The Spirit of 8888 Continues to Intensify: Joint Statement on the 23rd Anniversary of Burma’s 8888 People’s Uprising

By Assistance Association for Political Prisoners - Burma, Forum for Democracy in Burma, Nationalities Youth Forum, and Students and Youth Congress of Burma • August 8, 2011

Today marks the 23^rd anniversary of the 1988 people’s uprising in Burma in which individuals from all walks of life throughout the country stood up and dared to speak out against the ruthless military regime. On this day in 1988, as many as 3,000 lives were lost when the regime responded to this people’s movement with a brutal crackdown. The efforts of those who perished trying to bring freedom to their country will not be forgotten.

The spirit that launched the 8888 movement lives on in the people from all over the country who have been active in opposing the successive military regimes, bravely showing their commitment to bringing about genuine democratic change in Burma. In addition to those who have lost their lives in the struggle for freedom, tens of thousands have been thrown into jail merely for the crime of openly expressing their desire for freedom, with 1,994 political prisoners currently being held in Burma’s notorious prisons.

The military regime continues to commit gross human rights abuses on a daily basis against its own people, which include extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and forced labor, among others. The military regime consistently fails to respect international humanitarian law and instead targets civilians in its wars against ethnic armed groups. As part of these wars the army has destroyed 3,700 villages in eastern Burma since 1996. War against ethnic groups, and the practice of targeting non-combatants and burning down villages, has forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee into neighboring countries and created more than half a million internally displaced persons (IDPs). The heinous human rights violations committed by the regime and its army are well documented and likely amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.

In the six months since the military dominated parliament was convened, the situation has not improved and these crimes continue. Militarization, armed conflict, and displacement have increased in ethnic areas in eastern Burma. Rather than engaging in constructive dialogue with ethnic groups, the Burma Army increased attacks, leading to the breakdown of decades long ceasefires in Karen, Kachin and Shan States. This escalation of hostilities has caused at least 20,000 people to flee from their homes in Kachin State to the China border alone.

In 2008, the regime unilaterally adopted a constitution that grants members of the military regime immunity for the crimes they have committed in the past, as well as any they may commit in the future. Given that the culture of impunity for human rights abuses is now enshrined in law, Burma’s democracy and ethnic movement inside and outside the country have called on the United Nations to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the crimes committed by the military regime. We believe that a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma is the most practical step forward to prevent more crimes, obtain justice for victims, and provide a basis for national reconciliation and sustainable peace in the country.

Burma’s democracy and ethnic movement also strongly rejects any attempt to prolong the military dictatorship in Burma including through the adoption of the 2008 Constitution and the holding of sham elections last year. The 2010 elections were broadly denounced by the international community as nothing more than an attempt to ensure the continuation of the military dictatorship under the guise of an “elected civilian government”. This “elected civilian government” continues to ignore the calls of the democracy movement led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the ethnic nationalities for genuine dialogue aimed at achieving national reconciliation in Burma.

On the occasion of the 23^rd anniversary of the 8888 people’s uprising, we call on the military regime:

1) To release all political prisoners immediately and unconditionally;

2) To cease all attacks on ethnic communities and democracy activists; and,

3) To hold inclusive tripartite dialogue with all stakeholders, with such dialogue to include a review of the 2008 Constitution

Today, 8^th August, also marks the 44^th anniversary of the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Burma’s military regime has clearly shown its lack of concern for the welfare of its people, requiring ASEAN and the international community to take responsibility. They must call on Burma’s leaders to declare a nationwide ceasefire and cease the attacks on ethnic communities. As witnesses to the crimes against humanity and war crimes being committed by one of their member states, ASEAN countries must also support the establishment of a UN-led Commission of Inquiry.

