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By LALIT K JHA Saturday, December 19, 2009
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WASHINGTON — In a unprecedented move, 53 US congressmen have written a letter to Burmese junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe urging the release of Kyaw Zaw Lwin (aka Nyi Nyi Aung), a Burma-born US citizen who has been on a hunger strike in a Burmese prison since Dec. 4.
“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to immediately and unconditionally release Mr. Aung and allow him to return to the United States,” the congressmen said in a letter to Than Shwe. The letter was sent to the military strongman through the Burmese embassy in Washington.
“Based on information relayed by the US embassy in Rangoon, it appears that Mr. Aung’s detention and trial is inconsistent with both Burmese and international law,” said the congressmen led by Howard Berman, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The letter, dated Dec. 17, was signed by congressmen from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Among the signatories to the letter are Congressman Frank Wolf, co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Right Commission; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer; Assistant to the Speaker Chris Van Hollen; and Dan Rohrabacher, ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.
Kyaw Zaw Lwin, a democracy activist, was arrested by the Burmese authorities on Sept. 3 at Rangoon's international airport. Washington-based Freedom Now said he was attempting to visit his mother, an imprisoned democracy activist who has cancer. He was accused of using a forged Burmese identity card and illegally importing currencies into the country, Freedom Now said in a statement.
Referring to the charges against Kyaw Zaw Lwin that have appeared in the state-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, the congressmen said: “We can only conclude that the new charges are pretextual and are in fact a direct result of Mr. Aung’s longstanding non-violent activities in support of freedom and democracy in Burma.”
The congressmen also said that the Burmese authorities denied him consular access for 17 days, in violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which Burma is a party.
The letter also accused the government authorities of torturing Kyaw Zaw Lwin, saying he was deprived of food and sleep for more than a week, beaten and denied medical treatment. He was also denied his right under Burmese law to regular access to counsel and a public trial, the letter said.
State Department Deputy Spokesman Robert Wood said the US embassy in Rangoon has not been able to get consular access since Dec. 4, when Kyaw Zaw Lwin went on a hunger strike.
“On Friday, Dec. 11, we heard the distressing news that Mr. Aung’s trial was canceled due to unexplained 'health reasons,' and that the US embassy has been denied access to see him. As you know, Mr. Aung has been on a hunger strike to protest the conditions of political prisoners in Burma since Dec. 4, and there are reports that his health is seriously deteriorating,” the letter said.
“The detention of an American citizen under these circumstances has caused alarm among many members of the United States Congress, and raises serious doubts about your government’s willingness to improve relations with the United States,” the congressmen said.
The US lawmakers said they believe that the way to move forward was to release all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, and begin a process of genuine political reconciliation before next year’s election.
Welcoming the letter, Freedom Now President Jared Genser said he hopes this important intervention “will make clear to the Burmese junta that the United States will first look to the treatment of one of its own citizens in assessing the junta’s willingness to engage in dialogue.”
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Saturday, December 19, 2009
US Congressmen Urge Release of Activist
Burma: Where Impunity Reigns
Burma: Where Impunity Reigns
Friday, 18 December 2009
The world needs to be reminded, again and again, that the military regime in Burma (Myanmar) continues to perpetrate every conceivable human rights violation.
Below is an article published by the New York Times:
Any Burmese showing any dissent is brutally suppressed, as the world witnessed two years ago when peaceful Buddhist monks demonstrated. Many monks were killed or have disappeared; several hundred remain in prison.
Beyond that, more than 2,000 political activists are in Burmese prisons today, subjected to torture, denial of medical treatment and ludicrous sentences.
Student leader Bo Min Yu Ko is serving a 104-year prison term; Shan ethnic leader Hkun Htun Oo has been imprisoned for 93 years; democracy activist Min Ko Naing for 65 years. The most famous human rights activist, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest for almost 14 years, and the term was extended for a further 18 months after a sham trial.
Many of these activists are in prisons thousands of miles from their families, and several are critically ill.
One category of victims of the military dictatorship that gets far less attention is Burma’s ethnic minorities.
In eastern Burma, the regime has been conducting a brutal military campaign against people of the Karen, Karenni and Shan groups. Since 1996, more than 3,300 villages have been destroyed and more than a million people internally displaced. A Karenni friend of mine has described it as “Pol Pot in slow motion.”
The catalogue of terror includes the widespread, systematic use of rape as a weapon, forced labor, the use of human minesweepers and the forcible conscription of child soldiers.
In northern and western Burma, the predominantly Christian Chin and Kachin peoples also face systematic religious persecution.
The Muslim Rohingyas, targeted for their faith and ethnicity, are denied citizenship, despite living in Burma for generations. Thousands have escaped to miserable conditions in Bangladesh.
