The Pearl ပုလဲသြယ္

25-12-2011 Pope prays for Syria and Myanmar in Christmas message

2011-12-25T22:22:00.001+05:30

ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရး ဆက္လက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးဖုိ႔ ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္း ႏုိးေဆာ္
VOA ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ေဆြးေႏြးမႈေတြ ဆက္လက္ ျပဳလုပ္ဖုိ႔ ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းႀကီး ဘန္းနဒစ္ (Benedict) က ႏုိးေဆာ္လုိက္ပါတယ္။ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၂,ဝဝဝ ေက်ာ္က ေယ႐ႈခရစ္ေတာ္ ဖြားျမင္ခဲ့တဲ့ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ျပဳတဲ့ ဒီခရစၥမတ္ေန႔မွာ ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းႀကီးက အခုလုိ ေတာင္းဆုိလုိက္တာပါ။ ဆီးရီးယားႏုိင္ငံမွာ ေသြးထြက္သံယုိမႈေတြ အဆုံးသတ္ဖုိ႔ အာရွတဝန္းက ေရေဘးဒုကၡသည္ေတြ၊ အာဖရိက ေတာင္ပုိင္းက အငတ္ေဘး ရင္ဆုိင္ေနရသူေတြ အပါအဝင္ ကမၻာတလႊားက ဒုကၡသည္ေတြအတြက္ ေရာမၿမိဳ႕ စိန္႔ပီတာစ္ (St. Peter’s) ရင္ျပင္ကေန တကမၻာလုံးကုိ ပုိ႔သတဲ့ ႐ုိးရာ ခရစၥမတ္ ဆုေတာင္း ေမတၱာပုိ႔သတဲ့အထဲ အခုလုိ ထည့္သြင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့တာပါ။ အစၥေရးနဲ႔ ပါလက္စတုိင္း ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲေတြ က်င္းပႏုိင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းႀကီးက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ခရစၥမတ္အခ်ိန္ကာလရဲ႕ အတုအေယာင္ ၿပိဳးၿပိဳးပ်က္ပ်က္ လင္းလက္တာေတြကုိ ေက်ာ္လြန္ၿပီး စစ္မွန္တဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္ကုိ ရွာေဖြၾကဖုိ႔ စိန္႔ပီတာစ္ရင္ျပင္မွာ က်င္းပတဲ့ ခရစၥမတ္ေန႔ မတုိင္ခင္ စေနေန႔ ညေနခင္း တရားပြဲမွာ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာဝင္ေတြကုိ ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းႀကီးက တုိက္တြန္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။

By the CNN Wire Staff
December 25, 2011 -- Updated 1407 GMT (2207 HKT)
Vatican City (CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI prayed for peace in Syria, reconciliation in Myanmar, and comfort in flood-stricken Thailand and the Philippines in his annual Christmas message "To the City and the World" on Sunday.

Addressing a packed St. Peter's Square on a glorious sunny day, the pope pleaded with God to "bring an end to the violence in Syria, where so much blood has already been shed."

More than 5,000 people have died in Syria since President Bashar al-Assad began a brutal crackdown in mid-March on anti-government protesters calling for his ouster, the United Nations said earlier this month.

In his Christmas morning speech, Benedict also urged the international community to help those suffering hunger and insecurity in the Horn of Africa, a reference to famine and violence in Somalia and Kenya.

The pope's reference to the Philippines came as the death toll from flooding there last week topped 1,000, with more than 1,000 more missing.

He also prayed for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, and in Iraq, Afghanistan and South Sudan, and wished "renewed vigor" to those striving for the common good across the Arab world after this year's revolutions.

The speech, called "Urbi et Orbi" in Latin, came a day after the pope delivered a homily that focused on the "essence" of the holiday rather than the "commercial celebration" it has become.

"Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God's humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity," the pope said during Mass on Christmas Eve. "Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light."

The 84-year-old pope, presiding over his seventh Mass as pontiff, also conjured up an image of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, explaining that visitors must bend down to enter its low opening, drawing a tie to what followers of Christ must do to find their faith.

"If we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our 'enlightened' reason," he said. "... In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped."

The pope started off Saturday's celebrations by lighting a peace candle in the window of his study during the unveiling of a larger-than-life Nativity scene in St. Peter's Square. The scene, at 23 feet high and 82 feet wide, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, according to the Vatican's news agency.

Thousands poured into the square and St. Peter's Basilica ahead of the midnight Mass, which was actually held at 10 p.m. this year. Before his homily, the aging pontiff rode down St. Peter's long aisle on a wheeled platform, waving to worshippers.

24-12-2011 Letter from Burma: An old soldier

2011-12-25T19:16:00.001+05:30

By Aung San Suu Kyi

It is always sad when a good life comes to an end. At the same time the knowledge that a human being has completed his sojourn on this earth with due honor is a matter for gratitude and a sense of wonder. When U Lwin, one of the founding members of the NLD, died on Dec. 6 I saw it as the fading away of an old soldier. I found my own attitude curious.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote about U Lwin in one of my Letters from Burma and outlined his career in the military, which included a wartime training course at the Rikugun Shikan Gakko in Japan. I also wrote that he subsequently served as Minister of Planning and Finance, Deputy Prime Minister and State Council member in the Burma Socialist Programme Party administration until he resigned from the last position in 1980.

From 1988 onwards he was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the NLD and it was his meticulous discharge of the office of treasurer that carried the party unblemished through eight rigorous and somewhat unfriendly examinations of its books by the Bureau of Special Investigation. Altogether he served his country as a military man for 19 years and in a civilian capacity for more than twice that length of time. Yet at the conclusion of his life I find myself thinking of him as an old soldier.

Military training has left an unmistakable stamp on some of the older members of the NLD executive committee. To begin, appropriately, at the top, their hair is immaculate, slicked down frequently with a little comb that would materialize out of some pocket or other. Then there is the erect bearing and the precision of movement that speak of endless hours of drill. They also have a tendency to wash and mend their own clothes instead of leaving such chores to the womenfolk as is normal in our society. The best of our old soldiers have a certain sweetness of demeanor which I imagine must be a leftover from the hard days during the war when they had to rely on the affection and generosity of the people for their small comforts and, at times, for their very safety.

When I first met U Lwin I saw him mainly as a conscientious CEC member who spoke little at meetings beyond what related to his duties as treasurer. It was only in 1995 after my release from the first stint of house arrest that I came to know him well. 'Lwin' is a very common name in Burma and to distinguish him from other Lwins in the army he was often referred to as 'U Lwin the handsome' or 'U Lwin the matinee idol.' (I learnt very recently that he was also known to his soldiers as 'bread' because his rounded cheeks took on the semblance of bread loaves when puffed out and wobbling while he played football.) His good looks were evident even in his old age but what struck me about him was the pouting expression that made him look like a sulky baby. This belied his benign nature and camouflaged an engaging wit. When Madelaine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, visited Burma we arranged a breakfast meeting at my house for her and her entourage. U Lwin shared a table with some members of the State Department, one of whom expressed the anxiety then felt in some circles that perhaps I was subject to the control of 'military elements' within the NLD. This was a reference to the four ex-army members of the CEC with whom I worked closely.

"Ma'am," retorted U Lwin in the very polite American army officer manner he had acquired during his stint as military attache in Washington, "How could the four of us do what the four hundred thousand strong Burmese army has been unable to do?"

U Lwin had run away from home to join the Burma Independence Army as soon as he finished high school and he was very humble in acknowledging his lack of higher education. When he was appointed Minister of Finance he frankly told his civil service subordinates that his academic credentials were non-existent and that they would have to teach him a lot. It was this willingness to learn that made U Lwin one of the best ministers in the BSPP government and provided him with an admirable grasp of a wide range of subjects. It was as much a delight to hear him talk about audio systems, horticulture and meditation as to listen to his reminiscences about his days in the fledgling Burmese army.

The soldier in him kept U Lwin unswervingly true to what U Tin U, another of the 'military elements' in the NLD, would refer to as my "commander" status. This was particularly touching in view of the fatherly warmth with which he treated me while upholding an awareness of what he considered to be my official position. When I went to see him at his home a couple of months ago his health was already failing although it was not then obvious that there was such a short span of life left to him. Speaking very slowly, he thanked me formally for having taken the trouble to come to see him despite my "heavy responsibilities." Then when I made my obeisance to him, he blessed me with a gravity that infused each word with deep meaning and sincerity.

U Lwin's passing was gentle. He faded away with great dignity as befitted an old soldier.

(Mainichi Japan)

စစ္သည္အုိႀကီးတဦး

ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ဘဝတခုဆုံးခန္းတုိင္သြားတဲ့အခါ အၿမဲကုိ ဝမ္းနည္းစရာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာ ဒီကမၻာေျမေပၚခရီးမွာ လူသားတဦးရဲ႕ဂုဏ္ျဒဗ္န႔ဲ ယာယီနားခုိမႈၿပီးဆုံးသြားတဲ့အျဖစ္ကုိ သိတဲ့စိတ္က ေက်းဇူးတရားရဲ႕အၾကာင္းအရာနဲ႔ အံ့ၾသဘြယ္ခံစားမႈတခုျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲန္အယ္လ္ဒီတည္ေထာင္သူ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္တဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ ဦးလြင္ ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၆ ရက္ေန႔မွာ ကြယ္လြန္သြားတဲ့အခါ စစ္သည္အုိႀကီးတဦးရဲ႕ ေဖ်ာ့မွိန္သြားတာလုိ႔ ကၽြန္မျမင္မိပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္မကုိယ္တုိင္ရဲ႕ စူးစမ္းလုိစိတ္ကုိလဲ ေတြ႕ျမင္လိုက္ပါ တယ္။

လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၅ ႏွစ္က ကၽြန္မရဲ႕ ျမန္မာျပည္မွေပးစာမ်ားတခုမွာ ဦးလြင္အေၾကာင္းကုိေရးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံ “ရိခုဂြန္ ႐ွင္ခန္ ဂတ္ခုိ” မွာ စစ္အတြင္း ေလ့က်င့္ေရးသင္တန္းတက္ခဲ့တဲ့အေၾကာင္း အပါ အဝင္ သူ႕ရဲ႕စစ္ဘက္ဆုိင္ရာအသက္ေမြးဝမ္းေက်ာင္းဘဝေကာက္ေၾကာင္းကုိေပါ့။ အဲဒိေနာက္ ျမန္မာ့ ဆုိ႐ွယ္လစ္ပါတီအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွာ စီမံကိန္းနဲ႔ဘ႑ာေရးဝန္ႀကီး၊ ဒုတိယဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ေကာင္ စီဝင္အျဖစ္ တာဝန္ဆက္လက္ထမ္းေဆာင္းရင္း ၁၉၈၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေနာက္ဆုံးရာထူးမွႏႈတ္ထြက္လုိက္တဲ့အ ထိ ကၽြန္မေရးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္မွစ၍ သူဟာ အဲန္အယ္လ္ဒီဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ေကာ္မီတီဝင္ျဖစ္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ပါတီရဲ႕ ဘ႑ာ္ေရးမႉး႐ံုးကုိ အထူးစံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးဗ်ဴ႐ုိရဲ႕ ျပင္းထန္ၿပီး ရန္လုိတဲ့ စာရင္းစစ္ေဆးမႈ ၈ ႀကိမ္တိ တိအတြင္း ဘ႑ာေရးမႉး႐ံုးမွ သူ႔ရဲ႕သတိႀကီးစြာႏႈတ္ထြက္မႈျဖင့္ ပါတီရဲ႕သိကၡာကုိဆယ္ခဲ့တာပါ။ စုစု ေပါင္း သူ႔ရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ အမႈထမ္းသက္မွာ ၁၉ ႏွစ္တာ စစ္သည္ ဘဝနဲ႔ ယင္းအခ်ိန္ရဲ႕ ၂ ဆျဖစ္တဲ့ အရပ္ဘက္ဝန္ထမ္းသက္တုိ႔ျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ သူ႔ဘဝနိဂုံး ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ိန္မွာ သူ႔ကုိ စစ္သည္အုိႀကီး တဦးအျဖစ္ကၽြန္မစဉ္းစားမိတာကုိ ကၽြန္မကုိယ္တုိင္ ေတြ႕႐ိွရပါတယ္။

အဲန္အယ္လ္ဒီအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ေကာ္မီတီရဲ႕ သက္ႀကီးအဖြဲ႕ဝင္အခ်ဳိ႕မွာ စစ္သင္တန္းတက္ခဲ့တာဟာ မမွားတဲ့အမွတ္အသားအျဖစ္ က်န္ရစ္လ်က္ပါ။ သင့္ေလ်ာ္စြာ ထိပ္ပုိင္းကစရလွ်င္ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ဆံပင္ေတြ က အေရာင္မဆုိးပကတိအတုိင္း သပ္သပ္ယပ္ယပ္ဆီလိမ္းသလ်က္ အိတ္တခုခုမွာပါတဲ့ ဘီးငယ္ေလး နဲ႔ မၾကာခဏဖီးၾကပါတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ တည့္မတ္တဲ့ဟန္ပန္အမူအရာနဲ႔ တိက်တဲ့လႈပ္႐ွားမႈဟာ စစ္ေရး ျပသင္တန္းရဲ႕ မဆုံးႏိုင္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္မ်ားကုိ ေျပာေနသလိုပါပဲ။ ကၽြန္မတို႔ရဲ႕ လူ႔အသုိင္းအဝုိင္းမွာ သာမန္ လုိျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားရဲ႕ အိမ္မႈေဝယ်ာဝစၥအျဖစ္ သတ္ မွတ္ေပးရမဲ့အစား သူတုိ႔ကုိယ္တုိင္ မိမိ တုိ႔ရဲ႕အဝတ္အစားမ်ားကုိ ေလွ်ာ္ဖြတ္သန္႔စင္လုိစိတ္ ႐ိွေနၾက ပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္မတို႔စစ္သည္အုိႀကီးမ်ား ရဲ႕အေကာင္းဆုံးမ်ားမွာ အမူအရာရဲ႕ သီးသန္႔ခ်ဳိၿမိန္မႈ႐ိွေနပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာလဲ စစ္အတြင္း ၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့ ေန႔ရက္မ်ားရဲ႕ လက္ငုတ္လက္က်န္ျဖစ္ရမယ္လုိ႔ ကၽြန္မစဉ္းစားမိပါတယ္။ အဲဒိအခ်ိန္အခါမွာ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ သက္ေတာင့္သက္သာမႈအနည္းငယ္နဲ႔ တခါတရံ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕လုံၿခဳံ စိတ္ခ်ရမႈမ်ားအတြက္ ျပည္သူမ်ားရဲ႕ ေမတၱာနဲ႔ရက္ေရာမႈမ်ားအေပၚမွီခုိေနရတာကုိ။

ဦးလြင္ကုိ ကၽြန္မပထမဆုံးစတင္ေတြ႕႐ိွရခ်ိန္မွာ သူဟာယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ခိုင္မာကာ တာဝန္ေက်ပြန္တဲ့ ဗဟုိေကာ္မီတီဝင္တဦးျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိျမင္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သူဟာ အစည္းေဝးမ်ားမွာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ဘ႑ာေရးမႉး တာဝန္မ်ားနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့အေၾကာင္းမ်ားမွလြဲၿပီး စကားမ်ားမ်ားေျပာေလ့မ႐ိွခဲ့ပါ။ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္ကၽြန္မ ပထမဆုံးေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္မွ လြတ္ ေျမာက္လာၿပီးေနာက္မွာမွ သူကုိေကာင္း ေကာင္းသိကၽြမ္းခဲ့ပါ တယ္။ “လြင္”ဆိုတဲ့အမည္နာမဟာ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ အသုံးမ်ားပါတယ္။ စစ္တပ္တြင္းက အျခား“လြင္” မ်ားနဲ႔ ခြဲျခားႏိုင္ေအာင္ သူ႔ကုိ မၾကာခဏ “လူေခ်ာ ဦးလြင္” သုိ႔မဟုတ္ “မာတီနိျပယုဂ္ ဦးလြင္”လုိ႔ ေခၚဆုိၾကပါတယ္။ (ေနာက္ဆုံး ကၽြန္မေလ့လာမိတာကေတာ့ သူ႔ကုိ“ေပါင္မုန္႔”လုိ႔ေခၚဆုိၾကတယ္ဆုိ တာပါ။ သူ ေဘာလုံးကစားစဉ္ ေလမႈတ္ထုတ္လႈပ္႐ွားတဲ့အခါမွာ သူ႔ပါးေဖာင္းေဖာင္းဝုိင္းဝိုင္းေလးဟာ ေပါင္မုန္႔ပုံ ေပါက္ေနလုိ႔ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။) သူရဲ႕ဥပဓိ႐ုပ္ေကာင္းျခင္းဟာ အ႐ြယ္အုိခ်ိန္မွာေတာင္ေပၚလြင္ ထင္႐ွားေနလ်က္ပါ။ ကၽြန္မသူ႔ကုိ စိတ္ထဲစြဲမွတ္ခဲ့တာက ႏႈတ္ခမ္းစူစူ အသြင္ဟာ ႏႈတ္ခမ္းစူေနတဲ့ အ႐ုပ္နဲ႔တူေနတာကုိပါ။ ဒီသ႐ုပ္က သူ႔ရဲ႕ ၾကင္နာစရာသဘာဝကုိထင္ေယာင္ထင္မွားျဖစ္ေစကာ ဆြဲေဆာင္မႈ႐ိွတဲ့ ဉာဏ္ရည္ဉာဏ္ေသြးကုိ ဖုံးကြယ္ေနေစပါတယ္။ အဲဒိအခ်ိန္က အေမရိကန္ဆုိင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢသံအမတ္ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ မစၥ မဲဒလင္း ေအာဘ႐ိုက္နဲ႔အဖြဲ႕တုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလာေရာက္လည္ပတ္ စဉ္ ကၽြန္မအိမ္မွာ မနက္စာ တည္ခင္းရင္း ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးဘုိ႔ စီစဉ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဦးလြင္က အေမရိကန္ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္အခ်ဳိ႕နဲ႔ တစားပြဲတည္း အတူထုိင္ၾကပါတယ္။ အဲန္အယ္လ္ဒီအတြင္းမွာ ကၽြန္မဟာ စစ္ဘက္ အုပ္စုရဲ႕ထိန္းေက်ာင္းမႈကုိခံေနရသူ ျဖစ္ေကာင္းျဖစ္မယ္လုိ႔ အခ်ဳိ႕အသုိင္းအဝန္းမွာ ခံစားေနတဲ့စုိးရိမ္ ပူပန္မႈကုိ ဧည့္သည္တဦးက ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ ဗဟုိေကာ္မီတီမွာ ကၽြန္မနဲ႔ အနီးကပ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေနတဲ့ စစ္ဘက္အရာ႐ိွ ႀကီးေဟာင္း ၄ ဦးကုိ ရည္ၫႊန္းလိုက္တာပါ။

ဦးလြင္က ဝါ႐ွင္တန္မွာ စစ္သံမႉးအျဖစ္ထမ္းေဆာင္စဉ္ ရ႐ိွခဲ့တဲ့ အလြန္ယဉ္ေက်းတဲ့ အေမရိကန္စစ္ ဘက္အရာ႐ွိတဦးရဲ႕ အမူအရာနဲ႔ “မဒမ္”ခင္ဗ်ား စစ္သား ေလးသိန္း႐ိွတဲ့ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ကေတာင္ မစြမ္းေဆာင္ႏိုင္တဲ့အလုပ္ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ေလးေယာက္က ဘယ္လုိစြမ္းေဆာင္ႏိုင္မွာလဲဗ်ာလုိ႔ ” ျပန္လည္တုန္႔ျပန္လုိက္ပါတယ္။

ဦးလြင္ဟာ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းၿပီးၿပီးျခင္း အိ္မ္ကထြက္ေျပးကာ ျမန္မာ့လြတ္လပ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ကုိ ဝင္ေရာက္လုိက္ပါတယ္။ သူ႔မွာ အဆင့္ျမင့္ပညာအရည္အခ်င္းမ႐ိွခဲ့တဲ့အေျခအေနေၾကာင့္ ဦးလြင္ဟာ အေတာ္ကုိ ႏွိမ္ႏွိမ္ခ်ခ်ေနထုိင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘ႑ာေရးဝန္ႀကီးအျဖစ္ခန္႔အပ္ခံရခ်ိန္မွာ ဦးလြင္က သူ႔ရဲ႕ အရပ္ဘက္လက္ေအာက္ဝန္ထမ္းမ်ားကုိ သူ႔မွာ ပညာေရးမွတ္တမ္းအေထာက္အထားမ်ား မ႐ိွတဲ့အ တြက္ သူ႔ကုိ ဝိုင္းဝန္းသင္ၾကားေပးၾကဘုိ႔ ပြင့္ပြင့္လင္းလင္းေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီလုိ သင္ၾကားလုိစိတ္ဆႏၵ ျပင္းျပမႈေၾကာင့္ ဦးလြင္ဟာ မဆလ အစုိးရထဲမွာ အေကာင္းဆုံးဝန္ႀကီးမ်ားထဲကတပါးျဖစ္ခဲ့ေစၿပီး၊ က႑မ်ားစြာရဲ႕ က်ယ္ေျပာတဲ့ဝန္းက်င္မွာ သူ႔ကုိ အံ့ၾသဂုဏ္ယူဘြယ္အျဖစ္လဲ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳခံရေစခဲ့ ပါတယ္။ အသံပုိင္းဆုိင္ရာစနစ္၊ ဥယ်ာဉ္စုိက္ပ်ဳိးေရနဲ႔ တရားထုိင္ျခင္း အေၾကာင္းမ်ားနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕ေျပာစကားမ်ားကုိ ဝမ္းေျမာက္စြာၾကားရေလ ပြင့္သစ္စျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္မွာ သူ႐ိွစဥ္အခ်ိန္မ်ားရဲ႕ အမွတ္ရအေတြ႕အႀကဳံမ်ားကုိ္ နားေထာင္ရေလပါပဲ။

စစ္သားအျဖစ္ခံယူထားတဲ့ဦးလြင္ဟာ အဲန္အယ္လ္ဒီအတြင္းမွ အျခားစစ္ဘက္အရာ႐ွိေဟာင္းတဦး ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဦးတင္ဦးက ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ “တပ္မႉး”လုိ႔ ရည္ၫႊန္းသလုိ အစဉ္အၿမဲမွန္ကန္ေနပါတယ္။ သူက ကၽြန္မရဲ႕တရားဝင္ရာထူးကုိ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳျခင္းရဲ႕ သတိမူေထာက္ခံျခင္းနဲ႔ ဘခင္တဦးရဲ႕ေႏြးေထြးမႈ ျဖင့္ဆက္ဆံတဲ့ျမင္ကြင္းကုိ ထင္ထင္႐ွား႐ွား ခံစားေစခဲ့ပါတယ္။ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၂ လက ကၽြန္မသူ႔အိမ္ကုိ သြားၾကည့္ခဲ့စဉ္ သူသက္တမ္းတုိတုိက်န္ေနေတာ့မယ္လုိ႔ သိသာထင္႐ွားမႈမ႐ိွခဲ့ေပမဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕က်န္းမာ ေရးအေျခအေနဟာ အေတာ္ယုိယြင္းေနပါၿပီ။ စကားကုိျဖည္းညႇင္းစြာေျပာရင္း ကၽြန္မရဲ႕ ႀကီးေလးတဲ့ တာဝန္မ်ားၾကားက ဒုကၡခံလာၾကည့္တာကုိ ေက်းဇူးတင္ေၾကာင္း သမ႐ိုးက်ေျပာဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ကၽြန္မေခါင္းၫႊတ္အ႐ိုအေသေပးေတာ့ ေလးနက္တဲ့အဓိပၸါယ္နဲ႔ ရင္းႏွီးေဖာ္ေ႐ြမႈတုိ႔ စိမ့္ဝင္ေနတဲ့ ျပင္း အားႀကီးဆြဲငင္မႈျဖင့္ ဆုေပးပါတယ္။

ဦးလြင္ကြယ္လြန္ျခင္းဟာ ညင္ညင္သာသာပါ။ စစ္သည္အုိႀကီးအျဖစ္ခံယူထိုက္တဲ့ ႀကီးမားတဲ့ ဂုဏ္ျဒဗ္ နဲ႔ ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္သြားပါတယ္။

(ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္)

(မိုင္အိနိခ်ိေန႔စဉ္သတင္းစာ ဂ်ပန္) ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၄ ၂၀၁၁

(ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံထုတ္ မိုင္အိနိခ်ိသတင္းစာပါ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ Letter from Burma – An Old Soldier ကုိ ဘာသာျပန္ပါတယ္။)

ေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္

ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၅ ၂၀၁၁

၂၅-၁၂-၂ဝ၁၁ NCGUB ၏ ကရင္ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးေန႔ သဝဏ္လႊာ

2011-12-25T12:19:00.001+05:30

NATIONAL COALITION GOVERNMENT OF THE UNION OF BURMA
ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ

ကရင္ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးေန႔ သဝဏ္လႊာ

ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ (၂၅) ရက္၊ ကရင္ သကၠရာဇ္ ၂၇၅၁ ခုႏွစ္ သေလးလဆန္း (၁)ရက္ေန႔သည္ မဂၤလာ အေပါင္းႏွင့္ ျပည္စုံေသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားတို႔၏ ႏွစ္သစ္အခါသမယ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားတို႔၏ ႏွစ္သစ္အခါသမယတြင္ ရာသီဥတုသာယာေလ့ရွိသည္။ လယ္ယာဥယ်ာဥ္ၿခံေျမစိုက္ပ်ိဳးျခင္း၏ ရလဒ္အျဖစ္ ေကာက္ပဲသီးႏွံအသစ္မ်ား ေပၚထြန္းသည့္အခါ သမယလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ေတာေတာင္ေရေျမ ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ အခင္းအက်င္းမွာလည္း ပန္းေပါင္းစုံေဝဆာလန္းဆန္း သင္းပ်႕ံလွ်က္ ေက်းငွက္သာရကာအေပါင္း ေပ်ာ္ျမဴးသည့္ လရာသီ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုသို႕ေသာ စိတ္လက္ ၾကည္လင္ဖြယ္ရာ သဘာဝအေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ လူသားတို႔အဖို႔လည္း ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ အလင္းေရာင္ ထြန္းသစ္ေသာ ဥတုကာလဟု ဆိုႏိုင္ေပသည္။

ဤသို႔ေသာ ရာသီ အခါသမယတြင္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္တကြ ကရင့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး စစ္သည္ေတာ္ ရဲေဘာ္မ်ားသည္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအေပါင္း ရရွိခံစားထိုက္သည့္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး၊ တရားမွ်တေရး၊ လြတ္လပ္ေရးႏွင့္ တန္းတူညီမွ်ေရးတည္းဟူေသာ ေမြးရာ ပါအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားအား ဇြဲလုံ႔လ ၿမဲျမန္စြာ ကာကြယ္တိုက္ပြဲဆင္လွ်က္သည္ကို ေလးစားဖြယ္ ေတြ႔ျမင္ရေပသည္။ ထိုသို႔ အသက္၊ ေသြး၊ ေခြ်း၊ အရင္းအႏွီးၾကီးစြာ ေပးဆပ္တိုက္ပြဲဝင္လွ်က္ရွိၾကေသာ ကရင့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး စစ္သည္ေတာ္ ရဲေဘာ္မ်ား၏ ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ႏွင့္ ကိုယ္က်ိဳးစြန္႔ အနစ္နာခံမႈမ်ားကို အမ်ိဳးသား ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ အထူးပင္ ေလးစားဂုဏ္ယူမိပါေၾကာင္း ဦးစြာ ဂုဏ္ျပဳမွတ္တမ္းတင္ အပ္ပါသည္။

ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္လည္း ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို အျပည့္အဝ အာမခံေသာ၊ ျပည္ေထာင္စုဖြား တိုင္းရင္းသားအသီးသီး၏ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ျပ႒ာန္းခြင့္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတန္းတူခြင့္ကို အျပည့္အဝ အာမခံေသာ၊ စစ္မွန္သည့္ ဖက္ဒရယ္ျပည္ေထာင္စု ေပၚထြန္းေရးအတြက္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ကရင္ တိုင္းရင္းသား ျပည္သူလူထုမ်ားႏွင့္ တစိတ္တဝမ္းတည္း ေသြးစည္းလွ်က္ ကိုယ္စြမ္းဥာဏ္စြမ္းရွိသမွ် လက္တြဲ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဤကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားတို႔၏ ႏွစ္သစ္အခါသမယတြင္ ေလးနက္တည္ၾကည္စြာ ကတိျပဳအပ္ပါသည္။

ဤထူးျမတ္ေသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားတို႔၏ ႏွစ္သစ္အခါသမယမွအစျပဳ၍ ကရင္တိုင္းရင္းသားျပည္သူလူထုအေပါင္း လိုလား ေတာင့္တလွ်က္ရွိေသာ ဆႏၵမြန္မ်ားႏွင့္တကြ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ား အားလံုး အျမန္ဆုံး ေအာင္ျမင္ထေျမာက္ပါေစေၾကာင္း အမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရက အထူးအေလးအနက္ ဆုမြန္ေကာင္းေတာင္းလွ်က္ ဤ ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးေန႔ သဝဏ္လႊာကို ေလးစားဂုဏ္ယူစြာ ေပးပို႔အပ္ပါသည္။

၁၃၇၃ ခုႏွစ္၊ ျပာသိုလဆန္း (၁) ရက္ေန႔၊
ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ။

၂ဝ-၁၁-၂ဝ၁၁ ျမန္မာ-တိုင္းမ္း ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံသံအမတ္ႀကီး ေတြ႔ဆုံျခင္း

2011-12-25T12:16:00.001+05:30

ျမန္မာ-တိုင္းမ္း၊ ေက်ာ္ဆုမြန္
အတြဲ ၂၈ ၊ အမွတ္ ၅၄၂ (၄ - ၁၀ ၊ ၁၁ ၊ ၂၀၁၁)
အိႏိၵယႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအၾကား ကုန္သြယ္ေရးသည္ ႏွစ္စဥ္တုိးတက္ လာေနၿပီး ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံအက်ဳိးတူ စီးပြားေရး တိုးျမႇင့္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အိႏိၵယသံအမတ္ႀကီး ေဒါက္တာ ဗီအက္စ္ဆက္ ရွာဒရီႏွင့္ ျမန္မာတိုင္း(မ္)က ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေခတၱ စကား ေျပာခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။

အိႏိၵယနိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအၾကား ကုန္သြယ္မႈပမာဏသည္ ၂၀၁၀-၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁ ဒသမ ၃ ဘီလ်ံသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ကာ ၎ပမာဏ သည္ ႏွစ္စဥ္ ပိုမိုျမင့္တက္လာေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

* အိႏိၵယနိုင္ငံနဲ႔ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံၾကား ကုန္သြယ္ေရး ျမႇင့္တင္ဖို႔အတြက္ အိႏိၵယ အေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားတယ္လို႔ ထင္ပါသလဲ။

ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ဘက္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ကုန္သြယ္မႈလုပ္မယ့္ အိႏိၵယ စီးပြားေရးသမားေတြကို ပိုၿပီး ရင္းႏွီးမႈေတြရလာေအာင္ ကူညီေပး ႏိုင္တယ္။ အဲဒါကေတာ့ ပထမေျခလွမ္းေပါ့။ အဲဒီကေန တစ္ဆင့္ ႏွစ္ဦးႏွစ္ဖက္ အျပန္အလွန္ ရင္းႏွီးမႈေတြရလာမယ္။ ယုံၾကည္မႈေတြ ရလာမယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ စီးပြားေရးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲေတြ လုပ္လာမယ္။ ေနာက္ဆုံးမွာေတာ့ ႏွစ္ဦးသေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ေတြ ခ်ဳပ္ဆိုလာႏိုင္မွာေပါ့။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အေနနဲ႔ စီးပြားေရးမွာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္း တိုးတက္လာႏိုင္မယ္ဆိုတာ ေျပာဖို႔ေစာေနေသးတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ျမင္ရသေလာက္ကေတာ့ စီးပြားေရးပိုင္းမွာ အလား အလာေကာင္းေတြရွိေနတယ္ဆိုတာကို ေတြ႕ေနရတယ္။

* နယ္စပ္ကုန္သြယ္ေရးနဲ႔ ပုံမွန္ကုန္ သြယ္ေရးႏွစ္ခုမွာ အခုခ်ိန္မွာ ဘယ္ဟာက ပိုျပီးအေရးပါေနပါလဲ။ ပမာဏကေကာ။

နယ္စပ္ကုန္သြယ္ေရးကေတာ့ အခု ခ်ိန္မွာ နည္းပါတယ္။ ဒီႏွစ္ဆိုရင္ အေမရိ ကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၂ သန္းေလာက္ပဲရွိတယ္။ ပုံမွန္ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးကေတာ့ ကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁ ဒသမ ၃ ဘီလ်ံ ရွိတယ္။ ေလာေလာဆယ္မွာ နယ္စပ္ကုန္သြယ္ ေရးအေနနဲ႔ မဏိပူရ္နဲ႔ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္း ေဒသႀကီး ကေလးၿမိဳ႕၊ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္နဲ႔ မီဇိုရမ္ျပည္နယ္ဘက္တို႔မွာပါ။

* အခုေလာေလာဆယ္ဆိုေတာ့ ေနာင္မွာ နယ္စပ္ကုန္သြယ္ေရးစခန္း အသစ္ဖြင့္ဖို႔ ရွိနိုင္မလား။

သမၼတႀကီးရဲ႕ အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံကိုလာတဲ့ ခရီးစဥ္မွာေတာ့ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္တခ်ဳိ႕ ခ်ခဲ့တာမ်ဳိး ရွိတယ္။ တမူး-မိုေရးနဲ႔ မီဇို ရမ္ျပည္နယ္ဘက္ မွာပါ။ သိသာထင္ ရွားတာကေတာ့ တကယ္လို႔ ကုလားတန္ စီမံကိန္းသာ လာမယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ဒီေနရာက အခ်က္အခ်ာက်တဲ့ေနရာ တစ္ခုအေနနဲ႔ စဥ္းစားရေတာ့မယ္။ အနာဂတ္မွာေတာ့ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ ေတြေပၚမူတည္ၿပီး ရွိလာႏိုင္မွာပါ။

* ပုသိမ္-မုံရြာ လမ္းမၾကီးေပၚမွာ၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအထက္ပုိင္းမွာ အၾကီးဆုံး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္ႀကီးတစ္ခု ေဆာက္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာကို သိပါ သလား။ အဲဒီကုန္စည္ဒိုင္က အိႏိၵယနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံၾကား ကုန္သြယ္မႈကို ပိုတိုးတက္ လာေစမယ္ထင္လား။

ပုသိမ္-မုံရြာ လမ္းေပၚမွာ ေဆာက္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ ၾကားပါတယ္။ ဒီကုန္စည္ဒိုင္က ကေလးနဲ႔ မုံရြာၾကား လမ္းေပၚမွာ ရွိေန တာပါ။ ဒီကုန္စည္ဒိုင္ ဘယ္ေတာ့ၿပီးမလဲဆိုတာေတာ့ မသိပါဘူး။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒါကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရပါဦးမယ္။ အခုေလာေလာဆယ္ ပိုၿပီးအားစိုက္ လုပ္ေနရတာကေတာ့ ကုလားတန္ စီမံကိန္းပါ။ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ေတြကေန အေပၚတက္ၿပီး ပလက္၀ကေန မီဇို ရမ္ျပည္နယ္အထိ ဆက္သြယ္ထားတာပါ။

* ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက အင္အားၾကီး အိႏိၵယနဲ႔ တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံေတြၾကားမွာ ရွိေနေတာ့ လက္ရွိမွာ အိႏိၵယရဲ႕အခန္းက႑က ဘယ္လိုရွိေန တယ္လို႔ ထင္ပါသလဲ။

ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေျပာႏိုင္တာကေတာ့ အိႏိၵယနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံၾကားမွာ ရွိေနတဲ့ ႏွစ္ဦးသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ေတြကိုပဲ ေျပာႏိုင္တာပါ။ ဒါဆိုလုံေလာက္ၿပီလို႔ ထင္ပါတယ္။

၁၆-၁-၁၂-၂ဝ၁၁ မံုရြာေအာင္ရွင္ ပုလဲ မဲဆႏၵနယ္မွာ ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ဖြယ္ရွိ

2011-12-25T12:13:00.001+05:30

ကိုေပါက္ | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၆ ရက္ ၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၇ နာရီ ၂၄ မိနစ္
နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ လာမည့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ လစ္လပ္ေနရာ တခုျဖစ္သည့္ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္း၊ ပုလဲၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ မဲဆႏၵနယ္အတြက္ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD မွ မံုရြာေအာင္ရွင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ အေရြးခံဖြယ္ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ထိုသို႔ ပါဝင္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရန္ အဆိုျပဳခ်က္မ်ား ရွိထားေသာ္လည္း ပါတီဗဟိုမွသာ ဆံုးျဖတ္ေပးမွာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း တဦးျဖစ္သည့္ မံုရြာေအာင္ရွင္က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

“ေျပာေနၾကတာေပါ့။ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ တိတိက်က် မေျပာခ်င္ေသးဘူးဗ်။ အဆိုျပဳထားတာေတာ့ ရွိပါတယ္။ ဗဟိုမွာ ဆံုၾကေတာ့ လစ္လပ္တယ္ဆိုေတာ့ လုပ္ဖို႔ တိုက္တြန္းၾကတာေတြ ရွိတယ္။ ဗဟိုကပဲ ေရြးမယ္လို႔ ေျပာတာကိုး။ က်ေနာ္က ၾကိဳၿပီးေတာ့ မေျပာခ်င္ေသးဘူး။ လူၾကီးေတြက တာဝန္ေပးရင္ ယူရမွာပါပဲ” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

NLD အေနျဖင့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ လစ္လပ္ ၄၈ ေနရာလံုး ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ဟု ဆိုထားရာ ပုလဲၿမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးပါတီႏွင့္ အဓိက ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးပါတီ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အျဖစ္ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေက်ာ္ဆန္း၏ညီ ဦးေဌးႏိုင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ ဟုလည္း သတင္းမ်ား ထြက္ေပၚေနရာ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရာတြင္ NLD အႏိုင္ရေရး အတြက္ မ်ားစြာ ႀကိဳးပမ္းရမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ဦးေအာင္ရွင္က “ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ေက်ာ္ဆန္းရဲ႕ နယ္ေျမဆိုေတာ့ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး လုပ္ထားတာေတြ ရွိတယ္ဗ်။ ေက်ာင္းေဆာက္တာတို႔၊ စာၾကည့္တိုက္ ကိစၥေတြ၊ လမ္းပန္း ကိစၥေတြ၊ လတ္တေလာ လက္လုပ္ လက္စားေတြကို ေငြေခ်းတာေတြေပါ့။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ဝင္ၿပီးယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ေတာ္ေတာ္ျပန္လုပ္ရမွာဗ်။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ပုလဲကို က်ေနာ္ ေတာ္ေတာ္အာ႐ုံစိုက္တယ္။ ပုလဲက ေတာ္ေတာ္လုပ္ရမယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ ၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ၂၆ ႏွစ္တာ တည္ေဆာက္ထားေသာ လမ္းစဥ္ပါတီ တျဖစ္လဲ တိုင္းရင္းသား စည္းလံုး ညီညြတ္ေရးပါတီ (တစည)ႏွင့္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရာတြင္ NLD အႏိုင္ရခဲ့ဖူးေၾကာင္း အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ၁၉၉၀ NLD လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

“သူတို႔က ၂၆ ႏွစ္ တည္ေဆာက္ထားေသာ္လည္းဘဲ ပုလဲ မဲဆႏၵရွင္ေတြဟာ NLD ကို ပံုေအာၿပီး မဲေပးၾကလို႔ အမွတ္ ၁ ေရာ၊ အမွတ္ ၂ ေရာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ခုတခါကေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၁၉၉၀ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ႏွစ္ဦးလံုး ကလည္း မဲဆႏၵနယ္ေျမမွာ မရွိၾကေတာ့ ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးပါတီက တည္ေဆာက္ခြင့္ ရသြားတယ္ေပါ့။ ခပ္႐ိုင္း႐ိုင္းေျပာ ရရင္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔က ပြဲလန္႔တုန္း ဖ်ာခင္းခဲ့တာလို႔ေတာင္ ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ပုလဲတြင္ အျခားမည္သည့္ပါတီမ်ား ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ကို မသိရေသးေသာ္လည္း ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ NLD အႀကိတ္အနယ္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ၾကရမည့္ မဲဆႏၵနယ္ေျမတခု ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက “၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတုန္းက ေရြးေကာက္ခံထားရတဲ့ ဦးေက်ာ္ဆန္းကလည္း သူ႔ရဲ႕လႊမ္းမိုးမႈေတြ၊ ၾသဇာအာဏာေတြနဲ႔ တည္ေဆာက္ထားတယ္လို႔ ယံုၾကည္ပါတယ္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ပုလဲမဲဆႏၵရွင္ေတြဟာ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရး လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို ေရြးႏိုင္ၾကလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။ အႀကိတ္အနယ္ ႏွစ္ဖက္လံုးက ႀကိဳးစားၾကလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ယူဆတဲ့အတြက္ ဒါဟာ အင္မတန္မွ ၾကည့္ေကာင္းတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပြဲတပြဲ ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ဒီဇဘၤာ ၂ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္း NLD အစည္းအေဝးတြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေအာင္ႏိုင္ေရး တိုင္းေကာ္မတီအား အေယာက္ ၃၀ ေက်ာ္ျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့ၾကၿပီး မံုရြာခ႐ိုင္ ေအာင္ႏိုင္ေရး ေကာ္မတီကို စေနေန႔တြင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းၾကမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ပုလဲၿမိဳ႕နယ္မွာ မံုရြာခ႐ိုင္အတြင္း ပါဝင္သည္။

၂၀၁၂ ဇန္နဝါရီလဆန္းပိုင္းတြင္ NLD ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည့္ မဲဆႏၵနယ္မ်ား စာရင္းအား ဗဟိုမွ ထုတ္ျပန္ႏိုင္ဖြယ္ရွိၿပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကိုမူ ဧၿပီလဆန္းေလာက္တြင္မွသာ က်င္းပႏိုင္ဖြယ္ရွိေၾကာင္း ဦးေအာင္ရွင္က ခန္႔မွန္းေျပာဆိုသည္။

ကဗ်ာဆရာတဦးျဖစ္သူ မံုရြာေအာင္ရွင္အား ၂၀၀၀ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ သံုးခုျဖင့္ တရားစြဲဆိုခဲ့ၿပီး ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၂၁ ႏွစ္ ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့ရာ ေထာင္အတြင္း ၉ ႏွစ္ႏွင့္ ၅ ရက္ က်ခံခဲ့ၿပီး ၂၀၀၉ စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၈ ရက္တြင္ လြတ္ၿငိမ္း ခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ျဖင့္ ျပန္လည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာခဲ့သည္။

14-12-2011 Indian Govt Urged to Tackle Rights Abuses in Burma

2011-12-25T12:12:00.001+05:30

The Irrawaddy: By ZARNI MANN Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Indian parliamentarians have urged their government to address the subject of human rights abuses in Burma while a Burmese delegation visits the South Asia superpower.

