Day: October 22, 2009
U2 Walk On: A last request from the late Burmese freedom fighter, U Han Lin
By Jeffrey Hellmann
Electricity mysteriously returns to villages in Mon and Karen States
Thu 22 Oct 2009, IMNA, Rai Maraoh
After months without regular electricity, the residents of many villages in Mon State and Karen State report that they have, without any prior warning from the Burmese government, enjoyed a constant supply of power for the past month.
“Now the electricity comes regularly, but we don’t know why? The electricity has come before but never for a long time, just for a minute. Now the electricity comes for a long time (sometimes for the whole day, sometimes it is cut off for 5 minutes or something like that), and regularly,” said a villager who lives in Hneepadaw village in Mudon Township.
IMNA’s story from May 11th of this year described the severity the power outages in Southern Burma. Near the close of 2008, villages in the Mudon Township area only had electricity for 3 days a month, and on those days electricity only ran for a two-hour period. University student protests in Moulmein this March over a lack of electricity during spring exams resulted in a 2-month block of fairly steady electricity in the city area, but by the middle of May, the Burmese government once again plunged the city into darkness, along with the rest of Mon State. The renewal of steady electricity without warning in many areas of Mon and Karen States this month has thus come as an extremely pleasant surprise. Continue reading “Electricity mysteriously returns to villages in Mon and Karen States”
ENC တုိင္းရင္းသားလူမ
ေကာင္းဝါ(ေအာက္တုိဘာ-၂၂)။ ။ စက္တင္ဘာလကုန္ပုိင္းက အျငင္းပြားစရာျဖစ္ခဲ့ၾကေသာ ENC တုိင္းရင္းသား လူမ်ဳိးမ်ားေကာင္စီသည္ ဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္အဖြဲ႔ သုံးလပတ္ပုံမွန္အစည္းအေဝး က်င္းပေနေၾကာင္း သတင္း ရ႐ွိခဲ့သည္။
ယင္းအစည္းအေဝးကုိ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ၊ ခ်င္းမုိင္ၿမဳိ႕၌ ယမန္ေန႔က စတင္ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး တုိင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔အသီးသီးမွ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ၂၀ ဦးခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ေနေၾကာင္း ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းခ်က္အရ သိရသည္။
ENC သဘာပတိအဖြဲ႔ဝင္တစ္ဦးျဖစ္သူ မြန္တုိင္းရင္းသား ႏုိင္စြမ္းထုမ္က “ENCအတြင္းေရးမႉးကေန မစၥတာဂ်င္ ဝက္ဘ္ဆီ ပုိ႔တဲ့စာအေၾကာင္းကိစၥလည္းပါတယ္၊ ဒီလုိမ်က္ႏွာခ်င္းဆုိင္ ေဆြးေႏြးလုိက္ၾကေတာ့ အျမင္ ႐ွင္းသြားၾကတာေပါ့၊ ေစတနာမွန္က အရင္းခံေပၚလာပါတယ္၊ အခုေတြ႔ျမင္ခဲ့တဲ့ အားနည္းခ်က္ေတြကုိ ျပင္လုိက္ရင္ လုပ္နည္းလုပ္ဟန္ေတြ မွန္ကန္လာပါလိမ့္မယ္” ဟု ေကာင္းဝါသတင္းဌာနႏွင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ ေမးျမန္းခ်က္ တစ္ရပ္တြင္ ထည့္သြင္းေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။
ယခုက်င္းပဆဲ ဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္အဖြဲ႔ သုံးလပတ္ပုံမွန္အစည္းအေဝးကုိ ၅ ရက္ခန္႔ ၾကာျမင့္ႏုိင္သည္ဟုခန္႔မွန္း ထားၾကသည္။ အစည္းအေဝးၿပီးေျမာက္သည့္အခါ ေၾကညာခ်က္တစ္ရပ္ထုတ္ျပန္ဖြယ္႐ွိသည္ဟု ယူဆႏုိင္သည္။ Continue reading “ENC တုိင္းရင္းသားလူမ”
Village secretary killed
by Myo Gyi
Thursday, 22 October 2009 19:45
Ruili (Mizzima) – A village secretary in Nam Hkam town in Northern Shan State was shot dead by an unknown gunman on October 17. The killer is still at large.
Kyaw Nyunt (45) secretary of Noung Hkam village was shot dead after he attended a village meeting.
“It was at about 10 p.m. (local time) when he was shot dead. He was coming out of the meeting. He died on the spot and was later taken to Nam Hkam hospital. He has since been buried,” a local villager told Mizzima.
The villager said, though authorities have questioned people they have not been able to arrest the killer.
Earlier in September, Kyaw Nyunt was summoned by the authorities and was interrogated on charges of illegally smuggling rice. He was later appointed secretary of the village.
