Influential Burmese Politic and Fate of Sixty Millions People

Dr. Horst Hutter

2009-02-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

If you want to be happy, never get involve in politics!! (Dr. Horst Hutter)

This is what he said in our class last year. He is a very energetic and hard working teacher. He was kind to the students and seemed to have a lot of experiences with Asian culture. He may be close to 70 or more than 70....

Apparently, the government cannot force the teachers to take retirement.

My apology

2008-08-28T06:36:00.001-07:00

It has been so long I could not write any new posting since the Nargis crisis. I was mostly copying articles from some other websites. I apologize to those who regularly come and read here.

However, I have been doing some other useful things for Burmese readers. We published a new journal, which is educational and informative to Burmese readers. It is called Pin Lone Thit Sar journal. We also actively involve in other business and education sectors as well. This year we plan to invest some money in Myanmar and give scholarships to high school students. Our intention is to help develop education and economy situation in our mother land.

I will get back to my new posting asap even though I have been extremely busy.

Do you have any further questions? Please leave your comment in the comment box.

We Salut Our Late Heros

2008-07-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

UN must try Burmese leaders for Genocide

2008-06-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 02, 2008

U.N. Must try BurmeseLeaders for Genocide

Burma's ruling generals - including Than Shwe, Maung Aye and Thura Shwe Mann [Reuters]

U.N. must try Burmese leaders for genocide

JOEL BRINKLEY
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Almost 30 years ago, my editor dispatched me to Cambodia to cover the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and the resulting refugee holocaust. The images of babies with swollen bellies and only a few days left to live, emaciated and lethargic adults dying from typhoid, cholera or worse have hung with me to this day.

Now, three decades later, the United Nations and the Cambodian government are staging a genocide tribunal for several surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge reign - most of them from disease and starvation.

One country away, in Burma, more than 1 million survivors of Cyclone Nargis have now gone without food, medicine, clean water or sanitation services for more than four weeks. Though Burma's military dictators won't allow anyone to see, babies' bellies are beginning to swell, and listless adults are slipping away, victims of cholera, dysentery or worse. Tens of thousands are likely to die - most of them from disease and starvation.

The fault for all of this lies squarely on Gen. Than Shwe's shoulders. It's past time that the United Nations started planning a genocide tribunal for Shwe, the Burmese leader, and his fellow thugs. The case is clear, the verdict already known.

In Cambodia, prosecutors are digging through musty, incomplete records and relying on testimony from feeble, octogenarian witnesses. In Burma, all the evidence prosecutors would need is in the newspapers and on TV. Put together, it displays a callous disregard for human life so stunning that it would probably embarrass Kim Jung Il, Robert Mugabe - perhaps even Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan.

Here's the dossier: On May 20, Shwe promised Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, he would finally allow aid workers to deliver food and medicine to cyclone victims - three weeks after the storm.

The next day, Shwe ordered his troops to sweep through the Irrawaddy Delta and evict cyclone victims from the few buildings that remained standing so they could be used as polling places. Then soldiers pushed and prodded hungry and sick Burmese to vote in a sham referendum intended to extend Shwe's time in office - and sometimes filled in their ballots for them.

Last Sunday, soldiers ordered cyclone victims to dismantle makeshift shelters they had put up near main roads to escape the floodwaters. The soldiers said they were unsightly.

Meanwhile, the International Red Cross reported that rivers and ponds in the delta remained clotted with corpses. On Tuesday, UNICEF noted that Burmese children were drinking from these fetid ponds. They had no other source of water. Even before the storm, Save the Children said it had identified 30,000 malnourished children in the affected areas. Many of them, the group said a few days ago, "may already be dying for lack of food."

In Rangoon, meanwhile, when Ban proposed a donors conference for reconstruction aid, Shwe's government suddenly perked up and said Burma would be delighted to host it. Save our people, no; give us money - sure!

Representatives from more than 50 countries attended the conference last Sunday. Gen. Thein Sein, the Burmese prime minister, told them he would happily take their money. As for finally allowing aid workers in, he said, "we will consider allowing them in if they wish to engage in rehabilitation and reconstruction work."

The government's relief operations have come to an end, he insisted. Burma is shifting its focus to rebuilding and reconstruction. So much for Shwe's promise to Ban. So much for 100,000 sick and dying people. Last week, Burma admitted about 40 more aid workers - while throwing up onerous restrictions on their work.

For weeks, Shwe had refused even to take Ban's phone calls. Finally, Ban decided simply to show up. So the military set up a Potemkin refugee camp complete with crisp green tents and shiny new cookware. When Sein took Ban there a week later, reporters noticed that cooking oil jars remained sealed and store labels were still affixed to the frying pans.

The New York Times reported that soldiers had used dynamite to rid the streams of unsightly corpses in the areas Ban visited.

Now, a month after the storm, the United Nations estimates that fewer than half of the sick and starving cyclone victims have received even the first dollop of aid, while the generals insist that it's time to give up on the victims and start putting up new buildings.

If the world were a just place, then the first building project would be a prison to hold Shwe and his fellow thugs - after their genocide trial.

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. E-mail him at brinkley@foreign-matters.com. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page G - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Labels: Burmese Leaders, Genocide, Khmer Rouge Tribunal

An Experience of a Burmese relief worker

2008-06-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

I copied this article from Irrawaddy online magazine. If you want to see original page, please visit http://www.irrawaddy.org/interview_show.php?art_id=12448

Zarganar’s Relief Role

Monday, June 2, 2008

Zarganar, a popular Burmese comedian and social activist, has been heavily involved in volunteer disaster relief aid in the cyclone-damaged areas. An estimated 400 Burmese involved in the entertainment world joined together to do volunteer work in the delta.

Question: Can you talk about the situation on the ground since the cyclone struck Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta?

Zarganar

Answer: We started our [volunteer] emergency relief work on May 7, and we are still working. I have been to all the townships struck by the disaster, except Nga Pu Taw.

There are 420 volunteers in our group. We divided our volunteers in groups to work more effectively. The places we go to are usually places nobody has been to yet. We have been to 42 such villages, most under the administrative area of Dedaye Township. Three of these villages are large village tracts where the paddy [rice] purchasing center was located.

We went to three large village tracts in Bogalay Township. They hadn’t received aid not only from the government, but also from UN agencies. No NGOs had reached there yet.

Q: What did you see there? What do they need at this moment?

A: I can give you an example. There was a large village tract called Ma Ngay Gyi, where 1,000 families used to live and 700 houses were demolished totally. The other 300 houses left remnants of house-poles and floors. In total, 221 people died in the village and 300 are missing. Nobody knows where they are.

We arrived there on May 22 and until that day, and we saw bodies floating in streams. Survivors there received 7 tins (measurement with condensed-milk-tin) of rice from authorities and an instant noodle pack from some independent donors. Apart from that, they received nothing else. That was the scene we saw 20 days after the cyclone.

On May 28, we went from Bogalay to Tin Maung Chaung, Kyein Su, Hteik Chaung Kyi, Kan Su and Shwe Bo Su villages. The villagers there had received no assistance as well. They had almost no clothing and almost all the children were virtually naked.

In numbers, there were 542 households there and all the houses were heavily damaged. There was a small pagoda left on high-ground. The villagers gathered themselves on the platform of the pagoda and sleep together. There were no UN or NGOs there yet, and they had received nothing. Our private group gave them what we had. The most horrible thing was that they had no water to drink and collected water when it rained. We gave them 10,000 bottles of drinking water.

Q: Has any of the international aid that the regime received reached those areas?

A: There are temporary shelters in Laputta and Bogalay Townships. Some people can stay in tents in those shelters with four or five people to a tent. The people staying there eat rice and rice gruel. Those people receive some assistance, but they are few in number. The people in the villages get no assistance.

Q: The UN said only 25 percent of the storm survivors have received assistance up to last week; do you think that estimate is correct?

A: It’s fairly correct. Only a few people can access these shelters. The other survivors are stranded on islands and in distant villages with hardly accessible roads. They usually rely on boats for transportation.

I would like to share a sad story with you. I met an old lady who had 11 family members and 10 of them died in the storm. I saw many people like her. I saw many traumatized people on the delta islands. Only boats can get in there.

Q: You saw many people suffering trauma and depression?

A: I see three types of people suffering trauma. One type is very violent, and sensitive. They are angry, and I can't say anything to them. They are aggressive all the time.

The second type is people crying and moaning all the time. They think about what happened again and again, and they repeat what happened over and over.

The third type is silent—no talking, very little movement.

We gave people yellow beans and lablab, along with a blanket and mosquito net. We gave a pack of these things to each survivor, and many didn't even appear to acknowledge it. They showed little interest, as if they thought it would be better to die.

Q: How was your experience with the local authorities? Any problems?

A: At the beginning, we took risks, and we had to move forward on our own. Sometime we had confrontations with the authorities.

For example, they asked us why we were going on our own without consulting them and wanted us to negotiation with them. They said they couldn't guarantee our lives.

We said we’d take our chances on our own. Later after the Natural Disaster Prevention and Protection Committee (NDPPC) said private donors could contribute, we faced fewer problems.

After that announcement, well-off traders from Chinatown and gold traders from Mogul Street joined the relief work. It is better now since the survivors can receive more assistance. These rich traders can't go to remote areas, and we try to help them deliver aid to remote villages. For instance, they can drop the assistance in Bogalay and our actors' group takes it to villages.

Q: The Myanmar Alin newspaper said survivors in the delta don’t need foreign ai. They can survive on locally grown vegetables and edible fish and frogs. It says the Irrawaddy delta can prosper again next year with vast golden fields of paddy.

A: I have no idea whether they can catch edible fish and frogs. We renamed the Irrawaddy River and Bogalay River by the color of the water. The rivers are a chalky white color. We call it the Nargis color. There are many dead bodies and cadavers of cattle floating in the rivers. We call that the Nargis odor.

The odor sticks with us when we come back from the villages. Nobody can stand it, and causes some people to vomit. How could people find edible fish and frogs in that environment?

Q: Have many of the bodies have been properly buried?

A: I returned returned from five villages in the Bogalay area on May 28. I couldn't take videos and photos in those villages because there were so many bodies, at least 40 bodies. That was after about 1,000 corpses were burned, I think. I believe some NGOs like AZG and some Christian organizations helped cremate bodies.

Q: Most of the people in the delta are Karens. How is their situation?

A: In Bogalay and Dedaye districts there are Karen villages and most of them are Christians. I like these Karen. When I arrived in their villages, I saw some organizations were already there. They appointed some local Karen leaders to go to Rangoon, and they organized meetings with doctors and other professionals. They are taking a part in their reconstruction effort.

They came back to some villages with relief items like material for shelters, food and utensils. I believe they have already been given some vegetable seeds like morning glory, amaranth, rosells and fertilizers that can be used on any kind of soil.

Q: When do you think the area can start to recover its agricultural potential?

A: In many areas, I think rice will be unworkable for a long time, but vegetables can grow. We need to start working with the people on how to recover the land and work their crops.

There are only 15 days left in the rice planting season. We have talked to private companies and Thai professionals about how to resume the agricultural works with small machinery.

A small mechanical plow, called Shwe Kywe, costs 1.4 million kyat. We have selected the Kyun Nyo Gyi village tract for a pilot project. About 5,514 people live there. Thai professionals said the agricultural work could be resumed. We will try to start the work with 18 small plows. We’ve received 10 plows from donation.

Q: Is any assistance coming from northern and central Burma?

A: Of course, many people come to assist. For example, 10-wheel trucks from Namti, Myit Kyi Na and Lashio arrived with aid. They brought 200 tanks of cooking oil and other supplies. The Christian group from Lashio came with 10 trucks. They are Shan.

Q: How is Rangoon now?

A: We are also reaching out in Rangoon as well.

Our group left this morning to Dala, Kwan Chan Kone, Kyi Myin Daing and Nyaung Wine on the other side of the river. The situation there is not as bad as in delta. However, the houses were damaged, and we do need to assist them as well. Psychologically, they are not as traumatized as the people in the delta.

Q: What do you want to say people living outside of Burma?

A: There are many things we can’t do alone. People can help us a great deal. For instance after the tsunami in Thailand, professionals arrived immediately and built houses for the survivors in a short time. We can't afford such assistance, and it is a very vast area. It would be better if international assistance could help with this.

Q: What is the UN able to do?

A: I am not happy with the UN. It doesn’t seem able to reach many of our people. The UN and NGO staff must work under the eye of the regime. That’s a problem. Why are they so concerned with the government's endorsement of their relief work? They should have taken more risks.

Even if they can't go without permission, they could assist volunteers like us who are willing to go to the villages. There are a lot of groups like us assisting refugees. Many people have received nothing from the UN and NGOs. The UN and a lot of professional organizations send their aid to the compounds of the local township authorities.

Q: What happens with the people who are waiting for food on the roads?

A: Actually, they have to beg as they are starving. The authorities said don't give out food to people on the roads, but they are starving. The scenes are not that chaotic. I didn't see people robbing each other for food.

Q: The US says some relief work could be done with their amphibious boats. They are willing to help. Do you think they are still needed a month after the cyclone?

A: I believe they are necessary. We provided some survivors with radios and asked them to listen to the news, to keep in contact with the world. They were happy with that news, but now they feel sad and desperate because the ships aren’t allowed to come. They feel alone and abandoned.

Things are moving.......

2008-05-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

Things seem to be improving. I personally welcome the latest development initiated by the military government.

The best effort done by UN and internationally community so far I have seen.
I wish all of you who get involve in relief work have good luck.

important message for Burmese

2008-05-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

Check out the website

http://www.burmaunited.blogspot.com/

ALARM

2008-05-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

Alarming Official figure

The death toll in Burma now is 32610, more than 150,000 are missing. 1227000 are injured . Burmese who live inside speculated that more than 500,000 died. If proper management does not start now, 1.5 millions may die due to the lack of water and food.

Reference: Hittaing.org

Fund Rising for the Cyclone victims

2008-05-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

Fund Rising for the Cyclone Victims

The Rangoon alone has 760,000 cyclone victims. The aid apparently reach only 6 percents the survivors. In Delta area, many villages disappeared from the map. According to a NLD party member who came from Laputta, Irrewaddy delta, the Laputta alone has 100,000 people died: more than 300 villages were wiped out. Many survivors from Laputta now moved to nearest city, Myaung Mya. Among them, there are 300 hundred children who cannot find their parents.

Meanwhile, Rangoon, the old capital have no telephone, no electricity and facing short of food and water.

Reference: Myanmar websites: Democratic Voice of Burma, Mizzima.com, Irrawaddy.org

IN Canada, we are doing fund rising for Myanmar Cyclone victims through Myanmar Charity Foundation (registered organization) based in Ottawa: If you want to donate, please contact Kyaw Moe at 613, 878 2371 or Thet Thet Tun, 514 766 2378 in Montreal.

The junta has no mercy

2008-05-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

The Junta has no mercy

The News from inside Burma is devastating. Many survivors die everyday due to the lack of clean water and food. The government is still very stubborn to accept the foreign aid. What they want is to receive food, but not experts who understand how to solve such mess. Now people are speculating millions may die if proper management does not start now. I copied following news from www.komoethee.blogspot.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Up to 1.5 million cyclone survivors in Myanmar could die if clean water and sanitation are not provided to them, an international aid organisation has said.
An Oxfam official said the toll from the May 3 cyclone could eventually be 15 times higher than their latest estimate of 100,000.
Sarah Ireland, Oxfam's regional chief, said "all the factors" existed for a public health crisis.

The warning came after Myanmar's government pushed ahead with a controversial referendum despite international appeals for the ruling military to focus on relief efforts.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B8448A41-0C90-4674-852F-A1564E8D7FBF.htm

Posted by Moethee Zun at 04:17

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Lu Du Daw Ah Mar

2008-04-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

LU DU Daw Amar and Paw Oo Thett's paintings

2008-04-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

I have never met Lu Du Daw Ah Mar in my life, nor will I have chance to meet her. Yet, she is one of the most famous and respected women of Burma.

Five years ago,my husband and I went to visit her house in Mandalay. Someone told me she possessed some paintings of Paw Oo Thett. Wanting to see the paintings of Paw Oo Thett may be a great reason to go and meet her, I thought. We took a taxi to her place. It was very easy to find the place as taxi drivers already knew who she was and where she lived. When we arrived her home, we met her son. We told him we were art collectors and came to see the paintings of Paw Oo ThettShe. He told us Daw Ah Mar was very sick and, apparently, under oxygen treatment at that moment. So he took us around the house, we saw a few paintings of Paw Oo Thett hanging in different rooms.

In fact, the goal of my husband to see Daw Ah Mar was quite different from mine. Since he did not know much about Daw Ah Mar, his aim was to go and learn what she had, and if it is possible, to buy the paintings. These paintings are very rare and he believed that the value of the paintings will eventually go up in the future. However, when we saw the paintings, we realized that the paintings were bad conditions; they certainly needed urgent restoration. So we asked if they would like to sell these paintings, instead of leaving them without proper care; because everyone seemed to be so busy and did not seem to have much knowledge of taking care of these precious paintings. Even though Daw Amar's son was quite nice and let us look at all the paintings they had, he told us his mother would not be interested to sell any of these paintings. The reason was that they had been given to her by Paw Oo Thett himself as gifts. I personally understood her attachment to the paintings, but felt sorry that they seemed to be eventually have destruction if they could not restore them in near future.

Anyway, this happened 5 years ago. Now Dw Amar has passed away. When I saw the news of her death, I felt that she gave up everything, not only the paintings she received from Paw Oo Thett, but also her ultimate desire to see the victory of our people- democratic reform for our land and our people.

2008-03-06T04:18:00.001-08:00

"The Uncertain Future of Burma"

In recent days, the military junta has been pushing forward
towards the referendum for the new constitution, which will be

held in May. There is no doubt that the referendum will play a

critical role for Burma if it is approved. Most importantly, the power

of the junta will become legitimate and subsequently, most countries

will have to recognize the power of the junta and start to consider
how to stop the recent economic sanctions and embargoes imposed

against Burma. In a way, stopping sanctions would help the majority of

Burmese as some levels of starvation would be resolved.

