Friday, February 26, 2010

US lawmakers and government seeks to punish Myanmar regime


The United States on Friday criticized Myanmar's Supreme Court for not releasing Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with one lawmaker saying the time had come to tighten sanctions.

The military-ruled nation's highest court rejected an appeal by the democracy champion to be freed from house arrest. The verdict comes ahead of elections which have raised deep suspicions among the opposition and overseas.

"We condemn the Supreme Court's decision," a State Department official said, saying that Aung San Suu Kyi was being held under house arrest "for purely political reasons."

The official, who by protocol could not be named, said that the United States "strongly" urged Myanmar to free other political prisoners and allow them to participate fully in the political process.

Representative Joe Crowley, a Democrat who has long championed Aung San Suu Kyi, said the time had come for the United States to implement tighter sanctions that target military leader Than Shwe's regime.

"Aung San Suu Kyi's 14-year imprisonment has been a sham from day one," Crowley said.

"The cruel military junta must face consequences for violating the human rights of the Burmese people," he said, using Myanmar's former name of Burma.

The United States last year opened dialogue with Myanmar as part of the Obama administration's policy of reaching out to adversarial regimes.

The Obama administration argued that the previous tactic of isolating Myanmar had failed, although it said it would only ease sanctions in return for progress on democracy.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past two decades since her National League for Democracy swept 1990 elections. The junta plans to hold fresh elections later this year.

The opposition leader had her incarceration lengthened by 18 months in August after being convicted over a bizarre incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside home.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

TENSION FOR FIGHT


စစ္အစိုးရ တာ၀န္ရွိသူ မ်ားႏွင့္ “၀” ျပည္ ေသြးစည္း ညီညြတ္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ (UWSA) ေခါင္းေဆာင္ တခ်ဳိ႕တို႔က နယ္ျခားေစာင့္ တပ္အသြင္ ေျပာင္းေရး အတြက္ မူအားျဖင့္ သေဘာတူညီ ထားေသာ္လည္း ဆက္လက္ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ တင္းမာ ေနၾကသည္။
စစ္အစိုးရဘက္မွ စစ္ဖက္ဆုိင္ရာ လုံၿခဳံေရးအဖြဲ႔ အႀကီးအကဲ ဒုတိယ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ရဲျမင့္က ၀တပ္ဖြဲ႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးေပါက္ယူ ခ်မ္းကုိ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလ ၁၄ ရက္ေန႔၌ လားရႈိးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ လာေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆံုရန္ အေၾကာင္းၾကားခဲ့ၿပီး ၀တပ္ဖြဲ႔က ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့သည္။

အလားတူပင္ ၀တပ္ဖြဲ႔ကလည္း ၎တို႔ ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ျဖစ္ေသာ ပန္ဆန္းၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ လာေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆံုႏိုင္ရန္ ဒု ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ရဲျမင့္အား ျပန္လည္ ဖိတ္ၾကား ထားသည္ကုိ ယမန္ေန႔ အထိ အေၾကာင္း ၾကားျခင္း မရွိဘဲ ႏွစ္ဘက္ တင္းမာေနျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

“အစိုးရ ဘက္က ပန္ဆန္းကုိ ဖုန္းနဲ႔ ေျပာတယ္၊ လာရႈိးၿမိဳ႕ အထိ ဥကၠဌ ေပါက္ယူခ်မ္းကို လာေတြ႔ဖို႔ ေျပာတယ္၊ အဲဒါကုိ ဥကၠဌ ေပါက္ယူခ်မ္းက က်ေနာ္ ေနမေကာင္းဘူး၊ မသြားႏိုင္ဘူး၊ ခရီးက ေ၀းတယ္၊ လမ္းက ၾကမ္းတယ္၊ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ရင္ ပန္ဆန္းဌာနခ်ဳပ္ကုိ လာပါ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႔ လာႏိုင္တယ္ေပါ့၊ ေဆြးေႏြးမယ္၊ အဲဒါကုိ ယေန႔ အထိ အစိုးရ ဘက္က တစံုတရာ အေၾကာင္း မျပန္ဘူး”ဟု သွ်မ္းသံေတာ္ဆင့္ သတင္းစဥ္မွ ဦးစိန္ၾကည္က ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ ေျပာသည္။

ယင္း သို႔ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ကမ္းလွမ္းမႈ ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ၀တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားက အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံမွ အလိုရွိေနသည့္ ၀ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ၈ ဦးထဲတြင္ ဥကၠဌ ေပါက္ယူခ်မ္း ပါ၀င္ေနသည့္ အတြက္ စစ္အစိုးရအေပၚ သံသယရွိေနေၾကာင္းလည္း ၎က ဆိုသည္။

အပစ္ရပ္ တုိင္းရင္းသား အဖဲြ႔မ်ားအားလုံး နယ္ျခားေစာင့္ တပ္အျဖစ္ အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးကုိ ယခုလကုန္ ေနာက္ဆုံးထားၿပီး ျပဳလုပ္ ရန္ စစ္အစုိးရက ညႊန္ၾကားထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

အပစ္ရပ္ အဖဲြ႔မ်ားတြင္ အင္အား အႀကီးဆုံးျဖစ္သည့္ UWSA တပ္ဖြဲ႔က နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းလွ်င္ စစ္အစုိးရဘက္မွ ဒုတိယ တပ္ရင္းမႉး ရာထူးတခုသာ ပါ၀င္ခြင့္ ျပဳမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သေဘာထား ေပးထားသည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္ ေတာင္ပုိင္းရွိ ၀မ္ဟုန္ေဒသအား ကုိယ္ပုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရ ေဒသတခု အျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ေပးရန္ ၎တုိ႔၏ ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္ကုိ စစ္အစုိးရက ပယ္ခ်ထားသည္။

UWSA သည္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အေရွ႕ပုိင္း ေဒသတြင္ အေျခစုိက္ လႈပ္ရွားလ်က္ရိွသည္။ ယမန္ႏွစ္က အတည္ျပဳခ့ဲသည့္ “ျပည္ ေထာင္စု သမၼတ ျမန္မာ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ ဖဲြ႔စည္းပုံ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒ” တြင္လည္း ဝ ေဒသကုိ ကုိယ္ပုိင္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရ ေဒသအျဖစ္ ထည့္ သြင္း ျပဌာန္းထားၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

အေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္ “ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ရိွ ဟုိပန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ မုိင္းေမာၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ပန္ဝုိင္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ နားဖန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ မက္မန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ႏွင့္ ပန္ဆန္း (ပန္းခမ္း) ၿမိဳ႕နယ္တုိ႔ကုိ ခရုိင္ႏွစ္ခရုိင္ဖဲြ႔ၿပီး “ဝ” ကုိယ္ပုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရတုိင္း” အျဖစ္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ အဆုိပါ သံလြင္ျမစ္ အေရွ႕ ဘက္ျခမ္းမွ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ၆ ခုမွာ တရုတ္ ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တြင္ တည္ရိွသည္။

စစ္အစုိးရ၏ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ ေျပာင္းလဲဖြဲ႕စည္းေရး အစီအစဥ္သည္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည္ႏွစ္ ဧၿပီလမွ စတင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ ကခ်င္ျပည္သစ္ တပ္မေတာ္ (NDA-K) ၊ ကရင္နီျပည္ လူမ်ဳိးေပါင္းစံု ျပည္သူ႔ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္ဦး (က လလတ) ႏွင့္ ကုိးကန္႔ အထူးေဒသ(၁) စသည့္ အဖဲြ႔ ၃ ဖဲြ႔သာ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္မ်ားအျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းလဲခဲ့သည္။

၁၉၈၉ ခုႏွစ္မွစတင္၍ စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ အပစ္အခတ္ ရပ္စဲထားေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ အဖြဲ႕ေပါင္း ၁၇ ဖြဲ႕ရွိသည္။

READY TO FIGHTS FOR RIGHTS (BBC)


Their discipline is good, their uniforms smart and there is little doubting their sense of purpose or patriotism towards the red and green flag with crossed machetes they proudly wear on their right shoulders.

They are the next generation of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), and say they are not afraid to be the generation that fights in a civil war many fear may soon be upon them.

"The Union of Burma was formed on the basis of equality for ethnic people, but there has been inequality throughout history and we are still being suppressed," said cadet Dashi Zau Krang.

He is 26 and has a degree in business studies, but says inequality has stopped him getting a good job and driven him to join the military.
But he is not afraid.

"The Burmese army may be the strongest in South East Asia, while we are very few, but God will help us to liberate our people to get freedom and equality. This is our responsibility," he said.

It is a war the Kachin people do not want and one they cannot win.

But their generals believe a 17-year ceasefire could soon end as a Burmese army deadline approaches, demanding the forces merge or disarm.

They have already refused, and although their leaders are still pushing for a political solution, their commanders are preparing for the worst when time runs out at the end of February.

"I can't say if there will be war for sure, but the government wants us to become a border guard force for them by the end of the month," said the KIA's Chief of Staff, Maj Gen Gam Shawng.

"We will not do that, or disarm, until they have given us a place in a federal union and ethnic rights as was agreed in 1947."

The KIA and its civilian organisation have been allowed to control a large swathe of northern Burma as part of a ceasefire agreement with the country's ruling generals.

Trade with China

They provide power, roads and schools funded by taxes on the brisk trade from China as well as the jade and gold mines and teak.

But now soldiers are being recruited, veterans are being recalled and retrained, and an ethnic army is preparing to fight perhaps the biggest military force in South East Asia.

On the car radio are freedom songs, and at one of the training camps a course in traditional dance is being run - cultural nationalism and propaganda is strong.

A BBC team travelled to an area in northern Burma controlled by the Kachin army and its civilian arm, the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO).

We were taken to training camps and outposts, but could not walk into Laiza town to talk to people on the street for fear of being seen by an extensive network of Burmese or Chinese government informers and spies.

It made forming a balanced view very difficult, but the determination and planning of the military was clear.

High on a vantage point above their headquarters, trenches are being dug and tree trunks are being hauled and hewn into gun turrets piled high with earth.

They can see the Burmese army positions from here and they know this will be just one of the front lines if fighting breaks out.

A well-oiled and highly polished large-calibre anti-aircraft gun is produced, standing on a tripod in a bunker overlooking the lush jungle valley.

Guerrilla war

The gleaming gun is a statement, a display for the visitors, but the small metal plane stencilled on the sights looks woefully optimistic.

They are organised and say they have heavy weapons, but we did not see them.

There are around two dozen ethnic groups in Burma, mostly scattered around its borders, and the biggest have been in various states of ceasefire or civil war over the past few decades.
The KIA is one of the biggest. Their commanders say it includes 10,000 regular troops and 10,000 reservists, but it is impossible to know for sure.

