Unlike Than Shwe, Kim Jong Il was a master of thought control

By BENEDICT ROGERS | 20 December 2011 | DVB

The death of Kim Jong Il rids the world of perhaps the most brutal, reclusive and eccentric dictator of recent times. It plunges North Korea into a period of uncertainty and instability, and threatens yet more tension on the Korean Peninsula. And it is a fittingly symbolic end to the year which saw tyrants tumble.

Regime ready to meet UNFC now: PaO leader

U Aung Min and Hkun Okker shaking hands
after the meeting (Photo: Hkun Okker)
Monday, December 26, 2011 | S.H.A.N

According to PaO National Liberation Organization (PNLO) president Hkun Okker, Naypyitaw’s chief negotiator U Aung Min has disclosed to him that he is ready to meet the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), the alliance of 11 armed groups, during a meeting with him in Bangkok on Friday, 23 December.

BURMESE PERSPECTIVE: The Regime War against Humanitarianism

By Kanbawza Win | 19 December 2011 | Monday

The international community was shock and aghast when the Burmese military regime turned down the humanitarian aid offered by the international community after the Nargis Cyclone hit the country in May 2008 killing some 200,000 people and making millions homeless. The United Nations practically had to beg to deliver assistance to hundreds of thousands flood-stricken people and according to the UN figures 80,000 people needlessly died from their regime’s arrogance This episode alone proves that the Burmese Generals and the army (Tatamadaw) have no good will (cetena) to its own people. So it came to no surprise when the Burmese regime block the humanitarian aid to the Kachin refugees running away from an all out war waged by the Tatamadaw against its own people just like what President Bashar al-Assad is doing in Syria..What cruelty and inhuman gesture can be more vivid than this and yet it is hoping for the West to lift sanctions and enter into the community of civilized nations?

ပအို၀္းလူမ်ဳိးမ်ားကို ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္မွ ေမာင္းထုတ္ေတာ့မည္လား

SSA (S) ဆင္ႏြဲသည့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသည္ MTA ဆင္ႏဲြသည့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးႏွင့္ ဆင္တူမႈမ်ား

By ရွမ္းျပည္သားေလး | ၁၄ ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၀၁၁ | ေတာင္ႀကီးတုိင္းမ္

၂၀၁၁ တြင္ ေပၚေပါက္လာသည့္ အစိုးရသစ္၏ လက္ထက္တြင္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ တည္ၿငိမ္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္ (SSA-S) [ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္ (ေတာင္ပိုင္း)] အၾကား ရွမ္းႏွစ္သစ္ကူး ကာလျဖစ္ေသာ ဒီဇင္ဘာလအတြင္းတြင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ကို လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ရွိ ျပည္သူမ်ား၏ဘ၀ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းတည္ၿငိမ္သာယာေရးအတြက္ အင္မတန္မွ လိုအပ္ပါသျဖင့္ ဤလုပ္ရပ္ကို အထူးႀကိဳဆိုပါသည္။

Suu Kyi needs ethnic support to lead: KNU

By Kate Kelly | 14 December 2011 | DVB

Aung San Suu Kyi could realise her dream of leading Burma at the next elections, but only if she has the full support of the nation’s many ethnic groups behind her, says a high-ranking commander in the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).

The Nobel laureate’s opposition party has been given the nod of approval to rejoin mainstream politics by President Thein Sein’s government, meaning Suu Kyi could run for a seat in parliament.

Sanctions on Burma must be Maintained


By Kanbawza Win | 14 December 2011

Sanctions and other punitive actions on Burma should  be maintained by the US and  Western nations for the simple reason that the current regime is not interested in political solutions and is mounting an all out  war against the Kachin ethnic nationalities, practicing ethnic cleansing and committing gross human rights violations on all other ethnic nationalities. It even continues to use chemical weapons to wipe out this particular ethnic race. One could not comprehend of why there is a cacophony of calls to drop the sanctions and let Burma into the community of civilized nations when it is still a rogue state.

Ceasefires are not enough

By Shwe Yinn Mar Oo | Volume 31, No. 605 | Myanmar Times
December 12 - 18, 2011

The head of the Euro-Burma Office, Mr Harn Yawnghwe, on his role in last month’s negotiations on the Thai-Myanmar border, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in peacebuilding and the need to achieve a ‘political solution’ with ethnic groups

What role have you played in the peace negotiations that have taken place to date?

အစိုးရႏွင့္ ရွမ္း (ေတာင္) တို႔ အပစ္ခတ္ရပ္ လက္မွတ္ထိုး

ေက်ာ္ခ | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၀၂ ရက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္

ခ်င္းမိုင္ (မဇၩိမ) ။ ။ ျမန္မာအစိုးရႏွင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္ ေတာင္ပိုင္း SSA-S တို႔ အပစ္ခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး
ႏွစ္ဘက္ သေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ တရပ္ကို ေသာၾကာေန႔ ေန႔လည္ပိုင္းက ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ေတာင္ႀကီးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ လက္မွတေရးထိုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

Signs of hope in Burma, Suu Kyi tells Clinton

Bangkok Post | 2/12/2011

RANGOON - Aung San Suu Kyi voiced guarded hope Friday that democracy will come to Burma as the opposition leader warmly welcomed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the home that was her prison for years.

In scenes unthinkable before Burma's recent reforms, Suu Kyi took Clinton by the arm and escorted her through the garden of her crumbling lakeside villa in the commercial hub Rangoon where she was locked up until a year ago.