1 October (1999), Burmese Embassy Siege, Bangkok, Thailand. Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors:
Myint Thein, Ye Thiha, Hla Myint, Johnny and Swe Min.
1 October (2008), death in custody, Ko Aung Moe Win, NLD youth, Natmauk, Magwe
3 October, Abhidhamma Day (according to lunar calendar Thadingyut Full Moon Day)
3 October (2005), death in custody at Police Station, U Htay Lwin, NLD, Aungmyae Thazon, Mandalay
Day: October 2, 2009
Dr. Kyi May Kaung addresses Senator Webb
This is a letter to Senator Webb, expressing disappointment on Wednesday’s Congressional US Policy Hearing, from a respected friend, Dr Kyi May Kaung. To many of you, she may require no introduction – but to the rest of you, read on and you will learn.
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Sometimes we must interfere. . . There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention . . . writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the left and by the right.” Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1986, Oslo.
Senator Webb,
I was disappointed by your Hearing yesterday, which I saw as rather one-sided. No representatives of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, her lawyer Jared Genser, representatives of the National League for Democracy, or the NCGUB (the Exile Government, elected to their constituencies in Burma in the 1990 elections), Burmese refugees and dissidents, Burmese monk survivors of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, the US Campaign for Burma, scholars who have not advocated removing sanctions, representatives of major non-profits working for change in Burma, other stakeholders or known strong supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein or Mitch McConnell were present. Here is Sen. McConnell’s “two tests for the new US policy from his website: http://mcconnell.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=318402&start=1
I request that you place this Statement on the official record of the Hearing of September 30th, 2009. Continue reading “Dr. Kyi May Kaung addresses Senator Webb”
Letter to Senator Webb from Ethnic Nationalities CouncilShare
Letter to Senator Webb from Ethnic Nationalities CouncilShare
Today at 16:38
Oct 1st, 2009
P. O. Box – 49, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, 50202, THAILAND
Email: , Website: http://www.encburma.org
Date: 28th September, 2009
Dear Senator Webb,
Thank you for initiating a hearing on the impact and effectiveness of U.S. policy toward Burma. We are especially encouraged by your intention to examine how Burma’s long history of internal turmoil and ethnic conflicts has affected the development of democracy. This issue is, we believe, the key to building a sustainable democracy in Burma.
The Burmese military first seized power in 1962 precisely because it did not agree with the manner in which it was proposed that the ethnic conflicts be ended. At that time, the democratically-elected government of U Nu had agreed to the demand of the ethnic states to amend the constitution. They wanted a federal system of government instead of a centralized one.
It is the view of the Ethnic Nationalities Council (ENC) that democracy cannot flourish in Burma without resolving the question of how its constituent states relate to each other and to the national government. The military, democracy advocates and the ethnic nationalities need to agree on their vision for a future Burma. If this question is not resolved, the conflicts will continue and the development of democracy in Burma will be seriously hindered.
For the past twenty years, the conversation on US policy has been dominated by the issue of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the 1990 elections. While these are crucial matters, the equally important issue that lies at the heart of Burma’s problem, has been largely ignored. The complex problem of governing one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world needs to be addressed.
