Burma’s various ethnic armed groups. Many depend on support, including food and surveillance, from local populations.

The attack on the Thingahyang church will also fuel accusations that the Burmese army is waging religious persecution against the predominantly Christian Kachin minority. During the Aungja assault, troops attacked a local pastor and his pregnant wife, who was hospitalised.

Sunday 18 December 2011

ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရဖို႔ သံုးႏွစ္ၾကာႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္းေျပာ

2011-12-17

တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္အဖြဲ႔ အားလံုးနဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးသေဘာတူညီ ခ်က္ ရရွိဖို႔အတြက္ ေနာက္ထပ္ သံုးႏွစ္အထိ ၾကာျမင့္ႏိုင္တယ္လို႔ အစုိးရ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးေရး အဖဲြ႔ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္းက မေန႔က ေျပာလုိက္ပါတယ္။

RFA

၂ဝ၁၁ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၆ ရက္ေန႔က ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ ေတြ႔ရေသာ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအဆင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဆြးေႏြးေရးအဖဲြ႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္းႏွင့္ ဦးသိန္းေဇာ္။

ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွာ မေန႔က ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအဆင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးေရးအဖဲြ႔ရဲ႕ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲမွာ ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္းက အဲဒီလုိ ေျပာလိုက္တာပါ။

ျမန္မာအစုိးရဟာ လက္နက္ကိုင္တုိင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔ ၁ဝ ဖြဲ႔နဲ႔ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာ တူညီခ်က္ေတြ ရရွိထားေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ ဒီသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ေတြကတဆင့္ ထာဝရၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ရရွိဖို႔ အတြက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အထူးအစည္းအေဝးမွာ တင္ျပေဆြးေႏြးသြားမယ့္အေၾကာင္း စစ္အစိုးရလက္ထက္ စက္မႈ (၁) ဝန္ႀကီးေဟာင္း ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္း ရဲ႕စကားကို ကုိးကားၿပီး ရိုက္တာ သတင္းဌာနက ေဖာ္ျပပါတယ္။

ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ထိုးစစ္ေတြရပ္ဆိုင္းဖို႔ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္က ညႊန္ၾကားထားေပမယ့္ တုိက္ပြဲ ေတြ ဆက္ျဖစ္ပြားေနတာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေမးျမန္းရာမွာ ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္းက- ေဝးလံတဲ့ အစြန္အဖ်ားေဒသ တခ်ိဳ႕မွာေတာ့ ပစ္ခတ္မႈေတြ အနည္းအက်ဥ္း က်န္ရွိႏုိင္တဲ့ အေၾကာင္း၊ ဆက္သြယ္ေရးစနစ္ မေကာင္းတဲ့အတြက္ ညြန္ၾကားခ်က္ မေရာက္ရွိ ေသးတာ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ေျဖဆုိသြားတယ္လုိ႔လည္း သတင္းမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

မေန႔က ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအဆင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးေရးအဖဲြ႔ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲကို တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ Yangon Media Group က အယ္ဒီတာခ်ဳပ္ ကိုကို(စက္မႈ) ကို ကိုဥာဏ္ဝင္းေအာင္က ဆက္သြယ္ ေမးျမန္းထားပါတယ္။

Saturday 17 December 2011

Burma's 'Papillon' Goes Back to Prison

Five months after being deported from China, Karen rebel leader Mahn Nyein Maung has been sentenced to 17 years imprisonment, according to a source following the case in Rangoon.

A controversial character, Mahn Nyein Maung is often likened to French convict “Papillon” because of his extraordinary escape from prison on Coco Island in 1970 when he floated across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood.

He went on trial on Dec. 8 behind closed doors at Mingaladon Court in Rangoon and was later sentenced after being charged with having connections to the Karen National Union (KNU), long denounced by the Burmese government as an illegal militia.

Mahn Nyein Maung, a leading member of the KNU and a central committee member of the ethnic armed alliance, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), disappeared at China’s Kunming Airport in late July.

He was subsequently charged in Burma for violating immigration laws and possessing a fake passport. He was sentenced to one year for the immigration charge on Sept. 27, according to Rangoon-based Flower News Journal.

Then, in early December, he was put on trial on the more grievous charges. His case was not publicized and next to no information has been divulged either by the authorities or the KNU about Mahn Nyein Maung’s case or his condition.

An inside source told The Irrawaddy that the Karen rebel leader visited the ethnic Wa region via China on the Sino-Burma border in July. He was subsequently denied reentry into Thailand—where he was living at the time—as he had not applied for a reentry visa when he left from Thailand to China.

Despite his role within the KNU and UNFC, his trip to China and the Wa region had nothing to do with those organization, said the sources. KNU leaders also said that they didn’t know about Mahn Nyein Maung trip to China.

A former activist and political prisoner, Mahn Nyein Maung apparently visited northern Burma to observe first-hand the armed conflict between ethnic armed groups and government troops near the border.

Karen sources have said that after he was denied entry into Thailand, he was sent back to China's Yunnan province where he was detained at the Kunming Airport. Yunnanese authorities reportedly insisted that Mahn Nyein Maung buy an air ticket with his own money for his deportation to Rangoon.

Mahn Nyein Maung was first arrested in 1960 for his work as an underground dissident. He was sentenced and sent to Coco Island, an infamous detention center for political prisoners located about 300 km off the Burmese mainland. He and two other political prisoners, Mahn Aung Kyi and Aung Ngwe, managed to escape from the island in 1970 by floating across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood.

Due to his extraordinary escape from Coco Island, Mahn Nyein Maung is frequently likened to the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière, nicknamed “Papillon,” who escaped a penal colony in French Guyana. Like Charrière, Mahn Nyein Maung wrote and published a book about his experiences inside the brutal prison at Coco Island and his daring escape.

သမၼတ အရပ္ခိုင္းေသာ္လည္း ကခ်င္တြင္ တိုက္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနဆဲ

ဖနိဒါ | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၆ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၂၂ နာရီ ၀၉ မိနစ္


ခ်င္းမုိင္(မဇိၥ်မ) ။ ။ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္း အစိုးရတပ္မ်ား ထုိးစစ္ရပ္ဆုိင္းထားရန္ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္က ညြန္ၾကားထားေသာ္လည္း ကခ်င္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ KIA တပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေန႔စဥ္ တုိက္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပြားေန သည္ဟု KIO က ေျပာသည္။

မန္စီၿမိဳ႕နယ္ KIA တပ္မဟာ ၃ လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ရင္း ၁၂၊ ၁၅၊ ၂၇ ႏွင့္ မုိးေမာက္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ တပ္မဟာ ၅ လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ရင္း ၃ နယ္ေျမမ်ားအတြင္း ထုိးစစ္ဆင္မႈမ်ားလည္း ေန႔စဥ္ျဖစ္ပြားေနျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

“အင္အားတုိးလာတာက တပ္မ ၉၉ စစ္ဆင္ေရး ေနရာမွာ စကခ ၁ဝ လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ရင္းေတြ ျပန္ျဖည့္တယ္။ တပ္အင္အားေလ်ာ့တာလည္း မရွိေသးဘူး။ သူတို႔တပ္ေတြ က်ေနာ္တို႔ နယ္ေျမထဲ ရွိေနသေရြ႔ တုိက္ပြဲကေတာ့
ျဖစ္ေနဦးမွာပဲ။ သမၼတက ညြန္ၾကားထားေပမယ့္ ေရွ႕တန္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔ေတြက စစ္ေျမျပင္ခြင္မွာ ေရာက္ေနေတာ့ တုိက္ပြဲ က ၿငိမ္းဖို႔မရွိဘူး” ဟု KIO ေျပာခြင့္ရ ဦးလနန္က မဇိၥ်မကုိ ေျပာသည္။
meetlotdaw0101

အစိုးရတပ္မ်ား ထုိးစစ္ရပ္ဆုိင္းထားရန္ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္က ညြန္ၾကားထားေသာ္လည္း KIA တပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေန႔စဥ္ တုိက္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပြားေန (ဓါတ္ပံု မဇၥ်ိမ)

ယေန႔ ေန႔လယ္ပိုင္းကလည္း မန္စီၿမိဳ႕နယ္ KIO တပ္ရင္း ၁၅ နယ္ေျမရွိ အစိုးရတပ္မ်ားရွိသည့္ လြယ္ရင္းစခန္း ကိုလည္း ရဟတ္ယာဥ္တစီးျဖင့္ လက္နက္ႏွင့္ ရိကၡာမ်ား ျဖည့္တင္းေပးေနသည္ဟု KIA ေရွ႕တန္းသတင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

