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Tuesday 11 December 2007

AJWS reports winter 07

Defending Democracy Burma's Struggle for Human Rights, Freedom and Justice

"Peace and stability have been restored in Myanmar, and life has returned to normal all over the country." Thus spoke the UN envoy to Burma, Kyaw Tint Swe, to the United Nations Security Council on November 13. Unfortunately, Swe's comments do not reflect the reality of the situation on the ground in Burma, where AJWS is working closely with those fighting for democracy and human rights.

In August and September of 2007, mass demonstrations swept across Burma. The Burmese government had removed fuel subsidies, and the price of diesel and petrol quickly rose by 100 percent. Hundreds gathered on the streets of Rangoon, Burma's largest city, to speak out against the price hike. In defiance of government threats, thousands of Burmese monks joined the demonstrations, protesting not only the fuel hikes but also continued state oppression. A total of 246 demonstrations occurred in 66 towns and cities across the country. The powerful image of these highly revered monks captured the world's attention and led to the coining of the term the "Saffron Revolution."

The Burmese government cracked down violently on demonstrators, tear-gassing crowds, arresting hundreds and killing many. An estimated 4,000 monks were detained and deported to prison camps, and 52 monasteries were raided.

While the government stated that few people were killed, it is estimated that the death toll is significantly higher: AJWS' sources report that more than 200 activists were killed. Visits from a UN special envoy appointed especially to negotiate a solution to the protracted conflict in the country, as well as to highlight condemnation by the international community, offered hope for many. Unfortunately, following the initial wave of worldwide support, international efforts on behalf of the country's pro-democracy movement faded quickly. In addition, a media blackout banned or shut down almost all communications lines.


Full_Report (pdf* format - 3.3 Mbytes)

President's Statement on UN Special Rapporteur's Findings on Burma

I am deeply disturbed by the report that UN Special Rapporteur Paulo Pinheiro released today in Geneva documenting his findings from his trip to Burma last month. It provides further alarming details about the Burmese authorities' crackdown on demonstrations by monks and democracy activists and the severe reprisals that continue today.

He describes how the regime harassed, detained, and killed many peaceful demonstrators. The Special Rapporteur received reports, for example, that a large number of bodies were burned September 27-30 at the Ye Way Crematorium.

I strongly condemn these actions and the junta's refusal to accept the need for real change in Burma. Even while Mr. Pinheiro was in Burma, the regime continued to arrest and harass monks and democracy activists. The regime has also closed down monasteries, including the Maggin Monastery in Rangoon that served as a hospice and treatment center for HIV/AIDS patients.

Mr. Pinheiro's report demonstrates why the world cannot go back to business as usual with General Than Shwe and his junta. I call on all members of the international community to condemn the atrocities detailed in Mr. Pinheiro's report in the strongest possible terms. Last month, I announced new sanctions on the leaders of the regime and their cronies. Should the regime continue to ignore calls for a true democratic transition and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, the United States is prepared to lead international efforts to place more sanctions on the regime. Laura and I will continue to stand with the Burmese people as they seek the freedom they deserve.

ဘဂၤလာေဒ့ခ်္နိုင္ငံ ျမစ္နားရြာ ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရားႀကီး ဘဒၵႏၱပ႑ိတႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေမးျမန္းခန္း



ေမးခြန္း(၁) လက္ရွိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးလို႔ အမည္ေပးထားတဲ့ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအေပၚ ဆရာေတာ္ရဲ႕ အျမင္ေလးသိပါရေစဘုရား။

ေျဖ။ ။ ျမန္မာျပည္ရွိ ယခုျဖစ္ေပၚေနေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ ေရးမွာ ေမတၱာတရားကို အဓိကထား၍ ေမတၱာပို႔ လမ္းေလ်ာက္ျခင္းသာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ထိုကဲ့သို႕ျပဳလုပ္ရျခင္းမွာ အဓမၼ၀ါဒီ အစိုးရရဲ႕မတရားသျဖင့္ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာေၾကာင့္ တိုင္းျပည္ရွိ အမ်ိဳးဘာသာသာသနာမွာ တေန႔ထက္တေန႔အေျခအေန ဆိုးရြားလာေသာ ေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ အမ်ိိဳးဘာသာ သာသနာေတာ္ အေရးကို လက္ပိုက္ၾကည့္္မေနႏိုင္တဲ့အတြက္ အခုလို အသက္စြန္႔ကာ ပံ့ပိုး ကူညီရမယ့္ အခ်ိန္နဲ႔ အေနအထားကို ေရာက္ရွိလာတဲ့အတြက္ ဘာသာ သာသနာနဲ႔တိုင္းျပည္ အက်ိဳးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးရတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ရဟန္းေတာ္ မ်ားဟာ တာ၀န္သိစိတ္ရွိေသာေၾကာင့္ မိမိတို႕၏ အသက္ကိုမငဲ့ကြက္ပဲ ရဟန္းေတာ္ မ်ားပီပီ အမ်ိဳးဘာသာ သာသနာကို ေစာင့္ေရွာက္တဲ့ အေနနဲ႕ စီတန္းလမ္းေလ်ာက္ေမတၱာပို႕ ဆႏၵျပ ရျခင္းျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္။

