Day: June 14, 2013

Protestors jailed for demonstrating “without permission”

On By Burma Myanmar newsIn BurmaLeave a comment

credit emg 13.june 2013

Seven protestors were jailed on Wednesday and more sentenced for demonstrating without permission by local authorities in Mandalay. The sentences are the latest in a number of cases under a controversial law that activists say goes against their constitutional rights to freedom of assembly.

On June 12, Aye Thein, Win Swe Myint and Sein Aung were each given a one year and three month prison sentence for protesting against the relocation of Kinetan Market in Mandalay back on August 7, 2012.

Their colleagues Nyi Nyi Kyaw, Ni Ni Aung, Nwe Nwe Oo and Thal Thal were each given three month for the same offence in a case that has taken 10 months to resolve.

The protesters were charged for demonstrating without permission which is a requirement under Section 18 of the Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law. According to the Law, if one is convicted of protesting without required permission from the authorities, he or she will be sentenced for maximum one year and charged 30,000 kyats.

Critics have argued that Section 18 goes against the constitutional rights of citizens that guarantee freedom of assembly and procession. According to the Section 354 (b) of the 2008 Constitution, every citizen shall be at liberty to hold assembly and procession peacefully without arms, if it is not contrary to the laws, peace and tranquillity.

“The law’s Section 18 is inconsistent with the section 354 (b) in Chapter (8) of the Constitution which mentions the citizens’ rights and duties,” said lawyer Thein Than Oo.

Naw Ohn Hla was also charged for protesting against President Thein Sein’s remarks over the controversial Letpadaungtaung copper-mine in central Myanmar during a recent visit to the United States.  She and her five friends from the Democracy and Peace Women Association are now facing a total of 26 charges in the township courts of Yangon region for protesting without permission.

Lawyers have said that they oppose the Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law and have requested numerous time for Parliament to amend the law.

“The Constitution is the most supreme law in the country. Section 18 is just that of a by-law. Now, a section of a by-law seems to be influencing the most supreme law. If the Constitution allows [freedom of peaceful assembly and procession] the by-laws should allow it, too,” said Soe Tint Yi, an advocate from the Lawyers Network.

Others prosecuted under Section 18 include six workers from Taw Win Wood Factory in Yangon and their helper, activist Kyaw Min from Action Labour Rights, who protested without permission for better working conditions. Continue reading “Protestors jailed for demonstrating “without permission”” →

TRUTH !! “We Burmese workers have to take turns standing guard at nights.”Interview of home coming workers

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credit voice weekly

“We Burmese workers have to take turns standing guard at nights.”
Interview with First Two Workers to Come back from Malaysia
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Myanmar Citizens in Malaysia.မေလးရွားေရာက္ ျမန္မာလူမ်ဳိးမ်ား စုစည္းမႈ႕
Myanmar Citizens in Malaysia.မေလးရွားေရာက္ ျမန္မာလူမ်ဳိးမ်ား စုစည္းမႈ႕

On June 12th, the Voice conducted an interview with the first two Burmese workers to come back from Malaysia at the Yangon International Airport. They were able to return to Myanmar with the help of their employees, whose names could not be mentioned as the workers wished to conceal them.

Voice: In what regions of Malaysia did you work?
Worker (1): I worked in La Wup. It is not very far from Kuala Lumpur, where the violence is going on.
Worker (2): I lived in Malacca. I have been working in Malaysia for two years.

Voice: What are the current problems and difficulties faced by the Burmese in Malaysia?
Worker (1): There is not much unrest near the area we live. But, we are not quite assured about security. When we Burmese workers sleep at night, we have to take turns standing guard. The Burmese living near Kualu Lumpur have to lock three doors in a row. In some places, people came and knocked on the door at nights. If we didn’t open the door, they would use spray to force us to do so. If we came out as we couldn’t stand the fume, they would beat us. There were also robberies.
Worker (2): We have to pay particular attention to security. Although there is no unrest in our neighborhood, I keep hearing news of violence from my friends every day. There was once a case where the person who got killed had been in Malaysia for only a few days. Some events are real while some are rumors. We don’t dare go out even in the afternoon.

Voice: How many people are coming back from Malaysia?
Worker (1): There are a lot actually. But, some overstayers are having difficulties even though they want to come back.
Worker (2): There are a lot of people who want to come back. I also have a lot of overstaying friends who are working. I heard, though, that overstayers could come back as well. I also heard that if they paid the Myanmar embassy 180 ringgits and the Malaysia Immigration 400 ringgits as fines, they would be allowed to return legally.

Voice: Is the violence going on in Kualu Lumpur only? Or are there other areas where the same thing is happening?
Worker (1): There are violent acts, but they are limited to theft and robbery, I heard. However, there are killings in Kuala Lumpur.
Worker (2): I did not witness them but I heard from my friends that there are violent acts in other areas as well.

