2009 Collective Action Committee(Burma)

A Letter to President Mr.Barack Obama

To:

Mr. Barack Obama

President of the United States of America

Dear Mr. President,

We watched your inauguration and were inspired by the words you spoke. We, the peoples of Burma, are an oppressed people and we long and yearn for freedom. We feel very deeply that those inspiring words of hope, determination and resolve that you uttered with such conviction will help us in our epic struggle. We know that, with you help, someday soon the very values you emphasized during you inauguration will be a reality for all our people.

Today our nation as a whole is suffering from the whims and pangs of a cruel, brazen and ruthless military regime. This regime does not respect the will of the people nor does it protect the citizens of the nation. In fact, they have repeatedly violated those principles you so emphatically espoused during your inauguration and they have relentlessly eroded the very core of human dignity. Their actions are a direct dismissal of those articles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They continually reveal their obstinacy, arrogance and blatant disregard toward these principles, and toward freedom loving democratic nations. This is evident in their outright refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with the democratic forces of the nation, who were excluded from the drafting of the constitution, and confirms their agenda to hold on to power. In this regard, this so-called referendum on the constitution, which they have exclusively designed, is bogus and is only intended to further entrench their power position. This was further revealed in their persistence with this bogus referendum in the midst of one of the worst humanitarian disasters the world has seen. This only confirms their inhumaneness, and their inhumanity toward their fellow country people.

This then is evidence of a regime whose policies are nothing more than self-preservation at the cost of a nation’s wellbeing. They can never be the de jure government as they do not represent the will of the people, nor are they willing to protect the people, which is the very core of responsibility that comes with authority as a government. How then can this brutal and brazen regime be tolerated by democratic nations? This is one of the crucial questions of our age, Mr. President. If we, should we, and must we defeat tyranny and restore democratic values, that which is for the people, by the people and of the people, then we must act with resolve and determination.

Although we know that you are faced with a Herculean task to cleanse the Augean stables, we entrust that you will guide the rivers of truth and integrity to wash away this quagmire that you have inherited. We hope inter alia you will cast your attention to the peoples of Burma who now face a critical year in their struggle to dislodge this fraudulent election that has been planned by the military junta to further enslave the nation.

We thank you for the hope you have given us and we are quietly confident that you will help us in this epic struggle. May God bless and guide you in all that you are about to face.

Yours gratefully,

The 2009 Collective Action Committee(BURMA)

on behalf of all the oppressed peoples of Burma

More information;

http://cacburma.blogspot.com

cacburm@gmail.com

+660897062329

+66 0800293350

AAPP and BWU inadequate health care statement To: Media Statement – for immediate release

Friday 23 January

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) and the Burmese Women's Union today strongly condemned the inadequate health care for political prisoners in Burma's prisons.
23 year-old Kay Thi Aung has recently suffered a miscarriage in O Bo Prison, Mandalay Division, due to lack of adequate medical care in prison. Kay Thi Aung, a member of the All Burma Federation of Students Unions, was arrested on 14 September 2008 in connection with her efforts to provide aid to Cyclone Nargis victims. She was pregnant at the time of her arrest. In December, the regime's courts sentenced her to 26 years in prison.

Nilar Thein, a leading member of the 88 Generation Students Group who was sentenced to 65 years in prison on 11 November 2008, has been suffering from gastric problems in Thayet Prison in Magwe Division. The authorities have not yet granted her proper medical treatment for her condition.

General-Secretary of the Burmese Women's Union Tin Tin Nyo said, "The SPDC signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1997, promising to uphold women's rights. Yet women who are involved in pro-democracy activities are subjected to harsh and cruel punishments such as Kay Thi Aung's 26-year sentence. In her case, the authorities have clearly failed to meet their obligations under Article 12 of the convention, relating to providing adequate health care to women during pregnancy. As a result,
Kay Thi Aung has suffered a terrible loss. She needs urgent medical treatment."

Bo Kyi, Joint-Secretary of AAPP said, "Pregnant women in prisons must be given top priority for medical treatment. Kay Thi Aung's tragic case is a clear example of the regime's neglect of the health and well-being of all political prisoners, even those who need priority treatment. We strongly condemn the regime's systematic neglect of the health care needs of political prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross must be allowed to resume prison visits immediately.

They should be allowed to fulfil their independent, impartial mandate, free of restrictions."

-ENDS-

AAPP and the BWU

An Open Letter to Mr. Barack Obama

To:

Mr. Barack Obama

President of the United States of America

An Open Letter:

Dear Mr. President

We the freedom loving peoples of Burma make this declaration to you on this momentous occasion. Your inauguration represents the triumph of the politics of hope against the politics of fear and division. Today our country is engaged in a great struggle to free ourselves from tyranny and fear. In order to achieve the very principles of democratic values that we harbor in our hearts, the same values you so eloquently espoused in your victory speech with words that aroused our hopes and inspired us, we must persist in our struggle in this critical year 2009.

So many of our fellow country women and men, whose hearts and minds are dedicated to the ideals of democracy, are now languishing in remote prison labor camps far from their homes and loved ones, in atrocious conditions, enduring mental and physical torture and summary executions at the hands of the military. This then is the measure of what the military is willing to do at any given point, and at any cost, in order to stay in power. Thus, military rule has deprived the present of meaningfulness and hold out no hope for the future – so said our leading figure in this struggle, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1990.

Presently, this military has embarked on maneuvering to transform itself into a pseudo-civil government that will secure its power in perpetuity. Hence, it has manipulated, and continues to manipulate, some of these breakaway ethnic groups who have compromised and succumbed to the military’s corrupt ways of persuasion. However, these compromised and corrupted ethnic individuals do not in any way represent the ethnic people’s real need nor their true aspirations to be freed from oppression, tyranny and unjust laws brutally imposed on them, the overwhelming majority within the nation. This goes against the grain of human nature enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

These machinations by the military all point to an intransigent junta bent on holding power for power’s sake only. It is the worst form of tyranny and has become the tragedy of a nation that keeps the people in unending suffering and continuous turmoil, not of their own making.

We the freedom loving peoples therefore seek your help urgently to enact more effective measures and maintain strong sanctions that will force the military to come to the negotiating table and engage in meaningful dialogue with the democratic forces of the nation. The bogus and fraudulent 2010 election planned by the junta is designed to further enslave the peoples of Burma to a cruel and callous regime. Hence, Mr. President, as the present leader of the world’s leading democracy, we are hopefully confident that you will do all in your just power to help us emancipate our country from a military planned system of dominance.

For these cogent reasons, with your help Mr. President, we will be able to reclaim our inalienable rights as members of the human family, living and protected with dignity by the rule of law. We understand that you have a great task ahead of you, but know that you are committed to the principles of freedom and democracy, and that you will help us in our struggle to free ourselves from oppression and tyranny. We wish you and your family well in the future.

May God bless you.

From:

2009 Collective Action Committee (CAC-BURMA), on behalf of all the freedom loving peoples of Burma.

For more information; cacburma@gmail.com

January, 2009

http://cacburma.blogspot.com မွကူးယူေဖၚျပပါသည္။

Posted by ၂၀၀၉ စုစည္း လႈပ္ရွားမႈ ေကာ္မတီ at Tuesday, January 20, 2009 0 comments

A New Year’s Message to all the Peoples of Burma to Rise and be Free from Military Oppression

To all Burma citizens in the country and abroad:

Today is New Year’s Day, a day to celebrate, we wish you well, but our country is not well. We are still suffering under an oppressive military junta. No matter how many New Years may come, we will not be able to truly celebrate until we are free of tyranny.

Should we reflect on 2008, the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis in May killed more than 100,000 in the Delta regions, and over a million were made homeless. The military junta’s response was appalling. It did not allow immediate humanitarian aid or aid workers to enter the country, despite the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the hundreds of villages that were wiped out during the cyclone. This callous and uncaring behavior of the junta exacerbated the situation, and caused even more deaths and suffering for the survivors of the disaster. This was their response to the overwhelming suffering of the peoples of Burma. How can we celebrate while such a brutal regime reigns terror over our nation?

Let us not forget that seven days after the disaster, in spite of the Buddhist tradition of honouring the dead seven days after death, the junta held their bogus referendum. Moreover, after the disaster and this bogus referendum, the military junta stepped up its brutal persecution of political activists, monks, social workers, bloggers and writers, and their lawyers, arresting many and giving out jail sentences from 20 to 65 years. These people were sent to remote prison camps away from their families.

Furthermore, this brutal and brazen military junta is bent on legitimizing itself by pushing on with its fraudulent national elections in 2010. For these and many more valid reasons, we your freedom loving fellow country folk, today, have formed the 2009 Collective Action Committee. We urge you to join us in this momentous struggle. Together we can free ourselves of oppression and tyranny. Rise people of Burma, be active according to your own capacity so that you will be able to impede the so-called elections of 2010.

The main aim of this committee is to impede the forthcoming bogus elections of 2010 in order to expose the very callous and cruel nature of the military rule that has afflicted our beloved motherland for so many decades.

