http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/l07myanmar.html
Letter
Burmese Justice
On behalf of monks and nuns inside Myanmar, which we still call Burma, I applaud Nicholas D. Kristof’s call for new actions against the “odious” regime ruling our country.
Burmese monks and nuns were brutally attacked by the military during peaceful protest in September 2007. Senior Gen. Than Shwe exacted vengeance against all protesters, shooting and killing many and arbitrarily imprisoning monks and political activists (issuing sentences ranging from 4 to 104 years in prison).
Mr. Kristof calls for new approaches. We monks are not politicians, but it is our religious duty to try our best to help relieve the suffering of our people, and we consider justice an old approach that has eluded the junta.
The world has an International Criminal Court, and the United Nations Security Council has the power to refer Burma to it. This call for justice is not a new approach. It is a basic human right.
Ashin Nayaka
New York, Feb. 5, 2009
The writer, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, is a leading member of the International Burmese Monk Association.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Burmese Justice
Global diplomacy has failed in Burma
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/uncategorized/global-diplomacy-has-failed-in-burma_100152258.html
February 7th, 2009 - 2:59 pm ICT by Nksagar - Send to a friend:
Global diplomacy has failed in Burma to bring back democracy and envoy of Ban Ki-moon recent visit has not proved fruitful for restoration of democracy themoot purpose and peoples even blogging with present Junta regime are put on prison for more than twenty years which needs UN attention.
Myanmar once most vibrant economy in Asean countries is one of the
poor economy with its major population living below poverty line of WHO
standards.
Johnny Chatterton friend of mine from UK writes,A United Nations envoy
has just returned from Burma and has yet again failed to secure the
release of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s 2,130 other political prisoners. UN envoys have now made 38 visits to Burma and have consistently failed to achieve any progress towards democracy and
human rights.
He further adds that Stronger action is needed. These prisoners have done nothing wrong.They have been imprisoned for calling for freedom and human rights. The United Nations Security Council must bring in a binding resolution to ensure that Burma’s political prisoners are released. We need your help to make this happen.
Today Vice President Hamid Ansari on the second
day of his four-day visit to Myanmar drove around the huge complex of
the the under-constructed Parliament building with a pagoda-type roof
yesterday, he joined a growing list of foreign dignitaries to be shown
the structure, that is set to be the temple of democracy in this
country, on their visit here.But when shall Burmese have right to have
government of the people,for the people,by the people is question
haunting the world leaders.Vice-President Mohd. Hamid Ansari paid
homage at the historic Bahardur Shah Zafar mazar at Yangon in Myanmar
on Saturday.Speaking on the occasion, the Vice-President said that
Bahadur Shah Jafar occupies a special place in history. Describing him
as a saintly figure, Mohd Ansari said that Jafar will remain in our
hearts forever.
လမင္းခင ္ဘေလာက္နဲ ့ မႏၱလာေႏြဦး ဘေလာက္အဖ်က္ခံရ-ကိုဖိုးတရုတ္လဲပါသြားျပီ
အတူတူ ပါပဲ က်မ လအိခင္ ဘေလာ့လည္း မေန ့ က ည ၇း၀၀ မွာ အဖ်က္ခံရပါတယ္
ဆရာမေမျငိမ္းဘေလာ့ေတာ့ျပန္ပြင့္ျပီျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းသိရပါတယ္ ။။
အသစ္ ထပ္ဖြင့္တဲ့အခါ လည္း မေျပလည္ပါဘူး ။။
အပိတ္ခံရေသာ ဘေလာ့ www.laminkhin. blogspot. com
ညမွထပ္မံဖြင့္ထားေသာ ဘေလာ့ www.laminkhinkhin. blogspot. com
အိေရႊစင္ညြန္ ့
--- On Fri, 2/6/09, Aung Moe Win
From: Aung Moe Win
Subject: [8888peoplepower] ဘေလာက္ဂါမ်ားသို႔.......
