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

Friday 24 April 2009

BURMA IS EIGHT YEARS TOO LATE; MALAYSIA WAS FIRST

Posted by admin
Friday, 24 April 2009 17:17



Yes, that’s right. Ustaz Dr Badrulamin was detained without trial for two years for the ‘crime’ of praying. That’s because he made the ‘mistake’ of praying for the release of all ISA detainees.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

Arrested for praying

Two members of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's political party were arrested and charged with insulting religion after they prayed for the release of political prisoners, a party spokesman said on Friday.

National League for Democracy spokesman Nyan Win said authorities arrested Chit Pe, the party's deputy chairman, and party member Aung Saw Wei in Twante on Tuesday.

Both took part in a prayer service for the release of political prisoners, which was held at a pagoda in the township, about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Yangon.

Nyan Win said the two were charged with insulting religion, which carries a possible two-year jail sentence.

'The government is suppressing anyone who opposes or challenges them,' Nyan Win said. 'If a Buddhist is arrested and charged for praying at a pagoda, what can they do?'

Myanmar's military, which has held power since 1962, tolerates no dissent. The current junta came to power in 1988 after crushing a nationwide pro-democracy uprising and has stepped up its campaign against opposition politicians and activists ahead of elections planned for next year.

In recent months, military courts have sentenced hundreds of pro-democracy activists to prison terms of up to 104 years.

Myanmar now has more than 2,100 political prisoners, according to rights groups. The most prominent among them is Suu Kyi, who has spent more than 13 of the last 19 years under detention. She is currently under house arrest. – AP

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The above is today’s news item from AP. What you just read really makes Burma look real bad; don’t you think so? Well, many of you may not be aware that the same thing happened in Malaysia eight years ago. And, in that incident, Ustaz Dr Badrulamin Bahron, one-time lecturer with the International Islamic University (UIA), was detained without trial under Malaysia’s draconian Internal Security Act and was sent to Kamunting for two years -- for praying.

Yes, that’s right. Ustaz Dr Badrulamin was detained without trial for two years for the ‘crime’ of praying. That’s because he made the ‘mistake’ of praying for the release of all ISA detainees. So they made sure he himself became an ISA detainee (maybe they thought the closer he is to the ISA detainees he is praying for, the better chance he has for his prayers to be heard). If he had instead prayed for the long-life, health and happiness of the Sultans, like they do during every Friday prayer in all the mosques in Malaysia, then he would not have been sent to Kamunting for two years.

It is actually quite ironical is it not? You pray to God that the ISA detainees get released, then ‘God’ grants you your wish by making you an ISA detainee. If this is not a point for atheists to use in their argument that there is no God then I really don’t know what is.

Anyway, it just goes to show that sometimes man does the work of God and you really can’t blame God for your predicament. I mean, if God is really is involved in all this, then how can God take away two years of your freedom just because you prayed to Him for the welfare of fellowmen who are victims of injustice?

To digress a bit here: do you know it is mandatory for all mosques to offer prayers to the Rulers and their crown princes during the Friday congregational prayers? I remember more than ten years ago or so when about seven or nine imams from Selangor were sacked because they were alleged to have ‘boycotted’ the part where they were supposed to offer prayers for the Sultan of Selangor.

Actually, this was not true at all. These imams were known PAS sympathisers and Umno wanted to get rid of them. So the Religious Department went to meet the Sultan and played a tape-recording of the Friday prayers to ‘prove’ that these mosques did not offer prayers to the Sultan and his son.

Of course, all they had to do was to delete that part where the prayers were held and splice the tape. Then the ‘new’ tape-recording would show that no prayers were offered. The Religious Department sought permission from the Sultan to sack these seven or nine imams and the Sultan consented.

I can’t remember all the imams or mosques involved but I do remember that the Sungai Buloh, Subang Airport, and Subang Jaya mosques were amongst those that suffered the removal of their imams for the crime of not offering prayers to the Sultan and his son. Later, other mosques in the Federal Territory -- like the Bangsar Abu Bakar Siddique and Damansara Utama Mujahidin mosques -- also came under the hammer of the religious authorities. These mosques too were headed by known PAS sympathisers.

