I incur the downfall as the result of lacking concentration through out the previous period at work. Since last September, I have been looking for more on my country than myself.
I woke up with the thought of what happened the previous night to Burma. I ate with the news of arresting, protests, and prediction about Burmese's future. I stared at the computer screen the whole day and thought about what would be right; what would be wrong; which would be the best way; what would be the meaning of the most famous and popular word 'DEMOCRACY' for us; whose words were the most dramatic and realistic way for the freedom of my homeland; how to built a free and equal, develop physically mentally and multinational republic nation along with some kinds of big open and best mind, etcetera etcetera. I did it emotionally, hopefully and enthusiastically. I even dropped some of my long-lost tears for the photo shots and videos of the events. I listened the songs of Ga Bar Ma Khay, Do BaMar, and 8888 with big voraciousness of the freedom for my homeland.
As a young man, my opinion fall onto the area of revolution by any means as our National Father Bo Gyote Aung San did though I still believe in people power as the only possible way so far. I wanted to be a part of it. But I knew that something was not right for me. I didn't have enough courage for going back to the home and doing it. I am sure if I were in Yangon last September, I would be at the front line and no one would be able to predict my life now. I sorrowfully come to know and accept as many young Burmese like myself do not have enough courage or enough knowledge to do it, to risk their life or, more than that to risk their family members life. They also do not believe in the current environment of fighting for democracy. True words hurt us sometime.
"It's not enough to care about the world. Caring and feeling emotions is a waste of time and energy. Unless we get up and do something about the things we care about, it would be irrelevant."
[1997 Nobel Peace Laureate, Jody Williams]
The above words clean me a lot of my confusion. I got this from a famous Burmese blog, The One Whose Name Gyittu's odds and ends. It is absolutely right to me. We may get some advantages for caring others or worrying about them without going through with any exercise. Nobody doubts it will be definitely better and more productive if we exercise it.But knowing and exercising is still a bit, perhaps a big, different to me. I am not a hero. Sadly, I understand that without the young Burmese active efforts there will not be any freedom to our future as the only way to effect change is to participate by all Burmese and I also do feel it like my responsibility though, honestly, I am still afraid of picking it up to my shoulders. At last, I have to accept I am still an ordinary Burmese who does not have anything enough to fight from the front line and being like this is also a main reason of full of oppression in Burma instead of freedom. But I believe strongly that our bad era will surely come to demise one day in which we all boldly united and I am now trying to be there.
Time to consider the most critical objectives
21 August 2008 Labels: EssaysToday, I read a commentary from Irrawaddy, titled "Danish Viewpoint Merits Debate". It analyses the impact of economic sanctions and tourism boycott on Burma.
This debate on how effective the economic sanctions and tourism boycott against Burma seems to be ongoing for a considerable amount of time without being able to reach to a favorable consensus. I feel that the pros and cons behind such debate are also not as straightforward as the writer has stated in his commentary.
First of all, in such profit-driven world, even the governments which have adopted the universal economic sanctions on Burma, may be unable to persuade their countrymen to do the same. And Burma offers too many lucrative business opportunities to resist for companies driven largely by their profit and loss, rather than by the "humanitarian grounds". The same idea is applicable to those countries in ASEAN as well as China and India, etc. As long as such situation remains, whether we like it or not, I believe trade sanctions will end up as nothing more than just showing support for our democracy movement.
Secondly, though a large pie of revenue from tourism industry goes into the pockets of the junta and their associates, it still seems reasonable to think that many restaurants, guest-houses, hotels, and resorts that sprung up to cater for the tourists, have created a certain number of job opportunities, regardless of how insignificant the number might be, for Burmese people.
Many travelers, being empathetic towards the plight of Burmese people under the hands of repressive junta, have rallied among their own community to stick to private-owned small guest-houses and eateries, etc in the hope of not becoming a contributor towards the pockets of the junta and their associates. Such actions, though arguable at their effectiveness, seem to provide a more down-to-earth approach in supporting the livelihood of some of the common people in Burma.
Having said all this, there will always be two camps to this kind of debate. At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves what is the best practical support for our Burmese people, not forgetting that when a person is suffering in poverty, and dying from malnutrition, the meaning of democracy no longer seems critical to him.
Mr Bush, why only now?
