Education ministry urges student support for junta-backed parties

Wednesday, 21 July 2010 23:32 Salai Tun

New Delhi (Mizzima) – The Education Ministry has urged students to vote for junta-backed parties in this year’s elections, amid threats of “bloodshed”, a military coup and “disintegration of the union”, during a speech yesterday at a university in Rangoon, students who attended said.

Deputy Minister of Education Brigadier-General Aung Myo Min, accompanied by 10 other ministry officials, spoke to a total of more than 2,000 teachers and students at the University of Foreign Languages in Kamayut Township, Rangoon, encouraging them to cast their votes for parties sponsored by the junta, the university’s students said.

“He said that he didn’t want the result of the forthcoming election to lead to bloodshed,” a foreign languages master’s degree student told Mizzima. “He doesn’t want to mount a military coup. So, he told us to cast our votes for junta-backed parties.”

The deputy minister reportedly also used the speech to impart junta propaganda, to say that a vote for junta-friendly parties was a vote for national unity, another student said.

“You should vote tactically. All of you should cast your vote for the non-disintegration of the union. So you should support military-sponsored parties,” a second-year student quoted the deputy minister as saying.

On Martyrs’ Day, a national holiday in Burma that fell on Monday, students were reportedly ordered via phone messages to attend a public talk by the deputy minister.

“We had to go to the convocation hall before 9 a.m. [Tuesday] without knowing what the minister would tell us,” the master’s student said. “We thought that he would give a speech about education but he talked non-stop about the forthcoming elections. The one-hour speech started at 9:30 a.m.”

Aung Myo Min also said that the 1990 election and the forthcoming elections would be different and gave his own reasons for the National League for Democracy party’s overwhelming victory.

“In the 1990 election, people voted for the National League for Democracy just to oppose the National Unity Party, which was a spin-off of the former Burmese Socialist Programme Party. So, the NLD won a landslide victory,” the deputy minister was quoted as saying.

Although the deputy minister failed to specify the name of the junta-backed party to which he was referring, students understood that he meant the Union Solidarity and Development Party.

The University of Foreign Languages was opened in 1964, providing degree courses in French, German, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Chinese, English and Burmese. It also accepts students for part-time graduate programmes.

International students from Korea, Japan, China, Thailand, India and other countries also attend the university.