However, to get a "yes" for the referendum from the majority of the

public may be quite tricky for some reasons. First and most
importantly, the public has no more trust in the junta after seeing

broken promises for more than four decades. THE Public, in fact, has
expressed tremendous levels of disgust at the junta after seeing the
brutal crackdown on the recent monks' protest. But, there is still

hope for the junta for the referendum, as most Burmese do not
understand what "the constitution" means. Even if some of them know
how important a constitution is for a state, many of them have no idea

of the components of constitutions and what the results would
likely to be if it is voted into effect.Unfortunately,
National League for Democracy, the winner of the 1990 election and all other opposition parties cannot move fast enough to educate the public. Even worse, the public will probably be forced
to vote for the referendum, and/or the voted result will be tampered with.

Let's hope the referendum is voted into existence; yet, stopping the
sanctions and embargoes imposed by the States and the West are still
being debated in the international political arena; everyone

knows that the junta is playing a big political mind game to buy

themselves time. Therefore, even if the referendum vote is "yes",
there is doubt that the US and its allies will stop the sanctions.
Consequently, the politics of Burma will keep their ambiguity for
another four to five years unless some miracle happens.

Congratulation to Than Shwe!!!

2008-02-17T15:46:00.001-08:00

Than Shwe Won Third Place at World's Worst Dictators

We Salut To Phado Mann Shar

2008-02-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

We Salut To Phado Mann Shar

The sudden death of Phado Mann Shar was a shock to all who participate in democratic reform of Burma. The news was everywhere on the internet and both Karen community and Burmese show their deepest sympathy to his surviving family.

The question here is "Who is behind the assassination?"; many are speculating the junta behind the attack as KNU is most resistant group who wants the separation from Burma.

Another big question,"who is going to replace him?, the new leader will make a big difference?

So far, there is no response from the Junta.

Good news and bad news!!

2008-02-13T05:01:00.000-08:00

Good news and bad news!!

This morning when I woke up, I was a bit confused after putting myself in the shoes of Burmese. If I were in Burma, what should I do? The referendum is coming very soon. and the situation is getting more difficult and tense. Numbers of people hope to see the good changes and they are now thinking of voting for the referendum, that I personally agree with them. However,according to RFA and many other news agencies, the constitution is just a tool to make military rule to become legitimate. In the end, no matter what happen, the constitution will give a power to the army to overthrow the government and take control of the country again. So what is the point of voting for constitution? At worst, many Burmese did not even know what the constitution is, and what will include in the constitution.

The good news is that Than Shwe and his best ally Tay Za, who brought money to the military rulers, are in deep trouble. Than Shwe is, apparently, desperately looking for the support of majority of the public for upcoming referendum. It is not so sure how he is going to manage such matter. Meanwhile, Tay Za is desperately looking for the money- to compensate for most of his accounts frozen by the US and its allies. Subsequently, they cannot limit the supply of cell phones anymore; the price of cell phones going down after bringing different cell phones in, which apparently could bring regular income to the seller. I personally hope this will continue and the plan of referendum will be destroyed.

"Congratulation to China"

2008-02-09T05:46:00.000-08:00

It might have been so wonderful to have an Olympic game inside one's land to celebrate!!

This article is to congratulate the Chinese government who violate human rights and help those countries who abuses its own people. I got the Cartoon pictures from our Burmese online magazines; the one on the left is made by our Burmese cartoonist and the other made by a German cartoonist. Enjoy!!

Nway Hnaung Khin Maung Than and her Husband

2008-02-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

Nothing is happening except more human right abuses violated by the relatives of generals and its allies. The news about Nway Hnaung Khin Maung Than (the daughter of Lt General Khin Maung Than) and her husband, coming from both DVB (democratic voice of Burma) Mizzima was truly disturbing. DVB described detail information of how this couple confiscated the lands from farmers and continue more abuses.

Does it means that there is no more law and regulation in Burma anymore? The one who has the power can do anything they want? The military officials and their societies are doing everything without conscious in order to become richer. If this continues, the fate of the country will sink into the deeper hell. All nationalists are hoping that educated military officers would change the fate of country, but it seems very difficult to reach that level so far.

In the end, the real desire of public may be to go and bomb the so called "Nay Pyi Daw". Who knows this will not happen one day.

Moronic Tay Za

2008-02-08T08:15:00.001-08:00

Moronic Tay Za bowing to the killer couple, Than Shwe and Kyaing Kyain

From Latest Reading

2008-02-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

"The Meeting with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi"

It may be very early to give any comment about the meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi and government's representative. It is just because there were a lot of distrusts and misunderstandings between two parties; to develop a constructive collaboration is, in deed, difficult to reach. Perhaps, hundreds of death in every uprising and ongoing corruptions of the government officials even make more difficult to reach such collaboration. For example, many residents in Yangon said, "They (generals) are too afraid to end up at International criminal court", "And nobody wants to let the power go as they are making so much money".
For sure, the generals are definitely buying their time to save everything for themselves.

However, we should constantly focus on our interest, what is our real interest? The answer is to save the nation.

We can now see our young generations, even middle ages, are thinking of welcoming outside military interference to declare the war on the generals. To bring an American army to Burma may be easier for everyone to think than facing a reality. Strategically Burma is not that important to the States to spend its army, and there will be a lot of complications if this ever happens. The cost for a war is unimaginable; for example, lives of both soldiers and civilians and financial matters.

So let's think about the reality. Again, what do we really need for our Nation? Our interest should only focus on National Interest rather than planing a revenge on generals. As soon as there was a meeting between DASSK and her party members, the important words come from her is everywhere, but most online journals did not give a complete message come from Aung San Suu Kyi, except Irrawaddy online magazine. Under the title of "Unimportant Topics Take Up All the Time, Says Suu Kyi", here is what the Irrawaddy described, "She suggested that sometimes the party needs to push and sometime it needs to pull, and if it is necessary, everyone needs to give up everything". Obviously, she considers every option as possibility.

As she said, "If it is necessary everyone needs to give up everything" would save the nation, then we should seriously think about that option as well. What will be the best option for our nation? Right now 60 millions of people are suffering in tremendous situation. Please save our nation!!

(I am not not a democracy activist who is funded by other party, neither have tie to any general. I am just one of the nationalists who want to save our nation. Thank you for reading my article.)

2008-02-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

"Incredible black magic planned in the new capital"

What is going on? Moemaka brought an updated news about the latest black magic plan of Senior general Than Shwe, in order to keep the power. You may wonder what it is; yes, he gave order to "Supreme Drinking Water" company to construct a raising farm for penguins. (ps. Pyinmana Nay Pyi Daw is very closed to equator zone)

If this news is true, senior general's closest allies seriously consider to force him to see a psychiatrist either in Yangon or Singapore.

Hope the best, but prepare for the worst"

2008-01-30T19:05:00.000-08:00

"Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst"

This is the message from Aung San Suu Kyi to her party members and the public. In reality, public had been facing the worst ever since 1962; there is no more to loose. Everyone is now waiting for the last change!!!

Latest news from Yangon!!

2008-01-30T03:05:00.000-08:00

"Internet, freedom of express"

There is not much to say about Burma's situation except the country is under the complete control of the military rulers again. Not a single chance of freedom of express, many news indicated in these recent months after the uprising.

My sister who went to the new capital, the so called Nay Pyi Daw, said," Spies are everywhere, they deliberately following us to listen our conversation". She continued telling me about how should be careful when she opens my emails in the internet cafes. "There are many spies both inside and outside of internet cafes, I cannot open my email regularly anymore".

Irrawaddy just published a news that one blogger was arrested. But I did not see anything related to the politic, so far, in his website.

Yangon Mayor's Corruption

2008-01-28T06:07:00.000-08:00

This is from ko Htike website. sorry for not asking his permission.

Yangon Mayor's Corruption

Whenever Yangon Mayor (Brig-Gen- Aung Thein Lin) go to Nay Pyi Taw , Assistant Chief Engineers,Executive Engineer and A/E need to pay Kyats 100,000(About US $ 100) each for his travel expences the total of about Kyats 20 lakh (About US $ 2000)in one trip.

Last year when Mayor's wife attended in private hospital to get operation CE,A/CE,EE,A/E had to support (Kyats 5 million)as fund for his wife's hospital expenditure.

That is a real story which YCDC (Yangon City Development Comittee)'s senior staff's has been suffering that virus since that guy became Mayor.

Stealth, Rambo, and the Lady

2008-01-25T04:31:00.000-08:00

After “Rambo,” the “Lady”—Hollywood Discovers Burma [Commentary]
By Yeni
January 25, 2008

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The fourth in a series of war veteran “Rambo” films, featuring Hollywood's mega-star Sylvester Stallone as a 61-year-old who heads into the Burmese jungle to rescue abducted Western missionaries, has its world premiere on Friday.

Many Burmese democracy activists believe this is a good time to release the film, four months after the September pro-democracy protests in Burma and the subsequent vicious military crackdown made international headlines.

Although the character of Rambo is essentially apolitical and not known as a subject of intellectual interest, many Burmese will watch the movie, which is expected to direct wide attention again to the Burma issue.

Burmese inside the country will be looking for clandestine copies of the film. Burmese youngsters are bound too enjoy the movie and will be emulating Rambo and his feats.

Several Hollywood celebrities have recently shown interest in the Burma crisis and helped increase awareness of the situation. Burma is now a hot Hollywood property, figuring for the second time in less than two years in action movies with Burmese settings. In the first, “Stealth”, a fictitious air raid is made on a terrorist cell in Rangoon.

Rambo deserves thanks for attracting world attention to Burma's current plight under the cruel oppression of the military junta. But while the film remains true to Hollywood tradition and has a happy ending, the reality in Burma has so such outcome.

Meanwhile, the leading US entertainment magazine, Variety, recently reported that the life of Burmese democracy icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi will be the subject of a new movie, titled “The Lady.”

Giuseppe Tornatore, director of the Oscar-winning Italian film “Nuovo cinema Paradiso,” plans to make “The Lady” with Japanese producer Naofumi Okamoto. Production is set to begin later this year.

According to the Variety report, “The Lady” will cover the period from Suu Kyi’s return to Burma in 1988, when she was 43, to the present day, and Okamoto is to produce the US $30 million project alongside Avi Arad, Steven Paul and Benedict Carver of Los Angeles-based Crystal Sky Pictures, which will finance the film.

Arad, best known for movies based on Marvel Comics superheroes such as Spider-Man and X-Men, told Variety: "At first I thought it wasn't my kind of movie, but then I realized it was. To me, Suu Kyi was like a character from 'X-Men,' except she's a real hero, not an imaginary one. She didn't need to do what she did, and she gave up a lot to do it."

Suu Kyi is, of course, a living heroine. That is why it will be interesting to see who will play her in the movie and how the Italian director and his film team will portray Burma's democracy icon and present her—and her beloved people's—struggle against the military dictatorship.

Arad told Variety that the movie is intended to reach the broadest possible audience. "It's a love story and a political thriller. If it's not commercially successful, we will have missed the mark."

Who knows? The film could rival the highly successful film on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, who led the nonviolent resistance movement against British colonial rule in India during the first half of the 20th century.

2008-01-24T20:05:00.001-08:00

2008-01-24T20:03:00.000-08:00

Britney, maybe, is not Crazy as People Thought

2008-01-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

Britney, maybe, is not Crazy as People Thought

In an interview accompanied by her personal paparazzi Adnan Ghalib, Britney told The Spoof.com, "Aung San Suu Kyi has long been estranged from her own two children through her involuntary detention and house arrest, I now believes that this was a sign and that she, Paris and I have a special connection. I also shaved my head last year and attacked a car with an umbrella, I saw the monks in Burma carrying umbrellas during their demonstartions last year and I need to act upon this synchronicity, first we'll visit Rangoon and then travel to Yangon." When it was pointed out to Britney that they were alternative names for the same place she paused before replying "You mean like Paris Hilton and Paris Hilton."

When asked their reasons for attending Burma during its "Thingyan" festival in April, Britney replied "We heard that its a really good piss up and we wouldn't want to miss that, Paris is going to join me there after her trip to Rwanda."

Staff at the Burmese Embassy in Washington DC would not comment on whether Britney or Paris Hilton would be granted visas.

With their antics a little more synchronicity they might both end up in the Insein Jail.

Security Alert

2008-01-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

I copied this from Ko Moe Thee.

Security Alert

We heard SPDC is secretly negotiating with Chinese and Thai phone companies to trace the signals of phones inside Burma. They are giving them lucrative contracts in return for providing SPDC the location of the signals. Anybody using the phones originated by Thai or Chinese phone companies should be careful.

Use only when necessary and use the phone only 1-2 minutes ( I do not know the exact time SPDC needs to trace a call). They are also trying hack gmail accounts. So, change your password frequently.
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ဖုန္းကို အခ်ိန္တုိေျပာပါ။ဖုန္းသုံးေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ ဘက္ထရီတပ္သုံးပါ။ ျပီးရင္ ဘက္ထရီတုံးကို ခ်က္ျခင္း ျဖဳတ္ပစ္လုိက္ပါ။တယ္လီဖုန္းတုိင္းဟာ ငါးစကၠန္႔မွာတၾကိမ္က် သူဘယ္မွာရိွေနတယ္ဆုိတာကို ျဂိဳလ္တုကေနတဆင့္ ဖုန္းcompanyကို သတင္းပို႔ပါတယ္။ Suggestion from - Mait.

Statement on all terrorist act!!

2008-01-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

"The Statement on Bomb Attack"

Within last two days, there were at least three bomb explosions in three different cities in Burma. The bomb attacks are rare terrorists acts in peaceful Burma. Most of the time, no party claimed responsible for such act.

In 2005, there were bomb attacks at three places in Yangon, the capital. Many innocent people died and injured in those attacks.

All terrorist act must be denounced as this does not bring any benefit to the public. If this is believed to be done by government itself, they would pay a big price later. Public should be alert and avoid the crowded area.

Critical Thinking for Critical Time

2008-01-12T06:23:00.000-08:00

The meeting of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and government representative U Aung Kyi was confirmed on the 11th of January. Even if the government did not mean much for this meeting, we would like to welcome all the attempts and steps made for national reconciliation.

Let's say we should forget about everything in the past and just move forward ahead for our 60 millions people.

The hope and the attempts to get help from neighboring countries or the west world from both sides, the opposition and the government leaders, should be dropped as well. In reality, nobody would give any help without own interest, either they want to influence politically or financially.

We are now at very important time to think of our people, our young generation and the future of the country. If the government really care about the sovereignty of the state, why won't they start the meaningful step right now? Aung San Suu Kyi and the majority of the public would probably not reject if the government give some percentages of power to share with them right now. As soon as they reach some agreements, everything would be opened up and most of problem would be solved. Both sides need courageous decisions and hopefully they would make a meaningful steps very soon.

Sixty years after independence, Myanmar remembers in secret

2008-01-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

Sixty years after independence, Myanmar remembers in secret

by Hla Hla Htay

YANGON (AFP) - Pausing in front of the fence around Yangon's main park, a man points through the iron bars to show his two young children the statue inside.

"This is Myanmar's independence leader General Aung San. He was a very honourable man," he said.

The children gazed at the 10-foot (three-meter) statue and started to ask a question when their father hushed them.

"I will tell you all about him once we get home," he said.

Although Kandawgyi Park is one of the most popular public spaces in Myanmar's main city of Yangon, almost no one takes the path that leads by the statue or reads the inscription, "General Aung San, the leading star of the Union."

The man credited with winning Myanmar's independence from Britain, 60 years ago on January 4, is now most famous overseas for being the father of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi -- the Nobel peace prize winner who has spent 12 years under house arrest for her efforts to end decades of military dictatorship.

She is so despised by the ruling junta that few are willing to speak publicly about her father, even though Aung San is revered as a hero for leading the battle against British colonisers and Japanese occupiers during World War II.

He is also remembered for uniting the nation's many ethnic groups in the struggle for independence, which Aung San never lived to see.

He was assassinated at the age of 32, along with eight of his top lieutenants in July 1947, in a plot blamed on a rival politician who is now seen as a national traitor.

Even the military leadership remembers Aung San's sacrifice on the anniversary of their deaths, which is called Martyrs' Day.

But since his daughter achieved prominence during a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, few people are willing to mention Aung San in public for fear of angering the junta and its ubiquitous informers.

"We never forget our independence leader. He's always in our hearts and minds. People just dare not to show their love openly because they don't want any problems," Khin, a 30-year-old company staffer, told AFP.

"He had very high hopes for our country's future. I'll tell my infant daughter about him and his struggles for our country's independence," she added.

For those old enough to remember independence, the upcoming anniversary brings a certain sense of loss at what might have been had Aung San survived to lead the new nation.

Mya Mya, a retired government officer, was only 11 when Burma became a country that was seen as far more developed than most of its neighbours.

Sixty years later, the nation now known as Myanmar is among the poorest in the world, hobbled after 45 years of military dictatorship and disastrous economic policies.

"We all love Aung San like a father. That's why we were so hurt when he died," Mya Mya said, her eyes watering at the memory of his death.

"I don't understand politics, but I often wonder what might have happened if he had lived to see independence," she added.

Aung San had succeeded in cobbling together an alliance with Myanmar's ethnic minorities, many of whom had seen independence as an opportunity to win their own sovereign homelands.

After his death, that alliance quickly fell apart and the nation was wracked by a score of armed insurgencies across the country.

The military used the rebellions as a pretext to seize control over the government in 1962, and has ruled with an iron fist ever since.

Aung San Suu Kyi has emerged as the leader of peaceful resistance to military rule. Although she was only two when her father was killed, her stature has been built in large part because of the similarities the public sees in them.

She led her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to victory in elections in 1990, although the junta has never recognised the result.

When Buddhist monks led protests against the government in September, their movement was galvanised by a single, brief appearance by Aung San Suu Kyi to greet them at the gate of the home where she is detained.

Many here see her leadership as a continuation of her father's, although the junta has tried to diminish both their roles while building up its own image through relentless propaganda extolling the virtues of the military.

In the privacy of their homes, many families are quietly passing along their own unfiltered history of independence.

"I love General Aung San unconditionally, because my teacher taught us he was the father of our independence from Britain," said Pyi Sone, an eight-year-old boy.

