The Dictators

By Pablo Neruda (Chilean Poet, 1904–1973)
Neruda’s death linked him with the unrest in Chile and elevated his status even further. General Pinochet denied permission to conduct a public funeral for Neruda. In protest, thousands of shocked and saddened Chileans disobeyed the curfew and mourned in public. Neruda’s funeral became the first public protest against the military dictator.

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

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အာဏာရွင္၏ 'ဒီ' ေ၀ါဟာရ (Dictator’s D Words)

တရားမဲ့၊ သစၥာမဲ့၊ ေမတၱာမဲ့ အေတာမသတ္ ေလာဘ ေဒါသ ေမာဟ မာန္မာနေတြ ဖုံးလြမ္းေနတဲ့ ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊ ၏ လက္စြဲ 'ဒီ' စကားလုံးမ်ား

ျမန္မာျပည္ destiny အတြက္
က်ဳပ္
diplomacy ဂရုမစုိက္
dialogue မႀကိဳက္
democracy မခုိက္
development မေတြး။

က်ဳပ္အဖုိ ့
democracy အေရး
destructive elements ေတြ
demonstrate လုပ္ရင္ေတာ့
ဘယ္သူေတြ ဘယ္ေလာက္
denounce လုပ္လုပ္
de facto အာဏာသုံးၿပီ
demonstrators ေတြကုိ
လက္မေႏွး destroy လုပ္ျပစ္မယ္။

deaths နဲ ့ detainees အေၾကာင္း
မေမးနဲ ့
ေျဗာင္ deny လုပ္ၿပီး
က်ဳပ္လုိေကာင္က
decry လုပ္ေနတဲ့ ကမၻာ့ႀကီးကုိ
အာဏာရွင္ အလုပ္ အာဏာရွင္လုပ္ေနေၾကာင္း
(dictator does/dedicates dictator’s work)
declare လုပ္

က်ဳပ္ အာဏာဆက္ေရး အတြက္
အမ်ား disapproval အေရးမလုပ္
က်ဳပ္လက္စြဲ destructive policy ျဖင့္
Let me devastate this nation all the way.

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ေမတၱာသုတ္သစ္

လူအခ်င္းခ်င္း ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းမွ ကင္းေ၀းႏုိင္ၾကပါေစလုိ ့ ဘုရားသားေတာ္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား၊ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ႏုိင္ငံသားေတြ က ေမတၱာတရား ပက္ျဖန္း ရႊတ္ဖတ္ေနေပမယ့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တုိ ့၏ ရက္စက္စြာတုန္္ ့ျပန္မူမွာ အံ့မခန္း ယုတ္မာရုိင္းစုိင္း လွေပသည္။


ဒီလုိ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေရွ ့ထား ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားဦးေဆာင္ ျပည္သူျပည္သားမ်ားက ယဥ္ေက်းစြာ မိမိတုိ ့ ေသြးသားခ်င္း လူသားအခ်င္းခ်င္း အမုန္း၊ အဓမၼတရားမ်ားဖယ္ရွား၊ တဦးအေပၚတဦး ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းမ်ား မလုပ္ဖုိ ့ ေျပာဆုိေနတာကုိ ဘာေၾကာင့္္ ဒီငမုိက္သား စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား နားမ၀င္ပဲ မယုံေလာက္ေသာ ရက္စက္ အၾကမ္းဖက္မူမ်ားျဖင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားအား ကုိယ္ထိလက္ေရာက္ ေစာ္ကားတုန္ ့ျပန္ၾကတာလဲလုိ ့ ေလးေလးနက္နက္ ျပန္ေတြးၾကည့္ေတာ့ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ ရႊတ္ဖတ္ေနတဲ့ ေမတၱာသုတ္ အသုံးအႏူန္း မွားေနတာကုိ ေတြ ့ရသည္။