The Burmese army is huge. It has an air force of sorts and artillery, and the KIA knows the only way to survive will be to withdraw into the jungle and fight a guerrilla war of attrition.

But civil war would create tens of thousands of refugees and create regional instability.

"If we are attacked the other ethnic groups will support us, as they know the same could happen to them," Gen Gam Shawng explained.

The nearby Wa ethnic group has tens of thousands of troops and resources funded by drug smuggling, and we were told a deal with them had been agreed.

Whether civil war comes here is now up to the Burmese government.

If they use this election year to solve what they see as the "problem" of the ethnic groups they will have a fight on their hands, and the region will have to deal with the consequences.

Friday, February 19, 2010

UN envoy deeply regretted Myanmar Junta for refusing Suu Kyi visit


မစၥတာ ကင္တာနာက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ခြင့္ မရသည့္ အျပင္ အေၾကာင္း ျပခ်က္ တစုံတရာ မေပးေသာေၾကာင့္ စိတ္မေကာင္းေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ျပန္လည္ မထြက္ခြာမီ ယေန႔ ညေနပိုင္းတြင္ ရန္ကုန္ အျပည္ျပည္ ဆိုင္ရာ ေလဆိပ္၌ က်င္းပေသာ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ ေျပာၾကားသြားၿပီး ေၾကညာခ်က္ တေစာင္ကိုလည္း ထုတ္ျပန္သည္ဟု ရန္ကုန္ အေျခစိုက္ စာနယ္ဇင္း သမားတဦးက ေျပာသည္။

ထို႔အျပင္ ယခုႏွစ္ က်င္းပရန္ စီစဥ္ထားသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲသည္ လြတ္လပ္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈ ျဖစ္ေပၚရန္ မလြယ္ကူေၾကာင္း၊ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကို လႊတ္ေပး မည္ဟုလည္း မထင္ျမင္ေၾကာင္း၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ တရားေရး စနစ္သည္ လြတ္လပ္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈ မရွိေၾကာင္း ကိုလည္း ေျပာၾကား သြားသည္ဟု သိရသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္းရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအေျခအေနမ်ားကို ေလ့လာရန္ လာေသာ သူ၏တတိယ အၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ယခင္အၾကိမ္မ်ားက ကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ စစ္အစိုးရမွ ေတြ႔ဆံုခြင့္ မျပဳခဲ့ေပ။

သူသည္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ရဲခ်ဳပ္ ဗုိလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ခင္ရီ၊ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး ၀န္ၾကီး ဦးဉာဏ္၀င္း၊ ျပည္ထဲေရး ၀န္ၾကီး ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ဦး၊ ဆက္ဆံေရး ၀န္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္ၾကည္၊ တရားသူၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးေအာင္တိုး၊ ေရွ႕ေနခ်ဳပ္ ဦးေအးေမာင္ တို႔ႏွင့္ ေသာၾကာေန႔ မနက္ပိုင္းက ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ျပီး ရန္ကုန္သို႔ ျပန္လာကာ ႏိုင္ငံျခား သံတမန္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္လက္ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့သည္။

ၾကာသပေတးေန႔က ကင္တာနာသည္ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေသာ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္(NLD) ဒုဥကၠဌ ဦးတင္ဦး၊ သတင္းစာ ဆရာၾကီး ဦး၀င္းတင္ အပါအ၀င္ အျခား NLD အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့သည္။

“ဦးတင္ဦးကေတာ့ ၇၄ ခုႏွစ္အေျခခံဥပေဒဟာ ပ်က္ျပယ္သြားျပီျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ ၇၄ ခုႏွစ္ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒအရ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားတဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းကို လႊတ္ေပးဖို႔သင့္တယ္၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ဒီအမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးထဲမွာ ပါရမယ္ဆိုရင္ လႊတ္ေပးဖို႔ေကာင္းတယ္ဆိုတာေတြေျပာျပပါတယ္”ဟု NLD ျပန္ၾကားေရး တာ၀န္ခံ ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေဆြက ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ ေျပာသည္။

ဦးတင္ဦးသည္ ၂၀၀၃ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္းက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္အတူ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ ခ်မွတ္ခံခဲ့ရျပီး မၾကာေသးမီကမွ ျပန္လည္လြတ္ေျမာက္လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

သတင္းစာ ဆရာၾကီး ဦး၀င္းတင္ကမူ ၉၀ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္ကို အေလးထားရန္၊ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံု ဥပေဒကို ျပန္လည္သံုးသပ္ရန္၊ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုးကို လႊတ္ေပးရန္ လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ဦးခြန္ထြန္းဦး အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ားကို ဆက္ျပီး ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားျခင္းသည္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ျပႆနာသာမက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေဖာက္ဖ်က္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု ကင္တာနာအား တင္ျပခဲ့သည္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္က ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ေျပာသည္။

ကင္တာနာသည္ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ေမလ အတြင္းက သူ၏ ျမန္မာျပည္သို႔ ပထမဆံုး ခရီးစဥ္တြင္ သတင္းစာဆရာၾကီး ဦး၀င္းတင္ အင္းစိန္ ေထာင္တြင္းရွိစဥ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ဦး၀င္းတင္ ေထာင္မွ ျပန္လြတ္ခါစ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလတြင္မူ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ အစီအစဥ္ကို လက္မခံလိုေသာေၾကာင့္ ဦး၀င္းတင္မွ ေတြ႔ဆံုရန္ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့သည္။

ကင္တာနာသည္ NLD အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား၏ စစ္အစိုးရ က်င္းပမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ပတ္သက္သည့္ သေဘာထားမ်ားကိုလည္း ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

“ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကေတာ့ အခုထိ အဆံုးအျဖတ္မရွိေသးပါဘူးလို႔၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ေတြ႔တဲ့အခါက်မွ ဆံုးျဖတ္သြားမွာျဖစ္တယ္၊ ဒါေၾကာင့္မို႔လို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ေတြ႔ေရးဟာ ပထမအေရးၾကီးသလို ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးၾကီးသန္းေရႊနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ေရးဟာ ဒုတိယအေရးအၾကီးဆံုး ကိစၥေတြ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္လို႔ ဒီကိစၥမွ မျဖစ္လို႔ရွိရင္လည္း ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး ထြက္ေပါက္ကို သြားႏိုင္မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ အန္ကယ္လ္တို႔ ေျပာျပ လိုက္ပါတယ္”ဟု ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေဆြက ေျပာသည္။

ကင္တာနာက သူႏွင့္ NLD အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား ေတြ႔ဆံုေျပာဆိုသည္မ်ားကို မွတ္သားထားျပီး သက္ဆိုင္ရာသို႔ တင္ျပေျပာဆိုမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။

ထိုကဲ့သို႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုရာတြင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားစည္းလံုးညီညြတ္ေရးပါတီ (တဆည)၊ တိုးတက္ေသာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသား တပ္မေတာ္ (DKBA) အဖြဲ႔၀င္တခ်ိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ၁၉၉၈ ခုႏွစ္ အတြင္းက စစ္အစိုးရထံ လက္နက္ခ်ခဲ့သည့္ ဘုရားကုန္း အထူးေဒသ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအဖြဲ႕မွ ပဒိုေအာင္ဆန္းလည္း ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည္။

သူ၏ ၅ ရက္တာ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ေတြေထာင္ႏွင့္ ဘူးသီးေတာင္ေထာင္ရွိ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား၊ ရခိုင္ေဒသရွိ အစိုးရမဟုတ္ေသာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္တြင္းရွိ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုရန္ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့ရာ ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ႕တြင္ ဗံုးေပါက္ကြဲမႈမ်ားျဖင့္ စြပ္စြဲအေရးယူထားသည့္ ရခိုင္လူငယ္ ခုိင္ေက်ာ္မိုးႏွင့္ အဂၤါ၀တ္ျပဳဆုေတာင္းအဖြဲ႔မွ ေဒၚေနာ္အံုးလွ အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားတခ်ိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။

ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကို လႊတ္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုေနသည့္ ကင္တာနာ ေရာက္ရွိေနစဥ္ကာလအတြင္းတြင္ပင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံေရး တက္ၾကြ လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား၊ လူမႈေရး ကူညီသူမ်ားကို ေထာင္ဒဏ္ခ်မွတ္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။

အင္းစိန္ေထာင္တြင္း တရား႐ံုးက ေဒၚေနာ္အံုးလွ အပါအ၀င္ ၄ ဦးတို႔ကို တနလၤာေန႔တြင္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၂ ႏွစ္စီ ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့ျပီး၊ နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္း ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး ကူညီေပးသည့္ ငါးထပ္ၾကီး ေက်ာင္းတိုက္မွ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေဃာသိတ ကို ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔တြင္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၇ ႏွစ္ စသျဖင့္ ဆက္တိုက္ ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားႏွင့္ တနလၤာေန႔က ေတြ႔ဆံုစဥ္တြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ ထပ္မံခ်မွတ္ျခင္း သည္ ဥပေဒႏွင့္ မညီညြတ္ေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ တရားစီရင္ေရးမွာ တရားမွ်တမႈမ်ား မရွိေၾကာင္းကို ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ထိုေန႔တြင္ပင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားတက္ၾကြသူမ်ားကို ႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္ဒဏ္မ်ားခ်မွတ္ျခင္းျဖင့္ နာမည္ေက်ာ္ၾကားေသာ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း ခ႐ိုင္တရားသူၾကီး ဦးေသာင္းညႊန္႔၊ ဦးညီစုိးတို႔ႏွင့္ ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ႕တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရမွ ေတြ႔ဆံုေစခဲ့သည္။

ကင္တာနာက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အားလုံးကို ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မတိုင္ခင္ လႊတ္ေပးျပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို လြတ္လပ္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈ ရွိေစရန္အတြက္ စစ္အစိုးရအား ေတာင္းဆိုထားသည္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ NLD အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး တက္ၾကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား၊ ၂၀၀၇ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကာလက ဖမ္းဆီးထားေသာ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား ၂၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ရွိသည္။

NLD ပါတီသည္ ၁၉၉၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ အႏိုင္ရရွိခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စစ္အစိုးရမွ အာဏာလႊဲေျပာင္းေပးျခင္းမရွိဘဲ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ပါတီ၀င္မ်ားအား အက်ဥ္းခ်ျခင္း၊ ပါတီ၀င္မ်ား၏ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ဖိအားေပးျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳခဲ့သည္။

စစ္အစိုးရသည္ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ေမလအတြင္း နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္း တိုက္ခတ္ျပီးခ်ိန္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရအလိုက် ေရးဆြဲထားေသာ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒကို အတည္ျပဳ မဲဆႏၵေပးေစခဲ့ရာ ၉၀ ရာႏႈန္းေက်ာ္ ေထာက္ခံမဲ ရရွိသည္ ဟူ၍ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည္။

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၂၀၁၀ တြင္ လြတ္လပ္၍ တရားမွ်တစြာျဖင့္ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ဟု စစ္အစိုးရမွ ဆိုထားေသာ္လည္း ယခုအခ်ိန္ထိ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဥပေဒကို ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာျခင္းမရွိေသးေပ။
A UN envoy said Friday he "deeply regretted" that Myanmar's ruling junta had refused to let him meet detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of elections promised later this year.

