Carter Center Congratulates Myanmar People on Election, Urges Key Democratic Reforms

YANGON — The Carter Center congratulates the people of Myanmar, who have exercised their political rights with pride and enthusiasm. Both on election day and in the preceding months, they participated as voters, observers, political party agents, election officials, and civil society activists […]

Election Report, 2010 Myanmar (Burma) – Pre-Election Observations

The report covers a general overview of the election, the UEC, how many political parties are eligible to run, population statistics and eligible voters, political parties contesting in each state and reagions, influential candidates, problems faced by some parties […]

Elections Marred By Regime’s Campaign Restrictions, Harassment and Lack of Voter Education

“In my region, many people were not interested in the elections, and didn’t know anything about the elections. There was no electoral education and people who knew about elections were afraid of getting into trouble. I don’t think the elections will bring any betterment to people. I see the elections are designed for the military regime.”

– A voter in Sagaing Division

During the elections, the regime took extensive measures to limit election participation at all levels; from restricting political party participation to blocking free flow of information on the elections, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) ensured that they would be able to dominate and control the process from beginning to end. Ethnic parties and ethnic voters were particularly marginalized and suppressed as the Election Commission rejected leading ethnic parties and candidates, security forces hassled ethnic parties, and ethnic voters received little to no electoral education. By limiting such participation, the regime effectively stifled opposition from political parties and the electorate on the day of the polls.[…]

Abuses of Government Authority During Elections Highlight Un-Rule of Law in Burma

“Although we don’t like the USDP, all the villagers including me voted for the USDP since we were ordered by the town authorities to vote for the USDP. We were afraid while we were voting since the authorities were watching on us at the polling station, to see if were voting for them or not.”

– A voter in Shan State

Throughout the elections, the regime exercised gross abuses of authority in a widespread attempt to dominate and manipulate the elections to their advantage. From publically supporting the regime-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), to employing the Union Election Commission to unlawfully influence voters, to forcing vast numbers of voters to support the USDP or face consequences such as fines, demotions, or arrests, the regime was involved in the elections at all levels. The Election Commission’s blatant favoritism highlights the way in which the elections have been structured to further the regime’s plans to entrench military rule. Certainly, the regime’s handpicked Election Commission and undemocratic election laws are indicative of the severe lack of rule of law in Burma – where laws are structured to be used against the people, rather than to protect their rights […]

PFOB Chair Decries Absurd Election Complaint Fees and Calls on the Military and its Proxy Party to Protect Aung San Suu Kyi

It is absurdly difficult to make a complaint about the recent sham elections in Burma orchestrated by the military and their party USDP. To make a single complaint costs about 5 times your annual income. And if the complaint is determined to be unfounded, you can be fined about 15 times your annual salary. “This is absurd” said PFOB Chair the Honourable Larry Bagnell M.P. Yukon […]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the SPDC’s Election (040-2010)

In this week’s report, you will find:

• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon demanded the SPDC regime again on October 29 to free all political prisoners and open the way to national reconciliation, saying that it was not late yet to carry out genuine democratization in Burma.

• Local authorities and SPDC army joined hands to extort money through Naungpein village tract headmen on the pretext of polling-station construction and military outpost fencing, local residents reported.

ယခုအပတ္ NDD ၏သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းတြင္ –

• ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ စစ္မွန္သည့္ဒီမိုကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးအတြက္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အခ်ိန္မေႏွာင္းေသးေၾကာင္း၊ စစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားအားလံုးကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးျပီး အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးအတြက္ လမ္းဖြင့္ေပးရန္ ကုလသမဂၢ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီမြန္းက ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ ထပ္မံတိုက္တြန္း ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္သည္။ […]

Burma’s 2010 Elections: The story so far

This briefer shows that despite the SPDC’s repeated pledges for “free and fair” elections, indicators for election monitoring based on EU, UN, and OSCE guidelines point to the contrary. The SPDC election laws and conduct of the SPDC Election Commission have caused the dissolution of parties that won 84% of seats in the last election, and disenfranchised at least 1.5 million voters […]

NDD Monthly Chronology Events June – 2010

An extensive monthly chronology of events researched and distributed by the Network for Democracy and Development (NDD), a Burmese political organization based on the Thai-Burma border[…]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the SPDC’s Election (023-2010)

ယခုအပတ္ NDD ၏သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းတြင္ –

* အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစု NDF မွေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရာတြင္ အသုံးျပဳရန္အတြက္ တင္ျပထားေသာ ပါတီတံဆိပ္သည္ ခေမာက္ပုံပါေနသျဖင္႔ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဴပ္ NLD ကတရားဝင္ကန္႔ကြက္ သြားမည္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဴပ္ ဒု- ဥကၠဌ ဦးတင္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။
* နအဖစစ္အစိုးရ ျပန္ၾကားေရးဝန္ၾကီးဌာန လက္ေအာက္ခံ စာေပစိစစ္ေရးႏွင္႔ မွတ္ပုံတင္ဌာနက ျပည္တြင္းထုတ္ဂ်ာနယ္မ်ားတြင္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ား၏ လႈပ္ရွားမႈသတင္း၊ အင္တာဗ်ဴးမ်ားကို စိစစ္ျဖတ္ေတာက္မႈမ်ား ပိုမိုဆိုးရြာလာေနသည္႔အေပၚ မတူကြဲျပားျခင္းႏွင္႔ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးပါတီက အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားမွ ေလွ်ာ႔ေပါ့ေပးရန္ေတာင္းဆိုလုိက္သည္[…]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the SPDC’s Election (022-2010)

In this week’s political events, you will find:

* A resident from Putao stated that USDP has been providing 5,000 kyat each to every local resident who would vote for USDP in the elections in Putao District, which is the northernmost district of Burma. The USDP launched that particular campaign in some villages in Machyangbaw Township from 10 to 25 May.

ယခုအပတ္ NDD ၏သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းတြင္-

* ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ေျမာက္ပိုင္းအစြန္ရွိ ပူတာအုိခရုိင္တြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၾက႔ံခုိင္ေရးႏွင့္ ဖြ႔ံၿဖိဳးေရးပါတီ(USDP) မွေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ၄င္းတို႔ပါတီအား မဲထည္႔ရန္အတြက္ ေဒသခံျပည္သူမ်ားကို တစ္ဦးလွ်င္ က်ပ္ေငြ ၅၀၀၀ ေပး၍ စည္းရုံးေနသည္ဟု ေဒသခံတစ္ဦးကေျပာသည္[…]