ဗန္းေမာ္ခ႐ုိင္ ေဒါ့ဖုန္းယန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ခြဲရွိ အစုိးရတပ္စခန္းသုိ႔ ရိကၡာပို႔ရန္ႏွင့္ အင္အားထပ္ျဖည့္ရန္ ဝင္ေရာက္လာသည့္ ခလရ ၁၄၂ ႏွင့္ ၃၇ တပ္မွ အင္အား ၁ဝဝ ခန္႔ႏွင့္လည္း ယေန႔နံနက္ပိုင္းက တိုက္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။

“က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က စစ္အလံုးအရင္း ဝင္လာၿပီဆုိရင္ ပစ္ရမွာဘဲ။ ပစ္လုိက္ေတာ့ မဝင္ႏုိင္ဘူး၊ ဒီမနက္ မနက္ ၄ နာရီ
ေက်ာ္ကေန ျပန္ပစ္တာ သူတုိ႔ ေနာက္ဆုတ္လုိက္ရတယ္လုိ႔ ေျပာတယ္။ အဲဒီအေနာက္မွာ ဒိန္ဂါရြာဆုိတာရွိတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ လုိက္ပစ္တယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ ေဒါ့ဖုန္းယန္ကေန ေတာင္ဘက္ ၃ မုိင္ေလာက္ ေဝးမွာရွိတဲ့ ဒိန္ဂါရြာက သူတုိ႔က အိမ္ေတြ မီး႐ႈိ႕လုိက္္တယ္”ဟု ေရွ႕တန္းသတင္းရပ္ကြက္မွ အရာရွိတဦးက ေျပာသည္။

ဆုတ္ခြာသြားသည့္ အစိုးရတပ္မ်ားက ေဒါ့ဖုန္းယန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ခြဲ ေတာင္ဘက္ရွိ ဒိန္ဂါေက်းရြာမွ KIO ေဆးခန္း အျပင္
ေနအိမ္ ခုနစ္လံုးကို ယေန႔နံနက္ ကိုးနာရီခန္႔က မီး႐ႈိ႕ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့သည္။

ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္တြင္း ထိုးစစ္ဆင္မႈမ်ား ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ႏွင့္ ခုခံကာကြယ္ရန္အတြက္ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီး မင္းေအာင္လႈိင္ထံ ဒီဇင္ဘာလက ၁ဝ ရက္ေန႔က သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္က ညြန္ၾကားထားခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

အလားတူ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းရွိ KIA တပ္မဟာ ၄ နယ္ေျမ လက္ေအာက္ခံ အမွတ္ ၈ တပ္ရင္းႏွင့္ မန္တံု ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အေျခစိုက္ အစိုးရတပ္မ်ားလည္း တိုက္ပြဲမ်ား ဆက္ျဖစ္ေနဆဲျဖစ္သည္ဟု တပ္မဟာ ၄ တာဝန္ခံ ဗုိလ္မႉးႀကီး ေဇာ္ေရာ္က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

KIO အေနျဖင့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရ ေဆြးေႏြးမႈကို လိုလားၿပီး အစိုးရဘက္ကမွ အေကာင္အထည္ မေဖာ္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္သာ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ တုိက္ပြဲမ်ား ဆက္ရွိေနရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု ႐ႈျမင္သည္။ KIO မွာ ႏုိဝင္ဘာလ ၂၉ ဂက္ေန႔ကလည္း တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံ၌ အစိုးရကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုရာ၌လည္း ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရသာ ေျဖရွင္းလိုေၾကာင္း တင္ျပခဲ့ၿပီး
ျဖစ္သည္။

ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၉ ရက္ေန႔ကလည္း KIO ႏွင့္ သီးျခားေတြ႔ဆံုရန္အတြက္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအဆင့္ ညွိႏိႈင္းေရးအဖြဲ႔ကို
ျပင္လည္ျပင္ဆင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားသည္ဟုလည္း KIA သတင္းရပ္ကြက္အရ သိရသည္။

ယင္းအဖြဲ႔ကို ၾကံ့ခိုင္ေရးပါတီ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ၁ ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္း ဦးေဆာင္ကာ မီးရထားဝန္ၾကီး ဦးေအာင္မင္း၊ ဦးသိန္းေဇာ္၊ ဦးအုန္းျမင့္၊ ဦးခက္ထိန္တို႔ ပါဝင္သည္ဟုလည္း သိရသည္။

ယခင္က တုိင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအဆင့္ ညွိႏႈိင္းေရးအဖြဲ႔ကို မီးရထားဝန္ၾကီး ဦးေအာင္မင္း ဦးေဆာင္၍ လူဝင္မႈၾကီးၾကပ္ေရးႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႔ အင္အားဝန္ၾကီး ဦးခင္ရီ၊ သမဝါယမ ဝန္ၾကီး ဦးအုန္းျမင့္အပါအဝင္ ခုနစ္ဦးျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားသည္။

“က်ေနာ္တို႔ KIO ကေတာ့ ဘယ္သူနဲ႔ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရ စကားေျပာမယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာ့ ဘယ္သူနဲ႔ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္
ေဆြးေႏြးမွာပါ။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမႈေတာ့ လုပ္ရေတာ့မယ္ဆုိတာ သူတုိ႔မွာ ရွိမယ္လုိ႔ ထင္တာပဲ။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ ခုလုိ အဖြဲ႔ေတြ ဖြဲ႔လာတယ္လို႔ ထင္တာပဲ” ဟု ဦးလနန္က ေျပာသည္။

လက္ရွိတြင္ ႏွစ္ဖက္တိုက္ပြဲမ်ားေၾကာင့္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ဒုကၡသည္ ၄၆,ဝဝဝ ေက်ာ္ရွိေနၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။ ယင္းဒုကၡသည္ မ်ားအတြက္ ကုလသမဂၢလက္ေအာက္ခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားက ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၂ ရက္ေန႔က သြားေရာက္ကူညီခဲ့မႈမ်ာ ရွိၿပီး ျပည္နယ္အစိုးရအဖြဲ႔မွ လႉဒါန္းသည့္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကိုမူ KIO ဘက္က လက္မခံဘဲ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့သည္။

မိုးေမာက္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ခြဲ လြယ္ဂ်ယ္ႏွင့္တဖက္ကမ္း လာရိန္းၿမိဳ႕ရွိ ဒုကၡသည္ ၂,ဝဝ ေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ တ႐ုတ္ဘက္ျခမ္း မန္းဝင္းႀကီး နမ္ေတာင္ေဒသရွိ ဒုကၡသည္ ၇,ဝဝဝ ေက်ာ္မွာလည္း အိမ္သာလံုေလာက္မႈ မရွိျခင္းေၾကာင့္ က်န္းမာေရးအတြက္ စိုးရိမ္ဖြယ္ ရွိေနသည္ဟု သိရသည္။

“သူတုိ႔ေတြက တ႐ုတ္ထဲျဖစ္ေတာ့ အခက္အခဲေတြ ရွိတယ္။ ေတာေတြမွာ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္မရဘဲ ထင္း၊ သစ္၊ ဝါးေတြ မခုတ္ရဘူး။ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္ထဲျဖစ္ေတာ့ တ႐ုတ္ခြင့္မျပဳရင္ လုပ္လုိ႔ မရဘူး။ နမ္ေတာင္းပါဆုိတဲ့ေနရာက လယ္ကြင္းျဖစ္ တယ္။ လူမ်ားေတာ့ အိမ္သာေတြ မဆံ့ဘူး။ အိမ္သာမလံုေလာက္ေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရး ထိခုိက္လာႏုိင္တယ္” ဟု ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ကူညီေရးေကာ္မတီ တာဝန္ခံ ဦးဒြဲပီဆားက ဆုိသည္။

Derek Mitchell: Burma policy point man

Friday, 16 December 2011 16:28 Mizzima News


(Interview) – Derek Mitchell, the special representative and policy coordinator for Burma, talked with reporters at the U.S. embassy in Beijing on Tuesday, at the end of his visit to brief Chinese officials on recent U.S. talks with Burmese officials. The interview includes the U.S. view of recent reforms by the new Burmese government, regional security, ethnic minorities and cooperation between the U.S. and China regarding reforms in Burma. The interview, provided by the U.S. State Department, has been edited for length.

QUESTION: After Secretary [Hillary] Clinton went to Burma there was a belief that there is something changed in the relations between the U.S. and Burma. What kind of role will Burma play in the U.S. foreign policy?

Derek Mitchell, U.S. policy coordinator for Burma Photo: U.S. State Department

Derek Mitchell, U.S. policy coordinator for Burma. Photo: U.S. State Department
Answer: The relationship continues to evolve. As they continue to reform, then the United States will be responding in kind with increasing assistance, increasing partnership in the process.

I’ve made four trips including the latest with the secretary. I think each time we’ve been building trust, building contacts, building a relationship. I met the foreign minister maybe five times in the past three or four months, or more. Burma is an essential component of Asean. For too long, Burma’s been an outlier because of its under-development and its policies.

