By LALIT K JHA Tuesday, July 14, 2009
WASHINGTON — Three permanent members of United Nations Security Council—the United States, Britain and France—expressed skepticism that the Burmese junta will hold free, fair and credible general elections in 2010, while urging the military rulers to match their words with deeds.
China, on the other hand, which has been a strong supporter of the totalitarian Burmese rulers both inside and outside the Security Council, urged Western countries including the US, Britain and France to lift their economic sanctions on Burma.
View of the UN Security Council in New York. (Photo: AFP)
“Now is the time for Burma to match its words with deeds,” said Rosemary A DiCarlo, the US alternate representative for special political affairs, following a Security Council briefing on Burma by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the UN headquarters in New York.
DiCarlo expressed US disappointment that the Burmese authorities refused Ban’s request to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi.
“By turning down this simple, straightforward request, the Burmese government missed a critical opportunity to, in your words, ‘show its commitment to a new era of political openness,’” she said.
Calling on the Burmese regime to free Aung San Suu Kyi immediately and unconditionally, she said the junta is clearly not respecting the popular will by putting the leader of the country’s democratic opposition on trial for spurious charges of violating her house arrest, which itself was illegitimate. “We are deeply concerned about these proceedings,” she said.
British Deputy Permanent Representative Philip Parham said Ban’s visit was an opportunity for the junta to transform its relationship with the international community which stands ready to respond positively to real progress.
“The regime’s failure to take this opportunity has only served to isolate it further. We can only hope that we may yet see progress in the coming days; it is not too late. But if it does not come, and if we see an unjust outcome in Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, the international community will need to follow the secretary-general’ s lead and respond robustly,” Parham said. “The onus is on the government to act.”
He said the generals heard the strong message the secretary-general delivered in Rangoon when he addressed ministers and the diplomatic and NGO communities.
“They can be in no doubt about his disappointment and the disappointment of the international community as a whole,” Parham said.
France called for stronger actions by the Security Council.
“The current impasse is no reason for the international community to do nothing. The council must respond firmly if she [Suu Kyi] is found guilty, but inaction must not be the price of its unity,” said Jean-Maurice Ripert of France.
Far from initiating a dialogue with political parties and ethnic groups, Ripert said the junta has unilaterally implemented a “road map” to democracy which had led to increased polarization.
In defense of the junta, Chinese Deputy Ambassador Liu Zhenmin said Ban’s failure to meet with Suu Kyi should not be the criterion to judge the success of the visit.
“Gen Than Shwe had not made arrangements for the secretary-general to meet with her, and the United Nations must respect that decision by a member state. During his visit, the secretary-general had held in-depth dialogues with top leaders and that would play an important role in encouraging the democratic process,” he said.
Liu said that Ban’s visit had been significant and its positive outcome deserved to be assessed fairly by the international community.
He said Burma’s problems could not be addressed in a Western manner, the junta should steadily reform and the international community should fairly assess the country’s challenges.
He called for lifting the international sanctions against Burma, a necessary step for economic development.
“Events occurring inside Myanmar [Burma] are internal affairs that should be handled by the government, as they posed no threat to international peace and security. China is against isolating and sanctioning Myanmar and its position in that regard remained unchanged,” Liu said.
Copyright © 2008 Irrawaddy Publishing Group | www.irrawaddy. org
http://www.irrawadd y.org/article. php?art_id= 16320
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
US, Britain and France Doubt Credible Election; China Calls for Lifting Sanctions
More Karen IDPs Fleeing Fighting
More Karen IDPs Fleeing Fighting
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By SAW YAN NAING Monday, July 13, 2009
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More than five hundred Karen villagers in Mon Township, Nyaunglebin District, in northern Karen State have become internal displaced persons (IDPs) after they were forced to flee and hide in the jungle due to fresh attacks by the Burmese military, according to relief groups.
The Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a relief group operating in the area, reported on July 7 that the five hundred villagers, including women and children, are facing food shortages as they were unable to take sufficient food with them when they fled.
Infants are suffering from illness due to heavy rain and a lack of proper medical treatment in the jungle.
Three men were also killed during the attack, according to the FBR report.
Karen sources said that Burmese army forces and troops from battalions 333 and 555 of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) ceasefire militia are now more active in Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) Brigade 5 area in northern Karen State after ending the week-long offensive against KNLA Brigade 7 in southern Karen State.
Due to the offensive launched by the joint force of the Burmese army and DKBA troops in June in the KNLA Brigade 7 area, about 4,000 Karen civilians in Pa-an district in Karen State fled into Thailand’s Tha Song Yang district for safety.
About 20 clashes took place in KNLA Brigade 5 areas during June, and an estimated 16 Burmese soldiers were killed and 39 were injured, according to the Karen news organization, Kwe Ka Lu.
Saw Steve, a leader of a Karen relief team of the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP) said, “We heard the Burmese army has been reinforced in Mon Township, Nyaunglebin District, and now there is more military activity in this area.”
Border sources and observers said that after the fall of KNLA Brigade 7, the DKBA and Burmese force will turn its attention to the KNLA’s outposts in Brigade 5 and 6 areas.
The joint force intends to clear the KNLA from areas they control along the Thai-Burma border as assigned by the Burmese military, before the Burmese regime holds its planned general election in 2010, sources have reported.
The DKBA is conscripting new members in order to complete its assignment and make up a border guard force with 326 soldiers in each battalion, sources said.
The DKBA split from its mother organization the KNU and signed a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese military government in 1995.
Copyright © 2008 Irrawaddy Publishing Group | www.irrawaddy.org
End in sight of Suu Kyi trial
United Press International
End in sight of Suu Kyi trial
Published: July 13, 2009 at 9:36 AM
YANGON, Myanmar, July 13 (UPI) -- Final arguments in the trial of jailed Myanmar opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi will be heard on July 24.
Suu Kyi won the country's general election in May 1990 by a landslide, taking 392 of the 492 seats, with the next largest party taking 23 seats. But the military refused to recognize the results, and she has been detained on various charges for 13 of the past 19 years.
Suu Kyi, 64, has been under house arrest since May 2003 and is held on charges of threatening the national security of Myanmar, formerly called Burma. The current trial is over her alleged breaking of her house arrest when John William Yettaw, a U.S. citizen, swam across a lake and gained access to her property in May.
If convicted she faces up to five more years in jail. No date has been set for sentencing if Suu Kyi is found guilty.
Analysts believe the military would like to have her officially in jail during the first multiparty elections since 1990 that they have scheduled for next year. Although the junta's constitution prevents Suu Kyi from taking part, having her out of the way would avoid any embarrassing demonstrations at rallies of officially allowed parties.
The military has given itself 25 percent of seats in any new government decided by the elections.
At a special court set up inside Insein Prison in Yangon on Friday her lawyer, a member of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy Party, argued her arrest was unlawful because it was based on the old 1974 constitution, which was replaced by another in 2008.
Her last witness gave his testimony when the trial was restarted only for the day, a week after the country's military head Than Shwe refused to let U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on an official visit to Myanmar, see her.
In his departure speech Ban said the regime should release Suu Kyi to show the international community that the military is serious about moving towards democracy.
Amnesty International Australia renewed its call for her release this past weekend. In a written statement the pressure group called on the U.N. Security Council and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to intervene to secure her release "without conditions."
Amnesty also said there are 2,100 political prisoners in Myanmar imprisoned in terrible conditions, including in the infamous Insein Prison where Suu Kyi is being held.
"Conditions in Burma's jails, including the notorious Insein Prison where Aung San Suu Kyi has been held for weeks, are appalling. The health of prisoners is put at risk by the circumstances in which they are forced to live and political prisoners are also at risk of torture and other ill-treatment, " said Jenny Leong, spokeswoman for Amnesty International Australia.
The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said in March that the detention of Suu Kyi violates both international law and Burma's domestic legislation, Amnesty said.
Irish rock band U2 is dedicating their song "Walk On" to Suu Kyi every night on their current tour, which kicked off in Barcelona June 30.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave Suu Kyi the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. The European Parliament awarded Suu Kyi the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought earlier that year. The Sakharov Prize is awarded around Dec. 10 every year, the day on which the U.N. General Assembly ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