Our committee’s motto is taken from the words of an NLD senior leader, who said:

“Seek not to escape from this conflict – but rather seek to confront it and break through it”.

Hence, we will act to free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners so that we will be able to engage in genuine dialogue and to stop the military orchestrated, bogus election of 2010.

We shall assist as one active group, in order that all freedom loving people can actively participate in this struggle for freedom! To achieve the above ideas, we will render encouragement for unity, advice, and information to all our people for their political activities within the country and abroad.

We urge you to engage in undermining the aims of the junta. Do something on a daily basis that will hinder the junta’s program for their fraudulent election, whether you are an office worker, a civil servant or a soldier, do not follow the orders or rules that are given to you on a daily basis.

This will help us in our struggle to free our country from this oppressive, inhumane, brutal and unjust military regime.

We wish you all the best for this New Year.

2009 Collective Action Committee

For further information: Please contact to cacburma@gmail.com

The Final Act of a DKBA Soldier under the Command of Captain Gadone (Captain Bald).

DKBA Soldiers Marching

The Final Act of a DKBA Soldier under the Command of Captain Gadone (Captain Bald).

By Ka Saw Wah*

Nineteen year old soldier Paw Doh Kho comes from Nan Shwe Min Village, near Kaw Ka Rate Township. Young Paw Doh Kho was forced by the DKBA into the 999 Regiment 1 under the command of Captain Gadone (Captain Bald). On the 28^th of November, 2008, Paw Doh Kho was ordered to go to the front line to fight KNLA Battalion 6. Young Paw Doh Kho knew that, should he follow these orders, he would have to fight his fellow Karen in the KNLA, and he said “I do not want to shoot at my fellow Karen any longer – enough! Should I have to go I would rather shoot myself. Only then will I be at peace.” On that same day he ended his life.

This incident is nothing extraordinary, however, what the young soldier was quoted as saying is something to be reflected on – “I do not want to shoot at my fellow Karen any longer – enough!” These may be the words of an ordinary young man in the army, nevertheless they are thought provoking. Since 1994 this has been the sad story among Karens. All people value their own life. Yet this is not an isolated incident among our Karen nationals. This is why every Karen has a duty to stop such incidences from occurring. I, the writer of this article, have shed many a tear for our Karen people, I cannot stop thinking about this continuing situation. All Karens should be concerned about their fellow Karen nationals and the present situation. It is the duty of all Karens.

The conflict amongst fellow Karen has been a bloody one. Many a life has been destroyed because of it. It is a most unbecoming and undignified thing. Can we not be unified? This has been, and is, a continual question. Many a person has said to me, “Can you Karens not find unity?” Also, I have heard it said “Can you not stop killing each other, isn’t this enough?” What are we going to do about this? If we Karens from all over the world could get together, we could solve this. We can solve this and be freed from this dire situation.

A long time ago one of our great Karen ancestors, Phu Htaw Mae Bah, called his sons and daughters together, he gave them each a bunch of bamboo and told them to try and break it - not one of them could break it. Then he undid the bunch and he gave a single bamboo rod to one of his children and that child was able to break the bamboo in half. He said to them, “Take a bunch of bamboo together and you cannot break it, but take one stick of bamboo by itself and it is easily broken”. He then said, “You see my children, when you are united, when you are together, you cannot be broken, you cannot be corrupted, and you cannot be destroyed. Therefore, if you are not united, you can be broken, corrupted and destroyed. That is why I say to you my children, be united, stand together and you shall not suffer from the disarray that comes with disunity.”

This is what our ancestor told us. Hence, we the living today, our Karen brothers and sisters all over the world, even though we say lets be united, if we don’t find a way to do it we will never be able to achieve unity. So let us exchange our ideas, let us communicate our thoughts, only then shall we, as a collective, bring about peace and unity for our peoples. Then Paw Doh Kho’s death will not have been in vain. I, Ka Saw Wah, urge you all to be united, let us be one and this problem can be solved.

*Ka Saw Wah is one of the present leaders of the KNLA.

Translated by Saffron Group

DKBA ၉၉၉ တပ္ရင္း(၁) ဗိုလ္ကတံုး လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္သား ဖားဒို႕ခို

မိမိကိုယ္ မိမိ အဆံုးစီရင္ျခင္းအေၾကာင္း

ဖားဒို႕ခို ၁၉ႏွစ္ ေကာ့ကရိတ္ၿမိဳ႕အနီး နန္းေရႊမင္ ေက်ုးရြာတြင္ေနပါတယ္။ ၂၈.၁၁.၀၈ ေန႕တြင္ ဖားဒို႕ခိုသည္ တပ္မဟာ(၆) ဘက္သို႕ေရွ႕တန္းသြားရမည္။ ေရွ႕တန္းသို႕ သြားလွ်င္ ေကအင္ယူႏွင့္ တိုက္ရမည္။ထို႕ေၾကာင့္ သူေျပာသည္ ။

“ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအခ်င္းခ်င္းေတာ့ မပစ္ခ်င္ေတာ့ဘူး။ေတာ္ၿပီ အကယ္၍ တကယ္ သြားရရင္ေတာ့ ငါ့ကိုယ္ငါ ျပန္ပစ္သတ္မယ္။ ဒါမွ ေအးမယ္”

ဟု ေျပာခဲ့သည္။ ဤေန႕တြင္ပဲ သူ႕ကိုယ္သူ အဆံုးစီရင္လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ဖားဒို႕ခိုသည္ ဒီေကဘီေအဘိုကတံုး အမိန္႕အရ ဒီေကဘီေအတပ္ထဲသို႕ အတင္းအဓမၼ သြတ္သြင္း ခိုင္းေစခံရသူ တဦးျဖစ္သည္။

ဤျဖစ္စဥ္သည္ ရိုးရိုးစဥ္းစားလွ်င္ ရိုးရိုးေလးပဲ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ သူေျပာသြားတဲ့ စကားရပ္ေလး တခုမွာ စဥ္းစားစရာေတြ ျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။

“ကရင့္အမ်ိဳးသား အခ်င္းခ်င္းမပစ္ခ်င္ေတာ့ဘူး”

ဆိုတဲ့ စကားဟာ အညတရ လူငယ္ေလးတဦး၏ ရင္တြင္း၌ ဘယ္အတိုင္းအတာအထိေလာင္ကၽြမ္းခဲ့ သလဲဆိုတာ စာဖတ္သူတိုင္း စဥ္းစား ခံစားလို႕ ရပါတယ္။လူသားတိုင္းဟာ ကိုယ့္အသက္ကို ကိုယ္အခ်စ္ဆံုးပါ။စာေရးသူကိုယ္တိုင္ အမ်ိဳးသားေရး မွာ အႀကိမ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ မ်က္ရည္က်ခဲ့ရဘူးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အမ်ိဳးသားေရးမွာ ဟန္႕တားလို႕မရပါ။

ကရင့္အမ်ိုးသားေရးသည္ ကရင့္အမိ်ဳးသားတိုင္းမွာ တာဝန္ရွိ၏။ကရင့္မ်ိဳးသား အခ်င္းခ်င္း ပ႗ိပကၡ ျဖစ္မႈတြင္ ဖားဒို႕ခို လုပ္ရပ္ႏွင့္ မတူေပမယ့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားစြာရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလမွ စ၍ ယေန႕တိုင္ ယူႀကံဳး မရသည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားစြာ ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဤအနိဌာရံု ျဖစ္ရပ္မ်ား ရပ္စဲပစ္ရန္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕ ကရင္ အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ား ဘယ္လို ဝိုင္းဝန္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ ၾကမည္နည္း။

ကရင္ အမ်ိဳးသား အခ်င္းခ်င္း ပ႗ိပကၡမႈေၾကာင့္ အသက္ေသြး ေခၽြးမ်ားစြာ စေတးခဲ့ရၿပီ။ ကရင့္ တမ်ိဳးသားလံုး မ်က္ႏွာ ညိဳးႏြမ္းခဲ့ရၿပီ။ မင္းတို႔ ကရင္ညီညြတ္ေအာင္ လုပ္လို႕မရဘူးလား။ ဤကဲ့သို႕ အေမးခံရသည္။ ဒီေလာက္ သတ္ၾကတာ ေတာ္ၿပီေပါ့။ ဤကဲ့သို႕ လည္း အေျပာခံရသည္။

အဲဒီေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕ မည္ကဲ့သို႕ လုပ္ၾကမည္နည္း။တဦးေကာင္း တေယာက္ေကာင္း လုပ္လို႕ မရပါ။ ကမာၻတဝွမ္းလံုးရွိ ကရင့္တမ်ိဳးသားလံုး စည္းလံုးညီညြတ္စြာ ဝိုင္းဝန္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကေသာ္ ကရင္ တမ်ိဳးသားလံုး လိုလား ေတာင့္တေနသည့္ ကရင့္ အမ်ိဳးသား ေသြးစည္း ညီညြတ္ေရးကို ရရွိမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ တဆက္တည္းမွာပဲ ကရင့္အမ်ိုးသားမ်ားလည္း ေန႔တဒူဝ ကိစၥေတြကို ခါးစည္းၿပီး ခံေနရတဲ့ ဘဝမွ လြတ္ေျမာက္ မွာျဖစ္တယ္။

