PRESS RLEASE FOR INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN
As part of the Global Day of Action on Burma on Saturday 06 October, we, Burmese community in Norway will hold a demonstration at the Chinese Embassy to show our support and solidarity with Burmese people who have been peaceful demonstrations inside the country, and to urge China to support for Burma National reconciliation.
On Wednesday 26 September 2007, Burmese security forces exerted violence to end peaceful mass demonstrations in Burma; using tear gas, batons, and firing directly on peaceful protestors. Since brutal crackdown began, reports have surfaced that injured protesters are being burned alive, and that 6000 demonstrators are being held at makeshift detention centres.
We express our deepest solidarity our brothers and sisters with the peaceful and holy movement initiated by Buddhist Monks and joined by many Burmese citizens, who have been holding peaceful demonstrations exercising their basic right such as freedom of opinion and expression in the country.
The Junta’s criminal crackdown on peaceful protesters led by monks exemplifies the regime’s brutality, as well as its shameful intransigence in the face of calls to respect human rights.
We support UN special envoy Mr. Ibrahim Gambari attempt for Burma national reconciliation and urge for more strong action to protect the people of Burma. We appeal to international community particularly China and India to increase pressure on the SPDC to show utmost restraint and engage to political dialogue focused on democratic reforms which allow all people of Burma could participate.
It is clear that countries with close military and economic ties to Burma are in the best position to prevent further bloodshed. We therefore urge China to call for the release of those arbitrarily detained during the recent protests, and to urge junta to stand with people of Burma.
The theme of the 2008 Beijing Olympics is “One world, one dream”. The Burmese people have a dream of freedom, social justice, democracy, and human rights. We therefore call on the Chinese government, and all people inside and outside Burma to take immediate action as “one world, one dream” and to transform the Burmese dream into reality.
06. 10. 2007
For enquires:
Overseas Karen Network Organization
Mon Community (Norway)
Rakhaing National Association (Norway)
National League for Democracy (L-A) Norway
Myanmar Muslim Political Awareness Organization (Norway)
Democratic Party for a New Society (Norway Branch)
Saturday, October 6, 2007
ေနာ္ေ၀းေရာက္ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားေတြကလည္းကမၻာတ၀ွမ္း နအဖကိုဆႏၵျပပြဲအတြက္လွဳပ္ရွားၾက
့ကမၻာတ၀ွမ္းနအဖကိုဆႏၵျပပြဲဒီေန ့ၾသစေတးလ်မွာစတင္
Global day of Myanmar protests starts in Sydney
8 minutes ago October 6.2007
SYDNEY (Reuters) - A global day of demonstrations against Myanmar's violent suppression of pro-democracy protests started in Sydney on Saturday, where around 250 people called for a stronger international response.
"We are united in opposition to the military dictatorship in Burma. It's time for the regime to start reconciliation," said rally organizer Maung Maung Than, 40, calling for pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners to be freed.
Hot weather and a lack of local media coverage may have kept the numbers down at the protest in central Sydney.
It was also calm in comparison to a demonstration in Canberra last week when riot police stopped demonstrators trying to charge the Myanmar embassy.
Than said the protests were also aimed at keeping up the pressure on the international community to act. "The international response is just getting started, it must get a lot stronger."
One banner at the protest called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, reflecting a view that regional powerhouse China should be exerting more pressure on the junta.
A bigger turnout is expected at a protest in Bangkok in Thailand, host to thousands of refugees who have fled from neighboring Myanmar.
Western powers circulated a draft proposal on Myanmar to the U.N. Security Council in New York on Friday that condemned repression by the junta and demanded it free political detainees and begin dialogue with the opposition.
Myanmar soldiers opened fire last week to clear the streets of the capital Yangon of up to 100,000 Buddhist monks and civilians demanding democracy -- the biggest protests in the country in 20 years.
State media said 10 people were killed, though diplomats believe the real number is likely to be far higher.
ျမန္မာ့သံဃာ့လွဳပ္ရွားမွဳမွဦးေဆာင္သံဃာေလးပါးကိုနအဖကအျပင္းအထန္ရွာေဖြေနဟုေအပီသတင္းတြင္ေဖၚျပ
Myanmar seeks alleged monk 'ringleaders'
2 minutes ago October 6,2007
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) - Myanmar's junta said Friday that hundreds of Buddhist monks were detained during its crackdown on pro-democracy activists and that it was hunting for four more clerics it described as ringleaders of the uprising.
The government insisted that most of the monks had already been freed, with only 109 still in custody, according to an official statement broadcast on state TV.
The junta's treatment of the Buddhist monks — who are revered in this deeply religious nation — is a key issue that could anger soldiers loyal to the military rulers.