14 August 2008 Labels: EssaysI was reading this article from Irrawaddy by Aung Zaw about his recent encounter with Bush.
No doubt, to many of us, Bush appears as an amicable man who has genuine interest and concern for Burma and its citizens. In fact, when Bush took up the presidency, I was elated to have someone who seemed prepared to take on a tougher stand against the junta. Now, despite Aung Zaw's generous comments about his "seemingly wonderful" encounter with Bush, I can't help but just to say "talk looks really good on the table".
My question to Bush: Mr Bush, why do you have time for Burma only when your term in office is almost over?
Past is haunting - Present is daunting
06 July 2008 Labels: ArticlesBurma is in fact country of many black historic days. Ceaseless massacres were happened all along under bloody wrong hand. Memorials and anniversaries have to hold year round as many as seasonal festive celebrations of Burma calender. Now on July, two prominent black days are awaiting to haunt recent regime of killer generation. These are 7 July massacre and 19 July Martyrs day.
Notionally, 7 July is a bit different from 19 July, in which, Burma national hero, general Aung San and his cabinet members were assassinated. But, deep in reality, hatred, jealous, shortsightedness, paranoid and inhumane natures were the main causes and rooted in every corner of Burma history. Another difference is that 19 July, Martyr day is official Public Holiday in Burma but 7 July mourning day has yet to be recognized and publicized.
On that July 7, back in 46 years ago, groups of unarmed University students were killed by machine gun on the very spot of historic Rangoon University Compound. And the next day , early in the morning, Burma Student Union Building was abruptly destroyed by the wicked hand of military coup d'etat. The reason was that students were annoying and appeared as destructive elements to them, aired on state owned radio by the then coup leader, General Ne Win. He stressed his speech with unforgettable phrase - " an sword for sword, an spear for spear, we have to fight back" . But this had just been bitterness for people all over the country, as all know who actually use sword and spear.
Coup leaders might think that they could possibly eliminate and conquer any of obstacles just by killing and torturing. 26 years after this incident, however, they had realized that past is still haunting and history is rewound itself. Burma' milestone, 1988 revolution was in fact born again spirits of 7 July students.
1988 revolution and stained blood were passed along 20 years now. But past is still haunting to those who committed massacre. So, what is the present situation in Burma now ? Burmese civilians did try their best whenever the circumstances favored. Then military regime has repeatedly tortured and killed whomever against them. Many families were broken and destroyed under this oppression. Mothers are crying. Sons are dying. Political prisoner are lying in the darkness. Political crisis makes ever-deepening social crisis and in turn it causing political unrest again. Moreover, Nagis cyclone pushes Burma to the edge of worst. Everything seems hopeless and unimaginable what would happen to worrisome and desperate 50 million souls. Will it be another revolution? Will it be another cyclone to make sufferer? Will it be another earthquake to punish dictator? Will it be any betterment? Will it be even worse? One thing for sure is present is daunting.
( 7 July memorial)
All of Burma Is a Prison
Labels: Articlesby Min Zin
Posted June 29, 2008
[Source]
Much has been written about Cyclone Nargis and the failure of Burma’s military junta to respond adequately. But what of the hundreds of political prisoners held in Burma, many in areas devastated by the storm? When Cyclone Nargis ravaged Burma in the late night hours of May 2, it did not spare political prisoners. The notorious Insein prison, where hundreds of political prisoners (including my brother) are locked up, was one of the hardest hit places in Rangoon.
Why is my brother in Insein? On Feb. 15, the military raided the offices of the Myanmar Nation and took my brother, the weekly journal’s editor in chief, to jail. His crime? Possession of a U.N. report on the military’s brutal crackdown on last September’s demonstrations by monks and democracy activists—known around the world as the “Saffron Revolution.”
My brother’s name is Thet Zin, and he is one of hundreds of Burmese citizens who struggle to tell the truth about what is happening in their country—whether through traditional forms of journalism or through the Internet—under threat of arrest or worse by the military regime. Along with my brother, his office manager, Sein Win Maung, was also arrested.
When Cyclone Nargis hit, it uprooted trees; rain flooded the prison cells and the power was cut. A fire broke out in one of the prison wards, filling the prison with smoke. The flames triggered a riot. The guards started shooting.
