Day: August 21, 2010
Thailand:The National Security Council is looking at granting foreign migrant status to about 200,000 illegal immigrants
The National Security Council is looking at granting foreign migrant status to about 200,000 illegal immigrants who have lived in Thailand for decades.
The council is considering offering the status, equivalent to permanent residency, to migrants who have lived in the country illegally for 20 to 30 years, NSC secretary-general Thawil Pliansri said.Their offspring will be given Thai nationality.
Mr Thawil said after a meeting of the NSC yesterday the 200,000 migrants were regarded as being “on the run” from authorities.
They fall into the “documented” group of illegal migrants.
Many more migrants, numbering about half a million, are believed to have slipped into the country illegally and are not documented.
Mr Thawil said giving the 200,000 documented illegal migrants the status of foreign migrants would benefit the country.
The state could keep track of their movements and collect taxes from them, he said.
Mr Thawil said another category of illegal migrants was the 100,000 people who fled strife in their home countries and entered Thailand through its western border.
These include Burmese, Rohingya, and North Korean refugees.
Mr Thawil said the government would provide this group with temporary shelter on the condition they were unarmed.
This group is not qualified to receive foreign status even if the NSC’s proposal to treat them in such a way is approved by the government, he said.
A security source said some members of this group showed no interest in settling in Thailand as they land on the border in the hope of being resettled in a third country.
Mr Thawil said some illegal migrants intentionally violate the law while staying here. They form criminal gangs or intentionally overstay their visas.
Authorities will step up measures to arrest them, once officials have completed an estimate of their numbers.
The NSC secretary-general said criteria for giving foreign migrant status to migrants included what jobs they have done during their illegal stay in the country.
If there is a labour skills shortage in that area, they stand a better chance of receiving legal status.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/191736/residency-tipped-for-200000
Mekong River basin nations approve rail link plan
HANOI, Aug 21 — Six Asian countries whose citizens depend heavily on the Mekong River have approved a railway system plan connecting between them which would facilitate cross-border transport and trade once the project is completed.
Ministers from the six countries — Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam — on Friday approved the plan during their meeting in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
Currently, only China and Vietnam have railway lines that connect with each other, and landlocked Laos has no rail network at all.
Ministers at the Greater Mekong Sub-region meeting finally agreed on a plan which was first promoted 18 years ago, designed to develop closer economic links among the six nations. Continue reading “Mekong River basin nations approve rail link plan”
မင္းထက္ေအာင္(၂၁-ၾသဂုတ္)။ Kaowao news
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မင္းထက္ေအာင္(၂၁-ၾသဂုတ္)။ ။ မေလး႐ွားႏုိင္ငံေရာက္ မြန္လူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႔မွ ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး မြန္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေန႔ အခမ္းအနားတစ္ရပ္က်င္းပသြားရန္ စီစဥ္ထားၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ယင္းအဖြဲ႔အတြင္းေရးမႉး ႏုိင္ဥကၠာက ေကာင္းဝါသတင္းဌာနသုိ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ေျပာၾကားပါသည္။
၄င္းအေျပာအရ လာမည့္ၾသဂုတ္လ(၂၅) ရက္ေန႔တြင္က်ေရာက္မည့္ (၆၃)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ မြန္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေန႔အခမ္းအနားကုိ ကြာလာလမ္ပူၿမဳိ႕ေတာ္႐ွိ Chinese Assembly Hall ခမ္းမေဆာင္အေပၚထပ္တြင္ က်င္းပမည္ဟု သိရသည္။
