07 May 2009
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအတြင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈေတြဟာ လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈေတြ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္တရပ္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းၿပီး စစ္ေဆးေပးဖို႔ ၿဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္အမတ္ေတြက ဒီေန႔ပဲ ၿဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္မွာ အဆုိျပဳ တင္သြင္းလုိက္ပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းစုံကို ကုိသားၫြန္႔ဦးက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။
ဒီအဆုိကို ျမန္မာ့ဒီမုိကေရစီေရးအတြက္ ပါတီစုံပါတဲ့ ၿဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္အမတ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ဒုတိယဥကၠ႒ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္ ဂၽြန္ဘေကာင္းက ဦးေဆာင္တင္သြင္းသြားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအတြင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီအဖြဲ႕အေနနဲ႔ မၾကာမၾကာ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ စုိးရိမ္ပူပန္မႈကို ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆိုဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒီေန႔ ၿဗိတိသွ်ပါလီမန္ မွာ တင္သြင္းတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့အေရး အဆုိျပဳခ်က္နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး CSW ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ခရစ္ယာန္ ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ေျပာခြင့္ရသူတဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ အလစ္ဇာ ပါပါဒုိးရပ္စ္ကို ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ၿဗိတိသွ်လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲမွာ ဒီေန႔ ျမန္မာ့အေရး အဆုိျပဳခ်က္ကို ၿဗိတိသွ်လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ဘယ္ေလာက္ေလာက္ ေထာက္ခံ ခဲ့ၾကပါသလဲ။
“ၿဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္အမတ္ေတြရဲ႕ ဒီအဆုိျပဳခ်က္ကို လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ၆၀ ေက်ာ္က လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီ အဆုိျပဳခ်က္ထဲမွာ ကုလသမဂၢ စုံစမ္းေရးေကာ္မရွင္တရပ္အေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအတြင္း လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈေတြအတြက္ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးဖို႔ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအစိုးရေတြကို ေတာင္းဆုိထားတာပါ။ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံထားရတဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကုိ လႊတ္ေပးဖို႔အခ်ိန္ကလည္း သီတင္း ၂ ပတ္ေလာက္ပဲ က်န္ေတာ့တာမုိ႔ ဒီအခ်ိန္ဟာ အခ်ိန္အခါေကာင္းပါပဲ။”
အခုလိုမ်ဳိး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္းက လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈဟုတ္မဟုတ္ ဒါကို စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးဖုိ႔ဆုိ ရင္ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြက ဘယ္ေလာက္အထိ အခုိင္အမာရွိလုိ႔ပါလဲ။
“ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အေရွ႕ဘက္ျခမ္းမွာ အရပ္သား ျပည္သူေတြအေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္တဲ့ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြကို စုေဆာင္းတင္ျပထားတဲ့ အစီရင္ခံစာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိထားၿပီးသားပါ။ ဒါေတြဟာ လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္ျပစ္မႈေတြ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ယူဆေနသူေတြ၊ ယုံၾကည္ေနသူေတြလည္း အမ်ားႀကီးရွိပါတယ္။ ဒီအျဖစ္အပ်က္ဆုိးေတြ ကို က်မတို႔ CSW အေနနဲ႔ မွတ္တမ္းျပဳစုထားတာ ရွိသလို တျခားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႕ေတြမွာလည္း မွတ္တမ္းမွတ္ရာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိပါတယ္။”
ျပႆနာတခုကေတာ့ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္းက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခအေနေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ျမန္မာ့အိမ္နီးခ်င္း တ႐ုတ္ အပါအ၀င္ အာဆီယံႏုိင္ငံ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက ဒါေတြဟာ ျပည္တြင္းေရးပဲျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိၿပီး တစိုက္မတ္မတ္ ေျပာေနတာ ရွိပါတယ္။ တကယ္တမ္း ကုလသမဂၢအေနနဲ႔၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအေနနဲ႔ ဒီျပႆနာေတြဟာ Crimes against Humanity လူသား မ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ဆုိတာ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးဖုိ႔ ေကာ္မရွင္ဖြဲ႕ေရးမွာ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအားလုံးက ပါ၀င္လာႏုိင္ပါ့မလားခင္ဗ်။
“ဒီလုိျဖစ္ပ်က္ေနတာေတြကို ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အသုိင္းအ၀ုိင္းအေနနဲ႔ လက္ခံအသိအမွတ္ျပဳဖုိ႔ တာ၀န္ရွိပါတယ္။ ဒီရာဇ၀တ္မႈ ေတြအတြက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးေကာ္မရွင္တရပ္ထားဖုိ႔ ႀကိဳးပမ္းရမယ့္အခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ေနပါၿပီ။ ျမန္မာျပည္သူ ေတြအေနနဲ႔ ဆက္ၿပီးဖိႏွိပ္ခံဖို႔ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈေတြကလည္း သိသိသာသာႀကီးကို ေပၚလြင္ေနတာပါ။ ဒီေတာ့ တာ၀န္ရွိတဲ့ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြကို တရားဥပေဒနဲ႔အညီ အေရးယူဖုိ႔အတြက္ ကမၻာတ၀န္းႏုိင္ငံ အသီးသီးရဲ႕ အစိုးရေတြမွာ လုံး၀ တာ၀န္ရွိပါတယ္။”
ၿဗိတိသွ်ႏုိင္ငံအေျခစုိက္ CSW က ေျပာခြင့္ရသူတဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ အလစ္ဇာ ပါပါဒုိးရပ္စ္ ရွင္းျပသြားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
သူတုိ႔အေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအတြင္းက အခုလို လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈေတြဟာ Crimes against Humanity လူသား မ်ဳိးႏြယ္စုအေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တဲ့ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ဆိုတာ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအေနနဲ႔ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးဖုိ႔၊ ဒီကေနၿပီး ICC
ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈ တရား႐ုံးအထိ တင္သြင္းဖို႔ ႀကိဳးစားသြားမယ္လို႔လည္း သူမက ေျပာဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။
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Saturday, May 9, 2009
စစ္အစိုးရ ျပစ္မႈ စံုစမ္းဖို႔ ၿဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္အမတ္ေတြ အဆိုျပဳ
Friday, May 8, 2009
Myanmar ignores US request to see detained citizenအက်ဥ္းက်ခံေနရေသာ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံသားအားေတြ ခြင့္ျပဳရန္ေတာင္းဆိုမွဳအေပၚ ေခြးအစိုးရျငင္းဆန္
42 mins ago
YANGON, Myanmar – The U.S. Embassy in Myanmar said Friday the government has ignored its repeated requests for access to a detained American arrested for allegedly swimming to the lakeside home of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and sneaking inside.
