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Asean ministers put pressure on Burma

MANILA South-East Asian foreign ministers have pressed Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and show “tangible progress” in democratic reforms.

The members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) agreed at their annual meeting to set up a regional human rights commission, overcoming fierce resistance from Burma’s junta. Asean has said repeatedly that it hopes to encourage reform in Burma and promote human rights through engagement. (AP)

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ASEAN Head Says New Charter Will Put Pressure on Burma
By VOA News 24 July 2007

Ong Keng Yong

The head of ASEAN says a draft version of the group's first charter of standards - set to be released next week - will "pressure" military-ruled Burma to improve its human rights record.

Speaking with reporters in Singapore on Monday, Secretary-General Ong Keng Yong said the charter will stress "responsibility and obligation" of membership in the Association for South East Asian Nations.

Burma has long been a problem for the 10-nation group because of its poor human rights record and its detention of activists, including Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

A draft of the new charter will be presented to ASEAN members next week when they meet in the Philippines.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.

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Burmese regime

in brutal drive to
shore up power

Rangoon, Jul. 19,

2007

(CWNews.com) - Myanmar's army went on a violent spree of intimidation before the July 18 opening of a national convention, reports Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

The military regime

of Myanmar--

formerly know

n as Burma-- has

orchestrated the

national convention

to shore up its

power. The

delegates have been

chosen by the

incumbent military

government, with

opposition leaders

and all religious or

ethnic minorities

excluded from the

process.

Questioning or

criticizing the

convention, and

communicating with

international media

about the process,

are crimes that

could carry a 20-

year jail sentence.

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Atomic watchdog unaware of Burma nuclear plans

Last Updated 18/07/2007, 23:44:24

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, says he is unaware of any firm plans by Burma to build its own nuclear research reactor.Russia announced in May that it had agreed to help build a research centre in Burma, which would include a small light-water nuclear reactor.But Mr ElBaradei says so far no "concrete plans" have been submitted by the Burmese authorities to build a reactor or develop a nuclear programme. The head of the UN nuclear regulatory agency was speaking to journalists during a visit to Malaysia.

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Journalists to attend NC sans tape recorders, cell phones

Nem Davies Mizzima News

July 17, 2007 - In keeping with the paranoia of the Burmese military junta, foreign correspondents based in Rangoon invited by the convening committee to attend the National Convention, have been told not to carry tape recorders and mobile phones.

The invitation letter from the National Convention Convening Committee yesterday to all foreign correspondents and local journalists made it clear that only one representative journalist should attend the opening ceremony of the much-criticized constitution drafting process.

Foreign journalists who had applied for visas to go to Burma to cover the convention are yet to get it.

"The invitation letter told us not to take cell phones, cassette recorders, purses and bags. However, some had taken the items despite the same instructions being given last time," said a Rangoon based foreign correspondent to Mizzima.

"Usually we are allowed to stay there for only 10 to 15 minutes just after the opening ceremony. That's it," she added.

With a majority of hand picked delegates, the military junta has been drafting the constitution since 1993.

The opposition National League for Democracy which posted a landslide victory in the 1990 general elections has branded the convention as a sham.

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Human Rights Group Calls For Renewed Effort To Stop Torture

By VOA News 25 June 2007

The Asian Human Rights Commission is urging officials at the United Nations and elsewhere to take stronger action to stop the use of torture by police in a number of Asian nations, including Burma.

The rights group made a special appeal to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights to step up efforts for police reform.

A note to journalists from the Asian Human Rights Commission says torture remains the "primary mode of criminal investigation" in some nations.

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Gandhi Letter Pulled From UK Auction

Gandhi's Letter Withdrawn From London Auction, Will Be Acquired By Government Of India
LONDON, Jul. 2, 2007

(AP) One of the last letters written by Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi has been pulled from a London auction so it can be acquired by the government of India, Christie's auction house said Monday.

Christie's had earlier insisted that the six-page document, which was to go on auction as part of a larger collection Tuesday, would be sold despite India's protests.

But the collection's executors reconsidered, agreeing to withdraw the letter and hand it to the Indian government, Christie's said in a statement. The auction house did not give further details on the arrangement.

