The Voice for Justice, Equal Right, Freedom, Genuine Federal Union, Democracy and Self-determination in Burma. "Justice War Must always Win over Injustice".
Fire Breaks out between Security force that sent to guard the movement of Light Infantry Battalion No 91 at Hmaw Bi, Rangoon Division in the morning of Wednesday March 30 2011. After 15 minutes exchange gun fires between two side, two soldiers injured from junta security force side. ေမွာ္ဘီအေျခစုိက္တပ္ရင္း ၉၁ နဲ.လုံျခဳံခ်ထားသည့္တပ္ေတြယေန.မနက္ပုိင္း ၃ နာရီတြင္ပစ္ခတ္မွဳျဖစ္ပြား၊တပ္ရင္း ၉၁ တပ္ကုိလုံျခဳံေရးယူထားသည့္တပ္ကအရင္ပစ္တယ္၊ဒါေပမဲ့ တပ္ရင္း ၉၁ ကထိခုိက္မွဳမရွိ၊ ၉၁ ကျပန္ပစ္ခတ္တဲ့အခါလုံျခဳံေရးတပ္ဘက္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ထိုခုိက္ေသဆုံး၊ပစ္ခတ္မွဳက ၁၅ မိနစ္ၾကာျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊မာတ္ခ်္လ ၂၈ ၇က္ေန.တြင္ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္ေလးခ်က္ကုိတင္ျပျပီးေနာက္ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲအျပစ္ေပၚေပါက္လာတဲ့ပစ္ခတ္မွဳျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသိရွိရပါသည္၊တပ္ရင္း ၉၁ ကုိဝုိင္းေထာက္ခံၾကပါ၊ကူညီၾကပါ။
History Repeats Itself In Burma – Dictatorship Rebrands Itself Again
Burma’s Dictator, Than Shwe, has today officially disbanded the State Peace and Development Council, the body through which Burma’s dictators have ruled the country since 1997. However, Burma Campaign UK today warned that dictatorship remains alive and well in Burma, guaranteed by a new Constitution and a new political infrastructure.
The transfer of power from the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to a new all-powerful body, the National Defence and Security Council, is just the latest in a series of rebrandings since the establishment of the first dictatorship in Burma in 1962.
There are many parallels between the current rebranding, and that undertaken by General Ne Win between 1972 and 1974. Senior General Than Shwe has clearly taken these steps as a blueprint for his so-called roadmap to democracy.
Burma’s first dictatorship began in 1962, led by General Ne Win, under the name of the Revolutionary Council. At the same time he promoted the Burma Socialist Programme Party as a so-called grassroots political face for the dictatorship. Than Shwe has followed a similar path with the Union Solidarity Development Association, of which he was President, and which transformed into the Union Solidarity and Development Party ahead of the elections.
Like Ne Win, Than Shwe also drafted a new constitution designed to legalise his rule and give it a civilian face. Than Shwe also followed Ne Win’s blueprint in having a rigged referendum to approve that Constitution. Ne Win also held a sham election and created a rubber stamp Parliament, just as Than Shwe has now done. In another similarity Ne Win also had a handful of civilians in government positions in his dictatorship.
Following the introduction of the new Constitution in 1974, and a supposed transition from military to civilian dictatorship, Ne Win ruled for a further 14 years. 37 years later, there is still dictatorship in Burma.
This history helps to explain why most people in Burma are largely disinterested in the current political structures being created in Burma, as was shown by the low turnout in the election. They do not see any significant change. They have seen it all before. Excitement about these changes is largely confined to diplomatic circles, and those who are politically active in Rangoon. Understanding this history is also important in understanding the decision by the National League for Democracy not to take part in this sham process.
Whether or not the dictatorship brands itself the Revolutionary Council, the Central Committee of the Burma Socialist Programme Party, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, the State Peace and Development Council, or, as now, the National Defence and Security Council, it is still a dictatorship. Whether or not it is led by Ne Win, Maung Maung, Than Shwe, or Thein Sein, it is still a dictatorship. Whether or not it contains a handful of civilians, or ex-military people, it is still a dictatorship.
