88 Generation Students (Exile)

Eviction order for Burma monk

2011-12-15T13:59:00.000-08:00

Shwe Nya War Sayardaw Shwe Nya War Sayardaw is an abbot at Rangoon's Sadhu monastery Continue reading the main story Burma: Battle for DemocracyExiles watch Is change for good? In pictures: Clinton trip Suu Kyi to rejoin politics A senior Burmese monk has been ordered to leave his monastery in Rangoon because of a speech he gave at a pro-democracy event.Shwe Nya War Sayardaw, a well-known critic of the government, addressed the National League for Democracy at a recent event in Mandalay.He was among several figures who met US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she visited Burma in December. The Burmese government has recently implemented a series of reforms. But it still continues to hold hundreds of political prisoners and the country is still plagued by ethnic conflicts.The actual order to leave came from the monks' governing body, but this is backed by the Burmese authorities. 'Refusing to obey' Shwe Nya War Sayardaw, who is an abbot at Rangoon's Sadhu monastery, received a letter from the monks' governing body informing him that he was being disciplined for delivering a speech to pro-democracy leader Aung Sun Suu Kyi's political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).Continue reading the main story REFORM IN BURMA7 Nov 2010: First polls in 20 years13 Nov: Aung San Suu Kyi freed from house arrest30 Mar 2011: Transfer of power to new government complete 6 Oct: Human rights commission established12 Oct: More than 200 political prisoners freed13 Oct: New labour laws allowing unions passed17 Nov: Burma granted Asean chair in 201418 Nov: Suu Kyi's NLD says it is rejoining political processClinton's Burma visit: Turning point?Should it be Burma or Myanmar?US-China rivalry over Burma's hand intrigues mediaThe letter states that he must move away from the Sadhu monastery and that he cannot teach in monasteries without permission from the governing body - the Sangha.Although he has been ordered to leave the Sadhu monastery, he can live in other monasteries.However, according to one local journalist, he is refusing to obey the order and says that he will stay at the monastery until forced out. He is well-known for his outspoken views and for using Buddhist stories to draw unflattering parallels between the government and past administrations, correspondents say.Ms Suu Kyi's NLD recently re-registered as a political party, and she is expected to stand for parliament in forthcoming by-elections.Recent reforms by the government included freeing Ms Suu Kyi from detention and allowed to her take up a role in public life, prompting speculation that decades of isolation could be about to end. The army handed power to a civilian government last year, but the military's primacy is entrenched in the country's constitution.The US maintains tight sanctions on senior leaders in Burma, which was ruled by a brutal military junta from 1962 until 2010.Chinese meeting Meanwhile on Thursday China said its ambassador to Burma held talks with Aung San Suu Kyi in what is thought to be the first formal meeting between the most important supporter of the military-backed government and its most prominent critic. A spokesman for China's foreign ministry, Liu Weimin, said the meeting had been arranged at the request of Aung San Suu Kyi but he did not say when it took place. The spokesman said the ambassador met her because China was willing to speak to all sectors of Burmese society. Aung Sun Suu Kyi's NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990, but the junta refused to recognise the result and the party was never allowed to take power.Ms Suu Kyi spent much of the next 20 years in detention.

Mr.Dunkley In the Hell andတရားလုိ ျဖစ္ေသာ မခိုင္ဇာ

2011-02-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

အစြယ္ကုိလုိသူ ေက်ာ္ဆန္း အသြားေစခိုင္းသူ တင္ထြန္းဦး ကံကြက္ၾကားသူက Mr.Dunkley

ယေန႔ ၂၄ရက္ေန႔ မနက္ ၉ း၀၀ အခ်ိန္၌ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း၊ ကမာရြတ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ နာနတ္ေတာလမ္းမေပၚရွိ၊ ကမာရြတ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ တရားရုံးသုိ႔ ညွဥ္းပမ္းႏွိပ္စက္မႈ၊ မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါး ကုိင္ေဆာင္သုံးစြဲမႈ၊ နယ္စပ္ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ (လ၀က) အက္ဥပေဒမ်ားနဲ႔ တရားစြဲဆိုျခင္းခံ ထားရတဲ့ ယခင္ျမန္မာတိုင္းမ္ဂ်ာနယ္မွ (CEO)အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ Mr.Ross Dunkley အား စြဲခ်က္တင္အမႈ စစ္ေဆးရန္အတြက္ ရန္ကုန္၊ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္မွ ရုံးထုတ္ေခၚေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ Mr.Ross Dunkley အား ရဲလုံၿခဳံေရး မ်ားမွ လက္ထိပ္ခတ္ ေခၚေဆာင္ လာၿပီးေနာက္ တရားရုံးထုတ္ တရားခံမ်ားထားရွိရာ တရားရုံး အခ်ဳပ္ခန္းတြင္းသုိ႔ ထည့္သြင္း ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားခဲ့ပါသည္။ အဲ့ဒီ့ေနာက္ေန႔လည္ ၁၂း၁၅ မိနစ္အခ်ိန္ခန္႔တြင္ Mr.Ross Dunkley ကုိအခ်ဳပ္ေဆာင္ မွ ထုတ္ယူေခၚေဆာင္ၿပီး ကမာရြတ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အထူးတရားရုံးခန္းတြင္ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္တရားသူႀကီး (အမည္မေဖာ္ျပ)မွ စတင္စစ္ေဆး ေမးျမန္းပါသည္။

တရားသူၾကီးမွ စစ္ေဆးေနစဥ္အတြင္း တရားရုံးခန္း အနီးအနားတြင္ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ သတင္းဌာနမ်ားမွ သတင္းေထာက္မ်ား၊ ျမန္မာတိုင္းမ္ဂ်ာနယ္မွ တာ၀န္ရွိသူမ်ားက လာေရာက္ၾကည့္ရႈ ၾကားနာၾကပါသည္။ သတင္းေထာက္မ်ားႏွင့္ လာေရာက္ ၾကည့္ရႈ ၾကားနာသူမ်ားအား တရားရုံးခန္းအတြင္းသုိ႔ ၀င္ေရာက္ခြင့္ မျပဳသည့္အျပင္ ဓါတ္ပုံကင္မရာ၊ အသံဖမ္းစက္၊ မိုဘိုင္းဖုန္းမ်ား ကိုင္ေဆာင္ဝင္ေရာက္ လာသူမ်ားအား ၾကားနာ ၾကည့္ရႈခြင့္မျပဳခဲ့ပါ။ တရားခြင္ကုိ၂ နာရီခန္႕ ၾကားနာစစ္ေဆးခဲ့တယ္လုိ႔ သိရွိရပါသည္။

တရားလုိ ျဖစ္ေသာ မခိုင္ဇာ(ေနရပ္လိပ္စာအတိအက်မသိ) မွ တရားခြင္သုိ႔ လာေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၄င္းတရားလုိျဖစ္ေသာ မခိုင္ဇာ(ေနရပ္လိပ္စာအတိအက်မသိ) တြင္ ေလးလခန္႔ရွိေသာ ကုိယ္၀န္ကုိ လြယ္ထားရၿပီး၊ ၄င္းႏွင့္အတူသူမ၏ အမ်ိဳးသား ျဖစ္သူဟုဆိုေသာ လူငယ္တစ္ဦးပါ အတူပါရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ တရားလုိ ၊ တရားခံ ႏွစ္ဦးႏွစ္ဘက္အား ၿမိဳ႕နယ္တရားသူႀကီးမွ အမႈကုိ ၾကားနာစစ္ေဆးၿပီးေနာက္ ယခင္ျမန္မာတိုင္းဂ်ာနယ္မွ(CEO) အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ Mr.Ross Dunkley အား ျပစ္မႈဆိုင္ရာဥပေဒပုဒ္မ ၃၂၅ / ၃၄၂ / ၃၅၄ / ၁၃(က) အရ စြဲခ်က္ တင္လိုက္သည္ဟု သိရွိရပါသည္။ တရားသူႀကီးမင္းမွ အမႈကုိ လက္ခံ စစ္ေဆးၾကားနာ၊ စြဲခ်က္တင္ၿပီးေနာက္ အမႈရုံးခ်ိန္းကုိ ၂၀၁၁၊ မတ္လ(၃)ရက္ ေန႔သုိ႔ ခ်ိန္းဆိုလိုက္ေၾကာင္း သိရွိရပါသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ Mr.Ross Dunkley အားညေန ၄ နာရီအခ်ိန္ခန္႔တြင္ ရဲအခ်ဳပ္ကားျဖင့္ ရန္ကုန္၊ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္သုိ႔ ျပန္လည္ ေခၚေဆာင္သြားေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိပါသည္။

သတင္း ဓာတ္ပံု၊ ဒီမိုေဝယံ

BAN KI-MOON CALLS DAW SUU( ယူအန္ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရမွူးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီမြန္းမွ ေဒၚစုဆီသို့ ဆက္သြယ္)

2010-11-18T20:14:00.000-08:00

opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi and UN chief Ban Ki-moon spoke by telephone Thursday and renewed demands for her country's ruling generals to release all remaining political prisoners.

"Aung San Suu Kyi expressed her support for an early visit by the secretary general's special advisor for Myanmar to Yangon and her desire to engage with him for pushing ahead in addressing the challenges facing the people of Myanmar," a UN statement said.

The UN advisor, Vijay Nambiar, had been pressing to visit Myanmar before the country's contested national election on November 7. But diplomats said the junta had only agreed for him to go there after the vote.

Ban visited Myanmar last year but was not allowed to see Suu Kyi, who was released from almost two decades of detention and house arrest on Saturday.

The National League for Democracy leader has told diplomats that the release of the estimated 2,100 political prisoners still in Myanmar jails is her top campaign issue.

"The secretary general and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi both stressed the need for the Myanmar authorities to release all remaining political prisoners as a matter of priority so that all citizens of Myanmar are free to contribute to advancing the prospects of national reconciliation and democratic transition in Myanmar," said the statement.

Ban told Suu Kyi "he was encouraged by the spirit of reconciliation emanating from her statements and appeals for dialogue and compromise following her release."

The UN leader reiterated the United Nations' commitment "to uphold the cause of human rights and support all efforts by the government, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all other stakeholders to build a united, peaceful, democratic and modern future for their country."

It was not immediately clear whether Ban called Suu Kyi or the other way around.

Burma’s Elections in Name Only

2010-08-29T06:52:00.001-07:00

The last time Burma’s junta tried rigging an election in hopes of putting a civilian face on its military rule, in 1990, it was routed at the polls. The junta responded by annulling the results. Now, with the country’s first vote in 20 years set for Nov. 7, the generals have apparently learned their lesson: this time, the process will be even more tightly controlled.

In 2008 the junta pushed through a Constitution that guarantees it a quarter of parliamentary seats and a continued stranglehold on state power. In the upcoming elections, meanwhile, opposition candidates need permission to campaign and are barred from shouting slogans, waving flags, criticizing the junta, or “harming security.” Civil servants and monks are barred from running, as is anyone convicted of a crime—which means a good portion of the politically inclined. And parties must submit a list of at least 1,000 members in order to register, a scary proposition for voters who live in constant fear of the military and its spies. (One party chair has complained that security forces are already intimidating members on his list.)

None of this lends the appearance of legitimacy to the elections, and candidates are starting to quit in protest and threatening to boycott the polls. Unfortunately, this will likely matter very little to countries such as the other ASEAN nations and China, which have already been willing to do business with the junta and turn a blind eye to human rights. Worse, it may even give political cover to those like India that hope to ramp up trade with Burma. Twenty years later, it’s likely that the junta will finally get its desired results at the polls—but from an election free in name only.

Sex and the Capital City In Burma

2010-08-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

It didn't take long for Burma's new capital, Naypyidaw, to develop a red light district, where sex can be bought at brothels masquerading as beauty salons, massage parlors, karaoke lounges and even restaurants.

The seamy district, Paung Laung, is on the main road leading into the city. Nearly 100 establishments where girls can be bought by the hour or the night line the road. But sex comes at a high price—between 100,000 kyat (US $100) and 200,000 kyat ($200).
Such prices can only be afforded by well-heeled businessmen and members of Naypyidaw's top brass, who not only patronize the brothels but are said to have invested in many of them.

Business is brisk, spawning the development of a cheaper red light zone along the 30 mile stretch of highway between Naypyidaw and the next town. Before Burma's new capital moved to Naypyidaw, less than half a dozen brothels were in business along the roadside—today there are more than 70.

Most are just makeshift tents and bamboo huts, where 20 minutes with a sex worker costs 6,000 kyat ($6). Young boys working on commission tout for trade from passing motorists and motorcyclists.

One sex worker, from Lewe, near Naypyidaw, told me she resorted to prostitution because her family's land was expropriated by the authorities when the new capital was built. Her mother contributed to the household budget by selling rice at a local market.

The girl said her meager earnings have to cover a daily “fee” of 7,000 kyat ($7) demanded by police, who are at the bottom end of a systematic racket.

One sergeant serving at Naypyidaw's military headquarters accused the capital's commander, Maj-Gen Wai Lwin of encouraging the spread of prostitution in and around the city.

“He told his men to avoid brothels but then allowed them to get involved in the beauty parlor business,” the sergeant told me on condition of anonymity.
“All understood what he meant and that he was giving a green light to running massage businesses.”

Senior military officers and high-ranking officials reportedly own buildings in which massage parlors and beauty salons operate and where sex is also sold.

One top officer close to junta head Snr-Gen Than Shwe was granted ownership of a share in a hotel, the Myint-Moe-Nan Motel, which was built on Naypydaw's main street despite a ban on hotels within the city. Brig-Gen Soe Shein's involvement in the hotel project was regarded as a way for the consortium of owners to get official protection.
By ZIN MIN MAUNG /NAYPYIDAW

ၾကားေနရမယ့္အခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ပလား?

2010-08-27T21:18:00.001-07:00

ၾကားေနရမယ့္အခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ပလား?

မီဒီယာသမားေတြကို ရဲေဘာ္ေက်ာ္သန္း ေဝဖန္လိုက္လုိ႔ မီဒီယာသမားျဖစ္တဲ့ ကိုေမာင္ေမာင္ ျမင့္က တုံ႔ျပန္ေဝဖန္တာေတြ ဖတ္လိုက္ရပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကေတာ့ ဟိုလူေတာ္ ဒီလူေတာ္ေျပာၿပီး ၾကားက မဂၤလာယူတတ္သူမဟုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အေတြ႕အႀကဳံကို တင္ျပမယ္၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ကေတာ့ လူမိုက္လုိ႔ဘဲ ေျပာရမလား ကိုယ့္ကမွားေနတယ္ထင္တာကို အားမနာတမ္း ေျပာတတ္လုိ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြက ေက်ာင္းေနစဥ္က “တေစာက္ကမ္း” ဆိုတဲ့ ဘြဲ႔ကို ေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ အဓိကေတာ့ ကိုယ္တင္ျပခ်က္ေတြဟာ ကိုယ္က်ဳိးမဖက္ဘုိ႔ လိုပါတယ္။ ဒီမီဒီယာဆိုတာ သုံးတတ္ရင္ေဆး၊ မသုံးတတ္ရင္ေဘးလို႔ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားေတြက ယုံၾကည္ၾကပါတယ္။ မီဒီယာကို သုံးတတ္ရင္ မီဒီယာရဲ႕ပံ့ပုိးမႈနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေတြမွာ ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ကို အႏိုင္ရတတ္သလို မီဒီယာကို မသုံးတတ္ရင္ ခ်ီးေသးကအစ မေကာင္းတာမွန္သမွ် အညႈိးနဲ႔ ပုပ္ခ်တာကို ခံရၿပီး ကိုယ္က်ဳိးနဲတတ္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလုိ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စံနစ္ေအာက္မွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြဟာ မဆလ၊ နဝတ၊ နအဖအစဥ္အဆက္ ျပည္သူပိုင္ (၎တုိ႔ပိုင္) လုပ္ထားတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ မီဒီယာရဲ႕ နားမုဒိမ္း က်င့္ေနတာကို ေန႔စဥ္နဲ႔အမွ်ခံေနၾကရပါတယ္။ ငါတုိ႔အစိုးရလုပ္တာ အကုန္မွန္တယ္၊ ဒါတို႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ား တိုင္းျပည္ကို စည္းကမ္းရွိစြာ ျပဳျပင္ေနတယ္။ တံတားေတြ ေဆာက္ေနတယ္၊ လမ္ေတြခင္းေနတယ္၊ အႏွစ္သာရရွိေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီး၏ မိန္႔ခြန္း၊ အတိုက္အခံ ျပည္ပပုဆိန္ ႐ိုးမ်ား က်ဆုံးရမည္ စသည္ျဖင့္ တြင္တြင္ႀကီး မ်က္စိမုဒိမ္း၊ နားမုဒိမ္း ေန႔စဥ္က်င့္ေနသည့္ အသုံး ေတာ္ခံ မီဒီယာမ်ားကို တန္ျပန္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျပည္သူ႔အက်ဳိးျပဳ မီဒီယာမ်ားလိုအပ္ပါသည္။ ၈၈ ေနာက္ပိုင္း RFA ႏွင့္ DVB တို႔သည္ ဒီမုိကေရစီအေရးကို ေစာင္းေပးမည့္ သတင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားအျဖစ္ ထြက္ေပၚလာ သည္မွာ ကြ်ႏု္ပ္တို႔အားလုံးအတြက္ အားတက္စရာပါ။

ဒီမုိကရတစ္ျမန္မာ့အသံ (DVB) သည္ NCGUB ႏွင့္ ေနာ္ေဝးႏုိင္ငံတုိ႔ ပူးေပါင္းညႈိႏႈိင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ေပၚေပါက္လာေသာ အသံလြင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သလို Radio Free Asia လြတ္လပ္ေသာ အာရွအသံ သည္လည္း အေမရိကအစိုးရကြန္ဂရက္ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈျဖင့္ အာရွတိုက္ ဒီမုိကေရစီထြန္းကား လာေရးအတြက္ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ျဖင့္ ေပၚေပါက္လာေသာ ႒ာနမ်ားျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သတင္းစာဆရာႀကီး ေၾကးမုံဦးေသာင္း NCGUB အစိုးရကို ေဝဖန္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ ဆရာႀကီး၏ သတင္းေဆာင္းပါးမ်ား၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံးေဆြးေႏြးခန္းမ်ားကို DVB မွ ရပ္ဆိုင္းလိုက္ပါသည္။ ဆရာႀကီးမေသမွီ ကြ်န္ေတာ့ကို ရင္ဖြင့္ သြားခဲ့သျဖင့္ သိရွိရပါသည္။ ဆရာကေတာ္ အသက္ရွင္ေနပါေသးသည္၊ ေမးၾကည့္ႏုိင္ပါသည္။

DVB တြင္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းကို NCGUB မွ ေထာက္ခံမႈျဖင့္ ခန္႔အပ္လိုက္ၿပီးေနာက္ DVB သည္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္း ပိတ္ပင္ထားေသာသူမ်ားကို ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးျခင္း မျပဳလုပ္ေတာ့ဘဲ ပိတ္ပင္ထား ခဲ့သည္ကို ထင္ရွားစြာေတြ႕ရသည္။ ေနာက္ဆုံး DVB သည္ ဘက္မလိုက္ အသံလႊင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေျဗာင္ေၾကျငာလာၿပီး NCGUB ႏွင့္ လုံးဝ မသက္ဆိုင္ေတာ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ဘက္မလိုက္ရပ္တည္မည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း တရားဝင္ ေျပာၾကားသည္အထိ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အျမင္မွာ DVB သည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီဘက္မွ ထုတ္လႊင့္ေသာ အသံလႊင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သည္၊ ၾကားေနမဟုတ္၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီ အင္အား စုတို႔ဘက္မွ လိုက္၍ အသံလႊင္ရမည့္ တာဝန္ရွိသည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္ မီဒီယာဟု အစကဆိုလွ်င္ ၎တုိ႔ကို မည္သူမွ် အလုပ္ခန္႔မည္မဟုတ္ေခ်။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အျမင္သည္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းသည္ ABSDF ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလုံးဆိုင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ဒီမုိကရက္တစ္တပ္ဦးမွ ရဲေဘာ္တေယာက္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသမားဟု အမည္ခံယူခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။ DVB တြင္ သူ႔လက္ သူ႔ေျခ ျဖစ္လာသည့္အခါမွ ဘက္မလိုက္သတင္းသမားဟု ဟစ္ေႂကြးသည္မွာ သူ႔သ႐ုပ္ကို ေဖၚျပျခင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ အစက တည္းက စစ္အစိုးရကို ဆန္႔က်င္လာသူဟု ဆိုသူက မီဒီယာသမားအျဖစ္ ေကာင္းစားလာေသာအခါ ယၡင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသမားဘဝကို ေမ့ၿပီး ၾကားေန မီဒီယာလုပ္ျခင္းသည္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို သစၥာေဖာက္၍ ကိုယ္က်ဳိးရွာျခင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။

ABSDF ဗဟို ေကာ္မီတီတြင္ ျပန္ၾကားေရးတာဝန္ခံလုပ္ၿပီး ညီလာခံတြင္ မည္သည့္ အလုပ္ကိုမွ တင္ျပႏုိင္ျခင္းမရွိဘဲႏွင့္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေရးသားၿပီး ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေမႊး ေအာင္သန္းမွ ႐ိုက္ႏွိပ္ ျဖန္႔ခ်ီသည့္ “နီကာရာဂြါ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲ” “ဖီလစ္ပိုင္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ” စသည့္ ေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကို ၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မတိုင္မွီ ပုံႏွိပ္၍ ျပည္တြင္းသုိ႔ ABSDF ျပန္ၾကားေရး႒ာန အမည္ခံၿပီး ျဖန္႔ခ်ီေပးခဲ့ျခင္းကို ၎႒ာနမွ လုပ္ပါသည္ဟု ေျဗာင္လိမ္ခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။ တဖန္ တတိယအႀကိမ္ ညီလာခံမွ မွတ္တမ္း မ်ားကို၊ တိတ္ေခြမ်ားကို ျပန္ၾကားေရး တာဝန္ခံအျဖစ္ သိမ္းဆည္းသည့္အခါ “ဒါေတြက တေန႔ ေ႐ႊေတြဗ်” ဟု ေျပာသူမွာလည္း ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။

ကြ်န္ေတာ့အေနႏွင့္ မီဒီယာသမားအားလုံးကို မဆိုလိုပါ။ မီဒီယာသမားမ်ားထဲတြင္ အခြင့္ အေရးသမားမ်ား၊ ရန္သူ႔ပုဆိန္႐ိုးမ်ားကို သတိထားရမည္၊ သူ႔လူကိုယ့္ဘက္သမားမ်ားကို ပညာမ်က္စိ ျဖင့္ ၾကည့္တတ္ရမည္ဟု သတိေပးလိုပါသည္။

ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ျပင္ပရွိ မီဒီယာမ်ားတြင္ လြတ္လပ္မႈ အျပည့္ရွိပါသည္၊ မည္သူ႔ကိုမွ် ေၾကာက္လန္႔ ေနစရာမရွိ၊ အစိုးရမွ ျပည္တြင္း မီဒီယာမ်ားကို ထိမ္းခ်ဳပ္၍ မလြယ္၊ ထိုေၾကာင့္ BBC, VOA, RFA ညာေနသည္၊ မိုးလုံးျပည့္ မုသာဝါဒီမ်ား စသည္ျဖင့္ နအဖက တိုက္ခိုက္လာပါသည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့ အေနႏွင့္ နအဖေနရာမွ ေန၍ စဥ္းစားလွ်င္ ၎ျပည္ပမီဒီယာမ်ားကို ဘယ္လို ႏႈတ္ပိတ္ေအာက္ လုပ္မလဲဆိုလွ်င္ ျပည္တြင္းကဲ့သုိ႔ အာဏာသုံး၍မရျဖင့္ ဥပါယ္တမ်ဥ္ျဖင့္ မိမိလူမ်ားကို မီဒီယာထဲသုိ႔ သြတ္သြင္းေပးရမည္ဟု ဆုံးျဖတ္ရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားဘဝ ၁၉၇၃ ခုႏွစ္ေလာက္က ကြ်န္ေတာ့သူငယ္ခ်င္းအိမ္တြင္ အဂၤလိပ္စာက်ဴရွင္ေပးသည့္ ကရင္ေက်ာင္းဆရာ တေယာက္ရွိပါသည္။ တေန႔တြင္ ၎က ဝမ္းသာအားရႏွင့္ သူ႔ကို BBC တြင္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ရန္ အေရြးခံရေၾကာင္း ေျပာသျဖင့္ ဝမ္းသာမိၾကပါသည္။ ထုိသူသည္ ႐ိုးသား၍ ႀကိဳးစားေသာ ျမန္မာ- အဂၤလိပ္ႏွစ္ဘာသာကို ေၾကညက္ေသာသူျဖစ္သည္။ အသံလႊင့္သမားေကာင္း တေယာက္ျဖစ္ႏုိင္သည့္ အသံၾသဇာႏွင့္လည္း ျပည့္စုံပါသည္။ သုိ႔ရာတြင္ ေနာင္သုံးလအၾကာ ၎အတြက္ ပတ္စပုိ႔ ဗီဇာေစာင့္ေနစဥ္ Reject လုပ္ခံရပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ၎သည္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္စံနစ္ ယုံၾကည္သူတဦးျဖစ္သည္ဟုဆိုကာ သတင္းေပးေသာေၾကာင့္ဟု သိရပါ သည္။ BBC မွ အစိုးရ ေထာက္ခံသူတေယာက္ကို ေရြးယူသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။

ေနာက္တခ်က္မွာ VOA တြင္ အလုပ္လုပ္ခဲ့သူ ဝန္ထမ္းတဦးမွ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အား သူ႔အမည္ကို မေျပာရန္ ဂတိခံ၍ ေျပာၾကာခဲ့မႈျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၎အား တေန႔တြင္ VOA မွ တာဝန္ရွိသူက ေန႔လည္ ထမင္းစားေခၚယူခဲ့ၿပီး၊ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ႀကီး တဦးႏွင့္ ေပးေတြခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ႀကီးက ၎အား “ေအး... မင္းေရးခ်င္တာေရး အသံလႊင့္ခ်င္တာလႊင့္ေပါ့ကြာ၊ ဒါေပမဲ့ ငါတို႔ထိခိုက္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ဟာမ်ဳိးကုိ ေပါ့ၿပီးလႊင့္၊ အေရးႀကီးတာကို အေရးမႀကီးသလိုမ်ဳိးေပါ့ကြာ၊ နားလည္တယ္မဟုတ္လားဟု ေျပာခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ေနာက္ မင္းလဲတေန႔ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ျပန္မွာဘဲ လိမ္လိမ္မာမာ လုပ္ေပါ့ကြာ” ဟု ဆုံးမသြားေသးေၾကာင္း ရင္ဖြင့္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ သူ႔အေနႏွင့္ ႒ာနမႈး (ယၡဳ႒ာနမႈးမဟုတ္) က ယၡဳလို သံအမတ္ႀကီးႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးႂကြမ္းဝင္ေၾကာင္း ေတြ႕ရ သျဖင့္ Shock ေရွာ့ျဖစ္သြားသည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။

ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ သတင္း႒ာန အထူးသျဖင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူ သန္း ၅၀ ေက်ာ္ကို တခ်ိန္တည္း သတင္း ေပးႏုိင္ေသာ ေရဒီယို အသံလႊင့္႒ာနမ်ား၏ အခန္းက႑သည္ အလြန္အေရးႀကီးသည့္ အေနအထား တြင္ ရွိပါသည္။ BBC, VOA, တို႔သည္ အစကနဦးတည္းက ဘက္မလိုက္သတင္း႒ာနမ်ားျဖစ္သည္။ VOA သည္ အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရေပၚလစီဘက္သုိ႔ ယိမ္းရသည္ကို မျငင္းႏုိင္ေခ်။ RFA, DVB တုိ႔သည္ ဘက္လိုက္ကိုလုိက္ရမည္ဟု ျမင္သည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္လိုလွ်င္ RFA, DVB မွ ထြက္ၿပီး BBC, VOA သုိ႔ ဝင္ၾကပါဟု တိုက္တြန္းလိုသည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ေထာင္လိုက ေထာင္ၾကပါ။ DVB, RFA နာမည္ခံၿပီးေတာ့ စစ္အာရွင္မ်ားကို တန္းတူအားေပးမႈ မျပဳသင့္ဟု ယုံၾကည္သည္။ ရန္သူသည္ ျပင္ပသတင္း႒ာနမ်ားကို အင္အားသုံး၍ မထိမ္းခ်ဳပ္ႏုိင္လွ်င္ အႏုနည္းျဖင့္ အတြင္းလူမ်ားထည့္ၿပီး လႈိက္စားႏိုင္သည္ လႈိက္စားေနသည္ကို မ်က္စိေဒါက္ေထာက္ၾကည့္ဘုိ႔လိုသည္ဟု သတိေပးလိုက္ ခ်င္ပါသည္။

နိဂုံအားျဖင့္ ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္အတြင္း အဂၤလိပ္ႏွင့္ ဂ်ာမန္တိုက္ေနစဥ္ အဂၤလိပ္ဘက္မွ အသံလႊင့္သူ မ်ားကလည္း မည္ကဲ့သုိ႔ ေအာင္ပြဲခံေနသည္၊ ရန္သူမည္မွ်က်ဆုံးသည္ကို ေျပာေန သကဲ့သုိ႔ ဂ်ာမန္မွလည္း ထိုနည္းတူေျပာလ်က္ ဝါဒျဖန္႔ခ်ီၾကသည္။ ယေန႔ျမန္မာျပည္သည္၊ ျပည္သူ လူထုႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တုိ႔ စစ္ျဖစ္ေနသည့္ပြဲျဖစ္သည္။ စစ္ပြဲမၿပီးေသး၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အေနႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာ ရွင္မ်ားကို တန္းတူအခြင့္အေရးေပးစရာမလိုဟု လုံးဝယုံၾကည္သည္။ ရန္သူ႕လူမ်ား မီဒီယာသမားမ်ား ထဲတြင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ေနမည္မွာ ေျမႀကီးလက္ခတ္မလြဲဟု ယုံၾကည္သည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရရွိေရးကို လိုလား သူမ်ားပီပီ အတိုက္အခံႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ားကို ေဇာင္းေပး၍ ၎တုိ႔အသံကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးႏုိင္ ဘုိ႔လိုသည္။ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးမ်ားျဖင့္ ဆင္ဆာလုပ္ ပိတ္ပင္ေနျခင္းမ်ဳိးကို ခြင့္မလႊတ္သင့္ဟု ယုံၾကည္ ပါသည္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ၾကားေနရမဲ့ အခ်ိန္ေရာက္ၿပီလားေမာင္တို႔ဟု ေမးလိုက္ပါေၾကာင္း။

ထြန္းေအာင္ေက်ာ္

Transocean’s ties to Burmese drug lords

2010-08-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

I would like to expose about a man, drug lord (Lo Hsing Han). Lo Hsing Han's retirement has been much more comfortable than the prison cell he might have expected.
But, like every other drug lord who has lasted long enough to salt his gains into legal trades, the secret of his success is not his guns or cunning, but his connections.

Protected by his friends in Burma's military junta, the man once known as the "Godfather of Heroin" is today among the country's most successful businessmen, his fingers in everything from jade and teak to construction and luxury hotels.

The 73-year-old, once blamed for single-handedly flooding America's streets with heroin, is among dozens of regime "cronies" given government contracts to reconstruct the towns and villages of the storm-hit Irrawaddy Delta – deals likely to earn them millions of dollars in commissions from a fund financed mainly by aid from foreign governments.
Mr Lo's Asia World Company, which is run today by his son, US-educated Steven Law, is among 43 companies already earmarked for reconstruction contracts, according to Burma's state-run press. Many firms are understood to be owned by friends or relations of the generals, whose social lives revolve around Rangoon's golf courses.
Critics fear much of it will end up lining the pockets of the generals and their cronies, the military men disbursing generous contracts to their business friends and taking kickbacks in return.
"This donors' conference will be a cash cow," said Mark Farmaner, the director of the human rights group Burma Campaign UK.

"The generals are giving out contracts to their cronies to assist in the reconstruction, but much of it will disappear in bribes. I am sure that is one reason why they have now decided to let in foreign aid workers: they have realised that cheque-books may start opening."

