Chin Preacher from USA Ordered to Leave Town in Thantlang

MYANMAR :: Mr. Tial Lian Thang, a Chin Christian from the US visiting his family, has been ordered to leave town by the local authorities while preaching at a local church in Thantlang, Chin State.

A Burmese officer, Head of the Immigration Department was said to have warned Tial Lian Thang to make a report to the government authority in Hakha this afternoon after interrupting a Christian crusade organised by the Johson Memorial Baptist Church.

"He was told that he is not welcome here in the town. After making himself known to the authorities in Hakha, he was told to leave Chin State for Rangoon," one of his relatives from Thantlang town told Chinland Guardian.

Another source suggested that he has been accused of gathering people in a church and of telling them about politics besides the gospel.

Tial Lian Thang, a US citizen, who has been in the town for more than a month, was banned from preaching and staying in the town days after Burma's President Thei Sein's call on Burmese citizens in exile to return last month.

Some local churches including Thantlang Baptist Church have been threatened why he was allowed to preach to their congregation, according to a local who works for one of the churches.

"He is stopped during the gathering and now on his way home from School Block where the Christian crusade is held. He is going to Hakha very soon," added the local.

Currently based in Maryland, USA, Mr. Tial Lian Thang in his early thirties is visiting his family in Thantlang town for the first time after having left Burma for about ten years. 

Source: Chinland Guardian

Chin Christian Pastor Ordered to Leave Town in Magway Division

A Chin pastor, who has been living as a Christian missionary in Kyaukhtu Town, Magway Division for nearly three years, was ordered to discontinue his work and leave the town by the local authorities on 20 August 2011.

The Dai Chin Christian missionary whose name is not revealed, was forced to return to his native place after allegedly being accused of not participating in the so-called 'voluntary work' and not contributing financially to the authorities.

In Burma, religious minorities including Christians and Muslims have been forced to 'donate' money, food, labour or materials to maintain Buddhist monasteries, and to serve as military porters, according to an annual report 2011 by USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom).  

One of the Chin Christian leaders from Mindat Town, Chin State, said the Chin pastor and his family who stayed in their mission quarter were ousted from Kungpho block after the authorities gave them warnings and cut off electricity and water as punishment.

"The local government authorities warned that further action might be taken if he didn't listen and that an order would be issued to the State School teacher to ban their children from going to school," added the local who asked not to be named.

Having no other options, the Chin family, who had lived in the town since 2009, was known to have left the town and gone to the nearest town in southern parts of Chin State.

Speaking over the phone last Saturday, the Chin pastor in his mid 30s said: "I am worried and concerned about my church members. 

I really want to go back as soon as possible. Please pray for me so that the door will be open to continue my work and for the church members to be faithful and strong in this difficult time."

The junta sent in Buddhist monks to various towns and villages in Chin State, with soldiers to protect them, according to the magazine of Barnabas Fund in January-February 2007.

"Anyone who converts to Buddhism is exempt from forced labour or portering and all other kinds of persecution," added the magazine.

Religious leaders in Burma are not eligible to vote in the election under Section 392 of the 2008 constitution.

It is estimated that there are over 70 Christian believers in the areas near Kyaukhtu town, the second largest in Saw Township of Magway Division where approximately 98 percent of the total population, 4.4million, is Buddhist. 

Source: Chinland Guardian

Workers to form labor organizations under new bill

Workers in Myanmar are going to have the opportunity to form basic labor organizations comprising at least 30 of their fellow workers in their respective workplaces. Similarly, employers will also have the right to set up their organizations, according the labor organizations bill.

Under the labor organization bill, workers will have the right to strike, and how to go on strike in accordance with the law has been stated in the bill.

In the preamble of the labor organization bill, it is stated that Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, in accordance with the section 24 of the state constitution, has approved the law to protect the rights of workers, to improve the relations among workers and that between workers and employers, and to systematically form labor organizations.

According to the section 4 (A) of the bill, workers can set up basic labor organizations with at least 30 members of worker in respective workplaces to serve the interest of the workers and the employers. Workers in small workplaces with less than 30 employees can also form labor organizations jointly with counterparts from similar businesses. In addition, labor organizations are required to organize the support of at least 10 percent of workers in respective workplaces.

Township level labor organizations can be formed with the support of at least 10 percent of the grass-root level organizations in respective townships.

Region or state labor organizations can be set up with the support of at least ten percents of township level trade unions in respective regions and states.

The central labor organizations can be formed with the support of at least ten percent of region or state trade unions.

The All Myanmar Labor Organization can be founded with the support of at least 20 percent of central labor organizations based on the types of businesses.

According to section 8 of the bill, employers will also have the right to form employer organizations.

Strike means not working or refusing to work or work delays with the decision of some or all workers over a social or work related matters in which no negotiation between workers and the employer is possible, or cooperation of workers to affect the production or services with the support of the majority of workers. The term does not cover workers who leave their workplaces due to immediate hazard to their lives and health, according to Section 2 (G) of the bill.

Labor Organizations of public workers that want to strike are required to inform the employer and authorities concerned of the strike 14 days in advance, and follow the instructions of the labor federation concerned, if any, as to the date, place, the numbers of workers on strike means and duration.

Strikes involving labor organizations of public workers such as water supply, electricity supply, fire services, healthcare services, and telecommunication  services, that can affect the lives, health and safety of some of the public, are  illegal, according to the bill.

ျမန္မာအပါအ၀င္ ႏုိင္ငံေပါင္း ၁၅ ႏုိင္ငံကို အင္ဒိုနီးရွားက ဗီဇာကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ျပဳ

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အပါအ၀င္ ႏုိင္ငံေပါင္း ၁၅ ႏုိင္ငံမွ လာေရာက္သူမ်ား အား အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံက ဗီဇာကင္း လြတ္ခြင့္ျပဳလိုက္ၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ တစ္ရပ္အရသိရွိ ရပါသည္။
ယင္းသို႔ ဗီဇာကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ျပဳ လုိက္သည့္ ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားမွာ ျမန္မာ၊ ဘ႐ူႏုိင္း၊ ကေမၻာဒီးယား၊ ခ်ီလီ၊ အီေကြ ေဒါ၊ ေဟာင္ေကာင္၊ လာအို၊ မကာအို၊ မေလးရွား၊ ေမာ္႐ိုကို၊ ပီ႐ူး၊ ဖိလစ္ပုိင္၊ စင္ကာပူ၊ ထုိင္း၊ ဗီယက္ နမ္ႏုိင္ငံတို႔ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

အဆိုပါႏုိင္ငံမ်ားသည္ ဗီဇာမ လိုအပ္ဘဲ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံတြင္း ရက္ ၃၀ ၾကာေနထိုင္ခြင့္ရွိသည္ဟု  စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားသံ႐ုံးက ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္ထားသည္။
အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံသည္အာဆီယံ အဖြဲ႕အစည္း၏ဥကၠ႒အျဖစ္ယခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနၿပီး အာဆီယံအဖြဲ႕အစည္း ကႏွစ္စဥ္က်င္းပေလ့ရွိေသာ ထိပ္သီး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲႏွင့္ အစည္းအေ၀းမ်ားကို လည္း လက္ခံက်င္းပလ်က္ ရွိသည္။

အာဆီယံဥကၠ႒အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ယူထားေသာ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံအေနျဖင့္  ယခုႏွစ္တြင္ လက္ခံက်င္းပ ရေသာ အစည္းအေ၀းမ်ား၊ ေဆြးေႏြး ပြဲမ်ား၊ ျပပြဲမ်ားသို႔ လာေရာက္သူမ်ားလည္း မ်ားျပားခဲ့ကာ က်န္ရွိေနေသးသည့္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားသို႔လည္း တက္ေရာက္သူ ပိုမိုႏုိင္သည္ ဟု အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံ Antara News က ထုတ္ျပန္ထားသည္။

(၁၉)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ အာဆီယံ ထိပ္သီးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ အစည္းအေ၀းမ်ားကို အင္ဒိုနီးရွား ႏုိင္ငံ ဘာလီကြၽန္းတြင္ ႏုိ၀င္ဘာလ၌ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ႏုိ၀င္ဘာလ အတြင္းတြင္ပင္ (၂၆)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွအားကစား ၿပိဳင္ပြဲ (ဆီးဂိမ္းစ္)ကိုလည္း က်င္းပမည္ ျဖစ္ရာ ေဒသတြင္းႏုိင္ငံမ်ားမွ ႏုိင္ငံသားမ်ား ေရာက္ရွိမႈ ပိုမိုလာႏုိင္သည္ ဟု သိရွိရသည္။

အာဆီယံအတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ႐ုံးတည္ရွိသည့္အတြက္လည္း အာဆီယံအဖြဲ႕၀င္ႏုိင္ငံမ်ား၏ အစိုးရအရာရွိမ်ား လာေရာက္မႈမ်ားမွာ ယခင္ကတည္းက ရွိေနသည္။
၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လအတြင္း  အာဆီယံေဒသတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားမွ ခရီး သြားဦးေရ ၂၁၀၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ အင္ဒို နီးရွားႏုိင္ငံသို႔ ၀င္ေရာက္ခဲ့ကာ စင္ ကာပူ၊ မေလးရွား၊ ဖိလစ္ပုိင္၊ ထုိင္း ႏုိင္ငံတို႔ အဓိက ပါ၀င္ခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရွိရသည္။ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏိုင္ငံသည္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္ အာရွႏုိင္ငံမ်ားအနက္ ခရီးသြားမ်ားျပားေသာ အေနအထားျဖင့္ ရပ္တည္ေနၿပီး ဘာလီကြၽန္းမွာလည္း အာရွ၏ေက်ာ္ၾကားေသာ ခရီးသြားေဒသတစ္ခုလည္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသည္ ကေမၻာဒီးယား ႏုိင္ငံသို႔ သြားေရာက္ပါကလည္း ဗီဇာႀကိဳတင္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားရန္ မလိုအပ္ဘဲ ဆိုက္ေရာက္ဗီဇာျဖင့္ ၀င္ေရာက္ခြင့္ ရရွိထားသည္။

ျပည္ပမွ ကားတင္သြင္းခြင့္မ်ား ေပးေတာ့မည္၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခား ကားကုမၸဏီမ်ားကိုလည္း ကားအေရာင္းျပခန္း လာေရာက္ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ ျပဳမည္

သက္တမ္းရင့္ ကားအုိကား ေဟာင္းမ်ားအား ပယ္ဖ်က္ကာ ကားသစ္မ်ားျဖင့္ အစားထိုးခြင့္ ျပဳသြားမည့္အျပင္ ျပည္ပမွ ကား တင္သြင္းခြင့္မ်ားအား အကန္႔အ သတ္ျဖင့္ေပးရန္အစီအစဥ္ရွိ ေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိပါသည္။

ပို႔ကုန္လုပ္ငန္း၊ ဟိုတယ္ခရီး သြားလာမႈလုပ္ငန္း၊ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈ လုပ္ငန္း လုပ္ကိုင္သူမ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခား တြင္ တရား၀င္သြားေရာက္အလုပ္ လုပ္ေနသူမ်ားႏွင့္ သေဘၤာသားမ်ား သည္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ဘဏ္မ်ားတြင္ တရား၀င္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြစုေဆာင္းထား ရွိပါက ေမာ္ေတာ္ယာဥ္၀ယ္ယူခြင့္ ပါမစ္အား စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ ကူးသန္း ေရာင္း၀ယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွ ခြင့္ျပဳ ေပးသြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။

ယင္းအျပင္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရ အေနျဖင့္လည္း ဂ်ပန္၊ တ႐ုတ္၊ အိႏၵိ ယ၊ ကိုရီးယား၊ မေလးရွားႏွင့္ထုိင္း ႏိုင္ငံတို႔မွ ႏိုင္ငံျခားကားထုတ္လုပ္ သည့္ ကုမၸဏီမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ယာဥ္အေရာင္းျပခန္း Show Room မ်ား ဖြင့္လွစ္ ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္ေရး ခြင့္ျပဳေပးသြား မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။
ထိုသို႔အေရာင္းျပခန္း Show Roomမ်ားမဖြင့္လွစ္ႏိုင္မီေသးမီ ကာလအတြင္း၌မူ ကားအိုကားေဟာင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္သည့္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ သက္တမ္း အႏွစ္ ၄၀ ေက်ာ္ ယာဥ္ မ်ားကို ယာဥ္သစ္မ်ားျဖင့္ လဲလွယ္ ရာ၌ ကား၀ယ္ယူခြင့္ပါမစ္မ်ား ျဖင့္သာ ႏိုင္ငံျခားမွ တင္သြင္းၾကရမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရွိရပါသည္။

ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အရ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ ရွိ အမ်ားျပည္သူအေနျဖင့္ ေမာ္ေတာ္ ယာဥ္အေရာင္းျပခန္း Show Room မ်ားမွ ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ႏိုင္ငံျခားမွ မွာယူတင္ သြင္း၍ျဖစ္ေစ မိမိတတ္ႏိုင္ေသာ ေငြေၾကးျဖင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ၀ယ္ယူ သံုးစြဲခြင့္ရသည္အထိ ေဆာင္ရြက္ ေပးသြားရန္ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ယခုကဲ့သို႔ ထုတ္ျပန္ေပးမႈ အေပၚ လုပ္ငန္းရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ စီးပြား ေရးဆိုင္ရာအသင္းအဖြဲ႕မ်ားတြင္ပါ၀င္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသူမ်ားက ထင္မွတ္မထားသည့္ အေျပာင္းအလဲတစ္ခု အားေျဖေလ်ာ့ေပးျခင္းျဖစ္၍ ဆက္လက္၍ အမ်ားျပည္သူ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေနသည့္ အေျပာင္းအလဲမ်ား အတြက္ပါ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ထား၍ ရလာႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း သံုးသပ္ၾကသည္။

“လုပ္သင့္တာ ၾကာခဲ့ပါၿပီ။ လုပ္သင့္တာ ၾကာခဲ့တာကို လုပ္ေပးတဲ့ အတြက္ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးမႈအေပၚ ႀကိဳဆိုပါတယ္။ ဒီေျပာင္းလဲေပးမႈ တစ္ခုကိုၾကည့္ၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားတဲ့ အေျပာင္း အလဲေတြအတြက္ေတာ့ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ေတြ ပိုရွိလာပါတယ္”ဟု ျပည္ေထာင္စု သမၼတ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ကုန္သည္မ်ားႏွင့္ စက္မႈလက္မႈ လုပ္ငန္းရွင္မ်ားအသင္းခ်ဳပ္၏ တြဲဖက္ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးေအးလြင္ကလည္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါသည္။

“အမ်ားျပည္သူ သယ္ယူပို႔ ေဆာင္စရိတ္ေတြျမင့္တက္မႈ ဒဏ္ခံရတာေတြ ေလ်ာ့က်သြားႏုိင္သလို အမ်ားျပည္သူ အႏၲရာယ္ကင္းတဲ့ ကား အသံုးျပဳခြင့္ရမွာပါ။ အဲဒီအတြက္ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ေျပာင္းလဲေပးမႈကို ႀကိဳဆိုပါတယ္”ဟု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ဆန္စပါးလုပ္ငန္းအသင္း တာ၀န္ရွိသူတစ္ဦး ျဖစ္သည့္ ဦးေအာင္သန္းဦးက သံုးသပ္ခဲ့သည္။