The real facts on the ground are that there are no new freedoms, that human rights abuses continue, and that those ruling Burma clearly have no intention of introducing any genuine reforms to improve human rights or move towards democracy.
“What we are seeing in Burma today is a rebranding, not reform,” said Mark Farmaner, Director at Burma Campaign UK. “It’s groundhog day for the people of Burma, dictatorship is alive and well, and large parts of the international community seem to have been fooled by its shiny new branding.”
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Zoya Phan
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Burma Campaign UK
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သွ်မ္းျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပုိင္းတြင္းဗမာစစ္တပ္မွစစ္ဗုိလ္မ်ားျပည္သူ.ပစၥည္းမ်ားလုယက္ဓါးျပတုိက္ေနသည္ဟုျပည္သူမ်ားေျပာ၊ Burma Army committed Terrorist Acts in Shan State, Burma.
The following is full report from Shan Herald Agency for News
The brunt of the fighting comes to the people – as usual
Tuesday, 22 March 2011 13:04 S.H.A.N.
Since 22 February, travel between the Monghsu gemland and the rest of Shan State has been restricted. But since 13 March, when the Burma Army launched the offensive with at least 19 battalions on the Shan State Army (SSA) North that had turned down its “One country one military” program, the situation has turned from bad to worse in Monghsu and its neighboring townships: Kehsi. Tangyan and Mongyai.
The following are the first reports that have reached SHAN from the conflict zone:
Nampook village, Phak Narm village tract, Kehsi township နမ္းေပါ့ေက်းရြာ၊ကဲဆီျမဳိ.နယ္တြင္းအျဖစ္အပ်က္
မာတ္ခ်္လ ၉ ရက္ေန.မွာ လကာၤးအေျခစုိက္ဗမာစစ္တပ္မွရြားသားပုိင္းႏြားတစ္ေကာင္ဆြဲသြားပါသည္၊မာတ္ခ်္လ ၁၄ ရက္ေန.မွာလည္းေနာက္ႏြားတစ္ေကာင္းဆြဲသြားျပန္ပါသည္၊ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေငြတစ္ျပာမွမရ၊
On 9 March 2011, a cow worth 500,000 kyat ($500) was taken by the Langkher-based battalion (number of unit unidentified) for food. Later on 14 March 2011, another cow worth 600,000 kyat ($600) was taken from the main village, Phak Narm. There was no compensation.
On 15 March, Maj Min Min Hlaing, commander of the unit, summoned Loong Sai, 50, headman of Wanwarp to Nampook. On his arrival, the major accused him of being late and punched his face and kicked him several times. His soldiers later visited Loong Sai and asked him to stay calm as the major was a habitually short tempered person.
On 16 March 2011, after the SSA had retreated from Namlao, more than 100 villagers, most of them women, children and the elderly people, were detained at the military camp. The occupying force was made up of Infantry Battalion 33 (Mongkao-based) and Infantry Battalion 291 (Lashio-based).
On the next day, young people in Mongkao were summoned and detained at a villager’s house in Namlao. They were accused of assisting the rebels by not giving information to the Army.
As a result, more than 500 people had fled and taken refuge in the jungle. Their left behind possessions were ransacked and looted by the soldiers. At least 50 motor vehicles were taken each for his own
Markman village, Kehsi township မက္နမ္းရြာ၊ ကဲဆီျမဳိ.နယ္တြင္းအျဖစ္အပ်က္၊
On 18 March 2011, Maj Aye Aung of Light Infantry Battalion 578 (Langkher-based), 67 strong, took the following items without paying:
Liquor 50 bottles Price K 50,000 ($50)
Chicken 150 Price K 400,000 ($400)
Cooking oil 5 pails Price K 170,000 ($170)
Ajinomoto 10 bags Price K 20,000 ($20)
Rice 1 tang Price K 20,000 ($20)
On the next day, he and his men arrived at Pa Tep village and commandeered a bullock cart for use. The owner Sai Pi, 45, and another youth Sai Aung, 25, were beaten as they had no information about the rebels.