Twenty-nine monks were suspected of being protest leaders and 25 of them were already in custody, state media said. It identified the monks still at large as U Kantiya, U Visaitta, U Awbatha and U Parthaka, but did not name their monasteries.
Demonstrations that began in mid-August over a fuel price increase swelled into Myanmar's largest anti-government protests in 19 years, inspired largely by thousands of monks coming out on the streets.
Television images last week showed soldiers shooting into crowds of unarmed protesters — but the government on Friday described the troops' reaction as "systematically controlling" the protesters.
The government says 10 people were killed in the Sept. 26-27 crackdown and 2,100 were detained. But dissident groups put the death toll at more than 200 and the number of detainees at nearly 6,000.
The U.N. special envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, said the military government's new willingness to hold talks with detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi marked "an hour of historic opportunity."
"This is a potentially welcome development which calls for maximum flexibility on all sides," Gambari said, briefing the U.N. Security Council about his four-day visit to Myanmar.
On Thursday, Myanmar's military ruler, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, said he was prepared to meet with Suu Kyi if she stopped supporting international sanctions against the country.
The United States and the European Union have issued some sanctions against Myanmar's junta, but China and Russia have ruled out any Security Council action.
Diplomats and opposition figures were skeptical that Than Shwe's offer was genuine but expressed hope that the meeting with Suu Kyi would take place. The two have not met since 2002.
Shari Villarosa, the acting U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, flew to the remote capital of Naypyitaw on Friday for a rare meeting with the deputy foreign minister, but U.S. officials said the meeting was not productive.
"What she heard in private was not very different than what we hear from the government in public," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
The state media said troops searched 18 monasteries where alleged rogue monks were living. Initially, authorities detained 513 monks, one novice, 167 men and 30 women lay disciples from the monasteries, but most were released, it said.
Only 109 monks and nine other men are still being questioned, it said.
A government official met senior Buddhist monks Friday in Yangon, the country's main city, and asked them to "expose four monks who are at large," the report said.
The visit aimed to show ordinary people that the ruling generals still had high regard for the Buddhist clergy, despite targeting monks in the crackdown.
Older abbots are more closely tied to the junta, while younger monks are seen as more sympathetic to the pro-democracy protesters. Hundreds of monks were sent back to their hometowns this week from monasteries in Yangon. It was not known who ordered them out of the city — the abbots or the government.
Security forces also claimed to have seized nonreligious material from the monasteries, including pornographic videos, literature from Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, and headbands with a swastika or a U.S. flag.
The official report also said a body found floating in Pazundaung Creek in eastern Yangon last week was not that of a monk — as claimed by a dissident group — but a man "with a piece of saffron robe tied round his neck."
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Thailand-based dissident group, said Friday that more than 250 protests have taken place in Myanmar since Aug. 19.
Life in Yangon was slowly returning to normal but security remained tight downtown. A half-dozen military trucks were stationed near the Sule Pagoda, a flash point of the unrest.
The typically busy area around the city's famed Shwedagon Pagoda was eerily quiet, and seven fire engines with water hoses remained parked in the compound.
Elsewhere in the city, schools, classes and stores were all open.
In Geneva, the head of the U.N. telecommunications agency criticized the junta's decision to block access to the Internet during the protests.
"No government has the right to cut off its citizens from cyberspace," said Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union.
Dissidents and foreigners had used the Internet to get word out of the government's brutal crackdown. Internet service was spotty Friday in Yangon.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962. The current junta came to power after routing a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, killing at least 3,000 people. Suu Kyi's party won elections in 1990 but the junta refused to accept the results.
Suu Kyi, who has spent nearly 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest, won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her democracy campaign.
နအဖဟာေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ့ေတြ့မယ္ဆိုတာနိုင္ငံတကာကသူ့အေပၚဖိအားေပးေနတာေတြေလွ်ာ့သြားေအာင္လုပ္တာျဖစ္တယ္လို့့ ေအအက္ဖ္ပီသတင္းမွာေဖၚျပ
Myanmar tries to cool international pressure
18 minutes ago October 6,2007
YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar's junta Saturday tried to cool growing UN pressure over its deadly crackdown on peaceful protests, seeking talks with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and relaxing its blockage of the Internet.
But analysts warned that the rare gestures offered by the regime appeared to be token efforts to stave off tougher UN action demanded by the United States and other western countries.
Faced with the biggest protests against military rule seen in nearly two decades, Myanmar's government launched a bloody crackdown in late September that left at least 13 dead and more than 2,000 locked up.
UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari made a four-day mission here to express global outrage at the junta's actions, and warned the UN Security Council Friday that the nation's turmoil could have "serious international repercussions."
As he was briefing the Council in New York, state television in Myanmar broadcast images of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi for the first time in at least four years.
The television report referred to her as 'Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,' using a respectful form of address, rather than just her name, as was common in the past.
