Meri News
Kumar Sarkar
Mon 31 Dec 2007
In the aftermath of the bloody ‘Saffron Revolution’ in September there is fresh unrest among the Buddhist clergy in Myanmar. Posters have begun to appear in central Myanmar exhorting monks to rise in revolt once again against the military regime.
THE MONKS in Myanmar are restive and plans are afoot to restart protest movements similar to September, which has been dubbed the ‘Saffron Revolution’
Posters have begun to appear exhorting the Buddhist clergy to once again hit the streets of Myanmar on the country’s Independence Day. Posters have been seen pasted in Pakhokku town in central Myanmar, the Myanmarese media in exile reports.
The posters have exhorted monks to stage a mass rally of monks on the 60th anniversary of Myanmar’s Independence Day on January 4, 2008. The posters were found pasted on the northern gate of the Mahawihzayarrama monastery, also known as the East monastery, in Pakhokku, a town in Magwe Division where the uprising first took place in September and snowballed across Myanmar. The police hurriedly removed the posters.
In September this year the monks took over the protests from the 1988-generation students and were joined by the people, first demanding a roll back in the hike in fuel prices and essential commodities and then demanding change from military rule to democracy in a country plagued by economic and political deterioration.
The Myanmar military junta came down heavily on the protesting monks’ students and the people killing, beating and arresting large numbers. Though it officially claimed that 10 people died and 3,000 were arrested, human rights activists have gone on record as saying that the numbers were far higher. There has been international condemnation of the high handed and ruthless suppression of the peaceful movement by the Myanmar military junta.
What followed was worse for monks. Many were disrobed forcibly. The younger monks and novices were rounded up and sent back to their hometowns. Those detained were tortured and monasteries taken over. Monks all over Myanmar except those on the side of the ruling regime were publicly humiliated making a mockery of the Buddhist clergy who are held in highest esteem in Buddhist dominated Myanmar. The generals gave the lie to being Buddhists and scorning the clergy.
Now only one-third of the monks are visible in Pakhokku town after the regime drove away many monks and novices to their hometowns.
Monks in Pakhokku have boycotted the monks’ examination being conducted by the junta administration to protest against the treatment of the monks by the junta during the protests and after.
Monday, December 31, 2007
U Gambira of Saffron Revolution: Burma’s Person of the Year
Burma Digest
Mon 31 Dec 2007
In Burma Digest poll for Person of the Year 2007 (Burma), we got hundreds of direct votings on the website, and many more thousands of votes sent via email. U Gambira, and his fellow monks, who led Burma’s Saffron Revolution in 2007 got highest number of votes; and accordingly, named here as “The Person of the Year 2007 in Burma”.
U Gambira, the 29-year old leader of the All-Burma Monks’ Alliance that spearheaded nationwide protests in Burma in September, became a fugitive following the deadly Sept. 26-27 crackdown on protesters in Burma. He made important announcements to the world outside Burma about the alliance’s aims and in a climate of fear and arrests of pro-democracy activists, became one of the new leaders of Burma’s freedom movement.
U Gambira led the life of a monk until summer 2007, dedicating his life to religious study and working compassionately for the benefit of all people. Following the SPDC/USDA/SAS attacks on monks in Pakkoku, U Gambira became involved with what we now call the ‘Saffron Revolution’. His actions and those of his fellow monks brought the world’s attention to the protests in Burma, and gave enormous impetus to the pro-democracy movement inside Burma and with the activist movements around the world. The SPDC saw him and the rest of the protest organisers (and participatants) as their enemy; He was targeted by the SPDC and went into hiding, his family taken hostage until he gave himself up.
U Gambira now languishes in a grim prison cell, and like other protesters beaten and tortured by sadistic SPDC minions. He is reported to be incarcerated at Insein prison and it seems likely that he will be charged with treason and given what amounts to a life sentence behind bars. It was these risks that U Gambira took on himself just a few months ago; he knew the risk, but acted on his conscience and his belief – a belief that non-violent protest and the power of prayer against guns and tanks will eventually win the freedom that the people of Burma so desperately need.
U Gambira acted not for personal gain, or to better himself, or out of any wish for political power; he acted out of compassion and humility and a great love for his fellow man, in a manner true to the fundamental calling of the Sangha. He very deservedly receives our nomination as ‘Person of the Year 2007 in Burma.’
The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks/ All Burma Sangha Coalition
Describing themselves as The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, the author of a widely distributed leaflet gave the military government until September 17 to issue an apology for its brutal suppression of demonstrating monks in Pakkoku by police, soldiers and pro-government paramilitary thugs. When the junta failed to apologize, the alliance urged all Buddhist monks in the country to hold a “patam nikkujjana kamma”—a boycott of alms from members of the military regime and its supporters. The call prompted tens of thousands of monks and civilians around Burma to stage the largest protest marches against the military government in nearly 20 years, calling for better living conditions for the people and national reconciliation.
When the protests began, no one knew the identity of the leaders of the monks’ alliance. However, the Burmese people heard from some of the leaders of the underground network when they gave telephone interviews to overseas radio stations. U Gambira, U Obhasa, U Khemeinda and U Zakada are now household names. All went into hiding when the crackdown began.
Unfortunately, in early November U Gambira was arrested at his hiding place in Kyaukse in central Burma. His brother and father were taken hostage in October in an exchange for U Gambira turning himself in. However, his brother and father have yet to be freed. The 29-year-old leading monk has been charged with treason by the Burmese junta, according to his family. The punishment for treason is a life sentence or death.
Mon 31 Dec 2007
In Burma Digest poll for Person of the Year 2007 (Burma), we got hundreds of direct votings on the website, and many more thousands of votes sent via email. U Gambira, and his fellow monks, who led Burma’s Saffron Revolution in 2007 got highest number of votes; and accordingly, named here as “The Person of the Year 2007 in Burma”.
U Gambira, the 29-year old leader of the All-Burma Monks’ Alliance that spearheaded nationwide protests in Burma in September, became a fugitive following the deadly Sept. 26-27 crackdown on protesters in Burma. He made important announcements to the world outside Burma about the alliance’s aims and in a climate of fear and arrests of pro-democracy activists, became one of the new leaders of Burma’s freedom movement.
U Gambira led the life of a monk until summer 2007, dedicating his life to religious study and working compassionately for the benefit of all people. Following the SPDC/USDA/SAS attacks on monks in Pakkoku, U Gambira became involved with what we now call the ‘Saffron Revolution’. His actions and those of his fellow monks brought the world’s attention to the protests in Burma, and gave enormous impetus to the pro-democracy movement inside Burma and with the activist movements around the world. The SPDC saw him and the rest of the protest organisers (and participatants) as their enemy; He was targeted by the SPDC and went into hiding, his family taken hostage until he gave himself up.
U Gambira now languishes in a grim prison cell, and like other protesters beaten and tortured by sadistic SPDC minions. He is reported to be incarcerated at Insein prison and it seems likely that he will be charged with treason and given what amounts to a life sentence behind bars. It was these risks that U Gambira took on himself just a few months ago; he knew the risk, but acted on his conscience and his belief – a belief that non-violent protest and the power of prayer against guns and tanks will eventually win the freedom that the people of Burma so desperately need.
U Gambira acted not for personal gain, or to better himself, or out of any wish for political power; he acted out of compassion and humility and a great love for his fellow man, in a manner true to the fundamental calling of the Sangha. He very deservedly receives our nomination as ‘Person of the Year 2007 in Burma.’
The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks/ All Burma Sangha Coalition
Describing themselves as The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, the author of a widely distributed leaflet gave the military government until September 17 to issue an apology for its brutal suppression of demonstrating monks in Pakkoku by police, soldiers and pro-government paramilitary thugs. When the junta failed to apologize, the alliance urged all Buddhist monks in the country to hold a “patam nikkujjana kamma”—a boycott of alms from members of the military regime and its supporters. The call prompted tens of thousands of monks and civilians around Burma to stage the largest protest marches against the military government in nearly 20 years, calling for better living conditions for the people and national reconciliation.
When the protests began, no one knew the identity of the leaders of the monks’ alliance. However, the Burmese people heard from some of the leaders of the underground network when they gave telephone interviews to overseas radio stations. U Gambira, U Obhasa, U Khemeinda and U Zakada are now household names. All went into hiding when the crackdown began.
Unfortunately, in early November U Gambira was arrested at his hiding place in Kyaukse in central Burma. His brother and father were taken hostage in October in an exchange for U Gambira turning himself in. However, his brother and father have yet to be freed. The 29-year-old leading monk has been charged with treason by the Burmese junta, according to his family. The punishment for treason is a life sentence or death.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Dhamma banned in Burma
Irrawaddy
Wai Moe
Fri 28 Dec 2007
The Burmese military government has ordered a ban on Buddhist dhamma talks and seminars in Rangoon, according to monks in the former capital.
The monks told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that dhamma [the Buddha’s teachings] talks by four well-known monks were forced to cancel in December. The monks were named as: U Kawthala, also known as Dhamma Sedi Sayadaw; U Kawvida, also known as Mizzima Gon Yi Sayadaw; U Nadapadi, also known as Pyu Sayadaw; and U Sadila, also known as Lu Yay Chun Sayadaw.
Township authorities in Rangoon had been ordered to ban dhamma talks by the Regional Commander of Rangoon, said the sources. On Wednesday, U Kawvida, who is also a PhD in Buddhism, prepared to conduct a Buddhist tutorial in Insein Township, on the outskirts of Rangoon. However, officials arrived at the scene and ordered the dhamma talk to be stopped immediately.
“U Kawvida requested permission from the commander of the Rangoon Regional Command, Maj-Gen Hla Htay Win, to address the crowd, but the commander rejected the monk’s request,” said a monk, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“U Kawvida was scheduled to talk in Rangoon tomorrow, but he has been forced to cancel.”
Meanwhile, in central Rangoon, a dhamma talk by Khamasiri Linkaya, also known as Shwepyihein Sayadaw, was stopped by authorities recently, according to sources in Rangoon.
Khamasiri Linkaya was then interrogated, said a monk who attended the talk, adding that the authorities suspected his speech was critical of the junta and might charge the senior monk.
Since November, dhamma VCDs featuring Burma’s most respected senior monks, including U Nyanithara and U Kawvida, which are critical of the military crackdown , have reportedly been banned by the authorities.
“The authorities ban dhamma CDs and VCDs whether they are directly or indirectly critical of military rule,” said a senior monk.
Meanwhile, the Buddhist University in Rangoon was ordered to close by authorities according to sources. Officials have yet to announce a date for the university to reopen. Monks from the Buddhist University were actively involved in the September uprising.
The Burmese junta often claims it believes deeply in Buddhism and encourages the growth of the faith. It’s a claim that few Burmese people believe since the acts of brutality carried out by the authorities against the revered monks.
Wai Moe
Fri 28 Dec 2007
The Burmese military government has ordered a ban on Buddhist dhamma talks and seminars in Rangoon, according to monks in the former capital.
The monks told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that dhamma [the Buddha’s teachings] talks by four well-known monks were forced to cancel in December. The monks were named as: U Kawthala, also known as Dhamma Sedi Sayadaw; U Kawvida, also known as Mizzima Gon Yi Sayadaw; U Nadapadi, also known as Pyu Sayadaw; and U Sadila, also known as Lu Yay Chun Sayadaw.
Township authorities in Rangoon had been ordered to ban dhamma talks by the Regional Commander of Rangoon, said the sources. On Wednesday, U Kawvida, who is also a PhD in Buddhism, prepared to conduct a Buddhist tutorial in Insein Township, on the outskirts of Rangoon. However, officials arrived at the scene and ordered the dhamma talk to be stopped immediately.
“U Kawvida requested permission from the commander of the Rangoon Regional Command, Maj-Gen Hla Htay Win, to address the crowd, but the commander rejected the monk’s request,” said a monk, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“U Kawvida was scheduled to talk in Rangoon tomorrow, but he has been forced to cancel.”
Meanwhile, in central Rangoon, a dhamma talk by Khamasiri Linkaya, also known as Shwepyihein Sayadaw, was stopped by authorities recently, according to sources in Rangoon.
Khamasiri Linkaya was then interrogated, said a monk who attended the talk, adding that the authorities suspected his speech was critical of the junta and might charge the senior monk.
Since November, dhamma VCDs featuring Burma’s most respected senior monks, including U Nyanithara and U Kawvida, which are critical of the military crackdown , have reportedly been banned by the authorities.
“The authorities ban dhamma CDs and VCDs whether they are directly or indirectly critical of military rule,” said a senior monk.
Meanwhile, the Buddhist University in Rangoon was ordered to close by authorities according to sources. Officials have yet to announce a date for the university to reopen. Monks from the Buddhist University were actively involved in the September uprising.
