Day: March 2, 2012

President Thein Sein delivers live Inaugural speech from the state TV

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In his address to Parliament on Thursday, Burmese President Thein Sein impressed many with his choice of  politically meaningful words and colorful phrases reflecting the wishes of the people, but one simple question remains: How seriously can those words be taken?

From teashops around the country to Facebook, many have expressed their views on Thein Sein’s speech.

In his greeting, he called the people of Burma the “parents” of the country—something that might not strike many non-Burmese as particularly significant, but which would have a powerful resonance with citizens accustomed to being told that “only the Tatmadaw [armed forces] is the father, and only the Tatmadaw is the mother.” This motto, which has been used by Burma’s military rulers for decades, has always been seen as a deep insult to the Burmese people.

Ko Ko Gyi, a strategic leader of the 88 Generation Student group, listened to the speech carefully and told The Irrawaddy: “The words the President used, from ‘parents’ to ‘all political players’ to ‘political inclusiveness,’ are welcome. His words are very good and beautiful, as if he were a poet.”

The former student leader who was freed in January went on to say: “Generally speaking, his whole speech covered all the essential issues, from the political process and ethnic issue to even daily matters on the ground. That showed that he is aware of the day-to-day life of the people.”

In his speech, Thein Sein vowed that his nominally civilian government would continue the political reforms it initiated last year and strive to establish a lasting peace with ethnic armed groups. But he also touched on more mundane subjects, such as the availability of mobile phone SIM cards and the Internet. Continue reading “President Thein Sein delivers live Inaugural speech from the state TV” →

၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ပဒိုမန္းရွာ လူငယ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဆု FBR မွ ေစာထူးထူးအယ္ရရွိ

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မတ္လ ၂ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၂ခုႏွစ္။ (ေကအိုင္စီ)

ဖန္းေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္းမွ ႏွစ္စဥ္ခ်ီးျမွင့္ေပးလွ်က္ရွိသည့္ ပဒိုမန္းရွာ လူငယ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဆုအား ၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္ဆု အတြက္ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားအစည္းအ႐ံုး (ေကအဲန္ယူ) ထိမ္းခ်ဳပ္နယ္ေျမ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ဒူးပလာယာ ခ႐ိုင္အတြင္းရွိလူမႈကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းေဆာင္ရြက္ ေနသည့္ Free Burma Ranger (FBR) အဖြဲ႕မွ အသက္ ၂၈ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ေစာထူးထူးအယ္က ဆြတ္ခူးရရွိသြားခဲ့သည္။

ပဒိုမန္းရွာ လူငယ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဆုကို ရရွိရန္ ကရင္ေဒသအတြင္းရွိ လူထုအက်ဳိးျပဳ လူငယ္ ၄ဦးအား သက္ဆိုင္ ရာအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားမွ အဆိုတင္သြင္းခဲ့ရာ အလုပ္ခြင္တြင္ ခိုင္မာျပတ္သားစြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့သည့္ ေစာထူးထူး အယ္အား ဖန္းေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္းအဖြဲ႕မွ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ဖာပြန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္တေနရာ၌ ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ကရင့္အမ်ဳိးသား စည္းလံုးညီညႊတ္ေရးႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲတြင္ ယမန္ေန႔က ေရြးခ်ယ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ လုပ္ႀကံခံရသည့္ ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားအစည္းအ႐ံုး-KNU အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉး ခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း ပဒိုမန္းရွာလားဖန္းႏွင့္ ၂၀၀၄ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ကြယ္လြန္သြားသည့္ မိခင္ နမ့္ေရႊက်င္တို႔ကို ရည္စူး၍ သားသမီးမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ ေစာေစးေစးဖန္း၊ နမ့္ဘြားဘြားဖန္း၊ နမ့္ဇိုယာဖန္းႏွင့္ စလံု႔ဖန္းတို႔က ဖန္းေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္းကို တည္ေထာင္ကာ လူထုအက်ဳိးျပဳ ကရင္လူငယ္မ်ားကို ႏွစ္စဥ္ ဆုမ်ားခ်ီးျမွင့္ေပးလွ်က္ရွိသည္။

