Khajohn Boonpath
More fierce fighting broke out recently around the Karen National Liberation Army’s Yamu base, located close to the Thai/Burmese border in Mae Hong Son province. As a result, Thai army patrols are being sent to areas where incursion into Thai territory by the Burmese has previously occurred.
Around 500 Burmese soldiers attacked the base with mortar and machine-gun fire; the Karen troops responded with an ambush which resulted in the death of a Burmese army officer.
The Mission Commander of the special unit of the 17th Infantry Regiment, Col. Apichet Suesat, has ordered that troops on duty near the Yamu base should be on the alert for an incursion across the border by Burmese troops aiming to attack the base from the rear.
Day: July 19, 2009
Fifty Burmese pro-democracy activists were arrested on Sunday while marching in Rangoon to pay respect to Burma’s independence heroes on Martyr’s Day.
Junta Arrests 50 People on Martyrs Day
Fifty Burmese pro-democracy activists were arrested on Sunday while marching in Rangoon to pay respect to Burma’s independence heroes on Martyr’s Day.
“At about 11 a.m. this morning, 50 activists were arrested near the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Rangoon,” said a source close to the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). “Not only NLD members but also other activists, who are not NLD members, were among those arrested.”
“On the way to the Martyr Monument, there is a police checkpoint,” said a reporter in Rangoon. “The checkpoint only allows invited people and journalists. Without permission, nobody could enter the monument.”
Rangoon sources said Burmese authorities had tight security around the monument and the Shwedagon Pagoda near the mausoleum. Security forces questioned people were cameras.
The NLD held a Martyr Day ceremony at its headquarter in Rangoon which was monitored by authorities. An estimated 1,000 soldiers, riot police and officers in civilian clothes were stationed near the NLD office.
Sunday was the 62th Martyrs Day in Burma, recognizing the assassination of the nation’s independence hero, Aung San, and his key cabinet members on July 19, 1947.
The arrests in Burma could pose an issue at the Asean Ministerial Meeting now underway in Phuket, Thailand. On Monday, Asean foreign ministers are scheduled to adopt the Terms of Reference of the Asean Human Rights Body.
Since the 1988 crackdown on pro-democracy protestors across the country, Martyrs Day has become a kind of a political confrontation ground between security forces and pro-democracy activists.
Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, is currently on trial in the infamous Insein Prison in Rangoon. She donated food to ill inmates in the prison hospital on Saturday, according to her lawyer.
Irrawaddy correspondent Kyi Wai contributed reporting to this story from Rangoon.
Authorities in military-run Myanmar detained dozens of opposition party members on Sunday as they returned from ceremonies marking the death of the father of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, witnesses said.
Martyr’s Day Ceremonies Commemorating Father of Democracy Advocate Followed by Arrests
Authorities in military-run Myanmar detained dozens of opposition party members on Sunday as they returned from ceremonies marking the death of the father of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, witnesses said.
Some of the opposition National League for Democracy party members had been attending a ceremony at party headquarters to mark General Aung San’s death 62 years ago. Others had been at the official commemoration ceremony at Martyr’s Mausoleum.
At least 50 NLD members were walking in small groups Sunday when they were arrested, witnesses said on condition of anonymity for fear of official reprisal.
It was not immediately clear why police detained them.
“Some members were roughly taken into trucks, and those who ran away were chased,” a witness said.
Some who ran onto public buses were dragged out and taken away.
At least three journalists and cameramen who had been filming NLD members walking to the mausoleum were detained.
They were released minutes later after police told them not to use video footage that showed heavy security.
General Aung San and other government leaders were assassinated by gunmen during a Cabinet meeting on 19 July 1947, shortly after Britain granted independence to the Southeast Asian colony.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi marked the anniversary of her father’s death inside Yangon’s Insein prison.
She is on trial on charges of violating the terms of her house arrest by giving shelter to an uninvited American man who swam to her lakeside home in May. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison. Her trial is to resume Friday.
