Burma’s Youngest Female Political Prison Describes Life on the Inside

September 27th, 2008 by King Kong Janoi

Rights groups are demanding the release of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi following the release this week of around seven political prisoners in Burma.

The military government gave an amnesty for more than 9,000 inmates in act they described as ‘good will and kindness’.

One of them was Win Tin One of Burma’s most prominent political detainees who spent 19 years in detention.

After his release he spoke about his feelings to Asia Calling’s partner station the Democractic Voice of Burma.

“In my view, Burma is a prison. All of us are prisoners. We don’t have freedom of speech; we don’t have freedom of expression. It is only technology, not freedom of speech that allows me to speak to you on this phone. Is there any freedom in this country? Can you say or write anything freely in this country? No way! We are all in prison.”

He says that he strongly rejects the military government’s new consitution and vows to continue to fight for democracy in Burma.

“That is what I have done in the past and I will carry on. I will keep on working for it. I do not know how much strength, intelligence and power it will take. Please help me, advise me, and work hand in hand with me, back me up. I will do my best.”

He spent nearly two-decades behind bars in Rangoons notorious Insein jail. The prison is believed to be still holding thousands of political activists.

Those who have been in there and managed to survive say they will never forget the nightmare of being on the inside.

King Kong Janoi spoke to one such female political prisoner now living in Thailand.

TEXT:

“I have been release more than eight years but still sometimes I think I am sleeping in the cell. Until now I could not smell bean-curry because that is my horrible food in the jail.”

Ma Suu Mon was the youngest female political prisoner at Insein.

She was jailed at the age of 19 for being a leader in the young wing of the National League for Democracy or NLD.

Authorities came for her while she was cleaning the NLD office in April of 2000.

“We saw a nice, big car parked near the house. I joked that I’d love to drive the car and go sightseeing. I entered the house and changed clothes. After a few minutes there was a knock at the front door. My mom opened it and found eight military - intelligence officers in front of the house. I was scared, and just looked at the floor, shaking all over, because I knew I was going to be arrested.”

They blind folded and put her into the car without telling her where they were going.

“After an hour the car stopped. I heard the sound of an iron door opening. One of the officers told me to bow my head down and pushed me forward. I realised that I was already in my cell, because I knew the doorways of cells are lower. They took off the blindfold and I found myself in a cell with many other inmates. Later they took my photo and moved me into solitary confinement. That’s where I stayed until the day I was released.”

She was in there for 11 months.

“I didn’t eat or see the light of day for the first three days. I just drank water. They question me many times, day and night, for interrogation. While I was being questioned I had to wear a big hood so that I couldn’t see their faces. I had to sit on a high stool – my feet couldn’t touch the ground and there was no backrest, so my back ached after a while. Mentally I was exhausted, especially from not knowing what I was charged with or how long I would be in prison. I spent my days never knowing what was going to happen tomorrow.”

She was told she would be released if she signed a document vowing never to get involved in politics- she refused.

“Prison was cruel, but I worried about my friends there. When I heard them crying or losing their minds, I realised that I could never give up, and I just wanted to keep fighting for political change.”

She was finally released in January 2001.

“When I arrived home my mother was cooking some food to send me in prison. I tottered into the house because I hadn’t walked so much in such a long time. My eyesight was unclear because I couldn’t take the sunlight. My nose was unfamiliar with the fresh air. Only my mother and sister were home. When my mother saw me she called out my name and cried. I’d become just skin and bones and I was covered in painful.”

She wanted to return to University but was told she had to sign a document saying she would not participate in political activists. She refused again and missed another year of study.

The following year there was no obligation to sign an agreement so she returned and gained a degree in chemistry in 2003.

After graduating she became interested in journalism and is now a reporter for Radio Free Asia in Thailand.

“Sometimes I feel that I’ve been selfish for leaving my country, but I think I might be arrested again if I’m in Burma and wouldn’t get a second chance this time. Military-intelligence officers always stop at my house and ask my parents where I am. If Burma became a democratic country tomorrow, I’d return home immediately. I want to work for the people in my country and I want to live with my parents, but I have to live in another country for now and save my life for that day.”

