No Justice, No Peace by strategypage

November 30, 2010: When it became obvious to the tribes that the November 7 elections were rigged in favor of the military dictatorship candidates, the fighting resumed with the tribal militias. Two decades of efforts to make peace deals with tribal militias has fallen apart. The generals who run the military dictatorship hoped to absorb all the tribal militias into a new border guard force, and disarm the militias. But during the last two years, the tribal factions realized they were being played. It became obvious that the new border force would be commanded by non-tribal generals and closely watched by the secret police. This rebellion of the “pacified tribes” has been building for years. The latest one to rebel was the Buddhist faction of the Karen tribes, which had allied itself with the government in the 1990s. Now the Buddhist and Christian Karen are united in fighting the military dictatorship. Some of the tribes are also fighting to protect their lucrative new business producing and smuggling amphetamines. Northern Burma has become a major source of illegal amphetamines.

Further complicating the tribal situation are the three new natural gas and oil pipelines moving Burmese product to China. The tribal rebels are expected to stay away from these pipelines, and get some help from China in return (which already provides sanctuary for the United War Army, ethnic Chinese tribes that have long been fighting with the Burmese government).

Suu Kyi calls on Thailand

Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday called on Thais to be kind to migrants and refugees from her country.

“We know it is not easy for Thailand to cope with the situation, but we would so appreciate it if you could do what you can for them,” she said in a phone interview with Bangkok-based Thai-Asean News Network.

 

Thailand has been sheltering more than 100,000 Burmese refugees for over two decades, and about 2 million migrants from the country currently have jobs in the Kingdom. Recently, more Burmese people have fled to Thailand as troops fight with armed ethnic groups along the border.

 

Suu Kyi, who was released from house arrest early this month, expressed her gratitude to Thais for helping the Burmese people.

 

“We would like you to know that we wish to be your good friend and good neighbour,” she said.

 

She also spoke to fellow citizens in Thailand and promised they would not be forgotten, and that she would do what she could to bring them back home as soon as possible.

 

Suu Kyi also called on the government to not just engage with her country’s ruling junta, but also the opposition, which is working to bring democracy into the country.

 

“We would very much like all governments to engage with not just the government of Burma, but also with us,” she said.

 

The Burmese opposition leader, who won the Nobel prize for her dedication to democracy in a military-ruled country, is now trying to get her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to play a significant role in the country’s politics.

 

The immediate task, though, was for the party to re-register because officials dissolved it for failing to comply with the new political party law and refusing to take part in the November 7 election, she said.

 

Another task would be for the party to reach out to the younger generation and encourage them to play a bigger role in the struggle for democracy, Suu Kyi said.

 

The political atmosphere in Burma changed a lot while she was in detention and one of the most important changes was that the new generation was paying more attention to politics and joining the NLD, she said. The party plans to build a network of young people across the country and encourage them to work for democracy, she said.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2010/12/01/politics/Suu-Kyi-calls-on-Thailand-30143547.html?

 

Railway line rerouted after Arakanese heritage site damaged

New Delhi (Mizzima) – Two incumbent ministers and national legislators-elect ordered the railways ministry last Thursday to choose a new path for the line it is building near the ancient city of Mrauk-U, after residents complained that walls and pagodas had sustained damage after a section of track had been laid.

A visitor to Mrauk-U, the ancient city in northern Arakan State that was home to the Mrauk-U Kingdom (1433 to 1784), enters Sakya Manaung Pagoda in September, 2010. Three pagodas and 10 walls at the national heritage site were damaged during construction of the Kyauktaw-Mrauk-U section of the Sittwe-Ann-Minbu railway. which finished on national election day, residents said. Photo: Mizzima

The order also came three days after Transport Minister Thein Swe and Industry Minister 1 Aung Thaung, of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, had met lawmakers-elect of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, which won more state seats than the USDP in national polls on November 7.

The politicians visited Mrauk-U to redraw the route and Burma’s Archaeology Department under the Ministry of Culture informed the Rail Transport Ministry to follow the new route, which passes through the ancient city’s north.

“The new route will cross the Rangoon-Sittwe Road but it’s a long way from the ancient pagodas and buildings, so the new route is acceptable,” an archaeologist in Mrauk-U said on condition of anonymity.

