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ビルマ市民フォーラム メールマガジン 2008/10/24
People's Forum on Burma
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ビルマ情報ネットワーク（BurmaInfo）からのメールを転送させていただき
ます。
（重複の際は何卒ご容赦ください。）
ＰＦＢ事務局
http://www1.jca.apc.org/pfb/
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ビルマ情報ネットワークの「今週のビルマのニュース」をお送りします。
「今週のビルマのニュース」バックナンバー
http://www.burmainfo.org/weekly.html
きょうのビルマのニュース（平日毎日更新）もご利用ください。
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/burmainfo/
ビルマ情報ネットワーク （www.burmainfo.org）
秋元由紀
========================================
今週のビルマのニュース Eメール版
2008年10月17・24日合併号【0832号】
========================================
【今週の主なニュース】
ビルマへの援助をめぐる論争
・5月のサイクロン襲来後、ASEAN・国連・軍政が合同で
行った被災状況調査の報告書（PONJA報告書＝7月に発表）
について、独自の救援活動などを行う19のビルマ市民団体が
「内容が偏っており包括的でない」と批判した。
19団体は、軍政による援助物資の横流しや、被災地域での
強制労働や土地接収などの深刻な問題がPONJA報告書で
触れられていないことを指摘し、これらの問題をまとめた
独自の分析書（“Post-Nargis Analysis: The Other Side of
the Story”、秋元由紀著）をまとめ、16日にASEAN
事務局のあるジャカルタで発表した（17日付AFPほか）。
・シンクタンクの国際危機グループ（ICG）は20日、
サイクロン後のビルマの状況について報告書を出した。
この中でICGは、サイクロン被災地域以外でも深刻化
している人道危機に早期に対応するため、今後国際
社会は援助への制限を解除し、災害救援にとどまらず
教育や保健、経済政策の改善、市民社会の育成と
いった分野に対するものも含めて援助を大幅に増やす
べきだと述べた。
【その他】
スーチー氏の拘束期間が丸13年に、ほか
・24日、民主化指導者アウンサンスーチー氏が自宅
軟禁下で過ごした期間がちょうど13年になった。
ワシントンDCとロンドンでは中国大使館の前で
抗議デモが予定されている。
・北京で24日からアジア欧州会議（ASEM）首脳会議が
始まった。国際人権団体ヒューマン・ライツ・ウォッチは
「人権状況を改善するようビルマ軍事政権に圧力を
かける絶好の機会」として参加首脳に行動を求めた。
ビルマからは軍政のテインセイン首相が参加（23日付DPA）。
・国連事務総長はビルマの人権状況についての
国連総会への報告（9月17日付）の中で、軍政が
民主化実現に向けて国連や国際社会の期待に
応えようとする姿勢が見られないことに挫折感を
覚えると述べた。
・ミャンマー国営石油会社（MOGE）は2日、ベトナム
石油グループ（ペトロベトナム）らとモッタマ湾の
M-2天然ガス鉱区での探鉱をすることで合意した（6日付VNAほか）。
・軍政はシンガポールとタイの企業とテナセリウム
管区に設置出力600メガワットの水力発電所を建設
するという覚書を交わした（12日付国営新聞、13日付
イラワディ誌ほか）。
・ビルマ軍政への抵抗を続けるカレン民族連合（KNU）は
第14回総会で、2月に暗殺されたマンシャ書記長の後任に
ジッポラーセイン氏を選任した。KNU幹部職への女性の就任は初めて。
・世界自然保護基金（WWF）は15日、ビルマでトラなどの
野生ネコの毛皮などの取引が活発で、この18年間で
1000匹分以上の毛皮などが市場に出回っていたとする
調査結果を発表した（15日付AFPほか）。
・在日ビルマ人A氏が難民不認定処分の取り消しを求め
ていた訴訟の控訴審で、東京高裁は23日、一審判決を
取り消し、難民として認める判決を出した。
・24日に東京・千代田区で「ビルマ（ミャンマー）サイクロン
被災者救援チャリティ・コンサート」が開催された。
歌手の沢知恵氏、クリエイターのいとうせいこう氏らが
出演（19日付JANJANほか）。
【ビルマへの政府開発援助（ODA）約束状況など】
新たな発表はなし
・5月のサイクロン襲来でヤンゴン港に沈没した船の状況を
調査していた国際協力機構（JICA）のチームが2日、
調査結果をミャンマー港湾当局に報告した。
【イベントなど】
・宇田有三写真展「アウンサンスーチーとビルマ」
（岐阜県 瑞浪芸術館、10月25日～11月24日）
・第29回日本定住難民とのつどい
ベトナム、ラオス、カンボジア、ミャンマー（ビルマ）など
からの難民定住者の歌・民族舞踊の披露あり
（新宿区立新宿文化センター、26日13時～）
・第24回世界仏教徒会議日本大会
シンポジウムにビルマ僧侶アシン・ナヤカ師出席
（浅草ビューホテル、11月15日12時～）
★特定非営利活動法人メコン・ウォッチの
季刊誌「フォーラムMekong」、最新号はビルマ特集。
－ビルマ～サイクロン後の人々、軍政－
http://www.mekongwatch.org/resource/forum/FM_vol9_2_01.html
【もっと詳しい情報は】
きょうのビルマのニュース（平日毎日更新）
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/burmainfo/
ビルマ情報ネットワーク
http://www.burmainfo.org/
【お問い合わせ】
ビルマ情報ネットワーク 秋元由紀
====================================
今週のビルマのニュース Eメール版
2008年10月17・24日合併号【0832号】
作成： ビルマ情報ネットワーク
協力： ビルマ市民フォーラム
====================================
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配布元: BurmaInfo（ビルマ情報ネットワーク）
http://www.burmainfo.org
連絡先: listmaster@burmainfo.org
バックナンバー: http://groups.yahoo.co.jp/group/burmainfo/
※BurmaInfoでは、ビルマ（ミャンマー）に関する最新ニュースやイベント情報、
参考資料を週に数本配信しています。
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Friday, October 24, 2008
burmainfo] 今週のビルマのニュース（0832号）
AI wants Burma rights issue raised at Asem
http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=960:ai-wants-burma-rights-issue-raised-at-asem&catid=23:topnews
Written by Estrella Torres / Reporter
Friday, 24 October 2008 04:16
Amnesty International (AI) in Brussels has asked the presidency of the European Union, now held by France, to raise at the 7th Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) Summit—which will gather some 43 heads of state—the human- rights situation in Burma, particularly the release of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and more than 2,000 political prisoners.
In a letter to the presidency, AI said the EU should take the opportunity to address continuing rights abuses in Burma, renamed Myanmar by its dictator-junta.
“In accordance with the EU’s guidelines on human-rights defenders,
the French presidency should take advantage of this opportunity to inquire about the prisoners, many of whom are at risk of torture,” said Nicolas Beger, director of AI-Brussels, in the letter.
The international rights group is particularly concerned about urgent cases that include political detainee Myo Yang Naung Thein, who is expected to be sentenced in the next three weeks. He was arrested in December 2007 while filming protest actions.
Myo has since then suffered a paralysis of the lower part of his body and has to be carried in a stretcher when attending court hearings. “Amnesty International is concerned that this could be the result of torture during interrogation sessions and called on the EU leadership to demand his unconditional release.”
AI added that “Asem’s voice could make a real difference towards these prisoners of conscience,” with Beger saying, “This is a rare opportunity to engage in direct dialogue with the authorities of Myanmar which should not be missed.” Burma is a member of Asean.
The AI head in Brussels also reported the current Burmese military offensives against the ethnic Karen civilians are leading to the displacement of almost 150,000 people.
BURMA: Cyclone Relief - Distrust of Junta Deters Donors
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44410
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Oct 23 (IPS) - Burma’s military regime is struggling to attract international aid nearly six months after the powerful Cyclone Nargis tore through the country’s Irrawaddy Delta. The financial shortfall has more to do with distrust of the junta than donor fatigue.
Currently, only 50 percent of the 482 million US dollars that had been sought in a U.N. flash appeal has come in, the world body states in its assessment of pledges for the natural disaster in Myanmar, as the country is also known.
The lack of funding is expected to hamper plans to meet the humanitarian needs of millions of victims and help in the early recovery programmes. Some 13 U.N. agencies and 23 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were due to dip into these funds for ‘’critically-needed assistance’’ that was to last through April 2009.
According to a July report by a tripartite body that includes U.N. officials and representatives of the junta, the total damage caused by Nargis, which struck in the early hours of May 3, was put at four billion U.S. dollars. The official death toll, according to the Post-Nargis Joint Assessment (PONJA), was 84,537 with 53,836 people missing and 19,359 injured.
‘’Data shows that some 2.4 million people were severely affected by the cyclone, out of an estimated 7.35 million people living in the affected townships,’’ added PONJA, which has the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-member regional bloc where Burma is a member, as its third partner.
Yet other estimates have put the human toll much higher, with possibly close to 300,000 people being killed and some 5.5 million people affected.
Critics of the regime are hardly surprised by the funding shortfall since the disaster, remarking that it is a vote of no confidence by the donor community against military leaders notorious for their history of oppression, corruption and the destruction of what had once been a promising economy.
‘’The international community has not forgotten Burma. The money has not come in because of a lack of transparency, accountability and because the military regime has come in the way of aid,’’ says Sann Aung, a cabinet minister in the last elected Burmese government, now living in exile. ‘’The people are suffering as a result of the regime’s terrible reputation.’’
‘’It is not too late for the regime to allow independent monitoring of aid and support a system of accountability to make sure that the cyclone victims benefit from the aid,’’ Sann Aung added during an interview. ‘’There are still many restrictions that prevent NGOs and the U.N. having proper access to the people in the delta.’’
But not everyone agrees with such an assessment. The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank, is calling for the international community, particularly the Western nations, led by the U.S. government, to re-examine their aid policies to Burma in the wake of Nargis.
‘’The international community should build on the unprecedented cooperation between the Mayanmar government and humanitarian agencies following cyclone Nargis and reverse longstanding, counter productive policies,’’ the ICG argues in a new report released this week.
Holding back aid to pressure the junta into pursuing genuine political reform that ushers an open, vibrant democracy has not worked, reveals the 33-page ‘Burma/Myanmar After Nargis: Time to Normalise Aid Relations. ‘’Twenty years of aid restrictions -- which see Myanmar receiving 20 times less assistance per capita than other least-developed countries -- have weakened, not strengthened, the forces for change.’’
‘’Aid is valuable in its own right for alleviating suffering, as well as a potential means of opening up a closed country, improving governance and empowering people to take control of their own lives,’’ says John Virgoe, ICG’s South-east Asia project director.
The report is as critical of the Western governments’ failure to fund the 482-million- dollar flash appeal. ‘’This is regrettable, not only from the perspective of the cyclone survivors,’’ it notes.
‘’Many (donors) have been reluctant to extend their otherwise generous support for the affected communities into the recovery and rehabilitation work, raising doubts about how much international agencies will be able to do in this area,'' ICG said.
In fact, the ICG implies that the international community has been unfairly harsh in its aid policies towards Burma when set against international assistance to other repressive countries.