The Burmese junta often claims it believes deeply in Buddhism and encourages the growth of the faith. It’s a claim that few Burmese people believe since the acts of brutality carried out by the authorities against the revered monks.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
သံဃမဟာနာရကဆရာေတာ္မ်ား ႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္
Irrawaddy
ကိုသက္ | ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၁၊ ၂၀၀၇
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ၄၇ ပါးအနက္ ၁၀ ပါးခန္႔သည္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလလယ္ ခန္႔တြင္ ႏုတ္ထြက္စာ တင္ၾကေၾကာင္း သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူမ်ားက ေျပာဆိုၾကသည္။
ႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ထားသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယက ဥကၠဌျဖစ္သည့္ မေကြးဆရာေတာ္ ဦးကုမာရ၊ အက်ိဳးေတာ္ေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးၾသသထဘိ၀ံသ၊ အင္းစိန္႐ြာမဆရာေတာ္ ဦးတိေလာကဘိ၀ံသ၊ ေရနံေခ်ာင္း ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေတဇိႏၲတို႔ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူက ေျပာသည္။
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ၄၇ ပါးျဖင့္ အဖြဲ႔ ၃ ဖြဲ႔ခြဲကာ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားၿပီး တဖြဲ႔လွ်င္ ဆရာေတာ္ ၁၅ ပါးခန္႔ ပါ၀င္သည္။ ဦးကုမာရ သည္ အဖြဲ႔ ၁ ၏ ဥကၠဌျဖစ္ၿပီး သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ တာ၀န္ အရွိဆံုး ဆရာေတာ္လည္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဆရာေတာ္သည္ ႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ၿပီးေနာက္ မေကြးသို႔ျပန္ႂကြသြားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ရျခင္းမွာ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔က ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ ေငြၾကာယံ ပရိယတၳိစာသင္တိုက္ကို စစ္အစိုးရ၏ လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားက အၾကမ္းဖက္စီးနင္းေသာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္ဟု သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတခ်ိဳ႕က သံုးသပ္ၾကသည္။
စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔ည ၁၂ နာရီေက်ာ္တြင္ လက္နက္ကိုင္စစ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ လံုထိန္း ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္တို႔က မ်က္ရည္ယို ဗံုးႏွင့္ ေသနတ္မ်ားသံုး၍ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ကို ၀င္ေရာက္စီးနင္းခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သံဃာေတာ္အပါး ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အၾကမ္း ဖက္ ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးကာ လူ၀တ္လဲလိုက္သည္။ ၀င္ေရာက္ စီးနင္းသည့္ကာလအတြင္း ေ႐ႊ၊ ေငြအပါအ၀င္ ကာလတန္ဖိုး က်ပ္သိန္း ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို စစ္သားမ်ားကသိမ္းဆီးသြားၿပီး က်ပ္သိန္း ၅၀ ခန္႔ကို သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွတဆင့္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ျပန္လည္ေပးအပ္ေၾကာင္း ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတဦးက ဧရာ၀တီကို ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ေငြၾကာယံ ပရိယတၳိစာသင္တိုက္၏ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ အမွတ္ ၂ အဖြဲ႔မွ ဒုဥကၠဌ ျဖစ္သည္။ အာဏာပိုင္တို႔က ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တ၊ တိုက္အုပ္ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဥတၱမ အပါအ၀င္ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္မွ သံဃာ ၅၀ ေက်ာ္ကို ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ကမာၻေအးရွိ သာသနာ့နယ္ေျမတြင္ အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ ထားကာ ယခုလ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႔၌ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ျပန္ပို႔ခဲ့သည္။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားက စက္တင္ဘာလအတြင္းျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္ လူထုလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကို ဦးေဆာင္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ စစ္အစိုးရက ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ၆၀ ခန္႔ကို အဓမၼ၀င္ေရာက္ဖ်က္ဆီးကာ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည္။
ႏို၀င္ဘာလကုန္ပိုင္းတြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက HIV /AIDS ေ၀ဒနာရွင္မ်ားအတြက္ လူမႈအေထာက္အကူျပဳ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပးေနသည့္ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ သကၤန္းကၽြန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ မဂၢင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းကို မည္သည့္အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္မွ မေပးဘဲ ခိ်ပ္ပိတ္လိုက္သည္။ မဂၢင္ေက်ာင္းသည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား ကိုးကြယ္သည့္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခုအခါ နအဖ စစ္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို အသစ္ျပန္လည္ဖြဲ႔စည္းရန္ စီစဥ္လ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္း စံုစမ္းသိရွိရသည္။
ကိုသက္ | ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၁၊ ၂၀၀၇
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ၄၇ ပါးအနက္ ၁၀ ပါးခန္႔သည္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလလယ္ ခန္႔တြင္ ႏုတ္ထြက္စာ တင္ၾကေၾကာင္း သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူမ်ားက ေျပာဆိုၾကသည္။
ႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ထားသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယက ဥကၠဌျဖစ္သည့္ မေကြးဆရာေတာ္ ဦးကုမာရ၊ အက်ိဳးေတာ္ေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးၾသသထဘိ၀ံသ၊ အင္းစိန္႐ြာမဆရာေတာ္ ဦးတိေလာကဘိ၀ံသ၊ ေရနံေခ်ာင္း ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေတဇိႏၲတို႔ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူက ေျပာသည္။
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ ၄၇ ပါးျဖင့္ အဖြဲ႔ ၃ ဖြဲ႔ခြဲကာ ဖြဲ႔စည္းထားၿပီး တဖြဲ႔လွ်င္ ဆရာေတာ္ ၁၅ ပါးခန္႔ ပါ၀င္သည္။ ဦးကုမာရ သည္ အဖြဲ႔ ၁ ၏ ဥကၠဌျဖစ္ၿပီး သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ တာ၀န္ အရွိဆံုး ဆရာေတာ္လည္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဆရာေတာ္သည္ ႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ၿပီးေနာက္ မေကြးသို႔ျပန္ႂကြသြားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားႏုတ္ထြက္စာတင္ရျခင္းမွာ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔က ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ ေငြၾကာယံ ပရိယတၳိစာသင္တိုက္ကို စစ္အစိုးရ၏ လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားက အၾကမ္းဖက္စီးနင္းေသာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္ဟု သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတခ်ိဳ႕က သံုးသပ္ၾကသည္။
စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔ည ၁၂ နာရီေက်ာ္တြင္ လက္နက္ကိုင္စစ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ လံုထိန္း ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္တို႔က မ်က္ရည္ယို ဗံုးႏွင့္ ေသနတ္မ်ားသံုး၍ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ကို ၀င္ေရာက္စီးနင္းခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သံဃာေတာ္အပါး ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အၾကမ္း ဖက္ ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးကာ လူ၀တ္လဲလိုက္သည္။ ၀င္ေရာက္ စီးနင္းသည့္ကာလအတြင္း ေ႐ႊ၊ ေငြအပါအ၀င္ ကာလတန္ဖိုး က်ပ္သိန္း ၂၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို စစ္သားမ်ားကသိမ္းဆီးသြားၿပီး က်ပ္သိန္း ၅၀ ခန္႔ကို သာသနာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွတဆင့္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ျပန္လည္ေပးအပ္ေၾကာင္း ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူတဦးက ဧရာ၀တီကို ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ေငြၾကာယံ ပရိယတၳိစာသင္တိုက္၏ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ အမွတ္ ၂ အဖြဲ႔မွ ဒုဥကၠဌ ျဖစ္သည္။ အာဏာပိုင္တို႔က ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တ၊ တိုက္အုပ္ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဥတၱမ အပါအ၀င္ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္မွ သံဃာ ၅၀ ေက်ာ္ကို ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ကမာၻေအးရွိ သာသနာ့နယ္ေျမတြင္ အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ ထားကာ ယခုလ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႔၌ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ျပန္ပို႔ခဲ့သည္။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားက စက္တင္ဘာလအတြင္းျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္ လူထုလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကို ဦးေဆာင္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ စစ္အစိုးရက ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ၆၀ ခန္႔ကို အဓမၼ၀င္ေရာက္ဖ်က္ဆီးကာ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည္။
ႏို၀င္ဘာလကုန္ပိုင္းတြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက HIV /AIDS ေ၀ဒနာရွင္မ်ားအတြက္ လူမႈအေထာက္အကူျပဳ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပးေနသည့္ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ သကၤန္းကၽြန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ မဂၢင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းကို မည္သည့္အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္မွ မေပးဘဲ ခိ်ပ္ပိတ္လိုက္သည္။ မဂၢင္ေက်ာင္းသည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား ကိုးကြယ္သည့္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခုအခါ နအဖ စစ္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃမဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို အသစ္ျပန္လည္ဖြဲ႔စည္းရန္ စီစဥ္လ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္း စံုစမ္းသိရွိရသည္။
ပဲခူး ကလ်ာဏီသိမ္ေက်ာင္း ဆရာေတာ္ ျပန္လြတ္လာ
Mizzima
ထိန္လင္း
Friday, 21 December 2007 18:21 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ေရႊဝါေရာင္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးတြင္ ပါဝင္ခဲ့ရာမွ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရသူ ပဲခူးၿမ့ဳိ ကလ်ာဏီ သိမ္ေက်ာင္းတုိက္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ တနလၤာေန႔က ျပန္လြတ္လာခဲ့သည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ပထမပတ္တြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ဦးေတေဇာဘာသ (သက္ေတာ္ ၇၆ ႏွစ္) အား ေရႊတိဂံု ဘုရားေပၚမွအဆင္း စစ္ဖက္လံုျခံဳေရး တပ္ဖဲြ႔ဝင္မ်ားက ဖမ္းဆီးသြားခဲ့ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း လွည္းကူးၿမ့ဳိနယ္ရွိ ရြာသာႀကီး စိတ္ေရာဂါကု ေဆး႐ံုတြင္ ၂၅ ရက္ၾကာ ထိန္းသိမ္းထားရာမွ စခန္းႀကီးေက်းရြာရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္း တေက်ာင္းတြင္ ဆက္လက္ထားရွိကာ ယခုလ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားေပၚက အဆင္းမွာ အဖမ္းခံရတယ္ေလ။ ဘုမသိဘမသိနဲ႔ ေခၚသြားခံရတာ။ ၂၅ ရက္ၾကာ အရူးေထာင္မွာ ေနခဲ့ရေသးတယ္။ တနလၤာေန႔ကေတာ့ အိမ္ကို ျပန္ပို႔ၾကတယ္ေလ။ အိမ္က မိသားစုေတြနဲ႔လည္း ဓာတ္ပံု ႐ိုက္သြားေသးတယ္။ ေကာင္းေကာင္းမြန္မြန္ ျပန္ပို႔ခဲ့တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့အေၾကာင္း လက္မွတ္လည္း ထိုးလိုက္ရတယ္” ဟု သမီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒၚျမတ္ျမတ္ေထြးက မဇၩိမကို ေျပာျပသည္။
ယခင္က ေလျဖတ္ေဝဒနာ ခံစားခဲ့ရေသာ္လည္း ဖမ္းဆီးမခံရခင္အထိ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး တပါးတည္း ေရႊတိဂံု၊ ဆူးေလ၊ ဗိုလ္တေထာင္ဘုရားသို႔ ဘုရားဖူးႂကြခ်ီႏုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခု ျပန္လြတ္လာရာ၌ က်န္းမာေရး အေျခအေန ေကာင္းမြန္ျခင္း မရွိဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
ေဒၚျမတ္ျမတ္ေထြးက “က်န္းမာေရးက အရင္တုန္းကေတာ့ အေကာင္းပဲေလ။ ဟိုအရင္တုန္းက ေလျဖတ္ခဲ့ဖူးေတာ့ ကုခဲ့ရေသးတယ္။ အခု စကားေျပာေတြ တအားေလးေနတယ္။ ေဆးထိုးေဆးေကြ်း လုပ္ေနရတယ္။ ကိုယ္ေတြလက္ေတြကလည္း နာေနတယ္ ေျပာတယ္။ နဂို ေလျဖတ္တဲ့ဒဏ္နဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီး အခု စကားေတြက မပီေတာ့ဘူး” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မလိုအပ္ဘဲ စိတ္ေရာဂါကု ေဆး႐ံုတြင္ ထားရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ျပန္လြတ္လာသည့္အခါ က်န္းမာေရး ခ်ဳိ့ယြင္းလာခဲ့သျဖင့္ ၾကည္ၫိုသူ ဒါယိကာ၊ ဒါယိကာမမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆြမ်ဳိးသားခ်င္းမ်ားမွ စိတ္မေကာင္း ျဖစ္ေနၾကသည္။
ယခုအခါ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမ့ဳိနယ္ရွိ သမီးျဖစ္သူ၏ ေနအိမ္တြင္ သီတင္းသံုး ေနထုိင္ၿပီး ပဲခူးေက်ာင္းတုိက္သို႔ ျပန္ႂကြလိုလွ်င္ ေဒသအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို သတင္းပို႔ရမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။
စက္တင္ဘာလ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ၿမ့ဳိေတာ္ခန္းမေရွ့တြင္ သခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မႈိင္းႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း၏ ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္ကာ တပါးတည္း ဆႏၵျပသကဲ့သို႔ မဟာဗႏၶဳလ ပန္းၿခံေရွ့တြင္ ၃ ရက္ဆက္တိုက္ တရားေဟာခဲ့သည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးအား စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ထဲတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ကာ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္တြင္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။
ထိန္လင္း
Friday, 21 December 2007 18:21 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ေရႊဝါေရာင္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီးတြင္ ပါဝင္ခဲ့ရာမွ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရသူ ပဲခူးၿမ့ဳိ ကလ်ာဏီ သိမ္ေက်ာင္းတုိက္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ တနလၤာေန႔က ျပန္လြတ္လာခဲ့သည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ပထမပတ္တြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ဦးေတေဇာဘာသ (သက္ေတာ္ ၇၆ ႏွစ္) အား ေရႊတိဂံု ဘုရားေပၚမွအဆင္း စစ္ဖက္လံုျခံဳေရး တပ္ဖဲြ႔ဝင္မ်ားက ဖမ္းဆီးသြားခဲ့ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း လွည္းကူးၿမ့ဳိနယ္ရွိ ရြာသာႀကီး စိတ္ေရာဂါကု ေဆး႐ံုတြင္ ၂၅ ရက္ၾကာ ထိန္းသိမ္းထားရာမွ စခန္းႀကီးေက်းရြာရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္း တေက်ာင္းတြင္ ဆက္လက္ထားရွိကာ ယခုလ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားေပၚက အဆင္းမွာ အဖမ္းခံရတယ္ေလ။ ဘုမသိဘမသိနဲ႔ ေခၚသြားခံရတာ။ ၂၅ ရက္ၾကာ အရူးေထာင္မွာ ေနခဲ့ရေသးတယ္။ တနလၤာေန႔ကေတာ့ အိမ္ကို ျပန္ပို႔ၾကတယ္ေလ။ အိမ္က မိသားစုေတြနဲ႔လည္း ဓာတ္ပံု ႐ိုက္သြားေသးတယ္။ ေကာင္းေကာင္းမြန္မြန္ ျပန္ပို႔ခဲ့တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့အေၾကာင္း လက္မွတ္လည္း ထိုးလိုက္ရတယ္” ဟု သမီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒၚျမတ္ျမတ္ေထြးက မဇၩိမကို ေျပာျပသည္။
ယခင္က ေလျဖတ္ေဝဒနာ ခံစားခဲ့ရေသာ္လည္း ဖမ္းဆီးမခံရခင္အထိ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး တပါးတည္း ေရႊတိဂံု၊ ဆူးေလ၊ ဗိုလ္တေထာင္ဘုရားသို႔ ဘုရားဖူးႂကြခ်ီႏုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခု ျပန္လြတ္လာရာ၌ က်န္းမာေရး အေျခအေန ေကာင္းမြန္ျခင္း မရွိဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
ေဒၚျမတ္ျမတ္ေထြးက “က်န္းမာေရးက အရင္တုန္းကေတာ့ အေကာင္းပဲေလ။ ဟိုအရင္တုန္းက ေလျဖတ္ခဲ့ဖူးေတာ့ ကုခဲ့ရေသးတယ္။ အခု စကားေျပာေတြ တအားေလးေနတယ္။ ေဆးထိုးေဆးေကြ်း လုပ္ေနရတယ္။ ကိုယ္ေတြလက္ေတြကလည္း နာေနတယ္ ေျပာတယ္။ နဂို ေလျဖတ္တဲ့ဒဏ္နဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီး အခု စကားေတြက မပီေတာ့ဘူး” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မလိုအပ္ဘဲ စိတ္ေရာဂါကု ေဆး႐ံုတြင္ ထားရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ျပန္လြတ္လာသည့္အခါ က်န္းမာေရး ခ်ဳိ့ယြင္းလာခဲ့သျဖင့္ ၾကည္ၫိုသူ ဒါယိကာ၊ ဒါယိကာမမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆြမ်ဳိးသားခ်င္းမ်ားမွ စိတ္မေကာင္း ျဖစ္ေနၾကသည္။
ယခုအခါ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမ့ဳိနယ္ရွိ သမီးျဖစ္သူ၏ ေနအိမ္တြင္ သီတင္းသံုး ေနထုိင္ၿပီး ပဲခူးေက်ာင္းတုိက္သို႔ ျပန္ႂကြလိုလွ်င္ ေဒသအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို သတင္းပို႔ရမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။
စက္တင္ဘာလ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ၿမ့ဳိေတာ္ခန္းမေရွ့တြင္ သခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မႈိင္းႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း၏ ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္ကာ တပါးတည္း ဆႏၵျပသကဲ့သို႔ မဟာဗႏၶဳလ ပန္းၿခံေရွ့တြင္ ၃ ရက္ဆက္တိုက္ တရားေဟာခဲ့သည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးအား စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ထဲတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ကာ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္တြင္ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။
Friday, December 21, 2007
Posters exhorting monks' to protest on Independence Day in Pakhokku
Htein Linn
Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)
December 21, 2007 - Posters have appeared exhorting Buddhist monks to once again take to the streets on Burma 's Independence Day. In what appears to be an effort to renew the 'Saffron Revolution' posters were seen pasted in Pakhokku town in central Burma, sources said.
The posters calling for a mass rally of monks on the 60th anniversary of Burma's Independence Day on January 4, 2008, were pasted on the northern gate of the Mahawihzayarrama monastery, also Known as the East monastery, in Pakhokku, a town in Magwe Division where the September Saffron Revolution was sparked, the source said.
"This morning posters that call for a demonstration to be staged on January 4, were seen pasted at the northern gate. A number of monks and novices went to read the posters," a teaching monk from the monasteries told Mizzima.
However, the posters were removed soon by the local police force, the monk added.
Similarly, on November 9, posters exhorting monks to re-launch a boycott were also seen pasted on the walls of the monasteries.
Following the brutal crackdown on the September protests, the authorities raided several monasteries across the country and sent back most of the monks who were learning and novices to their native hometown, in a bid to weaken the monks' agitation.
Local residents said, only one-third of the monks could be seen present in Pakhokku town after the authorities forcibly drove away many monks and novices to their native hometown.
"Earlier there were about 600 monks but now there are only 200 left. Since there will be no more examinations, the monks left for their hometown after the September protests and did not return," the monk added.
A monk, who wished not to be named, said, authorities under the 'teacher-pupil' project ordered government employees to be informers by serving the monks at the monasteries and watch the activities of the monks closely.
"I have been ordered to work at one of the monasteries on the west of Shwe Street . Since there is no choice we have to do it," a government employee in Pakhokku told Mizzima.
Monks in Pakhokku planned to boycott the monks' examination to be conducted by the local authorities as opposition against the treatment meted out to the monks by the authorities during the Saffron 'Revolution'.
Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)
December 21, 2007 - Posters have appeared exhorting Buddhist monks to once again take to the streets on Burma 's Independence Day. In what appears to be an effort to renew the 'Saffron Revolution' posters were seen pasted in Pakhokku town in central Burma, sources said.
The posters calling for a mass rally of monks on the 60th anniversary of Burma's Independence Day on January 4, 2008, were pasted on the northern gate of the Mahawihzayarrama monastery, also Known as the East monastery, in Pakhokku, a town in Magwe Division where the September Saffron Revolution was sparked, the source said.
"This morning posters that call for a demonstration to be staged on January 4, were seen pasted at the northern gate. A number of monks and novices went to read the posters," a teaching monk from the monasteries told Mizzima.
However, the posters were removed soon by the local police force, the monk added.
Similarly, on November 9, posters exhorting monks to re-launch a boycott were also seen pasted on the walls of the monasteries.
Following the brutal crackdown on the September protests, the authorities raided several monasteries across the country and sent back most of the monks who were learning and novices to their native hometown, in a bid to weaken the monks' agitation.
Local residents said, only one-third of the monks could be seen present in Pakhokku town after the authorities forcibly drove away many monks and novices to their native hometown.
"Earlier there were about 600 monks but now there are only 200 left. Since there will be no more examinations, the monks left for their hometown after the September protests and did not return," the monk added.
A monk, who wished not to be named, said, authorities under the 'teacher-pupil' project ordered government employees to be informers by serving the monks at the monasteries and watch the activities of the monks closely.
"I have been ordered to work at one of the monasteries on the west of Shwe Street . Since there is no choice we have to do it," a government employee in Pakhokku told Mizzima.
Monks in Pakhokku planned to boycott the monks' examination to be conducted by the local authorities as opposition against the treatment meted out to the monks by the authorities during the Saffron 'Revolution'.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Burmese maze
The Economist
Thu 20 Dec 2007
For Muslims and other minorities, the monks’ battle was not their fight.
In the streets surrounding the Sule Paya pagoda in downtown Yangon, Burmese Muslims ply their trade, selling sweetmeats, calligraphy or spectacles. When the military junta opened fire on protesters led by monks in September, the Muslims had an excellent view of the violence. But for all the expletives they threw at the government, many refrained from joining the protesters. “It’s a Burmese problem,” says a grizzled old man, lolling outside the mosque opposite the pagoda. “Let them deal with it. They don’t think of us as being of their country.” The sense of being apart from Myanmar is an example of the religious and ethnic divisions that will persist, even if military rule eventually gives way to democracy.
The complexities of national identity are starkest in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state in western Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. Sittwe’s Muslims, who form anywhere from a third to half of the local population (official estimates of Muslim numbers are notoriously unreliable), are a mixed lot. Some claim descent from Indian and Bengali immigrants, who arrived in the once-thriving port when Burma was still a place where fortunes could be made. Others belong to the Rakhine ethnic group. Still others claim a distinct Rohingya ethnicity (a designation the junta does not recognise). But on one point, all agree: the government, being Buddhist, discriminates against Muslims. “The infidels are cruel to us and beat us,” goes a common refrain.
Severe poverty—the sight of ten people living under a single roof without electricity is as common as that of forced labour on the roads along the marshy sea—exacerbates Muslim resentment, particularly given the false but intractable belief that Myanmar’s Buddhists are getting rich. Although incidents of outright violence have decreased, relations between Muslims and Buddhists remain tense. Some Muslims take satisfaction from the government’s crackdown on the monks. “They [the junta] put them on a pedestal and now they’re the ones having a problem,” grins one local imam. Amongst Sittwe’s Muslims, the otherwise universal admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, is tempered. “She can’t help being an improvement on the current government,” says the imam. “But she’s Buddhist too. She’s probably not very good on the Muslim question.”