If you can remember, during the last general election, the head of PAS Johor appointed a young Indian (Hindu girl) lawyer to contest a seat in Johor. Well, this man, Ustaz Mahfoz, was the imam of the Mujahidin mosque in Damansara Utama who was sacked. And he appointed an Indian Hindu girl (read: girl, Indian and Hindu in one breath: three so-called taboos for PAS according to those who claim that PAS is a Taliban party) as a PAS candidate. Yet he was sacked by the religious authorities for being an ‘extremist’.

Okay, enough digression. Back to the story of Ustaz Dr Badrulamin who was detained for praying, just like what they do in Burma. Ustaz Dr Badrulamin was actually detained earlier that year but was released after a few months. However, it was a conditional release. He was not to meet in a group of more than four. He must remain indoors from dusk to dawn. And he may not leave his home district.

He complied with all that. But he thought that leading a prayer (baca doa) would not be regarded as an illegal gathering -- as any gathering of more than four without a police permit would be classified. And it was not a street or outdoor gathering. It was indoors. And he was not giving a ceramah or speaking in an anti-government rally. He was leading prayers for the wellbeing of all ISA detainees.

Ustaz Dr Badrulamin was wrong. The police did consider it an illegal gathering and therefore in breach of the terms and restrictions imposed on him. They summoned him to the Rawang Police Station without telling him what it was about. And as soon as he entered the police station they served him with a detention order and sent him to Kamunting.

That was Malaysia then. That is Burma now. Burma is eight years too late. And Malaysia is still like Burma today.

From- Malaysia Today
FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2009

၂ဝ၁ဝ ကိုေမ့ျပီး ကုလားဆီ အာရံုေျပာင္းေအာင္လုပ္ေနတာ
ျမန္မာ-ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နယ္စပ္အေျခအေန တင္းမာ

23 April 2009


ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဘက္က အိမ္နီးခ်င္း ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ နယ္စပ္မွာ ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးကာရံေနတဲ့ ကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ လုံၿခံဳေရးအာဏာပုိင္ေတြက ကန္႔ကြက္မႈေတြရွိလာလုိ႔ ႏွစ္ဖက္အၾကား တင္းမာမႈေတြ ျဖစ္ပြားေနတဲ့ သတင္းေတြ ျပန္ၿပီး ထြက္ေပၚလာေနပါတယ္။ အခုလည္းပဲ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ နယ္နိမိတ္ထဲအထိ ေက်ာ္လြန္ၿပီး ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးကာရံေနတယ္ဆုိၿပီး

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ဘက္က ကန္႔ကြက္ေနတာလုိ႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းစုံကုိ ကုိေအာင္လြင္ဦးက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံနယ္စပ္မွာ လုံၿခံဳေရးနဲ႔ ဒုစ႐ုိက္မႈေတြကုိ ကာကြယ္ဖုိ႔ဆုိၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဘက္က ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးကာရံတဲ့ အစီအစဥ္ေတြကုိ မၾကာေသးခင္လေတြကစၿပီး လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနတဲ့ေနရာမွာ အခုအခါ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ နယ္စပ္မ်ဥ္းနားအထိ ေရာက္လာတဲ့အတြက္ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံဘက္က ကန္႔ကြက္ေနတာလုိ႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။ ဒီအတြက္ေၾကာင့္မုိ႔လုိ႔လည္း ျမန္မာ ႏုိင္ငံက နစက လုိ႔ ေခၚၾကတဲ့ နယ္စပ္ေဒသ စိစစ္ႀကီးၾကပ္ေရးလုံၿခံဳေရးတပ္ဖဲြ႔ေတြနဲ႔ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ ေကာ့က္စ္ဘဇားၿမိဳ႕ အေျခစုိက္ လုံၿခံဳေရးတပ္ဖဲြ႔ေတြအၾကား မေက်မလည္ျဖစ္တာေတြ ရွိခဲ့တယ္လုိ႔လည္း ေဒသခံသတင္းေတြက ေဖာ္ျပၾက ပါတယ္။

