http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=14986
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By THE IRRAWADDY Friday, January 23, 2009
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The black market value of Burma's currency, the kyat, hit a three-year high of nearly 1,000 to the US dollar on Friday, putting a brake on the unofficial cash transfers from abroad known as hundi.
The kyat had been skyrocketing all week, reaching new highs against not only the dollar but also, on Wednesday, the Thai baht (25 kyat), Singapore dollar (714 kyat) and the Chinese yuan (1,639.34), according to hundi services in Bangkok, Singapore and at the Sino-Burmese border.
"We are surprised and shocked,” said one businessman running a hundi service in Bangkok. “Now our service has been halted, and we can’t say when we will restart it. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The hundi is an underground banking system that uses a network of unofficial currency exchangers and money transmitters in Burma.
The lack of an active and efficient money transaction service run by international and local private financial institutions and untrustworthy government exchange rates cause Burmese expatriates and migrant workers to use the informal services.
Burmese expatriates contacted by The Irrawaddy said they didn’t want to transfer money home at the current rate. Experts said that a fall in remittances from abroad, together with rising unemployment among migrant workers, could have a dire effect on Burma’s rural economy, in which millions of people rely on hundi transfers.
Black market currency dealers, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the illicit nature of their work, said the soaring value of the kyat could not be ascribed to any single reason. The black market rate is linked not only to China's yuan, the US dollar and the price of gold, but also to the volume of border trade.
One observer in Rangoon said the global recession could be a factor because it had resulted in a halt to cross-border trade.
The price of gold in the country is meanwhile falling because of declining demand, according to gold shops in Rangoon. So far this month, the price for a tical of 24 carat gold has dropped from 525,000 kyat to 468,000 kyat. One tical is equal to 0.525 troy ounces.
"Consumers are not buying like before,” said one gold shop owner. “There are more sellers than buyers.”
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Soaring Kyat Slows Remittances from Abroad
Gambari to visit Myanmar for the seventh time
http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=157155
IN YET another attempt to make the obdurate Myanmar military junta see reason and usher in political reconciliation at the earliest, the United Nations special envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari is likely to visit the Southeast Asian country yet again. The announcement was made by the UN office of the Secretary-General. This will be his seventh trip to the country.
The announcement made on January 23 and reported in the Myanmar media in exile said that Gambari has a standing invitation from the military junta to revisit Myanmar. The trip by the special envoy is likely any time soon. However, details of Gambari's trip to the country were not disclosed by the UN Office. But it did point out that as far as the military regime was concerned there was a standing invitation to the envoy.
Media reports suggest that Gambari's visit is likely to be of four days duration and is slated to begin on January 31. The trip is part of the United Nations efforts to persuade the military junta to shed its stubborn attitude and kick start a dialogue with the Opposition and various ethnic groups to usher in political reconciliation even as the junta prepares for general elections in 2010 as part of its roadmap to "disciplined democracy" for Myanmar.
Gambari's last visit to, what the western nations calls a rogue country, was in August 2008. However, as in his previous visits it failed to yield much, with the envoy failing to meet the Myanmar military junta supremo Senior General Than Shwe. The detained opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi also spurned Gambari's wish to meet her.
The Opposition in Myanmar is not thrilled with the UN special envoy's seventh visit to the country since he took up the job as the UN Secretary-General's special envoy to Burma in early 2006. It has been extremely critical of Gambari's failure to show case any tangible progress so far.
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more >> On the contrary both ethnic groups and the Opposition, including Su Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy have blamed the envoy of playing into the hands of the crafty generals. They have alleged that the envoy all this time has been led up the garden path by the generals who have just tolerated and toyed with Gambari to keep international pressure on the regime at bay. As such this time around too the Opposition harbours little hope that the envoy will make any progress.
