Suu Kyi ‘to be freed in November’

Burma’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will be released from house arrest in November this year, according to Burmese officials who met with a government minister last week.

The comments could not be independently verified by Reuters, who reported the news after speaking with two officials who attended a meeting on 21 January with Burma’s home minister, Maung Oo.

The meeting allegedly took place in Kyaukpadaung, around 350 miles north of the former capital, Rangoon, and was attended by several hundred people.

If true, the release would come one month after the rumoured date of Burma’s first elections in 20 years. According to information leaked from a meeting between a government official and the head of a prominent Japanese charity, elections will take place in October, most likely on the 10th.

Releasing Suu Kyi in November would fit with allegations by critics of the junta that her trial was a deliberate ploy to keep her out of the political arena whilst polling is taking place. This is despite international calls for the junta to release all political prisoners prior to that date.

ျမန္မာ့အေရး အေမရိကန္ အဆံုးမဲ့ စိတ္ရွည္မည္ မဟုတ္

ဒီေန႔ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး႐ုံး သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲမွာ မစၥတာ ကာ့တ္ ကမ္းဘဲလ္က အဲဒီလုိ ေျပာသြားခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

“ပထမဦးဆုံး ေျပာခ်င္တာက က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဟာ ျမန္မာအာဏာပုိင္ေတြနဲ႔ တုိက္႐ုိက္ အျပန္အလွန္ ဆက္သြယ္မႈတခ်ဳိ႕ ရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မၾကာခင္ ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲ ေဆြးေႏြးေျပာဆုိမႈ တခ်ဳိ႕ ရွိလာလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ပါတယ္။ အခုအေျခအေနမွာေတာ့ ေတြ႕ရတဲ့ အခ်က္ေတြက နည္းနည္း ေရာေထြးေနပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနတာပါ။

“ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ စစ္အစုိးရဘက္က အဆင့္ျမင့္ ဆက္သြယ္မႈတခ်ဳိ႕ ေတြ႕ရပါတယ္။ တျခား ျဖစ္ထြန္းတုိးတက္မႈ တခ်ဳိ႕လည္း ေတြ႕ရပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အျခားတဘက္မွာေတာ့ စိုးရိမ္စရာတခ်ဳိ႕ ေတြ႕ရျပန္ပါတယ္။ တိုင္းရင္းသား လူနည္းစုေတြနဲ႔ ပဋိပကၡေတြ ဆက္လက္ ျဖစ္ေနဆဲပါ။ တရားစြဲဆုိ ေထာင္ခ်တဲ့ ကိစၥမ်ဳိးေတြလည္း ရွိေနပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံသားတေယာက္ေတာင္ ဒီလုိ ႐ုံးတင္ တရားစြဲဆုိ ခံေနရတဲ့ အထဲမွာ ပါ၀င္ေနပါတယ္။

“လာမယ့္ ရက္သတၱပတ္ အနည္းငယ္ အတြင္းမွာ အေျခအေန သဲသဲကြဲကြဲ ျဖစ္လာဖုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး ၀န္ႀကီးနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အဖြဲ႕တဖြဲ႕လုံးက ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေနတယ္လို႔ ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔အေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ျပႆနာကို ျပန္လည္သုံးသပ္ၿပီး မူ၀ါဒ အသစ္တရပ္အျဖစ္ ဦးစားေပး ေဆာင္ရြက္ရာမွာ စိန္ေခၚမႈ အသစ္ေတြ ရွိေနတယ္ ဆုိတာကုိ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္းႀကီး သေဘာေပါက္ထားပါတယ္။

“ဒီေနရာမွာ စိတ္ရွည္ဖုိ႔ လိုအပ္တယ္ ဆိုေပမဲ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔အဖို႔ ဒါဟာ အဆုံးမရွိေသာ စိတ္ရွည္သည္းခံမႈမ်ဳိး မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ျဖစ္သင့္တဲ့ အခ်ိန္အတြင္းမွာ တုိးတက္မႈ အဆင့္တခ်ဳိ႕ ေတြ႕ျမင္ဖုိ႔ လုိကို လုိအပ္ပါတယ္။”

ေပါက္ယူခ်န္း၏ စစ္ေရးသတိရိွရန္ မိန္႔ခြန္း ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔တီဗီြမွ ထုတ္လႊင့္

ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔ ဥကၠ႒ ေပါက္ယူခ်န္း၏ မိန္႔ခြန္းတိုအား ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔၏ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားဌာနမွတဆင့္ ေဒသအတြင္း ထုတ္လႊင့္ျပသေနသည္။တ႐ုတ္ႏွင့္ ဝဘာသာျဖင့္ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္တြင္ ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔အေနျဖင့္ ပါတီ၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ဝေဒသအား စြမ္းစြမ္းတမံ ကာကြယ္သြားရန္အတြက္ စစ္ေရးသတိရိွရန္ ေျပာဆိုျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ဝ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားဌာန (WSTV) က နံနက္ပုိင္းႏွင့္ ညေနပုိင္းမ်ားတြင္ ရက္ျခားဆိုသလို ထုတ္လႊင့္ျပသေနသည္ဟု ပန္ဆန္းၿမိဳ႕မွ ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔ဝင္တဦးက ေျပာသည္။

၎က “သင္တန္းေတြက မႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာ လဆန္းပိုင္းေလာက္ကတည္းက စေနတာ။ တန္႔ယန္းသြားတဲ့လမ္းက ဝိန္းေကာင္ဘက္က သင္တန္းေတြဆို ၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ဝေတာင္ပိုင္းက ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြမွာ။ အခ်ဳိ႕ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြမွာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးေတြလည္း တက္တယ္။ အရန္ ျပည္သူ႔စစ္သင္တန္းေပါ့။ လက္နက္ငယ္ ပစ္ခတ္တာေတြေကာ သင္ေပးေနတာ။ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္က ဝေဒသကာကြယ္ေရး၊ လိုအပ္လာရင္ စစ္တိုက္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ေပါ့” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔တြင္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ျပည္သူ႔စစ္တပ္ဖဲြ႔အပါအဝင္ အင္အား (၃ဝ,ဝဝဝ) ခန္႔ ရိွေနခ်ိန္တြင္ ေဒသခံအရပ္သူ၊ အရပ္သား မ်ားအား အရန္ျပည္သူ႔စစ္ဆိုၿပီး သင္တန္းမ်ားေပးကာ ေဒသကာကြယ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္ေရးျပင္ေနျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

အပစ္ခတ္ရပ္အဖဲြ႔မ်ားအား နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းရန္ ယမန္ႏွစ္၊ ဧၿပီ (၂၈) ရက္၌ နအဖဘက္မွ စတင္ကမ္းလွမ္းလာၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔က နအဖ ကမ္းလွမ္းထားသည့္အတိုင္း လက္မခံႏိုင္သည့္အတြက္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ေနေသာ္လည္း မေျပလည္ဘဲျဖစ္ေနခ်ိန္တြင္ ဝတပ္ဖဲြ႔က ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔ ေဒသကာကြယ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္ေရးျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

WHAT'S A BEAUTIFUL OF WHITE AND GREEN ........

ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေဒသအတြင္းမွ ဘိန္းခင္းမ်ား မၾကာမီ အေစးျခစ္ႏိုင္ေတာ့မည္

နမ္းခမ္းၿမိဳ႕ အေနာက္ဘက္ေဒသမ်ားႏွင့္ ပေလာင္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား အဓိကေနထိုင္ရာ မန္တံုၿမိဳ႕နယ္အတြင္းရိွ ေတာင္ေစာင္း၊ လွ်ဳိေျမာင္မ်ား အတြင္း ဘိန္းခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ထားၾကၿပီး နယ္ေျမခံ ျပည္သူ႔စစ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေရႊလီေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္စက္႐ံု လံုၿခံဳေရးတာဝန္က် စစ္တပ္ကို ဘိန္းခင္း ပိုင္ရွင္မ်ားက ဆက္ေၾကးေပးေနရသည္ဟု နမ္းခမ္းေဒသခံတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
ဘိန္းခင္းမ်ားအားလံုးနီးပါးမွာ အပြင့္မ်ားပြင့္ေနၿပီး ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္စက္တင္ဘာလ၌ စိုက္သည့္အပင္မ်ားမွာ ေရွ႕လခန္႔တြင္ အေစးျခစ္၍ ရၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါ နမ္းခမ္းေဒသခံက ေျပာသည္။

Burma pledges free election

Burma’s foreign minister has told Southeast Asian counterparts that promised elections would be held this year and would be fair, the ASEAN secretary general said on Thursday.

Surin Pitsuwan said the military-ruled state's foreign minister, Nyan Win, made the comments at a dinner on Wednesday in Vietnam with his counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

“That was done last night and it was assured that it will be this year, and it will be free, fair and credible,” Mr Surin told reporters on the sidelines of an ASEAN foreign ministers' meeting. “No date has been set, but everything is moving on course. That's what we were told.”

Mr Surin said the ASEAN ministers “have expressed their high hope that the issue of Burma will be resolved this year and that we can move on to the new era of ASEAN relations and cooperation with the international community.”