ေမးခြန္း(၂) လက္ရွိ အေျခအေနမွာ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတြ ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ လႈပ္ရွားမႈဟာ က်ဆံုးသြားျပီ ရံႈးနိမ္႔သြားျပီလို႔ အရွင္ဘုရားယူဆပါသလား။

ေျဖ။ ။ဆရာေတာ္၏ ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္မွာ ျမန္မာျပည္ရွိ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားခ်ီတက္ ဆႏၵျပ ေမတၱာပို႔ လမ္းေလ်ာက္ရျခင္းမွာ ဘုရားရွင္၏ အလိုေတာ္အရ ရံႈးနိမ့္ဖို႔ အေၾကာင္းအရာ မရွိဘူးလုိ႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဘာအတြက္ေၾကာင့္လည္းဆိုေတာ့ ဘုရားရွင္၏ သားေတာ္မ်ားမွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း၂၅၀၀ ေက်ာ္အထိ အမ်ိဳးဘာသာ သာသနာအတြက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္လာခဲ့တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အခ်က္ကလည္း ေအာင္ျမင္မႈ တရပ္ပင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေရွ႕ကိုလည္း ဆက္လက္၍ သာသနာ (၅၀၀၀) တိုင္ေအာင္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား တညီတညြတ္တည္း ေပၚေပါက္လာေသာ အႏၱရာယ္မ်ားကို စည္းလံုးညီညြတ္စြာျဖင့္ ေအာင္ျမင္သည္အထိ ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္ လိ္မ့္မည္ဟု ဆရာေတာ္ယံုၾကည္ထားပါတယ္။

ေမးခြန္း(၃) ရဟန္းေတာ္ေတြ ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအေပၚနအဖ စစ္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက အၾကမ္းဖက္ျဖိဳခြဲခဲ့တဲ့အေပၚ ဘာသာေရးအရႈ႕ေထာင့္က ဘယ္လိုျမင္ပါသလဲ ဘုရား။

ေျဖ။ ။ျမန္မာျပည္ကို လက္ရွိအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာ နအဖ စစ္အစိုးရမွာ အမ်ိဳးသားေရး၊ ဘာသာေရး၊ သာသနာေရး၊ ပညာေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး စတာေတြကို လံုး၀ ထည့္သြင္းမစဥ္းစားပဲ သူတို႔စစ္အုပ္စု ေကာင္းစားေရးတခုတည္းကိုသာ အားထုတ္ေနတဲ့ အစိုးရျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ရဟန္းေတာ္ေတြကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ျပီး သတ္ျဖတ္ႏွိမ္ႏွင္းတဲ့ အစိုးရျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ရဟန္းေတာ္ေတြကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ ႏွိမ္ႏွင္းတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ နအဖ စစ္အုပ္စုဟာ ဘာသာသာသနာေရးအက်ိဳးကို လံုး၀စဥ္းစားျခင္းမရွိပဲ ဘာသာေရးကိုခုတံုးလုပ္ျပီး စစ္အာဏာ႐ွင္စနစ္တည္ျမဲ ေရး တခုတည္းကိုသာ အဓိကထား လုပ္ကိုင္ေနတာကို ေတြ႔ေနရတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ရဲ႕ ဘာသာေရးႏွင့္ သာသနာေရးအေပၚ လံုး၀ေလးစားယံုၾကည္မႈ မရွိတဲ့အတြက္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ေမတၱာပို႔သမႈကို ကမၻာေပၚရွိ ဘယ္ဘာသာကမွ မႏွစ္ျမိဳ႕ႏိုင္တဲ့ အျပဳအမူမ်ိဳးေတြနဲ႔ အာဏာစက္ကို သံုးစြဲကာ ေသြးေျမက်ေအာင္ ညွင္းပမ္းသတ္ျဖတ္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ နအဖ စစ္အုပ္စုဟာ အဓမၼ၀ါဒီ လူရိုင္းမ်ားသာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဆရာေတာ္ မိန္းၾကားလုိ ေပတယ္။

