Junta mouthpiece calls NLD narrow-minded

While the international community and media continue condemning the Burmese military rulers for its farcical electoral laws, the junta argues that the National League for Democracy (NLD) has adopted narrow-minded practices. Junta’s mouthpiece The New Light of Myanmar has published a news that “if NLD wants to amend the Constitution it should run for the election and should act in accordance with the law calling for constitutional amendment”.

Quoting junta officials, the government-run newspaper also urged the Aung San Suu Kyi led NLD to adopt a broader view and “not a narrow-minded view” based on personal and organizational prejudice.

It can be recalled that NLD did not register with the Burmese junta controlled Election Commission and thus faces forced dissolution since May first week. The newspaper of May 12 issue, categorically denied that the present military regime named as the State Peace and Development Council has adopted any flawed electoral laws.

“However, the NLD criticized the laws as unjust and refused to register. We have ensured all inclusiveness of the elections. It is up to the NLD to decide not to take part,” said the newspaper.

Press Release – Crowley Spearheads Introduction of Bipartisan bill to Renew Sanctions on Burma’s Military Regime

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Media Alert REPORT BY GLOBAL CAMPAIGN FOR FREE EXPRESSION-Final Condemnation for Upcoming Elections as Nld Ceases to Exist as Political Party

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Innlay Lake faces water decreased

A well known as a beautiful lake which brings most tourists’ attraction, Innlay Lake, in Taunggyi, the capital city of Shan State is facing water level decreased.

The water level of Innlay has been decreasing since last year and this year, it has made ferryboats difficult to travel as the water level has gone down significantly, said local sources in Innlay.

Its tributaries are also very low, and some places become sand bank, making travelers to walk a long distance to the ferryboats.

All Mon Region Democracy Party and Kayin People Party in dire need of funds

The All Mon Region Democracy Party (AMRDP) and Kayin People Party (KPP) are both desperately seeking election funds from their respective supporters.

Both parties are facing financial problems and are currently in need of funding to cover all costs necessitated by the election process, including party representative fees, traveling, and office rentals, KPP spokesperson Te Say Wah Nyunt and AMRDP leader Nai Janu informed IMNA today.

According to government election laws released in March of this year, each party must pay a fee of 500 thousand kyat per party representative to the Myanmar Union Election Commission.

In the 1990 elections, the Mon National Democratic Front (MNDF) registered 19 members for its campaign; registering each member cost a fee of 10,000 kyat. The AMRDP spokesperson indicated that the party wishes to register even more representatives for the upcoming 2010 elections.

Party leaders from each group reported that thus far, both parties have only been able to collect funds from among committee members, and are facing difficulties funding traveling and office rental costs.

“Now we are collecting the funds from among committee members and have a temporary office at Insein in Yangon [Rangoon],” Say Wah Nyunt  of the KPP reported. “We do not have the money to rent a permanent office yet.”

Representatives from the AMRDP reported that the party currently lacks even the funds to rent any form of campaign quarters.

Nai Janu stated “ The AMRDP has no permanent or temporary office, and will look for an office soon. Approximately, our party needs 120 million kyat, including 500 thousand kyat for each of the representatives, traveling, office renting and other necessary costs.”

“We do not have money. The businessmen have not donated any money yet, and we want our people to help us to run for the election” he said.

The KPP spokesperson also emphasized, “We are only relying on our people. If our people will donate 500 kyat each, we will not have any problems and we hope our people will provide us [with] the funds.”

Both the AMRDP and the KPP will run in the 2010 elections this fall, overlapping their campaigns in in Mon State, Karen State, and Tenasserim division.

All Mon Region Democracy Party (ARMDP)

The party aims to represent Mon State and other ethnic minority groups living in Mon-controlled regions. The party hopes to increase the political and cultural rights accorded to ethnic minorities, and to aid Burma’s transformation into a democratic state. The AMRDP was officially named and founded during an April 7, 2010 meeting and the party name was approved by the Burmese government on May 4^th. The party also elected two leaders to and picked a party flag and symbols that they submitted to the Myanmar Union Election Commission on May 10.

The  currently elected party leaders, still pending approval from the Election Commission:

1. Chairman: Nai Ngwe Thein (Nai Janu)
2. Vice Chairman: Nai Hla Aung

The fifteen approved committee members:

1. Nai Ngwe Thein (Nai Janu), party leader No. 1
2. Nai Hla Aung, party leader No. 2
3. Nai Seik
4. Nai Baya Aung Moe
5. Nai Nwe Soe
6. Nai Lawi Ong
7. Nai Chit Oo
8. Nai San Tin
9. Nai Thein Han
10. Nai Myo Thit Lwin
11. Nai Soe Thein
12. Nai Aung Ba
13. Nai Sein Aung
14. Nai Sein Tun
15. Nai Than Shwe

Kayin People Party (KPP)

The KPP was founded on March 31, 2001, and submitted to the Myanmar Union Election Commission for approval. The party aims to promote  good relations and trust among the  different races in the country, to preserve the culture, literature and heritage of each races and to help groups mutually respect each others’ faiths and cultures, to improve the qualifications and capacity of individuals regardless of their faiths and ethnicities, and to promote the identity and quality of life of the Karen people amid these emerging changes.

