Myanmar-US Relationship, Sanctions and Pro-Democracy Forces
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Let's Work TogetherMyanmar-US Relationship, Sanctions and Pro-Democracy Forces
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Let's Work TogetherEvents of the Week23 August 2009
Myanmar-US relationship, Sanctions and pro-
democracy forces
23 August 2009
One day after Webb’s visit, in a statement thanking the Myanmar government for
Yettaw’s release, the White House issued the following statement:
“The President is pleased that Senator Webb has facilitated the release of American
citizen John Yettaw from detention in Burma. He appreciates this decision by the
Burmese government. The President also notes that in addition to meeting with head
of state Than Shwe, Senator Webb was able to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi, the
first meeting by a U.S. official with her for many years. We urge the Burmese
leadership in this spirit to release all the political prisoners it is holding in detention
or in house arrest, including Aung San Suu Kyi”.
This week, some news are speculating that if Myanmar really wants to improve the
relationship with the US, Myanmar needs to demonstrate it by starting a “dialogue”
with Aung San Suu Kyi, releasing all political prisoners including her, ensuring the
2010 Elections credible. Otherwise the US will not change it’s policy towards
Myanmar including relaxing the sanctions.
Last week, Myanmar government demonstrated it’s desire to improve the
relationship with the US by releasing John Yettaw who had been sentenced to 7
years with hard labour for the illegal entry to the Aung San Suu Kyi House.
Myanmar does not need to demonstrate more, it is to the US who should show in
return its willingness to improve their relationship with us. If the US does not want
to improve the relationship, there is nothing Myanmar can do. A relationship can be
built and will be successful only when both sides wish.
Commuting Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence completely is not US’s affair, it is
Myanmar’s internal affair. Releasing the political prisoners will be done when time
will come, it has nothing to do with Myanmar-US relationship.
Sanctions
Every Myanmar wants lifting of sanctions, because we need the foreign investments
that can create thousands of jobs. Sanctions are effecting not only Myanmar but also
the interests of western powers. Myanmar has many natural resources. Myanmar has
gas natural which attract many countries. Oil and Gas are very important energy
resources for which world’s super powers do not hesitate to make wars, i.e in Iraq
and now watching eyes on Iran. Therefore it is to the western powers to decide if
they want the energy resources from our country or not.
Regarding the foreign investments, they will come when the foreign companies see
the political stability in Myanmar. If we can realise the peaceful and successful 2010
Elections, we will have this long-waited political stability. Once a new government
will be setup according to the results of 2010, the elected representatives to the Pyi-
Daung-Su Hluttaw will make proper laws and regulations in order to welcome the
foreign investments.
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Events of the Week23 August 2009
Therefore we really do not need to worry about the lifting of the sanctions, it will
come sooner or later.
The pro-democracy forces
Some pro-democracy forces are urging the US government to link the normalisation
of US- Myanmar relationship with their demands such as the release of political
prisoners and “Dialogue” with the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
What the pro-democracy forces need to pay attention is when we ask “help” from
the western powers, “help” never come alone, but with the attached strings.
The pro-democracy forces should not forget the following recent historic events:
1. What happened to Suharto who became President of Indonesia with the
support of the US and lost power in 1998 following the Asian financial
crisis when his once supporter, the US switched it’s support to Megawati
Sukarnoputri
2. What happened to Saddam Hussein of Iraq once named “Guy of the US”
when he had disobeyed the orders of the US
3. What happened to Benazir Bhutto when she returned to Pakistan after the
negotiation with president Musharraf mediated by the US
There will be the Elections in 2010, the best solution for all pro-democracy forces is
contest the Elections and let the people of Myanmar decide who to lead the country.
Myanmar does not need western powers’s intervention to resolve it’s internal
problems. Demanding outside help or trying to negotiate is simply trying to delay
the Political stability process.
Rumours about the 88 Generation group
23 August 2009
Some rumours are circulating that the government is talking to the members of the
88 Generation group. Whether or not it is true we do not know. Let’s assume that it
is true, what kind of talk or discussion we do not know either.
However, if they can get “General Amnesty” and if they decide to form a Political
party within the laws, it would be good for the country. They had experienced the
8888, and they have now their experience in Myanmar politics.
The last time when they were free, we could not separate them with NLD and the
exiles. We did not learn about their own political identity, because they supported
whatever NLD had said and whatever the Exiles had said.
They have experienced long years in prisons, political activities, difficulities, the
nature of Myanmar politics and matured politically hopefully. After all they all are
between 45-50, it is a good age with various experiences accumulated to prospect
their own political career.
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Events of the Week23 August 2009
All they need to do is forming a political party on their own within the laws. They
must not have connection with underground movements, illegal associations ouside
the country. They can be a very useful potentiel political force which can represent
the civilian side in the Hluttaws.
If the people from illegal associations or underground movements want to do
politics in Myanmar, they must enter into legal fold firstly.
In 1990, many parties went under the shade of NLD umbrella. They let NLD
dominated them. They lost their own identity.
