Elements of a Nuclear Weapons Program Threat Assessment for Burma

by Roland Watson

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US-Burma meet: The ball is now squarely in junta’s court

SATURDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2009 10:25 BY: SAI WANSAI

During US President Obama’s Asian tour from 13th to 19th of November most attention will be given on issues regarding North Korea, Iran, the economy, climate change, energy, human rights, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Jeffrey Bader, senior director for East Asian affairs on the National Security Council.

While Obama Asian trip covers a wide range of issues, the main thrust will be on how to correct the trade imbalance between the U.S. and China.

According to an interview with Reuters this week, Obama was said to describe China as a “vital partner, as well as a competitor.”

He went on to warn of the “enormous strains” in relations between the world’s two most powerful nations if economic imbalances between them were not corrected.

Consequently, many people see these imbalances, which are excessive US consumption and borrowing, facilitated by China’s aggressive export strategy and purchases of U.S. debt, a major cause of the boom and subsequent bust in the global economy.

Obama is scheduled to spend time in Shanghai and Beijing from 15th to 18th , whereas his stops in Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul will be just only one day each.

Kaowao News-ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းအႏၲရာယ္႐ွိေနဆဲျဖစ္ၿပီး ကမၻာတတိယေနရာတြင္႐ွိ

ေျမျမွဳပ္မိုင္း႐ွိေနသည့္ေဒသမ်ား

ေကာင္းဝါ(ႏုိဝင္ဘာ-၁၃)။ ။ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ ဘန္ေကာက္အေျခစုိက္ အာ႐ွေဒသေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းတားဆီးမႈ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေလ့လာေရးအဖြဲ႔၏ ေလ့လာသုေတသနျပဳခ်က္တစ္ရပ္အရ ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသည္လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္၌ တတိယေနရာသုိ႔ ေရာက္႐ွိေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းတားဆီးမႈ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့လာေရးအဖြဲ႔၏ ယမန္ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ေပးပုိ႔ခဲ့ေသာ Landmine Monitor Report 2009 အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ကရင္၊ မြန္၊ ကရင္နီ၊ ႐ွမ္း၊ ခ်င္း၊ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ ပဲခူးတုိင္း၊ တနသၤရီ ေဒသတုိ႔၌ ျမဳိ႕နယ္ေပါင္း ၂၃ ၿမဳိ႕နယ္တုိ႔တြင္ ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္း အႏၲရာယ္မ်ားျဖစ္ပြားေနသည္ကုိ ေျမပုံႏွင့္တကြ ေဖၚျပ ထားသည္။

အဆုိပါမုိင္းမ်ားကုိ ျမန္မာအစုိးရတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားနည္းတူ ေဒသ႐ွိတုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကုိင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔အခ်ဳိ႕တုိ႔ကလည္း အသုံးျပဳေနၾကသည္ဟု ေရးသားထားသည္။

ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ မဲေဆာက္ၿမဳိ႕အနီး၊ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသား အမ်ားစုအခမဲ့ လာေရာက္ကုသခံေနၾကေသာ မယ္ေတာ္ေဆးခန္း႐ွိ ေျခတုတပ္ဆင္ေရးဌာန၌ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေျခတုတပ္ဆင္ေပးရသူ ၂၂၀ ခန္႔႐ွိၿပီး ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္တစ္လလ်ွင္ ပ်မ္းမွ် ၂၀ ဦးခန္႔႐ွိသည္ကုိ သိ႐ွိရသည္။

ယင္းေျခတုတပ္ဆင္ဌာနသုိ႔ သာမန္ရြာသူ႐ြာသားမ်ား၊ KNU, DKBA ကရင္လက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔မွ မုိင္းဒဏ္ခံခဲ့ၾကရသူမ်ားႏွင့္ နအဖစစ္တပ္မွ မုိင္းဒဏ္သင့္ခဲ့ရေသာ ရဲေဘာ္ေဟာင္းမ်ားကုိလည္း အခမဲ့ေျခတုတပ္ဆင္ေပးမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ ေပးေနသည္ကုိ ေတြ႔႐ွိခဲ့သည္။

လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ားအရ ၁၉၉၈ မွ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္း ေပါက္ကြဲမွဳ ျဖစ္စဥ္ ၂၃၂၅ ႀကိမ္ျဖစ္ေပၚခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၇၅ ေယာက္ေသဆုံးကာ ၂၀၀၂ ေယာက္ ဒဏ္ရာရွိခဲ့သည္ဟု ICBL ေခၚ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းကင္းစင္ေရးလႈပ္႐ွားမႈအဖြဲ႔ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

Distance University students defy warning and attend picnic in Mon dress

Sat 14 Nov 2009, Asah
Mon distance university students who study at Moulmein University, attended a post exam picnic in Mon dress despite demands by university administration not to attend.