Asia World was involved in building Burma's new capital, Naypyidaw, including junta leader Than Shwe's house. Mr Lo is also said to have organised the catering for Than Shwe's daughter Thandar's wedding , where she appeared wearing seven diamond-encrusted necklaces and where guests enjoyed a five-tiered wedding cake and gallons of champagne.

In a July 2010, New York Times profile that singled out Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean's proclivity for breaking rules, Barry Meier noted that many human-rights activists have been calling for an investigation into the company's relationship with a family of powerful drug lords in Burma. One of their number is indeed Lo Hsing Han, known as the "Godfather of heroin." Now it appears that those activists are finally getting their wish.
The Treasury Department has opened a probe into Transocean's dealings in the region. Last year, Transocean signed a deal to drill in Burmese waters controlled by a family of drug lords. The family's leaders are Stephen Law — whom the U.S. government suspects is a launderer of enormous amounts of drug money — and Han, who "has been one of the world's key heroin traffickers dating back to the early 1970s," the Treasury Department says.

Business dealings with Law and Han would be considered a major breach of U.S. sanctions against Burma. The government hopes to discover whether any of the sanctioned parties are listed on the drilling contract — and to determine if Transocean knew that it was cutting a deal with some of the world's most ruthless international criminals.

The military junta that rules Burma has been accused of committing genocide, and reportedly using to develop nuclear weapons.

GOOD NEWS

2010-08-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရက သန္းေရႊ နဲ ့စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေတြကို စစ္ရာဇ၀တ္ေကာင္မ်ား အျဖစ္ နိင္ငံတကာ တရားရံုးမွာ အေရးယူေပးဖို့ကုလသမဂ ထံ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္ကို နယူဇီလန္ နဲ ့ ကေနဒါ နိင္ငံမ်ား က ေထာက္ခံ ေပးဖို ့ အေမရိကန္ သံတမန္မ်ားက တိုက္တြန္းေနျပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသတင္းရရိွပါတယ္။

War crimes probe for Myanmar

2010-08-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Aug 19, 2010
War crimes probe for Myanmar
WASHINGTON - CRITICS of Myanmar are voicing hope for intensified global pressure on the military regime after the United States signalled it would support a UN inquiry into alleged war crimes.

President Barack Obama's administration last year opened a new policy of engagement with Myanmar, also known as Burma, concluding that longstanding Western efforts to isolate the junta had failed to bear fruit.

But the administration has voiced growing dismay over the junta, which has faced allegations it is pursuing nuclear weapons and has stepped up efforts to marginalize democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of rare elections.

An administration official said the United States has opened discussions on how to set up a war crimes probe, a longstanding demand of activists as it could lead to the eventual indictment of junta leaders.

The US Campaign for Burma, led by exiled activists, said that Australia, Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have also supported an inquiry. It pledged to shift attention to persuading the European Union as a whole and Canada to offer support.

China, the main commercial and political partner of Myanmar, wields veto power on the UN Security Council, meaning any effort to establish an inquiry would likely come instead at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. -- AFP

NLD Sets Election Boycott Officially

2010-08-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

Leaders of Burma's main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), have decided to officially boycott the Nov 7. election, according to Ohn Kyaing, a party spokesperson.

The decision was made at a meeting on Thursday attended by central executive committee and leading party members.

Held at the house of NLD vice chairman Tin Oo in Rangoon, the meeting was attended by top NLD leaders including vice chairman Tin Oo, Win Tin, Nyunt Wai, Than Htun and Hla Pe, said Ohn Kyaing, who also attended.

He said the NLD decided to boycott the election because the 2008 Constitution and the election commission's election law do not guarantee democracy and human rights in Burma.

The NLD also affirmed that voters have the right to decide whether to vote in the election according to the constitution, he said.

In June, detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said Burmese citizens have the right not to vote in the upcoming election.

However, earlier in August, an article in one of the state-run newspapers warned that anyone who “disrupts” the upcoming elections could face up to 20 years imprisonment.

Ohn Kyaing said he cannot provide detailed information about the election boycott at this moment, but the NLD will hold strategy meetings in the near future for organizing the election boycott.

The Nov. 7 election takes place one week before Suu Kyi is due for release.
အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမုိကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (NLD) အေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ရန္ ယေန႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္လုိက္ၿပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ပါတီ ဗဟုိအလုပ္ အမႈေဆာင္ ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ဧရာ၀တီသုိ႔ ေျပာသည္။

NLD ဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဗဟုိဦးစီးအဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေသာ အစည္းေ၀းတရပ္ကုိ ဒုဥကၠဌ ဦးတင္ဦးေနအိမ္တြင္ ယေန႔ မြန္းလြဲပုိင္းက က်င္းပခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ အဆုိပါ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ေပၚထြက္လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
“က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဗဟုိ အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ အဖြဲ႔က ခရီးသြား ေနသူေတြ ကလြဲၿပီး က်န္တဲ့သူေတြ အားလုံး တက္တယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီး ဗဟုိဦးစီး အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ေတြလည္း တက္တယ္။ ဒီအစည္း အေ၀းကေန ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံ အေျခခံဥပေဒနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ၊ နည္းဥပေဒ ေတြဟာ ဒီမုိကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔ခြင့္အေရးေတြ ရရွိဖုိ႔ ဘယ္လုိမွ ဦးတည္ႏုိင္မွာ မဟုတ္တဲ့ အတြက္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိ NLD က သပိတ္ေမွာက္ဖုိ႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္ လုိက္တယ္။ ေနာက္တခုက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဥေပေဒ ေတြမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထား တဲ့အတုိင္း မဲဆႏၵရွင္ လူထုအေနနဲ႔ မိမိဆႏၵအတုိင္း မဲမေပးဘဲ ေနပုိင္ခြင့္ ရွိတယ္လုိ႔ NLD က သုံးသပ္တယ္”ဟု ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ေျပာသည္။

တိုင္းေဒသႀကီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ သို႔မဟုတ္ ျပည္နယ္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဥပေဒ၊ အခန္း (၁)၊ အပိုဒ္ (၂)၊ အပိုဒ္ခြဲ (ဎ) တြင္ ေရြးေကာက္မႈဆိုင္ရာ အခြင့္အေရးဆိုသည္မွာ ဟူေသာ အပိုဒ္၌ “ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ မဲေပးႏိုင္ေသာ အခြင့္အေရး သို႔မဟုတ္ မဲေပးျခင္းမျပဳဘဲ ေနႏိုင္ေသာ အခြင့္အေရးကို ဆိုသည္”ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

NLD အေနျဖင့္ လူထုႏွင့္လက္တြဲ၍ ေရွ႕ဆက္ၿပီး မည္သုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမည္ ဆုိသည္ကုိမူ အေသးစိတ္ မေျပာႏုိင္ေသး ေၾကာင္း ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ဆက္လက္ေျပာဆုိသည္။

ပါတီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကလည္း မဲဆႏၵရွင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မဲမေပးဘဲ ေနပုိင္ခြင့္ရွိေၾကာင္း လြန္ခဲ့သည့္လက ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားႏွင့္ေတြ႔ဆုံစဥ္ ေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။

၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္ေသာ ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၃ အရ တားျမစ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ မည္သူမဆို ေဖာက္ဖ်က္ က်ဴးလြန္၍ ျပစ္မႈ ထင္ရွားပါက ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အနည္းဆံုး ၅ ႏွစ္မွ အႏွစ္၂၀ အျပင္ ေငြဒဏ္ပါ ခ်မွတ္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ၾသဂုတ္လ အေစာပိုင္း ျမန္မာ့အလင္း သတင္းစာတြင္ ဥပေဒေလ့လာသူတဦး အမည္ခံ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္းက ေရးသားခဲ့သည္။

ယင္း ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၃ သည္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ တာ၀န္ကို တည္ၿငိမ္ေအးခ်မ္းစြာ စနစ္တက် လႊဲေျပာင္းေပးေရး၊ အမ်ဳိးသား ညီလာခံ
လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးတို႔ကုိ ေႏွာင့္ယွက္ ဆန္႔က်င္ျခင္းမွ ကာကြယ္ေသာ ဥပေဒ တရပ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဥပေဒေလ့လာသူ တဦး အမည္ခံ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္က ဆိုသည္။

၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏုိင္ရ NLD သည္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အတြက္ ပါတီထပ္မံ မွတ္ပုံ မတင္ရန္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ မတ္လ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႔ တြင္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။

ထုိ႔ေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီမ်ား မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္း ဥပေဒသစ္က NLD ၏ တရား၀င္ ရပ္တည္မႈကို ပယ္ဖ်က္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား တရား၀င္ရပ္တည္ခြင့္ပယ္ဖ်က္ခံရသည့္အေပၚ NLD ပါတီက နအဖကို ဧၿပီ ၂၉ ရက္တြင္ တရားစြဲဆိုခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းတရားရုံးက ေမ ၅ ရက္ ေန႔တြင္ ပယ္ခ် ထားခဲ့သည္။

လာမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ယွဥ္ၿပဳိင္ရန္ ပါတီဆက္လက္ တည္ေထာင္ခြင့္ႏွင့္ တည္ေထာင္ခြင့္ေလွ်ာက္ထားသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီ ၄၇ ပါတီ ရွိသည္။ ပါတီမွတ္ပံုတင္ခြင့္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားသည့္ ပါတီမွာ ၄၂ ပါတီရွိၿပီး ပါတီ ၄၀ ကို မွတ္ပံုတင္ ခ်ေပးၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

မွတ္ပံုတင္က်ၿပီးေသာ ပါတီ ၄၀ အနက္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေကာ္မရွင္သို႔ ယမန္ေန႔က ပါတီဝင္အင္အားစာရင္း တင္ျပခဲ့သည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးပါတီအပါဝင္ ၁၈ ပါတီသည္ ပါတီဝင္အင္အားစာရင္း တင္ျပခဲ့ၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

ပါတီစံု ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေထြေထြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၂၀၁၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာ ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အသီးသီးအတြက္ က်င္းပသြားမည္ဟု ၾသဂုတ္လ ၁၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကညာထားသည္။

polls cannot be 'credible': US

2010-08-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

The United States said Friday that Myanmar's planned November 7 elections cannot be "inclusive or credible" under the political circumstances there.

"Given the oppressive political environment in Burma, there is not a level playing field for these elections," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told AFP, using the previous name for Myanmar.

"They cannot be inclusive or credible under these circumstances."

Myanmar's junta announced Friday it will hold its first election in two decades on November 7 -- a vote critics say is a sham aimed at entrenching the ruling generals' half-century grip on power.

Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent much of the past 20 years in detention and is seen as the biggest threat to the junta, is barred from standing in the polls because she is a serving prisoner.

The election date, announced by state media, falls about a week before Suu Kyi's current term of house arrest is due to expire on November 13.

Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a landslide victory in 1990 but was never allowed to take office. It is boycotting the upcoming vote, saying the rules are unfair.

The Obama administration last year launched a dialogue with Myanmar, concluding that isolating the regime had not worked. But it has said it will only lift sanctions in return for progress on democracy and other concerns.
President Barack Obama should "renew his support" for Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and make sure the world is "not tempted to recognize this mockery of the democratic process," said top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a "free and fair" vote in Myanmar as the country's state media announced a date for the first election in 20 years.

A statement from Ban noted the announcement and asked that Myanmar's government uphold previous promises to hold "inclusive" elections.

"As essential steps for any national reconciliation and democratic transition process, the secretary-general strongly urges the authorities to ensure that fundamental freedoms are upheld for all citizens of Myanmar," the statement said.

He also asked that the government "release all remaining political prisoners without delay so that they can freely participate in the political life of their country."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest. She was first placed under house arrest in 1989. A year later, in 1990, her party won a landslide victory that the military junta refused to recognize. Elections have not been held in the country since then.

The junta recently announced an election law that bars Suu Kyi from taking part in the upcoming race.

UN a clear message for mass killing

2010-08-10T05:10:00.000-07:00

When a United Nations human-rights investigator for Myanmar called for an international inquiry to look into possible war crimes by the country's military regime, he added significant weight to similar calls that had been made in other quarters.

But that call in March by Tomas Ojea Quintana, as part of a scathing 30-page report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, has come back to haunt the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar. Quintana has been
denied a visa by the junta to return to the Southeast Asian nation for his fourth visit, according to diplomatic and UN sources.

Pro-democracy activists in exile are hardly surprised by the treatment given to the Argentine lawyer, who is currently on a visit to Thailand and Indonesia ahead of preparing another report on Myanmar to be presented to the UN General Assembly in October.

His predecessor, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, was also shut out from the country by the junta following critical reports tabled before the world body.

"It was very clear that Quintana touched on a very sensitive issue for the Burmese [Myanmar] regime when he called for the setting up of an international committee to look into war crimes," said Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Burma Partnership, an Asia-Pacific network of civil society groups championing democracy and human rights in Myanmar. "The regime cannot tolerate such criticism."

In fact, Quintana broke new diplomatic ground with the strong words he said in March, added the political exile. "It was the first time that a crime[s] against humanity inquiry was called for by a UN human-rights rapporteur."

Despite being denied a visa, "he [Quintana] is still committed to pushing the inquiry forward", revealed David Scott Matheison, Myanmar consultant for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights watchdog. "He is not giving up; he wants to go back inside and engage with as many actors."

The UN established a mandate to look into human-rights violations in Myanmar in 1992. That year also saw the start of resolutions critical of the junta being tabled during the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly.

But it was only in 2002 that the reports on war crimes allegations leveled at the junta began to emerge, confirming a worsening climate of oppression and abuse in a country that already had a growing list of gross human-rights violations. The most damning report was "License to Rape", published by the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN), a group from Myanmar's Shan ethnic minority.

This disturbing report documented the military's rape of Shan women as part of their war effort against Shan ethnic rebels.

Following that 2002 report, the UN General Assembly approved for the first time a resolution calling for an independent inquiry to investigate cases of rape and other crimes committed by the Myanmar regime in the border areas that are home to ethnic minorities where separatist battles were being waged.

Yet the disclosures in the SWAN report changed little, as reflected in other reports that followed. Some were published by women belonging to the Karen minority living along Myanmar's eastern borders, where a six-decade separatist conflict continues.

The Karen and Shan victims are among those in the north and eastern corner of Myanmar, close to the country's borders with Thailand and China, where some 500,000 internally displaced people live in dire conditions after fleeing conflict situations in their villages.

The impacts of these conflicts on the ethnic civilian population were exposed in a 2009 report authored by five international jurists. Over 3,000 ethnic nationality villages have been burnt to the ground by the military regime, revealed the report produced by the International Human Rights Clinic at the law school of the US-based Harvard University. "This is comparable to the number of villages estimated to have been destroyed or damaged in Darfur [Sudan]."

"The world cannot wait while the military regime continues its atrocities against the people of Burma [Myanmar]," added the jurists from Britain, Mongolia, South Africa, the United States and Venezuela in the report "Crimes in Burma". "We call on the UN Security Council urgently to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate and report on crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma."

Quintana echoed similar sentiments in his March report: "The UN institutions may consider the possibility to establish a commission of inquiry with a specific fact-finding mandate to address the question of international crimes."

Quintana's report, which followed his third trip to Myanmar in February following his appointment in May 2008, highlighted a litany of violations that included deaths and torture of detainees, forced labor, arrest of dissidents and the lack of freedom of expression and assembly.

"This report was the highest from a UN official and confirmed what ethnic communities living in the war zones have been saying during the past years," said Charm Tong, a ranking member of SWAN. "The victims are still under attack and have to flee the Burmese army."

For this suffering to end, Quintana's concerns and his call for a war crimes inquiry should "break the silence at the UN Security Council", the Shan activist told Inter Press Service. "We want Burma to be discussed at the Security Council."

(Inter Press Service)

RUSSIA TRAINS MYANMAR MILITARY STUDENT OFFICERS

2010-08-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

Russia has trained 4,185 Myanmar military officers in nuclear sciences over the past decade but only a "sprinkling" of scholars have pursued the positive uses of the energy source, a Myanmar academic said on Friday. Myanmar's nuclear ambitions have been a subject of concern in recent years after
allegations by defectors that the pariah regime is keen to develop nuclear weapons in cooperation with North Korea.
"Russia has begun to fulfil a 250-million-dollar contract to deliver surface-to-air missiles to seven countries including Libya, Syria and Venezuela and Myanmar, the Vedomosti business daily reported Friday. Russia will also deliver the S-125 Pechora-2M missile batteries to Egypt, Myanmar, Vietnam and Turkmenistan under the contract, the newspaper said, citing a source in the state-owned Russian Technologies corporation", said Aung Naing Htwe (leading members of 88 Generation Students -Exile.

Myanmar's ruling junta, however, claims that its nuclear ambitions are purely medical in nature.

Maung Zarni, a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, pointed out that only a handful of the Myanmar graduates who have studied nuclear-related technologies in Moscow had medical backgrounds, raising questions about the regime's claims of pursuing nuclear energy for medicinal reasons.

"Between 400 to 600 graduates are sent to Russia every year and out of those graduates only a sprinkling of officers have medical backgrounds," he told a seminar at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.

Zarni estimated that only five to 20 of the military graduates attending nuclear-related courses in Moscow since 2001 had medical backgrounds. He had compiled the list of 4,185 based on interviews with former graduates, he said.

"And if the nuclear programme is for medical purposes why isn't there any involvement by the Ministry of Health," Zarni noted.

He acknowledged that it was still difficult to prove whether Myanmar's military junta had acquired or developed nuclear weapons, but argued their intent to do so was pretty clear.

At this stage the junta might be more interested in using the threat of a potential nuclear arsenal as a "big stick" in diplomacy, he speculated.

"The fact that the US and other powers have not done anything substantive to rein in North Korea is because they have the bomb, so that's a role model for a lot of rogue states," Zarni said.

88 VIEW

2010-08-06T09:48:00.001-07:00

Than Shwe Is In Hospital

2010-08-05T21:27:00.001-07:00

Burmese military chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe was briefly hospitalized at a Rangoon hospital on Wednesday night, according to sources in Naypyidaw and Rangoon.

The 77-year-old junta leader, who is known to have a diabetes, was hospitalized at Pun Hlaing International Hospital in Rangoon, the sources said. But he was believed to be no longer at the hospital on Thursday morning, according to journalists in Rangoon.

Burmese Buddhist monks in India who met Than Shwe during his recent visit there said he appeared to be in ill health.

In December 2006, Than Shwe spent two weeks in Singapore's General Hospital, reportedly receiving treatment for intestinal cancer . He reportedly refused surgery.

Naypidaw sources speculate that the regime chief is likely to seek further medical treatment in Singapore if his health worsens.

UNfair ON BURMA'S POPULATION

2010-08-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

The UN has been forced to defend its record on Burma in recent days with the fallout from a leaked memo that slated Ban Ki-moon’s impact on the pariah state showing no signs of easing.

The now-infamous 50-page report, written by Inga-Britt Ahlenius and leaked to the Washington Post in mid-July, said that the UN secretariat is in a “process of decay” after three years of “absence of strategic guidance and leadership” under Ban.

The comments were a parting shot from Ahlenius, who recently finished her post as chief of the UN’s anti-corruption agency, the Office of Internal Oversight (UNOIOS).

“We seem to be seen less and less as a relevant partner in the resolution of world problems,” she said, questioning the UN’s “capacity to protect civilians in conflict and distress…What relevance do we have in disarmament, in Myanmar [Burma], Darfur, Afghanistan, Cyprus, G20…?”

The secretary general used one of his first speeches as UN chief in January 2007 to urge for the release of Burma’s political prisoners, but since his last, and widely criticised, visit to Burma in June last year, he has barely mentioned the country in public.

Moreover, the UN is yet to appoint a successor to Ibrahim Gambari, the equally maligned UN special envoy to Burma who was reassigned to Sudan in late 2009. In January this year it defended the hiatus on reappointing an envoy by claiming that UN Chief of Staff Vijay Nambiar was temporarily filling the role.

But it has again been forced to defend accusations in the wake of the leaked report that it has been lax on pressuring the Burmese junta to reform. One reporter asked Ban’s spokesperson, Martin Nesirky, on 23 July whether the UN had indeed accomplished anything on Burma, which is heading towards widely-criticised elections this year.

“We continue to work, as I also said to you before; the good offices [team] is not one individual, if you like, it’s people working behind the scenes,” he said. “Not everything that happens is in the public eye…Sometimes you see those results quickly, sometimes it takes longer. Certainly we’ve been very public about the need for credible elections in Myanmar.

Nambiar also responded to the Ahlenius report by saying that Ban’s work as secretary general had been “visionary” and that he had balanced his UN role with “providing truly global leadership.”

But critics have argued that his method of dealing in “soft power” has reinforced the growing influence of China within the UN, at a time when Western nations are in a face-off over China’s support for the Burmese junta. Ahlenius said that Ban was “spineless and charmless” and was “struggling to show leadership”, an accusation that has apparently rattled his office.

Thirty-two US senators urged to prove UN on Burma's nuclear ambition

2010-07-31T07:05:00.000-07:00

Thirty-two US senators urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday to back the creation of a special UN commission to investigate possible crimes against humanity and war crimes in Myanmar.

"While your administration continues along a path of sanctions and pragmatic engagement with Burma, we believe that such a commission will help convince Burma's military regime that we are serious about our commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for the people of Burma," they wrote.

The group, led by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and Republican Senator Judd Gregg said a UN Commission of Inquiry for Myanmar was needed to look into "a number of reports" that showed "a consistent pattern" of rights abuses.

They cited "the use of child soldiers, the destruction of villages and the displacement of ethnic minorities, the use of rape as a weapon of war, extrajudicial killings, forced relocation, and forced labor."

The lawmakers noted that the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Quintana, had called for such a commission when he reported UN Human Rights Council in March after a visit to Myanmar a month earlier.

US officials refer to the country as Burma.

US WATCHES NORHT KOREA AND BURMA RELATION

2010-07-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

The U.S. said it is carefully watching the budding secretive relationship between Myanmar and North Korea for signs of nuclear cooperation, as official talks between the authoritarian regimes entered a second day Friday.

North Korea's Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun's four-day visit to Myanmar is shrouded in secrecy. Myanmar has not officially announced the visit is taking place, and few details have leaked out about the nature of the trip, which is Pak's first since the two countries resumed diplomatic ties in 2007.

Asked to comment on the visit, U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley urged Myanmar to adhere to U.N. sanctions on North Korea that include restrictions on arms transactions.

"North Korea is a serial proliferator. North Korea is engaged in significant illicit activity. Burma, like other countries around the world, has obligations, and we expect Burma to live up to those obligations," he told reporters Thursday in Washington. He said the lack of transparency surrounding their ties makes it difficult to assess if North Korea is indulging in nuclear proliferation with Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.

"It is something that is of concern to us, given North Korea's historical record. And it is something that we continue to watch very carefully," Crowley said.

Pak went Friday to the junta's headquarters in the administrative capital of Naypyitaw to meet his Myanmar counterpart, Nyan Win, as well as Prime Minister Thein Sein, diplomats and officials said on condition of anonymity to stay below the junta's radar.

The talks begin the substantive part of Pak's visit after since sightseeing on Thursday in Yangon, the biggest city, where he visited the famed Shwedagon Pagoda and the National Museum.

It was not known if Pak would meet junta chief Senior Gen. Than Shwe who returned Thursday from a visit to India.

Myanmar and North Korea are two of Asia's most authoritarian regimes, and both face sanctions by the West. They have had increasingly close ties in recent years, especially in military affairs, and there are fears Pyongyang is supplying the army-led Southeast Asian regime with nuclear technology.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised concerns about Myanmar at a security meeting last week with senior Asian officials.

"We continue to be concerned by the reports that Burma may be seeking assistance from North Korea with regard to a nuclear program," Clinton said.

Myanmar denies it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Last month the junta dismissed reports on the subject as coming from "army deserters, defectors and dissidents."

Myanmar severed diplomatic relations with North Korea in 1983, following a fatal bombing attack during a visit by South Korea's then-President Chun Doo-hwan that killed 21 people, including four South Korean Cabinet ministers.

Three North Korean commandos involved in the bombing were detained — one blew himself up during his arrest, a second was hanged and a third died in prison in 2008.

North Korean diplomats seize books on Kim From Writer

2010-07-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

North Korean diplomats in Myanmar have confiscated hundreds of copies of a locally published biography on the Stalinist state's reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, the book's author said Friday.

Prominent Burmese writer Hein Latt, 62, said two senior embassy officials visited his home and took away the remaining 300 copies of the book, which they said was "false and inaccurate" and could endanger ties between the two countries.

"I handed over these books just because I don't want to take the trouble to sort out whatever consequences will appear," Hein Latt told Reuters, adding he had not received any complaints from the authorities in military-ruled Myanmar.

There was no immediate explanation as to why diplomats were acting to confiscate books in a foreign country.

North Korea and Myanmar have developed a close diplomatic relationship, causing concern among Asian and Western countries fearful the two are cooperating on issues related to nuclear weapons technology.

North Korea's Foreign Minister, Pak Ui-chun, is currently in Myanmar on a four-day visit.

Hein Latt, who has authored about 25 biographies, including books on U.S. President Barack Obama, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, said about 700 copies of his book had been sold since it was launched two months ago.

He said the biography, entitled "Kim Jong-Il: The Dear Leader of North Korea," had been approved by the Press Scrutiny Department of the Myanmar's Ministry of Information. It was written in the Burmese language.

The embassy officials said it contained false information because it made references to other texts published in North America about Kim, son of North Korea's late founder, Kim Il-sung, the country's "eternal" president.

(Reporting by Aung Hla Tun; Editing by Martin Petty and Ron Popeski)

NUCLEAR GODFATHER-NORTH KOREA FM VISITS ON BURMA

2010-07-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

North Korea's foreign minister visited Myanmar on Thursday for high-level talks that come on the heels of a U.S. warning against any cooperation between the two nations on nuclear technology.

Officials and diplomats confirmed the arrival of Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun, who is on a four-nation tour and making his first visit to Myanmar since the two countries resumed diplomatic ties in 2007. The sources spoke anonymously because the visit has not been officially announced by the military-ruled government.

Few details are known about Pak's four-day visit. He was scheduled to tour Yangon's famed Shwedagon Pagoda before traveling Friday to the administrative capital of Naypyitaw to meet his counterpart, Nyan Win, and other senior government officials, the officials and diplomats said. The subject of talks has not been disclosed.

Myanmar and North Korea are two of Asia's most authoritarian regimes, and both face sanctions by the West. They have had increasingly close ties in recent years, especially in military affairs, and there are fears that Pyongyang is supplying the army-led Southeast Asian regime with nuclear technology.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed concern at a security meeting last week with senior Asian officials about reports that North Korea had delivered military equipment to Myanmar, also known as Burma.

"We continue to be concerned by the reports that Burma may be seeking assistance from North Korea with regard to a nuclear program," Clinton said. "We will be discussing further ways in which we can cooperate to alter the actions of the government in Burma and encourage the leaders there to commit to reform and change and the betterment of their own people."

On his regional tour, Pak also visited Vietnam and Laos and was headed next to Indonesia, diplomats said.

Myanmar severed diplomatic relations with North Korea in 1983, following a fatal bombing attack during a visit by South Korea's then-President Chun Doo-hwan that killed 21 people, including four South Korean Cabinet ministers.

Three North Korean commandos involved in the bombing were detained — one blew himself up during his arrest, a second was hanged and a third died in prison in 2008.

ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး Pak Ui Chun သည္ နအဖစစ္အစုိးရႏွင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးရန္အတြက္ ယေန႔ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ေရာက္ရိွေၾကာင္း အစုိးရအရာရိွတဦးအား ကိုးကားၿပီး ဘန္ေကာက္ပို႔စ္သတင္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပသည္။

Pak Ui Chun သည္ မနက္ျဖန္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဦးဉာဏ္၀င္းႏွင့္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ေတြ႔ဆုံရန္ရိွၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၌ လာမည့္တနဂၤေႏြေန႔အထိ ေနထိုင္သြားရန္ရိွေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ ၁၉၈၃ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သံတမန္ အဆက္အသြယ္ျပတ္္ေတာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ လာေရာက္လည္ပတ္သည့္ ယင္းအခ်ိန္က ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားသမၼတ ခ်မ္ဒူး၀မ္အား ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕အာဇာနည္ ဗိမာန္တြင္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ေအဂ်င့္မ်ားက ဗုံးခဲြလုပ္ႀကံသတ္ျဖတ္ရန္ ႀကိဳးစားမႈျဖစ္ေပၚခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ သံတမန္ အဆက္အသြယ္ျပတ္္ေတာက္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ယင္းဗုံးေပါက္ကြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ လူေပါင္း (၂၁) ဦး ေသဆုံးခဲ့သည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ သံတမန္ဆက္ဆံေရး ျပန္လည္ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။

အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ သီတင္းပတ္အတြင္း ဗီယက္နမ္ႏိုင္ငံ ဟႏြိဳင္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ အာဆီယံေဒသတြင္း ထိပ္သီးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားႏိုင္ငံတို႔၏ စစ္ေရးအရ ဆက္ဆံမႈမ်ားအေပၚ စိုးရိမ္ေၾကာင္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသေဘၤာတစင္း စစ္လက္နက္ပစၥည္းမ်ားတင္ေဆာင္ကာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ဆိုက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ျခင္းႏွင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရသည္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ထုတ္လုပ္ေရး အစီအစဥ္အတြက္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားထံမွ အကူအညီယူေနသည္ဆိုသည့္ သတင္းမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚခဲ့ျခင္းအတြက္လည္း စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္ျဖစ္မိေၾကာင္း မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ဇြန္လအတြင္း၌လည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ထုတ္လုပ္ေရး စီမံခ်က္မ်ားကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္သည့္ သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းတခုကို္ အယ္လ္ဂ်ာဇီးယား ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားမွ ထုတ္လႊင့္သြားခဲ့သည္။ ယင္းထုတ္လႊင့္ခ်က္ကို နအဖအစိုးရက ျငင္းပယ္ခဲ့သည္။

ORTH KOREA HAS BEEN SELLING MISSILES TO BIN

2010-07-28T12:44:00.001-07:00

Wikileaksက ဇူလိုင္လ (၂၅)ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ေသာ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး အစီရင္ခံစာအတြင္း ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသည္ ကမာၻ႕အၾကမ္းဖက္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားသို႔ ဒံုးက်ည္မ်ား ေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည္။ အာဖဂန္မွ ဩဇာႀကီးမားသည့္ စစ္ေသြးၾကြ ေခါင္းေဆာင္တစ္ဦးျဖစ္ၿပီး အၾကမ္းဖက္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီး အိုစမာ ဘင္လာဒင္၏ ေငြေၾကးဆိုင္ရာ အႀကံေပး တာ၀န္ခံဟု ယူဆရသူ တစ္ဦးသည္ (၂၀၀၅)ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ကာ ေျမျပင္မွ ေ၀ဟင္ပစ္ ဒံုးက်ည္မ်ား ၀ယ္ယူခဲ့ေၾကာင္း Wikileaksက ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ “(၂၀၀၅)ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏို၀င္ဘာ (၁၉)ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဟက္ဇ္ဘ္-အစၥလာမီပါတီ အႀကီးအကဲ ဂူလ္ဘူဒင္ ဟက္မက္တရာႏွင့္ ဘင္လာဒင္၏ ေငြေၾကးဆိုင္ရာ အႀကံေပး တာ၀န္ခံ ေဒါက္တာအမင္တို႔သည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသို႔ အီရန္မွတဆင့္ အေရာက္သြားခဲ့သည္”ဟု အဆိုပါ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္တြင္ ပါရွိသည္။ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသည္ အေ၀းထိန္းစနစ္ျဖင့္ ပစ္ခတ္ႏိုင္သည့္ ဒံုးက်ည္လက္နက္မ်ားကို စစ္ေသြးၾကြမ်ားထံသို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ထိုလက္နက္မ်ားကို မည္သည့္ႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ထုတ္လုပ္သည္ကိုမူ တိတိက်က် မသိရဟုလည္း Wikileaksက ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည္။ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး အစီရင္ခံစာမ်ားကို အေျခခံထားသည့္ အဆိုပါ ေၾကညာခ်က္က ေနာက္ထပ္(၁၈)လအၾကာတြင္ အာဖဂန္နစၥတန္၌ အေမရိကန္၏ Chinook စစ္ရဟတ္ယာဥ္တစ္စင္း ဒံုးက်ည္ျဖင့္ ပစ္ခ်ခံရမႈသည္ အဆိုပါ အေရာင္းအ၀ယ္ႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနဖြယ္ရွိေၾကာင္း ေရးသားထားသည္။ Wikileaksက ဘင္လာဒင္၏ ေငြေၾကးဆိုင္ရာ အႀကံေပး တာ၀န္ခံဟုဆိုသည့္ ေဒါက္တာအမင္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္သည့္ အေသးစိတ္ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကိုမူ ေထာက္လွမ္းရန္ ခက္ခဲေနဆဲဟုဆိုသည္။ ကိုရီးယား ေရလက္ၾကား ေျမာက္ပိုင္းရွိ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ ႏိုင္ငံသည္ ဘင္လာဒင္၏ ကမာၻ႕ရန္ျဖစ္သည့္ အေမရိကန္ႏွင့္ ခါးသီးေသာ ဆက္ဆံေရးမ်ား တည္ရွိေနၿပီး ယခုအခါ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား၏ ႏုိင္ငံေရးၿပိဳင္ဖက္ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ အေမရိကန္တို႔သည္ ပူးေပါင္းစစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ေနေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည္။

Burma junta accused of extortion, rape

2010-07-22T06:27:00.001-07:00

Burma's junta has sent a team of officials to investigate allegations that militia border guards are committing extortion, rape and assault against Burmese people being deported from Thailand.