There is no intent of the United States in its relationship with Burma to have any negative influence on China-Burma relations. It is not meant to come at the expense of any country. It is not in the interest of the United States that Burma have tense relationships with its neighbors, in fact the contrary, that it’s in the interest of regional peace and stability and development that Burma have good relationships with its neighbors, that there not be division within the region, that there be cooperation and coordination of approaches, and that we have a unified approach or at least we’re working in coordination together.

China and Burma have, as I said, a long history as well as a long border. There is not a role for the United States in telling either country what to do with sovereign decisions on foreign policy and international relations. We haven’t in the past and we won’t in the future.

QUESTION: Talking about regional security, what is your biggest concern on Burma?

Answer: The biggest concern I think is the defining challenge, in essence, of Burma post-independence, which is its national unity and national reconciliation. The ability of the country to find a resolution to the division between the ethnic minorities, ethnic nationalities and the center, and the Burman majority. They’ve been basically at civil war, or at least had these constant internal conflicts I should say, since its inception as an independent nation. I think that remains the biggest concern that we all must have about the stability of the country, the sustainability, of the stability of the country.

You can have artificial stability through force of arms, but that’s not sustainable. The real sustainable stability inside the country comes from a political process of reconciliation: of dialogue, of trust, equality and goodwill on all sides. There’s a deep residue of mistrust, unfortunately, developed over years.

Democratic development is in the very, very nascent stage, very early stage. So we’re encouraged by some of the moves that have been made in terms of opening up the political process to allow Aung San Suu Kyi’s party to run in elections coming up. There is some more easing of restrictions on the media but only in certain arenas – sports, culture, that kind of thing. Not in the political realm.

So they have a ways to go but their words are certainly encouraging. They talk about their commitment to democracy and their commitment to human rights. The parliament and the parliamentary speakers talk about building the parliament as an institution. They can perhaps do more debate, and initiation of policy, but it’s a very, very early stage of this new system that they have as well as of that commitment to development of democracy.

QUESTION: What measures will the U.S. take to strengthen bilateral ties between Burma and the U.S. such as invite Burma’s leaders to visit to the U.S. or the U.S. ask Burma to participate in a regional joint military drill?

Answer: We have not asked the Burmese president to the United States. We have invited the foreign minister to come for a dialogue on Asia, just to exchange perspectives on the region as we do with many countries. We’ve never had that kind of conversation with the Burmese government. We want to develop habits of dialogue and perspectives. We really have a limited understanding and I suspect they don’t have a good understanding of where we’re coming from too.

But no, we haven’t invited the Burmese president to come to the United States. And on the regional joint military exercise there has been no movement on that as well. We have restrictions on military to military contact, so there is no movement on the second of your points.

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Clashes ongoing as UN visits Kachin IDPs

By FRANCIS WADE
Published: 14 December 2011
Clashes ongoing as UN visits Kachin IDPs thumbnail
The UN visited the IDP camp of Je Yang Hka yesterday to supply aid to refugees (Ryan Libre / DAA)

Teams from a number of UN bodies have begun distributing aid to refugees in the Kachin state town of Laiza, but despite orders from President Thein Sein to cease fighting, several clashes have broken out nearby as Burmese forces continue to push on Kachin rebel territory.

The order from the president came on Monday – domestic media reported that he had instructed commanders not to launch offensives against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), but only defend from attacks.

Mai Ja, from the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT), told DVB from the town of Maijayang close to the Kachin state border with China that heavy fighting had continued nearby. “It’s happening about 13 kilometres from Maijayang where the Burmese frontline is,” she said. “We can hear it very loud, all day yesterday and most of today.”

Rumours have circulated since yesterday that planes had bombed KIA positions. Mai Ja said she heard a “very loud [explosion] different from the days before. After that, the aircraft turned back”. Three helicopters had also flown over Maijayang.

The government-formed National Human Rights Commission warned in a letter published in the state-run New Light of Myanmar today that thousands of children were suffering from a result of intense conflict in the region since June.

“The children appear to be suffering from psychological trauma and the adults seem to experience a sense of insecurity and diminished confidence,” the letter said. “From individual interviews, it was evident that almost all wanted to return to their own villages.”

Staff from UNICEF are among the UN teams currently in Laiza, the headquarters of the KIA where thousands of refugees have escaped to. Barbara Mansi, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Burma, told DVB yesterday that teams would distribute pillows, mats and blankets to support the refugees during the winter months.

Doi Di Seng, chairman of the Committee for the Assistance of Refugees, said that UN officials had toured a number of camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in and around Laiza. “They came in 10 vehicles: seven trucks loaded with household materials and two vehicles carrying the officials,” he said.

Mansi said that negotiations would continue to allow it access to all of the estimated 40,000 Kachin refugees. Until this week, the UN had only been permitted to access the refugees in government-controlled territory, which are thought to number around 6,000.

More refugees are arriving “each day” to several locations along the China-Burma border, Mai Ja said. Up to 8,000 are also sheltering across the border from Maijayang in China, but last week Chinese officials met with representatives of the refugees and told them to return to Burma.

The situation in Maijayang however is far from stable, and Burmese forces appear to be steadily gaining ground on the town. Negotiations with the Chinese appear to have bought the majority of refugees more time, although a source who visited the area recently told DVB that there were unconfirmed reports the Chinese had forced a number of people sheltering in rural areas back across the border.

Additional reporting by Mahn Saimon.

Fighting flares near Tavoy project

Clashes have erupted along a key overland route that will link the Tavoy deep-sea port megaproject in southern Burma to Southeast Asian economies, once again highlighting the volatility of large-scale infrastructural ventures in Burma.

Burmese troops have been stationed along several locations between the port and the Thai border where work is underway to build a multi-lane highway to the town of Kachanaburi, and then on to Bangkok.

Fighting broke out on Tuesday last week close to the town of Myitta, through which the road will pass.

Territory controlled by the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)’s Brigade 4 lies close to the region of Tavoy that is being transformed into Southeast Asia’s largest industrial complex, and the group has actively opposed the project: Zipporah Sein, the general secretary of the KNLA’s political wing, the Karen National Union (KNU), told Karen News Group in July that companies that did not get the group’s permission to enter the region “will be regarded as military dictatorship-backed companies”.

The clash last week, which erupted after a landmine was detonated by the KNLA close to a Burmese army battalion, lasted only 10 minutes, but resulted in several casualties. “The enemy suffered three injuries: a private and two corporals,” said a KNLA Brigade 4 spokesperson. “I don’t know whether there was any death or not.”

He said the Burmese battalion, in a bid to send those injured in the clash to a nearby outpost, had forced civilians to porter supplies and blocked many from attending their farms around Myitta.

Similar clashes in July close to a construction workers’ camp forced 50 workers from the Thai engineering giant behind the project, Ital-Thai, to flee into Thailand.

Despite efforts to negotiate a ceasefire with several armed groups, the Burmese army is increasing its presence in the country’s southern Tenasserim division where the port is being built. It will house petrochemical plants, fertiliser factories and a steel mill, and is expected to cover up to 200 square-kilometres of land. According to the Bangkok Post, the vast deep-sea will be able to accommodate 55 vessels at once.

Ital-Thai said earlier this year that at least 10,000 people would be forcibly relocated. Local sources have told DVB the total number of those affected could be closer to 30,000. The effect on the local environment could also be significant, with a 3,000 MW coal-fired power plant also due for construction.

“Previously, [the Burmese army] had only two battalions in this region but that has now increased to five,” said the KNLA spokesperson. “Since they are increasing troop numbers and entering our territory, we have to fight them back.”

In November, a KNU delegation met with Burmese officials in northwestern Thailand to attempt to formulate a truce. The talks broke down, however, and three days later clashes took place further north in Karen state. A similar stab at a ceasefire on 7 December also failed to net a result.

ၿမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ မရွိေသး

By မေအးေအးမာ



အစုိးရက ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ဥပေဒ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္မွာ ပထမဆုံး အလုပ္သမား လႈပ္ရွားမႈတခုအျဖစ္ သစ္လုပ္ငန္း လုပ္သားေတြ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွာ ဆႏၵျပ ေတာင္းဆုိမႈတခုကုိ လုပ္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း၊ ေတာင္ဒဂုံၿမိဳ႕နယ္ စက္မႈဇုံက သစ္အေခ်ာထည္ စက္႐ုံတခုက အလုပ္ထုတ္ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ လုပ္သားေတြကုိေတာ့
ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ မရွိတဲ့အေၾကာင္း စက္႐ုံ တာ၀န္ရွိသူေတြက ေျပာဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ ဆႏၵျပပြဲကုိ ရပ္ဆုိင္းဖုိ႔ ဟန္႔တား ခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။ ျပႆနာကုိ မေက်နပ္ရင္ေတာ့ အလုပ္သမားအေရးနဲ႔ သက္ဆုိင္ရာ ဌာနေတြကုိ ဆက္ၿပီး အေၾကာင္းၾကားေပးမယ္လုိ႔ ကတိျပဳခဲ့တဲ့အေၾကာင္း ေျပာပါတယ္။ အျပည့္အစုံကုိေတာ့ မေအးေအးမာက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

လုပ္သက္ ၇ ႏွစ္ကေန ၁၄ ႏွစ္ၾကာရွိတဲ့ ေတာင္ဒဂံု စက္မူဇံု အလုပ္သမားေတြကို အလုပ္ရွင္က လုပ္ငန္း လုိအပ္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ဆိုကာ နစ္နာေၾကး နဲနဲပဲေပးၿပီး အလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို အလုပ္က ျဖဳတ္ပစ္ခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ဆႏျပမူျဖစ္ခဲ့တာပါ။ ဆႏျပမူကို ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းေဒသႀကီးက အလုပ္သမား ညႊန္ၾကားမႈ ဦးစီးဌာနမွဴးကုိယ္တုိင္ လာေရာက္ၿပီး အလုပ္ရွင္နဲ႔ ညိႇႏိွဳင္ခဲ့ေပမဲ့ ေျပလည္မူမရွိေႀကာင္း ဆႏၵျပေနတဲ့ အလုပ္သမာတဦးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“အလုပ္သမားညြန္ၾကားမႈ ဦးစီးဌာန တုိင္းဦးစီးမွဴးကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ၀ါဏိဇၨကုိ ဆက္တင္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေျဖရွင္းေပးမယ္ ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က အဲဒီလုိ ေျပာသြားတယ္။ သူတုိ႔က ၾကားထဲကေန ေျဖရွင္းေပးတာ။ အလုပ္ရွင္ဖက္က ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိတာကုိ မေပးႏုိင္ဘူး။ လူတေထာင္ကုိပဲ သူတုိ႔ ေပးမယ္။ ေက်နပ္မႈ ရွိလား၊ ေက်နပ္မႈ မရွိရင္ေတာ့ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ ၀ါဏိဇၨကုိ ဆက္ၿပီး ေျပာမလားဆုိေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီဇဘၤာေရာက္မွ တက္မယ္ဆုိၿပီး လက္မွတ္ ထုိးေပးလုိက္တယ္။”

မနက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အလုပ္သမားညြန္ၾကားမႈ ဦးစီးဌာနကလာၿပီး ဆႏၵျပလို႔ မရေႀကာင္း လာေရာက္ တားျမစ္ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။ ဆႏၵျပရျခင္း အေႀကာင္းရင္းကို ေျပာျပခဲ့တာကေတာ့။

“ဆႏၵျပပြဲကုိ လုပ္ရျခင္းကုိေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က ဆႏၵျပပြဲ လုပ္လုိ႔ရဘူးေပါ့ေနာ္။ သူတုိ႔ ေပးတဲ့အထဲမွာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္သက္ တစ္ႏွစ္လွ်င္ ၁,၀၀၀ က်ပ္ႏႈန္းျဖင့္ လုပ္သက္ ႏွစ္အလုိက္ ဆုေၾကးဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က ေျပာထားတယ္။ အဲဒါကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ၁၄ ႏွစ္ရွိရင္ ၁,၄၀၀၀ ပဲ ရမယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကုိ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပး ထုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္သက္ တစ္ႏွစ္ကုိ ၁,၀၀၀ ႏႈန္းနဲ႔ ဒါ ဆုေၾကးအေနနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကုိ ၁၄ ႏွစ္ရွိလုိ႔ရွိရင္ ၁,၄၀၀၀ ေပးမယ္။ ၁၀ ႏွစ္ရွိရင္ ၁၀,၀၀၀ ေပါ့။ ဒီလုိေပးမယ္ဆုိၿပီး သူက လႊတ္တယ္။
ဒီအေပၚမွာ မေက်နပ္လုိ႔ ဒီအခ်က္ေလးကုိ ညႇိေပးဖုိ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ေျပာတာပါ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ဥပေဒအတုိင္း ျဖစ္ေစခ်င္တာေပါ့။"

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ စုေ၀းခြင့္ ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ ဥပေဒကုိ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔က အတည္ျပဳၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ အခုလို ဆႏျပမူေတြ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့တာပါ။ အခုဆႏၵျပမူဟာ အလုပ္သမားေတြ အေနနဲ႔ သူတိုရဲ႕ လုပ္ငန္းခြင့္မွာ အလုပ္႐ွင္ထံကေန နစ္နာေၾကးရဖို႔ ျပတာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕က ဥေပေဒအတိုင္ပင္ခံ ဦးေအာင္သိန္းက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“အခုဟာက သူတုိ႔အလုပ္႐ုံမွာ သူတုိ႔ကုိမေပးရင္ သူတုိ႔က မဖ်က္ဘူး။ သူတုိ႔ အလုပ္လဲ ဆက္မလုပ္ဘူး။ သူတုိ႔ကုိ ေပးရမယ့္ တာ၀န္ေတြ ရွိတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ကုိ တႏွစ္မွ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကး ၁,၀၀၀ ေလာက္ပဲ ေပးတယ္ဆုိရင္ အဲဒီမွာ ၇ ႏွစ္၊ ၈ ႏွစ္၊ ၉ ႏွစ္ သမားေတြဆုိရင္ ဘယ္လုိ လုပ္မလဲ။ သူတုိ႔အတြက္ သိပ္နစ္နာတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ နစ္နာေၾကးကုိ ညႇိေပးဖုိ႔အတြက္ သူတုိ႔ ဒီစက္႐ုံထဲမွာပဲ ထုိင္ဆႏၵျပတာပဲ။ ဘာမွ သူတုိ႔ ေအာ္တာ ဟစ္တာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဖ်က္တာ ဆီးတာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ အဲဒီေတာ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ နစ္နာမႈအေပၚမွာ အာဏာပုိင္ေတြ
လာညႇိေပးေအာင္ သူတုိ႔ေျပာတဲ့ ကိစၥပဲ။

ဒါ ဥပေဒနဲ႔ေတာ့ မဆုိင္ဘူး။ ဆႏၵျပပုိင္ခြင့္ဥပေဒနဲ႔ေတာ့ မဆုိင္ဘူးလုိ႔ပဲ အန္ကယ္က ေျပာမယ္။ ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ ဥပေဒက လုပ္ထုံး လုပ္နည္းေတြ မထြက္ေသးတဲ့ အတြက္ ဆႏၵျပတဲ့ ဥပေဒ စုေ၀းခြင့္နဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ စုေ၀းခြင့္နဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပပုိင္ခြင့္ ဆုိတဲ့ဥစၥာဟာ လုပ္ထံုး လုပ္နည္းေတြကုိ ျပည္ထဲေရး ၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက မထြက္ေသးတဲ့အတြက္ အဲဒါကုိ ခြင့္မျပဳေသးဘူး ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ သူတုိ႔ ဒါကုိ ႀကိဳခြင့္ေတာင္းတဲ့သူေတြအေပၚ တားျမစ္ထားတာေပါ့ေလ။”

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ျပည္တြင္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ရရွိဖုိ႔ အပါအ၀င္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး တုိးတက္မႈေတြ ရရွိဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိ ဆႏၵျပၾကမယ့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး တက္ႂကြသူေတြရဲ႕ ေလွ်ာက္ထားခ်က္ကုိေတာ့ အာဏာပုိင္ေတြက လက္မခံပဲ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခုလို အလုပ္သမားေတြ ဆႏၵျပသလုိမ်ဳိး ဆႏၵျပလို႔ မရဘူးဆိုတဲ့အေႀကာင္း လာေရာက္ပိတ္ပင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အလုပ္သမားေတြကေတာ့ ညေနပိုင္းမွာ ဆႏၵျပမူကို ရုပ္သိမ္းခဲ့ေပမဲ့ ေျပလည္မူမရွိပဲ အလုပ္သမားနဲ႔ အလုပ္ရွင္ ညိႇႏႈိင္းေပးတဲ့ရံုးအထိတက္ၿပီး နစ္နာေႀကးရဖို႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။

Tuesday 13 December 2011

British FM announces Burma visit

Published: 13 December 2011
British FM announces Burma visit thumbnail
William Hague is due to visit Burma next month (Reuters)

British Foreign Secretary William Hague announced Monday he will travel to military-backed Burma next month, after a visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aimed at boosting reform.

“I will visit Burma in early January and we will remain in close contact with the US on this issue,” Hague said during a press conference with Clinton, following their talks here in Washington.

Clinton visited Burma, from November 30 to December 2, while British International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell travelled there in mid-November.

“Our common objective is to see political freedom in Burma, and constructive engagement which helps further that goal is very important,” Hague said.