ေမးခြန္း(၄) လက္ရွိျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ဘယ္လိုအျမင္ရွိပါသလဲ ဘုရား။

ေျဖ။ ။ျမန္မာျပည္ အေျခအေနကို ေလ့လာဆန္းစစ္ၾကည္ရလို႔ ရွိရင္ လူမ်ိဳးေရး၊ သာသာေရး၊ သာသနာေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ ပညာေရးတို႔မွာ အလြန္ေခတ္ေနာက္က်ေနတာကို ေတြ႔ျမင္ရပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အေၾကာင္းကေတာ့ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေသာ အစိုးရည့ံဖ်င္းလို႔ ျဖစ္ရတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဌာနဆိုင္ရာ မ်ားတြင္ တာ၀န္ေပးအပ္ျခင္းခံရတဲ့ ၀န္ၾကီးေတြဟာ စစ္ဗိုလ္မ်ားသာျဖစ္တဲ့အ တြက္ ၎တို႔မွာကမၻာ့အဆင့္မီ ပညာေရး၊ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတို႔တြင္ မကၽြမ္းက်င္ၾကတဲ့အတြက္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ထို႔ျပင္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဆိုင္ရာ သံတမန္ကိစၥမ်ားမွာလည္း စစ္ဗိုလ္မ်ားကိုသာ ဦးစားေပးခန္႕အပ္ထားတဲ့အတြက္ ၎တို႔မွာ သံတမန္ေရးရာမ်ားတြင္ အလြန္အားနည္းခ်က္မ်ား ရွိေနပါတယ္။ စီးပြားေရးတြင္လည္း စီးပြားေရး ပညာရွင္မ်ားနည္းပါးေသာေၾကာင့္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္ အဆင္မေျပပဲ ရွိေနပါတယ္။ သို႕ျဖစ္၍ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ ေခတ္မီနည္းစနစ္ျဖင့္ တိုးတက္လိုေသာ္ အထပ္ပါ ဌာနေတြမွာ ကၽြမ္းက်င္လိမၼာေသာ ပညာရွင္မ်ားကို ခန္႔အပ္ထားဖို႔ လိုအပ္ပါတယ္။

ေမးခြန္း(၅) အရွင္ဘုရား ေျပာစရာရွိတာေတြကို ေျပာျပႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာျပည္ရွိ ရဟန္းရွင္လူ ျပည္သအေပါင္းတို႔အား မွာၾကားရမယ္ဆိုရင္ က႑ႏွစ္ခုခြဲျခားျပီး မွာၾကားရပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ပထမမွာက ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား အုပ္စုျဖစ္ျပီး မွာၾကားလိုတာကေတာ့ အရွင္ဘုရားတို႔သည္ ပါဠိဘာသာ တခုတည္းကို သင္ၾကားျပီး ငါပညာတတ္ျဖစ္ျပီဟု မယူဆၾကပဲ ေခတ္မီပညာေရး ကိုပါ အထက္တန္းက်က် ေလ့လာသင္ၾကားေစလိုပါတယ္။ သိပၸံပညာတိုးတက္ ေနတဲ့ ယေန႔ေခတ္မွာ အရွင္ဘုရားတို႔အေပၚ ေခတ္ေနာက္က်ေနတာကို ေတြ႔ျမင္ေနရတဲ့အတြက္ ေလာကီ ေလာကုတၱရာ ႏွစ္ျဖာေသာစာေပေတြကို ေလ့လာလိုက္စားၾကပါလို႔မွာၾကားလိုပါတယ္။

