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Friday, December 25, 2015

ကမ႓ာႏွစ္ခု

(https://stolenchildhood.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/two-different-worlds/)


ကမ႓ာႏွစ္ခု

ေအာင္ဒင

ခရစၥမတ္ေန႕ဆိုတာ
မေန႕က ျပီးဆုံးသြားခဲ့တယ္
ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စြာ ဆင္ႏႊဲခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ အထိန္းအမွတ္ေတြကို
ေနာက္ ရက္အနည္းငယ္မွာ က်ေရာက္မယ္႔
ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးအတြက္ ခ်န္ထားရစ္ၾကတယ္
အဲဒီလို
ခန္းနားမႈေတြကို လက္ဆင့္ကမ္း
ႏွင္းဆီေတြ ယံုယံုၾကည္ၾကည္ပြင့္တဲ့ ပန္းခင္းထဲမွာ
ခ်စ္သူတို႕ရဲ့ လတ္ဆတ္တဲ့အနမ္းေတြနဲ႕
ကမ႓ာတစ္ခုဟာ ဝင္းလက္လို႕၊ ေတာက္ပလို႕…။

အေျမာက္သံ၊ ဗုံးသံေတြၾကားက
ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတစ္ခုမွာေတာ့
ခရစၥမတ္ေန႕ကို
က်င္းပဖို႕ အခြင့္အေရးမရွိ
လွလွပပေတြ ဆင္ယင္ဖို႕ေဝးလို႕
တရားေပးမယ္႕ ဓမၼဆရာေတာင္မရွိ
မလိုခ်င္ပဲ ရခဲ့တဲ့ဒုကၡေတြကိုပဲ
မခိုင္မာေတာ့တဲ့ ပုခုံးမ်ားေပၚမွာ ဆက္ထမ္း
ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနဲ႕ ေဝးေနရဦးမယ္႔
ေနာက္တစ္ႏွစ္ကို အလိုလိုေရာက္
လူသားတစ္စုရဲ့ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ေတြဟာ
ကမ႓ာတစ္ခုမွာ နာက်င္စြာ ေပ်ာက္ဆုံးလို႕…။

(ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၅)

Monday, December 21, 2015

To Support Myanmar Democratic Transition, U.S. May Need to Soften Policy toward Military (CSIS)



To Support Myanmar Democratic Transition, U.S. May Need to Soften Policy toward Military
 
Following the November 8 election, Myanmar’s political landscape has changed dramatically and the country is now stepping into uncharted territory. Both the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won a landslide victory, and the military, known as the tatmadaw and which ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, are about to do things they never have experienced.

Although the NLD won a landslide victory in the 1990 election, the party has never had a chance to hold power. Now, after 27 years, the NLD is going to govern the country. As the new Union Parliament will be dominated by the NLD and its allied ethnic parties, the tatmadaw representatives, who will be appointed by the commander-in-chief and take their allotted 25 percent of seats in parliament, will become an opposition group, a role in which the military has never served. The NLD and the military will have to govern the country together by sharing power, something neither side has done before. Myanmar’s military will have to recognize and respect a civilian president, who will be selected by party leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

At the start, the hope is that both the military and the NLD will try to work within the system of power sharing. However, sooner or later the situation may change.
The military’s leaders might choose one of the following options: (1) maintain the status quo, defend the powers of the tatmadaw outlined in the constitution, block the NLD government at every opportunity, revive the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), and try to return to power in the next election. Or (2) the military can stop paying respect to the NLD president, seize political power back from the civilian government by staging a coup and take the country back into international isolation. Or (3) it can accept gradual civilian rule over the military and give up political power over time.

Aung San Suu Kyi and her party may choose one of the following options: (1) try to force the military to give up power immediately and make herself president by using her popular mandate and amend the constitution. Or (2) she can seek to avoid confrontation and work closely with the military leaders to promote positive civil-military relations, which could convince the generals to leave power gradually according to their own schedule.

Which path each side will choose will depend on the pragmatism and wisdom of the leaders of both the military and the NLD. If they can work together, the country can be united, peaceful, and can prosper. If they choose to confront each other, the country could face chaos, disintegration, and deep recession.

The new government has to address a number of pressing problems. For example, the NLD cannot stop the decades-long civil war with ethnic armed groups and move the ongoing peace process forward without the help of the military. The two also need to work together to boost the country’s weak economy. Neither problem can be tackled if the NLD seeks to drive the military from power or if the tatmadaw chooses not to cooperate with the new government.

