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Young Myanmar refugees from the Rohingya ethnic minority attend their English class in Kuala Lumpur in this August 16, 2011 file picture. 

Aug 23 (AlertNet) - There are an estimated 12-15 million people worldwide who are not recognized as nationals by any country. On Thursday the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR will launch a campaign to highlight the plight of stateless people. Below are examples from around the world.
MYANMAR: The Rohingyas from western Myanmar have suffered a history of abuse. Unlike the majority population, they are Muslims of South Asian descent. In 1982 Myanmar passed a law which made it impossible for them to get full citizenship. Many fled to Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992 following a government crackdown. Today, an estimated 800,000 live in Myanmar, up to 300,000 in Bangladesh and many more have fled to Southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Some end up sold into slavery on fishing boats and plantations.
KUWAIT: Many people among the nomadic Bedouin tribes failed to acquire citizenship when the country became independent in 1961. Their descendents are known as bedoun, which means "without" (nationality) in Arabic. It is estimated there are 93,000-180,000 Kuwaiti Bedoun in the country and many more outside. They are barred from free education, healthcare and many jobs. The government says they are illegal residents from other countries. They faced increasing hardship after the 1990-1991 Gulf War and many thousands who fled Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation were refused back after liberation.
KENYA: The Nubians have lived in Kenya for over 100 years but they are regularly denied national identity cards and passports which they need to work, vote, travel, own a mobile phone, open a bank account, attend university or enter government buildings. Nubians from Sudan first arrived in Kenya in the 19th century when they were recruited by the British to fight in East Africa. Decades of marginalization have led to desperate poverty. In March 2011, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child found Kenya in violation of the rights of Nubian children to nationality and protection against statelessness.
MALAYSIA: Tens of thousands of children in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo are stateless. They are the children of Indonesians and Filipinos who have migrated to Sabah to work, both legally and illegally, often in palm oil plantations. Without citizenship these children have no rights to education or healthcare. Many end up as child laborers. Others get involved in drugs and petty crime. Some parents do not register their children because they fear deportation or are not legally married. Others cannot afford the cost. Mass deportations mean some children get stranded without their parents.
IVORY COAST: During the 20th century, Ivory Coast encouraged millions of immigrants, particularly from Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, to work on its coffee and cotton plantations. At least a quarter of the population is estimated to be of foreign descent. The issue of who is or is not Ivorian fueled the country's 2002-03 civil war. Much of the protracted peace process was about registering northerners and putting them on the electoral list if they could prove at least one parent was Ivorian.
SYRIA: In 1962 many Kurds in the northeast were stripped of citizenship. New York-based group Human Rights Watch says the move was part of a plan to "Arabize" the resource-rich region. Today there are an estimated 300,000 stateless Kurds in Syria. Their rights to education, healthcare, employment, property ownership and travel are severely limited. In reaction to this year's uprising in the country, President Bashar al-Assad promised to give nationality to many stateless Kurds, but it is not clear how many will benefit or whether any changes will last.
NEPAL: Official figures show 800,000 people do not have confirmed nationality and cannot access key services. However, the UNHCR believes the figure is far higher. Married women cannot get a citizenship certificate without the approval of their husband or father-in-law and women married to foreigners cannot pass citizenship to their children. The U.N. refugee agency fears a proposed new constitution could exacerbate statelessness. There is also a large stateless population from neighboring Bhutan, which expelled over 100,000 people of Nepali origin in the early 1990s after stripping them of citizenship. They are also refused citizenship in Nepal. Many have been resettled in the United States.
THAILAND: More than 540,000 people are stateless. Many are members of ethnic hill tribes such as the Yao, Hmong and Karen who live in the mountainous north on the border with Myanmar and Laos and have distinct languages and cultures. The government has refused to issue them ID cards or provide state services. This has left them economically vulnerable, especially to human trafficking.
EUROPE: The Roma, an ethnic group with origins in India, are concentrated largely in central and eastern Europe. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 have no nationality. The break-up of former Czechoslovakia and former Yugoslavia caused enormous difficulties for them when new successor states claimed they belonged somewhere else. Many other Roma in Kosovo and Bosnia have become stateless due to mass displacements during wars. Roma families often do not register the birth of a child and do not hold official property titles, preferring to pass their houses to relatives informally. This makes it difficult to prove where they are from and leaves them very vulnerable.
ESTONIA/LATVIA: When the Soviet Union broke up, many ethnic Russians were stranded in the new Baltic states. They were defined as "non-citizens" even though they had not acquired Russian citizenship. In Estonia and Latvia, ethnic Russians have had trouble obtaining citizenship and are frequently discriminated against. The UNHCR says there are over 100,000 in Estonia and 326,900 in Latvia.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: The government denies people of Haitian descent access to identity documents. This includes people whose grandparents were born in the Dominican Republic. The country has ignored a 2005 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights which declared that the nation must extend full citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent.
(Sources: UNHCR, Refugees International, Forced Migration Review, Open Society, Irish Center For Human Rights)
(AlertNet is a global humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit www.trust.org/alertnet)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/23/us-stateless-groups-idUSTRE77M2AS20110823



Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

22 August 2011 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today he is encouraged by last week’s meeting between Myanmar’s President U Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, with both figures voicing satisfaction with discussions aimed at finding common ground on issues that would benefit the country. 

The United Nations chief expects that Friday’s meeting will be followed by further steps towards a sustained high-level dialogue focused on national reconciliation, according to a statement issued by his spokesperson. 


“Whether these and other recent developments will move Myanmar forward depends on how all parties choose to work with each other,” said the statement. “It is in the national interest that they seize the opportunity to extend and accept conciliatory gestures to achieve durable peace and unity.” 

The Secretary-General reiterated his call for the release of all political prisoners as a matter of priority to give an opportunity to all citizens of Myanmar to contribute to the promotion of national reconciliation and democratic transition.
The Rohingyas from western Myanmar have suffered a history of abuse. Unlike the majority population, they are Muslims of South Asian descent. In 1982 Myanmar passed a law which made it impossible for them to get full citizenship. Many fled to Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992 following a government crackdown. Today, an estimated 800,000 live in Myanmar, up to 300,000 in Bangladesh and many more have fled to Southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Some end up sold into slavery on fishing boats and plantations.








statelessness

By Melanie Teff, Refugees International

Washington, D.C. - There are around 12 million people worldwide who lack citizenship and basic rights in the country in which they live. This stateless status often keeps children from attending school and condemns families to poverty. And it can be particularly hard on women – a fact that I had reinforced to me on a recent trip to Malaysia.

In February, I and a colleague travelled to Malaysia and Bangladesh to assess the needs of the Rohingya population – a Muslim ethnic minority group from western Burma.

The Rohingya have no rights in Burma, and their lives are made impossible by such practices as forced labor, displacement and systematic physical assault and rape. They are not allowed to marry or travel to other villages unless they pay prohibitively high taxes.

The Burmese authorities stripped the Rohingya of their Burmese citizenship in 1982, arguing that they are Bangladeshi. But the Bangladeshi government also does not accept the Rohingya as their citizens. So the Rohingya community is stateless, with no government that accepts them.

While in Malaysia, I met with Gultaz, who was nine months pregnant and very scared. Her story illustrates the type of problems that many stateless women around the world face, forced to hide themselves away and unable to advance in their lives.

Gultaz, her family and neighbours were displaced from their village near the archaeological ruins in Mrauk-U in Arakan State. The military wanted to develop the site for tourism and forcibly relocated them with no compensation. The Burmese authorities used brutal force to require Gultaz’s husband to work for them for no pay. They beat him in the face, and he has had two eye operations to try to repair the damage he suffered. He fled without being able to inform Gultaz of where he was going, so she was left alone struggling to look after their young son and suffering persecution from the Burmese authorities.

Eventually, Gultaz learned that her husband had made his way to Malaysia. She could no longer ensure the survival of her son in Burma and she decided that she had no option but to travel illegally, with her 12 year-old son, to Bangladesh, where they took a boat to Thailand. Then they made their way to the border between Thailand and Malaysia. Gultaz and her son were arrested there for illegal entry into Thailand, and they were held in a Thai detention centre for more than three months. The conditions in the detention centre were appalling for her and her child. When they finally got out of the detention centre, they managed to cross the border into Malaysia and Gultaz and her son were reunited with her husband.

Gultaz was relieved to get to Malaysia, where the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is permitted to assist the Rohingya. But, despite allowing UNHCR to register refugees there, Malaysia has not signed the international convention on refugees, and it still arrests foreigners who enter the country illegally, even if they are refugees or stateless.

Three years after arriving in Malaysia, when Gultaz was five months pregnant with her second child, she and her husband were both arrested by immigration authorities and were held in detention. Gultaz said that it was terrible being pregnant in the Malaysian detention centre, with inadequate food and unclean water, and she had difficulty getting medical attention. After two months, UNHCR secured the release of Gultaz from the detention centre. Over the past two years Malaysia has reduced arrests of refugees registered with UNHCR, but Gultaz’s experiences make her too scared to leave her house.

Gultaz struggles to survive economically, as her husband is still ill. But her fear of going out prevents her from taking up possible opportunities. She was offered a loan under a micro-credit scheme, but she refused as she was worried she would not be able to repay it. She pointed out that since she does not have the right to work in Malaysia, she fears she could be arrested again while trying to sell any products she would make. And she does not want to default on a loan.

When I asked Gultaz what she hoped for the future, she told me that her life was over (although she is only 37). All she thinks of is her children’s future. Her older child never went to school. But she hopes that her 3-year-old daughter will be allowed to go to government schools so that she will have a future.

Melanie Teff is a senior advocate for women’s rights at Refugees International. Refugees International is a Washington, DC-based organization that advocates to end refugee crises and receives no government or UN funding.
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By David Scott Mathieson

CHIANG MAI - It's a standard academic sleight of hand to win an argument by misrepresenting your opponents position. Professor David Steinberg applies this maneuver in his recent piece on Myanmar A foolish consistency (Asia Times Online, August 13, 2011). Steinberg borrows a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in Self Reliance that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines," yet never admits to his own propensity for foolish consistency. 

