Human rights groups say up to 25 boats of Burmese Muslim Rohingya refugees have set off from Bangladesh since September for Malaysia or Indonesia and may head on to Australia.

Groups of up to 15 refugees may later seek to make the journey onwards to Australia, according to Chris Lewa, Thailand-based co-ordinator for the Arakan Project, a human rights group supporting the Rohingya. 

''In terms of [numbers of] boats I would say Australia for some is a secondary movement. But the boat leaving from Bangladesh in Arakan border are mostly heading to Malaysia,'' Ms Lewa said.

''But we have observed a small number of Rohingya and maybe increase in the future of Rohingya who ... are now moving towards Australia.'' 

Up to 300 Rohingya have made their way to Australia over the past three years, fleeing discrimination and destitution.

Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson says the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, mostly live in Rakhine State in western Burma, but face discrimination and official abuse by Burmese authorities.

''Clearly the situation in northern Rakhine state is horrific. There have been no significant changes in the way they are treated by the Burmese authorities,'' Mr Robertson said.

In Bangladesh there are about 20,000 United Nations-registered Rohingya refugees as well as 400,000 unregistered living in sprawling overcrowded camps.

Recently Bangladesh and Burma agreed to see the Rohingya refugees returned to Burma despite many having no national identity papers.

''It's their discriminatory policies and their abuse of the Rohingya over the years that have created this incentive to flight,'' Mr Robertson said.

He said Australia should press Burma to deal humanely with the Rohingya refugees.

''The Australian Government should be pressing very hard on the Burmese to recognise the fact the Burmese government is in many ways a source of this problem,'' he said.

The Rohingyas' plight comes as Australia's Security Intelligence Organisation denied security clearance to three Rohingya asylum-seekers, despite the men being transferred to refugee centres on the mainland.

The three men had previously lived in Penang, Malaysia.

Ms Lewa said, ''These people were just simple refugees involved in some small business to survive in Malaysia.'' 

The case has been taken up by Amnesty International. 

Credit here

(၂၀၁၁ ခုႏႇစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာထုတ္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးမူ၀ါဒစာေစာင္တြင္ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ကလင္တန္ေရးသားခဲ့သည့္ America’s Pacific Century ေဆာင္းပါးကို ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ဘာသာျပန္ဆို ေဖာ္ျပထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။) 

အီရတ္ႏုိင္ငံရိႇ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ားကို အဆံုးသတ္ရန္ႏႇင့္ အာဖဂန္မႇတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားကို စတင္႐ုပ္သိမ္းရန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနခ်ိန္တြင္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံသည္ အေရးႀကီးသည့္ လမ္းဆံုလမ္းခြ၌ ေရာက္ရိႇေနၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ ျပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဆယ္ႏႇစ္လံုးလံုး အေမရိကန္တို႔အေနျဖင့္ အီရတ္ႏႇင့္အာဖဂန္စစ္ပြဲမ်ားအတြက္ လူ၊ လက္နက္၊ ပစၥည္း၊ ေငြေၾကးႏႇင့္ လုပ္အားမ်ား အႀကီးအက်ယ္ အသံုးျပဳခဲ့ရသည္။ ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္ အေမရိကန္အေနျဖင့္ လာမည့္ ဆယ္ႏႇစ္တာကာလတြင္ အေမရိကန္တို႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈအခန္းက႑ကို ဆက္လက္ထိန္းသိမ္းထား ႏုိင္ရန္၊ အေမရိကန္တို႔၏ အက်ဳိးစီးပြားမ်ားကို ကာကြယ္ရန္ႏႇင့္ အေမရိကန္တို႔၏ စံတန္ဖိုးမ်ားကို ျမႇင့္တင္ရန္အတြက္ အခ်ိန္ႏႇင့္စြမ္းအားမ်ားကို စနစ္တက်၊ ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ အသံုးျပဳႏုိင္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္ေနၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ အေမရိကန္အစိုးရမ်ားအတြက္ လာမည့္ဆယ္ႏႇစ္ကာလအတြင္း အေရး ႀကီးဆံုးလုပ္ငန္းတာ၀န္တစ္ခုမႇာ အာရႇ- ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသတြင္ သံတမန္ေရးအရလည္းေကာင္း၊ စီးပြားေရးအရလည္းေကာင္း၊ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာအရလည္းေကာင္း အားသြန္ခြန္စိုက္ ပါ၀င္လုပ္ေဆာင္ဖို႔ျဖစ္သည္။  

အာရႇ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသသည့္ ကမၻာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးဇာတ္ခံုတြင္ အေရးပါသည့္ ဇာတ္ေကာင္ျဖစ္လာေနသည္။ အိႏိၵယတိုက္ငယ္မႇ အေမရိကန္ အေနာက္ဘက္ကမ္းေျခအထိ က်ယ္ျပန္႔သည့္ေဒသတြင္ သမုဒၵရာႏႇစ္စင္းႏႇင့္ ကမၻာ့လူဦးေရထက္၀က္ခန္႔ရိႇၿပီး ထြန္းသစ္စ အင္အားႏုိင္ငံမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ တ႐ုတ္၊ အိႏိၵယႏႇင့္ အင္ဒိုနီးရႇားတို႔ တည္ရိႇေနသည္။ ထိုေဒသတြင္ပင္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ အေရးပါေသာ မဟာမိတ္ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားလည္း ရိႇေနသည္။ ေဒသတြင္းႏုိင္ငံမ်ားကလည္း ေဒသတည္ၿငိမ္ေရးႏႇင့္ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရး ကို အေထာက္အကူျပဳႏုိင္မည့္ လံုျခံဳေရး၊ စီးပြားေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကို တည္ေထာင္ေနၾကၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုအေျခအေနမ်ိဳးတြင္ အာရႇ-ပစိဖိတ္ ေဒသေရးရာမ်ားတြင္ အေမရိကန္က ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးသည္ မလုပ္မျဖစ္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမည့္ လုပ္ငန္းျဖစ္ေနၿပီျဖစ္၏။ 

ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း အတၱလန္တစ္ သမုဒၵရာကိုျဖတ္ၿပီး ေရရႇည္တည့္တံ့ခုိင္မာၿပီး အက်ိဳးရိႇတဲ့ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းေတြ၊ မိတ္ဖက္ဆက္ဆံမႈေတြ တည္ေဆာက္ႏုိင္ခဲ့သလို အာရႇ - ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသမႇာလည္း အဲဒီလို လံုျခံဳေရး၊ စီးပြားေရးဆုိင္ရာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြကို တည္ေဆာက္ၿပီး အ က်ိဳးေက်းဇူးကို ခံစားႏုိင္ေအာင္လုပ္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္ေနၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ အီရတ္ႏႇင့္အာဖဂန္နုိင္ငံမ်ားမႇာ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းစအဆင့္သာရိႇေနၿပီး အေမရိကန္ျပည္တြင္းမႇာ စီးပြားေရး အက်ပ္အတည္းျဖင့္ ရင္ဆုိင္ေနရခ်ိန္တြင္ အေမရိကန္အေနျဖင့္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာေရးရာမ်ားတြင္ ပါ၀င္ပတ္ သက္မႈမ်ားကို ေလ်ာ့ခ်ၿပီး ျပည္တြင္းေရးကိုသာ အာ႐ံုစိုက္ရန္ တိုက္တြန္းမႈမ်ား လည္း ေပၚေပါက္လ်က္ရိႇသည္။ ထိုသူမ်ား၏ ခံစားခ်က္ကို နားလည္ေပးႏုိင္ေသာ္လည္း ထိုကဲ့သို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုမႈမ်ားမႇာ ေခတ္ေနာက္ျပန္ဆြဲေနေသာ အယူအဆမ်ားသာျဖစ္ေသာ ေၾကာင့္ လက္ခံရန္မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေပ။ ႏုိင္ငံတကာတြင္ အေမရိကန္အတြက္ ေစ်းကြက္သစ္မ်ားရႇာေဖြျခင္း၊ အဏုျမဴလက္နက္ မျပန္႔ပြားေရးအတြက္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ျခင္းႏႇင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ကုန္သြယ္ေရေၾကာင္းသြားလာခြင့္ရရိႇေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းစေသာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအားလံုးသည္ အေမရိကန္ ႏုိင္ငံလုံျခံဳေရးႏႇင့္ ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအတြက္ အဓိကက်ေသာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားျဖစ္သည္။ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ႏႇစ္ေျခာက္ဆယ္လံုးလံုး ျပည္တြင္းေရးသာ အာရံုစိုက္ရန္ဆိုသည့္ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္မ်ားကို ပယ္ခ်ခဲ့ၿပီးျဖစ္ရာ ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္လည္း အလားတူ ပယ္ခ်ရဦးမည္သည္ျဖစ္သည္။ 

လက္ရိႇအခ်ိန္တြင္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာက အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ႏႇင့္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႏုိင္စြမ္းတို႔ကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ အာရႇေဒသတြင္လည္း အေမရိကန္အေနျဖင့္ အာရႇတိုက္တြင္ ခုိင္မာသည့္ စီးပြားေရးႏႇင့္ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာ ရင္းႏႇီးျမႇဳပ္ႏႇံမႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ စိတ္ပိုင္းျဖတ္ထားျခင္း ရိႇမရိႇႏႇင့္ ထိုဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ကို လက္ေတြ႔ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ႏုိင္စြမ္း ရိႇ မရိႇ ဆိုသည့္ ေမးခြန္းထုတ္လ်က္ရိႇေနၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ မိမိတို႔ အေနျဖင့္ အာရႇေဒသတြင္ ဆက္လက္ရိႇေနမည္၊ ဆက္လက္ပါ၀င္ႏုိင္စြမ္းရိႇသည္ကို သက္ေသျပရန္ လိုေနျပီျဖစ္သည္။ 

သမၼတအိုဘားမားအေနျဖင့္ အာရႇတိုက္၏ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈႏႇင့္ ႏိုးၾကားတက္ႂကြေနမႈကို အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ စီးပြားေရးႏႇင့္ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာ အက်ဳိးစီးပြားမ်ားႏႇင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ႏုိင္ရန္ ဦးစားေပး လုပ္ေဆာင္လ်က္ရိႇေပသည္။ စီးပြားေရးဘက္ကၾကည့္မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ပြင့္လင္းသည့္ အာရႇေစ်းကြက္သည္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံအတြက္ မၾကံဳစဖူးထူးကဲသည့္ ရင္းႏီႇးျမႇဳပ္ႏႇံမႈ၊ ကုန္သြယ္မႈႏႇင့္ နည္းပညာအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ေပးမည္ျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ အေမရိကန္စီးပြားေရး နလံထူမႈသည္ အေမရိကန္ကုမၸဏီမ်ားက အာရႇတိုက္မႇ လ်င္ျမန္စြာတုိးပြားေနသည့္ စားသံုးသူမ်ားထံသို႔ ထိုးေဖာက္ေစ်းကြက္ရႇာႏိုင္မႈအေပၚတြင္ မူတည္ေနသည္။ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာအရၾကည့္လွ်င္ အာရႇ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသတြင္ တည္ၿငိမ္ေအးခ်မ္းမႈရိႇေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ျခင္းသည္ ေတာင္တ႐ုတ္ပင္လယ္အေရး၊ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားအေရးကိစၥမ်ားတြင္ တိုးတက္မႈရရိႇေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရာ၌ အေထာက္အကူ ရရိႇမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ 