The regime also restored some Internet access -- but only during a military-imposed curfew -- and announced that it had freed hundreds of detained Buddhist monks who led the protests in Yangon.
The military, which has ruled this country also known as Burma for 45 years, rarely makes any concessions, but analysts warned the gestures were just a bid to ward off tougher international action.
"The regime is trying to cool down international pressure. The junta hopes to defuse pressure as the UN Security Council is likely to take some action against Burma following Gambari's briefing," Thailand-based Myanmar analyst Win Min said.
Junta leader Than Shwe has made a heavily conditioned offer to hold direct talks with Aung San Suu Kyi, but insisted that the Nobel peace prize winner first drop her support for sanctions and tell her supporters to stop confronting the government.
"It's a mixed signal. It showed Than Shwe at least recognized internal and international calls for dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi," Win Min said.
"But at the same time, the conditions set by the regime were not realistic at all. It looks like the regime really doesn't want to talk to her."
Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, has spent most of the last 18 years under house arrest, but she remains an international symbol of non-violent struggle against tyranny.
Protests against Myanmar's crackdown and in support of Aung San Suu Kyi were expected to take place around the world Saturday.
In one of the first rallies, hundreds of activists took to the streets in New Zealand while later demonstrations were planned for Taipei, Delhi, Geneva, London, Lisbon and Ottawa.
The United States has led global calls for her release and warned Friday that it may push for UN sanctions if the ruling junta kept up a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
After Gambari's briefing, the United States, Britain and France circulated a draft of a non-binding statement condemning Myanmar's government.
"The Security Council condemns the violent repression by the government of Myanmar of peaceful demonstrations, including the use of force against religious figures and institutions," the text said.
Gambari told reporters that there was a consensus among members of the Security Council that the status quo in Myanmar "is unacceptable and unsustainable and probably unrealistic."
He also said Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to be in good spirits when he met her.
"But now I think she wants this to be used as an opportunity to really engage in dialogue with the authorities so that together they can move the country forward," he told CNN.
Myanmar's neighbour China has previously sheltered the generals from action at the United Nations.
China's ambassador to the world body, Wang Guangyam, has warned that pressure for greater democratisation "would only lead to confrontation."
Nasaka's money-spinning business in northern Arakan
Kaladan News
October 5, 2007
Nasaka's money-spinning business in northern Arakan
Buthidaung, Arakan State: Nasaka Burma’s Border Security Force is into a money-spinning business in Rohingya villages in Buthidaung Township over the last three months.
Villagers found it strange that three-month ago, Nasaka distributed Kyat 500 to each family for one Taung (13 kg) of paddy through the Village Peace and Development Council (VPDC) Chairmen in "Badaka village tract" in Buthidaung Township. The village! rs were growing a subsidiary crop (especially paddy), said a village elder.
Nasaka gave kyat to each family for one to five Taungs according to the paddy they could grow. But, all the money went to the pockets of the VPDC Chairmen. The villagers did not get a penny, he added.
Now the Nasaka is demanding the paddy from the villagers, but the villagers refuse to give the paddy to because they did not get money which was paid for the paddy through VPDC Chairmen. The VPDC Chairmen said that the money was taken as toll by Nasaka. It is learnt that Nasaka has been collecting many kinds of toll from the villagers.
At present, in the open market, one Taung of paddy is being sold at kyat 1,500, while Nasaka gave them only kyat 500-per Taung. In Buthida! ung township, one kilogram of rice is being sold for kyat 500. Most of the poor people are suffering from hunger, said villagers. ##
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းကလူထုေတြအားမငယ္ၾကနဲ့အေမရိကန္ ေရာက္ ျမန္မာမ်ဳိးခ်စ္ေတြနအဖကိုဒီေန့စေနေန့မွာကန့္ကြက္ဆႏၵျပၾကအံုး မယ္တဲ့
Dear all,
The following is the scheduled program for this coming Saturday, 6 October 2007. Please help give a voice to the people of Burma with your participation.
United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Corner of 47th street and 1st avenue
Time: 1pm to 4pm
Union Square, New York City
Time: 5pm to 7pm
Dress Code: Wear Red T-shirt and bring as many red flowers as you can.
Regards,
Sandi
Six journalists currently held, three others released
Reporters Without Borders/Reporters sans fronti่res
Burma Media Association
5 October 2007
BURMA
Six journalists currently held, three others released
Authorities trying to track down "citizen journalists"
Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association today condemned the continuing detention of a total of six journalists who have been arrested since the start of the pro-democracy demonstrations. They also condemned the crackdown that has followed the protests and said they feared that more journalists could be arrested.
"Now that United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has failed to get the repression stopped, it is important that the international community should continue to call for the release of the hundreds or possibly thousands of people, including six journalists, who have arrested since mid-August," the two organisations said.
