Latest Highlight

မိုုးမခ၊

မိုုးမခက ယခင္၂ ပတ္က သတင္းတြင္ စာရင္းေကာက္ယူထုုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ေသာ ၄၂ ဦး စာရင္းႏွင့္ ယူအက္စ္ကင္ပိန္းက အေမရိကန္အစုုိးရသိုု႔ ပိတ္ဆိုု႔အေရးယူရန္ တင္သြင္းေသာ ၄၂ ဦး စာရင္း မွာ တိုုက္ရိုုက္ထပ္တူညီျခင္း မရွိပါ။ သိုု႔ျဖစ္ပါ၍ ယူအက္စ္ကင္ပိန္း၏ အေမရိကန္အစုုိးရထံ တင္သြင္းေသာ စစ္အစုုိးရအလုုိေတာ္ရိ လုုပ္ငန္းရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၀ါဒျဖန္႔ခ်ိေရးသမားမ်ားစာရင္းကိုု ျမန္မာဘာသာျဖင့္ တင္ဆက္လိုုက္ပါသည္။



Interview

Cheryl Benton,Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Public Affairs
Eric P. Schwartz,Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
George Rupp, President and CEO, International Rescue Committee
Washington, DC,  June 14, 2011

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SCHWARTZ: In fact, they have political solutions. You can solve the problem of the displaced – of the stateless Rohingya in Burma when you have a government in Burma that respects human rights and democracy, and that’s true with all the situations. But that doesn’t mean that humanitarians can’t play a role in promoting those ultimate outcomes. How do we do it? First with a canary in the coalmine, right? You can be sure when the – when Qadhafi was marching on Benghazi, humanitarians in the government were pointing out to decision makers what the humanitarian implications were going to be if he got to take over Benghazi. So we have a role to play. And we need to play that role in government as advocates, saying, look, if this happens, here are the bad things that are going to occur. So we have that role to play. But also we have this role, as George has said, in humanitarian situations where the superficial view is, oh, you can only provide assistance. But you can actually provide people with the tools to empower themselves. And if so, they can then begin to help create political solutions as well.

By AFP

Dunkley convicted, freed by Burma court thumbnail
Ross Dunkley seen being led to the Insein courtroom for trial in March (DVB)
A Burmese court on Thursday convicted an Australian newspaper boss of assault and sentenced him to one month in jail but allowed him to walk free after taking into account time already served.
Ross Dunkley, co-founder of the Myanmar Times, the country’s only newspaper with foreign investment, was found guilty of assaulting a 29-year-old woman and of breaching immigration laws but acquitted on other charges.
In a case that some observers say highlighted the risks of doing business in the military-dominated country, Dunkley was arrested in February and held in Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison until he was granted bail in late March.
The scene at the gem market in  Mahaaungmyay Township in Mandalay on Monday. Photo: Mizzima
New Delhi (Mizzima) – A fight broke out between ethnic Chinese and local Burmese gem traders at a gem market in Mahaaungmyay Township in Mandalay on Monday. The Chinese were taken to a safe location, and the gem market was closed after the clash.
The scene at the gem market in Mahaaungmyay Township in Mandalay on Monday. Photo: Mizzima
In Burma, many Chinese people own successful businesses. The recent incident and others like it have raised a question of whether there are racial problems between the Burmese and the Chinese living and doing business in Burma?

Mizzima reporter Te Te has compiled a roundup of views on the racial views of Burmese in Mandalay. In addition, he talked in depth with Dr. Hla Kyaw Zaw,  a Sino-Burmese affairs analyst.

By Matt Anderson, The Diplomat Blog

While the world’s attention is focused on the ongoing tension in the South China Sea, rebels in Burma are creating problems for the western extreme of Southeast Asia.  Though never fully pacified, Burma has made modest gains in subduing -- or at least co-opting -- the various ethnic groups that challenge the central government’s rule. But the past few days have seen troubling signs that this relative tranquillity may begin to unravel with Kachin rebels in Burma’s northwest fighting a series of skirmishes with government forces. 

