General Tamala Baw’s 90th Birthday pictures by YOMA

http://picasaweb.google.com/yoma3media/GeneralTamalaBawS90thBirthday#

Burma Constitutional PR Burmese

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Mg Chaw Nwe Poem Prize

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Ethnic Media Groups Eye FM Radio to cover the 2010 election

Burmese ethnic journalists met in Chiang Mai on Tuesday to discuss how best to cover the 2010 election and agreed that FM radio offers the best medium to reach a wide ethnic audience.

The meeting, organized by Associated Fairness International (AFI), was attended by seven ethnic media groups.

One outcome of the meeting was agreement to create proposals to create one or more FM radio stations and to seek donors to fund the proposals.

Khuensai Jaiyen, an editor of the Shan Herald Agency for News based in Chiang Mai, said, “Radio is the best medium for us to work with because it can reach a wide audience of our people very quickly.”

FM radio would be an effective tool to educate people about the 2008 Constitution and election, he said.

However, it is not easy to create an FM broadcast station, according to members of the Kaowao Newsgroup based in Thailand.

Ban Nyr Eain, a member of the group who works at its FM station in Mon State, said it broadcasts three days a week and employes 12 people.

Riot Battalion Arrives at Western Border for Fence Construction

12/23/2009
Maungdaw: A riot battalion arrived at the western Burmese border in the last few days to work on the ongoing construction of a border fence, said a witness from Maungdaw.

“The battalion is from Buthidaung, the township next to Maungdaw. The battalion first stayed at Aung Ba Hla Ward of Maungdaw, and later shifted to Kan Yin Chaung Village to construct the fence from there. There were about 200 riot police in the battalion,” he said.

According to an official source, after the riot battalion, there have been about 700 soldiers and 300 riot police so far that have been sent to the western border to construct the fence.

The soldiers are from various battalions based in Buthidaung Township but all of them fall under Sakhaka 15, the Military Operation Planning Bureau.

“The troops are usually working at many construction sites, but most of the troops are setting up barbed wire between one pillar of the fence to another,” he said.

The authority stopped construction on the fence during this past rainy season but resumed from the beginning of this month. The entire fence is a three-year project and is expected to be complete in 2012.

According to a local source, there is a rumor spreading in Arakan State that the authority has plans to electrify the fence to keep local people from destroying it. The military junta has set up a hydropower plant at Sai Din Waterfall in Buthidaung Township in northern Arakan, allegedly to provide power for the electric fence.
narinjara

Resurrected Burmese political party campaigns in Mudon Township

Tue 22 Dec 2009, Janu, Mi Yin Mon
Members of a Burmese military junta backed civilian political party that participated in a previous election attempt, have been campaigning for support from residents in the 2010 election.

According to residents from Mudon Township, since November 4th the Burmese National Unity Party (NUP), which participated in the 1990 election as the Burmese military junta’s civilian political party, has been working to win residents support.

“This group [NUP] goes from one village to after another to organize the villagers in Mudon Township. They go to one village for a day to organize the people, though it is not every day [that they go],” said a woman from Mudon township. “When they go and organize the people from any village, they go to the house, which they knew before. Then they have a discussion with these people on how to vote for them in the election.”

According to residents, during these political organizing visits, NUP members attempted to persuade residents to vote in favor of their party by telling them that if they (the NUP) win in the election or if they were the primary party in the new government, they would give people more business benefits through fewer taxes.

23Dec09 Joint Statement on 2010 Election Boycott-Rohingya Group

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ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂၃ရက္။ နန္းထူးစံ (ေကအုိင္စီ)Submitted by Karen Information Center

ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂၃ရက္။ နန္းထူးစံ (ေကအုိင္စီ)
ယခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလကတည္းက ကရင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ေတာင္ငူေဒသအတြင္း လုပ္အားခုိင္းေစမႈ မ်ားလာသည္ႏွင့္အမွ် တုိက္ပြဲျဖစ္ပြားမႈ လည္း ပုိမုိမ်ားျပားလာေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ား၏ ေျပာျပခ်က္အရ သိရသည္။

ေကအဲန္ယူ တပ္မဟာ(၂)၊ ေတာင္ငူခရုိင္ရွိ သံေတာင္ႏွင့္ ထန္းတပင္ၿမဳိ႕နယ္ စပ္ၾကားေဒသမ်ားအတြင္း အေျခစုိက္ လႈပ္ရွားေန ေသာ နအဖ စစ္ကြပ္ကဲေရးဌာနခ်ဳပ္-စကခ (၅)လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ရင္း၊ စစ္ေၾကာင္းမ်ားက ၎တုိ႔ တပ္စခန္းမ်ား ျပဳျပင္ေဆာက္ လုပ္ရန္ႏွင့္ ရိကၡာမ်ား သယ္ယူပုိ႔ေဆာင္ရန္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္လမွစ၍ ေဒသခံရြာသူရြာသားမ်ားကုိ ေခၚယူခုိင္းမႈ ပုိမုိ လုပ္ေဆာင္လာသည့္ အတြက္ နယ္ေျမခံ ေကအဲန္အယ္လ္ေအတပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ားႏွင့္ တုိက္ပြဲျဖစ္ပြားမႈ မ်ားလာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

Junta collecting existing political parties’(1990) member lists in Shan State

WEDNESDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2009 17:22 HSENG KHIO FAH

Military Affairs Security (MAS) authorities in Lashio, capital of Shan State North, have ordered local authorities to collect lists of members of the political parties in town that used to contest in the 1990 elections, according to reliable sources from the town.

The order was passed on 21 December. The lists must compile details such as how many members remain in each party and what those remaining members are doing including their personal information, a source said.

In Lashio, there are about 7 former political parties such as National League for Democracy (NLD), Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD), Shan State Kokang Democratic Party (SSKDP), Wa National Development Party (WNDP) and National Unity Party (NUP).

It is not known what the lists are for. However, local people commented that it could be connected to the planned elections.
To date, the junta authorities have yet to announce the electoral law.

“Many thought it would be announced early in the coming year,” the source said.

Nevertheless, the junta-backed Union Solitary and Development Association (USDA) has already been told to be ready to transform into a political party before 2010, during the 16th anniversary of the founding the USDA ceremony, which was held on 27 November at Naypyitaw, according to a USDA member in Lashio.

Junta to start construction on Lashio-Muse railroad project

WEDNESDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2009 12:59 HSENG KHIO FAH

Junta authorities will start constructing a new railroad, which is to connect Shan State North capital Lashio to the border town, Muse, in early month of coming year, 2010, according sources from the Sino-Burma border.

The estimated distance is about 170 km.

It is learnt that over 20 member survey team had inspected the route from the middle of November to the end of November. It was made up of land surveyors from Napyitaw and Lashio.

Local sources informed that two unidentified battalions from Lashio were providing security for the officials while they were conducting the survey.

The route is to run through Hsenwi township’s Mongpa village tract, west of the motor highway road continue to west of Kutkhai and will head to Wankhong village tract, Muse township, where the station will be located. The station construction started since three months ago, according to local sources.

“However, the authorities have yet to decide whether to use the proposed new route or the old one,” said a resident in Lashio. “But the authorities mentioned that the old route has many high mountains to pass,” he added.