ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအား ၈၈ ႏွင့္ NCUB ႀကိဳဆို၊ ဗကပ အႀကံျပဳ

ကိုေပါက္ | ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔၊ ဧၿပီလ ၀၄ ရက္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ၀၀ နာရီ ၀၆ မိနစ္

နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပမွ ေၾကညာခ်က္ျဖင့္ သေဘာထားမ်ား ထုတ္ျပန္ၾကရာတြင္ ျပည္တြင္းမွ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၊ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ အေျခစိုက္
ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားေကာင္စီ NCUB ႏွင့္ တ႐ုတ္-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္ရွိ ဗကပ တို႔လည္း ပါဝင္သည္။

“ယခုေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္သည္ ျပည္သူမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္အေပၚ ယုံၾကည္အားကိုးမႈကို ျပသျခင္း” ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အဂၤါေန႔ထုတ္ ၈၈ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားက ရႈျမင္ၿပီး “အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၏ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈအတြက္ ဝမ္းေျမာက္ဂုဏ္ယူေၾကာင္း” လည္း ေဖာ္ျပပါရွိသည္။

NCUB ၏ ‘ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွ တႏိုင္ငံလံုး အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးဆီသို႔’ ေခါင္းစဥ္တပ္ ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္မူ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္အား “လိႈက္လွဲစြာ ၾကိဳဆိုဂုဏ္ျပဳ”လိုက္ၿပီး ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးတို႔အတြက္ ေနာက္တဆင့္ တက္လွမ္းႏိုင္မည့္ အေနအထားသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိလာၿပီဟု ဆိုသည္။

ဦးသိန္းစိန္ အစိုးရ အေနျဖင့္ “ႏိုင္ငံအဝွမ္း အပစ္အခတ္ ရပ္စဲေရး လုပ္ရန္ႏွင့္ တႏိုင္ငံလံုးလႊမ္းျခံဳသည့္ လြတ္ၿငိမ္း ခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ ထုတ္ျပန္ျခင္း” မ်ား လုပ္ရန္ NCUB က အဂၤါေန႔ထုတ္ ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ တိုက္တြန္းထားသည္။

ထို႔အျပင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အကူအညီေပးသူမ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ “လူထုအေနျဖင့္ ခ်က္ခ်င္း အလုပ္အကိုင္ရရွိေစမည့္
ႏုိင္ငံဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးမႈအတြက္ အေျခခံအေဆာက္အအံုမ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ျခင္း” ကိစၥရပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ “ျပည္တြင္းေရေၾကာင္းလမ္းႏွင့္ မီးရထားလမ္းစနစ္မ်ား ခိုင္မာေအာင္ တည္ေဆာက္ျခင္း” မ်ားအတြက္ အကူအညီေပးသည့္ေၾကာင္းလည္း NCUB မွ အဂၤါေန႔ထုတ္ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာပင္ အၾကံျပဳထားသည္။

NCUB ကို တိုင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊ ၁၉၉ဝ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား၊ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္အေျခစိုက္ ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားျဖင့္ စုေပါင္းဖြဲ႔စည္းထားသည္။ ဗမာျပည္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီ (ဗကပ) အေနျဖင့္ ဧၿပီလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွ “ရဲရင့္တဲ့ ျပည္သူ၊ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ကို မုန္းတီးတဲ့ ျပည္သူရဲ႕ ဆႏၵကို အထင္အရွား ျမင္လိုက္ရပါတယ္”ဟု သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ထားသည္။

ဗကပ အေနျဖင့္ အုပ္စိုးသူ အစိုးရအဆက္ဆက္ႏွင့္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၇ဝ နီးပါး ဆက္ဆံခဲ့ဖူးသျဖင့္ NLD အေနျဖင့္လည္း သတိထားေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းသြားေစလိုေၾကာင္း ေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူ ရဲေဘာ္ဖိုးသံေခ်ာင္း က ဆိုသည္။

“အခု ႏိုင္လိုက္တာဟာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲမွာ အမ်ားစု မဟုတ္ေသးတဲ့အတြက္ ဗိုလ္သိန္းစိန္တို႔က ၾကည္ၾကည္ျဖဴျဖဴ လက္ခံလို႔ရတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲက်ရင္ ျပႆနာက အဲလိုမဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ အဲလိုမျဖစ္ေအာင္ စစ္အစိုးရဟာ တခုခု လုပ္လာႏိုင္တယ္။ အေျခခံဥပေဒကလည္း သူတို႔ကို လုပ္ခ်င္တာလုပ္ဖို႔ ခြင့္ျပဳထားေတာ့ အဲဒါေတြကို သတိျပဳရမယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔က အၾကံေပးတာပါ” ဟု မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