Tomas Ojea Quintana spoke out after meeting government officials on the fifth and final day of a trip that was focused on inspecting the human rights situation in Myanmar ahead of the first polls in two decades.

"I deeply regretted that my special request to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was not granted," Quintana told reporters at Yangon international airport before flying to Bangkok. Daw is a Burmese-language term of respect.

"I am disappointed that even this time I was unable to meet her at this crucial time in this election year, the first national election in 20 years," said Quintana, making his third trip to Myanmar.

Myanmar's ruling generals have promised elections later this year but have not yet set a date or issued any election laws, fuelling claims that the vote is a sham aimed at legitimising the junta's grip on power.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi has been in detention for 14 of the last 20 years. She had her house arrest extended by 18 months in August after a bizarre incident in which an American man swan to her lakeside home.

"I specially requested to meet with Daw Aung Suu Kyi in advance of my mission. Nonetheless this meeting did not take place. I am disappointed," added Quintana, who was appointed as envoy in 2008.

The Argentinian diplomat was also refused access during his visit to reclusive junta supremo Senior General Than Shwe, the man credited with taking all important decisions in Myanmar.

Instead he held talks on Friday in the remote capital Naypyidaw with Foreign Minister Nyan Win and Home Affairs minister Maung Oo, as well as the chief justice, attorney general and police chief, officials said.

Quintana was allowed to meet key figures from Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) during his visit, including vice chairman Tin Oo, who was freed from house arrest on February 13 after seven years in detention.

"We met for about one hour. We discussed the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the political prisoners," Tin Oo said after the meeting late Thursday.

"We also spoke of our request for a meeting between the Senior General and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and for a meeting between (her) and our central committee members so that we can continue our work for the future," he said.

The NLD has not yet said whether it will take part in the polls, the first in Myanmar since 1990 when the NLD won by a landslide. The military subsequently annulled the result.

Myanmar's new constitution, voted through in a 2008 referendum just days after a devastating cyclone killed around 138,000 people, effectively bars Suu Kyi from standing and reserves a quarter of legislative seats for the military.

The junta has also continued a crackdown on dissent ahead of the polls.

A court at Yangon's notorious Insein prison sentenced Buddhist abbot Gaw Thita to seven years in jail on various charges on Wednesday, the opposition said, the fifth dissident to be imprisoned during Quintana's visit alone.

Gaw Thita was arrested in August as he returned from a trip to Taiwan, while seven other monks detained with him were later freed. His lawyer plans to appeal, former NLD lawyer Aung Thein said.

Four women activists were sentenced to two years each with hard labour on Monday, the same day Quintana arrived in Myanmar, for donating literature to a monastery.

The United Nations says there are at least 2,100 political prisoners languishing in Myanmar's notorious jails.

During his latest trip Quintana visited a jail in a northwestern town near the Bangladeshi border and also the notorious Insein Prison in Yangon, where Suu Kyi was kept while on trial last year.

Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962 and remains under heavy sanctions from western nations led by the United States, although Washington has recently tried out a policy of engagement with the junta.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Abbot sentenced to seven years by Junta for helping Nagis vistims


The Burmese military junta’s judiciary continued to hand down harsh verdicts, with an abbot, who had assisted Cyclone Nargis victims, being sentenced to seven years in prison yesterday by a special court in session inside the Insein prison precincts.

The Rangoon western district court sentenced Abbot U Gaw Thita from the Rangoon Nga Htat Gyi monastery under the Immigration Act, Foreign Exchange Regulation Act and Unlawful Associations Act.

“Deputy District Judge (3) Tin Htut and law officer (public prosecutor) Daw Khin Po pronounced the judgment from the western district court bench,” an opposition source said.

The monk was arrested from Rangoon Mingaladon airport on August 28 last year after returning from Taiwan. Seven other monks were also arrested along with him on the same day from the airport but they were released after being questioned for a day. Abbot U Gaw Thita was the only one to be prosecuted.

Rangoon based legal advisor Aung Thein told Mizzima that trying a person entering the country with a valid passport and visa under the Immigration Act and Unlawful Associations Act is not in keeping with the law.

“As for charging him under the Foreign Exchange Act, all eight monks had some foreign currency when they entered Burma. One of them testified in court and said he exchanged his foreign currency the next day after being released from a day’s detention for they could not exchange it at the airport as they were arrested. So the trial under the Foreign Exchange Act is contrary to the law as well,” he added.

Three and-a-half months after the monk was arrested, he was produced in court on December 15. The period of judicial custody is counted from that date till the date of the court verdict.

“But the period between the arrest date and the begining of the trial is not taken as judicial custody. So his three months in judicial custody was not taken into account, which is also contrary to the law,” Aung Thein said.

Meanwhile, Burmese-American citizen Aye Min Khaing is being held in Insein prison in solitary confinement for protesting against lack of treatment of prisoners, who had contracted the AIDS virus. But his case is not yet known, a source close to prison officials said.

UN Envoy Visits Insein as Prisoners Demand Better Conditions

ရန္ကုန္ၿမဳိ႕ အင္းစိန္အက်ဥ္းစခန္းအတြင္းရွိ အက်ဥ္းသားတုိ႔က ဆုံး႐ႈံးေနေသာ အက်ဥ္းသားအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ သက္ဆုိင္ရာ ေထာင္အာဏာပုိင္တုိ႔ထံ အခ်က္ (၅) ခ်က္ကုိ ယမန္ေန႔က တင္ျပေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့သည္။

အဆိုပါေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္မ်ားမွာ (၁) သတင္းစာအပါအဝင္ စာေပဖတ္႐ႈခြင့္ ျပည့္ျပည့္ဝဝရရွိေရး၊ (၂) က်န္းမာေရး ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈ ျပည့္ျပည့္ဝဝ ရရွိေရး၊ (၃) အက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံး ပုိမုိေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အစားအေသာက္ ရရွိေရး၊ (၄) ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အေဆာင္ပရဝဏ္အတြင္း ေထာင္ပိတ္ခ်ိန္မွအပ အခ်ိန္ျပည့္သြားလာႏုိင္ေရး၊ (၅) စာေပေရးသားေလ့က်င့္ခြင့္ ရရွိေရးတုိ႔ ျဖစ္သည္။

“ဒီေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္က အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ထဲက အက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံးရဲ႕ ကုိယ္စားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေထာင္ထဲမွာ က်န္းမာေရးနဲ႔ မညီၫြတ္ေစတဲ့ အစားအစာ ကိစၥေတြနဲ႔ စာေပ ေလ့လာေရးသားခြင့္ေတြ ေပးဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆုိတာ။ ဒီေန႔မွာ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ကုိ မစၥတာ ကင္တားနား သြားေရာက္ေနတာနဲ႔ အခ်ိန္ကုိက္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ လုပ္ခဲ့ပုံရတယ္” ဟု ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) မွ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ကုိတိတ္ႏုိင္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ကုလသမဂၢ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိယ္စားလွယ္ မစၥတာ ကင္တားနားသည္ ယေန႔ ေန႔လယ္ (၁၂) နာရီတြင္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား (၃၀၀) ခန္႔ရွိသည့္ အင္းစိန္အက်ဥ္းစခန္းသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ကုလသမဂၢ႐ုံးမွ သိရသည္။

အက်ဥ္းေထာင္အတြင္းသုိ႔ စာအုပ္မ်ား ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ရာတြင္ အခ်ိန္ၾကာျမင့္ျခင္း၊ ျဖတ္ေတာက္ျခင္း၊ လုံးဝမရရွိျခင္း၊ တုိက္ပိတ္ အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအတြက္ မိလႅာခြက္မ်ား အဖုံးမပါျခင္း၊ ဆရာဝန္ႏွင့္ေဆးဝါး လုံေလာက္မႈ မရွိျခင္း၊ အန႔ံမေကာင္းသည့္ ဟင္းမ်ား ေကြၽးေမြးျခင္း၊ မိသားစုထံ စာေရးသားခြင့္ မရျခင္း၊ ေဘာပင္၊ စာရြက္ ေတြ႔ရွိပါက စစ္ေခြးတုိက္ပုိ႔ေဆာင္၍ အေရးယူျခင္းတုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ယင္းကဲ့သုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိရျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ကုိတိတ္ႏုိင္က “ကင္တားနားက အက်ဥ္းသားေတြရဲ႕ အခြင့္အေရးတခ်ဳိ႕အတြက္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးႏိုင္မယ္လုိ႔ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ပါတယ္။ ေတြ႔သင့္တဲ့သူေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရခဲ့ရင္ေတာ့ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္မွာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ထိ အေျခအေန ဆုိးရြားေနလဲဆုိတာ သူ သိမွာပါ” ဟု ဆုိသည္။

အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ ခုိင္လုံမႈမရွိဘဲ ထင္ရွားသည့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအား ေဝးလံေသာ နယ္ေထာင္အသီးသီးသုိ႔ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္လုိက္သည့္အေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အထူးကုိယ္စားလွယ္က ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရထံ တင္ျပေတာင္းဆုိေပးရန္အတြက္လည္း အက်ဥ္းသားမိသားစုဝင္တုိ႔က ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေနၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီ (၁၆၊ ၁၇) ရက္တုိ႔တြင္ မစၥတာ ကင္တားနား၏ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း စစ္ေတြအက်ဥ္းစခန္းႏွင့္ ဘူးသီးေတာင္အက်ဥ္းစခန္းရွိ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား (၉) ဦးႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆုံခြင့္ရရွိခဲ့သည္။

ကုလသမဂၢ႐ုံး (ရန္ကုန္) ျပန္ၾကားေရးဌာနမွ ဦးေအးဝင္းက “ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္က ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြနဲ႔ တေယာက္ခ်င္းစီ သီးျခားေတြ႔ခြင့္ရခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘူးသီးေတာင္ေထာင္မွာ (၃) နာရီေလာက္ ၾကာခဲ့တယ္” ဟု ေခတ္ၿပဳိင္သုိ႔ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကုိယ္စားလွယ္သည္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ အဂၤါေန႔၌ စစ္ေတြအက်ဥ္းစခန္းရွိ ဦးၾကည္သန္း၊ အရွင္စႏၵာသီရိ၊ ကုိေအာင္ထြန္းျမင့္၊ ျပည့္ၿဖဳိးလႈိင္တုိ႔ႏွင့္လည္းေကာင္း ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔တြင္ ဘူးသီးေတာင္အက်ဥ္းစခန္းရွိ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ျဖစ္ေသာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးေက်ာ္မင္း၊ ရွမ္းမ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးထြန္းညိဳ၊ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကုိေဌးႂကြယ္အပါအဝင္ ကုိျမတ္ထြန္း၊ မီယာအာမက္တုိ႔ႏွင့္လည္းေကာင္း အသီးသီးေတြ႔ဆုံခဲ့သည္။


In a letter leaked ahead of a visit by the UN human rights envoy to Burma on Thursday, political prisoners at Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison demanded improved conditions, including access to reading materials and better food and health care.

