Kachin Villagers Resist Order to Relocate

Efforts by Burmese authorities to persuade the first of about 15,000 affected Kachin villagers to move to new homes to make way for a hydro-electric dam project are meeting with resistance, according to sources in the area.

More than 100 residents of Tang Hpre village, one of 60 communities destined to be displaced by the proposed Myintsone dam, were urged by the authorities to relocate.

“We will oppose the pressure,” said one housewife. She said each affected family had been given 32 kg of rice and one 1.6 kg can of cooking oil, but had been offered no further compensation.

The authorities began their campaign to persuade villagers to move one week after an inauguration ceremony at the dam, which local people were forced to attend.

Kaowao-ေကာင္းဝါ(ဒီဇင္ဘာ- ၂၉)။ ။ မြန္ျပည္နယ္ သံျဖဴဇရပ္ ျမိဳ႕ ဝဲကလီေက်းရြာတြင ္အေျခခ်ထားသည့္တပ္မေတာ္

တန္းျမင့္ေလ့က်င့္ေရးေက်ာင္းတပ္နယ္မႉးမွ သံျဖဴဇရပ္ ဘုရားသုံးဆူျမိဳ႕ကိုေျပးဆြဲေနေသာ ေမာ္ေတာ္ယဥ္မ်ား ကို တပ္ရိကၡာသယ္ေဆာင္ရန္အတြက္ အတင္းအဓမၼ ေခ်ာဆြဲေနသည္ဟု ကားသမားမ်ားမွ ေျပာပါသည္။

အဆိုပါရိကၡာမ်ားကို ၾကာအင္းဆိပ္ၾကီးျမိဳ႕နယ္ အနန္း ကြင္းေက်းရြာအေျခခ်စစ္ဗ်ဴဟာ႐ုံးႏွင့္ ဘုရားသုံးဆူျမိဳ႕ အေျခခ်တပ္ရင္းအတြက္ ပို႔ေဆာင္ေပးခဲ့ရ သည္ဟုဆို သည္။ သံျဖဴဇရပ္နဲ႔ ဘုရားသုံးဆူလမ္းေၾကာတေလွ်ာက္ ေျပးဆြဲေနသည့္ တခ်ိဳ႕ကားသမားမ်ားသည္ မိမိတို႔၏ကား ေခ်ာဆြဲျခင္းေဘးမွလြတ္ကင္းေအာင္ ေငြေၾကးေပး ေဆာင္ျပီးေသာ္လည္း ထပ္မံေခ်ာဆြဲခံေနရသည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။ continue
http://www.kaowao.org/b/dec09-29.php

KIO Delegates In Myitkyina To Meet Junta Officials

Written by KNG
Tuesday, 29 December 2009

A Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) delegation reached Myitkyina, the capital of Burma’s northern Kachin State yesterday for yet another meeting with Burmese junta officials, KIO sources told the Kachin News Group today.

In keeping with the agreement of a meeting between officials from either side before the end of December, the KIO delegates left their Laiza headquarters in east of Kachin State, near the China border, said KIO sources.

The junta’s northern commander Maj-Gen Soe Win (left) and KIO chairman Lanyaw Zawng Hra

Sources close to KIO delegates said, KIO officials will meet the junta’s Myitkyina-based Northern Regional Command commander Maj-Gen Soe Win rather than Lt-Gen Ye Myint, Chief of Military Affairs Security and Naypyitaw’s chief negotiator on transforming ethnic armed groups to the BGF.

This will be the first meeting since October after negotiations fell through on transforming KIO to the Burmese Army controlled Border Guard Force, and the last meeting for both parties this year.

Sources close to KIO delegates said, KIO officials will meet the junta’s Myitkyina-based Northern Regional Command commander Maj-Gen Soe Win rather than Lt-Gen Ye Myint, Chief of Military Affairs Security and Naypyitaw’s chief negotiator on transforming ethnic armed groups to the BGF.

HOUSING, LAND AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN BURMA-HLP Book

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Gov reshuffle a ‘diplomatic offensive’

Dec 28, 2009 (DVB)–Around 30 high-ranking Burmese embassy officials have been reshuffled in what could be a diplomatic offensive prior to 2010 elections, said a former military intelligence officer.

