Authorities in Arakan State have been collecting family lists in Maungdaw Township but no one yet knows the reason, said one resident.

Authority Collects Family Lists in Arakan

8/19/2009
Maungdaw: Authorities in Arakan State have been collecting family lists in Maungdaw Township but no one yet knows the reason, said one resident.

“The authority has been collecting the family list in Maungdaw Township since 17 August, but has not disclosed why the family lists are being collected,” he said.

The family lists are being collected from Muslim and Hindu communities, but not from Buddhists.

A government clerk from the local administration said the authority will collect the family lists from the Buddhist community soon after the Muslim and Hindu communities.

Some officials from the immigration department along with members from the ward council are visiting homes in Maungdaw to collect the list of names.

The resident said, “Despite that the authority has not disclosed the reason, I heard they are collecting the family lists for the 2010 election. Government will hold the election four months after the scheduled election date is declared.”

He added that this is intended to prevent opposition parties from preparing for the election.

According to a local source, the Burmese military authority has been preparing many necessities related to the 2010 election in Arakan State. The authorities in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State, has also been collecting family lists, but is doing so via the ward council office.

A clerk from Sittwe said that all ward council offices in Sittwe have to send the family lists to the township administration and immigration departments by September, as ordered by the high authority.

The authority in Arakan State will be collecting the family lists throughout Arakan during the month of August

With no land, Rohingya refugees languish in jail

Wed 19 Aug 2009, IMNA, Rai Maraoh
A group of Rohingya people that was arrested trying to cross illegally into Rangnon, Thailand, remain in prison along the Thai-Burma border after Thai authorities were unable to find a location to repatriate the group.

About 50 Rohingya were arrested by the Thai police in July, as they attempted to enter Thailand by boat. The group, which was assisted by a broker, hoped to find better jobs and asylum in Malaysia.

The Rohingya are a state-less ethnic Muslim minority, traditionally from Arakan area in Western Burma. The Rohingya have attracted sporadic media attention over the last 20 years after facing a variety of abuses. However their status as refugees has been heavily disputed by both Burma and Thailand.

One factor in this dispute has been Burma’s refusal to recognize the group as a legitimate ethnic minority. Having been striped of citizenship in 1982 the group faces regular abuses of religious persecution, land confiscation and arbitrary arrest by the Burmese government.

“Thai soldiers arrested a group of 50 Rohingya migrants, and tried to send them back, but the Rohingya haven’t been sent back yet because they don’t have their own land,” said a Kawthaung resident. “Thai authorities have held them for over a month.”

According to an article published by the New Light of Myanmar, a Burmese government controlled newspaper, on January 30th, 2009, there are more than 100 ethnic groups officially recognized by the government in Burma, however the Rohingya are not amongst the sanctioned groups.

Early last January a group of Rohingya people, who had been living in Arakan State in western Burma, were arrested by Thai authorities after they landed in Rangnon, according to an article published by the Irrawaddy. In a widely criticized response, the Thai authorities beat the attempted refugees and forced them back on boats, setting them adrift without engines, and few supplies.

At ASEAN’s 14th summit meeting, the Burmese foreign minister, Nyan Win, stated that the Rohingya are not Burmese ethnic and that there are no Rohingya in Burma. The Junta has insisted that it will only take back migrants who can prove they are “Bengali”, an ethnic group the government recognizes.

Unmarked leaflets, that negatively portrayed the actions of two ethnic armed groups, were found spread throughout Karen state, according to local sources.

Mysterious leaflets found scattered in Karen State
Wed 19 Aug 2009, IMNA,
Unmarked leaflets, that negatively portrayed the actions of two ethnic armed groups, were found spread throughout Karen state, according to local sources.

The leaflets primarily targeted Nai Hong Sar, the general secretary of the New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the Karen National Union (KNU). They were first found several days ago, scattered on the ground, in villages in Kawkareik township, such as Kaw Bein and Kaw Pauk.

“Nai Hong Sar left to go abroad to organize other opposition organizations, and associated with the KNU to gave a training for how to build bombs in the country,” recounted a resident who had read the leaflets. “It seems the leaflets focused on attacking Nai Hong Sar.”

According to the villagers there was no signature or stamp printed on the paper and provided no description about the groups that issued the statement. However residents that have read the leaflet believed that they were released by the Burmese government as a form of propaganda.