No date has been set for sentencing if Suu Kyi is found guilty.
ビルマ市民フォーラム メールマガジン 2009/7/14
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ビルマ市民フォーラム メールマガジン 2009/7/14
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。）
ご紹介のドキュメンタリー映画『花と兵隊』につき、フォトジャーナリストの
山本宗補さん（ＰＦＢ運営委員）のコメントがこちらに掲載されています。
http://hanatoheitai.jugem.jp/?eid=19
8月8日より上映されます。ぜひご覧ください。
ＰＦＢ事務局 宮澤
http://www1.jca.apc.org/pfb/
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
以下、ご紹介いたします。
ビルマ情報ネットワーク （www.burmainfo.org）
秋元由紀
========================================
ドキュメンタリー映画『花と兵隊』（http://www.hanatoheitai.jp/）
８月８日より、シアター・イメージフォーラムにてロードショー、他全国順次公開
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『花と兵隊』は、タイ・ビルマ国境付近で敗戦を迎えた後、祖国に還らなかった6名
の日本兵、すなわち「未帰還兵」を描いたドキュメンタリー映画である。戦争の記憶
が薄れつつあるいま、90歳を前後する彼らを20代の監督・松林要樹がとらえた。2005
年から3年に渡る長期取材で、松林はもうひとつの戦後史ともいうべき彼らの暮らし
を見つめ、その生活に寄り添うことで、新たな証言を記録した。
敗戦後、自らの意思で所属部隊を離れ、現地に残った日本兵たち。彼らは、軍隊で
培った技術を生かし、土地に根付き、新しい家族をつくった。とりわけ妻たちの存在
が異郷の地に生きる彼らを支えた。家々には、いまでも新婚当時の彼女たちの可憐な
写真が飾られている。そして、彼らは、子や孫たちと、餅をつき、蕎麦を食べ、祖国
を懐かしんでいる。
しかし、そんな望郷の想いを引き裂くように、やがて質素な部屋の一角で、壮絶な戦
争の記憶が語られはじめる――
なぜ彼らは日本に還らなかったのか？ 南国の激しい雨の間隙、晴れやかな日差しの
中で、穏やかに老後を迎える元兵士たちの平和な日常に、漆黒の時代の闇が潜んでい
る。
監督・撮影・編集：松林要樹
編集：辻井潔
音楽：津嘉田泰三
プロデューサー：安岡卓治（『Ａ』、『Ａ２』、『Little Birds －イラク 戦火の家
族たち－』、『ガーダ ‐パレスチナの詩‐』、『パレスチナ1948・NAKBA』）
製作：記録映画「未帰還兵」製作委員会
配給：安岡フィルムズ
配給協力：東風、ＫＡＷＡＳＡＫＩアーツ
（2009/106分/DVCAM/日本語・ビルマ語・タイ語他 c2009 Yojyu Matsubayashi）
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劇場公開情報
8月8日より、シアター・イメージフォーラムにて公開
（Tel : 03-5766-0114／http://www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/index.html）
10：15～/12：30～/14：45～/17：00～/19：15～
※8/8(土)、初回上映後と２回目上映前に松林要樹監督による舞台挨拶あり
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お問合せ／東風tel:03-5389-6605
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Saturday, July 11, 2009
မဟာေအာင္ေျမ(ဓမၼပိယဆရာေတာ္)
ဘဝဟူသည္ တိုက္ပဲြအျမဲရိွသည္ဟု ဆိုႀက၏။ ဘဝက တိုက္ပြဲ ဆိုပါလား။ တကယ္ပဲ ဘဝက တိုက္ပဲြလား။
ေအးေအး ေဆးေဆး ေနလို ့ေကာ မရဘူးလား။ ေအာင္ျမင္ခ်င္သူ တိုးတက္ခ်င္သူတို ့ကေတာ့ ဘဝကို
တိုက္ပဲြအျဖစ္ ခံယူႀကသည္။ ဘဝကို တိုက္ပဲြအျဖစ္ ရႈျမင္ႀကသည္။ ဘဝကို တိုက္ပဲြ ပမာ သေဘာထားႀကသည္။
ေယာက်ာၤးတို ့ဇဲြ ေသကာမွေလွ်ာ့ရမည္ဟု ဆိုကာ ဝီရိယကို အျမဲေမာင္းတင္ထားႀကသည္။ ေအာင္ျမင္သူအမ်ားစု
က ဝီရိယ ကိုးဆယ့္ကိုးက်ပ္သားထဲကို အသိဥာဏ္ပညာ တစ္က်ပ္သားထည့္ျပီး ေရာသမေမႊလိုက္လွ်င္ ေအာင္ျမင္
မႈအထြပ္အထိပ္သို ့ ေရာက္ပါသည္ဟု ဆိုမိန္ ့ႀကသည္။ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈ၏ အဓိကေသာ့ခ်က္သည္ ဝီရိယ၊ လုံ ့လ၊ ဇြဲ ဟု
သတ္မွတ္ခဲ့ႀကသည္။
ေဘာလုံးပဲြတစ္ပဲြကန္ရာမွာ အနိုင္၊ အရံႈး၊ သေရဟု အေျဖသုံးမ်ိဳးရိွသည္။ ေဘာလုံးပဲြမွာ အနိုင္အရံႈးေပၚမွ ႀကည့္
လို ့ေကာင္းသည္။ သေရဆိုလွ်င္ သိပ္ႀကည့္လို ့မေကာင္း။ ဂိ္ုးမရိွသေရဆိုလွ်င္ ပိုဆိုးေသးသည္။ သို ့ရာတြင္ သေရ
ဆိုတာရိွေနျခင္းကလည္း ေဘာလုံးပဲြ၏ ဆဲြေဆာင္မႈ တစ္ခုပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ လိဂ္ပဲြေတြမွာဆိုလွ်င္ သေရဆိုတာက
ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္တစ္ခု၊ အင္အားတစ္ခုျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုသေရဆိုတာကပင္ ေနာက္ဆုံးတစ္ေန ့မွာ အနိုင္အရံႈး အဆုံးအျဖတ္
ေပးတာရိွသည္။
စာေမးပဲြေျဖဆိုရာမွာေတာ့ ေအာင္တာနွင့္က်တာ၊ နိုင္တာနွင့္ ရံႈးတာ နွစ္မ်ိဳးသာရိွသည္။ သေရဆိုတာမရိွ။ ဘဝမွာ
ေကာ သေရဆိုတာ ရိွပါသလား။ ေစ်းေလာကမွာေတာ့ ျမတ္လည္းမက်န္၊ အရံႈးလည္းမျပဆိုလွ်င္ အရင္းဟု သတ္မွတ္
ႀကသည္။ အရံႈးနွင့္ အနိုင္ကို ေစ်းေလာကမွာလို အရံႈးအျမတ္တြက္လွ်င္ ဘဝမွာလည္း သေရဆိုတာရိွသည္။ တကယ္ေတာ့
လည္း အနိုင္ထဲမွာ အရံႈးရိွသလို အရံႈးထဲမွာလည္း အနိုင္ဆိုတာရိွနိုင္ သည္သာ။ ယူတတ္သည့္အေပၚမွာ တည္ပါလိမ့္မည္။
သိမ္ႀကီးေစ်း၊ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေစ်း စသည္မွာ ေစ်းေရာင္းေနသူေတြ ေစ်းေရာင္းမေကာင္းလွ်င္ ေမတၱာပို ့ေန၊ ဂုဏ္ေတာ္ ပြားေန
ပုတီးစိပ္ေန၊ တရားမွတ္ေန၊ ဥစၥာမရလွ်င္ ကုသိုိလ္ရရမည္။ ကုသိုလ္ရတာ အျမတ္မဟုတ္လား။
ကေလးဘဝမွာ ပထမမူႀကိဳ၊ ေနာက္ေတာ့ မူလတန္း၊ အလယ္တန္း၊ အထက္တန္း၊ တကၠသိုလ္အသီးသီးမွာ ပညာေတြ
သင္ စာေတြတတ္၊စာေတြက်က္၊ စာေမးပဲြေတြ ေျဖနွင့္ ႀကိဳးစားပမ္းစားအားထုတ္ေနရျခင္းသည္ ဘဝတိုက္ပဲြဟုဆိုလိုက
ဆိုနိုင္သည္။ ေက်ာင္းျပီးသြားေတာ့ ကိုယ္ဝါသနာ ပါရာ ကိုယ္သန္ရာ သို ့မဟုတ္ ဘဝအက်ိဳးေပးအရ ေရာက္ရာေနရာ၊
က်ရာတာဝန္တို ့ကို ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနရျခင္းသည္ ဘဝတိုက္ပဲြဟု သတ္မွတ္လိုက သတ္မွတ္နိုင္သည္။
တခ်ိဳ ့က ဆရာဝန္၊တခ်ိဳ့က အင္ဂ်င္နီယာ တခ်ိဳ့က ေက်ာင္းဆရာ၊ တခ်ိဳ ့က ကုန္သည္၊ တခ်ိဳ ့ကပဲြစား၊ တခ်ိဳ ့က
စာေရးဆရာ၊ တခ်ိဳ ့က သရုပ္ေဆာင္ စသည္ ဆိုင္ရာလုပ္ငန္းခြင္မွာ ရုန္းကန္ လႈပ္ရွားေနရျခင္းသည္ ဘဝတိုက္ပဲြ
ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ တိုက္ပဲြဟူသည္ တိုက္ကတည္းက အနိုင္ရလိုသျဖင့္ တိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ သို ့ေသာ္ နိုင္တာလည္းရိွမည္။
ရံႈးတာလည္းရိွမည္။ တခ်ိဳ ့နိုင္ ၊ တခ်ိဳ ့ရံႈး၊ အနိုင္နွင့္ အရႈံး ေရာျပြမ္းေနတာလည္းရိွမည္။ နိုင္သလိုလိုနွင့္ ရံႈး၊ ရံႈးသလိုလို
နွင့္ နိုင္ ဆိုတာေတြလည္းရိွမည္။
ဘဝဆိုတာ ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ ့မွာ ဘတ္စ္ကားစီးရတာနွင့္ေတာ့ တူသည္။ ညေနရံုးဆင္းခ်ိန္ ဆူးေလဘုရားလမ္းမွတ္တိုင္မွာ
ေနအိမ္အသီးသီးသို ့ျပန္ႀကမည့္ ျမိဳ ါနယ္ အသီးသီးက ခရီးသည္ေတြသည္ အိမ္ျပန္လိုေဇာနွင့္ ဆိုင္ရာဘတ္စ္ကားေတြ
ေပၚကို တိုးျပီးေတာ့တက္ႀကရသည္။ တိုက္ခ်င္ရာတိုက္၊ တိုက္ျပီးေတာ့ တက္ႀကရသည္။ ဘဝဆိုတာကလည္း ဘတ္စ္ကား
ခရီးသည္ေတြပမာသာ ျဖစ္သည္။ တိုးျပီးေတာ့ တက္ေနႀကရသည္။ ဒီေတာ့ ဘဝဆိုတာ တိုက္ပဲြ အျမဲရိွသည္ဆိုေသာ
စကားက ျဖစ္နိုင္ေခ်ရိွသည္။
တိုက္ပဲြအသီးသီးမွာ တခ်ိဳ ့က အျပင္ပန္းမွာ ေအာင္ျမင္သည္၊ နိုင္သည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ္လည္း အတြင္းပိုင္းမွာ
ရံႈးေနတာ ရိွေနတတ္သည္။ တခ်ိဳ ့က အျပင္ပန္းမွာ ရံႈးေနသည္ဟု ထင္ရေသာ္လည္း အတြင္းပိုင္းမွာ ေအာင္ျမင္တာ၊
နိုင္တာေတြလည္း ရိွတတ္သည္။ လူအမ်ားစုကေတာ့ ေအာင္ျမင္်မႈ၊ က်ဆုံးမႈ၊ အနိုင္နွင့္အရံႈးကို အျပင္ပန္းႀကည့္ျပီး
ေတာ့သာ ဆုံးျဖတ္ႀကသည္။ တကယ္ေတာ့ အျပင္ပန္းႀကည့္ျပီးေတာ့ အနိုင္နွင့္ အရံႈးဆုံးျဖတ္ျခင္းသည္ မွန္ကန္တိက်
ေသာ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ေတာ့ မျဖစ္နိုင္ေခ်။
အေလာင္းေတာ္သည္ ဘဝတစ္ခုမွာ ကုဒါလပဣိတဟူေသာ နာမည္နွင့္ ရေသ့ ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ အေလာင္းေတာ္သည္
သူ လူဝတ္ေႀကာင္တုန္းက သိမ္းဆည္းထားေသာ ေျပာင္းဖူးဆန္တစ္စလယ္နွင့္ ေပါက္တူးတစ္ေခ်ာင္းအေပၚ သံေယာဇဥ္
မျပတ္လို ့ ရေသ့ဝတ္လိုက္၊လူျပန္ထြက္လိုက္နွင့္ သံသရာလည္ေနသည္။ လူျပန္ထြက္တာ ေျခာက္ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ရိွသြားသည္။
ေနာက္ဆုံးအႀကိမ္မွာ အေလာင္းေတာ္က သံေယာဇဥ္ျဖတ္လိုက္သည္။ ေျပာင္းဖူးဆန္ထုပ္နွင့္ ေပါက္တူးကို ဂဂၤါျမစ္ထဲ ပစ္
ခ်လိုက္သည္။ ပစ္ခ်လိုက္ျပီးေနာက္ အေလာင္းေတာ္က “ေအာင္ျပီ...........နိုင္ျပီ ” ဟု အသံကုန္သုံးႀကိမ္တိုင္တိုင္ ေအာ္
ဟစ္ ေႀကြးေႀကာ္လိုက္သည္။
ထိုအခိုက္ ထိုအနီးမွာ ဗာရာဏသီမင္းကလည္း တိုက္ပဲြေအာင္နိုင္ျပန္လာျပီး ေအာင္ပဲြခံေနသည္။ အေလာင္းေတာ္၏
ေအာင္ျပီ....... နိုင္ျပီဟူေသာ အသံကိုႀကားရလို ့ အက်ိဳးအေႀကာင္း ေခၚယူေမးျမန္းသည္။ အေလာင္းေတာ္က သူ ့ ့့့ဘဝျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းကုန္စင္ကို သံေတာ္ဦးတင္ျပီး “အရွင္မင္းႀကီး။ အရွင္မင္းႀကီး ေအာင္တယ္၊ နိုင္တယ္ဆိုတာ အျပင္အပ
က ရန္သူကို ေအာင္နိုင္တာပဲ။ အကၽြနုပ္ေအာင္နိုင္တာက အတြင္းရန္ကို ေအာင္နိုင္တာ။ အရွင္မင္းျမတ္ အျပင္အပက ရန္သူ
ကို ေအာင္နိုင္တယ္ဆိုတာ အခန္ ့မသင့္ရင္ကိုယ္က ျပန္ရံႈးရဦးမယ္။ အတြင္းရန္ကို ေအာင္နိုင္တာကမွ ေအာင္နိုင္မႈစစ္စစ္
ျဖစ္ပါတယ္” ဟု ေလွ်ာက္တင္ေလသည္။
မိမိတို ့အျပင္အပ ဘဝတိုက္ပဲြမွာ ေအာင္ျမင္တာေတြ အနိုင္ရတာေတြ ရိွတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းသားဘဝမွာ စာေမးပဲြေအာင္ႀက
သည္။ ဆရာဝန္၊ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာ စသည္ျဖစ္ေတာ့ ပညာေရးမွာ ေအာင္ျမင္သည္။ လုပ္ငန္းရွင္ႀကီးျဖစ္ေတာ့ စီးပြာယးေရးမွာ
ေအာင္ျမင္သည္။ စာသင္၊ စာျပ၊ ေဆးကု၊ သရုပ္ေဆာင္ စသည့္ ကိုယ့္လုပ္ရပ္ ကို အမ်ားက အသိအမွတ္ျပဳအားေပးႀက
ေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကိုယ္ ေအာင္ျမင္သည္ ဟု ဂုဏ္ယူႀကသည္။ အျခားျပိဳင္ရဆိုင္္ရ ထိ္္ပ္တိုက္ေတြ ့ရေသာပြဲေတြမွာ
ေအာင္ျမင္မႈ၊ အနိုင္ရမႈေတြသည္ အမွန္ေတာ့ အားရေက်နပ္ဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာ အာမခံခ်က္ရိွေသာ ေအာင္နိုင္မႈမ်ိဳးေတာ့
မဟုတ္ေသးေခ်။
ဘုရားလက္ထက္ေတာ္က သူေဌးသမီးကုဣလေကသီသည္ ႀကံႀကံ ဖန္ဖန္ သူသတ္ကုန္းသို ့ သတ္ဖို ့ရန္ထတ္လာေသာ
ရာဇဝတ္သားသူခိုးကိုမွ စဲြစဲြလမ္းလမ္းခ်စ္မိရွာသည္။ သူခိုးဆိုေတာ့ သူခိုးအက်င့္ကမေပ်ာက္။ သူခိုးႀကံပဲႀကံသည္။
ကဣလေကသီကို ေတာင္ေပၚညာေခၚသြား လက္ဝတ္ရတနာေတြကို ခၽြတ္ယူကာ ေတာင္ေအာက္တြန္းခ် သတ္ဖို ့ႀကံစည္
သည္။ လူတစ္ေယာက္လုံးေတာင္ ရထားျပီးမွ အားလုံးကို ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေနျပီမဟုတ္လား။ ဘာလိုေသးေတာ့လို ့လဲ။ ေတာ္ေတာ္
တုံးသည့္ေကာင္ပဲ။ လူဆိုးသူခိုးကို ကယ္ရုံတင္မက ယုံမွတ္ကာ ပုံအပ္မိေတာ့ ကုဣလေကသီ ဒုကၡေရာက္ရရွာသည္။
ဝ႗္ေႀကြးေႀကာင့္လား၊ ေရစက္ေႀကာင့္လား၊ တစ္ခုခုေတာ့ တစ္ခုခု။
ကုဣလေကသီကလည္း ခပ္ည့ံညံ့မိန္းမေတာ့မဟုတ္။ မာယာနွင့္ဖ်ားေယာင္းျပီး သူက ဦးေအာင္တြန္းခ်ပစ္လိုက္သည္။
ေတာင္ေစာင့္နတ္က ကုဣေကသီကို ပညာရွိပါေပသည္ဟု ခ်ီးက်ဴးစကားဆိုသည္။ ကုဣလေကသီလည္း ရွက္ရွက္နွင့္
အိမ္ကိုမျပန္ရဲေတာ့။ ေျခဦးတည့္ရာသြားရင္းက ပုရဗိုဇ္မေတြေက်ာင္းေရာက္၊ ပုရဗိုဇ္မဝတ္၊ ေနာက္ေတာ့ ဘိကၡဳနီမဝတ္ျပီး
ရဟႏၱာမႀကီးျဖစ္သြားသည္။ ဘဝဆိုတာ အဆိုးႀကီးဆိုးျပီးလွ်င္ အေကာင္းႀကီးေကာင္းတတ္သည္။ သို ့ေသာ္ လူတိုင္းေတာ့
လည္း ဟုတ္မည္မထင္။
တရားသဘင္မွာ ရဟန္းေတာ္ေတြ စပ္မိစပ္ရာေျပာႀကေတာ့ ကုဣလေကသီ ေထရီမသည္ တကယ့္စစ္ပဲြႀကီးတစ္ပဲြကို အနိုင္
ႏဲႊခဲ့တာပဲဟု ခ်ီးက်ဴးစကားေျပာႀကသည္။ ရဟန္းေတြစကားဘုရားႀကားရေတာ့ “ရဟန္းတို ့ အျပင္အပကရန္သူေတြကို
ေအာင္နိုင္တယ္ဆိုတာ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေအာင္နိုင္ျခင္းမဟုတ္ဘူး။ မိမိကိုယ္တြင္းက ကိေလသာရန္သူကိုနိုင္မွသာ စစ္မွန္တဲ့နိုင္ျခင္း
ေခၚတယ္။ စစ္ေျမျပင္မွာ ရန္သူစစ္သည္ေတာ္ဆယ္သိန္းကို နိုင္လိုက္ျခင္းဟာ ျမင့္ျမတ္တဲ့နိုင္ျခင္းမဟုတ္ဘူး။ တစ္ေယာက္
တည္းေသာ မိမိကိုယ္ကိုနိုင္မွသာ ျမင့္ျမတ္တဲ့နိုင္ျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကိုယ္နိုင္မွ တကယ့္သူရဲေကာင္းစစ္စစ္ပဲ” ဟု
မိန္ ့ေတာ္မူသည္။
ဘဝဟူသည္ တိုက္ပဲြျဖစ္သည္။ သို ့ေသာ္ မိမိတို ့တိုက္ေနတာက အျပင္ေလာကကို မ်က္နွာမူျပီးတိုက္ေနႀကသည္။
တကယ့္တိုက္ပဲြစစ္စစ္က မိမိကိုယ္တြင္းမွာသာ ျဖစ္သည္။ မိမိ အဇ်ၥတၱကိုယ္တြင္းကို မ်က္နွာမူျပီးတိုက္ပဲြဝင္ရမည္။ ကိုယ္
တြင္းက ကိေလသာရန္သူကို ရွာေဖြျပီး ေခ်မႈန္းရမည္။ အျပင္ရန္ကို ေခ်မႈန္းေနလို ့ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရမည္မဟုတ္။ အတြင္းရန္
ကို ေခ်မႈန္းနိုင္မွသာ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးစစ္စစ္မွန္မွန္ရရိွလိမ့္မည္။
ဘဝတိုက္ပဲြမွာ ပညာေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ အိမ္ေထာင္ေရး၊ လူမႈေရး၊ နိုင္ငံေရး စသည္ဆိုင္ရာေအာင္ျမင္မႈေတြ ရိွႀကသည္။ အနိင္
ရတာေတြ မ်ားခဲ့ပါျပီး။ သို ့ေသာ္ ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကိုယ္ေတာ့ မနိုင္ႀကေသးပါ။ ကိုယ့္စိတ္ကိုယ္ေတာ့ မနိုင္ႀကေသးပါ။ ကိုယ့္ေလာဘ၊
ကိုယ့္ေဒါသ၊ ကိုယ့္အတၱ စတာေတြေတာ့ နိုင္ေအာင္မတိုက္နိုင္ႀကေသးပါ။ ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကိုယ္နိုင္မွ၊ ကိုယ့္စိတ္ကိုယ္ နိုင္မွ၊
ကိုယ့္ေလာဘ၊ ေဒါသ၊ အတၱ၊ မာန ေတြကိုနိုင္မွ တကယ့္ေအာင္နိုင္သူ၊ ေအာင္ျမင္သူျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။ ေရႊဘိုျမိဳ ့ အဝင္
မဟာေအာင္ေျမဘုရားဝင္းအတြင္း၌ အေလာင္းဘုရားစစ္မခ်ီခင္ အျမဲနင္းခဲ့ေသာ မဟာေအာင္ေျမဟူ၍ ယခုတိုင္ရိွသည္။
ဗုဒၶအလိုအရေတာ့ တကယ့္မဟာေအာင္ေျမသည္ မိမိတို ့နွလုံးအိမ္အတြင္းမွာသာရိွသည္။ မိမိ၏ စစ္မွန္ေသာေအာင္ပဲြကို
မိမိ၏နွလုံးသားအတြင္းမွာသာ ရွာေဖြ ေတြ ့ရိွနိုင္သည္။
အရွင္သံဝရလကၤာရ
ဓမၼပိယဆရာေတာ္
၂၀၀၉-ေမလထုတ္-အေတြးအျမင္(အမွတ္-၂၀၆)မွ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပသည္။
Thursday, July 9, 2009
UNSG’s Remarks on Myanmar to Diplomatic Missions, UN Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations
ျမန္မာဘာသာျပန္ကို အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာေနာက္တြင္ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈနိုင္ပါသည္
(ဘာသာျပန္၍ေမးပို ့ေပးေသာအန္ကယ္ဦးေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္အားေက်းဇူးအထူးတင္ရိွပါသည္)
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests and colleagues
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is my second visit to Myanmar in just over a year. Both visits have been at critical times for the country's future.
My first visit was in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. This devastating natural disaster, which took so many lives and created so much hardship, touched hearts across the globe. In Myanmar's moment of need, the world responded generously.
I want to personally thank everyone here today for your remarkable contributions to the relief and recovery effort.
You have saved lives, rejuvenated communities and made it possible for many thousands of people to reclaim their livelihoods. You have helped Myanmar to overcome adversity. It is important that this work continues.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I felt the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis deeply -- as a fellow Asian and as Secretary-General.
I am Asia's second Secretary-General. The first was Myanmar''s U Thant. I revere his memory. I also recall his wise words.
U Thant said: “The worth of the individual human being is the most unique and precious of all our assets and must be the beginning and end of all our efforts. Governments, systems, ideologies and institutions come and go, but humanity remains.”
This is why I have returned.
As Secretary-General, I attach the highest importance to helping the people of this country to achieve their legitimate aspirations.
The United Nations works for people – their rights, their well-being, their dignity. It is not an option. It is our responsibility.
I have come to show the unequivocal shared commitment of the United Nations to the people of Myanmar.
I am here today to say: Myanmar – you are not alone.
We want to work with you for a united, peaceful, prosperous, democratic and modern Myanmar.
We want to help you rise from poverty.
We want to work with you so your country can take its place as a respected and responsible member of the international community.
We want to help you achieve national reconciliation, durable peace and sustainable development.
But, let me emphasize: neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights.
Myanmar is no exception.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The challenges are many. But they are not insurmountable.
We know from experience that securing Myanmar's peaceful, democratic and prosperous future is a complex process.
None of Myanmar's challenges can be solved on their own. Peace, development and human rights are closely inter-related.
Failure to address them with equal attention will risk undermining the prospects for democracy, durable peace and prosperity.
However, we also know that where there is a genuine will for dialogue and reconciliation, all obstacles can be overcome.
The question today is this: how much longer can Myanmar afford to wait for national reconciliation, democratic transition and full respect for human rights?
The cost of delay will be counted in wasted lives, lost opportunities and prolonged isolation from the international community.
Let me be clear: all the people of Myanmar must work in the national interest.
I said this yesterday when I met with representatives of Myanmar's registered political parties and with those armed groups that have chosen to observe a cease-fire. I encouraged them respectively to honour their commitments to the democratic process and peace.
Nonetheless, the primary responsibility lies with the Government to move the country towards its stated goals of national reconciliation and democracy.
Failure to do so will prevent the people of Myanmar from realizing their full potential.
Failure to do so will deny the people of Myanmar their right to live in dignity and to pursue better standards of life in larger freedom.
These principles lie at the core of the United Nations Charter, whose opening words are “We the peoples”.
The founding Constitution of independent Myanmar echoes these noble words. We must work together to ensure that Myanmar's future embodies these principles too.
With this in mind, I bring three messages.
First, respect for human dignity is the precondition for peace and development everywhere.
Myanmar was one of the first United Nations Member States to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It subscribed early on to the consensus that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is indispensable to political, economic and social progress.
Unfortunately, that commitment has not been matched in deed. Myanmar's human rights record remains a matter of grave concern.
The Government has articulated its goals as stability, national reconciliation and democracy.
The upcoming election –the first in twenty years – must be inclusive, participatory and transparent if it is to be credible.
Myanmar's way forward must be rooted in respect for human rights
This is why I say that all political prisoners, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, should be released without delay.
When I met General Than Shwe yesterday and today, I asked to visit Ms. Suu Kyi. I am deeply disappointed that he refused.
I believe the government of Myanmar has lost a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of political openness.
Allowing a visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would have been an important symbol of the government's willingness to embark on the kind of meaningful engagement that will be essential if the elections in 2010 are to be seen as credible.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must be allowed to participate in the political process without further delay.
Indeed, all the citizens of Myanmar must be given the opportunity to contribute fully to the future of this country.
National reconciliation cannot be complete without the free and active participation of all who seek to contribute.
The country must embark on a process of genuine dialogue that includes all concerned parties, all ethnic groups and all minorities.
People must be free to debate and to engage in political dialogue, and they must have free access to the information that will help them participate meaningfully in the democratic process.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Any transition is difficult. Myanmar has already undergone transitions from sovereign kingdom, to occupied colony, and now independent State.
This history carries a twin legacy of armed conflict and political deadlock, including recent painful events: the repression of demonstrators in 1988, the cancellation of the 1990 election results, and the clampdown on peaceful dissent that continues to this day.
At the same time, there have been some positive efforts that should be recognized.
Although still fragile, the cease-fire agreements between the Government and armed groups have reduced the level of conflict. The United Nations has wide-ranging experience in making such gains irreversible.
Sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity are legitimate concerns for any government.
We contend that opening and broadening the political space is the best way to ensure that each group and each individual becomes part of the greater collective project.
The military, all political parties, ethnic minority groups, civil society, and indeed every son and daughter of Myanmar has a role to play in this country's transition.
Only mutual compromise, respect and understanding can lay the foundations for durable peace, national reconciliation and democracy.
My second message is on addressing the humanitarian needs of Myanmar's people.
I am glad I have been able to return to see the progress made in the Irrawaddy Delta. The loss of some 130,000 people was tragic, but the rebuilding I saw today was impressive.
The tragedy showed the resilience of the people of Myanmar. It also demonstrated that people throughout the world care deeply about Myanmar and its people.
Above all, the response to Cyclone Nargis proved the value of engagement over isolation.
The unprecedented cooperation between Myanmar, the United Nations and ASEAN through the Tripartite Core Group, with the support of the donor community, has demonstrated that humanitarian imperatives and the principles of sovereignty do not conflict.
Humanitarian assistance -- in Myanmar as elsewhere -- should never be held hostage to political considerations. We can and must work together to ensure access to humanitarian and development assistance to all those in Myanmar who need it.
This brings me to my third message. It is time for Myanmar to unleash its economic potential.
Myanmar sits in the middle of Asia's economic miracle. Harnessing Myanmar to the rapid advances taking place around it is the surest way to raise living standards.
I welcome the Government's policy of opening up to outside trade and investment, and its efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, control HIV, combat human trafficking and curtail opium production.
But the reality is that millions continue to live in poverty. Standards of living in Myanmar remain among the lowest in Asia.
The people of Myanmar need jobs, they need food security and they need access to health care.
We must work to ensure that the people of Myanmar can benefit from and contribute to the regional and global economy.
We must recognize that the region and the world have much to gain from a stable, prosperous and democratic Myanmar. We must work together for that goal.
The Government of Myanmar must seize the moment.
It must take advantage of the opportunities that the international community is prepared to offer to the people of Myanmar.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I came here as a friend.
My duty is to uphold the ideals and principles of the United Nations Charter.
My role is to encourage all of you – the Government, political parties, ethnic groups, civil society – to move forward together as one people and one nation.
Nothing is insurmountable or impossible when the people's interest is placed above divisions.
The region and the world are changing fast. Myanmar only stands to gain from engagement -- and from embarking on its own change.
The Government of Myanmar has repeatedly stated that cooperation with the United Nations is the cornerstone of the country's foreign policy.