က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ လူအခ်င္းခ်င္း ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းမွ ကင္းေ၀းႏုိင္ၾကပါေစလုိ ့ ရႊတ္ဖတ္ေနေပမယ့္ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ ယေန ့အခ်ိန္အခါထိ ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္း ခံရေနျခင္းမွာ ဒီ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ အာဏာရူး ငမုိက္သားမ်ားမွာ လူသားစိတ္ကင္းမဲ့ေနေသာ လူမဟုတ္ေတာ့ သည့္ မိစၦာသရဲသဘတ္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေနေသာေၾကာင့္ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ ေမတၲာသုတ္မွာ မထိေရာက္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အခုအခ်ိန္မွစၿပီး က်ေနာ္တုိ ့ ေျပာင္းဆုိရႊတ္ဖတ္သင့္သည္မွာ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့”ျပည္သူျပည္သားမ်ား လူစိတ္ေပ်ာက္ မိစၧာသရဲသဘတ္ အာဏာရူးမ်ား၏ ႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္းမွ ကင္းေ၀းႏုိင္ၾကပါေစ” လုိ ့ ေျပာင္းလဲ ရႊတ္ဖတ္သင့္ပါေၾကာင္း အႀကံျပဳလုိက္ပါတယ္။
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A picture is worth more than a thousand words

Today, the Burmese soldiers virtually rule the streets. Almost two weeks of the peaceful protests led by the Buddhist monks in thousands dramatically has evaporated after the regime's ruthless butchery. Despite an upsurge of international outrage, reports on continuous physical attacks on monks and innocent people continue to be broadcast to the world.

No one can precisely tell how many people were killed, injured and detained. Besides the official confession of killing thirteen people, no final report has confirmed the death toll and the number of the arrested and missing people in this atrocious onslaught. There are only rumors and unconfirmed news across the Internet world that hundreds died and thousands have been arrested. After all, it looks like the vicious military regime with decades of enslaving people is winning again!

It is painful to know that the powerless are terrified these days when they hear the police shouting from the military vehicles patrolling the streets, "We have photographs. We are going to make arrests!" Around the city, the soldiers and their paid-USDA gangsters are monitoring and intimidating people with harassments, threats and warnings.

Well, these heartless loyalists of tyrant Than Shwe do not seem to know that their vicious crimes against humanity are being recorded in thousands of photos and videos. This time, they can never escape from their perpetrated atrocities. Bo Than Shwe and his cronies must remember that, with ample evidence of their crimes, the world is waiting for their judgment day and it is coming soon. The thuggish generals must anticipate that their days are already being numbered.
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Quotable Words

Daw Suu's response to John Pilger, Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker

Background photo: naingankyatha's photos
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Epitaph on a Tyrant

by W. H. Auden, English Poet (1907-1973)

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
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Notable Remarks

"The impotence of force to establish anything. There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind." (Napoléon Bonaparte - 1769-1821)

"We are fighting for fine distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false. At the end, the power of truth wins out over falsehood." (Albert Camus, a French author, political activist and philosopher - 1913-1960)





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ေလးစားတယ္ပါတယ္ ရဲေဘာ္

ဘုရားသားေတာ္ ရဟန္ေတာ္မ်ားကုိ
ပစ္ရဲသတ္ရဲ သတၱိကုိ ေလးစားတယ္။

လက္နက္မဲ့ ျပည္သူမ်ားကုိ
ပစ္ရဲသတ္ရဲ စြမ္းပကာကုိ ေလးစားတယ္။

ငရဲထက္ သခင္ေၾကာက္တဲ့
သင္တုိ ့စိတ္ဓါတ္ကုိ ေလးစားတယ္။

ဘုရားတရားထက္
ျပည္ဖ်က္မ်ဳိးယုတ္ကုိ သစၥာခံေနတဲ့
သင္တုိ ့ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ကုိ ေလးစားတယ္။

ရဲေဘာ္
လက္နက္မဲ့ အျပစ္မဲ့
ဘုန္းႀကီးအစ ခေလးအဆုံး
ဓမၼေတးသီ ေမတၱာသံခ်ီ
ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းသူေတြကုိ
ရက္ရက္စက္စက္ ပစ္ခတ္ရဲတဲ့ သင္တုိ ့ကုိ
တသက္လုံး ေလးစားေနမယ္။