Bangkok protest on anniversary Septermber uprising in Burma

နာဂစ္တန္ဆာခံ အျပစ္မ့ဲကေလးငယ္

Reporter Experience

All reporter try to question the source for information but why they don't want to be interviewer if necessary. Is that nature of reporter or personality behavior.

As my experience I have been working as reporter for four years. I like to ask question and as the same time I like explain what I know as interview when necessary.

Some people I don't want to mention here. I could not understand why they want to speak up what they know, what they hear, what they see.

In my theory, we are all fighting for press freedom, we need to speak up about our experience.

ထုိင္းနုိင္ငံသား ျမန္မာေတာင္ေပၚသားမ်ား နိုင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးဆံုးရံူး

ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံမွာ ေတာင္ေပၚသား ၃ သိန္းရွိေနေပမဲ့ သူတုိ့မွာ ႏုိင္ငံသားမွတ္ပုံတင္ ကတ္ျပားမရွိတဲ့အတြက္ သူတုိ့ရဲ့အေျခခံရပုိင္ခြင့္ အခြင့္အေရးေတြ ဆုံးရွံးခဲ့ရတယ္လုိ ့ ၃ ႏွစ္ၾကာ မွတ္တမ္းျပဳစုျပီး ေလ့လာခဲ့တဲ့ ကုလသမဂနဲ ့ ထိုင္း အန္ဂ်ီအိုအဖြဲ ့က ပူးေပါင္းျပီး ဒီကေန ့သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ပါ တယ္၊ ဒီျပသနာကုိ ေျဖရွင္းနိင္ဖုိ ့ ထိုင္းအစုိးရကလဲ ေတာင္ေပၚသားေတြအတြက္ နုိင္ငံသားမွတ္ပုံတင္ လုပ္ေပးေနတယ္လုိ သိရပါတယ္။

ဒီ္အေၾကာင္းအေသးစိတ္ကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ ့ သတင္းေထာက္ ကုိဗညာကင္းက ေတာင္ေပၚသားေတြကုိ မွတ္ပုံတင္လုပ္ေပးတ့ဲ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ အေနာက္ပုိင္း စံခလဗူရီျမဳိ ့ကေန သတင္းပုိ ့ထားပါတယ္၊

ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံေျမာက္ပိုင္းမွာရိွတဲ့ ေတာင္ေပၚသားေတြဟာ ဘုိးစဥ္ေဘာင္ဆက္ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ေပမဲ့ သူတုိ ့ရဲ့ အေျခခံအခြင့္အေရးျဖစ္တဲ့ ပညာေရး က်န္းမာေရး ခရီးသြားလာခြင့္ အိမ္ျခံ၀ယ္ခြင့္ ဆႏမဲေပးပုိင္ခြင့္ စတဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးေတြ အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ဆုံးရွံးရတယ္လုိ ့သိရတယ္၊

စံခလဗူရီျမိဳ ့မွာေနတဲ့ အသက္ ၂၂ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ မိစေမာတ္ခ်မ္းကေတာ့ ေနမေကာင္းရင္လည္း ေဆးရုံမသြားရဲပဲ ေဆးျမီးတုိေတြနဲ ့ပဲ ကုေနခဲ့ရတယ္္လုိ ့ ေျပာပါတယ္၊ ေဆးရုံး၀န္ထမ္းေတြကလည္း မွတ္ပုံတင္မရိွတဲ့ လူနာေတြကုိ ထုိင္းရဲေတြကုိ သတင္းပိုခဲ့တယ္ သတင္းထြက္ေပၚခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္စိုးရိမ္ေနၾကရပါတယ္၊

မြန္ေတာင္ေပၚသား ႏူိင္ေကာင္းနန္ကေတာ့ ထိုင္းမွာေမြးခဲ့ေပမယ္ ထိုင္းမွတ္ပုံတင္မရတဲ့ အတြက္ အစိုးရေပးတဲ့ပညာသင္ဆု ျငင္းပယ္တာ ခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္၊

