CAUGHT IN A VICE: KAREN REFUGEES FLEEING BATTLES BETWEEN THEIR OWN WARING FACTIONS

Feature – Network Media Group
REPORT BY ZAW GYI
MONDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2009 09:17

Late one rainy afternoon in early April, a soldier of the Democratic Karen Budhist Army (DKBA), brought an urgent message to Karen villagers in Tarlaewantmikalan village, Pankyone Township, Hpa-An.

“If you want to go, please go fast. We don’t know what the late comers will do. We can’t do anything to protect them,” he said.

The DKBA wanted them to flee the area, to a safe zone, before they began an offensive against the Karen National Union in two days.

One family, with many young children, left their village carrying their belongings in the rain.

They are among thousands of Karen villagers who have fled for the relative safety of the Thai-Burma border because the DKBA and Burmese armies started offensives against base camps controlled by the rival Karen National Union, in early April.

U Win Maung, a farmer who lives in Tarlel Wamt Mekalan Karen village, in Pai Kyon township, Pa-an district, said, “Now we are facing troubles and are on the run because the Karen are fighting each other.”.

He said he is familiar with similar conflicts in the past. He has had to run away and hide in the jungle during battles before, returning to his village when the shooting stopped. Now he is almost 50.

Moulmein youths organize secret Human Rights Day celebration

Independent Mon News Agency
REPORT BY JANU, LYI HTAW
TUESDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2009 17:09

On December 10th of this year, a small group of Moulmein youths held a secret celebration for Human Rights Day in their city, for the second year in a row.

The organizers of the event informed IMNA that the celebrations were begun last year, as part of an ongoing effort to educate their peers about the disparities between the human rights violations suffered in Burma and the human rights enjoyed by citizens of other nations; the celebration organizers also informed IMNA that they hope that the event spurred participants to actively pursue gaining increased human rights in Burma in the upcoming 2010 election.

“The organizers of the Human Rights Day celebration welcomed the people who attended the celebration, and fed them noodles and coffee. During the celebration, the organizers showed a video about human rights to these people. Some people who were in the celebration were watching the video with surprised faces. Because they have never seen how [compared to the outside world] the Burmese government does violence to human rights,” a Moulmein who attended the celebration told IMNA.

Deaths continue in Malaysian detention camp

REPORT BY ZAW GYI
TUESDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2009 13:21

Deaths among detainees afflicted by an unknown disease continue in the KLIA detention camp near the Kuala Lumpur International airport in Malaysia.

Malaysian authorities detain illegal foreigners in detention camps before they are deported to the migrant’s country of origin. There have been deaths among detainees since the end of August this year.

Ngaung Sapaung (45), died on December 9 in the camp of the unknown disease, a detainee said.

“Ngaung Sapaung was critically ill. He could not get up. They sent him to a hospital. He was in the hospital for a day. The next day at 9 p.m. he died. Seven inmates died in the camp in four months,” he added.

His legs were swollen and he could not have any food for a week before he died. He also suffered from constipation and retention of urine. Though other inmates informed camp authorities about his deteriorating health, camp authorities did not send him to hospital on time.

Anti-Child Trafficking Day held in Maesot by KIC

News – KIC
REPORT BY SAW HKAR SUNYAR/KIC
TUESDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2009 11:04

Anti-Child Trafficking day was held in Hsar Thulay School in Maesot Thailand at 9 am today.

About 300 people, including teachers and students from 40 Burmese schools in Maesot, attended the function.

Naw Hpaw Ray, chairperson of the migrant children committee, said “we have a duty to help children, who are victims of child trafficking. I would like to urge all of us to unite in helping them.”

At the function, a 14-year old student said “we would like to say ‘thanks’ to our teachers who have organized this Anti-Children Trafficking Day. Cases of exploitation of children are widespread in Burma. Children are forcibly recruited as soldiers in Burma.”

Children entertained the audience with songs, dance performances, and an opera during the Anti-Children Trafficking Day function.
On 2000, a convention recognized that child trafficking is a crime. Many countries signed the agreement of the convention. December 12 is observed as Anti-Children Trafficking Day.
Anti-Children Trafficking Day functions were held in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore.

