THAN SHWE MUST FALL IN 2010

BURMA INDEPENDENCE DAY

Editorial
VOA
December 31, 2009

The following is an editorial reflecting the Views of US Government.
On the anniversary of Burma's independence, the United States reiterates its call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

January 4, 2010, marks the sixty-second anniversary of Burma’s independence from British rule. The United States has expressed its warmest wishes to the people of Burma on this occasion and its hope that they will enjoy a better future.

As Department of State Spokesman Ian Kelly stated on December 30, “We support the peaceful efforts of people everywhere to exercise freely their universal human rights, and we look forward to the day when Burma’s citizens will be able to do so. We hope that day will come soon."

Unfortunately, for most of the years since independence, the aspirations of Burma's citizens for freedom and democracy have been frustrated by military rule. The country possesses a rich history, a wealth of natural resources, and a talented, resilient populace. Burma could one day be a leader among Southeast Asian nations.

However, the path the Burmese government has chosen has caused suffering and impoverished the nation. It has also estranged Burma from the community of nations.

That does not need to be the future course. Burma’s generals can choose to mark this year’s Independence Day by embracing a more democratic and prosperous future for their country and their people.

Sixty-two years ago the Burmese people secured their independence. Today, the people of Burma should again be able to determine their own future. On the anniversary of Burma's independence, the United States reiterates its call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners and the initiation of meaningful dialogue among the government, democratic groups, and ethnic minorities. The United States is prepared to support and facilitate that process.

As President Obama stated recently, a better relationship with the United States -- and indeed with much of the world -- is possible if Burma moves in the direction of democratic reform. For its part, the United States stands ready to improve relations based on reciprocal and concrete efforts by the Burmese government.

LETTER TO AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has written a personal letter to Aung San Suu Kyi, pledging his ongoing support for Myanmar's pro-democracy icon and praising her courage.

Brown also reiterated his call for Myanmar's military rulers to ensure elections promised for 2010 were free and fair, warning anything less would condemn the impoverished country to more hardship and isolation.

"If the scheduled elections proceed under a rigged constitution, with opposition leaders excluded and with no international oversight, the military rulers will be condemning Burma to more years of diplomatic isolation and economic stagnation," he said in the letter released by Downing Street Tuesday.

The PM said Britain stood "immovably" with the Nobel peace laureate, and urged the regime to start a "genuine dialogue" with her.

"Your continuing detention is only the most visible evidence of the bad faith of a regime which has so far shown no signs of listening to regional or international calls for an end to its violent behaviour," he said.

"I continue to call upon the regime to engage with you and allow you further contact with diplomats in Rangoon, and to start a genuine dialogue that can give the Burmese people back their future and their hope," he said.

Brown's letter has been passed to authorities in Myanmar -- which has been under military rule since 1962 -- by the British embassy in Yangon.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been locked up for 14 of the past 20 years and was ordered in August to spend another 18 months in detention after being convicted over an incident in which an American man swam to her house.

The extension of her detention sparked international outrage as it effectively keeps her off the stage for the elections promised by the regime some time in 2010.

If the polls go ahead they will be the first since 1990, when the junta refused to recognise her party's landslide victory.
ၿဗိတိန္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ေဂၚဒြန္ဘေရာင္းက ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ရဲစြမ္းသတၱိကို ခ်ီးမြမ္း ဂုဏ္ျပဳလိုက္ကာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအတြက္ ဆက္လက္အားေပးေထာက္ခံသြားမည့္အေၾကာင္း ေပးစာတေစာင္ကို ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ထံ ေပးပို႔လုိက္ေၾကာင္း ေအအက္ဖ္ပီသတင္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပသည္။

ျမန္မာစစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအားလည္း လာမည့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ေပးထားသည့္ကတိအတိုင္း လြတ္လပ္၊ တရားမွ်တသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအျဖစ္ က်င္းပေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ၿပီး ယင္းသို႔မျဖစ္ပါက ျပစ္တင္႐ႈတ္ခ်မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ အက်ပ္အတည္းႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ၏ ၀ိုင္းက်ဥ္မႈကို ပိုမိုခံရလိမ့္မည္ဟုလည္း သတိေပးေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္။

ယခုေရးဆြဲထားသည့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒအရ အတုိက္အခံေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား မပါ၀င္ဘဲ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ၏ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္မႈ ေအာက္တြင္ မရိွဘဲ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို က်င္းပမည္ဆိုပါက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ သံတမန္အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းအလယ္တြင္ အထီးက်န္ျခင္း၊ စီးပြားေရး တိုးတက္မႈမရိွျခင္းတုိ႔ ပိုမိုျဖစ္ေပၚလာကာ ျမန္မာစစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားသည္ ျပစ္တင္ခံရလိမ့္မည္ဟုလည္း မစၥတာ ေဂၚဒြန္ဘေရာင္းက ယမန္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္စာတြင္ ေျပာၾကားထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ႏိုဘယ္လ္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆုရွင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နွင့္ စစ္မွန္သည့္ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ ျပဳလုပ္ရန္လည္း စစ္အစိုးရကို ၿဗိတိန္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္က တိုက္တြန္းထားသည္။

စစ္အစိုးရသည္ ၎၏ျပင္းထန္သည့္ အျပဳအမူမ်ားကို ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ၏ ေတာင္းဆိုမႈမ်ားကို သာမက ေဒသတြင္း ႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ ေဖ်ာင္းဖ်ေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ နားေထာင္သည့္ အရိပ္လကၡဏာ မျပေသးသည့္အတြက္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ဆက္လက္ထိန္းသိမ္းထားျခင္းသည္ ၎တို႔၏ သေဘာထား ႐ုိးသားမႈမရိွျခင္းကို ျပသရာ ေရာက္သည္ဟုလည္း ၿဗိတိန္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာဘေရာင္းက ေျပာၾကားလုိက္သည္။

“စစ္အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔နဲ႔ ဆက္ဆံမႈေတြ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္မွာရိွတဲ့ သံတမန္မ်ားနဲ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ဖို႔အတြက္ေရာ၊ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြရဲ႕ အနာဂတ္နဲ႔ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ေတြ ျပန္လည္ရရိွဖို႔ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ စတင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ပါ အခြင့္အလမ္းေပးထားပါတယ္” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

ၿဗိတိန္ႏိုင္ငံ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ေဂၚဒြန္ဘေရာင္း၏ေပးစာကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ရိွ ၿဗိတိန္သံ႐ုံးမွတဆင့္ စစ္အစိုးရအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံ ေပးပို႔ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ လြန္ခဲ့သည့္အႏွစ္ (၂၀) ကာလအတြင္း အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ျဖင့္ (၁၄) ႏွစ္ၾကာ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံခဲ့ရၿပီး ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၾသဂုတ္လတြင္ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံသား မစၥတာယက္ေတာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေနအိမ္သုိ႔ ေရကူး၀င္ေရာက္ ခဲ့သည္ကို လက္ခံခဲ့မႈအတြက္ ေနာက္ထပ္ (၁၈) လ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ ထပ္မံခ်ထားျခင္းခံရသည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီသည္ ၁၉၉၀ ခုတြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ျပည္လုံးကၽြတ္ အႏိုင္ရရိွခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စစ္အစိုးရက ယခုတုိင္ အာဏာလႊဲေျပာင္းေပးျခင္း မရိွခဲ့ေပ။

OPPOSITION LAUDS UN RESOLUTION

A senior Burmese opposition leader today cautiously welcomed the United Nation’s resolution condemning the junta for systematic human rights violations and lack of fundamental rights in the country.

Win Tin, member of Central Executive Committee of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party National League for Democracy (NLD) said he welcomed the resolution of the UN General Assembly on human rights in Burma. He called it UN’s ‘routine work’ but morally very important.

“It is a good sign for Burma. It shows that countries across the world had carefully considered the human rights situation in Burma and voted to adopt the resolution,” Win Tin told Mizzima on Monday.

However, Win Tin said just UN’s expression of grave concern over human rights abuses including the systematic use of rape as a weapon and the ongoing attacks against ethnic groups in eastern Burma by the junta is insufficient.

“The UN needs to do more to discuss the human rights issue in Burma in the UN Security Council,” Win Tin said.

The ongoing human rights violation in Burma can be stopped only if the UN body comes up with evidence and punishes those responsible including the Burmese military, he added.

On December 23, 2009, the 64th UNGA adopted a draft resolution II on the human rights situation in Burma, by a vote of 86 in favour to 23 against and 39 abstentions. It was included in the Third Committee report on human rights situations and reports of special rapporteurs and representatives.

The resolution also called on the Burmese regime to immediately release the detained Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners.

After the resolution was passed, the UN’s report released on Wednesday said Burmese representatives to the UN expressed their disappointment over the continuing adoption of UN resolutions dealing with the situation in Burma.

“Myanmar [Burma] had voted against the “highly politicized and country-specific resolution”, rejected it and would not be bound by it,” UN’s report quoted a Burmese delegate to the UN as saying.

“Myanmar believes that the exploitation of human rights for political purposes is unacceptable. Furthermore, it could not accept nor allow interference in its national political processes,” the Burmese delegate said.

The Burmese delegation also appreciated 23 countries such as Russia and Burma’s neighbours China, India, and Bangladesh, except Thailand, which abstained opposing the UN’s resolution on the ongoing human rights abuses committed by the military regime.

The regime is determined to hold elections in 2010 as part of its seven-step road map to so called disciplined democracy, after the new constitution was forcibly approved in 2008, which the opposition said will entrench and legitimize military rule in Burma.