အခုေနာက္ဆုံးဆုိရင္လည္း ဒီကိစၥနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ အၿပီးသတ္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ မရႏုိင္ဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနရတယ္လုိ႔ အေျခအေန ေတြ ကုိ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနတဲ့ ေကာ့က္စ္ဘဇားၿမိဳ႕က အကဲခတ္တဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ ကုိသန္းထြန္းက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ကိုက္ ၅၀ အတြင္း ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးခတ္ဖို႔ ျပင္ဆင္ေတာ့ မီဒီယာေတြကေတြ႕ၿပီး ကန္႔ကြက္တယ္။ ဧၿပီလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႔ကေပါ့။ စာနဲ႔လွမ္းကန္႔ကြက္ေတာ့ ဧၿပီ ၂၁ ရက္ေန႔ မနက္ ၁၁ နာရီေလာက္မွာ ဟုိက လူ၀င္မႈ နယ္ေျမတာ၀န္ခံ ဗုိလ္ႀကီးမ်ဳိးဦးရယ္ ဒီကတာ၀န္ခံအရာရွိတေယာက္နဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲလုပ္တဲ့အခါ နစကေတြ ေျပာတာေတာ့ သူတို႔နဲ႔မဆုိင္ဘူး၊ ဒါ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာ တပ္ဖြဲ႕က လုပ္တာ၊ အဲလို ျငင္းတယ္။ သူတို႔က အထက္ကုိ တင္ျပေပးပါမယ္ဆုိၿပီး ေျပာတယ္။ ဒီကျမင္တာကေတာ့ အင္တာေနရွင္နယ္ဥပေဒမွာ ကိုက္ ၅၀ ထက္ပုိၿပီး ကိုက္ ၁၀၀ အတြင္းမွာ ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးခတ္မယ္ဆုိရင္ အင္တာေနရွင္နယ္ ဥပေဒနဲ႔ ျငိႏုိင္တယ္ဆုိၿပီး ကန္႔ကြက္တယ္။”

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဘက္က အခုလုိ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နယ္စပ္မွာ ၂၅ မုိင္ေလာက္ရွည္တဲ့ သံဆူးႀကိဳးခတ္ ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးကာတာေတြကို လုပ္မယ္ဆုိၿပီး ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့လက ေျပာတုန္းကလည္း ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံက ကန္႔ကြက္ခဲ့တာပါ။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဘက္ကေတာ့ ဒါဟာ လုံၿခံဳေရးနဲ႔ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈနဲ႔ ဆက္ႏြယ္တဲ့ လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြကုိ ကန္႔သတ္ဖုိ႔ဆုိၿပီး ေျပာဆုိခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ ေနာက္ပုိင္းျပႆနာေတြ ေျပလည္သြားသလုိရွိေပမယ့္ အခုအခါ တေက်ာ့ျပန္တင္းမာမႈေတြ ေပၚေပါက္လာတာပါ။ အခုဆုိရင္လည္း ႏွစ္ဖက္ႏုိင္ငံ နယ္စပ္က လက္နက္ကုိင္တပ္ဖဲြ႔ေတြအၾကား လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြေတာင္ ရွိေနတယ္လုိ႔ နယ္စပ္အကဲခတ္ ကိုသန္းထြန္းက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ဒီေန႔သတင္းက ဟုိဘက္က နစကနဲ႔ အရပ္၀တ္နဲ႔ စစ္သားေတြက ေသနတ္ေတြနဲ႔ ေနရာယူထားတယ္။ ဒီဘက္ကလည္း ေနရာယူထားတယ္။ ဒီဘက္နယ္စပ္မွာလည္း စခန္းသုံးခုရွိတယ္။ အဲဒီစခန္းသုံးခုက ဒီေန႔မနက္ ေစာေစာကတည္းက ေခ်ာင္းပစ္ေနတယ္လို႔ သတင္းရတယ္။ နစကကလည္း အဲဒီလိုပဲ ေနရာယူထားတယ္။ ဒီေန႔မနက္ သတင္းရတာေတာ့ တင္းမာေနတဲ့သေဘာ ရွိတယ္။ ဟုိကလည္း ဆက္ၿပီးလုပ္မယ့္သေဘာရွိတယ္၊ ဒီဘက္ကလည္း ဆက္ၿပီး ကန္႔ကြက္တုန္းပဲ။”