We ask it to match deeds with words.
The more Myanmar works in partnership with the United Nations to respond to its people's needs and aspirations, the more it affirms its sovereignty.
Similarly it is incumbent on the international community as whole to work together to help Myanmar meet our shared goals: a united, peaceful, prosperous and democratic future, with full respect for the human rights of all the country's people.
Kyae zoo tin bar tae.
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ား၊ ဧည့္သည္ေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ေရာင္းရင္းမိတ္ေဆြမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ဒါဟာ တႏွစ္ေက်ာ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္လာေရာက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္စလုံး ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္မ်ားပင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပထမ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တဲ့အခ်ိန္ဟာ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္း၀င္ေရာက္ၿပီးခ်ိန္အတြင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီ ေၾကာက္မက္ ဘြယ္သဘာ၀ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိယူသြားခဲ့တယ္၊ ၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့အေျခအေနေတြကုိလဲ ဖန္တီးခဲ့တယ္၊ တကမၻာလုံးရဲ႕ ႏွလုံးသည္းပြတ္ေတြကုိလဲခံစားရေအာင္လႈပ္ကုိင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕လုိအပ္ ေနခ်ိန္မွာ ကမၻာက ရက္ရက္ေရာေရာ တုန္႔ျပန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးနဲ႔ ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ရန္ႀကိဳးပမ္းခ်က္ျဖစ္တဲ့ သင္တုိ႔ရဲ႕ ထင္႐ွားတဲ့ ပ့ံပုိးကူညီမႈမ်ားအတြက္ အား လုံးကုိ ေက်းဇူးတင္႐ိွပါေၾကာင္း ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာကေန ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားလုိပါတယ္။
သင္တုိ႔ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိကယ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ လူ႔အသုိင္းအ၀ုိင္းကုိျပန္လည္႐ွင္သန္လန္းဆန္းေစပါတယ္၊ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေသာျပည္သူေတြကုိ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ေနထုိင္မႈဘ၀မ်ားအား ျပန္လည္အသက္ဆက္ေစႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ တယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အာ႐ွတုိက္သားတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ေရာ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ပါ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိ ေၾက ကြဲစြာခံစားရမိပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ဟာ အာ႐ွတုိက္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယေျမာက္အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ပါ။ ပထမေျမာက္ပုဂၢဳိလ္ကေတာ့ ျမန္ မာႏိုင္ငံသား ဦးသန္႔ပါ။ သူ႔ရဲ႕မွတ္ဉာဏ္ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ျမတ္ႏိုးၾကည္ညိဳပါတယ္။ သူရဲ႕ပညာ႐ိွစကားကုိလဲ အ မွတ္ရပါတယ္။
ဦးသန္႔ကဆိုမိန္႔ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “လူသားတဦးခ်င္းစီရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ရဲ႕အဘုိးတန္ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈေတြအနက္ အလြန္ထူးျခားၿပီး အလြန္တန္ဘုိး႐ိွလွပါတယ္။ အစုိးရမ်ား၊ စံနစ္မ်ား၊ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားနဲ႔ အသင္းအပင္းအ ဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား ၀င္လိုက္ ထြက္လုိက္နဲ႔ ျဖစ္ေနေပမင့္ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကေတာ့ ဆက္လက္တည္႐ိွ ေနမွာပါ” တဲ့။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ျပန္လာခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ဆႏၵျပင္းျပမႈမ်ားရ႐ိွေစႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ဒီႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူ မ်ားအား ကူညီႏိုင္ေရးကုိ အေရးအႀကီးဆုံးအျဖစ္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဦးထိပ္ပန္ဆင္သယ္ေဆာင္လာပါတယ္။
ကုလသမဂၢဟာ လူအမ်ားရဲ႕ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား၊ ခ်မ္းသာသုခမ်ား၊ ဂုဏ္အ႐ိွန္အ၀ါမ်ားအတြက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ေနပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ စိတ္ႀကိဳက္ေ႐ြးခ်ယ္လုပ္ေပးေနျခင္း မဟုတ္ပါ။ ဒါဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ရဲ႕တာ၀န္ပုိင္းပါ။
ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ ျပတ္သားၿပီးတာ၀န္ခြဲေ၀ကာ ျပဌာန္းႏွစ္ႁမႇဳပ္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းကို ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအား ျပသ ရန္ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာမွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာပါရေစ။ ျမန္မာ- သင္သည္ အထီးက်န္မဟုတ္ပါ။
စည္းလုံးညီၫြတ္တဲ့၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့ ေခတ္သစ္ဒီမုိကေရစီ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ အလုပ္လုပ္ရန္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုိလားပါတယ္။
ဆင္းရဲတြင္းမွ႐ုန္းထႏိုင္ရန္ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ ေလးစားခံရတဲ့ တာ၀န္သိတဲ့အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေနရာကုိ သင္တုိ႔ႏိုင္ငံရယူႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္လုိပါတယ္။
အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ တည္တံ့တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ေရ႐ွည္ခံ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ တုိ႔ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္အေလးအနက္ျပဳေျပာပါရေစ - ဒီမုိကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေလးစားလိုက္နာမႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေသာ္၄င္း၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈေသာ္၄င္း ႐ွင္သန္မွာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ခၽြင္းခ်က္မဟုတ္ပါ။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
စိန္ေခၚမႈေတြက အမ်ားႀကီးပါ။ ဒါေပမင့္ ေက်ာ္လႊားလုိ႔မရႏိုင္တာေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီစံနစ္႐ိွတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့အနာဂတ္ကုိ ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္း ရမဲ့ကိစၥဟာ ႐ႈပ္ေထြးတဲ့လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အေတြ႕အႀကဳံမ်ားအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ သိ႐ိွရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ မည္သည့္ စိန္ေခၚမႈကုိမဆုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံခ်ည္းသက္သက္ မေျဖ႐ွင္းႏိုင္ပါ။ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရးနဲ႔ လူအခြင့္အေရးဟာ အျပန္အလွန္ ႏြယ္႐ွက္ ဆက္စပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ေတြကုိ တူညီတဲ့အာ႐ုံစုိက္ အေလးထားမႈမ႐ိွပဲ ေျပာဆုိေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး၊ တည္တ့ံ တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ သာယာ၀ေျပာေရးတုိ႔ရဲ႕ အလားအလာေကာင္းျခင္းကုိ ေမွးမွိန္ ေသးသိမ္ေစပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးနဲ႔ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ဆႏၵ႐ိွမယ္ဆုိရင္ အခက္အခဲအားလုံး ကုိ ေက်ာ္လႊားေအာင္ျမင္မွာပါ။
‘အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ အေလးထားေရးအတြက္ ေစာင့္ဆုိင္းဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာဟာအခ်ိန္ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာၾကာႀကိဳးပမ္းႏိုင္မွာလဲ’ ဆုိတာဟာ ယေန႔ေမးခြန္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ႐ွင္းလင္းေျပာျပပါရေစ။ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံး ေဆာင္ရြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါ တယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ မွတ္ပုံတင္ထားတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားမွကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားနဲ႔ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးေလ့လာ ေနတဲ့ လက္နက္ကုိင္အုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔ ယမန္ေန႔ကေတြ႕ခဲ့စဥ္မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္နဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကုိ ဂုဏ္ျပဳရန္အတြက္ သီးျခားစီ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားအားေပး ခဲ့တာပါ။
သုိ႔ေသာ္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကုိ ေျမာ္မွန္းထားတဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ပန္းတိုင္ မ်ားကိုေရာက္႐ိွရန္ အဓိကတာ၀န္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံ့အစုိးရေပၚက်ေရာက္လ်က္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားအား သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ‘စြမ္းရည္ အျပည့္အ၀ကုိ နား လည္သေဘာေပါက္ျခင္း’ မွ ဟန္႔တားထားရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွစြာေနထုိင္ႏိုင္ခြင့္နဲ႔ ပုိမုိ လြတ္လပ္မႈျဖင့္ သာလြန္ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ လူမႈအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ားခံစားခြင့္ကုိ ျငင္းပယ္ရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီ အေျခခံစည္းမ်ဥ္းမ်ားဟာ ‘ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔သည္ ျပည္သူမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည္’ ဆုိတဲ့စကားမ်ားျဖင့္ အဖြင့္နိဒါန္းခ်ီထား တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္စာတမ္းရဲ႕ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအတြင္းမွာတည္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီ မြန္ျမတ္တဲ့စကားမ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ စတင္ေရးဆြဲခဲ့တဲ့ ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒကလဲ ပဲ့တင္ထပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္မွာ ဒီစည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔ ေသခ်ာေစေရးအတြက္လဲ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ကုိ ကြန္ေတာ္စိတ္ထဲမွာထည့္ထားၿပီး အမွာစကား ၃ ခုကို သယ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ပထမဦးစြာအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေဒသမွာမဆုိ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကုိ အေလးထားေလးစားျခင္းဟာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳး တုိးတက္ေရးအတြက္ မ႐ိွမျဖစ္လုိအပ္ခ်က္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္းကုိ ပထမ စတင္လက္ခံခဲ့တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွာ တႏိုင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြါးေရးနဲ႔ လူမႈေရးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ အေျခခံလြတ္လပ္မႈမ်ားအား ေလးစား ဘုိ႔ အမ်ားဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ဆႏၵကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ေစာစီးစြာ ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကံမေကာင္းအေၾကာင္းမလွစြာပဲ ဒီျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈဟာ အမွန္တကယ္မွာ အံ၀င္ခြင္က်မႈ မ႐ိွခဲ့ပါ။ ျမန္မာ့လူ႔အ ခြင့္အေရးမွတ္တမ္းဟာ အလြန္အမင္း စုိးရိမ္ေသာကျဖစ္စရာအေၾကာင္းအရာအေနနဲ႔ တည္႐ွိေနလ်က္ပါ။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈ၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး တုိ႔ကုိ ေျပာဆုိေနပါတယ္။
အႏွစ္ ၂၀ အတြင္း ပထမဆုံးအေနနဲ႔က်င္းပမွာျဖစ္တဲ့ လာမဲ့ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ ဂုဏ္ထယ္တင့္တယ္ေစလုိလွ်င္ အားလုံးပါ၀င္ၿပီး အျမင္ၾကည္လင္မႈ ႐ိွရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္မဲ့ခရီးမွာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိေလးစားလုိက္နာမႈ အျမစ္တြယ္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံးကုိ အျမန္ဆုံးလႊတ္ေပးရမယ္လုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးသန္းေ႐ႊနဲ႔ မေန႔ကနဲ႔ဒီေန႔ ေတြ႕ရတဲ့အခါ ေဒၚစုၾကည္ကုိေတြ႕ဘုိ႔ေတာင္းဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူကျငင္းပယ္ လုိက္တဲ့အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္မ်ားစြာစိတ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစိုးရဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပြင့္လင္းမႈရဲ႕ က႑သစ္မွာ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကိုျပသႏိုင္မဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးထူးတခု ဆုံး႐ႈံး သြားၿပီလုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ယုံၾကည္လုိက္ပါတယ္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အားေတြ႕ဆုံခြင့္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္းဟာ ၂၀၁၀ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပဲြကုိ အမ်ားယုံၾကည္လက္ခံႏိုင္မႈ ႐ိွေစေရးအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွေသာေဆာင္႐ြက္မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အစုိးရကဆႏၵ႐ိွေၾကာင္း ကိုေဖာ္ျပတဲ့ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ျပယုဂ္ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီနိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ ျပည့္၀တဲ့ ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ခြင့္အား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံးကုိ အမွန္တကယ္ ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္လုိသူမ်ားအားလုံး လြတ္လပ္တက္ႂကြစြာပါ၀င္မႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးဟာ မျပည့္စုံႏိုင္ပါ။
သက္ဆုိင္တဲ့ပုဂၢဳလ္မ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔လူနည္းစုမ်ားအားလုံးပါ၀င္တဲ့ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ စတင္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျပည္သူအမ်ားဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးမႈမွာ လြတ္လပ္စြာအေျခအတင္ေျပာႏုိင္ရမယ္၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မွာ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွစြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္ေစမဲ့ သတင္းအ ခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္စြာ သိ႐ွိရယူႏိုင္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းမႈတုိင္းဟာ ခက္ခဲလွပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ သက္ဦးဆံပုိင္စံနစ္ကေန ကုိလုိနီစံနစ္၊ အခု
တခါ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ႏိုင္ငံအျဖစ္ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သမုိင္းဟာ လတ္တေလာမွာ နာက်င္ဘြယ္ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ‘အေမြ’ႏွစ္မႊာပူးကို သေနၶေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လက္နက္ကုိင္ပဋိပကၡ နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေ႐ွ႕မတုိးသာေနာက္မဆုတ္သာအေျခအေနေတြပါ။
အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈ၊ နယ္ေျမတည္တံ့ခုိင္ၿမဲမႈ နဲ႔ အမ်ဳိးသားညီၫြတ္ေရးတုိ႔ဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတုိင္းရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ စိုးရိမ္ ေသာကမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၀န္းက်င္ကုိ ဖြင့္ေပးျခင္းနဲ႔ ခ်ဲ႕ထြင္ျခင္းဟာ ပုိမုိႀကီးမားတဲ့ စုေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းရဲ႕ အစိတ္အပုိင္းအ ျဖစ္ အုပ္စုတစုခ်င္းနဲ႔ လူတဦးခ်င္းပါ၀င္ႏိုင္မႈအတြက္ အာမခံရန္ အေကာင္းဆုံးနည္းလမ္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကၽြန္ ေတာ္တုိ႔ ရဲရဲႀကီးေျပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။
စစ္တပ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းအားလုံး၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားလူနည္းစုမ်ား၊ အမ်ားျပည္သူနဲ႔သက္ဆိုင္ေသာအဖြဲ႕အ စည္းမ်ားနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ သားသမီးတုိင္း အမွန္တကယ္ကုိ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးမွာပါ၀င္ၾကရမွာ။