ဟိုးေရွးေရွးတုန္းက ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕အဖိုး ဖူးေထာမဲ့ပါက သူ႕သားသမီးမ်ားကို ေခၚၿပီး ဝါးေလးေတြ တေယာက္ တပိုင္းစီ ယူလာ ခိုင္းပါတယ္။ သားသမီးမ်ား ေရာက္ေတာ့ ဝါးပိုင္းေလးေတြစုစည္းၿပီး အစည္းျဖစ္ေအာင္ ခ်ီခိုင္းထားၿပီး တေယာက္ၿပီးတေယာက္ ခ်ိိဳးခိုင္းတယ္။က်ိဳးေအာင္ခ်ိဳးခိုင္းတယ္။ ခ်ိဳးလို႕မရပါ။

ေနာက္ အဖိုးက - ဝါစည္းးကိုျဖည္ခိုင္းသည္။ဝါးစည္းေျပ သြားၿပီး အဖိုးက သားတေယာက္ကို ေျပာတယ္။

“ကဲ- မင္းအဲဒီ အစည္းေျပ သြားတဲ့ ဝါးေခ်ာင္းတေခ်ာင္း ေကာက္ၿပီးခ်ိဳးၾကည့္စမ္း။” သားတေယာက္က ထင္းေခ်ာင္းေလးကို ေကာက္ခ်ဳိုးလိုက္တယ္။ ဝါးပိုင္းေလး က်ိဳးသြားတယ္။

ထို႕ေနာက္ အဖိုိးေထာ့မဲ့ပါက သားသမီးမ်ားကို ဤကဲ့သို႕ မွာၾကားခဲ့ပါသည္။

“ကဲ သားတို႕ သမီးတို႕ ျမင္တဲ့ အတိုင္းပဲ အစည္းျဖစ္တဲ့ ဝါးပိုင္းေလးေတြကို မင္းတို႕ ခ်ိဳးလို႕ မရဘူး။အစည္းေျပသြားတဲ့ ဝါးပိုင္းေလးေတြကို တေခ်ာင္းစီ ေကာက္ၿပီး ခ်ိဳးလို႕ရတယ္။ အဲဒီ ဥပမာေလးကို အတုယူၾကပါ။ မင္းတို႕ စည္းစည္းလံုးလံုး ညီညီညြတ္ညြတ္ ရွိၾကမယ္ဆိုလွ်င္ ဘယ္သူမွ ဖ်က္ဆီးလို႕မရဘူး။ မင္းတို႕ညီအကို ေမာင္ႏွမေတြ စည္းလံုးမႈ မရွိဘူး၊ နားလည္မႈ မရွိၾကဘူး၊ အကြဲကြဲ အျပားျပား ျဖစ္ၾကမယ္ဆိုလွ်င္ သူမ်ား အႏိုင္က်င့္ ခံရမယ္။ ဘဝ အခက္အခဲ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ႀကံဳၾကရမယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သားသမီးအားလံုး ဥမကြဲ သိုက္မပ်က္ စည္းလံုး ညီညြတ္စြာ အသက္ရွင္ ေနထိုင္ၾကပါလို႕”အဖိုးက မွာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ကဲ အဖိုးကေတာ့ မွာၾကားခဲ့ၿပီးၿပီ။ ဒီေတာ့ ယၡဳအသက္ရွင္ က်န္ေနေသးတဲ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕ ညီအကို ေမာင္ႏွမ တေတြ ဘယ္လိုလုပ္ၾကမလဲ။ ကိုယ့္ေနရာမွာ ကိုယ္ထိုင္ၿပီး စည္းလံုး ညီညြတ္ၾကပါလို႕ သြားေျပာလို႕ မရဘူး။ အႀကံေကာင္း ဥာဏ္ေကာင္းေတြ တင္ျပၾကပါ။ သေဘာထား အျမင္ေတြ တင္ျပၾကပါ။ ေတြ႕ဆံုၾကပါ၊ ေဆြးေႏြးၾကပါ၊ အေျဖရွာွၾကပါ၊ ဒါမွသာ နားလည္မႈ ရရွိၾကမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဖားဒို႕ခိုတေယာက္ ေကာင္းရာသုဂတိ လားပါေစ

ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ား စည္းလံုးညီညြတ္ၾကပါေစ

(ကေဆာဝါး)

ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ ကေဆာဝါးသည္ လက္ရွိ ေကအန္အယ္ေအတြင္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ တဦးျဖစ္ပါသည္။

"We thought we were all going to die"

MYANMAR-THAILAND: Min Min U, Myanmar: "We thought we were all going to die"

Photo: Greg Lowe/IRIN

In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, Min Min U and his wife migrated to Thailand in search of a better life

MAE SOT, 19 November 2008 (IRIN) - Min Min U, 24, from the village of Betut in Labutta Township, deep in the heart of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta, recalls the day Cyclone Nargis struck, prompting him and his wife to migrate to the Thai border town of Mae Sot:

"The winds started to blow at around 2pm on 2 May. They were quite strong, but nothing out of the ordinary for that time of year. After a couple of hours we thought it might get worse, so my family collected our belongings and took them inside the house.

"At around 5pm the winds became stronger still. Everyone moved to shelter in our rice store. Only I stayed in the house.

"We lived next to a big creek and the storm was making the water level rise. After a while our boats started to blow against the house. It was deafening. The house shook so violently that it started to lean over and collapse.

"I was very frightened, so I ran to the rice store. By then, about 100 people from my village were sheltering there. It was very crowded and noisy. People were crying, the children were screaming.

"Everyone was sitting on the wooden beams under the roof, because the store was full of rice and the water was rising. But eventually the wind ripped the roof off.

"We were terrified. We thought we were all going to die. But all we could do was sit on the remaining shattered pieces of wood in the torrential rain.

Read more Asia testimonies

MYANMAR: Kyaw Sein: “I don’t know how I will survive”

MYANMAR: Aye Yin, Myanmar: “I pray we won’t starve to death”

"By the time it was light, the storm had stopped and the water level had dropped to normal. All we could see was devastation. My house was completely destroyed.

"I built a shelter for my wife and I. No one from the police or army came to our village, so after 10 days living off old rice and coconuts we went to Labutta.

"We stayed at a monastery where the monks built temporary shelters and were doing what they could to give out food and help to survivors.

"A group of monks from near Myawaddy [in Kayin state near the border with Thailand] was helping. They listened to my story. I told them how we'd lost everything, our house was destroyed, and we had no work. We didn't know what to do.

"One of them said a lot of Burmese people went to Mae Sot. He told us how to get there, and gave me the name of a group, the Arakan Workers' Union [AWU], that would help us.

"I had some money, and we sold everything else we could, even our wedding rings, to pay for the trip.

"It took us more than three days by bus to travel from Labutta to Yangon, and on up to Myawaddy.

"We crossed the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge to Mae Sot on 3 July.

"Things are okay here. We feel safer and we have food and a place to stay. AWU is teaching us Thai, and how to sew, so we can get work in a local factory.

"We really just want to go home. But as our livelihood in Betut has been destroyed, and there aren't any jobs, how would we survive?"

A Moment of Nothingness by Min Ko Naing( wrote in Sittwe Prison )

A Moment of Nothingness by Min Ko Naing

A Moment of Nothingness
By Min Ko Naing - 88 Student Leader
Courtesy: All Burma Federation of Students

Being a dragon - evolving from having been a snake,
However there is no dragon crest to raise high.
Having imprinted configurations
On ones’ palms,
Yet there is no sign of luck to be proud of.

Everybody enters the race in the river
through their own preparation,
However, when one meets the waterfall unexpectedly,
Some ‘free-riders’ downstream scream in shock,
And some struggling upstream against the tide finally become helpless.

Numbers are increasing year after year,
However, there is no actual age to show people.

It could be still be called a life
Because we are still living and struggling,
However, there is no actual meaning to express.

Original Message-Poem

Whislt at Sittwe Prison
Smuggled out of jail by another political prisoner.
To show, where there is a will there is a way...
the TRUTH finds its way OUT

(www.jegsburma.blogspot.com မွ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။)

Message from U Win Tin ဦးဝင္းတင္၏ သဝဏ္လႊာ

by SEAPA
Saturday, 15 November 2008 20:38

The following is the transcript of a pre-recorded message by recently released Burmese journalist U Win Tin. The video was first shown during the 10th Anniversary Celebration of SEAPA on 8 November 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand.

To my fellow journalists in Southeast Asia: A speech by U Win Tin

It has been a long time I was ousted from my profession as I was jailed by the military regime for my activities in the fields of press freedom, democracy and human rights. I passed through two decades of imprisonment. Those are the gloomiest days for my long professional life.