I CAN NOT EXCHANGE MY PLACE WITH YOURS

ျပည္သူေတြကေတာ့ ငတ္ျပတ္လို ့ သန္းေရႊတို ့နအဖေတြကေတာ့ ျမဳိဆို ့လို ့။

ယခုတစ္ေလာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ေတာင္ပိုင္းက ရြာေတြမွာ စားနပ္ေရစာရွားပါးမွဳကို အဆိုးရြားဆုံး ႀကဳံေတြ ့ေနရတယ္လို ့ သိရွိရပါတယ္။

အထူးသျဖင့္ ခ်င္းကေလးသူငယ္ လူမမယ္ေလးေတြဟာ အစာေရစာ ငတ္ျပတ္မွဳ ဆာေလာင္မွဳေႀကာင့္ ပူေဆြးငိုေႀကြးေနႀကရတယ္ဆိုတာ သိရွိရလို ့လည္း ၀မ္းနည္းေႀကကြဲစရာပါဘဲ။


ဒီလို စားနပ္ရိကၡာ အထူးသျဖင့္ ဆန္စပါးျပတ္လပ္မွဳ ႀကဳံေတြ ့ရတဲ့အေႀကာင္းရင္းကေတာ့ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ကတည္း ႀကဳံေတြ ့ခဲ့ရတဲ့ လယ္ေျမေတြက စပါးသီးႏွံေတြကို ႀကြက္ဆိုးႀကီးေတြ အစုလိုက္ အျပဳံလိုက္ ဖ်က္ဆီးခံခဲ့ရလို ့ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ေအာက္ေဖၚျပပါပုံေတြကို ႀကည့္ရင္ စိုက္ပ်ဳိးထားခဲ့တဲ့ သီးႏွံေတြကို ႀကြက္ဆိုးႀကီးေတြ ကိုက္စားဖ်က္ဆီးခံခဲ့ရတာနဲ ့ အဆိုပါႀကြက္ဆိုးမ်ားကို အနည္းငယ္ေလာက္သာ ႏွိမ္နင္းခဲ့ရေပမယ့္ မ်ားျပားလြန္းလွတဲ့အတြက္ စပါးသီးႏွံေတြ ကုန္သေလာက္နီးပါး ပ်က္စီးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ကို္ယ္ပိုင္စီးပြားႀကီးပြားသထက္ႀကီးပြားဖို ့ တိုင္းျပည္ရဲ ့ ဆန္ေရစပါးေတြကိုေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံျခားကို ေရာင္းခ်ျပီး ေဒၚလာေငြေတြကို သုံးျဖဳံးေနတဲ့ သန္းေရႊနဲ ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ႀကီးေတြ မိသားစုေတြ၊ နအဖနဲ ့ပလဲပနံသင့္တဲ့ စီးပြားေရး အတၱသမားႀကီးေတြကေတာ့ ဒီလို ဒုကၡေရာက္ ငတ္ျပတ္ေနႀကတဲ့ ေက်းလက္ေတာေတာင္ အစြန္အျဖားက ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ဘာမွ မကူညီဘဲ လစ္လ်ဴရွဴထားႀကပါတယ္။

ေဒၚလာေငြရဖို ့ အဲ့ဒီလိုေရာင္းခ်ေနတဲ့ ဆန္ေရစပါးေတြ၊ သန္းေရႊနဲ ့ နအဖဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ေတြရဲ ့ တည္ခင္းျပီး အားရပါးရ ျမဳိဆို ့ေနႀကတဲ့ အလွ်ံပယ္ ထမင္းဟင္းေတြကိုသာ အစာေရစာရွားပါးျပီး ဆာေလာင္ငတ္ျပတ္လို ့ ငိုေႀကြးေနႀကရရွာတဲ့ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို ့ရဲ ့ တိုင္းျပည္ရင္ေသြး ကေလးသူငယ္ေတြကိုသာ တမင္းေလးနပ္မွန္ေအာင္ ေကြ်းလိုက္ႏိုင္ရင္ ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ား ေကာင္းလိုက္ပါ့မလည္းဆိုတာ စဥ္းစားသာ ႀကည့္ႀကပါ။

CHINA GETS BURMA

Burma has given China political assurance over an important crude oil pipeline and promised to maintain stability along the border after unrest in August pushed thousands of refugees into the Chinese side.

The pledges were made during a weekend visit by Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping to the military-run former Burma, treated as a pariah by the West for alleged human rights abuses and the detention of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

China is junta's's main foreign backer and an important military supplier. China's overriding concern is a stable Burma to give its landlocked southwest access to the Indian Ocean, as well as oil, gas and timber to feed its booming economy.

A crucial part of that relationship has been the long-mooted construction of oil and gas pipelines to China, a project aimed at cutting out the long detour oil cargoes take through the congested and strategically vulnerable Malacca Strait.

China's top oil and gas firm CNPC has now received exclusive rights to build and operate the China-Burma crude oil pipeline, CNPC said in a report on its website (www.cnpc.comc.cn), in a deal signing witnessed by Xi.

The Burmese government will guarantee pipeline safety and the ownership and franchise right of the pipeline, the report said.

CNPC, parent of PetroChina, started building a crude oil port in Burma on October 31, part of the 771-kilometre pipeline scheme.

Xi, seen as frontrunner to succeed President Hu Jintao, assured Burma of China's continuing support.

"Developing friendly and cooperative relations between China and Myanmar is an important part of Chinese foreign policy, and this will not change," China's Foreign Ministry paraphrased Xi as telling Burma's reclusive leader, General Than Shwe.

STRAINED TIES

But the relationship has not been as smooth of late.

In August, Burma's military overwhelmed and disarmed the Kokang group, the weakest of many ethnic armies which, in some cases, have based themselves for decades along the Chinese border.

That triggered an exodus of more than 37,000 refugees across the border and strained ties with China, Burma's only real diplomatic ally.

Than Shwe, meeting with Xi in the country's new jungle capital of Naypyidaw, said they would ensure border stability.

"Myanmar will, as always, and working hard with the Chinese, preserve the peace and stability of the border areas," China's Foreign Ministry paraphrased Than Shwe as telling Xi, in a statement carried on the ministry's website (www.mfa.gov.cn).

"China and Myanmar share a long joint border, and Myanmar deeply understands and knows that maintaining peace and stability on the border is extremely important to both countries," added the general, who rarely meets foreign leaders.

Burma's army has maintained a sizable presence over the past few months in Shan State, where rebel militias are braced for an offensive that could turn into a protracted conflict, creating another refugee crisis for China.

The junta wants ethnic groups to take part in a general election next year and has told local militias to disarm and join a government-run border patrol force or be wiped out, according to activists in Shan State.

Xi added that China felt "happy" at Burma's "road map" to democracy, roundly dismissed by rights activists as a sham.

"China hopes and believes that Myanmar will peacefully resolve these problems through dialogue and consultations," Xi said.

CHINESE OFFICALDOM WELCOMS MORE REGIME IN ASIA

U.S. slams deportation of Uyghur refugees from Cambodia to China
The deportation to China of 20 Uighurs who had sought refuge in Cambodia shows that Beijing's mistreatment of the mainly Muslim minority continues unabated, Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer said Monday.

The 20 Uighurs, who had fled China's far western Xinjiang region after unrest erupted there in July, were seeking asylum with the help of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) in Phnom Penh.

They were deported late Saturday aboard a Chinese plane, despite protests from the United States, the UN and rights groups.

"Cambodia's decision to deport the asylum seekers... is a reminder that Beijing's oppression of the Uighurs does not stop at China's borders," Kadeer said in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal Asia.

"China's track record of mistreating repatriated Uighur refugees leads us to fear that they can expect even worse on Chinese soil," said Kadeer, the leader of the World Uighur Congress who lives in exile in the United States.

Cambodian officials said the Uighurs were expelled in accordance with domestic law, but rights groups said the move contravened an international convention on refugees.

Kadeer said the move reflected Beijing's growing clout in the region, saying Phnom Penh's decision was "no doubt influenced by enormous Chinese pressure, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in aid".

She also noted that the Uighurs were deported on the eve of the start of a visit to Cambodia by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping.

"Governments of countries neighbouring China are reluctant to take any action that would displease Chinese authorities, leaving Uighurs nowhere to flee," Kadeer said.

She urged the United States and other nations to "call upon China to provide the 20 repatriated Uighurs with due process of law"

Clashes between Xinjiang's Uighurs and China's majority Han ethnic group in July left nearly 200 dead and 1,600 injured, according to official tolls.

The violence erupted when Uighurs -- who have long complained of repression under Chinese rule -- attacked members of China's Han ethnic majority. In subsequent days, mobs of Han roamed the streets seeking revenge.

Last month, nine people were executed for their roles in the violence.

MISS GAMBARI

POPPIES GROW IN BURMA TO EXCHANGE MORE WAPONS

Ethnic groups in northeastern Burma have stepped up opium cultivation to buy weapons to defend themselves against possible attacks by the country's military, a United Nations report said on Monday.

Opium production increased for the third successive year and rose by 11 percent this year, with Shan State providing 95 percent of the poppy in Burma, the world's second-biggest opium producer after Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

"Increased instability in northeastern Myanmar is affecting the opium market. (Some ethnic groups) ... are selling drugs to buy weapons, and moving stocks to avoid detection," said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa.

Burma's army has maintained a sizable presence over the past few months in Shan State, where rebel militias are braced for an offensive that analysts said could turn into a protracted conflict, creating a refugee crisis for neighboring China.

The junta wants ethnic groups to take part in a general election next year and has told local militias to disarm and join a government-run border patrol force or be wiped out, according to activists in Shan State.

The military overwhelmed and disarmed the Kokang group, the weakest of the ethnic armies, in August after several days of fighting. That triggered an exodus of more than 37,000 refugees across the border and strained ties with China, its only real diplomatic ally.

The United Wa State Army, a 20,000-strong ethnic Chinese militia labeled a narcotics cartel by the United States, has refused to disarm and is preparing for an imminent attack, media reports and activists say.

UNODC said the amount of land dedicated to growing opium -- a thick paste from poppy used to make heroin -- had increased by 50 percent since 2006 to 31,700 hectares in Burma.

Despite the rise in cultivation, the report said the potential value of opium production in Burma had fallen by 15 percent to $104 million in 2009 from $123 million.

In neighboring Laos, opium cultivation had increased by 19 percent but the total remained low at 1,900 hectares.

However, with opium fetching $1,326 per kg, the price was still attractive for farmers at a time when the value of other crops was falling, the report said.

Lawmakers worldwide urge Myanmar probe

More than 400 lawmakers from around the world have urged the United Nations to investigate Myanmar's military junta, accusing it of committing crimes against humanity.

In a letter sent to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, the lawmakers -- from 29 countries, including France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States -- also pressed for a global arms embargo against the regime.

"For too many years, the Security Council has ignored widespread and systematic crimes carried about by Burma's military regime, including the destruction of over 3,300 ethnic minority villages, widespread rape of ethnic women, the forced displacement of over 1 million refugees and internally displaced persons, the recruitment of tens of thousands of child soldiers, and the prolific use of modern-day slave labor," the letter says.

