The 88 Generation (Peace and Open Society) to the 66th Anniversary of the Martyrs’ Day Commemoration

PHOTO CREDIT Philosophermg Myathar

GRAPHIC KO MYOE NY

It has been 66 years to the day when the Martyr leaders, including the national leader U Aung San, were violently assassinated. The invaluable loss of these leaders came while the country was attempting to traverse the challenges and difficulties of gaining their independence from colonialism, and attempting to rebuild Myanmar into a new independent nation. 6 months after the death of the Martyr leaders, Myanmar finally achieved this independence.
The 8888 democracy uprising, which broke out in Yangon 25 years ago, is approaching its Silver Jubilee. The uprising was overwhelmingly joined by citizens of all ethnic backgrounds, demanding with one voice a free democratic society where the human rights of the people are recognized and respected. These protests were the source of great humiliation to the leading figures in Myanmar, both publicly and privately. However, the political problems the demonstrations were rallying against are still in existence today. Every citizen must have awareness of the political atmosphere they live in. The diligence of the citizen will prevent the aims and achievements of the 8888 uprising from being diminished.
After the Martyrs had been assassinated, independence became a reality with the combined efforts of every citizen. Since independence was declared however, the country has been embroiled in numerous civil wars, the results of years of policy disagreement and ethnic tensions. The history of Myanmar is full of lessons for its future. Today is a time for democracy, human rights and ethnic equality to be at the forefront of change in this country. We can greatly aspire to the hope that every citizen can enjoy the true essence of independence and make the dreams of our Martyrs a reality for all the people of Myanmar.
The 88 Generation
(Peace and Open Society)

Commission to be formed to amend 2008 Constitution

CREDIT EMG 18.JULY 2013

Lower House Speaker Thura Shwe Mann says parliament will form a commission which will look into amending the Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution, he announced to the media on July 17.

“The commission will be inclusive of representatives from various political parties. The commission will have to make decisions on which clauses prescribed in the Constitution to be amended or cancelled or replaced following the formation of the commission,” said the Lower House Speaker.

Lower House MP Thura Aye Myint of Wetlatt Constituency had submitted a proposal to form a commission to review the constitution when it was approved after being put forward to the Union Assembly.

In response to the questions of the reporters, Thura Shwe Mann replied that the commission would represent different political parties in a proportional way. The commission would have to make decisions on which clauses prescribed in the constitution to be amended or cancelled or replaced.

Lower House MP Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out that Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution is the most difficult one in the world to be amended. In the constitution, amendments require 75 percent of MPs to vote in favour. Afterward, a national referendum must be held and more than half of eligible voters must support the constitutional amendment for it to take effect.

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Government soldiers kill 2 NMSP soldiers during unprovoked attack

Min Thu Tha – MON NEWS 18.JULY 2013

The government  Light Infantry Battalion  (LIB) 581 opened fire killing 2 Mon soldiers after intruding into New Mon State Party (NMSP) controlled territory on July 16.

 

LIB 581 entered Thu Ma Kha Lan village, in Mergui District, Tenasserim Division at about 10.00 am. A firefight broke out ending with 2 NMSP soldiers being killed. The government soldiers confiscated their weapons and ammunition, said Captain Tha Maw Chan, the commanding officer of the Mergui District battalion.

“Our men went back to village to have a meal and take a short break. Two men were left behind to patrol. They [LIB 581] opened fire at them. There was about 10 minutes of gunfire exchanged before our soldiers were killed.”

The Burma army took advantage of the fact that most of the Mon soldiers were not in the village base, according to Captain Tha Maw Chan.

“When our men arrive at spot where the fighting happened the Tatmadaw (gov’t army) had already withdraw. After searching the area we found 4 hats that had been left by the soldiers.”The cause for the attack is still unknown. The NMSP soldiers based in the area had good relations with LIB 581 that was under the leadership of Captain Nay Myo, according to Captain Tha Maw Chan. The area where the fighting happened is only about 3 miles from the Thai border.

 

Even NMSP’s central committee had no explanation for the unprovoked attack.

“We don’t know the reason yet why they fired at us like this. But during the funeral ceremony of NMSP’s late Vice-chairman Nai Rotsa the Tatmadaw didn’t allow our men to use the Ye to Thanbyuzayat highway,” said an unidentified member of NMSP’s central committee.

NMSP asked for permission from the Burma army’s tactical command headquarters Sa Ka Kha 19 for visiting Tavoy [District] members to travel the highway for the funeral in late May. But the Ye Town based army headquarters refused. They told them the road is owned by the Union of Burma, therefore only the Tatmadaw could use it.

The NMSP inked a preliminary ceasefire with the central government on Feb. 25 of last year at the Stand Hotel in Mon State capital of Moulmein. The NMSP delegation led by the late vice-chairman Nai Rotsa met with the government’s chief peace negotiator U Aung Min.