The man's motives remained unclear, and the embassy said it has not been able to confirm any information since his Wednesday arrest was reported by state-controlled media, which identified him as "John Willian Yeattaw."
"We have made repeated requests to see him and we still have not been granted access," said embassy spokesman Richard Mei. "We would like to confirm the information ourselves and speak to the individual directly."
Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, is rarely allowed visitors by Myanmar's ruling junta.
Asian diplomats in Myanmar quietly expressed concern that Suu Kyi could face stricter penalties if authorities found that she allowed the man to stay. They spoke on condition of anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
Her home is tightly guarded and she is not allowed visitors, aside from her doctor. On infrequent occasions she is allowed out under tight guard to meet with fellow party leaders and visiting U.N. representatives.
In addition, one of many strict rules the junta imposes on all citizens is that they must notify local officials about any overnight visitor who is not a family member. The law also states that foreigners are not allowed to spend the night at a local's home.
Some members of Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, have been jailed for about two weeks for violating that law.
Nyan Win, a spokesman for the party, noted that newspaper reports about the American's arrest said he had entered Suu Kyi's home but did not say he had met her. It remained unclear if the man was able to contact Suu Kyi.
"I'm not really concerned she could be penalized for this break-in because she didn't invite him in," Nyan Win said, adding that it was worrisome how easily the man accessed Suu Kyi's tightly guarded home. "My main concern is her security."
The state-run Myanma Ahlin newspaper reported Thursday that the man had confessed to swimming across Yangon's Inya Lake to Suu Kyi's home on Sunday night and then "secretly entered the house and stayed there." It said he left Tuesday and was arrested when "security personnel found a suspicious-looking foreigner swimming" early Wednesday morning.
It would be the first known instance that anyone has sneaked into Suu Kyi's compound or swam across the lake in an attempt to get there.
Suu Kyi has been held without trial for leading an internationally hailed movement for democracy in Myanmar, which has been ruled by the military with an iron fist since 1962. Her party won Myanmar's last elections in 1990 — a result the junta never recognized
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Thursday, May 7, 2009
Burmese Border Discount Discontinued
May 6, 2009: A year ago, India quietly stopped selling weapons to Myanmar (Burma.) Five years ago, India had agreed to supply Myanmar (Burma) with weapons and military equipment, and two years ago offered to refurbish Myanmar's aging warplanes (mainly MiG-21s).
India shares a 1,500 kilometer border with Myanmar. That border is in an area where India has had problems with tribal separatists for decades. So supplying heavy weapons (mortars, rifles and machine-guns), a few helicopters and some repairs and upgrades to their MiG-21s, is a way to getting Myanmar to be more cooperative along the border. Some of the tribal rebel groups had established camps just across the border in Myanmar. A more cooperative Myanmar would shut down all those camps, and more aggressively patrol the area, to prevent the Indian tribals from setting up new ones. There has been some such cooperation in the past, and the arms sales were meant to encourage even more.
India and Bangladesh thus made an informal deal with Myanmar to drive rebels from each other's borders. Over the last few years, the three countries have worked out these deals, to rid themselves of rebel groups that had only survived because they could flee across the border and set up camp until their pursuers went away. For decades, Myanmar's neighbors avoided such cooperative relations, as a form of protest against the Burmese military dictatorship. But eventually, the need to deal with various rebel organizations overcame this distaste.
But Myanmar has continued to allow weapons to be sold to tribal rebels in northeastern India. It's believed that the tribal rebels are obtaining 80 percent of their weapons from Myanmar. Diplomacy has failed to stop the weapons coming into India. Myanmar has other sources, primarily China. This is also annoying to the Indians, because they see Myanmar aiding efforts to extend Chinese naval power into the Indian ocean.
Myanmar has been ruled by a military dictatorship for the last 45 years. The generals have run the economy into the ground, and succeeded in suppressing all attempts at establishing a representative government. They have also managed to maintain the support of a fairly large army. How have they managed to pull this off for so long? Simple, the generals have concentrated on maintaining the loyalty of the officers and senior NCOs in the armed forces. This is done by making the military a well paid, by Burmese standards, profession, and select carefully from among those who apply. Meanwhile, Myanmar gets all the weapons it needs from China. Many of the Indian items were free, or cut rate, but it appears that the Chinese have lowered their prices to match that.
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The camp will change but never be fallen or you can't stop that becase you can't ,.......all can't be change because of you
KNLA Wah Lay Kee base camp has fallen [with pictures] by Daniel Pederson
2009 May 7
tags: Burma, DKBA Killers, Genocide, Junta, Karen, KNLA, KNU, world focus on Burma
by peacerunning
KNLA Wah Lay Kee base camp has fallen [with pictures] wlkpic1Corporal Saw Jay was killed during the final push for Wah Lay Kee when he triggered a trip wire while leading a group of scouts in dense jungle.
by Daniel Pedersen on May.06, 2009, under Battles, Burma reportage
Daniel Pedersen
Mae Sot, Thailand
May 6, 2009
Pictures of the camp
The Karen National Liberation Army’s Wah Lay Kee base camp, home to its Sixth Brigade 201st Battalion has fallen.
Since 1988 the camp had been held against repeated attacks by soldiers of the Burma Army and later the breakaway Karen militia allied with Burma’s military junta the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army.