ရဟန္းသတ္ သူရဲေကာင္းစစ္သည္
အမ်ဳိးယုတ္ သခင္စုတ္ ေနာက္လုိက္စစ္သည္
သင္တုိ ့ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ားကုိ ဂုဏ္ယူေနလုိက္ပါ။ ။

---

O Soldiers
You should be proud for your action
You are brave soldiers
You could shoot and kill holy monks and innocent people
You should proudly tell your friends, families for killing those peaceful and armless protesters

O Soldiers – loyalists of the unimaginable ruthless masters
Truly surprising for your bravery to kill monks! For your senseless action, you and your families would surely be rewarded with miseries in this life and next life either as human beings, in the hell and in any form.


They are not actually peoples' soldiers, but private mercenaries of tyrants.
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တရားေသာစစ္ ေအာင္ျမင္ရမည္

ဖမ္းစမ္းပါ သူတုိ ့ဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားႏုိင္သလဲ
သတ္စမ္းပါ သူတုိ ့ဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ သတ္ခ်င္(ႏုိင္)သလဲ
ငါတုိ ့ဘ၀ ဒီ ဘုရားမသိ၊ တရားမရွိ မုိက္မဲတဲ့ မိစၥာေတြေအာက္မွာ
ေနရာတာထက္ တုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ရင္ ေသရတာက ပုိျမတ္တယ္။

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ယေန ့ျပည္တြင္းဓါတ္ပုံမ်ား (Photos)

From niknayman.blogspot.com (http://picasaweb.google.com/niknayman/Burma)

From gmhembree's photos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/naingankyatha/
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Walk on with Caution

The curfew is now being imposed on the Burmese households across the nation. It hints to the world that the regime, again, is going to harshly handle the demonstration and show no will to settle this situation in a peaceful way. Clinging firmly onto his power, Gen. Than Shwe seems to believe the ongoing demonstration should be crushed before it escalates into the out-of-control stage. It is a shame that this vicious bloodthirsty monster cannot see that his days are being numbered. The consequences of his reckless actions in trying to tackle the situation violently will not turn out in his favor.

In looking at the regime's tactical move, we can predict that the troops and thugs operating under their tyrant's order will initially provoke people to engage in perilous confrontations. The demonstration leaders must therefore coordinate and control the crowd with caution so they will not fall into the regime's trap. Despite the rigid curfew, the protesters should carry on their daily protests peacefully under the well-coordinated guidance of the noble monks and leaders. The protesters should not trigger any further conflicts by offensively responding to the soldiers with improper remarks or inflammatory and provocative rhetoric. Perhaps, the monks and leaders must also constantly keep the oversea media and broadcasters informed about their daily demonstration time-frame as well as the venues of their matching and other political activities.

Undoubtedly, the regime will begin its vicious plan to incite people to commit premeditated violence. Meantime, the troops and thugs will also infiltrate the crowds of the demonstrators by disguising themselves as ones of the holy monks with the malicious aim to spark violence and justify a crackdown. Those who participated or witnessed the uprising in 1988 can never forget how we ended up flatly defeated by the regime's organized crackdown and nasty tactics.

Here are some cautionary guidelines to which our peace activists should pay attention:

• Do not engage in any type of violence
• Refrain from breaking public properties
• Do not offend soldiers with the inflammatory rhetoric or curses
• Peacefully carry on with organized marches
• Urge the Sangha Association head(s) to become mediators
• Respond to soldiers with smiles and warm greetings (let the soldiers feel the demonstration is not opposing them but the tyrannical doctrine)
• Prepare and let the soldiers/police arrest you without defending or running away
• Organize mass arrests (let them find out how many they can detain and how long they can keep us. At this point, we all know everyone in Burma is virtual prisoners and victims).

Retreat from this stage is not acceptable. We cannot lose this opportunity and we shall be victorious.

