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 […]

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 […]

No More “Wait and See”: ASEAN Must Support a Commission of Inquiry in Burma

Ahead of the 44th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) and 18th ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Bali, Indonesia, Burma Partnership joined civil society organizations in Jakarta to raise serious concerns about human rights situation in Burma and throughout the region.

In a briefing today, Khin Ohmar, Coordinator of Burma Partnership, spoke about the lack of genuine democratic progress in her country in the 8 months since the fraudulent elections and the first three months of the military regime’s puppet parliament […]

We have waited and seen enough: ASEAN must support a Commission of Inquiry

Eight months after Burma’s November 2010 elections, democracy remains an illusion and sparks of war are flying

This briefer explains the lack of progress since the election, in light of continued political repression, escalating armed conflict and ongoing human right violations. It calls on ASEAN to take immediate action to address these issues in its member country and set an example for the region […]

Defections Show Deep Dissatisfaction Within Burma’s Military Regime

On 4 July, the second highest-ranking diplomat at Burma’s Embassy in Washington, DC defected, claiming frustration at a lack of tangible change in the political system in his country.

Kyaw Win, a career diplomat, sent a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upon defecting that outlined his reasons for leaving the embassy and seeking asylum. He asserts that his suggestions of “actions to improve bilateral relations between Burma and the US,” have resulted in him being “deemed dangerous” by the regime. In his letter, Kyaw Win continued, “Because of this, I am also convinced and live in fear that I will be prosecuted for my actions, efforts and beliefs when I return to Naypyidaw after completing my tour of duty here” […]

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Calls for a Commission of Inquiry as Conflict Continues in Eastern Burma

Earlier this week, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi vocalized her strong support for a UN-led Commission of Inquiry in a video message recorded for a hearing of the US House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. The hearing was held to highlight the fraudulent November 2010 elections, as well as the ongoing conflict in Kachin State.

The Congressional Committee hearing was entitled “Piercing Burma’s Veil of Secrecy: The Truth Behind the Sham Election and the Difficult Road Ahead.” Representative Don Manzullo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on East Asia, criticized last year’s elections and drew on the ongoing fighting in Kachin State to highlight the lack of change in Burma: “The recent news of clashes in Burma’s Kachin province between government troops and ethnic minorities, which has been the heaviest fighting in 17 years, adds further evidence to the argument that the situation in Burma has not changed,” wrote Manzullo in his statement […]

Kachin Conflict Highlights Deep-seated Ethnic Concerns and Dire Need for a Commission of Inquiry

Yesterday, democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi celebrated her birthday in freedom for the first time in 7 years. However, her 66th birthday was marked by ongoing conflict between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Burma Army that broke a 17-year ceasefire between the two sides.

During an address at the National League for Democracy (NLD) headquarters, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi stated that there are “sparks of war flying” in Burma. With as many as 10,000 civilians displaced by the ongoing conflict in Kachin State, and documented conflict-related human rights violations, the past week’s conflict has only served to further highlight the failure of the regime to address the needs and concerns of ethnic communities in Burma […]

လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ လြတ္ေျမာက္စဥ္မွစ၍ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား

“လိုခ်င္တာကို လိုခ်င္ေနရံုနဲ႕ေတာ့ ရမွာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ လိုခ်င္ရင္ ရေအာင္ယူတတ္ရမယ္။” ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္

လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို နအဖစစ္အစိုးရမွ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၁၃ရက္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္မွ ခၽြင္းခ်က္မရွိ လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ ဤေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူလူထုႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအဝန္းမွ သူမႏွင့္အတူ ပူးေပါင္းပါဝင္ ၾကိဳးစားၾကရန္ ႏႈိးေဆာ္ျပီး အဓိက ဦးစားေပး လုပ္ငန္းအျဖစ္ လုပ္ေဆာင္လ်က္ရွိသည္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ အေမရိကန္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဂၽြန္မက္ကိန္း၊ ဂ်ဳိးဇက္ယြန္၊  ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဗီေဂ်နမ္ဘီယာ  အစရွိသည့္ အေရးပါေသာ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားႏွင့္ လူကိုယ္တိုင္ ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည့္အျပင္ ကမာၻတဝန္းရွိ ႏိုင္ငံေခါင္းေဆာင္ မ်ားႏွင့္လည္း အျခားေသာနည္းလမ္းမ်ားျဖင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ ထို႕အျပင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ လူငယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး နည္းပညာတိုးတက္လာေရး တို႕အေပၚလည္း အားေပးတိုက္တြန္းခဲ့သည္။ လူငယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ကိုယ္တိုင္ေတြ႕ဆံုကာ အမ်ဳိးသားလူငယ္ကြန္ယက္ ကဲ့သို႕ေသာ လူငယ္ကြန္ယက္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေစရန္ တိုက္တြန္း ၾကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့သည္။ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားထဲတြင္ လူမႈေရး လုပ္ငန္းသည္လည္း တစ္ခုအပါအဝင္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္သည္ သဘာဝေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ က်ေရာက္ေနသူမ်ားအေရး၊ လယ္သမားမ်ားအေရး အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေရးႏွင့္ ပညာေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို ကိုယ္တိုင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ရံုမွ်သာမက တျခားလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသူမ်ား၊ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကိုလည္း လႈိက္လိႈက္လွဲလွဲ ၾကိဳဆိုခဲ့သည္။ ထို႕အျပင္ ျပည္သူလူထုမ်ားႏွင့္ ပိုမိုရင္းႏွီးေႏြးေထြးစြာ ဆက္သြယ္ေဆြးေႏြးႏိုင္ရန္လည္း မၾကာမီကာလအတြင္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္တဝန္း ခရီးထြက္ရန္ စီစဥ္မႈမ်ား စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနျပီျဖစ္သည္ […]