Hundreds of lives have been lost around the camp, and hundreds maimed by landmines and booby traps.
Last year the KNLA lost it then won it back right at the beginning of the wet season proper.
This year, it seems, the rain has come early, and Wah Lay Kee has been abandoned.
The final push by the ruling Burmese junta, the State Peace and Development Council, and the DKBA began on April 12.
In late afternoon of April 28, the KNLA pulled out, leaving the camp surrounded by landmines and the camp itself loaded with booby traps and tripwires.
These images tell the story of the continuing brutality of the Burma Army and their allied militias.
They were captured by medics and soldiers during the hectic final days of Wah Lay Kee.
wlkpic4
http://www.danielpedersen.org/?cat=20&album=3&gallery=15
Thanks to Daniel Pederson and salute to all these heroes
This is Truth by Junta and DKBA Killers
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What Burmese Army for? ဗမာ တပ္မေတာ္ သန္းေရႊ တပ္မေတာ္ ..... ေခြးတပ္မေတာ္ ဘာေတြ လုပ္ေနသလဲ ...ဖတ္ၾကည့္ေပါ့
Wed 6 May 2009
Filed under: News, Inside Burma
Farmers in Burma’s northern Kachin State are being meted out ill treatment in the name of growing summer paddy by local Burmese Army battalions, said localfarmers.
Farmers, who are mainly into cultivation of monsoon paddy in Kachin State, are being forced to grow summer paddy. Some of their buffalos and oxen are being slaughtered for beef or sold for money in the market, while some are being used in the paddy fields for ploughing by Burmese Army troops, complained local farmers.
In Burma, summer paddy is grown in March and harvested in late May before the onset of the monsoons in June.
Last March, the Burmese Army’s Infantry Battalion (IB or Kha La Ya) No. 142 based in Dawhpumyang in Bhamo district deliberately drove seven heads of cattle into their summer paddy fields. Three cows were slaughtered while the rest received gun-shot wounds, said local farmers.
The current price of a cow is between 500,000 Kyat (US $490) and 600,000 Kyat (US $588) in Kachin State, said local farmers.
The cattle are owned by Kachin villagers in Dingga village in Dawhpumyang sub-township. They also grow summer paddy in the fields which are temporarily seized from Dingga farmers, according to farmers of the village.
Again on April 26, Burmese soldiers of IB No. 142 drove a herd of cattle belonging to Dingga farmers to the seized paddy fields and the cattle owners were threatened with imprisonment. The soldiers also demanded fines ranging between 30,000 Kyat (US $29) and 80,000 Kyat (US $78) per cow because the cattle ate their summer paddy, added local farmers.
Local farmers said the soldiers fence their summer paddy fields only on one side and the cattle enter the fields from the sides without fences.
At the moment, farmers in Dingga village are spending their days in nightmarish conditions because they may be fined or imprisoned when they check for their cattle in the summer paddy fields where soldiers deliberately drive cattle, the farmers said.
Similarly, another Burmese Army battalion, IB No. 58, based in Waingmaw town is also treating local farmers shabbily in the name of growing summer paddy, said farmers in Waingmaw.
Farmers who grow paddy in monsoon by using water from Washong Dam, the government’s irrigation project, have been ordered to grow summer paddy with their own money by the IB No. 58, said farmers.
Some farmers’ paddy fields have been temporarily seized by soldiers. Again the local people’s cattle entering the summer paddy fields are also slaughtered by soldiers, according to sources close to cattle owners.
Most farmers in Kachin State are reluctant to grow summer paddy because the farmers cannot start ploughing monsoon paddy in time. They have to skip cultivating monsoon paddy because of the summer paddy, said local farmers.
Usually, farmers in Kachin State rely on monsoon paddy which starts to grow from June and they do not need to put much effort to grow it, said local farmers.
Meanwhile, the Burmese military junta is forcibly selling a new variety of paddy seed to farmers in Kahcin State for 7,000 Kyat equivalent to US $ 6.8 per Tin (1 Tin = 40.9 Litre) and claiming that Kachin State will be the fourth largest rice producing state in the country. This is being proclaimed by pasting posters around Kachin State.
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Wednesday, May 6, 2009
ေခြးေလာက္မွ အသိတရားမရွိ ကိုယ္ ့အမ်ိဳ းကိုယ္ ့ျပန္သတ္ေနေသာ ေက်ာ္သန္း DKBA-saw-kyaw-san
စစ္ေခြးအစို းရဲ ့အရိုးအရင္းေလာက္နဲ ့ပိတိျဖစ္ယစ္မူးေနျပီး ကိုယ္ ့အမ်ိဳ းကိုယ္ျပန္သတ္ေနေသာ ကရင္ခြဲထြက္အမ်ိဳးယုတ္ေက်ာ္သန္းရဲ ့ပံု ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကရင္လူထုရဲ ့ထမင္းဟင္းကို အရြယ္ေရာက္တဲ ့အထိ စားေသာက္ျပီး သာရာစား ေက်ာ္သန္းနဲ ့အဖြဲ ့ ၁၉၉၅-၉၆ မွာ စစ္အၾကမ္းဖက္အုပ္စု ျဖစ္တဲ ့ သန္းေရႊတို ့ထံ မွာ ေျခေထာက္ ကုန္းနမ္းေနခဲ ့တာ အခုခ်ိန္ထိပါဘဲ။
Burmese lawyers says junta should be taken to ICC -International Criminal Court
တိုင္းျပည္ကို ထင္သလို ရမ္းကား အုပ္စိုးလ်က္ရွိေသာ စစ္အၾကမ္းဖက္ အုပ္စုအား စစ္ခံုရံုးသိုပို ့ ့ေဆာင္ရန္သင့္ျပီဟုု
by Mungpi
Tuesday, 05 May 2009 19:16
New Delhi – The Burma Lawyers’ Council in exile has said it is gathering evidence and collating ideas on how to produce the Burmese military generals in the International Criminal Court (ICC), for the crimes it had committed, including crimes against humanity.