Clinton, who was the first US secretary of state to visit Burma in more than 50 years, said she saw “openings” during her three-day trip that “give us some grounds for encouragement.”

President Thein Sein, while a former general, has surprised both the United States and the opposition for speaking the language of reforms and initiating dialogue both with democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and ethnic minorities.

Clinton met both Thein Sein and Suu Kyi.

10-party coalition only ‘cooperating’ with USDP

Tuesday, 13 December 2011 19:57 Min Thet


Rangoon (Mizzima) – The Friends of Democracy, a 10-party coalition, says it has not joined forces with the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) as reported in some domestic journals in Burma.

Dr. Than Nyein, chairman of the National Democratic Force party Photo: Mizzima

Dr. Than Nyein, chairman of the National Democratic Force party. Photo: Mizzima
A spokesman at a press conference on Monday at the Democratic Party (Myanmar) office in Mingala Taungnyut Township in Rangoon denied the news reports.

“We didn’t join with them – absolutely not. We are just cooperating on common causes, just working together by cooperating,” said Saw Than Myint of the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP).

Some domestic journals said that in a meeting on December 4 between members of the coalition and the USDP at the Mya Kyun Tha restaurant, the parties had combined forces.

National Democratic Force Chairman Dr. Than Nyein said, “Our people were not pleased with those news reports in the journals so we wanted to clarify our position here.”

“We just met with them after agreeing to focus on working for the country. We encountered many problems due to a lack of trust between us for many years, which affected the nation. We needed to talk with each other to correct the misunderstandings and to build trust. We must try hard to develop a better relationship,” he said.

At the meeting on Friday, eight coalition parties attended. The USDP party sent only Rangoon Region party chief Aung Then Lin, an ex-general who is on the USDP central committee.

Democratic Party (Myanmar) Chairman Thu Wei said, “As soon as we met, Aung Thein Lin said that the USDP had longed for this meeting with us for a long time. He said that his party could not accept the domination of our country by any foreign group. We said we agreed with them, and we liked that stand too.”

Saw Than Myint said that the 10-party coalition would cooperate with any party including the National League for Democracy and National Unity Party, if they shared common objectives.

The 10- party grouping incudes the Union Democracy Party, Peace and Unity Party, Democracy and Peace Party, Democratic Party (Myanmar), National Democratic Force, Shan Nationalities Democratic Party, Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, Chin National Party, All Mon Region Democracy Party and Pha Lon Sa Waw Democratic Party.

Saturday 10 December 2011

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ႏိုဘယ္ဆုရရွိျခင္း ႏွစ္ ၂ဝ ျပည့္

2011-12-10

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေနတဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးပန္းတိုင္ကို တက္လွမ္းႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ဝိုင္းဝန္းပါဝင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကဖို႔ ဒီကေန႔ က်င္းပတဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ႏိုဘယ္ဆုရရွိျခင္း ႏွစ္ ၂ဝ ျပည့္ အခမ္းအနားမွာ NLD ပါတီေခါင္းေဆာင္တဥိီးျဖစ္တဲ့ ဦးဝင္းတင္က ျပည္သူကို ပန္ၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။

AFP

၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁ဝ ရက္ေန႔က ရန္ကုန္ ေရႊညဝါ သာဓု ပရိယတၱိ စာသင္တိုက္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ႏိုဘယ္ဆုရရွိျခင္း ႏွစ္ ၂ဝ ျပည့္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳပြဲ အခမ္းအနားတြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ မိန္႔ခြန္းေျပာၾကားစဥ္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တက္ေရာက္ၿပီး မိန္႔ခြန္းေျပာၾကားခဲ့တဲ့ ဒီကေန႔ အခမ္းအနားကို ရန္ကုန္ ၾကည့္ျမင္တိုင္ျမိဳ႔နယ္ ေရႊညဝါ သာဓု ပရိယတၱိ စာသင္တိုက္မွာ က်င္းပခဲ့တာပါ။

ဒိီအခမ္းအနားမွာ ဦးဝင္းတင္က… ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ေတြကို ျပည္သူက အသိအမွတ္ျပဳခဲ့ၿပီး ျဖစ္သလို ကမၻာကလည္း အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳတာေၾကာင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏုိဘယ္ဆုကို ခ်ီးျမႇင့္ခံရတာလို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ေတြကို ဝုိင္းဝန္းၾကဖို႔ ဦးဝင္းတင္က အခုလို ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးပန္းတိုင္ကို ခ်ီတက္ေနတဲ့ ေလွႀကီးကို ပဲ့ကိုင္ၿပီး ေလွာ္ခတ္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ ျပည္သူေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ လူငယ္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားစြာ ပါဝင္ ေလွာ္ခတ္ေနၾက သလုိပဲ တခ်ိဳ႕ေသာ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားဟာ မိမိတို႔ဆႏၵအေလ်ာက္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေနၾကတဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားလည္း ရွိပါတယ္။ ဘာနဲ႔တူလဲ ဆုိေတာ့ ေလွႀကီးေပၚကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ေဘးမွာဆင္းၿပီး ေရကူးလုိက္ေနတဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားလည္း ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံ တုိက္တြန္းခ်င္တာက ေစာေစာက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေျပာခဲ့တဲ့အတိုင္းပဲ ဒီ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးခရီးအတြက္ ေလွႀကီးကို ေလွာ္ခတ္ျမဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္၊ ေလွေပၚမွာလည္း ျပည္သူူေတြ၊ ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္ေတြ၊ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတြ အားလံုး ပါဝင္ၿပီး ေလွာ္ခတ္ေနၾကပါတယ္၊ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ေဘးကေနၿပီး မိမိတို႔ရဲ႕ ဆႏၵ၊ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္၊ သေဘာထားအတိုင္း ေရကူးၿပီး သြားေနတဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ေလွေပၚတက္ၿပီးေတာ့ တစုတေဝးထဲ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးပန္းတုိင္ ေရာက္ေအာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ ဦးေဆာင္မႈေအာက္ကေန ေလွာ္ခတ္သြားၾကပါလို႔႔ က်ေနာ္တိုက္တြန္းရင္း နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္ပါတယ္”

ဒီအခမ္းအနားကို ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ႏုိဘယ္ဆု ရရွိခ်ိန္ ၁၉၉၁ ခုႏွစ္က ဆုလက္ခံ ယူႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္က လႊတ္ေပးဖို႔ ဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့တဲ့ အတြက္ ဖမ္းဆီး အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ 10/D ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႔က ႀကီးမွဴးက်င္းပခဲ့တာပါ။

အခမ္းအနား မက်င္းပခင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ေရႊညဝါ ဆရာေတာ္ရဲ႕ ရန္ကုန္ ဗုဒၶတကၠသိုလ္ ပိဋကတ္စာၾကည့္တိုက္ကို ဖဲႀကိဳးျဖတ္ ဖြင့္လွစ္ေပးတယ္လို႔ အခမ္းအနား က်င္းပေရး တာဝန္ခံတဥိီးျဖစ္တဲ့ ကိုကိုႀကီး (စမ္းေခ်ာင္း) က ေျပာပါတယ္။

အခမ္းအနားကို ႏိုင္ငံျခားသံတမန္ေတြ၊ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီေတြနဲ႔ စိတ္ဝင္စားသူ ျပည္သူေတြ စုစုေပါင္း ၁ ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒီကေန႔ အခမ္းအနားမွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေျပာၾကားတဲ့ မိန္႔ခြန္းေကာက္ႏႈတ္ခ်က္ကို ေဒၚစမ္းစမ္းတင္က စုစည္းတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

ေက်ာင္းသားနဲ႔ သံဃာ တညီတညြတ္ ရပ္တည္

2011-12-09

၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ အေနနဲ႔ လာမယ့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိ ဝင္ၿပိဳင္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူး ဆုိၿပီး ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၅ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္လုိက္တာဟာ မိမိတို႔နဲ႔ သေဘာထား တူညီ ေၾကာင္း ၂ဝဝ၇ ဗကသ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢမ်ား အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံလုံးဆိုင္ရာ သံဃာ့တပ္ေပါင္းစု က ဒီကေန႔ ေျပာလုိက္ပါတယ္။

AFP

ေ႐ႊဝါေရာင္ သံဃာ့လႈပ္ရွားမႈ ကာလအတြင္း ၂ဝဝ၇ စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၁ ရက္က ေမတၲာပို႔ရင္း စီတန္းလွည့္လည္လာေသာ သံဃာမ်ားကို လက္ခ်င္း ခ်ိတ္ဆက္၍ ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေနၾကေသာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ လူထုအုံႂကြမႈမွာ ပါဝင္လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ တခ်ဳိ႕က လာမယ့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ဝင္ၿပိဳင္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ သတင္းေတြ ထြက္ေပၚလာအၿပီးမွာ ခုလို ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထြက္ေပၚလာတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