Gandhi wrote the letter, which had been expected to sell for up to $24,000, 19 days before his assassination in New Delhi by a Hindu extremist in January 1948. Addressed to an Indian magazine, it pleaded for tolerance toward India's Muslim population.

Amin Jaffer, the International Director of Asian Art at Christie's, said Christie's was happy with the arrangement. "We are pleased to have facilitated the negotiations which have resulted in an important historical record returning to India," Jaffer said in a statement.

The letter was part of a collection amassed over three decades by the late Albin Schram, who kept the documents in a filing cabinet in his home in Lausanne, Switzerland, according to Christie's.

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Myanmar Still On Asean's Mind, Says Syed Hamid

By D.Arul Rajoo

BANGKOK,

June 30 (Bernama) -- Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said Asean had not forgotten the issue of Myanmar and hoped the coming final session of its 15-year-old National Convention would lead to an election.

He said although there was not much discussions and comments by Asean leaders on Myanmar in the newspapers recently, it did not mean the regional grouping had forgotten the issue or are not encouraging their friends in Myanmar to change.

"They are still a member of Asean. Doesn't mean that if we don't read in newspapers (matters about Myanmar), we have forgotten them. We don't talk everyday (about Myanmar), that is the nature of government," he said in an interview after the 10th Malaysia-Thai Joint Commission Meeting here today.

Syed Hamid said no matter what Asean or others wanted Myanmar to do, the country cannot be forced into it as Myanmar also wanted to make sure its sovereignity was not jeorpardised or affected.

"There is a lot of pride in protecting sovereignity. And we also have the principle of non-interference in Asean," he said.

On the same note, Syed Hamid said it was good that Myanmar still engaged with the international community, especially with Ibrahim Gambari, a special adviser to the United Nations secretary-general, who visited Myanmar twice last year.

"Myanmar prefers to deal with the United Nations, that is good...but Myanmar is not a security issue. We tried to do something, but I don't think so Asean has it, they are more comfortable with the UN," he added.

During his visits, Gambari was allowed by Myanmar's military junta rare meetings with National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest.

On the National Convention scheduled to start on July 18, Syed Hamid said Malaysia hoped that Myanmar would be able to complete the constitution drafting process, get it approved and hold an election.

"Then they will be seen as fullfilling their move towards democracy. National reconciliation must be seen to be happening," Syed Hamid said.

The National Convention process was initiated by the military in 1992 after the 1990 general election won by the NLD but the party was not allowed to take power.

The constitution drafting process stalled in 1995 and restarted in 2004, with the last session held at the end of last year.-- BERNAMA

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A Letter From Han Yawnghew

Dear Friends,

Unfortunately those in power such as the SPDC "generals" use religion & ethnicity to divide and rule - to manipulate a fearful population to distrust each other - and to bolster their hold on power that comes out of the barrel of a gun like gangsters do.

I understand that during the time of the Constituent Assembly in 1947 after the signing of the Panglong Agreement that February & before the Union of Burma came into being in January 1948 - my father Sao Shwe Thaike was asked if the Rohingyas of Arakan are indigenous Peoples? My father, who is a Shan as am I, replied - "if the Rohingyas are not indigenous, nor am I".

There is no logical and rational reason why we should allow ourselves to be manipulated by a group of power hungry & greedy army men to perpetuate their hold on political power - that is a sourse of their disparite wealth - which they seized illegally. Such unscrupulous men will use religious worship, creed, colour, ethnicity or any differences such as education, social class, dress, speech, accents & so on between us Peoples to divide and rule.

If we allow ourselves to be so manipulated we have only ourselves to blame.

Sincerely,
Tiger Yawnghwe.

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Burma fails corruption index
Last Updated 11/07/2007, 14:25:50

A World Bank report has cited some progress in the global fight against corruption, but warns that overall problems with stability and poor governance remain entrenched in many regions. The 1996-2006 Worldwide Governance Indicators report showed a number of African countries had demonstrated progress. The United Stateswas notable for its decline in five of six areas over the 10-year span, including control of corruption and government effectiveness, and showing its sharpest decline in political stability. Finland led the pack when it came to the fight against corruption over Iceland and Denmark, while Burma, North Korea and Somalia came in last.

