The Mon National Party is being torn apart by competing factions, some of which do not have the party's best interest at heart, according to a recently axed member.
MP U Min Soe Lin (Ye Township 1 Constituency), an executive member of the MNP, was ousted on July 19.
“When we expanded the manpower of our party in 2012, different factions entered [the party]. It was like building a small house on top of a big house,” said U Min Soe Lin.
He served as general secretary for the MNP's predecessors, known as the Mon Democracy Party (MDP) and the Mon National Democratic Front (MNDF), from October 1988 to January 2015.
“Before the MNP was established, our party was like a family. The party members were very close. We lost a lot of money but we didn’t mind. We gave time for the party even though we had our own work and businesses to run. It’s not the same anymore after the party was expanded,” U Min Soe Lin said.
Nai Layih Tamarh, general secretary of the MNP, said the party gave all members time to respond to the central executive committee's decision, but many former members are no longer actively engaged.
“Some members lost contact with the party for one year. Some members haven’t contacted the party for two years. They don’t carry out the party’s tasks. They don’t even attend the meetings. Under the decision of the central committee, we sent letters to them to ask whether they still want to serve in the party. We gave them a two-month time frame [to respond] but nobody got back to us,” he said.
The party waited until July 18, at which point it considered the lapsed members to have resigned of their own volition. The party then announced the decision to axe both the lapsed members and MP U Min Soe Lin, he added.
The MNP’s former vice chair Nai Thet Lwin (currently the Union Minister of Ethnic Affairs) also resigned from the party, while former joint secretary Nai Mon Yarzar, also known as U Min Soe Win, was sacked from the party last December.
The MNP chair Nai Ngwe Thein submitted a resignation letter last September but he was not allowed to resign. In his resignation letter he said that while he had tried to unify the party, certain members were working against those efforts. He has since made additional requests to resign, but was urged to stay.
The MNP established its 31-member Central Executive Committee and its 91-member Central Committee during its first conference in 2015. Currently, there are 27 members in the Central Executive Committee and 78 members in the Central Committee. The party has over 70,000 members.