ေနာက္ဆက္၍ ဆရာေတာ္အေနျဖင့္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သတ္၍ မိန္းၾကားလိုသည္မွာ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ ပါဠိဘာသာစနစ္ကို ေခတ္မီပညာေရးစနစ္ အျဖစ္သို႔ ေျပာင္းလြဲပစ္ဖို႔လိိုပါတယ္။ အထက္ပါ ကိစၥႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္၍ ရဟန္းပညာေရး စနစ္ကိုျပဳျပင္ရန္မွာ စာေပပို႔ခ်မည့္ေနရာ၊ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား စာသင္ေက်ာင္းအျပင္ စာသင္တိုက္မ်ားတြင္ ပါဠိဘာသာ၊ ျမန္မာဘာသာ၊ အဂၤလိ္ပ္ဘာသာ၊ သီဟိုဠ္ဘာသာ၊ အိႏၵိယဘာသာမ်ားကို ျပဌာန္းသင္ၾကားဖို႕ လိုပါတယ္။ အထက္ပါ ပညာေရးစနစ္ေအာက္က်ေနမႈေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာသံဃာ ေတာ္မ်ားမွာ ေခတ္ကိုမလိုက္ႏိုင္ဘဲ ေနာက္က် ေနသည္ကို ဆရာေတာ္ကိုယ္တိုင္ေတြ႔ရွိခဲဖူးပါတယ္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ ျမန္မာရဟန္းေတာ္တပါး ဓမၼစရိယ ေအာင္ျပီး သီဟိုဠ္ကၽြန္းသို႕ ပညာသင္ၾကြႊလာသည့္အခါ ဆရာေတာ္ ကိုယ္တိုင္ ၎ရဟန္းေတာ္ကို စာသင္တိုက္သို႕ သြားသြင္းေပးတဲ့အခါ ၄င္းကိုယ္ ေတာ္မွာ မူလတန္းတြင္သာ သင္ၾကားခြင့္ အခြင့္အေရး ရရွိေလတဲ့အတြက္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ လူပိုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားအား အၾကံေပးလိုသည္မွာ ျမန္မာ့ပညာေရး စနစ္မွာ အလြန္ေခတ္ေနာက္ေနက်ေသာ ပညာေရးစနစ္ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္ ဥပမာေျပာရရင္ ဘြဲ႔ရတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေတာင္မွ အဂၤလိပ္စကား မေျပာတတ္၊ အဂၤလိပ္စာမေရးတတ္၊ စာကိုအသံထြက္မွန္မွန္ မဖတ္တတ္တဲ့အျပင္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကိုပင္ သဒၵါမွန္ေအာင္ မေရးတတ္ၾကပါ။ အထက္ပါအခ်က္အလက္မ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားမွာ အေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံကိုထား အာရွတိုက္ေလာက္မွာပင္ ကၽြန္းက်င္စြာေျပာဆိုမႈ ေရးသားႏိုင္မႈ မရွိသည္ကို ေတြ႔ရွိႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾကတဲ့ ဘဂၤလာေဒ့ခ်္၊ အိႏၵိယ၊ ပါကိစၥတန္ႏွင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ား အဆင့္အတန္းကို မီဖို႔ရာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၁၀၀ ခန္႔လိုအပ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။ ထိုကဲ့သို႔ေသာ ေနာက္က်ေနမႈကို ျပဳျပင္ ရန္မွာတိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရမွာ တာ၀န္႐ွိတယ္လို႔ ဆရာေတာ္မိန္းၾကားခ်င္ပါတယ္။

ျမစ္နားရြာ ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရားႀကီး ဘဒၵႏၱပ႑ိ၏ သက္ေတာ္မွာ ၈၁ ႏွစ္ရွိျပီး၊ ၀ါေတာ္က ၆၁ ၀ါျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ကို ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ႕နယ္ပိုင္ ကၽြန္းေတာင္ရြာ၌ အဖ ဦးျမထြန္းေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ အမိေဒၚ ထာရီေမတို႔မွ ရခိုင္သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ တန္းေဆာင္မုန္းလၦဳတ္ ၁၃ ရက္၊ ၾကာသပေတး ေန႕တြင္ေမြးဖြားခဲ့သည္။ ဆရာေတာ္မွာ ဒုတိယကမၻာ့စစ္ႀကီး အတြင္း ၁၉၄၂-ခုႏွစ္ ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာႏွင့္ မူဆလင္တို႔ အဓိကရုဏ္းျဖစ္မႈေၾကာင့္ နတ္ျမစ္အေနာက္ဘက္ကမ္းေျခသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိလာ ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ကမၻာ့စစ္ၾကီး ျဖစ္ေနခ်ိန္ျဖစ္၍ ထိုအခ်ိန္တြင္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ ယခုအခါ ဘဂၤလာေဒ့ခ်္ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံလံုးကို ျဗိတိသွ်အစိုးရ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သည္။ ယခုအခါ ဆရာေတာ္မွာ ဘဂၤလာေဒ့ခ်္ႏိုင္ငံ ရခိုင္-မာရ္မာသံဃာေကာင္စီ၏ ဥကၠဌျဖစ္ျပီး ကမၻာဗုဒၶ ဘာသာသံဃာေကာင္စီတြင္လည္း အဖြဲ႕၀င္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၎အျပင္ WFB အဖြဲ႕၀င္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဆရာေတာ္မွာ တက္ကနက္ျမိဳ႕နယ္ ျမစ္နားရြာေက်းရြာ အေသာကာရံုေက်ာင္းတိုက္တြင္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္သီတင္းသံုးေန ပါသည္။

