Today, UK Government launched the 2011 Foreign & Commonwealth Office Report on Human Rights and Democracy and Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) is honoured to be invited.

Myo Thein, Director of the Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) attended the occasion representing Burma.

During the launch, Myo Thein has raised the question to the Foreign Secretary Mr William Hague regarding the situation in Kachin State and what efforts has the British Government been doing to stop fighting, to achieve peace and national reconciliation.

Mr Secretary said that British Government has been asking Burmese Government to cease hostilities and to make every effort to stop fighting and to achieve peace in Burma.

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US 'careful' on easing investment ban in Myanmar
WASHINGTON – The U.S. said Wednesday it will ease its investment ban in Myanmar carefully, noting that recent democratic reforms are reversible and deplorable rights violations persist.
Kurt Campbell, the top diplomat for East Asia, also said in testimony to a congressional foreign affairs panel that the U.S. remains troubled by Myanmar's military trade with North Korea.
His cautious comments come as human rights groups voice increasing concern that the U.S., European Union and other nations are moving too fast to relax economic sanctions to reward Myanmar's shift from five decades of authoritarian rule.
Rep. Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., the panel chairman, said there is still no rule of law in the country also known as Burma, and corrupt officials and the military stand to reap a windfall from the country's rich natural resources.
"Have our European and Asian allies gone too far by rushing headlong into suspending all sanctions and immediately boosting assistance?" Manzullo told the hearing of the committee that oversees U.S. policy in Asia and the Pacific. He cautioned that a "reckless" lifting of U.S. sanctions could feed the cycle of corruption.
The EU this week suspended its economic sanctions, and Japan said it would forgive $3.7 billion in Myanmar's debt following recent special elections that saw democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party sweep most of the contested seats. The U.S. has said it will allow export of financial services and American investment in some sectors of the impoverished economy — such as agriculture and telecommunications — but has yet to announce details.
Campbell described the Myanmar's political opening as "real and significant" but "fragile and reversible." In his testimony he credited economic reforms and said the government has doubled spending on education and quadrupled it on health, but military spending, at 16.5 percent of the total budget, remains "grossly disproportionate."
He noted fighting and reports of severe rights violations in the northern Kachin State — scene of one of Myanmar's most entrenched ethnic insurgencies — and "deplorable" discrimination against ethnic Rohingyas in the western Rakhine State. He said that despite the releases of more than 500 political prisoners by Myanmar authorities since last October, at least several hundred are still behind bars.
Aung Din, of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, alleged that arbitrary detention and torture continues, and questioned the significance of recent political reforms.
Although Suu Kyi's party won all but two of the seats in the recent special elections, it still has less than 7 percent representation in parliament. He said the quick easing of sanctions by the U.S. and other nations meant that "the Burmese government led by President Thein Sein is the real winner" of the vote.
In his prepared testimony, Aung Din complained that U.S. officials had failed to consult with veteran student protest leaders, leaders of Suu Kyi's party and ethnic minorities before announcing its the targeted easing of bans on investment and financial services.
Campbell said the State Department would proceed "in a careful manner" on easing the sanctions, and would work with the Treasury Department to re-examine and refresh its list of sanctioned Myanmar nationals — principally military officials and their associates.
The U.S. has consulted closely with Suu Kyi, who is widely admired in Congress, as it has engaged with Thein Sein's government, lending bilateral support for its shift from diplomatic isolation of Myanmar. Suu Kyi also endorsed the EU's move to suspend its economic sanctions for a year.


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Govt relaxes NGO registration process

THE government plans to amend a law concerning the registration of local and international non-government organisations, a presidential adviser revealed last week.

“The current law for [registration of] NGOs will be amended following a proposal from a member of parliament,” adviser Dr Nay Zin Latt said last week. “The government wants to increase cooperation with NGOs … [and] intends to loosen restrictions gradually.”

The amendments come after the government cut the waiting time for registration and also extended the length of validity for registration.

The change in policy came about in 2011 after the handover to President U Thein Sein’s government and by the end of the year 280 domestic groups had registered, according to Ministry of Home Affairs statistics. However, that still represents just a small percentage of the total number of non-government groups, which is estimated at about 20,000.

“We had to wait for two years for our application to register to be approved,” said U Nay Myo from Ratana Metta Organisation, which focuses on health, child protection and livelihoods and was officially registered in March 2011. “And we still had to promise to do only social affairs.”

Among the more high-profile organisations to be able to register is the Free Funeral Service Society, led by actor Kyaw Thu. The group, which formed in 2000, had its registration revoked in 2008 after a dispute with the government but it was reinstated last month with a validity period of five years, Kyaw Thu told The Myanmar Times.