I have travelled more than 30 times to Burma and its borderlands. I have met former child soldiers, women who have been gang-raped, and many people who have been forced to flee from their burned villages.
Earlier this year, I met a man who had lost both his legs following an attack on his village.
When the Burmese Army came, he fled, but after the troops had moved on, he returned to his smoldering village to see if he could salvage any remaining belongings. Where his house had stood, he found nothing except ashes — hidden in which was a landmine laid by the troops. He stepped on the mine, and lost both legs.
He was carried for an entire day for basic medical treatment and then, a few weeks later, he walked on crutches through the jungle for two days to escape. He fled to a camp for internally displaced people near the Thai border. Four months later, that camp was attacked and he had to flee again.
An eyewitness once told me that in a prison camp in Chin State, prisoners who tried to escape were repeatedly stabbed, forced into a tub of salt water, and then roasted over a fire. A woman in Karen State described to me how her husband was hung upside down from a tree, his eyes gouged out, and then drowned.
The United Nations has documented these atrocities. For years, General Assembly resolutions have condemned the abuses. Previous special rapporteurs have described the violations as “the result of policy at the highest level, entailing political and legal responsibility.” A recent General Assembly resolution urged the regime to “put an end to violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
The U.N. has placed Burma on a monitoring list for genocide, the Genocide Risk Indices lists Burma as one of the two top “red alert” countries for genocide, along with Sudan, while the Minority Rights Group ranks Burma as one of the top five countries where ethnic minorities are under threat. Freedom House describes Burma as “the worst of the worst.”
This year, the United States reviewed its Burma policy and adopted a new approach of engagement while maintaining existing sanctions.
While this is the right approach in principle, and one advocated by the democracy movement, the danger is that the message has been misinterpreted, both by the regime and countries in the region.
Even though President Obama and senior U.S. officials have consistently emphasized that sanctions will not be lifted until there is substantial and irreversible progress in Burma, including the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners and a meaningful dialogue between the regime, the democracy movement and the ethnic nationalities, the impression created in the region is that the U.S. is going soft.
This is unfortunate, as it has let Burma’s neighbors off the hook just when they were showing tentative signs of toughening up their approach. Trying to talk to the generals is right, but it needs to be accompanied by strong and unambiguous pressure.
In short, little action has been taken by the international community. Countries continue to sell the regime arms, impunity prevails.
The violations perpetrated by the regime amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Harvard Law School’s report, “Crimes in Burma,” commissioned by five of the world’s leading jurists, concludes that there is “a prima facie case of international criminal law violations occurring that demands U.N. Security Council action to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these grave breaches.”
Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If that is to mean anything in Burma, the time has come for the U.N. to impose a universal arms embargo on the regime, to invoke the much-flaunted “Responsibility to Protect” mechanism, and to investigate the regime’s crimes. The time to end the system of impunity in Burma is long overdue.
Benedict Rogers is East Asia Team Leader with the human rights organization Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and author of several books on Burma, including “Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant.”
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Japan, U.S. vow cash to gain climate deal
The Japan Times Printer Friendly Articles
Japan, U.S. vow cash to gain climate deal
America set to join $100 billion aid fund: Clinton
By ERIC JOHNSTON and SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writers
COPENHAGEN — In a last-minute attempt to achieve a breakthrough at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, Japan and the United States announced Wednesday and Thursday short- and long-term financial pledges for developing countries to mitigate the effects of climate change over the next three years and to adapt to the future effects of global warming by 2020.
The announcement of new aid packages came on the ninth and final day of formal negotiations on a deal for new emissions reduction targets for the post-2012 period, following the expiration of the first period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.
On Wednesday evening, Japan pledged ¥1.75 trillion ($15 billion) in public and private funding to help developing countries adjust to climate change between 2010-2012. The U.S. announced Thursday morning it would work to help provide developing countries with up to $100 billion annually through yet-to-be-determined financial mechanisms and incentives by 2020 for adaptation to future climate change.
"We're announcing this pledge in the hope that it will become a driving force for the negotiations to move forward and come to a meaningful agreement," Environment Minister Sakihito Ozawa said Wednesday, at Japan's first open press briefing of the COP15 conference.
Of the total, public finance comprises about ¥1.3 trillion ($11 billion) and the rest will be collected from the private sector by creating a new plan involving the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, said Vice Foreign Minister Tetsuro Fukuyama. Details of that plan were still being discussed and will require a change in the law, he added.
Ozawa's announcement now means short-term financing pledges for developing countries, which the United Nations said should be around $30 billion by 2012, have nearly been met. The European Union announced last week that about $10.8 billion in total would be available for the remaining period and the U.S. and other countries were expected to contribute as well.
