နအဖႏွင့္ အပစ္ရပ္ ကိုးကန္႔တို႔ ၾကား ေသြးထြက္သံယိုမႈ စတင္ၿပီ

ၾကာသပေတးေန႕၊ 27 ၾသဂုတ္လ 2009 သွ်မ္းသံေတာ္ဆင့္

နအဖစစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာအမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ မဟာမိတ္တပ္မေတာ္ (MNDAA) (ေခၚ) ကိုးကန္႔လက္နက္ကိုင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအဖြဲ႔တို႔ၾကား ၾသဂုတ္လဆန္းပိုင္းမွ စတင္၍စစ္ေရးအရ တင္းမာမႈေရခ်ိန္ ထိုးတက္လာေနရာ ယေန႔တြင္ အျပန္အလွန္ ပစ္ခတ္မႈ စတင္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ယေန႔နံနက္(၁၀)နာရီခန္႔က သွ်မ္းျပည္(ေျမာက္ပိုင္း) ကိုးကန္႔အထူးေဒသ(၁) ဌာနခ်ဳပ္တည္ရိွရာ ေလာက္ကိုင္ၿမိဳ႕ အနီးရိွ ရန္လံုကိုင္းရြာတရုတ္နယ္စပ္ဂိတ္အနီးတြင္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ ပစ္ခတ္မႈျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔ဥကၠဌ ဦးဖုန္ၾကားရွင္းေခါင္းေဆာင္သည့္ တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားႏွင့္ နယ္စပ္ဂိတ္ေစာင့္ ဗမာရဲတို႔ အျပန္အလွန္ ပစ္ခတ္ခဲ့ၾကျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ပစ္ခတ္မႈတြင္ ဗမာရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔မွ (၃) ဦးေသဆံုးသြားေၾကာင္း တရုတ္နယ္စပ္ရိွ တိုင္းရင္းသား စစ္ဘက္သတင္း ရပ္ကြက္မွ သွ်မ္းသံေတာ္ဆင့္ ကို ေျပာသည္။

“ဒီေန႔မနက္ပိုင္း (၁၀) နာရီထိုးခါနီး (၁၅) မိနစ္ေလာက္မွာ နယ္စပ္တံတားမွာေစာင့္ေနတဲ့ ဗမာရဲနဲ႔ ကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔ ေတြ႔ၿပီး ပစ္ၾကတယ္ ရဲ (၃) ေယာက္ေသသြားတယ္ က်န္တဲ့ (၄) ေယာက္ကေတာ့ တရုတ္ျပည္ထဲထြက္ေျပးသြား တယ္ ” လို႔ အဆိုပါ တိုင္းရင္းသားစစ္ဘက္သတင္းရပ္ကြက္ က ေျပာသည္။

(၁၉၈၉) ခုႏွစ္ကတည္းက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရယူထားသည့္ ကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠဌ ဦးဖုန္ၾကားရွင္း ေနအိမ္အား မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါး ႏွင့္ လက္နက္စက္ရံုရိွသည္ဟု ဆိုကာ ယခုလ (၈) ရက္ႏွင့္ (၂၃) ရက္ေန႔မ်ားက နအဖလက္နက္ကိုင္ တပ္ ဖြဲ႔မ်ားက (၂)ႀကိမ္၀င္စီးခဲ့သည့္အတြက္ ႏွစ္ဘက္ တင္းမာလာခဲ့သည္။

ထိုသို႔ ႏွစ္ဘက္တင္းမာမႈ (၁) လနီးပါးၾကာ အခ်ိန္ကာလအတြင္း၌ နအဖစစ္တပ္၏ စစ္ေရး ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္း၏ ရပ္တည္မႈမွာ တစ္ဆစ္ခ်ိဳး ေျပာင္းလဲသြားရသည္။

အဖြဲ႔အတြင္း မတည္မၿငိမ္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေသာေၾကာင့္ ေဒသတြင္းရိွျပည္သူမ်ားမွာ တရုတ္နယ္စပ္ဘက္ ထြက္ေျပး တိမ္းေရွာင္သူ (၁၀၀၀၀) နီးပါးခန္႔ရိွေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

“ ဒီလ ေစာေစာပိုင္း တိုင္းမွဴးေအာင္သန္းထြဋ္ ေလာက္ကိုင္လာကတည္းက ရပ္ေ၀းက ဗမာ အလုပ္သမားေတြကို ေနရပ္ျပန္ဖို႔ ေျပာထားၿပီးၿပီပဲ အခုျဖစ္ေတာ့ လူေတာ့အကုန္ေရွာင္သြားၾကၿပီ အသက္ႀကီးတဲ့အဖြားႀကီး အဖိုးႀကီးေတြ ေလာက္ပဲ အိမ္ေစာင့္က်န္ထားေတာ့တယ္ ” လို႔ ေဒသတြင္းအေျခအေနကို ဆို႔စ္ က ေျပာသည္။

ယခုလိုပစ္ခတ္မႈျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့အၿပီး အေျခအေနသည္ ေအးစက္ၿငိမ္သက္လွ်က္ရိွကာ အခ်ိန္မေ႐ြးေသနတ္သံမ်ား ျပန္
ထြက္ေပၚလာႏိူင္ေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံတစ္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။

“ အခုေလာေလာဆယ္ေတာ့ ဘယ္လိုေျပာမလဲ ၿငိမ္ေနတယ္ ဒါေပမဲ့ ညျဖစ္မလား ေန႔ျဖစ္မလား ဆိုတဲ့ အေျခ အေနမ်ိဳးပဲ ခန္႔မွန္းရခက္တယ္ ” လို႔ သူကေျပာသည္။

လတ္တေလာအေျခအေနတြင္ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္အင္အား (၂၀၀၀) ေက်ာ္ခန္႔ ကိုးကန္႔နယ္ေျမအတြင္းသို႔ ပို႔လြတ္ ထားၿပီး ေနာက္ထပ္စစ္အင္အားျဖည့္တင္းမႈမ်ားလည္း ရိွေနေၾကာင္း ေစာေစာက စစ္ဘက္သတင္းရပ္ကြက္ကေျပာသည္။

“ေနာက္ထပ္ဗမာစစ္တပ္က အင္အားျပန္ျဖည့္ေနတယ္လို႔ၾကားတယ္ တိုင္းရင္းသား မဟာမိတ္တပ္ေတြကေရာပဲ အင္အား ေတြျဖည့္ၿပီး အားလံုးအသင့္ျပင္ထားၾကၿပီ ” လို႔ သူကေျပာသည္။

မေန႔က ဖုန္းၾကားရွင္းေခါင္းေဆာင္သည့္ ကိုးကန္႔တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားက ေၾကျငာခ်က္တစ္ေစာင္ထုတ္ျပန္ထားရာတြင္ နအဖ စစ္တပ္မ်ား ကိုးကန္႔ေဒသအတြင္းမွ ထြက္ခြာေပးရန္ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္လည္း ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ ယခုအေျခအေနသည္ နအဖက နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးကိုျငင္းဆိုခဲ့သည့္ ဥကၠဌ ဖုန္ၾကားရွင္း အပါအ၀င္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ (၄) ဦးကို ၀ရမ္းေျပးအျဖစ္ ထုတ္ျပန္ထားကာ ဒုဥကၠဌ ပိုင္ဆံုခ်ိန္အား ဥကၠဌ အျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခဲ့၍ ေက်ာေထာက္ေနာက္ခံေပးထားသျဖင့္ အဖြဲ႔လည္း (၂) ျခမ္းကြဲသြားသည္။

နအဖက အေျခအေနကို အခြင့္ေကာင္းယူအျမတ္ထုတ္ႏိူင္ရန္ စစ္တပ္အင္အား(၂၀၀၀)ေက်ာ္ကို အေစာပိုင္းက တည္းက အထူးေဒသ (၁) ေလာက္ကိုင္ၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ပို႔ေဆာင္၍ ၿမိဳ႕အား ဆက္လက္ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားဆဲျဖစ္သည္။

http://www.mongloi.org/burmese/2008-08-01-03-22-02/86-2008-08-01-03-20-45/506-2009-08-27-13-02-46.html

Expert Doubts Napyidaw’s Nuclear Program


By WAI MOE Thursday, August 27, 2009


A well-known expert on Burma’s military affairs is skeptical about recent reports on nuclear cooperation between the Burmese regime and North Korea.