အျပန္အလွန္ အေပးအယူလုပ္ၫိႇႏိႈင္းျခင္း၊ ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔ နားလည္မႈတုိ႔သာလွ်င္ ၾကာ႐ွည္တည္တ့ံမဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္း ေရး၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတုိ႔အတြက္ အေျခခံအုတ္္ျမစ္ခ်ေပးႏိုင္မွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယအမွာစကားကေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာတဲ႔လိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ ေဖာ္ျပ လုိပါတယ္။
ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚေဒသမွာျဖစ္ထြန္းခဲ့တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈမ်ားကုိ ၾကည့္ျမင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျပန္လည္ေရာက္႐ိွလာႏိုင္စြမ္း အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္၀မ္းသာလွပါတယ္။
အလုိခ်င္ဆုံးကေတာ့ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ျခင္းဟာ သီးျခားခြဲျခားထားျခင္းအေပၚ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ ႏိုင္ျခင္းရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးကုိ သက္ေသျပႏိုင္တာပဲ။
အလႉ႐ွင္အသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ကူညီပံ့ပုိးမႈျဖင့္ ‘သုံးပြင့္ဆုိင္ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအုပ္စု’အျဖစ္ ျမန္မာ၊ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ အာဆီယံတုိ႔ အတြင္း မႀကံဳစဖူးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအေရးပါျခင္းနဲ႔ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာအာဏာပုိင္မႈရဲ႕ စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းတုိ႔ဟာ ပဋိပကၡ မျဖစ္ၾကဘူးဆုိတာ သက္ေသျပသြားပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ မည္သည့္ေနရာတြင္မဆုိ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအကူအညီဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအတြက္တုန္႔ျပန္ရမဲ့ ဓားစာ ခံ မျဖစ္သင့္ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ႐ိွ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈနဲ႔ တုိးတက္မႈအေထာက္အကူမ်ား လုိအပ္ေနသူအားလုံး ရ႐ိွႏိုင္ေရးအာမခံခ်က္႐ိွေအာင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ရမယ္၊ လုပ္ကုိလုပ္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုဟာကေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ တတိယ အမွာစကားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုအခ်ိန္ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ သူရဲ႕ စီးပြါးေရးစြမ္းအင္အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ားကို ထုတ္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔အခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ ပါတယ္။
‘အာ႐ွစီးပြါးေရးအံ့ဘြယ္’ အလယ္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာရပ္တည္ေနပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံအ၀ွမ္းမွာ လ်င္ျမန္တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈ မ်ားအတြက္ ျမန္မာကုိ ‘ကႀကိဳးဆင္ေစျခင္းဟာ’ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေရးအတြက္ အေသခ်ာဆုံးနည္း လမ္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရရဲ႕ ကုန္သြယ္မႈအတြက္ ျပင္ပကိုလမ္းဖြင့္ေပးျခင္း၀ါဒ၊ ေထာင္စုဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ား ရေအာင္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈ၊ အိတ္ခ်္အုိင္ဗီြေရာဂါထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈ၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးနဲ႔ ဘိန္းထုပ္လုပ္မႈအဆုံးသတ္ ေရးတုိ႔ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ႀကိဳဆုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ အမွန္လက္ေတြ႕မွာေတာ့ ျပည္သူသန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာဟာ ဆက္လက္ဆင္းရဲေနဆဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းဟာ အာ႐ွရဲ႕ အနိမ့္ဆုံးထဲမွာပါ၀င္ေနတုန္းပါ။
ဒီျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားဟာ အလုပ္မ်ားလိုအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ စားနပ္ရိကၡာဖူလုံမႈေတြလုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ က်န္းမာေရး ေစာင့္ေ႐ွာက္ခံယူႏိုင္မႈေတြ လုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ေဒသဆုိင္ရာနဲ႔တကမၻာလုံးဆုိင္ရာ စီးပြါးေရးမွ အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ရႏိုင္ေအာင္နဲ႔ ပါ၀င္ပံ့ပုိးေပးႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို အာမခံရဘုိ႔ ကြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
တည္ၿငိမ္ၿပီး သာယာ၀ေျပာေပါႂကြယ္တဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာက အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ေတြပုိမုိရ႐ွိလာ မွာကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီရည္မွန္းခ်က္အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ရပါ့မယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရကလဲ ဒီအခ်ိန္အခါကုိ အမိအရ ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူမ်ားကုိ လက္ကမ္းရန္ျပင္ဆင္ေနသည့္ အခြင့္အလမ္း မ်ားရဲ႕ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈကုိ ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီကုိ မိတ္ေဆြတဦးအျဖစ္ေရာက္လာခဲ့တာပါ။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္တာ၀န္က ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္ရဲ႕ အေကာင္းဆုံးစံမ်ားနဲ႔စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ ထိန္းသိမ္းဘုိ႔ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အခန္းက႑ကေတာ့ သင္တုိ႔အားလုံး - အစုိးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ား၊ လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား - ကို ျပည္သူတရပ္အေနနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတခုအေနနဲ႔ အတူတကြ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္ေ႐ြ႕လ်ားဘုိ႔ အား ေပးရန္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
က႑အားလုံးရဲ႕အေပၚမွာ ျပည္သု႕အက်ဳိးကုိထား႐ွိလုိက္တဲ့အခါ မေက်ာ္လႊားႏိုင္တာ သုိ႔မဟုတ္ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္တာ ဆုိတာ မ႐ွိပါဘူး။
ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာဟာ လ်င္ျမန္စြာေျပာင္းလဲေနပါတယ္။ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းမွ၊ ၿပီးေတာ့ မိမိကိုယ္တုိင္ေျပာင္းလဲ မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ျခင္းမွ အက်ဳိးျဖစ္ထြန္းဘို႔ ျမန္မာဟာ ရပ္တည္လုိ႔သာ ေနပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ကုလသမဂၢႏဲ႔ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀ါဒရဲ႕ အေျခခံအုတ္ျမစ္ျဖစ္ တယ္လုိ႔ ထပ္ခါတလဲလဲ ေျပာလ်က္႐ွိပါတယ္။
စကားေတြနဲ႔ အလုပ္ေတြ ကုိက္ညီဘုိ႔အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိပါတယ္။
သူ႔ျပည္သူမ်ားရဲ႕လုိအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားနဲ႔ ျပင္းျပတဲ့ဆႏၵမ်ားကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ ပုိမုိပူးေပါင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္ေလ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈကုိ အခုိင္အမာျပဳႏိုင္ေလ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအတူပါပဲ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔္ရဲ႕ေ၀မွ်ခံယူထားတဲ့ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပည္သူအားလုံးရဲ႕လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔အတူ ညီၫြတ္တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီနည္းလမ္းက်တဲ့ အနာ ဂတ္အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလက္လွမ္းမွီႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကူညီရန္ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ဘုိ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္း မွာလဲ တာ၀န္႐ွိပါတယ္။
ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။
( ၂၀၀၉ ဇူလုိင္ ၄ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အစုိးရမဟုတ္ေသာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား (NGO) ၊ သံတမန္မ်ား၊ ျပည္တြင္း သတင္းေထာက္မ်ား စုစုေပါင္း ၅၀၀ ခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည့္ ဟံသာဝတီ မူးယစ္ ေဆးဝါးျပတုိက္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ၌ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ မိန္႔ခြန္းအျပည့္အစုံကုိ ျပန္ဆုိပါသည္ )
Unofficial translation
ေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္
၂၀၀၉ ၀၇ ၀၆
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
BURMA: UN Chief Speaks Out Against Lack of Human Rights
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jul 8 (IPS) - Using the power of his office, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon achieved a rare diplomatic feat during his recent visit to military-ruled Burma. He broke a taboo by delivering a public speech about the lack of democracy and human rights in the country.
So far, the notoriously prickly regime, which controls the South-east Asian nation with an iron grip, has accepted Ban's verbal thrust without an outburst. But Burma watchers wonder how long that silence will last, given the regime is known to lash out at U.N. officials who have made public statements in the country about the debilitating effects of ignoring political and civil liberties.
"Neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights," the world body's top diplomat said over the weekend to an audience of diplomats, U.N. officials and staff from aid agencies in Rangoon, the former capital. "Peace, development and human rights are closely inter-related."
"Myanmar's human rights record remains a matter of grave concern," Ban added, using the name of the country that the junta opts for, instead of Burma. "Myanmar's way forward must be rooted in respect for human rights."
Ban's speech, on the last of his two-day stay in Burma, also touched on the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has spent over 14 years either under house arrest or in Rangoon's Insein Prison. He called for the release of the Nobel Peace laureate and the over 2,100 political prisoners languishing in Burmese jails.
"Aung San Suu Kyi must be allowed to participate in the political process without further delay," Ban said after being denied a chance to meet the 64-year-old Suu Kyi, currently being held in the Insein Prison as part of a bizarre trial after a U.S. citizen showed up as an uninvited guest in her home in early May after he swam there across a lake.
Little wonder why Ban's critical comments - which shatter the illusion being created by the regime that it is on the right track as part of its "roadmap to democracy," including a planned general election in 2010 - is being welcomed in some quarters.
In the past, the junta has not been kind to the far less provocative and milder comments about the shortcomings of the regime's model for democracy and the humanitarian situation made by Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. special envoy to Burma, and Charles Petrie, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the country.
Gambari was given a dressing down by Information Minister Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan in March last year for comments the Nigerian diplomat made about flaws in the "democratic" political process being pushed by the junta. Gambari said that the U.N. wanted this push, including the new constitution, to be inclusive, accommodating the opposition.
Petrie paid a different price for speaking his mind in a press release issued in October 2007. The junta refused to renew his visa, prompting an early departure from his post, after the head of the United Nations Development Programme deplored the "deteriorating humanitarian situation" in the country
The regime described that statement as "unprecedented" and "very negative."
But by going many steps further, Ban's speech is being described as "encouraging" by the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the democratically elected government forced into exile after the regime refused to recognised the results of the 1990 general elections.
"This is the first time that someone has been so openly critical about the reality in Burma," says Bo Hla Tint, the foreign minister of the NCGUB. "It was important for Mr. Ban to tell the regime how the U.N. sees the problem in Burma."
"The U.N. secretary-general's role is important to bring change in Burma," the minister in the exile government told IPS. "It has to be part of a long serious political process, and not just a one-time event."
The personal commitment shown by Ban to usher in an open and inclusive democratic culture in Burma is being well received by the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-member regional bloc of which Burma is a member.
"The prime minister, as the chair of ASEAN, supports the U.N. secretary-general's trip to Myanmar and he wants to ensure that the U.N. keeps engaging the Myanmar government," said Panitan Wattanayagorn, the acting spokesman for the Thai government. "We will see from this point onwards what more can be done now that the U.N. secretary-general has delivered his message."
Such a regional response marks a departure from the harsh comments by Western governments that saw Ban's trip as a failure, achieving barely any concessions from the junta. A key to this dismissive stance was Ban being denied access to meet Suu Kyi.
"Although we know that expectations among some in the international community was very high and they wanted the secretary-general to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, it is not fair to say the mission was a failure because the meeting did not take place," added Panitan in an interview. "The issues are much more complex and beyond this single issue."
But for the current U.N. engagement to achieve political reform in Burma more is required, say human rights groups that have continued to expose the litany of abuse in a country that has been under the grip of successive military regimes since a 1962 coup.
"Setting the standards through a speech is the easiest thing to do; achieving the standards is the difficult part," says David Scott Mathieson, Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights watchdog. "That is where the hard work and effort is going to be." "The average person in Burma will find Ban's speech patronising," Mathieson told IPS. "They expect more from the U.N." (END/2009)
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
North Korea and Burma – Sharing Nukes?
Alanna Shaikh - July 6, 2009 - 12:12pm
* Non-Proliferation
Well, this certainly scares me. North Korea and Burma are growing increasingly close. The two countries re-established diplomatic relations in 2007, and they’ve been growing closer ever since. According to the Bangkok Post, a high-level military delegation from North Korea was in Rangoon in November 2008, where they signed a memorandum of understanding on military cooperation. There are reports from the Democratic Voice of Burma news service that North Korean advisors are supporting construction of a network of underground tunnels throughout Burma. According to DVB, the tunnels are large enough to drive trucks through, constructed to withstand attacks, and intended to house munitions factories.