The UN envoy, Tomás Ojea Quintana, went to the prison at noon on Thursday as part of a five-day visit to the country to examine the Burmese authorities' treatment of political prisoners.
According to the letter, rice given to prisoners is stale and mixed with small stones. It also said that although prisoners are allowed to receive books and newspapers from relatives, all reading material is heavily censored.

“Books and journals our families gave to us have been cut out and torn apart,” the letter reads.

Of the more than 2,000 political prisoners in Burma, nearly 400 are detained in Insein Prison, the country's largest prison. Around 300 of the political prisoners currently serving sentences at the prison were arrested in the aftermath of monk-led mass protests in September 2007.

The authenticity of the letter was confirmed by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thailand-based Burmese human rights group.

“We can only confirm that the letter did come from the political prisoners,” said Bo Kyi, the AAPP joint-secretary. “But we cannot tell you how it came out for security reasons.”

On Wednesday, Quintana traveled to northwestern Arakan State, where he met several political prisoners at Buthidaung Prison, including Htay Kywe, a prominent student activist serving a 65-year sentence for his role in the 2007 uprising.

After his prison visit, Quintana will meet with Tin Oo, the vice-chairman of the opposition National Leagues for Democracy, who was released from six years of house arrest last weekend.

The UN envoy has asked the ruling military junta to release all political prisoners and ensure that elections to be held later this year are fair and transparent.

Monday, February 15, 2010

BURMA MILITARY OFFICLADOMS WELCOMS NORTH KOREAN REGIME BIRTHDAY


Lt-Gen Tin Aye, ranked No 5 in the Tatmadaw (Burmese armed forces) hierarchy, attended a ceremony at the Chartrium Hotel in Rangoon on Sunday to mark the birthday of the North Korean leader.

The state-run The New Light of Myanmar on Monday ran a front-page story with a photograph of Lt-Gen Tin Aye and North Korean Ambassador H.E. Kim Sok Chol holding hands together at a welcome reception. Kim Jong Il's birthday will be on Tuesday.

Senior ministers including Nyan Win, the minister of foreign affairs; Maj-Gen Htay Oo, the minister of agriculture and irrigation and Maj Brig-Gen Aung Thein Lin, the chairman of the Yangon City Development Committee also attended the ceremony.

Analysts said the presence of Tin Aye signified a warmer relationship between the two countries.

A graduate of Defense Services Academy-9, 64-year-old Tin Aye has made official visits to various countries, including China, North Korea, Russia and Ukraine to procure arms and military equipment. He chairs the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), often regarded as the armed forces' business arm in handling trade.

Analysts say Burma's military leaders see a kindred spirit in Kim Jong Il as a politician who dares to confront the United States and the West.

A full-page birthday tribute to the North Korean leader was approved by Burma's censorship board, and the Burmese language Popular Journal published a full-page story this week.

The article is expected to be carried by other journals when they appear on Wednesday.

In the privately run journal, the author, Maung Wint Htun, described Kim as a “wise” and “patriotic” leader who has created nuclear and guided missile programs, and other industries. The article praised Kim for sacrificing his life for the future of North Korea.

Burma and North Korea have developed a military relationship since the two countries restored diplomatic ties in 2007. Analysts believe that clandestine military ties between the two countries may have been reestablished as early as 1999, when junta officials paid a low-profile visit to North Korea.

Gen Shwe Mann, the regime's No 3 man, made a secret visit to Pyongyang in November 2008, according to a secret report leaked by Burmese officials in 2009.

During the visit, Shwe Mann signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with North Korea for military cooperation between the two countries.

In the MOU, North Korea would build or supervise the construction of special Burmese military facilities, including tunnels and caves in which missiles, aircraft and even naval ships could be hidden. Burma would also receive expert training for its special forces, air defense training, plus a language training program between personnel in the two armed forces.

In July 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern over military links between North Korea and Burma, after evidence emerged that the Burmese junta may be trying to acquire nuclear technology from Pyongyang.

“We know that there are also growing concerns about military co-operation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously,” Clinton told journalists in Bangkok during a visit to Southeast Asia. “It would be destabilizing for the region. It would pose a direct threat to Burma's neighbors.”

Military analysts say the North Korean regime has provided Burma with weapons, military technology transfers and expertise in underground tunneling used for concealing secret military installations and since 2002, dozens of North Korean technicians have assisted the Burmese armed forces.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

US Senator Jim Webb wants to play more political check with Regime


Senator Jim Webb, who paid a rare visit to Myanmar last year, called Thursday for the United States to keep engaging the military regime after it handed a three-year sentence to a US citizen.

Webb, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia, said he was concerned about Myanmar's sentence on Thursday of activist Kyaw Zaw Lwin, who also goes by Nyi Nyi Aung.

"The circumstances of Kyaw Zaw Lwin's arrest, confinement and trial demonstrate clearly the need for more consistent high-level engagement between our two governments," said Webb, a Democrat from Virginia.

"It is strongly in the national interest of the United States to continue to promote a democratic transition in Burma," Webb said, using Myanmar's former name.

Webb last year visited Myanmar and secured the release of an eccentric American who had swum to the home of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest.

The United States has demanded that the regime immediately release Kyaw Zaw Lwin, who has been active in Myanmar's pro-democracy movement and said he returned to his native country to see his ailing mother.

The court convicted him of fraud and forgery, in part for not formally renouncing his former nationality.

The conviction led Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to call on President Barack Obama's administration to consider tightening sanctions on the regime.

The Obama administration last year entered talks with Myanmar to coax it out of isolation. The regime plans this year to hold elections, which Western governments and the opposition fear will be a sham.

Ojea Quintana wants to meet Suu Kyi


UN rights envoy asks Myanmar to allow Suu Kyi visit
Thu Feb 11, 2010 9:59am EST* Ojea Quintana makes third visit to Myanmar next week

* Wants to meet political party leaders before elections



GENEVA, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The United Nations human rights investigator for Myanmar called on the ruling junta on Thursday to let him meet pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his third visit to the country next week.

Myanmar, once known as Burma, is preparing for its first elections in 20 years, the final step in a democratic "road map" it says will end almost half a century of unbroken army rule.

"I hope that my request to the government to meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will be granted this time. It would be important for me to meet with political party leaders in the context of this year's landmark elections," Tomas Ojea Quintana said in a statement.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi is one of more than 2,100 political prisoners in Myanmar.

She has been detained for 15 of the past 21 years and was sentenced to a further 18 months of house arrest last August for harbouring an American who swam uninvited to her lakeside home.

The guilty verdict sparked an international outcry, and was dismissed by critics as a way of keeping her in detention for the elections, which many observers expect in October.

The approach of elections makes this year a critical time for the people of Myanmar, according to Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar.

The Argentine lawyer and human rights expert, who has served in the independent post since May 2008, is making his third visit to Myanmar from Feb. 15-19 at government invitation. He was denied permission to visit Suu Kyi during previous visits.

Ojea Quintana plans to meet senior government officials and press his earlier recommendations, including the need to release political prisoners and revise domestic laws to comply with international human rights standards, the statement said.

He also plans to travel to Northern Rakhine state, home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group, to evaluate the human rights situation there.

He will report his findings to the U.N. Human Rights Council during its next regular session in Geneva in March. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, editing by Tim Pearce)

KO KYAW THU'S REFLECTION


ကက္ကင္း။

ပီတိျဖစ္လိုက္ရသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။

ရင္ခုန္လိုက္ရသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။

ေပ်ာ္လိုက္ၾကသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။


လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ( ၅ ) ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္...ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးရက္မ်ားႏွင့္ ရုပ္ရွင္ အႏုပညာသည္မ်ား၏ မွတ္တိုင္မ်ား စိုက္ထူခဲ့ၾကသည့္ည....။

အကယ္ဒမီည။

ထိုေန႔...ထိုညမ်ားသည္ မိမိႏွင့္ မသက္ဆိုင္ေတာ့။

ရုပ္ရွင္အႏုပညာေလာကႏွင့္ တဖက္သက္ ကြားရွင္းျပတ္စဲ ျပီးစီးခဲ့သည္မွာ ( ၂ ) ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ ( ၃ ) ႏွစ္ထဲသို႔ ၀င္လာခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္သည္။

အေၾကာင္းရင္းစစ္ေသာ္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္ တစ္ေယာက္၏ လုပ္ရိုးလုပ္စဥ္ တစ္ရပ္ေပၚ အေျခခံသြားသည္။

မိမိသည္ ေအာ္ဟစ္ဆူပူေသာင္းက်န္း မိသူမဟုတ္။

မိမိသည္ လက္သီးလက္ေမာင္းတန္းဖို႔ ေနေနသာသာ လက္ႏွစ္ဘက္ကို မိမိပခံုးထက္ထိပင္ မ မခဲ့။

ရွိေစေတာ့...ကိုယ့္ကံႏွင့္ကို ကမၻာေျမၾကီး ေပၚရွိ ျမန္မာျပည္ၾကီး ထဲသို႔ေရာက္လာခဲ့ျပီးကိုး။့

သို႔ေသာ္ ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါသည္ အမိျမန္မာျပည္။

ေက်းဇူးၾကီးလွပါသည္ ( အဘ ) ဘဘဦးသုခ။

မိမိ၏ ပိရိတ္သတ္၊ မိမိ၏ ေက်းဇူးရွင္မ်ား၊ မိမိႏွင့္ ပါ၀င္ပက္သက္ခဲ့ ဖူးေသာ ခင္ပြန္းၾကီး ( ၁၀ ) ပါး။

