Village abbot leads the way

Mon 20 Apr 2009, Lyeh Mon, IMNA
A village abbot in northern Ye Township has taken the lead on local road repairs with the support of local villagers.

The residents of Kokdut village told IMNA that their abbot contributed money left over from a monk’s funeral three months ago and collected further donations from villagers. The money paid for materials and the hiring of workers to repair the road. After two week’s work the two-mile long and ten feet wide stretch of road is already half finished.

One of the locals explained, “We needed this road repaired but the authorities wouldn’t provide anything so the abbot organized it himself using donations and the extra cash from the funeral.”

While the repairs have been going on many of the villagers have volunteered to work and provided other services.

“During the repairs there are crowds of people offering their labor and some truck owners offering to carry materials such as sand and stones. We’ve had to stop for a while due to the rain but we’ll soon continue again,” said a local female participant.

The women added that the abbot was also leading the way in the effort to get electricity for the village.

At the beginning of April local authorities in Lamine Sub-township demanded money from some residents to pay for repairs on the road by their houses even though municipal funding should have been provided.

Students mount protest campaign during water festival in Mon State

Mon 20 Apr 2009, Mon Son, IMNA
Students in Mon State lead a bandana campaign to protest rule by Burma’s military government during last week’s water festival. According to a protest organizer, over a thousand bandanas bearing the slogan, in English, “No free, no happy” were distributed in three townships.

On April 15th, protest organizers distributed 1,500 bandanas to residents of Moulmein, Mon State’s capital city, and nearby Mudon and Thanbyuzayat Townships. The campaign fell on the mid-point of Burma’s “Thingyin” New Years festival, when people across the country took days off to throw water on each other, sing and dance.

“The reason we distributed this bandana: we want people know, if we don’t have freedom we also will not have happiness,” one of the organizers told IMNA. “Because we are living under military control, we have no freedom – no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression.”

Moulemin residents told IMNA they saw many youth on trucks and cars wear the bandana. A youth in Mudon Town agreed, but added that some of his friends did not know what the English-language slogan meant.

“I saw many people wearing the bandana during the festival,” said the youth. “Some of my friends didn’t know what the slogan meant. And it was free. But for other people, they knew what it means but they were still not afraid to wear it.”

IMNA has not received any reports of arrests related to the campaing. Prior to Thingyin, state-run television in Burma announced that people were prohibited from wearing “political” clothing.

Freedom Journal (April, 2009) by Free Burma Federation scribd burmese

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14441025/Freedom-Journal-April-2009-by-Free-Burma-Federation

Burmese Man Murdered

Man killed by ex-workmates

Police were called out to investigate a murder report sent out on the morning of the 19th April. They went along to a cement mill next to the Pattaya Floating Market on Sukhumvit Road to find the body of 40 year old Mr. Chai from Myanmar (Burma) who had been discovered in a room at the site. According to the mill owner, during Songkran Chai came to visit some Burmese friends who were still working at the site where he used to work and they got into an argument resulting in one of them killing their visitor. Whether it was deliberate murder or an accident, police will investigate further into the case and a warrant is now out for the capture of 6 Burmese men who fled the scene and are apparently still at large in the region.
http://www.pattayapeople.com/default.asp?Folder=16&IdArticle=17026

MYANMAR: Counting the chickens in Ayeyarwady Delta(IRIN)

KAYINISU, 20 April 2009 (IRIN) – Khin Shwe, 37, lost her prized pig and dozens of ducks and chickens valued at over US$300 in Cyclone Nargis, which left some 140,000 people dead or missing nearly a year ago.

“All I have are these two hens,” the mother-of-five told IRIN, pointing to the two birds (purchased after selling her son’s jeans) on the floor of her makeshift hut.

Prior to the cyclone, Khin Shwe earned $10-$20 per month from her backyard livestock farming business, while her fisherman husband earned $15 more.

She had hoped the two chickens would help her re-establish herself, but so far that is not happening. Like other residents of Kayinisu, a village in Dedaye Township in Myanmar’s badly affected Ayeyarwady Delta, she barely has enough money for three meals a day.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 68,000 pigs, 525,000 ducks, 7,500 goats, 1.5 million chickens, and 227,000 draught animals were lost to Nargis. continue http://www.IRINnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83995

Thai Govt to host ASEAN+3 and +6 by May

Deputy Secretary-General to the Prime Minister, Panitan Wattayakorn, revealed today (April 20) that Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya had been in the middle of coordination with ASEAN country members and partner countries as to when and where the ASEAN Summit should be held.