Sai Pi was punched, kicked and beaten with a piece of wood used as a fence stake, until he was drenched in blood. As for Sai Aung, he was hit on his forehead with a rifle stock.
They also took 50 liquor bottles, 20 bottles of cooking oil, 5 cooking pots, 10 Ajinomoto bags and 3 Buddha images from the village.
Yemen on the brink as military and political leaders join revolt
Dubai (Platts)--21Mar2011/847 am EDT/1247 GMT
The fate of the once-divided state of Yemen was at a crossroads Monday as senior military and political leaders resigned from their positions and joined a growing anti-government protest to demand the ouster of veteran president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
"Saleh has an opportunity to make a historic decision now," said one of the opposition's youth leaders on al-Jazeera television, which aired footage of what appeared to be the largest demonstration in weeks of unrest in Yemen, an oil and gas exporter and the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula.
Tanks were deployed outside the presidential palace in the capital Sana'a, where an increasingly isolated Saleh has faced a swell of popular anger over his heavy-handed handling of protests that threaten to unravel the cohesion of a tribal nation that was once split along north-south lines.
More than 20 people were killed in fighting in northern Yemen, where Saleh has been battling mainly Shi'ite Muslim Huthi rebels since 2004 in a fight that last year drew in Yemen's powerful northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia.
In the south, where Saleh has faced a secessionist movement, the governor of the southern province of Aden, home to the country's main oil terminal and refinery, also resigned on Monday as pressure grew on Saleh to quit.
The tank deployment in central Sana'a followed one of the bloodiest days in the uprising that has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people and prompted the defections of senior army officers, including some from Saleh's own Hashid tribe.
Saleh's last ditch effort to restore calm by firing his cabinet failed to subdue the masses as they prepared to bury their dead on Sunday.
The US, which considers Saleh a key ally in the fight against al-Qaida militants operating out of Yemen, was compelled to condemn the violence in a strongly worded statement.
President Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism official on Friday condemned "in the strongest terms" the brutal crackdown on protesters saying it would feed extremism.
General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, an armored infantry division commander who Monday announced that he had joined the youth-led revolution, warned in a statement on al-Jazeera that the crisis was pushing the country to civil war and urged a peaceful transition of power.
The triple threats of rebellion in the north, secessionism in the south and al-Qaida militancy have made the country more vulnerable than its wealthier neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, to the type of unrest that brought about regime change in Tunisia and Egypt.
The regime has already been weakened by the resignations of ministers, ambassadors and a number of parliamentarians, but Saleh has so far refused to step down until his term ends in 2013.
Saleh, who was re-elected to a seven-year term in 2006, last month ordered social reforms to try to ease some of the economic pressures on the most vulnerable sectors of society in a country where the average age is 18 and unemployment is running at over 40%.
The inauguration of Yemen's LNG plant in 2009 after years of delay should have been a bright spot for the country but failed to repair deep flaws in the economy.
Yemen's economy faces huge challenges, the fall-out of which has contributed heavily to the state of political unrest that has fomented the spread of extremism and bred secessionist movements.
The country's dependence on its limited and rapidly dwindling oil reserves -- oil income generates 70% of the general budget, 92% of export income and 30% of GDP -- has turned an already volatile situation into a potentially explosive one, while posing a threat to the region at large.
From peak production of around 420,000 b/d in 2002, Yemen saw its oil production fall to 300,000-350,000 b/d last year. The civil unrest and rising violence now presents a big challenge for attracting new foreign investment.
While armed tribesmen in the Marib region to the east of the capital Sana'a have previously attacked an oil pipeline and engaged in gun battles with security forces protecting oil installations, these attacks have generally been considered a protest against the policies of the central government and a bid to secure more jobs for local populations.