Some news and reviews from trip to Burma

2007-12-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

Some News and Reviews After Returning from Burma

Burma is in deep trouble; everything seems going down deeply and would not be able to solve any situation.

People confessed to online medias that many people are begging on the streets in different ways. Nothing is working except some companies directly related to higher officials.

All foreign companies who invested need to pay 20% shares as bribe to a respective higher official to get a permit to set down a company, a foreigner who has a company in Taug Gyi confessed. He, however, refused to give any further details.

The generals summoned all diplomats from both UN and embassies around 10th of November. Everyone had to traveled to the so called "Nay Pyi Daw", literally "the palace". The reason for the invitation was to explain that the golden color revolution was organized by NLD. They asserted that NLD had planned ahead to take over the power after organizing demonstrations which destroyed the stability and peace of the country. Nobody believed in what they said, of course not; but what else could they say?

On the other hand, China and Russians have had eyes on the natural resources of Burma whatever they could pick up. The latest found natural gas maybe the most powerful source to resist. Someone recently came back from the country said that "Everything would be taken over by Chinese and Russian; do not worry about the sanctions imposed by the West." People who live in Mandalay need to speak some basic Chinese, some people suggested.

The controversial subject here is "sanction". Many politicians continue to debate about how useful sanctions and economic embargo are to punish brutal governments. To change the mind of the military junta, no one can say any definite answer. Time will tell us. The one definite answer is the sanctions and embargo would bring everything down.

Crazy Than Shwe's another stupidity

2007-12-24T17:06:00.000-08:00

သန္းေရြ ယုတ္မာပက္စက္ ေနျပန္ျပီ။

ေရြ တိဂံုဘရားမွာ သန္းေရြ ေက်ာက္စိမ္းဘုရား တဆူ ကို လ်ဴထားတယ္လို ့သိရတယ္။ ဘုရားပုံေတာ္ကိုသူမ်က္နာနဲ ့တူေအာင္ထုထားတယ္လို ့ဆိုတယ္။ ဘုရားကိုလူေတြကေတာ့သလို မ်ိဳး သူကိုလူေတြက ကေတာ့ေအာင္ မပုန္ကန္ရဲ ေအာင္လို ့ဆိုတယ္။ ဘုရားက ရုပ္ပြားေတာ္က ညဏ္ေတာ္ ၁ဒသမ ၅ မီတာျမင့္တယ္လို ့သိရတယ္။ ေရြတဂံုဘုရား ေတာင္ဖက္ မုဒ္ အျခမ္းမွာရိွတယ္။ သတင္းအျပည္ ့အစံု ကို ေအာက္မွာ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာျဖင့္ဖတ္ရူ နိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းကို အင္တာနက္မွတဆင့္ရရိွလို ့အမ်ား

ျပည္သူမ်ားသိရိွရန္ တင္ျပေပးလိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Than Shwe first insulted the Buddha before he murdered the monks

Found at the Burma’s holiest shrine, Shwedagon Pagoda, Than Shwe-like Jade Buddha Image is clearly lacking in serenity and calmness of Buddha.

Like many of my fellow Burmese people still reeling from the brutal September crackdown, I recently paid a visit to the Shwedagon pagoda for much-needed spiritual comfort but only discovered another painful truth. Burmese Senior General, Than Shwe, has insulted the Buddha long before he killed the sons of Buddha.

After arriving at a rest-hall named Ponnya-Kusala-Bahukara, located between the southern corner and western corner of the pagoda, I was aware of a 1.5 m-high jade Buddha image whose face strikingly resembles that of Than Shwe. In great amazement, I repeatedly surveyed the face of the image and could ascertain that its facial proportion and appearance are nearly the same as Burmese junta-chief’s. The forehead of the Buddha image is set with precious gems. According to the brass plates that describe the history of this “Jade Buddha Image”, it weighs a total of 324 kg and is adorned with 91 rubies, 9 diamonds and 2500.28 gram of gold. Sculpted in 1999 when the Shwedagon Pagoda was renovated on a large scale under the supervision of former General Khin Nyunt, the image was housed in a glass-walled room— probably to make its abnormality easily unnoticeable to the pilgrims.

Observing the image more and more closely, I was overcome by feelings of discomfort and abhorrence one usually feels when seeing at Than Shwe’s face, burdened with mountains of grisly crimes he committed against his own people and thus as gloomy and dirty as Burmese currency notes. Obviously, this Buddha image can be one of many crazy things Than Shwe did for his continued rule on the advice of astrologers (probably including the move of ministry buildings from Yangon to a jungle redoubt in central Myanmar and naming the new capital Naypyidaw—meaning royal palace), wasting an enormous amount of country’s wealth while many of Burmese people are living in abject poverty. In fact, the peaceful atmosphere of Shwedagon Pagoda where the sacred relics of past three Buddhas were enshrined in is contaminated by this kind of bizarre astrological act aimed at self-exaltation.

Of Three Gems for all Buddhists--Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha Order, Than Shwe has already assaulted the first and the third to desperately maintain his grip on power and to build a personality cult around him. “And would he even continue to make amendments to the Buddha’s teachings, the Second Gem that categorically denounces the unjust rule?” I thought to myself because the most well-known Buddhist monk, Sayadaw Ashin Nyanissara and other Buddhist monk-preachers began launching thinly-veiled attacks against the recent crackdown in their latest discourses, using direct quotes from the Buddhist scriptures.

Of course, given his lack of qualms about even insulting the Buddha, it should be no wonder that Than Shwe decided to butcher the peacefully-protesting monks who have preserved the teachings of Buddha for 2550 years ago. And I wonder if the strongman who dares to insult the Buddha and kill the monks has a genuine will to help transform Burma to a democracy. I doubt it, but one sure thing is that Than Shwe’s faith in astrology could have become more passionate these days because he found himself killing the monks just two months after “ewhsnahtrellik-killerthanshwe” joke came out.

အစအဆံုး..ၾကည့္ခ်င္ ရင္…..

Quotations of Aung San Suu Kyi

2007-12-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

If you are very new to the crisis of Burma and its related politicians and activists, I would like to introduce to a most prominent political activist of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi. She has been under house arrest for more than 12 years out of last 18 years.

Here are the Quotations of Aung San Suu Kyi

Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.
Aung San Suu Kyi

I think I should be active politically. Because I look upon myself as a politician. That's not a dirty work you know. Some people think that there are something wrong with politicians. Of course, something wrong with some politicians.
Aung San Suu Kyi

It is often in the name of cultural integrity as well as social stability and national security that democratic reforms based on human rights are resisted by authoritarian governments.
Aung San Suu Kyi

Peace as a goal is an ideal which will not be contested by any government or nation, not even the most belligerent.
Aung San Suu Kyi

Sometimes I didn't even have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn't get out of bed.
Aung San Suu Kyi

The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.
Aung San Suu Kyi

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.
Aung San Suu Kyi

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.
Aung San Suu Kyi

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.
Aung San Suu Kyi

2007-12-19T18:32:00.000-08:00

"Myanmar in Most Devastating Situation"

I escaped from Burma just like others . I realized later, I could only escape physically. I get lost when I see my country is in deep trouble. In deed, our souls will never be saved as long as we see our compatriots suffering under the repressive military regime.

We are concerned not only about the people living inside the country, but also for those who were forced to leave and worked under dangerous situation in other countries. Today, millions of Burmese living in exile with all kinds of fears, facing different threats, loosing lives, being humiliated, exploited by other people.

Our ethnic minorities are forced to leave their places, loosing lives everyday: women are raped, men are forced to work as human mine sweepers or as porters to carry military equipments with little food or no food. In villages, livestock and foods are systemically destroyed by the regime's troops. Our civilized society is completely ruined by the military junta.

We ask for those who can help to save our country. However, China may have most imported role in to help our case, most importantly it is our closest neighbor and most powerful country in the region.

Please help stop killing and torturing our people.

Senators Push for Arms Embargo Against Burma

2007-12-19T16:58:00.000-08:00

Senators Push for Arms Embargo Against Burma

A bipartisan group of 48 Senators have asked the US President to support an international arms embargo against Burma.

In a letter to the White House, Senators urged the President to urge the UN Security Council to impose arm embargo sanction and to continue to support the efforts of thousands of Burmese citizen fighting for democratic change.

The Senators asked the President to support binding measures that will stop the inflow of weapons to the military.

The article of our honorary monks

2007-12-19T02:53:00.000-08:00

Our greatest honor to our monks who sacrifice their lives in September uprising.

The uprising is not over

The military may control the streets and monasteries, but they will never be able to control the hearts or determination of the Burmese people.

Written by U Gambira and Ashin Nayaka

Religious orders of monks have been the face of Burma ever since Buddhism was introduced here more than 1,000 years ago. For a monk to involve himself in politics or to hold a political post is contrary to the ethical code of Theravada Buddhism. But in Burma today, this spiritual philosophy, rooted in compassion and non-violence, has assumed unexpected dimensions of defiance and recalcitrance, as monks challenge the hegemony of the military junta that rules our country.

We are both Burmese Buddhist monks - a leader of the All Burma Sangha Coalition that led the recent protests, and a scholar teaching in the United States. One of us is in hiding today, because Burma's military government met the peaceful protests of our Buddhist brothers and sisters with violence and brutality.

Many monks and nuns have been abused and beaten, and thousands who have been arrested endure continued brutality. More than 1,000 are missing, and many are presumed dead.

A few weeks ago, Burma's monks began to march and pray and spread loving kindness in an effort to solve our nation's problems peacefully. Burma is a country rich in natural resources, but its people are poor. When the government suddenly and capriciously increased the price of fuel by as much as 500% overnight, everyone was affected - and made even more desperate.

As monks, we believe in alleviating suffering wherever we see it, as part of the vows we have taken. We could not ignore our people's suffering. We formed the Sangha Coalition when we saw that the country's monks were united.

Those of us who are studying and teaching abroad share this unity, and have rallied to the support of those of us in Burma. And it is not only the monks who are united. When we started our peaceful marches for change, students, youth, intellectuals, and ordinary people joined us in the streets, in the rain.

We thought that we could appeal to some, if not all, of the generals - Buddhists themselves - who control our country to join us in trying to right the many ills befalling Burma. At first, we tried to show our displeasure with military rule by refusing to receive alms from them. We turned our begging bowls upside down as a gesture of our feelings. We have not lost our loving kindness towards ordinary soldiers, nor even towards the leaders who ordered them to brutalise their own people, but we wanted to urge them to change while there was still time.

We know that some people in the army and organisations close to the regime have been reluctant to use violence against the monks. We want to tell the people who are violent towards their own countrymen to stop and think whether their actions are in accordance with the dharma, whether they are acting for the good of Burma's people. Some of the soldiers who were ordered to beat us and to stop us from marching actually refused to do so, because they understood the truth of what we were doing.

We hoped to create a way out for the military leaders, a way to start a real dialogue with the people's leaders and the leaders of ethnic groups, for the unity of the nation. But that hope was short-lived. The regime is now hunting down those who participated in the demonstrations and committing unspeakable acts of violence.

They have attacked monasteries and arrested monks and nuns by force. Guards are everywhere, on all the streets, around the pagodas and residential areas. Wounded demonstrators are reported to have been buried alive in mass graves, and there are confirmed reports of bodies washing ashore in the waterways near Yangon (Rangoon). The regime is brutalising the Burmese people, and lying to the world about its actions.

Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, a representative of the military, recently told UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari that the marchers in the streets were "bogus monks." But we are genuine, and thousands of us - from Rangoon, Mandalay, Pegu, Arakan, Magwe, and Sagaing - demonstrated for peace.

Some have said that the uprising in Burma is over. That is what the junta wants the world to think. But we believe that the protests represent the beginning of the end of military rule in our country. The generals who ordered the crackdown are assaulting not only Burma's people, but also their own hearts, souls, and spiritual beliefs. The monks are the preservers of dharma; by attacking them, the generals attack Buddhism itself.

We know that the international community is trying to help us, but we need that help to be more effective. We thank the many people and organisations abroad who are helping us regain the rights denied to us for more than 40 years. But we also appeal to the international community to make its actions practical and effective.

The military government will do anything to remain in power, and their violent acts must be exposed to the world. They may control the streets and monasteries, but they will never be able to control our hearts and our determination.

Great Reality Show of Than Shwe's family

2007-12-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

Great Reality Show of Than Shwe's family

Note: Translated from Ko Moe Thee's original article

The following story shows how Burma was ruled by a crazy family. It is unbelievable but this is inevitable happening in Burma.

Recently, Kyaing Kyaing's leg was broken after having accident in her residential home; poor old woman. The news was in Mizzima.org. The whole point here is she could not attend army official graduation ceremony this year. "I felt much relieved", said one army officer who just graduated.

Actually, the entire Myanmar army is just slaves of General Than Shwe's family. To bring all stories of Than Shwe and his infamous daughters would never end. Do they have good ethics and morals? The best thieves and mafias will have to praise them as their mentors.
And they all seem to be quite brilliant; the brightest daughter passed her high school when she turned thirty. Then she went to China and had her PHD ......!! And their mother Kyaing Kyaing is not a dump either. When she went to visit China, she introduced herself to a Chinese minister, " Kyaing Kyaing is my name". The interpreter kept herself very hard not to laugh in front of people. After the meeting, she went to the washroom to have a big laugh.

There are more about Kyaing Kyaing: in era of former prime minister Khin Nyunt, a daily duty of a colonel from Military Intelligence Department was to help Kyaing Kyaing operate a Karaoke machine !!

About their infamous daughters: A while ago, they went to Ngwe Saung beach (famous beach closest to Yangon). Young army officers had to ride bicycles on the beach in order to let these women sit behind.

Than Shwe and Kyaing Kyaing usually select young army officers in annual army official graduation ceremony. The army community says it is the time they make selection of potential army officers for their daughters. However, there was a young army officer who did not accept any approach for such reason. He was transfered to a rural area and later put in custody.

Once, Than Shwe and the family went to a Buddhist school opening ceremony in Hinthada, Irrawaddy division. While divisional army commanders kept busy accommodating Than Shwe and his wife Kyaing Kyaing, the duty of the wife of divisional commender and wives of majors was to take care of the first daughters. Thus, the wife of D.C had to make an urgent meeting. In that meeting, she decided to give three days hands on training how to take care of the first daughters.

Some guidelines in that training included following...........
1- Go only when one is summoned
2- Stand up at a place not far, neither too closed
3- When passing near by put one's head must down.
4. Do not have to keep hands still on chest, nor bow.
5- Clean hands before serving water or juice.
6- use tissue paper whenever holding a glass or opening a bottle.
7- use both hands to give or take something.
8- Never touch the bodies of first daughters
9- Do not shake hands with them

Additional to remember in that training was to make best effort to take care of them during their stay, and if they ask army official number of their spouses, then this is a sign of a trouble coming. Furthermore, the trainees were provided some more informations such as this specific daughter is horny, the other one is a big eater, the another one has bad temper and etc.
Among several first daughters, the one named "Ma Pauk" is apparently unbearable; she is the one who threw an ash tray to the Burmese ambassador to China. Wives of divisional army commanders cannot stand her, the army community reported. Apparently, she loves to hear if anyone makes compliment of being resemble to a famous western actress, Cate Winslet.

Duties of these ladies are also varied according to the positions of their spouses.

1- Duty of wives of divisional army commanders: to greet Kyaing Kyaing and holding an umbrella when she comes out from her car.
2- Duty of wives of colonels is to do similar thing to the first daughters.
3- Duty of the wives of captains is to carry the luggages of the daughters, and to be always ready nearby to help them
4- Duty of wives of lower officials is to do dishes and folding their clothes.

Anyway, in that trip one of the daughters bullied a wife of young army staff. On the way back from the trip, they stopped over at a small hotel. One trouble maker thought the hotel was not decent enough and was complaining lack of facilities. All her angers dropped on the young lady who came to take care of her: she asked the young lady to clean her feed, the young lady brought a bowl with water and cleaned her feed, then she asked her to make them dry. The problem was there was no such towel to dry feed ( Burmese are too superstitious to mix up towels, especially for face towel to use for other part of body). So the young lady was using a tissue paper to dry up the feed of the first daughter. She was fuming for such incident. In the entire situation, the young lady testified, the vicious woman did not use any single word, instead communicated with the body language. The result of that incident: she asked the army official no of the spouse of the young lady.

Another similar story: The first daughters accompanied their father to Pago, which is fifty miles far from Yangon. They decided to stay over night, unfortunately all forgot the spare underwear. Wives of senior army officials understood the situation quickly and sent someone to buy some underwear. After the person came back with a bunch of underwear, the daughters were angry, complaining that the person did not buy excellent quality products.

The most vicious one may have been "Dae Wa Shwe". If she sees any army officer she doesn't like, she usually throw boiled water from her balcony. Once, she told her driver she wanted to see Yangon city and eat at the same time. The driver took her with entire lunch preparation on the car by driving the care slowly to let her see the capital.

Their another vicious scam was in the Inle Lake. In the middle of the night, they wanted to eat "Mon Kwye Thae", which is a traditional snack only sold for breakfast and afternoon. Wives of divisional army officers did not know what to do. So what did they do? They had to make "Mon Kwye Thae" in the middle of the night.

One of their famous businesses is to go and look around best Jewelery shops in Yangon after misguiding themselves in order not to be recognized by local people. If they find something they like, they keep in a list and usually ask wives of different ministers to buy. So these jewelery are considered to be some kind of levy asking by a mafia group because they know that wives the ministers are corrupted by using their husband's power. One day, they asked Daw Khin Khin, wife of Yangon mayor U Ko Lay, to go and get a specific pearl necklace from FMI shopping centre. It must have been quite expensive, Daw Khin Khin borrowed some money from someone to buy that necklace. There were many similar stories like this among high officials, but they do not know how to get out of the situation. Reportedly, they love diamonds and pearls. There is a remark among wives of minister level,"if first daughters ever summon you by letter, make sure to bring money with you".

Everyone knows about a little monkey, a grandson of Than Shwe. There may be something that nobody knows yet. To be added more about him, once he lost his watch in a lake of Mawlamyaing. In the middle of the night, the monkey forced a divisional army commander to buy him a watch. The commander took him downtown Mawlamyaing, forced an owner who owned a watch shop. The little monkey was following his auntie's tradition, took a dozen of watches without paying. Neither
the army commander paid for those watches.

