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On 1 April, more than six million Burmese are eligible to go to the polls to elect less than 7% of the total number of seats in the National Parliament.

While the by-elections have limited political significance, they are important because they are being championed as an indicator of progress by the international community after the sham 2010 polls. Despite the hype, the bulk of laws and regulations that still govern Burma’s electoral process are the same as those applied in the widely-condemned 2010 elections.

In addition to the flawed election laws, the other obstacle towards holding free and fair elections is the regime’s handpicked Election Commission. The body, which oversees all aspects of the electoral process, has repeatedly failed to act in an impartial and independent manner.

Despite pledges that the by-elections will be free and fair, regime authorities and the Election Commission have repeatedly obstructed the NLD’s campaign activities. Widespread irregularities, threats, harassment, vote-buying, and censorship have marred the electoral process in the lead-up to voting day. In addition, the regime disenfranchised over 200,000 voters in Kachin State.

The regime’s eleventh hour decision to invite external election monitors is a public relations ploy that is ‘too little, too late’ to ensure adequate, effective, and independent monitoring of the electoral process.

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မ​ေကြး​တိုင္း​ ​ေရြး​ေကာက္ပဲြ​ေကာ္မရွင္က ျမင္း​ဝင္း​ေက်း​ရြာ မူလတန္း​ေက်ာင္း​မွာ မ​ေန့​က ​ေရြး​ေကာက္ပဲြနဲ့​ ပတ္သက္တဲ့​ သင္တန္း​ေပး​ေနခိ်န္ ရြာသား​ ၃ ဦး​ ​ေရာက္လာျပီး​ ခြပ္​ေဒါင္း​ကို မဲ​ေပး​ရင္ ဒူး​ကို ရိုက္ခ်ိဳးပစ္မယ္ဆိုျပီး​ ျခိမ္း​ေျခာက္ခဲ့​တဲ့​အတြက္ ရုန္း​ရင္း​ဆန္ခတ္ ျဖစ္သြား​ခဲ့​တယ္လို့​ ပခုကၠဴျမို့​နယ္ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီ ကိုယ္စား​လွယ္​ေလာင္း​ ဦး​ပိုက္ကိုက ​ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ရြာသား​ ၃ ​ေယာက္ျဖစ္တဲ့​ ကိုငဥရယ္၊​ ကိုငလြင္ရယ္၊​ ကိုဟန္သိန္း​လြင္ရယ္က သင္တန္း​ေပး​တဲ့​ မူလတန္း​ေက်ာင္း​ထဲကို မူး​ျပီး​ ​ေရာက္လာတယ္။ ​ေရာက္လာတဲ့​ အခါက်​ေတာ့​ သူတို့​ထင္တာက အဖဲြ့​ခု်ပ္က​ေန အစည္း​အ​ေဝး​ လုပ္တယ္လို့​ ထင္တယ္။ ထင္တဲ့​အခါမွာ သူက မူး​ျပီး​ေတာ့​ ျခိမ္း​ေျခာက္တယ္။ မင္း​တို့​ ခြပ္​ေဒါင္း​ထဲထည့္​ရင္ ဒူး​ေတြကို ရိုက္ခို်း​ပစ္မယ္ ဆိုျပီး​ ျကိမ္း​ေမာင္း​ ျခိမ္း​ေျခာက္ တယ္။ ဒါ​ေပမဲ့​လို့​ တကယ့္​ ျအဖစ္အပ်က္က ျမို့​နယ္ ​ေကာ္မရွင္က သင္တန္း​ လာ​ေပး​ တာျဖစ္​ေနတယ္။ ဒီ​ေတာ့​ ဝင္ျပီး​ေတာ့​ တား​ျက၊​ ျပုျကရင္း​နဲ့​ ​ေက်း​ရြာ​ေကာ္မရွင္ ကို​ေဂ်ာ္ကာဆို လက္နဲ့​ အရိုက္ခံရတယ္။”

​ေရြး​ေကာက္ပဲြကာလမွာ အာဏာအရိွဆံုး​ ​ေကာ္မရွင္ကို အခုလို ျခိမ္း​ေျခာက္တာဟာ ​ေရွ့​ အလား​အလာ မ​ေကာင္း​သလို ​ေရြး​ေကာက္ပဲြ ရက္ ​ေရာက္လာတာနဲ့​ ပိုမို ဆိုး​ဝါး​ လာနိုင္တယ္ လို့​ ဦး​ပိုက္ကို က သံုး​သပ္ ​ေျပာဆိုပါတယ္။

ပခုက0×081ကူျမို့​နယ္မွာ ျပည္သူ့​လွြတ္​ေတာ္ မဲဆႏၵနယ္အတြက္ ျကံ့​ခိုင္​ေရး​ ပါတီနဲ့​ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီ ၂ ခုသာ အဓိက ယွဉ္ျပိုင္မွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီက ျကံ့​ခိုင္​ေရး​ပါတီက ဦး​ေက်ာ္တင့္​က ယွဉ္ျပိုင္မွာပါ။

Source : DVB 



မေန႔က မေလးရွားနိုင္ငံဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဒါတို ဆရီ မိုဟာမက္ နာဂ်စ္ တြန္း ရာဇတ္ ျမန္မာျပည္ကုိ အလည္ေရာက္လာပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာသမၼတအိမ္ေတာ္ေရွ႕ ဂုဏ္ျပဳတပ္ဖဲြ႔ကို စစ္ေဆးေနၾကပုံ

၂ နုိင္ငံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြရဲ႕ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ သမၼတအိမ္ေတာ္ ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြ

၂ နုိင္ငံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ပူးတဲြ ေၾကညာခ်က္ - 



























ဒီမွာ ဖတ္ပါ။
undefinedBANGKOK, 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - As millions go to the polls across Myanmar, IRIN took a brief look at a chronology of key events that have impacted this nation of around 50 million since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1948.

1948: Burma gains independence from British rule. Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) leader U Nu becomes the first prime minister.

1958-60: A military-led caretaker government is formed with General Ne Win as head.

1962: A government lead by U Nu, who won elections two years previously, is ousted in a military coup lead by General Ne Win. A single-party state with the Socialist Programme Party is established.

1974: A new constitution that transfers power from the military to a People’s Assembly, led by Ne Win and other former military leaders, is drawn up.

1982: The Burmese Citizenship Law is adopted, stating that anyone who arrived after 1823 is not considered a citizen. This law isolates ethnic groups such as the Kachin, Karen, Chin and Rohyinga as “associate citizens” denied the rights/relief offered to full citizens, including the right to serve in public office. [ MYANMAR: What next for the Rohingyas?]

1988: Around 3,000 people are killed in anti-government protests. The State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) is formed with the “mission to eliminate all forms of internal dissent or rebellion”

1988: Border trade between China and Myanmar officially opened.

1989: SLORC arrests thousands, including National League for Democracy (NLD) opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is put under house arrest. The government changes the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar.

1990: The NLD wins 392 out of 429 seats in the first free general election held in 30 years, but the military government does not recognize the results.

1991: Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house arrest, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1993: The US imposes an arms embargo on Myanmar “in light of the human rights abuses being committed by the current Government of Burma.”.

1994: A ceasefire agreement is signed between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the government.

1996: The EU adopts a Common Position on Burma which includes a ban on the sale or transfer of arms and weapons expertise to the country, visa restrictions on members of the military regime and their families and allies, and a freeze on officials' overseas assets. It also suspends all bilateral aid other than humanitarian assistance.

1997: US expands sanctions to include all new investments.

July 1997: Myanmar joins the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

2001: The government releases over 200 political prisoners from jail, motivated by pressure from the international community. [ MYANMAR: Hundreds of political prisoners still behind bars]

2003: In mid-2003 international aid inflow is below US$70 million, or less than $1.50 per capita.

2003: The US Burma Freedom and Democracy Act bans Burmese imports, restricts financial transactions, freezes the assets of some financial institutions and extends visa restrictions on officials.

2004: Peace talks between government and Karen National Union (KNU) lead to an informal ceasefire.

2005: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria withdraws from Myanmar, citing travel restrictions imposed by the government that limit access to their projects. The Fund’s projects were to have received $98.4 million over five years, $11.8 million of which has already been distributed.

2005: A third-country programme is implemented to resettle officially registered Burmese refugees living in camps in Thailand to the US, Canada and Australia.

Since 2005, more than 58,000 Burmese refugees have been resettled under this programme.

2006: Government restrictions on foreign aid workers tighten out of fear they may provide support to the opposition.




Photo: Jo Kuper/MSF
Families affected by HIV travel far in search of medication

October 2006: To fill the need left by the withdrawal of The Global Fund, the UK government
gives the multidonor Three Diseases Fund $37 million to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria as part of an expected $100 million, five-year pledge by all donors.

November 2006: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is forced to shut down five field offices outside the economic hub of Yangon, providing care to mostly border populations.

2007: International aid nearly triples since 2004 to around $200 million.

January 2007: China and Russia veto a US resolution in the UN Security Council urging Myanmar to stop persecuting opposition and minority groups.

April 2007: Myanmar and North Korea restore diplomatic relations.

June 2007: ICRC publicly denounces the government for abuses against civilians, and closes offices serving ethnic communities, telling local media its operations have reached “near paralysis”.

September 2007: A government crackdown on peaceful anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks draws diplomatic condemnation.

October 2007: The UN Security Council issues a statement “deploring” the military crackdown.

December 2007: The government forces the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, Charles Petrie, to leave his post after the release of a statement on 24 October linking the September 2007 protests to widespread frustration at the hardships of day-to-day living in Myanmar and a “deteriorating humanitarian situation”.

April 2008: The government presents a new constitution that assigns a quarter of the parliamentary seats to the military and prohibits opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from holding office.

May 2008: Tropical Cyclone Nargis hits Myanmar affecting some 2.4 million people, killing an estimated 140,000 and destroying over 700,000 homes.

The cyclone is one of the deadliest storms in recorded history but the government initially refuses foreign aid.

May 2008: The Tripartite Core Group (TCG) - a partnership between the UN, the government of Myanmar and ASEAN - is formed to coordinate the response to Nargis and humanitarian assistance, including facilitating visas for aid workers.

January 2009: The Thai military forcibly expels approximately 1,000 Rohingyas arriving in Thailand by boat. Several hundred more are rescued off the coast of Indonesia.

March 2009: The government tightens its visa policy, making it more difficult for international aid workers to secure a visa to assist hundreds of thousands still in need of assistance almost a year after Cyclone Nargis.

May 2009: US President Barack Obama renews existing sanctions against Myanmar.

June 2009: Some 1,000 Rohingyas are evicted from Bangladesh. According to UNHCR, there are some 200,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh, of whom only 28,000 are documented refugees living in two government camps and assisted by the agency.

October 2009: The Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT) of $100 million is established in Myanmar by multiple donors to channel aid through local partners and strengthen external assistance after Cyclone Nargis.

October 2010: Cyclone Giri strikes the west coast of Myanmar, killing 45 people and affecting an estimated 260,000.

7 November 2010: Myanmar holds its first general election in 20 years - without international election observers - and transfers power from the military to a nominally civilian government. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USPD) wins a landslide victory that opposition groups and a UN human rights committee call fraudulent. The election triggers ethnic violence, causing some 20,000 people to flee to Thailand.

13 November 2010: Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is released after spending 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest due to her open opposition of the military junta.

2010: Government efforts to incorporate numerous armed ethnic groups into a single Border Guard Force heighten tension and reignite fighting.

January 2011: The Supreme Court rejects an appeal by Aung San Suu Kyi to reinstate the NLD.

March 2011: An earthquake of magnitude 6.8 strikes the northeastern Shan State, killing 74 people and affecting 18,000.

May 2011: The UN Special Rapporteur, Tomas Ojea Quintana, spends a week assessing the human rights situation in Myanmar and documenting human rights abuses, stating: “The situation of ethnic minority groups in the border areas presents serious limitations to the government's intention to transition to democracy."

May 2011: Thai officials start a headcount of Burmese refugees living in three of 10 camps along the Thai-Burmese border to get a sense of the number of registered and unregistered migrants living there. Aid workers hope this census will allow them to address the problems of thousands who are unregistered, and thus missing out on vital services.

June 2011: A 17-year ceasefire between Myanmar government forces and the Kachin Independence Army is broken when fighting erupts along the northern border.

September 2011: Myanmar suspends construction of a hydroelectric dam project financed by China Power Investment Corporation in northern Kachin State that would have forced more than 15,000 people in 60 villages to relocate.

12 October 2011: Myanmar releases over 200 political prisoners.



Photo: Lynn Maung/IRIN
Struggling years after Cyclone Nargis hit in 2008
19 October 2011: Flash floods hit the Magway, Mandalay and Sagaing Regions of Myanmar, affecting some 35,000 people and killing 78.

December 2011: After visiting the country, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledges US support of recent reforms and challenges Myanmar to continue the pace of change, hinting at further diplomatic openings.

December 2011: A government official participates in an international landmine ban meeting in Cambodia for the first time. Myanmar has the fifth highest number of landmine casualties in the world.

December 2011: The government allows a UN convoy access to Kachin State to distribute humanitarian relief for the first time since the armed conflict broke out in June.

January 2012: During the first visit by a UK politician to Myanmar in 56 years, Foreign Secretary William Hague calls for the release of remaining political prisoners, fair by-elections in April, and improved relations between the government and ethnic populations as a foundation for improved UK-Burmese relations.

