Children struggle in Yangoon

This photograph discloses that the children are searching food among the rotten rubbish for their daily survival in Kyaut Tadadar township, Yangoon, Myanmar(Burma).This photo -report expresses that the majority of the population in Myanmar is still suffering and facing hardship daily while the international governments and diplomats are taking consideration that Myanmar has started to change to democratization. But it is not realism for grassroots.



Reported by Burma Development Network
(BDN)
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To contact: email Burmadevelopmentnetwork@gmail.com
Phone: Mr. Aung Naing Ht we 630 456 6517 (USA)
Mr. Hla Htay Naing 09 430 64660 (Yangoon, Myanmar)
POSTED BY NAN MAY SU THWE
ၿမန္မာနိုင္ငံရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ.ေက်ာက္တံတားၿမိဳ.နယ္တြင္ေက်ာင္းေနအရြယ္ကေလးငယ္မ်ားသည္စြန္.ပစ္အမိွဳက္မ်ားအတြင္းမွစားေသာက္စရာမ်ားရွာေဖြစားေသာက္ေနေသာပံုၿဖစ္ပါသည္.။ၿမန္မာနိုင္ငံသည္ယခုအခ်ိန္အခါမွာၿပဳၿပင္ေၿပာင္းလဲမွဳေတြၿဖစ္ေပၚေနၿပီဟုနိုင္ငံတကာအသိုင္းအ၀န္းကထင္ၿမင္မွဳမ်ားကိုနိုင္ငံတြင္းၿဖစ္ေပၚေနေသာပကတိအမွန္တိုင္းတင္ၿပၿခင္းၿဖစ္ပါသည္။ တိုင္းၿပည္အတြင္းဆင္းရဲမြဲေတမွဳမ်ားစြာကိုၿပည္သူအမ်ားခံစားေနၾကရၿပိးေန.စဥ္နွင္.အ မ်ွခက္ခဲၾကမ္းတမ္းေသာဘ၀မ်ားကိုၿဖတ္သန္းေနၾကရသည္မွာအပကတိအမွန္ပင္ၿဖစ္ သည္။သို.ပါေသာေၾကာင္.နိုင္ငံတကာအသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းမွသိရိွနိုင္ေစရန္အလို.ငွာမွတ္တမ္းဓါတ္ပံုနွင္.တကြၿမန္မာၿပည္ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးကြန္ယက္မွတင္ၿပပါသည္။ POSTED BY NAN MAY SU THWE

ရန္ကုန္တိုင္းဒဂံုၿမိဳ.သစ္ေတာင္းပိုင္းၿမိဳ.နယ္(၁၀၇)ရပ္ကြပ္မွာၿဖစ္ပါသည္။ယခုေတြၿမင္ရေသာမွတ္တမ္းဓါတ္ပံုမွာေသာက္သံုးေရးမလံုေလာက္ေသာလူေနရပ္ကြက္တြင္စား၀တ္ေနေရးအတြက္ဆင္းရဲဒုကၡမ်ိဳးစံုခံစားေနရေသာမိသားစုမ်ားပံု၇ိပ္မ်ားၿဖစျ္ပီး၊ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းမွာဆင္းရဲမြဲေတမွဳအင္မတန္မွမ်ားၿပားေနၿပိး၊တတိုင္းၿပည္လံုးဆင္းရဲတြင္းသို့ ေဇာက္ထိုးက်ေနၿပီဟုဆိုရမည္ၿဖစ္သည္၊တိုင္းၿပည္တြင္းရိွေသာသယံဇာတမ်ားမွာတိုင္းတပါးသိုစစ္အုပ္စုႏွင့္၄င္းတို့နီးစပပ္ရာစီးပြါးေရးသမားမ်ားမွလက္၀ါးၾကီးအုပ္အက်ိဳးၿမတ္မ်ားရရိွေနၿပီးနိုင္ငံတြင္းမွထြက္၇ိွေနေသာေရနံနွင္.သဘာ၀ဓါတ္ေငြမ်ား၊သစ္ေတာထြက္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကိုေနစဥ္ၿပည္ပသို႔ ပို႔ေဆာင္ေရာင္းခ်ကာ စီးပြါေရးလူတစုတို့နွင့္ အက်ိဳးတူခံစားခ်မ္းသာေနၾကသည္။သို႔ေသာ္တိုင္းၿပည္တြင္းမွအေၿခခံလူတန္းစားဘ၀သည္ပို၍ပို၍ဆင္း၇ဲၾကပ္တည္းမွဳကိုေန႔တဓူ၀ခံစားေနၾက၇သည္ကိုဓါပံုႏွင့္တကြ တင္ၿပလိုက္ပါသည္။ ၿမန္မာၿပည္ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတို.တက္ေရးကြန္ယက္ BURMA DEVELOPMENT NETWORK (BDN) မွတ္ခ်က္၊ က်ေနာ္တို့ တင္ၿပေသာ ဓါတ္ပံုႏွင့္ စာသားမ်ားကို အသံုးၿပဳလိုပါက က်ေနာ္တို့ကြန္ယက္မွ ခြင့္ၿပဳခ်က္ကိုေတာင္းခံရမည္။ ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ ကိုေအာင္ႏိုင္ေထြး 630 456 6517 (အေမရိကန္ၿပည္ေထာင္စု) ကိုလွေဌးႏိုင္ 09 430 64660 (ၿမန္မာၿပည္) burmadevelopmentnetwork@gmail.com