Thousands Of Chinese Vietnam War Veterans Join Wa

Written by KNG
Tuesday, 15 December 2009

In a development, which does not bode well for the Burmese ruling junta, thousands of Chinese Vietnam war veterans have joined the ethnic Wa rebels in Burma in the wake of the contentious Border Guard Force issue, said border sources.

About 15,000 military personnel from China entered Wa or United Wa State Army territory east of Shan State in Burma by crossing the border recently, said sources close to the rebels.

The military reinforcement comprises mainly Chinese Vietnam veterans who fought against US soldiers on the North Vietnam side during the war between 1965 and 1970, and Wa students who did higher military training in China and other foreign countries, added the sources.
The Wa is also recruiting and mobilizing retired soldiers from the former Communist Party of Burma (CBP) in Shan State and bordering China’s southwest Yunnan province. All this is in preparation for a war looming on the horizon with the Burmese Army, said sources close to retired CBP soldiers.

In November 14, UWSA, Burma’s largest ethnic armed group submitted the nine-fact proposal to military leaders in capital Naypyitaw through Lt-Gen Ye Myint, chief of Military Affairs Security (MAS) but it was rejected by the junta.

YOMA News:ေစ်းေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ခုိင္းသည္ကို မေက်နပ္၍ ေစ်းသည္မ်ား ခ်ီတက္ေတာင္းဆို

MONDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2009 19:08 ႐ုိးမ ၃
ဘိုကေလးၿမိဳ႕ေပၚရွိ အခြန္လြတ္ေစ်းကို ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ခုိင္းသည့္အတြက္ ေစ်းသည္ ၁၅၀ ခန္႔က ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အာဏာပိုင္႐ံုးမ်ားဆီသို႔ ယမန္ေန႔က ခ်ီတက္ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားဘက္က ယခုလ (၁၅) ရက္ေန႔ ေနာက္ဆံုးထား၍ အခြန္လြတ္ေစ်းမ်ားကို ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ရန္ အမိန္႔ထုတ္ျပန္ထားခဲ့ၿပီး မလိုက္နာပါက တည္ဆဲဥပေဒအရ အေရးယူမည္ဟု ေၾကညာထားသည့္အတြက္ ယင္းကဲ့သို႔ ခ်ီတက္ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၿမိဳ႕ခံတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
အရင္တုန္းက စည္ပင္သာယာက ခ်ေပးထားတဲ့

ဘုိကေလးၿမဳိ႕ အခြန္လြတ္ေစ်း (ဓာတ္ပုံ-႐ုိးမ ၃)

“အရင္တုန္းက စည္ပင္သာယာက ခ်ေပးထားတဲ့ ခြန္လြတ္ေဈးရယ္၊ ေနာက္ ဒီဘက္ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းေရွ႕မွာ ခ်ေပးထားတဲ့ ေနရာေတြမွာရွိတဲ့ ေဈးကို သူတို႔က ဖယ္ခိုင္းတယ္။ ဒီလ (၁၁) ရက္ေန႔ မွာ သူတို႔က အသံခ်က္စက္နဲ႔ လိုက္ၿပီးေတာ့ အဲဒီေနရာကေန ဖယ္ေပးပါ၊ မဖယ္ေပးဘူးဆိုရင္ တည္ဆဲဥပေဒအရ အေရးယူမယ္ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ အသံခ်က္စက္နဲ႔ လိုက္ေအာ္ထားတာကို မေက်နပ္လို႔ အခုလို ခ်ီတက္ေတာင္းဆိုတာ” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

An Urgent Appeal to Help Shan Refugees in Northern Thailand and Loisamseep by Feraya

At this moment there are now thousands of Shan refugees who have fled over the border from Burma in northern Thailand who need your help.        

The weather is getting cold and they are in desperate need of warm clothes, blankets medicines, especially medicine for babies.