This theory appears to be true. IMNA recently learned from a village headman in Mon state, that the Townships Peace and Development Council (TPDC) in Mon state called the heads of villages to hold meeting last week. There, headmen received copies of statements identical to the leaflets found scattered though Karen state.

A few weeks ago the Burmese government authorities issued an official order to the headman of every village in Karen State, saying that they must watch for any ethnic armed group’s movement, and to write a report about the activity to the high officials.

Village headmen were also ordered to report any visits made my armed groups, and what reason they gave for visiting the village.
Imna

USDA Secretary to visit Japan

by Nem Davies
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 19:38

New Delhi (Mizzima) – A Burmese delegation led by the Secretary of the pro-junta civil organisation – the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) – will leave for Japan on a good will mission on Wednesday evening.

The delegation’s week-long tour follows an invitation by the Japanese Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone. The delegation will be led by USDA Secretary U Htay Oo, who is also the Minister for Agriculture and Irrigation. He will be accompanied by Tin Htut Oo, Director General of the Agricultural Department and other officials including those of the Military Affairs Security (MAS).

The delegation will leave on Wednesday evening for Bangkok on a TG flight and will arrive in Tokyo on Thursday morning on a Nippon Airlines flight.

In Japan, the delegation will put up at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo. On Thursday it will visit the Buddha statue located in a popular tourist attraction centre – Kamakura, north of Tokyo.

On August 23 and 24, the delegation is scheduled to meet Japanese opposition Members of Parliament. On August 25 it will meet the Japanese Foreign Minister. The same evening it will meet the Deputy Agriculture Minister.

While the trip is being termed as a friendly visit, it is also expected to be part of the Burmese junta’s lobbying of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), currently the opposition party. The DPJ is expected to win the August 30 elections in Japan.

The Yangon United Football Club has signed a joint-venture agreement with BEC Tero Sasana FC of Bangkok to contract with Arsenal, the Premier League club in Britain, to offer a youth football training academy before the start of the Myanmar National League season on September 5, according to the state-run newspaper Myanmar Alin.

Tay Za is Junta cronie and millionare.Why Thailand offering this ?He,s buisness is banned.!

As the soccer season nears, soccer observers are talking about Yangon United FC’s owner, Tay Za, who is known to be close to the ruling generals and the owner of Air Bagan, who reportedly invested more than 500 million kyat (US $500,000) into his team this year, according to a source at the Myanmar Football Federation.
Some observers questioned how a Burmese soccer club could expect to recoup such a large investment.

Tay Za told the First Eleven journal that he will pay higher salaries to some players this year, and he plans to distribute 10,000 free jerseys. He also plans to offer free transportation for fans who wish to attend games in Mandalay, about 383 miles north of Rangoon.

Yangon United Club has been scheduled to play a friendly match with Thailand Port FC, Pattaya United and Tero Sasana FC on August 20, 24 and 26 in Thailand. The team will fly in sports reporters from Burma to cover the match.

According to soccermyanmar, an online magazine, Sai Khin Maung Aye, the CEO of Yangon United, said the match against Tero Sasana FC has been canceled because the Thai club will begin league competition in August.

After the league competition in Burma, promising youth players will be sent to Tero Sasana FC of Thailand to improve their skills, according to soccer sources.

Tero Sasana FC’s managing director, Brian Marcar, is American-Burmese, according to sport journalists in Burma.

Salaries for players with Yangon United FC reportedly range from $200 to $1,200 a month. Each game’s best performer is awarded a Man of the Match award of 500,000 kyat ($500).

The president of the club, Pyae Phyo Tay Za, the son of Tay Za, said a shop selling football club products will open soon on Sule Road at Rangoon.

The new professional clubs were formed with a minimum investment of 200 million kyat ($180,000). Some clubs have spent more than 1,000 million kyat ($900,000) to cover costs of salaries, players’ contract fees, transportation, advertising and equipment, according to local sports journalists.