Far from presenting two sides to a complex debate on strategies of international engagement with Myanmar, the author misleads readers with polemical critiques. Steinberg contends that calls for increased United States sanctions and the formation of a United Nations-led Commission of Inquiry into allegations of widespread human-rights violations in Myanmar are designed to derail the promise of reforms emanating from the new government elected in November 2010, or more precisely, the March 30 inaugural speech by the new president Thein Sein. 

Steinberg grudgingly concedes that "major human-rights violations [in Myanmar] ... are apparent." He then portrays the calls for their cessation and the push for an investigation as a "Western policy orthodoxy". He argues that calls for enhanced sanctions measures and a UN formed Commission of Inquiry are "confrontational approaches" that seek to further isolate the new government. 

He suggests that "(c)onspiratorial theorists" are using these measures to thwart the possibility of reform, in order to provoke more "chaos" and depravation and a violent overthrow of military rule, which will ensure the transfer to a civilian government, ideally the National League for Democracy (NLD) which the West has long supported. However, nowhere does Steinberg name groups or individuals who harbor such an apocalyptic and fantastical approach. 

Steinberg has reversed the orthodoxy, and cast himself as the lone voice of rationality. If anything, the prevailing Western policy view on post-election Myanmar is one of guarded trust, or resigned optimism, that the new government will gradually reform crucial sectors such as agriculture, social services, and tackle systemic corruption. Western engagement has increased in the past several years, including through high-level diplomatic visits, increased humanitarian assistance, and as Steinberg concedes, by a more conciliatory approach by the US. 

Yet what he fails to admit is that many Western governments publicly state that their efforts have been largely rebuffed, or postponed, by Myanmar authorities. Kurt Campbell, the Under Secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, has publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of reciprocity by the Myanmar government to Washington's change of approach. 

The appointment of Derek Mitchell as the first US policy envoy on Myanmar is a welcome, if long overdue, action, but he faces enormous hurdles in improving relations with the new government. Steinberg blames the West and their "confrontational" approaches for continuing vexed relations with the Myanmar military, but he rarely concedes that the generals' intransigence is more to blame for the impasse. 

Steinberg has long delved into the speculative art of Myanmar political analysis, yet his work rarely engages the broad body of documentation on human-rights violations or acknowledges that human rights promotion is a form of engagement with Myanmar authorities. This is a debilitating flaw in his policy formulations, as he looks only for positive signs of change, regardless of how small or ephemeral. 

Strengthen, don't scrap, sanctions 
Steinberg has long opposed US sanctions, and he is right in arguing that they haven't achieved the desired result which is an end to abuses and the genuine transition to a democratic civilian government. Where he undermines his position is by claiming that they can't, and never will, work. 

He never acknowledges that the sanctions regimes imposed by the US, European Union, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Norway, have been haphazardly applied, hardly coordinated, and hesitant to target the real sources of Myanmar military financial power. They haven't worked because they haven't been tried properly. 

For example, the national budget (announced before the new government took office in March) continues to neglect health and education sectors - they receive only 1.3% and 4.5% of the budget respectively. Yet over the past several years, the military government squirreled away more than US$5 billion in natural gas revenues in offshore banks. If more sanctioning countries targeted the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), they could potentially spark a debate inside Myanmar about fiscal responsibility and meeting the basic needs of the impoverished population. But this addition was never contemplated because of European and American energy companies operating in Myanmar.
Sanctions imposed over the past 15 years need to be rethought, not just to make them more effective, but to reflect changes in the Myanmar economy and the military's control of key sectors. The system of military monopolies through their holding companies has markedly declined in the past decade, and the economy is now controlled by a rising class of oligarchs who benefit from close ties to senior military officers, either for awarding contracts, accessing lucrative natural resources, or acting as middlemen for foreign arms purchases. 

One of the major tycoons involved as a middleman in bilateral Myanmar and Chinese investment is Steven Law, head of the Asia World Company, whom the George W Bush administration placed on its targeted sanctions list for Myanmar, and has long been on US counter-narcotics lists. 

Is Steinberg suggesting that individuals such as Law should not be subject to financial restrictions, despite abundant evidence of drug trafficking and funding military projects? Observers such as Steinberg laud Thein Sein's speech for his reference to "clean government" and tackling corruption, but he refrains from pointing out what everyone in Myanmar knows: pervasive corruption benefits the military and their business cronies. 

Instead of summarily dismissing sanctions, Steinberg might want to critique their efficacy, which would prove valuable in the debate of how they are imposed. Instead, he just says they drive the Myanmar military further into isolation. If this is the case, why do so many Myanmar officials call for the repeal of sanctions so prominently? Could it be that sanctions are inhibiting the ability of the privileged class of officials and oligarchs and their families to maximize their profits and deepen their control of the economy? 

Justice, not revenge
Steinberg misrepresents the call for a UN Commission of Inquiry. Calls for a high-level inquiry have been voiced for years, from the UN, a Harvard Law School report endorsed by five eminent jurists including Judge Richard Goldstone, and numerous non-governmental organizations. The current proposal did not stem from activist "orthodoxy", but from a recommendation by the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2010. 

To date, 16 countries have publicly affirmed their support for the establishment of an inquiry, as have two of Quintana's predecessors, a host of Nobel Prize winners, many Myanmar political opposition organizations, and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This isn't orthodoxy; it's a principled call seeking an end to impunity for serious violations of international law. 

Steinberg is fueling the erroneous perception that the proposal is designed to target just the Myanmar military, when a commission of inquiry would investigate all parties to the conflict and alleged violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. It would first establish the facts of the conflict and map out patterns of abuses and perpetrators, and then make recommendations. It is not a covert push for an International Criminal Court investigation. As Suu Kyi herself has said, she supports an inquiry, not a tribunal. 

Steinberg hardly acknowledges the fundamental role that state violence, coercion and fear play in the daily routine of many people's lives in Myanmar. He avoids mentioning any details of these "apparent" violations. Increased counter-insurgency operations this year in Karen, Shan and Kachin states have displaced some 50,000 people, with reports of direct attacks against civilians, torture, use of sexual violence against women and young girls, and other brutally commonplace features of Myanmar military practices. 

It is anything but a "foolish consistency" to seek to end the suffering of the victims of the country's long running civil war past and present, the ongoing abuses resulting from intensive militarization in ethnic areas, and the systematic state persecution of the ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority in western Myanmar. 

Even new president Thein Sein in his March 30 speech voiced concerns over the "hell of untold miseries" that people living in conflict areas have endured for decades. The information minister Kyaw Hsan, in a press conference in August, reportedly broke down emotionally when discussing development initiatives in border conflict areas, which is either an acknowledgement of the abuses perpetrated in the war, a guilty conscience, or mere crocodile tears. 

What many detractors of the commission of inquiry proposal ignore is the role that such a commission played in increasing the engagement of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Myanmar to tackle the widespread and systemic use of forced labor. That inquiry, released in 1998, paved the way for high-level talks between the ILO and military government, the official banning of all forced labor in 1999, the establishment of a permanent ILO office in Yangon (Rangoon), and a supplementary understanding reached in 2007 that permits the ILO to investigate cases of forced labor and child soldier recruitment. 

The efforts of the ILO are widely acknowledged as a model of principled international interaction with the Myanmar authorities, and official forced labor complaints to the ILO continue to increase. The effect has been a marked decrease in the use of forced labor by officials in urban and rural Myanmar over the past 10 years. But as the ILO makes clear, the practice of the Myanmar army has not improved at all. 

Take, for instance, the post-election pattern of abuses. In January 2011, the Myanmar military drew an estimated 700 convicted criminals from more than 12 prisons in central Myanmar to carry supplies as conflict porters for intensified fighting against ethnic Karen rebels. 

The ex-porters I interviewed spoke of how soldiers forced them to walk first through heavily mined areas, summarily executed wounded porters, and tortured porters deemed to break the harsh rules. This is not a recent phenomenon, but a routine practice by the Myanmar military. In short, the optimism of post-election reforms does not extend to the conflict zones, which demonstrates not just the disregard of the military to its own citizens, but is also reflective of the lack of new thinking by the central government in dealing with ethnic disunity. 

Eyes open engagement 
Steinberg is asking for people to wait and see what comes of the new government, and hope for positive change to blossom. But proponents of a commission of inquiry know that abuses are occurring, and an inquiry is one proposal to seek an end to them. Sanctions are not working, and will never work on their own, but can be made more effective if the sanctioning countries coordinate and calibrate their efforts. Neither sanctions nor justice are being used as threats against the new government, and if Steinberg seriously believes they are being wielded as destructive tools then he is not paying much attention to the real messages he so easily distorts. 

Steinberg argues that outsiders do not have a moral right to tell Myanmar citizens to rise up to resist the regime. And he's right. We don't. But outsiders also don't have a right to tell the country's citizens, as Steinberg does, that their "immediate well-being ... should take precedence over the possible and unknown long-term improvement of their lot". In other words, that they should accept the injustice they face in their daily lives and their disenfranchisement from politics, and focus instead on improving their material well being, which the new government might be willing to allow, rather than confronting the government in ways that bring a violent response. 

This is a choice that some people in Myanmar will make, of course. And we should not judge them for it. But a great many others would be profoundly offended to hear a foreigner tell them that they should choose bread over freedom. As would most South Africans under apartheid, Poles under communism, French citizens under the Vichy government, and so on and so on. What Steinberg doesn't understand is human nature. People don't want to live the way the government makes people live in Myanmar. They value their dignity, not just their material well being. Often they are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. And while we can't tell them they must do that, it is foolish to base public policy on an expectation that they won't. 