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Source: United Nations Secretary-General
Date: 18 Jul 2007
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As Myanmar's National Convention resumes, Secretary-General urges inclusive participatory, transparent political process

SG/SM/11095

The following statement was issued today by the Spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

The Secretary-General takes note of the resumption today of Myanmar's National Convention for its final session, as announced by the Government of Myanmar, and is closely following developments. The Secretary-General wishes to encourage the Government of Myanmar to seize this opportunity to ensure that this and subsequent steps in Myanmar's political road map are as inclusive, participatory and transparent as possible, with a view to allowing all the relevant parties to Myanmar's national reconciliation process to fully contribute to defining their country's future.

For information media • not an official record

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"I have visited many refugee camps across the world, most recently in Darfur, Sudan. But the situation here (Damdamia) is worst than that," said Jaap Broersma, the MSF Head of Mission.

Sharif, a Rohingya refugee said, quote;

"Life here in the camp is no better. Hunger and disease stalk us day in and day out. Our children are growing up like dogs on the street," Sharif said last week."

"They will kill us or put us into jail for life, if we go back," said Sharif at the Kutupalong camp, 450 km from Dhaka.

Monday, August 13, 2007

ဆီဆြတ္အာရီယံမ်ား (ႏွင့္) ကၽြန္သေဘာက္စိတ္ဓါတ္

ရခိုင္သားမ်ားမွာ ရခိုင္ျပည္ပ်က္စီးရသည္ကို ျမန္မာမ်ားကို အျပစ္တင္ေလ့ဟိပါသည္။ ဘိုးေတာ္ေမာင္၀ိုင္းကို အျပစ္တင္ေလ့ဟိပါသည္။ ဘိုးေတာ္ေမာင္၀ိုင္းသည္ သံုးႀကိမ္တိုင္တိုင္ပင့္ဖိတ္ၿပီးမွ ရခိုင္ျပည္ကို သိမ္းယူျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပင့္ဖိတ္ခီသူမွာ ငသံေတြျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဗိုလ္ခ်င္းျပန္၏ဖခင္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ရခိုင္သားမ်ားအတြက္ သမိုင္းသင္ခန္းစာရပါသည္။ (ျပည္တြင္းေရးျပႆနာကို ကိုယ့္အားကိုယ္ကိုး ေျဖယွင္း။ သူမ်ားကို လားအားမကိုးကဲ့) အေျဖရသည္။

အတိတ္အေၾကာင္းကို ထားလိုက္ပါဖိ။ အခု ပစၥဳပၸန္မွာ၀ါ ဇာျဖစ္နီေရလဲ။ ျပည္တြင္းက မဂၢဇိန္းမ်ားကို ခ်န္ထားလိုက္ပါ။ ျပည္တြင္းမွာ စာပီစီးစစ္ေရးဟိနီလို႔ လြတ္လတ္လပ္လပ္ ထုတ္၀ီခြင့္မရလို႔ ဆိုလိုက္ပါဖိ။ အခု လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ၿမီကို ေရာက္နီၿပီးျဖစ္သည္။ ရခိုင္သတင္းစာမ်ားကို ဖတ္လိုက္ေသာအခါ ရခိုင္တလံုးတပါဒကိုလည္း ရွာမတြိရပါ။ ေအခ်င့္ကို (ကၽြန္) စိတ္ဓါတ္မေခၚေက (ဂႏၶဴး) စိတ္ဓါတ္ (မယူမ) စိတ္ဓါတ္လို႔ ေခၚရပါဖို႔လား။

သွ်မ္းသတင္းစာမ်ားကို ဖတ္လိုက္ေသာအခါ သွ်မ္းဘာသာ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာ ျမန္မာဘာသာ သံုးဘာသာျဖင့္ထုတ္၀ီသည္ကို အားရဖြယ္ တြိျမင္ရပါသည္။ ထို႔ျပင္ ကရင္သတင္းစာ စာအုပ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ကရင္ဘာသာ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာ ျမန္မာဘာသာမ်ားျဖင့္ ထုတ္၀ီပါသည္။ မိမိဘာသာကို လံုး၀လွ်စ္လ်ဴမျပဳကတ္ပါ။ အစဥ္အၿမဲ အေလးထားသည္ကို တြိရပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ရခိုင္သား (အာရီယံမ်ား) မွာ ပဇာအေၾကာင္းေၾကာင့္ မိမိဘာသာကို ေဂ်ာင္ထိုးသိမ္းထားကတ္ပါသနည္း။

