Myanmar asylum seekers find safe haven in Palau

Myanmar asylum seekers find safe haven in Palau
By TOMOKO A. HOSAKA – 1 day ago
KOROR, Palau (AP) — The newcomers on this tiny Pacific nation are young and in limbo, scared that they'll be arrested if they're sent back to their native land. Most speak no English, but they say they're astounded by the generosity of Palau and its people.
They are not the Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo who made world news last week when Palau's president said the country would take them. Instead, they are 11 asylum seekers from Myanmar — and they may offer the best idea what the freed detainees' new lives might be.
"They didn't know us," Aye Aye Thant, 34, the group's sole fluent English speaker and de facto spokeswoman, said Sunday. "We are not workers, and we don't serve their country. But we are treated as their own siblings."
Fearing arrest for their political activities, the 10 men and one woman fled military-run Myanmar to Malaysia and then to the Philippines, always moving on because they thought the countries might deport them. They had never heard of Palau, but friends suggested it. It also offered an attractive feature — visa-free entry.
They arrived in late February, and Palau has mobilized to protect them.
Once their money ran out, the local Roman Catholic church offered to house and feed them. On Monday, a senator — the president's younger brother — will take over, letting them stay at his farmhouse as they await word on their application for asylum.
"It's our age-old tradition to receive those in need whenever they somehow arrive on our shores," President Johnson Toribiong said in an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday. He said that idea is behind the decision to accept the Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, and rejected criticism that the move is somehow tied to U.S. aid.
The Myanmar asylum seekers say in tropical Palau, one of the world's smallest countries, they finally feel free.
"We were going to be arrested by the military government (in Myanmar)," said Aye Aye Thant, a former English teacher who openly opposes Myanmar's ruling junta.
She decided to leave after a family friend and police officer warned her father that she appeared on a government arrest list. She had made unauthorized trips to the Irrawaddy Delta region, hit hard by last year's Cyclone Nargis, to pass out donated supplies and money.
Her cousin Agganana, another asylum seeker who goes by one name, said he led various anti-government demonstrations at home.
All but one in the group, which includes two Buddhist monks, are members of the overseas offshoot of the National League for Democracy led by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi currently is on trial on charges of violating terms of her house arrest by harboring an American who swam uninvited to her lakeside home.
In Palau, a tropical island nation of 20,000 people, local residents approach them from time to time, offering what they can to help.
Their main benefactor from the Catholic church, Father Rusk Saburo, stopped by Sunday afternoon to check on them before their move.
They immediately swarmed him, with smiles and greetings that transcended the language barrier.
Saburo, one of Palau's three Roman Catholic priests, said the church has been paying $500 a month for the apartment. It also has provided groceries and medical care.
"The goal of life for us is you help a stranger," he said, sitting between the two Buddhist monks. "No questions asked."
At their new home starting Monday, the men will help out on the senator's farm in return for housing. And Aye Aye Thant said she may be able to start teaching English informally.
Even though the group seems happy with their transition to Palau, Saburo admits he has concerns about the Uighurs' (pronounced WEE'-gurs) expected arrival. How will they fit in after a life spent largely in dry western China? Where will they live? What will they do?
Saburo said he must practice what he preaches, regardless of religion.
"Whether the president has other motives or not is another matter," he said. "For humanitarian purposes, I am a Christian, so I accept anybody who comes in peace. I'm sure a good number of my parishioners feel the same way."
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Aung San Suu Kyi said "The Results of the 1990 General Elections Must Be Implemented"

16 June 2009

Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) is the global campaigning and lobbying organisation to restore democracy and human rights in Burma where everyone can enjoy freedom of speech, press, beliefs, assembly and rule of law that emphasizes the protection of individual rights.

In honour of Burma's Legitimate Leader Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th Birthday, Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) will recall Aung San Suu Kyi's dictum for 64 days.

Day 2: The results of the 1990 General Elections must be implemented

"That the results of the 1990 General Elections must be implemented is a resolution already taken by the United Nations. We already know that the General Assembly of the United Nations has accepted the notion that the will of the people has been expressed in the 1990 General Elections. This is something we can not abandon. It will be to the detriment of our country if after an election has been held the results are not honoured and we do not resist attempts to trivialise it."

For more information please visit

http://www.bdcburma.org

http://bdc-burma.blogspot.com/

http://www.gcast.com/u/bdcburma/main

http://www.youtube.com/user/bdcburma

Aung San Suu Kyi said "Words need to be back up by Action"

15 June 2009

In honour of Burma's Legitimate Leader Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th Birthday, Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) will recall Aung San Suu Kyi's dictum.

