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by : ခင္မမမ်ိဳး

နိဒါန္း

လူတေယာက္၏ ဘ၀လမ္းေၾကာင္းတြင္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလမ္းစဥ္မ်ားတြင္ျဖစ္ေစ အေတြးအေခၚက အဓိကက်ေလသည္။ အေတြးအေခၚ ရွင္းလင္းမွသာ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမည့္ လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို သတ္မွတ္ေရြးခ်ယ္ႏိုင္သည္။ တိက်စြာ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ႏိုင္သည္။

အေတြးအေခၚ ရွဳပ္ေထြးေနလွ်င္ လမ္းစဥ္မ်ားကလည္း ေ၀၀ါးေနတတ္သည္။ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရာတြင္လဲ တိက်ျပတ္သားမွဳ မရွိျဖစ္တတ္သည္။ ၾကံတိုင္းမေျမာက္ပဲ လုပ္တိုင္း မေအာင္ ျဖစ္ေလ့ရွိသည္။ အခ်ိဳ႕က လမ္းစဥ္ကို ေရြးခ်ယ္ျပီးမွ အေတြးအေခၚကို လိုက္လံ စဥ္းစားတတ္သည္။ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ခင္မွ တရားမင္တယ္ ဆိုေသာ စကားလံုးကား ဤသို႕ေသာ အေျခအေနကို ဆိုလိုရင္း ရွိဟန္တူသည္။ လမ္းစဥ္ကို အရင္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ ထားျခင္း မရွိပဲ ေလးစားရင္းစြဲရွိေနေသာ လူပုဂၢိဳလ္တဦးတေယာက္ (သို႕မဟုတ္) အဖြဲ႕အစည္း တခု၏ ဦးေဆာင္မွဳေနာက္ကို လိုက္ပါျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးကိုးကြယ္မွဳမ်ားႏွင့္ ပုဂၢိဳလ္စြဲ၊ အဖြဲ႕စြဲ စိတ္ဓာတ္ မ်ား ေပၚေပါက္လာရျခင္းမွာ အဆိုပါ အေျခအေနေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။

အခ်ိဳ႕ကက်ေတာ့ အေျခအေန တရပ္၏ လွံဳေဆာ္မွဳေၾကာင့္ လမ္းစဥ္တခုကို ကိုင္စြဲလာျခင္းျဖစ္ျပီး၊ ထိုလမ္းစဥ္ အေျခခံထားသည့္ အေတြးအေခၚပိုင္းတြင္မူ ရွင္းလင္းျပတ္သားမွဳ မရွိ ျဖစ္ေနတတ္သည္။

သာကူးလုပ္တတ္သူမ်ား၊ ခြေက်ာ္စားတတ္သူမ်ား၊ ႏွစ္ဖက္ခၽြန္လုပ္တတ္သူမ်ား၊ စမူဆာ လုပ္တတ္သူမ်ားမွာ ဤအမ်ိဳးအစားမွ ထြက္ေပၚ လာေလ့ရွိသည္။ လမ္းစဥ္တခုကို ကိုင္စြဲျပီးမွ လမ္းဆံုးသည္ အထိ ျပီးဆံုးေအာင္ မေလွ်ာက္သူမ်ားမွာလဲ ဤအမ်ိဳးအစားထဲမွ ေပၚထြက္ လာတတ္သည္။ သို႕ရာတြင္ လမ္းဆံုးသည္အထိ မေလွ်ာက္သူတိုင္းကိုကား အေတြးအေခၚ မရွိပဲ အေျခအေန တရပ္၏ လွံဳ႕ေဆာ္မွဳေၾကာင့္ လမ္းစဥ္တခုကို ကိုင္စြဲလာသူမ်ားဟု တရားေသ သတ္မွတ္၍ ကား မရ။ အေတြးအေခၚတရပ္ ရွိျပီးမွ အဆိုပါအေတြးအေခၚ ေဖာက္ျပန္သြားျခင္း (သို႕မဟုတ္) လူမွဳေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး အေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အဆိုပါ အေတြးအေခၚကို ဆက္လက္ဆုပ္ကိုင္ထားႏိုင္မည့္ ခိုင္မာေသာ စိတ္ဓာတ္ ပ်က္ျပယ္သြားျခင္း (သို႕မဟုတ္) အေတြးအေခၚသစ္တရပ္၏ ဆြဲေဆာင္ရာသို႕ လိုက္ပါသြားျခင္း (သို႕မဟုတ္) လူပုဂၢိဳလ္ႏွင့္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းတရပ္၏ ဦးေဆာင္မွဳေနာက္သို႕ လိုက္ပါသြားျခင္း စသည္မ်ားေၾကာင့္လဲ မူလဆုပ္ကိုင္ ထားေသာ လမ္းစဥ္ကို စြန္႕ခြာသြားျခင္းမ်ား ရွိလာတတ္ပါသည္။

မည္သို႕ဆိုေစ လမ္းစဥ္မ်ား၊ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား၏ ေနာက္ကြယ္တြင္ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနစျမဲပင္ျဖစ္ရာ လမ္းစဥ္တခုကို မေရြးခ်ယ္ခင္ အဆိုပါလမ္းစဥ္ႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနေသာ အေတြးအေခၚကို ကနဦးၾကိဳတင္ ေလ့လာသင့္ၾကေပသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ ဘာသာေရး၊ လူမွဳေရးရာမ်ားတြင္ ေရြးခ်ယ္စရာ လမ္းစဥ္မ်ား၊ လမ္းေၾကာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား အမ်ားအျပား ရွိေနတတ္ပါသည္။ ထိုလမ္းစဥ္မ်ားကို အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားက ဦးေဆာင္ထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ တခါတရံတြင္ ၀ိေရာဓိမ်ား၊ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ရာမ်ား၊ ထိပ္တိုက္ထိခတ္ေနျခင္းမ်ား၊ တိုက္ရိုက္ဆက္စပ္ေနျခင္းမ်ား၊ သြယ္၀ိုက္ ဆက္စပ္ေနျခင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္တည္ေနတတ္ပါသည္။ ဆက္စပ္ေနေသာ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ား ေပါင္းစပ္သြားျပီး လမ္းစဥ္သစ္မ်ား ေပၚထြန္းလာျခင္းမ်ား ရွိသကဲ့သို႕၊ ထိပ္တိုက္ထိခတ္ေနေသာ သေဘာတရားႏွင့္ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား၊ စစ္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပြားလာျခင္းမ်ားလဲ ရွိပါသည္။

ကမၻာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမိုင္း၊ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမိုင္းတြင္ ဤသို႕ေသာ အျဖစ္အပ်က္မ်ားမွာလည္း မ်ားခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္သည္။ သမိုင္း တပတ္ျပန္လည္ေနေသာ အျဖစ္အပ်က္မ်ားမွာလည္း ဒုနဲ႕ေဒး။ အေတြးအေခၚ တိုက္ပြဲမ်ားမွ စတင္လိုက္ေသာ လမ္းစဥ္တိုက္ပြဲမ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ ကံၾကမၼာကို အဆံုးအျဖတ္ေပးသည့္ ဦးတည္ခ်က္ လမ္းေၾကာင္းတိုက္ပြဲမ်ား၊ ယင္းမွ တဖန္ ဆက္လက္ေပၚထြက္လာေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ လူတန္းစားအေရး၊ ကုန္ထုတ္လုပ္ေရးထဲက တိုက္ပြဲမ်ားကား စာဖြဲ႕လို႕ပင္ မမွီႏိုင္သည္မို႕ သုေတသန နယ္ပယ္အသီးသီးေတြ ေလ့လာဆန္းစစ္ မွတ္တမ္းျပဳေနၾကရဆဲပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ယခု ေဆာင္းပါးသည္ကား အဆိုပါ သမိုင္းေၾကာင္းမ်ားကို ဆန္းစစ္ေလ့လာထားသည့္ က်မ္းတခု မဟုတ္ပါ။ ယေန႕ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးေလာကကို လႊမ္းမိုးေနေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးရာ အေတြးအေခၚ ႏွစ္ရပ္ကို တင္ျပလိုေသာ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ျဖင့္ ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
 By Zin Linn

The talk concerned a Burmese delegation led by Colonel Than Aung, leaders of the Kachin Consultative Council and KIO military wing the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), said KIO Joint-Secretary La Nan. KIA leaders included vice-chief-of-staff Brig-Gen Sumlut Gun Maw and Battalion 4 commander Colonel Zau Raw, he added.

It has not been confirmed so far whether the KIO and Burmese delegation have reached an agreement, with Kachin sources saying further talks between the two sides were likely in the event of a stalemate.


The KIO has offered to end ongoing fighting if the government will commence talks for a nationwide ceasefire. But Burmese government authorities did not show any positive signal, according to La Nang, a spokesman for the KIO.

Prior to Burma Army and KIO ceasefire negotiation, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed a meeting between Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and Burmese Government minister Aung Kyi on 25 July, and urged the Government to consider release of political prisoners, according to a statement issued by a spokesperson, as informed by the UN News Centre.

Releasing all remaining political prisoners is the sole most vital step that authorities in Myanmar (Burma) can take, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also said on 29 July, expressing hope that the Government of the Asian nation will soon take steps towards greater democracy.

In addition, Mr. Ban telephoned earlier Friday with Wunna Maung Lwin, Myanmar's Foreign Minister, just days after he paid tribute to a meeting between a Government minister and Burma's key prominent opposition figure. In his conversation with Wunna Maung Lwin, Mr. Ban highlighted that he had publicly welcomed the reform measures announced by the new Government, according to his spokesperson.

"He hoped that the Government would now move toward concrete action and take the country forward towards peace, democracy and prosperity."

 The Secretary-General also expressed his concern to the Foreign Minister about the ongoing warfare involving some armed groups and the impact of that on civilians, saying the Government must resolve the situation peacefully.

However, the issues of releasing political prisoners and ceasefire with ethnic rebels are still unresolved in the new cabinet as vice-president Tin Aung Myin Oo's faction has been objecting, as said by some observers inside Burma.

According to a source said, President Thein Sein wants Burma Army to withdraw away from the headquarters of the ethnic groups. But, Tin Aung Myint Oo does not agree with Thein Sein. He considers the military maneuver must continue although there are food-shortage problems inside the frontline armed forces. The disagreement between "soft-liner" President Thein Sein and "hardliner" Vice President Tin Aung Myint Oo were considerably inflexible, it seemed the new government could not go further with the two hot issues -- free political prisoners and ceasefire with ethnic rebels.

Eventually, Than Shwe crossed the line and provided resolution, a source said.   Thein Sein and Tin Aung Myint Oo have to stay at status quo serving unity of the armed forces. By following Than Shwe's advice, Burma Army has to be maintained unity. The source said it has a document in possession to support his report, According to (S.H.A.N.).

On the other hand, releasing political prisoners and calling peace to armed ethnic groups would provide evidence to the international community that government is really bringing about political change and embracing genuine democratic values.

But, presently, Tin Aung Myin Oo has becoming a barrier on the way to Burma's political restructuring. He became a hard-line vice-president in the new government as the representative of the military bloc. Tin Aung Myint Oo (62) won the Thiha-Thura courage award in fight against Communist rebels in the 1980s. He took charge victorious operations against Communist troops in Eastern Shan State in September 1988, which led to a cease-fire agreement in 1989. He was promoted to secretary-1 when Thein Sein became prime minister in 2007.

In July 2010, Tin Aung Myint Oo traveled to China to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss the issue of ethnic rebels along the Sino-Burma border. As a pro-China, Tin Aung Myin Oo relies too much on China. With China's backing, he believes Burma can neglect Western sanctions and pressures.  