"The longer the council waits, the more people in Burma will die," the letter concludes.

The military junta has ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma, since 1962.

After years of refusing direct talks with Myanmar, the United States has indicated a possible re-engagement with the military regime.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, U.S. President Barack Obama named Myanmar, Congo and Darfur as governments that "violate international law by brutalizing their own people," and said there must be consequences.

He also praised Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a fellow Nobel Peace laureate.

Myanmar's military junta has kept Suu Kyi under house arrest for about 14 of the past 20 years. Obama called for her release and that of other political prisoners when he spoke in Singapore at a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations economic alliance in November.

Not To Recognize 2010 Myanmar Election

Dissident Groups Urge UN Not To Recognize 2010 Myanmar Election


(RTTNews) - The United Nations and the international community have been urged not to recognize the Myanmar elections scheduled for for 2010 unless all political prisoners including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi are released by the country's military junta.

On the occasion of International Human Rights Day (December 10), three dissident Burmese groups--All Burma Monks' Alliance, 88 Generation Students, and All Burma Federation of Student Unions--in a joint statement have asked the international community not to recognize the forthcoming elections in 2010 and to put more pressure on junta leader to hold a meaningful dialogue with the democratic opposition.

"We urge the international community not to recognize the 2010 election, if there is no release of all political prisoners, including the General Secretary of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, no sustainable political dialogue with democratic opposition and ethnic minorities, and no national reconciliation first," they said in the joint statement.

It was on December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to observe the day as International Human Rights Day to remind the people that all human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms.

For comments and feedback: contact editorial@rttnews.com

Copyright(c) 2009 RTTNews.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Obama Warns Dictators of 'Consequences' in Nobel Acceptance Speech

The same principle applies to those who violate international law by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo or repression in Burma — there must be consequences. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.


"ကိုယ့္ျပည္သူကို သတ္ၿပီး နိင္ငံတကာဥပေဒကို ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ တဲ့သူေတြ၊ ခင္ဗ်ားတို႔ လုပ္ရပ္ေတြ အတိုင္း ခင္ဗ်ားတို႔ခံရမယ္။ ဒါဖါက အစုလိုက္ အျပံဳလိုက္ လူသတ္မႈေတြ၊ ကြန္ဂိုက စနစ္တက် က်ဴးလြန္ေနတဲ့ မုဒိန္းမႈေတြ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ျမန္မာျပည္က ရက္စက္ယုတ္မာမႈေတြ - ဒီလုပ္ရပ္ေတြအတြက္ တန္ျပန္ သက္ေရာက္မႈေတြ ခံရေစ့မယ္။

ဒီလူသားမဆန္တဲ့ မတရားမႈ လုပ္ရပ္ေတြကုိ ဆန္႔က်င္ဖုိ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏွင့္အတူ ရပ္တည္ၾက၊ လက္တြဲၾကပါ။ သုိ႔မဟုတ္ပါက လက္နက္ၿဖင့္ ရပ္တန္႔ေအာင္ ၀င္ေရာက္ေၿဖရွင္း ေပးရမႈ (သုိ႔) ရက္စက္ယုတ္မာမႈ ေတြ ရဲ႔ ေနာက္ကြယ္က ၾကံရာပါအၿဖစ္ ၿပစ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္းသူမ်ားအၿဖစ္ ရင္ဆုိင္ၾကရ လိမ့္မယ္လုိ႔" သတိေပးေၿပာဆုိသြား ပါသည္။


(သန္းေရႊ မိသားစုအတြက္ ေနာက္ဆံုးရက္ေတြ က သိပ္မက်န္ေတာ့ဘူး ၊ တိုင္းျပည္ရတနာေတြကို မတရားခိုးယူ ၾကြယ္၀ေနတဲ့သူတို့ရဲ ့ စည္းစိမ္ဥစာေတြဟာ ဘာမွ မတည္ျမဲဘူး။ သူတို႔ ရွာထားသမ်ွဟာသူတို႔ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ခြင့္ရိွမွာမဟုတ္ဘူး ဆိုတာ ျမဲျမဲမွတ္ထားပါ။ ျပည္သူလက္၀ယ္ကို ျပန္လည္ေရာက္ရိွေစရမယ္။ ျမန္မာ တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ား ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ ဖက္က ရပ္တည္ပါ။ သမိုင္းမွာ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ ဖက္ကရပ္တည္တဲ့ တပ္မေတာ္သာလ်င္ ေအာင္ပြဲခံတယ္။ မွန္ကန္စြာမရပ္တည္ရင္ အနိဌာရံုေတြနဲ႔ နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္ရမယ္။ သန္းေရႊ ေခတ္က ျပီးသြားပါျပီ။ )


Even as his administration begins a new policy of engagement with Burma's junta, US President Barack Obama warned in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on Thursday that oppressive regimes face “consequences” if they violate the rights of their own citizens.

In his speech, delivered in Oslo, Norway, Obama specifically mentioned Burma as one of the countries where there is systematic abuse of human rights by the government and honored opposition leader and fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for her commitment to democratic reform.
Acknowledging that he has adopted a policy of engagement with the Burmese junta, Obama said that “sanctions without outreach—and condemnation without discussion—can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.”

However, he also warned that the world could not afford to ignore threats to peace from regimes that menace their neighbors or their own citizens.

“Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war. The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people,” he said.

“When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma—there must be consequences,” he added.

“Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy—but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.”

Obama also rejected the notion that governments must chose between promoting human rights and narrowly pursuing national interests, noting that “neither America's interests nor the world's are served by the denial of human aspirations.”

Peace, he said, “is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear.”

“America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal,” said Obama.

“We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung Sang Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran,” Obama said.

“It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation. And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements—these movements of hope and history—they have us on their side.”

On Oct. 9, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee announced that it had awarded the prize to Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Obama said in a statement soon after the announcement that he would accept the award as “a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.”

“To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize, men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace,” Obama said at the time.

Meanwhile, Obama's National Security Adviser, James Jones, said in an statement issued on International Human Rights Day that the Obama administration would continue to call attention to the repression in Burma and Iran.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, also said that the world needed US leadership to deal with human rights abuses noting that violations and genocide continue without resolution in Darfur, while in Burma, Suu Kyi still languishes in detention.

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said the US must never lose sight of the plight of those living under dictatorial regimes in China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

No progress despite engagement with Myanmar: US official

There are no signs of progress towards democratic change in Myanmar despite Washington's decision to hold direct talks with the country's military rulers, a senior US diplomat said Wednesday.

High-level talks last month in Myanmar between the junta and US officials were "cautious" and made little headway, said Scot Marciel, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs.

"It's perhaps useful that we are talking, but that isn't progress," Marciel said at a seminar organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, a Singaporean think tank.

"Progress will come when there's change on the ground in Burma. So far, there's been none," said Marciel, who was part of the US delegation led by Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

A lack of progress will make it difficult for the United States to continue its policy of engagement with Myanmar but Washington is willing to give it time to yield results, said Marciel.

"At some point if there's no progress, it will be hard to sustain a dialogue but we're not at that point yet and I think, as I said, we didn't make progress on our trip," he said.

"On the other hand, we didn't really anticipate that we were going to go there and make progress overnight.

"The problem is there is only one person who makes the decisions and that person has not yet shown a particular amount of openness," Marciel said in reference to Than Shwe, the chief of Myanmar's military government.

Under President Barack Obama, the US government has adopted a policy of engagement after sanctions on the impoverished Southeast Asian country had failed to bring about desired reforms.

At a landmark summit in Singapore on November 15 with Southeast Asian leaders including Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein, Obama called for the release of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.

BYE- BYE MR GAM

UN special envoy Gambari quits Burma job
by Mungpi
Thursday, 03 December 2009 20:23

New Delhi (Mizzima) - United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday announced that Ibrahim Gambari would stop being the special envoy to military-ruled Burma and a replacement will be sought.

Marie Okabe, deputy spokesperson for Ban, at a press briefing in New York, told reporters that Ban has communicated his intention to appoint Gambari as Joint Special Representative of the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur, and he would find a replacement for him as the special envoy to Burma.

Gambari will replace Rodolphe Adada and would begin his mission to eastern Sudan in January 1, 2010, Okabe said.

Though the Nigerian diplomat will be shifted from his mission to Burma, Okabe said, “The Secretary-General would continue his good offices role on Myanmar and would seek a replacement for Gambari.”

Gambari was appointed the special envoy to Burma in 2006 by the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, with the task of facilitating a political dialogue between the military junta and opposition groups including ethnic minorities as part of a larger process of national reconciliation in the Southeast Asian nation.

However, critics said Gambari, who had visited Burma eight times during his tenure as the special envoy, failed to achieve his principle objective of facilitating a dialogue between the junta and the opposition.

Win Tin, a senior member of Burma’s opposition party – the National League for Democracy – told Mizzima on Thursday that Gambari had been used by the ruling junta, - the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

“I would say he [Gambari] has failed in his mission. But that’s not to disregard his efforts and that is because the junta has had no intention to change,” Win Tin said.

While expressing his appreciation for the efforts of the UN Secretary General’s good offices, Win Tin said, to solve Burma’s problems requires a unified stand by the international community.

Win Tin said, Gambari, as the special envoy to Burma had achieved two things – a significant statement made by Aung San Suu Kyi on her responsibility to consider ethnic minorities and Than Shwe’s stern pre-conditions made for holding direct talks with Aung San Suu Kyi.

In November 2007, the opposition leader released a statement through the visiting UN envoy, stating that she is seriously considering the interest of ethnic nationalities and also said she had been given the mandate by ethnic nationalities to represent them.

Win Tin said it was a significant statement made by the Nobel Peace Laureate and thanked Gambari for being a useful channel to release the statement.

In yet another of Gambari’s visit to the Southeast Asian nation, following the junta’s brutal crackdown on monk-led protesters in September 2007, the junta supremo Than Shwe told him that he is willing to talk to Aung San Suu Kyi if she stops advocating confrontation, utter devastation, economic sanctions and isolation.

According to the veteran politician and journalist, who spent 19 years in prison for his political beliefs, Gambari has made himself useful for Aung San Suu Kyi and Than Shwe in expressing their stands through him.