Ethnic unrest in Burma isn’t new and certainly isn’t surprising.
WASHINGTON,  (UPI) --

 Fulfilling U.N. rights demands is crucial to making Myanmar the democracy the ruling junta claims it wants, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi told U.S. lawmakers.

Freeing the estimated 2,000 political prisoners held by the army government will show that the junta truly wants to create a modern, democratic nation, the pro-democracy activist said in videotaped testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Asia and the Pacific subcommittee.
Getting the military, which has ruled the country since 1962, to free political prisoners is a key demand of a March U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution.
Matthew Pennington, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The United States is prepared to have a positive relationship with Myanmar and seeks better international co-ordination in encouraging democratic reform in the Asian country, the nominee to be U.S. special envoy said Wednesday.

Derek Mitchell, who is currently a senior defence official for Asia-Pacific affairs, said that the inability of key members of the international community to co-ordinate their approach had undermined their efforts to press the government of Myanmar, also known as Burma, to free political prisoners and hold dialogue with its opponents.
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ သူဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမုိကေရစီ အဖဲြ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (NLD) ပါတီရဲ႕ ႏုိင္ငံေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြကုိ ရပ္တန္႔ဖုိ႔ ျမန္မာအစုိးရရဲ႕ သတိေပးခ်က္ ထြက္ေပၚလာတဲ့ေနာက္ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ မာ့ခ္ တုန္နာ (Mark Toner) က ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပဲြအတြင္း ေျပာဆုိလုိက္တာပါ။

AFP-YANGON — Myanmar's new military-backed government has warned pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her party to halt all political activities, official media said Wednesday.
The home affairs ministry has written to the Nobel Peace Prize winner saying her party is breaking the law by maintaining party offices, holding meetings and issuing statements, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.

"If they really want to accept and practise democracy effectively, they are to stop such acts that can harm peace and stability and the rule of law as well as the unity among the people including monks and service personnel," it said.
 Gordon Brown, Former Prime Minister , UK

This week I spoke to Aung San Suu Kyi after, for the third time in a year, the junta refused me permission to visit her in Burma. She impressed on me the need for mass mobilization to demand the release of all Burma's political prisoners and asked that I and her millions of supporters around the world sign the global petition here. She has been liberated by our solidarity -- and she asks that we now apply the same pressure on behalf of the silenced thousands who remain in detention. 


U.S. Campaign for Burma (www.uscampaignforburma.org) For Immediate Press Release June 27, 2011 Media Contact: Jennifer Quigley at (202) 234 8022 (Washington, DC, June 27, 2011) 

The U. S. Campaign for Burma (USCB), a Washington, DC-based human rights organization campaigning to end crimes against humanity and the culture of impunity in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, today strongly urged U.S. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner to take action on cronies who are providing economic and political support for the ruling regime in Burma, as authorized by the Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act of 2008. The Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act of 2008 authorized the U.S. government to impose targeted financial sanctions on former and present leaders and officials of Burma’s ruling regime, current or former officials of the security services and judicial institutions of the regime, and any other Burmese persons, who provide substantial economic and political support for the regime, as well as their family members. The Department of Treasury has added names and entities of the Burmese persons under targeted sanctions in its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. However, the cronies targeted by the Department of Treasury are much fewer in number than those who are sanctioned by the governments of Australia and the European Union. Many of the regime’s business cronies are still exempt from targeted U.S. financial sanctions. 

By Francis Wade Jun 27, 2011
Refugees sit in a detention center on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pic: AP.
The Australian government’s apathetic treatment of refugees and asylum seekers has long been a blot on its record – an irony given the historical make-up of the country and its rulers. Any hope that the new Gillard administration would reverse the hawkish policies of former prime minister John Howard, who championed the island gulags that hold thousands of refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma and elsewhere, has been short-lived – Gillard, herself a Welsh immigrant to Australia, is pushing ahead with a plan to send hundreds of refugees to Malaysia, one of only a handful of countries not to have ratified the UN refugee convention and which is therefore not bound by international laws dictating how refugees should be treated.

