Former air force officer sentenced to two years

by Phanida
Friday, 04 September 2009 22:35

Chaing Mai (Mizzima) – A retired air force Captain Zaw Nyunt, who demonstrated alone demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, while she was on trial, was sentenced to two years in prison by the Insein township court.

Zaw Nyunt (56) held aloft a poster saying “Saving Suu is Saving Burma” in front of Insein prison on May 28. He was sentenced today under Act No. 505 (B) of for agitating to destablise the country.

“The reading of the final verdict took about 20 minutes. It concluded at 11:45 a.m., said defence lawyer Maung Maung Latt.

In the trial, four police lieutenants from Insein Township and two ordinary civilians were produced as witnesses by the prosecutor.

“They said he frightened the public. They arrested him in two minutes flat. After arresting him at the back of the bazaar he shouted “Free Aung San Suu Kyi” only once. Many even didn’t realise what was happening. So, how did he destablise the country?” asked Maung Maung Latt.

A close associate who met Zaw Nyunt during the trial told Mizzima that two of his teeth were broken because of the beating he received from the police.

Zaw Nyunt, an English language teacher following retirement participated in the 1988 people’s movement and founded the Worker’s Solidarity Organization but the organization later was banned by the military junta.

Similarly, Htwe Thein, a member of NLD living in Shwepyithar Township, who was arrested while DASSK was facing tria, was sentenced to two years by the court on August 10.

The Thailand based Association of Assistance for Political Prisoners (AAPP) released a statement today saying that there are 2,211 political prisoners in Burma’s prisons.

Shwe Ohn and ‘Third Force’ to ally

by Nem Davies
Friday, 04 September 2009 22:25

New Delhi (Mizzima) – The veteran ethnic Shan politician Shwe Ohn, who will contest the forthcoming 2010 general elections, said that he would forge an alliance with a group of persons known as the Third Force.

His group the ‘Union Democracy Alliance’ formed in 2008 will have an alliance with the five-member group popularly known in Burma as the ‘Third Force’, which has adopted a policy of equidistance from both the military regime and the main opposition party the ‘National League for Democracy’. The new alliance group is now drafting and formulating its electoral policy.

“Yes, we will form it when the election law is enacted and announced. In future, it will be very difficult for us to work separately. We must amalgamate with the broad minded and cooperate,” Shwe Ohn who attended the historic Panlong Conference told Mizzima.

Those who join this new alliance are members of independent candidates’ network Nay Myo Wei, Htay Oo, Thein Tin Aung, Than Min Soe and Thaung Win.

“Now it’s 99 per cent sure. It’s difficult to contest as a lone party. There are only few people who dare speak and stand alone. So we decided to form an alliance,” Nay Myo Wei said.

“We do not have much difference with them in terms of policy. Anyone can join this alliance if the basic policy is the same as it allows a broad policy window. We have no plans to seize the top position as the founder. We are ready to follow any powerful leader who will join us,” Shwe Ohn said. Despite joining the alliance, he will maintain his own organization, he added.

FBR REPORT: More than 5,000 IDPs on the run from the Burma Army in Arakan State, 100,000 villagers suffer from food shortages

More than 5,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) are living a life on the run in the jungles along the border of Arakan State and in southern Chin State in western Burma, according to a recent report by FBR teams on the ground there. In addition to these 5,000 IDPs, more than 100,000 villagers are suffering from the ongoing famine that stretches through both northern Arakan State and into Chin State.
Isolated from most international aid providers, the people here have little access to medical aid, food relief, or any other assistance typically provided in crisis areas. Free Burma Ranger relief teams are one of the few providers of medical aid in this area. Since the onset of the food shortage, caused by the ongoing infestation of rats that attack the rice crops, the price of rice has shot up from 5 rupees per kilogram (about $0.10 USD) to 32 rupees/kg ($0.67USD). This crisis, relentless for the last three years, is leading to the unraveling of the social fabric of life, with increases in incidences of robbery and kidnapping as well as poaching of wild animals, including elephants, tigers, and buffalo. Additionally, our teams report an increase in the production of opium as the people become increasingly desperate for cash crops.
click on FBR Report

Looking For help!!!!!-Subject: Attention To: ChairMan of Kingfisher Airline Limited

Attention To:
Dr. Vijay Mallya
Chairman of The UB Group

Date: 30th August 2009

Dear Dr. Vijay Mallya,

I am Swe Naing Aung from Myanmar. I think you would remember me as Capt. Aung
Myint’s son. I am now writing this letter because it has been overstepping my
endurance. You, Kingfisher Airline (KFA) and Rishworth Aviation Limited
(RAL) made very unethically and inhumanly on my family, especially on my
mother and I.

