BANGKOK, 3 February 2009 (IRIN) – Food insecurity in Myanmar’s remote and impoverished Chin State, northwestern Myanmar, has worsened following a major infestation of rats.

“It has been well documented that food insecurity in Chin is chronic,” Chris Kaye, country representative for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) told IRIN from Yangon, the former Burmese capital.

“The rat infestation has made this acute in several areas and this acute situation remains, particularly among communities in Madupi and Paletwa [townships],” he said.

According to WFP, farmers are now struggling to meet day-to-day food needs and resorting to edibles gathered from the forests.

Others are migrating to border areas inside India in search of work.

“We are doing what we can to address these needs through an inter-agency effort and progress is being made. However, ongoing information collection and reports from the field suggest that we have a long way to go before we can say the situation is in any way improving,” Kaye warned.

More : http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82722

Feb 2, 2009 (DVB)–A student and a university lecturer were arrested last Wednesday on Hlaing University campus in Rangoon by government officials who raided their dormitory and seized documents.A student who lives near Kapaung dormitory on Hlaing campus said authorities arrested the lecturer in the dormitory after arresting a student who was staying with him for involvement in political activities.

The student, who witnessed the arrest, said the detained student was not registered at the dormitory but was staying there as a guest of the lecturer.

“Authorities arrested the student somewhere on the campus first and then raided the dorm where he was staying,” he said.

“They also arrested the lecturer after they found some documents in the room.”

Over the next two days, all the dorms in the campus were searched by intelligence officials in civilian clothing accompanied by professors from the university.

“They arrived at our dorm in four pick-up trucks on Friday in a surprise raid,” the witness said.

“Now we are not allowed to receive visitors in our rooms.”

Lecturers from Kapaung dormitory said the authorities were looking for three more students in connection with Wednesday’s arrest.

The lectures would not identify the student and lecturer who were arrested for fear of being arrested themselves.

ထိုင္း ေရတပ္မွ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး ရက္ဆက္ေနပံုပါ။ ျမန္မာတာ၀န္ရွိသူမ်ား ႏႈတ္ပိတ္ေန။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ႏိုင္ငံလား။ လူမ်ိဳးခြဲျခား ဆက္ဆံတာလား။ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားေတြကို လူသားျခင္းမစာနာတာလား။

က်ေနာ္ မြတ္ဆလင္မဟုတ္ပါ။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးစိတ္မ၀င္စားပါ။

ဒါေပမဲ့ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာစိတ္ရွိပါတယ္။ စာဖတ္သူတို႔ သူတို႔ေနရာ အစား၀င္ၾကည့္ပါ။

Al Jazeera has uncovered fresh evidence from Thailand’s southwestern coast of another instance of abuse of Muslim Rohingya boat people.

A recently arrived group of refugees say their boat was boarded by soldiers from Myanmar, who beat them and tried to set fire to their vessel.

Al Jazeera’s Selina Downes, reporting from the town of Ranong, said that 78 Rohingya migrants were found on a boat near Surin island, located near Thailand’s Andaman coast.

They took to the seas in search of work to support their families.

“This group, we are told, have all come from Arakan state in western Myanmar. What they got, they say, was more brutality by one of the harshest military regimes in the world,” Downes said.

“One man told us the Burmese Border Security Patrol twice intercepted their boat as it headed south towards Thailand. They say dozens of officers boarded the boat and severely beat them. Many of the men appear to have severe burns to their skin.”

The incident appears to be just another case of the abuses and atrocities committed against a people who are essentially defenceless and stateless.

Myanmar refuses to recognise the Muslim Rohingya minority as a distinct ethnic group.

Human-rights activists say they have been abused and exploited, forcing many to flee abroad, mainly across the border to Bangladesh.

Thousands of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis leave the country aboard rickety boats each year in hopes of finding work, with many travelling to Thailand by sea and then overland to Malaysia.

The Rohingya migrants told Al Jazeera that they each paid a few hundred dollars for the boat journey they thought would take them to a better life.

But by the time the Thai navy found them, they were floundering at sea, trying to keep their boat afloat.

But this time, the Thai authorities did not dump them at sea, but brought them to the mainland to be treated by medical staff.

The Thai military, too, have been accused of human-rights abuses against the Rohingya.

A Thai naval officer  confirmed on Monday claims that Rohingya boat people from Myanmar, detained along Thailand’s southwestern coast, were taken back out to sea and set adrift.

The naval officer, who declined to be identified, told Al Jazeera: “We have to take the engines off the boats or they will come back.