It is precisely for this reason that the United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon avoided going to Myanmar in December 2008, which he was scheduled to. He backed out saying that he saw little point in engaging the junta in talks on political reconciliation in the country because there was little to show that the regime was inclined to start an all inclusive dialogue with the Opposition camp.
ဦးဝင္းတင္ေျပာတဲ့ ဦးသန္႔
Thursday, 22 January 2009 19:53 ဧရာဝတီ
ကမၻာ့ ကုလ သမဂၢ အေထြ ေထြ အတြင္း ေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးသန္႔ႏွင့္ သတင္းစာ သမား တဦး အေနျဖင့္ ေတြ႕ႀကံဳ ခဲ့ဖူးသည့္ (ယခု NLD ေခါင္းေဆာင္) ဦးဝင္းတင္အား ဦးသန္႔ ႏွစ္ ၁၀၀ ျပည့္ေမြးေန႔ အထိမ္း အမွတ္ အျဖစ္ ဧရာဝတီ မဂၢဇင္းက ေမးျမန္း ထားခ်က္ ျဖစ္သည္။
သူက ႏိုင္ငံ့ အက်ိဳး ေတြလည္း အတတ္ ႏိုင္ဆံုး ထမ္းေဆာင္ ခဲ့တယ္။ ေနာက္ ကုလ သမဂၢလို ကမၻာ့ အဖြဲ႕ အစည္း ႀကီးမွာ အျမင့္ဆံုး ေနရာကေန တာဝန္ ေတြကို ထမ္းေဆာင္ ခဲ့တဲ့သူ ျဖစ္ေလေတာ့ သမိုင္းမွာ အလြန္ ဂုဏ္ယူစရာ ေကာင္းတယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဒါက လူပုဂၢိဳလ္အရ ေျပာရတာပါ။ ဗမာႏိုင္ငံသား တေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ အလြန္ ဂုဏ္ယူစရာ ေကာင္းတဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္လို႔ ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္။ တခုရွိတာက ဦးသန္႔ဟာ ကုလသမဂၢလို ေနရာမွာ ရာထူးရသြားလို႔ ဂုဏ္ယူျခင္းဆိုတာထက္ ဒီပုဂၢိဳလ္ရဲ႕စြမ္းေဆာင္ခ်က္၊ သူ႔ရဲ႕ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ေတြက ထူးထူးျခားျခား ေကာင္းမြန္ ခဲ့တာ ေတြ႕ရတယ္ဗ်။ကမၻာ့ႏိုင္ငံတကာအေရးမွာပဲ က်ဴးဘားအေရးအခင္းကိစၥတို႔၊ ဒံုးပ်ံကိစၥတို႔၊ အေရွ႕အလယ္ပိုင္းကိစၥ၊ ဗီယက္နမ္ကိစၥတို႔ကိုၾကည့္။ ဒီကိစၥေတြကိုေဆာင္ရြက္ရာမွာ သူဟာ အလြန္ကိုတည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ ေအးေအး ခ်မ္းခ်မ္းနဲ႔ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈရေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တာေတြအတြက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလြန္ကို ဂုဏ္ယူစရာ ေကာင္းတယ္ဗ်။ သူ႔ဟာသူ ရာထူးရတာက တပိုင္းေပါ့ဗ်။ လူတေယာက္ ရာထူးရၿပီး ဘာမွ မယ္မယ္ရရ မေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္တာေတြ ျပည္တြင္းမွာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ျပည္ပမွာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္ဗ်။
ေနာက္တခုက ဦးသန္႔ဟာ ဘာပဲလုပ္လုပ္ တည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္လုပ္တတ္တယ္ ဆိုတာကိုေတြ႕ရတယ္။ ဘယ္အလုပ္ လုပ္လုပ္ စကားနည္းနည္းပဲေျပာၿပီး တိတိက်က် ေဆာင္ရြက္တတ္တယ္ဗ်။ ဒါက ကုကသမဂၢလို ေနရာမ်ိဳးေရာက္မွ မဟုတ္ဘူး ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းမွာ ေနစဥ္ကတည္းကလည္း ဒီတိုင္းပဲ။ ဥပမာ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွာ အတြင္းဝန္လုပ္ေတာ့ သတင္းစာဌာနေတြဘာေတြနဲ႔ ဆက္ဆံတဲ့ေနရာမွာ တိတိက်က် တည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ပဲ ေဆာင္ရြက္တာ ေတြ႕ရတယ္။
တည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ဆိုတာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး အေရးႀကီးတယ္ဗ်။ စကားသိပ္မေျပာဘူး။ က်ေနာ္ဆံုဖူးတာေလး တခုဆိုရင္ ၁၉၆၀ ေက်ာ္ ေလာက္ကေပါ့ ဗမာျပည္မွာလာၿပီး ဗီယက္နမ္စစ္ပြဲနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ေဆာင္ရြက္ဖူးတယ္။ ဗီယက္နမ္အေရးကို ကုလသမဂၢရယ္ ဗီယက္နမ္ေတာင္ပိုင္း၊ ေျမာက္ပိုင္း အလယ္ပိုင္းေတြ ေဆြးေႏြးရာမွာ ဗမာျပည္က ေနရာေပးတယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာသူက အလုပ္လုပ္တာမွာ အကုန္လံုး သင့္သင့္ျမတ္ျမတ္ ျဖစ္ေအာင္ လုပ္တတ္တယ္။
ဒီကိစၥက လွ်ိဳ႕ဝွက္ကိစၥဗ်။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လူေတြက သိခ်င္တယ္ေလ။ အဲဒီမွာ လွ်ိဳ႕ဝွက္ကိစၥကိုလည္း မျငင္းေရွာင္ဘူး၊ သိသင့္တာကိုလည္း သိရေအာင္ မီဒီယာရဲ႕သိခြင့္ကိုလည္း မေလ်ာ့ပါးေအာင္လုပ္တတ္တယ္ဗ်။ က်ေနာ္ မွတ္မိတာေလး တခုဆိုရင္ သူ သတင္းေထာက္ေတြနဲ႔ေတြ႕ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ထဲက သတင္းေထာက္တေယာက္က စကားနည္းနည္းေလး ထစ္တယ္။ အဲဒီတုန္းကလည္း သတင္းေထာက္ နည္းနည္းပဲရွိတာပါ။ ဒါေတာင္ တေယာက္ကို တမိနစ္ပဲ ေပးမယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ေမးတာေကာ ေျဖတာေကာေနာ္။ အဲဒီထစ္တဲ့သူက စကားထစ္ၿပီး ဗီ ဗီ ဗီ ဗီ ဆိုၿပီး ဗီယက္နမ္ ဆိုတာေတာင္ မေရာက္ဘဲ ျဖစ္တယ္ဗ်။ အဲဒီမွာ သူက ေျပာလိုက္တယ္ ခင္ဗ်ားဗ်ာ ေမးတာနဲ႔တမိနစ္ျပည့္ေနၿပီ က်ေနာ့္အေျဖမေပးႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူး ဆိုၿပီး ေျပာလိုက္တယ္။ တိတိက်က် လုပ္တာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ တည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား လုပ္တတ္တာ ဦးသန္႔နဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ အမွတ္တရ တခုေပါ့ဗ်ာ။
ေနာက္တခုက ဦးသန္႔အေရးအခင္းနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္တာေပါ့။ ဒါလူတိုင္းသိတဲ့ကိစၥပါ။ အမ်ားႀကီး မေျပာခ်င္ေတာ့ဘူး။ တခု ေျပာခ်င္တာက ျပည္သူလူထုဟာ တန္ဖိုးထားရမယ့္သူကို တန္ဖိုးထားရမယ္ဆိုတာ ဘယ္ေတာ့ပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ သိတယ္ဗ်။ အထူးသျဖင့္ ဗမာျပည္သူလူထုေပါ့။ ေနာက္တခုက ဒီလိုလူေတြနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး မထိုက္တန္တဲ့ အျပဳအမူမ်ိဳးကိုလုပ္ေတာ့ ျပည္သူလူထုက သိပ္ၿပီး ေဒါသထြက္တယ္၊ မႀကိဳက္ဘူးဗ်။ ဒီေတာ့ ဒီဟာနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လာရင္ အၿမဲ တုန္႔ျပန္တယ္။ ဒီအေရးအခင္းဟာ ဒီသေဘာထားကို ထင္ထင္ရွားရွား ျပလိုက္ တာပဲ။