Burmese army accused of murder and rape

As Burma prepares for by-elections, a new report accuses the army of the rape, torture and murder of ethnic people, with Human Rights Watch (HRW) saying that the abuse of civilians has deepened since fighting against ethnic Kachin rebels in the country's north-east was triggered last year after a 17-year ceasefire. Up to 75,000 people have been forced from their homes. Troops have blocked humanitarian aid and attacked innocent people, burning down entire villages, abducting women and forcing children as young as 14 to become porters. "The Burmese army is committing unchecked abuses in Kachin state while the government blocks humanitarian aid to those most in need," HRW's Elaine Pearson said. "Both the army and Kachin rebels need to act to prevent a bad situation for civilians from getting even worse." The fighting is one of a number of wars with ethnic groups in Burma that have rumbled on for decades with devastating consequences. Western countries, including Britain, have stressed that finding a peaceful solution to ethnic conflicts is a requirement for the lifting of economic sanctions, something the Burmese authorities are very keen to achieve. When British Foreign Secretary William Hague met with senior Burmese leaders earlier this year, he reportedly highlighted the need to achieve reconciliation. Talks between the Kachin fighters and government peace negotiators have been held on seven occasions since President Thein Sein issued a call for dialogue last August to find "everlasting peace", but they have been fruitless. Reuters reported that according to the rebels, the conflict has now reached the stage of "total annihilation". POSTED BY NAN MAY SU THWE

Arab spring inspires Burma's 88 generation

Two prominent Burmese dissidents of the 88 Generation Group say they plan to continue campaigning for democracy either through civil society or by forming a political party. One of them admits that the events of "Arab Spring" prove that Burma will inevitably follow the path of democracy."We are not afraid to be arrested again. It's perhaps part of Burma's political culture. Jail is our second home anyway," said Mya Aye, who was released along with other political prisoners on January 13. Min Ko Naing, perhaps Burma's most prominent pro-democracy dissident after Aung San Suu Kyi, said in a separate interview that he will remain outside parliament to pursue full-fledged democracy for the country. "There are three options for us - parliamentary politics, civil society or ethnic affairs. I am going to be involved in people's politics - civil society. We have to strengthen our foundation for democracy," he said. Some members of the 88 Generation Group will take part in party politics while others will be involved in civil society's work. "Others will be working in various fields as intellectuals such as artists, writers, painters, film stars, etc," he said. "I don't want to run in the election because Aung San Suu Kyi is already playing that role and I respect her for that. I will be involved in civil society's activities," he said. Asked whether he believes in President Thein Sein's sincerity in launching political reform, Min Ko Naing said he believes in what Aung San Suu Kyi says. "As for the president's promise of reform, I will wait and see." Mya Aye, in response to the same question, said it doesn't matter whether the government is sincere or not. "Burma must move democracy forward. That's the trend of the world. Look at the Arab Spring. Look at the events around the world. Burma will have to follow that trend, whether they like it or not." He said members of the 88 Generation Group are weighing the pros and cons of setting up a political foundation to pursue civil activities or forming a "strong political party". "We may form a political party … just maybe. We are still debating the issue among ourselves," he said. Min Ko Naing has, since the student uprising of 1988, spent most of his years incarcerated for opposing the military regime. He was instrumental in organising protests against the military government including one calling for a general strike on 8-8-88 (August 8, 1988) which later became synonymous with the dissident movement itself. The 8-8-88 general strike attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of Rangoon and was considered a turning point in Burma's democracy movement. Min Ko Naing was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, which was commuted to 10 years under a general amnesty in 1993. In November 2004, he was released from prison after serving 15 years. He was rearrested in September 2006 ahead of Burma's 2006 national convention. He was released in 2007 and rearrested in November 2008, with at least 22 other dissidents, this time to serve 65 years behind bars. Mya Aye was first arrested in 1989 and sentenced to eight years in jail for his role as a student leader in the 1988 campaign for democracy. He was arrested again in 2007 together with other student leaders and sentenced to 65 years and six months in jail. They were both freed on January 13 in a mass release of prisoners, including some prominent "prisoners of conscience". POSTED BY NAN MAY SU THWE

Eviction order for Burma monk

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 BURMA 7 Nov 2010: First polls in 20 years 13 Nov: Aung San Suu Kyi freed from house arrest 30 Mar 2011: Transfer of power to new government complete 6 Oct: Human rights commission established 12 Oct: More than 200 political prisoners freed 13 Oct: New labour laws allowing unions passed 17 Nov: Burma granted Asean chair in 2014 18 Nov: Suu Kyi's NLD says it is rejoining political process Clinton's Burma visit: Turning point? Should it be Burma or Myanmar? US-China rivalry over Burma's hand intrigues media The 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

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)

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Than Shwe Is In Hospital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.