Religion is not the only source of division. Race plays a powerful role. Sittwe’s Muslims, like its rarer Hindus, find it almost impossible to travel outside Rakhine state. Even inside it, paperwork and perpetual inspections can make a simple fishing trip harrowing. Most attribute these restrictions to the government’s belief that Rakhine is plagued by illegal immigrants from India and Bangladesh who do not deserve citizenship or the right to travel.
Such oversimplifications miss the demographic complexities of Sittwe. Some residents are Indians who were born there. Others are products of mixed marriages. Many have family members in other parts of Myanmar whom they might never see again. “There have been Muslims here since before the British ever came to Burma,” says a local teacher. “And yes, a lot of the people here did come over from Bangladesh. But that was years and years ago.” Small wonder that most of Sittwe’s people nowadays just want to leave. “I’d go to Malaysia or even Bangladesh,” says a young man who was born of a Bengali father and Rakhine mother. “But I don’t have the money.”
Though it is most potent amongst Muslims, the idea of not belonging is common among other ethnic and religious minorities. Sittwe’s Hindus also say they are locked out of the labour market. Buddhists in Rakhine often identify themselves as belonging “Not [to] Myanmar, but the Arakan kings” (a reference to the ancient Rakhine empire). Forging a single national identity from these disparate ethnic and religious groups will be a challenge for any Burmese government. Already, disunity may have harmed the prospects for democratic change. “Where were the ethnic armies?” asked one resident of Yangon, plaintively, of the uprising against the junta in September. “If the Shan and Kachin had come, we might have got somewhere.” Perhaps, like the Rakhine and Muslims, they felt it was not their fight
Thu 20 Dec 2007
For Muslims and other minorities, the monks’ battle was not their fight.
In the streets surrounding the Sule Paya pagoda in downtown Yangon, Burmese Muslims ply their trade, selling sweetmeats, calligraphy or spectacles. When the military junta opened fire on protesters led by monks in September, the Muslims had an excellent view of the violence. But for all the expletives they threw at the government, many refrained from joining the protesters. “It’s a Burmese problem,” says a grizzled old man, lolling outside the mosque opposite the pagoda. “Let them deal with it. They don’t think of us as being of their country.” The sense of being apart from Myanmar is an example of the religious and ethnic divisions that will persist, even if military rule eventually gives way to democracy.
The complexities of national identity are starkest in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state in western Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. Sittwe’s Muslims, who form anywhere from a third to half of the local population (official estimates of Muslim numbers are notoriously unreliable), are a mixed lot. Some claim descent from Indian and Bengali immigrants, who arrived in the once-thriving port when Burma was still a place where fortunes could be made. Others belong to the Rakhine ethnic group. Still others claim a distinct Rohingya ethnicity (a designation the junta does not recognise). But on one point, all agree: the government, being Buddhist, discriminates against Muslims. “The infidels are cruel to us and beat us,” goes a common refrain.
Severe poverty—the sight of ten people living under a single roof without electricity is as common as that of forced labour on the roads along the marshy sea—exacerbates Muslim resentment, particularly given the false but intractable belief that Myanmar’s Buddhists are getting rich. Although incidents of outright violence have decreased, relations between Muslims and Buddhists remain tense. Some Muslims take satisfaction from the government’s crackdown on the monks. “They [the junta] put them on a pedestal and now they’re the ones having a problem,” grins one local imam. Amongst Sittwe’s Muslims, the otherwise universal admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, is tempered. “She can’t help being an improvement on the current government,” says the imam. “But she’s Buddhist too. She’s probably not very good on the Muslim question.”
Religion is not the only source of division. Race plays a powerful role. Sittwe’s Muslims, like its rarer Hindus, find it almost impossible to travel outside Rakhine state. Even inside it, paperwork and perpetual inspections can make a simple fishing trip harrowing. Most attribute these restrictions to the government’s belief that Rakhine is plagued by illegal immigrants from India and Bangladesh who do not deserve citizenship or the right to travel.
Such oversimplifications miss the demographic complexities of Sittwe. Some residents are Indians who were born there. Others are products of mixed marriages. Many have family members in other parts of Myanmar whom they might never see again. “There have been Muslims here since before the British ever came to Burma,” says a local teacher. “And yes, a lot of the people here did come over from Bangladesh. But that was years and years ago.” Small wonder that most of Sittwe’s people nowadays just want to leave. “I’d go to Malaysia or even Bangladesh,” says a young man who was born of a Bengali father and Rakhine mother. “But I don’t have the money.”
Though it is most potent amongst Muslims, the idea of not belonging is common among other ethnic and religious minorities. Sittwe’s Hindus also say they are locked out of the labour market. Buddhists in Rakhine often identify themselves as belonging “Not [to] Myanmar, but the Arakan kings” (a reference to the ancient Rakhine empire). Forging a single national identity from these disparate ethnic and religious groups will be a challenge for any Burmese government. Already, disunity may have harmed the prospects for democratic change. “Where were the ethnic armies?” asked one resident of Yangon, plaintively, of the uprising against the junta in September. “If the Shan and Kachin had come, we might have got somewhere.” Perhaps, like the Rakhine and Muslims, they felt it was not their fight
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Monks refuse documentary team to film in monastery
Irrawaddy
Saw Yan Naing
Wed 19 Dec 2007
A documentary team, led by Zin Yaw Maung Maung, one of Burma’s best-known film directors, was denied permission to take footage of Burmese minister Aung Thaung making an offering to monks by the resident monks of a monastery in Mandalay on Tuesday.
Buddhist monks at the Maha Gandayon monastery in Amarapura Township of Mandalay refused the documentary team, claiming that they were funded by the pro-junta group, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, according to sources.
A source close to the monks said: “The monks didn’t allow the group to take any footage. However, Zin Yaw Maung Maung tried to film it. The monks finally convinced the documentary group to leave and closed the gate. The group left the monastery at about 2:30 p.m.”
Zin Yaw Maung Maung has produced several films in the past promoting the propaganda of the military government. In 1996, he produced a documentary celebrating the anniversary of the USDA.
The source added that the senior monks urged their members not to accept offerings from Aung Thaung, Minister of Industry-1, who is believed to serve as one of the regime’s hardliners, earning the trust of junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
Buddhist monks staged a patta ni kozana kan, meaning a refusal to accept alms from members of the armed forces and their families, in September. Following their activities against the junta, many monasteries were raided and monks were brutally tortured.
Meanwhile, a 76-year-old Buddhist monk, Ashin Tay Zaw Bartha, is now staying at his daughter’s home after being forced out of the Klayani monastery in Pegu Division by the security forces, said sources.
Ashin Tay Zaw Bartha staged a solo protest against the military government at Rangoon City Hall in September and was subsequently arrested. He went missing for 15 days after his release on October 25. After being sent to his daughter’s home in South Okkalapa Township in Rangoon on Monday, he was told by the authorities not to go back to his monastery, said sources.
In late November, Buddhist monks were forcefully removed from Maggin Monastery in Rangoon by the authorities and the monastery was ordered to close. Nine monks, two laypersons and six HIV/AIDS patients were expelled from the monastery to unknown locations, said sources.
The Burmese junta has reported that 13 protesters were killed during the crackdown on September’s uprising; however, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said at least 31 people were killed, while dissidents claimed the death toll was much higher.
As a result of the crackdown, sanctions on Burma have been enforced by several Western countries, led by the US government. A freeze on arms to Burma was also reportedly imposed by the Indian government.
To ease international pressure at that time, Than Shwe announced he would conditionally meet with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
One month later however, Than Shwe shelved the talks, concentrating instead on his own agenda, including a series of ceremonies invariably bestowing high praise on the soldiers who carried out his shoot-to-kill orders during the pro-democracy demonstrations.
The main opposition party in Burma, the National League for Democracy, said that it did not see any signals of dialogue between Than Shwe and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Nyan Win, a spokesperson for the NLD, said: “The meeting between Than Shwe and Suu Kyi should not take long to hold. It should be accelerated. The authorities should also allow us [NLD leaders] to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi whenever necessary.”
In a move supposedly associated with initiating dialogue between the two parties, the junta recently appointed a liaison minister, Aung Kyi, to deal with the pro-democracy leader.
The latest meeting between the regime’s liaison minister and Suu Kyi was held on November 19. No meeting has been held since, said the party’s spokesperson.
Saw Yan Naing
Wed 19 Dec 2007
A documentary team, led by Zin Yaw Maung Maung, one of Burma’s best-known film directors, was denied permission to take footage of Burmese minister Aung Thaung making an offering to monks by the resident monks of a monastery in Mandalay on Tuesday.
Buddhist monks at the Maha Gandayon monastery in Amarapura Township of Mandalay refused the documentary team, claiming that they were funded by the pro-junta group, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, according to sources.
A source close to the monks said: “The monks didn’t allow the group to take any footage. However, Zin Yaw Maung Maung tried to film it. The monks finally convinced the documentary group to leave and closed the gate. The group left the monastery at about 2:30 p.m.”
Zin Yaw Maung Maung has produced several films in the past promoting the propaganda of the military government. In 1996, he produced a documentary celebrating the anniversary of the USDA.
The source added that the senior monks urged their members not to accept offerings from Aung Thaung, Minister of Industry-1, who is believed to serve as one of the regime’s hardliners, earning the trust of junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
Buddhist monks staged a patta ni kozana kan, meaning a refusal to accept alms from members of the armed forces and their families, in September. Following their activities against the junta, many monasteries were raided and monks were brutally tortured.
Meanwhile, a 76-year-old Buddhist monk, Ashin Tay Zaw Bartha, is now staying at his daughter’s home after being forced out of the Klayani monastery in Pegu Division by the security forces, said sources.
Ashin Tay Zaw Bartha staged a solo protest against the military government at Rangoon City Hall in September and was subsequently arrested. He went missing for 15 days after his release on October 25. After being sent to his daughter’s home in South Okkalapa Township in Rangoon on Monday, he was told by the authorities not to go back to his monastery, said sources.
In late November, Buddhist monks were forcefully removed from Maggin Monastery in Rangoon by the authorities and the monastery was ordered to close. Nine monks, two laypersons and six HIV/AIDS patients were expelled from the monastery to unknown locations, said sources.
The Burmese junta has reported that 13 protesters were killed during the crackdown on September’s uprising; however, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said at least 31 people were killed, while dissidents claimed the death toll was much higher.
As a result of the crackdown, sanctions on Burma have been enforced by several Western countries, led by the US government. A freeze on arms to Burma was also reportedly imposed by the Indian government.
To ease international pressure at that time, Than Shwe announced he would conditionally meet with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
One month later however, Than Shwe shelved the talks, concentrating instead on his own agenda, including a series of ceremonies invariably bestowing high praise on the soldiers who carried out his shoot-to-kill orders during the pro-democracy demonstrations.
The main opposition party in Burma, the National League for Democracy, said that it did not see any signals of dialogue between Than Shwe and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Nyan Win, a spokesperson for the NLD, said: “The meeting between Than Shwe and Suu Kyi should not take long to hold. It should be accelerated. The authorities should also allow us [NLD leaders] to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi whenever necessary.”
In a move supposedly associated with initiating dialogue between the two parties, the junta recently appointed a liaison minister, Aung Kyi, to deal with the pro-democracy leader.
The latest meeting between the regime’s liaison minister and Suu Kyi was held on November 19. No meeting has been held since, said the party’s spokesperson.
Mandalay monks decline junta offering
Democratic Voice of Burma
Aye Nai
Wed 19 Dec 2007
The majority of monks at Maha Gandhayon monastery, a lecturing monastery in Mandalay, refused to accept a food offering from minister for industry-1 Aung Thaung yesterday.
Aung Thaung went to the monastery to offer a meal to the monks, but only 100 of the 1000 monks in the monastery came to eat the meal, according to one of the monks.
“Only around 100 monks came to the meal, while the others went out to collect alms around the town instead,” the monk said.
The previous day, film director Zinyaw Maung Maung and his crew had visited the monastery to make a video funded by the Union Solidarity and Development Association.
The video was intended to be broadcast on state television showing the monks having a meal and accepting alms.
But when the monks became aware of the planned video shoot, they refused to come out of the monastery.
The film crew waited until the afternoon but eventually had to leave without any footage after the monks locked the gates.
One member of the film crew who went into the monastery told DVB that he saw writing on the walls of the toilet calling on the monastery’s monks not to accept Aung Thaung’s meal offering and saying that those who attended the donation would be regarded as traitors.
This is the second time that Aung Thaung’s alms offering has been rejected, after an attempt to give food to Seittabala monastery in Kyaukpadaung township Mandalay on 4 December met with the same response.
Aye Nai
Wed 19 Dec 2007
The majority of monks at Maha Gandhayon monastery, a lecturing monastery in Mandalay, refused to accept a food offering from minister for industry-1 Aung Thaung yesterday.
Aung Thaung went to the monastery to offer a meal to the monks, but only 100 of the 1000 monks in the monastery came to eat the meal, according to one of the monks.
“Only around 100 monks came to the meal, while the others went out to collect alms around the town instead,” the monk said.
The previous day, film director Zinyaw Maung Maung and his crew had visited the monastery to make a video funded by the Union Solidarity and Development Association.
The video was intended to be broadcast on state television showing the monks having a meal and accepting alms.
But when the monks became aware of the planned video shoot, they refused to come out of the monastery.
The film crew waited until the afternoon but eventually had to leave without any footage after the monks locked the gates.
One member of the film crew who went into the monastery told DVB that he saw writing on the walls of the toilet calling on the monastery’s monks not to accept Aung Thaung’s meal offering and saying that those who attended the donation would be regarded as traitors.