“ထုတ္ျပန္ထားခ်က္အရ ဆိုရင္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြ တရား၀င္ရရွိၿပီး ဘဏ္ေတြမွာ စုေဆာင္းထားတာရွိ တဲ့သူ ဘယ္သူမဆိုကို ပါမစ္ေပးသြားမယ္လို႔ ပါရွိတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြ မရွိေသးတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ အနာဂတ္မွာ ေနာက္တစ္ဆင့္ အေနနဲ႔ေပးမယ့္ သေဘာလည္းပါရွိတယ္။ အခု အကန္႔အသတ္ေလး ရွိတယ္ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း တစ္ဆင့္ခ်င္းေျပာင္းလဲ သြားမွာျဖစ္္လို႔ အစိုးရသစ္ရဲ႕ အခု ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အေပၚမွာ ၀မ္းသာႀကိဳဆိုပါတယ္။ လြယ္လြယ္နဲ႔လုပ္မေပးပါဘူးလို႔ ထင္ထားတဲ့အရာတစ္ခု ကိုလုပ္ေပးခဲ့တာျမင္ရလို႔ေနာက္ပိုင္း မွာလည္း အမ်ားျပည္သူ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေနတဲ့ အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြအထိ သြားမယ္ဆိုတာကိုပါ ယံုၾကည္စိတ္ ျဖစ္လာတယ္လို႔ ေျပာရမွာပါ။ ႀကိဳဆိုပါတယ္။ ကားတင္သြင္းခြင့္ပိတ္ထား လို႔ အမ်ားျပည္သူ သယ္ယူပို႔ေဆာင္ စရိတ္ႀကီးျမင့္တာေတြ ခံစားေနရတာေတြပါ ေလ်ာ့က်သြားမွာျဖစ္လို႔ ၀မ္းသာစရာပါ။ မီဒီယာေတြက လည္း ကားတင္သြင္းခြင့္ပိတ္ထား တဲ့ကိစၥကို မၾကာခဏ ေရးသားၾကသလို ကြၽန္ေတာ္တို႔ အသင္းအဖြဲ႕ေတြ အေနနဲ႔လည္း တင္ျပမႈတခ်ဳိ႕ ရွိခဲ့ၾက တယ္။ ဆိုလိုတာက မီဒီယာေတြရဲ႕ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္ ကြၽန္ေတာ္တို႔လုပ္ငန္း ရွင္ေတြရဲ႕ တင္ျပခ်က္ေတြကို အေလးထားေပးတာေတြ႕ရလို႔ ေနာက္ဆိုရင္ ဘာအခက္ခဲပဲရွိရွိ တင္ျပရဲလာၾကေတာ့မွာ ျဖစ္လို႔ အစိုးရသစ္နဲ႔ ျပည္သူဆက္ဆံေရးက ပိုၿပီးတန္ဖိုးရွိလာတယ္လို႔ ျမင္ပါတယ္။ အရင္ကလို ခ်င့္ခ်ိန္ၿပီး တင္ျပေနရတာ မ်ဳိးေတြမရွိလုိ႔ပိုၿပီး ျမင္သာလာမယ္ လို႔ထင္ပါတယ္”ဟု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ငါးလုပ္ငန္းအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ ဒုတိယဥကၠ႒ ဦး၀င္းႀကိဳင္က သံုးသပ္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါသည္။

Lead-Poisoned Children 'Neglected'

China fails in following up to help children harmed by lead poisoning, report says.

AFP

Chinese parents stand next to their children suffering from lead poisoning at a hospital in Anhui province, Jan. 6, 2011.

Chinese children who suffer lead poisoning as a result of industrial pollution are frequently sent back to live in contaminated environments and refused treatment, according to a new report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Local officials often prevent the children from getting the care they need, and intimidate and detain parents who complain, said the report, published online on Wednesday.

"Children with dangerously high levels of lead in their blood are being refused treatment and returned home to contaminated houses in polluted villages," said Joe Amon, HRW's health and human rights director in a statement on the group's website.

"Parents, journalists, and community activists who dare to speak out about lead are detained, harassed, and ultimately silenced," Amon said.

The report details a public-health crisis based on research into lead-contaminated villages in Henan, Yunnan, Shaanxi, and Hunan provinces.

"Local authorities are ignoring the urgent and long-term health consequences of a generation of children continuously exposed to life-threatening levels of lead," the group's statement said.

It said that while the Chinese media have reported an increasing number of such cases around the country in recent years, family members and journalists seeking information about the problem are often intimidated and harassed.

Laws not enforced

China has an exemplary body of environmental protection legislation, but environmental protection officials seldom pack enough political punch to ensure that such laws are implemented by powerful local governments and their corporate vested interests.

The failure to address the health consequences of lead poisoning is a breach of Chinese children's right to health, HRW said.

"It's not enough to penalize factory owners and officials after a village is severely contaminated," Amon said. "The government needs to provide treatment and to make sure that children aren't immediately re-exposed to toxic levels of lead."

Officials in some areas have imposed arbitrary limits on blood lead tests, and even when children do succeed in getting tested, the results are sometimes withheld, the report found.

In January, RFA reported on a group of 23 children from the eastern province of Anhui who were taken to hospital with high levels of lead in their blood, and were later found to have tested within the normal range, in an abrupt turnaround from previous media reports.

Children particularly vulnerable

Children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can result in neurological, liver, and kidney impairment, as well as anemia, convulsions, coma, and death.

High levels of lead exposure can cause permanent intellectual and developmental disabilities, including reading and learning disabilities, behavioral problems, hearing loss, attention problems, and disruption in the development of visual and motor functioning.

Battery makers and lead and zinc smelting plants have been blamed for a wave of lead poisoning cases affecting an unknown number of children across China in recent years.

Last month, Guangdong authorities sent a specialist medical team to the province's Heyuan city to treat dozens of children who had been tested for lead in the wake of complaints about pollution from a nearby battery factory.

At the same time, authorities in Zhejiang province detained the boss of a similar plant after more than 300 people, including 99 children, were sickened by lead pollution.

But HRW said such efforts, while laudable, are just beginning to scratch the surface of a nationwide problem.

"The Chinese government has begun to realize that the environmental cost of massive toxic pollution is unacceptable," Amon said.

"Unfortunately, it has yet to address the health consequences for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children who face the dire consequences of the government's neglect."

Reported by Luisetta Mudie.

Child Soldiers Released

2011-09-09

Burmese military officials free two young men to their families following international intervention.

RFA

Phyo Sithu with his mother following his release from prison, Sept. 2, 2011.

The Burmese military, notorious for recruiting under-aged fighters, has released two child soldiers to their families following pressure from a global labor rights watchdog.

Zaw Wai Lin, 16, and Nay Ye Lin, 15, who were conscripted into different military units, were both allowed to leave their barracks on Friday after each had spent nearly a year in forced service.

Both children had been the subject of RFA coverage after their parents reported the boys missing and local rights group Human Rights Defenders and Promoters (HRDP) filed cases on their behalf with the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Zaw Wai Lin, of Rangoon division’s Hlaing Tharyar township, told RFA that he was released from the Mandalay 111 Directorate of Signal in front of local authorities and his parents.

"A group of army officers, one local authority, and my parents were present when they released me. They didn’t say anything when I was set free,” he said.

“I will be going back to school next year. For now, I will help my mom with farming."

Zaw Wai Lin said he was forced to join the army in September last year at the age of 15.

When his parents asked the HRDP for help and filed the case with the ILO, he said, the military withheld his salary. Six months later, he said he has never received the money.

Nay Ye Lin, of Zigon township in Bago region’s Pyay district, was forced to join the military in early 2011.

During his training, Nay Ye Lin said he managed to escape twice, but was arrested by the army each time and tortured on his return.

When his case was brought to the attention of the ILO, the military promised to pay him 100,000 kyat (U.S. $150) for his suffering as a minor, but he never received the compensation.

He was also released Friday and returned to his parents’ home in Yetarshe village.

Granted reprieve

In a separate case, authorities last week released a former child soldier who had spent more than seven years in prison for a shooting incident during his time in the military.

Phyo Sithu, of Bogyok village in Rangoon division, had been forcibly recruited by the military in 2003 when he was 13 years old.

He was sentenced to death at the age of 14 for his involvement in a shooting that left one person dead and another injured following a dispute with fellow soldiers.

Robert San Aung, an attorney who assisted with the case, told RFA that authorities had illegally sentenced Phyo Sithu to death.

"When he was sentenced to death, they ignored the fact that he was a child, and according to Article 46 of the 2003 law that protects children rights, the sentence was wrong,” he said.

San Aung said he appealed to higher authorities, the ILO, UNICEF, and other relevant agencies beginning in December 2010.

In May 2011, after historic elections ended junta rule of Burma and ushered in a nominally-civilian government, Phyo Sithu’s sentence was commuted to life in prison as part of a general amnesty granted by incoming President Thein Sein.

San Aung again appealed to authorities to release Phyo Sithu, claiming that children are by law subject to a maximum of seven years in prison for the crime he had committed.

"We appealed again to the defense minister and to the chief of army, as well as to international organizations in July 2011,” he said.

It was with the help of the international community and other concerned groups that he secured Phyo Sithu’s release on Sept. 2, seven years and nearly four months after entering Kalay prison.

Phyo Sithu said he had no idea that he would be released.

"They told me only 30 minutes before the release. They told me, ‘Take your belongings and pack.’ Then they brought me to the office, handed me a paper and released me," he said.

"There was no explanation about my release. On the paper I received, it said my sentence was commuted to seven years—that's it."

Military abuses

In its annual Human Rights Report, the U.S. State Department said Burma’s government army continued to recruit and use child soldiers in 2010, despite an age requirement of 18 years to enlist and an official policy to avoid conscripting children.

It said sources indicated the number of child soldiers may have risen to 12,000, although accurate statistics were difficult to obtain.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Burmese army has recruited children as young as 10 years old.

Parents seeking assistance in freeing their children from military duty have enlisted HRDP to investigate 24 cases of forced conscription from April 2010 to April 2011.

Despite intervention from the ILO, only five of the children have been released.

