Posts
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Monday, 18 April 2011
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
My father would be proud of Karen army unity
I can’t remember how many times the Karen National Union and other ethnic political organisations have been dismissed as losing, or being on the verge of defeat. In February 1950 General Ne Win boasted to international media that victory over the Karen ‘insurgents’ would be completed by May that year. The New York Times duly reported: “Defeat of rebels withdrawing to hills would leave minor guerrillas to cope with.”
Fast-forward 61 years and still the Karen National Union (KNU) is on the verge of defeat, this time according to long-time KNU critic Ashley South, writing in a March 2011 report for the Transnational Institute and Burma Centre Netherlands. He said that “the organisation’s future looks increasingly precarious.”
When journalists and self-appointed experts have made these statements on the state of our struggle, there has often been reason to be pessimistic. There are occasions when the situation has looked bad. In 2008, my father, Padoh Mahn Sha, General Secretary of the Karen National Union, was assassinated, and other KNU leaders have found their names on a hit list with assassins searching for them in Thailand. The dictatorship has passed a new constitution in a rigged referendum, one that not only ignored all ethnic demands for rights and protection, but also required all armed ethnic groups under ceasefire to effectively surrender, and hand over their arms. More troops were stationed in Shan state and Karenni state, and in 2009 an important KNU base near the Thailand-Burma border was overrun by Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) and Burmese army soldiers.
However, the situation recently has started to look more positive. The DKBA has split, with the old Brigade 5 refusing to become a Border Guard Force under the control of the Burmese army. The main DKBA, now a Border Guard Force, has also been severely weakened, with the Burmese army reducing its size. DKBA soldiers unhappy with Burmese commanders giving them orders are now defecting back to the KNU everyday.
Even more significantly, a new United Nationalities Federal Council has been created, a new political and military alliance of armed ethnic political parties, which for the first time in nearly 20 years unites armed ethnic political parties across the country.
And recently, Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldiers were in Manerplaw, the old headquarters of the KNU which fell in 1995.
Many people have asked me what my father would have thought of these two significant developments. I cannot claim to know for sure. He had experience and wisdom that was unique, but I knew the kind of man he was, and how all his decisions and opinions were based on firm principles.
Much of the work my father did for the KNU was promoting unity – unity among the Karen, unity between ethnic nationalities, and unity with all the people of Burma. He knew it was vital we all work together to win our freedom, and that we must not let the dictatorship divide us. He travelled all over Burma, often risking his life, to promote unity between ethnic nationalities. He was also the strongest voice arguing that the KNU should offer shelter and support to students who fled the cities after the uprising in 1988. What he wanted to see is unity; that despite differences, people would work together, be different but equal, living and working for our freedom side by side.
Fast-forward 61 years and still the Karen National Union (KNU) is on the verge of defeat, this time according to long-time KNU critic Ashley South, writing in a March 2011 report for the Transnational Institute and Burma Centre Netherlands. He said that “the organisation’s future looks increasingly precarious.”
When journalists and self-appointed experts have made these statements on the state of our struggle, there has often been reason to be pessimistic. There are occasions when the situation has looked bad. In 2008, my father, Padoh Mahn Sha, General Secretary of the Karen National Union, was assassinated, and other KNU leaders have found their names on a hit list with assassins searching for them in Thailand. The dictatorship has passed a new constitution in a rigged referendum, one that not only ignored all ethnic demands for rights and protection, but also required all armed ethnic groups under ceasefire to effectively surrender, and hand over their arms. More troops were stationed in Shan state and Karenni state, and in 2009 an important KNU base near the Thailand-Burma border was overrun by Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) and Burmese army soldiers.
However, the situation recently has started to look more positive. The DKBA has split, with the old Brigade 5 refusing to become a Border Guard Force under the control of the Burmese army. The main DKBA, now a Border Guard Force, has also been severely weakened, with the Burmese army reducing its size. DKBA soldiers unhappy with Burmese commanders giving them orders are now defecting back to the KNU everyday.
Even more significantly, a new United Nationalities Federal Council has been created, a new political and military alliance of armed ethnic political parties, which for the first time in nearly 20 years unites armed ethnic political parties across the country.
And recently, Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldiers were in Manerplaw, the old headquarters of the KNU which fell in 1995.
Many people have asked me what my father would have thought of these two significant developments. I cannot claim to know for sure. He had experience and wisdom that was unique, but I knew the kind of man he was, and how all his decisions and opinions were based on firm principles.
