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Related articles below: 
   Newsweek: An Upside to the Relief Effort
   Shadow Tibet: THINKING OF BURMA
   Dominican University to present a check to BADA for $5,000
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Dear Colleagues, Burma supporters and donors,

BADA has solicited donations to help the Cyclone Victims in Burma. We have said we will directly fund the Burmese-led (lay or monks) NGOs and community groups inside who are in the front line helping the victims. To that end, please read the Newsweek article below, to see why such direct donation to Burmese led internal NGOs and groups (in addition to international aid agencies) are so important to help Burma now as well as in the long run.

 

We have received so far $ 20,000. Some of your donation has already gone into Burma helping the children survivors in the Irrawaddy delta. You can make more donations here: www.badasf.org. Again, your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it will go to Burma.

 

We are currently in the process of identifying more recipients and sending the money into Burma to monasteries and community groups. Donors will be given receipt for tax purposes, and a certificate of recognition for those who donated more than $500. Donors of other amounts can still request the certificate of recognition if needed. We will release a report too.

 

We would like to acknowledge a kind donation received from Dominican University community for $6000 and Tibetan community led by Tibetan Association of Northern California for $1500 to BADA Cyclone relief efforts. Members of Student for Free Tibet has also solicited for more donations for us. Besides, Tibetans community has held a special vigil on May 9 for Burma Cyclone victims in Berkeley, CA.

Meantime, Burmese communities in this area are coming together and generously donating through community fundraising events that we are informing you of.

 

Thank you all for standing up for Burma.


Thanks,

Nyunt Than

President

BADA

www.badasf.org

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BURMA

An Upside to the Relief Effort

 
burma junta disaster periscope

Will Baxter / WpN for Newsweek

Is Help on the Way? Victims of Cyclone Nargis wait by a roadside in Burma for deliveries of relief supplies
NEWSWEEK
May 26, 2008 Issue   They line the roads running south from Burma's former capital, Rangoon. Aid organizations call them "separated children" because so many don't know if their parents are alive or dead. They're waiting for food, water and other essentials, delivered by private groups operating without legal authority amid a brutal dictatorship. It's all surprisingly open: drivers pull over and hand out cargos of noodles and water as armed soldiers look on. Then the kids return to the churches, temples and schools that have become makeshift refugee camps in towns across the Irrawaddy Delta.
The storm that battered Burma on May 2 left as many as 128,000 people dead, according to the Red Cross, and orphaned children by the thousands. Two weeks on, the scene suggests a halfhearted official relief effort at best. The junta's strategy: keep it an internal affair—even if that triggers what the U.N. Office of Humanitarian Affairs calls "a second wave of deaths." To the paranoid men who run Burma, the tragedy unfolding in their heartland is an acceptable price to pay for not welcoming in large numbers of foreign experts. "They see the outside world as a bigger threat," says one Burmese intellectual who does not wish to be named.

Yet the generals' strategy implies a trade-off. Because government agencies have fallen so far short, various community networks, NGOs and religious groups are scrambling to fill the void. They're networking on the fly, moving food, medicine and other essentials into the flood zone, and often arriving to find survivors who still haven't received any official assistance. "They've established channels to work around the government and deliver aid directly to the villages," says Jasmin Lorch, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. These aide workers represent a ray of hope—for both cyclone victims and, longer term, for Burma's political development. Lorch, who did fieldwork in Burma from 2004 to 2007, found a nascent "civil society" consisting of community-based schools, orphanages run by Buddhist monks, homegrown Christian charities and several dozen registered NGOs.

Whether these groups can coalesce into a meaningful force after the crisis is unclear. If they continue to find common cause with local officials, win tolerance from top military leaders and assiduously cast themselves as apolitical and therefore nonthreatening, the social structures they've created could become permanent. "There is a potential for that dynamic," says John Virgoe, Southeast Asia project director for the International Crisis Group. "But because of the way the country has been [misgoverned] for so long, people are not accustomed to coming together." Given the junta's record of brutality, a benign outcome is anything but ensured. "Never forget," says a foreign expert familiar with the country's political dynamic, "that the Army stands ready to shoot its own people."

© 2008
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http://www.jamyangnorbu.com/blog/2008/05/18/thinking-of-burma/

May 18th, 2008
Shadow Tibet

THINKING OF BURMA

 It was somewhere in an article by George Orwell that I came across the phrase “the solipsism of the sick man”, i.e. the inability of people mired in depression, disease or suffering to see beyond their own condition. Which is, I suppose a fairly natural thing. Even something as commonplace as a toothache has a way of making genocide in Rwanda or Darfur seem irrelevant at that moment.

Our own life-and-death struggle, and concerns about China’s draconian crackdown in Tibet take up every bit of our time and attention right now, but we should spare a moment to consider the enormous and devastating tragedy that is playing out in Burma. Last time I checked the official death toll was 78,000. Many more have died according to other sources. I know some Tibetans have already donated money and offered prayers and butter lamps at the temple in Dharamshala. His Holiness has made a $50,000 donation.

Those wanting to help might be discouraged by reports of the military government distributing rotten food grain to the people and stockpiling food aid for its own soldiers, and also accounts of generals handing out aid packages as if it were their personal gift contributions. I just received an email from a trusted friend yesterday who has been working closely with the Burmese American Democratic Alliance (BADA). She wrote, “If you are considering making a donation toward helping the hundreds of thousands of Burmese cyclone victims, please consider donating through BADA. Donating through them is actually more effective than donating through one of the large aid organizations, as they are able to circumvent the Burmese junta’s control and get the money to people who need it through unofficial channels. We know BADA’s president, and I trust him 100%. Their website is www.badasf.org.”

