Refugee Organizations and the UNHCR held meeting

21 August 2009, Kuala Lumpur

Ms. Latchimi from the UNHCR office initiated the meeting and followed by Mr. Elan Vernon (Chief of Mission), and delivered about Social Protection. He said to all participants, “The reason why we call you to attend a meeting with us is that we want to find a new method which would be helpful and benefit for your communities. He also distinguished that how much they wanted to help all refugees in Malaysia, adding they had been in touch with refugee organizations for long time but they still wanted to improve relationship between refugee organizations and the UNHCR.

He also described relating to refugee status in Malaysia that the refugees were in risky-security, no right to employ, housing, education and health. Refugees were isolated across the urban landscape, often group in small enclaves.

Refugee Organizations and the UNHCR held meeting

“I don’t know why they [security guards] didn’t stop me,” Yettaw said in a telephone interview with Newsweek magazine. “The man with the AK-47 shook my hand and let me in.”

Yettaw Says Guards Let Him Enter Suu Kyi Compound
John Yettaw, the American man who made international headlines after he swam to the lakeside home of detained Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in May, said in an interview published on Friday that guards did nothing to prevent him from entering her compound.

“I don’t know why they [security guards] didn’t stop me,” Yettaw said in a telephone interview with Newsweek magazine. “The man with the AK-47 shook my hand and let me in.”

In his first public statement on the circumstances of his visit to Suu Kyi’s home since leaving Burma, Yettaw appeared to lend credence to suspicions that the incident was part of an effort by the Burmese junta to extend Suu Kyi’s detention, which was due to end just weeks after Yettaw’s sudden appearance on the scene.

Although Yettaw declined to explain why he decided to return to Suu Kyi’s home after an earlier intrusion last November, during which her live-in aides told him to leave, the Newsweek report cites a Western diplomatic source who said that he may have been lured back by agents posing as members of her political party.

The source, citing intelligence reports, said that around a week before Yettaw’s second swim, two men claiming to be members of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy allegedly approached him in the Thai border town of Mae Sot and told him that Suu Kyi was ready to meet him.

According to the source, the intelligence reports also showed that senior Burmese officials had been instructed to find a pretext to keep Suu Kyi incarcerated as her May 27 release date approached.

On August 11, she was found guilty of violating the terms of her house arrest for allowing Yettaw to stay at her home overnight. She was sentenced to a further 18 months under house arrest—long enough to prevent her participating in elections slated for next year.

Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit

Sangha-454 2009

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Burma’s Censor Board has relaxed its stringent rules and allowed two Rangoon based weekly journals to quote the spokesman of the main opposition party the ‘National League for Democracy’ (NLD).

by Nem Davies
Friday, 21 August 2009 19:43

New Delhi (Mizzima) – Burma’s Censor Board has relaxed its stringent rules and allowed two Rangoon based weekly journals to quote the spokesman of the main opposition party the ‘National League for Democracy’ (NLD).

The latest issues of ‘The Voice’ and ‘7 Days’ could cover the news of Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who is serving a suspended one and-a-half year prison sentence at her home by quoting party spokesman Nyan Win.

“Previously leave alone quoting him, we could not mention even his name in our publications. It is significant to see the censor board allowing us to cover news by quoting the NLD spokesman,” an editor of a weekly journal told Mizzima.

The ‘7 Days’ weekly journal in its latest issue carried an interview by her lawyer and party spokesman Nyan Win after he visited her house a day after the special court pronounced the verdict on her trial.

“I bought and gave two journal copies to her. We could give them to her now. She can also receive guests. So we talked with her today for about an hour, Suu Kyi’s lawyer Nyan Win said,” the journal reported.

Similarly ‘The Voice’ covered the same news with the headline ‘Despite of arriving back at her home, ongoing house renovation allowed’ by quoting Nyan Win.

The inside pages had news of the verdict, news of the renovation of her house, action taken against security personnel deployed at her residence for security lapses and Suu Kyi’s release by 2011.