ယခု က်င္းပေပးလိုက္သည့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ထားသည့္ အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ား အား ဆြဲေဆာင္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း သူက ေျပာသည္။

“ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆို လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲမွာ သိပ္ကို ၾကီးမားတဲ့ အမ်ားစုၾကီးကို သူတို႔က ပိုင္ပိုင္ႏိုင္ႏိုင္ ရထားၿပီးျဖစ္တယ္။ အဲေတာ့ အကုန္လံုးကို ျဖစ္သင့္တဲ့အတိုင္းပဲ လႊတ္ေပးထားလိုက္ၿပီးေတာ့ နာမည္ေကာင္း ယူလိုက္တဲ့ဟာမ်ဳိးလို႔ပဲ
ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္။ တနည္းေျပာရရင္ ဗိုလ္သိန္းစိန္တို႔အတြက္ကေတာ့ သူတို႔ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ ေအာင္ျမင္သြားတယ္လို႔
ေျပာလို႔ရပါတယ္” ဟု ရဲေဘာ္ဖိုးသံေခ်ာင္း က ေျပာသည္။

NLD အေနျဖင့္ အေျခခံဥပေဒ ျပင္ဆင္ေရးကို လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္းမွ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ ဆိုသည္ကို မဆန္႔က်င္ေသာ္ လည္း “၆ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းအေျခအေနနဲ႔ေတာ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္းလုပ္ငန္းတခုတည္းနဲ႔ လံုးဝမျဖစ္ႏိုင္ပါဘူး။ တျခားနည္းနာ
ေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းစပ္မွ၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ရင္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲမွာ ကိုယ္က အမ်ားစု ရလာေအာင္ လံုးပမ္းမွ။ အဲဒါကလည္း စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ားက ခြင့္ျပဳေကာင္းမွ ခြင့္ျပဳပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ နည္းနာေပါင္းစံု ေပါင္းစပ္ရမယ္လို႔ ထင္ပါတယ္ ခင္ဗ်” ဟု ဗကပ ၏ သေဘာထားကို ထင္ဟပ္ေျပာဆိုသြားသည္။

Caucus calls for Asean to raise Burmese human rights issue

Tuesday, 03 April 2012 18:30 Mizzima News

The Asean Inter Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC), while noting allegations of irregularities and widespread electoral violations, on Tuesday welcomed the results of the Burmese by-elections held on 1 April, but called on Asean to raise the issue of ongoing violence and conflict in Burma’s ethnic areas during Asean Summit on Wednesday and Thursday in Phnom Penh.

“While the elections in Myanmar this Sunday can be seen as a step in the right direction, we must not forget that they have been overshadowed not only by widespread and well documented allegations of electoral improprieties, but also the continued violence and human rights abuses taking place in the ethnic areas,” said Eva Kusuma Sundari, Indonesian MP and AIPMC president.

“We congratulate Daw Aung Sang Suu Kyi on this historic day for her and her party and we stand by her in her continued efforts to bring human rights, justice and democracy to the people of Myanmar. But the hard work is still to come and we must not be distracted too long by this election,” she said. “The serious issue of continued conflict and human rights abuses in the ethnic areas must be brought to the forefront, as the human toll of these conflicts continues to be too high for any of us to ignore.”

AIPMC called on Asean to monitor closely the situation of human rights, in particular, the continued violent conflict in ethnic areas. UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Burma, Tomás Ojea Quintana, reiterated in his latest report in March that the legal institutions were not capable of investigating and bringing human rights cases to legal process. He also expressed concern over the breakdown of ceasefire agreements between government and armed ethnic groups and reports of allegations of serious human rights violations, including attacks against civilian populations, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, internal displacement, land confiscations, the use of human shields, the recruitment of child soldiers, as well as forced labour and portering.

The caucus said it recognizes the reforms undertaken by the government to date, but maintains that key minimum benchmarks remain unsatisfied.

“It is still unclear whether this government sees itself as a transitional government or the real representatives of the people of Burma. We must not hold back until real and substantive reforms have been enacted and the army is neutralized as a political force,” said Son Chhay, Cambodian MP and AIPMC vice president.

“We can take a moment to celebrate the election victory for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to be an inspiration to us all, but the hard work for her and her country is still to come. And it is our responsibility as fellow members of the Asean community to stand by her and the Burmese people as they continue to strive for genuine change in their country. We will continue to impress upon our parliaments how important this issue is,” he said.