For the sake of the country’s future, Aung San Suu Kyi will need to establish positive relations with the generals. However, her efforts and diplomatic skills will not be enough if the United States continues to maintain its policy of disengagement with the military.
Many U.S. lawmakers still view Myanmar’s military as a human rights violator and will only move to lift restrictions when the tatmadaw agrees to work under civilian authorities, something which may not happen soon. Some members of Congress blame the military for the ongoing offensives against ethnic armed organizations in Kachin and Shan states. However, the military is not alone responsible for this fighting.

While Myanmar’s armed forces are continuously pushing ethnic troops closer to the border, the ethnic armed groups are trying to expand their areas of control inside Myanmar, some of which they have not controlled before. As a result, armed clashes are unavoidable. The military leadership is blamed for human rights violations in ethnic areas, but the armed ethnic groups are not innocent. These groups also impose heavy taxes on the local populations, recruit child soldiers, steal the property of their own ethnic minorities, lay landmines on farmland, and kill anyone they suspect of being a government informer.

Today, whether we like it or not, the military is a key stakeholder in the transition to democracy and national reconciliation in Myanmar. Engaging with the generals and encouraging them to fully cooperate with the new civilian government will help to build trust between the military and the new civilian politicians in Myanmar. As long as tatmadaw leaders are singled out as villains and excluded from engagement with the United States, they are unlikely to feel incentives to help make the transition smoother and make the peace process more successful. Their frustration with the United States may be directed at the new government and Aung San Suu Kyi.

This does not mean selling weapons to and providing combat training for the military. But the U.S. Congress should not discourage the departments of State and Defense from engaging the military by facilitating high-level visits, exchanging professional experience, assisting tatmadaw leaders in obtaining international exposure, and training some mid-level officers at U.S. military colleges.

Earlier, the hardline position of Congress against the military helped the democracy movement to endure hardship and survive brutal military rule. U.S. sanctions also denied legitimacy to the military regime, which was one of the driving forces prompting the generals to initiate the current transformation from the military rule to constitutional government. But today, the still-hardline position of many in Congress against the military may hinder Myanmar’s national reconciliation process, undermine the efforts of the new NLD government and Aung San Suu Kyi, and prompt the military to take measures contrary to country’s political democratization.

Mr. Aung Din is a former political prisoner in Burma and currently lives in the United States. He serves as a consultant for Moemaka Multimedia, based in San Francisco, and as senior adviser to the Open Myanmar Initiative (OMI), a non-profit organization based in Yangon that promotes the right to information and education. See more information about OMI here.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

President Aung San Suu Kyi? Probably Not Yet (CSIS)


President Aung San Suu Kyi? Probably Not Yet


Since Aung San Suu Kyi met on December 4 with former military dictator Than Shwe, who ruled the country from 1992 to 2010 and was the architect of the 2008 constitution, there has been widespread speculation that she could become president of Myanmar soon. These expectations were encouraged by a Facebook post the same day by Nay Shwe Thway Aung, a grandson of Than Shwe who facilitated the meeting, saying that Than Shwe accepted Aung San Suu Kyi as the future leader of the country and that he pledged to support her if she works for the development of the country.

Nay Shwe Thway Aung also posted the image of a 5,000 kyat bank note (just under $4), with the signatures of Than Shwe, President Thein Sein, and Aung San Suu Kyi on Facebook. Than Shwe’s signature is dated October 3, 2009, Thein Sein’s May 12, 2012, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s November 19, 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi also said that she reached an agreement with the former dictator, but without spelling out details.

Many observers interpreted Than Shwe’s gesture as giving a green light to the current military leaders to allow the amendment of the Section 59f of the constitution, which bars Aung San Suu Kyi from the presidency because her two sons are foreign citizens. At the same time, Aung Ko, a member of parliament from the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party, floated the idea that she could become president if Section 59f is temporarily suspended by the approval of the parliament with a simple majority vote. Many believe this might be feasible.

However, even it is true that Than Shwe authorized military leaders to amend Section 59f, the new parliament, which will take office at the end of January 2016, cannot amend the constitution immediately. According to the constitution, the first order of business for the new parliament is electing chairmen of both the Lower and Upper Houses. Next the Union Parliament will divide into three groups to nominate three vice-presidential candidates. Then the Union Parliament as a whole will serve as the Electoral College and select one of the three vice-presidential candidates to be president.