The Burmese military, or Tatmadaw, one of the largest armed forces in Asia with an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 personnel, has often been charged with committing abuses on ethnic minorities, including the forced relocation of villages, forced labor, and systematic human rights abuses, including rape.

Human Rights Watch and Karen Human Rights Group said in a jointly issued report in July that the military also carries out deliberate attacks on civilian villages and towns, torture, extrajudicial executions, and the use of child soldiers.

Reported by Zaw Moe Kyaw and Ko Ko Aung for RFA’s Burmese service. Translated by Khin May Zaw. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Sudanese UN-authorised ‘officer’ in foreign worker scam

KUALA LUMPUR: A Sudanese man tried to posed as a United Nations (UN) officer and collect money by registering foreign workers at a coffee shop but was caught in the act by Datuk Michael Chong.

Chong, who is the MCA Public Services and Complaints Department head, said he was having his dinner at the shop in SS2, Petaling Jaya, on Aug 25 when suddenly an African man at another table demanded to see the owner.
“He ordered the owner to sit down. He had a stack of forms on the table,” he told reporters at Wisma MCA here yesterday.

The imposter: Chong (centre) showing (from left) Theng and Chin a picture of the Sudanese man who posed as a United Nations officer at Wisma MCA, Kuala Lumpur, Monday.

When the man became rude, Chong approached them and the owner told him that the man, in his 30s, claimed to be a UN officer and was trying to register foreign workers.

“When I asked the man to show his UN identity card, he refused and snubbed me by saying, I am not talking to you',” he said.

Chong then asked the man to follow him to the police station at SS2, to which he agreed.

“But when the police asked him for his UN identification card, he took out a Universiti Malaya student card,” he said, adding that the student card was outdated it was valid from 2008 to 2009.

“The man then denied that he had introduced himself as a UN officer.

“I left the police to handle the case after that,” Chong said.

The shop owner also told Chong that the man came to the coffee shop earlier during the day with two Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) officers in uniform.

Chong said the man had told the officers he was a university student conducting a survey for his project.
“Out of goodwill, the officers accompanied him to the coffee shop. But the man was merely using the officers to frighten the shop owner,” he said.

Chong said he had received three similar complaints, whereby other impersonators had asked for between RM1,000 and RM2,000 for each foreign worker.

“We have checked and found that UN officers do not approach factories or shops to register foreigners. Such efforts are usually on a government-to-government level,” he said.

Selangor MCA Public Complaints Bureau chief Datuk Theng Book and Federal Territory MCA Public Complaints Bureau chief Banie Chin, who were also present, said they encountered similar cases.

http://thestar.com.my/news

Forced Labor in Vietnam Drug Centers: Rights Group

An international human rights group urged Vietnam to shut down drug rehabilitation centers that it said subject inmates to abuse and forced labor. On Wednesday, it also called on international donors to check the programs they fund inside the centers for possible ties to human rights violations.

New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Vietnam of imprisoning hundreds of thousands of drug addicts over the past decade without due process and forcing them to work long hours for little pay.

It also alleged that the US and Australian governments, the United Nations, the World Bank and other international donors may "indirectly facilitate human rights abuses" by providing drug dependency or HIV treatment and prevention services to addicts inside some of the centers.

About 309,000 drug users nationwide passed through the centers from 2000 to 2010, with the number of facilities more than doubling — from 56 to 123— and the maximum length of detention rising from one to four years, the report said, citing government figures.

The report called drug treatment at the centers "ineffective and abusive," claiming donor support for health services inside such facilities allows Vietnam to "maximize profits" by detaining drug addicts for longer periods and forcing them to do manual labor.

"People who are dependent on drugs in Vietnam need access to community-based, voluntary treatment," Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch in New York, said in a statement. "Instead, the government is locking them up, private companies are exploiting their labor and international donors are turning a blind eye to the torture and abuses they face."

Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to questions about the drug rehabilitation centers submitted by The Associated Press.

The US, Australia and the United Nations also declined to comment.

The US last year provided $7.7 million to the country for methadone treatment and community-based drug intervention, according to the US Embassy website. Injecting drug users are a driving force behind HIV infections across Vietnam.

"We have not received any reports of human rights violations" in Vietnam drug rehabilitation, said Victoria Kwakwa, World Bank Vietnam Country Director. "If we do, we will conduct a supervision mission to ensure Bank policies are met and concerns are fully examined."

The World Bank's HIV/AIDS Prevention Project operates in 20 drug rehabilitation centers across Vietnam.
Detainees inside the Vietnamese drug centers report beatings and spells of solitary confinement, and some who attempted escape say they were captured and shocked with an electric baton as punishment, according to the 126-page report that interviewed 34 former detainees in 2010 who were held at 14 centers in and around southern Ho Chi Minh City.

It also charged Vietnam with forcing prisoners to sew clothing, lay bricks or husk cashews for between $5 and $20 per month, a violation of domestic labor law, which guarantees a minimum monthly wage of about $40.

Instead of providing health services inside the centers, donors should focus on releasing detainees back into their communities, the report said, citing government reports that place the relapse rate for drug users treated inside the centers at 80 percent or higher.

China and other Southeast Asian countries have also come under fire from rights groups in recent years for alleged human rights violations inside similar drug rehabilitation facilities.

Several large escapes from Vietnam's drug rehabilitation centers have been reported in recent years.
The centers, which began opening after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, are one facet of Vietnam's ongoing campaign against drug abuse, prostitution and other so-called "social evils."

Most detainees are young male heroin users, the Human Rights Watch report said, citing government data. Some are rounded up by police while others are sent to the centers by family members.

Vietnam says there are 138,000 drug addicts in the country and 30 percent them are HIV positive, down from 60 percent in 2006.

Burmese Army Plant Landmines around Kachin Church

Members of the Katsu Kachin Baptish Church in Waimaw Township have sent a letter of complaint to the chief minister of Kachin State saying that they have been banned by government troops from entering the church since Aug. 13.

Burmese army Infantry Battalion (IB) Nos. 58 and 318 rejected an earlier appeal made by the Kachin Christian church members on Aug. 16, saying that landmines had been planted in the compound of the church, as well as in a school compound, and along several main roads. The church has called on the chief minister to have the mines removed.

From: Irrawaddy News Agency

Shortage of skilled labor a problem for Myanmar garment industry

Reported by Yadana Oo Translated and Edited by Myint Win Thein + MYA

Recently, due to increasing demand from foreign clients in the garment industry, hundreds of apprentices, at their middle and high school levels, are hired by garment factories in Shwe Paukkan Industrial Zone, Mingaladon Industrial Zone and South Dagon Industrial Zone. Some of the factories are providing their workers with accommodations. “Most of the workers in industrial zones are from small towns and rural areas. Only when workers from other towns are provided with accommodations, they could send back K 15,000 to K 20,000 a month to their families. An average worker in garment factories earns over K 10,000. The worker gets between K 45,000 to 50,000 per month when benefits for regular attendance and overtimes are added to their salaries.  An apprentice earn over K 25,000 in all. Skilled workers often move from low paid jobs to well paid jobs. As a result, most factories face a shortage of skilled workers, and hundreds of apprentices without any knowledge of the industry are hired and trained to get skilled laborers in time of needs,” said an official in south Dagon Industrial Zone. The garment industry is now at its peak of the last three years, and it is facing a shortage of skilled workers despite the hiring of hundred of apprentices. “There has been a shortage of skilled workers in garment industries for some time. This is because foreign firms are investing in the local market due to cheap labor in Myanmar. However,  skilled workers have gone to work in garment industries in neighboring countries as they are paid more there. If garment factories here pay them wages as much as those in Thailand, the skilled workers will not migrate to work there. Workers who are already in Thailand will come back as they do not want to be away from their families. In this way, we will be able to solve the shortage of skilled workers in the garment industry,” said an economist. Although the average basic salary of a worker in the local garment industry increased from K 17,800 in 2004 to K 21,600 in 2005, skilled workers go to work in Thailand as they earn as much as US$ 2 per day there. The salary of skilled workers in local garment industry increased from K 30,000 - K 40,000 in 2006 to over K 50,000 at present.