တစ္ဖက္ကလည္း အေမရိကန္အတြက္ အာရႇက အေရးပါသကဲ့သို႔ အာရႇအတြက္လည္း အေမရိကန္က အေရးပါေနသည္။ ေခတ္သစ္သမိုင္းတြင္ ယခုအခ်ိန္သည္ အာရႇက အေမရိကန္၏ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈႏႇင့္ စီးပြားေရး အင္အားကို အလိုအပ္ဆံုးအခ်ိန္ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ အေမရိကန္သည္ အာရႇေဒသတြင္ နယ္ေျမရယူလိုျခင္းမရိႇဘဲ ဘံုအက်ိဳးစီးပြားအတြက္သာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ေသာ၊ ေဒသတြင္း က်ယ္ျပန္႔သည့္ မဟာမိတ္မ်ားရိႇၿပီး ျဖစ္ေသာ တစ္ခုတည္းေသာ အင္အားႀကီးႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏႇင့္ မဟာမိတ္မ်ားက အာရႇတိုက္လံုျခံဳေရးအတြက္ ဆယ္စုႏႇစ္ေပါင္းမ်ား စြာ တာ၀န္ယူခဲ့ၿပီး အာရႇေဒသ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအတြက္ လိုအပ္သည့္ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ အာရႇေဒသကို စီးပြားေရးဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေအာင္ ကူညီေပးျခင္းျဖင့္ သန္းေထာင္ႏႇင့္ခ်ီသည့္ျပည္သူမ်ားကို ကမၻာ့စီးပြားေရးႏႇင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မိေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးႏုိင္ခဲ့သည္။ အေမရိကန္သည္ အာရႇေဒသ၏ အဓိက ကုန္သြယ္ဘက္ႏႇင့္ ရင္းႏီႇးျမႇဳပ္ႏႇံသူျဖစ္ျပီး အာရႇေဒသမႇ ေက်ာင္းသားသံုးသိန္းခြဲေက်ာ္သည္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ပညာသင္ၾကားလ်က္ရိႇသည္။ 

အိႏိၵယတိုက္ငယ္မႇ အေမရိကန္ အေနာက္ဘက္ကမ္းေျခအထိ က်ယ္ျပန္႔သည့္ေဒသတြင္ သမုဒၵရာႏႇစ္စင္းႏႇင့္ ကမၻာ့လူဦးေရထက္၀က္ခန္႔ရိႇၿပီး ထြန္းသစ္စ အင္အားႏုိင္ငံမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ တ႐ုတ္၊ အိႏိၵယႏႇင့္ အင္ဒိုနီးရႇားတို႔ တည္ရိႇေနသည္။ ထိုေဒသတြင္ပင္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ အေရးပါေသာ မဟာမိတ္ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားလည္း ရိႇေနသည္ . . . 

သမၼတအိုဘားမားက အေမရိကန္၏ ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသဆုိင္ရာ ဦးေဆာင္မႈအခန္းက႑ကို ထိန္းသိမ္းႏုိင္ေရးအတြက္ အစဥ္တစိုက္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနၿပီး ထိုလုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္တြင္ အစိုးရဌာနအသီးသီးက ဘက္စံုေထာင့္စုံမႇ ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရိႇသည္။ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးျဖစ္သူ မိမိအေနျဖင့္ အစဥ္အလာကို ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ၿပီး ၀န္ႀကီး၏ ပထမဆံုးခရီးစဥ္အျဖစ္ အာရႇေဒသကို ေရြးခ်ယ္ခဲ့သည္။ ထုိအခ်ိန္မႇစၿပီး အာရႇေဒသသို႔ ခုႏႇစ္ႀကိမ္ လာေရာက္လည္ပတ္ႏုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသတြင္း လ်င္ျမန္စြာေျပာင္းလဲေနမႈမ်ားကို မ်က္ျမင္ကိုယ္ေတြ႔ ျဖစ္ခဲ့႐ံုမက အာရႇ - ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသ၏ အနာဂတ္ႏႇင့္အေမရိကန္၏ အနာဂတ္ ခြဲျခားမရေအာင္ ဆက္စပ္ေနသည္ကို လည္းနားလည္ႏုိင္ခဲ့သည္။ တကယ္ေတာ့ အာရႇ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသဆုိင္ရာ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာေျပာင္းလဲမႈသည္ ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈက႑ကို ဆက္လက္ထိန္းသိမ္း ထားရန္ဆိုသည့္ ရည္မႇန္းခ်က္ကို အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္လိုက္ျခင္းပင္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ထိုလုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္ ေအာင္ျမင္ေစရန္အတြက္ ကြန္ဂရက္တြင္ ပါတီႏႇစ္ခုလံုးက ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကရန္ လိုအပ္ေပသည္။ မည္သည့္ပါတီက သမၼတျဖစ္ေစ၊ လာမည့္ဆယ္စုႏႇစ္မ်ားစြာအတြင္း ဤ ေဒသဆုိင္ရာ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာကုိ စဥ္ဆက္မျပတ္ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္သြားရမည္သာ ျဖစ္သည္။ 

အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ အာရႇ - ပစိဖိတ္ဆုိင္ရာမဟာဗ်ဴဟာက ဘာလဲဟုေမးလာလ်င္ ပထမဆံုးအခ်က္မႇာ သံတမန္ေရးရာအရ ေရႇ႕တန္းက်က် ပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္မႈကို စဥ္ဆက္မျပတ္ အသံုးျပဳျခင္းဟုပင္ ဆိုရေပမည္။ ထိုမူ၀ါဒအရ အေမရိကန္အဆင့္ျမင့္ အရာရိႇႀကီးမ်ား၊ ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးဆုိင္ရာ ကြၽမ္းက်င္သူမ်ား၊ ဌာနဆိုင္ရာအဖြဲ႔မ်ားႏႇင့္ ေဒသအတြင္းရိႇ အေမရိကန္ သံတမန္မ်ားသည္ ေဒသအတြင္း ေနရာအႏႇံ႔ျဖန္႔ၾကက္ထိေတြ႔မႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမည္ ျဖစ္ သည္။ အေမရိကန္မဟာဗ်ဴဟာသည္ အာရႇေဒသတြင္း လ်င္ျမန္စြာ ေျပာင္းလဲျဖစ္ေပၚေနမႈမ်ားကို မျပတ္ထည့္သြင္းစဥ္းစားၿပီး အေျခအေနႏႇင့္ လိုက္ေလ်ာညီေထြစြာ ေျပာင္းလဲေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုကဲ့သို႔ ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ရန္အတြက္ အေမရိကန္တို႔၏ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာသည္ ေအာက္ပါအဓိက လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ေျခာက္ရပ္ကို အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ 

(က) ႏႇစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုျခံဳေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ားကို ပိုမိုအားေကာင္းေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္း။

(ခ) တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ ေဒသတြင္း အင္အားႀကီးႏုိင္ငံမ်ားႏႇင့္ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ားကို တိုးခ်ဲ႕ျခင္း။

(ဂ) ေဒသတြင္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ားပါ၀င္သည့္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားႏႇင့္ ထိေတြ႔ဆက္ဆံျခင္း။

(ဃ) ကုန္သြယ္မႈႏႇင့္ ရင္းႏႇီးျမႇဳပ္ႏႇံမႈမ်ားကို တိုးခ်ဲ႕ျခင္း။

(င) အေမရိကန္တပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ား ပိုမိျုဖန္႔ၾကက္ႏုိင္မည့္ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ား တိုးျမႇင့္ျခင္း။ 

(စ) ဒီမိုကေရစီႏႇင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ျမႇင့္တင္ကာကြယ္ျခင္း။ 

အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၏ ထူးျခားေသာ ပထ၀ီအေနအထားအရ အေမရိကန္သည္ အတၲလန္တစ္ အင္အားႀကီးႏုိင္ျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ ပစိဖိတ္အင္အားႀကီးႏိုင္ငံလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ ဥေရာပမႇာ ေရရႇည္ တည္တံ့ခုိင္မာၿပီး အက်ဳိးရိႇတဲ့ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းေတြ၊ မိတ္ဖက္ဆက္ဆံမႈေတြ တည္ေဆာက္ႏုိင္ခဲ့သလို ဂုဏ္ယူဖြယ္ရာရလဒ္မ်ားလည္း ရရိႇခဲ့သည္။ ယခုအခါ ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသတြင္ ဥေရာပကဲ့သို႔ပင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အခ်ိန္ၾကၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ 

(ဆက္လက္ေဖာ္ျပပါမည္)

By မေအးေအးမာ- ဗီြအိုေအသတင္း

မတရားမလုပ္ၾကပါနဲ႔ တရားေတာ္ (ေရႊည၀ါဆရာေတာ္) (အသံဖိုင္) 

Credit here

The report said, the head of Monastery in Myanmar had asked and seek the consent of the government and he is very optimistic that they would be allowed to bring the Dalai Lama in their country.

The probability of acquiring a visa for the highly respected spiritual leader of Tibet is restricted since China is opposing the visit of Dalai Lama to any Southeast Asian countries. 

It is evidently clear that the reason of China for raising objection of the visit is due to the political exposure that would lead to international campaign for Tibetan independence, said in a news report.

The supposed plan to visit South Africa in October by the Dalai Lama did not pushed through after the request for visa was denied.

South Africa and Myanmar on the other hand developed a closer relationship to China with regards to the investments and diplomatic ties and this could be the reason for Myanmar to hold back its decision.

As this developed, fans of Dalai Lama where not discouraged about the issue and still hoping that he would be able come to pay a visit in their homeland someday.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s news report, during the World Buddhist Summit of 2004 in Myanmar, the Dalai Lama wasn’t able to attend. But maybe in the coming years to come if Myanmar would host again the Buddhist Summit maybe then that the Dalai Lama can be permitted to take a visit since his recent reforms has taken its toll on positive views and has been an eye opener to other nations.

Involving China in as far as allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Myanmar will take complications and will further the procedure.

Ko Ko Hlaing, an advisor to the Myanmars’ president told the Wall Street Journal there are no issues concerning on religion’s point of view but solely contentious on politics related issues.

Britain's Hague announces trip to Myanmar in January 

Photo: AP 

Burma democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi (R), US special envoy to Myanmar Derek Mitchell (C), and US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner meet the media after a meeting, in Rangoon, Burma, November 2011. (file photo) 

The U.S. special envoy to Burma says Washington's improved relations with the southeast Asian country should not be seen as a threat to China.

Derek Mitchell told reporters Tuesday at the end of a visit to Beijing that the U.S. does not intend for its relationship with Burma to have any "negative influence on Burma-China relations." 

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a landmark visit to Burma, where she said the U.S. would consider lifting sanctions if Burma's new nominally civilian government continues to make political reforms.

During the visit, a state-run Chinese newspaper said China is open to Burma seeking closer ties to the West, but not at the expense of Beijing's interests. 

Some have speculated that Clinton's visit was meant to persuade Burma to align itself with the U.S. instead of its longtime ally China.

