Burma Democratic Concern has the firm determination to carry on doing until the democracy restore in Burma.

Friday 21 August 2009

The Swimmer Speaks


How was a retired bus driver from Missouri able to make a flipper-clad, two-kilometer swim to the heavily guarded house of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous dissidents? While John Yettaw languished in Burmese jail during his trial for "illegal swimming," all we could do is speculate. But now, in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK, Yettaw has offered an explanation: Burmese security officials let him. "I don't know why they didn't stop me," he says. "The man with the AK-47 shook my hand and let me in."

In his first full-length interview, conducted by telephone from his home in central Missouri, Yettaw addressed the rationale for his undiplomatic dip, responding to critics and speaking at length about his commitment to Burma. "I want to free Myanmar. I want to stop the suffering there. I am antijunta. I will never be at peace, emotionally or psychologically, until that woman is free, until that nation is free," he said.

Yettaw burst onto the front pages of the world's papers in May, when he had made an uninvited two-day visit to the home of Suu Kyi. "The Lady," as locals call her, trounced opponents in the country's last open election in 1990, but the junta refused to recognize the results and has kept her under arrest for 14 of the past 20 years for trying to topple the regime. She was due to be released on May 27, just weeks after Yettaw showed up, well ahead of next year's landmark national elections—the first in two decades. But earlier this month, Suu Kyi was sentenced to 18 more months of home confinement. On Sunday, Yettaw was freed from seven years of hard labor when U.S. Sen. Jim Webb negotiated for his release; he was deported back to the United States.


A quixotic man who didn't have a passport until last year, Yettaw is an unlikely protagonist on the international political stage. The junta believes that antigovernment activists used Yettaw to embarrass its leaders, while Suu Kyi's supporters say that the government used the American as a pretense for keeping their best-known critic under house arrest rather than risk igniting the opposition ahead of the 2010 elections. Yettaw's family, for its part, doesn't know what to believe. After years of questions that have gone unanswered and behavior that doesn't quite add up, they have come to accept Yettaw the way he is—bighearted but unsteady—without asking too many follow-ups.

Late Thursday night, the 53-year-old Missourian remained an enigmatic figure, failing to clarify lingering questions and offering rambling and occasionally contradictory responses. "I have to be careful what I say or it will hurt the people of Myanmar," he explained, using Burma's other name. Echoing his court testimony, he says he traveled to Burma hoping to visit the Nobelist Suu Kyi—and to warn her that he'd learned, in a divine vision, terrorists were planning to assassinate her. He denied that the military junta ruling the country had put him up to the visit. "I've been accused of being CIA, of being on the books of the junta. The idea is just ridiculous," he said.

Still, the question remains: why didn't guards stop Yettaw as he made his way across the lake to the home of the country's most famous prisoner? Yettaw had made a similar aquatic bid for the Suu Kyi house in November 2008, but he was turned away by her on-site companions. He told family that he had been captured by guards at gunpoint on his way back from her house. The guards, he says, apparently unaware of his first attempted visit Suu Kyi's house, bought his story that he had fallen into the lake while fishing and let him go.
Dictatorship,Disorder and Decline in Myanmar
Cartoon
Aug News

Burmese Junta's Attack

ျပည္ပေရာက္စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရအားလူထုမေထာက္ခံ သျဖင့္ လူထုေထာက္ခံေသာGlobal Action for Burma မွျပည္ပတြင္ အေ၀းေရာက္စင္ၿပိဳင္ အစိုးရ ဖြဲ႕ရန္စီစဥ္

ျပည္ပတြင္ အခ်ိန္ၾကာျမင့္စြာ တည္ရွိေနေသာ ေဒါက္တာစိန္၀င္း ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရအား လူထုမေထာက္ခံသျဖင့္ လူထုေထာက္ခံေသာ Global Action for Burma မွ ထပ္မံၿပီး အေ၀ေရာက္ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရ ဖြဲ႕ရန္စီစဥ္ ေနၾကာင္းသတင္းရရွိသည္။

ေဒါက္တာစိန္၀င္း ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရသည္ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚစုၾကည္ အမွဳရင္ဆိုင္ေနခ်ိန္ ၂၀.၅.၂၀၀၉ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ နိဳင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရအား အမ်ိဳးသား ျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရး အဆိုျပဳခ်က္ စာတစ္ေစာင္ေပးပို႔သည့္ ကိစၥႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ျပည္ပ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားၾကားတြင္ အျငင္းပြားစရာ ကိစၥ တစ္ခုျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ၈၈ ေက်ာင္းသားအဖြဲ႕ ၊ ျမန္မာျပည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ တို႔မွ ကန္႕ကြက္ေၾကာင္း အင္တာနက္ စာမ်က္ႏွာေပၚတြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ား ထုတ္ခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ယခုလို ျပည္ပ အတိုက္အခံအဖြဲ႕ အစည္း (၉၃) ျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႕စည္း ထားေသာ Global Action for Burma မွ ေဒါက္တာ စိန္၀င္းတို႔ ၏ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရ ႏွင့္ အၿပိဳင္ အေ၀း ေရာက္စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရ ဖြဲ႕စည္းရန္ စီစဥ္ေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ေဒါက္တာ စိန္၀င္းဦးေဆာင္ေသာ စင္ၿပိဳင္ အစိုးရကို ျပည္တြင္းမွ ျပည္သူမ်ားမွ လက္မခံေၾကာင္း ကို သံဃာအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္-ျမန္မာနိဳင္ငံ မွ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး အရွင္ ပါရမီခႏၱီ ႏွင့္ ရခုိင္ျပည္လုံးဆုိင္ရာ သံဃာ့အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမႉး ရွင္ပညာသာမိက တို႔မွ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလတြင္ အင္တာနက္ စာမ်က္ႏွာမ်ားေပၚတြင္မိန္႔ၾကားဘူးသည္။

လည္းေကာင္းမိန္႔ၾကားခ်က္မွာ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒါက္တာစိန္၀င္းဆုိသည့္ အမည္ကုိပင္ ျပည္ပ မီဒီယာမ်ားက မၾကာခဏေျပာေန၍ သဲ့သဲ့ၾကားဖူး႐ုံ ရွိေသာ္လည္း အေ၀းေရာက္ စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရ၏ လုပ္ရပ္ကုိ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းက ျပည္သူမ်ား မသိသည့္အတြက္ လူထုေထာက္ခံမႈမရွိဟု ယုံၾကည္ေၾကာင္း တို႔ျဖစ္သည္။

ယခု Global Action for Burma ကို သံဃာအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္-ျမန္မာနိဳင္ငံ မွ ဦးေဆာင္ပါ၀င္ေနသည့္ အတြက္ ယခုလို ထပ္မံ အေ၀းေရာက္စင္ၿပိဳင္အစိုးရ ဖြဲ႕ျခင္း ကိစၥေပၚေပါက္လာျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ျပည္တြင္း/ျပည္ပ အတိုက္ အခံ မ်ားၾကားတြင္ ေျပာဆိုေနၾကၿပီး ၄င္းအဖြဲ႕ကို ႀကိဳးကိုင္ ေနသူမ်ားမွာ အရွင္ပါရမီခႏၱီ၊ ထြန္းထြန္း ၊မ်ိဳးေက်ာ္လြင္ ၊ ေရႊစင္ထြန္း ၊ စိုင္းမ်ိဳး၀င္း ၊ ေဒါက္တာ-ေအးမင္း ႏွင့္ မ်ိဳးသိန္းတို႔ ျဖစ္ၾကေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

Posted by Kyay Mon Online newspaper at 3:32 AM
Son of TayZa