January 2012: The Burmese government signs a ceasefire agreement with the Karen National Union and holds ceasefire talks with ethnic Kachin fighters.

January 2012: Myanmar releases hundreds of prisoners and grants amnesty to 651 detainees.

The US restores diplomatic relations with Myanmar.


March 2012: Myanmar grants visas to exiled journalists and proposes widespread press reforms.

March 2012: Officials draft a new investment law that allows foreigners to set up businesses in Myanmar without a local partner, and grants new investors a five-year tax exemption.

March 2012: A UN convoy is allowed into Kachin State for the second time to provide food assistance to 1,000 of the estimated 60,000 people displaced by the conflict.

1 April 2012: By-elections scheduled in 48 parliamentary seats. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD will participate for the first time in over 20 years and foreign observers have been invited to monitor.

Credit Here :


Photo: David Swanson/IRIN
Only a fraction of the Rohingyas who have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh are registered

BANGKOK, 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - As Myanmar gears up for a by-election on 1 April, experts and community leaders are divided over what the ongoing reforms may hold for the Rohingya people, a stateless Muslim ethnic group living in the country’s Northern Rakhine State.

Candidate and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has highlighted ethnic conflicts as the country’s most urgent problem. In January the government signed a ceasefire with ethnic Karen rebels in southern Burma to halt one of the world’s longest running civil wars.

But to the frustration of Nurul Kabir, president of the London-based Arakan Rohingya National Organization, “There is no change of attitude of the new civilian government of U Thein Sein towards Rohingya people; there is no sign of change in the human rights situation of Rohingya people. Persecution against them is actually greater than before.”

Statelessness

The Rohingya are not legally recognized in Myanmar and struggle with a lack of access to healthcare, food and education.

There are some 800,000 stateless Muslims, mostly Rohingyas, who form 90 percent of the population of northern Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh and includes the townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung.

Known as Arakan State in British colonial times, in 1989 the ruling military junta changed its name to Rakhine State to reflect the dominant ethnic group, the Rakhine Buddhists. Communal violence between Muslims and Buddhists has led to periodic large-scale riots, forcing hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh.

The heavily populated (295 persons per square kilometre compared to 80 persons nationwide), primarily rural and disaster-prone zone suffers from a consistently high rate of global acute malnutrition that exceeds the World Health Organization emergency threshold of 15 percent, according to the European Community Humanitarian Office.

In early 2011, the UN World Food Programme reported 45 percent of surveyed households in Northern Rakhine State as “severely food insecure”, compared to 38 percent in 2009.

Some 200,000 Rohingya have fled west from Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh. Almost 30,000 are documented and living in two government camps, assisted by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), but hundreds of thousands more have been living illegally nearby since the Bangladeshi government stopped registering arrivals.

Recognition

Given the unprecedented pace of change in Myanmar, Eric Paulsen, co-founder of the Malaysia-based human rights and law reform NGO, Lawyers for Liberty, has advised Rohingyas to make the most of the current political opening.

Rohingya activists have long demanded recognition as a national ethnic group with full citizenship by birthright, but Paulsen thinks they should push for naturalization.

“Naturalized citizenship is not on a par with national ethnic group recognition, but at present it remains the most realistic and workable solution to their statelessness,” Paulsen recently wrote.

The Arakan Rohingya National Organization is pursuing full recognition and is unhappy about a perceived lack of support. “Obviously she [Aung San Suu Kyi] is ignoring the Rohingya problem, a key human rights issue in Burma,” said Kabir.

“However, still the Rohingyas have high expectations of her. Rather than avoiding the Rohingya people and their problem, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi should take all measures to formally accommodate Rohingya into the family of the Union of Burma, with full ethnic and citizenship rights, as one of the many ethnic nationalities of the country.”

Tin Soe, the editor of the Bangladesh-based Rohingya newsgroup, Kaladan Press Network, noted that elections do not necessarily equate democracy, without which Rohingyas cannot gain legal recognition.

“We Rohingya will fight for our rights in the parliament if democracy comes to Burma,” Soe told IRIN. “Then we will lobby the parliament, hold demonstrations, show them the results of our fact finding. Now you basically have the armed forces still in power - with them you cannot do anything.”

Repatriation fears

Following Myanmar’s transition from military to a nominally civilian government in 2010, many Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh were briefly hopeful, but soon disappointed.

“After the 2010 election the Rohingya situation is going from worse to worse,” said Soe. Rohingyas were given voting rights in the 2010 elections and promised citizenship if they voted for the military regime’s representatives, he added.



Photo: Photo courtesy of The Arakan Project
Life on the run for Rohingyas
“Citizenship is still not restored,” said Kabir. “Killing, rape, harassment, torture and atrocious crimes of border security forces and armed forces have increased. The humiliating restrictions on their freedom of movement, education, marriage, trade and business still remain imposed.”

The Bangladeshi government has sought support for repatriating Rohingya refugees to Myanmar and according to Bangladeshi media, representatives of the Burmese government have said the country is ready to “take” them back.

“The refugees are against repatriation because conditions in Northern Rakhine State have not improved at all, so the announcement has created a new panic in the [Bangladeshi] camps,” said Chris Lewa, who monitors the Rohingya situation for the Arakan Project, an NGO advocating Rohingya issues in Myanmar.

“They don't know what will happen,” Lewa said. “The fear is there that harassment in the camps [to force repatriation] may happen again soon.”

Credit Here :
ဧၿပီလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔မွာ က်င္းပမယ့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၾကည့္ရႈေလ့လာဖို႔ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုက ေစလႊတ္မယ့္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အဖဲြ႕၀င္ႏွစ္ဦးရဲ႕ အမည္ေတြကို ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာနက မေန႔က ေၾကညာသြားပါတယ္။



US Department of State
အေမရိကန္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဌာန ပုံမွန္ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔က ေျပာခြင့္ရ အမ်ဳိးသမီး Victoria Nuland က သတင္းေထာက္မ်ားကုိ ရွင္းလင္းတင္ျပေနစဥ္။


ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး လွဳပ္ရွားေနတဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္အဖြဲ႕ NDI က Peter Manikas နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ရီပါပလင္ကင္အဖြဲ႕ IRI က Johanna Kao တို႔ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရ အမ်ဳိးသမီး Victoria Nuland က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္ သူတို႔ေတြဟာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႕ဆိုတာထက္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ဘယ္လိုက်င္းပသလဲ ဆိုတာ ကိုယ္တိုင္မ်က္ျမင္ သြားေရာက္ၾကည့္ရွဳၾကမွာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ Victoria Nuland က သတင္းေထာက္ေတြကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

သူက ဆက္လက္ေျပာဆိုရာမွာ- အေမရိကန္က ေစလႊတ္မယ့္အဖဲြ႕ဟာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အဆင့္မွာေတာ့ မရွိပါဘူး။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြက်င္းပမယ့္ ရက္ပိုင္းအလိုမွ ဖိတ္ေခၚခဲ့တာမို႔ ကုလသမဂၢက ျပ႒ာန္းထားတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေစာင့္ၾကည႔္ေရး အခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔အညီ စစ္ေဆးႏိုင္မွာ မဟုတ္လို႔ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္လို႔ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႕ဟာ မတ္လ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔ ကေန ဧၿပီလ ၃ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ေလ့လာၾကည့္ရႈမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အလားတူပဲ ကုလသမဂၢက ေစလႊတ္မယ့္ အဖဲြ႕နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔လည္း အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီမြန္းရံုးရဲ႕ ေျပာခြင့္ရအမ်ဴိးသမီး Eri Kaneko က ျမန္မာအစိုးရရဲ႕ ဖိတ္ၾကားခ်က္ကို တုန္႔ျပန္တဲ့ အေနနဲ႔ နယူးေယာက္ၿမိဳ႕ ကုလသမဂၢ ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ကေန ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႕ကို ေစလႊတ္မွာပါ၊ အဲဒီအဖဲြ႕ကေန ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ အစီရင္ခံစာကို အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီးမြန္းကို တင္ျပမွာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ေျပာဆိုပါတယ္။

Source : RFA




By ဦးေက်ာ္ဇံသာ

မၾကာခင္က်င္းပဖုိ႔ရွိေနတဲ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြဟာ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး အတြက္ အဓိကက်တဲ့ ေသာ့ခ်က္ျဖစ္တာမို႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚထားရွိတဲ့ ဥေရာပသမဂၢ (EU) ရဲ႕ မူဝါဒေတြကို သိသိသာသာေျပာင္းလဲေစလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ အီးယူရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးအႀကီးအကဲ ကက္သရင္းအက္ရွ္တြန္က ေျပာလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ အားလံုး ျပန္လည္လြတ္ေျမာက္ဖုိ႔နဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ အေျခအေေနေတြ တိုးတက္ဖုိ႔ ဖိအားေပးရမယ့္ကိစၥေတြ က်န္ေနေသးတယ္လို႔ ၿဗိတိန္အေျခစိုက္ ျမန္မာအေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈ အဖဲြ႔တစ္ခုျဖစ္တဲ့ Burma Campaign-UK က EU ကို ေဝဖန္လိုက္တာပါ။ ဒီအေၾကာင္း အျပည့္အစံုကို ဦးေက်ာ္ဇံသာက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုုင္ငံမွာ အစုုိးရက ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးကိုုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ေတြ ေစလႊတ္ဖိုု႔ ဖိတ္ ၾကားတာကိုု မႀကံဳစဖူး ပြင့္လင္းမႈတစ္ရပ္ျဖစ္တယ္လိုု႔ ဥေရာပ သမဂၢက ေခၚဆိုုထားတဲ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္ တစ္ေစာင္ကိုု ဒီကေန႔ ထုုတ္ျပန္လုုိက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ မဲဆြယ္စဥ္ကာလမွာ ေယဘုုယ်အားျဖင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့ သေဘာသဘာဝေတြ ရွိေနတာကိုု ႀကိဳဆိုုတယ္၊ ပါတီတခ်ဳိ႕ရဲ႕ မသမာမႈ၊ ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈေတြကိုု ၾကားရေပ မယ့္ အစိုုးရက စံုုစမ္းေျဖရွင္းေပးလိမ့္မယ္လိုု႔ ယံုုၾကည္တယ္လိုု႔ ေျပာထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ရဲ႕ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ အားလံုုးကိုုလည္း ခ်ီးက်ဴးထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကက္သရင္း အက္ရွ္တြန္ (Catherine Ashton)ရဲ႕ ဒီထုုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ကိုု အစိုုးရရဲ႕ ေျပာခြင့္ရအမ်ဳိးသမီးက ဗီြအိုုေအျမန္မာပိုုင္းကိုု အခုု လိုု ေျပာပါတယ္။

"သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္နဲ႔သူ႔အစိုုးရရဲ႕ မွတ္သားေလာက္ေအာင္ ထူးျခားတဲ့ ႏိုုင္ငံေရးျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ အစီအ စဥ္ေတြကိုု အီးယူ ႏုုိင္ငံျခားေရးအႀကီးအကဲက ႀကိဳဆိုုပါတယ္။ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ႏွစ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုုင္ငံလႊတ္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ အျပဳသေဘာေဆာင္ အခန္းက႑မွာ ပါဝင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ေတြ၊ ႏိုုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြကိုု လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့ တာေတြ ၊ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုုၾကည္အပါအဝင္ အတုုိက္အခံေတြနဲ႔ ဆက္လက္ေဆြးေႏြးတာ၊ တုုိင္းရင္းသားအုုပ္ စုုေတြနဲ႔ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ရယူဖိုု႔ႀကိဳးပမ္းတာ၊ စီးပြားေရးျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈေတြအတြက္ လုုပ္ေဆာင္တာေတြ အား လံုုးဟာ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အျပဳသေဘာေဆာင္ တုုိးတက္မႈေတြ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ လာမယ့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ဟာ ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျ့မတ္ေရးအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ကာလျဖစ္သလိုု ဥေရာပသမဂၢ ရဲ႕ ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံအေပၚ သေဘာထားကိုုလည္း သိသိသာသာ ေျပာင္းလဲေစႏုုိင္ပါတယ္။ အီးယူအႀကီးအကဲက မဲဆြယ္ကာလကိုု ဂ႐ုုတစိုုက္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနၿပီး အမတ္ေလာင္းေတြ၊ ႏုုိင္ငံေရးပါတီေတြအားလံုုး သူတိုု႔ရဲ႕ အစီအစဥ္ေတြကိုု အဟန္႔အတား၊ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ကင္းကင္းနဲ႔ တင္ျပေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုုိင္လိမ့္မယ္လိုု႔ လည္း ေမ်ွာ္လင့္ထားပါတယ္။"

ဥေရာပသမဂၢ၊ ျပည္ပဆက္ဆံေရးအႀကီးအကဲ ကက္သရင္း အက္ရွ္သြန္ရဲ႕ေျပာခြင့္ရ မာဂ်ာ ခိုစီဂ်န္စစ္ (Maja Kocijancic) ေျပာသြားခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘားမားကမ္ပိန္း၊ ယူေက (Burma Campaign for UK) လိုု႔ ေခၚတဲ့ ၿဗိတိန္ႏိုုင္ငံ ျမန္မာ့အေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖဲြ႔ ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမႉး မာ့ခ္၊ဖာမနာ (Mark Famaner) ကေတာ့ - ဥေရာပသမဂၢဟာ ေကာင္းတဲ့အခ်က္ေတြကိုုသာ ေထာက္ျပ ေျပာဆိုုေနၿပီး အႏုုတ္လကၡဏာျပေန တဲ့အခ်က္ေတြကိုု မ်က္ကြယ္ျပဳထားတယ္လိုု႔ ေဝဖန္ပါတယ္။