For the past two decades, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on the former Burmese military government because of its harsh human rights abuses, including military operations against ethnic groups and the jailing of up to 2,000 political prisoners.

The new Burmese government has made a series of political reforms in the past year, releasing about 200 political prisoners, easing some press restrictions and opening a dialogue with some of its critics, including pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. 

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.

Credit here

Written by: Kanbawza Win

Sanctions and other punitive actions on Burma should be maintained by the US and Western nations for the simple reason that the current regime is not interested in political solutions and is mounting an all out war against the Kachin ethnic nationalities, practicing ethnic cleansing and committing gross human rights violations on all other ethnic nationalities. It even continues to use chemical weapons to wipe out this particular ethnic race. One could not comprehend of why there is a cacophony of calls to drop the sanctions and let Burma into the community of civilized nations when it is still a rogue state.

By whatever barometer it measured, be it a capitalist or a communist, the DNA of the Burmese regime is fundamentally brutal and one should mot reward such a capricious regime just for making some superficial changes as releasing just a mere one tenth of the political prisoners and continue to lie the very concept of truth by uttering that there is no political prisoners. Maintaining its rapist army and relying and encouraging the narco related companies to run the economy, not to mention child soldiers, exporting refugees and killings its own people..

The crux of the Burmese Crisis is that its army better known as Myanmar Tatmadaw wants the Myanmar race to be a perpetual colonial power over the ethnic nationalities and not the Pyidoungsu Myanmar Naing Ngan the Union of Burma, which the architect of modern Burma Bogyole Aung San envisaged. The Tatmadaw wants to reign supreme in perpetuity. What more proof is wanted when you join the army, you can never resign, indicating its attempt to hold perpetual control and attract the young people as “The Triumphant Elites of the Future.” a motto that hung on the gates of the Burma Military Academy. Congressman Joseph R.Pitts remarked that “The brutality of Burma’s generals against the ethnic minorities has not stopped, even during this time when they are allegedly making democratic reforms. It has used the advanced light helicopters bought from India on the ethnic nationalities.”

Obama’s willingness to promote democracy around the world – a mission that hark back to Woodrow Wilson days fell short when George W. Bush took on to Iraq, is now back on its track, complimented with its foreign-policy move that the US is a Pacific power and will act with forcefulness required of a superpower’s presence. In this scenario, Burma is but one nation now wary of too close an embrace by an ambitious and aggressive China, and anxious for a balancing relationship with America. Obama’s America needs to add Burma to a list of countries – Vietnam, Philippines, India, Australia, and most of the ASEAN countries that recently sought stronger ties with the United States.

Lying next to India and under the giant belly of China, Burma would be a key plank in the US strategy to reassert influence in Asia, hence the visit of Hillary Clinton to Burma. President Obama, who grew up in Indonesia, seems to understand that the wielding of power in Asia isn’t always the visible kind – besides guns, ships, money, trade, natural resources, norco drugs (in Burma and Mexico) not to count the psyche and rationale of the generals are included in the deciding factors. Perhaps, Burma will test American concepts of power. Two decades of US-led economic sanctions against Burma have done little to loosen the military’s grip or to help the beleaguered the ethnic nationalities.

Factually, t he US has looked to Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as the champion of democracy and rights in Burma. Obama called Ms. Suu Kyi by phone to gain her approval for Mrs. Clinton’s visit. But the US also needs to see more of where Suu Kyi looks for her legitimacy. It isn’t just enough that she is the daughter of Burma’s founder or that she helped rally protesters in the 1988 demonstrations, house arrest for one and half decade and spends time as she can with the behind-the-scenes power in Burma i.e., the Buddhist monks. The much-revered monks were on the front lines of the 1988 protests and again in 2007.

Hundreds, if not thousands have been killed or jailed. Burma’s robed clergy play a powerful role as stewards of a common faith for the Burmese majority. In Burmese history, they have often bestowed or withdrawn legitimacy to a ruler. Their power flows from their followers’ reverence for the way monks display spiritual qualities, such as compassion, humility, and pacifism. The monks’ daily walks among the people to collect alms helps make them moral leaders and identify themselves with the people. That compels the military to fear their influence – and to co-opt or suppress them. China now on the defensive sees the writings on the wall and had sent a Buddhist relic – an alleged tooth of the Buddha – to Burma in November. The tooth was carried by an elephant in high-profile processions in various cities, which delighted the strong man Than Shwe who pulls the strings from behind. It was under his directions that the ruling party and military MPs oppose the adoption of releasing the political prisoners and instead introduce new restrictive laws designed to limit political participation. This is just but one example and hence what rational can we consider to lift the Western Sanctions.

Knowledgeable Burmese who have contact with the regime had warned that far from true changes what the regime really wanted was to follow a path of development perfected by China. The Chinese model, at first glance, is an attractive one for repressive, autocratic leaders: by applying one foot on an economic accelerator and another on a political brake, a regime can bring a better standard of living to citizens without threatening its grip on power. The story of China’s rise over the past two decades has been one of both exuberant growth rates and non-existent political change. The regime is stealthily following this path without much ado.

But the crucial difference between Burma and China is that the Chinese government has unleashed economic reforms that have enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Around 130 million of China’s 1.3 billion citizens may live under the official poverty line (an assessment of $1 a day, which is lower than the World Bank’s $1.25 a day), but one-third of Burma’s 50 million-plus people subsist in poverty. In a single generation, the economic trajectory of many Chinese lives has gone from grim to upbeat.