The fear is, of course, that North Korea is exporting weapons to Burma. Especially nuclear weapons. That is not an unfounded fear. According to the US Treasury, North Korea has already exported weaponry to several Middle Eastern and African states, including Syria, as well as Taiwan and Iran. And the missile tests that took place on the fourth remind us that North Korea remains committed to proving its military prowess to the world.
http://www.undispat ch.com/node/ 8547
Ban—Empty-handed But Wiser
The Irrawaddy - EDITORIAL:
Monday, July 6, 2009
Although he left Burma empty-handed without any visible sign of progress or concession from the Burmese junta, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit was by no means pointless.
Through his official visit to the military-ruled country he should have discovered a deeper understanding of how far the international community—under the name of the United Nations—can expect to go in its current mission to facilitate democratization in Burma through national reconciliation.
Ban's talks with the Naypyidaw regime—and primarily junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe—focused on three important issues: gaining the release of all political prisoners including democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi; resumption of dialogue between the military government and its opposition; and creating the conditions for credible elections.
The UN secretary-general’s hopes were quickly dashed. He was even refused a visit with detained opposition leader Suu Kyi.
However, in forcing Than Shwe to show his cards, Ban is left in no doubts as to what degree of flexibility the regime might be prepared to go to—none.
The UN chief had no qualms about publicly criticizing Burma’s military rulers before he left from the country. "I believe the government of Myanmar [Burma] has lost a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of political openness," he said in an emotive speech at Rangoon’s Drug Elimination Museum to 500 state officials, diplomats, INGO staff and local pressmen.
Of course, no one expected much from the visit, and observers noted once again that the junta would manipulate it for propaganda purposes. But at least Ban should have earned the respect of the international community for confronting the junta and for speaking the truth.
Now the gloves are off and Ban can concentrate more forcefully on what he has called "a very tough mission."
At a pit stop in the Thai capital, Bangkok, Ban met with Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, and told reporters that to show his commitment to moving the Burma issue forward, his special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, will shortly convene the so-called Group of Friends on Myanmar, a gathering of countries supporting greater dialogue.
However, Ban must now know that words without teeth will not worry the Burmese generals.
Naypyidaw has proved to the world that no matter how many resolutions the UN passes—even dragging Burma before the 15-nation UN Security Council—the junta will not willingly release the 2,100 political prisoners in the country, least of all Suu Kyi.
We will all be closely watching the UN secretary-general’s next step.
Ban’s visit may not have achieved any visible outcome, but the people of Burma will remember what he promised: "I have come to show the unequivocal shared commitment of the United Nations to the people of Myanmar. I am here today to say: Myanmar – you are not alone."
BURMA-Despite Humiliation, Ban Irked the Generals
The Irrawaddy
By WAI MOE, Monday, July 6, 2009
Local reporters who covered the fruitless two-day visit to Burma by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon say that although he was humiliated by junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe, his candid message to the generals would have irked them.
Before leaving Burma empty-handed, Ban told INGO staffers and local reporters that the cost of delaying national reconciliation in Burma would be counted in wasted lives and lost opportunities.
“Nonetheless, the primary responsibility lies with the government to move the country towards its stated goals of national reconciliation and democracy,” Ban said. Failure to do so would prevent the Burmese people from realizing their full potential, such as their right to live in dignity, and to enjoy better standards of life in a broader freedom, he said.
Ban said he had called for the release of political prisoners, including pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, because Burmese stability, national reconciliation and democracy must be rooted in respect for human rights.
“When I met General Than Shwe yesterday [Friday] and today [Saturday], I asked to visit Ms Suu Kyi. I am deeply disappointed that he refused,” Ban said. “I believe the government of Myanmar [Burma] has lost a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of political openness.
“Allowing a visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would have been an important symbol of the government’s willingness to embark on the kind of meaningful engagement that will be essential if the elections in 2010 are to be seen as credible.”
Ban Ki- moon will brief the UN Security Council on his visit.
“I would like ask him to describe the situation exactly,” Win Tin, a prominent leader of the NLD told The Irrawaddy..
“The international community must know the real situation in the country,” he said.
Burma, like North Korea, should be subjected to an arms embargo as a means of pressure on the regime to change course, Win Tin said.
Ban should also talk with Russia and China, who customarily use their vetoes to stall UN Security Council action on Burma, he said—and urged action by the international community to pressure the regime to release political prisoners and agree to a national reconciliation process.
Commenting on Ban Ki-moon’s remarks after his Burma visit, Win Tin said he hoped the secretary-general’s words would be followed by real action. “I hope Mr Ban Ki-moon’s speech will not end just in Rangoon,” he said.
Burma’s state-run-newspaper s reported on the meetings between Ban and Than Shwe but did not publish Ban’s remark.
According to The New Light of Myanmar, Than Shwe told Ban that he would like to arrange a meeting with Suu Kyi but could not do so because she was on trial.
Than Shwe told Ban that Burma is focusing on two important tasks: holding elections in 2010 and forming the future government. There was no possibility now to pay attention to any personal cases, he told Ban.
Observers say that Than Shwe’s rejection of Ban’s request to meet Suu Kyi was a humiliation for the UN.
“There was never much chance that Mr Ban would succeed at gaining freedom for Mrs Suu Kyi or the other political prisoners,” Thailand’s Bangkok Post wrote in an editorial on Monday. “Nor was there a chance that the generals would heed the prestige of the UN and switch from brutal dictatorship to democracy.”
Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network (Altsean), said the junta humiliated Ban because the Burmese generals assumed they would not be subject to any real pressure, sanctions and punishment for this behavior.
“I think if we want to stop the violation of human rights in Burma and war in Burma, it is time for the UNSC to take action on the junta,” she said. “At least the UNSC should have the commission inquire into war crimes and crimes against humanity that the State and Peace Development Council is afraid of.”
Monday, July 6, 2009
Victory over KNU, new order on Thai-Burma border
Mizzima News -
by Brian McCartan
Sunday, 05 July 2009 21:20
Mae Sot, Thailand (Mizzima) - The victory of the Burmese Army and its proxy, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), in attacks on bases of the Karen National Union (KNU) last month, puts the regime in firm control of a major portion of its border with Thailand for the first time in 60 years. Success brings with it a whole new order of forces along the border.
Burmese and DKBA forces took the border camps of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the armed wing of the KNU, after a month-long battle in June. The fighting was relatively light with many of the 200 Burmese and DKBA casualties the result of landmines. Fighting, the threat of landmines and fear of being taken as porters by the attackers resulted in over 3,500 Karen villagers fleeing their homes to take refuge on the Thai side of the border.
The Burmese regime and the DKBA have big plans for the border now that it is under their control. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has long aimed to establish several economic zones along the stretch of the border from Myawaddy north to the confluence of the Salween and Moei Rivers. One of these special economic zones is slated for construction on the outskirts of Myawaddy and another to the east of the township capital of Hlaing Bwe.
Past Thai governments have given their verbal support for these plans, although little money has of yet been put into them. Now that the area is in firmer control and the threat from the KNLA reduced, the economic zone plans may be dusted off again. Burma hopes to entice Thai investment and develop an otherwise economically poor area, while Thailand sees the economic zones as a way of using cheap Burmese labour without having to deal with a large influx of migrant workers. At one point, the area around Hlaing Bwe was also seen as a potential repatriation point for Karen refugees in the Mae La refugee camp.
A component of the DKBA’s acceptance of the junta’s border guard programme is that the DKBA will be allowed to keep, and possibly even expand, its economic activities. Although details of the concessions are still unclear, notes from internal DKBA meetings in May and June seen by Mizzima, indicate that the DKBA is moving some of its tax gates and setting up new units as a part of a major expansion. Certain officers, including Colonel Maw Tho who is already heavily involved in legal and black market trade with Thailand from his base in Myawaddy, will be reassigned to specifically economic activities.
A greatly expanded DKBA taking control of a large portion of the border is likely to make Thai security officials nervous. Following the fall of the KNU headquarters at Manerplaw in January 1995, DKBA troops carried out a reign of terror along the border, burning refugee camps, kidnapping and sometimes killing Karen and Thai civilians, looting Thai shops along the border and even attacking Thai army and police forces. Although the attacks largely stopped in 1998, occasional incursions have taken place since.
This year DKBA incursions increased as it made itself felt along the border. In January 2009, DKBA troops burned down field huts, stole livestock and looted houses along the border in Umphang district of Tak province. During and immediately following the recent attacks on the KNLA’s 7th Brigade, Karen sources say DKBA troops crossed the border several times to demand rations for their troops and to eat and drink in local shops around Mae Salit.
An ambush on June 26 on the Moei River that killed five DKBA soldiers including Colonel San Pyone and wounded another 20 has many Karen worried about possible retaliatory attacks. San Pyone is widely believed to have been the leader and triggerman in the assassination of KNU General Secretary Mahn Sha La Phan on Valentine’s Day last year. The KNLA military officers claim it was not a revenge attack because they have no troops in the area. This leaves open the possibility of involvement of the KNU/KNLA Peace Council, another splinter Karen group, the SPDC or Thai security forces. Whoever carried out the attack, the incident shows that despite greater DKBA and government control, stability is far from assured.
The transformation of the DKBA into a border guard under the central command of the Burmese Army may bring some stability, even if it costs the regime a scapegoat for cross-border incursions. The SPDC has been careful in the past to blame all cross-border attacks on the DKBA and say that it has very little influence on the group’s actions. Recent fighting against the KNLA’s 7th Brigade was described in the state-run media as Karen-on-Karen fighting. With the DKBA’s transformation into a border guard force within the Burmese Army, this pretext will no longer be possible.
One area Thai security forces will be keen to keep a watch on is the effect greater territorial control and legitimization as a unit of the Burmese military will have on the DKBA’s drug trafficking activities. Karen military sources allege the DKBA operates several amphetamine, or yaba, laboratories in areas near the border. While DKBA production and trafficking activities are not at the same level as groups such as the United Wa State Army (UWSA) in Shan State, Thai narcotics officials and opposition sources say the DKBA moves both yaba and heroin through its border camps near Myawaddy and Three Pagodas Pass. The group’s transformation into a border guard unit would make the military regime directly complicit in any continued drug activities.
Recent media reports describing the KNU as all but finished following the loss of its border camps last month are rather premature. KNLA sources say that they intend to continue to operate as guerrilla units in north central Karen State. The loss of the central border region, however, will make it harder for the KNU to communicate and supply its units as well as arrange supplies for villagers and internally displaced villagers that it cares for. The KNLA still has the bulk of its forces in northern Karen State as wells as in parts of Pegu Division and Mon State as well as maintains forces in areas of southern Karen State and Tenasserim Division.
Within Karen State itself, firmer control by the DKBA and Burmese government means that many Karen who still sympathize with the aims of the KNU will now be forced to work with the new rulers. Human rights monitors in the area for several years have said the greater DKBA presence has made their work much more dangerous. DKBA threats of retribution have made many villagers afraid to speak out about abuses.
A KNU source says that greater DKBA control will have little effect on Karen representation in the 2010 elections. The DKBA is different from other ethnic insurgent groups in that it has no political wing. Minutes of a May 7 meeting of DKBA commanders indicate that the DKBA has been told they may participate in politics, but in order to do so, DKBA members, or any other Karen, must either form a new political party or contest the election as an individual. KNU source, however, say it is irrelevant since the SPDC has already decided who the winning candidates are.
The KNU’s position in central Karen State has certainly been greatly weakened by the loss of its border camps last month. Whether firmer government and DKBA control of the area will translate into greater peace and development for the local population is far from clear. Fighting with the KNU in this area may be almost over, but new border tensions may only be beginning.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
UN secretary general plans to meet Aung San Suu Kyi: Official
July 1st, 2009
YANGON - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is likely to meet Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his visit to the country later this week, an official said Wednesday.
“He (Ban Ki-moon) is supposed to meet Aung San Suu Kyi when he arrives here but we cannot definitely tell his schedule,” said an official who requested anonymity.
Ban is scheduled to visit Myanmar Friday and Saturday at the official invitation of the ruling junta.
He is expected to meet the country’s most powerful man, Senior General Than Shwe, head of the State Peace and Development Council, as Myanmar’s junta styles itself, officials said.
Besides Suu Kyi and Than Shwe, Ban also plans to meet with political parties and ethnic groups and travel to the Irrawaddy delta region that was devastated by Cyclone Nargis on May 2-3 last year, killing up to 150,000 people.
Ban last visited Myanmar in May 2008 to hasten international aid to the country, whose military rulers are notoriously paranoid about western interference in their internal affairs.
Ban’s talks with Myanmar’s senior leadership are expected to focus on a plea for the release of all political prisoners including Suu Kyi; resumption of dialogue between the government and opposition; and the need to create conditions conducive to credible elections planned in 2010.
“The secretary general believes that the sooner these issues are addressed, the earlier Myanmar will be able to move towards peace, democracy and prosperity. He looks forward to meeting all key stakeholders to discuss what further assistance the United Nations can offer to that end,” a UN statement said.
The first day of Ban’s visit will coincide with the resumption of the trial of Suu Kyi on charges of violating her house arrest, by allowing a US citizen to swim to her lakeside residence in Yangon.
