Arakanland News & Article

ARAKANLAND

Young asylum-seekers play in front of a reception and integration centre in Bulgaria. Photo: UNHCR/B.Szandelszky

30 March 2012 – The United Nations refugee agency today welcomed the adoption of a joint resettlement programme by the European Union (EU), describing it as an important step towards a more substantive contribution to global efforts to relocate displaced persons.

“We hope the EU’s joint programme will help to increase resettlement places in the European Union as a whole and provide solutions for a greater number of refugees who find themselves in desperate situations,” said a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Melissa Fleming.

When refugees cannot return to their native countries because they face continued persecution or have specific needs that cannot be addressed in the country where they have sought protection, UNHCR helps them resettle in a third country as the only safe and viable solution. According to the agency, of the 10.5 million refugees of concern to UNHCR around the world, only one per cent are candidates for resettlement.

Currently, twelve EU countries run resettlement programmes, which together contribute to less than eight per cent of the annual resettlement places on offer around the world.

While participation in the new joint programme is on a voluntary basis, increased coordination and larger financial benefits arising from it are likely to create more resettlement places in Europe, Ms. Fleming said.

The programme allows countries to prioritize refugee populations for resettlement including people from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, Myanmar and Somalia. It will also provide States with additional funding for the integration of resettled refugees in local communities.

According to UNHCR, up to 80,000 refugees are resettled every year, with a majority going to the United States, Canada and Australia, while Europe takes only some 5,000 refugees annually.

“The adoption of the joint EU Programme should alter that imbalance,” Ms. Fleming added.

Source: UN News Service

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ARAKANLAND

Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar Tomás Ojea Quintana. UN Photo/Evan Schneider

30 March 2012 – The upcoming by-elections in Myanmar will be a “crucial moment” in history for the country and a key test for the Government on the progress made implementing democratic reforms, a United Nations independent expert said today.

“This is a crucial moment in Myanmar’s history,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana. “I have consistently stressed that the next round of elections should be truly free, fair, inclusive and transparent, but the credibility of Sunday’s vote will not be determined solely on the day, but in the lead-up to and following election day.”

Independent experts, or special rapporteurs, are appointed by the Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a country situation or a specific human rights theme. The positions are honorary and the experts are not United Nations, nor are they paid for their work.

Mr. Ojea Quintana said he was encouraged by the recent wave of reforms in Myanmar, including the release of a significant number of prisoners of conscience and the registration of a number of political parties, which represent a positive change in the human rights situation.

However, Mr. Ojea Quintana noted that due to electoral irregularities in the past, authorities must show clear political will to achieve a peaceful election and to establish public confidence and legitimacy for the country’s democratic transition.

“The flawed electoral process of the 2010 national elections, which failed to meet international standards, was a missed opportunity for Myanmar to address its challenges in democratisation,” he said. “It should not be repeated as Myanmar enters a new and more open era.”

Mr. Ojea Quintana also urged the Government to ensure respect for freedom of expression and opinion during the elections, in which 48 parliamentary seats will be contested.

Source: UN News Service

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ARAKANLAND

By Ko Khaing Mrat

၂၉-၃-၂၀၁၂ ေန႕ကျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ၁/၂၀၁၂

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ARAKANLAND

By AKS

'Bangladesh: Bangladesh shares a 4,156 km border with 30 districts on
the Indian side. India has
20 official checkpoints manned by the Border Security Force (BSF).
Being few and widely dispersed,
they are ineffective in maintaining strict vigilance over movements
across the border. Crossing the
border between Bangladesh and West Bengal is a daily routine for many.
Thus, keeping track of
the movement of people is very difficult. Illegal entries by
traffickers are a matter of common
knowledge, and there is a perception that they are protected. A number
of businesses have developed to facilitate these cross-border
movements; each trip may cost no more than Rs. 50 per person (ADB
2002: 16,23). A well-organised bribe system also helps people to cross
over the flat terrain (BNWLA 1998). Further, a multiple passports
system ‘facilitates easy entry of Bangladesh; girls into Kolkata
brothels and a close nexus exists between traffickers and border
village communities’ (DWCD 1996).'
(from p.14 of the document at
http://nhrc.nic.in/Documents/ReportonTrafficking.pdf)

The same cruel gangs are in action smuggling young Bangladeshi men
into Burma, some will continue their onward migration journeys to
Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and even Australia.

