By AUNG ZAW
Marking the anniversaries of the student uprising on September 18, 1988, and the Buddhist monk-led demonstrations last year, the Burmese junta has launched another offensive—a cyber attack—on The Irrawaddy and several other Burmese news agencies in exile.
We at The Irrawaddy quickly learned the attack was linked to the anniversary of the “Saffron Revolution.” Burma’s military authorities obviously did not want any similar sentiments this year and, once again, shot down their enemies.
Exiled media groups, bloggers, reporters inside Burma and citizen journalists played major roles in September 2007 in highlighting the brutal suppression of the monks and their supporters in the streets of Rangoon.
Live images, eye-witness reports, updates and photographs landed on our desks every few seconds. The outside world was able to witness the terror of the Burmese regime on TV and on the Internet.
And so the military regime struck back. On September 27, all connections to the Internet were closed down for four days as the authorities tried to conceal their crimes.
So it was no surprise that they attempted the same tactic this year.
On Tuesday, we received reports that the Internet in Burma was running slowly, suggesting a concerted effort to prevent information from going in or out of the country.
Then on Wednesday, our colleagues and subscribers in the US, Japan and Malaysia notified our Thailand-based office that they were unable to access our Web site.
A few hours later, I-NET, the largest host server in Thailand, confirmed: “Your site has been under distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since around 5pm.”
I-NET finally decided to shut down our server.
Singlehop, which hosts The Irrawaddy’s mirror site, explained: “Your server is under a major attack. Due to the size of the attack our network engineers had to null route the IP to negate it. When the attack has subsided we will remove the null route.”
Singlehop told us that the cyber attack was very sophisticated.
Currently, our Web site is disabled and we have been forced to launch our daily news in blogs. Fellow exiled news agencies Democratic Voice of Burma and New Era were also disabled.
The attack on our Web sites is persistent and believed to be manually launched from various locations - the attacks on our site including mirror site continue.
It is no secret that in recent years Burma’s regime sent an army of students to Russia for cyber warfare training. They also enjoy a large budget to hire cyber criminals overseas to attack exiled media Web sites.
Burmese dissidents believe that some of the cyber criminals working for the regime are based in the US, Japan and Europe. One IP address identified in the current attack was in The Netherlands.
In Burma, Internet cafes are not safe. They are the substations of subversive activity. In some Internet cafes, users have to provide ID, informers observe students playing video games, and Buddhist monks complain they are treated like criminals if they ask to the Internet.
In this increasing climate of fear where Internet users are frequently suspected of working for exiled media, people in Burma there are naturally afraid to communicate.
Reporters, editors and publishers based in Rangoon are under increasing pressure. Earlier this month, police apprehended some reporters for allegedly working for The Irrawaddy, though they were not.
Our stringers remain undetected, though they say they are nervous.
My friend, a foreign journalist who just came out of Burma, said that the mood was very tense. “It is hard for our Burmese colleagues to report,” she said. “But they are very brave.”
Over the last 20 years, the ongoing battle between Burma’s regime and the pro-democratic forces has shifted from the streets to the jungle and now to the computer.
The Burmese junta will not give in—rather, they will equip themselves and become more sophisticated.
Acknowledging the magnitude of the cyber attack against us, we at The Irrawaddy have to build stronger firewalls and more effective systems to prevent inevitable attacks in the future.
However, the junta is mistaken. Ultimately, the flow of information is unstoppable. The Burmese regime’s cyber criminals cannot penetrate the strongest firewall of all—the spirit of desire for change.
By THE IRRAWADDY
Today, September 18, is the anniversary of two important events in Burma’s political history. The first is the bloody coup that installed the current regime in power 20 years ago, and the second is the start of last year’s uprising by Buddhist monks who took to the streets to seek a peaceful end to decades of brutal military rule.
The coincidence of these two anniversaries serves as a sad reminder of Burma’s plight as a nation struggling for survival under rulers hell-bent on holding onto power. In the 19 years that separate these two events, Burma moved not one step closer to peace and political reconciliation. It is as if the country’s history simply collapsed on this day.
