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Monday 5 November 2007

Special envoy tackles relations between Myanmar and UN country team

5 November 2007 The Secretary-General’s Special Adviser, Ibrahim Gambari, continued his visit to Myanmar today with discussions on future cooperation between the Government and the United Nations Country Team, after authorities last week declared they did not want the world body’s top official in the South-East Asian nation to continue his service.

Myanmar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a letter to the world body last week that it does not want UN Resident Coordinator Charles Petrie to continue working in Myanmar. It cited a statement released by the UN Country Team – headed by Mr. Petrie – on 24 October which referred to socio-economic issues in Myanmar.

Mr. Gambari took up the issue today when he met with Foreign Minister U Nyan Win, their second meeting in as many days. During their meeting yesterday, they discussed the Government’s response so far to the expectations of the international community following the recent crisis.

Upon his arrival in Myanmar on Saturday, Mr. Gambari met with Mr. Petrie and conveyed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s support for the Country Team and the Resident Coordinator, and the important work they continue to do to improve the socio-economic and humanitarian situation.

On Sunday, he met with U Aung Kyi, Minister for Labour and Minister for Relations, who was recently appointed by Myanmar authorities as a liaison officer to start dialogue between the Government and the opposition.

They had an extensive and detailed exchange about the Minister’s discussions with detained pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on an agreed framework for meaningful dialogue.

Mr. Gambari is scheduled to meet Ms. Suu Kyi and other relevant interlocutors, as well as the Prime Minister and other senior government officials, during his current visit, which is a follow-up to his last mission in October aimed at promoting democratization, the protection of human rights and national reconciliation.

Burma Campaign UK welcomes DFID’s decision to double aid to Burma


01 Nov 2007

The Burma Campaign UK welcomes the announcement by The Secretary of State for International Development, Douglas Alexander MP, to double British aid to Burma from £8.8 million this year to £18 million by 2010. Douglas Alexander made the announcement during the first debate on Burma in the House of Commons on Monday.

The Burma Campaign had condemned DFID’s failure to take action on any of the key recommendations made by the International Development Committee and has been calling on DFID to implement the recommendations of the Committee.

“We are delighted that DFID is finally listening and recognizes the urgent need for more aid to Burma,” said Zoya Phan, Campaigns Officer at the Burma Campaign UK. “However, this is just a first step. DFID now needs to implement all of the recommendations made by the International Development Committee, including funding for cross border aid, which is the only way to reach some of the most vulnerable people in Burma, and projects supporting human rights and democracy in Burma.”

The International Development Committee, a cross-party committee of MPs which scrutinizes the work of DFID, has called for key changes in DFID’s aid policy, including:

• A quadrupling of aid to Burma by 2013, taking aid from £8.8m to £35.3m a year.

• Providing cross-border aid in addition to in-country aid, to ensure aid reaches internally displaced people who cannot be reached through in-country mechanisms because of restrictions imposed by the regime.

• Funding projects promoting human rights and democracy, including exile based Burmese women’s groups and the trade union movement.

• Setting up alternative mechanisms to provide funding for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB in parts of the country that the 3D fund can’t reach because of restrictions by the regime.


For more information contact Zoya Phan, Campaigns Manager, on 020 73244712.

ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းၾကီး၏ အထူးသတိေပးခ်က္

ဥပေဒမရွိ ဘာသာတရားမရွိေသာ ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံတြင္ ေနထိုင္ၾကေသာ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ၀င္အေပါင္းတုိ႔ခင္ဗ်ား ”မည္သည့္ဘာသာတရားကုိမွ်ယံုၾကည္မႈမရွိ တန္ဘုိးထားမႈမရွိဘဲ

ဘာသာေပါင္းစံုကို ေႏွာက္ရွက္ဖ်က္ဆီးေနေသာ ယုတ္ညံ့ေသာစစ္အစိုးရအား ျမင့္ျမတ္ေသာ ထာ၀ရဘုရားသခင္၏ တရားေတာ္မ်ားကို ဗုဒၶဘာသာရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားနည္းအတုိင္း ေဟာၾကားျခင္းမျပဳၾကရန္ႏွင့္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏လွဴဒါန္းမွႈမ်ဳိးစံုကုိလည္း လက္မခံၾကရန္
စစ္အစိုးရအဖဲြ၀င္မ်ားက ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာသို႔ ကူးေျပာင္းလာပါကလည္း လက္မခံၾကရန္” ပုပ္ရဟန္းမင္းၾကီးက အထူးသတိေပး အေၾကာင္းၾကားလိုက္သည္။
အဘယ္ေၾကာင့္ဆိုေသာ္ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးမ်ားႏွင့္ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ၀င္မ်ားကို ဗုဒၶဘာသာရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္မ်ား ကဲ့သုိ႔ သတ္ဖ်က္ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းခံရမည္စိုးေသာေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္သည္ အထူးမွာၾကားလိုသည္မွာ မည္သည္ဘာသာကုိမွ ယံုၾကည္မႈမရွိ ဘာသာအားလံုးကို ေႏွာက္ယွက္ဖ်က္ဆီးေနေသာ ယုတ္ညံ့ေသာ စစ္အစုိးရလက္ေအာက္တြင္ ေနထိုင္ၾကေသာ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ၀င္အခ်င္းခ်င္း စည္လံုးညီညႊတ္ၾကရန္ႏွင့္ တစ္ဦးကိုတစ္ဦး ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ျပီး သတိၾကီးစြာထားျပီးေနၾကရန္ အထူးသတိေပးမွာၾကားလိုက္သည္။
(ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ၀င္ တစ္ဦးမွေပးပို.သည္)

ဒီဘေလာက္မွကူးယူသည္ (သီရိလကၤာေရာက္ ျမန္မာရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား)

Burmese blood is the U.N.'s shame

CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 5
HU SHAOJIANG
Guest Commentary

September's street demonstrations in Burma were the country's largest public demonstrations in 20 years. Unlike previous actions, the main protestors were the monks and nuns who are supposed to live quietly in monasteries. Their peaceful protests lasted more than a week, but finally ended in brutal suppression by the Burmese military government, as expected.