“I think these two statements are the only thing he was able to get out of his mission to Burma. And that’s because he had been manipulated,” Win Tin added.

But the NLD would like to express its appreciation for the interest and efforts he took for Burma, Win Tin said, adding that he would like to urge Gambari to advice his successor, if there is one, not to follow in his footsteps.

ဗုဒၶဘာသာအဖြဲ.အစည္းကုိ " ကမ ၻာ.အမြန္ၿမတ္ဆံုး ဘာသာတရားဆုခ်ီးၿမွင့္

ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) မွ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း တဦးျဖစ္တဲ႕ ကိုသက္ဦး (သုံးေရာင္ခ်ယ္) အီးေမး မွတဆင့္ ေပး ပို႕ပါသည္။



ဗုဒၶဘာသာအဖြဲ.အစည္းကုိ " ကမ ၻာ.အမြန္ၿမတ္ဆံုး/ အေကာင္းဆံုး " ဘာသာတရားဆုခ်ီးၿမွင့္

ဆြစ္ဇာလန္နုိင္ငံ၊ဂ်နီဗာၿမဳိ.အေၿခစုုိက္အၿပည္ၿပည္ဆုိင္ရာဘာသာေရးႏွင္.အသိဥာဏ္ၿမင္.မားေရးဆုိင္ရာပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးအဖဲြ.ကဗုဒၶဘာသာအဖြဲ.အစည္းကုိ " ကမ႓ာ့အမြန္ၿမတ္ဆံုး/အေကာင္းဆံုး " ဘာသာတရားဆုခ်ီးၿမွင္.ခဲ.ေႀကာင္းသိရွိရပါတယ္...

အဆုိပါအထူးတစ္လည္ခ်ီးၿမွင္.တဲ.ဆုကုိကမ႓ာဘာသာေပါင္းစံုမွကုိယ္စားလွယ္၂၀၀ေက်ာ္ကေရြးခ်ယ္ခ်ီးၿမွင္.ခဲ.ၿခင္းၿဖစ္ၿပီးပုိ၍ဝမ္းေျမာက္အံ့ဩဖြယ္ေကာင္းသည္မွာပါ၀င္ေရြးခ်ယ္သည္.ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္အမ်ားစုကအဆုိပါအဖြဲ.အစည္းတြင္အဖြဲ.ခြဲ၀င္အနည္းဆံုး
ၿဖစ္ေသာဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိမိမိတုိ.ဘာသာထက္ေက်ာ္လြန္ၿပီးဆႏၵမဲေပးခဲ.ႀကၿခင္းၿဖစ္သည္...

ပါ၀င္ဆႏၵမဲေပးခဲ.သူေလးဦးကေၿပာဆုိခဲ.ရာတြင္...

အဆုိပါအဖဲြ.ႀကီး၏သုေတသနညြန္ႀကားေရးမွဴးJonnaHultက"ဒီကမာ.အမြန္ၿမတ္ဆံုး၊အေကာင္းဆံုးဘာသာတရားဆုကုိဗုဒၶဘာသာရရွိတာအံ.ႀသစရာမရွိပါဘူး...ဘာၿဖစ္လုိ.လည္းဆုိေတာ.ကမာေပၚမွာဗုဒၶဘာသာေႀကာင္.ၿဖစ္ပြားေပၚေပါက္ခဲ.တဲ.စစ္ပဲြဆုိတာမရွိခဲ.ပါဘူး...တစ္ၿခားဘာသာမ်ားနဲ.မတူတာကအဲဒါပါပဲ...တစ္ၿခားဘာသာေတြကအကယ္၍ဘုရားသခင္သာမွားယြင္းခဲ.ယင္ဆုိတဲ.အေတြးနဲ.လက္နက္ေတြကုိအရံသင္.ထားႀကပါတယ္...ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္တစ္ေယာက္ဟာ(ဘာသာေရးအတြက္နဲ.)စစ္တုိက္တာကုိေတြ.ရဖုိ.အေတာ္ခဲယဥ္းပါတယ္...တစ္ၿခားဘာသာ၀င္ေတြရဲ.အစဥ္အလာအေလ.အထနဲ.ဆန္.က်င္စြာပဲဗုဒၶဘာသာဟာကုိ္ယ္
ကုိယ္တုိင္က်င္.ႀကံတဲ.တရားကုိသာသူမ်ားကုိေဟာႀကားခဲ.တာပါပဲ " လုိ.ဆုိခဲ.ပါတယ္...

Belfastၿမဳိ.မွကက္သလစ္ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးTedO'Shaunghnessyကေတာ.ကက္သလစ္သာသနာကုိၿမတ္နုိးကုိကြယ္ေပမယ္.လူသားေတြကုိေမတၱာဂရုဏာထားရန္ေဟာႀကားၿပီးလူသားေတြကုိပဲသတ္ၿဖတ္ကာဘုရားသခင္ရဲ.အလုိဆႏၵနားလည္ပါတယ္လုိ.ေၿပာႀကတာကစိတ္အေႏွာက္အယွက္အၿဖစ္ရဆံုးပါပဲ...ဒါေႀကာင္.မြန္ၿမတ္တဲ.ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိမဲေပးခဲ.တာပါလုိ.အမိန္.ရွိခဲ.ပါတယ္....

ပါကစၥတန္ကမြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္TalBinWassadကလည္းဒီအဆုိကုိသေဘာတူေထာက္ခံခဲ.ပါတယ္...အဆိုပါအဖဲြ.ႀကီးရဲ.ပါကစၥတန္နုိင္ငံမြတ္စလင္အစည္းအရံုးဆုိင္ရာမဲေပးေရးအဖဲြ.၀င္တစ္ေယာက္ၿဖစ္တဲ.သူက"ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဟာအစၥလာမ္္ဘာသာကုိႏွစ္ႏွစ္ကာကာယံုႀကည္သူတစ္ေယာက္ပါ...သုိ.ေသာ္လည္းပုဂၢဳိလ္ေရးဆုိင္ရာခံစားခ်က္ထက္ဘာသာေရးကုိအေႀကာင္းၿပၿပီးအမ်က္ေဒါသေတြထြက္ႀက၊ေသြးေၿမက်ႀကရတာေတြကုိေတြ.ၿမင္ခံစားရပါတယ္...ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္ေတြကေတာ.အဲဒါကုိသိၿမင္နားလည္သေဘာေပါက္ခဲ.ႀကပါတယ္...ေၿပာရယင္ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ရဲ.အရင္းႏွီးဆံုးမိတ္ေဆြတစ္ခ်ဴိ.ဟာဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္ေတြပါ "လုိ.ေၿပာခဲ.ပါတယ္...

အစၥေရးနုိင္ငံေဂ်ရုဆလင္ၿမဳိ.ကဂ်ဴးဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးShmuelWassersteinကေတာ."ကြ်န္ေတာ္လဲကြ်န္ေတာ္.ဘာသာၿဖစ္တဲ.ဂ်ဴဒါအစ္ဇင္ကုိႏွစ္သက္ၿမတ္နုိးပါတယ္...ကုိ္ယ္.ဘာသာမုိ.ကုိယ္ဒါဟာကမၻာ.ေပၚမွာအႀကီးၿမတ္ဆံုးဘာသာတရားလုိ.လည္းထင္ပါတယ္...ဒါေပမယ္.ရုိးရုိးသားသား၀န္ခံရယင္ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဟာေန.စဥ္ဂ်ဴးဘာသာအရ၀တ္မၿပဳခင္၀ိပႆနာတရားကုိက်င္.ႀကံအားထုတ္ေနတ ၁၉၉၃ ခုႏွစ္ကတည္းကပါ...ဒါေႀကာင္.အခုလုိမဲေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္ " လုိ.ေၿပာလုိက္ပါတယ္...

သုိ.ေသာ္..စိတ္မေကာင္းစရာအခ်က္တစ္ခုကအဆုိပါအဖြဲ.ႀကီးအေနၿဖင္.ထုိဆုကိုလက္ခံမည္.သူတစ္ေယာက္ကုိမွ်မေတြ.ခဲ.ရေပ....သူတုိ.ဆက္သြယ္ေၿပာဆုိသမွ်ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္အားလံုးကထုိဆုကုိလက္ခံဖုိ.ၿငင္းပယ္ခဲ.ႀကၿခင္းၿဖစ္သည္...


အဘယ္ေႀကာင္.ထုိဆုကုိလက္ခံရန္ၿငင္းဆန္ရေႀကာင္းေမးၿမန္ခဲ.ရာၿမန္မာဗုဒၶဘာသာအသင္းဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးဂုရတၱက "ယခုလုိမိမိတုိ.ဘာသာကုိအသိအမွတ္ၿပဳခ်ီးၿမွင္.သည္.အတြက္၀မ္းေၿမာက္ေက်းဇူးတင္ေႀကာင္း...သုိ.ေသာ္ဒီဆုကုိအၿမတ္ဆံုးလြတ္ေၿမာက္မွဳနိကၡမဓါတ္၊နိဗၺာနဓါတ္ႀကဳိးစားအားထုတ္ကာရရွိနုိင္သည္.လူသားအားလံုးကုိမိမိတုိ.မွ်ေ၀ေပးအပ္ပါေႀကာင္း
..." မိန္.ႀကားခဲ.ပါတယ္...

အဖဲြ.ႀကီးအေနနဲ.ထုိဆုကုိလက္ခံရယူေပးမယ္.သူကုိဆက္လက္ဆက္သြယ္ေနဦးမွာၿဖစ္ေႀကာင္းသိရွိရပါတယ္....


တရားအရသာသိတဲ.သူေတြကေတာ.ကုိယ္တုိင္ကုိလက္ေတြ.က်င္.ႀကံအားထုတ္ေနႀကၿပီ...တရားမသိ၊အမွားၿပည္.ေနတဲ. ...ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ.ငမုိက္သားမ်ားကေတာ. ...ဒီသံသရာေရယာဥ္ေႀကာမွာ ...ေၿမာလုိ.ေကာင္းေနဆဲ....

မူရင္းသတင္းေလးကေတာ.ဒီလုိပါ...

The Geneva-based International Coalition for the Advancement of
Religious and Spirituality (ICARUS) has bestowed "The Best Religion In
the World" award this year on the Buddhist Community.