Therefore, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should not think that establishing democratic transformation in Burma is too easy to proceed.   In his March report to the UN Human Rights Council, Ojea Quintana said that a pattern of "gross and systematic" human rights violations in Burma had persisted over a period of several years and still continued. He suggested that a specific fact-finding UN Commission of Inquiry to be convened as soon as possible to scrutinize the series of international crimes.

Not only Mr. Ban but also ASEAN leaders should stop reciting rhetorical verses via media, said some observers in the country. At least, they should show their pragmatic supporting towards Quintana's Commission of Inquiry proposal.

It is a dishonor that the UN and ASEAN members look like less committed on protecting poor people of Burma from atrocious international crimes. Overlooking inhumane international crimes in Burma, it will be in vain to expect a true political talk or reform.

Burma needs wide-ranging international pressure for political change, starting free political prisoners plus nationwide ceasefire.
By Tony Cliff

LAIZA, Myanmar - "At first the Burmese soldiers were looking very confident, they were moving up on the road shouting and shooting towards the jungle. They just did not realize we were hiding around," said Aung Myat, a 27-year-old soldier with the insurgent Kachin Independence Army (KIA)'s 23rd Battalion.
When the government troops arrived, the insurgent soldiers triggered landmines and started to shoot. The clash was the first of a series of confrontations in the area which lasted almost three days, according to Aung Myat. In the evening of July 18, back in the relative safety of Hkaya Bum camp, the battalion's bamboo barrack headquarters, the young insurgents released an excess of adrenaline when telling their war stories.
Their animated conversation was stifled by the roar of a heavy monsoon rain; a thick mist blanketed the whole area. Between sips from beer cans and puffs from cigarettes brought earlier by a supply truck, they traded their stories with an almost childish excitement, mimicking with their arms the handling of machine guns. "We counted at least eight bodies, including four or five incinerated in a vehicle we destroyed with a grenade, but surely there were more," said Aung Myat.
At 27, Aung Myat is one of the eldest in the battalion: most of the other guerrillas are around 20 years of age. For all of them it was their first ever combat experience. Less than 10 kilometers (km) to the east from the battlefield road, across a succession of jungle-covered hills down a narrow valley, lies Laiza, a small city of 10,000 people that houses the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the KIA's sister political organization. Laiza is crossed by a stream marking the Chinese border.
Rumors spread by exile media groups of massive Myanmar military reinforcements and of an imminent offensive hardly seem to have reached the city. Schools, shops and hotels remain open while people attend to their business as usual. Yet two new developments are a reminder that the situation is exceptional and potentially grave. As a safety measure, Chinese authorities have closed the border gate in the middle of downtown from 6 pm to 6 am, presumably to avoid a flood of refugees into their territory.
Thousands of people, mostly women and children, can already be seen crammed in a few locations such as the city hall, a cardboard factory warehouse and the "Manau", a vast ground where the ethnic Kachin organize traditional celebrations. These are the civilians who left their villages when armed hostilities first broke out on June 9. On that day, there was a violent clash at the site of the Dapein dam, about 50 km south of Laiza. The exchange of gunfire signaled the end of 17 years of ceasefire between the Myanmar military and the KIA.
From 1989 onwards, some 15 armed ethnic insurgent groups concluded separate ceasefire agreements with Myanmar's ruling junta. The Kachin had always looked like an exception in Myanmar's complex ethnic jigsaw. With a size of 89,000 square km, more than twice the size of Switzerland, their state is one the country's largest administrative entities. But with an estimated population of 1.36 million (based on 2002 official statistics, the latest available), it's also one of the country's least inhabited areas because of the steep mountains that cover nearly half of the state.
The predominantly Christian Kachin ethnic population is estimated at 1.2 million (out of a total national population of 55 million), half of them living in the Kachin State, the other half in other parts of Myanmar. About 300,000 Kachin also live in neighboring China, where they are known as Jinpo. For historical reasons, the Kachin have managed to develop a strong social and educational system, making them arguably one of the most sophisticated ethnic groups in Myanmar.
The agreement with the Kachin, signed in 1994, was the only one formalized on paper. Essentially, it defined a framework for future business deals with and without Myanmar companies and delineated a portion of the Kachin State that would fall under the KIO's control. However, the document was never made public, which made the assessment of its implementation difficult.
Kareng La Nan,* [1] a teacher from Myitkyina, summarizes many of his ethnic companions' opinions: "Those 17 years have surely brought stability, some social and economic developments and less-human rights violations but we have gained absolutely nothing on the political level."
As with other armed ethnic groups, the Kachin have abandoned their previous claim for independence. Instead, they have demanded a certain degree of autonomy over their own affairs which would guarantee respect for their own rights and culture.
Except for certain Kachin leaders, other politically connected individuals and large private companies who took advantage of business opportunities allowed for in the agreement, many people now view the ceasefire as a fool's bargain. The long list of grievances has fueled the new hostilities. Kachin land, they say, has been systematically looted of its natural resources. The ethnic group has all but lost to the benefit of Burmese companies the lucrative trade in jade which fueled the insurgent organization for decades.
Giant business groups affiliated with the military junta, such as Yuzana, Htoo Trading or Asia World, took up in Kachin State massive production of tapioca and the exploitation of hydropower, timber and various minerals. Still, the sharper arrows are aimed at the Chinese companies which have invested heavily in gold mining, hydropower and other products such as timber with allegedly very little benefit for the local population.
This perceived "one-way" investment policy has stirring up an anti-Chinese feeling with many people. "When they develop large plantations of bananas with export quality standards or gold mining, they bring their own equipment and workers and they don't share with the locals," complains a KIA cadre.
The current most sensitive Chinese investment is the construction of the Myitsone dam, 40 kilometers north of Myitkyina at a site considered by Kachin as a cultural heartland, with a planned capacity of 6,000 megawatts. To many Kachin, the project is an environmental abomination.
Activists say the water in the planned reservoir will put immense pressure on the underground soil and water system. Environmental groups also warn about potential detrimental effects downstream on the lives of millions of people who depend on the Irrawaddy River's system. It also may be, although this is not confirmed, that the electricity from the dams will be exported entirely to China.
The last straw, it seems, was the junta's order in 2009 to various ethnic armed ceasefire groups to transform into Border Guard Forces (BGF) that must disarm and submit under government officers' command. "It was nothing less than an order to surrender," comments one long-time observer of the ethnic groups.

The KIO, as well as other groups such as the Wa and the Mon, rejected the BGF order and proposed alternative plans which were all flatly rejected by the junta. Subsequently, the KIO was officially declared an outlaw organization.
The June 9 clash marked the official return to armed conflict. "They created this incident as an excuse to penetrate into our territory," claims Zau Awn, the KIO's administrator officer at the central region. However, it looks like the Myanmar military's strategists underestimated the resolve of the Kachin. Perhaps they thought they could repeat the operation they launched in August 2009 against the ethnic Kokang, another armed group who rejected the BGF and was crushed in a few days of fighting.
Under a banner in the Kachin language reading "Operation Victory Journey" in a large meeting room at the downtown Laiza Hotel which has been transformed into a central command post, General Gun Maw, the KIA's 46-year-old deputy chief of staff, sums up many Kachin officers' opinions, "The Burmese soldiers don't have the motivation and very little support from their own people."
Interviews with three Myanmar military prisoners of war in Laiza seem to confirm this assessment. Asked whether he knew the reasons why he was sent here, Aung Myo Hlat,* a 36- year-old captain with the 21st Infantry Battalion, paused for a long minute before finally saying: "I am a soldier, I had to obey."
Soe Myint,* a 48-year-old career sergeant, recalls how he fell unconscious in the bush after a bullet went through his left arm. "I don't know why we are fighting, I just remember that I lost a lot of blood, I fainted and was left alone. When I woke up I was into KIA's hands."
Htoo Lay,* a 22-year-old Karen ethnic private attached to an artillery unit, did not even ask to join the army. "I was forcibly conscripted three years ago by officers while I was waiting for a train at Mandalay railway station." He was hit in the back by shrapnel. "I did not know what to do, the injury was not too bad, I just hid in the bush, KIA soldiers came and shouted 'we won't shoot you, just come out', I came out, I never used my weapon."
Like his two companions and probably like most Burmese soldiers, he was experiencing his first combat. Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former soldier with the Burmese Communist Party who has maintained good relations with ethnic groups along the Chinese border, makes a stark assessment based on his historical knowledge, "The quality of the Burmese army rank and file has never been so low."
The KIA claims it has sent a letter to the Myanmar authorities proposing to deliver the prisoners. "We got no answer," says a KIA officer. "After their return in their army, the prisoners will probably be court-martialed, they will be charged with lack of responsibility, loss of weapon and giving intelligence to the enemy. The officers will get at least seven years of jail."
As the ethnic groups long-time observer says, "The Kachin are feared by many people for their fighting capabilities. During WWII [World War II], when they fought alongside the British, they were given strong credit for helping to kick the Japanese out. They have this 'we can do, we can stand on our own' mentality."
The determination of Kachin soldiers is further strengthened by the knowledge that their enemy's weaponry on the field is not really superior to theirs. In a Hkaya Bum barrack, the KIA laid their arms catch from the three days of battle. Mixed with identity documents, mobile phones, money, family pictures and other personal items, Burmese rifles, machine guns, mortars, grenades and other landmines are arranged. Much of the weaponry would look more appropriate in a museum than on a modern battlefield.
While the Kachin will be happy to use these relics against their original owners, they also manufacture their own weaponry. Copies of the famous AK-47, mortars, landmines and other items are made by Kachin gunsmiths in secret armories. The KIA claims to have around 6,000 standing soldiers and can count on as many as 8,000 more village militias composed of women and men who have received basic military training and been provided with weapons. (Asia Times Online could not independently verify the figures.)
The Myanmar military's main comparative strength is its artillery fire power. Yet any attempt to capture Laiza would represent a stiff test of its capabilities. Only two roads lead to the city. In the current monsoon season, rain and mud have made the northern access all but inaccessible while the KIA claim they can maintain strategic control of the southern road. If the Myanmar military used heavy artillery to shell Laiza across the hill ranges, they would inevitably send mortars into Chinese territory, with the risk of provoking an international incident.
So far the KIA's strategy has been to defend its territory and positions against any incursion. Sabotage operations, such as blowing up bridges, have also been conducted. "Since we are declared outlaw, we have started to lay landmines to protect our positions," adds Major Kumbu Din, the KIA's 5th Brigade commander.
The renewed conflict has brought its share of human misery. At the time of writing, more than 17,000 villagers had fled their homes to safer areas, mostly along the Chinese border. The majority of them left in anticipation rather than in response to fighting. Mali Bawk La, a 70-year-old farmer from Nam San village, walked some 30 kilometers with his six family members to Laiza. "The tension was growing, we feared that the Burmese soldiers would capture us and force us to do things like [act as] porters," he said.
According to the KIO, an estimated 6,500 displaced people have managed to cross the Chinese border to live with Jinpo relatives. Another 7,500 are taken care of by the KIO in temporary camps, including more than 6,000 in Laiza. The rest are scattered in Myitkyina and in western areas of the vast state. Anticipating a long war, the KIA has already started to build 500 bamboo houses along the Chayan river down from Laiza which will accommodate 7,000 people.
"So far we could count on the KIO's administration, donations from individuals and churches and the help of many young Kachin volunteers who came from all over the country," says La Rip, the relief effort coordinator in Laiza. "Maybe the situation looks normal but it won't be at all as long as there is no ceasefire. If the crisis lasts or gets worse we will certainly need outside help."
There are also credible reports of human-rights abuses committed by Myanmar army soldiers against Kachin civilians. The Laiza-based Kachin Women Association has documented at least 18 cases of rape, sometimes aggravated with murder, between June 10 and 18. More recently, on July 21, a KIA female officer reported the rape of a nurse in a local clinic. A nurse running a clinic in a Kachin village, says that she "never heard about rape cases before the fighting started".
The conflict has had at least two unexpected consequences. First, many Kachins confirm that support for the KIA is once again on the rise. That has not always been the case: under the ceasefire it was not rare to hear criticism of the Kachin leadership, who many felt had sold out the state's land and resources for their own personal gain.
Second, government pressure to join its BGF scheme and other recent developments have radicalized a new generation of Kachin youth that was raised in peace time conditions. "Everyone wants to go to war," shouted a young businessman coming out from a Sunday mass at the Laiza Baptist church. "It's time for the Kachin people to free themselves from the Burmese regime. We like [opposition leader] Aung San Suu Kyi but her appeals for non-violence have failed."
Within the KIA, the conflict has also signaled a changing of the guard. "The old leaders who still want to compromise without a political agreement have no say anymore," says a young KIA cadre. Yet even though many Kachin don't see any other way than armed resistance to push their grievances, nearly everyone wishes for a negotiated settlement.
La Nan, the KIO's spokesman, said the Kachin are determined to stick to a three-point proposal. "First we will try to establish a temporary ceasefire in our area; secondly, we want the same for the whole country; thirdly, we want a political dialogue where all ethnic armed groups will be represented by the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC)." (UNFC is an organization formed in February with three ceasefire groups and three non-ceasefire groups who advocate for a federal union.)
A June 30 meeting between government and Kachin delegations failed to reach any agreement, though contacts are reportedly ongoing. The Kachin side has blamed the government for sending a team with no real negotiating power and no clear mandate from Naypyidaw, Myanmar's capital. "The Burmese told us 'let's work peacefully so let's go for a ceasefire'," said Gun Maw. "But there is no political agreement, it's just a call to facilitate the life of people for business purposes."
The mid-July clashes down from Hkaya Bum camp were the most intense of the nascent conflict. Since then there have been sporadic skirmishes, but apparently without a concerted strategy from the Myanmar military. The two sides have reportedly resumed contacts in recent days, without clear results. Meanwhile, those in Kachin State hold their breath, hoping for real peace and autonomy, not just another ceasefire.
Note
1. Names marked with an asterisk * have been changed for security reasons.
Tony Cliff, a pseudonym, is a Bangkok-based freelance photojournalist. He may be reached at tonycliff7@gmail.com.
 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MH03Ae03.html
By Doug Bandow 