While the overseas development assistance in 2006 was 2.88 U.S. dollars per person in Burma, the average assistance for the other 50 poorest countries was over 58 U.S. dollars per person, it reveals in a footnote. ‘’Other countries with similarly repressive governments receive much more aid: Sudan (55 dollars per person); Zimbabwe (21 dollars per person); Laos (63 dollars per person).’’
The misery caused by Nargis added to the woes of a country where over a third of its 57 million people live in absolute poverty and where along the borders -- home to the country’s discriminated ethnic communities -- poverty rates are far higher, reaching over 50 percent in some areas. Child malnutrition affects over a third of the under five population, states a U.N. report.
The tough sanctions and aid restrictions imposed on Burma followed a brutal crackdown of a pro-democracy uprising in 1988, where thousands of protesters were killed by troops.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for instance, has had its hands tied by a 1992 U.S. law that threatens funding cuts if the U.N. agency has any programmes linked to a Burmese government agency.
But even if this appeal to normalise aid relations prompts a change attitude among the donors, it will amount to little for the victims unless the military regime agrees to abide by prevailing humanitarian aid principles and practices.
‘’These principles are not new, but the regime is refusing to recognise and implement these international norms,’’ Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Burma Partnership, a network of Burmese and regional NGOs, told IPS.
‘’The international community should understand that the Burmese in the delta survived with nothing before the cyclone, and it has continued even after the disaster,’’ she added. ‘’We want the people to benefit from the aid, not the military regime.’’ ************ ********* ********* *********
စပယ္ေတြ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို႕
[Ye Yint Thet Zwe]
၁။
အေရာင္တူငွက္ေတြ
ဆံုမွတ္တခုကို ဦးတည္ပ်ံသန္းသြားၾကတဲ့ေန ့က
စပယ္ေတြ ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့
အေမ့မွာ တရားနဲ ့ေျဖလည္း မရဘူး ။
၂။
ငါတို ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
ေႏြးေထြးေသာ
ရင္ခြင္မ်ား
အိမ္မ်ား
အေမမ်ား
ခ်စ္သူမ်ား
အနာဂတ္မ်ား
ပိုင္ဆိုင္ႏိုင္ခြင့္ရွိေသာ အရာမ်ား
ထားရစ္ ခ်န္ရစ္
ေက်ာခိုင္းထြက္ခြါခဲ့ၾက
ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေတြက
စပယ္ေတြလို ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့ ။
၃။
အခုေတာ ့ ့ ့ ့
ဆရာေမာင္ေသာကရဲ ့
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္လည္း မဟုတ္
ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်စ္ေကာင္းရဲ ့
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္လည္း မဟုတ္
ႏူးညံ့ေသာ ႏွလံုးသား
ခံႏိုင္ရည္နဲ ့ အားတင္းထားခဲ့တဲ့
အေမအိုရဲ ့မ်က္၀န္းမ်ားမွာ
စြန္းထင္းေပက်န္ေနတဲ့
ေသာကရဲ ့အတိုင္းအဆ
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ကာလ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
ဟုတ္တယ္ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
အေမအိုရဲ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ ။
စပယ္ပြင့္ေတြၾကားမွာ အေမၿပံဳးတယ္
ေသာက မ်က္ရည္စေတြနဲ ့
နာနာ က်ည္းက်ည္း ၿပံဳးတယ္ ။
ကုန္လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ အခ်ိန္ကာလေတြနဲ ့
ေရာက္ရွိလာဦးမယ့္ ေန ့သစ္ေတြမွာ
အေမ့ရဲ ့စိတ္ဟာ သားနဲ ့ထပ္တူ
ေအာင္ပြဲကို ေပြ ့ဖက္မယ့္သူပါ
အေမ ေစာင့္ေနတယ္ သားေရ
စပယ္နံ ့ေတြနဲ ့မႊမ္းထံုေနတဲ့ အေမ့ရဲ ့စကား
သားရွိရာအရပ္ဆီကို
သယ္ေဆာင္သြားေပးပါလား ေလညွင္းကေလးးေရ ။
၄။
အေရာင္တူငွက္ေတြ
ဆံုမွတ္တခုကို ဦးတည္ပ်ံသန္းသြားၾကတဲ့ေန ့ကလိုပါပဲ
သားရယ္ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့အခုလည္း
စပယ္ေတြ ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့
အေမ့မွာ တရားနဲ ့ေျဖလည္း မရဘူး ။
စပယ္ေတြ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို႕
[Ye Yint Thet Zwe]
၁။
အေရာင္တူငွက္ေတြ
ဆံုမွတ္တခုကို ဦးတည္ပ်ံသန္းသြားၾကတဲ့ေန ့က
စပယ္ေတြ ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့
အေမ့မွာ တရားနဲ ့ေျဖလည္း မရဘူး ။
၂။
ငါတို ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
ေႏြးေထြးေသာ
ရင္ခြင္မ်ား
အိမ္မ်ား
အေမမ်ား
ခ်စ္သူမ်ား
အနာဂတ္မ်ား
ပိုင္ဆိုင္ႏိုင္ခြင့္ရွိေသာ အရာမ်ား
ထားရစ္ ခ်န္ရစ္
ေက်ာခိုင္းထြက္ခြါခဲ့ၾက
ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေတြက
စပယ္ေတြလို ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့ ။
၃။
အခုေတာ ့ ့ ့ ့
ဆရာေမာင္ေသာကရဲ ့
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္လည္း မဟုတ္
ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်စ္ေကာင္းရဲ ့
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္လည္း မဟုတ္
ႏူးညံ့ေသာ ႏွလံုးသား
ခံႏိုင္ရည္နဲ ့ အားတင္းထားခဲ့တဲ့
အေမအိုရဲ ့မ်က္၀န္းမ်ားမွာ
စြန္းထင္းေပက်န္ေနတဲ့
ေသာကရဲ ့အတိုင္းအဆ
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ကာလ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
ဟုတ္တယ္ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့
အေမအိုရဲ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ ။
စပယ္ပြင့္ေတြၾကားမွာ အေမၿပံဳးတယ္
ေသာက မ်က္ရည္စေတြနဲ ့
နာနာ က်ည္းက်ည္း ၿပံဳးတယ္ ။
ကုန္လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ အခ်ိန္ကာလေတြနဲ ့
ေရာက္ရွိလာဦးမယ့္ ေန ့သစ္ေတြမွာ
အေမ့ရဲ ့စိတ္ဟာ သားနဲ ့ထပ္တူ
ေအာင္ပြဲကို ေပြ ့ဖက္မယ့္သူပါ
အေမ ေစာင့္ေနတယ္ သားေရ
စပယ္နံ ့ေတြနဲ ့မႊမ္းထံုေနတဲ့ အေမ့ရဲ ့စကား
သားရွိရာအရပ္ဆီကို
သယ္ေဆာင္သြားေပးပါလား ေလညွင္းကေလးးေရ ။
၄။
အေရာင္တူငွက္ေတြ
ဆံုမွတ္တခုကို ဦးတည္ပ်ံသန္းသြားၾကတဲ့ေန ့ကလိုပါပဲ
သားရယ္ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့ ့အခုလည္း
စပယ္ေတြ ပြင့္လိုက္တာ
ေဖြးေဖြးလႈပ္လို ့
အေမ့မွာ တရားနဲ ့ေျဖလည္း မရဘူး ။
US presses Myanmar to free Aung San Suu Kyi
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081023/pl_afp/usmyamarpoliticsrightssuukyi_081023202551
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States on Thursday marked the 13th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest by renewing its call for Myanmar's military rulers to swiftly release the pro-democracy leader.
"As of October 24, Aung San Suu Kyi has spent a total of 13 years under house arrest," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in a statement.
"Over the many years, Aung San Suu Kyi has endured unlawful detention, she has remained a steady beacon of hope and inspiration to those seeking a peaceful, democratic Burma," he said.
"We again call upon the Burmese regime to immediately and unconditionally release her and the more than 2,000 political prisoners it holds."
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, has been confined to her home for 13 of the past 19 years. Her National League for Democracy swept elections in 1990, but was never allowed by the military to take power.
Recalling that Friday is also the anniversary of the coming into force of the United Nations charter in 1945, Wood reiterated US support for UN efforts to obtain the release of political prisoners in Myanmar and encourage its shift to democracy.
"Releasing Aung San Suu Kyi would be a first step toward Burma's reintegration into the world community," he said.
"We further join the United Nations and the rest of the international community in calling upon the regime to engage credibly in an inclusive, time-bound dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratic and ethnic minority leaders to bring about a genuine democratic transition."
Myanmar -- whose former name Burma is still used by the United States and other Western nations -- has been ruled by successive military juntas since 1962, 14 years after its independence from British colonial rule.
Lawmaker approve veteran as Bank of Japan deputy
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Tokyo-Bank-of-Japan-new-deputy-governor-Hirohide-Yamaguchi-Yamaguchi/photo//081021/481/f0dad1c9829c442cb0d552f7e75fea60//s:/ap/20081024/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_central_bank_1;_ylt=AmXJv5Wn_w_Mz9f9sPb40ulv24cA
Bank of Japan's new deputy governor Hirohide Yamaguchi arrives for Diet confirmation in Tokyo Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008. The legislature hears from Yamaguchi as worries grow about a global recession.
(AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye)
By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama, Ap Business Writer – Fri Oct 24, 2:58 am ET AP – Bank of Japan's new deputy governor Hirohide Yamaguchi arrives for Diet confirmation in Tokyo Tuesday, … TOKYO – A veteran bank official won approval as deputy governor of the Bank of Japan from both houses of parliament Friday as the ruling party and opposition put aside flaring contentions to maintain financial stability.
Hirohide Yamaguchi, an expert in interest rate policy, is filling a seat left empty for half a year. The opposition has wrangled repeatedly with the ruling Liberal Democrats over central bank appointments. But with Tokyo stock markets gyrating by the day and fears growing that U.S. economic woes will hurt Japan's export-dependent economy., the opposition opted this time around to cooperate with the government nomination.
Yamaguchi, 57, has promised to use his experience to steer monetary policy at the world's second biggest economy through looming financial uncertainties.
"Japan's financial system is relatively stable compared to the U.S., but there is escalating stress," he told lawmakers earlier this week. "Equity and currency markets are nervous. And the economy, suffering a slowdown in exports, is sluggish and will be sluggish for the time being."
The more powerful lower house of parliament, where the ruling coalition controls a two-thirds majority, approved Yamaguchi's appointment in a vote shown live on a Web broadcast. Earlier in the day, the opposition-controlled upper house supported it in a 226-7 vote, a parliamentary official said.
Yamaguchi will become deputy governor to Masaaki Shirakawa, who took office in April only after weeks of political jockeying.
The appointment now fills all the vacancies on the BOJ's nine-member policy board.
The Bank of Japan, whose key interest rate is already at a low 0.5 percent, sat out the coordinated interest rate cut by North American and European financial authorities earlier this month.
The Bank of Japan has flooded the money market with cash to keep liquidity and help stabilize the financial system since the September collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.
Japan's Nissin recalls 500,000 noodles over insecticide fears
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081024/hl_afp/japanfoodsafetynoodle_081024060223
Nissin Food's Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka. The company said Friday it was recalling half a million cups of instant noodles over fears of insecticide contamination in the latest food safety scare to rock the country's consumers
(AFP/Yoshikazu Tsuno)
Fri Oct 24, 2:02 am ET AFP – Nissin Food's Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka. The company said Friday it was recalling half a million … TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's Nissin Food Products Co. said Friday it was recalling half a million cups of instant noodles over fears of insecticide contamination in the latest food safety scare to rock the country's consumers.