က်ေနာ္ ထိုင္းေက်ာင္းမွာ သူငယ္တန္္းကေန အလယ္တန္းအထိ တက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အမွတ္ေကာင္းေအာင္လည္း ၾကဳိးစားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ က်ြန္ေတာ္တုိ ့မိသားစုက ဆင္းရဲတယ္ေလ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာင္းတက္ဖုိ ့ စေကာလာရွစ္ ေလ်ာက္တယ္။ စေကာလာရွစ္က ရကုိ ရရမယ္လုိ ့ က်န္ေတာ္ ေမ်ာ္မွန္းထားတယ္ ဒါေပမဲ့ အပယ္ခဲ့ရတယ္ ဘာျဖစ္လဲဆုိေတာ့ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ထုိင္းေက်ာင္းသား မဟုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ ထုိင္းနုိင္ငံသားေတြလုိ အခြင့္အေရး မရွိဘူး၊

ထုိင္းဘုရင္မင္းျမတ္ရဲ့ ဖိအားေပးမူေၾကာင့္ ၂၀၀၅ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ထုိင္းအာဏာပုိင္ေတြဘက္က ေတာင္ေပၚသားေတြကုိ မွတ္ပုံတင္ကတ္ျပားလုပ္ေပးဖုိ ့ စတင္စီမံခ်က္ခ်ခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ ထုိင္းမွာေမြးတဲ့လူတုိင္း ေမြးစာရင္း အေထာက္ထား ျပႏုိင္ရင္ ထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံသားျဖစ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ရွိတယ္လုိ ့သိရပါတယ္၊

အသက္ ၂၀ အရြယ္ရိွတဲ့ ႏုိင္ေကာင္းနန္ဟာ ထုိင္းႏိုင္ငံသား ကုိင္ေဆာင္ခြင့္ရအတြက္ သူအရမ္းဂုဏ္ယူေနမိပါတယ္လို ့ေျပာပါတယ္။။

အရမ္းကုိိ ကြာျခားပါတယ္။ ဟုိတုန္းကဆုိရင္ က်ေနာ္ ထုိင္းမဟုတ္တဲ့ အတြက္ ဘာမွလုပ္လုိမရဘူး ဘာမွလုပ္ပုိင္ခြင့္ မရွိဘူး။ ပညာေရးမွာလည္း အခြင့္အလမ္းမရွိဘူး မဲဆႏလည္း ထည့္ပိုင္ခြင့္မရဘူး။ ဒါေပမဲ့ က်ေနာ္ထုိင္းျဖစ္သြားတဲ့အခ်ိန္ကေနစျပီ က်ေနာ္ဘ၀က ေျပာင္းျပန္ျဖစ္သြားတာပဲ၊

သူဘ၀မွာ ေက်ာင္းဆက္တက္ခြင့္ရတဲ့အတြက္ အားလုံးကုိေက်းဇူးတင္လုိ ့ မဆုံးျဖစ္ေနတယ္၊

ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံကုိေက်းဇူးတင္တယ္။ ဘုရင္ကုိလည္း ေက်းဇူးတင္တယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ အစုိးရေရာ အာဏာပိုင္ပါ ထုိင္းျပည္ထူတရပ္လုံး က်ေနာ္ကုိ ေျပာင္းလဲမူ အခြင့္အေရးအမ်ားၾကီးေပးခဲ့တဲ့ ဒီထုိင္းႏိုင္ငံသား ျဖစ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံသားလုိ ရသင့္ရထုိက္တဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား ရႏုိင္တဲ့ အတြက္ ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္၊ က်ေနာ္က တက႕သုိလ္တက္ႏုိင္ဖုိ ့အခြင့္အေရး အိမ္မက္ေတြ အမ်ားၾကီးမက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္ထုိင္းျဖစ္သြားတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ က်ေနာ္ရဲ့ အိမ္မက္ေတြကို အေကာင္္အထည္ေပၚလာတယ္၊

ထိုင္းနိုင္ငံမွာ ေမြးဖြားခဲ့တဲ့ ေနာေစးမာကေတာ့ သူမွာ ထိုင္းေမြးစာရင္းမရိွတဲ့အတြက္ နိုင္ငံသားမွတ္ပံုတင္လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္မရပါဘူး၊

က်မထုိင္းမွာပဲ ေမြးတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ ေဆးရုံမွာမေမြးဘူး အိမ္မွာေမြးေတာ့ ေမြးစာရင္းမရွိဘူးေလ။ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံသားျဖစ္ႏိုင္ဖုိ ့ ေမြးစာရင္း ရွိရမယ္။ က်မတုိ ့အတြက္ကေတာ့ ေတာ္ေတာ္ ခက္ခဲ့တယ္ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ့လည္း မသိဘူး သူတို ့ရဲ့လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္လည္း ေခါင္းရူပ္တယ္၊။

