Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was briefed for two hours by her defence team Wednesday and is well prepared for her trial which is scheduled to resume on Friday, one of her lawyers said.

Aung San Suu Kyi ready for resumption of her trial, lawyer says
Wed 8 Jul 2009

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was briefed for two hours by her defence team Wednesday and is well prepared for her trial which is scheduled to resume on Friday, one of her lawyers said.

Suu Kyi’s defence team met with the Nobel peace laureate in Insein Prison in preparation for the continuation of her trial Friday, when defence witness Khin Moe Moe will testify, Nyan Win, one of her lawyers, said Wednesday.

“Daw (Mrs) Aung San Suu Kyi is fully prepared for whatever happens at the trial,” Nyan Win said.

Nyan Win, who is the official spokesman for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, also informed Suu Kyi that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had been denied a meeting with her by the junta during his brief trip to Myanmar on Friday and

Saturday.

“She made no remark on that,” Nyan Win said.

Myanmar’s military regime refused Ban’s request to meet Suu Kyi on the grounds that she was currently on trial, and such a visit might prejudice the judiciary.

The excuse was deemed ridiculous since it is well-known that Myanmar’s judiciary does not operate independently of the junta.

Ban said he was “very disappointed” by the refusal, and described it as “missed opportunity” for the regime.

Khin Moe Moe, an NLD member and professional attorney, was originally scheduled to testify on Friday, but the court session was postponed until July 10, shortly after UN chief Ban arrived in Yangon.

A special court has been set up at Insein Prison to try Suu Kyi for breaking the terms of her detention by allegedly permitting US national John William Yettaw to swim to her lakeside home-cum-prison on May 3 and stay until May 5.

Suu Kyi’s trial began May 11. While the prosecution was allowed to present 14 witnesses in the first week, the defence was initially allowed only one. Later a second witness, Khin Moe Moe, was permitted.

Critics have accused the military junta of using the case as a pretext to keep Suu Kyi in jail during a politically sensitive period leading up to a general election planned for next year.

Suu Kyi has spent 13 of the past 19 years in detention.

Suu Kyi’s NLD won the 1990 general election by a landslide but has been blocked from power by Myanmar’s junta for the past 19 years.

The new trial of Suu Kyi, whose most recent six-year house detention sentence expired May 27, has sparked a chorus of protests from world leaders and even statements of concern from its regional allies in the Association of South-East Asian Nations.

Two soldiers were killed in Three Pagodas Pass Township last night—both members of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA).

Violence between Karen armies continues in Three Pagodas Pass
Thu 09 Jul 2009, IMNA, HURFORM
Two soldiers were killed in Three Pagodas Pass Township last night—both members of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA).

The fighting between the DKBA and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) took place around 8 p.m. in the temporary Tae Tone Lone camp, 12 kilometers outside Three Pagodas Pass, between Makate and Three Pagoda Pass.

Aye One and Majar Soe Mone commanded 30-men from the DKBA against 10 from the KNLA.

The KNLA, the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) reported no deaths during the brief 10-minute clash, a source close to the KNU told IMNA: “none of the KNLA soldiers died in the fighting because they didn’t sleep in the battalion base. They moved to another place last night [fearful of an imminent attack].“

After the fighting ended, the DKBA arrested two villagers and turned them into forced porters for the Burmese army-backed military group, said a 52-year-old villager. Now local villagers cannot go into the forest to tend to their farms and plantations for fear of the DKBA and future corvee labor.

The practice of forced labor and portering remains a fundamental and widely-exercised human rights abuse, as part of the Burmese army’s Pya Ley Pya, or “Four Cuts” strategy.

Aung San Suu Kyi on “Lives under junta”

Day 24: Aung San Suu Kyi on “Lives under junta” To struggle on a daily basis against a dictatorial military regime is not an easy business. Many of our people have suffered grievously and some are still suffering but they continue with their struggle because of their deeply held beliefs in the ability of the human race to do better for themselves now than they have done in the past.

www.bdcburma.org

American paedophile arrested in Chiang Mai

CMM reporters
At 4 p.m on July 1 at Chiang’s Provincial Police Region 5 headquarters, Pol.Lt.Col. Apichart Haptasin announced that US citizen, Robert Ward Cutler, 37, had been arrested on charges of paedophilia involving at least 5 young boys under the age of 15 years, the most recent victim being 13 years old.
Robert Ward Cutler, an American citizen who had been working as a guest lecturer and researcher in Chiang Mai, shown being questioned by police after his arrest for sexual abuse of underage boys.
At the time of his arrest, the accused was working as a guest lecturer and researcher at a university in Chiang Mai. Previously, Cutler, a Fulbright scholar, had taught at Bard College in New York. A search of the his rented house in Muang district resulted in the seizure of a laptop computer, boxes of pornographic CDs and sex toys for use during anal intercourse.
Police were initially alerted to Cutler’s identity, place of work and crimes by the Australian police in Thailand, and subsequently contacted the Foundation of Child Development. Cooperation then took place between Region 5’s Office of Protection against Transnational Crime and other relevant organisations, including Rights of the Child in America and Australia, which resulted in Cutler’s interrogation and subsequent arrest.
chiang mai mail
http://www.chiangmai-mail.com/333/news.shtml#hd3