ASEAN, which has a principle of non-interference in members' affairs, has long faced criticism for not taking a firmer stand on Burma.

THIS MONTH CHOICE

Burma junta confirms elections

Military-ruled Burma's junta chief urged people on Monday to make "correct choices" at national elections to be held this year, in a message to mark the country's 62nd independence anniversary.




Senior General Than Shwe said his seven-step "road map" to democracy was "the sole process for transition" in the annual message which was read out by another general at a ceremony in the remote administrative capital Naypyidaw.



"Plans are under way to hold elections in a systematic way this year. In that regard, the entire people have to make correct choices," Than Shwe's message said.



Critics of Burma's regime say the polls are a sham designed to cement the ruling generals' grip over the nation, especially as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently had her house arrest sentence extended beyond 2010.

A date has still not been announced for the elections, which will be the first since 1990 when the junta refused to recognise the landslide win of the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Suu Kyi.

မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားညီလာခံတစ္ရပ္ႀကဳိးပမ္းသင့္ေၾကာင္း မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားေရးရာအဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္မွ ေၾကညာခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္

လာမည့္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ စစ္အစိုးရ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပဲြသည္ ဗမာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ စစ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးအား သက္ဆိုး႐ွည္ေစၿပီး မြန္လူထုမ်ားအတြက္ အက်ဳိးမျဖစ္၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အခြင့္အေရးႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား အခြင့္အေရး မ်ားကိုလည္း အာမခံ ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ေပးမည္မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း တက္ေရာက္လာသည့္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားမွ သုံးသပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ေ႐ွ႕လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ မ်ားကုိလည္း ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။

မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားေရးရာႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပဲြသည္ မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားထုတစ္ရပ္လုံးတြင္ အဆင့္ျမင့္ဆုံး ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပဲြ တရပ္ ျဖစ္ကာ မြန္ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ႐ွိ လူထုအေျချပဳ မြန္အသင္းအဖြဲ႔ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ (၈၉)ဦးခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည္ကုိ ေတြ႔ရသည္။

ယခုႏီွးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပဲြႀကီးတြင္ မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားေရးရာအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ဗဟိုေကာ္မီတီအဖဲြ႔ဝင္သစ္ (၃၃)ဦးတုိ႔ျဖင့္ ထပ္မံ ဖဲြ႕စည္းလိုက္သည္။

မြန္ေရးရာအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ Mon Affairs Union ကုိ လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ၂ ႏွစ္ကစတင္ဖြဲ႔စည္းႏုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခုတြင္ ပထမအႀကိမ္ ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲ က်င္းပႏုိင္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ယခင္ႏွစ္မ်ားက MUL မွႀကီးမႉး၍ မြန္အမ်ဳိးသားႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲမ်ား က်င္းပခဲ့ၾကသည္။

OFFICE OF THE SUPREME HEADQUARTERS
KAREN NATIONAL UNION
KAWTHOOLEI
www.karennationalunion.net
Karen National Union Not Responsible for Bomb Blast in Papun, Karen State
December 18, 2009
Once again the illegitimate dictatorship ruling Burma has accused the Karen Nation Union (KNU) of
responsibility for bombing that has happened in Papun, which killed 7 Karen civilians and injured 11
others during the celebration of the Karen New Year on December 16, 2009. KNU categorically denies
responsibility for these attacks. The KNU is not a terrorist organization. The KNU has a policy of not
targeting civilians. This is in contrast to the Burmese Army, which the United Nations has verified as
committing war crimes by deliberately targeting civilians in breach of the Geneva Conventions.
The KNU is deeply sadden and disturbed to hear of this explosion and it adds to the great concern for the
safety and security of the Karen population. We, the KNU express great grief and sorrow for the victims'
families and others, who have been affected by this tragedy.
The KNU deplores this action instigated by the Burmese military regime. It is further proof that the
regime continuously and systematically commits crimes against Karen civilians in rural areas. It clearly
shows there is no guaranteed security for the Karen people under the rule of the military regime not only
in the rural areas but also in towns.
In order to win the 2010 election, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has used military
tactics and strategy to create conflict and misunderstanding in order to fracture the Karen community and
also their relationship with other ethnic nationalities and to divide their unity and strength. The SPDC is
fixed on defaming the KNU and uses every excuse to bring our organization into ill repute. It has
constantly misappropriated blame for actions it is guilty of itself. The SPDC endeavours to defame other
ethnic groups caught up in the armed struggle against the oppressors. The military junta continues to snub
international condemnation of its actions and continues to persecute all those who threaten the junta’s
hold on the political power of Burma.
The struggle for democracy and human rights must continue. The people of Burma regardless of their
ethnic origins or beliefs must stand together and unite against the common enemy, the military junta, that
deprives citizens of their right to live freely and to elect their own leaders and to feel proud of their
nation.
The KNU conveys best wishes to all the Karen people throughout the world and wish them to celebrate
the Karen New Year in peace and happiness. The KNU expects and encourages the Karen people in
Burma, on the borders and abroad to organize and celebrate the Karen New Year in a spirit of friendship
and unity as it is one of the most important traditional and cultural celebrations of our nation.
The KNU is a democratic organization, representing the Karen people of Burma. Our goal is peace and
prosperity in a democratic federal Burma.
*********