"ကက္သရင္းအက္ရွ္တြန္နဲ႔ သူ႔လူေတြက အရင္ကတည္းက ပိတ္ဆိုု႔အေရးယူမႈေတြကိုု ႐ုုပ္သိမ္းခ်င္ေနၾက တာပါ။ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး မလုုပ္ခင္ကတည္းက ပုုံမွန္ဆက္ဆံေရး ထူေထာင္ခ်င္ေနၾက တာပါ။ အခုုလည္းပဲ ေကာင္းတဲ့အခ်က္ေတြကိုု ထပ္ခါတလဲလဲ ေျပာေနၿပီး မေကာင္းတာေတြကိုု ဘာမွ မေျပာေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံမွာ အခုု ႏုုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ ရာနဲ႔ခ်ီၿပီး ရွိေနဆဲပါ။ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခံရလိုု႔ထြက္ေျပးၾကရတဲ့ တုုိင္းရင္းသားေတြ ေသာင္းနဲ႔ခ်ီၿပီး ရွိေနပါတယ္။ ဒါေတြကိုု ကက္သရင္း အက္ရွ္တြန္တိုု႔က ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေျပာၾကပါဘူး။ sanction ေတြ႐ုုပ္လိုု႔ရေအာင္ ေကာင္းတာကိုု ပဲ ေရြးေျပာေနၾက တာပါ။"

ဥေရာပသမဂၢထဲက ဥေရာပအစိုုးရတခ်ဳိ႕နဲ႔ ကုုလသမဂၢအရာရွိေတြဟာ အေရးယူပိတ္ဆိုု႔မႈကိုု မယံုုၾကည္ ဘဲ ျမန္မာအစိုုးရနဲ႔ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မယ္၊ အကူအညီေပးမယ္၊ ဒီလုုိနည္းနဲ႔သာ အေျပာင္းအလဲ ျပဳလုုပ္ႏုုိင္ မယ္လိုု႔ ယံုုၾကည္ေနၾကသူေတြ ျဖစ္တယ္လိုု႔ မာ့ခ္ဖာမနာက ဆုုိပါတယ္။ သူတိုု႔ရဲ႕ ဘားမားကမ္ပိန္း ယူေက အေနနဲ႔ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုုင္ငံမွာ အေျပာင္းအလဲတခ်ဳိ႕ ျမင္လာရတာဟာ ဒီလိုု ဒဏ္ခတ္အေရး ယူမႈေတြေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္တယ္လိုု႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။ အခုု သမတၱဦးသိန္းစိန္ကလည္း ဒဏ္ခတ္အေရးယူမႈေတြ ႐ုုပ္သိမ္းေစခ်င္တဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈတခ်ဳိ႕ လုုပ္ျပေနျခင္းသာျဖစ္တယ္၊ ဒဏ္ခတ္အေရးယူ မႈေတြ ႐ုုပ္သိမ္းလိုု႔ စီးပြားေရးအင္အား ေကာင္းလာရင္ စစ္အင္အားကိုု တိုုးခ်ဲ႕ၿပီး ဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ျခယ္မႈေတြ ပိုုလုုပ္ လာမယ္လိုု႔လည္း မာ့ခ္ဖာမနာက ေထာက္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ဥေရာပသမဂၢကေတာ့ အခုုအခါ ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကိုု ေစာင့္ၾကည့္မယ့္အဖဲြ႔ ေစလႊတ္လိုုက္ၿပီလိုု႔ ဆိုုေပမယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကိုု အစ၊ အလယ္၊အဆံုုး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ႏိုုင္တဲ့အေျခအေနမရွိဘူး၊ အခ်ိန္အလံုုအေလာက္ မရဘူးဆိုုၿပီး ေျပာၾကားပါ တယ္။

"ဘရပ္ဆဲလ္ (Brussel)က အဖဲြ႔ငယ္တစ္ဖဲြ႔ ေရာက္လာမွာပါ။ သူတိုု႔ကိုု ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့ လာေရးအဖဲြ႔လုုိ႔ မေခၚႏိုုင္ပါဘူး။ သူတိုု႔ဟာ အခ်ိန္အလံုုအေလာက္ မရပါဘူး။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ က်မတိုု႔ေစလႊတ္ သူေတြဟာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူ အဖဲြ႔သာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။"

ကက္သရင္း အက္ရွ္တြန္ရဲ႕ ေျပာခြင့္ရ မာဂ်ာ ခိုစီဂ်န္စစ္ ေျပာသြားခဲ့တာပါ။ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ျပဳလုုပ္တဲ့ကာလ မွာ ဥေရာပသမဂၢအျပင္ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုု၊ ဥေရာပသမဂၢနဲ႔ အာဆီယံတုုိ႔ကလည္း အလားတူ ကိုုယ္ စားလွယ္ေတြ ေစလႊတ္ၾကမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

source :VOA




ပဲခူးတိုင္း(အေနာက္ျခမ္း) ပန္းေတာင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္က လယ္သမား(၁၀၀)ခန္႔ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးရုံးကုိ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခ်ီတက္ေနပုံေတြပါ။

အမ်ိဳးသားသယံဇာတဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးကုပၼဏီလီမိတက္ရဲ႕ မတရားမႈကို တားဆီးေပးဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆိုခ့ဲၾကပါတယ္။

အေသးစိတ္ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ မသိရေသးပါဘူး။

ဒန္႕ဒလြန္အုပ္စု ၾကာအင္းရြာက လယ္သမားေတြပါ။

ခ်ီတက္ၾကတာကေတာ့ (၂၇-၃-၂၀၁၂)ေန႔၊ မနက္(၈)နာရီက ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။


Credit here





ေလးျဖဴက ႀက့ံခုိင္ေရးပါတီကုိ မဲေပးခ့ဲတယ္ ဆုိျပီး ပဲြဆူခ့ဲတ့ဲ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္ဟာ မွားေနတယ္၊ ဖန္တီးထားတာ လုပ္ႀကံထားတာ ျဖစ္တယ္ တ့ဲ။ IC တီး၀ုိင္းက Facebook မွာ ရွင္းခ်က္ ထုတ္ထားတာကုိ အခုလုိ ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။

ဒီေန႔ ထုတ္ျပန္တ့ဲ ဒီ ရွင္းလင္းခ်က္ကုိ ပရိသတ္အမ်ားအျပားက ႏွစ္သက္ေၾကာင္း ေဖာ္ျပၾက၊ လက္ဆင့္ကမ္း ဖတ္ရႈေနၾကတာေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။



ဒါကေတာ့ Envoy ဂ်ာနယ္မွာ ပါခ့ဲတ့ဲ စကားပါ။



အေျခခံဥပေဒမွာ စစ္တပ္ ၂၅%ပါေနတာ ျပင္သင့္တယ္လုိ႔ ေဒၚစုကခံယူတယ္

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ဒီလုိေျပာတယ္



ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥေပဒဆိုတာ ျပည္သူနဲ႔ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူတို႔အၾကားမွာ ထားရွိတဲ့ ပဋိဥာဥ္ျဖစ္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့အတိုင္း လိုအပ္တဲ့အခါေတြမွာ ျပင္ဆင္ျခင္း၊ ေျပာင္းလဲျခင္း၊ ပယ္ဖ်က္ျခင္း တို႔ကို ျပဳလုပ္ၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

လက္ရွိဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒဟာ ဒီမုိကေရစီစံႏႈန္းနဲ႔ မကိုက္ညီတာကို ေတြ႕ေနရပါတယ္။ ထင္ရွားတဲ့ ဥပမာတစ္ခုကိုေျပာရမယ္ဆိုရင္ .. ျပည္သူေတြကို ျပည္သူကတင္ေျမာက္တဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ခံ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြက အုပ္စိုးျခင္းကသာ ဒီမုိကေရစီရဲ႕ အႏွစ္သာရျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒမွာ ေရြးေကာက္ခံမဟုတ္တဲ့ လြတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ၂၅ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းပါ၀င္ေနတာကို ျပည္သူေတြအသိျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဆိုလိုတာက လက္ရွိလႊတ္ေတာ္အသီးသီးမွာ ျပည္သူက ေရြးေကာက္ထားျခင္းမဟုတ္တဲ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြ ပါ၀င္ေနတဲ့အတြက္ ဒီမိုကေရစီမူမ်ားနဲ႔ မကိုက္ညီပါဘူး။အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥေပဒမွာ ျပင္ဆင္သင့္တဲ့ ပုဒ္မမ်ားကို ျပည္သူေတြကို အသိေပးထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ၿပီးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

အေျခခံဥပေဒမွာ စစ္တပ္ ၂၅%ပါေရးဟာ ၆၇ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ တပ္မေတာ္ေန႔ ဦးတည္ခ်က္တခု ျဖစ္္တယ္

ပီးခဲ့တဲ့ (သူတုိ႔အေခၚ) တပ္မေတာ္ေန႔မွာ ကာခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးမင္းေအာင္လႈိင္က ဒီလိုေျပာတယ္




ဒို့တပ္မေတာ္ သားေတြက xxxxx နိုင္ငံေတာ္ရဲ႕ အသက္ သဖြယ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ နိုင္ငံေတာ္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံု အေျခခံ ဥပေဒကို နိုင္ငံသား အားလံုးနဲ့ အတူ ဒို့တပ္မေတာ္က ေလးစား လိုက္နာ ရမွာျဖစ္သလို ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ သြားရမွာလည္း ၿဖစ္တယ္။

နိုင္ငံေတာ္ရဲ႕ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံု အေျခခံ ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၂၀၊ ပုဒ္မခြဲ(စ) မွာ "တပ္မေတာ္သည္ နိုင္ငံေတာ္ဖြဲ ့စည္းပံု အေျခခံ ဥပေဒကို ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ရန္ အဓိက တာ၀န္ရွိတယ္။" လို့ အတိအက် ေဖာ္ျပ တာ၀န္ ေပးအပ္ထားျပီး ၿဖစ္တယ္။

ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဒို႕ တပ္မေတာ္ အေနနဲ႕ ေခတ္မီ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳး တက္ေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီ နိုင္ငံေတာ္ သစ္ တည္ေဆာက္ရာမွာ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံု အေၿခခံဥပေဒကို အဓိက တာ၀န္တစ္ရပ္ အေနနဲ႕ ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ သြားမွာ ၿဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေၿပာၾကားလိုတယ္။
-နိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အမ်ိဳးသားေရး နိုင္ငံေရး ဦးေဆာင္မႈ အခန္း က႑တြင္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ မ်ိဳးခ်စ္ စိတ္ဓာတ္ ၿဖစ္သည့္ ၿပည္ေထာင္စု စိတ္ဓာတ္ၿဖင့္ တပ္မေတာ္က ပါ၀င္ ထမ္းေဆာင္ႏိုင္ေရး။

-ေခတ္မီဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳး တိုးတက္သည့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီ နိူင္ငံေတာ္ တည္ေဆာက္ ရာတြင္ တပ္မေတာ္၏ အဓိက တာ၀န္ ၿဖစ္ေသာ ဖြဲ ့စည္းပံု အေၿခခံ ဥပေဒကို ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး။ ဆိုတဲ့ ဦးတည္ခ်က္ေတြနဲ ့အညီ တာ၀န္ ထမ္းရြက္ သြားၾကဖို ့မွာၾကားရင္း နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္လိုက္တယ္။

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အခုတစ္ေလာ ေရာက္လာသမွ် ၿပည္တြင္း၊ၿပည္ပ သတင္းမီဒီယာသမား အားလံုးက တစ္ခုတည္းေသာ ေမးခြန္းကိုပဲ ေမးၾကတယ္။ သတင္းမီဒီယာေလာကသား အားလံုး စိတ္၀င္တစား ေၿပာဆိုေဆြးေႏြးေနၾကတဲ့ “မီဒီယာ ဥပေဒ” ဆိုတာကို ဘယ္လုိၿမင္သလဲဆိုတဲ႔ေမးခြန္းၿဖစ္တယ္။
မီဒီယာဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး ညီလာခံ
ဒီလ ၁၈ ရက္ ၁၉ ရက္က ၿပန္ၾကားေရး၀န္ၾကီးဌာနနဲ႔ ကုလသမဂၢပညာေရးသိပၸံနဲ႔ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈအဖြဲ႕ (ယူနက္စကို) တုိ႔ ပူးေပါင္းၿပီး“ၿမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ မီဒီယာဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရး ညီလာခံ” ဆိုတဲ႔ ညီလာခံတစ္ခု က်င္းပခဲ့တယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ ၿပည္ပအဖြဲ႕အစည္းတခ်ိဳ႕ကကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြ တက္ေရာက္ၿပီး စာတမ္းဖတ္ ၾကားသလုိ ၿပည္တြင္းမီဒီယာ သမားတခ်ိဳ႕လည္း စာတမ္းမ်ားဖတ္ၾကတယ္။ ၿပန္ၾကားေရးနဲ႔ ၿပည္သူ႕ဆက္ ဆံေရးဦးစီးဌာန ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးရဲထြဋ္က “New Media Laws and regulations in Myanmar”ဆိုတဲ႔ေခါင္းစဥ္နဲ႔ စာတမ္းဖတ္ၾကားသြားေၾကာင္း သိရတယ္။ လူေတြေၿပာေနၾကတဲ႔ မီဒီယာ ဥပေဒဆိုတာက ဒါပဲၿဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ဘာေတြပါတယ္ဆိုတာ မသိပါဘူး။ ေယဘုယ် သေဘာေတာ႔ေၿပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