A 67-year-old woman vomited and felt numbness on her tongue after eating Nissin's Cup Noodle this week in the Tokyo suburb of Fujisawa, the city's health office said late Thursday.
The product was made at a Nissin factory in Japan. A series of previous scares have involved food imported from China.
The health office said on inspecting the Cup Noodle they had discovered paradichlorobenzene, the key chemical in bug repellent, but no puncture or other abnormality in the cup.
Nissin was voluntarily recalling around 500,000 cups made on the same factory line the same day, a company spokesman said.
They were sold at supermarkets in Tokyo and neighbouring areas with most of them already gone from store shelves, he said.
"We apologise for causing trouble to Cup Noodle lovers," Nissin president Susumu Nakagawa told reporters late Thursday.
However, he denied the possibility of contamination at the factory, saying it had never used or stored the insecticide and had seven security cameras watching manufacturing lines.
"It is unthinkable that the contamination occurred at our production lines," he said.
The noodles scare spread Friday as another company, Myojo Foods Co. of Tokyo, said it found instant noodles laced with paradichlorobenzene and naphthol, also used as bug repellent.
A man "poured in hot water and noticed chemical smells," said a health official in Yososuka, southwest of Tokyo. The man was unhurt as he did not eat the noodles.
Nissin, based in the western Japan city of Osaka, created instant ramen noodles as Japan's economy grew rapidly after World War II. Aimed at busy people on the go, it has since become a multibillion-dollar industry.
Japan has been on alert after a series of health scares involving food, mostly made in China.
Earlier this month one woman fell sick after eating frozen green beans imported from China, which were found to contain thousands of times the permissible level of pesticide residue.
Myanmar Taunggyi chosen as one of 10 best ASEAN environmental conservation cities
Taunggyi, a cold and hilly city lying 1.37 kilometers above sea-level, stands as the fourth biggest city of Myanmar with a population of 200,000.
http://www.mathaba.net/rss/?x=609713
YANGON, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's Taunggyi, the capital of Shan state, has been chosen as one of the 10 best natural environmental conservation cities in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN), the local Weekly Eleven news journal reported Tuesday.
It was so awarded at a ceremony held recently in Vietnam to encourage undertakings in environmental conservation in the region in the best way with upgraded level.
Taunggyi, a cold and hilly city lying 1.37 kilometers above sea-level, stands as the fourth biggest city of Myanmar with a population of 200,000.
The city is not only a commercial center for Shan state but also a place where ethnic minorities inhabit and travel.
The Inlay Lake, located near Taunggyi, is known as one of Myanmar's famous tourist sites attracting large number of world travelers.
Meanwhile, Myanmar is making efforts to extend its environmental conservation area up to 10 percent of the total of the country as part of its long-term plan of promoting eco-tourism.
Myanmar's present environmental conservation area remains at 4.7 percent that is 31,961 square-kilometers covered by 38 environmental conservation regions.
Of them, there set up 14 eco-tourism based camps mainly known as Hlawga Wildlife park, Yangon Zoological Garden, Inlay Lake Sanctuary, Mount Popa Park, Pyin Oo Lwin National Kandawgyi Garden, Khakaborazi National Park and Myainghewun Elephant Camp.
Of these eco-tourism facilities, the Khakaborazi National Park, located in Kachin state, northernmost part of the country, was highlighted as a significant one which will soon emerge as the first ever world heritage of Myanmar.
In 1998, Myanmar designated the area of Mount Khakaborazi as the national park to focus on conservation of environment and bio-diversities of eastern area of Himalayan mountain ranges as well as to safeguard the areas where Myanmar's mighty Ayeyawaddy River originates.
The park, covered an area of 3,811 square kilometers and with an altitude of between 900 meters and 5.7 kilometers, has a temperature of between 15 degree Celsius in maximum and -3 degree Celsius in minimum.
Visitors may enjoy scenic beauty of over 3,000 meters high snow-capped mountain ranges.
Rich in natural resources including wildlife and rare species of flora and fauna that attracts tourists, Myanmar is encouraging entrepreneurs to promote eco-tourism industry at the environmental conservation regions to earn income for the state.
According to official statistics, tourist arrivals in Myanmar in the fiscal year 2007-08 which ended in March, totaled 288,776 with 51,872 more registered in the first quarter of 2008-09.
Full democracy in Myanmar will take generations to achieve – UN expert
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28695&Cr=&Cr1=
Tomás Ojea Quintana, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar
23 October 2008 – Democracy will take decades to take root in Myanmar, and in the meantime tangible, step-by-step benchmarks should be set up to spur progress in the Asian country, an independent United Nations human rights expert told the General Assembly today.
Addressing the Assembly’s third committee (social, humanitarian and cultural), Tomás Ojea Quintana said assistance, expertise and cooperation with Myanmar should be provided to help its authorities realize those benchmarks.
“Restoration of full democracy cannot happen overnight; it will take generations,” he said.
Mr. Quintana, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the committee that it was not enough for the Assembly to adopt resolutions about the country – it should also provide the resources to implement those resources.
While Myanmar’s Government has the prime responsibility to protect and promote human rights within the country’s borders, the international community should stand ready to help at any time.
Earlier this month, in a report issued following his first visit to Myanmar, Mr. Quintana proposed that four core human rights elements be implemented: the revision of domestic laws that limit fundamental rights, the progressive release of the estimated 2,000 prisoners of conscience still in detention, the reform and training of the military so that it conforms with human rights, and changes to the judiciary so that it is fully independent.
These four elements must be completed before national elections are held in 2010, the Special Rapporteur told journalists after his presentation to the Assembly committee.
In response to questions, he called for the immediate release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the National League of Democracy (NLD) who is under house arrest.
“She’s under arbitrary detention,” Mr. Quintana said, describing the situation as a serious violation of human rights and warning that he was not confident she would be released in the near future.
Mr. Quintana, who serves in an independent and unpaid capacity, said he hopes to visit Myanmar again before the end of the year.
After he addressed the Assembly committee, Myanmar’s representative said Mr. Quintana had given an independent, caring and fair-minded perspective on the country, and noted that he had drawn attention to positive developments, such as the recent release of a significant number of prisoners and plans to hold multi-party elections.
But he said the Special Rapporteur had also included unsubstantiated information in his presentation, often based on what he said were distorted allegations from exiles, and had unfairly criticized the Government’s response to the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Nargis in May.
Suu Kyi's lawyer asks Myanmar junta for further appeal meeting
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gqzwxx89NR9fGweOV-iwk1rSdYvw
YANGON (AFP) — Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's lawyer has requested another meeting with her to discuss an appeal against her detention, amid repeated international calls for her release, her party's spokesman said Friday.
Kyi Win asked the ruling junta for permission to meet with the Nobel peace prize winner, who has spent most of the past 19 years locked away in her lakeside home in Yangon, the National League for Democracy's Nyan Win said.
"Lawyer U Kyi Win has asked the authorities to meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi again to give her receipt of her appeal and to get further instructions for it," Nyan Win told AFP.
"We haven't received any reply yet. But the authorities are likely to allow him to meet her," he said.
The authorities acknowledged receipt of Aung San Suu Kyi's appeal on October 9 but have not yet indicated whether they will accept the case.
Aung San Suu Kyi last met with Kyi Win in September to finalise her appeal.
The 63-year-old rarely meets with anyone except her lawyer and doctor and refused a visit from United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari in August, apparently in protest at the lack of progress he was making on political reform in Myanmar.
On Thursday leaders around the world marked the 13th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest by renewing calls for the government to release her.
A US State Department spokesman urged the "unlawful detention" to end, while the European Parliament joined rights groups in urging Asian and European leaders meeting in China this week to appeal to Myanmar for liberal reforms.
Meanwhile, the United Nations' expert on human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, announced a four-point plan of political reforms he is asking the junta to implement before elections due in 2010.
The NLD won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed it to take office.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962.
Story Sample: The Playing Field, a Beijing Flashback
http://fotosonics.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/story-sample-the-playing-field-a-beijing-flashback/
In the wake of criticisms and chaos surrounding the Beijing Olympics, at least one story remains to China’s credit — the historical joint US-Chinese operation in 2003 that took down the world’s biggest heroin ring
Beijing 2008
Olympics aside, Beijing’s pollution is special. While competing as the noisiest city in the world, direct sunlight and distinct cloud outlines are indeed rare. This – along with the shortsighted, over-anxious nature of government censorship — fosters the sense of living in a bubble, a manufactured environment, a kind of limbo with an undefined sky.
The ratio of women to men adds to the air of desperation, 119 men for every 100 women, most of whom fall prey to a naïve and gargantuan sense of entitlement due to being doted on by one-child policy parents. Yet with so much physical and cultural change occurring before their very eyes, it’s understandable, the feeling that nobody wants to be left behind. Rock music only arrived in China twenty years ago. In 1985, rock bands were not allowed by the government to play outside private parties. Now, China has its own brand of hip-hop.
A taxi driver once remarked to me, “We working people don’t like what’s going on in Beijing,” a reference to the record-scale remodeling efforts ahead of the Olympics and subsequent earnings from corruption, cited by leading Olympic “Bird’s Nest” architect Ai WeiWei in a Der Spiegel article earlier this year.
Aside from the Sichuan earthquake, and allegations of Indian exiles with UK passports stirring pro-Dalai Lama dissent around Aba (for an uprising which was supposed to happen in July), China has suffered heavy criticism for a deteriorating human rights record leading up to the Olympics. Persecution of petitioners are only one example, explored in a 2007 UK documentary called “China’s Olympic Lie,” now making rounds over the internet. All of this tends to sway public opinion towards a negative view of a leadership called a “group of goons and thugs” by CNN commentator Jack Cafferty. Even after the apology, the negativity stuck, all the way into a lawsuit against CNN in China.
But there’s an independent layer to all this, something called “cop culture.” It’s all over the world, the job produces the same symptoms in law enforcement personnel wherever you might find them. It’s the choice of language, the way they handle themselves. The way two cops from different countries seem to understand each other is different from how two civilians find ways to understand each other, let alone the politicians. A byproduct of this culture is a tiny population of people who put aside their personal aspirations and agendas for something greater than themselves, and in the best cases, leave politics a lot of room to catch up.
There is one instance which not only defines this culture, but in a blind justice kind of way, does not play into current events the way politicians might want it to – in this case, politicians from Beijing and Washington. This instance was the 125 case, otherwise known as “Operation City Lights,” the historic US/China collaboration which ended in the takedown of the world’s biggest Asian heroin ring in 2003. It wasn’t just the takedown, nor the meticulous navigation through one of the worst political climates between two superpowers in history, a prerequisite to accomplishing the takedown. It was what emerged, of which we were allowed a glimpse, that stirred and surfaced in a glorious precious moment, something we as people might bear witness to in defense of our existence if we ever had to. One might call it Edge, the guts to go beyond, finally hitting the mark – which the Greeks called Virtue.