Once, they all went to a city called "Pyae". Many cars in big line traveling together on a highway. One of ladies, wife of a lt.colonel, wasn't very obedient like other ladies; she was very neutral among others. On the way between Yangon and Pyae, they stopped over somewhere, the vicious family left the wife of colonel on the highway.

To be concluded, there are much more incredible stories.....

Canadians are Tougher!!

2007-12-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Canada imposes more sanctions on Burma


	Canada says its sanctions on Burma are the toughest in the world

Canada has enforced its sanctions against Burma to punish the military regime for the violence crackdown on democracy protestors in September.

"With the new sanctions now in effect, we have the toughest sanctions in the world," said Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier in a statement announcing that the measures, drafted last month, had come into force.

The measures include bans on exports from Canada to Burma except humanitarian goods, and on Canadians' new investment there, and a freeze on assets in Canada of Burmese people linked to the rulers.

It also bans Burmese ships and planes from docking or landing in Canada, and vice versa.

Black Represent our Sad Memory of September

2007-12-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

More Human Right Abuses in Yangon Universities

After the popular uprising, the Golden Color Revolution, many Burmese all over the world try to show their emotions by all mean including dressing particular colors. Some of protesters in Singapore dressed red T shirts to show the solidarity with those who suffering inside the country. In homeland, many dressed in red or black to protest the bloody crackdown and sorrow. Some dressed in yellow to honor the monks who led the September uprising.

The latest movement in Yangon universities is dressing black among student activists. Meanwhile, the security has been tighten in different university compounds. There are many police official who pretend to be students are in every university classes watching student constantly , the prominent Burmese bloggers and news agencies mentioned earlier this month. There are, reportedly, nine students who are in the black list to be arrested when the school are opened again. According to a testimony from a university student in the eastern township, the most remarkable incident took place on the 20th of November. More than hundred students came wearing black color had to sign that they will not dress the black color again. Some of them already heard from teachers and they could avoid it, but many unfortunately had to sign.

The professors in universities are also warned that none of any incident or campaign should take place, otherwise, they would be charged for being lack of responsibility.

Genocide and Human Right Abuses in Karen Areas

2007-12-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

This following news is translated from Khitpyaing.org

Thanks to China, Our Ethnic Groups are Loosing Their Lives

There was a news conference at Thai-Burma border area where Karin Ethnic rebel commander Phado Lay Law Saw met regional reporters. Here is the testimony of human right abuses by the Burmese government troops.

Military troops went to Lae Wa village and destroyed the food and all household stuff of the villagers. Their main goal is to control the territory and to carry out the genocide. In the middle of this year, the military troops entered a peasants field in Lae Wa village where villagers were working. Everyone run away, but one was unfortunately caught. They took out his eyes and cut his tong. His body was found two days later.

Another incident in Jun, 2007; in Wa Kho Do village, there were five Karen villagers caught by the army, three were shot dead on the spot. The other two other villagers are tied up by the ropes and being used as human mine sweepers. After going a while in the jungle, a soldier behind mine sweepers stepped on the mine and died on the spot."

From the third week of November, 187 military army groups spreading over ethnic areas, mostly in Karen State and Shan state. Many reliable sources in border areas also confirmed the news of four hundred military trucks sent by the Chinese government. Numbers of battles were already carried out in different areas and some casualties on both sides.

Absolute Horrified Human Right Abuses Committed by the Military Junta

2007-12-14T21:11:00.000-08:00

Proof of Absolute Horrified Human Right Abuses and Excuse of Burmese Ambassador

The generals may never understand what the human rights means. The Burmese ambassador to the United Nations, U Wonna Maung Lwin, recently slammed the report of Human Right professor Dr. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, saying that the crackdown on recent uprising is not violating any human right as a state using the legitimate use of force to solve a problem.

The world has been changing rapidly. It is not like 1988 or 1989 when thousands of universities students from Burma and China constantly killed by their respective governments. The ambassador should open his eyes bigger and think about whether he is saying right things and believing in right policy. Because the words he said will always remain and there is a serious consequence. U Wonna Maung Lwin supposed to be more open to the world as he has been working as foreign ambassador and many opportunities to learn how other leaders rule their states.

The following websites have a solid proof of how the military junta abused the power and violated the crimes. You can also look for more videos in these websites. They cannot eliminate the crimes they committed, and the history will remain forever.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1UqQaizM15Q
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SPSsKcpxJMk

Figures of Dead Civilians and Monks are much more than What People Thought!!

2007-12-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

Figures of Dead Civilians and Monks are much more than What People Thought!!

The number of casualty in the September's uprising, given by the military junta and the report of Human right reporter Mr. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro were completely opposite from those of Chinese News paper. According to the Chinese newspaper, Global News, which is quite popular within China described that there were more than thousand died. The reason maybe Chinese news agencies can work freely inside Burma whereas local Burmese are not allowed during the uprising.

In Human right professor Paulo Sergio Pinheiro's report, there were large numbers of dead bodies burnt in cementaries; police and soldiers were replaced the regular cemetery workers to carry out such activities.

စက္တင္ ဘာ လူထုလႈပ္ရွားမႈ မွာ ကုလသမဂ နဲ ့ နအဖ ေျပာသလို လူအနည္းငယ္ပဲ ေသတယ္ဆိုတာမဟုတ္ပါ။ တရုပ္ သတင္းစာ တေစာင္အဆိုအရ လူေတြ ေထာင္နဲ ့ခ်ိီေသတယ္လို ့ေဖၚျပထားပါတယ္။ သတင္းစာ နာမည္က -Global Journal - လို ့ ေခၚပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းစာ က တရုပ္ျပည္တြင္းမွာ ေပၚျပဴလာျဖစ္တဲ ့သတင္းစာတေစာင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာ ျပည္မွ နိင္ငံျခားသတင္းေထာက္ေတြလြတ္လပ

္စြာသတင္းယူလို ့မရပါဘူး။ တရုပ္သတင္း ေအဂ်င္စီေတြပဲ လြတ္လပ္စြာသတင္းယူနိင္တာပါ။

ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရဟာ ေသေနတဲ့ အေလာင္းေတြကို သဂ်ိင္းကုန္းေတြမွာမီးရူိ ့ ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့ျပီး သဂ်ိဳင္း အလုပ္သမားေတြေနရာမွာ စစ္သားေတြ ရဲေတြကို အစားထိုး ျပီး အေလာင္းေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္မူေတြကို လုပ္ကိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္လို ့လည္း ပါေမက ပီနဲ ရိုးရဲ ့အစီရင္ခံစားမွလည္း ေဖၚျပထားပါတယ္။

Maung Maung, is he opportunist?

2007-12-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

Maung Maung, is he opportunist?

Activists Leaders Say Maung Maung Not 'Mastermind' of Uprising
By Wai Moe
December 13, 2007

Leading Burmese activists this week disputed claims by exiled politician and labor activist Maung Maung that he trained people to participate in the September uprising.Maung Maung, a controversial politician in exile, was quoted in The Washington Post, on December 4, "We had about 200 people inside the country trained to take pictures with digital and video cameras. We also trained them to transmit using satellite phones and Internet cafes. They were on the front lines when the demonstrations started.”

"We want money for Sat phones, for digital cameras, for typewriters for the monks, for bicycles. We need it now"—Maung Maung

"We want money for Sat phones, for digital cameras, for typewriters for the monks, for bicycles। We need it now," he told the Post.However, many pro-democracy opposition groups inside and outside Burma strongly disputed Maung Maung's claims and are critical of his unsubstantiated comments.U Sila Nanda, a leading monk during the September uprising who arrived on the Thai-Burmese border recently, said independent monks led the mass protests and no exiled politicians were behind the uprising.

On December 3 in press conference in Naypyidaw, the Burmese junta's Police Director Brig-Gen Khin Yi alleged that exiled Burmese opposition groups and politicians were the masterminds behind the planning and organizing of the pro-democracy uprising.

U Sila Nanda said the junta’s claim in the press conference that Maung Maung, also known as Pyi Thit Nyunt Wai, played a leadership role in the uprising was U Sila Nanda said the junta’s claim in the press conference that Maung Maung, also known as Pyi Thit Nyunt Wai, played a leadership role in the uprising was false।Maung Maung is also secretary of The Federation of Trade Unions—Burma (FTUB). On Thursday, he was in Washington, DC, with a Burmese delegation lobbying for funds to aid opposition groups.

“The exiled politician [Maung Maung] was not related to the monks in Burma during the uprising,” said U Sila Nanda.

“The monks in Burma are clearly free from any exiled organization. If any politicians tried to control the monks, we [monks] would not accept it.

"If they want credit for the monk-led demonstrations, then they should cooperate with the monks,” he said.

Tun Myint Aung, a leader of the 88 Generation Students group who is in hiding, told The Irrawaddy this week that exiled politicians and activists should speak carefully about the causes behind the demonstrations.

“This kind of talk can split the pro-democracy movement," he said. "It can also make more risky situations for activists inside Burma. It is counterproductive.

"Nobody, including the 88 group, systematically prepare for the movement. It happened naturally through the people’s momentum.

“On August 19, we marched in Rangoon. But we did not prepare for that march. We immediately decided to march because of the Burmese people’s poor situation after the fuel price hike by the junta.”

Bo Kyi, the joint secretary of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), said all anti-junta protests were originated by people inside Burma who suffer under the military rules.

“Exiled politicians should not say that it was their work," he said.

All the junta's accusations were false, he said.

"No one gave money to people to join the protests. Hundreds of thousands of people decided to join the protests for democracy and their future,” he said.

Naing Aung, the secretary-general of the Forum for Democracy in Burma, said most protesters were independent monks, young people and students who were not connected to exiled groups such as the FDB or FTUB.

He was critical of exiled leaders who claim ties to groups inside Burma, also saying it could make trouble for pro-democracy activists.

Both Bo Kyi and Naing Aung were named by Brig-Gen Khin Yi as masterminds behind the scene of the September uprising.

A former political prisoner in Mae Sot also disputed statements made by Maung Maung, who, during a meeting on the border during the uprising, said members of his trade union organization would join the uprising.

"But none of his men joined the September movement,” the activist said.

In the press conference in Naypyidaw, Police Director Brig-Gen Khin Yi alleged that systematic planning designed to topple the junta was done months before the uprising.

He claimed the main group behind the opposition was the FDB, which is based on the Thai-Burmese border.

2007-12-13T01:26:00.000-08:00

U Gambi Ya, the monk leader may not get death penalty

Earlier informations reported that U Gambi Ya would have death penalty for pursuing to control the state power, which can result death penalty.

According to VOA news, U Gam Bi Ya who led September uprising the popular first time met his mother recently and will be charged for destroying the state's sovereignty. This type of charges can lead to maximum seven years imprisonment.

He looks healthy and still a monk except he does not wear a monk's robe. U Gambi Ya is getting a lot of attention and admiration from the public, said the mother.

2007-12-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

Hanger Strikes in Insein Prison

Many political prisoners in Insein prison are now doing hunger strikes according to reliable new agencies. The one who is in longest hunger strikes is Ko Htin Kyaw who made the solo and small group protests before the September popular uprising. Ko Htin Kyaw was abruptly taken into custody in his last solo protest in front of the Hle Tan Market.

Early news indicated that Ko Htin Kyaw was tortured in custody and put in isolated cell. He later could join the other prisoners.

Ko Htin Kyaw started the hunger strike demanding some number of justices for all political prisoners, including the right to have proper medical treatment. So far, he has been in his 13th day of hunger strike and drink only coffee mix; he will soon switch to water, according to his wife. He was recently transfered to downtown police station in Yangon and the government is preparing to put his case as trying to ruin of the sovereign of the state, which can put him in jail for at least two years behind bars.

Make A Brilliant Decision

2007-12-07T04:57:00.000-08:00

Make A Brilliant Decision

It is the time to realize that someone to replace Than Shwe. If there is anyone from Military who is courageous, patriotic and brilliant, then the person should start the coup now!! We don't have much time and we need to take advantage out of this situation before something happens!!

Many political activists still believe the country needs strong military in order to protect the country. However, we only need who can change the lives of 60 millions people, we don't need a military leader who looks for the sake of his family and relatives. It is the time to change!!

latest news from Irrawaddy online magazine

2007-12-07T04:55:00.000-08:00

Rumors Say Than Shwe is Ill—Bad Karma?
By Wai Moe
December 7, 2007

Rumors are spreading within Burma and as far abroad as Singapore that the health of junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe is deteriorating, with many people suggesting he’s experiencing bad karma because of his brutal crackdown on peacefully demonstrating monks in September.

[Photo: Reuters]

The rumors appear to have originated with Tatmadaw soldiers whose menial duties bring them into close contact with the 74-year-old general. From there, reports of his failing health reached higher ranking officers.

They broke surface on Thursday after Than Shwe met a Chinese official who reportedly urged him to adopt reforms in order to improve the country’s economy. The general was reported to be suffering strain and “psychological problems.”

An earlier meeting with a visitor from Beijing, a Chinese deputy foreign minister, was also followed by a bout of ill health, ascribed by military sources to stress. The Chinese minister was believed to have urged Than Shwe to speed up work on the seven-step road map to democracy.

One source told The Irrawaddy that Than Shwe had been depressed by a report by the head of the United Nations Development Programme in Burma, Charles Petrie, who was expelled from Burma recently. The report highlighted the junta’s economic failures and mismanagement.

Rumors of Than Shwe’s ill health also circulated among Burmese living in Singapore, where members of the junta usually seek medical attention. Despite his reluctance to leave the country, for fear of a coup in his absence, Than Shwe traveled to Singapore in January this year for treatment at Singapore General Hospital.

Than Shwe was in the hospital for about one week, but he reportedly rejected advice to undergo surgery for a life-threatening condition, saying he wanted first of all to consult his chief astrologer. He was said to be suffering from hypertension and diabetes.

Many Burmese say Than Shwe’s health problems are bad karma because of his suppression of the monks’ demonstrations. They point to the precedent of Snr-Gen Saw Maung, regime head and commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw from 1988 to 1992, who launched a crackdown on a monks’ boycott in 1990.

He subsequently fell ill—many say with psychological problems—and was replaced by Than Shwe in 1992. Two years later, Saw Maung died.

“Now it’s Than Shwe’s turn,” said one Buddhist resident of Rangoon. “He is responsible for the deaths of monks and has earned bad karma. His end could come very soon.”

General Than Shwe facing serious psychological problem!!

2007-12-07T02:35:00.000-08:00

It is the time for Than Shwe to go?

According to some sources inside the army, Than Shwe recently lost conscious just after his meeting with a Chinese diplomat. A psychiatrist from Yangon was recently taken to Pyinmana to help the case, sources continued. Apparently, family and friends are deliberately encouraging him to go to Singapore for emergency case.

news from irrawaddy online magazine

2007-12-04T04:26:00.000-08:00

General Than Shwe will die soon

The sources in a Singapore hospital said General Than Shwe may die in a few years . He has been suffering from a cancer and also kidney problem. The sources said, the physicians encouraging the frail general to have operations as what he has is a serious cancer. However, they were astonished to hear that he would rather go back to Burma to verify with his astrologer whether he should have operation.

His health has been deteriorating since previous years and he has been reportedly looking for someone who can replace when he goes for retirement. He is now in his 74.

I Always Love Burma

2007-12-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

I Always Love Burma

A book named "I always love Burma" was published in Norway this month. The book was written by a Norwegian author “Ragnhilt Rossvær" and the price is about 30 US dollars. The author illustrated the life events inside Burma of family members of poet Cho Saint Tun (a) Cho Saint Hmaine, who is a great grand son of honorable National Leader, Thakhin Ko Daw Hmine, during the British colonial time.

Leader of the monks will face death penalty!!

2007-12-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

Dear all, Please help if you can do anything about following news!! It just came out a few hours ago.

Monk 'faces death for treason'

'I am proud of him' says 29-year-old's mother

A young monk who led the September demonstrations in Rangoon has been charged with treason, according to his family, writes Edward Loxton for The First Post. Treason is a capital crime in Burma. If convicted and executed, 29-year-old U Gambira would be the first monk to be put to death in Burma since the British colonial administration hanged a monk who led a rebellion more than 70 years ago.

U Gambira's mother told the exile magazine Irrawaddy that she had been officially told of the charge against her son, who was hunted down and arrested earlier this month. U Gambira's father, Min Lwin, was also arrested.

The young monk is a leader of the Alliance of All Burma Buddhist Monks, which rallied Burma's clergy behind the September demonstrations. He had been in hiding since the demonstrations were brutally suppressed by Burmese troops and police, but continued to send out messages of defiance—including a vow to continue the anti-regime struggle – until his capture.

"I am proud of him," his mother told the Irrawaddy in a phone call, putting herself at risk of retribution from a regime that commonly takes family members hostage. She was briefly detained, together with some other members of her family, when U Gambira fled in September. U Gambira's brother, Kyaw Kyaw, is still being held.

The regime's practice of taking family members hostage has been roundly condemned by human rights groups, who compare it to Nazi Germany's Sittenhaft, where family members were held accountable for the political 'crimes' of their parents and siblings.

Meanwhile, the authorities announced today that they had freed six political prisoners, including five members of the opposition National League for Democracy. They included a student, That Naung Soe, who had served five years of a 14-year sentence for staging a solo demonstration outside Rangoon's City Hall. The group were released as UN human rights rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro ended his five-day visit to Burma, during which he visited several jailed detainees and tried to put together a list of those still held.

The regime claims to have freed all but 91 of the 3,000 people arrested during and after the September demonstrations, but independent sources say at least 1,000 are still detained. Pinhiero said he was moderately satisfied with the results of his visit and promised to issue a report within the next two weeks. He said he had been able to visit several detained members of the 88 Generation Student movement, the main motor behind the September demonstrations, but had not met Min Ko Naing, a former political associate of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The outspoken activist was arrested at the start of the September protests and is reportedly in a grave physical condition after repeated sessions of 'hard' interrogation. Pinheiro also failed to meet Burma's longest serving political prisoner, 78-year-old journalist Win Tin, who has served 18 years of a life sentence for his criticism of the regime.