However, the situation has worsened in the past year and Saleh faces his biggest challenge since the country's unification in 1990.
In the north, the government has sent in the army to attack Huthi rebels, a strict Shi'ite Muslim group unhappy with the Sunni influence in the country, especially from Saudi Arabia north of the border.
OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia has always kept a close eye on developments in its southern neighbor, fearful of infiltrations by extremists across the porous Yemeni border. Riyadh last year provided military support to the Yemeni government against the Huthis, sending jets and tanks to attack rebel posts inside Yemen.
In the once-independent south, where bitterness towards Sana'a is swelling, the military has been involved in clashes with the local secessionist movement seeking a return to the pre-1990 separation of the two states.
Any secession would see Sana'a lose some of its most prolific oil producing regions, as well as the vital port of Aden, its refinery and the Yemen LNG plant, one of the largest LNG facilities in the world.
The 6.7 mt/year Yemen LNG plant, a joint venture with French major Total its major shareholder, is the country's largest ever investment project and was meant to provide a new source of income to replace falling oil exports.
It was not immediately known if the protest had affected foreign oil company operations in the country that lies on the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
--Kate Dourian, kate_dourian@platts.com
Similar stories appear in Oilgram News. See more information at http://bit.ly/OilgramNews
For more news focusing on unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, please see Platts web feature at http://bit.ly/oilunrest
ဗမာအာဏာရွင္သန္းေရႊတုိ.လုိဘဲမုိက္မဲေခါင္းမာေနတဲ့ကဒါဖီအာဏာရွင္တပ္ကုိမဟာမိတ္တပ္မ်ားကတုိးမေဟာ့ခ္မစ္ဆဲလ္အလုံးေပါင္း ၁၁၀ ျဖင့္စတင္ပစ္ေနျပီ၊သန္းေရႊအလွည့္ေရာက္မယ္၊ Next line is Burma dictator Than Shwe's troop. (ဗြီဒုီယုိ)
American, French and British forces have attacked Muammar Gaddafi's forces, in the first strikes to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone in Libya. More than 110 Tomahawk missiles fired from American and British ships and submarines hit about 20 Libyan air and missile defense targets.
“In Germany they first came for the communists; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic. Then they came for me – and by that time there was nobody left to speak up.”
– Martin Niemoller
တုိင္းရင္းသားအသံTweet Condolence and encouragement Letter from Ethnic Nationalities' Voice of Burma to Japanese people တုိင္းရင္းသားအသံမွဂ်ပန္ျပည္သူဆီသုိ.ေပးပုိ.သည့္ဝမ္းနည္းျခင္း၊အားေပးျခင္းသဝဏ္လႊာ
Since the earthquake hit Japan on the last Friday March 11, 2011, tineyintharvoice is following the news everyday on that day and of aftermath of the earthquake. As result, tineyintharvoice has seen the uncountable values that caused many damage of the country of Japan and unknown well beings of many lives of Japanese people. It is a world tragedy that we have ever seen in our lives. At the same time, we also see the courage, strength, unity and brave heart of the Japanese people that dare to face the crisis of both tsunami and nuclear power radius.
Recently, we have learned that the dead toll reached ten thousands as victims of tsunami and nuclear reactor explosion.
We, tineyintharvoice (the voice of Ethnic Nationalities of Burma) team would like to express our deep condolence for the families of the victims of tsunami and nuclear reactor explosion. On the other hand, we would like to encourage and give our moral support to the Japanese people and Japanese government to keep your heart strong and overcome the crisis by joining hands on hands with your beloved citizens.
May Japanese people overcome the crisis and recover from disaster soon.