Suu Kyi’s trial, being held at a special court set up in Yangon’s Insein Prison, is scheduled to resume Friday with testimony from defence witness Khin Moe Moe, an attorney.
The trial began May 11. While the prosecution was allowed to present 14 witnesses in the first week, the defence was initially allowed only one. Later, Khin Moe Moe was permitted to testify.
Critics say the military junta is using the case as a pretext to keep the 1991 Nobel peace laureate in jail during a politically sensitive period, leading up to next year’s general election.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won the 1990 general election by a landslide but has been blocked from power by Myanmar’s junta for the past 19 years.
The new trial of Suu Kyi, whose most recent six-year house arrest sentence expired May 27, has sparked a chorus of protests from world leaders and statements of concern from its regional allies in the Association of South-East Asian Nations.
ASEAN – toothless but with a “sharp tongue”?
http://theonlinecitizen.com/2009/07/asean-toothless-but-with-a-sharp-tongue/
Wednesday, 1 July 2009, 4:47 pm | 190 views
ASEAN ministers are expected to endorse the setting up of an ASEAN Human Rights Commission in July when they meet for the 42nd ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. Civil society groups in the region, however, have expressed concerns that the commission would be all form and no substance, without any power to intervene if a member country violated these rights.
Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr George Yeo, was reported by the local media in July 2008 as having said:
“Whether or not the human rights body we establish will have teeth I don’t know. But it will certainly have a tongue, and I hope it will have a sharp tongue.” (MFA)
The following is a report, headlined “Toothless rights body would hurt ASEAN group”, from the Philippine Daily Inquirer:
Leila Salaverria
BANGKOK—As the target date for launching the ASEAN human rights body (AHRB) nears, civil society groups have warned depriving it of watchdog powers would erode the credibility of the regional organization.
The warning came amid concerns over Burma’s (Myanmar’s) renewed crackdown on democracy fighter Aung San Suu Kyi and Thailand’s refusal to accept thousands of Burmese refugees fleeing from military rule.
About 200 civil society groups and individuals have endorsed a letter urging the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to give the AHRB the power to investigate complaints of abuses, conduct country visits and review the human rights situation in the region.
The letter, addressed to a panel drafting the AHRB’s terms of reference (TOR), also calls for the appointment of independent experts to the body.
The terms of reference, which detail the AHRB’s powers and duties, are expected to be adopted in July at the 42nd ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. The AHRB itself is to be formally launched in October.
The draft TOR has not been made public but journalists who have seen it say that while it focuses on promoting human rights, it gives no power to the AHRB to investigate and prosecute.
The TOR is expected to maintain ASEAN’s adherence to its noninterference policy, which some members have invoked to ward off criticisms of their rights records.
The civil society groups warned that a human rights body with no protection powers or independent experts would not fulfill its pledge to respect fundamental freedoms, protect human rights, and promote social justice.
“This would reflect badly on ASEAN as being unable to live up to the spirit of its own Charter and further dent the credibility of ASEAN in the eyes of the international community for setting up a substandard regional human rights mechanism as compared to those in the African, Inter-American and European systems,” the June 22 letter said.
The letter was cosigned by the Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy Task Force on ASEAN and Human Rights and the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (Forum-Asia).
Indonesia’s example
Forum-Asia underscored the importance of having competent experts in the AHRB, saying they could make the body relevant to beleaguered peoples.
They could also help the AHRB initiate actions to reduce human rights problems even with a limited mandate, Forum-Asia’s Yuyun Wahyuningrum, program manager for East Asia, told the Inquirer.
Wahyuningrum said it was vital that the people manning the AHRB would not be afraid to contradict the government line, if necessary.
She said this was the case with Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission which, although created by then President Suharto, did not become a government mouthpiece but criticized abuses and tried to curb them.
First time
Former ASEAN Secretary General Rodolfo Severino of the Philippines said the establishment of the body was a step forward.
“For the first time, ASEAN will have a body concerned with human rights. This is an advance. It certainly will not have powers of ’enforcement’ in an association of sovereign states, but it can bring opinion to bear on egregious violations of human rights,” Severino said in an email interview.
He pointed out there was no transnational human rights body anywhere with the power to punish or protect.
Dr. Termsak Chalermpalanupap, ASEAN’s director of Political and Security Directorate, said in an article the AHRB mandate includes protection and promotion of human rights but would focus on protection first.
He said its functions could evolve over time and the body “is merely the new beginning.”
No biting
Responding to claims that the AHRB would be toothless, Chalermpalanupap said the body was not intended to have teeth or to function as an independent watchdog.
“The AHRB shall operate through consultation and consensus, with firm respect for sovereign equality of all Member States. Good points can be made and constructive actions can be agreed upon in friendly discussion and persuasion. No ‘biting’ is ever required,” Chalermpalanupap said.
As for concerns that the noninterference principle would hamper AHRB’s functions, he said the ASEAN charter also speaks of collective responsibility in enhancing peace, security and prosperity in the region, and of enhanced consultation on common concerns.
Wahyuningrum said noninterference could not be invoked when it came to crimes against humanity, genocide and humanitarian cases.
She said ASEAN members were signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in signing such conventions, they gave up part of their sovereignty.
(This article was written under the 2009 Southeast Asian Press Alliance fellowship)
—–
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
ミサイル開発装置不正輸出、あて先はミャンマー軍傘下の組織
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/feature/20080115-899562/news/20090630-OYT1T00623.htm
北朝鮮系貿易商社が長距離弾道ミサイル開発に必要な磁気測定装置をミャンマーに輸出しようとした外為法違反事件で、装置はミャンマー陸軍傘下の組織「防衛産業理事会（ＤＤＩ）」に届けられようとしていたことが３０日、神奈川県警の調べで分かった。捜査関係者が明らかにした。
北朝鮮の指示を受けた貿易商社社長らが不正輸出を図ったとみられており、県警は、ミャンマー軍事政権にミサイル技術を拡散させようとしていた裏付けとみて捜査している。
捜査関係者によると、北朝鮮系貿易商社「東興貿易」（東京都新宿区）が２００８年９月、磁気測定装置をミャンマー第２工業省に輸出しようとした際、防衛産業理事会の通称名「ＤＤＩ」のマークが箱に付いていた。
また、東興貿易が今年１月にマレーシア経由で輸出しようとした装置の箱にも「ＤＤＩ」のマークがあった。
ミャンマーは、１９８８年に成立した軍事政権が軍の強化を進めており、現在の兵力は社会主義時代の約３倍にあたる約５０万人。武器の調達は、小銃などの基本装備を中国、戦闘機を中国とロシア、軍事用ＩＴ機器をシンガポールから輸入しているとみられている。
一方、ミサイルについては、ミサイル関連技術輸出規制（ＭＴＣＲ）で国際的に技術の輸出が禁止されている。このため、ミャンマー軍事政権がＭＴＣＲに加盟していない北朝鮮から入手を図った可能性が高いとみられている。
（2009年6月30日16時03分 読売新聞）
3 HELD OVER EXPORT BID OF DPRK MISSILE KNOW HOW TO MYANMAR
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20090630TDY01304.htm
The Yomiuri Shimbun
YOKOHAMA--Kanagawa prefectural police arrested three people Monday over an attempt to illegally export to Myanmar a magnetic measuring device believed necessary for developing long-range ballistic missile systems on instructions from North Korea, the police said.
Arrested on suspicion of violating the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law were Lee Kyoung Ho, 41, of Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, president of trading firm Toko Boeki; Miaki Katsuki, 75, of Setagaya Ward, president of a manufacturing firm; and Yasuhiko Muto, 57, of Nerima Ward, president of an export agency.
The police initially thought the company was trying to export the device to North Korea itself via Myanmar, but they then found out the content of the order from a North Korea-aligned Hong Kong-based firm.
As the police now suspect the firm has exported other missile development-related equipment to Myanmar, they believe North Korea was attempting to promote the transfer of missile technologies, such as its Taepodong system, to Myanmar.
The Yomiuri Shimbun
YOKOHAMA--Kanagawa prefectural police arrested three people Monday over an attempt to illegally export to Myanmar a magnetic measuring device believed necessary for developing long-range ballistic missile systems on instructions from North Korea, the police said.
Arrested on suspicion of violating the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law were Lee Kyoung Ho, 41, of Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, president of trading firm Toko Boeki; Miaki Katsuki, 75, of Setagaya Ward, president of a manufacturing firm; and Yasuhiko Muto, 57, of Nerima Ward, president of an export agency.
The police initially thought the company was trying to export the device to North Korea itself via Myanmar, but they then found out the content of the order from a North Korea-aligned Hong Kong-based firm.
As the police now suspect the firm has exported other missile development-related equipment to Myanmar, they believe North Korea was attempting to promote the transfer of missile technologies, such as its Taepodong system, to Myanmar.
According to the police, the three conspired to export the magnetic measuring device to Myanmar via Malaysia around January 2009 at a price of about 7 million yen without seeking approval from the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry.
Export of the device is restricted under the so-called Catch-all Control that prohibits exports of products that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.
Previously, around September 2008, the company had also tried to export the same instrument to Myanmar's Second Industry Ministry. Both attempts to export the device were aborted immediately before shipment when METI notified the company that it had failed to submit an export application.
According to investigation sources, the prefectural police have analyzed material they seized during a search of Toko Boeki in February this year.
The illegal export attempts to Myanmar were based on an order by the Beijing office of New East International Trading Ltd. based in Hong Kong around spring 2008. The firm is believed to be under the direct control of the Second Economic Committee of Pyongyang's Workers' Party of Korea. The committee is responsible for the party's military procurement.
The company's Pyongyang office has been included in a METI-announced blacklist of companies believed to have been involved in the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Diplomatic ties between Myanmar and North Korea were severed after a 1983 terrorist attack by North Korean agents in Yangon, but the two countries resumed ties in 2007. In 2004 a high-ranking U.S. government official revealed that North Korea had proposed the sale of missiles to Myanmar.
(Jun. 30, 2009)
How high carbohydrate foods can raise risk for heart problems
Tel Aviv, 29 June —
Doctors have known for decades that too much
carbohydrate-laden foods like white bread and corn
flakes can be detrimental to cardiac health. In a
landmark study, new research from Tel Aviv
University now shows exactly how these high
carb foods increase the risk for heart problems.
“Looking inside” the arteries of students eating
a variety of foods, Dr. Michael Shechter of Tel
Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and
the Heart Institute of Sheba Medical Center —
with collaboration of the Endocrinology Institute
— visualized exactly what happens inside the body
when the wrong foods for a healthy heart are eaten.
He found that foods with a high glycemic index
distended brachial arteries for several hours.
Elasticity of arteries anywhere in the body can
be a measure of heart health. But when
aggravated over time, a sudden expansion of the
artery wall can cause a number of negative health
effects, including reduced elasticity, which can cause
heart disease or sudden death.—Internet
高炭水化物食品をどのようにすることができます
心の問題の危険性を高める
テルアビブ、 6月29日-
医師の知っている
数十年が過ぎる
炭水化物を多く含んだ食品
白パンやトウモロコシのような
フレーク支障が出ることができます
心臓の健康に。一で
画期的な研究では、新しい
テルアビブから研究
大学の今を示して
まさにこのような高
炭水化物食品の増加
心臓病の危険性。
"探し"を内部に
学生の食事の動脈
食品、博士は様々な
マイケルShechter電話
Aviv大学のサックラー
医学部と
ハート研究所
シバ医療センター-
とのコラボレーション
内分泌研究所
-正確に可視化が
体の内部に発生する
食品の場合、間違った
健康な心臓を食べている。
彼が見つかりましたが、食品と
高血糖インデックス
膨張した上腕動脈
数時間。
動脈の弾力性
体内のどこにでもすることができます
心の尺度になる
健康。しかし、
時間以上の悪化を
の急拡大
動脈壁を引き起こす可能性があります
負の数の健康
などの効果、縮小
弾力性を引き起こす可能性があります
心臓病や突然の
死。
Supreme Court (Yangon) pronounced the order to confirm Yangon Division Court’s order dated 9 June and dismiss the Criminal Revision Case. (DAW SU)
THE NEW LIGHT OF MYANMAR Tuesday, 30 June, 2009
YANGON, 29 June—Final statements of both sides
were heard at Supreme Court (Yangon) on 24 June for
Criminal Revision Case No 333 (b)/2009 filed by
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw Khin Khin Win and Ma
Win Ma Ma in dissatisfaction with Yangon Division
Court’s order of confirming Yangon North District
Court’s order of refusing nomination of defence
witnesses U Win Tin and U Tin Oo in Yangon North
District Court’s Criminal Case No 47/2009 against
US citizen Mr John William Yettaw, Daw Aung San
Suu Kyi, Daw Khin Khin Win and Ma Win Ma Ma.
Supreme Court (Yangon) pronounced the
judgment on the Criminal Revision Case at 10 am
today.