Some of them will use the word Rohingya to take an easy migration
route to rich welfare states if they can pay the agents in UNHCR
(UNHCR has agents who will help them emigrate and they will
have to pay back fees later). In fact it is not right to use the word
Rohingya as there is (or was) no
Rohingya as a race or tribe in Burmese history. See the British
archives below: Search with keyword Rohingya, you will never get any
word before 1920. That means there was no British
archive recording Rohingya. However check with the word "Sepoy" that
is the word for Indian soldiers fighting for British Raj. Then you
will come up with documents as early as early 1900s.
Search the link yourself.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

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ARAKANLAND

Burmese Authroties and Yattara Sarataw's magical contrivances umbralla, which will replace  at Maha Mrat Muni Shrine against the Arakanese people's wish on April 6,2012. 

 ေထရ၀ါဒဗုဒ္ဓသာသနာေတာ္စတင္ခေရနီရာ၊

ဘုရားရွင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္တိုင္ၾကြေတာ္မူခေရနီရာ၊

ရခိုင္သားရို႔၏အသဲႏွလံုးျဖစ္ေတ မဟာမုနိရွပ္ရွင္ေတာ္ျမတ္သြန္းေရနီရာ၊

ကိန္း၀ပ္ေတနီရာျဖစ္ေတ သီရိ၈ုတ္ေတာင္ေတာ္ ျမတ္ကား ေဒသခံလူထု၏မေၾကနပ္မႈတိ၊အသဲထိတ္ရင္ဖိုရသည့္အျဖစ္နန္႔အုတ္ေအာ္

ယေကေလ့ တကာႀကီးရို႔မွာရွိးေဟာင္းကိုဖ်က္ဆီးစြာကမေကာင္းပါ။ထုတ္ထားေရဥပေဒနန္႔ ေလ့ မညီပါ။ေျမာက္ဦးမွာသွ်စ္ေသာင္ါးပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးနန္႔မုခ္၀ကိုဖ်က္ဆီးပလိုက္က္ိုစြာကိုရခိုင္သားတိက တဆိ ေခ်ေလ့မေၾကနပ္ကတ္ပါ။

ရခိုင္ယိုင္ေက်းမႈသည္ေလ့ျမန္မာယိုင္ေက်းမႈရာမဟုတ္လား။ရခိုင္ယိုင္ေက်း မႈျမင့္မား စြာေရ ျမန္မာယိုင္ေက်းမႈျမင့္မားစြာပင္မဟုတ္ပါလား။ လို႔ၾသ၀ါဒပီးလိုက္ပါေရလတ္။ ယၿပီးေက အလွဴက ေပၚမလာ၊ေပ်ာက္လားလားချပန္ေရ။

တခါ ေနာက္ေရာက္ေတာတိုင္းမွဴးေမာင္ဦးက ၾသ၀ါဒခံယူ ျပန္ေရလတ္။ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးရို႔ကေလ့ အလ်ဴအတန္းလုပ္စြာေကာင္းပါေရလို႔ၾသ၀ါဒပီးပါေရ။တိုင္းမွဴးက-မဟာမုနိျပသဒ္ ေတာ္မွာ ကေကာင္းျမင့္လြန္းေရအတြက္ ရခိုင္ကလီမုန္တိုင္းတိကိုခံႏိုင္ေအာင္ တဆိေခ် ေလာက္ႏွိမ့္ခ်င္ေရ လ ို႔ေလွ်ာက္ပါေရ။ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးရို႔က-ရခိုင္မွာအျပင္းထန္ဆံုးျဖစ္ေတ(၁၉၃၀ခုႏွစ္လို႔ ထင္ပါေရ) မုန္တိုင္း ခါေတာင္မဟာမုနိျပသဒ္ေတာ္ကသြပ္ျပား(၁)ခ်ပ္ေတာင္ိမကြာကခပါ။ ယၿပီးေက ဘာသာထံုးစံအရေလ့ ့ေဒပိုင္မလုပ္ေကာင္း္ပါ လို႔ၾသ၀ါဒပီးလိုက္ပါေရ။ 

ယေကေလ့ ကေကာင္းမၾကာခင္မွာပင္ ျပသဒ္ေတာ္ကိုႏွိမ့္ခ် လိုက္ပါေရ။

္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ပါသည္။

မၾကာျမင့္မွီ အခ်ိန္ကာလပိုင္းတခုမွာရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္၏က်က္သေရေဆာင္မဟာမုနိရုပ္၇ွင္ေတာ္ျပသဒ္ႀကီးႏွင့္ေရႊသားေရႊ စင္ထီးေတာ္ျမတ္ကိုရဟန္းရွင္လူအမ်ားျပည္သူတို႔ဖူးေမွ်ာ္ၾကည္ညိုသဒ္ဓာ