For a half century, the impoverished people of Burma (also known as Myanmar) have lived under a brutal military dictatorship. Although Burma has not seen mass starvation as in the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea, unrelenting wars are raging against numerous ethnic groups seeking autonomy.

Until recently the military, headed by Gen. Than Shwe, constituted the State Peace and Development Council: a junta that promoted its version of peace and development by imprisoning democracy advocates in the cities, impeding provision of humanitarian aid in the delta, and killing guerrillas and civilians alike in the more distant eastern hills. Oppression has led to poverty for the Burmese people.

However, not everyone is poor. As in most dictatorships, members of the regime and their families and friends have profited abundantly from political power. U.S. and European sanctions provide their only impediment to fiscal success.
Those sanctions, unfortunately, do nothing to promote democracy or improve the condition of the Burmese people, and serve merely to bother the ruling elite. With China, India, and other Asian states active in the Burmese markets, there has been no lack of opportunity for Shwe & Co. to travel and spend their ill-gotten gains.

Nevertheless, Shwe's regime desires recognition and money from the West. So last year Shwe proclaimed the end of military rule. Numerous military officers resigned from the army. An election was held and Burma launched a charm offensive overseas. Domestic democracy activists hoped the process would be a harbinger of change. Foreign human rights activists hoped the process would spark the start of reform.
It did nothing. The regime had learned from 1990, when it foolishly allowed a free election and the overwhelming majority backed Aung San Suu Kyi​, daughter of a revered general who helped win Burma's independence after World War II​. The regime had to void the election, arrest Suu Kyi and suppress her party, resulting in domestic bloodshed and international obloquy.

So this time the junta decided to enforce "disciplined democracy." After the SPDC wrote a new constitution and drafted new election rules to ensure its supremacy, the military chose as president former General Thein Sein​. Human Rights Watch called Sein "a ruthless loyalist with a well-established past in command positions during some of Burma's darker and most corrupt periods." Four years ago he was prime minister when protestors were murdered on the streets.

The military also guaranteed itself numerous legislative seats, barred its most dangerous opponents (including now-Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi) from running, prohibited campaign criticism of itself, and placed the vote count in its own hands. Surprise, surprise, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (the SPDC's captive political organization filled with former military officers) won an overwhelming victory last November.

Since then the government has jailed democracy activists in the cities, controlled access to the rural areas, and killed guerrillas and civilians in the more distant eastern hills. More than 100,000 Burmese have been forced over the border into Thailand and millions have been displaced within their own country. The verdant eastern Burmese landscape has been sown with land mines, resulting in debilitating human injuries and costly livestock deaths. I have met many children orphaned by the ruling junta's policy of oppression, and their stories are devastating.

Though 110 political prisoners have been released, several others have been newly arrested and an estimated 2100 languish in prison (twice the number from just four years ago). Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest after the election and a government minister met with her last week, but she is barred from participating in politics, her party remains banned, and many of her associates remain in prison. Moreover, the government has not so subtly threatened her with violence ("chaos and riots") if she travels outside of Rangoon. In May 2003 a military-inspired mob killed more than 70 of her supporters and nearly murdered her.

When thousands of Buddhist monks helped lead a series of peaceful anti-government protests dubbed "The Saffron Revolution" in 2007, the Burmese government responded with shameful brutality. Demonstrators were shot, activists were imprisoned. Even the monks, though revered in Burmese society, were beaten and detained. The movement of monks is now restricted and their sermons are censored.
The old SPDC agreed to ceasefires with some ethnic groups, but launched a new offensive against the Karen people shortly after last November's election. Earlier this year the new "civilian" government launched similar attacks against the Shan in the north, pushing refugees into China.

In January Burma underwent its Universal Periodic Review by the Human Rights Council. Filled with repressive regimes, the HRC is a pretty forgiving body. And the Burmese military performed remarkably well in its review, claiming that it ran free elections, censored no media, held no political prisoners, and fought no ethnic groups. David Scott Mathieson of Human Rights Watch called it "a Monty Python-like defense whose central comedic device was total denial."

The people responsible for Burma's success have simply changed out of uniforms and put on suits. Nothing else has changed. General-President Thein Sein's new agenda of "national reconciliation" is another way of saying "military domination." Distressed at the lack of reform, two senior diplomats at Burma's embassy in Washington defected last month.
Unfortunately, there is little the international community can do. The U.S. and Europe have applied sanctions, but with little effect. Few nations formally defend the Burmese junta, but its neighbors benefit from trade in teak and other resources. China seeks a geopolitical edge, with India in close pursuit. The ASEAN member-states dream of better times in Rangoon but do nothing; in fact, Burma is scheduled to take over chairmanship of that organization in 2014.

The elections were seen as a possible opening for increased Western engagement. So far, however, the regime has rejected any substantive reforms, including the single step which would best signify change: releasing all political prisoners. Perhaps change will come after Than Shwe dies, though for 50 years every dictator has been followed by another dictator. Sadly, the Burmese Gorbachev has yet to emerge.
USN2
ဒီတစ္ခါအိပ္ရာက မထႏုိင္ျဖစ္တာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ၾကာသြားတယ္။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ထိ ၾကာသြားလဲဆုိရင္ နံပါးႏႇစ္ဖက္မႇာ ဘုိလုိ 
bedsore လုိ့ေခၚတဲ့ အိပ္ရာပြန္းနာေတြ ရလာတဲ့အထိပါပဲ။ သုံးလလုံးလုံး ေန့ေရာညပါ အိပ္ရာထဲမႇာပဲေနၿပီး 
ညာဖက္နံေတာင္းနဲ့ ေစာင္းအိပ္လုိက္၊ ဘယ္ဖက္နံေတာင္းန ဲ့ေစာင္းအိပ္လုိက္နဲ့သာ ေနရတာကုိး။








စိတ္ပူရႇာၾက
ေရးေနက်ဂ်ာနယ္ေတြအတြက္ စာမေရးႏုိင္ေတာ့ နယ္ေပါင္းစုံကစာ ဖတ္ပရိတ္ေတြ ဖုန္းဆက္ၾက၊ စာေရးၾကနဲ႕ စိတ္ပူရႇာၾကတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္နဲ့ နီးတဲ့ေဒသက စာဖတ္သူမ်ားကေတာ့ လူကုိယ္တုိင္ေရာက္လာၿပီး စုံစမ္းေမးျမန္းၾကတယ္။ နဂိုက ဧည့္မျပတ္ရတာ ထက္ေတာင္ပုိၿပီး အေရာက္အလာမ်ားတယ္။ ေနမေကာင္းဘူးၾကားေတာ့ စာေပသမား သတင္းသမားေတြကလည္း စိတ္ပူၿပီး တစ္ေယာက္ၿပီး တစ္ေယာက္ေရာက္ေရာက္လာ ၾကတယ္။ တခ်ဳိ႕မ်ားဆုိ ၀ီရိယေကာင္းလြန္းလုိ့ ေနမေကာင္းတဲ့ၾကားက ျပံဳးေတာင္ျပံဳးမိေသးတယ္။ စာေရးႏုိင္ၿပီလားဆုိတာ သိခ်င္လုိ့လာတာပါဆုိၿပီး အိပ္ရာထဲလႇဲေနတဲ့သူကုိ ေထာင့္မ်ဳိးစုံကလႇည့္ၿပီး ဓာတ္ပုံ႐ိုက္သူက႐ိုက္၊ ဗီဒီယုိ႐ိုက္သူက႐ိုက္နဲ့ လုပ္ၾကေတာ့ သတင္းသမားခ်င္း မဟုတ္လား။ သူတုိ့လာတဲ့ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ကုိ မသိဘဲဘယ္ေနပါ့မလဲ။

မဂိုးေသးပါဘူး
လူငယ္ေလးေတြမုိ႕ ဘာမႇမေျပာဘဲ ျပံဳး႐ုံသာျပံဳးေနလုိက္ေပမယ့္ စိတ္ထဲကေတာ့ ''မဂိုးေသးပါဘူးကြယ္၊ တစ္ေသြးတစ္သံတစ္မိန့္ဆုိတဲ့ အာဏာရႇင္စနစ္ လုံး၀ခ်ဳပ္ၿငိမ္းၿပီး ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္ေတြ၊ ဆရာေတာ္သံဃာေတာ္ေတြ၊ တပ္မေတာ္သားေတြနဲ့ လႇည္းေနေလႇေအာင္း ျမင္းေဇာင္းမက်န္ ျပည္သူေတြအားလုံး လုိလားေတာင့္တေနၾကတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ႀကီးကုိ မျမင္ရမခ်င္း အၾကာႀကီးကုိ ေနသြားဦးမႇာပါ''လုိ့ ေျပာေနမိတယ္။ အနိစၥမသိ၊ တရားမရႇိလုိ့ ေျပာတာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ႀကီးမႇာေမြးၿပီး ႏႇစ္ေပါင္း ၆၀ ေက်ာ္ျပည္တြင္း စစ္ႀကီးနဲ့ တစ္ပါတီ တစ္ဖြဲ႕တစ္စည္း အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈေအာက္မႇာ ႏႇစ္ေပါင္း ၅၀ နီးပါး ေနထုိင္ခဲ့ရသူတစ္ဦးအေနနဲ့ ဒါေလာက္ကေလး လုိလားေတာင့္တတာဟာ မလြန္ေလာက္ဘူးထင္လုိ့ပါ။