The First Post has posted amateur video footage showing conclusively that the ruling junta's claim that it did not use excessive force to put down the protests are false.

Articles from Moe Thee Zon's website

2007-12-02T06:16:00.000-08:00

This is from Moe Thee Zon's website!! Sorry to those who don't know how to read Burmese!!

ေၾကးစည္သံၾကားေတာ့ ေခြးေတြ အူၾကျခင္း

ရုပ္ရွင္ေကာင္စီ ထဲ မွာ နအဖ လူေတြရိွတယ္။ သူတို ့ထဲမွာ သိန္းထြန္းေအာင္၊ မလိခ နဲ ့ ျမင့္သိန္းေဖ တို ့ က နအဖ အလို က် ရုပ္ရွင္ေကာင္စီက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေၾကညာခ်က္ကို ရူတ္ခ်တဲ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္ထုတ္ ျပီး ႏို ့တစ္ ဘုတ္မွာ ကပ္ထားတယ္လို ့သိရတယ္။ ၾကခတ္၀ိုင္း ဖုန္းၾကီးကလည္း သာသန အရည္ျခံဳ ျပီး စဏက် နိတိ ( ဟင္ဒီအဘိဓမာဆရာတဦးရဲ ့ေလာကအျမင္ ) ေတြ ကို ေဟာခဲ့တယ္။ အၾကြင္းမထားရ တရားေတြ ေဟာခဲ့တယ္။ ( ရန္ၾကြင္း၊ မီးၾကြင္း၊ ေၾကြးၾကြင္း ) ဒါေတြက ဘုရားမေဟာခဲဘူး။ ဘုန္းၾကီးကေျပာေတာ့ ဘုရားေဟာလိုလိုဘာလိုသူကခတ္တည္တည္နဲ့လိမ့္ထားတယ္။က်ေနာ္ကနာခံမူကိုဆန္းစစ္ျခင္းဆိုတဲ့စာအုပ္မွာ ဒီျပသာနာကို ေဆြးေႏြးတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ရြက္မြန္ ဘေလာက္နဲ ့ မဇိမ မွာ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ရနိင္ပါတယ္။ )
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္စု ၾကည္ကို ဟိုမိန္းမက ခ်ေနျပီဆို ျပီး မင္းတို ့ ဘာလုပ္ေနတာလည္း ျမန္ျမန္ သတ္ေတာ့ ဆိုတဲ့ပံုစံမ်ိဳး အားေပးအားေျမာက္လုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ လက္နက္ခ်အညံခံထားတဲ့ တိုင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ ့အခ်ိဳ ့က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ ့ ေၾကညာခ်က္ကို မေထာက္ခံပါဘူး ဆိုျပီး ၀ိုင္းကန္ ့ကြက္တဲ့စာေတြ ထုတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒါေတြ ကို နအဖ ဖိအားေပးလို ့လုပ္ခဲ့ရတာပါ လို ့ ဆင္ျခင္ေပးတဲ့သူကေပးပါတယ္။ကိုယ္တိုင္လိုလိုလားလားလုပ္တဲ့သူေတြလည္း ရိွပါတယ္။ ဥပမာ သိန္းထြန္းေအာင္၊ မလိခ၊ နဲ ့ျမင့္သိန္းေဖ နဲ ့ၾကခတ္၀ိုင္းဘုန္းၾကီးတို ့ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီျဖစ္ရပ္က ဘာနဲ ့တူေနသလည္း ဆိုေတာ့ ေၾကးစည္သံၾကားေတာ့ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းေတြ က ေကာင္းမူကုသိုလ္တခုေတာ့လူသားျပဳေနျပီဆိုျပီးသာဓုေခၚၾကတယ္။ေခြးေတြကေတာ့အူလိုက္သည္းလိုက္ျဖစ္လာျပီး အူၾကရတဲ့ျဖစ္ရပ္ မ်ိဳးပါပဲ။ လူနဲ ့တိရစန္ ျခားနားခ်က္ကေတာ့ အသိညဏ္ပဲလို ့ ဒသနိက ဆရာေတြက ဆို ၾကတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာေတာ့လူနဲ ့ေခြး နဲ ့ၿခားနားခ်က္ဟာ ေၾကးစည္သံလို ဆိုရမွာေပါ့၊၊ ေကာင္းမူကိုလူကသာဓုေခၚနိင္တယ္၊၊ ေခြးကမေခၚနိင္ဘူး။ ဒီေတာ့ အူတယ္။ ထူးျခားတာကေတာ့ တခ်ိဳ ့ေခြးေတြက လူေယာင္ေဆာင္ထားၾကတယ္။ သူမ်ား ဘေလာက္ေတြ မွာနာမည္၀ွက္ေတြ ၊ ဆဲစာေတြကို ေရးျပီး အူျခင္ ေဟာင္ျခင္တဲ့စိတ္ကို ေျဖ သိမ့္ေပးေနရတယ္။ ဒီေခြးေတြ နဲ ့ ေခြးအစစ္ရဲ ့ျခားနားခ်က္ကေတာ့ ဒီေတြ IP Address ေတြရိွေနျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေခြးဆိုေတာ့ ေၾကးစည္သံၾကားရင္ သာဓုေခၚရမွန္းမသိပဲ အူျခင္စိ္တ္ကမ်ားေနေတာ့ ကိုယ္ IP Address ေတြ ေပၚေနမွန္းမသိၾကရွာဘူး၊၊

အစအဆံုး..ၾကည့္ခ်င္ ရင္…..

ေဒၚၾကိုင္ၾကိုင္ ယၾကာယာေခ် ျခင္း

နအဖ ၊ ေအာက္လမ္း ဆရာမ်ား နဲ ့လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး ဂါထာ

ႏို၀င္ဘာ ၁၈ ရက္ေန ့ညသန္းေခါင္ယံ၊ ေရြ တိဂံု ဘုရား ေပၚမွာ ေဒၚၾကိုင္ၾကိုင္လာေရာက္ျပီး
ယတၾတာေခ်တယ္လို ့သတင္းရရိွပါတယ္။ ၀က္တေကာင္၊ေခြးတေကာင္ကို ဆြဲ ျပီး
ဘုရားကို တပတ္လွည္ ့သြားတာလို ့ အမည္မေဖၚလိုတဲ့ ေဂၚပက လူၾကီးတဦးက ထုတ္ေဖၚေျပာဆိုပါတယ္။ ဒီလို ယႏၾကာကိုေခ်ေပးတဲ့ ဘိုးေတာ္က ေတာ့ ကေလာျမိဳ ့ကေနေခၚလာတာလို ့သိရပါတယ္။ သူကို အေရွ ့ပိုင္းတိုင္းတိုင္းမႈး ကိုယ္တိုင္ေခၚယူလာေပးတာလို ့သိရပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းကို ၾကည္ ့ရင္ ရီစရာေတာ့ေကာင္းတယ္။ကေလးကလားဆန္တယ္လို့မိတ္ေဆြေတြးေကာင္းေတြးမိနိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဒီသတင္းနဲ ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြဟာ အာဏာရ နအဖ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြထဲမွာ အူလိုက္သည္းလိုက္ယံုၾကည္ေနတဲ့ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနတဲ့ျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြ ပါ။ ဒီလိုအရူးထမူေတြဟာ သန္းေရြ စစ္အုပ္စုရဲ ့ဆရာ ၾကီးျဖစ္တဲ့ ေန၀င္းလက္ထက္ကတည္းကစခဲ့တာပါ။ သူရဲ ့လက္စြဲ ကေတာ့ ဆရာျမိဳင္ဆိုတဲ့ စုန္းကေ၀ ဆရာၾကီး ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ျပည္သူေတြကို ဒုကေပါင္းစံု ေရာက္ေအာင္ ေန၀င္း အာဏာတည္ျမဲ သထက္တည္ျမဲေအာင္
ေအာက္လမ္းနည္းလမ္းေပါင္းစံုကိုသံုးျပီး အက်ိဳးျပဳခဲ့သူတဦး ျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ျမန္မာ ျပည္မွာလူထု အံုၾကြမူေတြ ျဖစ္ျပီး ေန၀င္း ျပုတ္ေတာ့မွာကို ဆရာျမိဳင္က ယတၾကာေခ်ေပးတဲ့အေနနဲ ့ ထိုင္းနိင္ငံကို ေန၀င္း ကိုယ္တိုင္သြားျပီး ဘုရားတဆူလူခဲ့ပါေသးတယ္။ ဘုရားေအာက္မွာ အင္းကြက္ေတြေရးခဲ့တယ္လို့ဆိုပါတယ္။
ထိုင္း နိင္ငံဆိုတာကလည္း ေဗဒင္တို ့ယႏၾတာယာတို ့ကို အင္မတန္မွာ ယံုတဲ့သူေတြပါ။
ေန၀င္းယတၾကာေခ်တဲ့ဘုရားအေၾကာင္းကိုသူတို ့သိေတာ့ ဘုရားကို ျမန္မာ ျပည္ထဲ
ျပန္လာျပီးလြတ္ျပစ္တယ္လို ့သံတမာန္ အတင္းစကားေတြ ကို က်ေနာ္တို ့တကသိုလ္ေက်ာင္းသားဘ၀က ၾကားခဲ့ဘူးတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့ ၈ေလးလံုးဆိုတဲ့ မဟာ လူထု တန္ခိုးေတာ္ေအာက္မွာ ေန၀င္းလည္း ျပဳတ္။ မဆလလည္း သမိုင္းအမူက္ျခင္းထဲ ေရာက္ဆရာျမိဳင္လည္း ဆရာကြိဳင္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ဒီတံုးက လူထုေတြ ရြတ္ဆိုခဲ့တဲ့ ဂါထာကေတာ့ ရွင္းရွင္းေလးပါပဲ
ဒီမိုကေရစီရရိွေရး- ဒို ့အေရး
တပါတီစနစ္ဖ်က္သိမ္းေရး - ဒို ့အေရး
ေနာက္ခင္ညြန္ ့ တန္ခိုးထြားစဥ္က ဘိုးေတာ္သန္းလွ ( ခ) တလမ္းသြား (ခ) တိမ္းၾကားမင္းေခါင္း ဟာ လည္း ခင္ညြန္ ့ရဲ ့အလြန္ ယံုၾကည္ေနတဲ့ ဘိုးေတာ္တဦးျဖစ္ခဲ့ဘူးတယ္။ သူအၾကံေပးခ်က္နဲ့ပဲ ခင္ညြန္ဟာ အဘရာလာဘမုနိဘုရားကိုတည္လိုတည္ ေရြတိဂံုဘုရားကို ရွမ္းေဘာင္းဘီ၀တ္ျပီးတက္လိုတက္ နဲ ့ ေသာက္လုပ္ေတာ္ေတာ္ရူပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူအာဏာရခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၀ နစ္ေက်ာ္ ၁၅ နစ္နီးပါးကို ဘုရားတည္လိုက္။ ေသာက္ေရးမပါတဲ့အလုပ္ေတြနဲ ့ အခ်ိန္ျဖန္းခဲ့တယ္။ လူထုအတြက္လိုအပ္ေနတဲ့ လြတ္လပ္မူ။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ ့လက္တြဲျပီးဒီမိုကေရစီျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမူလုပ္ငန္းေတြ ?လူသားအရင္းျမစ္ဖြင့္ျဖိဳးမူ အစီအစဥ္ေတြ နိင္ငံေတာ္အတြက္လိုအပ္ေနတဲ့ အေျခခံအေဆာက္အအံုေတြကို ဘာတခုမွာမယ္မယ္ရရ အေကာင္ထည္မေဖၚနိင္ခဲ ပါဘူး။ အယူမွားမူေတြရဲ့ရလပ္ကေတာ့ရာသက္ပန္ေထာင္နန္းစံရျခင္းပဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခုတခါကေတာ့ သန္းေရြ အလွည္ ့က်လာျပန္ျပီ။ သူမိန္းမ ေဒၚၾကိုင္ၾကိုင္ဟာ ေအာက္လမ္းဆရာ တဦးကိုေခၚျပီး သမိုင္း၀င္ေရြတိဂံုဘုရားၾကီးေပၚမွာ ေပါက္ကရရွစ္ဆယ္ေတြ ကိုလုပ္ေနျပန္ျပီ။ သမိုင္းနဲ ့လူထုရဲ ့ဒဏ္ခတ္မူကို မလြဲမေသြခံရပါဦးမယ္။ လူထုအတြက္ ေအာင္ပြဲ ကိုရေစမဲ ့ ဂါထာကေတာ့ ငါတို ့တိုက္တယ္။ ငါတို ့နိင္တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ ဂါထာသာျဖစ္ေတာ္မူပါေၾကာင္း သတင္းေကာင္းပါးပါရေစ။

မိုးသီး

Miss Universe 2005 will Visit Burma

2007-12-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

Burma invited Miss Universe 2005 from Canada

The Canadian government recently claimed economic sanctions against Burma. It is not surprising that many Canadians gave a lot of comments on the internet pages to support their government's decisions. However, a surprising news just came out is 2005 Miss Universe from Canada is going to visit Burma as a special guest. She was apparently invited by a company which sponsors a beauty contest, which will be held on the 17th of December. It is not in any news yet except Myanmar Times Burmese version.

2007-11-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

The Canadian Link to Burma

Within a few days Canadians will hear an outrageous news about a Canadian link to Burma. I will translate it from a journal. wait and see.

I Love This Article!!

2007-11-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Armed Intervention Debate Goes Online [Commentary]
By Aung Zaw
November 28, 2007

The debate on humanitarian intervention and covert operations to remove Burma’s regime leaders isn’t just a domestic talking point but is increasingly being taken up on Internet Web sites, in the media and even in US congressional hearings.

In what was regarded as a “pointed remark” at the height of the September crackdown, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, for instance, warned the Burmese military dictators of the potential consequences of their actions.

“If you slaughter the monks and those calling for democracy, when your regime falls, and it will fall, you will be pursued to every corner of the globe like the Nazi criminals before you,” said the hawkish legislator from California.

Exactly two years previously, in September 2005, Rohrabacher suggested pressuring the Burmese regime with the “threat of military intervention.”

In testimony before the Asia and Pacific Subcommittee of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, Rohrabacher urged US support for all attempts by the Burmese people, including revolutions and covert operations, to topple the regime.

Aside from hot air, some serious thought has been—and is being—given to the possibility of an invasion to remove the hated regime.

The London-based independent think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said on May 19, 1993, that a better case could be made out for the UN to intervene in Burma than in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The IISS said that UN intervention in Burma "would have a clear aim: removing SLORC [the regime’s previous name, the State Law and Order Restoration Council], a finite end, and the support of the majority of the [Burmese] people."

Prince Khaled Sultan Abdul Aziz, commander of the Saudi contingent in the 1991 Gulf War, called for “Desert Storm” style action against Burma after he visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in April 1992.

US Senator Joe Lieberman suggested in an article in the New York Daily News in October that the Bush administration should be asked to “actively investigate how else our military and intelligence capabilities can be used to put additional stress on the regime.”

William Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, a hawkish writer who advocated the war on Iraq, wrote in The Washington Post on October 7: “What about limited military actions, overt or covert, against the regime's infrastructure—its military headquarters, its intelligence apparatus, its rulers' lavish palaces? Couldn't such actions have a deterrent effect, or might not they help open up fissures in the regime? Have we really done all we can to avert the disaster that is unfolding?”

Isn’t it ironic that Burma, preparing now to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its independence, now generates debate about a new invasion from outside?

Some observers say the Burmese people would definitely welcome any foreign liberation troops that could remove regime leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe and his regime in Naypyidaw—a sitting target for air strikes. But then what? After a few years of “liberation,” would Burma witness a new armed struggle to eject the invaders?

Burma is one of the countries identified by Condoleezza Rice as outposts of tyranny when she was appointed US Secretary of State in 2002. Cuba, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Iran and North Korea were the others. So far, some say, Burma is off the US radar screen.

On October 12, Ramzy Baroud, author and editor of the online magazine PalestineChronicle.com, posed the question: “So why aren't the US and Britain responding to the situation in Burma with the same determination that they exhibited for Iraq, and now Iran?”

In an article titled ‘Burma Is Not Iraq,’ Baroud criticized the West’s hypocritical stand: “Western leaders, aware of the criticism that awaits them, have paid the necessary lip service, but little else. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown decried the use of violence against protesters and demanded European sanctions. President Bush declared that Americans ‘stand in solidarity with these brave individuals’.

“Israel, on the other hand, denied its military links to the junta, despite much contradictory evidence. It justified its unwillingness to influence the situation on the grounds of nostalgia—Burma was the first South Asian country to recognize Israel.”

He continued: “If Iraq has been a lesson of any worth it is that the Burmese are much better off without American bombing raids or British napalm in the name of intervention. True reforms and democracy can only come from within, from the closed fists of the determined dispossessed. Indeed, Burma is not Iraq, and Thank God for that.”

These articles provoked some vigorous online feedback.

“Why is it that a guy who thinks US military action is always the answer is any more credible than the peacenik who thinks it never is?” fumed one reader of Kristoll’s article.

One letter writer contributed to the debate on the online Tiscali Forum: “So why aren't we proposing an invasion of Burma to remove the regime there? At the time of the Iraq war, we were told about the ‘moral case for regime change’ in Iraq. Well, isn't there a moral case for regime change in Burma? Why aren't the USA and UK sending a task force to liberate the people of Burma?”

The letter continued: “Burma has a long coastline, allowing many landing points for our forces. The western-friendly neighbors, India and Thailand, might allow our troops to invade from their borders. It should not be too difficult. What's the big difference between Iraq and Burma, then? Apart from the fact that Burma hasn't got huge oil reserves?”

A debate on the Helium website produced the opinion: “Fundamentally, Iraq was a country of interest to the US government, while Burma has long been off America's radar, as it's a highly secretive country. Burma has pursued a very low profile and made it difficult for people to visit. On the other hand, Saddam's Iraq pursued the limelight and enjoyed pushing the envelope. Saddam pursued a cult of personality and relished brinkmanship.

“There are many differences between Iraq and Burma, but the most important seem to be that Iraq had lots of oil, threatened Israel and insulted American leaders. Iraq had been a country of concern for years and it had lots of powerful enemies.”