In a paper published on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Web site on Monday, Andrew Selth, an expert on Burmese military affairs and author of “Burma’s Armed Forces: Power without Glory,” expressed doubts about Burma’s nuclear capability.


Selth said that Burma’s recent arms and materiel purchases from various countries including North Korea “do not necessarily mean that the junta is engaged in a secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD).”


“Some generals—possibly including regime leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe—are clearly attracted to the idea of acquiring a nuclear weapon, in the belief that possession of WMD would give Burma the same stature and bargaining power that they believe is now enjoyed by North Korea,” Selth said.


“The key question, however, is whether this is just wishful thinking, or if there has been a serious attempt by the regime to pursue a nuclear weapons program,” he said.


In early August, based on interviews with defectors conducted over two years by Professor Desmond Ball of the Australia National University's Defense Study Center and Thailand-based journalist Phil Thornton, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Bangkok Post published stories saying that the junta could develop a nuclear bomb by 2014.


Selth said US officials knew about the Burmese defectors more than two years ago. “Yet, even when armed with the apparent revelations of all these defectors, the Bush administration remained conspicuously silent about Burma’s nuclear status,” he said.


Selth also said that the tunnels pictured in recent news reports were “quite modest” and would be vulnerable to attack by “a modern air force equipped with latest weapons.”


“Many of these underground facilities are probably for military purposes, such as command bunkers, air raid shelters and protective tunnels for vehicles and weapons systems,” Selth said, noting that the Burmese generals have feared an air attack ever since the Gulf War.


“Some are more likely to be related to civil engineering projects. None of the photos support claims of a secret nuclear reactor, or nuclear weapons project,” he said.


Facing an arms embargo since 1988, the Burmese junta sought to reduce its dependency on foreign arms suppliers, Selth said, suggesting that recent purchases could be part of a program for the country’s large defense industrial complex to produce more sophisticated weapons, rather than WMD.


Selth said that it is certain that North Korea is “selling Burma conventional arms, sharing its military expertise and experience, and helping it upgrade its defense infrastructure.”


However, Selth does not totally deny reports of Naypyidaw’s nuclear ambitions, saying that Burmese natural gas sales have given the regime untapped foreign exchange reserves that could be used to fund a nuclear program.


“Russia is providing technical training for a large number of Burmese servicemen and officials, including in the nuclear field,” he said. “Some sophisticated equipment has been imported, and it is possible that sensitive nuclear technologies have been provided to Burma by North Korea.”


Speaking in an interview on National Public Radio, Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based expert on the Burmese junta, said that the Burmese are “certainly interested” in acquiring a nuclear weapon.


“[The Burmese are] seeing how the North Koreans have been able to stand up against the Americans and the rest of the world because they are nuclear-armed. And they would like to have the same kind of negotiating position,” he said.


According to Lintner, Beijing is “well aware of Burma’s nuclear ambitions,” and “there’s definitely Chinese complicity in this new cooperation between North Korea and Burma.”


However, Lintner said the Chinese can conveniently deny any role by saying that it is the North Koreans who are cooperating with Burma, and that China cannot control them.


http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16650

Does Myanmar Want Nuclear Weapons?

by Michael Sullivan

August 24, 2009

There is no doubt Myanmar has a nuclear program. It sent scientists, technicians and army officers to Russia for training in recent years. And Moscow has agreed to supply Myanmar, formerly Burma, with a small nuclear reactor for civilian use. The question is, do the Burmese generals want a nuclear weapon, too?
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STEVE INSKEEP, host:


Even as he tries to keep his domestic program from falling apart, the president has to pay attention to threats abroad. And this morning, we have a hint why the U.S. may need to pay attention to Myanmar. Last week, we heard from a Virginia senator, who visited that country. Here's one reason why that engagement matters. Myanmar, like Iran, has a nuclear program.

Here's NPR's Michael Sullivan.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN: There is no doubt Myanmar has a nuclear program. It sent scientists, technicians and army officers to Russia for training in recent years. And Moscow has agreed to supply Myanmar with a small nuclear reactor for civilian use. None of this is disputed. The question is do the Burmese generals want a nuclear weapon too.

Mr. BERTIL LINTNER (Yale Global Online): It is quite clear, I think, that although the Burmese may not have a bomb or even a nuclear capability - no, not yet - they're certainly interested in acquiring one.

SULLIVAN: That's Bertil Lintner. He has written extensively about both Myanmar and North Korea from his base in Thailand.

Mr. LINTNER: And they're seeing how the North Koreans have been able to stand up against the Damascus and the rest of the world because they are nuclear armed. And they would like to have the same kind of negotiating positions.

SULLIVAN: Lintner's recent piece in Yale Global Online detailed the growing defense ties between the two countries and the elaborate underground complexes Myanmar's generals are building with help from North Korea. The tunnels, and the reports this summer - ships from North Korea with mysterious cargos bound for Myanmar - have many countries concerned, including the U.S.

Secretary of State Clinton speaking last month in Thailand.

Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): We know that there are also growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously. It would be destabilizing for the region, it would pose a direct threat to Burma's neighbors and it is something as a treaty ally of Thailand that we are taking very seriously.

SULLIVAN: But the ship may have already sailed. Interviews with defectors, done by Professor Desmond Ball of the Australia National University's Defense Study Center and journalist Phil Thornton, suggest Myanmar is already well on its way with two reactors already in place.

One of the defectors who worked for a prominent Burmese businessman with close ties to the military, says his former boss helped transport materials from North Korean ships to the remote nuclear sites.

Unidentified Man: Their first intention is with the help of North Korea, they produce U235. If they get U235, (unintelligible) not so difficult. If they can arrange UF6, they can make the nuclear bomb.

SULLIVAN: Phil Thornton says he believes the defector's story to be both credible and worrisome, since it matches what other defectors interviewed in Thailand has said.

Mr. PHIL THORNTON (Journalist): Professor Ball has estimated, based on the defector's testimonies, that it could be about 2014 that may have enough nuclear material to start thinking about a weapon.

SULLIVAN: Myanmar, of course, denies any weapons program exists, but seems unusually sensitive to the recent publicity about the issue. Virginia Senator Jim Webb says it came up during his meetings with Myanmar's leadership ten days ago.

Senator JIM WEBB (Democrat, Virginia): I did not directly raise the issue of the nuclear program. It was raised to me by a high governmental official, basically saying, you know, we would never move toward a nuclear weapons program.

SULLIVAN: These denials, of course, are met with a great deal of skepticism by those who follow the growing relationship between North Korea and Myanmar. But analyst Bertil Lintner still isn't convinced Myanmar has even one reactor, let alone two. There is no concrete evidence, he says, that the Russians have delivered the reactor they promised, nor, he says, is there any hard evidence the North Koreans have either - though satellite images do show construction around Myanmar's suspected nuclear sites.