Even if Steinberg were right in principle that if everyone played along with the Myanmar military for the next decade, avoiding confrontation, and encouraging reformist tendencies, in practice a great many Myanmar citizens are simply not going to play along. 

Ethnic minorities are unlikely to sit back and take the abuse they are getting and give up their militias and sign up for the Border Guards (which is what they would do if they accepted Steinberg's "rational" approach). Some groups can be expected to fight on, even if it brings them more grief in the short run. One can also expect more acts of resistance to the government from the Myanmar population, whether small ones or large ones as in the 2007 demonstrations. And none of this will happen because outsiders encourage it; it will come from within Myanmar society. 

There is a nastier undertone to Steinberg's piece in his cynical denial of the role that justice can play in authoritarian transitions. He does so in order to see the bright side of possibility, not the dark side of reality. This is why his call for "do no harm" in Western policy formulation appears so simple: he is really saying "do nothing". 

David Scott Mathieson is a Senior Researcher in the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. 


UNHCR-Malaysia ၏ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား လက္ေဗြႏွိပ္ရန္သတင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သတ္၍ ၂၂.၈.၂၀၁၁ တြင္ UNHCR-Malaysia သည္ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာဒုကၡသည္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းတခ်ိဳ႕အားေခၚယူ၍ UNHCR-Malaysia ႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္သည့္ စာရြက္စာတမ္း လက္၀ယ္ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားသူ မည္သူမဆို ၂၆.၈.၂၀၁၁ (ေသာၾကာေန႔) ေနာက္ဆံုးထား၍ မေလးရွားလ၀က႐ံုး၌ လက္ေဗြသြားေရာက္ ေပးေဆာင္ရမည္ဟု အဖြဲ႕အစည္းေခါင္းေဆာင္တခ်ိဳ႕အား ပါးစပ္စကားေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရပါသည္။ (ႏႈတ္စကားသာျဖင့္သည့္အတြက္ ျမန္မာျပည္ရွိ လက္ရွိအစိုးရကဲ့သို႔ အခ်ိန္မေရြး ေျပာင္းလဲႏိုင္ပါသည္)

UNHCR-Malaysia တြင္ Community Development Unit (CDU) ေခါင္းစဥ္ခြဲဌာနတခုရွိျပီး ထိုဌာနလက္ေအာက္တြင္ မေလးရွားရွိ ျမန္မာဒုကၡသည္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းအားလံုး၏နာမည္ႏွင့္ စာရင္းမ်ားရွိေနသည္ဟု သိရပါသည္။ ထိုသို႔အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားအား ေခၚယူရာတြင္ CDU စာရင္းတြင္ ရွိေနသည့္ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာဒုကၡသည္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားအားလံုးအား ေခၚယူေျပာၾကားျခင္းမဟုတ္ဘဲ UNHCR-Malaysia ႏွင့္နီးစပ္သည့္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကိုသာ ေခၚယူအသိေပးျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရပါသည္။

မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ယခုျပဳလုပ္ေပးလွ်က္ရွိသည့္ Legalization ကာလအတြင္း ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအတြက္ အလြန္တရာအေရးၾကီးသည့္ ေဖာ္ျပပါသတင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္၍ UNHCR-Malaysia မွ စာအားျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ http://www.unhcr.org.my/ ႏွင့္ UNHCR-Malaysia ႏွင့္သက္ဆိုင္သည့္ facebook ကဲ့သို႔ေသာ အင္တာနက္စာမ်က္ႏွာမ်ားတြင္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း ေၾကျငာခ်က္တစံုတရာထုတ္ျပန္ျခင္းမရွိဘဲ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းတခ်ိဳ႕မွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကိုသာ ႏႈတ္ျဖင့္သာ သတင္းေပးစကားေျပာၾကားခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရပါသည္။

မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ လာေရာက္ခိုလႈံၾကသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား မ်ားျပားေနသည့္အေလ်ာက္ UNHCR-Malaysia ၏ သတိေပးစကားေျပာၾကားမႈကို ၾကားနာခဲ့ရသည့္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေခါင္းေဆာင္တခ်ိဳ႕သည္ မိမိတို႔ အဖြဲ႕မွ UNHCR မွတ္ပံုတင္စာရင္း၀င္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားကိုေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတနံတလ်ားမွ UNHCR မွတ္ပံုတင္စာရြက္/ကဒ္ လက္၀ယ္ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားသူမ်ား အားလံုးကိုေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း မည္သည့္ဆက္သြယ္ေရးစနစ္ကို အသံုးျပဳ၍ အသိေပးေျပာၾကားမည္ကို မခန္႔မွန္းႏိုင္ေပ။

ယခုဤသတင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္သည္မ်ားကို ေရးသားေနသည့္အခ်ိန္အထိ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ရွိေနၾကသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအားလံုးအေနႏွင့္ UNHCR-Malaysia မွ တရား၀င္ထုတ္ျပန္ျခင္းမရွိေသာ သတင္းစကားအေပၚ ေ၀ခြဲမရျဖစ္ေနၾကျပီး သတိေပးစကားၾကားနာခဲ့ရသည့္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းတခ်ိဳ႕မွေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ လက္လွမ္းမမွီ၍ ထိုသတင္းအား မၾကားသိရဘဲ လ၀က႐ံုးသို႔ လက္ေဗြသြားေရာက္ မေပးေဆာင္ႏိုင္ၾကမည့္ UNHCR-Malaysia ၏ မွတ္ပံုတင္စာရင္း၀င္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအေပၚ မည္ကဲ့သို႔ ဆိုးက်ိဳးသက္ေရာက္ႏိုင္မည္ကို မသိရွိရေသးေပ။

ထိုသို႔ UNHCR-Malaysia ႏွင့္ မေလးရွားအစိုးရတို႔၏ ႏွစ္ဦးႏွစ္ဖက္လံုး၌ လက္ေဗြပံုစံရယူထားမႈ ေပၚေပါက္လာရျခင္းမွာ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံတြင္ UNHCR-Malaysia မွ အေထာက္အထားစာရြက္/ကဒ္ ႏွင့္ အလုပ္လုပ္ခြင့္ တရား၀င္ပါမစ္ (ပတ္စပို႔) ႏွစ္ခုစလံုးကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားသူမ်ား ေပါမ်ားလာျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုကဲ့သို႔ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားႏိုင္သူအမ်ားစုမွာလည္း UNHCR-Malaysia မွ အေထာက္အထားစာရြက္/ကဒ္တို႔ကို အလြယ္တကူျပဳလုပ္ႏိုင္ၾကသူမ်ားျဖစ္ျပီး ထိုသူမ်ားသည္ UNHCR-Malaysia မွအေထာက္အထားကို တတိယႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ထြက္ခြာႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္သာ အသံုးျပဳျပီး အလုပ္လုပ္ခြင့္ တရား၀င္ပါမစ္ကို မေလးရွားအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားမွ ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့လွ်င္ ထုတ္ျပအသံုးျပဳၾကေၾကာင္း သိရပါသည္။
  UK Statement on Burma

The UK Government has welcomed the meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein on 19 August.
Foreign and Commonwealth office
A Foreign Office spokesperson said that comments today by Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy that she was satisfied with the meeting are encouraging:

"However, the international community is watching closely for tangible outcomes from this dialogue, such as the release of political prisoners and genuine efforts towards national reconciliation.”

Further information

British Embassy in Burma website

Foreign Office News on Burma on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter: @foreignoffice, @FCOHumanRights and @ukinburma

Countries of concern - Burma: read and comment on the FCO Human Rights and Democracy Report


Source : Here
Muslim Liberation Organization of Burma (MLOB) Chairman U Kyaw Hla interviewed by BBC regarding an open letter to Human Rights special UN envoy  Tomas Ojea Quintana. Please listen here

Note: Please skip to minute at 13.30



By: Sai Wansai>>



Quite a lot of positive happenings have been making headlines during the last few days, notably where Aung San Suu Kyi’s interaction with the military regime and her freedom of movement, which could be taken as political ones, are concerned. The Pegu or Bago day trip, open letter to the President Thein Sein and ethnic armed conflict parties to the most recent meeting for one hour with the President himself, while, on the side line, attending a forum on the impoverished nation's economy on Saturday morning, have lined Aung San Suu Kyi’s busy agendas.
On the part of President Thein Sein, some policies to remedy the hard-hit country's economy, offering peace talks to end the armed conflicts with ethnic armed groups and reaching out for the return of dissidents staying in and out of the country, were spelled out, on the eve of Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrival to Naypyidaw to meet him.
Of all these measures, peace offensive is the most crucial issue, which needs to be seriously scrutinized. For political future of the country will depend on the outcome of this initiative.
The military regime under General Ne Win made two attempts to reach a political solution. First, offers were made in 1963 for peace talks that included both communist and ethnic groups, but the talks failed. Then, in 1968-1969, Ne Win invited former political leaders under the direction of U Nu to make suggestions for the restoration of national unity. The majority of the members of this advisory committee recommended a return to democratic civilian rule and a federal state, but their advices were rejected. (Source: Burma – Twelve Years After 1988 - Camilla Buzzi)
When N e Win assumed direct control of the Burmese government for the second time in 1962, he gave the highest priority to ending insurgency. For almost 15 years the Rangoon government had been coping not only with the problem of Communist insurgency but with the larger, more serious problem of ethnic insurgency. As a first step towards solving the problem, Ne Win announced a general amnesty to all insurgents who surrendered to the government. After this availed nothing, he went a step further in June 1963, inviting all underground groups, Communists and non-Communists alike, to come to Rangoon for unconditional peace talks. (Source: CIA Intelligence Report - RSS NO. 0052171, July 1971)