The BLC, formed with Burmese lawyers in exile, on Tuesday said, it was looking for a way to file a case against the Burmese junta, for its crimes against the country’s citizens.
“We are looking at ways to determine how we can file a case against the junta, for their brutal actions against the Burmese people,” Thein Oo, Chairman of the BLC, told Mizzima.
He said, as a step towards looking for a way to bring the junta to the ICC, the BLC along with the International Federation for Human Rights (IFDH) is bringing together international experts, Burmese activists and others to a two-day seminar in Bangkok.
“This seminar is to brainstorm on how best to get justice for the suffering people in Burma and how the international community can take action against the brutal regime,” Thein Oo said.
The campaign to bring the Burmese military junta to the ICC began about two years ago, with a vague idea by the BLC. However, today, it has gained momentum and is able to draw the attention of international experts as well as the Burmese regime.
On Friday, May 1, 2009, Burma’s military regime in its official mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, declared the Burma Lawyers’ Council and other associated organizations and persons as unlawful.
The paper said, acts of the BLC and its members were harmful for the stability of the nation and therefore, Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), Snr Gen Than Shwe declared the BLC and its members unlawful.
Although this gesture of the Burmese regime may seem to be a mere coincidence, sources in the military establishment told Mizzima, the junta fears that the BLC’s efforts might gain greater momentum.
According to sources, the Burmese embassy in Bangkok was diplomatically approaching Thailand, where the seminar is being held on May 4 and 5.
During the seminar, Burmese activists and international experts discussed how the regime had perpetrated human rights abuses with impunity and how they could be made accountable for the crimes they had committed.
But, as Burma has not rectified the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court in July 2002, the ICC does not have any jurisdiction over Burma.
However, a clause under the statute of Territorial Jurisdiction of the treaty allows the ICC to act on a case based on a referral by the United Nations Security Council. The clause says the court is allowed to exercise jurisdiction, “where a situation is referred to the court by the UN Security Council”.
Thein Oo said, “The case of the UN Security Council referring it to the ICC might not take place soon but we are already in the process of campaigning for it.”
He said, they would present the case to the UNSC explaining how Burma’s military regime’s actions were threatening peace and security in the region.
Rights groups have accused Burma’s military junta of systematically abusing the rights of its own citizens, causing outflow of a large number of refugees and migrants. The junta’s military actions in eastern Burma have also particularly caused thousands of people to become homeless and live in the jungles.
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Burma terrorist government known as Myanmar junta rejects Suu Kyi's detention appeal
ေခြးသူခိုးအစိုးရ အေမစုဆို ေၾကာက္မွေၾကာက္ ..
AFP
Myanmar junta rejects Suu Kyi's detention appeal AFP/File – Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi speaks at a press conference in 2002. Myanmar's military …
YANGON (AFP) – Myanmar's military government has rejected an appeal by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi against her detention, a party spokesman said Tuesday.
National League for Democracy (NLD) party spokesman Nyan Win told AFP that Aung San Suu Kyi's lawyer had received a letter confirming the failed bid last Friday, less than a month before her current sentence expires.
The 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has spent most of the past 19 years under house arrest in Yangon where she lives with her two maids and is allowed only occasional visits, mostly from her lawyer and doctor.
She lodged her appeal in October last year.
"According to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's lawyer U Kyi Win, the appeal against her detention was rejected," Nyan Win said, although he himself had not read the letter.
"It should not be like this as they haven't allowed her any court hearing for her appeal."
He said the assistant to Aung San Suu Kyi's lawyer, Hla Myo Myint, went to the remote administrative capital Naypyidaw on Friday to receive the rejection letter after being summoned by authorities.
Her lawyer Kyi Win has now requested a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, Nyan Win said.
The appeal was lodged after Aung San Suu Kyi was given an intravenous drip by her doctor because of malnourishment after refusing food deliveries for a month.
In August last year she refused a visit from United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari, apparently in protest at the lack of progress he was making on reform in Myanmar.
Aung San Suu Kyi's latest period of incarceration expires at the end of May and authorities have not said yet if they intend to extend her sentence.
The military, which has ruled impoverished Myanmar with an iron rod since 1962, is preparing for elections next year under a "road map to democracy" -- which critics have derided as a sham meant to entrench the generals' power.
The NLD won a landslide victory in elections in 1990, but the junta never allowed them to take office.
Last week the NLD set conditions on taking part in the election, saying it would participate only if all political prisoners including NLD leaders were unconditionally released.