This is the second time that Aung Thaung’s alms offering has been rejected, after an attempt to give food to Seittabala monastery in Kyaukpadaung township Mandalay on 4 December met with the same response.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
ဆရာေတာ္ကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေသာ္လည္း ေငြၾကာယံကို လံုျခံဳေရး တင္းက်ပ္ထား
Mizzima
ဖနိဒါ
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 22:01 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ရန္ကုန္ၿမ့ဳိ ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမ့ဳိနယ္မွ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရဝတအား စက္တင္ဘာ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ရာမွ ယခုလ ၁၄ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ သံဃာ ၉၆ ပါးႏွင့္အတူ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးေသာ္လည္း ေက်ာင္းတိုက္ကိုမူ လံုျခံဳေရးမ်ား ခ်ထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရဝတႏွင့္အတူ စက္တင္ဘာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးခံရသူမ်ားထဲမွ သံဃာေတာ္ ၉၆ ပါးကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ျပန္လႊတ္ခဲ့ရာတြင္ ေငြၾကာယံမွ သံဃာ ၅၁ ပါးကို ေက်ာင္းတုိက္၌ ျပန္လည္ သီတင္းသံုးခြင့္ ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ေက်ာင္းတုိက္သို႔ ဖူးေျမာ္လာသူမ်ားကုိ စြမ္းအားရွင္ႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖံြ႔မ်ားက တင္းက်ပ္စြာ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွသာ ေက်ာင္းတုိက္အတြင္းသို႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ခြင့္ေပးေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ား ေျပာဆိုသည္။
“လံုျခံဳေရးကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းထဲမွာ စြမ္းအားရွင္ေရာ၊ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔ေတြေရာ ၁၅ ေယာက္ေလာက္ေတာ့ ရွိတယ္။ အခုေလာေလာဆယ္က သြားၿပီးေတာ့ ဖူးမယ္ဆုိရင္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွ ဝင္သြားဖူးၾကတယ္ေလ။ ေက်ာင္းထဲမွာ တျခားဘုန္းႀကီးေတြ ဒီ ၅၁ ပါးထက္ ေက်ာ္မေနရေအာင္ မၾကာမၾကာ စစ္ေဆးေနပါတယ္” ဟု ေက်ာင္းတိုက္အနီး ေနထိုင္သူတဦးက မဇၩိမကို ေျပာသည္။
ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယက အဖဲြ႔တြင္ ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ တပါးလည္းျဖစ္သည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ျပန္လြတ္လာသည္ကို ၾကားသိသျဖင့္ ယခုရက္ပုိင္းအတြင္း လာေရာက္ဖူးေျမာ္သူ မ်ားျပားသျဖင့္ လံုျခံဳေရးမ်ား အထူးၾကပ္မတ္ကာ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွ အဝင္အထြက္ ခြင့္ျပဳေနျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟု အျခားေဒသခံ တဦးကလည္း ေျပာဆိုသည္။
အဆိုပါ ေဒသခံက “က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒကာ၊ ဒကာမေတြအေနနဲ႔ကေတာ့ အရမ္းကုိ ဝမ္းသာပါတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကလည္း ရပ္ရြာအတြက္ကုိ ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေစတနာ၊ ေမတၱာနဲ႔ ပရိတ္ရြတ္တယ္။ အားလံုးက ဝမ္းပမ္းတသာနဲ႔ သြားၿပီးေတာ့ ဖူးၾကတယ္ေလ။ ဒီလုိျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြကုိ မၾကာမၾကာ ေနာင္မွာလည္း ျမင္ေတြ႔ၿပီးေတာ့ တုိင္းျပည္မွာ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ခ်မ္းခ်မ္းသာသာ ျမင္ကြင္းေလးကုိ ျမင္ခ်င္ပါတယ္ဗ်ာ” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
သူက ဆက္ၿပီး သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ေက်ာင္းအျပင္သို႔ ထြက္ခြါပါက ေနာက္မွ စြမ္းအားရွင္အခ်ဳိ့က ေနာက္မွ ထပ္ခ်ပ္မကြာ လိုက္ပါသြားေလ့ရွိသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီး ျဖစ္ပြားေနစဥ္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တပ္မ်ားက ေငြၾကာယံ ေက်ာင္းတုိက္အတြင္း ဝင္ေရာက္စီးနင္းကာ သံဃာအပါး ၉ဝ ေက်ာ္အား ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ေနာက္တရက္တြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကိုပါ ဖမ္းဆီးသြားၿပီး ယခုအခါ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္မွ ၅၁ ပါးသာ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ပထမ ေဒသခံက “မနက္မွာ သူတုိ႔ဘက္က ဆုိင္ကယ္ေတြနဲ႔ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္း ေရာက္လာၿပီးေတာ့၊ စြမ္းအားရွင္ေတြလည္း ပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ သန္႔ရွင္းေရး လုပ္တယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္ ေတာ္ေတာ္အၾကာမွာ ကားေတြနဲ႔ ေရာက္လာတယ္။ ေရာက္လာတာကလည္း ကားတစီးကုိ ၄ ၊ ၅ ပါးနဲ႔ ေရာက္လာတယ္။ အားလံုး အပါး ၅၁ ပါး ျပန္ပုိ႔တာ ေတြ႔ရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကို ကမၻာေအး သာသနာ့နယ္ေျမတြင္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားရာမွ ေခၚလာကာ အျခား သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကိုမူ အင္းစိန္ စက္မႈလက္မႈ သိပၸံေက်ာင္းမွ ေခၚလာေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ယခုလႊတ္ေပးသည့္ သံဃာ ၉၆ ပါးအနက္ ၄၅ ပါးကိုမူ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ရန္ကုန္တြင္ သီတင္းသံုးခြင့္ မေပးေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ယခုကိစၥႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ အေသးစိတ္သိရွိရန္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ဆက္သြယ္ေသာ္လည္း ဆက္သြယ္၍ မရခဲ့ပါ။
ဖနိဒါ
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 22:01 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ရန္ကုန္ၿမ့ဳိ ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမ့ဳိနယ္မွ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရဝတအား စက္တင္ဘာ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ရာမွ ယခုလ ၁၄ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ သံဃာ ၉၆ ပါးႏွင့္အတူ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးေသာ္လည္း ေက်ာင္းတိုက္ကိုမူ လံုျခံဳေရးမ်ား ခ်ထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရဝတႏွင့္အတူ စက္တင္ဘာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးခံရသူမ်ားထဲမွ သံဃာေတာ္ ၉၆ ပါးကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ျပန္လႊတ္ခဲ့ရာတြင္ ေငြၾကာယံမွ သံဃာ ၅၁ ပါးကို ေက်ာင္းတုိက္၌ ျပန္လည္ သီတင္းသံုးခြင့္ ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ေက်ာင္းတုိက္သို႔ ဖူးေျမာ္လာသူမ်ားကုိ စြမ္းအားရွင္ႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖံြ႔မ်ားက တင္းက်ပ္စြာ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွသာ ေက်ာင္းတုိက္အတြင္းသို႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ခြင့္ေပးေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ား ေျပာဆိုသည္။
“လံုျခံဳေရးကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းထဲမွာ စြမ္းအားရွင္ေရာ၊ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔ေတြေရာ ၁၅ ေယာက္ေလာက္ေတာ့ ရွိတယ္။ အခုေလာေလာဆယ္က သြားၿပီးေတာ့ ဖူးမယ္ဆုိရင္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွ ဝင္သြားဖူးၾကတယ္ေလ။ ေက်ာင္းထဲမွာ တျခားဘုန္းႀကီးေတြ ဒီ ၅၁ ပါးထက္ ေက်ာ္မေနရေအာင္ မၾကာမၾကာ စစ္ေဆးေနပါတယ္” ဟု ေက်ာင္းတိုက္အနီး ေနထိုင္သူတဦးက မဇၩိမကို ေျပာသည္။
ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သံဃမဟာနာယက အဖဲြ႔တြင္ ဦးေဆာင္ဆရာေတာ္ တပါးလည္းျဖစ္သည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ျပန္လြတ္လာသည္ကို ၾကားသိသျဖင့္ ယခုရက္ပုိင္းအတြင္း လာေရာက္ဖူးေျမာ္သူ မ်ားျပားသျဖင့္ လံုျခံဳေရးမ်ား အထူးၾကပ္မတ္ကာ စစ္ေဆးၿပီးမွ အဝင္အထြက္ ခြင့္ျပဳေနျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟု အျခားေဒသခံ တဦးကလည္း ေျပာဆိုသည္။
အဆိုပါ ေဒသခံက “က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒကာ၊ ဒကာမေတြအေနနဲ႔ကေတာ့ အရမ္းကုိ ဝမ္းသာပါတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကလည္း ရပ္ရြာအတြက္ကုိ ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေစတနာ၊ ေမတၱာနဲ႔ ပရိတ္ရြတ္တယ္။ အားလံုးက ဝမ္းပမ္းတသာနဲ႔ သြားၿပီးေတာ့ ဖူးၾကတယ္ေလ။ ဒီလုိျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြကုိ မၾကာမၾကာ ေနာင္မွာလည္း ျမင္ေတြ႔ၿပီးေတာ့ တုိင္းျပည္မွာ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ခ်မ္းခ်မ္းသာသာ ျမင္ကြင္းေလးကုိ ျမင္ခ်င္ပါတယ္ဗ်ာ” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
သူက ဆက္ၿပီး သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ေက်ာင္းအျပင္သို႔ ထြက္ခြါပါက ေနာက္မွ စြမ္းအားရွင္အခ်ဳိ့က ေနာက္မွ ထပ္ခ်ပ္မကြာ လိုက္ပါသြားေလ့ရွိသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ သံဃာလူထု လႈပ္ရွားမႈႀကီး ျဖစ္ပြားေနစဥ္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တပ္မ်ားက ေငြၾကာယံ ေက်ာင္းတုိက္အတြင္း ဝင္ေရာက္စီးနင္းကာ သံဃာအပါး ၉ဝ ေက်ာ္အား ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ေနာက္တရက္တြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကိုပါ ဖမ္းဆီးသြားၿပီး ယခုအခါ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္မွ ၅၁ ပါးသာ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ပထမ ေဒသခံက “မနက္မွာ သူတုိ႔ဘက္က ဆုိင္ကယ္ေတြနဲ႔ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္း ေရာက္လာၿပီးေတာ့၊ စြမ္းအားရွင္ေတြလည္း ပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ သန္႔ရွင္းေရး လုပ္တယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္ ေတာ္ေတာ္အၾကာမွာ ကားေတြနဲ႔ ေရာက္လာတယ္။ ေရာက္လာတာကလည္း ကားတစီးကုိ ၄ ၊ ၅ ပါးနဲ႔ ေရာက္လာတယ္။ အားလံုး အပါး ၅၁ ပါး ျပန္ပုိ႔တာ ေတြ႔ရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကို ကမၻာေအး သာသနာ့နယ္ေျမတြင္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားရာမွ ေခၚလာကာ အျခား သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကိုမူ အင္းစိန္ စက္မႈလက္မႈ သိပၸံေက်ာင္းမွ ေခၚလာေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ယခုလႊတ္ေပးသည့္ သံဃာ ၉၆ ပါးအနက္ ၄၅ ပါးကိုမူ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ရန္ကုန္တြင္ သီတင္းသံုးခြင့္ မေပးေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ယခုကိစၥႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ အေသးစိတ္သိရွိရန္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္သို႔ ဆက္သြယ္ေသာ္လည္း ဆက္သြယ္၍ မရခဲ့ပါ။
Buddhist Monks start Japan tour to defend Buddhism
Phanida (Mizzima News)
December 17, 2007 - On the invitation of various Buddhist organizations, the 'International Burmese Monks Organization' (Sasana Moli) led by venerable U Pannavamsa started its tour of Japan from 7th December, wrapping it up by the 16 th of this month. The Organization intends to seek further support from the international community to immediately stop hostilities and acts of repression in Burma and begin a genuine political process of reformation by inclusive dialogue.
The International Burmese Monks Organization was formed on 27th October this year in Los Angeles, US to work together with the international Buddhist community in defending and protecting Buddhism.
We present here an interview of Ven. U Pannavamsa on his tour to Japan.
Q: What is the intention of your organizing a tour in Japan?
A: We are here to organize the Buddhist people to protect the Burmese people from the junta's repression. And also we would like to start an awareness campaign of what is going on in Burma such as expelling the monks from the monasteries viz. Maggin, Ngwe Kyaryan etc.
Q: Where have you been? Whom have you met?
A: We shall visit Tokyo and Nagoya and meet Buddhist monks and politicians. Then we will proceed to Maloto and meet 2 to 3 Monks organizations there and will discuss Burma issues.
Q: How will you conduct your organizational tour, Ven.?
A: We are striving hard for this. We told them about the September uprising regarding the monks. We told them how our Burmese Buddhist monks have nowhere to go and asked them to help us. We discussed with them administrative issues but not about financial assistance.
Q: When did you form your International Burmese Monks Organization?
A: We formed our organization on 27th October this year.
Q: What are your aims and objectives?
A: We didn't form this organization for ourselves. We formed this organization for the monks in Burma who have nowhere to go and are hapless, while some are injured. We consulted our senior abbots and the respective governments worldwide and formed this organization to help Burmese people and to talk about Burmese people.
Q: How many monks are there in your organization?
A: Over 50 monks.
Q: What would you like to say about your Japan tour, Ven.?
A: We would like to say especially that this tour is not for ourselves. On behalf of all, I would like to say we are striving hard for the perpetuation of Buddhist Sasana in Burma , because the junta is posing a threat to Sasana in our country. Burma itself has been under threat for 45 years. We are persuaded by the pressure of Buddhism. We would like to request all with due respect to do something that should be done, and not to stay calm, indifferent and quiet. We shall do this task too and do our organizational work.
Q: How important is the role of Japan regarding the democratic struggle in Burma?
A: It's very important. We are under two menaces. This is our issue. The first issue is the situation of the Buddhist monks in Burma . There are many Buddhists in Japan , so we have come here to ask for their assistance for their fellow Buddhist monks and Buddhist people.
Q: What is the achievement from your current tour?
A: We firmly believe they will provide us their utmost help as Japan is also a Buddhist country. Similarly the former Foreign Minister, former diplomats assured us help when we met them.
Q: What do you feel about the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrations led by the monks during the September uprising?
A: As you know, the news of the brutal crackdown on the peaceful demonstrations led by the Buddhist monks was spread on the international media and on internet. Even the international community cannot tolerate it anymore. As a responsible person, every Burmese citizen should show their sorrow and sadness on this brutal crackdown and should do something for it.
Q: What did you do in US before coming to Japan?
A: I met many organizations from various countries personally and also met Congressmen and Senators, NGOs, and visited White House before coming to Japan. There are many other Burmese monks from various Buddhist Organizations in their respective countries and they are also working for our organization. We are doing our utmost to make Burma free from all repression and hardships. We will proceed to other countries too after this Japan tour, but we have not yet fixed our itinerary.
Q: How have the Burmese people in Japan respond to your Japan tour?
A: We are not meeting only with the Buddhists here, but also met with people from all faiths, Christians and Muslims too. We asked for them to work together in unity for our country. All accepted this point.
December 17, 2007 - On the invitation of various Buddhist organizations, the 'International Burmese Monks Organization' (Sasana Moli) led by venerable U Pannavamsa started its tour of Japan from 7th December, wrapping it up by the 16 th of this month. The Organization intends to seek further support from the international community to immediately stop hostilities and acts of repression in Burma and begin a genuine political process of reformation by inclusive dialogue.
The International Burmese Monks Organization was formed on 27th October this year in Los Angeles, US to work together with the international Buddhist community in defending and protecting Buddhism.
We present here an interview of Ven. U Pannavamsa on his tour to Japan.
Q: What is the intention of your organizing a tour in Japan?
A: We are here to organize the Buddhist people to protect the Burmese people from the junta's repression. And also we would like to start an awareness campaign of what is going on in Burma such as expelling the monks from the monasteries viz. Maggin, Ngwe Kyaryan etc.
Q: Where have you been? Whom have you met?
A: We shall visit Tokyo and Nagoya and meet Buddhist monks and politicians. Then we will proceed to Maloto and meet 2 to 3 Monks organizations there and will discuss Burma issues.
Q: How will you conduct your organizational tour, Ven.?
A: We are striving hard for this. We told them about the September uprising regarding the monks. We told them how our Burmese Buddhist monks have nowhere to go and asked them to help us. We discussed with them administrative issues but not about financial assistance.
Q: When did you form your International Burmese Monks Organization?
A: We formed our organization on 27th October this year.
Q: What are your aims and objectives?
A: We didn't form this organization for ourselves. We formed this organization for the monks in Burma who have nowhere to go and are hapless, while some are injured. We consulted our senior abbots and the respective governments worldwide and formed this organization to help Burmese people and to talk about Burmese people.
Q: How many monks are there in your organization?
A: Over 50 monks.
Q: What would you like to say about your Japan tour, Ven.?
A: We would like to say especially that this tour is not for ourselves. On behalf of all, I would like to say we are striving hard for the perpetuation of Buddhist Sasana in Burma , because the junta is posing a threat to Sasana in our country. Burma itself has been under threat for 45 years. We are persuaded by the pressure of Buddhism. We would like to request all with due respect to do something that should be done, and not to stay calm, indifferent and quiet. We shall do this task too and do our organizational work.
Q: How important is the role of Japan regarding the democratic struggle in Burma?
A: It's very important. We are under two menaces. This is our issue. The first issue is the situation of the Buddhist monks in Burma . There are many Buddhists in Japan , so we have come here to ask for their assistance for their fellow Buddhist monks and Buddhist people.
Q: What is the achievement from your current tour?
A: We firmly believe they will provide us their utmost help as Japan is also a Buddhist country. Similarly the former Foreign Minister, former diplomats assured us help when we met them.
Q: What do you feel about the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrations led by the monks during the September uprising?
A: As you know, the news of the brutal crackdown on the peaceful demonstrations led by the Buddhist monks was spread on the international media and on internet. Even the international community cannot tolerate it anymore. As a responsible person, every Burmese citizen should show their sorrow and sadness on this brutal crackdown and should do something for it.
Q: What did you do in US before coming to Japan?
A: I met many organizations from various countries personally and also met Congressmen and Senators, NGOs, and visited White House before coming to Japan. There are many other Burmese monks from various Buddhist Organizations in their respective countries and they are also working for our organization. We are doing our utmost to make Burma free from all repression and hardships. We will proceed to other countries too after this Japan tour, but we have not yet fixed our itinerary.
Q: How have the Burmese people in Japan respond to your Japan tour?
A: We are not meeting only with the Buddhists here, but also met with people from all faiths, Christians and Muslims too. We asked for them to work together in unity for our country. All accepted this point.
Than Shwe’s days in top spot are numbered
The Nation
Myint Thein
Tue 18 Dec 2007
Killing Buddhist monks is not the same thing as killing students in Burma. When Than Shwe mass-murdered Buddhist monks, he activated a religious “poison pill” that will destroy him. We do not expect Than Shwe to survive for more than another six months.
But the problem in Burma goes beyond dictator Than Shwe.
A retired Burmese ambassador told me that the Burmese army never learned how to govern the country. He cited the example of Zaw Tun, the former deputy economics minister. Zaw Tun graduated from the prestigious St Paul’s High School and was Than Shwe’s aide-de-camp.
Zaw Tun publicly complained that regional commanders were providing inflated economic statistics to impress Than Shwe. For this honesty, Zaw Tun, despite his former close ties to Than Shwe, was asked to resign.
This is why last year I sent a feature article in The Wall Street Journal to a senior general about the Communist Party of China sending their future leaders to the US to learn how to govern. Some were trained at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and others at graduate schools of public administration at America’s leading universities.
The next military leader of Burma has a clear choice. He can negotiate in good faith at a neutral site in Singapore, or face an armed national uprising.
Myint Thein is Senior Adviser to the Burmese Resistance
Myint Thein
Tue 18 Dec 2007
Killing Buddhist monks is not the same thing as killing students in Burma. When Than Shwe mass-murdered Buddhist monks, he activated a religious “poison pill” that will destroy him. We do not expect Than Shwe to survive for more than another six months.
But the problem in Burma goes beyond dictator Than Shwe.
A retired Burmese ambassador told me that the Burmese army never learned how to govern the country. He cited the example of Zaw Tun, the former deputy economics minister. Zaw Tun graduated from the prestigious St Paul’s High School and was Than Shwe’s aide-de-camp.
Zaw Tun publicly complained that regional commanders were providing inflated economic statistics to impress Than Shwe. For this honesty, Zaw Tun, despite his former close ties to Than Shwe, was asked to resign.
This is why last year I sent a feature article in The Wall Street Journal to a senior general about the Communist Party of China sending their future leaders to the US to learn how to govern. Some were trained at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and others at graduate schools of public administration at America’s leading universities.
The next military leader of Burma has a clear choice. He can negotiate in good faith at a neutral site in Singapore, or face an armed national uprising.
Myint Thein is Senior Adviser to the Burmese Resistance
Monday, December 17, 2007
Spies, suspicion and empty monasteries, Burma today
The security policemen who snatched the young shop owner from his bed and hauled him off to the bare interrogation room of Mandalay’s police station No 14 really had only one question - and just one answer - in mind.
But the interrogators had an array of techniques to extract the “confession” they wanted to hear from him and the thousands of others scattered in jails across Burma; an admission that the pro-democracy demonstrations led by thousands of monks that shook the country’s paranoid military government in September were really a foreign-backed political plot to bring down the regime.
“I was sitting on the floor of the interrogation room,” said the man, an art shop owner in his 20s. “There were five of them asking questions. The first day I was beaten very hard and they asked: who organised the monks? I told them we were following the monks, respecting the Buddha, they weren’t following us.”
“I was interrogated all night for three nights. They kicked and punched me on the side of my head with their fists. They asked me the same question over and over. I told them: you can ask anything, my answer will always be the same. I don’t know who organised the monks. They didn’t like that answer.”
So the interrogators forced the young man to half-crouch as though he were sitting on a motorbike, made him put his arms out as if gripping the handlebars and demanded he imitate an engine, loudly.
