Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Students, militia clash in 2nd day of Iran protest
More than 200 people were arrested in Tehran on Monday during protests by tens of thousands at universities nationwide, and Iran's top prosecutor warned further unrest would not be tolerated. He hinted authorities could even pursue the top opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, an escalation the government has so far balked at in Iran's postelection turmoil.
Masked motorcyclists — likely hard-line militiamen — harassed Mousavi at his Tehran office on Tuesday. An angry Mousavi confronted them, daring them, "Kill me!" before being hustled away by aides, according to pro-opposition Web sites.
Authorities appear concerned that the protest movement could pick up new steam after Monday's demonstrations, in which students clashed with police and militiamen in the streets of Tehran.
A fierce crackdown since the summer crushed the mass protests that erupted after June's disputed presidential election. But Monday's unrest showed how students have revitalized the movement. They showed an increased boldness, openly breaking the biggest taboo in Iran, burning pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and chanting slogans against him.
The protests spilled over into a second day Tuesday. Several thousand students rallied in Tehran University, chanting slogans and waving Iranian flags in front of the Engineering College when they were assaulted by hard-line Basij militiamen, witnesses said. At least one student was dragged away, the witnesses said.
Footage posted on the Internet, said to be from Tuesday, showed the crowd of students sitting in front of the college building, many wearing surgical masks and scarves over their faces against gas or to hide their identities. They clapped and chanted "death to the dictator" and insults against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters, saying "Ahmadi came up short, he brought out brainless youth."
They are then seen fleeing as Basijis rush after them, firing tear gas and throwing stones. Students jostled in the crowd to get away, some crying out in warning, "Basiji, Basiji," while women screamed, "God is great." One student is seen staggering away, holding his eyes after being hit by pepper spray. Inside the college building, students lit papers in a bonfire in an attempt to ward off clouds of tear gas.
About a dozen students also clashed with riot police on the streets outside the university, witnesses said. The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity fearing retribution. Foreign journalists, including The Associated Press, have been barred from covering protests.
Tehran's police chief, Gen. Azizullah Rajabzadeh, announced that 204 protesters, including 39 women, were arrested in the capital during Monday's demonstrations and would be handed over to the judiciary. There was no immediate word on the number of arrests outside Tehran.
Iran's top prosecutor, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, warned that the judiciary will no longer tolerate protests.
"So far, we have shown restraint. From today, no leniency will be applied," he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
When asked at a press conference if the judiciary will pursue Mousavi, he said, "We will not tolerate anyone who commits actions against security, and we will confront them," according to the Fars news agency. He also suggested prosecutors could go after Mahdi Hashemi, the son of the most powerful supporter of the opposition in the clerical hierarchy, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ejehi, a hard-line cleric, even snapped at Tehran prosecutors not to be lax. "If the Tehran prosecutor does not make its first priority (investigating) those who every day violate public order and damage public property, we will give it a warning and, if necessary, take action," he said.
Hard-line clerics and commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard have called for Mousavi's arrest, accusing him of fueling protests and conspiring against Iran's clerical leadership. Arresting Mousavi or other top opposition leaders would likely spark greater turmoil.
Up to 30 men on motorcycles, some in masks, swarmed outside Mousavi's office on Tuesday. They blocked him as he tried to drive out of the garage and chanted slogans against him, two opposition Web sites said, citing witnesses.
Mousavi got out of his car and shouted at them, "You're agents. Do whatever you've been ordered to do, kill me, beat me, threaten me!" before aides rushed him inside, the Gooya News Web site reported. The men left several hours later and Mousavi was able to leave.
During Monday's demonstrations, hard-line students mobbed Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard at Tehran University, spraying her with pepper spray before her supporters took her away, opposition Web sites reported.
The turnout in Monday's protests showed that months of arrests and government intimidation have failed to stamp out the movement, sparked by opposition claims that Mousavi was the rightful winner of the June vote and that Ahmadinejad won by fraud.
In the crackdown, more than 100 politicians, activists and protesters have been put on a mass trial, accused of being part of a foreign-backed plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Five have been sentenced to death and 80 others to prison terms up to 15 years.
Since the summer, the opposition has held major protests less than once a month — timed to coincide with the many political anniversaries and religious occasions that traditionally bring street demonstrations. The strategy aims to drum up as many people as possible and draw more attention.
The coming months could heat up with several key occasions for possible protests.
In mid-December, the Islamic holy month of Moharram begins — and throughout the month Iranians traditionally hold mass mourning ceremonies. Next comes the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which is marked by 10 days of celebrations in early February.
Keath reported from Cairo.
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Monday, December 7, 2009
Holiday Appeal: Will you make a Special Holiday Donation for Burma?
As the year comes to an end, I would like to thank you for your dedication to the U.S. Campaign for Burma. Without our grassroots members, our efforts to support the non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma, under the leadership of the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, would not be possible.
