Letter of support for Burma on 8888 Anniversary from Belarusian Association of Journalists

Dear colleagues and friends,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, an independent organization of media professionals from Belarus. Today, when the world commemorates an anniversary of the 8.8.88 Uprising in Burma, I would like to address you on behalf of my association and all the people in my country, who struggle for democracy, with sincere words of solidarity and support.

We all know that despite courage and aspiration of free-thinking people, tyranny and dictatorship are still present in the world. Unfortunately, both our countries, your Burma and our Belarus, know from their own experience what is the price to pay for democracy and freedom. Fortunately, though, both Burma and Belarus have courageous and determined people, who are ready to pay this price to see their countries joining a family of free and democratic nations of the world […]

The Spirit of the 1988 Uprising Lives On – Activists Call for UN Commission of Inquiry

Twenty-three years after the 8 August 1988 nationwide people’ s uprising, groups inside Burma and around the world hosted events that demonstrated that the desire for freedom remains as strong today as it was in 1988. On that fateful day in 1988, hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, men and women, from all walks of life and a range of ethnic groups, took to the streets as part of a student led movement for democracy. Burma’s military regime, headed by General Ne Win, sensed a profound threat to its grip on power and cracked down hard on the protesters, killing at least 3,000 and imprisoning and torturing many thousands more […]

End Oppression Now! Support a Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity in Burma!

More than 50 people representing the Free Burma Coalition – Philippines held a demonstration in front of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) at Roxas Blvd in Manila calling on the Philippine government to support the international call for the creation of a UN Commission of Inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity in Burma. The demonstrators held a program to commemorate the 23rd year anniversary of the violent crackdown on Burma’s national people’s uprising outside of the DFA building while a short ceremony was happening inside to celebrate the 44th year since the founding of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) […]

23 Years after 8-8-88 — It Is Finally Time For Asean to Get It Right on Burma

Twenty-three years after the democracy uprising of 1988 in Burma was brutally crushed, the world has gone through remarkable changes. In particular, Asean’s role in economic cooperation, peace and security as well as human rights and humanitarian issues has grown dramatically.

But the people of Burma, which was renamed Myanmar by the military junta after the uprising, have faced continued suppression by their own government even after last year’s so-called general elections and promised reforms. The dedication and sacrifice of the people who bravely stood up against the military regime 23 years ago remains commendable. In keeping with their people’s desire for a free and democratic homeland, Burma’s government needs to come to terms with its brutal past and stop its ongoing crackdowns against the political opposition and ethnic groups […]

Invitation: Commemoration in Bangkok of the 23rd Anniversary of the 1988 Nationwide Pro-Democracy Uprising in Burma

The Forum for Democracy in Burma, Student and Youth Congress of Burma, Nationalities Youth Forum, Assistance Association of Political Prisoners – Burma, Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma and Burma Partnership would like to invite you to join our commemoration of the 23rd anniversary of the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988.

The event will include a panel discussion entitled “23 Years of Resistance: Ongoing Human Rights Abuses and the Urgent Need for a Commission of Inquiry.” Speakers will recall experiences of the 1988 uprising, share details about the current human rights abuses and armed conflict in […]

Action Alert: Call for a Commission of Inquiry on the Anniversary of the 8.8.88 Uprising

There are only 32 days remaining to persuade the European Union to include the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry in the draft of resolution on Burma to be adopted at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly scheduled in September in New York. With the 23rd anniversary of the 8.8.88 nationwide pro-democracy uprising less than 2 weeks away, the anniversary presents an important opportunity to pressure key governments to support the Commission of Inquiry (CoI). Read more about how you can get involved.