The Thai government is under heavy criticism over the allegations, which come amid a new crackdown on illegal Burmese workers who are being sent home.

Some deportees say they have faced beatings and even conscription into a Burmese militia army.

At an immigration detention centre on the Thai-Burma border, there is a depressing daily ritual.

"Before we only had one to 200 people per day [being sent home]," immigration police colonel Montree Manjit said.

"But now we have about six or 700 people per day."

Fifteen thousand illegal migrants from Burma went through the centre last month. They were then trucked to the border and deported.

Burmese are the biggest migrant group in Thailand. About 900,000 have legitimate work permits but even they are being sent back.

They are now required to apply for passports and they have to go back home to get them.

Passport brokers help them with the process but they are only accessible to those with money.

Those with letters from bona fide employers who are seeking passports cross at the official border gate.

But labour rights activist Moe Swe says paperless illegal workers with few means are facing extortion and worse when they get to the other side of the river.

"I must say 95 per cent of people are facing that problem. Everybody is extorted at the checkpoint," he said.

The informal checkpoints are run by the Burmese junta's proxy militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army.

They impose a fee of just over $40 on the deportees before they enter Burma and most do not have it.

One young woman who was working illegally in Thailand was recently released after being caught and deported by Thai authorities.

"I was sleeping in the afternoon when I heard a boy shouting 'police are arresting, police are arresting' and I ran away," she said.

"It was the border police and I got caught by them. They took us away."

After she crossed the border, she says she was held in a cell by the militia until a friend came to pay the fee.

She left others behind who were told they would be conscripted into the militia force if they did not find the money.

Mr Swe says it is a common story.

The crackdown is being criticised by human rights groups after some deportees have reported being beaten and raped.

Despite the risks, the border remains a revolving door for impoverished Burmese who take great risks crossing back and forth to work.

Thai authorities expect to deport 300,000 people in the next three months.

JANE SATELLITE WATCHES REGIME NUCLEAR PLAN IN BURMA

2010-07-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

Allegations by a Burmese defector that the military-run country is pursuing a nuclear program are corroborated by newly available commercial satellite images, Jane’s Intelligence Review said in an article released yesterday.

The photos of buildings and security fences near the country’s capital, Naypyidaw, confirm reports by Major Sai Thein Win of machine tool factories and other facilities alleged to be part of a nascent program to build nuclear weapons, the magazine reported from London.

“They will not make a bomb with the technology they currently possess or the intellectual capability,” Jane’s analyst Allison Puccioni said in an interview. “The two factors do make it possible to have a route to one.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern about reports that North Korea and Burma are expanding military ties and sharing nuclear technology at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Thailand last year.

Clinton said the U.S. would remain “vigilant” against any military cooperation between the two countries. Yesterday, Clinton announced further sanctions against North Korea in an effort to halt the country’s nuclear-weapons program.

Sai said he worked at two factories involved in the nuclear program. His report to a Burmese opposition news website, Democratic Voice of Burma, based in Norway, included documents and color photographs of the interior of the installations.

The satellite imagery reviewed by Jane’s showed only the exterior of the buildings, Puccioni said.

‘Overly Ambitious’

Jane’s said Burma’s nuclear program is “overly ambitious with limited expertise,” in a statement yesterday. While Burma is a signatory to international agreements to control nuclear weapons use, it hasn’t agreed to more recent changes in the treaties and therefore isn’t subject to international inspections, the magazine said.

“With Myanmar’s current freedom from sanctions and relative economic prosperity, the junta may be able to outsource the technical know-how and tools to reach its goals far sooner than expected,” Christian Le Mière, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review, said in a statement.

“Someone had to be assisting them, that’s the frightening thing,” said David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector and now a fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia, in an interview. “Myanmar is uniquely incapable of carrying this through.”

North Korea could be the country providing aid, said Michael J. Green, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former senior director for Asia on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

North Korea

During the Bush administration, North Korea discussed delivering short-range missiles and nuclear capability to Burma, Green said.

“We worry about the transfer of nuclear technology” and indications of clandestine military cooperation between two of Asia’s most secretive regimes, Clinton said last year. “I’m not saying it is happening, but we want to be prepared to stand against it.”

State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said on July 12 that the U.S. continues “to have concerns about Burma’s relationship with North Korea. It’s something that we watch very, very carefully and consistently.”

Last year, the U.S. Navy followed the Kang Nam I, a North Korean freighter headed in the direction of Burma with unknown cargo. The ship turned around and returned home.

The evidence points to a method of uranium enrichment, laser enrichment, that the North Koreans have never used, Kay said. “If it is laser enrichment the finger points more toward Chinese assistance or some place in the former Soviet Union,” he said.

United States concerned about Myanmar-North Korea military ties

2010-07-22T05:59:00.000-07:00

Hanoi, Vietnam (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed U.S. concerns about Myanmar's reported military ties to North Korea and its potential impact on the region during a visit to Vietnam Thursday.

"We know that a ship from North Korea recently delivered military equipment to Burma and we continue to be concerned by the reports that Burma may be seeking assistance from North Korea with regard to a nuclear program," Clinton said.

Myanmar was formerly known as Burma.

Clinton's comments came after meetings with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem.

In June, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, a key member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, postponed a trip to Myanmar out of concern that Myanmar's government was working with North Korea on the development of a nuclear program.

At the time, Webb noted that "a defecting officer from [Myanmar's] military claims direct knowledge of such plans, and reportedly has furnished documents to corroborate his claims."

Webb said it was unclear "whether these allegations have substantive merit."

However, in light of the U.S. State Department's recent accusation that Myanmar has violated a U.N. Security Council resolution "with respect to a suspected shipment of arms from North Korea, there are now two unresolved matters related to activities of serious concern between these two countries."

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, Regional Forum begins in Friday in Hanoi. Developments in Myanmar are likely to be a popular topic of discussion at the summit.

A military junta has ruled Myanmar since 1962 and preparing to hold its first elections in 20 years, but no date has been announced.

ASEAN leaders unsure about Myanmar's nuclear ambitions

2010-07-20T06:35:00.001-07:00

ASEAN leaders are unsure about Myanmar's nuclear ambitions, a regional foreign policy expert said Tuesday.

A documentary produced by Burmese journalists alleged in June that Myanmar, a member of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), is developing nuclear weapons.

Myanmar could be purchasing nuclear weapon technology from North Korea, said Tim Huxley, executive director of the Singapore branch of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, but ASEAN members are reluctant to comment on that in "strong terms."

"ASEAN countries aren't sure how to deal with" Myanmar's alleged nuclear ambitions, Huxley said. "If they confront Myanmar, Myanmar will just say they have a right to develop nuclear energy for civil purposes, and they would simply deny any links to North Korea."

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told the German PressAgency dpa that nuclear weapons would not be on the agenda of his bilateral meeting with Myanmar officials Tuesday.

Earlier on Tuesday, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan told reporters in Hanoi that there was no consensus among member nations about Myanmar's nuclear ambitions.

"But there is certainly the ASEAN charter and the (South-East Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone) treaty, which requires that South-East Asia be free of nuclear weapons," Pitsuwan said.

The 1997 treaty binds ASEAN countries to a pledge against the use, manufacture or transport of nuclear weapons. They also promised not allow other countries to develop or manufacture nuclear weapons inside their borders.

A spokesman for US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last week that the United States was concerned about a lack of transparency surrounding Myanmar's "commercial interactions" with North Korea. Clinton plans to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on Thursday and Friday.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Burma gets 'earful' from Asean on elections

2010-07-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

Burma's Foreign Minister Nyan Win "got an earful" from his Southeast Asian colleagues on the need for elections in his country to be fair and credible, the Asean bloc's chief said Tuesday.

"Myanmar, I think, got an earful last night," Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan told reporters, referring to a working dinner Monday by the group's foreign ministers.

"Asean is very much concerned and Asean is very much interested in the peaceful national reconciliation in Myanmar."

Surin said Nyan Win was told the elections could have "positive or negative implications" for Asean, a 10-nation group of 600 million people trying to project itself as a major trade and investment partner.

Burma's top diplomat "listened very, very attentively" during the discussions, Surin added.

Nyan Win briefed his fellow ministers on the progress of the elections planned for this year, but gave no date for the vote.

Burma's democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been disqualified from taking part in the elections.

The country's military regime disbanded her National League for Democracy but gave permission to some of its former members to run under a new name.

Burma also assured Asean it was not seeking to build nuclear weapons, as reported in the media, Surin said.

As well as Burma, Asean groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

North Korea and Myanmar hot-top agenda for Asia security meet

2010-07-19T11:18:00.001-07:00

Tension on the Korean peninsula, elections in military-ruled Myanmar and the question of whether the former Burma is developing nuclear arms will top the agenda of meetings of Asian foreign ministers this week in Vietnam.

Southeast Asian foreign ministers met in Hanoi on Monday to discuss regional security ahead of talks this week with counterparts from China, Japan, North and South Korea, the United States, the European Union and Russia.

Myanmar's foreign minister repeated that the country had no ambition to become a nuclear power, denying a report published in June by an exile group that it was trying to develop a secret nuclear program with the intention of making an atomic bomb.

"Myanmar told the meeting that it's not attempting to procure or develop nuclear weapons and we thanked them for their clarification on the matter," said Thani Thongpakdi, a deputy spokesman for the Thai foreign ministry.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives on Thursday and will reinforce Washington's commitment to Asia in the face of rising Chinese influence and growing tensions with North Korea during two days of meetings, U.S. officials say.

A copy of a draft statement to be issued by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) said the 10-member group shared "deep concern" at the sinking of a South Korean warship and growing friction on the Korean peninsula.

Tension between North and South Korea remains high following the March sinking of the corvette Cheonan, killing 46 South Korean sailors. Pyongyang has denied responsibility and escaped censure this month from the United Nations, which condemned the attack but, under pressure from China, did not blame North Korea.

"We expressed deep concern over the sinking of (the) ship Cheonan," said the draft, which also did not blame Pyongyang.

U.S. officials say Clinton is also likely to discuss human rights concerns, and could touch on prospects for Pacific trade talks that the Obama administration hopes will open regional markets to more U.S. exports.

North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun will attend Friday's ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia's largest security dialogue that includes all six parties in the stalled North Korean nuclear talks -- North and South Korea and regional powers China, Japan the United States and Russia.

PRESSURE ON MYANMAR

U.S. officials say Clinton will raise concerns about election preparations in Myanmar, hoping to underscore that the country's military leaders must be held accountable for the lack of real democratic reform.

Myanmar's Southeast Asian neighbors have urged the junta to hold "free and fair" elections, expected this year, and to free pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Southeast Asia has been divided over the issue. Early last year some Southeast Asian countries urged ASEAN to take a tougher stand with a public appeal calling on the junta to grant an amnesty to Suu Kyi.

That went nowhere. Several ASEAN nations rebuffed it, saying it contravened the grouping's long-standing non-interference policy in each others' internal politics. The detention of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been jailed or under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years, has led the West to sharply criticize the former Burma's election plans.

"There will certainly be questions about Myanmar on progress and preparation for the upcoming elections. But it is unlikely to be strong, stinging words," Chitriya Pinthong, deputy permanent secretary of Thailand's foreign ministry, told Reuters.

"Things are moving in a positive direction and we want to engage the government in a constructive way rather than condemnation even before elections take place."

The United States is also increasingly concerned about potential links between Myanmar and North Korea, including reports by an exiled anti-government group that Myanmar may be harboring nuclear ambitions of its own, U.S. officials said.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said the United States would press Myanmar to implement U.S. Security Council resolutions tightening sanctions on North Korea but that there were "no plans in the current climate" for Clinton to meet representatives of either North Korea or Myanmar in Hanoi.

(Additional reporting by John Ruwitch, Andrew Quinn and Jack Kim; Editing by Alex Richardson)

REGIME FORMS MISSILE FORCE

2010-07-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Burmese military junta has formed a strategic missile force that works with North Korean suppliers and reports directly to Vice Snr-Gen Maung Aye, the commander-in-chief of the army, according to military sources who leaked the classified information to The Irrawaddy.

The Directorate of Missile, formed in September 2009 to work alongside the Artillery Force and the Air Defense Force, comprises one of Naypyidaw’s major defense initiatives to strategically prepare for modern warfare and protect against external threats to the country's long coastline, strategic defense industries, command centers and air force and naval bases.
Burma’s missile force is armed with two types of weapons: surface-to-surface missiles, including short and medium range ballistic missiles such as the Scud-type Hwasong-6 imported from North Korea, and 122-mm and 240-mm multiple rocket launch systems imported from China and North Korea.

Known in the Burmese language as Ka Ka Dom, the Directorate of Missile is currently headed by Maj-Gen Myint Soe, who is reportedly close to Maung Aye.

There are 10 missile operations commands under the Directorate of Missile: Kyaukse in the Naypyidaw Regional command; Hmawbi in the Rangoon regional command; Bilin and Moulmein in the Southeast Regional Command; Dawei and Myeik in the Coastal Regional Command; Kengtung in the Triangle Regional Command; Loikaw in the Eastern Regional Command; and Sittwe in the Western Regional Command.

Under the missile operation commands, mobile battalions are deployed in locations such as Mong-Hnyin in Kachin State, Nawng-cho in northern Shan State and Kyaukpadaung in Mandalay Division, as well as other undisclosed places in the country.

Comprising another important wing of the Directorate of Missile are electronic battalions, which are deployed within missile operations commands and have the task of mapping and finding targets with electronic devices.

The idea for the strategic missile force came in 2007, when the National Defense College suggested forming a new directorate to better manage imported missiles and multiple rocket launchers.

The Directorate of Missile was formed as a separate entity from the Directorate of Artillery. Previously, Burma’s Artillery Force and Armor Force were under the same command, the Directorate of Artillery and Armor. However, in 2005, the junta separated the two directorates for better military mobilization

To protect Burma's 1,385-mile coastline, artillery and missile units are deployed on strategic off-coast islands.

Lt-Gen Myint Hlaing, the chief of the Directorate of Air Defense who commands eight air defense operations commands, and Maj-Gen Mya Win, the chief of the Directorate of Artillery who commands 10 artillery operations commands, are also reportedly close to Maung Aye.

34 REBELS IN INDIA

2010-07-13T10:00:00.001-07:00

အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရက ၁၂ ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ၾကာ ထိန္းသိမ္းၿပီး တရားစြဲဆို ထားေသာ ျမန္မာ သူပုန္မ်ားကို ေထာင္ဒဏ္ႏွင့္ ေငြဒဏ္မ်ား အသီးသီး က်ခံေစရန္ ကာလကတၱား တရား႐ံုးမွ ယမန္ေန႔က အၿပီးသတ္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ့ ေသာ္လည္း ကြင္းလံုးကၽြတ္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ရန္ မေရရာေသးေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။
ကာလကတၱားၿမိဳ႕ ပရက္စီဒင္စီ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္ ထိန္းသိမ္း ထားေသာ ရခုိင္ႏွင့္ ကရင္ တိုင္းရင္းသား ၃၄ ဦးတို႔ကို လက္နက္ ခဲယမ္းႏွင့္ ေဖာက္ခြဲေရး ပစၥည္းမ်ား ကိုင္ေဆာင္မႈ အက္ဥပေဒ၊ တရားမ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား အက္ဥပေဒ တို႔ျဖင့္ အလုပ္ႏွင့္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၁ ႏွစ္ႏွင့္ ၃ လ အျပင္ ေငြဒဏ္ ႐ူပီး ၆၀၀၀ စီ အသီးသီး ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။

“တရား႐ံုးက ဒီအမႈ ၿပီးသြားၿပီ ဆိုၿပီးပဲ ေျပာလိုက္တယ္။ သူတို႔ဟာ ေထာင္ထဲမွာ ၁၀ ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ ေနခဲ့ၿပီးၿပီ။ ေထာင္ထဲ ဆက္ေနဖို႔ မလိုအပ္ ေတာ့ဘူး။ ဒါကို တရား႐ံုးက တခုခု လုပ္ေပးရမွာ ျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ သူတို႔ကို အေၾကာင္း ျပခ်က္မရွိဘဲ ေထာင္ထဲမွာပဲ ေနေစခ်င္ ေနတယ္။ က်ေနာ္ တို႔လည္း ဘာမွ လုပ္ေပးလို႔ မရဘူး ျဖစ္ေနတယ္” ဟု ေရွ႕ေန တဦးျဖစ္သူ Akshay Sharma ကေျပာသည္။

အက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္ ႏွစ္ရွည္လမ်ား ေနခဲ့ရၿပီးျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ အဆိုပါ ခ်ဳပ္ရက္မ်ားကို ခံစားခြင့္ေပးသည့္အေနျဖင့္ ေထာင္ ဒဏ္မ်ား ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း သက္ဆိုင္ရာအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ကြင္းလံုးကၽြတ္ လႊတ္ေပးလိုျခင္းမရွိ ျဖစ္ေနသည္ဟု ျမန္မာသူပုန္မ်ား၏ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အျဖစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးေနသူ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ (NCGUB) ၀န္ႀကီး ေဒါက္တာ တင့္ေဆြကလည္း ဆိုသည္။

“အလုပ္နဲ႔ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ကေတာ့ သူတို႔ ခ်ဳပ္ရက္ေတြ ေလွ်ာ့ေပးလိုက္လို႔ က်ခံဖို႔ မလိုေတာ့ဘူး။ ဒဏ္ေငြကေတာ့ ေဆာင္ရမယ္။ မေဆာင္ရင္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၈ လ လို႔ ထပ္ေျပာတယ္။ ဒဏ္ေငြ ေဆာင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာင္ သူတို႔ကို မလႊတ္ေပးခ်င္ဘူး ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ တရားမ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား ပုဒ္မ တပ္ၿပီး ေထာင္ထဲကို ျပန္ထည့္ဖို႔လုပ္ေနၾကတာ” ဟု ေဒါက္တာ တင့္ေဆြက ေျပာျပသည္။

ဒဏ္ေငြေဆာင္လိုက္ပါက လြတ္ေျမာက္ရမည္ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ထိုသူတို႔သည္ အိႏၵိယေျမေပၚတြင္ တရား၀င္ ေနထိုင္ခြင့္မရွိသည့္အတြက္ တရားမ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား အမႈျဖင့္ အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရက ထပ္မံ အေရးယူႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ေဒါက္တာ တင့္ေဆြက ဆက္လက္၍ “သူတို႔ကို UNHCR က ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိမွတ္ျပဳဖို႔ စဥ္းစားဆဲအဆင့္ လက္မွတ္ကို တင္ျပထားေပမယ့္ ဒါက တရား၀င္ေနထိုင္ခြင့္ မဟုတ္ဘူးဆိုၿပီး ပယ္ခ်ထားတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ သူတို႔ေတြ လံုး၀ လြတ္သြားဖို႔ အတြက္က က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဆက္ၿပီး သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အဆင့္ဆင့္ကို တက္ၿပီး ႀကိဳးစားၾကရဦးမယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

အမႈအေပၚ ညႇာတာ ေထာက္ထားၿပီး ေထာင္ဒဏ္မ်ား ခ်မွတ္ရာတြင္ သတ္မွတ္ထားသည့္ ႏွစ္မ်ားထက္ ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့ ခ်မွတ္ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း တရား႐ံုး၏ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မွာ ရွင္းလင္းမႈ မရွိေၾကာင္း ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားက ဆိုသည္။

အမႈၿပီးဆံုးသြားၿပီဟု ဆိုေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာသူပုန္မ်ား၏ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးမွာ မေရမရာျဖစ္ေနၿပီး ကာလၾကာရွည္ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံထားရသူမ်ားအေပၚ ခ်မွတ္သည့္ ဒဏ္ေငြပမာဏမွာလည္း မ်ားျပားေနသျဖင့္ တရား႐ံုး၏ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မ်ားသည္ တရားမွ်တမႈ မရွိေၾကာင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားက ေ၀ဖန္ၾကသည္။

လတ္တေလာတြင္ ၃၄ ဦးအနက္ ကုိစိုးႏိုင္ဆိုသူသည္ အစာအိမ္ေရာဂါ ခံစားေနရသည္မွ လြဲ၍ က်န္သူမ်ားမွာ က်န္းမာေရး ေကာင္းမြန္ေနၾကၿပီး ကာလကတၱားရွိ ပရက္စီဒင္စီ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္ပင္ ေနၾကရမည္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

“သူတို႔ကေတာ့ ေထာင္ပဲ အက်ခံလိုက္မယ္ ေျပာၾကတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ကေတာ့ သူတို႔ လံုး၀ လြတ္ေျမာက္ဖို႔ လုပ္ရမယ္။ သူတို ခံခ့ဲရတာေတြက မ်ားလြန္းေနၿပီ” ဟု ေဒါက္တာ တင့္ေဆြက ေျပာသည္။

အိႏၵိယေရပိုင္နက္အတြင္းရွိ လန္းေဖာလ္ကၽြန္းသို႔ ေရာက္လာေသာ ရခိုင္အမ်ဳိးသား ညီညြတ္ေရးပါတီ (NUPA) ႏွင့္ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသား အစည္းအ႐ုံး (KNU) တို႔မွ ရခိုင္ႏွင့္ ကရင္တုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ား ပါ၀င္သည့္ လူစုကို ၁၉၉၈ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလ ၁၁ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အိႏၵိယေရတပ္က ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည္။

ထို႔ေနာက္ လက္နက္ခဲယမ္းမ်ား လက္၀ယ္ေတြ႔ရွိမႈျဖင့္ အက္ဒမန္ကၽြန္းစု ပို႔ဘလဲယားၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ၈ ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ၾကာ အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ျဖင့္ ထားရိွခဲ့သည္။ ထိုအေတာအတြင္း သူတို႔အဖြဲ႔မွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ၆ ဦးတို႔မွာ ေသဒဏ္ေပးကြပ္မ်က္ခံရၿပီး က်န္သူမ်ားကိုမူ ကလကတၱားအက်ဥ္းေထာင္သို႔ ပို႔ေဆာင္၍ အိႏၵိယဗဟို ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအဖြဲ႔ (CBI) က ၂၀၀၆ ေအာက္တိုဘာလတြင္ တရားလိုျပဳ တရားစြဲဆိုခဲ့သည္။

ျမန္မာ သူပုန္မ်ားဟု အစြပ္စြဲ ခံခဲ့ရသူမ်ားသည္ အိႏၵိယေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအဖြဲ႔မွ ဒုဗိုလ္မႉးၾကီး ဗီ အက္စ္ ဂရာဝယ္လ္ (Lt. Col. V.S. Grewal) ႏွင့္ လွ်ိဳ႕၀ွက္သေဘာတူညီထားသည့္ “ပင္လယ္ေမွ်ာ့ စစ္ဆင္ေရး”အတြက္ လာေရာက္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ လက္ေတြ႔တြင္မူ အိႏၵိယ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရတို႔ ပူးေပါင္းအကြက္ခ် ဖမ္းဆီးျခင္းခံခဲ့ရသည္။

အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရမွ စြပ္စြဲသည့္အတိုင္း အိႏၵိယ ခြဲထြက္ေရး သူပုန္မ်ားကို လက္နက္မ်ား ေထာက္ပံ့မည့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ သူပုန္မ်ား မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း အဖမ္းခံရသူမ်ားက အစဥ္တစိုက္ ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အမႈ စစ္ေဆးစဥ္ ကာလတေလွ်ာက္လံုး တရားလိုဘက္မွ အေထာက္အထားမ်ား၊ သက္ေသမ်ား တင္ျပရန္ ပ်က္ကြက္မႈမ်ားစြာရွိခဲ့ျပီး တင္ျပခဲ့သည့္ အေထာက္အထားမ်ားမွာလည္း ခိုင္လံုမႈ တစံုတရာမရွိေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာသူပုန္မ်ား၏ ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားက ေ၀ဖန္ျပစ္တင္ခဲ့သည္။

အဆိုပါ ၃၄ ဦးတို႔ကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ျပန္မပို႔ရန္ ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားက ေလွ်ာက္လဲခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ကုလသမဂၢ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာ မဟာမင္းႀကီး႐ံုး (UNHCR) ၏ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳေပးေရးအတြက္ စဥ္းစားေနဆဲအဆင့္ လက္မွတ္မ်ားကို တင္ျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။

ျမန္မာသူပုန္မ်ားကို ႏိုင္ငံေရး ခိုလႈံခြင့္ေပးရန္ ခ်က္သမၼတႏိုင္ငံက ေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ျမန္မာသူပုန္မ်ားအေရး လႈပ္ရွားေနေသာ Solidarity Committee ကလည္း ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုျခင္းမ်ား ရွိခဲ့သည္။

ဖမ္းဆီးထားသူမ်ား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအတြက္ အိႏၵိယ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားက ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ေဒါက္တာ တင့္ေဆြ၊ Euro Burma ႐ံုးမွ ဒါ႐ိုက္တာ ဦးဟန္ေညာင္ေဝႏွင့္ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ အေနာက္ ဘင္ေဂါျပည္နယ္ရွိ အားကစားေရးရာ ၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အရာရွိတဦးတို႔ကလည္း တရား႐ံုးတြင္ အဖမ္းခံရသူ ၃၄ ဦးသည္ ျမန္မာျပည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအတြက္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရး သမားမ်ားသာ ျဖစ္သည္ဆိုသည့္ အေထာက္အထားမ်ားကို ယမန္ႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလအတြင္းက တင္ျပ ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့ၾကေသးသည္။

အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံသည္ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရးကို ေထာက္ခံအားေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း အေရွ႕ေမွ်ာ္ မူ၀ါဒကုိ စတင္က်င့္သံုးခဲ့သည့္ ၁၉၉၀ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးစြာ ဆက္ဆံခဲ့ျပီး စစ္သံုးပစၥည္းမ်ား၊ နည္းပညာ အကူအညီမ်ားေပးျခင္း၊ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ကုန္သြယ္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား တိုးျမႇင့္ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳခဲ့သည္။

US worried the polls would be unfair

2010-07-13T09:55:00.001-07:00

WASHINGTON DC, United States—The US said Monday it was deeply worried Myanmar's upcoming election would be unfair, dismissing the junta's move to allow former members of the main opposition party to run.

The military regime in Myanmar, also known as Burma, disbanded democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) but last week gave permission to some of its former members to run under a new name.

"It doesn't change our concern about the electoral process. We think that this is a flawed electoral process," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.

"We respect decisions that former NLD members have made," he said. "We certainly do not have any expectation that what proceeds in Burma here will be anything that remotely resembles a free, fair, or legitimate result."

The NLD plans to boycott the elections this year, believing they are an attempt for the junta to legitimize its rule.

The polls will be the first since 1990, when the NLD triumphed but was never allowed to take power. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, has spent most of the past two decades under house arrest.

Some activists believe the junta allowed the registration of the new National Democratic Force in part to splinter the opposition, weakening the influence of the NLD and of Suu Kyi.

President Barack Obama's administration has made dialogue with US adversaries a signature policy and last year opened talks with the junta aimed at repairing relations.

Crowley acknowledged the talks have not borne fruit on democratization but said the United States planned to stick with the policy.

"We have years, if not decades, of experience that tells us that isolation has not worked, either," he said.

"We will continue to engage them not to reward them, but just simply to make sure that they have clarity that if they envision any different kind of relationship with the United States, that fundamental processes within their own country have to change," he said.

MILITARY REGIME KILLS MILITARY OFFICER DURING INTERROGATION IN NAYPYIDAW

2010-07-09T10:50:00.001-07:00

An official from the Burmese regime's War Office died recently while being interrogated by the junta's military intelligence service, according to sources in Naypyidaw.

“He was arrested by military intelligence agents three weeks ago. Three days later, they informed his family that he had died during interrogation,” the source said.

“He was an army major in his early 30s who lived in Sein Pan Avenue in Naypyidaw,” the source added, referring to a residential area that is home to many senior officials from the War Office.

According to the source, the officer was arrested by Military Affairs Security (MAS), the junta's military intelligence service, on suspicion of leaking secret information about the War Office to a former senior officer living in exile.

The Irrawaddy was unable to confirm any details relating to the officer's death. Sources in Naypyidaw said that his family has since disappeared and that access to his house on Sein Pan Avenue has been blocked by local authorities.

Meanwhile, there are reports that MAS also arrested a former intelligence officer at his home two weeks ago.

The officer, Col Yan Naung Soe, served under the commander of the Rangoon Regional Military Command.

The recent arrests are the latest sign that the Burmese regime has stepped up its efforts to stem leaks from within its military command.

Earlier this year, it sentenced ex-Maj Win Naing Kyaw and Foreign Ministry official Thura Kyaw to death for revealing information about the junta's secret relations with North Korea to the exiled media.

According to military sources, the MAS has increased its surveillance of officials and non-officials from the War Office since missile expert Maj Sai Thein Win defected earlier this year with photographs and documents that served as the basis of a report revealing the regime's secret nuclear weapons program.

Plague-infected rats reported in capital NAPYIDAW

2010-07-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

Plague-infected rats reported in Myanmar's capital 07 Jul 2010 10:17:15 GMT
Source: Reuters
YANGON, July 7 (Reuters) - Myanmar's health ministry has circulated a warning among government departments about rat-borne plague after finding infected dead rodents in a compound of a government office, an official said.

Half a dozen dead rats were found in a ministry in the new capital, Naypyitaw, an official told Reuters on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

The warning called on other ministries to look out for dead rodents at their offices and at living quarters, urging civil servants to report cases to the nearest health office.

Villagers and motorists between Yangon, the former capital, and Naypyitaw reported seeing thousands of field mice on the move and squashed on the highway in what could possibly be a mass migration away from an affected area.

"I saw hundreds of dead mice killed after being driven over by vehicles scattered on the highway when I drove back to Yangon last week," Min Kyaw, a Yangon-based travel agent, said.

Thai-based Irrawaddy magazine said an unspecified number of Yangon residents had been diagnosed with plague in June, citing an epidemiologist. The report said all were treated and had since recovered.

A senior health ministry official told Reuters the authorities were alert to the dangers of the contagious disease primarily transmitted by rodents and had taken measures, but insisted there had been no humans affected.

State-owned Myanmar language newspapers carried a public notice about the danger of bubonic plague spread by infected rat fleas on July 1, calling on civilians to report cases to the nearest health department. (Reporting by Aung Hla Tun; Writing by Ambika Ahuja; Editing by Alan Raybould)

REGIME FUNDS GAS TO NUCLEAR BOMB

2010-07-06T06:59:00.000-07:00

Funding for Myanmar nukes

PARIS - MYANMAR'S military rulers are using gas revenue from US and French energy giants Chevron and Total to fund an illegal bid to build nuclear weapons, human rights monitors said in a report on Monday.

Myanmar's Yadan gas pipeline, run by the two companies along with Thai firm PTTEP, made billions of dollars for the military leaders, the Paris-based group EarthRights International said, citing data from the firms.

The NGO also branded the companies complicit in human rights abuses such as targeted killings and forced labour at the pipeline.

It said Chevron, Total and PTTEP have generated US$9 billion (S$12.5 billion) from Myanmar's Yadana gas pipeline since 1998, more than half of which has gone straight to the ruling junta.