အခုလုိ တင္းမာမႈေတြ၊ ကန္႔ကြက္မႈေတြ ရွိေနတဲ့အထိ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ကိစၥေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ဒကၠားမွာရွိတဲ့ ျမန္မာသံ႐ုံးကုိ ေမးျမန္းတဲ့အခါမွာေတာ့ သံအမတ္ႀကီး မရွိဘူးလုိ႔သာ ေျပာပါတယ္။ မုိင္ေပါင္း ၂၀၀ ေလာက္ နယ္နိမိတ္ခ်င္း ထိစပ္ေနတဲ့ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ ဒီလုိ နယ္စပ္ေဒသက ၿခံစည္း႐ုိးျပႆနာ မေပၚေပါက္ခင္ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ကုန္ပုိင္းမွာတုန္းကလည္းပဲ ဘဂၤလားပင္လယ္ေအာ္ထဲမွာ ကမ္းလြန္ေရနံ ရွာေဖြမႈေတြ လုပ္ကုိင္ရင္း တင္းမာမႈ ေတြ ျဖစ္ခဲ့လုိ႔ ၂ ႏုိင္ငံ ေရတပ္သေဘၤာေတြ အေခ်အတင္ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ေဒသထဲ ေစလႊတ္တာမ်ဳိးအထိလည္း ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။

Thanks to Arzarni blogspot

Arrests Continue in Burma



Than Shwe has decided to restrict the types of prayers a person can make in his latest act of tyranny. He arrested *National League for Democracy members for praying for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi to assert his authority in religion. The road map to Burma’s new future already has pot holes and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt it will dead end in more repression.

There is no future and his road map looks more like a guided tour of hell since he has decided to act like a G*D and dictate what people can pray for. Clearly democracy will not have a place within his vision of future Burma and arresting people for the content of their prayers is shear madness. As cancer spreads throughout his body it may very well be exacting a toll on his brain since this insanity at its best.

Rape and murder continues to be the rule as reports of more atrocities manage to make their way to the outside world. Than Shwe’s henchmen in the State Peace and Development Counsel raped a **13 year old girl in the Papun District and continue their rain of murder on Karen villagers. It is business as usual for the criminal regime who continues to commit crimes against humanity with impunity.

Other arrests continue in secret as people disappear from the streets and placed in distant jungle prisons. Eventually the Burmese government will have arrested all the opposition to the pending 2010 election. It is believed that the people who disappear without public knowledge are simple being killed to put an end to the opposition of his illegal elections. The brutality of his criminal regime has no boundaries and has escalated with a vengeance in an effort to thwart efforts the opposition to him and his band of criminals.

Pro junta businessmen who’ve benefited from the corrupt military junta have become spies against the people of Burma. They have also used their new status to intimidate and threaten citizens. They identify people as pro democracy advocate causing innocent people to be arrested and persecuted to satisfy vendettas. There is no question they will use their positions to eliminate competition as they lie about businessmen as well. These businessmen will undoubtedly be added to the list of criminals who will stand trial for crimes against humanity as well. Than Shwe’s legacy will convict his minions long after he dies from the cancer that is consuming his body. Destiny awaits and justice will be served.

* http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=15518

** http://www.khrg.org/khrg2009/khrg09f8.html

Your Devil’s Advocate

Buffalohair