Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) welcome the release of our Hero, U Tin Oo, Leader of 1990 Election Wining Party (NLD)

13 February 2010

Today NLD’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi’s very close comrade, U Tin Oo is now released. He is the man of action and Burmese people believe in his leadership. U Tin Oo earned deep respects and high regards in the Burma’s military. This is the reason why junta put him under house arrest or in prison most of the time. He is the ex-commander in chief of the military and he earned “Thura Title” for his bravery in the battle which would equivalent to Victoria Cross.

U Tin Oo is the legitimate elected leader of Burma according to the 1990 election held by the very junta who is ruling Burma today. He shouldn’t be in the prison or under house arrest at the first place.

If the military regime truly wanted to see national reconciliation, they must release all the political prisoners unconditionally and immediately as well as they must grantee that they won’t find any excuses to do illegitimate arrest again. This would be very very basic minimum benchmark junta must do.

U Tin Oo’s party, National League for Democracy, the victor of 1990 election clearly stated their position in “Shwe-Gone-Daing” declaration that need to place in order to have true national reconciliation in Burma, i.e. to

1. Release all the political prisoners
2. Review 2008 Constitution
3. Allow to reopen NLD and ethnic nationalities offices
4. Recognise 1990 election result
5. Take place political dialogue

Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) welcomes the release of our leader, U Tin Oo but unless junta fulfils above five main principles demanded by legitimate leaders of Burma, we cannot say that Burma is on the road to positive change.

We truly believe that with the added leadership of U Tin Oo, NLD will effectively drive Burma future to the better place.

For more information please contact Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) at

Myo Thein
00-44-208 493 9137
00-44-787 788 2386
myothein@bdcburma.org
myothein19@gmail.com

Tin Oo expects Suu Kyi to be released

Sunday, 14 February 2010 00:28 Mizzima News

Interview with Dr. Win Naing

Mizzima Assistant Editor Ye Yint Aung interviews NLD Central Executive Committee member and spokesperson Dr. Win Naing, who was on the scene at the release of NLD Vice-Chairperson Tin Oo. According to Win Naing, Tin Oo revealed he also expects party Chairperson Aung San Suu Kyi to also soon be released.

Q: Please tell us the scene as Tin Oo was released?

A: Two cars entered at 8:30 p.m., one a saloon car and the other a van. They opened the gate and we saw them taking photographs. After doing what they had to do inside the house for about 10 to15 minutes they left the house. The gate was left open when they left the security personnel posted at his house were withdrawn. Then all of us, including reporters, rushed into the house. When we got into the house uncle (Win Tin) welcomed us. Then he (Tin Oo) answered questions asked by reporters.

One of the two main questions asked regarded his stand and position on the US’s new engagement policy towards Burma. He replied that this was good and long overdue.

Regarding the leadership of the NLD party, he will follow the leadership of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Uncle (Tin Oo) replied that he would accept and work on the policies and principles as laid down by the party.

Q: How did you feel when you first saw Tin Oo after his release?

A: He was extremely happy and so were we. We forgot everything about our hunger and the biting of mosquitoes and sand flies. All of us were happy. Uncle was also happy. He smiled and patiently answered questions asked by reporters. We sat around him too. After the media people left he talked with us, admonished us, and then we knelt down before him and offered our obeisance to him.

Q: Please tell us briefly about the scene inside the house?

A: There were about 25 reporters inside the house as soon as we entered. They asked him questions. The last people left inside his house were CEC members, family members and party youth members. The room is about 20 feet by 20 feet. There were about 40 to 45 people, including reporters, inside his house.

Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan,killed 14.February 2008 at his home in Maesot, Thailand

ပဒုိမန္းရွာ အမွတ္တရ

ဓါတ္ပုံ-လင္းလက္ႀကယ္စင္

ဒီေကဘီေအ ႏွင့္ပါတ္သက္၍ ပဒုိမန္းရွာ၏ သေဘာထားႏွင့္ ေျပာခဲ့ေသာ စကားေလးတခြန္းကုိ ျပန္လည္တင္ဆက္ေပးလုိက္ပါရေစ။

“လက္ရွိပဏိပကၡဟာ ဒီေကဘီေအ နဲ ့ေကအဲန္ယူႀကားက ပဏိပကၡ မဟုတ္ဘူး… ကရင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းႀကားက ပဏိပကၡမဟုတ္ဘူး… အဓိက ပဏိပကၡဟာ နအဖ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေတြက ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားေတြကုိ ရာသက္ပန္ကြ်န္လုပ္ခ်င္လုိ ့ အဲဒီအႀကားက ျဖစ္လာတဲ့ ပဏိပကၡျဖစ္တယ္” ပဒုိမန္းရွာလားဖန္း

တုိ ့ကရင္ညီကုိယ္မ်ား အေျခအေနအရပ္ရပ္ကုိသုံးသပ္ျပီး မိတ္ေဆြ ႏွင့္ရန္သူကုိ ခြဲျခားႏုိင္စြမ္းရွိလ်က္ အတူတကြဘုံရန္သူကုိ တုိက္ထုတ္ႀကစုိ ့လုိ ့ ဆႏၵျပဳရင္း ကုံလြာဲ – မ်င္ၟစိင္ခီက်ံင္း သီခ်င္းျဖင့္တင္ဆက္ေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။

NLD Vice Chairperson Tin Oo released

(Mizzima) – Tin Oo, Vice-Chairman of the National League for Democracy was released late today as his six-year term of detention expires.