၂ဝဝ၇ ဗကသ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢမ်ား အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ ကိုမင္းေသြးသစ္ကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြဟာ ပါတီႏုိင္ငံေရး ဆုိတာထက္ အမ်ဳိးသားႏိုင္ငံေရး လုပ္သြားဖို႔ ပိုၿပီး စိတ္အားထက္သန္သူေတြ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ လက္ရွိ လုိအပ္ခ်က္အရ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ NLD ပါတီ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္မယ္ ဆုိတာကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ဘာမွ ကန္႔ကြက္စရာ မရွိဘူး။ NLD ကို ဝန္းရံၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကိုလည္း ေထာက္ခံေပးမယ္။ တခ်က္ရွိတာက ႏိုင္ငံေရးအသိုင္းအဝုိင္းမွာနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာမွာ ၾကားေနရတာက ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြထဲက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္မယ္ ဆုိတဲ့ ကိစၥေပါ့။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ခ်ထားတဲ့မူက ၁၉၆ဝ ဗကသ ရဲ႕ ၆ ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ညီလာခံမွာ ကတည္းက ခ်ထားတဲ့ စည္းကမ္းေတြအရ အမ်ိဳးသားႏုိင္ငံေရးပဲ လုပ္မယ္ဆုိတဲ့အတြက္ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမဝင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဗကသ ကလည္း ၈၈ ေနာင္ေတာ္ေတြနဲ႔ အတူတူ ရွိတယ္ဆုိတာကို ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထုတ္တာပါ”

အလားတူပဲ လက္ရွိ ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံလုံးဆုိင္ရာ သံဃာ့တပ္ေပါင္းစုရဲ႕ သေဘာထားကို ေျပာခြင့္ရပုဂၢိဳလ္ အရွင္ဓမၼသီရီက အခုလို မိန္႔ပါတယ္။

“ဦးဇင္းတို႔ရဲ႕ ဦးေဆာင္သူေတြ ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဦးဂမၻီရတို႔၊ မင္းကိုႏုိင္တို႔၊ ကိုကိုႀကီးတုိ႔ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ အသီးသီးထဲမွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ သူတို႔ေတြ အျပင္ ျပန္မေရာက္ေသးဘဲနဲ႔ ဦးဇင္းတို႔က ဘယ္ႏုိင္ငံေရးပံုစံ လမ္းေၾကာင္းေပၚကိုမွ ေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းမွာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဘာလို႔လဲဆုိ အဲဒီလုိသာ ပံုေဖာ္သြားမယ္ ဆုိရင္ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕သမုိင္းစာမ်က္ႏွာေတြကို ခ်န္လွပ္ထားခဲ့သလုိ ျဖစ္မယ္၊ သူတို႔ကို ေစာ္ကားသလုိ ျဖစ္မယ္။ သူတို႔ ထြက္လာမွသာလွ်င္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပံုစံသစ္ကို ဦးဇင္းတုိ႔က သူတို႔နဲ႔ တုိင္ပင္ေဆြးေႏြးၿပီးမွ ပံုေဖာ္လို႔ ရမွာပါ”

ဒီကေန႔ ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ ၂ဝဝ၇ ဗကသရဲ႕ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာေရာ၊ သံဃာ့တပ္ေပါင္းစုရဲ႕ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာပါ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေျပလည္ေစဖို႔ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ၊ တုိင္းရင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြနဲ႔ သံဃာ့ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကို အျမန္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးေရးဟာ အေရးႀကီးေၾကာင္း ထည့္သြင္း ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

Thursday 8 December 2011

National Endowment for Democracy director visits Burma’s NLD

Thursday, 08 December 2011 22:13 Ko Wild


Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – A senior director of the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) met with National League for Democracy (NLD) leaders on Tuesday to discuss Burma’s economy and law enforcement.

NLD Vice Chairman Tin Oo said NLD leaders met with Brian Joseph, the senior director for Asia and global programs, to brief him on Burmese affairs.

The NED is a private, nonprofit foundation that supports human rights, press freedom, democracy and law enforcement around the world.

Tin Oo told Mizzima, “We told him that we have lawyers. But, our country lacks law enforcement. Political prisoners especially have suffered a lot. They want to conduct training workshops to promote our people’s knowledge regarding laws.”

Joseph met with Aung San Suu Kyi, Tin Oo, Than Tun, Hla Pe, Nyunt Wai, Nyan Win, Han Thar Myint, Win Myint and May Win Myint at NLD headquarters in Rangoon.

Tin Oo said they discussed sending Burmese lawyers to special workshops conducted in Thailand or European countries. They also discussed the government’s recent push for privatization which gave priority to government officials or business associates.

Joseph met with local media, social workers, small-scale money-lenders and women’s organizations at Mingalar Myanmar’s Rangoon office on Saturday. Mingalar Myanmar is a nonprofit group that promotes economic development throughout the country.

More Kachin Refugees Increase, Int'l NGOs Denied Access

By BA KAUNG Thursday, December 8, 2011


The Burmese government continues to deny the UN and international aid organizations access to war refugees in conflict zones in Kachin State, northern Burma, where thousands of local villagers have been displaced by fierce fighting between government troops and Kachin rebels.

Local relief workers estimate that there are more than 34,000 war refugees in the town of Laiza, which hosts the headquarters of the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the militia that has engaged the Burmese army for the past six months.

At least 7,000 local civilians were displaced in the first week of December from 30 villages in the townships of Momauk, Waimaw and Bamaw, all of which are close to the Sino-Burmese border, as clashes intensify between the two sides, according to local aid groups.

“No international aid has arrived in those areas,” said La Rip, an official with the Kachin Development Group, speaking by phone from Laiza on Thursday. “I don't understand why the government is blocking aid for these refugees. As far as I know, the KIA has said it will guarantee the security of aid officials if they come here.”

His organization and other local Christian aid groups have been assisting the refugees in the region since hostilities broke out in June after the collapse of a 17-year ceasefire between the Burmese army and the KIA, a nationalist Kachin militia that has demanded autonomy for predominantly Christian Kachin State for decades.

Nearly two months ago, Naypyidaw permitted the World Food Program (WFP) and Oxfam to distribute food to refugees in government-controlled areas of Kachin State.

WFP has so far delivered food assistance to about 10,000 displaced people in Kachin State—250 tons of food making up three-month family rations, according to Marcus Prior, the organization's Asia spokesman in an interview with The Irrawaddy.

“Should access improve for assessments and distributions, WFP is preparing for the possibility of an increased level of assistance,” he said, but also revealed that without new funding WFP is facing a break in its food supplies for its Burma operation in February which would negatively impact its ability to respond to the situations in Kachin and southern Chin State.

The Burmese government is yet to give broader access to these international organizations to attend to refugees in KIA-controlled areas.

“We cook rice with bamboo shoots during the rainy season,” a refugee was quoted as saying in Thursday's Eleven Weekly journal. “But now that the rains are gone and bamboo shoots are no longer available, we are living on the bark of young bamboo trees. But still, shelter and clothing are what we most need.”

The report also quoted a local aid volunteer in Bamaw Township as saying: “New refugee camps in the jungles were built just a few days ago. But there is still not enough space for all the refugees. Some camps have no roofs at all while some have their roofs made only with leaves.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently visited Burma, stressed to the Burmese government leadership the importance of giving aid groups access to the conflict zones. On the other hand, there are also accusations from locals that the international aid organizations are not doing enough in this crisis.

“These groups are more concerned about their relations with the Burmese government than helping and advocating for the refugees,” complained a local resident in Kachin State, highlighting the difficult position of international aid groups in the country which attempt to implement their projects in a non-confrontational mode and are mostly obliged to turn a blind eye to any sensitive issue, even though it may beg humanitarian urgency.

“The most effective approach appears to be through exploring needs and issues together with officials, with no confrontation and no blame, just looking for ways to meet needs together,” said an interviewee who explained the relation of NGOs with the Burmese government in a 2010 research conducted by Daekin University in Australia.

The situation has remained much unchanged despite the country's recent tentative political and economic reforms. And the future of the refugees looks bleak because of the ongoing armed clashes in this strategic region near the China border, and the growing numbers of displaced persons affected by the conflict.

Col. Zau Raw, a KIA official in Laiza, confirmed on Thursday that fierce fighting against government units continues to date in several areas of Kachin State and northeastern Shan State.

“There have been 50 armed clashes in the past week alone, and heavy fighting is still going on in Momauk Township and Sadong area in Waingmaw Township,” he said.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Invitation to participate and support protest calling for the immediate release of all political prisoners

Dear brothers and sisters,


We, 88 New Generation Students (UK) , would like to kindly invite you all, to support and participate in the protest calling on the Military Backed Thein Sein government to immediate release of all political prisoners in Burma.