Elderly Burmese, however, remember how their country used to be one of Asia’s richest and wonder when the real change will come.But the Burmese people are committed to the superiority of the Western-style democracy rather than the proud Chinese whose 5, 000 year old civilization construe that a wise and benevolent ruler with a mandate from heaven. No doubt the new quasi civilian administration of Thein Sein can bring much needed political and social reforms only if he managed to throw off the shackles of Than Shwe whose right hand man Tin Aung Myint Oo is the Vice President. So actions should remain in place as long as the semi-authoritarian regime controls the legislative, administrative, and judicial functions of the new government.

On the other hand the regime is cynically observing the downfall of dictatorships around the globe and is moving before Burma’s long despotic reign comes to the same ugly end. The pragmatic reason for this sudden accommodation with the US is because of the bad breath of the Chinese. From their perspective Burma is placed between the devil and the deep sea and obviously if given a choice they prefer America. These hybrid military-civilian rulers are growing increasingly wary of Beijing’s geopolitical sway—not to mention China’s economic dominance over Burma’s natural resources. No doubt they are endeavoring to find a counter-balance to China. Hence an American charm approach of market reforms, release of political prisoner, stop an all out war to the ethnic nationalities compound with modicum of political liberalizations, should be enforced without any compromise.

Surely the new US engagement policy in the Southeast Asia in general, and Burma in particular, is based on a smart public diplomacy and must be calculated a policy of fairness that support the existing foundation to win the hearts and minds of the people to utilize its role in the region. The US should be highly sensitive to the development of a wider East Asian community, and its policy should not only deal with governments only but the people in the region. It must be people-centered, people-driven and people-oriented that sends an important message to the world that people in the region have the right to freedom and the right to respond and interpret what is understood as fair and unfair as appropriate to them. The people of Burma will surely agree with the WikiLeaks of how US Charge d’Affaires Larry Dinger sent a cable to Washington, “The most senior generals are looking for an escape strategy, they are getting old and want an assurances that, they and their families will retain their assets and will not be prosecuted”.

Even though “Freedom from Fear” was written by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the people of Burma, unlike the Arabs still could not conceptualise that this freedom from fear was the basic human rights. The story of the Tunisian vegetable vendor so humiliated by police that he lit himself on fire, showing the world that his right to human dignity was more precious to him than life itself was not much admired in Burma, even though Phone Maung episode of 1988 sparked that nation’s protests is still fresh on them. Compared with those of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen etc. Burma’s revolution has not been so successful because its soldiers are willing to shoot demonstrators and the monks. For now, the Burmese must continue to “live like free people in an un-free nation,” and perhaps wait for a new generation to achieve liberty. Then and only then, America should think of releasing sanctions.

Credit here

To mark International Human Rights Day, people from the Burmese community, North Korean community and many supporters are standing together to call for justice and freedom in both countries. Burma Campaign UK and Christian Solidarity Worldwide have organised a demonstration today in front of the Chinese embassy in order to ask the Chinese government to use their influence on both countries responsibly.

Since last year’s so-called election in Burma, many people consider that the country’s situation has improved and changed. In reality, little has changed, considering that there are more rapes, murders and conflicts in ethnic areas. Most political prisoners remain in prison.

In North Korea, there are more than 200,000 political prisoners locked away in several prison camps all over the country with terrible conditions and slave labour. Many children have been born in those prison camps and branded as criminals. North Korea is known as the country with the world’s worst human rights record.

“It is very important to remember that there are many human rights abuses happening in Burma and North Korea. People in both countries have known little freedom and basic human rights. The Chinese government should recognise those facts and use their influence responsibly to stop those terrible human rights abuses,” said Wai Hnin, Campaigns Officer from Burma Campaign UK.

Benedict Rogers, East Asia Team Leader at Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said, "The human rights violations perpetrated by the regimes in North Korea and Burma rank among the worst in the world. Both regimes stand accused of crimes against humanity. For that reason, as we remember the 63rd anniversary of the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international community should take action to end the reign of terror in North Korea and Burma, seek the release of all prisoners of conscience, an end to slave labour, torture, rape and killings in both countries. China’s influence on both North Korea and Burma is significant, and therefore we are appealing to China to use its influence responsibly, and urge both regimes to stop their crimes against humanity."

HRDP 

သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ အစိုးရသစ္ လက္ထက္တြင္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ား ယခင္အစိုးရေဟာင္းနည္းတူ ဆက္လက္က်ဴးလြန္ေနလွ်က္ရွိေၾကာင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကာကြယ္ျမႇင့္တင္သူမ်ားကြန္ယက္ (HRDP) က ေျပာသည္။ 

ဧရာဝတီတို္င္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ဘိုကေလးၿမိဳ႕ေပၚတြင္ HRDP အဖြဲ႕မွ ယေန႔က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္သည့္ (၆၃) ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေန႔ အထိမ္းအမွတ္အခမ္းအနား သဘာပတိမိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္ ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔ ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ 

“ယခုက ဒီမိုကေရစီစနစ္လို႔ ေျပာေနတဲ့အတြက္ ဘယ္လိုပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ဒီမိုကေရစီစနစ္ဟာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို လက္ခံရပါမယ္၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးရွိသင့္တယ္၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တာေတြ မရွိဘူးဆိုရင္ ဒီမိုကေရစီအစိုးရ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ဘူးလို႔ ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္” ဟု အခမ္းအနားသဘာပတိအျဖစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္သူ ဦးေမာင္ေမာင္ေလးက ေျပာသည္။ 

အစိုးရသစ္တရပ္အေနျဖင့္ ယခင္အစိုးလက္ထပ္ကတည္းက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း ရပ္တန္႔ကာ ေနာက္ထပ္ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားမျဖစ္ေပၚေစရန္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို အသိမွတ္ျပဳရန္လိုအပ္ၿပီး လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္သည့္ ကိစၥရပ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ကာကြယ္ေပးရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဦးေမာင္ေမာင္ေလးက သဘာပတိမိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္ ထည့္သြင္းေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။ 