နိရဥၥရာေတြ႔ဆံုေမးျမန္းခန္းမွ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။

Myanmar Latest News In English

15 to 30 minutes old

US House adopts sanctions against Myanmar Yahoo! US 21:35

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar (A/HRC/6/14) ReliefWeb 21:32

Burma rejects UN rights report Ireland.com 21:25


30 minutes to 1 hour old

Burma Legislation Moves Through Congress Voice of America News 21:14

Myanmar defends its rights record, rejects U.N. report canada.com 20:57


1 to 2 hours old

Stallone fears for his life... Bahrain Tribune 20:46

Thailand top athletics medals charts in SEA Bahrain Tribune 20:46

United Nations Special Rapporteur reports on worsening situation in Burma ReliefWeb 20:46

Man admits illegal $4M transfer NorthJersey.com 20:46

US sanctions against Myanmar ... ADVFN 20:42

Myanmar rejects U.N. human rights report (Reuters) Yahoo! US 20:42

US Boosts Sanctions Against Myanmar The Associated Press 20:31

Myanmar rejects U.N. human rights report Reuters 20:30

US House approves bill that would tighten sanctions against Myanmar, stop gem imports to... International Herald Tribune 20:15

US House adopts sanctions on Myanmar's gem, energy industries Yahoo! US 20:07

US Sanctions Against Myanmar Boosted The New York Times 20:04

US House adopts sanctions on Myanmar's gem, energy MoneyAM 20:03

US lawmakers tighten Myanmar ... ADVFN 20:00

US Bill Boosts Sanctions Against Myanmar The Guardian 20:00

US House adopts sanctions against Myanmar (AFP) Yahoo! US 19:59

House OKs Bill Tightening Sanctions on Gems From Myanmar Fox News Channel 19:54


2 to 4 hours old

House OKs bill to boycott Burma's gems USA Today 19:48

US lawmakers tighten Myanmar sanctions Houston Chronicle 19:46

Mizzima News

ကမၻာ့သြင္တူျဖစ္စဥ္ (Globalization) ေထာက္ခံျခင္းနဲ႔ ကန္႔ကြက္ျခင္း
Tuesday, 11 December 2007 21:04 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္

ဒီေန႔ ကမၻာ့ႏုိင္ငံေတြဟာ တႏုိ္င္ငံနဲ႔တႏုိင္ငံ ပိုၿပီး ကူးလူးဆက္ဆံရတဲ့ အေနအထားကို ေရာက္လာတယ္။ ဒီေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈပံုစံေတြ တႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ တႏုိင္ငံ နီးစပ္လာရတယ္။ တႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ တႏုိင္ငံ တူလာတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္မို႔ အသြင္တူလာတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကမၻာ့အသြင္တူလာတဲ့ ျဖစ္စဥ္လို႔ ယူဆတယ္ ...

ျမန္မာ့အားကစား အေရွ့ေတာင္အာရွတြင္ ပိုမိုက်ဆင္းလာ
Tuesday, 11 December 2007 20:23 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္

ျမန္မာ့အားကစား အရည္အခ်င္းသည္ အေရွေတာင္အာရွ အားကစား ေလာကတြင္ ယခင္ႏွစ္မ်ားထက္ ပိုမို က်ဆင္းေနေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာ့အားကစား ေလ့လာ သံုးသပ္သူမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။ ထုိင္းႏိုင္ငံ NAKHONRATCHASIMA ၿမ့ဳိတြင္ ယခုလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔မွ ၁၅ ရက္ေန႔အထိ က်င္းပလာသည့္ ၂၄ ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ အေရွ့ေတာင္အာရွ အားကစား ၿပိဳင္ပဲြတြင္ ...

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခခံအဆင့္ေဖာ္ရန္ လိုအပ္ဟု အၾကမ္းမဖက္အဖဲြ႔က ေျပာ
Tuesday, 11 December 2007 20:19 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္

ကုလလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေက်ညာစာတမ္းကို ေလးစားလိုက္နာမည္ဟု လက္မွတ္ထိုးထားေသာ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆုိင္ရာ အေျခခံအဆင့္မ်ားကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရန္ လိုအပ္ေနၿပီဟု ရန္ကုန္အေျခစိုက္ အၾကမ္းမဖက္ အမ်ဳိးသားေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈ ေကာ္မတီ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) က ေျပာဆို ...