စာသင္ခန္းအတြင္း စည္းကမ္းေသ၀ပ္မႈ ရရွိေစရန္ စစ္သားေဟာင္းမ်ားကို ေက်ာင္းဆရာခန္႔အပ္မည္

စည္းကမ္းေသ၀ပ္ေသာ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ ရွိေနေစရန္အတြက္ ၿဗိတိန္စာသင္ေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္မ်ားကို ပိုမုိရရွိေတာ့မည္။ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္ ဆရာမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ကာယအင္အားကို အသံုးျပဳခြင့္ေပးမည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။

ကာယအင္အားကို ေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ အသံုးျပဳခြင့္ စည္းကမ္းမွာ စာသင္ခန္းမ်ားအတြင္း “လူႀကီးမ်ား၏ အခြင့္အာဏာကို ျပည္လည္တည္ေဆာက္ရန္” ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈျဖစ္သည္ဟူ၏။

ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ လက္ကိုင္ဖုန္းမ်ားထဲရွိ မက္ေဆ့ခ်္စာသားမ်ားကို ဆရာမ်ားက ဖတ္ရႈခြင့္ရရွိမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ရုန္႔ရင္းေသာ မက္ေဆ့ခ်္မ်ား၊ ဓါတ္ပံုမ်ားႏွင့္ ဗီြဒီယိုတို႔ကို ဖ်က္ခြင့္လည္းရွိေနသည္။ “သင့္တင့္ေသာ အင္အား” အသံုးျပဳခြင့္ကို တရားဥပေဒႏွင့္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏုိင္ရန္လည္း ထားရွိသည္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ စည္းကမ္းေဖါက္ဖ်က္ေသာ ေက်ာင္းသားကို စာသင္ခန္းက ထုတ္ပယ္ျခင္းမ်ဳိး။

ေက်ာင္းျပင္ပတြင္လည္း အျပဳအမူ လြဲမွားစြာ ျပဳမူလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကေသာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားကို စည္းကမ္းအရ အေရးယူရန္ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္မ်ားအား လုပ္ေဆာင္ခြင့္ ေပးထားသည္။ ဆရာဆရာမမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္း၀န္ထမ္းမ်ား အေပၚတြင္ လြဲမွားစြာ စြပ္စြဲ ေျပာဆိုေသာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားကို ေက်ာင္းထုတ္ ပစ္ခြင့္ကိုလည္း ေပးထားသည္။

ပညာေရး ၀န္ႀကီး မိုက္ကယ္ဂို႔က ယခု လက္ရွိနည္းပေဒမ်ားမွာ ဆရာမ်ား၏ ဆံုးျဖတ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ကို တားျမစ္ထားေၾကာင္း ေျပာျပခဲ့သည္။

ကေလးမ်ားအေပၚတြင္ “အခြင့္အာဏာပိုင္ေသာ ေယာက်္ားဟန္ပန္” ပံုရိပ္ ရွိေနေစရန္ အမ်ဳိးသား ေက်ာင္းဆရာမ်ားကို ပိုမို ေလ့က်င့္ ေမြးထုတ္ဖို႔ လုိအပ္ေၾကာင္း ၀န္ႀကီး ဂို႔က ဆို၏။

အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ မလိုအပ္ဘဲ ဆိုးသြမ္း ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားကို “ေက်ာင္းတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီး ထိန္းသိမ္းခြင့္” no-notice detention အေၾကာင္းလည္း ၀န္ႀကီးက တင္ျပထားၿပီးျဖစ္သည္။ ပိတ္ပင္ထားေသာ ပစၥည္းမ်ား ရွာေဖြခြင့္အတြက္လည္း ဆရာမ်ားအား အာဏာပိုမို ေပးအပ္ထားသည္။ ေစာ္ကားသည္ဟု စြပ္စြဲ ေျပာဆိုခံရေသာ ဆရာမ်ားကိုလည္း နာမည္ မေဖၚဘဲ ထားရမည္။

ပညာေရး အတြင္း၀န္က အစိုးရ အေနျဖင့္ လာမည့္ ေႏြဦးရာသီတြင္ စစ္သားေဟာင္းမ်ားကို စာသင္ၾကားေရး တာ၀န္မ်ား ထမ္းေဆာင္ၾကရန္ တုိက္တြန္းသည့္ အစီအစဥ္တစ္ရပ္ကိုလည္း စတင္မည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ “ေယာက်္ား ပံုရိပ္” မ်ား လႊမ္းမိုးေနေစရန္အတြက္ အဓိက စီမံခ်က္လည္းျဖစ္သည္။

ေတာင္ပိုင္း လန္ဒန္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ ဒူရန္းအကယ္ဒမီေက်ာင္းတြင္ မိန္႔ခြန္းေျပာၾကားရာ၀ယ္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ နိမ့္နိမ့္ ထားရွိသည့္ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ စံႏႈန္းတုိ႔ကို အရွိန္အဟုန္ျဖင့္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ အတြက္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဂို႔က တိုက္တြန္းခဲ့သည္။

“သူတို႔ေလးေတြ (ကေလးမ်ား) ဟာ ၀ိဥာဥ္ ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးေနၾကၿပီ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေက်ာင္းပညာေရးဟာ က်ဆံုးေနၿပီ။ လူသစ္ေတြ ရွာေဖြေနၾကတဲ့ လူဆိုးဂိုဏ္းေတြ၊ ေအာက္တန္းစားေတြေၾကာင့္ ဒီလို ျဖစ္ရတာပါ။ ငယ္ရြယ္တဲ့ ျပစ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္သူေတြ ေထာင္က်ခံရတဲ့အခါ ေထာင္တိုက္ခန္းေတြမွာ လူဆိုးဂိုဏ္းေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ၾကရတယ္ေလ။”

“က်ေနာ္ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း ထပ္ေျပာမယ္။ မိဘေတြက ဒီလိုမ်ဳိး ထပ္ၿပီးေတာ့  ၾကားရတဲ့အခါ - ေဆာရီးပါ။ က်မတို႔ ေက်ာင္းက ဆရာဆရာမမ်ားဟာ ကေလးေတြကို လက္ဖ်ားနဲ႔ေတာင္ မထိရဘူး -ဆိုတာမ်ဳိး၊ အဲဒီေက်ာင္းဟာ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ လြဲမွားေနၿပီ ျဖစ္တယ္။ လံုး၀ကို ေက်ာင္းဟာ လြဲေနၿပီ။ ကစားနည္း စည္းမ်ဥ္း ေျပာင္းသြားပါၿပီ။” ၀န္ႀကီး ဂို႔က ထပ္ေလာင္းေျပာျပခဲ့သည္။

“စာသင္ၾကားေနတာကို အေလးမထားၾကေတာ့ဘူး၊ လူနည္းစုေလး ေလာက္ကေန အလွည့္အေျပာင္း လုပ္ရံုနဲ႔တင္ ဒီလို ျဖစ္ရတာ။ အဲဒီ ေက်ာင္းသား နည္းနည္းပါးပါးကို မွတ္ေလာက္သားေလာက္ ပညာေပးရေတာ့မယ္။ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းနဲ႔ စာသင္ခန္းထဲမွာ ဘယ္သူက ေဘာ့စ္လဲ။” ၀န္ႀကီး ေျပာျပခဲ့သည္။

ေမာကၡႏုိင္ငံတကာ ပညာေရးသတင္း
Source: indo-india news agency/ IANS
Britain prepares to discipline school children

ပထမဆံုးျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳး ခရစ္ယာန္

ေဇာ္ေအာင္ (မံုရြာ)

ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ငယ္စဥ္က မံုရြာျမိဳ႔မွာေနစဥ္ ... မက္သဒစ္ခရစ္ယာန္ေက်ာင္း၀င္းအတြင္းမွာ ေနထိုင္ပါတယ္။ လမ္းတစ္ဖက္မွာေတာ့ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ေက်ာင္း၀င္းက အိမ္ေျခမ်ားစြာရွိပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ကို မံုရြာျမိဳ႔သားမ်ားက ဘုရင္ဂ်ီဘာသာ၀င္လို႔ ေခၚၾကေတာ့ .. ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔က ခရစ္ယန္ဘာသာ၀င္၊ သူတို႔က ဘုရင္ဂ်ီဘာသာ၀င္ .. မတူညီတဲ့ဘာသာ၂ခုပဲလို႔ ခံယူထားပါတယ္။ အဆက္အဆံလည္း မရွိၾကေပမဲ့ ခရစ္စမတ္အခ်ိန္ၾကေတာ့ သူတို႔လည္း ခရစ္စမတ္ပြဲလုပ္ၾကတယ္။ သီခ်င္းေတြကလည္း တူေနေတာ့ .. ေၾသာ္ .. ဒီဘာသာႏွစ္ခုက ခပ္ဆင္ဆင္ပါလား... လို႔ေတြးမိတယ္။ မိဘမ်ားကလည္း ဘုရားခ်င္း အတူတူပဲဆိုတာ ... မေျပာတာလား၊ ရွင္းမျပႏိုင္တာလား .. မသိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့ သူတို႔လဲ ခမည္းေတာ္၊ သားေတာ္၊ သန္႔ရွင္းေသာ၀ိညာဥ္ေတာ္ သံုးပါးတစ္ဆူ ဘုရားကိုပဲ ကိုးကြယ္ၾကတာ အသက္အရြယ္ေရာက္မွ သိရေတာ့တယ္။ ..