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Tuesday, May 5, 2009
က်မတို ့့ကျမန္မာျပည္ကပါ ေနျပည္ေတာ္က ဟုတ္ပါဘူး
A Myanmar family has a meal under the plastic tent that serves as their home in Twantay, Myanmar, April 30, 2009. Many Myanmar resident are still struggling to meet basic daily needs a year after Cyclone Nargis struck the area. Twantay is about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Yangon
Monday, May 4, 2009
မုန္တိုင္းေဒသ သတင္းမွန္ စစ္အၾကမ္းဖက္အစိုးရ ဖုံးထားဆဲ
03 May 2009
တႏွစ္ျပည့္သြားတဲ့ နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းေဘးဒဏ္နဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအစိုးရထုတ္ သတင္းစာေတြက အေျခအေနေတြ တိုးတက္ေကာင္းမြန္လာၿပီလို႔ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ တကယ့္လက္ရွိအေျခအေနမွာကေတာ့ မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္သင့္ ျပည္သူလူထုေတြဟာ နလန္မထူႏိုင္ၾကဘဲ ရွိေနတုန္းပါ။ ဒါကို ျမန္မာအစိုးရသတင္းစာေတြက သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ေတြ စံုစံုလင္လင္ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္ မေဖာ္ျပတဲ့တြက္ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနရတဲ့ျပည္သူေတြမွာ အမ်ားႀကီး ထိခိုက္နစ္နာေနၾကရတယ္လုိ႔ ကိုယ္တုိင္ကူညီကယ္ဆယ္ေရး လုပ္ေနၾကတဲ့သူေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ အျပည့္စံုကို ေဒၚေမၿငိမ္းက တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။
အစိုးရပိုင္သတင္းစာတရပ္က သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ေတြကို ထိမ္ခ်န္တဲ့အတြက္ တကယ္တမ္းဒုကၡေရာက္ၾကရတဲ့ မုန္တိုင္း သင့္ျပည္သူေတြမွာ ဘယ္လိုမ်ိဳး ဆိုးက်ိဳးေတြ ခံစားရသလဲ ဆိုတာကို မုန္တိုင္းသင့္ေဒသေတြမွာ သြားၿပီးေတာ့ ကိုယ္တိုင္ ကိုယ္က် အကူအညီေတြေပးခဲ့ဖူးၿပီး အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုကို ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ မခိုင္မြန္ဦး က အခုလို ေျပာျပပါတယ္။
“မုန္တိုင္းဒုကၡသည္ေတြမွာ အကုန္လံုး အဆင္ေျပေနတယ္ဆိုတာကေတာ့ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ တခ်ိဳ႕ဟာေတြ အဆင္ေျပေနၿပီ။ အကုန္လံုးအဆင္ေျပသြားတယ္ ဆိုတာကေတာ့ လံုး၀မဟုတ္ဘူး။ လူတေယာက္အတြက္က မိသားစုေရာ အိမ္ေရာ လုပ္ငန္း ေတြေရာ မုန္တိုင္းတိုက္လုိက္လို႔ ပါသြားတဲ့အခါမွာ တႏွစ္အတြင္း အကုန္လံုးျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ မူလအတိုင္း ျပန္ျဖစ္သြားၿပီ ဆိုတာ ကေတာ့ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ဘူးေပါ့ေနာ္။ ဒီလိုကိစၥေတြမွာ အစုိးရကေနၿပီးေတာ့ အဆင္မေျပေသးတာေတြကို သတင္းအေမွာင္ခ်ၿပီး ေတာ့ အဆင္ေျပေနပါၿပီ ဆိုၿပီးေျပာေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းက ကူညီခ်င္တဲ့သူေတြကလည္း၊ ဒီဟာေတြက အကုန္အဆင္ေျပ သြားၿပီဆိုၿပီး မကူညီလိုက္ေတာ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြမွာ အကူအညီရမယ့္ဟာ မရေတာ့ဘဲနဲ႔ ပိုၿပီးေတာ့ ဒုကၡေရာက္လာတာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးေပါ့ေနာ္။ သိသိသာသာ လိုအပ္ေနတာေတြကို ေဖာ္ျပမွပဲ ျပည္သူေတြအခ်င္းခ်င္း ကူညီႏိုင္မယ္၊ ကူညီဖို႔လည္း သိလာမယ္။ ဒါမွလည္း ဒုကၡသည္ေတြလည္း လိုအပ္ေနတဲ့ အကူအညီေတြကို ျမန္ျမန္ရၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ဘ၀အတြက္ နဂို အတိုင္း ျပန္ျဖစ္ဖို႔အတြက္ ျမန္ျမန္လုပ္ႏိုင္မယ္လို႔ ထင္ပါတယ္။”
မုန္တိုင္းသင့္ေဒသေတြကို အေခါက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာသြားၿပီး ကူညီကယ္ဆယ္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြ လုပ္ကိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့ စာေရးဆရာမ ခက္မာ ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာအစိုးရသတင္းစာေတြမွာ သတင္းမွန္ေတြ မေဖာ္ျပတာဟာ အံ့ၾသစရာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူးလို႔ အခုလို ေျပာပါတယ္။
“က်မတို႔က နာဂစ္တုန္းက ေဒးဒရဲ ကို အဓိကထားၿပီး သြားၾကတာ။ သူတို႔က အမ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ လယ္သမားေတြေလ။ စပါး ျပန္မစိုက္ႏုိင္ေသးဘူး။ ေနာက္ စိုက္ႏိုင္ျပန္ေတာ့လည္း မ်ိဳးေတြက သူတို႔သံုးေနက် စပါးမ်ိဳးေတြ မဟုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ မေပါက္ဘူးေပါ့။ အစိုးရက တကယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ လက္လမ္းမမီဘူးလို႔ပဲ ေျပာရမလားပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လက္လွမ္းမမီဘူးလို႔ ေျပာရေအာင္လည္း က်မေျပာတဲ့ ေဒးဒရဲတို႔ မအူပင္တို႔ဆိုတာ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕နဲ႔အနီးဆံုး ၿမိဳ႕၀ကၽြန္းေပၚ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြပဲေလ။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ ကြာဟေနသလဲ ဆိုတာကို ေျပာရမယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ဒါကေတာ့ အားလံုးသိၿပီးသားပဲ။ ဒါ ထံုးစံပဲဟာ။ ဘယ္တုန္းကမွ အမွန္ကုိ မသိရဘူးေလ။”
ေနာ္ေ၀ႏိုင္ငံမွာေရာက္ရွိေနထိုင္ေနတဲ့ အေနာ္မာ သတင္းဌာနရဲ႕ အယ္ဒီတာ ျမေၾကးမံုကေတာ့ သတင္းစာေတြမွာ တကယ့္ လိုအပ္ခ်က္ေတြကို ေဖာ္ျပမွ မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္သင့္ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနသူေတြကို ကူညီကယ္ဆယ္ႏိုင္မွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ေျပာသြားပါ တယ္။
