Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar

The Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar was a movement of medical professions and medical students against the appointment of military officers to positions within Ministry of Health in Myanmar (Burma) in August 2015.[1][2][3]

Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015
The banner of Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015
DateAugust – September 2015
Location
Online plus physical protests in various locals
Caused byappointment of military officers to positions within Ministry of Health
Goals
  • to issue an official declaration from MOH to halt the further appointment of military staff
  • to withdraw the recently appointed military officers from MOH
MethodsWebsite banners and various actions
Motto: Say no to militarisation of Myanmar Ministry of Health.
Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015

Background

Successive Burmese governments since the military took over in the 60s have transferred retired military officers into management positions in various civilian departments[4] and army appointees across various sectors have often stifled the progress of experienced civilian staff.

Pe Thet Khin, a paediatrician and Minister for Health, was forced into retirement on 29 July 2014,[5] and was replaced by Than Aung, a former military doctor.[6] On reform, the department of health under Ministry of Health was split into two departments; department of public health and department of medical services, and as a result, about 330 new vacancies appeared.[7] There had been widespread speculation within the Ministry that the minister planned to appoint 350 military officers.[8]

On 28 and 30 July, Ministry of Health announced [9] that 14 officers[10] from Ministry of Defence would be transferred to the department.[3] Five of the appointment notices were leaked online in early October.[11][12][13] According to the appointments, not only military doctors but also other military officers graduated from Defence Services Academy were appointed to senior positions.[7] These military officers[6] will become assistant and deputy directors of Ministry of Health.[11] As of 2015, more than 100 ex-military officers are serving in various positions within the Ministry appointed before reforms in Myanmar.[3]

Protests
As for DSMA, it is an academy, they (military medical students) get the salaries, their life as a public servant starts. As for universities of medicine, they (medical students) are students; when they pass the exam (when they graduate), they apply for job, and they get the job. So, the length of service becomes different. When a medical student's service is one year, a person from his side (Minister) will be 7 or 8 years.

— Saw Win, a paediatrician[14]

Black ribbons ready to be worn at Yangon General Hospital

On 10 August, doctors from Mandalay Orthopaedic Hospital[15] and Taungoo Hospital created a Facebook page named Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015.[13][16] The page reached 40000 likes within three days after creation. The campaign encouraged anyone, including medical professionals, to make a black ribbon, take a photo of themselves wearing it on their chest, and then share the image on Facebook.[8] People who lead the campaign welcomed the military veterans to participate in the campaign announcing that this movement did not mean to fight graduates from Defence Services Academy, and was just to oppose the dictatorial decisions.[17]

Doctors graduated from University of Medicine, Mandalay (up) and University of Medicine 1, Yangon wearing black ribbons at a protest

Participants were required to give exact information about themselves such as their names, majors, schools (if they’re students) and positions, departments and companies (if they’re employees) and allowed to post their photos taken individually or in groups on the social media page titled “Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015”.[18] Well-known doctors like Ye Myint Kyaw, head of department of paediatrics, and Nyunt Thein, emeritus professor of University of Medicine 1, Yangon supported the campaign.[16] Doctors working in the ministry and civil organisations both at home and abroad as well as medical students were taking part in the campaign.[16] Hundreds of doctors, nurses and other medical staff from various hospitals across the country rallied against the appointment donning black ribbons in photos posted online and adopting the catch cry, Say no to militarisation of Myanmar Ministry of Health.

Some organizers were planning to send a letter to the President and Parliamentary Speaker[19] to express their opposition and discussing with some MPs to submit an urgent proposal to the parliament.[7] Petitions against the transfers of military officers were also collected[20][19]in many hospitals,[18] and in Yangon, and Mandalay.[21] Union of Karenni State Youth and Kayan New Land Party declared that they supported the campaign.[22]

Governmental response

On 11 August, following the public backlash, Minister for Health conveyed a verbal message to the Myanmar Medical Association pledging that the Ministry would halt the further appointment of military staff. On 12 August, the Movement called on the Ministry to issue an official declaration and officially withdraw the recently appointed military officers. However, the Ministry refused to withdraw the military appointees or offer an official declaration.[3]

