http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2012/0105/Conflicting-signals-on-reform-in-Burma-Myanmar
radio report here http://www.rte.ie/news/player/world-report/2012/0108/
BANGKOK – Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi says she believes that her country will hold full democratic elections in her lifetime, a good sign for the country, which has long been notorious for its oppressive military rule.
Ms. Suu Kyi’s remarks came on the heels of three high profile visits to Burma (Myanmar): Both Hillary Clinton and billionaire businessman George Soros, longtime funder of exiled opposition groups, made the trip last month, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague arrived in Burma earlier today.
In yet another positive nod to reforms in Burma, the government approved Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy to run in April by-elections for the country’s parliament, and a presidential adviser said that the she could one day lead the country where she spent 15 years under arrest.
Though Suu Kyi she said she was optimistic about Burma’s future, the Nobel Peace Laureate quickly cautioned the West to not get too excited, pointing out that the democratic reforms could still be blocked by Burma’s Army.
“I trust the president but I can’t say I trust the government for the simple reason that I don’t know everyone in the government,” Suu Kyi told the BBC.
Today’s soundbites come after a series of reforms by a nominally-civilian government that took office almost one year ago, replacing a military regime in control since 1962. Some 300 political prisoners have been freed, a controversial China-backed dam in the north has been shelved, and laws have been amended to allow greater media freedom, public protests, and the establishment of trade unions.
However Burma still holds hundreds of political prisoners. Estimates vary, but the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma (AAPP), run by former detainees and which tracks political prisoners in Burma, says that there are around 1,500 still in jail.
Secretary Hague said after meeting his counterpart Wunna Maung Lwin in Naypyidaw that “the foreign minister has reaffirmed commitments that have been made to release political prisoners,” but the Burmese foreign minister later reiterated to the BBC the old military junta line that Burma does not have any political prisoners.
Aung Myo Thein of the AAPP says that “reform is so-called reform,” citing a prisoner amnesty earlier this week, when only about 34 political detainees were freed – after already serving much of their jail time.
The US has said that full and unconditional release of political prisoners is a necessity before it will consider lifting economic sanctions on Burma.
Aside from political prisoners, conditions in Burma’s ethnic minority regions are another litmus test of the government’s reformist intentions.
Benedict Rogers, activist and author of a biography on Than Shwe, the reclusive former military dictator thought by some to retain behind-the-scenes influence in Burma, told the Monitor that the Burmese government should be encouraged to reform but added that “if the regime wants to convince us it is changing” there needs to be “an end to the attacks in the ethnic states, and a nationwide cease-fire must be announced.”
Far from Rangoon and Naypyidaw, such reform is hard to detect.
Zipporah Sein, head of the Karen National Union (KNU), says she fears that the approaching dry season will see a return to the bloody clashes between the Burmese Army and the ethnic Karen militia, which has strongholds near the Thailand-Burma border.
And as investors size up what they hope will be a reformed Burma, the KNU is taking its time on going ahead with a Thai-backed multibillion dollar port and highway development linking Burma’s coast with Bangkok.
“We want the project to be done to international standards,” says Zipporah Sein, adding that they are still in discussion with Italian-Thai Development, the Thai company leading the project.
In Burma’s northern Kachin state, near China, fighting has been running for seven or eight months now, with tens of thousands made homeless, according to Ah Noh, of the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand. In Kachin state, “we don’t see any sign of change in the ground,” she says.
ဇႏၷဝါရီလ၅ရက္အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးမွာေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္အက်ဥ္းက်ေနတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမိသားစုဝင္ေတြနဲ႕ေတြ့ဆံုစဥ္မွာဇႏၷဝါရီလ3ရက္ေန႕လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္မွာႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြအမ်ားအျပားပါဝင္လာျခင္းမရွိတာဟာ ႏင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း AAPP ၏ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့စာရင္းေတြ၊ျပည္ထဲေရမွာရွိတဲ့စာရင္းေတြနဲ႕NLDထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့စာရင္းေတြကိုညိွႏိႈင္းလို႕မရေသး
တာေၾကာင့္ေဒၚအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။”ယခုအခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ကြၽန္မတို႕အေနနဲ႕ကေတာ့ တတ္ႏိုင္သေလာက္ေတာ့ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေတြကိုသြားျပီးေတာ့စစ္ေဆးျပီးၾကည့္ေနပါတယ္။ၾကည့္တဲ့အခါမွာAAPPစာရင္းထဲမွာပါတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကြၽန္မတို႕စာရင္းထဲမွာမပါဘူး”လို့ေျပာၾကားသြားပါတယ္။
(Third Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi re-affirmed third time again on 5th January 2012 that NLD found out that after visiting various prisons all over the country they cannot find the people who were listed in the AAPP list as the political prisoners. Due to the variance of the numbers of political prisoners held — there is the delay in releasing them.