Almost all of armed resistance groups participated the 1963 peace talks in Rangoon, including the Burma Communist Party (BCP), Communist Party, Burma (CPB), Karen National United Party (KNUP), New Mon State Party (NMSP), Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Karen Revolutionary Council (KRC) and Shan State Independence Army (SSIA).
However, after several months, on 14th November, the peace talks broke down, due to the Revolutionary Council (RC) military government's pressure only to surrender and refusal to listen to their demands.
Points that were unacceptable to the negotiating parties include that “all troops must be concentrated in a designated area, no one must leave without permission, all organisational work must stop and fund-raising must stop”. (Source: Wikepedia -Communist Party of Burma)
Other than that, the RC was determined to pressure all political parties, including all the negotiating anti-government armed organizations to come under the banner of Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), which was due to be the sole party to govern the country.
In accordance with the RC directive, on 28th March 1964, a decree that dissolved all political parties and associations except the (BSPP) was issued.
After the 1963 nation-wide peace overture, piecemeal ceasefire negotiations were conducted by successive military regimes.
According to the recent military-backed government, since 1994, 17 major anti-government ethnic armed groups and 23 other small groups have made peace with the government. Of them, 15 groups laid down arms completely; five were transformed into government's border guard forces and 15 into militia. (Source: Xinhua)
The government official invitation, announced through the state radio and television on 18th August, directed at anti-government ethnic armed groups for peace talks to end internal dispute and build peace in the country is a positive, conciliatory gesture and should be welcomed.
The statement, which was read out urged ethnic armed groups engaged in conflict with the military to contact state or division governments as a first step leading to further meetings with a union government delegation, which is to be formed soon.
Almost on the heels of the announcement non-Burman ethnic leaders said that the government offer was doubtful and insincere, since the key demand of  collective participatory in the peace talks have been rejected.

The United Nationalities Federal Council (UNCF),  an alliance of some 12 ethnic armed resistance groups, disagree with the regime’s two steps negotiation plan and insists on a collective bargaining directly with Naypyidaw, which should first declares a temporary nation-wide ceasefire to create a matching atmosphere for a ‘political dialogue.’
According to Chinland Guardian of 19th August, “During one of the recent ceasefire talks with the KIA – against the KIA insistence that talks be held collectively with the UNFC members – the Burmese head of delegation Col. Than Aung likened the conflict situation with other ethnic groups to the relationship between parents and spoiled children, which he said, requires the responsible parents to deal differently with each child according to their individual behaviours. If this analogy represents the mentality of the Burmese government, then it would have validated the fear of the UNFC members that the Burmese government remains committed to its decades-old “Divide and conquer” tactics.”

The recent KIO statement, published by Kachin News Group, dated 17 August writes:
The KIO wants to solve political problems using the principles of the 1947 Panglong Agreement but the government wants to solve the problems on the basis of the military-designed 2008 Constitution.

The KIO and other ethnic armed groups believe all political problems in the country are caused by successive governments failing to follow the Panglong Agreement, the historic treaty which formed the Union of Burma through the cooperation of ethnic Burman, Kachin, Shan and Chin representatives.
The civil war started early this year after the new government pressured Kachin, Mon, Karen, Wa and Shan ethnic ceasefire groups to transform into the Burmese Army-controlled Border Guard Force, without offering political dialogue.

Clearly, the distrust of the armed ethnic groups on the military-backed government is enormous, for during the past few decades, the KNU and KIA have made several negotiations to find a political settlement but have always been pressured to surrender. On top of that, they are not ready to conduct a negotiation process within the mould of military supremacy, 2008 Constitution.

For the time being, it is still hard to predict whether President Thein Sein’s peace initiative will repeat the same failure of General Ne Win’s peace call in 1963 or break rank with the traditional, conservative military doctrine and deliver the long awaited peaceful co-existence and co-habitation for the benefit of the people.
The author is General Secretary of the exiled Shan Democratic Union

By  ၀င္႔ထန္း>>

 
၁၉၆၂ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးေန၀င္း က ဦးေဆာင္ အာဏာသိမ္းယူ ၿပီးေနာက္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ စနစ္ေအာက္မွာ စတင္ ျပားျပားေမွာက္ခဲ႔ရသည္။ ျပင္ပဩဇာ အလႊမ္းမိုးမခံရေအာင္ဆိုၿပီး
တံတိုင္းကာ အဆက္ျဖတ္ရင္း၊ ျမန္မာ႔ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ လမ္းစဥ္ပါတီနဲ႔ တိုင္းျပည္ကို ဆင္းရဲတြင္းနက္ေစခဲ႔သည္။
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္မွာ တစ္တိုင္းျပည္လံုး ဆူပူအံုၾကြမွႈျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ဦးေန၀င္းကို ဆက္ခံသူ စစ္အစိုးရက တိုင္းျပည္တံခါးကို ဖြင္႔ၾကည့္ေသးသည္။ ဒါေပမဲ႔ စစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ သေနၶမမွန္တဲ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္မွႈေတြေၾကာင္႔ အားလံုး အခ်ည္းအႏွီးပင္။
ၿပီးခဲ႔တဲ႔ႏွစ္ ရွက္ဖြယ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတစ္ဆင္႔ စစ္အစိုးရက အရပ္၀တ္ပံုစံနဲ႔ အာဏာဆက္ယူထားသည္။ အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံေတြက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို စီးပြားေရး ဆက္လက္ ပိတ္ဆို႔ထားလ်က္ပင္။ အေမရိကန္နဲ႔ ဥေရာပက ျမန္မာ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကို ပိတ္ဆို႔ဟန္႔တားမွႈေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ဆက္လုပ္ထားသည္။ ဒါက လက္ေတြ႔ အေျခအေနျဖစ္သလို၊ အားလံုးရဲ႕အျမင္နဲ႔ အေနာက္ရဲ႕အျမင္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း ကြယ္လြန္သူ ဦးသန္႔ရဲ႕ ေျမးျဖစ္သူ၊ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္ သန္႔ျမင္႔ဦး က သူ႔စာအုပ္အသစ္ (Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia) ကို ပံုစံတစ္မ်ဳိးျဖင္႔ တင္ျပထားသည္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြားေရးနဲ႔ ပထ၀ီအရ အထီးက်န္ အေရးမပါဘူးလို႔ အေနာက္တိုင္းသားအမ်ားစု ျမင္ထားတဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ တရုတ္နဲ႔ အိႏၵိယ ႏိုင္ငံႀကီးႏွစ္ခုၾကားမွာ အခိုက္အတန္႔အားျဖင္႔ 'ကြင္းဆက္ျပတ္ေနမွႈ' (a relatively minor missing link) ပါပဲဟု ဆိုထားသည္။

သူ႔အဆိုရ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ေသးေသးေလး မဟုတ္။ လူဦးေရ သန္း ၆၀ ရွိၿပီး၊ ျပင္သစ္ထက္ ဧရိယာနယ္နမိတ္ ပိုက်ယ္၀န္းသည္။ ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ လူမ်ဳိးစု ပုန္ကန္အဖြဲ႔မ်ားထဲက တစ္ဖြဲ႔ျဖစ္တဲ႔ ၀တပ္ဖြဲ႔ (UWSA) ဆိုရင္ သူတို႔ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတဲ႔ နယ္ေျမက ဘယ္လ္ဂ်ီယံႏိုင္ငံ အေနအထား ထက္ပင္ ပိုက်ယ္ေသးသည္။