The initial humiliation gave way to intense pains in his legs, arms and throat after several hours. When he fell over he was beaten again. He was held for a month and is still not sure why he was detained. He suspects the police identified him from photographs of civilians who marched with the monks. But he was not alone in the cells of police station No 14.
Thousands of civilians have emerged from weeks in prison following the protests with accounts of brutal torture aimed at extracting “confessions” and at terrorising a new generation of Burmese into acquiescing to military rule.
Crackdown
From Rangoon to Mandalay and down the Irrawaddy river to the small town of Pakokku, demonstrators and politicians were rounded up in the crackdown against the greatest challenge to the 400,000-strong army’s hegemony in a generation. Scores were killed, including monks.
At the same time, hundreds of monasteries were purged of monks. Some were arrested and tortured but mostly they were driven back to their villages to prevent more protests which began over price rises but evolved into demands for an end to 45 years of military rule.
What remains is a climate of terror in an already fearful land where anyone who took part in the protests lives in dread of being identified. Even the monks are suspicious of each other, believing the regime has planted spies and agents provocateurs or coerced some into becoming informers.
But the military has not emerged unscathed from its confrontation with the monasteries. There are divisions over the brutal treatment of the monks, and accounts that soldiers are fearful of the spiritual price they might pay.
The monks of Pakokku are wary of unknown faces. Their monasteries were among the first to be purged after the small town and seat of Buddhist learning, about six hours downriver from Mandalay, became the crucible of the demonstrations that spread nationwide.
Behind closed doors inside the largest of Pakokku’s monasteries, the Bawdimandine, two monks describe a confrontation with the army that on the face of it the monks have lost, but which the Buddhist clergy believe marks the beginning of the downfall of the regime - although none of them are predicting that it will happen any time soon.
“All the monks here are very much against the government,” said one. “They’re still against the government mentally but not physically because we can’t do anything. If we do they will arrest us. We don’t want to kill. We don’t want to torture. The government takes advantage of this. The government suppressed the protests but there’s not really quiet. There’s a lot of defiance.”
The protests began in August over fuel and food price rises but escalated in September after the army broke up a demonstration in Pakokku by shooting dead one monk and lashing others to electricity poles and beating them with rifle butts. Pakokku’s monks demanded an apology from the junta and the reversal of price rises.
But they added two overtly political demands - for the release of the opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from house arrest and the start of a dialogue to end military rule - that changed the character of the confrontation.
When the deadline passed, monasteries across Burma took up the cause and poured tens of thousands of monks on to the streets in days of marches that initially left the military paralysed. But the crackdown soon came. In some cases it took no more than the threat of mass arrests to empty a monastery. Lorryloads of troops herded the clergy away from others.
Fear of arrest
Almost half of the 1,200 monks at the Bawdimandine monastery fled. Those who remain say they are afraid to venture on to the streets for fear of arrest.
“Things have changed for us,” said one monk. “The soldiers used to drag the civilians off the buses to check their identity cards and leave the monks in their seats. Now it is the monks they line up in the road to check and they leave the civilians on the bus.”
It is a similar story in monasteries from the former capital, Rangoon, to Mandalay where 20,000 monks and their supporters turned out on the streets of Burma’s second city and religious heartland to challenge the military regime.
The purges continue despite the government’s assurances to the United Nations. “The government has many spies among the monks,” said one of the chief monks of the Old Ma Soe monastery in Mandalay.
“During the demonstrations they pulled the prisoners out of Mandalay jail and shaved their heads and put them among the monks to cause trouble. The bogus monks were chanting aggressively. They are still trying to send spies. When we have a new monk we do not know we test their knowledge of Buddhist literature. If they don’t know we send them away.”
In some monasteries, the monks were given time to pack up and get out. But in others, they fled without notice, leaving neatly made beds, books lining the shelves of their cubicles and the single key that each monk is permitted to possess. Cats and dogs wander the prayer halls.
Ask where the monks are and those that remain say they went back to their villages. What has happened to them there? Some were arrested but most have been left alone, provided they do not try to return to their monasteries, according to the leading clerics. “It was all about silencing them,” said the monk at Old Ma Soe.
Fear is pervasive in Burma. There are not many soldiers on the streets but the regime has many ordinary people believing that their every move is being watched and that anyone might be an informer. .
The fear is underpinned by the sheer numbers of men who have been through the regime’s jails at some time or another, even if only for a few weeks.
The 1988 generation of protesters remembers the slaughter of 3,000 of their number as the regime quashed the demonstrations and the mass arrests afterwards.The latest crackdown has introduced a new generation to the regime’s use of terror against its own population.
“There were 85 others in my police cell, mostly young people,” said the young shopkeeper held in police station No 14. “Some were only 15 or 16 years old. One boy told me he was arrested for wearing an American flag on his head. Some of the students had broken bones and head wounds.
“At the end of three days I still hadn’t confessed so they gave up and put me back in the cell and left me alone. Some of the others confessed under the pressure but they weren’t real confessions. I don’t blame them. There were people in my cell who were interrogated non-stop for 15 days.”
Among those detained were politicians from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) elected in the annulled 1990 parliamentary election.
Last week, the government called diplomats to the new capital, Naypyidaw, to lay out the results of all these interrogations. The military said it had uncovered a longstanding plot involving “bogus monks”, a little-known exile group, the Forum for Democracy in Burma, and billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society organisation to bring down the regime.
The junta outlined a complex conspiracy to infiltrate the monasteries, the labour force and universities in an 18-page document filled with scores of names of alleged plotters and their backers. Among others, it names U Gambira, the 27-year-old leader of the All Burma Monks Alliance, who is presently locked up in Mandalay prison. The government accuses him and opposition politicians of using ordinary monks as a front for political ends.
Foreign diplomats who have spoken to senior army officers since the protests say the regime is blind to the growing discontent at deepening economic hardship that underpinned the demonstrations.
The government maintains the illusion that Burma’s economy is growing faster than China’s even though the World Bank has rubbished statistics that claim to show double-digit growth. The reality can be seen in the contrasts with the booming economies of much of the rest of south-east Asia - Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia - particularly outside Rangoon. There’s hardly a new vehicle to be seen besides scooters and Chinese-made motorbikes. The principal means of transport is old, underpowered buses and horse and trap. Ploughs are pulled by cattle.
There is such a shortage of cars that 25-year-old vehicles worth a few hundred pounds across the border cost £10,000 in Burma. A Sim card for the government-run mobile phone network, the only one there is, costs about £1,000.
Aside from a sprinkling of new hotels, there are few modern buildings to be seen beyond Rangoon and the surreal new capital, Naypyidaw. Life expectancy is well short of that in Burma’s neighbours.
The chief United Nations representative, Charles Petrie, left Rangoon last week after being expelled for a speech in which he observed that Burma’s per capita gross domestic product was less than half that of Cambodia or Bangladesh, and that the recent protests “clearly demonstrated the everyday struggle to meet basic needs. The average household is forced to spend almost three-quarters of its budget on food. One in three children under five are suffering malnutrition, and less than 50% of children are able to complete their primary education”.
Military elite
That is not the world the generals live in. They are cocooned in the new capital or Pyin U Lwin, an army town 90 minutes’ drive north of Mandalay. It is home to the military’s main barracks and the Defence Services Academy training base. The grand, red-tiled entrance proclaims in gold lettering that its officers are the Triumphant Elite of the Future.
Two new and vast mansions sit on distant hilltops, and a neighbourhood of spacious, colonial-style homes is spreading in all directions, all apparently reserved for the military elite.
Few outsiders penetrate this closed world where career officers and their families live mostly cut off from the rest of Burma. Inside that world, the junta portrays itself as all that stands between order and disintegration into ethnic conflict. It says it is committed to a roadmap to a “disciplined flourishing democracy” that will lead to a “golden land in future”.
But it has taken 14 years to complete the first two stages of the map which means that at the present rate of progress the end of the road will not be reached until well into the second half of the century.
The military’s view that it is central to Burma’s very survival is displayed on the front of all the heavily censored newspapers, where each day appear the 12 “political, economic and social objectives” of the military government. These include “uplift of the morale and morality of the entire nation” and “uplift of dynamism of patriotic spirit”.
A senior monk who teaches at Pyin U Lwin’s military academy said there was disquiet among some soldiers over the assault on the monks. “Soldiers are telling their relatives not to go into the army. Many soldiers are unhappy with what has happened. Some of them are my pupils. Even some of the colonels tell me they don’t agree with what has happened,” he said.
“We are educating the new generation about what is right and what is wrong. Evolution is better than revolution. We have no weapons. They have the weapons. All we have is loving kindness. Who wants to be killed? People are very peaceful, very passive. No one wants to die, no one wants to kill. They are not like the Muslims. You never heard of Myanmar people suicide bombing. But it will not be quick. Maybe another 10 years.”
Many people in Burma are patient, but not that patient. The frustration and sense of helplessness is reflected in the self-delusion among some that the United Nations will invade and overthrow the regime.
Others draw strength from the widespread practice of interpreting what are seen as auspicious signs. Near Bagan a small pagoda has become the site of pilgrimage after a colony of bees settled on the face and chest of a Buddha. Bees are considered particularly auspicious and their choice of a Buddha has been widely interpreted as siding with monks.
Sitting atop a centuries-old pagoda nearby, a politician who has gone into hiding said many Burmese drew strength from the belief that the military leaders will pay for their crimes in the next life.
“They will have an amazing surprise in their afterlife. By killing monks they will come back as dogs who eat shit with many diseases, not the ones that eat good food and look nice; ugly dogs,” he said. There are not many who would dare say such things openly but Thet Pyin is among them. The army first threw him into prison 45 years ago for his opposition to its rule.
“The problem the government has created for itself is that the conflict is no longer between the government and the people, it’s between religion and the government. That’s important because 80% of the population is Buddhist and the government is Buddhist. All the army is Buddhist. That will be its downfall,” he said.
Occupation
“I’m 81 years old. I’ve never in all my life seen as bad a government as this, as unqualified as this. Even the Japanese occupation was not as bad as this. These military people don’t have a clue what they are doing and their treatment of the monks is the latest evidence of that.”
Pyin, a member of a small party that won three seats in the annulled 1990 election, said that the army duped people back then with promises of democracy but that it will not be able to get away with that again.
“This regime managed to pacify people after the 1988 demonstrations with promises of multiparty elections and an open economy and that the military would return to the barracks. The army reneged on that but it was forced to make the promise. The regime is going to have to do something to pacify the people again but they will not believe its promises now,” he said.
“There are divisions in the army. The core of the dictatorship is small, it is at odds with the military in its larger role. This government will fall.”
Burma’s most renowned female writer, Ludu Daw Ahmar, is also outspoken against the regime. Arrested in 1978 at the age of 63 on suspicion of links to the Communist party, which she denies, Ahmar spent a year in Mandalay jail. She has just celebrated her 92nd birthday and no longer fears what the regime might do to her. Frail and hard of hearing, she remains vigorously defiant.
“People are very much afraid of the government but this can’t go on forever. There will be a day when the people break this,” she said. “People will have to sacrifice their lives. There is no choice. We can’t go on like this. We must get arms to resist them. I can’t say how, but the people must find arms.”
That is not the view of most Burmese, or the monks who have taken up a low-key but symbolically significant protest against the regime by refusing alms from the government. Some monks turn their bowls upside down when offered food by soldiers, interpreted as a form of excommunication.
At the Old Ma Soe monastery the monks refused to invite government representatives to celebrations to mark its 100th anniversary.
The clerics have also declared a boycott of government exams they are expected to take every year. But the monasteries hold their own exams in April, and some senior clerics are predicting that will mark the beginning of a new campaign of protest.
“The monasteries will be full again. They will not be silent. No one has changed their mind about this government,” said a senior cleric in Mandalay. “But we know it will not change tomorrow. It might take five years, it might take 10, but it will be go. It has no solutions.”
Atop the pagoda near Bagan, the political activist who is now in hiding said the military was wrong to believe it has cowed another generation.
“Nobody won in September because it’s not finished,” he said.
Resource-rich but with faltering economy
Burma is a resource-rich country but its economy is crippled by overbearing government control and ineffective policies. It is the world’s biggest exporter of teak, a principal source of precious stones, has fertile soil and significant offshore oil and gas deposits but the majority of its people live in abject poverty. Steps in the early 1990s to liberalise the economy after decades of failure under the programme Burmese Way to Socialisation, a large-scale attempt at central economic planning, were largely unsuccessful. The US imposed fresh economic sanctions in August 2003 in response to the junta’s attack on Aung San Suu Kyi and her convoy. A banking crisis in the same year saw hundreds of Burmese lining up outside banks to withdraw their savings after the government shut down several institutions. The average household spends three-quarters of its budget on food and one in three children under five are suffering malnutrition.
Buddha’s irresistible maroon army
Times of London Online
Michael W. Charney
Mon 17 Dec 2007
The military junta in Burma came under fierce pressure from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, and from the White House, in the unusual guise of Laura Bush this week. While the US First Lady was telling the generals to introduce democratic reforms or to step aside, the All-Burma Monks Alliance was agitating for a UN commission to establish how many monks were killed in the September protests and how many are still imprisoned.
The presence of monks in the anti-government marches may have confused those who assumed that Buddhist monks do not involve themselves in such secular affairs, but in fact the monastic role in Burmese politics goes back centuries.
Theravada Buddhism is primarily practised today in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. This school of Buddhism reached South-East Asia in the 11th century. Among the stories about its introduction is that of King Anawrahta (r. 1044-77) of the Kingdom of Pagan, who conquered the Kingdom of Thaton in the southeast corner of present-day Burma. He brought back to his capital of Pagan on the Irrawaddy River the three core collections of texts (the Tipitika) of the Pali Buddhist canon.
Thereafter Burmese courts patronised Theravada Buddhism. Villagers, however, continued to venerate local spirits, many of which were gradually absorbed into Buddhism via the work of monks in a landscape increasingly populated by monasteries. In time monks circulating between South-East Asia and Sri Lanka pursued greater reliance on orthodox texts and practices and urged the court to launch religious reforms based on them. The most complete reform of Buddhism in Burma was launched under King Bodawhpaya (r. 1782-1819). It established the main monastic sect in the country today, the Thudhamma monks. Most Buddhist kings in SouthEast Asia strove to uphold their responsibilities as dhamma-rajas (kings of the Buddhist law), in ensuring monastic unity and thus the wellbeing of Buddhism within their domains. They discouraged monks from involvement in mundane politics as stipulated by the rules of the Vinaya, the monastic code.
As most patronage came from these rulers, monks restricted themselves to studying Buddhist texts, meditating, and providing for the survival of the religion so that the populace could accrue merit through good works.
The role of monks changed as a result of the introduction of colonial rule in the 19th century. The British, unable to provide officials to locally administer villages, turned to the village headman. In the past the headman had worked for both the State and the villagers, collecting revenue, manpower and agricultural resources when the court required it and voicing complaints of villagers up through the hierarchy. The headman was thus an important intermediary who helped to ensure local social stability, protecting as much as administering. Under the British the headman became a paid agent of the State, who owed no obligations to the people under his charge. This removed the protection against state demands and the means for peacefully resolving local complaints. So the people turned to the only remaining pre-colonial institution, the monastery, and monks now came to provide community leadership.
Throughout British rule, but especially from the 1920s, the so-called “political monks” played an important role in mobilising opposition to colonial excesses and forcing the administration to pay closer attention to local complaints.
Even before British rule there had been a strong monastic contribution to Burmese secular intellectual life. Important late-18th-century monks, especially a clique from the Lower Chindwin River area in the northwest, played a key role in shaping the standard texts still influencing Burmese understandings of history today and introducing new strands of Indian thought into Burma. This intellectual vigour persisted under British rule. Shin Ottama, for example, introduced the anti-colonial thinking that emerged out of the Indian National Congress, as well as information on modernisation in Japan after the First World War.
Buddhist communalism also grew out of the fear that the combination of the British reluctance to patronise Buddhism, the introduction of thousands of immigrants, and the political incorporation of animist and Christian converts in the minority hill areas would challenge the place of Buddhism in Burmese society and as part of the Burmese national identity. Thus, monastic organisations pushed Burma’s postwar nationalist leaders to make Buddhism the state religion. After independence this struggle continued until the legislation was finally passed in 1962. At about the same time the monastic order was mobilised in a nationwide anti-communist campaign.
Burma has been under military rule since 1962, formally or informally, and in this time the relationship between the State and monks has been tense. Attempts by the dictator General Ne Win in the 1960s and mid-1970s to bring Buddhism under tighter government regulation met fierce resistance. During the pro-democracy demonstrations that saw the rise of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, monks were involved in anti-government protests.
Since 1988 the military has ruthlessly kept monastic involvement in politics to a minimum. So the role of the monks at the head of the recent protests in Burma took many, including the Government, by surprise. Predictably, the State’s reaction was delayed but harsh when it finally came. Monks were defrocked, interrogated and beaten. The regime has since closed monastic colleges and sent member monks back to their respective villages.
Although it may appear that the State has successfully cowed the monks into submission, they have survived perhaps more serious episodes of state persecution in the past. Given their importance in Burmese society and their resilience in past periods of political turmoil, it would be foolish to assume that they will not rebound from current setbacks.
Dr Michael W. Charney teaches in the Department of History, SOAS
Michael W. Charney
Mon 17 Dec 2007
The military junta in Burma came under fierce pressure from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, and from the White House, in the unusual guise of Laura Bush this week. While the US First Lady was telling the generals to introduce democratic reforms or to step aside, the All-Burma Monks Alliance was agitating for a UN commission to establish how many monks were killed in the September protests and how many are still imprisoned.
The presence of monks in the anti-government marches may have confused those who assumed that Buddhist monks do not involve themselves in such secular affairs, but in fact the monastic role in Burmese politics goes back centuries.
Theravada Buddhism is primarily practised today in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. This school of Buddhism reached South-East Asia in the 11th century. Among the stories about its introduction is that of King Anawrahta (r. 1044-77) of the Kingdom of Pagan, who conquered the Kingdom of Thaton in the southeast corner of present-day Burma. He brought back to his capital of Pagan on the Irrawaddy River the three core collections of texts (the Tipitika) of the Pali Buddhist canon.