Although the government blocked communications between Burma and the outside world, and reported only a small number of civilian casualties, we could see from photos and videotapes sent overseas or posted online that hundreds of demonstrators disappeared. Many of them have most likely been killed.

Peaceful protest is the people's right. In today's world there are only a few totalitarian countries that ban their people from this means of political expression. Burma is among these countries; so is its neighbor, China.

Actually it is the totalitarian Chinese government that is supporting its counterpart in Burma. In fact, back in January, several democratic countries submitted a proposal that the United Nations pressure the military government in Burma to stop political repression. However, China and Russia, as permanent members of the Security Council, vetoed the proposal.

On the eve of the crackdown against monks and civilians in September, a number of countries had proposed a U.N. resolution calling for restraint in Burma, to prevent a repeat of the brutal suppression that occurred in Burma 19 years ago. But again China's opposition put the proposal on the shelf. With the support of big brother China, the Burmese military leaders were especially violent in suppressing the protests.

The United Nations accomplished nothing toward protecting the legal rights of Burma's citizens, once again revealing its incapability in dealing with major international affairs. As a matter of fact, since the United Nations was founded it has almost never played a decisive role in major international issues.

The only exception was in the early 1950s when the United Nations discussed whether or not to fight against the North Korean regime led by Kim Il Sung, which had invaded South Korea. Because the former Soviet Union made a wrong decision and did not attend the meeting, the United Nations had a good opportunity to exercise justice.

During the Cold War period, there was no understanding and no forgiveness among the superpowers. The United Nations didn't have the chance to work even in a superficial function as a rubber stamp. This situation hasn't really improved substantially even now that the Cold War is over.

In the 1980s, the Chinese government openly used tanks and guns to attack peaceful protesters, who held no weapons at all. The United Nations only watched and did nothing. The United Nations again did nothing when the Serbian army massacred an entire race of people in Kosovo in the 1990s. It did nothing during the racial massacres in Rwanda and Sudan. The United Nations just looked on with folded arms in innumerable situations.

The major reason why the United Nations could not take effective action in human crises caused by totalitarian regimes is that among the permanent members of the Security Council there are nations allied with the totalitarian regimes, and they have veto power. Moreover, with the support and indulgence of their totalitarian big brother, some rogue nations have tried to create chaos within the United Nations. As a result, the United Nations has become a place where justice is not supported, while totalitarianism is protected.

Take Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe's leadership, for example. After nearly 30 years of his rule, the country has changed from the richest in Africa to a poor country where people lead miserable lives under brutal suppression. Nevertheless, this country was allowed to sit on the former U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which sullied human rights under the name of the United Nations.

Even more ridiculous is that the United Nations is financially dependent on membership fees paid by democratic countries. The current situation at the United Nations is that democratic countries pay to allow totalitarian regimes to wreak havoc on the international stage.

In fact, "equality among countries" is not equivalent to "equality among governments." If we let totalitarian governments enjoy the same rights as democratic ones that are elected by their citizens' free choice, it is humiliating to people who are deprived of their rights under totalitarian governments.

In my opinion, if a country violently suppresses its people's right to participate in political affairs, that country's right to speak and participate in international affairs should be taken away. Unless this problem is solved, the United Nations cannot effectively implement justice in key international affairs.

--

(Hu Shaojiang is director of the China Research Center at the University of Cambridge in Britain. He is also an active commentator in overseas media on China affairs. This article is edited and translated from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online; the original can be found at www.ncn.org ©Copyright Hu Shaojiang.)

UN envoy begins discussions with senior Myanmar officials

United Nations Special Advisor Ibrahim Gambari has returned to Myanmar where he has begun talks with senior officials on speeding up the process of democratization and national reconciliation in the troubled South-East Asian nation.

Mr. Gambari met today with Foreign Minister U Nyan Win to discuss the Government of Myanmar's response, so far, to the expectations of the international community following the recent crisis, according to a press release issued by the UN in Yangon.

He also met with U Aung Kyi, Minister for Labour and Minister for Relations, who was recently appointed by Myanmar authorities as a liaison officer to start dialogue between the Government and the opposition.

The two has “extensive and detailed exchanges” on the Minister's discussions with pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on an agreed framework for meaningful dialogue, the press release stated.

Mr. Gambari “expects that these initial steps will lead to early initiation of dialogue aimed at accelerating inclusive national reconciliation, the restoration of democracy and the full respect for human rights.”

Upon his arrival yesterday, Mr. Gambari met UN Resident Coordinator Charles Petrie, who briefed him on the UN Country Team's assessment of the situation in the country. They also discussed the letter from the Government stating that it does not want Mr. Petrie to continue his work in the country.

Mr. Gambari conveyed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's support for the Country Team and the Resident Coordinator – the highest ranking UN official in the Myanmar – and the important work they continue to do to improve the socio-economic and humanitarian situation.

The Special Advisor plans to address this and other issues pertaining to further cooperation and dialogue between the UN system and Myanmar in his discussions with the authorities.

During his visit, Mr. Gambari is scheduled to meet the Prime Minister and other senior government officials, as well as Ms. Suu Kyi and other relevant interlocutors, according to UN officials. He will stay in Myanmar as long as necessary to accomplish his mission.