When I first met him in person (after six months of emails and phone calls), walking into his hotel room in Kunming in September 2006, I could sense the caution. This was the first encounter with someone who had done a career-load of DEA undercover work, since 1978, and by the end of his career he was the DEA country attaché, reporting directly to the Ambassador, his position directly appointed by the President of the United States.
Los Angeles, 1992
A delegation of some thirty Chinese cops were in town, visiting from Yunnan Province. Although there were no official arrangements, no trips to Universal Studios, and the Chinese had arranged their own transportation, Jimmy, as his responsibility usually dictated, was still set to play the host. In reality, as always, he was hoping to score some off-the-record sense of the state of affairs in the country of his guests.
With no DEA office yet in mainland China, the closest assessment of what was going on there routinely came from the occasional whisper or rumor picked up by DEA Hong Kong. Jimmy wondered if this time, he might be able to piece together a more complete picture to the equation which, at present without factoring in Chinese seizure reports, left the regional (Asian) average at no more than half a ton per year.
As there was no official lunch, the Chinese invited Jimmy to Chinatown to share a meal. In his best pidgin Mandarin, Jimmy managed to get into some issues concerning the Burmese border with China. The DEA believed, he said, that Khun Sa and a handful of his lieutenants were the biggest, most formidable group in that area.
“Ha! Khun Sa is peanuts!” was the response. “We’ve got other people, Wei brothers, Lin Ming-xien, Peng Chia-sheng, the Ko Kang… Jimmy, you want big guys? These are the guys that cause China problems. And we take four tons of dope out of them a year.” The Chinese were working on a group a little north of Khun Sa’s people who had been responsible for the killings of Chinese counternarcotics agents along
the Yunnan/Burma border.
It was a shock, Jimmy couldn’t believe it, the DEA never knew. He grabbed a napkin and asked for the names. Arriving back in his office, Jimmy approached John Whalen, an ex-Marine Captain, an intelligence-type. He handed the napkin to Whalen, who returned with a list of names thirty minutes later.
“Yeah, we know about these guys. They’re big.”
They were so big, in fact, that one of the names on that list turned out to be in the 125 group, the world’s biggest heroin smugglers, nicknamed 125 for the weight in kilos of the ringleader.
“So who’s working them?” Jimmy asked.
“Nobody,” Whalen uncomfortably replied.
“Oh. Okay…” Jimmy drifted, his perception of China just beginning to change, at that moment. It was the new playing field, a target-rich environment with real, tangible groups, identified, operating at the highest level in volumes that dwarfed anything known before. The names on the paper napkin, the four-ton seizures, were strategic intelligence, which then would go into a threat assessment, which would then be incorporated into a proposal, which was instrumental in the decision to open an office in China. Finally, in 1997, Jiang Zhemin and Bill Clinton signed the Mutual Law Enforcement Cooperation Agreement, and the post which Jimmy would eventually fill was created.
New York, 2001
The FBI were making undercover heroin purchases off two Hong Kong nationals in New York, Cheung and Lau. As it turned out while reviewing the surveillance, Cheung was driving a car that was registered in Boston by another Chinese man. Why was Cheung driving another guy’s car? And who was this guy? FBI agents wrote a subpoena which was signed and sent to the telephone company to get a record of all incoming and outgoing calls made by the car’s owner in Boston over the prior six months. A woman at the phone company received the subpoena and walked away from her desk into a special area behind glass doors. Usually what is asked for is a three-month or six-month phone toll. In this case, the FBI learned that their target had made some phone calls – there were three numbers — to a city in China called Fuzhou.
For the FBI, the case was at a dead end. The UC investigation wasn’t working for them and they weren’t getting what they needed. All they had were the two buyers, the car registered to the other accomplice in Boston, and the three Fuzhou phone numbers. Meanwhile DEA New York had a separate case going, which eventually merged into the FBI case, both looking at the same group. As part of the standard procedure, when intel involves another country, this then becomes the business of the DEA’s Country Attaché. It was September 2002 when DEA New York then called Jimmy, now in Beijing, to get the subscriber information – owner and address. When the numbers were plugged into Jimmy’s case on 125, it was a fresh morsel of intel, and the case lurched forward.
Stills from the CCTV-1 production of “Operation Without Borders,” the Chinese government’s propaganda version of what happened.
ျမန္မာ့နည္း ျမန္မာ့ဟန္ ဖက္ဆစ္၀ါဒ-From: "Tom Brown"
ျမန္မာ့နည္း ျမန္မာ့ဟန္ ဖက္ဆစ္၀ါဒ
ဘာေတး လင့္တ္နာ | ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၃၀၊ ၂၀၀၇
အကယ္၍ ကားလ္မာ့က္စ္သာ မွန္ခဲ့မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ သမိုင္းက
၀မ္းနည္းေၾကကြဲဖြယ္အျဖစ္ တပတ္ျပန္ေက်ာ့လာသည္ဟု ဆိုရ မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး
မွားယြင္းေနေသာအခ်က္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ဤ၀မ္းနည္းေၾကကြဲဖြယ္အဆင့္တြင္သာ
ပိတ္ဆို႔ ရပ္တန္႔ေနရျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ မၾကာေသးမီ ရက္ပိုင္းမ်ားအတြင္းက
ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားႏွင့္
အၾကမ္းဖက္ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈမ်ား သည္ အေရးနိမ့္ခဲ့ရေသာ ၁၉၈၈
ဒီမိုကေရစီလႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးႏွင့္ အလားတူ ျပန္ေျပာင္းအမွတ္ရဖြယ္ ျဖစ္သည္။
အခ်ိန္ရလာ သည္ႏွင့္ အမွ် လံုျခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားက လူထုကို ေကာင္းစြာ
ရိုက်ဳိးလာေစရန္ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ကမၻာႀကီး၏ မခံ မရပ္ႏိုင္
ေဒါသထြက္ရမႈမ်ားသည္လည္း ထိေရာက္မႈမရွိေသာ အဆံပလာ တုံ႔ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ားအျဖစ္
ေျပာင္းသြားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ေနာက္ဆံုး ခ်ဳပ္ၿငိမ္းသြားသည့္
အေနအထားေရာက္ခဲ့ရသည္။
အေရွ႕ဥေရာပႏွင့္ ယခင္ဆိုဗီယက္ယူနီယံ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ
"အေရာင္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးမ်ား" ႏွင့္ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ကာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ
လူထုလႈပ္ရွားမႈကို ေအာင္ပြဲခံႏိုင္မည္ဟု တြက္ဆခဲ့ၾကၿပီး အစပိုင္း လူအမ်ား
စိတ္တက္ႂကြေနဆဲကာလတြင္ အေနာက္တိုင္းသတင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားကလည္း
"ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး"ဟု တင္စားေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ၾကသည္။ အေၾကာင္းက ဦးေဆာင္
လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို ရည္ၫႊန္းခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး
တခ်ိန္က အာရွေဒသအတြင္း ႂကြယ္၀
ခ်မ္းသာခဲ့သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံကို ဆင္းရဲမြဲေတကပ္ဆိုက္ေစခဲ့ေသာ၊ လူအမ်ားက
လိုလားလက္ခံမႈလည္း မရွိေတာ့ၿပီျဖစ္ေသာ စစ္ အစိုးရကို အၿပီးတိုင္
ျဖဳတ္ခ်ႏိုင္ေတာ့မည္ဟု ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားခဲ့ၾကေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ စိတ္ ဓာတ္ေရးရာပိုင္းအရ လႊမ္းမိုးထားႏိုင္သည့္ အေရးပါေသာ
ၾသဇာတိကၠမ၊ အဆင့္ျမင့္နည္းပညာ မ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျပင္ပကမၻာသို႔ သတင္းမ်ား
လွ်င္ျမန္စြာစီးဆင္းလာႏိုင္မႈ အေနအထားတို႔ ေပါင္းစပ္၍ လူအမ်ားတြင္
ဤကဲ့သို႔ အေကာင္းဘက္ေျပာင္းလဲ လာေတာ့မည့္ စိတ္လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား
ျဖစ္ေပၚလာခဲ့ရျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ အေမရိကန္အစိုးရက လည္း ပိုမိုျပင္းထန္ေသာ
ဒဏ္ခတ္ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈမ်ား ခ်မွတ္လာခဲ့ၿပီး ေနာက္ဆံုး ယခင္က ဖိအားေပးစကား
အလွ်င္းေျပာၾကား ခဲ့ဖူးျခင္း မရွိသည့္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ
ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားအဖြဲ႕ (အာဆီယံ) တို႔ကပါ ျပင္းထန္ေသာစကားလံုးမ်ားျဖင့္
ထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကျငာခ်က္မ်ား ျပဳလာခဲ့ၾကရသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း လက္ေတြ႕အမွန္တရားမွာ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ အေျခအေနႏွင့္ စာလွ်င္
သိသိသာသာ မည္သို႔မွ် ေျပာင္းလဲလာမႈ မရွိေသးျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ေျပာရမည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ယခင္ကထက္ပင္ ပိုမို၍
အားေကာင္းလာခဲ့သည္။ စစ္ အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ၾကံဳဆံုရင္ဆိုင္လာရမည့္ အသစ္ေသာ
ျပည္တြင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဆန္႔က်င္ေ၀ဖန္မႈ မိုးႀကိဳးမုန္တိုင္းမ်ား အတြက္
ျပင္ဆင္ထားၿပီးသား အဆင္သင့္ရွိေနၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ အဆက္ဆက္ေသာ စစ္အစိုးရမ်ား၏ ရွင္သန္ရပ္တည္ႏိုင္မႈမွာ
အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အတြင္း ထူးျခားအံ့ဖြယ္မ်ားအနက္
တခုျဖစ္ေနခဲ့ရသည္။ ဤပေဟဠိပုစၧာ အတြက္ အဓိကက်ေသာ အေျဖမွာ ရန္ကုန္ရွိ
စစ္အစိုးရကို နားလည္ထားရမည့္ အခ်က္မွာ "သာမန္" စစ္အစိုးရမ်ဳိး
မဟုတ္ျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ၎ကို ထိုင္း၊ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား၊ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္၊
