UN warning over Burma cyclone aid
By Jonathan Head BBC News, Bangkok
Hundreds of thousands of people in Burma's Irrawaddy Delta still need assistance - a year after a deadly cyclone, the UN and aid agencies warn.
The UN and Burma's neighbours made a $700m (£469m) appeal for reconstruction in February but have so far received pledges of only $100m (£67m). The UN says it is now allowed to bring in all the staff it needs after an initial ban by Burma's (Myanmar) junta.
Cyclone Nargis killed about 140,000 people in 2008. More than two million people were left homeless.
'Intensely suspicious'
The cyclone that ripped across the fertile delta of the Irrawaddy caused a humanitarian disaster on a scale comparable to the Asian tsunami. Yet the amounts of aid being requested are just a fraction of what was spent on countries like Indonesia after the tsunami - and not much is forthcoming yet.
Part of the problem is that most foreign journalists are banned from reporting in Burma - so there is little public awareness of the work being done by around 60 international aid agencies there. Another factor that deters donors is the fear that aid could be misused by the military - a fear that Save the Children's (STC) Andrew Kirkwood says is unfounded. "We have 3,000 of our own staff in the delta, and I'm absolutely confident that the assistance given to STC and other agencies got exactly where it was supposed to go - there has been no systematic diversion of those funds," Mr Kirkwood says.
Large numbers of the cyclone's survivors are still living in flimsy shelters; many supplies remain contaminated by salt.
Reconstruction - as opposed to emergency relief - has barely begun.
The one bright spot, say the agencies, is that they are getting as much access as they need for their staff. Although they still need to ask permission from a military government that remains intensely suspicious of any foreign presence in the country.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8030211.stmPublished: 2009/05/02 00:01:07 GMT
ျမန္မာျပည္ ဧရာဝတီ ျမစ္ဝကၽြန္းေပၚ ေဒသသို႔ နာဂစ္ဆုိင္ကလုံး ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့သည္မွာ တႏွစ္တာၾကာျမင့္သြားၿပီ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း၊ ထုိေဒသတြင္ ဆုိင္ကလုံးသင့္ ဘဝမ်ား ျပန္လည္ ထူေထာင္ေရးႏွင့္ အေဆာက္အဦမ်ား ျပန္လည္ တည္ေဆာက္ေရးသည္ မ်ားစြာ လုိအပ္ေနေသးေၾကာင္း ကုလသမဂၢ အကူအညီေပးေရး ေအဂ်င္စီမ်ား အပါအဝင္ ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့ေရး အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားက ေထာက္ျပေျပာဆိုၾကသည္။
Burma's largest opposition party says it will consider taking part in planned elections if the military government meets a series of demands.
The National League for Democracy (NLD) set out its conditions for taking part after a two-day meeting in Rangoon.
In a statement, it urged the release of all political prisoners, including its leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
It also called for changes to the constitution and for international observers to monitor the poll.
The NLD has made similar demands in the past. So far they have not been met.
But analysts say the statement is still a departure from the NLD's previous calls for the government to honour the results of Burma's last general election in 1990.
The NLD won that poll by a landslide but the results were ignored by Burma's ruling generals.
'Final decision' delayed
The party held a national meeting in Rangoon to discuss its stance on the general election scheduled for 2010.
But the NLD chairman, Aung Shwe, said the party would wait to see new election rules drawn up by the ruling military before making a final decision on whether or not to participate.
The ruling junta has said it will hold elections under a revised constitution.
But the NLD says the junta's constitution is fundamentally flawed.
"The constitution's main objective is for the propagation of perpetual military rule in this country and therefore is not acceptable," Aung Shwe told the meeting.
The military has reserved 25% of the seats in any future parliament for itself.
The meeting began just one day after the EU extended sanctions against Burma and renewed calls for the release of all political prisoners.