khitpyaingnews.org/articles/july09

ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊအေနနဲ႔ စစ္တပ္အရာရွိေတြကို ေနရာခြဲေ၀ခ်ထားမယ့္အပိုင္းမွာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး ေခါင္းစားေနသလို မထင္မွတ္တဲ့ အခက္အခဲေတြနဲ႔လည္း ရင္ဆိုင္ရဖို႔ ရွိေနပါတယ္။ ကိုယ့္႐ူးကိုယ္ပတ္မယ့္ သေဘာမ်ိဳးေၾကာင့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ က်င္းပဖို႔ အခ်ိန္နီးကပ္လာေလေလ မထူးဇာတ္ခင္းဖို႔ ေနျမင့္ေလ အ႐ူးရင့္ေလေလ ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ တပ္မေတာ္ဟာ ျပည္သူ႔အက်ိဳးအ တြက္ ရပ္တည္ၿပီး ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးလုပ္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ က်စ္လ်စ္ခိုင္မာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ေလးစားတဲ့ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာရွိရွိ တပ္မေတာ္ ျဖစ္ေစလိုေၾကာင္း တပ္တြင္းက လက္ရွိတာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနေသာ အရာရွိႀကီးတခ်ိဳ ႔မွလည္း နားလည္ သေဘာေပါက္ေနပါတယ္။

န၀တနဲ႔ နအဖေခတ္မွာ စစ္တပ္အင္အားကို တိုးခ်ဲ ႔ဖို႔ အရာရွိအမ်ားအျပားကို ေမြးထုတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ယေန႔ေခတ္ အခ်ိန္မွာ ဗ်ဴဟာမႉးဆုိတဲ့ ဗုိလ္မႉးႀကီးအဆင့္မွာ ယခင္ကလုိ ရာထူးတက္လမ္း မလြယ္ကူေတာ့ဘဲ တပ္မေတာ္ရဲ႕ ထိပ္ပုိင္းရာထူး မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ တပ္မမႉး၊ တုိင္းမႉးရာထူးေတြကုိ တက္ႏိုင္ဖို႔အတြက္ အေျမာက္အျမားရွိေနတဲ့ ဗ်ဴဟာမႉးမ်ားအၾကားက ခက္ခက္ခဲခဲ ထိုးေဖာက္ထြက္ရတဲ့ အေနအထားကို ေရာက္ရွိေနပါတယ္။ continue

http://www.khitpyaingnews.org/articles/july09/090709.php

Two armed men looted a famous gold shop near No. 1 Central Market in Bamo town of Kachin State in Northern Burma on July 6 and fled with gold ornaments and jewellery worth Kyat 6 million (approximately USD 6,000)

Gold shop looted in Northern Burma
by Myo Gyi
Thursday, 09 July 2009 13:20

Ruili (Mizzima) –Two armed men looted a famous gold shop near No. 1 Central Market in Bamo town of Kachin State in Northern Burma on July 6 and fled with gold ornaments and jewellery worth Kyat 6 million (approximately USD 6,000), local residents said.

Two motorcycle borne gunmen arrived at the ‘San Shwe Myint’ gold shop at about 8:30 a.m. One of them entered the shop, held the staff members at gunpoint and looted about 12 ticals (1 tical = 16 gms) of gold ornaments and jewellery. They fled on their motorcycle after firing two shots in the air in an apparent bid to scare away people.

“The girl [shop owner’s daughter] was opening the shop, when an armed man entered, pretending to be a customer. His accomplice waited outside on the motorcycle with the engine running. After looting the gold and jewellery, they fled on the motorcycle,” a woman living in the town and close to the family of the gold shop owner told Mizzima.

Another gold shop owner near ‘San Shwe Myint’ said, “At about 8:30 in the morning, on full moon day, I didn’t open my shop. The two armed men fired two shots in the air. It sounded like a bicycle tyre bursting. I don’t know whether the guns were genuine or fake. The two robbers are still at large”.

According to sources close to the shop owner’s daughter, two salesgirls were inside the shop, when the armed robber entered. It is learnt that they looted 12 ticals of gold and jewellery worth about Kyat 6 million.

No. 1 Central Market in Bamo is a busy and crowded area and the gold shops do business right in front.

In 2007, two sisters were stabbed to death and their store in Central Ward near the same market was robbed and looted.

Special agents sent from Naypyitaw came and cracked the case last year and the killer was nabbed.
mizzima

Free Hkun Htun Oo Now! Or Is The Law To Stand On Its Head? by Sai Merng Mai

Hkun Htun Oo and the 8 other Shan leaders have now been unjustly incarcerated for 2 years, with the sad passing of Myint Than in May of last year. Despite an attempt by their lawyers in Burma to have the case reviewed by the high court in Rangoon, their appeal case was thrown out. The persecution of these leaders by the regime has highlighted the issues of all that is wrong with the government of Burma – the lack of any independent and fair judiciary, the lack of any real attempt by the regime to reach a peaceful solution to the constitution of Burma, and the persecution of anyone who opposes the regime – especially Shan and other ethnic political groups seeking a truly federal constitution based on the spirit of the Panglong Agreement. Outside Burma, there has been much hard work by freedom activists to highlight the case to the world community, and to demonstrate that the convictions are shamefully unjust.

