Activists threaten unrest over gas prices

A group of activists, including Ko Htin Kyaw, released a formal statement today warning the government to reduce gas prices by August 22 or face widespread public protests.

The group’s statement said that the gas price rises would push thousands of people over the poverty threshold, leaving them nothing to lose in the fight against the military’s policies.

“The State Peace and Development Council know that the people of Burma are already struggling to feed themselves on a daily basis. The gas price hikes are going to cause many people to starve,” the statement said.

“Rather than sitting in our houses waiting to die from starvation, we will go out and face death on the street. The government has treated us inhumanely and we will express our bitterness by staging peaceful, nonviolent protests and sacrificing our lives,” the activists said.

Ko Htin Kyaw and a number of other activists were arrested on April 22 after staging a protest against high commodity prices outside Thingangyun township’s San Pya market. They were held in police detention without charge for more than two months before being released in late July.

“We are going back out onto the street to protest in a non-violent way and show the world that Burmese people are polite, honest and starving,” the group’s statement said.

“We will stop the protests as soon as the government withdraws their decision to increase the gas prices.”

Bus fares and some commodity prices double in Yangon

Bus fares have doubled in Yangon in response to a 100 per cent hike in fuel prices earlier this week, and commodity prices at markets are also on the rise, sources said Friday.

Myanmar’s military regime doubled benzine and diesel prices at state-run petrol stations on Wednesday, and hiked the price for compressed natural gas by 200 per cent.

The surprise fuel hike forced about 60 per cent of the city buses, reliant on compressed natural gas, to stop operations on Wednesday.

Most buses were back on the road on Thursday and Friday after they doubled fares from 50 kyat (0.04 dollars) to 100 kyat (0.08 dollars), passengers said.

Inevitably, the fuel price hikes have affected commodity prices at Yangon markets.

Shoppers said the price of rice, the food staple in Myanmar, had risen by 16 per cent, while vegetable and fruit prices had doubled by Friday.

As of Friday there were no reports of protests against the sudden fuel price hike, believed to be nationwide.

Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962, when General Ne Win staged a coup against elected prime minister U Nu and launched the country along the disastrous “Burmese Way to Socialism.”

Mass anti-military demonstrations in 1988, sparked by the country’s dire economic circumstances, forced the leadership to scuttle it socialist platform and open the economy up to foreign investment and market forces.

But a brutal military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in the same year cut Myanmar off from all forms of international aid and discouraged foreign investments in the pariah state.

The military’s decision to stage a general election in 1990, and then to ignore the outcome after the opposition National League for Democracy Party led by Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory, solidified Myanmar’s pariah status in the world community.

Myanmar has been suffering double-digit inflation since 2005 after the government increased civil servants pay to placate their discontent over being forced to move from Yangon to the new capital of Naypyitaw, 350 kilometres to the north.

Military corruption in fuel exposed following hike in price

The sudden hike in prices of fuel by 500 percent this week by the Burmese military junta in the country has created a strange conflict of interest in Mon State because people used to buy fuel hoarded by the Southeast Military Command at a lower price, a source said.

Army officers of the Southeast Command are known to stock up on fuel collected from the government energy department for use in the barracks. But instead of using the fuel in the barrack they used to sell it to the people, said a source close to the army.
The Southeast Command has been at this racket for a long time with out any hitches. Now because of the sudden rise in fuel prices, the army command is in a jam, he added.

“We gave them 300,000 kyat (about US $ 240) as part payment in advance for 10 barrels of fuel before the price went up but now they cannot sell to us and are also unable to give back 300,000 kyat they took as advance”, said the source in Moulmein .

Many people in Moulmein (Mawlamyine) Town paid a deposit to Southeast Command for buying fuel and are now unable to get back the money or get the fuel. They are also unable to complain to the Southeast Command.

Not only is Southeast Command selling fuel but also many energy departments like the shipping department and the government petrol stations in Mon State are selling fuel to people illegally.

At government stations petrol prices jumped from 1,500 Kyat a gallon to 2,500 Kyat (US $ 1.17 to 1.95). Diesel prices jumped from 1,500 Kyat to 3,000 Kyat. In the market the prices have doubled to 8,000 Kyat for diesel and petrol.

People who have licensed cars and motor cycles are allowed to buy fuel from government stations at a lower price. For example, a motorbike owner is allowed buying two gallons of fuel from the government stations.

Commotion after sudden fuel price hike in Burma

The sudden increase in fuel prices in Burma on Tuesday night has thrown the transport sector in Rangoon into disarray. Commuters are bearing the brunt of the inconvenience caused, given that fares have skyrocketed.

Residents in Rangoon said bus operators have been forced to raise the fares, and conductors have pasted the new fares in the buses, to avoid complaints from commuters.

