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။