What is clear, Lintner says, is that Myanmar's main ally, China, is well aware of Myanmar's nuclear ambitions. Last year's clandestine visit to North Korea but a senior Burmese general, he says, proves it.

Mr. LINTNER: He passed through China on his way to North Korea, back again. On his way back from North Korea, Shwe Mann and his entourage had meetings with high-level officials. It was almost as the Chinese were, not only aware of what this trip through North Korea, but they were closely involved in it. See, it's very convenient for the Chinese to be able to say, we're not doing this. This is the North Koreans. We can't control them. It's kind of a sort of plausible deniability. But there's definitely Chinese complicity in this new corporation between North Korea and Burma.

SULLIVAN: Something else for the U.S. to think about as it considers a review of its policy toward Myanmar, amid the ongoing tug-of-war with North Korea over its nuclear program.

Michael Sullivan, NPR News.

INSKEEP: This is NPR News.

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112164691&ft=1&f=1004

Drug dealers put to death

Writer: KING-OUA LAOHONG
Published: 25/08/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: News

Two convicted drug traffickers at Bang Khwang prison have been executed by lethal injection.

Bundit Jaroenwanit, 45, and Jirawat Poompreuk, 52, yesterday became the country's fifth and sixth people to be executed by lethal injection, which replaced death by shooting in 2003.

The atmosphere at Bang Khwang prison in Nonthaburi was subdued yesterday when the two learned they were about to die.

They were given 60 minutes to call or write to their loved ones. They were then offered a last meal and a chance to listen to a sermon from a monk invited from Wat Bang Praek Tai.

They were blindfolded and given flowers, candles and incense sticks before being taken to the execution chamber.

The two, their legs manacled, turned their faces towards the temple as they were laid out on beds.

They received three injections. The first was a sedative, the second a muscle relaxant and the third a drug that stops the heart beating.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/22629/drug-dealers-put-to-death

'Evidence lacking' of Burma's nuke plans

August 24, 2009 - 6:49PM

Information leaking out of Burma raises suspicions of a clandestine nuclear program in cahoots with North Korea but there's no solid evidence, a new study says.

The paper, released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) says any suggestion of a secret weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program conducted by a rogue state like Burma must be cause for serious concern.

The author, Griffith University research fellow Andrew Selth, said no one could underestimate the lengths to which Burma's military leaders would go to stay in power and to protect the country from perceived external threats.

"Some of the information that has leaked out of Burma appears credible, and in recent years other snippets of information have emerged which, taken together, must raise suspicions," he said.

Relations between Burma and North Korea, which both achieved independence in 1948, have been traditionally patchy but warmed in 1988 when Burma was ostracised by the west after the abortive 1988 pro-democracy uprising.

Mr Selth said reliable information was scarce but it seemed that Burma had purchased weapons and munitions from North Korea. Periodic visits of North Korean freighters to Rangoon have prompted speculation that Burma has acquired more advanced weaponry, such as SCUD-type missiles.

Media reports last month claimed Burma had embarked on a secret nuclear weapons program, aided by North Korea which has long conducted a clandestine nuclear weapons program, testing devices in 2006 and 2009.

Mr Selth said the US had steadfastly refused to accuse Burma of a secret WMD program, probably because it did not feel there was sufficient reliable evidence to mount a public case.

"Understandably, foreign officials looking at this issue are being very cautious. No one wants a repetition of the mistakes which preceded the 2003 Iraq War, either in underestimating a country's capabilities, or by giving too much credibility to a few untested intelligence sources," he said.

Mr Selth said the challenge was to determine if Burma had such a program and if so, to do something about it.

He said Burma's regime did not seem to fear international criticism or the threat of increased sanctions.

"The exposure of a WMD program would probably see Burma expelled from ASEAN," he said.

"Even if that were to occur, however, the generals seem prepared to see Burma return to its pre-1988 isolation and poverty, if that was the price they had to pay to remain masters of the country's and their own destiny."

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/evidence-lacking-of-burmas-nuke-plans-20090824-ewf7.html

Max Myanmar Company awarded mining contract

By May Kyaw
Friday, 21 August 2009 16:16


Chiang Mai (Mizzima) - The Burmese Ministry of Mines has awarded Max Myanmar Group of Companies, a domestic conglomerate owned by business tycoon Zaw Zaw, a contract to produce lime stone on the basis of an with agreement signed between the two sides on August 18.

Headed by the Myanmar Football Federation President Zaw Zaw, the Max Myanmar Group of Companies has signed an agreement with the No (3) mining department of the Burmese Ministry of Mines to produce lime stone, according to a report in the state-run newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, report on Friday.

The newspaper said the lime stone will be supplied as raw material for the cement factory to be built near the capital Naypyitaw’s Taungphilar region. The cement factory is expected to produce 50 tons of cement daily.

The production contract was signed on August 18, at the meeting hall of the Ministry of Mines in Naypyitaw, the newspaper said.

The contract signing ceremony was attended by the Minister for Mines Brig Gen Ohn Myint and Managing Director of the Max Myanmar Group of Companies Zaw Zaw and Director Ohn Kyaw.

The 43-year-old business tycoon Zaw Zaw is the son-in-law of Thein Htut, who is also known as Pepsi Thein Htut because of his dealership of the Pepsi Co. which in 1997 withdrew its presence in Burma. The Max Myanmar Company has been awarded contracts in construction, hotel and tourism and gems and jewellery mining. Zaw Zaw is also president of the MFF and the Myanmar Tennis Federation.

His close rapport with the ruling military junta, has forced the United States to list him among individuals that the US has imposed sanctions on including restrictions in travelling to the US and freezing of his foreign assets.

http://www.mizzima.com/news/inside-burma/2660-max-myanmar-company-awarded-mining-contract-.html

RI supports Myanmar’s nuclear energy program

Lilian Budianto , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sat, 08/22/2009 11:58 AM | World

Indonesia will support Myanmar’s nuclear energy program for civilian use, said a top official on Friday, amid controversy concerning the junta’s poor human rights records and its nuclear weapon ambition.

Rezlan Ishar Jenie, Foreign Ministry’s Director General for Multilateral Affairs, said Myanmar, as a member of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), had the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, regardless of how the country has enforced its human rights.

“Our concern about [Myanmar’s] human rights records is separate from wishing to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” he said.

“We oppose nuclear weapons but not nuclear energy for peaceful use. The most important thing is the control from the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” said Rezlan during a memorial lecture and award presentation at the Indonesia’s Institute of Science (LIPI).

The Memorial lecture to commemorate LIPI first chairman, Sarwono Prawirohadjo, was delivered by Dewi Fortuna Anwar, senior researcher of the institute and also member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board member on Disarmament Matters (2008-2009).

Indonesia is a loud critic of Myanmar, which harshly suppressed the political dissent. The Myanmar military regime, who refused to acknowledge the 1990 landslide victory of main opposition party, has jailed thousands of political prisoners and dissenters, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar’s court has recently handed out another 18 months of house arrest to Suu Kyi for violating her house arrest terms in a trial the global community called a “sham”. Yangon has also recently drawn international concerns over reports from Australia that Myanmar will develop nuclear weapons with the help of North Korea.

Indian authorities have intercepted a North Korean ship over suspicion that it contained radioactive material for Myanmar. Myanmar has said they aimed to build a nuclear power plant for electricity but the Sydney Morning Herald reported recently that North Korea is helping Myanmar build a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction plan.