“မုန္တိုင္းတိုက္သြားတယ္ဆိုတာ သဘာ၀ ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ပါ။ အစိုးရတိုက္ခုိင္းလို႔ တိုက္တာလဲ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ သူတို႔ အျပစ္ လို႔လည္း မေျပာတဲ့ကိစၥမွာေတာ့ သတင္းအေမွာင္ခ်တာ မလုပ္သင့္ဘူးလို႔ ျမင္ပါတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ အခု တႏွစ္ ဆိုတာ ဘာမွၾကာေသးတာလည္းမဟုတ္ေတာ့ ဘာေတြျဖစ္သြားတယ္၊ အဲဒီေနရာမွာ အခုထိ ဘာျပႆနာေတြ တက္ခဲ့ တယ္၊ လူေတြ စား၀တ္ေနေရးေတြ က်န္းမာေရးေတြ ဘယ္လိုအခက္အခဲေတြ ရွိတယ္ဆိုတာကို အမွန္အတုိင္း သတင္းဖြင့္ ေပးလိုက္လို႔ရွိရင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာကေရာ ျပည္တြင္းကေရာ အကူအညီေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ရႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ အခု သတင္းေတြကို အေမွာင္ခ်ထားေတာ့ ရစရာရွိတဲ့အကူအညီေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ေလ်ာ့နည္းသြားရတယ္။ ဆံုးရံႈးသြားရတယ္။ ကာယကံရွင္ေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး နစ္နာပါတယ္။ အခုလက္ရွိ အေျခအေနမွာေတာ့ ရွိေနတဲ့ျပႆနာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးပါ။ ကေလးေတြ ေစာေစာ စီးစီး ေက်ာင္းထြက္လုိက္ရတယ္။ ဒီႏွစ္ဆိုလည္း ကေလး ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ေက်ာင္းျပန္မအပ္ႏိုင္ဘူး။ ဒီလိုပဲ အိမ္ေထာင္ က်တဲ့ကေလးေတြက အိမ္ေထာင္စုမွာ ဦးစီးေခါင္းေဆာင္ ျဖစ္ကုန္တယ္။ သူတို႔ေက်ာင္းထဲမွာ မေနႏိုင္ဘူး။ ဒါေတြကို အမွန္ အတိုင္း သတင္းဖြင့္ေပးလိုက္ရင္ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးဟာ အင္မတန္ စာနာတတ္တဲ့လူမ်ိဳးပါ။ သိရင္ အမ်ားႀကီး အကူအညီ ေပးၾက မွာပါ။ ဒီကေလးေတြကိုေရာ၊ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ နီးစပ္ရာ ေဆြးမ်ိဳးသားခ်င္းေတြကိုေရာ။ သတင္းေတြ အကုန္အုပ္ထားၿပီး အားလံုး ေကာင္းသြားၿပီ၊ ၿပီးသြားၿပီ၊ အဆင္ေျပပါၿပီ လုပ္ေနေတာ့ တကယ့္လက္ေတြ႔ အဲဒီမွာ စား၀တ္ေနေရး ဒုကၡ ေရာက္ေနတဲ့သူ ေတြ မွာ ဒုကၡကို ဘယ္သူမွလည္း မသိဘူး။ သူတို႔ဘာသာ ျဖစ္သလို ရုန္းေနရတယ္။ ဒါေတြ မျဖစ္ေစခ်င္ပါဘူး။”
ႏိုင္ငံပိုင္သတင္းစာမ်က္ႏွာေတြေပၚမွာ မုန္တိုင္းသင့္ေဒသရဲ႕ အေျခအေနမွန္ေတြကို အခု တႏွစ္ၾကာတဲ့အထိ ျပည္သူေတြ ကို အသိမေပးဘဲထားတဲ့အေပၚမွာ အသီးသီးတံု႔ျပန္ခဲ့ၾကတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
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နာဂစ္ အျဖစ္မွန္ အေတြ ့အၾကံဳ (ဘီဘီစီမွ)
((သစ္တံုးမွတ္လို ့ဖက္ျပီး လိုက္လာတာကုန္းေပၚတင္မွ မိေက်ာင္းမွန္းသိတယ္ အျမီးကလုပ္စိလုပ္စိနဲ ့)).......ကိုရင္ေလး
Confirmed cases of H1N1 Swine Flu virus approach 1,000
(CNN) -- The World Health Organization cautioned that the swine flu outbreak could gain momentum in the months ahead, despite claims by the health secretary of Mexico -- the epicenter of the outbreak -- that the virus "is in its declining phase."
The number of confimed cases of the H1N1 virus continue to multiply.
As of early Monday, Mexican health officials reported 568 cases and 22 fatalities linked to the flu. WHO says it has confirmed 506 cases and 19 deaths in Mexico.
The world has 985 confirmed cases of the virus, known to scientists H1N1 virus, in a total of 20 countries, WHO said Monday.
The United States has reported 226 confirmed cases in 30 states. The U.S. cases include one death -- a Mexican toddler visiting relatives in the United States.
According to WHO, Canada has 85 confirmed cases; Spain has 40; the United Kingdom has 15; Germany has 8; New Zealand has 4; Israel has 3; El Salvador has 2; France has 2; and Austria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, South Korea and Switzerland each have one.
The outbreak is only about 10 days old, and even if the illness is declining, it could return, said Gregory Hartl, the WHO spokesman for epidemic and pandemic diseases, at a briefing Sunday.
"I ... would like to remind people that in 1918 the Spanish flu showed a surge in the spring, and then disappeared in the summer months, only to return in the autumn of 1918 with a vengeance," Hartl said. "And we know that that eventually killed 40 million to 50 million people."
Mexican authorities believe the most active period of the virus in Mexico was between April 23 and April 28, and Mexican Health Secretary Jose Cordova described the outbreak as being in decline in his country.
In China, officials have quarantined 68 people, including 13 crew members, who were passengers of a Mexico City to Shanghai flight, which carried a passenger who tested positive for the virus, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported Sunday. None of the other passengers has exhibited any flu-like symptoms, one health official said.
About another 110 people who were on the Aeromexico plane went on to other destinations, and may face quarantines elsewhere, the news agency said. Fifteen have been quarantined at a Beijing hotel.
Shanghai's airport is now barring other Aeromexico planes from landing there, a representative of the airline told CNN. Aeromexico is suspending flights to Shanghai until May 15, the representative said. The airline does not fly to Hong Kong or Beijing.
In the United States, New York has the most confirmed cases, with 63, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Texas has 40; California has 26; Arizona 18; South Carolina 15; Delaware 10; Massachusetts and New Jersey each have seven; Colorado has four; Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin each have three; Connecticut, Kansas and Michigan each have two; Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah each have one.