To: "SYCB"
Cc: democracy_forburma@ yahoogroups. com.au, "burma today"
Date: Friday, February 6, 2009, 11:31 PM
မိတ္ေဆြမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား...... က်ေနာ့ရဲ႕မႏၱေလးေႏြဦးဘေလာက္ကို ဒီကေန႔မနက္မွာပဲတစံုတေယာက္ကဖ်က္ဆီးပစ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။ကိစၥမရိွပါ။၂၀၁၀.....မတိုင္ခင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းႀကားမွာပိုမိုရႈပ္ေထြးေစမဲ့အရာေတြေပၚလာလိမ့္မယ္ဆိုတာႀကိဳတင္ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားပါတယ္။ဒုတိယႀကံစည္ခ်က္ေတြကိုက်ေနာ္တို႔အၿမဲၿပင္ဆင္ထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မိမိေရးသားမႈအားလံုးကိုမိမိရဲ႕ကြန္ၿပဴတာမွာမဟုတ္ပဲ၊တၿခားတေနရာမွာသီးသန္႔သိမ္းထားေစခ်င္ပါတယ္။ အေႏွာက္အရွက္အတားအဆီးေတြက......က်ေနာ္တို႔ရဲ႕ဝီရိယ၊အတတ္ပညာအားလံုးကိုပိုမိုႀကိဳးစားေစတဲ့အရာေတြလို႔ပဲသေဘာထားလိုက္ပါတယ္။( အဲ့ဒီလူေတြရဲ႕ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈဟာအခ်ိန္ကုန္ၿပီးေအာင္ၿမင္မႈမရိွတဲ့ရလဒ္ဆိုတာအဆင့္တိုင္းမွာနားလည္သြားပါလိမ့္မယ္) သတိတယၿဖင့္ ေအာင္မိုးဝင္း
ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ကိုဖိုးတရုတ္၏ စည္းလံုးျခင္းရဲ ႔ အင္အား ဘာေလာဂ္ http://photayokekin g.myanmarblogger s.org ဟာ ဒီေန႔ ၇ရက္ေန႔ ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ ည ၁၀ နာရီခန္႔မွာ Server Data Error ျဖစ္သြားတာကို အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာ ေတြ႔ရွိရပါတယ္။ တျခား myanmarbloggers. org Domain နဲ႔ လုပ္ထားတဲ့ ဆုိဒ္ေတြကေတာ့ ဘာမွ ထူးျခားမႈ မရွိတာကိုလည္း အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာ ေတြ႔ရွိရပါတယ္။ အထက္ပါ အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြအရ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ဆုိဒ္အား အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ အတားအဆီး တခုခုေတာ့ ရွိေနတယ္ဆုိတာ သတိျပဳလာရပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ မိတ္ေဆြတုိ႔အေနျဖင့္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ ဘာေလာဂ္အား http://photayokekin g.blogspot. com အေနနဲ႔သာ ျပန္လည္ ၾကည့္ရႈၿပီး ရဲေဘာ္ရဲဘက္ မိတ္ေဆြမ်ားကိုလည္း အေၾကာင္းၾကား ျဖန္႔ေ၀ေပးၾကပါလို႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံ အေၾကာင္းၾကားအပ္ပါတယ္။
ေလးစားစြာျဖင့္
ကိုဖုိးတရုတ္
http://photayokekin g.blogspot. com
Kyaw Thu kicked upstairs, junta turns reclusive-MIZZIMA
http://www.mizzima.com/edop/anslysis/1667-kyaw-thu-kicked-upstairs-junta-turns-reclusive.html
by Larry Jagan
Friday, 06 February 2009 20:04
Bangkok (Mizzima) - Burma's top military rulers have begun to show further signs that they have no interest in the international community and its efforts to assist the regime's humanitarian programmes.
The country's No.1 military leader Sr. Gen. Than Shwe has signaled a further retreat from the outside world with the sacking of the deputy foreign affairs minister, Kyaw Thu.
The junta surprised everyone, especially humanitarian agencies, including the UN, and diplomats alike earlier this week by transferring Kyaw Thu -- who is chairman of the Tripartite Core Group (TCG) which coordinates and monitors international assistance and for the country's relief and reconstruction efforts in the wake of Cyclone Nargis which hit the country in May last year -- to become Chairman of the Civil Service Selection and Training Board.