ေဒပိုင္ဆိုပါေက တိုင္းမွဴးတိက ရခိုင္ျပည္ကဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးတိကိုေလွ်ာက္ထားစြာေရ-အလိုေတာ္ ျပည့္ဘုန္းႀကီးကလွဴႏိုင္ဖို႔အတြက္လား။ မဟုတ္ေက၊ တိုင္းမွဴးကေလွ်ာက္ထားစြာေရ ျပည္နယ္စားတဦးက  ႏိုင္ငံစားအႀကီးအကဲအတြက္(ခိုင္းလို႔)ေလွ်ာက္ထားရစြာလား။ မဟုတ္ေက၊ တိုင္းမွဴးတိပစပ္ထဲကအလုပ္ေရ ေဒေၾကာင္သူေတာ္လက္ထဲကေပၚလာရစြာက ရခိုင္ျပည္ကိုခ်ိဳးႏွိမ္ခ်င္လို႔ ရခိုင္ဘုန္းႀကီးကိုလက္ဆင့္ကမ္း လိုက္ စြာလား။ ေဒပိုင္ ေဒပိုင္ပင္ ရခိုင္သားတိ၏ႏွလံုးအာရံုထဲမွာ ရႈပ္ထြီးနီကတ္ပါယာ။ ေျမာက္ဦးေခတ္ႀကီး ၏ ထယ္၀ါေရ အထင္ကရျဖစ္ေတသွ်စ္ေသာင္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးကိုဖ်က္ၿပီးယာ ။ေ၀သာလီ ၿမိဳ႔ေတာ္ကို အေနာက္ဘက္ကေမာ္ေတာ္ကားလမ္းေဖာက္လို႔ဖ်က္ထားယာ။

အရွိဘက္ကိုေလ့ မီးရထားလမ္း ေဖာက္ဖို႔ လုပ္ျပပနာဖ်က္ဖို႔လုပ္ထားယာ။

ေနာက္ဆံုးအဆင့္ ဓည၀တီကိုဖ်က္ဆီးဖို႔တက္လာစြာျဖစ္ေတ။ ဓည၀တီ အတြက္မဟာမုနိရုပ္၇ွင္ေတာ္ျမတ္ကိုဒုက္ခပီးႏိုင္ေက သူရို႔အႀကံေအာင္ယာ။ ရခိုင္အညြန္႔က်ိဳးယာ။ လံုး၀ နလံမထူႏိုင္ယာ။ ရခိုင္ လူကိုပင္မက နတ္ကိုပါေအာင္ယာ။ ယင္းပိုင္အႀကံထင္ေရ။

၂၃-၃-၂၀၁၂နိက ရန္ကုန္ကစစ္ေတြၿမိဳ႔ကိုလီယိုင္ပ်ံနန္႔ယူလားခယာ။ စစ္ေတြလီယိုင္ပ်ံကြင္းကပင္ၿခီက်င္ေလွ်ာက္လို႔ၿမိဳ႔ကို ပတ္ေတဆိုေရ။ စစ္ေတြမွာႀကိဳဖို႔အတြက္စစ္ေတြကရခိုင္စည္အဖြဲ႔တိကိုေခၚစြာတဖြဲ႔ေလ့ မလားကတ္လို႔သိ ရေရ။ ေဒနိရဟိေရသတင္းအရ လက္ဟိျပသဒ္ေတာ္ထိပ္အလယ္ကကြ်န္းတိုင္ႀကီးကိုျဖတ္လိုက္ယာဆိုေရ။ ၿမိဳ႔နယ္သံဃနာယကအဖြဲ႔က ကြ်န္းတိုင္ႀကီး အေကာင္းစက္စက္ျဖစ္လို႔မျဖတ္ဖို႔နန္႔ သံမဏိရိုးကိုကြ်န္းတိုင္ ထဲမွာသြင္းထည့္ဖို႔လို႔ေတာင္းဆိုကတ္ေက။ အလိုေတာ္ရိနန္႔သံဃနာယကရို႔ မေျပမျပစ္ျဖစ္ကတ္ပါေရ။  ေဒသခံလူထုကေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္(၂)ရပ္ကိုေတာင္းထားပါေရ-