ေနာ္ေစးမာက ၉ တန္းႏွစ္ကတည္းက ေက်ာင္းဆက္တက္ခြင့္မရွိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ထိုင္းမဟုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ ၉တန္းေအာင္ျပီးေနာက္မွာ ဆက္တက္ခြင့္မရွိေတာ့တဲ့အတြက္ တကသုိလ္တက္ႏုိင္ဖုိ ့လဲ အခက္ခဲရိွတယ္လုိ သူကဆက္ေျပာပါတယ္။

ထုိင္းျပည္ထဲေရး၀န္ၾကီးကလည္း ေတာင္ေပၚသားလူမ်ဳိးစုေတြက အသစ္ေရာက္ေရာက္လာနဲ ့ အရင္ရွိေနတဲ့ လူေတြကုိ ခြဲျခားႏုိင္ဖုိ ့ခက္ခဲတယ္။ ဗမာျပည္ကေန ထြက္ေျပးလာၾကတဲ့ ဒုကသည္ အမ်ားအျပားရိွေနတယ္လုိ ့ ေျပာတယ္၊

ဘန္ေကာက္အေျခစုိက္ အမ်ဳိးသားတုိင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ိဳးစု သုေတသနပညာရွင္ စူရပုန္္ေကာင္ခ်မ္းတဲ အျမင္ကေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံမွာ လူမ်ဳိးအစြဲေတြကုိ အေျဖရွာသင့္သည္လို ့ေျပာပါတယ္၊

ထုိင္းလူမ်ဳိးၾကားမွာ သူတုိ ့မွာ အစြဲၾကီးၾကတယ္။ ထုိင္းအစစ္မဟုတ္ဘူဆုိရင္ ထုိင္းႏုိငံမွာရိွတဲ့ သံယံဇာတေတြကို အသုံးျပဳပိုင္ခြင့္မရဘူး ထုိင္းမွာေမြးခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ထုိင္းမ်ဳိးဗီဇ မဟုတ္ရင္ ထုိင္းလူမူအသိုင္းအ၀ုိ္င္းက လက္မခံဘူး၊

ဒီႏွစ္၂၀၀၈အတြက္ေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံသားမွတ္ပုံတင္လာေလ်ာက္တဲ့သူေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားက အပယ္ခဲ့ရတယ္လုိ ့သိရပါတယ္။။ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံအေနာက္ပုိင္ စံခလဗူရီရဲစခန္းအေရွ့မွာေတာ့ မွတ္ပုံတင္ရုိက္ဖုိ႑ လူေတြတန္းစီေနၾကဆဲပါ။။

School Trash Bank Helps Reduce Rubbish

August 25th, 2008 by King Kong Janoi

What to do with rubbish is a problem every country in Asia is facing.

Burning rubbish contributes to global warming and we are running out of land to use as garbage dumps. Plastic bags cog the regions rivers killing fish and wildlife.

Reducing, Recycling, and Re-use recycling as become a urgent and immediately task for us all.

Leading the way is the Thammachote Suksalai School in Suphanburi, 200 kilometers North West of Bangkok. It’s publics run a garbage bank are earn money saving the environment.

King Kong Janoi visited the inspiring school.

Students make flowers out of used plastic bottles.

Pupils at this school in North-West Thailand are recycling champions.

On site is a garbage bank where they collect, recycle, re-use and sell rubbish.

Sunisa Suandokmai is one of the volunteers running the garbage bank.

“I am happy to work saving the environment because we can earn money recycling garbage. I have also learned from my teachers about global warming and I want to do something to stop the planet from getting hotter and hotter.”

The garbage bank was set up two years ago. Now every day before the end of school students trade rubbish.

Students collect rubbish from the school grounds or bring waste from their homes.

The waste is then separated into three groups-paper, plastic, and aluminum.

They then sell what they can to recycling collectors and use the rest to make products to sell at the market.

Over two years the school has earned more than three thousand US dollars from the project.