The new post is a minister-level appointment, but is considered an inactive post. "For the time being at least", Kyaw Thu will continue to oversee the TCG and will be present at the crucial 9-month meeting in Bangkok on Monday [9th February], he told senior UN officials in Rangoon. But most diplomat and aid workers involved in the post-Nargis programme were dismayed at the announcement, and remain uneasy about what will happen and the future of the group's work.
Kyaw Thu has become a crucial link between Burma and the outside world in the past nine months. He has chaired the TCG – which brings together ASEAN, the UN and the Burmese government – and manages the government and international relief and reconstruction efforts in Burma.
The former deputy foreign ministers was instrumental in speeding up visa clearances for extra international staff of aid agencies working in Burma, eased access to the Irrawaddy Delta area, and made sure supplies and equipment were brought into the country as quickly as possible – waving a lot of the bureaucratic red tape.
"It is a slap in the face to all of us in the donor community, who have tried to funnel funds into the country to support the post-cyclone work," said a European diplomat based in Bangkok who is responsible for his country's aid programme in Burma.
"Even if Kyaw Thu continues in his role for the time being – his removal from the foreign ministry casts a long, black shadow over future government cooperation with international assistance," he said.
Senior figures in the UN were more sanguine, and told Mizzima that it was necessary to see what happened in the future before jumping to worst-case conclusions. One scenario, that at least one UN consultant suggested, was that actually this may strengthen Kyaw Thu's role in the TCG. The minister has frequently complained in the past to UN officials and diplomats that he was overwhelmed with the work involved in the TCG.
"It's a full-time job, and I cannot concentrate enough on it with my other ministerial duties," he told UN officials several months ago when the last assessment meeting of the TCG was held in Bangkok. Now he's been relieved of all his foreign ministry duties, he could concentrate on the cyclone reconstruction, a UN official mused. That is, if the senior general wanted to continue the current level of engagement with the UN and the international donors.
Kyaw Thu's profile has been rising ever since he took in the task of chairing the TCG. He recently traveled to ASEAN-member nations to meet with ministers and has attended TCG meetings and conferences abroad to raise more assistance for Burma's relief efforts. Earlier this week, he also accompanied the UN special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, on an inspection tour of the cyclone-affected areas in Irrawaddy.
Sources close to Kyaw Thu, warned Mizzima several weeks ago that he was worried about his future and feared there were those who were trying to have him removed. Some members of the government, especially the information minister General Kyaw Hsan was jealous of the limelight that had fallen on the deputy foreign minister since the Nargis disaster.
The foreign minister, Nyan Win and the other deputy foreign minister, Maung Myint were reportedly jealous of Kyaw Thu's standing in the international community, especially amongst other ASEAN capitals.
"He finally feel foul of the petty jealousies within the regime," a Burmese businessman with close links with the top generals told Mizzima. "The knives have been out for him for some time," he said.
The fact that he was now a civilian in a military government, which only trusts its own kind, would not have helped him either. Although Kyaw Thu served in the 33rd Light Infantry Division, more recently he has become something of a career diplomat, having served as an ambassador to South Africa and India. His father was the late president and scholar Dr Maung Maung – who is believed to have been the key drafter of the current constitution.
But the crucial question now is for the future of relations with the international community – and especially the TCG. Originally set up in June last year, at the international donor conference in Rangoon, it is due to expire in four months time. While the international community, the UN and ASEAN are keen to see its mandate extended, only the Burmese government can decide that.
The fear is that Kyaw Thu's being effectively kicked upstairs may signal the end of the TCG. There are many hardliners, especially the Planning Minister Soe Tha, Science and Technology Minister, U Thaung and Industry 1 Minister Aung Thaung, who have Than Shwe's ear, have been urging an end to cooperate with the international community – and pointing out that few of the promised funds have actually eventuated. They also say that cooperation has not brought any change in the international community's real desire – regime change -- and particular nothing has been done to end sanctions.
Many analysts believe Kyaw Thu may stay in place until June, after which, if the regime does decide to extend the TCG, the hardliner planning minister Soe Tha would replace him. This would mean that the TCG would be maintained but weakened – cooperation with the community would be reduced and a facade maintained, especially in deference to ASEAN.