တည္ၿငိမ္ေအးခ်မ္းဖုိ႔


ဥပေဒဆိုတာ ဘယ္ႏိုင္မွာၿဖစ္ၿဖစ္ ဘာစနစ္နဲ႔အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္၊ လူေတြကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ဖို႔ လုပ္ၾကတာခ်ည္း ၿဖစ္တယ္။ မရွိမေကာင္း၊ ရွိမေကာင္းဆိုတဲ႔ အရာၿဖစ္တယ္။ လူ႕အဖြဲ႕အစည္းတည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္နဲ႔ ေအးခ်မ္းသာယာဖုိ႔အတြက္ လူတိုင္းလူတိုင္းမွာ သဘာ၀အရ ရွိေနၾကတဲ့ အရိုင္းစိတ္ေတြနဲ႔ ပရမ္းပတာ စိတ္ေတြကို အနားကြပ္ၿပီး ထိန္းသိမ္းေပးဖုိ႔လုိတယ္။ ဥပေဒက ဒီတာ၀န္ကို ယူရတယ္။ လူ႔အဖြဲ႕အစည္းဆို တာက လူမ်ိဳးေပါင္းစံု ပါ၀င္ေနတာၿဖစ္လုိ႔ဆိုၿပီး လူတိုင္းနဲ႔ကိုက္ညီေအာင္ ဥပေဒကို လုိက္ညွိေရးလုိ႔ မရဘူး။ ဥပေဒဆိုတာ ဘယ္ေနရာၿဖစ္ၿဖစ္၊ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္အခါၿဖစ္ၿဖစ္၊ ဘယ္သူ႕အတြက္ၿဖစ္ၿဖစ္ တစ္မ်ိဳးတည္း၊ တစ္သမတ္တည္း ၿဖစ္ရတယ္။ သူ႕က်ေတာ႔တစ္မ်ိဳး၊ ငါ႔က်ေတာ႔ တစ္မ်ိဳး၊ လုိရင္တစ္မ်ိဳး၊ မလိုရင္တစ္မ်ိဳး လုပ္လုိ႔မရဘူး။ ဥပေဒေရွ႕ေမွာက္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံသားအားလံုး တစ္ေၿပးညီ ၿဖစ္ရတယ္။ ဥပေဒအထက္မွာ ဘယ္သူမွ မရွိေစရဘူး။

ကာကြယ္ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္မႈေပးရမယ္

ဥပေဒက လက္လွမ္းမမီီတဲ႔ လူတန္းစားတစ္ရပ္ သီးၿခားတည္ရွိေနတာမ်ိဳးလည္း လံုး၀မရွိေစရဘူး။ ရွိေနရင္လည္း အဲဒါ အာဏာရွင္ႏိုင္ငံပဲ ၿဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီမုိကေရစီႏိုင္ငံ ဘယ္လုိမွ မၿဖစ္ႏိုင္ဘူး။ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏိုင္ငံ ဆိုတာ တိုင္းသူၿပည္သားအားလံုး တန္းတူညီမွ်ရွိရတယ္။ စံစရာရွိ အတူစံၿပီး ခံစရာရွိလည္း အတူခံရတယ္။ ေတာင္ယာလုပ္တဲ့ လယ္သမားေတြဆီက ဘိမ္း(ကြမ္းပံု)ကေလးတစ္ငံုစာမိတာကို ေထာင္ခုႏွစ္ႏွစ္ ၿပစ္ဒဏ္ခ် ၿပီး သိန္း ၇၀၀၀ ဖုိး ဘိန္းေတြ၊ ေဆးၿပားေတြနဲ႔မိတဲ႔ ေလာ္ပန္ၾကီးကေတာ့ အုတ္နံရံအၿမင္႔ၾကီးနဲ႔ ဘံုခုႏွစ္ဆင္႔ နန္းေတာ္ၾကီးထဲမွာ ဇိမ္က်ေနၿမဲ က်ေနတာမ်ိဳး လံုး၀မရွိရဘူး။ အဲဒီလုိ မညီမွ်မႈေတြ ရွိေနေသးသေရြ႕ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ႏိုင္ငံလုိ႔ မေခၚႏိုင္ဘူး။ ဒီမုိကေရစီ စနစ္မွာ အခြင္႔ထူးခံ လူတန္းစားလံုး၀မရွိရဘူး။ ဥပေဒဟာ ႏိုင္ငံသားအားလံုးကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္သလုိ ႏိုင္ငံသားအားလံုး စိတ္ခ်လက္ခ် လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကာကြယ္ ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္မႈလည္း ေပးရမယ္။


အပ္နဲ႔ထြင္းရမွာ ပုဆိန္နဲ႔ေပါက္

ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈနဲ႔ ကာကြယ္ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္မႈမွာ ကာကြယ္ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္မႈဘက္က အေလးသာမွ အဲဒီႏိုင္ငံဟာ ေနေပ်ာ္တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတစ္ခု ၿဖစ္မွာပါ။ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈ လြန္ကဲရင္ စိတ္ညစ္စရာ ေကာင္းပါတယ္။ အာဏာရွင္ စနစ္ကို လူေတြစက္ဆုပ္မုန္းတီးတာက အဲဒီအခ်က္အဓိကပဲ။အာဏာရွင္စနစ္တုိင္းမွာက ဘယ္ကိစၥမဆို သူတို႔ဘ၀လံု ၿခံဳေရး၊ သူတုိ႔အာဏာတည္ၿမဲေရးကိုပဲ အၿမဲဂရုစိုက္ေတြးေလ့၊ ၾကည္႔ေလ့ရွိတယ္။ မလိုအပ္ဘဲနဲ႔ တင္းၾကပ္လြန္း တဲ႔ဥပေဒေတြ ခ်မွတ္ၿပ႒ာန္းရံုမက သဘာ၀မက်စြာ ၿပင္းၿပင္းထန္ထန္ အေရးယူတာမ်ိဳးလည္း လုပ္ေလ့ရွိတယ္။ အပ္နဲ႔ထြင္းရမယ္႔ ကိစၥကို ပုဆိန္နဲ႔ ေပါက္တတ္ေသးတယ္။
သဟဇာတ ၿဖစ္မႈ
ပုဆိန္နဲ႔ ေပါက္တဲ႔ အစိုးရဆိုေတာ႔လည္း လူေတြက ရြံေၾကာက္ၾကီး ၿဖစ္ေနတာေပါ႔။ ဒါဆိုရင္ ဘယ္ေကာင္းေတာ႔ မွာလဲ။ အစိုးရဆိုတာ တုိင္းသူၿပည္သားမ်ားရဲ႕ လစာရိကၡာကိုစားတဲ့ ၿပည္သူ႕၀န္ထမ္းလုိ႔ေခၚတဲ႔ အဆိုနဲ႔ ေၿဖာင္႔ေၿဖာင္႔ၾကီးဆန္႔က်င္ေနမွာ မဟုတ္လား။ အစုိးရနဲ႔ ၿပည္သူဆိုတာ တစ္သားတည္းက်ေနရမွာမ်ိဳး ၿဖစ္တယ္။ အစိုးရက ၿပည္သူကို ကာကြယ္ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္ရမယ္။ ၿပည္သူက အစိုးရကို ပံ့ပုိးကူညီရမယ္။ အစိုးရနဲ႔ ၿပည္သူ သဟဇာတ ၿဖစ္ရင္ တိုင္းၿပည္သာယာတယ္။ သဟဇာတမၿဖစ္ရင္ ပစၥႏ ၱရစ္အရပ္လုိ ေနခ်င္စဖြယ္ မရွိဘူး။ ပစၥႏ ၱရစ္အရပ္ၿဖစ္ရတဲ့ကိစၥမွာ အမ်ားအားၿဖင္႔ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးအာဏာကို ခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ရယူထားတဲ့ အစိုးရမ်ားရဲ႕ တာ၀န္သာၿဖစ္တယ္။


ေဒ၀ါလီခံရေအာင္ လုပ္လုိ႔


အစိုးရက အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးည႔ံဖ်င္းလုိ႔၊ အာဏာကို အလြဲသံုးစားလုပ္လုိ႔၊ ဥပေဒကို မ်က္ကြယ္ၿပဳလုိ႔ တိုင္းၿပည္ေတြ ဆင္းရဲတြင္း နက္သထက္ နက္ၾကရတာသာ ရွိတယ္။ ၿပည္သူေတြက ေပးေဆာင္ရမယ္႔ အခြန္ေတြ မေပးၾက လုိ႔ ေဒ၀ါလီခံရတဲ့ တုိင္းၿပည္ဆိုတာ မရွိဘူး။ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး အာဏာကိုင္စြဲထားတဲ့ အစိုးရက အာဏာသံုးၿပီး အခြန္အခေတြ မရ ရေအာင္ ေကာက္ယူၾကၿမဲ ၿဖစ္တယ္။ ၿပည္သူေတြကအခြန္အခမေပးရင္ တရားစြဲ ေထာင္ခ် လုိ႔ရေပမဲ့ အစိုးရတာ၀န္ကို ေက်ပြန္ေအာင္ မထမ္းေဆာင္တဲ့ အစိုးရကို တာ၀န္မေက်ပြန္မႈနဲ႔ တရားစြဲ ေထာင္ခ်ႏိုင္တဲ့ ဥပေဒေတာ့ ကမၻာေပၚမွာ ဘယ္ႏိုင္ငံမွမရွိဘူး။ တိုင္းၿပည္ကို ေဒ၀ါလီခံရေအာင္ လုပ္လုိ႔ ေထာင္ခ်ခံရတဲ့ အစိုးရဆိုတာလည္း ကမၻာေပၚမွာ မရွိခဲ့ဘူး။


ၿခိမ္းေၿခာက္ဖုိ႔ မဟုတ္

စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီႏိုင္ငံမွာ တရားဥပေဒဆိုတာ အစိုးရက အသံုးခ်တဲ႔ လက္နက္အၿဖစ္သာ ရွိမေနေစရဘူး။ ၿပည္သူလူထုက အစိုးရကို ၿပန္လည္ထိန္းသိမ္းဖုိ႔လည္း ၿဖစ္ေစရမယ္။ ၿပည္သူက အခြန္အခမေပးရင္ အေရးယူ သလုိ ၿပည္သူေပးတဲ႔ လစာရိကၡာကို စားၿပီး တာ၀န္ေက်ပြန္ေအာင္ ထမ္းေဆာင္ဖုိ႔ ပ်က္ကြက္တာကိုလည္း အေရးယူ အပစ္ေပးႏိုင္ဖုိ႔ လုိတယ္။ ဥပေဒမွန္သမွ်ရဲ႕ အႏွစ္သာရက တိုင္းသူၿပည္သားမ်ား အပူအပင္၊ အေၾကာင္႔အၾက ကင္းကင္းနဲ႔စိတ္ေအးခ်မ္းသာစြာ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ ေနထိုင္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင္႔ ေရွာက္မႈေပးဖုိ႔ ၿဖစ္တယ္။ ၿပည္သူေတြကို ၿခိမ္းေၿခာက္ဖုိ႔ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဖိႏွိပ္ဖုိ႔ မဟုတ္ဘူး။
အေၿခခံဥပေဒကို ဆန္႔က်င္
ေစာေစာက အေမးရွိခဲ့တဲ့ မီဒီယာဥပေဒဆိုတာက ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံု အေၿခခံဥပေဒက အသိအမွတ္ၿပဳ ေပးအပ္ထားၿပီး ၿဖစ္တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံသူႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္ခြင့္၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေၿပာၾကားခြင့္၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာေရးသားခြင္႔ဆိုတဲ့ အေၿခခံလူ႕အခြင္႔ အေရးကို ဆန္႔က်င္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရာ ၿဖစ္တဲ့ အတြက္ သတင္းမီဒီယာ သမားတစ္ေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ ကန္႔ကြက္သလုိ ႏိုင္ငံသား တစ္ေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ လည္းကန္႔ကြက္ပါတယ္။ လက္ရွိအေၿခအေနမွာေတာင္ သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတဲ႔ ဥပေဒေတြက လုိတာထက္ေတာင္ အမ်ားၾကီး ပုိေနပါေသးတယ္။ အသေရဖ်က္မႈ ဥပေဒ၊ အစိုးရကို အၾကည္ညိဳပ်က္ေစမႈ ဥပေဒ၊ဆူပူေအာင္ လံႈေဆာ္ေရးသားမႈ ဥပေဒ၊ အစုိးရလွ်ိဳ႕၀ွက္ခ်က္ ေပါက္ၾကးမႈ ဥပေဒ၊ အီလက္ထေရာနစ္ အက္ဥပေဒ၊ ရံုးေတာ္ကို မထီမဲ့ၿမင္ၿပဳမႈ ဥပေဒ စတဲ႔ စတဲ႔ ဥပေဒေတြအမ်ားၾကီး ရွိပါတယ္။