'The companies are financing the world's newest nuclear threat with multi-billion dollar payments,' EarthRights said in a statement.

'The funds have enabled the country's autocratic junta to maintain power and pursue an expensive, illegal nuclear weapons programme.' The United States has voiced concerns about Myanmar's cooperation with alleged nuclear proliferator North Korea after the Norwegian-based news group Democratic Voice of Burma said Myanmar was trying to build an atomic bomb. -- AFP

Tensions between locals and the Chinese community grow in Burma

2010-07-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

Tensions between locals and the growing Chinese community in Burma are rising, as Beijing’s influence in its southern neighbour expands. Some analysts are warning that widespread race riots – which broke out in the 1960s – could occur again.

People in Burma, particularly in the northern part of the country where the majority of Chinese immigrants have settled, are increasingly vocal in their criticism of the newcomers, as well as of China’s policies towards their country.

Most of those moving to Burma from China are businesspeople in search of new markets, and bring with them their own workers from China. Locals complain that the Chinese businesses are of little benefit to them economically while the people make little or no attempt to integrate.

“The Chinese get rich whilst we get poor,” said Soe San, who is from a small village on the Irrawaddy Delta, south of Bhamo. “All the opportunities are taken by them.”

The widespread Sinophobia is aimed at the “New Chinese”, recent immigrants from China, as opposed to the second and third generations of Sino-Burmese, who are well-integrated, speak Burmese and practise Buddhism – Burma’s dominant religion.

“Recent migrants, mainly from the [south-western] Yunnan province, have little attachment to the country and keep their language and culture intact,” said a Sino-Burmese analyst in Rangoon, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Exact numbers of Chinese immigrants to Burma are unknown – especially as acquiring Burmese citizenship is a fairly simple process that many have undertaken. Estimates run anywhere between one to three million.

Whatever the true figure, Mandalay, Burma’s second biggest city, is 30 per cent to 40 per cent Chinese, according to statistics from Global Witness, a London-based human-rights monitor; Lashio, the capital of Shan state, is dubbed “Chinatown”, and Mandarin is the language of choice in Kachin state.

Denied permission to work in professional positions, many of the Chinese immigrants entered business with large firms bringing in Chinese workers. They dominate Burma’s economy and have a disproportionately large presence in the country’s higher education.

Burmese industry is underdeveloped as China supplies cheap goods from Yunnan province. Imports from China to Myanmar have reached unprecendented levels, rising in value from US$546 million (Dh2 billion) in 2000 to $2bn in 2008, according to the Internatonal Monetary Fund.

The real value of exports is likely far higher given the considerable black market trade.

Underlying much of the tension between the Burmese and Chinese immigrants are Beijing’s policies in Burma.

Political support from Beijing, which has a veto in the United Nations Security Council, is seen as a major reason for the stability of Burma’s junta, a source of resentment among many in Burma who long for democracy.

China is also pushing to extract more of Burma’s resources, including hydropower, oil and gas.

“The Burmese population believe that China’s exploitations have caused environmental degradation and undermined Myanmar’s democratic aspirations,” said the analyst in Rangoon.

China has rapidly expanded its foreign direct investment in Burma in recent years, mostly in the field of resource extraction, and now boasts $1.85bn in official direct investment in the country; the real figure is believed to be higher as not all such investment has to be channelled officially.

According to a 2008 report by Earth Rights International, there are at least 69 Chinese corporations investing in over 90 hydropower, mining, oil and natural gas projects in Burma.

Two Chinese pipelines running through Myanmar are due to go online within the next two years. One will bring oil from the Middle East, while the other will have the capacity to bring 12 billion cubic metres of Burma's gas to China every year.

Apart from concerns about the fact that Burma – where electricity is intermittent – is selling off gas it needs itself, critics accuse China of brutally exploiting both people and the environment in its quest for resources.

“Imagine your home has been bulldozed for a dam construction project, your farm, which is your livelihood, has been seized without compensation, and you and your family are forcibly relocated,” said Ko Ko Thett, a commentator for The Irrawaddy, a Rangoon-based daily.

“Then the Chinese immigrants come to work the land where your farm used to exist. This is the source of tensions.”

In the past two months there have been protests by villagers in Kachin against the Myitsone Dam being built by the state-owned Chinese Power Investments Company which is causing the relocation of up to 15,000 people. In April unclaimed bomb blasts killed 300 Chinese workers.

In addition, a conflict between the Burmese army and the Kokang, a largely Chinese minority, has intensified in the border region.

“Repressed anger against the New Chinese has been seething for years and could easily build up to a communal clash,” said Ko Ko.

“There is also potential for the destruction of Chinese projects as long as there are groups which can exploit the justifiable grievance of the local people who have been displaced by such projects.”

To The Top

‘No Rallies, No Slogans’ Order Shackles Parties Ahead of Poll

2010-07-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Burma’s military regime is giving its critics more ammunition, tightening its grip ahead of a general election this year by seeing to it that independent political parties are barred from chanting slogans, marching in rallies and displaying their party flags when they campaign.

Ahead of national elections for parliament – meant to set the foundation for a "discipline flourishing democracy" in the South-east Asian nation -- the country’s latest restrictions aim to stamp out the customary colour, animated campaigning and slogan cheering that is the standard feature of pre-poll politics in the more vibrant democracies in the region, such as Indonesia and the Philippines.

These limitations were spelled out in a late June directive issued by Burma’s powerful Election Commission (EC), whose rulings cannot be challenged in a court ahead of the poll. The election date itself has not been announced.

Published in the local media, ‘Directive 2/2010’ reveals the lengths to which the EC has gone to protect the authoritarian order in Burma, also called Myanmar.

Declared taboo during the campaign are any speeches and published material that "tarnish" the image of the military-run state, its over 400,000- strong armed forces and the junta-shaped 2008 Constitution. Candidates have been warned to avoid public utterances that undermine "security and community peace."

And even if the independent parties – only three of the registered 33 so far – yield to these shackles, they face even more challenges when they organise public meetings for candidates to address the estimated 27.2 million voters across the country.

The parties have to first seek approval from the EC and three different local authorities a week ahead of a planned meeting, specifying the building where it will be held.

In addition, their applications need to state how many people will attend each meeting and give a detailed biography and photograph of each speaker, as well as the exact time each speaker will begin and end speaking.

"This is blatant interference by the junta to try and control the outcome of this year’s election," said Zin Linn, spokesman for the National Coalition Government for the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the democratically elected government that won Burma’s last general election in 1990 but has since been forced into exile. "Some of these restrictions are more severe than those in the 1990 election."

That this election will be a "sham" is confirmed by the unlimited freedom enjoyed by the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), Zin Linn says. "It is allowed to break all the limits placed by the EC on political parties. The junta is also openly encouraging people to support the USDP," he told IPS.

The USDP, headed by the junta’s second-in-command, Prime Minister Thein Sein, is the political wing of the pro-regime Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA).

But the USDA, which at one time declared that it had 18 million members, does more than serve as the social and welfare arm of the regime. Its members have been used to harass those with the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party led by pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

The NLD, which won the 1990 elections with a thumping 82 percent of the 485 seats in parliament, was forced to dissolve as a party after it announced in March that it would boycott the poll given the junta’s restrictions around the conduct of this year’s poll.

The NLD’s high-risk political gamble was in solidarity for Suu Kyi, who has spent over 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest, and the country’s over 2,200 political prisoners.

The poll restrictions come at a time when Burma’s military rulers have a greater stranglehold on the country than they had in 1990. That poll was held two years after a student-led democracy uprising was brutally crushed. Thus, the intervening years saw the regime at the time -- in power since a 1962 coup – nurse uncertainty about its absolute hold over the country.

That political atmosphere enabled the 1990 poll to be held with "a bit more openness" than this year’s general election, says Aung Naing Oo, a Burmese political analyst living in exile in Thailand. "Political parties had 17 months to campaign and although there were restrictions, not all were properly enforced."

"There was lot of intimidation against the NLD but no rules against parties that are as restrictive as this year’s," he told IPS. "Election Day was very, very free and fair; vote counting was very transparent."

That same poll saw some 230 political parties apply to contest the election, but only 93 vied for seats in the legislature on voting day. And although the military warned that the number of people at campaign meetings in townships could not exceed 50, NLD’s meeting reportedly drew between 300 to 500 people at times.

This time around, the junta appears determined to avoid a repeat of seeing a pro-junta party trounced at the polls, an attitude that has alarmed rights groups.

"The laws have been drafted with broad language as to what would constitute illegal or not," said Benjamin Zawacki, Burma researcher for the London-based Amnesty International. "The powers vested in the EC gives them complete discretion and there is no appeal process."

"There are three freedoms utterly fundamental for an election – the human rights for freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association," he said in an interview. "We see these three freedoms clearly under attack this time." (END) By Marwaan Macan-Markar

IAEA HEADS TO BURMA

2010-06-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

IAEA to investigate Burma's nuclear program

Updated June 30, 2010 20:43:24

It's been a rumour for years but now the international nuclear watchdog has formally turned its attention to Burma. The International Atomic Energy Agency is understood to be investigating a report, written by one of its own former directors. The document draws on a new dossier of material which was smuggled out of Burma, by a Burmese weapons expert. The IAEA has approached the Burmese regime asking it to explain why it appears to be manufacturing parts for nuclear weapons.

Presenter: Jeff Waters
Speakers: Robert Kelly, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency
ႏ်ဴကလီးယား စစ္ေဆးေရးမႉးေဟာင္း ေရးသား ျပဳစုသည့္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ ဆိုင္ရာ အစီရင္ခံစာကို ဖတ္ၿပီး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး ေဒါသ ထြက္လ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ျပည္ပသို႔ တိမ္းေရွာင္လာေသာ ဗိုလ္မႉး စိုင္းသိန္းဝင္း သယ္ေဆာင္လာသည့္ အေထာက္အထားမ်ားအေပၚ မူတည္၍ ႏိုင္ငံ တကာ အဏုျမဴ စြမ္းအင္ ေအဂ်င္စီ (IAEA) ၫႊန္ၾကားေရးမႉးေဟာင္း ေရာဘတ္ ကယ္လီ ဦးေဆာင္ျပဳစုၿပီး ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ ျမန္မာ့အသံ (DVB) က ယခုလ အေ“ျမန္မာ့ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ဆိုင္ရာ လႈပ္ရွား ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ား” အမည္ရွိ အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား အစီအစဥ္ မ်ားသည္ “ကြ်မ္းက်င္ ေသသပ္မႈ မရွိ”၊ “အၾကမ္းထည္ ဆန္လြန္းသည္” ဟု ေရာဘတ္ ကယ္လီက ေကာက္ခ်က္ ခ်ထားသည္။

“ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ထုတ္လုပ္ေရးႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္သည့္ စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ မ်ားတြင္ လက္ေတြ႔ သုေတသန ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈ ရွိပံုမရ။ အနည္းဆံုး အားျဖင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ဆိုင္ရာ အစိတ္ အပိုင္းမ်ား၊ စမ္းသပ္မႈ မ်ားကိုပင္ လုပ္ႏိုင္ပံု မရေသး”ဟုလည္း အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပ ထားသည္။

စနစ္တက် အေသးစိတ္ သံုးသပ္ထားေသာ အစီရင္ခံစာကို ဖတ္႐ႈၿပီးေနာက္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား လက္နက္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ရန္ နီးစပ္လာၿပီဟု အစဥ္တစိုက္ သတင္းပို႔ေနခဲ့ေသာ သိပၸံႏွင့္နည္းပညာ ဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေသာင္း စသည့္ ထိပ္တန္းအစိုးရအရာရွိမ်ား၏ လိမ္ညာ ထား ခ်က္မ်ားကို သိျမင္လာသျဖင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးက ေဒါသထြက္ေနျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေနျပည္ေတာ္ စစ္အသိုင္းအဝိုင္းက ဆိုသည္။

စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား အေနျဖင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ အင္အားႀကီးႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္ေရး ေအာင္ျမင္ရန္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ အနည္းငယ္သာ ရွိေၾကာင္း၊ စစ္အစိုးရသည္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားဗံုး ပိုင္ဆိုင္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေနသည္မွာ ထင္ရွားၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံတကာ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္မ်ား ကို ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ေနေၾကာင္း ေရာဘတ္ ကယ္လီက အစီရင္ခံစာထဲတြင္ သံုးသပ္ထားသည္။

“အေထာက္အထားမ်ားကို ၾကည့္ျခင္းအားျဖင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားတပ္ဖြဲ႔က ေရးဆြဲထားသည့္ ပံုစံမူၾကမ္းမ်ားမွာ ကြ်မ္းက်င္မႈ မရွိ ျခင္းကို ျပေနသည္။ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ား စိစစ္မႈအရ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ၏ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား အစီအစဥ္မွာ ေခတ္ေနာက္က်လြန္း လွေပသည္”ဟု ေရာဘတ္ ကယ္လီက ဆိုထားရာ ျမန္မာ့ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ လမ္းစဥ္ပါတီ ေခတ္ကတည္းက အာဏာရွင္ ဦးေနဝင္းကို ေအာက္ေျခ အရာရွိမ်ားက လိမ္ညာ ဖံုးဖိထားသည့္ အစီရင္ခံစာမ်ား၊ အာဏာရွင္ အႀကိဳက္ျဖစ္မည့္ သတင္းလြဲမ်ားသာ တင္ျပခဲ့ၾကသျဖင့္ ေနာက္ဆံုးတြင္ မည္သည့္စီမံကိန္းမွ် အေကာင္အထည္ မေပၚခဲ့ျခင္းကို ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး ေစ့ေစ့ေတြးရင္း အံတႀကိတ္ႀကိတ္ ျဖစ္ေနမည္မွာ မလြဲဟု ေဝဖန္သံုးသပ္သူမ်ားက ဆိုၾကသည္။

Australia expels Burma commander’s daughter

2010-06-30T04:56:00.001-07:00

The daughter of a senior Burmese air force commander will be expelled from Australia after Canberra ruled that her stay in the country violated sanctions on Burma.

Zin Mon Aye, an accountancy student at the University of Western Sydney, had an appeal over her stay in Australia rejected and will likely return to Burma within days, The Australian newspaper said. Her father, Brigadier-General Zin Yaw, is commander of the Mingalardon air base, one of Burma’s largest military airfields.

Australia is party to sanctions on Burma that target individuals deemed to have close ties to the ruling junta.
The 25-year-old was first targeted by the Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith in 2008, along with her brother, Htet Aung. The newspaper said that she had launched a series of appeals over the past two years, claiming that she was estranged from her father and had no financial ties to him.

Zetty Brake, spokesperson for Burma Campaign Australia (BCA), said it was hard to tell whether the claims made by Zin Mon Aye and her lawyers were true.

“However the sanctions list is very much targeted towards individuals and it’s not a blanket list; it’s meant to target people who are benefitting from the brutal repression in Burma,” she said. “In that case, [Zin Mon Aye’s expulsion] is very fair because these are people who are specifically named and targeted for that reason.”

While Australia’s sanctions on Burma are comprehensive, the country has been criticised for not pushing an embargo far enough. In April this year BCA alleged that bilateral trade between the two countries had risen more than three-fold since early 2009, with a subsidiary of Australian company Twinza Oil still operating in the country.

Danford Equities Corporation signed a contract with the Burmese state-run Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) in November 2006 to explore for oil in Burma. According to BCA, the deal will net the ruling junta around $US2.5 billion.

But campaigners scored a victory earlier in October after Australian clothing chain, Speciality Fashion Group (SFG), announced it would stop sourcing products from Burma.

Brake said said that there were still “a number of steps the Australian government could be taking to have a stronger sanctions regime”, particularly targeting the oil and gas industry which would have a “minimal impact on ordinary citizens of Burma”.

The majority of produce from Burma’s vast natural energy sector, particularly gas and hydropower, is sold to neighbouring countries, despite the country being plagued by terminal electricity shortages.
ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံ၌ စာရင္းကိုင္ ပညာသင္ၾကား ေနသည့္ မဇင္မြန္ေအး သည္ စီးပြားေရးအရ အေရးယူ ဒဏ္ခတ္ ထားေသာ စာရင္း၀င္ တဦး ျဖစ္ေနသည့္ အတြက္ မၾကာမီ ရက္ပိုင္း အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ျပန္ရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၾသစေၾတးလ် ျပည္ေထာင္စု တရားရံုးက အမိန္႔ခ်မွတ္လိုက္သည္ဟု သိရွိရသည္။

မဇင္မြန္ေအးသည္ ဖခင္ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဇင္ေယာ္၊ မိခင္ ေဒၚခင္သီရိ၊ ေမာင္ျဖစ္သူ ေမာင္ထက္ေအာင္ တို႔ႏွင့္အတူ ၾသစေၾတး လ်အစိုးရမွ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ေသာ စီးပြားေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူခံရသူမ်ား စာရင္းတြင္ အမွတ္ 2007BUR0310, 2007BUR0311, 2008BUR0434, 2008BUR0435 စသည့္ အမွတ္စဥ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔၏ မိသားစုတစုလံုး ပါဝင္ေနခဲ့သည္။

ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဇင္ေယာ္သည္ ပုသိမ္ ေလတပ္စခန္းတြင္လည္းေကာင္း ျမန္မာ့စီးပြားေရး ဦးပိုင္လီမိတက္၏ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ အျဖစ္ လည္းေကာင္း တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနသူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၾသစေၾတးလ်ႏိုင္ငံမွ ထုတ္ျပန္ေသာ စီးပြားေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူခံရသူမ်ား စာရင္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

၂၀၀၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေမလ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔က အေနာက္ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားမွ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ေသာ စီးပြားေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူခံရသူမ်ား စာရင္း တြင္လည္း ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဇင္ေယာ္ႏွင့္ ေဒၚခင္သီရိ တို႔ ပါဝင္ေနခဲ့ျပန္သည္။

University of Western Sydney တြင္ စာရင္းကိုင္ ပညာျဖင့္ မဟာတန္း တက္ေရာက္ေနသူ အသက္ ၂၅ ႏွစ္ အရြယ္ရွိ မဇင္မြန္ေအး ၏ ေရွ႕ေနျဖစ္သူ တိုနီ ေဆးလ္ဗား က“သူ႔မွာ အျပစ္မရွိဘူး ဆိုေပမယ့္ အျပစ္ေပးခံရေတာ့မွာျဖစ္တဲ့ အတြက္ ဝမ္းနည္း မိပါတယ္”ဟု The Australian သတင္းစာသို႔ ေျပာၾကားထားသည္။

မဇင္မြန္ေအးသည္ ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္က ေရာက္ရွိေနျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ၎ကို ေနထိုင္ခြင့္ေပးခဲ့ေသာ ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး မစၥတာ စတီဖင္ စမစ္ ကို ျပည္ေထာင္စု တရားရံုးက ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ခဲ့ေသးသည္။

ျပည္ေထာင္စု တရားရံုး၏ တရားခြင္အတြင္း၌ မဇင္မြန္ေအးက“သူမ၏ ဖခင္သည္ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရအုပ္စုအတြင္းတြင္ ပါဝင္ေနသျဖင့္ သူမက မိဘျဖစ္သူမ်ားႏွင့္ ကင္းကင္းရွင္းရွင္းေနခဲ့ေၾကာင္း”တရားရံုးသို႔ ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့သည္ဟု ယေန႔ထုတ္ The Australian သတင္းစာတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ဆက္လက္၍“သူမသည္ မိဘမ်ားကို ေငြေၾကးအရပင္ ပတ္သက္မႈ မရွိေၾကာင္း၊ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အလုပ္လည္း ရွိ ေၾကာင္း” တရားရံုးတြင္ ထြက္ဆိုထားခဲ့သည္ဟုလည္း ဆိုသည္။

ယင္းအမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ မဇင္မြန္ေအး က အယူခံဝင္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း အယူခံ ပယ္ခ်ခံခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

မဇင္မြန္ေအး က“စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ သားသမီးမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနေသာ္လည္း စစ္အာဏာရွင္ စနစ္ကို မေထာက္ခံသည့္အတြက္ ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံ အေနျဖင့္ အေရးယူ ဒဏ္ခတ္ ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈ မျပဳသင့္ေၾကာင္း”ေလွ်ာက္လဲခ်က္ ေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္းလည္း The Australian သတင္းစာကေဖာ္ျပသည္။

ထို မဇင္မြန္ေအး တဦးတည္းသာ မဟုတ္ဘဲ ျပည္ပတြင္ ပညာသင္ၾကားေနေသာ ျမန္မာ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးမ်ား၏ သားသမီး မ်ားစြာ က်န္ရွိေနေသးေၾကာင္း စစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတဦးက ဧရာဝတီသို႔ ေျပာဆိုသည္။

REGIME DOES NOT ALLOW TO OPEN SU KYI' GATE FOR EU

2010-06-29T06:51:00.000-07:00

A scheduled European Union high-level visit to Burma was cancelled recently after the Burmese ruling junta denied a request from the EU Presidency Council to meet pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

German ambassador to Burma, Julius Georg Luy, representing the EU presidency currently held by Spain, had on June 15 asked State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Foreign Affairs Minister Nyan Win in Naypyidaw for a meeting with Suu Kyi, the world’s most well-known political prisoner. It was to be part of a high-level EU visit but the junta declined the request, months ahead of its as yet unscheduled elections.

The SPDC is the Burmese ruling junta’s self-styled title.

“I cannot comment whether the meeting’s been cancelled because of [the] SPDC’s refusal to allow access to Aung San Suu Kyi or other reasons,” EU regional delegation spokeswoman Suvi Seppalainen said.

She added that the high-level meeting would not take place during the Spanish presidency of the EU, which ends on Wednesday, but was unable to speculate whether it would be tabled again. She was also without the agenda for the proposed meeting and had no knowledge of what was to be discussed with Suu Kyi.

“I think it’s quite clear why it would be high on their wish list to meet with ‘The Lady’ herself,” she said. “But unfortunately this request was not transferred [sic] by the government.”

The junta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs could not be reached for comment.

In response to the junta’s decision to bar EU access to Suu Kyi, the National Council of the Union of Burma (NCUB), a coalition of Burmese pro-democracy groups and political dissidents, released a statement condemning the military regime.

The council’s joint general secretary No.1, Myint Thein of the National League for Democracy (Liberated Area), called upon the EU to reaffirm international demands and denounce the junta’s upcoming election and its results.

“They still don’t have any plans to release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners,” he said of the military regime. “They have refused proposals from all world leaders to release her and have dialogue.”

Myint Thein said the election would neither be free nor fair and that the military had repeatedly refused to take any steps towards changing the political situation in Burma. For those reasons he called on the international community, including the EU, to take a stronger stance against the junta. However the EU is not yet talking about rejecting any election results.

“That would be premature,” Seppalainen said, adding however that the EU was standing its ground. “We’ve been calling for free and fair elections; this has been the EU line for a while and this has not changed.”

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi remains under house arrest after spending around 15 of the past 21 years held by the Burmese junta in various forms of detention. Her National League for Democracy Party won the last elections in 1990 by a landslide but the junta refused to allow the party to form a government and jailed many NLD members.

The party on May 6 was declared illegal and disbanded by the ruling military junta after the NLD chose not to re-register for upcoming elections under electoral laws it deemed unfair and unjust as they were targetted to exclude anyone serving a prison sentence, automatically excluding the party’s leader and imprisoned members.

Than Shwe the Third 'Worst of the Worst'

2010-06-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

In an article titled “The Worst of the Worst,” Foreign Policy magazine named junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe the world's third worst dictator, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il ranked No 1 and Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe No 2.

Than Shwe, Kim Jong Il and Mugabe were pictured on the magazine cover with the caption, “The committee to destroy the world.”

Than Shwe, who has been ruling Burma by force for almost 20 years, was described by Foreign Policy as a “heartless military coconut head whose sole consuming preoccupation is power.”
The article said the Burmese dictator has decimated the opposition with arrests and detentions, denied humanitarian assistance to his people in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Burma in May 2008, and thrived off a black market economy and natural gas exports.

“This vainglorious general bubbling with swagger sports a uniform festooned with self-awarded medals, but he is too cowardly to face an honest ballot box,” the article said.

Kim Jong Il, in power for 16 years, was described as a personality-cult-cultivating isolationist. Foreign Policy said Kim has pauperized his people, allowed famine to run rampant, thrown hundreds of thousands in prison camps and spent his country's resources on a nuclear program.

Robert Mugabe, in power for 30 years, was described as a liberation “hero” in the struggle for independence who has since transformed himself into a murderous despot. He was condemned by Foreign Policy for arresting and torturing the opposition, squeezing his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation and funneling off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts.

The article named 23 world dictators in total, including the leaders of Uganda, Rwanda, Cuba, China, Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt.
BY IRRAWADDY

Burma's vote will 'lack international legitimacy': US

2010-06-23T05:37:00.001-07:00

The United States said that elections planned in military-run Burma this year will "lack international legitimacy."

"US believes elections planned for this year in Burma will not be free or fair and will lack international legitimacy," the State Department said on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

US Senator Jim Webb said earlier this month he expected Burma to hold elections on October 10 and urged support for the vote despite the military regime's exclusion of the democratic opposition.

Webb is a leading US advocate for engagement with the junta, although he called off a trip to Burma this month due to allegations the country was developing nuclear weapons with support from North Korea.

Burma plans to hold its first elections in two decades later this year, although the regime has not set an exact date.

The Obama administration last year initiated dialogue with North Korea but has voiced concern about the elections, ahead of which Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy was forcibly dissolved.

Webb acknowledged that the election was designed to preserve the military regime, but said it was a step forward that the country would allow at least some opposition figures to stand for seats.

REGIME ELECTION ISSUSES MORE RAGID RULES FOR PARTIES

2010-06-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

Members of political parties contesting Myanmar's first elections in two decades will be banned from marching, waving flags and chanting to garner support, under rules announced on Wednesday.

The directive, which did not reveal a date for the polls, requires party members who want to gather and deliver speeches at places other than their offices to apply for a permit one week in advance, according to state media.

'Rules prohibiting the act of marching to the designated gathering point and the venue holding flags, or marching and chanting slogans in procession ... shall be stipulated in the permit,' the New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.

Holding knives, weapons and ammunition are also banned, along with acts that harm security and the rule of law or tarnish the image of the military. Misuse of religion for political gains is also prohibited, state media said.

Critics have dismissed the election - which is scheduled for some time later this year - as a sham due to laws that have effectively barred opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from participating.

Suu Kyi?s National League for Democracy (NLD) was forcibly dissolved under widely criticised laws governing the polls. The NLD refused to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register as a party - a move that would have forced it to expel Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest - and is boycotting the vote. -- AFP

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO AUNG SAN SUU KYI !

2010-06-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

People admire her, support her, love her, miss her and want to shake hands with her during the celebration of her birthday. She, perhaps, also wants to join the celebration.

However, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy icon, like on 15 previous birthdays, will spend it under house arrest, celebrating in a low-key party with her two companions this time in her lakeside home in Rangoon.

Her colleague and lawyer, Nyan Win who is a spokesperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD), said, “We always hope she can celebrate her birthday together with people freely. We are very sorry that we will not have this opportunity.”

“My birthday wish for her is that I hope everyone who loves her will always support her and call for her release,” Nyan Win said.

Suu Kyi will be 65 on Saturday. She has spent 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest in her lakeside home.

Suu Kyi's party will also hold a birthday event in Rangoon on Saturday. The party will offer food to monks, make donations to needy people and provide school material to students.

World leaders as well as her Burmese supporters called for her immediate release to mark her 65 birthday which will be celebrated around the world.

The Elders—a group of eminent global leaders founded by South African Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela—called on Asean and the international community to assist the government, the opposition, ethnic minorities and religious groups in Burma to begin a UN-led process of reconciliation.

The Elders includes former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Anan, ex US president Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Jimmy Carter, the former US President, said: “Aung San Suu Kyi is a global symbol of moral courage in the face of repression. As she spends yet another year in captivity, we urge the world, and especially Burma’s partners in Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], to recognize that it is an oppressive and misguided regime that excludes her and thousands of other political activists from playing a part in their country’s future.”

Desmond Tutu, South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said, “National processes in Burma have been usurped by the military government. They do not serve the people. The elections due later this year will not be any different. With such deep fractures in society, the country needs an avenue for dialogue. Without a way to talk and reconcile with one another, the people will never achieve the peace and prosperity they deserve.”

Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: “My fellow Elders and I believe it is time to document systematically the crimes allegedly being committed against the people by the military government.”

Also, Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and Nobel Peace Laureate, said, “Neighboring countries have already experienced the effects of conflict in border areas and have the greatest interest in trying to prevent future instability. The international community should also make every effort to help Burma’s divided peoples to find a peaceful and prosperous way forward.”

Tomás Ojea Quintana, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, said, “I urge the government of Myanmar [Burma] to heed the call of an independent United Nations human rights body to immediately release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

“I also call upon the government to release all prisoners of conscience in order to create the conditions for an inclusive election process and to demonstrate that it intends to take a more serious and sincere approach to its international obligations to uphold human rights.”

The Canadian ambassador to Thailand, Ron Hoffmann, said that his country will continue to support Suu Kyi and Burma's democratic struggle while the nation imposes strong economic sanctions against the Burmese regime.

Among the the last of the personal handwritten letters by Britain's former prime minister, Gordon Brown, after his resign on May 11, were two addressed to Nobel Peace Prize laureates Mandela and Suu Kyi.

In his letter to Suu Kyi, Brown wrote: “This is one of the last letters I write as prime minister, and I want it to be to you, to champion your cause for democracy in Burma and to say I will do everything I can to support you.

Burma"s Regime buys 50 Jet Fighters with National Revenue

2010-06-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

The military regime air force continues to expand with the recent procurement of 50 K-8 jet trainer aircraft from China, according to sources within the air force in Meikhtila.

“Parts of the K-8 aircraft were transported by cargo ship from China and are being assembled at the Aircraft Production and Maintenance Base in Meikhtila,” said one of the sources.
The purchase of the 50 aircraft comes after Burma’s air force chief Lt-Gen Myat Hein traveled to China in November to negotiate an upgrade to the fleet of Chinese-made military aircraft already owned by Burma.

“There are two reasons to purchase K-8 trainers,” said the source. “Either for training exercises or for counter-insurgency.”

The K-8 jet trainer, sometimes called the K-8 Karakorum or the Hongdu JL-8, is a joint venture between China and Pakistan, and is fitted with air-to-air missiles and rockets.

In 1998-9, the Burmese air force bought 12 K-8 jet trainers from China, which are now stationed at Taungoo Air Base in Pegu Division.

In addition to purchasing Chinese-made fighters and trainer aircraft, Naypyidaw signed a contract in late 2009 to buy 20 MiG-29 jet fighters from Russia at a cost of nearly US $570 million.

“The parts of the MiG-29 jet fighters will arrive in July and September by cargo ship and by plane,” said an officer close to Col. Tun Aung, a key figure in the Burmese air force. He said that the 20 Russian aircraft will be assembled in Meikhtila.

Meanwhile, Burma's main air base for maintenance, the Aircraft Production and Maintenance Air Base (APMAB) in Panchangone in Mingaladon Township has been relocated to Nyaunggone, close to the regime's Flying Training Base in Shante in Meikhtila Township, according to a source from the air base.

“The APMAB got the order from Naypyidaw in January to relocate to the new location,” he said, but said he did not know why the relocation took place.

Military sources from Rangoon said that Burmese ruling military council upgraded the air force’s facilities and expanded airfields, as well as two air force bases in Bassein and Homemalin in 2006, to fulfill operational capabilities.

Burma has brought 280 aircraft from China, Russia, Yugoslavia and Poland, including trainers and fighters, since the military took power in 1988.

The Burmese air force was founded in 1947 before Burmese independence. Its main objective has since been counter campaigns against the Communist Party of Burma and several ethnic armies.

Burma has 10 air force headquarters: Bassein Air Base in Irrawaddy Division; Mingaladon Air Base in Rangoon Division; Myitkyina Air Base in Kachin State; Myike Air Base in Tenasserim Division; Namsang Air Base in Shan State; Taungoo Air Base in Pegu Division; Meikhtila (Shante) Flying Training Base; Meikthila Grounding Training Base in Mandalay Division; Magwe Air Base in Magwe Division; and Homemalin Air Base in Sagaing Division.

