| QUOTE OF THE DAY | |
 |  I will discuss with everyone—government officials, the leaders of neighboring countries, relief coordinators and international donors—the way forward and how best to save lives and prevent further hardship.  — UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon |
UN Sec-Gen to meet Snr-Gen Than Shwe
| By LALIT K JHA / UNITED NATIONS | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 |
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to meet with Snr-Gen Than Shwe in Rangoon this week, after being snubbed for more than a week by the reclusive junta leader.
Ban, who is scheduled to arrive in Rangoon on Thursday, will visit the storm-wracked Irrawaddy delta, which was devastated by tropical cyclone Nargis on May 3.
More than 100,000 people have died and several hundred thousand rendered homeless.
Ban is also scheduled to attend a pledging conference in Rangoon on Sunday.
The confirmation of the meeting with Snr-Gen Than Shwe, diplomats said, could be considered significant because the xenophobic Burmese leader has resisted all moves to establish communication with the secretary-general either by phone or letter for the past 10 days. Ban wrote three letters including one delivered to Burmese officials through UN Under Secretary-General John Holmes. Ban has not received any response to his attempts at communication.
Observing that relief operations have so far reached only about a quarter of the affected people in Irrawaddy delta, Ban said this is a critical moment for the relief effort.
"My aim in going to Myanmar [Burma] is to first of all demonstrate my sympathy to the people and government at this time of crisis and challenge, and to see for myself the situation on the ground, particularly in areas most affected," he said.
Besides meeting senior government officials, the secretary-general will also meet with UN and NGO aid workers in Rangoon.
"I want to see the conditions under which relief teams are working, and I intend to do all I can to reinforce their efforts in coordination with Myanmar [Burma] authorities and international aid agencies," he said.
"I will discuss with everyone—government officials, the leaders of neighboring countries, relief coordinators and international donors—the way forward and how best to save lives and prevent further hardship," Ban said. He said he hoped the Burmese government would expedite visas for international relief workers so relief efforts can be scaled up quickly.
Referring to a figure cited by the Burmese foreign minister, Nyan Win, Ban said the cyclone had resulted in an estimated loss of more than US $10 billion. As such, he said, there was a need for a long-term reconstruction effort in Burma.
Ban said Asean has a crucial role to play in the relief operation and reconstruction effort, which would follow. These issues will be discussed with Sean leaders during his trip to the region, he said.
"The coordination between the UN and Asean will be crucially important, and in that regard, I am encouraged that Asean leaders have taken initiative and leadership roles in addressing this issue. Asean foreign ministers yesterday, in their statement, made it quite clear. This humanitarian assistance and campaign will be led by Asean mechanisms," Ban said.
Among specific proposals from Ban to Asean include establishing a logistical hub near Burma, and the creation of a coordinating body to serve as a middleman between the UN and Burma and private relief organizations. Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and French Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Rama Yade on Tuesday met officials of NGOs working in Burma to discuss humanitarian assistance and the situation on the ground in the Irrawaddy delta.
"I think, it is important that we use this opportunity to recognize that there is a relief effort underway in that country, but there remain many tens and thousands of people who have not been given the help they need," Miliband said.
Yade said the most important thing for her country is not to talk about the aid, but to deliver the aid, to have access to the victims.
"That is why we consider that it is very important for Ban Ki-moon to go to Rangoon, to talk with the Burmese about the tragedy on the ground,” she said. “We hope that after that visit we will have the means to act, to have access to the victims."
Convinced that political pressure is important, Yade said: "It is a question of level, of course, but there is a level between the humanitarian issues and the political issues."
The British foreign secretary said the Asean effort signals a growing Asean commitment to help the people in Burma.
"The pledging conference that the secretary-general is convening next Sunday in Rangoon with the Burmese authorities is obviously a landmark event and needs to produce a real outcome that would deliver help and aid to people on the ground," he said.
The US ambassador to the UN said he is somewhat encouraged.