“လယ္ယာေျမကိစၥဆိုရင္ ႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ အဝွမ္းမွာ နည္းမ်ဳိးစံုနဲ႔ လယ္ယာေျမေတြ သိမ္းပိုက္ခံေနရပါတယ္။ အလုပ္သမားေတြ နားရက္မရွိေအာင္ အလုပ္လုပ္ေနရတာေတြ၊ ဆင္းရဲဒုကၡေတြဟာလည္း အစိုးရေဟာင္းလက္ထက္နဲ႔ သိပ္မကြာေသးပါဘူး။ နယ္စပ္ေဒသေတြက တိုက္ပြဲေတြကေန ဒုကၡသည္ ေသာင္းနဲ႔ခ်ီေမြးထုတ္ေပးေနတာလည္း ျငင္းမရပါဘူး” ဟု ေျပာသည္။ 

ထို႔အျပင္ အေျခခံလူတန္းစားမ်ားအတြက္ ဥပေဒအကာအကြယ္သည္ အေရးတႀကီး လိုအပ္သည့္အျပင္ တရားစီရင္ေရးကိစၥမွာလည္း ဥပေဒရဲ႕ ကာကြယ္ဖိႏွိပ္မႈသည္ စိုးရိမ္စရာေကာင္းလွသည့္ အေျခအေနတြင္ ရွိေနေသးေၾကာင္း သူက ဆက္ေျပာသည္။ 

HRDP အေနျဖင့္ ထုိအခမ္းအနားမ်ဳိးကုိ ၂၀၀၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္က်ေရာက္သည့္ (၅၈) ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေန႔မွ စတင္က်င္းပလာခဲ့ရာ ယခုအခါ ဆဌမအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ က်င္းပျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဦးျမင့္ေအးမွာ စစ္အစုိးရလက္ထက္ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္မွ စ၍ ယေန႔အခ်ိန္ထိ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ထဲတြင္ မတရားဖမ္းဆီးထားျခင္း ခံေနရသည္။ 

ယခုလက္ရွိ အစိုးရသစ္လက္ထက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ရွိသူ၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ေဆြးေႏြးစည္း႐ံုးလႈပ္ရွားသူေတြကို ရာဇဝတ္ပုဒ္မမ်ားတပ္ကာ ေထာင္ခ်ထားမႈ၊ ကေလးစစ္သားအသံုးျပဳေနမႈမ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားတြင္ ထိုးစစ္ဆင္ေနျခင္းမ်ားသည္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို မေလးစားရာေရာက္ေၾကာင္း HRDP ေျပာေရးဆုိခြင့္ရွိသူ ကိုေစာဗန္ကူးက ေျပာသည္။ 

“၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ထဲမွာ ကေလးစစ္သားအမႈ ၄၂ မႈရွိခဲ့တယ္၊ အဲဒီထဲက ကေလးတခ်ဳိ႕ပဲ ျပန္လြတ္လာေသးတ၊ လူထုေတြၾကား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ အသိပညာေတြ ဆက္လက္ျပန္႔ပြားဖို႔၊ တည္ၿငိမ္းေအးခ်မ္းတဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏိုင္ငံ တည္ေဆာက္ေနတယ္ဆိုရင္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဟာ ဒဂၤါတျပားရဲ႕ ေခါင္း ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ပန္းျဖစ္ေနတဲ့အတြက္ ခြဲလို႔မရဘူး” ဟု သူက ဆက္ေျပာသည္။ 

အဆုိပါ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေန႔အခမ္းအနားကုိ ဘိုကေလးၿမိဳ႕၊ အမွတ္ (၄) ရပ္ကြက္၊ (၄) လမ္းတြင္ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး အခမ္းအနားသို႔ ပရိသတ္အျဖစ္ မႏၱေလးတိုင္း၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္၊ မေကြတိုင္းႏွင့္ ပဲခူးတိုင္းတုိ႔မွ HRDP အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးစိတ္၀င္စားသူ ေဒသခံျပည္သူ ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ 

ယေန႔ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ အခမ္းအနားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ တစံုတရာ ေႏွာင့္ယွက္ဟန္႔တားမႈမ်ား မရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

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Teknaf, Bangladesh: The female Rohingya communities from northern Arakan who travel for medical treatment, are facing more difficult in Bangladesh than Burma, said a female patient from Maungdaw.

“We are checking whole body including female private area by Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) female staff while entering to Bangladesh entry point (Teknaf Land port) and Dum Dum Meah check post, for searching drug (Yaba) which come from Burma to Bangladesh).” 

“The Burmese authority didn’t search like this, but the authority searches the female passengers, not private area. If the authority got information, they search everywhere they suspect.”

“Are all the Rohingya communities are drug smugglers, so the authority is going to check all the people who enter the entry point?”

The custom and Immigration officers are also collecting money from Rohingya community who enter into Bangladesh, it is fee or extortion, said a trader who always visit Bangladesh for his business.

“The officers are collecting 200 taka from a passenger while reporting and to get entry permit on their passport.”

While we are going back to our home land, the BGB female personnel again check as same as entry time. Why it is also for drug checking?, said the female patient from Maungdaw.

“BGB female personnel took secretly Taka 10,000 from a female Rohingya from Maungdaw while they were checking when the female didn’t find her money; the passengers asked the BGB personnel to return the money. Then the BGB personnel return the money. It is happen on December 2 at the evening,” said a female passenger from Maungdaw.