Tens of thousands of people remain internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands more are living in refugee camps outside of the country, it said. Of particular concern is the plight of the Rohingya population, who are continually persecuted at home and abroad, and the ongoing conflict in Kachin State, where reports of serious human rights abuses continue, the group said.

While Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy Party have done a valiant job, their small percentage of seats in Parliament leaves them with little constitutional power, said the group. “They, along with reformers in the government, will need the continued support and backing of the international community and Asean to ensure that Myanmar’s transition to democracy will be both enduring and peaceful,” it said.

“As we have seen across the region, we cannot always rely on individuals, no matter how well meaning they may seem. We have to have the laws that protect us, as people can be changed and turned by power. When you change to a new political system, there will necessarily be many legal loopholes, and these holes must be plugged as quickly as possible. You must strengthen the systems and you have to neutralize the power of the army.”

AIPMC also called on Asean leaders to pressure the government of Burma to move swiftly towards conducting a comprehensive and transparent review of the 2008 Constitution and all national legislation. The review should be fully participatory, involving political opposition, civil society, and ethnic nationalities, and be carried out with the aim of amending, repealing or replacing laws that are inconsistent with international human rights and democratic standards, it said.

The Asean Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC) is a network formed by parliamentarians from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries. It advocates for human rights and democratic reform in Burma.

Suu Kyi urged to give priority to ethnic politics

Tuesday, 03 April 2012 14:22 Phanida

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Burmese ethnic leaders have asked Aung San Suu Kyi, the MP-elect of the National League for Democracy [NLD] party, to make her first priority solving ethnic political issues, after decades of political and armed struggle against the government.

Shan ethnic leader Khun Htun Oo said, “I don’t think that Aung San Suu Kyi will forget ethnic affairs. Because of events, she cannot ignore it.”

Released from prison in early 2012, Khun Htun Oo noted it is a critical moment for ethnic groups across the country, which are trying to engage with the newly formed government and to build trust while forging a new political relationship.

Suu Kyi has said that she would give priority to three areas: the rule of law, establishing countrywide peace and trying to amend the 2008 Constitution. In the by-elections, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won seats in 40 constituencies, according to official Election Commission results. Results for five more constituencies are still pending.

NLD candidates won in ethnic areas in Kalaw in Shan State and Mawlamyaing in Mon State.

The United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), an alliance of ethnic groups, said the electoral results show ethnic people trust Suu Kyi, and she could be a mediator in ethnic-government relations.

Ethnic leader Nai Hong Sar said Suu Kyi wants to work with ethnic groups and the Parliament should “give her responsibility to work for ethnic people.”

“I believe she will work to amend the 2008 Constitution,” he said, which has been cited as a way to realign political relations between the government and ethnic groups, which have sought more autonomy over their affairs.

A spokesman for the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) said Suu Kyi should give first priority to ethnic affairs like her father, General Aung San, who forged deep relations with ethnic groups.

“Establishing nationwide peace is the most important affair. I want her to do it first, and then she can work to establish democracy,” he said.

အာဆီယံ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ရဲ႕ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံ

Photo courtesy of 88 Generation Student website

၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လ ၂၃ ရက္တြင္ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ဦးစီးၿပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေလ့လာမႈကြန္ယက္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းသည့္ အခမ္းအနား၌ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္ စကားေျပာေနစဥ္။

လာမယ့္ ဧၿပီလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔ ၾကားျဖတ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကုိ ေလ့လာဖုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ အာဆီယံ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ရဲ႕ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ဟာ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြနဲ႔ ဒီကေန႔ သြားေရာက္ေတြ႔ဆုံ ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြကုိ သိလုိတဲ့အတြက္ လာေရာက္ေမးျမန္း စံုစမ္းတာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကုိကုိႀကီးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အာဆီယံ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ အေနနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေလ့လာေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြအတြက္ ျပင္ဆင္ဖုိ႔ အခ်ိန္မလုံေလာက္တာေၾကာင့္ ၈၈ မိ်ဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ လုပ္ကုိင္ေနတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြကေန အကူအညီေတြ ရယူႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ကုိလည္း အဲဒီ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔က ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေတြက ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ တစ္ဖြဲ႔ကို ဖြဲ႔စည္းျပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ အႀကိဳကာလအတြင္း စည္းမ်ဥ္းဥပေဒေတြနဲ႔ မကုိက္ညီတဲ့ အခ်က္ေတြကုိ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ မွတ္တမ္းတင္ေနသလုိ၊ လာမယ့္ ဧၿပီလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔မွာလည္း ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္မယ့္ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြကုိ ျဖန္႔ခြဲသြားေရာက္ၿပီး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေလ့လာဖုိ႔ကုိလည္း စီစဥ္ထားပါတယ္။

ဒီသတင္းနဲ ့ ပတ္သက္ျပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြကုိ ဦးေဆာင္လုပ္ကုိင္ေနတဲ့ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ ကုိကုိႀကီးကုိ အာအက္ဖ္ေအ အဖြဲ႔သား ကုိေဇာ္မုိးေက်ာ္က ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းထားပါတယ္။

By-elections, democracy and sanctions

By BILL DAVIS
Published: 31 March 2012

This week’s elections in Burma will no doubt add to the hype about democratic change in the country and have apologists of the nominally civilian government calling for the international community to drop economic sanctions.

