


| National Endowment for Democracy Mr. Brian Joseph and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi |
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| Khum Htun Oo interview |
| Election a test of Myanmar's new openness by Hilary Whiteman, CNN reade more ---cilck |
| Pu Cin Sian Thang interview |
| The ZNC, under the same name, was allowed to participate in the 1990 election in which it won two seats,” said Van Lian. “I cannot comprehend why they are being rejected now.” Name keeps ethnic group out of politics By PETER AUNG 23 May 2012 (DVB) The Union Election Commission denied the Zomi National Congress entrance into the country’s political landscape after the party’s registration request was rejected over a naming row. The party, which represents the Zomi ethnic group in Chin State, won two seats in the 1990 general elections, but the results were later annulled by ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council in 1992. The Zomi primarily live in Tedim and Tonzang townships in Chin state. However, the government does not recognise the group as a separate ethnic nationality and classify their language as a local dialect within the country’s western state. Union Election Commission’s deputy director Hla Maung Cho said the ZNC was unable to register because the term ‘Zomi’ is not recognised by the Burmese government. “We notified them to change their title because [Zomi] was not included on the list of ethnic nationalities recognised by the [Immigration and National Registration Department],” said Hla Maung Cho. ZNC leader Pu Cint Sian Thang said that government’ s denial of the party’s right to mention their own ethnicity could lead to the disintegration of ethnic solidarity. “So this implies that we are not allowed to use our own dialect. This is saddening because we just wanted to have our language in the title, but the [UEC] rejected us citing a law that can harm the unity among the ethnic nationalities,” said Pu Cint Sian Thang. “It is not important whether we get to participate or not, but we are disappointed in having our rights violated and told that [the Zomi ethnic group] doesn’t actually exist.” He said the party’s leaders were discussing whether the group should try to reregister under a new title. The ZNC has been allied with the National league for Democracy for more than 20 years and boycotted the general elections in 2010. The party was prepared to register and participate in April’s by-election; however, their bid was denied by the UEC. NLD chairman in Chin State Van Lian said the UEC’s decision was unfair. “The ZNC, under the same name, was allowed to participate in the 1990 election in which it won two seats,” said Van Lian. “I cannot comprehend why they are being rejected now.” source : DVB --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 27 May 2012 BBC India PM Manmohan Singh in historic Burma visit Manmohan Singh is beginning an official visit to Burma, the first by an Indian prime minister since 1987. Mr Singh said he hoped to strengthen trade and diplomatic co-operation during his three-day trip. He will meet President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose mother once served as Burma's ambassador to India. The two nations share a 1,600km (1,000 mile) border, but relations have often been uneasy. The Delhi government cold-shouldered Burma's military rulers during the 1990s, infuriating the generals by openly supporting Ms Suu Kyi. But Mr Singh has overseen a dramatic turnaround in Delhi's policy, and controversially hosted former ruler Than Shwe on a state visit in 2010. Before his current visit, Mr Singh said he wanted "stronger trade and investment links, development of border areas, improving connectivity between our two countries and building capacity and human resources". Analysts say India is desperate to counteract the influence of China in the region, and Mr Singh will be keen to stress the close cultural and historical ties between the two countries. India has already signed a number of deals for the exploitation of Burma's vast reserves of natural gas, and Indian firms are building ports and other infrastructure projects in Burma. Continue reading the main story Binding ties British ruled Burma as part of colonial India from mid-19th Century to 1937 1962: Burmese military junta takes over, expels Burmese Indians 1993: India honours Aung San Suu Kyi with the Jawaharlal Nehru Award 1998: New Indian government kick-starts rapprochement with junta 