Earlier on Sunday, hundreds of riot police erected barricades secured with barbed wire and blocked streets leading to the Martyr’s Mausoleum.
More than two dozen trucks carrying riot police and four prison vans were parked near the monument, located near the famed Shwedagon pagoda.
Flags were flown at half-staff at the mausoleum as officials placed flowers at the tomb, and families of the slain leaders joined the tightly guarded wreath-laying ceremony.
Authorities allowed about 30 NLD members to pay tribute at the mausoleum but turned away others who wore T-shirts emblazoned with images of Aung San.
Suu Kyi, 64, who used to attend the official ceremony, was absent for a sixth consecutive year and instead marked the day by donating food to patients at the hospital inside the prison, said Nyan Win, a spokesman for her party.
Martyr’s Day was an important event on Myanmar’s calendar for years, but has been gradually downgraded as Suu Kyi has become more popular, particularly since a 1988 pro-democracy uprising that was crushed by the junta.
Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been under military rule since 1962.
Suu Kyi has been under detention for 14 of the past 20 years. Her opposition party won national elections in 1990, but Myanmar’s generals refused to relinquish power.
Her trial has drawn condemnation from the international community and her supporters within Myanmar, who worry that the ruling junta has found an excuse to keep her detained through elections planned for next year.
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knu-dkba news by Karen United
ညေနစာ စားေနသာ KNLA စစ္သားမ်ား
KNU ထဲသို႔ျပန္လာေနေသာ DKBA စစ္သားေတြကို လက္ခံသင္႔ မသင့္ ဆိုတဲေ့ဆြးေႏြးခ်က္ ႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ကြ်နေ္တာ့္ကိုပါ
၀ငေ္ဆြးေႏြးျပဳပါခင္ဗ်ား။၁၉၄၉ တတိယအႀကိမ္ ဂ်နီဗာအစညး္အေ၀းႀကီးမွျပဌာနး္ခ်က္တခုကို တင္ျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။
Third Geneva Convention 1949
Articles 13 to 16 states that prisoners of war must be treated humanely without any adverse discrimination and that their medical needs must be met.
၁၉၄၉ ဂ်နီဗာျပဌာနး္ခ်က္ အခနး္ ၁၃ မွ ၁၆ ထိတြင္ စစ္သံု႔ပနး္ ႏွင့္ပတ္ၿပီးေဖၚျပထားပါ တယ္။
“ စစ္သံု႔ပနး္မ်ားကို လူဆန္စြာထားရွိ ၿပီး အဆင့္အတနး္ခြဲျခားမူမရွိဘဲ လိုအပ္တဲ့ ေဆး၀ါးကုသမူကို္လံုေလာက္စြာေပးရမည္။”
လက္ႏွက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔တိုငး္သည္ သူတို႔လိုက္နာရမည္႔ စစ္ဥပေဒ၊ က်င့္၀တ္ခ်က္ (Military code of conduct) အစရွိသျဖင့္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာမွာျပဌာနး္ထားပါတယ္။ KNU အေနျဖင့္တခ်ိန္က ခေလးစစ္သားရွိခဲ့တာ ကလြဲၿပီး အဆိုပါ ျပဌာနး္ထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံ တကာဥပေဒကို လိုက္နာခဲ႔လို႔ အၾကမး္ဖကေ္သာငး္က်နး္္သူစာရငး္မွာ ထည္႔သြငး္ျခငး္ မခံရတာျဖစ္တယ္။