New Delhi-based Indian Parliamentarians Forum for Democracy in Burma released a statement highlighting that Burma still has political prisoners, protracted ethnic civil conflicts and severely limited freedom of speech despite the government claiming to be cleaning up its act.

“India's government should call on Burma’s parliament to release all political prisoners, declare a nationwide ceasefire and take up the cause of the National Human Rights Council and pass legislation that will ensure it can operate independently and with a broad-based mandate to investigate violations of fundamental human rights,” said the statement.

Meanwhile, Burmese activists are holding a rally at Janta Manta, close to the Indian Parliament Building, condemning the visit of the Burmese delegation to India and urging both governments to promote democracy towards Burma.

“The so-called Burmese delegation is of the corrupt government which won the 2010 election unfairly. We don’t want those kinds of people to be our delegates,” said Zaw Win Aung, joint secretary of the Federation of Trade Unions Burma.

The activists said that the Burmese regime, which claims to be a “good and clean government,” is ignoring basic human rights and the principles of democracy.

“Clean government and clean politics is not one which imprisons its opposition. If they really want to be a clean, good and respectable [government], they must release all political prisoners and allow them to participate in elections. They also must stop wars against ethnic groups and give them freedom of speech,” he added.

Tint Swe won a parliamentary seat as a National League for Democracy (NLD) candidate in Burma’s 1990 election that was voided by the previous military junta. In Wednesday's memorandum submitted to the Indian Prime Minister’s office, he said, “We doubt that democratic practices learnt from India will be helpful in Burma because of the undemocratic constitution of 2008 which must be amended in accordance with democratic principles.”

Activists also urged the Burmese delegation to absorb their experiences of democracy from the Indian Parliament and employ them back in their own country.

“The visit to the Indian Parliaments should not in vain. If they really want to change, they must use [the same ideals] back in their country practically and sensibly,” they said.

They also urged the Indian government to engage with pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD party.

In its week-long visit, the Burmese delegation met with Indian Members of Parliament from both houses as well as representatives from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

The delegation led by Thura Shwe Mann, the speaker of the Lower House of the Burmese Parliament, followed an invitation from India’s speaker of the council of the state, Mohamamad Hamid Ansari, and the speaker of the house of representatives, Meira Kumar, for Burmese MPs and government officials to come to India and experience the rules, procedures and practices of the country.

14-12-2011 Indian Parliamentary Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB) Statement

2011-12-25T12:11:00.001+05:30

14-12-2011 Indian Parliamentary Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB) Statement

14-12-2011 Memorandum on the visit of Parliamentarians from Burma/Myanmar to India

2011-12-25T12:04:00.001+05:30

We, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India appreciate India for extending democracy education to visiting Burmese Hluttaw representatives. But we regret that India failed to provide democracy teaching to those who were freely and fairly elected in the election held in 1990.

In fact India’s offer comes late and the lesson is out of curriculum for Burma. Before that Burmese military must have leant constitution drafting and election commission before this parliament comes alive. The Burmese parliamentarians are those who are announced elected during that bogus election held in 2010.

We doubt that democracy practice learnt from India will be helpful in Burma because of the undemocratic constitution of 2008 which must be amended in accordance with democratic principles. Burmese military must also learn Indian Army which is dignified for keeping away from politics.

We also wish Burmese delegation to learn the role of opposition in Indian parliament. The current Hluttaw (parliamenta) in Burma deliberately minimize the voices of the opposition parties. In the election of 2010, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) managed to hold 259 out of 330 seats added by 56 army officers in Amyotha Hluttaw (Upper House) and 129 out of 224 seats added by 110 army officers in Pyithu Hluttaw (Lower House). That means 83.86% in the Lower House and 82.59% in the Upper House are military and semi-military representatives. There is no opposition but only non-UDDP minority members in the parliament.

We advise Burmese delegation to witness the campaign being staged by Anna Hazare who is fighting against the corruption because it is also rampant and unchecked from top to down in Burma. We urge the people of Burma to organize such nonviolent mass movement against corruption and injustice. This intolerable practice is widespread in India although legal system is superior. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi recently questioned the legal system in Burma.

Even though positive developments are taking place, the escalating warfare in Kachin State indicates that the new regime of Burma is yet to be trusted. Burma needs not only democracy but also lasting peace. Moreover hundreds of political prisoners are being held hostage. Burmese parliament has done just a little for the release of political prisoners.

We, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India would like to see Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visiting India!

For more information: Mr. Kim (880-041-4483)
Media Contact: Dr. Tint Swe (981-000-3286)

13-12-2011 Burmese Delegation Traveling to New Delhi to Study Indian Parliament

2011-12-25T12:01:00.001+05:30

By ZARNI MANN Tuesday, December 13, 2011
A Burmese delegation led by Thura Shwe Mann, the speaker of the Lower House of the Burmese Parliament, is traveling to India to study the rules, practices and procedures of the Indian Parliament, and the host MPs hope that members of the delegation will learn lessons about democracy and promote it back in their home country.

“We hope the delegation of Burma will able to take good examples which may suit with their country and we are sure that people of Burma will be able to taste the fruit of real democracy in the near future”, said Shivanand Tiwari, a member of the Upper House of India’s Parliament.

“Although they said they have democracy, we feel like it is not a full one,” he added. “But the process has been started and they might move towards real democracy.”

Shivanand Tiwari said that the Burmese delegation was welcomed by Indian MPs from both houses and were explained the rules, process and procedures of India’s Parliament.

The Burmese delegation, which will stay in India from Dec. 11-17, included: T Khun Myat, the chairman of the Bill Committee for Burma’s Lower House; Soe Tha, the chairman of the Planning and Finance Development Committee; Maung Maung Thein, the chairman of the Economic and Trade Development Committee; Htay Myint, the chairman of the Investment and Industrial Development Committee; and 30 other leaders from various sectors.

According to an official from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, the Burmese delegation is likely to meet with the external affairs minister, parliamentary affairs minister, the leaders of the opposition in both houses of India’s Parliament and the chief minister of Delhi. They will also visit places of economic, cultural and historic importance in New Delhi and Mumbai.

“It will be beneficial only if the delegation is able to learn about real parliamentary democracy and the multiparty democratic system from India, because the new system back in Burma has a nominally-democratic and multiparty parliamentary system, although the new government said this is the true one,” said Tint Swe, who ran and won as a National League for Democracy candidate in Burma’s 1990 election that was disallowed by the previous military regime.

Tint Swe also said that it would be good for the people of Burma if the delegation was also able to study suitable systems of agriculture, education and information technology in India that could be put in practice back in Burma.

The Indian government offered its assistance in developing democracy in Burma during the state visit by Burmese President Thein Sein in October.

The visit to India by Thura Shwe Mann and the rest of the Burmese delegation followed an invitation from India’s speaker of the council of the state, Mohamamad Hamid Ansari, and the speaker of the house of representatives, Meira Kumar, for Burmese MPs and government officials to come to India and experience the rules, procedures and practices of the country.

၁၂-၁၂-၂ဝ၁၁ အိႏၵိယ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြက ျမန္မာလႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ကို ေျပာဆုိဖုိ႔

2011-12-25T12:00:00.001+05:30

RFA
ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးေတြ ျမန္ျမန္ ဆန္ဆန္ လုပ္လာေအာင္ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ ေရာက္ ျမန္မာလႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စား လွယ္အဖဲြ႔ကို ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ ေျပာဆုိဖို႔ နယူးေဒလီအေျခစိုက္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး လႈပ္ရွားေနသူေတြက အိႏၵိယလႊတ္ေတာ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေတြကုိ ဒီကေန႔ တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာလႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ လႊတ္ေတာ္မွာ အေရးတယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနတဲ့ အဂတိလိုက္စားမႈ တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရးကိစၥကို အဓိကထား ေလ့လာသင့္တယ္လို႔ Burma Center New Delhi အဖဲြ႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္တစ္ဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ဒီေန႔ အိႏၵိယပါလီမန္ထဲမွာ အေရးႀကီးဆံုး အဆုိနဲ႔ ျငင္းဆိုခ်က္ကေတာ့ ျခစား၊ လာဘ္စား တုိက္ဖ်က္မႈအတြက္ အင္နာ ဟာဇာရီ ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ေနတဲ့ ဂႏၵီနည္းနဲ႔ ဆႏၵျပမႈက လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲမွာကို ပူညံပူညံ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္၊ ဒီဟာေတြဟာ အခ်ိန္ေကာင္းျဖစ္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဦးေရႊမန္းတို႔လည္း ဗမာျပည္မွာ အဂတိလုိက္စားမႈ ကင္းေအာင္ လူထုအားနဲ႔ ေဆာင္ရြက္တဲ့ နည္းေတြကို ခြင့္ျပဳသင့္တယ္။ ဗမာျပည္သူေတြကလည္း အဲဒီနည္းမ်ိဳးနဲ႔ ရေအာင္လုပ္သင့္တယ္ဆုိတဲ့ နမူနာေကာင္းရႏုိင္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္လည္း ျဖစ္ပါတယ္”

ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ဥကၠ႒ သူရ ဦးေရႊမန္း ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ျမန္မာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အေယာက္ ၃ဝ ဟာ အိႏၵိယ အထက္နဲ႔ေအာက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒ေတြရဲ႕ ဖိတ္ၾကားခ်က္အရ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံကို ငါးရက္ၾကာ ခ်စ္ၾကည္ေရး ခရီးစဥ္အျဖစ္ ေရာက္ေနတာပါ။ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔မွာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ေရးရာ ေကာ္မတီဥကၠ႒ အသီးသီး လိုက္ပါသြားပါတယ္။

ဒီခရီးစဥ္မွာ အိႏၵိယရဲ႕လႊတ္ေတာ္ႏိုင္ငံေရးနဲ႔ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကို ေလ့လာဖို႔ရွိတယ္လို႔ သိရပါတယ္။ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္နယူးေဒလီအျပင္ စီးပြားေရးအခ်က္အခ်ာက်တဲ့ မြန္ဘိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ကိုလည္း သြားေရာက္ ေလ့လာမယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။

7-12-2011 New gambit in the great game

2011-12-25T11:56:00.001+05:30

Times of India
David I Steinberg | Dec 7, 2011, 12.00AM IST
Eighteen months ago, no one would have anticipated that two of the world's most eminent women, each arch critics of the Myanmar government from opposite sides of the world, could have reached supportive conclusions about changes in one of the world's previously most repressive states.

The western world's icon of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, after being held under house arrest for some 15 years since 1989, spoke positively about the reforms instituted by the new president of Myanmar, Thein Sein, a former military man who was prime minister under a junta anathema to the internal opposition and external western powers. And during the first week of December 2011, Hillary Clinton, on the first visit of a US secretary of state in half a century, spoke of the progress that had been made under the new government. Both women want continued reforms and progress, but even their guarded optimism could not diminish what has been a startling and welcome set of changes. Whether they are ephemeral or sustainable is one critical issue.

Some believe that democracy, however defined, is just around the corner, while others consider that these reforms are simply window dressing for continuing military control and the denial of democracy and a better life for the diverse Myanmar peoples. Neither are correct.

A half century ago, after the coup of 1962, the military formed the Burma Socialist Programme Party under military domination and stipulated that once one joined the party, one could never resign, thus indicating its attempt to hold perpetual control. It has ruled directly and indirectly throughout most of Burma/Myanmar's independent history since 1948. Under the new government headed by Sein, inaugurated in the spring of 2011, that control continues through a number of constitutional provisions. These constitutional controls are supplemented by a pervasive government party that swept 80% of the legislative seats and is military dominated.

The armed forces or Tatmadaw have continuously articulated their core concerns. Primary is that the military is the only institution that can hold the multi-ethnic state together, and thus its continuing role is essential. National unity and state sovereignty are vital, and the military's responsibility in maintaining them have been pursued with a bombastic vigour that is not simply propaganda, but reflects deeply held nationalistic sentiments. If these elements and military autonomy within the state structure are maintained, then reforms are possible in economic, political and social fields.

But if the reformers are sincere, then why now? Cynics point to the desire of Myanmar to host the 2014 Asean summit as a prime motivating factor. The critics maintain that these reforms should be discounted as superficial changes, likely to be reversed after that date.

The reasons are likely more complex. There seems little doubt that receiving approval from Asean to hold the 2014 chair was a factor. But Myanmar may also have wanted to ensure that it would not become overly depen-dent, or perceived so, on China, the source of much of its economic aid, investment, infra-structure development and military assistance. Myanmar has also been inundated with illegal Chinese immigrants - by some estimates two million. Myanmar thus sought improved relations with the US and relaxation of the sanctions regimen to achieve a balance-neutralism that's been its policy since independence.

Other possible causes may have prompted the current reforms. Power is now somewhat diversified, without arbitrary top-down leadership. Until 2011, Myanmar had a singular source of power - Senior General Than Shwe. No one seemed willing to disagree on any policy or challenge him. His arbitrary rule was law, and he is said to have a dislike for Suu Kyi. He is supposedly aged and retired, caring only for protecting the core military concerns and influence, as well as the safety of his family.

The highly nationalistic military is also concerned for its historic reputation. They have rewritten Myanmar history to stress their role. Refurbishing the Tatmadaw's reputation through improving the previously inept economic performance of the military to date, and allowing a significantly expanded space between the state and the citizens, are elements of this attempt to restore the military's lustre and good reputation earned by its success in securing independence from the British in 1948.

So diverse motivations and circumstances are likely responsible for the change in attitudes. Sending Clinton to Naypyidaw was both strategically and tactically influential in improving relations with Myanmar.

Strategically, it was the most vital signal the Obama administration could send that did not require intense negotiations with the US Congress and using up valuable political capital for no ostensible domestic benefits. Myanmar is not high on any political list of US priorities. Yet the visit has strengthened Myanmar's reformers, who can attest that the reforms are having a positive effect. If there had been no substantive response from the US, the strong anti-reform elements within the Tatmadaw could claim that the reforms were ineffective and should be rescinded. By responding positively to the reforms and reformers, the US is strengthening the likely continuity of those changes.

The game is afoot and the outcome uncertain, but we have witnessed progress unanticipated, at a pace unheralded, and in fields hitherto unrecognised by the Myanmar administration. It has taken 50 years to reach this far. We can only hope that the engagement and reforms will continue.

The writer is professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Copyright: Yale Centre for the Study of Globalisation.

2-12-2011 The Essential Flame

2011-12-25T11:55:00.000+05:30

HT Magazine | Global Agenda 2012
The Essential Flame
By AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Published: December 2, 2011

Why does change seem so desirable and so exhilarating in our times? Barack Obama's presidential campaign was fueled by the promise of change. In Burma today there is continuous debate on whether the new government means real change or whether it is no more than the old army dictatorship in new civilian garb. Almost every day I am asked if I believe that measures taken by the new administration should be seen as mere window dressing or as signs of genuine change in the right direction. After 23 years under authoritarian rule, impatience to see and to experience change is understandable. It has been sharpened by events in other parts of the world during 2011.

The political upheavals of the Arab Spring have been of such proportions that fundamental and irreversible changes are expected throughout the Mideast and Arab Africa in 2012, with possible copycat effects elsewhere. Whether such expectations will be fulfilled will depend on many factors, not least the degree of commitment by those who wish to create a brave new future. I'm thinking of commitment here as passion, in the social theorist Max Weber's sense of passionate dedication to a cause.

Were the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya led to topple seemingly indestructible regimes by such passion, or were they merely moved by what Weber denigrated as "sterile excitement?" It would surely be sophistry to label as sterile an outcry that led to such convulsive results. It might be argued, though, that the emotion fueling the Arab Spring was the kind that burns itself out speedily, after setting off the first sparks of defiance.

If the original impulse needed some help to turn those first sparks into a full-scale conflagration, another more effective catalyst must have been at work. Could that have been power? People power, or IT power or the power of global democratic solidarity or, simply, in the end, military power, either the use of it or the decision to refrain from using it?

Power is by nature latent until a force sets it in motion. What starts up the engines of power, whether they be tanks and fighter jets and nuclear weapons or diverse individuals linked by a shared cause and modern technology? The means to unleash power that could change frontiers or crush men and their aspirations can become active only when an initial force sweeps away irresolution and inhibitions. The power of defiance, too, needs that first impulse to encourage passive individuals to put aside the inaction fostered by decades of fear or by natural human caution.

So then, is it "passion vs. power?" Does it have to be versus? Are passion and power natural opposites, or mutually exclusive in promoting political change, either of the ordinary variety brought about through constitutional processes in established democracies, or of the revolutionary brand that reshapes the destinies of peoples and nations?

There is also the kind of change that defeats easy categorization. The U.S. presidential election of 2008 was certainly not ordinary, but whether the election of Barack Obama should be regarded as a seismic event in the history of the United States or just a political landmark is a matter of opinion. There can, however, be no controversy about the outcome of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; it changed the political landscape of the nation, and it changed perceptions with regard to race and color the world over.

What prevented the now toppled regimes of Tunisia and Egypt from using all their administrative and military might? What convinced the despots of Libya and Syria to make war on their own people? And what made the anti-government forces of Libya and Syria persist even after it was clear the fight would be prolonged and brutal?

Is there not, behind the iron mask of autocracy, the flesh and blood of human will, just as there is a steely, collective will behind a motley, unarmed crowd determined to exercise its right to cry out its woes and perhaps even to take up arms to assert that right? And is not will --- which is, after all, deliberate, controlled purpose --- closely joined to passion? It may be joined either as an intense, transitory emotion, which may well be no more than "sterile excitement," or as a long-term, firmly rooted dedication to principles or a cause --- something as broad as freedom or as limited as self-preservation.

As a member of a movement that has been engaged in a long struggle to effect change through nonviolent means, I have learned to value above all other attributes in colleagues and supporters disinterested, active commitment. Such commitment is seldom given to pyrotechnic display, but it is always there, and it provides constant assurance that the essential flame that keeps our cause vibrant will not die out. It is passion, not of the sterile breed, but passion that moves hearts and minds and makes history. It is passion that translates into power. When such passion is brought to bear on public issues, it is a potent instrument for political and social change.

In Burma, again and again, the most active members of our party and other forces committed to the struggle have been placed under detention, their voices silenced, their faces almost forgotten by the public. Again and again they have emerged, arousing the world to their cries. In 2002, after I was released from my second term of house arrest, I toured the country, and the commitment of our supporters translated into large, enthusiastic rallies that made the authorities feel the power of our passion. Quite recently, concern over the fate of our Irrawaddy River united peoples from all walks of life. Our passionate appeal for a reappraisal of the dam project was so powerful that the president announced the suspension of the project for the duration of his term.

Can the process be reversed, can power become passion? Power that effects political change cannot be defined as an isolated, unique brand different from all other powers. Party power, money power, media power, pressure group power and many other powers strongly influence political evolution and revolution. Power as the authority of the ruler(s) backed by the machinery of state might, however, be considered a contrast to passion. The distinction between despotic power and democratically invested power is relevant here.

When do those in authority wish to work for political change? The impulse of those who hold the powers of state is generally toward conservation, not transformation. Only when problems arise, and not always then, do rulers begin to consider the need for change. Intelligent rulers are quick to grasp when change becomes unavoidable. But realizing the need for change is not the same as having the means to make it possible.

In pluralistic societies, government alone cannot bring about change. Many other players are involved. The bipartisan negotiations to push through the U.S. debt deal that did not seem to please anybody demonstrated that the president of the United States does not have sufficient means to effect the change that not only he but many of his countrymen consider necessary.

If presidential power can be considered an impetus toward change, it is one that is easily dissipated by other powers. Commitment, perseverance, persuasion, the ability to win hearts and minds can be counterweights to these opposing powers. Passion can fill in the gaps when power alone is not enough.

It is easier for an authoritarian government untroubled by counteracting powers or passions to act in accordance with its own will. A ruthless despot allowed to proceed unchecked can change not just the political scene but the very psyche of a nation. For a time. Under Stalin's brutal absolutism, terror seeped into the very bones of citizens and made them unrecognizable to themselves. For a time. Then the despot died, and the country woke from its nightmare. People began to ask what had happened and why. Did power alone transform a whole society? What enabled Stalin to exercise power with such single-minded brutality?

Whether Stalin was fired by dedication to a cause or whether personal ambition motivated him, it could be said the element that initially fueled his ruthless machine was passion, albeit of the worst kind. As his iron rule continued, an all-consuming preoccupation with the preservation of his inviolability, obsession rather than passion, moved him to commit some of the greatest political crimes in history.

Stalin was not alone in establishing his reign of terror. Vast numbers collaborated, and some of those who did so consciously and willingly were fired by passion: as commitment to the political and social changes they believed Stalin would achieve for their country or as dedication to the man himself. Power can generate passion; and power needs passion as its agent.

In all its might, power is less self-sufficient than passion; passion generates its own power. Passion is in itself a kind of power that is by its very nature a kinetic force.

Power, on the other hand, tends naturally toward entrenchment. When power moves in the direction of political change, it usually does so because external forces --- from popular uprisings to poll predictions --- have become irresistible.

Passion is more effective than power as an impetus for political change. Meaningful political change, however, needs to be sustainable. For that, passion and power must work together as mutually supportive partners.

We all wish for change, but there is no guarantee that change will take place or that it will live up to expectations. There is always an element of risk when we step out into the unknown. The greatest challenge for Burma and the countries of the Arab Spring, as well as all peoples who hope to enjoy the flowers and fruits of their endeavors in 2012, will be to bring wisdom to bear on passion and power, to create a blend of the two that is both effective and wholesome.

Aung San Suu Kyi was born in 1945 in Burma, now called Myanmar. Her father, the nation's independence hero, was assassinated when she was 2. She left the country as a teenager when her mother was named an ambassador, then returned from Britain in 1988 and became a pro-democracy leader. She won the Nobel Peace Price in 1991, one of 15 years she spent under house arrest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opinion/magazine-global-agenda-the-essential-flame.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&src=twrhp

1-12-2011 Suu Kyi Wants India to Do More

2011-12-25T11:53:00.001+05:30

Irrawaddy - By LALIT K JHA
Aung San Suu Kyi said on Wednesday that she wants a “friendly” relationship with China, and wants India to do more to promote genuine democracy in Burma.

“With regards to China, I've always emphasized the fact that we have not only been neighbors and will always be neighbors, we have enjoyed quite a good record of friendship … and I would like to maintain that,” Aung San Suu Kyi said in response to a question as she interacted with members of US intelligence and journalists by Skype.

The rare interaction with the popular Burmese leader was organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think tank. The early morning event attracted a full house in the US capital.

“I hope that whatever little snags may have arisen along the road, we will be able to overcome them and be able to maintain our friendly relations with China. I do not think simply because we believe in different systems of government, we need necessarily be hostile to one another,” Suu Kyi noted.

Responding to a question on India, she said she would like India to do more to promote democratic values in Burma. Similarly the United Nations too can play a more proactive role in Burma, she noted, but was quick to refer to the differences in the UN Security Council which prevents the world body from doing so.

Suu Kyi conceded that the climate in Burma is freer than before. “Certainly the media is freer. It's not totally free, but it's freer than it used to be. Young people are now able to read articles about politics, about the history of the independence movement in Burma, about our political figures now. They were not able to do that just a year ago. I think this has invigorated them,” she said.

The Nobel laureate said she supported the new policy of the Obama administration. “I think the United States has got it just right, because although, of course, we discuss many things very often, they also engage with other groups in Burma. I'm not the only democratic opposition party member with whom they discuss … the issue of engagement with the government,” she said.

“They understand that I did not wish to use our friendly relations with the United States in any way hurt the situation in Burma,” Suu Kyi noted.

Responding to a question on the lifting of US sanctions on Burma, Suu Kyi said she and her party has always said that the best way to get sanctions lifted in Burma is to meet the conditions that were set by the US Congress when sanctions were imposed—the release of political prisoners, negotiation with the democratic opposition, and humanitarian access to conflict areas.

“So if these conditions are met, then the time will certainly have come for sanctions to be relaxed, and whether I say it or not, I'm sure Congress will know that the time has come,” she said.

When asked if she believes in a federal system, Suu Kyi said the word "federal" has been misused terribly in Burma.

“It has become a very controversial word simply because it was not understood properly or perhaps it was understood quite well or too well by some politicians, but they deliberately misused the word to create the kind of political situation they wanted,” she said.

“There were many members of the army as well as some politicians who equated federalism with secession. They said that federalism would mean the dissolution of the union. Of course, we know that this is not so, and so we had to try to make the people understand first what federalism means,” she noted.

“If they understand that federalism simply means the division of powers between the central government and the state government and that this all has to be embodied in the constitution … people would be much less afraid of the word 'federalism,'” she said. “And then I think the people of Burma can decide what kind of system they want.”

28-11-2011 Foreign-based dissident organizations reorganizing their missions

2011-12-25T11:51:00.001+05:30

Monday, 28 November 2011 13:14 Ko Wild
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) -- In response to the National League for Democracy's (NLD) decision to re-register as a political party, many dissident organizations in foreign countries are reassessing their strategies and redefining their missions.
Among the organizations are the NLD -- Liberated Area; the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB); Members of Parliament Union -- Burma (MPU) and the National Council of the Union of Burma.

The NCGUB includes five former MPs from the1990 general election and is led by Dr. Sein Win, the prime minister of the Burmese government in exile, who is Aung San Suu Kyi's cousin. After a meeting last week, the NCGUB decided that the word "Government" in its name is no longer appropriate.

Dr. Tint Swe, the information minister of the Burmese government in exile, told Mizzima, "If Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD legally enter parliamentary politics, 'NCGUB', the name of our organization, will not be appropriate anymore."

However, he said he still had reservations about the current government because a military government ruled Burma for so many years. The group would continue to fight for human rights, peace in ethnic areas and work for the freedom of political prisoners, he said.

The NCGUB was formed in December 1990. Tint Swe said the Norwegian government supports the group and it will continue to support its involvement in Burmese politics.

The MUP, formed 15 years ago, will continue in its current form, said Tint Swe who also serves as an MPU member. The MPU comprises 32 MPs elected in the never-honoured 1990 general election.

One significant change, he said, is that "the demand to convene the parliament in accord with the results of 1990 general election does not exist anymore. But, the electoral results and the support of Burmese citizens will be milestones in our history."

The MPU MPs represented the National Democracy Party, from Chin, Shan, Arakan, Mon, Lahu, Zomi parties, and independent MPs.

An official of the NLD-LA Foreign Affairs sub-committee said a central executive meeting last week decided to drop the name "NLD-LA" because it is tied to the 1990 general election.

"The NLD-LA may be transformed into NLD groups based in foreign countries. Eight branches of NLD-LA now exists in the U.S., Japan, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, South Korea, Norway and England.

The NLD-LA would work for reconciliation between the government and opposition groups, including ethnic armed groups, he said.

"We helped to hold the dialogue between the Minister Aung Min and ethnic groups. NLD-LA will be involved in seeking national reconciliation and working for the development of the country," he said.

Both the NLD-LA and MPU, along with Democratic Alliance of Burma and the National Democratic Front, are member groups of the NCUB.

Aung Moe Zaw, the NCUB joint secretary No.1 and chairman of the Democratic Party for New Society, said that whether the member groups will continue as members of the NCUB has yet to be decided.

"The NCUB needs to review its activities and structure, I think. Meetings between chairmen and secretaries of member groups need to be conducted as soon as possible. Most of our activities are related to the results of 1990 general election so we need to review whether our activities are in line with the current situation," Aung Moe Zaw said.

The NCUB was formed in September 1992 and it incudes 26 pro-democracy organizations. http://mizzima.com/news/inside-burma/6226-foreign-based-dissident-organizations-reorganizing-their-missions.html

၂၆-၁၁-၂ဝ၁၁ ျပည္ပေရာက္ ျမန္မာ့အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြ အေျပာင္းအလဲ ရွိလာနိုင္

2011-12-25T11:50:00.001+05:30

BBC 26 နိုဝဘၤာလ 2011 - 16:43 GMT
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ ျပည္တြင္း နိုင္ငံေရး အေျခအေနအရ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြရဲ့ အခန္းက႑ဟာ အေျပာင္းအလဲ ရွိလာနိုင္တယ္ဆိုတာကို လက္ခံေၾကာင္း ျပန္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ အမ်ိုးသား ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ NCGUB ျပန္ၾကားေရး တာဝန္ခံ ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြေက ဘီဘီစီကို ေျပာၾကားပါတယ္။

NLD မွတ္ပုံတင္ျပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရုံနဲ႔ လိုခ်င္တဲ့ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ေတြ မျပည့္ဝေသးပါ။

အမ်ိုးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD နဲ႔ တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြ ပါဝင္တဲ့ ၁၉၉၀ ခုနွစ္က ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြ ျပည္တြင္း လႊတ္ေတာ္ နိုင္ငံေရးထဲ ေရာက္သြားရင္ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြအေနနဲ႔ သူတို႔ကို အားျဖည့္ ေပးဖို႔ တာဝန္ရွိေၾကာင္း သူက ဆက္ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း NLD မွတ္ပုံတင္ျပီး ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရုံနဲ႔ လိုခ်င္တဲ့ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ေတြ မျပည့္ဝေသးဘူးလို႔ ယူဆေၾကာင္း ေျပာပါတယ္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ NLD လြႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲေရာက္ေရးဟာ သူတို႔ရဲ့ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ မဟုတ္ဘူးလည္း ဆိုပါတယ္။

အေၾကာင္းကေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ၁၉၆၂ ခုနွစ္ကတည္းက စစ္အုပ္စု အုပ္ခ်ုပ္လာတဲ့ အေပၚမွာေရာ၊ စစ္အုပ္စုရဲ့ အာဏာရလိုမွု အေပၚမွာပါ ျပည္သူလူထုက လုံးဝ ယုံၾကည္ စိတ္ခ်ရျခင္း မရွိေသးတာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။

စိတ္မခ်ရေသးသ၍ ျပည္တြင္းက နိုင္ငံေရးအင္အားစုေတြ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသလို ျပည္ပကေနလည္း ေဆာင္ရြက္သင့္တယ္လို႔ ယူဆေၾကာင္း သူကေျပာပါတယ္။

လူထုက ေထာက္ခံေပးလိုက္တဲ့ ၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္အရ ဒီမိုကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေတြ အျပည့္အဝ ရရွိေရး၊ အမ်ိဳးသား ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးနဲ႔ တိုင္းရင္းသားအေရး၊ ဒါေတြ စိတ္ခ်ရျပီဆိုမွ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ ျပည့္စုံမွာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔လည္း ေျပာပါတယ္။

ေနာက္ဆုံးအေျခအေနမွာေတာ့ ျပည္တြင္း အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းစည္းလႈပ္ရွားနိုင္မွာ ျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ အခုေလာေလာဆယ္မွာေတာ့ အဲဒီလိုအဆင့္ေရာက္ဖို႔ အေတာ့္ကို ေစာေနေသးေၾကာင္း သူကေျပာပါတယ္။

အခုလို လပိုင္းအတြင္း ျဖစ္ေပၚလာတဲ့ အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြေၾကာင့္ နွစ္ေပါင္း ေလးငါးဆယ္ ေက်ာ္ လုပ္ခဲ့တာေတြ အတြက္ ေျပေလ်ာ့သြားတယ္လို႔ မထင္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာျပသြားပါတယ္။

၁၅-၁၁-၂ဝ၁၁ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အတုိက္အခံမ်ား စုဖြဲ႔မႈ ပံုစံေျပာင္းမည္

2011-12-25T11:48:00.001+05:30

ကိုဝိုင္း | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ ႏုိဝင္ဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၂၀ နာရီ ၄၃ မိနစ္
ခ်င္းမိုင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ၿပီးေနာက္ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အတိုက္အခံ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႔မ်ားလည္း စုဖြဲ႔မႈ ပံုစံေျပာင္းရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ေနသည္။

၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ေျမ) NLD-LA၊ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အေဝးေရာက္ အမ်ဳိးသား ၫြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ NCGUB၊ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႔ MPU၊ ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားေကာင္စီ NCUB တို႔၏ စုဖြဲ႔မႈ အေနအထားမ်ားကို ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ လိုအပ္လာျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

၁၉၉ဝ ခု ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအမတ္ ငါး ဦးျဖင့္ စုဖြဲ႔ထားၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ အကိုဝမ္းကြဲေတာ္စပ္သူ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီပါတီမွ ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းက ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ တာဝန္ယူထားသည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အေဝးေရာက္ အမ်ဳိးသားၫြန္႔ေပါင္း အစိုးရ NCGUB ၏ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႔ အစည္းအေဝးမွ “အစိုးရ” ဟူသည့္ စကားလံုးမွာ လက္ေတြ႔တြင္ မအပ္စပ္ေတာ့ေၾကာင္း သံုးသပ္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။

NCGUB ျပန္ၾကားေရးဝန္ၾကီး ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက “ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးထဲကို တရားဝင္ ေရာက္သြားၿပီဆိုရင္ NCGUB ဆိုတဲ့ အစိုးရဆိုတဲ့ နာမည္ကေတာ့ မအပ္စပ္ေတာ့ဘူးဆိုတဲ့ ေကာက္ခ်က္ခ်ပါတယ္။” ဟု မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

စစ္တပ္က အခ်ိန္ၾကာျမင့္စြာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့သျဖင့္ လက္ရွိေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားအေပၚ အျပည့္အဝ ယံုၾကည္မႈ မရွိေသးဘဲ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားကိစၥ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသား အေရးတို႔အတြက္ ျပည္ပတြင္ ဆက္လႈပ္ရွား သြားမည္ဟုဆိုသည္။ မည္သည့္ပံုစံျဖင့္ ဆက္လႈပ္ရွား မည္ကိုမူ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ ေျပာဆိုရန္ အခ်ိန္ေစာေသးသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။

၁၉၉ဝ ခု ဒီဇင္ဘာတြင္ ဖြဲ႔ခဲ့ၿပီး ၂၁ ႏွစ္သက္တမ္းရွိၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ NCGUB အေဝးေရာက္အစိုးရအျဖစ္မွ ပံုစံအသစ္ တခု ေျပာင္းလိုက္လွ်င္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ “အခုဆို ေနာ္ေဝးအစိုးရကပဲ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈရွိတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလုပ္ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအေျခအေနေတြနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေလာက္ အပ္စပ္သလဲအေပၚ မူတည္ၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ေထာက္ပံ့မွာပါ။” ဟု ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက ေျပာသည္။

၁၉၉ဝ ခု အမတ္ ၃၂ ဦးျဖင့္ စုဖြဲ႔ထားၿပီး NCGUB ဝန္ၾကီးအဖြဲ႔ကို ေရြးခ်ယ္ေပးေနသည္မွာ ၁၅ ႏွစ္ ဝန္းက်င္ရွိၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ MPU မွာမူ အစိုးရမဟုတ္သျဖင့္ လက္ရွိအတိုင္းပင္ ဆက္ရွိေနႏိုင္မည္ဟု MPU အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြ က ေျပာသည္။

“၉ဝ ခု ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအရ လႊတ္ေတာ္ေပၚလာရမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ေတာင္းဆိုမႈသာလွ်င္ မရွိေတာ့တာ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ရလဒ္နဲ႔ ျပည္သူကေပးလိုက္တဲ့ တာဝန္ဆိုတာ သမိုင္းမွာ မွတ္တိုင္အျဖစ္ ရွိေနတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။

၁၅ ႏွစ္ သက္တမ္းရွိၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ MPU တြင္ NLD ပါတီအမတ္ ၁၉ ဦးႏွင့္အတူ ခ်င္း၊ ရွမ္း၊ ရခိုင္၊ မြန္၊ လားဟူ၊ ဇိုမီး၊ တစည၊ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီပါတီႏွင့္ တသီးပုဂၢ အမတ္မ်ားျဖင့္ စုစည္းထားသည္။

၁၉၉ဝ ခုေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (လြတ္ေျမာက္ နယ္ေျမ) NLD-LA ဟူသည့္ အမည္ကို ဆက္ထားရန္ မလိုအပ္ေတာ့ဘဲ ျပည္ပေရာက္ NLD အဖြဲ႔အေနျဖင့္ ဆက္သြားရန္ NLD-LA ဗဟို အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ ယခင္အပတ္ အစည္းအေဝးက စဥ္းစားထားၾကသည္ဟု ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ေကာ္မတီခြဲ တာဝန္ခံ ဦးညိဳအုန္းျမင့္က ေျပာသည္။

“NLD-LA လို႔ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘဲနဲ႔ ျပည္ပေရာက္ NLD မ်ားအဖြဲ႔လည္း ျဖစ္ေကာင္းျဖစ္သြားႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါမွမဟုတ္လည္း NLD အေဝးေရာက္အေနနဲ႔ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြ၊ ခ႐ိုင္အဆင့္လိုမ်ဳိးေတြလည္း ျဖစ္သြားႏိုင္ပါတယ္။” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။ အေမရိကန္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊ ၾသစေၾတးလ်၊ ကေနဒါ၊ မေလးရွား၊ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား၊ ေနာ္ေဝး၊ အဂၤလန္ စသည့္ ဌာနခြဲ ရွစ္ခုႏွင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးသြားဦးမည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။