However, he said the K500,000 (about US$600) registration fee was “unfair”.

“For small organisations, how they can afford this amount? Social welfare work is not a business. Instead of having to pay this fee it would be more beneficial to use this amount to improve people’s health and education,” he added.

Despite the relaxation of the registration process, many local organisations, particularly smaller informal groups, are still not interested in applying to register, said Dr Sid Naing, country director for Marie Stopes International.

“According to the Law of Founding an Organisation, all organisations must register but the law did not come into effect until 2006,” he said. “The former government only gave a registration number to the organisations that it trusted.

“After Cyclone Nargis in 2008, the number of local NGOs rose dramatically. While some of these organisations are officially registered with the government, many are not.”

However, those that operate without official registration can face difficulties, particularly from local officials.

“We had some problem when we went in the wards. The authorities asked our team, do we have an official registration number? If we haven’t, they said only to come back and do our welfare work when we have one,” said U Kyaw Thain Tun, head of Ratna Mahal, a Yangon-based education organisation that formed in 2009.

“We applied to register officially in August 2011 and I hope to get a registration number when I go to the Home Affairs Ministry office in Nay Pyi Taw next month.”

U Myo Yan Naung Thein, director of the Bayda Institute, a political education training centre based in Yangon, said the restrictions on political activities in the current law should be removed.

“It is not fair that NGOs are unable to join political movements. This meant that during the Myitsone Dam affair some environmental NGOs did not participate,” he said. “If NGOs are able to operate freely it will improve the democratic reforms in Myanmar.

“I want to apply to register our organisation because I want to work according to the law but we cannot do so under these restrictions … I would like to suggest to the government that the 1988 registration law is too restrictive and the government should create a new law that is very free and fair.”
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Energy is an essential for development. Burma must work to ensure providing sufficient electricity and gas for all the citizens of Burma.
http://www.bdcburma.org

Urgent help needed for Burma

These are the most basic needs which is urgent and most directly benefitting the people's daily lives.

(1) Electricity - (We are now living in the stone age with no electricity ironically we have full resources and people are not getting it )
(2) Communications - internet etc..
(3) Transportation

Photo: BAYDA Institute teaching political sciences subjects with no electricity ေဗဒါေက်ာင္းမီးမရွိပဲစာသင္ရပါသည္

We need to give priority to agricultural investments that support the infrastructure and input requirements of sustainable family farming

We need resources from agricultural investments to improve the effectiveness, capacities and capabilities of the organisations and networks at all levels to be able to develop, promote and defend family farming, sustainable food systems and food sovereignty:

We need to realise a common approach in the face of harmful agricultural investments that are capturing productive resources, imposing industrial models of production, and implementing policies, strategies and research and other programmes that undermine local food systems.

We need to Increase the knowledge at all levels including individual famers’ organisations to national platforms and the regional and continental networks about the CFS (UN Committee on world
Food Security) and CSM (Committee on World Food Security) process
http://www.bdcburma.org

Burma Democratic Concern (BDCs) warmly welcome US Government Easing Sanctions on Burma: http://ping.fm/E4zE5

Burma’s transition away from military rule continues
Elections sweep Aung San Suu Kyi into parliament
by Brendan Brady on Monday, April 2, 2012 11:31am - 0 Comments

Khin Maung Win/AP
Update: Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s party won 40 of 45 seats in Burma’s by-elections on Sunday

The sun-baked dirt road was already chock full of chanting supporters when Phyu Phyu Thinn emerged from her headquarters in downtown Rangoon. They had been waiting for hours in the sweltering heat to catch a glimpse of the politician, whom they hurriedly pursued on foot after she was whisked away in an open-top vehicle. The size and furious energy of the crowd were startling sights in Burma, where stultifying and violent military rule has long suppressed public expressions of support for figures outside the ruling clique. The last time the streets of Rangoon rang with calls for political change, in 2007, soldiers gunned down scores of protesters and detained thousands more.

“We have been living in fear for a long time,” Thinn, 40, who is the country’s leading HIV activist and has served multiple stints in prison for participating in protests, told an attentive audience packed inside a Buddhist temple. “But times have changed. We should not be afraid anymore.” It is a hopeful message that Thinn and her fellow National League for Democracy (NLD) member, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, 66, have balanced with caution as they run in parliamentary by-elections on April 1; they will mark their party’s return to electoral politics after being sidelined for over two decades.

