Asean and the UN will co-chair an international aid pledging conference in Rangoon on Sunday, both organizations announced in separate press releases.
“The ASEAN-UN International Pledging Conference will support efforts to alleviate the devastating impact of Cyclone Nargis on the country and widespread suffering caused to the people of Myanmar [Burma],” said the UN statement.
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| UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lights a candle at the Shwedagon pagoda on Thursday in Rangoon before going to view conditions in cyclone damaged areas. (Photo: AP) |
However, critics say the main agenda of the ruling Burmese generals at the conference will be securing US $11 billion for aid and reconstruction, which is the amount the junta is calling for, according to Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, who visited Burma on May 20-21.
A potential dilemma that could arise at the conference is the chasm in concept between the donors and the military regime. While donors, particularly in Western countries, insist on transparency and accountability within a relief mission, the junta strives mainly to control foreign relief workers and to line their own pockets, say critics.
Richard Horsey, the spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Bangkok, said, “The donor conference will be a good opportunity for a detailed discussion between the Burmese regime and Asean leaders, as well as the UN, on what is needed right now for relief efforts—what the obstacles are, how to overcome those obstacles—which means not only financial pledges.”
He also said that the recovery would be focused on aspects such as the rehabilitation of the agriculture sector in the delta, which was totally destroyed by Cyclone Nargis on May 2-3.
The main thing about the donor conference is for the international community to see the Burma’s relief needs are met in the short, the medium and the long terms, said Larry Jagan, a British journalist in Bangkok who specializes on Burma.
Expected at the conference is United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Rangoon on Thursday. He is due to travel to the areas worst hit by Cyclone Nargis before meeting the head of the Burmese junta, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, on Friday.
“Aid in Myanmar should not be politicized. Our focus now is on saving lives,” said Ban.
The UN’s highest ranking humanitarian officer, John Holmes, said on Wednesday that the Burmese regime must either say “yes” or “no” to the relief mission. “The scene is set to move in the directions we have spoken about, but we need to see that happening on the ground before we can be absolutely certain about it,” he said.
UN agencies estimate as many as 100,000 people died or missing and at least 2.5 million people have been affected by the tropical cyclone Nargis.
Ahead of Ban Ki-moon trip to Burma, the main opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) said in the May 21 statement that it welcomed the UN secretary-general to Burma.
Asean foreign ministers, including Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win, held a special meeting on Burma’s crisis on May 19 in Singapore. During the meeting, ministers agreed to establish a task force that will closely work with the UN as well as a central coordinating body to be set up by the Burmese regime.
The task force would also “realize the Asean-led mechanism.” At the same time, the regional body called on the Burmese junta to allow more international relief workers into the stricken areas.
However, Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network (Altsean), said that the big problem is getting a commitment of aid, because everyone knows the Burmese regime is the one of the most corrupt one in the world.
“The latest report by Transparency International said Burma and Somalia are the most corrupt countries in the world,” she said.
Stothard said Asean may not be able to do everything, but it must assume leadership and then the rest of the international community could participate.
“Asean’s role is to make sure the aid goes to where is needed”, she said. “If not, the donor conference in Rangoon on Sunday will be only a nice tea party without an outcome.”
This is the collecting news from Irrawaddy.org .But we have one question for that Asean want to save who?SPDC or victims of Nargis ? Since the earlier , what they did for our victims ,Thailand and other Asean countries gave their help aid directly to SPDC.We hard many news about that aid .Do victims of Nargis really received it?Thought they knew about that they are silent.Last a few days ago French , USA ,British try for that poor victims to go their places and to give help aid.Asean started action for to give help aid pass over by them.We are glad and thanks for that but we still have a few questions .Why they didn't care about that victims since the earlier ? How many people were dead for that ignore?For SPDC , they really didn't care about that victims and they just focused on Referendum .Many people have not food , clean water , medicine , enough shelters and also clothes .Some of them are still living in the badly destroyed places and they do for their survive requesting to the travelers beside of the rail way road. They need help at once and not to divide who can go there and who can't go there.We believe every human have chance to give his help and to show his loving kindness to the victims.