If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart. ~Buddha~
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Power of Peace

Swarm across the land
Match of a sea of peace army
Compassion in their hearts
Love is their arms
Walk in hands
for Peace and Freedom
Standing up for suffering ones

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ဓမၼ အဓမၼ တုိက္ပြဲ

နားေထာင္လုိက္စမ္း
တုိ ့ျမန္ျပည္တလႊာ
ဓမၼေတးမ်ား ျပန္ ့လႊင့္ေနတာ၊

ၾကည့္လုိက္စမ္း
တုိ ့ျမန္ျပည္ေျမတလႊာ
ဘုရားသားေတာ္ေတြ
တရားတုိက္ပြဲဆင္ႏႊဲေနတာ၊

ျမင္လုိက္စမ္း
တုိ ့ျမန္ျပည္ေကာင္ကင္ထက္
ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးငွက္ေတြ ၀ဲျပန္ေနတာ၊

အေမွာင္တုိက္ထဲ
ျပားျပား၀ပ္ ေၾကာက္လန္ ့ေနတဲ့
တုိ ့ျပည္သူေတြ
ေၾကာက္တာေတြေဖ်ာက္
ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရားမ်ားေနာက္
တေကာက္ေကာက္လုိက္ၿပီး
အဓမၼ၀ါဒီမ်ားအား တုိက္ဖ်က္ၾကေတာ့။

ဓမၼစစ္သည္မ်ားသုိ ့

အေမွာင္တုိက္ အခ်ဳပ္အေႏွာင္းေအာက္
တုိ ့တေတြဘ၀ေတြအမ်ားႀကီးပ်က္ခဲ့ေပမယ့္
ဒီတပြဲက ေအာင္ပြဲျဖစ္တာမုိ ့
တုိ ့တေတြ ေက်ာခ်ငး္ကပ္
ဘာမဟုတ္တဲ့ လက္တဆုတ္စာ
မိစၥာ၀ါဒီ ဗုိလ္ယုတ္တစုကုိ
ရဟန္းျမတ္မ်ား၏ တရား
တုိ ့ျပည္သူမ်ား၏အားႏွင့္ ညီညီညာညာ တုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ၾကေလာ့။

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Do not miss this opportunity

Unlike 1988, the military regime this time cannot escape from the close scrutiny of the whole world. A single move of our revered Buddhist monks in Burma has been highlighted through fast communication technology. I pay homage to those courageous holy monks and brave individuals who have recorded the events and broadcast them to the world. Seeing hundreds of thousands of monks take to the streets with peaceful followers in cheers and support is truly encouraging. Burmese people now expect their spiritual masters to heal their long sufferings and teach those wrong-doers to stop all at once. They are very optimistic and very hopeful that this is the right time and opportunity for both the rulers and the people. If the pigheaded military generals read the situation well, they should be able to avoid committing any more crimes. This is an exceptional opportunity for their freedom and peaceful exit path.

Song Dedicated To Burmese Monks in Protest

Naturally, people are not content with the country’s ongoing political deadlocks and overall deteriorating conditions, but they are pleased to see a peaceful transformation that the generals can take under the guidance and blessing of the holy monks. Yet people do not seem to be as angry and aggressive as they once were in 1988. But who can tell how long they will be able to maintain their calm and composure in the midst of this unstable situation. Of course, the peoples' next move will now rest on the regime's first reactive stance.

In this situation, the top generals who wish to be good soldiers of people and leave the nation their legacies should stand up for people, instead of remaining loyal to a handful of power-mongers. By now everyone in every corner of the world knows and sees our saintly Buddhist monks marching on with compassion and love toward national reconciliation as well as compromise and peaceful transformation. In observance of the Buddha's teachings, their action genuinely demonstrates their values and love for peace.

