The Guardian - Desmond Tutu: my tribute to Burma's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi
In the week when Amnesty International awarded Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi its highest accolade, Ambassador of Conscience, a fellow Nobel laureate pays tribute
This article was written in response to a feature about Aung San Suu Kyi by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark which was published on 11 November 2008
Desmond Tutu
The Guardian, Thursday 30 July 2009
I think of my sister Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi every day. Her picture hangs on the wall of my office, reminding me that, thousands of miles away in Asia, a nation is oppressed. Every day I ask myself: have I done everything I can try to end the atrocities being committed in Burma? And I pray that world leaders will ask themselves the same question. For if they did, the answer would be "no", and perhaps their conscience will finally force them to act.
Humankind has the ability to live in freedom and in peace. We have seen that goodness has triumphed over evil; we have witnessed political transitions in South Africa, and elsewhere, evidencing that we live in a moral universe. Our world is sometimes lacking wise and good leadership or, as in the case of Burma, the leadership is forbidden to lead.
Aung San Suu Kyi has now been detained for more than 13 years. She recently passed her 5,000th day in detention. Every one of those days is a tragedy and a lost opportunity. The whole world, not just the people of Burma, suffers from this loss. We desperately need the kind of moral and principled leadership that Aung San Suu Kyi would provide. And when you add the more than 2,100 political prisoners who are also in Burma's jails, and the thousands more jailed in recent decades, the true scale of injustice, but also of lost potential, becomes heartbreakingly clear.
Like many leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi has had to make great personal sacrifices. It is cruel enough to deprive an innocent person of her freedom. Burma's generals are crueller still. They try to use her as leverage to make her submit to their will. They refused to allow her husband to visit one last time when he was dying of cancer. She has grandchildren she has never even met. Yet her will and determination have stayed strong despite her being kept in detention for so many years.
More than anything, the new trial and detention of Aung San Suu Kyi speaks volumes about her effectiveness as a leader. The only reason the generals need to silence her clarion call for freedom is because they fear her and the principles she stands for. She is the greatest threat to their continuing rule.
The universal demand for human freedom cannot be suppressed forever. This is a universal truth that Than Shwe, the dictator of Burma, has failed to understand. How frustrated must he be that no matter how long he keeps Aung San Suu Kyi in detention, no matter how many guns he buys, and no matter how many people he imprisons, Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma will not submit. The demands for the freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners of Burma grow louder and echo around the world, reaching even his new capital hidden in central Burma. Words, however, are not enough. Freedom is never given freely by those who have power; it has to be fought for.
The continuing detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's other political prisoners is a crime and an indictment of an international community that often substitutes the issuance of repeated statements of concern for effective diplomacy. The UN treats the situation in Burma as if it is just a dispute between two sides, and they must mediate to find a middle ground. The reality is that a brutal, criminal and illegal dictatorship is trying, and failing, to crush those who want freedom and justice. The international community cannot be neutral in the face of evil. That evil must be called what it is, and confronted.
Change is overdue to the framework within which the international community approaches Burma. Twenty years of trying to persuade Burma's generals to reform has not secured any improvement. Forty visits by UN envoys have failed to elicit any change. The warm embrace of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) did not improve the behaviour of the regime towards Burma's citizens whether Christian, Buddhist or Muslim. The regime rules with an iron fist and those under its rule have suffered long enough.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters have time and again offered to dialogue with the regime. They offered a path of reconciliation and non-violent transition. Even as Aung San Suu Kyi stood before the regime's sham court, facing five years' imprisonment, we heard her voice loud and strong. She said: "There could be many opportunities for national reconciliation if all parties so wished."
Burma's generals must now face the consequences of their actions. The detention of Aung San Suu Kyi is as clear a signal as we could get that there will be no chance of reform and that the regime's "road map to democracy", including the call for elections, in 2010, is an obstacle to justice.
A new report from Harvard Law School, Crimes in Burma, commissioned by some of the most respected jurists in international law, has used the UN's own reports to highlight how Burma's generals have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Burma's generals are criminals, and must be treated as such. Than Shwe should be held accountable for abominable atrocities: his soldiers rape ethnic women and children, they torture, mutilate and murder at will. In eastern Burma, more than 3,300 ethnic villages have been destroyed, more than in Darfur. Civilians are deliberately targeted and shot on sight.
Than Shwe spurned the compassion of those willing to provide assistance following Cyclone Nargis. Instead, he conducted a referendum and he declared his undemocratic constitution the victor while victims perished from the cyclone's devastation. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity. Than Shwe and the rest of the generals cannot be allowed to go unpunished. The UN must establish a commission of inquiry, with a view to compiling evidence for prosecution. Failure to do so amounts to complicity with these crimes.
An international arms embargo must also be imposed immediately. Those countries supplying arms to Burma are facilitating these atrocities. Countries across the world must declare their support for a global arms embargo, making it impossible for China to resist such a move at the Security Council.
Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma deserve nothing less than our most strenuous efforts to help them secure their freedom. Every day we must ask ourselves: have we done everything that we can? I pledge that I will not rest until Aung San Suu Kyi, and all the people of Burma, are free. Please join me.
Desmond M Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and recipient of the Nobel peace prize
The Guardian - Desmond Tutu: my tribute to Burma's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi
US presses Myanmar on NKorea, Suu Kyi at rare talks
US officials urged Myanmar to obey UN sanctions on North Korea and to review its treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi in a rare meeting between the two countries, a US official said on Thursday.
The talks happened late on Wednesday on the eve of Asia’s biggest security conference in the Thai resort island of Phuket, which US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is attending, a senior State Department official said.
Clinton did not attend the meeting with the representatives from the reclusive, junta-ruled nation. The State Department said the US officials urged Myanmar to implement the terms of UN Security Council resolution 1874, which imposed sanctions on North Korea over its recent missile and nuclear tests.
Clinton had raised concerns earlier on Wednesday over the possible transfer of nuclear technology from Kim Jong-Il’s communist regime to military-ruled Myanmar.
The US officials also “noted that the outcome of the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi would affect our willingness and ability to take positive steps in our bilateral relationship.”
Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is currently on trial for breaching the terms of her house arrest after an incident in which an American man swam uninvited to her lakeside house in Yangon in May.
She faces up to five years in jail and is being held in the city’s notorious Insein prison.
Clinton said on Wednesday that if Myanmar frees Aung San Suu Kyi “that would open up opportunities at least for my country to expand our relationship with Burma, including investments in Burma,” she said, referring to Myanmar by its former name.
Japanese officials said that Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win had pledged that his country would oblige by the UN sanctions on North Korea when he met his Japanese counterpart Hirofumi Nakasone on Wednesday.
“The Myanmar foreign minister mentioned very clearly that Myanmar is a member of the United Nations, Myanmar also is obliged to fully comply with any UN Security council resolutions, including 1874,” said Kazuo Kodama, the Japanese minister’s press secretary. “That is I think a very reassuring message from the Myanmar foreign minister,” Kodama said.
လက္ဗလာထက္ ဦးေႏွာက္ဗလာက ပုိၿပီးရွက္ဖုိ႔ေကာင္းတယ္ [Forum ဂ်ာနယ္]
Posted by ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဒီမိုကရက္တစ္အင္အားစု On July - 16 - 2009
ကုလအတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္းေတာ့ ျပန္ၿပီး။
‘လက္ဗလာႏွင့္ ျပန္သြားရၿပီး’လုိ႔ မွတ္ခ်က္ေပးသူေတြ မ်ားပါတယ္။ သူ႔ခရီးစဥ္ကုိ အားမလိုအားမရ အေတာ္ပဲျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္။ အားမလိုအားမရ ျဖစ္သူမ်ားကုိလည္း အဆုိးမဆုိသာဘူး။
ဘာေၾကာင့္ဆုိ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ေထာက္ျပတဲ့ အခ်က္ (၃)ခ်က္၊ ေျပာရရင္ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးခ်င္တဲ့ မစ္ရွင္ (၃)ခု။
လက္ေတြ႔မွာ ဘာဆုိဘာမွ မရခဲ့ဘူး ျဖစ္ခဲ့ေပတာကုိး။
ၾကည့္ဦးေလ -
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးကုိ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ ေနေနသာသာ ေတြ႔ခြင့္အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္ေတာင္းတာေတာင္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊရဲ႕ ေခါင္းအခါကုိ ခံခဲ့ရတာပါ။
၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏုိင္ရပါတီမ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ခြင့္ေပးေတာ့လည္း ၾကည့္ဦး။
တပါတီစီက တင္ျပခြင့္ (၂) မိနစ္စီတဲ့။
အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က လံုး၀မသင့္ေလ်ာ္ေၾကာင္း၊ သီးျခားေတြ႔ဖုိ႔လုိေၾကာင္း ေထာက္ျပမွ အိပ္ခန္းမွာ (၁၀)မိနစ္ ထပ္ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရခဲ့တယ္။
ဒီလုိ အႏုိင္ရပါတီႀကီးေတြကုိ (၂)မိနစ္စီပဲ စကားေျပာခြင့္ေပးတာက ဒီမစ္ရွင္ (၃)ရပ္ကုိ ကုိင္လာတဲ့ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ရဲ႕ အစီအမံလုိ႔ က်ေနာ္လံုး၀မယူဆဘူး။ ဒါဟာ ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊရဲ႕ အစီအမံသက္သက္မွ်သာ ျဖစ္တယ္။
ဒါေပမယ့္ ဒါကုိ သူ ျငင္းခြင့္မရိွခဲ့ဘူး။ မျငင္းႏုိင္ခဲ့ဘူး။
အပစ္ရပ္အင္အားစုေတြႏွင့္ ေတြ႔မယ္ဆိုျပန္ေတာ့လည္း လက္ညွိဳးေထာင္၊ ေခါင္းညိမ့္အဖြဲ႔ေတြ၊ အားမတန္လုိ႔ မာန္ခ်ထားရတဲ့ သူေတြ၊ ယံုလုိ႔ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ပေယာဂ တစံုတရာေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္ေစ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအေပၚ ပေဒသာပင္ေပါက္သလုိ ေျပာဆုိ၀ံ့သူေတြႏွင့္ပဲ ေရြးၿပီး ေတြ႔ခြင့္ျပဳခဲ့သည္။
ဒါဟာ …
ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊရဲ႕ ဇယားေတြပါ။ ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊ ေရႊ႕ခ်င္သလုိ ေရႊ႕ထားတဲ့ အကြက္ေတြျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒါကုိ ကမၻာပတ္ေနတဲ့ နားႀကီး မ်က္စိႀကီး အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးက မသိ ဘယ္မွာရိွပါ့မလဲ။
မုခ် သိပါတယ္။ ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာကုိ သိပါတယ္။
သိလုိ႔လည္း သံအမွတ္ေတြ၊ မီဒီယာသမားေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုတဲ့ပြဲမွာ သူ ‘လူအ မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း’ တရား၀င္ အတိအလင္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆုိခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊတုိ႔ကေတာ့ ဒီခရီးစဥ္မွာ အပုိင္ခ်ည္လုိက္ႏုိင္ၿပီလုိ႔ ထင္ေကာင္းထင္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒါေပမယ့္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအလယ္မွာ၊ လူတေယာက္အလယ္မွာ ေခါင္းမာၿပီး ဦးေႏွာက္မဲ့သူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ဆင္ျခင္တံုတရား ေခါင္းပါးသူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သူကုိယ္တုိင္ လူသိရွင္ၾကား ၀န္ခံလုိက္သလုိ ျဖစ္သြားတာကုိေတာ့ မူလတန္းကေလးေတာင္ ရိပ္မိႏုိင္ေလာက္ပါတယ္။
မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္းက လက္ဗလာ ျဖစ္ေကာင္းျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊ ဦးေႏွာက္ဗလာျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိတာကုိေတာ့ ဒီခရီးစဥ္က ပုိၿပီးပိုၿပီး
ရွင္းသြားေစတယ္လုိ႔ မွတ္ခ်က္ခ်ခ်င္ပါတယ္။ ။ … [ Forum ဂ်ာနယ္ file ]
My opinion about this article-The Future of Burma Cannot Be Tied to Aung San Suu Kyi
We Burmese democracy activists do not think sanction is wrong . I believe lifting
sanction is supporting military junta. We know that people are suffering not because
of sanction only,but also very selfishness of military junta mainly.We do not want to hurt this columnist. We agree that everyone have different point of view.