Signed by:

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) – AAPP
Forum for Democracy in Burma – FDB
Nationalities Youth Forum – NYF
Students and Youth Congress of Burma – SYCB

For more information:
Bo Kyi – +66 (0) 898 58 0674 (Joint Secretary of AAPP)
Naw San – +66 (0) 848 11 9594 (General Secretary of SYCB)

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၈၈ စိတ္ဓာတ္ကုိ္ ဆက္လက္ကိုင္စြဲစို႔

ရွစ္ေလးလံုး လူထုအေရးေတာ္ပံု ၂၃ ႏွစ့္ျပည့္အတြက္ ပူးတြဲေၾကညာခ်က္

ၾသဂုတ္လ ၈ ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၁ ခု

ယေန႔သည္ ျမန္မာတျပည္လံုးရွိ ျပည္သူမ်ားမွ လွည္းေနေလွေအာင္း ျမင္းေဇာင္းမက်န္ ရက္စက္ယုတ္ မာေသာ စစ္အုပ္စုအား ရဲရဲရင့္ရင့္ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား ရင္ဆိုင္၍၎တို႔၏ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအတြက္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ စတင္ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည့္ ၈ ေလးလံုးလူထုအေရးေတာ္ပံု ၂၃ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ေန႔ျဖစ္ သည္။ ထိုအေရးေတာ္ပံုတြင္ စစ္အုပ္စု၏ ရက္စက္စြာ ဖိႏွိပ္ျဖိဳခြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ ဆႏၵျပသူ ၃၀၀၀ ခန္႔က်ဆံုးခဲ့ ၾကရကာ ထိုသူမ်ား၏ျပင္းျပေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီရရွိေရး စိတ္ဓါတ္ႏွင့္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းမႈမ်ားကို ယေန႔တုိင္ မည္သူမ်ွမေမ့နုိင္ခဲ့ၾကေပ။

ထိုအေရးေတာ္ပံုၾကီးမွ ေပၚထြက္လာေသာ ၈၈ စိတ္ဓါတ္သည္ တျပည္လံုးရွိျပည္သူမ်ားထံသို႔ပ်ံႏွံကာ စစ္အစိုးရအဆက္ဆက္ကို ထိုစိတ္ဓါတ္ႏွင့္ပင္ အေရးေတာ္ပံု အံုၾကြမႈမ်ား ဆက္လက္ျပဳလုပ္၍ ရဲရဲရင့္ရင့္ အံတုေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ အေရးေတာ္ပံုမ်ားတြင္ က်ဆံုးခဲ့ရသူမ်ားအျပင္ ထိုသုိ႔ဆႏၵထုတ္ ေဖာ္ျပ ရံုမ်ွျဖင့္ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရ သူေပါင္းလည္းေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ရွိခဲ့ကာ ယခုလက္ရွိတြင္ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္မ်ားထဲတြင္ နုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား ၁၉၉၄ ဦးရွိေနသည္။

စစ္အုပ္စုသည္တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသထိုးစစ္မ်ားကို အဆက္မျပတ္ျပဳလုပ္လ်က္ရွိယံုတင္မကပဲ ထိုထိုးစစ္ မ်ားအတြင္းတြင္လည္းေဒသခံ တုိင္းရင္းသားအရပ္သားမ်ားကို ပစ္မွတ္ထားကာ တရားလက္လြတ္ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ား၊ လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ား၊ အတင္းအၾကပ္ ခုိင္းေစမႈမ်ား၊ ရြာမီးရႈိ႔မႈမ်ားစသည့္ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ေန႔စဥ္ရက္ဆက္က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ၁၉၉၆ ခုႏွစ္ ကတည္းကယခုအ ထိျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေရွ႔ဘက္နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္တြင္ပင္ေက်းရြာေပါင္း ၃၇၀၀ ေက်ာ္မီး ရႈိ႔အဖ်က္ဆီးခံခဲ့ ရျပီးျပီျဖစ္သည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္လဲ ထိုေဒသမွျပည္သူမ်ားသည္ ေသာင္းခ်ီေသာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအျဖစ္အိမ္ နီးခ်င္းနိုင္ငံမ်ားသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးၾကရယံုတင္မကပဲ တသန္းဝက္ခန္႔ရွိေသာသူမ်ားမွာ ရြာအနီးရွိေတာမ်ား ထဲတြင္လွည့္လယ္၍ ပုန္းေအာင္းေနၾကရသည္။စစ္အုပ္စု၏လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ုဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားသည္အ ေထာက္အထားမ်ားအရ စစ္ရာဇဝတ္မႈ၊ လူသားမဆန္ေသာ ဒုစရိုက္မႈမ်ား အဆင့္သို႔ပင္ေရာက္ရွိ ေနျပီျဖစ္သည္။