ပါကစၥတန္ႏွင့္ အျခားေသာ ေဒသတြင္းရွိႏိုင္ငံမ်ား၏ စစ္အစိုးရမ်ားႏွင့္
ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ရန္ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ပါ။
၁၉၆၂ ခုႏွစ္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ စစ္တပ္က အာဏာသိမ္းခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ၎က ႏိုင္ငံ၏
အစိုးရအာဏာကိုသာ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားျခင္း မဟုတ္၊ စီးပြားေရးအာဏာကိုပါ
ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားခဲ့ပါသည္။
ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ "ျမန္မာ့နည္း ျမန္မာ့ဟန္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္၀ါဒ" က်င့္သံုးမည္ဟု
ဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဆိုလိုသည္မွာ ပုဂၢလိကပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈ မ်ား အားလံုးကို
ျပည္သူပိုင္သိမ္းခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး စစ္တပ္က ဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ထားသည့္
ေကာ္ပိုေရးရွင္းတခ်ဳိ႕ထံ လႊဲေျပာင္းေပးခဲ့ သည္။ အိႏၵိယႏွင့္
တရုတ္ႏြယ္ဖြား အမ်ားစုျဖစ္သည့္ ယခင္ကုန္သည္ႀကီးဓနရွင္မ်ားလည္း
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ စြန္႔ခြာထြက္သြားခဲ့ ၾကရၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ
ပညာတတ္အမ်ားစုလည္း ထြက္ခြာခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ ၁၉၆၂ ခုႏွစ္ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈ
မတိုင္မီက အေရွ႕ ေတာင္အာရွ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားအနက္ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္း
အျမင့္ဆံုးႏိုင္ငံတခု ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီး ပညာတတ္လူဦးေရအမ်ားစု ရွိခဲ့ေသာ
ႏိုင္ငံလည္း ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ေတာ့ စစ္တပ္သည္သာ
တိုင္းျပည္၏ထိပ္သီး လက္ေရြးစင္အုပ္စုျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။
ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္၏ ယႏၲယားသည္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံႀကီးအတြင္း
ႏိုင္ငံေလးေဆာက္ထားသည့္သဖြယ္ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။ စစ္တပ္မွ တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ား၊
၎တို႔၏ မိသားစု၀င္မ်ား၊ မွီခိုသူမ်ားမွာ အထူးအခြင့္အေရးခံမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾကၿပီး
သာဓကအားျဖင့္ ထိုင္း ႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ စစ္တပ္မ်ားထက္
အခြင့္အေရးပိုယူထားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ၎အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏိုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္ ေယဘုယ်
အားျဖင့္ သေဘာထားကြဲလြဲတည္ရွိေနၾကသည့္ ဗဟုအယူအဆကို အနည္းႏွင့္အမ်ား
ဆိုသလို လက္ခံက်င့္သံုးခဲ့ၾကၿပီး စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ား အုပ္စိုးထားေသာ
အေမွာင္လႊမ္းသည့္ကာလမ်ားတြင္ပင္ အျခားအင္အားစုမ်ားက ရွင္သန္လႈပ္ရွားခြင့္
ရွိခဲ့ၾကသည္။
ေနာက္ဆံုးျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ၁၉၈၈ လူထုအံုႂကြမႈႀကီးအၿပီးတြင္
ျမန္မာ့ဆိုရွယ္လစ္လမ္းစဥ္ကို တခန္းရပ္နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ
ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ျဖစ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ေသာ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္စြာ
ၿဖိဳခြဲေခ်မႈန္းမႈကို ျပစ္တင္ေ၀ဖန္ေနၾကေသာ ႏိုင္ငံ တကာ အသိုက္အ၀န္းကို
အနည္းဆံုးေခၽြးသိပ္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ တဘက္တြင္လည္း
လြတ္လပ္ေသာေစ်းကြက္ စီးပြားေရးစနစ္တြင္ သူတို႔စစ္တပ္အတြက္
ပိုမိုအက်ဳိးအျမတ္ရွိႏိုင္သည္ကို သေဘာေပါက္ေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
အနည္းဆံုး လူ ၃,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ အသက္ဆံုးခဲ့ရေသာ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္
ေသြးထြက္သံယုိေခ်မႈန္းမႈမ်ားအၿပီး အာဏာသိမ္း စစ္ အစိုးရက
ပုဂၢလိကလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားႏွင့္
ႏိုင္ငံျခားရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈမ်ားကိုခြင့္ျပဳေပးခဲ့ကာ ျမန္မာ့နည္း
ျမန္မာ့ဟန္ အရင္းရွင္စနစ္ကို အစားထိုးခဲ့ျပန္သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း
အႏွစ္သာရမွာ စစ္တပ္ကလႊမ္းမိုးခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ထားေသာ စီးပြားေရးစနစ္သာ ျဖစ္သည္။
စစ္တပ္က တိုက္ရိုက္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ သြယ္၀ိုက္၍ ျဖစ္ေစ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားမႈ မရွိေသာ၊
စစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သည့္ စီးပြားေရးသမားမ်ား က ခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္မထားေသာ
စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားဟူ၍ အနည္းငယ္သာ ရွိသည္။ စစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သည့္
စီးပြားေရးသမားမ်ား တြင္ အသက္ ၄၃-ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ဦးေတဇက တဦးအပါအ၀င္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး
စစ္အစိုးရ အႀကီးအကဲ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္သန္းေရႊ၊ ၎၏မိသားစု ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူလည္း
ျဖစ္သည္။ ဦးေတဇပိုင္ ထူးထရိတ္ဒင္းကုမၸဏီမွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏
အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္သစ္ "ေနျပည္ေတာ္" ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရးကန္ထရိုက္ရသည့္
ကုမၸဏီႏွစ္ခုအနက္ တခုလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ အျခားကုမၸဏီတခုမွာ ေအးရွေ၀ါအုပ္စုျဖစ္
ၿပီး ေလာ္စစ္ဟန္၏သားျဖစ္သူ စတီဗင္ေလာ ေခၚ ဦးထြန္းျမင့္ႏိုင္က
ဦးေဆာင္ေနသည့္ ကုမၸဏီ ျဖစ္သည္။ ေလာ္စစ္ဟန္ မွာ ၁၉၇၀ ခုႏွစ္မ်ားတြင္
အေမရိကန္အစိုးရ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ေရႊႀတိဂံေဒသအတြင္း ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ဟု
သတ္မွတ္ေဖာ္ျပခံခဲ့ရသူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ စစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ စစ္တပ္မိသားစုမ်ားအတြက္
အထူးေက်ာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆးရံုမ်ားလည္း ရွိေသးသည္။ ၎တို႔က သီးျခား
ခြဲျခားထားေသာ၊ အစိုးရက ေထာက္ပံ့ထားေသာ အိမ္ရာမ်ားတြင္
ေနထိုင္ခြင့္ရွိၾကၿပီး ျပင္ပကုန္စံုဆိုင္မ်ားတြင္ မရႏိုင္သည့္
ကုန္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကိုလည္း ၀ယ္ယူႏိုင္သည့္ အခြင့္အေရး ရၾကသည္။ စစ္တပ္က
ထုတ္ေပးထားသည့္ လက္မွတ္ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားသူက ရထား၊ ေလယာဥ္မ်ားတြင္ ထိုင္ခံု
လြယ္လင့္တကူ ၀ယ္ယူရႏိုင္ၾကၿပီး ၎တို႔က စည္းကမ္းဥပေဒ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္လွ်င္လည္း
ရဲမ်ားက အေရးမယူ၀ံ့ၾကပါ။ စစ္တပ္၏ အရံအင္အားဟု ဆိုၾကသည့္
လူထုေနာက္ခံအင္အားရေစ ရန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾကံ့ခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္
ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးအသင္း(USDA) ကိုလည္း ၁၉၉၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။
ဤအဖြဲ႔က ယခု အခါ အဖြဲ႔၀င္အင္အား ၂၁ သန္းရွိေနၿပီဟု ေႂကြးေၾကာ္ေနပါသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း အစိုးရ၀န္ထမ္းမ်ားႏွင့္ အရပ္သား မ်ားကို မ၀င္မေနရ
အတင္းအက်ပ္ ထည့္သြင္းထားမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္သာ ေဖာင္းပြေနျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
၁၉၈၈ လူထုအံုႂကြမႈ ျဖစ္သည့္ တိုင္ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနခဲ့ေသာ
ျမန္မာ့ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ လမ္းစဥ္ပါတီ ကဲ့သို႔ပင္ အေျခမခိုင္ သည့္ သဲရုပ္တု
သဲရဲတိုက္ သဖြယ္သာ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ၁၉ ႏွစ္ကာလက မဆလပါတီၿပိဳက်ခဲ့
သကဲ့သို႔ပင္ လူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈ လိႈင္းထန္လာခ်ိန္၌ ၿပိဳလဲက်ဆင္းရမည္သာ
ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ စစ္တပ္တန္ခိုးထြားလာျခင္းက ၿဗိတိန္ထံမွ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္
ဇန္န၀ါရီလ ၄ ရက္ လြတ္လပ္ေရးရၿပီး မၾကာ မတင္ကပင္ စလာခဲ့သည္။
ကြန္ျမဴနစ္မ်ားႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္သူပုန္မ်ားက
ရန္ကုန္အစိုးရကို အံုႂကြဆန္႔က်င္ ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံ၏
အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ေမာ္စီတုန္းဦးေဆာင္သည့္ တရုတ္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ကို
အေရးနိမ့္ထြက္ေျပးလာသည့္ ခ်န္ေကရွိတ္ တရုတ္အမ်ဳိးသား ကာကြယ္ေရးတပ္မ်ားက
ေနရာယူထားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ လြတ္လပ္ေရးရစဥ္ကာလက ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္မွာ အင္အား
၁၅,၀၀၀ ခန္႔ႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႔စစ္ လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔အခ်ဳိ႕သာ ရွိသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ ေၾကာင့္ ၁၉၅၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္တပ္အင္အားက တပ္သား
၄၀,၀၀၀ အထိ တိုးခ်ဲ႕လာခဲ့ၿပီး အျခားစီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားျဖစ္ ေသာ
သေဘၤာသယ္ယူပို႔ေဆာင္ေရး၊ ဘဏ္လုပ္ငန္းႏွင့္
ပံုႏွိပ္ထုတ္ေ၀ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္လည္း ေျခခ်ပတ္သက္ေနခဲ့ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
ႏိုင္ငံႀကီးအတြင္း ႏိုင္ငံငယ္တည္ေနရာမွ ၁၉၆၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္တခုလံုးကိုပါ စစ္တပ္က၀ါးၿမိဳခဲ့ေတာ့ သည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္တြင္
စစ္တပ္အင္အားက ၁၀၄,၂၀၀ အထိ ေရာက္လာခဲ့ၿပီ။ ေနာက္ပိုင္း ၁၉၇၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္
စစ္တပ္အင္အား ၁၄၀,၀၀၀ အထိ တိုးတက္လာခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉၈၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၁၆၀,၀၀၀၊
၁၉၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပံု ျဖစ္ပြားခ်ိန္တြင္ တပ္မေတာ္ၾကည္း အတြင္း၌ ၁၈၀,၀၀၀ ႏွင့္
အျခားတပ္ဖြဲ႔ ၃ ခုေပါင္းလွ်င္ ၂၀၀,၀၀၀ ခန္႔အထိ ရွိေနခဲ့ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခု အခ်ိန္တြင္ေတာ့ ၾကည္း-ေရ-ေလ စစ္တပ္အင္အားစုစုေပါင္းမွာ ၄၀၀,၀၀၀