The NMSP threatened to end the ceasefire if a meeting involving political talks with all the ceasefire groups didn’t take place by the end of 2012, according to party secretary Nai Hang Thar. A meeting with the government that was scheduled for Dec. 31 failed to happen.

To this day the government hasn’t met with all the ceasefire groups at once to discuss political matters.

The recent clash was the first time NMSP fought with the Burma army in a long time. Fighting didn’t even break out in 2010 when tensions were running high after the last ceasefire broke down. The ceasefire ended after the government pushed them to become a border guard force.

 

 

 

CREDIT EMG 18 JULY

The Myanmar military has exchanged fire with a Mon ethnic armed group after attacking their bases near the Myanmar-Thailand border in Myeik District, Taninthari Region on July 16 resulting in three casualties, according to the New Mon State Party (NMSP).

The skirmish occurred as soldiers from the army’s coastal devision attacked Thumingalan Village where the New Mon State Party (NMSP) is based, near the southern part of Thailand. This is the first encounter between the army and the MNLA who signed a fresh ceasefire in 2012.

“The station that we locally call Paungkuu was firstly attacked by the costal army soldiers. There were casualties,” Naing Talanyi, NMSP central committee member told Eleven Media on July 17.

Two soldiers from New Mon State Party and one from the government military were killed during the ten-minute long skirmish according to Tamot Chan, the regional commander of the Mon National Liberation Army (MNLA) – the armed wing of NMSP – who was quoted by Shwe Hintha News. The military was unable to confirm the attack.

“Their reply is they did not launch the attack. They just attacked because they thought it was the Hongsarwatoi Restoration Party (HRP),” Naing Talanyi said.

Founded in 1958, the New Mon State Party is mainly active in Mon, Kayin and Taninthari Regions, and its Mon National Liberation Army has 800 soldiers and 2,000 auxiliaries. They reached a ceasefire with the government in 1995, but the truce broke apart in 2010 when they refused to join the governments Border Guard Forces. The MNLA said it is militarily prepared to defend itself if the army should attack its bases in Myeik District.

There have been criticisms that such encounters between the army and ethnic armed groups are happening while the government is engaging in nation-wide peace talks with ethnic armed groups and could derail the fragile peace process.

NMSP is a member of United Nationalities Federal Council which represents a total of 11 ethnic armed groups in Myanmar, who are currently working with the government to establish a nation-wide ceasefire to end decades of civil war.

BREAKING NEWS: STATEMENT_KNU-RCSS MEDIATION NOT FAIR IF CONDUCTED BY AUNG SAN SUU KYI

BREAKING NEWS:ေတာင္ကုတ္ လူသတ္မႈ၌ သံသယရွိသူမ်ားကို ေနျပည္ေတာ္မွရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕ တိုက္ရိုက္ကြပ္ကဲ ဖမ္းဆီးရာ ၆ဦးမိ၊ တစ္ဦးလြတ္ေျမာက္ေနဟု DVB ဆို၂ဝ၁၅ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ တရားမွ်တမႈရွိေစရန္ သူ၏ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ဖက္ျဖစ္မည့္သူ သူရဦးေရႊမန္း တာဝန္ယူမည္ဟု ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေၾကာင္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေျပာ

လံုၿခံဳေရးတင္းၾကပ္ထားသျဖင့္ အာဇာနည္ဗိမၼာန္သို႔ လက္ကိုင္ဖုန္း၊ အိတ္၊ ကင္မရာ၊ ပန္းစည္းတို႔ ယူေဆာင္ျခင္းမျပဳရဟု အစိုးရက စည္းကမ္းထုတ္

တစ္ႏိုင္ငံလံုး အပစ္ရပ္ေၾကညာၿပီးပါက ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ပါဝင္ရန္ KNU ႏွင့္ RCSS/SSA တို႔ ပူးတြဲေၾကညာခ်က္ထုတ္

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CREDIT PANLONG NEWS

A joint statement issued yesterday by the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), apparently in response to the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) proposal on Saturday, 13 July 2013, said mediation between armed ethnic groups and the Thein Sein government would not be fair if conducted by National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu because she is a key stakeholder in the peace process.

“The dialogue process in Burma is very complicated, with multiple stakeholders simultaneously involved. This is not conducive to use of a single mediator. To overcome this situation, the National Dialogue process designed by ethnic armed groups enables all stakeholders to address their concerns without the use of mediators. As the process matures, stakeholders can request to utilize mediators or facilitators for specific discussions. Normally, stakeholders do not act as mediators or facilitators,” read the statement.

The National Dialogue process, as mentioned in the statement, has been jointly developed by 18 UNFC and non-UNFC organizations since February 2012, and circulated among the groups for perusal in April this year. A copy of it was presented to the government supported Myanmar Peace Center (MPC) on 13 May by the KNU and the RCSS.