By John Pomfret ( The Washington Post)

The Obama administration decided Tuesday to support the creation of a United Nations commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma, a sign of a tougher U.S. policy against a regime long accused of murdering and raping its political foes.
 
U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said the administration is considering tightening financial sanctions against the regime as part of an effort to force it to open its authoritarian political system and free thousands of political prisoners.


ခ်င္းမိုင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ) ။  ႏုိင္ငံျခားအဆင့္ျမင့္အရာရွိမ်ား ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ယခုတေလာလာေရာက္ၾကသကဲ့သို႔ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးမစၥတာKevinRuddလည္းၾကာသပေတးေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္သို႔ ေရာက္ရွိမည္။
မစၥတာ Rudd သည္ ဇြန္ ၃ဝ ရက္မွ ဇူလိုင္ ၂ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ေနထိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ကာ၊ အစိုးရ အရာရွိမ်ား၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ အပါအဝင္ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕၌ ေတြ႔ဆံုရန္ စီစဥ္ထားသည္။
“ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ၏သမိုင္းတြင္အေရးႀကီးေသာအေျခအေနတခု ျဖစ္ပြားေနစဥ္ ယခုခရီးစဥ္ ေပၚေပါက္လာၿပီး ၾသစေၾတးလ် အစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ၏ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈကို မည္ကဲ့သုိ႔ အေကာင္းဆံုး ကူညီႏုိင္မည္ကုိအကဲခတ္ ေလ့လာရန္အခြင့္ရရွိလာေစမည္”ဟုၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး႐ံုး၏ ေၾကညာခ်က္ထဲတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။


တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးစံုနထိုင္တဲ့မန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းမႈရွိဖို႔ဆိုရင္မျမႇဳပ္မိုင္းပေပ်ာက္ေရးကိုဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔လိုအပ္တယ္လို႔ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ေျပာပါတယ္။ အစိုးရတပ္ေတြေရာလက္နက္ကိုင္တာ္လွန္ေနတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ေတြပါမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္းေတြအသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ေျမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္း သံုးစြဲမႈရပ္တန္းကရပ္ပါလို႔င္ငံတကာမွာမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္းသံုးစြဲမႈပေပ်ာက္ေရးလႈပ္ရွားေနတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ကတဆင့္ ေျပာၾကားထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းစံုကို မစုျမတ္မြန္က တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

ICBLဆိုတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေျမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္းသံုးစြဲမႈပေပ်ာက္ေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖြဲ႕ကတဆင့္ဗြီဒီယိုနဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္ထဲမွာ သာမန္ အရပ္သား ျပည္သူေတြ၊ လက္နက္ကိုင္ စစ္သားေတြ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသား အဖြဲ႕ေတြပါ ထိခိုက္ေသေက် ဒဏ္ရာရေစတဲ့ ေျမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္းေတြကိုဆက္မသံုးၾကဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုထားပါတယ္။ ျပည္ေထာင္စုႀကီးၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းဖို႔ ေျမျမႇဳပ္မိုင္း ပေပ်ာက္ေရးဟာ အေရးႀကီးတယ္လို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က အခုလို ေျပာၾကားခဲ့တာပါ။

By Zin Linn


The Union Parliament Speaker of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar or Burma Thura U Shwe Mann met with parliament representatives in Yangon Region and responsible persons of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry at the meeting hall of Yangon Region Parliament on Pyay Road Friday afternoon, according to the New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

It was also attended by people’s parliament representatives, national parliament representatives and Yangon Region parliament representatives in Yangon Region, RUMFCCI President and CEC members, media persons and guests.
Photo: AP/Khin Maung Win

Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi (file photo)Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to journalists after meeting with European Union special envoy to Myanmar Piero Fassino and European Union diplomatic official Robert Cooper at her home in Rangoon (file photo)
The leader of Burma’s opposition movement has urged the U.S. Congress to do what it can to make sure that her government adheres to a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi told members of Congress a resolution that the U.N. Human Rights Council passed in March is a clear guide for what needs to be done to bring democracy to Burma.