ဦးသန္႔လိုပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးဟာ ဗမာျပည္အတြက္၊ ဗမာတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ သိပ္ကိုဂုဏ္ယူစရာေကာင္းတယ္၊ ေနာက္ၿပီး အလြန္ကိုိထိုက္ထိုက္တန္တန္နဲ႔ ကမၻာ့အေရးကိုေတာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ရဲ႕ ႐ုပ္အေလာင္းကို ႀကိဳတာေတာင္မွ ႀကိဳဖို႔ခြင့္မေပးဘူး၊ ဘယ္သူ႔ကိုမွ မေျပာဘူး။ ၾကားတာတခုကေတာ့ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က ဦးေနဝင္းက ငပလီမွာရွိေနတယ္ေျပာတယ္ဗ်။ ဒီကသံ႐ံုးေတြက သြားႀကိဳခ်င္ေတာ့ ဘယ္သူႀကိဳမွာလဲ ေမးေတာ့ သူက မင္းတို႔ ႀကိဳခ်င္ႀကိဳ ငါဘာမွလုပ္စရာမရွိဘူးကြာ လို႔ေျပာတယ္တဲ့။ သူအဲလိုေျပာလိုက္ေတာ့ အားလံုးက သူ႔ရဲ႕စိတ္သေဘာ ကိုသိၿပီ။ အဲဒီမွာ ဘယ္သူကမွ ဘာမွမလုပ္ရဲေတာ့ဘူး။
ေနာက္ဆံုးပိတ္က်ေတာ့ ပညာေရးဒုဝန္ႀကီးဦးေအာင္ထြန္း ဆိုတာ က်ေနာ့္သူငယ္ခ်င္းပါပဲ၊ သူ႔ကို တာဝန္ေပးလိုက္တယ္တဲ့။ သူကလည္း ေတြးတာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဒီလိုေနရာက ႏိုင္ငံတကာအဖြဲ႕အစည္းေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႕ရမယ့္ေနရာမွာ ေကာင္းေကာင္းလုပ္မယ္ဆုိၿပီး အေနာက္တိုင္းဝတ္စံုုေတြ ဘာေတြဝတ္ၿပီး နကၠတိုင္နဲ႔ဘာနဲ႔ က်က်နနသြားတာဗ်။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဦးသန္႔ရဲ႕ အေလာင္းကိုႀကိဳမိလိုက္တာနဲ႔ အဲဒီဝန္ႀကီးလည္း ျပဳတ္ေရာဗ်။ အဲဒါကိုျပည္သူလူထုသိတာနဲ႔ ဒီလိုဂုဏ္ယူစရာေကာင္းတဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးကို ေသးသိမ္ေအာင္ လုပ္တယ္ဆိုၿပီး မေက်နပ္ေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသား ျပည္သူအမ်ားက ဦးသန္႔အေလာင္းႀကီးကိုအတင္း က်ိဳကၠဆံကြင္း ကေနလုၾကတာ။
ပထမၾကားတာက ေဒၚခင္ေမသန္းရဲ႕ ေျခရင္းမွာျမႇဳတ္ဖို႔ေတာင္ စီစဥ္ထားတာလို႔ ၾကားတာပဲ။ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ေတာ့ မသိဘူးဗ်။ ႀကံေတာမွာေပါ့။ အဲဒီမွာ တကၠသိုလ္ဝင္းထဲကိုသယ္ၿပီး ဆႏၵျပပြဲ ျဖစ္ေတာ့တာပဲ။ ဒါက ဘာျပလဲ ဆိုေတာ့ ဒီစစ္တပ္က အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူေတြဟာ အၿမဲတမ္း သူတို႔ထင္သလို လုပ္သမွ် ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ထင္တယ္။ ခုလို ဂုဏ္ရွိတဲ့ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးကို ေသးသိမ္ေအာင္လုပ္ခ်င္တယ္။ အေလးမထားခ်င္ဘူး၊ ဂုဏ္ပ်က္ေအာင္ လုပ္ခ်င္တယ္။ အဲဒီအတြက္ ႀကီးစြာေသာ တုန္႔ျပန္မႈရတယ္ဆိုတာကို ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ နမူနာ မယူဘူး။
ဆိုပါေတာ့ဗ်ာ က်ေနာ္စကား ဆက္ၿပီးေျပာရရင္ ေဒၚခင္ၾကည္စ်ာပနတုန္းကလည္း ေဒၚခင္ၾကည္ကို ႀကံေတာ မွာျမႇဳပ္ဖို႔လုပ္တယ္ဗ်။ အဲဒီမွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကေကာ က်န္တဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသား၊ သံဃာ၊ လူထုက လက္မခံႏုိင္ဘူးဗ်။ လက္မခံႏုိင္ေတာ့ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ခန္းမကိုသယ္ၿပီး ျပည္သူ႔စ်ာပနလုပ္ဖို႔အထိ လုပ္မလို႔ဗ်။ ေနာက္ဆံုး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ျပည္သူ႔စ်ာပနလုပ္တာေတာ့ မႀကိဳက္ဘူး ဆိုၿပီး ေျပာေတာ့မွ သတိရၿပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ သေဘာထားကို ႀကိဳက္ပါတယ္ ဆိုၿပီးျဖစ္တာဗ်။ မိသားစုစ်ာပဏပဲေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ အဲဒီမွာမွ ဦးသန္႔နဲ႔ ဆရာႀကီးသခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မႈိင္းရဲ႕ၾကား ေျမကြက္ကိုေပးလိုက္တာဗ်။ မဟုတ္ရင္ ေအာက္ေျခမွာ ျပည္သူလူထုက ဆူပူေတာ့မွာ။ ေဒၚခင္ၾကည္တုန္းကလည္း ဦးသန္႔အေရးအခင္းလိုကို ျဖစ္ေတာ့မွာ။
ခ်ဳပ္လိုက္ရင္ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးအတြက္သာမက ကမၻာအတြက္ပါ ဂုဏ္ယူစရာေကာင္းတဲ့သူ က်ဴးဘားအေရးအခင္းလို ကမၻာမွာ ႏ်ဴးကလီးယားစစ္ႀကီးေတာင္ ျဖစ္ေတာ့မယ့္ အေနအထားကို တားႏိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့သူ ဒီလိုပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳး ျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ ဂုဏ္ယူရမယ္။ တိုင္းျပည္မွာ ဂုဏ္ယူ အေလးထားရမယ့္ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးကို အၿမဲတမ္းစစ္အစိုးရက ေသးသိမ္ေအာင္ မဖြယ္မရာ သေဘာထားနဲ႔ ျပဳမူ ခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္တတ္တဲ့ သေဘာထားမ်ိဳးရွိတယ္ဆိုတာ ဦးသန္႔အေရးအခင္းက သက္ေသျပေနတယ္လို႔ပဲ ေျပာခ်င္တယ္။
ဦးေနဝင္းက ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးအာဃာတ ထားတဲ့ျပႆနာတခု .. အဲဒါကေတာ့ ဦးေနဝင္းျပႆနာဗ်။ ဦးသန္႔ျပႆနာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဦးသန္႔ဟာ လူေတြနဲ႔ဆက္ဆံရာမွာ အလြန္ကို တည္ၾကည္မွန္ကန္တဲ့ပုဂၢိဳလ္ဗ်။ စကားေျပာရာမွာ ယဥ္ေက်းတယ္၊ သိမ္ေမြ႕တယ္၊ ေအးေဆးတယ္။ ဘယ္သူ႔ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ေလးေလးစားစား ဆက္ဆံတယ္။ ဒီေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥျဖစ္တာဟာ ဦးသန္႔နဲ႔ မဆိုင္ဘူးဗ်။ ဦးႏုနဲ႔ ဦးေနဝင္းျဖစ္တဲ့ကိစၥ။ ဦးႏုက အာဏာသိမ္းခံရေတာ့ ကမၻာလွည့္ၿပီးႏုိင္ငံေတြကို ေထာက္ခံခ်က္ ေတာင္းရင္း ကုလသမဂၢကိုေရာက္ေတာ့ ကုလသမဂၢ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ အခန္းမွာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာသတင္းေထာက္ေတြ ေရွ႕မွာ ေျပာတယ္။
အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က ဦးေနဝင္းက ဦးႏုကို ေဒါသျဖစ္ေနတာဗ်။ ဦးေနဝင္းအေနနဲ႔က သူ႔ရဲ႕စစ္အစိုးရနဲ႔ တိုင္းျပည္ကို ၿငိမ္ေအာင္ႀကိဳးစားေနရတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာ ဦးႏုက ကုလသမဂၢလို ေနရာမ်ိဳးမွာ သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲလုပ္၊ ကမၻာသိေၾကညာ၊ စစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ခၽြတ္ယြင္း ခ်က္ေတြ ေထာက္ျပ၊ သူ႔ရဲ႕ ဒီမိုကေရစီအခြင့္အေရးေတြ ေတာင္းဆိုတာမ်ိဳးေတြလုပ္ေတာ့ ဦးေနဝင္းက ေဒါသထြက္ တုန္လႈပ္တယ္။ ဒါက အစုိးရကို ၿဖိဳဖ်က္ႏိုင္ ေလာက္ေအာင္ ျဖစ္တယ္ေလ။