In response to the controversy of Myanmar’s purpose of importing nuclear materials, Rezlan said: “Every member of NPT has the right to develop nuclear energy for civilian use under the control of IAEA.”

He added the interception of shipment of nuclear materials from North Korea to Myanmar was conducted based on the decision of UN Security Council that ruled members to halt the transfer of all nuclear material to or from North Korea, and was not aimed at banning Yangon from developing nuclear energy.

“We have no problem if Myanmar wants to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purpose with the help of other countries,” said Rezlan, nodding in agreement when asked whether Jakarta agreed with Myanmar getting help from China in developing its nuclear technology.

Dewi, who delivered the speech on disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, said although the reports over Myanmar’s nuclear weapon strive had yet to be verified, it had sparked worries over the future of the region’s nuclear-weapons-free-zone deal signed under the ASEAN Bangkok Treaty.

“Myanmar is allowed to develop nuclear technology for peaceful use. However it has to be noted that there is not much difference between nuclear technology for peaceful use and for warfare. Uranium material can be converted into nuclear weapon through enrichment. That’s why the control over the use is very important,” she said.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/08/22/ri-supports-myanmar%E2%80%99s-nuclear-energy-program.html

ကရင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းျပန္လွည္ပူးေပါင္းရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေန

ကရင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းျပန္လွည္ပူးေပါင္းရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းေန

ကို(၂)/ ၾသဂုတ္ ၁၉၊ ၂၀၀၉

ခြဲထြက္သြားခဲ့ေသာ ကရင္ဗုဒၵဘာသာတပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားလြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္တို႔ တဖန္ ျပန္လည္ပူးေပါင္းရန္ ကမ္းလွမ္းမႈမ်ားရွိလာသည့္အတြက္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအစီးအရံုး(ေကအဲန္ယူ)အတြက္ သတင္းေကာင္းတခု ျဖစ္လာပါသည္။

ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ တိုးတက္ေသာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားတပ္မေတာ္(ဒီေကဘီေအ)အဖြဲ႔မွ ေကအဲန္ယူ တပ္မေတာ္အား ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဇြန္လက တိုက္ခိုက္ေျခမုန္း ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ကရင္ျပည္သူ (၃၀၀၀)ေက်ာ္ အိုးမဲ့အိမ္မဲ့ ျဖစ္ကာ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံသို႔ထြက္ေျပးသိမ္းေရွာင္ခံခဲ့ရာမွ ယခုလိုျပန္လွည္ ပူးေပါင္းရန္ ကမ္းလွမ္းမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာသည္။

ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဇြန္လႈိင္လမွစ၍ ဒီေကဘီေအဘက္မွ ေကအဲန္ယူတပ္မေတာ္ထံသို႔လာေရာက္ပူးေပါင္းရန္ ဆက္သြယ္မႈမ်ား စတင္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာခဲ့ၿပီး အေျခအေနမ်ား ဆက္လက္တိုးတက္သြားေရးအတြက္ ေကအဲန္ယူ တပ္မဟာ (၆)အေနျဖင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ညွိႏိႈင္းမႈမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ေနပါေၾကာင္း ေကအဲန္ယူ ဗဟုိအလုပ္မႈေဆာင္ ေကာ္မတီ၀င္ တဦးျဖစ္သည့္ ပဒိုေဒးဗစ္ေထာကေျပာသည္။

၎က “ကရင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းကရင္ သတ္ရမယ့္ ျဖတ္ရမယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီဗမာစစ္တပ္ေတြ စိတ္ခ်မ္းသာေအာင္ ကရင္ေတြက ေသေပးရမယ္ ဆုိတဲ့ဟာမ်ဳိးကေတာ့ ဒီေကဘီေအလည္း မလုိခ်င္ဘူး။ ေကအဲန္အဲလ္ေအလည္း မလုိခ်င္ပါဘူး” ဟု ဆက္ေျပာပါသည္။

ဒီေကဘီေအမွ ေကအဲန္ယူတပ္မဟာ(၆)အတြင္း ျပန္လွည္ပူးေပါင္းႏိုင္ရန္ ကမ္းလွမ္းေနသည့္ အေျခအေနမ်ားကို ေကအဲန္ယူမွ ထိပ္ပိုင္းေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကလည္း လက္ခံႀကိဳဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။

ဒီေကဘီေအမွ တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားကို ၎တုိ႔၏ ရာထူးအတုိင္း တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခြင့္ ေပးႏုိင္ေရးအတြက္ တပ္မဟာ(၆)ႏွင့္ ေကအဲန္ယူေခါင္းေဆာင္ပိုင္းတို႔အေနျဖင့္ သင့္ေလွ်ာ္သည့္အတုိင္း အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖာ္သြားမွာျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ အႀကံဉာဏ္ေပးသြားမည္ဟုဆိုသည္။

၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမတိုင္မွီ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရမွ ၎တို႔ႏွင့္အပစ္ရပ္ယူထားေသာဒီေကဘီေအကို ေအအဲန္ယူအား “အျမစ္ျပတ္ေျခမုန္းရန္” တြန္းအားေပးမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚေနၿပီး၊ တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာပင္ အျခားေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ အပစ္အရပ္မ်ားကိုလဲ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္အျဖစ္အသြင္ေျပာင္းရန္ ဖိအားေပးမႈမ်ား ရွိေနသည္ကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာသတင္းဌာနမ်ားႏွင့္ ျပည္ပေရာက္ ျမန္မာသတင္းဌာန အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက အစီရင္ခံတင္ျပမႈမ်ား ရွိေနသည္။

ဒီေကဘီေအကို ဦးသာထူးေက်ာ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ကာ ၂၀၀၄ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေကအဲန္ယူမွခြဲထြက္၍ စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ အပစ္ရပ္ယူၿပီး ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ လႈိင္းဘဲြ႔ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူ ရြာတြင္ အေျခစုိက္ေနထုိင္သည္။

http://ktimes.org/thatin/1-latest-news/437-2009-08-19-13-35-35.html

Moscow stands by Myanmar nuclear cooperation deal

19:48 21/07/2009

MOSCOW, July 21 (RIA Novosti) - Nuclear cooperation between Russia and Myanmar is not in conflict with the Nonproliferation Treaty or IAEA requirements, and will move ahead, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

Andrei Nesterenko's comment came in response to U.S. concerns over the cooperation.

However, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier on Tuesday that Washington was taking concerns about military cooperation between nuclear-armed North Korea and Myanmar "very seriously," but made no mention of Russia.

"Our cooperation with Myanmar is absolutely legitimate and in full compliance with our obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty and IAEA requirements," Nesterenko said.

He added that the IAEA had no problem with Myanmar over its nonproliferation commitments.

Russia signed an agreement in 2007 on the construction of a nuclear research center in Myanmar, and it will stand by this agreement, Nesterenko said.

The center will include a 10 MW light-water research reactor.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090721/155576709.html

The History Of Burma's Nuclear Ambitions

The push for nuclear technology started way back in the 1950s and continues today

Writer: By Aung Zaw
Published: 9 August 2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: Spectrum

Reports of Burma's shady nuclear ambitions have resurfaced to take their place alongside warnings by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of secret military ties and possible technology transfers between Burma and North Korea.

Defectors tell of Burma's secret nuclear reactor



North Korea is helping country develop weapons, according to the men

By Roger Maynard in Sydney
Monday, 3 August 2009

Two of Asia's most oppressive regimes may have joined forces to develop a nuclear arsenal, according to strategic experts who have analysed information supplied by a pair of Burmese defectors.