Thereafter Burmese courts patronised Theravada Buddhism. Villagers, however, continued to venerate local spirits, many of which were gradually absorbed into Buddhism via the work of monks in a landscape increasingly populated by monasteries. In time monks circulating between South-East Asia and Sri Lanka pursued greater reliance on orthodox texts and practices and urged the court to launch religious reforms based on them. The most complete reform of Buddhism in Burma was launched under King Bodawhpaya (r. 1782-1819). It established the main monastic sect in the country today, the Thudhamma monks. Most Buddhist kings in SouthEast Asia strove to uphold their responsibilities as dhamma-rajas (kings of the Buddhist law), in ensuring monastic unity and thus the wellbeing of Buddhism within their domains. They discouraged monks from involvement in mundane politics as stipulated by the rules of the Vinaya, the monastic code.
As most patronage came from these rulers, monks restricted themselves to studying Buddhist texts, meditating, and providing for the survival of the religion so that the populace could accrue merit through good works.
The role of monks changed as a result of the introduction of colonial rule in the 19th century. The British, unable to provide officials to locally administer villages, turned to the village headman. In the past the headman had worked for both the State and the villagers, collecting revenue, manpower and agricultural resources when the court required it and voicing complaints of villagers up through the hierarchy. The headman was thus an important intermediary who helped to ensure local social stability, protecting as much as administering. Under the British the headman became a paid agent of the State, who owed no obligations to the people under his charge. This removed the protection against state demands and the means for peacefully resolving local complaints. So the people turned to the only remaining pre-colonial institution, the monastery, and monks now came to provide community leadership.
Throughout British rule, but especially from the 1920s, the so-called “political monks” played an important role in mobilising opposition to colonial excesses and forcing the administration to pay closer attention to local complaints.
Even before British rule there had been a strong monastic contribution to Burmese secular intellectual life. Important late-18th-century monks, especially a clique from the Lower Chindwin River area in the northwest, played a key role in shaping the standard texts still influencing Burmese understandings of history today and introducing new strands of Indian thought into Burma. This intellectual vigour persisted under British rule. Shin Ottama, for example, introduced the anti-colonial thinking that emerged out of the Indian National Congress, as well as information on modernisation in Japan after the First World War.
Buddhist communalism also grew out of the fear that the combination of the British reluctance to patronise Buddhism, the introduction of thousands of immigrants, and the political incorporation of animist and Christian converts in the minority hill areas would challenge the place of Buddhism in Burmese society and as part of the Burmese national identity. Thus, monastic organisations pushed Burma’s postwar nationalist leaders to make Buddhism the state religion. After independence this struggle continued until the legislation was finally passed in 1962. At about the same time the monastic order was mobilised in a nationwide anti-communist campaign.
Burma has been under military rule since 1962, formally or informally, and in this time the relationship between the State and monks has been tense. Attempts by the dictator General Ne Win in the 1960s and mid-1970s to bring Buddhism under tighter government regulation met fierce resistance. During the pro-democracy demonstrations that saw the rise of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, monks were involved in anti-government protests.
Since 1988 the military has ruthlessly kept monastic involvement in politics to a minimum. So the role of the monks at the head of the recent protests in Burma took many, including the Government, by surprise. Predictably, the State’s reaction was delayed but harsh when it finally came. Monks were defrocked, interrogated and beaten. The regime has since closed monastic colleges and sent member monks back to their respective villages.
Although it may appear that the State has successfully cowed the monks into submission, they have survived perhaps more serious episodes of state persecution in the past. Given their importance in Burmese society and their resilience in past periods of political turmoil, it would be foolish to assume that they will not rebound from current setbacks.
Dr Michael W. Charney teaches in the Department of History, SOAS
Monks expelled from Sangha University
Irrawaddy
Wai Moe
Mon 17 Dec 2007
Twenty five monks from a Rangoon Buddhist university, including a number of junior tutors, have been expelled from the campus, according to reliable sources.
The authorities told the expelled monks to leave the campus of Kaba Aye Sangha University and return to their home monasteries, the sources said on Monday. The monks were told they were being expelled because of their participation in the September demonstrations.
Ninety six monks arrested during and after the demonstrations were released from custody on Friday. Half were from Nywekyaryan Monastery, in South Okkalapa, Rangoon. including the abbot, U Yeveda.
UN Human Rights Rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro visited Nywekyaryan Monastery during his November trip to Burma and reported that he found it empty of monks.
The Nywekyaryan Monastery was raided by security forces on September 26, and all the monks were arrested. Many were beaten and abused.
A school run by the monastery for children from poor families, the Pyanya Dana School, had to close because of the raid.
Nywekyaryan’s deputy abbot, U Ottama, was released from custody on December 14 and returned to the monastery.
The monks freed on Friday had been held at the Kaba Aye detention centre. Others are still imprisoned in Rangoon’s Insein Prison. Some, including a leading monk in the uprising, U Gambira, have been charged with high treason, said a Rangoon monk.
Wai Moe
Mon 17 Dec 2007
Twenty five monks from a Rangoon Buddhist university, including a number of junior tutors, have been expelled from the campus, according to reliable sources.
The authorities told the expelled monks to leave the campus of Kaba Aye Sangha University and return to their home monasteries, the sources said on Monday. The monks were told they were being expelled because of their participation in the September demonstrations.
Ninety six monks arrested during and after the demonstrations were released from custody on Friday. Half were from Nywekyaryan Monastery, in South Okkalapa, Rangoon. including the abbot, U Yeveda.
UN Human Rights Rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro visited Nywekyaryan Monastery during his November trip to Burma and reported that he found it empty of monks.
The Nywekyaryan Monastery was raided by security forces on September 26, and all the monks were arrested. Many were beaten and abused.
A school run by the monastery for children from poor families, the Pyanya Dana School, had to close because of the raid.
Nywekyaryan’s deputy abbot, U Ottama, was released from custody on December 14 and returned to the monastery.
The monks freed on Friday had been held at the Kaba Aye detention centre. Others are still imprisoned in Rangoon’s Insein Prison. Some, including a leading monk in the uprising, U Gambira, have been charged with high treason, said a Rangoon monk.
Abbot jailed for government defamation
Democratic Voice of Burma
Moe Aye
Mon 17 Dec 2007
The abbot of Zantila Rama monastery has been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for defamation after complaining about the seizure of money from the monastery during a raid.
Zantila Rama monastery in South Okkalapa township, Rangoon, was raided by government security forces in early October.
Officials seized 4.2 million kyat that belonged to the monastery during the raid, according to a lay supporter of the abbot.
U Zantila, the monastery’s abbot, wrote a letter of complaint about the incident to the minister of home affairs, minister of religious affairs and State Peace and Development Council chairman.
The abbot was arrested at the monastery by security forces a few days after he sent the letter and was charged with defaming the government.
He was disrobed and given a two-year prison sentence at the end of November.
The lay supporter was angered by the prison term, and is now trying to find out the names of the officials involved in the raid.
He plans to take his complaints further and bring the case to the attention of international Buddhist organisations.
Moe Aye
Mon 17 Dec 2007
The abbot of Zantila Rama monastery has been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for defamation after complaining about the seizure of money from the monastery during a raid.
Zantila Rama monastery in South Okkalapa township, Rangoon, was raided by government security forces in early October.
Officials seized 4.2 million kyat that belonged to the monastery during the raid, according to a lay supporter of the abbot.
U Zantila, the monastery’s abbot, wrote a letter of complaint about the incident to the minister of home affairs, minister of religious affairs and State Peace and Development Council chairman.
The abbot was arrested at the monastery by security forces a few days after he sent the letter and was charged with defaming the government.
He was disrobed and given a two-year prison sentence at the end of November.
The lay supporter was angered by the prison term, and is now trying to find out the names of the officials involved in the raid.
He plans to take his complaints further and bring the case to the attention of international Buddhist organisations.
Burma quietly releases 96 monks
Deutsche Presse-Agentur via The Nation
Mon 17 Dec 2007
Rangoon - Burma’s military regime has recently released from detention 96 monks who participated in September’s marches, permitting half of them to return to the Ngwekyaryan monastery in Rangoon, sources said Monday.
Authorities released the 96 monks, including Abbot Sayadaw U Yevada, last Friday from the Kaba Aye detention centre, where they had been kept since the government crackdown on monk-led protests on September 26-27.
Some 50 monks were permitted to return to the Ngwekyaryan monastery in Rangoon, but the other 46 were ordered to leave the city, said sources who visited the monastery over the weekend.
Burma’s monkhood, which has a long history of political activism, took the lead in organizing peaceful protests against drastic fuel hikes announced August 15 and the country’s deteriorating economic conditions.
The demonstrations culminated in ten-of-thousands taking to the streets of Rangoon in increasingly aggressive protests against the military, which has ruled the country for the past 45 years.
The junta finally cracked down on September 26-27 with batons and bullets, killing at least 15 people and imprisoning more than 3,000.
The actual death toll and the number of people still in prison remains a mystery in Burma. At a government press conference on December 3 in Naypyitaw, the new administrative capital, Burma police chief Khin Yi claimed only 21 monks and 59 laymen remain in Burma jails on charges related to the protests.
Abbot Gambira, one of the top leaders of the monks’ movement, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment, according to a retired religious affairs ministry official who asked to remain anonymous.
Mon 17 Dec 2007
Rangoon - Burma’s military regime has recently released from detention 96 monks who participated in September’s marches, permitting half of them to return to the Ngwekyaryan monastery in Rangoon, sources said Monday.
Authorities released the 96 monks, including Abbot Sayadaw U Yevada, last Friday from the Kaba Aye detention centre, where they had been kept since the government crackdown on monk-led protests on September 26-27.
Some 50 monks were permitted to return to the Ngwekyaryan monastery in Rangoon, but the other 46 were ordered to leave the city, said sources who visited the monastery over the weekend.
Burma’s monkhood, which has a long history of political activism, took the lead in organizing peaceful protests against drastic fuel hikes announced August 15 and the country’s deteriorating economic conditions.
The demonstrations culminated in ten-of-thousands taking to the streets of Rangoon in increasingly aggressive protests against the military, which has ruled the country for the past 45 years.
The junta finally cracked down on September 26-27 with batons and bullets, killing at least 15 people and imprisoning more than 3,000.
The actual death toll and the number of people still in prison remains a mystery in Burma. At a government press conference on December 3 in Naypyitaw, the new administrative capital, Burma police chief Khin Yi claimed only 21 monks and 59 laymen remain in Burma jails on charges related to the protests.
Abbot Gambira, one of the top leaders of the monks’ movement, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment, according to a retired religious affairs ministry official who asked to remain anonymous.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The role of Buddhism in the wake of the crackdown
Dhamma sermons are usually attended almost exclusively by elderly people; however, since the crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in September, more and more laypersons, especially youths, are turning up at monasteries to listen to Buddhist sermons. Attending dhamma sermons is now a way for Burmese people to vent their defiance against the military government.
An ancient Sanskrit word meaning “justice” or “the law of nature,” dhamma is taught by monks to Buddhist devotees at monasteries. Recently, these sermons have become popular events in Burma and a series of dhamma talks is currently being held from December 11 to 15 in South Okkalapa Township in Rangoon.
An eyewitness said that about 1,000 people have been attending the sermons, including many young people. The roads around the monastery have been blocked between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. each night because many people are finishing their work early to attend the sermons. Even former soldiers have been attending.
Sermons on dhamma are being given by well-known monks and abbots such as U Kawthala, Ashin Sundadhika, U Jotika, U Kovida, U Nyanithara and Ashin Say Keinda, who is currently a lecturer at the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University in Rangoon.
In their talks, the monks often recount the words of Lord Buddha, telling their subjects that life is suffering and that, to atone for their sins, those who have committed evil acts would be committed to “ape-nga-ye” (the Buddhist version of “hell”).
“We feel sad about the recent crisis,” a former solider who requested anonymity told The Irrawaddy. “Until now we have felt nothing but pain when we think about [the crackdown on monks].”
He said that since he was a child, he had been taught that soldiers were here to protect the nation, the religion and the language. However, under current circumstances, the government’s actions have completely contradicted that moral.
The ex-soldier served the military for 10 years until 2001 and is now nearly 40. He said that he now works in social welfare and follows religious issues. He estimated that more and more people were listening to dhamma talks since the crackdown because the sermons remind people about the forces of good and evil.
From students at a grade 4 level upward, laypersons are flocking to monasteries and to dhamma talk events, he claimed. Close to 90% of the population of Burma is Buddhist.
He went on to say that dhamma sermon VCDs and tapes were selling well all over the country. The organizers of dhamma events were making the VCDs and tapes by themselves and distributing them quietly. The Burmese military government has banned the distribution of dhamma VCDs and tapes through the country’s censorship board. However, devotees have been making copies and sharing them with others.
Khin Oo, a woman resident in Rangoon, says the dhamma sermons are encouraging and she feels consoled when she listens to them. Often, she says, the sermons involve subtle jokes, indirectly criticizing the military government for oppressing and killing its own people.
She said that the most popular dhamma VCDs were the talks by U Kovida and U Nyanithara, which were recently banned by the authorities.
The title of the U Nyanithara VCD is “The Way of Dumb People,” a pointed criticism of people who believe in astrology and commit evil acts. It is supposedly dedicated to the junta’s leader, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, who is known to be a strong believer in astrology. A second VCD featuring U Nyanithara is titled “The Ending of the King.”
At his recent dhamma talk in Rangoon U Kovida referred to the Burmese junta as the second “Azartathet.” (Azartathet is an infamous villain who killed his father for power in Buddhist folklore). His sermon also included commentary on the September demonstrations. U Kovida, a Buddhist PhD scholar, is an abbot at Mizzima Gon Yee Monastery in Rangoon’s Thakayta Township.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Myanmar warns hajj pilgrims to steer clear of politics in Mecca
By DPA
Dec 10, 2007, 6:01 GMT
Yangon - Myanmar's military regime has warned 325 state-sponsored hajj pilgrims to stay away from political activities while in Mecca, news reports said Monday.
Myanmar Minister for Religious Affairs Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung issued the warning to the pilgrims Sunday before their departure for Saudi Arabia, said The New Light of Myanmar, a government mouthpiece.
'The pilgrims are to stay away from activities or participation in political and economic affairs violating the existing laws, bylaws and rules and regulations prescribed by the State,' said the minister.
He said the 325 Burmese Muslims on the state-supervised hajj 'are to give priority to religious affairs only.'
The week of the Hajj starts on December 18 this year.
Thura Myint Maung claimed that the government has provided necessary assistance to Myanmar's Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religious communities.
There is some truth to the government's claim that it does not discriminate against any particular religion.
Although a predominantly Buddhist country, the ruling junta had few qualms cracking down on peaceful anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks last September, clubbing monks and shooting their laymen followers.
There has been a long, well recorded history of persecution of Muslim minority groups in Myanmar, especially the Rohingyas of Arakan State, thousands of whom have been forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh due to policies that deny them citizenship and rights to work.
Dec 10, 2007, 6:01 GMT
Yangon - Myanmar's military regime has warned 325 state-sponsored hajj pilgrims to stay away from political activities while in Mecca, news reports said Monday.
Myanmar Minister for Religious Affairs Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung issued the warning to the pilgrims Sunday before their departure for Saudi Arabia, said The New Light of Myanmar, a government mouthpiece.
'The pilgrims are to stay away from activities or participation in political and economic affairs violating the existing laws, bylaws and rules and regulations prescribed by the State,' said the minister.
He said the 325 Burmese Muslims on the state-supervised hajj 'are to give priority to religious affairs only.'
The week of the Hajj starts on December 18 this year.
Thura Myint Maung claimed that the government has provided necessary assistance to Myanmar's Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religious communities.
There is some truth to the government's claim that it does not discriminate against any particular religion.
Although a predominantly Buddhist country, the ruling junta had few qualms cracking down on peaceful anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks last September, clubbing monks and shooting their laymen followers.
There has been a long, well recorded history of persecution of Muslim minority groups in Myanmar, especially the Rohingyas of Arakan State, thousands of whom have been forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh due to policies that deny them citizenship and rights to work.
Burma: Crackdown Bloodier Than Government Admits
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Burma: Crackdown Bloodier Than Government Admits
Arrests Continue Amidst International Inaction
(New York, December 7, 2007) – Many more people were killed and detained in the violent government crackdown on monks and other peaceful protestors in September 2007 than the Burmese government has admitted, Human Rights Watch said today in a new report. Since the crackdown, the military regime has brought to bear the full force of its authoritarian apparatus to intimidate all opposition, hunting down protest leaders in night raids and defrocking monks.
The 140-page report, “Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma,” is based on more than 100 interviews with eyewitnesses in Burma and Thailand. It is the most complete account of the August and September events to date.
Human Rights Watch research determined that that the security forces shot into crowds using live ammunition and rubber bullets, beat marchers and monks before dragging them onto trucks, and arbitrarily detained thousands of people in official and unofficial places of detention. In addition to monks, many students and other civilians were killed, although without full and independent access to the country it is impossible to determine exact casualty figures.
“The crackdown in Burma is far from over,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Harsh repression continues, and the government is still lying about the extent of the deaths and detentions.”
Human Rights Watch found that the crackdown was carried out in part by the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a “mass-based social welfare” organization with more than 23 million members that the Burmese military is grooming to lead a future civilian government. It operated alongside the Swan Arr Shin (Masters of Force) militia, soldiers and riot police in beating and detaining protestors.
The report documented the killing of 20 people in Rangoon, but Human Rights Watch believes that the death toll there was much higher, and that hundreds remain in detention. Human Rights Watch was unable to gather information on killings and detentions from other cities and towns where demonstrations took place.
At a news conference in the new capital at Naypidaw on December 3, National Police chief Major General Khin Ye stated that, “Ten people died and 14 were injured during the monk protests from 26 to 30 September. The security members handled the situation in accord with the procedures.” Human Rights Watch has information that Khin Ye personally supervised the brutal arrests, beatings and killings of monks at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon on September 26.