Simon Taylor added a humorous slant to the debate on the Tiscali Forums Web site: “The leaders of Burma didn't try any funny business with George Bush's dad when he was in power. God hasn't told Bush to invade Burma. (YET)!”

2007-11-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

Great Respect to our Monks who led the September Protest

2007-11-26T06:44:00.000-08:00

Why ASEAN and China defending Burma?

2007-11-22T21:11:00.000-08:00

Why ASEAN and China are defending Burma?

The voice of ASEAN was very loud at the beginning of ASEAN summit; surprisingly to hear what Ong Keng Yong told reporters, "Myanmar is part of our family and it is the principle involved". Ong continued, "Our approach is not to take such a confrontational, drastic action, especially when it doesn't yield good results. His explanation seem to be quite reasonable if there was nothing happened in Burma. "Not only ASEAN rejected US's proposal to expel Burma from its team, but also canceled Gambary's briefing on Burma's subject in the summit.
It seem like ASEAN does not care the fact that military government brutally crackdown on recent peaceful protest. It is just because the members of ASEAN, themselves are brutal to their own citizens just like the junta? Or they have some other reasons hiding behind to do so? Why Myanmar is so important to ASEAN? Basically, if there is relationship, because there is an interest. As everyone knows, now Burma became the richest in Asia in term of natural gas. Recent news from different sources indicated that India, China, Thailand and many others are competing to buy natural gas. Among them, Junta's favorite is China, as it has been very supportive to Burma's regime since 1962. Most importantly, China always defended Burma along with its ally, Russia. In early 2007, UN security council meeting, China used double veto to defend the junta on the proposal of American and its allies. Consequently, Burmese activists living inside and abroad confronted Chinese embassies all over the world to condemn Chinese's action toward Burma's policy. It was not a good sign for China as it is going to have Olympic game in 2008. People worldwide are also encouraged to boycott 2008 Olympic. Despite China is powerful country for some reasons, it is still suffering economically.

However, the world has been changing than ever. 21st century is not the time Chinese army crashed their student activists in Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. China may want to improve its image by showing its tendency toward Burma's democratic reform. Moreover, China recently denied that they have no self interest on Burma's issue. The Chinese leaders may be the best who knows what they are doing!! The world is watching what they said and what they do are the same!

Popular Dream of Today Burmese

2007-11-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

This is from Irrawaddy online magazine. (sorry for not asking permission)

Apocalypse Naypyidaw!

By Yeni and Aung Zaw
November 22, 2007

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After living for decades under a military-ruled Burma and witnessing the junta’s bloody crackdown on monks and innocent people on the streets in September, many Burmese have begun calling for—not diplomacy—air strikes and international intervention.

No, it’s not a joke. And it’s not just the exiled Burmese who are saying this—it’s those inside Burma as well.

An artist’s impression on striking at Than Shwe’s residence in Naypyidaw

Here are some of the excerpts from Burmese people who broached the subject with The Irrawaddy during and after the September crackdown.

U Pinyazawta, a leading monk from the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, told The Irrawaddy by phone from his hiding place in Burma: “We need a foreign army to protect us,” he said, referring particularly to UN troops.

Some Burmese were even more straightforward.

“We need air strikes,” said a prominent editor and CEO of a successful privately-run publication in Burma.

He claimed many Burmese would welcome military intervention. “This is our hope,” he said. “The regime is unyielding. We have to teach them a lesson or two.”

However, it is commonly understood that most foreign observers and policy makers who are involved in Burma would simply shake their heads at the proposal.

The desire for a forceful regime change in Burma is nothing new. During the invasion of Iraq, American diplomats and US embassy staff in Burma are believed to have received a number of letters asking: “When are you coming to Burma?”

In September 2003, in a lively talk at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in Bangkok, Ross Dunkley, editor of the semi-official newspaper, Myanmar Times confirmed that all the Burmese people he had met—whether they were taxi drivers or office workers—wanted to see an invasion. “They all want George W Bush and the UN to come into Myanmar [Burma] with a whole lot of guns and airplanes and jets and solve the problem. They believe that’s possible,” said Dunkley.

Indeed, if diplomacy and sanctions are doomed to failure, the best solution ordinary Burmese folk can think of is humanitarian intervention and air strikes.

Instead of smart sanctions, they say, “smart missiles” are the readymade solution to Burma’s ills—and as quickly as possible!

The image of Snr-Gen Than Shwe and his cadres being pounded by F-16 fighter jets in their ivory tower in Naypyidaw is perhaps a wishful fantasy widely shared among ordinary Burmese who have lived under the military government since 1962.

A Rangoon-based journalist said that he admired how the US taught Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi a lesson he would never forget when they launched air raids on Tripoli in 1986, killing dozens of civilians, including Qaddafi's adopted daughter.

“Now Than Shwe’s compound in Naypyidaw is just a sitting target—if we hit him, there will be little collateral damage," said the journalist, angered after seeing Information Minister Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan lecturing UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari on early November.

It’s therefore ironic that, in 2005, Than Shwe relocated the capital to Naypyidaw, near Pyinmana in central Burma. Analysts at that time said that it was because of advice from a soothsayer coupled with his fears of foreign invasion.

Nowadays, Than Shwe’s new house in new capital can be viewed clearly on Google Earth.

In February 2006, a “Top Secret” document obtained by The Irrawaddy revealed that Burma’s military leaders were fearful of a possible attack or invasion by the US, and were closely monitoring Thailand, which is one of the US’s most important allies in the region.

The document indicates that junta leader Than Shwe warned that the country must be guarded against a plan of destruction drawn up by the US Central Intelligence Agency. It did not say what that plan was.

The government document also revealed that if the US bombs Rangoon, or second city Mandalay: “We have to make sure to kill all NLD members.” The NLD, winners of the 1990 elections, would otherwise be used as US stooges, the document suggests.

However, Aung Naing Oo, a political analyst in Thailand, said that dialogue is the best solution; not an air strike.

“There are options,” the exiled Burmese analyst said. "Diplomacy and dialogue are the best answer to our problems.”

The other options, Aung Naing Oo said, include a fully-fledged engagement with the regime, dropping all sanctions and pressure.

And if these measures still didn’t yield any results?

“Humanitarian intervention and air strike,” he said.

Aung Naing Oo considers humanitarian intervention to be the last option on the table. “It would only take a small budget to take down Than Shwe.”

Firing missiles in from the US fleet in the Indian Ocean toward the dictator’s compound in Naypyidaw could break down many obstacles, he concluded. “And might open the doors that are currently closed to the reconciliation process in Burma.”

Several Burmese living inside Burma would unquestionably concur. And Burma analysts often conclude that military intervention or air strikes would be economical compared to the deep Western pockets that would be needed to fund Burma’s democracy movement.

On October 3, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in the New York Daily News: “The Bush administration should also actively investigate how else our military and intelligence capabilities can be used to put additional stress on the regime.”

He continued: “The junta has tried to cut off the ability of peaceful demonstrators to communicate to the outside world through the Internet and cell phone networks; we should be examining how the junta's ability to command and control its forces throughout the country might itself be disrupted.”

So far, the attack on Burma’s brutal regime takes place only on Hollywood’s silver screen. Two years ago, Hollywood movie “Stealth” was launched worldwide but banned in Burma. Why? The film included an air strike on terrorists in Rangoon.

Diplomacy will continue, as will mind-numbing debate on sanctions and constructive engagement. But the Burmese people, who have suffered long enough under the regime, now want those “smart missiles.”

How do we consider our lives in Burma?

2007-11-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

Life is so precious to lose or even to suffer!! I started to consider this very seriously only when I settle down in Canada. For those who used to live in abusive countries, even expatriate staff, get used to with the abuses. I still remember, one day, the CNN was showing mine workers in US trapped underground and how emergency teams tried to save the lives of those who were in critical situation. Suddenly, my husband said" these Americans make big things about the case, they should see how Chinese miners came out of the mine end of the working hours". His comment shocked me how people adapt to abusive system. I, myself wondered why western governments care so much about their people, at the beginning of my arrival in Canada.

2007-11-21T06:01:00.000-08:00

Today is very cold. The temperature went down to -1. The snow started to fall since yesterday, but very light snow. Yet, my son is so happy to see the snow expecting to play when it is becoming in big amount.

Will Buddhism disappear from Burma?

2007-11-21T04:42:00.000-08:00

တင္းဳကပ္တဲ့ ကန္ႚသတ္ခဵက္ေတၾေဳကာင့္ သံဃာေတာ္ေတၾ ခရီးသၾားလာေရး ခက္ခဲ

2007.11.20

ရန္ကုန္႓မိႂႚလယ္ သိမ္႒ကီးေဈးေဘးမႀ စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၄ရက္ေနႛက စီတန္း ႔ကခဵီ လႀည့္လည္ေနေသာ သံဃာေတာ္မဵား ဴဖစ္ပၝသည္။ (Photo: RFA)

စက္တဘႆာ သံဃာအေရးအခင္း ႓ပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ပုိင္း တုိင္းဴပည္အတၾင္း သံဃာေတာ္ေတၾ သၾားလာတာကုိ စစ္ေဆးေမးဴမန္းတာေတၾနဲႚ ခရီးသၾားလာမႁေတၾအေပၞ တင္းဳကပ္မႁေတၾဴပႂလုပ္တဲ့အတၾက္ သံဃာေတၾအေနနဲႚ အေတာ္ကေလး စိတ္မခဵမ္းမသာ ဴဖစ္ေနတယ္လုိႚ သတင္းရရႀိပၝတယ္။

နယ္ကေန ရန္ကုန္ကုိ ခရီးသၾားရင္ ကားနဲႚသၾားသၾား ရထားနဲႚသၾားသၾား ရန္ကုန္ဂိတ္ဆုံးကုိ ေရာက္တာနဲႚ သံဃာေတာ္ေတၾဟာ လုိရာကုိသၾားခၾင့္မရဘဲ စစ္ေဆးေမးဴမန္းတာေတၾကုိ နာရီနဲႚ ဳကာေအာင္ ခံဳကရတယ္လုိႚ ဆုိပၝတယ္။

မဳကာေသးမီကမႀ နယ္ကေန ရန္ကုန္ကုိ သာနာ့ကိစၤနဲႚ ခရီးသၾားခဲ့တဲ့ ဆရာေတာ္တပၝးက အခုလုိ အမိန္ႚရႀိပၝတယ္။

ဆရာေတာ္တပၝး။ ။ "အားလံုးသံဃာေတၾ စိတ္ဆင္းရဲေနဳကတယ္၊ ဦးဇင္းတုိႛအပၝအဝင္အားလံုး၊ အားလံုး၊ တဴပည္လံုးပၝပဲ ဟိုတုန္းကလည္း သိတဲ့အတုိင္းပဲေလ၊ အဳကမ္းဖက္ထားတဲ့ ကိစၤေတၾသိပၝတယ္၊ အဲဒီတုန္းကေတာ့ အဳကမ္းေပၝ့၊ အခုဟာက အႎုနည္းနဲႛ ႎႀိပ္စက္ေနတယ္လုိႛ ေဴပာရမႀာပၝပဲ၊ ဘာဴဖစ္လုိႛလည္းဆုိေတာ့ ပင္နဲရုိးလာတဲ့အခဵိန္မႀာ နယ္ကေနရန္ကုန္ကုိ ခရီးသၾားမယ္ဆုိရင္ ကားဂိတ္ကုိေရာက္ရင္ ထမင္းေဳကာ္တနပ္ ကပ္တယ္ ေငၾ ႎႀစ္ေထာင္ေပး႓ပီး ဴပန္လၿတ္တယ္၊ နယ္ကုိ ဴပန္ခုိင္းတာ၊ ရထားမႀာ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ဴပန္ေတာ့မလၾတ္ဘူး စစ္ေဆးတယ္ တနာရီေလာက္ စစ္ေဆးတယ္လုိႚ ဳကားတာေပၝ့။ အခုကုိယ္တုိင္ ခရီးေရာက္တဲ့ အခၝဳကေတာ့ စစ္ေဆးတာ ၄၅ မိနစ္ေလာက္ဳကာတယ္၊ စိတ္ေတာ့ဆင္းရဲစရာပဲ အကုန္လံုး အဲဒီထဲမႀာ ႎုိင္ငံေတာ္အဆင့္တုိႚ၊ တုိင္းအဆင့္တုိႚ၊ ႓မိႂႚနယ္အဆင့္တုိႚ အကုန္လံုး သံဃာ့အဖၾဲႚအစည္းက ဆရာေတာ္႒ကီးေတၾလည္းပၝတယ္။ ဝၝ႒ကီးမႀန္းမသိ ဒီသံဃာေတၾက ဘယ္လုိသံဃာေတၾမႀန္းမသိ စစ္ေဆးေမးဴမန္းခံရေတာ့ ဆရာေတာ္႒ကီးေတၾလည္း အလၾန္ႎႀလံုး မသာမယာဴဖစ္ဳကတယ္လုိႛ ဆရာေတာ္႒ကီးေတၾနဲႛ အတူသၾားတဲ့ ဦးဇင္းကုိယ္တုိင္သိရ တယ္ေပၝ့။"

စစ္ေဆးေမးဴမန္း႓ပီးလဲ၊ သၾားခၾင့္မဴပႂေသးဘဲ သၾားေရာက္မယ့္ေကဵာင္းက သံဃာေတၾကေန ဟုတ္မႀန္ေဳကာင္း အာမခံ လက္မႀတ္ေရးထုိးေပးမႀ သၾားရတယ္လုိႛ ဆုိပၝတယ္။

ဒီလို ဘုရားအာဏာစက္နဲႛ ရဟန္းဴပႂထားတဲ့ သံဃာေတာ္ေတၾကုိ ဟုိသံဃာကအတု ဒီသံဃာက အစစ္စသည္ဴဖင့္ စစ္ေဆးတာေတၾ၊ ဖမ္းဆီးတာေတၾဟာ မသင့္ေလ႖ာ္ဘူးလုိႚ ဆရာေတာ္ကအမိန္ႚရႀိပၝတယ္။

ဆရာေတာ္တပၝး။ ။ "အဲဘုရားရဲႚအာဏာေတာ္ကုိ အာဏာသိမ္းလိုက္႓ပီလုိႚ ခံစားရတယ္၊ အာဏာသိမ္းတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ေနရာမႀာလည္း ဒၝကသိသာထင္ရႀားေအာင္ ေဴပာတာပၝ၊ သိမ္းလုိႚေတာ့မရပၝဘူး၊ ဦးဇင္းတုိႚ ရဟန္းေတၾကုိ ကံေဆာင္႓ပီးေတာ့မႀ ခက္ခက္ခဲခဲ ဴပည့္စံုဴခင္းတရားေတၾ ဝတၨႂဴပည့္စံုဴခင္း၊ သိမ္ရဲႚဴပည့္စံုဴခင္း၊ ကမၳဝၝစာရဲႛဴပည့္စံုဴခင္း၊ ပရိသတ္ရဲႚဴပည့္စံုဴခင္းတုိႛစတာေတၾကုိ သံပတၨိလုိႛေခၞပၝတယ္၊ အဲဒၝမႀ ကံေဆာင္လုိႛရ႓ပီးေတာ့ ရဟန္းဴဖစ္ရတယ္၊ ဒီရဟန္းေတၾကုိ သူတုိႛရဲႛအာဏာကုိ ထိပၝးလာတဲ့ အခၝမႀာ ဒၝကရဟန္းအစစ္မဟုတ္ဘူး ဒၝကရဟန္းအတုလုိႛ ဒီလုိေဴပာဆုိတာဟာ ဘုရားရဲႚအာဏာေတာ္နဲႚ ရဟန္းဴဖစ္ရတဲ့ ရဟန္းေတၾကုိ ရဟန္းမဟုတ္ပၝဘူးလုိႚ ေဴပာတာ ဒၝဟာဘုရားရဲႚအာဏာေတာ္ကို သိမ္းတယ္လုိႚ ဦးဇင္းတုိႚခံစားရတယ္။"

သံဃာေတၾကေန အေကာင္းဴမင္ေစဴခင္တယ္ဆုိရင္ အခုလုိ သံဃာထုအေပၞ ဖိႎႀိပ္ကန္ႚ သတ္မႁေတၾဴပႂေနမယ့္အစား သံဃာေတၾကုိ လၾတ္လၾတ္လပ္လပ္ သၾားလာခၾင့္၊ သီတင္းသုံးခၾင့္ဴပႂဴခင္းအားဴဖင့္ စည္းရုံးပၝလုိႚလည္း အဳကံေပးလုိေဳကာင္း ဒီဆရာေတာ္က အမိန္ႛရႀိပၝတယ္။

Burmese Migrant Workers Shot to death!!