“ဒီလုိေတာ္လွန္ေရးေန႔အခမ္းအနားေတြကုိ မေလးရွားမွာတစ္ခါမွမလုပ္ခဲ့ဖူးဘူး၊ ဒီႏွစ္မွာမွ ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္လုပ္ၾကတာပဲ၊ လွဳပ္ရွားမွဳရွိမွ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးစိတ္ဓါတ္ရွင္သန္မယ္၊
ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မွဳရွိၾကမယ္၊ မတူညီတဲ့အျမင္ေတြစုစည္းႏုိင္မယ္”ဟု ႏုိင္ဥကၠာ ေျပာသည္။
မေလး႐ွားႏုိင္ငံေရာက္ မြန္လူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႔မွဦးေဆာင္က်င္းပမည့္ ယင္းအခမ္းအနားတြင္ မေလး႐ွားမွမြန္အဖြဲ႔အစည္း (၃၅) ဖြဲ႔ပါဝင္ၾကသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
မေလး႐ွားႏုိင္ငံေရာက္မြန္မ်ားမွာ ျပည္တြင္း႐ွိမိမိေက်းရြာမ်ားအလုိက္ စုဖြဲ႔ထားေသာအဖြဲ႔(၃၀) ေက်ာ္ ႐ွိသည့္အျပင္ မြန္ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ကဲ့သုိ႔ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးကုိအေျခခံဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့သည့္အဖြဲ႔(၃) ဖြဲ႔လည္း ႐ွိသည္။
“ေတာလွန္ေရးေန႔အထိမ္းအမွတ္ တီ႐ွပ္အထည္ငါးရာ႐ုိက္ထားတယ္၊ တစ္ထည္ရင္းဂစ္(၃၀) နဲ႔ေရာင္းေနတယ္” ဟု ႏုိင္ဥကၠာ ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
Wa, Mongla meet Naypyitaw’s negotiators
Two of Burma’s ethnic ceasefire groups: United Wa State Army (UWSA) and National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA) better known as Mongla group, that have refused to transform themselves into Naypyitaw’s border guard force (BGF) program are scheduled to meet military officials today, local sources from the Sino-Burma border reported.
On 17 August, Naypyitaw invited UWSA and NDAA to meet its negotiators Lt-Gen Ye Myint, Chief of Military Affairs Security (MAS) and Maj-Gen Kyaw Phyoe, Commander of Golden Triangle Region Command on 20 August. “But the two have to meet separately,” said an informed source.
The UWSA including its supreme leader Bao Youxiang was asked to meet Lt-Gen Ye Myint at Tangyan, 83 miles southwest of Shan State North’s capital Lashio and NDAA is to meet Maj-Gen Kyaw Phyoe at Shan State East’s capital Kengtung. No reason for the meeting was given to the groups.
In addition, the UWSA was told to arrive at the venue by 10:00 today, but details for Mongla group is unknown. However, both UWSA and NDAA are expected to be meeting with the military officials by the time of this reporting.
“The Wa left Panghsang yesterday. The group has 8 members. Mongla is leaving this morning,” he said.
Panghsang group was led by Bo La kham, Chairman of the Political Consultative Conference, a source said. “Bao Youxiang could not attend the meeting because he is not in Panghsang,” he said. “His chief interpreter U Aung Myint (aka Li Julieh) is also away.”
The Wa authorities said it did not seem to matter though without their leader’s participation. On the other hand, the group “will be there only to listen’ as they have nothing new to inform the military officials; a source quoted one of the Wa leaders as saying.
Nevertheless, with regards to the meeting, many border watchers commented that it may at least concern with the upcoming elections because the junta has announced that both Mongla and Wa areas are recognized as constituencies despite the two’s announcement that any political parties are banned from campaigning in their controlled areas.
In early August, Union Election Commission announced that all 55 townships in Shan State will be constituencies. In addition, the 2008 constitution designated that Wa, Danu, Palaung, Pa-O and Kokang were granted Self-Administered Areas/Zones. They are:
* Danu Self-Administered Zone: Pindaya and Ywa-ngan townships
* Kokang Self-Administered Zone: Laogai and Kungjang townships
* Palaung Self-Administered Zone: Namhsan and Mantong townships
* Pa-O Self-Administered Zone: Faikhun (Pekhon), Hopong and Hsihseng townships
* Wa Self-Administered Region: Hopang, Mongmai, Pangwai, Napharn, Panghsang and Markmang (Metman) townships
democracy for burma 