In the judgment, Supreme Court (Yangon) said
that the lawsuit against applicant No (1) Daw Aung
San Suu Kyi was filed under Section (22) of the Law
to Safeguard the State Against the Dangers of Those
Desiring to Cause Subversive Acts; that the Section is
to take action if a person against whom action is taken
opposes, breaches or fails to abide by the restriction
order (or) prohibition order; that Daw Aung San Suu
Kyi just needs to argue, providing an evidence that
she did not oppose or breach the restriction order (or)
prohibition order in the trial filed by the initial court;
that the lawyer of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in the case
said that the witnesses they nominated were important
for the judgment, U Tin Oo, for instance, was
nominated as he was assumed to be a witness capable
of giving profound statements that action should not
be taken under the Law to Safeguard the State Against
the Dangers of Those Desiring to Cause Subversive
Acts; that according to the provision of Section (7) of
that Law, the provision is that the cabinet is authorized
to pass an order, as may be necessary, restricting any
fundamental right, not the provision that action is
Supreme Court (Yangon) dismisses criminal revision case for
refusing nomination of two defence witnesses in trial against
US citizen Mr John William Yettaw, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
Daw Khin Khin Win and Ma Win Ma Ma
taken in accordance with the judiciary or judicial trend;
that therefore, it is to be assumed that there is no need
to take into consideration the statements of the lawyer
of the applicants; that the lawyer of the applicants also
demanded that U Win Tin and U Tin Oo should be
examined as defence witnesses regarding political
character of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi; that the
explanation of the provision of Section 55 of the
Evidence Law says that the term “character” stipulated
in Sections 52, 53, 54 and 55 comprises both reputation
and disposition; that according to the explanation,
there is no provision in the Evidence Law that says
there is the right to nominate a witness regarding
political character; that in view of the statements given
by the witnesses in the case of the initial court, there is
not any argument regarding character or political
character of applicant Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the
accused of the initial court; that therefore the character
of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi does not attract any argument
in the initial case; that according to the documents of
the file of the initial court, applicant Daw Aung San
Suu Kyi, the accused of the initial court, was examined
as the accused, not as a witness in the court; that so it
can be deduced that the application for examining U
Win Tin and U Tin Oo as defence witnesses for
character of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is particularly
intended to disrupt and delay the case; that the district
court refused to summon and examine U Win Tin and
U Tin Oo as defence witnesses in accordance with the
provision of Section 257 (1) of Code of Criminal
Procedure; that the lawyer of the applicants publicly
admitted that the judge of the district court pronounced
an order according to Section 257 (1) of Code of
Criminal Procedure; that Yangon Division Court
reviewed that it dismissed the revision case as it is
designed to delay the trial as evidenced by the
documents of the initial court, although the initial
court’s order does not enumerate, in accordance with
Section 257 (1) of Code of Criminal Procedure, the
reason of why the nomination of three defence
witnesses was refused; that however, it cannot be said
that the review of the division court is wrong; that the
lawyer of the applicants submitted that the division
court pronounced an order “it is right according to
Paragraph 1115 of Manual to Courts” and it did so
without any authority bestowed on it; that it is
required to find out whether his statement is right
or not; that with daily records, stating in brief the
reason of refusing the nomination, the district court
pronounced the order to refuse the nomination of
defence witnesses, according to Paragraphs 1115
and 1116 of Manual to Court, and the court
procedure, so it is not wrong; that it is virtually
illogical to say that the division court’s confirmation
of the district court’s daily records, referring to
Paragraph 1115 of Manual to Courts, is beyond its
authority; that therefore, it is assumed that the
criminal revision case to summon and examine U
Win Tin and U Tin Oo as defence witnesses is
intended to hinder and delay the trial because they
just wanted to submit a subject that does not need
any argument in the case; that the district court’s
order to refuse to summon and examine U Win Tin
and U Tin Oo as defence witnesses, and the division
court’s confirmation of the district court’s order
are in accordance with the law; and that therefore
making a deduction that the Supreme Court does
not need to intervene in the case with the authority
to revise the orders of the district and division
courts, it pronounced the order to confirm Yangon
Division Court’s order dated 9 June and dismiss
the Criminal Revision Case.—MNA
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Israel launches world’s first hybrid solar power station
Photo takenon 24 June,2009 showsthe solarreceiver ofthe world’sfirst hybrid
solar thermalgas turbinepower stationat KibbutzSamar insouthernIsrael.
XINHUA
KIBBUTZ SAMAR, 25 June — AORA,
A leading Israeli solar energy technology company,launched Wednesday world’s first hybrid
solar thermal power station at KibbutzSamar in southern Israel.
This marked the first time that concentratingsolar power (CSP) stations can provide
environmentally-friendly power 24hours a day, according to AORA’s CEO,
Haim Fried. AORA’s “Power Flower” station, named due to its unique yellow tulip design, consists of a field of 30 tracking mirrors (heliostats) situated on half an acre of land.
Each of the station’s 30 heliostats tracks the sun and reflects its rays towards the top
of a 30 meter-high tower housing a special solar receiver along with a 100 kilowatt gas
turbine. The patented receiver uses the solar energy to heat air to a temperature of 1,000
degrees Celsius and directs this energy into the turbine, which converts the thermal energy
into electric power that will be fed directly into the national grid.
Xinhua
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Trial-YANGON, 26 June
YANGON, 26 June—Judges sat for Criminal Cases Nos 47/2009, 48/
2009, and 49/2009 filed against US citizen Mr John William Yettaw, Daw Aung
San Suu Kyi, Daw Khin Khin Win and Ma Win Ma Ma at Yangon North District
Court this morning.
In the process, Supreme Court (Yangon), in relation to its Criminal
Revision Case No 333 (B)/2009, summoned Criminal Case No 47/2009 of
Yangon North District Court. So, Yangon North District Court was in no position
to continue Criminal Case No 47/2009.
Therefore, Yangon North District Court, in order to question defence
witness Daw Khin Moe Moe, put off Criminal Case No 47/2009 to 3 July
together with Criminal Cases Nos 48/2009 and 49/2009.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Michael Jackson, the 'King of Pop,' dies at age 50
အသားအေရာင္နဲ ့လူမ်ိဳးခဲြျခားမႈကို သူ ့နည္းသူ ့ဟန္နဲ ့အသက္ဆုံးတိုင္ တိုက္ပဲြဝင္သြားတဲ့ ေပါ့ဘုရင္ကိုဦးညႊတ္ဂုဏ္ျပဳပါတယ္။
I solute you and god bless you.
ုဘုန္းလိႈင္-FWUBC
Autopsy set after Michael Jackson's sudden death
Remembering the 'King of Pop'
Slideshow:Michael Jackson dies at 50 Play Video Video:Jermaine Jackson: Want privacy in 'tough time' AP Play Video Video:Sights and Sounds: Remembering the 'King of Pop' AP AP – FILE - In this Aug. 29, 1993 file photo, pop singer Michael Jackson performs during his 'Dangerous' concert … By LYNN ELBER, Associated Press Writer Lynn Elber, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 7 mins ago
LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson, defined in equal parts as the world's greatest entertainer and perhaps its most enigmatic figure, was about to attempt one of the greatest comebacks of all time. Then his life was cut shockingly — and so far, mysteriously — short.
The 50-year-old musical superstar died Thursday, just as he was preparing for what would be a series of 50 concerts starting July 13 at London's famed 02 arena. Jackson had been spending hours and hours toiling with a team of dancers for a performance he and his fans hoped would restore his tarnished legacy to its proper place in pop.
An autopsy was planned for Friday, though results were not likely to be final until toxicology tests could be completed, a process that could take several days and sometimes weeks. However, if a cause can be determined by the autopsy, they will announce the results, said Los Angeles County Coroner Investigator Jerry McKibben.
Police said they were investigating, standard procedure in high-profile cases.
Jackson died at UCLA Medical Center after being stricken at his rented home in the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him at his home for nearly three-quarters of an hour, then rushed him to the hospital, where doctors continued to work on him.
"It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. However, the cause of his death is unknown until results of the autopsy are known," his brother Jermaine said.
Cardiac arrest is an abnormal heart rhythm that stops the heart from pumping blood to the body. It can occur after a heart attack or be caused by other heart problems.
Jackson's death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.
His 1982 album "Thriller" — which included the blockbuster hits "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" — is the best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 50 million copies sold worldwide.
As word of his death spread, MTV switched its programming to play videos from Jackson's heyday. Radio stations began playing marathons of his hits. Hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital. In New York's Times Square, a low groan went up in the crowd when a screen flashed that Jackson had died, and people began relaying the news to friends by cell phone.
"No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow," Michael Harris, 36, of New York City, read from a text message a friend had sent him. "It's like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died."
The public first knew him as a boy in the late 1960s, when he was the precocious, spinning lead singer of the Jackson 5, the singing group he formed with his four older brothers out of Gary, Ind. Among their No. 1 hits were "I Want You Back," "ABC" and "I'll Be There."
He was perhaps the most exciting performer of his generation, known for his backward-gliding moonwalk, his feverish, crotch-grabbing dance moves and his high-pitched singing, punctuated with squeals and titters. His single sequined glove, tight, military-style jacket and aviator sunglasses were trademarks, as was his ever-changing, surgically altered appearance.
"For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don't have the words," said Quincy Jones, who produced "Thriller." "He was the consummate entertainer and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him."
Jackson ranked alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles as the biggest pop sensations of all time. He united two of music's biggest names when he was briefly married to Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie. Jackson's sudden death immediately evoked comparisons to that of Presley himself, who died at age 42 in 1977.
"I am so very sad and confused with every emotion possible," Lisa Marie Presley said in a statement. "I am heartbroken for his children who I know were everything to him and for his family. This is such a massive loss on so many levels, words fail me."
As years went by, Jackson became an increasingly freakish figure — a middle-aged man-child weirdly out of touch with grown-up life. His skin became lighter, his nose narrower, and he spoke in a breathy, girlish voice. He often wore a germ mask while traveling, kept a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles as one of his closest companions and surrounded himself with children at his Neverland ranch, a storybook playland filled with toys, rides and animals. The tabloids dubbed him "Wacko Jacko."
"It seemed to me that his internal essence was at war with the norms of the world. It's as if he was trying to defy gravity," said Michael Levine, a Hollywood publicist who represented Jackson in the early 1990s. He called Jackson a "disciple of P.T. Barnum" and said the star appeared fragile at the time but was "much more cunning and shrewd about the industry than anyone knew."
Jackson caused a furor in 2002 when he playfully dangled his infant son, Prince Michael II, over a hotel balcony in Berlin while a throng of fans watched from below.
In 2005, he was cleared of charges that he molested a 13-year-old cancer survivor at Neverland in 2003. He had been accused of plying the boy with alcohol and groping him, and of engaging in strange and inappropriate behavior with other children.
The case followed years of rumors about Jackson and young boys. In a TV documentary, he acknowledged sharing his bed with children, a practice he described as sweet and not at all sexual.
Despite the acquittal, the lurid allegations that came out in court took a fearsome toll on his career and image, and he fell into serious financial trouble.
Michael Joseph Jackson was born Aug. 29, 1958, in Gary. He was 4 years old when he began singing with his brothers — Marlon, Jermaine, Jackie and Tito — in the Jackson 5. After his early success with bubblegum soul, he struck out on his own, generating innovative, explosive, unstoppable music.
The album "Thriller" alone mixed the dark, serpentine bass and drums and synthesizer approach of "Billie Jean," the grinding Eddie Van Halen guitar solo on "Beat It," and the hiccups and falsettos on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'."
The peak may have come in 1983, when Motown celebrated its 25th anniversary with an all-star televised concert and Jackson moonwalked off with the show, joining his brothers for a medley of old hits and then leaving them behind with a pointing, crouching, high-kicking, splay-footed, crotch-grabbing run through "Billie Jean."
The audience stood and roared. Jackson raised his fist.
During production of a 1984 Pepsi commercial, Jackson's scalp sustains burns when an explosion sets his hair on fire.
He had strong follow-up albums with 1987's "Bad" and 1991's "Dangerous," but his career began to collapse in 1993 after he was accused of molesting a boy who often stayed at his home. The singer denied any wrongdoing, reached a settlement with the boy's family, reported to be $20 million, and criminal charges were never filed.
Jackson's expressed anger over the allegations on the 1995 album "HIStory," which sold more than 2.4 million copies, but by then, the popularity of Jackson's music was clearly waning even as public fascination with his increasingly erratic behavior was growing.
Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley in 1994, and they divorced in 1996. Later that year, Jackson married Deborah Rowe, a former nurse for his dermatologist. They had two children together: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., known as Prince Michael, now 12; and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, 11. Rowe filed for divorce in 1999.
Jackson also had a third child, Prince Michael II. Now 7, Jackson said the boy nicknamed Blanket as a baby was his biological child born from a surrogate mother.
Billboard magazine editorial director Bill Werde said Jackson's star power was unmatched. "The world just lost the biggest pop star in history, no matter how you cut it," Werde said. "He's literally the king of pop."
Jackson's 13 No. 1 one hits on the Billboard charts put him behind only Presley, the Beatles and Mariah Carey, Werde said.
"He was on the eve of potentially redeeming his career a little bit," he said. "People might have started to think of him again in a different light."
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AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch and AP writers Derrik J. Lang, Solvej Schou, Anthony McCartney and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles; and Virginia Byrne, Hillel Italie, Nekesa Mumbi Moody and Jocelyn Noveck in New York contributed to this report.
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