Confusion in the Court

While the case against Aung San Suu Kyi remains shrouded in deliberate obfusca tion, the likely outcome seems clear

John William Yettaw had it easy.

Swimming across Inya Lake with a backpack containing a camera, two sets of Muslim women’s clothing and a veritable toolbox of other items was no doubt hard going for the 54-year-old diabetic. But it was probably a cakewalk compared to the task of trying to get to the bottom of the case against him and his famous co-defendant, Aung San Suu Kyi.

There are many hurdles to making sense of the trial against Suu Kyi, her two personal assistants and her American intruder, not the least of which is the often impenetrable prose of The New Light of Myanmar, the ruling junta’s main English-language newspaper.Among other challenges: the Burmese regime’s tight control over access to the facts surrounding the case; constitutional issues in a country that has been ruled by diktat for more than two decades; political posturing; and a host of conspiracy theories.
Wading through the pages of The New Light of Myanmar for reliable information is never a very rewarding experience, but in this case, the crudely written propaganda broadsheet is an important point of reference for news about the proceedings at the special court in Insein Prison, where Suu Kyi, et al, are being tried, and so cannot be ignored.

Occasionally, amid the tangle of often incomprehensible sentences, something of genuine interest appears. For instance: in an account of Yettaw’s testimony on the eight day of the trial, he is reported as telling the court that when he first visited Suu Kyi’s home on November 30, 2008, “he walked along the bund [embankment] of Inya Lake through the drain.”

The fear, as one of Ban’s 38th floor advisers told Inner City Press, is that Burma may become “Sri Lanka Two,”by Inner City Press

The fear, as one of Ban’s 38th floor advisers told Inner City Press, is that Burma may become “Sri Lanka Two,” an embarrassment in which the re-imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi, like the bombardment then internment of Tamils, is legitimated by a seemingly hapless UN Secretary General. But if that is what happens, who can it be reported differently?

The shifting ways Ban dealt with Kosovo — going silent when asked about the legality from the UN perspective of recognizing the theretofore Serbian provinces’ unilateral declaration of independence — and then with Abkhazia and South Ossetia are fodder for forthcoming reviews, as is Ban’s claim to have been responsible for the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur. There are pieces in the works, unless destructive deadline competition curtail them, to assess and take apart even Ban’s claims on climate change.
continue http://www.innercitypress.com/ban1reviews070109.html

Asean Foreign minister :Internal Security Act to cover entire island for meeting this month

Act, an Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc) panel would be set up and chaired by the prime minister.

Even though it will take away some of the people’s basic rights for the duration, the latest move for the high-profile Asean foreign ministers meeting is aimed at boosting international confidence in Thailand.

Besides foreign ministers from Asean’s 10 member countries, those from dialogue partners, including the US, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as China and Japan will attend.

Army chief General Anupong Paochinda said all the Armed Forces branches had jointly proposed to the Cabinet the use of the Internal Security Act during the event.
The law, initiated by the military-backed government last year, lets the premier mobilise forces from any agency for security reasons. Article 18 of the law authorises the premier in his capacity as the director of Isoc to impose curfews, prohibit the movement of people and vehicles and block commuting routes.

The premier can also take action to manage the security situation in a pre-emergency state as it could be used without the declaration of a state of emergency.

Thailand, as the chair of Asean, has the duty to host the ministerial meeting but the government feared the red-shirted protesters might disrupt proceedings as they did with the East Asia Summit in Pattaya in April.

Isoc argued that the act would be indispensable following the Pattaya chaos, which it said ruined the country’s image and reputation as well as its economy. continue
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/07/01/politics/politics_30106449.php

‘Truth Today’ hosts to seek royal pardon for Thaksin

BANGKOK, 1 July 2009 (NNT) – The three hosts of the ‘Truth Today’ program are preparing to collect one million names of people to be submitted for a royal pardon from His Majesty the King for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

The three hosts of the ‘Truth Today’ program, also the United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) core leaders, consisting of Mr Jatuporn Prompan, Mr Weera Musikapong and Mr Nattawut Saikua chaired a press conference today. They informed that they were currently revising the documents and related forms.

The trio expected that the forms would be disseminated to people and UDD supporters afterwards. They said if they could not collect one million names within one month, they would give up and cease operation of the matter.

In regards to the disagreement towards this movement of another UDD core leader Surachai Danwattananusorn, the three stated that they respected Mr Surachai’s decision and opinion, saying that Mr Surachai was free to not participate in any activities that he disagreed. In addition, the trio asserted that this reflected a difference in opinion but not disunity in the UDD.

Burma Tests ASEAN’s Legitimacy

To critics of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Burma has long served as proof of the organization’s ineffectuality. For decades, the country’s ruling junta has suppressed democracy, oppressed its people, and ignored global calls to observe human rights. ASEAN member nations have previously been reluctant to apply economic sanctions to Burma because of a founding agreement not to intervene in the affairs of fellow members.

But with the current trial of democracy advocate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi drawing widespread international condemnation, ASEAN once again faces a critical test in its quest for legitimacy. The time is now ripe for ASEAN to pressure the Burmese regime to accept the organization’s governing terms, by cutting off its economic support to the country. Strategic economic sanctions targeted at Burma could help bring down the military junta that rules the nation. More importantly, penalizing Burma will demonstrate to member nations and the world that ASEAN is a legitimate and effective regional organization.