This special award was voted on by an international round table of more than 200
religious leaders from every part of the spiritual spectrum. It was
fascinating to note
that many religious leaders voted for Buddhism rather than their own
religion although Buddhists actually make up a tiny minority of ICARUS
membership. Here are the comments by four voting members:


Jonna Hult, Director of Research for ICARUS said "It wasn't a surprise
to me that Buddhism won Best Religion in the World, because we could
find literally not one single instance of a war fought in the name of
Buddhism, in contrast to every other religion that seems to keep a gun
in the closet just in case God makes a mistake. We were hard pressed
to even find a Buddhist that had ever been in an army. These people
practice what they preach to an extent we simply could not document
with any other spiritual tradition."

A Catholic Priest, Father Ted O'Shaughnessy said from Belfast , "As
much as I love the Catholic Church, it has always bothered me to no
end that we preach love in our scripture yet then claim to know God's
will when it comes to killing other humans. For that reason, I did
have to cast my vote for the Buddhists."

A Muslim Cleric Tal Bin Wassad agreed from Pakistan via his
translator. "While I am a devout Muslim, I can seehow much anger and
bloodshed is channeled into religious expression rather than dealt
with on a personal level. The Buddhists have that figured out." Bin
Wassad, the ICARUS voting member for Pakistan 's Muslim community
continued, "In fact, some of my best friends are Buddhist."

And Rabbi Shmuel Wasserstein said from Jerusalem, "Of course, I love
Judaism, and I think it's the greatest religion in the world. But to
be honest, I've been practicing Vipassana meditation every day before
minyan (daily Jewish prayer) since 1993. So I get it."

However, there was one snag - ICARUS couldn't find anyone to give the
award to. All the Buddhists they called kept saying they didn't want
the award.

When asked why the Burmese Buddhist community refused the award,
Buddhist monk Bhante Ghurata Hanta said from Burma, "We are grateful
for the acknowledgment, but we givethis award to all humanity, for
Buddha nature lies within each of us." Groehlichen went on to say
"We're going to keep calling around until we find a Buddhist who
will accept it. We'll let you know when we do."
at 21:31 2 comments
ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) မွ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း တဦးျဖစ္တဲ႕ ကိုသက္ဦး (သုံးေရာင္ခ်ယ္) အီးေမး မွတဆင့္ ေပး ပို႕ပါသည္။

Secret video reveals Burma's crackdown on monks in prison

ABC Online, Australia

A hidden camera has provided a rare glimpse inside Burma's mental health system which is used to incarcerate opposition figures and politically active monks.

At one hospital where activities were filmed by a Burmese video journalist, there are hundreds of patients and not enough supplies to go around.

The head nurse says more clothes and shoes are needed.

She also acknowledges criminals are held there, confined because of their mental condition.

It appears from the footage that some of the "criminals" in the hospital are monks.

The film shows they are allowed to keep their heads shaven but are forced to give up their robes, although some defy that rule.

Many observers have long suspected that Burma's junta has confined political monks to mental institutions to treat what the regime claims is a sickness.

Bo Kyi from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma told Australia Network's NewsHour that it is not known how many people were rounded up after the monk-led political uprising known as the Saffron Revolution.

The uprising was crushed by the military junta in September 2007.

"After the September revolution, some monks were sent to mental hospitals, also other activists," he said.

"The military regime regards them as the crazy men or something."

Silencing opposition

The video of monks in the mental institution appears to confirm reports that opposition groups have been receiving for years.

"Because we cannot go to mental hospitals, it's really difficult to collect information," Mr Bo said.

"But definitely we knew that monks were in hospital because of their participation in the monk struggle and the other sorts of protests."

That kind of treatment has helped the regime silence political opposition, particularly from Buddhist temples and monasteries.

Generous donations also ensure some toe the line.

But some monks will speak out.

"There will be other monks who will appear again," one said, seemingly unafraid of the risk of years in prison or a mental hospital just for speaking to a journalist.

"They won't be afraid to die.

"If there is any grime, there will be someone who will clean that grime."

Min Ko Nain Is Fighting For Suffering In Prison

A prominent activist serving a 65-year prison term in Burma is suffering from high blood pressure and needs urgent medical care, an opposition party spokesman said Thursday.

Min Ko Naing, a leader of the 88 Generation Students group that was at the forefront of a failed 1988 pro-democracy uprising, is being held in a remote prison in the country's northeast. He was arrested on Aug. 21, 2007 along with more than a dozen other activists after staging a street protest against a massive fuel price hike.

Khin Maung Swe, a spokesman for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), said Min Ko Naing's sister told him about the activist's worsening health Wednesday.

"The family of Min Ko Naing is very concerned with his health," said Khin Maung Swe, adding that relatives hoped to visit the ailing dissident next month. "He's suffering from hypertension and needs proper medical attention."

Human rights groups believe the ruling military junta is holding roughly 65,000 prisoners, including more than 2,200 political detainees. Many are jailed in remote locations with little access to medical care.

The most prominent political prisoner is opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years. Suu Kyi's NLD party won general elections in 1990 but the military refused to give up power and increased its repression of the country's pro-democracy movement.

"It's very inhumane to hold political prisoners in far-flung prisons," said Khin Maung Swe, a senior member of Suu Kyi's party who had been imprisoned for 15 years. "According to my experience, proper and prompt medical care is almost impossible in most prisons."

A spokesman for the junta could not be reached for immediate comment.

HOW DO YOU BELIEVE 2010 ELECTION

Although Burma's military regime has announced no election law nor declared the date of the poll it plans to hold in 2010, preparations appear to have begun in Naypyidaw.

Informed sources suggest that potential candidates for president, vice-president, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and defense minister have been chosen.

The current list may yet be modified before the election and some potential candidates in the list could be removed. All depends on the regime leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe, who still calls the shots.

Than Shwe, who is in his late 70s, and his number 2, Dep Snr-Gen Maung Aye, who is only slightly younger, will retire soon after the election. Informed sources said that they are building lavish new homes in Naypyidaw for their retirement.

However, before vacating the throne, Than Shwe will make sure he and his family can live in safely, leaving his trusted officers in high positions to ensure security.

Than Shwe has reportedly already endorsed the junta's No 3, Gen Thura Shwe Mann, joint chief-of-staff in the armed forces, to become president of post-election Burma.

According to sources close to the military elite, Shwe Mann, 61, will be nominated by the representatives of the military in the future Senate and House, to be formed after the planned 2010 election.

The military will receive 25 percent of the seats at the village, township, state, regional and district levels in the new governing body, according to the 2008 Constitution.

There will be three nominees for the presidency—one from the military contingent, one from the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (Union Assembly or Senate) and one from the members of the Pyithu Hluttaw (People's Assembly or House). The Senate and the House will then vote to choose the president.

Shwe Mann, a protégé of Than Shwe, has a reputation of being down to earth and a good listener, but he has yet to show his teeth on a broad range of social, economic and political issues. His vision of Burma’s future is unknown.

However, Shwe Mann increasingly oversees regular meetings on political and security affairs with high-ranking military officials in Rangoon and Naypyidaw—perhaps a further sign that Than Shwe will take a back seat after the election.

Shwe Mann and his wife are close to Than Shwe’s family on a personal level, undertaking shopping trips together to Singapore.

Recently, Shwe Mann was the subject of extensive news coverage focusing on his secret mission to North Korea in November.

According to the Constitution, one of the duties of the new president will be to head the National Defense and Security Council, which has the power to declare a state of emergency and nullify the Constitution.

Than Shwe's choice for one of the two proposed vice-presidents, according to informed sources, is Maj-Gen Htay Oo, the minister of agriculture and irrigation and a key leader of the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), the junta-backed mass organization.

Htay Oo recently visited Japan—displaying, according to military sources, all the qualities of a politician rather than an army officer.

The choice of the second vice-president is likely to fall to an ethnic leader. It's worth recalling that Burma’s first and second presidents were Shan and Karen.

Analysts ponder the question of who will become commander-in- chief of the armed forces.

Than Shwe currently holds Burma’s most powerful position in the armed forces and analysts say he will hand this position over only to his most trusted ally.

There appear to be plenty of subordinates who could fill the shoes.
They include Lt-Gen Hla Htay Win, Maj-Gen Ko Ko, Maj-Gen Tin Ngwe and Maj-Gen Kyaw Swe. All are close to Than Shwe and Dep Snr-Gen Gen Maung Aye, the current army chief and deputy to Than Shwe.

Maj-Gen Tin Ngwe is said by analysts to be the front runner for the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He recently accompanied Than Shwe when he made an official visit to Sri Lanka.

Born in Nyaung-Oo, in the central heartland of Burma, Tin Ngwe attended the Defense Services Academy Intake 22, together with Kyaw Swe, later serving as G-1 in the defense ministry. He is known to be loyal to Than Shwe and Shwe Mann.

According to the new Constitution, the commander-in-chief will control the ministries of defense, border affairs and home affairs, exercising wide executive powers.

Analysts also tip Lt-Gen Myint Swe, a Than Shwe protégé, as a possible candidate for the post of defense minister. He attended the 15th intake of the Defense Services Academy in 1971 and is currently commander of the Bureau of Special Operations 5.

LET US SUPPORT BLC PROJECT FOR ICC

The Burma Lawyers’ Council (BLC) is attending a Nov 18-26 meeting of the Assembly of State Parties to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to discuss the Burmese military government's alleged crimes against humanity, war crimes and other human rights abuses.

BLC General Secretary Aung Htoo, who is based in exile, has been attending the meetings in the Netherlands as an NGO delegate from Burma for the first time.

According to the International Criminal Court's (ICC) web site, the grouping will discuss "ICC Campaigns in Asia: Prospects and Challenges in Afghanistan, Burma and Indonesia" on Nov. 25.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Monday, Thein Oo, the chairman of the BLC, said, “We intend to cooperate with International Criminal Court and to create a network to take more action against the Burmese military junta. Moreover, we intend to share our experience of the junta’s abuses and crimes, and discuss how we can cooperate to establish a regional network.”

He added: “We expect the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) to cooperate among state parties and put more pressure on the Burmese junta through the UN and the ICC. We especially want to lobby harder because representatives of China and other world powers will be attending."

The CICC is a network of over 2,500 nongovernment organizations which work closely with the ICC.

“Actually, we all need to practice alternative approaches to the Burmese military junta and pave ways for preventive actions,” Thein Oo said.