Heart breaking story of the week
21 August 2009
I saw the following story on the Khitpyaing web:
ဆရာႀကီးနန္းၫြန္႔ေဆြသည္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္လက သုခမိန္ကေလာင္Aမည္ျဖင့္ Aပယ္ရတနာဆိုသည့္
ေဆာင္းပါးတပုဒ္ကို ျမန္မာသစ္မဂၢဇင္းသို႔ ေပးပို႔ခဲ့ရာ စာေပစိစစ္ေရးက ပိတ္ပင္ခဲ့သျဖင့္ Aက်ဳိးAေၾကာင္း
သြားေရာက္ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
Aဆိုပါေဆာင္းပါးတြင္ ဆရာႀကီးက သူ႔၏ဇနီးသည္ စာေရးဆရာမႀကီး ေဒၚၾကည္Uီး မက်န္းမမာျဖစ္ၿပီး
ေဆး႐ုံတင္ကာစမွ ေနာက္ဆုံးကြယ္လန
ြ ္ခ်ိန္Aထိ လြမ္းေမာစရာ Aမွတ္တရ Aျဖစ္Aပ်က္မ်ားကို
ေရးသားထားျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ေဆာင္းပါးတြင္ စာေရးဆရာမႀကီး ေဒၚၾကည္Uီးက Aိမ္ေထာင္ထိန္းသိမ္းခဲ့ပုံ၊
သား(၃) ေယာက္ကို ျပဳစုပ်ဳိးေထာင္ခ့ပ
ဲ ုံ၊ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ခဲ့ပုံ၊ တရား႐ႈမွတ္ပုံစသျဖင့္ ေရးသားထားေၾကာင္း
သိရသည္။
ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာသစ္မဂၢဇင္းမွ Aယ္ဒီတာတေယာက္ႏွင့္Aတူ စာေပစိစစ္ေရး႐ုံးသို႔
ကိုယ္တိုင္သာြ းေရာက္ခ့ျဲ ခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
စာေပစိစစ္ေရး႐ုံးမွ စာစစ္မႉးတUီးက “လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ပတ္ေလာက္က Aသက္ခပ္ႀကီးႀကီး AဖိုးAိုတေယာက္
ေရာက္လာၿပီး ၫႊန္မႉးဗိုလ္မႉးတင့္ေဆြ Aခန္းကို ေမးတယ္။ ဒါနဲ႔က်မက ၫႊန္ျပလုိက္တယ္။
ေနာက္ဗိုလ္မႉးAခန္းဘက္က ဆူဆူညံညံ Aသံၾကားတာနဲ႔ သြားၾကည့္ေတာ့ ေစာေစာက AဖိုးAိုက
Aသံတုန္တုန္ရီရီန႔ဲ ဗိုလ္မႉးတင့္ေဆြကို ေ၀ဖန္ေနတာ ၾကားရတယ္။ ဗိုလ္မႉးကေတာ့ ဘာမွျပန္မေျပာဘူး။
ေနာက္မွ AဲဒီAဖိုးAိုက နာမည္ေက်ာ္စာေရးဆရာႀကီး နန္းၫြန္႔ေဆြျဖစ္ေနတာ သိရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
ဗိုလ္မႉးတင့္ေဆြႏွင့္ေတြ႔ဆုံရာတြင္ ၎၏ေဆာင္းပါးကို ဘာေၾကာင့္ပိတ္ပင္ရသည္ကို ျပန္လည္ေျဖၾကားႏိုင္ျခင္း
မရိွသည့္ Aတြက္ စိတ္ဆိုးေဒါသထြက္ၿပီး စာေပစိစစ္ေရးက ယခုကဲ့သို႔ လုပ္ေနမႈကို
ေ၀ဖန္ကန္႔ကက
ြ ္ခ့ျဲ ခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
I do not know about the credibility of the story, however, I know that Nan Nyut Swe’s
writings have been banned since around 2000. He worked as a high ranking officer at
the research department of Myanmar history and culture. And at the same time he was
an artist and had worked as a “professional story teller” – “Quate Sait Sa Ya” on the
Myanmar Radio for many years. He wrote so many articles related to Myanmar history
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Events of the Week23 August 2009
and culture with pen name “Nan Nyut Swe”. He is not only a writer, an artist but also
an historian. Probably we may not have many historians still alive like him. He is
already well over 80, his days are counted. Whether or not the above story reported by
“Khitpyaing” is true, however, It would be good if our government will allow him to
write again. He still has so many things to tell us, probably about his knowledge in
history and culture . Please let us learn from Nan Nyut Swe before he dies.
I remember one of the programs on BBC called “who run your world” I no longer
remember when this program was aired. However, I remember well about what Nan
Nyut Swe told in this program. He said “it is my wife who run my world, because
without her I do not exist. I earn no money. My writings are censored. So our family
depends on her earning. She cooks, she finds money, she writes, she works at home as
a wife and as a mother”
