Archive for November 11th, 2007
ကုလ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး သံတမန္ ပီညဲရိုးရဲ႕ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ခရီးစဥ္ ေအာင္ျမင္ဖို႔လို
Download (PDF) pinheiro-trip-in-burma.pdf
Myanmar: New evidence of mass detentions, hostage taking, deaths in custody and disappearances
Amnesty International
AI Index: ASA 16/038/2007 (Public)
News Service No: 218
9 November 2007
Myanmar: New evidence of mass detentions, hostage taking, deaths in custody and disappearances
Amnesty International has today written to Myanmar‘s authorities with a briefing paper outlining grave and ongoing human rights violations committed since the start of September’s crackdown.
The briefing comes ahead of next week’s visit to Myanmar by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights Paulo Sergio Pinheiro.
“Widespread arbitrary detentions, hostage taking, beatings and torture in custody and enforced disappearances clearly disprove any claims from the Myanmar Government of returning normality,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific programme director.
“Instead of protesting about interference in sovereignty, the Myanmar authorities must honor their promises of ‘full cooperation’ with the UN through full access for Mr Pinheiro and full delivery of concrete human rights improvements identified by the UN Human Rights Council and Security Council.”
Amnesty International’s key concerns include:
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- The continued detention of some 700 political prisoners including at least 15 individuals sentenced to prison terms of up to nine and a half years;
- An official policy of taking family members and friends as “hostages” to force others to turn themselves in;
- Deaths in detention due to severe beatings and others forms of torture;
- Appalling detention conditions including the denial of adequate food, water and sanitary facilities as well as the keeping of detainees in “dog cells”;
- Enforced disappearances since the crackdown, including at least 72 individuals whose whereabouts the authorities have failed to account for;
- Failure by the Myanmar authorities to account for the number of people killed during the crackdown;
- Evidence of marksmen atop military trucks and bridges using live ammunition to target individual demonstrators during the crackdown resulting in the death of at least two students and the serious wounding of others;
- Ambulances being denied access to victims on the streets during September’s demonstrations and private medial clinics ordered not to treat the injured.
Amnesty International is calling on Myanmar authorities to account for all those killed and those who have disappeared. The authorities must also provide the Special Rapporteur with a full list of all those detained and sentenced since the crackdown as well as full and unrestricted access to all detention facilities and crematoria.
For a full copy of the briefing, please see: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA160372007
The Monk’s Tale: Death in detention
Amnesty International
The Monk’s Tale: Death in detention
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| U Thilavantha was killed after the Myitkyina monastery raid © AAPPB |
“We only dared go back into the monastery in the morning. The whole building looked fairly messed up with doors that had been kicked open. We saw red stains on the floor… and solid red blobs that appeared to be blood.”
U Thilavantha was a respected and much-loved member of his local community. He spent several years studying as a monk in Sri Lanka and was the Deputy Abbot of the Yuzana Kyaunghtai training school in Myitkyina, a city in the far north of Myanmar. He gave English classes to local children. He was around 35 years old.
On 25 September, the day after Myitkyina’s monks had taken part in peaceful marches calling for an end to restrictions imposed by the military government, U Thilavantha’s monastery was raided by police. He was beaten and arrested. Once in detention, he received further beatings.
He died of his injuries the following day. Officials at the local hospital were pressured into declaring that he had suffered a heart attack.
The monastery in which U Thilavantha lived had originally housed 142 monks. On 31 October, only 11 remained.
 Listen: The monks recount the full story of the military’s brutal attack |
Monks from the training school in Myitkyina have told Amnesty International of the day the police destroyed their home. The monks have described the events of the 25 September that led to the death of U Thilavantha and the beating of many others.
“The authorities cut the phone lines at about five in the afternoon. At ten past nine that night, they crashed open the main gate of the monastery with their military trucks,” recalled one of the monks.