Day (1): "Words need to be back up by Action"

“There have been many words supporting democracy, and we are duly grateful for them, because we do not underestimate the power of words. But words need to be backed up by action -- by action that is united and that is focused on essentials. Only by such action will we be able to realize our democratic aspirations”. (Aung San Suu Kyi)

64th Birthday of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
အေမရိကန္ အေနာက္အလယ္ပုိ္င္း ျပည္နယ္တခုျဖစ္သည့္ Iowaျပည္နယ္ Des Moines ျမဳိ႔တြင္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး လွဳ ပ္ရွားတက္ႀကြသည့္ ညီညြတ္ေသာ ျမန္မာတုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအဖဲြ႔မွ ဦးေဆာင္ကာ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမုိကေရစီ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ႏုိဘယ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆုရွင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္၏ ၆၄ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ေမြးေန႔ပဲြကုိ ဇြန္လ ၁၄ရက္၊ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔ ညေန ၅နာရီမွ ည၈နာရီထိ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။

ေမြးေန႔ပဲြက်င္းပရာ Des Moines ျမဳိ႕ စည္းေဝးခန္းမသို႔ ကရင္ ကယား ကရင္ ခ်င္း မြန္ ျမန္မာ ရခုိင္ ရွမ္း အစရွိေသာ တုိင္းရင္းသား အသီးသီးအျပင္ နီေပါလ္ ဘူတန္ လာအုိ အစရွိေသာ ျမန္မာ့အေရး စိတ္၀င္စားသည့္ ပုဂၢဳိလ္မ်ား အပါအ၀င္၂၀၀ခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ႀကပါသည္။

ထုိ႔အျပင္ အထူးဖိတ္ႀကားထားသည့္ ဧည့္သည္ေတာ္ Iowa ျပည္နယ္ အစုိးရ အရာရွိ အာရွလူ႔ခြင့္အေရး ျမင့္တင္ေရးဆုိင္ရာ႒ာနမွ Mrs. Cyndi Chen ကုိယ္တုိင္တက္ေရာက္ျပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္အတြက္ ေမြးေန႔ဆုေတာင္း အမွာစကားေျပာႀကားသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။ သူမ ေျပာႀကားရာတြင္ ကမၻာ့ႏုိဘယ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆုရွင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္တစ္ေယာက္အေနျဖင့္ ေမြးေန႔ပဲြကုိ ကုိယ္တုိင္ ပါ၀င္ခြင့္ မရျခင္းကုိ အင္မတန္မွ စိတ္မေကာင္းျဖစ္မိပါေႀကာင္း ေနာင္လာမည့္ေမြးေန႔ေတြမွာ သူမကုိယ္တုိင္ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စြာ ပါ၀င္ ဆင္ႏဲြႏုိင္ပါေစဟု ဆုေတာင္းေပးပါေႀကာင္း ေျပာႀကားသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။

ထုိ႔အျပင္ တုိင္းရင္းသား ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား အသီးသီးမွ ေမြးေန႔သ၀ဏ္လႊာ ေပးပုိ႔ရာတြင္ ယၡဳျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ျဖစ္ပ်က္ေနသည့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးျပႆနာမ်ားစုမွာ ျပည္သူက ေလးစားအားထားသည့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ ကုိယ္တုိင္ပါ၀င္ျပီး ႏုိင္ငံေရးျပႆနာကုိ ႏုိင္ငံေရးနည္းျဖင့္ ေျဖရွင္းမွသာလွ်င္ ေျပလည္မည္ျဖစ္ပါေႀကာင္း၊ ယၡဳကဲ့သို႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ကုိ မတ၇ား အမူဆင္ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္း ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားျခင္းက ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးျပႆနာကုိ ပုိမိုျပီး ဆုိးရြားေစေႀကာင္း စသည္ျဖင့္ တုိင္းရင္းသား ကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားမွ သ၀ဏ္လႊာမ်ားကို ဖတ္ႀကားသြားခဲ့ႀကပါသည္။

ထုိ့အျပင္ အခမ္းအနားကုိ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ေမြးေန႔သို႔ ၾကြေရာက္လာေသာ တုိင္းရင္းသားကုိ္ယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဧည့္သည္ေတာ္မ်ားမွ မိမိတုိ႔ ကုိးကြယ္ယုံႀကည္ရာ ဘာသာမ်ားအလုိက္ ဆုေတာင္းေမတၱာပုိ႔သျခင္း၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားမွ ေမြးေန့ကိတ္လွီးျခင္းအျပင္၊ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳကဗ်ာမ်ားကုိလည္း ဖတ္ႀကားသြားခဲ့ႀကပါသည္။

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုုႀကည္ေမြးေန႔ ဂုဏ္ျပဳပဲြ ျဖစ္ေျမာက္ေရးေကာ္မတီ၀င္ ဦးမင္းစုိးျမတ္က ျမန္မာ့အေရးကုိ Iowa State အစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ ပုိမုိထိေရာက္စြာ ပါ၀င္ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားေအာင္ အထူးဆက္လက္ ႀကဳိးပမ္းသြားမည္ျဖစ္ေႀကာင္း ေျပာႀကားသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။

အခမ္းအနားကုိ တက္ေရာက္လာသူ အားလံုးက ကမၻာေက်ာ္အဆု္ိေတာ္ Paul McCartney ၏ Freedom သီခ်င္းအား ဝိုင္းဝန္း သီဆုိကာ ည ၈နာရီတြင္ ေအာင္ျမင္စြာက်င္းပၿပီးစီးခဲ့ပါသည္။

သတင္းေပးပို႔သူ ေခမာနႏၵ
Khaymarnanda@gmail.com
Posted By Zaw Myo Lwin to ခြပ္ေဒါင္းၾကယ္စင္ at 6/14/2009 11:25:00 PM