BBC Burmese News Tuesday Evening

UN human rights envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro
UN human rights envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro

UN's human rights rapporteur said Burma underestimating dead and detained

A United Nations investigator will present evidence later today that Burma's military rulers have not told the truth about the number of people who died and were detained during the suppression of anti-government protests in September.

The UN's human rights rapporteur, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, is presenting his long-awaited findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

He told the BBC that at least thirty-one people died -- not fifteen as Burma's military leaders suggest -- and that up to one thousand people are still being detained.

Mr Pinheiro says he wants an unconditional amnesty for all those held, and an independent investigation into what he said were killings, beatings, hostage-taking and torture.

His report follows his recent visit to Burma -- the first time for four years that he was allowed in.

Also in the news

-According to Ko Tate Naing, the secretary of AAPP (Burma), 22 people died, all are men including 2 monks.

-U Min Htet interviewed the mother of The Monks Alliance spokesperson Sayadaw U Gambira.

- U Min Htet also interviewed one of the Ba-Ka-Tha student leaders in hiding, Ko Kyaw Ko Ko on the set-up of Students' Rights Committee.


US navy monitoring hijacked ship

Piracy is a major problem for shipping off Somalia

United States navy officials based in Bahrain say they're closely monitoring a hijacked tanker off the Somali port of Bossaso.

US navy ships have surrounded the vessel -- the Golden Nori -- to prevent the pirates from receiving supplies.

Officials told the BBC that the ship is carrying potentially dangerous chemicals.

The US navy says it'll allow the pirates to leave the ship, and take no further action, so long as the pirates take nothing from it.

The Golden Nori, carrying crew from Burma, the Philippines and South Korea, was seized in late October off the east coast of Somalia.

The Golden Nori was sailing from Singapore to Israel when pirates seized it in October.

There have been reports that pirates asked for a ransom of one million dollars.

မတူကြဲျပားမွဳကုိစမ္းစစ္ေလ့လာျခင္း၊ ပ႗ိပကၡတုိက္ပြဲ ႏွင့္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအေရးသုိ.ေရာက္သြားတဲ့ ဗမာျပည္

Studying diversity, conflict and internationalizing Burma

By Nehginpao Kipgen

The Union of Burma consists of 7 states and 7 administrative divisions. States are predominantly inhabited by minority ethnic groups while divisions are largely dominated by majority ethnic Burmans.

Burma gained independence with adopted name ‘Union of Burma’ in 1948 and later changed to Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1974, but reverted to the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1988. On 18th June 1989, the State Law and Order Restoration Council adopted a new name called ‘Union of Myanmar’ with which the country is now officially known at the United Nations.

The country’s total land area is 261,970 square miles. Ethnic minorities occupy roughly two-thirds: Arakan/Rakhine state- 14,200 square miles, Chin state- 13,907 square miles, Kachin state- 34,379 square miles, Karen/Kayin state- 11,731 square miles, Karenni/Kayah state- 4,530 square miles, Mon state- 4,747.8 square miles, Shan state- 60,155 square miles.

As of July 2003 estimate, population according to the military is 52.4 million; last official census which occurred in 1983 reported just over 35 million (35,442,972). The same source puts religious affiliation in percent as: Buddhism (89.2%), Christianity (5.0%), Islam (3.8%), Hinduism (0.5%), Spiritualism (1.2%) and others (0.2%).

The military regime identifies “135 national races” of which the major ones are Arakan/Rakhine (7 sub-groups), Burman/Bamar (9 sub-groups), Chin (53 sub-groups), Kachin (12 sub-groups), Karen/Kayin (11 sub-groups), Karenni/Kayah (9 sub-groups), Mon (1 group), and Shan (33 sub-groups). The appellation “135 races” is codified on dialectical variations.

Although the accuracy is questionable, the 15th November 2007 update of the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook gives ethnic composition in Burma as: Burman 68%, Shan 9%, Karen 7%, Rakhine 4%, Chinese 3%, Indian 2%, Mon 2%, other 5%. Figures slightly vary from source to source.

Burma was administered as a province of India from 1886 until sundered from the British India in 1937. This was the year when settlements of the Kuki (also synonymously recorded in literature as Chin and Lushai) people were divvy up into two countries- Burma and India . With the creation of Bangladesh in 1972, the Kukis were further dispersed in three countries.

