IAEA HEADS TO BURMA

IAEA to investigate Burma's nuclear program

Updated June 30, 2010 20:43:24


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia expels Burma commander’s daughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ယင္းအမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ မဇင္မြန္ေအး က အယူခံဝင္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း အယူခံ ပယ္ခ်ခံခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Than Shwe the Third 'Worst of the Worst'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REGIME ELECTION ISSUSES MORE RAGID RULES FOR PARTIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO AUNG SAN SUU KYI !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burma"s Regime buys 50 Jet Fighters with National Revenue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POLITICAL VIEWPOINT STAMENT OF 88GSE

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

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

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

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

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



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

ဤကဲ့သို႔အေျခအေနဆိုးမ်ားျဖင့္ႀကံဳေတြ႔ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရေသာျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္စစ္ဘက္အာဏာပိုင္တို႔မွ ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေရး လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသည္ဟူေသာ သတင္းထြက္ေပၚလာသည့္ အတြက္မ်ား စြာစိုးရိမ္
ေသာကျဖစ္ရပါသည္ ။

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

သို႔ျဖစ္ပါ၍ စစ္အင္အားစုႀကီးတရပ္္ျဖစ္လာမည့္ အေျခအေနဆိုးမ်ားကို ႀကိဳတင္တားဆီးႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစစ္အစိုးရအားကုလသမဂၢလံုၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီမွထိေရာက္စြာျဖင့္အလွ်င္အျမန္အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္ပါရန္
ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ အင္အားစုမ်ားမွ အေလးအနက္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။

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




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

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

Myat Thi ha 31 61 61 03181 ( BDF)

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

San Shir ( 510 ) 356 – 7201 (BSA)

Tay Za Thura + 45 50 15 75 02

ကိုေတဇသူရ + 45 50 15 75 02

Suu Kyi Says Burmese Have Right Not to Vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myanmar military nukes would destabilise region: US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

PM’s party appoints Chinese businessman

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

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

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

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

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

AFTER ELECTION DATE, US TOP OFFICIER STARTS JOURNEY TO MAESOT

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

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

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

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


ဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္၏ ေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ားသည္ တေကာင္ႂကြက္အသံျဖစ္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္ ေျပာၾကား

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

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

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

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

ယင္းသို႔ မစၥတာဂ်င္မ္၀က္ဘ္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေရးကို အမ်ားႏွင့္ကြဲျပားစြာ ေျပာဆိုေနျခင္းသည္ အလြန္ဆိုး၀ါးသည္ဟု ဦး၀င္းတင္က ေျပာသည္။

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

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

ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ယခုနွစ္အတြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ျပဳလုပ္ေပးမည္ဟု တရား၀င္ထုတ္ျပန္ေျပာဆိုထားေသာ္လည္း ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ အတိအက် ရက္သတ္မွတ္ ေျပာဆိုျခင္း မရိွေသးေပ။

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

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

US DECIDES TO WATCH CLOSELU N KOREA-BURMA TIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BURMA DENIES NUCLEAR PROJECT

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

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

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

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

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

IAEA INTERESTS IN TO SEEK BURMA'S NUCLEAR PROJECT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BURMA'S SECRET NUCLEAR DISCLOSES ON MEDIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

တ႐ုတ္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္သည္ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း စြမ္းအင္လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား၊ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ၿပီး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးရန္ရိွသည္ဟုလည္း တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ထားသည္။

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

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

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

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

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

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

JIM WEBB CANCLES VISIT ON BURMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five facts about China-Myanmar relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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