အေအးေပးႏုိင္စြမ္းပ်က္စီးမွဳေၾကာင့္အဏုျမဴစြမ္းအင္သုံးစက္ရုံႏွစ္ရုံတြင္ရွိအဏုျမဴဓါတ္ေပါင္းဖုိ ၅ ခုအတြက္ဒီကေန.မနက္ပုိင္းမွာဂ်ပန္အစုိးရကအေရးေပၚအေျခအေနေၾကညာလုိက္ပါျပီ၊ဒုိင္ခ်ိရွိအဏုျမဴစြမ္းအင္စက္ရုံကုိႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အေရးေပၚအေျခအေနေၾကညာလုိက္တာဟာဂ်ပန္သမုိင္းမွာဒါကပထမဦးဆုံးျဖစ္သည္၊အစုိးရအေနနဲ.ဒီလုိေၾကညာျပီးေနာက္နာရီပုိင္းအာၾကာမွာပင္ ဒုိင္ခ်ိမွာရွိတဲ့ဓါတ္ေပါင္းဖုိ ၆ ေနရာအတြက္လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားပုိ.ေဆာင္ေပးေနသည့္ Tokyo Electric Power Co ကဒုိင္ခ်ိမွာဒုတိယေျမာက္ဓါတ္ေပါင္းဖုိတစ္ခုႏွင့္ Fukushima Daichi အနာတစ္ဝုိက္မွာရွိတဲ့အျခားေသာဓါတ္ေပါင္းဖုိ ၃ ခုတုိ.ကုိလည္းအေအးေပးမွဳစနစ္ပ်က္စီးေၾကာင္းထပ္ေၾကညာခဲ့ပါသည္၊အစုိးရကလည္းထုိေနရာသုံးခုတုိ.ကုိလည္းအေရးေပၚအေျခအေနအလ်င္စလုိေၾကညာျပန္ပါသည္၊ဒုိင္ခ်ိမွာအေျခေနကထိတ္လန္.ဖြယ္ေကာင္းပါတယ္၊တြန္းအားပုံမွန္ထက္ႏွစ္ဆတုိးပြားေနေၾကာင္ဂ်ပန္ႏ်ဴကလီးယားလုံျခဳံေရးဌာနကအတည္ျပဳေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္၊ႏုိင္ငံတကာအဏုျမဴစြမ္းအင္ေအဂ်င္ရဲ.ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာေတာ့ ဖူခူရွိမာဒုိင္ခ်ိမွာရွိတဲ့ႏ်ဴကလီးယားစြမ္းအင္စက္ရုံဟာအေအးေပးစနစ္ပုံမွန္လည္ပတ္ႏုိင္ရန္အတြက္ဒီဇယ္ဓါတ္ထုတ္လုပ္ေပးတဲ့ စက္ကဆူနာမိေရလႊမ္းမွဳေၾကာင့္အလုပ္မလုပ္ေတာ့ဘူးလုိ.ေဖာ္ျပထားပါသည္၊
ငလ်င္လွဳပ္ဒဏ္၊ဆူနာမိဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ဂ်ပန္ႏုိင္ငံဟာ ေလထုအဆိပ္သင့္မွဳဳျဖစ္ပြားႏုိင္ျပီးကင္ဆာေရာဂါမ်ား၊အသက္ရွဴလမ္းေၾကာင္ပိတ္ေရာဂါမ်ားႏွင့္အကယ္၍ႏ်ဴကလီးယားအပူခ်ိန္လြန္အရည္ေပ်ာ္အႏၱရာယ္ကုိကာကြယ္မွဳမလုပ္ႏုိင္ပါကေရာဂါမ်ဳိးစုံျဖစ္ပြားႏုိင္ျပီးေရာဂါကပ္ဆုိက္ေရာက္သြားႏုိင္သည္၊တုိင္းရင္းသားညီအစ္ကုိေမာင္ႏွစ္မအေပါင္းတုိ.ခင္ဗ်ား၊မိမိတုိ.တုိင္းျပည္ကုိျပန္လာျပီးအဓိပၸါယ္ရွိတဲ့အလုပ္တစ္ခုခုအတြက္အသက္စြန္.လႊတ္ႏုိင္ပါေစ၊ Live for Nothing, Die for Something.