It comes no surprise that the Thein Sein regime in Burma still holds an estimated 1,700 political prisoners while more than 500 political prisoners are remained incarcerated in prisons. Recently, following the ASEAN summit in Bali, Thein Sein said his government”does not agree with” the commonly-held belief that around 1,700 people are serving jail terms in Burma because of political activity. This shows the violation of the fundamental, civil, political and human rights of political prisoners who have been working hard towards freedom of our country under the hardship of the Thein Sein government.


In addition, rumors on impending political prisoners amnesty circulated throughout since then, but have not yet to materialize. Far from the prisoners amnesty, all prominent political figures who are serving 65yrs prison terms including Buddhist monks leader Sayadaw Gambira ,88 Generation Students Leader Ko Min Ko Naing, Female dissident Ma Nilar Thein were sent to far remote prisons in Burma. Further, the evil of this military backed Thein Sein regime is still committing the arbitrary arrest of political activists, human rights lawyers and targeted outrageous attack to the ethnic minorities.


Therefore, we, the youth generation, believe that the current crisis in Burma will not be solved by the fake tactics of the military dominated government.


Since denial of political status is denial of dignity, we would respectfully like to ask all organizations working for the freedom of all political prisoners to show our solidarity with the core aim of:

Calling on the Thein Sein government to immediate release all political prisoners in Burma.


Program details

Date: 8th December 2011 (Thursday)
Time: 12:00 to 1:00PM
Venue: Burmese Embassy
19A Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London W1J 5DX


Further demonstrations will be on:

(1) 5th Januaray 2012 ( Thursday), date , time and venue : same as above.

(2) 26th January 2012 ( Thursday), date , time and venue : same as above.

Your continued support and cooperation is essential to bring freedom, justice, human rights and democracy in Burma.



Yours sincerely,
88 New Generation Students (UK)

NLD Yet to Decide Where to Contest By-Elections

By SAI ZOM HSENG Tuesday, December 6, 2011



The National League for Democracy (NLD), Burma's main democratic opposition party, still has not confirmed which of the 48 constituencies they will run for in the upcoming by-elections.

NLD spokesperson Nyan Win said that party leaders, including pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, have not yet made any firm decision on the issue other than they are sure to participate in Rangoon Division.

“As the Union Election Commission (EC) hasn’t announced anything yet, we can’t say [which constituencies] either. We haven’t decided anything yet because we are waiting for [the EC] announcement and we will try to participate in every constituency that they announce,” said Nyan Win.

The NLD was dissolved because of its refusal to register for the 2010 election in protest at the 2008 Constitution which guaranteed a certain proportion of Parliamentary seats to the Burmese military. But the party decided on Nov. 18 to re-register and run in the upcoming by-elections.

The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party won a landslide in the 2010 election prompting fierce condemnation from rights groups and the international community.

Speculation is spreading that Suu Kyi herself will participate in Kawhmu constituency of Rangoon Division because she previously mentioned that she will represent the neediest people in Burmese society. Older leaders of the NLD, such as vice-chairman Tin Oo, will not stand in the ballot because of their advancing years.

Su Su Nway, a labor rights activist and NLD supporter, told The Irrawaddy that she will support Suu Kyi as much as possible if she stands in Kawhmu Township.

Su Su Nway was recently released from prison and has been awarded the 2006 Humphrey Freedom Award by Montreal-based rights group Rights and Democracy for her courageous struggle for justice and human rights.

According to NLD officials, when the EC announces details for the upcoming by-elections, the party’s central executive committee will decide which candidates will compete and the constituency each will contest. The candidates will be selected depending on their ability with women, youth members and different ethnicities being included.

Phyo Min Thein, one of the 88 Generation Students' leaders who currently coordinates the Youth Network for Education, said that he welcomes the intention of Suu Kyi to contest a constituency where there are poor and needy people.

The NLD is also preparing to re-open their offices across the country and re-organize executive committees in different townships. There are around 300 NLD branches all over Burma.

The 88 Generation Students issued a statement on Monday that they understand why the NLD is participating in the upcoming by-elections, but that they are not going to join a party and compete themselves.

“The 88 Generation of Burma will not consider having anything to do with the by-elections because their leaders such as Min Ko Naing, Ko Ko Gyi, Ko Htay Kywe, etc, as well as ethnic leaders and monks, still remain behind bars,” the statement said.

US Secretary of the State Hillary Clinton said during her recent visit to Burma that she welcomed the reforms which have enabled the NLD and Suu Kyi to stand in the upcoming by-elections, but that more needed to be done including the release of all political prisoners.

Monday 5 December 2011

ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမလႊတ္လ်ွင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ၀င္ဟု ၈၈ ေျပာ

ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမလႊတ္လ်ွင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ၀င္ဟု ၈၈ ေျပာ
ထြန္းထြန္း | တနလၤာေန႔၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၀၅ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၉ နာရီ ၂၅ မိနစ္


နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ႏုုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုုး မလြတ္မခ်င္း အစိုးရမွ က်င္းပသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ား၌ မည္သည့္နည္းႏွင့္မွ် ပါ၀င္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ မဟုုတ္ေၾကာင္း ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႔က ေၾကညာခ်က္ထုုတ္ ေျပာဆိုုလိုုက္သည္။

အားလံုုးပါ၀င္သည့္ ႏုုိင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ေပၚထြန္းေရးအတြက္ လိုုလားၿပီး ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား အပါအ၀င္ တိုင္းရင္းသား၊ သံဃာႏွင့္ ႏုုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုုး လြတ္ေျမာက္ျခင္း မရွိေသးသည့္အတြက္ ယခုုကဲ့သိုု႔ ဆံုုးျဖတ္လိုုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၅ ရက္ရက္စြဲျဖင့္ ထုုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္တြင္ ပါရွိသည္။

“၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႔” ကိုု ရွစ္ေလးလံုုးအေရးေတာ္ပံုုအတြင္း ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည့္
ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားျဖင့္ ၂၀၀၅ ခုုႏွစ္က စတင္ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏုုိင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ၂၀၀၇ ခုုႏွစ္တြင္ ကိုမင္းကိုႏုိင္အပါအ၀င္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္အခ်ဳိ႕ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရသည္။

အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ျပင္ပတြင္ က်န္ရစ္ခဲ့သူမ်ားမွာ ေျမေအာက္လႈပ္ရွားမႈပံုုစံျဖင့္သာ လႈပ္ရွားႏုုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး အက်ဥ္းေထာင္မ်ားတြင္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ၂၆ ဦး က်န္ရွိေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။

သိုု႔ေသာ္လည္း ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္မ်ားအတြင္း တသီးပုုဂၢလအေနျဖင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ၀င္ေရာက္မည္ဆိုုပါက ကန္႔ကြက္သြားမည္ မဟုုတ္သလိုု တစံုုတရာ မွတ္ခ်က္ေပးျခင္းမ်ဳိးကိုုလည္း လုုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမည္ မဟုုတ္ဟုု ထုုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မွ တဆင့္ ေျပာဆိုထားသည္။

၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္အေနျဖင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ၀င္မည္မဟုုတ္ေသာ္လည္း လူထုုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္ အပါအ၀င္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD မွ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၀င္မည့္အေပၚ ေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္း ထုုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္၌ ပါရွိသည္။

NLD ၏ ဆံုုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မွာ ဒီမိုုကေရစီစနစ္အရ အမ်ားသေဘာတူ ဆံုုးျဖတ္ျခင္းျဖစ္ကာ အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ အေထြေထြ သဟဇာတျဖစ္ေရးအတြက္ အသင့္ေတာ္ဆံုုးလမ္းေၾကာင္းကိုု ေရြးခ်ယ္ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ၎တိုု႔၏ ဒီမိုုကေရစီေဖာ္ေဆာင္ေရး လုုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကိုု ၀ုုိင္း၀န္းကူညီသြားမည္ဟုုလည္း ပါရွိသည္။

ယခုုလအေစာပိုုင္းက ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံသိုု႔ ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့တဲ့ အေမရိကန္ႏုုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဟီလာရီ ကလင္တန္၏ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း အက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုုး လႊတ္ေပးရန္အတြက္ တိုုက္တြန္းခဲ့ၿပီး ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒ သူရေရႊမန္းကလည္း လႊတ္ေပးမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကတိေပးခဲ့သည္။

ျပည္ေထာင္စုု လႊတ္ေတာ္နာယက ဦးခင္ေအာင္ျမင့္ကမူ “ႏုုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားဆိုုတာ သူ႔အခ်ိန္ေစ့ရင္ ထြက္သြားမွာပဲ” ဟုု လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားအား ေျပာဆိုုခဲ့သည္။