စက္တင္ဘာလ နယူးေယာက္ျမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြညီလာခံတြင္ အတည္ျပဳဆံုးျဖတ္ ႏုိင္ရန္အတြက္ ျမန္မာျပည္ အေရးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ေသာ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္မ်ားအား ျပင္ဆင္ေရးသားရာတြင္ လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္အေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္ေသာ ရာဇဝတ္မႈ ႏွင့္ စစ္ရာဇဝတ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္မႈမ်ားကို ေဖၚထုတ္ရန္အတြက္ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္တရပ္ဖြဲ႕စည္းေရးကို ထည့္သြင္းေရးသားရန္ ဥေရာပ သမဂၢအား ဝိုင္းဝန္းလႈံ႕ေဆာ္ၾကရန္ ရက္ေပါင္း (၃၇) ရက္သာက်န္ေတာ့သည္ […]

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Ethnic Nationalities: Nationwide Ceasefire and Genuine Dialogue Necessary for National Reconciliation

On 25 July, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi met with the military regime’s representative, Aung Kyi at a state-run guesthouse. This was the tenth meeting between Daw Suu and the regime’s Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister, appointed as liaison to the democracy leader. After the 70-minute meeting, Aung Kyi read a statement that failed to give any details about what was discussed, but declared that both sides were happy about the meeting. However, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s serious demeanor and body language suggested otherwise.

Khin Ohmar, Coordinator of Burma Partnership and Chairperson of the Network for Democracy and Development, told the Irrawaddy, “I don’t think the government is honest about this meeting. It is just window dressing. They want the international community to know that they have started a dialogue toward national reconciliation. They are using Aung San Suu Kyi.” This meeting was nothing more than an attempt by the regime to convince ASEAN that they are deserving of the bloc’s chairmanship in 2014. When ASEAN makes its decision, likely to be at the Summit in Bali in November, the bloc must not consider this meeting as a sign of serious dialogue and must certainly not reward the regime for such empty actions […]

Spirit of Resistance Strong as Activists Attend Large Public Gatherings on Martyrs’ Day

In a stirring reminder of the strength and resilience of pro-democracy and human rights movement in Burma, over 3,000 people marched in a public demonstration led by democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to commemorate Martyrs’ Day on 19 July in Rangoon.

The day marked the anniversary of the assassination of the independence hero General Aung San and his colleagues in 1947. Burma’s military regime has consistently sought to wipe General Aung San from public memory, not least because of the legacy that his daughter, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, continues to this day.

This year, sparked by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s presence, the National League for Democracy (NLD) and other pro democracy and ethnic rights organizations rallied over 3,000 people in a march towards the Martyrs’ Mausoleum, the largest public gathering in the country since the Saffron Revolution in 2007. The democracy leader visited the mausoleum twice; once in the regime organized ceremony, and the second as the leader of the public procession […]

ASEAN Must Address Burma’s Armed Conflict and Human Rights Violations at Upcoming Meetings

Prior to the upcoming 44th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) and 18th ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), Burma Partnership has highlighted the continued deterioration of human rights under the military regime and the urgent need for ASEAN to take concrete action against such violations of basic human rights standards and principles included in the ASEAN Charter.

Despite the regime’s claims of a new peaceful democratic order in Burma, opposition politicians remain sidelined and little has changed for the 1,994 political prisoners that remain behind bars. Moreover, ongoing military offensives against ethnic armed groups in Eastern Burma have lead to tens of thousands of displaced civilians, many of whom have faced mounting human rights abuses, including rape, extrajudicial killings, and forced labor. The situation has resulted in refugees fleeing to neighboring Thailand and China, presenting a threat to regional stability […]

လုုံျခံဳစိတ္ခ်ရေသာ ဒီဂ်စ္တယ္ နည္းပညာမ်ား အသုုံးျပဳႏုုိင္ရန္ အရင္းအျမစ္အသစ္မ်ား

သင့္ရဲ႕ အေထာက္အထားနဲ႔ သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ေတြအား ဆန္းသစ္တဲ့ နည္းပညာေတြကုိ အက်ိဳးရွိရွိ အသုံးခ်ျပီး လုံလုံျခဳံျခဳံထားႏုိင္တဲ့နည္းကုိ သင္စိတ္၀င္စားပါသလား။ ဒီအရင္းအျမစ္ ႏွစ္ခုဟာ ဒစ္ဂ်စ္တယ္ နည္းပညာ ေလာကထဲမွာ အႏၱရာယ္ကင္းကင္းနဲ႔ သင္လႈပ္ရွားႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ စီမံျပဳလုပ္ထားတာ ျဖစ္တယ္။

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