So far the regime has been non-committal about the future of the TCG. "The issue of extending the life to tripartite core group will be taken into consideration," Prime Minister Thein Sein told Mr. Gambari, according to the state-owned newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar.
"There were talks with the Foreign Affairs minister and the issue will be kept open till June 2009. Measures will be taken as necessary after June 2009," he reportedly said.
Of course Kyaw Thu is not likely to be involved in these discussions. Even the ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan is only cautiously optimistic that this tripartite formula is going to have a future.
"Lessons learned from the Tripartite Core Group in its dealing with Cyclone Nargis relief efforts and confidence building measures could provide guidance for future dealings with the Government of Myanmar on other sensitive issues of humanitarian, economic and political nature," he told Mizzima on the eve of Mr. Gambari's visit to Burma last week.
Hints of the future may emerge from Monday's meeting of the TCG, but Kyaw Thu's removal from the foreign ministry cannot be seen as a good-will gesture in the part of the junta, warned a Burmese businessman with strongly links to the regime.
Ansari inaugurates Myanmar-India Entrepreneurship Development Centre in Yangon
http://www.newspostonline.com/national/ansari-inaugurates-myanmar-india-entrepreneurship-development-centre-in-yangon-2009020631966
Posted by admin in National
0 Comments Yangon, Feb.6 (ANI): Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari,on Friday urged entrepreneurs of India and Myanmar to share their experiences and look for ways to enhance bilateral trade cooperation.
Inaugurating the Myanmar-India Entrepreneurship Development Centre (MIEDC) at Yangon, he said India is keen to share its developmental experience with the people of Myanmar through the MIEDC.
He hoped the MIEDC would spearhead the entrepreneurship development movement in Myanmar and facilitate the creation of viable and competitive new enterprises and new job opportunities.
It will also help existing enterprises to face new challenges of global competition, Ansari added.
Stressing on the need for entrepreneurship growth, Ansari said it would help in coming on par with some of the more intractable problems of a developing economy, including unemployment and poverty.
Ansari said the youth of Myanmar would be benefit immensely from the opening-up of the MIEDC, which would provide necessary skills to them for competing with the world economy.
It is our hope that the MIEDC, together with the recently established Centre for Enhancement of IT Skills and the soon-to-be established Centre for English Language Training would provide a comprehensive infrastructure for training of Myanmars youth and equip them with essential skills for participating in the global economy, he said.
Commenting on the natural richness of Myanmar, Ansari said the country abounds in natural resources, such as gas, minerals, forest products and agro-products, and that the aim of the MIEDC is to create a pool of entrepreneurs who can transform these resources into marketable commodities, thus enriching themselves and the country as a whole. (ANI)
China doesn’t want conflict between Bangladesh and Myanmar
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/latest_news.php?nid=14834
UNB, DhakaChina does not want to see any conflict between Bangladesh and Myanmar on the maritime issues, a visiting delegation from Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) said today.
“All kinds of debates should be solved through negotiation,” director of Department of South Asian Studies and senior fellow of SIIS Zhao Gancheng told reporters at a `Meet the Press’ programme at the Jatiya Press Club.
Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS) in partnership with SIIS organised the programme. A 5-member SIIS delegation led by its president Yang Jiemian, a representative from the Chinese embassy and BIPSS president Maj Gen (rtd) ANM Muniruzzaman attended the function.
Replying to a question Zhao Gancheng said China does not see any conflict with the USA if they come to build the deep sea port in the Bay of Bengal. “China’s policy is defensive.”
He said China is keen to provide all kinds of assistance to the neighboring countries to help eradicate global terrorism and extremism and also establish social and economic security in the region.
“Now-a-days, we see the terrorism, extremism and separatism in the global arenas…No country is immune individually…,” said Yang Jiemian.
Describing China as a victim of extremism, he said China has been closely working with the neighboring countries to promote mutual understanding and bilateral relationship. “We’ve to support our neighbors.”
Yang Jiemian stressed the need for strengthening the cooperation between China and Bangladesh to promote economic, social and cultural stability in this region. “Bangladesh and China are very close cooperators and partners.”
Replying to a question, Yang said China is very glad to see the democratic rule in Bangladesh, achieved through a free and fair general election in the country. “Elections can establish stability and prosperity,” he added.
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