ဒါေၾကာင္႕
''စစ္ဆုိရင္မုန္းလြန္းလုိ့ ေရေတာင ္စစ္မေသာက္ခ်င္ဘူး'' လုိ့ ေရႇးလူႀကီးေတြ ေျပာၾကသလုိေတာင္ တစ္ခါတစ္ခါ ေျပာခ်င္မိတယ္။ ႏႇစ္ ၆၀ ေက်ာ္ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ႀကီးအတြင္းမႇာ တပ္ထဲ၀င္သြားတဲ့ ဦးေလးသားခ်င္းစစ္ဗုိလ္ေတြ တုိက္ပြဲမႇာက်ဆုံးသြားတာရႇိသလုိ၊ ရဲေဘာ္ျဖဴေတြထဲ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ေတြထဲ ေရာက္သြားၿပီး က်ဆုံးသြားတဲ့ ေဆြမ်ဳိးေတြလည္း ရႇိခဲ့တယ္။ ကုိယ္ႀကီးလာေတာ့လည္း ဒီအတုိင္းပဲ။ သူငယ္ခ်င္း စစ္ဗုိလ္တခ်ဳိ႕ က်ဆုံးသြားၾကသလို ေတာထဲေတာင္ထဲေရာက္သြားၿပီး တုိက္ပြဲမႇာ က်သြားတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းေနဖက္ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြလည္း ရႇိတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကုိ ခ်စ္တာ၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီကုိ လုိခ်င္တာ။


အဆုံးအျဖတ္ျပဳႏိုင္ေလာက္တဲ႕သတင္း
ဇူလုိင္ကုန္ခါနီးေတာ့ ဧည့္သည္ အ၀င္အထြက္ ပုိမ်ားလာတယ္။ နည္းနည္း သက္သာသလုိျမင္ရရင္ စကားေျပာလာၾကတယ္။ ႐ူးပတ္မားေဒါ့ရဲ႕ မီဒီယာအင္ပါယာႀကီး ကိစၥအေပၚ ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္ ေမးခ်င္လာၾကတယ္ ''ဇူလုိင္ေနာက္ဆုံးပတ္ေရာက္ေတာ့ မားေဒါ့ကိစၥတုန္းက အလုိက္သိစြာနဲ႕ ဘာမႇမေမးဘဲ ႏႈတ္ဆိတ္ေနခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ မိတ္ေဆြတခ်ဳိ႕ေတာင္ မေမးဘဲမေနႏုိင္ၾကေတာ့ဘဲ ''ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္ေလး ေပးပါဦး''လို႕ ေျပာလာၾကတယ္။ မားေဒါ့ကိစၥလိုမဟုတ္ဘဲ ကုိယ့္တုိင္းျပည္ ကုိယ့္လူမ်ဳိးအတြက္ေတာ့ အေရးႀကီးဆုံး ထိပ္တန္းသတင္းႀကီး မဟုတ္လား။ တုိင္းျပည္ရဲ႕ ကံၾကမၼာကုိ အေကာင္းအဆုိး အဆုံးအျဖတ္ျပဳႏုိင္ေလာက္တဲ့အထိ အေရးပါတဲ့ သတင္းႀကီးပဲေလ။ အစုိးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ၀န္ႀကီးဦးေအာင္ၾကည္နဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေတြ႕ဆုံၾကတဲ့ သတင္းေပကုိး။


ေကာင္းတာေတြ႕ရင္ ေကာင္းတယ္လုိ႕ ေရးသလုိ၊ မေကာင္းတာ ေတြ႕ရင္လည္း မေကာင္းဘူးလုိ့ ေရးရတယ္။ အစုိးရသစ္၀န္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္ၾကည္နဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တုိ႔ ေတြ႕ဆုံတာဟာ ေကာင္းတဲ႕ကိစၥျဖစ္တယ္။ မဂၤလာသတင္းျဖစ္တယ္  . . .

သုိ႕ေလာ၊ သုိ႕ေလာ
သူတုိ႕အေရးတႀကီးနဲ့ အေလးထားၾကတာ မလြန္ပါဘူး။ ကုိယ္တုိင္လည္း အိပ္ရာက မထႏုိင္ေပမယ့္ သတင္းမႇန္သမွ်ကုိေတာ့ မ်က္ျခည္မျပတ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ အစုိးရသစ္က ဦးေအာင္ေရႊနဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ အမည္တပ္ၿပီး သတိေပးခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္လုိက္ေတာ့ လူတုိင္းရဲ႕စိတ္ထဲမႇာ သို႕ေလာသုိ႕ေလာ ေတြးေနၾကခုိက္မႇာ မထင္မႇတ္ဘဲ အစုိးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ၀န္ႀကီးဦးေအာင္ၾကည္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႕ ႏႇစ္ဦးတည္း ေတြ႕ဆုံမယ္လုိ့ ေၾကညာလုိက္တာကုိး။ ဒီေတာ့ ဘယ္လုိျဖစ္လာႏုိင္သလဲ။ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးနဲ႕ တစ္မ်ဳိးသားလုံး စည္းလုံးညီညြတ္ေရးအတြက္ အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္ႏုိင္သလား။ စာ နဲ႕ သတိေပးခ်က္ကုိ ပုိၿပီးခုိင္မာေစဖုိ့ လူကုိယ္တုိင္ေတြ႕ဆုံ သတိေပးတာလား။ ဒီလုိအေျခအေနမႇာ ဒီမုိကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ားအေနနဲ့ ဘာေတြလုပ္ေဆာင္သင့္ၾကသလဲ စတဲ့စတဲ့ လဲေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ၊ လားေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိ ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ေနၾကတယ္။

ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္မ်ဳိးစုံ
''ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္ေပးပါဦး'' ဆုိလာ  သူေတြကုိ ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္မေပးမီ အရင္ဆုံးအေနနဲ့ လာသမွ်ဧည့္သည္မ်ဳိးစုံနဲ႕ မီဒီယာသမားႀကီးငယ္မ်ဳိးစုံတုိ႕ရဲ႕ ေျပာသံဆုိသံေတြနဲ့ ထင္ျမင္ယူဆခ်က္ေတြ၊ ဆႏၵစြဲမႇန္းဆမႈ (wishful speculation) ေတြကုိ စုစည္းၾကည့္လိုက္တယ္။ ဒီလုိေတြ႕ရတယ္။

(၁) ဘန္ကီမြန္းလုိ ဒါဟာ အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးအတြက္ ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ လမ္းစျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိတဲ့ အေကာင္းျမင္႐ႈေထာင့္က ၾကည့္တဲ့သူမ်ား။
(၂) အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဟီလာရီကလင္တန္ ေျပာသလုိ၊ မႇန္ကန္ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့လမ္းေၾကာင္း ျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဒါေလာက္နဲ႕ မလုံေလာက္ေသးဘူး။ လက္ေတြ႕ အလုပ္နဲ႕ သက္ေသျပဖုိ့လုိတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ 'ေထာက္ကြက္' လုပ္သူမ်ား။
(၃) အေမရိကန္နဲ႕ အာဆီယံႏုိင္ငံေတြက ပရက္ရႇာ(ဖိအား) ေပးေနတာေတြ ေလ်ာ့က်သြားေစဖုိ႕နဲ႕ အာဆီယံမႇာ ဥကၠ႒ေနရာရယူဖုိ့အတြက္ လႇည့္ကြက္သက္သက္မုိ႕ 'အရာႀကီးနဲ့ဘာဘူႀကီး'လုိ ထူးမျခားနားပါပဲလုိ့ ဆုိသူမ်ား။
(၄)ေတြ႕ဆုံၾကတဲ့ ဘက္ႏႇစ္ဖက္မႇာ ကုိယ္စီကုိယ္စီ ဘယ္လုိရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ေတြ ရႇိေနရႇိေန၊ တစ္ဖက္နဲ့တစ္ဖက္ ေက်ာခုိင္းေနတာထက္ေတာ့ မ်က္ႏႇာခ်င္းဆုိင္ ေတြ႕ဆုံတာက ပုိေကာင္းတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေထာက္ခံသင့္တယ္။ ေတြ႕ဆုံပြဲကေန ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲျဖစ္ေအာင္ အားလုံး၀ုိင္းၿပီး တြန္းအားေပးရမယ္လုိ႕ ဆုိတဲ့သူမ်ား။


အက်ဳိးေတာ္ေဆာင္လုပ္ဖုိ႕
အဓိကအေနနဲ့ေတာ့ အဲဒီေလးမ်ဳိးေလးစား ေတြ႕ရတယ္။ ဒီၾကားထဲမႇာ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲျဖစ္ေျမာက္ဖုိ့အတြက္ ႏႇစ္ဖက္စလုံးနဲ႕ ထိေတြ႕မႈ အမ်ားဆုံးရရႇိေနတဲ့ မီဒီယာႀကီးေတြက 'အက်ဳိးေတာ္ေဆာင္' ၀င္လုပ္ေပးရင္ မေကာင္းဘူးလားလုိ့ ေျပာလာသူ ႏႇစ္ဦးသုံးဦးလည္း ရႇိေသးတယ္။ သူတုိ့ကေတာ့ လူနည္းစုေလးမုိ႕ အထက္မႇာ ေျပာခဲ့တဲ့ေလးမ်ဳိးေလးစားထဲ ထည့္မတြက္ဘဲ ခ်န္လႇပ္ထားခဲ့တာပါ။ မီဒီယာႀကီးေတြလုိ႕ေျပာေတာ့ ကုိယ္နဲ့လည္း ဆက္စပ္ေနတာေၾကာင့္ ေျဖတဲ့အခါမႇာေတာ့ ထည့္သြင္းေျဖၾကား သြားပါမယ္။

ႀကိဳတင္ေျပာပါရေစ
ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္ေပးဖုိ႕ ေျပာသူမ်ားထဲမႇာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားေတြပါသလုိ၊ မီဒီယာသမားေတြလည္း ပါပါတယ္။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမား မီဒီယာသမားမဟုတ္တဲ့ ႐ိုး႐ိုးလူငယ္ေတြလည္း ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ပါၾကတယ္။ ကုိယ္တုိင္က ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီတစ္ခုခုမႇာ ပါ၀င္ပတ္ သက္ေနသူမဟုတ္ဘဲ သတင္းမီဒီယာသမား သက္သက္သာျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားလုိ 'ခြဲျခမ္းစိပ္ျဖာ' (analyse) စဥ္းစားတာမ်ဳိး မလုပ္ႏုိင္ပါဘူး။ သတင္းသမားတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ႕ သုံးသပ္ေ၀ဖန္ခ်က္ ေရးသလုိမ်ဳိးသာ ေျဖတတ္တယ္။ ဒါၾကာင့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး သုံးသပ္ေ၀ဖန္ခ်က္ စစ္တမ္းတစ္ခုလုိ မၾကည့္ဘဲ၊ ပုံႏႇိပ္ေဖာ္ျပဖုိ့ သတင္းစာ၊ ဂ်ာနယ္ထဲမႇာေရးတဲ့ သတင္းသုံးသပ္ခ်က္ ေဆာင္းပါးတစ္ပုဒ္အျဖစ္နဲ့သာ ႐ႈျမင္ပါလုိ႕ ႀကိဳတင္ေျပာထားပါရေစ။