Burma’s transition away from military rule had an inauspicious start. In November 2010, the army held a national election that was widely seen as a ploy by the junta to rule through plainclothes proxies in order to rehabilitate the country’s image and end Western-imposed economic sanctions. The army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) was dominated by former military officers who used their patronage networks to steamroll threadbare competition: many of the NLD’s leading politicians were in jail or barred from participating. Suu Kyi was released from years of house arrest only after the vote. For good measure, the 2008 constitution reserved a quarter of all parliamentary seats and control of key ministries for the army. With its hands tied, the NLD decided to boycott the election and expressed little faith in the new regime.

But a breathtaking series of reforms over the past year has transformed the substance and tone of the power handover, lifting the climate of fear that long gripped the country and paving the way for the first steps of a democratic system to gain traction. Since taking the reins in March of last year, President U Thein Sein, a retired general, has emerged as an unlikely reformer—“Burma’s Gorbachev,” as some analysts have dubbed him. The government released hundreds of political prisoners, allowed citizens to form unions and hold public protests, relaxed media controls and attempted to de-escalate fighting with ethnic separatist armies. Thein Sein has made overtures to Suu Kyi—when the army ruled, its generals made every attempt to denigrate her—and when he addressed parliament this month, he even criticized the past leadership: “Our people suffered under various governments and different systems,” he said. “The people will judge our government based on its actual achievements.”

Thinn, the HIV activist, has been tirelessly delivering speeches and receiving garlands and warm wishes from ecstatic supporters. And in the few moments when she rests, her party’s chief symbols—Suu Kyi and the NLD’s red flag emblazoned with a peacock and star—continue to circulate the city on T-shirts, taxis and pushcarts. A year ago, such public displays of devotion to the “The Lady,” as Suu Kyi is known, were grounds for arrest. Today, NLD supporters are not losing the chance to voice their opinions. “Do you know who that is?” an exuberant commuter walking past a poster of Suu Kyi asked without leaving time for an answer. “She is our leader.”

Such optimism is curbed, however, by questions about whether the army and the party it supports will play fair and allow further reform after the election. The NLD has accused the governing party of fabricating voter rosters and vote-buying. Fears remain of backlash from hard-line elements who might be tempted to sideline Thein Sein and other reform-minded leaders before their authority is consolidated. “We must be very careful in every step we make,” said Myo Yan Naung Thein, a formerly imprisoned political activist who last year founded the Bayda Institute, an NGO that promotes awareness about democratic systems of government. “We must not show any sign that we are a threat.” And though the president has pledged to pursue ceasefires and lasting peace, the state army continues campaigns against ethnic armies that exact devastating tolls: soldiers continue to fire on civilians, rape women and conscript children as porters in front-line fighting, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch in March.

If voted in, celebrated figures like Thinn and Suu Kyi also risk their reputations by joining a government that fails to provide basic public services, suffers from rampant corruption and has driven the national economy into the ground through mismanagement. Good intentions cannot turn around decades of neglect that have left most Burmese to survive on a few dollars a day. Asked by an audience member after her speech how she would resolve shortages of clean water and electricity, Thinn’s response that, if elected, she would raise the issue in parliament did not leave listeners as inspired as did the initial impact of her reputation and fresh face.

The 48 seats to be contested on Sunday are just a fraction of the parliament’s total of more than 650. “Ultimate power still rests with the army, so until we have the army solidly behind the process of democratization we cannot say that we have got to a point where there will be no danger of a U-turn,” Suu Kyi, whose view of the reform is being used by Western governments to judge whether sanctions should be dropped, told an audience at Ottawa’s Carleton University last month via video link. But that hasn’t stopped some NLD supporters from seeing the April 1 vote as a precursor to a much larger moment. The current cover of The People’s Age, a Burmese weekly newspaper, shows voters nervously standing at the edge of a cliff with a ballot box acting as a bridge. Lying on the other side of the divide is a sign reading “2015”—the year of the next general election.

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Generalplan og folkevår
Publisert I går kl. 11:35 - 9666 visninger Innlegg
Det som nå skjer i Myanmar er en leksjon i politisk ­strategi ovenfra. Men også i folkelig styrke nedenfra.

YANGON (Dagsavisen): Det har gjort inntrykk å stå blant tusenvis av ekstatiske burmesere, som i sentrum av millionbyen Yangon og langs støvete landsbyveier jublet over at de for første gang er på vei mot noe som minner om et fritt samfunn, der de selv får bestemme hvem som skal styre landet deres.

Fortsatt er det langt igjen, og det er nå det virkelig blir krevende. Nå skal Aung San Suu Kyi og hennes parti være med å ta ansvar for å løse landets etniske konflikter og økonomiske utfordringer – og samtidig skape et demokrati. Men hvis NLD virkelig har vunnet rundt 40 av de 44 kretsene de stilte i (slik de selv hevdet i går), og de militære virkelig lar seieren forbli så total når de offisielle resultatene kommer, ja da har dette landet i det minste tatt et viktig steg framover langs veien mot demokrati.

