Month: March 2010

KNPLF steps up campaigning activity

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Ko Reh/ March 31, 2010

Karenni Nationalities People’s Liberation Fronts (KNPLF) have stepped up election campaign around the main controlling areas, said a local redident from Loikaw.

“They are now campaigning around Deemawso town, Namelkon, Mese, Loikaw division. They built up libraries for villages, gave biscuits, clothes.”He said.

High ranking KNPLF leaders decided to participate in the planned general election, and registered a political party in Karenni State. They decided to register because they want to govern their people by themselves.

KNPLF’s general secretary Oo Shwe Wa said on the Irrawaddy “We decided to set up. Our party going to be Karenni Natinalities People’s Liberation Party, we didn’t change from former’s name and party flag too”.

It is unknown if KNPLF will be allowed to register as a political party in the general election, but they have already chosen their representatives for the party.

They are a second chairman from KNPLF Oo Htun Kyaw, former government staff Oo Taw Reh, Loikaw Education Department chief Oo Shar Myay Ayela and Oo Thain Aung from Ethnic Alliances Party.

Even though they campaigned around villages, villagers didn’t care what they say and what they have to do. A local villager from Loikaw town added “We can support their party for the election, if the education system is getting better for our children and we are free to farm, plant, and move around to feed our families.”

According to KNPLF’s campaigning around villages throughout Karenni State, Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) seems not to be encouraged.

“We didn’t expect their party to work for our people, because there is no mention of ethnics’ rights if we look back on SPDC’s 2008 constitution”.

KNPLF started campaigning around Karenni State on last week of January.

200 left homeless after storm ravishes refugee camp

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Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Fifty-seven houses were destroyed and 200 people made homeless in a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border as a result of a strong wind storm.

The storm raced through the Ban Don Yang refugee camp near Three Pagoda Pass, Mon State, Burma, around 2 p.m. on Monday.

Though lasting only some ten minutes, the winds were strong enough to destroy thatch and bamboo structures.

One refugee said, “It’s very lucky that we are safe. When we were out of our house a tree fell on the house. During the strong wind a lot of people were running around. We ran to an open field.”   Ban-Don-Yang

The camp chairman, Saw Htoo Han, said, “The food warehouse, primary school, computer classroom and patient room were damaged in the camp. The camp is home to 4,000 people.”

“At first, rain and hail fell. Then the strong wind came with a loud sound. Some huts were destroyed. The roofs of some cottages were opened,” Saw Htoo Han continued.

The principal of the primary school exclaimed, “The roofs, walls and floors of the school were opened and damaged. Now, we can’t teach to the students. There are around sixty students.”

Many refugees in the camp are from Kyar Inn Seik Kyi Township in Karen State, having fled a junta offensive in 1997.

Additionally, over 2,000 refugees from the Htan Him camp in southern Thailand were transferred to the Ban Don Yang in 1998.

The Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) has arranged food and clothing for the refugees who lost their homes.

photayokeking-Articlesmm/old-soldiers-political-point-of-view-part-1

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စစ္မႈထမ္းေဟာင္းတစ္ဦး၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအျမင္- အပိုင္း (၁)

ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ – သံႀကိဳး

စာဖတ္ပရိတ္သတ္မ်ားခင္ဗ်ား

ပင္တိုင္ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းနဲ႔ စစ္မႈထမ္းေဟာင္း တပ္ၾကပ္ႀကီးတစ္ဦးလည္း ျဖစ္ခဲ့သူ သံၾကိဳးက စူးရွေသာ အေတြးအျမင္မ်ားျဖင့္ ေရးသားေပးပို႔လာတဲ့ ေဆာင္းပါးတစ္ပုဒ္ကို ဒီကေန႔ တင္ျပေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္။ ဒီေဆာင္းပါးမွာ နအဖက စကားလံုးလွလွေလးေတြသံုးကာ အမ်ဳိးသားႏိုင္ငံေရးတို႔ ဘာတို႔ ေျပာေနေပမဲ့ တကယ္တမ္း တိုင္းျပည္ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ဖို႔ရာမွာ ဒါေတြဟာ အဓိက မဟုတ္ပံု၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ ကမၻာမွာ မေျပာနဲ႔ အာရွမွာေတာင္ သူမ်ားႏိုင္ငံေတြကို ေငးၾကည့္ေနရတဲ့အတြက္ မိမိတို႔ရဲ႕ အမိျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို အမွန္တကယ္ ခ်စ္သူတိုင္း အေျပာင္းအလဲ တစ္ခုကို မျဖစ္မေနလုပ္သင့္ပံု၊ တိုးတက္ေနတဲ့ ကမၻာ႔ႏိုင္ငံေတြက ေခါင္းေဆာင္ၾကီးေတြရဲ႕ အဆိုအမိန္႔မ်ားအား အတုယူ လိုက္နာသင့္ပံုေတြအျပင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက တိုးတက္မႈအရင္းခံ အေၾကာင္းတရားမ်ားအား ျပည့္ျပည့္စံုစံု သံုးသပ္ တင္ျပထားရာ စာဖတ္ပရိသတ္မ်ားအား အထူးဗဟုသုတ တိုးပြါးေစပါတယ္။ အခုလို ေရးသားေပးပို႔ေနတဲ့ ပင္တိုင္ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ သံၾကိဳးအား အထူးေက်းဇူးတင္ရွိပါေၾကာင္း ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကိုဖိုးတရုတ္မွ အဖြဲ႔သားမ်ားကိုယ္စား မွတ္တမ္းတင္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳရင္း ေဖၚျပအပ္ပါတယ္ ခင္ဗ်ား။

http://www.photayokeking.org/Articlesmm/old-soldiers-political-point-of-view-part-1.html

BGF deadline for armed groups extended again

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The military junta has set 28 April as another deadline for Special Region #4, the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA-ESS) better known as Mongla group, to give response on its border guard force (BGF) program, according to sources close to the NDAA leadership.