Sons of people, Generals with brains and hearts, should avoid any confrontation and should not miss this opportunity for your own freedom and fear from the vicious tyrants.
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လြတ္ေျမာက္ရာလမ္း

ေဗဒင္ေမးစရာမလုိ ယေန ့ျမင့္ျမတ္ေသာရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ ကံေဆာင္၊ ေန ့စဥ္ရက္ဆက္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ေမတၱာတရားေတာ္မ်ား ရြတ္ဖတ္ ဆႏၵျပလုပ္ေဆာင္မူမ်ားေၾကာင့္ သာသနာဖ်က္ အယူတိမ္းပါး မိစၥာ၀ါဒီ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊတုိ ့ လြတ္လပ္မရွိ ကုိယ့္တြင္းကုိယ္တူး ခရီးဆက္ရမည့္ အေျခအေနေရာက္ေနၿပီ။

အမွန္မွာ သူတုိ ့အဖုိ ့ အခ်ိန္မေႏွာင္းေသးပါ။ က်ႏုပ္တုိ ့ ျမန္မာလူမ်ဳိးစစ္စစ္ ဘာသာ သာသနာ အမွန္ ကုိင္းရွဳိင္းၾကသူတုိ ့မွာ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ဗုိလ္သန္းေရႊ တုိ ့ ျပစ္မွားက်ဳးလြန္းမူမ်ားကုိ ခြင့္လြတ္ေပး ႏုိင္သူမ်ား ျဖစ္တယ္၊ ေၾကာက္စိတ္၊ မုိက္စိတ္မ်ားကုိ ရပ္တန္ ့ကာ၊ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ တုိက္တြန္း ေတာင္းဆုိ လမ္းၫြန္းမူမ်ားအား အသာတၾကည္ လုိက္နာ၍ ဗုဒၶရွင္ေတာ္ျမတ္တရားေတာ္ႏွင့္အညီ လူလူခ်င္း ႏွိပ္စက္မူမ်ားကုိ ထပ္မက်ဴးလြန္ၾကေတာ့ပဲ မိမိအက်ဳိး၊ အမ်ားအက်ဳိး သတၱ၀ါအေပါင္း ေဘးဒုကၡအေပါင္းမွ လြတ္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းသားရၾကဖုိ ့ ဥေဏွာက္အသိစိတ္၀င္ကာ ဒီမုိကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားနဲ ့ စကားေျပာဆုိလုပ္ကုိင္မူမ်ားျဖင့္ ျပႆနာမ်ားကုိ ေျဖရွင္းျခင္းျဖင့္ အျပစ္မ်ားအားလုံးမွ ကင္းလြတ္ႏုိင္ကာ၊ ႏုိင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ေမတၱာေရွ ့ထားခြင့္လြတ္ျခင္းကုိလည္း ရရွိပါလိမ့္မည္၊

ျပည္သူစစ္သည္ေတာ္မ်ားျဖစ္လုိပါသလား

စစ္သားမ်ားသည္ အမွန္စစ္စစ္ ျပည္သူမ်ား၏ ရန္သူမဟုတ္။ ယေန ့ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၊ ျပည္သူျပည္သားမ်ားသည္ စစ္သားမ်ားကုိ ေတာ္လွန္ေနသည္မဟုတ္။ တရားမဲ့ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စနစ္၊ တုိင္းျပည္လူမ်ဳိးအက်ဳိးမငဲ့ေသာ စစ္၀ါဒီမ်ားကုိ ေတာ္လွန္ပုန္ကန္ေနျခင္းသာျဖစ္သည္။ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ား ႏွင့္ စစ္၀ါဒီစနစ္သာလွ်င္ ျပည္သူတုိ ့၏ ရန္သူမိစၥာမ်ားျဖစ္သည္။ တုိင္းျပည္ဆင္းရဲတြင္းနစ္၊ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္စြာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာ ဖက္စစ္၀ါဒီစနစ္ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ခ်ိန္တန္ၿပီ၊ ျပည္သူစစ္သည္မ်ား ျပည္သူမ်ားႏွင့္ လက္တြဲကာ ေကာင္းက်ဳိးမေပး စစ္၀ါဒီကုိ ပူးေပါင္းတြန္လွန္ၾကပါ၊