The men, who played key roles in helping the isolated military junta before defecting to Thailand, have provided evidence which suggests Burma has enlisted North Korean help to build its own nuclear bomb within the next five years.

Details supplied by the pair, who were extensively interviewed over the past two years by Professor Desmond Ball of the Australian National University and Thai-based Irish-Australian journalist Phil Thornton, points to Burma building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facility with the assistance of North Korea.

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• Burma's ruler: brutal, reclusive – and a skilled manipulator

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, the head of Thailand's Institute of Security and International Studies, said: "The evidence is preliminary and needs to be verified, but this is something that would completely change the regional security status quo.

"It would move Myanmar [Burma] from not just being a pariah state but a rogue state – that is one that jeopardises the security and well-being of its immediate neighbours," he said.

The nuclear claims, revealed by The Sydney Morning Herald at the weekend, will ring alarm bells across Asia. The newspaper said the testimony of the two defectors brought into sharp focus the hints emerging recently from other sources, supported by sightings of North Korean delegations, that the Burmese junta, under growing pressure to democratise, was seeking a deterrent to any foreign moves to force regime change.

Their evidence also reinforces concerns expressed by Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, in Thailand last week about growing military co-operation between North Korea and Burma. "We worry about the transfer of nuclear technology and other dangerous weapons," she said at a regional security conference.

The two defectors whose briefings have created such alarm are both regarded as credible sources. One was an officer with a secret nuclear battalion in the Burmese army who was sent to Moscow for two years' training. He was part of a nuclear programme which planned to train 1,000 Burmese. "You don't need 1,000 people in the fuel cycle or to run a nuclear reactor. It's obvious there is much more going on," he said.

The other is a former executive of the regime's leading business partner, Htoo Trading, who handled nuclear contracts with Russia and North Korea. The man, who died in 2008, provided a detailed report which insisted that Burma's rationale for a nuclear programme was nonsense.

"They [the generals] say it is to produce medical isotopes for health purposes in hospitals. How many hospitals in Burma have nuclear science? he asked. "Burma can barely get electricity up and running. It's a nonsense," he said.

Professor Ball and Mr Thornton reported that the army defector claimed that there were more than five North Koreans working at the Thabeik Kyin uranium processing plant in Burma and that the country was providing yellowcake – partially refined uranium – to both Iran and North Korea.

The authors concluded that the illicit nuclear co-operation was based on a trade of locally refined uranium from Burma to North Korea in return for technological expertise.

What is missing in the nuclear chain at the moment is a plutonium reprocessing plant, but according to the army defector, one was being planned at Naung Laing in northern Burma, parallel to a civilian reactor which is already under construction with Russian help.

The secret complex would be hidden in caves tunnelled into a nearby mountain. Once Burma had its own plutonium reprocessing plant, it could produce 8kg of weapons-grade plutonium-239 a year, enough to build one nuclear bomb every 12 months.

If the testimony of the two defectors proves to be correct, the secret reactor could be operational by 2014, The Herald reported. "These two guys never met each other, never knew of each other's existence, and yet they both tell the same story basically," said Professor Ball.

"If it was just the Russian reactor, under full International Energy supervision, then the likelihood of them being able to do something with it in terms of a bomb would be zero," Professor ball said. "It's the North Korean element which adds danger to it."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/defectors-tell-of--burmas-secret-nuclear-reactor-1766566.html

Is Burma Pursuing A Nuclear Program?


By Leah Wawro

Evidence is surfacing that suggests that Burma, also known as Myanmar, may be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Along with recent reports from defectors saying that the pariah regime is building a nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facility in the North, a new photo of a mysterious and enormous building has been posted online.

Jeffery Lewis of the New America Foundation posted the image on his blog, Arms Control Wonk, and the Institute for Science and International Security (Isis) used the image in a report published on Monday. Obtained via Google Earth, it shows an "anomalous building buried in the ground north-east of Maymyo."

Although the Isis report says that it cannot "ascribe [the buildings] with obvious nuclear industrial characteristics," it also notes that Burma has carried out suspicious transactions with North Korean companies, including the aquisition of "extremely high precision equipment."

The building, which looks like a huge swimming pool, is approximately 80 meters (262 feet) on each side. Lewis notes that it is in a remote, mountainous area and there seems to be a power transmission line attached to it.

The Naypyidaw regime of Burma has known connections to North Korea and is guilty of many human rights abuses, but both the Bush and Obama administrations have been fairly quiet on speculations of its nuclear weapons program. Clinton did address the issue briefly at July's ASEAN summit meeting, saying "We know there are also growing concerns about military co-operation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously."

According to a dramatic, and perhaps overblown, report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the two defectors independently described a tunnel complex used to build Burma's nuclear program:

The secret complex, much of it in caves tunnelled into a mountain at Naung Laing in northern Burma, runs parallel to a civilian reactor being built at another site by Russia that both the Russians and Burmese say will be put under international safeguards.

Burma expert Andrew Seith cautions that Burma's suspected nuclear program is "still the subject of considerable debate among scholars and officials," but agrees with many bloggers that the evidence against the Naypyidaw regime is mounting, and says there may be growing concern about the issue in the Obama administration.

The reports from ISIS are inconclusive, but the recently published image adds to the growing evidence of Burma's pursuit of a nuclear program that is certain to make the U.S. and Burma's neighbors anxious.

http://airamerica.com/blog/2009/aug/04/burma-pursuing-nuclear-program

Burma denies nuclear power plant scheme: Asean nations rally to gain Suu Kyi amnesty

Writer: BANGKOK POST AND AGENCIES
Published: 18/08/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: News

Burma's junta has denied it is building a nuclear power plant, US Senator Jim Webb says.

Mr Webb, who met with regime officials at the weekend, said that while he did not discuss the issue directly with Burma's State Peace and Development Council chairman Than Shwe, "it was communicated to me early on that there was no truth to that from a very high level in the government".

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed concern about reports that North Korea and Burma were cooperating on nuclear technology.

Mr Webb was the first senior US official to meet with Snr Gen Than Shwe, according to the senator's office.

He met detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and secured the release of US citizen John Yettaw, who was sentenced to seven years in jail with hard labour for swimming to her lakeside home in Rangoon and staying there for two days.

Mrs Suu Kyi, 64, was sentenced last week to jail for three years with hard labour, after being found guilty of breaching a detention order by letting Mr Yettaw stay in her home. Her sentence was commuted to 18 months under house arrest.

In Bangkok on Monday Mr Webb met Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva at Government House. He also met Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya at the Foreign Ministry.

Acting government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn said Mr Abhisit assured Mr Webb the Association of Southeast Asian Nations would not meddle in Burma's internal affairs and would not support any sanction measures against Burma.

Mr Webb told a press conference in Bangkok yesterday he wanted to be careful not to misrepresent Mrs Suu Kyi's views, but it was his "clear impression from her that she is not opposed to lifting some sanctions", and that "there would be some areas she would be willing to look at".

He said the sanctions issue was not specifically raised in his talks with Snr Gen Than Shwe, "although obviously it's the elephant in the bedroom".

Thailand, as the current Asean chair, is spearheading an effort to issue a letter from Asean foreign ministers to call for an amnesty for Mrs Suu Kyi.

Senior Asean officials will meet tomorrow and Thursday in Jakarta to discuss the final draft of the joint letter before sending it to the Burmese junta.

Mr Kasit said no Asean member was opposed to the idea and would like to cooperate even though some members were concerned about the Thai proposal and wanted to look at the final wording.