NLD-LA အေနျဖင့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားပါဝင္သည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးအတြက္ ဆက္လက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ဟု မၾကာေသးမီက မီးရထားဝန္ၾကီး ဦးေအာင္မင္းႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔မ်ား ေဆြးေႏြးမႈကို ဥပမာေပးေျပာသည္။

“ဝန္ၾကီးဦးေအာင္မင္း တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြ ေဆြးေႏြးႏိုင္ဖို႔အတြက္လည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ဝိုင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ကူညီတဲ့ အစိတ္အပိုင္းေတြလည္း ရွိပါတယ္။ NLD-LAသည္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ရဲ႕ အမ်ဳိးသားရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးနဲ႔ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးကိစၥေတြမွာ တစိတ္တပိုင္း ပါသြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။” ဟု သူကဆက္ေျပာသည္။

NLD-LA၊ MPU အဖြဲ႔ ႏွစ္ဖြဲ႔သည္ ျမန္မာျပည္ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ မဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္-DAB၊ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ တပ္ေပါင္းစု-NDF စသည့္တပ္ေပါင္းစုမ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ဳိးသား ေကာင္စီ-NCUB တြင္ ေထာက္တိုင္အဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ားအျဖစ္ ပါဝင္သည္။

NCUB တြဲဘက္အတြင္းေရးမႉး-၁၊ လူ႔ေဘာင္သစ္ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးေအာင္မိုးေဇာ္ကမူ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ား၏ ဆက္လက္တည္ရွိျခင္း မတည္ရွိျခင္းသည္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၏ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္သာျဖစ္သည္ဟုဆိုသည္။

“NCUB အေနနဲ႔ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ေတြ၊ စုစည္းမႈေတြကို ျပန္သံုးသပ္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္တယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ေတာ့ ယူဆတယ္။ သဘာပတိ အဖြဲ႔တို႔ အတြင္းေရးမႉးအဖြဲ႔တို႔ စံုညီအစည္းအေဝးကို ျမန္ျမန္ေခၚဖို႔လိုတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ရလဒ္ကို အေျခခံတဲ့ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ ေတြမ်ားတယ္ေလ။ ကေန႔ကာလမွာ လိုက္ေလ်ာညီေထြမႈ ရွိေသးလား မရွိဘူးလား NCUB အတြင္းမွာ ေဆြးေႏြးၿပီး ျပဳျပင္သင့္တာေတြ ျပဳျပင္ဖို႔ လိုလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ယူဆတယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

၁၉၉၂ ခု စက္တင္ဘာလတြင္ဖြဲ႔ခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉ ႏွစ္သက္တမ္းရွိၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ NCUB ကို အစပိုင္းတြင္ DAB၊ NDF၊ NLD-LA၊ NCGUB တို႔ႏွင့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့ၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ NCGUB ကို MPU ျဖင့္ အစားထိုးခဲ့သည္။

DAB၊ NDF တပ္ေပါင္းစု ႏွစ္ခုပါဝင္သည့္ NCUB တြင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားတန္းတူေရးႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစု အဖြဲ႔အစည္း စုစုေပါင္း၂၆ ဖြဲ႔ပါဝင္သည္။

၂ဝ-၁၁-၂ဝ၁၁ အေဝးေရာက္ ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစုိးရ ဆက္ရွိဖို႔ မလုိေတာ့ေၾကာင္း ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းေျပာ

2011-12-25T11:44:00.001+05:30

ဒီကေန႔ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္စဥ္ တိုးတက္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈေတြအရ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အမ်ဳိးသား ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရအဖြဲ႔ NCGUB အေနနဲ႔ ဆက္လက္ ရပ္တည္စရာ မလိုေတာ့ေၾကာင္း ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က လာမယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေတြမွာ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မယ္လို႔ ေၾကညာလိုက္တဲ့အတြက္ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအႏိုင္ရ NLD လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ေတြနဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားတဲ့ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အမ်ဳိးသား ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ NCGUB ဟာ ဆက္လက္ ရပ္တည္စရာ မလိုအပ္ေတာ့ဘူးလို႔ ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းက သူ႔အျမင္ကို ေျပာျပပါတယ္။

“ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကိုယ္တိုင္က ေျပာတာေတာ့ လာမယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မယ္။ လာမယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိမွ ဝင္ေရာက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္တဲ့ေနာက္ေတာ့ ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလာဒ္ကို ဆက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ျဖစ္ရမယ္ဆုိတဲ့ ပံုစံမ်ိဳး လုပ္လုိ႔ မရဘူးေပါ့။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အေနနဲ႔ကေတာ့ NLD နဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ လာမယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မယ္ ဆုိရင္ေတာ့၊ တကယ္လည္း စၿပီး ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ၿပီ ဆုိရင္ေတာ့ အေဝးေရာက္ ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစုိးရ NCGUB အေနနဲ႔ ဆက္လက္ၿပီးေတာ့ တည္ရွိဖို႔လိုမယ္လို႔ မထင္ဘူး”

ဒါေပမယ့္ လုပ္ထုံးလုပ္နည္းအရ ျပည္ပေရာက္ ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏုိင္ရ အမတ္ေတြနဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားတဲ့ MPU ေခၚ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္မ်ား သမဂၢ ကေန NCGUB အမ်ဳိးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ေတြကို ေရြးခ်ယ္ထားတာျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ MPU အဖြဲ႔ကသာ ဆုံးျဖတ္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အေဝးေရာက္ ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ NCGUB အဖြဲ႔ကို ေပါက္ေခါင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္း ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအႏိုင္ရ အမတ္ေတြနဲ႔ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသား အစည္းအရုံး KNU ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ရွိရာ မာနယ္ပေလာစခန္းမွာ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ အဖြဲ႔ေတြရဲ႕ ေထာက္ခံမႈနဲ႔ ၁၉၉ဝ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၈ ရက္ေန႔က ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

14-11-2011 Burma/Myanmar: Not Regime Change

2011-12-25T11:41:00.001+05:30

Many observers assume the new developments in Burma are promising and encouraging. The era of the soldier-agriculture minister didn't know Jaggery got out of toddy tree tapping and the soldier-judge did not read any section of panel code has virtually ended but was replaced by birds of the same feather. The new folks could not revive the economy but badly ruined the reputation of the country. After over 20 years these guys made a new arrangement. They just took off feather.

Yes the new authorities seek advice and are making fresh moves which are impossible before. General Ne Win who ruled 26 years made a motto of good citizen over capable person. He meant those who obey the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) were good and the skilled professionals who were not party members were bad. Although new rulers of Burma today seek recommendations from intellectuals the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is supreme. So it is not a “regime change”.

There are arguments on change of men versus change of policies. For some people policy is more important than individuals. They will readily endorse the new developments taking place in Burma. The current dominant trend in the world also favors that way. That means no matter criminals or manufacturers who can deliver the goods are the men to do business. So the veiled regime can sell all what they want. Then competition for new Burma becomes important.

The Mingladon airport of Rangoon becomes so busy at both arrival and departure terminals. President U Thein Sein, his number two and etc. went to Beijing, New Delhi and ASEAN capitals. Bangkok-Yangon airline carried more business class passengers from the United States than the Asians. In fact they come and go for real business.

For everybody it is time to review. Before the new election in 2010 the opposition or pro-democracy activists got political and other assistance exclusively from the West which also imposed sanctions against the regime. Though it was obviously flawed, that election changed the support structure considerably. The Europeans went into Burma too early and made political gambit. The long-time democrats think it contentious. The EU tried to breed a new dissection among the non-junta civilians. Some foreign scholars also recommended for so-called a third force. I noticed that the foreign agencies used the conventional practice of buying candidates during 2010 election. It was because they regarded Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD) as sinking boat.

When Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released the intellectual assertion of such was proved wrong. U Thein Sein’s government chose the alternative arrangement. The elected the non-military parliamentarians have just a small room to speak out. Aung San Suu Kyi is not Titanic but a floating five-star ocean liner.

So it is worthy to see who are dealing both with U Thein Sein as well as with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi? What levels of which foreign governments are meeting with both key players of Burma? U Thein sein has met with top leaders of China as well as of India one time each. Interestingly his team received American diplomats several times so far. It is the maximum number of visits by the Americans in the entire history of Burma. I am sure India and China will open eyes widely. But it seems Rangoon is quite far for them.

I am not saying that Thein Sein has exclusive authority like General New Win and Senior General Than Shwe. U Thein Sein has to obey own rules and new norms. Above all Thein Sein works with Aung San Suu Kyi who also made surprise to all observers.

In the mean time Indian analysts continue praising the rulers of Burma by writing that India's pragmatic approach has paid significant dividends. I think it is not the time for talking of who deserves credit but for how to grasp the opportunity. U Thein Sein’s government is different from the previous regime in terms of structure. Military was diluted. Aung San Suu Ky is not a captive but the one who helps shape the new scenario. U Thein Sein cannot do those changes alone. So is time for new approaches. Time of one-way traffic is over.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) is expected to regain the legal status. As the space has been widen more arguments and more talks are there in Burma. It should not be correct to blame at those who do not agree NLD to register as a political party because (1) they never trust the regime which has done unforgivable political crimes and (2) no one knows what she and the president have agreed. At the same time I am sure Aung San Suu Kyi will wisely decide. The second phase of changes in Burma depends on the NLD’s decision which will be made on 18-11-2011. It will be the destiny of Burma as well as the fortune of U Thein Sein’s government.

What I mean is that the role of the Burmese in exile as well as the foreign players also hinge on the decision of Aung San Suu Kyi. The USDP regime desperately wants her in. The old regime saw clearly those western sanctions and embargoes, modified ODA from Japan, the resolutions at the UN, threats of Commission of Inquiry for human rights violations, ILO measures, and etc. made them unable to pursue the old ways. All soft-policy governments have been on their side there was no reason to change because of those supportive countries. It was pressure that made them change.

In response to changing scenario it needs to remodel relation with Burma. In the 21st century world hegemony is not accepted. To make balance of power Burma possible becomes one of the playing grounds. Unfortunately Burmese military’s foreign relation did not help that necessity. And now the pitch is different.

When Aung San Suu Kyi chose to sit in the parliament, then everything will be changed. New approaches and new policies should be in hand by now. The fate of huge hydropower dam over Irrawaddy River indicates that all old dealings of business or political done by the unpopular regime are at stake. If NLD got the right place to play in country’s affairs, regional competition will be in balance and Burmese will have to rebuild and no time for unnecessary external matters. But Burma may become a ground for more players.

ASEAN will become more comfortable to play as an important regional bloc. China and India may need to adjust existing concerns and opportunities. The western nations will reenter there. However it is still early to exclude worse scenario.

Dr. Tint Swe

11-11-2011 US to support India’s Look East policy

2011-12-25T11:37:00.001+05:30

WASHINGTON, Nov 11 – Aiming to strengthen its ties with countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the US has said it wants to actively support India’s Look East policy and is committed to broader, deeper and more purposeful ties with it, reports PTI.

“Our ability to build a successful regional architecture will turn on our ability to work effectively with the emerging powers, countries like Indonesia, or India, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam, Brunei, and the Pacific Island countries,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in her remarks at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

As such the US is making a concerted effort to build closer and more extensive partnerships with all these nations, she said.

“India and Indonesia in particular are two of the most dynamic and significant democratic powers in the world, and the United States is committed to broader, deeper, more purposeful relations with each. And we want to actively support India’s Look East policy as it grows into an Act East policy,” Clinton said.

From the very beginning, the Obama administration embraced the importance of the Asia Pacific region, she said.

Clinton said that so many global trends point to Asia — it is home to nearly half the world’s population, it boasts several of the largest and fastest-growing economies and some of the world’s busiest ports and shipping lanes, and it also presents consequential challenges such as military build-ups, concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, natural disasters, and the world’s worst levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century, the world’s strategic and economic centre of gravity will be the Asia Pacific, from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of Americas, she said.

And one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decades will be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic and otherwise – in this region, she said.

10-11-2011 Myanmar women stalked, assaulted in Delhi

2011-12-25T11:36:00.001+05:30

ေဒလီမွာ ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္ မိန္းကေလးမ်ားကို ေဒသခံ အိႏၵိယလူမ်ိဳးမ်ားက ေစာ္္ကား
Dwaipayan Ghosh, TNN | Nov 10, 2011, 02.03AM IST

NEW DELHI: Three women from Myanmar were assaulted by their neighbours in west Delhi in the continuing discriminatory attacks against people from the Northeast and southeast Asia in the capital of the world's largest democracy.

Even their male friends, who tried to intervene, were not spared. The victims allege they had been stalked and teased by the local goons for several weeks before being assaulted. But the women mustered enough courage to nab one of the accused even as the other three fled.

The incident happened in the weekend at Vikaspuri, where hundreds of refugees from Myanmar lead a ghetto-like existence after fleeing the crackdown by the junta back home at Yangon. The women were attacked when one of them was waiting outside her rented accommodation to receive two female friends with a male companion. Two of the accused have been arrested.

"We arrested two of them, including the kingpin Bhupendra. A case of eve-teasing and causing hurt has been lodged against the duo. We have identified the third accused and hope to arrest him soon,'' said V Renganathan, additional CP (west).

Sources in the Vikaspuri police station said the women had earlier complained about harassment by the local residents and the matter was resolved after police intervention. "The accused said they had only asked the women to vacate their house. But the victims allege they had been stalked for over a week,'' said a senior investigating officer.

Talking to TOI, Pyinmya Than, a Myanmarese refugee, said, "We are a target of harassment. We are still viewed as foreigners despite living in the city for decasdes. We have never broken the law or done anything to hurt sentiments of residents to deserve such treatment,'' he said.

The 7000-odd refugees who have fled Myanmar over the past 22 years and are now residing in small rented accommodations in Vikaspuri , Dwarka and Janakpuri.

They believe geo-political compulsions and the compelling need to checkmate China will not allow India to oppose the military junta in Myanmar.

The low point, refugees say, came when India welcomed Myanmar's reclusive military leader Than Shwe for a state visit in July this year.

7-11-2011 India to showcase more than 60 companies in Rangoon

2011-12-25T11:35:00.001+05:30

Monday, 07 November 2011 20:23 Ko Pauk
New Delhi (Mizzima) –

More than 60 Indian companies will participate in the trade exhibition "Enterprise India – Exclusive Exhibition of Indian Products & Services" opening on Monday at Tatmadaw (military) Hall in Rangoon.

The Confederation of Indian Industry and the Indian embassy in Rangoon jointly organize the four-day exhibition that aims to support the industrial sector of Burma and is a gathering of Indian businesspersons representing small, medium and big businesses.

The major exhibitors will show automobiles (commercial and passenger), agriculture machinery, telecommunication infrastructure, electrification equipment, renewable energy products, textiles and garments and consumer durables representing companies including Tata Motors, Mahindra and Mahindra, Shyam Telecom, Escorts, NHPC, Fedders Lloyd, Exim Bank, Ion Exchange, HMT and International Tractors.

A conference on ‘Opportunities for Strengthening Myanmar-India Trade and Economic Cooperation” will be held at the Park Royal Hotel in Rangoon on Wednesday.

Sanjay C. Kirloskar, chairman and managing director of Kirloskar Brothers Ltd, leads the Indian delegation.

The Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (UMFCCI) helped facilitate the trade event. "The Indian embassy asked us to send invitations to about 50 businesses,” said an UMFCCI official.

Burma, ‬one of the world's Least Developed Countries (LDC), is a beneficiary of the Duty Preferential Tariff Scheme for LDCs announced by India last year. It has also benefited from the India-Asean Free Trade agreement.‬

Currently, the India-Burma trade volume is estimated to be USD 1,500 million. It includes timber, steel, machinery equipment, medicine and agricultural products. In September, the two countries agreed to double trade volume by 2015.

The two sides also agreed to establish a trade and investment forum, setting up markets along the border and holding regular border trade meetings.

For more information, see http://www.indiaembassy.net.mm/index.php?option=com_content&;view=article&id=139%3Aenterprise-india-show10-13-november-2011&catid=2%3Aupcoming-events&lang=en

24-10-2011 India, Myanmar open up borders

2011-12-25T11:33:00.001+05:30

24 Oct, 2011, 03.53PM IST, IANS
AIZAWL: In a reciprocal gesture, Myanmar has decided to allow Indians living in border areas of four northeastern states to travel upto 16 km inside its territory without a passport or visa, a Mizoram government official said Monday.

"The reciprocal arrangements for the visit of both Indians and Mynmarese were discussed in detail at a deputy commissioner-level meeting held at Falam in Myanmar's Chin state last week," a Mizoram home department official here told IANS.

India had already made a similar announcement earlier this year, allowing unrestricted entry of Myanmarese up to 16 km territory inside Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

"Besides residents of Mizoram, inhabitants of Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh would be allowed to visit the other side of the Myanmar border," the official said.

Citizens of both countries can stay on the other side of the border for a maximum period of one week.

Mizoram's Champhai district Deputy Commissioner Vijaya Kumar Bidhuri led the Indian delegation at the meeting held Saturday.

Official of both countries have also agreed to work together in curbing trafficking of rare orchids, animal organs and skins, drugs and sandalwood.

The tribal-dominated population on both sides of the border share common lifestyles and traditions.

Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram share a 1,640 km-long border with Myanmar, manned by the Assam Rifles on the Indian side. The dense forests make the border porous and vulnerable.

24-10-2011 Dalai Lama invites Suu Kyi to attend meeting in the Czech Republic

2011-12-25T11:32:00.001+05:30

Monday, 24 October 2011 19:00 Ko Pauk
New Delhi (Mizzima) –

Burmese Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been invited by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, to attend a conference in the Czech Republic.

The National League for Democracy said the meeting in early December would include Nobel Peace laureates and other world leaders.

Since 1988 when Suu Kyi returned Burma, she has never gone out of the country.

She has received about 100 international awards, but has not attended any of the presentation ceremonies. There is public concern that if she leaves to visit a foreign country, she would not be granted re-entry into Burma.

Normally, Suu Kyi sends a video message to international meetings and conferences or participates in live discussions.

18-10-2011 We are all indignados

2011-12-25T11:29:00.001+05:30

Socialist International
18 October 2011

A feeling of unrest is sweeping the world. In recent days and weeks we have seen thousands of citizens from all walks of life gather in cities around the world to peacefully express their demands for fundamental change. This growing movement by indignados, outraged citizens protesting, has been characterised by the diversity of those taking to the streets to march, protest and occupy. The demonstrations have spread to the major financial centres, from the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York to protests in the City of London and at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Thousands have marched in the streets of Santiago, Tokyo and Cairo. These people, behind different causes and demands, are united not by political ideology or allegiance, but have come together to express their anger and frustration at existing economic and political realities which have failed them and their fellow citizens.

Of all the causes advocated by this movement, the one which has most resonated has been the rejection of the current speculatory nature of global financial capitalism, responsible for creating the bubble which burst in 2008, leaving the global economy in chaos and taxpayers to bear the cost. It is unacceptable that those banks which made huge profits from the indebtedness of states and individuals were then able to socialise their losses as we saw in the huge bail-outs of 2008-9, without severe constraints and regulation in the aftermath. To see a return to risk-taking, speculation and profiteering within such a short space of time is an affront to those suffering the policies of austerity felt in the real economy, who are rightly directing their anger at those who became extremely wealthy promoting complex financial schemes. Whilst delivering no tangible benefit to anyone outside of the economic bubble, this behaviour directly precipitated the global financial crisis and its destructive impact on the lives of hundreds of millions around the world, resulting in an ever growing disparity in income and wealth in those economies.

As bankers continue to benefit from state funds and tax loopholes, the effects of cuts are felt, with rises in unemployment, declining salaries and worsening of working conditions. The values and principles of the global social-democratic movement are aligned with those myriad individuals uniting to decry this injustice, and the Socialist International stands today on the side of those who through these demonstrations seek a fair financial system, and will ensure that their demands are heard. It is equally crucial not to allow conservatives and those with an interest in maintaining the status quo to misrepresent their initiatives by spreading fear of anarchy and chaos, but to recognise the common goals with those protesting for which the progressive movement has always stood: more and better jobs, the respect of people before capital, free healthcare and education.

It is now three years since the outbreak of the global financial crisis, during which time the Socialist International has placed much-needed change in world finances at the heart of its agenda. The work of different bodies of our International on these matters in the intervening period has addressed the imbalances and injustices that exist in the current system, and proposed credible, authoritative and realisable responses that address today’s economic order in a socially responsible manner. In line with these long-held positions, the International stands today in solidarity with those participating in a movement inspired by an honest desire to make a difference. After years during which the supposed virtues of an individualist society have been trumpeted by many, it is refreshing to witness on a daily basis the rebirth of the selfless ideals of cooperation and common humanity shown by these activists.

The Socialist International reiterates its call for world leaders to show due consideration for the interests of the majority in taking unified action to counter what is more than ever a global crisis, something that has been lacking to date following the disappointing outcomes of successive G20 summits. A coordinated show of multilateralism by governments to recognise that a more just and prosperous future lies in tackling the short-termism of those driven by personal interest and profit to move to a more durable vision of a global economy which rewards responsibility and not risk would be a step in the right direction. In order to do this, action is needed to implement initiatives such as the global tax on financial transactions for which the SI has been calling for a number of years and which would raise revenue whilst reducing the profitability of the most risky, socially useless transactions.

Further damaging is the powerful role now played by ratings agencies, at a moment when many governments are struggling with the consequences of crippling sovereign debt. For elected administrations to be destabilised by unaccountable bodies is a threat to the very principles of democracy, and the influence of these agencies must diminish.

Our global movement has consistently prioritised a recovery based on sustainable growth in the real economy, and not another speculative bubble liable to burst at any moment. With more and better global governance, reform of markets and institutions and fairer distribution of resources, we can redesign a financial system aligned to the benefit of the many rather than the few, providing greater security, stability and social justice. The challenge is to transform the urgency, determination and resolve of the street into concrete political action. To fulfil this challenge must be the task of our International today.

SI Asia-Pacific region

2011-12-25T11:27:00.001+05:30

Socialist International (SI)
Strengthening democracy and pursuing sustainable and fair economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region
07-08 October 2011

‘Combining economic growth with environmental responsibility: the dual challenge of development’ and ‘Advancing social democracy in the Asia-Pacific region’ were the main themes on the agenda of the recent meeting of the Socialist International Asia-Pacific Committee, which took place in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on 7-8 October, hosted by the SI the member party in that country, the Mongolian People’s Party.

The meeting was opened by SI Secretary General Luis Ayala and Prime Minister and MPP Party Chairman Sukhbaatar Batbold. In congratulating the Mongolian People’s Party on their achievements, Ayala highlighted that for social democrats, democracy and good governance were key to economic growth and creating opportunities for people, as their country was experiencing. Economic development needed to be combined with sustainability and a heightened sense of responsibility. In today’s Mongolia we had a good example of a democracy that is delivering in economic performance to improve education, health, public services, in short, the living standards of its people. Many possibilities existed today for social democracy in the Asia-Pacific region, where until some years ago too often politics placed the emphasis only on the economy while ignoring rights and freedoms of citizens. Prime Minister Batbold warmly welcomed participants to Mongolia and expressed his party’s satisfaction at hosting this SI meeting. In addressing the main themes on the agenda, he stressed the need to use the natural resources at hand in the interest of the population while preserving and protecting the environment. He underlined the importance of enabling the people to benefit from the economic growth that Mongolia had been experiencing in recent years and referred to initiatives such as the Human Development Fund that had been implemented by his government to ensure that citizens received their share of the revenue from natural resources.

Introducing the first main theme, Enkhbold Nyamaa, Deputy Speaker of the Mongolian Parliament, outlined the policies and measures taken in Mongolia to turn the fast advancing economic development into an environmentally friendly green growth. The country was facing similar challenges as other fast growing economies and in their case, the development of their mining industry, the rapid increase of housing and a growing infrastructure with the resulting impact on the environment. Ultimately, the question was how to strike the right balance between development and environmental responsibility.

The ensuing discussions centred on the impact of global warming on the region, and on ways to ensure that the income from natural resources benefited the population as a whole. Other experiences of governments in the region in regard to similar types of funds as the one established in Mongolia were shared by participants. The need to hold mining and other companies working in the exploitation of natural resources accountable with regard to the protection of the environment was discussed at some length in which different experiences were examined. The regulatory role of the state was emphasised as well as the involvement of civil society and other NGOs in this process. The consistency of the policies of the state to halt environmental degradation was considered crucial to live up to the need to tackle the impact of global warming, the draining of lakes and rivers, or further desertification. Recent floods in countries of the region highlighted a sense of urgency on these issues, as could be seen in Pakistan, Cambodia or Thailand, where large numbers of people were suffering. Several projects and initiatives to tackle climate change, which had surfaced in different countries of the region were mentioned, as were the recommendations made by the SI’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society for commitments with clear objectives and deadlines, deeper emission cuts, binding engagements, the verification of commitments, and a real solidarity between developing and developed nations. It was underlined that fighting climate change was not only a challenge but also an opportunity to come up with fresh approaches to the current economic crisis to generate new areas for growth, new industries and employment.

Otgonbayar Yondon, Mongolian Minister for Education, introduced the second theme, ‘Advancing Social Democracy in the Asia-Pacific Region’, reporting on the situation of his own party and their engagement in moving forward the progressive agenda in Mongolia. During the discussions it was stressed that every step forward for democracy in the region was also a new opportunity for social democracy. Participants reaffirmed that functioning multi-party systems, the holding of regular free and fair elections and the respect of fundamental freedoms were an imperative. Social-democracy had a relatively short history in Asia but today new opportunities had arisen, building on the presence of the International over recent years supporting and engaging those who were mobilised in the search for democracy, freedoms and rights. A new era of change was beginning to take shape in the region, a change which in many countries was driven by values and principles of our movement.

Extensive and detailed reports on national situations in countries of the region were presented, starting with that of the host country, given by Foreign Minister Zandanshatar Gombojav. The Committee subsequently adopted a statement on Mongolia, which recognised the MPP’s contributions to the establishment of modern Mongolia, its role in the transition of the country to a true democracy and its part in the work of the Socialist International, as a centre-left, social democratic party leading a government with a positive and successful record. A second declaration of the meeting addressed a number of national situations which were part of the discussions. In this document, the contribution of Pakistan under the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party, PPP, to the war against terror, its many sacrifices and its commitment to upholding the progressive agenda carried forth by the late Benazir Bhutto was recognised. In regard to the border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, the declaration supports the dialogue in place to restore peace and stability, welcoming the fact that both parties have refrained from using force since the new government in Thailand came to power, urging both sides to respect the decisions of the International Court of Justice. On Burma/Myanmar, recent positive developments were found to be encouraging, hoping that they will lead to a decisive move towards democracy. The Committee extended its full support to Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy in their efforts for a peaceful transition, calling for the immediate release of all remaining prisoners of conscience. On Timor Leste, the Committee congratulated Fretilin for the successful holding of direct elections for its leadership as part of the wider process of strengthening political parties in the region.

Discussions in Ulaanbaatar closed with a warm recognition by participants of the fraternal hospitality they had received from the MPP, the people of Mongolia and the media who widely covered the meeting.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
Socialist International
Luis Ayala (Secretary General)
AUSTRALIA
Peter Yates, Australian Labor Party, ALP
GREECE
Eleni Christidou, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK
MONGOLIA
Mongolian People’s Party, MPP, Sukhbaatar Batbold, Bayar Sanjaa, Sodbaatar Yangug, Enkhbold Nyamaa, Zandanshatar Gombojav, Munkh-Orgil Tsend, Otgonbayar Yondon, Tenger Gonchigzeveg, Amarbayasgalan Dashzeveg, Dawadash Sambuu, Sayanaa Lkhagvasuren, Uyanga Sukhbaatar, Bazarragchaa Damba, Mandkhai Davaadorj, Tamir Jambal
PAKISTAN
Shazia Marri, Pakistan People’s Party, PPP
SWEDEN
Anders Bergérus, Swedish Social Democratic Party, SAP
TIMOR-LESTE
Estanislau da Silva, Fretilin
BURMA
Tint Swe, National League for Democracy, NLD
CAMBODIA
Cambodian People’s Party, PPC, Yara Suos, Kheav Sambat
SI Secretariat
Sophie Weidenbach

၁၇-၁ဝ၂ဝ၁၁ အိႏၵိယ-ျမန္မာ အျပန္အလွန္ ျငင္းခ်က္ထုတ္ခဲ့ၾက

2011-12-25T11:22:00.001+05:30

နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၩိမ) ကိုေပါက္
အိႏၵိယ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး သူပုန္မ်ား တည္ေနရာအား ၿဂိဳလ္တုေျမပံု ေပးပါက တိုက္ေပးႏိုင္ မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာဘက္က ေျပာၾကားလိုက္သကဲ့သို႔ အိႏၵိယဘက္မွလည္း ကခ်င္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္ KIA ႏွင့္ အဆက္အဆံ မရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ဆက္ဆံေရး အရွိန္အဟုန္ တိုးျမႇင့္ရန္ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သည့္ ဝန္ႀကီး ၁၃ ဦးပါ ကိုယ္စား လွယ္ အဖြဲ႔ ေလးရက္ၾကာ လာေရာက္စဥ္ ျမန္မာ ကာကြယ္ေရး ဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္႐ုံးမွ ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီး လွေဌးဝင္းႏွင့္ အိႏၵိယ အမ်ဳိးသား လံုၿခံဳေရး အၾကံေပး အရာရွိ Shiv Shanker Menon တို႔ နယူးေဒလီၿမိဳ႕၌ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း တနဂၤေႏြေန႔ထုတ္ Hindustan Times သတင္းစာႀကီးတြင္ ေရးသားထားသည္။

စေနေန႔က အဆံုးသတ္ခဲ့ေသာ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း အဓိက ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့သည့္ အေၾကာင္းအရာ တခုျဖစ္သည့္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ နယ္စပ္ လံုျခံဳေရး ကိစၥတြင္ အျပန္အလွန္ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္မ်ားအား အသီးသီး တုန္႔ျပန္လိုက္ၾကျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

KIA တပ္မ်ားသို႔ နယူးေဒလီ အစိုးရမွ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ားျဖင့္ ရိကၡာမ်ား ခ်ေပးခဲ့သည္ ဟူေသာ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ႏွင့္ အိႏၵိယ ပိုင္ Tirap-Changlang ေဒသတြင္း KIA တပ္မ်ား တပ္စြဲထားသည္ ဟူေသာ ျမန္မာဘက္မွ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ကို အိႏၵိယ ဘက္မွ ျငင္းဆို လိုက္သည္။

ေအာက္တိုဘာလအတြင္း အိႏၵိယ Naxelite ႏွင့္ PLA သူပုန္မ်ားက ျမန္မာ့ ေျမပိုင္နက္အတြင္း စစ္သင္တန္း စခန္း မ်ား ဖြင့္လွစ္ရန္ စီစဥ္ထားရွိၿပီး ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျမပံုမ်ားႏွင့္တကြ အိႏၵိယ အထူးရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔က မၾကာမီက ေဖာ္ထုတ္ သိရွိ ခဲ့သည္။

ျမန္မာဘက္မွ အဆိုပါ သူပုန္မ်ားအေပၚ အေရးယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ား ရွိပါေၾကာင္း အိႏၵိယဘက္မွ ယံုၾကည္ လက္ခံလာရန္ ႀကိဳးစားေသာ္လည္း အိႏၵိယဘက္မွမူ အခိုင္အမာ သက္ေသျပေစလိုသည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဆည္ေျမာင္း လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား အပါအဝင္ စီမံကိန္း လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားစြာ အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖာ္ႏိုင္ ရန္အတြက္ နယူးေဒလီက အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ သန္း ၅၀၀ ေခ်းယူခြင့္ ျပဳလိုက္သည္။

စက္တဘၤာ လဆန္းပိုင္းက ျမန္မာတပ္ စစ္ဆင္ေရး တခုအတြင္း အိႏၵိယ အာသံသူပုန္ ULFA စစ္ဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ Paresh Buruah ေသနတ္ ဒဏ္ရာ ရရွိသြားေၾကာင္း အိႏၵိယ ျပည္ထဲေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာနက အတည္ျပဳ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ အိႏၵိယ လံုျခံဳေရး သတင္းရပ္ကြက္ကမူ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ အေနျဖင့္ အိႏၵိယ သူပုန္မ်ားႏွင့္ စည္းဝါး႐ိုက္ ပူးေပါင္း ႀကံစည္မႈမ်ား ရွိေနႏိုင္သည္ဟု သံသယရွိေနၾကသည္။ ျမန္မာတပ္ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ား မဝင္ႏိုင္မီ တရက္အလိုတိုင္း အိႏၵိယသူပုန္မ်ားက ေရွာင္တိမ္းသြားႏိုင္ကာ ဗလာ စခန္းမ်ားအား ပစ္ခတ္ေနေလ့ ရွိသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ေလးလပါတ္ အစည္းအေဝးမ်ား မက်င္းမမီ ျမန္မာဘက္မွ လုပ္ႀကံ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ား ခင္းျပေလ့ ရွိေၾကာင္း လည္း အဆိုပါ စစ္ဘက္သတင္းရပ္ကြက္က ဆိုသည္။

အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရ အဆိုအရ ျမန္မာပိုင္ ဒကာ Taga ေဒသတြင္ အိႏၵိယ အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ သူပုန္မ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည့္ NSCN (K) , PLA ႏွင့္ ULFA စခန္းမ်ား ကီလိုမီတာ ၂၀-၃၀ ေက်ာ္ တည္ရွိေနၿပီး PLA ႏွင့္ UNLF တို႔ မဏိပူရျပည္နယ္ မုိးေရးနယ္စပ္တြင္ ေတာင္ေျမာက္ တပ္စြဲထားသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။

ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ တာဝန္က် တပ္မႉးမ်ား လစဥ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေလ့ရွိၿပီး တပ္ရင္း တပ္မမႉးမ်ားကလည္း သံုးလတႀကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေလ့ရွိကာ ျပည္ထဲေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာန အရာရွိမ်ားကလည္း ေျခာက္လတႀကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေလ့ ရွိၾကသည္။

အိႏၵိယအေနႏွင့္ နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ တပ္မေတာ္ခ်င္း ဆက္သြယ္ေရးမ်ား တိုးျမႇင့္ေစလိုၿပီး ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ တပ္မႀကီးမႉးမ်ား ႏွစ္ႏွစ္တႀကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုလိုေၾကာင္း တင္ျပခဲ့သည္။

ႏွစ္ဖက္ နယ္စပ္ တေလွ်ာက္ ထိေရာက္ေသာ ပူးတြဲစစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ား ျမႇင့္တင္ရန္အတြက္ ယမန္ႏွစ္က နအဖ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးသန္းေရႊ လာေရာက္ခဲ့စဥ္က ရရွိခဲ့သည့္ သေဘာတူခ်က္မ်ား အေပၚတြင္ အေျခခံေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

India and Burma argue over border insurgent issues
Monday, 17 October 2011 21:26 Ko Pauk

New Delhi (Mizzima) – The Burmese government has asked India to provide satellite imagery of anti-Indian insurgent military camps in order to wage military operations, and India has said that it had no truck with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an anti-Burmese government ethnic armed group.

A map of the Indian-Burmese border area where anti-Indian insurgents are active.

A map of the Indian-Burmese border area where anti-Indian insurgents are active.
During the four-day visit of a Burmese delegation led by President Thein Sein to India recently, Lieutenant General Hla Htay Win of the office of the commander-in-chief met with the Indian national security advisor Shiv Shanker Menon in New Delhi, the Hindustan Times reported on Sunday.

During the visit, which ended on Saturday, border security affairs was a main topic.

Indian officials denied that it had dropped food supplies to the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) via helicopters, and that KIA troops were based in the Tirap-Changlang area in India.

Recently, Indian media reported that Indian Maoist rebels, popularly known as Naxalites, had a plan to open training camps inside Burmese territory, according to documents and maps seized by Indian police. Although Burma claims that it has taken actions against the anti-Indian insurgents, India has asked for proof.

At the end of the state visit, the Indian government announced a US$ 500 million credit line to Burma for developmental projects including irrigation projects in the border area.

Recently, Indian media reported that ULFA Commander-in-Chief Paresh Baruah, who heads an insurgent group, had been injured in a military operation launched by the Burmese army in early September.

On the other hand, a source close to Indian national security said that the Burmese army may have prearranged agreements with anti-India insurgents, because the insurgents usually evade Burmese army military operations, and the army usually attacks the insurgent’s empty bases. According to the source, the Burmese army frequently launches fake offensives against anti-Indian insurgents before quarterly border meetings between India and Burma.

According to Indian government sources, the northeast insurgent group NSCN-(K) is located in Taga, PLA and ULFA rebel camps spread over 20 to 30 kilometres, and PLA and UNLA rebels are based across the north and south of the Moreh border in Manipur.

Presently, Indian border post commanders meet their Burmese counterparts monthly; sector or division commanders meet four times a year; and Home Affairs Ministry officials meet once every six months.

India has proposed the enhancement of inter-army contacts on the Indo-Burmese border, and it wants commanders of both sides to meet twice a year.

When former junta Senior-General Than Shwe visited India last year, Burmese and Indian leaders agreed to promote joint military operations along the Indo-Burmese border. The recent discussions between the two countries are based on the previous agreement between the former Burmese junta and India.

13-10-2011 Interview with AsiaNews

2011-12-25T11:21:00.001+05:30

Q: What's your opinion about recent developments in Burma?
Recent developments in Burma are interesting indeed. Relaxation on restrictions, meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, releasing political prisoners and etc. are welcome. However those released should not be arrested at outset. Media restriction made the regime more difficult and was relaxed. Sidelining Aung San Suu Kyi proved counterproductive for the junta to remain in power and ultimately it was decided for an alternative way. So all so-called positive moves are not because dictators changed their mind and heart but it is to keep them staying at the top by an unusual way.

Q: In a near future Aung San Suu Kyi will have a political "active" role in the country or a public office?
Aung San Suu Kyi is politically active not only in the future but it is she who is pivotal of current changes. However she is different from many others who are vying for power position. She works for the good of the nation and her people. She does not agree all wrong doings of military regime. For instance she did not accept abandonment of the 1990 election results not because of her party’s victory but it was the peoples’ legitimate choice expressed in a free and fairly conducted election. It is also up to the people whether she should serve as a statesman or not. It does not necessarily mean she works and pays the price for a political position.

Q: Which are the reasons behind the recent steps taken by the government (halt of Myistone dam, scores of political prisoners freed)? Asean Presidency in 2014, EU and USA sanctions...
The track record shows that the regime did not do for the good of the country or the people but for their own sake. New moves are meant for the same intent. The halting of dam project kills two birds with one stone. Those who opposed are satisfied and the president gained the score. China was appeased with compensation. But that money will not come from the wallet of the president but the poor people will be taxed more. The high profile release of prisoners is merely temporary relief. Everybody can be rearrested at any time and given any length of prison terms. It is up to the ASEAN bloc for chairmanship. If more demands come from ASEAN more good news will come. This means simply constructive policy did not make the regime to change but it is pressure that forced to do so. Likewise if the West continues asking for genuine reform yes, more changes are sure to come. Appeasement policy failed.

Q: China is the main economical partner for Burma. But do you think the government is searching for other countries with whom to trade?
Burmese regime played China card without long term strategic vision. It is dangerous for the country. To some extends generals tried to balance but it has been too late and more importantly balance cannot be achieved by the Burma army alone. Without the political force which genuinely represents the majority of population, it proved impossible when it comes to national interest.

Q: Do you believe political leadership in Burma is serious or it's just a double cross?
History tells us that military regimes were not serious. This Quasi-military administration may or may not be different from the past. Next chapter of history will take decades to record the new events. So it is unwise and dangerous to give full credit to this new government right now.

Q: What is Q: if there is any Q: the role Than Shwe is playing nowadays in Burma? More freedom seems to be connected with his departure from a public role in the country...
General New Win’s successor Senior General Saw Maung detached Ne Win and then let him die disgracefully. Senior General Than Shwe removed Saw Maung and let him die with nervous breakdown. Why not Thein Sein to go against Than Shwe! All dictators built own power base and if necessary the boss must be eliminated.