"We are appalled by the methods used by the police, who are arresting many people, especially young demonstrators, on the basis of photos taken by plain-clothes police who were in the demonstrations," Reporters Without Borders and the BMA added.
According to the information available to the two organisations, the six journalists and writers held are Maung Yan Paing, a writer living in North Okkalapa, Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a writer and radio and TV producer, Ye Lwin, a poet, writer and singer with the Mizzima Wave Band, Kyaw Zeya Tun, a reporter with The Voice Journal, Win Ko Ko Lat, a reporter with Weekly Eleven Journal, and photo-journalist Win Saing, who has been held since 28 August
Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi was arrested on 26 or 27 September. As he sustained a head injury, he is being held at the Insein Township hospital, near Rangoon. Ye Lwin was beaten at the time of his arrest on Pansodan Street. He suffers from epilepsy.
The two organisations welcome the release of Min Zaw, 56, the Burmese correspondent of the Japanese newspaper Tokyo Shimbun. He was freed on 3 October after being held for six days. Reporter Nay Linn Aung of 7-Days Journal and Kyaw Kyaw, an editor from Seik Ku Cho Cho (Sweet Thoughts) Publishing House, were also released after being arrested.
A Rangoon reporter said all of his colleagues were afraid to go about with cameras or video cameras. Radio DVB reported that the government has ordered the security forces to identify the journalists and demonstrators who sent photos and video footage abroad showing the demonstrations and their violent dispersal. The information ministry, the official news agency and the security forces have reportedly been told to work together to identify the "citizen journalists."
The Burmese public is able now to use the Internet but restricted to Burmese web sites and email messages with Burmese addresses ending in .mm. At the same time, many privately-owned magazines have still not reappeared on news stands. Some are refusing to publish propaganda while others are still waiting for the military censors to approve their next issue.
Foreign journalists who have just left Burma say it is getting harder and harder to find reliable Burmese sources. "They are afraid and you no longer know who is who," said a French-speaking journalist based in Asia. "Those who took part in the demonstrations have been arrested or are in hiding."
The government press has published articles that are critical of the foreign media and accuse them of being "liars trying to destroy the nation." The New Light of Myanmar, a government daily, has not mentioned the recent nighttime raids in which dozens of monks and civilians have been arrested.
The Japanese government is meanwhile said to be about to suspend its aid as a result of the murder of Japanese video reporter Kenji Nagai, whose body has been repatriated.
Reporters Without Borders and the BMA finally apologise for including information in recent releases that was not properly verified and turned out to be wrong. The security forces did not search the Traders Hotel and no German journalist was injured in Rangoon
Friday, October 5, 2007
Myanmar's ethnic minorities suffer a 'hidden war'
Children from the Karen National Union insurgent army at the 51st anniversary celebrations of the army's rebellion.Photo :AFP
Myanmar's ethnic minorities suffer a 'hidden war'
http://www.cnn. com/2007/ WORLD/asiapcf/ 10/03/myanmar. hidden.war. ap/index. html
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- While international attention has focused on the protests for democracy in Myanmar's cities, a hidden war has decimated generations of the country's powerless ethnic minorities, who have faced brutality for decades.
Children from the Karen National Union insurgent army at the 51st anniversary celebrations of the army's rebellion.
The Karen, the Shan and other minority groups who live along the Myanmar-Thai border have been attacked, raped and killed by government soldiers. Their thatched-roofed, bamboo homes have been torched. Men have been seized into forced labor for the army, while women, children and the elderly either hide out in nearby jungles until the soldiers leave or flee over the mountains to crowded, makeshift refugee camps.
"Many, many thousands of Karen have died in those 60 years," Karen National Union secretary general Mahn Sha said this week of his people's struggle for autonomy since 1947.
The military junta has denied reports of atrocities and says the ethnic rebels are "terrorists" trying to overthrow the government.
The Southeast Asian nation, formerly known as Burma, has more than 100 subtribes. Myanmar's diverse minority groups make up nearly a third of the country's 54 million population.
About two-thirds of the country belongs to the Burman ethnic majority, which is also known as the Myanmar. The other ethnic groups include the Shan, the Karen, the Chin, the Mon, the Arakan or Rakhine, and the Kachin.