POLITICAL VIEWPOINT STAMENT OF 88GSE

2010-06-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

ႏ်ဴကလီယားလက္နက္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေရးက်ဳိးပမ္းေနေသာ
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစစ္အာဏာရွင္တို႔အား အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္မႈျပဳလုပ္ရန္ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္
၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ ၊ ဇြန္လ ၊ ( ၁၄ ) ရက္

ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္(၁၉၆၂)ခုႏွစ္မွအစျပဳ၍ စစ္ဘက္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားမွ အဓမၼ အာဏာသိမ္းပိုက္ခဲ့ၿပီး စစ္ကၽြန္ျပဳအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္လာခဲ့သည္။
( ၁၉၈၈ )ခုႏွစ္တြင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရးေတာ္ပံုႀကီးအား စစ္တပ္မွလက္နက္ျဖင့္အၾကမ္းဖက္ ၿဖိဳ
ခြဲၿပီးထပ္မံ၍ စစ္အစိုးရအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈေအာက္က်ေရာက္္ခဲ့ရေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈဆိုးဝါး လွေသာ ကမၻာ့ဆင္းရဲဆံုးႏိုင္ငံတႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။
မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးထုတ္လုပ္ေနမႈ ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ ဒုတိယအမ်ားဆံုးႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္ၿပီးဒီမိုကေရစီကင္းမဲ့မႈျပႆနာ ၊ လူနည္းစု
တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား၏ ရပိုင္ခြင့္အခြင့္အေရးဆံုးရႈံးမႈေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရေသာျပည္တြင္းစစ္စသည့္ ေဒသတြင္းမတည္ၿငိမ္မႈ ျပႆနာမ်ားျဖင့္ တေန႔ထက္တေန႔ ပိုမိုဆိုး၀ါးေနလွ်က္ရွိသည့္ႏိုင္ငံတခုျဖစ္သည္ ။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ဥပေဒမဲ့အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္လွ်က္ရွိေသာစစ္အစိုးရသည္တိုင္းျပည္၏ အမ်ိဳးသားဝင္ေငြ( ၆၀ )ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္း
ေက်ာ္ကိုစစ္အသံုးစရိတ္အျဖစ္အသံုးျပဳျခင္းျဖင့္ေဒသအတြင္းမွာစစ္အင္အားကိုစံနစ္တက်တည္ေဆာက္လွ်က္ရွိၿပီး
စစ္တပ္၏ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ား ၊ လမ္းေဖာက္ျခင္း ၊ တံတား ေဆာက္ျခင္းကိစၥမ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားကို အဓမၼ မတရား
အလုပ္ခိုင္းေစျခင္း ၊ စစ္တပ္အတြင္းတြင္လည္း အသက္မျပည့္ေသးေသာခေလးငယ္မ်ားကိုစစ္သားအျဖစ္အတင္း
စုေဆာင္းလွ်က္အသံုးျပဳေနျခင္း ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ိဳးစု ေဒသမ်ားတြင္ အစုအၿပံဳလိုက္သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္း ၊ အမ်ိဳးသမီး
ငယ္မ်ားအား မတရားျပဳက်င့္ျခင္းမ်ားကို လည္းနအဖစစ္တပ္ကိုယ္တိုင္ က်ဴးလြန္လွ်က္ရွိေနေပသည္ ။

ဤကဲ့သို႔စစ္အာဏာရွင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈေအာက္၌ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းေငြေၾကးေဖာင္းပြမႈႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးမတည္ၿငိမ္မႈမ်ား
ျဖစ္ေပၚေနလွ်က္ရွိၿပီး ဆင္းရဲဲၾကပ္တည္းမႈတို႔ေၾကာင့္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ားသို႔ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းေျမာက္မ်ားစြာတရားမဝင္ ဝင္ေရာက္အလုပ္ရွာေဖြမႈ ၊ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအျဖစ္ ဝင္ေရာက္ခိုလႈံမႈ ၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈ ၊ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးမ်ား တရားမ၀င္
၀င္ေရာက္မႈမ်ား အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ားသို႔ ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲအက်ိဳးဆက္မ်ားအျဖစ္ ကူးစက္္ျပန္႔ႏွံ႔ခဲ့ေပသည္ ။

ယင္းအေျခခံအေၾကာင္းရင္းမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးမတည္ၿငိမ္မႈမ်ားကို ေျပလည္ေအာင္
ေျဖရွင္းႏိုင္မည့္ တခုတည္းေသာနည္းလမ္းအျဖစ္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးျခင္းျဖင့္ အေျဖရွာရန္ေဒၚေအာင္ ဆန္းစုၾကည္ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ(NLD)ပါတီ ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားအင္အားစုမ်ားႏွင့္ အတိုက္အခံဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ားမွ တင္ျပေတာင္းဆိုမႈမ်ားကို လ်စ္လွ်ဴရႈခဲ့ၿပီး (UN) အပါအ၀င္ႏိုင္ငံတကာမွ ၾကား၀င္ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ားကိုလည္း မထင္မဲ့ျမင္ ျပဳကာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖၚသူမ်ားကိုလည္း မတရားႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္သြင္း အက်ဥ္းခ်ျခင္း မ်ားအျပင္ (၂၀၀၇)ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵေဖၚထုတ္မႈႀကီးကို
လည္း ကမၻာကအံ့အားသင့္ေလာက္ေအာင္ ရက္စက္စြာ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ၿဖိဳခြဲျပစ္ခဲ့ေပသည္။
ျဖစ္ပြားေနေသာျပည္တြင္စစ္ပြဲမ်ားေၾကာင့္ေဒသဖြံံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရးႏွင့္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ေ႔ရွရႈလွ်က္အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲ
ခဲ့ေသာလူမ်ိဳးစုတိုင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔မ်ားအားတဘက္သပ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ရန္အဓမၼလုပ္ေဆာင္လာျခင္းေၾကာင့္

အေျခအေနဆိုး၀ါးလာၿပီးတရုတ္နယ္စပ္ရွိကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႕ႏွင့္ျပန္လည္စစ္မက္ျဖစ္ပြားခ့ျဲခင္း၊တခ်ိဳ႕အင္အားစုမ်ားႏွင့္ လည္း ဆက္လက္ၿပီးစစ္မက္ျဖစ္ပြားလာစရာအေျခအေနဆိုးမ်ားကိုလက္ရွိျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ေတြၾကံဳေနရသည္။ ထပ္မံျဖစ္ေပၚလာမည့္ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ပြဲမ်ားေၾကာင့္ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲအက်ိဳးဆက္မ်ားအျဖစ္ မိမိတို႔ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ပြဲမ်ား
မွသည္အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ားဆီသို႔ ကူးစက္ရိုက္ခတ္လာမည့္ စသည့္အက်ိဳးဆက္မ်ား မလြဲမေသြခံရေပလိမ့္မည္ ။

ဤကဲ့သို႔အေျခအေနဆိုးမ်ားျဖင့္ႀကံဳေတြ႔ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရေသာျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္စစ္ဘက္အာဏာပိုင္တို႔မွ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေရး လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသည္ဟူေသာ သတင္းထြက္ေပၚလာသည့္ အတြက္မ်ား စြာစိုးရိမ္
ေသာကျဖစ္ရပါသည္ ။

အဘယ့္ေၾကာင့္ဆိုေသာ နအဖစစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ပိုင္ဆိုင္သြားမည္ဆိုပါက မိမိတို႔ ေဒသတြင္းသာမကအိမ္နီးခ်င္းတရုတ္၊အိႏၵိယ၊ထိုင္းအပါအဝင္အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွႏိုင္ငံမ်ားႏွင့္ ကမၻာ့ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတည္ ၿငိမ္မႈကိုပါ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ထိခိုက္ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္လာႏိုင္မည့္ဆိုးက်ိဳးမ်ားကို မလြဲမေသြရင္ဆိုင္ႀကံဳေတြရေပလိမ့္မည္။ နအဖစစ္အစိုးရသည္( ၁၉၉၅ )ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား မျပန္႔ပြားေရး ႏိုင္ငံတကာစာခ်ဳပ္ကိုလက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး ထား
ပါလွ်က္ ေျပာင္ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္လိုက္ျခင္းလည္းျဖစ္ေပသည္ ။

သို႔ျဖစ္ပါ၍ စစ္အင္အားစုႀကီးတရပ္္ျဖစ္လာမည့္ အေျခအေနဆိုးမ်ားကို ႀကိဳတင္တားဆီးႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစစ္အစိုးရအားကုလသမဂၢလံုၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီမွထိေရာက္စြာျဖင့္အလွ်င္အျမန္အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္ပါရန္
ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ အင္အားစုမ်ားမွ အေလးအနက္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။

ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးအင္အားစုမ်ား
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၁ ။ ၂၀၁၀ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖြဲ႔ ( ျပည္တြင္း )
၂ ။ ၈၈မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား(ျပည္ပ)
၃ ။ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ( လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ေျမ )USA
၄ ။ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစု (နယ္သာလန္)
၅ ။ ရခိုင္ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ( ျပည္ပ)
၆ ။ ေဖါ့၀ိန္းျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ား (အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု)
၇ ။ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ား ( စင္ကာပူ )
၈ ။ ျမန္မာေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအစည္းအရံုး (ဆန္ဖရန္ဆစPကို - ေဘးဧရိယာ )
၉ ။ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစု (ဘယ္လ္ဂ်ီယံ)
၁၀။ ျပည္ပေရာက္အမ်ဳိးသားေက်ာင္းသားမ်ာ:အဖြဲ႔ (ျမန္မာျပည္) ဗဟိုဌာနခ်ဳပ္
ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ - ကိုထြန္းထြန္း (၅၀၃) ၃၃၄ - ၉၉၉၇ ၊ ကိုသိန္းထိုက္(260)418 – 7010
ကိုေအာင္ျမင့္ထြန္း(၂၆၀)၂၄၉ - ၇၁၈၉ ၊ ကိုျမတ္သီဟ 31 61 61 03181
ကိုျမင့္ေမာင္ေဌး (859)652 – 2581 ၊ ကိုစံရွား(510) 356 – 7201
A Call for Actions Against Burma’s Military Dictators Attempting to Own Nuclear Weapons
Date : 06 / 14 / 2010
Burma has been placed under a brutal and corrupt dictatorship since the 1962 military coup d'état. The military regime has repeatedly crushed the popular movements for basic democratic and human rights including the 1988 nation-wide democratic uprising. Therefore, Burma today has become one of the most impoverished nations with the worst human rights record. The regime is also responsible for allowing Burma to become a place for growing opium and the world’s largest heroin producer next to Afghanistan. The country’s deteriorating situation due to its prolonged civil war that stems from the regime’s oppression against ethnic minorities’ rights and its annihilation of democratic and human rights in Burma has been an ongoing threat to the regional stability.
The illegal regime in Burma is also systematically expanding its military power and infrastructure in the region by using 60 percent of national income. In the process and for decades, the regime has intensified its domestic military operations for building roads, bridges and encampments for military use through the means of forced labor, forced relocation for land confiscation, conscription of under-age children, ethnic cleansing, and violation of female population. This wasteful militarization against its own population by the regime paired with the out-of-control inflation has wrecked the country’s economy and consequently forced the people to flee into neighboring countries in search of basic human needs: food and decent habitats. The human tragedies generated by such a large-scale displacement of mass population from Burma include the increasing volume of drug and human-trafficking and the ever-growing number of refugees in all neighboring countries, and thus, they become social and economic crisis not only to the region but the whole world.
A meaningful political dialogue, the only solution to the solving ongoing overall crisis in Burma, was and is still being proposed by the democratically-elected National League for

Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi, ethnic groups and other opposition parties. Domestic appeals and international mediation for such a political dialogue have been consistently rejected by the military regime and met with its brutal retaliations such as jailing peaceful political activists with long term imprisonments of 60 years or longer without any proper judicial processes. The regime even shocked the whole world with its show of ruthlessness and intolerance against peaceful civilian movements when it mercilessly cracked down the monks’ peaceful movement in 2007 in which they nonviolently expressed their concerns over the worsening human plight in the country.Moreover, the military regime’s attempt to force-convert the ethnic groups along Sino-Burma border such as Kokant nationals, who already signed cease-fire agreement with it as an exchange for their local peace and development, into paramilitary forces under its absolute control has created an explosive political atmosphere. If the cease-fire breaks down, the renewed fights in these volatile areas could refuel the ongoing civil war with other anti-military forces at any moment and generate more undesirable political and economic consequences to the neighboring countries and the whole region.
Despite collectively facing such tragic human rights, economic and political crisis, we are now greatly concerned and troubled by the recent news about the ongoing clandestine efforts by military dictators for possessing its own nuclear arsenals. Possession of nuclear weapon by such a military regime like SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) will pose a severe threat to our region, which includes neighboring China, India and the whole Southeast Asia, as well as the world peace. The military regime is now in violation of the 1995 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) to which it is a signatory.
Therefore, we, the democratic forces of Burma, would like to urge the United Nations Security Council to take urgent and effective measures against the Burmese military regime to prevent it from becoming a nuclear-armed dictatorship and to protect the people of Burma and the whole region from nuclear-related unfortunate consequences.
coordinating committee
1 ။ 2010 Action Committee ( Burma )
2 ။ 88 Generation Student ( Exile )
3 ။ National League for Democracy (Liberated Area ) USA

4 ။ Burmese Democratic Force (NetherLands)
5 ။ Arakan League for Democracy ( USA )
6 ။ Burmese Democratic Force (Fort Wayne) USA
7 ။ Burmese Democratic Force (belgium)
8 ။ Association of Burmese Students (sanferancisaco – bae Area)
9 ။ Burmese Democratic Force (Singapore)
၁၀ ။ Overseas National Students' Organization of Burma ( H.Q )
Contact : HtunHtun ( 503 ) 334 – 9997 (88gse)
Thein Hteike ( 260 ) 418 – 7010 (NLD - LAUSA)
Aung Myint Htun ( 260 ) 249 - 7189 (88gse)

Myat Thi ha 31 61 61 03181 ( BDF)

Myint Maung Htay ( 859 ) 652 – 2581(ALD)

San Shir ( 510 ) 356 – 7201 (BSA)

Tay Za Thura + 45 50 15 75 02

ကိုေတဇသူရ + 45 50 15 75 02

Suu Kyi Says Burmese Have Right Not to Vote

2010-06-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Burmese people have the right not to vote in the upcoming election, detained Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi told her lawyer on Friday. She also commented on US Sen. Jim Webb's support of the election.

“Daw Suu said that just as the people have the right to vote, they also have the right not to vote,” Suu Kyi's lawyer Nyan Win told The Irrawaddy shortly after meeting with her on Friday afternoon.
Although her comment seems to allude to the possibility that she and her now-disbanded National League for Democracy (NLD) may call for a boycott of the planned election, Nyan Win declined to elaborate on her comment.

During a two-hour meeting that focused on legal issues relating to repairs to her home, Suu Kyi also said that she believed Webb's views on the election were his personal opinion only, and did not reflect his official position as chairman of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Webb, a strong advocate of US engagement with the Burmese regime, canceled his scheduled visit to Burma earlier this month amid fresh reports that junta was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

On Wednesday, the Democratic lawmaker called for support of Burma's election, saying it was a step forward and that the junta would allow at least some opposition figures to stand for seats.

Nyan Win also said that Suu Kyi heard about Burma's alleged nuclear program, but she did not wish to make any comment on the issue at this point, as there was not enough information available.

Suu Kyi decided against her party re-registering under the regime's “unjust” election laws. The NLD was dissolved in May for its failure to meet the regime's party registration deadline.

Myanmar military nukes would destabilise region: US

2010-06-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

Myanmar risks destabilising Southeast Asia through its pursuit of weapons, although it is not yet clear whether the military regime is developing a nuclear program, a US official has said.

A senior army defector, in a recent documentary broadcast on Al Jazeera television, said the junta has been seeking nuclear weapons and developing a secret network of underground tunnels with help from North Korea.

Scot Marciel, the State Department official in charge of Southeast Asia, said that the United States was still assessing the allegations about Myanmar - also known as Burma.

"I think there's two issues. One is whether there is some kind of serious nuclear program in Burma, which certainly would be tremendously destabilising to the entire region," Marciel testified at a congressional hearing.

"There's also the Burmese acquisition of other military equipment -- conventional -- which also can affect regional stability," he said.

"We're looking at both of those questions very closely," said Marciel, the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs.

A senior Myanmar official last week said that the accusations of a nuclear program were "groundless," without elaborating.

On a visit to Myanmar in May, Marciel's superior, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, expressed concern about a suspected arms shipment from North Korea and sought assurances from the regime.

Senator Jim Webb, one of the most vocal US advocates of engagement with Myanmar, abruptly cancelled a visit to the country earlier this month due to the allegations of cooperation with North Korea.

Addressing the Asia Society on Wednesday, Webb said he was still waiting to learn more about the allegations but decided it would be counterproductive to visit Myanmar at the time the documentary was broadcast.

President Barack Obama's administration last year opened dialogue with Myanmar, concluding that the previous approach of isolating the regime had not borne fruit.

But the administration has voiced deep concern about elections later this year, which the opposition considers a sham to legitimise military rule.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/news/world/myanmar-nukes-would-destabilise-region-us-31048.php?u=0933&cp

PM’s party appoints Chinese businessman

2010-06-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

The party headed by Burma’s current prime minister, Thein Sein, has appointed a Chinese businessman with close ties to the ruling junta as an election candidate in the country’s northern Kachin state.

The man, known only as Yawmo, is from China’s southern Yunnan province and, according to a local in Kachin state’s Bhamo, is “business partners” with the Burmese government. He will run for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Momauk town, about 30 kilometres from the China border.

“He is Miao [ethnic Chinese minority group] from Yunnan province,” said the local. “He came and settled in Momauk in 1990 and later moved to Hpakant [a jade mining town] where his brothers-in-law already live.”

Election laws announced in February ban foreigners, and spouses of foreigners, from participating. This factor played a key role in forcing the party of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was married to UK-born Michael Aris, to boycott the polls.

But numbers of influential Chinese businessmen close to the government are known to buy Burmese passports and ID cards. Burma has become heavily reliant on China as one of the junta’s principal economic allies; a visit to Naypyidaw by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao last week saw the two countries sign some 15 trade deals.

AFTER ELECTION DATE, US TOP OFFICIER STARTS JOURNEY TO MAESOT

2010-06-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

After US Senator Jim Webb said Wednesday he expected Burma to hold elections on October 10 and urged support for the vote despite the military regime's exclusion of the democratic opposition, US assistant secretary of state will visit the Thai-Burmese border town of Mae Sot on Saturday to study the latest situation of Burmese refugees living there.

Eric Schwartz, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, will meet with representatives of at least 15 Burmese opposition groups based in Mae Sot.

During his trip, Schwartz will hold talks with Thai authorities to discuss the refugee issue. He will also hold a press conference in Bangkok on Thursday night, according to the US Embassy in Bangkok.

There are an estimated 130,000 Burmese refugees living at nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border. Most fled oppression by the Burmese regime. In recent years, many have been resettled in the the West, with most going to the US.

ဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္၏ ေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ားသည္ တေကာင္ႂကြက္အသံျဖစ္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္ ေျပာၾကား

အေမရိကန္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္၏ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ ေျပာၾကားမႈမ်ားသည္ အေမရိကန္ရွိ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပင္မေရစီးေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ တလြဲစီျဖစ္ေနသည္ဟု အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ဗဟိုအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာဆိုလိုက္သည္။

၎က “သူ႔ရဲ အေထြေထြ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအယူအဆက အေမရိကန္မွာရိွတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပင္မေရစီးေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ တလြဲစီျဖစ္ေနတယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ေတာ့ထင္တယ္။ ေယဘုယ်အားျဖင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၊ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ဒါေတြကို ေထာက္ခံမယ္။ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးစုမ်ားရဲ႕ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္ေတြကို ေထာက္ခံမယ္၊ ေနာက္ျပည္ပမွာရိွတဲ့ အတုိက္အခံဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုေတြရဲ႕ လုပ္ငန္းလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကို အားေပးမယ္၊ ေထာက္ခံမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပင္မေရစီးေၾကာင္းမွာ သူရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံေရးအယူအဆ အမ်ားစုက အၿမဲတမ္းကြဲလြဲတဲ့ဟာေတြပဲ ထြက္လာေနတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သူ႔အသံေတြက အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပင္မေရစီးေၾကာင္း တခုလုံးရဲ႕အသံေတြ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ သီးျခားကြဲလြဲတဲ့ တေကာင္ႂကြက္အသံေတြ ျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သို႔ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ဇြန္လ (၉) ရက္ေန႔ ၀ါရွင္တန္ဒီစီရိွ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ ကမာၻလုံးဆုိင္ရာ အာရွအဖြဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္က ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရသည္ လာမည့္ေအာက္တိုဘာ (၁၀) ရက္တြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ က်င္းပေပးလိမ့္မည္ဟု ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ရေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၿပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ေထာက္ပံ့ကူညီရန္ တုိက္တြန္းေျပာၾကားခဲ့မႈအေပၚ ဦး၀င္းတင္က တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာဆိုုျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၌ ယခုျပဳလုပ္မည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲသည္ စစ္အစိုးရ ဆက္လက္တည္ၿမဲေစမည့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒအရ လုပ္ေဆာင္မည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း အတိုက္အခံပါတီအခ်ဳိ႕ကို ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္ခြင့္ ျပဳလာၿပီး လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ အမတ္ေနရာအခ်ဳိ႕ေပးရန္ ခြင့္ျပဳလာျခင္းသည္ ေရွ႕ကို ေျခတလွမ္းတိုးလိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟုလည္း မစၥတာ၀က္ဘ္က ေျပာဆိုသြားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ယင္းသို႔ မစၥတာဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေရးကို အမ်ားႏွင့္ကြဲျပားစြာ ေျပာဆိုေနျခင္းသည္ အလြန္ဆိုး၀ါးသည္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာသည္။

“ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို လက္မခံဘူးဆိုတာဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီေထာင္တဲ့ ပါတီေတြကအပ သာမန္အားျဖင့္ၾကည့္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေရးတခုလုံးက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ျငင္းပယ္ၾကတယ္။ ၂၀၀၈ အေျခခံဥပေဒကို ျငင္းပယ္တယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ကို ျငင္းပယ္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္သေဘာမွန္ႀကီးက ေပၚလြင္ေနပါတယ္။ ဒီလိုအခ်ိန္မွာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၀င္ဖို႔ တုိက္တြန္းတာတို႔ ေျပာတာမ်ဳိးကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ လက္မခံႏိုင္ဘူး။ ျဖစ္ရပ္မွန္ အေျခအေနမွန္ေတြနဲ႔ လုံး၀ဆန္႔က်င္ေနပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြ ျမင္ေတြ႔ေနတဲ့အေနအထားက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆိုတာကို မယုံၾကည္ဘူး။ လက္မခံဘူး။ မဲမေပးခ်င္ၾကဘူးဆိုတဲ့ အေနအထားေတြက ျမင္သာေနပါတယ္” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

မစၥတာဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္က တ႐ုတ္တုိ႔၊ ဗီယက္နမ္တုိ႔တြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မရိွခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္မူ ယခု အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ားကို အေထာက္အကူျပဳသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတခု ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ယခုနွစ္အတြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ျပဳလုပ္ေပးမည္ဟု တရား၀င္ထုတ္ျပန္ေျပာဆိုထားေသာ္လည္း ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ အတိအက် ရက္သတ္မွတ္ ေျပာဆိုျခင္း မရိွေသးေပ။

မစၥတာ ဂ်င္မ္ဝက္ဘ္သည္ မၾကာေသးခင္က ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံတို႔သို႔ အလည္အပတ္ေရာက္ရွိၿပီးေနာက္ ဇြန္ (၄) ရက္တြင္ သြားေရာက္မည့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံခရီးစဥ္ကို အနီးကပ္မွ ႐ုတ္တရက္ေရႊ႕ဆိုင္းခဲ့သည္။

ယင္းသို႔ေရႊ႕ဆိုင္းရျခင္းမွာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရသည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားအကူအညီျဖင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား လက္နက္မ်ား ထုတ္လုပ္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနသည့္ဆိုသည့္ သတင္းမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚခဲ့သည့္အတြက္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ၎က ေျပာဆိုသည္။

US DECIDES TO WATCH CLOSELU N KOREA-BURMA TIE

2010-06-09T05:46:00.001-07:00

The US must appoint an envoy to Burma “without delay” in light of allegations that the pariah state is developing a nuclear weapons programme and has traded military hardware with North Korea, a senior US senator has said.

In a letter yesterday to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Jim Webb, who last week cancelled a trip to Burma after the allegations surfaced, called on Washington to examine “objectively and factually…and in a timely manner” the allegations.

He said that the appointment of an envoy was a requirement of the 2008 Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act, but that the position remained empty. An envoy, he said, would promote “multilateral sanctions, direct dialogue with the [Burmese junta] and democracy advocates, and support for nongovernmental organizations operating in Burma and neighbouring countries”.

The US ambassador to Thailand, Eric John, was given a “strong recommendation” by Webb as someone fit for this role, largely for his knowledge of East Asian affairs, which includes “long experience in dealing with the North Korean regime on issues that might be similar to those we will be facing in Burma”.

The US appears to take the warming relationship between Burma and North Korea as a real threat, but has remained coy about the extent of its knowledge on the relationship: Webb mentioned in his letter reports about a weapons shipment from North Korea to Burma this year, which the US is believed to have known about, but added that the state department was yet to publicly clarify the details.

State department spokesperson Philip Crowley told reporters yesterday that he and Clinton hadn’t yet seen the letter, but asserted that Burma remains a country “of significance” to the US. However he declined to answer whether the appointment of an envoy was a viable option for the US, saying only that Washington was “watching closely” the relationship with North Korea.

Part of the reason for US concern is its waning influence in Southeast Asia, which has allowed China to strengthen economic and political ties with, among others, Burma and North Korea. Huge gas sales to China have largely financed Burma’s weapons programme and have supported clandestine trade with Pyongyang, which appears to have evaded a tight UN arms embargo.

In his letter, Webb lamented the silence from the state department regarding recent weapons exports from North Korea to Burma; it is alleged that a ship offloaded cargo at a Rangoon port around April this year, although more specific details have not been released.

He said that he and his staff “worked for weeks to seek public clarification of this allegation, but the State Department provided none”. But as the results of a five-year investigation by DVB into Burma’s nuclear ambitions and its ties with North Korea began to surface last week, Webb cancelled what would have been his second visit to Burma.

BURMA DENIES NUCLEAR PROJECT

2010-06-08T05:16:00.001-07:00

Burma's ambassador to Singapore has categorically rejected allegations in a recent media report that the country is developing a nuclear weapons program, even as the chief of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog said that the agency is assessing information in the report.

In answer to a question about charges that Burma is seeking help from North Korea to build a nuclear weapons program, Ambassador Win Myint told the Singapore-based news Web site AsiaOne on Sunday that the allegations were “not true.”

“Some communities and societies … stereotype our country,” he said at the conclusion of the Shangri-La Dialogue security dialogue, held in Singapore on June 4-6. “If [we wanted to] know how to produce nuclear bombs, we need infrastructure and technology,” he added.

According to the report, which was produced by the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an exiled Burmese news organization, and broadcast last week by the Al Jazeera news network, the Burmese regime has a clear intent to develop nuclear weapons, although its efforts are still at an early stage.

Burmese Deputy Defense Minister Maj-Gen Aye Myint was scheduled to attend the three-day Shangri- La Dialogue summit over the weekend, but canceled at the last minute, possibly to avoid answering questions about the DVB report. Win Myint was the only Burmese official in attendance.

IAEA INTERESTS IN TO SEEK BURMA'S NUCLEAR PROJECT

2010-06-08T05:10:00.001-07:00

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday it was looking into a report that military-ruled Burma was aiming to develop nuclear weapons.

Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also said that if necessary the Vienna-based body may ask for clarification from Burma. Accounts of suspected nuclear plans surfaced last year, but Burma has never confirmed or denied any nuclear ambitions.

Last week, an investigation by an exiled anti-government group said Burma was seeking to develop a clandestine nuclear programme with the intent to produce an atomic bomb.

The five-year investigation by the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) concluded that Burma was a long way from producing a nuclear weapon but had gone to great lengths to acquire the technology and expertise to do so.

If true, it would be the first southeast Asian country with nuclear ambitions and alter the strategic landscape of a fast-growing region whose big countries -- from Indonesia to the Philippines and Thailand -- are closely allied with Washington.

"We have seen the related articles in the media and we are now assessing the information," Amano told a news conference.

"And, if necessary, we will seek clarification from Myanmar," the Japanese diplomat said, speaking on the first day of a meeting of the 35-nation board of the IAEA.

Burma is a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a global anti-nuclear arms pact, and of the IAEA.

The DVB report cited a U.S. nuclear scientist assessing evidence provided by Sai Thein Win, a Burmese defence engineer trained in Russia in missile technology.

He said he had defected after working in factories built to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The report prompted a U.S. Senator, Jim Webb, to cancel a trip to Burma last Thursday, which he said would be "unwise and inappropriate" in light of the report.

Previous claims by defectors suggest Burma had enlisted the help of North Korea, with which it reportedly agreed a memorandum of understanding on military cooperation during a visit by a top general to Pyongyang last year.

BURMA'S SECRET NUCLEAR DISCLOSES ON MEDIA

2010-06-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

Military-ruled Myanmar has begun a nuclear weapons programme with the help of North Korea, a new investigation revealed Friday, citing an army major defector and years of "top secret material".

A documentary shows thousands of photos and defector testimony revealing its nuclear ambitions and a secret network of underground tunnels, allegedly built with help from North Korean experts, television network Al Jazeera said.

Revelations in the film, made by Norway-based news group Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and broadcast by Al Jazeera on Friday, prompted a US senator to abruptly cancel a trip to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Jim Webb was due to fly to the country Thursday but said it would be "unwise and potentially counter-productive" until there is further clarification on accusations of cooperation with nuclear-armed North Korea.

The findings "contain new allegations regarding the possibility that the Burmese government has been working in conjunction with North Korea in order to develop a nuclear programme," Webb said.

DVB, a news service run by Myanmar expatriates, says "evidence of Myanmar's nuclear programme has come from top-secret material smuggled out of the country over several years," Al Jazeera reported on its website.

The years-long investigation included hundreds of files and other evidence from a Myanmar defector, army major Sai Thein Win, who said he was deputy commander of a military factory heading up Myanmar's nuclear battalion.

"They really want to build a bomb. That is their main objective," he is quoted as saying in the film.

Files reportedly smuggled out of Myanmar by Sai Thein Win have been seen by experts including Robert Kelley, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in the film.

"It appears it is a nuclear weapons programme because there is no conceivable use for this for nuclear power or anything like that," he said, according to Al Jazeera.

Myanmar, which has been military-ruled since 1962, has previously been accused of violating a UN Security Council ban on North Korean arms exports, which was imposed last June.

Following a visit there in May, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell expressed concern about a suspected arms shipment from North Korea to Myanmar.

He called for a "transparent process" to be put in place as a way for Myanmar to assure the international community of its commitments to the resolution on North Korean arms.

President Barack Obama's administration last year launched a dialogue with Myanmar's military rulers, after concluding that Western attempts to isolate the regime had met with little success.

But Washington has sharply criticised preparations for this year's elections -- the first in 20 years -- as well as raising nuclear worries.