ဒါေပမယ့္ ဦးေနဝင္းရဲ႕ေဒါသက ဦးႏုထက္ ဦသန္႔ဆီ ေရာက္သြားတယ္။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ဦးသန္႔နဲ႔ဦးႏုကလည္း အလြန္ရင္းႏွီးၾကတာကိုး။ ငယ္သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြကိုး။ ဒါဟာဦးသန္႔ဟာ ဦးႏုကို အထူးအခြင့္အေရးေပးတာပဲ လို႔ထင္တယ္ဗ်။ တကယ္က မဟုတ္ဘူးဗ်။ ဒီအခန္းကို ကုလသမဂၢေရာက္တဲ့ ဘယ္ႏုိင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္မဆို သံုးခြင့္ရွိတယ္ဗ်။ သူကလည္း ႏိုင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္တဦးပဲကိုး။ အျပင္လူ အေနနဲ႔ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ဦးႏုဟာ ျပဳတ္က်ေနတဲ့ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေဟာင္း လို႔ေျပာမယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေဟာင္း မဟုတ္ဘူးဗ်။ အာဏာသိမ္းခံထားရတဲ့ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဗ်။ အဲဒီမွာ ဦးေနဝင္းရဲ႕ ေဒါသေတြဟာ ဦးႏုဆီကေန ဦးသန္႔ဆီကို ေရာက္သြားေတာ့တာပဲ။
ဦးသန္႔ ဗမာျပည္ကိုေရာက္တိုင္း ဦးသန္႔ဟာ ဦးေနဝင္းနဲ႔ ေတြ႕ဆံုဖို႔ႀကိဳးစားတာ အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္ပဲ။ အဲဒါလည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔သတင္းစာေလာကက အသိဆံုးပဲ။ အဲဒီလိုအခါတိုင္းမွာ ဦးေနဝင္းက ျငင္းပယ္တယ္၊ ေရွာင္တယ္ဗ်။ ဦးသန္႔လာတဲ့အခါ ေျမာက္ဖ်ား ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ခရီးထြက္ေနတယ္၊ အနားယူေနတယ္၊ ေနမေကာင္းဘူး အၿမဲလုပ္တယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ဦးေနဝင္းနဲ႔ ဦးသန္႔နဲ႔ ၾကားမွာ မညီညႊတ္တဲ့သေဘာထားေတြ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာတာ ဦးသန္႔ေၾကာင့္မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဦးႏုကေန ဆက္စပ္ၿပီး ေပၚလာတဲ့ သေဘာထား။ အဲဒီကေန တျဖည္းျဖည္းကြာသြားၿပီး ေနာက္ဆံုး စ်ာပန အခမ္းအနား မွာေတာင္ ႐ုပ္အေလာင္းကို ႀကိဳမိတဲ့ ဒုဝန္ႀကီးတေယာက္ေတာင္ ျပဳတ္ရတဲ့အထိ မလိုမုန္းထားစိတ္ေတြ ျဖစ္ခဲ့တာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။
ဦးေနဝင္းအစိုးရက မေထာက္ခံတာေၾကာင့္ ဦးသန္႔ရဲ႕ တတိယသက္တမ္း ျပယ္သြားတယ္လုိ႔ ေျပာၾကတယ္။ တကယ္ေတာ့ ဦးေနဝင္းမေထာက္ခံ႐ံုနဲ႔ ဒီလိုမျဖစ္ပါဘူးဗ်။ ဦးသန္႔ကိုယ္တိုင္ကိုက အဲဒီမွာ က်န္းမာေရးက မေကာင္းေတာ့ဘူး။ ငယ္ငယ္ကတည္းက ေဆးျပင္းလိပ္ေသာက္ခဲ့တာဆိုေတာ့ သူ႔မွာ ကင္ဆာျဖစ္လာတဲ့ အေနအထားေတြ သူသိမယ္ဗ်။ မိခင္ႏုိင္ငံကကန္႔ကြက္တာနဲ႔ လူတေယာက္ အလုပ္မလုပ္ ႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူး ဆိုတာမ်ိဳးေတာ့ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ဘူးဗ်။ ႏိုင္ငံအမ်ားစုက ေထာက္ခံရင္ကို လုပ္ႏုိင္တာပဲ။ လံုၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ေတြက ေထာက္ခံရင္ကိုၿပီးတာပဲ။ သူကိုယ္တိုင္ကိုက က်န္းမာေရးေၾကာင့္ ဆုတ္သြားတာျဖစ္မယ္ဗ်။ အဲဒီေနာက္ပိုင္း ၁ ႏွစ္ ၂ ႏွစ္အတြင္းမွာ ဒီေရာဂါကဆိုးရြားခဲ့တာကိုးဗ်။
ေျပာစမွတ္ျပဳစရာကေတာ့ အမ်ားႀကီးေတာ့ မေျပာႏုိင္ဘူး။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆို အဲဒီတုန္းက က်ေနာ္က ငယ္ေသးတာကိုး။ ေနာက္ၿပီး က်ေနာ္က သိပ္ၿပီးအေရးပါတဲ့သူလည္း မဟုတ္ခဲ့ဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ တခု မွတ္မိ တာကေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ သတင္းစာအသင္း အတြင္းေရးမႉး လုပ္စဥ္ကေပါ့ အဲဒီတုန္းက ဥကၠဌက ဂါးဒီးယန္း ဦးစိန္ဝင္း။ ဦးသန္႔ကရန္ကုန္ေရာက္ေနတယ္ ႏွစ္ေတာ့ေသခ်ာမမွတ္မိဘူး ၁၉၆၄ ဝန္းက်င္ျဖစ္မယ္ဗ်။ အဲဒီမွာ သတင္းစာအသင္းက ဦးသန္႔ကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳပြဲေလးလုပ္တယ္ဗ်။
အဲဒီမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ဦးသန္႔ကိုလက္ေဆာင္ေပးဖို႔ စီမံတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ဆႏၵေလးလည္းယူတယ္။ ဒါက လူ ၁ ေယာက္ ၂ ေယာက္ပဲ သိတဲ့ကိစၥေပါ့။ အဲဒီမွာ ဦးသန္႔က ဒီလိုလုပ္ဗ်ာတဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢမွာ အခန္းေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ရွိတာဆိုေတာ့ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြ ထားတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ ဗမာပန္းခ်ီကားလည္း ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲခ်င္တယ္လို႔ေျပာတယ္ဗ်။ အဲဒီမွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔က ပန္းခ်ီကားစီစဥ္တယ္။ ေပၚဦးသက္ရဲ႕ကားဗ်။ ေပၚဦးသက္ကလည္း ဆြဲလိုက္တာ ဆင္ပံုႀကီးဗ်။ ဆင္နဲ႔ မ်က္မျမင္ပုဏၰား ေျခာက္ေယာက္ ေပါ့။ ဆင္ကလည္း ႐ိုး႐ိုး ငုတ္တုတ္ေနတဲ့ ဆင္ႀကီး မဟုတ္ဘဲ ကခုန္ေနတဲ့ ဆင္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ေနာက္တခု ပုဏၰားေတြက အျဖဴေတြ ဝတ္လို႔ ဆင္ႀကီးကအမည္းဗ်။ ဆန္႔က်င္ဘက္အေရာင္ႏွစ္ခုနဲ႔ ဆြဲထားတာ။ ပုဏၰားေတြက တခ်ိဳ႕က ဆင္ကိုစမ္း၊ တခ်ိဳ႕က ကခုန္လို႔ အဲလိုပံုဗ်။ က်ေနာ့္မ်က္စိထဲမွာ ျမင္ေယာင္ ေနေသးတယ္။
အဲဒီကားက ၆ ေပ ၃ ေပေလာက္ရွိမယ္။ သူ႔ရဲ႕ေဘာင္က ကႏုတ္ထြင္းထားတဲ့ ေခါင္းပြႀကီး။ ပန္းခက္ေတြနဲ႔ ဝန္းရံေနတဲ့ သစ္လံုးႀကီးလိုပဲ။ အဲဒီပန္းခ်ီကားကို အေၾကာင္းေၾကာင္းေၾကာင့္ ေဘာင္ႀကီးနဲ႔ မသယ္ႏုိင္ဘူး။ ဒါနဲ႔ ေဘာင္ႀကီးကိုဦးစိန္ဝင္းဆီမွာ ထားခဲ့တယ္။ ဒီကားကေတာ့ ကုလသမဂၢမွာ ဘယ္ပံုနဲ႔ ရွိေနလည္း မေျပာတတ္ဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ေဘာင္ႀကီးကေတာ့ ဦးစိန္ဝင္းက ဓမၼိကဦးဘသန္းတို႔ကေနတဆင့္ လွဴလိုက္ေတာ့ ခု ေလာကနတ္ ပန္းခ်ီျပခန္းမွာ ေရွးေဟာင္းကားတခုျဖစ္တဲ့ ဆရာၿခံဳရဲ႕လက္ရာ ခပ္ေသးေသးပဲ အဲဒီကားကို ထည့္ထားတယ္။ ေဘာင္ကေတာ့ ဗမာျပည္မွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ ေလာကနတ္မွာရွိေသးလားေတာ့ မသိဘူး။
ဒါကဘာကိုျပလဲဆိုေတာ့ ဦးသန္႔ရဲ႕ အႏုပညာျမတ္ႏိုးမႈရယ္၊ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို အေလးထားတဲ့စိတ္ ရွိတာရယ္ေပါ့ ဗ်ာ။ သူရွိစဥ္က ျမန္မာေတြကို ရာထူးေပးတာမ်ိဳးရွိတယ္။ ဒါက ဘက္လိုက္ေပးတာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ထူးခၽြန္တဲ့ သူျခင္းတူရင္ ဗမာေတြကို အလုပ္အခြင့္အလမ္း ေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးခဲ့တယ္။ မွတ္မွတ္သားသား မေျပာႏုိင္ေပမယ့္ ဒါမ်ိဳးရွိတယ္ဗ်။ ဦးတင္ေအာင္ဆိုတဲ့ သတင္းစာဆရာတဦးဆို ကုလသမဂၢမွာ လုပ္ခဲ့တာပဲ။ ဦးသန္႔ဟာ မထိုက္မတန္ဘဲ ကိုယ့္လူပဲဆိုၿပီးဆြဲသြင္းတာမ်ိဳးမဟုတ္ဘူး။ ျမန္မာ့အႏုပညာကို ဂုဏ္တင္ ျမတ္ႏိုးတယ္၊ ကမၻာ့အလယ္မွာတင့္တယ္ေစခ်င္တဲ့သေဘာေပါ့။ အဲဒီကိစၥေလးကေတာ့ က်ေနာ့္ရဲ႕စိတ္ထဲ စြဲေနတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။
