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Appeal to the Myanmar Peoples (Charter 77-inspired Call for Grassroots Democracy)

By Myanmar individuals  •  April 7, 2016

We the endorsers of this declaration are Myanmar individuals who want to see liberty, justice and human rights prevail in our multi-ethnic multi-faith Union of Myanmar. Today our country has begun to move along the path of democratization, peace and harmony.

1. However, our farmers throughout the country have been displaced from their land and are being put behind bars as they protest against land grabs. They are being forced to exist under conditions similar to the ones their fore-parents lived through under the British colonial rule during the Great Depression worldwide.
2. Likewise, the majority of our labourers work in hazardous conditions, with no living wage, workers’ rights or social security – living the conditions not dissimilar to those that triggered the great nationwide Labour Strikes of the colonial era in 1936.
3. The non-Burmese ethnic peoples or the “minorities” are not faring any better. Those in active war zones live daily lives devoid of personal and communal safety, often on the run to survive. Inter-ethnic wars of varying degrees of intensity rage on as the Tatmadaw (the armed forces) has trampled upon the country’s founding Panglong or Pin-lon principles of ethnic equality and self-determination.
4. Today the mistreatment and indictment of student activists who, in 2015 demanded education befitting a democracy, is more inhumane, repressive and violent than that the British colonial administration meted out to striking Rangoon University students in the Nationalist Student Protests of 1936.
5. Our country’s Buddhist clergy and the majority lay Buddhist public too are being subject to various measures of manipulation, control and abuse through the government-patronized Sangha (or Buddhist clergy) organizations. Meanwhile our religious minorities face legalized racist discrimination, threats of violence, denial of the genuine freedom of religion including the right to repair or build places of worship.
6. Dejected and outraged by the lack of a professional future, our public servants with diverse technical expertise have long been denied autonomy, adequate salaries and opportunities for advancement, while the retired and in-service military officers are appointed to lord the former in fields about which these military men have little expertise.
7. Even our own rank and file members of the country’s powerful national armed forces live with little economic security and few social safety nets, including those who have been injured and disabled serving in the Generals’ wars against their own peoples.
8. Our business-men and -women operate in a climate of uncertainty while bearing the weight of the country’s officially mismanaged and malfunctioning cut-throat economy.
9. Finally, our national community of creative minds, from literati and theatrical artists to musicians and other performing artists, have lost the vital freedom of expression and freedom to create, bound by restrictive laws, official regulations and unofficial means of control.

We call on all Myanmar peoples to join hands in the birth of a new era filled with genuine freedoms and equality for all ethnic peoples and communities. We firmly and fervently believe that only We the People determine our own destiny. We are – and we must be – the principal drivers for change. And we must act in unison now. We urge everyone to hold hands and work towards human rights, freedoms and genuine transition to a federalist democracy for all.

Endorsed by:

1. U Thein Than Oo
   2. Saw Hpoe Khwa
   3. Mun Awng (Singer)
   4. Reverend Zaw Win Aung (Vice-Chair, Myanmar Council of Churches)
   5. Saw Kapi
   6. U Tin Aye Kyu (Poet)
   7. Daw Phyu Phyu Win (Writer)
   8. U Nay Win, General Secretary, YMCA Mandalay
   9. Myawaddi Sayadaw (Mandalay) U A Ri Ya Bi Wun Tha
   10. U Pazin Pein (Meikhila)
   11. Nyi Pu Lay (Writer)
   12. Asia Light Sayadaw U Sein Di Ta
   13. Sithu Aung Myint (Journalist)
   14. U Khin Maung Myint (President, YMCA Mandalay)
   15. Ko Tar (Chin Dwin)
   16. U Kyaw Thu (Free Funeral Service Society)
   17. Dr Kyaw Thu (Paung Ku)
   18. Harry Myo Lin (Mandalay)
   19. Ma Wai Wai Nu (Arakan Woman’s Network)
   20. U Ye Lwin (Mizzima Waves/ Flowers’ Path)
   21. Sai Ye Kyaw Zwa Myint
   22. U Tun Lin Oo (Sa Bae Phyu)
   23. Phyo Win Latt (National University of Singapore/ Myanmar Cultural Research Journal)
   24. Daw Khin Ohnmar (Burma Partnership)

 

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ျပည္သူသို႕ပန္ၾကားလႊာ

 

ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔သည္ လြတ္လပ္မႈ၊ တရားမွ်တမႈႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို လုိလားေသာ ျပည္ေထာင္စုျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည္။ မ်က္ေမွာက္ေခတ္ ျမန္မာႏိိုင္ငံတြင္ ဒီမုိကေရစီေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းစ၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေရာင္ျခည္သန္းစ၊ အမ်ဳိးသားညီညြတ္ေရး လမ္းစေပၚခ်ိန္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