I have asked my father’s PM Report for a long time on KFA human resource
manager, Mr. Jargdish Iyer, But until now, there is no response and did not
send PM Report. So, I am just wondering why?????

You, KFA and RAL collaborated and took my father’s left salary for over 1 year
and 8 months. My mother gave time until 22nd August 2009, but RAL did not
send my father’s left family because of your instigation. We have asked our
bank at 23rd August 2009, but RAL did not send my father’s salary. So, my
mother believe that RAL take my father’s left salary with unfairness,
unethical, inhumanity, racism, and discriminating on other nationality and
other nationality employee. So, my mother does not open her email anymore and
she will not accept any mail or contact with from KFA and RAL. Now, my mother
gives every right to do on that matter. I am the only person KFA and RAL
shall negotiate with.

First, you, KFA have send my father’s mortal remain back to Myanmar very fast
and your KFA employees promised me that KFA will settle all my family’s
entitlement. My family and I are very thanking to you, Dr. Vijay Mallya as
you are very kind and gentlemanly person. But after a month later, I have
known that you, Dr. Vijay Mallya, is just an ogre with prince mask. You
ordered your KFA employees to open my father’s room take everything without
informing my family.

RAL also took salary and coerced to sign the indemnity to release RAL after we
got salary.

Rebel kin on the run

As tensions between Wa and the Burma Army that has recently seized control of Kokang increased, families and relatives of the Wa leadership have been quietly taking refuge in neighboring countries, several sources on the border reported.

They however have not given specific information.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed report coming from a reliable Kokang rebel source says Peng Xiaoyi, the third daughter of Peng Jiasheng, deposed Kokang leader, was arrested on Wednesday (2 September) at the Mingladon airport along with her children. “She was about to leave the country,” said the source.

Wife of Peng’s younger brother Jiafu, who is living in Rangoon, was also detained the day before. “All their houses and assets in Rangoon, Mandalay, Pyin Oo Lwin (Maymyo) and elsewhere have been raided /searched and seized,” he said.

Overnight, Peng, who had been enjoying the status of “one of the national race leaders,” has become a drug runner after his rejection of Naypyitaw’s proposal to change his armed group a Burma Army-controlled border security force, leading the path to be followed by other ethnic leaders who, like himself, are continuing their rejection of the proposal.
shanland org

An online Chin language weekly magazine in Burma has been banned because of carrying news broadcast by the Washington based RFA Burmese news recently

The Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese news broadcast news about the outbreak of dengue in Thantlang Township, Chin state western Burma on August 15, which was in turn picked up from a story published by the Khonumthung News Group. The authorities banned the online weekly magazine called the Maivan Cazual.

“The Maivan Cazual weekly online magazine published that many children were suffering from dengue fever and some schools were closed in Thantlang Township as a result. An irate Mr. Chit Ko Ko, Chairman of Thantlang Town Peace and Development Council banned the magazine accusing it of disseminating news to the outside world,” said a source close to the online magazine group.

The RFA had not used Maivan Cazual magazine as the source regarding the news of dengue being rampant in Thantlang but had picked it up from Khonumthung News as its main source.

A Chin student in Mizoram said, “It clearly reveals that there is no human rights and freedom of the press in Burma. Such news coverage is beneficial for the countrymen. Prohibiting such magazines mean the authorities are doing an injustice.”

Maivan Cazual magazine started being published in January 2009 by a Thantlang youth group as an online internet website updated once a week.

In Burma, most newspapers, magazines and journals are controlled by the junta’s notorious censor board. All printed publications are censored by the board. The board bans newspapers or magazines at will. – Khonumthung News

Naypyitaw’s Negotiator Postpones Meeting With KIO Leaders

Thursday, 03 September 2009 21:40
Naypyitaw’s chief negotiator and Chief of Military Affairs Security (MAS) Lt-Gen Ye Myint today postponed a meeting with the leaders of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO). The meeting was meant to be held in the group’s Laiza headquarters in northern Burma, said KIO sources.

The meeting was originally slated for September 5 but it was rescheduled for September 6 (Sunday). This was because on September 5 a meeting was scheduled between KIO leaders and invited regional Kachin community leaders, according to KIO officials in Laiza.