ေနာက္ စာေရးသူ သန္႔ျမင္႔ဦးက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ အေနာက္ဘက္ ေဒလီ၊ မြမ္ဘိုင္းနဲ႔ အေရွ႕ဘက္ ရွန္ဟိုင္း၊ ေဟာင္ေကာင္တို႔ၾကား အမွန္တကယ္ ဆက္သြယ္ေပးႏို္င္တဲ႔ ပင္မလမ္းေၾကာင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ ရန္ကုန္ကို စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြ ရြာသိမ္ဇနပုဒ္ အျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းမပစ္ခင္၊ အထူးသျဖင္႔ ၿဗိတိသွ်ေခတ္မွာ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္က အာရွႏိုင္ငံ အားလံုးအတြက္ အဓိက အခ်က္အခ်ာ လမ္းဆုံ ျဖစ္ခဲ႔သည္။
ေျမပံုမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားတဲ႔အတိုင္း ျမန္မာႏို္င္ငံ အလယ္ပိုင္းမွ မႏၱေလးကိုဗဟိုထားၿပိီး၊ ၇၀၀ မိုင္ပတ္လည္ (၁၁၀၀ ကီလိုမီတာ) အခ်င္း၀က္နဲ႔ စက္၀ိုင္း ၀ိုင္းၾကည့္လိုက္ပါ။ အိႏၵိယရဲ႕ အေနာက္ဘန္ေဂါလ္နဲ႔ ဘီဟာ ျပည္နယ္မ်ား၊ တရုတ္က ယူနန္၊ စီခြ်မ္ျပည္နယ္မ်ား၊ ေနာက္ တိဘက္ကုန္းျပင္ျမင္႔နဲ႔ ေတာင္ဘက္က ဗီယက္နမ္၊ လာအို၊ ထိုင္း တို႔အထိ ဆန္႔တန္းသြားသည္။ အဲဒီ စက္၀ိုင္း၀ိုင္းထားတဲ႔ ေဒသေတြမွာ လူသန္း ၆၀၀ ေက်ာ္ ေနထို္င္ၾကသည္။
သန္႔ျမင္႔ဦး က သူ႔စာအုပ္ အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏို္င္ငံ ေတာင္ကုန္း ေဒသမ်ားနဲ႔ ေျမပံုရဲ႕ ေတာင္ပံႏွစ္ဖက္၊ ယူနန္ျပည္နဲ႔ တရုတ္ နယ္စပ္ေဒသမ်ား၊ အိႏၵိယ အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ အာသံနဲ႔ မနိပူရတို႔ထိ ကိုယ္တိုင္ သြားေရာက္ ေရးသားခဲ႔ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒါေပမဲ႔ ခရီးသြား စာေရးဆရာ တစ္ေယာက္ထက္ သမိုင္း သုေတသီ တစ္ဦး ပိုဆန္သည္ဟု The Economist မဂၢဇင္းက စာဖတ္ညႊန္းတြင္ သံုးသပ္သည္။
စာအုပ္မွာ အဓိက ေထာက္ျပတဲ႔အခ်က္က အေနာက္က တန္ျပန္ထိန္းညွိမွႈေတြ မလုပ္ႏိုင္ခဲ႔ရင္၊ ျမန္မာဟာ တရုတ္ရဲ႕ ဩဇာလႊမ္းမိုးမွႈေအာက္ မေရွာင္လႊဲသာဘဲ က်ေရာက္သြားရေတာ႔မယ္ ဆိုတဲ႔ အခ်က္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ျမန္မာကိုျဖတ္ၿပီး အိႏၵိယနဲ႔ တရုတ္ကို ဆက္သြယ္ႏိုင္ဖု႔ိဆိုတဲ႔ အိပ္မက္က ရာစုခ်ီ ရွိေနခဲ႔တာ ျဖစ္သည္။ ၀ိတိုရိယေခတ္ကတည္းက ကလကတၱားကေန ေတာေတာင္ေတြျဖတ္ တရုတ္အထိ မီးရထားလမ္း ေဖာက္ဖို႔ စိတ္ကူးယဥ္ခဲ႔ၾကသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ ယခု အဲဒီရာစုခ်ီ အိပ္မက္ကို တကယ္အေကာင္ထည္ ေဖာ္ႏိုင္ခဲ႔တာက တရုတ္ ျဖစ္သည္။ တရုတ္က မာလကာ ေရလက္ၾကားကိုျဖတ္ စြမ္းအင္တင္ပို႔ရမွာ အခက္အခဲျဖစ္ေနတဲ႔ ျပႆနာကို မဟာဗ်ဴဟာ က်က် ေျဖရွင္းလိုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
တရုတ္က ပထမဆံုးအႀကီမ္ ဘဂၤလားပင္လယ္ေအာ္ကို တိုက္ရိုက္ ဆက္သြယ္ဖုိ႔နဲ႔ ၄င္းရဲ႕ ေရနံ ၂၀ ရာခုိုင္ႏွႈန္းေက်ာ္ တင္ပို႔ႏိုင္မယ္႔ လမ္းေၾကာင္းအတြက္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ဆိပ္ကမ္းအသစ္၊ ေရနံနဲ႔ ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ ပိုက္လိုင္းအသစ္၊ လမ္းအသစ္ေတြ တည္ေဆာက္ထားၿပီ။ ယူနန္ျပည္နယ္ မီးထိန္ထိန္ညီးဖို႔နဲ႔ ဓာတ္အားေပးစက္ရံုေတြ တည္ထားဖုိ႔အတြက္ ျမန္မာ႔ျမစ္ေတြမွာ ဆည္ေတြ မွႈိလိုေပါက္လာသည္။
ဒါေၾကာင္႔လည္း တရုတ္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအၾကား တစ္ဦးကိုတစ္ဦး အျပန္အလွန္ မွီခိုမွႈက ပိုလာရသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ယဥ္ေက်းမွႈနဲ႔ ဘာသာေရး သမိုင္းေၾကာင္းႀကီးတဲ႔ အိႏၵိယႏွင္႔ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွႏိိုင္ငံေတြက အဲဒီ တရုတ္နဲ႔ျမန္မာ အျပန္အလွန္မွီခို္ ပလဲနံပသင္႔လြန္းမွႈကို ေလွ်ာ႔ခ်ဖို႔ ႀကိဳးစားမွႈကလည္း အလုပ္ျဖစ္ပံုမေပၚ။
သို႔ႏွင္႔တိုင္ ယခု မာဖီ၀တ္ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြက သူတစ္ပါး မီွခိုမွႈေအာက္ မေနခ်င္သူမ်ားဟုလည္း စာေရးသူက သံုးသပ္သည္။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ စိတ္အခံက တရုတ္ရဲ႕ ရုပ္ေသး မျဖစ္ခ်င္ၾက။ သူတို႔ ေရွ႕မ်ဳိးဆက္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြက တရုတ္ကို ေက်ာေထာက္ေနာက္ခံ အမွီျပဳေနသူ ဗကပေတြကို ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ တိုက္ခိုက္ခဲ႔သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။
သန္႔ျမင္႔ဦး က ျမန္မာ႔ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သမိုင္းကို မိတ္ဆက္ေပးတဲ႔အေနနဲ႔ The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press 2000) နဲ႔ The River of Lost Footsteps (2007) ဆိုတဲ႔ လူသိမ်ားတဲ႔ စာအုပ္ႏွစ္အုပ္ကို ေရးသားသူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ အေနာက္ရဲ႕ စီးပြားေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူမွႈကို ဆန္႔က်င္သူျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ျပည္ပေရာက္ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားအတြက္ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ရာပုဂၢိဳလ္လည္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း The Economist မဂၢဇင္းတြင္ ေရးသားထားသည္။

Rohingya asylum seekers in detention in Thailand (Reuters)
 
By Joseph Allchin
Rohingya asylum seekers in detention in the Indian Andaman islands have alleged shocking abuse at the hands of Thai authorities earlier this year, in a repeat of treatment that Rohingya asylum seekers were subjected to in 2009, and that Thai authorities claimed to have stopped.
Around 91 Rohingya were reportedly rescued by the Indian Navy adrift in the Bay of Bengal, who alleged that they had been pushed out to sea by the Thai Navy in a vessel with no engine and only 100 litres of water. 25 had to be admitted to hospital after their rescue.
Speaking to the South China Morning Post, one Shaik Montaz said; “After torturing us for five days in Thailand, the Thai army handed us over to the Thai navy. The navy soldiers loaded us on to our boat on January 18 and we found that the engine was missing. For more than two days our boat was towed by the navy boat until we were hundreds of miles away from the Thai coast.”
The men were not picked up by the Indian navy till February 5, but the treatment they allege will also cast doubt over Thailand’s human rights record;
“The soldiers beat us badly with wooden batons. They forced us to go nude and stay in seawater for more than five hours every day,” Sohail Ali told the South China Morning Post.
“Using cigarette lighters, the Thai soldiers burned the beards of some of us.”
Former Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva vowed after similar incidents with Rohingya asylum seekers surfaced in January 2009 that there would be “no repeats”, adding that his government had demonstrated its “sincerity”.
The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) told DVB that they were never given access to the 91 in either Thailand or India and therefore were unable to verify whether they were indeed the same asylum seekers. Kitty McKinsey from UNHCR did however state that Thailand had been “generous” in accommodating refugees and that they were working well with both the Thai and Indian governments.
Whilst a statement from the Thai authorities claimed that; “It must be emphasised that this action was in line with their wish”….”Thai authorities have no knowledge as to how this group of people may have travelled onwards after they departed from Thai territory.”
This comes as local press in Thailand’s Phuket reported that 33 Rohingya were deported back to Burma on the 19 of August after being detained since January, but reports could not verify what had happened to these detainees.
Alan Morrison and Chutima Sidasathian from the local Phuket Wan news web site did however claim to DVB that the local head of immigration had started pushing all Burmese, regardless of ethnicity, back instead of detaining and attempting to fine illegal Burmese migrants. This could not be verified and it was not sure for how long and how official any such actions or policy were.
As ever with the Rohingya, repatriation is problematic as the Burmese government deny their claims to citizenship and as a result they are left without official documentation, but despite this it was alleged by local media outlets such as the Kaladan Press’ Tin Soe that they were coerced into voting for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in last year’s elections, a clear breach of election laws.
The Rohingya ethnic group are considered by groups such as Refugees International to be amongst; “the most persecuted in the world”, with alleged religious and ethnic persecution widespread in their native northern Arakan state. As a result some 200,000 are believed to have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh whilst others have sought asylum further afield in Malaysia.


 

United Nations human rights envoy Tomas Ojea Quintana arrived in Burma on Sunday for a five-day visit to assess the human rights situation in the country.
Quintana is scheduled to meet with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon on Wednesday. He last visited Burma 18 months ago, but was not allowed to see the Nobel peace laureate, who was then under house arrest. Subsequent requests to enter the country had been denied until now.
The Argentine lawyer will also meet with government officials in the administrative city of Naypyidaw and attend a session of the new parliament on Monday.
Quintana will present preliminary observations at a press conference in Rangoon on Thursday. His full report on the visit will be presented to the UN General Assembly later this year.
credit : VOA Blog

Asylum-seekers are locked in a detention centre on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a nation that is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention. Source: AP

THE High Court will today formally consider the Gillard government's plan to send asylum-seekers to Malaysia. At the same time, many of the poor and the desperate across Asia have already considered the plan. 

And many, it seems, have dismissed it. Since Australia signed the deal with Malaysia on July 25, five boats have arrived in Australian waters, carrying at least 338 asylum-seekers.
Under the scheme, which has already seen one Labor MP sidestepping party loyalty to express her concerns, Australia will resettle 4000 recognised refugees from Malaysia over four years, and in return send 800 arrivals back to Malaysia. If news spreads that an expensive and dangerous sea voyage will end not in Australia but in the crowded refugee ghettos of Malaysia, the Australian government believes potential asylum-seekers will think twice about setting sail.
And should the Malaysia plan come to grief, there is now a back-up: Papua New Guinea has agreed that a detention centre on Manus Island, closed for seven years, can be reopened.