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References
  1. "A day in photos". Bangkok Post. 11 August 2015. Retrieved 14 August 2015.
  2. "Myanmar health professions call against military overpowering of the Ministry of Health". European Press Photo Agency. 11 August 2015. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  3. Zarni Mann (12 August 2015). "Movement Against Army Appointees in Burma's Health Ministry Vows to Continue Advocacy". The Irrawaddy. Retrieved 13 August 2015.
  4. Lwin Moe (10 August 2015). "Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar 2015". Burmese Python. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  5. Press, Associated. "Myanmar information and health ministers step down". The Washington Post. Retrieved 29 July 2014.
  6. "ကျန်းမာရေးဌာန စစ်ဘက်အရာရှိတွေခန့်အပ်မှု ဖဲကြိုးမည်းလှုပ်ရှားမှုနဲ့ ကန့်ကွက်". Burmese VOA. 11 August 2015. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  7. "Civilian doctors oppose transference of military officials to health ministry". Eleven Myanmar. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  8. Shwe Yee Saw Myint. "Ministry backs down on jobs for soldiers". The Myanmar Times. Retrieved 13 August 2015.
  9. "တပ်အရာရှိများ ကျန်းမာရေး ၀န်ကြီးဌာနသို့ ပြောင်းရွှေ့ခန့်ထားမှု ရပ်ဆိုင်း". Messenger. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  10. ဟိန္းကိုစိုး (11 August 2015). "စစ်တပ် အရာရှိအချို့ ကျန်းမာရေးဝန်ကြီးဌာနသို့ ပြောင်းရွှေ့ခန့်ထားခြင်းကို လူမှုကွန် ရက်တွင် ကမ်ပိန်းပြုလုပ် ကန့်ကွက်". Mizzima. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  11. Shwe Yee Saw Myint (12 August 2015). "Health campaigners win backdown over military appointments". The Myanmar Times. Retrieved 14 August 2015.
  12. "ကျန်းမာရေး ဝန်ကြီးဌာနသို ့တပ်မတော်ပိုင်းမှ အရာရှိများ ပြောင်းရွှေ ့နေရာချထားပေးခြင်း အစီအစဉ် ရပ်ဆိုင်း". XINHUA. 11 August 2015. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  13. Aung Naing Soe (11 August 2015). "Myanmar medics wear black ribbons to protest 'militarization' of health sector". Yangon Coconuts. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  14. မသိင်္ဂီထိုက် (11 August 2015). "ကျန်းမာရေးဌာန စစ်အရာရှိများ ခန့်ထားမှု ရပ်ဆိုင်းမည််". VOA. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  15. "စစ်သားများအား ကျန်းမားရေး၀န်ကြီးဌာနသို့ ့ပြောင်းရွှေးခန့်ထားခြင်းအပေါ် ဆရာ၀န်ကြီးများမကျေနပ်သဖြင့် Black Ribbon Campaign စတင်ပြုလုပ်". 10 August 2015. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  16. ယမင်း (11 August 2015). "တပ်မတော်အရာရှိအချို့ ကျန်းမာရေး၀န်ကြီးဌာနသို့ ပြောင်းရွှေ့ခန့်ထားမှုကို ကန့်ကွက်သော အနက်ရောင်ဖဲကြိုးလှုပ်ရှားမှု လူမှုကွန်ရက်တွင် စတင်". 7daydaily. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  17. အေးနိုင် (11 August 2015). "အရေးပါတဲ့ အရပ်ဘက်ရာထူးတွေကို စစ်အရာရှိတွေ ခန့်အပ်မှု ဆန့်ကျင်နေကြ". DVB. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  18. အိသဉ္ဇာကျော်၊ ထွယ်ဆန်အောင် (12 August 2015). "ကာကွယ်ရေး၀န်ကြီးဌာနမှ အရာရှိများကို ကျန်းမာရေး ၀န်ကြီးဌာနသို့ ပြောင်းရွှေ့ခန့်ထားမှုအပေါ် အရပ်ဘက် ဆရာ၀န်များက မကျေနပ်ကြောင်း ပုံစံအမျိုးမျိုးဖြင့် ပြသရန် စီစဉ်နေ". News-Eleven. Retrieved 14 August 2015.
  19. ထွန်းထွန်း (10 August 2015). "စစ်ဘက်အရာရှိများ ကျန်းမာရေး ကဏ္႑တွင် ခန့်အပ်မှု ကန့်ကွက်ခံနေရ". Mobile Irrawaddy. Archived from the original on 15 August 2015. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  20. "မိုးကျရွှေကိုယ်စနစ် အမြစ်ဖြတ်ပါ". Mobile Irrawaddy. 11 August 2015. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  21. "ကျန်းမာရေးမှာ စစ်အရာရှိတွေ ခန့်ထားမည့်အစီအစဉ် ပြန် ရုပ်သိမ်း". RFA. 11 August 2015. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  22. ယမင်း (12 August 2015). "တပ်မတော်အရာရှိများအား ကျန်းမာရေး ၀န်ကြီးဌာနတွင် ခန့်အပ်သည့်အစီအစဉ်ရပ်ဆိုင်း". 7 Day Daily. Retrieved 15 August 2015.

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Declaration of Black Ribbon Movement Myanmar Campaign Participants

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