မဂၤလာသတင္း
သတင္းသမားဆုိတာ သတင္းျဖစ္လာရင္ ျဖစ္လာတဲ့အတုိင္း အပုိအလုိမရႇိ အမႇန္အတုိင္း အရႇိအတုိင္း ေရးရတယ္။ သုံးသပ္ေ၀ဖန္ရာမႇာလည္း ေကာင္းတာေတြ႕ရင္ ေကာင္းတယ္လုိ့ ေရးသလုိ၊ မေကာင္းတာ ေတြ႕ရင္လည္း မေကာင္းဘူးလုိ႕ ေရးရတယ္။ အစုိးရသစ္၀န္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္ၾကည္နဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တုိ႕ ေတြ႕ဆုံတာဟာ ေကာင္းတဲ့ကိစၥ ျဖစ္တယ္။ မဂၤလာသတင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီလုိေတြ႕ဆုံမႈမ်ဳိး ထပ္ခါထပ္ခါျပဳလုပ္ၾကဖုိ့ တုိက္တြန္းႏႈိးေဆာ္ရမယ္။ ဒီေတြ႕ဆုံမႈမတုိင္မီက အာဇာနည္ေန့မႇာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႕ သူ႕အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေတြ ခ်ီတက္အေလးျပဳဖုိ႕ ကိစၥနဲ့ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး တာ၀န္ရႇိသူခ်င္း ေတြ႕ဆုံညိႇႏႈိင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကတယ္လုိ့ သိရတယ္။ သားအမိႏႇစ္ေယာက္ရဲ႕ ပုဂံဘုရားဖူးခရီးစဥ္မႇာလည္း တာ၀န္ရႇိသူခ်င္း ေတြ႕ဆုံညိႇႏႈိင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကတယ္လုိ႕ သိရတယ္။

ေတြ႕ဆုံျခင္းရလဒ္
အာဇာနည္ေန့ကိစၥေရာ၊ ပုဂံဘုရားဖူးကိစၥပါ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားေတြ သာမက ကမၻာတစ္ခုလုံးကပါ ရင္တမမနဲ့ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနခဲ့ၾကေပမယ့္ မျဖစ္သင့္မျဖစ္ထုိက္တဲ့ ကိစၥမ်ဳိး တစ္ခုမႇ ျဖစ္ေပၚမလာခဲ့ဘဲ ေအးေအးခ်မ္းခ်မ္းနဲ့ ၿပီးဆုံးသြားခဲ့တယ္။ ဒါဟာ ႏႇစ္ဦးႏႇစ္ဖက္ ေတြ႕ဆုံညိႇႏႈိင္းမႈေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေပၚလာတဲ့ ရလဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ျပည္သူျပည္သားအားလုံး ၀မ္းေျမာက္၀မ္းသာ ျဖစ္ၾကရတယ္။ ကမၻာမႇာအစုိးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာလည္း တက္သြားေစတယ္။ အစုိးရသစ္ဟာ လုံျခံဳေရး႐ႈေထာင့္တစ္ခုတည္းကသာ ၾကည့္ၿပီး လုံျခံဳေရးအတြက္ စစ္တပ္ေတြ ရဲတပ္ေတြ အမ်ားအျပားခ်ထားျခင္းမျပဳဘဲ ႏုိင္ငံေရး႐ႈေထာင့္ကပါ ႐ႈျမင္သုံးသပ္ၿပီး ပါးပါးနပ္နပ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ဒီလုိရလဒ္မ်ဳိး ရရႇိခဲ့တာျဖစ္တယ္။

အာမခံခ်က္ေပး
ဒီမုိကေရစီႏုိင္ငံတုိင္းမႇာ တုိင္းသူျပည္သားအားလုံးအတြက္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ေျပာဆုိေရးသားခြင့္၊ စည္း႐ုံးလႈပ္ရႇားခြင့္၊ အသင္းအပင္းဖြဲ႕စည္းခြင့္၊ ဆႏၵျပ စာတမ္းလႇည့္လည္ခြင့္တုိ့ကုိ ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒမႇာ ထည့္သြင္းေရးသားၿပီး အာမခံခ်က္ေပးထားၾကတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံက လက္ရႇိဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံ ဥပေဒမႇာလည္း ျပ႒ာန္းေပးထားတယ္။ ဆႏၵျပတယ္ဆုိတာ ဒီမုိကေရစီႏုိင္ငံေတြမႇာ မထူးဆန္းပါဘူး။ အေမရိကန္၊ အဂၤလန္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊ ေတာင္ကုိရီးယားလမ္းမေတြေပၚမႇာ လူ ေလးငါးဆယ္ေလာက္ကေန ေလးငါးရာနဲ့ ေလးငါးေထာင္ထိဆုိင္းဘုတ္ေလးေတြကုိင္ၿပီး စီတန္းလမ္းေလ်ာက္ေနၾကတာေတြ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားမႇာ ေန့တုိင္းေတြ႕ေနၾကရတာပါ။ ဆႏၵျပသူ ကျပ၊ လမ္းသြားလမ္းလာေတြက သြားျမဲလာျမဲ၊ ႐ုံးသူ႐ုံးသားေတြက ႐ုံးတက္ျမဲပါပဲ။ ဆႏၵျပသူေတြကလည္း သူတုိ့ျပစရာရႇိတာျပ၊ ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္ေပးစရာရႇိတာေတြေပးၿပီး ေအးေအးေဆးေဆးျပန္သြားၾကတာ ပါပဲ။

ေျပာမယုံၾကံဳဖူးမႇသိ
လုံျခံဳေရး႐ႈေထာင့္တစ္ခုတည္းက မၾကည့္ဘဲ ႏုိင္ငံေရး႐ႈေထာင့္ကပါ ႐ႈျမင္သုံးသပ္လုိ႕ ရလဒ္ေကာင္းရခဲ့တဲ့ 'ျဖစ္ရပ္ဆန္း' တစ္ခု အာဇာနည္ေန႕က ၾကားသိခဲ့ရတယ္။ ေျမာက္ဒဂုံက လူေပါင္း ႏႇစ္ဆယ္အစိတ္ေလာက္ဟာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႕အဖြဲ႕ ခ်ီတက္အေလးျပဳမႇာကုိ သြားေရာက္ပူးေပါင္းဖုိ့အတြက္ စီတန္းထြက္ခြာလာၾကတယ္။

အဲဒီမႇာ ''မေျပာမယုံၾကံဳဖူးမႇသိ'' လုိ႕ ေျပာရမယ့္ျဖစ္ရပ္ကုိ ေတြ႕ရတယ္။ စီတန္းခ်ီတက္လာသူေတြကုိ လုံျခံဳေရးတာ၀န္ရႇိသူေတြက ရင္ဆုိင္ေတြ႕ဆုံေမးျမန္းၿပီးေတာ့ သူတုိ့သြားလုိရာအေရာက္ ကားေတြေပၚတင္ၿပီး လုိက္ပုိ႔လုိက္သတဲ့။ ကဲအဲဒါထက္ ဆန္းတဲ့သတင္းရႇိေသးရဲလား။ ဒီလုံျခံဳေရးအဖြဲ႕၀င္မ်ားရဲ႕ လုပ္နည္းလုပ္ဟန္ကုိ မခ်ီးက်ဴးဘဲ မေနႏုိင္ဘူး။ နမူနာေကာင္းေလး ျဖစ္ပါေစလုိ့ ေအာက္ေမ့လုိက္ရတယ္။

ဗ်ဴဟာေတြလုိတယ္
သတင္းသမားတစ္ေယာက္ အေနနဲ့ျမင္တာကုိ ျမင္တဲ့အတုိင္းေျပာတာျဖစ္တယ္။ မျမင္ရတဲ့ကိစၥ မျဖစ္ေသးတဲ့ကိစၥကုိ ေျပာလုိ႕မရပါဘူး။ အစုိးရက ဘာရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ့ လုပ္တယ္ဆုိတာ မသိပါဘူး။ သိေအာင္လုပ္တဲ့ကိစၥက ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီေတြရဲ႕ အလုပ္ပါ။ သတင္းသမား အလုပ္မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီေတြဆုိတာက မဟာဗ်ဴဟာေတြ၊ နည္းဗ်ဴဟာေတြ ခ်မႇတ္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရတာျဖစ္ေတာ့ တစ္ဖက္သားရဲ႕ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ တစ္ဖက္သားရဲ႕အခံစိတ္ဓာတ္ကုိ အေသးစိတ္ ေလ့လာတြက္ခ်က္ၿပီး မႇန္းဆရတယ္။ အဲဒီလုိ မႇန္းဆရာမႇာ မႇန္ကန္ဖုိ့ သိပ္အေရးႀကီးတယ္။ 'ဆႏၵစြဲမႇန္းဆခ်က္' (wishful speculation) မျဖစ္ဖုိ့လုိတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ႏုိင္ငံေရး အသုိင္းအ၀ုိင္းထဲက ပုဂၢိဳလ္အမ်ားစု မႇားေလ့ရႇိတဲ့ အမႇားမ်ဳိးထပ္ မမႇားေစဖုိ့ သတိထားသင့္တယ္။ အေမရိကန္နဲ့အီးယူက ဖိအားေပးလုိ့ အာဆီယံက 'ပရက္ရႇာ' ေပးလုိ့ အစုိးရက လုိက္ေလ်ာလာတာဆုိတဲ့ အျမင္ဟာ အင္မတန္မႇားယြင္းတဲ့ အျမင္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ႏႇစ္ေပါင္းငါးဆယ္နီးပါး လက္ေတြ႕ျမင္ေတြ႕ခဲ့ရတဲ့ အခ်က္ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာအစုိးရဟာ ဘယ္သူ႕ဖိအားကုိမႇ ဂ႐ုမစုိက္ဘူးဆုိတဲ့ အခ်က္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ သမၼတဘီလ္ကလင္တန္ရဲ႕ ဖိအားကုိေတာင္ အေရးမလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ အစုိးရဟာ သူ႔မိန္းမ ဟီလာရီလုိ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးရဲ႕ မိန့္ခြန္းေလာက္ကုိ ဂ႐ုစုိက္နားေထာင္မႇာေတာင္ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။

အပ္နဲ႔ ထြင္းလုိ႔မရ

အေရးႀကီးတာက ကုိယ့္အားကုိယ္ကိုးဖုိ့ပဲျဖစ္တယ္။ ကုိယ့္မႇာ ခ့ံညား႐ိုေသေလာက္တဲ့ အင္အားရႇိမႇ အမ်ားက ေလးစားမႇာျဖစ္တယ္။ သတင္းသမားတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ႕ မ်က္စိထဲမႇာ ေလာေလာဆယ္ျမင္ေနရတဲ့ အျဖစ္အပ်က္ေတြ သတင္းေတြက ၾကာရႇည္လစ္လ်ဴ႐ႈထားရင္ 'အပ္နဲ့ထြင္း' ႐ုံနဲ႔ မရတဲ့အေျခအေနအထိ ေရာက္လာႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ တုိင္းရင္းသားေဒသအားလုံးလုိလုိမႇာ စစ္ပြဲေတြ အရႇိန္ျပင္းျပင္းနဲ့ျဖစ္လာေနတာေတြဟာ အင္မတန္အႏၲရာယ္ႀကီးလႇတယ္လို႕ သေဘာရတယ္။ စိတ္မခ်မ္းသာစရာျဖစ္တယ္။ တပ္မေတာ္သား က်ဆုံးလည္း ျမန္မာပဲ။ ေကအုိင္ေအကက်လည္း ျမန္မာပဲ။ ဒီေကဘီေအနဲ့ ေကအင္န္ယူကေသလည္း ျမန္မာပဲ။ ရႇမ္းဘက္ကက်လည္း ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားပဲ။ ကုိယ့္အခ်င္းခ်င္း တုိက္ေနသတ္ေနရတာ ဘာေကာင္းလုိ့လဲ။