Suffering from asthma, my brother was choking with smoke. His former office manager and fellow inmate, Sein Win Maung, passed out. Some sympathetic prison guards rushed to the cells and managed to push aside fallen trees and move the political prisoners to a prison hospital.
“Many political prisoners in the cells could have died from smoke if the rescue was delayed one more hour,” said Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who now works with Thailand-based Assistant Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP-Burma).
It is still hard to know how many died or were injured during the havoc. But according to AAPP at least 36 prisoners at Insein were shot to death when the cylcone hit. Some prisoners, like many of their countrymen, lost their entire family to the cyclone. Thiha Thet Zin, a political prisoner in Insein, was informed that eight out of nine of his family members—including his son, his parents, his grandmother, and all his siblings—were swept away by the storm. His wife was the only survivor.
This is hell on earth. Still, Insein prison and the injustices that take place there are but a microcosm of what’s taking place throughout Burma. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all of Burma is a prison.
Cyclone Nargis claimed more than 138,000 lives and left millions homeless. Still, the junta denied millions of Burmese people the basic right to food by blocking foreign aid workers and supplies in the weeks immediately following the storm.
Indeed, the misuse of international aid is by now well documented. Aid supplies ended up in military warehouses, local markets and the homes of police officers and members of pro-government civilian groups instead of reaching starving and disease-stricken survivors. Soldiers even looted jewelries from dead bodies.
Moreover, the junta forced survivors to take part in the reconstruction of military sites and conscripted male orphans into the army, which before the storm was already notorious for its tens of thousands of child soldiers. All of these reports have been confirmed by sources both inside and outside Burma.
Clearly, the junta’s inability and unwillingness to care for the Burmese people is tantamount to “crimes against humanity.” Cyclone Nargis has exposed the failures of the regime and brought forth a defining moment in Burmese history with inevitable, if yet unpredictable, political consequences.
“Things will not return to status quo ante,” says Priscilla Clapp, a U.S. diplomat who served as Chief of Mission in Burma from 1999-2002. Post-cyclone Burmese politics will be a humanitarian politics—pressuring and arguing about mobilizing aid and its delivery. Political goals will be set aside at least for the medium-term, and more consideration will be given to humanitarian works.
The junta continues to ensure that the cyclone will not have an effect on its “Road Map to discipline flourishing democracy.” But there are pressures within the junta itself that could eventually lead to change. “We have heard that there are considerable tensions within the military,” said David Steinberg, a Burma expert from Georgetown University. “But I don’t know whether the tension is strong enough to split the military and at what level it exists, and whether it is at a high enough level to threaten present leadership.”
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has approved millions in aid for Burma and now has hundreds of aid workers from member countries in storm-stricken areas. This could serve to expose to the outside world the prison state that is Burma. Still, despite a visit last month by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon and the demands of dozens of heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of Burma’s opposition Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest—long after the May 24 deadline for her release.
What’s most important here is to assure the aid money is not used by the junta to retrench and tighten its grip on the Burmese people. Foreign aid runs the risk of being a “jackpot for the military junta, who will be the sole beneficiary of the international donation in the name of the cyclone victims” says Aung Din, a former political prisoner and director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
The outside world must demand more transparency and accountability when it comes to aid money and how it is distributed. So long as the world allows itself to be co-opted and outfoxed by the junta, political prisoners—including Aung San Suu Kyi and those in cyclone-ravaged Insein prison—will continue to languish in Burma’s gulags, and the Burmese people will remain shackled.
Min Zin is a Burmese journalist in exile.
Myanmar politics roiled, but junta's grip remains strong
Labels: ArticlesDENIS L. GRAY
Published: 07.03.2008
[Source - tucsoncitizen.com]
BANGKOK, Thailand - The cyclone that devastated Myanmar's heartland has also roiled a political landscape dominated by the military for more than four decades.
Buddhist monks are regrouping after the battering they took nine months ago, civil society groups are emerging and foreign aid workers — often agents of political change in the wake of humanitarian crises — are present in unprecedented numbers.
The junta's grip on power remains absolute. But anger against the regime has probably never run so high.
"Perhaps incremental change will emerge from engagement on humanitarian problems," said Joel Charny, vice president of U.S.-based Refugees International who visited Myanmar just before the cyclone struck.