Irrawaddy.org

ဒီေကဘီေအ ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီးေစာခ်စ္သူ လုပ္ႀကံခံရ ရန္ကုန္တြင္ ေဆးကုသမႈ ခံယူ by Khitpyaing

တိုးတက္ေသာဗုဒၵဘာသာကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားတပ္မေတာ္ (ဒီေကဘီေအ) ၉၉၉ တပ္မဟာအေျခခ် ဗ်ဴဟာမႉး ဗိုလ္မႉးႀကီး ေစာခ်စ္သူသည္ ေအာက္လက္ငယ္သားမ်ား၏လုပ္ႀကံမႈခံရ၍ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ေဆးကုသမႈ ခံယူေနရသည္ဟု ဒီေကဘီေအႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သည့္ ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္ တဦးက ေျပာသည္။၎က “ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ တပ္မဟာ(၇) ထိုးစစ္ကအျပန္မွာ ၉၉၉ တပ္ရင္း (၇) က တပ္ရင္းမႉး ဗိုလ္စံၿပံဳး (ဆန္ျပဳတ္) လုပ္ႀကံခံရတဲ့ကိစၥအပါအ၀င္ အျခားကိစၥေတြေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်စ္သူလုပ္ႀကံခံရတယ္လို႔ သိရတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္ကေန ႏိုင္ငံျခားထိ သြားကုဖို႔လုပ္ေနၾကတယ္။ အေျခအေနအေတာ္ဆိုးတယ္လို႔ သိရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ဒီေကဘီေအ ၉၉၉ အေျခခ်ဗ်ဴဟာ႐ံုးစိုက္ရာ ျမ၀တီခ႐ိုင္ ေရႊကုကၠိဳရြာတြင္ ေနထိုင္သူတဦးက “ဒီကိစၥဟုတ္ပါတယ္၊ သတင္းပိတ္ထားတယ္၊ ခရီးသြားတယ္လို႔ေျပာတယ္၊ ျဖစ္တာ ဗိုလ္ဆန္ျပဳတ္ အသုဘအၿပီး ဇြန္လကုန္ေလာက္မွာျဖစ္တာ” ဟု ေျပာသည္။ continue
http://www.khitpyaing.org/news/Aug09/190809a.php

Simmering Under Ashes- a collection of essays, poems, stories and articles written by Burmese journalists, writers and ordinary people. Published to commemorate both the 21st anniversary of the pro-democracy protests of 8 August 1988

and the 20th year since Aung San Suu Kyi was first imprisoned, it celebrates the struggle for freedom in Burma. It also calls attention to the complicity or indifference of the international community. These contributions tell us of the catastrophic human cost and absolute cruelty of the regime. They also remind us that we are all diminished by the continued denial of freedom to the people of Burma.

The booklet, Simmering Under Ashes (SUA), has been produced by the Article 19(*1) organisation to mark the 21st anniversary of the 8-8-88 uprising. Launched on 8th August 2009, the publication contains poems, articles and presentations given over recent years by writers from Burma’s many ethnic groups on a range of key topics: Pro-Democracy Movement, Refugees and Exiles, Women, and Environment. Readers of Burma Digest will recognise many familiar names from our regular contributors. The title of the booklet comes from Zarganar, during an interview with Mizzima regarding the people’s feelings after the violent suppression of 2007.

Whilst we might have expected the works to be filled with anger and hatred of the regime, we find that they are all filled with a great sense of justice (or rather the injustice of the regime’s actions) and humanity; compassion for the suffering of people in Burma at the hands of the regime and their acolytes. What also shines forth is the strength of hope and the conviction that the future holds the promise of a better life; democracy and liberty, where the people of Burma can ‘bathe in the light of freedom’.

The articles in this booklet are worth reading (or re-reading) to remind ourselves of the scope of the task ahead and the affirmative attitudes that will bring about positive change. As one writer asks us; “Enjoy your freedom. Don’t be careless with it.”

Supreme Leader Than Shwe might be working his bottom off to convince the world that he, after killing several thousand monks and people, is actually a true Buddhist but his cunning efforts seemed to have ended up in the worst possible place for any highly honoured man – the girls toilet.