စစ္အုပ္စု၏ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ရလဒ္အျဖစ္ အတုအေယာင္ပါလီမန္ေခၚျပီး ၆ လၾကာခဲ့သည့္တုိင္လဲမည္ သည့္ အေျခအေနမွ တိုးတက္လာျခင္းမရွိပဲ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား၊ ျပသာနာမ်ား၊ ဒုစရိုက္မႈမ်ားသာ ပိုတိုးလာ ခဲ့သည္။ နုိင္ငံေရးျပသာနာကို နုိင္ငံေရး နည္းျဖင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးအေျဖမရွာပဲ တဘက္သတ္ထုိးစစ္ ဆင္ခဲ့ေသာ ေၾကာင့္ ကခ်င္၊ ကရင္ ႏွင့္ ရွမ္း လက္နက္ကိုင္အဖဲြ႔မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ရွည္ၾကာစြာရယူ ထားခဲ့သည့္ အပစ္ရပ္ေရးသေဘာတူညီခ်က္လဲ ပ်က္ျပယ္ခဲ့ရကာ ျပည္သူအမ်ားဒုကၡေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကရ သည္။ မၾကာေသးမွိက ကခ်င္ ေဒသထိုးစစ္မ်ားေၾကာင့္ ဒုကၡသည္ ၂ ေသာင္းေက်ာ္ခန္႔ တရုတ္ နယ္စပ္သို႔ထြက္ေျပးခဲ့ၾကရသည္။

စစ္အုပ္စု၏ တဖက္သတ္ေရးဆြဲထားေသာ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္လဲ ၎တို႔က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ ေသာ၊ က်ဴးလြန္ရန္ရွိေသာ ဒုစရိုက္မႈအားလံုးအတြက္ အကာအကြယ္ေပးရန္ အတိအလင္းထည့္သြင္း ေရးဆြဲထားျပီးျဖစ္သည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္လဲ မိမိတို႔ ျပည္တြင္း၊ ျပည္ပရွိဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ႏွင့္တိုင္းရင္းသားအ ေရးလႈပ္ရွားေနေသာ သူမ်ားက ကမၻာကုလသမဂၢမွ တရားဝင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးေသာ စံုစမ္းေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သည္ စစ္ အုပ္စုက်ဴးလြန္ထားေသာ ပစ္မႈမ်ားကို ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာ စံုစမ္းေပးနို္င္ မည့္အျပင္ ေနာက္ထပ္ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားမျဖစ္ေစရန္၊ တရားမွ်တမႈေပၚေပါက္လာေစရန္၊ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအတြက္အေျခခံရရွိရန္ ႏွင့္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိရန္ လက္ေတြ႔က်သည့္ ေျခလွမ္း ျဖစ္သည္ဟုယံု ၾကည္သည့္အတြက္ ထို စံုစမ္းေရးေကာ္မရွင္ကို ဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုထားၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