Q: How do you picture future in Burma?
It is coming out of the darkest days. The praise should go neither to the president Thein Sein not the new parliament. All positive developments are the outcome of all those who made sacrifices and worked hard. The quality as well as quantity of pro-democracy side is swelling. Twenty years of severe tyranny could not diminish that force. Future Burma depends on them not on those working in Naypyitaw.

Dr. Tint Swe
Burmese MP of 1990 election
New Delhi
13-10-2011

14-10-2011 Joint Statement on the occasion of the State Visit of the President of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar to India

2011-12-25T11:19:00.001+05:30

October 14, 2011
New Delhi
1. At the invitation of the President of India, Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, the President of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, U Thein Sein, is paying a State Visit to India from October 12-15, 2011. He is accompanied by his wife Daw Khin Khin Win. Apart from his official engagements in New Delhi, President U Thein Sein visited places of economic, historical and religious interest, including Bodhgaya, Kushinagar and Varanasi.

2. In New Delhi, President U Thein Sein was accorded a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan on October 14, 2011. The President of Myanmar will meet with the President of India who will host a banquet in his honour.
3. The President of Myanmar paid tribute and respect to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat.
4. External Affairs Minister Shri S.M. Krishna called on President U Thein Sein.
5. President U Thein Sein had a meeting with the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, which was followed by delegation level talks. The meetings and exchanges were held in a warm, cordial and constructive atmosphere, reflecting the close and friendly relations between the two neighbouring countries and peoples.
6. During the official talks, the Prime Minister of India was assisted by Home Minister Shri P. Chidambaram, External Affairs Minister Shri S.M. Krishna, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Shri Jaipal Reddy, Minister of Power Shri Sushil Kumar Shinde, Minister of Commerce and Industry Shri Anand Sharma, Minister for Science and Technology Shri Vilasrao Deshmukh, Minister of State for Defence Shri M.M. Pallam Raju, National Security Adviser Shri Shivshankar Menon, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Shri Pulok Chatterji, Foreign Secretary Shri Ranjan Mathai, Secretary to the Ministry for Development of North Eastern Region Ms Jayati Chandra and other senior officials.
7. The President of Myanmar was assisted by Chief of General Staff Lt Gen. Hla Htay Win, Minister for Border Affairs and Myanmar Industrial Development Lt. Gen Thein Htay, Minister for Foreign Affairs U. Wunna Maung Lwin, Minister for Agriculture and Irrigation U Myint Hlaing, Minister for Religious Affairs Thura U Myint Maung, Minister for Industry (1) and (2) U Soe Thane, Minister for Electric Power (1) U Zaw Min, Minister for National Planning and Economic Development and Livestock and Fisheries U Tin Naing Thein, Minister for Transport U Nyan Tun Aung, Minister for Energy U Than Htay, Minister for Science and Technology U Aye Myint, Minister of Commerce U Win Myint, Deputy Minister for Health Dr. Win Myint, and other senior officials.
8. The visit represented the first State visit to India following the swearing in of a new Government in Myanmar in March 2011 that marks welcome progress in moving towards an open and democratic framework.
9. The Prime Minister of India congratulated the President of Myanmar on the transition towards democratic Government and offered all necessary assistance in further strengthening this democratic transition in an inclusive and broad based manner. He welcomed the ongoing efforts at political, economic and social reform in Myanmar. He also welcomed the convening of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, Pyithu Hluttaw and Amyotha Hluttaw (National Parliament of Myanmar) and the elected assemblies in all the States and Regions in Myanmar and expressed readiness to share India's own experiences in evolving parliamentary rules, procedures and practices. In this context it was noted that the Speaker of the Pyithu Hluttaw (Lower House of Myanmar’s Parliament) has been invited to lead a delegation to India in December 2011.
10. The Prime Minister of India and the President of Myanmar reiterated their shared commitment to strengthening and broadening the multifaceted relationship based on shared history, civilizational ties and close religious, linguistic and cultural affinities and to take it to a new level. While acknowledging the fact that both sides have a responsibility to promote peace, security and stability in the region, they emphasized the need to intensify economic, social and developmental engagement in order to bring about overall socio-economic betterment and inclusive growth.
11. With a view to carrying forward the momentum of bilateral exchanges, it was agreed that a meeting of the External Affairs / Foreign Minister of the two countries would be held in New Delhi in early 2012 and the next round of Foreign Office Consultations would be held in India at mutually convenient dates in 2012.
12. Both sides reaffirmed their unequivocal and uncompromising position against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. They agreed on enhancing effective cooperation and coordination between the security forces of the two countries in tackling the deadly menace of insurgency and terrorism, which has caused countless loss of innocent lives. Both sides also underscored the need to strengthen institutional mechanisms for sharing of intelligence to combat the menace of insurgency, arms smuggling and drug trafficking. In this context, they discussed matters relating to further strengthening of border management mechanisms. The two leaders reiterated the assurance that the territory of either would not be allowed for activities inimical to the other and resolved not to allow their respective territory to be used for training, sanctuary and other operations by terrorist and insurgent organizations and their operatives.
13. They welcomed the scheduling of meeting of the Heads of Survey Department of India and Myanmar in November 2011, directed the Heads to jointly work out and implement a schedule for inspection and maintenance of boundary pillars in the open season in 2011-12 in a time bound manner.
14. Both sides reiterated their common desire to complete the repatriation process of Myanmar fishermen who drifted into Indian maritime territory and who are being looked after by Indian authorities in Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar.
15. The two sides reviewed the infrastructure development and cooperation projects that are being undertaken in Myanmar with technical and financial assistance from Government of India, including in the field of roads, waterways, power, health, education and industrial training, telecommunications, and others.
16. During the visit, the following documents were signed:
1).Memorandum of Understanding for the Upgradation of the Yangon Children's Hospital and Sittwe General Hospital; and
2).Programme of Cooperation in Science & Technology for the period of 2012-2015.
17. The Myanmar side conveyed its gratitude for Lines of Credit amounting to nearly US$ 300 million that had been extended by India, including for the development of railways, transport, power transmission lines, oil refinery, OFC link, etc. The President of Myanmar welcomed the interest of Indian companies to invest in Myanmar.
18. The Prime Minister of India announced the extension of a new concessional facility of US$500 million Line of Credit to Myanmar for specific projects, including irrigation projects, each of which will be duly processed and approved in accordance with the modalities applicable for LDCs for such lines of credit. The President of Myanmar thanked the Prime Minister of India for extending the new credit facility.
19. The two leaders welcomed the progress made towards enhancing connectivity between the two countries to mutual benefit of the peoples of the two countries. They expressed satisfaction at the implementation of the Kaladan Multi-modal Transit Transport Project, especially the port development and Inland waterways. It was decided that the road component of the project be started at the earliest, a study be undertaken on the commercial usages of the Kaladan project and necessary agreements to operationalise the route finalised. It was also decided to open an additional Land Customs Station / border trade point on the India-Myanmar border to allow for the smooth flow of goods generated by the Kaladan Project.
20. Both sides reiterated their commitment for an early implementation of the Rhi-Tiddim Road Development Project with grant assistance from India.
21. Reviewing the progress in establishing trilateral connectivity from Moreh in India to Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar, it was noted that substantial progress had been achieved in the preparation of a DPR for roads and causeways in Myanmar. Both sides reiterated the commitment to realize this project.
22. The two leaders also expressed their commitment to enhance cooperation in the area of Science & Technology. They noted that following the renewal of Science & Technology Agreement in 2010 the Programme of Cooperation in Science & Technology for the period of 2012-15 was signed during the current visit. The Prime Minister of India announced India's support for training of Myanmar researchers in the areas of mutual interest and twinning of Indian and Myanmar institutions under India-Myanmar Programme of Cooperation in Science & Technology.
23. The two sides also expressed their commitment to enhance cooperation in the area of agriculture. They noted that the contract for the supply of agricultural machinery under the US$ 10 million grant assistance from India had been awarded. The Prime Minister of India announced that India would extend technical and financial support for following new projects:
(i). Setting up an Advanced Centre for Agricultural Research and Education (ACARE) in Yezin; and

(ii). Setting up a Rice Bio Park demonstrating the various techniques in rice biomass utilisation in the Integrated Demonstration Farm at Nay Pyi Taw.
The President of Myanmar expressed gratitude for the assistance being extended by the Government of India and emphasised that these institutions could play a vital role in reviving the country's agricultural sector, on which over 70% of the population is dependent.
24. Recognising the fundamental place of education and human resource development in bringing about overall economic development, and the importance of IT in today's global scenario, the Prime Minister of India announced India’s support for setting up an Information Technology Institute in Mandalay in cooperation with the Government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.
25. Welcoming the successful completion of the Industrial Training Centre in Pakokku, with India’s assistance, the two sides expressed satisfaction at the progress on the setting up of another Industrial Training Centre at Myingyan with technical support from M/s HMTI.
26. The Myanmar side expressed appreciation for India's assistance in the relief and rehabilitation efforts that followed the severe earthquake that struck North-Eastern Shan State in March 2011. It was noted that the assistance of over US$ 1million from India, which included assistance in the reconstruction of a high school and 6 primary schools in the affected area, was timely and catered to urgent requirements of the people of the area.
27. The two sides agreed to promote trade, investment and economic cooperation in a sustainable manner. In this context, the two leaders endorsed the understandings arrived at the 4th meeting of the bilateral Joint Trade Committee that was held in New Delhi recently, and called for the expeditious implementation of decision taken, including the proposal to establish a Trade and Investment Forum at the business level, expand the basket of goods under border trade, visit of an Indian banking delegation to Myanmar to facilitate better trade and payment arrangements, etc. The two sides also welcomed the decision to hold the 'Enterprise India' Show in Yangon on November 10-14, 2011 and urged companies on both sides to look seriously at opportunities in the other. The two sides encouraged business associations in their respective countries to enter into closer ties with their counterparts and also participate in each other's trade fairs.
28. With a view to promoting border trade, the two sides agreed that meetings between Indian and Myanmar customs, immigration, border chambers of commerce, officials of bank branches at the border, border trade officials (Tamu and Rhi –OSS Team) and Government officials would take place at Tamu-Moreh and Rhi-Zowkhathar at regular intervals. The business representatives of the Manipur/Sagaing Region and of Mizoram/Chin State will also participate in these meetings.
29. It was agreed to consider opening up new Border Trading points along the border for the economic upliftment of the people of the area. It was also agreed to consider better functioning of the existing points and to facilitate movement of people and goods between the two countries.
30. Recognising the importance of the power sector as a major area of cooperation, the two sides reiterated their commitment to cooperate in the implementation of the Tamanthi and Shwezaye projects on the Chindwin River Basin in Myanmar. They welcomed the successful completion of the task of updating the DPR on the Tamanthi project by NHPC on the basis of essential additional investigations. They noted that the final updated DPR for Shwezaye would be available by March 2012. They directed the concerned officials on both sides to finalise plans for implementation of the project within six months.
31. Both leaders underscored the need for energy security and expressed satisfaction at ongoing bilateral cooperation in the area. They agreed to enhance cooperation in the area of oil and natural gas. In this context, the Myanmar side welcomed the substantial investments made by Indian companies like GAIL, ESSAR, ONGC and others in off-shore and on-shore blocks, and construction of natural gas pipelines. Myanmar agreed to encourage further investments by Indian companies, both in public and private sector, in the oil and natural gas sectors.
32. It was also agreed to extend bilateral cooperation to generation of electricity from renewable energy sources, including solar and wind. In this regard, companies, both in public and private sectors, in India and Myanmar would be encouraged to set up joint projects.
33. Appreciating the importance of people-to-people contacts in forging even closer ties, the two sides agreed to take steps to ease the movement of people between India and Myanmar. The Myanmar side thanked India for the facilities and courtesies being extended to Myanmar pilgrims visiting India.
34. The two sides agreed on the need for expansion of air connectivity between the two countries, and directed the concerned officials to work towards enhancing air services which could cover more carriers, flights and destinations. It was noted that this would transform business and cultural ties between the two nations.
35. Both sides agreed to examine feasibility of establishing railway links, ferry and bus services between the two countries. In this context, both sides agreed to examine commencement of ferry services on the Kolkata-Yangon and Chennai-Yangon routes.
36. The two leaders agreed for early upgradation of the microwave link between Moreh and Mandalay or other necessary link under the Indian line of Credit, and directed the concerned officials to work towards establishment of the new Optical Fibre link between Monywa to Rhi-Zawkhatar with Indian assistance.
37. The Myanmar side expressed gratitude for the training offered by India under the ITEC and TCS schemes to Myanmar scholars and Government officials. The Indian side agreed to Myanmar’s request to increasing the number of training slots offered annually to Myanmar nationals to 250 from 2012-2013.
38. Both sides agreed to support joint research projects and exchanges of a historical, archaeological, cultural and educational nature. In this context, it was agreed to enter into a comprehensive Cultural Exchange Programme to promote bilateral exchanges with special emphasis on the four Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram and cooperation in the fields of art, archaeology, museology, sports, media, etc. Both sides agreed to review the Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Republic of India, for expeditious implementation. It was agreed that both sides would jointly organise a high level International conference of Buddhist Philosophy in Myanmar in 2012.
39. It was noted with satisfaction that two teams of professionals from the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) visited Myanmar and carried out detailed studies on the conservation and restoration of the Ananda Temple in Bagan, Myanmar. It was agreed that restoration work on the site would start at the earliest based on the report by ASI.
40. With a view to strengthen diplomatic and consular presence in each other’s countries, it was noted with appreciation that the Myanmar side had agreed that it shall make available the identified plots of land in Nay Pyi Taw, its Capital city, on a lease in perpetuity, and shall transfer the ownership of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) properties in Yangon in the name of the Government of India on a lease for 60 years extendable further by a block period of 30 years each time, on the same terms, as long as India maintains its Diplomatic/Consular Mission in Myanmar. With regard to transfer of the ownership of the LIC properties in Yangon, it was agreed in principle that the Government of Myanmar, in exercise of the powers vested in it under the Article 14 of the Transfer of Immovable Property Restriction Law 1987 authorized the LIC to handover the land and building thereon at 545-547 Merchant Street and 654-666 Merchant Street, Yangon. The Government of India agreed to the request of the Government of Myanmar to facilitate allocation of land in Bodh Gaya for setting up a Buddhist monastery for use of pilgrims and monks from Myanmar.
41. While discussing international developments, the two sides emphasized the importance of an effective multilateral system, centred on a strong United Nations, as a key factor in tackling global challenges. In this context, they stressed the urgent need to pursue the reform of the United Nations including the Security Council, to make it more representative, credible and effective. The President of Myanmar reiterated his country’s support for India’s candidature for the permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council.
42. The two sides emphasized the importance of close coordination towards the cause of regional cooperation. The Indian leadership offered its good wishes to Myanmar for a successful term as BIMSTEC Chair, including its proposal to host the next BIMSTEC Summit meeting. The Indian side also offered to deepen its engagement with Myanmar under its “Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI) programme”. Myanmar being a natural bridge between the ASEAN and India, the Indian side reiterated its intention of building upon the commonalities and synergies between the two countries to advance its ‘Look East’ Policy.
43. The President of Myanmar thanked the President of India for the warm and gracious hospitality extended to him and the members of his delegation during their stay in India.
44. President U Thein Sein extended invitations to the President and Prime Minister of India to visit Myanmar at a mutually convenient time. The invitations were accepted and it was agreed that the dates of the visits would be decided by mutual consultations through diplomatic channels.

http://meaindia.nic.in/mystart.php?id=190018395

14-10-2011 India-Burma relation: Perspective of a Burmese democrat

2011-12-25T11:18:00.002+05:30

History books recorded the elaborate relations and links on culture, religion, history, and such between India and Burma of old times. Cotemporary observers added strategic factors and business sort of things. Nobody neglects China factor. It is termed as pragmatism and or realism policy. Then those who argue for moral ground to support democracy movement in Burma are seen as immature and outdated in the world’s largest democracy.

For the eyes of 90% Burmese population the origin of Buddhism from India is not a small factor which is more important than tourist industry to flourish in both countries. However the single airline between Calcutta and Rangoon has dry season for 8 months per year. Although India is well-known for high level of education and information technology, only a small section of Burmese people can taste of them and more students go to Southeast Asian Universities.

The high profile border trade operating at Moreh-Tamu point is facing new challenges. India’s Moreh is no match for Maesot of Thailand. In fact it is no man’s land. It should consider twice implementing the Trilateral Highway project and the rail link from Manipur to Vietnam via Burma. India’s desire to construct Tamanthi Dam over Chindwin River may face uncertainty after Myitson Dam over Irrawaddy River has faced nationwide public criticism.

Burmese people took decades to forget the cruelties of Japanese occupiers during Second World War and they will also take long time to forgive the greediness of British imported moneylenders from South India. A major portion of Japanese war reparations was building of Baluchaung Hydropower plant called Lawpita dam since 1950. The quasi-reparations from Japan included vehicles and machinery productions in Burma. All are transformed to Official Development Assistance (ODA), which was officially stopped when 8888 pro-democracy uprising took place in Burma. India’s assistance to Burma became visible when her Look East policy was implemented in 1992-93. All aid come from India is partially appreciated by Burmese. The fact is that due to closeness with the military regime during the hardest times, the people have anti-Chinese as well as anti-India sentiment, which needs to correct.

In history India and Burma deserved credits to each other. Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) had close association with Burma and Aung San. Nehru’s helping hand saved U Nu’s democratic government. Gandhi’s Satayagaha was inspired till today. When the National League for Democracy (NLD) held its first and last national convention two months after winning the election held on 27th May 1990, the official declaration of NLD included Ahimsa.

The presence of a sizeable Indian community in Burma has been talked in Delhi and Chennai. In the eyes of Burmese people, the genuine India-origin people are seen differently from Chinese who have been residing in Burma. The time of when Chinese, Indians and Burmese Muslims lived peacefully with local Burmese is over. Generally ordinary Burmese are puzzled with different peoples from Burma’s western neighbors, India and East Pakistan (Bangladesh). The problem arose when newcomers from China and Bangladesh became huge in number. Thanks to military dictatorship which lacked strategic and patriotic visions.

The Cold War made Burma to be truly neutral. When Americans were to construct a six-lane Rangoon-Mandalay highway, the Soviet Union offered to plant beautiful trees along the middle line. So no Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers could be there in Burma. Unfortunately after army seized the power in 1988 the map of Burma was allowed to reshape by others but asymmetrically. So the lesser gainer India tried to make it as achievable as possible. So there came realistic and strategic policy, which is termed as pragmatism.

The 160 kilometer Indo-Myanmar Friendship Road inaugurated on February 13, 2001 was meant for bilateral advantages. However, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India had to pay the collateral damage. An officer from Indian military intelligence took advantage of the Border Roads Organization (BRO) which constructed the highway and killed the top leaders and jailed the member of Burmese freedom fighters for 13 years in India. Before that 11 Burmese soldiers who deserted from Burma army and a student activist were handed over to Burmese military intelligence by the same Indian officer.

Burma origin South Indians and pro-democracy Burmese have to leave Moreh where different anti-India armed groups dominate one after another. The Look East policy also gave new dimension of anti-India armed groups from the Northeast of India. That is no near to contain.

China and India are not different when it comes to not-interfering in Burma's internal affairs in the foreign policy statement. Both countries mostly kept quiet while Aung San Suu Kyi narrowly escaped from assassination attack on 30th May 2003 and when Buddhist monks’ peaceful protests were severely crushed in September 2007. But both nations defend military regime when criticized for domestic issues such as human rights violations, forced labor, crackdown on peaceful protests and etc. Thanks to western arms embargo both countries can also sell arms to the regime. Both countries protect the regime at all international forums like the United Nations Assemblies, the Non-Allied Movement (NAM), the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Burma’s geographical position and her natural resources are inherent curse when the country is not ruled by those freely and fairly elected by the people. Instead of the nations’ interest the rulers will think more of own sake that may unnecessarily cause regional troubles. Burmese people should not blame at the governments which chose their relevant strategic relations. However the people of Burma are also not wrong to point the finger at because they feel being treated unfairly while they are being suppressed.

India being a flourishing democracy all different views are heard and paid attention. Everywhere in India Burmese struggle for democracy can enjoy full sympathy. But there are only a countable number of Indians who do know real Burma of today.

The development projects in Burma are not without controversies. The Yadana Gas Project is transporting natural gas from Burma to Thailand is operated by Total (France), Chevron (US), PTTEP (Thailand), and the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE). The environmental groups won the coordinated campaign against the project works and in November 2005 Total offered 5.2 million Euros to Burmese villagers who were forced to work ordered by the Burmese army.

After failed attempts on Gas pipeline India pays much attention on Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sector Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) and Mekong Ganga Cooperation (MGC). But this enthusiasm is rarely aware inside Burma. The Shwe Gas Project is a project of the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), South Korea’s Daewoo International, Korean Gas Corporation, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and the Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL). Burmese activists with the support of international campaigners tried hard to oppose to the Shwe Gas Project. This campaign may be rejuvenated after Irrawaddy dam project was suspended on 30 September 20011. It is a US $3.6 billion project of China Power Investment (CPI) Corporation and the Burmese Ministry of Electric Power No. 1 and Asia World.

So the next focus by the activists can be on the Shwe Gas and the Tamanthi Dam, which is expected to displace more than 35 villages and 30,000 people and approximately 17,000 acres of fertile farmland flooded. More than 6% of Wildlife sanctuary will be inundated by the dam. All bi- or tri-lateral dealings made with military junta of Burma need to raise eyebrows by now.

Being a small country Burma is also right to engage with both big neighbors. Regrettably big brothers have worked only with the rulers. This policy was suitable for the last two decades. The 2011 events indicate that it is not enough and to work only with the rulers. Aung San Suu Kyi holds a spare key for changes in Burma.

Dr. Tint Swe
14-10-2011

14-10-2011 India unveils $500 mn for Myanmar, to expand security ties

2011-12-25T11:16:00.001+05:30

In a major diplomatic initiative, India on Friday unveiled $500 million for a host of developmental projects for Myanmar and decided to expand security cooperation with the energy-rich Southeast Asian nation that also enjoys close ties with Beijing.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held talks with Myanmar President U. Thein Sein on a host of issues, including the intensification of economic, energy and security cooperation between the two countries.

Thein Sein, who is on his maiden visit to India since the election of a civilian government early this year, was accorded a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan before he sat down for talks with Manmohan Singh.

Marking a major upsurge in bilateral ties, Manmohan Singh announced a $500 million line-of-credit to Myanmar for a host of projects, including irrigation projects.

This is in addition to nearly $300 million India had extended earlier for several infrastructural projects, including the development of railways, transport, power transmission lines and oil refinery.

India also announced a raft of initiatives to expand its involvement in capacity building that include the setting up of an Advanced Centre for Agricultural Research and Education (ACARE) in Yezin, a Rice Bio Park and an IT training institute in Mandalay.

Significantly, Manmohan Singh lauded Thein Sein on steps taken by him to spur 'the transition towards democratic government' and offered all necessary assistance in further strengthening this democratic transition in an inclusive and broadbased manner.

"The visit represented the first state visit to India following the swearing-in of a new government in Myanmar in March 2011 that marks welcome progress in moving towards an open and democratic framework," said a joint statement after the talks.

In an important step, the two sides agreed on 'enhancing effective cooperation and coordination between the security forces of the two countries in tackling the deadly menace of insurgency and terrorism,' the joint statement said.

Thein Sein, who began his four-day state visit to India Wednesday, assured India that Myanmarese territory would not be allowed for insurgent activities directed against India.

"The two leaders reiterated the assurance that the territory of either would not be allowed for activities inimical to the other and resolved not to allow their respective territory to be used for training, sanctuary and other operations by terrorist and insurgent organizations and their operatives," said the joint statement.

Bolstering border management mechanisms figured prominently in delegation-level talks.

Stressing their 'unequivocal and uncompromising position against terrorism,' the two sides decided to bolster institutional mechanisms for sharing of intelligence to combat the menace of insurgency, arms smuggling and drug trafficking.

The two leaders also discussed a swathe of infrastructure projects that will enhance connectivity between the Southeast Asian nation and India's northeastern states.

The two sides decided to speed up the construction of India-aided $120 million Sittwe deep water port with a view to making it operational by June 2013.

The port, when completed, will act as a trade gateway for India's northeastern states to Southeast Asia by allowing cargo vessels from India's landlocked state Mizoram to navigate the the Kaladan River and connects them to Myanmar and the East Asia region.

Voicing satisfaction at the implementation of the Kaladan Multi-modal Transit Transport Project, the two sides decided to start the road component of the project started at the earliest.

They also agreed to to open an additional border trade point on the India-Myanmar border to allow for the smooth flow of goods generated by the Kaladan Project.

After the talks, the two sides signed a pact on upgradation of the Yangon Children's Hospital and Sittwe General Hospital. Another pact was signed for programme of cooperation in science & technology from 2012 to 2015.

13-10-2011 Myanmar: India rejects China rivalry, Sittwe port by 201

2011-12-25T11:15:00.001+05:30

New Delhi, Oct 13 (IANS)
A day before holding talks with Myanmar, India Thursday rejected competition with China and opposed sanctions targeting Yangon. New Delhi also set 2013 deadline for completing Sittwe port, a landmark project that will act as a trade gateway for India's northeastern states to southeast Asia.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will hold wide-ranging talks with Myanmar President U Thein Sein Friday that are expected to expand economic, energy and security cooperation between the two countries.

Thein Sein began his four-day visit to India from Bodh Gaya Wednesday and visited neighbouring Buddhist pilgrimage destinations, including Kushinagar, before touching down in Delhi in the evening.

Signalling Yangon's keenness to expand ties with India across the spectrum, 13 senior ministers handling key portfolios are accompanying Thein Sein to India. Several pacts in areas related to economy and infrastructure development are expected to be signed after the talks.

Ways to expand security cooperation, specially in the context of insurgents of India's northeastern states suspected to be sheltering in the Myanmarese territory, will figure in the discussions.

"We have received assurances that the Myanmarese territory will not be allowed for insurgent activities directed against India," Vishnu Prakash, the spokesperson of the external affairs ministry, told reporters here. Seeking to add greater economic heft to bilateral ties, India said it was confident of making the $120-million Sittwe deep water port functional by June 2013 and described Myanmar as "an important partner in India's quest for energy security."

The port will allow cargo vessels from India’s landlocked Mizoram state to navigate the Kaladan River and connect them to Myanmar and Southeast Asia. “We expect the highway to be completed by 2014,” Harshvardhan Shringla, joint secretary in charge of Myanmar in the external affairs ministry, told reporters while referring to the multi-modal Kaladan project.

The two countries have set a target of nearly doubling their bilateral trade to $3 billion by 2015. Leading energy companies like ONGC Videsh, GAIL and the Eassar group plan to up their stakes in the oil and gas sector in Myanmar.

Ahead of the talks, New Delhi rejected competition with Beijing amid Yangon's fraying ties with Beijing over a mammoth dam. "The relations between nations is not a zero sum game. There is room for everyone," Prakash said here when asked whether India was seeking to counter China's growing influence in the southeast Asian country.

"We have an important relationship with Myanmar. And we have an important relationship with China. There is no competition," said Prakash.

Prakash also underlined New Delhi's opposition to sanctions that have been slapped by some Western countries against Myanmar on account of its perceived human rights violations.

"We have a distaste for sanctions. They do not serve the desired purpose and affect the people who are vulnerable," said Prakash when asked whether New Delhi will use its leverage with Western countries to lift sanctions in the wake of reforms undertaken by the civilian government.

Taking note of significant economic and political reforms, including launching dialogue with pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, initiated by the civilian regime, New Delhi also underlined the need for broadbased and inclusive political process in that country.

India has also offered to share parliamentary practices with Myanmar. Significantly, Myanmar's minister for border affairs is also part of the president's delegation. The upgradation of border trade infrastructure will also figure in the discussions.

The two sides will aslo explore greater cooperation in agriculture with India planning to set up an advanced agricultural research centre in Myanmar. Thein Sein will visit the Indian Agriculture Research Institute Saturday morning before heading back to Yangon. Thein Shein, a former general in Myanmar's Army, touched down on a day when the government in Yangon released several political prisoners as part of a general amnesty, bolstering the new regime's reformist credentials.
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/197654/myanmar-india-rejects-china-rivalry.html

13-10-2011 Myanmar assures not to use its territory for insurgent activities against India: MEA

2011-12-25T11:13:00.002+05:30

By ANI | ANI –
New Delhi, Oct 13 (ANI):

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday said New Delhi has received assurances from Myanmar that its territory will not be allowed to be used for insurgent activities against India.

"With respect to security we have ongoing cooperation with Myanmar. We have also received assurances that Myanmar territory will not be allowed to be used for insurgent activities against India. Both sides remained in close and regular contact in this regard," said MEA spokesperson Vishnu Prakash, while briefing media persons on the state visit to India of the President of Myanmar Thein Sein.

Myanmar President U Thein Sein arrived in Bodh Gaya on Wednesday on a State visit to India.

The visiting President assumed office on March 30 this year after general elections and this is the first high-level visit from Myanmar to India, of the new civilian government.

"The President is accompanied by his spouse and is leading a high-level delegation that includes a number of his Cabinet colleagues such as the Minister for Border Affairs and Myanmar's Industrial Development, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Minister for Agriculture and Irrigation, the Minister for Religious Affairs, the Minister of Industry, the Minister of Electric Power, the Minister of National Planning and Economic Development as well as the Minister for Livestock and Fisheries, the Union Minister for Transport, the Union Minister for Energy, the Minister of Science and Technology, the Union Minister of Commerce, the Chief of General Staff in the Ministry of Defence, the Deputy Minister of Health, a number of senior officials, and other members of the delegation," said Vishnu Prakash.

"He arrived yesterday at Gaya and is presently undertaking a pilgrimage of the holy Buddhist sites at Gaya, Khushinagar and Sarnath. He will be arriving later in the evening at New Delhi," he added.

There will be a ceremonial reception and welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhavan tomorrow in honour of the visiting Myanmar President.

"Tomorrow there will be a ceremonial reception and welcome at Rashtrapati Bhavan. There will be a call on him by the External Affairs Minister followed by delegation-level talks at noon with the Prime Minister of India, signing of some agreements. He would be paying a visit to Akshardham Temple. In the evening he meets the President who also hosts a banquet in the honour of the visiting dignitary," said Vishnu Prakash.

He said the visiting President would also be visiting the Indian Agricultural Research Institute on Saturday before emplaning for Myanmar, as agriculture is an important area of cooperation between the two countries

Vishnu Prakash further said this is the third visit of Myanmar President U Thein Sein to India.

"This is his third visit to India. He first visited India in 2004 during the state visit of Sr. General Than Shwe as Secretary-1 as he was called then. He next visited in November 2008 as the Prime Minister of Myanmar to participate in the BIMSTEC Summit in New Delhi," he said.

Vishnu Prakash said India and Myanmar have enjoyed a longstanding relationship underpinned by ethnic, cultural and linguistic proximities, affinities.

"A large section of the Myanmar population is Buddhist and naturally sees India as their spiritual home. By various counts, something like a million people in Myanmar are of Indian origin," said Vishnu Prakash.

"Four of India's Northeastern States - Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram - share a land border with Myanmar, which is more than 1600 kilometres. In fact, Myanmar is the only Southeast Asian State with which we have a land boundary, and as such it is a bridge between South Asia and Southeast Asia, and also a gateway to the ASEAN region. Naturally connectivity through Myanmar can play a valuable role in spurring economic development in our northeastern region," he added.

Stating that Myanmar is also an integral part in our Look East Policy, Vishnu Prakash said: "India and Myanmar are members of a number of regional fora including BIMSTEC, the East Asia Summit, ASEAN Plus Six, as well as other international fora. In 2008, Myanmar became an Observer at the SAARC."

" Our relations with Myanmar encompass a number of important areas like security, trade and investments, energy, capacity-building, health and education, science and technology, as well as infrastructure development," he added.

The MEA spokesperson further said India attaches the highest importance to the state visit of the President of Myanmar and is confident that this would place the relationship on an even stronger footing. (ANI)
http://in.news.yahoo.com/myanmar-assures-not-territory-insurgent-activities-against-india-155937914.html

13-10-2011 Memorandum of Burmese pro-democracy movement in India on Burmese President visits to India

2011-12-25T11:10:00.002+05:30

To
Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister
Government of India

Dear Prime Minister,
We, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India see this visit of President of Burma to India is an opportunity for India to cautiously deal with quasi-military government of Burma. The progress in bilateral relations in line with Look Easy Policy has been too slow and the promises repeatedly given by leaders of Burma before are not kept. So India should not make the same mistake in dealing with new administration of her east neighbor.

We, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India cannot welcome president U Thein Sein’s visit to India because this Burmese government does not genuinely represent the people of Burma. Serious section of political circle do not accept the constitution of 2008 and all major political parties which truly won in the 1990 election did not participate in the election held in 2010. Keeping Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and thousands of political prisoners in prison the election of 2010 was shockingly manipulated and the visiting president and his government officials are those who announced themselves as the winners of the election. Therefore all agreements signed by the visiting president will definitely give the same outcomes of the MoUs of previous military regime of Burma.

The new developments taking placed in Burma need meticulous analysis and jumping hasty conclusion will give rise to negative consequences. All dictators yield when their power is being challenged. It seems that although they could continue rule the country by hood or by crook they may feel insecure and decided to pay a little bit of carrot.

Those who imprisoned for political reasons are not to be jailed at outset. Then those released in a high profile manner can be arrested at any time for any lengthy prison terms. Media restriction might have proved to be counterproductive for longer stay in power and has been partially relaxed. Bringing some non-military representatives in the parliament will have cosmetic effect. Giving out some money to pensioners and loans to extremely needy people will not deflate millionaires’ pocket.

Halting the huge dam project has been agreed to pay compensation to China and consequentially the people will have to pay more tax for the wrong decision made by the military regime. That good news kills two birds with one stone: satisfaction for Burmese people and appeasement for China as well as praise by others.

We, Burmese pro-democracy movement fully support Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts for democracy, national reconciliation and peace. We are still doubtful of changes made by the government side.

We are grateful to the people of Burma and international community who do not give much expected credit to the new government of Burma. We forewarn those people and countries which quickly applaud those new developments.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tint Swe
On behalf of Burmese democratic forces in India
New Delhi

7-8 October 2011 Socialist International Asia Pacific Committee Meeting

2011-12-25T11:06:00.002+05:30

Socialist International (SI) Asia-Pacific Committee meeting ဆိုရွယ္လစ္-အင္တာေနရွင္နယ္၊ အာရွ-ပစိဖိတ္ ေကာ္မတီ အစည္းအေဝးကို မြန္ဂိုးလီးယားႏိုင္ငံျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ (အူလန္ဘာတာ) တြင္ ၂ဝ၁၁ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၇ ရက္မွ ၈ ရက္အထိ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။

အိမ္ရွင္အျဖစ္ အာဏာရ မြန္ဂိုလီယား ျပည္သု႔ပါတီ ကလက္ခံ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္-အင္တာေနရွင္နယ္ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး (လူဝီ-အာယာလာ)၊ မြန္ဂိုလီယား ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ Mr. Sukhbaataryn Batbold (ဆူကာဘာတာယန္ ဘတ္ဟိုးဒ္) တို႔က အဖြင့္မိန္႔ခြန္းမ်ား ေျပာၾကားၾကသည္။

အာရွ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသတြင္းမွ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ အျမင္ခံယူသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ား တက္ေရာက္ရာ (၁) အာဏာရ Mongolia People's Party (MPP) မြန္ဂိုလီယား ျပည္သု႔ပါတီ၊ (၂) အာဏာရ Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP) ပါကစၥတန္ ျပည္သူ႔ပါတီ၊ အာဏာရ Cambodia Peoples' Party ကေမာၻဒီယား ျပည္သူ႔ပါတီ၊ အာဏာရ ၾသစေၾတးလ် ေလဘာပါတီ၊ တီေမာ-လက္ဆီ အတိုက္အခံပါတီ၊ ဂရိ၊ ဆြီဒင္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္တို႔အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ အမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ကိုယ္စား ၁၉၉ဝ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ဆိုရွယ္လစ္-အင္တာေနရွင္နယ္ ၏ ဂုဏ္ထူးေဆာင္ သဘာပတိအျဖစ္ တင္ေျမွာက္ထားျပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

ေကာ္မတီ အစည္းအေဝး ေနာက္ဆံုးေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္သည့္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္တခုခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။ (၁) ျဖစ္ေပၚေနသည့္ သတင္းေကာင္းမ်ားကို ၾကိဳဆိုေၾကာင္း၊ (၂) ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး၊ အမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို အျပည့္အဝ ေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္း၊ (၃) ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ အက်ဥ္းက်ေနသူအားလံုး လြတ္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ (၄) ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားအားလံုး အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္တြင္ အျပည့္အဝ ပါဝင္ခြင့္ျပဳရန္ လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္းတို႔ ပါရွိသည္။

မြန္ဂိုလီယား ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ (ဆူကာဘာတာယန္ ဘတ္ဟိုးဒ္) ၏ အပိတ္မိန္႔ခြင္းတြင္လည္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား အထူးေလးစား ေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္း ထည့္သြင္းေျပာၾကားသြားသည္။

Dr. တင့္ေဆြႏွင့္ သီးျခားေတြ႔ဆံုရာတြင္ မြန္ဂိုလီယား ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ၾကီး Gombojav Zandanshatar (ဂြမ္ဘိုဂ်က္-ဇန္ဒန္ရွာတာ) က မြန္ဂိုလီယား သမတၾကီး အေနျဖင့္ ျပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဘယ္လ္ဂ်ီယန္ႏိုင္ငံ ဘရပ္ဆဲလ္ တြင္ ၂ဝ၁ဝ ေအာက္တိုဘာလက က်င္းပခဲ့ျပီး ၄၇ ႏိုင္ငံ တက္ေရာက္ေသာ ASEAN Europe Meeting (ASEM) ရွစ္ၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ အာစီယန္-ဥေရာပ အစည္းအေဝးတြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား လြတ္ေပးရန္ အေလးအနက္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုသည္။

10-10-2011 Look East policy: Red carpet for Vietnam, Myanmar heads

2011-12-25T11:03:00.001+05:30

Indiatimes|The Times of India|The Economic Times|

Indrani Bagchi, TNN | Oct 10, 2011, 05.52AM IST

NEW DELHI: India is putting its Look East policy in high gear with New Delhi preparing to welcome two important heads of state next week - Vietnamese president Truong Tan Sang and Myanmarese president Thein Sein. They will hold talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and sign agreements.

The visits, which will be closely followed by China, come at a time when both countries are having their own difficulties with China. While China has been rubbing up against Vietnam on their differences on South China Sea (which Vietnam calls East Sea), Myanmar surprised everyone recently by blocking a dam being built by China in the Kachin state.

Despite their difficulties with China, both Vietnam and Myanmar are taking care to see that they remain deeply engaged with Beijing. Coinciding with Truong Tan Sang's visit to New Delhi, the Vietnamese government is sending the chief of the Vietnam Communist Party Nguyen Phu Trong to China to talk to the Chinese leadership about issues related to the South China Sea.

Similarly, Myanmar's vice-president, Tin Aung Myint Oo, will also travel to China next week - ostensibly to attend the opening of a China-Asean trade event - but in reality to explain Myanmar's decision to block the $3.6 billion Myitsone dam, following environmental protests.

Vietnam is an attractive partner for India, quite apart from the strategic component. Defence and strategic issues are likely to dominate discussions. Vietnam has allowed India the use of the Nha Trang port, which is situated close to Cam Ranh Bay, an important area, formerly used by the Americans. Vietnam only opened Cam Ranh Bay to foreign vessels earlier this year, largely to counter an assertive China.

India has growing naval and maritime relations with Vietnam, with reports that India might consider exporting its smaller nuclear reactors to Vietnam as well as meet Hanoi's demands for the Brahmos super-cruise missile. There is no confirmation that any of these are on offer at present.