People were already incensed by the brutal suppression last September of anti-government demonstrators, including the country's revered, saffron-robed Buddhist monks.
Then came Cyclone Nargis, exposing the junta as inept and heartless, initially blocking international aid efforts and even now still hampering them.
"The people are blaming the government. They are responsible for many deaths. They don't care about right or wrong and they let people die just to hold onto power," said Aung Myoe, a 32-year-old driver in a comment typical of the mood in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city.
"In the `Saffron Revolution' they lost their Buddhist legitimacy; with the cyclone they lost whatever concept of efficacy they had with the public," said David Steinberg, a Myanmar expert at Georgetown.
Steinberg said the junta constantly trumpet achievements in modernizing the isolated and impoverished Southeast Asian nation formerly named Burma.
Analysts say these passions and emerging trends may in the longer term loosen the junta's grip on power. But for now it's business as usual: dissidents are arrested, a brutal campaign against ethnic minorities rages on and the military strides toward elections guaranteed to perpetuate its control.
But the 500,000-strong Buddhist monkhood, the only viable national institution after the army, is regaining strength and cohesion by assuming a leading role in helping cyclone survivors.
Their work is seconded by quietly burgeoning civil society groups, which Steinberg said could foster pluralism and democracy in the future. These groups include professional guilds, including those of actors and singers, charity organizations and loose associations of like-minded citizens.
So could the influx of foreign aid workers and agencies in what may be the most intense interaction Myanmar has experienced with the outside world since gaining independence from Great Britain in 1948.
The operative word is "incremental." Analysts don't foresee meaningful political changes in the short run, discounting a dramatic turn of events, such as social upheaval in face of cyclone-induced rice shortages, or a split within the military.
The regime will be hard-pressed to provide enough rice to keep its 400,000 troops and their families loyal and ensure that shortages, which could last several years, don't trigger major popular unrest as they have in the past, said Donald Seekins, a Myanmar watcher at Japan's Meio University.
Meanwhile, the junta marches forward along its so-called "road map to democracy." Elections are scheduled in 2010, based on a referendum-approved Constitution which guarantees the military 25 percent of parliamentary seats and power to run the country in event of a national emergency.
The cyclone response, the referendum and the extension of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's detention for a sixth year all sparked international outcry, but the absence of U.N. or other foreign action reassured the junta it needn't fear outside intervention.
"The people of Myanmar would have been happy if the United States or France invaded," said Ye Htun, a 30-year-old English teacher. "In Myanmar, the government is too strong and people are too scared. We can't do it alone."
Denis Gray, AP bureau chief in Bangkok, has covered Myanmar since the mid-1970s.
Frustrated Burmese Organize Aid Forays
22 June 2008 Labels: ArticlesAd Hoc Groups Formed In Cyclone's Aftermath, But Causes May Widen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008; A01
RANGOON -- Seven weeks after huge swaths of Burma were savaged by a cyclone and tidal wave, a new and remarkable citizen movement is delivering emergency supplies to survivors neglected by the military government's haphazard relief effort.
The scores of ad hoc Burmese groups, many of them based here in the country's largest city, are not overtly political. But they are reviving a kind of social activism that has been largely repressed by successive military rulers here.
Defying roadblocks and bureaucratic obstruction, volunteers have reached devastated villages in many parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, dropping off food, drinking water and other essentials and bringing back photos that contradict claims in the state media that life is returning to normal.
Some members of the groups say they hope to keep working together when the cyclone damage is finally repaired and turn toward other activities that carry shades of political activism in this tightly controlled state.
With residents' frustration over the official relief effort mounting, pledges of support and donations to the National League for Democracy, the main opposition group in Burma, also called Myanmar, have doubled since the cyclone, according to a student leader of the league.
The storm, which came ashore on the night of May 2-3, killed an estimated 134,000 people and created severe hardship for 2.4 million more. The country's deeply xenophobic junta turned aside many offers of foreign help, agreeing to let in substantial numbers of international aid workers only after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon flew to the country May 22 with a personal appeal.
By then, however, homegrown groups were already mobilized, working to offset the tragic shortcomings of the government operation.
Down a street lined with gold and ruby merchants, where dealers charm clients over tiny tables set with tea and chess, employees in the back room of a gem shop one recent morning were swapping evidence: photos of rotten government food handouts.