On November 15, local residents filed a complaint at the office of the Burmese Army Western Command chief Brigadier General Soe Thein, seeking a redesign of the Sittwe-Ann-Minbu railway project after 10 sections of wall, including those named Thazintan, Mungalar Manaung, Khrunkite, Kathel Ai Moat, and three pagodas, were found to have been damaged during the construction of the Kyauktaw-Mrauk-U section, which finished on national election day, residents said.

An ancient stone wall similar to the 10 damaged in Mrauk-U, the ancient city in northern Arakan State that was home to the Mrauk-U Kingdom (1433 to 1784), the most important and powerful Arakanese realm, in September, 2010. The damage was caused during construction of the Kyauktaw-Mrauk-U section of the Sittwe-Ann-Minbu railway. Photo: Mizzima

“After the residents filed the complaint, the Ministry of Culture immediately informed the Ministry of Rail Transport … [which] then … had to postpone the project. The damage was repaired and the route was redrawn,” the archaeologist said.

The Archaeology Department issued a ban last Thursday on railway workers digging in exclusion zones around the city or damaging the ancient forts. It also warned that cultural heritage thieves would be punished, he said.

The Sittwe-Yechanbyin section and Kungaung-Yoetayoke section of the Sittwe-Ann-Minbu railway has been commissioned into service since May last year and 75 per cents of Kyauktaw-Mrauk-U section was complete, a Sittwe rail official said.

Observers and party members have speculated as to the motivation behind Aung Thaung and Thein Swe seeking the meeting with three lawmakers from the RNDP on November 22 in Sittwe, capital of Arakan (Rakhine) State. In the elections, the RNDP secured the largest number of seats, 18, in the 46- to 47-seat Arakan Assembly

Statement+Monks+Protest+Destruction+of+Cultural+Sites

 

View this document on Scribd

BLC Statement on the Destruction of Arakan Cultural Heritage by Spdc Construction Projects

View this document on Scribd

 

 

NLD Report Documents Election Fraud

The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has completed a draft report that documents cheating and unfair procedures in Burma’s Nov. 7 election and the party’s central executive committee has approved the report, according to NLD leader Han Thar Myint.

“The cases are coming mostly from individual candidates because they were more oppressed in the election than political parties. There was only one political party which submitted their case to us,” Han Thar Myint told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday.

“The candidates who submitted their complaints about the Nov. 7 election had to show evidence substantiating their complaint. Although we finished the draft, there are still many more cases to come. We can’t confirm when we will release the report because we have to compile many cases and if necessary translate them into an English version,” said Han Thar Myint.  

လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ သားငယ္ကိုထိန္လင္းတို႔ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္ေစ်းကို ေရာက္ရွိစဥ္ ၾကိဳဆိုၾကတဲ့ ျမင္ကြင္း

ွဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေစ်းမွာ ဒီလို ၾကိဳဆိုခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္..

(အေမကိုခ်စ္တဲ့ ျပည္သူလူထုမွ အေမကို ဒီလိုၾကိဳဆိုခဲ့ ၾကပါတယ္.. အေမ့ပါးကို ၾကည္႔ပါဦး )

အေမစု.. လူထုႏွလံုး လူထု အျပဳံးေတြကို ရရွိပိုင္ဆိုင္တဲ့ ္လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္..

လူရာေပါင္းမ်ားစြာမွ ၾကိဳဆိုၾကျပီး အေမစုက်န္းမာပါေစလို႔ ဝိုင္းဝန္း ဆုေတာင္းေပးၾကပါတယ္..။

အေမနဲ႔သား ေစ်းကို ေရာက္စဥ္..

http://www.demowaiyan.co.cc/2010/12/blog-post.html

statement in compliance with the UKorg “Freedom torch award” presentation

View this document on Scribd

Daw Aung San Suu Speech Bur

Condition of Fugees Who Flee by Battle of SPDC and DKBA-vdo 30.November

Exclusive: A Video Message from Aung San Suu Kyi

http://www.4shared.com/video/7Nf85793/DASSK_.html

When FP Global Thinker Aung San Suu Kyi emerged this fall from a house arrest that had lasted on and off for two decades, the world was impatient to hear what this symbol of Burma’s embattled resistance movement would have to say. Would she rage against her captors, the Burmese junta that had just days before staged its first, extraordinarily flawed election in two decades? Would she call for international intervention to end a regime that has become known for its vicious crackdowns on minority and opposition groups and a dangerously laissez-faire attitude toward the drug barons operating along its borders? Instead, the freed dissident made a remarkably levelheaded call for long-term reform of the sort that comes from within: “value change,” as she put it, not regime change. And she has already begun to take action, filing papers to reinstate her political party and promising an investigation into the recent election. As she said upon her release, “We have a lot of things to do.”