ရုပ္သိမ္းေပးရမွာ

ၿပန္ၾကားေရး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနက ေၿပာသလုိ သတင္းမီဒီယာ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရး အတြက္၊ စတုတၳမ႑ိဳင္ ၾကံ႕ခိုင္ေရး အတြက္ လုပ္တာပါဆိုရင္ ေနာက္ထပ္ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ အသစ္အသစ္ေတြနဲ႔ ထပ္ၿပီး ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ဖုိ႔ လုပ္မယ္႔အစား ရွိေနတဲ႔ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈသေဘာေဆာင္တဲ့ ဥပေဒပုဒ္မေတြကို ရုပ္သိမ္းေပးဖုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမွာ ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ငါးဆယ္ေက်ာ္ သတင္းသမားလုပ္လာခဲ့သူ တစ္ေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ သတင္းမီဒီယာကို ကန္႔သတ္ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ဖုိ႔ လုပ္တဲ့ ဥပေဒမွန္သမွ်ကို လက္မခံႏိုင္ပါဘူး။ သတင္းသမားအစစ္“ပေရာ္ဖက္ရွင္နယ္” မွန္သမွ်လည္း လက္ခံၾကမွာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ပေရာ္ဖက္ရွင္နယ္ သတင္းသမား မဟုတ္တဲ႔ ေခတ္ပ်က္ ဂ်ာနယ္ လစ္ေတြကသာ အခြင္႔အေရးေမွ်ာ္ကိုးၿပီး ေထာက္ခံခ်င္ ေထာက္ခံၾကပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ပေရာ္ဖက္ရွင္နယ္ သတင္းသမားမွန္ရင္ကိုယ္႔လည္ပင္းစြပ္မယ္႔ ၾကိဳးကြင္းကို ကိုယ္တုိင္၀င္က်စ္ေပးတာမ်ိဳး ဘယ္နည္းနဲ႔မွ မ်က္ႏွာေၿပာင္တိုက္ၿပီး လုပ္မွာ မဟုတ္တာ ေသခ်ာပါတယ္။ ။
ဒီလႈိင္း စာစဥ္ပါ
ဆရာၾကီး
လူထုစိန္၀င္း ၏ ေဆာင္းပါး





 ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ဧၿပီလတစ္ရက္ေန႔က်ရင္ က်င္းပမယ့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ဖို႔အတြက္ အခုဆိုရင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အဖဲြ႔ေတြ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွာ ေရာက္ေနၾကပါၿပီ။ ဖိတ္ၾကားထားတဲ့ အတုိင္းပဲ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ သံတမန္ေတြနဲ႔အတူ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြလည္း ပါဝင္လာၾကပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုဘက္ကေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေတြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနတဲ့ အဖဲြ႔ႏွစ္ခုက ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ႏွစ္ဦး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ေရာက္ေနပါၿပီ။ အျပည့္အစံုကို ကိုသားညြန္႔ဦးက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့လာဖုိ႔အတြက္ ေဒါက္တာ Mely Anthony ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ အာဆီယံ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးရဲ႕ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ဝင္ ၈ ဦးကေတာ့ ဒီေန႔ညေနပိုင္း ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ကို ေရာက္လာပါၿပီ။ အျခား ႏိုင္ငံအသီးသီးက ေလ့လာေရးအဖဲြ႔အခ်ိဳ႕လည္း ရန္ကုန္ကို ေရာက္ရိွေနၿပီး ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုဘက္ကေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေတြကို ေလ့လာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနတဲ့ NDI (National Democratic Institute) နဲ႔ IRI (International Republican Institue) က ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ႏွစ္ဦး သြားေရာက္မွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ကမ္းလွမ္းခ်က္နဲ႔ NDI ရဲ႕ အာရွေဒသဆိုင္ရာညြန္ၾကားေရးမႈး Peter Manikas နဲ႔ IRI ရဲ႕ အာရွအစီအစဥ္ ညြန္ၾကားေရးမႉး Johanna Kao တို႔ ႏွစ္ဦးဟာ အခု မတ္လ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔ကေန ဧၿပီ ၃ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း မဲ႐ံုေတြကို ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္သြားမယ္္လို႔ NDI ေျပာခြင့္ ရသူက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း ၂၀၀၅ ခုႏွစ္တုန္းက ကုလသမဂၢက ေရးဆဲြသတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာစံႏႈန္းအတိုင္း ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေစာင့္ၾကပ္မႈမ်ိဳးေတာ့ လုပ္ႏိုင္မယ့္ အေျခအေနမရိွဘူးလို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ စံႏႈန္းအရဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြမတိုင္ခင္ လနဲ႔ခ်ီၿပီး အေျခအေနေတြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရတာမ်ိဳး၊ ႏိုင္ငံအႏွ႔ံက ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ လံုေလာက္တဲ့ လူအင္အား သံုးသပ္မႈထားရိွတာမ်ိဳး စတဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြအေပၚ ႏိုင္ငံတကာေစာင့္ၾကည့္မႈ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ေတြ လိုအပ္ပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း လာမယ့္ ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္လုပ္မယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြအတြက္ အခုလုပ္မယ့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ အေတြ႔အႀကံဳေတြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္သြားမွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ NDI ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ Rob Runyan က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“NDI ေရာ IRI ပါ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို သြားေရာက္ၾကည့္႐ႈခြင့္ရတဲ့အတြက္ ဝမ္းသာပါတယ္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြၿပီးတဲ့ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာလည္း ဆက္လက္ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားႏုိင္ဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ NDI ေရာ IRI ႏွစ္ခုစလံုးက ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ က်င္းပပံု၊ က်င္းပနည္းကေန ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြႀကီးက်င္းပရာမွာ ဘယ္လို အေထာက္အကူေပးႏုိင္မယ္ဆိုတာကို အထူး စိတ္ဝင္စားၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ပိုၿပီးက်ယ္ျပန္႔တဲ့ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးေတြကိုလည္း ဦးတည္ေစမယ္ဆိုတာ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ပါတယ္။”

မနက္ျဖန္ မတ္လ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႔မွာေတာ့ အဲဒီ သံတမန္အားလံုးကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာနက ေခၚယူထားပါတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေလ့လာေရး စီစဥ္မႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ ရွင္းျပဖို႕ရိွၿပီး အဲဒီက်မွ ေလ့လာေရးအဖဲြ႔ေတြအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေနရာကို ဘယ္လို သြားေရာက္မလဲဆိုတာ ေဆြးေႏြး ဆံုးျဖတ္ဖြယ္ ရိွပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံအမ်ားစု ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေလ့လာဖို႔ သီးျခားကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ ေစလႊတ္တာရိွသလို အခ်ိဳ႕ႏိုင္ငံေတြကေတာ့ သက္ဆိုင္ရာသံ႐ံုးကေန တာဝန္ယူၿပီး ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္မွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာရိွတဲ့ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္သံ႐ံုးကေန ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္ သြားမွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ Mr.Raul Hernandez က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ျမန္မာအာဏာပိုင္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ အခုလို ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရး ႏိုင္ငံတကာကို ဖိတ္ၾကားရာမွာ သံတမန္ေတြတင္မဟုတ္ဘဲ ႏိုင္ငံလႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ေတြနဲ႔ သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြကိုပါ ဖိတ္ၾကားခဲ့ပါ တယ္။ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီးေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္သံအမတ္ႀကီး ဟယ္လန္ ဒလာေဘးကား ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ေလးဦးပါ အဖဲြ႔က ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္သြားမွာပါ။ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္လႊတ္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရး ေကာ္မတီဥကၠ႒ ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး ပါလီမန္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အဖဲြ႔ကလည္း ျမန္မာေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေစာင့္ၾကည့္ဖို႔ သြားေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ဒီ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရး အဖဲြ႔ေတြနဲ႔ အတူ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ အႀကီးဆံုး႐ုပ္သံဌာနကလည္း သတင္းသမားေတြ သြားေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။”

ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံဘက္ကေတာ့ ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး႐ံုးနဲ႔ ဂ်ပန္သံ႐ံုးက ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ သံုးဦးကို ေစလႊတ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္သြားမယ္လို႔ ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာနက ထုတ္ျပန္ပါတယ္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြဟာ လြတ္လပ္ မွ်တမႈျဖစ္ေစလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္တဲ့အေၾကာင္းလည္း ပါရိွပါတယ္။ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံဘက္ကေတာ့ မဏိပူရ္နဲ႔ အာသံေဒသ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြႀကီးၾကပ္ေရးအရာရိွႏွစ္ဦးကို အိႏိၵယႏိုင္ငံကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳၿပီး ေစလႊတ္ထားတယ္လို႔ ထုတ္ျပန္ပါတယ္။ အလားတူလိုပဲ ကုလသမဂၢ ေလ့လာေရးကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ေတြလည္း မနက္ျဖန္ မနက္ပိုင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ေရာက္ရိွမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီအဖဲြ႔ဟာ သူတို႔ေလ့လာေတြ႔ရိွခ်က္ေတြကို ကုလသမဂၢအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ထံ ျပန္လည္ အစီရင္ခံရမွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္႐ံုး ေျပာခြင့္ရသူတဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ Eri Kaneko က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ျမန္မာအစိုးရရဲ႕ ဖိတ္ၾကားခ်က္အရ နယူးေယာက္ၿမိဳ႕၊ ကုလသမဂၢ႐ံုးခ်ဳပ္က ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖဲြ႔ သြားေရာက္ဖို႔ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီအဖဲြ႔အေနနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္သြားမွာျဖစ္ၿပီး အခ်ဳပ္ သံုးသပ္ခ်က္ကို အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ကို ျပန္လည္ အစီရင္ခံမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။”

အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုဘက္မွာေတာ့ အေမရိကန္အစိုးရရဲ႕ကမ္းလွမ္းမႈနဲ႔ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုမွာရိွတဲ့ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ႏွစ္ခုက ကို္ယ္စားလွယ္နွစ္ဦး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို သြားေရာက္မွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပဲြဟာ ျမန္မာသမိုင္းအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ မွတ္ေက်ာက္ျဖစ္မယ္လို႔ သံတမန္ေတြက ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ Mr.Raul Hernandez ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာအာဏာပို္င္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ အခုလို ႏိုင္ငံတကာေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ေတြကို ဖိတ္ေခၚတာဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္ကို လို္က္ေလ်ာေပးမႈျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ဧၿပီ ၁ ရက္ေန႔လုပ္မယ့္ ပါလီမန္ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ ေအာင္ေအာင္ျမင္ျမင္ ၿပီးဆံုးဖို႔ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏုိင္ငံက ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားပါတယ္။ ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပဲြဟာ ျမန္မာသမိုု္င္းရဲ႕ ေနာက္ထပ္ မွတ္တိုင္တခုျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ကေတာ့ အဓိက အတိုက္အခံ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ အျခားႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီေတြ ပါဝင္လာတာေၾကာင့္ပါ။ အခုလို ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြက်င္းပေနစဥ္မွာ အျခားႏိုင္ငံတကာကို ေလ့လာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ႏိုင္္ဖို႔ ဖိတ္ၾကားတဲ့အတြက္လည္း အားတက္ေက်နပ္မိပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာအာဏာပိုင္ေတြ အေနနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခြင့္ရဖို႔ ႏုိင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္ကို လိုက္ေလ်ာလိုက္တာပါ။”

ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္မယ့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာသံတမန္ေတြ၊ သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္လို ပံုစံနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေနရာကို သြားေရာက္ၾကမလဲဆိုတာ မနက္ျဖန္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဌာနနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုၿပီးမွ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း ျဖစ္လာမယ့္ သေဘာရိွပါတယ္။ ေနရာတိုင္းကို လြတ္လြတ္လပ္လပ္ သြားေရာက္ႏုိင္ဖို႔ေတာ့ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားၾကပါတယ္။ အမ်ားစုကေတာ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မယ့္ ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ကအေျခအေနကို ပိုၿပီး အာ႐ံုစိုက္ၾကဖြယ္ရိွပါတယ္။ အခု ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကလည္း အတိုက္အခံေခါင္းေဆာင္ျဖစ္တဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ပါဝင္လာတာေၾကာင့္လည္း ႏုိင္ငံတကာက ပိုၿပီးေတာ့ စိတ္ဝင္စားေနၾကပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်ား။


Source : VOA

 ေလးႏွစ္အတြင္း တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ေခ်းယူတဲ့ ေဒၚလာ သန္းသုံးေထာင္ေက်ာ္ ႏွင့္ ယြမ္ ေငြ သန္းႏွစ္ေထာင္နီးပါ ရွင္းတမ္း
၂၀၀၆ ခုႏႇစ္မႇ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏႇစ္အထိ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံက တ႐ုတ္ျပည္သူ႔သမၼတႏုိင္ငံထံမႇ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာသန္း ၃၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ႏႇင့္ တ႐ုတ္ ယြမ္ေငြ သန္းႏႇစ္ေထာင္နီးပါး ေခ်းေငြရရႇိခဲ့ၿပီး လွ်ပ္စစ္ႏႇင့္ စြမ္းအင္က႑အတြက္ ေခ်းေငြ ပမာဏမႇာ အမ်ားဆုံးျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အမ်ဳိးသားစီမံကိန္း ႏႇင့္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန ႏုိင္ငံျခားစီးပြား ဆက္သြယ္ေရး ဦးစီးဌာန၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ားအရ သိရႇိရသည္။