The ethnic nationalities together make up 30-40% of the total population of Burma. The seven ethnic states bordering Bangladesh, India, China, Laos and Thailand make up 60% of the national territory. Many of the ethnic nationalities can also be found in large numbers in at least five of the seven administrative divisions of Burma. Furthermore, their close cousins can also be found numbering tens of millions across the borders in all the neighbouring countries. Continue reading “Letter to Senator Webb from Ethnic Nationalities CouncilShare”
The Saffron March (Revolution on the Streets of Yangon) By Salai Z T Lian
By Salai Z T Lian
Chinland Guardian
29 September 2008
For the thirsty Saffron Revolutionists of peace,
Sleep is uneasy
On the Streets of Yangon
On the 18th of September, they start to
March for peace, freedom and democracy
On the Streets of Yangon
The Saffron Revolutionists march meekly to bring democracy
In the rain, but the brutal Monsters threaten them
On the Streets of Yangon
The Monsters threaten to kill the innocent
But the Saffron Revolutionists gracefully pray
For peace, freedom and democracy
On the flooding Streets of Yangon
On the 22nd of September, the Icon of the Burmese appears from her house
With tears to give respect
To those who march for peace, freedom and democracy
On the University Avenue Road
Old men and women shed thankful tears
Men also breathe deeply
The children clap their hands with hope and happiness
When they see the marching
But the Monsters begin arresting and killing the people
While the Revolutionists march without fear
On the Streets of Yangon Continue reading “The Saffron March (Revolution on the Streets of Yangon) By Salai Z T Lian”
Security tightens during Moulmein University examinations
Fri 02 Oct 2009, IMNA,
Burmese authorities in tightened security last week during the Moulmein University student examinations. Government police trucks patrolled the school twice a day.
The security at the Moulmein University has been tighter since the since exams started on September 18th; according to students from Moulmein town, police continue to patrol the school’s campus now that the first wave of exams are over and the exams taken by out-of-town students have commenced.
A group of Moulmein University students who finished their exams on September 25 were later involved in a confrontation with two members of the Moulmein police department that same night.
“On September 25, about 100 students went around the city celebrating, the students didn’t do anything, however two police patrol were following and watching them. It was like the police worried that the students would do something “ said a Moulmein resident who saw the police truck that followed the students.
When a group of students arrived at Moulmein view point quarter on the outskirts of the city, the police who had been following the group reportedly beat some students while the students were talking to each other.
“Two police truck followed us and they asked why we drove motorbikes with the exhaust pipes open, and why we traveled around the city with such loud voices. After that the police beat two of our friends. We didn’t want any trouble, so we left quickly,” said a member of the group.
A monk from Moulmein city alleges that since the final day of the student’s exam coincided with the anniversary of 2007’s “Saffron Revolution”, the authorities in Moulmein city tightened police security because they feared that the students would join with the city’s monks and organize a protest; Moulmein University students and Moulmein city monks organized together during the original protest two years ago.
information 1.october by Karenunited
ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၁ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ တိုက္ပြဲသတင္း
တပ္မဟာ (၂) ေတာင္ငူခရိုင္
၂၈/ ၉/ ၀၉- ဖေလးဆာလို စခန္းရိွ စကခ (၅)၊ ခမရ (၅၄၄) မွစခန္းျခံစည္းရိုး
ေဆာက္ရန္ ၀ါးအလံုး (၄၀) ပို႔ေပးရန္ ေဒသခံရြာသားမ်ားကိုအတင္းအားဓမၼေစ
ခိုင္းခဲ့ပါသည္။
၂၉/၉/ ၀၉- ၁၀း၂၅ ခ်ိန္ ထီညားပယ္လိုစခန္းနား ရန္သူကိုပစ္ခတ္ခဲ့သျဖင့္ ရန္
သူတစ္ဦးဒဏ္ရာရ။
တစ္ရက္ထဲ၂၂း၁၅ ခ်ိန္ ရန္သူကို ကလိုးမီးဒဲ စခန္းနားမွာပစ္ခတ္သျဖင့္ ရန္သူ
ဖက္မွတစ္ဦး ဒဏ္ရာရ။
တပ္ရင္း(၂၀၁)