During our long struggle many of my journalist comrades also were persecuted by the military regime along with all other political dissidents all over the country. Tens of my close colleagues, including famous journalist writer Maung Thaw Ka, perished in inhumanly tormented prison-camps. Some like me were released after suffering long years of languishing in the hellish prison cells. There are still many journalists and writers suffering untold miseries in the jails. Some of them might have gone incapacitated mentally as well as physically, or few of them might have been dead. We got very scant information about our comrades scattered all over the country in far out camps.

While we were behind bars, we were prohibited to write, to read, or for some even to talk to others.

We were put out of prison, but we were not being blinded. We had seen the light, however dim and scant at the end of the tunnel all the time. We saw the light in the form of news and messages. We made out all of them into news bulletin. Political prisoners as well as ordinary convicts were informed, encouraged and enlightened. Volatile political activities and protest deliberations resulted.

On my release from jail, political persecutions, economic exploitations, social discriminations, cultural disintegrations, human rights violations are found everywhere.

In these times, power and prestige of the press grew immense around the world. But it is not a universal reality. I learn few hard facts that many members of the press in Burma are still discriminated, persecuted and imprisoned. They are being sued and suppressed and even murdered in many countries in Southeast Asia, Asia, Africa, etc. all over the world. Unlike in all other countries, press men in Burma are pressured by repressive laws, and threatened with involvement in terrorism, official secrecy or national security matters.

These are the situations we still have to face today in Burma. We have to fight for democracy and free expression very hard. We still have to struggle for freedom of press and upholding of human rights. This is the struggle, we, all the journalists in Southeast Asia still continue to strive to the end.

I greet the 10th anniversary celebrations of Southeast Asian Press Alliance. It is a great moment of joy for all the free and independent journalists, especially fettered and oppressed journalists in Burma today.

Let us never forget the oneness of our common freedom of press struggle.

Long live Southeast Asian Press Alliance.

ဦးဝင္းတင္၏ သဝဏ္လႊာ

ေဆာင္းပါး
SEAPA
တနဂၤေႏြေန႔၊ ႏုိဝင္ဘာလ 16 2008 18:21 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္


ေအာက္ပါသဝဏ္လႊာသည္ မၾကာခင္က ေထာင္မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေသာ ျမန္မာ သတင္းစာဆရာၾကီး ဦးဝင္းတင္၏ ၾကိဳတင္ အသံသြင္းယူ ရိုက္ကူးထားေသာ သဝဏ္လႊာကို ျပန္လည္ ေရးကူးထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဤဗြီဒီယိုေခြကို ထိုင္း ႏိုင္ငံ ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမ့ဳိ တြင္ ၂ဝဝ၈ ခုႏွစ္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၈ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပခဲ့ေသာ SEAPA ၏ ၁ဝ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ အစည္းအေဝးတြင္ စတင္ျပသခဲ့ပါသည္။

ဦးဝင္းတင္၏ မိန္႔ခြန္း
အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွမွ ေရာင္းရင္း သတင္းစာဆရာမ်ား ခင္ဗ်ား ...

က်ေနာ့္ရဲ့ စာနယ္ဇင္း လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီန႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး တိုက္ပြဲဝင္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ စစ္အစိုးရက က်ေနာ့္ကို အက်ဥ္းခ်ထားခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ က်ေနာ့္ရဲ့ သတင္းစာလုပ္ငန္းကို မလုပ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့တာ အေတာ္ၾကာခဲ့ပါၿပီ။ က်ေနာ္ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ ၂ ခုစာမွ် ေထာင္ထဲမွာ ေနခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ့္ရဲ့ ရွည္ၾကာလွတဲ့ သတင္းစာဆရာဘဝမွာ ဒီကာလဟာ စိတ္ပ်က္စရာ အေကာင္းဆံုး ကာလေတြပါဘဲ။

ရွည္ၾကာလွတဲ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ရဲ့ တိုက္ပြဲအတြင္းမွာ အျခားႏိုင္ငံတဝွမ္းက ႏိုင္ငံေရး အတိုက္အခံမ်ားနဲ႔အတူ က်ေနာ့္ရဲ့ သတင္းစာဆရာ ရဲေဘာ္ အမ်ားအျပားလည္း စစ္အစိုးရရဲ့ ညႇဥ္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းကို ခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ နာမည္ေက်ာ္သတင္း စာဆရာ စာေရးဆရာ ေမာင္ေသာ္က အပါအဝင္ က်ေနာ့္ရဲ့ ရင္းႏွီးတဲ့ သတင္းစာဆရာမိတ္ေဆြ ဆယ္ဂဏန္းအခ်ဳိ႔ ဟာ ေထာင္တြင္း လူမဆန္တဲ့ ညႇဥ္းပန္းမႈဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ၾကရပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ့္လို တခ်ဳိ႔ေသာ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားကေတာ့ ငရဲခန္းလို တိုက္ခန္းက်ဥ္းေလးေတြထဲမွာ ႏွစ္ရွည္လမ်ား အက်ဥိးခ်ခံရၿပီးမွ ျပန္လည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ခုခ်ိန္ ထိသတင္းစာဆရာ အမ်ားအျပားနဲ႔ စာေရးဆရာ အမ်ားအျပား ေထာင္ေတြထဲမွာ လူမသိေသးတဲ့ ဆင္းရဲဒုကၡမ်ဳိးစံုကို ခံစားေနၾကရဆဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ထဲက တခ်ဳိ႔ကေတာ့ ႐ုပ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာအရ၎၊ စိတ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာအရ၎ မစြမ္းမသန္ ျဖစ္သြားခဲ့ၾကရပါတယ္၊ တခ်ဳိ႔ကေတာ့ ေသဆံုးသြားခဲ့ၾကရပါတယ္။ တႏိုင္ငံလံုးအႏွံ႔ ျပန္႔ၾကဲေနတဲ့ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ေတြက ရဲေဘာ္ သတင္းစာဆရာေတြရဲ့ သတင္းေတြကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ တိုေရရွားေရသာ ရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ထဲမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔စာေရး၊ စာဖတ္ခြင့္ မရခဲ့ၾကပါဘူး၊ အျခားအက်ဥ္းသားေတြနဲ႔ စကားေျပာခြင့္ေလး ေတာင္မရခဲ့ပါ။

က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို ေထာင္ထဲထည့္ ဒုကၡေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္၊ ဒါေပမဲ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ မကန္းေသးပါဘူး။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ဘဲ မွိန္ေဖ်ာ့ေနပါေစ၊ ဘယ္ေလာက္ဘဲ ေသးငယ္ပါေစ၊ လိႈဏ္ဂူအဝက အလင္းေရာင္ကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အၿမဲျမင္ေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီအလင္းေရာင္ဆိုတာကို သတင္းေတြ၊ သတင္းစကားေတြ အျဖစ္နဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ျမင္ေတြ႔ခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။ ဒီသတင္းေတြ အကုန္လံုးကိုစုၿပီး က်ေနာ္တို႔ သတင္းစဥ္ေလးတခု ျဖစ္ေအာင္လုပ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းစဥ္ေလးနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြ၊ ဘဝတူ သာမန္ရာဇဝတ္ အက်ဥ္းသားေတြကို သတင္းေတြ ျပန္ၾကားအသိေပးပါတယ္၊ အားေပးပါတယ္၊ အသိအျမင္ တိုးပြါးေစပါတယ္။ ဒီအက်ဳိးေၾကာင့္ မတည္ၿငိမ္တဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြ၊ ဆႏၵျပဘို ႔ေဆြးေႏြးတိုင္ပင္ ႏိုင္တာေတြကို လုပ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

က်ေနာ္ ေထာင္ကလြတ္လာေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ ညႇဥ္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္တာေတြ၊ စီးပြါးေရးအရ အျမတ္ထုတ္တာေတြ၊ လူမႈေရးအရ ခြဲျခား ဆက္ဆံတာေတြ၊ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ၿပိဳကြဲေနတာေတြ၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္တာေတြကို ႏိုင္ငံတြင္းမွာ ေနရာအႏွံ႔အျပား ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။

အခုကာလဟာ စာနယ္ဇင္းလုပ္ငန္းရဲ့ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာနဲ႔ၾသဇာ ကမၻာတဝွမ္းမွာ အၾကီးအက်ယ္ တက္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္ပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ဒါဟာ တေလာကလံုး လက္ေတြ႔ဘဝေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာျပည္ စာနယ္ဇင္းလုပ္ငန္းက သတင္းစာဆရာ အမ်ားအျပားဟာ ခုထိ ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံ ခံေနရတံုးဘဲ၊ ညႇဥ္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ခံေနရတံုး၊ အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံေနရတံုးဘဲ ဆိုတဲ့ခါးသီးတဲ့ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြကုိ က်ေနာ္ သိလာပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ဟာ အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွက ႏုိင္ငံအမ်ားအျပား၊ အာရွ၊ အာဖရိကနဲ႔ တကမၻာလံုးမွာ တရားစြဲခံေနရတံုး၊ ႏွိမ္နင္းခံေနရတံုး၊ တခ်ဳိ႔ဆိုရင္ သတ္ျဖတ္တာ ေတာင္ခံေနၾကရတံုးပါ ဘဲ။ တျခားႏိုင္ငံေတြနဲ႔ မတူဘဲ၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက သတင္းသမားေတြကေတာ့ ဖိႏွိပ္ေရး ဥပေဒေတြရဲ့ ဖိအားေပးမႈကုိ ခံေနၾကရပါတယ္။ အမ်ဳိးသား လံုျခံဳေရး ကိစၥေတြ၊ အစိုးရ လွ်ဳိ႔ဝွက္ခ်က္ ေပါက္ၾကားမႈေတြ၊ အၾကမ္းဘက္သမားေတြဆိုတဲ့ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔ ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္ခံေနၾကရပါတယ္။