နအဖကအေရိကန္နွင့္ျမန္မာ့အတိုက္ခံေခါင္းေဆာင္ကိုေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ဖိတ္ေခၚ
နအဖအစိုးရဟာရန္ကုန္အေျခစိုက္အေမရိကန္သံရံုးတာ၀န္ခံကိုျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေရးနဲ ့ပတ္သက္ျပီးေတာ့၊ေဆြးေႏြးဖုိ့ဖိတ္ေခၚခဲ့တယ္။ဒါဟာနအဖက၊ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာသံဃာနဲ ့ျပည္သူလူထုေတြဆႏၵျပမွဳေတြကို ေသြးထြက္သံယိုမွဳေတြနဲ့ႏွိမ္နင္းျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာပထမဆံုးအၾကိမ္အေ မရိကန္နဲ့နအဖအဆင့္ျမင့္အရာရွိေတြေတြ့ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမွာျဖစ္တယ္လုိ့အေမရိကန္ျပည္ထဲေရးဌာ နက၊ၾကာသပေတးေန့ကေျပာပါတယ္။
“နအဖဟာရန္ကုန္ကအေမရိကန္သံရံုးတာ၀န္ခံကိုသူတို့တင္ျပစရာရွိတာေတြကိုေျပာျပဖုိ့အတြက္ေန ျပည္ေတာ္ကိုဖိတ္ေခၚခဲ့တယ္။”လုိ့အေမရိကန္ျပည္ထဲေရးဌာနေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူဦးေရွာင္း မက္ခ္ေကာမက္ကသတင္းေထာက္ေတြကိုေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။
“ေနျပည္ေတာ္မွာနအဖကသူနဲ့ဘယ္အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြကိုဘာေခါင္းစဥ္နဲ့ေဆြးေႏြးမလဲဆိုတာကိုျမန္
မာနိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာအေမရိကန္သံရံုးတာ၀န္ခဦးရွာရီဗီလာရိုဆာကမသိေသးပါဘူး။”လို့ဦးေရွာင္း ကေျပာပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမဲ့၊နအဖနဲ့ေတြ့ဆံုတဲ့အခါမွာဦးရွာရီဗီလာရိုဆာကအေမရိကန္အစိုးရရဲ့ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံနဲ ့ပတ္သက္တဲ့ ရွင္းလင္းျပတ္သားတဲ့သေဘာထားကိုေျပာျပဖုိ့ရွိတယ္။အဲဒါကေတာ့၊နအဖကအတိုက္အခံဒီမိုကေရ စီအုပ္စုေတြနဲ့အဓိပၸါယ္ရွိတဲ့ေတြ့ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမွုဳေတြလုပ္ဖုိ့၊ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုေနတဲ့သူေတြကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ႏွိမ္နင္းေနတာေတြရပ္ဆိုင္းဖုိ့၊စီးပြားေရးနဲ့နိုင္ငံေရးျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမွဳေတြလုပ္ဖုိ့နဲ့လြတ္လပ္စြာေျပာဆိုေရးသားခြင့္ေပးဖုိ့ေတြျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
တခ်ိန္ထဲမွာပဲ၊နအဖဟာေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ့ေတြ့ဆံုမယ့္သတင္းကိုလည္းအစိုးရပိုင္သတင္းေတြ မွာေဖၚျပသြားပါတယ္။
အကယ္၍ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ဟာအေနာက္နိုင္ငံေတြကနအဖအေပၚအေရးယူထားတဲ့စီးပြားေရးအရဒါဏ္ခတ္ပိတ္ဆို့မွဳေတြကိုေထာက္ခံထားတာကိုစြန့္လႊတ္မယ္ဆိုရင္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးၾကီးသန္းေရႊဟာ
ေဒၚေအ ာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ့ေတြ့ဆံုဖုိ့ဆႏၵရွိတယ္လုိ့နအဖအစိုးရပိုင္ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားသတင္းမွာေျပာ
သြားပါတယ္။
အေမရိကန္အစိုးရဟာနအဖအေပၚနိုင္ငံေရး၊နိုင္ငံျခားရင္းႏွီးျမွဳပ္ႏွံ့မွဳနဲ့သြင္းကုန္ကန္ ့သတ္မွဳအပါအ၀င္စီးပြားေရးပိတ္ဆို့မွဳနဲ့သံတမန္ေရးစတဲ့က႑ေတြမွာအျပင္းအထန္အေရးယူထားပါတယ္။
ျပီးခဲ့တဲ့၊အဂၤါေန့တံုးကရန္ကုန္ကိုေရာက္ေနတဲ့ကုလသမဂၢအထူးသံတမန္ဦးအီဗရာဟင္ဂမ္ဘာရီဟာ
ျမန္မာ့နိုင္ငံေရးျပႆနာကိုေျဖရွင္းဖုိ့အထိန္းသိမ္းခံနိုဘယ္ဆုရွင္ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ ့ေတြ့ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
နအဖဟာျပီးခဲ့တဲ့၊ရက္သတၱပတ္တံုကသူ့ကိုဆႏၵျပတဲ့သူေတြကိုအၾကမ္းဖက္ႏွိမ္နင္းရာမွာလူေပါင္း ၂၀၀၀ေက်ာ္ကိုဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခဲ့တယ္လုိ့ၾကာသပေတးေန့ကထုတ္ေဖၚေၾကညာခဲ့ပါတယ္။အဲဒီလူ
ေတြဟာဆႏၵျပသူေတြကိုလမ္းေဘးကရပ္ၾကည့္တဲ့သူေတြလို့လည္း၀န္ခံသြားပါတယ္။
နအဖရဲ့လံုျခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ့ေတြကနံပါတ္တုတ္၊မ်က္ရည္ယိုဗံုး၊ေမာင္းျပန္ေသနတ္ေတြနဲ့ပစ္ခတ္ျ ပီးေတာ့၊အၾကမ္းဖက္ႏွိမ္နင္းရာမွာအနည္းဆံုးလူ၁၃ဦးေသဆံုးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေအအက္ဖ္ပီ-ေအဘီစီ၊သတင္းကိုအန္ဒါမန္ဟီးရိုးမွဆီေလွ်ာ္ေအာင္ဘာသာျပန္ထားသည္။
ကမၻာတ၀ွမ္းကဗုဒၡဘာသာ၀င္ေတြ ျမန္မာ့သံဃာလွဳပ္ရွားမွဳကိုေထာက္ခံ
ကမၻာတ၀ွမ္းကဗုဒၡဘာသာ၀င္ေတြျမန္မာ့နိုင္ငံေရးအေျပာင္းအလဲအတြက္ၾကိဳးပမ္းတဲ့ျမန္မာ
သံဃာေတာ္ေတြကိုေထာက္ခံဟုေအအက္ဖ္ပီသတင္းတြက္ေဖၚျပ
Buddhists worldwide back Myanmar's monks
Agence France-Presse
BANGKOK - The Buddhist monks who led Myanmar's protests have drawn support from fellow believers worldwide, including Tibetan and Vietnamese spiritual leaders who are no strangers to state persecution.