We support Aung San Suu Kyi because she is the only Burmese leader trusted by people
of Burma and all ethnic nationalities.She believe in non- violent activities and democracy.
We support Aung San Suu Kyi because only she can bring national reconciliation together
among our ethnic nationalities.
In solidarity.
Phone Hlaing-FWUBC
Virginia M. MoncrieffInternational Correspondent
Posted: July 15, 2009 10:39 PM
That old chestnut question "name six people you would love to have to dinner" usually holds no surprises. The guest list from many liberal, forward-thinking (and may I also point out -- male) types will include Aung San Suu Kyi. She is regarded as the epitome of elegance and sacrifice. The pinup girl for human rights causes.
And she is amazing.
This seemingly serene and fragile presence, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, has mesmerized us with her martyrdom and noble sacrifice.
But what is all this sacrifice for? What has her house arrest achieved?
It has achieved for Daw Suu (or The Lady as she is known inside Burma) a sometimes self-defeating near-secular saint status. Her position as a figure head who has sacrificed so much has made any chance of sensible debate about Burma almost hopeless. The slightest hint of criticism of her actions brings howls of protest and accusations. (By writing this article I know I will be shouted down). Her selflessness and her symbolism have rendered her beyond and above public criticism among many in the pro-democracy movement and in the greater outside human rights movement.
This is self defeating. No matter how great her sacrifice, the future of one country cannot revolve around the actions and ideas of one person. What has happened to this extraordinary woman is of course criminal. But there are 48 million other Burmese people and they cannot continue to be held captive while the international community listens to, and complies with Daw Suu's policies of sanctions.
Daw Suu's strategy is fundamentally flawed. By maintaining that the regime must be isolated and that Burma must be the target of stringent sanctions only helps the junta reverse further into mad "behind-the-wall" strategies; she is penalizing the very people she aims to assist. Many pro-democracy activists (both inside and outside the country) who strongly support Daw Suu as a figurehead believe she is wrong about sanctions but such is her position, they often decline to say so publicly. And such is her status, that no one in a better and more practical position to try and negotiate Burma moving forward will take the reins from her.
The main battle cry of the National League of Democracy is the restitution of the 1990 election results, when they were overwhelmingly elected. That bird has flown. Nearly 20 years later it is time to come up with some other arguments, definitive strategies, a move towards the negotiation table. Saying "no" to every offer from the junta is simply daft. (Daw Suu's flat out refusal -- without wide consultation -- to refuse the junta's civilian parliament offer was completely mystifying. Her rejection of negotiating anything gets Burma precisely nowhere).
Everything about Daw Suu's cause is just, but some new fresh thinking must be found, some shirking off the old "absolutely no negotiation" policies.
As her sham subversion trial nears its end (in a pretense of due process, "closing arguments" will be heard on July 24) there are few who hold out hope for a not guilty decision for Daw Suu. It would be extraordinary if the junta did a volte-face and miraculously decided that she had no case to answer. We need to free Aung San Suu Kyi. But free or not, we must start talking about the other 48 million Burmese.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Burma
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/virginia-moncrieff/the-future-of-burma-canno_b_234757.html#comments
သမိုင္းစစ္စစ္မ်ား
>
Date: 2009/7/15
Subject: [Ye Yint Thet Zwe] သမိုင္းစစ္စစ္မ်ား
ညီမေလးေရ
သူရဲေကာင္းဆိုတာ
ဖန္ၿပြန္သေႏၶသားလို
ေမြးယူလို ့မရတာ အေသအႁခာ
ေခတ္ စနစ္ကေတာင္းဆိုမွသာ
လူထုထဲက ေပၚထြက္လာရတာ မဟုတ္လား ၊
ညီမေလးေရ
ရာဇ၀င္ေတြက
တလူးလူး တလိမ့္လိမ့္
တရိပ္ရိပ္နဲ ့ ေသြးဇာတ္လမ္းကို
ေပထက္အကၡရာတင္ခဲ့ႂက ၊
သမိုင္းစစ္စစ္ေတြက
လိမ္ညာမႈ အေရႁပားေတြကိုေဖါက္ထြက္
ေခတ္ေတြကို ေတာက္ပေစခဲ့ တယ္ ၊
ညီမေလးေရ
မတရားမႈေတြက
၀င္ကစြပ္ေကာင္ေတြလိုပဲ
အႏႈတ္အသိမ္းကလည္းႁမန္ႂက
(ေသြးရူးေသြးတမ္းနဲ ့ ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့အမိန္ ့မွတ္တမ္း)
ဥပေဒ အထက္မွာ ဘယ္သူမွ မရွိေစရတဲ့
ခုမ်ားေတာ့
ဆဲဗင္းဂၽဳလိုင္က စလိုက္တဲ့ အေရးေတာ္ပံုေတြ
ေသြး အလိမ္း လိမ္း လမ္းမမၽားထက္
လဲ ႃပိဳ ပိ ကၽ
မိုးေကာင္းတုန္း ရြာထားႂကေဟ့၊
ဒီလိုနဲ႔
ႄကိမ္းေမာင္း မာန္မဲ
တို႔အေရးလည္း ရင္ကြဲဟစ္ေအာ္
ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္ခုေကၽာ္ခဲ့
ေတာ္လွန္ေရးႄကီးလည္း အဓြန္႔ရွည္ခဲ့ႃပီပဲ ၊
ညီမေလးေရ
ဇူလိုင္လဟာ ငါတို႔ကို ဖမ္းစား
ဆရာႄကီး သခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မိွဴင္းရဲ႔
စကားတခြန္းသာ
ႏွလံုးသားမွာ ခြန္အားျဖစ္ေစခဲ့ၿပီ ။
“သမဂၢအုတ္မၽား
ႃပိဳေလရာ
ဒီမိုကေရစီအုတ္မၽားႁဖင့္
တည္ေဆာက္အံ့ ”
ရဲရင့္သက္ဇြဲ
Global Unions: G-8 Didn’t Do Enough to Address Economic Crises
- AFL-CIO NOW BLOG - http://blog.aflcio.org -
Global Unions: G-8 Didn’t Do Enough to Address Economic Crises
Posted By James Parks On July 13, 2009 @ 5:15 pm In Legislation & Politics | No Comments
The leaders of the world’s top economies failed to adequately address the three major economic crises facing the world—unemployment, climate change and development, according to leaders of unions around the globe who had [1] called on the G-8 summit last week in Italy to take strong action to stimulate the global economy.
Said John Evans, general secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee ([2] TUAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [3] OECD) :
There are no explicit commitments to making the necessary resources available for achieving employment and social protection goals, although the focus on the need to protect the tax base represents a welcome step in this direction.
Evans represented TUAC, the International Trade Union Confederation ([4] ITUC) and the [5] Global Union Federations at the summit.
On climate change, the G-8 countries for the first time committed to the objective of limiting the rise of the global temperature. But they failed to offer steps toward moving to a low-carbon economy in a manner that is fair to workers and communities dependent on producing carbon-based fuels.
With only five months to go before the United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, G-8 countries still have not stepped up and provided the necessary support to convince developing countries to reach an agreement. Read more about the role of global unions in climate change negotiations [6] here, [7] here, [8] here and [9] here.
Reaching a climate change agreement is crucial, global union leaders say, because developing nations say developed nations have all the “historic responsibility” for acting on climate change and they have none. Yet many of the developing countries, especially China, are some of the world’s top contributors to global warming.
In a speech June 23 to the OECD’s annual forum in Paris, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said failure by the world’s leaders to take strong action on the global economy could prolong the recession worldwide.
The truth is that we are still in uncharted water, and no one knows when the bottom of this recession will be found nor how vigorous the recovery will be. The depth and duration of the recession will be determined by how urgently governments can act together to promote recovery and build the foundation for a more sustainable, more fair and more environmentally responsible basis for global growth.
You can read Sweeney’s speech [10] here.
The world’s workers are looking now to the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September to push their proposals for global economic recovery and to ensure that workers’ views are represented in any final decisions. Sweeney adds:
Trade unions and the workers we represent have no confidence that this time governments and bankers alone will get it right. We are asking for a seat at the table.
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http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/07/13/global-unions-g-8-didnt-do-enough-to-address-economic-crises/
Shut out in Burma
Shut out in Burma
(Jul 13, 2009)
True to form, Burma's military dictator, General Than Shwe, showed only disdain when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited that tortured land (also known as Myanmar) 10 days ago. Than Shwe and the other four generals in the ruling junta denied Ban's requests for a democratic evolution.
To his credit, Ban spoke out afterward, asking, "How much longer can Burma afford to wait for national reconciliation, democratic transition and full respect for human rights?"
Now that he has experienced the junta leader's inflexibility firsthand, Ban must confront the question: What can the world body do to help liberate the people of Burma?
The narco-trafficking regime there has forced people into labour, used systematic rape as a weapon of war, and conducted brutal army offences that uprooted hundreds of thousands of people from minority ethnic groups.
Ban had the right idea. Upon arriving in Burma, he planned to ask for the release of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and 2,100 other political prisoners.
He would call for reconciliation with Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, landslide winners of Burma's last free election in 1990, a mandate the junta never honoured. Ban also wanted to foster humanitarian aid and economic development.
But after Than Shwe refused to cede to any of these requests, Ban got the message.
"Neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights," he told diplomats and aid agencies.
Ban is mistaken, however, if he thinks that proper monitoring will legitimize an election scheduled for 2010 -- an exercise rigged to perpetuate military rule with a civilian patina. Burmese democratic activist Win Tin has observed that the true barrier to democracy in Burma is not the mechanics of next year's balloting but the junta's "unjust constitution." That document bars Suu Kyi from participating, reserves 25 per cent of seats in parliament for the military, and practically guarantees the generals and their cronies an overwhelming majority
If Ban really wants to help the people of Burma, he should side with the 55 members of the U.S. Congress who recently signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him "to take the lead in establishing a United Nations Security Council Commission of Inquiry into the Burmese military regime's crimes against humanity and war crimes against its civilian population."
Such commissions were instituted for Rwanda and Darfur. Nothing less is needed if the UN, that would-be parliament of nations, is to fulfil its commitment to protect the peoples of the world from criminal rulers.
http://www.thespec.com/Opinions/article/598938
China opposes putting Myanmar question on UN Security Council agenda: diplomat
08:29, July 14, 2009
China is opposed to putting the Myanmar question on the UN Security Council agenda and is against isolating and sanctioning against the country, a senior Chinese diplomat said here on Monday, stressing the events that happened inside Myanmar were its internal affairs.
"We believe that the events happened inside Myanmar are the internal affairs of Myanmar itself, which should be handled by its own government and people in consultation," Liu Zhenmin, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, said at an open Security Council meeting on Myanmar.
The situation in Myanmar has not posed any threat to international or regional peace and security, Liu said.
"China has explicitly opposed the inclusion of the Myanmar question on the Security Council agenda. And we are against the policy of isolating and sanctioning against Myanmar," he told the 15-member Council. "That position of China has remained unchanged."
UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon briefed the Security Council at the meeting on his latest visit to the southeastern Asian country earlier this month, the second in just over a year.
Liu said China supports Ban and his special representative Ibrahim Gambari in their continued good offices on the issue.
"It is our sincere hope that the secretary-general's good offices will help Myanmar to achieve domestic stability and national reconciliation and that the United Nations will play a constructive role in helping Myanmar address its economic, social and humanitarian and human rights issues," said the ambassador.
He said that China has been and will be helping and facilitating the government of Myanmar and its efforts to address the problem in a responsible and constructive manner.
"As Myanmar's friendly neighbor, China will always provide assistance to the government and people of Myanmar within its capability," Liu said, calling on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other regional countries to join hands in helping Myanmar out of its current difficulties.
Source: Xinhua
http://english. people.com. cn/90001/ 90776/90883/ 6699703.html
UNSG’s Remarks on Myanmar to Diplomatic Missions, UN Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations
ျမန္မာဘာသာျပန္ကို အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာေနာက္တြင္ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈနိုင္ပါသည္
(ဘာသာျပန္၍ေမးပို ့ေပးေသာအန္ကယ္ဦးေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္အားေက်းဇူးအထူးတင္ရိွပါသည္)
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests and colleagues
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is my second visit to Myanmar in just over a year. Both visits have been at critical times for the country's future.
My first visit was in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. This devastating natural disaster, which took so many lives and created so much hardship, touched hearts across the globe. In Myanmar's moment of need, the world responded generously.
I want to personally thank everyone here today for your remarkable contributions to the relief and recovery effort.
You have saved lives, rejuvenated communities and made it possible for many thousands of people to reclaim their livelihoods. You have helped Myanmar to overcome adversity. It is important that this work continues.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I felt the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis deeply -- as a fellow Asian and as Secretary-General.
I am Asia's second Secretary-General. The first was Myanmar''s U Thant. I revere his memory. I also recall his wise words.
U Thant said: “The worth of the individual human being is the most unique and precious of all our assets and must be the beginning and end of all our efforts. Governments, systems, ideologies and institutions come and go, but humanity remains.”
This is why I have returned.
As Secretary-General, I attach the highest importance to helping the people of this country to achieve their legitimate aspirations.
The United Nations works for people – their rights, their well-being, their dignity. It is not an option. It is our responsibility.
I have come to show the unequivocal shared commitment of the United Nations to the people of Myanmar.
I am here today to say: Myanmar – you are not alone.
We want to work with you for a united, peaceful, prosperous, democratic and modern Myanmar.
We want to help you rise from poverty.
We want to work with you so your country can take its place as a respected and responsible member of the international community.
We want to help you achieve national reconciliation, durable peace and sustainable development.
But, let me emphasize: neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights.
Myanmar is no exception.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The challenges are many. But they are not insurmountable.
We know from experience that securing Myanmar's peaceful, democratic and prosperous future is a complex process.
None of Myanmar's challenges can be solved on their own. Peace, development and human rights are closely inter-related.
Failure to address them with equal attention will risk undermining the prospects for democracy, durable peace and prosperity.
However, we also know that where there is a genuine will for dialogue and reconciliation, all obstacles can be overcome.
The question today is this: how much longer can Myanmar afford to wait for national reconciliation, democratic transition and full respect for human rights?
The cost of delay will be counted in wasted lives, lost opportunities and prolonged isolation from the international community.
Let me be clear: all the people of Myanmar must work in the national interest.
I said this yesterday when I met with representatives of Myanmar's registered political parties and with those armed groups that have chosen to observe a cease-fire. I encouraged them respectively to honour their commitments to the democratic process and peace.
Nonetheless, the primary responsibility lies with the Government to move the country towards its stated goals of national reconciliation and democracy.
Failure to do so will prevent the people of Myanmar from realizing their full potential.
Failure to do so will deny the people of Myanmar their right to live in dignity and to pursue better standards of life in larger freedom.
These principles lie at the core of the United Nations Charter, whose opening words are “We the peoples”.
The founding Constitution of independent Myanmar echoes these noble words. We must work together to ensure that Myanmar's future embodies these principles too.
With this in mind, I bring three messages.
First, respect for human dignity is the precondition for peace and development everywhere.
Myanmar was one of the first United Nations Member States to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It subscribed early on to the consensus that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is indispensable to political, economic and social progress.
Unfortunately, that commitment has not been matched in deed. Myanmar's human rights record remains a matter of grave concern.
The Government has articulated its goals as stability, national reconciliation and democracy.
The upcoming election –the first in twenty years – must be inclusive, participatory and transparent if it is to be credible.
Myanmar's way forward must be rooted in respect for human rights
This is why I say that all political prisoners, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, should be released without delay.
When I met General Than Shwe yesterday and today, I asked to visit Ms. Suu Kyi. I am deeply disappointed that he refused.
I believe the government of Myanmar has lost a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of political openness.
Allowing a visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would have been an important symbol of the government's willingness to embark on the kind of meaningful engagement that will be essential if the elections in 2010 are to be seen as credible.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must be allowed to participate in the political process without further delay.
Indeed, all the citizens of Myanmar must be given the opportunity to contribute fully to the future of this country.
National reconciliation cannot be complete without the free and active participation of all who seek to contribute.
The country must embark on a process of genuine dialogue that includes all concerned parties, all ethnic groups and all minorities.
People must be free to debate and to engage in political dialogue, and they must have free access to the information that will help them participate meaningfully in the democratic process.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Any transition is difficult. Myanmar has already undergone transitions from sovereign kingdom, to occupied colony, and now independent State.
This history carries a twin legacy of armed conflict and political deadlock, including recent painful events: the repression of demonstrators in 1988, the cancellation of the 1990 election results, and the clampdown on peaceful dissent that continues to this day.
At the same time, there have been some positive efforts that should be recognized.
Although still fragile, the cease-fire agreements between the Government and armed groups have reduced the level of conflict. The United Nations has wide-ranging experience in making such gains irreversible.
Sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity are legitimate concerns for any government.
We contend that opening and broadening the political space is the best way to ensure that each group and each individual becomes part of the greater collective project.
The military, all political parties, ethnic minority groups, civil society, and indeed every son and daughter of Myanmar has a role to play in this country's transition.
Only mutual compromise, respect and understanding can lay the foundations for durable peace, national reconciliation and democracy.
My second message is on addressing the humanitarian needs of Myanmar's people.
I am glad I have been able to return to see the progress made in the Irrawaddy Delta. The loss of some 130,000 people was tragic, but the rebuilding I saw today was impressive.
The tragedy showed the resilience of the people of Myanmar. It also demonstrated that people throughout the world care deeply about Myanmar and its people.
Above all, the response to Cyclone Nargis proved the value of engagement over isolation.
The unprecedented cooperation between Myanmar, the United Nations and ASEAN through the Tripartite Core Group, with the support of the donor community, has demonstrated that humanitarian imperatives and the principles of sovereignty do not conflict.
Humanitarian assistance -- in Myanmar as elsewhere -- should never be held hostage to political considerations. We can and must work together to ensure access to humanitarian and development assistance to all those in Myanmar who need it.
This brings me to my third message. It is time for Myanmar to unleash its economic potential.
Myanmar sits in the middle of Asia's economic miracle. Harnessing Myanmar to the rapid advances taking place around it is the surest way to raise living standards.
I welcome the Government's policy of opening up to outside trade and investment, and its efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, control HIV, combat human trafficking and curtail opium production.
But the reality is that millions continue to live in poverty. Standards of living in Myanmar remain among the lowest in Asia.
The people of Myanmar need jobs, they need food security and they need access to health care.
We must work to ensure that the people of Myanmar can benefit from and contribute to the regional and global economy.
We must recognize that the region and the world have much to gain from a stable, prosperous and democratic Myanmar. We must work together for that goal.
The Government of Myanmar must seize the moment.
It must take advantage of the opportunities that the international community is prepared to offer to the people of Myanmar.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I came here as a friend.
My duty is to uphold the ideals and principles of the United Nations Charter.
My role is to encourage all of you – the Government, political parties, ethnic groups, civil society – to move forward together as one people and one nation.
Nothing is insurmountable or impossible when the people's interest is placed above divisions.
The region and the world are changing fast. Myanmar only stands to gain from engagement -- and from embarking on its own change.
The Government of Myanmar has repeatedly stated that cooperation with the United Nations is the cornerstone of the country's foreign policy.
We ask it to match deeds with words.
The more Myanmar works in partnership with the United Nations to respond to its people's needs and aspirations, the more it affirms its sovereignty.
Similarly it is incumbent on the international community as whole to work together to help Myanmar meet our shared goals: a united, peaceful, prosperous and democratic future, with full respect for the human rights of all the country's people.
Kyae zoo tin bar tae.