Also included in the reshuffle are 12 directors of Burma’s foreign ministry, while Burma’s ambassador to Washington has changed.
But the move could also have something to do with the current trial of former senior army officials, Win Naing Kyaw and Thant Zin Kyaw, who are being tried on charges of leaking state secrets, said the former intelligence officer.
They are accused of leaking the details of the junta’s second-in-command, Maung Aye, to Russia, and General Shwe Mann’s visit to North Korea. Both trips focused on advancing weapons and military intelligence trading.
A letter signed on behalf of Burmese foreign minister Nyan Win and obtained by DVB said that the current director general of the junta’s political department, Yin Yin Oo, was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Included in the letter were details of the reshuffle, notably Myo Thant Pe, also from the government’s political department, appointed as head of mission to Beijing, and Kyaw Tin Shein appointed first secretary of the embassy in Washington.

Thai-Burma border radio to launch by Mekong-Karen Youth Network (MKYN)

Dec 29, 2009 (DVB)–A daily one-hour radio programme will be aired by a local youth network on the Thai-Burma border, to educate and promote awareness on child rights, the group said.

Su Htet Lwin, youth development coordinator at the Mekong-Karen Youth Network (MKYN), said the FM radio programme which will be aired six days a week and will start on 1 January 2010, in Karen, Burmese and Thai languages.
“We leased one hour a day airtime from Thai radio station 99.75 MHZ and we specifically aim to educate on child rights and child migrant workers,” said Su Htet Lwin.
“Our target [audience] is children and young adults and [for the start] we will host the programme ourselves,” she said. “Later, we will bring in kids from [community] schools to let them host it.”
She said the programme will feature in the Burmese language from Monday to Wednesday, Karen on Thursday and Friday, and Thai on Saturday.
The MKYN was formed in May 2009 under an ethnic youth development programme.

Migrant Workers Unwilling to Make Temporary Passports: Arrested

Friday, 11 December 2009 11:28
Thirty workers, some of whom were not willing to make temporary passports, resigned from their jobs at SAHA FARM Co. Ltd Meat Product factory after receiving their salary. The factory is located outside Luburi Town, near Bangkok. After their resignation, the employer called the police to have the workers arrested.
The workers collected their wages the night of Tuesday, December 8th and were then left by their boss at a nearby football field, which had been covered with a plastic tarp. Around 3:00 am, on the morning of Wednesday December 9th, local police arrived and arrested the workers.
The scene was witnessed by other workers who were returning from the night shift. The workers, upset with what they witnessed, destroyed one of the office rooms inside the factory.
One of the eye witnesses, Ma Phyu said; “Those who were unwilling to make passports and asked to resign from their jobs were kept at a football ground with their belongings. There was no roofing and no ground sheet. Some of those workers who saw the situation became upset and destroyed an office room- the computer and the TV. They even burned documents”.
Ko Soe Moe, one of the workers said: “We were asked to make temporary passports and we didn’t want to. 1,100 baht will cut up to 8 months salary and we replied that we were not willing to. For those of us who wanted to resign- it did not go smoothly. The police were called and they were arrested”.
Ko Arkar, another worker who was arrested, said: “In our factory, we earn 4,500 baht per month, but we have to buy rice and curries outside of the factory due to the poor quality of the provided food- after buying food we have nothing left. We work from around 6 am to 8 pm daily. So we discussed it and decided to resign and move to another work place after we received our wages”.
In the SAHA FARM Meats Produce Company, there are two factories, which are referred to as “88” and “99” in Thai. The incident occurred at factory “88”. Factory 88 currently employs around 3000 Burmese migrant workers. The various jobs within the factory include: feeding chickens and pigs, producing meats, and products from fish and shrimp farms. The jobs are easy to obtain, but resigning from the factory is very difficult. According to the workers, they are not allowed to stop working if they would like to.
Some Burmese workers were upset and decided not to return to work following the arrest of their coworkers. The employer talked with Burmese workers who are fluent in Thai and asked the workers to return to work, ensuring them that they would be granted the same rights as Thai workers.
According to factory workers, those who were arrested have not yet been released. Many workers still at the factory are left disappointed and frustrated, knowing they will have to pay the money to have temporary passports made.

http://www.ghre.org/en/

US citizen Nyi Nyi Aung standing trial in Insein Prison was charged with yet another case today, this time by the Immigration Department

New Delhi (Mizzima) – US citizen Nyi Nyi Aung standing trial in Insein Prison was charged with yet another case today, this time by the Immigration Department, his lawyer said.

He is facing trial in three cases in Rangoon South District court sitting inside Insein prison. During today’s hearing the Botataung Township Immigration Department filed another case against him.

“Another case was filed against him today under section 6(3) of the 1949 Immigration Act, for making a wrong statement and entering with his ID. The Botataung Township Immigration Department Officer lodged a direct complaint in court. The court will pronounce its views on this complaint on 1 January 2010,” his lawyer Nyan Win said.