မိမိထက္နိမ့္က်သူမ်ား၊ မိမိထက္ျမင့္မားသူမ်ား၊ မိမိႏွင့္ ကိုးကြယ္ရာ ဘာသာတူသူမ်ား၊ မိမိႏွင့္ ကိုးကြယ္ရာ ဘာသာမတူသူမ်ား၊ မိမိေလးစား သည့္မိတ္ေဆြမ်ား၊ မိမိရြံရွာခဲ့ေသာ ရန္သူမ်ားႏွင့္ အမိျမန္မာ ျပည္သူ ျပည္သား မ်ားအျပင္ နိုင္ငံရပ္ျခားမွမိမိတို႕ ျမန္မာျပည္အတြင္း တြင္ဘ၀ေျပာင္းသြားေသာသူမ်ား...အားလံုး ..အားလံုး...ျငိမ္းခ်မ္း လွပအဆင္ေျပမႈရွိေအာင္ အခမဲ့ အသုဘ ၀န္ေဆာင္မႈျဖစ္ေသာ နာေရးကူညီမႈ အသင္း(ရန္ကုန္) တည္းဟူေသာ လူမႈေရးအသင္းအဖြဲ႔ေပၚေပါက္လာေအာင္ စတင္ဖြဲ႔စည္း မ်ိဳးေစ့ခ် ေပးခဲ့ေသာ ဘဘ ဦးသုခ၏ေက်းဇူးနွင့္ တရားသေဘာ (အနိစၥ၊ ဒုကၡ၊ အနတၱ)ကို လြယ္ကူစြာရွာေဖြ ေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးခဲ့ေသာ အမိျမန္မာျပည္၏ ေက်းဇူးတရားမ်ားပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။

“ေသေသာသူသည္ သုႆန္သုိ႔ သက္သက္သာသာသြားသင့္သည္။ ” ...... မဟုတ္ပါလား။

သုိ႔ေသာ္

အမ်ားအက်ိဳး ရြက္သယ္ပိုးက

ခနိုးခနဲ႔ ဆိုကဲ့ရဲ့လည္း

မငဲ့မေစာင္း ကိုယ့္လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို

စိတ္ေကာင္းနွင့္ယွဥ္ ေရွ့ရႈနွင္ေလာ့....။

ဟူေသာ ေရႊဟသၤာဆရာေတာ္ၾကီး၏ ဆံုးမၾသ၀ါဒ အတုိင္းပင္ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။

ဘဘ(ဦးသုခ)၏ ေဖးမျမွင့္တင္မႈစြမ္းအားနွင့္အတူ နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္း (ရန္ကုန္)တြင္ ေငြအား၊ လူအား၊ဥာဏ္အားနွင့္ ကိုယ့္ထမင္းကုိယ္စား ကိုယ့္စားရိတ္နွင့္ကိုယ္သြား၍ ျပည္႔သူ႔အက်ိဳး ထမ္းေဆာင္ မႈျပဳကတည္းက...မိမိနွင့္ ရုပ္ရွင္မရိုက္ခ်င္ေသာ ကုမၸဏီမ်ား၊ ဒါရိုက္တာမ်ား၊ မင္းသမီးမ်ား ထူးဆန္း အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ ေပၚထြက္လာခဲ့သည္။ ျပည္သူေကၽြးေသာထမင္းကိုစားျပီး ျပည္သူ႔အေရးကိစၥကို မ်က္ကြယ္ျပဳ၍ မိမိအား ရြံရွာသူ၊ မဂၤလာ မရွိသူ၊ လာဘ္ပိတ္သူအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္အက်င္ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္။

လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ (၂) နွစ္ေက်ာ္ အခ်ိန္ကာလမွစ၍ ယခုလက္ရွိအခ်ိန္တြင္ေတာ့ မိမိ၏ အခ်ိဳ႔ေသာ အနုပညာ ေလာကသားမ်ားသည္ မိမိအား တစိမ္းတစ္ေယာက္၊ မျမင္ဖူးေသာသူတစ္ေယာက္၊ အႏၱရာယ္ရွိသူ တစ္ေယာက္၊ အဖက္မတန္ေသာသူတစ္ေယာက္၊ရြံရွာဖြယ္ ေၾကာက္ရြံ႔ဖြယ္ တစ္ေယာက္ကဲ့သုိ႔ ျဖစ္သြားျပန္ ပါျပီ။ ယခင္က ညီအစ္ကိုေမာင္နွမသဖြယ္ ဆက္ဆံကူညီေဖးမခဲ့ေသာသူမ်ားပင္ လမ္းေတြ႔လွ်င္ မေခၚရဲ၊ မေခၚခ်င္၊ မေျပာရဲ၊ မေျပာခ်င္၊ မျမင္ခ်င္ဟန္ ေဆာင္သြားၾကသည္။ တယ္လီဖုန္းေလးပင္ဆက္၍ စကား ေျပာေဖာ္မရွိေတာ့။

ေတာ္လိုက္သည္႔ ......အနုပညာရွင္

ေျပာင္ေျမာက္လိုက္သည္႔.......... အနုပညာရွင္

ထူးခၽြန္လိုက္သည္႔ ........ အႏုပညာရွင္မ်ားပင္ ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။

အရင္းစစ္ေသာ္..ဖန္တီးရွင္၊ တန္ခိုးရွင္၊ ကံဇာတ္ဆရာၾကီး၏ တန္ခိုးအာဏာ အစြမ္းထက္မႈေၾကာင့္ပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။

ပီတိျဖစ္လိုက္ရသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။

ရင္ခုန္လိုက္ရသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။

ေပ်ာ္လိုက္ၾကသည္ျဖစ္ျခင္း....။

ယခင္နွင့္ယခု မတူေတာ့...။

ယခင္ အနုပညာေလာကမွာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားက.......... အတၱဟိတ။

ယခု လူမႈေရးေလာကမွာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားက.............ပရဟိတ။

ယခင္နွင့္ယခု ကြာျခားလွသည္.....။ မိမိ၏ ရင္ထဲ၊ နွလံုးသားထဲ၊ ဦးေနွာက္ထဲ ယခုေပၚေပါက္လာသည္႔ ပီတိ၊

ရင္ခုန္မႈအေပ်ာ္တုိ႔သည္ မိုးနဲ႔ေျမျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါျပီ ဘဘဦးသုခေျပာခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။ ဆံုးမခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။

ေမာင္ေက်ာ္သူ.....မင္းအီတလီ၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ကိုသိလား? (မသိပါ)
.....မင္းျပင္သစ္သမၼတကိုသိလား? (မသိပါ)
......မင္းခ်ာလီခ်က္ပလင္ကိုသိလား? (သိတာေပါ့)

ေအး.....အဲ့ဒါပဲကြ..အနုပညာသည္ဆိုတာ လူတုိင္းသိတယ္။ စစ္မွန္တဲ့အနုပညာသည္ဆိုတာ လူတိုင္းေလးစားတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္....အနုပညာသည္လုပ္တဲ့....အကိ်ဳးျပဳလုပ္ငန္းဆိုတာ..."ေအာင္ျမင္ရမယ္" တဲ့။

ဘဘဦးသုခစကားသည္............
မိမိအတြက္ အားေဆးတစ္ခြက္ပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ထိုအခ်ိန္မွစ၍ မိမိသည္....အသက္မရွိသူတို႔နွင့္သာ ပတ္သက္သြားေတာ့သည္။
မိမိသည္.....လူတုိင္းမသြားခ်င္ေသာ သခၤ်ဳိင္းသုႆန္သုိ႔ အျမဲသြားေနသည္။
မိမိသည္.....လူေတြေမ့ခ်င္ေယာင္ေဆာင္မႈကို သိလာသည္။
မိမိသည္.....လူေတြမသိေသာအရာမ်ားကို ျမင္လာသည္။

ထို႔ေၾကာင့္- မိမိ၏ အနုပညာနွလံုးသားကို ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းမႈအတြက္ စေတးပစ္လုိက္ေတာ့သည္။
ဤတြင္....ေက်းဇူးရွင္ဘဘ (ဦးသုခ) ကမၻာေျမျပင္မွမထြက္ခြါခင္ မိမိအား ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္႔ ေနာက္ဆံုးစကားရပ္ကို ၾကားေယာင္မိပါသည္...။

“ေမာင္ေက်ာ္သူ...မင္းနဲ႔ဘဘက အက်ိဳးေပးတယ္...ကက္ကင္း” တဲ့
ဟုတ္ေပသားပဲ....

သုခ ၊ ေက်ာ္သူ ။
(ေသာၾကာ+တနၤလာ) ၊ (တနလၤာ+ေသာၾကာ)

ေက်ာ္သူ ၊ သုခ ။
(တနလၤာ+ေသာၾကာ) ၊ (ေသာၾကာ+တနၤလာ)။

ထိုအခါ...မိမိ၏ဦးေနွာက္ထဲ ဖ်တ္ခနဲေပၚလာ၍ ဆတ္ခနဲျပန္ေျပာမိသည္။
“ ဟာ..ဘဘ...ဒါဆို က်ေနာ္က သခၤ်ဳိင္းနဲ႔လည္း အက်ိဳးေပးတာေပ့ါ...”
“ေက်ာ္သူ၊ သခၤ်ဳိင္း။ သခၤ်ဳိင္း၊ေက်ာ္သူ ေလ”...။
“ မွန္လိုက္ေလ...... ဟုတ္လုိက္ေလ....ေမာင္ေက်ာ္သူရယ္တဲ့..” တဲ့

ဟုတ္ပါတယ္.... ေမာင္ေမာင္(ေက်ာ္၀င္း) ဆိုတဲ့လူတစ္ေယာက္ ကမၻာေျမျပင္ကိုေရာက္လာျပီး “ေက်ာ္သူ” ဟူေသာ အမည္နာမနွင့္ ဘ၀ဘ၀ေတြကို ျဖတ္သန္းေက်ာ္ျဖတ္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွစျပီး ေပးဆပ္ လုိက္ရတဲ့ ေပးဆပ္မႈေတြ....“ကက္ကင္း”ကိုက္ျပီး သခၤ်ဳိင္းေျမနွင့္ အက်ိဳးေပးခဲ့ရသည္မွာ ယေန႔တုိင္....။

မိမိပီတိျဖစ္လိုက္ရသည္............ျဖစ္ျခင္း။

မိမိရင္ခုန္လို္က္ရသည္..............ျဖစ္ျခင္း။

မိမိေပ်ာ္လုိက္ရသည္................ျဖစ္ျခင္း။

သုိ႔ေသာ္...အားလံုး..အားလံုး..အလံုးစံုတို႔သည္...အနိစၥ၊ ဒုကၡ၊ အနတၱ။

တရားသိသလိုလို..တရားရွိသလိုလိုနဲ႔
၀င္ေလထြက္ေလရပ္ျပီး
ငါ့ေနာက္မလုိက္ခဲ့နဲ႔။

ေက်ာ္သူ။

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

BURMA HAS TO JOIN NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS AS PRETENDING


Burma considers joining regional nuclear safeguards body

Australia Network News

Australia has confirmed that Burma's military regime is interested in joining the regional nuclear safeguards body, the Asia-Pacific Safeguards Network.