Girls On Top
Translated by Nay Chiu
On the morning of Friday 14 August, the Year 9 girls of No 8, State Girls’ High School, Mandalay were summoned to the hall where they were all given stern warning by the head, for sticking letters containing less than respectful writing about the country’s Supreme Leader, General Than Shwe.“ The Royal Great Granddad “ (sarcastic way to call someone who is powerful) , “ Dog Shit” , “Hope you can still rule from your own coffin” , etc. were written on papers, then stuck on the toilet walls.
http://burmese.dvb.no/news.php?id=8249

http://jegsburma.blogspot.com/2009/08/girls-on-top.html

Humanitarian Community in Myanmar reaffirm their commitment to bringing positive changes to the lives of the people -press

And some of Aid workers into prison and they NOT released yet!!!!!! famoust of all Ko Zarganar
————————————————————————

Media Release

Humanitarian Community in Myanmar reaffirm their commitment

to bringing positive changes to the lives of the people

Yangon, 19 August 2009 – At its inaugural commemoration of World Humanitarian Day today, the humanitarian aid community in Myanmar gathered together in Yangon, to pay tribute to their colleagues across the world who had lost their lives and had endured hardship and personal sacrifice to help those in need of help. They also paid tribute to the dedication of their colleagues in Myanmar, especially those who for the past 16 months since Cyclone Nargis, have been working hard in post-Nargis relief and recovery efforts.

“Especially in the immediate aftermath of the cyclone, in spite of some of you suffering from personal loss and tragedy, you have been working beyond the call of duty to support the people in greater need in the cyclone-affected areas,” said Mr. Bishow Parajuli, United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator and the Chair of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee.

The vital role that civil society plays in responding to humanitarian crises was underscored both by the Executive Director of Myanmar Red Cross Society, U Khin Maung Hla and the Chair of the Myanmar NGO Network, Dr. Myo Thant Tyn, who spoke from experiences of the humanitarian efforts after Cyclone Nargis.

“Unless we involve communities and the groups that form within them in identifying needs, implementing programmes, learning and reflecting about what works well and what does not work, programmes are not likely to succeed. Even worse, they have the potential to cause more harm than good,” he said.

The occasion was also “an opportunity to reiterate the partnership that had been built through the humanitarian efforts in response to Cyclone Nargis – which included good cooperation between the Government, ASEAN, donors the UN, INGOs, local NGOs and the community,” said Mr. Parajuli .

“Let us unite and continue our strong partnership to address these critical needs in the cyclone-affected areas. The affected population is awaiting our action to improve their lives,” said Dr. Niken Gandini, who spoke on behalf of the Special Envoy of the ASEAN Secretary-General for post-Nargis Recovery in Myanmar.

Through partnership built on mutual trust, the humanitarian community here in Myanmar has proven its ability to effectively respond and deliver humanitarian assistance in close collaboration and coordination with Government authorities at all levels to the vulnerable people in their time of need.
Such partnership would need to continue to be strengthened, not only in the delta, but also in other parts of the country.
UNIC Yangon

BURMA: Two journalists imprisoned for helping cyclone victims visit international aid groups-
http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2009/3136/

95 documented migrant workers arrested in Phuket

18.August
At about 07:00 this morning, Phuket police arrested 95 migrant Burmese workers at a construction site after receiving phone report from their employer.
These workers were on strike because of general dissatisfaction about their working conditions. Among the reasons reported by workers were; irregular payment, termination of the credit system for buying food, forced overtime work and insufficient drinking water.
Quoting a police officer from Phuket Police station, Ms. Manlika Ketthisong, a legal aid officer from Grassroots Human Rights Education and Development committee (FED), said that someone speaking Thai reported to the police that these workers were undocumented and then the police went to the worksite to arrest them. After they found out that 77 of them had work permits, they were released. The remaining 18 who could not produce a work permit card were detained and will be processed according to the immigration act procedure. One of the retained workers, a female worker, explained to GHRE/FED Director Htoo Chit that all 18 of them have paid for the work permit card and they have receipts with them.
Htoo Chit promised them that GHRE/FED would help in their legal case to work for their immediate release as best as he can in collaboration with Action Network for Migrants, a regional migrant assistance organization. According to Maung Oo, one of the 77 workers released this morning, Burmese workers who could speak Thai fluently and who helped with translation between police and workers were among the retained group for charges of leading the strike. One of them has a new born baby who is only 4 months old. His wife is recovering from a caesarean. The employer is asking them to leave the worksite but they are having a hard time as she is still recovering and her husband is in prison and they have no place to stay. Migrant workers only have shelter when they have an employer to work for and a worksite to live at.
This incident happened at a construction site close to the hotel where the ASEAN ministerial meeting took place earlier this month.
http://www.ghre.org/en/