As if to underline the futility of the Burmese people’s desire for freedom, this September, too, has been a month of arrests, torture, intimidation and trials that make a mockery of the law.
The streets of Rangoon are now monitored by soldiers, police and armed thugs known as Swan Arr Shin, the Masters of Force, who are constantly on the alert against any signs of potential unrest. In recent weeks, they have arrested a number of prominent activists, including Nilar Thein, a mother who has not seen her infant daughter since she was forced to go into hiding after last year’s protests. She is now in prison and at risk of torture, according to Amnesty International.
The regime has also apprehended at least 14 other activists in recent weeks. One of the detained activists is the younger brother of the prominent activist-monk U Gambira, who is also in prison for his leading role in last year’s “Saffron Revolution.”
There is also growing concern over the fate of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s most famous torchbearer for the democratic cause. For four weeks from the middle of August, she refused to accept food deliveries to her home, where she has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years. This prompted fears that she had gone on a hunger strike—something she hasn’t done since 1989, when she was first refused permission to leave her home. These fears have been confirmed by reports that she is now malnourished and receiving intravenous fluid to help her recover her strength.
Despite claims that it is moving towards democracy, the Burmese regime continues to hold more than 2,000 political prisoners. And even after signing numerous ceasefire agreements with ethnic insurgent groups, forced labor, rape and mass killings are still commonplace in border regions.
Burma’s rulers have succeeded only in placing the country near the bottom of every human development index. Burma is now among the worst countries in the world in terms of poverty, education, healthcare and corruption. The result of decades of economic mismanagement has been dire: more than a third of children in Burma are malnourished, the average household spends up to 70 percent of its budget on food, and more than 30 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, according to United Nations estimates.
It is difficult to believe that Burma’s economy was once regarded as one of the strongest and most promising in the region. But now the country’s immense natural wealth serves only to enrich the junta and a handful of cronies.
The regime is quick to blame its Western critics for Burma’s precipitous economic decline, but it refuses to acknowledge that the US and the EU have imposed sanctions for a reason. Burma’s human rights record is appalling, and the junta’s refusal to engage in meaningful reconciliation talks with the democratic opposition has sent a strong signal to the West that the ruling generals have no interest in moving the country forward.
All of this has earned Burma a place among the world’s pariah states. But the junta doesn’t seem to mind that Burma now stands alongside North Korea, Zimbabwe and Sudan as a country that routinely brutalizes its own population.
Burmese people, however, are keenly aware that their country has been dragged down to this shameful state. More than anything else, the two anniversaries that we mark today show that Burma is a nation divided between those who have no shame, and those who, despite their fear and their past failures to liberate their country, still nurture some hope for the future.
By MIN LWIN
Burmese security forces, including firefighters and members of the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and Swan Arr Shin, have been deployed around Rangoon’s main streets and landmarks, wearing red cravats around their necks as a sign of a heightened state of alert.
It is widely believed that security has been tightened to prevent a recurrence of the events of September 18 last year when an estimated 400 Buddhist monks marched from Shwedagon Pagoda to protest the military authorities’ alleged use of violence against monks in Pakokku Township, which led to mass demonstrations across the country.
According to sources in Rangoon, the security forces, including members of the USDA and Swan Ah Shin, were posted around Shwedagon Pagoda and Rangoon City Hall, two of the focal points for last year’s demonstrations.
“The USDA and Swan-Arh-Shin have set up road blocks in the outskirts of the city,” a resident said. “They are stopping cars, buses, taxis and passers-by, and checking everyone.”
She recalled that on this date last year, security forces had been wearing blue cravats, signifying a mid-level alert, whereas today they were sporting bright red cravats around the collars of their green uniforms.
Another resident said that riot police had been deployed around many of Rangoon’s well-known monasteries.
He said that plainclothes police and members of the USDA encircled Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery in South Okkalapa Township three days ago.
Meanwhile, Internet users found that connection speeds had been reduced drastically as authorities stepped up monitoring of suspects.
“We cannot even sit in an Internet café in comfort,” a senior monk in Rangoon said. “The authorities stare at us like we are terrorists.”