၂၀၀၆ ခုႏႇစ္မႇ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏႇစ္ အထိ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္သူ႔သမၼတႏုိင္ငံမႇ သက္သာေသာ ေခ်းေငြ၊ အတုိးမဲ့ ေခ်းေငြ၊ ဦးစားေပး၀ယ္သူ ေခ်းေငြ၊ ၀ယ္သူ ေခ်းေငြ၊ ကူးသန္းေရာင္း၀ယ္ေရး ေခ်းေငြမ်ား ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံက ရရႇိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ လွ်ပ္စစ္က႑ႏႇင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေတာင္ငူ-ေရႊေတာင္ ၂၃၀ ေကဗြီ ဓာတ္အားလုိင္းႏႇင့္ ဓာတ္အားခြဲ႐ုံမ်ား စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ ယြမ္သန္း ၇၀၊ ေရႊက်င္-သာယာကုန္း(၂၃၀) ေကဗြီ ဓာတ္အားလုိင္းႏႇင့္ ဓာတ္အားခြဲ႐ုံမ်ား၊ နမ့္ဆန္-ပင္းပက္ ဓာတ္အားလုိင္း စီမံကိန္းမ်ားအတြက္ ယြမ္သန္း ၁၀၀၊ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ဓာတ္အားခြဲ႐ုံမ်ား၏ ပစၥည္း ၀ယ္ယူေရးအတြက္ ယြမ္သန္း ၅၀ကုိ အတုိးမဲ့ ေခ်းေငြအေနျဖင့္ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္သူ႔သမၼတႏုိင္ငံက ထုတ္ေခ်းေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။


ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ႏႇင့္ ပတ္သက္၍လည္း ဘီလူးေခ်ာင္းအမႇတ္(၃) ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ႏႇင့္ မဟာဓာတ္အားလုိင္း စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၄၈ ဒသမ ၃၁ သန္း၊ အထက္ရဲရြာ ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ႏႇင့္ မဟာဓာတ္အားလုိင္း စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၇၇ ဒသမ ၁၆ သန္း၊ သူေဌးေခ်ာင္း ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၆၀ တုိ႔ကုိ ဦးစားေပး ၀ယ္သူေခ်းေငြ ရရႇိခဲ့ၿပီး ေသာက္ေရခပ္(၂)ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ စီမံကိန္း၊ အထက္က်ဳိင္းေတာင္း ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ စီမံကိန္းတုိ႔အတြက္လည္း ေခ်းေငြရရႇိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။


စြမ္းအင္က႑ျဖစ္သည့္ ေရနံႏႇင့္ သဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ႏႇင့္ ပတ္သက္၍လည္း တ႐ုတ္ႏုိင္ငံက ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသို႔ ေခ်းေငြမ်ား ေပးထားၿပီး ေရႊသဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ စီမံကိန္းတြင္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၄၄၅ ဒသမ ၀၈ သန္း၊ ျမန္မာ - တ႐ုတ္ သဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ ပုိက္လုိင္း စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၈ ဒသမ ၀၈ သန္းႏႇင့္ ျမန္မာ-တ႐ုတ္ ေရနံစိမ္း ပုိက္လုိင္း စီမံကိန္းအတြက္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၁၀၅ ဒသမ ၅၈ သန္းကုိ ကူးသန္းေရာင္း၀ယ္ေရး ေခ်းေငြအေနျဖင့္ ထုတ္ေခ်းေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း အမ်ဳိးသားစီမံကိန္းႏႇင့္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြ႔ံၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈ ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ားအရ သိရႇိရပါသည္။

စဥ္စီမံကိန္းေခ်းေငြပမာဏ
၁။ မဲေခါင္သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ႏႇင့္ အျမန္ဆက္ေၾကာင္း- ယြမ္သန္း ၃၀၀
၂။ ေလယာဥ္သုံးစင္း၀ယ္ယူေရး- ယြမ္သန္း ၃၉၉
၃။ ေကာ့စတစ္ဆုိဒါစက္႐ုံ -ယြမ္သန္း ၆၉၀
၄။ ေသာင္တူးေရယာဥ္၀ယ္ယူေရး- ယြမ္သန္း ၂၉၂
၅။ ေတာင္ငူ-ေရႊေတာင္ဓာတ္အားလုိင္း- ယြမ္သန္း ၇၀
၆။ ေရႊက်င္-သာယာကုန္းဓာတ္အားလုိင္း
နမ္ဆန္-ပင္းပက္ဓာတ္အားလုိင္း -ယြမ္သန္း ၁၀၀
၇။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ့ ဓာတ္အားခြဲ႐ုံမ်ား၏ ပစၥည္း၀ယ္ယူေရး- ယြမ္သန္း ၅၀
၈။ ပက္လက္ကုန္တြဲရႇည္မ်ား၀ယ္ယူေရး ယြမ္သန္း ၅၀
၉။ ဘီလူးေခ်ာင္းအမႇတ္(၃)ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၄၈ .၃၁
၁၀။ အထက္ရဲရြာေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၁၇၇ .၁၆
၁၁။ သူေ႒းေခ်ာင္းေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၆၀
၁၂။ လူစီးတြဲ၊ ကုန္တြဲသစ္တည္ေဆာက္ေရး ေဒၚလာသန္း ၄၇ .၅၁
၁၃။ စက္ေခါင္းသစ္တည္ေဆာက္ေရး ေဒၚလာသန္း ၄၇ .၀၂
၁၄။ အႀကီးစားေမာ္ေတာ္ယာဥ္တည္ေဆာက္ေရး ေဒၚလာသန္း ၂၀
၁၅။ ေနျပည္ေတာ္အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာေလဆိပ္ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၂၀၀
၁၆။ ယူရီးယား ဓာတ္ေျမၾသဇာစက္႐ုံ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၇၄ .၀၈
၁၇။ ေရႊသဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ ေဒၚလာသန္း ၄၄၅ .၀၈
၁၈။ ျမန္မာ-တ႐ုတ္ သဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔ပုိက္လုိင္း ေဒၚလာသန္း ၁၅၈ .၀၈
၁၉။ ျမန္မာ-တ႐ုတ္ ေရနံစိမ္းပုိက္လုိင္း ေဒၚလာသန္း ၁၁၀၅ .၅၈
၂၀။ သံမဏိစက္႐ုံ တည္ေဆာက္ေရး ေဒၚလာသန္း ၇၁၂.၀၅

Source : EMG


၂၀၁၂-၂၀၁၃ ဘ႑ာေရးႏႇစ္တြင္ စည္းၾကပ္ေကာက္ခံမည့္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္ႏႇင့္ ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ စနစ္မ်ား အေၾကာင္းကို မတ္လ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပသည့္ အခြန္ဆုိင္ရာ ရႇင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သတင္း ရရႇိပါသည္။

အဆိုပါ ရႇင္းလင္းပြဲသို႔ ဘ႑ာေရးႏႇင့္ အခြန္၀န္ႀကီးဌာန ဒုတိယ၀န္ႀကီး ဦး၀င္းသန္းႏႇင့္ ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမႇဴးခ်ဳပ္၊ ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမႇဴးမ်ား တက္ေရာက္ကာ အခြန္ဆုိင္ရာမ်ား ေခတ္စနစ္ႏႇင့္အညီ ေျပာင္းလဲထားသည့္ အေၾကာင္း မ်ားကို ရႇင္းလင္းခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

၀င္ေငြခြန္ဆိုင္ရာမ်ားကို ျပင္ဆင္သတ္မႇတ္ေပးရာ၌ အမိန္႔ေၾကာ္ျငာစာ ခုနစ္ခု ထုတ္ျပန္ကာ သတ္မႇတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

၂၀၁၂ ခုႏႇစ္ ဧၿပီလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔မႇ စတင္သက္ေရာက္မည့္ ျပင္ဆင္ေျပာင္းလဲေပးထားသည့္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္အရ တစ္လ လစာ က်ပ္ ၁၂၀၀၀၀ ေအာက္ရရႇိသူ ႏိုင္ငံ့၀န္ထမ္း၊ ပုဂၢလိက ၀န္ထမ္းမ်ားသည္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္ ကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ ရရႇိမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ယင္းအျပင္ သမ၀ါယမႏႇင့္ စီးပြားေရး လုပ္ကိုင္သူမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ တစ္လက်ပ္ တစ္သိန္းႏႇင့္ က်ပ္တစ္သိန္းေအာက္ ၀င္ေငြရႇိသူမ်ား ၀င္ေငြခြန္ကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ ရရႇိမည္ျဖစ္သည္။

ယခင္က လစာအေပၚ ၀င္ေငြခြန္ ေပးေဆာင္ရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ထားရာတြင္ ၀င္ေငြပမာဏအလိုက္ အလႊာ ၁၅ လႊာ သတ္မႇတ္ထားေသာ္လည္း ယခု အခါ ၁၂ လႊာသာ သတ္မႇတ္လိုက္ေၾကာင္း၊ ယခင္က တစ္က်ပ္မႇ ၅၀၀၀ က်ပ္အတြင္း ရရႇိသူမ်ားအား ၀င္ေငြခြန္ ငါးရာခိုင္ႏႈန္း ေကာက္ခံရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ထားျခင္းမႇစကာ က်ပ္ ၂၀၀၀၀၀၀၁ ႏႇင့္အထက္အား ၃၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းအထိ ေကာက္ခံရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ထားခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခုအခါတြင္မူ တစ္က်ပ္မႇ က်ပ္ငါးသိန္းအထိ လစာ၀င္ေငြရႇိသူမ်ားသည္ပင္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္ တစ္ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းသာ ေပးေဆာင္ရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ထားေၾကာင္း၊ အျမင့္ဆံုးႏႈန္းအျဖစ္ က်ပ္ ၂၀၀၀၀၀၀၁ ႏႇင့္အထက္ လစာ ၀င္ေငြရႇိသူမ်ား ပင္ ၂၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းသာ ေပးေဆာင္ရန္ ျပင္ဆင္သတ္မႇတ္ထား ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

စီးပြားေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအေပၚ စည္းၾကပ္သည့္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္မ်ားကိုလည္း ျပင္ဆင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခင္က အနိမ့္ဆံုး ငါးရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းမႇ အျမင့္ဆံုး ၄၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းေကာက္ခံရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ထားေသာ္လည္း ယခုအခါ အနိမ့္ဆံုး ႏႇစ္ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းမႇ အျမင့္ဆံုး ၃၀ ရာခုိင္ ႏႈန္းအထိသာ ေပးေဆာင္ရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ သတ္မႇတ္လိုက္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ယခင္က က်ပ္ ၅၀၀၀ ၀င္ေငြရႇိလွ်င္ပင္ ငါးရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ေပးေဆာင္ရမႈမႇ ယခုအခါ က်ပ္ငါးသိန္း ၀င္ေငြရႇိသည့္ စီးပြားေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားသည္ပင္ ၀င္ေငြခြန္ ႏႇစ္ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းသာ ေပးေဆာင္ရေတာ့မည့္ျဖစ္ၿပီး စီးပြားေရး လုပ္ငန္း၊ လစာ၊ သမ၀ါယမစသည္ျဖင့္ မည္သည့္ ၀င္ေငြအတြက္ျဖစ္ေစ သတ္မႇတ္ထားသည့္ သက္သာခြင့္မ်ားရႇိၿပီး အဆိုပါ သက္သာခြင့္မ်ား ခုႏႇိမ္လ်က္ က်န္၀င္ေငြအေပၚ ၀င္ေငြ ခြန္ေပးေဆာင္ရန္ သတ္မႇတ္ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္အား ျပင္ဆင္သတ္မႇတ္ရာတြင္ အမိန္႔ေၾကာ္ျငာစာ ကုိးခုထုတ္ျပန္ကာ ျပင္ဆင္ သတ္မႇတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ ျပင္ဆင္ေပးရာတြင္ အဓိကအားျဖင့္ ငါးရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းသာ ေပးေဆာင္ရမည့္ ကုန္စည္အုပ္စုႏႇင့္ အခြန္ႏႈန္းျမင့္ျဖင့္ ေပးေဆာင္ရမည့္ အထူးကုန္စည္မ်ားဟူ၍ ႏႇစ္မ်ဳိး ခြဲျခားေပးခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ကုန္သြယ္ လုပ္ငန္းခြန္အား ျပင္ဆင္ေပးမႈအရ ကုန္စည္အမ်ဳိးအစား ၇၀ မႇာ အခြန္ ကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ ရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ယခင္က ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ ၁၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းအထိ ေပးေဆာင္ရေသာ ကုန္စည္ ၉၈ မ်ဳိး၊ ၂၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းေပး ေဆာင္ေနရေသာ ကုန္စည္ ၄၅ မ်ဳိး၊ ၂၅ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ေပးေဆာင္ရေသာ ကုန္စည္ ၅၂ မ်ဳိးတို႔ အားလံုးကို ယခုအခါ ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ ငါးရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းသာ တစ္ေျပးညီ ေကာက္ခံရန္ ေလ်ာ့ေပါ့သတ္မႇတ္လိုက္သည္ဟု သိရသည္။ ယခုအခါတြင္ ေရာင္းရေငြ က်ပ္သိန္း ၁၀၀ ေအာက္ရႇိေသာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို စည္းၾကပ္ျခင္း မျပဳရေသာ ေရာင္းရေငြအျဖစ္ သတ္မႇတ္ေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ထိုသို႔ပင္ ကုန္စည္ ၀ယ္ယူေရာင္းခ်ျခင္းလုပ္ငန္း၊ ခရီးသည္ ပို႔ေဆာင္ေရးလုပ္ငန္း၊ စားေသာက္ဖြယ္ ေရာင္းခ်ျခင္းလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအေနျဖင့္လည္း ယခင္ကစည္းၾကပ္ျခင္း မျပဳရေသာ ေရာင္းရေငြပမာဏ သတ္မႇတ္ခ်က္အား က်ပ္သိန္း ၁၀၀ အထိ တိုးျမႇင့္ ျပင္ဆင္ေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ယခုကဲ့သို႔ အခြန္ႏႈန္းမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္ေပးျခင္းမႇာ ေခတ္ကာလျဖင့္ ေလ်ာ္ညီေစရန္၊ အခြန္ထမ္းအမ်ားစုထံမႇ သင့္ေတာ္သည့္ ပမာဏျဖင့္သာ ေကာက္ခံရန္၊ အခြန္ထမ္းမ်ား ပိုမိုမ်ားျပားလာေစရန္၊ အခြန္ထမ္း ကိုယ္တိုင္မႇ ေက်နပ္စြာ အခြန္ေပးေဆာင္သည့္ အေနအထားသို႔ သြားရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ျပင္ဆင္ေပးသည့္ အခြန္အေနအထားမ်ားကို တြက္ခ်က္ၾကည့္ပါက ၀င္ေငြခြန္ ျပင္ဆင္သတ္မႇတ္ေပးမႈမႇာ အခြန္ထမ္းမ်ားအတြက္ ေပးေဆာင္ႏိုင္သည့္ အေနအထား ရႇိလာႏုိင္ၿပီး ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ ျပင္ဆင္ သတ္မႇတ္ေပးမႈတြင္လည္း သက္သာေစႏိုင္သည့္ အေနအထားရႇိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ ကုန္သြယ္လုပ္ငန္းခြန္ ငါးရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းအုပ္စုတြင္ အခ်ဳိ႕ေသာ ကုန္စည္မ်ားမႇာ တန္ဖိုးျမင့္ကုန္စည္မ်ားႏႇင့္ တန္းတူေပးေဆာင္ရသည့္ အေနအထားရႇိေနေသးေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
Source :EMG
Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak arrived in Burma's capital Naypyidaw on Wednesday leading a 150-member diplomatic and business delegation on a two-day visit to the country.

