Saturday 14 May 2011

Myanmar (Burma) Signature Campaign Calling for to FREE All Political Prisoners

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has urged all Burmese and Non-Burmese to join and stand with her to this "Signature Campaign" to request the followings to newly installed President of Myanmar (Burma).

U Thein Sein
President
Republic of the Union of Myanmar (Burma)

Date: 17 April 2011

Subject: Requesting for the implementation of measures leading towards National Reconciliation, Peace and Prosperity in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (Burma)

Dear Mr. President,

We sincerely desire national reconciliation, peace and prosperity in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. We would like to submit to you and the newly formed cabinet that unlike the usual run of elected bodies, the present administration cannot confine itself merely to development works for the country during its five year tenure. The new cabinet must discharge the grave responsibility of opening a new page in the history of the country by firmly establishing a genuine democratic system.

The people are earnestly looking to you and your cabinet to fulfill this duty satisfactorily.

We desire the new administration to demonstrate its magnanimity and positive attitude and to prove its commitment to democratic practices by the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience; by the speedy institution of conditions under which Burmese individuals and organizations at present taking refuge overseas can return to our country in comfort and security; and by the resolution of political issues, including problems relating to armed ethnic groups, through dialogue and negotiation.

We desire, Mr. President, that you and your cabinet should strive for the promotion of essential democratic principles and practices. Genuine national reconciliation and peace talks with armed ethnic groups constitute the best single means whereby the true benefit of the people could be realized. The people long for a cease-fire agreement between the Tatmadaw and armed ethnic groups and for the peaceful solution of political problems through meaningful dialogue.

Therefore as an initial step towards a negotiated settlement that would lead to national reconciliation, we would request the government to release instantly and unconditionally all prisoners of conscience; to declare immediately a cease-fire between the Tatmadaw and armed ethnic groups; to resolve political conflict through dialogue; and to create conditions that would enable individuals living as refugees in various countries abroad to come back to Burma in comfort and security.

People Desirous of Democracy and Peace




Please sign the petition here!


http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/signature-campaign-of-burma.html



The following is the Burmese version of the petition.

ျပည္သူ႔ပန္ၾကားလႊာ လက္မွတ္ထိုးေတာင္းဆိုေရး အားလံုးပါ၀င္ဖို ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ႏႈိးေဆာ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

လက္ရွိ ဒီမိုကေရစီကြန္ယက္ထဲက အဖြဲ ့အစည္းေတြ ၊ လူပုဂၢိဳလ္ေတြ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနတဲ့ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံ လက္မွတ္ထိုးေတာင္းဆိုေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမွာ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကို လုိလားသူအားလံုး တက္တက္ၾကြၾကြ ပါ၀င္ၾကဖို ့ လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ဒီကေန႔ ေသာၾကာေန႔မွာ နိႈးေဆာ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

“ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ လႊတ္ေပးေရး တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္အဖြဲ႔ေတြနဲ႔ တပ္မေတာ္ၾကား အပစ္ခတ္ ရပ္စဲေရး ျပည္ပကိုေရွာင္ခြာသြားရတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြနဲ႔ အျခား ႏိုင္ငံသူႏုိင္ငံသားေတြ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံကို လုံၿခဳံေအးခ်မ္းစြာ ျပန္လာႏိုင္ေရး စသည္တုိ႔ကိုေတာင္းဆိုထားတဲ့ လက္မွတ္ထိုးလႈပ္ရွားမႈ ေအာင္ျမင္ေရးအတြက္ ၀ိုင္းၿပီးကူညီေပးေစခ်င္ပါတယ္-“ (ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုုၾကည္)

“ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသူ ႏုိင္ငံသားေတြ မဟုတ္တဲ့သူေတြလဲ ေသြးစည္းညီညြတ္မႈကို ျပေသာအားျဖင့္ လက္မွတ္ထိုးႏုိင္ ပါတယ္ အေမထပ္ၿပီးေတာ့ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္ အေမတုိ႔လုပ္ေနတဲ့ လက္မွတ္ထိုးလႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးကို သမီးတို႔ျပင္ပက ဒီမုိကေရစီလိုလားသူေတြ အားလုံး ၀ိုင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ကူညီပံ့ပိုးေပးၾကပါ၊ အင္တာနက္ကတဆင့္ လက္မွတ္ေတြကို ပုိ႔ေပးၾကပါလို႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခ်င္ပါတယ္။” (ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုုၾကည္)

လက္မွတ္မ်ားကို စုစည္းျပီး ျမန္မာျပည္က အင္န္အယ္ဒီရုံးႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားထံ တင္ပို႔ေပးမည္။

Friday 13 May 2011

PUNISHMENT OF MONK POLITICAL PRISONER HIGHLIGHTS ON-­‐GOING ABUSE AND REPRESSION


The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has grave concerns for Ashin
Sandar Dika, a monk political prisoner, after learning he has been placed in solitary confinement
as a punishment for requesting adequate health care. Ahshin Sandar Dika is currently
incarcerated in Insein prison in Rangoon.
He was arrested on 11 August 2009 for waiting outside the Insein prison gates during
Daw Aung San Su Kyi’s trial. He was taken to the High Court office in Rangoon where he was
interrogated and severely tortured, resulting in a hernia and adversely affecting his long-­‐term
health. He was ultimately sentenced to 2 years in prison under 295 (a) of the Penal Code for
insulting religion, and is set to be released on 11 August 2011.
There are currently at least 225 monks in prisons in Burma. “Monks considered political
are held in particular contempt by the regime. After arrest they are forcibly disrobed and
subjected to torture and harsh treatment. Some have died in detention. We do not want Ashin
Sandar Dika to follow the same fate”, said Tate Naing, Secretary of AAPP.1 His family has
expressed deep concern for his deteriorating health condition and fear the worst if he is not
released immediately.
Ahshin Sandar Dika was punished for demonstrating for his basic rights, as he has not
been provided with adequate health care while in prison. As a response, he was placed in
solitary confinement where he is more vulnerable to torture and conditions are harsher. His
family has reason to believe he has been tortured in his cell, which could have a devastating
impact on his already fragile health condition.
At least 159 political prisoners are in poor health due to the harsh prison conditions,
torture, transfers to remote prisons where there are no doctors, and the denial of proper
medical care.
1Monk Ashin Nameinda died on 8 December 2010 in Moulmein prison due to the denial of healthcare. Ashin Arnada died in prison in
January 2009. 19 monks have died in prison labour camps in Burma. in direct violation of their religious beliefs.
P.O Box 93, Mae Sot, Tak Province 63110, Thailand, e.mail:
info@aappb.org
, web: www.aappb.org
“Ashin Sandar Dika’s case is emblematic of the abuse suffered by political prisoners in
Burma,” Tate Naing said. “Beaten, deprived of medical treatment, and cut off from the outside
world, they have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress, granting prison authorities
total impunity”.
The failure by the authorities to respond to concerns raised by prisoners about their
conditions of detention, and the ongoing arbitrary use of solitary confinement is a violation of
both domestic and international laws and standards. Despite the new ‘civilian’ administration,
which came into power through a fundamentally flawed election held in November 2010, Ashin
Sandar’s case is further evidence that changes made do not signify sincere steps towards
democratic reform and national reconciliation. AAPP urges the international community to
intensify pressure on the current administration to immediately and unconditionally release all
political prisoners.

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma)

Speech of General Aung San