COMMENTS (3)SHARE: 

TwitterRedditBuzz

More…

She also spoke directly to you, our readers at Foreign Policymagazine, in an exclusive video message commemorating her selectionas a Top Global Thinker of 2010. Noting how the world has changed in the years since she was imprisoned, she reaffirms the need to keep fighting for democracy. Her words are transcribed below:

It is a great pleasure to be able to address you like this today. But of course, it would have been an even greater pleasure if I could have joined you in person. I was greatly honored to find that I had been chosen as one of Foreign Policy‘s Top Global Thinkers. Honored, and at the same time humbled. During the last two decades, my life has swung between periods when I have ample time for thought and contemplation, and periods when I hardly had time to catch thoughts on the wing, because there was so much to do.

But in all these years, the one thought that has stayed with me is that we all have to work together to try to improve any situation. That is not an original thought; I think it’s as old as humanity: that there is strength in numbers, that we must learn to help each other. But yet, that is a thought that never ages. I wish I could meet all of you to talk over all the things I have thought about over the last seven years, during which many changes took place in this world.

ကရင္နီျပည္ရွိ ေစတီဘုရားအား DKBA မွလာေရာက္ျပဳျပင္

ကရင္နီျပည္၊ ဒီးေမာ့ဆိုၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ေဒါတေဆးရြာနားရွိ ဆင္မေတာင္ေစတီဘုရား ေတာင္တက္လမ္းအား ကတၱရာမ်ားျဖင့္ ခင္းက်င္းရန္ DKBA တပ္ဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ ျမိဳင္ႀကီးငူဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵ  ႏၱသုဇန ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရွိသည္။

အခု DKBA အဖြဲ႕ႏွင့္ ေဒသခံျပည္သူမ်ား လမ္းခင္ရန္လုပ္အားေပးေနေသာပုံ (ဓါတ္ပံု-ကယားလီဖု)

“DKBA အဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ေက်ာ္သန္း တို႔လည္းပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ တျပည့္ေတြေကာ္။ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္လႈိုင္းဘြဲၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ဘာအံ့ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ဘက္က ကရင္ေတြလည္းလာတယ္။ အဖြဲ႕အားလုံး ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူဆရာေတာ္က ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး ဆင္မေတာင္ရွိ ေတာင္တက္လမ္းကို လာခင္းပါတယ္” ဟုေဒသခံ တစ္ဦးကေျပာသည္။

ကရင္နီျပည္နယ္အတြင္းမွ ဘာသာတူ ေဒသခံမ်ားကလည္း ေန႔တုိင္းလာေရာက္ လုပ္အားေပးၾကသည္။

“ကယား၊ ကယန္း၊ ပအို၀္၊ ရွမ္း၊ ဗမာ၊ ကရင္ လူမ်ိဳးေပါင္းစုံလာၿပီး လုပ္အားေပးတာေတြ႔ရပါတယ္”ဟု သြားေရာက္လုပ္အားေပးေသာေဒသခံ တစ္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။

၎ေတာင္တက္လမ္းသည္ (၂) မိုင္ခြဲရွိၿပီး လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူဆရာေတာ္တို႔နွင့္ DKBA အဖြဲ႕တို႔မွ ဘုရားေစတီတည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ဆင္မေတာင္ဟု အမည္သြင္ထားခဲ့ေၾကာင္ သိရသည္။ ကတၱရာလမ္းခင္းရာတြင္ ခန္႔မွန္ေျခ သိန္းတစ္ေထာင့္ရွစ္ရာ ကုန္က်မည္ဟုသိရသည္။

http://ktimes.org/news/regional/item/851-dkba-come-to-repair-pagoda-in-karenni-state