KIO officials added, the urgent meeting was initiated by Lt-Gen Ye Myint, the ruling junta’s chief Naypyitaw negotiator to all ethnic ceasefire groups in the country but it was again postponed for several days by Lt-Gen Ye Myint himself. A fresh date for the meeting is yet to be announced.
If Lt-Gen Ye Myint meets KIO leaders, he will be the first senior military officer to meet them in the midst of escalating military tension between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the armed-wing of KIO and the Burmese Army, according to KIO sources.

KarenRefugees090109 vdo

Kaowao News KNU 04.09

စံခလပူရီ(စက္တင္ဘာ-၄)i။ – ။ ဒီေကဘီေအ ေစာေနာ္တယာ စစ္ေၾကာင္း ဘုရားသုံးဆူေဒသအနီး႐ွိ မဲကသာ႐ြာ သုိ႔ ဝင္ေရာက္လာၿပီးေနာက္ ယမန္ေန႔တြင္ နအဖစစ္ေၾကာင္းတစ္ေၾကာင္း ၄င္း႐ြာအနီးသုိ႔ ထပ္မံေရာက္႐ွိလာရာ ႐ြာသားအခ်ဳိ႕ အျခားေနရာမ်ားသုိ႔ မသိမသာေျပာင္းေ႐ြ႕ထြက္ခြာေနၾကေၾကာင္း ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္မႈမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

အဆုိပါ ဝင္ေရာက္လာသည့္ နအဖစစ္ေၾကာင္းမွာ ဘုရားသုံးဆူၿမဳိ႔၌ အေျချပဳလ်ွက္႐ွိေသာ ခမရ ၂၈၃ မွ ဗုိလ္ႀကီး ေအာင္သန္းဝင္း ဦးစီးအင္အား ၃၀ ခန္႔တပ္ခြဲတစ္ခြဲဟု ယူဆရေၾကာင္း၊ မဲကသာေခ်ာင္းတစ္ဝုိက္၌ လႈပ္႐ွားေနၾက ေၾကာင္း KNU တပ္မဟာ ၆ ေျပာခြင့္ရ အရာ႐ွိတစ္ဦးက ဆုိပါသည္။
continue
Kaowao News KNU

Exiled MP Vows to Reclaim Seat in a Junta-Free, Democratic Burma

Foreign Policy Journal, U.S.

In Burma’s 1990 election, National League for Democracy (NLD) candidate U Hla Oo won 62 percent of the vote in his home division of Pegu to secure a parliamentary seat; a victory that the country’s military junta refused to honor.

The 58 year-old was dismissed from parliament and declared a fugitive. Eventually he would seek safety along the Thai-Burma border and serve as Minister for Labour for the National Coalition Government for the Union of Burma (NCGUB), a government-in-exile.

Nearly two decades later, he still has a thorough recollection of events leading up to the election.

“Back in 1990, there were two groups of people: Burmese nationals who were not interested in politics, and the more educated who were more interested and active in politics,” U Hla Oo says. He wanted to remove apathy and encourage everyone to take an interest in politics.

U Hla Oo knew that educated people were aware of the military junta’s plans to rig the polls. But he told civilians that voting would bring change to a population still scarred from the military junta’s savage reaction to the 1988 People’s Uprising in which thousands of people were killed.

“Everyone [in the NLD] was pretty confident of winning. I spent four months travelling around Pegu Division, meeting people and asking them what issues mattered most.”

As each day passed, U Hla Oo continued to deliver the party’s motto: the NLD would deliver a democratic and accountable government accessible to all people. He met with farmers in remote villages, listening to their concerns and guaranteeing to make regular trips to consult with local villagers if elected.

“I trawled through mud-infested forests and deep rivers. Leeches clung to my skin. An opposition candidate for the National Unity Party did not bother showing up,” he says.

Like his fellow party candidates, U Hla Oo was not paid for his campaigning. However, he claims that candidates representing the military received 25 Burmese Kyats per day, with their campaign leaders received over five times this amount. The regime, he says, treated campaigning like a business.

Confirmation of victory came courtesy of townspeople who informed him of the result.

“My first reaction was ‘I’m in trouble’, because of the extra responsibilities associated with being elected to parliament,” U Hla Oo confesses.

Although the NLD won more than 80 per cent of all seats in parliament, the military refused to stand aside, leading to an emergency meeting amongst opposition politicians.

As the military secretly named their choices of senators, the NLD’s elected campaigns and party members met in Ghandi Hall with victorious independent MPs. Delegates debated the possibility of opening parliament in defiance of the junta’s orders. However, rumors circulated that the building was wired with explosives, and that the military would detonate bombs if any attempt to resume parliament was made.