Worldwide Shan activists raised the issue in 2006 with a signature petition, collecting over 2,000 signatures, mostly collected by Shan Youth in Thailand, and with an online petition collecting over 470 signatures from around the world. The petition was sent to ASEAN and UN Security Council leaders calling for pressure on the regime to free Hkun Htun Oo and all political prisoners in Burma. Delivery of the petition in Tokyo was accompanied by numerous speeches by many Burmese activist groups. The petition certainly raised the issue among the Shan community and got the message through to international leaders. The pity of course is that the international leaders have been unable to agree on any practical way of dislodging the intransigent regime.

In January 2007, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) began a campaign against the convictions, with a suggested letter detailing the issues ready for posting to the Attorney General and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Rangoon, and those international figures and observers interested in Burma’s human rights issues. The AHRC view is that there are at least 4 serious issues that invalidate the convictions; namely, (i) the charge of treason was against a constitutionally appointed state, which the regime is not, (ii) the trial was held by a tribunal outside of Shan State where the offence was alleged to have occurred – contrary to Burmese law, (iii) prosecution witnesses were not available for cross-examination, and (iv) photocopies of evidence was used in court and not the originals as required under law. The AHRC view is that the trials were flawed in other ways too, and that these cases demonstrate the lack of the rule of law in Burma, as do many other cases. The AHRC campaign letter demands that the men obtain their legal rights under Burmese law.

For not informed Readers: History of All Burma Federation of Student Unions

View this document on Scribd

Members of the Chin Democracy and Human Rights Network staged a rally against the Myanmar government in front of the Myanmar Embassy in Korea on July 5.

Advocate Democracy in Myanmar

By John Smith Thang
Members of the Chin Democracy and Human Rights Network staged a rally against the Myanmar government in front of the Myanmar Embassy in Korea on July 5.

The protest was in memorial of a pro-democracy leader ― an ethnic Chin student, Salai Tin Mg Oo, who was killed by Myanmar’s military government on June 24, 1976.

Salai Tin Maung Oo was popular among university students in 1974-75 for his dedicated fight against the brutal military regime in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

He and his colleagues organized a “U Thant Uprising” there in honor of U Thant, a former U.N. secretary general. After the military government prohibited the public from holding an honorable funeral for U Thant, Salai Tin Maung Oo and students led demonstrations to protest the dictatorial military rule.

Apart from the uprising, Salai Tin Maung Oo organized a “labor strike anniversary day” and “Mai-yar-pih events.” The military arrested him for his role in the uprising and pro-democracy movement.

Before Salai Tin Maung Oo was executed, military intelligence officers tried to persuade him to pledge to follow their authority in exchange for freedom. But he refused to do so and shouted, “I shall never kneel down under your soldiers’ boots.”

And he continued to shout in jail, “Comrades, they are killing me secretly.” Finally he was secretly hanged at Insein Jail on June 24, 1976.

continue http://saveburma.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/advocate-democracy-in-myanmar/

Villagers in areas under the control of Shan State Army (SSA) ‘North’, northern Shan State, have been forced to pay off local Burmese unit’s debt to shops and restaurants

Villagers forced to pay army debts
THURSDAY, 09 JULY 2009 17:51 HSENG KHIO FAH
Villagers in areas under the control of Shan State Army (SSA) ‘North’, northern Shan State, have been forced to pay off local Burmese unit’s debt to shops and restaurants, according to sources from the area.

Since April, a 12 strong unit from Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) #131 based in Wanhsaw village, Wanhsaw village tract, Monghsu township, has been forcing village headmen from surrounding villages to collect money from people and pay for their debts at villager’s shops and restaurants where they had eaten, said a local elderly source.

Those villages were Haipa, Wanhsaw, Wanhawng, Wankung, Nawngkhek and Naphee.

“They do such things whenever and wherever they [Burmese soldiers] arrive. They order what they want and leave villagers to pay for the fees,” complained another villager.

The group was led by Captain Thein Myint and Sergeant Kyaw Myint. The incidents took place just 7 miles far from the 1st Brigade of SSA-N’s main base Wanhai, Kehsi township. The SSA however could do nothing for its people even though it received the information, said yet another villager.

“We have paid several times. Last week, we just paid about over Kyat 35,000 ($ 32) at a restaurant which stands on the way to Mongnawng-Monghsu,” she said.
The group has been patrolling in Kehsi, Mongnawng, Monghsu, Mongyai towships and committing several abuses to villagers.

Besides, they have been subjecting villagers to do forced labor including providing security, portering and doing domestic chores like collecting firewood, providing food and water for the battalion. Even worse is they forcibly take livestock, money and luxury items from the villagers, the source said.