ေလေဘးဒုကၡခံရသည့္ ေနရာမ်ားသို႔ကုလ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ားကို သြားခြင့္ျပဳ
NEJ/ ၂၁ ေမ ၂၀၀၈
ေလေဘးဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအတြက္ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးပစၥည္မ်ား သယ္ယူပို႔ေဆာင္ရန္ ကုလသမဂၢ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ (၉) စီးကို ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက သယ္ယူပို႔ေဆာင္ခြင့္ ျပဳလုိက္သည္ဟု ကုလ သမဂၢအတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ မစၥတာဘန္ကီမြန္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသုိ႔ မထြက္ခြာမီ နယူးေယာ့ခ္ၿမိဳ႕၌ ေျပာၾကား သည္။
မစၥတာဘန္ကီမြန္းက “ကမၻာ့စားနပ္ရိကၡာအစီအစဥ္ (ဒဗ လ်ဴအက္ဖ္ပီ) ရဲ႕ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ (၉) စီးကို သယ္ယူပုိ႔ေဆာင္ ေရးလုပ္ငန္းလုပ္ဖို႔ အစိုးရဆီက ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္ က်ေနာ္တို႔
ရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အလြန္ အလွမ္းေ၀းကြာတဲ့ ေနရာေတြ သြားေရာက္ႏိုင္မွာျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ေျပာၾကားေၾကာင္း ကုလသမဂၢသတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္၌ ေဖာ္ျပသည္။
မစၥတာ ဘန္ကီမြန္းသည္ ၾကာသပေတးေန႔ အေစာပိုင္း၌ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕သုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ဆိုင္ကလုန္း မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္အခံရဆံုးျဖစ္သည့္ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚေဒသဘက္သုိ႔ ဆက္လက္ သြားေရာက္မည္ဟု သိရသည္္။ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔၌ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အာဆီယံႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းက်င္းပမည့္ ေလေဘးကယ္ဆယ္ေရးႏွင့္ ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအတြက္ အလႉေငြ ရွာေဖြေရး ဆိုင္ရာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ညီလာခံတခုသုိ႔ တက္ေရာက္ရန္ရွိသည္။
ယခုအခ်ိန္သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြက္ ေသေရးရွင္ေရး အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ေလေဘးဒုကၡခံေနရသူ မ်ား၏ (၂၅) ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းထံသုိ႔သာ အကူအညီ ေပးေရးအဖြဲ႕မ်ား ေရာက္ရွိေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံသို႔ေရာက္ရွိပါက ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း အင္အားျဖည့္တင္း လုပ္ကိုင္သြား မည္ဟု ကုလသမဂၢ အႀကီးအကဲက ေျပာသည္။
၎က “က်ေနာ္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူလူထုအတြက္ က်ေနာ္ တတ္ႏိုင္သေလာက္ အစြမ္းကုန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ သြားပါမယ္။ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ေတြ လုပ္ကိုင္ေနရတဲ့ အေျခအေနကို က်ေနာ္ၾကည့္ခ်င္ပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔အားစုိက္လုပ္ကိုင္ေနတဲ့ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းအတြက္ အင္အားျဖည့္တင္းေပးမယ္။ ၿပီး ေတာ့ ျမန္မာအာဏာပိုင္ေတြရယ္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အကူအညီေပးေရးအဖြဲ႕ေတြရယ္နဲ႔ ညိႇႏိႈင္းေဆာင္ ရြက္သြားမယ္” ဟု ေျပာၾကားသည္။
မုန္တိုင္းေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၌ စိုက္ပ်ဳိးေရးလုပ္ငန္း အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ပ်က္စီးသြားေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ဆိုင္ကလုန္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာမည့္ စီးပြားေရးအေပၚ ထိခိုက္မႈသည္ ၂၀၀၄ ခုတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္ ဆူနာမိထက္ ပိုမိုဆိုးရြားၿပီး အခ်ိန္ပိုမိုၾကာရွည္ႏိုင္သည္ဟုလည္း မစၥတာဘန္ကီမြန္းက ေျပာၾကား သည္။
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