Soon after the visit of the Vietnamese president, India will play host to Thein Sein - this will be his second overseas visit after taking over. India's ties with Myanmar have deepened, with the neighbour playing a proactive role against Indian insurgents crossing over. Myanmar's decision to shelve the Chinese-built dam project Myitsone in response to protests drew fire from Beijing.

29-9-2011 What Thein Sein promised Suu Kyi

2011-12-25T11:00:00.002+05:30

By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK -

An emerging rapprochement between Myanmar President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has set a new tone over the country's historically military dominated political landscape. The two met on August 19 and details now emerging from that closed-door encounter indicate that major concessions could be in the cards in the weeks ahead.
Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has spent 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest, recently told a small group of supporters outside of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party headquarters she believes there is an "opportunity for change". She has met and made public appearances with top government officials and insiders say that more meetings are imminent, perhaps as early as next week.

The high-level meetings, a parliamentary motion and recent official pronouncements have raised speculation that Thein Sein's government is poised to release over 2,000 political prisoners, a major sticking point to his winning international recognition for the country's recent transition from military to democratic rule. Many of those held are affiliated with Suu Kyi's NLD or other political groups opposed to military rule.

Myanmar Foreign Minister Wanna Maung Lwin told the United Nations General Assembly in New York earlier this week that the government intended to free more prisoners in the near future, though he did not mention whether political prisoners would be included. A government official who requested anonymity claimed they may be released in three batches, with more than 200 set to walk free within next week, including renowned comedian and blogger Zaganar.

If true, the release of political prisoners would send a clear signal both domestically and internationally that Thein Sein's government, formed in March after last year's elections, is following through on his democratic reform vows. "There is enough to make us cautiously optimistic, with the stress on optimistic," a senior International Labor Organization official in Yangon told Asia Times Online.

Although tight-lipped about the details of his visit, which included talks with both President Thein Sein and Suu Kyi, US special envoy to Myanmar Derek Mitchell was likewise upbeat about the prospects for change. At the end of an earlier visit, Mitchell said "genuine and concrete reforms" were needed before Washington would consider reciprocating. Thein Sein is lobbying for the end of US and European economic sanctions.

"I think it would be fair to say that winds of change are clearly blowing through [Myanmar]," Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell told reporters in Washington earlier this month. "The extent of it is still unclear, but everyone who's gone there recognizes that there are changes."

Significantly, many of the government's concessions have come without formal announcement or legal commitment. To mark Democracy Day, the government unblocked many censored international news sites, including the BBC, Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), and Burmese language broadcasts of Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. The move followed an earlier relaxation of blocks on Skype, Yahoo! and Youtube.

The list of small incremental changes is long, though few if any have been enacted by law. The most critical change, however, is that Thein Sein, the country's quasi-civilian leader and former military general, seems willing to involve Suu Kyi in the country's political future. This represents a sharp reversal of the outgoing junta's stance, which banned her NLD after it refused to participate in last November's polls.

While Suu Kyi said she was happy with the outcome of her August 19 meeting with Thein Sein, few details of the substance of the talks have been revealed. The two met privately - "four-eyes", as Asian diplomats like to call it - for a little over an hour. Atmospherics and appearance matter in Myanmar's cultural context and both came out of the meeting relaxed and smiling.

More symbolically, a photo of General Aung San, Myanmar's independence hero and Suu Kyi's assassinated father, was hanging in the presidential palace where they met. Over the past decade, former ruling General Than Shwe had tried to remove Aung San's name and image from the national memory. Many analysts have perceived the reemergence of Aung San's portrait as a significant sign of change.

"It was important to show the Lady that we are willing to work with her," said a government official close to the president, referring to Suu Kyi. "We see her as a potential partner, not an adversary."

Another message apparently sent was that Suu Kyi is viewed by the new regime as an important public figure rather than a politician or leader of the legally banned NLD. During the closed door meeting, Thein Sein apparently talked about the role she could play in the future, according to sources in Naypyidaw who spoke on condition of anonymity.

They characterized the meeting as more trust-building exercise than negotiation, where both leaders laid out scenarios for the process of genuine reform and democracy to take root. Thein Sein apparently assured Suu Kyi that although her NLD party is currently illegal, it would be left alone and she would be free to travel freely inside the country, the sources said. Thein Sein's wife even invited her to an informal working dinner with other ministers' wives, they said.

Prisoner politics
The political prisoner issue was high on Suu Kyi's agenda, and she apparently told the president that there could be no forward movement without their unconditional release. Thein Sein's advisors know that this is also the key to improved relations with the outside world, including their neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). A mass release would likely smooth the way for Myanmar to take ASEAN's chairmanship for 2014, a decision that will be made later this year.

Whether Thein Sein has the power to follow through, however, is still in question. Former junta leader Than Shwe has made it clear on at least two occasions - once just after last November's elections last and again earlier this year before Thein Sein was officially sworn in - that the release of political prisoners and jailed former military intelligence officers was non-negotiable.

However, a recent motion to free political prisoners adopted by a majority of parliament may have set the seal for the release of at least some of them. Analysts say it was highly significant that the lower house speaker Thura Shwe Mann - the former third top general in the ruling junta - was the one that steered the motion through parliament.

When it appeared the motion was set to be rejected, Thura Shwe Mann called a 15-minute recess on the pretense the computer screens which showed the voting results were down. During the break he apparently lobbied the military parliamentarians who make up 25% of parliament - a quota set by the new constitution adopted in a sham referendum in 2008 - to support the proposal. It then passed with a large majority.

Thura Shwe Mann, formerly seen as Than Shwe's heir apparent, strongly supports the new president, according to sources close to him. They say he sees the release of political prisoners issue as something he can support that would make a difference, both domestically and internationally. His support is crucial because for various reasons the government cannot be seen to be bowing to international pressure on the issue.

Thein Sein's and Suu Kyi's meeting also touched on private matters, according to inside government sources. Significantly, Thein Sein has recently intervened to save from demolition the now dilapidated house in which Aung San and his family once lived in Pymina while he was leading the battle for independence against British colonialists. Suu Kyi reportedly sent the president an old photo of the house with her standing outside of it when she was a very young child as a token of appreciation.

Diplomats in Yangon who have recently met Suu Kyi all say that she is confident about the future and optimistic about the possibility of genuine change. Thein Sein can be trusted, he is genuinely trying to reform the country, and needs international support, she has told several foreign envoys.

Long time observers see similarities between the current warming trend and previous secret talks between Suu Kyi and former military intelligence chief and prime minister Khin Nyunt. Those talks led to Suu Kyi's release from house arrest in May 2002 but little else. She was rearrested a year later after her entourage was attacked by armed pro-government thugs who massacred many of her supporters. Khin Nyunt was purged in 2004 and remains under house arrest.

While arguments persist as to whether those talks represented a genuine opening, there is little doubt that the lack of international support for Khin Nyunt's gambit contributed its demise. This time, diplomats say, the international community, including the US, is keen not to make the same mistake.

Like then, there are still military hardliners waiting in the wings ready to pounce if given the opportunity. These same hardliners - now led by the Vice President Thin Aung Myint Oo - are apparently not pleased by Thein Sein's overtures towards Suu Kyi. Some hardline ministers apparently did not know the meeting had taken place until they saw it on the evening television news, according to government insiders.

Many diplomats and analysts believe Thein Sein's conciliatory gestures are genuine and a mass release of political prisoners would set the stage for substantive talks with Suu Kyi towards national reconciliation. Government insiders claim another meeting between the two is tentatively scheduled for after next week's first phase release.

However some believe another military coup is also possible, particularly if the army decides change, including the release of political prisoners, risks instability. For the moment, the Armed Forces Commander Gen Min Aung Hlaing has signaled his support for Thein Sein and Thura Shwe Mann, but the military's sustained support is by no means certain.

That's especially true if former military supremo Than Shwe starts to feel threatened by the change underway, including engagement with Suu Kyi, and decides to intervene. Under the 2008 constitution, the military may legally seize power in the name of upholding national security. "If we fail, we'll end up in jail," said a senior member of government on condition of anonymity.

Larry Jagan previously covered Myanmar politics for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He is currently a freelance journalist based in Bangkok. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MI30Ae01.html

28-9-2011 Opportunities for Indian exporters in Myanmar

2011-12-25T10:56:00.001+05:30

SME Times News Bureau | 28 Sep, 2011
Trade minister of Myanmar Tuesday invited Indian companies to invest in the country and added that Myanmar offers opportunities for Indian exporters in a number of sectors.

"Since Myanmar imported a lot of consumer goods, industrial and infrastructural goods, there was a huge potential in those areas," Myint said in New Delhi on Tuesday. He is currently on a visit to India to participate in the fourth India-Myanmar Joint Trade Committee meeting.

He said that India is presently the fourth largest export market and fifth largest trading partner of Myanmar with total bilateral trade of about $1.5 billion. He pointed out that investment from India till now was very low and urged Indian businessmen to ‘explore ways and means’ to get a market in Myanmar.

Myint said that Myanmar government was on a fast track to liberalize the economic policies through reforms to make it trade and investment friendly.

Referring to the forthcoming “Enterprise India Show” being organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry in Yangon from 10-13 November 2011, the minister expressed his hope that the event would provide opportunities for the enterprises of the two countries to come closer to each other and create a business environment conducive to trade and investment.

He felt that India being rich in technology & capital resource in manufacturing & services, especially the ICT sector, could invest in Myanmar in the form of a joint venture or foreign equity.

Speaking at the event, Ambassador of Myanmar Mr U Zin Yaw expressed satisfaction over the implementation of the ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement by the two countries.

President of Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce & Industry (UMFCCI) Mr U Win Aung said that due to its strategic position between large markets of India and China, Myanmar can serve as a hub and a gateway for trade with its neighbors and also with the ASEAN regional market.

Chairman CII National Committee on Healthcare and Chairman & Managing Director Medanta -The Medicity, said that the two countries should cultivate the age old bonds of culture, religion and history to take the bilateral trade and economic cooperation to new level.

The CII official said that India- Myanmar cooperation in service sectors, such as healthcare, IT, science and technology, education, tourism etc., would create better understanding between the two countries and benefit the development on long term basis.
http://smetimes.tradeindia.com/smetimes/news/top-stories/2011/Sep/28/myanmar-opportunities-for-Indian-exporters50900.html

28-9-2011 US Urges India to Wield Influence Over Burma

2011-12-25T10:54:00.001+05:30

Irrawaddy By LALIT K JHA Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Washington—

Seeking an increased role for India in Southeast Asia and praising its “Look East” policy, the Obama administration urged New Delhi on Tuesday to use its close ties with Naypyidaw towards concrete political and economic reforms in Burma.
“Across the board, we hope India recognizes that with increased power comes increased responsibility—including the recognition, in the spirit of Gandhi, that an assault on human rights and freedom in one place is an assault on human rights and freedom everywhere,” said Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns.

Burns added that there had been encouraging signs from Burma in recent weeks, including a new embracing of the language of reform.

“Then Foreign Secretary [Nirupama] Rao’s meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this year was an important step, and we hope that the Indian government will use its close ties in Burma to encourage concrete action on political and economic reform and national reconciliation,” he said.

Rao is now the Indian Ambassador to the US and was also present at the event which was jointly organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Washington-based eminent American think-tank the Brookings Institute.

Just as the United States and India have a mutual stake in supporting a stable and more integrated South Asia, Burns said the two countries must also work together as the strategic center of gravity for world affairs shifts toward the Asia-Pacific region, where India has a vital role to play.

“It is precisely for this reason that the US and India decided to launch a strategic dialogue on the Asia-Pacific in 2010. Since then, this mechanism has emerged as a model for the type of engagement and dialogue that we need to identify new areas of cooperation and to pursue complementary strategies,” he said.

India is already a powerful economic and cultural presence in the East—from the temples of Bali to the dynamic expatriate communities who connect the sub-continent with the export-driven economies of Southeast Asia, the US official said.

He added that India has built a vast network of bilateral economic cooperation agreements and security arrangements in the Asia-Pacific with traditional American allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia, and with our other partners like Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“We are launching a new US-India-Japan trilateral consultation on regional issues. India’s outreach is growing, moving toward a comprehensive vision for the East Asia region—a 'Look East' policy that is becoming an 'Act East' policy,” he said.

Burns hoped that India will join the US in working to strengthen Asia’s many regional institutions. The appearance of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alongside US President Barack Obama at the East Asia Summit in November will help the body become the premier forum for their leaders to discuss political and security issues in Asia, he said.

“Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton has underscored our commitment to work closely with India as we deepen our engagement with Asean. As Ambassador Rao once commented to me, Southeast Asia begins in northeast India. India already trades nearly as much in goods with the Asean region as it does with the United States,” Burns said.

“An architecture of free trade and investment that connects India to all of Southeast and East Asia will have a profound impact on global trade and economic growth,” he added.

27-9-2011 NCGUB statement on NLD Founding Day

2011-12-25T10:53:00.001+05:30

National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma
ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမိ်ဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ
အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းတည္ေထာင္ျခင္း (၂၃) ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၁။ ၂ဝ၁၁ စက္တင္ဘာ (၂၇) ရက္ေန႔သည္ လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေသာ အမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD ဖြဲ႔စည္း တည္ေထာင္ျခင္း (၂၃)ႏွစ္ျပည့္ေျမာက္သည့္ေန႔ ျဖစ္သည္။

၂။ အမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္သည္ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပုံႀကီးမွ ေပါက္ဖြားလာျပီး၊ လူမ်ိဳး ေပါင္းစုံ၊ လူတန္းစား ေပါင္းစုံပါဝင္ေသာ ေတာင့္တင္း ခိုင္မာသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အင္အားစုႀကီး ျဖစ္သည္။ ၁၉၉ဝ ပါတီစံုဒီမိုကေရစီ အေထြေထြေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ လံုးလံုးလ်ားလ်ား တခဲနက္ အႏိုင္ရရွိျပီးေနာက္ အမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီေဖၚေဆာင္ေရးႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသားတန္းတူညီမွ်မႈကို အေျခခံသည့္ ျပည္သူ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ေပၚေပါက္လာေရးကို ၾကီးမားလွသည့္ အခက္အခဲမ်ိဳးစံုကို ရင္ဆိုင္လ်က္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေနခဲ့ေပသည္။

၃။ ၂ဝ၁၁၊ စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၅ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္မွ ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ ဒီမုိကေရစီေန႔တြင္ ေျပာၾကားေသာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ မိန္႔ခြန္း၌ ႏုိင္ငံသား အားလုံးသည္ ေန႔စဥ္ေန႔တိုင္း ဒီမုိကေရစီေန႔ အျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ၿပီး အလုပ္မ်ားမ်ား လုပ္ၾကဖုိ႔ လုိအပ္သည္ဟု ပါရွိခဲ့သည္။ ထို႔ျပင္ အစိုးရ အေျပာင္းအလဲကိစၥမ်ားတြင္ မည္သူ႔ကိုမွ နစ္နာမႈ မရွိေစဘဲ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္း ျငင္သာစြာ အေျပာင္းအလဲ လုပ္ႏုိင္ျခင္းသည္ ဒီမုိကေရစီစနစ္၏ အေရးအႀကီးဆုံး လကၡဏာတခု ျဖစ္သည္ဟုလည္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေပသည္။

၄။ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ တိုင္းျပည္ႏွင့္ လူထုအက်ိဳးကို အမွန္ေရွးရႈပါက ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား အားလုံးကို ျခြင္းခ်က္မရွိ လႊတ္ေပးရန္၊ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအျခခံ ဥပေဒႏွင့္တကြ အမ်ားလက္မခံႏိုင္သည့္ ဥပေဒမ်ားကို ျပန္လည္ သုံးသပ္ျပင္ဆင္ရန္ လိုအပ္ေနသည္။ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္အားလည္း တရားဝင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီအျဖစ္ ဆက္လက္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳရပါမည္။ ထို႔ျပင္သာမက ဧရာဝတီ ျမစ္ဆုံေရကာတာကိစၥ အားလည္း လူထုဆႏၵႏွင့္ အညီသာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရပါမည္။ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္အဖြဲ႔မ်ားႏွင့္လည္း အမွန္တကယ္ ျငိမ္ခ်မ္းေရး ေဖၚေဆာင္ရန္ အေရးတၾကီး လိုအပ္ေပသည္။

၅။ လက္ရွိ အစိုးရသည္ စိတ္ေကာင္း ေစတနာမွန္ျဖင့္၊ ေနာက္ေၾကာင္း မျပန္ေတာ့မည့္ လိုအပ္သည့္ အေျပာင္းအလဲမ်ားကို ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ဆက္လက္ညွိႏိႈင္းလ်က္ စနစ္တက် ႏွင့္ ေဆာလ်င္စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္မွသာလ်င္ လူထုႏွင့္တိုင္းျပည္ သက္သာရာရမည္ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ ညင္သာေခ်ာေမြ႔သည့္ အသြင္ ကူးေျပာင္းေရးကို ေဖၚေဆာင္ႏိုင္မည္ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

၆။ ျဖစ္တည္လာေနသည့္ အေျခအေနကို အခြင့္ေကာင္းယူလ်က္ ႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ လူထုအက်ိဳးအတြက္ သတၠိရွိရွိ ဥာဏ္ရည္ရွိရွိ ရြက္ေဆာင္ေနၾကကုန္ေသာ စာေပႏွင့္ အႏုပညာရွင္မ်ား၊ မီဒီယာသမားမ်ား၊ ျပည္တြင္း-ျပည္ပ တက္ၾကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားလည္း ေလးစား ဂုဏ္ျပဳအပ္ပါသည္။

၇။ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္မႈမ်ား၊ ဖိႏွိပ္မႈမ်ားကို ႀက့ံႀက့ံခံလွ်က္၊ အမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီ က်င့္စဥ္ ေဖၚေဆာင္ေရးႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား တန္းတူညီမွ်ေရးတို႔အတြက္ မဆုတ္မနစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ကို ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရက ဆက္လက္ ဝန္းရံ ေထာက္ခံသြားမည္။ ထို႔ျပင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈေနာက္တြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတာဝန္မ်ားကို အေျခအေန အခ်ိန္အခါႏွင့္ ေလ်ာ္ညီစြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဤ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ဖြဲ႔စည္း တည္ေထာင္ျခင္း (၂၃) ႏွစ္ ျပည့္ အခါသမယတြင္ ေလးနက္စြာ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္အပ္ပါသည္။

ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမိ်ဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ (NCGUB)
၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ (၂၇) ရက္ေန႔။

Letter from Burma: Holiday 3

2011-12-25T10:47:00.000+05:30

The third temple where we went to worship in Pagan was That-byin-nyu.

The highest of the ancient religious monuments, it is also one of the most beautiful, with its harmonious proportions and tiered terraces. Until the 1990s, visitors were allowed to climb up to the terraces and look down on the serenity of Pagan as it spread out in inimitable stillness. It was a perfect spot for "I've been there" photographs, and I have several of my young self sitting on one of the terraces with a cousin and an uncle, all of us looking very pleased with ourselves and with life in general. Since climbing up to the terraces has been disallowed in the interests of conservation, the number of visitors who come to That-byin-nyu has dropped dramatically, and the temple now has the wistful air of neglected beauty waiting to be rediscovered. Behind the rough lime wash on the inner walls are murals which might still be saved by skilled art restorers. Maintenance is obviously kept to a minimum, a lamentable state of affairs for a building that is of so much cultural and historical significance.

There is so much that needs saving in Pagan and its environs. To begin with, the monuments themselves: the restoration work carried out in the 1990s was undertaken without the benefit of expert advice and with quick results, rather than excellence, in mind. I am told there are lovers of art and archaeology who weep every time they see Pagan in its present state. However, with care and expertise it should still be possible to recover the authenticity of the lovely old temples that have been spoilt by a hasty drive to turn the plain of pagodas into a tourist magnet. Many small temples remain in what one might say is a fortunate state of disrepair; these might yet be restored to a close semblance of their original condition or preserved in varying stages of ruin as a visual history of the ravages time has wrought on the old city. These are matters for specialists, but before their work can begin we will have to promote an awareness of the need to protect and preserve Pagan not just as an important landmark in the history of our country, but as part of the cultural heritage of the world.

It is not only the ancient monuments which are in need of care and protection. The whole land around Pagan cries out to be cherished and conserved. An hour by car took us to the last remaining patch of ingyin forest in the region, a gallant oasis amidst the harshness of its surroundings. The ingyin (Pentacmesiamensis) is a most unusual tree; when it dies of old age, its wood, instead of rotting away, petrifies into a stone-like substance. Conservation laws forbid logging in the area, but there is a scrawny look to the trees that is less than reassuring, and there is little evidence of strong new growth.

Our expedition to the forest grove included some twenty journalists. I had hoped our holiday in Pagan could be kept quite private, but it had not turned out that way, and making the best of the circumstances I had decided to look upon the journalists as an extended part of our group. It helped that they were all friendly and cooperative. Our plan was to have a quiet picnic lunch in a secluded part of the forest, but when we arrived there we found that a large number of people from a nearby village had gathered to meet us. This village bears the poetic name of Zee-O Thit-hlaNat-hteinInngyin-taw: "Old Plum, Beautiful Wood, Retainer of the Gods, Ingyin Forest." It is almost a haiku.

There is an unexpected link between Japan and this little village. When I asked the women what the greatest need was for their village, they replied, "water." They went on to explain that Bridge Asia Japan had dug an artesian well for them a few years ago so they were much better off than they had been in the past, but those who did not live in the vicinity of the well had to walk a fair distance everyday to fetch water. Moreover, they had to pay for the cost of the diesel oil needed to operate the pump, and although the charge was reasonable, it was a burden for most of the villagers, who eke out a spare living from the palmyra palm, commonly known as the "toddy" palm. The palmyra thrives in the hot, dry climate of central Burma and provides fan shaped leaves, which can be used to weave mats and baskets, and an edible fruit. Its most important product, however, is its sweet sap that can be taken as a refreshing drink, fermented to make a strong country spirit ("toddy"), or boiled to produce a delectable brown sugar candy.

As a schoolgirl I learnt of the hardships of palm climbers from a famous poem of the twelfth century that we had to commit to memory. The description of the daily round of those who start out into the early morning mist to begin their dangerous (falls are frequent and can lead to serious injuries) and exhausting work is sharp and vivid and remains valid to the present day, as I discovered from talking to the men of the village. They are treading the same relentless round of work that their forebears trod centuries back. However, there is one significant difference: today, among the palm climbers of Old Plum, Beautiful Wood, Retainer of the Gods, Ingyin Forest Village, there are university graduates. (By Aung San Suu Kyi)

(Mainichi Japan) September 26, 2011
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/news/20110924p2a00m0na020000c.html

23-9-2011 Dalai Lama sends message to Burmese democracy movement

2011-12-25T10:45:00.001+05:30

၂၃-၉-၂ဝ၁၁ ျမန္မာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး အတြက္ ဒလိုင္းလားမား စကားလက္ေဆာင္ပါး

ကိုေပါက္ | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၃ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၂၀ နာရီ ၀၂ မိနစ္

နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၩိမ) ။ ။ တိဘက္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ား၏ အၾကမ္းမဲ့ ႏွလံုးရည္ တိုက္ပြဲလမ္း ခက္ခဲမည္ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ ခိုင္မာစြာ ဆက္လက္ ေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းသြားၾကဖို႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ႏိုဗယ္ဆုရွင္ တိဘက္ ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီး ဒလိုင္းလားမားက တိုက္တြန္း လိုက္သည္။

အေဝးေရာက္ တိဘက္အစိုးရ ႐ုံးစိုက္ရာ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံရွိ ဒရမ္ဆာလာၿမိဳ႕သို႔ သံုးရက္ၾကာ ေလ့လာေရးခရီး ေရာက္ရွိေနေသာ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအား ေသာၾကာေန႔က ၁၀ မိနစ္ၾကာ လက္ခံေတြ႔ဆံုစဥ္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ စကားလက္ေဆာင္ ပါးလိုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း Regional Tibetan Youth Congress ဥကၠ႒ Tenzin Tsundue က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

“တိဘက္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြမွာ ေရွ႕ေလွ်ာက္ အလြန္ခက္ခဲတဲ့ တိုက္ပြဲေတြ ဆင္ႏႊဲၾကရဦးမွာ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ အရံႈးမေပးၾကဖို႔၊ အထူးသျဖင့္ အၾကမ္းမဲ့ လႈပ္ရွားမႈ အေပၚမွာ ယံုယံုၾကည္ၾကည္ ဆက္ေလွ်ာက္သြားၾကဖို႔ တိုက္တြန္းၿပီး ပိုမိုေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္အခါေတြ ေရာက္လာဦးမွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးက မိန္႔ပါတယ္” ဟု Mr Tsundue က ျပန္ေျပာျပသည္။

ထို႔ျပင္ ဒလိုင္းလားမား အေနႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ တစံုတရာ ဆက္သြယ္မႈ ရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

တိဘက္ လူငယ္၊ အမ်ဳိးသမီး အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားႏွင့္ တိဘက္ NGO အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၏ အစီအစဥ္ျဖင့္ ဖိတ္ၾကားခံရသည့္ ျမန္မာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူ ၃၄ ေယာက္အား ၾကာသပေတးေန႔ မနက္က တိဘက္ ပါလီမန္သို႔ တက္ေရာက္ ေလ့လာခြင့္ရခဲ့ကာ တိဘက္ ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ Dr Lobsang Sangay က ႀကိဳဆို ႏႈတ္ခြန္းဆက္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း Burma Center Delhi မွ ကိုကင္မ္ က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

“က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို ႀကိဳဆို ႏႈတ္ခြန္းဆက္ မိန္႔ခြန္းကို တိဘက္ဘာသာလိုပဲ ေျပာတယ္။ အားေပးစကား ေျပာသြားတယ္။ မိနစ္ ၂၀ ေလာက္ ပါလီမန္မွာ ထိုင္ၿပီး ေလ့လာခြင့္ ရခဲ့တယ္” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။

ေလ့လာေရး ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း တိဘက္ NGO အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းမ်ား၊ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားလည္း ေလ့လာခြင့္ ရမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ေသာၾကာေန႔ ညေနတြင္ မဇၥ်ိမႏွင့္ Al Jazeera တို႔ ပူးတြဲ ထုတ္လုပ္သည့္ The Longest Ongoing War မွတ္တမ္း ဗီဒီယိုကို တိဘက္ ပရိသတ္မ်ားအား ျပသမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

၁၉၄၉ တြင္ တိဘက္ကုန္းျပင္ျမင့္ကို တ႐ုတ္ ျပည္သူ႔လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ PLA က သိမ္းပိုက္လိုက္ၿပီး တ႐ုတ္ျပည္မႀကီးထဲမွ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရ ေဒသတခုအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္သည့္ အေပၚ တိဘက္မ်ား ပုန္ကန္ထၾကြကာ အိႏၵိယထဲသို႔ ၁၉၅၉ မွစ၍ ခိုလႈံလာခဲ့သည္။

ျပည္ပေရာက္ တိဘက္လူမ်ဳိးဦးေရ တသိန္းခြဲခန္႔ရွိရာ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ၌ တသိန္းခန္႔ ေနထိုင္လ်က္ ရွိသည္။ ကမၻာတဝွမ္းရွိ တိဘက္ ၆၀ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းမွ ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ကို တိုက္႐ိုက္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ တင္ေျမႇာက္သည္။

Dalai Lama sends message to Burmese democracy movement
Friday, 23 September 2011 21:19 Ko Pauk
New Delhi (Mizzima) – Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama urged Burmese pro-democracy activists to continue their struggle for democracy through non-violent means. He said the struggle for the Burmese and the Tibetan people were both hard and arduous.

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, who met with a delegation of Burmese pro-democracy activists. Photo: dalailamafilm.com

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, who met with a delegation of Burmese pro-democracy activists. Photo: dalailamafilm.com
The message was conveyed on Friday during a 10-minute meeting as he received visiting Burmese pro-democracy activists in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government.

Regional Tibetan Youth Congress chairman Tenzin Tsundue told Mizzima that the Dalai Lama said he had communication with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Groups including Tibetan youth, women’s organizations and Tibetan NGOs invited 34 Burmese pro-democracy activists to visit the Tibetan Parliament on Thursday morning. They were received by Prime Minister Dr. Lobsang Sangay, a spokesperson at the Burma Centre Delhi (BCD) told Mizzima. During the study tour, members will visit Tibetan NGOs, schools and monasteries.

On Friday morning, a documentary video film, “The Longest Ongoing War,” jointly produced by Mizzima and Al Jazeera will be screened for a Tibetan audience.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army occupied the Tibetan plateau in 1950. It was annexed as a special autonomous region and became an integral part of mainland China. In an uprising in 1959 in Lhasa, Tibetans rose up against the Chinese occupation forces and the Dalai Lama fled to India, followed by about 80,000 refugees. Today, there are about 150,000 Tibetans living in exile. About 100,000 reside in India.

22-9-2011 Burmese Activists Inspired by The Tibetan Freedom Struggle

2011-12-25T10:44:00.001+05:30

Thursday, 22 September 2011 11:19 The Tibet Post International
Dharamshala, India:

As a part of the annual program, a group of Burmese refugee students and activists visits Dharamshala from 22nd to 24th September. The main aim of their visit is to learn more about the Tibetan struggle, get a sense of organization and the different strata of the community.

"The Burmese struggle for democracy and the Tibetan struggle for independence are both fighting Chinese colonialism. The Burmese military dictators are funded and supported by China. Being common victims of imperialist Chinese Government, we stand in solidarity with each other," said Tenzin Tsundue, President of the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress, Dharamsala, "There is much to learn and support each other. This kind of ongoing dialogue and sharing between the two struggles will help each other stand stronger in our own struggle."

In the course of three days, participants will have the opportunity to witness the ongoing session of the 15th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, visit the various NGOs, schools, monasteries and engage with Tibetan audience after an evening of documentary screening on their second day of the visit.

"People of Burma have been sharing a similar plight as ours under the military junta rule for almost five decades," said Jigdal, Program Coordinator of Students for a Free Tibet, India. "As a Tibetan born and brought up in exile, it is certainly encouraging to have Burmese students & activists visit Dharamsala to learn more about our freedom struggle."

This visit is being organized by the four Tibetan NGOs: Tibetan Women's Association, the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress, Dharamsala, Gu Chu Sum Movement of Tibet and the Students for a Free Tibet, India.

22-9-2011 Myanmar: Major Reform Underway by ICG

2011-12-25T10:42:00.001+05:30

အရပ္သား တစ္ဝက္ပါေသာ အစိုးရသစ္သို႔ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရး ေျခာက္လၾကာျပီးေနာက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အဓိက ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚေနျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္သည္ ၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လတြင္ ၎၏ အဖြင့္ မိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ ၾကီးမားေသာ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး အစီအစဥ္မ်ားကို လွ်င္ျမန္စြာ စတင္အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖာ္ေနျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အစိုးရေဟာင္းကို ႏွစ္ရွည္လမ်ား ေဝဖန္ခဲ့သူမ်ား အားလည္း အျမင္မတူသည္မ်ား ေဘးဖယ္၍ တိုင္းျပည္ ေကာင္းက်ိဳးအတြက္ အတူလက္တြဲ အလုပ္လုပ္ရန္ အဆိုျပဳျပီး လက္လွမ္းမီေအာင္ ၾကိဳးစားခဲ့ပါသည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ ထိုအခြင့္အေရးကို အရယူျပီး ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ သမၼတသည္ တကယ့္ အေပါင္း လကၡဏာ ေဆာင္ေသာ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈကို လိုခ်င္ေၾကာင္း သူမက ေျပာပါသည္။ အေရွ႕ေတာင္ အာရွ အသင္းၾကီးကလည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ လမ္းေၾကာင္းမွန္ေပၚ ေရာက္ရွိေနျပီဟု ယံုၾကည္ျပီး၊ မၾကာမီ္ ၂၀၁၄ တြင္ အဖြဲ႔ၾကီး၏ ဥကၠဌ ေနရာကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအား ေပးအပ္ေရးအတြက္ ေဆြးေႏြးၾကမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

ထိုအခ်က္သည္ ျပည္တြင္းရွိ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး ဝါဒီမ်ားကို စြမ္းအားမ်ား ျဖစ္ေစျပီး ၎တို႔ တိုက္တြန္းထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ျပန္လည္ တည္ေဆာက္ေရးကို လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အခ်ိန္ သတ္မွတ္ ေပးလိုက္ သကဲ့သို႔ ရွိေနပါသည္။ ယခုလို အခ်ိန္ မ်ိဳးတြင္ အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံ မူဝါဒ ခ်မွတ္သူမ်ားသည္ တိုးတက္လာေသာ အေျခအေန အေပၚ တုန္႔ျပန္ ေျခလွမ္း လွမ္းသင့္ပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအား လႊတ္ခဲ့ပါက အဓိက ေျခလွမ္းမ်ားျဖင့္ တုန္႔ျပန္ရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ ထားသင့္ပါသည္။ ၾသဂုတ္လ (၁၉)ရက္ေန႔ မိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္ သမၼတသည္ ၎၏ အျမင္ကို ရွင္းရွင္း လင္းလင္း ေျပာၾကား ခဲ့ရာ ၎၏ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံကို ေခတ္မီ၍ ဖြ႕ံျဖိဳး တိုးတက္ေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏိုင္ငံ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။

ထိုသို႔ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ အတြက္ မည္သည့္ ေျခလွမ္းမ်ား လွမ္းရမည္ ဆိုသည္ကို လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ (၆) လက ၎၏ ရိုးသားျပီး လတ္ဆတ္ေသာ အဖြင့္မိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ျပီး ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အခ်ိဳ႕ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေလ့လာသူမ်ားက အဆိုပါ မိန္႔ခြန္းကို ‘အေျပာ’ သာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုျပီး လက္မခံခဲ့ေပ။ သို႔ေသာ္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း မ်ားစြာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အရလည္းေကာင္း၊ စီးပြားေရး အရ လည္းေကာင္း၊ တိုးတက္မႈ မရွိဘဲ တန္႔ေနျခင္းထက္ စာလွ်င္ မ်ားစြာ အဓိပၸါယ္ ရွိပါသည္။ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း (၅၀)ခန္႔ အာဏာရွင္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး စနစ္ ျပီးေနာက္၊ ယခု အစိုးရသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈ ပံုစံသစ္ ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ လံုးဝ ျခားနားေသာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈ ဆက္တင္ အသစ္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ယခင္လ အနည္းငယ္က လံုးဝမေတြးဝံ့ခဲ့ေသာ ေဆြးေႏြးမႈ မ်ားႏွင့္ အစျပဳ လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈမ်ားကို ခြင့္ျပဳ လာခဲ့သည္ကို ေတြ႔ရပါသည္။

သမၼတၾကီး ေျပာခဲ့ေသာ စကားမ်ားကို ယခုအခါ လက္ေတြ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္ ေနျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ျပီးခဲ့ေသာ ရက္သတၱပတ္ မ်ားအတြင္း သမၼတ၏ ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲေရး အစီအစဥ္ အတြက္ အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖာ္ရန္ ခိုင္မာေသာ ေျခလွမ္းမ်ား စတင္ခဲ့ရာ၊ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေသာ စီးပြားေရး အတြက္ အင္အား သစ္မ်ား ေပးရန္၊ အမ်ိဳးသား ႏိုင္ငံေရးကို ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခ အေနမ်ား တိုးတက္ရန္မ်ား ပါဝင္ပါသည္။ တိုင္းျပည္တြင္ အေျခခံ က်ေသာ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရန္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္မႈမွာ ရွိေနလိမ့္မည္ ဆိုသည္မွာ ထင္ရွားပါသည္။ ထိုသို႔ေသာ ခက္ခဲေသာ ၾကိဳးပမ္း မႈမ်ား၏ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈသည္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ခိုင္မာေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ထက္ ပိုမို လိုအပ္ပါသည္။

ယခင္ မေျပာင္းလဲ ႏိုင္ေသာ အေျခအေနေဟာင္း (Status quo) တြင္ အသာစီး ရေနသူမ်ား၏ ခုခံ ဆန္႔က်င္ မႈကိုလည္း ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ ထားရမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ မ်ားစြာ အထီးက်န္ ျဖစ္ျပီး အာဏာရွင္ စနစ္ လက္ေအာက္မွ ရုန္းထြက္လာရေသာ ႏိုင္ငံ တစ္ႏိုင္ငံ အေနျဖင့္ နည္းပညာ အရ၊ အဖြဲ႔ အစည္းမ်ား ဆိုင္ရာ စြမ္းေဆာင္မႈ အားနည္းမႈ မ်ားသည္ ၾကီးမားေသာ အကန္႔အသတ္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေနပါသည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ အေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ အၾကံဥာဏ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံစံုအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၏ အကူအညီမ်ားကို ေနရာတက် ျဖည့္ဆည္းေပးရန္ အလ်င္အျမန္ လိုအပ္ေနျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ခြင့္ျပဳၾကရလိမ့္မည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

အခ်ိဳ႕ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေလ့လာသူမ်ား သတိထားၾကရန္ တိုက္တြန္း ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ ၎တို႔သည္ မည္မွ် ေျပာင္းလဲခဲ့ျပီဆိုသည္ကို အာရံု မျပဳဘဲ၊ မေျပာင္းလဲဘဲ က်န္ေနသည္ မ်ားကိုသာ လက္ညႈိုးထိုး လ်က္ ရွိပါသည္။ ေသခ်ာေအာင္ ေျပာရလွ်င္ ေအာင္ျမင္ေသာ ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲေရး လုပ္ငန္း စဥ္မ်ားသည္၊ အာမခံျခင္းႏွင့္ သီးျခားစီ ျဖစ္သည္ ဆိုသည္ပင္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အေျခခံက်ေသာ ေျခလွမ္းမ်ား လွမ္းရန္ လိုေနပါေသးသည္။ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအား ခြဲျခားထားျခင္းကို ကုစားရန္၊ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ မ်ားစြာ ၾကာေနေသာ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား၏ အေမြဆိုးမ်ား ေက်ာ္လႊားရန္၊ စစ္တပ္၏ ေသြးထြက္သံယို ႏွိပ္စက္မႈမ်ား အေပၚ လက္ရွိ စြပ္စြဲ ထားမႈမ်ားကို ေျဖရွင္းရန္၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား လႊတ္ေပးရန္၊ အေျခခံ အရပ္သား ရပိုင္ခြင့္မ်ား ျပန္လည္ ရရွိရန္ႏွင့္ မီဒီယာ ဆင္ဆာမ်ား ေရွ႕ဆက္၍ ေျဖေလ်ာ့ရန္မ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

အေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ အေပါင္း လကၡဏာ ေဆာင္ေသာ တိုးတက္မႈမ်ားကို တုန္႔ျပန္ရန္ အသင့္ ရွိေၾကာင္းအခ်က္ ျပခဲ့ျပီး ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အနည္းဆံုးေတာ့ျဖင့္ ၎တို႔သည္ အနည္းငယ္ မျပင္းထန္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ ရပ္တည္မႈေတာ့ ရွိသင့္ ပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေငြေၾကး အဖြဲ႔ မ်ားႏွင့္ UNDP ကဲ့သို႔ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံစံု ေအဂ်င္စီမ်ားကို ၎တို႔ လက္ရွိ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ အတြင္းမွာပင္ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္သမွ် လုပ္ေဆာင္ ႏိုင္ရန္ အားေပး ၾကရမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ထိုနည္း တူစြာပင္ အီးယူ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ မ်ားသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အေပၚ သတိ ၾကီးစြာထားျခင္းထက္ စာလွ်င္ အီးယူ ေကာင္စီ၏ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ခ်မွတ္ ထားေသာ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မ်ား အေပၚတြင္ အျမင္က်ယ္က်ယ္ အဓိပၸါယ္ ဖြင့္ဆိုရန္ ေထာက္ခံ ကူညီသင့္လွေပသည္။ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ ကလည္း လမ္းေၾကာင္းသစ္ကို သြားေနသည္ ျဖစ္ရာ၊ အထက္က ဆိုခဲ့ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေျခလွမ္းေလးမ်ားသည္ ယခု လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေသာ ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲေရးမ်ား ဟန္ခ်က္ ညီရန္ ပံ့ပိုး ေပးသလို ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

အေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံမွ အမ်ားစုက အဓိက စံအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ ထားမႈမ်ား မၾကာမီ လုပ္ေဆာင္ ႏိုင္ေတာ့မည္ ဆိုေသာ ျပဆိုမႈမ်ား ရွိေနျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဥပမာ အားျဖင့္ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ အတိုက္ အခံ၏ တင္ျပခ်က္ ျဖစ္ေသာ သမၼတအား ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား လြတ္ျငိမ္း ခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ ျပဳေရး တင္ျပရန္ အဆိုကို တပ္မေတာ္သား အမတ္မ်ားက ေထာက္ခံ ခဲ့ျခင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ထိုသို႔ အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ မူဝါဒမ်ား ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား နည္းတူ ယခင္က အေရးယူ ပိတ္ဆို႕မႈ ျပဳခဲ့သူ မ်ားကလည္း မူဝါဒ ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ လိုအပ္ပါသည္။ ထိုသို႔ ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ မျပဳလုပ္ ႏိုင္ျခင္း သို႔မဟုတ္ ယခင္ ေတာင္းဆိုမႈ အေဟာင္းမ်ား ေနရာတြင္ အသစ္မ်ားႏွင့္ အစားထိုး ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ မျပဳႏိုင္ခဲ့လွ်င္၊ မူဝါဒမ်ား၏ စြမ္းအားေလ်ာ့နည္း သြားေစမည္ ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ အေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ရွိေသာ အားနည္းေသာ ၾသဇာ လႊမ္းမိုးမႈကို ပိုမို အားနည္းသြားေစမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ တိုင္းသူ ျပည္သားမ်ားကို အက်ိဳးရွိေစမည့္ ျပည္တြင္းရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္း အဝိုင္း အေနျဖင့္ အသိ အမွတ္ ျပဳျပီး ေထာက္ခံ သင့္လွေပသည္။

Crisis Group အေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အေပၚခ်မွတ္ ထားေသာ အေရးယူ ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈမ်ားသည္ ပစ္မွတ္ ထားသည္ ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ပစ္မွတ္ မထားသည္ ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ရလဒ္ မရွိေၾကာင္း ယခင္ ကတည္းက ရႈျမင္ ခဲ့ျပီး ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ၾကားတြင္ ရန္သူမ်ား ဝိုင္းေန၍ မိမိ ကိုယ္ကို ကာကြယ္ ရမည္ ဆိုေသာ စိတ္ဓာတ္ မ်ိဳးကိုသာ ျဖစ္ေစျပီး၊ ဆင္းရဲေသာ လူမ်ားအား ထိခိုက္ပါသည္။ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ အရွိန္ ေကာင္းလာေလေလ၊ အေရးယူ ပိတ္ဆို႕မႈမ်ား ဆက္ထားရန္ သို႔မဟုတ္ ထပ္တိုးရန္ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္မ်ား အားနည္း လာေလေလ ျဖစ္ေပမည္။

စစ္တပ္သည္ သူပုန္ထ မႈမ်ားကို ေသြးထြက္ သံယို ႏွိမ္နင္းရန္ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာကို ဆက္လက္ ကိုင္စြဲ ထားေၾကာင္း လံုေလာက္ေသာ အေထာက္ အထားမ်ား ရွိေနျပီး၊ ျပည္တြင္းတြင္ တာဝန္ယူ လုပ္ေဆာင္ ႏိုင္မႈ မရွိ မျခင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေကာ္မရွင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းရန္ ေတာင္းဆို ေနမႈမ်ား ရွိေနဦးမည္သာ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ မရွင္းလင္းေသာ အခ်က္မွာ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေကာ္မရွင္ တစ္ခုကို ဖြဲ႔စည္း ႏိုင္ခဲ့သည္ ထားဦး၊ ထိုအဖြဲ႔သည္ ထိုစဥ္က က်ဴးလြန္ ခဲ့မႈမ်ားကို ထိေရာက္စြာ အေရးယူ ႏိုင္ေသာ နည္းလမ္း တစ္ခု ေပေလာ၊ သို႔မဟုတ္ ထိုအဖြဲ႔ေၾကာင့္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား ေလွ်ာ့ခ် လိုက္ျခင္းကို ျဖစ္ေစ မည္ေလာဟု ေမးရေတာ့မည္ သာျဖစ္ေပသည္။

Myanmar: Major Reform Underway
Crisis Group Asia Briefing N°127, 27 September 2011
Asia Briefing N°127 22 Sep 2011

OVERVIEW
Six months after the transition to a new, semi-civilian government, major changes are taking place in Myanmar. In the last two months, President Thein Sein has moved rapidly to begin implementing an ambitious reform agenda first set out in his March 2011 inaugural address. He is reaching out to long-time critics of the former regime, proposing that differences be put aside in order to work together for the good of the country. Aung San Suu Kyi has seized the opportunity, meeting the new leader in Naypyitaw and emerging with the conviction that he wants to achieve positive change. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) seems convinced that Myanmar is heading in the right direction and may soon confer upon it the leadership of the organisation for 2014. This would energise reformers inside the country with real deadlines to work toward as they push for economic and political restructuring. Western policymakers should react to the improved situation and be ready to respond to major steps forward, such as a significant release of political prisoners.