“It is widely expected that the visit will focus on economic issues,” Malaysian ambassador to Burma Ahmad Faisal Mohamed told Malaysian journalists on Tuesday. “Everybody is interested in Myanmar. If you are late, all the opportunities will be gone.”

Bilateral trade between Malaysia and Burma stood at US $795 million in 2011, an increase of nearly 27 percent from the previous year, according to Malaysian government figures. Roughly 258,000 Burmese nationals are registered as working in Malaysia.



Malaysia's Prime Minister Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak


Malaysia’s state-owned oil and gas giant Petronas and the hotel group Micasa have investments in Burma. In January, the Burmese government awarded two out of 18 new onshore oil and gas blocks to Petronas in its biggest energy tender in years. Petronas said in December that it was looking to expand its onshore presence in Burma. Six additional onshore oil and gas blocks are expected to be tendered soon.



Malaysia is ranked third as country of origin of tourists in Burma, overtaking South Korea and Japan last year, according to figures by the Burmese Ministry of Hotels and Tourism. 23,287 tourist visas were issued to Malaysians in 2011, up 44 percent on the previous year.

“In trade and investment, we are not doing that badly, but we can take these opportunities to talk about areas we can further develop. There is huge potential,” Ambassador Mohamed said.

A business delegation of more than 50 representatives of Malaysian companies has travelled with Najib to Naypyidaw to explore investments in telecommunications, construction, timber and agriculture, according to Malaysia’s state news agency Bernama.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is temporarily home to a total of 88,500 Burmese refugees as of the end of January. 34,400 Chins and 23,000 Rohingyas are the two biggest ethnic groups of asylum seekers in Malaysia.

The ministers for human resources and home affairs, whose portfolios deal with foreign workers and asylum seekers, are part of the prime ministers’ delegation along with Foreign Minister Anifah Aman.

Opposition parliamentarian Mujahid Yusof Rawa expressed hope that Najib will raise the issue of the Rohingya refugees in Naypyidaw.

“I hope that the prime minister’s visit will open a new chapter in how we handle the Rohingya refugees,” the MP for the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday. “I hope there will be a new approach.”

“I call for the Burmese government to treat Rohingyas as Burmese,” he said. “Do not treat them as aliens.”

Najib’s visit was preceded by a preparatory visit by Foreign Minister Aman two weeks ago. This is his first prime ministerial visit to Burma and the first of a Malaysian prime minister since his predecessor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s visit in 2004.

Source : PATRICK BOEHLER/ THE IRRAWADDY





Rohingya travel hundreds of nautical miles thus to escape economic and civil oppre3ssion.

by Marque A. Rome

Thai governments — whether of yellow or red stripe — have in recent years suffered mounting international criticism owing to treatment of Rohingya refugees, who dare journey in flimsy open boats, typically with insufficient supplies, across the Indian Ocean in hope of finding somewhere a livelihood and home.

Many come ashore along Thailand’s Andaman Sea coast. The Thais, however, among whom xenophobia forms a cultural trait, do not welcome stateless immigrants, especially not economic refugees adhering to the Muslim faith.

Thai law is quite clear on the point, the gist of which is, Thailand is for Thai people; visitors are welcome, but legal immigration is sharply restricted. A number of small ethnic groups around the country has suffered under these strictures, notably the northern hilltribes and Sea Gypsies here in the south. Formerly, though native for generations past, they were perceived as unwanted outsiders and denied citizenship.


Rohingya have lived in refugee camps in Bangladesh for decades.

That has gradually changed.

Sea Gypsies, for example, who appear to be the Andaman coast’s aboriginal inhabitants, now have full rights of citizenship and royally bestowed surnames.

But still no legal apparatus is in place for dealing with immigrants in an orderly way. Unwanted visitors are deported. But what can be done with those unwanted in their home countries, where officials deny them repatriation?

That is the unfortunate case of the Rohingya, whose home is on the Arakan coast of Burma: the Burmese don’t want them there and will not accept them back.


Their enervation may be forgiven after days at sea without shelter.

So the Thais are placed in the invidious position either of accepting entry by an alien and impoverished group or…pushing them back whence they came — back into the sea. This has sometimes been done, prompting criticism from abroad. Thus the government is now creating a permanent plan for dealing with the Rohingya boat people.

What that will encompass remains to be seen, but the question naturally arises, “Who are the Rohingya and why have they no home?”

Their origins are vague but not because lost in the shrouds of antiquity; they appear, as an ethnic group, only recently. Burmese historian Khin Maung Saw asserts that the term ‘Rohingya’ does not appear before the 1950s. Another historian, Dr. Maung Maung, noted no ‘Rohingya’ are mentioned in the British 1824 census survey.

Aye Chan, of Kanda University of International Studies, has written that ‘Rohingya’ was adopted as a name by Bengalis in the 1950s whose forbears had migrated to Arakan during the British Raj. Many came at the behest of British employers but found themselves no longer wanted, and, indeed, stateless, after Burma’s independence in 1947. Aye Chan also argues that no record exists of ‘Rohingya’ in any language before the ’50s.

Arakan, in western Burma, borders East Bengal, now the nation of Bangladesh, so it seems reasonable to accept that the group’s origins are there, especially as they are Muslim, and the Burmese — for whom Buddhism is regarded as a defining national trait — do not accept them as native. They also speak a language related to Chittagonian, a Bengal dialect common in the south along Bangladesh’s border with Burma.


A 500-year-old coin the Rohingya think indicates their antiquity as a nation.

The Rohingya themselves derive their origin from a fanciful story: the 8th Century shipwreck of an Arab trading vessel whose crew begged — and received — mercy from Arakan’s local raja when he ordered them killed. The Rohingya said they were allowed to stay and have been in Arakan since.

However the case may be, relations between the Rohingya and the Burmese long have been uneasy. A 1939 study carried out under the auspices of British authorities, anxious that animosity might flare into violence between the Arakanese majority and Muslim migrants, concluded that migration from Bengal should be greatly reduced.

That British fears of violence were not misplaced became evident after the Japanese conquest of Burma in 1942: On 28th March of that year, perhaps 5,000 Muslims were slaughtered by Arakanese nationalists and Karens. The animosity was not all on one side, Muslims in northern Arakan massacred some 20,000 Arakanese.


"One law for both the Lion and the Ox," wrote Blake, "Opression." It has certainly been that of the Rohingya since long before most were born.

By no means all Burmese Muslims are Rohingya, but during World War II Muslim Bengali immigrants largely supported the British against the Japanese, who invaded the country in the guise of liberators. Support for the British was equated as opposition to Burmese nationalism — and so left the Rohingya with few friends after independence.

During the war, Rohingya support for the British manifested itself in active collaboration. They provided intelligence to British commanders fighting the Japanese, who reciprocated with brutal reprisals of a type similar in kind to the notorious Rape of Nanking: massacre, rape, murder, torture, extortion and forced labour. Tens of thousands fled into Bengal.

Since the war, various military governments in Burma have, for domestic political reasons, regularly incited violence against the Rohingya and other minorities. The former are an easy target, being strongly religious and — with their mosques and madrasa schools — plainly opposed to integration with the Buddhist majority, leading to further displacement of the community.

Amnesty International has noted that:

“Rohingyas’ freedom of movement is severely restricted, the vast majority are effectively denied Burmese citizenship. They are subjected to various forms of extortion and arbitrary taxation; land confiscation; forced eviction and house destruction; and financial restrictions on marriage. Rohingyas are used as forced labourers on roads and military camps….”

In 1961, the democratic government of U Nu granted local autonomy to Rohingya and established the Mayu Frontier Administration, a special frontier district ruled directly by the central government. But in 1964, Gen Ne Win — after toppling U Nu — abolished it. Thereafter his government’s policy towards the Rohingya has been described as one of ethnic cleansing, the goal being “a Rohingya-less Arakan.”

“In 1978 over 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh,” Amnesty International reported, “following the Burmese army’s ‘Nagamin’ (‘Dragon King’) operation. Officially this campaign aimed at ‘scrutinising each individual living in the state, designating citizens and foreigners in accordance with the law and taking actions against foreigners who have filtered into the country illegally.’ It directly targeted civilians, and resulted in widespread killings, rape, destruction of mosques and religious persecution.”

From 1988 till the recent change in regimes, the government permitted three marriages per year per village in the principal Rohingya population centres of northern Arakan State. This edict was later extended to other townships in Arakan.

“During 1991-92, over a quarter-million Rohingya fled to Bangladesh,” wrote Amnesty International. “They reported widespread forced labour, summary executions, torture, and rape. Rohingya were forced to work without pay by the Burmese army on infrastructure and economic projects, often under harsh conditions. Many other human rights violations by security forces occurred….”

Worse still for the Rohingya, the Bengalis are no longer amenable to accepting them: the government no longer provides support for refugee camps in which the overwhelming majority live and actually prevents international agencies from improving facilities for fear that, as a 2006 Refugees International report explained: “a humane camp environment will attract more Rohingya to their country.”


Conditions at a typical camp in Bangladesh.

Malnutrition rates therein are described as “very high”, with acute malnutrition prevalent in 16.8 per cent of children aged younger than five years, and 2.8 per cent severe cases. “Chronic malnutrition was present in 51.9% of the children. The underlying causes include poor water and sanitation, lack of access to complementary food and non-food items, and the poor socio-economic conditions of the refugees.”

So, displaced from their homeland or treated as aliens, failing to find sympathy for their plight in co-religionist Bangladesh, they take to the sea. But their treatment after coming ashore in other countries is far from certain. In Indonesia and Malaysia they are treated with a modicum of human dignity.

In Thailand they have been treated as pests.


Rohingya being towed: sometimes the overloaded derelict vessels succumb to the stress and...their passengers then present a problem to no one any longer.

In February, 2009, scandal erupted. A boatload of 190 Rohingya refugees was towed to sea and the story raised international headlines. A group rescued by Indonesian authorities that month told stories of being captured and beaten by Thai authorities, then abandoned in the ocean. Another group of five boats was towed to sea where four sank.

Thailand’s prime minister at the time, the Democrat Apisit Vejjajiva, admitted “some instances” in which Rohingya were abandoned at sea. He said they were allowed to “drift to other shores” but that policy was to supply “enough food and water” to ensure their arrival, and vowed he would bring to account officers guilty of human rights violations.

In the event, none were found guilty.

Although the new government of Burma agreed late last year to repatriate “registered Rohingya refugees” it is by no means clear how many can prove they are ‘registered’ — too many having been displaced during a period covering now seven decades.

The United Nations estimates the total population of Rohingya at 729,00 scattered throughout various Indian Ocean nations: Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and, of course, Burma.

Other figures suggest this wildly underestimates the population: In a briefing paper dated 26th March 2009, the Brussels-based Euro-Burma Office estimated the number at 800,000 in Arakan alone.