This week, as hundreds of disrobed monks could be heard chanting from inside a windowless detention centre in Yangon, Buddhist supporters in cities around the world continued their protest rallies and prayer vigils for them.
Buddhist faithful have rallied, chanted and meditated in cities worldwide for the monks, who were shot, beaten, tear-gassed and arrested last week after they started refusing alms from soldiers and marched against the regime.
Their involvement in worldly affairs during times of crisis recalls other non-violent Buddhist protests from Asia's anti-colonial struggles and acts of defiance such as the self-immolations of monks during the Vietnam war.
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader in exile and the world's most prominent Buddhist, was among the first to offer his support to the tens of thousands of shaven-headed monks at the vanguard of the "saffron revolution."
"I fully support their call for freedom and democracy and take this opportunity to appeal to freedom-loving people all over the world to support such non-violent movements," the 72-year-old said in a statement.
"As a Buddhist monk, I am appealing to the members of the military regime who believe in Buddhism to act in accordance with the sacred dharma in the spirit of compassion and non-violence."
The Dalai Lama said he prayed for the early release of fellow Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader under house arrest who has advocated non-violent resistance in line with her Buddhist beliefs.
The Dalai Lama may understand the plight of Myanmar's monks better than most -- he and thousands of his followers fled to India in 1959 after China's People's Liberation Army brutally crushed a Tibetan uprising in Lhasa.
Buddhist monks in Vietnam also have a history of political protest.
Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire on a busy Saigon street corner in 1963 to protest the repression of Buddhism by US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem's regime. Images of the event remain among the most powerful of the conflict.
More recently the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) ran afoul of authorities by joining protests by dispossessed farmers and lending them financial support, drawing fire from the state-controlled press.
The UBCV's deputy leader Thich Quang Do, who has won been nominated for the Nobel peace prize, has sent several messages speaking of a common struggle with Myanmar's people.
"For almost 200 years, the people of Burma and Vietnam shared the same fate under colonial rule, with repression of our faith and the dismantling of our clergy," the 79-year-old wrote from his monastery.
"Over the past decades, we have both suffered oppression under military or totalitarian dictatorships," he wrote in a letter of support. "We come together in a common aspiration for the right to life and freedom."
Do pointed out that Buddhist monks have a long history of struggle in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
"In the 19th century, when the British conquered Burma, they eliminated the role of the Buddhist Supreme Patriarch, dismantled the clergy and sought to destroy the Buddhist faith," he wrote.
"Monks and nuns in Burma rose up against this foreign aggression. Many were arrested and imprisoned. Many died in the British jails for their devotion to the cause of independence, freedom and Buddhism."
Buddhism is sometimes seen as a pursuit of mindfulness and spiritual enlightenment far removed from earthly matters -- but teachers such as exiled Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh have propagated an activist, engaged Buddhism.
"Buddhism is for this life, for this society," said Thai social critic Sulak Sivaraksa, author of the book "Socially Engaged Buddhism."