On August 14 night, the Burmese junta raised the prices of fuel – petrol and diesel from Kyat 1500 per gallon to Kyat 2500 (US$ 2) and Kyat 3000 (US$ 2.3) respectively and Compressed Natural Gas from Kyat 54 to Kyat 273 per kilogram.

“Conductors continue to shout and remind passengers of the new fares. Yesterday was terrible with passengers getting off the bus and complaining while paying the fares. So today the conductors have stuck the new fare rates in their buses,” a Rangoon resident told Mizzima.

Bus fares shot up at least three times. Passengers have to pay Kyat 150 (11 cents) for what was previously Kyat 50 (3 cents). While the fare from downtown to rural areas rose to Kyat 300 kyat (23 cents), from a minimum of Kyat 100 (7 cents) charged for two to three bus stops, a resident said.

Those who cannot afford to pay the new fares have opted to travel by local trains, where the fares are only Kyat 10 per station. However, with the sudden increase in travellers, the local trains are reportedly overcrowded.

“People rushed for local trains as the fares are much lower. And some buses have stopped plying totally with operators waiting for the situation to improve. Yesterday’s situation was bad when many buses suddenly stopped plying. So, those plying were overcrowded,” said another local resident.

He added that despite the fare hike, buses are overcrowded, particularly during office hours. With more buses plying once again after bus conductors were able to fix the new fares today, communication has resumed though it is not as smooth as before, said the resident.

“But there are a lot of complaints from the people because everybody knows that once the fares are increased it will never come down. The daily wage earners are the hardest hit because though fares have increased their wages have not gone up. So, there is a lot of resentment among the people,” a government employee told Mizzima.

According to rumours and unconfirmed reports, the sudden hike in fuel price including the price of CNG came after Nay Pyi Daw issued a direct order on Tuesday night.

Ko Pandeik Tun, an 88 generation student leader said, “There is a lot of natural gas in Burma, but the junta is exporting it at cheap prices in order to get dollars but prices are hiked inside Burma. The junta in their craze for foreign currency are fleecing and heaping hardship on its people.”

“The other things is that by raising the prices of commodities including fuel, travel becomes difficult and life is worse, so the people will understand who is behind the causes,” he added.

(၇) ရက္အတၾင္း ေလာင္စာဆီေစဵး ခဵမေပးပၝက ဆႎၬဴပပၾဲ မဵားကို ႎိုင္ငံအႎႀံႚတၾင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္မည္

စစ္အစိုးရ အေနနဲႚ ေလာင္စာဆီေစဵး ခဵမေပးဘူး ဆိုရင္ လာမယ့္ (၂၂) ရက္ေနႚက စ႓ပီး လူထု ဆႎၬဴပပဲၾေတၾ ႎိုင္ငံအႎႀံႚ လုပ္ေဆာင္ သၾားမယ္လိုႚ ကုန္ေစဵးႎႁန္း ကဵဆင္းေရး ဆႎၬဴပ ခဲ့သူေတၾ ဴဖစ္တဲ့ ဴမန္မာႎုိင္ငံ ဖၾံႚ႓ဖိႂး တိုးတက္ေရး လိုလား သူေတၾက ဒီကေနႚ ေဳကညာခဵက္ ထုတ္ဴပန္ လိုက္ပၝတယ္။

ဒီဗၾီဘီ ၊ ၁၇ ၊ ဳသဂုတ္ ၊ ၂၀၀၇
ေအးႎုိင္ ၊ ဒီဗၾီဘီ သတင္းေထာက္ ၊ ထုိင္း

"ဳသဂုတ္လ (၁၅) ရက္ေနႛ နအဖ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ေတၾ ထုတ္ဴပန္ လိုက္တဲ့ ေလာင္စာ ေစဵးႎႁန္း တိုးဴမၟင့္မႁ ကိစၤကုိ ဒီအမိန္ႛကို ခဵက္ဴခင္း ႟ုပ္သိမ္း ေပးဖိုႛရယ္၊ (၇) ရက္ အတၾင္း ႟ုပ္သိမ္း ေပးဖိုႛရယ္ ကဵေနာ္တုိႛ ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံ ဖၾၾံႚ႓ဖိႂး တိုးတက္ေရး လုိလား သူမဵားက ေန႓ပီး ေတာ့မႀ ေဳကညာခဵက္ တရပ္ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ထုတ္ဴပန္ လိုက္တယ္။