 အခုအခ်ိန္အထိ မံုရြာသားမ်ားက ဘုရင္ဂ်ီလုိ႔ေခၚတဲ့ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္မ်ားနဲ႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ ပရိုစတက္တင့္ (ဘက္ပတစ္) မ်ား သိပ္ရင္းႏွီးမႈမရွိလွပါဘူး။ တခ်ိဳ႔ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္က ပရိုတက္စတင့္ေျပာင္းလာတဲ့လူေတြ အထူးသျဖင့္ အေမရိကားေရာက္ ဖိလစ္ပင္းလူမ်ိဳးေတြ .. လည္း သံုးပါးတစ္ဆူ ဘုရားအတူတူ ျဖစ္တယ္ ဆိုတာကို မေျပာပဲ .. ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ေတြရဲ့ မလြတ္လပ္မႈ၊ ရုပ္ထုမ်ားျပားမႈေတြကို .. ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာဆိုၾကတယ္။ ဘာပဲျဖစ္ပါေစ .. ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာရဲ့ အရင္းအျမစ္ဟာ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ိဳးျဖစ္ျပီး၊ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ မူလပထမဟာ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ေတြျဖစ္တယ္ဆိုတာ .. ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ လက္ခံရမွာပါ။

 မာတင္လူသာက ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ ၾကိဳးနီစနစ္ေၾကာင့္ မဖြယ္မရာေတြေၾကာင့္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရး တရပ္ျဖစ္ပြားျပီး .. ဥေရာပမွာ စစ္ေတြျဖစ္၊ .. ေနာက္ဆံုး ပရိုတက္စတင့္ဘာသာ ျဖစ္လာျပီး .. ဘုန္ၾကီးလည္း မိန္မယူလို႔ရတဲ့ ခရစ္ယာန္ (ေရွးတုန္းက ယဇ္ပေရာဟိတ္ေတြလို) ျဖစ္လာၾကတယ္။ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ေတြလည္း သူတို႔စည္းမ်ဥ္းေတြကို .. အာဏာသိပ္မသံုးပဲ ေလွ်ာ့ခ်လိုက္ေတာ့တယ္။

 ကမၻာ့လူမႈ၊သမိုင္းပညာရွင္ေတြကပါ ... ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ နဲ႔ ပရိတက္စတင့္ ၂ခုစလံုးကို ခရစ္ယာန္မ်ားလို႔ သတ္မွတ္ထားပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အျမင္အရလည္း လက္ခံပါတယ္။

 ဒီေတာ့ ျမန္မာ့ ခရစ္ယာန္သမိုင္းကို ပရိုတက္စတင့္ေတြ ေရးတာပဲ ဖတ္ေနရတဲ့ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အဖို႔ ျမန္မာျပည္ေရာက္တဲ့ ပထမဆံုးေသာ ခရစ္ယာန္ ဘုန္းၾကီးဟာ ဆရာၾကီးယုဒႆန္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ပထမဦးဆံုးေသာ ခရစ္ယာန္ျဖစ္လာတာ ဦးေနာျဖစ္တယ္၊ ျမန္မာျပည္ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ ၁၈၁၃ မွာ ေရာက္လာတာ အႏွစ္၂၀၀ ျပည့္ေတာ့မယ္ .. .. ဆိုတဲ့ အျမင္ရွိပါတယ္။ သမိုင္းကို နည္းနည္းပါးပါး ဖတ္ၾကည့္ေတာ့ .. လြဲမွား ေျပာေနၾကတာေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။

 တကယ္ေတာ့ ဗမာစာေပေလ့လာသူတိုင္း ... နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္နဲ႔ ဓါတုကလွ်ာ ရတု၊ကဗ်ာေတြကို မဖတ္ဖူးေတာင္ ၾကားဖူးမွာပါ။ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္ ေတာင္ငူဘုရင္ျဖစ္စဥ္မွာ ေပၚတူဂီ ငဇင္ကာ ဆိုတဲ့ ဒီဗရစ္တိုဟာ သံလွ်င္ကို ဘုရင္ခံအျဖစ္ ၁၅၉၉ မွာ ခန္႔အပ္ျခင္းခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးမ်ား နဲ႔ ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမ်ား သံလွ်င္နယ္မွာ မစ္ရွင္စတင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ပိုင္း အေနာက္ဖက္လြန္မင္းက နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္ရဲ့ ေတာင္ငူကို သိမ္းပိုက္ျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ .. နန္းက်ဘုရင္ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္တေယာက္ ဒီဘရစ္တိုရွိရာ သံလွ်င္မွာ သြားေရာက္ခိုလႈံရင္း ဆက္လက္ပုန္ကန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီဗရစ္တို နဲ႔ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္တို႔ ေတာ္ေတာ္ရင္းႏွီးမႈ ရခဲ့ျပီးပါတယ္။ဒီေနာက္မွာ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္ကို ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ဘာသာအျဖစ္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးတစ္ပါးအားျဖင့္ ဗတၱိဇံမဂၤလာ ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၁၆၁၃ မွာ သံလွ်င္ကို အေနာက္ဖက္လြန္မင္း အျပင္းအထန္ တိုက္ခိုက္သိမ္းယူျပီးေနာက္ ဒီဗရစ္တိုကို ကြပ္မ်က္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေနာက္ဖက္လြန္မင္းရဲ့ ညီအစ္ကိုတစ္၀မ္းကြဲေတာ္သူ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္ကိုေတာ့ သစၥာခံရင္ လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ေပးဖို႔ ကမ္းလွမ္းပါတယ္။ နတ္ရွင္္ေနာင္က ရိုမင္ကက္သလစ္ခရစ္ယာန္ျဖစ္သြားျပီဆိုေတာ့ သစၥာခံ၊ဘာသာစြန္႔မလုပ္ႏိုင္ပဲ မာတုရအျဖစ္ ကြပ္မ်က္ျခင္းကိုပဲ ခံယူသြားပါတယ္။

 ဒါေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာ ေရာက္ရွိတာ ၁၅၉၉ ခုႏွစ္ (လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ အႏွစ္၄၁၀) ကပဲ၊ ပထမဆံုးေသာ လူသိရွင္ၾကား ခရစ္ယာန္ျဖစ္လာသူကေတာ့ နတ္ရွင္ေနာင္ .. လို႔ ေျပာရပါမယ္။


