Day: March 6, 2012
Burma army soldiers cross to Thailand to sexually assault Karen villager
wo soldiers from the Burma Army attempted to rape a Karen woman in a location near the Thai border village of Mulu Chai [opposite Thay Baw Boe village on the Burma side], Phophra district in Tak province, Thailand.
On 5th of March 2012 at about 4 pm, two men Burma Army soldiers abducted a 22-year- old Karen woman on a road outside Mulu Chai village.
A member of the Karen Women Organization, who investigated the case, said the soldiers tried to rape the woman.
The KWO member told Karen News what the woman told her about the incident.
“The two soldiers were wearing their guns and uniform. She [the woman] said that she was forced to breath in some drugs and she felt dizzy before she was taken to a nearby forest.”
At the time of writing, the woman is still suffering from injuries sustained in the assault.
In media statement released late last night the general secretary of the Karen Women Organization, Dah Eh Kler, said.
“We are outraged and deeply saddened to hear about this attempted rape and brutal attack. Unfortunately, it is only the most recent case. We hope for peace every day, but this despicable attack reminds us how far we have to go to have the rights, peace and safety our community deserves.”
The woman is a mother of two children and came to Mulu Chai village on the Thai-Burma border with her husband to work as daily laborers. Continue reading “Burma army soldiers cross to Thailand to sexually assault Karen villager”
THAILAND: Threats to political freedom intensify with assault on HRD and law professor Worachet Pakeerut
A Statement from the Asian Human Rights Commission
5.march 2012
THAILAND: Threats to political freedom intensify with assault on HRD and law professor
On the afternoon of 29 February 2012, Professor Worachet Pakeerut, a law professor at Thammasat University, leader of the Khana Nitirat, and human rights defender (HRD), was assaulted by two men outside the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University. The two men punched Professor Worachet several times in the face until he bled and his eyeglasses were broken. He was subsequently treated at Thonburi Hospital and released. The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) would like to urgently express concern over the physical assault of Professor. The AHRC calls on the relevant Thai state agencies to take immediate action to guarantee the safety of Professor Worachet, the additional members of the Khana Nitirat, and others who are at risk for their work defending political freedom.
In January 2012, the Khana Nitirat (which means “Law for the People” in Thai), a group of seven law lecturers at Thammasat University (Worachet Pakeerut, Jantajira Iammayura, Thapanan Nipithakul, Teera Suteewarangkurn, Sawatree Suksri, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, and Poonthep Sirinupong) proposed an amendment to Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code. Article 112 reads: “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished (with) imprisonment of three to fifteen years.” The proposed amendment arose out of observation that in the five years since the 19 September 2006 coup, the use of Article 112 has risen exponentially, with hundreds of charges being investigated or already in the courts. The proposed amendment of the Khana Nitirat leaves the position of the monarchy within the Thai polity as it is currently, but aims to reduce the potential for abuse under Article 112 in several significant ways. The proposed amendment would make the punishment for alleged lèse majesté proportionate to the crime, limit who can file a complaint to the Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary rather than any citizen, differentiate sincere and truthful criticism from threats to the monarchy, and categorize violations of Article 112 as about the honor of the monarchy, rather than national security. Continue reading “THAILAND: Threats to political freedom intensify with assault on HRD and law professor Worachet Pakeerut”
Battle : Fighting continues as Burmese Army expands its presence
A battle took place on the way between Shwe Nging Shan and Pang Hkawm Yang village as Burmese Army soldiers of 121st Light Infantry Battalion advanced towards Pang Hkawm Yang on March 6, 2012, Kachinnet reported. KIA soldiers under 5th Battalion have deterred invading Burmese soldiers in KIA’s 5th Brigade territory. No casualties have been reported from both sides so far.
KIA soldiers of 3rd Battalion under 5th Brigade have fought against invading Burmese Army soldiers of 88th Light Infantry Division at Kaung San on March 4 at 6 am. Burmese soldiers were heading towards Wu Htau hill from Sam Pai. At least 6 Burmese soldiers were killed in this battle.
On March 3, a battle took place between KIA’s 255th mobile battalion and Burmese Army’s 389thLight Infantry Regiment at Gang Dau Yang. 3 Burmese Army soldiers were reportedly killed in this battle.
KIO General Secretary Dr. La Ja said in a recent press briefing in Chaing Mai, Thailand that if Burmese government really wants a ceasefire, all it needs to do is withdraw its troops from Kachin areas. Though Burmese government is repeatedly saying to international communities that it is working to achieve peace in the country, the actual actions on the ground by Burmese Army are indicating otherwise.
The Kachin arm-struggle revolution began as the then Burmese government ignored the promise of Panglong and asserted the Union in its own term, repressing the ethnic groups and their cultural and religious traditions. U Nu’s notorious racial project to Burmanize the whole country and to make Buddhism as a state religion further fueled the ethnic resistances.
Renewed arm conflict began on June 9 of last year after 17 years of ceasefire between KIA and Burmese Army. During ceasefire times, natural resources such as timber, gold and jade have been exploited by others without much benefit to local Kachin. Local farmlands were seized by Yuzana Company backed by then Burmese military government in Hugaung valley. Kachin villagers were forcibly relocated for various development projects. Many Kachin youth became drug addicts.
KIO, political wing of Kachin Independence Army repeatedly said that without meaningful political solution, KIO will not repeat the mistake of the last 17 years. KIO said it is striving to initiate a meaningful and constructive political dialogue based on 1947 Panglong Agreement which the Burmese government has so far objected to implement.