CHINA HAS TO INSTALL IRON FIST ON REGIME : U WIN TIN

2010-06-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

တ႐ုတ္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ၀မ္ၾကားေပါင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသုိ႔လာေရာက္သည့္အတြက္ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကိစၥတြင္ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈ၊ ေရာင္ျပန္ဟပ္မႈ တစုံတရာမွ် မရိွနိုင္ေၾကာင္း အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ဗဟိုအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

“ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ သူတို႔ ဘာမွလုပ္ေပးမွာလည္းမဟုတ္ဘူး။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ၾသဇာလည္း ရိွမွာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ သူတုိ႔ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီအေယာင္ျပ လုပ္တဲ့ဟာေတြ ဒို႔လုပ္လို႔ရတယ္။ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္မွာ ဘယ္လိုလုပ္လို႔ရတယ္ ဆိုတာမ်ဳိးေတြကို ျမန္မာအစိုးရက မက်င့္သုံးဘူး။ အဲဒါကေတာ့ ေသခ်ာပါတယ္” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

တ႐ုတ္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ၀မ္ၾကားေပါင္သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ (၂) ရက္ခရီးစဥ္အျဖစ္ ဇြန္ (၂) ရက္တြင္ ေရာက္ရိွခဲ့ၿပီး ယေန႔ ေနျပည္ေတာ္သို႔ သြားေရာက္ကာ စစ္အစိုးရအႀကီးအကဲ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးသန္းေရႊႏွင့္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးသိန္းစိန္တို႔ကုိလည္း ေတြ႔ဆုံရန္ရိွသည္ဟု ရန္ကုန္မွလာေသာ သတင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

တ႐ုတ္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္သည္ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း စြမ္းအင္လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား၊ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ၿပီး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးရန္ရိွသည္ဟုလည္း တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ထားသည္။

ယင္းသို႔ တ႐ုတ္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ လာေရာက္မႈသည္ စီးပြားေရးကိစၥမ်ားအျပင္ ေရွ႕လာမည့္ (၁) ႏွစ္၊ (၂) ႏွစ္အတြင္း တ႐ုတ္ျပည္တြင္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈအေျပာင္းအလဲက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ႐ိုက္ခတ္လာမည့္ ပုံသဏၭာန္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အေျပာင္းအလဲက တ႐ုတ္ျပည္နွင့္ျပန္လည္ ထိစပ္လာမည့္ ပုံသဏၭာန္မ်ားကုိလည္း အရိပ္အကဲၾကည့္မည့္သေဘာ ပါမည္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္က ခန္႔မွန္းသည္။

“ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအလြန္ကာလမွာ အမ်ားႀကီးကို အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအေျခအေန ပတ္၀န္းက်င္သစ္ေတြက ေပၚလာမယ္။ ဒါထင္ရွားတယ္။ ေပၚေပါက္လာမယ့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအေနအထားေတြကို သူတုိ႔သိတယ္။ အဲဒါသိတဲ့အတြက္ ေလွ်ာ့လိုက္၊ ေျပာင္းလုိက္၊ ျပင္လိုက္လို႔ မလုပ္ပါဘူး။ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီအေနနဲ႔ကေတာ့ လက္အိတ္မစြပ္ဘဲ လက္သီးထိုးရမယ့္ အေနအထားမ်ဳိးျဖစ္တဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ စစ္အစိုးရကို တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရကေနၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ေပးမယ့္ဟာက လက္အိတ္တင္မကဘူး သံလက္သီးတပ္ေပးမယ့္ အေနအထားမ်ဳိးလုိ႔ က်ေနာ္က ယူဆတယ္” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၀၇ ခုနွစ္ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးတည္ၿငိမ္မႈ political stability ဆိုသည့္ စကားလုံးမ်ားကို သုံးစြဲလာခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ သို႔ေသာ္ တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ေျပာလာသည့္အတိုင္း (၃) နွစ္မက အခ်ိန္ၾကာခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ဘာမွအေကာင္အထည္မေပၚခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာသည္။

၎က “တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရကေန တ႐ုတ္သံအမတ္ႀကီးက ၀မ္ၾကားေပါင္မလာခင္ အႀကိဳထုတ္တဲ့ေၾကညာခ်က္ထဲမွာလည္း ဒီစကားလုံးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘာမွ တ႐ုတ္က ႏိုင္ငံေရးတည္ၿငိမ္မႈအတြက္ လုပ္ေပးတာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ အခုဆို အန္အယ္လ္ဒီကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးပင္မ ေရစီးေၾကာင္းထဲကေန ထုတ္လုိက္တဲ့ အဆင့္အတန္းထိ ေရာက္လာတယ္။ ဒါေတြကို ၾကည့္ရင္ တ႐ုတ္ေျပာတဲ့ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈမရိွဘူးဆိုတာ ျပတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

အကယ္၍ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရေျပာသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတည္ၿငိမ္မႈကို လုပ္မည္ဆိုပါက ႏိုင္ငံေရးေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ ဆိုသည္မွာ ျဖစ္ေျမာက္ႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း၊ သို႔ေသာ္ စစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ေစတနာမရိွျခင္းသည္ အခက္အခဲျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဦး၀င္းတင္က ဆက္လက္ေျပာၾကားသည္။

“တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔လည္း တကယ္ေစတနာရိွရင္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းတို႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီအရိပ္အေယာင္ျပတဲ့ဟာမ်ဳိးေတြေလာက္ လုပ္ေနလို႔ကေတာ့ ဘာမွမထူးဘူး။ လုပ္ရမယ့္ဟာက ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးသန္းေရႊနဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႔ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပဲြလုိဟာမ်ဳိး၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြနဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြးဖို႔ျဖစ္တယ္။ ဘာမွလည္း အဓိပၸာယ္ရိွတဲ့ အေနအထားမ်ဳိး ေရာက္ေအာင္မလုပ္ဘူး။ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ ၀မ္းၾကားေပါင္လာတဲ့ကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ဘာမွ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္မထားဘူး။ အဲဒီက ေပၚေပါက္လာမယ့္ အက်ဳိးရလဒ္ေတြကိုလည္း ဘာမွမေမွ်ာ္လင့္ဘူး။ အဲဒီက ေပၚေပါက္လာမယ့္ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈ ဆိုတာေတြလည္း ဘာမွရိွလိမ့္မယ္မဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ သေဘာထားတယ္” ဟု ၎က ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သို႔ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

JIM WEBB CANCLES VISIT ON BURMA

2010-06-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသို႔ ဇြန္ (၄) ရက္တြင္ သြားေရာက္မည့္ အေမရိကန္အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္သည္ ၎၏ ခရီးစဥ္ကို ႐ုတ္တရက္ ယေန႔ေရႊ႕ဆိုင္းလုိက္သည္။

ထိုသုိ႔ေရႊ႕ဆိုင္းလိုက္ရသည့္အေၾကာင္းမွာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရသည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား အစီအစဥ္မ်ား တိုးျမႇင့္လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသည့္ဆိုသည့္ စြပ္စြဲေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚလာသည့္အတြက္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေအအက္ဖ္ပီ သတင္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပသည္။

ယေန႔ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္ သတင္းမ်ားအရ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရသည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား အစီအစဥ္တခု လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေၾကာင္း ခန္႔မွန္းရေသာေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု မစၥတာ ဂ်င္မ္ဝက္ဘ္၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ယခုကဲ့သို႔ ေျပာဆုိစြပ္စြဲမႈမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚေနၿပီး ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း မရိွေသးျခင္းေၾကာင့္ နဂိုရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္အေပၚ ဆန္႔က်င္ဘက္သက္ေရာက္မႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚႏိုင္သည့္အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ရန္ မသင့္ေတာ္ေသးေၾကာင္း မစၥတာ ဂ်င္မ္ဝက္ဘ္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

အေမရိကန္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ႏွင့္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးရာေကာ္မတီ၏ အာရွႏွင့္ပစိဖိတ္ေရးရာ ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီဥကၠ႒လည္းျဖစ္သူ မစၥတာ ဂ်င္မ္ဝက္ဘ္သည္ ကိုရီးယားႏွင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံတို႔သို႔ အလည္အပတ္ေရာက္ရွိၿပီးေနာက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသြားေရာက္မည့္ခရီးစဥ္ကို ေရႊ႕ဆိုင္းလိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
US Senator Jim Webb has canceled his planned visit to Burma, saying it would be “unwise and counterproductive” for him to go there while new allegations were surfacing about possible nuclear cooperation between Naypyidaw and North Korea.

In a statement issued by his office in Washington, Webb also said he would urge President Barack Obama to appoint a special envoy to tackle all issues relating to US-Burma relations.
Webb was to have begun his visit to Burma on Thursday.

Announcing the last-minute cancellation on Thursday, Webb's office issued a statement by the senator saying: “News reports published today contain new allegations regarding the possibility that the Burmese government has been working in conjunction with North Korea in order to develop a nuclear program.”

The announcement did not say which news media had carried the reports. But the Doha-based television station Al Jazeera said it would broadcast on Friday a program made by the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) on Burma's secret nuclear program.

The DVB program reports on key files and other information smuggled out of Burma by a Burmese army defector, Major Sai Thein Win, a former deputy commander of a top-secret military factory at a town called Myaing. The smuggled material reportedly supports suspicions that North Korea is helping Burma develop a nuclear capability.

“It is unclear whether these allegations have substantive merit,” said Webb in his statement. “However, given the fact that Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell recently accused Burma of violating UN Security Council Resolution 1874 with respect to a suspected shipment of arms from North Korea, there are now two unresolved matters related to activities of serious concern between these two countries.

“Until there is further clarification on these matters, I believe it would be unwise and potentially counterproductive for me to visit Burma.”

During a visit to Burma in August 2009, Webb met detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the regime supremo Snr-Gen Than Shwe.

Rangoon sources said that the program of the visit Webb was to have begun on Thursday included meetings with Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein and opposition figures.

In his Washington statement, Webb said: “I strongly believe that a continuation of dialogue between our two countries is important for the evolution of a more open governmental system and for the future strategic balance in Southeast Asia. However, a productive dialogue will be achievable only when these two matters are further clarified.”

Webb added: “In the interim period, I intend to strongly suggest to the President that he fulfill the requirements of Public Law 110-286 and immediately appoint a special envoy to address the entire range of issues regarding relations between the United States and Burma.”

Webb chairs the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was the first US senator last year to visit Burma in more than 10 years, and he remains the only American official to meet with Than Shwe.

He is strongly critical of the US administration’s economic sanctions against Burma, arguing that isolating Burma has strengthened China's grip, weakened US influence and done nothing to improve the junta's behavior.

During his visit to Burma in August 2009, Webb secured the release of an American citizen who was arrested after illegally entering Suu Kyi's home.

The visit he was to have begun on Thursday was part of an Asian tour that has taken him to Thailand and South Korea. The US embassy in Bangkok said he would address a press conference there on Thursday evening.

Five facts about China-Myanmar relations

2010-06-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

(1)*In 1949 Burma, as Myanmar was then known, was one of the first countries to recognise the People's Republic of China. But relations soured in the 1960s following anti-Chinese riots in Rangoon (now called Yangon).

(2)* Following a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1988, the West imposed broad sanctions on Myanmar. China stepped into the void, providing aid and weapons and ramping up trade.

Beijing has continued to provide broad diplomatic support for Myanmar's military government, although the ruling generals remain wary of their powerful northern neighbour.

(3)* China has invested more than $1 billion in Myanmar, primarily in the mining sector, and is the country's fourth largest foreign investor, say state media. Bilateral trade grew by more than one-quarter in 2008 to about $2.63 billion. Chinese firms are heavily involved in logging in Myanmar.

(4)* Myanmar gives China access to the Indian Ocean, not only for imports of oil and gas and exports from landlocked southwestern Chinese provinces, but also potentially for military bases or listening posts.

In October, China's state energy group CNPC started building a crude oil port in Myanmar, part of a pipeline project aimed at cutting out the long detour oil cargoes take through the congested and strategically vulnerable Malacca Strait.

(5)* The relationship has had rocky patches of late. In August, refugees flooded across into China following fighting on the Myanmar side of the border between rebels and government troops, angering Beijing.

In 2007, China's Foreign Ministry published an unflattering account of Myanmar's new jungle capital Naypyidaw, expressing surprise that the poor country would consider such an expensive move without even first telling its supposed Chinese friends.

(Writing by Ben Blanchard; editing by Emma Graham-Harrison)

North Korea Exporting Nuke Technology to Burma

2010-05-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

UNITED NATIONS — North Korea is exporting nuclear and ballistic missile technology and using multiple intermediaries, shell companies and overseas criminal networks to circumvent U.N. sanctions, U.N. experts said in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The seven-member panel monitoring the implementation of sanctions against North Korea said its research indicates that Pyongyang is involved in banned nuclear and ballistic activities in Iran, Syria and Burma. It called for further study of these suspected activities and urged all countries to try to prevent them.

The 47-page report, obtained late Thursday by AP, and a lengthy annex document, details sanctions violations reported by U.N. member states, including four cases involving arms exports and two seizures of luxury goods by Italy — two yachts and high-end recording and video equipment. The report also details the broad range of techniques that North Korea is using to try to evade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after its two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

Council diplomats discussed the report by the experts from Britain, Japan, the United States, France, South Korea, Russia and China at a closed-door meeting on Thursday.

Its release happened to coincide with heightened tensions between North Korea and South Korea over the March sinking of a South Korean navy ship which killed 46 sailors. The council is waiting for South Korea to decide what action it wants the U.N.'s most powerful body to take in response to the sinking, which a multinational investigation determined was caused by a North Korean torpedo.

The panel of experts said there is general agreement that the U.N. embargoes on nuclear and ballistic missile related items and technology, on arms exports and imports except light weapons, and on luxury goods, are having an impact.

But it said the list of eight entities and five individuals currently subject to an asset freeze and travel ban seriously understates those known to be engaged in banned activities and called for additional names to be added. It noted that North Korea moved quickly to have other companies take over activities of the eight banned entities.

The experts said an analysis of the four North Korean attempts to illegally export arms revealed that Pyongyang used "a number of masking techniques" to avoid sanctions. They include providing false descriptions and mislabeling of the contents of shipping containers, falsifying the manifest and information about the origin and destination of the goods, "and use of multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions," the panel said.

It noted that a chartered jet intercepted in Thailand in December carrying 35 tons of conventional weapons including surface-to-air missiles from North Korea was owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates, registered in Georgia, leased to a shell company registered in New Zealand and then chartered to another shell company registered in Hong Kong — which may have been an attempt to mask its destination.

North Korea is also concealing arms exports by shipping components in kits for assembly overseas, the experts said.

As one example, the panel said it learned after North Korean military equipment was seized at Durban harbor in South Africa that scores of technicians from the North had gone to the Republic of Congo, where the equipment was to have been assembled.

The experts called for "extra vigilance" at the first overseas port handling North Korean cargo and close monitoring of airplanes flying from the North, saying Pyongyang is believed to use air cargo "to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports."

While North Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices which do legitimate business as well as most of the country's illicit trade and covert acquisitions, the panel said Pyongyang "has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes."

This may also include goods related to weapons of mass destruction and arms, it added.

Under council resolutions, all countries are required to submit reports on what they are doing to implement sanctions but as of April 30 the panel said it had still not heard from 112 of the 192 U.N. member states — including 51 in Africa, 28 in Asia, and 25 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

While no country reported on nuclear or ballistic missile-related imports or exports from North Korea since the second sanctions resolution was adopted last June, the panel said it reviewed several U.S.
ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ႏိုင္ငံသည္ လက္နက္မ်ားကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အပါအ၀င္ အီရန္ႏွင့္ ဆီးရီးယား ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားသို႔ တင္ပို႔လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ကုလ သမဂၢ၏ အေရးယူမႈမ်ားကို ေရွာင္ရွားရန္ အတြက္ ၾကားခံ ကုမၸဏီမ်ား၊ တျခားေသာ အဆက္ အသြယ္မ်ားကို အသုံးျပဳလ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း ယင္း အစီရင္ခံစာကို လက္ခံရရွိ ထားသည့္ ေအပီ သတင္း တရပ္တြင္ ေရးသား ထားသည္။

“ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက သေဘာၤ ကြန္တိန္နာေတြမွာ မွားယြင္းတဲ့ ပိုင္ရွင္လိပ္စာ အညႊန္းေတြ တပ္ၿပီးေတာ့ ကုန္ပစၥည္းေတြ ဘယ္ ကေန ဘယ္ကို ပို႔တယ္ဆိုတာ မသိရေအာင္ လွည့္စားတယ္၊ ေျမာက္ျမားလွတဲ့ ၾကားခံ လက္နက္ကုမၸဏီေတြနဲ႔ ေငြေၾကး အဖြဲ႔ အစည္းေတြကို အသုံးျပဳတယ္”ဟု ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ားက ယင္းအစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ေရးသား ထားသည္။

၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ႏ်ဴကလီးယား အစီအစဥ္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ ဆက္ႏြယ္မႈရွိသည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ မေလးရွားမွ တဆင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသုိ႔ သံလိုက္ဓာတ္အား တိုင္းတာသည့္ ကိရိယာ တမ်ိဳး တင္သြင္းရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့သူ ၃ ဦးကို ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံ၌ ဖမ္းဆီး ခဲ့သည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို စစ္လက္နက္ပစၥည္း ကူညီခဲ့သည့္ Namchongang Trading ကုမၸဏီစေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ပတ္ သက္သည့္ သံသယ ျဖစ္ဖြယ္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ဆက္လက္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ား အဖြဲ႔က ဆို သည္။

၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုင္လက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို စစ္လက္နက္ ပစၥည္းဆိုင္ရာ အကူအညီေပးခဲ့ေသာ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား Namchingang Trading ကုမၸဏီကို အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံက ဘ႑ာေရး ဆိုင္ရာ တားျမစ္ ကန္႔သတ္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။

ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယားသည္ ျမန္မာျပည္ကုိ ဒုံးက်ည္္မ်ား ေရာင္းခ်ေနသည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရ အရာရွိတို႔က ၂ဝဝ၄ ခုႏွစ္ကပင္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

“တရားမ၀င္ လက္နက္ ျဖန္႔ခ်ိဖို႔နဲ႔ သယ္ေဆာင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ ေျမာက္ကိုးယားက ျပည္ပ အေျခစိုက္ ဥပေဒ ျပင္ပက အဖြဲ႔ေတြနဲ႔ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေဆာင္ရြက္တာလည္း ေတြ႔ရတယ္”ဟု ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ားက အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေထာက္ျပထားသည္။

ယင္းကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ားက ေလဆိပ္မ်ား၌ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက တင္သြင္းသည့္ ပစၥည္းမ်ားကုိ စစ္ေဆးရာတြင္ ပိုမို သတိ၀ီရိယ ရွိရန္ ႏႈိးေဆာ္ထားၿပီး ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားမွ ထြက္ခြာလာေသာ ေလယာဥ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ေသခ်ာစြာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရန္ တိုက္တြန္း ထားသည္။

အဆိုပါ ၄၇ မ်က္ႏွာရွိ အစီရင္ခံစာကို ေမလ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေအပီသတင္းဌာနက လက္ခံရရွိထားၿပီး အစီရင္ခံစာ ထြက္ေပၚ လာသည့္ အခ်ိန္သည္ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား ေရတပ္သေဘၤာကို ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားတို႔က ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံတကာ စုံစမ္း ေလ့လာေရး အဖြဲ႔က ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ ေပၚထြက္လာျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ခ်င္းမုိင္ၿမိဳ႕အေျခစုိက္ ျမန္မာ့အေရးေလ့လာသူ ဦး၀င္းမင္းက ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား လက္နက္ ေရာင္းခ်ျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ အေသအခ်ာ မသိရွိရေသာ္လည္း ဒုံးက်ည္လက္နက္မ်ားကို တင္ပို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ေနသည္မွာ ခုိင္မာ ေၾကာင္း ဆုိသည္။

“ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက သူ႔သဘာ၀အရ အဲသလို ၾကားခံ ကုမၸဏီေတြနဲ႔ လုပ္ေလ့ရွိတယ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ စာရင္းမွာေတာ့ ေျမာက္ ကိုရီးယား သုံးတဲ့ ကုမၸဏီ စာရင္းေတြ အတိအက်ရွိတယ္၊ ျမန္မာကလည္း ႏ်ဴကလီးယား နည္းပညာေတြရေအာင္ေတာ့ ႀကိဳးစား ေနတာပဲ”ဟု ဦး၀င္းမင္းက ေျပာသည္။

ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသည္ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ စမ္းသပ္ခ့ဲသည့္အတြက္ ကုလသမဂၢ လံုၿခံဳေရး ေကာင္ စီက ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ အမွတ္ ၁၈၇၄ ကို ခ်မွတ္ၿပီး အေရးယူျခင္း ခံခဲ့ရသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။

ယင္းဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ၁၈၇၄ အရ သံသယ ျဖစ္ဖြယ္ရွိေသာ ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယားႏိုင္ငံ၏ မည္သည့္ သေဘၤာ၊ ေလယာဥ္မ်ားကိုမဆို ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ၀င္ေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးပိုင္ခြင့္ ရွိရမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

ေမလက အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံ အေရွ႕အာရွႏွင့္ ပစိဖိတ္ ေဒသေရးရာ လက္ေထာက္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး မစၥတာ ကာ့တ္ ကမ္းဘဲလ္ႏွင့္ သိပၸံႏွင့္ နည္းပညာ ဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေသာင္းတို႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုရာတြင္ ကုလသမဂၢ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ (၁၇၁၈) ႏွင့္ (၁၈၇၄) ကို လိုက္နာမည္ဟု ဦးေသာင္းက ေျပာသည္။ သို႔ ေသာ္ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာ အာဏာကို ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ရမည့္ တာဝန္လည္း ရွိသည္ဟု ဆက္လက္ ေျပာဆိုသြားသည္။

ျမန္မာႏွင့္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားအစိုးရတို႔သည္ ၁၉၈၃ ခုႏွစ္က သံတမန္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ရပ္ဆိုင္းခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ထုိႏွစ္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ အလည္လာေရာက္ေသာ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား သမၼတ ခ်န္ဒူး၀မ္ ႏွင့္အဖြဲ႕အား ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ အာဇာနည္ ဗိမာန္တြင္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ကြန္မန္ဒုိတုိ႔က ဗုံးခြဲတိုက္ခိုက္ရာ သမၼတ ခ်န္ဒူး၀မ္ ေသဆုံးျခင္း မရွိေသာ္လည္း ၀န္ႀကီး ၄ ဦး အပါအ၀င္၂၁ ဦး ေသဆုံးၿပီး ေနာက္ပုိင္း သံတမန္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ရပ္သြားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ထုိကဲ့သို႔ ျမန္မာႏွင့္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားတို႔သည္ ၂ ႏိုင္ငံ သံတမန္ ပုံမွန္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ရပ္ဆိုင္းခဲ့ရာမွ မၾကာေသး ေသာ ႏွစ္မ်ား အတြင္း တိတ္တဆိတ္ ဆက္ဆံေရးမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္လာခဲ့ကာ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ ဧၿပီလတြင္ တရား၀င္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ျပန္လည္ စတင္ခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ရန္ကုန္ အာဇာနည္ ဗိမာန္ ေဖာက္ခြဲမႈျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ၿပီး ၂၅ ႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ အာဏာရွင္ ႏွစ္ႏုိင္ငံသည္ သံတမန္ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး သာမက စစ္ေရး ဆက္ႏြယ္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္လာသည္ကို ေတြ႔ရသည္။

၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလအတြင္း ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး သူရေရႊမန္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ေသာ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အဖြဲ႔သည္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသုိ႔ လွ်ဳိ႕၀ွက္သြားေရာက္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ေနာက္ပုိင္းတြင္ သတင္း ေပါက္ၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ထိုခရီးစဥ္တြင္ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား စစ္ဦးစီး အရာရွိခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ကင္မ္က်ဳတ္ဆစ္ (Kim Kyok-sik)ႏွင့္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ နားလည္မႈ စာခၽြန္လႊာကိုလက္မွတ္ ေရးထိုးခဲ့ၿပီး စစ္ေရး အရ ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈျပဳလုပ္ရန္ သေဘာတူခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ၿမိဳယမ္းရွိ ေရဒါႏွင့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈဌာန (Radar and jamming units) မ်ား၊ ၿပံဳယမ္းရွိ ေလေၾကာင္းရန္ ကာကြယ္ေရး တပ္မ်ား၊ ေလေၾကာင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာျဖင့္ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ အမိန္႔ေပး ဌာနမ်ားသို႔လည္း သြားေရာက္ ၾကည့္ရႈခဲ့သည့္ အျပင္ ဥမင္လိုဏ္ေခါင္း အတြင္းရိွ အေဆာက္အဦးမ်ားတြင္ ထုတ္လုပ္ေနသည့္ ေျမျပင္မွ ေျမျပင္ပစ္ စကဒ္ (SCUD) ဒံုးက်ည္ စက္ရံုမ်ားသို႔ သြားေရာက္၍ ေလ့လာၾကေသးသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ စစ္ေရး အေဆာက္အအုံ တခ်ဳိ႕ ေဆာက္လုပ္ရာ၌ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက ကူညီ ေဆာက္လုပ္ျခင္း၊ ႀကီးၾကပ္ေပးျခင္း ျပဳမည္ ဟူေသာ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္အရ အေဆာက္အအုံမ်ားတြင္ ဒံုးက်ည္မ်ား၊ ေလယာဥ္မ်ား၊ သေဘၤာမ်ား သိုဝွက္ထားႏိုင္မည္ ဟု ဆုိသည္။

၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လကလည္း လက္နက္မ်ား တင္ေဆာင္လာသည္ဟု ယူဆရသည့္ ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယား သေဘၤာတစီး ျမန္မာျပည္သုိ႔ ဦးတည္ ခုတ္ေမာင္း ေနသည္ဟူေသာ သတင္းက ကမၻာ့မီဒီယာ၌ ထိပ္တန္းသုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့သည္။ တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာပင္ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ ႏ်ဴကလီးယား ထုတ္လုပ္မည့္ အစီအစဥ္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ႏိုင္ဖြယ္ရွိေသာ ေျမေအာက္ ဥမင္မ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ေနမႈ ဓာတ္ပုံႏွင့္ ဗီဒီယို မွတ္တမ္းမ်ားကိုလည္း သတင္းဌာနမ်ားတြင္ ထုတ္လႊင့္ျပသခဲ့သည္။

ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကင္မ္ဂ်ဳံအီးလ္၏ ေမြးေန႔ပဲြကုိ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားသံ႐ံုးက စီစဥ္ က်င္းပရာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရ ထိပ္ပုိင္း ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား တက္ေရာက္ၾကသည္။ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး သန္းေရႊ ကလည္း ေမြးေန႔အတြက္ သ၀ဏ္လႊာတေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည္။

DRUG WARLORD MONOPOLIZES BURMESE BUSINESS

2010-05-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

Swiss-American firm Transocean, presently embroiled in the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster, did exploratory drilling last autumn in Burmese waters owned by a partnership between a Chinese state-run energy company and a firm owned by Stephen Law, a junta crony alleged by the US to be a major drug-money launderer, according to corporate filings with the US stock market regulator.

Stephen Law, (a.k.a. Tun Myint Naing), his Singaporean wife and his “narco warlord” father are on the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) blacklist, officially called the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. All three are also on a similar European travel ban and sanctions lists.

The SDN blacklist targets the Burmese junta’s senior leadership, its cronies and the financial networks that continue to support the military dictatorship. The US Treasury website states that when an individual, firm or other entity is added to the sanctions list “any assets the designees may have subject to US jurisdiction are frozen, and all financial and commercial transactions by any US person with the designated companies and individuals are prohibited”.

Transocean International’s corporate 8-K filing to the US Securities and Exchance Commission on November 2 last year shows that Chinese state-run energy company CNOOC hired Transocean’s semi-submersible Actinia, a Panamanian registered drilling rig, to operate in Burma from last October to December. An 8-K form is the “current report” companies must file with the US market regulator to announce major events that shareholders should know about. The 82-metre-long, 78-metre-wide rig was hired at a daily rate of US$206,000. Transocean could not be reached for comment.

According to the CNOOC website, all of the firm’s stakes in Burma’s gas industry are held in partnership with China Focus Development (formerly known as Golden Aaron) and China Global Construction, with CNOOC as the operator. China Focus Development is a privately owned Singapore-registered firm whose sole shareholders are Stephen Law and his wife Ng Sor Hong (a.k.a. Cynthia Ng). The US and EU sanctions list show Ng Sor Hong to be chief executive of the firm, which is also among more than a dozen companies controlled by Law on the OFAC blacklist of banned Burma-related entities.

Industry journal International Oil Daily reported last February that the CNOOC-China Focus Development partnership held onshore blocks C-1, C-2 and M and offshore blocks A-4, M-2 and M-10. It also said CNOOC’s attempt in 2008 to swap its stake in two of its blocks with the Thai national oil firm PTEEP was vetoed by the Burmese regime.

Law’s Sino-Burmese father Lao Sit Han (a.k.a. Lo Hsing Han) is believed by US drug-trafficking analysts to have controlled Southeast Asia’s best-armed narcotics militias during the 1970’s.

According to the US Treasury in February, 2008: “In addition to their support for the Burmese regime, Steven Law and Lo Hsing Han have a history of involvement in illicit activities.”

“Lo Hsing Han, known as the ‘Godfather of Heroin’, has been one of the world’s key heroin traffickers dating back to the early 1970s. Steven Law joined his father’s drug empire in the 1990s and has since become one of the wealthiest individuals in Burma,” the Treasury statement said.

Calls for a US government investigation

In an interview with Mizzima, Wong Aung of the Shwe Gas movement called on the US government to immediately probe the links between Transocean and Stephen Law.

“Transocean’s drilling for Stephen Law’s natural gas consortium appears to be a serious breach of American sanctions on Burma,” he said. “The US government must investigate Transocean’s Burmese operations as soon as possible and send a clear message that it is not acceptable for multinational firms such as Transocean to do business with Burma’s most notorious narco-oligarch.”

Last month Transocean was involved in what has been described as one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. On April 20, 2010, Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico while it was drilling under contract for oil giant BP. The explosion killed 11 workers.

Early this month at a special US congressional hearing convened to investigate the disaster, senior executives from BP, Transocean and contractor Halliburton all testified the other firms were responsible for the blast and subsequent unprecedented oil spill.