အမွတ္တရ ဒီေန႔အတြက္ေျပာခ်င္တာကေတာ့ ဦးသန္႔အႏွစ္ ၁၀၀ ျပည့္တဲ့အခ်ိန္က သာမန္လူပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ကမၻာသိပုဂၢိဳလ္ပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ မွတ္မွတ္သားသား ရွိဖို႔ေကာင္းတဲ့အခ်ိန္ေပါ့။ ဦးသန္႔လိုကမၻာ့အက်ိဳး၊ ျမန္မာ့အက်ိဳးေတြ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးကေတာ့ ပိုၿပီး မွတ္မွတ္သားသား လုပ္သင့္တာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ခုလိုခ်ိန္မွာ က်ေနာ္ေျပာခ်င္ တာကေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔တိုင္းျပည္က ဆင္းရဲတယ္၊ ဒုကၡမ်ိဳးစံုႀကံဳခဲ့ရတယ္။ အဆိုးဆံုးကေတာ့ စစ္အစိုးရေတြ ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၄၀ ေလာက္က စစ္အစိုးရက အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္တယ္၊ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၂၀ ေလာက္က ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ေတြ ႀကံဳရတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာ ႏြံအိုင္ထဲမွာ ပြင့္တဲ့ၾကာတပြင့္လိုပဲ ဦးသန္႔လိုပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးေပၚထြက္ခဲ့တာဟာ မီးလွ်ံထဲကေန ပန္းတပြင့္ပြင့္ခဲ့တာပဲဗ်။ အဲဒီလိုပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ိဳးရဲ႕ အားထုတ္မႈေတြ၊ နမူနာေတြ၊ ထူးခၽြန္မႈေတြမ်ိဳး က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဗမာေတြရဲ႕ စိတ္ထဲမွာရွိသင့္တယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ဗမာတေယာက္စီတိုင္းဟာ ဦးသန္႔လိုပဲႀကိဳးစားသင့္တယ္၊ အားထုတ္ သင့္တယ္။ ႀကိဳးစားၾကပါ၊ အားထုတ္ၾကပါလို႔ပဲ ေျပာခ်င္တယ္ဗ်ာ။ ။
Will Obama be ready for radical humanitarian intervention in Burma?
http://www.shanland.org/Mailbox/2009/will-obama-be-ready-for-radical-humanitarian-intervention-in-burma
by admin — last modified 2009-01-24 04:54
Even before the euphoria has died down, following the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, he moved almost with lighting speed, on his first day in the office, to tackle the issue of Guantanamo Bay detention centre closure.
By Sai Wansai
Friday, 23 January 2009
Accordingly, the prison camp in Cuba would be closed down within one year and the administration has suspended trials for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo for 120 days pending a review of the military tribunals.
Many EU countries were particularly impressed with the intended Guantanamo Bay prison closure, which was seen as a right approach to undo the Bush’s era human rights violations, and restore America’s lost moral posture, befitted for a democratic superpower.
Meanwhile, Burma has been hinting that new US President should change Washington’s tough policy towards its military regime and end the “misunderstandings” of the past, according to the AFP report on Friday.
In Obama’s inauguration speech, he states, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist”.
Also, in the administration’s foreign policy agenda, a paragraph reads, “Seek New Partnerships in Asia: Obama and Biden will forge a more effective framework in Asia that goes beyond bilateral agreements, occasional summits, and ad hoc arrangements, such as the six-party talks on North Korea. They will maintain strong ties with allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia; work to build an infrastructure with countries in East Asia that can promote stability and prosperity; and work to ensure that China plays by international rules”.
One wonders, whether the overtures or hinting of the Burmese military regime to have a better relation with Washington could be a fresh start for reconciliation and the beginning of a win-win outcome solution for the conflict within Burma and as well, the hostile Burma-U.S relationship.
Arranging a kind of the six-party talks, like in the case of North Korea, could be a possibility. The only condition to get it started is the give-and-take nature of compromising must be available. While the US-led team wouldn’t pose a problem, the Burmese military regime will have to budge from its stance of insisting only to play by its own game plan and rules. In other words, the acceptance of political accommodation, all-inclusiveness and level playing field would have to be the agreed precondition.
The Burmese military regime couldn’t expect to better the relation with Washington without genuine compromise to end its tyrannical rule, oppression and political monopoly.
While the ethnic resistance and democratic opposition groups are well aware that Obama’s plate is full with heavy issues like global financial crisis, US troops withdrawal from Iraq, climate change, improving America’s relationship internationally, brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and empowering, supporting Afghanistan government against the Taliban, which would be given priority in his decision making, they are confident that the moral and humanitarian issue involving Burma would also be definitely part and parcel of his foreign policy agenda, down the line of his priority-setting.
As it is, the Burmese military has never been ready for compromise or flexibility, where power-sharing or political accommodation is concerned. In such a situation of continued rejection from the part of Burmese military, Obama would be forced to alter his approach to help deliver reconciliation and democratisation process in Burma.
