Foreign Secretary: "Flawed election in Burma does not represent progress"

04 November 2010

"The British Government will stand by the people of Burma and will continue to maintain pressure on the regime until we see real progress on democracy, governance and human rights".

The first general election in Burma for more than 20 years takes place on Sunday 7 November. Speaking ahead of the election, Foreign Secretary William Hague said:

"We know the result of these elections is already a foregone conclusion. They will not be free, fair or inclusive. More than 2,100 political prisoners  remain incarcerated, opposition and ethnic parties have been refused the right to stand and a quarter of the seats are already reserved for the military.

“Holding flawed elections does not represent progress. For the people of Burma, it will mean the return to power of a brutal regime that has pillaged the nation’s resources and overseen widespread human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, rape and torture.

“The British Government will stand by the people of Burma and will continue to maintain pressure on the regime until we see real progress on democracy, governance and human rights.”

How democratic will Burma's election be?

Seeing first-hand the difficulties of opposition campaigning in Burma

By Sue Lloyd-Roberts BBC Newsnight, Burma

The people of Burma go to the polls this weekend for the first time in 20 years.
In 1990, an overwhelming majority voted for Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD). The generals ignored the result and have imposed strict military rule ever since.

BURMA ELECTION: PARTIES Union Solidarity and Development Party: Junta-linked party contesting all seats - about 1,160 National Unity Party: Junta-linked party contesting 999 seats National Democratic Force: Pro-democracy party contesting 163 seats Shan Nationalities Democratic Party: Largest of the ethnic parties, contesting 157 seats Burma election: Q&A Burma election: The parties David v Goliath in Rangoon

Three years ago crowds led by monks came out on to the streets to protest against arbitrary price rises and ongoing military rule, but this so-called Saffron Revolution was put down brutally by the army.
So why are the generals holding elections and what do they hope to achieve?
Journalists are not being allowed into Burma to cover the elections but I entered the country illegally as a tourist and did my best to find out.
Diplomats and Burma-watchers say that the generals are trying to get their critics off their backs.
Historically, the junta has shown indifference to complaints about their behaviour by the United Nations, the United States and the European Union.
But now the complaints are coming from closer to home, from allies and trading partners in the regional grouping Asean - more so in the wake of the 2007 protests.
Veto power
The generals reluctantly agreed a roadmap towards what they call a "disciplined democracy". A new constitution was passed in 2008 to pave the way for elections junta-style.

General Than Shwe has been under pressure from Asean allies

The constitution reserves more than 100 seats for the army in the 450-seat lower parliament.
Dozens of senior officers have recently "retired" to stand for the government-approved Union Solidarity and Development Party - by far the strongest party.
The combined force of these two groups will likely mean that they have an effective veto over legislation.
It is because of the constitution that Ms Suu Kyi's party, the NLD, is calling for an election boycott.
She is still under house arrest, but I met her spokesman U Win Tin, who was himself only recently released from a 19-year prison sentence, and he explained the boycott call.
"This election is like a feast which is poisoned, we cannot join the feast because poisoned fruits are served. It is just to prolong military rule. Only by boycotting the elections can we put pressure on the military rulers."
Boycott call
But not all members of the opposition agree. One afternoon in Rangoon, I found myself taking afternoon tea in an elegant drawing room with three ladies in their 60s, all contemporaries of Ms Suu Kyi. They are all standing as candidates in these elections for the Democratic Party.

Aung San Suu Kyi friends and allies explain why they are contesting election

So why are they betraying their old friend? The youngest of the three, Nay Ye Ba Swe, explained that the elections are at least a step towards parliamentary democracy.
"If people like us don't participate", she said, "then the generals and their cronies will just stay in power for another 100 years."
Sitting beside her, Cho Cho Kyaw Nein added, "Suu Kyi is like a sister to us. I am sure she understands."
Funding issues
As we chatted about the rigours of campaigning, sipping tea in white porcelain cups, you could be forgiven for thinking that these Three Princesses, which is what people call them, are simply playing at politics.
That would be far from the truth. They have all been imprisoned for their pro-democracy activities.

Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party are boycotting the poll

None of the opposition candidates are getting government funding for their campaigns. The Three Princesses had to sell jewellery to fund the printing of pamphlets and transport costs.
Another candidate, Dr Phone Win, who is standing as an independent candidate, is using his savings. He told me that the government party, the Big Party as people call it, are intimidating voters.
"Some voters", he said, "have been warned that they will lose their homes if they don't vote for the Big Party or that they will lose their shops in the market".
Special permission and one week's warning are demanded for a meeting of more than five people.
And the election campaign has coincided with the rainy season. The streets of Rangoon were impassable for hours every day that I was there.
But to hire a government approved building can cost hundreds of dollars per hour, a luxury only affordable for the Big Party.
"In Burma, we cannot expect a free and fair election," was an understatement from a weary looking Dr Win.
Rare satire
It is hard to cover an election in a country where, if you are found working as a journalist, you are likely to be arrested and deported. This has happened to me before in Burma and I tried to avoid it happening again.

The regime just included what they wanted in the constitution, and the election is now just to legalise that constitution Burmese monk and Saffron Revolution leader

Foreigners, especially those carrying cameras, are watched by plain clothes agents wherever they go. People are wary of talking about politics to strangers in public.
So it was a refreshing change to come across in Mandalay a satirical cabaret performed by the "Two Moustaches" which lambasts and ridicules the generals.
In their hour-long show, Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw offer typical Burmese folklore dance and song with scathing asides on the junta, accusing them of nepotism, cronyism, dealing in drugs and murder.
No wonder the two of them have been in and out of prison like yo-yos. Today they are only allowed to perform to tourists in English.
So what do they think of the elections?
"It is just old wine being poured into new bottles," said Law Zaw, laughing, "Johnny Walker, Ballantines, they're just changing the bottles."

This Suu Kyi supporter says he will not vote

And will he vote? "No. We voted for the one we want, Aung San Suu Kyi, 20 years ago. That is enough. What is the point of voting again? We love her."
It is an opinion you hear a lot in Burma. People voted for the leader and the party in the last elections and they were ignored and so, they argue, what is the point of voting again in these elections, junta-style?
I spoke to one senior monk who was a leader in the Saffron Revolution and is now in hiding in a monastery near Mandalay.
Talking in one of the monks' dormitories where no-one would see us, he said the tightly controlled polls will give the junta the result they want.
"This election should give us democracy. But it won't," he said.
"The regime just included what they wanted in the constitution, and the election is now just to legalise that constitution."

The UK does not recognise the elections in Burma as being legitimate

03 November 2010

Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne discussed the elections in Burma on Channel News Asia on 2 November.

Speaker:

Minister for Human Rights Jeremy Browne

Female Interviewer:  So let me ask you firstly what is the British Government’s position for the upcoming Myanmar elections?

Jeremy Browne:  Well we don’t recognise the elections as being legitimate. There are over two thousand political prisoners in Burma; people who would wish to stand for election are not able to do so, so it is not an accurate reflection of the view of the people of Burma, and for that reason we don’t think the elections are a legitimate process.

Interviewer:  Do you not think though that this is a step in the right direction by the military rulers?

JB:  Well I think you either have a proper set of elections or you don’t have a proper set of elections and we’ve looked at these elections and we don’t regard them as a proper set of elections. I mean what are the purpose of elections? They are to express the, the views of the population of that country and to have a parliament, a government, that reflects the views of the people who voted in that country.
 
Now if you have a distorted process at the beginning, you have restrictions on who can be candidates, you have more than two thousand people in prison for their political beliefs, then you’re not able to get an outcome that is an accurate reflection of popular sentiment.

Interviewer:  So would you support then, obviously some party to be NLD obviously Aung San Suu Kyi’s party are, are, well they’re, they’re being sensitive about it, they’re suggesting a boycott. Would you, does the Government support a boycott?

