Ethnic Nationalities Voice တုိင္းရင္းသားအသံ

ေကအုိင္အုိဌာနခ်ဳပ္သုိ.သြားတဲ့အဓိကဂိတ္ၾကီးကုိစစ္အစုိးရကပိတ္ပင္

ဖိအားေပးမွဳကုိတုိးျမွင္.တဲ့ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ျဖင့္ ကခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊တရုတ္-ျမန္မာနပ္စပ္ရွိ လုိင္ဇာထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေဒသျဖစ္

ေသာေကအုိင္အုိဌာနခ်ဳပ္သုိ.ျဖတ္သန္းသြားလာတဲ့အဓိကဂိတ္ၾကီးကုိ မေန.ည (၉) နာရီေလာက္မွာစစ္အစုိးရ

ကပိတ္ပင္လုိက္ေၾကာင္းကခ်င္းသတင္းဌာနမွာေရးသားေဖာ္ျပ၊

The junta seals main gate to KIO HQ, people in a spot

November 21, 2007KNG

In an attempt mount further pressure, Burma's ruling military junta has sealed the main gate to the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) Headquarters, in the Laiza controlled area on the Sino-Burma border in Kachin State, in the north of the country as of 9 p.m. yesterday local time, KIO sources said. All pedestrian and vehicular movement across the gate has come to a halt.

People, cars and motorcycles from both KIO and the junta controlled areas have been stopped from crossing the junta's Lajayang Gate close to the Laiza Headquarters on Myitkyina-Bhamo highway, residents of Laiza and Lajayang said.

"The gate was closed at 9 p.m. last night. No people, cars or motorcycles are being allowed to cross the gate by the Burmese Army. Travellers from both controlled areas are in deep trouble," a resident of Lajayang told KNG this evening.

Lajayang Gate is the key border export and import exit and entry point of both Burmese and Chinese merchants in Kachin State. On an average there are more than 100 passengers and cars crossing the gate daily. Now every kind of movement has come to a halt.

KIO officials said this is the latest instance of pressure on the KIO by the junta because of the KIO's refusal to its demand to counter democracy leader Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's November 8 statement released in Singapore by the UN special envoy Mr. Ibrahim Gambari —where she stated she will talk to the ruling junta on behalf of political parties and ethnic nationalities.

Last Saturday, Burmese soldiers and the military intelligence also called the Military Affairs Security Unit (Sa-Ya-Pha) raided KIO liaison offices and homes of officials in Myitkyina and Bhamo and seized all illegal Chinese wireless landline phones without notice. Even the home of KIO vice-president N'ban La Awng in Shatapru quarter in Myitkyina was not spared, KIO officials said.

The authorities also seized illegal Chinese phones from civilians but it seemed to mainly target the Kachin ceasefire groups, KIO and New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K) and people who relate to them, local sources added.

Cheap, easy to buy and good service of the Chinese telephones compared to the junta's telephones make people from all backgrounds even the junta, the Kachin ceasefire groups and civilians use these illegal phones, said residents of Myitkyina.

This year, however, the KIO, the main Kachin ceasefire group is under severe military, economic and political pressure from the ruling junta after the KIO took a neutral stance on the Burma issue in the United Nations Security Council agenda proposed by the United States in January this year.

Now again the KIO is being pressurized by the junta but the KIO will not issue any statement either supporting or against Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's statement, KIO senior leaders said.