Events of the Week

7 September 2009

The Spirit of Union must be built on goodfoundations

6 September 2009

Following the fighting between Kokang and the Myanmar military has created fears for the“End of the Cease-fires ”. Some even think of possible “war ” because of the deploymentof more Myanmar military troops in the Wa region. Obviously, the government's proposed“BGF (Border Guard Forces)” does not please the majority of the Cease-fires, though noneof them did not reject it completely except Kokang and Wa. For example, the Kachin(KIO) has proposed their own KRGF (Kachin Regional Guard Forces) to replace “BGF”. Itappears that the main reason of rejection or hesitation is the number of their soldiers will be much reduced under “BGF” Plan. The Cease-fires want to maintain their currentnumber of soldiers at least until the new government will be installed according to theresults of the Elections in 2010. On the other hand for the SPDC, it is important toterminate all ethnic insurgencies before the Elections in 2010, because as long as there areethnic insurgencies, the realisation of peaceful Union of Myanmar is impossible.

The ethnic insurgencies in Myanmar

The ethnic armed groups have fought against the Myanmar government in search of moreautonomy and equality since Myanmar gained it's independence in 1948. The leadership of these groups are non-democratic, often isolated with it's own ethnic civilian people. Mostof these groups have produced opium for their survival. The groups closed to the border of China had once been supported by China and those closed to Thailand are being supportedand used as a buffer one - buffer zone to prevent the expansion of communism in the pastand now to maintain a continuum-conflict in favour of democracy movement. The majorityof the Cease-fires are those situated closed to China border. These groups have seen thank to the “Stop of fighting”, the developments in their regions, the most important thing for these groups is “contact with it's own people” while in the Non Cease-fires regions,especially at the KNUs, many Karen live in the refugees camps and their lives are confinedin these camps, waiting for “Foods, cloths and various assistance” from some NGOs andUN's humanitarians organisations.

Union spirit needed

To realise “peaceful Union of Myanmar”, the spirit of Union is necessary in both sides,Ethnic and Myanmar military. The SPDC proposed it's Road map plan to rebuild the Unionof Myanmar in which there is only one military to represent the Nation. The SPDC needsthe trust and co-operation of the ethnic leaders to realise it. None of the Cease-fires want to

1this weekly report can be read at “http://letsworktogethers.blogspot.com/”

Events of the Week

7 September 2009

end “Cease-fire agreement”. None of these groups want to re-start “Fighting”.The ethnic leaders were drug traders (opium was firstly introduced by the British EastIndia Company in Myanmar in the colonial period, proof: the British made 3 opium warswith China known as Anglo-Chinese wars. China was defeated in both wars leaving itsgovernment having to tolerate the opium trade. And also the origin of ethnic insurgencieswas the British “divide and rule”),warlords, however, for the moment, it would be better to put aside these ugly things, because since the Cease-fires, the production of opium hasreduced. The government should only discuss about the “BGF” and “Elections” subjects, besides, there are many positives signs which can enable to reach a final agreement with allCease-fires - for example, the Kachin and Mon did not really reject the “BGF” Plan, theyinstead proposed their own plan, they have principally agreed that their armies should betransformed. The Kachin are even preparing to form a political party for 2010. What theSPDC should do is to discuss about these subjects with all ethnic leaders in the mutualrespect. The SPDC should communicate and discuss with them on equal level. Sometimes,the important things can be realised by improving the communication simply. These ethnicleaders will represent their people in the Parliament of future Union of Myanmar, thereforethey merit “respect” from the part of Myanmar military leaders. Likewise, the leaders of Cease-fires have to understand that future Union of Myanmar must have unique army. If the Cease-fires want to join the Union of Myanmar, their armiesalso must be integrated into Union of Myanmar's unique military force. In the interests of their ethnic people as well as of the Nation, the Cease-fires leaders should also demonstratethe spirit of Union.

The KNU

The KNUs should also enter into legal fold, The Karen should compare their region andCease-fires regions, If the Karen leaders really want to elevate the living standard of their people, they should join the Cease-fires. Moreover, the international politics has changed. In 1950s, there were plenty of civil war inAsia, in China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Thailand was not stable economically and politically. Now the Asian countries have changed, they have developed their economy and proved the world they could become potential economic powers. All civil wars ended inAsia except in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Asia has now strong China and India. China,India and Thailand want a stable Myanmar and to end drugs entry into their countries. For the West, keeping a political conflict in Myanmar no longer useful for them. The west isnow realising that Myanmar can not be treated like Thailand, Philippines or Pakistan.It is now time for KNU to join the Cease-fires and enter into the Elections to help Karen people, to represent the inspirations of Karen people and to develop the Karen region.