The director of Thailand-based rights group Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, Aung Myo Min, told The Irrawaddy on Monday: “It’s very hard to put the issue of the Burmese junta's crimes against humanity to the ICC because Burma is not yet a signatory to the ICC. But, the UN Security Council can take the junta to task about its deplorable humna rights record. The Burmese regime has commited many crimes such as the conscription of child soldiers and the systematic rape of ethnic women which should be put before the ICC.”

The Burmese military authorities issued Order 1/2009 in April, blacklisting the BLC as an unlawful association. This order came alongside a campaign of defamation in the Burmese state-run press, which denounced the BLC as an “enemy of the state,” and accusing BLC members, in particular those working with the ICC, of “violating the rule of law of Burma.”

The ICC was established in 2002 as a permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The ICC has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes which have been committed or are being committed if a given state’s judicial system is unable or unwilling to investigate and take legal action to ensure justice.

In July, the CICC called on the Security Council to press for the surrender and trial of President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and others wanted for serious crimes committed in Darfur.

Possible Release of Suu Kyi Cheers Political Prisoners , But Not Yet

A 73-year-old mother broke into tears when she heard the message from her son, Tun Tun Oo, who is in Meik-Hitla Prison, one of thousands of political prisoners in Burmese jails.

The message was delivered by his brother, who had visited him in prison.
Tun Tun Oo told his mother not to worry about him, and "sooner or later, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will be free."

"My son preferred to talk about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom rather than his own,” she said, holding back more tears. “He’s said repeatedly that only Aung San Suu Kyi can bring better times to Burma."

After news reports appeared recently saying that the regime might release Suu Kyi, people across Burma—and in prisons—have hoped the news is true, and not just another tactic by the military government to buy time before the 2010 election.

The Associated Press news agency reported on Nov. 9, that a senior Burmese diplomat said the junta will release Suu Kyi to take part in the reorganization of her political party.

The wife of a political prisoner in Kalay Prison said, "I told my husband, and he was very happy. He didn't ask about home immediately, but he asked about more Suu Kyi news and information about the NLD. He asked me to give him details about his colleagues who are not in prison."

She said she knew her husband wanted such news, and she had prepared magazines and journals to give to him, since authorities now allow prisoners to read the news in prison.

"They don’t have access to radio, so they don't know the latest news,” she said. “He told me to bring news. He wants it more than food and medicine. He thrives on it," she said.

Similarly, a family member of political prisoner Shwe Maung, who is bedridden in Pyapon Prison with a chronic illness, told The Irrawaddy that his morale improved noticeably when he heard the news of her possible release.

"His is suffering. He can't speak much, and he can't walk, but when he heard the news, he started feeling better," said a family member.

Rangoon tea shops, popular gathering places for regular gossip and the sharing of information with friends, have been buzzing with speculation about Suu Kyi’s release, and the neighborhood where her compound is located has seen more visitors and tourists.

"Since the news came out, more people are coming to the corner of University Avenue [where Suu Kyi lives], and frequenting teashops and restaurants close to Sayar San Road," said a resident who lives on University Avenue.

A Rangoon journalist said: “Some people believe she could be freed, but it will take time, while others have suspicions that the regime is just playing on the news to please the US. Nevertheless, it is obvious everybody wants to see her free."

The Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma has estimated that there are 2,100 political prisoners in Burma.

စစ္အုပ္စုထဲက ေၿပာတိုင္း အေမရိကန္ မယံု

ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား မၾကာမီ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္မွ လႊတ္ေပးလိမ့္မည္ဆုိသည့္ ေျပာဆိုခ်က္မ်ားအေပၚ သံသယျဖစ္မိေၾကာင္း အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဟီလာရီကလင္တန္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံတြင္ လာမည့္တနဂၤေႏြေန႔၌ အေမရိကန္သမၼတ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္ အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ေတြ႔ဆုံမည့္ အာရွ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသ စီးပြားေရးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈအဖြဲ႔ (ေအပက္) ညီလာခံတြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ အထူးတလည္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေျပာဆိုလိမ့္မည္ဟု မထင္ေၾကာင္း ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ေရာက္ရိွေနသည့္ မစၥစ္ ကလင္တန္က ေျပာၾကားျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွ ၫႊန္ၾကားေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးမင္းလြင္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို စစ္အစိုးရက လႊတ္ေပးႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း၊ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အေနျဖင့္ ေနာက္ႏွစ္က်င္းပမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ေအပီသတင္းဌာနသို႔ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေရးသည္ စိတ္ရွည္သည္းခံရန္လိုအပ္ၿပီး ေရရွည္အားထုတ္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမည့္ကိစၥျဖစ္သည္ဟုလည္း မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ABS-CBN သတင္းခ်ယ္နယ္က ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲတခုတြင္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း က်ဳိဒိုသတင္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပသည္။

ထို႔အျပင္ ေရွ႕နွစ္ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို အမ်ားလက္ခံႏိုင္ရန္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ အတိုက္အခံမ်ား၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား အားလုံးပါ၀င္သည့္ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈကို ျပည္တြင္း၌ စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးက တိုက္တြန္းထားသည္။

“က်မတို႔အေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာစစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကို ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈေတြမွာ ပါ၀င္လာေအာင္ အားေပးတာ၊ တိုက္တြန္းတာ၊ ေဖ်ာင္းဖ်တာေတြ လုပ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေတြဟာ ပထမဆုံးလိုအပ္ခ်က္ပါ” ဟု ၎ကေျပာသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း ေျပာႏိုင္ဆိုႏိုင္ရိွသည့္ တ႐ုတ္ႏွင့္အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံတို႔ကိုလည္း ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ား အက်ဳိးရိွေစမည့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီျဖစ္ထြန္းေရးအတြက္ ကူညီလုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးရန္ ေျပာဆိုထားေၾကာင္း မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ေျပာသည္။

၎က “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈ မွားယြင္းေနတယ္ဆိုတာ သံသယျဖစ္စရာ မရိွပါဘူး။ ေမးစရာရိွတာက သူတုိ႔ေတြ ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာၾကာမွားေနမလဲဆိုတာနဲ႔ ကိုယ့္ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ လြတ္လပ္မႈနဲ႔ အခြင့္အေရး လမ္းေၾကာင္းဆီ ဦးတည္ဖို႔ သူတို႔ကို အားေပးတိုက္တြန္းႏိုင္မလား ဆိုတာပါပဲ ” ဟုေျပာသည္။

အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ တိုက္႐ိုက္ေတြ႔ဆုံမႈမ်ား စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ၌ အေျပာင္းအလဲမ်ား မျဖစ္မခ်င္း ပိတ္ဆို႔တားျမစ္မႈမ်ားကို ႐ုပ္သိမ္းရန္ အဆင္သင့္မျဖစ္ေသးေၾကာင္း မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ေျပာသည္။

“က်မတို႔အေနနဲ႔ လုပ္ႏိုင္စရာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရိွတာကို လုပ္မွာမဟုတ္ေသးပါဘူး။ ဘာလုိ႔လဲဆိုေတာ့ အခုအစိုးရကို ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့မႈ မေပးခ်င္လို႔ပါပဲ” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

ယမန္ေန႔ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား လႊတ္ေပးရန္ ထပ္မံေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၿပီး လြတ္လပ္ တရားမွ်တၿပီး အမ်ားလက္ခံသည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျပဳလုပ္ႏိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ အားလုံးပါ၀င္ခြင့္ရမွသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္ကို တရား၀င္အျဖစ္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ျမင္ၾကမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း မစၥစ္ကလင္တန္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ယခုလအေစာပိုင္းတြင္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အေရွ႕အာရွႏွင့္ပစိဖိတ္ေရးရာ လက္ေထာက္ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး မစၥတာ ကာ့တ္ကမ္ဘဲလ္ႏွင့္ ဒု-လက္ေထာက္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး စေကာ့မာရွယ္တုိ႔သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ယင္းခရီးစဥ္သည္ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္အတြင္း အဆင့္အျမင့္ဆုံး အေမရိကန္အရာရိွမ်ား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

Aung San Suu Kyi has proposed

On Wednesday, Suu Kyi met with Nyan Win, the NLD spokesperson, and asked him to inform the party’s executive committee of “important” proposals. Nyan Win declined to elaborate on the nature of her proposals.
When The Irrawaddy asked Nyan Win on Friday if Suu Kyi had discussed meeting with Than Shwe to talk about economic sanctions, he said: “The sanctions would be the most suitable issue to start any high-level talks.” However, he declined to elaborate, saying, “Wait until Tuesday.”

He said the NLD central executive committee will discuss Suu Kyi’s proposals on Monday and probably issue a statement on Tuesday.

Presumably, if given her party’s consent, Suu Kyi would write a letter to Than Shwe seeking a direct meeting or make a proposal through Aung Kyi, who serves as Than Shwe’s liaison officer to Suu Kyi.

According to sources, Suu Kyi will also ask the regime to allow her to meet with NLD party leaders and to visit the homes of three executive committee members—party chairman Aung Shwe; secretary U Lwin; and Lun Tin, all of whom are in poor health.

In the past, Suu Kyi has angered the junta because of her vocal support for economic sanctions, but in recent months she has indicated that she is now open to cooperating with the regime to work for their removal. Her change of mind comes at a time when the US has initiated a new direct engagement policy with Burma and has held several exploratory discussions with high-level generals.

In August, Suu Kyi sent a letter to Than Shwe, offering to cooperate with the government and requesting to meet with Western diplomats to discuss the extent and impact of the sanctions.

Since then she met twice with liaison Aung Kyi. A short while later, she was allowed to meet with Rangoon-based diplomats from the UK, Australia and the United States in order to gather information about the impact of sanctions.

Expectations that Suu Kyi may soon be released from house arrest or given more discretionary freedom are running high in Rangoon, following a statement by Min Lwin, the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, given to The Associated Press in Manila on Monday, in which he said, “There is a plan to release her [Suu Kyi] soon.”

Meanwhile, Suu Kyi’s lawyers filed an appeal with the Supreme Court on Friday that challenged the legality of her house arrest.

The United States said on Thursday that if Suu Kyi were not allowed to participate in Burma’s 2010 elections, the international community would not consider the election credible. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week called for Suu Kyi's unconditional release to ensure the elections would be free and fair.