The ruling State and Peace Development Council (SPDC) claims that overall 2,927 people, including 596 monks, were “interrogated,”and almost all have been released. It says that nine people have been sentenced to prison terms, while 59 lay people and 21 monks remain in detention.
Human Rights Watch said that hundreds of protestors, including monks and members of the ’88 Generation students, who led protests until being arrested in late August, remain unaccounted for. Human Rights Watch noted that before the protests there were more than 1,200 political prisoners languishing in Burma’s prisons and labor camps.
“The generals unleashed their civilian thugs, soldiers and police against monks and other peaceful protestors,” said Adams. “Now they should account for those killed and shed light on the fate of the missing.”
Human Rights Watch called for greater international action, including by the United Nations Security Council, to press the Burmese government to undertake major reforms. On December 11, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, will present his findings on the crackdown to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Human Rights Watch criticized the lack of action by countries with good relations and influence on Burma, such as China, India, Russia, Thailand, and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations members. China has made it clear that it will not allow the UN Security Council to take up Burma in any meaningful way. Despite the killing of a Japanese journalist by Burmese security forces, Japan has reacted timidly.
“It’s time for the world to impose a UN arms embargo and financial sanctions, to hurt Burma’s leaders until they make real changes,” said Adams. “Countries like China, India and Thailand have the responsibility to take action to help hold the generals accountable and to end this long nightmare of military repression.”
Selected Eyewitness Accounts from “Crackdown”
“The raid at the monastery was around 1 a.m. The soldiers shouted to open the monastery gates, and then broke the gate open by hitting it with their truck when no one came to open. Shouting loudly, they were throwing teargas and firing their automatic guns into the buildings of the monastery, and used their batons to beat the monks whenever they saw them. Many monks ran away, climbing into the trees nearby and escaping by hiding in the houses of the neighborhood. I was injured in the head when I was hit by baton charges. I saw pools of blood, shattered windows, and spent bullet casings on the floor when I came back to the monastery in the morning. We found about 100 monks missing out of 230 monks. They took our money and jewelry, and other valuable things they found at the monastery.”
– U Khanda, a monk describing a raid on his monastery, September 27
“We were so frightened. My two friends were crying loudly, and I was so frightened that the soldiers would find us. Then the informers pointed to the grass. Seven young people were hiding there. They got up and ran, but the soldiers started firing into their backs. They were only able to run six or seven steps before they fell. Three or four of the young boys aged around 20 to 22, were gunned down straight away. The others tried to run but were caught and taken away in the military cars.”
– Thazin Aye, describing killings at Tamwe No.3 High School on September 27
“After the warnings, the soldiers in the first row shot teargas into the crowd. Five soldiers shot the teargas. They began shooting immediately after the announcement. People ran in all directions. Twenty soldiers came over the barricade, climbed over, and started beating the people. Two people died. … It was not like in the movies. When the soldiers beat those people, they were trying to kill them. They beat them on the head and the abdomen. The soldiers pulled them by their legs over the barricade … they put the two bodies next to their trucks.”
– Zaw Zan Htike, describing an incident on September 27 in downtown Rangoon
“At the time, a girl wasn’t sure whether to lie down or stand up. A riot police [officer] hit the girl on the side of her face with his baton. The girl collapsed. She was in her 20s – there was blood running down her face, and her skull might have been broken. I’m not sure if she died. No one was able to help her. If we put our heads up, they would hit us and kick us with their boots.”
– Htun Kyaw Kyaw, describing arrests on September 27
If you would like to comment on this report, or provide us with additional information, please email us at burma@hrw.org.
Burma: Crackdown Bloodier Than Government Admits
Arrests Continue Amidst International Inaction
(New York, December 7, 2007) – Many more people were killed and detained in the violent government crackdown on monks and other peaceful protestors in September 2007 than the Burmese government has admitted, Human Rights Watch said today in a new report. Since the crackdown, the military regime has brought to bear the full force of its authoritarian apparatus to intimidate all opposition, hunting down protest leaders in night raids and defrocking monks.
The 140-page report, “Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma,” is based on more than 100 interviews with eyewitnesses in Burma and Thailand. It is the most complete account of the August and September events to date.
Human Rights Watch research determined that that the security forces shot into crowds using live ammunition and rubber bullets, beat marchers and monks before dragging them onto trucks, and arbitrarily detained thousands of people in official and unofficial places of detention. In addition to monks, many students and other civilians were killed, although without full and independent access to the country it is impossible to determine exact casualty figures.
“The crackdown in Burma is far from over,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Harsh repression continues, and the government is still lying about the extent of the deaths and detentions.”
Human Rights Watch found that the crackdown was carried out in part by the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a “mass-based social welfare” organization with more than 23 million members that the Burmese military is grooming to lead a future civilian government. It operated alongside the Swan Arr Shin (Masters of Force) militia, soldiers and riot police in beating and detaining protestors.
The report documented the killing of 20 people in Rangoon, but Human Rights Watch believes that the death toll there was much higher, and that hundreds remain in detention. Human Rights Watch was unable to gather information on killings and detentions from other cities and towns where demonstrations took place.
At a news conference in the new capital at Naypidaw on December 3, National Police chief Major General Khin Ye stated that, “Ten people died and 14 were injured during the monk protests from 26 to 30 September. The security members handled the situation in accord with the procedures.” Human Rights Watch has information that Khin Ye personally supervised the brutal arrests, beatings and killings of monks at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon on September 26.
The ruling State and Peace Development Council (SPDC) claims that overall 2,927 people, including 596 monks, were “interrogated,”and almost all have been released. It says that nine people have been sentenced to prison terms, while 59 lay people and 21 monks remain in detention.
Human Rights Watch said that hundreds of protestors, including monks and members of the ’88 Generation students, who led protests until being arrested in late August, remain unaccounted for. Human Rights Watch noted that before the protests there were more than 1,200 political prisoners languishing in Burma’s prisons and labor camps.
“The generals unleashed their civilian thugs, soldiers and police against monks and other peaceful protestors,” said Adams. “Now they should account for those killed and shed light on the fate of the missing.”
Human Rights Watch called for greater international action, including by the United Nations Security Council, to press the Burmese government to undertake major reforms. On December 11, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, will present his findings on the crackdown to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Human Rights Watch criticized the lack of action by countries with good relations and influence on Burma, such as China, India, Russia, Thailand, and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations members. China has made it clear that it will not allow the UN Security Council to take up Burma in any meaningful way. Despite the killing of a Japanese journalist by Burmese security forces, Japan has reacted timidly.
“It’s time for the world to impose a UN arms embargo and financial sanctions, to hurt Burma’s leaders until they make real changes,” said Adams. “Countries like China, India and Thailand have the responsibility to take action to help hold the generals accountable and to end this long nightmare of military repression.”
Selected Eyewitness Accounts from “Crackdown”
“The raid at the monastery was around 1 a.m. The soldiers shouted to open the monastery gates, and then broke the gate open by hitting it with their truck when no one came to open. Shouting loudly, they were throwing teargas and firing their automatic guns into the buildings of the monastery, and used their batons to beat the monks whenever they saw them. Many monks ran away, climbing into the trees nearby and escaping by hiding in the houses of the neighborhood. I was injured in the head when I was hit by baton charges. I saw pools of blood, shattered windows, and spent bullet casings on the floor when I came back to the monastery in the morning. We found about 100 monks missing out of 230 monks. They took our money and jewelry, and other valuable things they found at the monastery.”
– U Khanda, a monk describing a raid on his monastery, September 27
“We were so frightened. My two friends were crying loudly, and I was so frightened that the soldiers would find us. Then the informers pointed to the grass. Seven young people were hiding there. They got up and ran, but the soldiers started firing into their backs. They were only able to run six or seven steps before they fell. Three or four of the young boys aged around 20 to 22, were gunned down straight away. The others tried to run but were caught and taken away in the military cars.”
– Thazin Aye, describing killings at Tamwe No.3 High School on September 27
“After the warnings, the soldiers in the first row shot teargas into the crowd. Five soldiers shot the teargas. They began shooting immediately after the announcement. People ran in all directions. Twenty soldiers came over the barricade, climbed over, and started beating the people. Two people died. … It was not like in the movies. When the soldiers beat those people, they were trying to kill them. They beat them on the head and the abdomen. The soldiers pulled them by their legs over the barricade … they put the two bodies next to their trucks.”
– Zaw Zan Htike, describing an incident on September 27 in downtown Rangoon
“At the time, a girl wasn’t sure whether to lie down or stand up. A riot police [officer] hit the girl on the side of her face with his baton. The girl collapsed. She was in her 20s – there was blood running down her face, and her skull might have been broken. I’m not sure if she died. No one was able to help her. If we put our heads up, they would hit us and kick us with their boots.”
– Htun Kyaw Kyaw, describing arrests on September 27
If you would like to comment on this report, or provide us with additional information, please email us at burma@hrw.org.
Myanmar junta suppressed death tolls of crackdown: HRW
Press Trust Of India
New York, December 08, 2007
First Published: 09:51 IST(8/12/2007)
Last Updated: 10:04 IST(8/12/2007)
A US-based human rights watchdog has accused the Myanmar government of suppressing the number of people killed and detained during "violent" crackdown on pro-democracy protests by Buddhist monks and others seeking an end to the military regime.
Many more people were killed and detained than the Myanmar government has admitted and since then, the regime has "brought to bear the full force of its authoritarian apparatus to intimidate all opposition, hunting down protest leaders in night raids and defrocking monks," Human Rights Watch said in a just released 140-page report.
It called for greater international action, including by the United Nations Security Council, to press the Myanmar government to undertake major reforms.
The report criticises the "lack of action" by countries with good relations and influence on Myanmar, such as China, India, Russia, Thailand, and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations members.
It regretted that China has made it clear that it will not allow the UN Security Council to take up the issue in any meaningful way and that Japan has reacted "timidly" to the killing of its journalist.
"It's time for the world to impose a UN arms embargo and financial sanctions, to hurt Burma's leaders until they make real changes," said Adams. "Countries like China, India and Thailand have the responsibility to take action to help hold the generals accountable and to end this long nightmare of military repression."
The bill bans the importation of Burmese jade and rubies into the United States and freezes the assets of Burmese political and military leaders.
It also prevents Burma from using US financial institutions via third countries to launder the funds of those leaders or their immediate families, and prohibits Burmese officials involved in the violent suppression of protesters from receiving visas to the US.
The Foreign Affairs Committee approved the legislation in October and the House is expected to take up the legislation next week. "As we commemorate International Human Rights Day, those who support the fundamental rights of all humankind must take a stand to prevent barbarism like what we have recently seen in Burma," Lantos said.
"From Cuba to Caracas, in Darfur and Tehran, violence such as this is continuing. We need to take a clear position against such acts of brutality and stand up for human rights in these places, just as we stand with the people of Burma today," he added.
New York, December 08, 2007
First Published: 09:51 IST(8/12/2007)
Last Updated: 10:04 IST(8/12/2007)
A US-based human rights watchdog has accused the Myanmar government of suppressing the number of people killed and detained during "violent" crackdown on pro-democracy protests by Buddhist monks and others seeking an end to the military regime.
Many more people were killed and detained than the Myanmar government has admitted and since then, the regime has "brought to bear the full force of its authoritarian apparatus to intimidate all opposition, hunting down protest leaders in night raids and defrocking monks," Human Rights Watch said in a just released 140-page report.
It called for greater international action, including by the United Nations Security Council, to press the Myanmar government to undertake major reforms.
The report criticises the "lack of action" by countries with good relations and influence on Myanmar, such as China, India, Russia, Thailand, and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations members.
It regretted that China has made it clear that it will not allow the UN Security Council to take up the issue in any meaningful way and that Japan has reacted "timidly" to the killing of its journalist.
"It's time for the world to impose a UN arms embargo and financial sanctions, to hurt Burma's leaders until they make real changes," said Adams. "Countries like China, India and Thailand have the responsibility to take action to help hold the generals accountable and to end this long nightmare of military repression."
The bill bans the importation of Burmese jade and rubies into the United States and freezes the assets of Burmese political and military leaders.
It also prevents Burma from using US financial institutions via third countries to launder the funds of those leaders or their immediate families, and prohibits Burmese officials involved in the violent suppression of protesters from receiving visas to the US.
The Foreign Affairs Committee approved the legislation in October and the House is expected to take up the legislation next week. "As we commemorate International Human Rights Day, those who support the fundamental rights of all humankind must take a stand to prevent barbarism like what we have recently seen in Burma," Lantos said.
"From Cuba to Caracas, in Darfur and Tehran, violence such as this is continuing. We need to take a clear position against such acts of brutality and stand up for human rights in these places, just as we stand with the people of Burma today," he added.
Exiles try to keep pressure on Burmese rulers
By Blaine Harden, Washington Post | December 9, 2007
MAE SOT, Thailand - Desperate to maintain the momentum of their challenge to military rule in Burma, opposition leaders in the border town of Mae Sot are working with networks of supporters to get monks to return to the streets in protest, to push foreign governments to impose tougher sanctions, and to persuade ethnic militias to resume guerrilla attacks.
The leaders in the town say they believe that the generals who run Burma gave them a priceless political gift in September by ordering soldiers to attack Buddhist monks. "We have to thank them for their stupidity," said Maung Maung, secretary general of the National Council of the Union of Burma, which is based in the hill town of Mae Sot along the Thailand-Burma border and is the main umbrella group for exiled politicians and ethnic leaders.
Images of soldiers clubbing barefoot monks in saffron robes focused world attention on Burma's often-ignored military dictatorship, and prodded the generals to begin talking to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate and opposition leader whose party trounced them in a 1990 election and who is under house arrest in Rangoon. It also energized a nationwide cadre of angry monks, potent agents of grass-roots change in a Buddhist nation where the number of monks (about 400,000) rivals the number of soldiers.
Still, the generals' public relations gift loses value with each passing day, Burmese opposition figures say.
Without more "bone-breaking" pressure on the generals, talks with Suu Kyi will devolve into an empty delaying game, said Maung Maung. More than a dozen senior leaders of the opposition who were interviewed, including longtime members of Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, echoed his comments.
To ratchet up pressure, opposition leaders said they are urging monks inside Burma to regroup and join in more mass protests with students and workers. They are pleading with Western countries to stiffen economic sanctions and to donate cash to support political activity inside Burma, which the generals call Myanmar.
Opposition leaders including several recently exiled supporters of Suu Kyi, a proponent of nonviolence, are also urging Burma's armed ethnic minorities to prepare for a unified guerrilla conflict against the government.
"Armed struggle has to be part of the pressure," said Khun Myint Tun, a longtime supporter of Suu Kyi. "Something needs to happen soon to take advantage of the September momentum."
Some of that momentum seems to be slipping away.
The military is continuing to raid monasteries and arrest civilians, as it has since the late September crackdown on protesters. Suu Kyi remains under house arrest and cut off from supporters.
China, Thailand, and India have not substantially changed their economic dealings with the Burma military, buying electricity, natural gas, oil, and timber worth an estimated $2 billion a year.
Rangoon is said to be quiet and tense. Since the crackdown, sandbag bunkers have been built on many of its streets. Soldiers often stand around the bunkers, but it is now uncommon to see monks in the city, according to Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires for the US Embassy in Burma.
"You can't overestimate the power of fear to keep things from happening," Villarosa said.
In Mae Sot, newly exiled monks, baby-faced army deserters, and ethnic minorities rub shoulders with aging politicians who have been waiting for decades for something - anything - that would send the Burmese generals packing.
The September marches obviously fell short of that goal. But veterans of the opposition movement agree that the monks' protests revealed significant weaknesses in the intelligence arm of the military junta.
After the demonstrations, the military detained more than 3,000 people, holding many in makeshift detention centers. Individuals released from detention in recent weeks have described their interrogators as confused, inept, and sometimes willing to accept bribes to release detainees. They often argued among themselves in front of detainees.
Diplomats and analysts have traced the breakdown of military intelligence to the abrupt dismissal in 2004 of General Khin Nyunt, then prime minister and the longtime head of intelligence. His firing and arrest, on order of Senior General Than Shwe, the head of state, coincided with the firing of thousands of intelligence officers.
"The intelligence operation used to be very professional, all the way down to the lower ranks," said David Tharckabaw, a leader of the Karen National Union, which represents the Karen ethnic minority. "Now it has become amateurish."
The crackdown in September differed from previous episodes of military brutality inside Burma in that it was captured in photographs and on video, and was seen around the world within hours.
This was no accident, according to opposition leaders here in Mae Sot. "We had about 200 people inside the country trained to take pictures with digital and video cameras," said Maung Maung. "We also trained them to transmit using satellite phones and Internet cafes. They were on the front lines when the demonstration started."
MAE SOT, Thailand - Desperate to maintain the momentum of their challenge to military rule in Burma, opposition leaders in the border town of Mae Sot are working with networks of supporters to get monks to return to the streets in protest, to push foreign governments to impose tougher sanctions, and to persuade ethnic militias to resume guerrilla attacks.
The leaders in the town say they believe that the generals who run Burma gave them a priceless political gift in September by ordering soldiers to attack Buddhist monks. "We have to thank them for their stupidity," said Maung Maung, secretary general of the National Council of the Union of Burma, which is based in the hill town of Mae Sot along the Thailand-Burma border and is the main umbrella group for exiled politicians and ethnic leaders.
Images of soldiers clubbing barefoot monks in saffron robes focused world attention on Burma's often-ignored military dictatorship, and prodded the generals to begin talking to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate and opposition leader whose party trounced them in a 1990 election and who is under house arrest in Rangoon. It also energized a nationwide cadre of angry monks, potent agents of grass-roots change in a Buddhist nation where the number of monks (about 400,000) rivals the number of soldiers.
Still, the generals' public relations gift loses value with each passing day, Burmese opposition figures say.
Without more "bone-breaking" pressure on the generals, talks with Suu Kyi will devolve into an empty delaying game, said Maung Maung. More than a dozen senior leaders of the opposition who were interviewed, including longtime members of Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, echoed his comments.
