EU Could Begin Lifting Burma Sanctions in February
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားကို အားေပးတိုက္တြန္းရန္အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ ပိတ္ဆို႔ အေရးယူထားမႈမ်ားကို ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလတြင္ စတင္႐ုပ္သိမ္းသြားရန္ ဥေရာပသမဂၢက စဥ္းစားေနေၾကာင္း ဥေရာပ သံတမန္မ်ားက ဇန္န၀ါရီ ၁၈ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။
ဥေရာပသမဂၢႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးရာ မူ၀ါဒဥကၠ႒ ကက္သရင္းအက္ရႇ္တန္သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ မၾကာမီလာ ေရာက္လည္ပတ္မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ကူညီေပးရန္အတြက္လည္း စဥ္းစားေနေၾကာင္း သူ၏ေျပာခြင့္ရပုဂၢဳိလ္ မိုက္ကယ္မန္းက ေအအက္ဖ္ပီသို႔ ေျပာၾကားခ့ဲသည္။ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ ၂၇ ႏိုင္ငံရႇိေသာ ဥေရာပသမဂၢသည္ ဇန္န၀ါရီလ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဘရက္ဆဲလ္၌ ဥေရာပသမဂၢႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးမ်ား အစည္းအေ၀းကို က်င္းပမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ထိုအစည္းအေ၀းတြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေရးကို ဆံုးျဖတ္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ဥေရာပသမဂၢ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားက ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလတြင္ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈမ်ား စတင္႐ုပ္သိမ္းရန္ စဥ္းစားထားမႈကို ေၾကညာသြားဖြယ္ရႇိသည္။ ဧၿပီလလယ္တြင္ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈမ်ားႏႇင့္ပတ္သက္၍ သံုးသပ္မႈမ်ားကို ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားရန္ရႇိေသာ္လည္းအခ်ဳိ႕ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားကဧၿပီလၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ားမတိုင္မီ ပိတ္ဆို႔မႈမ်ား ႐ုပ္သိမ္းလိုေၾကာင္း ဥေရာပသမဂၢ သံတမန္တစ္ဦးက ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေရး ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားကို အားေပးတိုက္တြန္းရန္အတြက္ ဥေရာပသမဂၢအတြင္း ေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနေၾကာင္း ၿဗိတိန္ႏႇင့္ ေနာဒစ္ႏိုင္ငံအခ်ဳိ႕က ဧၿပီလ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ားကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္လိုေသာ္လည္း ျပင္သစ္၊ ဂ်ာမနီအပါအ၀င္ အျခားဥေရာပႏိုင္ငံမ်ားက ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္း လဲေရးလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားကို အားေပးရန္အတြက္ လ်င္လ်င္ျမန္ျမန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္လိုေၾကာင္း သတင္းရင္းျမစ္တစ္ခုက ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္ဟု ေအအက္ဖ္ပီက ေရးသားခဲ့သည္။
ဥေရာပႏိုင္ငံမ်ားသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ကုန္သြယ္ေရးႏႇင့္ ဘ႑ာေရး ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈမ်ားကို ယမန္ႏႇစ္က တစ္ႏႇစ္ သက္တမ္းတိုးထားခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း မၾကာေသးခင္က ခရီးသြားလာမႈႏႇင့္ ဘ႑ာေရးထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားမႈမ်ားကို ဖယ္ရႇားေပးခဲ့သည္။ ဥေရာပ သမဂၢသည္ အကူအညီေပးေရးအစီအစဥ္မ်ားကို စီမံခန္႔ခြဲရန္ႏႇင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္ ကူညီရန္အတြက္ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ႐ုံးဖြင့္လႇစ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ယခုလအေစာပိုင္းတြင္ ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။
Source :Eleven Media Gorup
Ref:AFP
By Claire Rosemberg
Brussels. The European Union is mulling whether to begin lifting sanctions against Burma as soon as February to encourage signs of reform after decades of outright military rule, EU diplomats said Wednesday.
Aid for the southeast Asian nation is also under consideration, as well as a visit soon by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, her spokesman Michael Mann told AFP.
“In the light of developments in the country, we have launched a general review of our policies,” he added.
The 27-nation bloc’s response to a string of conciliatory gestures by the new nominally civilian government in Burma is to be decided at talks between EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.
The ministers are expected to announce willingness “to consider initial steps in February” on a start in lifting the sanctions, which otherwise come up for an annual review in mid-April, an EU diplomat said.
“Some countries want to give a sign of encouragement before April elections” which will see a historic bid for parliament by Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the source said on condition of anonymity.
European states last year extended by 12 months a set of trade and financial sanctions despite Suu Kyi’s release in November 2010, but lifted travel bans and an assets freeze on a third of the cabinet, including the foreign minister.
In exchange for an end to all sanctions, the EU demanded Burma release all political prisoners and launch a dialogue with the opposition.
Since coming to power in March, the new military-backed government dominated by former generals has released hundreds of political prisoners and made other reformist moves, including dialogue with the opposition and pursuing peace deals with ethnic minority rebels.
The moves have sparked intense debate worldwide on potential policy change and in Brussels intensive discussions have been under way all week to overcome “differences of opinion and decide how to encourage Burma” ahead of Monday’s ministerial talks, a source said.
Britain and some Nordic nations favor waiting to ensure that the April by-elections are fair and free while other European countries, notably France and Germany, argue in favor of quick action to encourage the reform process.
“There are steps before you lift sanctions,” said one diplomat on condition of anonymity. “Encouraging measures can be a first step, and then you lift sanctions.”
Earlier this month, Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague, the first British foreign minister to visit Burma in over half a century, called for “much more” work to be done before sanctions could be lifted.
“It is not possible to say a country is free and democratic while people are still in prison on the grounds of their political beliefs,” he said.
Hague also called for free and fair by-elections on April 1 and improved humanitarian access to ethnic conflict areas, saying it was “very important that we do not relax the pressures prematurely.”
But this week, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in Burma that he was confident President Thein Sein was a reformer.
“It’s a certainty. It’s enough to look at what he has done in the past few months,” he said, describing the president as a “wise man, completely determined.”
Should the differences continue, a decision to lift even very few sanctions in February could be strained as it would require unanimity. In April on the other hand it would require a unanimous vote to maintain them.
Meanwhile ministers are expected to agree to offer more development aid and other financial measures to bolster the reform process.
In January, the EU announced it would open an office in Burma’s main city Yangon to manage aid programs and play a “political role.”
Source :Agence France-Presse
