Mie Mie, 39, one of Burma’s well-known political prisoners, was recently transferred to the remote Kathar Prison.

A Husband Whose Wife is a Political Prisoner

Mie Mie, 39, one of Burma’s well-known political prisoners, was recently transferred to the remote Kathar Prison. Once again, her husband, Hla Moe, will struggle to find a way to visit his wife as often as possible, traveling a long distance to share 20 minutes together each visit.

“It is very difficult to visit Kathar Prison because it is so far from Rangoon. Transportation is not easy” said Hla Moe, who works in a car repair shop and raises their three children alone.
“I will continue to visit my wife to honor what she has done for our country” Hla Moe told The Irrawaddy. “She is mentally sound, but her health is not good.”

Like other political prisoners, Mie Mie (aka Thin Thin Aye) has served time in various prisons including Pathein, Insein and Tharrawaddy prisons, in what activist say is a calculated plan on the part of the military regime to make it difficult for family members and friends to stay in contact with their loved ones.

Mie Mie was arrested in October 2007 during a demonstration in Rangoon against the high price of fuel, which later led to the monk-organized mass demonstrations that spread across the country.
She received a 65-year prison sentence based on five charges including unlawful association, threatening state security and violation of laws governing communication.

Kyaw Zaw Lwin has been handcuffed during the court sessions, which he said was against Burma’s law.

Handcuffing of Burmese-American in court protested
by Mungpi
Friday, 27 November 2009 22:18

New Delhi (Mizzima) – The lawyer of detained (alias) Nyi Nyi Aung, said he had objected to handcuffing the accused during the trial and had submitted an objection letter, but it was rejected by the court.

Kyi Win, one of the defence attorneys of the Burmese-American, on Friday told Mizzima that Kyaw Zaw Lwin has been handcuffed during the court sessions, which he said was against Burma’s law.

“I have submitted an objection letter, but it was rejected and he [Kyaw Zaw Lwin] continues to be handcuffed during the session,” said Kyi Win, adding that Kyaw Zaw Lwin was handcuffed on Friday, where five prosecution witnesses were cross-examined at Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison.

According to the veteran lawyer, who earlier this year co-defended detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s law does not permit an accused to be handcuff unless there is any special exception.

“Besides, the Presidential decree 4/77, which is known as the handbook for the courts, also prohibits such practice,” Kyi Win said.

While there are no technical complications in handcuffing the accused during the trial, Kyi Win said, it indicates the level of rule of law prevailing in the courts in Burma.

Surin: looking beyond cross-border conflicts accelerates AEC establishment

BANGKOK, 27 November 2009 (NNT) – The ASEAN’s Secretary-General suggested that ASEAN member countries should consider the establishment of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) more imnportant than cross-border conflicts derived from concepts of nation states.

Dr Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of the ASEAN, said that cross border conflicts between ASEAN member countries has caused regional discord and delayed the establishment of the AEC.

He explained that colonialism brought the concept of a nation state into the region. The concept forced ASEAN countries to consider territorial borders seriously and led to nationalism. He said that this was an origin of cross border conflicts and suggested that the region needed to look back before colonialism.

“Our ancestors would not care about the exact boundary back then. Why do we have to fight for the boundary when we still care and share together?” Dr Surin questioned.

The Secretary-General, 57, stated that the concept was too new to the region where human control was more important than boundary accuracy. ASEAN as a cultural community was not ready to adapt to the concept.

He said that the reason why Thailand had more cross-border problems came from its location in a central position. Thailand has over 5,000 km of borders with 4 countries. This is the longest in the region. Only 56 km has been ratified by the Thai national legislature. The rest has been under control of committees.

Dr Surin emphasized that looking beyond border and colonialism mentality was one way for ASEAN to move forward to being a single community. He said that “there is still a community when boundaries becomes meaningless.”

SEAPA_Empty Promises

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Residents ire over dumped rubbish-vdo

Yoma-အာက္ေျခတပ္မွဴးမ်ား ဒီမိုကေရစီလိုလား

FRIDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2009 10:35 ဗထူး
စစ္အစိုးရ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္မည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ေအာက္ေျခတပ္မွဴးမ်ား စိတ္ဝင္စားျခင္းမရွိဘဲ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စနစ္သည္ မွန္ကန္ျခင္းမရွိဟု သံုးသပ္ေျပာဆိုေနၾကသည္။

