Mandalay Protestors Call for End to Ethnic Conflict

MANDALAY — Political parties in Mandalay called on the government on Wednesday to end its armed conflicts in Burma’s ethnic regions and put more of an effort into the country’s peace process.

At a demonstration led by nine political parties including the National Democratic Force (NDF), National Unity Party (NUP) and local civil society groups, protestors spoke out against a recent Burma Army attack in Kachin State that killed 23 ethnic rebel cadets and injured 20 others, saying the incident indicated a lack of resolve in the government’s purported desire to reach a sustainable peace with Burma’s numerous ethnic rebel groups. […]

Move to Proportional Representation a Power Grab by the Military-backed USDP

The debate over a potential change to Burma’s electoral system, from a First Past the Post System (FPP) to a Proportional Representation System (PR) is gathering momentum, with a new committee formed by the Parliamentary lower house speaker, Shwe Mann, to discuss whether this is appropriate for the country. While the general debate over suitability of differing electoral systems is complex and broad, if seen through the eyes of the context in Burma, there is one clear winner if this change is implemented before the 2015 general election: the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) which is unsurprisingly supportive of this change.

The argument for Burma to change to PR is certainly compelling. Theoretically, it will give smaller political parties, such as the NDF who proposed the motion, more chance of representation in the legislature, while the same goes for smaller ethnic political parties. Yet it is much more complex than this. For constituencies in ethnically concentrated areas, where there is a dominant ethnic political party, for example the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) in Arakan State, FPP is more advantageous for that dominant ethnic political party, as seen in the RNDP’s dominance of the Arakan State legislature. Focusing on winning seats in ethnically concentrated areas might be the only way that ethnic political parties guarantee representation under the first past the post system. Yet under PR, if the total population of a certain ethnic group is under the 1% threshold of votes needed to gain a seat that is typical of PR, then that party will not win any seats at all, even if the ethnic nationality it represents is dominant in certain constituencies.[…]

အခ်ိဳးက် ကုိယ္စားျပဳစနစ္(PR)ကို ျပည္နယ္မ်ားမပါ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးေရးဆုိင္ရာ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအင္အားစု NDF ပါတီ အေနျဖင့္ ဇြန္လ ပထမပတ္ တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသား လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ အခ်ိဳးက်ကိုယ္စားျပဳစနစ္ PR က်င့္သုံးေရးကို ျပည္နယ္ မ်ားတြင္မပါဘဲ၊ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးရန္ အဆိုျပဳခဲ့ပါသည္။

၂။ NDF ပါတီအေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ကာလကပင္ ပီအာစနစ္ကုိ က်င့္သုံးရန္ ျပည္သူ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ တင္ျပခဲ့သည္ […]

Week 35: 2010 Election Watch (2-8 November)

Developments

Widespread evidence of electoral fraud, irregularities, threats, harassment, and lack of independent monitoring characterized Election Day and the days leading up to it:

• In the days before the election, local SPDC officials, polling station officials, and Union Solidarity and Development (USDP) members throughout the country solicited advance and proxy votes, in the overwhelming majority of cases specifically for the USDP […]

Week 32: 2010 Election Watch (12-18 October)

Developments

• SPDC Election Commission Chairman Thein Soe said that no foreign journalists or international monitors would be allowed to observe the upcoming elections.
• SPDC Election Commission Chairman Thein Soe said that 3,071 candidates, including 82 independent candidates, will contest the elections […]

Week 28: 2010 Election Watch (14-20 September)

Developments

• The SPDC Election Commission announced that polls would not be held in 3,314 Villages in Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon, and Shan States because “they are in no position to host free and fair elections.”
• The SPDC Election Commission rejected the application of 14 Kachin State Progressive Party members to run as independent candidates […]

Week 27: 2010 Election Watch (7-13 September)

Developments

• The Myanmar Democracy Congress and the Myanmar New Society Democratic Party failed to field at least three candidates as required by the SPDC election laws. Myanmar Democracy Congress General Secretary Kaung Htet announced that the party would boycott the upcoming elections because of the SPDC Election Commission’s “unacceptable and unsatisfactory” actions […]

Week 25: 2010 Election Watch (24-30 August)

Developments

• Union Democracy Party Chairman Thein Htay said that the party had decided to field only three candidates nationwide to protest the SPDC election laws. National Democratic Force leader Khin Muang Swe said he would not stand for election because of the SPDC Election Commission’s restrictions […]

Week 21: 2010 Election Watch (27 July – 2 August)

Developments

• The SPDC Election Commission told four leaders of the National Democratic Force that they must seek pardons for their past political activities if they want to participate in the upcoming elections […]

Week 19: 2010 Election Watch (13-19 July)

Developments

• The SPDC granted permission for the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) to dissolve. All USDA assets have been transferred to the Union Solidarity and Development Party, led by SPDC PM Thein Sein […]