Much of the work my father did for the KNU was promoting unity – unity among the Karen, unity between ethnic nationalities, and unity with all the people of Burma. He knew it was vital we all work together to win our freedom, and that we must not let the dictatorship divide us. He travelled all over Burma, often risking his life, to promote unity between ethnic nationalities. He was also the strongest voice arguing that the KNU should offer shelter and support to students who fled the cities after the uprising in 1988. What he wanted to see is unity; that despite differences, people would work together, be different but equal, living and working for our freedom side by side.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Germany Karen Seminar
Germany Karen Seminar "Time for Liberty and Peace", organized by Karen National Community Germany, 2-3 April 2011, Frankfurt, Germany.
(Photo-European Karen Network)
(Photo-European Karen Network)
ျမန္မာျပည္ဖြား CIA ေသနတ္သမား ခ်င္းမုိင္တြင္ ေသဆုံး
မုိးမခအေထာက္ေတာ္ အမွတ္ ၀၀၄
ဧၿပီ ၅၊ ၂၀၁၁
CIA အရာရိွေဟာင္းတဦးသည္ ယမန္ေန႔က ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ၊ ခ်င္းမုိင္ျမိဳ႕ ေနအိမ္တြင္ ေသဆုံးသြားသည္။ ဦးေခါင္းတြင္ ေသနတ္ဒဏ္ရာျဖင့္ေသဆုံးျခင္း ျဖစ္ျပီး လက္တဘက္တြင္ ေျခာက္လုံးပူး၊ တဘက္တြင္ လက္၀ါးကပ္တုိင္ ကုိင္ထားသည္ဟု လန္ဒန္အေျခစုိက္ The First Post အြန္လုိင္းမဂၢဇင္းက ဆုိသည္။
အမည္မွာ Mr. Bill Young ျဖစ္ျပီး အသက္ ၇၆ ႏွစ္ ရိွျပီဟု သိရသည္။
အေမရိကန္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအဖဲြ႔ CIA ၏ ေသနတ္သမားအျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ယူခ့ဲသူ Mr. Bill Young သည္ စကားတုိးတုိးေျပာသူ၊ အရပ္ရွည္ရွည္ လူတေယာက္ျဖစ္ျပီး သူ၏ ျဗိတိသွ် မိတ္ေဆြမ်ားက အျငိမ္းစားဂ်ိမ္းစ္ဘြန္းဟု တင္စားခံရသူ ျဖစ္သည္။
စိတ္ဓာတ္က်ျပီး ေသဆုံးျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟု တခ်ဳိ႕က သုံးသပ္ၾကသည္။
“တခ်ိန္တုန္းက သူ က်င္လည္ က်က္စားခ့ဲသလုိေပါ့၊ သူ အခု အၾကမ္းပတမ္းနည္းနဲ႔ ဆုံးသြားရွာတာပဲ” ဟု သူ၏ မိတ္ေဆြတဦး၏ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္ကုိ The First Post တြင္ ေတြ႔ရသည္။
ခ်င္းမုိင္ အေမရိကန္ ေကာင္စစ္၀န္ရုံး ၀က္ဆုိက္ရိွ နာေရးေၾကာ္ျငာတြင္ “ထူးျခားသည့္ဘ၀ကုိ ျဖတ္သန္းခ့ဲသူ ပုဂၢဳိလ္ထူးျဖစ္သည္” ဟု ဆုိသည္။
အျငိမ္းစားယူျပီးေနာက္ ခ်င္းမုိင္ျမိဳ႕ျပင္ရိွအိမ္တြင္ ေနထုိင္စဥ္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းအတန္ၾကာက ရခ့ဲေသာ ေရႊႀတိဂံေဒသ အဆက္အသြယ္မ်ားကုိ အသုံးျပဳျပီး အေမရိကန္မူးယစ္တုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးအဖဲြ႔အတြက္ အလုပ္လုပ္ေပးခ့ဲသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။
Mr. Bill Young သည္ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ ေမြးဖြားခ့ဲျပီး ေတာင္ေပၚတုိင္းရင္းသား ေက်းရြာမ်ားတြင္ ႀကီးျပင္းခ့ဲသည္။ အနည္းဆုံး ေဒသခံစကား ၅ မ်ဳိး အသုံးျပဳခ့ဲသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။ ထုိေဒသမွ ရခ့ဲေသာ အဆက္အသြယ္မ်ားက ေနာက္ပုိင္း သူက်င္လည္ရာ အႏၱရာယ္ႀကီးေသာ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ အသုံးတည့္ခ့ဲသည္။