The defence lawyers argued on the first three cases today on behalf of their client Nyi Nyi Aung a.k.a. Kyaw Zaw Lwin (40) on whether he should be formally charged by the court as the public prosecutor had accused in the indictment or the charges dropped. Today’s trial was attended by the Vice-Consul from the US Embassy in Rangoon.

The former student activist fled to the Thai-Burma border after the army staged a coup in 1988. He resettled in the US later. He was alleged to have entered Burma eight times. Intelligence personnel arrested him when he arrived at the Rangoon Mingaladon airport via Bangkok on 3 September this year.

First he was charged under section 420 (fraud), 468 (forgery of national ID) of the Penal Code and under section 24 of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. Now the Immigration Department has filed another case against him today under section 6(3) of the Immigration Act.

အႀကီးစား comment တစ္ခု by photayokeking

ေပးပို႔သူ – သိုးထိန္း (တပ္မေတာ္ အရာရွိတစ္ဦး)

စာဖတ္ပရိတ္သတ္မ်ားခင္ဗ်ား

ပင္တိုင္ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ တပ္မေတာ္အရာရွိ ဗိုလ္သိုးထိန္းရဲ႕ က်ားႀကီးေျခရာႀကီး ေဆာင္းပါးကို စည္းလုံးျခင္းရဲ႕ အင္အား ၀က္ဘ္ဆိုဒ္တြင္ တင္ျပေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေဆာင္းပါးရဲ႕ အပိုင္း (၂) မွာ Soldier ဆိုသူတစ္ဦးက ပင္တိုင္ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္အား ထင္ျမင္ယူဆခ်က္ Comment ၀င္ေပးလာတဲ့အေပၚ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ ဗိုလ္သိုးထိန္းက ျပန္လည္ရွင္းျပထားတဲ့ ေဆာင္းပါးအား ဤ၀က္ဘ္ဆိုဒ္သို႔ ေပးပို႔လာပါတယ္။ Soldier ဆိုသူဟာ မ်က္ကန္း မ်ိဳးခ်စ္တစ္ဦး ျဖစ္ေနေၾကာင္း၊ စစ္ကၽြန္တစ္ဦး ဘ၀နဲ႔ တိုင္းတစ္ပါးကၽြန္ တစ္ဦးဘ၀တို႔ဟာ ကြာျခားလွျခင္း မရွိေၾကာင္း ဒီေဆာင္းပါးမွာ ဗိုလ္သိုးထိန္းက သုံးသပ္တင္ျပထားပါ တယ္။ အလ်ဥ္းသင့္လို႔ တင္ျပလိုရာမွာ ဗိုလ္သိုးထိန္းဟာ DSA ေက်ာင္းဆင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ထူးခၽြန္လို႔ ႐ုရွားကဲ့သို႔ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသင္တန္း လိုမ်ိဳး သင္တန္းကို တက္ေရာက္သင္ၾကားခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သလို ဤ၀က္ဘ္ဆိုဒ္မွာ ေရးသားတင္ျပေနေသာ တပ္မေတာ္အရာရွိမ်ား မွာလည္း ျပန္တမ္း၀င္အရာရွိ အမွန္အကန္မ်ားျဖစ္ကာ စစ္ဘက္နယ္ဘက္ အေတြ႔အႀကဳံ ရင့္က်က္သူမ်ား၊ ျပည္သူ႔ဘက္ကို ရပ္တည္မည့္ ျပည္သူ႔တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဗိုလ္သိုးထိန္းရဲ႕ ေဆာင္းပါးကို စာဖတ္ပရိတ္သတ္မ်ား ေလ့လာ သုံးသပ္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ကိုဖိုးတ႐ုတ္က တင္ျပေပးလိုက္ရပါတယ္။

Will DKBA Join Border Guard Force?

The Burmese regime’s main ally in eastern Burma, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), was the first armed ethnic group to announce its support for the military government’s plan to order all cease-fire groups to join a united border guard force under Burmese army command.

However, since its enthusiastic endorsement of the proposal, the DKBA has shied away from official statements regarding its stance, while other armed ethnic cease-fire groups, such as the New Democratic Army-Kachin and the Karenni National People’s Liberation Front, were officially received at ceremonies in November marking their participation in the border guard force plan.

The DKBA has been strongly allied with the Tatmadaw––the Burmese name for the country’s armed forces—since it signed a cease-fire agreement with the junta in 1995 following a split from its mother organization, the Karen National Union (KNU).