Burmese Army Imparts Training To NDA-K Soldiers
Written by KNG
Thursday, 22 October 2009 18:09
Troops of the New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K), a Kachin ceasefire group, is being imparted military training by the Burmese Army since early October. This is the first step towards transforming into the Border Guard Force under the aegis of the Burmese Army, said NDA-K sources.
NDA-K soldiers, specially selected from different battalions are being imparted military training at No. 7 Military Higher Training School based in Pyindaung near Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, said NDA-K sources.
This is the first time in the group’s 20-year old ceasefire history that the NDA-K, the former 101st Army Division of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), is being directly trained by the Burmese military, sources close to NDA-K said.Half the number of Burmese soldiers in Infantry Battalion No. 236 based in Bhamo in Kachin State was shifted to the NDA-K’s headquarters in Pangwah near the Sino-Burma border east of Kachin State over two weeks ago to help NDA-K transform to BGF. Continue reading “Burmese Army Imparts Training To NDA-K Soldiers”
Can China tame the Burmese junta?
ForeignPolicy.com
October 22, 2009
The Obama administration’s new policy toward Burma follows a strategy of mixing engagement and pressure, much as the administration is attempting in other thorny areas of foreign policy such as Iran, Sudan, and North Korea, to name a few.
Also like those examples, the new Burma policy will depend somewhat on cooperation from other countries that have significant involvement and interests there. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell traveled to China last week and asked senior Chinese leaders to “play a positive role” in promoting reform in Burma.
“We will need to work with friends and partners to achieve our goals, including stepped up dialogue and interactions with countries such as China and India that have traditionally close relationships with Burma’s military leaders,” Campbell testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday morning.
Campbell will travel to Burma with his deputy Scot Marciel in the coming weeks, where he plans to meet with regime leaders, prodemocracy advocates, and he might even sit down imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a State Department official confirmed.
The committee’s ranking Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL, a skeptic of engaging Burma’s military junta, pointed out in the hearing that China been so far unwilling or unable to prevent the Burmese junta from waging war on ethnic minority militias, a major source of humanitarian strife and a problem for Chinese border areas, where the refugees from such fighting typically flee.
Moreover, the Chinese seem to be already preparing for more bloodshed before next year’s Burmese elections, she pointed out, calling into question again the Obama administration’s contention that China can or would be helpful on this issue.
“China has reportedly begun construction of refugee camps on the Burmese border in anticipation of a pre-election military offensive by the military junta against ethnic armed militias,” Ros-Lehtinen said to Campbell, “If these militias reject the regime’s demands to be incorporated into a border guard force and a bloodbath ensues, how will this impact our new policy of engagement with this bloodthirsty regime?”
Campbell could only respond that the U.S. deplores military actions against ethnic groups inside Burma and that he has asked the Chinese to urge restraint in their dealings with the junta.
“The truth is, as you well know, that some of these military actions are not on the horizon” he testified. “They’ve already occurred.”
Leaders of Burma’s National League for Democracy responding to requests on Thursday by party members to call a General Assembly said they are not in a position to call a nation-wide meeting due to the current political restrictions imposed on the party.
Restrictions on NLD obstacle to General Assembly
New Delhi (Mizzima) – Leaders of Burma’s National League for Democracy responding to requests on Thursday by party members to call a General Assembly said they are not in a position to call a nation-wide meeting due to the current political restrictions imposed on the party.
The NLD, in a statement, said while it understands the need for a General Assembly in order to reform and strengthen the Central Committee and Central Executive Committee of the party, since party General Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi and Vice-Chairman Tin Oo are detained and no other branch offices across the country are allowed to function, it is not possible now to convene the assembly.
In September, several members of branch NLD offices in various states and divisions made renewed demands to the Central Executive Committee to convene a General Assembly and urged it to reform the party leadership by reconstituting the Central Committee, most of whose members are under detention or had died.
NLD members of at least 25 townships in Mandalay, Pegu, Magwe and Rangoon division have demanded that the CEC convene the Assembly and implement party reformation by filling in places in the CC and CEC, whose members are unable to perform their functions due to various reasons including incarceration and deaths.
But the party’s statement on Thursday said, “The Central Executive Committee will discuss the issue when the CEC meets Aung San Suu Kyi or will decide when necessary, when the government announces the party registration laws.”
Khin Maung Swe, a CEC member of the NLD told Mizzima that technically it is not viable for the NLD to convene a General Assembly as the party’s branch offices have been closed down, members restricted from organizing party activities and several key leaders being in detention. Continue reading “Leaders of Burma’s National League for Democracy responding to requests on Thursday by party members to call a General Assembly said they are not in a position to call a nation-wide meeting due to the current political restrictions imposed on the party.”
democracy for burma 
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