"If you think about the next life, that is escapism not Buddhism. Buddhism is about awakening.
"Socially engaged Buddhism is a newly coined word in English," he said. "But Buddhism is the teaching that you care for others more than you care for yourself. Every step must be taken non-violently, that is the essence."
နအဖဟာနိုင္ငံတကာကိုလွည့္စားဖုိ ့ၾကိဳးစားေနတံုးပါပဲ
နအဖဟာကုလအထူးသံတမန္နဲ့ေတြ့ဆံုျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္နိုင္ငံတကာကသူ့ကိုေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္း
သြားျပီလုိ့ျမင္ရေအာင္လွည့္စားတဲ့အေနနဲ့ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ့ကတခ်ဳိ့အတားအဆီးေတြကိုရုပ္ သိမ္းျပျပီးေတာ့၊နအဖကိုဆန့္က်င္သူေတြ၊ခ်ီတက္လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ပြဲတြင္ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သူေတြကို
အခ်ိန္မေတာ္သန္းေခါင္ယံအခ်ိန္မွာလိုက္လံဖမ္းဆီးေနဆဲျဖစ္တယ္။
Myanmar junta tightens screws
Reuters
YANGON - Despite gradually easing its iron grip on Myanmar's main city on Thursday, the junta continued to round up scores of people and grill hundreds more arrested during and after a ruthless crackdown on pro-democracy marches.
In the first official remarks since a visit by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari this week, junta chief Than Shwe said he would talk to detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi if she abandoned her "obstructive measures" and support for sanctions.
Than Shwe told Gambari that Suu Kyi, who has been in detention for 12 of the last 18 years, was "confrontational" and for "utter devastation," state television said without explaining what the last accusation meant.
He told Gambari that if Suu Kyi "announces publicly she has given up these four things, he would hold direct talks" with her, it said.
Gambari was dispatched to Myanmar to persuade the generals to end their ruthless crackdown on protests and talk to Suu Kyi, but reports of verbal and physical abuse suggest Than Shwe is paying scant regard to his calls for restraint.
"That is one of the top concerns of the international community," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, due to attend a meeting of the 15-member Security Council on Friday to discuss the crackdown in a country now under military rule for an unbroken 45 years.
Jailed for clapping
A relative of three women released said detainees were being divided into four categories: passers-by, those who watched, those who clapped and those who joined in.
"They're looking for the people who led the demonstrations. The people clapping will only get a minimal punishment -- maybe two to five years," said Win Min, who fled to Thailand during a crackdown on a student-led uprising in 1988.
Leaders could be looking at up to 20 years behind bars, he said.
People in central Yangon's Kamayut district said soldiers had arrested scores of people on Wednesday night for trying to impede a raid on the Aung Nyay Tharzi monastery a few days earlier and giving protection to fleeing Buddhist monks.
Another 70 young monks rounded up in other swoops across the city a week ago were freed overnight from a government technical institute, complementing 80 monks and 149 women believed to be nuns released on Wednesday.
One freed monk, who did not want his name revealed, said some had been beaten when they refused to answer questions about their identity, birthplace, parents and involvement in the protests, the biggest challenge to the junta in nearly 20 years.
"The food and living conditions were horrible," the monk, from Yangon's Pyinya Yamika Maha (A) monastery told Reuters.
Among those detained in the middle of the night on Wednesday was a Myanmar UN staff member and her two relatives. They were released, along with her driver, on Thursday, a UN source said.
The evening state news broadcast said that since the crackdown on peaceful protests led by monks began last week, 2,093 people had been arrested and 692 released after interrogators deemed them innocent.
India protest
The junta's crackdown has provoked scores of protests around the world and on Thursday hundreds of Buddhist monks in yellow robes marched in India chanting hymns, and waving placards that read "Stop Killing" and "No violence against democracy."
Gambari was to brief Ban after arriving in New York on Thursday in the midst of international outrage at the use of soldiers against peaceful columns of Buddhist monks and civilians demanding an end to military rule.
Official media say 10 people were killed, including a Japanese video journalist, although Western governments say the final toll is likely to be far higher.
The body of 50-year-old Kenji Nagai, shot dead near Yangon's Sule Pagoda, returned home on Thursday for an autopsy whose results could lead to Tokyo making good on a threat to scale back economic assistance to Myanmar, one of Asia's poorest countries.
Fears of a repeat of 1988, when the army killed an estimated 3,000 people in a crackdown lasting several months, were not realized, but even China, the junta's closest ally, made a rare public call for restraint.
China praised Gambari's mission -- which Western diplomats said Beijing helped facilitate -- saying it gave his efforts a "positive appraisal."