Voice: MAI is reducing the price of flight tickets by half. What are the prices of the flight tickets you used to come back?
Worker (1): It is the original price, not half price. I bought the ticket through my agent and it cost me 300 ringgits. I heard that supporting organizations from Myanmar would discount the tickets by 50%.
Worker (2): My boss bought the air ticket for me, so I have no idea how much it costs.

Voice: I heard some employers would provide job opportunities for the Burmese workers coming back from Malaysia. Do you have any plan to take those positions?
Worker (1): I actually want to work in those jobs.
Worker (2): I live in Sate Phyu, Magway division. So I’ll see how things go.

U Nay Myo Zin,MSDN,claims that about 50 people will conduct an official demonstration June 17th-ENGLISH/BURMESE

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CORRECTION 17.JUNE 2013

NAY MYO ZIN said that although people planned to protest in front of the Malaysia Embassy in Yangon on June 17th, they were denied the permission to do so. However, as news began escalating on Facebook saying that protests would be held from June 15th to 17th, he was forced to make the aforesaid clarification. 

He explains that the proposal to organize a demonstration in front of the Malaysia Embassy on June 17th was rejected by the Dagon Police Department, rendering the protest impossible.

“I am lucky this demonstration never happened. Those who spread the news are probably trying to spark conflicts,” says U Nay Myo Zin.

 

Burmese to Protest in front of Malaysia Embassy to Call for Protection
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Yangon, June 13

U Nay Myo Zin, chairman of the Myanmar Social Development Network, claims that about 50 people will conduct an official demonstration on June 17th; the demonstration is intended to request that the Burmese be protected who are suffering violence at the hands of Malaysians.

The demonstrators will wear Burmese traditional attire and hold the vinyl with a slogan asking for the Burmese in Malaysia to be protected and provided with the same level of security as other foreigners, adds U Nay Myo Zin.

“We are asking for the halt of detainment and violence against the Burmese,” says former General Nay Myo Zin.

He adds that he has asked the Chief of Department in Dagon for the permission to protest in front of the Malaysia Embassy.

Due to the fact that a special delegation is currently in Malaysia to resolve the violence inflicted on the Burmese people, U Nay Myo Zin has been requested to consider if it is appropriate to carry out the demonstration and his decision will be officially announced, says an authority from the Dagon Police Department.

As a result of the group violence that started on May 29th, at least 6 Burmese have died and about 20 have been injured.

On June 6th, 4 Burmese opposition groups in Malaysia protested in front of the Myanmar Embassy in Malaysia to call for legal protection of the Burmese.

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ျမန္မာမ်ားကို ကာကြယ္ေပးေရး မေလးသံ႐ုံးေရွ႕ ဆႏၵျပမည္
…………………………………………………………..
ရန္ကုန္၊ ဇြန္ ၁၃

အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ား ဆက္တိုက္ခံေနရသည့္ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားကို အကာအကြယ္ေပးရန္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ မေလးရွားသံ႐ုံး ေရွ႕တြင္ ဇြန္လ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႔၌ လူ ၅၀ ခန္႔ တရားဝင္ ဆႏၵျပမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါ ဆႏၵျပမႈကို ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ ျမန္မာ့လူမႈဘဝ ဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိး တိုးတက္ေရး ကြန္ရက္၏ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးေနမ်ဳိးဇင္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ သားမ်ားကို အျခားႏိုင္ငံျခားသား မ်ားႏွင့္ တန္းတူ ေဘးကင္းလုံၿခံဳမႈ ရွိေစရန္၊ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေပးရန္ စာသားပါ ဗီႏိုင္းကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္၍ တိုက္ပုံႏွင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဝတ္စုံကို ဝတ္ဆင္ကာ ေတာင္းဆိုသြားမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၄င္းကဆိုသည္။
“ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားေတြ အဖမ္းဆီး ခံရမႈနဲ႔ အၾကမ္းဖက္ခံရတာေတြ ရပ္ဆိုင္းဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုတာ” ဟု ဗိုလ္ႀကီးေဟာင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သူ ေနမ်ဳိးဇင္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

မေလးရွားသံ႐ုံး ေရွ႕တြင္ တရားဝင္ ဆႏၵျပခြင့္ရရန္ ဇြန္လ ၁၂ ရက္ေန႔က ဒဂုံ ၿမဳိ႕နယ္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕မွဴး ထံသို႔ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္ ေတာင္းခံထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ၄င္းက ဆိုသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ား အၾကမ္းဖက္ ခံရမႈမ်ားကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက အထူးကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အဖြဲ႕တစ္ဖြဲ႕ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ကာ ေျဖရွင္းေနခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ ဆႏၵေဖာ္ထုတ္ရန္ သင့္ မသင့္ စဥ္းစားေပးရန္ ဦးေနမ်ဳိးဇင္ကို ေမတၱာရပ္ခံ ထားေၾကာင္း ဆႏၵ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ခြင့္ျပဳမည္၊ မျပဳမည္ ကို တရားဝင္ ျပန္ၾကားေပးမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဒဂုံၿမဳိ႕နယ္ ရဲစခန္း၏ တာဝန္က် ရဲအရာရွိက ေျပာၾကားသည္။

မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ေမလ ၂၉ ရက္ ေန႔ကစတင္ကာ ျမန္မာမ်ားကို လူအုပ္စုလိုက္ အၾကမ္းဖက္ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသား အနည္းဆုံးေျခာက္ဦး ေသဆုံးခဲ့ၿပီး ၂၀ ဦးခန္႔ ဒဏ္ရာရရွိခဲ့သည္။

မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသား မ်ားကို တရားဥပေဒေၾကာင္းအရ အကာအကြယ္ေပးရန္ မေလးရွား ႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာအတိုက္အခံ အဖြဲ႕ေလးဖြဲ႕က ဇြန္လ ၆ ရက္ေန႔က မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံ ဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံ႐ုံးေရွ႕တြင္ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။

TO U SHWE MANN: If someone say that 969 movement is not right then you got to blame Ghandi’s non-violent movement

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Nothing wrong with 969 movement. If someone say that 969 movement is not right then you got to blame Ghandi’s non-violent movement in which he publicly calls for Indian and his supporters to non-association with British, non-cooperation of British and boycott all British goods. Actually, 969 movement is a non-violent movement. Think twice before you say something U Shwe Mann. You won’t be a Burma’s President.

11

Yangon’s industrial zones :Exploitation and forced-labour

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credit EMG 13.JUNE 2913

Officials have uncovered incidences of exploitation and forced-labour after recent inspections to factories in Yangon’s industrial zones, according to a labour rights commission.

The Commission for Observing Rights of Employees and Employers has been making field trips to Hlinethayar, Insein, South Dagon and Dagon Seikkan industrial zones since the beginning of May.

“Instances of exploitation and forced labor have been found,” said Dr. Myat Nyana Soe, a member of the commission told Eleven Media.

“Their basic pay is only 30,000 kyats (US$30) per month. If is combined with overtime charge, the maximum amount they get is 80,000 kyats (US$80). They are exploited because the basic salary is very low so they have to work overtime to cover their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter,” she said.

Sometimes employees are forced to work 12 to 16 hours round the clock. The commission also acknowledges that employers are also struggling because of the constant power shortages.

“Sometimes there are 24-hour shortages and they have to put that with the huge rental fees on industrial zone properties,” added Dr. Soe.

The Commission will gather its findings and submit them to Parliament for review.

Rakhine State Government considers citizenship for Rakhines fleeing Bangladesh

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credit emg 13.june 2013

Myanmar’s Rakhine State Government says it will consider citizenship for Rakhine ethnic people who fled Bangladesh due to attacks against them on a condition that they will never return, said officials in the state government.

Hundreds of Rakhine Buddhists have fled Bangladesh into Rakhine State in recent months, claiming that they have been targeted because of their faith and feel unsafe living in the predominantly Muslim country.

More than 700 of them are now taking refuge in the state’s townships such as Maungdaw and Kyauktaw, the state government said. Maungdaw residents say there could well be over 1000 refugees.

“The government will consider citizenship for them only if they will never go back. For the time being, the government has provided basic foods, housing and money as assistance. We’ll do everything for them according to the law. They fled Bangladesh in fears of their life,” said Hla Thein, an official with the Rakhine State Government.

The 2012 sectarian violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Rakhine state led to the 192 deaths, 265 injured and the destruction of 8,614 households, displacing an estimated100,000 people, according to Myanmar’s government.

It is estimated that more than 300,000 Rakhine Buddhists living in Bangladesh.

Chinese-language billboards to remove in Mandalay

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credit emg 13.june 2013

 

The Mandalay City Development Committee (MCDC) has requested to remove all Chinese language billboards around the ancient capital.

The MCDC also asked all schools to remove signs and other advertisements in Chinese-language.

“We don’t allow any languages except Myanmar and English on billboards. We requested the billboard owners to remove advertisements written in Chinese. We didn’t take action but we are scrutinizing them,” said Myo Aung, an official with the MCDC.

Many locals in Mandalay are Chinese. Seeing as the MCDC has only asked to remove the billboards and has not taken any action, some billboards in Mandalay have not changed, local residents say.

“We have allowed two advertising billboards for a Chinese airline in downtown Mandalay because of a request from the Chinese embassy. However, we are not allowing any other billboards in Chinese in any other areas. So if they are found out, let us know and we will ask to remove them,” said Mr. Aung.

Most of billboards in Chinese are advertising special clinics, language schools, jewellery shops and hotels and most are located in central areas such as 80th street and 78th street.

Mandalay has around 50,000 residents from Chinese origin holding legal household registration papers, according to Immigration and National Registration Department.