Aung San Suu Kyi Stops in Myanmar’s Mandalay Region to Sell Peace Process!
Aug 7,2107
Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi held a
public roundtable meeting on the country’s peace process in a Mandalay
region village on Monday, though residents used the opportunity to
question her about the lack of electricity in the area and other issues
thataffect their livelihoods.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also state counselor and
foreign affairs minister, is spearheading peace negotiations with the
government military and ethnic armed groups in a bid to end decades-long
civil war and foster national reconciliation. She has made the
achievement of peace the primary goal of the National League for
Democracy government, which has been in power for 16 months. Two rounds
of discussions have been held since the talks began almost a year ago,
though no significant progress has been made, and rebel militias
continue to engage in clashes with the Myanmar army.
Zaw Myint, chief minister of Mandalay region, told
Reuters that Aung San Suu Kyi selected Myaetinekan village for her visit
because it is situated at the geographical center of Myanmar and is a
typical Myanmar village.
The village’s residents and rice farmers belong to the country’s majority ethnic Bamar Buddhist group, Reuters said.
Aung San Suu Kyi told villagers that the peace
negotiations, known as the 21st Century Panglong Peace Conference, must
be a priority for the country.
But the eight village representatives with whom she
met were more concerned about issues that are affecting residents’
livelihoods, including the availability of electricity in some areas in
and around the village, land grabs, and irrigation problems.
May Than Yee from the area’s Nyaungbin Thar village said of the 250 houses in the village, only 85 have access to electricity.
“The only power source is about 400 to 500 feet away,
we have to pay a user fee of 700,000 kyats (U.S. $502), and we have to
connect the supply line by ourselves,” she said.
“It’s very unaffordable,” she said. “Some people are getting their power like that, but I’m not yet. It is very disheartening.”
In response, Aung San Suu Kyi said the government is trying its utmost to provide electricity to remote towns and villages.
“I know the entire country needs electricity,” she
said at the roundtable discussion. “I just talked to some of your
leaders about this issue. I don’t know about other countries what they
do or don’t, but here the government and people will have to join hands
to find ways to solve the problems.”
Aung San Suu Kyi told the villagers that she would talk to the Ministry of Electricity and Energy about resolving the issue.
During a brief tour of Myaetinekan, Aung San Suu Kyi
saw a Japanese-made transformer installed in March to connect the
village to the national power grid for the first time, Reuters reported.
She also toured weaving factories with machines powered by the
transformer.
Only about 38.5 percent of Myanmar’s 53 million
people have access to electrical power, though those who do have it
experience frequent outages.
Other grievances
The villagers also told Aung San Suu Kyi about
instances of local officials illegally appropriating land, a major cause
of social tension throughout developing Southeast Asia.
Myaetinekan resident Aung Thway said the village head had cheated some residents by selling their farmland to a third party.
The incident was reported to authorities at the
township and district levels, but after they summoned the villagers
affected and heard their cases, they failed to issue a fair verdict, he
said.
Aung Sang Suu Kyi told Zaw Myint to investigate the issue and ensure that justice is rendered.
The villagers who participated in the meeting also
told Aung San Suu Kyi about their difficulties obtaining enough water
for their crops through irrigation.
In response, she instructed Zaw Myint to look into the issue.
After the discussions, some well-wishers pledged to
contribute 12 million kyats (U.S. $8,600) to make electrical power
accessible to all villagers.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s meeting with the villagers is the
fourth round-table discussion on peace that she had held with ordinary
people since taking office in April 2016.
Reported by Kyaw Thu for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏အတိုင္ပင္ခံပုဂၢိဳလ္ႏွင့္လူငယ္မ်ားစကားဝိုင္း ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးစကားဝိုင္း (PEACE TALK)
Peace Talk (11.4.2017)
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏အတိုင္ပင္ခံပုဂၢိဳလ္ႏွင့္လူငယ္မ်ားစကားဝိုင္း ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးစကားဝိုင္း Peace Talk (1.1.2017)
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