Yangon - Myanmar'a junta announced an amnesty Friday for more than 6,000 prisoners, although it remained unclear how many political prisoners were included, Napyitaw radio reported Friday.
'For the humanitarian reasons, for the sake of the family members, to demonstrate the goodwill of the government and to be able to allow fair participation in the
upcoming 2010 free and fair general election, Myanmar government will release 6,313 prisoners started from 21 February,' the announcement said.
The announcement was made the day after the conclusion of United Nation special Rapporteur on Human Rights Tomas Ojea Quintana's six- day visit to Myanmar.
The television announcement did not say whether political prisoners including opposition leaders Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo will be included in the amnesty.
Prisoners to be released on Saturday include 'good disciplined' ones, the announcement said.
Quintana concluded his visit to Myanmar on Thursday, noting at the airport upon his departure that 'the human rights situation in Myanmar is still challenging.'
The junta refused to allow Quintana to meet with either Aung San Suu Kyi, the longstanding leader of the opposition, or Myanmar's junta chief Senior General Than Shwe during the trip.
Quintana arrived on Saturday on a mission to push for the freedom of an estimated 2,100 political prisoners, including Suu Kyi who has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house arrest, and to assess abuses against ethnic minority groups opposed to the regime.
The UN human rights envoy travelled to the junta's headquarters in Naypyitaw Wednesday where he met with Myanmar's interior minister to push for the freedom of political prisoners.
'He said he will consider my recommendations,' Quintana told a press conference.
Quintana also met with Myanmar's chief justice and attorney general, who said they would consider amending some national laws to be more in keeping with international standards, although he received no firm commitments.
While in Myanmar, the UN rapporteur on human rights also visited jails in the Karen State, home to some of the country's most prolonged unrest, and the notorious Insein prison in Yangon, meeting with several political prisoners.
On the eve of Quintana's arrival in Yangon Saturday, Myanmar authorities sentenced Tin Oo, the 82-year-old deputy leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), to another year under house arrest.
Critics of the UN visit called it a 'showboat' mission for the junta, permitting it to improve its image at the 14th summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations in Thailand later this month.
While allowing the visit, the regime sent a clear message to Quintana that it will continue to brook no domestic political opposition.
Besides slapping another year on to Tin Oo's house arrest Friday, the day before Quintana's arrival, Myanmar courts sentenced NLD members Nyi Bu and Tin Min Htut to 15 years for sending an open letter to the UN in August that was critical of the military's plans to set up a civilian government.
Quintana hoped to persuade the junta to free hundreds of political prisoners before a scheduled general election in 2010.
His mission was to encourage the regime to progressively release 'prisoners of conscience,' giving independence to the judiciary, bringing laws into line with international human rights standards and training officials to respect these rights, according to a statement released by the UN in Geneva.
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မနက္ျဖန္ ျမန္မာ တႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ အက်ဥ္းသား ၆၃၁၃ ေယာက္ လႊတ္မည္
ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင္႔ အခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ခံရေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အမ်ားအျပား ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားရာ နံမည္ဆိုးႏွင္႔ ေက်ာ္ၾကားေသာ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႔ရွိ အင္းစိန္ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေရွ႔ (သတင္း အေထာက္အကူျပဳ ဓါတ္ပံု - Getty Images )
ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရပိုင္ ေရဒီယိုႏွင္႔ ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားမ်ားမွ ယေန႔ ေသာၾကာေန႔ ညပိုင္း အစီစဥ္ မ်ားတြင္ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ တစံုတရာ မျပဳပဲ လြတ္ၿငိမ္း ခ်မ္းသာခြင္႔ အစီစဥ္ မ်ားျဖင္႔ တႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ အက်ဥ္းသား ေျခာက္ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ လႊတ္ေပးမည္ ေၾကညာ ေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္သားမ်ား မည္၍ မည္မွ် ပါဝင္၊ မပါဝင္ကို ေသျခာ ဂဃနဏ ရွင္းလင္းစြာ ေျပာဆိုျခင္း မျပဳေခ်။
စစ္အစိုးရပိုင္ မီဒီယာမ်ား၏ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္အရ လာမည္႔ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ က်င္းပမည္ျဖစ္ေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအား ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ပူးေပါင္း ပါဝင္မည္ ျဖစ္ေသာ အမႈ အမ်ဳိးအမည္ ေပါင္းစံု အက်ဥ္းသား ၆၃၁၃ ေယာက္အား မနက္ျဖန္ စေနေန႔မွ စတင္ကာ လႊတ္ေပးသြားမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေၾကညာ လိုက္သည္။
ယမန္ႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလက တႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ အက်ဥ္းသားေပါင္း ၉၀၀၂ ဦး လႊတ္ေပး ခဲ႔ေသာ္လည္း ဒါဇင္ မွ်သာရွိေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားသာ ပါဝင္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ခဲ႔သည္၊ မၾကာေသးမည္ လမ်ားကလဲ ရာႏွင္႔ခ်ီေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအား ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အခ်ိန္ေက်ာ္ေအာင္ အထိ အခ်ိန္ဆြဲေသာ ေထာင္သက္တမ္း မ်ားျဖင္႔ သတ္မွတ္ခ်ေလ႔ ရွိသည္ဟု ႏိုင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင္႔အေရး ေစာင္႔ၾကည္႔ ေလ႔လာသူမ်ားက ေထာက္ျပ ေျပာဆိုလွ်က္ ရွိသည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္မ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေပါင္း ၂၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္အား ထိမ္းသိမ္းထား သျဖင္႔ လြန္ခဲ႔ေသာ လက ကုလသမဂၢမွ အထူးသံတမန္ မစၥတာ ဂမ္ဘာရီ ေစလႊတ္ခဲ႔ေသာ္လည္း၊ ျမန္မာ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားႏွင္႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲေသာ မစၥဂမ္ဘာရီမွာ နယူးေယာက္ သို႔ ျပန္ေရာက္ေသာ အခါ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ၌ “ က်ေနာ္႔ အေနႏွင္႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား၊ အျခားေသာ အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား စစ္အစိုးရမွ ျပန္လႊတ္ေပး မည္ဟု ယံုၾကည္ပါတယ္ ” သာေျပာဆို သြားခဲ႔သည္။
ဂမ္ဘာရီ၏ တုန္႔ျပန္မႈအား အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီမြန္း၏ ေျပာေရးဆိုခြင္႔ ရွိသူ အမ်ဳိးသမီး မီရွဲလ္ မြန္းတတ္(စ္) အား ေအပီ သတင္း႒ာနမွ ေမးျမန္းေသာအခါ “ ျပန္လႊတ္ရာမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ပါ၊ မပါ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း မသိရေသး ေသာ္လည္း၊ ဆက္လက္ ညႈိႏႈိင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနဆဲ ” ဟုသာ ျပန္လည္ ေျဖၾကားပါသည္။