“စားဝတ္ေနေရးကိစၥကို တပ္ကိုပဲမွီခိုေနရလို႔ စိတ္သြားတိုင္း ကိုယ္မပါၾကဘူး။ အေျပာင္းအလဲတရပ္ျဖစ္မွ အျခားအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ားအတြက္ အဆင္ေျပမွာပါ” ဟု အမည္မေဖာ္လိုသည့္ ဒုဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးတဦးက ေျပာသည္။

SPDC SOLDIER (AP)
ျမန္မာ့ဒီမုိကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေနအိမ္ လုံၿခဳံေရးတာဝန္က် စစ္သားတဦး (Photo: AP)

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္ေပၚလာပါကလည္း စစ္အစိုးရသာ ရာသက္ပန္ သက္တမ္းရွည္မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးႏွင့္ ဒုဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးအဆင့္မ်ားမွာ ထပ္ဆင့္ ရာထူးတိုးျမႇင့္ျခင္းမခံရသည္က တပ္တြင္း အၾကပ္အတည္းအလြန္ႀကီးမားေနေၾကာင္း ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။

ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ – မန္းေရာဘတ္ ဘဇန္ posted by Thaw Thi Kho

(ဖါးကပ္)တုိက္ပဲြကုိမေဖၚျပမွီ စစ္နွင့္ပါတ္သက္သည့္ စစ္သေဘာထား တခ်ိဳ႕ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ မန္းေရာဘတ္ဘဇန္ အေနျဖင့္ ဦးစြာ တင္ျပလုိပါသည္ –

(The purpose of the revolutionary war is peace) “ေတာ္လွန္ေရး စစ္ပဲြ၏ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မွာ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ျဖစ္သည္”။ ကၽြန္ုပ္တုိ႔ စစ္တုိက္ေနျခင္းသည္ တပါးသူကုိ ကၽြြန္ျပဳ၊ အႏိုင္က်င့္၊ ေစာ္ကားရန္ မဟုတ္၊ (တိုင္းရင္းသား) အမ်ဳိးသား တန္းတူအခြင့္အေရး ရရွိေရး၊ ကုိယ္ပုိင္ျပဌာန္းခြင့္ ရရွိေရး အတြက္ က်ဴးေက်ာ္လာမႈကုိ ခုခံသည့္ တရားေသာ စစ္ပဲြကုိ တုိက္ေနျခင္းသာ ျဖစ္သည္။

ေျပာက္က်ားစစ္ ပါရဂူ တပ္မဟာ (၇) မွဴး ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ေဂ်ာ္နီ
ေျပာက္က်ားစစ္ ပါရဂူ တပ္မဟာ (၇) မွဴး ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ေဂ်ာ္နီ

New report UNDC: Burma rebels cashing in illegal drugs stocks

2009 Patterns and Trends of Amphetamine-Type Stimulants and Other Drugs in East and South-East Asia

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A Burmese video journalist has released a secret video from inside a hospital revealing maltreatment of Monks sent there on the grounds of mental heath.

A hidden camera has provided a rare glimpse inside Burma’s mental health system, used to incarcerate opposition figures and politically active monks.

At one hospital where activities were filmed by a Burmese video journalist, there are hundreds of patients, and not enough supplies to go around.

The head nurse explains that clothes and shoes are needed. She also acknowledges criminals are held there, confined because of their mental condition. It appears from the film that some of the (patients) in the hospital are monks.

The footage shows they are allowed to keep their heads shaven but are forced to give up their robes – although some defy that rule.

It is not known how many were rounded up after the monk-led Saffron Revolution, crushed by the military junta in September 2007.

Many observers have long suspected that Burma’s junta has confined political monks to mental institutions to treat what the regime claims is a sickness.

Bo Kyi, of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), told Australia Network’s NewsHour: “After the September revolution, some monks were sent to mental hospitals, also other activists.

“The military regime regard them as the crazy man or something.”

No Roadmap Without Dialogue: Opposition Leaders

National League for Democracy (NLD) central executive member Win Tin and Arakanese leader Aye Thar Aung reaffirmed in a Burmese language letter to a conference being held by Burmese exiles in Tokyo this week that the roadmap to breaking Burma’s political deadlock lies in the release of political prisoners, a review of the 2008 Constitution and genuine political dialogue.

Aye Thar Aung wrote that the 2010 election under the 2008 Constitution will not bring democracy and ethnic rights to Burma.

Genuine dialogue between the military junta, ethnic leaders and NLD leaders has to take place before the election, he said. He called the 2008 Constitution “one-sided” and said both cease-fire and non-cease-fire ethnic groups have rejected it.

Win Tin added that releasing pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and having international observers monitoring the election are keys to making progress in the political crisis.