But this plan, too, has been questioned. Greens immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young yesterday called for an investigation to determine who would be sent to Manus Island, how much it would cost, and whether children would be detained in the centre.
"Last time Manus was open, under John Howard, for one month the bill for one lone person was $216,000," she told the ABC. "I don't think the minister can give the answers: [the government] is struggling to give the answers on Malaysia."
Labor MP Anna Burke has also gone on the record to criticise the Manus Island plan. And lining up with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and prominent human rights advocates such as Frank Brennan, Burke says she fears the Malaysia deal abrogates Australia's international responsibilities to asylum-seekers.
"I am concerned that we can't really guarantee the safety of the 800 people," Burke says. "That is my personal concern and I have expressed that in caucus."
Even so, if the asylum-seekers case in the High Court fails, it's likely the government will break records to get the first group on a plane bound for Malaysia. There are plans to film their departure and arrival and post the footage on the internet in the hope it will deter anyone considering getting on a boat destined for Australia.
Certainly, Afghans living in Kuala Lumpur have kept a close eye on the unfolding saga of the Australia-Malaysia refugee swap agreement.
Most know friends, relatives and compatriots who have attempted the journey to Australia in search of a better life, and they are aware the Australian government is trying hard to come up with a game-changer.
"They are actually well informed about it," says Afghan Zabiullah Ahmadi, who lives in Kuala Lumpur. "It's newspapers; it's the people around who watch what's going on. It's such a small community that word can spread very quickly."
Tahera Ahmadi and her husband Ali Haidari don't want to risk their lives, or the life of their two-year-old daughter, Angela, on a rickety boat, but they desperately want to live in Australia. From the Hazara ethnic minority, they have lived in Kuala Lumpur for nearly four years, waiting for the magic letter inviting them to become Australians.
"Actually, I think Australia likes Hazara people," says Ahmadi in the small flat she shares with eight members of her extended family, all recognised by the UNHCR as bona fide refugees.
"We have heard they give rights to Hazara people; they understand our problems. In Afghanistan, we don't have any rights. If a person doesn't have rights, this person is like a servant. I'm sure if I get to Australia I will have a nice future."
According to Abdul Ghani bin Abdul Rahman, a leader in the Rohingya community in Malaysia, asylum-seekers have paid as much as 10,000 Malaysian ringgit (about $3200) per person for passage to Australia, a stake that has frequently entailed selling everything and borrowing from friends and family.
And this is relatively inexpensive compared with fares cited elsewhere. From Burma, the Muslim Rohingya minority is considered among the worst-treated in the world, denied citizenship by their own country.
Abdul Ghani says some people-smuggler agents in Malaysia are working with Indonesian agents, preying on the desperate.
"Many lives are lost at sea. I think this [the Australia-Malaysia scheme] is a good policy," Ghani says. "In 2006 a friend of mine passed away because he went to Christmas Island. There are empty promises by the agents; unscrupulous agents. Many times I beg Rohingya not to do this."
For asylum-seekers, risk, hardship and expense are the prices to be paid for a new life. A survey of Hazara men conducted in four Afghan provinces late last year showed a degree of ignorance about Australian policy.
Commissioned by Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, the Afghanistan Counter People Smuggling Scoping Study found that in all provinces, the Hazara were aware of the various risks associated with using people smugglers to travel to Australia, but "only a few Hazara realise that migrants also face a risk of repatriation and detention by the Australian authorities".
Some of the Hazara quoted in the survey had no access to the internet, some had no electricity in their homes, and many relied mostly on news from friends and family, although the BBC, Voice of America and certain Afghan broadcasters were also trusted sources of information.
Many, living all their lives in landlocked Afghanistan, feared drowning on the way to Australia, or otherwise dying, or being imprisoned, or losing their language or culture, or being humiliated. One interview subject voiced his fears of a sea journey to Australia.
"Some people call it the dolphin's way because many people are eaten by these dolphins in the sea."
The survey found "information on the dangers of illegal immigration is primarily spread by word of mouth", with news coming from returning migrants, victims of people-smuggling fraud, friends and relatives in Australia and repatriated Afghans.
Regardless of the risks of the voyage, exodus beckons. There is little to keep potential asylum-seekers in Afghanistan, with economic stagnation, a critical shortage of government services and frequent discrimination pushing the Hazara people to look for a way out.
Many asylum-seekers in Malaysia took note of the announcement of the Australia-Malaysia plan in early May, but then, as the weeks passed, doubts began to surface regarding the final shape of the agreement. Hundreds of asylum-seekers in Asia apparently believed the failure to come up with a concrete plan presented a window of opportunity, and they arrived in Australian waters by the boatload.
Then, in late July, the plan was finalised, and officially signed. And still the boats kept coming -- five since the deal was signed, carrying nearly half the number of asylum-seekers Malaysia has agreed to take.
Many have been unaccompanied minors and, although Immigration Minister Chris Bowen declares there will be no blanket exemptions for unaccompanied under-18s, it's unlikely Australia will risk international opprobrium by sending these more vulnerable people to an uncertain future in Malaysia.
Many critics of the plan note that Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, that in general, refugees and asylum-seekers are not permitted to work in Malaysia, nor to send their children to government schools, they are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention, and at the extreme, brutally caned. The Australia-Malaysia plan has specific provisos to permit the 800 transferred to Malaysia to work, and to ensure they will not be caned.
But still the critics are not convinced. The opposition has slammed both the Malaysia deal and the recent PNG agreement, noting the dearth of detail.
Hanson-Young says the government should go back to the drawing board. "This is a mess. I don't think the government is winning any favours from anyone on this, and the solutions put forth by the opposition aren't cutting through either."
And she is particularly concerned about the children involved. "Why are we treating children like pawns in this awful human chess game?"
So far this year, 37 boats have arrived in Australian waters, carrying 2186 asylum-seekers. Afghans, like last year, loomed large: discounting the most recent boat, the totals comprise 892 Iranians, 604 Afghans, 129 Iraqis, as well as "other". It's not a huge number of people, in the global scheme of things, when millions of displaced Afghans languish in Iran and Pakistan, but asylum-seekers punch well above their weight in the Australian political arena.
Despite the clamour, numbers of arrivals have actually fallen this year, perhaps because of the mooted Malaysia plan.
Last year 134 boats arrived in Australian waters, carrying 6535 asylum-seekers, more than three times this year's total so far. But over the past few years there has been a steady increase.
Bowen has pinned his hopes on the swap plan, which he insists will "break" the people-smugglers' business model and prevent asylum-seekers risking their lives on often unseaworthy boats.
The Christmas Island boat tragedy last year has failed to dissuade asylum-seekers, although it seems they know that drowning is one of the risks.
When, or perhaps if, the first asylum-seekers eventually get to Malaysia, they will be taken to Port Dickson, on the coast south of Kuala Lumpur, where two basic hotels have been leased and renovated to provide temporary housing. It is expected they will remain in this accommodation for a short period, perhaps 45 days, before they are sent out into the community to lead their own lives.
Afghan advocate Zabiullah Ahmadi says the plan will create a two-tier system, with some asylum-seekers in Malaysia holding what he calls a "golden card" giving them some security.
But, he says, there is remarkably little envy from the refugees who have been living in Malaysia for so long. "At some point they are happy," he says.

Link:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/hope-springs-from-inside-the-wire/story-fn59niix-1226119180451
 
ၾကပ္ေျပး (ေနျပည္ေတာ္) တြင္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႔ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တဲ့အေပၚ ျပည္တြင္းရွိ အၿငိမ္းစား တပ္မေတာ္အရာရွိႀကီး တစ္ဦးအား စည္းလံုးျခင္းရဲ႕ အင္အားဝက္ဆိုက္ဒ္က ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ရာမွာ  ယခုတေလာ ေဘးၾကပ္နံၾကပ္ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ထြက္ေပါက္ဟာ မီးရွဴးတန္ေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္း ေျပာဆိုသြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

[B]ေမး - မၾကာမီကၿပီးဆံုးသြားတဲ့ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႔ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တဲ့ ျဖစ္စဥ္ ၾကားသိရသေလာက္ ရွင္းျပေပးပါ။[/B]

[B]ေျဖ -[/B] က်ေနာ္တို႔ လက္လွမ္းမွီသေရြ႕ တပည့္မ်ားကို ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းၾကည့္ရာမွာ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ ရံုးခန္းတြင္ ထူးျခားခ်က္အေနနဲ႔ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း ဓါတ္ပံုအား ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ တစ္ဦးအျဖစ္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ နံရံတြင္ အျခားသမၼတမ်ားရဲ႕ ဓါတ္ပံုမ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ယွဥ္တြဲ ထိုးတင္ထားတာကို ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ၁၉၉၂ ခုႏွစ္က ဦးသန္းေရႊ အာဏာသိမ္းၿပီးေနာက္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနဝင္း ဓါတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ဇြတ္အတင္း ျဖဳတ္ခိုင္းခဲ့ဘူးပါတယ္။ ဆိုလိုတာက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား စည္းရံုးလိုလို႔ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း ဓါတ္ပံု ျပန္တင္တာျဖစ္တယ္။ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ကေတာ့ တိုင္းျပည္စီးပြားေရး ခၽြတ္ခ်ဳံက်တဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ပိတ္ဆို႔ထားတဲ့ စီးပြားေရး Section ကုိ ရုတ္သိမ္းေပးေရး ႏိုင္ငံတကာအား တိုက္တြန္းေပးဖို႔ရယ္၊ ကမာၻ႔ဘဏ္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာေငြေၾကးရံပံုေငြ အဖြဲ႔က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအား ေထာက္ပံ့ကူညီဖို႔ရယ္၊ ေဒၚလာေငြေၾကး လဲလွယ္ႏႈန္း သတ္မွတ္ျပင္ဆင္ေရး အပါအဝင္ ေငြမာ အျဖစ္ထားရွိေရး အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားက ကူညီပံ့ပိုးေပးဖို႔ စည္းရံုးေပးေရး စတာေတြေျပာဆိုႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

[B]ေမး - ယခုတေလာ အစိုးရသစ္ အၾကပ္အတည္း ျဖစ္ေနတာ ၾကားတယ္။ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးရဲ႕ ထင္ျမင္ယူဆခ်က္ကို ရွင္းျပပါ။[/B]