Following the hearing, a furious US President Barack Obama chided the executives for their refusal to accept responsibility saying, “I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle”. He added that the millionaire executives were “falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display and I certainly wasn’t”.
ဆြစ္-အေမရိကန္ ဖက္စပ္ကုမၸဏီ Transocean သည္ တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရပိုင္ စြမ္းအင္ကုမၸဏီႏွင့္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ လူရင္းလူယံုျဖစ္ၿပီး အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရက ေငြေၾကး ခဝါခ်သူအျဖစ္ စြပ္စြဲေနေသာ စတီဖင္ေလာႏွင့္ အစုစပ္ကာ ျမန္မာ့ေရျပင္ ေရနံလုပ္ကြက္ တေနရာတြင္ အစမ္းတြင္း တူးေဖာ္ေနသည္။

ၿပီးခဲ့ေသာ ေဆာင္းဦးေပါက္က တူးေဖာ္ခဲ့သည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ စေတာ့ေစ်းကြက္ ၾကီးၾကပ္ကြပ္ကဲေရး အဖြဲ႔သို႔ တင္သြင္းေသာ ေကာ္ပိုေရးရွင္း စာရြက္စာတမ္းမ်ားတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

စတီဖင္ေလာ ေခၚ ထြန္းျမင့္ႏိုင္၊ သူ႔ဇနီးစကၤာပူႏိုင္ငံသူ၊ သူ႔ဖခင္ဘိန္းဘုရင္တုိ႔မွာ အေမရိကန္ ႏိုင္ငံ ဘ႑ာေရးဌာန ႏိုင္ငံရပ္ျခားပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈမ်ား ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေရး႐ံုး (OFAC) က နာမည္ပ်က္စာရင္း အသြင္းထားခံရသည္။ အဆုိပါ နာမည္ပ်က္စာရင္းကို တရားဝင္အားျဖင့္ အထူးသတ္မွတ္ထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ား (Specially Designated Nationals – SDN) ဟု ေခၚသည္။ သူတို႔ ၃ ဦးမွာ ဥေရာပသမဂၢက ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူျခင္းကိုလည္း ခံထားရသူမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။

နာမည္ပ်က္စာရင္းမွာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ၏ ထိပ္တန္းေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ယင္းတို႔၏ လူရင္းလူယံုမ်ားႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ားကို အေထာက္အပံ့ျပဳေနသည့္ ဘ႑ာေရးကြန္ရက္မ်ားကို ပစ္မွတ္ထား ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူထားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ပုဂၢိဳလ္တဦး၊ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းတခု၊ စီးပြားေရးအဖြဲ႔အစည္းတရပ္ရပ္တို႔ကို ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈခံရေသာ စာရင္းတြင္ ထည့္သြင္းျခင္းခံရလွ်င္ `အဆိုပါ သတ္မွတ္ခံရသူ သို႔မဟုတ္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္း၏ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု၏ စီရင္ပိုင္ခြင့္ ေအာက္တြင္ရွိသည့္ မည္သည့္ ရပိုင္ခြင့္ကိုမဆို ထုတ္ယူမရေအာင္ ပိတ္ဆို႔ထားရမည္။

ထို႔ျပင္ အဆိုပါ သတ္မွတ္ခံရေသာ ကုမၸဏီမ်ား၊ လူပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားတို႔ႏွင့္ မည္သည့္ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံသားမွ် ဘ႑ာေရးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းမ်ား မျပဳလုပ္ရန္ တားျမစ္သည္´ ဟု အေမရိကန္ ဘ႑ာေရးဌာန ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

အေမရိကန္ စေတာ့အိပ္ခ်ိန္း ေကာ္မရွင္သို႔ Transocean International ကုမၸဏီက တင္သြင္းသည့္ Corporate 8-K စာရြက္စာတမ္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားခ်က္အရ တ႐ုတ္အစိုးရပိုင္ စြမ္းအင္ကုမၸဏီတခုျဖစ္ေသာ CNOCC က ကုမၸဏီပိုင္ ပနားမားမွတ္ပံုတင္ေရတြင္ တဝက္တပ်က္နစ္ျမဳပ္ေနေသာ ေရနံတြင္းတူးစင္ Actinia ကုိ ငွားရမ္းခဲ့ေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ေအာက္တိုဘာလမွ ဒီဇင္ဘာလအထိ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္အတြက္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ပံုစံ 8-K စာရြက္စာတမ္းဆိုသည္မွာ ကုမၸဏီမ်ား၏ `လတ္တေလာ အစီရင္ခံစာ´ ျဖစ္ၿပီး အစုရွယ္ယာပိုင္ရွင္မ်ား သိရွိရန္ လိုအပ္သည့္ အဓိကအျဖစ္အပ်က္ ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ားကို အေမရိကန္ စေတာ့ေစ်းကြက္ ကြပ္ကဲမႈဌာနသို႔ တင္သြင္းရသည့္ စာရြက္စာတမ္းတခု ျဖစ္သည္။ အရွည္ ၈၂ မီတာ၊ အက်ယ္ ၇၈ မီတာရွိသည့္ အဆိုပါ ေရနံတြင္းတူးစင္ကို တရက္လွ်င္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၂ဝ၆ဝဝဝ ျဖင့္ ငွားရမ္းခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ အဆိုပါ ကိစၥႏွင့္စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ေမးျမန္းရန္ Transocean ကို ဆက္သြယ္ရာ ဆက္သြယ္၍မရပါ။

CNOC ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားခ်က္အရ ကုမၸဏီပိုင္ ျမန္မာ့သဘာဝဓာတ္ေငြ႔လုပ္ငန္း ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈႏွင့္ အစုရွယ္ယာမ်ားကို ယခင္ Golden Aaron ဟု သိၾကေသာ China Focus Development ႏွင့္ China Global Construction တို႔ႏွင့္အတူ ပူးတြဲပိုင္ဆိုင္ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး CNOC က လုပ္ငန္းအေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္သူအျဖစ္သာ လုပ္ကိုင္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ China Focus Development မွာ စကၤာပူတြင္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ထားေသာ ကုမၸဏီတခုျဖစ္ၿပီး တဦးတည္းေသာ အစုရွယ္ယာပိုင္ရွင္မ်ားမွာ စတီဖင္ေလာႏွင့္ သူ႔ဇနီးသည္ Ng Sor Hong ေခၚ Cynthia Ng တို႔ ျဖစ္ၾကသည္။

အေမရိကန္ႏွင့္ ဥေရာပသမဂၢတို႔၏ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈစာရင္းတြင္ Ng Sor Hong ကို ကုမၸဏီ၏ အမႈေဆာင္ အရာရွိခ်ဳပ္အျဖစ္ ေဖာ္ျပထားၿပီး အေမရိကန္ဘ႑ာေရးဌာန လက္ေအာက္ခံ (OFAC) ႐ံုးက ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူထားေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနသည့္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား နာမည္ပ်က္စာရင္းတြင္ ထည့္သြင္းေဖာ္ျပထားျခင္း ခံရသည့္ စတီဖင္ေလာ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားသည့္ အျခားကုမၸဏီ တဒါဇင္တြင္ ပါဝင္ေနေသာ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းတခုလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

စက္မႈလုပ္ငန္းဆိုင္ရာ ဂ်ာနယ္တေစာင္ျဖစ္ေသာ International Oil Daily က လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီလက သတင္းေရးသားေဖာ္ျပရာတြင္ CNOCC ႏွင့္ China Focus Development တို႔သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ကုန္းတြင္းေရနံႏွင့္ ဓာတ္ေငြ႔လုပ္ကြက္မ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ C-1, C-2 M တို႔ႏွင့္ ကမ္းလြန္ေရနံလုပ္ကြက္မ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ A-4, M-2, M-10 တို႔ကို အတူပူးတြဲ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ထားၾကသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ သူတို႔ပုိင္ဆိုင္ေသာ လုပ္ကြက္ ၂ ခုကို CNOCC က ထိုင္းအစိုးရပိုင္ PTEEP သို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ရန္ ၂ဝဝ၈ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္းက ၾကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ရာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ဗီိတိုအာဏာသံုးပယ္ခ်ခဲ့သည္ဟုလည္း အဆိုပါသတင္းတြင္ ဆက္လက္ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

စတီဖင္ေလာ၏ဖခင္ ေလာ္ဆစ္ဟန္ ေခၚ ေလာ္ရွင္းဟန္မွာ ၁၉၇ဝ စုႏွစ္မ်ားအတြင္း အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွတြင္ အေကာင္းဆံုး လက္နက္မ်ား တပ္ဆင္ထားသည့္ ဘိန္းတပ္ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္တြယ္ခဲ့သည္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးအရာရွိမ်ားက ယံုၾကည္ထားၾကသည္။

အေမရိကန္ဘ႑ာေရးဌာန၏ ၂ဝဝ၈ ခုႏွစ္ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီလ ေဖာ္ျပေရးသားခ်က္အရ `စတီဖင္ေလာႏွင့္ ေလာ္ရွင္းဟန္တို႔သည္ စစ္အစိုးရကို ေထာက္ခံပံ့ပိုးေနသည္သာမက တရားမဝင္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္ ပါဝင္ပတ္သက္ခဲ့သည့္ ရာဇဝင္ရွိသူမ်ားလည္း ျဖစ္သည္´ ဟု ဆိုသည္။

`ဟီး႐ိုးအင္းေခါင္းကိုင္ဖခင္ၾကီး´ ဟု သိရွိၾကေသာ ေလာ္ရွင္းဟန္သည္ ၁၉၇ဝ စုႏွစ္အေစာပိုင္း ႏွစ္ကာလမ်ားက ကမၻာ့အဓိက ဟီး႐ိုးအင္း ေရာင္းဝယ္ေဖာက္ကားသူမ်ားတြင္ တဦးအပါအဝင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ စတီဖင္သည္ သူ႔ဖခင္၏ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးအင္ပါယာကို ၁၉၉ဝ စုႏွစ္မ်ားအတြင္း ဝင္ေရာက္ကိုင္တြယ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၿပီး ထိုအခ်ိန္ကတည္းကစ၍ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ အခ်မ္းသာဆံုးစာရင္းဝင္ တဦးျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္ဟု ဘ႑ာေရးဌာန ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ ေရးသားထားသည္။

အေမရိကန္အစိုးရက စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုျခင္း

ေရႊသဘာဝဓာတ္ေငြ႔လႈပ္ရွားမႈမွ ကိုဝင္းေအာင္ကို မဇၩိမက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ရာ Transocean ႏွင့္ စတီဖင္ေလာတို႔အၾကား အဆက္အဆံမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးပါရန္ အေမရိကန္အစိုးရကို သူေတာင္းဆိုေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

`စတီဖင္ေလာပိုင္ ကုမၸဏီလုပ္ငန္းစုၾကီးအတြက္ Transocean က ေရနံတြင္းတူးေပးေနျခင္းသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ခ်မွတ္ထားေသာ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈကို အၾကီးအက်ယ္ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနေသာ Transocean ၏ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအားလံုးကို အေမရိကန္အစိုးရက အျမန္ဆံုး စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ Transocean ကဲ့သို႔ ႏိုင္ငံစံု ေကာ္ပိုေရးရွင္းၾကီးတခုအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးရာဇာၾကီးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ဆက္သြယ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းကို လက္မခံႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ျပတ္သားစြာ သတင္းစကားပါးရမည္´ ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။

ၿပီးခဲ့ေသာလက Transocean သည္ အေမရိကန္သမိုင္းတြင္ အဆိုးရြားဆံုး ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ ညစ္ညမ္းမႈ ျဖစ္ေပၚေစခဲ့သည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုတြင္ ပါဝင္ေနခဲ့သည္။ ေရနံကုမၸဏီၾကီးျဖစ္ေသာ ဘီပီအတြက္ ေရနံတြင္းတူးေပးေနသည့္ Transocean ပိုင္ ပင္လယ္ေရနက္ ေရနံတြင္းတူးစင္သည္ ၂ဝ၁ဝ ခုႏွစ္ ဧၿပီလ ၂ဝ ရက္ေန႔က မကၠဆီကို ပင္လယ္ေကြ႔တြင္ ေပါက္ကြဲမီးေလာင္သြားခဲ့သည္။ အဆိုပါ ေပါက္ကြဲမႈတြင္ လုပ္သား ၁၁ ဦး ေသဆံုးသြားခဲ့သည္။

အဆိုပါ ကပ္ေဘးဒုကၡၾကီးႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ အေမရိကန္ကြန္ဂရက္လႊတ္ေတာ္က ယခုလဆန္းပိုင္းတြင္ အထူးၾကားနာပြဲတရပ္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ရာ ဘီပီ၊ Transocean ႏွင့္ ဟာလီဘာတန္ (Halliburton) ကုမၸဏီတို႔က ေပါက္ကြဲမႈႏွင့္ ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲ ေပၚထြက္လာေသာ တခါမွ်မၾကံဳဖူးေအာင္ ဆိုးရြားလွသည့္ ေရနံယိုစိမ့္မႈၾကီးအတြက္ သူတို႔တြင္ တာဝန္မရွိဘဲ အျခားကုမၸဏီမ်ားတြင္သာ တာဝန္ရွိေၾကာင္း ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အဆိုပါ ၾကားနာပြဲၿပီးေနာက္ အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ဘားရက္အိုဘားမားက သူတုိ႔တြင္ တာဝန္ရွိမႈကို လက္မခံဘဲ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့သည့္အတြက္ ကုမၸဏီအမႈေဆာင္အရာရွိမ်ားကို ေဒါသတၾကီး ေဝဖန္ျပစ္တင္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။ `ၾသခ်စရာေကာင္းေလာက္ေအာင္ ဟာသေျမာက္တဲ့ ေျပာဆိုမႈေတြကို က်ေနာ္အထင္မၾကီးဘူး´ ဟု သူက ေျပာခဲ့သည္။

ထို႔ျပင္ အဆိုပါ သန္းၾကြယ္သူေ႒း အမႈေဆာင္ အရာရွိမ်ားသည္ `တဦးကိုတဦး လက္ညိွးထိုး အျပစ္တင္ေနၾကသည္။ အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူမ်ားက ဤလုပ္ရပ္အေပၚ အထင္တၾကီးရွိၿပီး ယံုၾကည္လက္ခံမည္ မဟုတ္သကဲ့သို႔ ကၽြႏု္ပ္ကလည္း လက္မခံပါ´ လည္း ဆက္လက္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

A GAINST VOTE CAMPAIGN IN OVERSEAS

2010-05-27T05:51:00.000-07:00

နအဖက်င္းပမည့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ကမာၻလံုးဆိုင္ရာလႈပ္ရွားမႈအေနျဖင့္ ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ပြဲမ်ားကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာ၌ ယေန႔စတင္က်င္းပရာ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ မဲေဆာက္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ာက ကန္႔ကြက္မဲမ်ား ေပးၾကသည္။

ယေန႔ က်ေရာက္ေသာ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္၏ ၁၉၉၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ပါတီစံုေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏိုင္ရ အႏွစ္ (၂၀) ျပည့္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ေန႔၌ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး လႈပ္ရွားေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ အဖြဲ႔ႀကီး (၁၀) ဖြဲ႔မွ ကမကထျပဳ က်င္းပသည့္ ကမာၻလံုးဆိုင္ရာ ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ပြဲတြင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားက လာေရာက္ ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ခဲ့ၾကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ပြဲ၏ သဘာပတိအဖြဲ႔၀င္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားအေရး ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ (JACBA) အဖြဲ႔ဥကၠ႒ ဦးမိုးႀကိဳးက “စစ္အုပ္စုရဲ႕မတရားဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈေတြကို အလုပ္သမားေတြက နည္းစနစ္က်က် သေဘာေပါက္ၿပီး အသည္းၾကားက မဲတျပားဟာ ကိုယ့္ရဲ႕ ေရြးခ်ယ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ျဖစ္တယ္ ဆိုတာကို မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္အသံုးခ်ၿပီး ဘယ္လိုတရားမွ်တေအာင္ ေဖာ္ေဆာင္မွာလည္းဆိုတာ သိရိွႏိုင္ဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားေတြကို ဖိတ္ၾကားတာ ျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားကလည္း ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို မိမိတို႔တတ္ႏိုင္သည့္ဘက္က ၀ိုင္း၀န္းဆန္႔က်င္ၾကျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ျပည္တြင္းရိွ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားႏွင့္ လူထုတရပ္လံုးကို တိုက္တြန္းႏိုးေဆာ္လို၍ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သိုု႔ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

မယ္ပအထည္ခ်ဳပ္စက္႐ံုမွ ကိုလွေမာင္က “ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပက အလုပ္သမားထုရဲ႕အားက အာဏာရွင္ကို ဆန္႔က်င္တိုက္ဖ်က္ရာမွာ အဓိက အင္အားႀကီးတရပ္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ျပည္ပမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ တတ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ဘက္က ဆန္႔က်င္ၾကသလို ျပည္တြင္း အလုပ္သမားထုေတြကလည္း ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဆန္႔က်င္မႈမွာ ပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ ႏိုးေဆာ္တာျဖစ္တယ္" ဟု ေျပာသည္။

လံုၿခံဳေရးအေျခအေနအရ ကန္႔ကြက္ပြဲသို႔ လာေရာက္ရန္ အခက္အခဲရိွသည့္ စက္႐ံုအလုပ္႐ံုမ်ားမွ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားက ၎တို႔ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးထားသည့္ ဆန္႔က်င္ကန္႔ကြက္သည့္ မဲလက္မွတ္မ်ားကို အလုပ္သမားအေရး ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသူမ်ား မွတဆင့္ ေပးပို႔ခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အဆိုပါ ဆန္႔က်င္ကန္႔ကြက္ပြဲမ်ားကို အေမရိကန္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊ ၾသစေၾတးလ်၊ ကေနဒါ၊ ထိုင္း၊ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား၊ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေပါင္း (၁၅) ႏိုင္ငံတြင္လည္း ယေန႔ တၿပိဳင္တည္း က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္သည္ဟု တပ္ေပါင္းစု (၁၀) ဖြဲ႔၏ ညႇိႏႈိင္းေရးမႉး ကိုသြင္လင္းေအာင္က ေျပာသည္။

၎က “ဒီေန႔လႈပ္ရွားမႈကေတာ့ ကမာၻလံုးဆိုင္ရာလႈပ္ရွားမႈပဲ။ နအဖစစ္အုပ္စုက လုပ္ေနတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ လူထုလိုအပ္ခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔ ကိုက္ညီမႈမရိွဘူး။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာရိွေနတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးျပႆနာေတြကို ေျဖရွင္းေပးႏိုင္ျခင္းမရိွဘူး။ အဲဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ဆန္႔က်င္ၿပီးေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ လိုလားတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို လိုခ်င္တယ္ဆိုတာကို ျပည္သူလူထုကေနၿပီး ဆႏၵေဖာ္ထုတ္တဲ့ပြဲကို ဒီေန႔ လုပ္တာျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ကမာၻလံုးဆိုင္ရာ ဆန္႔က်င္ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ပြဲမွရရိွသည့္ ကန္႔ကြက္မဲမ်ားကို သက္ဆိုင္ရာႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ အစိုးရမ်ားမွတဆင့္ ဖိအားေပးေတာင္းဆိုမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ႏိုင္ရန္ႏွင့္ အာဆီယံေဒသတြင္းမွ မဲျပားမ်ားကို အာဆီယံ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ေဒါက္တာဆူရင္ပစ္ဆူ၀မ္ထံသို႔ ေပးပို႔မည္ျဖစ္သည္။

ဆန္႔က်င္ကန္႔ကြက္ ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ပြဲသို႔ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ တပ္ေပါင္းစု (၁၀) ဖြဲ႔မွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားလည္း တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ကန္႔ကြက္မဲမ်ား ေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ) က နအဖ တဖက္သတ္ေရးဆြဲထားသည့္ ဥပေဒပါ စည္းကမ္းခ်က္မ်ားမွာ ဒီမိုကေရစီနည္းမက်သည့္အတြက္ တရားမွ်တမႈမရိွသည့္ ဥပေဒအရ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအတြက္ ပါတီမွတ္ပုံတင္ျခင္းကို လက္မခံေၾကာင္း ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။

U.S. Senate's Webb to visit Burma and Women’s Groups Want to See Than Shwe before the ICC

2010-05-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

A US senator who secured the release last year of an American jailed for swimming to the home of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will return to Myanmar for talks with the junta, his office said Wednesday.

Democratic lawmaker Jim Webb, a strong supporter of engaging Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, also plans to visit South Korea and Thailand during his May 29-June 6 trip to Asia.

The visit "comes at a time of great unrest in the region following the North Korean torpedo attack on a South Korean vessel, violent protests in Thailand and provocations from the Burmese regime," his office said in a statement.

Webb became the first US official to meet the Myanmar junta's reclusive leader Than Shwe in August, when he won the release of American John Yettaw, an eccentric Vietnam War veteran who was sentenced to seven years' hard labour.

Yettaw, who suffers from epilepsy and diabetes, said he had intruded on Suu Kyi's house on a "mission from God" to warn about a vision that she would be assassinated, but his actions landed her with another 18 months' house arrest.

Webb met Suu Kyi during his last trip and urged the country's military rulers to free the detained opposition leader.

A Myanmar official said the Virginia senator -- who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs -- was likely to meet Suu Kyi again when he visits the country from June 3-5.

"He will meet government officials here and is also likely to meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi again and also with her party's (former) senior members," said the official, who asked not to be named. "Daw" is a term of respect in Myanmar.

Before the announcement of Jim trip,Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will meet with leaders of Myanmar's junta to discuss energy cooperation and aid to the southeast Asian nation during a visit next week, a top diplomat said Wednesday.

During the June 2-3 visit, Wen will hold talks with reclusive junta chief General Than Shwe, Prime Minister Thein Sein and other top officials, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun told reporters.

"The two countries will sign a number of cooperation documents covering economy, trade, finance, energy, science and technology," Zhang said, without offering specifics.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) was forcibly dissolved after refusing to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register as a political party -- a move that would have forced it to expel its own leader.

Suu Kyi has been in jail or under house arrest for most of the past 20 years. The NLD won 1990 elections by a landslide but was prevented by the junta from taking power.

Veteran Myanmar opposition politician dies at 87

2010-05-20T12:47:00.001-07:00

A veteran colleague of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who joined Myanmar's fight for independence, died Thursday, his family and colleagues said.

Soe Myint, 87, a central executive committee member of the recently dissolved National League for Democracy (NLD) party, died of heart disease at his house in the country's main city Yangon.

"He had stopped breathing in his chair when we went to remind him of a medical checkup for his heart disease," one of his granddaughters, told AFP.

Soe Myint joined the NLD when it was founded in 1988, after fighting for the Burma Independence Army and Burma Defence Army in the 1940s against Japanese invaders and British colonialists, until the country won independence in 1948.

Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962. Soe Myint was also elected by voters as a member of the NLD when the party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed the party to take office.

The NLD was founded in 1988 after a popular uprising against the military junta that left thousands of people dead.

Years of persecution by the junta have left the NLD in poor shape, and the purist stance taken by leaders like Soe Myint, many in their 80s and 90s, has been questioned by a new generation favouring a more pragmatic approach.

Suu Kyi's NLD was forcibly dissolved early this month under widely criticised laws governing elections that are scheduled for later this year, the first in two decades.

"We are so sorry for losing our colleague. He had many experiences as he went through the long history," Tin Oo, 83, a vice-chairman of the dissolved NLD told AFP.

ျပည္ေထာင္စု ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ (နအဖ ဥပေဒ အမွတ္ - ၁/ ၂၀၁၀) ကို ေ၀ဖန္သုံးသပ္ျခင္း

2010-05-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

ဦးမ်ဳိး (ဥပေဒ) / ၁၉ ေမလ ၂၀၁၀

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ပထမဦးဆုံးေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဥပေဒမွာ (၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ အက္ဥပေဒအမွတ္ - ၆၅ ) “၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္ ပါလီမန္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအက္ဥပေဒ” ျဖစ္သည္။ တဆက္တည္း ပါလီမန္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲနည္းဥပေဒမ်ားကိုလည္း ျပ႒ာန္းၿပီး က်င္းပခဲ့ပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ တျပည္ေထာင္ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္ပါရွိေသာ အမ်ဳိးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ (၂၂၄) ဦးအနက္ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္က ေစလႊတ္ေသာ စစ္သားကိုယ္စားလွယ္ (၅၆) ဦးေနရာႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ (၄၄၀) ဦးအနက္ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္က ေစလႊတ္ေသာ စစ္သားကိုယ္စားလွယ္ (၁၁၀) ဦး ေနရာတုိ႔ကုိ ႀကိဳတင္သတ္မွတ္ထားခဲ့ျခင္းမ်ဳိး မရွိပါ။ မဲေပးျခင္းဆုိင္ရာမူကို ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ၿပီး ေနရာရယူ သတ္မွတ္ထားျခင္းမ်ဳိးကို အလ်ဥ္းမေတြ႔ရပါ။ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၇၄၊ ၁၀၉၊ ၁၄၁၊ ၁၆၁ တို႔ႏွင့္အညီ ျပည္ေထာင္စုလႊတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ဥပေဒျပဳက႑ အဆင့္အသီးသီးတုိ႔တြင္ တပ္မေတာ္သား (၂၅) ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ပါ၀င္ေစရန္ ေနရာႀကိဳတင္သတ္မွတ္ထားျခင္းမ်ဳိးလည္း လုံး၀မပါရွိပါ။ တျပည္ေထာင္ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒႏွင့္ စေရြးကုိက္ အံ၀င္ခြင္္က်ျဖစ္ေစရန္ ျပ႒ာန္းလာသည့္ နအဖ ဥပေဒ အမွတ္ ၁/၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ၏ ဘက္လိုက္မႈ မတရားမႈအားလုံးကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ရန္ လိုအပ္ပါသည္။

၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ - ၂၀၁ ပါ (က) မွ (ဍ) အထိ သမၼတ၊ ဒုသမၼတ၊ ဒုသမၼတ၊ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒၊ အမ်ဳိးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒၊ တပ္မေတာ္ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္၊ ဒုတိယတပ္မေတာ္ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္၊ ကာကြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီး၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး၊ ျပည္ထဲေရး၀န္ႀကီး၊ နယ္စပ္ေရးရာ၀န္ႀကီး၊ စုစုေပါင္း (၁၁) ဦးစလုံးမွာ တုိင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မင္းလုပ္မည့္ စစ္အုပ္စု ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးမ်ားသာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေတြ႔ရပါသည္။ ထို (၁၁) ဦး၏ အမည္စာရင္းကို ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမႇာက္ျခင္း မျပဳမီကပင္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ စာရင္းထြက္ၿပီးသားရွိပါသည္။ (၁၁) ဦး စစ္အုပ္စုက စိတ္ႀကိဳက္ ေခါင္းစဥ္လုိက္ေရြးခ်ယ္သြားမည့္ ေကာ္မရွင္ဥပေဒကို ၉.၃.၂၀၁၀ ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ ထုတ္ျပန္လာပါသည္။ သမိုင္းကို မအေအာင္ (ငတုံး ငအ) မျဖစ္ေအာင္ သင္ၾကားထားၿပီးေသာ တုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ျပည္သူမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မတရားသည့္ အမိန္႔အာဏာမွန္သမွ် ဆန္႔က်င္တိုက္ဖ်က္ပစ္ရန္ လိုပါသည္။

၂၀၀၈ အေျခခံဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ - ၄၄၃ (ဤဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒ အာဏာတည္သည့္ေန႔မတုိင္မီ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ေအးခ်မ္းသာယာေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေကာင္စီက ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ေရးအတြက္ ႀကိဳတင္ေဆာင္ရြက္သည့္ လုပ္ငန္းရပ္မ်ားသည္ ဤဥပေဒအရ ေဆာင္ရြက္သည္ဟု မွတ္ယူရမည္။) ႏွင့္အညီ ျပ႒ာန္းသည္ဟုလည္း ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ နအဖေကာင္စီကုိ ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ နအဖေကာင္စီ၏ လုပ္ငန္းရပ္မ်ားကိုေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း ၂၀၀၈ အေျခခံဥပေဒထဲတြင္ ႀကိဳတင္ျပင္ဆင္ ထည့္သြင္းထားျခင္းကိုယ္ႏိႈက္က မတရားဘက္လိုက္မႈကို ႀကီးႀကီးမားမား လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမည္ဟု စိန္ေခၚထားေၾကာင္း ေတြ႔ရသည္။ သြားေလသူ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးစိုး၀င္း ေျပာခဲ့သည့္ သူတို႔အစိုးရဟာ တဆက္တည္း အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သြားမည့္ အစိုးရျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာခဲ့သည့္ စကားအတုိင္း အမွန္တကယ္ လုပ္ခ်လိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကြက္ကြက္ကြင္းကြင္း ေတြ႔ရသည္။ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံျဖင့္ ေျဗာင္လိမ္စရာ မလိုအပ္ေတာ့။ ယခု နအဖစစ္အစိုးရသည္ ၂၀၁၀ နအဖစစ္အစိုးရသာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းကို ျပည္သူေတြက ေမ်ာက္ေလာင္း ေမ်ာက္ေလာင္းပါပဲဗ်ာ ေျပာကုန္ၾကၿပီ။

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒကုိ ထုတ္ျပန္သည္က နအဖ ဥကၠ႒ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး သန္းေရႊ။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ကုိ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ (၁၇) ဦးျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးသည္က နအဖ အတြင္းေရးမႉး (၁) ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး သီဟသူရ တင္ေအာင္ျမင္ဦး။ ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔၀င္တဦးခ်င္းကို စစ္ေဆးၾကည့္လိုက္ပါက ဆႏၵခံယူပြဲက်င္းပေရးေကာ္မရွင္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ (၄၅) ဦးထဲမွာ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည့္ လခစား၀န္ထမ္းမ်ားသာ ျဖစ္ေနသည္ကုိ ေတြ႔ရွိရပါသည္။ ၎ပုဂၢိဳလ္အားလုံးမွာ နအဖႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔ မေတာ္မတရားလုပ္ခဲ့သည့္ အမႈတိုင္းလိုလိုမွာ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည့္ နာမည္ပ်က္ႏွင့္ ေက်ာ္ၾကားေသာ လူမ႐ုိေသ ရွင္မ႐ိုေသ လူမသိသူမသိ လခစား မင္းတိုင္းေက်မ်ားသာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း လွည္းေနေလွေအာင္း ျမင္းေဇာင္းမက်န္ သိၾကပါသည္။ ယခုေကာ္မရွင္ဥပေဒ (၁/၂၀၁၀) ပုဒ္မ - ၄ (ခ) တြင္ “ထင္ေပၚေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ ဂုဏ္သတင္းရွိေသာ ပုဂၢဳိလ္အျဖစ္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ေအးခ်မ္းသာယာေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေကာင္စီက ယူဆသူျဖစ္ရမည္” ဟု ေပၚလြင္စြာ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ နအဖ စစ္ေကာင္စီက ထင္ေပၚေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ ဂုဏ္သတင္းရွိေသာ ပုဂၢိဳလ္အျဖစ္ ယူဆသူမ်ားသာျဖစ္ရမည္ ဆိုေသာေၾကာင့္ နအဖဘက္ ဘက္လိုက္သူမ်ားသာ ျဖစ္ေနပါသည္။ ဘက္လိုက္မႈႀကီးစြာ တရားမွ်တမႈကင္းမဲ့စြာျဖင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ကန္လန္႔ကာေရွ႕ ထြက္ျပလာပါသည္။

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ- ၄ (စ) အရ “ေကာ္မရွင္ဥကၠ႒ႏွင့္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားသည္ လစာ၊ စရိတ္၊ ေၾကးေငြရေသာ အျခားမည္သည့္ ရာထူးကိုမွ် လက္ခံျခင္းမျပဳသူ ျဖစ္ရမည္” ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားပါသည္။ အျခားရာထူးဆုိသည္မွာ ေကာ္မရွင္ရာထူးမွလြဲ၍ မည္သည့္ရာထူးကိုမွ် လက္ခံျခင္းမျပဳရသူသာ ျဖစ္ရပါမည္။ ေကာ္မရွင္ဥကၠ႒ ဦးသိန္းစိုး အပါအ၀င္ ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔၀င္အားလုံးမွာ အစိုးရ၀န္ထမ္းဘ၀မွ ထြက္ႏွင့္ၿပီးသားျဖစ္ရပါမည္။ သို႔မဟုတ္ပါက ႏိုင္ငံေရးႏွင့္ ကင္းရွင္းသူ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီ၀င္မဟုတ္သူ ျဖစ္ရမည္ဆိုေသာ ဤဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ - ၄ (င) ကုိ ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ေနသူမ်ားျဖစ္၍ ေကာ္မရွင္တဖြဲ႔လုံး ဥပေဒခ်ဳိးေဖာက္သူမ်ားအျဖစ္ ရာဇ၀တ္ေကာင္မ်ားကဲ့သို႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာျမင္ကြင္းတြင္ ၾကည့္မေကာင္း ျမင္မေကာင္း အျမင္မေတာ္ျဖစ္ေနသည္္။

ဤေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ - ၂ (စ) တြင္ “ေကာ္မရွင္ဆိုသည္မွာ ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမႇာက္ျခင္းဆုိင္ရာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကုိ ႀကီးၾကပ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားကို ႀကီးၾကပ္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္လည္းေကာင္း ဤဥပေဒႏွင့္အညီ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေသာ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ကို ဆိုသည္” ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားၿပီး ဤဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ-၈ တြင္ ေကာ္မရွင္၏ တာ၀န္ႏွင့္ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္မ်ားမွာ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ပုဒ္မ ၈ (ဋ) တြင္ “ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားကို ဥပေဒႏွင့္အညီ ေဆာင္္ရြက္ေစရန္ ႀကီးၾကပ္ျခင္း၊ ႀကီးၾကပ္ေစျခင္းႏွင့္ လမ္းၫႊန္ျခင္း” ဟု ထပ္ဆင့္ျပ႒ာန္းထားျပန္သည္။