In a speech on 19 August, the president made clear that his goal is to build a modern and developed democratic nation. His initial views on what steps are needed were set out in his wide-ranging and refreshingly honest inaugural speech less than six months ago. Some observers have dismissed such talk as “just words”, but in a context of long-term political and economic stagnation they are much more than that. After 50 years of autocratic rule, they show strong signs of heralding a new kind of political leadership in Myanmar – setting a completely different tone for governance in the country and allowing discussions and initiatives that were unthinkable only a few months ago.

These words are now being put into practice. In recent weeks a series of concrete steps have been taken to begin implementing the president’s reform agenda, aimed at reinvigorating the economy, reforming national politics and improving human rights. The political will appears to exist to bring fundamental change, but success will require much more than a determined leader. Resistance can be expected from hardliners in the power structure and spoilers with a vested interest in the status quo. Weak technical and institutional capacities also impose serious constraints on a country emerging from decades of isolation and authoritarianism. It is urgent that those best placed to provide the necessary advice and assistance – the West and multilateral institutions – are allowed to step forward to provide it.

Some observers are still urging caution, putting the focus not on how much is changing but on how much has yet to change. To be sure, a successful reform process is far from guaranteed. There are many fundamental steps that still must be taken, including healing deep ethnic divisions and overcoming the legacy of decades of armed conflict – something the government has yet to fully grapple with – together with addressing adequately ongoing allegations of brutality by the armed forces; the release of political prisoners; restoration of basic civil liberties; and the further lifting of media censorship.

Western countries have indicated that they stand ready to respond to positive developments. At a very minimum, this should include a less cautious political stance and the encouragement of multilateral agencies – including the International Financial Institutions and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – to do as much as possible under their existing mandate restrictions. Similarly, member states should support the broadest interpretation of the EU Council decision on Myanmar rather than the most cautious. As Naypyitaw sets its new course, these small political steps would help to facilitate the provision of ideas that could add momentum to the reforms now underway.

There are already indications that key benchmarks many in the West have insisted on may soon be reached. Military legislators have, for example, supported an opposition motion in the lower house calling on the president to grant a general amnesty for political prisoners. If such a dramatic policy shift occurs, it would need to be reciprocated by those who earlier authorised sanctions. Failure to do so, or to shift the goalposts by replacing old demands with new ones, would undermine the credibility of these policies and diminish what little leverage the West holds. Internal progress on human rights and economic reforms that benefit the country’s citizens should be acknowledged and supported by the international community.

Crisis Group has long held the view that sanctions on Myanmar – targeted and non-targeted – are counterproductive, encouraging a siege mentality among its leadership and harming its mostly poor population. The greater the pace of change, the weaker the rationale becomes for continuing them – or adding more. Many problems remain. There is ample evidence that the army continues to employ brutal counter-insurgency strategies, and in the absence of domestic accountability, calls for an international commission will remain. But it is far from clear that such a body, even if one could be established, would be the most effective way to address abuses at this time or whether its impact would rather be to cause retrenchment in Naypyitaw.

Jakarta/Brussels, 22 September 2011

ဝီကီလိခ္ေျပာတဲ့ အိႏၵိယ-ျမန္မာ ဆက္ဆံေရး

2011-12-25T10:41:00.001+05:30

ကိုဝိုင္း | ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၁ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၈ နာရီ ၀၂ မိနစ္
ခ်င္းမိုင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ)

တခ်ိန္က ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ အင္အားစုဘက္မွ ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား ေထာက္ခ့ံခဲ့ေသာ အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရႏွင့္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအၾကား ဆက္ဆံေရး ေျပာင္းလဲလာပံုကုိ ရန္ကုန္ႏွင့္ နယူးေဒလီ အေျခစိုက္ အေမရိကန္ သံ႐ံုးက အနီးကပ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း အေမရိကန္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာန လ်ဳိ႕ဝွက္ေၾကးနန္းမ်ားက ေဖာ္ျပေနသည္။
ဝီကီလိခ္မွ ၂ဝ၁၁ ခု ၾသဂုတ္လအတြင္း ေပါက္ၾကားလာသည့္ အေမရိကန္သံ႐ံုး ႏွစ္ခုက ဝါရွင္တန္ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနသို႔ ေပးပို႔ေသာ ၂ဝဝ၄၊ ၂ဝဝ၇ ခု ေၾကးနန္းမ်ားတြင္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးအရ တိုးတက္လာမႈကို ထင္ဟပ္ေနသည္။

“စစ္အစိုးရနဲ႔ ဆက္ဆံတာဟာ အိႏိၵယရဲ႕ အမ်ဳိးသား လံုၿခံဳေရးနဲ႔ စီးပြားေရးဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးဖို႔အတြက္ လက္ေတြ႔က်တယ္လို႔ အိႏိၵယအစိုးရက ယူဆတယ္။ သူတို႔နဲ႔ ဆက္ဆံေရး အဆင္ေျပတဲ့သူက နအဖ နံပတ္ ႏွစ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ေမာင္ေအးျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ၂ဝဝ၇ ခု ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီ ၈ ရက္ ရန္ကုန္သံ႐ံုး ေၾကးနန္း၌ သိရွိခ်က္ကို ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

အိႏိၵယအစိုးရသည္ ၁၉၈၈ ခု ဒီမိုကေရစီ အံုႂကြမႈဘက္မွ ရပ္တည္ကူညီခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉၉၂ ခုတြင္ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ ကုလသမဂၢမွ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ေရး အထိပင္ ေတာင္းဆို ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ္လည္း တ႐ုတ္က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ၾသဇာလႊမ္းမိုးရန္ ႀကိဳးစားေနမႈ၊ သူ၏ အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ဖက္ ျပည္နယ္ သူပုန္မ်ားကို ႏွိမ္ႏွင္းရန္ႏွင့္ ယင္းျပည္နယ္မ်ား၏ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေစရန္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ေျပာင္းလဲလာခဲ့သည္။

“အစိတ္စိတ္ ႁမႊာႁမႊာျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီ လိုလားတဲ့ အဖြဲ႔ေတြဟာ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ အေျပာင္းအလဲ တခုကိုျဖစ္ေစမယ့္ ညီၫြတ္မႈကို မတည္ေဆာက္ႏိုင္ဘူး။ တည္ေဆာက္လိုစိတ္ မရွိၾကဘူးလို႔ ထင္တယ္။ အဲဒါက ႏိုင္ငံမွာ စစ္တပ္ကို စုစည္းမႈ အရွိဆံုး ႏိုင္ငံေရး အင္အားစု ျဖစ္လာေစၿပီး အာဏာကို ဆက္ကိုင္သြားေစႏိုင္တာပဲ” ဟု အိႏၵိယ သံတမန္ တဦး၏ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္ကို ကိုးကားၿပီး ၂ဝဝ၇ ခု ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီ ၈ ရက္ရက္စြဲတပ္ ေၾကးနန္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ဒုဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးၾကီးေမာင္ေအးသည္ အိႏိၵယ ဒုတိယသမၼတ Krishan Kant ၏ ဖိတ္ၾကားခ်က္အရ ဒုဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္၊ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၊ စက္မႈ၊ အခြန္ဘ႑ာ၊ သိပၸံႏွင့္ နည္းပညာ၊ လွ်ပ္စစ္စြမ္းအင္ ဝန္ႀကီးတို႔ လိုက္ပါလ်က္ ရွစ္ေလးလံုး ဒီမိုကေရစီ အံုႂကြမႈျဖစ္အၿပီး ၁၂ ႏွစ္အတြင္း ပထမဆံုး လည္ပတ္ေသာ ျမန္မာ အဆင့္ျမင့္ဆံုး ေခါင္းေဆာင္အျဖစ္ ၂ဝဝဝ ခု ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၁၄ မွစ၍ ၈ ရက္ၾကာ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။

ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံနယ္စပ္ အရွည္ မိုင္ ၉၉ဝ ေက်ာ္အတြင္း အိႏိၵယ ဗဟိုအစိုးရကို ဆန္႔က်င္ေနသည့္ အေရွ႕ ေျမာက္ ျပည္နယ္ သူပုန္မ်ားကို ပူးေပါင္းႏွိမ္နင္းေရး၊ မူးယစ္ေဆး တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး ကိစၥမ်ား ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၿပီး အိႏိၵယ အစိုးရထံမွ ေခ်းေငြ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၅ သန္းရႏိုင္ရန္လည္း လက္မွတ္ ထိုးခဲ့သည္။

အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး မစၥတာပရာနက္ မူကာဂ်ီ Mr. Pranab Mukherjee သည္ ၂ဝဝ၇ ခု ဇန္နဝါရီလ ၁၉ ရက္ေန႔မွ ၃ ရက္ၾကာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ လာေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း မည္သည့္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္မွ် မရွိေၾကာင္း အိႏၵိယသံတမန္က ရန္ကုန္ အေမရိကန္ သံအရာရွိကို ေျပာသည္ဟု ေၾကးနန္းက ေဖာ္ျပသည္။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး သန္းေရႊကမူ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးခင္ၫြန္႔ကို ရာထူးမွ ျဖဳတ္ခ်ၿပီးေနာက္ အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ပထမဆံုးအႀကိမ္အျဖစ္ ၂ဝဝ၄ ခု ေအာက္ တိုဘာလ ၂၄ မွ ၆ ရက္ၾကာ သြား ေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ အဆိုပါ ခရီးစဥ္အၿပီး ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၉ ရက္တြင္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံပူးတြဲ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အတြင္း “အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီစနစ္သို႔ အျမန္ေျပာင္းလဲႏိုင္ေရး” တို႔ ထည့္သြင္းခဲ့ေၾကာင္း နယူးေဒလီ အေျခစိုက္ အေမရိကန္ သံ႐ံုး၏ ၂ဝဝ၄ ခု ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၂ ရက္ ေၾကးနန္းတြင္ ပါရွိသည္။

“ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူျခင္းသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို အထီးက်န္ ျဖစ္ေစၿပီး ဒီမိုကေရစီ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈကို မေဖာ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ဘဲ ေစ့စပ္ ေဆြးေႏြးသည့္နည္းျဖင့္သာ စစ္အစိုးရကို ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ေစႏိုင္မည္” ဟု အိႏိၵယ၏ အျမင္ကိုလည္း ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအတြက္ သည့္ထက္ပို၍ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အစီအစဥ္ရွိ မရွိ ေမးျမန္းခ်က္ကို “ဒီမိုကေရစီကို ေအာက္ေျခမွစ၍ တည္ေဆာက္မွသာ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ျပည္သူမ်ားအၾကား ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ၊ အားကစား စသည့္က႑မ်ားမွ ဆက္စပ္ဆက္ဆံေရး နည္းဗ်ဴဟာကို က်င့္သံုးသြားမည္” ဟု အိႏိၵယ အဆင့္ျမင့္ သံတမန္ကေျဖၾကားသြားသည္။

အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံသည္ သူ၏ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ လံုၿခံဳေရးကို အဓိကထားၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံေရး တိုးခ်ဲ႕လာရာ နအဖ နံပတ္ ၂ ဒုတိယ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးေမာင္ေအး ၂ဝဝ၈ ခု ဧၿပီ ၂ ရက္မွစသည့္ ၅ ရက္တာ အိႏိၵယခရီးစဥ္တြင္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ေတြ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း တည္ေဆာက္ေရး၊ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ ပလက္ဝမွ မီဇိုရမ္ျပည္နယ္သို႔ အေဝးေျပးလမ္း ေဖာက္လုပ္ေရးတို႔ ပါဝင္သည့္ ကုလားတန္ျမစ္ ဘက္စံု သယ္ယူပို႔ေဆာင္ေရး စီမံကိန္းကို လက္မွတ္ထိုးႏိုင္ခဲ့သည္။

၂ဝ၁၃ ခု တြင္ၿပီးစီးမည္ဟု ကနဦးက ခန္႔မွန္းထားခဲ့ေသာ စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အိႏၵိယက ခန္႔မွန္း အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၃၂ သန္း ကုန္က်ခံမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ မီဇိုရမ္ျပည္နယ္မွ ကုန္စည္မ်ား ပလက္ဝ၊ စစ္ေတြတို႔ မွတဆင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာသို႔ တင္ပို႔ႏိုင္ရန္ ျဖစ္သည္။

တဘက္တြင္လည္း ၂ဝဝ၁ ခု ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီတြင္ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခဲ့ေသာ မဏိပူျပည္နယ္ မိုးေရးမွ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္း ကေလးဝၿမိဳ႕ထိ ၉၉ မိုင္ရွည္ ျမန္မာ-အိႏၵိယ ခ်စ္ၾကည္ေရးလမ္းမသည္ မႏၲေလး၊ ျမဝတီတို႔မွ တဆင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ေပါက္မည္ျဖစ္ကာ အိႏၵိယ–အာဆီယံ ကုန္သြယ္မႈတြင္ အေရးပါလာမည္ ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ အိႏၵိယဘက္က ဆက္လက္ တိုးခ်ဲ႕လိုေနသည္။

19-9-2011 Former Indian ambassadors discuss Indo-Burma relations in New Delhi

2011-12-25T10:34:00.001+05:30

Monday, 19 September 2011 23:03 Ko Pauk
New Delhi (Mizzima)

Former Indian ambassadors to Burma, former generals from the Indian Navy and Army, scholars and other experts held a closed-door meeting to discuss Indian foreign policy towards Burma at a meeting in Chanakya Puri, New Delhi, on Monday.
The group concluded that India’s foreign policy should be framed and adopted in accordance with the current world order and with the alignments of neigbouring countries.

“India changed its Burma policy in 1992. Most of the conclusions said that the current policy would not work for the benefit of the country judging from the results it has produced during these years,” said Dr. Tint Swe, a National League for Democracy MP who was elected in the 1990 general election, and who attended the meeting.

The Burmese ambassador to India, H.E. Zin Yaw, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address, but he didn’t turn up at the meeting.

Well-known journalist Bertil Lintner of Chiang Mai, Thailand, submitted a paper titled “Political Reconciliation: Reality or Chimera?” “He said in the paper that the changes [in Burma] were not yet believable and concluded with the line that they were not irreversible,” said Tint Swe.

The meeting, titled “Myanmar in Transition: Asian Perspectives,” was sponsored by the Vivekananda International Foundation.

About 30 people attended including former Indian ambassadors to Burma Ranjit Gupta, Rajiv Sikri, Kanwal Sibal, Rajiv Bhatia and Bhaskar Mitra.

Tint Swe said that the meeting allowed the participants to openly and frankly discuss Indo-Burma relations, and that serving Indian bureaucrats and senior foreign policy makers usually paid attention to the views of experienced former ambassadors.

India in recent years has been extending economic cooperation to Burma, particularly in areas of infrastructure and trade.

The Confederation of Indian Industry has organized a business delegation to go to Burma on November 9-12 that will focus on sectors including agriculture, food processing, automotives, biotechnology, drugs and pharmaceuticals, education, mining and mining equipment, information technology, infrastructure, forestry, gems and jewelry, power, telecoms, textiles and tourism.

India has been focusing on extending its economic influence as part of it “Look East” policy, which observers say is designed to counter some of China’s influence in the region.

Leaked U.S. Cable: Than Shwe gave order to kill monks

2011-12-25T10:29:00.001+05:30

ဘုန္းၾကီးေတြကို ပစ္ခတ္ဘို႔ သန္းေရႊ အမိန္႔ေပးခဲ့တယ္ (ဝီကီလိခ္)

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 RANGOON 001148
According to [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN]´s military contacts, both Than Shwe and Maung Aye gave the orders to crackdown on the monks, including shooting them if necessary. Number three General Thura Shwe Man personally opposed the order, but carried it out, quietly advising regional commanders to do so with minimal bloodshed.

28.11.2007: BURMA: THE DIALOGUE IS DEAD
Publisert: 04.02.11 kl. 19:22
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 RANGOON 001148
SIPDIS
DEPT FOR EAP/MLS, DRL, AND IO
PACOM FOR FPA
E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/28/2017
TAGS: PGOV, PREL, PHUM, BM
SUBJECT: BURMA: THE DIALOGUE IS DEAD
REF: A. RANGOON 48
B. RANGOON 1119
Classified By: P/E Chief Leslie Hayden for Reasons 1.4 (b) & (d)

1. (C) Summary: PM Thein Sein told an Embassy contact that Than Shwe had dispatched him to ASEAN with two objectives: to cancel Gambari´s briefing during the Summit, and to undermine support for U.S. sanctions on Burma. Thein Sein said Than Shwe had ordered him to walk out of the Summit if ASEAN leaders refused to cancel Gambari´s briefing. Thein Sein also revealed that the Senior General is singularly focused on removing U.S. sanctions and has no plans to engage in a genuine dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi. Our contact believes Than Shwe feels the pressure of U.S. sanctions and recommends we exploit emerging differences within the top levels of the regime by tightening the sanctions against Than Shwe and other senior generals. Gambari has no visa for a follow-up visit to Burma, reportedly due to regime pique at him for issuing Aung San Suu Kyi´s statement, about which they claim Gambari failed to inform them in advance. End summary.

2. (C) Embassy contact [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN], who has close ties to high-level members of Burma´s military regime (Ref A), told pol/econ chief that he had met Prime Minister Thein Sein [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN]. Thein Sein told [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] that Than Shwe had dispatched him to ASEAN with two objectives: to cancel Gambari´s briefing during the Summit, and to undermine support for U.S. Sanctions on Burma. Thein Sein said Than Shwe had ordered him to walk out of the Summit if ASEAN leaders refused to cancel Gambari´s briefing. Note: reporting in other channels corroborates this account, end note. Thein Sein said Than Shwe is singularly focused on U.S. sanctions, and is well aware of how difficult they would be to lift. Nor does Than Shwe have any plans to engage in a genuine dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi.

3. (C) [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] pronounced the dialogue “dead.” He said that many of the regional commanders he knows, as well as lower-level military officials, were pleased with the content of Aung San Suu Kyi´s statement that Gambari released on her behalf. However, as soon as Than Shwe dispatched his hard-line Minister of Culture to demand the ethnic cease-fire groups disavow Aung San Suu Kyi as their representative (Ref B), they realized Than Shwe had no intention of engaging in a serious dialogue with the opposition. [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] considers Than Shwe and Maung Aye to be a lost cause, but he sees growing daylight between the top two leaders and the regime´s second tier commanders. According to [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN]´s military contacts, both Than Shwe and Maung Aye gave the orders to crackdown on the monks, including shooting them if necessary. Number three General Thura Shwe Man personally opposed the order, but carried it out, quietly advising regional commanders to do so with minimal bloodshed.

4. (C) [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] told us that Than Shwe felt the pressure of U.S. sanctions and recommended the U.S. exploit the emerging differences within the top levels of the regime by tightening our sanctions against the senior generals. Than Shwe has done nothing to reward, he stated. [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] also urged us to continue vocally advocating the need for any upcoming referendums or elections to be free and fair.

5. (C) In a separate conversation with the Charge d´Affaires, outgoing UN Resident Coordinator Charles Petrie said the regime has not been cooperative in arranging Gambari´s next visit, and has yet to issue him another visa. The generals now complain that Gambari had not informed them in advance that he would be issuing a statement on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi, even though Gambari had informed GOB officials of this intention at meetings during his last visit to Burma. For this reason, Gambari had accepted the tight restrictions on his schedule. Without the statement, Gambariunderstood he would have failed, according to Petrie.

6. (U) Arrests in Rangoon continue, two 88 Generation Students members, Myat Sann and Win Maw, were reportedly arrested yesterday evening. Both were trying to rebuild the leadership of 88 Generation since its main leaders were arrested last August. We also confirmed reports that the few monks remaining at Maggin Monastery were ordered to leave and that the facility would be sealed. Before the crackdown, Maggin Monastery had sheltered Phyu Phyu Thinn´s homeless HIV/AIDS patients. The monastery has a reputation for being a gathering point for the pro-democracy opposition.

7. (C) Comment: Within the next few months it will become clear that Than Shwe´s “dialogue” is a farce. He will string the UN along by allowing Aung San Suu Kyi to meet with his powerless Minister of Relations and Gambari, and point to this empty process as a concession worthy of reward. Clearly our sanctions grate but Than Shwe does not seem to realize that smoke and mirrors will not suffice to make them go away. The rest of the international community will shortly realize that the long hoped for dialogue is going nowhere: Aung San Suu Kyi is still held incommunicado; arrests are continuing; and Gambari is not as welcome as he claimed earlier this month.

8. (C) Pinheiro´s report on December 11 will likely reinforce the conclusion that the regime remains resistant to dialogue. We might use that opportunity to announce new sanctions targeting Than Shwe, Maung Aye, and their crony financiers. At that time we should state categorically that the sanctions will not be lifted until we see concrete progress towards national reconciliation, citing specific objectives such as all political prisoners free; restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly lifted; and a broadly representative group of Burmese discussing the way forward that will lead to a free and fair referendum and elections.

9. (C) Than Shwe has a clearly reasonable way out working with the UN. However, should he continue to defy the UN´s good offices, his few defenders will at least distance themselves from him, which may increase the odds that less hard-line members of the military decide it is finally time for him to go. End comment.

January 09, 2001: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi meets senior representatives of SPDC.

5-9-2011 Daw Suu attends Tagore’s 150th anniversary celebration at Indian embassy

2011-12-25T10:28:00.001+05:30

၅-၉-၂ဝ၁၁ တဂိုး ႏွစ္ ၁၅ဝ ျပည့္ပြဲ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တက္မည္
ကိုေပါက္ | တနလၤာေန႔၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ ဝ၅ ရက္ ၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၉ နာရီ ၃၉ မိနစ္

နယူးေဒလီ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။ ။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ သံ႐ံုးတြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ေနသည့္ ဘဂၤါလီစာေရးဆရာႀကီး ရာဘိျႏၵာနသ္တဂိုး Rabindranath Tagore ၏ ႏွစ္၁၅ဝ ျပည့္ပြဲသို႔ တနလၤာေန႔ ညပိုင္းတြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တက္ေရာက္မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ NLD က အတည္ျပဳ ေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္။

၁၉၁၃ စာေပႏိုဗယ္ဆုရွင္ တဂိုး၏ အႏုပညာလက္ရာျပပြဲႏွင့္ အိႏၵိယ-ျမန္မာ အႏုပညာစခန္းသို႔ တက္ေရာက္မည္ဟု NLD ေျပာခြင့္ရ ဦးအုန္းၾကိဳင္ကမဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အေနျဖင့္ အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံသံ႐ံုးမ်ား၏ အခမ္းအနားမ်ား၊ ေန႔လည္စာစားပြဲမ်ားသို႔ အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ္လည္း အိႏၵိယသံ႐ံုးသို႔ ပထမဆံုးအၾကိမ္ သြားေရာက္ျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ဤသို႔ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံ သံ႐ံုးက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ဖိတ္ၾကားျခင္းမွာ ထူးျခားခ်က္ အစစ္အမွန္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း နယူးေဒလီၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ေနထိုင္သူ ၫြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရဝန္ၾကီး ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြက သံုးသပ္သည္။

“အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ တသက္လံုး အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ ေနရမယ့္ ႏိုင္ငံႏွစ္ခု ျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီလို အိႏၵိယႏုိင္ငံၾကီးရဲ႕ အဓိကရေန႔တခုကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ဒီမိုကေရစီလႈပ္ရွားမႈမွာ အဓိက ေခါင္းေဆာင္တဦးက တက္ေရာက္တယ္ဆိုတာက ထူးျခားတယ္ခင္ဗ်။ ဒါဟာ ေရရွည္ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ဆက္ဆံေရး အတြက္လည္း အမ်ားႀကီး အေထာက္အကူ ျပဳလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ယူဆပါတယ္” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။

အိႏၵိယအစိုးရ၏ အေရွ႕ေမွ်ာ္ မူဝါဒအေပၚ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ေဝဖန္မႈမ်ား ျပဳေနခ်ိန္တြင္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ဖိတ္ၾကားျခင္းမွာ အိႏၵိယအစိုးရအတြက္ အမွတ္ေကာင္း ရေစမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း သူက “အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚမွာထားတဲ့ ေပၚလစီနဲ႔ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္မႈအေပၚမွာ တကမၻာလံုးက ဝိုင္းဝန္း ေဝဖန္ေနတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာ အိႏၵိယအစိုးရကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီး သံ႐ံုးက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို တေလးတစား ဖိတ္ၾကားတယ္ဆိုတာက အိႏၵိယအတြက္ အမွတ္ ရမယ္လို႔လည္း ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ဆက္ဆံေရးအတြက္ ထူးျခားတဲ့ ေျခလွမ္းတခုကို ဦးတည္ေနတယ္လို႔ေျပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္” ဟု ဆက္လက္ေျပာသည္။

ဗဟန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ NLD ႐ံုးခ်ဳပ္တြင္ က်င္းပေလ့ရွိသည့္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသံ႐ံုးမ်ားမွ သံအရာရွိမ်ား တက္ေရာက္ေလ့ ရွိၾကေသာ္လည္း အိႏၵိယသံ႐ံုးမွ လာေရာက္ျခင္း မရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္းလည္း ဦးအုန္းႀကိဳင္က ေျပာသည္။

ယခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လအတြင္းက အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ၾကီး၏ ျမန္မာျပည္ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး အတြင္းဝန္ မစၥနီ႐ူပါမာေရာင္းက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား တနာရီၾကာ သြားေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ဖူးသည္။

ထိုသို႔ေတြဆံုးစဥ္ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ဆက္ဆံေရး ရင္းႏွီးပြင့္လင္းလာေစရန္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ ဆႏၵရွိေၾကာင္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ျပသခဲ့သည္ ဟုသာ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း အေသးစိတ္ကိုမူ မသိရွိရေပ။

တဂိုး ႏွစ္ ၁၅ဝ ျပည့္အထိမ္းအမွတ္ပြဲမ်ားကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အိႏၵိယသံ႐ံုးမွ ကမကထျပဳ က်င္းပလ်က္ရွိရာ ဇူလိုင္လအတြင္းတြင္ တကၠသိုလ္မ်ားတြင္ တဂိုးစာေပလက္ရာမ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ စာစီစာကံုးေရးသားျခင္းႏွင့္ တဂိုးျပဇာတ္မ်ား ကျပတင္ဆက္ခဲ့သည္။ ၾသဂုတ္လတြင္ ‘တဂိုး၏ အႏုပညာႏွင့္ ဒႆနႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲ’ ကို ရန္ကုန္တကၠသိုလ္တြင္ လည္းေကာင္း၊ Jeebansmriti 'ပန္းခ်ီစခန္း' ကို ရန္ကုန္သံ႐ံုးတြင္လည္း ဖြင့္လွစ္ ဆင္ႏႊဲခဲ့ၾကသည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ အလြန္နက္႐ႈိင္းေသာ ဆက္ႏြယ္မႈ ရွိသည္။ အထက္တန္းပညာကို အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဆည္းပူးခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉၆၄ တြင္ ေလဒီရွရီရမ္ေကာလိပ္မွ ဘြဲ႔ရရွိခဲ့သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ ၁၉၉၃ ခုႏွစ္ ဂ်ဝါဟာလာ ေနရူး ႏိုင္ငံတကာနားလည္မႈဆု၊ ၁၉၉၆ တြင္ ရာဂ်စ္ဂႏၶီဆု၊ ၁၉၉၇ တြင္ ေဒလီတကၠသိုလ္ ထူးခၽြန္ေက်ာင္းသူဆု၊၂ဝဝ၇ တြင္ ဆူဘတ္ခ်န္ဒရာဘို႔စ္ ဆုတို႔ကို ရရွိထားသူ ျဖစ္သည္။

အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံကို ကမၻာ့အၾကီးဆံုး ဒီမုိကေရစီ ႏိုင္ငံၾကီးဟူေသာ ဂုဏ္ပုဒ္ႏွင့္အညီေနသည္ကို ေတြ႔ျမင္လိုေၾကာင္းလည္း ဇြန္လ ၁၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္က်ေရာက္သည့္ သူမ၏ ၆၆ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ေမြးေန႔ပြဲသို႔ ေပးပို႔သည့္ ဗီဒီယို သဝဏ္လႊာ တြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ေျပာၾကားထားသည္။

တဂိုးႏွင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္
တဂိုးသည္ ကိုလိုနီေခတ္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ၃ ၾကိမ္ လာေရာက္လည္ပတ္ခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ သူ၏ အာရွခရီးစဥ္မ်ားအတြင္း ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ၁၉၁၆ ေမလ ၅ ရက္တြင္ လာေရာက္စဥ္က ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားအား ဖူးေျမာ္ၾကည္ညိဳခြင့္ရခဲ့သလို သူ၏ေမြးေန႔ ေမလ ၈ ရက္ကို ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ အိႏၵိယတိုက္သားမ်ားက ဂ်ဴဗလီေဟာတြင္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳက်င္းပေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

၁၉၂၄ မတ္လ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ‘ဘဂၤါလီစာေပညီလာခံ’ သို႔တက္ေရာက္ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ၄ ရက္ၾကာ ေနထိုင္သြားခဲ့သည္။ သူေနထိုင္သြားခဲ့သည့္ ကုန္သည္လမ္းအမွတ္ ၃၉၂-၃၉၆ ‘ဂါးဒီယန္းမဂၢဇင္းတိုက္’ အေရွ႕ဘက္ အတြင္းနံရံေက်ာက္ျပားတြင္ ၎ေရာက္ရွိေနထိုင္သြားခဲ့သည့္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ အဂၤလိပ္-ျမန္မာ ႏွစ္ဘာသာျဖင့္ ေရးထိုးထားသည့္စာတမ္း ယေန႔ထက္တိုင္ ရွိေသးေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

၁၉၂၇ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၂ တြင္ တတိယအၾကိမ္ ေရာက္ရွိလာၿပီး ထိုႏွစ္ေဒဝါလီေန႔ ၂၄ ရက္ထိ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ေနထိုင္သြားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း မွတ္တမ္းမ်ားရွိခဲ့သည္။

ပထမႀကိမ္ လာေရာက္စဥ္က ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အိႏၵိယ တိုက္သားမ်ားက အမ်ားစုျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာမ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံျခားသားကဲ့သို႔ ျမင္ေတြ႔ခဲ့ရပံုကို “က်ေနာ္ေရာက္သြားေသာ အခါ ျမန္မာျပည္ ေရာက္ေနသည္ႏွင့္ပင္ မတူေတာ့။ ရန္ကုန္သည္ ေျမပံုေပၚတြင္သာ ရွိၿပီး ေျမေပၚတြင္ တကယ္မရွိသလုိ ျဖစ္ေန၏။ တနည္းေျပာရလွ်င္ၿမိဳ႕သည္ ေျမဆီလႊာမွ ေပါက္လာေသာ သစ္ပင္ႏွင့္မတူဘဲ ေရစီးတြင္ ေမ်ာလာေသာေရျမႇဳပ္ႏွင့္ တူေနသည္” ဟု တဂိုးက ခံစားမွတ္တမ္းတင္ သြားခဲ့ဖူးသည္။

တဂိုး၏ စာေပအႏုပညာ ျမတ္ႏိုးသူမ်ားက ၁၉၅၂ တြင္ ‘ျမန္မာျပည္တဂိုးအသင္း’ ကို ဖြဲ႔စည္းတည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။

တဂိုး၏ စာေပလက္ရာမ်ားကို ဆရာပါရဂူက ၅ အုပ္ထက္ မနည္း ဘာသာျပန္ခဲ့ဖူးၿပီး ေမာင္ျဖဴး၊ ေဇာ္ဂ်ီ၊ မင္းသုဝဏ္၊ ျမသန္းတင့္၊ ျမင့္စိုးလိႈင္၊ ဟိန္းလတ္ စသူတို႔ကလည္း တဂိုး၏ ကဗ်ာ၊ ဝတၳဳတိုစာအုပ္မ်ား ျမန္မာဘာသာသို႔ ဘာသာျပန္ဆို ေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

တဂိုး၏ ထင္ရွားေသာ ကဗ်ာလကၤာမ်ားမွာ ‘ဂီတဥၹလီ’၊ ‘ဥယ်ာဥ္မႉး’၊ ‘ေတေလငွက္’၊ ‘သစ္သီးခူးကဗ်ာမ်ား’၊ ‘စိၾတ’ တို႔မွာ ျမန္မာစာဖတ္ပရိသတ္ႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးသည္။

စာေပဆိုင္ရာ ႏိုဗယ္ဆုကို ၁၉၁၃ တြင္ ပထမဆံုးရရွိခဲ့သည့္ အာရွတိုက္သား စာေရးဆရာၾကီး ရာဘိႁႏၵာနသ္ တဂုိး (၁၈၆၁-၁၉၄၁)သည္ ဂီတကဗ်ာ ေပါင္း ၃,ဝဝဝေက်ာ္ ေရးစပ္သီကံုးခဲ့သည္။ ျပဇာတ္ဆရာအျဖစ္လည္း သ႐ုပ္ေဖာ္ျပဇာတ္၊ ဘဲေလးဇာတ္၊ အေျပာျပဇာတ္၊ အိမ္ေျပာျပဇာတ္၊ အရိပ္ျပဇာတ္ ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေရးသားခဲ့သည္။

ဝတၳတုိ၊ဝတၳရွည္၊ စာတမ္း၊ ေဆာင္းပါး မ်ားစြာကုိလည္း မိခင္ ဘဂၤါလီ ဘာသာအျပင္ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာျဖင့္ပါေရးသားခဲ့သည္။ ရာသီဘြဲ႔ေတးမ်ားကုိ စာသား/သံစဥ္ စပ္ဆုိေရးဖြဲ႔ႏိုင္ေသာ ဂီတပညာရွင္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူ၏ ပန္းခ်ီကား ၄ဝဝ ေက်ာ္ကုိ ျပင္သစ္၊ အဂၤလန္၊ ဂ်ာမနီ၊႐ုရွားတုိ႔တြင္ လွည့္လည္ျပသႏိုင္ခဲ့သည္။

‘ရွန္တိနိေကတန္’ ေက်ာင္းႀကီးကုိလည္း တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ကာ မညီမွ်ေသာ ပညာေရး ေလာကႀကီးကုိ ေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့သူ တဦးလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

Suu Kyi attends Tagore’s 150th anniversary celebration at Indian embassy
Monday, 05 September 2011 22:13 Ko Pauk
Rangoon (Mizzima) – Aung San Suu Kyi made a special visit to the Indian embassy in Rangoon on Monday evening for the 150th anniversary celebration of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913.

This marks the first ever visit to the Indan embassy by Suu Kyi, who attended high school and graduated from college in India.

The New Delhi-based National Coalition Government of Burma (NCGUB) exile government minister Dr. Tint Swe said, “The visit by a key leader of the Burmese democracy movement to a major function of India is really significant. I assume this will help in enhancing long-term bilateral relationship between the two countries.”

Inviting Suu Kyi to the function would reflect well on the Indian government’s “Look East” policy that has been criticized by the international community, he said.