2007-11-21T02:09:00.000-08:00

မန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၅ ဦး မဲေဆာက္အနီး အသတ္ခံရ႓ပီး၊ မီးရႁိႚအေလာင္းေဖဵာက္ခံရ

2007.11.20

ထုိင္းႎုိင္ငံ၊ ဘန္ေကာက္႓မိႂႚအနီး မဟာခဵႂိင္တၾင္ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၂ ဦး ငၝး၊ ပုဇၾန္မဵား ေရၾးခဵယ္ေနပံုဴဖစ္ပၝသည္။ (Photo: RFA)

ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၅ ဦးကို ပစ္သတ္႓ပီး၊ အေလာင္းေဖဵာက္မႁအတၾက္ ထိုင္းႎုိင္ငံသားတခဵိႂႚကို ရဲက ဖမ္းဆီးလိုက္ပၝတယ္။ ထိုင္းရဲက ဒီအမႁကို ဆက္လက္ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေနပၝတယ္။

အသတ္ခံရတဲ့ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၅ ဦးဟာ ေဴပာင္းခင္းအလုပ္သမားေတၾ ဴဖစ္ဴပီး၊ ႎိုဝင္ဘာလ ၉ ရက္ေနႛက အသတ္ခံရတာ ဴဖစ္ပၝတယ္။ သူတိုႚကို ေဴပာင္းအိပ္ေတၾ ခိုးယူမႁနဲႚ စၾပ္စၾဲ႓ပီး၊ ေဴပာင္းခင္းပိုင္ရႀင္က သတ္ဴဖတ္တာလိုႚ ထုိင္းသတင္းေတၾက ေရးပၝတယ္။ တခဵိႂႚကေတာ့ ဒီဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမားေတၾဟာ ေဴပာင္းခင္းမႀာလဲ အလုပ္လုပ္၊ ေဴပာင္းခင္းပိုင္ရႀင္ရဲႚ ခၾင့္ဴပႂခဵက္နဲႚ သူပုိင္လယ္ေဴမေပၞမႀာ ပဲခင္းတခင္း စိုက္ထားတယ္လိုႚ ဆိုပၝတယ္။ ဒီပဲခင္းက ၅ ဧကေလာက္ ရႀိဴပီး၊ ဒီပဲေတၾကို ေရာင္းရင္ ဘတ္ေငၾ ၅ ေသာင္းေလာက္ ရႎိုင္တဲ့အတၾက္ ဒီ ေငၾရလိုမႁနဲႚ သူတိုႛကို ခုလို သတ္လိုက္တာလိုႚ တခဵိႂႚကလည္း ယူဆဳကပၝတယ္။

ဒီ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၅ ဦး အသတ္ခံရေနရာကေတာ့ ထိုင္းႎုိင္ငံ မဲေဆာက္႓မိႂႚကေန ၂၄ ကီလိုမီတာေဝးတဲ့၊ ကဵယ္ဒီခၾပ္ရၾာမႀာ ဴဖစ္ပၝတယ္။ ဒီရၾာကို တဴခားသတင္းေထာက္ေတၾနဲႚအတူ သၾားေရာက္စံုစမ္းခဲ့တဲ့ ဦးခင္ေမာင္စိုးက သူဴမင္ခဲ့၊ သိခဲ့တာေတၾကို မေနႚက ခုလို ရႀင္းဴပပၝတယ္။

ဦးခင္ေမာင္စုိး။ ။ ႎုိဝင္ဘာလ ၉ရက္ေနႛ ည ၉နာရီေလာက္မႀာ လာေခၞတယ္၊ လယ္ကၾင္းထဲကေခၞသၾား႓ပီး ေတာစပ္မႀာ ပစ္သတ္လုိက္တယ္၊ သတ္႓ပီးေတာ့ အဲဒီအေလာင္းကုိ ေနာက္တေနႚမႀာ မီးရိႁႚတယ္၊ ကားတာယာေတၾပံု႓ပီး မီးရိႁႚတယ္၊ အရုိးေတၾကုိ အထၾန္းအိမ္နဲႚ မလႀမ္းကမ္းမႀာ ေတာင္ေဴခမႀာရႀိတဲ့ ေကဵာက္တၾင္း႒ကီးတတၾင္းရႀိတယ္၊ အဲဒီကဵင္းထဲကုိ သၾားခဵတယ္ သၾားခဵဘိုႚဖမ္းသၾားတဲ့ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၅ ေယာက္အဴပင္ ေနာက္ထပ္ ၂ ေယာက္လည္းပၝေသးတယ္။ အဲဒီဴမန္မာ ၂ေယာက္ကုိ အ႔ကင္းအကဵန္ေတၾကုိ ပလတ္စတစ္ အိတ္ထဲထည့္႓ပီးေတာ့ တၾင္းထဲပစ္ခဵခုိင္းတယ္၊ အဲဒီဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၂ေယာက္ကုိ ထုိင္းရဲက မိ႓ပီ၊ အဲဒီ ၂ ေယာက္က အလိႁင္နဲႛ အေကဵာ္တဲ့ အဲဒီအလိႁင္က သူႚေရႀႚမႀာ ဘယ္လုိပစ္သတ္တယ္ဆုိတာ ေဴပာပၝတယ္။

အလိႁင္။ ။ ကဵေနာ္က သူတုိႚနဲႚမလႀမ္းမကမ္းမႀာေပၝ့ေနာ္ သူတိုႚ ေသနတ္နဲႚပစ္သတ္တာပဲ ဘာေသနတ္လည္းဆုိတာ ကဵေနာ္တုိႚက အမဵႂိးအစားေတာ့မသိဘူး ႒ကႂိးခဵည္ထား႓ပီးမႀ ေသနတ္နဲႚပစ္သတ္တာ။

သူတုိႚကေဴပာတာေတာ့ ပစ္သတ္တဲ့လူက ၃ ေယာက္တဲ့ ထုိင္းရာဇဝင္ လူဆုိးေတၾလုိႚေဴပာတယ္။ ေသနတ္ အတုိ ၂လက္ အရႀည္တလက္ ပၝတယ္လုိႚေဴပာတယ္။

ထိုင္းရဲက ဒီအမႁကို ဆက္လက္ စစ္ေဆးေန႓ပီး၊ ဴပစ္မႁ ထင္ရႀားရင္ ေသဒဏ္အဴပစ္ေပးႎုိင္တယ္လိုႚ ဆိုပၝတယ္။

အသတ္ခံရသူ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား အထၾန္းရဲႚ ဇနီးနဲႚ အရၾယ္မေရာက္ေသးတဲ့ ကေလးကို၊ သူတိုႛရဲႚ လံုဴခံႂေရးအတၾက္ မဲေဆာက္မႀာ ရႀိတဲ့၊ ဴမန္မာအသိုင္းဝိုင္းက ေစာင့္ေရႀာက္ေပးထားတယ္လိုႚလည္း သိရပၝတယ္။

ထိုင္းႎုိင္ငံမႀာ ဴမန္မာအလုပ္သမား ၂ သန္းေလာက္ ရႀိ႓ပီး၊ အဓိကအားဴဖင့္ ငၝးဖမ္းလုပ္ငန္း၊ စိုက္ပဵိႂးေရးလုပ္ငန္းနဲႚ စက္ရံုေတၾမႀာ လုပ္ေနဳကတာပၝ။ သူတိုႛတေတၾဟာ ထိုင္းႎုိင္ငံသားေတၾ မလုပ္ခဵင္တဲ့ လုပ္ငန္းေတၾမႀာ လုပ္ကိုင္ေနဳက႓ပီး၊ အလုပ္ရႀင္ေတၾရဲႚ အႎိုင္ကဵင့္မႁအမဵိႂးမဵိႂးကို ခံေနဳကရတယ္လိုႚလည္း လူႚအခၾင့္အေရးအဖၾဲႚေတၾက ေဴပာဳကပၝတယ္။

Thanks to Ko Htyke for his contribution!!

2007-11-20T17:10:00.000-08:00

I have already listened to the Tayar daw of Ashin Nya Nait Thara and ashin Caw Wi Da. What a brilliant monks!! All these tayar daws are now available in famous website of Ko Htike. Many overseas Burmese, including me, appreciate of Ko Htike's contribution.

NO NEWS, NOTHING SO FAR

2007-11-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

So far, there is no news for change in Burma, no hope, nothing. Than Shwe is just buying his time and his wife Kyaing Kyaing and thier children are doing shopping as usual. What about other important officials like Maung Aye and Shwe Man? They are nothing more than follower of Than Shwe.

It is extremely frustrating to think of those who are surviving in terrible situation inside the country!! If this continue like this, what are we going to do?

The interest between ASEAN and US makes it clear!!

2007-11-19T18:51:00.000-08:00

No US-Asean free trade with Burma present

Singapore (dpa) - Current political conditions in Burma make a free-trade deal between the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations impossible in the near term, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said.

The relationship "can't be business as usual," she said as Asean readied for Tuesday's signing of a landmark charter giving the 40-year-old regional grouping legal status and committing the members to pursuing human rights, democracy and a blueprint for economic integration by 2015.

Asean leaders recognize that the bloc's reputation and credibility have been undermined by the situation in military-ruled Burma, where troops fired on peaceful protesters in September, killing at least 15.

Schwab, who is on a two-day visit to Singapore, met Monday with economic ministers to discuss progress made under the US-Asean Trade and Investment Framework Arrangement, signed a year ago.

"The issue of Burma did come up, and I expressed our concern," she told reporters. "Asean has special responsibility when it comes to the situation in Burma."

Despite the US Senate's unanimous vote Friday, urging Asean to suspend Burma until the regime shows respect for human rights, Asean is dealing with the issue within the "family."

Asean leaders have called off a planned summit briefing by UN Special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, scheduled for Wednesday, after Burma objected.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, in the city-state's capacity as Asean chairman, said Burma made it clear that it prefers to deal directly with the United Nations, and Asean leaders respect its wishes.

Singapore had invited Gambari to brief Asean leaders and their counterparts from China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

The US has a free-trade agreement with Singapore. It also has trade and investment framework arrangements (TIFA) with Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Ten-member Asean signed a TIFA deal in August 2006, regarded as a precursor to liberalizing trade.

"The fact that we have a TIFA with Asean means we have the potential for creating the building blocks down the road," Schwab said.

Asean includes Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma.

Junta “eliminating” soldiers who fired on monks!!

2007-11-19T18:41:00.001-08:00

Junta “eliminating” soldiers who fired on monks

Yangon (AsiaNews) – Repression in Myanmar is now turning against the army that carried it out. Reliable sources in the country told AsiaNews that rumours are circulating Mandalay and Yangon according to which the junta is physically “eliminating” the soldiers that shot at monks and protesters in late September in anti-regime demonstrations in order to get rid of evidence and witnesses should they be called to account for ordering the violence.

In a brief announcement on state TV, the junta said that people involved in the demonstrations caused by fuel price hikes are still being detained. Out of 2,927 people arrested, 468 remain in prison. However, these numbers refer only to people taken into custody on September 26 and 27 when tension was at its peak. Since then the military has continued to arrest opponents by using photos taken during the marches to identify people. Unofficial estimates put the number of those in prison at over 6,000.

Along with arrests and torture, the military’s propaganda campaign continues. By organising pro-regime rallies, the junta is trying to turn the population against Western countries, which it holds responsible for the crisis and the monk-led movement.

“The authorities are forcing every village to send 400 to 500 residents to join these [pro-junta] rallies,” said some farmers from the area Sagayng area, just north of Mandalay. “Anyone who tries to avoid taking part in the march runs the risk of spending months in jail or paying stiff fines. This happened yesterday to us, but we still won’t shout the slogans the military imposed on us.”

Sometimes people are summoned in stadiums or public spaces at 5 am and forced to wait until 8 am “when some officials arrive to read speeches full of attacks against Europe and pro-democracy activists in order to educate participants.”

During these rallies in the city of Monywa, some ethnic Burmese were forced to wear clothes identifying them as members of local ethnic minorities in order to show that these groups supported the government.

Many monks have found refuge in villages which are now surrounded by soldiers days and night. “Some monks are wearing civilian clothes to avoid visibility,” some residents in the Mandalay area said. “But they also wear a yellow string as an arm band to show that they are not giving up their role.”

The international community also continues to put pressure on the generals to stop arrests, release prisoners and start talking to the opposition. Japan, one of the junta's biggest aid donors, announced it was cutting off US$ 4.7 million in funding. The European Union has also increased its sanctions. And US President George W. Bush is threatening new measures against the junta.

Thailand, where UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari began his new Asia tour, has proposed a regional forum with China and India to push the Burmese government to implement democratic reforms.

Yesterday in Malaysia Gambari only got “support” from the members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the UN Myanmar mission.

Malaysia Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said there would be no threat of sanctions or suspension from ASEAN.

Is another trick of the psychological warfare expart?

2007-11-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

Is it another trick of the psychological warfare expert?

According to the different news coming from reliable sources, many people are now realizing that Than Shwe will never negotiate with democracy icon, DASSK. Despite giving promises to UN, the regime is doing their best to arrest activists everyday. It is understandable that he doesn't want to move out of the best position he ever achieved.

The big question here is, if he does not want to negotiate, why is he bothering DASSK's meeting with Aung Kyi? Is Than Shwe still trying to cheat 60 millions people or the international community; may be both? In fact, he does not need to. The entire army, legitimide use of violence, is in his hand and therefore everyone has to accept what ever he is doing. However, for those who are willing to see any little improvement to save the entire country are still trying to think of the situation positively despite daily arrests keep going on.

It is too bad now that no one knows what DASSK discussing with Aung Kyi every time she meet him. It seems like this turns out the same situation during Khin Nyunt's era. On the other hand, the entire country is suffering in his hand and desperately wishing to get rid of him and his regime.

One of the coldest day!!

2007-11-19T16:15:00.000-08:00

We are now entering into a real winter. The temperature went down to 0 or less. Snowing started yesterday and I could hear my son preparing to play in the snow.

To be Buddhist in Contemporary Society

2007-11-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

To be Buddhist in Contemporary Society

Pracha Hutanuwatr *

Buddhism during the first eighteen years of my life was very concern with ritual and magic rather than content. I grew up in a fruit orchard environment in the Bangkok suburbs where I went to government primary school located in a local monastery but had little contact with the monks residing there. The main memories I have of monastery activities were big funeral and ordination ceremonies that included fun-filled events such as movies, folk music and theatre shows. We kids liked to go to the monastery for that. In our classroom we were also given an envelope for donations twice or trice a year for yellow-robe offering (kathina) or forest-robe offering (pha pa).

My mother ran a small business in a market in central Bangkok, my father looked after us six siblings at home. My parents were both second generation overseas Chinese with the father coming from China and the mothers born in Siam [Thailand]. My mother''s religious belief was a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. All were of popular type. My father was more agnostic but went along with my mothering ancestor worship and other ceremonies in the Chinese way. As I understand from my mother in those days, all the ceremonies were for the prosperity of the family. Only late in her life did she get into the meditative aspect of Buddhism and Taoism. Buddhism for her was to visit monks she believed had special power that they put into amulets and statues to help our business. She also consulted a blind Chinese astrologer intensively and this helped her cope with the hardship of bringing up six children to be well fed and educated.

At school Buddhism was taught as one subject among others mostly with old-fashioned teachings who made Buddhism very boring. We had to memorise a lot of principles for the exam. We did three minutes of chanting in the morning before going into class and in primary school a longer chanting on Friday afternoons. We did not understand what we chanted.

So until I was eighteen Buddhism did not have a deep impression on me, despite three years in my early teens when I attended a Buddhist Sunday school and enjoyed the friendship of the monks who taught us. I remember during this time I challenged him that there are no more enlightened beings in the world today. He quoted the Buddha saying ''As long as there are those who practice the eightfold path, the world will not be without the enlightened one''.

However the real ethos of my first two decades was to get rich and move-up. Both at home and school we were brought up to compete with each other. The whole society was dominated by the Americanisation process of the ''development era''. It was a kind of uneven continuation of the previous 100 years of ''mordanisation''. Through the radio, television and billboards all over the countries, the Government intensively propagated the motto ''Good education brings good money and happiness'' or ''Work is money, money is work''. This was the time when the American adviser to the Thai government asked the dictator Sarit to forbid the monks to teach contentment saying this would make the country backward.

So we grew up with the idea that we had to get rich and move out of this orchard neighbourhood. A good life was one with a lot of money, big house and big car. My elder brother had to help my mother earn a living during daytime and he went to night school. He studied hard, went to university and got a Fulbright scholarship for a Ph.D. in the USA. He was our role model when we were young. So we all worked hard at school except my elder sister who had to work hard with my mother to earn our living and send us all to school. She did not even get a chance to go to primary school. I got into a prestigious high school in Bangkok by merit where competition was extremely intensive as all the ''best'' from all over the country would come here as a gateway to a prestigious future. It was clear here that to compete was a virtue.

However, at the end of 60''s and the beginning of 70''s a wave of student awakening crept into my school. I intensively read Buddhadasa, a monk who gave life to contemporary Buddhism and his teaching washed away the Thai version of the American dream in my head nearly completely. Then when I went to university the student movement moved left and Buddhadasa had no ready-made answer for social change, so I shifted to the left and became deeply involved with the underground Thai Marxist-Maoist movement for 3 years. At the same time the new left intellectuals above ground also appeared to me personally. At the end of the 3rd year of Marxism I got completely disillusioned as it seemed to me that we spent more time fighting each other than the fight for the cause of social justice and ecological well-being we first aspired to. In early 1975 I quit the youth wing of the Communist Party of Thailand.

Supported by Ajarn Sulak Sivaraksa and other friends who formed the ''Ahimsa Group'' I became a Buddhist monk. My original intention was for two weeks but I ended up eleven years in robes. It became an attempt to come to terms with my disillusionment and to explore my Buddhist roots. I spent the first four years moving around forest monasteries searching for meditation teachers all of whom were very traditional and conventional and spent the last seven years with Buddhadasa who was very unconventional.

Three important things I learnt during this decade:

(1) Coping with the enemy within: no escapism. For me the Buddha designed the life of a monk so that one cannot escape from oneself especially if one tries to live a monk''s life as original designed. You have to face your own self without any escape. As activists, our enemy was always out there but now you start to see all those whom you have accused, the dictator, the capitalist, the reactionary, the conservative, the feudalist, they are all inside you and you have to learn to live and cope with them and tame them step by step with a lot of sense of humour otherwise you go crazy.

(2) Joy unlimited: The other very important thing I learnt was meditation. One can find quite a sensational joy just by meditation and not that deeply actually. Daily meditation is like spring water for daily spiritual thirst and if used wisely this also reinforces the abovementioned self-recovery.

(3) Some synchronicity: Though I could not swallow Marxist philosophical ideas any longer, I had not abandoned the morality of social justice and ecological concern. I am on the left in the conventional political spectrum. Buddhist studies and meditation, at least under the guidance of Buddhadasa and Sulak Sivaraksa did not undermine this aspect of my life rather reinforced and refined it. Thus, the third big portion of my time was spent on understanding the complications of modern society.

For a rebel to have in a real sense is not easy. That''s why my first four years as a monk were quite restless. Although I tasted some deep joy of meditation, most monks, some were good meditation teachers, did not really related to my way of thinking. To have a good friend or teacher includes a lot of surrendering of your ego and accepting your teacher''s spiritual authority. Ajarn Buddhadasa was so generous for my endless questions and arguments. He used these arguments to sharpen my understanding of Buddhism skillfully. Though he pitied me when I told him that I wanted to leave the monkhood for a woman I lived, we became and remained goodfriends even when I left him to disrobe.