If the elections are indeed fair, and this is a big “if,” it would certainly be a first in Burma and a benchmark on the path to democracy. But there are only four dozen Parliamentary seats up for grabs in this week’s election, so even if there is no foul play, then only a sliver of the Parliament would have been elected through a fair and transparent process. The winners of this election, and the rest of Parliament, would remain under the control of the military – as dictated by Burma’s 2008 Constitution.

A fair election would mark a departure from Burma’s corrupt past, but it is not reason enough for the international community to stop pushing for continued change. Nor is it reason to give amnesty for past human rights abuses or to allow sanctions to expire.

The US Congress has emphasised several criteria that must be met before sanctions are dropped, and these conditions should serve as a scorecard on which to measure democratic progress: unconditionally release all political prisoners; allow humanitarian access to populations in all areas of armed conflict; and end human rights violations, including rape, forced labor, child labor, and the use of child soldiers.

The Burmese government has partially met some of these conditions, but it still has a long way to go, and implementing substantive change will take time. For example, ending human rights violations does not just mean halting abuses but also ending impunity for violations and ensuring accountability for past crimes.

Burma needs to ensure that perpetrators of human rights violations can be held accountable according to internationally recognised legal standards, which demands the establishment of the rule of law. The judiciary in Burma is not independent from the rest of the government, and ensuring this independence is a necessary element of ensuring fairness and transparency in the country’s judiciary.

Burma also needs to shift from militarisation and build a truly civilian government that can keep its military in check. And lastly, it needs to stop violence against civilians, egregious human rights violations, and denial of humanitarian aid in ethnic areas.

This is no small problem: ethnic minorities comprise about a third of the population of Burma, and these areas have a long history of human rights abuses.

Burma needs to ensure that perpetrators of human rights violations can be held accountable

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have documented recent human rights abuses in several ethnic areas in Burma—in Karen, Shan, Kachin, and Chin States. When asked if they would return to Burma given the recent changes, refugees have answered with a resounding “no”—some refugees even laughed in my ace at the question.

With decades of violence and corruption to reflect upon, refugees have said that they don’t trust the government and do not believe that the changes are genuine. Indeed, extrajudicial killings, forced labor, religious persecution, and pillaging are still widely reported in these areas. Accounting for these violations would be a major step towards democracy.

If Burma is truly transitioning to democracy, it is certainly in the earliest of stages. With so many more changes still needed in Burma, it would be foolish to allow all sanctions to expire. The international community should not give up its bargaining chips too soon.

The sanction legislation calls for specific criteria that must be met, including the unconditional release of political prisoners, the granting of humanitarian access, and an end to human rights violations. PHR continues to support the renewal of sanctions until each of these essential elements is actualised. Additionally, PHR calls on the U.S. government to continue to use sanctions as key leverage until the Burmese government is able to make peace with its own people over past and present abuses.

Change may happen in Burma, but it will not happen overnight. The international community and the business interests pushing to end sanctions must show patience and should not reward modest changes with hefty rewards. Sanctions must remain until more substantive reforms become a reality.

Bill Davis is the Burma Project Director for Physicians for Human Rights

‘Elections Neither Free Nor Fair,’ Says Suu Kyi

By THE IRRAWADDY|

Aung San Suu Kyi cited repeated incidences of intimidation on the campaign trail. (Photo: Irrawaddy)

RANGOON—Pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi said that Sunday’s by-elections will be neither free nor fair because of widespread irregularities, but vowed to continue her candidacy to press forward with reform.

The Nobel laureate said opposition candidates had suffered stone-throwing incidents and other intimidation that hampered their campaigning in the run-up to the weekend poll.

The ballot is considered a crucial test of Burma’s commitment to democratic reforms and may well herald the end to punitive economic sanctions imposed by Western nations.

The 66-year-old told a press conference that the irregularities go “beyond what is acceptable for democratic elections.”

“I don’t think we can consider it genuinely free and fair if we consider what has been going on for the last couple months,” she said. “We’ve had to face many irregularities.”