အစိုုးရမွ ခင္းေပးသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲလမ္းေၾကာင္းသိုု႔ ၀င္ရန္အတြက္မူ ယခုုခ်ိန္ထိ ဆံုုးျဖတ္ထားျခင္း မရွိေသးဘဲ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္း က်ခံေနရဆဲျဖစ္သည့္ ရဲေဘာ္ရဲဘက္မ်ား လႊတ္ေျမာက္လာမွသာလွ်င္ ထပ္မံညွိႏႈိင္းဦးမည္ဟုု ျပင္ပရွိ ၈၈ ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႔က ဆံုုးျဖတ္ထားသည္။

“က်ေနာ္တုုိ႔ ညီအစ္ကုုိေတြ ထြက္လာေတာ့မွပဲ စဥ္းစားဆံုုးျဖတ္ရမယ့္ကိစၥ ျဖစ္တယ္ဗ်။ အခုုက က်ေနာ္တိုု႔ ညီအစ္ကိုုေတြအားလံုုး မဆံုုၾကေသးဘူးေပါ့ေနာ္။ ဒါေတြက အဖြဲ႔ထဲက တဦးတေယာက္တည္းနဲ႔ ဆံုုးျဖတ္လိုု႔ ရတဲ့ကိစၥ မဟုုတ္ဘူး” ဟု ကိုုစိုုးထြန္းက ေျပာဆိုုသည္။

ႏိုု၀င္ဘာလ ၁၆ ရက္ေန႔ကလည္း ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ က်ဳိင္းတံုုေထာင္ရွိ ကိုုမင္းကိုုႏုုိင္အား မေကြးတုုိင္း သရက္ေထာင္သိုု႔ ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ျခင္းအပါအ၀င္ ရွမ္းတိုုင္းရင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးခြန္ထြန္းဦး၊ ၂၀၀၇ သံဃာ့ အေရးအခင္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ ရွင္ဂမၻီရအပါအ၀င္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအခ်ဳိ႕အား ေထာင္ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕မႈမ်ား
ျပဳလုုပ္ခဲ့သည္။

Saturday 3 December 2011

Ethnic leaders brief Clinton on conflicts

Friday, 02 December 2011 22:29 Phanida


Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrapped up her visit to Burma on Friday, she met leaders of ethnic political parties and social organizations to hear first-hand what’s it like to deal with the new Burmese government.

Secretary Hillary Clinton speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon on Friday. Photo: Mizzima

Secretary Hillary Clinton speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon on Friday. Photo: Mizzima
Sao Yun Paing of the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP) told Mizzima his party asked Clinton to seek the release of Shan National League for Democracy (SNLD) Chairman Khun Tun Oo, who is being held as a political prisoner.

“We told her about the losses to Shan State in terms of stability and peace. Our needs cannot be achieved by armed conflict. They must be solved by a political dialogue,” he said.

Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) Secretary Oo Hla Saw said his party told Clinton that Burma’s greatest need is a definitive resolution to the ethnic issues that prevent improvements in economic development, education and health.

“Ethnic areas are lagging far behind in education and health. We told her about the fighting in ethnic areas, our efforts to stop the civil war, and the difficulties our people have encountered,” said Oo Hla Saw.

Kachin religious leaders and social organizations briefed Clinton on the fighting in the state, the conditions of war refugees and the problems regarding education and health care. Sai Yaw of the Metta Foundation and Kachin Baptist Christian Association General-Secretary Dr. Sam Zun talked about current conditions in Kachin State.

Oo Hla Saw said Clinton told them that she understood their problems in dealing with the new government, and said that when she returned to the U.S., she would make further recommendations to the government on how to deal with ethnic issues.

The meeting with Clinton on Friday included RNDP Secretary Oo Hla Saw; CPP chairman Noe Thang Kup; Sao Yun Paing of the SNDP; Nai Khin Maung of the All Mon Region Democracy Party; Dr. Sai Montha of the Kayin People’s Party; and Sai Saw Aung of the SNLD.

Also attending were NGO representatives; an official from the Metta Foundation; a religious leader from the Kachin Baptist Christian Association; and an official from the Karen Development Network.
Burma pledges to Clinton it will release political prisoners
Thursday, 01 December 2011 23:21 Kyaw Kha


Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The speaker of the Burmese Lower House Thura Shwe Mann said on Thursday that he made a pledge to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that all political prisoners across Burma will be released.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, right, and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi have dinner at the U.S. Chief of Mission Residence in Rangoon on Thursday. Photo: AFP

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, right, and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi have dinner at the U.S. Chief of Mission Residence in Rangoon on Thursday. Photo: AFP
“She urged Burma to release political prisoners. In response, I said I pledged that we will do as much as we can in order that all citizens including political prisoners can be involved in building the nation and for the sake of national reconciliation,” Thura Shwe Mann said in the press conference in Naypyitaw after meeting with Clinton.

Earlier, Clinton met with Burmese President Thein Sein in Naypyitaw followed by a private lunch.

Burma’s relationship with the U.S. has evolved rapidly in the past several months to the point where the U.S. is now prepared to reinstate a modest aid program and not oppose moves by the International Monetary Fund and other key bodies to offer assistance to Burma as it attempts to emerge from two decades of isolation.

Burma’s big hope is that the U.S. will lift economic sanctions against the country, which were put in place after the former military regime attacked and killed hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in 1988 and began a systematic imprisonment of pro-democracy activists.

In the press conference, Thura Shwe Mann denied that Burma had tried to get North Korean nuclear technology.

“Some allegations said that some officials including me went there and signed an agreement regarding nuclear aid. That’s not true. All we did in North Korea is observe their defense systems against air attacks and their ammunition plants. We also observed their air force, navy and other affairs.”

The Lower House speaker also said Clinton told him that the U.S. will watch Burma’s efforts to move toward democracy, and pledged to reward it with aid to education, health and social programmes.

Clinton said in a press conference that the US is not ready to lift sanctions against Burma until it sees further concrete progress in reforms, including the release of political prisoners, a resolution to the bloody fighting in ethnic areas, a more open democratic system that guarantees political parties the right to open offices and travel to all areas of the country, and an end to Burma’s “illicit” dealings with North Korea involving missiles and nuclear technology.

She said that she welcomed the Burmese side’s pledge to release political prisoners soon and to abide by U.N. resolutions on missile and nuclear technology.

Thura Shwe Mann said Clinton urged the newly elected government to continue to make changes that improved the lives of the people and offered greater freedom. He said any improvement in relations with the U.S. would not alter Burma’s relationship with neighbouring countries including China and India.

Meanwhile, on Thursday 70 people including Burmese activists and others staged a demonstration at the U.S. consulate in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, urging the Burmese government to bring peace to ethnic areas and to release all political prisoners.

Win Aung, a member of the demonstration, told Mizzima, “We want Clinton to urge the Burmese government to hold an all-inclusive political dialogue, to try to seek cease-fires and release all political prisoners.”

Since early June, there has been widespread fighting between Burmese government troops and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Kachin State in northern Burma.

The Associated Press reported on Thursday said a senior U.S. official said President Thein Sein outlined his government's plans for reform in a 45-minute presentation in which he acknowledged that Burma lacked a recent tradition of democracy and openness. He asked for U.S. help in making the transition from military to full civilian rule, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Clinton replied that she was visiting because the U.S. was "encouraged by the steps” Burma had taken, the AP reported.

"We're not at the point yet where we can consider lifting sanctions that we have in place because of our ongoing concerns about policies that have to be reversed," Clinton was quoted as saying. "But any steps that the government takes will be carefully considered and will be matched."

Nyan Win, a spokesman for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, welcomed the U.S. package of rewards and said, "The incentives will help promote better relations and a better future for the country, and I hope the government will expand its reform process."

Burmese officials hope Clinton's visit, which started on Wednesday, opens a new chapter in U.S.-Burma relations. Burma’s overriding goal is a lifting of Western economic sanctions. The AP said that Clinton's historic journey is a culmination of behind-the-scenes overtures since a newly elected President Barack Obama told the world's despotic regimes in 2009 that the "US will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

Since then, Burma has released pro-democracy leader Suu Kyi from house arrest, installed an elected government, and opened a dialogue with Suu Kyi, offering Washington just enough of an opening to re-engage.

Three key sticking points block better relations: the remaining political prisoners in Burmese jails, a civil war it has waged against ethnic armed groups, and its illicit dealings with North Korea, which the U.S. believes could involve missile and nuclear technology.

For Burma, better U.S. relations offer a potential flow of badly needed aid and over time even a military relationship with access to U.S. technology and expertise. Better relations also would allow Burma to play off its dependency on China, its prime benefactor in terms of aid and lucrative energy deals involving oil, gas and hydropower. Burma benefits from its strategic position between India, China and Southeast Asia.

The AP quoted David Steinberg, the director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., saying: "They [Burma] do feel that they are in such a solid position that they can begin to do things that they could not do before."

Speech of General Aung San