ဒါေတြဟာ ကေန႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရဆဲ အေျခအေနေတြပါ။ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးနဲ႔ သတင္းစာ လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္အတြက္ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ ဆက္လက္ တိုက္ပြဲဝင္ရပါဦးမယ္။ ဒီတိုက္ပြဲဟာ အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွက စာနယ္ဇင္းသမားေတြ အားလံုး အဆံုးတိုင္ ဆက္လက္ၾကိဳးပန္းရမဲ့ တိုက္ပြဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွ သတင္းစာသမဂၢ (SEAPA) ရဲ့ ၁ဝ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ အခမ္းအနားကို က်ေနာ္ ၾကိဳဆို ႏႈတ္ခြန္းဆက္လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ အခ်ဳပ္အခ်ယ္ကင္းၿပီး လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ သတင္းစာဆရာအားလံုး၊ အထူးသျဖင့္ ယေန႔ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ဖိႏွိပ္ခံ၊ ထူးခတ္ခံ စာနယ္ဇင္းသမားေတြ အားလံုးအတြက္ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ဘြယ္ အခ်ိန္ကာတရပ္လဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ရဲ့ သတင္းစာ လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ဆိုတဲ့ တခုတည္းေသာ ဘံုတိုက္ပြဲကို ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေမ့ၾကပါနဲ။

အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွ သတင္းသမဂၢ အဓၶန္႔ရွည္ပါေစ။

Barack Obama's message of change for Burma

Wednesday, 05 November 2008 12:26
Barack Obama won an historic presidential election. He became the 44th U.S. President just four years after he won a seat in the United States Senate from the State of Illinois. Throughout his quest for the presidency, his campaign has focused on one word – change. Between 2004 and 2008, President-elect Barack Obama had two opportunities to deliver his message of change for Burma, and he did deliver it.

The first opportunity was during the Saffron Revolution. In September, 2007, Obama issued a strong statement condemning the Burmese military regime's inhumane attacks on peaceful demonstrators in his capacity as a U.S. Senator. In his statement, he called on the regime to release Aung San Suu Kyi and to begin national reconciliation.

The second was in the wake of Cyclone Nargis. He called the tragedy in Burma heartbreaking. In May 2008, he joined Senator John Kerry for a Senate resolution on calling for humanitarian aid for Cyclone Nargis' victims.

In addition, Vice President-elect Joe Biden has been a longtime supporter of Burma's democracy movement. In July 2008, Congress passed the Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE (Junta's Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act under his leadership. Biden said, "I look forward to the day when a democratic, peaceful Burma will be fully integrated into the community of nations."As Vice President, Biden will strengthen Obama's message for change in Burma.

The voters who elected Obama, however, were far more focused on the economy than on foreign affairs.

The financial meltdown as well as a rise in unemployment has given him a chance to take the U.S. in a new direction. The Obama administration must immediately launch a plan for economic recovery in the first 100 days after his inauguration on January 20, 2009. It appears the 44th president's domestic agenda, such as energy independence, health care, education and more, will significantly occupy his four years in the White House, much as was the case with former President Bill Clinton. If he does well, the chance for reelection in 2012 is promising. Despite these efforts, President Obama will also have to deal significantly on the international scene as well.

In fact, the Obama administration will try to end the war in Iraq, and continue to pursue al-Qaeda. These will be his main foreign policy priorities. As such, human rights and promoting democracy may not even rise to be a mid-level agenda during his first term at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. However, it appears likely that he will want to deal with the genocide in Darfur that has touched his mind and heart since 2005. In this scenario, the new administration will have to talk to China, a key ally of Sudan. If that is the case, the White House could also raise the issue of Burma at the same time. Obama will be able to kill two birds with one stone.

Samantha Power, Obama's former foreign policy adviser, doesn't believe the current UN approach towards Burma will produce a tangible result. In October 2007, she wrote in the Time that "history has shown that envoys rarely succeed unless the Security Council is united behind them." She further suggested a multilateral approach towards China.

Obama, Biden, and Power share the same policy: Multilateralism.

Obama has supported economic sanctions against Burma He has backed President Bush's actions as well as his rhetoric on Burma. However, he has a fundamental difference with the Bush administration on how to approach Burma itself. He sees Bush's approach as one of unilateralism. This difference in foreign policy approach was reflected by Obama's opposition to the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003. Instead, Obama will likely pursue a multilateral approach; that is working together with ASEAN, the European Union, Japan, India, and China. Indeed, Obama suggests the United States should lead these key international players on Burma in a multilateral effort.

President-elect Obama has a clear message of change for Burma's opposition groups too. His statement in September was that change must come from within Burma.

Unless change begins from within Burma, it appears likely that Obama's hands might be too tied to act. While he believes in change for Burma, it is up to the people of Burma to create the opportunity for him to act.

Obama Statements on Burma

Searched For: Burma Results 1 - 10 of 11.

1. Senator Obama Statement on Burma | US Senator Barack Obama

... Senator Obama Statement on Burma. ... "The people of Burma have endured terrible oppression under that country''s brutal military junta. ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/070926-senator_obama_s_1/-7k

2. Obama Statement on the Situation in Burma | US Senator Barack ...

... Obama Statement on the Situation in Burma. Monday, October 1, 2007. ... Meanwhile, President Bush is right to try to increase pressure on Burma's repressive regime. ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/071001-obama_statement_88/-7k

3. Obama Joins Kerry Resolution on Humanitarian Aid for Burma | US ...

... Obama Joins Kerry Resolution on Humanitarian Aid for Burma. Thursday, May 8, 2008. Printable Format. ... "The tragedy in Burma is heartbreaking," said Obama. ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080508-obama_joins_ker_1/-14k

4. Statement of Senator Barack Obama on the 63rd Birthday of Daw Aung ...

... WASHINGTON, DC - US Senator Barack Obama today released the following statement on the 63rd birthday of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma: ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080619-statement_of_se_39/-8k

5. Obama Statement on the Continued Detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in ...

... Obama Statement on the Continued Detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Tuesday, June 19, 2007. Printable Format. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Ben LaBolt. ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/070619-obama_statement_68/-7k

6. Statement of Senator Barack Obama on the ASEAN Regional Forum ...

... I remain particularly concerned about conditions in Burma. I commend ASEAN for its attempts to reach the suffering people in southern ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080724-statement_of_se_49/-10k

7. Obama Encourages President to Urge Tibet Resolution | US Senator ...

... including denuclearization of North Korea, ending Iran's nuclear program, stopping the genocide in Darfur, confronting repression in Burma, and combating ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080328-obama_encourage_1/-11k

8. Statement of Senator Barack Obama on the US Visit of Philippine ...

... Together, we must address many challenges going forward, including the future of ASEAN, the continuing tragedy in Burma, implementation of recently-authorized ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080624-statement_of_se_43/-10k

9. Statement of Senator Barack Obama on International Human Rights ...

... The hundreds of thousands killed and two million displaced by the genocide in Darfur; the shell-shocked Buddhist monks in Burma; the political opposition in ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/071210-statement_of_se_12/-13k

10. Obama Joins Senators Feinstein and Smith, Bipartisan Group of ...

... Unfortunately, China instead has engaged in a harsh repression of the people of Tibet, adding to their already negative influence in the crackdown in Burma. ...

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080407-obama_joins_sen_1/-17k 11. Barack Obama - US Senator for Illinois ... Senator Obama voted in favor of the measure, which passed by a vote of 92 to 6. Obama Joins Kerry Resolution on Humanitarian Aid for Burma. May 8, 2008. ...