Although the diplomatic overtures to woo the Burmese military for genuine democratic change and all-inclusiveness should continue without fail, Obama could also up the ante by innovative and radical humanitarian intervention, short of military undertaking by US forces. For example, Washington could work with Bangkok, hand-in-hand, to create sanctuaries along Thai-Burma border, where the bulk of 500,000 internally displaced persons (IDP) are struggling to survive on a daily basis. All these could take place within Burma, close to Thai border, with the help of ethnic resistance movements like Karen National Union (KNU), Shan State Army (SSA) South, Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the likes. This way, the US military wouldn’t need to be involved physically, but only need to come up with material needs and know-how, under the supervision of UN or agreed international establishment, on how to manage and protect such sanctuaries.
If this happened, a row of other humanitarian devices and forms of aid could be carried out across the border without having to deal with the military regime. In other words, the international community could bypass the regime to help the badly needed oppressed population along the border.
For such a scenario to become a reality, Obama needs to secure Bangkok’s involvement in implementing humanitarian aids. It should be possible for the US President to co-ordinate and work closely with the newly elected Thai PM Abhisit Vejjajiva, notwithstanding ASEAN, known to be a real democrat with broad vision and not shy to take hard decision.
Imagine how such radical approach could weaken the Burmese military front-line soldiers, in contested areas, physcologically, which could lead to defection to the ethnic-democratic opposition side, provided there are facilities to accommodate and handle them. If this happen, the power of Burmese military based on coercion and fear would crumble like a house of cards.
Of course, this is just one out of many options in thinking out of the box to end the stalemate and create a new balance of power, so that the Burmese military would be willing to come to the table for genuine give-and-take discussion.
At the end of the day, a two-pronged approach of "pressure and engagement" would be the only viable approach to deal with such an entrenched military dictatorship.
What the people of Burma really need now is a real physical commitment from international stakeholders, with the lead of the United States, to give them a helping hand, once another massive uprising like last saffron revolution take place, and not just mere lip-service.
# End….
(Sai Wansai is the General Secretary of the exiled Shan Democratic Union - Editor)
One Response to “Thailand and Myanmar's army leaders compared”
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/04/18/thailand-and-myanmars-army-leaders-compared/
January 24th, 2009 at 7:20 am David Brown: 1
The Burmese military has been continuously in power for much longer and has tightened its grip on the country apparently with little effective resistance except at the edges
As Awzar Thi of AHRC says, the Thai military is similar in its approach and actions but because of pressures on it (internally and externally?) has permitted elected or part elected governments to take power periodically.
The general case is obviously right and Awzar Thais plea for Burmese activists not to support he Thai system as if it is democratic and above criticism is also right.
However, the case would be stronger if there was more description of the forces in Thailand that constrain, and require, the military to relinquish their grip periodically.
The Thai economy was opened up to international influence because the US required access to Thailand for their war against Vietnam and the Thai military discovered how to achieve huge subsidies and became dependent on foreign, mainly US, sources of funds and political support.
The Thai military need to maintain some legitimacy for themselves and for their US benefactors which acts as some constraint on them.
Another constraint is that the military use the Monarchy to maintain control of the braod base of people in Thailand.
The military use protection of the monarchy as a routine cover for their actions in removing elected governments or any government that shows signs that it will become a danger to the military’s power in the land.
Using this cover also places a constraint on the military as it must ensure that the monarchy is internationally respectable which entails providing some opportunity for the monarch to appear to protect his people form excesses.
The recent dramatic improvement in communications, especially in the regions of Thailand, via radio, TV, including via satellite and the Internet has meant that the broad mass of people of Thailand are becoming much more aware of the manipulations occurring in their society.
In particular, military and rich families interference in the justice system, in disenfranchising the bulk of the Thai people.
The people are now aware of the opportunities for them if they are permitted to choose a government through free and fair elections.
Therefore the latest “silent” coup engineered by the military that installed the Abhisit government is finding it very difficult to maintain its legitimacy both with its own people and internationally.
When the Wall Street Journal * publishes:
“Thaksin was no angel. Yet his main “mistake” was to win over the loyalty of the bulk of Thai voters through the one-man-one-vote parliamentary system. His power base threatened the cozy status quo enjoyed by Thailand’s army, urban elites and favored entrenched business concerns.”
then the Thai army (but the other military are not exmpt) need to tread very carefully in a world that at least pays strong lip service to democracy!
* http://bangkokpundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/is-abhisit-practicising-what-he-is.html
Gambari's return fails to inspire Burmese Opposition
http://www.mizzima.com/news/inside-burma/1597-gambaris-return-fails-to-inspire-burmese-opposition.html
by Mungpi
Saturday, 24 January 2009 00:17
New Delhi (Mizzima) - Burma's main opposition party - the National League for Democracy - said it does not expect United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari's visit to yield fruit as the ruling generals are stubbornly determined to continue with their roadmap.
Nyan Win, spokesperson of the NLD, told Mizzima on Friday that so far Gambari's visits to Burma have failed to yield any productive result and it is not likely to change anything even if he comes again.
"We have heard that Mr. Gambari is to make another trip to Burma by the end of this month. We have made our views clear on his [Gambari's] visits." Nyan Win said.
"We have seen no results so far and do not expect it."
Nyan Win's comments came in the wake of news on Friday that the UN special envoy will make his seventh trip to the military-ruled country as part of his continued effort to usher political reconciliation in the country.
The four-day trip, January 31 to February 3, will be the first for Gambari to re-visit Burma in 2009 and is the seventh since he took up the job as the UN Secretary-General's special envoy to Burma in early 2006.
Like the NLD, several other Burmese observers view that Gambari's mission has not only failed but Burma's military rulers have been successful in manipulating the Nigerian diplomat to serve their purpose – easing international pressures.
Aye Thar Aung, Secretary of the Committee Representing Peoples Parliament (CRPP), an alliance formed with several ethnic political parties along with the NLD, said Gambari's mission has derailed and his re-visit is not likely to make any difference.
"So far there is no substantive progress made by the visits [of Gambari]. He has been used by the junta to spread their voice and to ease pressure," Aye Thar Aung, who is also Secretary of the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD), told Mizzima.
According to him, Gambari's only task is to convince the military to reconsider its roadmap and modify the constitution, which the junta said had been approved in a referendum in May 2008.
"But I don't think Gambari can convince the military and as long as the junta does not make it an all inclusive process [roadmap] and does not modify the constitution, we will not be participating in the process including the 2010 election," Aye Thar Aung said.
The CRPP, a group formed to represent the peoples' parliament based on the 1990 general election result, has earlier announced that it will boycott the 2010 election unless the government modifies its constitution and implement an all inclusive process of roadmap.
Similarly, the ALD has made clear that they are boycotting the election. But the NLD has so far taken no decisions on their role in the 2010 election, with Nyan Win saying, "The agenda for the 2010 election has not yet been discussed among us. We feel there is no need to discuss as of now."
Aye Thar Aung said, with Gambari's mission failing to show any political progress, "We the Burmese people have nothing left to hope from the United Nations."
But a Thailand based longtime observer and analyst Aung Naing Oo, said Gambari's mission should not be judged only in terms of political development. Gambari's mission includes convincing the junta of implementing a series of projects including poverty alleviation and establishing of an economic forum.
Aung Naing Oo, however, admits that Gambari's visit is unlikely to make any difference in terms of politics at this juncture. But it should be considered a success if there are any break through in other agendas.
While the opposition and observers question the effectiveness of Gambari's upcoming visit, the real task for the Nigerian diplomat, according to sources, will yet be getting to meet junta head Snr. General Than Shwe and detained opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, both of whom he failed to meet during his last visit.
During his last visit in August 2008, he failed to meet Burma's military Supremo Snr. Gen Than Shwe and detained pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who spurned his two attempts to meet her.