စစ္ပြဲအတြငး္ဖမး္မိတဲ့ စစ္သံု႔ပနးေ္တြကိုေတာင္ ေကြ်းေမြးျခငး္၊ ေဆး၀ါးကုသေပးျခငး္ လုပေ္ပးေနရမွေတာ့ စိတ္သေဘာထားေျပာငး္ျပီး ျပန္လာပူးေပါငး္တဲ့ ညီအကို DKBA ေတြကိုဘယ္လိုညငး္ပယ္ လို႔ရမလဲ။ ဒီလိုျပန္လာတဲ့ ရဲေဘာေ္တြထဲမွာယံုလို႔ရတဲ႔သူရွိသလို ယံုလို႔မရတဲ႔ သူလဲရွိနိုင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ လက္ႏွက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔တိုငး္သိေနတဲ႔အခ်က္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး ဘယ္လိုကိုင္တြယ္ရမည္ဆိုတာကို နားလည္ၾကပါတယ္။ကရင္လက္နက္ကိုင္သမိုငး္ကို ျပန္ၾကည္႔ရင္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ားဟာ ၁၉၁၄ မွာစခဲ့တဲ့ ပထမကမၻာစစ္ကတညး္ကစၿပီး အေတြ႔အၾကံဳ ရွိခဲ့လို႔ ေတာ္လွနေ္ရးကိုႏွစ္ ၆၀ ေက်ာ္္ထိနး္ ထားႏိုင္ျခငး္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ နအဖ ရဲ႔ စစ္တကၠသိုလ္ မွာလညး္လက္ရွိေတာ္လွနေ္ရး အင္အားစု မ်ားတြင္ KNU ဟာ တိုက္ရည္ခိုက္ရည္ရွိတဲ့အင္အားအႀကီးဆံုးအဖြဲ႔လို႔သံုးသပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ဧရာ၀တီတိုငး္ထိ စစေ္ရးကစားႏိုင္တဲ႔တစ္ခုတညးေ္သာအဖြဲ႕လညး္ ျဖစ္ပါ တယ္။ DKBA ေတြ KNU ဆီျပန္လာျခငး္ဟာ ကရငေ္တာ္လွနေ္ရးအတြက္ အက်ိဳးရိွသလို ဆိုးက်ိဳးမျဖစ္ ေ Continue reading “knu-dkba news by Karen United”
Authorities on Sunday turned away several people, who had come to pay their respects to Burma’s Martyrs, including the country’s independence architect General Aung San, as they marched to Rangoon’s Martyr’s Mausoleum to pay tribute to the country’s heroes.
by Mungpi
Sunday, 19 July 2009 17:54
New Delhi (mizzima) – Authorities on Sunday turned away several people, who had come to pay their respects to Burma’s Martyrs, including the country’s independence architect General Aung San, as they marched to Rangoon’s Martyr’s Mausoleum to pay tribute to the country’s heroes.
Several members of the opposition party – National League for Democracy – and well wishers on Sunday marched to the Martyr’s Mausoleum but were turned away by the authorities as they were wearing T-shirts with pictures of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Ohn Kyaing, spokesperson of the NLD, said several of the party members, who wore T-shirts emblazoned with the picture of Aung San Suu Kyi, were barred at the entrance of the Martyr’s Mausoleum by authorities.
On the occasion of Burma’s 62nd Martyr’s Day, the NLD held a commemorative service where they paid tributes and honoured the martyrs.
Following the service, scores of members of the NLD and well-wishers including former party member Naw Ohn Hla marched towards the Mausoleum to lay wreaths and to salute the martyrs, but several of them were turned away by authorities as they wore T-shirts with Aung San Suu Kyi’s picture, Ohn Kyaing said.
“But others, who wore other dresses, were allowed into the Mausoleum to pay their respects,” he said.
During the commemorative service held at the NLD office in Rangoon’s Shwegondine Street, where hundreds of party members as well as well wishers and foreign diplomats came, authorities beefed up security and closely monitored the function.
Ohn Kyaing said dozens of plainclothes officials as well as members of the pro-junta civilian organization – Union Solidarity and Development Association and Swan Arrshin – were visible, hanging around the party head office, where the ceremony was held. Continue reading “Authorities on Sunday turned away several people, who had come to pay their respects to Burma’s Martyrs, including the country’s independence architect General Aung San, as they marched to Rangoon’s Martyr’s Mausoleum to pay tribute to the country’s heroes.”
democracy for burma 
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