Det har også gjort inntrykk å høre de mange stillferdige fortellingene fra aktivister som i tiår har kjempet mot militærdiktaturet, men nå samarbeider med det. Da han var ung studentaktivist, drømte Myo Yan Naung Thein om å bli selvmordsbomber. Hvis han bare kunne sprenge generalene i lufta, ville framtida bli bedre for landet hans. Etter å ha sittet ti år i fengsel, hvor armene hans ble svidd med fyrstikker og stukket med nåler mens han var bakbundet, var drømmen borte. Nå støtter han samarbeid og forsoning. «Vi må la generalene beholde overtaket. Bare slik kan vi få forandring», sa han til meg.

En kan lese dette som resignasjon, som å bli torturert til underkastelse. Etter å ha snakket med mange av disse aktivistene, framstår det for meg som noe mer. En imponerende pragmatisk og målrettet kamp som over tid kan vise seg å gi større resultater enn væpnet opprør.
Det som har skjedd i Myanmar (Burma) de siste månedene, og som toppet seg med søndagens valg, er på ett plan en styrt revolusjon ovenfra. En nøye uttenkt plan der generalene bruker valg og ytringsfrihet som redskaper for å sikre sin makt og sine økonomiske goder. En ny grunnlov er laget som sikrer immunitet og fortsatt innflytelse i parlamentet. Store rikdommer er privatisert. Forsiktig demokratisering sikrer at folket ikke gjør opprør på ny. Nå mangler det bare at sanksjonene skal bli borte så generalene kan skaffe seg en motvekt i Vesten mot Kinas stadig økende innflytelse over landet.

I dette perspektivet er det som skjer i Myanmar det motsatte av hva som har skjedd i Midtøsten de siste månedene. Det kan faktisk godt være at en styrt demokratisering ovenfra vil vise seg å være mer bærekraftig enn opprør nedenfra som presser generalene mot veggen. Myanmar ser ut til å være i en bedre posisjon enn Egypt for øyeblikket, både for generalene og folket.

Men det er ikke gitt at alt skjer etter en nøye uttenkt plan. Flere peker på at munkeopprøret, syklonen Nargis og den arabiske våren alle har presset fram endringer. Hendelsene har tatt hverandre, og skapt en bevegelse som har gått fortere enn noen hadde ventet. Slik kan det fortsette. Noe av det mest slående med å være i Yangon i én uke, var å merke hvordan alle snakket uten frykt, fra taxisjåfører til studentaktivister. Slik var det ikke for ett år siden, sier alle jeg har snakket med. Når frykten først slipper taket, er det ikke gitt at generalene kan fortsette å kontrollere utviklingen slik de har gjort hittil. Det snakkes allerede om at parlamentarikere både fra militærets parti og militærets utvalgte kvote ønsker å slutte seg til vinnerlaget og Aung San Suu Kyis parti.

Dette vil neppe skje over natta. Kanskje vil det ta flere år. Flere i Yangon peker på andre asiatiske lands overgang fra militærstyre til demokrati som modell. Både i Sør-Korea og Indonesia tok det mange år før de militæres innflytelse over politikken ble svekket.

Men selv om utviklingen i Myanmar er styrt ovenfra, har den også kommet etter mange års press nedenfra. Folk demonstrerte i gatene i 1988, 1996 og 2007. Hver gang uten vold, selv om regimet svarte med våpen. Aung San Suu Kyi har vært en sterk bærer av denne ikkevoldslinjen, en moralsk posisjon og politisk strategi som de siste årene har veltet diktatorer fra Serbia og Georgia til Tunisia og Egypt. Den amerikanske ikkevoldstenkeren Gene Sharps tekster er blitt kjent etter den arabiske våren. Sharp beskriver i boka «From dictatorship to democracy» hvordan man konkret kan kaste diktaturer gjennom målrettet, ikkevoldelig motstand. Boka ble brukt på Tahrirplassen. Men ble skrevet i Myanmar, der Sharp var rådgiver for studentaktivistene etter at de hadde rømt fra regimet i 1988. Slik er ikke Myanmar og arabervåren bare motstykker, men også beslektede fenomener.

Publisert i Dagsavisens papirutgave samme dag.
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Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) don’t want to hurt the livelihood of the ordinary people of Burma whom are suffering from reputation risk. Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) opposes anything hurting people. www.bdcburma.org

Burma Democratic Concern is on the way to support the Kachin organisation's demonstration today in London.