ဘားရက္ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး သူ႔သေဘာထား

ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔၊ ႏုိဝင္ဘာလ 05 2008 18:00 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္

ေမြးေန႔ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၄ ရက္၊ ၁၉၆၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဇာတိ ဟိုႏိုလူလူ၊ ဟာဝိုင္ရီ ေမြးအမည္ ဘားရက္ ဟူစိန္ အိုဘားမား လူမ်ဳိး အာဖရိကန္ - အေမရိကန္ ပါတီ ဒီမိုကရက္ ဇနီး မစ္ခ်ယ္လီ အိုဘားမား (၁၉၉၂ လက္ထပ္) သားသမီး မာလီယာ အန္ (သမီး၊ ၁၉၉၈ ေမြး) နာတာရွာ (ဆာစ္ဟာ) (သမီး၊ ၂ဝဝ၁) ေနရပ္ ခ်ီကာကို၊ အီလီႏြိဳက္ျပည္နယ္ ပညာေရး ဟားဗတ္ဥပေဒေက်ာင္း၊ ကိုလံဘီယာတကၠသိုလ္၊ ေအာစီဒင္တယ္ေကာလိပ္ ကိုးကြယ္သည့္ ဘာသာ ပရိုတက္စတင့္ ခရစ္ယာန္ ငယ္စဥ္ဘ၀ ဟာ၀ိုင္ရီရွိ အေမရိကန္တကၠသိုလ္ University of Hawaii at Manoa အတြင္းရွိ ႏုိင္ငံျခားသား ေက်ာင္းသားတဦးျဖစ္သည့္ ကင္ညာႏိုင္ငံသား လူမည္းလူမ်ဳိး ဖခင္ ဘားရက္ ဟူစိန္ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္ ေဒသခံ Kansas နယ္မွ အေမရိကန္ လူျဖဴလူမ်ဳိး မိခင္ Ann Dunham တို႔ လက္ထပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ျဖစ္လာမည့္ ဘားရက္ အိုဘားမားကို ေမြးဖြားခဲ့သည္။ အိုဘားမား ၂ ႏွစ္အရြယ္တြင္ မိဘမ်ား ကြာရွင္းခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဖခင္မွာ ကင္ညာႏုိင္ငံသို႔ ျပန္သြားခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၈၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူ ဆိုင္ကယ္ မေတာ္တဆမႈ ျဖစ္ပြားကာ ေသဆံုးသည္အထိ ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူႏွင့္ အိုဘားမားမွာ တႀကိမ္သာ ေတြ႔ဆုံခဲ့ရသည္။ မိခင္မွာ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားလူမ်ဳိး လုိလို ဆိုးတိုရိုႏွင့္ လက္ထပ္ခဲ့ကာ ၆ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ သားငယ္ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္အတူ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံသို႔ ၁၉၆၇ ခုႏွစ္ ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ေနထုိင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏိုင္ငံ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ဂ်ာကာတာတြင္ ၁၀ ႏွစ္အရြယ္အထိ ေက်ာင္းေနခဲ့ရသည္။ ၁၉၇၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မိခင္ဘက္မွ အဘိုးအဘြားမ်ားရွိရာ ဟာ၀ိုင္ရီသို႔ သြားေရာက္ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ဟာ၀ိုင္ရီရွိ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္း တခုျဖစ္သည့္ Punahou ေက်ာင္းတြင္ ၅ တန္းမွ ၁၉၇၉ ခုႏွစ္ ေက်ာင္းၿပီးသည္အထိ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ မိခင္မွာ ဟာ၀ိုင္ရီသို႔ ျပန္လာကာ အခ်ိန္အတန္ၾကာ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္အတူ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး၊ သူ၏ ေဒါက္တာဘြဲ႔အတြက္ သုေတသနျပဳလုပ္ရန္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားသို႔ ျပန္လည္ ၀င္ေရာက္ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သားအိမ္ကင္ဆာေရာဂါျဖင့္ မိခင္ကြယ္လြန္သည္။ အိုဘားမားသည္ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္း တက္ေရာက္စဥ္ ေဆးေျခာက္၊ ကိုကင္းႏွင့္ အရက္မ်ား သံုးစြဲခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ လူထုေဟာေျပာပြဲတြင္ ၀န္ခံခဲ့ၿပီး စာရိတၱေရးရာပ်က္စီးမႈ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ဖူးေၾကာင္း ၀န္ခံခဲ့သည္။ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းအၿပီး ကယ္လီဖိုးနီးယားျပည္နယ္၊ ေလာ့စ္အိန္ဂ်ယ္လိစ္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ Occidental College တြင္ သြားေရာက္ ပညာသင္ၾကားခဲ့သည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ နယူးေယာက္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ Columbia University သို႔ ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ပညာသင္ၾကားခဲ့ၿပီး၊ သူ႔တြင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဆက္ဆံေရး ပညာရပ္ အထူးျပဳေလ့လာကာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသိပၸံျဖင့္ B.A ဘြဲ႔ကို ၁၉၈၃ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရရွိခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၈၃ ႏွစ္ဦးပိုင္းမွ စတင္ၿပီး Business International Cooperation တြင္ တႏွစ္ၾကာ ၀င္ေရာက္လုပ္ကိုင္ခဲ့ကာ New York Interest Research Group တြင္ ပါ၀င္လုပ္ကိုင္ခဲ့သည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ ခ်ီကာကိုသို႔ ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ကာ ေဒသခံ ကက္သလစ္ခရစ္ယာန္ အသင္းေတာ္မ်ား အေျချပဳ လူထုစည္းရံုးေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား လုပ္ကိုင္သည့္ Developing Communities Project - DCP တြင္ ဒါရိုက္တာအျဖစ္ ၃ ႏွစ္ၾကာ ၀င္ေရာက္လုပ္ကိုင္သည္။ အိုဘားမား ဦးေဆာင္သည့္ ကာလအတြင္း ၀န္ထမ္းမ်ား တိုးပြားလာကာ ၀င္ေငြမွာလည္း ေအာင္ျမင္ တိုးတက္လာခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္လယ္ပိုင္းတြင္ ဥေရာပသို႔ သံုးပတ္ၾကာသြားေရာက္ လည္ပတ္ခဲ့ၿပီး ဖခင္ႏွင့္ ေဆြမ်ဳိးမ်ားရွိရာ ကင္ညာသို႔ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ဖခင္အပါအ၀င္ ေဆြမ်ဳိးမ်ားအား ပထမဆံုးအႀကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္ကုန္ပိုင္း ဟားဗတ္ ဥပေဒေက်ာင္းသို႔ ၀င္ေရာက္ ပညာသင္ၾကားခဲ့သည္။ တႏွစ္အၾကာ သူ၏ အရည္အခ်င္းေၾကာင့္ ဟားဗတ္ ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရး ဂ်ာနယ္တြင္ အယ္ဒီတာအျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ျခင္း ခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဒုတိယႏွစ္ေက်ာင္းသားကာလတြင္ ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠဌအျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံရသည္။ ပထမဆံုး လူမည္း ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠဌအျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ အယ္ဒီတာခ်ဳပ္အေနျဖင့္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔၀င္ အယ္ဒီတာ ၆ ဦးကို ဦးစီးလမ္းၫႊန္သူအျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံရသည္။ ပထမဆံုး လူမည္း ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠဌ အျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံရမႈအား က်ယ္ျပန္႔စြာ ေဆြးေႏြးတင္ျပခဲ့ၾကၿပီး အခ်ိန္အေတာ္ၾကာအထိ ေဆြးေႏြးစရာကိစၥ ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ လူ႔အသားအေရာင္ကြဲျပားမႈမ်ား ဆက္စပ္မႈအေၾကာင္း စာအုပ္ေရးသားရန္ ကံထရိုက္ရခဲ့ၿပီး၊ University of Chicago Law School က ထုိစာအုပ္ေရးသားရန္ ၀န္ထမ္းတဦးႏွင့္ ရံုးခန္းတခုအား ျပင္ဆင္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ ၎စာအုပ္အား တႏွစ္အတြင္း အၿပီးသတ္ရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း အခ်ိန္ၾကာျမင့္ခဲ့ကာ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ ဘ၀ျဖတ္သန္းမႈမ်ားကို ေရးသားသည့္ စာအုပ္အသြင္သို႔ ေျပာင္းလဲသြားသည္။ “Dream From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” စာအုပ္အား ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ထုတ္ေ၀ခဲ့ၿပီး ၎စာအုပ္သည္ အုိဘားမား ႏိုင္ငံေရးနယ္ပယ္ထဲသို႔ မ၀င္ေရာက္မီ ဟားဗတ္ ဥပေဒသံုးသပ္ေရးဂ်ာနယ္ ဥကၠဌအျဖစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနစဥ္ ေရးသားထုတ္ေ၀ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ သူ၏ ဘ၀ျဖတ္သန္းခဲ့မႈမ်ားကို ေရးသားခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ၁၉၉၂ ခုႏွစ္မွ စတင္ကာ University of Chicago Law School တြင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုဆိုင္ရာ ဥပေဒဘာသာရပ္အား ၁၂ ႏွစ္ၾကာ သင္ၾကားခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၉၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အီလီႏိြဳက္ျပည္နယ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အျဖစ္ ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမွာက္ခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ၁၉၉၈ ခုႏွစ္ႏွင့္ ၂၀၀၂ ခုႏွစ္အထိ အီလီႏိြဳက္ျပည္နယ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အျဖစ္ ဆက္တိုက္အေရြးခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အျဖစ္ အေရြးခံရန္ အီလီႏြိဳက္ျပည္နယ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ရာထူးမွ ႏႈတ္ထြက္ခဲ့သည္။ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ အေထြေထြေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ အီလီႏိြဳက္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္းမွ ၇၀ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ေထာက္ခံမဲျဖင့္ အေမရိကန္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အျဖစ္ ေရြးေကာက္တင္ေျမွာက္ခံရသည္။ အေမရိကန္သမိုင္းတြင္ ပဥၥမေျမာက္ အာဖရိကန္-အေမရိကန္လူမ်ဳိး အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ဇႏၷ၀ါရီလ ၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ က်မ္းသစၥာက်ိန္ဆိုသည္။ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလ ၁၀ ရက္တြင္ ေအဗဟမ္လင္ကြန္း၏ ၁၈၅၈ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္းက ေက်ာ္ၾကားခဲ့ေသာ မိန္႔ခြန္းမ်ား ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ အီလီႏိြဳက္ျပည္နယ္ Springfield တြင္ အေမရိကန္ သမၼတေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၌ ၀င္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ မဲဆြယ္စည္း႐ံုးေရးကာလအတြင္း ဒီမိုကရက္ပါတီအတြင္း ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ျဖစ္သူ ဟီလာရီကလင္တန္ႏွင့္ အခ်ိန္အေတာ္ၾကာ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ ၄ ရက္ေန႔ အေမရိကန္ သမၼတ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ သမၼတအျဖစ္ ေရြးေကာက္ခံခဲ့ရသည္။ အိုဘားမားႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ နာဂစ္ျဖစ္ပြားၿပီး လူသားခ်င္းစာနာသည့္ အကူအညီေပးရန္ ဆီးနိတ္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ဂၽြန္ကယ္ရီ တင္သြင္းသည့္ နာဂစ္ဒဏ္ခံ ျပည္သူမ်ားအား အကူအညီေပးေရး ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္အား ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ “နာဂစ္ဒဏ္ခံ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ အေျခအေနမွာ စိတ္မေကာင္းဖြယ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ အေမရိကန္အစိုးရ၏ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာသည့္ အကူအညီ အစီအစဥ္အား ေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရကို လိုအပ္သည့္ လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈအားလံုးကို လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားရန္” တိုက္တြန္းေျပာဆိုသည္။ ၂၀၀၇ စက္တင္ဘာ အေရးအခင္းျဖစ္ပြားၿပီး အိုဘားမား၏ ေၾကညာခ်က္ “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေသာ ျပည္သူမ်ားသည္ ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ႏွစ္ရွည္လမ်ား ရွည္ၾကာခဲ့ေသာ အခက္အခဲမ်ားကို ေျပာင္းလဲပစ္ရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔ လူသားမ်ား၏ ရဲစြမ္းသတၱိကို မ်က္ျမင္ႀကံဳေတြ႔ခဲ့ရသည္။ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ထံုးတမ္းစဥ္လာေအာက္ရွိ အၾကမ္းမဖက္လမ္းစဥ္၏ စြမ္းအားကို ျမင္ေတြ႔ခဲ့သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ယေန႔ ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ေတာင္းဆိုသူမ်ားအား ရိုက္ႏွက္ျခင္း၊ မ်က္ရည္ယိုဗံုးမ်ားျဖင့္ ပစ္ခတ္ျခင္း၊ လူအမ်ား ဖမ္းဆီးျခင္းျဖင့္ ရက္စက္စြာ ႏွိမ္ႏွင္းခဲ့သည္။ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားသည္ သူတို႔၏ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္းရပ္တန္႔သင့္သည္။ ျပည္သူမ်ား၏ ဆႏၵမ်ားကို အေရးတယူ နားေထာင္သင့္သည္။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို လႊတ္ေပးသင့္ၿပီး အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္သင့္သည္။ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားသည္ စစ္အစိုးရ၏ ဖိႏွိပ္မႈမ်ားကို ခံစားေနရသည္။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ႏွင့္ အျခားၿမိဳ႕ လမ္းမမ်ားေရွ႕တြင္ ရဲ၀ံ့စြာ ရပ္ေနေသာ သူရဲေကာင္းမ်ားအား ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔က ခိုင္မာစြာ ေထာက္ခံထိုက္သည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားသည္ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေသာ ျပည္သူမ်ား အသတ္မခံရမီ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ား ရပ္တန္႔ရန္အလို႔ငွာ လိုအပ္ေသာ အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမ်ားကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ရမည္။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာရမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံတကာအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ရဲရင့္ေသာ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအား ေထာက္ပံ့ရန္ အေရးႀကီးသည္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူေရးအား ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ကုလသမဂၢ အေထြေထြညီလာခံတြင္ အေမရိကန္ သမၼတ၏ ျမန္မာျပည္အား ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူေရး အဆိုျပဳမႈကို ႀကိဳဆိုပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ အျခားလိုအပ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ခ်က္ခ်င္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ရမည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံအေနျဖင့္ တဦးထဲ ေဆာင္ရြက္၍ မရပါ။ တျခား အဓိကက်သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ အာဆီယံ၊ အိႏၵိယ၊ ဥေရာပသမဂၢ၊ တ႐ုတ္ႏုိင္ငံတို႔ႏွင့္အတူ အေမရိကန္က ဦးစီးလုပ္ကိုင္ရမည္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ အခက္အခဲမ်ားကို ကူညီေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေသာ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ျဖစ္သည့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးမ်ားကို အၾကမ္းမဖက္သင့္ေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေပၚ ေျပာဆိုလုပ္ကိုင္မႈတြင္ ပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ရမည္။ “ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ား လြတ္လပ္မႈအတြက္ ရပ္တည္မႈမ်ားအတိုင္း ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔လည္း သူတို႔ႏွင့္အတူ ရွိရမည္”