မ်က္ႏႇာမလႇတဲ႕ကိစၥ


ခုခ်ိန္မႇာ ျမန္မာတစ္မ်ဳိးသားလုံးအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးဆုံးက ေသနတ္သံေတြရပ္စဲၿပီး အေသအေပ်ာက္ သတင္းေတြ မၾကားရေတာ့ဖုိ ့ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီကိစၥကုိ အားလုံး၀ုိင္း၀န္းႀကိဳးစားၾကေစခ်င္တယ္။ ေနာက္အေရးႀကီးတာတစ္ခုကေတာ့ အစုိးရအတြက္လည္း ႏုိင္ငံတကာမႇာ မ်က္ႏႇာမလႇျဖစ္ေနရတဲ့ တုိင္းရင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြနဲ့ ၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ အပါအ၀င္ လူေပါင္းႏႇစ္ေထာင္နီးပါး ကိစၥျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီလုိ ထိန္းသိမ္းထားမႈေတြဟာ အစုိးရအတြက္ မ်က္ႏႇာမလႇျဖစ္႐ုံသာမက တုိင္းျပည္အတြက္လည္း စြမ္းအားေတြ အေဟာသိကံျဖစ္ရာေရာက္တယ္လုိ့ ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ႀကီး ကယ္တင္ေရးကိစၥ၊ လယ္သမားေတြ အေၾကာင္းအမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးေၾကာင့္ လယ္မလုပ္ႏုိင္ၾကေတာ့ဘဲ ၿမိဳ႕တက္ၿပီး ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းလုပ္သားျဖစ္ကုန္တဲ့ ကိစၥ၊ ျမန္မာအမ်ဳိးသမီးေတြ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏုိင္ငံေတြဘက္ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရတဲ့ကိစၥ၊ ခ်မ္းသာသူတစ္စုက ပုိပုိခ်မ္းသာေနၿပီး ဆင္းရဲသူေတြက ပုိပိုၿပီး ဆင္းရဲလာေနတဲ့ကိစၥ၊ စတဲ့စတဲ့ ကိစၥေတြက မနည္းလႇဘူး။၀န္ႀကီးဦးေအာင္ၾကည္နဲ႕ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တုိ႕ ေတြ႕ဆုံရာကေန ေဆြးေႏြးတဲ့အဆင့္ကို ေရာက္ရင္ေတာင္ ေျဖရႇင္းရမယ့္ ျပႆနာေတြ ေတာင္လုိပုံေနတယ္လုိ႕ ဆုိခ်င္တယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ ေတြ႕ဆုံပြဲကေန ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲျဖစ္လာေအာင္ အားလုံး၀ုိင္း၀န္း ႀကိဳးစားၾကဖုိ့ ျမန္ႏုိင္သမွ် အျမန္ဆုံး ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကဖုိ့ ႏႈိးေဆာ္လုိက္ပါတယ္။

ဆက္ေရးပါဦးမယ္
Written by လူထုစိန္၀င္း     

The Secretary-General talked today on the phone with H.E. U Wunna Maung Lwin, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar. 

During the conversation, the Secretary-General underlined that he had publicly welcomed the reform measures announced by the new Government. He hoped that the government would now move toward concrete action and take the country forward towards peace, democracy and prosperity. 

The Secretary-General emphasized that the release of the remaining political prisoners was the single most important step the international community expected the Government to take. He called for early action in this regard. The Secretary-General expressed concern at the ongoing violence with some armed groups and the impact on the civilian population and urged the Government to resolve the situation peacefully. 

The Secretary-General welcomed the recent meeting between Daw Aung San Suu Kyii and Mr. Aung Kyi, Minister for Social Welfare, and the fact that she was able to engage in public activities beyond Yangon. He also encouraged the Government to engage broadly with the international community and to make use of the UN country team.

The Secretary-General looked forward to continuing his engagement with the Government of Myanmar at the forthcoming General Assembly session as well as at the next Summit of ASEAN in Bali.
link : http://www.un.org/apps/sg/offthecuff.asp?nid=1894
 Mizzima News

(Interview) – Hip-hop singer and political activist Zay Yar Thaw, who was released from Kawthaung Prison on May 17, wants to create music that expresses people’s true feelings. His band, ACID, was the first Burmese hip-hop group. He was arrested in 2008 for forming an unlawful organization (Generation Wave) and for possessing foreign currency (Malaysian Ringgit). He was sentenced to six years in prison, which was commuted to four years. He was released under the presidential commutation earlier this year. Mizzima interviewed him about his prison experiences, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and his social, political and art activities.

Burmese hip-hop singer Zay Yar Thaw, founder of General Wave, was released from Kawthaung Prison on May 17. Photo: Mizzima

Burmese hip-hop singer Zay Yar Thaw, founder of General Wave, was released from Kawthaung Prison on May 17. Photo: Mizzima
Question: Since you were released from prison, what activities have you been engaged in?

Answer: After I was released from prison, I provided help to the National League for Democracy on events and ceremonies held at the party’s headquarters. For instance, they held a 10-day music festival to mark Amay Su’s (Aung San Suu Kyi’s) 66th birthday. I helped them by using my musical skills. On July 19, to commemorate the 64th Martyrs’ Day, we displayed a collection of articles. I also volunteered for a blood donation group, BG school, the Sympathetic Hands Foundation, and I did some work of the Free Funeral Services Society led by Kyaw Thu and Shwe Zeegwat and the HIV/AIDS salvation centre for children, which is operated by writer Than Myint Aung.

Q: What are you current art activities?

A: Regarding art, there is a song, “Being Abstract,” on our album “Starting” that was released by our Acid Music band in 2000. The song was jointly written by Anagga and me and sung by me. We donated the song to the Free Funeral Services Society. And I helped the Free Funeral Services Society in an MTV project.

Q: After you were released, have your activities been monitored?

A: Honestly, I am not aware of it. They might watch me or not. I don’t think about whether they watch me or not. If I think about something I should do, I’ll do it. I ‘m not worried about it.

Q: What were prison conditions like for you and other political prisoners?

A: I’ve answered this question in interviews. In every country, the living standards of prisoners are lower than that of the people [living outside the prisons]. The living standard for average people in our country is very low, so I think I don’t need to describe how low the living standard is in prison.

Q: The government says there are no political prisoners.



After his release, Zay Yar Thaw has been active in work for the National League for Democracy and other social groups. Photo: Mizzima
A: If the government wants to establish a genuine democratic country and wants to be a democratic government, releasing political prisoners will be its primary task. Only if there are no prisoners who are detained for their beliefs and opinions will we be able to make the second step to seek national reconciliation. So I believe and accept that the first step is to release all political prisoners.

Q: After you were released from prison, why did you become involved in NLD activities?

A: My opinion on Amay Suu (Suu Kyi) is not personal worship. We just respect and emulate her sacrifice, her great attitude toward the people and her courage. I want to try to be a person like Amay Suu. But it’s not a kind of blind hero worship.

Q: Will you continue your NLD activities?

A: When I met with Amay Suu, I told her that she could invite me any time I’m needed. I’ll be ready to cooperate with Amay Suu at any time and at any place.

Q: Do you have any plans for projects to reach music and art audiences?

A: If news stories or something tug at my heartstrings, I’ll create music whether it can reach an audience or not. But, I will not create music with my former attitude: just to release a music album or perform in a stage show. I want to create music that can express people’s feelings: pain, hatred and hope.

Q: Are you banned from doing artistic activities?

A: Currently, I’m not banned. But I don’t know about the future. Meanwhile, I heard that my interviews with local journals were not allowed to be published by the censors.

Q: Does censorship of literature, music, film and other forms of art affect the creation of art?

A: If art were a seed and censorship covered it, a plant could not grow from the seed. And if an artist practices a form of self-censorship, his or her creation will be different. I do not mean we want to be totally free from censorship. But, I think the censorship should be relaxed to some extent.

Q: When you were released from prison, how did your friends in the artist community react?

A: Nearly all of my friends from the musicians’ community warmly welcomed me back. I think that although they might not do the right things, they respect and value those who do.

Q: What do you want to say to your fans?

A: I would like to say that I promise that whether I am allowed to create art or not, I, Zay Yar Thaw, will do as many good things as I can for my fans who are my benefactors
by Nirmala Carvalho

Waves of refugees fleeing across the border to China. But the government blocks the borders and prevents the entry of aid to war zones. The Nobel Laureate is open to mediate for peace. Activist: the meeting between Suu Kyi and the Myanmar Minister is window-dressing, to gain international credibility.

The civil war between Burmese army and Kachin ethnic militias, to the north of Myanmar, along the border with China, continues to cause waves of refugees fleeing across the border. Soldiers threaten the civilian population, killing and raping women and girls, the situation is serious and the war front covers a variety of areas. So says Raw Zau, coordinator of the Kachin Refugee Committee (KRC), a humanitarian organization based in New Delhi, India, and active in bringing aid to the Burmese minority. Speaking to AsiaNews he also accuses the Burmese leadership of exploiting the image of Aung San Suu Kyi to cover the crimes committed by the regime and gain credibility within the international community.

From 9 June the northern Kachin State has been the scene of a bloody conflict that has sowed death and terror among the population. So far there have been 32 confirmed cases of sexual violence against women by the Kachin soldiers, 13 of which ended with the murder of the victim. On 26 July in a gun battle between the two sides four Burmese soldiers were killed and 12 others were wounded in an ambush by the Kachin Independence Army militia (Kia).

In order to suppress the resistance, says the activist Zau Raw, "the central government continues to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid to the war zone, in the areas controlled by the Kachin and along the border with China." Only in the last two weeks about two thousand families living in seven villages located near Bhamo, have fled their homes. Thousand others have fled from Kala Yang, Tapant and Kazue, by order of the authorities.

The coordinator of Kachin Refugee Committee (KRC) has criticized Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition leader, for not taking a long position on the conflict. But recently the Nobel Laureate said she was ready to mediate between the government and ethnic groups, to achieve a ceasefire. In an open letter sent to the president Thein Sein and Kachin leaders, the activist calls for a "peaceful solution" in the interests of "all ethnic minorities in the Union of Myanmar."