“They started beating the monks as soon as they came in. They kicked open the main door of the monastery after they crashed open the gate. They beat us indiscriminately as soon as they got inside the building. It was a preventive strike so that the monks could not resist the attack. They ordered us to stand against the wall and hit the monks who did not obey their orders with sticks…”
လူရွင္သခ်ၤဳိင္းမ်ားအေၾကာင္း (ေနလင္း-ေရး)
လူရွင္သခ်ၤဳိင္းမ်ားအေၾကာင္း စာအုပ္မွာ ေနလင္း (အ.က.သ)က သူ႔ရဲ႕ေထာင္တြင္းအေတြ႔အၾကံဳေတြကို ေရးသားထားၿပီး ဗမာႏိုင္ငံလံုးဆိုင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးရာ ေကာ္မတီက ထုတ္ေ၀ေပးထားပါတယ္။
စာမ်က္ႏွာ (၁၆၅)ထိကို ဒီေနရာမွ ကူးယူပါ။ nay_lins_luu-shin_thin-gyine.pdf
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ေထာင္ေတြမွာ ဘယ္လို ၾကံဳေတြ႔ရတယ္ဆိုတာေတြကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားေတြနဲ႔ ကမာၻက အစစ္အမွန္အတိုင္း သိေစခ်င္တဲ့ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ ဒီစာအုပ္ကို ျဖန္႔ေ၀ေပးဖို႔ အျခား ဘေလာ့ဂ္ေတြနဲ႔ Email ေတြမွာလည္း ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။ အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ တိုက္ဖ်က္ပစ္ ဘေလာ့ဂ္မွာလည္း ေဖာ္ျပခြင့္ေပးဖို႔ စာေရးသူ ကိုေနလင္းနဲ႔ စာအုပ္ထုတ္ေ၀သူတို႔ကို ဒီေနရာကေန ခြင့္ေတာင္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။
စာအုပ္ပါ မာတိကာကို ေဖာ္ျပလိုက္ပါတယ္။
World Focus on Burma (11-11-2007)
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eFluxMedia -
Aung Din, executive director of the US Campaign for Burma said: “I would say it is a breakthrough if she is able to meet the leadership without … - Foreign Office minister is ‘liability’, say his officials
Times Online, UK -
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Hartford Courant, United States - 4 hours ago
… pored over the news from Sri Lanka only to realize that it was what they used to call Ceylon, and then from Myanmar, only to work out that it was Burma. … - UN human rights envoy to visit Myanmar
Xinhua, China -
11 (Xinhua) — United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro is due to arrive here later on Sunday on a five-day visit … 
JA students join Memory Project
Jackson Clarion Ledger, MS -
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Inter Press Service (subscription), Italy – By Larry Jagan
“Myanmar (Burma)… will never allow any outside interference to infringe on the sovereignty of the state,” he was quoted as saying on the state-run TV. … - UN Human Rights Envoy Visits Myanmar
The Associated Press -
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — A UN human rights envoy arrived Sunday in Myanmar on a mission to get inside the country’s prisons to determine the numbers of people … - UN rights envoy in Myanmar to see junta
AFP -
New York-based Human Rights Watch said the UN Security Council should “redouble efforts to prod Burma’s generals into starting a genuine political dialogue … - Oil’s run shifts fate of nations
Denver Post, CO -
Myanmar’s recent demonstrations were triggered by a government decision to raise fuel prices. In the US, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers … - UN probes human rights in Myanmar
Aljazeera.net, Qatar -
Meanwhile Human Rights Watch, the New York-based organization, said the UN security council should “redouble efforts to prod Burma ‘s [ Myanmar 's] generals ... - Preventing sexual exploitation in society
The Tide, Nigeria -
Thailand’s neighbor to the north, Myanmar (Burma), has been under a military dictatorship for years, and its people have endured human rights abuses and a … - Growing Impact of HIV/AIDS on Teenage Girls
Media For Freedom, Nepal -
… has estimated that as many as 50 percent of sex workers in Kenya were HIV-positive; 45 percent in Guyana; and 50 percent in Myanmar (Burma). … - Burma Gets a Big Bang For The Buck
Strategy Page -
India has been quiet about the pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma (Myanmar), which borders India’s restive northeastern tribal areas. … - 600 people gather in Tokyo calling for end of Burma dictatorship
Japan News Review, Sweden -
“Japan should review its official development assistance policy (to Myanmar) and consider economic sanctions,” the Rengo chief Tsuyoshi Takagi was quoted by … - Draft Copy of Much-Awaited ASEAN Charter Leaked to Media
Voice of America -
ASEAN has been under pressure to do more to address human rights abuses, particularly in Burma. A recent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there led to … - A year for Asia
Chicago Tribune, United States -
… resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, military repression against demonstrating monks in Myanmar (formerly Burma), the 2008 Summer Olympics in China …