[B]ေျဖ -[/B] အစိုးရသစ္အေနနဲ႔ သဘာဝေဘးအႏၱရယ္ ေရႀကီးတဲ့ဒဏ္ ဆန္ေရစပါးေပါမ်ားတဲ့ ျပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ တိုင္းအမ်ားစု ေရလႊမ္းမိုးခံရတဲ့အျပင္ ေဒၚလာေစ်း မႀကံဳဘူးေအာင္ စံခ်ိန္တင္ ထိုးက်သြားတာေၾကာင့္ စီးပြားေရး အၾကပ္အတည္း ျဖစ္ေနတာရယ္၊ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ျဖစ္လုနီးနီး မႀကံဳစဖူး ေျမာက္ပိုင္းမွသည္ ေတာင္ပိုင္းအထိ တပ္မေတာ္က စစ္မ်က္ႏွာမ်ား ျဖန္႔က်က္ကာ ရင္ဆိုင္ႀကံဳေတြ႔ ေနရတာရယ္၊ အပစ္ရပ္ တိုင္းရင္းသား အဖြဲ႔အား စစ္ဆက္တုိက္ရမလို၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေလသံ မပြင့္တစ္ပြင့္ ေျပာရမလို ေရြးခ်ယ္ရ ခက္ေနတာရယ္၊ အာဆီယံဥကၠဌ ျဖစ္ဖို႔ေလ့လာသူ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးအား ဖိတ္ၾကားခဲ့ၿပီးမွ ဆိုင္းငံ့ထားတာရယ္၊ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ေၾကြးေၾကာ္သံ တစ္ခုျဖစ္တဲ့ အဂတိလိုက္စားမႈ ကင္းရွင္းေရး သန္႔ရွင္းေသာ အစိုးရျဖစ္ေရးအတြက္ စံျပလုပ္ေဆာင္မႈအျဖစ္ တပ္မေတာ္အတြင္း တိုင္းမွဴးႏွင့္အထက္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားကို စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေနၿပီး အခ်ဳိ႕ကို ဖယ္ရွားတဲ့အေပၚ တပ္တြင္း မေက်နပ္မႈမ်ားစတဲ့ စတဲ့အၾကပ္အတည္းေတြရွိတယ္ဗ်ာ။

[B]ေမး - အပစ္ရပ္ တုိင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔အေပၚ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ဆက္ဆံေျပာဆိုေနမႈမ်ားအေပၚ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီး ဘယ္လိုျမင္သလဲ..?  [/B]

[B]ေျဖ -[/B] အစိုးရသစ္အေနနဲ႔ အပစ္ရပ္တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြအေပၚ ျပတ္သားတဲ့ မူဝါဒမ်ဳိး မရွိသလို သံတမန္ေရးရာ စကားလံုးမ်ား သံုးႏႈန္းမႈအားနည္း ေနတာေတြ႔ရတယ္။ သမၼတ တစ္ဦးအေနနဲ႔ လက္လႊတ္စပယ္ K.I.A အေပၚ မေျပာသင့္ဘူးဗ်၊ ယခင္အစိုးရလက္ထက္ကေတာင္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ရဲ႕ အဆင့္ (၂) ရွိတဲ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ညြန္႔လို လူမ်ဳိးက လံုၿခံဳေရး အေစာင့္အေရွာက္ ေဘးဖယ္ထားၿပီး တိုင္းရင္းသား နယ္ေျမထဲသုိ႔ ယံုၾကည္မႈကို တည္ေဆာက္တဲ့အေနနဲ႔ ရဲတင္းစြာ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တာမ်ဳိး လုပ္ခဲ့ေသးတာဘဲ။ ခက္တာက သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ အေနနဲ႔ စစ္ဦးစီး လုပ္သက္ဘဲ စစ္ရံုးမွာ ေတာက္ေလွ်ာက္ ေနခဲ့တာမ်ားတာမို႔ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ခ်ရာမွာ တံု႔ဆိုင္း ေႏွးေကြးေနတာ ေတြ႔ရတယ္။ အစိုးရသစ္ အဖြဲ႔အတြင္း တင္းမာတဲ့ အုပ္စုမ်ားရဲ႕ ေလသံမ်ားက ဦးသိန္းစိန္အေပၚ လႊမ္းမိုးေနတယ္။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ တသမတ္တည္း စဲြကိုင္ထားတဲ့ အယူအဆက တိုင္းရင္းသား အဖြဲ႔ေတြကို ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ တစုတစည္းထဲ  အစိုးရသစ္ အေနနဲ႔ ေတြ႔မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဘာလို႔လည္းဆိုေတာ့ တိုင္းရင္းသားအားလံုး ေပါင္းေတြ႔ရင္ အင္အားစု ႀကီးမားလာမွာျဖစ္လို႔ အစိုးရသစ္ လက္ေရွာင္တာျဖစ္တယ္။

[B]ေမး - ဒီေတာ့ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးအေနနဲ႔ လက္ရွိႏိုင္ငံေရး အခင္းအက်င္း အေပၚ အစုိးရသစ္ရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံေရး မဟာဗ်ဴဟာ ဘယ္လို သံုးသပ္ သလဲ ?[/B]

[B]ေျဖ - [/B]ယခုတေလာ ေခတ္စားေနတဲ့ သံုးပြင့္ဆိုင္ ေဆြးေႏြးေရးကို အပစ္ရပ္တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြႏွင့္ တစုတစည္းတည္း ေတြ႔ဖို႔ေတာင္ မလိုလားတဲ့ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ အသြင္ေျပာင္း အစိုးရသစ္က စိတ္ကူးထဲေတာင္ ထည့္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူး၊ ႏွစ္ပြင့္ဆိုင္ေဆြးေႏြးေရးကို အစိုးရသစ္က ဦးစြာ ညွိႏိႈင္းၿပီးမွ က်န္တဲ့တစ္ပြင့္ကို အေပၚစီးမွ ကိုင္တြယ္မွာ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ယခင္နအဖ လက္ထက္က NLD ႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ဦးစြာ မေဆြးေႏြးဘဲ အပစ္ရပ္တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားကို တဖဲြ႔ျခင္း ခဲြထုတ္စည္းရံုးခဲ့ၿပီးမွ တိုင္းရင္းသား အားကို ရယူကာ NLD အား အေပၚစီးမွ ဆက္ဆံျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ ယခုေတာ့ ေျပာင္းျပန္ျဖစ္သြားၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ NLD ကုိ ဦးစြာ ေဆြးေႏြးကာ တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြကို အေပၚစီးမွ ကိုင္တြယ္မွာျဖစ္တယ္။

[B]ေမး - ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီး ဆိုလိုတာက အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ထြက္ေပါက္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ျဖစ္ေနသလား ?[/B]

[B]ေျဖ -[/B] အစိုးရသစ္အေနနဲ႔ ေရြးခ်ယ္ရန္ နည္းလမ္းအေနျဖင့္ NLD ႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို စည္းရံုးမွာလား၊ NLD ကို ဖယ္ၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို လူပုဂၢိဳလ္တစ္ဦးအေနနဲ႔ စည္းရံုးမွာလား ဆိုၿပီး နည္းလမ္းႏွစ္သြယ္ ရွိပါတယ္။ အစိုးရသစ္အေနနဲ႔ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ အရိုးစြဲ အယူဆအတိုင္း အင္အားနည္းေလ ေကာင္းေလမို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တစ္ဦးတည္းကိုသာ ေရြးထုတ္ၿပီး ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ရင္ NLD ႏွင့္ ကဲြသြားေစခ်င္တယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ေထာက္ခံမႈရေနေသာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးျခင္းျဖင့္ အစိုးရသစ္က လိုလားေနတဲ့ စီးပြားေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈ Section အထိုက္အေလ်ာက္ ေလ်ာ့ပါးသြားလိုပါတယ္။ အစိုးရသစ္က တိုင္းရင္းသား အေရးကိစၥမ်ား ကိုင္တြယ္ဖို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ေျဖရွင္းခိုင္းဖို႔ ေလာေလာဆယ္ အကူအညီေတာင္းမွာ မဟုတ္ေသးဘဲ ႏုိင္ငံေရး က်ားကြက္ ေရႊ႕ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္မ်ားကို အခ်ိန္အတိုင္းအတာ တစ္ခုထိ ပစ္ထားမွာ ျဖစ္ၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ေျပလည္မႈ ရရွိေရးအတြက္ ႏွစ္ပြင့္ဆိုင္ ေဆြးေႏြးေရးကို ဆက္လက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ေလသံက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးတံခါး မပြင့္တစ္ပြင့္ ဖြင့္ထားတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံဖံြ႔ၿဖိဳး တိုးတက္ေရးအတြက္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးမႈ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး ဆိုင္ရာ အလုပ္ရံု ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမ်ား ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ အပါအဝင္ ျပည္သူလူထု တရပ္လံုး ပါဝင္ေနသေယာင္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈ သ႑န္ ေဖာ္ထားၿပီး တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္မ်ားကိုေတာ့ စစ္မက္လိုလားသူ အၾကမ္းဖက္သမားမ်ားအျဖစ္ ႏုိင္ငံေရး ထိုးစစ္ ဆင္ထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ထြက္ေပါက္အျဖစ္ အသံုးခ်ထားတယ္ျဖစ္တယ္ဗ်ာ။

Link:   :http://www.photayokeking.org/hot-news/651-kyat-pye-nay-pyi-daw#.Tk90-iEy7cR.facebook

Rohingya would-be-refugees on Phuket after arriving in a boat in February
Photo by phuketwan.com/file
 
By Alan Morison and Chutima Sidasathian
 
PHUKET: Accusations that the Thai military mistreated Rohingya boatpeople this year in a shocking new ''pushback'' have been made today in a Hong Kong newspaper, quoting survivors in India.