“We can say this is a significant step in bilateral relations,” he said.

Diplomats from other foreign missions have often attended functions held at the NLD party headquarters in Rangoon, but the Indian embassy never sent its diplomats to the functions, NLD party spokesman Ohn Kyaing said.

Indian Foreign Ministry Secretary Ms. Nirupama Rao met Aung San Suu Kyi for about an hour while the Indian foreign minister visited Burma in June. Both sides said that they wished to make relationship between two countries frank and friendly.

The Indian embassy in Burma has organized various events to honour Tagore including a symposium on his philosophy and art at Rangoon University and an Arts Camp at the embassy.

Suu Kyi has deep relations with India. She graduated from Lady Shri Ram College in 1964. She received the Jawalhala Nehru International Understanding Prize in 1993, the Rajiv Gandhi prize in 1996, the Outstanding Student of Delhi University in 1997 and the Subbhas Chandra Bose Prize in 2007.

In a video message sent during her 66th birthday celebrations on June 19, she said that she wished to see India stand in accord with her status as the largest democracy in the world.

Tagore and Burma
Tagore visited Burma three times during the colonial period. He visited Shwedagon Pagoda on May 5, 1916, and Indians in Rangoon celebrated his birthday on May 8 that year at Jubilee Hall in Rangoon. He attended the “Bengali Literature Conference” held in Rangoon on March 24, 1924, and stayed in Rangoon for four days. An inscription engraved in both Burmese and English marks his visit to a building at No. 392-396 Merchant Street, Rangoon, on the east wall of “Guardian Magazine.” He also visited Burma from October 22-24, 1927, for the Dewali Festival.

During his first visit, he noted that Indians were a majority and Burmese were a minority in Rangoon. He wrote, “Burma did not look like Burma when I reached there. Rangoon just exists on a map and it’s as if it didn’t really exist on the ground. In other words, the city does not look like a tree growing from the ground, it looks like a bubble drifting in the water.”

Admirers of Tagore’s literature established the “Burma- Tagore Association” in 1952. Burmese writer Paragu translated at least five books by Tagore. Many of his poems and stories were translated by other writers including Maung Phyu, Zaw Gyi, Min Thu Wun, Mya Than Tint, Myint Soe Hlaing and Hein Latt.

The well-known works of Tagore in Burmese are Gitanjali, Gardener, Stray Birds, and Picking Fruits and Sitra.

Gitanjali (Verse No. 35):
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way in the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

The first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), wrote more than 3,000 poems and songs. He wrote many plays, a ballet, an opera, stage plays, shadow plays and other works He also wrote many short stories, novellas, essays and articles in both his mother tongue Bengali and English. He was also a musician who wrote many songs, and he created more than 400 paintings and exhibited them in France, England, Germany and Russia. He established the “Santiniketan” school and worked to improve education standards.

6-9-2011 Press Conference

2011-12-25T10:25:00.001+05:30

Press statement
Indian Parliamentarians’ Press Conference
“Calling for the release of political prisoners in Burma”

6 September 2011, Press Club of India, New Delhi

New Delhi: More than 100 Indian Parliamentarians urged the new government of Myanmar to release all political prisoners in the country.

Mr. D. Raja, member of Indian Parliamentarians’ Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB) said that the release of remaining 2000 political prisoners is important and necessary step for restoration of democracy and political freedom in Burma. The political activists are held in the country's 43 prisons and many serving sentences of several decades after trials without getting access to legal representation, he added.

Noting that Burma was the only country in South Asia that was being ruled by a military junta in the 21st century, Mr. D. Raja announced at the press conference organized by IPFDB that ‘Parliamentarians cutting across party lines have come together to highlight the cause of the Burmese people for restoration of democracy in Burma.’

A letter, signed by 104 Indian Parliamentarians, urging for the release of all political prisoners in Burma was sent to President Thein Sein through National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese democratic leader and Nobel Peace Laureate as well as recipient of Jawarhalal Nehru award for International Understanding Award.

The political prisoners have been languishing in prisons in Burma in the most deplorable and inhuman conditions. Most of them have been sentenced to 65 years and more of rigorous imprisonment, and have little hope of ever leaving prison.

Mr. Syed Azeez Pasha, member of IPFDB, noted that since the elections in November 2010, the human rights situation in Burma has in fact deteriorated. The government has broken ceasefires in Karen, Kachin and Shan State, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

Mr. Azeez also urged the government of India to take up the cause of the Burmese people and to impress upon the current Burmese government the urgency of releasing all political prisoners in the country, without which a transition to democracy in Burma was not possible.

India and Burma, he noted, have a long history of friendship and deep cultural ties, which are greatly cherished by both peoples. In the interest of maintaining these ties it is incumbent upon Indians as the citizens of the world’s largest democracy, to help promote democracy, human rights, peace and stability in Burma.

The IPFDB was formed in 2005 by Indian Parliamentarians on the initiative of the late Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande. The IPFDB has for long been supporting democracy movement in Burma and recognizes that the release of political prisoners is the first step in the process of restoring democracy in the country.

For More Information, Please contact-
Ms. Thin Thin Aung, Coordinator of IPFDB (+91-9891252316

Free political prisoners in Myanamar: Indian MPs
Calcutta News.Net
Tuesday 6th September, 2011 (IANS)

More than 100 Indian MPs have urged the Myanmar president to free more than 2,000 political prisoners.

The appeal has been made by Ram Jethmalani, convener of the Indian Parliamentarians' Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB), and members of the group.

They are backing a call from Myanmar democratic leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for the release of political prisoners.

There are still more than 2,000 political prisoners in prisons in Myanmar, and many are in deplorable conditions, the group said.

Most of them have been sentenced to 65 years and more, it said.

'We, Indian parliamentarians, hope to see a genuine democratic system in Burma and ... call upon the government to release all political prisoners in the country.

'Their release will be a positive step in the spirit of conciliation and dialogue that Burma now needs.'

Hundred of Indian Parliamentarians call for release of 2000 political prisoners in Burma

2011-12-25T10:21:00.001+05:30

PRESS INVITATION
“Hundred of Indian Parliamentarians Call for release of 2000 political prisoners in Burma”

Mr. Ram Jethmalani, Convener and other honourable members of the Indian Parliamentarians’ Forum for Democracy in Burma (IPFDB) will hold a press conference to support the call by Burmese democratic leader and Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for the release of Burma's Political Prisoners and will announce sending of the signed letter to President Thein Sein.

A call letter was signed by more than 100 Indian Members of Parliament across the parties to be sent to President U Thein Sein, Union of Myanmar, urging for immediate release of the remaining political prisoners in the country.

There are still more than 2000 political prisoners languishing in prisons in Burma. They have been kept in deplorable and inhuman conditions. Most of them have been sentenced to 65 years and more of rigorous imprisonment, and have little hope of ever leaving prison.

The release of Daw Aung San Syu Kyi by the new government has been a welcome move. However, her release alone does not signify Burma’s transition to democracy. If the new government is serious about its intention of promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law in Burma then it is incumbent upon the new Government of Burma to release all the other political prisoners too, who constitute no other threat than that of being the voice of dissent.

We, Indian Parliamentarians, hope to see a genuine democratic system in Burma and, as the first step towards peace and reconciliation in Burma, we call upon the President and the government of Burma to release all political prisoners in the country. Their release will be a positive step in the spirit of conciliation and dialogue that Burma now needs.

Indian Parliamentarians' Forum for Democracy in Burma invites you to a press conference “calling for the release of political prisoners in Burma” as below scheduled;
Date: 6th September 2011
Venue: Press Club of India, Raisina Road, New Delhi
Time: 4:00 -5:30 pm

ထင္ရွားေသာ ျမန္မာေဆးေလာက ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ား

2011-12-25T10:17:00.001+05:30

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• ေဒါက္တာဆာစံစီပုိး (၁၈၇ဝ- ၁၉၄၆) M.D. (Albany), ဥပေဒျပဳေကာင္စီအမတ္၊ ဝႈိက္ေကာ္မတီဝင္၊ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသား အစည္းအရုံး ဥကၠ႒ (၁၉၂၅)၊ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္၊ ဂ်ပန္ေခတ္ အတုိင္ပင္ခံ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္
• ေဒါက္တာဘရင္ (၁၈၈၄- ၁၉၇..) M.B., Ch. B., (Edin.), ဝုိင္အမ္ဘီေအတည္ေထာင္သူတဦးႏွင့္ ဥကၠ႒၊ အမ်ိဳးသားေကာလိပ္ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္၊ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ပထမ ျမန္မာၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ဝန္၊ ဒုိင္အာခီေခတ္ ျပည္သူ႔က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရးႏွင့္ ေဒသႏၱရအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္
• ေဒါက္တာသိန္းေမာင္ (၁၈၉၁- ၁၉၄၆) B.A. (Cal.) M.M.F. (Bengal), ျမန္မာျပည္ ေဆးဘြဲ႔ရမ်ားအနက္ ပထမဆုံးပုဂၢလိကဆရာဝန္၊ သီေပါေခတ္ အေျမာက္ဝန္သမက္ ၊ လတ္သခင္ေယာက္ဖ၊ အမ်ိဳးသားပညာေရးႏွင့္ ေဆးေကာင္စီဝင္၊ ဥပေဒျပဳအမတ္၊ ၂၁ ဦးပါတီ ေဆာ္ၾသသူ၊ လန္ဒန္မ်က္ႏွာစုံညီေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ (၁၉၃၁-၃၂)၊ အိႏၵိယဥပေဒျပဳအမတ္ (၁၉၃၄)၊ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ဝန္၊ ျမန္မာကုန္သည္ႀကီးမ်ားအသင္း ဥကၠ႒၊ ကူးသန္းေရာင္းဝယ္ေရးဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ (၁၉၃၇-၃၉)၊ ျမန္မာ့ေဘးႏွင့္လူဝင္လူထြက္အေရး (၁၉၃၉)ေရး၊ ဂ်ပန္-ျမန္မာယဥ္ေက်းမႈအသင္း၊ ဂ်ပန္-ျမန္မာကုန္သည္ႀကီးမ်ားအသင္း အက်ိဳးေဆာင္ဒါရုိက္တာ၊ ဗမာ့ထြက္ရပ္ဂုိဏ္း ငါးပြင့္ဆုိင္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ (၁၉၃၉)၊ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံရ (၁၉၄ဝ)၊ ဘ႑ာေရးဝန္ႀကီး (၁၉၄၂-၄၄)၊ ပထမဆုံး ဂ်ပန္သံအမတ္ (၁၉၄၄-၄၅) (ဂ်ပန္ကျပန္အပုိ႔ သေဘၤာေပၚဆုံးသည္)
• ဗုိလ္မွဴးႀကီးစည္သူလွဟန္ (ဗုိလ္လွသမိန္) (၁၉၁၈-၂ဝဝ၆) M.B.,B.S.; D.P.H (London), ဒုတိယသပိတ္ဖ်ာပုံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ေဆးဝန္ထမ္း ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴး (ကာကြယ္ေရး) (၁၉၅၅)၊ အိမ္ေစာင့္အစုိးရ က်န္းမာေရးႏွင့္ ဘီပီအုိင္ အထူးအရာရွိ၊ တကၠသုိလ္မ်ား အဓိပတိ (၁၉၆၂-၆၄?)၊ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအစုိးရ က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရး (၁၉၆၂-၇၄)ႏွင့္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးတာဝန္ခံ၊ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ ေကာင္စီဝင္ေဟာင္း (ဆုိရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ၊ မဆလ)
• ေဒါက္တာလွေရႊ (၁၉၁၄ – ၁၉၄၇) တတိယသပိတ္ေက်ာင္းသားအာဏာရွင္၊ ဗကသႏွင့္ တကၠသုိလ္သမဂၢဥကၠ႒ (အေမရိကန္ မင္နီဆုိတာတြင္ ခြဲစိတ္ပညာသင္အသြား ဘာရိန္းတြင္ ေရယာဥ္ပ်ံပ်က္က်၍ဆုံး) (ဗုိလ္လက်္ာညီ)
• ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးစန္းယု (၁၉၁၈-၁၉၉၆) တတိယသပိတ္ ျပည္ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္တေယာက္၊ ေဆးေက်ာင္းသား၊ ဆုိရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ၊ ဘ႑ာခြန္၊ အမ်ိဳးသားစီမံကိန္း၊ ကာကြယ္ေရးဝန္ႀကီး၊ ဒုဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္၊ စစ္ဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္၊ သမၼတေဟာင္း၊ လမ္းစဥ္ပါတီအတြင္းေရးမွဴးေဟာင္း
• ဗုိလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ေမာင္ (၁၉၂ဝ-၂ဝဝ၉) M.A. (ANU) ေဆးေက်ာင္းသား ေျမေအာက္လႈပ္ရွားမႈလက္နက္သင္တန္းေပးသူ၊ ဆုိရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ၊ ရန္ကုန္တကၠသုိလ္စစ္ပညာပါေမာကၡ (၁၉၅၈) ၊ လုံၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီဥကၠ႒ (၁၉၅၉)၊ ႀကံ့ခုိင္ေရးအဖြဲ႔အတြင္းေရးမွဴး (၁၉၅၉-၁၉၆၁)၊ သံအမတ္၊ သမုိင္းျပဳစုသူ
• ဗုိလ္မွဴးႀကီးေဒါက္တာေမာင္လြင္ (၁၉၁၉-၁၉၉၈) L.M.P. (Rgn.), D.T.M&H. (UK), ဒုစစ္ေထာက္ခ်ဳပ္၊ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေကာင္စီ ပညာေရးႏွင့္က်န္းမာေရးတြဲဘက္အတြင္းဝန္၊ လူမႈဝန္ထမ္းႏွင့္ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး၊ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးႏွင့္ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးဝန္ႀကီးေဟာင္း၊ ေဖာင္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းအုပ္၊ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ေကာင္စီဝင္ေဟာင္း (ဆုိရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ၊ မဆလ) (ေဒါက္တာေတာင္ႀကီးေယာက္ဖ)
• ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဘန္း (၁၉ဝ၁ -၁၉၆၆) တုိင္းျပည္ျပဳလႊတ္ေတာ္ဒုဥကၠ႒ (၁၉၅ဝ-၅၁)၊ လူမ်ိဳးစုလႊတ္ေတာ္ဒုဥကၠ႒ (၁၉၅၂-၅၆)၊ က်န္းမာေရးဝန္ႀကီး (၁၉၅၆-၅၈)
• ေဒါက္တာေစာလွထြန္း (၁၉ဝ၆- ၁၉၈၁) ဖက္ဆစ္ဆန္႔က်င္ေရးကရင္ေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ဝန္ႀကီး၊ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ဥကၠ႒၊ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ေကာင္စီဝင္ေဟာင္း
• ေဒါက္တာေကာင္းလွျဖဴ (၁၉၂၉ ေမြး) ၁၉၄၆-၄၇ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢအတြင္းေရးမွဴး၊ ေက်ာင္းသားသပိတ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ တပ္မွဴး၊ ဗုိလ္မွဴးႀကီး၊ တပ္မေတာ္ေဆးရုံႀကီး၊ မဆလလႊတ္ေတာ္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္
• ေဒါက္တာေအာင္ခင္ဆင့္ (၁၉၃၅ေမြး) M.B.,B.S., M.Sc (Comn; Med. Manchester), M.I.H.E (Manchester), F.R.S.H. (Lon), က်န္းမာေရးပညာဌာန လ/ထညႊန္မွဴး၊ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ က်န္းမာေရး ဝန္ထမ္းမ်ား သမဂၢဥကၠ႒
• ေဒါက္တာဉာဏ္ခ်စ္ (ဗကပေဆးမွဴးႀကီး) ဦးေအာင္ေသာင္း ဗမကေဇာ္ျမင့္ေဖေယာက္ဖ၊ ဗကပ အပ်က္တြင္က်ဆုံး
• ေဒါက္တာမန္းျမင့္ဆုိင္ (ေကအင္ယူေဆးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္) မန္းဘခုိင္တူ၊ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒ေဟာင္း မန္းဘဆုိင္သား
• ေက်ာ္ဝင္း (ေတာျပန္၊ အၿမဲစိမ္း (မုံရြာ)၊ ဘာသာျပန္ဆရာ)
• ဇာဂနာ (ေဒါက္တာသူရ) (သြား)
• ေဇာ္ထြန္း (ေဆး ၂? ) (၈၈ ရန္ကုန္သပိတ္ေကာ္မတီ၊ နယ္စပ္ေပ်ာက္ဆုံး)
• ေဒါက္တာတင္မ်ိဳးဝင္း (ဒီခ်ဳပ္၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သမားေတာ္)
• ေဒါက္တာေဇာ္ျမင့္ေမာင္(၉ဝ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္၊ ဒီခ်ဳပ္၊ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစုိးရကိစၥ ႏွစ္ရွည္အက်ဥ္းက်ခံရသူ)
• ေဒါက္တာတင့္ေဆြ (ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစုိးရဝန္ႀကီး၊ အိႏၵိယ)
• ေဒါက္တာေသာင္းထြန္း (ေဒါက္တာစိန္ဝင္းညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစုိးရ ကုလကုိယ္စားလွယ္)
• ေဒါက္တာႏုိင္ေအာင္ (ေအဘီအက္စ္ဒီအက္ဖ္ ဥကၠ႒ေဟာင္း)
• ကုိသံခဲ (ေအဘီအက္စ္ဒီအက္ဖ္ ဥကၠ႒)
• ေဒါက္တာသန္းၿငိမ္း (၉ဝ အမတ္၊ ဒီခ်ဳပ္စီအီးစီေဟာင္း၊ အန္ဒီအက္ဖ္ဥကၠ႒)
• ေဒါက္တာလွေက်ာ္ေဇာ (ဗကပ)
• ေဒါက္တာေနဝင္းေမာင္ (ျမန္မာအီးဂရက္စ္၊ ဗြိဳက္စ္ဂ်ာနယ္)
• ေဒါက္တာလြဏ္းေဆြ (အယ္ဒီတာေဟာင္း၊ နယ္စပ္ဘေလာက္ဂါ)
• ေဒါက္တာခင္ေဇာ္ဝင္း (သြား) (ယူနီဆက္ဝန္ထမ္းေဟာင္း၊ အက်ဥ္းက်ခံ၊ ေလာ္ဘီႏွင့္အန္ဂ်ီအုိသမား)
• ခင္မမမ်ိဳး (ႏုိင္ငံေရးေဆာင္းပါးရွင္၊ တက္ၾကြသူ)

၂ဝ၁ဝ မ်က္ႏွာသစ္မ်ား
• ေဒါက္တာဖုန္းဝင္း (ဦးရဲထြန္းသမက္)
• ေဒါက္တာျမတ္ဉာဏစုိး (အမ်ိဳးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္) (သြား)
• ေဒါက္တာေအးေမာင္ (ရခုိင္ပါတီဥကၠ႒၊ အမ်ိဳးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္) (တိေမြးကု)
• ေဒါက္တာစုိင္းေမာက္ခမ္း (ဒုသမၼတ၊ ရွမ္းစာ/ယဥ္ဥကၠ႒၊ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔)

၂၉-၈-၂ဝ၁၁ အျမင္

2011-12-25T10:16:00.001+05:30

ကြ်န္ေတာ့္အျမင္

၁။ ၂ဝဝ၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုကို ေက်နပ္-လက္ခံျပီး၊ ဝမ္းသာအားရ ၂ဝ၁ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဝင္ခဲ့ၾကသူေတြကို ေဝဖန္ေနၾကတယ္။ သူတို႔ခင္းတဲ့ လမ္းကို အဲလို လိုက္ပါလာသူေတြအတြက္ တခုခုေတာ့ကို လုပ္ေပးဘို႔ဟာ လိုအပ္ခ်က္တခု ျဖစ္လာတယ္။ (ေကာ္မတီထဲ ပါဝင္ခြင့္၊ အဆိုတင္တာ လက္ခံမႈ) မ်ိဳးေတြ ျဖစ္လာတယ္။ ဒါမွ "ေနာက္လိုက္ရက်ိဳးနပ္ပါလား" လို႔ ေနာက္လိုက္လာသူေတြက ေက်နပ္ေနၾကမယ္။ ၾကိဳက္သလို ေရွ႕ဆက္ဘို႔ရာလဲ ဒီပုဂၢိဳလ္ေတြဟာ ေနာက္ကေန ဆက္ပါဘို႔ ဆြဲအားျဖစ္သြားတယ္။

၂။ "ျပန္လာပါ" ဆိုတာ အျပင္ေနျပီး လုပ္သင့္တာ လုပ္ေနသူေတြအတြက္ အခြင့္အလမ္း (အေပၚက်ဴနတီ) မဟုတ္ဘူး။ စိန္ေခၚမႈ (ခ်ဲလင့္) ျဖစ္တယ္။ သႏၷိ႒ာန္ (ကြန္မစ္တ္မင့္) ကို စမ္းသပ္လိုက္တာပါဘဲ။

၃။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို အမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ကေန ခြဲထုတ္သလား စိုးရိမ္ၾကတယ္။ စိုးရိမ္ထိုက္တာ မွန္ပါတယ္။ ေဒၚစုဟာ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳတဲ့အျပင္ လႈတ္ရွားမႈၾကီးကိုလဲ ဦးေဆာင္ေနသလို သူ႔ကို ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ ဦးေဆာင္ဘို႔ပါ လြဲထားလိုက္ၾကျပီ။ ဒါေတြအားလံုးနဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ခြဲထုတ္လို႔ မရပါ။

22-8-2011 Letter from Burma: Holiday (2)

2011-12-25T10:14:00.001+05:30

People visit a golden stupa in Yangon, Myanmar. (Mainichi)

Bagan Hotel (Riverview) truly does provide a magnificent view of the Irrawaddy flowing lazily along the western boundary of the lush grounds. Although well into the monsoon season, there was just one fleeting shower (the merest drizzle, really) during the four days we spent in Pagan and every evening we enjoyed the splendid sunsets for which the ancient capital is famous. From the verandah of our bungalow we would watch the red disc slide down at a regal pace, tinting the sky with impossible vermilions and oranges and yellows and lighting up fantastic cloud profiles before sinking behind the mauve and indigo hills that smudged the opposite bank of the river. It was a travel brochure photograph come to life.

Much has been written by scholars, specialists and casual visitors about the romance and wonder of Pagan. The scrubby plain is dotted with thousands of religious structures (the archaeological department lists more than 3,000, including the remains of very small edifices) of all sizes, each one, from the largest to the smallest, crowned with an apex rising towards the sky, the architectural expression of a yearning for something higher than mere material achievement. I can only add my personal impressionist gloss to a picture that has been painted too often to require an accurate reproduction. At twilight the city of pious intent is removed by deepening shadows to a dim realm that is neither in the past nor in the present. The great majority of the smaller monuments are in varying stages of ruin and serve as an illustration of impermanence and decay and the crumbling of illusion, lessons appropriate not only in a Buddhist land but in any part of the earth where the powerful and the proud have tried to leave an ineradicable print of their authority and splendor. Pagan is evocative of vanished glory and lost civilizations and the pathetic arrogance of man so well depicted by the stony sneer of Ozymandias lying in colossal pieces in the endless desert sands: "Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

How many of the kings and queens and princes and courtiers of Pagan who have left evidence of their apparent religious fervor in brick and mortar genuinely sought to free themselves from the bondage of samsara? How many aspired merely to prove their material worth in this world by the construction of costly monuments? How many viewed such works as an insurance policy that would guarantee their comfort throughout the cycles of existence because their minds shied away from encompassing the concept of nirvana?

The list of kings who ruled Pagan is long indeed but only one has ever captured my imagination: Kyansittha, whom the history books of my childhood said was the son of King Anawratha, the monarch credited with the first unification of Burma. Scholastic research however suggests that the two kings were not related by blood. Kyansittha was perhaps a commoner but he was uncommonly gifted. A man of courage and daring, he rose to be a general of the royal troops and became a popular hero. It is very likely he aroused the jealousy of the old king who seemed to have feared him as a possible usurper. When Anawratha died he was succeeded by a weak and incompetent son whose reign was very short. It must be assumed that no heirs of Anawratha's line remained for Kyansittha's subsequent ascension to the throne was unchallenged.

Kyansittha proved to be an intelligent, able and compassionate king and the Ananda temple that he built reflects an attractive personality. Gracefully proportioned and engineered to provide both light and shade, it is beautiful in structure as in concept. To visit the Ananda is as much to pay homage to a rare ruler as to contemplate on the spiritual legacy represented by the unusual images of the Buddha that it houses.

The hotel grounds offered us a wonderful surprise in the form of two more temples, practically unknown, also attributed to Kyansittha. We were told that one was built at the beginning of his reign in thanksgiving for the victories he had achieved over his enemies while the other was an offering made towards the end of his life in atonement for the many acts of violence he had committed as a warrior. The modest sized structures, tucked in the garden near the dining terrace where traditional harp music is played every evening, have the air of private chapels and to light candles there in the quiet dusk is a different experience from praying in the big and famous temples.

My son and I had decided that we were not going to rush around all the old monuments apart from the Ananda and the little temples of King Kyansittha within the hotel grounds, we only visited two other temples, That-byin-nyu and Manuha. The latter has a special significance because it is generally held to have been built by a captive Mon king, Manuha. This long accepted history is now disputed by some scholars but it cannot be denied that the temple seems deliberately designed to create the heavy atmosphere of freedom deprived. The images of the Buddha are disproportionately large for the available space and produce in the visitor a sensation of claustrophobia, of the strained breathing of a soul longing to be free. To worship there is to be aware of two great needs for our country: the need to weave harmony between the different ethnic nationalities and the need to achieve the release of all political prisoners. There can be no holiday from such awareness. (By Aung San Suu Kyi)

(Mainichi Japan) August 22, 2011
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/news/20110819p2a00m0na021000c.html

20-8-2011 NCGUB's view on meeting of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and U Thein Sein

2011-12-25T10:13:00.001+05:30

၂ဝ-၈-၂ဝ၁၁ အေဝးေရာက္ အစိုးရ ရဲ့ တုန္႔ျပန္ခ်က္

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ နဲ႔ သမတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ တို႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံပြဲဟာ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ေဆြေႏြးပြဲအတြက္ စတင္တဲ့ အဆင့္လို႔ သူမျမင္တဲ့ အေၾကာင္း ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ အေဝးေရာက္ ညြန္႔ေပါင္း အစိုးရကို ဦးေဆာင္သူ ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ ေဒါက္တာ စိန္ ဝင္းက ဘီဘီစီကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

အရင္ စစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ုပ္မွဴးၾကီး သန္းေရႊ၊ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီး ေမာင္ေအး၊ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီး ခင္ညြန္႔ စတဲ့ သူေတြက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ေတြဆုံခဲ့တာေတြ အတိတ္မွာ ရွိခဲ့ျပီး တိုးတက္တဲ့ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈေတြ မျဖစ္ခဲ့တာ၊ တကယ့္ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ နိုင္ငံေရး အရ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ဆြေးႏြးမႈ မျဖစ္ခဲ့တာကို သူက ေထာက္ျပျပီး အခု ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႔ ေတြဆုံပြဲဟာ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြဆုံ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ အဆင့္ကို မေမွ်ာ္မွန္းနိုင္ေသးေၾကာင္း သူက ေျပာပါတယ္။

နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဉ္းသားေတြကို လႊတ္ေပးတာ၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈေတြကို ရပ္ဆိုင္းတာ၊ တရားဥပေဒအတိုင္း စိုးမိုးအုပ္ခ်ုပ္မွု ျဖစ္ေအာင္လုပ္ေဆာင္တာ စတဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြ ျဖစ္လာမွ တကယ့္ အမ်ိုးသား ျပန္လည္ ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးအတြက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ေဆြေႏြးမႈေတြ ျဖစ္လာမွာလို႔ ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ ေဒါက္တာ စိန္ဝင္းက ဘီဘီစီ ကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

18-8-2011 My view on U Thein Sein's speech

2011-12-25T10:11:00.001+05:30

၁၇-၈-၂ဝ၁၁ ေန႔မွာ ေျပာလာတာ ဘာလို႔လဲ

အဝတ္လဲ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္လာရတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းရင္းထဲမွာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ စားသံုးဘို႔ ရည္ရြယ္တာက ရာႏွဳန္း အမ်ားၾကီးပါတယ္။ ေမာင့္က်က္သေရ ေခါင္းေပါင္းနဲ႔ တက္တက္ခ်င္း (ဆန္ရွင္း) နဲ႔ (အာစီယန္) စကားေတြ ေျပာတယ္ မဟုတ္ပါလား။ (အာစီယန္) ကေတာ့ လုပ္ေပးမွာပါ။ ေစာင့္ရ ခဏေပါ့။ (ဆန္ရွင္) ကိုေတာ့ အလိုတူ-အလိုပါေတြက ၾကံဳတိုင္း ဝိုင္းေအာ္ ေပးေနၾကတာက လြဲရင္ မေအာင္ျမင္ေသးဘူး။

အၾကံေပးအဖြဲ႔၊ အလုပ္ရံု-ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ၊ ေနာက္ မီဒီယာကို အကန္႔အသတ္နဲ႔ ေလ်ာ့ေပးလာရတယ္။ အခု (ကင္တားနား) ကို ဗီဇာ ေပးလာရတယ္။ ဘာလို႔လဲ ႕႕႕႕။

ေနာက္ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္က ၂ဝဝ၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံု တျခမ္းပဲ့ေနတာကို ျဖည့္ခ်င္ေနလို႔ဘဲ။ သူတို႔အတြက္ ဧရာဝတီထက္ အေရးၾကီးေနတယ္။ ၃၇ ပါတီနဲ႔လဲ ညာမရေသးဘူး ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ NLD ကို ေနာက္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဝင္ဘို႔ ဟိုေနရာေျပာ၊ ဒီေနရာ ေရးေနတယ္။ ေဒၚစုကို ေတြ႔လာတယ္။ ခရီးထြက္တာမွာ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ မေပးဘဲ ထားေသးတယ္။ ဒါလဲ ရမဲ့ပံု မရွိေသးျပန္ဘူး။

ေနာက္ ေျခလွမ္းကိုေတာ့ ၁၇-၈-၂ဝ၁၁ မွာ ေျပာလာတယ္။ အျပင္ေရာက္ေနသူေတြ ျပန္လာပါ။ ျပည္ပ-ဖိအားက ထိေရာက္ သင့္သေလာက္ ထိေရာက္ေနတာမို႔ ျဖိဳခ်ဘို႔ လိုေနတယ္။ မညီညြတ္ဘူး လက္ညွိဳးထိုး အမွန္ခံေနၾကရေပမဲ့ ဖိအားရေအာင္ လုပ္တာမွာ သိပ္ညီၾကတယ္ မဟုတ္ပါလား။

ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြ လႊတ္ေပးပါ ဆိုတာကို Amnesty ဆိုျပီး ပါးပါးေလး လုပ္ေပးတာနဲ႔ အခုေခၚတယ္ဆိုတာ မကြာပါ။ ၁၉၈၈ မွာ ေက်ာင္းသား-တပ္မေတာ္ကို ဒီနည္းနဲ႔ သိပ္မၾကီးေအာင္ လုပ္ခဲ့တာဘဲ။ ဘယ္သူျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ဝင္လို႔ရေနတာဘဲ။ ဝင္ခ်င္တဲ့ သူေတြလဲ ဝင္ေနၾကတာ၊ အမတ္ေတြေတာင္မွ ၁ဝ ေယာက္ မကေတာ့ဘူး။

စီးပြါးေရး တက္ေအာင္ဆိုတဲ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္ အျမဲတပ္ေနတာက လက္ေဝခံ လက္ၾကီးသမားေတြ ေကာင္းသထက္ ေကာင္းလာဘို႔ ျဖစ္ေပမဲ့၊ အရိုး-အရင္းနဲ႔ ေက်နပ္ခ်င္သူေတြက အမွတ္ေတြ မေတာင္းဘဲ ေပးေနၾကတယ္။ တခုခု အေပါင္းလကၡဏာ ရွိတိုင္း ေပးတဲ့အမွတ္က မ်ားလွျပီ။ အျမင္မတူတာ ရပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမဲ့ ေမ့ထားတာလား၊ မသိတာလား မေျပာတတ္ဘူး။ အဲလိုတခုခု ျဖစ္လာေအာင္ လူဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ရင္းခဲ့ရသလဲ။ အခ်ိန္ဘယ္ေလာက္ ကုန္ခဲ့ျပီလဲ။ အထဲကေန လုပ္ၾကသူေတြကေတာ့ သက္စြန္႔ဆံဖ်ား။ အျပင္မွာလဲ ေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာ ေနပူပူ-မိုးရြာရြာ၊ အလုပ္ပ်က္ပ်က္၊ ဆက္တိုက္ ေအာ္ခဲ့၊ ေဆာ္ၾသခဲ့ၾကရတယ္။ ဒါေတြေၾကာင့္ မလြဲသာလို႔ နဲနဲေလး ေလ်ာ့ေပးရ၊ လႊတ္ေပးရတာေတြ လုပ္တာပါ။ ေက်ာင္းသားကို မေပးဘဲ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ၾကီးဘဲ အမွတ္ေပးေနၾကတာ မမ်ားဘူးလား၊ မမွားဘူးလား။

အထဲဖိအား၊ အျပင္ဖိအားဆိုတာ အျမဲရွိေနတာပါ။ အထဲကို နဲနဲျပင္ေပးေတာ့ ဒီဘက္မွာ ေနခဲ့သူေတြ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲအထိ လိုက္သြားၾကတယ္။ အခု အျပင္ကလူေတြ ဘယ္အထိ လိုက္ၾကမလဲ။ အထဲမွာ ၁၉၉ဝ က NLD နဲ႔ တိုင္းရင္သား ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီေတြ က်န္ေနသလို အျပင္မွာလဲ က်န္ေနမွာ အမွန္ပါ။

Dr. တင့္ေဆြ
၁၇-၈-၂ဝ၁၁

၁၇-၈-၂ဝ၁၁ မွာ ေျပာတာ ျဖစ္ေပမဲ့ ၁၈-၉-၁၉၈၈ ကေန ၃ဝ-၃-၂ဝ၁၁ အထိ သမိုင္းေနာက္ခံက ဆက္ထြက္ေပၚလာလို႔ ျမင္ပါတယ္။ ဒီကာလေတြမွာ အုပ္ခ်ဴပ္ခဲ့သူေတြက ေျပာခဲ့တာေတြနဲ႔ ေျပာျပီး တကယ္ ဘယ္လိုလုပ္ခဲ့သလဲ ဆိုတာေတြကို ထည့္တြက္ပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔က ၁၉၉ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ တရားဝင္ အေရြးခံထားရသူ ျဖစ္လို႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အျပီး ထိပ္ဆံုး တာဝန္ရွိသူရဲ႕ စကား-ကတိ မတည္ခဲ့တာ၊ ေနာက္ တာဝန္အရွိဆံုး အဖြဲ႔ကေန တရားဝင္၊ ေဂဇက္ဝင္၊ ရလဒ္ေတြကို ဖ်က္ျပန္တာေတြက မွတ္တမ္းဝင္ေတြပါ။ လက္ရွိသမတကေန ေျပာလာတာလဲ မွတ္တမ္းထဲ ေရာက္လာျပီ။ ဒီအထိသာ ဆိုရင္ ဒီမိုကေရစီနဲ႔ အမ်ိဳးသားသင့္ျမတ္ေရး လိုအပ္ခ်က္ေတြကို အသာထားတာျပီး၊ ၂ဝဝ၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုကို အဂၤါစံုခ်င္လို႔သာ လုပ္တယ္လို႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေတြကို ေလးစားသမႈ မျပဳေသးယံုမကဘဲ ျမစ္တစင္း အခြင့္အေရးေတာင္မွ ေသလုေျမာပါး ျဖစ္ေနေတာ့ အႏွစ္ ၂ဝ ေက်ာ္ တိုင္းျပည္က ထြက္ေနသူေတြအတြက္ ျပန္ဝင္ရင္ အာမခံခ်က္ဆိုတာ ရွိမယ္မထင္ေသးဘူး။ အခုလဲ ဘယ္သူျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ျပန္ဝင္လို႔ ရေနတာဘဲ။ ၁၉၉ဝ အမတ္ေတြဝင္တာ ၉ ေယာက္ ရွိပါျပီ။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ ထူးျခားတယ္လို႔ အေျပာရ ခက္ပါတယ္။

(အာစီယန္) နဲ႔ (ဆန္ရွင္) အေရးဟာ လက္ရွိအစိုးရ တက္တက္ခ်င္း ကိုယ္တြယ္တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ (အစ္ရွဴး) ေတြ ျဖစ္တယ္။ (အာစီယန္) ဆိုတာကေတာ့ ျဖစ္ခ်င္တာ ျဖစ္လာဘို႔ မခဲယဥ္းပါ။ ေစာင့္ရ ခဏေပါ့။ (ဆန္ရွင္) နဲ႔ ဖိအားက်ဘို႔ရာ တခ်ိဳ႕ဟာေလးေတြ ေျပာင္းေပးတယ္။ ဒါလဲ မရေသးေတာ့ ထပ္ေဆာင္းလာရတယ္ေပါ့။ လာပါလိမ့္အံုးမယ္ ထင္တယ္။

အထဲမွာ အလုပ္ၾကသူေတြက သက္စြန္႔ဆံဖ်ား လုပ္ေနၾကခ်ိန္မွာ အျပင္မွာလဲ ေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာ ေနပူပူ-မိုးရြာရြာ၊ အလုပ္ ပ်က္ပ်က္၊ ဆက္တိုက္ ေဆာ္ၾသေနၾကလို႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာဖိအား ဆိုတာ ရသင့္သေလာက္ရျပီး၊ ထိန္းထားႏိုင္တယ္။ (ဆန္ရွင္း) လဲ ဆက္ရွိေနေစတယ္။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာမွာ အားနည္းေစဘို႔ ျပန္လာေအာင္ ေခၚရတာ တခ်က္ခုတ္ ႏွစ္ခ်က္ျပတ္ ခ်င္ပံုရတယ္။ ၁၉၈၈ မွာ ေက်ာင္းသား-တပ္မေတာ္ကို ဒီနည္းနဲ႔ သိပ္မၾကီးေအာင္ လုပ္ခဲ့တယ္ မဟုတ္ပါလား။

အထဲမွာ နဲနဲေလး ျပင္ေပးေတာ့ တဘက္မွာ ေနခဲ့သူေတြ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲအထိ လိုက္သြားၾကပါတယ္။ အျပင္ကလူေတြ အခု အေခၚမွာ ဘယ္အထိ လိုက္ခြင့္ရၾကမလဲေတာ့ မသိပါ။ လိုက္မဲ့သူေတြ ရွိမွာပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အထဲမွာ ၁၉၉ဝ က NLD နဲ႔ တိုင္းရင္းသား ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီေတြ က်န္ေနသလို အျပင္မွာလဲ က်န္ေနမွာ အမွန္ပါ။

တိုင္းျပည္ စီးပြါးေရး ေကာင္းေအာင္ ဝိုင္းလုပ္ဘို႔ အျပင္ကလူေတြ ေခၚတာဆိုရင္ ဖိတ္စာ မွားေနျပီ။ စီးပြါးေရး မေကာင္းလို႔ အလုပ္အကိုင္ေတြ ရွားလို႔ ထြက္ေနရသူေတြကို ျပန္လာႏိုင္ေအာင္ မလုပ္ႏိုင္ေသးဘူး။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ရသူေတြဟာ အမ်ိဳးသား သင့္ျမတ္ေရး တကယ္စေတာ့မွ ဝင္ရမယ္ ထင္ပါတယ္။ အားမနာတမ္း ထင္ေၾကးေပးရရင္ (အယ္ဒီတာက ဆင္ဆာ လုပ္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။) ျပန္လာတဲ့သူေတြ မ်ားဘို႔-မမ်ားဘို႔ အေရးမၾကီးဘဲ၊ မိန္းခြန္းထဲမွာ အေကာင္းေတြ ပါတယ္လို႔ ျမင္သြားၾကရင္ မိန္႔ခြန္းရဲ႕ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္အတြက္ လံုေလာက္ေနတယ္။

ႏိုင္ငံေရး-အက်ဥ္းသား နဲနဲလႊတ္ေပးတာျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ ကေလးစစ္သား တေယာက္စ ႏွစ္ေယာက္စ အိပ္ျပန္လာရတာျဖစ္ျဖစ္ တခုခု ျဖစ္လာေအာင္ လူဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ရင္းခဲ့ရသလဲ၊ အခ်ိန္ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ကုန္ခဲ့ျပီလဲ ဆိုတာ မေမ့သင့္ၾကပါ။ မလြဲသာလို႔ လုပ္ေပးလာရတိုင္း ေက်ာင္းသားကို မေပးဘဲ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ၾကီးဘဲ အမွတ္ေပးေနၾကတာ မမ်ားဘူးလား၊ မမွားဘူးလားလို႔ ေမးခ်င္ပါတယ္။

တဦးခ်င္းသေဘာ ေျပာရရင္ -
တိုင္းျပည္ကေန ထြက္ခဲ့ရတဲ့ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္က (၁) အဖမ္း မခံခ်င္တာနဲ႔ (၂) ႏိုင္ငံေရးမွာ ဆက္လုပ္ဘို႔ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ မ်က္ကြယ္မွာ ေထာင္ ၂၅ ႏွစ္ ခ်ထားတာကို သေဘာထားၾကီးစြာ စဥ္းစားေပးတဲ့အထဲမွာ ပါခဲ့ရင္ေတာင္မွ ၁ဝ ႏွစ္၊ အႏွစ္ ၂ဝ က်န္မယ္။ ေထာင္ထဲေနျပီးလဲ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ က်န္တဝက္အတြက္ မေရရာေသးဘူး။ တရားဝင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး လုပ္ခြင့္ ရွိမလား။ လူအမ်ား က်န္းမာေရးအတြက္ လြတ္လြတ္လပ္လပ္ ကူညီခြင့္၊ လက္တြဲလုပ္ခြင့္ေတြ ရွိမလား။ ခ်ိတ္ပိတ္ထားတဲ့ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အိမ္နဲ႔ ေဆးခန္းေလးမွာ ကိုယ္တိုင္ျပန္ေနလို႔ ရမွာလားလဲ မသိဘူး။

ျပစ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့တယ္ ဆုိတာေရာ ထုိက္သင့္တဲ့ ျပစ္ဒဏ္လာခံပါ ဆိုတာပါ၊ လြတ္လပ္မႈ မရွိတဲ့ တရားစီရင္ေရးေအာက္မွာ လာရဲစရာ မရွိပါ။ ႏိုင္ငံေရး လုပ္တာမွန္သမွ် ရာဇဝတ္မႈလို႔ အဓိပၸါယ္ဖြင့္ေနဆဲ မဟုတ္လား။ Being elected should not be a crime!