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ား၊ ဧည့္သည္ေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ေရာင္းရင္းမိတ္ေဆြမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ဒါဟာ တႏွစ္ေက်ာ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္လာေရာက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္စလုံး ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္မ်ားပင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပထမ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တဲ့အခ်ိန္ဟာ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္း၀င္ေရာက္ၿပီးခ်ိန္အတြင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီ ေၾကာက္မက္ ဘြယ္သဘာ၀ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိယူသြားခဲ့တယ္၊ ၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့အေျခအေနေတြကုိလဲ ဖန္တီးခဲ့တယ္၊ တကမၻာလုံးရဲ႕ ႏွလုံးသည္းပြတ္ေတြကုိလဲခံစားရေအာင္လႈပ္ကုိင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕လုိအပ္ ေနခ်ိန္မွာ ကမၻာက ရက္ရက္ေရာေရာ တုန္႔ျပန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးနဲ႔ ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ရန္ႀကိဳးပမ္းခ်က္ျဖစ္တဲ့ သင္တုိ႔ရဲ႕ ထင္႐ွားတဲ့ ပ့ံပုိးကူညီမႈမ်ားအတြက္ အား လုံးကုိ ေက်းဇူးတင္႐ိွပါေၾကာင္း ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာကေန ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားလုိပါတယ္။
သင္တုိ႔ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိကယ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ လူ႔အသုိင္းအ၀ုိင္းကုိျပန္လည္႐ွင္သန္လန္းဆန္းေစပါတယ္၊ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေသာျပည္သူေတြကုိ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ေနထုိင္မႈဘ၀မ်ားအား ျပန္လည္အသက္ဆက္ေစႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ တယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အာ႐ွတုိက္သားတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ေရာ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ပါ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိ ေၾက ကြဲစြာခံစားရမိပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ဟာ အာ႐ွတုိက္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယေျမာက္အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ပါ။ ပထမေျမာက္ပုဂၢဳိလ္ကေတာ့ ျမန္ မာႏိုင္ငံသား ဦးသန္႔ပါ။ သူ႔ရဲ႕မွတ္ဉာဏ္ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ျမတ္ႏိုးၾကည္ညိဳပါတယ္။ သူရဲ႕ပညာ႐ိွစကားကုိလဲ အ မွတ္ရပါတယ္။
ဦးသန္႔ကဆိုမိန္႔ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “လူသားတဦးခ်င္းစီရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ရဲ႕အဘုိးတန္ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈေတြအနက္ အလြန္ထူးျခားၿပီး အလြန္တန္ဘုိး႐ိွလွပါတယ္။ အစုိးရမ်ား၊ စံနစ္မ်ား၊ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားနဲ႔ အသင္းအပင္းအ ဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား ၀င္လိုက္ ထြက္လုိက္နဲ႔ ျဖစ္ေနေပမင့္ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကေတာ့ ဆက္လက္တည္႐ိွ ေနမွာပါ” တဲ့။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ျပန္လာခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ဆႏၵျပင္းျပမႈမ်ားရ႐ိွေစႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ဒီႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူ မ်ားအား ကူညီႏိုင္ေရးကုိ အေရးအႀကီးဆုံးအျဖစ္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဦးထိပ္ပန္ဆင္သယ္ေဆာင္လာပါတယ္။
ကုလသမဂၢဟာ လူအမ်ားရဲ႕ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား၊ ခ်မ္းသာသုခမ်ား၊ ဂုဏ္အ႐ိွန္အ၀ါမ်ားအတြက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ေနပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ စိတ္ႀကိဳက္ေ႐ြးခ်ယ္လုပ္ေပးေနျခင္း မဟုတ္ပါ။ ဒါဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ရဲ႕တာ၀န္ပုိင္းပါ။
ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ ျပတ္သားၿပီးတာ၀န္ခြဲေ၀ကာ ျပဌာန္းႏွစ္ႁမႇဳပ္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းကို ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအား ျပသ ရန္ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာမွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာပါရေစ။ ျမန္မာ- သင္သည္ အထီးက်န္မဟုတ္ပါ။
စည္းလုံးညီၫြတ္တဲ့၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့ ေခတ္သစ္ဒီမုိကေရစီ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ အလုပ္လုပ္ရန္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုိလားပါတယ္။
ဆင္းရဲတြင္းမွ႐ုန္းထႏိုင္ရန္ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ ေလးစားခံရတဲ့ တာ၀န္သိတဲ့အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေနရာကုိ သင္တုိ႔ႏိုင္ငံရယူႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္လုိပါတယ္။
အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ တည္တံ့တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ေရ႐ွည္ခံ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ တုိ႔ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္အေလးအနက္ျပဳေျပာပါရေစ - ဒီမုိကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေလးစားလိုက္နာမႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေသာ္၄င္း၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈေသာ္၄င္း ႐ွင္သန္မွာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ခၽြင္းခ်က္မဟုတ္ပါ။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
စိန္ေခၚမႈေတြက အမ်ားႀကီးပါ။ ဒါေပမင့္ ေက်ာ္လႊားလုိ႔မရႏိုင္တာေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီစံနစ္႐ိွတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့အနာဂတ္ကုိ ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္း ရမဲ့ကိစၥဟာ ႐ႈပ္ေထြးတဲ့လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အေတြ႕အႀကဳံမ်ားအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ သိ႐ိွရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ မည္သည့္ စိန္ေခၚမႈကုိမဆုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံခ်ည္းသက္သက္ မေျဖ႐ွင္းႏိုင္ပါ။ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရးနဲ႔ လူအခြင့္အေရးဟာ အျပန္အလွန္ ႏြယ္႐ွက္ ဆက္စပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ေတြကုိ တူညီတဲ့အာ႐ုံစုိက္ အေလးထားမႈမ႐ိွပဲ ေျပာဆုိေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး၊ တည္တ့ံ တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ သာယာ၀ေျပာေရးတုိ႔ရဲ႕ အလားအလာေကာင္းျခင္းကုိ ေမွးမွိန္ ေသးသိမ္ေစပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးနဲ႔ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ဆႏၵ႐ိွမယ္ဆုိရင္ အခက္အခဲအားလုံး ကုိ ေက်ာ္လႊားေအာင္ျမင္မွာပါ။
‘အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ အေလးထားေရးအတြက္ ေစာင့္ဆုိင္းဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာဟာအခ်ိန္ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာၾကာႀကိဳးပမ္းႏိုင္မွာလဲ’ ဆုိတာဟာ ယေန႔ေမးခြန္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ႐ွင္းလင္းေျပာျပပါရေစ။ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံး ေဆာင္ရြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါ တယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ မွတ္ပုံတင္ထားတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားမွကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားနဲ႔ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးေလ့လာ ေနတဲ့ လက္နက္ကုိင္အုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔ ယမန္ေန႔ကေတြ႕ခဲ့စဥ္မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္နဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကုိ ဂုဏ္ျပဳရန္အတြက္ သီးျခားစီ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားအားေပး ခဲ့တာပါ။
သုိ႔ေသာ္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကုိ ေျမာ္မွန္းထားတဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ပန္းတိုင္ မ်ားကိုေရာက္႐ိွရန္ အဓိကတာ၀န္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံ့အစုိးရေပၚက်ေရာက္လ်က္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားအား သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ‘စြမ္းရည္ အျပည့္အ၀ကုိ နား လည္သေဘာေပါက္ျခင္း’ မွ ဟန္႔တားထားရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွစြာေနထုိင္ႏိုင္ခြင့္နဲ႔ ပုိမုိ လြတ္လပ္မႈျဖင့္ သာလြန္ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ လူမႈအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ားခံစားခြင့္ကုိ ျငင္းပယ္ရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီ အေျခခံစည္းမ်ဥ္းမ်ားဟာ ‘ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔သည္ ျပည္သူမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည္’ ဆုိတဲ့စကားမ်ားျဖင့္ အဖြင့္နိဒါန္းခ်ီထား တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္စာတမ္းရဲ႕ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအတြင္းမွာတည္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီ မြန္ျမတ္တဲ့စကားမ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ စတင္ေရးဆြဲခဲ့တဲ့ ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒကလဲ ပဲ့တင္ထပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္မွာ ဒီစည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔ ေသခ်ာေစေရးအတြက္လဲ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ကုိ ကြန္ေတာ္စိတ္ထဲမွာထည့္ထားၿပီး အမွာစကား ၃ ခုကို သယ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ပထမဦးစြာအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေဒသမွာမဆုိ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကုိ အေလးထားေလးစားျခင္းဟာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳး တုိးတက္ေရးအတြက္ မ႐ိွမျဖစ္လုိအပ္ခ်က္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္းကုိ ပထမ စတင္လက္ခံခဲ့တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွာ တႏိုင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြါးေရးနဲ႔ လူမႈေရးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ အေျခခံလြတ္လပ္မႈမ်ားအား ေလးစား ဘုိ႔ အမ်ားဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ဆႏၵကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ေစာစီးစြာ ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကံမေကာင္းအေၾကာင္းမလွစြာပဲ ဒီျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈဟာ အမွန္တကယ္မွာ အံ၀င္ခြင္က်မႈ မ႐ိွခဲ့ပါ။ ျမန္မာ့လူ႔အ ခြင့္အေရးမွတ္တမ္းဟာ အလြန္အမင္း စုိးရိမ္ေသာကျဖစ္စရာအေၾကာင္းအရာအေနနဲ႔ တည္႐ွိေနလ်က္ပါ။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈ၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး တုိ႔ကုိ ေျပာဆုိေနပါတယ္။
အႏွစ္ ၂၀ အတြင္း ပထမဆုံးအေနနဲ႔က်င္းပမွာျဖစ္တဲ့ လာမဲ့ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ ဂုဏ္ထယ္တင့္တယ္ေစလုိလွ်င္ အားလုံးပါ၀င္ၿပီး အျမင္ၾကည္လင္မႈ ႐ိွရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္မဲ့ခရီးမွာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိေလးစားလုိက္နာမႈ အျမစ္တြယ္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံးကုိ အျမန္ဆုံးလႊတ္ေပးရမယ္လုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးသန္းေ႐ႊနဲ႔ မေန႔ကနဲ႔ဒီေန႔ ေတြ႕ရတဲ့အခါ ေဒၚစုၾကည္ကုိေတြ႕ဘုိ႔ေတာင္းဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူကျငင္းပယ္ လုိက္တဲ့အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္မ်ားစြာစိတ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစိုးရဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပြင့္လင္းမႈရဲ႕ က႑သစ္မွာ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကိုျပသႏိုင္မဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးထူးတခု ဆုံး႐ႈံး သြားၿပီလုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ယုံၾကည္လုိက္ပါတယ္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အားေတြ႕ဆုံခြင့္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္းဟာ ၂၀၁၀ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပဲြကုိ အမ်ားယုံၾကည္လက္ခံႏိုင္မႈ ႐ိွေစေရးအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွေသာေဆာင္႐ြက္မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အစုိးရကဆႏၵ႐ိွေၾကာင္း ကိုေဖာ္ျပတဲ့ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ျပယုဂ္ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီနိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ ျပည့္၀တဲ့ ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ခြင့္အား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံးကုိ အမွန္တကယ္ ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္လုိသူမ်ားအားလုံး လြတ္လပ္တက္ႂကြစြာပါ၀င္မႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးဟာ မျပည့္စုံႏိုင္ပါ။
သက္ဆုိင္တဲ့ပုဂၢဳလ္မ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔လူနည္းစုမ်ားအားလုံးပါ၀င္တဲ့ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ စတင္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျပည္သူအမ်ားဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးမႈမွာ လြတ္လပ္စြာအေျခအတင္ေျပာႏုိင္ရမယ္၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မွာ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွစြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္ေစမဲ့ သတင္းအ ခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္စြာ သိ႐ွိရယူႏိုင္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းမႈတုိင္းဟာ ခက္ခဲလွပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ သက္ဦးဆံပုိင္စံနစ္ကေန ကုိလုိနီစံနစ္၊ အခု
တခါ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ႏိုင္ငံအျဖစ္ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သမုိင္းဟာ လတ္တေလာမွာ နာက်င္ဘြယ္ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ‘အေမြ’ႏွစ္မႊာပူးကို သေနၶေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လက္နက္ကုိင္ပဋိပကၡ နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေ႐ွ႕မတုိးသာေနာက္မဆုတ္သာအေျခအေနေတြပါ။
အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈ၊ နယ္ေျမတည္တံ့ခုိင္ၿမဲမႈ နဲ႔ အမ်ဳိးသားညီၫြတ္ေရးတုိ႔ဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတုိင္းရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ စိုးရိမ္ ေသာကမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၀န္းက်င္ကုိ ဖြင့္ေပးျခင္းနဲ႔ ခ်ဲ႕ထြင္ျခင္းဟာ ပုိမုိႀကီးမားတဲ့ စုေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းရဲ႕ အစိတ္အပုိင္းအ ျဖစ္ အုပ္စုတစုခ်င္းနဲ႔ လူတဦးခ်င္းပါ၀င္ႏိုင္မႈအတြက္ အာမခံရန္ အေကာင္းဆုံးနည္းလမ္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကၽြန္ ေတာ္တုိ႔ ရဲရဲႀကီးေျပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။
စစ္တပ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းအားလုံး၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားလူနည္းစုမ်ား၊ အမ်ားျပည္သူနဲ႔သက္ဆိုင္ေသာအဖြဲ႕အ စည္းမ်ားနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ သားသမီးတုိင္း အမွန္တကယ္ကုိ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးမွာပါ၀င္ၾကရမွာ။
အျပန္အလွန္ အေပးအယူလုပ္ၫိႇႏိႈင္းျခင္း၊ ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔ နားလည္မႈတုိ႔သာလွ်င္ ၾကာ႐ွည္တည္တ့ံမဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္း ေရး၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတုိ႔အတြက္ အေျခခံအုတ္္ျမစ္ခ်ေပးႏိုင္မွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယအမွာစကားကေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာတဲ႔လိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ ေဖာ္ျပ လုိပါတယ္။
ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚေဒသမွာျဖစ္ထြန္းခဲ့တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈမ်ားကုိ ၾကည့္ျမင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျပန္လည္ေရာက္႐ိွလာႏိုင္စြမ္း အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္၀မ္းသာလွပါတယ္။
အလုိခ်င္ဆုံးကေတာ့ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ျခင္းဟာ သီးျခားခြဲျခားထားျခင္းအေပၚ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ ႏိုင္ျခင္းရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးကုိ သက္ေသျပႏိုင္တာပဲ။
အလႉ႐ွင္အသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ကူညီပံ့ပုိးမႈျဖင့္ ‘သုံးပြင့္ဆုိင္ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအုပ္စု’အျဖစ္ ျမန္မာ၊ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ အာဆီယံတုိ႔ အတြင္း မႀကံဳစဖူးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအေရးပါျခင္းနဲ႔ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာအာဏာပုိင္မႈရဲ႕ စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းတုိ႔ဟာ ပဋိပကၡ မျဖစ္ၾကဘူးဆုိတာ သက္ေသျပသြားပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ မည္သည့္ေနရာတြင္မဆုိ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအကူအညီဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအတြက္တုန္႔ျပန္ရမဲ့ ဓားစာ ခံ မျဖစ္သင့္ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ႐ိွ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈနဲ႔ တုိးတက္မႈအေထာက္အကူမ်ား လုိအပ္ေနသူအားလုံး ရ႐ိွႏိုင္ေရးအာမခံခ်က္႐ိွေအာင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ရမယ္၊ လုပ္ကုိလုပ္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုဟာကေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ တတိယ အမွာစကားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုအခ်ိန္ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ သူရဲ႕ စီးပြါးေရးစြမ္းအင္အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ားကို ထုတ္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔အခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ ပါတယ္။
‘အာ႐ွစီးပြါးေရးအံ့ဘြယ္’ အလယ္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာရပ္တည္ေနပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံအ၀ွမ္းမွာ လ်င္ျမန္တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈ မ်ားအတြက္ ျမန္မာကုိ ‘ကႀကိဳးဆင္ေစျခင္းဟာ’ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေရးအတြက္ အေသခ်ာဆုံးနည္း လမ္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရရဲ႕ ကုန္သြယ္မႈအတြက္ ျပင္ပကိုလမ္းဖြင့္ေပးျခင္း၀ါဒ၊ ေထာင္စုဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ား ရေအာင္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈ၊ အိတ္ခ်္အုိင္ဗီြေရာဂါထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈ၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးနဲ႔ ဘိန္းထုပ္လုပ္မႈအဆုံးသတ္ ေရးတုိ႔ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ႀကိဳဆုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ အမွန္လက္ေတြ႕မွာေတာ့ ျပည္သူသန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာဟာ ဆက္လက္ဆင္းရဲေနဆဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းဟာ အာ႐ွရဲ႕ အနိမ့္ဆုံးထဲမွာပါ၀င္ေနတုန္းပါ။
ဒီျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားဟာ အလုပ္မ်ားလိုအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ စားနပ္ရိကၡာဖူလုံမႈေတြလုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ က်န္းမာေရး ေစာင့္ေ႐ွာက္ခံယူႏိုင္မႈေတြ လုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ေဒသဆုိင္ရာနဲ႔တကမၻာလုံးဆုိင္ရာ စီးပြါးေရးမွ အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ရႏိုင္ေအာင္နဲ႔ ပါ၀င္ပံ့ပုိးေပးႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို အာမခံရဘုိ႔ ကြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
တည္ၿငိမ္ၿပီး သာယာ၀ေျပာေပါႂကြယ္တဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာက အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ေတြပုိမုိရ႐ွိလာ မွာကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီရည္မွန္းခ်က္အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ရပါ့မယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရကလဲ ဒီအခ်ိန္အခါကုိ အမိအရ ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူမ်ားကုိ လက္ကမ္းရန္ျပင္ဆင္ေနသည့္ အခြင့္အလမ္း မ်ားရဲ႕ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈကုိ ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီကုိ မိတ္ေဆြတဦးအျဖစ္ေရာက္လာခဲ့တာပါ။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္တာ၀န္က ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္ရဲ႕ အေကာင္းဆုံးစံမ်ားနဲ႔စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ ထိန္းသိမ္းဘုိ႔ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အခန္းက႑ကေတာ့ သင္တုိ႔အားလုံး - အစုိးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ား၊ လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား - ကို ျပည္သူတရပ္အေနနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတခုအေနနဲ႔ အတူတကြ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္ေ႐ြ႕လ်ားဘုိ႔ အား ေပးရန္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
က႑အားလုံးရဲ႕အေပၚမွာ ျပည္သု႕အက်ဳိးကုိထား႐ွိလုိက္တဲ့အခါ မေက်ာ္လႊားႏိုင္တာ သုိ႔မဟုတ္ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္တာ ဆုိတာ မ႐ွိပါဘူး။
ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာဟာ လ်င္ျမန္စြာေျပာင္းလဲေနပါတယ္။ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းမွ၊ ၿပီးေတာ့ မိမိကိုယ္တုိင္ေျပာင္းလဲ မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ျခင္းမွ အက်ဳိးျဖစ္ထြန္းဘို႔ ျမန္မာဟာ ရပ္တည္လုိ႔သာ ေနပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ကုလသမဂၢႏဲ႔ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀ါဒရဲ႕ အေျခခံအုတ္ျမစ္ျဖစ္ တယ္လုိ႔ ထပ္ခါတလဲလဲ ေျပာလ်က္႐ွိပါတယ္။
စကားေတြနဲ႔ အလုပ္ေတြ ကုိက္ညီဘုိ႔အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိပါတယ္။
သူ႔ျပည္သူမ်ားရဲ႕လုိအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားနဲ႔ ျပင္းျပတဲ့ဆႏၵမ်ားကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ ပုိမုိပူးေပါင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္ေလ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈကုိ အခုိင္အမာျပဳႏိုင္ေလ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအတူပါပဲ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔္ရဲ႕ေ၀မွ်ခံယူထားတဲ့ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပည္သူအားလုံးရဲ႕လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔အတူ ညီၫြတ္တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီနည္းလမ္းက်တဲ့ အနာ ဂတ္အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလက္လွမ္းမွီႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကူညီရန္ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ဘုိ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္း မွာလဲ တာ၀န္႐ွိပါတယ္။
ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။
( ၂၀၀၉ ဇူလုိင္ ၄ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အစုိးရမဟုတ္ေသာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား (NGO) ၊ သံတမန္မ်ား၊ ျပည္တြင္း သတင္းေထာက္မ်ား စုစုေပါင္း ၅၀၀ ခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည့္ ဟံသာဝတီ မူးယစ္ ေဆးဝါးျပတုိက္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ၌ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ မိန္႔ခြန္းအျပည့္အစုံကုိ ျပန္ဆုိပါသည္ )
Unofficial translation
ေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္
၂၀၀၉ ၀၇ ၀၆
UNSG’s Remarks on Myanmar to Diplomatic Missions, UN Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests and colleagues
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is my second visit to Myanmar in just over a year. Both visits have been at critical times for the country's future.
My first visit was in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. This devastating natural disaster, which took so many lives and created so much hardship, touched hearts across the globe. In Myanmar's moment of need, the world responded generously.
I want to personally thank everyone here today for your remarkable contributions to the relief and recovery effort.
You have saved lives, rejuvenated communities and made it possible for many thousands of people to reclaim their livelihoods. You have helped Myanmar to overcome adversity. It is important that this work continues.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I felt the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis deeply -- as a fellow Asian and as Secretary-General.
I am Asia's second Secretary-General. The first was Myanmar''s U Thant. I revere his memory. I also recall his wise words.
U Thant said: “The worth of the individual human being is the most unique and precious of all our assets and must be the beginning and end of all our efforts. Governments, systems, ideologies and institutions come and go, but humanity remains.”
This is why I have returned.
As Secretary-General, I attach the highest importance to helping the people of this country to achieve their legitimate aspirations.
The United Nations works for people – their rights, their well-being, their dignity. It is not an option. It is our responsibility.
I have come to show the unequivocal shared commitment of the United Nations to the people of Myanmar.
I am here today to say: Myanmar – you are not alone.
We want to work with you for a united, peaceful, prosperous, democratic and modern Myanmar.
We want to help you rise from poverty.
We want to work with you so your country can take its place as a respected and responsible member of the international community.
We want to help you achieve national reconciliation, durable peace and sustainable development.
But, let me emphasize: neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights.
Myanmar is no exception.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The challenges are many. But they are not insurmountable.
We know from experience that securing Myanmar's peaceful, democratic and prosperous future is a complex process.
None of Myanmar's challenges can be solved on their own. Peace, development and human rights are closely inter-related.
Failure to address them with equal attention will risk undermining the prospects for democracy, durable peace and prosperity.
However, we also know that where there is a genuine will for dialogue and reconciliation, all obstacles can be overcome.
The question today is this: how much longer can Myanmar afford to wait for national reconciliation, democratic transition and full respect for human rights?
The cost of delay will be counted in wasted lives, lost opportunities and prolonged isolation from the international community.
Let me be clear: all the people of Myanmar must work in the national interest.
I said this yesterday when I met with representatives of Myanmar's registered political parties and with those armed groups that have chosen to observe a cease-fire. I encouraged them respectively to honour their commitments to the democratic process and peace.
Nonetheless, the primary responsibility lies with the Government to move the country towards its stated goals of national reconciliation and democracy.
Failure to do so will prevent the people of Myanmar from realizing their full potential.
Failure to do so will deny the people of Myanmar their right to live in dignity and to pursue better standards of life in larger freedom.
These principles lie at the core of the United Nations Charter, whose opening words are “We the peoples”.
The founding Constitution of independent Myanmar echoes these noble words. We must work together to ensure that Myanmar's future embodies these principles too.
With this in mind, I bring three messages.
First, respect for human dignity is the precondition for peace and development everywhere.
Myanmar was one of the first United Nations Member States to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It subscribed early on to the consensus that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is indispensable to political, economic and social progress.
Unfortunately, that commitment has not been matched in deed. Myanmar's human rights record remains a matter of grave concern.
The Government has articulated its goals as stability, national reconciliation and democracy.
The upcoming election –the first in twenty years – must be inclusive, participatory and transparent if it is to be credible.
Myanmar's way forward must be rooted in respect for human rights
This is why I say that all political prisoners, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, should be released without delay.
When I met General Than Shwe yesterday and today, I asked to visit Ms. Suu Kyi. I am deeply disappointed that he refused.
I believe the government of Myanmar has lost a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of political openness.
Allowing a visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would have been an important symbol of the government's willingness to embark on the kind of meaningful engagement that will be essential if the elections in 2010 are to be seen as credible.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must be allowed to participate in the political process without further delay.
Indeed, all the citizens of Myanmar must be given the opportunity to contribute fully to the future of this country.
National reconciliation cannot be complete without the free and active participation of all who seek to contribute.
The country must embark on a process of genuine dialogue that includes all concerned parties, all ethnic groups and all minorities.
People must be free to debate and to engage in political dialogue, and they must have free access to the information that will help them participate meaningfully in the democratic process.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Any transition is difficult. Myanmar has already undergone transitions from sovereign kingdom, to occupied colony, and now independent State.
This history carries a twin legacy of armed conflict and political deadlock, including recent painful events: the repression of demonstrators in 1988, the cancellation of the 1990 election results, and the clampdown on peaceful dissent that continues to this day.
At the same time, there have been some positive efforts that should be recognized.
Although still fragile, the cease-fire agreements between the Government and armed groups have reduced the level of conflict. The United Nations has wide-ranging experience in making such gains irreversible.
Sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity are legitimate concerns for any government.