California officials suspended visitation and other "nonessential activities" at Centinela State Prison in Imperial County after an inmate was suspected of having swine flu. The case has yet to be confirmed with lab testing.
On Sunday, health officials in North Carolina and Pennsylvania announced the first confirmed cases in those states, and Louisiana's governor said his state had seven confirmed cases. The cases from those three states were not immediately included in the CDC tally.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," warned that even if the flu outbreak wanes, "it could come back with greater force in the winter and fall, when we get into flu season."
"So, this is no time for complacency," she said. "We want to stay out ahead of this."
Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC's interim deputy director for public health, told reporters Sunday that she was "heartened" by Mexican authorities' reports but still is "very cautious."
"I know that influenza can be surprising, and the time course here in the United States is later. We believe we're just on the upswing here, and in several parts of Mexico, cases began quite a while ago," Schuchat said.
"From what I know about influenza, I do expect more cases, more severe cases and I do expect more deaths," she added. "And I'm particularly concerned about what will happen in the fall."
Acting CDC Director Richard Besser, also speaking on "State of the Union," said U.S. health officials are examining whether people who received flu shots for the swine flu in 1976 may have some level of protection from the current swine flu.
"That's going to play in very, very big as we move forward with our plans around vaccines, because that may help guide some of the issues around who is most at risk at getting this in the future," Besser said.
Offering a general picture of the state of U.S. efforts to combat the virus, Besser said "there are encouraging signs."
"We're not out of the woods yet," he said. "But what we've learned about the virus itself -- it doesn't contain the factors that we know are seen in much more severe flu strains."
While the new virus strain in the recent outbreak has affected humans, Canadian officials said it has shown up at a pig farm in Alberta, Canada.
Officials said the pigs may have been infected by a Canadian farmer who recently returned from a trip to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak. The pigs have since been quarantined.
"We have determined that the virus H1N1, found in these pigs, is the virus which is being tracked in the human population," said Dr. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. iReport.com: How should H1N1 be handled?
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Evans and other officials said it is not uncommon for flu viruses to jump from humans to animals, and that it does not pose a risk for consuming pork. The number of pigs infected was not disclosed.
The infected farmer had flu-like symptoms, but he is recovering, Evans said.
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Myanmar survivors mark cyclone anniversary နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းလြတ္ေျမက္သူတဦးရဲ ့ႏွစ္ပါတ္လည္
နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းလြတ္ေျမက္သူတဦးရဲ ့ႏွစ္ပါတ္လည္ မျပီးႏိုင္ေသးေသာ ခိုလံုရာ အရိပ္
THA KYAR HIN O, Myanmar (AFP) – Emotional survivors gathered in Myanmar to remember the 138,000 people left dead or missing by Cyclone Nargis, despite authorities largely ignoring the storm's first anniversary.
No official ceremonies were planned and state media made no mention of the deadly storm, which lay waste to large swathes of the country on May 2-3 last year and drew worldwide criticism for Myanmar's military rulers.
Only the Myanmar language daily newspaper Myanma Ahlin made any reference to the 2.4 million people affected by the cyclone, with photographs of the new houses authorities have built for some of the survivors.
Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar on May 2 and 3 with wind speeds reaching 240 kilometres (150 miles) an hour and storm surges up to four metres high.
Thousands of homes were swept away, rice fields were flooded with saltwater and schools and hospitals were ravaged in the storm.
A year later aid agencies say half a million people remain without adequate homes, while at least 250,000 people will require food handouts until the end of 2009 at the earliest.
But many survivors were more concerned with the dead as they marked the cyclone's anniversary Sunday, with those who could afford to paying about 100,000 Kyats (100 dollars) in donations for a monk-led ceremony at home.
Win Khaing, 22, from Tha Kyar Hin O, hosted his own memorial before visiting the unveiling a new cyclone shelter in his village.
"We did a memorial for my mum and two-year-old niece by donating to Buddhist monks this morning. I think they are in peace now," he said.
Most people in this predominantly Buddhist country believe that donations to monasteries can lead to a more peaceful afterlife for dead souls.
But many of those still reliant on handouts of aid to survive said they could not afford to pay for their own ceremony.
"I want to hold a memorial for my parents. But I can't help as we are also relying on donations," said 38-year-old Aye Tint, from Shwe Magyikan village that neighbours Tha Kyar Hin O.
Aye Tint lost both her parents and two sisters to the cyclone, while nearly 60 residents from her village were killed.
She and her sister Thaung believe they have been possessed with the restless spirits of their dead relatives, who they said would not find peace until a monk-led memorial is held.
"I feel so sorry for my mum as she came into my body. I have never faced anything like this in my life before," Aye Tint's sister Thaung, 50, told AFP.
Myanmar's military government faced international criticism for its immediate response to the storm, accused of stymieing emergency aid and initially refusing to grant access to humanitarian workers and supplies.
In late May UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon brokered a deal that allowed a group of officials from the UN, Myanmar's government and regional bloc ASEAN to coordinate aid deliveries to the delta.
But long-term shelter, cash to replenish lost assets and further food supplies are all still critically needed, aid workers said, as they sought 691 million dollars in fresh donations for the next three years.
"Continued support and engagement by the international community must be ensured for years to come," said UN Resident Coordinator Bishow Parajuli.
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Sunday, May 3, 2009
တခါတေလလည္းလူ ့ဘ၀ဆိုတာ Culture Unplugged Video
ဒီဗီြဒီယိုကေတာ့ ဂ်ာမနီ ဘာလင္ျမိဳ ့မွာ ပထမ ရခဲ ့တဲ ့အတို ဆံုးဗြီဒီယိုေလးပါ။
This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people
Burma worst for blogger bans ကမၻာတြင္ ဘေလာ့ခ္အမ်ားဆံုးအထိုးနက္ခံရသည္ ့ဗမာစစ္အၾကမ္းဖက္ အစိုးရ
* Tracy McVeigh
* The Observer, Sunday 3 May 2009
* Article history
Burma has been judged the worst country in the world for online restrictions in a report looking at the repression faced by bloggers.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which has compiled a list of the 10 worst countries to be a blogger, says it wants to shame those governments which are most aggressively attempting to curtail and censor web activity.