 ျမန္မာစြယ္စံုက်မ္းအတြဲ အတြဲ၆ စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၁၃၅
 သံလွ်င္ပ်က္လွ်င္ ဗိုလ္မႈး ငစကၤာႏွင့္ နတ္သွ်င္ေနာင္ကို လက္ရဖမ္းမိသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ ဓမၼရာဇာမင္းက ငစကၤာအား - "ငါ အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ စာေပးမွာထားသည္။ ငါ့ရန္သူကို အပ္ရမည္ ဆိုသည္ကို မေပးအပ္ပဲေနသည္မွာ ယခုငါ့လက္သို႔ေရာက္ျပီ။ အသနားခံ၍ ေတာင္းပန္လွ်င္ ခ်မ္းသာေပးမည္ဟု" မိန္႔ေတာ္မူေလသည္။ ေပၚတူဂီဗိုလ္မႈးကလည္း "ကြ်ႏ္ုပ္တြင္ အျပစ္မရွိသည္ကို အဘယ့္ေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္းပန္ရမည္နည္း။ အရွင္မင္းၾကီး၏ ရန္သူျဖစ္ခဲ့လွ်င္ ခပ္သိမ္းေသာသူအေပါင္းတို႔၏ ရန္သူျဖစ္ရအံ့ေတာ့ေလာ။ ကြ်ႏ္ုပ္အား မိတ္ဖြဲလာလွ်င္ ကြ်ႏ္ုပ္၏ မိတ္ေဆြခင္ပြန္းျဖစ္သည္။ မိတ္ေဆြခင္ပြန္းကို အမွန္ မခြ်တ္မယြင္း စြမ္းေဆာင္ရမည္ျဖစ္၍ စြမ္းေဆာင္ေပးသည့္ ဓမၼတာအတိုင္း တေန႔ေမြးလွ်င္ တေန႔ေသရျမဲျဖစ္သည္။ ယခု အရွင္မင္းၾကီးလက္သို႔ ေရာက္၍ ျပဳလိုရာ ျပဳႏိုင္မည္ပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။ သို႔ရာတြင္ ကြ်ႏ္ုပ္ႏွင့္ ေတာင္ငူမင္းမွာ ေသလွ်င္ေသခ်င္း ၊ ရွင္လွ်င္ ရွင္ခ်င္း၊ သစၥာဂတိၾကီးစြာရွိသည္။ ေသလွ်င္လည္း အတူ၊ ရွင္လွ်င္လည္း အတူျဖစ္လိုသည္" စသျဖင့္ မတုန္မလႈပ္ ေလွ်ာက္ၾကားသည္။ (ဒီဗရစ္တို - ရႈ။) တဖန္ ေတာင္ငူမင္းကို ေမးျမန္းစစ္ေဆးျပန္လွ်င္လည္း "ငါ့အေၾကာင္းကို စစ္ေမးလွ်င္ ငါ့အေၾကာင္းကို သိျပီးပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့သည္။ ဤေပၚတူဂီအမ်ိဳးသားႏွင့္ ေပါင္းယွက္၍ တေသြးတသားတည္း ျဖစ္ရျပီးရကား၊ ေသေဘးကို ေၾကာက္သာေတာ့မည္မဟုတ္။ ဓမၼတာတမ္း ျဖစ္ျမဲ၊ပ်က္ျမဲပင္။ ငါတစ္ေယာက္တည္းသာ ျဖစ္ရ ပ်က္ရသည္မဟုတ္။ လက္သို႔ ေရာက္သည္ဟု သတ္ေသာ္လည္း ကိုယ္ကာယ အေလာင္းသာေသမည္၊ အသက္ကို စိုးပိုင္သည္မဟုတ္၊ ျပဳလိုရာ ျပဳေလ၊ ခံမည္" ဟူ၍ မိန္႔ေတာ္မူလွ်င္ ေတာင္ငူမင္းႏွင့္ ငစကၤာတို႔ကို သကၠရာဇ္ ၉၇၄ ခု တန္ခူးလျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၃ရက္ စေနေန႔တြင္ သံလွ်င္ျမိဳ႔ ေစ်းလယ္၌ ကားၾကက္၍ ကြပ္မ်က္သည္။ သံလွ်င္တြင္ အနိစၥေရာက္ရသည္ကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳ၍၊ နတ္လွ်င္ေနာင္ကို သံလွ်င္ေရာက္ မင္းတရားဟူ၍ တြင္သည္။ နတ္လွ်င္ေနာင္သည္ ကြယ္လြန္သည့္အခါ၌ အသက္ ၃၅ႏွစ္ အရြယ္မွ်သာ ရွိေသးသည္။
 
 ေဇာ္ေအာင္ (မံုရြာ)

 Ref:
1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natshinnaung
2. Burmese Encyclopedia Volum 6, Page 139

ေမးခြန္း၁၀ခု 10 Things GOD won't ask on that day

ဘုရားရွင္မေမးေသာ ေမးခြန္း၁၀ခု၊  ေမာ္ေတာ္ကား၊အိမ္၊ လစာေငြ၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈ၊ မိတ္ေဆြမ်ား၊ အလုပ္အကိုင္၊ အိမ္နီးျခင္းမိတ္ေဆြၾကီးမ်ား...

သင္ပုိင္ဆိုင္ေသာ ေမာ္ေတာ္ကား

သင္၏ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေသာအိမ္

သင္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ေသာ အ၀တ္အစား၊ ပရိေဘာဂမ်ား

သင္၏ မ်ားျပာေသာလစာေငြ၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈမ်ား

သင့္ရာထူး၊ အလုပ္ကိုင္ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာ

သင့္မွာ မိတ္ေဆြမ်ားစြာရွိသလား

သင့္အိမ္နီးခ်င္း မိတ္ေဆြၾကီးမ်ား

သင့္လူမ်ိဳး၊အသားအေရာင္

သင့္ကယ္တင္ျခင္းမရေသးျခင္း

Obituary: Not Burmese, but a real Burmese

 Jean Dickason (back right) with Cetana Educational Foundation scholars at an Asian Institute of Technology graduation ceremony in May 2005.

I HAVE met many foreigners: friends, colleagues and schoolmates; some of whom are interested in Myanmar, and some of whom are not.

However, Elizabeth Jeanette (Jean) Dickason, a philanthropist who passed away on August 4 in the United States, is one who I can call a real Burmese at heart.

This is not because she was born in Mawlamyine, on February 7, 1933, but because of her passion for this country, which led her to establish and run the Cetana Educational Foundation.

She was American and could only speak English, but she always smiled in a Burmese way: Whenever she smiled, it was noticeable to many Myanmar that she was born here. Perhaps this was her heart’s way of giving us this message.

Jean lived most of her first 10 years in Myanmar. She, along with the rest of her family, was a refugee of the Japanese invasion of Myanmar during WWII, escaping first to India and later to the US.

Jean returned with her family to Myanmar as a teenager. After contracting polio during a worldwide epidemic after the war, she was treated at a medical complex in Vellore, south India, and completed her secondary schooling at the nearby Kodaikanal International School.

Jean entered the College of Wooster Ohio and transferred to Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, completing her bachelor of arts and registered nurse degrees. She served as a member of the Nurses Christian Fellowship for more than five years, counselling trainee nurses in seven US states. She also served as a volunteer nurse in a civilian hospital in South Vietnam during the war there. Jean was a nursing educator at Queensborough Community College until her retirement in 1998. She was a progressive educator and edited or published seven books on nursing education. One of these, on maternal and child care, became a reference standard and has been translated into six languages.

However, it was in retirement that Jean discovered the great passion of her life, to which she gave unremitting effort. In 1992 she founded the Cetana Educational Foundation to produce future leaders for Myanmar’s development through the provision of educational opportunities to young people.

Cetana, a Myanmar term derived from Pali meaning “giving without thought of recompense”, was Jean’s philosophy, and she was also a visionary in terms of her leadership.

The foundation has so far produced nearly 100 Myanmar scholars, educated in the United States and Thailand, who are working inside the country. But Jean also led several literacy projects, including the development of two tri-lingual graphical dictionaries (Kachin-English-Myanmar and Kayin-English-Myanmar), which have been widely distributed to ethnic minority groups in Myanmar, Thailand and the US. She helped establish low-cost English language learning centres to improve opportunities for young people and create jobs for teachers. Another of her programs resulted in books being provided to Myanmar libraries with support from the Sabre Foundation.

As a Cetana scholar, I had several wonderful conversations with Jean at her home in New York. She loved talking and hearing about Myanmar, a subject that was guaranteed to elicit one of her Myanmar smiles. To us she was also a real Myanmar historian thanks to her colonial experiences; rather than talk about our own country, we would happily listen to her discuss Myanmar history.

Many considered her their mum, as her house regularly hosted Myanmar students, especially in summer. We all named her the “second JS Furnivall” of Myanmar: one who made a great contribution to Myanmar society through the creation of educational opportunities.

Jean’s passing is a sad moment for Cetana as well as the country. Though she’s gone, her contributions will live on forever in Myanmar, where she will always be known as “a real Burmese”.

Large demand for micro-credit in Burma

Only about 10 per cent of the demand for small loans in Burma is being met, according to participants at a micro-finance workshop held recently in Rangoon.

The vast majority of those who do borrow are women.

The Microfinance Working Group in Burma held a best-practice workshop on August 16 to work out ways to provide more small loans to people, particularly in rural areas, according to a press statement recently released by the group.

About 70 participants attended the workshop including senior government officials, donors, UN staff, international and local NGOs and representatives from the private sector.

“In Myanmar [Burma], only 10 per cent of the total demand for micro-credit is met and the UNDP Microfinance Project is presently providing about 80 per cent of this micro-credit through PACT Myanmar, a non-profit organization,” said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative, Akbar Usmani. “Given the huge demand, the Microfinance Working Group is well placed to help further expand microfinance support services in Myanmar.”

Usmani said he welcomed the government’s latest initiative for rural development and poverty reduction under which micro-finance is one of the major components.

Micro-finance practitioners in Burma including the former deputy governor of the Central Bank, Than Lwin, PACT Myanmar, Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques (GRET), Save the Children, World Vision and UNDP shared their experiences on improving livelihoods through the creation of sustainable micro-finance services for poor rural communities.