Nyan Win, Burma's Foreign Minister, during a meeting with Chinese Ambassador to Burma Mr. Juan Mu in March 2008, said Gambari should not consider his visits unsuccessful if he was not allowed a meeting with Snr. Gen Than Shwe.
In the leaked meeting minutes, a copy of which is in Mizzima's possession, Nyan Win assured Juan Mu that Gambari should consider that he had talked to the Burmese government even if he is met by junior officials including him and that Gambari should feel confident of his mission though he may not meet Snr. Gen Than Shwe.
Nyan Win's assurance came as a response to China's request to allow Gambari a meeting with Snr. Gen Than Shwe and actors that he wishes to meet during his visit.
So much for China's request for Gambari, during his visit in March 2008, he met Snr. Gen Than Shwe and detained Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. But he failed to convince the junta to allow an independent group to observe the referendum, which was conducted in May 2008 following his visit.
Total Burma protest at Watford Court and Offices
http://totaloutofburma.blogspot.com/2009/01/total-burma-protest-at-watford-court.html
From London Indymedia Article:
On 23rd January the opening day of French Total Oil's Buncefield explosion criminal proceedings at Watford Magristrates Court, Burma protesters and supporters remind passers-by of Total's other disgraces and also leafleted at Total's Watford offices just down the road from the magistrates court.
Total Denial and Total Disasters
In January 2008 a French court made French Total Oil pay a large share of €200 million in damages to civil parties for Europe's largest oil tanker disaster. The Erika tanker disaster suffocated hundreds of miles of Atlantic coastline killing or injuring 300,000 sea birds. The court said Total, the world's fourth largest oil group, had failed to take into account the age of the ship and deficiencies in its maintenance. This carelessness had a "causal role in the sinking and, as such, provoked the accident", the judge said.
In October 2008 Total Oil was found guilty of price fixing. The European Commission fined nine firms that had been fixing the price of paraffin between 1992 and 2005. French Total Oil was fined 128.1million euros (the 2nd largest fine of the firms involved).
In December 2008 Total Oil faced criminal charges over Buncefield, Europe's largest peacetime blaze and the UK's largest peacetime explosion. Total is facing three charges — failing to ensure the health, safety and welfare of its employees; failing to protect persons not in their employment; and causing pollution to ground water in the vicinity of the plant. In October Total finally gave up 3 years of ridiculous denial that they were only liable for damages within 451m of the explosion, putting residents through years of "unnecessary struggle". Ironically Total's partner in Buncefield is Chevron (known as Texaco in UK), the same partner as in Total's Burma Yadana gas pipeline. Chevron (Texaco) and Total are arguing over responsibility for Buncefield : "Chevron, which owns 40 per cent of Hertfordshire Oil Storage Ltd. claims that Total alone should be responsible for the damage claims, on the grounds that the French company controlled Buncefield's employees and day-to-day operating procedures. "Total proposes that the focal point of the current litigation should be to ensure that Chevron, its joint venture partner, properly faces up to its responsibilities,'' the company said."
The Burmese have long suffered from Total Denial with Total financing the military dictatorship with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but let's hope Total doesn't manage to get away with it for much longer in the UK and the Buncefield victims get total satisfaction in 2009.
References:
Erika tanker disaster - Europe's largest tanker disaster
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/17/oilspills.pollution
Price fixing
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7646408.stm
Buncefield - UK's largest peacetime explosion
Total is facing three charges
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article5268763.ece
3 years of ridiculous denial + Chevron (Texaco) and Total are arguing over responsibility
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d515930-9407-11dd-b277-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
Total Denial in Burma
http://www.totaldenialfilm.com/
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/total.php
Posted by totaloutnow at 4:57 PM
Labels: Buncefield Watford
Total Burma protest at Watford Court and Offices
http://totaloutofburma.blogspot.com/2009/01/total-burma-protest-at-watford-court.html
From London Indymedia Article:
On 23rd January the opening day of French Total Oil's Buncefield explosion criminal proceedings at Watford Magristrates Court, Burma protesters and supporters remind passers-by of Total's other disgraces and also leafleted at Total's Watford offices just down the road from the magistrates court.
Total Denial and Total Disasters
In January 2008 a French court made French Total Oil pay a large share of €200 million in damages to civil parties for Europe's largest oil tanker disaster. The Erika tanker disaster suffocated hundreds of miles of Atlantic coastline killing or injuring 300,000 sea birds. The court said Total, the world's fourth largest oil group, had failed to take into account the age of the ship and deficiencies in its maintenance. This carelessness had a "causal role in the sinking and, as such, provoked the accident", the judge said.
In October 2008 Total Oil was found guilty of price fixing. The European Commission fined nine firms that had been fixing the price of paraffin between 1992 and 2005. French Total Oil was fined 128.1million euros (the 2nd largest fine of the firms involved).
In December 2008 Total Oil faced criminal charges over Buncefield, Europe's largest peacetime blaze and the UK's largest peacetime explosion. Total is facing three charges — failing to ensure the health, safety and welfare of its employees; failing to protect persons not in their employment; and causing pollution to ground water in the vicinity of the plant. In October Total finally gave up 3 years of ridiculous denial that they were only liable for damages within 451m of the explosion, putting residents through years of "unnecessary struggle". Ironically Total's partner in Buncefield is Chevron (known as Texaco in UK), the same partner as in Total's Burma Yadana gas pipeline. Chevron (Texaco) and Total are arguing over responsibility for Buncefield : "Chevron, which owns 40 per cent of Hertfordshire Oil Storage Ltd. claims that Total alone should be responsible for the damage claims, on the grounds that the French company controlled Buncefield's employees and day-to-day operating procedures. "Total proposes that the focal point of the current litigation should be to ensure that Chevron, its joint venture partner, properly faces up to its responsibilities,'' the company said."
The Burmese have long suffered from Total Denial with Total financing the military dictatorship with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but let's hope Total doesn't manage to get away with it for much longer in the UK and the Buncefield victims get total satisfaction in 2009.