ရခိုင့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတြင္ အာရီယံ (ဆီဆြတ္) တိ မ်ားနီသိမ့္လို႔ ရခိုင္သားမ်ား လြတ္လပ္ေရးမရႏိုင္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ခဲ၀ါပိတုန္းျပတ္လွ်င္ သူမ်ားကိုလည္းျပတ္စီခ်င္သည္။ သို႔မွသာ ကိုယ္ပိတုန္းျပတ္နီသည္ကို သူမ်ားျမင္ႏိုင္လိမ့္မည္မဟုတ္ေပ။ ထိုနည္းတူစြာ ခဲ၀ါပိတုန္းျပတ္ကယ္တင္သွ်င္မ်ားက ရခိုင္ျပည္သူမ်ားကို ေဂ်ာက္ထဲတြန္းပို႔နီကတ္ပါသည္။ ရခိုင္လူငယ္မ်ားကို အဆိပ္ခြံ႕ေကၽြး သတ္ျဖတ္နီကတ္ပါသည္။ အိန္တာဗ်ဴးမ်ားတြင္ ရခိုင္သားမ်ား ျမန္မာစကားမပီကလာ ပီကလာေျပာဆိုလွ်က္ (ရခိုင္ပ်ည္က်ီး သီးခ်ားလြတ္ေမ်ာက္ေယး) ဟု အရွက္တရားမဲ့ကင္းစြာ ကၽြီးေအာ္နီကတ္ပါသည္။

လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ၿမီေရာက္နီကတ္ပ်ာယ္မဟုတ္ပါလား။ လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ၿမီမွာ ျမန္မာဆင္ဆာဘုတ္အဖဲြ႔ဟိေရလို႔ တခါလည္းမၾကားဖူးပါ။ အစြာျဖစ္လို႔ ကိုယ့္ျပည္သူဖတ္ဖို႔ ထုတ္ေတသတင္းစာတိကို ကိုယ့္ျပည္သူသံုးစကားျဖင့္ မထုတ္ကတ္ပါသနည္း။ တခါဖတ္လိုက္တိုင္း ဖတ္လိုက္တိုင္း ျမန္မာက အဘာေခၚေလာက္ေအာင္ က်ိက်ိပက္ပက္ ခၽြဲတတ္ႏဲြ႔တတ္ပါသည္။ ေလ့လာသူတခ်ိဳ႔က (လွ်ာတိအာတြိ) ၿခီလားခကတ္ပ်ာ။ ပ်င္လို႔မရဗ်ာဟု သံုးသပ္ပါသည္။ (ဘိန္းစဲြစြာထက္ စာစဲြစြာ ျဖတ္ရခက္) ဟုဆိုပါသည္။ သြီးထြက္ေအာင္မွန္ပါသည္။

၄င္းသတင္းစာမ်ားကို (ေရာင္ရာ ဆီလူး) ေငြေထာက္ပံ့ပီးနီလူတိကလည္း ဟိပါသည္။ ရခိုင္မွာ စာမဟိလို႔လား။ သို႔မဟုတ္ ယားလို႔လား။ အေျဖမွာ ယွင္းယွင္းေခ်ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ရခိုင္သား (အာရီယံ) မ်ားမွာ (ကိုယ့္ဆီကိုယ္ဆြတ္) ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သူမ်ားကို လားအျပစ္မတင္သင့္ပါ။ မည္သူမျပဳ မိမိမႈ (ဆီဆြတ္အာရီယံမ်ားကို ဒါဏ္ခတ္ဖို႔ အခ်ိန္တန္ဗ်ာယ္) ျဖစ္ပါေၾကာင္း ရြာလည္ေမာင္းခတ္ ေၾကျငာအပ္သည္။

(ဆီဆြတ္အာရီယံမ်ား ေကာင္းရာသုဂတိလားပါစီ)

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