ခန္႔အထိ တိုးတက္လာသည္ဟု ခန္႔မွန္းၾက ၿပီး ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ ေခတ္သစ္
သမိုင္းတေလွ်ာက္လံုးႏွင့္ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္လွ်င္ အေကာင္းမြန္ဆံုး
လက္နက္တပ္ဆင္ျဖည့္ဆီး ထားႏိုင္ေသာ ကာလလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ အထူးသျဖင့္
တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ လက္နက္မ်ား အလံုးအရင္းႏွင့္ ၀ယ္ယူျဖည့္တင္းထားခဲ့ သည္။
ေနာက္ဆံုးအႀကိမ္ စစ္တပ္အင္အားတိုးခ်ဲ႕ ျဖည့္တင္းမႈမွာ တိုင္းရင္းသား
လက္နက္ကိုင္သူပုန္ အင္အားစု မ်ားႏွင့္ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာတူညီထားေသာ
ကာလတြင္ျဖစ္ၿပီး လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္တာကာလအတြင္း ပံုမွန္အားျဖင့္
တိုက္ပြဲမ်ား တၿခိမ္းၿခိမ္းႏွင့္ ဆူပူမတည္ၿငိမ္ျဖစ္ေနတတ္သည့္
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ေတာင္တန္းေဒသမ်ားတြင္ တိုက္ပြဲဟူ၍ က်ဳိးၾကဲမွ်သာ
ရွိေနခဲ့သည္။ ယခုတႀကိမ္တြင္ ပစ္မွတ္ထားေသာ ရန္သူမွာ ျပည္သူလူထုႀကီး
တရပ္လံုးျဖစ္ေန ေတာ့သည္။
တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ပံ့ပိုးေပးေနမႈကလည္း စစ္တပ္က အာဏာျမဲေနႏိုင္ျခင္းအတြက္
အေၾကာင္းတခု ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံ ၏ လိုလားမႈက "တည္ၿငိမ္မႈ" ျဖစ္ၿပီး
အစိုးရ အေျပာင္းအလဲကို မလိုလားပါ။ ယခုႏွစ္ ဇန္န၀ါရီလက အေမရိကန္ႏွင့္
ၿဗိတိန္တို႔ ဦးေဆာင္၍ ကုလသမဂၢ လံုျခံဳေရးေကာင္စီတြင္
ျမန္မာ့အေရးဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ႏိုင္ရန္ တင္သြင္းခဲ့ရာတြင္ အဖြဲ႔၀င္
ႏိုင္ငံအမ်ားက ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ရုရွားႏွင့္အတူ
ဗီတိုအာဏာသံုးကာ ပိတ္ပင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္
ေဒသဆိုင္ရာလံုျခံဳေရးကို ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္ေနသည္ဟု သူတို႔ မယူဆေၾကာင္း
တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ခုခံေျပာဆို ခဲ့ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း
အစိုးရဖိႏွိပ္ေနမႈမ်ားအတြက္ ေဆြးေႏြးရန္၊ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ရန္
လံုျခံဳေရးေကာင္စီသည္ ေနရာမွန္ မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။
လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားက ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံတြင္ က်င္းပမည့္
ေဘဂ်င္းအိုလံပစ္ကို
၀ိုင္း၀န္းသပိတ္ေမွာက္ပါရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုေနသည့္ၾကားမွပင္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက
ေျပာင္းလဲလာ၍ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရကို ျပစ္တင္
ေ၀ဖန္ရန္ အလားအလာ မေတြ႔ရေသးပါ။ ရန္ကုန္တြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္
ရက္စက္စြာေခ်မႈန္းမႈမ်ားအတြင္း ျမင္ေတြ႔ခဲ့ၾကရ ေသာ ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားအရ
ျမန္မာစစ္သားမ်ားက တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံလုပ္ တီ-၅၆ (T-56)
ေမာင္းျပန္ေသနတ္မ်ားျဖင့္ ကိုင္စြဲေခ်မႈန္းခဲ့ ၾကသည့္ အေပၚတြင္လည္း
တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာဆိုမႈ မျပဳခဲ့ပါ။
ဤမၿငိမ္မသက္မႈမ်ားကို ၿဖိဳခြဲရာတြင္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ပါ၀င္ကူညီေပးမႈ
မရွိသေလာက္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ၎က ျငင္းခ်က္ ထုတ္ႏိုင္ပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္မွစတင္၍ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ ေခတ္မီေရးအစီအစဥ္မ်ားက စစ္တပ္အတြင္း
တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ား သစၥာရွိမႈကို ခိုင္မာေစၿပီး ဤအေရးပါေသာ အခ်က္ေၾကာင့္
လက္ရွိ စစ္အစိုးရတည္ျမဲေနရသည္ကို ျငင္းမရႏိုင္ပါ။ စစ္တပ္က
ညီၫြတ္ေနသမွ်ကာလပတ္လံုး အေျပာင္းအလဲျဖစ္ရန္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထား၍
မရႏိုင္သကဲ့သို႔ စစ္တပ္ အတြင္း အကြဲအျပဲရွိေနသည္ဟု ယံုၾကည္ရေလာက္ေသာ
သတင္းမ်ားကိုလည္း ထူးထူးျခားျခား မၾကားၾကရပါ။ အာဏာ အလြဲသံုးစား လုပ္ေနမႈ၊
ခံစားေနၾကရေသာ အထူးအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကိဳက္သလို
ႏွိပ္စက္ခြင့္ရေနသမွ်ကာလပတ္လံုး ႏိုင္ငံကို ပိုမိုဖြင့္ေပးျခင္း၊
ပြင့္လင္းျမင္သာမႈ ရွိေစျခင္းျဖင့္ စစ္တပ္အတြက္ အက်ဳိးမ်ားေစမည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။
ဆံုးရႈံးနစ္နာဖြယ္ သာ ျဖစ္သည္ဟု စစ္တပ္က ျမင္ၾကပါလိမ့္မည္။
ႏိုင္ငံျခားတြင္ အေျခစိုက္ထားၾကေသာ အတိုက္အခံအဖြဲ႔မ်ားက "ေတြ႔ဆံု
ေဆြးေႏြးေရး"၊ "အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရး" ဟူေသာ စကားလံုးမ်ားကို
ေျပာဆိုရန္ ႏွစ္သက္ၾကပါလိမ့္မည္။ သို႔ ေသာ္လည္း လူၾကားေကာင္းရံု
စကားလံုးမ်ားသာျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ လက္ေတြ႔အေျခအေနႏွင့္
မကိုက္ညီလွပါ။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ စစ္တပ္က ၎ကိုယ္တိုင္မွလြဲ၍ အျခားမည္သူႏွင့္မွ်
စကားေျပာမည္ မဟုတ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ရန္ကုန္အေျခစိုက္ အေနာက္တိုင္းသံတမန္တဦးက တခ်ိန္က မိမိကို ေျပာင္ပင္
ဖြင့္ေျပာခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။ "သူတို႔ေၾကာက္ေန တာကေတာ့၊ တကယ္လို႔ သူတို႔သာ
အတူတူတြဲမေနၾကဘူးဆိုရင္ တကြဲစီ ႀကိဳးေပးခံရမွာကို ေၾကာက္ေနတာပဲ" ယခုလည္း
စစ္အစိုးရက ၎၏က်မ္းရိုးစာသားမ်ားကို ျပန္လွန္ဖတ္ေနၾကျပန္ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
"အဖ်က္အေမွာက္မ်ား" "ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ အဖ်က္သမားမ်ား"ကို စြပ္စြဲ
အျပစ္ပံုခ်ေနၾကျပန္သည္။ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔က သာသနာေရး ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန
၀န္ႀကီး ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ သူရျမင့္ေမာင္က ေျပာေသာ မိန္႔ခြန္းတြင္
အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္၊ (လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ၁၈-ႏွစ္ကာလကပင္ ၿပိဳ
ကြဲခဲ့ၿပီျဖစ္သည့္) ဗမာျပည္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီ၏ လက္က်န္မ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခား
သတင္းဌာနမ်ား စသည့္ "ႏိုင္ငံေရးအစြန္းေရာက္" အင္အားစုမ်ားက သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္
အျခားသူမ်ား ဆႏၵျပေစရန္ ေသြးထိုးခဲ့ၾကသည္ဟု စြပ္စြဲခဲ့ပါ သည္။ ထို႔အျပင္
သူက ဤ အေျခအေနကို "ျငင္သာစြာ" ႏွင့္ "သတိႀကီးစြာျဖင့္"
ထိန္းသိမ္းကိုင္တြယ္ေနေၾကာင္းလည္း ေျပာခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။
ယခုအခါ ၁၉၈၈ လူထုအံုႂကြမႈ အၿပီး၌ ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့ေသာ
အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္(အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ) ကိုလည္း ခ်ိနဲ႔ေအာင္
ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ ထားႏိုင္ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။ ၎၏ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္မွာ
လူထုေထာက္ခံမႈရွိေသာ္လည္း အိမ္အက်ယ္ ခ်ဳပ္ ခ်ခံ ထားရသည္။ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ
ေခါင္းေဆာင္ပိုင္းတခုလံုး မဟုတ္လွ်င္ေသာ္မွ မူလပါတီစတင္
တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့သူတို႔ မွာ ေသသူ ေသ၊ ေထာင္က်သူက်ျဖင့္ ျပန္႔က်ဲေနၿပီျဖစ္ၿပီး
တခ်ဳိ႕မွာလည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကို စြန္႔လႊတ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီ၏ လူငယ္အဖြဲ႔၀င္အမ်ားစုမွာလည္း ေထာင္ခ်ခံရ၊
က်ဳိးႏြံေအာင္ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ခံရ၊ ျပည္ပ ထြက္ေျပး ၾကရျဖင့္ ရွိေနခဲ့သည္။
အသက္အရြယ္ႀကီးရင့္ၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ ေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူ လူႀကီးတခ်ဳိ႕သာ
က်န္ရွိေနေတာ့သည္။ ၎တို႔အားလံုး မွာလည္း ပါတီကို ဆက္လက္သယ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္မည့္
စည္းရံုးေရးအင္အားႏွင့္ လူထုေထာက္ခံမႈ မရွိၾက။ ၎၏ တည္ရွိေနမႈက
စစ္တပ္အတြက္ ပို၍ အက်ဳိးျဖစ္ေနေစေတာ့သည္။ ျပင္ပ ကမၻာက ေမွ်ာ္ၾကည့္ပါက
အန္အယ္လ္ဒီသည္ စစ္တပ္မဟုတ္လွ်င္ အစားထိုးႏိုင္ဖြယ္ အင္အားစုတခုအျဖစ္
မျမင္ၾကေတာ့ပါ။
ျပင္ပအင္အားစုမ်ားကလည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနသည့္
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားအေပၚ ထူးထူးျခားျခား ၾသဇာမေညာင္းလွပါ။ အေနာက္ကမၻာက
ပိတ္ဆို႔ခ်မွတ္ထားေသာ အေရးယူမႈမ်ားကလည္း အနည္းငယ္သာ အာနိသင္
သက္ေရာက္မႈရွိပါသည္။ တရုတ္၊ အိႏၵိယႏွင့္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္း ေအဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ားက
ဆက္လက္ကုန္သြယ္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံေနၾကပါသည္။ ဤအေန အထား တြင္
ျမန္မာဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားကလည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ေဖာသီႂကြယ္၀သည့္
သဘာ၀အရင္းအျမစ္မ်ားကို အသံုးခ်ရင္း၊ ၎၏ မဟာဗ်ဴဟာက်သည့္ ပထ၀ီအေနအထားကို
အသံုးခ်ကစားရင္း ဆက္လက္ ရပ္တည္ေနႏိုင္ၾကပါသည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏
ႂကြယ္၀ေသာ အရင္းအျမစ္မ်ားကို တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ၁၉၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပံု
မတိုင္မီကပင္ မ်က္စိက်ေနခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံ၏ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး ဒု ၀န္ႀကီးေဟာင္း ပန္က်ီ (Pan Qi) က ၁၉၈၅
ခုႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေဘဂ်င္းရီဗ်ဴး၌ "အေနာက္ေတာင္ဘက္ကို
တံခါးဖြင့္ျခင္း၊ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူ ပညာရွင္တဦး၏အျမင္" ဟူေသာ ေဆာင္းပါး တေစာင္
ေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံ၏ ကုန္းတြင္းပိတ္ျပည္နယ္မ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ ယူနန္ႏွင့္
စီခၽြမ္ျပည္နယ္မ်ားကို တိုးတက္ လာေစရန္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကိုျဖတ္၍
အိႏၵိယသမုဒၵရာသို႔ လမ္းေၾကာင္းရွာႏိုင္မည့္ အလားအလာကို
ေဖာ္ျပထားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ရထားလမ္းဆံုး
ျမစ္ႀကီးနားႏွင့္ လားရိႈးမွ ရထားျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊
ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ေၾကာင္းမွ ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း တရုတ္ကုန္ပစၥည္းမ်ားတင္ပို႔ႏိုင္သည့္
အေျခအေနကို ေဖာ္ျပေရးသားထားခဲ့ပါသည္။
၁၉၉၁ ခုႏွစ္ ေနာက္ပိုင္းကာလတြင္ တရုတ္ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ားက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏
ညံ့ဖ်င္းလွေသာ ကားလမ္းႏွင့္ ရထားလမ္း မ်ား ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေစရန္အတြက္
