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။