Mr Kasit went to lobby the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Singapore at the weekend. He also talked by phone with his Cambodian and Vietnamese counterparts yesterday.

Mr Kasit said the release of Mr Yettaw was an "encouraging sign".

"The release of Yettaw gave us hope that the Burmese government might consider on the issue of Mrs Suu Kyi as well," Mr Kasit said.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/22218/burma-denies-nuclear-power-plant-scheme

Experts Question Reports of Secret Myanmar Nuclear Program

Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009

Several experts have questioned the claims of two defectors from Myanmar that their home nation is operating a secret nuclear program that might be aimed at weapons production, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 10).

The two men, interviewed extensively by a strategic analyst and a journalist over the course of two years, said they were part of a clandestine effort aided by North Korea to construct an underground nuclear facility capable of producing weapon-grade plutonium. They also said Myanmar had supplied "yellowcake" uranium to North Korea and Iran, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

However, Trevor Wilson, Australia's former ambassador to Myanmar, argued that defectors in generally should not be automatically believed.

"I wasn't entirely convinced the evidence they were sitting was pointing to a nuclear weapons program. It could have been a nuclear power program," Wilson said. "There's plenty of evidence of a military relationship [between Myanmar and North Korea] and also a suggestion over a long period that the Burmese army is interested in acquiring missiles from a country like North Korea, but not necessarily a nuclear-armed missile."

Wilson added that while Myanmar possesses uranium, nothing suggests that is in the business of processing the ore to produce "yellowcake, or anything else for that matter." Still, he said it was plausible that Myanmar's military government might trade the ore itself for missiles and conventional weapons.

He said Myanmar would have no strategic reason for developing nuclear arms, since it had no nuclear-armed enemies.

"Why would the Burmese army want to acquire nuclear weapons for national security?" Wilson said. "It would actually make them a target. It wouldn't help them with any threats they face, which are all of a conventional nature" (Bill Tarrant, Reuters I, Aug. 11).

While satellite photos do suggest a network of underground tunnels in Myanmar, some analysts say they are located in an unlikely spot for a nuclear reactor, Reuters reported.

The alleged site of the underground facility is too far from a water source to pipe in sufficient coolant for a nuclear reactor, analyst Sean O'Connor wrote last week on the Arms Control Wonk blog.

Another analyst, Mark Hibbs of the online publication Nuclear Fuel, said the structure shown in satellite images is probably "a non-nuclear industrial workshop or machinery center."

While some satellite photos "do indeed depict tunnel entrances and indoor or underground storage facilities," stated the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, those structures "are likely not nuclear industrial facilities" (Reuters II, Aug. 11).

http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090812_8921.php

Q+A - Myanmar and N.Korea nuclear ties: smoke or fire?

Tue Aug 11, 2009 5:24pm IST

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Speculation that North Korea has been helping military-ruled Myanmar build nuclear facilities near its capital has been growing recently, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voicing those concerns last month.

But are the reports -- including one mainly based on interviews with Mynamar defectors -- more smoke than fire?


Is Myanmar joining nuclear club with North Korea aid?

Tue Aug 11, 2009 5:27am EDT
By Bill Tarrant – Analysis

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A spate of reports that North Korea may be helping fellow pariah state Myanmar join the nuclear club has underlined concerns over Pyongyang's proliferation activities since it renounced disarmament talks and tested a bomb.

အပစ္ရပ္တိုင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔ (၄) ဖြဲ႔ စစ္ေရးမဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္း

၀ီရ / ၁၂ ၾသဂုတ္ ၂၀၀၉

နအဖစစ္အစုိးရ၏ တပ္ဖြဲ႔အသြင္ေျပာင္းေရး ကမ္းလွမ္းခ်က္ကုိ ျငင္းဆန္ေနသည့္ ျမန္မာျပည္ေျမာက္ပုိင္း အပစ္ရပ္ တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔ (၄) ဖြဲ႔တုိ႔ နအဖက စစ္ေရးအရ ပုိမုိဖိအားေပးလာလွ်င္ အတူတကြ စစ္ဆင္ေရးဆင္ႏႊဲႏုိင္ရန္ ရည္ရြယ္၍ စစ္ေရးပူးတြဲ မဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းလုိက္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

စစ္ေရးမဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔တြင္ ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသားလြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ (KIO)၊ ဝျပည္ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ (UWSA)၊ ကုိးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ မုိင္းလားအဖြဲ႔ ေခၚ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမုိကရက္တစ္ မဟာမိတ္တပ္မေတာ္ (NDAA-ESS) တုိ႔ ပါဝင္သည္ ဟု ကခ်င္သတင္းဌာနက ယမန္ေန႔တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

အဆိုပါအဖြဲ႔ (၄) ဖြဲ႔အနက္ (၁) ဖြဲ႔က နအဖႏွင့္အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး ပ်က္ျပားသြားပါက က်န္ရိွသည့္အဖြဲ႔ (၃) ဖြဲ႔ကလည္း အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲမႈ ပ်က္ျပယ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း မဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔၏ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္တြင္ ပါရိွေၾကာင္း ကခ်င္သတင္းဌာနမွ အယ္ဒီတာ ကုိေနာ္ဒင္က ေျပာသည္။

“ဒီအပစ္ရပ္အဖြဲ႔ (၄) ဖြဲ႔က သူတုိ႔ မဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔လုိက္တယ္ဆုိတာ အတိအလင္းေတာ့ ေၾကညာတာမဟုတ္ဘူးခင္ဗ်။ နအဖက ဒီအပစ္ရပ္ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္တဲ့ေဒသေတြမွာ တပ္အင္အားတုိးခ်ဲ႕ေနတဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ ဇူလုိင္လကတည္းက ဒီအဖြဲ႔ကုိ ဖြဲ႔စည္းလုိက္တာ။ ဒီမဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔က သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ေတြထဲမွာ အဓိကက နအဖက ဒီမဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔တဖြဲ႔နဲ႔ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး ပ်က္ျပားသြားလုိ႔ရွိရင္ အျခားအဖြဲ႔ေတြကလည္း နအဖကို ျပန္တုိက္ၾကဖုိ႔လည္း ပါတယ္။ နအဖက တုိက္လာရင္ သူတုိ႔က အကုန္တုိက္မယ္ေပါ့။ နအဖကလည္း အခုဆုိ သူတုိ႔နယ္ေျမမွာ စစ္အင္အားေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး တုိးခ်ဲ႕ထားတာဆုိေတာ့ တုိက္ပြဲက ဒီလအတြင္းမွာေတာင္ ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္တယ္” ဟု ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္သုိ႔ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပုိင္းတြင္ တည္ရွိသည့္ ေကအုိင္အုိ တပ္မဟာ (၄) ႏွင့္ ေကအိုင္အို ဌာနခ်ဳပ္တို႔ အဆက္အသြယ္ ျပတ္ေတာက္ေစရန္အတြက္ ေကအုိင္အုိအဖြဲ႔၏ ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ရွိရာ လုိင္ဇာေဒသတေလွ်ာက္တြင္ နအဖစစ္တပ္မွ အင္အား (၅) ေသာင္းခန္႔ ေရာက္ရွိေနေၾကာင္း ကုိေနာ္ဒင္က ေျပာသည္။