Arakanese-kingရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွ ကမန္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားမွာ ျမန္မာ အစိုးရမွ သတ္မွတ္ထားေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသား လူမ်ိဳး ၁၃၅ မ်ိဳးထဲ ပါ၀င္ေသာ္လည္း အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာကို ကိုးကြယ္သူမ်ား ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ခရီးသြားလာျခင္း မရဘဲ ကန္႕သတ္ ပိတ္ပင္ ခံေနၾကရသည္ဟု သတင္း ရရွိသည္။


ကမန္ တုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ားမွာ ျမန္မာ အစိုးရမွ ႏိုင္ငံသား ကဒ္ျပား အစစ္အမွန္ကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားသူမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾကေသာ္လည္း ခရီးသြားလာရာတြင္ အဆိုပါ ႏိုင္ငံသား ကဒ္ျပားျဖင့္ ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္မရဘဲ ပံုစံ(၄) ျဖင့္သာ ခရီးသြားလာေနၾကရသည္။
ရခိုင္ဘုရင္လက္ထက္တြင္ကမန္အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ားသည္ ေလးသည္ေတာ္မ်ားအျဖစ္တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ ခဲ့ၾကသည္။


Rohingya refugees in Malaysia. Photo: UNHCR ,Thursday, June 23, 2011

I am a Rohingya Burmese refugee asylum seeker in Australia and I left Burma since the end of 1999 for certain circumstances based on race, political and systematic oppression.
Due to the Burmese military government’s long war against minorities through an ethnic cleansing pogrom, the Rohingya ethnic minority became the most oppressed group and Burma’s first refugees.

I escaped to Malaysia and spent 10 years where I worked with Rohingya refugee organisations and Burmese political opposition groups based in Kuala Lumpur.

MAHN SAIMON 
Refugees struggle as EU cuts aid thumbnail
Ethnic Karen children play in the rain in Mae La refugee camp, Thailand (Reuters)

Burmese refugees living in camps along the Thai border say they have been receiving less food and housing material since the EU reduced border aid earlier this year, triggering concerns about the extent to which already difficult conditions in the camps will be exacerbated.



In her first appearance before Congress, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi testified before a House committee on Wednesday in a videotaped address.

The Nobel Peace laureate and well-known pro-democracy activist spoke calmly and deliberately in the video, mentioning little of her own experience of living for much of the past two decades under house arrest.
New Delhi (Mizzima) – Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi said on Sunday, her 66thBirthday, that peace was the most important thing as more fighting has broke out in Burma.
DAASK-66th-Birthday
 General-Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi, 66, delivers remarks during her birthday ceremonies at the headquarters of the National League for Democracy in Rangoon on Sunday, June 19, 2011. Photo: Mizzima
National League for Democracy (NLD) General-Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi, 66, gave a five-minute speech at her birthday party at NLD headquarters in Rangoon.

‘In order to develop and prosper, the first thing a country need is peace. So my birthday prayer is that we all can live in peace,’ Suu Kyi said.

She also said that to establish peace, neither a person nor an organization could do it alone. She called for cooperation.

2011/06/22
ZAFAR AHMAD ABDUL GHANI, President Myanmar Ethnic Rohingyas Human Rights Organisation Malaysia Kuala Lumpur
letters@nst.com.my


JUNE 20 was World Refugee Day. The Myanmar Ethnic Rohingyas Human Rights Organisation Malaysia (Merh-rom) regrets that there is no change in our condition over the years.
June 20 also marked the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. We must analyse whether this convention has done enough to protect refugees.