“The checking was only for harassment of the Rohingya community who had come to Bangladesh for medical treatment where they are not getting any medical facility in their home land and are not able to travel to Akyab for restriction of movement where they can get the medical facility. It is the life of Rohingya in northern Arakan – no education, no medical, no job, can’t able to marriage freely, no religious freedom, no permit to travel one place to another, force looting their foods grain and etc.”

Credit : Kaladan Press

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By Doug Bandow

 

Assessing the situation in Burma after the Clinton mission.

Dwight Eisenhower went to Korea and Hillary Clinton went to Burma. True, it's not quite the same. Nevertheless, Clinton recent trip was almost as dramatic, coming after Washington's lengthy campaign to isolate the brutal military regime that has been running the impoverished nation since 1962.

Despite well-founded skepticism of the commitment to reform in Naypyidaw -- a city created at great cost apparently in the belief that locating the capital far away from the people would help protect the regime -- President Barack Obama was right to suggest that "After years of darkness, we've seen flickers of progress." The Clinton visit may help spur a reform process capable of ultimately transforming Burma, also known as Myanmar.

There long has been no hope. Although the junta's membership changed over time, its deadly policies did not vary. With equal ruthlessness the regime suppressed the urban democracy movement, symbolized by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and battled ethnic guerrillas, such as the Chin, Karen, Shan, and Wa, seeking autonomy in the east. The result has been thousands of political prisoners, hundreds of thousands of refugees in bordering countries, and millions of displaced people within Burma. Tens of millions of Burmese languish in poverty.

The U.S. and Europe tried economic sanctions, but China, India, and most other Asian states felt no compunction about dealing with Naypyidaw. Human rights be damned when there are profits to be made. While the Burmese people suffered, well-connected Burmese elites prospered. And the regime went on doing what it did best: killing, imprisoning, punishing, and oppressing.

Now come "flickers of progress." The election last fall was a fraud, and the new "civilian" government initially seemed little better. However, in recent months some political prisoners have been freed, controls over the media and labor unions have been relaxed, Suu Kyi has met with government officials, and restrictions on her party have been lifted. Equally significant, Burmese leaders seem increasingly nervous about Beijing's tight embrace.

Nevertheless, the reforms might be a façade. And the latest engagement boomlet might fade as have others in the past. Still, so long as the two countries are talking, Washington should promote democracy and individual liberty. And the administration should emphasize Naypyidaw's obligation to end the army's vicious military campaigns against ethnic groups seeking autonomy and related attacks on religious freedom.

Suu Kyi's activities long have captured the West's attention. And she is a worthy symbol of the Burmese people's desperate struggle for liberty. But a variety of ethnic groups have been battling even longer for the autonomy promised them when Britain released its colony to independence. Some, such as the Chin, Karen, Karenni, and Naga, are heavily or largely Christian. While the junta's repression of urban democracy protestors has been brutal, its campaign against ethnic freedom forces has been murderous. The army has routinely conscripted civilians as porters, killed and raped ethnic peoples, destroyed villages and displaced residents, and sown land-mines to create territorial dead zones. Documenting Naypyidaw's depredations against just the Karen and Karenni is the group Christian Freedom International, which has been active in Burma for years.

Beyond these wars, Naypyidaw long has been one of the world's most notorious religious persecutors. According to the latest State Department report on religious liberty, "The government imposed restrictions on certain religious activities and limited freedom of religion." Although members of officially recognized faiths are allowed to worship, "Religious activities and organizations were subject to restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and assembly." The government monitored religious activities and limited public events. Buddhists involved in the 2007 democracy demonstrations continued to suffer severe punishment.

Moreover, added State, "The government also actively promoted Theravada Buddhism over other religions, particularly among ethnic minorities. Christian groups continued to struggle to obtain permission to repair places of worship or build new ones." The regime favored Buddhist institutions in the placement of orphans, and based government and military promotion on adherence to Buddhism.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom long has rated Burma as a County of Particular Concern. The Commission's latest report warned that the regime "severely restricts religious practice, monitors the activity of all religious organizations, and perpetrates violence against religious leaders and communities, particularly in ethnic minority areas." The USCIRF also pointed to "the severe repression and forced relocation of the Rohingya Muslim minority; the banning of independent Protestant 'house church' activities; and the abuses, including forced labor, relocations, and destruction of religious sites, against ethnic minority Protestants."

Compass Direct News, which covers religious persecution, reports continuing assaults on Christians despite the (admittedly modest) positive steps in the capital. In mid-October in the Kachin State, for instance, the army burned down two churches, detained several leaders and congregants, and insisted that all religious gatherings required government permission. Kawdin Lahpai, editor-in-chief of the Kachin News Group, explained that this "reflects the long-time policy" of the regime.

While any genuine reform will take time since repression is so deeply embedded in the system, it appears that that whatever the currents of change in Naypyidaw, no waves have reached Christians and other disfavored faiths elsewhere. As the Commission explained when writing to Secretary Clinton last month, "serious human rights violations continue to occur daily in Burma and any recent positive steps can easily be reversed."

The panel urged the secretary to maintain pressure on Naypyidaw to release political prisoners and stop ethnic conflicts, as well as to "end attacks and discrimination against minority religious groups, and improve religious freedom and related human rights." The Obama administration should include religious liberty in any dialogue with Burma over human rights.

No one knows if this time the thugs who rule this tragically poor and oppressed nation are really prepared to yield power. History suggests much reason for pessimism, but many dissidents, including Suu Kyi, are allowing themselves to hope for a different, more positive future. Hopefully they are right.

Washington should encourage positive developments and expand engagement if the regime broadens its reforms. In doing so the administration should remember the first liberty. Only if the Burmese authorities come to respect freedom conscience in religion are they likely to respect freedom of conscience in politics and elsewhere.
About the Author

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).

Credit Here:http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/12/religious-libertys-flicker