As a result, the new parliament must elect the president before it can consider amending the constitution at its first session. Also during the first session, the new parliament will be busy debating the 2016-2017 budget, which will be submitted by the outgoing government, and approving nominations for more than 200 Union level positions, including cabinet ministers, that will be submitted by the president-elect.

Even if the new parliament amends Section 59f with the support of the military in the next session, a national referendum is needed for it to go into effect. Amending this provision will be a long process and take several months, if not years.

In addition, how much influence Than Shwe still has on the military leaders and whether they will agree to make her president is also in question. The offices of both President Thein Sein and Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing said that they were not informed about the meeting between Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi in advance. Presidential spokesperson and Information Minister Ye Htut said, “Let me tell you frankly, Senior-General Than Shwe is now retired. We have some respect for him as he used to lead us. But he doesn’t have the right to reverse the policies we are taking. If he [tried to], we would not accept it.”

The president’s office director Zaw Htay also told the Myanmar Review Journal that the president was not informed in advance about the meeting and that he never signed the 5,000 kyat bank note because it is against the law. Senior military officials told The Irrawaddy that the commander-in-chief and top military leaders were at Pyin Oo Lwin at the time of the meeting and they were not informed about it in advance either. One unnamed general from the military’s information unit said that Than Shwe is already retired and has nothing to do with the military.

The idea of temporarily suspending Section 59f is also a pie in the sky notion. The 2008 constitution does not allow suspension of its provisions either permanently or temporarily. Adding the provision for “temporary suspension” of the constitution would need to be added before it could be used.

Judging by the negative responses from the offices of the president and the military commander, it is clear that for Aung San Suu Kyi to become president depends solely on the goodwill of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and current military leaders. It will take some time for her to build trust with the military leaders and get their support.

On December 4, before Aung San Suu Kyi went to see Than Shwe in Naypyitaw, Min Aung Hlaing delivered a speech at the Defense Service Academy in Pyin Oo Lwin, at which he spoke about the military’s participation in politics. He said “since democracy enhances one’s value, we will have to proceed with respect for the betterment of the country with a reciprocal arrangement.” By stating “reciprocal arrangement,”, Min Aung Hlaing made clear that as long as Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party acknowledge the role of the military and treat it with respect, the military will respond with the same attitude.

Mr. Aung Din is a former political prisoner in Burma and currently lives in the United States. He serves as a consultant for Moemaka Multimedia, based in San Francisco, and as senior adviser to the Open Myanmar Initiative (OMI), a non-profit organization based in Yangon that promotes the right to information and education. See more information about OMI here.


Monday, December 7, 2015

တိုးတက္ေျပာင္းလဲေနေသာ ေခတ္

(ေခတ္ရနံ႕၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ၊ ၂၀၁၅)



တိုးတက္ေျပာင္းလဲေနေသာ ေခတ္
ေအာင္ဒင္

မိဘႏွစ္ပါး ခ်န္ထားရစ္ခဲ့တဲ့
ျမိဳ႕လယ္ေခါင္ လမ္းမၾကီးနေဘးက
ေပ ၆၀ ပတ္လည္ အိမ္နဲ႕ေျမကြက္ကို
ဗမာစကားမေျပာတတ္တဲ့
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားအသစ္မ်ားထံ ေရာင္းခ်ျပီး
ေမာင္ႏွမ ၅ ေယာက္အေမြခြဲယူၾကေတာ့
က်ေနာ္က
ရပ္ကြက္အတြင္း၊ လမ္းက်ဥ္းက်ဥ္းကေလးထဲမွာ
၁၀ ေပက်ယ္တဲ့ အိမ္ကေလးတစ္လုံး
အပိုင္ရလိုက္တယ္…။

ေနာက္ အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ၾကာတဲ့အခါ
အဲဒီ ၁၀ ေပအိမ္ကေလးကို
က်ေနာ္႔ သားသမီး ၃ ေယာက္
ေရာင္းခ်ျပီး အေမြခြဲၾကလိမ့္မယ္
သူတို႕ေတြ တစ္ေယာက္ ဘယ္ေလာက္စီ္ရၾကမလဲ
က်ေနာ္ စိတ္ပူမိတယ္
အဲဒီလို  အေမြခြဲႏိုင္ဖို႕ေတာင္
အဲဒီ အခ်ိန္ထိ
ဒီအိမ္ကေလး က်န္ရစ္ပါ့မလား
ဪ၊ မစဥ္းစားတာပဲ ေကာင္းပါတယ္…။

(ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၁၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၅)