The body is currently chaired by Australia.

Burma's interest in membership was revealed by the Washington-based non-government body, the Institute for Science and International Security, amid ongoing international concern that Burma's reclusive rulers might be seeking to develop a nuclear weapons program with North Korean assistance.

Other regional states are thought to be sceptical about Burma's intentions with possible membership of the safeguards network, though some experts argue for engagement.

Australia's Foreign Affairs Department says no formal request to join has been received from Burma and so it hasn't been considered.

Australia says if the matter arises, it'll be considered in consultation with other members of the network, which makes it's decisions by consensus.

Aid pledged

Meanwhile, Australia has pledged a 40 per cent increase in humanitarian aid to Burma over the next three years, saying the country can't be allowed to decay completely while waiting for political change.

Foreign minister Stephen Smith has announced that aid focussed on health, education and agriculture will rise from $US26 million dollars now, to around $US43 million.

Mr Smith says it's in line with the change of US policy that calls for engagement as well as sanctions to try to bring the reclusive regime out of its isolation and to ease harsh repression.

But with elections due later this year, Mr Smith told Parliament the aid pledge was not a reward for the generals.

"Australia and the international community stand ready to assist Burma, but it is not a one-way street."

"Australia urges the Burmese authorities to respond in good faith both to international engagement and to Aung San Suu Kyi's recent approach to it on sanctions and on dialogue."

IT IS TOO EARLY TO GO TO POLL: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi


Burmese democracy icon and National League for Democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has declared that a decision on contesting the general election in Burma cannot be taken till the electoral process is publicized.

She made her view clear to those who visited her yesterday. She also spoke of the necessity of right to information to make the election free and fair.

"A decision on electoral affairs cannot be taken at the moment. There are a lot of facts regarding the electoral process which needs to be known. Before that, it is impossible to take decision on the election - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi told us,” National League for Democracy (NLD) party spokesman and lawyer Nyan Win said.

Lawyer Nyan Win and Htin Kyaw, who have been assigned by Suu Kyi to monitor the renovation of her residence, met her at her home yesterday between 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

"Any election must have right to information, media freedom, and freedom in releasing news. Without these freedoms, no election can be free and fair,” Nyan Win quoted her as saying.

The basic needs of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of organization are essential for free and fair election, NLD General Secretary Suu Kyi told them.

Senior NLD leader Win Tin commenting on Suu Kyi’s observations said, “She cannot say more than that as the electoral laws and regulations are yet to be announced. I think she will give her precise views sand opinions when the time is ripe".

"What Daw Suu said is very important. They are the main requirements for the election. It is also a political requirement. What Daw Suu said is we must make our demands to get to know the full electoral process," Win Tin further said.

Daw is an honorific similar to madam for older, revered women.

If the election is conducted within the framework of the 2008 constitution, it will not help implement the democratic system, Suu Kyi once said, Nyan Win recalled.

In the backdrop of the announcement made by the junta on the forthcoming election to be held during this year after forcibly approving the 2008 constitution under media blackout, the opposition groups are demanding amendment to the constitution, release of all political prisoners including Suu Kyi and engagement in dialogue with the opposition.



အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ၀င္ မ၀င္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ရန္ အခ်ိန္မေရာက္ေသးဟု
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေျပာၾကား
NEJ/ ၁၀ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ ၂ဝ၁ဝ


ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ယခုႏွစ္က်င္းပမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၌ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ) ပါ၀င္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရန္၊ မယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရန္ ဆိုသည္ကို ဆုံးျဖတ္ရန္ အခ်ိန္ေစာလြန္းေသးေၾကာင္း ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္က်ခံေနရသည့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ယမန္ေန႔က ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ေၾကာင္း အန္အယ္လ္ဒီေျပာခြင့္ရပုဂၢိဳလ္ ဦးဉာဏ္၀င္းက ေျပာၾကားသည္။

၎က “ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ေျပာတယ္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ၀င္ေရးမ၀င္ေရးဆိုတာ ဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ဆုံးျဖတ္လို႔ မရေသးဘူး။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆိုင္ရာ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြဟာ အမ်ားႀကီးသိဖို႔လိုေသးတယ္။ ဒါေတြ သိၿပီးမွသာ စဥ္းစားဆုံးျဖတ္ႏိုင္မယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္” ဟု ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သို႔ ေျပာသည္။

ထိုသုိ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီအေနျဖင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၀င္ မ၀င္ ဆိုသည္ကို မဆုံးျဖတ္ေသးေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားခ်က္သည္ မွန္ကန္ေၾကာင္း အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ဗဟိုအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

၎က “ရွင္းေနတာပဲဗ်ာ။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကိစၥဆိုတာ အစိုုးရက စေျပာရမယ့္တာ၀န္၊ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ဘာမွေျပာစရာမလိုဘူး။ ခပ္႐ိုင္း႐ိုင္း ေျပာလိုက္မယ္ဗ်ာ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က အၿမီးႏွံ႔ေနစရာ အခ်ိန္မဟုတ္ဘူးဗ်။ သြားရည္ယိုေနစရာ အခ်ိန္လည္းမဟုတ္ဘူး။ ေစာေသးတယ္။ ေဒၚစုေျပာတာမွန္တယ္။ အစိုးရက သူတို႔ေျပာရမယ့္တာ၀န္ဗ်ာ။ ၂၀၁၀ အတြင္းမွာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ က်င္းပေပးမယ္လို႔ သူတို႔ ေျပာထားတယ္။ ေျပာထားတဲ့ၾကားထဲက အခုထိ စကားတခြန္းမွ မဟဘဲနဲ႔ေနရင္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဘက္က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ေျပာဖို႔ေစာေသးတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ေဒၚစုရဲ႕စကားဟာ မွန္တယ္လို႔ထင္ပါတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

“ေနာက္တခ်က္က ေဒၚစုက ဒီလိုေျပာတာဟာ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားေတြကိုလည္း ေျပာတာလို႔ထင္တယ္။ ေနာက္တခုက က်ေနာ္တို႔ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီေတြ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ တျခားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားကို ေျပာတယ္လို႔ထင္တယ္။ ဒီလိုေျပာမွသာလွ်င္ ပါတီအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားအၾကား ျပည္သူမ်ားအၾကားမွာ ႐ႈပ္ေထြးတဲ့အျမင္ေတြ၊ ဆႏၵေစာတဲ့အျမင္ေတြ၊ ေနာက္ မစားရ ၀ခမန္း ဘယ္အခ်ိန္မွ စားရမယ္မွန္းမသိဘဲနဲ႔ ေလွ်ာက္ေျပာေနသူေတြရဲ႕ အဆိုအေျပာေတြကို နားမေယာင္ဖို႔ အေျခအေနေတြကို ေပၚေစမယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ထင္တယ္ဗ်” ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္က ဆက္လက္ေျပာဆိုသည္။

စစ္အစိုးရက ယခုနွစ္အတြင္း ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲက်င္းပမည္ဟု တရား၀င္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆိုထားေသာ္လည္း ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲက်င္းပမည့္ ရက္အတိအက်ကို ေၾကညာျခင္းမရိွသည့္အျပင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆိုင္ရာ ဥပေဒ၊ ပါတီမ်ား မွတ္ပုံတင္ျခင္းဆိုင္ရာ စည္းမ်ဥ္းဥပေဒမ်ားကို ထုတ္ျပန္ျခင္းမရိွေသးေပ။

ကုလသမဂၢ အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းကမူ စစ္အစိုးရက က်င္းပမည့္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲသည္ သက္ဆိုင္သူမ်ားအားလုံး ပါ၀င္ၿပီး တရားမွ်တ လြတ္လပ္သည့္ေရြးေကာက္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳခံရေရးႏွင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမတိုင္ခင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအားလုံး ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးေရးတုိ႔ကို ေတာင္းဆိုထားသည္။

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Authorities Threaten Rangoon Strike

လိႈင္သာယာစက္မႈဇုန္အတြင္း အလုပ္သမားမ်ား လုပ္ခလစာႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး တုိးျမႇင့္ရရွိေရးတုိ႔အတြက္ ယခုႏွစ္အတြင္း တတိယအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္သည္။

ယေန႔ လိႈင္သာယာ စက္မႈဇုန္ (၃) ရွိ Taiyi ဖိနပ္ခ်ဳပ္စက္႐ံုႏွင့္ ျမဖက္ရွင္ အထည္ခ်ဳပ္စက္႐ံုတို႔မွ လုပ္သား (၂,၀၀၀) ေက်ာ္ လုပ္ခတိုးျမႇင့္ရရွိေရး ဒုတိယေန႔အျဖစ္ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၿပီး ကုန္သည္စက္မႈအသင္းခ်ဳပ္မွ အလုပ္သမားႏွင့္ အလုပ္ရွင္အၾကား ယေန႔ လာေရာက္ညႇိႏႈိင္းေပးခဲ႔ေၾကာင္း ႐ိုက္တာသတင္းဌာန အဆုိအရ သိရသည္။

ယမန္ေန႔မွစၿပီး အဆိုပါစက္႐ုံ (၂) ႐ုံမွ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားက လုပ္ခလစာ တုိးျမႇင့္ရရွိေရး ဆႏၵျပမႈ စတင္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

“စစ္ကားအစီး (၃၀) ေက်ာ္ရွိတယ္။ လမ္းေတြ ပိတ္ထားတယ္။ အေသးစိတ္ ဘာေတြ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာ မသိရေသးဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔သြားေတာ့ ညေန (၄) နာရီမွာ အနီးအနားက ေျပာတာ ၿပီးသြားၿပီလို႔ေတာ့ ေျပာတယ္။ လမ္းေတြ မဖြင့္ေသးဘူး” ဟု ယေန႔ သြားေရာက္ၾကည့္႐ႈခဲ့သူတဦးက ေျပာသည္။

လႈိင္သာယာ စက္မႈဇုန္ (၂) ရွိ ပုစြန္အေအးခန္းစက္႐ံုတခုတြင္ အလုပ္သမား (၁၀၀) ခန္႔က ယခုလ (၇) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ သကဲ့သုိ႔ စက္မႈဇုန္ (၃) ရွိ Weng Hong Hung အထည္ခ်ဳပ္ စက္႐ုံတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလက အလုပ္သမားမ်ား လုပ္အားခ တိုးျမႇင့္ေတာင္းဆိုမႈ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည္။

လိႈင္သာယာစက္မႈဇုန္တြင္ စားေသာက္ကုန္ထုတ္လုပ္ငန္း၊ အထည္ခ်ဳပ္၊ အိမ္သံုးကုန္မ်ား ထုတ္လုပ္သည့္ စက္႐ံုအမ်ားအျပား ရွိေနၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအႏွံ႔အျပားမွ အလုပ္သမားမ်ား အေျခခ် လုပ္ကိုင္ေနၾကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
Authorities Threaten Violence at Rangoon Strike
Around 2000 textile factory workers in Rangoon started striking on Monday evening, demanding a pay increase and reduced working hours.