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္မွာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆုိင္ရာ လုပ္ငန္းရပ္မ်ားတြင္သာ တခုတည္းေသာ တာ၀န္ရွိပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားႏွင့္ လုံး၀ကင္းရွင္းေနရမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ပါတီႏိုင္ငံေရးထဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္ႀကီးၾကပ္ျခင္း၊ လမ္းၫႊန္ျခင္းမ်ား လုပ္ရသည့့္ အဖြဲ႔မ်ဳိးမဟုတ္ပါ။ ဘက္လုိက္မႈ လုံး၀ကင္းရွင္းႏုိင္ရန္ ဥပေဒအရပင္ တားျမစ္ပိတ္ပင္ထားေလ့ရွိပါသည္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆုိင္ရာ သမိုင္းအခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ ျပန္လည္ငဲ့ေစာင္းၾကည့္လိုက္လွ်င္ ပါလီမန္ေခတ္ကာလက ယခုစစ္အုပ္စု၏ ဘိုးေအ ဗိုလ္ေန၀င္းကိုယ္တုိင္က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ေျခလြန္လက္္လြန္ တည္ၿမဲတို႔ မဲရရွိရန္ လူသိရွင္္ၾကား ဘက္လိုက္္ၾကသည္ဟု အေၾကာင္းျပကာ မိမိမလိုလားသူ စစ္ဗိုလ္ႀကီးမ်ားအခ်ဳိ႕ကုိ လွ်ဳိ႕၀ွက္အစည္းအေ၀းသို႔ ဗိုလ္ေန၀င္းကိုယ္တိုင္ တင္္သြင္း၍ ရာထူးမွထုတ္ခဲ့သည္။ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ေအာင္ေရႊ၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး ေအးေမာင္၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး တင္ေမာင္၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး လူေမာ္၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး ၾကည္၀င္း၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး သိန္းတုတ္ႏွင့္ ဒုတိယဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး ခ်စ္ခိုင္တို႔အား ပင္စင္လစာေပး၍ တပ္မွ အနားယူၾကေစသည္။(ေၾကးမုံ ဦးေသာင္း - ေရႊကညစ္ႏွင့္ ေရးကာ စာကိုစီ၊ စာ-၁၂၅) ဟု ဖတ္မွတ္ဖူးပါသည္။ ဘက္လိုက္္မႈ လုံး၀ကင္းရွင္းေစရန္ ေတြ႔ရေသာ ျဖစ္ရပ္သာဓကတခု ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ပါတီစုံေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ငါးႀကိမ္တုိင္တုိင္ က်င္းပခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။
၁။ ပထမအႀကိမ္ ၁၉၄၇ ဧၿပီ (၉) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ အမတ္ေနရာ (၂၂၅) ေနရာတြင္ ဖဆပလအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က (၉၇) ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း အႏိုင္ရၿပီး သခင္သန္းထြန္း၏ ဗမာျပည္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီက အမတ္ (၈) ေနရာ အႏုိင္ရခဲ့သည္။
၂။ ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၁၉၅၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ က်င္းပသည္။
၃။ တတိယအႀကိမ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၁၉၅၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဖဆပလ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈေအာက္၌ ပုံမွန္က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။
၄။ စတုတၳအႀကိမ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္သည့္ ၁၉၆၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို အိမ္ေစာင့္အစုိးရနာမည္ခံၿပီး မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာ က်င္းပေပးခဲ့သည္။
၅။ ပၪၥမအႀကိမ္ ၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကိုလည္း မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာ စစ္အုပ္စုက လုပ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ မဲ (၈၂) ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းျဖင့္ အျပတ္အသတ္ အႏိုင္ရပါတီ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္၏ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္ကို ပစ္ပယ္ခဲ့သည္။ န၀တ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဥပေဒ အမွတ္ - ၁/၈၈၊ ပုဒ္မ - ၃ တြင္ “လႊတ္ေတာ္ကို မဲဆႏၵနယ္မ်ားမွ ဤဥပေဒအရ ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမႇာက္လုိက္ေသာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းရမည္” ဟု ကိုယ္ကိုယ္တုိင္ျပ႒ာန္းထားသည့္ ဥပေဒအား ကိုယ္တုိင္ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ကာ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ (၂၀၀) ေက်ာ္အပါအ၀င္ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္၀င္မ်ား လူ (၁) ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ကို ဖမ္းဆီးအေရးယူခဲ့သည္။ ယခုေနာက္ဆုံးအေနျဖင့္ န၀တ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ အမွတ္ ၁/၈၈ ကုိ ဤ နအဖ ေကာ္မရွင္ဥပေဒ ၁/ ၂၀၁၀ ပုဒ္မ ၁၄ ျဖင့္ ႐ုပ္သိမ္းလိုက္ျပန္ပါသည္။ ဥပေဒကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးက ေမြးဖြားေပးရသျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးကို ဥပေဒျဖင့္ သတ္ပစ္္၍ ရေကာင္းသည့္အရာမဟုတ္ပါ။ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ပါတီ ပိုမိုေတာက္ေျပာင္လာပါသည္။ သမိုင္းျဖစ္္ရပ္မွန္မ်ားက ပူပူေလာင္ေလာင္ ရွိေနသည္။

၁၉၉၆ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ (၇) ရက္ေန႔က နအဖ ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္ ၅/၉၆ - အမ်ဳိးသားညီလာခံလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးကို ေႏွာင့္ယွက္ဆန္႔က်င္ျခင္းမွ ကာကြယ္သည့္ ဥပေဒကို ထုတ္ျပန္၍ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားအား …
(က) ကာလသတ္မွတ္၍ ရပ္ဆုိင္းထားႏုိင္သည္။
(ခ) ဖ်က္သိမ္းႏုိင္သည္ (သို႔မဟုတ္)
(ဂ) မတရားသင္းဥပေဒအရ မတရားသင္းအျဖစ္ ေၾကညာႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ျပ႒ာန္းထားေသးသည္။ တုိင္းရင္းသား ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအား ႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္ဒဏ္မ်ား ခ်မွတ္ထားသည္။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္း အသက္စြန္႔လႊတ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံးကို ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအတြက္ လႊတ္ေပးရေပမည္။ အေရြးေကာက္ခံပိုင္ခြင့္လည္း ေပးရမည္။ လူတိုင္းလူတိုင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ရွိသင့္ေပသည္။

ဤေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ - ၉ တြင္ “ေအာက္ပါကိစၥရပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ေကာ္မရွင္၏ အဆုံးအျဖတ္သည္ အၿပီးအျပတ္ ျဖစ္ေစရမည္။
(ခ) ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ခုံအဖြဲ႔မ်ား၏ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္မ်ား၊ အမိန္႔မ်ားႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္းသည့္ အယူခံမႈမ်ားႏွင့္ ျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ား။
(ဂ) ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီမ်ား မွတ္ပုံတင္ျခင္း ဥပေဒအရ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္မ်ား” ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ခုံအဖြဲ႔၏ အဆုံးအျဖတ္သည္ အၿပီးအျပတ္(conclusive) ျဖစ္သည္ဟု အတိအက် ျပ႒ာန္းထားသျဖင့္ နအဖ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံ ပုဒ္မ - ၂၉၄ တြင္ ပါရွိေသာ ျပည္ေထာင္စု တရားလႊတ္ေတာ္ခ်ဳပ္သည္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္၏ အျမင့္ဆုံး တရား႐ုံးျဖစ္သည္ ဆိုေသာ တရားစီရင္ေရးအာဏာထက္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲခုံ႐ုံးက ပိုမိုျမင့္မားေနသည္ကို ေတြ႔ရပါသည္။ တရားလက္လြတ္ အသားကုန္ အာဏာေပး၍ မည္သည့္တရားစီရင္ေရးကမွ ၀င္ေရာက္ကုစားမေပးႏုိင္သည့္ မတရားခုံ႐ုံးမ်ိဳးကို မည့္သည့္ႏုိင္ငံတြင္မွ ျပ႒ာန္းထားျခင္းမရွိပါ။ အ႐ူးအမူး အာဏာေလာဘေဇာတက္ကာ မေတာ္မတရားလုပ္ႏုိင္ရန္ ရမ္းကားစိမ္ေခၚမႈ ျဖစ္သြားပါသည္။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားကို လမ္းၫႊန္ဦးမည္ ဆိုသည္က ပို၍ရယ္ေမာဖြယ္ရာျဖစ္ေနသည္။ တရားစီရင္ေရးစနစ္တခုလုံးအေပၚ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္က လႊမ္းမိုးခ်ယ္လွယ္သြားေစရန္ ျပ႒ာန္းလာမႈမွာ လူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္းအတြက္ အနိ႒ာ႐ုံမ်ားကိုသာ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေစႏုိင္ပါသည္။ တရားမွ်တမႈ လုံး၀ဆိတ္သုဥ္းသြားေစသည္။ စစ္အုပ္စု ႀကံ႕ဖြဲ႔မဟုတ္ေသာ အျခားတဦးဦး တဖြဲ႔ဖြဲ႔က မေတာ္တဆ အေရြးခံခဲ့ရလွ်င္ စစ္အုပ္စုက ကန္႔ကြက္ၿပီး သူတို႔စိတ္ႀကိဳက္ဖြဲ႔ထားသည့္ ခုံအဖြဲ႔က ႀကိဳက္သလို ဆုံးျဖတ္တာကို မုခ်ခံၾကရေပမည္။ မတရားမႈမွန္သမွ် တိုက္ဖ်က္ပစ္ရမည္က သမိုင္းေပးတာ၀န္ျဖစ္သည္။

ဤဥပေဒ ၁/၂၀၁၀ ပုဒ္မ - ၂ (စ်) တြင္ “ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ခုံအဖြဲ႔ဆိုသည္မွာ ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမႇာက္ျခင္းဆိုင္ရာ အျငင္းပြားမႈကိုေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ကိုယ္ပုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရတိုင္း သို႔မဟုတ္ ကိုယ္ပုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရေဒသ ဦးစီးအဖြဲ႔၀င္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခန္႔ထားျခင္းႏွင့္စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ကန္႔ကြက္ခ်က္ကိုေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း ၾကားနာစစ္ေဆးရန္ ေကာ္မရွင္က ဤဥပေဒႏွင့္အညီ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေသာအဖြဲ႔ကုိ ဆိုသည္” ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ ခုံအဖြဲ႔သည္ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ အေျခခံဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ -၂ရ၆ (ဇ) အရ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခန္႔ထားသည့္ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံကိုေက်ာ္ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးဆုံးျဖတ္ပုိင္ခြင့္မရွိပါ။ အေျခခံဥပေဒစည္းေဘာင္ကိုေက်ာ္၍ ခုံအဖြဲ႔အား ပါ၀င္စြက္ဖက္ပိုင္ခြင့္ေပးထားျခင္းမွာ စစ္အုပ္စု နအဖ မလိုလားသူ တဦးဦး ပါ၀င္လာပါက ကန္႔ကြက္ဖယ္ရွားႏုိင္ရန္ ျဖစ္သည္ကို ေပၚလြင္ထင္ရွားစြာ ေတြ႔ျမင္ရပါသည္။ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရ ေဒသမ်ားရွိ လူမ်ဳိးစုျပည္သူမ်ား၏ ေရြးခ်ယ္ပုိင္ခြင့္ ဆႏၵကိုပါ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ပုိင္ခြင့္ ေပးထားပါသည္။ ဤေရြ႕ဤမွ် ခုံအဖြဲ႔၏ အဆုံးစြန္ေသာ အာဏာကို ႀကိဳက္သလိုထင္ရာ စိုင္းႏိုင္ရန္ ျပ႒ာန္းလုိက္ျခင္းမွာ စစ္အုပ္စု နအဖ၏ စစ္ဗ်ဴ႐ိုကရက္လူမ်ိဳးႀကီး၀ါဒကို အစြယ္ထုတ္ျပလိုက္ျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အာဏာလြန္ကဲစြာ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျခစားမႈကုိ မီးေလာင္ရာ ေလပင့္လိုက္သည့္ ျပ႒ာန္းခ်က္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေတြ႔ရသည္။

ေရြးေကာက္္ပြဲ ေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ (နအဖ ဥပေဒ အမွတ္ - ၁/၂၀၁၀) တြင္ ပါရွိေသာ ဥပေဒအရ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရာတြင္ မတရားမႈ၊ ဘက္လိုက္မႈ၊ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျခစားမႈ၊ ျပစ္မႈဆုိင္ရာ ဥပေဒပါ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆုိင္ရာ ျပစ္မႈမ်ားကို ေကာ္မရွင္က က်ဴးလြန္လွ်င္ အေရးယူအျပစ္ေပးရန္ ပုဒ္ထီးပုဒ္မ တခုမွ် မပါသည္ကုိလည္း ထူးကဲစြာ ေတြ႔ျမင္ရပါသည္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆုိင္ရာ ျပစ္မႈမ်ားအားလုံးအား စစ္ေဆးစီရင္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ေပးရမည့္ သီးျခားလြတ္လပ္သည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဆိုင္ရာ တရား႐ုံးမ်ားျဖင့္သာ အဆုံးအျဖတ္ခံယူရပါမည္။ မတရားမႈ၊ ဘက္လိုက္မႈ၊ အႏိုင္က်င့္မႈ၊ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျခစားမႈမ်ားကို တေလွ်ာက္လုံး တဆက္စပ္တည္း က်ဴးလြန္လာသည့္ နအဖစစ္အုပ္စု၏ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔ႏွင့္ စြမ္းအားရွင္လို အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ဳိးအား ပါတီမွတ္ပုံတင္ခြင့္ ေပးရသည့္ ဤေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္မွာ နအဖစစ္အစိုးရ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္ရာတြင္ အႀကံတူဉာဏ္တူ ပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ က်ဴးလြန္သည့္ ပူးတြဲတရားခံမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနပါသည္။ သို႔ျဖစ္ပါ၍ ဦးသိန္းစိုး ဥကၠ႒ အပါအ၀င္ (၁၇) ဦး အဖြဲ႔အား ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မက်င္းပမီကပင္ ဤဥပေဒႏွင့္တပါတည္း ဖ်က္သိမ္းပစ္ရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဥပေဒေရးရာ ေ၀ဖန္သုံးသပ္ခ်က္အျဖစ္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္တင္ျပအပ္ပါသည္။

230 Die Of Heat Stress In Burma

2010-05-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

At least 230 people have died of heat stress in Myanmar's second largest city of Mandalay during the weekend, as temperature recorded at 45 degree Celsius, the local daily quoted Mandalay municipal authorities as reporting Wednesday.

The red-hot temperature has brought many patients of all ages to the Mandalay General Hospital and private clinics, reports China's Xinhua news agency citing the daily.

Among the dead, most were liquor drinkers, the report said, adding that following this, the Mandalay local authorities have banned selling of liquor in the city.

The excessively high weather temperature too dried up some drinking water ponds in suburban areas in Yangon.

It is reported that thousands of fishes, bred in ponds in the country's southwestern Ayeyawaddy division, died of heat stress daily, local fish breeders said.

There were even some cases that all 100,000 fishes died in a single day in Twantay township, Yangon division.

Excessively hot weather temperature in Myanmar over the past two months broke the highest in the history.

From late April through to the mid-May, the day temperatures in central Myanmar were reaching a record high in over four decades, peaking at between 43 and 47 degree Celsius in such regions as Minbu, Magway, Mandalay, Monywa, Nyaung Oo, Chauk and Mingyan as well as in Yangon and Bago over the past week, which are 5 to 8 degree Celsius above April average temperature

Burma-North Korea Ties Worry the World

2010-05-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

For the past 10 years, Burma has been accused of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. A number of developments during this period — notably Burma’s growing relationship with North Korea — have raised international concerns. Yet, to date, no hard evidence of such a plan has been produced.

Claims of a secret nuclear weapons program date back to 2000, when Burma’s military government announced that it was going to purchase a small research reactor from Russia. These accusations were repeated in 2003, when it was suggested by a respected news magazine that North Korea had taken over from Russia as the source of Burma’s nuclear technology. In the years that followed, the issue resurfaced periodically on activist Web sites, but in August 2009 it attracted global attention when a story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald citing Australia National University professor Des Ball and the Thai-based journalist Phil Thornton.

The SMH claimed that there were in fact two nuclear projects running in Burma. The first was the Russian research center, which was to be operated under international safeguards. (Contrary to the SMH story, construction of this reactor has not yet begun). The second was said to be a secret project to build a reactor and associated nuclear fuel processing plants with North Korean help. According to the SMH, if all went according to plan Burma would have a nuclear weapon by 2014 and “a handful” of such devices by 2020. The main sources for these claims were two Burmese “defectors” and commercial satellite imagery of suspect facilities in Burma.

Needless to say, such claims have been the subject of close scrutiny by the United States and other governments. There have also been comprehensive studies of the issue by think tanks like the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

The US government has expressed its concern about the defense ties that appear to have developed between Burma and North Korea over the past decade. These links reportedly include the sale of conventional arms to Burma, North Korean help with the development of Burma’s defense infrastructure (including the construction of various underground facilities), assistance to Burma’s arms industries and training in fields like air defense. In 2004, the US blocked the sale of North Korean short-range ballistic missiles to Burma.

The Obama administration has also stated its wish to discuss a number of proliferation issues with Burma, including the possible transfer of nuclear technology from North Korea. Significantly, however, at no time has the US government stated that Burma is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, with or without North Korean help. Indeed, despite considerable pressure from members of Congress, activists and journalists, Washington has refused to be drawn on the subject. Its position seems to reflect either a belief that Burma does not have a secret nuclear weapons program, or a lack of hard evidence to support such a claim.

This approach has been shared by other countries, including Britain and Australia, both of which have referred only to “unconfirmed” reports of a secret nuclear program. For their part, the IISS and ISIS have both stated that there is insufficient evidence to support the claims. The IISS, for example, said in late 2009 that Burma “has no known capabilities that would lend themselves to a nuclear weapons program.”

Even so, both governments and think tanks remain suspicious of Burma’s intentions, and point to a number of factors which they believe warrant continuing close attention.

Of all Southeast Asian countries, Burma has the strongest strategic rationale for a nuclear weapons program. Since the abortive pro-democracy uprising in 1988, the military government has feared armed intervention by the United States and its allies. The regime has also suffered from economic sanctions and other punitive measures. Burma’s generals envy North Korea’s ability to resist such pressures and still win concessions from the international community. They reportedly believe that this influence derives from Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons.

In addition, Burma has for some years been working closely with two North Korean trading entities that have a record of proliferating sensitive nuclear and missile technologies. Also, Burma has imported a number of sophisticated machines and items of dual-use equipment from Europe and Japan that could conceivably be used in a nuclear program. The number of Burmese sent to Russia for nuclear-related training seems to be more than that required for a peaceful research program. Furthermore, some of the claims made by the “defectors” are plausible.

None of these factors in themselves prove that Burma has embarked on a nuclear weapons program. After the mistakes of the Iraq war, no government wants to rush to judgment based on incomplete or unverified intelligence. Having been caught napping a few years ago, however, when it was discovered that Syria was building a reactor with North Korean help, the international community is now looking carefully for hard evidence of a secret Burmese nuclear program.

Andrew Selth is a research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Queensland.

WATER, ELECTRICITY MUST BE CUT IN REGIME ERA

2010-05-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

Electricity for businesses in Rangoon was cut off on Friday by the state-own Myanmar Electric Power Enterprise (MEPE), partly as a result of low-water levels at hydropower generating plants.

The cut off affects private hospitals, shopping centers, small businesses and industry zones, most of which will provide their own electricity supply through the use of private generators.
The MEPE is responsible for electrical generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in Burma.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Monday an MEPE official said,“The conditions for distributing electricity are very difficult now. We have no choice.”

Unusually high temperatures in recent weeks have exacerbated what is normally a seasonal shortage of electricity.

An employee at Asia Taw Win private clinic in Rangoon said, “For emergency operations and patients who need air conditioning we are facing many problems.”

In Rangoon and Mandalay, the country's two largest cities, electricity has been distributed under a rationing system for the past eight years, because authorities have not been able to keep up with rising demand.

Rangoon’s 5 million residents need about 450 megawatts daily, according to the local journal Weekly Eleven.

During the dry season, many households, offices and workplaces receive no more than three or four hours of electricity a day in Rangoon. Power cuts are frequent.

Meanwhile, in some parts of Rangoon, MEPE has sealed power meter boxes for small businesses.

A businessman on 32nd Street in Rangoon said, “MPEP has sealed the meter box. Now we cannot use electricity.”

Many businesses and residents are experienced in using private generators to provide their electricity, but the cost of fuel is prohibitive.

In Rangoon, the power supply is usually restricted from March to June, because of a lack of rain water to power the Lawpita hydroelectric plant at full capacity. Lawpita, located 210 miles (350 kilometers) north of Rangoon, is one of the main sources of electricity for the former capital.

The water supply of the Lawpita hydroelectric plant depends on Innlay Lake in Shan State—one of the tourist attractions in Burma. High temperatures this year have severely lowered the lake's water level, said a resident of Khaungdine village, located near the lake.

“At the center of the lake, there is only a little water. We have to carry drinking water from other places. Authorities are ignoring the situation.”

The lake's water level is near a 50-year low and the famous floating market in Ywama village has nearly disappeared, according to Weekly Eleven.

Normally, in monsoon season the government can provide 24-hours of electricity in Rangoon.

Burma has one of the world’s lowest electricity generating capacities. According to statistics from the Ministry of Electric Power-2 , the country needs 1,555.25 megawatts while power plants can produce only 556 megawatts.

The Ministry of Electric Power-2 is responsible for distributing electricity, and the Ministry of Electric Power-1 manages power plants.

IT IS FRUITFUL VISIT: DAW AUNG SAN SUU KYI

2010-05-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Myanmar's detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi believes a recent visit by a top US diplomat to the military-ruled country was fruitful, her lawyer said Friday.

Suu Kyi "said it was very beneficial regarding Mr Kurt Campbell's visit," Nyan Win told reporters after meeting the Nobel Peace Prize laureate at her home earlier in the day.

"She said they had agreed on many things," he added.

Nyan Win said the 64-year-old pro-democracy icon was in good health and was allowed to meet the visiting US assistant secretary of state for more than one and half hours Monday at a government state guest house.

According to official sources, the two spent about 20 minutes talking in private outside, sheltering from the sun under an umbrella

The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Suu Kyi was forcibly dissolved after refusing to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register as a political party -- a move that would have forced it to expel its own leader.

Campbell said after his talks with Suu Kyi and government officials that the United States was "profoundly disappointed" in the junta's preparations for upcoming elections and wanted "immediate steps" to address fears that they would lack legitimacy.

Under election legislation unveiled in March, anyone serving a prison term is banned from being a member of a political party and parties that fail to obey the rule will be abolished.

A faction within the now-defunct NLD has said it would form a new political party, to be called the National Democratic Force, to run in the election.

The move came amid signs of a split between older, hardline former NLD members and younger more moderate figures who opposed the boycott decision.

"Daw Suu said it's undemocratic if the minority did not obey the majority's decision," Nyan Win said. "Daw" is a term of respect in Myanmar.

WATER CALAMITY IN BURMA BY MISGOVERNING SYSTEM

2010-05-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

နအဖအာဏာရူးေတြဟာ ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ေသာက္သုံးေရကန္ေတြႀကေတာ့ မတည္ေဆာက္၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားကို လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေရာင္းစားဖို ့ႀကေတာ့ ေရေလွာင္ကန္ေတြ အတင္းေဆာက္။

ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ေရေပးေ၀ေရး အဆင္ေျပဖို ့ ေရပိုက္လိုင္းေတြႀကေတာ့ မတည္ေဆာက္၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားကို ဓါတ္ေငြ ့ေရာင္းစားဖို ့ ႀကေတာ့ ဓါတ္ေငြ ့ပိုက္ေတြ မဟားဒယားေဆာက္။

ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းအင္းအိုင္ကေရေတြ သန္ ့စင္ေပးျပီး ေသာက္သုံးေရစီမံကိန္းေတြႀကေတာ့ မေဆာင္ရြက္၊ ေျမေအာက္လုိဏ္ေခါင္းေတြႀကေတာ့ တူးျပီး ညဴကလီးယား စီမံကိန္းေတြႀကေတာ့ ေဆာင္ရြက္။

ျပည္သူေတြ ရာသီဥတု မွ်မွ်တတေနထိုင္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ သဘာ၀ေတာေတာင္ေရေျမေတြကို ထိန္းသိမ္းတာမ်ဳိးႀကေတာ့ မလုပ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြရဖို ့အတြက္ ေရာင္းစားဖို ့ႀကေတာ့ သစ္ေတာေတြ စိတ္ႀကဳိက္ ခုတ္ ဆိုေတာ့ အခုေႏြရာသီအခ်ိန္ အပူျပင္းတာနဲ ့ ရင္ဆိုင္ရခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ တြင္းေရေတြ ခန္းေျခာက္တာကအစ ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းအင္းအိုင္ေတြကအထိ ေရေတြ တိမ္ေကာကုန္တာ ပိုျဖစ္ေတာ့တာပါဘဲ။

ဒီအတြက္ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ေသာက္ဖို ့ ေရ မရွိ၊ သုံးစြဲဖို ့ ေရ မရွိ၊ စိုက္ပ်ဳိးေရးေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို ့ ေရ မရွိ၊ မီးေလာင္ရင္ ျဖန္းဖို ့ ေရ မရွိ။

ျပည္သူေတြရဲ ့ အေျခခံ စား၀တ္ေနေရးအတြက္ ျပည့္စုံေအာင္ မလုပ္ေပးတဲ့ မလုပ္ႏိုင္ဘဲ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဴပ္ေနရင္ေတာ့ ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ တစ္ေန ့စားဖို ့ ထမင္း၊ တစ္မနက္ေသာက္ဖို ့ ေရ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ ျပည့္စုံမယ္ဆိုတာ ရွိမွာမဟုတ္ပါဖူး။

ေျပာရဦးမယ့္ အျခားအခ်က္တစ္ခုကေတာ့ နအဖသန္းေရႊတို ့ကေတာ့ နာဂစ္ေဘးႀကဳံတုန္းကလည္း ႏိုင္ငံတကာက အလွဴေငြေတြ ရက္ရက္ေရာေရာရလိုက္လို ့ နာဂစ္ကို ေက်းဇူးတင္ေနသလို အခုလည္း ေရျပႆနာႀကဳံေနတာကို ဘန္းျပျပီး ႏိုင္ငံတကာက အလွဴေငြေတြ ေတာင္းဖို ့ ႀကံစီေနျပီထင္ပါရဲ ့။
ေရအသက္ တစ္မနက္တဲ့။ ျပည္သူမ်ား ေရငတ္ျခင္း ေရျပတ္ျခင္းေဘးမွ ကင္းလြတ္ႀကပါေစလို ့ ဆုေတာင္းလိုက္ရပါတယ္။ ဒီဆုေတာင္းျပည့္ဖို ့ကေတာ့ တိုင္းျပည္မွာ အရည္အခ်င္းရွိရွိ ဥာဏ္ပညာအေျမာ္အျမင္ရွိရွိ တရားမွ်တမွဳရွိရွိ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ားအက်ဳိးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးလိုေသာစိတ္ရွိရွိနဲ ့ ျပည္သူ ့အစိုးရမ်ဳိး ေပၚေပါက္မွသာလွ်င္ ဆုေတာင္းျပည့္မွာပါ။

ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းအင္းအိုင္ေပါမ်ားလွတဲ့ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ျပည္သူေတြ ေရငတ္ေဘး ႀကဳံေနရတာ ပူျပင္းတဲ့ ရာသီဥတုေႀကာင့္ဆိုတာထက္ ေသာက္ေရသုံးေရ စီမံကိန္းေတြ၊ ေရေလွာင္တာတမံ စီမံကိန္းေတြ၊ ေရေပးေ၀ေရး စီမံကိန္းေတြကို ႀကဳိတင္စီမံေဆာင္ရြက္မွဳမရွိဘဲ လစ္လ်ဴရွဴပစ္ပယ္ထားတဲ့ နအဖအာဏာရူးေတြ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဴပ္ေနတဲ့ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းႀကာ ျဖစ္ေနတာရဲ ့ ဆိုးက်ဳိးေတြကို ျပည္သူေတြ လက္ေတြ ့ႀကဳံရတာပါဘဲ။

ျပည္သူေတြ ႏွစ္ႀကာရွည္စြာ ေသာက္ေရသုံးေရ ျပတ္လတ္ေနခ်ိန္မွာ နအဖ သန္းေရႊတို ့ အာဏာရူး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ႀကီးမ်ားေတာ့ စည္းစိမ္ခံျပီး ေရမီးအျပည့္အစုံနဲ ့ နန္းေတာ္ဆံဆံ တိုက္အိမ္ယာေတြမွာ ေနႀက၊ စားေသာက္ႀကေတာ့လည္း ေရသန္ ့ဗူးက ေရကိုမွ ေသာက္သုံးႀကဆိုေတာ့ ႏွဳိင္းယွဥ္ႀကည့္ႏိုင္ဖို ့ ေဖၚျပလိုက္ရပါတယ္။
ေရအသက္ တစ္မနက္တဲ့။ ျပည္သူမ်ား ေရငတ္ျခင္း ေရျပတ္ျခင္းေဘးမွ ကင္းလြတ္ႀကပါေစလို ့ ဆုေတာင္းလိုက္ရပါတယ္။ ဒီဆုေတာင္းျပည့္ဖို ့ကေတာ့ တိုင္းျပည္မွာ အရည္အခ်င္းရွိရွိ ဥာဏ္ပညာအေျမာ္အျမင္ရွိရွိ တရားမွ်တမွဳရွိရွိ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ားအက်ဳိးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးလိုေသာစိတ္ရွိရွိနဲ ့ ျပည္သူ ့အစိုးရမ်ဳိး ေပၚေပါက္မွသာလွ်င္ ဆုေတာင္းျပည့္မွာပါ။

WHO IS GOVERNMENT NOW AND FUTURE IF THE CABINET IS NOT GOVERNMENT?

2010-05-13T09:41:00.001-07:00

The Myanmar Union Election Commission has insisted that formation of political party by in- post government ministers to take part in the coming multi-party general election this year is "in conformity with the law".
In response to a question raised recently by Larry M, Dinger, Charge d'affaires of the United States Embassy in Yangon when international governments and political parties which have to run in 2010 election and members of CEC of NLD shut their HQ office by the 2010 electoral registration law, Chairman of the commission U Thein Soe replied that "ministers are political posts, not state service personnel" referring a provision of Myanmar's party registration law which says state service personnel shall not be organized in political parties. But the commission chairman does not count on cabinet who are receiving salary from the people revenue and the cabinet is not hour pay employees or daily paid workers.
"The present ministers' formation of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is in conformity with the law," Union Election Commission Chairman, Thein Soe insisted.
He cited a section of the 2008 constitution as saying that in- service state service personnel including the armed forces on the date on which the constitution came into force shall continue to discharge duties until the government promulgates others provisions.
Another section of the law was also cited as saying that "the government that is on existing on the date on which the constitution comes into force shall continue to discharge its duties until a new government is formed in accordance with the constitution".
Secretary-General of the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) U Htay Oo, who is in-post Agriculture Minister, also added that "ministers and deputy ministers are merely the political posts, not government servants". The question has to be risen that who is government in Myanmar (Burma) now if the ministers of cabinet are not government servants.
Dozens of government ministers, led by Prime Minister U Thein Sein, have quit their military posts but not government posts to form the USDA-transformed USDP with 27 leading ministerial members to take part in the planned election and the formation has been granted by the commission.
Meanwhile, the commission has granted formation of 28 new political parties out of 31 and four old political parties are confusing who the present government is if the whole cabinet is not government now in accordance with the mention by the Chairman of the commission, and how our nation and international communities would recognize for the forming cabinet in future as government by means of diplomatic relationship after 2010 election result.
Written by Aung Naing Htwe
88 GSE

LETTERS TO CAMPBELL FROM THE WORLD

2010-05-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

Well, Good Luck Mr. Campwell and welcome to the good old sightseeing trip to Burma! I don't think Mr. Campbell can achieve anything other than sightseeing and greetings from those smiling monster from the new capital. Without the backing of the Almighty PRC, no one can do anything to change the mind of the equally Almighty Burmese General in the new capital and on one can touch them. Period! Have some fun and enjoy talking with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, who I think will last her precious life in her own home. All the best, Mr. Campbell!

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I wish at least a minor meltdown in ace age attitudes will result from this seemingly innocuous interaction. Still have to work on democratic expression of the Burma's public within the framework of current legal establishment. It is a slow change, that moves along with the age of ruling generals.
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those GENERALS need to go to jail.... for starters!

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Than Shwe is about to die. Let's wait

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Mr. Campwell you are wasting the time. They were never telling the true and never shame for lie. Mr. Campwell has you ever talk to General Than Shwe and Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on 1 table with TV Media. I would like to suggest you about that meeting.

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Little known to the west, Myanmar is now in the midst of an environmental apocalypse funded by China, Thailand, various multinationals and other foreign countries. Executed by the government of Myanmar which is a military dictatorship.

Deforestation,
Mega-dams,
Enormous strip mines,
Agribusiness land clearing foe crop moncultures,

The result?.... millions forcibly displaced without compensation. Others arrested/killed/assaulted who attempt to resist the destruction.

Millions of people from 135 tribal/ethnic groups in Myanmar flooding into Thailand and surrounding countries to escape government/corporate brutality.

Also civil war within Myanmar, as these forcibly displaced people try to defend themselves and are branded as "rebels".