Raw Zau then accused the Burmese government - which took office last April and is an emanation of the military regime - of "exploiting" the image of the "Lady" to ease international pressure. He recalls that the woman was released after the "farce" elections of November 2010 to cover allegations of fraud and early voting. And now that the army is engaged in a civil war against a minority, it is organizing "a meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and a government minister for the sole purpose of diverting attention" from its atrocities and war crimes and crimes against 'humanity' in the ethnic areas.
 By မေအးေအးမာ (VOA)
ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ထဲက စစ္ေတြ၊ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴ၊ ရမ္းၿဗဲ၊ သံတဲြ၊ ေက်ာက္နိေမာ္ စတဲ့ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြမွာ ေနထုိင္ၾကတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ျပား ကိုင္ေဆာင္ခြင့္ရသူ အစၥလာမ္ ဘာသာ၀င္ေတြရဲ႕ လြတ္လပ္စြာခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ကို ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္က စလို႔ ပိတ္ပင္ထားခဲ့ရာကေန ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုင္လ ေနာက္ဆံုးပတ္ကစၿပီး ေထာက္ခံစာ မယူဘဲ ခရီသြားလာခြင့္ကို စၿပီး ခြင့္ျပဳေပးလိုက္ၿပီ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီအေၾကာင္းကို ထိုင္းအေျခစိုက္ သတင္းေထာက္ မေအးေအးမာက တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းမွာ ႏုိင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ျပား ကိုင္ေဆာင္ၿပီး လြတ္လပ္စြာသြားလာခြင့္မရဘဲ ပိတ္ပင္ထားမႈကို အစိုးရသစ္တက္လာၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာ ေဒသခံေတြက ႏုိင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးေပးဖုိ႔အတြက္ ဇြန္လအတြင္းမွာ တင္ျပေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၾကၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ အခုလို ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ေတြမွာ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္မယူဘဲ သြားလာႏိုင္ခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေဒသခံတဦးေျပာျပတာကေတာ့ -
“အခုသြားလာခြင့္ရတာက စစ္ေတြ၊ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴ၊ ရမ္းၿဗဲ၊ ေက်ာက္နိေမာ္၊ သံတြဲ။ ေနျပည္ေတာ္အစိုးရက ဘယ္လိုအေၾကာင္းျပသလဲေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ မသိရပါဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဒီ ရက္ ၂၀ ေလာက္မွာ ျပည္နယ္မွာ အစည္းအေ၀းေခၚတယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ သိရတယ္။ ခရိုင္အဆင့္ အရာရွိေတြ အစည္းအေ၀းေပါ့ေနာ္။ အဲဒီအစည္းအေ၀းမွာ ျပည္နယ္မႉးက ခရိုင္အဆင့္အရာရွိေတြကို ေနျပည္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ ညႊန္ၾကားခ်က္ကို ဖတ္ျပတယ္လို႔ေျပာတယ္ခင္ဗ်။ အဲဒီအထဲမွာ ႏိုင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကို လြတ္လပ္စြာခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ ေပးတယ္၊ ပံုစံေလး ယူေဆာင္ခြင့္ လံုး၀မျပဳ ဆိုတဲ့ဟာကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ သိရပါတယ္။”

အမ်ဳိးသား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီဝင္ တဦးလည္းျဖစ္၊ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားျပဳ ေကာ္မတီရဲ႕ အဖြဲ႔ဝင္တဦးလည္းျဖစ္၊ ဘူးသီးေတာင္ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အမွတ္ (၁)၊ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ျဖစ္သူ ဦးေက်ာ္မင္းဟာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းမွာပဲ အခုလို ႏုိင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ျပားကို မမွန္မကန္ လုပ္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ စဲြခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔ သူ အပါအ၀င္ မိသားစုတစုလံုးဟာ ႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္ဒဏ္ေတြ ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

ဒီလို လြတ္လပ္စြာခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ေတြ  ခြင္ျပဳလုိက္ၿပီဆိုတာေၾကာင့္ သူ႔ကို ဖမ္းဆီးထားမႈကို ျပန္လည္ လႊတ္ေပးသင့္တယ္လို႔ ေဒသခံေတြက ဆုိပါတယ္။ သူဟာ မတရားသျဖင့္ ဖမ္းဆီးတာကိုခံခဲ့ရတယ္လို႔ ေဒသခံက ဆက္ေျပာျပပါတယ္။

“သူတို႔က ႏုိင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ျပား ရွိလ်က္သားနဲ႔ျဖစ္တာ။ ၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ သူက အေရြးခ်ယ္ခံရတယ္။ အေရးခ်ယ္ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာ သူတို႔က ရန္ကုန္ကို မိသားစုလိုက္ေျပာင္းသြားတယ္ဗ်။ ေျပာင္းသြားၿပီးေတာ့မွ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ေတြက ဘယ္လိုရတာလဲ၊ ရန္ကုန္ကိုဘယ္လို ေရာက္တာလဲေပါ့ဗ်ာ စသည္ျဖင့္ အျပစ္မရွိအျပစ္ရွာၿပီးေတာ့ အဲဒီလုိမ်ိဳး သူတို႔ကို ဖမ္းၿပီးေတာ့ မိသားစုေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက ေထာင္ထဲကို ေရာက္ကုန္တယ္ဗ်။ အရင္တုန္းက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆံုး႐ံႈးၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီလိုမ်ိဳး ေထာင္ထဲကိုေရာက္ေနတဲ့ မူစလင္ေတြရွိတယ္။ ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္မရဘဲနဲ႔ ခရီးသြားလို႔ ေထာင္ထဲေရာက္ေနတဲ့ မူစလင္ေတြရွိတယ္။ ဒီဟာေတြကို နည္းမ်ိဳးစံုနဲ႔ဖမ္းထားတာေတြကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ေဖာ္ထုတ္ၿပီးေတာ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ လက္ရွိႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရဆီမွာ တင္ျပႏိုင္တယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ အခြင့္အေရးတခုခုေတာ့ ရႏုိင္လိမ့္မယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ ျမင္တယ္ေလ။”
ရန္ကုန္ စီးပြားေရးတကၠသိုလ္က ဘြဲ႔ရခဲ့ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ ပညာေရးတကၠသိုလ္ကပါ ဘီအီးဒီဘြဲ႔ ရခဲ့တဲ့ ဦးေက်ာ္မင္းဟာ လက္ေထာက္ ၿမဳိ႕နယ္ ပညာေရးမႉး၊ အလယ္တန္း ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ႀကီး စတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ တာဝန္ေတြကို ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒီလို တာ၀န္ေတြယူခဲ့တဲ့ ဦးေက်ာ္မင္းကို ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ႏိုင္္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳ ဖမ္းဆီးၿပီး ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၄၇ ႏွစ္နဲ႔ ဒဏ္ေငြ ၂ သိန္းခြဲအျပင္ အျပစ္ဒဏ္ေတြခ်ၿပီး မိသားတစုလံုးဘ၀ပ်က္တဲ့အထိ လုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းမွာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြမလုပ္ခင္၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဖဲြ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို မဲေပးေရး ကာလတုန္းက ႏိုင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ဖုိ႔ အခြင့္အလမ္းမရရွိခဲ့တဲ့ ေဒသခံေတြကို အျဖဴေရာင္ ယာယီမဲထည့္ဖုိ႔ ကဒ္ေတြလုပ္ေပးခဲ့ဖူးပါတယ္။
ဒီကဒ္ေတြကို ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြမွာ မဲထည့္ဖို႔အတြက္တုန္းကလည္း လုပ္ေပးခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသခံေတြကို ပညာေရး၊ က်န္းမာေရး၊ ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ေတြ ရမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ကတိေတြကို အာဏာပုိင္ေတြက ေပးခဲ့ဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဒီကဒ္ေတြနဲ႔ ပညာေရး က်န္းမာေရး အခြင့္အလမ္းေတြ မရရွိခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ဒီကဒ္ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားေတြကိုလည္း ထည့္သြင္းစဥ္းစားေပးေစခ်င္တယ္လုိ႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။
“ႏိုင္ငံသားလဲျဖစ္တယ္။ တိုင္းရင္းသားမိဘႏွစ္ပါးက ေမြးဖြားလာတဲ့သူေတြလဲ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ေငြေရးေၾကးေရး အခက္အခဲေၾကာင့္ ႏိုင္ငံသားကဒ္ေတြ မလုပ္ခဲ့ဘဲနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြနဲ႔ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုမွာ မဲေပးတဲ့အခ်ိန္ေတြမွာ အျဖဴကဒ္ေတြ ထုတ္ေပးထားတာေတြရွိတယ္။ သူတို႔က ဒီကိစၥကို ဘာမွ ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ လဲလွယ္ေပးျခင္းလဲ မရွိဘူး။ ဒီအျဖဴကဒ္ေတြ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားတာကိုယ္က မည္သည့္ႏိုင္ငံသားလို႔ မသတ္မွတ္ရလို႔ သူတို႔ကဒ္ထဲမွာပါတာက တေၾကာင္း၊ ေနာက္တခုက ပညာေရးဆိုင္ရာ ဆံုး႐ံႈးမႈေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးပဲ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေတြ႔ရတယ္။ က်န္းမာေရးဆုိင္ရာ ဆံုး႐ံႈးမႈေတြ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အမ်ားႀကီး ႀကံဳေတြ႔ရတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ဒါေတြကိုလဲ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ တာ၀န္ရွိပုဂၢိဳလ္ေတြက ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ အေရးတယူနဲ႔ ျပန္လည္ လဲလွယ္ေပးႏိုင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ႏိုင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးေတြဟာ ပိုၿပီးေတာ့ ခံစားရလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္တယ္။”

ႏိုင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ ရရွိဖို႔အတြက္ ေငြေၾကးအကုန္အက်ခံၿပီး မလုပ္ႏုိင္သူေတြ၊ လုပ္ခြင့္မရသူေတြ၊ ႏိုင္ငံသား စိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ရွိၿပီး ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ခံရသူေတြ အေနနဲ႔ က်န္းမားေရး အေျခအေန ဆုိးရြားတဲ့အခါ ၿမိဳ႕ႀကီးေတြကိုသြားၿပီး ေဆးကုသခြင့္မရလို႔ ေသဆံုးရတဲ့အျဖစ္ေတြ၊ အထူးသျဖင့္ ပညာေရးလုိလားတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအေနနဲ႔ တကၠသိုလ္ ဆက္တက္ခြင့္မရတာ၊ ဘဲြယူလုိ႔မရတာေတြ စတဲ့ ပညာေရးဆုိင္ရာ အခြင့္အလမ္းေတြလည္း ဆံုး႐ံႈးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ အခုအခါမွာေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံသားစိစစ္ေရးကဒ္ေတြ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားၿပီး လြတ္လပ္စြာ သြားလာခြင့္ေတြ ရၿပီဆုိတဲ့အတြက္ အစိုးရသစ္လက္ထက္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးတခ်ိဳ႕ ရရွိလာၿပီလို႔ ယူဆသူေတြလဲ ရွိလာပါတယ္။
By: Sai Wansai
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s open letter to President Thein Sein, together with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Karen National Union (KNU), New Mon State Party (NMSP) and Shan State Army (SSA), is a move which must be welcomed.
Sai Wansai
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has pinpointed the importance of peaceful co-existence among co-inhabitants of the Union of Burma and that it is a paramount task for every party concerned to make it a reality.
The letter added that armed conflicts within the non-Burman ethnic areas have created human tragedy, suffering, loss of lives, economic deterioration and destruction of costly physical infrastructures.
The use of force wouldn’t bring the warring parties nearer and that only negotiation and political dialogue could deliver the desired genuine peace and reconciliation.

She added that only within the atmosphere of peace would a genuine nation-building process be successfully implemented.

In closing, she made herself available to do everything in her power for the termination of armed conflicts and building peace within the Union of Burma.
While this is, undoubtedly, a sincere and noble act from the part of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, it is also essential to look deeply into the underlying core conflict issues and Burmese military leadership mindset, as to why it is so uncompromising and unyielding, when it comes to facilitating genuine reconciliation and democratisation process.
First, successive military dominated regimes, including the present military-backed Thein Sein government, see Burma as an existing unified nation since the reign of Anawratha thousands of years ago. As such, all other non-Burmans - Shan, Kachin, Chin, Arakanese, Mon, Karen and Karenni - are seen as minorities, which must be controlled and suppressed, lest they break up the country.