Retired Commander-in-Chief Tin Oo, along with party General Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi and followers were ambushed and attacked by a pro-junta mob near the town of Depayin, in Sagaing Division on 30th May 2003 during an organizational tour. After the attack in May 2003, he was detained in Kalay prison in Sagaing Division and then put under house arrest in February 2004 by the Burmese regime under the law ‘Safeguarding the State from the Danger of Subversive Elements’.

The National League for Democracy that won in a landslide victory in 1990 elections but denied by the regime to call a parliament has recently expanded its Central Executive Committee members from 11 to 20. The expansion of the leadership was followed after its detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed by the Burmese military government to meet ailing and aging top leaders of the party including Tin Oo last December.

Tin Oo, 82, is expected to resume his political activities after the release.

U Tin Oo,NLD Leader freed

Burma.s military government has freed the 82-year-old deputy leader of the pro-democracy party led by Aung San Suu Kyi after nearly seven years in detention.

The release Saturday of Tin Oo, who helped found the National League for Democracy with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi, comes shortly before a U.N. envoy visits the country. Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.
“U Tin Oo”was released at 8:20pm from the prison.

NLD headquarters denies sending list of CC nominees

New Delhi (Mizzima) – In a complete denial the Central Executive Committee (CEC) members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) said that they had not sent instructions on Central Committee (CC) nominees to be selected and prepared by States and Divisional branches.

The Pegu Division NLD Organizing Committee selected seven persons to be nominated as CC members on February 9 in keeping with the list believed to have been sent by the party headquarters. It created a ruckus among divisional organizing committee members following which the spokesmen at the party headquarters denied sending nomination lists.

“The party headquarters has no such principles and there was no need to send instructions. The grassroots level must select their nominees. If the party leadership has a list at all, it will check with the list sent. It is out of the question to show this list to them even if the party headquarters has such list,” party CEC member Win Tin told Mizzima.

Another CEC member Khin Maung Swe said, “We don’t make nominations by name. They are free to select without instructions on who to select. The problem in Pegu Division has not been communicated to us. But we have heard of the dispute. There is a misunderstanding regarding nominations”.

ENVIRONMENT: World Bank Faces Tiger Trap in Burma

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 12, 2010 (IPS) – As the World Bank embarks on its latest foray to protect Asian forests that are home to wild tigers, one of the continent’s iconic predators, a visible trap looms in military-ruled Burma.

The challenge for the Bank stems from a need to find a balance between its new interest as a conservationist – through its Global Tiger Initiative (GTI) – and a policy that shackles the Washington DC-based international financial institution from being directly involved, including doling out financial aid, to the South-east Asian nation.

The GTI, which the Bank unveiled in June 2008, has identified a raft of measures to help the 13 Asian countries where the last of the estimated 3,200 wild tigers roam. This includes direct investments to preserve and expand the prevailing habitats of the endangered predator, which numbered about 100,000 a century ago.

The importance of Burma, or Myanmar, as it is also known, in this unique environmental drive is not lost on conservationists. The country is home to the world’s largest tiger reserve among the 13 tiger range nations, which include Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam.

What is more, the Bank’s efforts to tiptoe around the trap of being prevented from working in Burma will be in the spotlight this year due to the world’s first tiger summit to be held in Vladivostok in September. Robert Zoellick, the Bank’s president, is billed to co-chair the summit with the host nation’s prime minister, Vladmir Putin.

“We in the World Bank do not have the mandate to fund projects in Myanmar,” admitted Keshav Varma, leader of the GTI. “But we can provide technical assistance through United Nations agencies and other organisations.”

ILO to begin Burma child soldier campaign

Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)
Date: 12 Feb 2010

Feb 12, 2010 (DVB)–The International Labour Organisation will begin circulating leaflets on forced labour and child solider recruitment across Burma, but not before it is passed through the regime’s notorious censor board.

Burma is thought to have one of the world’s highest counts of child soldiers, and the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) is the only body officially mandated to tackle the problem in the pariah state.

Steve Marshall, ILO liaison officer in Rangoon, said that a draft of the leaflet had been submitted to the government’s labour ministry for approval.

The campaign, he said, was raised during talks in Burma last month between ILO executive director Kari Tapiola and labour minister Aung Kyi.

The talks also resulted in an extension of the ‘supplementary understanding’ between the government and the ILO, which acts as an agreement that the Burmese junta will not avenge those who complain to the ILO about forced labour and child solider recruitment.

“There will need to be an extensive printing of these [leaflets] in various languages, with a wide distribution,” said Marshall.

Open Letter to Mon &_NLD MPs

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The Love We Share-poem by Salai Z T Lian

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