ျမန္မာျပည္သူျပည္သားအေပါင္း မင္းဆုိးမင္းညစ္မ်ား အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မူေအာက္မွ အျမန္လြတ္ေျမာက္ပါေစ။ ျပည္သူ ့စစ္သားမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾကပါေစ။ ျမင့္ျမတ္ေသာရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ား က်န္းမာခ်မ္းသာပါေစ။
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Match with Sons & Daughters of Buddha

Sons and daughters of Buddha
They
Following the disciplinary codes of Buddha
Stand up for Rights
Walk for Justice
Pray for Peace

You (USDA auxiliaries) decide
Stand up with virtuous monks or
Be lackeys of the pitiless evils

It's truly shocking! Who would believe such unthinkable crime occurred in Burma. The regime’s physical attack on Buddhist monks in public is a grave insult to not only the Burmese monks but also to all Buddhists around the world.

The ongoing upsurge of the holy Buddhist monks is a colossal movement in years. The showdown less than ten thousands out of four hundred thousands of religious souls across the nation does not seem enough at this moment! The number is escalating dramatically. Hopefully, all monks in every corner of Burma and around the world will rise up like a mighty storm that the foolish tyrant this time can’t resist. This holy movement symbolizes the beginning of national liberation, and the end of militarism. People inside and outside Burma should not have a second thought. This is a movement toward victory! People of all walks of life and Buddhists and non-Buddhists must wholly support and join the movement, and stand up firmly with the monks. Enough is enough for the regime’s ruthlessness, and vicious violent actions against people and sacred monks.

Now is the time for the regime to kneel down before Buddha for forgiveness and leave for good in this life and after.
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Burmese Majority Timid

Unfortunately, the cunning and vicious regime’s “divide and conquer” scheme is still functioning in Burma. The truth is both democracy activists and Union Solidarity and Democracy Association followers are the victims in this hellish land and they suffer equally under the most repressive military regime in decades.


Sadly, the military regime maintains its position of privilege and power by sowing the seeds of hatred, confusion and fear. It is hard to believe the barbaric behaviors of the thuggish USDA auxiliaries, including disguised plainclothes police who openly attack their fellow Burmese in public (ignoring appeals and condemnations from the international community).

It's sickening to see the anarchic USDA hoodlums assault their fellow citizens on their devilish masters’ behalf! It seems these brainwashed gangs have no sense and are totally trapped in the web of the regime. In the past two decades, the regime has significantly and openly built up the USDA to do its dirty work. The whole world has witnessed the pro-regime mobs beating up peaceful freedom activists.

One can see that the majority of the population remains timid and does not stand up for those who sacrifice their lives for all. The future of Burma depends on the unity and participation of people from all walks of life, not just a group of students or a political party.

The pro-democracy groups have a lot to do to get the frightened bystanders on their side before launching another people-power movement.

{Letter to Irrawaddy.org, Sept 03, 2007}
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A Tyrant's Death Is Not the Solution

Last week, a Singaporean medical team successfully saved its honorable patient from Burma. Despite a tight media control, there were some sketchy reports about where Snr-Gen Than Shwe was and what was going on. Then, a buzz about his death! Elation spread among the Burmese diaspora and inside Burma. Perhaps some people beat the triangular brass gong, known as kjei zi, and shared meritorious deeds to free his wicked soul. Then, the breaking news brought grave disappointment to many: “He is still alive and back in Naypyidaw!”

Is Than Shwe’s death the answer to the problems in Burma? Remember his predecessor, General Ne Win, who terrorized the country for 26 years. People had waited for three decades and hoped that his death would change the minds and hearts of his successors. The late dictator died quietly and escaped justice altogether, but he left intact a savage, tyrannical model for his successors.

We all know that death is absolutely inevitable. We could calculate how, and pray for when, tyrants will die, but their death alone will not end a nation's political problems. It is the inherited, institutionalized militarism and the systematic repression that have to be eliminated to insure future freedom after a tyrant has expired. Thus, instead of expecting (or wishing for) the death of Burma’s dictators, we must work hard to obliterate the infrastructure of tyranny in the country by any means necessary.

Repost,(On Irrawaddy.org on January 10, 2007)
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