When asked how far she would go to dispute the result, Suu Kyi said she would wait and see.

“We will have to see how the polling goes .. if the will of the people is represented,” she said. “We will have to see if these irregularities affect the result.”

Suu Kyi said there were attempts to injure candidates and cited two cases in which stones or other objects were thrown at members of her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), even causing one of the party’s security guards to be hospitalized.

There were “many, many cases of intimidation” and vandalism of party campaign posters. She blamed some of the acts on “people in official positions.”

Despite the irregularities, Suu Kyi said that the party is “determined to go forward because we think that is what our people want.”

The by-elections are likely to mark a symbolic turning point by bringing Suu Kyi into Parliament for the first time, an event that would raise hopes for a more representative government after half-a-century of repressive military rule.

The by-elections will fill 45 vacant seats in Burma’s 664-seat Union Parliament.

A victory by Suu Kyi and her opposition NLD would do little to alter the balance of power in Parliament but would give her a voice in government for the first time.

Asked how she wanted to aid the nation, she replied, “in a way to help all the ethnic nationalities to live peacefully and happily with one another.

“I don’t need an official position but if it makes my work more effective then why not. We have very unreasonable expectations!—we want to win as many constituencies as possible.”

And Suu Kyi vowed to make reconciliation in Burma a priority should she win a parliamentary seat.

“We have differences of opinion within the government … but we have faced many challenges over the years and we will face many more. I feel we can have a voice within Parliament even if we win about 44 seats.”

And Suu Kyi said she was overwhelmed with the strength of support she encountered on the campaign trail.

“Lots of people approached me during the campaign but particularly children jumping up and down and shouting for the NLD,” she said.

“I’m not going to visit all the polling stations [in Kawhmu Township where she is standing] but I would like to visit some of them—I do not want to [have] a disruptive effect.

And Suu Kyi said that there were few countries which have had such a chequered history as Burma with respect of prolonged conflict and related abuses.

“We are confident that we too can achieve reconciliation despite our record of violence and violation of human rights,” she said.

When asked if she believed that Burma could learn from the South African model of reform, she was positive.

“Certainly we would like to learn from as many countries as possible,” she said. “We would like to study all different patterns of reconciliation and see what we can gain from experiences elsewhere.

“We haven’t even really started our process of reconciliation officially. We are very interested in how other countries went about it and negotiated settlements.”

When asked whether she would want the perpetrators of human rights abuses to face trial, Suu Kyi quoted Arch-Bishop Desmond Tu-Tu, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, in that, “what we believe in is not retributive justice but restorative justice.”

Suu Kyi denied that she has had discussions with the government of China regarding democracy, but said that the by-elections were positive for the entire region.

“It’s a step towards step one towards democracy,” she said. “For the Asean community it’s an opportunity to assess if real reforms have taken place or might be taking place in the near future.

“Democracy in this country will be a victory for our people. Once we get into Parliament we will be able to start building towards democratization.”

Serious Voter List Fraud Uncovered by Observer

By THE IRRAWADDY| March 31, 2012 | Hits: 133

A man looks at election material posted outside a polling station in central Rangoon during the 2010 general elections which were widely condemned for vote-rigging. (Photo: Reuters)

An international election observer has uncovered a series of serious voter list irregularities ahead of Sunday’s crucial by-elections in Burma.

A total of 45 parliamentary seats are up for grabs in the weekend ballot but a preliminary report has uncovered the same name repeated up to 20 times and many dead people included on voter lists.

“The party’s members from the Maha Aung Myay Township said that they found a single name repeated as many as 15 or 20 times,” wrote the observer, who requested to remain anonymous, concerning Thanhlyat constituency in Mandalay.

“[The] name of a voter has been detected in two different polling stations. The names have the same name, father’s name and the NRC number,” said the report.

“Names of dead people in the voters list are in plenty. This perhaps reflects the inability of the heads of wards, villages and townships in entering the data correctly during the enumeration process.”

There were also problems in the Burmese capital Naypyidaw, according to the report.

“There have been allegations from the some groups, mainly NLD [National League for Democracy], that names of ghost voters have been entered in the list and migrant workers who have moved out of Naypyidaw and settled elsewhere permanently are being asked to come back to vote by showing that they are still registered as voters in the above mentioned constituencies,” he said.

NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi told a press conference on Friday that she was well aware of voting irregularities and that the by-elections “could not be considered free or fair.”

“Violation of the election law continues to happen,” she said. “We have asked them two times about violations of the regulations. But, they have not told us anything yet about this,” she said.

Tin Aye, chairman of the Union Election Commission, said that the government will conduct a free and fair election.