Are you in Rangoon? Did you attend the meeting? Send us your comments.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8023352.stmPublished: 2009/04/29 16:23:52 GMT
အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမုိကေရစီ အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္က ၂၀၁၀ တြင္ စစ္အစုိးရ က်င္းပမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြကုိ ျခြင္းခ်က္ သုံးခုျဖင့္ လက္ခံသည္ဟု ယမန္ေန႔က သေဘာထား ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထုတ္ျပန္ လုိက္သည္။ အဆုိပါ ျခြင္းခ်က္ သုံးခုမွာ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား လႊတ္ေပးရန္၊ ၂ဝဝ၈ ခုႏွစ္ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒကုိ ျပင္ဆင္ရန္၊ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြတြင္ အလႊာ အသီးသီး ပါဝင္ၿပီး ႏုိင္ငံတကာက ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခြင့္ျပဳရန္ တုိ႔ ျဖစ္သည္။
ထုိအခ်က္မ်ားမွာ ကုလသမဂၢ၊ အေရွ႕ေတာင္ အာရွ ႏုိင္ငံမ်ား အဖဲြ႔၊ ဥေရာပသမဂၢ စသည့္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အင္အားစုက စစ္အစုိးရကုိ တစုိက္မတ္မတ္ ေတာင္းဆုိထားသည့္ အခ်က္မ်ားလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဤသုိ႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္လုိက္ျခင္းမွာ ျမန္မာ တျပည္လုံး ႀကဳံေတြ႔ေနရေသာ အခက္အခဲမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္ဟု အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ တဦး ျဖစ္သူ ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေဆြက ေျပာသည္။“ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေတြရဲ႕ ႏွစ္ရွည္လမ်ား ဒုကၡ သုကၡေတြကုိ မွ်ေဝေနတ့ဲ မိသားစုေတြ၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ လူမႈေရး၊ ႏုိင္ငံေရးမွာ ေျခကုန္ လက္ပန္း က်ေနတ့ဲ ျပည္သူေတြရဲ႕ အက်ဳိးစီးပြားကုိ ေမွ်ာ္ေတြးၿပီးေတာ့ လက္ကမ္းလုိက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္”ဟု ဗဟုိ အလုပ္အမႈ ေဆာင္ အဖဲြ႔ဝင္ ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေဆြက ေျပာသည္။
အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္သည္ အာဏာပုိင္မ်ားက ျပဳလုပ္ေပးသည့္ ၁၉၉ဝ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြတြင္ အျပတ္အသတ္ ႏုိင္ခ့ဲသည့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီ ျဖစ္သည္။ အစုိးရက အဆုိပါ ရလဒ္ကုိ အေကာင္အထည္ မေဖာ္ဘဲ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြတခု ျပဳလုပ္ပါက အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ အေနျဖင့္ လက္မခံႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ယခင္က ေၾကညာထားသည္။ ယမန္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္ စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၃ မ်က္ႏွာပါ ေရႊဂုံတုိင္ ေၾကညာစာတမ္းသည္ အနယ္နယ္ အရပ္ရပ္မွ အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား ရန္ကုန္တြင္ အထူး အစည္းအေဝး ျပဳလုပ္ခ့ဲရာမွ ထြက္ေပၚလာျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ထြက္ေပၚလာမည့္ အေျဖကုိ သိလုိသျဖင့္ အာဏာပုိင္မ်ားကပင္ အဆုိပါ အစည္းအေဝးကုိ ျဖစ္ေျမာက္ေစလုိ သည္ ဟု အကဲခတ္မ်ားက သုံးသပ္ၾကသည္။ အထူး အစည္းအေဝးသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္မည့္သူမ်ားကုိ ကန္႔သတ္ ပိတ္ပင္၊ ဖမ္းဆီးျခင္း မျပဳခ့ဲသည့္ အခ်က္ကုိ ၎တုိ႔က ေထာက္ျပၾကသည္။
Burma offers Rohingya return deal
By Jonathan Head BBC News, Bangkok
The Burmese government has said it will take back ethnic Rohingyas who have fled to neighbouring countries.
But it will only do so if they identify themselves as Bengalis, as it refuses to recognise the Rohingyas as one of its official minorities. Tens of thousands of Rohingyas have left Burma in recent years and washed up in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
In December, the Thai military began dragging boats of Rohingya asylum seekers to sea and setting them adrift. The policy has provoked widespread condemnation. However, leaders from the affected countries attending the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Thailand have been unable to agree on a solution to the displaced Rohingyas. Confronted by evidence that his military had been casting hundreds of Rohingya boat people adrift at sea, the Thai Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, has responded that this is a regional problem which can only be solved in consultation with the various affected countries.
Bizarre policies
This week's Asean summit would seem to be the ideal opportunity - it is one of the few international venues attended by senior Burmese leaders. But the other Asean states are getting little co-operation from their Burmese colleagues. The Burmese foreign minister told his Thai counterpart that his country might be willing to take back Rohingyas - but only if they were categorised as Bengalis who reside in Burma, not Burmese citizens. This is in keeping with a bizarre official policy which denies Rohingyas official status, the right to move around, even to marry without permission, despite the fact that they have lived in western Burma for more than a thousand years.
A memo faxed to journalists by the Burmese consul in Hong Kong last week insisted Rohingyas could not be real Burmese, as they were dark-skinned and "as ugly as ogres". In any case, sending them back to a country where they face even worse treatment than the average Burmese citizen does not appear to be a practical solution.
That has left the Asean leaders bereft of ideas.
None wants to open the door to more Rohingyas.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the only option his country had was to turn them back - but that just raises the prospect of hundreds more being left to drift and die on the high seas.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7916254.stmPublished: 2009/02/28 07:27:26 GMT
ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အေရးကိစၥကို ျပႆနာ ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံ ႏွစ္ဘက္အၾကား ေဆြးေႏြးတာမ်ိဳးရိွသလို၊ အခုလို ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အဆင့္၊ ေဒသ အဆင့္ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈနဲ႕လည္း ေျဖရွင္းဖို႕ ႀကိဳးစားသြားမယ္လို႕ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားကေတာ့ ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အခု ဘာလီ အစည္းအေ၀းမွာ တထိုင္တည္း သေဘာ အေျဖထုတ္ႏုိင္မွာေတာ့ မဟုတ္ဘဲ ဒါကို လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ တရပ္အေနနဲ႕ အခ်ိန္ယူ လုပ္သြားရမယ့္ သေဘာ ရိွတယ္လို႕လည္း အင္ဒိုနီးရွား ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန ေျပာခြင့္ရသူ ဖိုင္ဆာရွားက ေျပာပါတယ္။
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