One of the teachers, Ampanan Mekchai says they try to recycle everything.

She says, Organic waste is made into fertilizer and sold to local farmers.

Used cooking oil is mixed together with methanol and sodium hydroxide to make bio-diesel which fuels the schools garbage truck.

“I am really happy about our work because although it’s small we are helping the country by reducing garbage and slowing climate change.”

Teacher Vannaporn Mukda calls on other schools to follow their lead.

“We want to urge other school in other province to save our world. Even though, we don’t have much budget from the government for doing this the impact of the community, the students and the environment is really significant.”

The garbage bank also buys computers and electrical appliances that are no longer functional.

Students learning mechanics practice their skills by fixing them.

They also encourage their students to reject plastic bags and across the campus, students proudly carry renewable cloth bags.

“To fight global warming we encourage students to plant trees at school and at home. We also encourage student to use public transport as much as they can. We are do not allow the student to burn the garbage and ask them to sell it at the garbage bank instead.”

Last year the school won an environmental award from Thailand’s Ministry for the environment.

Remembering the 1988 Burmese Uprising

August 9th, 2008 by King Kong Janoi

20 years ago this week, Burmese Women and men, old and young, rich and poor, were flooding the streets – in a tide of anger against the repressive military government.

Revolution was in the air on August 8 back in 1988.

Ma Myait Myait San was a final year student at Rangoon University at the time.

“In 1988 I would say that was the birth of the human rights movement. I had never heard the word human rights. I took part with the other students because I was hoping for a life change.”

Six weeks of rallies - which became known as the 88 protests - were eventually brutally suppressed by the military.

At least 3,000 civilians were killed as the military tightened its grip on power.

On the anniversary, King Kong Janoi speaks with Aung Zaw, a student leaders who was forced to flee after their uprising failed.

“I still remember my departure when I prayed and worshipped my mom. I told her I will be back in a few months and she cried and I cried. I thought naively that I would see her again but I have not.”

He is now the editor of Irrawaddy Magazine that covers Burma from Thailand.

His greatest wish is to return home.

“I thought of if I buy air ticket here to Burma, it would only take 55 minutes to fly but I can not go home. So that is really give us a hard feeling. But the spirit of 88 continues. We have determination.”

But the military regime that has ruled the country for 46 years shows no signs of collapse, despite international condemnation and economic sanctions.

This week President Bush both delivered speeches criticising the Burmese junta.

In an exclusive Interview with Asia Calling’s partner station the Democratic Voice of Burma President Bush says the international community needs more.

“What we have to do is continue to work with members of the Security Council and explain to them that what matters most in life is the human condition. We have a lot of work to do to convince people that life can be better in Burma and it’s in their interest to make it better. China is a very important country. It’s in our common interest that Burma be peaceful but I don’t know if China will agree that Aung San Suu Kyi should be free and at the centre of the country like we do. We just have to work that much harder.”

Political analysis U Aung Naing Oo who met with President Bush argues America should take a more diplomatic approach.

“The US government should engage with Burmese military and US government should come out with pragmatic program to help the transition and to build democratic institution in Burma and to bring the military out of isolation.”

He argues that the Burmese people not the military are suffering because of the economic sanctions.

“I don’t think sanctions are effective. Sanctions have unwittingly punished the people because the military has a lot of money from the sale of oil and gas. They don’t care sanction.”

He says while fellow Asian nations like Thailand and China still trade with the military US and EU sanctions are meaningless.

Southeast Asian nations maintain a non-intervention policy with Burma.

But there have been recent moves by ASEAN to put more pressure on the military to make democratic reforms.

Many of the protests to mark the 88 revolution have focus on China.

Activists say Beijing could be the key to making the military respect human rights.

Dissidents in Rangoon though, say it is very difficult to organize mass protest now because most their leaders are in jail or hiding.

But U Aung Moe Zaw, the chairperson of the Opposition Democratic Party for a New Society remains optimistic.

“Change in our country will come from the inside. The people and our political activists are working together to achieve our goal.”

On the eve of the anniversary One of Burma’s most popular comedians was charged with several offences, after he defied the military by giving aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis.

His relatives say Zarganar faces charges including creating public unrest and unlawful association for his aid activities during the disaster.