Over the past year, your calls to Congress resulted in record backing for the renewal of comprehensive sanctions on Burma's military regime. Your volunteer hours with USCB at dozens of U2 concerts across the country brought 10,000 new supporters into our movement. And your contributions have allowed us to continue to keep the American public and policy makers focused on Burma, with USCB cited in more than 5,000 media articles, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
2010 will be the most critical year for Burma in twenty years. With a showcase election on the horizon, broken ceasefire agreements between the regime and ethnic resistance groups, and a new U.S. policy towards Burma, we need your support now more than ever.
I appeal to you to make a tax-deductible gift to U.S. Campaign for Burma.
With your contributions, we will continue our plans to push for the United Nations to set up a Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma, the release of over 2,100 political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi, and realizing of a meaningful and time-bound dialogue among political forces inside Burma toward national reconciliation.
This holiday season, we will be sharing video messages from Burma's celebrity supporters on our webpage: www.uscampaignforburma.org. And we will continue to keep you updated on our advocacy efforts as the year wraps up. 2010 will change Burma forever; we are asking your support to make sure these are positive developments.
We are truly grateful for your commitment to USCB and the struggle for freedom, justice and democracy by the people of Burma.
Best Wishes,
Aung Din
Executive Director
U.S. Campaign for Burma
aungdin@uscampaignforburma.org
Please make your holiday gift today --
Donate Here
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Dead lady in Belantek campMonday, December 7, 2009 5:36 AM
Good day Angeline ,
Kasper
[8888peoplepowergroup] မွတဆင့္ျဖန္႔ေ၀ပါသည္၊
I have the story about 1 lady die in the Belantek camp. My last visit to camp on 22-09-2009 . I took some picture.Ma Ni Ni Aye ( body no. 4475 ) told the story about Ma Nyein Yin who die at the camp. Ma Nyein Yin is illegal immigrant and caught by police on March 2009.She have been stay in prison for 2 months . Then authority send her to Belantek camp on May 2009.She did interview with UNHCR on end of June 2009 . She fail . Because she can not sign on any document.On that time 6 lady free . 2 have been registered before and 4 new lady . NON of Myanmar and Buddhism . All are Muslim .Many lady interview including 4 pregnant lady . 1 can't able to walk lady . All fail . Because they all are Myanmar and Buddhism . Interpreter question them Nationality / Religion / Where do you live / Why you are here ..... Main question .If answer Myanmar / Buddhism / any town / illegally come to Malaysia ..... So sorry ...... Wrong answer ..... All Fail ......If Muslim or Chin , interpreter will question them and they are helping to answer . Q & A will carry by them . Very fast . Funny interview.Ma Ni Ni Aye advise to believe by whom it may concern , should question anybody in camp who have UNHCR interview experiences .Ma Nyein Yin is very angry to UNHCR . She is not feeling well during interview . She hate interpreter . During she waiting for next UNHCR visit , she is dead.She did operation her stomach on December 2008 at Alor Setar GH .She pain stomach on 20-07-2009 at night and she have no chance to get medical. Officer in camp send her to hospital on 21-07-2009 lunch time . Next day morning 22-07-2009 @ 7 am she is dead. News was covered .UNHCR is helping many people .. She is misunderstanding because of interpreter . Ma Ni Ni Aye , who told the story will go back to Myanmar on 24-09-2009.Military junta accept her to return . She will go back with fear . Military junta accept Myanmar from camps to return home . The project start from 01-08-2009. First group go back to Myanmar on 04-09-2009. 49 persons from JURU camp . Procedure as ,( 1 ) The person who wish to go back have to fill the form completely .
( 2 ) Wait for approval from Junta . Take about 1 month to process .
( 3 ) The person who approved by junta , pay 550 Ringgit for airfare and CI ( Certificate if ID ). All included .
( 4 ) Fixed the flight date . Depart from KLIA . Air line are MAI and SUNBUMI .
Ma Ni Ni Aye said THANKS to UNHCR . She will be free on 24-09-2009.She is looking for fair interview . If UNHCR really want to help effectively , should review about interpreter .
Best regardKasper
[8888peoplepowergroup] မွတဆင့္ျဖန္႔ေ၀ပါသည္၊
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Car maker calls for release of Aung San Suu Kyi
Photo/Lancia
Car maker calls for release of Aung San Suu Kyi
The Independent [Sunday, December 06, 2009 12:43]
A major car manufacturer has aired a hard-hitting advert in the United States calling for the release of Burmese pro-democracy figure Aung San Suu Kyi, opening a new front in the battle to improve the industry's battered social image among the public.
The Chrysler advert, aired Thursday on several national TV networks, is a bold move from an industry struggling to regain widespread public support after a difficult year of bankruptcies and bailouts. Suu Kyi is the democratically elected leader of Burma but has been held under house arrest by the Burmese military junta for almost 14 of the past 20 years.
"We produced the TV film in honor of all those who put their lives at stake in the hopes of making the world a better place," said Chrysler's president Oliver Francois. "For Chrysler, this is a chance to use our brand image to join with others in the fight for peace."