A number of research findings concluded that “Kookies” or “Kuki” is a Bengali word meaning hill men or highlanders. These people have a tradition of passing on their history orally; and as a result, today’s researchers have to rely substantially on the works of British writers who wrote extensively on the Kuki people during colonial era. Their traditional government ‘chieftainship system’ has been abandoned in Burma , but still retained and practiced in India .

In the context of Burma , Kuki is an unpopular terminology and so is the term Chin in India . The military junta recognizes “Thado” and “Kaung Saing Chin” under Chin nomenclature. In India , particularly in the state of Manipur, “Thado” is widely written as Thadou and “Kaung Saing” as Khongsai. The connotation may sound different, yet it refers to the same people. In local dialects, they also call themselves as eimi, laimi, zomi/mizo, etc.

Prior to independence, ethnic minority territories were not part of Burma proper. Considerable effort was mobilized for the materialization of Union of Burma at Panglong on the 12th day of February 1948. The nullification of this historic Panglong Agreement and 1947 constitution had annihilated the essence of forming the Union of Burma.

Burma had a parliamentary democracy from 1948 till general Newin seized power in 1962. A broken promise of Panglong Agreement was one important factor that led to the rise of armed movements. Ethnic minorities’ demand is greater autonomy under a federated structure and not secession or disintegration.

Neither the bloodless coup of 1962 nor 1988 mass uprising was the root cause of today’s conflicts in Burma . As early as 1948, the Karen National Union under its armed wing Karen National Liberation Army had begun rebelling against the Burmese government.

The struggle in Burma is basically of 2 stages – restoration of democracy and rights of ethnic minorities. To attain the latter, the former has to come first. Any democratic set-up sidelining ethnic minorities would not bring an end to decades’ old political imbroglio.

Within the status quo states and divisions, there are sub-ethnic groups advocating for autonomy or separate administration. Although every demand of every sub-group may not be feasible, criteria for eligibility and legality need to be established. One should not expect the Union of Burma to remain forever 7 states and 7 divisions, or 8 states as envisaged by some.

For many years since independence, Burma political crisis remained a microscopic issue to the international community – either as a result of the country’s insignificant role in international politics or her too little importance to the interest and security of other nations. However, this concept has changed dramatically since 1988 mass uprising and countrywide general elections.

Non-recognition of 1990 election results led to intimidation and imprisonment of several Member of Parliament elects – which became the genesis of many of the opposition groups in exile, including National Council of the Union of Burma and National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.

Deadliest attack on the entourage of Aung San Suu Kyi at Depeyin in 2003 and her continued detention was one reason behind the passing of Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003 by the U.S. Congress. The act bans the import of Burmese products and freezes the assets of senior officials.

In recent years, Burma has attracted unprecedented attention of the international community. The successful placement of Burma situation as permanent agenda of the United Nations Security Council on 29th September 2006 was a historic moment. It was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to pass a Security Council resolution on January 12th of this year.

More recently, the 2007 uprising incredibly got international community’s attention - headlines in many leading world newspapers, electronic medium and on television screens. Several world leaders and human rights activists around the world spoke up in support of Burmese democracy movement.

The entire world watched the brutality of military on its own people. The uprising immediate success was the attention it received from the world community and subsequent intervention by the United Nations Secretary General’s office through its special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.

The United States and European Union were quick to respond in taking tougher sanctions on the military generals and their businesses. Although there is no doubt about the powerful message it carries, unilateral sanctions seem to have limited impact. The vacuum created as a result of western sanctions has been filled by Burma neighboring countries.

Only western sanctions without cooperation from neighboring Asian countries have given enough space for the army generals to move around. Conflicting interests of two different approaches will continue to prolong the survival of military regime at the depletion of the country’s natural resources and collateral environmental damage.

While western powers pursue stick diplomacy, the Asian powers opt for carrot. Under such circumstance, the U.N. special envoy’s mission has become a little more than lip services with no substantive results to follow. The adamant stance of the 2 veto wielding powers ( China and Russia ) of the Security Council makes the world’s highest enforcement agency bootless.

The removal of Burma ’s military regime could probably take less than a month or so. But unlike Iraq, the United States would not reign in its fighter jets and ground troops for reasons including: (i) Burma is insignificant importance to the U.S. national interest and security (ii) U.S. foreign policy toward Burma is more of policy oriented than strategic (iii) Rapidly advancing Asian super power is docking at the military’s backyard.

Though there is close to zero percent chance of military intervention either by the United States or by the United Nations, this would be the swiftest action to bring change to Burma should it be pursued. However, this would be a naïve prediction or suggestion for any political analyst at this point of time.