On November 4th a day after completing their final exam, Mon University Distance Education (UDE) students traveled to Kare village [aka. U Nar Oak Pagoda] in Moulmein Township in Mon State. According to picnic organizers, the trip was organized so that Mon students would be able to unite with each other.

“This is the fist time we’ve had a picnic. At fist we thought that only 30-40 Students would want to go, but later many students wanted to go – we had over 180 Students [attend],” one student leader explained “We Scheduled this picnic because we wanted to make friends with others and organize a network and community of friends.”

Before the UDE left, they went to university dean and asked for permission to allow them to travel after the scheduled exam. The university dean, explained one student, refused to give them permission to travel. “If we went somewhere else he wouldn’t stop us from going, but he doesn’t give us permission to go. He also meant that if we got into any problems, we would have to solve them ourselves.”

In a recent article by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) on November 12th, the UDE students were repeatedly warned by both class tutors and the university dean not to attend the post exam picnic. Prior to their exam they had planed to travel to Pa-an town. However after the numerous administrative warnings against attending picnic, they decided instead to travel to Kare village.

Monks ‘too scared to protest’ NO!!!!!-Monks boycott junta chief in Sri Lanka

Nov 13, 2009 (DVB)–Burmese monks living in Sri Lanka have said they will enact a boycott of religious services for the visiting Burmese junta chief in protest against mistreatment of monks in Burma.

Senior General Than Shwe, who has presided over the ruling military government since 1992, this week made a rare visit to Sri Lanka.
The notoriously reclusive leader is known to regularly shun diplomatic meetings with foreign envoys visiting Burma, and rarely sets foot outside of the new jungle capital, Naypyidaw.
U Awbartha, a member of the Burmese Scholar Monks Association in Sri Lanka, said that the normally apolitical monk community would deny religious services, a practice known as Pattanikkujjana, for Than Shwe.
“Burmese monks inside and outside of the country initiated their act of Pattanikkujjana against the government who tortured, murdered and imprisoned them after the 2007 Saffron Revolution,” he said. “The Pattanikkujjana act is still in place so we would not accept any donation [from Than Shwe]. We have also urged our fellow monks to refuse his donations.”
He added that ties between the two countries appear to have strengthened since the Sri Lankan government successfully defeated the rebel group, the Tamil Tigers, last year.
The Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has been heavily criticized by the United Nations for allegedly violating international law during the conflict, visited Burma soon after the Tamil defeat.
The Sri Lankan conflict had ranked alongside the Burmese junta’s conflict with the opposition Karen National Union (KNU) as one of the world’s longest running.
“Burma doesn’t have many friends in Europe and in America,” said U Awbartha. “Similarly, Sri Lanka hasn’t been in close relations with these countries due to their war against the Tamils. I think these two countries are building diplomatic ties because of this.”
Meanwhile, Than Shwe has reportedly been taken ill at the President’s House in Colombo, where doctors are treating him for a “minor stomach ailment”, according to the Colombo Page news agency.

Thaksin left Cambodia

BANGKOK, 14 November 2009 (NNT) – The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made plans to visit a Thai engineer detained by Cambodia on grounds of stealing the flight information of former Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra. Mr Thaksin reportedly left Cambodia on Saturday.

Acting Government Spokesperson, Dr Panithan Wattanayakorn, stated that the Thai consulate in Cambodia would assist the Thai engineer, Siwalak Chotephong, will all legal affairs.

Mr Siwalak is an engineer of the Cambodia Air Traffic Services. He is accused of stealing the flight information of the ex-Thai PM and giving it to the Thai premier secrétaire of the Royal Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. The premier secrétaire was earlier expelled from Cambodia.

Dr Panithan said PM Abhisit Vejjajiva did not wish to have a private discussion with his Cambodian counterpart on the matter. The two leaders are scheduled to attend the ASEAN-US Summit in Singapore next week.

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