၁။ လယ္သိမ္းခံ၊ ယာသိမ္းခံ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားတုိ႔၏ ဘဝကား ၁၉၃၀ ဆရာစံလယ္သမား သူပုန္ေခတ္ႏွင့္ ထူးမျခားနား။
တရားမဲ့မႈကိုခုခံရင္း ေထာင္ခ်ခံရရွာေသာ လယ္သမားနင္းျပားမ်ား၏ ဘ၀။

၂။ လုပ္ငန္းခြင္လုံၿခဳံမႈမရွိ၊ ရပုိင္ခြင့္ႏွင့္ လုပ္ခလစာ လုံေလာက္မႈမရွိၾကေသာ အလုပ္သမားတုိ႔၏ အဖိႏွိပ္ခံဘ၀ကား ၁၃၀၀ ျပည့္အေရးေတာ္ပုံကာလအတုိင္း မေျပာင္းမလဲ။

၃။ အမ်ဳိးသားတန္းတူေရးႏွင့္ ကုိယ့္ၾကမၼာကိုယ္ဖန္တီးခြင့္ အာမခံပင္လုံစာခ်ဳပ္ကုိ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခံရၿပီး စစ္၏ အနိဌာ႐ုံကို ေန႔စဥ္ႀကဳံေတြ႕ေနရရွာေသာ တုိင္းရင္းသားျပည္သူတုိ႔၏ ဘ၀။

၄။ ဒီမုိကေရစီပညာေရးစနစ္ ေတာင္းဆုိရင္း ဗုိလ္ေအာင္ေက်ာ္ေခတ္ထက္ဆုိးရြား။ လူမဆန္စြာ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ အၾကမ္းဖက္ခံၾကရရွာေသာ ေက်ာင္းသူေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားရဲ႕ဘ၀။

၅။ အသုံးခ်ခံ သံဃာ့အဖြဲ႕အစည္းဖြဲ႕စည္း၍ ႏွိပ္ကြပ္သည္ကုိ ခံစားေနရေသာ သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္လူအမ်ား၏ ဘ၀။ လြတ္လပ္စြာယုံၾကည္ကုိးကြယ္ခြင့္ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခံရ၊ ဘာသာေရး ခြဲျခားမႈဥပေဒမ်ားျပဌာန္းၿပီး လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခံရ၊ ၀တ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္ရာ သာသနိက အေဆာက္အဦ တည္ေဆာက္ခြင့္၊ ျပင္ဆင္ခြင့္မ်ားကို တားျမစ္ပိတ္ပင္ခံေနရသည့္ ဘာသာေပါင္းစုံျပည္သူမ်ား။

၆။ အနာဂတ္မဲ့၊ လက္ရွိဘ၀လူတန္းမေစ့၊ ဆိုင္ရာကၽြမ္းက်င္မႈ၊ လုပ္ငန္းအေတြ႕အႀကဳံ အသုံးခ်ခြင့္မရ၊ မုိးက်ေရႊကုိယ္မ်ား၏ ပရမ္းပတာျခယ္လွယ္ခံ ျပည္သူ႔၀န္ထမ္းမ်ား၏ ဘ၀။

၇။ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္၏ သားေကာင္၊ ေျခလက္အဂၤါ အသက္ခႏၶာ စြန္႔လႊတ္ အသုံးခ်ခံရင္း ထမင္းမ၀၊ ဘ၀မလုံၿခဳံသည့္ အညတရ တပ္မေတာ္သား မိသားစုတုိ႔၏ ဘ၀။

၈။ လက္သင့္ရာစားေတာ္ေခၚ စီးပြားေရးစနစ္ဆုိးေအာက္ ဒူးေထာက္ အလဲလဲ အၿပဳိၿပဳိျဖစ္ေနရရွာေသာ၊ ျမန္မာ့စီးပြားေရးသမား လုပ္ငန္းရွင္မ်ား၏ မေရရာေသာဘ၀။

၉။ စာေပ၊ ဇာတ္သဘင္၊ ႐ုပ္ရွင္ ဂီတႏွင့္ သုခုမအသုိက္အၿမဳံတစ္ခုလုံး လြတ္လပ္စြာ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆုိေရးသားခြင့္ဆုံး႐ႈံးကာ ဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈ ဥပေဒပုဒ္မအမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိး ထမ္းပုိးအတင္ခံေနရရွာေသာ အႏုပညာရွင္ အသိပညာရွင္မ်ား၏ ဘ၀။

ထုိသုိ႔ေသာ ဘ၀မွလြတ္ေျမာက္ေသာ အနာဂတ္ဒီမုိကေရစီဖက္ဒရယ္ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာျပည္သစ္သုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိရန္မွာ ျပည္သူသည္သာ အရာရာ၊ ျပည္သူသည္သာ အခရာ အားလုံးလက္တြဲပါ၀င္ၾကပါစုိ႔။

Tags: Freedom of Information, Freedom of Movement, Human Rights Declaration, Laws, Myanmar Individuals

This post is in: Press Release

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