“The wind will carry them to India or somewhere.”

Humanitarian groups have accused Thailand of systematically abusing Rohingya migrants.

The allegations surfaced after accounts emerged of a group of Rohingyas who were beaten and then towed back out to sea by Thai soldiers.

Reports from survivors who washed up on India’s Andaman islands and northwest Indonesia suggested as many as 550 of the 992 towed out to sea by Thai soldiers later died.

The Thai authorities who rescued the latest group of Rohingya migrants, told Al Jazeera that once these men are processed by immigration, they too will be pushed back out of Thailand by land or, more likely, by sea.

Pressure is mounting on Thailand after allegations that the army towed refugees out to sea and abandoned them in boats without engines.

ထိုင္းစစ္တပ္က စက္ျဖဳတ္ၿပီး ပင္လယ္ေရထဲေမွ်ာလိုက္ပါတယ္။ အိႏၵိယေရတပ္မွ ကယ္လိုက္မွ အားလံုး ဗူး ေပၚသလို ေပၚလာပါတယ္။

Footage seen on CNN appears to show the military towing the ill-equipped vessels away from land before cutting them adrift.

The cable news channel also interviewed a refugee reportedly captured on a remote Thai island in the Andaman Sea.

He said he had been on one of six boats that arrived in December carrying Rohingya migrants from the northwest of neighbouring Myanmar.

The boats were towed back out to sea in January but five of them sank, the man said in a mixture of broken English and sign language.

“All men … dead,” said Iqbal Hussein.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority who have fled decades of persecution at the hands of Myanmar’s military rulers into neighbouring Bangladesh.

More than 230,000 are now in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and tens of thousands more have also fled.

Many have ended up in Malaysia.

Rohingya rights groups and survivors claim 992 migrants were towed out from Thailand in two separate episodes in December.

Of the 992, some 550 are thought to be missing, feared drowned.

The army colonel at the centre of the allegations has denied any wrongdoing, saying the migrants were given food and water and helped on their way after Thai villagers repaired their boats.

Prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has promised a full investigation but has also issued a blanket denial, on behalf of the military, of any abuse.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees said last week it believed 126 other Rohingyas were still in Thai military custody.

It says it has got nowhere with a formal request lodged six days ago with the government to see them.

Fears are growing that they, too, might have been forced into boats and dumped at sea.

“We don’t know where they are,” UNHCR spokeswoman Kitty McKinsey said.

ဟစ္ေဟာ့အဆုိရွင္ ေဂ်ာက္ဂ်က္အား စာေပစိစစ္ေရးႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ဂီတအစည္းအ႐ုံးက ေခၚယူ၍ ခံ၀န္ကတိလက္မွတ္ထုိးခုိင္းေၾကာင္း ဟစ္ေဟာ့သတင္းရပ္ကြက္က သိရသည္။ ျမန္မာနိဳင္ငံတြင္း မည္သည့္ေနရာတြင္မဆို က်င္းပသည့္ စင္ၿမင့္ေဖ်ာ္ေၿဖပြဲမ်ား၌ ေဂ်ာက္ဂ်က္နာမည္သံုး၍ သီဆိုေဖ်ာ္ေၿဖခြင့္ကို ပိတ္လိုက္တယ္လို႔ သိရပါတယ္။ Bi Weekly Eleven ဂ်ာနယ္ ႏွင့္ အျခားျမန္မာ သတင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားရဲ့ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္အရ ဆင္ဆာမဲ့ ညစ္ညမ္း ျမန္မာသီခ်င္း ေတြ သီဆုိမွဳနဲ႔ ပတ္သတ္ျပီး ေဂ်ာက္ဂ်က္ကို အခုလို အေရးယူခဲ့ တာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ သိရပါတယ္။ ေဂ်ာက္ဂ်က္သည္ ဟစ္ေဟာ့ေလာကထဲသုိ႔ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္က စတင္ေရာက္ရွိလာကာ Underground အေခြမ်ား ေ၀ၿပီးခ်ိန္မွစ၍ နာမည္ရလာၿပီး VIP အဖြဲ႕တြင္ Ah.Boy၊ ထိန္၀င္း၊ ေက်ာ္ထြဋ္ေဆြတုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ သီဆုိသူတဦးျဖစ္သည္။ ေဂ်ာက္ဂ်က္ရဲ့ Rap သီခ်င္းေတြကိုေတာ့ Internet (mp3.mmblogs.net) ေပၚမွာ အလြယ္တကူ ရွာေဖြ နားဆင္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။

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