၂၇/၉/ ၀၉- ၁၄း၀၀ ခ်ိန္ သစ္ဆင္ေက်ာင္းနားမွာ DKBA ႏွင့္ ရင္ဆိုင္ပစ္ခတ္မွု
ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ ရန္သူဖက္မွတစ္ေယာက္ဒဏ္ရာရ။
တစ္ရက္ထဲ ၁၆း၀၀ ခ်ိန္တြင္ရန္သူဖက္မွဒဏ္ရာရသူကိုျပန္ပို႔စဥ္ ထပ္မံရင္ဆိုင္
ပစ္ခတ္မွုျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ရန္သူဖက္မွ (၁) ဦးထပ္မံဒဏ္ရာရ။
တပ္မဟာ(၇) ဘားအံခရိုင္
၂၈/၉/ ၀၉ ၁၈း၁၄ ခ်ိန္ေမာ္ပယ္ခို နားမွာ DKBA ကိုပစ္ခတ္သျဖင့္ရန္သူ (၁) ဦး
ဒဏ္ရာရ။ ၁၉း၃၀ ခ်ိန္ ညာေဘာေခ်ာင္းနားမွာ ထပ္မံပစ္ခတ္သျဖင့္ ရန္သူဖက္
မွ (၁) ဦးထပ္မံဒစဏ္ရာရ။
၂၉/၉/၀၉- ၁၁း၃၀ ခ်ိန္ စီဖိုးခီး နားမွာ DKBA တစ္ဦးကို ပစ္ခတ္ဒဏ္ရာရေစခဲ့။
Lack of freedom of speech worsens the waste of talent in an impoverished country, writes new UK ambassador in Rangoon
Aung San Suu Kyi’s failed appeal symbolises Burma’s tragedy
At 10.45am today (local time), the Rangoon divisional court announced its decision on Aung San Suu Kyi’s appeal. The appeal was rejected. No one was surprised by this outcome, despite her legal team’s meticulously prepared arguments and public expressions of optimism ahead of the decision. The next stop is the supreme court, where it is difficult to imagine there will be a different outcome.
So Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest. More than 2,000 other prisoners of conscience are being held across the country. They all symbolise the tragedy of the country, in which freedom of speech is ruthlessly controlled.
But the tragedy actually goes deeper than this. Burma is chronically poor. Its education and health systems are hopelessly underfunded, leaving NGOs and the UN – supported by the UK and other donors’ contributions – to fill some of the gaps in services that government should be delivering. Its economy has fallen further and further behind its regional neighbours due to disastrous economic policies. And, just as Aung San Suu Kyi and her fellow political prisoners symbolise the waste of talent in the political sphere, the waste of talent in the economic and business fields is equally damaging. continue
Aung San Suu Kyi’s failed appeal symbolises Burma’s tragedy
Turning the bowl upside down 2nd
The Buddhist monks across Burma are boycotting the military personnel and their families due to ongoing abuses against Buddhist doctrine and clergy by the ruling military junta.
The Burmese monks have demanded the military junta to apologise the killing and insulting of monks and the religion not later than October 2, 2009 or face the consequences of excommunication starting on October 3, 2009 in Burma and around the world.
This is the second wave of the Saffron Revolution, that started in 2007.
Known as a Pattanikkujjana in Pali, a Buddhist monks’ boycott involves refusing morning alms from those said to have violated religious principles.
Burmese monks have declared a Pattanikkujjana against the military regime and their cronies twice in recent history: the first time in 1990 following the suppression of Aung San Suu Kyi and her opposition party, the National League for Democracy, after they had won a national election by a landslide; and again in 2007, the “Saffron Revolution,” when monks led demonstrations against price hikes in Rangoon that turned into a national uprising against the government.
The meaning of giving alms in Buddhism
In Buddhism, alms or almsgiving is the respect given by a lay Buddhist to a Buddhist monk, or nun, spiritually-developed person or other sentient being. It is not charity as presumed by Western interpreters. It is closer to a symbolic connection to the spiritual and to show humbleness and respect in the presence of normal society. The visible presence of monks and nuns is a stabilizing influence. The act of alms giving assists in connecting the human to the monk or nun and what he/she represents. As the Buddha has stated:
Householders & the homeless [monastics]
in mutual dependence
both reach the true Dhamma….
—Itivuttaka 4.7[1][note 2]
In Theravada Buddhism, monks (Pali: bhikkhus) and nuns go on a daily almsround (or pindacara) to collect food. This is often perceived as giving the laypeople the opportunity to make merit (Pali: puñña).
bestfriend.org
democracy for burma 
You must be logged in to post a comment.