We contend that opening and broadening the political space is the best way to ensure that each group and each individual becomes part of the greater collective project.
The military, all political parties, ethnic minority groups, civil society, and indeed every son and daughter of Myanmar has a role to play in this country's transition.
Only mutual compromise, respect and understanding can lay the foundations for durable peace, national reconciliation and democracy.
My second message is on addressing the humanitarian needs of Myanmar's people.
I am glad I have been able to return to see the progress made in the Irrawaddy Delta. The loss of some 130,000 people was tragic, but the rebuilding I saw today was impressive.
The tragedy showed the resilience of the people of Myanmar. It also demonstrated that people throughout the world care deeply about Myanmar and its people.
Above all, the response to Cyclone Nargis proved the value of engagement over isolation.
The unprecedented cooperation between Myanmar, the United Nations and ASEAN through the Tripartite Core Group, with the support of the donor community, has demonstrated that humanitarian imperatives and the principles of sovereignty do not conflict.
Humanitarian assistance -- in Myanmar as elsewhere -- should never be held hostage to political considerations. We can and must work together to ensure access to humanitarian and development assistance to all those in Myanmar who need it.
This brings me to my third message. It is time for Myanmar to unleash its economic potential.
Myanmar sits in the middle of Asia's economic miracle. Harnessing Myanmar to the rapid advances taking place around it is the surest way to raise living standards.
I welcome the Government's policy of opening up to outside trade and investment, and its efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, control HIV, combat human trafficking and curtail opium production.
But the reality is that millions continue to live in poverty. Standards of living in Myanmar remain among the lowest in Asia.
The people of Myanmar need jobs, they need food security and they need access to health care.
We must work to ensure that the people of Myanmar can benefit from and contribute to the regional and global economy.
We must recognize that the region and the world have much to gain from a stable, prosperous and democratic Myanmar. We must work together for that goal.
The Government of Myanmar must seize the moment.
It must take advantage of the opportunities that the international community is prepared to offer to the people of Myanmar.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I came here as a friend.
My duty is to uphold the ideals and principles of the United Nations Charter.
My role is to encourage all of you – the Government, political parties, ethnic groups, civil society – to move forward together as one people and one nation.
Nothing is insurmountable or impossible when the people's interest is placed above divisions.
The region and the world are changing fast. Myanmar only stands to gain from engagement -- and from embarking on its own change.
The Government of Myanmar has repeatedly stated that cooperation with the United Nations is the cornerstone of the country's foreign policy.
We ask it to match deeds with words.
The more Myanmar works in partnership with the United Nations to respond to its people's needs and aspirations, the more it affirms its sovereignty.
Similarly it is incumbent on the international community as whole to work together to help Myanmar meet our shared goals: a united, peaceful, prosperous and democratic future, with full respect for the human rights of all the country's people.
Kyae zoo tin bar tae.
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ား၊ ဧည့္သည္ေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ေရာင္းရင္းမိတ္ေဆြမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ဒါဟာ တႏွစ္ေက်ာ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္လာေရာက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္စလုံး ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္မ်ားပင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပထမ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တဲ့အခ်ိန္ဟာ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္း၀င္ေရာက္ၿပီးခ်ိန္အတြင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီ ေၾကာက္မက္ ဘြယ္သဘာ၀ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိယူသြားခဲ့တယ္၊ ၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့အေျခအေနေတြကုိလဲ ဖန္တီးခဲ့တယ္၊ တကမၻာလုံးရဲ႕ ႏွလုံးသည္းပြတ္ေတြကုိလဲခံစားရေအာင္လႈပ္ကုိင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕လုိအပ္ ေနခ်ိန္မွာ ကမၻာက ရက္ရက္ေရာေရာ တုန္႔ျပန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးနဲ႔ ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ရန္ႀကိဳးပမ္းခ်က္ျဖစ္တဲ့ သင္တုိ႔ရဲ႕ ထင္႐ွားတဲ့ ပ့ံပုိးကူညီမႈမ်ားအတြက္ အား လုံးကုိ ေက်းဇူးတင္႐ိွပါေၾကာင္း ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာကေန ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားလုိပါတယ္။
သင္တုိ႔ဟာ အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိကယ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ လူ႔အသုိင္းအ၀ုိင္းကုိျပန္လည္႐ွင္သန္လန္းဆန္းေစပါတယ္၊ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေသာျပည္သူေတြကုိ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ေနထုိင္မႈဘ၀မ်ားအား ျပန္လည္အသက္ဆက္ေစႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ တယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အာ႐ွတုိက္သားတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ေရာ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ပါ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိ ေၾက ကြဲစြာခံစားရမိပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ဟာ အာ႐ွတုိက္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယေျမာက္အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ပါ။ ပထမေျမာက္ပုဂၢဳိလ္ကေတာ့ ျမန္ မာႏိုင္ငံသား ဦးသန္႔ပါ။ သူ႔ရဲ႕မွတ္ဉာဏ္ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ျမတ္ႏိုးၾကည္ညိဳပါတယ္။ သူရဲ႕ပညာ႐ိွစကားကုိလဲ အ မွတ္ရပါတယ္။
ဦးသန္႔ကဆိုမိန္႔ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “လူသားတဦးခ်င္းစီရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ရဲ႕အဘုိးတန္ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈေတြအနက္ အလြန္ထူးျခားၿပီး အလြန္တန္ဘုိး႐ိွလွပါတယ္။ အစုိးရမ်ား၊ စံနစ္မ်ား၊ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားနဲ႔ အသင္းအပင္းအ ဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား ၀င္လိုက္ ထြက္လုိက္နဲ႔ ျဖစ္ေနေပမင့္ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကေတာ့ ဆက္လက္တည္႐ိွ ေနမွာပါ” တဲ့။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ျပန္လာခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္အေနနဲ႔ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ဆႏၵျပင္းျပမႈမ်ားရ႐ိွေစႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ဒီႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူ မ်ားအား ကူညီႏိုင္ေရးကုိ အေရးအႀကီးဆုံးအျဖစ္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဦးထိပ္ပန္ဆင္သယ္ေဆာင္လာပါတယ္။
ကုလသမဂၢဟာ လူအမ်ားရဲ႕ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား၊ ခ်မ္းသာသုခမ်ား၊ ဂုဏ္အ႐ိွန္အ၀ါမ်ားအတြက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ေနပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ စိတ္ႀကိဳက္ေ႐ြးခ်ယ္လုပ္ေပးေနျခင္း မဟုတ္ပါ။ ဒါဟာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ရဲ႕တာ၀န္ပုိင္းပါ။
ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ ျပတ္သားၿပီးတာ၀န္ခြဲေ၀ကာ ျပဌာန္းႏွစ္ႁမႇဳပ္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းကို ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအား ျပသ ရန္ကၽြန္ေတာ္လာေရာက္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီေန႔ ဒီေနရာမွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာပါရေစ။ ျမန္မာ- သင္သည္ အထီးက်န္မဟုတ္ပါ။
စည္းလုံးညီၫြတ္တဲ့၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့ ေခတ္သစ္ဒီမုိကေရစီ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ အလုပ္လုပ္ရန္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုိလားပါတယ္။
ဆင္းရဲတြင္းမွ႐ုန္းထႏိုင္ရန္ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ ေလးစားခံရတဲ့ တာ၀န္သိတဲ့အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေနရာကုိ သင္တုိ႔ႏိုင္ငံရယူႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သင္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္လုိပါတယ္။
အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ တည္တံ့တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ေရ႐ွည္ခံ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ တုိ႔ သင္တုိ႔ကုိကူညီလုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္အေလးအနက္ျပဳေျပာပါရေစ - ဒီမုိကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေလးစားလိုက္နာမႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေသာ္၄င္း၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈေသာ္၄င္း ႐ွင္သန္မွာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ခၽြင္းခ်က္မဟုတ္ပါ။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွလူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
စိန္ေခၚမႈေတြက အမ်ားႀကီးပါ။ ဒါေပမင့္ ေက်ာ္လႊားလုိ႔မရႏိုင္တာေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီစံနစ္႐ိွတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာ ေပါႂကြယ္၀တဲ့အနာဂတ္ကုိ ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္း ရမဲ့ကိစၥဟာ ႐ႈပ္ေထြးတဲ့လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အေတြ႕အႀကဳံမ်ားအရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ သိ႐ိွရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ မည္သည့္ စိန္ေခၚမႈကုိမဆုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံခ်ည္းသက္သက္ မေျဖ႐ွင္းႏိုင္ပါ။ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး၊ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရးနဲ႔ လူအခြင့္အေရးဟာ အျပန္အလွန္ ႏြယ္႐ွက္ ဆက္စပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ေတြကုိ တူညီတဲ့အာ႐ုံစုိက္ အေလးထားမႈမ႐ိွပဲ ေျပာဆုိေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး၊ တည္တ့ံ တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ သာယာ၀ေျပာေရးတုိ႔ရဲ႕ အလားအလာေကာင္းျခင္းကုိ ေမွးမွိန္ ေသးသိမ္ေစပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးနဲ႔ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ဆႏၵ႐ိွမယ္ဆုိရင္ အခက္အခဲအားလုံး ကုိ ေက်ာ္လႊားေအာင္ျမင္မွာပါ။
‘အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ အေလးထားေရးအတြက္ ေစာင့္ဆုိင္းဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာဟာအခ်ိန္ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာၾကာႀကိဳးပမ္းႏိုင္မွာလဲ’ ဆုိတာဟာ ယေန႔ေမးခြန္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ႐ွင္းလင္းေျပာျပပါရေစ။ အမ်ဳိးသားေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံး ေဆာင္ရြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါ တယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ မွတ္ပုံတင္ထားတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားမွကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားနဲ႔ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးေလ့လာ ေနတဲ့ လက္နက္ကုိင္အုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔ ယမန္ေန႔ကေတြ႕ခဲ့စဥ္မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္နဲ႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကုိ ဂုဏ္ျပဳရန္အတြက္ သီးျခားစီ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေျပာၾကားအားေပး ခဲ့တာပါ။
သုိ႔ေသာ္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကုိ ေျမာ္မွန္းထားတဲ့ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ပန္းတိုင္ မ်ားကိုေရာက္႐ိွရန္ အဓိကတာ၀န္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံ့အစုိးရေပၚက်ေရာက္လ်က္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားအား သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ‘စြမ္းရည္ အျပည့္အ၀ကုိ နား လည္သေဘာေပါက္ျခင္း’ မွ ဟန္႔တားထားရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီတာ၀န္မ်ားကုိေက်ပြန္စြာမေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္လွ်င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွစြာေနထုိင္ႏိုင္ခြင့္နဲ႔ ပုိမုိ လြတ္လပ္မႈျဖင့္ သာလြန္ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ လူမႈအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ားခံစားခြင့္ကုိ ျငင္းပယ္ရာေရာက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီ အေျခခံစည္းမ်ဥ္းမ်ားဟာ ‘ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔သည္ ျပည္သူမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည္’ ဆုိတဲ့စကားမ်ားျဖင့္ အဖြင့္နိဒါန္းခ်ီထား တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္စာတမ္းရဲ႕ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအတြင္းမွာတည္႐ိွေနပါတယ္။