အဲဒီ ေဳကညာခဵက္ အရ ဳသဂုတ္လ (၂၁) ရက္၊ (၂၀၀၇) ခုႎႀစ္ ညေန ေနာက္ဆုံး ထား႓ပီးေတာ့ ေလာင္စာဆီ ေစဵးႎႁန္း တိုးဴမၟင့္မႁကုိ ထုတ္ဴပန္ ခဲ့ေသာ နအဖ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ မဵားအား ႟ုပ္သိမ္း ေပးရန္၊ ေနာက္ဆုံး ပန္ဳကား လိုက္သည္။ (၂၂) ရက္ေနႛ ဳသဂုတ္ လမႀ စ႓ပီးေတာ့ ဴမန္မာ တႎိုင္ငံ လုံးမႀာ ဴမန္မာ ဴပည္သူ မဵားနဲႛ အတူ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ယဥ္ေကဵး သိမ္ေမၾႚစၾာနဲႛ ဆႎၬ ဴပဳကမည္ ဴဖစ္ေဳကာင္း နအဖ အစိုးရ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ မဵားအား ေဳကညာခဵက္ ထုတ္လိုက္သည္။

ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံ ဴပည္သူႛ ဖၾံႚ႓ဖိႂး တိုးတက္ေရး လုိလား သူမဵား။

(၁၇) ရက္ ၊ (၈) လ၊ (၂၀၀၇)။"

ကုိထင္ေကဵာ္ ဴဖစ္ပၝတယ္။ ဒီေဳကညာခဵက္ေဳကာင့္ ထပ္ အဖမ္း ခံရမယ္ ဆိုရင္ ႎႀစ္ရႀည္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ကဵမႀာ မစိုးရိမ္ ဘူးလား ဆိုတဲ့ အေမး ကိုေတာ့ ကိုထင္ေကဵာ္က အခုလို ေဴဖဆို ပၝတယ္။

"စဥ္းစားဳကည့္၊ ကဵေနာ္တုိႛ ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံမႀာ လူမႁ ဒုကၡ ေပၝင္းစုံ ခံစား ေနရ တာကို ဒီ နအဖ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ေတၾ သိတယ္ဗဵ။ မသိ ခဵင္ေယာင္ ေဆာင္ေန တာပဲ ဴဖစ္လိမ့္မယ္။ အဲလို သိေနတဲ့ ဳကားထဲမႀာ အခု ဴပည္သူ လူထုက ထမင္း စားဖိုႛ မနည္း ႒ကိႂးစား ေနရတာ။ တေနႛကို မနက္ တနပ္၊ ည တနပ္ကုိ မစားႎိုင္တဲ့ ဴပည္သူေတၾ အမဵား႒ကီးဗဵ။ ဒီဳကားထဲမႀာ သူက ထပ္႓ပီး ေတာ့မႀ တိုးဴမၟင့္ လိုက္တာ ဴပည္သူကုိ ငတ္႓ပီး ေသေအာင္ လုပ္လိုက္တာဗဵ။

အဲဒီေတာ့ဗဵာ ဆိုလိုတာက ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ငတ္႓ပီး ေသရ မႀာကို ရင္ဆိုင္ ရမႀာကုိ သိေနတဲ့ ဟာကုိဗဵာ၊ သူ ဖမ္းမႀာတိုႛ ေထာင္ခဵမႀာတိုႛ ႎႀိပ္စက္မႀာတိုႛ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ဘက္က ဘာမႀ ထူးဆန္း ႓ပီးေတာ့ အံ့ဳသ စရာ မရႀိေတာ့ဘူး။ ကဵေနာ္ တိုႛကို ေသေစခဵင္ ေနတာ ကိုးဗဵ။ အဲေတာ့ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ကလဲ အိိမ္ထဲမႀာ ထုိင္႓ပီီးေတာ့ အေဳကာက္တရားနဲႛ ငတ္႓ပီး ေသရတာ ထက္စာရင္ ငတ္ေန တာကို ရဲရဲဝ့ံဝံ့့နဲႛ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ ႓ပီးေတာ့ ကမာၲကုိ ဴပ႓ပီးေတာ့ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံ ဴပည္သူ ေတၾဟာ အငတ္တရားနဲႛ အေဳကာက္တရားကုိ ဆန္ႛကဵင္ ႓ပီးေတာ့မႀ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ရဲရဲဝံ့ဝံ့နဲႛ ေသရဲတယ္ ဆိုတာ ကဵေနာ္ တိုႛက ထၾက္႓ပီးေတာ့ ဴပရမႀာပဲ။ ဒီအတိုင္း ေနလဲ ေသေန ဳကတာ ပဲဗဵာ။ လူနဲႛ တူေအာင္ ေနခဵင္ တယ္ဗဵာ။ လူဆန္တဲ့ ဘဝကို ဴဖတ္သန္း ခဵင္တယ္ဗဵာ။ ေမ႖ာ္လင့္ခဵက္ ကင္းမဲ့ ေနတဲ့ ဴပည္သူ ေတၾကုိ ကဵေနာ္ တိုႛက ဒၝကို ဒၝဟာ လူမဆန္တဲ့ အလုပ္ကုိ လုပ္လိုက္ တာလိုႛ ယူဆတယ္ဗဵာ။