Even as a monk, I maintained a regular relationship with Ajarn Sulak as another close teacher who tamed me in many other aspects outside Ajarn Buddhadasa''s concerns, especially the understanding of com plex modern society and the complications of urban activist psyche. Both of them trained me to challenge and accept, accept and challenge spiritual authority. It was so wonderful for a young seeker.

I disrobed in 1986 to be rejected by the woman I loved and to be humbled by my inability to use Dhamma to cope with the pain of my ego. I became a womanizer for a number of years creating a lot of pain to many people and myself. It may seem that the former is the cause of the latter - but this might not be so as I am of lustful temperament since I was young.

As a layperson, I worked under the ethos of socially engaged Buddhism under the leadership of Ajarn Sulak. We have been doing all sorts of projects and activities, local, regional, international, many of which are my own initiatives. I had plenty of room to breathe my teacher''s leadership has not shadowed my growth. The overall aim being to enhance the values of cooperation and compassion over competition, simplicity and local cultures over consumer-mono culture, social justice over exploitation, living in harmony with nature over conquering nature, inclusive over exclusive. We also work with non-Buddhist friends with deep respect for each other.

For me to be a Buddhist means firstly to reject the aims of life promoted by the present society to have more power, wealth, recognition or sensual pleasure. On the contrary we should aim to reduce the existential suffering of others and ourselves by reducing our cravings either in the form of greed, lust, hatred or self-importance. But this is just one aspect. We have to also reduce greed, hatred and wrong values in the society by changing the structural violence in society at the same time.

Relief work, though useful in any society, alone is never enough to reduce the suffering of the world. This is the difference between Buddhists who understand the present society and those who do not. Each year the social welfare department and the high-class charity foundations in Siam go out to the countryside or the slums in big city and provide cloths or food for the poor or stationary for the poor children. Most of the people involved do not realise their way of life is the cause of the poverty. They do not understand that poverty can often be reduced by reorganising the economic structure in a way that wealth is more justly distributed in society. We can reorganise economics so that the concept of dana (sharing) and karuna (compassion) are the core of the system instead of the maximization of profit and competition. Or if the education and the media stop brain-washing the rural people and forest dwellers that their way of life is inferior to the city dwellers, and if these institutions start promoting respect of cultural diversity and respect for local culture, a lot of those who are classified as ''poor'' will be able to live a self-reliant life with dignity and don''t have to depend on the donation of the upper-class and government departments.

We take the structural issues seriously because firstly the present structure is the result of and reproduces wrong view and unwholesome thoughts. These include pursuit of endless economic growth, the conquering of nature, the over emphasis on individualism (or collectivism in the case of Soviet model experiment). In other words these wrong views are the cause of the increasing greed, hatred and illusion in society. Hence a natural increase of suffering. Secondly, as the social structure is humanmade, it is the out come of policy makers, government, inter-government or TNCs, so it can be changed by public opinion and political will.

Moreover, when the majority of public opinion has not changed we can create new experiments, new ventures, and new social innovations to show that alternatives are possible and stimulate social reform in different areas. The Buddha actually did this when he established the Sangha during his lifetime.

For me a meaningful Buddhist life in this contemporary world needs to be based on the application of wisdom and compassion both for inner work and outer work. If you work only for inner change, emphasise only on vipassana and keeping your personal precepts, you escape from social responsibility and avoid all the suffering around you. Your meditation on loving kindness and compassion could be a fake. If you work only for social change, you escape from responsibility of dealing with the negative and cultivating positive aspects of consciousness that is part of the collective consciousness. External and internal work complements each other for a more healthy society and more enlightened individual.

As I also believe that the path to this goal of enlightenment is a slow sloppy process, not unlike the slope from the ''shore to the centre of the ocean, we have to pay a lot of attention to how we live our daily life and try to have a glimpse of enlightenment here and now. This would not have been possible without the intensive training I had during my years as a monk. St that time I was young enough to endure the hardship of intensive sitting and walking meditation. So the path to enlightenment should start when you are young enough. Young people should be ambitious in this aspect. Taming the dragon within need to a lot of psychical and mental strength. Side by side with this meditation we need to train ourselves to look at things around us from a non-self perspective. This changing of perspective needs a lot of practice too at least for a period in one''s life which will make it easier to bring it into our daily life. Without practice, philosophising about non-self can be very self-deceptive and harmful. A lot of so-called Buddhists fall into this trap without awareness of it.

A non-self perspective is a radical way of looking at everything beyond all kinds of conventional frames of reference and even beyond the concept of non-self itself. A good book on the subject can help as a first step, a good spiritual teacher can help tremendously then we have to work it out for ourselves individually. As the Buddha said when we know only we know that we know.

As I have a lust temperament, I find the keeping the third precept difficult. Even though since my marriage, I have stopped sleeping around with many women, I still enjoy women''s companionship and I have more women friends than men. I have been training myself to welcome getting old as it helps the hormones to be less active. I also still enjoy eating meat with some feelings of shame from time to time but not guilt. However, training oneself in precepts is as important as in meditation and wisdom though it is as hard and also a gradual process to achieve. Even we try and fail we have to keep on trying and failing with a lot of compassion and sense of humour. Without the latter two elements you can become selfrighteous as the ego will creep into your trying to be good.

As to earning my living, I am that the dilemmas have reduced as I have a strong community and as time goes by. I have discovered some of my potential and am quite content using it for the benefit of others in my social change work. From a Buddhist perspective; to work for the benefit of others will benefit your-self. As you offer your thoughts and energy to help others with the right frame of mind, you are also cultivating the seeds of enlightenment within you. For me working for social change is part of a part to enlightenment. But again this is not easy. Your ego will always jump in and take possession of the good work you do for others and spoil it. For me at least this happens from time to time. One always has to be cautions. Learning to disown our good deeds is a good practice.

One thing that I find very helpful is to regularly visit who suffer, for example those who claim to be our target groups. If we sit and work in the office for too long or jet around to meet other people of the same sort too much, our heart can get lost even though our mind still articulates our mission. Visiting the poor, the excluded, the protesters, the slums, the handicapped and the forest dwellers helps the flowering of our compassion. We can also learn a lot of wisdom from these people as suffering makes them wise and some of them live a much more sustainable life than those of us who preach it. When we were young and got confused easily, visiting them helped clarify our direction. Now I visit them to gain wisdom and develop my compassion and pull me down to earth.

However as a non-enlightened being, there are times in daily life that our minds are clouded. I am not always a happy bunny. Whenever that happens, I take that state of mind as a visit of a great teacher to show me the areas in my heart that needs to be cultivated, to show me where the non-self perspective has not been sufficiently applied. As life goes by if we can see affliction and confusion reduced, we can bow to ourselves.

There are other time when the comparing mind pops in to say ''hello dear, you don''t have as gig a house as your friends, you don''t have as much power and position as this one, or you are not as famous as that one''. I would that comparing mind with a gentle smile and respond humorously ''Thanks, but I don''t need your nagging. I am who I am. I enjoy my work. I enjoy my friendship, I have a good family and community and I have enough for my life. I accept and sometimes enjoy the challenge of life as causes and conditions arise. Sometime I even go for a challenge. My life here and now is precious. I enjoy exploring and expanding my potential and I don''t need a sense of lack to do that. I am good enough and I do not need to compare. Thank you very much. If you are not sure you can visit me again. Bye!''

I will talk to this comparing mind as many times as needed with a lot of love and gentleness. He seems to come to visit me less often as time goes by.

As for the basic needs of life I go for a minimum principle but not scarcity. Besides enjoying working a lot I go to a good movie from time to time. Once in a while I go to a bad one. I go for beach holidays most years and immerse myself with the sea. I go for a forest walk every year. I often read good novels that touch the deeper part of my heart and good non-fiction that stimulates my intellectual curiosity increases my understanding of complicated social issues. I enjoy the companionship of good friends and close relatives and walks in nature.

Though I still have a clear sense of what ideas are right or wrong, I am less attached to the rightness and wrongness of them and able to listen to people of different opinions with understanding and if needed with patience. However, I have a clear sense that I am treading on a right path but knowing that this is not the only path.

All in all, to be a Buddhist in contemporary society, I am aware that my society is based on a wrong view (miccha ditthi) and I have to resist the mainstream way of life which promotes greed, violence, individualism, competition. I cannot wait until the dawn of a new society to live a good Buddhist life so, here and now, I have to find and create alternatives that based on the Buddhist values of compassion, generosity, justice, living close to nature and peace. I have to live a life that Ieads to the reduction of my existential afflictions. An important part of doing that is to embark on a challenging and meaningful work to shift the society to move towards right view. I like to think of myself as a small bodhisattva whose mission to transform my consciousness and to change the structure of society is one. ( I copied it fro rakhapura online magazine, sorry for not asking permission)

I would prefer to die than being a Burmese soldiIer!!

2007-11-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

ဘီဘီစီ “ငပြၾကီး”မဟုတ္ အစစ္အမွန္“ငပြၾကီး”သန္းေရႊဟုေျပာ၍ စစ္သည္တဦး ေသဒဏ္ခ်မွတ္ခံရ

11/18/2007

ခိုင္မင္းမူ(နိရဥၥရာ)
စစ္ေတြအေျခစိုက္ ေထာက္ပံ့ပို႕ေဆာင္ေရးတပ္ရင္းမွ စစ္သည္တဦးက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ လက္ရွိျဖစ္ေပၚေနမႈမ်ားမွာ သန္းေရႊ“ငပြၾကီး”ေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေျပာၾကားျခင္းေၾကာင့္ မၾကာေသးမီက ေသဒဏ္အျပစ္ေပးခံရေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

အဆိုပါ ေသဒါဏ္အခ်ခံရသူမွာ စစ္ေတြအေျခစိုက္ အမွတ္ (၈၂၈) ေထာက္ပံ့ပို႕ေဆာင္ေရး တပ္ရင္းမွ တပ္ၾကပ္ေအာင္ႏိုင္ျဖစ္သည္။

တပ္ၾကပ္ေအာင္ႏိုင္မွာ ယခင္က အန္အလ္ဒီပါတီ၏ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ားကို ေထာက္ခံအားေပး မႈေၾကာင့္ တပ္တြင္းအခ်ဳပ္ ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္က်ခံဖူးသူျဖစ္ျပီး ရာထူးအခ်ခံထားရသူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည္။

ယခုျဖစ္စဥ္ႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္ျပီး အဆိုပါတပ္ရင္းမွ အမည္မေဖာ္လိုသူ စစ္သည္တဦးက “ဆႏၵျပတာေတြ ျဖစ္ကတည္းက တပ္ရင္းမႈက အရာရွိစစ္သည္အားလံုးကို ခဏခဏတန္းစီျပီး ဘီဘီစီနဲ႕တျခားသတင္းဌာနေတြက သန္းေရ“ငပြၾကီး”လုပ္ထားတာေၾကာင့္ တိုင္းျပည္ အခုလိုျဖစ္ေနတာဟု မဟုတ္တာေတြေလ်ာက္ေျပာေနတယ္္ဟု တပ္ရင္းမွဴးကေျပာပါတယ္၊ အဲလိုေျပာအျပီးမွာ သန္းေရႊ“ငပြၾကီး”လုပ္တာေတြကို ကမၻာကသိေအာင္ ဘီဘီစီ-ဗြီအိုေအ တို႕က ျဖစ္ရပ္မွန္ သတင္းေတြ လႊင့္ေပးေနတာပါလို႕ ဆရာေအာင္ႏိုင္က ေျပာပါတယ္၊ အဲဒီလိုေျပာတာနဲ႕ သူ႕ကို ခ်က္ခ်င္းဖမ္းယူ သြားပါတယ္ဟ”နိရဥၥရာသို႕ေျပာသည္။

တပ္ၾကပ္ေအာင္ႏိုင္၏ ျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ားမွာ တပ္ရင္းတည္ျမဲအမိန္႕မ်ားအရ ထူးျခားျဖစ္စဥ္၌ အက်ံဳး ၀င္၍ (၂၄)နာရီအတြင္း သက္ဆိုင္ရာ ကြပ္ကဲမွဴး စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္မ်ားသို႕ ေၾကးနန္းပို႕ရျပီး စစ္သည္တရားခံအား တပတ္အတြင္း တိုင္းစစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္သို႕ အေရာက္ပို႕ရေၾကာင္း စစ္ဥပေဒႏွင့္စည္းကမ္းဆို္င္ရာ တပ္ၾကပ္ၾကီး စာေရးတဦးကဆိုသည္။

အဆိုပါ စစ္သည္မွာ တပ္မေတာ္ အက္ဥပေဒအရ တပ္တြင္းအခ်ဳပ္ျဖင့္ ျပီးဆံုးႏိုင္ေသာ္လည္း နည္းဥပေဒျဖင့္ တရားစြဲခံရေသာေၾကာင့္ ေသဒဏ္ခ်မွတ္ခံရျခင္းျဖစ္ျပီး ေသဒဏ္အမိန္႕ကို စစ္ဥပေဒခ်ဳပ္ရံုးမွ အထူးစစ္ခံုရံုးဖြဲ႕၍ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္မွ ခ်မွတ္ရေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ အလားတူ ျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ား ေနာက္ထပ္ျဖစ္ပြားမႈမရွိေစရန္ တပ္ရင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ားသို႕ အမိန္႕ညႊန္ၾကားစာမ်ားျဖင့္ အေၾကာင္းၾကားထားျပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းကို ၎မွဆက္လက္ေျပာၾကားသည္။

တပ္ၾကပ္ေအာင္ႏိုင္၏ စစ္သည္တဦး ရပိုင္ခြင့္အားလံုးအား တပ္မေတာ္ဘ႑ာအျဖစ္ သိမ္းယူသြားျပီး က်န္ရစ္သူမိသားစုအား မိမိေနရပ္သို႕ ျပန္ပို႕လိုက္ေၾကာင္း စံုစမ္းသိရွိရသည္။ ( I copied from Narinjara News Agency. Sorry for not asking permission)

Canadian's role toward Burma's democratic movement

2007-11-18T14:13:00.000-08:00

Divestment must include all Canadian business interests in Burma

OTTAWA – NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre), criticized the Conservatives for taking half-measures against the junta regime in Burma, also known as Myanmar. “Half-measures against a dictatorship amount to half-compliance with the dictatorship” said Dewar.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Bernier announced a series of sanctions and a ban of new investments in Burma today. The measures do not cover current Canadian investments.

“What we need are concrete measures that divest all Canadian investment in Burma – not just a ban on new investments. It’s the only way to send a clear message to the junta that they must immediately relinquish power and hand it over to the Burmese democrats,” said Dewar, who held a press conference to call for tough financial action against the military junta last week.

Tin Maung Htoo, the Executive Director of Canadian Friends of Burma, was with Dewar last week and said, “Fourteen Canadian companies are listed as being active in Burma. However, many more Canadian companies and public pension funds have indirect investments in Burma through third parties – for instance the Canadian Power Corporation mines a gas deposit in Burma and pays hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties to the ruling military junta through the French oil company Total. The investment ban should cover all indirect investment as well.”

“While I welcome the steps taken in the right direction, this is not enough – the NDP would have cut the financial support the junta receives from investments currently held by Canadian corporations and public pension funds in Burma,” declared Dewar.

Dewar has tabled a motion in the House of Commons that called on the Canadian government to invoke the Special Economic Measures Act, divest all Canadian investments in Burma and ban ships flying Burma’s flag from calling on Canadian ports. “It is not only those who do direct business with Burma, but all companies with ties to Canadian corporations, public pension funds and individuals with investments in Burma who must divest,” said Dewar.

Tin Maung Htoo and Dewar have also called on the government to strengthen the Burmese democratic movement by hosting a gathering of the movement in Ottawa and providing it with material and intellectual support in its efforts toward democratizing Burma.

“Knowing what we know about the junta, business as usual in unconscionable,” concluded Dewar.

checking the news about homeland!!

2007-11-16T21:02:00.000-08:00

It is extremely frustrating to read the news and to think of the situation there. When are we going to solve the problem? When are the going to give up? Many people are dying everyday, many are already dead....

What a day!!

2007-11-16T20:24:00.001-08:00

Today was very windy and very cold. The computer in the car indicate that 3 degree, but with the wind it must have had less than 0 degree. Here in Canada, ability to drive a car is so important especially when there are children at home.

I was in the car ready to get out of the garage, but there is a funny sound coming out of the car. I was very worried. First, I did not know what to do; meanwhile there was a car coming into the garage and I realized my car was blocking it. So I turned off the car and turned it on again.Then the funny sound disappeared: thank God. Then I tried to give him a way by getting out of the garage. The problem was solved.

After I arrived at day care center, I found a parking at the same place. Just to get out of the car was freezing. Anyway, I took him and placed him in his seat belt. After he was well attached, he started to eat and drink what ever I brought from home. Then I started to drive.

Came back in front of the garage, I realized that another car key attached to the remote control to open the garage was missing. Where did I put??? I was getting so nervous...should I go back to the day care? here again, there is another car waiting behind to get into the garage. So, I need to back up...and let them go. They opened the garage with ordinary key card. Off course, I tried to follow them instead of looking for my remote... too late. I wasn't quick enough..So I back up again with all the frustration. I suddenly realized that rear wheel was on the side walk. My heart was beating so hard... Thank God again. It wasn't a major problem. But I really need to be careful with everything. I don't want to make any mistake as I don't have driving permit yet.

I found my remote after checking Thurain's bag. So I finally, back into the garage safe and sound.

Class poli 205, introduction to the International relationship

2007-11-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

The presentations are made by different groups every week. It is amazing to see some Brilliant African origin students; many of them are good public speakers. Some of them, I have never seen before; they probably never showed up in the class. The professor told me there are 135 students in the class, but I barely see 60 people a week.

challenging study life

2007-11-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

We just did our mid term part 2. The exam was not difficult, in fact rather easy. We were just confused with so many things to read.For me, the major challenge is "language". However, I am getting improve and feel that things are moving forward.

Every time I am frustrated I think about my people living in other part of the world. They face extreme difficulty, loosing everything including their lives. I still have hope one day I will be doing something for them.

life has changed ever since I lfet my homeland!!

2007-11-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

It was in the mid November of 1999 when I left my homeland. I went back to Burma many times over within these years...I still miss the homeland and feel sorry for things I can't solve today.