A Comparative Picture of Migration in Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand: Summary

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photayokeking-“ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္း က်န္ေနေသာ တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ားအတြက္”

အပိုင္း (၅) ကို ဒီေနရာမွာ ႏွိပ္ၿပီး ျပန္လည္ေလ့လာ ဖတ္႐ႈႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီလိုနဲ႔ က်ေနာ့္ကို အိုင္အိုအရာရွိက “မင္း ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးသင္တန္းကို သြားပါ” လို႔ လာေျပာတာနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္လည္း အိမ္ကို ျပန္ခ်င္တာေၾကာင့္ နာမည္စာရင္း သြင္းလိုက္တာ သင္တန္းတက္ခြင့္ က်လာပါတယ္။ သြားတက္ရမွာက အေရွ႕ပိုင္းတိုင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ရွိရာ ေတာင္ႀကီးၿမိဳ႕ (ျမစိမ္းေတာင္ ထလရ) သင္တန္းေက်ာင္းကိုပါ။ အဲဒီမွာ က်ေနာ္သင္တန္း တက္မယ္။ ၿပီးရင္ အိမ္ကို ခဏျပန္မယ္ေပါ့။ စဥ္းစားထားတာေတြပါ။ သင္တန္းဖြင့္မွာက (၄ – ၁ – ၁၉၉၅) ရက္ေန႔၊ က်ေနာ့္ ကို တပ္ရင္းကေန လႊတ္လိုက္တာက လကုန္ရက္ႀကီး၊ ႀကိဳတင္ေငြ (၂) လစာရယ္၊ ရိကၡာစိုေငြရယ္ ေဆာင္းၿပီး ေပးလိုက္ ပါတယ္။

သြားရမဲ့ခရီးက အလာတုန္းကလိုေတာ့ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး၊ ရဲေဘာ္သစ္ မဟုတ္တာရယ္၊ ေနာက္လုံၿခဳံေရးအရ စိတ္မခ်ရတာ ရယ္ေၾကာင့္ ေသနတ္ေတြ က်ည္ေတြကအစ ထုတ္ၿပီး သြားရတယ္။ ေနာက္ က်ေနာ့္ကို တပ္ရင္း႐ုံးက တပ္ၾကပ္ႀကီး စာေရး ေတြ၊ ႐ုံးအုပ္ေတြက မုန္႔ဖိုးေပးလိုက္တာန႔ဲဆို က်ေနာ့္မွာ ေငြ (၈၀၀၀) က်ပ္ေလာက္ ပါသြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ လိုအပ္တဲ့ (ေရး – ၁၀၀)၊  ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ (Movement Order) လက္မွတ္၊ အဲဒါေတြယူၿပီး သြားရတယ္ဗ်ာ။ continue     http://www.photayokeking.org/Articles/

Arrested local in serial bomb blast case released

A local arrested in connection with the serial bomb blasts in the Irrawaddy Myitsone dam project site in northern Burma, which killed four Chinese workers and injured 12, was released yesterday by Burmese junta authorities, said sources.

Marip La Ram, a Kachin villager of Tang Hpre at the Irrawaddy River’s confluence (Myitsone in Burmese), 27 miles north of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, was freed yesterday at about 9 a.m. local time. He was detained for more than a couple of weeks, said relatives of La Ram.La Ram is the chief organizer of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) in his village. He was picked up and detained at the office of Burma’s Asia World Company, constructing the dam, said villagers.

Sources close to La Ram said, he was interrogated and tortured by Burmese security agents during detention for over a couple of weeks in the company’s office.According to Tang Hpre’s villagers, the security agents for the dam project are now detaining at least three villagers in the company’s office.  The military authorities are making rampant arrests and releasing villagers, added the villagers.

A Kachin Baptist Church in Tang Hpre village and the villagers are increasingly intimidated into accepting a relocation by Burma’s ruling junta since the serial bomb blasted inside the dam project site nearbly village on April 17.

Chin Christians Held Conferences in Recent Months

Chinland Guardian: A series of Christian conferences was held across Chin State and outside in recent months, celebrating anniversaries and promoting spiritual unity and understanding among Chin Christians of different denominations.

A week-long Youth conference held as part of Myanmar Baptist Convention’s programmes from 27 April, 2010 in Matupi town ended last Monday with a successful out-turn, where about 30 youths from Hakha Baptist Association participated.

The first Dai Inter-Denominational Conference, co-hosted by the two mainstrem denominations – the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church, was held on 23-25 April 2010 in Mindat Town of Southern Chin State, with about 100 Dai-Chin Christian leaders attending from Mindat, Kanpetlet, Matupi, Paletwa townships and Yangon.

http://www.chinlandguardian.com/news-2009/957-chin-christians-held-conferences-in-recent-months.html

Arakan village chief robbed at gunpoint

Dhaka (Mizzima) – Armed men disguised as border security officers raided the home of a village chairman in Arakan State late last Saturday, holding he and his family at gunpoint while robbing them of money and gold, the victim told Mizzima.

Tun Aye Maung, chairman of the Village Peace and Development Council of Thayakoak Village, Maungdaw Township, said about 20 men arrived at his home at about 10 p.m. on May 8 posing as border security force officers (Na Sa Ka) checking for unreported overnight house guests.

Upon being admitted, the men brandished guns and forced Tun Aye Maung’s wife to reveal the family’s hiding places for valuables. They took four million Kyats (about US$4,000) and some gold, the village chairman told Mizzima by phone.

“The robbers beat my wife and told her to show them where we kept our valuables, so she took them to where the money and gold were hidden. Although neighbours could hear [the commotion], they were afraid to follow and catch the robbers”, Tun Aye Maung said.

Although the family informed the local headquarters of the border security force, there were no clues as to the identities or whereabouts of the culprits, sources said.