There are hundreds of children urgently needing warm clothes, hats and socks. Please donate as much as you can – all of the money will go to needy Shan refugee children along the Thai-Burma border. Your generosity will be greatly appreciated.
All money will be forwarded to Abbot Sao Mahapanya,

Office of IABU, Bangkok.

click on       An Urgent Appeal to Help Shan Refugees in Northern Thailand and Loisamseep
http://www.taigress.info/

Q&A : ‘Cartoons Are My Way of Protesting against Burmese Junta’(HarnLay)

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Dec 15 (IPS) – He talks with his hands. They are in constant motion as he expresses a view, makes a joke, mumbles.

They are the hands that have combined with Harn Lay’s wit and political insights into exposing the oppression and absurdities in military-ruled Burma through a flow of cartoons that have appeared in the Burmese media in exile.

In one, 44-year-old Harn Lay depicts Burma’s strongman, Senior Gen Than Shwe, sweeping the homes of residents under a carpet to make way for the junta’s new administrative capital in Naypidaw. In another, he depicts the junta leader shaped like a giant balloon to show the increasing power of the military. “Humour is my weapon to target the military regime in my country,” says Harn Lay, a member of Burma’s Shan ethnic minority who got his first taste of brutal politics during the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which was crushed by the military, leaving over 3,000 students and activists dead.

He fled Rangoon soon after the crackdown to begin his first foray as a cartoonist and an illustrator for a Shan rebel group operating close to the Thai-Burmese border. But work in the public relations arm of the resistance movement was not for him.

The product of Rangoon’s School of Fine Arts Academy knew he had more to offer. The influence of his father, who painted as a hobby, had also shaped his interest in the visual media, including a “fascination with cartoons.”

IPS caught up with Harn Lay on the sidelines of the just concluded Mekong Media Forum – which brought together more than 200 journalists from across the region – in this northern Thai city to talk about his art and his politics as a cartoonist in exile.

Q: When you first came to Chiang Mai in 2003, it was to be a journalist for an exile media organisation. So what made you switch?

Aung San Suu Kyi meets her legal counsels tuesday afternoon

by Phanida
Tuesday, 15 December 2009 20:37

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met her legal team on Tuesday.

The four lawyers – Nyan Win, Kyi Win, Hla Myo Myint and Khin Htay Kywe arrived at the residence of Aung San Suu Kyi on Rangoon’s University Avenue on Tuesday afternoon at about 1:50 p.m. (Local time). They were allowed to enter the house after a 25-minute wait.

Though they concluded their discussions at about 4:35 p.m. (local time), the lawyers were only allowed to come out of the residence, which is under tight security, after waiting another 20 minutes, they said.

“We mainly discussed the case because the prosecutors have also submitted their arguments in the High Court. We have not received the revised argument but we had discussions on it,” Nyan Win, one of the defence counsel and spokesperson of the National League for Democracy party, said.

“We also discussed her [Aung San Suu Kyi] house renovation. She said that only when repairs started, she realised that a lot more needs to be done. I think it will take a long time to complete it,” Nyan Win added.

He said that he is satisfied with their meeting with the detained Nobel Peace Laureate and believes that it would help the case.

Burmese Media Lead with Than Shwe’s Favorites

Burmese military strongman Snr-Gen Than Shwe traveled to Pyin Oo Lwin on Friday to attend the graduation of the 52nd Intake of the Defense Services Academy (DSA). As with previous graduations, he took along an entourage of family members, including his favorite grandson, Nay Shwe Thway Aung.

The following day, a photograph of Than Shwe’s extended family appeared in The New Light of Myanmar, the country’s only state-run newspaper in English. In the photo, Nay Shwe Thway Aung sits on a sofa alongside Than Shwe’s wife wearing sunglasses and a white Western suit.
Described quietly by ordinary people as “The Royal Family,” Than Shwe and his kin regularly dominate the pictorial sections of state-run newspapers with the following pages covering senior ranking generals in order of favor or importance.

The New Light of Myanmar featured separate photos of Shwe Mann and Tin Aung Myint Oo––who reportedly dislike each other––at the event. Whether intentionally or not, Tin Aung Myint Oo, the No 4 general in the military hierarchy and quartermaster-general of the armed forces, appeared ahead of Shwe Mann’s photo in the newspaper. Such details are frequently said to portray underlying messages, observers say.