Dr. တင့္ေဆြ
၁၈-၈-၂ဝ၁၁

14-8-2011 Burmese refugees in Delhi

2011-12-25T10:09:00.001+05:30

'We don't have the Dalai Lama'
Pooja Kashyap, TNN | Aug 14, 2011, 07.20AM IST
The Tibetans have the Dalai Lama, we have no one of that stature to get us noticed," says the man who just calls himself Peter. "Many of us are uneducated and have a language problem. So people ignore us."

Obviously, Peter is not a Tibetan, although people here often mistake him for one. They also call him 'Nepali' or 'Manipuri' , though he's neither. Peter is Burmese - among the 10,000 Christian refugees who fled persecution and poverty in their own country and found refuge in Delhi. Most are from Chin, a Christian-majority state of Myanmar near Mizoram.

It's a refuge like no other. Dirty, slushy bylanes in Delhi's western sprawl - Vikaspuri, Asalatpur, Janakpuri and Uttam Nagar.... Each dingy building is a maze of boxes - eight by 12 feet - masquerading as rooms. The paint is peeling off the walls; wires hang from the roofs. Outside the hovels, the children - scrawny and malnourished - wait while their mothers cook inside. "The rooms are too small for families to be inside while the cooking is on," says Steven Ral Kap Tluang, president of the Chin Refugee Committee. He says most rooms are shared by six to eight people. Fifteen rooms share a common loo. "We left our homes, hoping to make a fresh start here. But life has become a nightmare," says Steven.

It is estimated that around 86,000 Chin Christians have come to India since 1988. Most of them crossed over the porous border into Mizoram, travelling to Shillong and Delhi.

Runbik, a journalist who fled Buddhist dominated Mynamar over three decades ago, says it has become increasingly difficult for the country's Christian minority to preserve its identity. Plato, a human rights activist, says that Christians "were forcibly asked to build pagodas, while our churches were destroyed" . He fled Myanmar a decade ago after a run-in with the military. "Our women were assaulted and our men were forced to serve as porters for soldiers. With 50 military camps across Chin state, ration and money was forcibly extracted from the locals. In the last two decades, Chin has seen no development and is the poorest region in the country," he says. A UNDP survey found that almost three-fourth of the state's population is below the poverty line.

But is life as a refugee any better? Miserably poor and condemned to a ghetto-like existence , the Burmese have little access to good education or decent jobs. "Our children face discrimination in government schools because of their physical appearance, language and culture. So we have stopped sending them there," says Runbik. Many work in restaurants and factories, as security guards and house maids. "Sometimes, employers do not even pay us fully," says Tshery, another refugee . The women have a rougher time, she says.

"They are teased and manhandled when they go out at night to collect leftover vegetables from the shifting bazaars." She remembers her own experience when she arrived in Delhi . "My landlord came to my room asking for rent. All of a sudden, this 45-something man started groping me. When I raised an alarm, he went away but later doubled the room rent." Police apathy makes matters worse. The gangrape of a 20-year-old deaf and dumb Burmese girl by nine locals in Uttam Nagar less than a year ago still haunts the refugees. "Why has no action been taken in her case?" asks Steven.

Although most of them have United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) certificates, they do not enjoy any legal rights as India is not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees. The subsistence allowance they used to receive from UNHCR was discontinued from this year. To make matters worse, "the Foreigners' Regional Registration Office, which grants residence permits, extracts anything between Rs 3,000 to 15,000 from us," alleges Plato.

Despite all this, their numbers seem to have swelled in the past three years. Around 60% of the Chin Burmese diaspora is under 35 years; many are going to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. Is going back an option? For oldtimers such as Runbik, Myanmar is still Burma - the home they hope to return to some day. But they know reality is different. "The so-called democratically elected government of Burma is a sham. Even now, it's the generals who control the reins," says Runbik.

'Their cornered life is appalling'

IIT-Delhi student Abhishek Jain is part of a team that runs a project to help Burmese refugees in Delhi. He tells Sunday Times how every little help counts

How are these refugees as a community?

They are close knit - rich in culture and tradition. It's astounding they have existed here in large numbers for decades. Yet, their presence has largely gone unnoticed. They are very sceptical about trusting Indians; this stems from fear and exploitation .

What are the core issues that trouble them?

Their isolation and pathos just strikes you. They live in inhospitable conditions, with no support base, no work permit, no legal rights....Their cornered existence is appalling. Even a little support can make a difference like it did the Tibetans. We need to stop discriminating the Burmese. Give them a means of livelihood.

Any improvement after your intervention?

Under the banner of 'Project Aarambh', that began last November, Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE-IIT Delhi) is working with institutions such as UNHCR to set up placement cells to address unemplyment . In the last four months, 15 people have got permanent employment.

11-8-2011 Aung San Suu Kyi (Irrawaddy Appeal)

2011-12-25T10:03:00.001+05:30

We appeal to environmental experts, to conservationists and to lovers of nature, peace and harmony everywhere to join us. Together we can find solutions to problems, ecological, economic, technical, and political, related to the Irrawaddy.

54 - 56 University Avenue
Bahan Township Rangoon

August 11,2011

lrrawaddy Appeal

Irrawaddy, 'the great river," is the main waterway of Burma, It starts in the Kachin State in the north as the confluence of the Maykha and Malikha rivers and follows a steady course to the south where it disperses into a network of streams and rivulets that feed the fertile delta before finally flowing into the Indian Ocean. It is the most significant geographical feature of our country, the grand natural highway, a prolific source of food, the home of varied water flora and fauna, the supporter of traditional modes of life, the muse that has inspired countless works of prose and poetry.

Today, the lrrawaddy is under threat. tack of sound planning, the failure to enforce necessary conservation laws, and a poor ecological awareness have created diverse problems. The plains forests on the banks of the river are in danger of disappearing as illegal logging and charcoal production proceed at an alarming pace. Deforestation has meant erosion that in turn has led to a rise in the level of the riverbed and an increased formation of sandbanks. The building of bridges without sufficient attention to the appropriateness of location and design has aggravated the problems of erosion and sandbank formation. For some decades now, navigation and the procurement of potable water have become increasingly difficult during the hot season. Climate change is an additional factor to be taken into account in assessing the damage that has been inflicted and continues to be inflicted on the lrrawaddy due to lack of timely and effective action.

A relatively new problem is pollution. The proliferation of factories and the unregulated panning for gold over the last decade have introduced waste matter that constitutes a threat to rare species of fish, including the famous lrrawaddy dolphin, and to the health of people who rely on the river for water and food.

The construction of darns and hydro-electric power stations bring such benefits as the regulation of waterways and the availability of renewable electric energy. However there is a downside to such projects. The river course is fragmented and the strength of flow is weakened; decrease in sedimentation aggravates the erosion problem; although the water becomes clearer, there is a greater concentration of impure elements; during the course of the construction work much industrial refuse is generated, adding to the despoliation of the environment and pollution af the river.

A particularly serious problem resulting from the weakened flow of the waters of the lrrawaddy is the intrusion of salt water into the delta. This is detrimental to paddy production and thus affects the whole population of the countsy for whom rice is the staple food. Moreover rice is one of our major export items and any decrease in its production could affect foreign exchange earnings.

The Eight Dams Project

The latest dam construction, begun in 2010, is the prologue of the 'Eight Dams', or Myit Sone Hydro Electric Project, a joint Burmese-Chinese venture. This project has raised issues additional to the problems of dam construction outlined in the previous paragraph. An environmental impact assessment report has generated intense concern, in particular with regard to the safety aspect. The presence of fault lines En the vicinity of the dams and the sheer immensity of the reservoir raises the spectre of horrendous devastation in the event of an earthquake. Meanwhile 12,000 people from sixty three villages have been relocated. It is not yet clear whether they will receive compensation commensurate with the loss of livelihoods and the disruption to a traditional way of life.

As good neighbours, Burma and China have an established tradition of mutual regard and friendship. We believe that, keeping in mind the interests of both countries, both governments would wish to avoid consequences which might endanger lives and homes. Since the commencement of the Myit Sone project, the perception, long held by the Kachin people, that successive Burmese governments have neglected their interests has deepened. While recognizing that large sums of money have already been spent en the realization of the project, we would urge that in the interests of both national and international harmony, concerned parties should reassess the scheme and cooperate to find solutions that would prevent undesirable consequences and thus allay the fears of all who are anxious to protect the Irrawaddy.

Save the lrrawaddy

Ecological changes to the lrrawaddy would impact all those whose lives are linked to the great river, from the ethnic peoples in the northernmost state of our country to the rice growing communities of the delta. To conserve the Irrawaddy is to protect our economy and our environment as well as to safeguard our cultural heritage. Most important of all, uniting in conservation efforts would carry dividends in the way of better understanding and practical cooperation. Many individuals and organizations have done valuable research on the lrrawaddy and there will surely be no lack of information and practical suggestions that could serve as a basis for a conservation scheme. Much can be achieved simply by the strict application of already existing laws and regulations pertaining to the conservation af forests and rivers. We therefore appeal to environmental experts, to consewationistr and to lovers of nature, peace and harmony everywhere to join us in a campaign to create a worldwide awareness of the dangers threatening one of the most important rivers of Asia. Together we can find solutions to problems, emlogical, economic, technical, and political, related to the Irrawaddy.

Aung San Suu Kyi

8-8-2011 Memorandum Protest Rally, New Delhi

2011-12-25T09:57:00.002+05:30

23rd Anniversary of Burma’s 8-8-88 protest rally, New Delhi, Memorandum
8th August 2011

Today democracy still-deficient Burmese people around the world hold the 23rd anniversary of the People’s Uprising which took place on 8-8-88. The Burmese pro-democracy movement in India issues this memorandum to let the regime of Burma, the government of India and the people of Burma and around the world know our desire and demands.

In September 1987, the then military dictator General Ne Win who has ruled Burma for 26 years and made the country the poorest revoked certain Burmese currency notes unexpectedly. That did not improve Burma’s moribund economy but brought about protests spearheaded by the University students. On 8th August 1988 hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life participated in the historic nationwide uprising. The people demanded for end of one-party rule and democracy.

Eventually, General Ne Win resigned but he made a last warning that when the army shoots, it shoots to hit. On 18 September 1988, the Army seized power and gunned down protesters by killing at least 3,000 citizens including young school-children, nurses, monks and housewives.

When the people were allowed to vote more or less freely in the election held in 1990, they voted for the National League for Democracy (NLD) and the political parties of the ethnic nationalities. However the military failed to concede but ruthlessly suppressed the opposition. The elected Parliamentarians, the students, the monks and the activists in thousands were arrested and imprisoned.

Meanwhile the military made a long-term groundwork. Keeping Aung San Suu Kyi and all opponents in check, the dictators tried to write a constitution of their choice. While a devastating Cyclone was killing 134,000 people, the referendum was held in 2008. After all major political parties which won landslide in 1990 were prohibited to contest, an election was held in 2010. The vote counting was utterly diabolical and the army-back USDA party was announced as sole winner. The selected army officers took off uniforms and are sitting in the parliament. To gain outside recognition Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released in November 2010.

It has been 23 years but the people of Burma can’t forget those killing days as the killers continue ruling the country in different names and dissimilar clothes. It shows now that the new set-up has new problems among themselves, the government Vs the army. The decade-old ceasefire agreements broke down and gun fires flood back in Kachin, Shan and Karen areas. New regime has old hands and not-new policies. It continues keeping over 2,000 political prisoners including the 88-Generation student leaders.

It was the “Pinglong spirit” that united all nationalities and the country gained independence. It was the “8888 spirit”, which could unite the entire nation and bring down the incumbent junta. It is time to revive those spirits among all of us.

We, Burmese pro-democracy movement in India strongly demand:
• to immediately free all political prisoners
• to end all arm conflicts and declare nationwide ceasefire
• to set off national reconciliation as called by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

We urge all the people inside and outside Burma to team up in unison to fulfill our demands. We also appeal to the government of India and the international community to effectively support the political initiatives of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Long live 8888 spirit!

8th August 2011
New Delhi

8-8-2011 NCGUB Statement

2011-12-25T09:56:00.002+05:30

NATIONAL COALITION GOVERNMENT OF THE UNION OF BURMA
ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ

ရွစ္ေလးလုံး ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပုံ (၂၃) ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေႀကညာခ်က္
၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ (၈) ရက္ေန႔သည္ ျမန္မာျပည္ ေနရာေဒသစံုတြင္ လူထုလူတန္းစားစံု၊ လူမ်ိဳးဘာသာစုံ၊ တခဲနက္ ပါဝင္ခဲ့ၾကေသာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ထြန္းကားေရး၊ ရွစ္ေလးလုံး ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပုံႀကီး ဆင္ႏႊဲျခင္း (၂၃) ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ေန႔ ျဖစ္သည္။

အေရးေတာ္ပုံႀကီး စတင္ ေပၚေပါက္ရျခင္းမွာ ရန္ကုန္ စက္မႈ-တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားႏွင့္ အရပ္သား လူငယ္မ်ား အၾကား ခိုက္ရန္ ျဖစ္ပြားမႈကို အာဏာပိုင္တို႔က အဂတိလိုက္စား ေျဖရွင္းခဲ့သျဖင့္ အမွန္တရားကိုသာ လိုလားၾကကုန္ေသာ စက္မႈတကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားက ေက်ာင္းပရဝုဏ္ အတြင္း ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သို႔ရာတြင္ ၁၉၈၈ မတ္လ (၁၃) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အာဏာပိုင္တို႔ ပစ္ခတ္ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ေျဖရွင္းေသာေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ေက်ာင္းဝိုင္း အတြင္းမွာပင္ ေသြးေျမက်ခဲ့ၾကရေတာ့သည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး အေရးေတာ္ပုံမွာ ဆက္လက္ ႀကီးထြားလာၿပီး၊ တႏိုင္ငံလုံး အတိုင္းအတာျဖင့္ ရဟန္းရွင္လူ ျပည္သူ တရပ္လုံး အုံၾကြကာ “ရွစ္ေလးလုံး အေရးေတာ္ပုံႀကီး” အျဖစ္ သမိုင္းတြင္ ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့ရသည္။

အာဏာကို ရာသက္ပန္ ဆုပ္ကိုင္ထားလိုေသာ ဗိုလ္ေနဝင္း၊ ဗိုလ္စိန္လြင္၊ ေဒါက္တာ ေမာင္ေမာင္တို႔က တေယာက္ျပီး တေယာက္ အာဏာ စြန္႔ခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ဗိုလ္ေစာေမာင္၊ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊတို႔က (နဝတ) အမည္ျဖင့္ အာဏာ ထပ္မံ သိမ္းခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တို႔သည္ ၁၉၉ဝ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေမလ (၂၇)ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ပါတီစုံ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေထြေထြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲၾကီးကို မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာ က်င္းပေပးခဲ့ရသည္။ ျပည္သူလူထုက NLD အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္အား အေရးေတာ္ပုံ ဦးေဆာင္ပါတီအျဖစ္၎၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေခါင္းေဆာင္အျဖစ္၎၊ ဆႏၵျပဳ ေရြးခ်ယ္ လိုက္ၾကသည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တို႔က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚေရး၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေတာင္းဆိုေသာ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ေဆြးေႏြးေရးတို႔ကို ျငင္းပယ္လွ်က္ အေကာက္ဥာဏ္သုံး အခ်ိန္ဆြဲကာ အာဏာ ဆက္လက္ ခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ေနခဲ့သည္။ စစ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး ေအာက္တြင္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား၊ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၊ ရဟန္း သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားသည္ နည္းအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးျဖင့္ အာဏာရွင္ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတို႔အတြက္ ဆက္လက္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းၾကသည္။

အာဏာ ဆက္လက္ လက္ဝယ္ထားေရး ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ျဖင့္ ၂ဝဝ၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံဥပေဒကို တဖက္သတ္ ေရးဆြဲ-အတည္ျပဳ၊ အတိုက္အခံျပဳမည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီမ်ားကို ခ်န္လွပ္ကာ ၂ဝ၁ဝ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဇြတ္က်င္းပျပီး၊ မဲရလဒ္ကို မသမာနည္း မ်ိဳးစံုသံုး၍ အမည္ႏွင့္ အဝတ္အစားကိုသာ ေျပာင္းလ်က္ ဆက္လက္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္လာခဲ့သည္။ အာဏာတည္ျမဲေရးအတြက္ စိတ္ၾကိဳက္ ျပင္ဆင္ တည္ေဆာက္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ျပီးေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဖိအား ေလ်ာ့ေစရန္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့ရသည္။

ေပၚေပါက္လာသည့္ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ လူထုအက်ိဳးကို ႏုတ္ျဖင့္ပင္ ေဖၚထုတ္ခြင့္ ကင္းမဲ့ေနျပီး၊ အစိုးရသစ္သည္လည္း မင္းကိုႏိုင္၊ ကိုကိုႀကီး၊ အစရွိသည့္ ရွစ္ေလးလံုး ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား အပါအဝင္ ခြန္ထြန္းဦး၊ စိုင္းညြန္႔လြင္ အစရွိသည့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ျပည္သူ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ား၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ား စုစုေပါင္း (၂ဝဝဝ) မွ်ကို ဆက္လက္ အက်ဥ္းခ်ထားဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။

လူထု၏ ယံုၾကည္မႈမရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေထာက္ခံမႈလည္း ပိုမို ေကာင္းမလာေသာအခါ ဇူလိုင္ (၂၅) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ဝန္ၾကီးက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆုံခဲ့ၿပီး၊ တိုင္းျပည္ႏွင့္ လူထုအက်ိဳးအတြက္ ညွိႏႈိင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ဟု ဆိုလာခဲ့သည္။

ဇူလိုင္ (၂၈) ရက္စြဲျဖင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္မွ (၁) သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္၊ (၂) ကခ်င္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး အဖြဲ႔၊ (၃) ကရင့္ အမ်ိဳးသား အစည္းအရုံး၊ (၄) မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီ၊ (၅) ရွမ္းျပည္ တပ္မေတာ္ တို႔ထံ ရည္ညႊန္းလွ်က္ အိပ္ဖြင့္ ေပးစာတေစာင္ ေပးပို႔လိုက္သည္။ တိုင္းျပည္ ျပႆနာမ်ားကို စစ္အင္အားသုံး ေျဖရွင္း၍ မရႏိုင္၊ တဦးႏွင့္ တဦး အျပန္အလွန္ နားလည္မႈ၊ အျပန္အလွန္ ယုံၾကည္ ေလးစားမႈတို႔ျဖင့္ ေျဖရွင္းမွ ေျပလည္မည္၊ တိုင္းရင္းသား လူမ်ိဳးအားလုံး၏ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားကို ေရွးရႈ၍ ပဋိပကၡမ်ားကို ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ေျဖရွင္းၾကရန္ ႏွင့္ အျမန္ဆုံး အပစ္အခတ္ ရပ္စဲၾကရန္ ပန္ၾကားထားပါသည္။

သို႔ျဖစ္၍ ဤ (၂၃) ၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ “ရွစ္ေလးလုံး ျပည္သူ႔ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပုံေန႔” တြင္ ျပည္တြင္း ျပည္ပရွိ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အင္အားစုမ်ား၊ တိုင္းရင္းသား အင္အားစုမ်ားသည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး၊ ႏိုင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ကာကြယ္ ျမွင့္တင္ၾကရန္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ေပးစာကို တခဲနက္ ေထာက္ခံၾကရုံမွ်မက၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား အားလုံး လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး ႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္း ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားတြင္ တက္ၾကြစြာ ပါဝင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကပါရန္ အမ်ိဳးသား ညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရက သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကညာအပ္ပါသည္။

၂ဝ၁၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ ၾသဂုတ္လ (၈) ရက္ေန႔။
ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားညြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ၊

5-8-2011 Rebels pray for Bhupen, Mamoni in Myanmar

2011-12-25T09:55:00.001+05:30

TNN | Aug 5, 2011, 11.19PM IST
Read more:militant outfits|meeting for speedy recovery|Bhupen Hazarika

GUWAHATI: Several militant outfits of the region on Thursday held a prayer meeting at their common base in Myanmar for the speedy recovery of music maestro Bhupen Hazarika and Gyanpeeth award-winning writer Indira Goswami, both of who are undergoing treatment in different hospitals.

The prayer meeting, convened by the Paresh Baruah faction of Ulfa, was chaired by chairman of NSCN(K) faction, S S Khaplang. An e-mailed statement from the Baruah faction said the prayer meeting was held at the military council headquarters of Ulfa in Myanmar. The meeting was attended by several Manipuri outfits, including the PLA, the UNLF and Prepak. Hazarika has been undergoing treatment at a hospital in Mumbai since June 29 after he complained of trouble breathing. Goswami was recently shifted from a New Delhi hospital to Guwahati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH). She was initially hospitalized at GMCH in February this year after she suffered respiratory trouble and a stroke.

Recently, Manipuri outfit NSCN(K), Ulfa and anti-talk faction of NDFB joined hands in Myanmar to launch joint operations. The outfits came together at the behest of Paresh Barua, the 'commander-in-chief' of the anti-talks faction of Ulfa after his striking strength diminished greatly, with the major chunk of Ulfa led by Arabinda Rajkhowa heading the peace talks way. Baruah, who is opposed to the talks, is engaging hardened cadres of the PLA of Manipur and even jihadi elements to strike back in the coming weeks.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/Rebels-pray-for-Bhupen-Mamoni-in-Myanmar/articleshow/9498191.cms

Burma VJ Documentary Film Show to Burmese Community in India

2011-12-25T09:53:00.003+05:30

* Before 8888 anniversary Day, to motivate Burmese community in India
* Burma VJ Documentary Film about Saffron Revolution in 2007 in Burma will be shown to public
* Venue: BCRC, New Delhi
* Date: 6 August 2011
* Time: 3:00 pm

3-8-2011 Myanmar, India step up cooperation in health sector

2011-12-25T09:52:00.001+05:30

Irish Sun
Myanmar and India are stepping up bilateral cooperation in the health sector, a media report said.

Talks have taken place between the Myanmar Union Health Minister Pe Thet Khin and Indian Ambassador to Myanmar Villur Sundararajan Seshadri in Nay Pyi Taw, Xinhua reported Wednesday.

The negotiation covered upgrading of Yangon's Children's Hospital and Sittway General Hospital, provision of telemedicine for Yangon General Hospital, training specialists and other medical professionals for liver transplantation and other subjects, said the official daily New Light of Myanmar reported Wednesday.

In February, India held a pharmaceuticals exposition in Yangon, showcasing pharmaceutical products and medical equipment of India.

Myanmar imported over 5,000 categories of pharmaceutical products from abroad annually and the import in the fiscal year 2009-10 registered a value of $147.7 million, an increase of 17.4 percent from 2008-09.

According to official statistics, Myanmar-India bilateral trade reached $1.07 billion in 2010-11, standing as Myanmar's fourth largest trading partner after Thailand, Singapore and China.

Of the total, Myanmar's export to India amounted to $876.91 million, while its import from India was valued at $194.92 million.

http://story.irishsun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/2411cd3571b4f088/id/820232/cs/1/

1-8-2011 India's Arms Deal With Burma Reprehensible

2011-12-25T09:50:00.001+05:30

By Nava Thakuria
The Burmese exiles living in India and their sympathizers had recently came to the street of India's national capital to lodge a stronger protest against the government for supplying arms and ammunitions to the semi-military Burmese government at Naypyidaw.

Expressing resentment at New Delhi's continued military relationship with Naypyidaw, hundreds of pro-democracy activists and various Indian civil society groups demonstrated in New Delhi on the 22nd of July, 2011 arguing that 'supplying arms to the most brutal military dictatorship may have grave consequences to millions of innocent lives'. It may be mentioned that the Indian government had recently supplied 52 military trucks load of arms and ammunition to the Burmese government.

India maintained its strategic and military relationship with the Burmese regime even after receiving brickbats from the international community. "It is hurting and awful that the Government of India has breached its democratic principles by supplying arms and ammunitions to the Burmese military rulers, which are identified as the world's most notorious military regime. The consequence will be the victimization of innocent Burmese citizens who have been yearning for justice, peace and democracy for many decades," said M Kim, a young Burmese exile living in India. "Systematic human rights abuses and criminal hostilities against the ethnic groups, political activists, journalists and civilians have been committed without a halt by Burma's Army even after the installation of a so-called civilian type government.

It is a fact that over 2,200 political prisoners in Burma are still detained in jails," he added. The demonstrators also sent a memorandum to Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh urging him to renew New Delhi's support the Burmese people's movement for restoration of peace and democracy in Burma. Till the early nineties, Indian government supported the democratic movement led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But later it changed the course and started engaging the then military regime named State Peace and Development Council for various bi-lateral relationships. "We believe that India is a nation founded on sound democratic principles and time and again India has proven to uphold the principles of constitutionally elected governments.

Further as a nation committed to playing an important, if not pivotal role in maintaining peace in the region, it is unbecoming of a responsible nation to supply arms to countries known for abusing military power," states the memorandum, which was signed by nearly hundred Indian civil society groups and individuals with many Burmese organizations. "While other big neighbours (of Burma) are silently urging for negotiation between the authorities and ethnic groups, New Delhi has continued its arm supply to the infamous regime," said Dr Tint Swe, the chairman of Burma Centre Delhi, a pro-democracy forum.

Speaking to the author from New Delhi, Dr Swe asserted that "democracy and human rights activists in Burma have been imprisoned, intimidated, tortured and many of them are put to death and it is observed by none other than the United Nations and the international community that the advocators for democracy, justice, peace and human rights in Burma have been regularly castigated". So we are apprehensive that those arms will only be used against the pro-democracy activities and ethnic minorities like Kachin, Shan and Karen in eastern Burma, added Dr Swe.

In a separate memorandum to the Indian Premier, the Burmese pro-democracy groups urged New Delhi 'to immediately halt the supply of military aids to Burma's dictatorship' and 'to review India's foreign policy on Burma by focusing on long-term interests, development and stability, prosperity and peace in the region'. 'Systematic human rights abuses and criminal hostilities against ethnic groups, political activists, journalists and civilians have been committed by Burmese Army even after the installation of a so-called civilian government at Naypyidaw,' the memorandum pointed out.

'India's national interest will be served only if a real democratic regime is established in its eastern neighbour,' argued the memorandum which was endorsed by the Women League of Burma, All Burma Students Democratic Front, Arakan Liberation Party, All Burma Democratic Lusei Women Organization, Chin Human Rights Organization, Chin Student Union, Kuki Women Human Rights Organization, Kachin National Organization, Matu Youth Organization, Zomi Women Union and others, adding that 'supporting the democratic movement in Burma will thus be beneficial for the largest democracy in the globe as well.'

Nava ThakuriaNava Thakuria is a Guwahati (Northeast India) based journalist who contributes to NewsBlaze and various media outlets throughout the world. Contact him at navathakuria@yahoo.com

1-8-2011 India's NHPC to develop hydro power projects in Myanmar

2011-12-25T09:48:00.001+05:30

Aug 1 (Reuters) - India's state-run hydro power developer NHPC Ltd plans to develop two hydro power projects in neighbouring Myanmar, it said on Monday.

At present, NHPC is preparing detailed project report for 1,200 mega watts (MW) Htamanthi and 660 MW Shwezaye hydro power projects on Chindwin river in Myanmar, it said in an emailed statement.

In all NHPC has 14 operational power stations with a total installed capacity of 5,295 MW. (Reporting by Ketan Bondre;Editing by Harish Nambiar)
http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/nhpc-myanmar-idINI8E7GN03920110801?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews&rpc=401

29-7-2011 Indian assistance to Chin State

2011-12-25T09:47:00.001+05:30

ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ကို အိႏိၵယ က ေဒၚလာ ၂ သန္း ကူညီ
RFA 2011-07-29

မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ ့မွာ အေျခစုိက္တဲ့ အိႏိၵယ ေကာင္စစ္၀န္႐ုံးးက ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးအတြက္ ေငြေၾကး အကူအညီ ေဒၚလာ ၂ သန္း ကူညီဖို႔ ကတိ ေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရပါတယ္။

အိႏိၵယေကာင္စစ္၀န္ Dr. Mohan Sethi နဲ႔ အဖြဲ႔ဟာ ဟားခါးၿမိဳ ့ကို ေရာက္ရွိၿပီး ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ အစိုးရအဖြဲ ့၀င္ေတြနဲ႔ တိုက္႐ုိက္ ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဟားခါးၿမိဳ ့ခံတဦး က RFA ကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

“၂၇ ရက္ေန႔မွာ အိႏၵိယသံ႐ုံးက တာ၀န္ရွိသူေတြ ဟားခါးကုိ ေရာက္တယ္။ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရး အတြက္ ေဒၚလာ ၂ သန္း လွဴဒါန္းမယ္လုိ႔ ေျပာတယ္။ ျပည္နယ္အစုိးရ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ေတြရယ္၊ ရပ္မိရပ္ဘ ေတြရယ္ကုိေခၚတယ္။ ရပ္မိရပ္ဘ ဆုိတာကလည္း ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔၀င္တုိ႔ ၾကံ႕ခုိင္ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရး အဖြဲ႔၀င္တုိ႔ပါ။ ေက်းဇူးတင္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာခုိင္းတယ္။ ေငြကုိ လိုတယ္ေနရာမွာ သုံးမယ္လုိ႔ ျပည္နယ္အစုိးရက ေျပာတယ္။ ဘယ္ေနရာမွာ သုံးမယ္ဆုိတာ အစည္းအေ၀းတက္သူေတြက မသိဘူး”

အဲဒီ ေငြအကူအညီေတြကို ဘယ္အခ်ိန္မွာ စတင္ေပးမယ္။ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈအတြက္ ဘယ္က႑ ေတြကို ေပးမယ္ဆိုတာကို အေသးစိတ္ေျပာဆိုတာ မရွိဘူးလိုဆိုပါတယ္။

အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ နယ္စပ္ ကုန္သြယ္ေရး အမွတ္(၂)ျဖစ္တဲ့ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ အတြင္းပိုင္းက တီးတိန္ၿမိဳ႕ နဲ႔ နယ္စပ္ဂိတ္စခန္း တည္ရွိရာ ရိခြပ္သာရြာ ကို ရာသီမေရြးသြားႏိုင္တဲ့ ကားလမ္း ေဖာက္လုပ္ ေပးဖို႔ လည္း ေလ့လာမူေတြလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနပါတယ္။

အခုေပးမယ့္ ေငြေၾကးအကူအညီထဲမွာ အဲဒီကားလမ္းေဖာက္လုပ္ေရး စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ ပါမပါဆိုတာ မသိရွိရေသးပါဘူး။

ကမၻာေပၚမွာ အဆင္းရဲဆုံး ႏိုင္ငံေတြထဲမွာပါ၀င္တဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက တိုင္းနဲ႔ျပည္နယ္ေတြ အထဲမွာ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ဟာ အဆင္းရဲဆုံး ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ကုလသမဂၢ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရး အစီအစဥ္ UNDP က ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့လက ထုတ္ျပန္ ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

28-7-2011 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Open Letter

2011-12-25T09:45:00.001+05:30

တိုင္းရင္းသား ျပည္သူအေပါင္းတို႔ ခင္ဗ်ာ

အမ်ိဳးသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္ေရးဖခင္ႀကီး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းရဲ့သမီး လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္က တုိင္းရင္းသား ညီအကုိမ်ား မွီတင္းေနထုိင္ရာ ျပည္နယ္တခ်ိဳ႕မွာ လတ္တေလာ ေတာက္ေလာင္ေနတဲ့ စစ္မီးေတာက္မ်ား ၿငိမ္းေအးသြားေစေရးအတြက္ ကိုယ္စြမ္းရွိသမွ် ပါဝင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးလိုတဲ့ ေစတနာနဲ႔ သက္ဆိုင္သူမ်ားထံ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ တစ္ေစာင္ ဒီကေန႔ ေပးပို႔၊ ထုတ္ျပန္လုိက္ပါတယ္။

လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပဋိပကၡေတြ အျမန္ဆံုးရပ္ဆုိင္းဖို႔၊ ျပသနာေတြကို ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြး အေျဖရွာႀကဖို႔ အနဴးအညြတ္ တိုက္တြန္း ပန္ႀကားထားပါတယ္။ ဒီကေန႔ ရက္စြဲနဲ႔ ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္တဲ့ ဒီအိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံ တရားဝင္ လမ္းေႀကာင္းက ေပးပို႔ၿပီးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ က်န္ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားကေတာ့ ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ လမ္းေႀကာင္းမရွိတဲ့အတြက္ အဖြ႔ဲခ်ဳပ္ျပန္ႀကားေရးကပဲ ထုတ္ျပန္ထားပါတယ္။ ရယူေလ့လာေဆာင္ရြက္ႀကဖို႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံပါတယ္။

ဦးအုန္းႀကိဳင္
သတင္းႏွင့္ျပန္ႀကားေရးဌာန
အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္

25-7-2011 Myanmar's Suu Kyi holds rare talks with minister

2011-12-25T09:42:00.001+05:30

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi held a rare meeting with a government minister on Monday, raising the prospect of a thaw in relations between the Nobel Peace laureate and the country's new military-backed leadership.

Suu Kyi, who was only told of the meeting on Sunday, talked for just over an hour with Labour Minister Aung Kyi in what was the first known contact between the 66-year-old and a member of the new, nominally civilian government.

In a joint statement, both parties said they were positive and satisfied with the meeting, in which they had discussed issues that would be of benefit to Myanmar's people.

Suu Kyi, the figurehead of the fight against military dictatorship in Myanmar, already knew Aung Kyi, having met him on nine occasions since 2007 while she was in detention and he was a minister liaising between her and the junta.

Aung Kyi dismissed suggestions those meetings were a waste of time and said he hoped for further dialogue with Suu Kyi.

"There were some benefits from previous meetings and we expect better results from these talks," he told reporters.

"You can say this meeting is the first step of a series of things on which we intend to cooperate further."

"Discussions were focused on possibilities for cooperating in the interests of the people," he said. "This included the rule of law and overcoming disunity, and matters that will benefit the public."

Diplomats welcomed the meeting but said a lot hinged on the two parties ensuring talks did not break down.

"We hope to see some good results out of this," said an Asian diplomat. "Otherwise, the situation will be back to square one."

SIGNS OF PROGRESS
A new government took office in April, ending 49 years of direct military rule over the former British colony. Since her release from seven years of house arrest last November, Suu Kyi has made repeated calls for dialogue with the new rulers.

Nyan Win, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy (NLD), Suu Kyi's active but officially disbanded party, said the political climate had changed and the government's invitation to Suu Kyi indicated some progress.

Suu Kyi has been careful not to antagonise the government since her release and did not criticise a Nov. 7 election regarded at home and abroad as a sham that ensured the same regime stayed in power behind a veneer of democracy.

The government and military appear to have backed off from their tough stance towards Suu Kyi, occasionally criticising her in state-run media but allowing her freedom to travel and meet with diplomats, journalists and supporters.

Analysts say the government knows any move against Suu Kyi would upset the international community and rule out the possibility of sanctions being lifted in the near future.

Dialogue with Suu Kyi could be a attempt by Myanmar's reclusive leaders, many of them former military officers, to show foreign governments they are ready to engage.

But as is normal in Myanmar, no one quite seems sure.

"The timing of is very interesting," said one European diplomat. "Why did they decide to meet her at this time?"

Christopher Roberts, a Southeast Asia specialist at Australian National University, said the meeting was probably more than a publicity stunt.

"It comes as part of a collective pattern of behaviour by the government that has potential for incremental improvements," he said.

"Myanmar is trying to build a system and image of a real government and I think it wants to normalise things. Not only have its leaders met U.S., Australian and U.N. representatives, they've allowed them to meet Suu Kyi, too.

"It will do these things, as long as they don't undermine security or stability," Roberts added.

(Writing and additional reporting by Martin Petty; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

Myanmar's Suu Kyi meets senior gov't official

YANGON, Myanmar — Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with a senior Myanmar government official Monday for the first time since her release from house arrest, and he described their talks as a "first step" toward further cooperation in the military-dominated country.

Suu Kyi met for 70 minutes with Labor and Social Welfare Minister Aung Kyi at a government guest house. Aung Kyi said without elaborating that the two discussed the rule of law and ways to eliminate misunderstandings in the interests of the good of the country and the people.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi, the country's main opposition leader who was released from detention last year, has repeatedly asked for a dialogue with the government to solve a political deadlock focusing on the military's failure to establish democracy. Previous such initiatives have never gotten far.

Asked what she thought of Monday's meeting, Suu Kyi said only, "We expect results that are beneficial for the country and the people. "

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a 1990 general election but was barred from taking power by the army, which instead cracked down on political dissenters. Her party boycotted a fresh election held last November that was internationally denounced as unfair.

The elected civilian government that took office in March is led by retired military figures, and the constitution ensures the military retains dominance.

Last week, at a forum of Southeast Asian nations in Indonesia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on Myanmar to open a dialogue with the opposition and release political prisoners to win the trust of the international community.

Under the junta, Aung Kyi was appointed "relations minister" in 2007 to facilitate contacts with Suu Kyi, apparently because he had a moderate reputation among the hard-line military leaders. They had nine meetings during her house arrest, but no tangible outcome was ever seen.

Asked Monday about the earlier meetings, Aung Kyi denied there had been no progress, but added that this latest meeting would have better results.

Detained for much of the past two decades, Suu Kyi was released from house arrest just after the national election in November.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2015721638_apasmyanmarsuukyi.html?syndication=rss
Last Updated on Monday, 25 July 2011 13:11