Eye-witnesses said the situation is still tense with more than 30 riot police trucks and several fire engines stationed inside the factory zone.

The strike started in the Mya Fashion garment factory in No. 3 Factory Zone of Rangoon's Hlaing Tharyar Township. The workers are demanding an increase in salary of 10,000 kyat (US$ 10), a reduction of working hours and the provision of a clean space for meals. Workers from nearby factories have reportedly joined the strike.

Blocked by riot police trucks, fire engines and police custody vans, striking workers have been prevented from leaving the factory zone and no one has been allowed to enter, sources in Rangoon said.

According to the latest reports, members of Union Solidarity and Development Association, a junta-backed organization have also arrived at the scene, and the strike continues. The workers have been warned to disperse peacefully or face a violent crackdown.

The workers have to work from 7 am to 11 pm daily. In December, nearly 1,000 textile workers in Hlaing Tharyar staged a demonstration. Government officials were involved in negotiations with the workers over their demands, though it remains unclear as to how the issue was resolved.

The monthly income of most factory workers in Burma ranges from 20,000 kyat [$20] to 40,000 kyat [$40], forcing many to work overtime. Many factory owners employ temporary workers who have no legal recourse if they are fired without compensation, according to former factory workers in Rangoon.

More than 80 percent of factory workers in Rangoon work on a day-to-day basis. Most are young women between 15 and 27 years of age who come from the countryside in search of a better living.

MOVE TO BGF OR GO TO WAR


The Burmese military junta called on ethnic cease-fire groups to join the Border Guard Force (BGF) by the end of February as its top negotiator Lt-Gen Ye Myint traveled to the Northern Shan State city of Lashio to meet Shan and Wa leaders at the weekend.

Sources closed to cease-fire groups in Shan State said delegations from the Shan State Army –North (SSA- North) met with Ye Myint, who is also chief of the Military Affairs Security (MAS) formerly known as the Military Intelligence Service, on Saturday. But his efforts still seem unsuccessful.

“During the meeting, Lt-Gen Ye Myint told Shan leaders they must join the border guard force by the end of February,” a source said. “Unlike at previous meetings with the SSA, he used harsher tones in urging them to accept the BGF proposal.”

However, the SSA-North did not give an immediate response regarding the BGF February deadline to Ye Myint’s delegation at the meeting, he said.

Ye Myint’s was also scheduled to hold a meeting in Lashio with leaders of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the strongest ethnic armed group in Burma with an estimated 20,000 troops.

But the UWSA told Burmese officials that they were not available to come to Lashio, which is the headquarters of the Burma army’s northeast military regional command that overran the Wa’s allies in the Kokang area in August 2009.

Wa sources said they canceled the meeting with Ye Myint as their leader, Bao Youxiang, had health problems.

On Jan. 31, a week before his Lashio trip, Ye Myint met representatives of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) at Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital. He reportedly used tougher language there when urging the KIA to join Naypyidaw’s BGF plan.

Like other ceasefire groups on the Sino-Burmese border, the KIA did not officially answer Ye Myint during the meeting, but they seem prepared for the worst.

According to local sources in Kachin State, KIA officials have sped up recruitment of villagers for KIA militias in Kachin-controlled areas. They attract recruits by saying low rank and file troops would get at least 10,000 kyat [US $10] monthly.

Similar methods of recruitment have been reported in the Wa area in Shan State’s Special Region-2 ever since the junta started talks about the BGF with ethnic groups in April 2009. Recruitment for additional UWSA troops is active among Wa people as well as other ethnic peoples living in the Wa territory.

Speaking to the The New York Times last year, Col. Peeranate Katetem, a Thai expert on the Wa, estimated that using newly-recruited militias and reserve troops, the UWSA could field as many as 50,000 troops.

The National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), a Wa ally known as the Mongla Army which also resists the BGF plan, recently faced stronger challenges when its secretary-general, Min Ein, was assassinated by unknown gunmen on Jan.27.

No one has claimed responsibility and the killers are still at large. However, a rumor in Shan State suggests that a vehicle used by gunmen was found at a hotel in Mongla owned by a Wa leader. The Shan Herald Agency for News, which specializes in Shan State affairs, stated on Feb.3 that this could be a ruse by the junta to sow division between the NDAA and its allies, the UWSA.

Attending Min Ein’s funeral at Mongla on Jan. 31, junta army Col. Than Tun Thein reportedly told NDAA leaders that the junta is ready to cooperate and fine those responsible for the killing, citing a rumor that Wa troops were behind the incident.

In contrast to Thein's assertions, the UWSA sent high ranking officials to the funeral and Wa TV repeatedly broadcast reports about about Min Ein’s death and his funeral and showed solidarity with the Mongla people, Wa sources said.

Instability on China’s southwest border that threatens Chinese’s businesses in Yunnan Province and along the Sino-Burmese border is a concern for Beijing.

In Macao in January, Chinese scholars from Beijing held a meeting about Burma with experts and dissidents as part of Beijing’s survey on its neighbor’s affairs, particularly in regard to ethnic issues. Tensions on the border and Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in ethnic issues were reportedly discussed during the meeting.

အပစ္ရပ္ ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္မွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအား နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးအတြက္ အဓိက တာဝန္ယူေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ စစ္ဖက္ေရးရာ အရာရိွခ်ဳပ္ ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ရဲျမင့္က ယခုလ (၆) ရက္တြင္ ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း၊ လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕၌ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ၿပီး ျပည္သူ႔စစ္ အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရး အတြက္ ထပ္မံဖိအားေပး ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးလြယ္ေမာင္၊ ဒု-ဥကၠ႒ ဦးကိုင္ဖတို႔ (၂) ဦးႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆုံရာတြင္ ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ရဲျမင့္က ျပည္သူ႔စစ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးအတြက္ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ရွမ္းေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတဦးက ေျပာသည္။

၎က “ဗိုလ္ရဲျမင့္ ေျပာတဲ့သေဘာကေတာ့ အသြင္ေျပာင္းတာ ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသားလုပ္၊ ဒီလမကုန္ခင္ အသြင္ေျပာင္းရင္ ေျပာင္း၊ မေျပာင္းရင္ေတာ့ ျပန္ၿပီး စစ္တိုက္ၾကတာေပါ့ ပံုစံမ်ဳိးအထိ ေျပာေနတယ္။ အခုတေခါက္ သူတို႔ေတြ႔တာ ဗိုလ္ရဲျမင့္က တင္းတင္းမာမာနဲ႔ ေျပာခဲ့တယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း၊ သီေပါၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ စိန္ေက်ာ့ေက်းရြာတြင္ အေျခစိုက္ထားသည့္ ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္အား ျပည္သူ႔စစ္ အသြင္ ေျပာင္းရန္ နအဖက ယမန္ႏွစ္၊ ဧၿပီလကုန္ပိုင္းက စတင္ကမ္းလွမ္းခဲ့ၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ တပ္ဖဲြ႔အတြင္း တပ္မႉး၊ တပ္သားမ်ားက ျပည္သူ႔စစ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးကို လက္မခံႏိုင္ဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနၾကသည္။

သို႔အတြက္ ရွမ္းတပ္ဖဲြ႔ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက ေအာက္ေျခတပ္မႉး၊ တပ္သားမ်ားအား လိုက္လံေျဖရွင္း၊ ေဖ်ာင္းဖ်ေနရသကဲ့သို႔ နအဖဘက္ကလည္း အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးအတြက္ တစိုက္မတ္မတ္ ေျပာဆိုေနရာ ယခု ေနာက္ဆံုး ရာဇသံေပးသည္အထိ ေျပာဆိုလာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

နအဖက အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ နယ္စပ္တြင္ အေျခစိုက္ထားသည့္ အပစ္ရပ္အဖြဲ႔အား နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္အျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ နယ္စပ္ႏွင့္ေ၀းသည့္ ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္ကဲ့သို႔ေသာ အဖြဲ႔အား ျပည္သူ႔စစ္အျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း အသြင္ေျပာင္းဖြဲ႔စည္းရန္ ဖိအားေပး ေျပာဆိုေနျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

အသြင္မေျပာင္းေသးသည့္အဖဲြ႔အား စစ္ေရးအရ တိုက္႐ိုက္တိုက္ခိုက္ရန္ဆိုသည္မွာ နအဖအေနျဖင့္ လြယ္လင့္တကူလုပ္၍ မရဘဲ အခက္အခဲမ်ားရိွေနသည္ဟု တ႐ုတ္-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ စစ္ေရးအကဲခတ္ ဦးေအာင္ေက်ာ္ေဇာက သံုးသပ္သည္။

၎က “အပစ္ရပ္အဖဲြ႔ေတြကို နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္လက္မခံလို႔ တိုက္ရတာထက္ ဘိန္းကိစၥတို႔၊ ဘာတို႔နဲ႔ အေၾကာင္းျပၿပီး လုပ္ႏိုင္ ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လုပ္လို႔မရဘူးျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ သူတိုက္လို႔မရတဲ့ခါက်ေတာ့ တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြအေပၚ ေသြးခဲြသပ္လွ်ဳိတာတို႔၊ ဦးမင္းအိမ္လုပ္ႀကံခံရတဲ့ကိစၥကို ဝအဖဲြ႔က လုပ္တဲ့ပံုမ်ဳိး လုပ္လာတယ္။ အခုျပႆနာက ႏိုင္ငံေရးျပႆနာျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ ဗမာစစ္ဗိုလ္တစုရဲ႕ လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈေတြေၾကာင့္ တိမ္းေစာင္းမႈဟာ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးအထိ ဦးတည္သြားေနတယ္။ အပစ္ရပ္တိုင္းရင္းသားေပါင္းစံု၊ လူမ်ဳိးေပါင္းစံုက ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္ၿပီး နအဖကို ရင္ဆိုင္ဖို႔ ျပင္တာဟာ ေကာင္းတဲ့လကၡဏာ ဆိုေပမယ့္ လူမ်ဳိးေရးျပႆနာအတြက္ မီးပြားျဖစ္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ နအဖမွာ တာဝန္ရိွပါတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