Women Arrested for Holding Buddhist Prayer

Rangoon special branch police have arrested Naw Ohn Hla and three other women who regularly hold Buddhist prayer services for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and charged them in a special court in Insein Prison.

They are charged with inciting activities to undermine public order under section 505 (B) of the penal code, according to attorney U Kyaw Hoe.

He said the women, who were arrested on Oct. 3, regularly held religious services for Suu Kyi on Tuesdays. They are being held in Insein Prison. The case could be heard on Monday, he said.

If found guilty, the women could be sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Special branch police said Naw Ohn Hla was carrying a copy of the Kamavaca, a Buddhist scripture recited at monastic services, he said.

The other women arrested were Ma San San Myint, Ma Cho Cho and Ma Cho Wai Lwin. The women were arrested at San-Pya Market in Thin-Gan-Gyun Township in Rangoon while on their way home from a monastery after offering food to monks.

Naw Ohn Hla, a former National League for Democracy (NLD) member, has been frequently detained by authorities for her political activism.

Her attorney said the women were simply engaged in a private Buddhist religious ceremony.

"The Kamavaca is just a religious scripture, and there’s no reason for arresting people for having it," he said.

A monk in Rangoon, told of the arrests, said it was an infringement of religious freedom.

"I feel sorry to hear this news,” he said. “It is an extreme act that shows no respect for religious freedom in our country. It is a pure violation of religious freedom. Almost every Buddhist usually keeps an image of the Buddha, some mantra or religious teaching close at hand. The act was based on prejudice and it makes the government look bad in the eyes of the international community.”

The Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma says 2, 168 political prisoners are being held in Burmese prisons.

Clinton says China should play role in Burma

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has urged China and India to push Burma toward democracy.

Clinton says "we need a broad response by the nations in the region" to the situation in Myanmar, which has been under military rule since 1962.

She is in Singapore to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings ahead of the group's summit this weekend.

She told reporters Wednesday that China has an opportunity to play an important role.

China is Burma's biggest ally, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has long been trying to persuade the Burmese junta to allow democracy.

Clinton said countries must persuade the junta to have free fair elections by 2010.

ko KYAW THU'S VIEW

Junta may free Suu Kyi for poll: Myanmar diplomat

Singapore, Nov 9 (AP) Myanmar's military-ruled government may release pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi soon so she can play a role in next year's general elections, according to a senior Myanmar diplomat.

The remarks by Min Lwin, rare for a Myanmar government official on an overseas visit were in line with vague comments in recent years by the junta that it intends to free Suu Kyi soon. But officials have given no time frame and have made no real moves to release her despite hinting they would.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years, and not been able to speak publicly since she was last taken into detention in May 2003.

A court recently sentenced the 64-year-old to an additional 18 months of house arrest for briefly sheltering an uninvited American in a trial that drew global condemnation.

HANDS SHAKING IN PRISONS

Former Burmese military intelligence officials jailed after the fall of their boss, Gen Khin Nyunt, in October 2004 are reportedly nurturing contacts, and even making friends, with political prisoners.

The imprisoned former military intelligence officials include men responsible for arresting and prosecuting dissidents,When two top military intelligence officers, Brig-Gen Thein Swe and Col Khin Aung, were admitted to Myingyun Prison, dissident prisoners debated how they should behave towards the representatives of the repressive regime.

“When the MIS [Military Intelligence Service] officers were put into the separated cell block where political prisoners are detained, we discussed whether we should not talk with them by sanctioning them or whether we should be friendly to them by helping each other in prison,” said a former political prisoner at Myingyun Prison.

“Finally, political prisoners decided to be friendly toward the MIS officers,” he said. “We are human, so we cannot take revenge against them when they are in trouble.”

Thein Swe, who was the head of the MIS international relations department, was also known for permitting the publication of the semi-official Myanmar Times weekly.

After the MIS was abolished in 2004, he was arrested along with several brigadier colleagues: Myint Aung Zaw, Hla Aung, Kyaw Han, Than Tun, Myint Zaw and Kyaw Thein. Khin Aung was a deputy with the MIS administration department.

Thein Swe and Khin Aung were among 38 Burmese military intelligence officers sentenced in April 2005 to terms of imprisonment ranging from 20 years to more than 100 years on charges including bribery and corruption.

Like political prisoners, many intelligence officers were sent to serve their sentences in remote prisons scattered far from Rangoon. Thein Shwe and Khin Aung were sent to Myingyun Prison in middle Burma, notorious for ill-treating political dissidents.

Two Aung San Suu Kyi aides—Win Htain and Khin Maung Swe—and Karen rebel leader Mann Yin Sein were jailed in Myingyun Prison.

According to family members of political prisoners held at Myingyun, two intelligence officers are now learning about meditation methods from student activists who were victims of the MIS. In exchange, the former MIS men are teaching English to the imprisoned activists.

“I thought this is quite a human story when I heard from my son about their relationship with former intelligence officers,” said a member of the family of a political prisoner in Myingyun Prison. “Those who put my son in prison were cruel. But now they are my son’s friends.”

The former spy chief Khin Nyunt is now serving a 44-year suspended sentence under house arrest.

One of his former aides, ex-Foreign Minister Win Aung, died last week in prison, where he was serving a seven-year sentence. No government officials attended his funeral on Sunday.

BIG THIEF IN BURMA (ၿမန္မာၿပည္က သခိုးၾကီး

(ေရႊသူခိုး သန္းေရႊနဲ ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ႀကီးမ်ား ရင္ဘတ္ေပၚက ေရႊတံဆိပ္ေတြမ်ား)။

ယခုတေလာ ေရႊဘံုသာလမ္း (မဂိုလမ္း) မွာ ေရႊအေရာင္းအဝယ္လုပ္ၾကသူေတြ ကံဆိုးမိုးေမွာင္ၾကေနၾကပါ တယ္။ ေရႊေလာကမွာ ႏွစ္(၃၀) ေက်ာ္ အေတြ႔အၾကံဳ ရင့္က်က္ေနသူ “ဦးစိုးတင့္” ကို CID မွ လာေရာက္ဖမ္းဆီး ေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

တည္ဆဲဥပေဒအရ သူခိုးက ရဲနဲ႔ေပါင္းျပီး လက္ညႈိးထိုးျပီး ခိုးရာပါပစၥည္းကို ဒီဆိုင္မွာ ေရာင္းပါတယ္လို႔ စြပ္ဆြဲခံရရင္ အစြပ္ဆြဲခံရတဲ့ဆိုင္ဟာ ဟုတ္ဟုတ္၊ မဟုတ္ဟုတ္ သူတို႔စြပ္ဆြဲတဲ့ တန္ဘိုးအတိုင္း အေလ်ာ္ေပးရေလ့ ရွိပါတယ္။ မေလ်ာ္ဘဲ ျငင္းဆန္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ေထာင္ထဲ ေရာက္သြားႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ အဆိုးဆံုးကေတာ့ ေထာင္ထဲ မေရာက္ခင္ စစ္ေၾကာေရးကာလအတြင္း ရဲေတြရဲ႕မတရားညွင္းပန္း ႏွိပ္စက္မွဳဒဏ္ကို အေသအလဲ ခံစားၾကရတာပါဘဲ။

အဲဒါကို သိတဲ့ ဦးစိုးတင့္က မတရားစြပ္ဆြဲခံရတာျဖစ္ေပမဲ့ သူတို႔ေျပာတဲ့အတိုင္း ေလ်ာ္ေပးပါ့မယ္လို႔ ေျပာဆိုသည့္တိုင္ ျပန္လည္လႊတ္ေပးျခင္း မရွိဘဲ ထိမ္းသိမ္းထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ့ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ေရႊလုပ္ငန္းရွင္ေတြ တေယာက္ျပီးတေယာက္ ေခၚယူစစ္ေဆးေနျပီး အတင္းအက်ပ္ မ်ားျပားလွတဲ့ တန္ဘိုးေတြ သတ္မွတ္ေပးျပီး ေလ်ာ္ခိုင္းေစပါတယ္။

ေရႊကုန္သည္ေတြကို တေယာက္ျပီးတေယာက္ ေခၚယူစစ္ေဆးခ်ိန္တိုင္းမွာ ညွင္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ ရိုက္နွက္ခံထားရလို႔ ခပ္ေျမာ့ေျမာ့ပံုစံျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ဦးစိုးတင့္ကို ျမင္ေအာင္ တမင္တကာ ထုတ္ျပျပီး စစ္ေဆးေနတာလို႔ အမည္မေဖၚလိုတဲ့ ေရႊကုန္သည္တဦးမွ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ထူးဆန္းတာကေတာ့ ေခၚယူစစ္ေဆး ေငြညွစ္ခံရသူေတြဟာ ေတာင္းသေလာက္ အေလ်ာ္ေပးႏိုင္ၾကသူေတြပါဘဲ။ ေထာင္က်ခံမယ့္သူ တေယာက္မွ မပါပါဘူး။ အထူးသျဖင့္ မတရားဖမ္းဆီးခံရသူေတြထဲမွာ ေရႊဘံုသာလမ္းရွိ ေရႊေစ်းကြက္ဥကၠဌ ဦးဝင္းျမင့္ပါဝင္ေနျပီး တန္ဘိုးၾကီးမားလွတဲ့ ေရႊေတြ အေတာင္းခံေနရေၾကာင္း ၾကားသိရပါတယ္။

တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဝင္တို႔ရဲ႕ အထြဠ္အျမတ္ထားရာ ေရႊတိဂုံဘုရားမွာ ကပ္လွဴထားတဲ့ေရႊေတြကို ျပန္ခြာယူေနတာနဲ႔ ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ႕ေနရာအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားရွိ ဘုရားေတြက ေရႊေတြေပ်ာက္ဆံုးမွဳေၾကာင့္ဆိုတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္နဲ႔ ေရႊဘံုသာလမ္းေရႊကုန္သည္ေတြကို ဖမ္းဆီးစစ္ေဆးျပီး ေရႊအေလွ်ာ္ေတာင္းေနတာဟာ အေၾကာင္း ခိုင္ခိုင္လံုလံု ရွိေနပါတယ္။