ပုဂၢလိက အလႉရွင္မ်ား၏ အကူအညီပစၥည္းမ်ား ရယူႏိုင္ရန္ ကားလမ္းနံေဘးတြင္ ေစာင့္ဆိုင္း ေနထုိင္သည့္ ေလေဘးဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ဖယ္ရွားရွင္းလင္းေနၿပီး အခ်ိဳ႕ကို နမူနာျပ ဖမ္းဆီးအေရးယူေနေၾကာင္း ေကာ့မႉး၊ ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ဘက္မွ ျပန္လာသူမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။
ယခုလ (၁၉) တြင္ ပစၥည္းမ်ား သြားေရာက္လႉဒါန္းခဲ့သူတဦးက “က်ေနာ္တို႔ ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ က ျပန္လာေတာ့ လမ္းမွာ စစ္သားေတြ၊ ရဲေတြက ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို လမ္းေဘးမွာ မေနဖို႔ ေအာ္လံေတြနဲ႔ တားေနတာ ေတြ႕ရတယ္။ အမိန္႔ကို မနာခံရင္ ဖမ္းမယ္၊ တခ်ိဳ႕ေနရာေတြမွာေတာ့ တေယာက္ကို ဒဏ္ေငြ က်ပ္ (၃,၀၀၀) ႐ိုက္မယ္ဆိုၿပီး ေၾကညာတာ ၾကားရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားက စစ္ကားႏွင့္ ရဲမ်ား ခ်ထားသည့္ ေနရာမ်ားတြင္မေနဘဲ အျခားေနရာမ်ား၌ သြား စု႐ံုးၾကကာ စစ္ကားမ်ား ေရာက္လာပါက လမ္းေဘးသုိ႔ ဆင္းေျပးၾကၿပီး စစ္ကားမ်ား လြန္သြား ၿပီးေနာက္ လမ္းေပၚသုိ႔ ျပန္တက္လာၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္နားရွိ ေက်းရြာတရြာ၌ လူ (၂၃) ေယာက္ကို ဖမ္းဆီးေခၚေဆာင္သြားၿပီး ပညာေပး ျပန္လႊတ္လုိက္ေသာ္လည္း ေနာက္ေန႔မ်ားတြင္ ထပ္ဖမ္းမိပါက ျပန္လႊတ္မည္မဟုတ္ဟု ေျပာသည့္ အတြက္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား မေက်မနပ္ျဖစ္ေနၾကေၾကာင္း ပစၥည္းသြားေရာက္လႉဒါန္းသူတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ခံရသည့္ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္း၊ ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္အတြင္း ေက်းရြာမ်ား၌ ျပည္သူအမ်ားအျပား အိုးအိမ္ကၽြဲႏြားမ်ား ဆံုး႐ႈံးၾကၿပီး အမ်ားစုမွာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ ခိုလႈံေနၾကသည္။
အခ်ိဳ႕ရြာသားမ်ားမွာ ၎တုိ႔၏ ရြာမ်ားတြင္ ျဖစ္သလို ျပန္ေနၾကရၿပီး အစိုးရႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေထာက္ပံ့ေရး အကူအညီမ်ား မရရိွေသးေပ။
အဆိုပါ ေက်းရြာမ်ားမွ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားသည္ ၎တုိ႔ေနထိုင္ရာ ေက်းရြာမ်ားသုိ႔ ပုဂၢလိက အလႉရွင္ မ်ား မလာေရာက္သည့္အတြက္ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွ အလႉရွင္အမ်ားအျပား လာေရာက္သည့္ ေကာ့မႉး၊ ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္း ကားလမ္းမ်ားေပၚသုိ႔ တက္ၿပီး အလႉခံၾကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
နအဖ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္းၿမိဳ႕အ၀င္ ေဘာလံုးကြင္း၌ ယာယီတဲ အလံုး (၂၀) ေက်ာ္ ထိုးၿပီး ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကုိ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ထားေသာ္လည္း လုံေလာက္မႈမရိွေပ။
လတ္တေလာတြင္ နအဖ အႀကီးအကဲ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးသန္းေရႊ ေလေဘးဒဏ္ခံ ေဒသမ်ားသုိ႔ လွည့္လည္ၾကည့္႐ႈေနျခင္း၊ ယေန႔တြင္ ကုလသမဂၢ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဘန္ကီမြန္း ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံလာေရာက္ၿပီး ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို လိုက္လံၾကည့္႐ႈရန္ ရွိေနျခင္းတုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔
လမ္းေပၚရွိ ေသာင္းႏွင့္ခ်ီသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို ရွင္းလင္းရန္ ႀကိဳးစားေနျခင္းျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေ၀ဖန္ၾကသည္။
ဖ်ာပံု-ဘိုကေလး ကားလမ္းတေလွ်ာက္၌လည္း ဒုကၡသည္ ေသာင္းႏွင့္ခ်ီ ရွိေနၿပီး နအဖ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စစ္တပ္ႏွင့္ ရဲမ်ားကုိ အသံုးျပဳကာ အဓမၼ ရွင္းလင္းဖယ္ရွားေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ။
