The first Mon political party to be officially registered since the 1990 election has now begun a series of campaign

The first Mon political party to be officially registered since the 1990 election has now begun a series of campaign efforts throughout Mon State, in order to raise party membership prior to the election, according to Nai Ngwe Thein (Nai Janu), the party’s chairman.

The All Mon Region Democracy Party (AMRDP) began its recent campaign during the second week of June, focusing primarily on Ye and Mudon Townships for primary party membership, but have also campaigned in Thanphyuzayart Township and Lamine sub-township.

The recent campaign has consisted of presentations and speeches explaining their party’s policy regarding support for ethnic communities through economic development, and instructions on how to vote.  The campaign so far has drawn support from residents and monks said party leader Nai Ngwe Thein.

Amnesty International Launches Radio Campaign for Burma

Amnesty International (AI) has launched an online campaign to collect enough money from donors to buy 4,000 radios to be distributed in Burma next month, according to a press release.
“Burma is preparing for its first elections in two decades,” the statement read. “By heavily censoring the media, the ruling military junta attempts to isolate the population from independent opinions. But you can help us beat the blackout.”
AI called on its readers and members to donate £12.50 (US $18.50), which the London-based rights group said is the cost of one radio.

Calling the campaign “Break the Silence,” AI said it hopes to collect enough donations to buy 4,000 radios, 60 walkie-talkie kits and six satellite kits.
“About 12 people will use each radio, so if we reach our target, 50,000 more people inside Burma will have access to independent news broadcasts,” the statement read.
In an e-mail sent to its members the same day, AI said, “Organisations like the Democratic Voice of Burma, an independent radio station based in Oslo and staffed by exiled Burmese dissidents, broadcast directly into Burma. Radios are not banned and they are one of the most effective ways to reach the Burmese people.
“But many of Burma’s 50 million people live in remote areas and don’t currently have access to a radio. We want to change that—and we need you to help us do it. Buy a radio now,” it said.
Kate Allen, the director of AI in the UK, was quoted as saying, “We have spoken to many Burmese groups and they have all said the same thing: independent information is vital, and radios are the key.”
AI is working with local organizations on the ground to distribute the radios, calling them “a powerful tool in bringing about social change.”
The Burmese junta tightly controls all media in the country, including printing, Internet, radio and TV, and is notorious for its draconian censorship and state propaganda.
A Mon reporter who was involved in the radio campaign in Mon State, said, “Radio is an easy campaign to promote. You don’t have to tell people twice because everyone needs one.”

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Suu Kyi receives Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Award for democracy

Islamabad, Jun 22 (PTI) Myanmar’s dissident political leader Aung San Suu Kyi has become the first recipient of the new Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Award for democracy instituted by the Pakistan People’s Party in the memory of the slain former premier.

The award was instituted by the ruling PPP to mark Bhutto’s birth anniversary, which was observed yesterday.

It pays tribute to Bhutto’s life-long struggle for democracy, human rights, improvement of the status of women and social causes.

The recipients of the award in four categories– democracy, human rights, philanthropy and women’s empowerment– were chosen by a committee chaired by PPP chief and President Asif Ali Zardari, an official statement said.

The statement said Suu Kyi was being honoured for challenging the dictatorship in Myanmar despite remaining in detention and house arrest for many years.

The recipients of the award in four categories ? democracy, human rights, philanthropy and women’s empowerment ? were chosen by a committee chaired by PPP chief and President Asif Ali Zardari, an official statement said.

The statement said Suu Kyi was being honoured for challenging the dictatorship in Myanmar despite remaining in detention and house arrest for many years.

Pakistani rights activist I A Rehman received the award for human rights for his role at the forefront of the struggle for greater human rights and for his work as a peace activist.

The award for philanthropy went to Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak, the founding president of the UAE Women’s Association.

The statement said she was known for her”concerted campaign for the case of promoting welfare and well-being of women in the UAE”.

The recipient of the award for women’s empowerment is Sheikha Mowza Ali Hamad Al Mualla, who has been engaged in educational and other social reforms in Qatar over the years.

Dhaka readies for legal battle on maritime dispute with India-Myanmar

Bangladesh is preparing for a lengthy legal battle at an international tribunal to establish its claim over territorial waters in the Bay of Bengal, as talks for an amicable settlement of maritime boundary disputes with India and Myanmar do not seem promising.

Bangladesh’s documents in the case regarding the dispute with Myanmar have been finalised, and will be filed at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) by July 1. The deadline for filing of counter-documents by Myanmar is December 1.

Bangladesh is also scheduled to submit, by May 31, 2011, a memorandum to the Arbitral Tribunal of the United Nations, claiming its legitimate authority over territorial waters in connection with the dispute with India. India will submit a counter-memorandum by May 31, 2012.

The Bangladesh government already appointed a panel of foreign experts to prepare the documents for the legal battle at the UN, foreign ministry sources said.

Besides, a technical team of Bangladeshi experts, led by a retired navy official, is currently reviewing the legal provisions, while also negotiating with Myanmar.