We must also spare a moment to contemplate the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi, the most fearless and committed fighter for freedom and democracy we have right now in the world. Tibetans, especially those in Chinese prisons for the cause of independence, have a genuine revolutionary bond with her. She remains a prisoner not just out of the viciousness of the Burmese military government, but because Beijing does not want her released.

In 2000 a worldwide campaign for a consumer boycott and shareholder pressure forced companies like ARCO, Eddie Bauer, Liz Claiborne, Macy’s, Reebok and Petro Canada to withdraw from Burma. In January 2001, the Burmese military junta finally agreed to enter into negotiations with Aung San Suu Kyi. On 6 May 2002, following secret confidence-building negotiations led by the United Nations, the government released her; a government spokesman said that she was free to move “because we are confident that we can trust each other”. Aung San Suu Kyi proclaimed “a new dawn for the country”.

However on 30 May 2003, a government-sponsored mob attacked her and her supporters in the northern village of Depayin, murdering and wounding many of her supporters. Aung San Suu Kyi fled the scene with the help of her driver, but was later arrested. The government imprisoned her at Insein Prison in Yangon.

What happened? China realized that the economic sanctions and pressure from the West was forcing the Burmese regime to release Suu Kyi, and perhaps even allow some possible measure of democratization in the country. So Beijing stepped in with massive investments, trade and arms supplies to the regime that effectively cancelled out the effect of the West’s sanctions. China has since been effectively blocking all discussion and action against the junta in the United Nations Security Council, and vetoing all resolutions calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. It has also effectively managed to water down discussions and block resolutions in other international forums, especially those condemning the junta’s murderous crackdown on monks and democracy activists in the wake of last year’s anti-government demonstrations.

Even a partially democratic Burma threatens China’s very profitable exploitation of Burma’s oil and gas resources. It also puts at risk China’s naval access to the Indian Ocean, which is a vital part of its “string of pearls” strategy to project Chinese military power in Asia and the Pacific. There is also the concern among Chinese strategic thinkers that a popular or democratic upheaval in Burma could have a ripple effect in Tibet, East Turkistan or even North Korea, and threaten the Chinese Communist Empire and its surrogate dictators in some Asian nations – which are fast becoming China’s new economic colonies.

Hence Aung San Suu Kyi is as much a prisoner and a victim of Beijing’s tyranny and power schemes as any one of the thousands of Tibetans now incarcerated throughout Tibet.

The Amnye Machen Institute published a Tibetan translation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s, Freedom From Fear, in 1997. AMI director Tashi Tsering la wrote the introduction. He knew Suu Kyi and her husband Michael Aris, the eminent scholar on Bhutan and Tibet. Tashi la mentions that when she was married in 1972 at Oxford, she wanted to observe the Burmese custom of having a monk blow on a conch shell, the sound of which Buddhists believe is auspicious and drives away bad luck. No Burmese monks being available, one of the first Tibetan lamas in the West, Chime Rimpoche, was inducted to perform the task.

When Michael Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, the Burmese government denied him an entry visa to the country. They told Suu Kyi that she could leave Burma, but she knew that if she did they would never allow her back. Michael died in 1999. He was a good friend and supporter of Amnye Machen and as an act of remembrance we printed a scholarly article by him in the AMI web-journal, HIGH ASIA. Aung San Suu Kyi has two sons, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for her. She remains separated from her children, who live in the United Kingdom.

It is a lot for one person to have to give up, even for so noble a cause as a people’s freedom. And she has her critics and detractors. I came across a couple of articles speculating that her actions might be causing more suffering than good for the Burmese people. That it might be a better idea for her to leave the country. That free trade would, anyhow, eventually bring about democracy and freedom to Burma. The same sort of speciously “concerned” theorizing that the Tibetan issue regularly receives.

But Suu Kyi seems unmoved by it all: death threats, a possible lifetime of confinement, personal anguish, and the flattering but false appeals to her intelligence, humanity and stature as a Noble Prize winner to end the confrontation and seek a more amenable way (outside Burma) to continue her fight for Burmese democracy. But even the seeming lack of any progress in the struggle for the last so many years, does not appear to have diminished her resolve. Her determination is, as Tibetans would say, “embedded in the ground like a boulder” (drak tsugpa nangshing).

This is one person I admire without reservation.

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Dominican University to present a check to BADA for $5,000
in honor of Aung San Suu Kyi and in support of
BADA's grassroots Cyclone relief efforts

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Dear Dominican Community,

This Saturday at our undergraduate commencement ceremonies we will honor Burmese democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi with a Doctor of Laws degree. I would like to thank Arthur Scott and his Asia Survey class for writing to me this winter with the suggestion that we honor Aung San Suu Kyi, who is recognized as an international symbol of heroic and peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.

As many of you know, Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest in Burma for almost 12 of the past 18 years. She will be represented at our ceremonies by Dr. Sein Win, who is prime minister of Burma's opposition party, the exiled National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.

We have all seen the news reports about the terrible devastation in Burma and the ensuing difficulties to provide aid to those in need. Representatives with the Burmese American Democratic Alliance (BADA) will accompany Dr. Sein Win to Dominican. This organization currently is raising money to provide aid in Burma. The aid will be sent in cash through discrete channels in Burma to monasteries and grassroots organizations currently housing, feeding and caring for those in need. For more information, please visit http://www.badasf.org/

Dominican will present a check to BADA for $5,000 in honor of Aung San Suu Kyi and in support of these grassroots relief efforts. Should any of you wish to contribute to this cause, you may send checks to Mary Jane Baird in my office. We will present the checks to Dr. Sein Win and BADA on Saturday. Checks should be made out to BADA.

Warm Regards,

Joseph R. Fink
President
Dominican University of California
50 Acacia Avenue
San Rafael, CA 94901