As participants at the workshop made clear, the need for credit in the rural economy is substantial. Currently, the demand for micro‐credit in the rural segment of the Burmese economy is estimated at around US$ 470 million. Due to inadequate credit from the private and public banks, the rural poor rely on relatives or friends and money lenders as well as pawn shops for small loans, according to the press release.

Micro-finance loans and services provide a sustainable option for the poor by providing a diverse range of financial services, including savings, loans and some insurance products that support hundreds of thousands of micro-enterprises.

According to the Microfinance Working Group, offering loans with no collateral requirements and at interest rates well below those charged by informal moneylenders, affordable credit has been able to address the needs of more than 400,000 poor clients in a more economical manner.

From its infancy in July 1997, through the end of September 2010, the UNDP’s Microfinance Project has grown to become one of the 23 largest micro-finance projects in the world with more than 400,000 clients and with a loan portfolio of 36 billion kyat (approx. US$ 52 million). Its loan repayment rate has constantly attained a percentage of 98 per cent or higher. Women constitute 97 per cent of its clientele.

The Microfinance Working Group was formed in 2004, by local and international NGOs, in collaboration with the UNDP. 

Sources: MIZZIMA

What great personalities have said about the bible

 

 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTS

George Washington (First): "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without the Bible."

John Adam (Second): "The Bible is the best book in the world." It contains  more…..than all the libraries I have seen."

Thomas Jeferson (Third): "That book, sir, is the rock on which our Republic rests."

Zachary Taylor (Twelfth): "It was for the love of the truths of this great book that our          Fathers abandoned their native shore for the wilderness."

Abraham Lincoln (Sixteeth): "But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man."

Ulysses S.Grant (Eighteenth): " The Bible is the Anchor of our liberties."

Rutherford B.Hayes(Nineteenth): "The best religion the world has ever known is the religion of the Bible. It builds up all that is good."

Benjamin Harrison (Twenty-third);" It is out of the word of God that a system has came to make life sweet."

William Mckinley (Twenty-fifth): "The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book…. the better citizens we will become."

Theodore Roosevelt (Twenty-fifth):  "No educated man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible."

Woodrow Wilson (Twenty-sixth);"The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life"

Herbert Hoover (Thirty-First);   "The whole of the inspirations of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ… to read the Bible…is a necessity of American life."

Fanklin D.Roosevelt (Thirty-second);"It is a fountain of strength ….I feet that a comprehensive study of the Bible is a liberal education for anyone."

Dwight D.Eisenhower (Thirty-fourth);" In the highest sense the Bible is to us the unique repository of eternal spiritual truths."

WORLD LEADERS:
 

William Glanstone: "I have known ninety-five great men of the world in my time, and of these, eighty-seven were followers of the Bible."

Winston Churchill: "We rest with assurance upon the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture."

Chiang Kai-Shek: "The Bible is the voice of the Holy Spirit."

Haile Selassie: "The Bible is not only a great book of historical reference; but it also is a guide for daily life and for this reason I respect it and I love it."

Syngman  Rhee: "Fellow prisoners held the Bible and turned the pages for me because my fingers were so crushed that I could not use them. I read the Bible, and I have read it the rest of my life."

GENERALS:
 

Douglas MacArthur: "Believe me, sir, never a night goes by, be I ever so tired, but I read the word of God before I go to bed"

William K.Harrison: "The Bible is the word of God, given by His inspiration for our use and benefit."

Robert E.Lee: "The Bible is a book in comparison with which all others in my eyes of minor importance, and in which in all my perplexities and distress has never failed to give me light strength."

Stonewall Jackson: "God's promises change not… let us endeavor to a dorm the doctrine of Christ in all things."

Oliver Cromwell(upon hearing Phil 4:11-13 read as he lay dying): "He that was Paul's Christ is my Christ too."

SCIENTISTS:

Sir. Isaac Neuton: "We account the scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatsoever."

Sir Francis Baxon: "The volume of scripture…. reveal the will of God."

Sir John Herschel: "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming  mere and more strongly the truths come from on high and contained in the  sacred writings…."

Michael Faraday: "Why will people go astray when they have this blessed Book to guide them."

James Dwight Dana: "Young men, as you go forth, remember that I, and old man, who has known only science all his life, say unto you that there are no true facts than the facts found within the Holy Scriptures."

HISTORIANS:

Arnold j.Toynbee: "It pierces through the Intellect and plays directly upon the heart."

H.G.Wells: "The Bible has been the Book that held together the fabric of Western civilization."

Thomas Calyle: "A  Noble book! All men's book! Grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity, and in its epic melody."

PHYSICIAN:

Mark Hpkins: "Thus we have every conceivable species of historical proof; both external and internal. Thus do the very stones cry out.

Charles W. Mayo: "In sickness or in health, on can find comfort and constructive advice in the Bible."

LAWYERS:

Daniel Webster: "I believe the scriptures of the O.T and the N.T to be the will and the word of God."

Benjamin Franklin: "Young men, my advice to you is that you cultivate an acquaintance with and a firm belief in, the Holy Scripture ."

Patrict Henry: "This is a book worth more than all the others that were ever printed."

EDUCATION:

Timothy Dwight: The Bible is a window in this prison-world through which we may book in to eternity."

William Lyon Phelps: "Everyone who has a through knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible."

Henry Van Dyke: "No other book in the world has had such a stranger vitality, such an outgoing power of influence who has this treasure for his our."

PHILOSOPHERS AND WRITERS:

Charles Dana: "Of all the books, the most indispensable and the useful, the one whose knowledge is the most effective, is the Bible.'

HoraceGreely: "It is impossible to mentally or socially enslave a Bible-reading people."

Immanuel Kant: "The existence of the Bible as a book for the people is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced."

John Locke: "It has God for its Author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter ; it is all pure, sincere, nothing too much, nothing wanting."

Count Leo Tolstoy: "Without the Bible the education of a  child in the present state of society is impossible."

John Ruchkin: "All I have taught in art, everything I have written, whatever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that, when I was a child, my mother daily read with me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart."

John Milton: "There are no songs like the songs of the Scriptures, no orations like the orations of the prophets."

William Cowper: "A Glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun: it gives alight to every age-it gives, but borrows none.."

John Dryden: "It speaks no less than God in every line: commanding words whose force  is still the same…"

Sir Walter Scott: "Within this awful volume lies the Mystery of mysteries."

Charles Dickens: "It is the best Book that ever was or ever will be in the word…"

PEOPLE FROM VARIOUS FIELDS:

J. Edgar Hoover: "The Bible is the unfailing guide which points the way for men to the perfect life."

Benard Baruch: "I have always placed the Bible as number one among the four books I think everyone should read and study. There in one will find all the problems that beset mankind."

Helen Keller: "In the Bible I find a confidence mightier than the utmost evil…"

Lowell Thomas: "The Bible is of vital importance in teaching freedom."

King George: "The English Bible is…the most valuable thing that this word affords."

THE CHURCH FATHERS:

Augustine: "Let us give in and yield our assent to the authority of Holy Scripture, which knows not how either to be deceived or to deceive….."

John Chrysostom: "It is a great thing, this reading of the Scriptures! For it is not possible, I say, not possible ever to exhaust the mind of the Scripture. It is a well which has no bottom."

Athanasius: "They were spoken and written by God through men who spoke of God…Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these."

Origen: "For my part, I Believe that not one jot or titles of the divine instruction is in vain instruction is in vain. We are never to say that there is anything impertinent or superfluous in the Scripture of the Holy Spirit…"

Jerome: "Give ear for a moment that I may tell you how you are to walk in the Holy Scriptures. All that we read in the Divine Book, while glistening and shining without, is yet far sweeter within."

Luther: "it cannot be otherwise, for the scriptures are Divine: in them God speaks, and they are  His Word. To hear or to read the Scripture is nothing else than to hear God."

Calvin: "The Scriptures is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing necessary and useful to be known is omitted, so nothing is taught which is not beneficial to know."

Abraham Lincoln's famous proverb:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Source: Willmington's Guide To the Bible, Dr. H.L Willmington, Christian Literature Crusade 1995

Our Page Audiences from August, 2011

Thank you all of our reader from abroad, we are very happy and welcome to visit our pages and partnership with our ministries.

Please pray and continue for us, and more working together for the Kingdom of God.

Page Audiences from 2011 Aug 3 – 31, 2011

No	Countries	Audience
1	United States	569
2	Thailand	445
3	Malaysia	120
4	United Kingdoms	34
5	Netherlands	30
6	Singapore	24
7	India	19
8	Myanmar	17
9	Germany	15
10	Romania	12
11	Philippines	12
12	China	10
	TOTAL	1,307