အေျခခံအေဆာက္အဦ စီမံခ်က္ အမ်ားအျပားကို ကူညီခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ထိုႏွစ္အတြင္းမွာပင္ တရုတ္ စစ္ေရးအၾကံေပးမ်ားလည္း ေရာက္ရွိလာခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
၁၉၅၀ ခုႏွစ္မ်ားကာလက ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ေလ့က်င့္ေရး အတြက္
ၾသစေတးလ်အၾကံေပးမ်ား ေရာက္လာခဲ့သည့္ ေနာက္ပိုင္း ပထမဦးဆံုး
ႏိုင္ငံရပ္ျခား စစ္အၾကံေပးမ်ား ျပန္လည္ အေျခခ် ေရာက္ရွိလာၾကျခင္းပင္
ျဖစ္သည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ တင္ပို႔ေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့ေသာ တရုတ္လက္နက္တန္ဖိုး
ပမာဏ စုစုေပါင္းကို မသိရွိၾကရပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း
ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးသတင္းရပ္ကြက္မ်ား အဆိုအရ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁. ၄ ဘီလီယံမွ်
ရွိမည္ ဟု ခန္႔မွန္းၾကပါသည္။
ျမန္မာႏွင့္ တရုတ္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ား နီးကပ္ဆက္ဆံလာမႈအေပၚ အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံကလည္း
အစိုးရိမ္ပိုလာပါသည္။ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႀကီးထြားလာေနေသာ ၾသဇာလႊမ္းမိုးမႈကို
ေခ်ဖ်က္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ကနဦးတြင္ အိႏၵိယက ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ားကို
ေထာက္ပံ့ေပးခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း အနီးကပ္ကာလ အနာဂတ္တြင္
အာဏာရလမ္းမျမင္သည့္ အေျခအေနကို သေဘာေပါက္လာၾကသည့္အခါ အိႏၵိယကလည္း
စစ္အစိုးရဘက္ ယိုင္လာပါေတာ့သည္။ နယူးေဒလီ အစိုးရ၏ လိုလား ခ်က္မွာ
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို တရုတ္ၾသဇာမွ ကင္းေ၀းေစေရးမွ်သာ မဟုတ္ပါ။
ႀကီးထြားတိုးတက္လာေနေသာ အိႏၵိယ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ စီးပြားေရးစနစ္ကို
ေလာင္စာေကၽြးရန္ လိုေနၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ေပါႂကြယ္၀လွေသာ
သဘာ၀ဓာတ္ေငြ႔မ်ားကိုလည္း ရယူ တင္သြင္း လိုေနၾကပါသည္။
မၾကာေသးမီကာလ အေရးအခင္းမ်ားတြင္လည္း တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ကုလသမဂၢ
လံုျခံဳေရးေကာင္စီတြင္ စည္းေႏွာင္သက္၀င္မႈ ရွိေသာ
ျမန္မာ့အေရးဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မ်ား မခ်ႏိုင္ေစရန္ တားဆီးပိတ္ပင္ေနသကဲ့သို႔
စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အိႏၵိယ အစိုးရ၏ ေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူကလည္း
အႏွစ္အသားမပါေသာ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္မ်ားသာ ျပဳေနခဲ့ပါသည္။ "အိႏၵိယ
အစိုးရက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ အေျခအေနကို စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္ေနေၾကာင္းႏွင့္
အနီးကပ္ေလ့လာေနေၾကာင္း၊ အင္အားစုအသီးသီးက ျပႆနာကို ၿငိမ္းေအးစြာ
ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြး ေျဖရွင္းႏိုင္မည္ဟု ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ပါေၾကာင္း၊
အိႏၵိယႏိုင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈႏွင့္
အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး အစီအစဥ္မ်ားတြင္ အင္အားစုအားလံုး
ပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ေစရန္၊ ပိုမိုက်ယ္ျပန္႔စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္ရန္ အစဥ္သျဖင့္
ယံုၾကည္ထားပါေၾကာင္း" မွ်သာ ဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဤအေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားက
အာဏာေျခကုတ္ျမဲေနႏိုင္ၾကၿပီး အေနာက္ကမၻာ၏ ျပစ္တင္ရႈံ႕ခ်မႈမ်ား ကိုလည္း
အလြန္အမင္း စိုးရိမ္ဖြယ္ မရွိလွပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း သူတို႔အတြက္
လံုး၀အေျခခိုင္ လံုျခံဳလွၿပီဟုေတာ့ မဆိုႏိုင္ပါ။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ
ျမန္မာျပည္သူအမ်ားက သူတို႔ကို အလြန္အမင္း မလိုလားေၾကာင္း သိထားၾကၿပီး
လြန္ခဲ့ေသာႏွစ္အတြင္း တြင္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားက အသစ္တဖန္ျပန္၍
ပံုေပၚအားေကာင္းလာခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဤလႈပ္ရွားမႈတြင္ ၁၉၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပံုမွ ထြက္ေပၚ
လာသည့္ ၀ါရင့္လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားလည္း ျပန္ပါလာခဲ့ၿပီး ၎တို႔အနက္
အထင္ရွားဆံုးမွာ မင္းကိုႏိုင္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ စစ္ အစိုးရက ၎ကို ၁၉၈၉ ခု
မတ္လတြင္ဖမ္းဆီး၍ တကိုယ္တည္း ၁၆ ႏွစ္ နီးပါးထိန္းသိမ္းထားခဲ့ၿပီးမွ ၂၀၀၅
ခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာ လတြင္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ကာလက
မင္းကိုႏိုင္မွာ အသက္ ၂၆ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ သတၱေဗဒ ေက်ာင္းသား တဦးသာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီး
ေထာင္ေသာင္းခ်ီေသာ လူထုကို မိန္႔ခြန္းေျပာလႈံ႔ေဆာ္ဦးေဆာင္ႏိုင္ပါသည္။ သူ
ေထာင္မွ လြတ္လာသည့္ အခါ အသက္ ၄၂ ႏွစ္ ရွိၿပီျဖစ္ၿပီး
ေထာင္တြင္းဒဏ္ရာဒဏ္ခ်က္မ်ားက သူ၏မ်က္ႏွာႏွင့္ ခႏၶာတြင္ အထင္းသား
က်န္ခဲ့ပါ သည္။ ၂၀၀၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သူ႔ကိုျမင္ရသည္မွာ
ရုပ္ရင့္ေရာ္သြားခဲ့ၿပီး အိုမင္းသြားပံု ေပါက္ေနပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း သူ၏
တိုက္ပြဲ၀င္စိတ္ဓာတ္ကိုမူ စစ္အစိုးရက မၿဖိဳခြင္းႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ။
"ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြအေနနဲ႔ မတရားမႈေတြကို ျငင္းဆန္လိုက္ဖို႔၊ အမွန္တရားကို
အမွန္အတိုင္းေျပာဖို႔ သတၱိရွိရပါလိမ့္မယ္"ဟု၂၀၀၆ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လအတြင္း
အသစ္ ျပန္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းခဲ့သည့္ "၈၈ မ်ဳိးဆက္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား အင္အားစု" ၏
အစည္းအေ၀းတခုတြင္ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္က ေျပာခဲ့သည္။
အစိုးရက ေလာင္စာဆီေစ်းႏႈန္းမ်ား ျမႇင့္တင္လိုက္ၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္
မူလကတည္းက လူေနမႈစရိတ္ႀကီးျမင့္၍ ဆင္းရဲ ၾကပ္ တည္းေနေသာ လူထုအတြက္ ပို၍
ဆိုးရြားစြာ ဆင္းရဲေစခဲ့သည္။ ၎ေနာက္ပိုင္း မၾကာမီ ၾသဂုတ္လတြင္
ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေသာ လူထုဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားအတြက္စည္းရံုးလႈပ္ရွားၾကရာတြင္
ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္ႏွင့္အဖြဲ႔က အေရးပါေသာအခန္းက႑ကပါ၀င္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ၎အဖြဲ႔၏ေခါင္းေဆာင္ပိုင္းအားလံုး
ခ်က္ခ်င္းဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရၿပီး လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြက္ဦးတည္ခ်က္ေပ်ာက္ေစရန္
ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့သည္။ ထိုအခါ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက လမ္းေပၚဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားအတြက္
ဦးေဆာင္လႈပ္ရွားလာခဲ့ၾကၿပီး လူထုပါ၀င္ လာေစသည့္လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးအျဖစ္
ေပၚေပါက္လာေစခဲ့သည္။ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရးအာဏာမေမွ်ာ္ကိုးဘဲ ဦးေဆာင္
လႈပ္ရွားလာၾကေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း စိတ္ဓာတ္ေရးရာအရ အသာစီးဘက္က
ရပ္တည္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ၁၉၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပံုႏွင့္မတူညီေသာအခ်က္မွာ
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးမွ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး
ေခါင္းေဆာင္အမ်ားအျပား ေပၚထြန္းလာခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း ယခုလႈပ္ရွားမႈမွာ
ေခါင္းေဆာင္မဲ့၊ ပဲ့ထိန္းမဲ့ ျဖစ္ေပၚခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
မည္သို႔ဆိုေစ ခါးသီးဖြယ္ လက္ခံရမည့္ အမွန္တရားမွာ စစ္တပ္အတြင္း
ညီၫြတ္ေနသမွ်ကာလပတ္လံုး၊ လူထုကို ေသနတ္ျဖင့္ပစ္ခတ္ ေခ်မႈန္းရန္
စိတ္လိုလက္ရ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသမွ် ကာလပတ္လံုး အေျပာင္းအလဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာရန္
အေၾကာင္းမရွိျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္
ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးရန္ လုိအပ္သည္ဟု သေဘာေပါက္ သိျမင္သည့္ ေနာက္မ်ဳိးဆက္
စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ေပၚထြက္လာေရးဆိုသည္မွာလည္း ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ရံုသက္သက္မွ်သာ
ျဖစ္ ေနေသးသည္။ ဤသို႔ ေတာင္ပံအမိုးေအာက္မွ ေဖာက္ထြက္လာမည့္ "မ်ဳိးဆက္
ေသြးသစ္" စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကို မျမင္ၾကရသကဲ့သို႔ စစ္တပ္အတြင္း သိသာေသာ
အက္ေၾကာင္းမ်ားကိုလည္း မျမင္ၾကရေသးပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္အေျပာင္း အလဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာခဲ့လွ်င္ေသာ္မွ
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ ဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားထက္စာလွ်င္ စစ္ေခါင္း ေဆာင္ မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္မ်ား၏
လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္သာ ျဖစ္လာဖြယ္ ရွိပါေတာ့သည္။
အမ်ားဆံုးစြမ္းႏိုင္မည္မွာ တခ်ဳိ႕ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက
လက္ရွိစစ္အစိုးရကို ဆက္လက္ေထာက္ခံေနျခင္းျဖင့္ သူတို႔အတြက္
အနာဂတ္မရွိႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း သေဘာေပါက္ သိျမင္မွ ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း
ဤအေနအထားျဖစ္လာေစရန္အတြက္ အခ်ိန္ကသာ စကားေျပာ လိမ့္မည္ ျဖစ္ပါေတာ့သည္။
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Far Eastern Economic Review မဂၢဇင္းတြင္ Bertil Lintner ေရးသားသည့္ The
Burmese Way to Fascism ကို ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ျပန္ဆိုေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။
ဘာေတး လင့္တ္နာသည္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအေျခစိုက္
အႀကီးတန္းသတင္းစာဆရာတဦးျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ စာအုပ္မ်ား
ေရးသားခဲ့ပါသည္။
Japan, China to set up leaders' hotline
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/081024/afp/081024112100asiapacificnews.html
BEIJING (AFP) - Tokyo and Beijing agreed Friday to establish a hotline between their leaders to build mutual trust, in Prime Minister Taro Aso's first meeting as Japanese leader with his Chinese counterparts.