ဖန္းေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္းသည္ ကရင္လူမႈအသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းအတြင္း ကိုယ္က်ိဳးစြန္႔ အနစ္နာခံၿပီး တစိုက္မတ္မတ္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသည့္ အသက္ ၃၅ႏွစ္ေအာက္ ကရင္လူငယ္မ်ားအား ပဒိုမန္းရွာလူငယ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဆုကို ၂၀၀၉ခုႏွစ္ကတည္းက စတင္ ေပးအပ္လာခဲ့ရာ ေညာင္ေလးပင္ ခ႐ိုင္မွ ေနာ္ေဖာကဘလာထူး၊ ဖာပြန္ခ႐ိုင္မွ ေစာၫႊန္႔၀င္းႏွင့္ ဘိတ္-ထား၀ယ္ခ႐ိုင္မွ ေနာ္ဒီဇင္ဘာေဖာတို႔အား ဆုရွင္မ်ားအျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခ်ီးျမွင့္ခဲ့ၿပီျဖစ္သည္။

Two women killed in fighting between the DKBA and Government’s militia

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DKBA

Two women were killed and a man wounded in a firefight between Democratic Karen Buddhist Army fighters and the Burma’s government’s Border Guard Force soldiers on 19th February in the Myaing Gyi Ngu area. A uncle of one of the dead women toldKaren News that his 20-year-old niece was married with young children and she was unlucky to be out shopping at the time. Sources told Karen News that the other woman killed in the Myaing Gyi Ngu area shooting was 18.

The uncle of the 20-year-old victim told Karen News.
“The shooting happened while my niece was buying things at a shop. She died on the spot. Her husband is working in Thailand and her children are now being cared for by relatives.”

On 19th February, the government’s BGF Battalion 1011 attacked the DKBA in the Myaing Gyi Ngu area and disarmed them taking 23 guns off them. Later in the day the DKBA launched a counter-attack against the BGF battalion killing five BGF soldiers and destroying one of their trucks.

In the following days tensions between soldiers from the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army and Border Guard Force troops forced at least 50 villagers from Mae Tha Waw village, Hlaingbwe Township and for them to seek temporary refuge across the border in Thailand.

According to a DKBA soldier from Maw Tha Waw village, on February 20, a BGF sniper shot and wounded a DKBA major at his camp compound in the Myaing Gyi Ngu. A DKBA soldier told to Karen News that recent clashes have created added more tension to an already tense situation.

A Democratic Karen Buddhist Army commander told Karen News that the DKBA factions that refused to give up their Karen identity and come under the direct control of the Burma Army by becoming members of the Border Guard Force do not trust their former allies now that they have enlisted as the government’s BGF.

In 2010, as outlined in the 2008 constitution, the Burma Army attempted to disarm and dismantle the ethnic ceasefire groups and bring them under its control. The former military regime’s intention was to reduce the size of the various ethnic armed ceasefire groups and reform them as a Border Guard Force to bring them under the strict command of the Burma Army.

DKBA sources say hostilities between the two groups has eased in the last week after the BGF returned the 23 weapons taken from the DKBA on 19th February.

Meanwhile, the families of the dead woman say they have received no contact from government officials or the DKBA over the killing of the two young women.

 karen news KIC

Burmese Army officers denied abduction of Sumlut Roi Ja, 28 year-old mother from Hkai Bang village

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Burmese Army Post at Mu Hill

Burmese Army Officers from Northern Command denied that Burmese Army’s soldiers of 321st LIB arrested and detained Sumlut Roi Ja, 28 year-old mother from Hkai Bang village in Momauk Township, said Ma Hka, an attorney for the victim. Sumlut Roi Ja (age 28) was abducted  by Burmese Army soldiers on Oct 28, 2011, stationed at Mu hill.

Mr. Brang Seng (age 30) of Tarlawgyi village an official of Kachin Su quarter in Myitkyina, was taken by Burmese soldiers led by Major Aung Zaw Oo from Hkalaya (37) on Jan 5, 2012. The same unit held Mr. Zau Seng of Tarlawgyi village as a hostage

The case was submitted to Burmese’s government’s Supreme Court in Nay Pyi Daw on Jan 26, 2012.  Supreme Court initially agreed to hear cases involving Sumlut Roi Ja, Mr. Brang Seng and Mr. Zau Seng in Nay Pyi Daw on Feb 9, 2012 and later postponed to Feb 23, 2012.

Ma Hka said the Court is expected to issue a verdict on next week. There are two possible verdicts, one is to investigate Sumlut Roi Ja’s arrest by 321st LIB and another is to close the case. Even the Court closes the case, we will continue to try to bring about the truth, said Ma Hka.

Captain Kyaw Kyaw Htay of 321st LIB and Major Zay Yar Aung of 37th LIB were presence in the hearing on Feb 23.

Brang Seng and Zau Seng were convicted under section 17(1) of Unlawful Associations Act and sent to Myitkyina prison. Two Kachin lawyers are currently helping to defend the victims.