The fresh allegations go one step further than reports of the notorious 2008-2009 incidents, claiming that captive Rohingya were tortured in Thailand over five days in January.

Today's report in the South China Morning Post newspaper quotes a Rohingya as saying that before being towed out to sea and cast adrift in a boat with no engine, "The soldiers beat us badly with wooden batons.

''They forced us to go nude and stay in seawater for more than five hours every day. Using cigarette lighters, the Thai soldiers burned the beards of some of us."

Reporter Shaikh Azizur Rhaman in Calcutta spoke by telephone to several of the 91 Rohingya who were rescued by Indian authorities on February 5.

The boatpeople are now being held in a jail in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, between Phuket and India.

Accusations of torture by the Thai military come as mystery surrounds the policy of Thailand's new government towards the Rohingya, a Muslim minority denied citizenship in their Burmese homeland.

Phuketwan revealed on Friday that Rohingya boatpeople who have been held on Phuket and in other parts of Thailand now appear to be being ''repatriated,'' but their destination has not been revealed.

The covert process leaves many questions unanswered. Today's revelation of a fresh ''pushback'' applies pressure on the new Thai government to provide comprehensive answers.

Governments in Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and India have failed to find a solution to the issue of the stateless Rohingya since Phuketwan journalists, working with the South China Morning Post, first revealed the secret ''pushbacks'' from Thailand in January 2009.

Today's claims are likely to provide the newly elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra with an international test of its human rights policies.

Rohingya told the Post that on January 13 they were intercepted by the Thai Navy off the coast near Phuket. They said the group was held in detention for five days, before being towed far out to sea.

"We were given around 250kg of rice, 5kg of dry fish and some vegetables, and some packets of charcoal when we were left at sea," said Sheikh Montaz, 38, who told the Post he came from Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh.

"They gave us only about 100 litres of water. We cried for more water. They did not care.

"We had no matches to light our oven. We just kept praying to Allah to keep us alive."

After more than two weeks adrift, the men were picked up by the Indian coastguard and taken to Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, joining 190 other Rohingya boatpeople who have been in detention since early 2009. 
 
Link:  :http://phuketwan.com/tourism/thais-tortured-rescued-rohingya-boatpeople-14583/
 

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၁၉ ရက္ေန႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုပြဲ ဓာတ္ပံု



ျမန္မာ့ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားက ဒီည ၈း၀၀ နာရီမွာ ထုတ္လႊင့္သြားတ့ဲ ေနျပည္ေတာ္က အ့ံအားသင့္စရာ ေတြ႔ဆုံပဲြကုိ ကူးယူ မွတ္တမ္းတင္ထားတာပါ။ နံရံမွာ ခ်ိတ္ထားတ့ဲပုံက ေခါင္းေပါင္း၊ တုိက္ပုံ ၀တ္ဆင္ထားတ့ဲ ဦးေအာင္ဆန္းရဲ႕ဓာတ္ပုံ ျဖစ္ေနတာကေတာ့ ဒီကေန႔အတြက္ ဒုတိယေျမာက္ အ့ံအားသင့္မႈ ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
email နဲ႔ ေရာက္လာတ့ဲ စာတေစာင္ကုိ ကူးယူ ေဖာ္ျပေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။

"ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ. သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ ေတြ.ျပီး နက္ဖန္ ေနျပည္ ေတာ္ စီးပြားေရးဖိုရမ္တက္မည္

ဒီေန. ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ. ဦးသိိန္းစိန္ ၁ နာရီနီးပါး ေနျပည္ေတာ္ သမၼတအိမ္ေတာ္မွာ ေတြ.ဆံုခဲ.ပါတယ္။ ဦးသိန္းစိန္နဲ.အတူ သမၼတကေတာ္ရယ္ သမၼတရံုးအဖြဲ.ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးတို.လည္း ေတြ.ဆံုပြဲမွာရွိတယ္ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲကေႏြးေႏြးေထြးရွိတယ္လို.သိရပါတယ္။ MRTV က ဒီသတင္းကို ထုတ္လႊင္.ေတာ. “မတူတာေတြဖယ္ျပီး တူတာေတြကို ဘံုအက်ဳိးစီးပြားအတြက္ တြဲျပီး လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမယ္လို.” ေၾကညာသြားပါတယ္။

ေဒၚစုကေနျပည္ေတာ္မွာ လွည္.ၾကည္.တယ္ ဆိုတဲ. သတင္းကေတာ.မမွန္ပါဘူး၊ ဒီညေနျပည္ေတာ္မွာ အိပ္ျပီး နက္ဖန္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္စီးပြားေရးဖိုရမ္ကို ခနတက္မယ္ လို. သိရပါတယ္"



မေန႔ကေတာ့ ပံုက တီဗီက ယူတာမို႔ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း မရွိလွပါဘူး။ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းပံုနဲ႔ ရွင္းလင္းတဲ့ ဓာတ္ပံုကို ေဖာ္ျပေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္။ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံုေအာက္မွာ “အမ်ိဳးသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း” လို႔ စာတန္းထိုးတာေတြ႔ပါတယ္။ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြ ႐ံုးေတြမွာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံု မျမင္ရတာ ၾကာပါၿပီ။ ခုမွျပန္ေတြ႔ရတာ ဆန္းပါတယ္။ ဘာသေဘာလဲဆိုတာေတာ့ သမၼတႀကီးႏွင့္ အေပါင္းအပါမ်ားသာ သိမွာပါပဲ။


ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တက္ေရာက္တဲ့ မေန႔ကပြဲ

အစိုးရရဲ႕ ျမန္မာ့အလင္းသတင္းစာမွာေတာ့ မေန႔က က်င္းပတဲ့ စီးပြားေရး ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး အလုပ္႐ံု ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ ဓာတ္ပံုတခ်ိဳ႕ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ေအပီသတင္းဌာနက တက္လာတဲ့ ဓာတ္ပံုတခ်ိဳ႕ကိုလည္း ေဖာ္ျပလိုက္ပါတယ္။


သမၼတရဲ႕ စီးပြားေရး အႀကံေပး ေဒါက္တာ ဦးျမင့္၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္

သမၼတ မိန္႔ခြန္း

ေဒါက္တာ ဦးျမင့္နဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ တို႔က ရင္းႏွီးၾကပါတယ္ 
 
 
 credit :Irrawaddy Blog
Burma’s Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, met President Thein Sein on Friday, a source in Naypyitaw (New Capital) said. It was said to be the first meeting between the two. Some optimists think this latest meeting as the first signs that it may make way for conciliation talks between the military-backed new government and the key opposition figure.

The key opposition party leader, Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years in custody under the former military junta for confrontation of democracy, arrived in Naypyitaw today to meet President Thein Sein, an ex-general in the military regime.\

The two met at the presidential palace, an official from the Information Ministry informed, who wishes to remain anonymous. The official did not elaborate on what was discussed. The meeting took place between 4 and 5 pm, according to Khun Thar Myint, one of Suu Kyi’s spokespersons.

Burma’s democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, made an appeal on 28 July for political talk and an urgent ceasefire between major ethnic rebel groups – Kachin Independence Organization, Karen National Union, New Mon State Party, Shan State Army – and the government troops.
In her open letter dispatched to the country’s new President Thein Sein, Suu Kyi offered to act as a mediator between the government and the ethnic rebels, and said that the continuous fighting has been damaging the national reconciliation which is so important for the nation that is composed mainly of ethnic populations.
Some analysts consider Thein Sein, who took office on March 30, as a soft-liner in the new government which was surrounded by hardliners opposed to talk with Suu Kyi. The relation between Suu Kyi and the military has long been freezing, except the new government’s engagement with Labour Minister Aung Kyi.
The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi released a statement dated June 20 calling for both the government and the KIO to stop heavy fighting immediately in order to protect people’s lives and properties. It also called for peaceful talks between stakeholders to settle the decade-long political crisis of the country.
Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, center, talks to reporters during her visit to a pagoda along with her youngest son Kim Aris, standing behind her, in Myanmar's ancient historic city of Bagan, Myanmar, Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Pic: AP.
In December 2010, Burmese junta’s two mouthpiece newspapers criticized dissident politicians who support Aung San Suu Kyi’s national reconciliation plan. Burma’s military rulers dismissed the actions of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who tried to revive the spirit of the Panglong Agreement by providing self-reliance to ethnic nationalities, as a “cheap political stunt”.
Burma’s 64-year-old Panglong Agreement has been disregarded by successive Burmese regimes, including the current President Thein Sein government. The Panglong Agreement was signed on Feb. 12, 1947, between General Aung San and leaders of the Chin, Kachin and Shan ethnic groups guaranteeing a genuine federal union of Burma.
Next week, Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, will revisit the country after being banned for more than a year. Quintana last visited Burma in February 2010 but was not allowed to meet the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest at that time. In this imminent trip, Quintana will meet Burma’s Nobel laureate, who was freed from seven years of house arrest soon after the country’s controversial election in November last year.
On August 12, Kyan Hsan, Information Minister of the Thein Sein government, led the first press conference in Naypyitaw. During the press panel, Kyaw Hsan said that even though the NLD is an unlawful party, the government has been managing that matter patiently.
Kyaw Hsan also said the government has been keenly observed to talk with Suu Kyi in accordance with President Thein Sein’s inaugural speech on March 30. He also urged the NLD to reregister as a party if they wished to take part in the affairs of state.
Currently, the NLD refuses to go under the 2008 constitution which has been disregarded by most ethnic armed groups including Kachin, Shan and Karen.
It is obvious that the problem of the 2008 constitution will be the toughest topic to talk about between President Thein Sein and opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi, apart from releasing political prisoners and stopping of ethnic wars.
Moreover, some observers are still doubtful that the meeting between Thein Sein and Suu Kyi might be a time buying tactic since the new government has been trying to gain the ASEAN chair ahead of political reforms.

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