အမွတ္အသားတိလက္ခဏာတိမပါဟိရ။      အက်င့္သိက္ခါဟိေတာ္မူေရဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးတစ္ပါးက- ယင္းသူလုပ္စြာ မေအာင္ျမင္-လို႔ ၾသ၀ါဒ ပီးထားပါေရ။  ရွင္ဘုရင္တိပါလို႔ၿမိဳ႔ပတ္စြာက ဗမာတိ ရခိုင္ျပည္ကိုထပ္သိမ္းေရပံုစံလား။ မဟာမုနိကိုထပ္လို႔ သိမ္းယူေရဆိုေရသေဘာလားေတာ့ခါ မေျပာတတ္ပါ။ ဇာပင္ျဖစ္ါျဖစ္ မရိုးမသားလုပ္စြာေတ့ခါ အမွန္ပင္ ျဖစ္ပါေရလို႔။  အ၀ီးေရာက္နိန္ေရ ရခိုင္သားတိအားလံုးသိႏိုင္ေအာင္ အခ်ိန္မီတင္ျပပီးလိုက္စြာျဖစ္ပါေရ။

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ARAKANLAND

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid949801312001?bckey=AQ%7E%7E%2cAAAACEco_Vk%7E%2c9bOat4XcfB_88ri1a3UMdKnLpH9aM8Fv&bclid=0&bctid=1271237687001

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ARAKANLAND

WAO-USA-03/05/2012- The current information of World Arakanese organization (WAO) United States of America Branch made the meritorious deed during the WAO-USA’s President U U Sein Tun shortly visited to Arakan.

He offered USD 400 to Arakanese Women Association, headquarters base in Dinnya Waddy Discipline monastery, Rangoon, for the aim of Grade 10^Th High School Outstanding Student awards on 02/09/ 2012. During the donation ceremony, Rakhine Thahaya Athum’s President U Khin Maung Soe and Its major members were attending.

WAO’s educational awards and decorations successfully rewarded First prize for Maung Zaw Htay Won, son of U Tun Aung Khine and Daw Hla Shwe Khin, Second prize for Ma Mrat Tha Zun Fru, daughter of U Mra Tha and Daw Won Won Myint, and Third prize winner as Won Su Mrat, daughter of U Thay Aung and  Daw Won Kyi on 02/11/ 2012.

After that, President U U Sein Tun went to Mrauk U and met the Board of Trustees of Radana Man Aung Buddhist Temple on 02/13/12. He donated USD 500, equal to Burmese Currency 407,500 Kyats, to abbot of Radana Man Aung monastery. So as to share donation, this sum is absolutely intended to Lawka Mizzu Buddhist Temple construction plan.

Source: WAO-USA

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ARAKANLAND

Shwe Gas Protesters in Bangook

THAILAND, March 1, 2012 –130 organizations over 20 countries today held demonstrations and submitted letters calling on Burma’s President Thein Sein to postpone China’s trans-Burma oil and gas pipelines project. The letter expressed serious concerns over human rights abuses as well as social, economic and environmental impacts of the Burmese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian company-led project.

The Shwe Gas Project and trans-Burma oil and gas pipelines are currently under construction, originating off Burma’s western coast and terminating in China’s Yunnan Province, and set to come online in 2013. The project will become the country’s largest source of foreign revenue generating US $29 billion over 30 years. 

The open letter to Thein Sein strongly condemns the confiscation of the thousands of acres of farm lands for the project, and the military offensives against ethnic armies in the pipeline corridor in Northern Shan State. The letter references the previous suspension of the Myitsone Dam and Dawei coal-fired plant and “call[s] for a consistent policy of social and environmental accountability, and an immediate postponement of the project”.

The Shwe Gas will be exported to China while around 75% of the population is not receiving electricity from the national grid. “Resentment to these pipelines is growing day by day, Thein Sein should listen to the will of the people” said Wong Aung.

Revenues from oil and gas are not managed transparently in Burma.  “Under the current unaccountable structure, gas monies from the project will only feed corruption and not benefit the people” said Wong Aung of the Shwe Gas Movement.

The Shwe Gas Movement advocates for community members’ rights and an equitable benefit sharing system under a framework of sustainable development.

To read the Open Letter, click here.

Contact:
Wong Aung: + 66(0)857133344  wongaung@gmail.com (English and Burmese)

Phyo Phyo, +66 (0)853283947 phyophyo@shwe.org (Burmese)

For more information visit: www.shwe.org

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