Considering the act as a breach of trust and compounded by refusal by non-UNFC groups to have it represent them during the talks with the government, the UNFC pulled out of the joint work group, Working Group for Ethnic Coordination (WGEC), in a huff the following month.

One of the peculiar things, according to the joint 3-day meeting which ended yesterday, was that Mahn Mahn a KNU top member had led the technical team to meet the MPC in preparation for a formal meeting between the UNFC and the government’s chief negotiator U Aung Min. “He had not attended the framework for political dialogue workshops,” said a participant. “Had he attended, he wouldn’t have made the mistake of proposing mediators.”

Mahn Mahn’s prominent role in the UNFC had also embarrassed the KNU leadership. The new setup that was elected last year has been increasingly playing a minor role in the alliance that has steadfastly refused to talk to the government except in a third country.

“Please be patient,” a Karen leading participant said. “We will settle our affairs in order before long.”

Both the WGEC and the UNFC have announced that each will be holding another Ethnic Nationalities Conference, a follow-up to last year’s conference in Chiang Mai that had adopted a “6 point peace roadmap,” the latter on 29-31 July and the former sometime in the middle of August.

The remaining WGEC members say, in view of what is happening, a parallel Ethnic Nationalities Conference would only serve to confuse the people both at home and abroad. “We are not going to cut off our nose to spite our face,” said a participant.

An unconfirmed report however says the WGEC may be planning to hold a conference inside Burma.

The UNFC meanwhile has issued an invitation on 16 July to several groups and groupings to participate in its Ethnic Conference on Pece and National Reconciliation. They include the United Nationalities Alliance (UNA), the alliance of 1990 elections winning ethnic parties; and the Nationalities Brotherhood Federation (NBF), the alliance of the 2010 elections winning ethnic parties. It aims “to strengthen unity among ethnic nationalities” and “lay down common agreement for peace and politics,” among others.

JOINT STATEMENT 
Karen National Union & Restoration Council of the Shan State

17 July, 2013

In response to the ethnic armed groups’ proposal, the Government of Myanmar recently announced that it will invite ethnic armed groups to Naypyitaw to sign a nation-wide ceasefire. A nation-wide ceasefire is a significant milestone as it consolidates the ceasefires already signed as the foundation for the next phase of the peace process.

Over the past year, the 18 ethnic armed groups have worked together to develop a framework for political dialogue with the Government. Armed groups have committed to this framework in order to ensure that the peace process does not stop with individual ceasefires. Groups continue to work together to ensure that the peace process moves forward. In the spirit of the words of the late Karen leader, Saw Ba U Gyi, “The destiny of Karen people will be decided by the Karen People,” each armed group retains the legal authority and mandate to negotiate with the government on behalf of their people.

The process of attaining a nation-wide ceasefire has involved direct negotiations between the individual armed groups and the Government, as these conflict partners must agree to end the armed conflict. In the political dialogue, additional stakeholders such as political parties, civil society, Parliament, the Burma Army and key leaders such as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi need to participate actively.

Numerous sources have referred to the use of mediators or facilitators. The dialogue process in Burma is very complicated, with multiple stakeholders simultaneously involved.

This is not conducive to use of a single mediator. To overcome this situation, the National Dialogue process designed by ethnic armed groups enables all stakeholders to address their concerns without the use of mediators. As the process matures, stakeholders can request to utilize mediators or facilitators for specific discussions. Normally, stakeholders do not act as mediators or facilitators.

For the first time ever, all of Burma’s stakeholders will sit together to discuss and design how to bring lasting and just peace to all of Burma’s citizens. The process is based in unity and consensus, and all of the stakeholders will have to move together for the process to succeed.

All of the armed groups respect the concerns of individual stakeholders, and the process will ensure that all stakeholders and Burma’s concerned citizens have the opportunity to raise concerns throughout the process.

Saw Mutu Sae Poe                                                                                                  Sao Yawd Serk
Chairman                                                                                                                         Chairman
Karen National Union                                                               Restoration Council of the Shan State

Contact:
KNU – Mahn Nyein Maung, Tel: 090 7459 731
RCSS – Sai Lao Saeng, Tel: 086 9124 104

Khandker Mosharraf Hossain “If anybody is found staying illegally in Saudi Arabia after the end of the amnestynment….

Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain yesterday urged Bangladeshi workers who are living illegally in Saudi Arabia to take advantage of the general amnesty.
“If anybody is found staying illegally in Saudi Arabia after the end of the amnesty on November 4, the person has to pay one lakh Saudi Riyal as fine and face one year imprisonment,” he said at a press briefing.
Saudi Arabia earlier declared general amnesty for foreign workers from May till July 4 so that they can correct their visa status. Later, the amnesty deadline was extended till November 4 following requests from foreign embassies.
Mosharraf briefed journalists following his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. He said the Saudi government would consider recruiting more Bangladeshi workers after the amnesty deadline.
Expatriates’ Welfare Secretary Zafar Ahmed Khan said more than 2.5 lakh Bangladeshis received the consular services.
Earlier, talking about the slow pace of sending workers to Kuala Lumpur, the minister said, “Malaysia has halted recruiting from Bangladesh as the newly elected government there is yet to hold discussions with Bangladesh in this regard.”
Starting from April 25 this year, a total of 10,000 workers were scheduled to go to Malaysia in first phase but only 198 workers had been recruited.

http://www.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/take-advantage-of-saudi-amnesty/

ဘာေတြလဲ ဘာလူမ်ိဳးေတြလဲ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာမရွိတဲ့ လူမ်ိိဳးေတြ ကို ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသား အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ ျပုမယ္ ဟုတ္လား…?

ဘာေတြလဲ ဘာလူမ်ိဳးေတြလဲ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာမရွိတဲ့ လူမ်ိိဳးေတြ ကို ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသား အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ ျပုမယ္ ဟုတ္လား…?

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နိုင္ငံကူး လက္မွတ္ တရားမဝင္ ရယူ ျပီး ေဆာ္ဒီမွာ နွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေနထိုင္ ေနတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေခၚ(ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကုလား) ၅သိန္း အတြက္ ဘဂၤလား ေဒ့ရွ္ အစိုးရက အထူး သက္ေသခံ စာရြက္ ထုတ္ေပးဖို့ စဉ္းစား ေနေျကာင္း သိရပါတယ္။

ဒီလူေတြကို ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နိုင္ငံသား အေနနဲ့ အသိအမွတ္ ျပုျပီး ထုတ္ေပးမွာ မဟုတ္ဘဲ ျမန္မာ နိုင္ငံသား အျဖစ္သာ အသိအမွတ္ ျပုမယ္လို့ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ ျပည္ပ အလုပ္သမား ဝန္ျကီး Khandker Mosharraf Hossain က ဗုဒၶဟူး ေန့က ေျပာျကား ပါတယ္။

ေဆာ္ဒီ အစိုးရနဲ့ ဒီကိစၥ တိုင္ပင္ ေဆြးေနြး ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္တယ္၊ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာခၚ(ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကုလား) ေတြ ဘယ္လို နိုင္ငံကူး လက္မွတ္နဲ့ ေဆာ္ဒီ ေရာက္လာတယ္ ဆိုတာ စိစစ္ရမယ္လို့ ေဆာ္ဒီ အာေရဗ် နိုင္ငံ ဆိုင္ရာ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ သံအမတ္ျကီး က ဘီဘီစီ ကို ေျပာဆို ပါတယ္။

တကယ္က ေဆာ္ဒီမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာခၚ(ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကုလား) ဦးေရ ၃ သိန္း ေက်ာ္ပဲ ရိွတယ္လို့ ေဆာ္ဒီ အေျခစိုက္Rohingya Union ဥကၠဌ Dr. Tahir Mohamed Siraj က ေျပာပါတယ္။

မျကာခင္က ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ျပႆနာ ေတြ ျဖစ္ေပၚျပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း ေဆာ္ဒီ အစိုးရက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ေတြကို ၄ နွစ္ ေနခြင့္ ကတ္ေတြ ထုတ္ေပး ေနတယ္၊ ကေလးေတြ ေက်ာင္းတက္ခြင့္ စတဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးေတြ ေပးတယ္လို့ သူက ဆို ပါတယ္။

ေဆာ္ဒီမွာ အလုပ္သမား မွတ္ပံုတင္ မရိွဘဲ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နိုင္ငံကူး လက္မွတ္နဲ့ လုပ္ကိုင္ ေနျကတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာခၚ(ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကုလား) ေတြအတြက္ သက္ေသခံ စာရြက္ ထုတ္ေပးဖို့ ေဆာ္ဒီ ဘက္က ေတာင္းဆိုတဲ့ အတြက္ ဒီလို စဉ္းစား ေနတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဘီဘီစီ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
ARAKAN BLOOD

U WIRA THU: “ကားတစ္တန္၊ ေလွတစ္တန္၊ လွညး္တစ္တန္၊ ခက္သင္ရြာ တရားပြဲပုံရိပ္မ်ား”

“ကားတစ္တန္၊ ေလွတစ္တန္၊ လွညး္တစ္တန္၊ ခက္သင္ရြာ တရားပြဲပုံရိပ္မ်ား”
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၁၇-၇-၂၀၁၃- PM 7:30- မႏၲေလးတိုင္း၊ ျပင္ဦးလြင္ခရိုင္၊ စဥ့္ကူးၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ခက္သစ္ရြာမွာ ေဟာၾကားသည္။