To ratchet up pressure, opposition leaders said they are urging monks inside Burma to regroup and join in more mass protests with students and workers. They are pleading with Western countries to stiffen economic sanctions and to donate cash to support political activity inside Burma, which the generals call Myanmar.
Opposition leaders including several recently exiled supporters of Suu Kyi, a proponent of nonviolence, are also urging Burma's armed ethnic minorities to prepare for a unified guerrilla conflict against the government.
"Armed struggle has to be part of the pressure," said Khun Myint Tun, a longtime supporter of Suu Kyi. "Something needs to happen soon to take advantage of the September momentum."
Some of that momentum seems to be slipping away.
The military is continuing to raid monasteries and arrest civilians, as it has since the late September crackdown on protesters. Suu Kyi remains under house arrest and cut off from supporters.
China, Thailand, and India have not substantially changed their economic dealings with the Burma military, buying electricity, natural gas, oil, and timber worth an estimated $2 billion a year.
Rangoon is said to be quiet and tense. Since the crackdown, sandbag bunkers have been built on many of its streets. Soldiers often stand around the bunkers, but it is now uncommon to see monks in the city, according to Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires for the US Embassy in Burma.
"You can't overestimate the power of fear to keep things from happening," Villarosa said.
In Mae Sot, newly exiled monks, baby-faced army deserters, and ethnic minorities rub shoulders with aging politicians who have been waiting for decades for something - anything - that would send the Burmese generals packing.
The September marches obviously fell short of that goal. But veterans of the opposition movement agree that the monks' protests revealed significant weaknesses in the intelligence arm of the military junta.
After the demonstrations, the military detained more than 3,000 people, holding many in makeshift detention centers. Individuals released from detention in recent weeks have described their interrogators as confused, inept, and sometimes willing to accept bribes to release detainees. They often argued among themselves in front of detainees.
Diplomats and analysts have traced the breakdown of military intelligence to the abrupt dismissal in 2004 of General Khin Nyunt, then prime minister and the longtime head of intelligence. His firing and arrest, on order of Senior General Than Shwe, the head of state, coincided with the firing of thousands of intelligence officers.
"The intelligence operation used to be very professional, all the way down to the lower ranks," said David Tharckabaw, a leader of the Karen National Union, which represents the Karen ethnic minority. "Now it has become amateurish."
The crackdown in September differed from previous episodes of military brutality inside Burma in that it was captured in photographs and on video, and was seen around the world within hours.
This was no accident, according to opposition leaders here in Mae Sot. "We had about 200 people inside the country trained to take pictures with digital and video cameras," said Maung Maung. "We also trained them to transmit using satellite phones and Internet cafes. They were on the front lines when the demonstration started."
Studying diversity, conflict and internationalizing Burma
Kangla Online
By: Nehginpao Kipgen
The Union of Burma consists of 7 states and 7 administrative divisions. States are predominantly inhabited by minority ethnic groups while divisions are largely dominated by majority ethnic Burmans.
Burma gained independence with adopted name ‘Union of Burma’ in 1948 and later changed to Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1974, but reverted to the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1988. On 18th June 1989, the State Law and Order Restoration Council adopted a new name called ‘Union of Myanmar’ with which the country is now officially known at the United Nations.
The country’s total land area is 261,970 square miles. Ethnic minorities occupy roughly two-thirds: Arakan/Rakhine state- 14,200 square miles, Chin state- 13,907 square miles, Kachin state- 34,379 square miles, Karen/Kayin state- 11,731 square miles, Karenni/Kayah state- 4,530 square miles, Mon state- 4,747.8 square miles, Shan state- 60,155 square miles.
As of July 2003 estimate, population according to the military is 52.4 million; last official census which occurred in 1983 reported just over 35 million (35,442,972). The same source puts religious affiliation in percent as: Buddhism (89.2%), Christianity (5.0%), Islam (3.8%), Hinduism (0.5%), Spiritualism (1.2%) and others (0.2%).
The military regime identifies “135 national races” of which the major ones are Arakan/Rakhine (7 sub-groups), Burman/Bamar (9 sub-groups), Chin (53 sub-groups), Kachin (12 sub-groups), Karen/Kayin (11 sub-groups), Karenni/Kayah (9 sub-groups), Mon (1 group), and Shan (33 sub-groups). The appellation “135 races” is codified on dialectical variations.
Although the accuracy is questionable, the 15th November 2007 update of the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook gives ethnic composition in Burma as: Burman 68%, Shan 9%, Karen 7%, Rakhine 4%, Chinese 3%, Indian 2%, Mon 2%, other 5%. Figures slightly vary from source to source.
Burma was administered as a province of India from 1886 until sundered from the British India in 1937. This was the year when settlements of the Kuki (also synonymously recorded in literature as Chin and Lushai) people were divvy up into two countries- Burma and India. With the creation of Bangladesh in 1972, the Kukis were further dispersed in three countries.
A number of research findings concluded that “Kookies” or “Kuki” is a Bengali word meaning hill men or highlanders. These people have a tradition of passing on their history orally; and as a result, today’s researchers have to rely substantially on the works of British writers who wrote extensively on the Kuki people during colonial era. Their traditional government ‘chieftainship system’ has been abandoned in Burma, but still retained and practiced in India.
In the context of Burma, Kuki is an unpopular terminology and so is the term Chin in India. The military junta recognizes “Thado” and “Kaung Saing Chin” under Chin nomenclature. In India, particularly in the state of Manipur, “Thado” is widely written as Thadou and “Kaung Saing” as Khongsai. The connotation may sound different, yet it refers to the same people. In local dialects, they also call themselves as eimi, laimi, zomi/mizo, etc.
Prior to independence, ethnic minority territories were not part of Burma proper. Considerable effort was mobilized for the materialization of Union of Burma at Panglong on the 12th day of February 1948. The nullification of this historic Panglong Agreement and 1947 constitution had annihilated the essence of forming the Union of Burma.
Burma had a parliamentary democracy from 1948 till general Newin seized power in 1962. A broken promise of Panglong Agreement was one important factor that led to the rise of armed movements. Ethnic minorities’ demand is greater autonomy under a federated structure and not secession or disintegration.
Neither the bloodless coup of 1962 nor 1988 mass uprising was the root cause of today’s conflicts in Burma. As early as 1948, the Karen National Union under its armed wing Karen National Liberation Army had begun rebelling against the Burmese government.
The struggle in Burma is basically of 2 stages – restoration of democracy and rights of ethnic minorities. To attain the latter, the former has to come first. Any democratic set-up sidelining ethnic minorities would not bring an end to decades’ old political imbroglio.
Within the status quo states and divisions, there are sub-ethnic groups advocating for autonomy or separate administration. Although every demand of every sub-group may not be feasible, criteria for eligibility and legality need to be established. One should not expect the Union of Burma to remain forever 7 states and 7 divisions, or 8 states as envisaged by some.
For many years since independence, Burma political crisis remained a microscopic issue to the international community – either as a result of the country’s insignificant role in international politics or her too little importance to the interest and security of other nations. However, this concept has changed dramatically since 1988 mass uprising and countrywide general elections.
Non-recognition of 1990 election results led to intimidation and imprisonment of several Member of Parliament elects – which became the genesis of many of the opposition groups in exile, including National Council of the Union of Burma and National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.
Deadliest attack on the entourage of Aung San Suu Kyi at Depeyin in 2003 and her continued detention was one reason behind the passing of Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003 by the U.S. Congress. The act bans the import of Burmese products and freezes the assets of senior officials.
In recent years, Burma has attracted unprecedented attention of the international community. The successful placement of Burma situation as permanent agenda of the United Nations Security Council on 29th September 2006 was a historic moment. It was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to pass a Security Council resolution on January 12th of this year.
More recently, the 2007 uprising incredibly got international community’s attention - headlines in many leading world newspapers, electronic medium and on television screens. Several world leaders and human rights activists around the world spoke up in support of Burmese democracy movement.
The entire world watched the brutality of military on its own people. The uprising immediate success was the attention it received from the world community and subsequent intervention by the United Nations Secretary General’s office through its special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.
The United States and European Union were quick to respond in taking tougher sanctions on the military generals and their businesses. Although there is no doubt about the powerful message it carries, unilateral sanctions seem to have limited impact. The vacuum created as a result of western sanctions has been filled by Burma neighboring countries.
Only western sanctions without cooperation from neighboring Asian countries have given enough space for the army generals to move around. Conflicting interests of two different approaches will continue to prolong the survival of military regime at the depletion of the country’s natural resources and collateral environmental damage.
While western powers pursue stick diplomacy, the Asian powers opt for carrot. Under such circumstance, the U.N. special envoy’s mission has become a little more than lip services with no substantive results to follow. The adamant stance of the 2 veto wielding powers (China and Russia) of the Security Council makes the world’s highest enforcement agency bootless.
The removal of Burma’s military regime could probably take less than a month or so. But unlike Iraq, the United States would not reign in its fighter jets and ground troops for reasons including: (i) Burma is insignificant importance to the U.S. national interest and security (ii) U.S. foreign policy toward Burma is more of policy oriented than strategic (iii) Rapidly advancing Asian super power is docking at the military’s backyard.
Though there is close to zero percent chance of military intervention either by the United States or by the United Nations, this would be the swiftest action to bring change to Burma should it be pursued. However, this would be a naïve prediction or suggestion for any political analyst at this point of time.
Meanwhile, the international community could consider the model of a six party talks on North Korean nuclear standoff. Six parties involving the United States, European Union, ASEAN, China, India, and Burma could break the iceberg of political crisis. Due to geographical proximity, enormous economic and diplomatic influence over Burma, China’s participation is pivotal.
If the international community continues to pursue two diametrically opposing views of western sanctions and Asian engagement, the military will continue to run the country with any resources available. Either concerted sanctions or collective engagement is needed to bring the military to a negotiating table.
Down the road, the culpable individuals in the military clique will be held accountable. Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 is one distant example that can be cited: carrot diplomacy brought warring parties to negotiation in a well devised plan.
However, stick diplomacy took its own course and the once powerful Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was tried for crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal in Hague, Netherlands.
On the death of Slobodan Milosevic in his detention cell, Richard Holbrooke, the then U.S. envoy who brokered the Dayton Peace Accords said, "I'm not going to shed any tears."
Nehginpao Kipgen is the General Secretary of US-based Kuki International Forum and a researcher on the rise of political conflicts in modern Burma (1947-2004).
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By: Nehginpao Kipgen
The Union of Burma consists of 7 states and 7 administrative divisions. States are predominantly inhabited by minority ethnic groups while divisions are largely dominated by majority ethnic Burmans.
Burma gained independence with adopted name ‘Union of Burma’ in 1948 and later changed to Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1974, but reverted to the Union of Burma on 23rd September 1988. On 18th June 1989, the State Law and Order Restoration Council adopted a new name called ‘Union of Myanmar’ with which the country is now officially known at the United Nations.
The country’s total land area is 261,970 square miles. Ethnic minorities occupy roughly two-thirds: Arakan/Rakhine state- 14,200 square miles, Chin state- 13,907 square miles, Kachin state- 34,379 square miles, Karen/Kayin state- 11,731 square miles, Karenni/Kayah state- 4,530 square miles, Mon state- 4,747.8 square miles, Shan state- 60,155 square miles.
As of July 2003 estimate, population according to the military is 52.4 million; last official census which occurred in 1983 reported just over 35 million (35,442,972). The same source puts religious affiliation in percent as: Buddhism (89.2%), Christianity (5.0%), Islam (3.8%), Hinduism (0.5%), Spiritualism (1.2%) and others (0.2%).
The military regime identifies “135 national races” of which the major ones are Arakan/Rakhine (7 sub-groups), Burman/Bamar (9 sub-groups), Chin (53 sub-groups), Kachin (12 sub-groups), Karen/Kayin (11 sub-groups), Karenni/Kayah (9 sub-groups), Mon (1 group), and Shan (33 sub-groups). The appellation “135 races” is codified on dialectical variations.
Although the accuracy is questionable, the 15th November 2007 update of the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook gives ethnic composition in Burma as: Burman 68%, Shan 9%, Karen 7%, Rakhine 4%, Chinese 3%, Indian 2%, Mon 2%, other 5%. Figures slightly vary from source to source.
Burma was administered as a province of India from 1886 until sundered from the British India in 1937. This was the year when settlements of the Kuki (also synonymously recorded in literature as Chin and Lushai) people were divvy up into two countries- Burma and India. With the creation of Bangladesh in 1972, the Kukis were further dispersed in three countries.
A number of research findings concluded that “Kookies” or “Kuki” is a Bengali word meaning hill men or highlanders. These people have a tradition of passing on their history orally; and as a result, today’s researchers have to rely substantially on the works of British writers who wrote extensively on the Kuki people during colonial era. Their traditional government ‘chieftainship system’ has been abandoned in Burma, but still retained and practiced in India.
In the context of Burma, Kuki is an unpopular terminology and so is the term Chin in India. The military junta recognizes “Thado” and “Kaung Saing Chin” under Chin nomenclature. In India, particularly in the state of Manipur, “Thado” is widely written as Thadou and “Kaung Saing” as Khongsai. The connotation may sound different, yet it refers to the same people. In local dialects, they also call themselves as eimi, laimi, zomi/mizo, etc.
Prior to independence, ethnic minority territories were not part of Burma proper. Considerable effort was mobilized for the materialization of Union of Burma at Panglong on the 12th day of February 1948. The nullification of this historic Panglong Agreement and 1947 constitution had annihilated the essence of forming the Union of Burma.
Burma had a parliamentary democracy from 1948 till general Newin seized power in 1962. A broken promise of Panglong Agreement was one important factor that led to the rise of armed movements. Ethnic minorities’ demand is greater autonomy under a federated structure and not secession or disintegration.
Neither the bloodless coup of 1962 nor 1988 mass uprising was the root cause of today’s conflicts in Burma. As early as 1948, the Karen National Union under its armed wing Karen National Liberation Army had begun rebelling against the Burmese government.
The struggle in Burma is basically of 2 stages – restoration of democracy and rights of ethnic minorities. To attain the latter, the former has to come first. Any democratic set-up sidelining ethnic minorities would not bring an end to decades’ old political imbroglio.
Within the status quo states and divisions, there are sub-ethnic groups advocating for autonomy or separate administration. Although every demand of every sub-group may not be feasible, criteria for eligibility and legality need to be established. One should not expect the Union of Burma to remain forever 7 states and 7 divisions, or 8 states as envisaged by some.
For many years since independence, Burma political crisis remained a microscopic issue to the international community – either as a result of the country’s insignificant role in international politics or her too little importance to the interest and security of other nations. However, this concept has changed dramatically since 1988 mass uprising and countrywide general elections.
Non-recognition of 1990 election results led to intimidation and imprisonment of several Member of Parliament elects – which became the genesis of many of the opposition groups in exile, including National Council of the Union of Burma and National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.
Deadliest attack on the entourage of Aung San Suu Kyi at Depeyin in 2003 and her continued detention was one reason behind the passing of Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003 by the U.S. Congress. The act bans the import of Burmese products and freezes the assets of senior officials.
In recent years, Burma has attracted unprecedented attention of the international community. The successful placement of Burma situation as permanent agenda of the United Nations Security Council on 29th September 2006 was a historic moment. It was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to pass a Security Council resolution on January 12th of this year.
More recently, the 2007 uprising incredibly got international community’s attention - headlines in many leading world newspapers, electronic medium and on television screens. Several world leaders and human rights activists around the world spoke up in support of Burmese democracy movement.
The entire world watched the brutality of military on its own people. The uprising immediate success was the attention it received from the world community and subsequent intervention by the United Nations Secretary General’s office through its special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.
The United States and European Union were quick to respond in taking tougher sanctions on the military generals and their businesses. Although there is no doubt about the powerful message it carries, unilateral sanctions seem to have limited impact. The vacuum created as a result of western sanctions has been filled by Burma neighboring countries.
Only western sanctions without cooperation from neighboring Asian countries have given enough space for the army generals to move around. Conflicting interests of two different approaches will continue to prolong the survival of military regime at the depletion of the country’s natural resources and collateral environmental damage.
While western powers pursue stick diplomacy, the Asian powers opt for carrot. Under such circumstance, the U.N. special envoy’s mission has become a little more than lip services with no substantive results to follow. The adamant stance of the 2 veto wielding powers (China and Russia) of the Security Council makes the world’s highest enforcement agency bootless.
The removal of Burma’s military regime could probably take less than a month or so. But unlike Iraq, the United States would not reign in its fighter jets and ground troops for reasons including: (i) Burma is insignificant importance to the U.S. national interest and security (ii) U.S. foreign policy toward Burma is more of policy oriented than strategic (iii) Rapidly advancing Asian super power is docking at the military’s backyard.
Though there is close to zero percent chance of military intervention either by the United States or by the United Nations, this would be the swiftest action to bring change to Burma should it be pursued. However, this would be a naïve prediction or suggestion for any political analyst at this point of time.
Meanwhile, the international community could consider the model of a six party talks on North Korean nuclear standoff. Six parties involving the United States, European Union, ASEAN, China, India, and Burma could break the iceberg of political crisis. Due to geographical proximity, enormous economic and diplomatic influence over Burma, China’s participation is pivotal.
If the international community continues to pursue two diametrically opposing views of western sanctions and Asian engagement, the military will continue to run the country with any resources available. Either concerted sanctions or collective engagement is needed to bring the military to a negotiating table.
Down the road, the culpable individuals in the military clique will be held accountable. Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 is one distant example that can be cited: carrot diplomacy brought warring parties to negotiation in a well devised plan.
However, stick diplomacy took its own course and the once powerful Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was tried for crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal in Hague, Netherlands.
On the death of Slobodan Milosevic in his detention cell, Richard Holbrooke, the then U.S. envoy who brokered the Dayton Peace Accords said, "I'm not going to shed any tears."
Nehginpao Kipgen is the General Secretary of US-based Kuki International Forum and a researcher on the rise of political conflicts in modern Burma (1947-2004).
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