Big Burmese Interest in Result of US Presidential Electionအေမရိကန္ သမၼတသစ္အေပၚ ျမန္မာတို႔အျမင္

A crowd of about 600, most of them young people, packed the US Embassy’s American Center in Rangoon on Wednesday morning to watch Barack Obama sweep to victory in the US presidential election.

The city’s teashops were also crowded with customers watching the historic event on satellite TV.

President-elect Barack Obama waves to his supporters behind bullet-proof glass as he takes the stage to deliver his victory speech at the election night party on Tuesday night. (Photo: AP)

The US Embassy’s American Center held an “Election Watch.” People gathered there from 9 a.m.—“Most of them are young people,” an American Center official told The Irrawaddy.

An American Center student, Ko Ye, said: “I support Obama. I think he will bring change to the world. As a young man, Obama can act dynamically.”

A young staffer with a UN agency in Rangoon said the election had also commanded big interest in his office.

A Rangoon journalist told The Irrawaddy that colleagues and civil servants kept each other informed on cell phones about Obama’s election to the White House.

He said the election had been followed in Burma more closely than any previous one because the Burmese people, encouraged by the removal of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, were hoping the US would act to end the tyrannical rule of Snr-Gen Than Shwe and his junta.

Thakin Chun Tun, a veteran politician and diplomat, said: “Obama’s victory shows how leadership skill is more important than skin color and race.”

Burmese living abroad also followed the election intensely. Ko Jay, who lives in New York, said he agreed with the general view that history had been made by Barack Obama.

Moe Thee Zun, a former student leader now living in the US, said that although he had supported Republican contender John McCain because of his Burma policy, Obama’s victory showed liberalism winning over conservatism and youth over old politics. “We should appreciate Americans who fight for what they want to be,” he said.

Some of those American citizens are Burmese who have won US citizenship—Ko Shwe, for instance. Voting in New York in his first election ever, he chose Obama.

“The first vote in my life puts me on the winning side,” he said.

ကိုသက္ | ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၅၊ ၂၀၀၈

မေန႔ကစတင္က်င္းပတဲ့ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲႀကီး ေအာင္ျမင္စြာၿပီးဆံုးသြားခဲ့ပါၿပီ။ ဒီေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီက ၅၂ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းနဲ႔အႏိုင္ရခဲ့ၿပီး တကမာၻလံုးကေမွ်ာ္ေနၾကတဲ့အတိုင္း အာဖရိကႏြယ္ဖြား ဘရက္ခ္ အိုဘားမား (Barack Obama) ဟာ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ ပထမဆံုး လူမည္း သမၼတ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့ပါၿပီ။

ေလးႏွစ္ကိုတႀကိမ္ပံုမွန္က်င္းပေနၾက အေမရိကန္ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲဟာ မဲဆႏၵရွင္ အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူေတြခ်ည္းသက္သက္ စိတ္ဝင္စားတဲ့ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ိဳးမဟုတ္ဘဲ တကမာၻလံုးက ရင္တထိတ္ထိတ္နဲ႔ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့ရွိတဲ့ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္ဟာ ကမာၻ႔အင္အားႀကီးႏိုင္ငံတႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သလို အေမရိကန္သမၼတေတြရဲ႕ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ဟာလည္း ကမာၻ႔လူသား ေတြအေပၚ သက္ေရာက္မႈေတြရွိေနတာေၾကာင့္ လူအမ်ားအာ႐ံုထားမႈကို ခံရတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဒီတေခါက္ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲကေတာ့ အရင္လုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲေတြနဲ႔မတူ ထူးျခားေနလို႔ တကမာၻလံုးရဲ႕ အာ႐ံု စိုက္ျခင္းကို ခံရတာလည္း ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီထူးျခားခ်က္ကေတာ့ ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီကေန ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္တဲ့ သမၼတေလာင္းဟာ အာဖရိကန္ႏြယ္ဖြား လူမည္းတေယာက္ ျဖစ္ေနလို႔ပါပဲ။