Meanwhile, the international community could consider the model of a six party talks on North Korean nuclear standoff. Six parties involving the United States , European Union, ASEAN, China , India , and Burma could break the iceberg of political crisis. Due to geographical proximity, enormous economic and diplomatic influence over Burma , China ’s participation is pivotal.

If the international community continues to pursue two diametrically opposing views of western sanctions and Asian engagement, the military will continue to run the country with any resources available. Either concerted sanctions or collective engagement is needed to bring the military to a negotiating table.

Down the road, the culpable individuals in the military clique will be held accountable. Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 is one distant example that can be cited: carrot diplomacy brought warring parties to negotiation in a well devised plan.

However, stick diplomacy took its own course and the once powerful Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was tried for crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal in Hague , Netherlands .

On the death of Slobodan Milosevic in his detention cell, Richard Holbrooke, the then U.S. envoy who brokered the Dayton Peace Accords said, "I'm not going to shed any tears."


Nehginpao Kipgen is the General Secretary of US-based Kuki International Forum and a researcher o­n the rise of political conflicts in modern Burma (1947-2004).

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္း အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္မ်ား စာရင္း နအဖ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ား ေကာက္ယူ

မင္းေအာင္ (နိရဥၥရာ) ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္း ျမိဳ႕နယ္အလိုက္ အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္မ်ား စာရင္းကို သက္ဆိုင္ရာ နအဖ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ အပတ္မွ စတင္ျပီး ေကာက္ယူ ေနေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

အမည္မေဖၚလိုသူ ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ႕မွ ေက်ာင္းဆရာ တဦးက “ခုခ်ိန္မွာ ဘာရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ေတြနဲ႕ အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္ စာရင္းကို ေကာက္ယူ ေနတယ္ဆိုတာကို တိတိက်က် ေျပာဆိုပါ ခက္ခဲပါေသးတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း အမ်ားခန္႕မွန္းေျပာဆိုေနတာက ခု ၅၄ ဦးေကာ္မီတီ ေရးဆြဲေနတဲ့ ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံု အေျခခံ ဥပေဒနဲ႕ ပတ္သက္ေကာင္း ပတ္သက္နိုင္တယ္လို႕ ထင္ေၾကးေပးေနၾကပါတယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ယခုကဲ့သို႕ အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္စာရင္းေကာက္ယူေနျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ျပီး သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အာဏာပို္င္မ်ားက တစံုတရာ တရား၀င္ ဖြင့္လွစ္ေျပာဆိုျခင္း မရွိေသးေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

“လက္ရွိ ေမာင္ေတာ ျမိဳ႕နယ္က အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္ ၁၈ ဦးစာရင္းကို ေကာက္ခံသြားပါတယ္။ ဘူးသီးေတာင္ျမိဳ႕နယ္က ၁၀ ဦးနဲ႔ ေတာင္ျပိဳျမိဳ႕နယ္ခြဲက ၂ ဦးစာရင္းေကာက္ခံထားတယ္လို႕ သိရွိရပါတယ္။” ဟု အဆိုပါ ေက်ာင္းဆရာက ဆက္လက္ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ႕နယ္က ေကာက္ခံထားသူမ်ား စာရင္းထဲတြင္ (၁) ဦးအင္ျမေအာင္ ေခၚ ပ႑ိတ္ ေဇာတိက လင္ကာရ (၂) ေဒါက္တာ ခင္ေမာင္ၾကီး (၃) ေဒါက္တာေဇာ္မင္း (၄) ေဒါက္တာ မိုးေဇာ္တင့္ (၅) ေဒါက္တာ ေရႊစိုးေအာင္ (၆) ဦးစိုးေရႊ (၇) ဦးအံုးဟန္ (၈) ဦးတင္ေမာင္၀င္း (၉) ဦးငမဲေခ် (၁၀) ဦးဘ၀င္း (၁၁) ဦးေအာင္ေက်ာ္ညြန္႕ (၁၂) ေဒၚေစာယဥ္ (၁၃) ဦးစိန္လွေမာင္ (၁၄) ဦးလွျဖဴသံႏွင့္ (၁၅) ဦးဧေမာင္တုိ႕ ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည္။

တျခားျမိဳ႕နယ္မ်ားတြင္လည္း အသိပညာရွင္ အတတ္ပညာရွင္ စာရင္းမ်ားကို ျမိဳ႕နယ္အလိုက္ ေကာက္ခံေနေၾကာင္း သတင္းမ်ား ရရွိပါသည္။