အဲဒီ အတၾက္ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ခၝးသီးတဲ့ အေတၾႚအဳကံႂ ေတၾကို နအဖ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ေတၾ သိေအာင္လိုႛ ဴမန္မာ ဴပည္သူ ေတၾဟာ ခင္ဗဵားတိုႛ ႎႀိပ္စက္ ညၟဥ္းပန္း႓ပီး ေသရမဲ့ အတူတူ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ အဳကမ္းဖက္မႁ မပၝဘဲနဲႛ ႟ိုးသားစၾာ၊ ယဥ္ေကဵးစၾာနဲႛ ေတာင္းဆိုမႁ႒ကီး တခုကုိ အေသခံ ႓ပီးေတာ့ ေတာင္းဆို သၾားမယ္ ဆိုတာ သိေအာင္လိုႛ ကဵေနာ္တိုႚ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ လိုက္တာ ဴဖစ္ပၝတယ္။"

ဆႎၬဴပပၾဲ ေတၾကို အဳကမ္းမဖက္ ဴပႂလုပ္မႀာ ဴဖစ္တဲ့ အတၾက္ ပူးေပၝင္း ပၝဝင္ ဳကဖိုႚ ဴပည္သူ လူထုကို ကုိထင္ေကဵာ္က အခုုလို ပန္ဳကား ပၝတယ္။

"ဴမန္မာ ဴပည္သူ အမဵားကုိ ပန္ဳကား လိုတာေတာ့ ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံ တဝန္းလုံးမႀာ ရႀိတဲ့ ရဟန္း ရႀင္လူ ေကဵာင္းသား ဴပည္သူ အေပၝင္းတိုႛ ခင္ဗဵား။

ကဵေနာ္တိုႛက အမႀန္တကယ္ ဒုကၡ သုကၡ ေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ေမ႖ာ္လင့္ခဵက္ ကင္းမဲ့ ေနတဲ့ အေဴခအေန အခဵိန္အခၝ ဆိုက္ေရာက္ ေနပၝ႓ပီ။ အခု အခဵိန္အခၝမႀာ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛက ကမာၲကို ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံ ဴပည္သူ အေပၝင္းဟာ ယဥ္ေကဵးတယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ အေဳကာင္း၊ ႟ိုးသားတယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ အေဳကာင္း၊ ငတ္ေန ပၝတယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ အေဳကာင္းကုိ အဳကမ္းဖက္မႁ မပၝဘဲနဲႛ လမ္းေပၞ လမ္းေလ႖ာက္ ႓ပီးေတာ့မႀ မတရားတဲ့ ေလာင္စာဆီ ေစဵးႎႁန္း တိုးဴမၟင့္မႁ အမိန္ႛကို ေဴခေထာက္နဲႛ ဆန္ႛကဵင္ ဴပဳကပၝလိုႛ၊ ကား မစီးနဲႛ ရထား မစီးနဲႛ ဘာမႀ မစီးဘဲနဲႛ လမ္းေလ႖ာက္ ႓ပီးေတာ့ ဆန္ႛကဵင္ ဴပဳက ပၝလိုႛ၊ ဒီ မတရားတဲ့ ေလာင္စာဆီ အမိန္ႛကို ခဵက္ဴခင္း ႟ုပ္သိမ္း သၾားေအာင္လိုႛ လုပ္ဴပ ဳကပၝလိုႛ ကဵေနာ္ ပန္ဳကား လိုပၝတယ္ ခင္ဗဵား။ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛနဲႛ လက္တၾဲ ဳကပၝ။

အဲေတာ့ နအဖ စစ္ေခၝင္းေဆာင္ ေတၾလဲ ပန္ဳကား ခဵင္တာက ကဵေနာ္တုိႛ ဒီမတရားတဲ့ အမိန္ႛ႒ကီးကုိ ခဵက္ဴခင္း ႟ုပ္သိမ္းပၝ။ ႟ုပ္သိမ္း ေပးမယ္ ဆိုရင္ ကဵေနာ္တုိႛရဲႚ ေတာင္းဆိုမႁ ေအာင္ဴမင္ တယ္လိုႛ ယူဆတယ္။ ေကဵးဇူး တင္မႀာပၝ။ ဴပည္သူကုိ မႎႀိပ္စက္ ပၝနဲႛ ခင္ဗဵားတိုႛ ႟ုပ္သိမ္း လိုက္တာနဲႛ တ႓ပိႂင္နက္ ကဵေနာ္တိုႛ ဆႎၬဴပမႁကို ႟ုပ္သိမ္း ေပးပၝ့မယ္။ ဒၝဟာ ကဵေနာ္တုိႛရဲႚ တခု တည္းေသာ ေတာင္းဆိုခဵက္ပၝ။"