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A battle clashes around KIA (2, 5) Brigade control area
A battle confronted with the Burmese forces from LIR-121 who took marched ahead towards KIA (2, 5) Brigade control area through the route via Shwe Nging Shan village under KIA Brigade 2 region that countered with KIA Battalion 5 on March 5, 2012.
At the same day another battle took place near the KIO Regional Development Workers office Gangdau Yang village, targeted by the KIA troops from (255) mobile forces while the Burmese army from LIB-389 marched ahead by the route between Mali Yang and Gangdau Yang area to assault the KIA controlled position. Whereas according to the frontline sources reported 3 Burmese soldiers were injured in the clashes around 1:00PM local time.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 March 2012 13:47
DASSK she was denied permission in two of its townships: Pobbhathiri and Zabuthiri.Vice President #1 Tin Aung Myint Oo was elected by Pobbhathiri township
Lions cannot afford to loose
Numerically, the 48 seats to be contested on April Fool’s Day are nothing to the rulling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), whose logo is the lion, that has a comfortable majority in both houses. But politically, losing them would be disastrous, according to sources coming from Burma.
“First of all, the seats to be contested are vacated by the people who have become president, vice presidents and ministers,” one highly informed source explained. “Losing them therefore would not be good both for them and the party.”
Another reason, said the second source, is that many of the seats are in “strategic” areas. For example, Lashio, where the National Assembly seat is being contested among 3 parties: USDP, National League for Democracy (NLD) and Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP), is where the Northeastern Region Command is headquartered.
SHAN has received a number of reports that Burma Army-run militia chiefs in the area have been threatening residents with expulsion if they refused to vote for the USDP candidate, Dr Keng Phawng Tip.
“Last but not least is losing the 48 seats to the NLD will have far-reaching impact on the 2015 elections,” the first source said. “There’ll be 498 seats (168 upper house, 330 lower house) to lose, not counting the state/region assembly seats (almost 700) by them.”
“The lions simply cannot afford to lose,” he concluded.
Their disclosures coincided with the February 28 article from the Irrawaddy reporting on the USDP’s highly-confidential strategy to defeat the NLD at the upcoming polls. It includes instructions such as:
- Character assassination of rival candidates
- Polling officers and booth attendants must be befriended and won over. Assistance must be given to them to meet their economic and social needs
Meanwhile, Mizzima News reported on 2 March the NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi was facing problems obtaining venues to hold rallies in the USDP’s heartland, Naypyitaw. According to the report, she was denied permission in two of its townships: Pobbhathiri and Zabuthiri.
Vice President #1 Tin Aung Myint Oo was elected by Pobbhathiri township and President Thein Sein by Zabuthiri.
Panglong org
Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) delegation leaves for Heho (Haiwo) for Tachilek
6.march 2012 A 15- person Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) delegation leaves for Heho (Haiwo) for Tachilek. They are due to arrive in the capital of Kayah State, Loikaw this afternoon. The formal negotiations will be held tomorrow, according to KNPP sources. The delegation is led by Oo Reh and Bee Htoo. (SHAN)
AGREEMENT KNPP
Bomb blasted at a township office in Hinthada. ဟသၤတျမိဳ႔ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးရံုးအတြင္း ဗံုးကြဲ
ဧရာ၀တီတုိင္း ဟသၤာတၿမိဳ႕ ရုံးၾကီးရပ္ကြက္ရွိ ၿမိဳ႔နယ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး ရုံး၀င္းအတြင္း ဒီေန႔မနက္ ၉ နာရီ မိနစ္ ၅၀ မွာ ဗုံးေပါက္ကြဲမွဳတခု ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ခရုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးရုံးနဲ႔ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးရံုးအၾကား ကြန္ ကရစ္လမ္းမွာ ေပါက္ကြဲခဲ့တာျဖစ္ၿပီး ေပါက္ကြဲတဲ့အရွိန္ေၾကာင့္ ျမိဳ ႔နယ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးရံုး အမိုးပြင့္ထြက္သြား တယ္လို႔ မ်က္ျမင္ေတြ႔ရွိသူေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ လူေသဆံုးထိခိုက္မွဴမရွိဘူးလို႔ ျမိဳ့နယ္ရဲစခန္းက ေျပာေပမဲ့ ေဒသခံေတြကေတာ့ ရံုးတက္ခ်ိန္ျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ၀န္ထမ္းတခ်ိဳ႔ ဒဏ္ရာရခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ ဟသၤာတၿမိဳ႕ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး႐ုံးဝင္းအတြင္းက ဆက္သြယ္ေရးတာဝါတိုင္ေအာက္မွာလည္း မေပါက္ကြဲေသးတဲ့ ဗံုးတလံုး ထပ္မံေတြ႔ရွိတဲ့အတြက္ တာ၀န္ရွိသူေတြက ရွာေဖြရွင္းလင္းေနတယ္လုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ျပီး ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲအေသးစိတ္အေျခအေနကို ဒီမုိကရက္တစ္ျမန္မာ့အသံက စုံစမ္းေနဆဲျဖစ္ ပါတယ္။ DVB Tv news
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A bomb has exploded inside the compounds of a local government office in the Irrawaddy division township of Henzada.
No one was injured in the explosion, although some reports claim it blew the roof off of the building. One local told DVB however that it occurred in the road between the Henzada District Administration Office and the Township Administration Office, causing minor damage.
The Henzada resident said the blast could be heard from a mile away. Another unexploded device was found beneath a radio mast in the Communication Office. Authorities continue to search the area, and have requested people to vacate their houses so bomb squads can investigate.
Henzada Police Station–1 confirmed the explosion was caused by a bomb but claimed it knew nothing of the specifics of the incident.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
democracy for burma 
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