Germany sides with China against UN Burma inquiry

Thursday, 04 November 2010 21:32 Thomas Maung Shwe

 

Angela_Merkel_Kevin

The government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (above) has stipulated it will opt out of a call for a UN commission of inquiry into rights abuses and war crimes in Burma. Activists had hoped it would support the motion, as the country was next year likely to win a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Photo: N. Aleph, Creative Commons (2008)

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The German Foreign Ministry has informed Mizzima that at this time it does not support the proposed UN commission of inquiry to investigate war crimes and human rights violations in Burma.

In an e-mailed response to Mizzima’s questions regarding Germany’s stance on the proposal, German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Theresa Schoenfeld told Mizzima that “to ensure that this new initiative [the inquiry] is successful and has positive consequences, it is important to continue to monitor the situation and crucial to find some co-operation mechanism with the [Burmese] national authorities.”

The reluctance of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition government to support the UN inquiry comes amid reports by The Washington Post that China had waged a “high-octane diplomatic campaign” over the past two months to convince Asian and European nations to oppose the creation of a commission of inquiry.

The Post reported that just days after the mid-August announcement the United States supported the creation of such an inquiry, Chinese UN ambassador Li Baodong “paid a confidential visit” to Vijay Nambiar, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff and the UN special envoy to Burma, to voice Beijing’s strong opposition to any inquiry.

According to Post writer Colum Lynch, three separate UN sources privy to the details of the meeting said that Baodong told Nambiar the proposed Burma inquiry was “dangerous and counterproductive, and should not be allowed to proceed”.

The Great Escape From Burma Using Elephants

Films tell story of WWII elephant rescue in Burma

 
AP – In this photo released by Cambridge University captured from a film shot at an unknown location in 1942 … 

 

By SYLVIA HUI, Associated Press Sylvia Hui, Associated Press – Mon Nov 1, 6:53 pm ET

LONDON – British tea planter Gyles Mackrell organized one of the most remarkable rescue missions during World War II — by using elephants when nothing else would do.

Now researchers have released new information that tells, for the first time, the full story of Mackrell's successful effort to use the animals to evacuate hundreds of desperate Burmese refugees stranded by a rain-swollen river. On Monday, Britain's Cambridge University put online a video shot by Mackrell, which together with his diaries and other documents brings to life a feat that with time had faded from public memory.

The material explains how Mackrell, who spent most of his life working as a planter for a tea company in British India, came to the aid of masses of people desperate to escape Burma as the Japanese army advanced. Through his work, he had access to elephants — the only safe way to cross the roiling Dapha river at the Indian border.

Tens of thousands of the refugees — many sick and starving — had trekked for hundreds of miles through dense jungle in the hope of reaching the Indian border. But by May 1942, those who made it to the border were trapped by monsoons that had turned the Dapha into a torrent.

Mackrell's diaries show that he collected some elephants to travel to the river soon after receiving a call for help from a group of refugees on June 4, 1942. His party rode the elephants for about 100 miles (160 kilometers) before finally reaching the river bank — only to find themselves helpless as they saw that fierce flood waters had trapping Burmese soldiers on river islands.

"On reaching the bank on a big tusker I discovered a number of men on an island surrounded by high and very fierce water," Mackrell, aged 53 at the time, wrote in his diary. "They signaled wildly and made signs to show us they were starving. I made several attempts to get over but it was utterly impossible."

The video shows Mackrell's elephants flailing against the power of the river, up to their eyes in water and struggling to move forward.

Mackrell and his men were about to give up when, the next morning, the waters retreated briefly and he saw an opportunity for his elephants to transport the men to safety.

"Rungdot, a Kampti elephant was the first to be ready and ... by 7 a.m. he was back in camp with the first three refugees," he wrote on June 10, 1942. "The others came in a few at a time and by midday we had the whole 68."

