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 […]

Election Commission Wipes Away Opposition

On 14 September, the Union Election Commission (EC) officially announced the dissolution of the National League for Democracy and nine other political parties. The NLD and five other political parties – the Union Pao National Organization, the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy Party, the Shan State Kokang Democratic Party, and the Wa National Development Party – were dissolved because they failed to re-register under section 25 of the junta’s Political Parties’ Registration Law. An additional five political parties were banned because they failed to meet the minimum candidate requirements.

State-run media that carried the news of the dissolutions also accused the NLD of “attempting to mislead the people into misunderstanding the law” […]

Canada Concerned by Dissolution of Political Parties in Burma

“Canada is disappointed that Burma’s military regime has reached a new low in its failure to live up to its democratic promises. The dissolution of the NLD and nine other political parties further illustrates the regime’s systematic disregard for the basic principles of democracy […]

Week 24: 2010 Election Watch (17-23 August)

Developments

• The SPDC Election Commission published Notification 91/2010 which requires candidates to seek approval for public speeches seven days in advance.. In addition, candidates cannot give speeches or distribute materials that criticize the constitution, “tarnish” the image of the state or the military, or “harm security. As with earlier regulations on campaign activities, chanting slogans, marching or carrying flags are prohibited as part of candidate rallies […]

“ဦး၀င္းတင္နဲ႔ ေမးခြန္းမ်ား” အီးဘြတ္ ၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပုံ ၂၂ ႏွစ္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ မိုးမခက ျဖန္႔ခ်ိ

စစ္အစုိးရ အလိုက် ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၊ NLD ပါတီ၏ ရပ္တည္ျဖတ္သန္းမႈႏွင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္အေရး အင္တာဗ်ဴးမ်ား စုစည္းတင္ဆက္ခ်က္ ဆိုတဲ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္နဲ႔ မိုးမခက ဦး၀င္းတင္နဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံေမးျမန္းျခင္း အင္တာဗ်ဴးေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကို တစုတစည္းတည္း အီးဘြတ္အျဖစ္ ထုတ္ေ၀လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး ၈ ေလးလုံး အေရးေတာ္ပုံၾကီးရဲ့ ၂၂ ႏွစ္ျပည့္မွာ အမွတ္တရ အေလးျပဳျပီး ထုတ္ေ၀တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။လက္ရွိ ၂၀၁၀ စစ္အစိုးရေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အရႈပ္အေထြးကာလမွာ ဆရာဦး၀င္းတင္ရဲ့ ျပတ္သားတဲ့ အေတြးအျမင္၊ အင္န္အယ္ဒီပါတီရဲ့ ၂၀၁၀ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအၾကပ္အတည္းကို မည္သုိ႔ တစုတစည္းတည္း ရင္ဆိုင္ျဖတ္သန္းပုံနဲ႔ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ရုန္းကန္ရမႈေတြကို သည္အင္တာဗ်ဴးမွတ္တမ္းကေန သမိုင္းစာမ်က္ႏွာအျဖစ္ ေမာ္ကြန္းထိုးတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ မိုးမခစာနယ္ဇင္းအဖြဲ႔က ၾကိဳးပမ္းတင္ဆက္လိုက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

NLD Leader U Win Tin Video Message For Aung San Suu Kyi

A video birthday message to Aung San Suu Kyi from National League for Democracy leader U Win Tin has been smuggled out of Burma.

In the message U Win Tin, who spent 19 years in jail as a political prisoner, describes how he misses Aung San Suu Kyi, and how he hopes she will soon be free to lead the people again […]

Graffiti for Aung San Su Kyi: People in Need will commemorate the sixty-fifth birthday of a Burmese dissident in Prague

Graffiti wall in the center of Prague at Těšnov will be decorated by a large portrait of imprisoned Burmese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Su Kyi from this Friday. People will be able to leave a short note and a birthday wish on the wall as well. Public happening organized by People in Need will be held on Friday June 18, 2010 at 5pm at Těšnov, Prague 1 (at the graffiti wall near tram stop Těšnov). A photo from the event will be sent to Czech, European and Burmese exile media and also to Su Kyi as an expression of Czech support. People in Need want to call the attention to the violations of human rights in one of the most severe authoritarian regimes of present time.[…]

Week 13: 2010 Election Watch (1-7 June)

Developments

• On 6 June, the deadline passed for new parties to file registration papers to participate in the elections. Before the deadline, a total of 42 parties – 37 new parties and five existing parties – had filed registration applications […]

Groups around the world commemorate 1990 Elections

Twenty years ago, on 27 May 1990, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the first multi-party elections Burma had seen for decades. However, the NLD and other winning ethnic opposition parties were never allowed to take power as a democratically elected government.[…]

Migrant workers vote in ‘People’s Ballot’ campaign

Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot, Thailand voted in the “People’s Ballot” campaign today, which pitted Aung San Suu Kyi against Senior General Than Shwe, part of a worldwide tribute to the National League for Democracy’s landslide victory in national polls in 1990.[…]