The announcement of the deadline was delivered by chief of Military Affairs Security (MAS) Lt-Gen Ye Myint on 29 March; when he and some 10 representatives of the NDAA met at Kengtung headquarters.

The meeting was attended by both Lt-Gen Ye Myint and Maj-Gen Kyaw Phyoe, Commander of Kengtung based Triangle Region Command, Sao Hsang Luu, Vice Chairman of NDAA, Kham Mawng, Deputy Chief-of-Staff and Sai Soe Win, liaison Officer in Kengtung were present at the meeting called by Ye Myint.

NDAA fighters

Lt-Gen Ye Myint warned the group that if it did not accept to transform itself into junta’ run border guard force by the deadline, it would become an illegal organization like it used to be before 1989. 1989 was the year that the Burma Army and the main ethnic armed groups concluded ceasefire agreement.

“This time he did not say there would be an offensive if the group rejected (the program),” a source said.

“It’s up to you whether your group will accept our proposal or not. We are now giving you a choice to decide for your future,” the source quoted Ye Myint as saying. “The group was not allowed to say anything.”

According to Ye Myint, 28 April will really be the latest deadline for the group. The junta military’s deadline has been extended five times including the latest one. The first was in October 2009, the second in December 2009, the third in February 2010 and the fourth 10 March.

In the meantime, the area commander of Mongkhark was reportedly making inspections around Mongyang facing Hsalue, regarded as Mongla’s strongest brigades on the same day. Because of the movement, some local villagers have reportedly fled to nearby towns like Kengtung, Tangyan and Chinese border towns thinking it as a forerunner of war, a local resident in Mongyang said.

Another local source who knows well about the areas says if there is going to be fighting; it will only be a small operation, not a major one.  Nevertheless, it is hard to say whether the military junta will launch offensive against Wa and Mongla. “If the junta is really serious, it would not have extended the deadline again and again.”

Lt-Gen Ye Myint is scheduled to meet the United Wa State Army (UWSA) on 1 April. But no venue and date has been set up, another source from Wa territory.

At the same time, Tangyan based battalions were reportedly ordered to stop all cargo trucks going in and out of Panghsang, capital town of the Wa State and not to allow any trucks to cross the Salween anymore. Similar action has also been taken against the UWSA’s 171st Military Region along the Thai-Burma border, said a source from the border.

A senior Wa officer said, the action did not have impact on their people because the food that Panghsang people consume come from China.

A few days ago, over 30 junta personnel who were ordered to leave Panghsang last week were reported to have returned, but the Wa authorities refused to allow the team to stay. The team then returned to Kengtung on that day.

Fresh crackdown likely, Win Tin warns

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Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – National League for Democracy (NLD) Central Executive Committee (CEC) member U Win Tin has warned that the military regime is likely to launch a new crackdown against the party.

“Our movements will be very much limited when we don’t have a party. If we make more movements and stand against them [the junta], they will declare our party an unlawful association,” Win Tin said.

CEC and Central Committee members yesterday decided not to register their party with the Election Commission as they argue the electoral laws are unjust.

As per the electoral laws, existing political parties must register with the Election Commission (EC) by May 6th or risk being labeled unlawful organizations.

Win Tin, who was imprisoned for 19 years because of his political beliefs, has long advocated for non-registration.

“They will certainly imprison those who take steps ahead of others and those who are competent. We must face it,” the 80-year old U Win Tin commented.

“We are not working just only for winning the election and holding power. We are working for abolishing and dismantling the entire military dictatorship. So they will certainly come down harshly against us,” he said. Continue reading “Fresh crackdown likely, Win Tin warns” →

Fresh sentence for NLD youth leader

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(Mizzima) – In continuance of harsh judgments against dissidents, a youth leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Tarmway Township, in Rangoon Division, was sentenced to two more years in prison by the Tarmway Township court yesterday for allegedly being in touch with an illegal team.

Kyaw Myo Naing the youth in-charge 2 (Tarmway Township), was sentenced to two years by the Bahan Township court last year. Now he has been sentenced to two more years by Tarmway court.

A relative of Kyaw Myo Naing told Mizzima, “His case was heard in the Tarmway court and he was sentenced two more years according to Act 17 (1). Moreover, he will be charged with the Electronic Act 33 (A) in the Tarmway court on April 9.

On November 20, 2009, Aung Aung Oo, the NLD youth in-charge of Tarmway Township, Kyaw Min Tun (alias) Bo Tun, the Township’s security and discipline in-charge and Kyaw Myo Naing (alias) Kyaw Gyi, the NLD youth in-charge 2 of Tarmway Township were charged under Act 505 (B) for public mischief and sentenced to two years by Bahan court.

Two policemen from Bahan police station arrested them for distributing photo stickers of Aung San Suu Kyi, NLD leader on July 18 last year.

A NLD youth member, who went to the court yesterday said, U Aye Thein was Kyaw Myo Naing’s lawyer. Kyaw Myo Naing was detained in the special detention room in Insein Prison and not allowed to walk.