The 2010 Padoh Mahn Sha Young Leader Award Launched

 

The Phan Foundation is pleased to announce the 2010 Padoh Mahn Sha Young Leader Award.

 

Each year the Padoh Mahn Sha Young Leader Award will be granted to a young Karen person who has shown outstanding leadership and dedication in areas such as fighting poverty, promoting education, promoting development, and preserving Karen culture.

 

An award of $2000 will be given to the organisation or community for whom that person works. The winner of the award will be announced by the end of January 2011.

 

Any Karen person under 35 is eligible to be nominated. That person can be living anywhere in the world.

 

Nominations close on 31^st December 2010. Nominations can be made by any individual or organisation. Organisations can nominate one of their own members.

 

“Our father always encouraged young people to become active in helping their people,” said Zoya Phan, Director of the Phan Foundation and daughter of Padoh Mahn Sha. “This award is a good way to pay tribute to him, to carry on his work, and to encourage the next generation of activists.”

 

More information on the award is available at www.phanfoundation.org

To arrange an interview, please call Zoya Phan on 44(0)7738630139.

 

ABOUT THE PHAN FOUNDATION

The Phan Foundation was founded by the four children of Padoh Mahn Sha, the General Secretary of the Karen National Union, and Nant Kyin Shwe, in their memory. On 14^th February 2008 Padoh Mahn Sha was assassinated by agents of Burma’s military dictatorship.

 

The Foundation aims to fight poverty, to promote human rights and to provide education for Karen people from Burma, who have suffered decades of oppression. It also aims to protect and promote the culture of the Karen, a culture which is being systematically destroyed as part of the Burmese regime's policy of ethnic cleansing. In meeting its objectives, the Foundation will, in particular, focus on young people, encouraging and supporting a new generation of grassroots activists who will work to help their people.

 

Details on nominating available at:

http://www.phanfoundation.org/index.php/burma/our-work/nominations-for-the-2010-young-leader-award

ငါးစီးရွင္ေက်ာက္ဆည္၏ ကာခ်င္း(သေရာ္စာ)

by ျမန္မာ့ အေရး on Monday, 01 November 2010 at 11:19

by Hninyee Thaung on Sunday, October 31, 2010 at 3:06pm


(နိဒါန္း)

ကၽြႏ္ုပ္ကို လူထုက ဘုရင္ရူး၊ မင္းၾတားရူး၊ မယားေၾကာက္ရူး၊ အာဏာရူး၊ ယၾတာရူး။ ပါ၀ါရူး၊ ဥစၥရူး စသျဖင့္ အရူးပေဒသာဘဲြ႕ကို ေပးအပ္ထားရံုသာမက ေပါတာႀကီး၊ ျမံဳစိစိနဲ႕ ထံုေပေပႀကီး လူရမ္းကားႀကီး စသျဖင့္ လည္း ေထာပနာျပဳၾကေပသည္။ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္သည္ စစ္တိုက္ဖုိ႕နဲ႕ လႊတ္မိုက္ဖို႕ပဲ သိသူအျဖစ္ ထင္ရွားလင့္ကစား ကၽြႏု္ပ္၏ ရင္တြင္း၀ယ္ အႏုပညာစိတ္လည္း ကိန္းေအာင္းေနေပသည္တမံု႕။ အားလပ္ခ်ိန္မ်ားတြင္ ဂိမ္းကစားျခင္း၊ ၾကြက္ႏွင့္ေၾကာင္ ကာတြန္းကားကို တရႈိက္မက္မက္ၾကည့္ရႈအားေပးျခင္းသာမက ရံဖန္ရံခါ ေတးသီခ်င္း ေရးစပ္ ျခင္း စာကဗ်ာေရးစပ္ျခင္းကုိလည္း ၀ါသနာထံုေၾကာင္းကိုကား သိသူ အလြန္နည္းေပသည္။