By LAWI WENG
An ongoing food shortage in Chin State in western Burma has forced 2,000 ethnic Chin to cross the Indian border to Mizoran to find work, according to the Chin Human Rights Organization in Thailand.
Victor Biak Lian, a board member of the Chin Human Rights Organization, said that Chin refugees continue to cross the border every day. The exodus started about two weeks.
About 50 village elders from different areas of Chin State traveled to Mizoran to appeal for international aid to address the food famine, he said. The Chin Human Rights group previously reported that 31 children have died from a lack of food.
The food shortage was caused by a plague of rats, which ate rice stocks in many of the villages.
Chin leaders say they have not received food relief aid from the Burmese military government. Burmese authorities also have reportedly banned ethnic Chin people from receiving food supplies donated by Burmese in foreign countries.
According to a Mizoram-based Chin relief group, the Chin Famine Emergency Relief Committee, about 100,000 of the 500,000 people in Chin State face food shortages. The food shortage began in December 2007. Many people are surviving on boiled rice, fruit and vegetables.
A famine occurs about every 50 years when the flowering of a native species of bamboo gives rise to an explosion in the rat population, say experts. The International Rice Research Institute has warned of “widespread food shortages” in the region.
စစ္အစိုးရ၏ ဆိုက္ဘာစစ္ဆင္ေရး
ဧရာဝတီ | စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၈၊ ၂၀၀၈
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားဦးေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအံုၾကြမႈႀကီးကို ႏွိမ္နင္းခဲ့သည့္ စစ္အာဏာ သိမ္း အထိမ္းအမွတ္ေန႔အားျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားဦးေဆာင္ခဲ့သည့္ ေရႊဝါေရာင္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးစတင္ခဲ့ေသာ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ေန႔အားျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ စစ္အစိုးရသည္ ဧရာဝတီ အပါအဝင္ျပည္ပအေျခစိုက္ ျမန္မာသတင္းဌာနမ်ား၏ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္ website မ်ားကို ထပ္မံ တိုက္ခိုက္ျပန္ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
ယမန္ႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလအတြင္း စစ္အစုိးရ၏ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္မႈမ်ားကို ျပည္ပအေျခစိုက္ အင္တာနက္ သတင္းဌာနမ်ား၊ ဘေလာ့ဂါမ်ား၊ ျပည္တြင္းအေျခစိုက္ သတင္းေထာက္မ်ားက မိနစ္ မဆိုင္း သတင္းအခ်က္ အလက္မ်ားႏွင့္ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ထုတ္ျပန္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ ဤ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္မ်ားကို အျပည္ျပည္ ဆိုင္ရာသတင္း ဌာနႀကီးမ်ားမွတဆင့္ ကမၻာ့လူထုက ၾကည့္႐ႈခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။ ယခုအခါ စစ္အစုိးရက လက္စားေခ် တုံ႔ျပန္သည္ ဟု ယူဆရသည္။
အဂၤါေန႔မွစ၍ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းရွိ ဆက္သြယ္မႈႏႈန္းမ်ားကို စစ္အစိုးရကေလွ်ာ့ခ်ခဲ့သည္။ အင္တာနက္ကေဖး မ်ားကလည္း လံုၿခံဳမႈမရွိေတာ့၊ လာေရာက္သံုးစြဲသူမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မွတ္ပံုတင္အစစ္ခံရၿပီး ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္ မ်ားဆိုလွ်င္ စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးမ်ားက ရာဇာဝတ္သားသဖြယ္ျပဳမႈဆက္ဆံေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည္။
ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔မွစ၍ အေမရိကန္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊ မေလးရွားရွိ စာဖတ္ပရိသတ္မ်ားက ဧရာဝတီ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္မ်ားသုိ႔ ဝင္ေရာက္ ၾကည့္ရႈ၍ မရေတာ့ဟု အေၾကာင္းၾကားလာသည္။ မ်ားမၾကာမီ ဧရာဝတီ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္ သိုမွီးရာ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအေျခစိုက္ အႀကီးဆံုးဆာဘာျဖစ္ေသာ I– NET က မိမိတို႔ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္ကို(DDoS)ျဖင့္ တိုက္ခုိက္ ခံရေၾကာင္း အေၾကာင္းၾကားလာသည္။ ေနာက္ဆံုး မိမိတို႔ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္ကိုျဖဳတ္သိမ္းရန္ I-NET က ဆံုးျဖတ္ ခဲ့သည္။
မိမိတို႔ဧရာဝတီ အရံဝက္ဘ္္ဆိုက္ mirror site ကိုလည္း ထပ္မံတိုက္ခိုက္လာရာ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္သိုမွီးရာ အေမရိကန္္ျပည္ေထာင္္စုအေျခစိုက္ Singlehop အေနျဖင့္ ဧရာဝတီဆိုက္ကို ျဖဳတ္သိမ္းလိုက္ရသည္။ Singlehop က ယခုတုိက္ခိုက္မႈမွာ အင္မတန္မွအဆင့္ျမင့္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာသည္။
ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ဆိုက္ဘာ စစ္ဆင္ေရးနည္းပညာမ်ားသင္ၾကားရန္ ရုရွႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ေစလႊတ္ေနသည္မွာ လူအမ်ားအသိပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ႏိုင္ငံတကာရွိ ဆိုက္ဘာရာဇဝတ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္သူ မ်ားကို ေစ်းႀကီးေပး၍ ငွားရမ္းအသံုးျပဳေၾကာင္းလည္း ၾကားသိေနရသည္။ ယင္းရာဇဝတ္က်ဴးလြန္သူမ်ားမွာ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု၊ ဂ်ပန္ႏွင့္ ဥေရာပႏိုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္ အေျခစိုက္သည္ဟု ယူဆရသည္။
စစ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ အႏွစ္၂၀ ၾကာၿပီးေနာက္ ၎တို႔၏စစ္ေျမျပင္ကို ၿမိဳ႕ျပလမ္းမမ်ား၊ ေတာတြင္းတိုက္ပြဲမ်ားမွ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာ အင္တာနက္ ကြန္ယက္ထဲသို႔လည္း ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းလာခဲ့ၿပီျဖစ္သည္။
သုိ႔ရာတြင္ ဧရာဝတီအပါအဝင္ လြတ္လပ္ေသာသတင္းဌာနမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ လက္မႈိင္ခ်အရႈံးေပးသြားမည္ မဟုတ္ေပ။
စစ္အစုိးရ၏ ေၾကးစားရာဇဝတ္သားမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ အင္တာနက္ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုက္ကြန္ယက္ ထဲသို႔ဝင္ေရာက္ ဖ်က္ဆီးႏိုင္ေကာင္း ဖ်က္ဆီးႏိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း မိမိတို႔၏ သံႏၷိဌာန္ကိုမူ ဖ်က္ဆီး၍မရႏိုင္ေပ။
ယခုအခါ ဧရာဝတီစာဖတ္ပရိတ္သတ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ေန႔စဥ္ပံုမွန္ဖတ္ရႈႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ဧရာဝတီဘေလာ့ ကို ယာယီျပဳလုပ္ထားၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။
ကိုသက္ | စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၈၊ ၂၀၀၈
ယေန႔သည္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨန ကံေဆာင္ျခင္း တႏွစ္ျပည့္ေျမာက္ေသာေန႔ျဖစ္သည့္အေလွ်ာက္ အာဏာပိုင္တို႔က ရန္ကုန္ႏွင့္ ၿမိဳ႕ႀကီးမ်ားတြင္ လံုၿခံဳေရးအထူးတင္းက်ပ္ထားၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံေရး လႈပ္ရွားတက္ႂကြသူမ်ားႏွင့္ သံဃာမ်ားကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္လ်က္ရွိသည္ဟု ေဒသခံမ်ားက ဧရာ၀တီကို ေျပာသည္။