Thursday, October 4, 2007
ဦးအီဗရာဟင္ ဂမ္ဘာရီ ရဲ့ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ ခရီးစဥ္ မေအာင္ျမင္ဘူးလို့ ကုလအတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ဦးဘန္ကီမြန္းေျပာ
UN chief says envoy's trip was not a success
YANGON - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York that his special
envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, had delivered 'the strongest possible message' to
Myanmar's military leaders about their bloody crackdown on democracy
activists, but added that he couldn't call Mr Gambari's four-day trip 'a
success.' '
Mr Ban will be discussing the Myanmar issue with the UN Security Council on
Friday.
Anti-junta demonstrations broke out in mid-August over a fuel price hike,
then ballooned when monks took the lead last month. But the military crushed
the protests a week ago with bullets, tear gas and clubs. The government
said 10 people were killed, but dissident groups put the death toll at up to
200 and say 6,000 people were detained, including thousands of monks.
A UN Development Program employee, Ms Myint Nwe Moe, and her husband,
brother-in-law and driver were among those detained, the UN agency said.
Three other UN staffers were detained and subsequently released, said
Charles Petrie, the UN humanitarian chief in Myanmar.
In Brussels, European Union nations agreed to expand sanctions against the
military regime. Diplomats said extra sanctions would include an expanded
visa ban for members of the military junta, a wider ban on investment and a
ban on trade in metals, timber and gemstones.
But the new measures do not include a specific ban on European oil and gas
companies from doing business in Myanmar, diplomats said.
For now, people who took part in the recent protests say they're too afraid
to return to the streets.
One 29-year-old in Yangon, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of
being identified, said he had joined the protests but stopped after seeing
plainclothes security agents taking his picture. Now he wonders if there's
any hope for change.
'If the United Nations can't do anything, we will have big difficulties
overcoming our present situation,' he said. -- AP
Nasaka forces villagers in Mungdaw to grow black pepper
Kaladan News
October 4, 2007
Maungdaw, Arakan State: Nasaka Burma's Border Security Force has been distributing black pepper saplings to villagers in Maungdaw Township since August 9 for growing it their compounds, said a farmer from on condition of anonymity. Each family is being charged Kyat 1,000.
Three black pepper saplings were distributed to every family in the southern side of Maungdawby after forcibly taking Kyat 1,000 per family through the Village Peace and Development Council (VPDC) members.
"Nasaka distributed three black pepper saplings to every family through VPDC members and forcibly took Kyat 1,000 from each family, on August 9," a villager from "Gawdhu Tharya" village in Maungdaw said.
Some villagers refused to take the saplings, but they were forced. Even the poor widows had to take the saplings after paying.
The authorities have been trying to grow black pepper saplings in Arakan Sta! te over the last two years. But, most of the saplings were destroyed. As such the villagers are not keen to take the saplings and suffer losses.
"Why do the authorities impose such projects on villagers in Arakan State where black pepper cultivation is not suitable," said a village elder referring to the earlier failure of black pepper crop. ##
ဗိုလ္မွဴးေဌး၀င္းႏွင့္သားေမာင္ေကာင္းထက္ဘန္ေကာက္၊ေနာ္ေ၀း သံရံုးသုိ ့ေရာက္
ဗိုလ္မွဴးေဌး၀င္းသည္သူ၏အထက္အရာရွိကျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာဆုုေတာင္းခ်ီတက္ေနေသာရဟန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ အရပ္သားမ်ားကိုပစ္ခတ္ရန္ေပးေသာအမိန့္ကိုျငင္းဆန္ျပီးေနာက္၊သားျဖစ္သူေမာင္ေကာင္းထက္ ႏွင့္အတူထိုင္းနိုင္ငံသို့တိမ္းေရွာင္ခဲ့သည္။
Photo : MICHAEL TÖPFFER
By : Dr.Lun Swe
Christian Freedom International calls on International community To Stand Up for Christians in China
Dear Friend,
With the Olympics less than a year away, Beijing is set to achieve a major propaganda victory.
Yet the so-called People's Republic of China just launched another church crackdown, arresting at least 15 Christian leaders in six provinces.
Fortunately, you and I can do something. We don't have to purchase Chinese toys or products.
I urge you to call, write, or email the Chinese embassy in Washington and the following companies to explain why.
Walmart | Toys R Us | Mattel | Hasbro | Target
Here is the email address for the Chinese embassy in Washington:
chinaembassy_us@fmprc.gov.cn, or call (202) 328-2500.
You can simply say, "Unless China allows religious freedom and stops the persecution of Christians I will not buy products made in China."
We can--we must--shame the Chinese government for denying its citizens the freedom to worship God.
I know such a strategy might not bear immediate fruit, but in following the Gospel pattern we would be planting seeds for the future.
We must never forget the plight of our brothers and sisters abroad--whether in China or elsewhere.
Please forward this alert to others.
Sincerely,
Jim Jacobson
Christian Freedom International