The movie features four former Nobel laureates stepping out of black Chrysler 300 vehicles at the recent summit of Nobel laureates in Berlin. The final vehicle, a white Chrysler, is empty, symbolizing the absence of Aung San Suu Kyi. Whilst the advert was originally aired in Europe by Chrysler's sister firm Lancia, this is the first time it has been shown in the United States. It also features Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former Polish President Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela.Car manufacturers face an uphill struggle to regain the trust of the public following multimillion dollar bailouts from several governments earlier this year, without appearing cynical. In 2008, Lancia produced a car advert in which Richard Gere drove into Tibet, leaving his handprints in the snow. Despite declaring that the advert did "not promote technical values but human values," Lancia's parent company Fiat later apologized to China when the images appeared in the Chinese press.
Not one auto firm appeared in the Q3 2009 top ten brands published by Covalence, a Swiss firm that that tracks the ethical reputation of multinationals. The first major car brand to be ranked is BMW, appearing at number 25.
"Over the last years automobile manufacturers have communicated a lot about their initiatives to make greener cars," said Antoine Mach, co-founder and director of Covalence. "But they are weaker on the social front. Chrysler's recent announcement reflects a need to improve image in terms of social performance and human rights."
8888peoplepowergroupမွကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။
Saturday, December 5, 2009
ဟံသာဝတီဝက္ဆိုက္မွ
လၾကတ္မႈႏႇင့္ေနၾကတ္မႈ ျဖစ္စဥ္ကုိ ႏုိင္ငံျခားခရီးသည္ မ်ား ၾကည့္႐ႈ ႏုိင္ရန္မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕ရႇိဟိုတယ္ႀကီးမ်ား၊ ခရီး သြား ေအဂ်င္စီမ်ား ႀကိဳတင္ စီစဥ္ လာၾက
၂၀၀၉ ခုႏႇစ္ ႏႇစ္ကုန္ ႏႇင့္ ၂၀၁၀ ျပည့္ႏႇစ္ဆန္း ပိုင္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္ အလယ္ပုိင္းမႇ ထင္ရႇားစြာ ေတြ႕ရႇိ ရမည့္ လၾကတ္မႈ ႏႇင့္ ေနၾကတ္မႈ ျဖစ္စဥ္ကုိ ႏုိင္ငံျခား ခရီးသည္မ်ား ၾကည့္႐ႇဳ ၾကရန္ အတြက္ မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕ ရႇိ ဟိုတယ္ႀကီးမ်ား၊ ခရီးသြားေအဂ်င္စီမ်ားမႇ ႀကိဳတင္စီစဥ္လာၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕မႇ မႏၲေလးေဟးလ္ရီေဆာ့ဟိုတယ္၊ ဆီဒုိးနားဟိုတယ္၊ မႏၲေလးဆြမ္းဟိုတယ္စသည့္ ဟုိတယ္ႀကီးမ်ားတြင္ အခန္းမ်ားႀကိဳတင္ငႇားရမ္းမႈ ပိုမုိမ်ားျပားသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
''၂၀၀၉ ခုႏႇစ္ ႏႇစ္ကုန္ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၃၁ ရက္ သန္းေခါင္ေက်ာ္ ၂၀၁၀ အကူး ဇန္န၀ါရီလ ၁ ရက္ ၁၂ နာရီ ၅၅ မိနစ္မႇာ လရဲ႕အစိတ္အပိုင္း စၾကတ္မယ္။ ၁ နာရီ ၂၃ မိနစ္ဆုိရင္ အျပည့္အ၀ ၾကတ္မယ္။ လၾကတ္မႈကို အပီအျပင္ျမင္ရမယ့္ေနရာမႇာ ျမန္မာျပည္ပါမယ္။ ေနၾကတ္တာကေတာ့ ၂၀၁၀ ျပည့္ႏႇစ္ ဇန္န၀ါရီလ ၁၅ ရက္ေန႕ မြန္းတည့္ ၁၂ နာရီ မိနစ္ ၂၀ ေလာက္က စျမင္ရမယ္။ ၁၂ နာရီ ၃၄ မိနစ္ဆုိရင္ ေနအျပည့္ၾကတ္မယ္။ ညေန ၄ နာရီ ၃၆ မိနစ္မႇာ ၿပီးဆံုးမႇာပါ။ ၂၁ ရာစုအတြင္း အၾကာဆံုး ေနၾကတ္မႈပါ။
မႏၲေလးက ထင္ထင္ရႇားရႇားျမင္ရမႇာပါ''ဟု မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕ခံ နကၡတၲေဗဒေလ့လာသူတစ္ဦးက ဆိုသည္။
လၾကတ္မႈႏႇင့္ေနၾကတ္မႈျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ားကို မႏၲေလးႏႇင့္အနီးကပ္ဆံုး သဘာ၀ေမွ်ာ္စင္မ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ မႏၲေလးေတာင္၊ ရန္ကင္းေတာင္ႏႇင့္ စစ္ကိုင္းေတာင္မ်ားမႇလည္း ၾကည့္႐ႈၾကရန္ စိတ္အားထက္သန္လွ်က္ ရိႇၾကေၾကာင္း သိရႇိရသည္။
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