2010: Than Shwe visits India A high-powered business delegation will join Mr Singh's entourage, including telecoms tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of mobile giant Bharti Airtel. Last week, India made a symbolic announcement that transport links would be improved, including the first official bus route across the border. India is now Burma's third biggest export market, behind China and Thailand. But China still dominates oil and gas exploration in Burma and is involved in the construction of roads, pipelines and port facilities. And the Burmese government's recent reforms have ended the country's international isolation, which means Western nations are joining the rush to invest. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| Indian PM visiting Myanmar amid energy quest (read more ) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| Aizawl, the spectacular hill-city of Northeast India’s Mizoram State, is host to Chin/Zo refugees from Burma’s Chin State, Sagaing Division and northern Arakan Sate. They form as much as 10 percent of Mizoram’s current population. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ အႀကံေပး ေကာင္စီ ဖြဲ႕စည္းရန္ျပင္ဆင္ 2012-05-26 ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတအား လူမႈေရးက႑၊ စီးပြားေရး က႑၊ နည္းပညာ က႑စတဲ့ အျခားေသာ က႑ေတြနဲ႔ ဆက္စပ္ၿပီး အႀကံျပဳမယ့္ လူမႈစီးပြားေရး အႀကံေပးေကာင္စီကို နာယက တစ္ဦး၊ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ ၁၅ ဦးနဲ႔ ဖြဲ႕စည္းရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ေနတယ္လို႔ အဆိုပါ အႀကံေပးအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ လ်ာထားစာရင္းမွာ ပါဝင္သူတစ္ဦးက အာအက္ဖ္ေအကို ေျပာဆိုပါတယ္။ AFP မဟာမဲေခါင္ေဒသ ညီလာခံကုိ တက္ေရာက္ရန္ အတြက္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ဧျပီလ ၁၂ ရက္ေန႔က ဂ်ပန္ႏုိင္ငံ တုိက်ဳိျမိဳ႕ကုိ ေရာက္ရွိလာေသာ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ကုိ ေတြ႔ရစဥ္။ အဆိုပါ အႀကံေပးေကာင္စီရဲ႕လ်ာထားစာရင္းမွာ ရန္ကုန္စီးပြားေရး တကၠသိုလ္ရဲ႕ ပါေမာကၡခ်ဳပ္အျဖစ္ တာဝန္ယူခဲ့တဲ့ ဦးေမာ္သန္းက နာယက အျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ဥကၠ႒ အျဖစ္ ဦးတင္ထြဋ္ဦး၊ ဒု-ဥကၠ႒ အျဖစ္ ေဒၚခင္စမ္းရီ၊ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးအျဖစ္ သမၼတရဲ႕ စီးပြားေရးအႀကံေပး ဦးဆက္ေအာင္၊ တြဲဘက္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး အျဖစ္ ေပာာင္ေကာင္ စီးတီး ယူနီဗာစတီမွ ေဒါက္တာ ေက်ာ္ရင္လိႈင္တို႔ အားလည္းေကာင္း၊ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္မ်ား အျဖစ္ Myanmar Egress မွ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးတင္ေမာင္သန္း၊ ကုန္သည္/စက္မႈ အသင္းခ်ဳပ္မွ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးဝင္းေအာင္၊ ကုန္သည္/စက္မႈ အသင္းခ်ဳပ္မွ ဒုတိယဥကၠ႒ ဦးလွေမာင္ေရႊ၊ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအေျခစိုက္ ဗဟု ဖြံၿဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕မွ ေဒါက္တာ ေဇာ္ဦး၊ ဥပေဒပညာရွင္ ဦးသီဟန္မ်ိဳးဥာဏ္၊ ဒိုင္းမြန္းစတား ကုမၼဏီ ပိုင္ရွင္ ဦးကိုကိုႀကီး၊ KMD ဦးေသာင္းတင္၊ဦးမိုးေက်ာ္ (MMRD)၊ ေဒါက္တာသန္႔ျမင့္ဦး၊ ဦးသန္းလြင္ (ကေမာၻဇဘဏ္ - ဒုတိယဥကၠ႒)၊ ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေအး (CB Bank) နဲ႔ ပါေမာကၡ ဦးေအာင္ထြန္းသက္တို႔ ပါဝင္ေၾကာင္း သိရပါတယ္။ အႀကံေပးေကာင္စီ ဖြဲ႕စည္းေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတရံုးက တရားဝင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာျခင္း မျပဳရေသးေပမယ့္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတနဲ႔ အႀကံေပး အဖြဲ႕ဝင္တို႔ ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္တိုင္ ေတြ႕ဆံုခဲ့ၿပီးသည့္ အျပင္၊ အႀကံေပး အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ဟာလည္း အႀကံေပးေကာင္စီနဲ႔ သက္ဆိုင္တဲ့ လုပ္ငန္းကိစၥရပ္မ်ားကို စတင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနၿပီ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အႀကံေပးေကာင္စီကို တရားဝင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေၾကာင္း အမိန္႔စာ ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ အခါမွာေတာ့ လက္ရွိ လ်ာထား စာရင္းမွာ ပါဝင္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ဦးေရဟာ ေလ်ာ့သြားႏိုင္တာ ရွိသလို၊ တိုးလာႏိုင္တာလည္း ရွိေၾကာင္း ယင္းအႀကံေပး အဖြဲ႕လ်ာထားစာရင္းမွာ ပါဝင္သူတစ္ဦးက ေျပာပါတယ္။ rfa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ဖြံ႔ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈဟာ အဓိကစိန္ေခၚမႈျဖစ္ေန 2012-05-25 ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရးမွာ ေဆာင္ရြက္စရာေတြ ရွိေသးတယ္လို႔ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၀ါရွင္တန္ဒီစီ ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္မွာရွိတဲ့ ခ်က္သမၼတ ႏိုင္ငံသံရံုးမွာ မေန႔ညက က်င္းပတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမွာ ပါ၀င္ေဆြးေႏြးသူေတြက ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။ RFA အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၀ါရွင္တန္ဒီစီျမိဳ႕ေတာ္က ခ်က္သမၼတႏိုင္ငံသံရံုးတြင္ ေမလ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပေသာ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမွာ ကမာၻ႔အမ်ိဳးသမီးေရးရာဆိုင္ရာ အေမရိကန္ သံအမတ္ၾကီး Melanne Verveer ပါ၀င္ ေဆြးေႏြးေနစဥ္။ ျမန္မာ့အနာဂတ္ေပၚ ရႈျမင္ခ်က္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာ့အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းက အမ်ိဳးသမီးေတြရဲ႕ အခန္းက႑ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို မၾကာခင္က ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ကမာၻ႔အမ်ိဳးသမီးေရးရာဆိုင္ရာ အေမရိကန္ သံအမတ္ၾကီး Melanne Verveer က အဓိက ေဆြးေႏြးသြားပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ဖြံ႔ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးဟာ အဓိက စိန္ေခၚမႈတရပ္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ တခ်ိန္တခါက ပညာေရးမွာ အရွိန္အ၀ါ ၾကီးမားခဲ့ေပမဲ့ ေလာေလာဆယ္မွာ နိမ့္က်ေနတာ ထင္ရွားေၾကာင္း ေျပာသြားပါတယ္။ ဒီေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမွာ Project 2049 က ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာနဲ႔ အာရွ-ပစိဖိတ္ေဒသ တရားဥပေဒ စိုးမိုးေရး ပညာရွင္ Kelly Currie က ဗဟိုနဲ႔ ေအာက္ေျခကြာဟမႈ ရွိေနတာကို ေထာက္ျပ ေဆြးေႏြးပါတယ္။ Freedom House လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႔က ဒုတိယ ဥကၠ႒ Robert Herman ကေတာ့ ေျမယာသိမ္းမႈ အပါအ၀င္ ျပည္တြင္းမွာ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ေနရတဲ့ အခက္အခဲေတြ တင္ျပေဆြးေႏြးပါတယ္။ USCB ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အေမရိကန္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖြဲ႔က ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသမီး Myra Dahgaypaw မိုင္းရာေဒကေပါ ကေတာ့ ေျပာင္းလဲေနတယ္လို႔ ကမာၻကျမင္ေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ တိုင္းရင္းသားပဋိပကၡ ခ်ဳပ္ျငိမ္းသြားတာ မရွိေသးတဲ့အေၾကာင္း၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေၾကာင္း အမွန္တကယ္ သိခ်င္ရင္ တစ္သံတည္းရဲ႕ အသံနားမစြင့္ဘဲ အသံေပါင္းစံုကို နားေထာင္သင့္တဲ့အေၾကာင္း တင္ျပေဆြးေႏြးသြားပါတယ္။ rfa -------------------------------------------------------------------- |






| Peter Chou, the chief executive officer (CEO) and president of the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer HTC Corporation, is planning to form a foundation in Rangoon to provide young people with technology training. The initiative will open at Rangoon University’s Myanmar Info- tech school and aims to help the next generation of Burmese entrepreneurs, he said during a speech at MICT Park. The Burmese-born business leader added that there will be no limit to the number of young people who can come and study with the scheme. “I am working on forming the foundation but I don’t have clear plan yet,” he told The Irrawaddy. “But it will be opened soon. The foundation will not provide funding but will offer training. “There are young people who have great ideas concerning technology but don’t have the education or resources to bring them to life, so we can help teach them to make these ideas a reality.” Many young people attended his speech on May 19 and Chou said that lots of progress could be made. The successful businessman arrived in Burma last week to visit family members and see how he could help people living there. A 23-year-old student who heard Chou’s speech in Rangoon told The Irrawaddy that he was very impressive. “When I heard that he wanted to form a foundation I was very glad as I am already interested in IT but don’t know how to develop,” he said. “To get training is very expensive so many young people like me will very interested in this scheme.” Chou, whose company is one of the world’s leading makers of smartphones and tablets, was born in Burma’s second-largest city of Mandalay where he studied before emigrating to Taiwan more than 30 years ago. Although Chou’s visit to his native country has coincided with President Thein Sein’s recent call to exiled intellectuals and businessmen to return to Burma, he said the purpose of his trip was see friends and relatives, not explore investment opportunities. When he was still living in Burma, Chou was reportedly a schoolmate of Thaung Tin, the chairman and CEO of the KMD Group of Companies, a leading provider of IT-related services. Chou reportedly used to repair radios and televisions for a living before moving to Taiwan and later the United States to continue his studies. In 2004, he became the CEO of HTC Corporation, formerly known as the High Tech Computer Corporation, which posted revenue stats of almost US $10 billion in 2011. |