The junta allowed the journalists to visit the court and allowed them to cover the trial but did not allow it to be printed in their publications. One of the censored news, ’75-minutes long court pronouncement of judgment’ has been published in ‘The Voice’ now.

august-report-by-maj-aung-lynn-htut by photayokeking

http://www.photayokeking.org/Articlesmm/august-report-by-maj-aung-lynn-htut.html

Global Action for Burma GAB Issues the Press Statement Regarding the Juntas Newspaper Article Attack-21.08

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Dr ေက်ာ္ၫြန္႔၊ KNU မွ ေစာသမိန္ထြန္း၊ NMSP အတြင္းေရးမႉး ႏုိင္ဟံသာ၊ ABSDF ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ပါဝင္ၾက သည္ဟု ဆုိထားပါသည္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ဒီမုိကေရစီပန္းတုိင္လႈပ္႐ွားမႈအဖြဲ႔ ဆုိသည္မွာ DAB အတြင္းေရးမႉး
Dr ေက်ာ္ၫြန္႔၊ KNU မွ ေစာသမိန္ထြန္း၊ NMSP အတြင္းေရးမႉး ႏုိင္ဟံသာ၊ ABSDF ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ပါဝင္ၾက သည္ဟု ဆုိထားပါသည္။

Kaowao
ၾသဂုတ္၂၁ ၊၂၀၀၉။

စံခလပူရီ(ၾသဂုတ္- ၂၁)။ ။ မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉး ႏုိင္ဟံသာအား ရယကမ်ားထံ စစ္အစုိးရ၏ ကန္႔သန္႔အဆင့္ျဖင့္ ညႊန္ၾကားစာတစ္ေစာင္တြင္ ထည့္သြင္းေဖၚျပခဲ့သည္ကုိ ေတြ႔႐ွိခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီႏုိင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးတာဝန္ခံ ႏုိင္ေအာင္မင္း ေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။

မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီ ဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ ႏုိင္ေအာင္မင္း၊ ဒုတာဝန္ခံ ႏုိင္ဟံသာဗြန္ခုိင္၊ လြတ္လပ္ေသာမြန္သတင္း ေအဂ်င္စီ IMNA ႏွင့္ ေကာင္းဝါသတင္းဌာန Kaowao Newsgroup အယ္ဒီတာတုိ႔ ယမန္ေန႔ညေန ၆ နာရီက စံခလပူရီ႐ွိ မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီႏုိင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရး႐ုံး၌ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတစ္ရပ္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ရာတြင္ ႏုိင္ေအာင္မင္း က ထည့္သြင္းေျပာၾကားခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ continue

thawthikho

Sangkhlaburi – Karen guerrillas ambushed a military convoy of the Burmese Army and Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA)

According to a liaison officer from the Karen National Liberation Army, a military wing of the KNU, troops from Light Infantry Battalion No. 356 led by Lt. Col Zeya Win was attacked by the Karen near Zee Hnapin village on August 11, 2009. Two Burmese Army soldiers were killed and another was seriously injured. LIB No. 356 is active along the motor road of Thanbyu Zayat in Mon State and the Three Pagodas Pass Thai-Burma border town.

Another troop battalion LIB No. 283 was also attacked by the KNLA guerrillas. The ambush on August 10 occurred near Lut Shan village located between Thanbyu Zayat and Anan Kwin. The troops were on route to replace LIB No. 356’s position.

The Burmese Army and DKBA joint forces have been launching a military offensive against the Karen National Union (KNU) along the border area capturing some bases under the control of the KNLA Battalion No.201.

A check-point officer from the New Mon State Party said: “It would be difficult to launch an offensive against the KNU during the rainy season. The roads are bogged down and it is difficult to find enough food for the men because the local villagers do not have enough food for themselves.”

About seventy soldiers and thirty porters led by Saw Naw-Taya of DKBA Battalion No. 907, who have just arrived at the Three Pagodas Pass, have ordered local village headmen to provide their troops with rice.

Meanwhile, many villagers have fled from their village to avoid being press-ganged into portering for the BA. A Karen villager who recently arrived at Three Pagodas Pass said the BA is asking every villager on their way for one basket of rice or 10000 Kyats.

The KNU has changed its military tactics from a war of position to a war of movement launching guerrilla offensives to counter the Burmese Army into their areas. The Burmese Army offensive is targeting several camps of the KNU which has been waging the world’s longest running civil war. The Karen have been fighting for autonomy since Burma gained independence in 1948 and is rarely reported in the international media.
Kaowao