ဒီ မြန္ျမတ္တဲ့စကားမ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ စတင္ေရးဆြဲခဲ့တဲ့ ဖြဲ႕စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒကလဲ ပဲ့တင္ထပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္မွာ ဒီစည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔ ေသခ်ာေစေရးအတြက္လဲ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအခ်က္ကုိ ကြန္ေတာ္စိတ္ထဲမွာထည့္ထားၿပီး အမွာစကား ၃ ခုကို သယ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ပထမဦးစြာအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္ေဒသမွာမဆုိ လူသားဂုဏ္ရည္ကုိ အေလးထားေလးစားျခင္းဟာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႔ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳး တုိးတက္ေရးအတြက္ မ႐ိွမျဖစ္လုိအပ္ခ်က္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္းကုိ ပထမ စတင္လက္ခံခဲ့တဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွာ တႏိုင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြါးေရးနဲ႔ လူမႈေရးတုိးတက္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ အေျခခံလြတ္လပ္မႈမ်ားအား ေလးစား ဘုိ႔ အမ်ားဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ဆႏၵကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ေစာစီးစြာ ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကံမေကာင္းအေၾကာင္းမလွစြာပဲ ဒီျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈဟာ အမွန္တကယ္မွာ အံ၀င္ခြင္က်မႈ မ႐ိွခဲ့ပါ။ ျမန္မာ့လူ႔အ ခြင့္အေရးမွတ္တမ္းဟာ အလြန္အမင္း စုိးရိမ္ေသာကျဖစ္စရာအေၾကာင္းအရာအေနနဲ႔ တည္႐ွိေနလ်က္ပါ။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈ၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး တုိ႔ကုိ ေျပာဆုိေနပါတယ္။
အႏွစ္ ၂၀ အတြင္း ပထမဆုံးအေနနဲ႔က်င္းပမွာျဖစ္တဲ့ လာမဲ့ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ ဂုဏ္ထယ္တင့္တယ္ေစလုိလွ်င္ အားလုံးပါ၀င္ၿပီး အျမင္ၾကည္လင္မႈ ႐ိွရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္မဲ့ခရီးမွာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိေလးစားလုိက္နာမႈ အျမစ္တြယ္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံးကုိ အျမန္ဆုံးလႊတ္ေပးရမယ္လုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးသန္းေ႐ႊနဲ႔ မေန႔ကနဲ႔ဒီေန႔ ေတြ႕ရတဲ့အခါ ေဒၚစုၾကည္ကုိေတြ႕ဘုိ႔ေတာင္းဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူကျငင္းပယ္ လုိက္တဲ့အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္မ်ားစြာစိတ္ပ်က္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစိုးရဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပြင့္လင္းမႈရဲ႕ က႑သစ္မွာ ျပဌာန္းႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈကိုျပသႏိုင္မဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးထူးတခု ဆုံး႐ႈံး သြားၿပီလုိ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ယုံၾကည္လုိက္ပါတယ္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အားေတြ႕ဆုံခြင့္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္းဟာ ၂၀၁၀ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပဲြကုိ အမ်ားယုံၾကည္လက္ခံႏိုင္မႈ ႐ိွေစေရးအတြက္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွေသာေဆာင္႐ြက္မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အစုိးရကဆႏၵ႐ိွေၾကာင္း ကိုေဖာ္ျပတဲ့ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ျပယုဂ္ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။
ဒီနိုင္ငံရဲ႕အနာဂတ္အတြက္ ျပည့္၀တဲ့ ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ခြင့္အား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအားလုံးကုိ အမွန္တကယ္ ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပါ၀င္ေဆာင္႐ြက္လုိသူမ်ားအားလုံး လြတ္လပ္တက္ႂကြစြာပါ၀င္မႈမ႐ိွလွ်င္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးဟာ မျပည့္စုံႏိုင္ပါ။
သက္ဆုိင္တဲ့ပုဂၢဳလ္မ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ားနဲ႔လူနည္းစုမ်ားအားလုံးပါ၀င္တဲ့ စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ စတင္ေဆာင္႐ြက္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျပည္သူအမ်ားဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးမႈမွာ လြတ္လပ္စြာအေျခအတင္ေျပာႏုိင္ရမယ္၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မွာ အဓိပၸါယ္႐ိွစြာပါ၀င္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္ေစမဲ့ သတင္းအ ခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ လြတ္လပ္စြာ သိ႐ွိရယူႏိုင္ရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ိွ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းမႈတုိင္းဟာ ခက္ခဲလွပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ သက္ဦးဆံပုိင္စံနစ္ကေန ကုိလုိနီစံနစ္၊ အခု
တခါ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ႏိုင္ငံအျဖစ္ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သမုိင္းဟာ လတ္တေလာမွာ နာက်င္ဘြယ္ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ‘အေမြ’ႏွစ္မႊာပူးကို သေနၶေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လက္နက္ကုိင္ပဋိပကၡ နဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေ႐ွ႕မတုိးသာေနာက္မဆုတ္သာအေျခအေနေတြပါ။
အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈ၊ နယ္ေျမတည္တံ့ခုိင္ၿမဲမႈ နဲ႔ အမ်ဳိးသားညီၫြတ္ေရးတုိ႔ဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတုိင္းရဲ႕ တရား၀င္ စိုးရိမ္ ေသာကမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံေရး၀န္းက်င္ကုိ ဖြင့္ေပးျခင္းနဲ႔ ခ်ဲ႕ထြင္ျခင္းဟာ ပုိမုိႀကီးမားတဲ့ စုေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းရဲ႕ အစိတ္အပုိင္းအ ျဖစ္ အုပ္စုတစုခ်င္းနဲ႔ လူတဦးခ်င္းပါ၀င္ႏိုင္မႈအတြက္ အာမခံရန္ အေကာင္းဆုံးနည္းလမ္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကၽြန္ ေတာ္တုိ႔ ရဲရဲႀကီးေျပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။
စစ္တပ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းအားလုံး၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားလူနည္းစုမ်ား၊ အမ်ားျပည္သူနဲ႔သက္ဆိုင္ေသာအဖြဲ႕အ စည္းမ်ားနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ သားသမီးတုိင္း အမွန္တကယ္ကုိ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးမွာပါ၀င္ၾကရမွာ။
အျပန္အလွန္ အေပးအယူလုပ္ၫိႇႏိႈင္းျခင္း၊ ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔ နားလည္မႈတုိ႔သာလွ်င္ ၾကာ႐ွည္တည္တ့ံမဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္း ေရး၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးနဲ႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတုိ႔အတြက္ အေျခခံအုတ္္ျမစ္ခ်ေပးႏိုင္မွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယအမွာစကားကေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရဲ႕ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာတဲ႔လိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ ေဖာ္ျပ လုိပါတယ္။
ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚေဒသမွာျဖစ္ထြန္းခဲ့တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈမ်ားကုိ ၾကည့္ျမင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျပန္လည္ေရာက္႐ိွလာႏိုင္စြမ္း အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္၀မ္းသာလွပါတယ္။
အလုိခ်င္ဆုံးကေတာ့ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ျခင္းဟာ သီးျခားခြဲျခားထားျခင္းအေပၚ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ ႏိုင္ျခင္းရဲ႕တန္ဘုိးကုိ သက္ေသျပႏိုင္တာပဲ။
အလႉ႐ွင္အသုိင္းအ၀န္းရဲ႕ကူညီပံ့ပုိးမႈျဖင့္ ‘သုံးပြင့္ဆုိင္ ေက်ာ႐ိုးအုပ္စု’အျဖစ္ ျမန္မာ၊ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ အာဆီယံတုိ႔ အတြင္း မႀကံဳစဖူးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအေရးပါျခင္းနဲ႔ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာအာဏာပုိင္မႈရဲ႕ စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းတုိ႔ဟာ ပဋိပကၡ မျဖစ္ၾကဘူးဆုိတာ သက္ေသျပသြားပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ မည္သည့္ေနရာတြင္မဆုိ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအကူအညီဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအတြက္တုန္႔ျပန္ရမဲ့ ဓားစာ ခံ မျဖစ္သင့္ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ႐ိွ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈနဲ႔ တုိးတက္မႈအေထာက္အကူမ်ား လုိအပ္ေနသူအားလုံး ရ႐ိွႏိုင္ေရးအာမခံခ်က္႐ိွေအာင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အတူတကြေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ရမယ္၊ လုပ္ကုိလုပ္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုဟာကေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ရဲ႕ တတိယ အမွာစကားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုအခ်ိန္ဟာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ သူရဲ႕ စီးပြါးေရးစြမ္းအင္အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ားကို ထုတ္ေဖာ္ဘုိ႔အခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ ပါတယ္။
‘အာ႐ွစီးပြါးေရးအံ့ဘြယ္’ အလယ္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာရပ္တည္ေနပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံအ၀ွမ္းမွာ လ်င္ျမန္တဲ့တုိးတက္မႈ မ်ားအတြက္ ျမန္မာကုိ ‘ကႀကိဳးဆင္ေစျခင္းဟာ’ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေရးအတြက္ အေသခ်ာဆုံးနည္း လမ္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရရဲ႕ ကုန္သြယ္မႈအတြက္ ျပင္ပကိုလမ္းဖြင့္ေပးျခင္း၀ါဒ၊ ေထာင္စုဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္မႈရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ား ရေအာင္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈ၊ အိတ္ခ်္အုိင္ဗီြေရာဂါထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈ၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးနဲ႔ ဘိန္းထုပ္လုပ္မႈအဆုံးသတ္ ေရးတုိ႔ကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ႀကိဳဆုိပါတယ္။
ဒါေပမင့္ အမွန္လက္ေတြ႕မွာေတာ့ ျပည္သူသန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာဟာ ဆက္လက္ဆင္းရဲေနဆဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းဟာ အာ႐ွရဲ႕ အနိမ့္ဆုံးထဲမွာပါ၀င္ေနတုန္းပါ။
ဒီျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားဟာ အလုပ္မ်ားလိုအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ စားနပ္ရိကၡာဖူလုံမႈေတြလုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။ က်န္းမာေရး ေစာင့္ေ႐ွာက္ခံယူႏိုင္မႈေတြ လုိအပ္ေနပါတယ္။
ေဒသဆုိင္ရာနဲ႔တကမၻာလုံးဆုိင္ရာ စီးပြါးေရးမွ အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ရႏိုင္ေအာင္နဲ႔ ပါ၀င္ပံ့ပုိးေပးႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို အာမခံရဘုိ႔ ကြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ လုပ္ေပးရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
တည္ၿငိမ္ၿပီး သာယာ၀ေျပာေပါႂကြယ္တဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာက အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ေတြပုိမုိရ႐ွိလာ မွာကုိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီရည္မွန္းခ်က္အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေပး ရပါ့မယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရကလဲ ဒီအခ်ိန္အခါကုိ အမိအရ ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာအသုိင္းအ၀န္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျပည္သူမ်ားကုိ လက္ကမ္းရန္ျပင္ဆင္ေနသည့္ အခြင့္အလမ္း မ်ားရဲ႕ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈကုိ ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ရယူရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရ႐ွိ လူႀကီးမင္းမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား
ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီကုိ မိတ္ေဆြတဦးအျဖစ္ေရာက္လာခဲ့တာပါ။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္တာ၀န္က ကုလသမဂၢပဋိဉာဥ္ရဲ႕ အေကာင္းဆုံးစံမ်ားနဲ႔စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းမ်ားကုိ ထိန္းသိမ္းဘုိ႔ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အခန္းက႑ကေတာ့ သင္တုိ႔အားလုံး - အစုိးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားအုပ္စုမ်ား၊ လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား - ကို ျပည္သူတရပ္အေနနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတခုအေနနဲ႔ အတူတကြ ေ႐ွ႕ဆက္ေ႐ြ႕လ်ားဘုိ႔ အား ေပးရန္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
က႑အားလုံးရဲ႕အေပၚမွာ ျပည္သု႕အက်ဳိးကုိထား႐ွိလုိက္တဲ့အခါ မေက်ာ္လႊားႏိုင္တာ သုိ႔မဟုတ္ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္တာ ဆုိတာ မ႐ွိပါဘူး။
ေဒသနဲ႔ကမၻာဟာ လ်င္ျမန္စြာေျပာင္းလဲေနပါတယ္။ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းမွ၊ ၿပီးေတာ့ မိမိကိုယ္တုိင္ေျပာင္းလဲ မႈကုိ စတင္လုပ္ျခင္းမွ အက်ဳိးျဖစ္ထြန္းဘို႔ ျမန္မာဟာ ရပ္တည္လုိ႔သာ ေနပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာအစုိးရက ကုလသမဂၢႏဲ႔ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းဟာ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀ါဒရဲ႕ အေျခခံအုတ္ျမစ္ျဖစ္ တယ္လုိ႔ ထပ္ခါတလဲလဲ ေျပာလ်က္႐ွိပါတယ္။
စကားေတြနဲ႔ အလုပ္ေတြ ကုိက္ညီဘုိ႔အတြက္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိပါတယ္။
သူ႔ျပည္သူမ်ားရဲ႕လုိအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားနဲ႔ ျပင္းျပတဲ့ဆႏၵမ်ားကုိတုန္႔ျပန္ဘုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ ပုိမုိပူးေပါင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္ေလ ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာပုိင္ဆုိင္မႈကုိ အခုိင္အမာျပဳႏိုင္ေလ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီအတူပါပဲ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔္ရဲ႕ေ၀မွ်ခံယူထားတဲ့ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပည္သူအားလုံးရဲ႕လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကုိ အျပည့္အ၀ေလးစားျခင္းနဲ႔အတူ ညီၫြတ္တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတဲ့ သာယာ၀ေျပာတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီနည္းလမ္းက်တဲ့ အနာ ဂတ္အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလက္လွမ္းမွီႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကူညီရန္ အတူတကြလုပ္ေဆာင္ဘုိ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသုိင္းအ၀န္း မွာလဲ တာ၀န္႐ွိပါတယ္။
ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။
( ၂၀၀၉ ဇူလုိင္ ၄ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အစုိးရမဟုတ္ေသာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား (NGO) ၊ သံတမန္မ်ား၊ ျပည္တြင္း သတင္းေထာက္မ်ား စုစုေပါင္း ၅၀၀ ခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည့္ ဟံသာဝတီ မူးယစ္ ေဆးဝါးျပတုိက္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ၌ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ မိန္႔ခြန္းအျပည့္အစုံကုိ ျပန္ဆုိပါသည္ )
Unofficial translation
ေမာင္ေမာင္လွႀကိဳင္
၂၀၀၉ ၀၇ ၀၆
Absence of unions has been a bane for students
by Phanida
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 15:12
(Interview with former student leader)
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Absence of students’ unions in Burma, which can operate freely, have led to many sacrifices by students with no guarantee of education, a former student leader of the 7th July student movement said.