မိမိတို႔ိဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ႏွင့္တိုင္းရင္းသားအေရးလႈပ္ရွားေနသူမ်ားမွ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ႏွင့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အတုအေယာင္အပါအဝင္ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တည္ျမဲေရးအတြက္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းေနမႈမွန္သမ်ွကို အတိအလင္း ဆန္႔က်င္ေၾကာင္းသေဘာထား ထုတ္ေဖာ္ထားျပီးျဖစ္သည္။ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ သည္ မရိုးသားမႈ၊ လိမ္လည္မႈ မ်ားျဖင့္သာ ျပည့္ႏွက္ေနျပီး အရပ္သားအေရျခံဳအ စိုးရေအာက္တြင္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စနစ္တည္ျမဲေရးအတြက္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းမႈ သက္သက္သာျဖစ္သည္ဟု အျပည္အျပည္ဆိုင္ရာ မွရႈံခ်ျခင္းကိုလဲ ခံခဲ့ရသည့္အျပင္ ထိုအရပ္သားအေယာင္ေဆာင္ အစိုးရမွလည္း ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစု ၾကည္ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ားနွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းသားအားလံုးမွ ေတာင္းဆိုထား သည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအတြက္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမႈျပဳ လုပ္ေရးကိုဆက္လက္ လစ္လွ်ဴရႈ႔ထားဆဲျဖစ္သည္။

ယေန႔ ၈ ေလးလံုးအေရးေတာ္ပံု ၂၃ ႏွစ္ျပည့္အခ်ိန္အခါတြင္ ကြ်ႏု္ပ္တို႔မွ စစ္အုပ္စုအားေအာက္ပါအ တုိင္းေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္သည္။

၁။ နုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုးကို ခြ်င္းခ်က္မရွိ ခ်က္ခ်င္း လြတ္ေပးရန္။

၂။ တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားရွိထုိးစစ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအေပၚ ဖိႏွိပ္ေနမႈမ်ားကိုခ်က္ ခ်င္းရပ္တန္႔ရန္။

၃။ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ျပန္လည္ျပင္ဆင္ေရးအပါအဝင္ သက္ဆုိင္သူအားလံုးပါဝင္ေသာ သံုးပြင့္ဆိုင္ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးေရးျပဳလုပ္ရန္။

ယေန႔သည္ အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွနိင္ငံမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ (အာဆီယမ္) စတင္ဖြဲ႔စည္းသည့္ ၄၄ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ေန႔ လဲျဖစ္သည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ယေန႔တြင္ အာဆီယမ္အဖြဲ႔ၾကီးအေနျဖင့္ ၎၏အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ နုိင္ငံတခုျဖစ္ေသာ ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံမွ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ာအား တတိုင္းျပည္လံုး ရွိ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအေပၚျပဳလုပ္ေနေသာ ထိုးစစ္မ်ားကိုခ်က္ခ်င္းရပ္တန္႔ရန္ဖိအားေပးရန္ ႏွင့္ ၎တို႔ က်ဴးလြန္ေနေသာ စစ္ရာဇဝတ္မႈမ်ား၊ လူ သားမဆန္သည့္ပစ္မႈမ်ားကို စံုစမ္းေဖာ္ထုတ္နိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ကုလသမဂၢမွစံုစမ္း ေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္း ေရးကိစၥကို ေထာက္ခံေပးရန္ ကြ်ႏု္ပ္တို႔မွ အေလးအနက္ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ သည္။

(၁) နုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ) – AAPP (၂) ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံဒီမိုကရက္တစ္အင္အားစု – FDB
(၃)တိုင္းရင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ားအင္အားစု – NYF
(၄)ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ားကြန္ဂရက္ – SYCB

တို႔မွပူးတြဲထုတ္ျပန္သည္။

ဆက္သြယ္ရန္

ကိုဘိုၾကည္ – + ၆၆ (၀) ၈၉၈ ၅၈ ၀၆၇၄ (တြဲဘက္အတြင္းေရးမႈး၊ AAPP)
ကိုေနာ္စန္း – + ၆၆ (၀) ၈၄၈ ၁၁ ၉၅၉၄ (အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႈး၊ SYCB)

Tags: 1988 Uprising, 8888 Anniversary, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners - Burma, Burmese, Commission of Inquiry, Forum for Democracy in Burma, Nationalities Youth Forum, Students and Youth Congress of Burma

This post is in: Press Release

The Spirit of 8888 Continues to Intensify: Joint Statement on the 23rd Anniversary of Burma’s 8888 People’s Uprising

၈၈ စိတ္ဓာတ္ကုိ္ ဆက္လက္ကိုင္စြဲစို႔

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