Migrant protest ends in violence

Protests by Burmese migrant workers in western Thailand at the weekend ended in violence after security guards locked around 1500 demonstrators in a garment factory compound.

The protests were triggered after four factory security guards last Friday assaulted two Burmese nationals, Kalar Lay and Ko Waw, who had arrived at the factory in Mae Sot to collect their younger sister.

Kalar Lay was hospitalised after the beating. Ko Waw’s subsequent disappearance drew the demonstrators, mostly women, to the factory compounds.

After security guards locked them in the compound, the protestors then set alight to a car belonging to the factory owner, and damaged factory property.

After two days of protests, police on Sunday brought Ko Waw back from Myawaddy in Burma, across the border from Mae Sot.

“We protested because there has been a lot of disappointment,” said a female factory worker. “We can only go home from work after midnight, and no one pays attention when we get harassed or violated by someone.”

Another woman who joined the protest said the factory officials on Sunday urged the employees to return to work.

“The employer urged us to come back to work starting from [Monday] and promised that they would not take any action,” she said.

Workers said it was still unclear if they would have to pay compensation for the damage to factory property during the protest.

Negotiations between factory owners and workers, the majority of whom have not returned to work, are currently taking place.

Up to 80 percent of Mae Sot’s inhabitants are estimated to be Burmese, many of whom work in low-skilled industries such as construction or factories for little pay. In Thailand there are thought to be around two million Burmese migrants.

Last month around 500 Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot filed a mass lawsuit against 12 factories which they claimed had failed to pay their salaries.

Although a programme to register migrants in Thailand is currently underway, many still struggle to gain any sort of legal status in the country, meaning that access to education and health service is restricted.

Suu Kyi lawyers appeal sentence at top Burma court

Lawyers for Burma's detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi argued an appeal against her extended house arrest sentence on Monday at the country's supreme court.

The 64-year-old democracy icon was ordered to spend another 18 months in detention in August after being convicted over an incident in which a US man swam to her house. A lower court rejected an initial appeal in October.

During the morning hearing in Rangoon, which lasted roughly one-and-a-half hours, Suu Kyi's legal team argued that her conviction was legally unsound, according to her main lawyer Kyi Win.

The judges said they would decide later Monday whether to allow the case to proceed further, he told AFP. If they do allow it, the prosecution team will be called to argue against the appeal at a later date.

"As lawyers we have to hope for the best. We are always hoping," Kyi Win said. If the case is thrown out, it is thought that they would have to appeal directly to the military government to try and get the conviction overturned.

Suu Kyi, who is detained at her lakeside mansion in Rangoon, did not attend the hearing while journalists were also barred. Witnesses said security was tight at the court, with plain-clothed policemen patrolling the area.

Burma's military rulers have kept the Nobel peace prize winner in detention for 14 of the last 20 years, since they refused to recognise the NLD's landslide victory in the country's last democratic elections in 1990.

The extension of her detention after a prison trial sparked international outrage as it effectively keeps her off the stage for elections promised by the regime some time in 2010.

But in recent months the United States, followed by the European Union, has shifted towards a policy of greater engagement with Burma - which has been under military rule since 1962 - as sanctions have failed to bear fruit.

Suu Kyi has also changed tack after years of favouring harsh measures, writing twice to junta chief Than Shwe since September offering her cooperation in getting Western sanctions lifted.

She has since met three times with the government liaison officer and last week she was granted a meeting with three elderly senior NLD members, at which she asked for their approval to reorganise the party leadership committee.

But the junta has not yet granted her requests to meet with the rest of the committee and to hold talks with Than Shwe himself.

In November the regime allowed her to make a rare appearance in front of the media after meeting with US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, the highest level official from Washington to visit Burma for 14 years.

A visit by US senator Jim Webb in August secured the release of John Yettaw, the American man who swam across a lake to Suu Kyi's home in May and sparked the case that led to her detention being prolonged.