Despite Bangladesh’s move for seeking UN involvement, the country’s Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said at a press conference on June 13, “We have kept open the option of amicable settlement through bilateral discussions.”

Bangladesh lodged objections with the UN, regarding the claims of India and Myanmar on October 8, 2009, as it has disputes with both countries in two areas — ”natural prolongation of the continental shelf and the baseline”.

ITLOS already nominated three of the five arbitrators of the tribunal instituted for settlement of the dispute with India. The three are Tullio Treves of Italy, Ivan Anthony Shearer of Australia, and Rudiger Wolfrum of Germany.

Bangladesh nominated Alan Vaughan Lowe, former professor of international law at the University of Oxford, and India proposed the name of P Sreenivasa Rao, former legal adviser to its external affairs ministry.

လက္မွတ္မရွိေသာ အလုပ္သမား (၈၃၀) ဖမ္းဆီးခံရ

ထုိင္းႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းရွိ ေနထုိင္ အလုပ္ လုပ္ကိုင္ခြင့္ လက္မွတ္မရွိေသာ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို စီမံခ်က္ျဖင့္ ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ရာ အလုပ္သမား (၈၃၀)ဦးဖမ္းဆီးခံရၿပီး ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမား (၃၄၆)ဦး ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ဖမ္းဆီးခံရေသာ အလုပ္သမား (၈၃၀)မွာ ျမန္မာ၊ ေလာႏွင့္ ကေမာၻဒီးယား အလုပ္သမား ျဖစ္ၿပီး ယခုလ (၁၆)ရက္ေန႔မွ (၁၉)ရက္ေန႔အတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၾကာင္း ထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံ ဗဟိုရဲဌာနခ်ဳပ္မွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ စထန္စရန္ႏုန္ႏွင့္ ဒုတိယ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ဥဖုန္ကိုမာကုန္တို႔က ေျပာသည္။

အဓိက ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည့္ ေနရာမ်ားမွာ ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရး၊ စားေသာက္ဆုိင္၊ ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖေရးႏွင့္ ေဘာလံုး ေလာင္းကစား လုပ္ေနသည့္ ေနရာမ်ားမွ ျဖစ္သည္။

ဖမ္းဆီးခံရ သူမ်ားအထဲတြင္ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳး အမ်ားစု ပါ၀င္ေနသျဖင့္ ေရရွည္တြင္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ ေအးခ်မ္းသာယာေရးႏွင့္ လံုၿခံဳေရးကို ထိပါးလာႏုိင္ဖြယ္ရွိၿပီး လုယက္မႈမ်ား ေပၚေပါက္လာႏိုင္ေသာေၾကာင့္ အထူး သတိထားရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ထိုင္းဘာသာျဖင့္ ေရးသားထုတ္ေ၀သည့္ ေခါင္စြတ္သတင္းစာတြင္ ေဖၚျပထားသည္။

(ဓာတ္ပံု- GHRE)

Democracy icon turns 65, still riling ‘the beast’

Why? Because the battle between the state of Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi goes on. On June 19, Suu Kyi celebrated her 65th birthday alone, except for two caretakers who share her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she has celebrated solo birthdays for 15 of the past 21 years in which she has been under house arrest.

This is a beauty versus the beast battle, borrowing the words of British historian and author Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote a popular story, Beauty and the Beast in Burma.

Daw Suu Kyi has been the victim of character assassination numerous times in the past 20 years. Physically, she was attacked by the ruling generals’ thugs when her car was mobbed in 1996 in Rangoon and again, more publicly, when her motorcade was ambushed in Depayin in upper Burma in 2003. She is regularly attacked by the regime’s media and junta-backed groups like the Union Solidarity and Development Association.

Although the regime regularly creates new schemes and plots to smear her image, she has survived and never lost the support of the people. In fact, Mrs Suu Kyi and Burmese politics have been like the two faces of a coin ever since she entered the country’s political arena during the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988. But the question is, for how much longer will she be under house arrest and ignored by the regime’s leaders?

The problem between Mrs Suu Kyi and the junta is complicated. Since 1988, it’s really come down to the relationship between three players: the military government and Mrs Suu Kyi, as the opposition leader, with the international community as moderator.

Let’s look at the two key players – Mrs Suu Kyi and the regime, whose policies and style can be compared and contrasted in four areas.

First, Suu Kyi:

Ideology: liberal Western democracy; Ethics: plain honesty practised as political integrity;Force: National League for Democracy, winner of the 1990 elections, now disbanded; Methodology: dialogue (through non-violence).

Now, the junta:

Ideology: disciplined democracy (opposed to liberal Western democracy); Ethics: cunning, manipulation and oppression; Force: more than 400,000 soldiers; Methodology: “democracy road map” with seven steps (the upcoming election being step five).

So far, Mrs Suu Kyi has been unsuccessful in persuading the generals to join her in reconciliation talks, a point stressed over and over again by members of the international community.

21Jun10 2010 Election Campaign Inside Burma 1

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