Mr. Panitan disclosed today (April 20) that Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya had been in coordination with ASEAN country members and participating countries in order to set suitable dates and venue to host the ASEAN +3 and +6 summits as soon as possible following the postponement due to the interruption by the UDD’s protest in Pattaya.

The government hopes to have the summit held by the end of May this year.

http://thainews.prd.go.th/newsenglish/previewnews.php?news_id=255204200035

NEWS ANALYSIS-Making Friends with Tyrants

Recently, US President Obama has been extending an olive branch to the “axis of evil” and “outposts of tyranny” so loudly condemned by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

At the Summit of Americas last week, Obama said that his administration would take a new approach with one of America’s most outspoken critics, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In return, Chavez said, “I want to be your friend.”

On Cuba, Obama announced the opening of a new page in history at the two-day summit, offering Havana a “new beginning” in relations with the US.

Since January, Obama has attempted to reverse many aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, promising a policy review and a new approach to relations with countries like Iran, North Korea and Burma.

Burmese Army, DKBA Mount Four-Day Attack on KNU

Despite claims by the Burmese junta that it is seeking talks with Karen rebel leaders, a combined force of Burmese and pro-regime Karen troops has been carrying out a sustained campaign against Battalion 201 of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) since last Thursday.

Karen sources said that clashes broke out on April 16, when around 300 troops from a combined Burmese army and Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) force attacked the KNLA Battalion 201 camp in Valeki, opposite Pho Phra District in Thailand’s Tak Province.

“Their plan is to attack us until they get our base in Valeki. But they haven’t captured it yet because there have been too many causalities on their side,” said Capt Bu Paw of the KNLA Battalion 201.

Capt Bu Paw claimed that only one KNLA soldier had died in the battle, while at least 16 soldiers from the other side had been killed or injured.

Inside news mizzima DKBA..ကရင္ရြာသားမ်ား စားနပ္ရိကၡာ ရွားပါးမႈႏွင့္ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ေနရ

ဒယ္နီယယ္ပီဒါဆင္
တနလၤာေန႔၊ ဧၿပီလ 20 2009 16:27 – ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္

မဲေဆာက္ (မဇၩိမ) ။ ။ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္ေပၚ ခြ၍ ေနၾကေသာ ကရင္ရြာသား ၂၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္မွာ အသက္ရွင္ ရပ္တည္ေနထိုင္ေရးအတြက္ အလြန္ခက္ခဲေသာ အေျခအေနႏွင့္ ရင္ဆိုင္ေနၾကရသည္။

သူတို႔သည္ စစ္ျဖစ္ပြားေနေသာ ဇံုအတြင္း ပိတ္မိေနၾကၿပီး၊ စားနပ္ရိကၡာ ရွားပါးမႈအျပင္ ေကာက္ခ်င္သလို ေကာက္ေနေသာ အခြန္အေကာက္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆုိးရြားလာေနေသာ က်န္းမာေရး အေျခအေနတို႔ႏွင့္ ရင္ဆိုင္ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ေနၾကရျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ေကာဆာ၊ ကေလာေဂါ၊ ေကာပိုးပိုးႏွင့္ ေပါဘူးလွတာ ေက်းရြာ ၄ ရြာမွာ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္ၿမ့ဳိျဖစ္ေသာ မဲေဆာက္၏ ေတာင္ဘက္တြင္ရွိၿပီး အုန္းဖ်ံမဲ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းႏွင့္ ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္ၿမ့ဳိ အုန္းဖန္အၾကား တည္ရွိကာ လူဦးေရ ၂၁၁၁ ဦး ရွိသည္။
continue http://www.mizzimaburmese.com/news/inside-burma/2778-2009-04-20-10-10-22.html

Chinese tycoon imports timber from northern Burma-Bhamo without electricity for four days

A well known Chinese tycoon, Lau Ying with business interests in northern Burma is resuming import of timber to China from Burma’s northern Kachin State since last month, said local sources.Lau Ying’s employees are felling teak and hardwood from the..

For four days and nights residents of Bhamo, the second largest city in Burma’s northern Kachin State, have been without electricity supply because fierce winds laced with heavy rain uprooted electric poles, said local residents.

http://www.kachinnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1