Bloggers inside Burma proved invaluable in passing out information during the September 2007 uprisings, leading to the ruling military junta blocking the internet completely for a period.
Iran, where a young blogger died in prison last month, was named as the second-worst country. Omid Mir Sayafi died in Tehran's Evin jail, which is known to hold political prisoners, after being arrested for allegedly insulting Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a blog he posted.
The "roll of dishonour" goes on to name Syria, where internet cafe owners were ordered to report on customers; Cuba, where 21 bloggers are in jail; Saudi Arabia, where an estimated 400,00 sites are blocked; Vietnam; Tunisia; China, where the most comprehensive online controls are in place; Turkmenistan, where the nation's first internet cafe was guarded by troops; and Egypt where more than 100 bloggers were detained last year alone.
All of the countries have burgeoning blogging cultures despite extensive monitoring, censorship and repression by the authorities
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UN still waiting on Burma cyclone aid
ABC news
Updated Sat May 2, 2009 3:56pm AEST
Two million people lost their homes and about 140,000 lost their lives after the cyclone tore through the region.
Two million people lost their homes and about 140,000 lost their lives after the cyclone tore through the region. (User submitted: file photo: Kyaw Kyaw)
Two million people lost their homes and about 140,000 lost their lives after the cyclone tore through the region on May 4, 2008.
The UN says it has received only about $136 million of nearly $1 billion that it appealed for.
Yet the amounts of aid being requested are just a fraction of what was spent on countries like Indonesia after the tsunami, and not much is forthcoming yet.
Reconstruction as opposed to emergency relief has barely begun.
The World Food Program's director in Burma, Chris Kay, says many survivors are still living in flimsy shelters and food supplies are contaminated by salt.
"Over 130,000 families we estimate are currently still living in shacks," he said.
"The other problem that we've got is because we haven't received the money required for the reconstitution of the agricultural production, we've got people who are in massive levels of debt. They don't have the way to be able to put the land to work."
Dan Collison, of Save the Children in Burma, says many survivors remain in flimsy shelters.
"Lots of people are still living in really terrible housing, up to half a million people still sheltering under the plastic sheeting that was distributed to them a year ago," he said.
"The second big problem is that livelihoods for many people still haven't recovered.
"The third big problem has been very very serious and widespread water shortages across the delta during this dry season."
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နာဂစ္ မုန္တိုင္းဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအား အတင္းအဓမၼ တံတားေဆာက္ခိုင္း
Cyclone tragedy forces Burma junta to build bridges
Published Date: 03 May 2009
By Special Report from Pathein, Burma
THE grass, one year on, has finally taken hold in the salty soil of the cemeteries. The bodies, nearly 85,000 of them, have been fished from the rivers, dug from the mud, cleared from the ponds and put to rest.
In addition, about 54,000 people are still listed as missing, but everyone in the Burmese delta who survived Cyclone Nargis knows full well that "missing", by now, means "dead".
The cyclone, which struck on the night of May 2 last year, was one of the deadliest storms in recorded history. It blew away 700,000 homes in the delta. It killed three-quarters of the livestock, sank half the fishing fleet and salted more than a million acres of rice paddies with its seawater surges.
In many ways, just a year beyond these horrors, life in the Irrawaddy Delta has settled back into some of its familiar rhythms: the push of the planting and the pull of the harvest.
But something unexpected has happened too, according to UN officials, aid workers and foreign diplomats in Burma. The storm – and the increase in humanitarian aid that followed – may have opened a breach in the hard political wall around Burma.
In the days after the cyclone, the hard-line generals who run Burma did not know what, quite literally, had hit them. French and American naval ships carrying aid supplies waited just offshore for more than two weeks while the generals dithered. Finally, lacking permission to deliver the aid, the ships withdrew – to international condemnation of the junta.
"The generals thought it was just another typical cyclone, where the army would hand out some rice and a few tarps and that would be it," said a senior UN programme director who spoke anonymously for fear of angering the government.
"The regime made some shocking mistakes early on, really horrible, when they blocked the aid. But these were decisions driven by national pride. They thought, 'We can handle this on our own.'
"With all the international furore, they finally realised 'This is way, way too big for us.' And after that, they did a lot. A huge national response occurred."
The secretive and xenophobic junta – still fearing a seaborne invasion by western powers – now readily accepts air shipments of foreign aid, even from the West. Although foreigners still cannot enter the delta without official permission, the number of international aid groups allowed to work in Burma has doubled in the past year.
Burma's neighbours in the Association of South-east Asian Nations, especially Indonesia and Singapore, have been widely credited with helping the junta to assume a somewhat more relaxed posture.
Healthcare experts also cite the government's efforts to actively address a range of public health issues, especially avian flu, HIV and Aids.
"You can work here very well, and to say that you can't is a lie," said Dr Frank Smithuis, a country director for Doctors Without Borders. "Look, the human rights record is shaky, yes, and it's politically nice to beat up Burma, but the military at times has actually been quite helpful to us."
The junta is widely vilified. It has imprisoned political opponents, Buddhist monks and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate without apology. When the country's most famous comedian, Zarganar, also known as The Tweezers, rebuked the government over its slow response to Cyclone Nargis, he was arrested and sentenced to 59 years in prison; the term was later reduced to 35.
And though short-term aid is getting to the delta, major donors have stayed away, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
According to a new recovery plan, the delta will need £460m in aid over the next three years, although it could be hard to raise. A yearlong UN appeal has just ended, underfinanced by £108m, or one-third of its goal.
"The people in the delta aren't defeated, but they are lost," said a western diplomat who recently visited the area but was not authorised to speak on the record.
"They're desperate. They didn't have much before, and now they have next to nothing. They just don't see how to climb out."
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