အေၾကာင္းကေတာ့ ျပည္သူ႔ခ်ဥ္ဖတ္ အာဏာရွင္သန္းေရႊ မိသားစုတည္တဲ့ ၾကပ္ေျပးဘုရားမွာ လိုအပ္ေနတာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ပါသတဲ့။ ျပည္သူျပည္သားေတြရဲ႕ သဒၵါၾကည္ျဖဴစြာ လွဴဒါန္းမွဳ မရွိတဲ့အတြက္ လိုအပ္ေနတဲ့ေရႊေတြကို ယခုလို အၾကံအဖန္လုပ္ျပီး ရွာေဖြေနရတာလို႔ ၾကားသိရပါတယ္။

ေဗဒင္ယၾတာအရ အခ်ိန္မွီေဆာင္ရြက္ရမွာ ျဖစ္သလို သူ ႔ဘုရားကလႊဲလို႔ တျခားဘုရားကို သပၸါယ္တာ မျမင္လိုတဲ့ မိစၦာဒိဠိသန္းေရႊရဲ ႕အမိန္ ႔နဲ ႔ ဘုရားေရႊခြာတဲ့ အကုသိုလ္အမွဳၾကီးကို က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။ ခြာတဲ့ေရႊ ခိုးတဲ့ေရႊေတြနဲ ႔ မလံုေလာက္ေသးတာေၾကာင့္ ေရႊကုန္သည္ေတြထံက ေရႊေတြကို ယခုလို ေအးဓါးျပတိုက္ယူေနၾကတာလို႔ စံုစမ္းသိရွိရေၾကာင္း အသိေပး တင္ျပလိုက္ရပါတယ္။

(စံုစမ္းေဖၚထုတ္တင္ျပသူ - အတြင္းသိ)။

Embezzlement of gold from Pagodas by Than Shwe.

Gold traders in Shwe-Bon-Tha Street (Mogul Street) were in miserable wretched situation for time being. It was begun as Police (CID) arrested well known and experience trader U Soe Tint, who knows all colleagues in his surroundings.

According to the Burmese law, if thief arrested say that he sold the stolen goods to so and so buyer, then police have a right to arrest the buyer without another prove. Then the buyer either repays the amount claimed by thief or otherwise end up in jail. Most of the buyer repays without argument as present day Burmese jurisdiction system is totally unreliable and corrupted with excessive torture and inhuman treatment are added up by police and government authority. Accused buyer normally sell all personal belonging plus borrowing from loan shark to settle the case.

U Soe Tint was ready to settle the case as mentioned above but he is not released in time as expected. Furthermore, many others gold traders in same surrounding followed the same path of where U Soe Tint was gone. They were accused of buying vast amount of gold from illegal channel so they have no choice but to repay. In their investigation and enquiry process, their colleague U Soe Tint was presented in the venue with handcuffed and obvious sign of badly beaten and tortured.

All traders understand the meaning of showing U Soe Tint as a signal for them to be suffered the same if not co-operated. Only strange coincident is that all accused traders are quite well to do and able to repay with none of them will ever dare to go to jail. They all unhappy for aberrantly collecting fund in that way but they have no other choice in unlawful country of present day Burma. Even one respectable Chairman U Win Myint of Shwe-Bon-Thar gold market association was included in that bizarre case.

At the same time, reliable source said that the gold from Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the most reverence and miraculous symbol for all Buddhist, was taken away together with most of the donations money. All that looted to be used in Pagoda built in Nay-Pyi-Taw by most obnoxious Than Shwe. Shwe Dagon Pagoda is not alone but all famous Pagodas around the Burma were in the same deal.

Than Shwe’s Pagoda in Nay-Pyi-Taw was in shortage of funds as no one donates there in genuine faith of generosity. Donations collected there were from fearful people intimidated by authority to contribute by force or from opportunists expecting the favors of authority to get government’s contracts etc. People’s donations for many famous and glorious religious establishments around the Burma drive obnoxious Than Shwe into strong resentment and he is not afraid of consequences thus order his followers to destroy other people donation and embezzle the properties belong to Buddhist institutions.

Amid embezzlement of Pagodas and religious institutions, Than Shwe and gangs swindle the money from Shwe-Bon-Tha Street gold traders. That was based on the greed and occult practice advised by witchcraft call (Ya-dra). Most of the traders in Shwe-Bon-Thar Street were in horror of demolishing their families’ lifetime saving for Than Shwe’s religious belief.

(Reported by Insider).

A Victim of the Junta’s Dog-Eat-Dog World

Win Aung, a former foreign minister and one of ex-spy chief Gen Khin Nyunt’s aides, died on Wednesday morning at 1:55 a.m. local time in Rangoon’s infamous Insein Prison. He was 65.

According to prison sources in Rangoon, Win Aung died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Burmese authorities allowed Win Aung’s family to post his obituary in Thursday’s state-run newspapers.

He is survived by his wife, one daughter and two sons. His younger son, Thaung Suu Nyein, is the editor-in-chief of a leading Rangoon-based weekly, 7 Days News Journal.

Win Aung was arrested in September 2004, a month before a government crackdown on powerful Military Intelligence officers. The junta announced Win Aung and his deputy Khin Maung Win’s retirement following news that Win Aung had told senior officials at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations Ministry meeting in Jakarta in July 2004 that Burmese Prime Minister Khin Nyunt was in political trouble.

“He [Khin Nyunt] is in a dangerous position,” Win Aung was quoted as saying. “Khin Nyunt may have to flee the country. If that happens, I will have to flee with him.”

Win Aung was replaced by Maj-Gen Nyan Win, the deputy head of the military training college who was junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe’s choice.

After his arrest, Wing Aung was detained under house arrest for two years. In 2006, he was sentenced to a 7-year jail term on charges of misuse of authority. He was detained in Insein Prison until he died.

Win Aung served as Burma’s foreign minister under the military regime from 1998 to 2004. He had previously been Burmese ambassador to Germany and the United Kingdom before being recalled to Burma to take up the foreign minister position.

Win Aung led a Burmese delegation to the UN General Assembly in September 2003 a few months after a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s convoy in Depayin had led to international criticism of the regime and economic sanctions on Burma.

At the UN, he said it was “disconcerting that some countries have chosen to turn a blind eye to the reality.”

In his earlier days, Win Aung was an officer with Military Intelligence. As a major, he was close to then spy chief Brig-Gen Tin Oo, the No 2 in the country after dictator Ne Win.

Following Tin Oo’s removal, Win Aung was reappointed as a counsel-general with several Burmese consulates in Asia in the early 1980s.

Fluent in English, Win Aung was said to be media savvy with foreign journalists. Unlike current Foreign Minister Nyan Win, he was willing to give regular interviews with foreign media, including Time Magazine.

“I am a democratic person myself,” Win Aung told Time in 1999. “I would like my children and myself to live under a real democratic situation.”

He added that this sentiment was also held by junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe and other members of the junta.

Before his removal from the foreign minister post, he wrote religious and political articles under the pen name of Sithu Nyein Aye.

Burma observers generally concurred that Win Aung was one of the first senior junta officials to become a victim of the dog-eat-dog world that exists in Burma’s military hierarchy.

US ENVOY MEETS IRON LADY IN BURMA

Aung San Suu Kyi Appears With US Envoy

RANGOON (AFP) -- Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi made a rare appearance in front of reporters at a Rangoon hotel Wednesday before holding talks with a visiting U.S. envoy.

Dressed in maroon traditional dress, the Nobel laureate smiled but said nothing as she headed into the meeting with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell.

The Nobel Laureate was driven to the hotel in central Rangoon from the lakeside mansion where she has spent most of the last two decades under house arrest.

To The Top

US envoys in historic meeting with Burma's PM

RANGOON (AFP) – The most senior US official to visit Burma for nearly a decade and a half met the military-led nation's prime minister Wednesday as Washington seeks to improve ties with the ruling junta.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, along with his deputy Scot Marciel, were also set to meet the detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi later in the day.

The US duo arrived in the remote administrative capital Naypyidaw on Tuesday on a two-day mission aimed at pushing a new policy of engagement by the administration of President Barack Obama.

"They are meeting now," a Burmese official told AFP on condition of anonymity after the talks with Prime Minister Thein Sein in Naypyidaw began early Wednesday.

Burma's officials said the US delegation was not expected to meet Senior General Than Shwe, the reclusive junta leader.

Campbell is the highest ranking US official to travel to Burma since Madeleine Albright went as US ambassador to the United Nations in 1995 during Bill Clinton's presidency.

The Obama administration recently shifted US policy because its longstanding approach of isolating Burma had failed to bear fruit. But Washington has said it will not ease sanctions without progress on democracy and human rights.

The visit by Campbell and Marciel is a follow-up to discussions in New York in September between US and the Burmese officials, the highest-level US contact with the regime in nearly a decade.

Campbell and Marciel at the time also raised US concerns about Burma's possible military links with nuclear-armed North Korea.

US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the current visit was a "fact-finding" mission, adding that it was the "first step, or I guess I should say the second step in the beginning of a dialogue with Burma."

Asked what Campbell discussed on Tuesday in talks with the information minister and local organisations, Kelly said: "They laid out the way we see this relationship going forward, how we should structure this dialogue, but they were mainly in a listening mode."

Campbell and Marciel were due to fly to the former capital Rangoon later Wednesday to meet Suu Kyi and members of her National League for Democracy party, a US embassy spokesman said.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi, 64, had her house arrest extended by another 18 months in August, prompting an international outcry. She has spent most of the past two decades in detention.

NLD spokesman Nyan Win has said the visit is the "start of direct engagement between the US and Myanmar government" but added that the party was not expecting any immediate "big change".

Suu Kyi will be discussed when Obama meets Southeast Asian leaders at a regional summit in Singapore in mid-November, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Tuesday, adding that Thein Sein was expected to attend.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) favours engagement but has been accused of going soft on Burma's generals.

The junta prolonged Suu Kyi's detention after she was convicted over an incident in which US national John Yettaw swam to her lakeside house. But critics say the charges were trumped up to keep her out of elections in 2010.

In August, leader Than Shwe held an unprecedented meeting with visiting US senator Jim Webb which yielded the release of Yettaw.

Thein Sein told Asian leaders at a summit in Thailand last month that the junta sees a role for Suu Kyi in fostering reconciliation ahead of the promised elections next year and could ease restrictions on her.

The junta refused to acknowledge the NLD's landslide win in the last elections, in 1990. The United States toughened sanctions after the regime cracked down on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007.