ကၽြႏု္ပ္သည္ မၾကာေတာ့ေသာ အခ်ိန္ကာလတြင္ ဘ၀ေန၀င္ခ်ိန္ေရာက္ရွိေတာ့မည့္အျဖစ္ကို ကစင့္ကလ်ား သတိျပဳမိျခင္းႏွင့္အတူ မင္းၾတားႀကီး အျဖစ္မွ မၾကာမီ သုိးေဆာင္းစကားျဖင့္ (ရီတိုင္းယာ)ေခၚ အနားယူ  အႏိုင္ပိုင္းေတာ့မည္ဟု ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ထားျပီး ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

အလ်ဥ္းသင့္၍ ေဖၚျပရလွ်င္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္ ဤေလာကမွ အနားယူသင့္ျပီမွန္ေသာ္လည္း ကၽြႏု္ပ္ျဖစ္ခ်င္ေသာ အရာတခုက ရွိေနေပသည္။ ယင္းမွာ ကၽြႏု္ပ္သည္ ဆင္ျဖဴငါးစီးကို ပိုင္ဆိုင္ထားလင့္ကစား ဆင္ျဖဴေျခာက္စီး သာ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ခဲ့ေသာ္ ေရွးေရွး မင္းတို႕ ထက္သာလြန္ေအာင္ ေျခာက္စီးရွင္ မင္းၾတားႀကီး ဟု သမုတ္ေခၚေ၀ၚခံလိုခ်င္းျဖစ္ ေပသည္။ ပမာျပရေသာ္ အကယ္ဒမီ ငါးဆုရထားသူက ၆ ဆုရယူလိုသည့္ဆႏၵကဲ့သို႕သာတည္း။ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္ကို အမ်ား က “ေျခာက္စီးရွင္ မင္းၾတားႀကီး” “ေျခာက္စီးရွင္ မင္းၾတားႀကီး” ဟု ေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ေသာ္ မည္မွ် နား၀င္ခ်ဳိေပမည္နည္း။ မည္မွ် နားအရသာရွိေပမည္နည္းဟု “ေျခာက္စီးရွင္ မင္းၾတားႀကီး” ဘ၀ကို ျဖစ္လိုသည့္ အာသီသ ရွိေၾကာင္းကို  ၀န္ခံလိုေပသည္။ (စကားခ်ပ္)

Burma Ranked The Second Most Corrupt Country In The World

October 26, 2010

 

by JJ Sutherland

Transparency International

Corruption seems endemic. It follows war and chaos like an unwelcome cousin. Transparency International has just released its annual report ranking corruption across the world.

At the bottom of the list, the most corrupt, are countries hit by warfare and strife, unsurprisingly. Somalia is the worst, followed by Burma, then Afghanistan and Iraq. The least corrupt countires are Denmark, New Zealand, and Singapore, unchanged from last year.

In a press release, the organization said, “Notable among decliners are some of the countries most affected by a financial crisis precipitated by transparency and integrity deficits.”  Greece fell from 71 to 78 and Italy from 63 to 67. The US also fell, from the 19th spot to the 22nd. From Reuters:

Nancy Boswell, president of TI in the United States, said lending practices in the subprime crisis, the disclosure of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme and rows over political funding had all rattled public faith about prevailing ethics in America.
"We're not talking about corruption in the sense of breaking the law," she said. "We're talking about a sense that the system is corrupted by these practices. There's an integrity deficit."
Various financial scandals at state and city level had encouraged the impression that the regulatory oversight was weak and that influence could be bought, she added.

Corruption is something that just becomes ingrained in a society and once it's there it's hard to stop. It becomes a habit of mind, a sense that this is simply how things done. An official pamphlet given to Iraqi refugees who are heading to the States advises them not to bribe police officers. After working in Iraq for years I came home from one trip and had to go to the DMV. I'm waiting in line, as one does, and all I can think is, "Who can I bribe to make this go away?" To address corruption you have to change a society's whole way of thinking about what the cultural norms are, which is not easy, to say the least.