On the other hand, the non-Burmans maintain that the Union of Burma is a newly developed territorial entity, founded by a treaty, the Panglong Agreement, where independent territories merged together on equal basis.

Given such conceptual differences, the Burmese military goes about with its implementation of protecting "national sovereignty" and "national unity" at all cost. This, in turn, gives way to open conflict resulting in more suppression and gross human rights violations. The intolerance of the military and its inspiration to "racial supremacy" and political domination and control has no limit and this could be seen by its refusal to hand over power to the winners of 1990 nation-wide election, the NLD, SNLD and other ethnic parties. The genuine federalism platform, which the NLD and ethnic nationalities embrace, is a threat to its racist mind-set. And as such, the non-Burman ethnic groups aspiration of “unity in diversity” or “genuine federalism” is viewed by successive military regimes, including the present Thein Sein government, as a “disintegration ploy “, which will break up the country, if ever allowed to be implemented.
Secondly, the woes of Burma today are deeply rooted in the inadequate constitutional drafting of 1947. The Union Constitution was rushed through to completion without reflecting the spirit of Panglong. The ethnic homelands were recognised as constituent states but all power was concentrated in the central government or the government of the Burma Mother state.

Almost all the non-Burmans and Burman democratic opposition groups are in agreement that the ethnic conflict and reform of social, political and economics cannot be separated from one another. And the only solution and answer is to amend the 1947 Constitution according to Panglong Agreement, where equality, voluntary participation and self-determination, of the constituent states, formed the basis for the Republic of the Union of Burma.

Again, instead of reforming and addressing the grievances of the non-Burman ethnic nationalities, the junta’s orchestrated the present 2008 constitution - dubbed Nargis constitution, due to the rigging of referendum vote by the junta shortly after Cyclone Nargis - is just doing the opposite, which is designed to give the military a clear political monopoly and military supremacy in all aspects of governing the country.
As a result, the non-Burman ethnic nationalities’ aspiration of “federalism, proportional share of power, in a true sense, in at least one major decision-making body in the central government so that they can protect themselves, and plausible guarantees that the military will not resume attacks on them” were not mentioned or provided in the 2008 constitution.( Source: Analysis of the 2008-SPDC Constitution for Burma - David C. Williams, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Democracy)
Thirdly, rightly or wrongly, the Burmese military has appointed itself to be the sole saviour of the country and the believe that the army under its command is the only institution that is capable of governing the country. In other words, the junta is entitled to rule over the civilian, with the help of the army.
Fourthly, Burmese military leadership urge for assimilation of non-Burman ethnic nationalities is closely intertwined with its version of forging national identity.
The views of successive Burmese governments, including the present, military-backed Thein Sein regime, concerning national identity has never been clear. They have been at a loss even as to what sort of name they should adopt; that is the reason why they are still using "Bamar“ and "Myanmar" interchangeably for what they would like to be termed a common collective identity, in other words, national identity. The reality is that when one mentions "Myanmar", "Bamar", "Burmese" or "Burman", such words are usually identified with the lowland majority "Bamar” and have never been accepted or understood by the non-Bamar ethnic nationals as a common collective identity to which they also belong.

For about a little more than a decade ago, the then Burmese military regime changed the name of Burma to Myanmar. Its aim is to create a national identity for every ethnic group residing within the boundary of the so-called Union of Myanmar. But since the name Myanmar has always been identified with the lowland "Bamar", the SPDC’s effort in trying to establish a common national identity among the non-Bamar ethnic nationals is doomed to fail. On top of that, this national identity was not chosen with the consent of the non-Bamar ethnic groups, but coercively thrust down their throats by the hated Burmese military dictatorship.
 
The point to note here is that the successive Burmese governments' nation-building process has totally shattered, failing even to take root after all these years, not to mention the forging of common national identity. It would be more pragmatic to accept the existing diversified “national identities” of all ethnic nationalities as a fact and work for a new common identity in the future federal union with the consent and participation of all ethnic groups, Burman included.

Finally, the misconception of majority-minority configuration has been so entrenched; at least in media and academic studies, it needs some clarification.

The Burman are majority in Burma Proper and in numerical sense, but become a minority in the Shan, Arakan, Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Karen, and the Mon states, where respective ethnic groups are in majority within their own territories.

Besides, Burma was formed in 1947 by virtue of the Panglong Agreement, one year prior to independence. This agreement was signed between the interim government of Ministerial Burma, headed by Aung San, and leaders of the Federated Shan States, the Chin Hill Tract, and the Kachin Hill Tract. It could be said that this agreement is the genesis of the post-colonial, current Burma.
Thus, the indigenous groups of Burma -- Shan, Arakanese, Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Karen, Mon and including the Burman -- are neither minorities nor majorities, but equal partners or co-inhabitants in a union of territories, the Union of Burma.
Fundamentally, the grievances of the non-Burman ethnic nationalities stem from the inadequate drafting of constitutions, whether they are 1947, 1974 or the recent one in 2008. The flare up of the recent armed conflict in Kachin, Shan, Karenni, Karen and Mon states has its root in the flawed constitutional drafting.

On 9 June 2004, during the SPDC's held national convention to draw up the 2008 constitution, 13 ethnic ceasefire armies put forward a joint proposal for the formation of a federal union. But no action or follow up action was taken on this advice till the end of national convention. This has been taken as a real drawback and disappointment for the ethnic ceasefire armies.
Thereafter, many instances of the non-Burman ethnic groups’ proposal within the national convention and outside of it were only met with deafening silence from the part of the then ruling junta, the SPDC. (Please see appendix for more information on ethnic initiatives and statements)
According to the 2008 constitution of chapter Vll, under the heading “Defence Services”,
Paragraph number 338, it states: “All the armed forces in the Union shall be under the command of the Defence Services”.

This paragraph has been quoted, time and again, as an argument that the ceasefire armies must come under the Burma Army. But the point is that the suggestion and proposal of a federal set up as a political system, during the drafting of 2008 constitution, by the attending ceasefire armies and ethnic political parties were rejected. And the aftermath half-hearted participation of the ceasefire armies, due to the heavy handedness of the junta could not be viewed as a whole-hearted acceptance of this particular paragraph, which in effect would mean the end of their self-determination struggle.
The junta was pressuring the ceasefire armies, even before the change of military-back, Thein Sein government. It even was able to overrun the Kokang ceasefire army in August 2009, when its Border Guard Force (BGF) plan was rejected. But the mainstream ceasefire armies like KIA, UWSA, SSA-N and NDAA continue to resist the Burma Army’s BGF plan.
As such, the ceasefire armies have every right to defend themselves and their homelands, and owe no legal commitment to the 2008 constitution, much less the paragraph 338.
To wind it up, the central issue is still the “constitutional crisis”. And in order to make a meaningful approach leading to a more accommodating, win-win outcome, there is no way around rather than the amendment of the present constitution, or better still, drafting a new constitution. For all the warring parties, negotiating the differing positions along the line of “pluralism” and “unity in diversity” is the only hope left to resolve the ongoing armed, ethnic conflict.

The author is General Secretary of the exiled Shan Democratic Union.
APPENDIX
April 7, 1993:
The convention is suspended again after ethnic nationality delegates protest against the proposed centralized political structure.
June 7, 1993:
Lt. Gen. Myo Nyunt reopens the convention by stating that the new constitution must guarantee a leading role for the Defense Services in national politics.
September 16, 1993:
The National Convention is suspended again, as ethnic minority representatives continue to propose a federal system. According to official reports, delegates have agreed to the 104 principles for the draft constitution.
December 23, 1995:
The convention acknowledges and then rejects a Shan Nationalities League for Democracy proposal for the constitution to accept the principle of sovereignty invested in the people.
March 21, 2001:
A statement is issued by seven ethnic nationality groups that had concluded military ceasefires (“ethnic ceasefire groups”) with the government—the Kayan New Land Party (KNLP), Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF), New Mon State Party (NMSP), Palaung State Liberation Organization (PSLO), Shan Nationalities People’s Liberation Organization (SNPLO), Shan State Army (SSA), and Shan State National Army (SSNA)—calling on the SPDC to begin a more inclusive negotiating process for political development and democracy and national unity.
May 11, 2004:
Eight ethnic ceasefire groups, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Kayan New Land Party (KNLP), Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF), New Mon State Party (NMSP), Palaung State Liberation Organization (PSLO), Shan Nationalities People’s Liberation Organization (SNPLO), Shan State Army (SSA), and Shan State National Army (SSNA), issue seven points for changes to the convention:
  1. The right to discuss Objective 6 (military’s leading role in the future affairs of the state) again and revise it, since it does not fit with the democratic principles and does not reflect the wishes of the people;
  2. The right to discuss and revise the points that are not in line with democratic procedures and principles;
  3. The right to hold consultation with anybody and any organizations that can provide good advice for the sake of the Union while attending the National Convention;
  4. The right of delegates to freely communicate with their mother organizations and to seek advice for discussion while attending the convention;
  5. The right of the representatives of the people elected in the 1990 elections to participate in the convention;
  6. The right of ceasefire organizations, and non-ceasefire organizations after entering into ceasefires, to join the National Convention;
  7. To revoke Law No.5/96 that was announced in June 1996 to protect the National Convention.
July 7, 2004:
Thirteen of 17 ethnic ceasefire groups issue a joint proposal for devolving authority to future state assemblies and for those assemblies to maintain armed militias. The nine points submitted to the NCCC were:
  1. To include a list of concurrent legislative powers for the states;
  2. To give residual powers to the states;
  3. To add a separate section on ethnic affairs in the union legislative list;
  4. To include a defense and security planning section in each state’s legislature;
  5. To include a literature/language section in each state’s legislature;
  6. To include a section for ethnic minority tradition in each state’s legislature;
  7. To let the states draft their own constitutions;
  8. To let the states make specific foreign policies in dealing with neighboring countries regarding various issues such as issuing border passes and border trade;
  9. To let the states collect local taxes and finance.
February 17 – 31 March, 2005:
The National Convention conducts another session with 1,075 delegates attending, including members of ethnic ceasefire groups, to discuss legislative power sharing. Some Shan delegates leave the convention in February following the arrest of leaders of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, which won the second highest number of seats in the 1990 general election, including the SNLD chairman Hkun Htun Oo and the leader of the Shan State Army-North, Maj. Gen. Sao Hso Ten.
Mid-July 2007:
The Kachin Independence Organization, one of the largest ethnic ceasefire groups, which signed a peace accord with the government in 1994, releases a 19-point list of demands to the SPDC calling for significant reforms to the constitutional process, including, point one:
As currently intended, the Union will be composed of constituent states; we believe that specifying these additional goals clearly and concretely will be necessary. One, that the constituent state union system of state be technically and genuinely a system of federation of states, and two, that this system of state organization be fully transparent in its implementation. We are mindful of the fact that, whereas, the Constitution of 1947 specified a Union that is a federation of states, what actually transpired was a system where all political power was centralized, as in a unitary system, instead of a federation, and one constituent state alone held that power. Therefore, to effectively preclude a recurrence of this fate, and the calamitous results, we urge in the strongest sense possible, that a specific constitutional mandate be included for a federal system of union and for its judicious implementation.
(Source: Chronology of Burma’s Constitutional Process – Human Right Watch -http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/burma0508chronology.pdf)

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