အဘုိးျဖစ္သူသည္ သာသနာျပဳတဦးျဖစ္ျပီး ၁၉ ရာစုႏွစ္က ျမန္မာျပည္ရိွ လားဟူ တုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ားကုိ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ၀င္မ်ားျဖစ္ေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ့ဲသူျဖစ္သည္။
ဖခင္ကလည္း သာသနာျပဳတဦးျဖစ္သည္၊ ထုိ႔ျပင္ ေမာ္စီတုန္း အာဏာရအၿပီး တရုတ္ႏုိင္ငံ ေတာင္ပုိင္းတြင္ CIA ၏ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကုိ လုပ္ကုိင္ခ့ဲသည္။
ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူေၾကာင့္ သူလည္း CIA တြင္ ၀န္ထမ္းတဦး ျဖစ္လာသည္။ သူ အကြ်မ္းတ၀င္ ရိွခ့ဲသည့္ လားဟူတုိ႔သည္ ထုိင္း ႏွင့္ ေလာႏုိင္ငံတုိ႔တြင္လည္း ပ်ံ႕ႏွံ႔ ေနထုိင္လ်က္ ရိွရာ CIA တြင္ တာ၀န္ယူျပီးေနာက္ ေလာႏုိင္ငံရိွ လားဟူသူပုန္မ်ားထံသုိ႔ ေရာက္သြားသည္။ ဗီယက္နမ္စစ္ပဲြအတြင္း ကြန္ျမဴနစ္တုိ႔၏ ေထာက္ပံ့ေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းကုိ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ေပးေရးကုိ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ့ဲသည္။
တုိင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားတြင္ သက္စြန္႔ဆံဖ်ား က်င္လည္စဥ္ “လုပ္ငန္းသေဘာအရ လူေတြ သတ္ရတယ္” ဟု သူက The First Post မွ သတင္းစာဆရာကုိ ေျပာျပခ့ဲဖူးသည္။
အင္တာနက္စာမ်က္ႏွာမ်ားတြင္ ေတြ႔ရေသာ သူ၏ ငယ္ဘ၀ အျဖဴအမည္း ပုံမွာ ေလာနုိင္ငံတြင္ လႈပ္ရွားစဥ္က ျဖစ္သည္။ ခ်င္းမုိင္ရိွေနအိမ္တြင္ ထုိပုံကုိ သတင္းသမားတဦးက ဓာတ္ပုံရုိက္ကူးခ့ဲသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။
ယမန္ေန႔က ခ်င္းမုိင္ရိွ လားဟူတုိ႔၏ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းတခုတြင္ သူ႔အတြက္ ၀တ္ျပဳဆုေတာင္းပဲြ ျပဳလုပ္ၾကသည္။
ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔တြင္ သူ႔ကုိ ခ်င္းမုိင္တြင္ သၿဂိဳၤဟ္မည္။ သူ႔အဆက္အသြယ္ တုိင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးမ်ားလည္း သူ၏ ေနာက္ဆုံးခရီးကုိ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ဖြယ္ ရိွသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
သူ၏ ဘ၀ဇာတ္လမ္းကုိ ရုပ္ရွင္ရုိက္ရန္ ေဟာလိ၀ုဒ္မွ ကုမၸဏီတခုက သူ႔ကုိ ေဒၚလာ တသိန္း ေပးအပ္ခ့ဲသည္။ သူ႔အေၾကာင္း ရုိက္ကူးသည့္ဇာတ္ကား ပိတ္ကားထက္မေရာက္မီ သူ ကြယ္လြန္သြားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Burma's New Govt Fails to Inspire
By KO HTWE Sunday, May 1, 2011
 |
| Rangoon's taxi drivers read a newspaper featuring a picture of newly-sworn in president Thein Sein. (Photo: Getty Images) |
Burma's new “Union Government” may have been sworn in on Wednesday, but several leading members of opposition parties and ethnic armed groups are dubious that the civilian administration will provide the peace and democracy that the people of Burma seek.
In President Thein Sein's inaugural address to parliament on Wednesday, he urged all MPs “to cherish and protect at risk to life the constitution and the democratic nation to be built in line with the constitution.”
He also called on the entire nation to help build the Tatmadaw [Burma's army] into “a strong, efficient, modern and patriotic army.”
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Friday, 25 March 2011
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