Every year, we see wars and conflicts across the world. This is worrying as more people flee their countries and become refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and displaced persons. While many have found new homes after resettlement to third countries, many more are struggling for survival.
Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
June 14, 2011


Dear Friends and Colleagues:

I wanted to brief you on my trip last week to Bangladesh to explore issues surrounding Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and the region. I was joined on the trip by Deputy Assistant Secretary Kelly Clements of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), and ably assisted on the ground by Deputy Refugee Coordinator Anjalina Sen and Embassy Dhaka officials Jon Danilowicz and Sophie Gao. I also received terrific guidance and support from our Ambassador, James Moriarty.
The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group from western Burma. Under successive Burmese regimes over several decades, they have been rendered stateless and subjected to systematic and severe violations of human rights. As a result of these deprivations, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh over the last three decades, principally in two waves ¬¬-- in 1978 and 1991-92.
Date: 06/16/2011 Description: Assistant Secretary Schwartz - State Dept Image
Sadly, the Rohingya are among many stateless populations throughout the world -- people who have no nationality. Without documentation or legal status, stateless people are vulnerable to serious abuses. To address this problem, our Bureau is working with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and others on a range of initiatives, which include efforts to promote equal nationality rights for women and a child’s right to nationality.
A year ago, the world was shocked by reports of Rohingya refugees being beaten and tortured by Thai soldiers. On 20 January 2009, the head of the Thai military promised an investigation into the alleged abuses. One year later, the public is still waiting for the facts to emerge.
'We should remind the government about this promised investigation,' said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Rohingya National Organization, which advocates for the rights of the Rohingya.
The Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim group, were fleeing persecution in Burma, which does not consider them citizens. But rather than finding asylum in Thailand, they were abused and set adrift in motor-less boats. Hundreds reportedly died at sea.

In a photo-essay for the Portfolio section of the Summer 2011 issue of World Policy Journal, Saiful Huq Omi documented the lives of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh—members of a Muslim minority community who fled persecution at the hands of the military junta that rules Burma, their homeland.
Though preferable in many ways to the oppression they faced in Burma (now officially known as Myanmar), life in Bangladesh is extremely difficult for the Rohingya, many of whom are denied legal status as refugees. Some Rohingya, however, have been granted asylum in places where conditions are less dire, including Britain.
Omi also spent time with a small community of Rohingya now living in Bradford, a city of around 300,000 residents in Northern England.
*****
By MAUNG TOO, DVB News

Seven Kachin women have been raped in separate attacks by Burmese troops in the country’s north, four of whom were subsequently murdered, a rights group has told DVB.

All incidents occurred in or close to Bhamo district in Kachin state, where additional battalions of Burmese soldiers have been deployed in the past fortnight to fight the insurgent Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

Moon Nay Li, coordinator of the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT), said that six women were raped this month – two of the incidents happened in Donbon village, one in Momauk township and three in Nahlon. The three women in Nahlon were then murdered.



NLD General Secretary and People's leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's 66th birthday and Burma Women's Day were celebrated on 19th June, 2011 in the headquarters of the NLD. CEC members, NLD leaders from States and Divisions, members from NLD townships, veteran politicians, CRPP members and ethnic leaders and diplomats attended the ceremony. Vice Chairman U Tin Oo chaired the ceremony when Daw Khin Saw Mu conducted as the master of ceremony.

By SIMON ROUGHNEEN Tuesday, June 21, 2011 

BANGKOK - on June 7, the day after 96 Pakistani Ahmadiyah refugees and asylum seekers were freed on bail in what was hailed as a landmark new departure in Thailand's dealings with refugees, six other Pakistani asylum seekers and one refugee were arrested in Pathum Thani, north of Bangkok.
The seven were sent to Bangkok’s Suan Phlu Immigration Detention Centre (IDC), site of the high-profile June 6 release, says the UN refugee agency (UNCHR). "We are deeply concerned about these arrests that just increase the sense of insecurity that refugees and asylum seekers already feel", said Jean-Noël Wetterwald, UNHCR regional representative and coordinator for Southeast Asia.
Rohingya Exodus