၂၀၀၇ ခု ေ႐ႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအတြင္း သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ခ်ီတက္လာစဥ္ (ဓာတ္ပံု - ဧရာ၀တီ)ယမန္ႏွစ္က ရန္ကုန္တြင္ သံဃာ့ဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားစတင္သည့္ေနရာမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ ေ႐ႊတိဂံုဘုရားႏွင့္ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ခန္းမ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္တြင္ စစ္ေဆးေရးဂိတ္မ်ားခ်ထားၿပီး လံုၿခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား၊ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔မ်ားႏွင့္ စြမ္းအားရွင္မ်ားက ရွာေဖြစစ္ေဆးလ်က္ရွိသည္ဟု ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ခံတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
အဆိုပါလံုၿခံဳေရးဂိတ္မ်ားမွ ျဖတ္သန္းသြားလာသည့္ ေမာ္ေတာ္ယာဥ္၊ အငွားကားမ်ားကို ရွာေဖြမႈမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ၿပီး ခရီးသည္မ်ား၏ ပိုက္ဆံအိတ္မ်ားကိုပင္ ရွာေဖြမႈမ်ားျပဳလုပ္သည္ဟု အထက္ပါ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ခံက ေျပာသည္။
“ရန္ကုန္မွာ လံုၿခံဳေရးအေတာ္မ်ားတယ္ဗ်၊ ေနရာတိုင္းပဲဲ … ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းေတြနားဆို ေပၚတင္ေရာ၊ မေပၚတင္ေရာ အမ်ားႀကီးပဲ … ညဆိုပိုမ်ားတယ္” ဟု ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ခံက ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
ယမန္ေန႔က ရန္ကုန္ရွိ ႏိုင္ငံကူးလက္မွတ္႐ံုးတြင္ စာ႐ြက္စာတမ္းထည့္သည့္ ဖိုင္တြဲမွစ၍ မိန္းမကိုင္ ပိုက္ဆံအိတ္ငယ္မ်ားအထိ ေမႊေႏွာက္ရွာေဖြမႈမ်ားကို ျပဳလုပ္လ်က္ရွိေၾကာင္း ၎႐ံုးသို႔ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့သူတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
၎အျပင္ အာဏာပိုင္တို႔က ေ႐ႊ၀ါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတြင္ တက္ႂကြစြာပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည့္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း မ်ားကို အထူးေစာင့္ၾကည့္လ်က္ ရွိသည္။
ရန္ကုန္ ေတာင္ဥကၠလာပၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းအနီးပတ္၀န္းက်င္၌ လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ၃ ရက္မွစ၍ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔ႏွင့္ အရပ္၀တ္ရဲမ်ား ေမာ္ေတာ္ဆိုင္ကယ္မ်ားျဖင့္ ပတ္ေနသည္ဟု ၎ရပ္ကြက္တြင္ ေနထိုင္သူက ေျပာသည္။
လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ေန႔ညက ေငြၾကာယံေက်ာင္းတိုက္ကို လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားက အၾကမ္းဖက္၀င္ေရာက္ဆီးနင္းကာ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္ရွိ သံဃာမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီးေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့သည္။
လံုၿခံဳေရးတင္းက်ပ္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ လႈပ္ရွားတက္ႂကြသူမ်ား၊ သံဃာမ်ားအား ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခံရျခင္းသည္ ေ႐ႊ၀ါေရာင္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကဲ့သို႔ အလားတူလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား ေနာက္ထပ္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္သီတင္းသံုးသည့္ စာခ်ဆရာေတာ္တပါးက “အာဏာပိုင္ေတြ ေၾကာက္တာေတာ့ေျပာမေနနဲ႔ေတာ့ ဘုန္းႀကီးေတြကုိ သူပုန္ၾကည့္နည္းနဲ႔ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနၾကတာ။ အင္တာနက္ဆိုင္ ထုိင္တာေတာင္မွ အေတာ္ေလး သတိထားေနရတယ္။ ဒါေတာင္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနသလားမေျပာတတ္ဘူး ဘာမွကုိ လြတ္လပ္မႈမရွိဘူး” ဟု မိန္႔ၾကားသည္။
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