2this weekly report can be read at “http://letsworktogethers.blogspot.com/”

Events of the Week

7 September 2009

က်န္ေတာ္တိုု့ျမန္မာေတ န ့နိုုင္ငံေရးေလေပ

အျမတမ္းအျပစ္ကင္းသူမ်ား

ကြ ်န္ေတာ္ တိ ု ု ့ ျမန္ မာနိ ု ု ္င္ငံသားေတြ လိ ု ု ့ေျပာရသည္ ့အတြ က္ ကြ ်န္ေတာ္သည္ လည္ း အပါအ၀င္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ၈၈၈၈ ေက်ာင္ းသားမ်ားဟု ုေျပာလွ ်င္ ထိ ု ုအခ်ိန္ က စျပီ း ဘ၀

အေၾကာင္ း ၊နိ ု ုင္ငံေရး

အေၾကာင္ း၊ နားမလည္ေသးသည္ ပညာနိ ု ု ့ခ်ဳိ ေသာက္သံ ု ု းသည္ ၁တန္ းအရြ ယ္ ေက်ာင္ း

သား တကၠသိ ု ု လ္ေက်ာင္ းေတာ္ ၾကီ းမ်ား တြင္ မဟာ သင္ တန္ းၾကီ း

မ်ား

တက္

ေရာက္ေနသည္ေက်ာင္ းသားမ်ားထိပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္သည္၊ဆိ ု ုင္သည္ ဟု ုယူဆပါသည္။

က်င္ လည္ခဲ ့ရေသာ ေနာက္ခံ ပတ္ ၀န္ းက်င္၊ အသိ ု ုင္ းအ၀ိ ု ုင္း၊ တိ ု ့ လူသားတစ္ဦ း အတြ က္ အထူ းသျဖင္ ့ ၁တန္ းေက်ာင္ းသားမွ တကၠသိ ု ု လ္ေက်ာင္းသားၾကီးမ်ားအထိ ဘ၀အေၾကာင္ း

ကိ ု ု ေတာ္ေတာ္သိသလိ ု ု၊ အျပည္ ့အ၀နားမလည္ေသာသူေတြ လည္ း ရိ ွသည္။ ထိ ု ု ့အတြ က္ ေၾကာင္ ့နိ ု ုင္ငံရဲ ့သမိ ု ုင္ းနဲ ့နိ ု ုင္ငံရဲ ့နိ ု ုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္ စဥ္၊နိ ု ုင္ငံေရးအေၾကာင္ းကိ ု ုသိ ဖိ ု ု ့ရာတြင္ နလ ဘိန္ းတံ ု ု းအဆင္ ့၊ ထဲ ထဲ ၀ယ္ ၀ယ္ တီ းမိေခါက္ မိ အဆင္ ့ ဆိ ု ုေသာ အပိ ု ုင္ း၂ခု ုအေနနွင္ ့ဘဲခြ ဲ ျခားၾကည္ ့ လိ ု ု ပါသည္။

နလဘိန္ းတံ ု ု းအဆင္ ့ဆိ ု ုေသာ ေနရာသည္ အလြန္ခံရခက္ေသာစကားလံ ု ု းျဖစ္ေပမဲ ့သူ တြင္ ရိ ု ု းသားေသာ အဆင္ ့၊ ျဖူ စင္ေသာအဆင္ ့ ကိ ု ု၁၀၀%ပိ ု ုင္ဆိ ု ုင္ ထားသည္။ မည္ ့သူ မွ ာ အေရာင္ လာမဆိ ု ုးရေသးသလိ ု ု၊ ဆိ ု ု းဖိ ု ု ့ လည္ း စိ တ္ မကူ းေသေသာ အေျခအေန၊ မရိ ွေသာအေျခအေနနဲ ့ ပြင္ ့ လင္ းရိ ု ုးသားျဖူစင္ေသာစိ တ္ ကိ ု ု ပိ ု ုင္ဆိ ု ုင္ေသာ အေနအထားတစ္ခု ု