အေမရိကန္ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ျပည္တြင္း၊ ျပည္ပမွာရွိၾကတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကလည္း အထူးစိတ္ဝင္စားစြာ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။

ရန္ကုန္မွာရွိေနတဲ့ သတင္းသမားတဦးကေတာ့ “အဲဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို စေလာင္းေတြကေန တိုက္႐ုိက္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ၾကတယ္။ သာမန္ျပည္သူကအစ ဘယ္သူသမၼတျဖစ္မလဲဆိုတာကို စိတ္၀င္စားၾကတယ္။ အဓိကေတာ့ လူမည္းသမၼတျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ေပါ့” လို႔ ဧရာဝတီကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

ကုမၸဏီ ဝန္ထမ္း တဦးကလည္း “က်ေနာ္သာ အေမရိကန္တေယာက္ဆိုရင္ သူ႔ကိုပဲ (အုိဘားမား) မဲေပးမိမွာ၊ ျပည္သူ ေတြက ေဆာ္မယ္တီးမယ္ဆုိတာကို သိပ္မလိုခ်င္ၾကေတာ့ဘူးေလ” လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

ကြန္ပ်ဴတာပညာရွင္တဦးကမူ “အိုဘားမားကိုႀကိဳက္တဲ့သူမ်ားတာကေတာ့ သူကအသက္ငယ္လို႔ တက္တက္ႂကြႂကြလုပ္ႏိုင္ မယ္လို႔ေမွ်ာ္လင့္လို႔၊ ေနာက္ၿပီး အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူေတြက ခုခ်ိန္မွာ အေျပာင္းအလဲကို အရမ္းလိုခ်င္ေနၾကတယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ အိုဘားမားကို ေထာက္ခံၾကတာ” လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

တခ်ိဳ႕ကလည္း ကမာၻ႔ႏိုင္ငံေရးအခင္းအက်င္းေပၚမူတည္ၿပီး အေမရိကန္ သမၼတသစ္ကို စိတ္ဝင္စားၾကတာပါ။ မစၥတာ အိုဘားမား ကေကာ အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူေတြအျပင္ ကမာၻ႔ျပည္သူေတြအႀကိဳက္ ဘာေတြမ်ားလုပ္ျပဦးမလဲဆိုတာကို စိတ္ဝင္စားသူက ထုနဲ႔ေဒးပါ။

“လူေတြက အီရတ္စစ္ပြဲအေျခအေနကိုသိခ်င္ၾကတယ္၊ သမၼတ ဘုရွ္က အီရတ္ကုိတိုက္ၿပီး ဆဒမ္ဟူစိန္ကို ျဖဳတ္ခ်ေပးခဲ့ တာကို သေဘာေတြ႔ၾကတယ္။ အာဏာရွင္ကိုဒီလိုျဖဳတ္ခ်ခဲ့တယ္ဆိုတာကို ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက လက္ခံၾကတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဆီမွာေကာ အဲလိုျဖစ္မလာႏုိင္ဘူးလားဆိုၿပီး ေမွ်ာ္ၾကတယ္။ ဆိုလိုတာက ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးကို အေမရိကန္က ကယ္ႏုိင္တယ္ဆိုၿပီးေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေနၾကတယ္” လို႔ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြၾကားက ေျပာဆိုမႈေတြကို အထက္ပါ သတင္းသမားက ျပန္လည္ရွင္းျပပါတယ္။

တခ်ိဳ႕ကလည္း အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူေတြက မစၥတာ အိုဘားမားကို သမၼတ အျဖစ္ ေ႐ြးလိုက္ျခင္းအားျဖင့္ ကမာၻေပၚက အသားအေရာင္ခြဲျခားမႈေတြဟာ ၂၁ ရာစုမွာ အဆံုးသတ္သြားၿပီလို႔ သံုးသပ္ၾကပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာ စာေရးဆရာအမ်ားစုကလည္း အိုဘားမား ႏုိင္မယ္ဆိုၿပီးခန္႔မွန္းခဲ့ၾကလို႔ အခုေတာ့သူတို႔ရဲ႕ အေတြးေတြ တကယ္ျဖစ္ လာခဲ့ၿပီဆိုၿပီး ဝမ္းသာေနၾကပါတယ္။

မစၥတာ အိုဘားမား အႏိုင္ရခဲ့လို႔ ျမန္မာျပည္သားအမ်ားစုက ဝမ္းသာၾကည္ႏူးေနခ်ိန္မွာ တခ်ိဳ႕ကလည္း မတူညီတဲ့ စိတ္ခံစား မႈေတြ ျဖစ္ေနၾကပါတယ္။

ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ ေရးသားေနသည့္ ျပည္တြင္းက စာေရးဆရာတဦးက “က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ မက္ကိန္းရႈံးသြား လို႔ စိတ္မေကာင္းဘူး။ သူကေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔လည္း ေတြ႔ဖူးတယ္။ ျမန္မာ့အေရးကို ပိုလုပ္ႏိုင္မယ္ထင္တယ္။ ေနာက္ သူက အသက္ႀကီးေတာ့ အေတြ႔အႀကံဳပိုရွိတယ္။ စစ္ေရးေကာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွာေကာ ပုိၿပီးလုပ္ႏိုင္မယ္ ထင္တယ္” လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

အခုအခ်ိန္မွာက ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြဟာ တျခားေသာ ကမာၻ႔ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာလိုပဲ အေမရိကန္ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲအေၾကာင္းကိုသာ ေျပာဆိုေနၾကတာ မ်ားပါတယ္။

နိဂုံးခ်ဴပ္ရရင္ေတာ့ အေမရိကန္သမၼတေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို အထူးစိတ္၀င္စားၾကတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့ပညာတတ္ အသိုင္းအ၀န္းမွာ အိုဘားမား ႏုိင္တာကို ႀကဳိဆိုၾကတယ္။ ႏုိင္ငံတုိင္းမွာ ဒီမုိကေရစီစနစ္ပင္ျဖစ္လင့္ကစား အေျပာင္းအလဲကို ျမင္ခ်င္ၾကတယ္၊ လိုခ်င္ၾကတယ္ဆိုတာ ပိုထင္ရွားလာတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလိုု စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေအာက္မွာေနၾကတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြအားလုံးလည္း အေျပာင္းအလဲကို အရမ္းလိုခ်င္ေနၾကတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ဆီမွာ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္လို႔မရတာကို သူမ်ားတုိင္းျပည္က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကိုၾကည့္ၿပီး

အေမရိကန္ျပည္သူေတြနဲ႔အတူ အေျပာင္းအလဲကိုေထာက္ခံအားေပးေနၾကတယ္ဆိုတာ ေသခ်ာလြန္းလွပါတယ္။

RAW DATA: Barack Obama's Victory Speech

The president-elect delivers his victory speech from Chicago.

FOXNews.com

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Chicago.

(APPLAUSE)

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

(APPLAUSE)

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.

(APPLAUSE)

A little bit earlier this evening, I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain.

(APPLAUSE)

Senator McCain fought long and hard in this campaign. And he's fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.

I congratulate him; I congratulate Governor Palin for all that they've achieved. And I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.

(APPLAUSE)

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton...

(APPLAUSE)

... and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

(APPLAUSE)

And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years...

(APPLAUSE)

... the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady...

(APPLAUSE)

... Michelle Obama.

(APPLAUSE)

Sasha and Malia...

(APPLAUSE)

... I love you both more than you can imagine. And you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us...

(LAUGHTER)

... to the new White House.

(APPLAUSE)

And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother's watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my sister Maya, my sister Alma, all my other brothers and sisters, thank you so much for all the support that you've given me. I am grateful to them.

(APPLAUSE)

And to my campaign manager, David Plouffe...

(APPLAUSE)

... the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best -- the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

To my chief strategist David Axelrod...

(APPLAUSE)

... who's been a partner with me every step of the way. To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics...

(APPLAUSE)

... you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done. But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy...

(APPLAUSE)

... who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.

It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory.

(APPLAUSE)

And I know you didn't do this just to win an election. And I know you didn't do it for me.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime -- two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage or pay their doctors' bills or save enough for their child's college education.

There's new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

(APPLAUSE)

AUDIENCE: Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

OBAMA: There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can't solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it's been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.

In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let's remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

(APPLAUSE)

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

(APPLAUSE)

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

(APPLAUSE)

To those -- to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

(APPLAUSE)

That's the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we've already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight's about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

(APPLAUSE)

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves -- if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see?

What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.