ASEAN was founded in 1967 to accelerate economic growth, increase social progress, and foster cultural development in Southeast Asia. Sensitive to the cultural and political differences in neighboring countries, ASEAN sought to achieve its stated objectives through mutual respect for the independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national identity of all members. These principles, referred to as the “ASEAN Way,” are exemplified in ASEAN’s policy of non-interference in the activities of its member nations.

Hsa_Blyot_dead by KNL Japan

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Burmese refugees at Mae La refugee camp are on alert due to a threat of attack by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), according to the vice chairman of the camp.

Orientation
Mae La is also known as ‘Beh Klaw’ in Karen, which means ‘cotton field’ due to the agricultural activities for which Karen leaders first negotiated permission for refugees to cross into the area in 1984.

Location: Tha Song Yang District, Tak Province
Distance from Border: about 8 kms
Distance from Mae Sot: 57 kms / approx. 1 hour driving time
Area about 1,150 rai (4 km2)

“The DKBA said they will destroy our camp,” said Vice-Chairman Htun Htun, speaking to The Irrawaddy on Wednesday.
Many of the refugees have packed clothing and belongings in preparation for a military assault, sources in nearby Mae Sot said. Camp authorities have imposed a curfew of 9 p.m. On all refugee residents.
The DKBA threatened to attack Mae La camp after one of their influential commanders, San Pyote (aka Soe Myint), the head of Battalion 7, was ambushed and killed by an unknown armed group while traveling by longtail boat on the Moei River on June 26.

Mae La refugee camp is located on the Thai side of the river, not far from where the ambush took place. It is the largest refugee camp in Thailand and currently houses about 37,000 Burmese refugees—mostly Karens from Eastern Burma displaced by the ongoing civil war. Despite the camp being established on Thai soil in 1984, Mae La refugee camp has been attacked by the DKBA in the past.

After the DKBA split from the KNU in 1995, the splinter group staged daring attacks on several Karen refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border with the help of Burmese troops.

In 1997-98, Huay Kaloke refugee camp, about 10 km (6 miles) from Mae Sot, was attacked and burned down by DKBA soldiers.

Former DKBA Battalion 7 commander San Pyote is rumored to have been behind the assassination of former Karen National Union (KNU) General-Secretary Mahn Sha on February 14, 2008.

The Battalion 7 commander and seven others—believed to be DKBA soldiers and porters—were killed as they were returning to DKBA Battalion 999 base in Shwe Koko in Karen State. Another eight soldiers were reportedly injured in the attack. The DKBA have blamed the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the armed wing of the KNU, for the deadly ambush.

DKBA soldiers reportedly gunned down two Karen villagers on Thai soil a few days after they seized KNLA Brigade 7 headquarters on June 23.

After the fall of KNLA Brigade 7, many observers and sources in Mae Sot predicted that more targeted killings would take place between the Karen enemies, because the DKBA will have more access to Mae Sot, traditionally the home base of the KNU.

In August 2007, Lt-Col Kyi Linn, a commander of the KNLA Battalion 18 was shot dead while crossing the Haungthayaw River in Kawkareik Township, Karen State, after meeting government officials and other Karen ceasefire groups, including the DKBA.

Mahn Sha’s death came two weeks after the death of Col Ler Moo, son-in-law of Maj Gen Htain Maung, leader of a Karen breakaway group, the KNU/KNLA Peace Council. Ler Moon was killed in January 2008 and Mahn Sha was suspected of being involved.

After Mahn Sha’s assassination, two more KNLA senior military leaders were rumored to also be on the Karen splinter groups’ hit list: Gen Mu Tu, commander in chief of the KNLA and Brig-Gen Jonny, commander of KNLA Brigade 7.

irrawaddy

ဇြန္လ (၃၀)ရက္။ နန္းထူးစံ (ေကအိုင္စီ)News by sawkyawkhwi.

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Khitpyaing News Karen 30.june

မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္း ျပာပုံျဖစ္ရမည္ဟု ဒီေကဘီေအတပ္ဖြဲ႕ ႀကိမ္း၀ါး

ခ်ဳံခုိတုိက္ခုိုက္ခံရသည့္ တိုးတက္ေသာ ကရင္ဗုဒၶဘာသာအဖဲြ႕ (ဒီေကဘီေအ) ၉၉၉ တပ္ဖြဲ႔က လက္စားေခ်သည့္ အေနျဖင့္ မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းကို ဖ်က္ဆီးပစ္မည္ဟု ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္ ႀကိမ္း၀ါးေနေသာေၾကာင့္ စခန္းမွ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား စုိးရိမ္ပူပန္ေနၾက သည္။

ယခုလ (၂၆) ရက္တြင္ ခ်ဳံခုိတုိက္ခုိက္ခံရသျဖင့္ ဒီေကဘီေအ (၉၉၉) အေျခခ်ဗ်ဴဟာ တပ္ရင္း (၇) မွ တပ္ရင္းမႉး ဗုိလ္စံၿပံဳး (ဗုိလ္ဆန္ျပဳတ္) အပါအ၀င္ တပ္ဖဲြ႔၀င္ (၁၀) ဦး အထိနာက်ဆုံးခဲ့သျဖင့္ လက္စားေခ်ရန္ ဒီေကဘီေအအဖဲြ႔က ေျပာၾကားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
continue http://www.khitpyaingnews.org/news/june_09/30_6_09d.php

Thura Shwe Mann Visit to N. Korea – Photos

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