Aso agreed in separate talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao to use the hotline "to conduct frequent and timely exchanges of opinion," the Japanese government said in a statement.
Aso, a former foreign minister who has boasted of his record as a diplomat to show his experience in managing Tokyo's difficult relations with its Asian neighbours, was speaking in Beijing ahead of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM).
"It's important to create a situation where top leaders can communicate any time," said Aso, who succeeded Yasuo Fukuda as prime minister a month ago.
Aso, who is bracing for a tough election at home, was hoping to use the ASEM summit to show off his foreign policy credentials, as his notoriously sharp tongue has been known to rile Japan's Asian neighbours in the past.
Tokyo has had especially difficult relations with China and the two Koreas due largely to Tokyo's wartime occupation of both countries.
Relations hit rock bottom during the 2001-2006 premiership of Junichiro Koizumi due to the former leader's visits to a controversial war shrine.
But China and Japan have since been working to build stronger relations and Chinese Premier Wen spoke optimistically about their ties ahead of Aso's visit.
Chinese state media reported that Wen said he was glad to meet Aso Friday and quoted Hu as saying China was ready to work with Japan to improve ties.
One of the thorny issues discussed in Friday's talks was food safety, officials said, without providing details.
A Japanese woman recently fell ill after eating frozen Chinese beans in the latest incident involving tainted food from China.
Aso also met with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak in Beijing early Friday to discuss a mooted three-way summit including China by the end of the year, according to a Japanese foreign ministry official.
The three countries had been arranging a summit for September in the western Japanese city of Kobe, but the plan was scrapped when Fukuda abruptly resigned over low public support.
Fukuda, who was known for his conciliatory views towards other Asian nations, had previously held a series of summits with Chinese leaders.
Aso and Lee also discussed North Korea, including six-party talks to persuade Pyongyang to get rid of its nuclear weapons and the North's abduction of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and '80s to train its spies.
Aso credits himself with helping repair ties with Beijing during his 2005-2007 tenure as foreign minister through talks with his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of international meetings.
However, he never visited China as foreign minister and caused controversy with a series of remarks, including saying in 2005 that Beijing "is becoming a considerable threat" to Japan because of its rising military spending.
Aso is under domestic pressure to call an election as soon as possible, with the opposition hoping for a landmark victory buoyed by polls suggesting a majority of voters would back the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan.
Southern China to shed millions of jobs as economic crisis bites
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/081024/afp/081024061610asiapacificnews.html
DONGGUAN, China (AFP) - At least 2.7 million factory workers in southern China could lose their jobs as the global economic crisis hits demand for electronics, toys and clothes, according to industry estimates.
The region has seen massive export-driven expansion in recent years by supplying the world with cheap consumer goods, but rising production costs and falling US and European demand have marked a swift end to the boom.
Now 9,000 of the 45,000 factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen are expected to close before the Chinese New Year in late January, the Dongguan City Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment estimates.
By then, the association expects overseas demand for products from the three manufacturing hubs to have shrunk by 30 percent, as the knock-on effects of the US housing market collapse and credit crunch filter down to Chinese workers.
"I am afraid it is not going to look good on the Chinese government if the decline of the export-led industries and the unemployment problem continue to worsen," Eddie Leung, the association's president told AFP.
Leung, also a member of the Chinese Manufacturers' Association, said the estimate of 2.7 million job losses was conservative, given that many of the larger factories in Guangdong province employ thousands of workers.
One of them, Hong Kong-listed Smart Union, a major toy manufacturer in Dongguan supplying US giants Mattel and Disney, closed its doors last week, leaving 7,000 workers out of work and with several weeks of back pay owed.
Clement Chan, chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, said a quarter of the 70,000 Hong Kong-owned companies in southern China, 17,500 businesses, could go to the wall by the end of January.
Describing the likelihood as a "worst case scenario," he said Hong Kong firms in the region employed a total of 10 million workers, but did not want to speculate on the extent of possible job losses.
While small and medium-sized factories are especially prone, the threat of lay offs looms just as large over the region's manufacturing giants, further squeezed by the appreciation of the yuan.
Harry To's Mansfield Manufacturing is a classic example of the spectacular growth in China's industrial heartland over the last three decades.
To started a metal business from a small room in Hong Kong in 1975. In 1991, he joined hundreds of other Hong Kong entrepreneurs moving their production across the border into China to take advantage of cheap labour and land.
He now employs 8,500 workers in 11 factories in China and Europe. His six factories in Dongguan cover 140,000 square meters (1.5 million square feet).
To's company, which is now a subsidiary of Singapore-listed InnoTek Ltd. supplies metal components for cars, plasma televisions, printers and other electrical appliances to Japanese brands including Canon, Toshiba, Epson, Minolta and Fuji-Xerox.
Business for the company, among the largest in its field in China, has grown by 40 percent annually in recent years, but with credit being harder to come by, no manufacturer is safe, he said.
"With banks being so tight on their lending policies now, bringing down a factory overnight has now become very easy."
All his expansion plans have had to be put on hold.
"Some of our long-time Japanese and European clients have asked us to stop producing for them in the next two to three weeks," he said.
"They said they did not want to have too much stock piled up in their warehouse as demand continues to dwindle."
To recently started building a new 70,000 square metre factory in Dongguan and was planning to hire 2,000 more workers later this year. But now, all work on the unfinished factory has stopped until more orders roll in.
"No one would expand their business when the prospects for the entire manufacturing industry look so grim," he said.
Instead of hiring more workers, To is looking at cutting 1,000 employees across his operations.
But far from being downhearted, he is shifting part of the company's export-led production to developing energy-saving electrical appliances for the domestic market, which he sees as weathering the current financial turmoil.
"In the long run, I am confident that mainland Chinese consumers' purchasing power will keep rising as their Western counterparts continue to lose out."
Burma's misery
http://www.developmentfromdisasters.net/content/view/5882/76/
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Supporters of World Food Day can find in Burma a case study in the lethal combination of climate change, poverty and politics, writes Thaung Htun, the Guardian, Thursday October 16 2008 at http://www.guardian.co.uk.
Forwarded by Budhi Mulyawan 171008.
Today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation's World Food Day obliges the world and its leaders to consider the issue of global hunger. A particular theme this year is climate change and its impact on poverty and hunger. While the role of climate change is significant, the matter of political will casts a broader shadow across world hunger. This year's World Food Day is, as a result, somewhat hollow.
Burma stands as a case study for the combined effects of poverty and hunger, climate change and politics. In short, the stresses created by these dynamics have created a collapsing system in which the majority of Burmese are in danger of being crushed.
The actions of Burma's military regime represent a situation whereby climate change and its impacts on hunger are actively utilised for political gain. Currently, for instance, there are reports that the regime is creaming off 10% of post-cyclone aid coming into Burma in the wake of this May's disaster as "exchange transfer costs". It's a clear case of profiting from the effects of climate change and hunger.
Under the military, rural communities have been decimated by being forced to destroy vegetable and other staple croplands and to replace them with the regime's designated exportable cash crops, such as tea and biofuels.
A life-threatening famine is emerging in Chin state, western Burma, for instance, while the junta does nothing. Plagues of rats gorging on a rare crop of bamboo flowers are razing community plots and destroying any remaining semblance of food security. Again, politics stands in the way of necessity.
As the government elected in Burma's last free and fair elections, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma is committed to raising Burma's understanding and action on climate change issues, both domestically and regionally, in direct contrast to the current regime.
We will seek to aim funding, such as that which we may be able to attract from foreign donors and investors, to better manage Burma's exposure to climate change and to alleviate hunger. We would look to develop rural investment opportunities as a means of improving the sector's sustainability profile and to help rural communities develop strategies and technologies designed to better manage climate change.
We aim to develop trade relationships that incorporate sustainability issues and would target 100% self-sufficiency in staple crops where sustainable. We would investigate options for improving regional trade exchanges and would discuss the implementation of early warning systems, identifying and tracking climate change focal points and developing joint disaster risk management strategies.
Our approach to climate change and hunger in Burma would essentially be to focus on Burma's farmers – around 65% of the country's workforce – to help them understand climate change and how they might better manage their surroundings, while looking to energise the agricultural sector and industrialise and modernise the economy in environmentally and socially sustainable ways.
Such goals might be well attuned to the World Food Day programme. The FAO have looked to encourage such agendas. We are making the connections between hunger and climate change the world community is encouraging.
We might expect to be held up as a positive case for the World Food Day. Yet, our policies remain trapped in the black hole of Burma's untenable military regime and are themselves starved by the failure of international political will.
Rather than emerging as a positive case study of a nation's approach to hunger and climate change, Burma is something of a black mark. Today, Burma stands as an example of how climate change and hunger, rather than being being tackled by the international community, are actually being
substantiated by inherent political weaknesses and shortcomings of the current methodologies.
The global community remains thwarted by the military junta's stonewalling. As our country's rightfully elected government, we are denied government even as our people starve and climate change, one of hunger's creators, is ignored.
While the broad agendas of World Food Day are worthy of support, no one can deny the political barriers which act as obstacles to activism around climate change and hunger alleviation. Were World Food Day instead focused on questions of political will and global political dysfunction, we might begin to get to the crux of the issue. It's a point the case of Burma proves only too well.
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