A week earlier, people in the shops said, more than a dozen local jewelers had loaded 100 bags of rice, 20 bags of beans, tarpaulins and blankets onto a truck donated by a supplier and set off at midnight for the storm-ravaged town of Labutta.
They returned with photos of homeless villagers lining up for tins of food at a makeshift camp, a tear-stained boy who, they said, had lost his entire family to the storm's fierce tidal surge, and rotten rice -- yellow, fist-size chunks of it, piled like rocks in bags donated by the government-affiliated Myanmar Red Cross.
"When I saw what they were being fed, I was shaking I was so angry," said a shop assistant, 26, narrating each photo as she passed it to a customer.
The informal organizations are often based on occupation. Artists, doctors, students and the gem dealers have formed separate groups. In other cases, the groups are made up of friends coming together to help.
A 27-year-old lawyer trainee said he and five friends were furious when they tried to distribute supplies around the ruined town of Bogalay about a week after the cyclone but were turned away by local authorities who told them they needed a permit.
"They say they are giving these things to the people, but we know they aren't," he said, pointing at a photo in the state daily newspaper, the Mirror, that showed a relief camp with neat rows of tents and tables laden with food. "We know not to believe them."
In the weeks immediately after the cyclone, a doctor recounted, he closed his private medical clinic for twice-weekly trips to the delta with others. There, they noticed local officials shooing away desperate children, many of them orphaned or suffering storm-related trauma.
So the doctors, four of whom are pediatricians, tried to entertain the children to keep their minds occupied. They held a sanitation workshop after noticing that there were no visible efforts to instruct people in basic hygiene.
"The Ministry of Health is trying, but they're not effective, not organized," the physician said.
Like many other residents, the doctor can't afford to take many more days off work, but he still meets with the group every week. He said he hopes to translate the momentum of its cyclone relief work into other efforts, operating under cover of medicine.
"I'm not political; I'm a community-based activist," the doctor said, when asked how his group could keep working and turn from cyclone relief to other activities, such as organizing debates on health care.
"Now we're seeing the time of civil society. Now thousands of small groups are helping any way they can," said a magazine editor, who pooled funds with other journalists and artists in the hope of purchasing 1,000 shortwave radios so delta survivors could receive uncensored foreign news broadcasts. In the end, the group could afford only 50 but managed to distribute them in villages.
The back page of the Mirror and the New Light of Myanmar daily tells readers that "everybody may make donations freely . . . to any person or any area." But nearly a dozen people interviewed offered firsthand or secondhand tales of confiscation or obstruction by local authorities.
A surgeon said he and his group of medical and psychology students were prevented from handing out food at a monastery near the town of Dedaye to about 1,000 refugees who had been sheltering inside. A general there wanted to be seen to hand out the food first, the surgeon said.
A lawyer said he had set out on a relief trip to the delta town of Kyunpangong with five friends, but every box of goods they brought was opened and searched in front of them.
"If I had the chance, I'd occupy the whole delta and put up a sign to the authorities that reads 'Don't come here,' " said a Rangoon monk who is active in medical work. "So many people are waiting to get aid from the government, but they're having to rely instead on private donors."
In five relief expeditions to the delta or ravaged areas around Rangoon, he said, he saw military troops and police patrolling roads or monitoring checkpoints but not once helping survivors.
Since the cyclone, three people have been arrested on charges of taking photographs of the cyclone-ravaged areas and sending them to foreign news sites, and one person for marching to the offices of the U.N. Development Program to complain about government neglect, according to a lawyer monitoring their cases.
Though some private groups are keeping up their relief efforts, others are running out of steam -- and money.
Under monsoon skies one recent afternoon, porters loaded a boat berthed in Rangoon with rattan baskets of cloth, children's pajamas and bags of rice. It was sailing to the delta under the auspices of a prominent Buddhist abbot. On its previous trip, the owners had offered the boat for free. This time, said a monk directing the loading, the owner was charging.
Nearby, in a single-room apartment, 16 current and former university students crowded around a surgeon who was writing notes on a blackboard in preparation for another crack-of-dawn trip to the delta.
Later the surgeon remarked: "I think the government made a huge mistake. If they were seen to care, people would have forgiven them for the past 20 years."