“နအဖနဲ႔ ဒီဘက္ (ေျမာက္) ပုိင္းက အပစ္ရပ္အဖြဲ႔ေတြရဲ႕အေျခအေနက အေတာ္ေလးကုိ ဆုိးေနၿပီ။ ေနာက္ဆုံးအေျခအေနအရ ေဒၚစုကုိလည္း ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ျပန္ခ်ထားလုိက္ၿပီဆုိေတာ့ အပစ္ရပ္အဖြဲ႔ေတြအေပၚမွာလည္း ဖိအားေတြ ပုိၿပီးမ်ားလာႏုိင္လုိ႔ ေကအုိင္အုိကလည္း အသင့္အေနအထားမွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ ေက်းလက္ေဒသက လူေတြက လုံၿခံဳရာကုိ ေျပာင္းေ႐ႊ႕ေနၾကၿပီ” ဟု ၎က ဆက္လက္ေျပာသည္။

ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသားလြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအဖြဲ႔၏ ယခုလက္ရွိအင္အားမွာ တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္ (၂) ေသာင္းဝန္းက်င္ရွိေၾကာင္း အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမႈး ေဒါက္တာ လဂ်ာက ေျပာသည္။

ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ စေနေန႔၌ နအဖစစ္တပ္က မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါး ရွာေဖြေရး အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ပုိင္း၊ ကုိးကန္႔ေဒသရွိ ကုိးကန္႔တပ္ဖြဲ႔ဥကၠ႒ ဖုန္က်ားရွင္၏ ေနအိမ္သုိ႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ရွာေဖြရန္ ႀကိဳးစားခဲ့၍ ႏွစ္ဖက္ ပစ္ခတ္လုနီးပါး ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည္။

ကုိးကန္႔အဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ နအဖစစ္တပ္အၾကား အေျခအေန တင္းမာေနသည့္အတြက္ ေဒသခံအရပ္သား (၁) ေသာင္းေက်ာ္ခန္႔ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္ဘက္ျခမ္းသုိ႔ တိမ္းေရွာင္ေနၾကရၿပီး ေက်းလက္ေဒသမွ ရြာသားမ်ားကလည္း နီးစပ္ရာ ၿမဳိ႕မ်ားသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ ခုိလႈံေနၾကရေၾကာင္း တ႐ုတ္နယ္စပ္မွ သတင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

http://www.khitpyaing.org/news/Aug09/120809e.php

Myanmar may have to leave ASEAN if it has nuclear plant

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug 8 (TNA) -- Myanmar may be forced to abandon its Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) membership if it is found to have a nuclear reactor in the country, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said on Saturday.

So far there is no clear evidence that the Southeast Asian country, Thailand’s neighbour to the west, has such a facility but if it does, it will be forced to leave the organisation because operating a nuclear plant violates a regional pact which states that ASEAN will be a nuclear free zone, said Mr Surin.

Mr Surin was responding to Western media reports which said recently that impoverished Myanmar was building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium facilities with the help of North Korea and aims to have a nuclear bomb in five years.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the ASEAN meeting in Thailand’s Phuket last month also warned about possible nuclear links between the two countries. She said the communist-state could be sharing atomic technology with military-ruled Myanmar which could pose a major threat to the region.

“ASEAN (government) leaders will have to jointly consider on the issue. If (Myanmar) is found guilty then it will be forced to leave ASEAN,” said Mr. Surin, adding that so far there is no sign that the country has built such facilities.

Myanmar along with Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are ASEAN members.

Touching on the court delay in issuing a verdict against Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and two housekeepers following
the May 3 incident in which American John William Yettaw allegedly swam across a lake to her home and stayed there for two days, Mr Surin said he believed the postponement probably so the verdict to be issued would not impact the feelings of the international community.

The verdict must be transparent before general elections, otherwise Myanmar authorities would not have reason to back their claims to the international community, and it would also put pressure on ASEAN, he said.

If convicted, Mrs Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest since 1989 could face up to five years in prison, which would prevent her from participating the general elections that the junta has scheduled for 2010.

Myanmar court has postponed the verdict until Tuesday. (TNA)

http://enews.mcot.net/view.php?id=11215

ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရ ၂၀၁၄ ခုမွာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္လုပ္ႏုိင္မည္ ခန္႔မွန္း

ၾသဂုတ္လ ၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉
လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ အာရွအသံ

ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရအေနနဲ႔ လက္ရွိအေနအထားအတုိင္း ညဴကလီးယားစီမံကိန္းကုိ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚမည္ဆုိရင္ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္လုပ္ႏုိင္လိမ့္မယ္လုိ႔ ၾသစေၾတးလ်ပညာရွင္ပါေမာကၡ Desmond Ball နဲ႔ ၾသစေၾတးလ်သတင္းစာဆရာ Mr.Phil Thornton က မၾကာခင္က ေဖၚထုတ္ေရးသားလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာစစ္ဖက္နဲ႔ အရပ္ဖက္က ထြက္ေျပးလာ ႏွစ္ဦးကုိ သီးျခားေမးျမန္းစံုစမ္းအၿပီး ၂ ႏွစ္အၾကာမွာ အခုလုိေရးသားလုိက္တာလုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။

ရုရွားအစုိးရက ကူညီထားသည့္ အႏုျမဴသုေနသနဌာနတြင္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္မည့္ ျမန္မာ့အမႈထမ္းမ်ားကို ရုရွားဘာသာသင္ၾကားေပးရန္ ေစလြတ္ထားေသာ ရုရွားလူမ်ိဳး ၄၀ ထဲမွ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေမၿမိဳ႕ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာၾကားေသာ ရုရွားအမ်ိဳးသမီး စက္ဘီးစီးလာသည္ကုိ ေမၿမိဳ႕လမ္းတစ္ခုတြင္ ေတြ႕ရပံု။ (Photo: RFA/Tyler Chapman)

ဒီအေၾကာင္းေတြနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေဖၚထုတ္ေရးသားခဲ့သူႏွစ္ဦးထဲက သတင္းစာဆရာ Phil Thornton ကို RFA အဖြဲ႔သား ကိုေက်ာ္မင္းထြန္းက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းထားပါတယ္။

ဟုတ္ကဲ့ Mr. Phil Thornton ခင္ဗ်ား။ ျမန္မာျပည္ထဲက ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့သူႏွစ္ေယာက္ကုိ ကုိယ္တုိင္ေတြ႔ဆံုေမးျမန္းခဲ့သူတစ္ဦးအေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္ႏုိင္တဲ့ စက္ရံုေဆာက္ေနတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ ေကာက္ခ်က္ကုိ ဘယ္လုိဆြဲခဲ့ပါသလဲဗ်။

က်ေနာ္တို႔ ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့သူႏွစ္ဦးကို သီးျခားစီေတြ႔ေမးခဲ့တာပါ။ တစ္ေယာက္က ရုရွားႏုိင္ငံ ေမာ္စကုိၿမိဳ႕မွာ သင္တန္းတက္ခဲ့တဲ့ စစ္တပ္က ဗုိလ္ႀကီးတစ္ဦးျဖစ္ၿပီး ေနာက္တစ္ေယာက္ကေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥေတြကို အတြင္းက်က်သိထားတဲ့ ထူးထရိတ္ဒင္းက စာရင္းကုိင္တစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အစေတာ့ သူတုိ႔ေျပာတာေတြကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔သံသယရွိပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာက ျပည္သူေတြကို လွ်ပ္စစ္မီး ၂၄ နာရီေပးႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ကုိ အခက္အခဲျဖစ္ေနတာဆုိေတာ့ ညဴကလီးယားစက္ရံု ကိစၥေတြကို ေျပာလာေတာ့ သံသယျဖစ္ၾကတာပါ။