In addition: “It is estimated 500,000 Rohingya live in Saudi Arabia, 200,000 in Pakistan, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in the United Arab Emirates and 25,000 in Malaysia.”

That makes about 1.8 million. Rohingya nationalists, however, dispute even this figure as greatly under-estimating their number, which they think is closer to 3.5 million, of which two million live in Burma and the rest in exile.


The Rohingya flag.

A Rohingya Patriotic Front has pressed for recognition of Rohingya status internationally. The group has a national flag — its green field emblematic of Islam; the central motif taken from a coin minted by Shams al-din Muhammad Ghazi, sultan of Bengal and dating from 1554 (the latter to support the group’s claim to an origin far earlier than the 1950s).

Thus the Rohingya are seen tenaciously holding onto their identity. Though scattered, like the Zionist Jews previous to Israel’s founding in 1947, they are eager to carve out a homeland.


Rohingya lined up awaiting deportation in February, 2009.

Born of this earth, yet with no land acknowledging them its children, the Rohingya necessarily wander — and even in that find themselves pursued and oppressed.

Bangkok (Mizzima) – Award-winning Thai photographer Suthep Kritsanavarin will exhibit photographs depicting the plight of the Rohingya at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre now through Sunday.

Titled “Stateless Rohingya…Running on Empty,” the exhibit is supported by the Asian Resource Foundation and the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus.

Suthep worked on the project for three years. It tells the story of the Rohingyas, an ethnic and Muslim religious minority from Burma, largely unknown to the world. Without citizen rights in Burma, many have fled to India and Bangladesh to seek refugee status.

As a photojournalist, Suthep Kritsanavarin has chronicled environmental, social, and humanitarian issues in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades. His award-winning photography essays have been published in: The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Time, Geographical, Aera, Days Japan, and Geo. He has also exhibited his documentary photography in Germany, France, China, Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia.
 
Credit Here:
Credit : Written by ကိုကို (ေရႊလံုး)

ဘာသာေပါင္းစံု ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ဆုေတာင္းပြဲ အခမ္းအနားကို ယေန႔ (မတ္လ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔) ညေန ၄ နာရီ အခ်ိန္က၊ ရန္ကုန္ တကၠသိုလ္ ယုဒႆန္ ခန္းမတြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့ရာ အခမ္းအနားသို႔ တက္ေရာက္လာေသာ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္က ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး​ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ ရန္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

၂၄ ႏွစ္တာ ကာလအတြင္း ရန္ကုန္ တကၠသိုလ္ေျမသို႔ ပထမဆံုး ေရာက္ရိွလာသည့္ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္က “အမ်ားစုက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကို ဘယ္ေလာက္ ေတာင့္တယ္ဆိုတာ ေဖာ္ထုတ္နိုင္ဖို ့ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြ ကိုလုပ္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္ပါတယ္။ အရင္ အေမွာင္ေခတ္တုန္းက အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေတြ၊ လမ္းေတြေပၚမွာ အသက္ေပးခဲ့ရတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အခုေခတ္ အခ်ိန္မွာ ေျပာရဲ၊ ဆိုရ၊ဲ နားေထာင္ရဲ၊ ၾကည့္ရဲရမယ္။ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္၊ တရားမွ်တမႈအတြက္ အေၾကာက္တရား မရိွရဘူး။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ပက္သက္လို႔ ေျပာရင္ အခု စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ အခ်င္းခ်င္း ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဆြေႏြးၾက တာ မေအာင္ျမင္ၾကဘူး။ ဒါ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ အျပစ္တင္တာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ပကတိကို ေျပာေနတာပါ။ စစ္ေဘးရဲ႕ ဒုကၡေတြကို တက္​ေခါက္​ေနတဲ့ တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြ၊ ကေလးေတြရဲ႕ ငိုသံေတြ၊ နာက်ဥ္း ႐ႈိုက္ေနတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြ၊ သူတို႔ကိုယ္စား ကၽြန္ေတာ္ တို႔​ေတြ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရမယ္။ ဒါကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ၾကားေအာင္ ကမ႓ာ့ေခါင္မိုးေပၚ တက္ၿပီး ေအာ္ရမယ္။” ဟု​ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

အခမ္းအနားတြင္ ဘာသာေရး ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား၊ ဖိတ္ၾကားထားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ မီဒီယာမ်ား တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ ၾကၿပီး၊ တက္ေရာက္ လာသူမ်ားက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ ဆုေတာင္းမႈ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ကဗ်ာမ်ားလည္း ရြတ္ဆို ခဲ့ၾကသည္။



Photo by ကိုကို (ေရႊလံုး)


By Qin Hui

After the decision to shelve a China-funded hydropower plant on the Irrawaddy caused uproar in Beijing, Qin Hui set off south to learn about the project and its opponents. He opens a three-part article.

Everywhere in Kachin, you see photos or paintings of Myitsonethe site is to this region what Mount Fuji is to Japan or Mount Kumgang to North Korea: an emblem of the nation.

On a recent trip to Myanmar also known as Burma my eyes were opened to the strength of opposition to the Myitsone dam, the China-led scheme in the northern state of Kachin suspended last September after more than a year of construction.

Groups usually positioned against each other across ethnic, religious or political lines on this issue appear united. Burmese or Kachin; existing regime or opposition; religious or secular; Christian or Buddhist; pro-West, pro-military or pro-China political factions almost all agree that the government was right to shelve the project at the source of the Irrawaddy River.

This is not to say that the dam, a project of China Power Investment Corporation (CPI), has no supporters whatsoever. After all, the junta, which governed the country in a military dictatorship from 1962 until the 2010 general election, was originally a firm advocate of the scheme. Indeed, it pushed not just for the Miyitsone dam, but for a cascade of seven hydropower plants on the Irawaddy River.

But anyone familiar with Burmese politics will know that the military government suffered periodic factional disputes throughout its rule, a dynamic that was crucial to kick-starting the current reform period. And, among those internal disagreements was a dispute over Myitsone.

Former head of state Than Shwe was replaced last year by the first civilian president in nearly 50 years, Thein Sein. Though the nominal civilian government is still backed by the military, Than Shwe has seen his clique undermined and its voice weakened. The generals supporters have failed to speak out in favour of the Myitsone dam, and even state newspaper New Light of Myanmar has published criticisms of the scheme.

Kachin state, where the majority of residents are members of the Kachin ethnic group, is home to a strong, separatist movement, led by the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). The organisation opposes the military-backed government and a de-facto state of war exists between the two parties. For many years, the KIO has acted as an autonomous local government, controlling most of the state, where it manages public order and economic development.

Unlike the NGO community, the KIO has in the past supported hydropower development. The KIO-governed Kachin State 2nd Special Region, for example, once turned to its only international neighbour, China, for help in this area. In fact, it was the KIO that first attracted Chinese investors to the regions hydropower potential.

But the friendship didnt last. Certain Chinese companies, preferring to cosy up to the more powerful Myanmar government, cast the KIO aside, causing the angry separatists to change their stance on several projects. A dam on the Tarpein River was one such scheme. The KIO had collaborated with Chinas Datang Corporation on the project and provided some of the funding. But when the military government intervened, Datang changed allegiance, forcing the KIO out. In order to protect the project, government soldiers were dispatched to occupy the area around the dam, leaving the Kachin down on both land and money and not at all happy about it.

In response, the KIO decided to obstruct the project, and the scheme is now paralysed. But it is important to note that the rebels are not opposed to a dam on the Tarpein itself, merely to the involvement of the Myanmar government.

The Myitsone Dam is a different case, however. While the KIO is by no means anti-dam, and was once keen to work with China on hydropower, it has never been in favour of the Myitsone project.

Even the Kachin faction closest to the Myanmar government opposes to the dam. The New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K) turned itself from a communist militia into a border guard force under the aegis of the military government. Its former leader, Zahkung Tingying, suppressed internal dissent with junta help and ended up as nothing but a puppet of Than Shwe. But even he has never spoken out in favour of the Myitsone project, while other NDA-K figures have been explicit in their opposition. When I spoke to former deputy commander of the NDA-K Wu Maoyin, he described the Myitsone Dam as the single largest source of public discontent with Chinese investment.

The Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) is an influential religious organisation in the region. I asked one of its senior members, Brother Kunsang, if there were cultural or religious reasons to oppose the dam, in addition to environmental and economic factors: Obviously, being a Christian, I dont believe there are any spirits residing at Myitsone. But as a Kachin, I see it as a symbol of our national spirit. That does not contradict my Christianity, he said. If the junta and Chinese companies come along and want to make money from it without even consulting us, of course Ill object, even if it doesnt damage the environment.

Myanmars ethnic Chinese come from a range of backgrounds: some originate from the mainland, some from the Kuomintang army (many of whose ranks fled to Myanmar after being expelled from China by the Communists) and some are members of the ethnically Chinese Wa and Kokang groups. But there is a common thread: overall, Myanmars ethnic Chinese population is comparatively successful and rich. Its members prefer to keep their heads down and make money, rather than getting involved in politics.

The growth in trade between Myanmar and China has provided many ethnic Chinese with the chance to get wealthy, and they have not wasted these opportunities. The beneficiaries of these ties do whatever is necessary to maintain friendly relations with both the military government and China and to keep a distance from anything the two governments might find objectionable. As a result, they are unlikely to discuss the Myitsone dam. When they do, however, they say it has not been handled well. Even members of the ethnic Chinese elite, who have the closest links with government, feel this way.

Li Zuqing, head of the Confucius Institute in Mandalay, is one example. He has always identified with China and approves of both the Chinese and Myanmar governments. But Li told me that, while he believes China has done many good things for Myanmar over the decades, the country has made two clear mistakes. One was encouraging ethnic Chinese students in Myanmar to become Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The other is the Myitsone dam: I dont know whose stupid idea it was, he said. They could have built it anywhere, and they had to build it right where it would be most taboo.

So why is the Myitsone dam so unpopular?

Opponents of the dam say it will damage the environment, impact fisheries, flood wide swaths of jungle and change the river flow downstream. And, since it is built on a geological fault, they argue it could collapse if an earthquake strikes.

There are good reasons for many of these concerns. But they also call for qualifying remarks.

First, this list of objections could apply to almost any dam. We cannot, however, rule out dam construction entirely. Instead, we need to work out the pros and the cons and identify suitable sites: if it isnt possible to build one here, where is it possible? Where would the damage be smallest? Alternative proposals are needed. Certain environmental groups appear capable only of saying where dams cannot go and not where they can. While these NGOs do have a role to play, we cannot rely solely on their advice about any specific project.

Second, some of the issues raised by opponents can be resolved through design changes, further investment or extra equipment. This doesnt have to be an all-or-nothing choice between the original proposal and no dam at all. Moreover, some of the problems flagged up are not as serious as they are made out to be. The main dam at Myitsone is designed as a concrete-face rock-fill dam, a type of barrage with a much shallower slope and wider base than arch or gravity dams, which rely on a steep narrow wall. Such dams are less prone to earthquake damage. Even if the Myitsone were damaged, there is virtually no chance of a sudden collapse; any failure would pan out over a period of time.

Third, opposition to dams can be contradictory. If the area to be flooded is sparsely-populated, it is described as a unique virgin ecosystem, which must not be touched. If it is densely populated, however, the problems of relocating local residents are played up. The outcome is that no matter what the population, the dam cannot be built. These two concerns need to be balanced.

Something else struck me during my visit to Kachin state: although environmental damage is the concern most prominently voiced by opponents to the dam, it is not the real reason they fight it.

Everywhere in Kachin, you see photos or paintings of Myitsone, the confluence of the Mail and N'Mai rivers and source of the Irrawaddy. The iconic image is visible in any public space and is a familiar sight even in non-Kachin areas (a Myitsone Restaurant near the Chinese embassy in Yangon is adorned with the image). It seems that Myitsone is to this region what Mount Fuji is to Japan or Mount Kumgang to North Korea: an emblem of the nation.

Why is this place so significant? Kachin legend has it that Father Dragon and his two sons, Hkrai Nawng and Hkrai Gam, were born here. Locals believe that, if the mountains are damaged, the dragons will awaken and bring disaster. Of course, many people dont believe this, but the point is the Kachin do and this is their land isnt it?

Besides, there are historic reasons for considering this a special place. When the people of the Tibeto-Burman language family (which includes the Burmese and the Kachin) migrated south from the Tibetan plateau, this is where they entered the Irrawaddy valley, emerging from the precipitous mountains to found a new civilisation.

Even if you dismiss the legends, the Kachin have cause to revere Myitsone as the birthplace of their culture.

I wondered why the dam threatens this special status. Myitsone will still be there, whether the dam is built or not. Wont it still be sacred even if there is a new reservoir? I asked Kata, a local writer.

No, said Kata. We cannot accept this happening to Myitsone. He paused. It isnt like Jerusalem or Mecca. We Kachin dont have buildings as symbols of our faith; we revere Myitsone in its natural state. If there was a reservoir here, then it wouldnt be Myitsone.

If they have to create a reservoir, why does it have to be here? They didnt even consult us. A few Burmese generals and Chinese bosses say do it, and its done?

NEXT: a history of Chinese involvement

Qin Hui is a professor of history at Tsinghua University.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Economic Observer.

Translated by Roddy Flagg

Homepage image by Fr餩ric Gloor shows the Myitsone section of the Irrawaddy River. 


Rohingya Exodus