But the long-term financing of the deal has been the more controversial issue. Economists and nongovernmental organizations have said that anywhere between $140 billion and $200 billion or more would be needed by 2020 to assist developing countries facing desertification, increased floods, crop failures and potential climate refugees displaced by severe weather patterns due to global warming.
"Today, I would like to announce that in the context of a strong accord, in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation, the U.S. is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
"We expect that this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance," she said.
But while both Japan and the U.S. offered developing nations a carrot, the pledges also came with a big stick, as Ozawa and Clinton said developing nations must commit to legally binding emissions cuts.
"If those conditions are not met, we'll have to withdraw this pledge," Ozawa said.
In a warning directed toward China — which insists that its reduction target of 40 percent to 45 percent per unit of gross domestic product by 2020 compared with 2005 levels is a domestic, voluntary measure and should not be codified in an international treaty — both Ozawa and Clinton said there were conditions attached to their pledges, which included participation in a new deal, and emissions-reduction actions that were transparent.
"I've often quoted a Chinese proverb which says that when we are in a common boat, you have to cross the river peacefully together. Well, we are in a common boat," Clinton said.
"All of the major economies have an obligation to commit to a meaningful mitigation action and stand behind them in a transparent way."
It remained to be seen whether the new pledges by the U.S. and Japan would be the game-breaker negotiators had been looking for to move the negotiations forward.
Fundamental differences over the amount by which countries should reduce their emissions remain.
The Japan Times: Friday, Dec. 18, 2009
(C) All rights reserved
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Irrawaddy: Call to reorganize NLD garners support, questions – Arkar Moe
Irrawaddy: Call to reorganize NLD garners support, questions – Arkar Moe
Thu 17 Dec 2009
Filed under: Inside Burma
NLD leaders embrace Aung San Suu Kyi’s call to reorganize Burma’s most prestigious opposition party, while raising questions about timing and and other matters.However, the party now faces difficult questions of how quickly and extensively the leadership structure can be reorganized, replacing long-serving leaders now in their 80s and 90s and how will such changes affect its decision on whether or not to take part in the 2010 national election?
Among the issues within the NLD have been differences of views between younger and more senior party members in terms of aggrersive promotion of the party’s interest throughout the country and its participation in the upcoming election. In recent years, the regime closed NLD offices throughout the country, threatening its survival as a viable opposition group, and arrested and jailed many party members.
On Wednesday, Suu Kyi called for a reorganization of the central executive committee (CEC) after meeting with three elderly and ailing senior leaders.
NLD spokesman Khin Maung Swe confirmed to The Irrawaddy on Thursday that most NLD offices outside of Rangoon are closed. “There are many difficulties in holding a nationwide meeting,” he said.
He said the central executive committe can be reorganized more effectively.
The NLD has not held a nationwide party gathering for at least a decade because of harassment by the authorities and other setbacks. Although younger party members recently called for party meetings across the country, the CEC did not authorize the move, sources said.
Political observers inside Burma have said the NLD must strengthen its presence in the countryside to maintain its popularity and influence, particular ahead of the 2010 general election.
Myat Hla,74, the NLD chairperson in Pegu and an elected representative of the people’s parliament, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday, “I welcome Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s calls. Most NLD CEC members are not functioning effectively now. If the NLD does not reorganize, it will lose its leadership role.”
Senior party leader Win Tin told The Irrawaddy, “I agree that the NLD needs to reorganize, but, it won’t be easy to carry out all in short time.”
Moe Zaw Oo, secretary 2 of the Foreign Affairs Department of the National League for Democracy—Liberated Area (NLD-LA), told The Irrawaddy on Thursday: “It’s high time to reform, and I welcome Suu Kyi‘s call. It’s natural that there are different views between older members and youths. But finally we must all be united in the best interests of the NLD.”
The NLD should hold a nationwide meeting, he said, but the military government would probably not allow it.
In November 2009, NLD members from Pegu and Mandalay divisions sent a joint letter calling for a national conference to debate the issue of the NLD’s role in next year’s election.
The letter also called for the resignation of two elderly NLD leaders.
Recently, members of the youth wing of the party voiced ideological differences publically, saying the main objective of forming the NLD in 1988 was to bring about democracy and positive change in the country. They said that instead the party had drifted into a “survival” mode.
Responding to the criticism, some members said the party reversed its so-called “survival” policy, noting that in 2008, it rejected the junta’s call to withdraw NLD statements that criticized the constitutional referendum.
The NLD wrote to the Election Commission on Nov. 16 saying that under the election law it had the authority to reorganize its party.
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