The student leader recalled the 7th July 1962 student movement which protested against lack of students’ rights, democratic rights and the military dictatorship in Rangoon University.
The Revolutionary Council led by former dictator Gen. Ne Win grabbed power in a coup from a democratically elected civilian government on March 2, 1962. The students staged peaceful protests against this coup d’etat. The regime quelled the student demonstration brutally by opening fire on peaceful and unarmed students. This student demonstration and massacre was later dubbed the 7th July incident.
On this ill-fated day, hundreds of students were killed and the junta dynamited the student union building situated in Rangoon University campus the next day, July 8 1962.
Though it has been 47 years now, successive Burmese governments still ignore the rightful demands of students and have suppressed student movements brutally till today.
Mizzima reporter Phanida interviewed a former student leader (who wished not to be named on security grounds) on the background of the 7th July student movement, students’ rights and current Burmese politics. The interview is presented here.
Q: Students have sacrificed their lives for democratic rights and an end to military dictatorships in all ages. Why do you think they have not yet achieved their goal?
A: There are two parts to this question, pre-1962 and post-1962. Our democratic struggle took too much time. It took the whole of post-independence period. We must introspect on it. This is very important for all of us. Naturally the sacrifices and losses are inevitable. But Burma experienced two historical ages in its 60-year long post-independence period. This is the significant point of Burma’s history. Another significant point is the complexity of ideology in our movement; the right, left and centrist lines. The last point is there were many separations in our movement.
Q: Please tell us the main objective of the student uprising in brief.
A: Bakatha (All Burma Federation of Students Unions- ABFSU) struggled for student rights and democratic rights. The first student movement in which a student was killed took place in 1956. After that, the then AFPFL (Anti-fascist People’s Freedom League) government imposed restriction on student union movements. The second point is on education. After 1962, let me frankly say, politics overwhelmed us so much that there were hardly any talk on education.
Q: Should students get into politics?
A: In fact, students and education are a part of the political programme. But student movements are not for political power. We joined the student movement but not for power. There was a student circle at a specific time. We joined this movement to fulfill the demands of a needy political situation. In fact, the students did not strive for political power. They struggled only for the restoration of democratic rights and for peace. And they were into these movements for the reform of the education system too, to be transformed to a democratic education system.
Q: What is the reason for not allowing freedom of association in Burma? Why do you think this is crucial?
A: This should exist. This is a hallmark of democracy. We need freedom of association, freedom of expression and right to demonstration by chanting slogans. If we want to exercise these democratic rights in a legal framework, we must have an organization. But now the students have no such organization. In fact, Ko Paw (Min Ko Naing) is no more a student. They are now working as student activists under the shadow of the 88 uprising. There are no labour rights also. Lack of such freedom and democratic rights create an intense situation. Such a situation reveals the students badly need democratic rights to express their will and desire freely.
Q: To what extent did the students suffer in their right to education due to the absence of a legal student union (ABFSU)?
A: Yes, they have and are suffering a lot in this regard, not only now but since our time. This vicious circle will never end. To the question, to what extent, we have to sacrifice our lives…..the current education has no guarantee for the students.
Q: How important is the role of the UN in Burmese affairs. Can we rely on it to some extent?
A: I’ll tell my own view in this regard. Many people said that our country’s affair is sandwiched in the ‘international platform strategy’ of major countries. I’d like to point out that as long as this situation exists, whatsoever they (international community) talk about our country, these talks will be a far cry from Burma’s practical situation as they are not aware of the in-depth situation in Burma.
Q: Please give a brief account of the 7th July movement for the current student of today.
A: The 1962 student movement originated from the tightening of hostel rules. The students demanded abolishment of tight hostel rules, to give them more freedom, to revoke the curfew order imposed under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code on that day of 7th July. They held meetings in the night and dynamited the student union building in the early morning of the next day at about 3 a.m. The army was deployed in the campus at about 4 p.m.
Almost all political organizations supported the then ‘Revolution Council’ after that incident. Only the students were left in this (anti-military dictatorship) struggle. At that time, there were student organizations namely ABFSU, University Student Union, Rangoon University Federation of Ethnic Student Union etc.
Q: What would you like to say in memory of the 7th July student movement?
A: In fact, in a human society where there is no peace, no democracy, no education policy which can guarantee the future of students, it will be very hard for the society to move forward. For the students, there will be their education on the one hand and the political system on the other.
http://www.mizzima.com/edop/interview/2412-absence-of-unions-has-been-a-bane-for-students.html
UN Chief Speaks Out Against Lack of Human Rights
BURMA: UN Chief Speaks Out Against Lack of Human Rights
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jul 8 (IPS) - Using the power of his office, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon achieved a rare diplomatic feat during his recent visit to military-ruled Burma. He broke a taboo by delivering a public speech about the lack of democracy and human rights in the country.
So far, the notoriously prickly regime, which controls the South-east Asian nation with an iron grip, has accepted Ban's verbal thrust without an outburst. But Burma watchers wonder how long that silence will last, given the regime is known to lash out at U.N. officials who have made public statements in the country about the debilitating effects of ignoring political and civil liberties.
"Neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights," the world body's top diplomat said over the weekend to an audience of diplomats, U.N. officials and staff from aid agencies in Rangoon, the former capital. "Peace, development and human rights are closely inter-related."
"Myanmar's human rights record remains a matter of grave concern," Ban added, using the name of the country that the junta opts for, instead of Burma. "Myanmar's way forward must be rooted in respect for human rights."
Ban's speech, on the last of his two-day stay in Burma, also touched on the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has spent over 14 years either under house arrest or in Rangoon's Insein Prison. He called for the release of the Nobel Peace laureate and the over 2,100 political prisoners languishing in Burmese jails.
"Aung San Suu Kyi must be allowed to participate in the political process without further delay," Ban said after being denied a chance to meet the 64-year-old Suu Kyi, currently being held in the Insein Prison as part of a bizarre trial after a U.S. citizen showed up as an uninvited guest in her home in early May after he swam there across a lake.
Little wonder why Ban's critical comments - which shatter the illusion being created by the regime that it is on the right track as part of its "roadmap to democracy," including a planned general election in 2010 - is being welcomed in some quarters.
In the past, the junta has not been kind to the far less provocative and milder comments about the shortcomings of the regime's model for democracy and the humanitarian situation made by Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. special envoy to Burma, and Charles Petrie, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the country.
Gambari was given a dressing down by Information Minister Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan in March last year for comments the Nigerian diplomat made about flaws in the "democratic" political process being pushed by the junta. Gambari said that the U.N. wanted this push, including the new constitution, to be inclusive, accommodating the opposition.
Petrie paid a different price for speaking his mind in a press release issued in October 2007. The junta refused to renew his visa, prompting an early departure from his post, after the head of the United Nations Development Programme deplored the "deteriorating humanitarian situation" in the country
The regime described that statement as "unprecedented" and "very negative."
But by going many steps further, Ban's speech is being described as "encouraging" by the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the democratically elected government forced into exile after the regime refused to recognised the results of the 1990 general elections.
"This is the first time that someone has been so openly critical about the reality in Burma," says Bo Hla Tint, the foreign minister of the NCGUB. "It was important for Mr. Ban to tell the regime how the U.N. sees the problem in Burma."
"The U.N. secretary-general's role is important to bring change in Burma," the minister in the exile government told IPS. "It has to be part of a long serious political process, and not just a one-time event."
The personal commitment shown by Ban to usher in an open and inclusive democratic culture in Burma is being well received by the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-member regional bloc of which Burma is a member.
"The prime minister, as the chair of ASEAN, supports the U.N. secretary-general's trip to Myanmar and he wants to ensure that the U.N. keeps engaging the Myanmar government," said Panitan Wattanayagorn, the acting spokesman for the Thai government. "We will see from this point onwards what more can be done now that the U.N. secretary-general has delivered his message."
Such a regional response marks a departure from the harsh comments by Western governments that saw Ban's trip as a failure, achieving barely any concessions from the junta. A key to this dismissive stance was Ban being denied access to meet Suu Kyi.
"Although we know that expectations among some in the international community was very high and they wanted the secretary-general to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, it is not fair to say the mission was a failure because the meeting did not take place," added Panitan in an interview. "The issues are much more complex and beyond this single issue."
But for the current U.N. engagement to achieve political reform in Burma more is required, say human rights groups that have continued to expose the litany of abuse in a country that has been under the grip of successive military regimes since a 1962 coup.
"Setting the standards through a speech is the easiest thing to do; achieving the standards is the difficult part," says David Scott Mathieson, Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights watchdog. "That is where the hard work and effort is going to be." "The average person in Burma will find Ban's speech patronising," Mathieson told IPS. "They expect more from the U.N." (END/2009)
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