(Second Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi verified the correct number of currently held political prisoners as 591 (as of 16 December 2011) when she is asked by a Burmese activist regarding the differences between the numbers of political prisoners in Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said that NLD is making sure everything possible they can to get the nearest correct numbers of political prisoners who are currently held in Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi again re-affirmed that in the AAPP list of political prisoners there are still people names who were already been released. This radio news was broadcasted in Burma on 16 December 2011.
(First Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said that there are 591 Political Prisoners in Burma as of 13 November 2011. This is the extract from questions and answers at the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s press briefing held on 13 November 2011 as the one year anniversary of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest. When she is asked from one of the reporters regarding about the differences in numbers of political prisoners currently held in Burma between NLD and AAPP then Daw Aung San Suu Kyi affirmed that according to the NLD’s network inside Burma who are supporting prisoners and visisting prisons around the country — the numbers are approximately nearest well documented that there are 591 political prisoners in Burma. We, Burma Democratic Concern (BDC), fully trust Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s led National League for Democracy (NLD) lists of prsioners since they are on the groung and they are practically working inside Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also confirmed that they found out that there are names of prisoners listed in the AAPP who were already been released. (The above is the direct un-official translation from Burmese to English)
We would like to reaffirm here that we have the full confidence and trust on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, NLD’s list of political prisoners. But we don’t on others due to the questions of credibility, accountability and transparency. There are a lot of questions on so-called prisoners supporting organisation due to the corruption and stealing funding money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bayS4x9j5Og&feature=channel_video_title
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbzzx6yukpI&feature=watch_response
ဇႏၷဝါရီလ၅ရက္အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးမွာေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္အက်ဥ္းက်ေနတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမိသားစုဝင္ေတြနဲ႕ေတြ့ဆံုစဥ္မွာဇႏၷဝါရီလ3ရက္ေန႕လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္မွာႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြအမ်ားအျပားပါဝင္လာျခင္းမရွိတာဟာ ႏင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း AAPP ၏ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့စာရင္းေတြ၊ျပည္ထဲေရမွာရွိတဲ့စာရင္းေတြနဲ႕NLDထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့စာရင္းေတြကိုညိွႏိႈင္းလို႕မရေသး
တာေၾကာင့္ေဒၚအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။”ယခုအခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ကြၽန္မတို႕အေနနဲ႕ကေတာ့ တတ္ႏိုင္သေလာက္ေတာ့ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေတြကိုသြားျပီးေတာ့စစ္ေဆးျပီးၾကည့္ေနပါတယ္။ၾကည့္တဲ့အခါမွာAAPPစာရင္းထဲမွာပါတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကြၽန္မတို႕စာရင္းထဲမွာမပါဘူး”လို့ေျပာၾကားသြားပါတယ္။
(Third Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi re-affirmed third time again on 5th January 2012 that NLD found out that after visiting various prisons all over the country they cannot find the people who were listed in the AAPP list as the political prisoners. Due to the variance of the numbers of political prisoners held — there is the delay in releasing them.
(Second Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi verified the correct number of currently held political prisoners as 591 (as of 16 December 2011) when she is asked by a Burmese activist regarding the differences between the numbers of political prisoners in Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said that NLD is making sure everything possible they can to get the nearest correct numbers of political prisoners who are currently held in Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi again re-affirmed that in the AAPP list of political prisoners there are still people names who were already been released. This radio news was broadcasted in Burma on 16 December 2011.
(First Time) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said that there are 591 Political Prisoners in Burma as of 13 November 2011. This is the extract from questions and answers at the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s press briefing held on 13 November 2011 as the one year anniversary of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest. When she is asked from one of the reporters regarding about the differences in numbers of political prisoners currently held in Burma between NLD and AAPP then Daw Aung San Suu Kyi affirmed that according to the NLD’s network inside Burma who are supporting prisoners and visisting prisons around the country — the numbers are approximately nearest well documented that there are 591 political prisoners in Burma. We, Burma Democratic Concern (BDC), fully trust Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s led National League for Democracy (NLD) lists of prsioners since they are on the groung and they are practically working inside Burma. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also confirmed that they found out that there are names of prisoners listed in the AAPP who were already been released. (The above is the direct un-official translation from Burmese to English)
We would like to reaffirm here that we have the full confidence and trust on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, NLD’s list of political prisoners. But we don’t on others due to the questions of credibility, accountability and transparency. There are a lot of questions on so-called prisoners supporting organisation due to the corruption and stealing funding money.