ဟုတ္ကဲ့၊ Mr. Thornton တုိ႔ ဒီ Sydney Morning Herald နဲ႔ Bangkok Post ေတြမွာ ေရးထားခ်က္အရဆုိရင္ ပထမဆံုးေတြ႔ၿပီး ေမးခဲ့တဲ့သူက ဗုိလ္ႀကီးမုိးႀကိဳးလုိ႔ အမည္၀ွက္ေပးထားတဲ့ ရုရွားျပန္စစ္ဗိုလ္တစ္ဦးလုိ႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။ သူ႔အေၾကာင္းေျပာျပပါလားခင္ဗ်။

ဟုတ္ပါတယ္။ မုိးႀကိဳးဆုိတာ သူ႔လံုၿခံဳေရးအတြက္ ေျပာင္းထားတဲ့နာမည္၀ွက္ပါ။ သူက ၂၀၀၃ ခုႏွစ္မွာ လက္ေရြးစင္ ေရြးၿပီး ေမာ္စကိုမွာ ညဴကလီးယား အင္ဂ်င္နီးယားရင္းပညာ တက္လာတဲ့ ဗုိလ္ႀကီးတဦးပါ။ အဲဒီမွာ ၂ ႏွစ္တက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာျပည္ျပန္ေရာက္ေတာ့ ညဴကလီးယားတပ္ရင္းမွာ တာ၀န္ေပးခံရပါတယ္။ ဒီကေန သူသင္လာခဲ့တာေတြကေန ျပန္တာ၀န္ယူရတဲ့သေဘာပါ။

က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ထဲက ပါေမာကၡ ေဘာလ္က ညဴကလီးယားသင္တန္းနဲ႔ စက္ရံုေတြအေၾကာင္း ပိုၿပီး အေသးစိတ္အခ်က္အလက္ေတြ ေမးျမန္း မွတ္တမ္းယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူက ညဴကလီးယားနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ ကြ်မ္းက်င္သူ ပညာရွင္ဆုိေတာ့ သူက ပုိၿပီး ထြက္ဆုိခ်က္ေတြကုိ မွတ္သားေ၀ဖန္ပါတယ္။ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ သံုးသပ္ပါတယ္။ သူက ဒီအခ်က္အလက္ေတြကို ေထာက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဟာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္ႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ ျပင္ေနတယ္။ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္ လက္နက္ထုတ္ႏုိင္မယ္ဆုိတာကုိ သံုးသပ္တာပါ။

က်ေနာ့္အတြက္ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ အခု ဒီလူႏွစ္ဦးက ေျပာဆုိခ်က္ေတြထဲက ၁၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းပဲ မွန္းထားဦး။ အရပ္သံုးျဖစ္ျဖစ္ စစ္သံုးျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ညဴကလီးယားစက္ရံု ေထာင္တယ္ဆုိရင္ ေဒသတြင္းလံုၿခံဳေရးအတြက္ စုိးရိမ္စရာလုိ႔ျမင္ပါတယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ႔လဲဆုိေတာ့ မႏွစ္က ဆုိင္ကလံုးနာဂစ္တုိက္ေတာ့ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရဆီမွာ အမ်ိဳးသားအေရးေပၚ လံုၿခံဳေရးစနစ္မရွိတာ ေတြ႔ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒီလုိ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးေတြကုိေတာင္ အမ်ိဳးသားလံုၿခံဳေရးအျဖစ္ မေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ရင္ ညဴကလီးယားလုိ ကိစၥမ်ိဳးမွာ ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ျဖစ္လာရင္ ဒါဟာ ေဒသတြင္း လံုၿခံဳေရးကို ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္လာႏုိင္တဲ့ ကိစၥျဖစ္လုိ႔ပါပဲ။

ဟုတ္ကဲ့။ ထြက္ေျပးလာသူ ၂ ေယာက္ထဲက ထူးထရိတ္ဒင္းက စာရင္းေတြကုိ ကိုင္တြယ္ရသူ ကုိတင္မင္းလုိ႔ နာမည္၀ွက္ေပးထားသူဆီကေတာ့ ဘယ္လုိအခ်က္အလက္ေတြရလဲ ေျပာပါဦးခင္ဗ်။

သူကေတာ့ ပစၥည္းေတြ ဘယ္လုိသယ္ယူတယ္၊ ပစၥည္းေတြ ဘယ္လုိမွာယူတယ္၊ ေဆာက္တယ္ စတဲ့ ေနာက္ခံအေျခအေနကို ေယဘုယ် ၿခံဳေျပာႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဘယ္လုိ၀ယ္တယ္ ဘယ္ကေန ေငြးေၾကးရတယ္ဆုိတာမ်ိဳးေတြကို ေျပာႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ သူ႔ထြက္ဆုိခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔ ေစာေစာက ဗုိလ္ႀကီး ထြက္ဆုိခ်က္ေတြကို ဆက္စပ္ၾကည့္ရင္ အေျဖမွန္ေပၚလာပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ သတင္းေထာက္ေတြကို ပိတ္ထားတဲ့ႏုိင္ငံဆုိေတာ့ အတိအက်စစ္ေဆးႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ ခက္ခဲပါတယ္။

ဘာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဟာ ကုလသမဂၢ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ မျပန္႔ပြားေရးစာခ်ဳပ္ လက္မွတ္ထုိးထားတဲ့ႏုိင္ငံပါ။ ဘယ္လုိ ညဴကလီးယားကိစၥမ်ိဳးလုပ္လုပ္ ကုလသမဂၢ အုိင္ေအအီးေအကို အစီရင္ခံရမွာပါ။ ဒါဟာ စုိးရိမ္စရာပဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဟုတ္ကဲ့ သတင္းစာ ၂ ေစာင္မွာ ေရးသားခ်က္အရ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရဟာ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္ႏုိင္မဲ့အဆင့္ေရာက္မယ္လုိ႔ ဆုိထားပါတယ္။ ဒီေကာက္ခ်က္ကေတာ့ ဘယ္လုိဆြဲပါသလဲ။ ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့သူေတြဆီက တုိက္ရုိက္ေျပာတဲ့ အခ်က္ပါလားဗ်။

ဒါ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ရတဲ့ ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့သူေတြေျပာတဲ့ သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ေတြ၊ အခ်ိန္ကာလေတြအေပၚမွာ သံုးသပ္ၿပီး ေဒါက္တာေဘာလ္က အကဲျဖတ္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကုိ ေျပာျပခ်က္ေတြသာ မွန္ခဲ့ရင္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဟာ ဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ထုတ္ႏုိင္မဲ့ အေျခအေနျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အဲဒါကေတာ့ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရအေနနဲ႔ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ညဴကလီးယားလက္နက္ ထုတ္လုပ္ႏုိင္မယ္လုိ႔ ေဟာကိန္းထုတ္လုိက္တဲ့ ၾသစေၾတးလ်ႏုိင္ငံသား ႏွစ္ဦးထဲက သတင္းစာဆရာ Mr. Phil Thornton ကို RFA မွ ကိုေက်ာ္မင္းထြန္းက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Transparency Needed in Burma's Nuclear Program

By MAUNG THUTA Wednesday, August 5, 2009

(This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of The Irrawaddy)

The news that Burma plans to build a nuclear research center with Russia’s help has created a storm in a teacup among critics of the military regime, including opposition groups within the democratic movement abroad as well as some quarters in the US government.

Burma Must Make Clear its Nuclear Ambitions

Commentary
By Aung Zaw Monday, August 3, 2009

Reports of Burma’s shady nuclear ambitions have resurfaced to take their place alongside warnings by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of secret military ties and possible technology transfers between Burma and North Korea.