၁၉၈၉ ခုႏွစ္၊ စက္တင္ဘာ (၂၄) ရက္တြင္ နဝတကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေဆထင္ ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ ရွမ္းတပ္ဖဲြ႔ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အၾကား လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕၌ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးယူရန္ ေဆြးေႏြးစဥ္က ေနာင္တက္လာမည့္အစိုးရျဖင့္သာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြး မည္ဆိုသည့္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္အရ ယခုအခါတြင္ အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရးကိစၥကို ရွမ္းလက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖဲြ႔ တပ္မႉးႏွင့္ ေအာက္ေျခအဆင့္က လက္မခံႏိုင္ဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။

Friday, February 5, 2010

ခိုင္ရႊန္းလဲ့ရည္မိသားစု နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္းကုိ သိန္း ၁၅၀ လႉ

မခိုင္ရႊန္းလဲ့ရည္၏ မိသားစုက နာေရးကူညီမႈ အသင္း၏ သုခကုသုိလ္ျဖစ္ ေဆးခန္းအတြက္ ဓာတ္မွန္ အေဆာက္အအံု ေဆာက္လုပ္ရန္ က်ပ္ သိန္း ၁၅၀ လႉဒါန္းခဲ့ေၾကာင္း အသင္း တာ၀န္ခံ တဦး ျဖစ္သည့္ ဦးေက်ာ္သူက ယေန႔ ေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္။

ဓာတ္မွန္ အေဆာက္အအံုကုိ ယခုလကုန္တြင္ စတင္ ေဆာက္လုပ္မည္ ဟု ဦးေက်ာ္သူက ေျပာသည္။

“လူနာေတြ ဓာတ္မွန္ရိုက္ဖို႔ ဆရာ၀န္က ညြန္ၾကားလိုက္ရင္ အျပင္မွာ သြားရိုက္ရတယ္၊ သူတို႔ အတြက္လည္း တကူးတက ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ေဆးခန္းမွာပဲ ဓာတ္မွန္စက္ထားဖို႔ စီစဥ္လိုက္တာ”ဟု ဦးေက်ာ္သူက ရွင္းျပသည္။

အသက္ ၁၅ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ေက်ာင္းသူ မခိုင္ရႊန္းလဲ့ရည္သည္ လြန္ခ့ဲသည့္ ၄ လခန္႔က ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ရိွ အထူးကု ေဆးခန္းတခုတြင္ ကုသမႈ ခံယူေနစဥ္ ေသဆံုးခဲ့ရာ ေဆးခန္းက ကာယကံရွင္မိသားစုသုိ႔ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကး က်ပ္ သိန္းတေထာင္ ေပးအပ္ခ့ဲေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

မခိုင္ရႊန္းလဲ့ရည္ အတြက္ ရရိွသည့္ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေငြ အားလုံးကုိ နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္း အပါအ၀င္ က်န္းမာေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား အကူအညီေပးသည့္ အဖဲြ႔တခ်ဳိ႕ထံ ျပန္လည္ လႉဒါန္းျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ႐ုပ္ရွင္ သ႐ုပ္ေဆာင္ ဦးေက်ာ္သူက ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ ေျပာသည္။

မခိုင္ရႊန္းလဲ့ရည္မိသားစု၏ လႉဒါန္းေငြ အပါအ၀င္ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ အလႉရွင္တုိ႔၏ အကူအညီျဖင့္ ေဆာက္လုပ္မည့္ ဓာတ္မွန္ေဆာင္တြင္ ေဒၚလာ ႏွစ္ေသာင္းခြဲခန္႔ တန္ဖိုး ရွိေသာ ဓာတ္မွန္စက္ကုိ တပ္ဆင္မည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

၂၀၀၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဇန္န၀ါရီလမွ စတင္ၿပီး နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္းကုိ စာေရးဆရာ၊ ဒါ႐ုိက္တာႀကီး ဦးသုခ၏ လမ္းၫႊန္မႈျဖင့္ သ႐ုပ္ေဆာင္ ဦးေက်ာ္သူက ဦးစီးတည္ေထာင္ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္မွ နာေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကုိ အခမ့ဲ ကူညီခ့ဲသည္။ ၇ ႏွစ္ အၾကာတြင္ သုခ ကုသုိလ္ျဖစ္ေဆးခန္းကုိ တုိးခ်ဲ႕ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခဲ့သည္။

ယခုအခါ ဒဂုံၿမိဳ႕သစ္ (ေျမာက္ပုိင္း) ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရိွ သုခ ကုသုိလ္ျဖစ္ ေဆးခန္းသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ ျပသေသာ လူနာေပါင္း ၂၀၀ ခန္႔ ေန႔စဥ္ ရွိေၾကာင္း၊ ေဆးခန္းတြင္ မ်က္စိ၊ အရုိးအေၾကာ၊ မီးယပ္ သားဖြား၊ ကေလး၊ အေရျပား၊ သြား ႏွင့္ ခံတြင္းဆုိင္ရာ အထူးကု ဆရာ၀န္မ်ား လုပ္အားေပးေနၿပီး အေသးစား ခြဲစိတ္ကုသမႈမ်ားလည္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးလ်က္ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Junta may free Suu Kyi during polls


Aung San Suu Kyi may be freed during the national elections in Myanmar, Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said Tuesday, predicting the polls could be held during the second half of 2010.

"What is the gut feeling? Maybe at the time of the declaration or the holding of the elections," he said, responding to a question on when the opposition leader, whose house arrest sentence had recently been extended until November 2010, could be freed.

"Around that time... maybe a day after or a day before," added Kasit.

A date has still not been announced for the elections, which will be the first since 1990 when the junta refused to recognise the landslide win of the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Suu Kyi.

Kasit believes that "the elections most probably will be in the second half of the year."

He noted that during meetings of a regional bloc known as ASEAN, Myanmar's prime minister had been "giving us the assurance ... that elections will be held this year" and that there will definitely be a "new government."

"He (the prime minister) mentioned about 70 to 80 percent completion of election law and political party law and the completion of the parliamentary site in the new capital and so on, so I predict it will take place in the second half of this year," added Kasit.

The foreign minister also cautioned against sanctions as a way to put pressure on the junta, saying the tactic has "proven to be a failure."

"Why hurt the Myanmar people?" he told journalists in Geneva.

Isolating Myanmar also risks cornering it "into the arms of certain countries," he warned.

"The Indians and the Chinese don't want to have any sanctions vis-a-vis Myanmar. So in that sense you allow a special relationship to happen. Would that be detrimental or not to the whole cooperative effort?" he said.

Rather, Kasit referred to the recent US move to engage in dialogue with the junta, saying that put the ball now in the junta's court.

"The world is waiting for Myanmar at the border, so it's up to Myanmar to respond in a positive manner," he added.

Home Affairs Minister Maung Oo reportedly told a meeting of local officials in central Myanmar last month that the release of 64-year-old Suu Kyi, who has been in detention for 14 of the past 20 years, would come in November.

A decision is expected from Myanmar's top court within few weeks on an appeal against her conviction last August. The conviction related to an incident in which a US man swam to her house and she was sentenced to another 18 months under house arrest.

Monday, February 1, 2010

8888 STUDENT LEADERS OPPOSE REGIME ELECTION


Burma's military authorities have recently tried unsuccessfully to pressure jailed members of the 88 Generation Students group into accepting the government's election process in return for their release, according to one of their colleagues.

"I can confirm that an exchange took place between military authorities and 88 Generation Student leaders Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi,” said Soe Tun, a 39-year-old former political prisoner and a leading member of the 88 Generation group who is now in hiding. “However, they didn't cave in to any form of pressure.”

Last week, the 88 Generation Students group issued a statement calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners so that all stakeholders can participate in the political process. The statement also urges the regime to seek peaceful ways in resolving the conflicts with armed ethnic groups.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Monday, Soe Tun said that Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi refused the regime's offer to “sign a 401,” which would effectively suspend their sentences and allow for their release. The offer was on the condition that both leaders accept the junta's election process, which is due to be held this year.

Section 401 of the Burma's Criminal Procedure Code is a mechanism used by the Burmese regime to provide suspended sentences to jailed political activists.

“Their response, as far as I know, was that they want to see a dialogue between all the political stakeholders and the regime,” said Soe Tun, who went into hiding after the 2007 Saffron Revolution was brutally suppressed by the Burmese junta. He added that both student leaders refused to sign a 401 during their previous periods of incarceration.

Both Min Ko Naing, 47, and Ko Ko Gyi, 48, spent nearly 15 years in jail as political prisoners until they were released in the years 2004 and 2005 respectively. The two student leaders were rearrested in 2007 for taking part in demonstrations against a hike in fuel prices and are currently serving 65-year sentences in different prisons in Shan State in northern Burma.

In a letter from his prison cell late last year, another imprisoned 88 Generation Students group leader, Hla Myo Naung, called for a blanket amnesty for Burma's political prisoners before this year's election and an inclusive political process, and said these were two of the cornerstones of the group's election policy.

Asked to clarify his group's stance, Soe Tun said, “We are not rigid. We are ready to accept the best options for the sake of the country.”

Meanwhile, the British Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Ivan Lewis said that “as long as the elections are contested on the current Constitution, whatever the outcome they cannot be recognized by the international community."

AMERICAN SUSPECTS BURMA LINKING NUCLEAR WITH NORTH KOREA


There are increased suspicions about the nuclear ambitions of the Burmese regime which according to an American think tank are building a reactor near Mandalay with the help of North Korea. The idea has been circulating for some time but the latest report from the Institute for Science and International Security, which included photos, reinforces the suspicion.

The document, titled "Myanmar: an aspiring nuclear state; suspected ties with North Korea; supplies of suspicious high-technology and facilities," denouncing the arrival of equipment useful for the development of a nuclear or missile program being amassed in remote areas of Burma for “unknown purposes". Although this is not enough to state that there is a nuclear weapons program - the report warns - companies and governments need to take extreme caution in relations with Myanmar and require the utmost transparency". The junta, in fact, is buying or applying for a large quantity of suspect material such as highly sophisticated technology potentially for missile or nuclear use.

According to the experts who drafted the document, David Albright and Paul Brannan, the former Burma and North Korea have discussed nuclear cooperation, but currently there is no certainty of the construction of a nuclear power plant. The evidence of collaboration include the Korean-Burmese presence in Myanmar of the heads of Namchongang Trading (NCG), a North Korean trading company targeted by UN sanctions. The nature of this partnership is still unknown, but the involvement of the NCG only increases the suspicions of those who look at Myanmar as a future nuclear threat like Iran or Pakistan.