References:
Erika tanker disaster - Europe's largest tanker disaster
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/17/oilspills.pollution
Price fixing
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7646408.stm
Buncefield - UK's largest peacetime explosion
Total is facing three charges
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article5268763.ece
3 years of ridiculous denial + Chevron (Texaco) and Total are arguing over responsibility
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d515930-9407-11dd-b277-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
Total Denial in Burma
http://www.totaldenialfilm.com/
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/total.php
Posted by totaloutnow at 4:57 PM
Labels: Buncefield Watford
ေကာင္းကင္စိတ္နဲ႔ ေျမလိုက်င့္တဲ့ ဧည့္သည္ႀကီး-U TIN MOE
From: "moehninaye08"
ေနျခဴး
ဇန္န၀ါရီ ၂၃၊ ၂၀၀၉
ဆရာႀကီးက အမတို႕သိပ္ခ်စ္ရတဲ႕အေဖပါ။ ဒီလိုဘဲ။ က်ေနာ္႕ရဲ႕အေဖဆိုလည္း မမွားပါဘူး။ ဆရာႀကီးဆုံးသြားလို႕ အမတို႕ညီအမေတြ ေၾကကြဲထိခိုက္ၾကရသလို က်ေနာ္လည္း ဘယ္ေလာက္ေၾကကြဲထိခိုက္ရသလဲဆိုတာ ခုက်ေနာ္ပို႕လိုက္တဲ႕စာအုပ္ကို စ … ဆုံး ဖတ္ၾကည္႕ရင္ ေတြ႕ရပါလိမ္႕မယ္။
အမွာစာ
အေဖ ကဗ်ာဆရာဦးတင္မိုး ဆုံးၿပီး လအနည္းၾကာတဲ႔ တေန႔မွာ ကိုယ္႔လက္ထဲကို စာအုပ္ေလး တအုပ္ ေရာက္လာပါတယ္။ အေဖ႔ သားအရင္းတေယာက္လို ခ်စ္ခင္တဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းသားေလး တေယာက္ရဲ႔ အေဖ႔အေၾကာင္းေရးထားတဲ႔ စာမူပါ။ မလြတ္လပ္တဲ႔ ေနရာ၊ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ထဲကေန ႏွလုံးေသြးနဲ႔ ေရးလိုက္တဲ႔ စာမူေလးပါ။
အေဖ႔အေၾကာင္းကို လူေတြ သူတို႔ျမင္တဲ႔ေထာင္႔ကေန အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးေရးၾကတာ ဖတ္ဖူး မွတ္ဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ႔ အမွန္တရားအတြက္ အေဖ မတရားအဖမ္းဆီးခံရစဥ္ အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ထဲမွာ ေနခဲ႔ရတဲ႔ အခ်ိန္ေတြကိုေတာ႔ မသိခဲ႔ရပါဘူး။ လြတ္လပ္မွဳကို ျမတ္ႏိုးလြန္းတဲ႔ အေဖ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ထဲမွာ ဘယ္လိုမ်ား ေနထိုင္ခဲ႔သလဲ ကိုယ္ေတြးၾကည္႔မိဖူးတယ္။
အခု ေဖာ္ျပမဲ႔ ဒီစာေလးဟာ အဲဒီကြက္လပ္ေလးကို ျဖည္႔လိုက္တာပါပဲ။ ဒီစာထဲမွာ အက်ဥ္းစံေတြ ျဖစ္တဲ႔၊ အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ကို မရွိခိုးႏိုင္ၾကတဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းသားေလးတေယာက္နဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းဆရာ ကဗ်ာဆရာတေယာက္ရဲ႔ မျမင္ရတဲ႔ သံေယာဇဥ္ေတြကို ေတြ႔ရမွာပါ။ အက်ဥ္းက်သူေတြရဲ႔ ရင္ဆိုင္ ရုန္းကန္ေနရတဲ႔ ဘဝေတြကို နားလည္ခံစားလို႔ရမယ္၊ သူတို႔ရဲ႔ ေမွ်ာ္လင္႔ခ်က္၊ ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္၊ ခံစားခ်က္ေတြကို ဖတ္ရင္း စာနာနားလည္ႏိုင္ေစဖို႔ ေဖာ္ျပလိုက္ပါတယ္။
စာမူကို အပိုင္းခြဲၿပီး တင္သြားပါမယ္။ ဖတ္ၾကည္႔ၾကပါအုံးရွင္။
မိုးခ်ိဳသင္း
စာေရးသူရဲ႔ မိတ္ဆက္စာ
အမတို႔ခင္ဗ်ား
လူတစ္ေယာက္ ဆုံးပါးသြားတဲ႕အခါ သူ႕ကို ခ်စ္ခင္တန္ဖိုးထား ေလးစားတဲ႕သူေတြက လူကိုယ္တိုင္ စ်ာပနအခမ္းအနားကို တက္ေရာက္ၾကတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းတစ္ခုခုေၾကာင္႕ မတက္ေရာက္ႏိုင္ၾကရင္ ဝမ္းနည္းေၾကာင္းသဝဏ္လႊာ ၊ လြမ္းသူ႕ပန္းေခြ ပန္းစည္းေတြပို႕ၿပီး မိသားစုနဲ႕အတူထပ္တူ ေၾကကြဲဝမ္းနည္းရေၾကာင္း သူတို႕ရဲ႕စာနာမွဳေတြကို ျပသေလ႕ရွိၾကတယ္။ ဒါဟာယဥ္ေက်းတဲ႕သူေတြရဲ႕ ဓေလ႕ထုံးတမ္းအစဥ္အလာတစ္ခုပါဘဲ။ က်ေနာ္က လူကိုယ္တိုင္လည္းတက္လို႕မရ ပန္းေခြပန္းစည္း သဝဏ္လႊာလည္း ပို႕လို႕ မရ ဆိုေတာ႕ က်ေနာ္က မယဥ္ေက်းတဲ႕သူမ်ားျဖစ္ေနမလားပဲ။
ဆရာႀကီးက အမတို႕သိပ္ခ်စ္ရတဲ႕အေဖပါ။ ဒီလိုဘဲ။ က်ေနာ္႕ရဲ႕အေဖဆိုလည္း မမွားပါဘူး။ ဆရာႀကီးဆုံးသြားလို႕ အမတို႕ညီအမေတြ ေၾကကြဲထိခိုက္ၾကရသလို က်ေနာ္လည္း ဘယ္ေလာက္ေၾကကြဲထိခိုက္ရသလဲဆိုတာ ခုက်ေနာ္ပို႕လိုက္တဲ႕စာအုပ္ကို စ … ဆုံး ဖတ္ၾကည္႕ရင္ ေတြ႕ရပါလိမ္႕မယ္။
တိုင္းသိျပည္သိဆရာႀကီးရဲ႕ အမ်ားသိၿပီးသားအေၾကာင္းေတြကို ထည္႕မေရးေတာ႕ဘဲ တကယ္ျဖစ္ခဲ႕ၿပီး လူသိပ္မသိတဲ႕ အေၾကာင္းေတြကိုပဲ ေရးထားတာပါ။ အထူးသျဖင္႕ ဘာမွမဟုတ္တဲ႕ ခပ္ရိုင္းရိုင္း ေကာင္ေလးတစ္ေယာက္ကို ယဥ္ေက်းတဲ႕ လူသားတစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ သူ ဘယ္လို ထုဆစ္ခဲ႕တယ္ ဆိုတာ လူသိရွင္ၾကားသိေစခ်င္တာပါ။
လူသူမျမင္ႏိုင္တဲ႕ေနရာမ်ိဳးေတြမွာေတာင္ ဆရာႀကီးဟာ အရိုးခံသက္သက္ ျပဳမူေနထိိုင္ခဲ႕တာေတြ၊ ဟန္ေဆာင္မွဳကင္းၿပီး မာန္မာန မရွိတာေတြ၊ ျဖဴစင္ရိုးသားၿပီး စာနာတရား ႀကီးမားတာေတြ ကဗ်ာ၊ စာေပနဲ႕ ပညာကို ခ်စ္မက္ တန္ဖိုးထားတာေတြ သိေစခ်င္လို႕၊ အထူးသျဖင္႕ က်ေနာ္႕လို အရိုင္းကို အယဥ္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ လုပ္ႏိုင္စြမ္းတဲ႕ ေမတၲာတရား ႀကီးမားတာကို အမတို႕ သိေစခ်င္လို႕ ''ေကာင္းကင္စိတ္နဲ႕ ေျမလိုက်င့္တဲ့ ဧည့္သည္ႀကီး'' ျဖစ္လာရတာပါပဲ။
အေရးႀကီးဆုံးကေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီးရဲ႕ အရိုးျပာအိုး ျမန္မာျပည္ကို မုခ် ျပန္ေရာက္ရမယ္လို႕ လူသိရွင္ၾကား ဟစ္ေႄကြးလိုက္တာပါပဲ။
အမတို႔ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းပါေစ..
ေနျခဴး
Tue, Feb 6 , 2007
10:05 PM
ေကာင္းကင္စိတ္နဲ႔ ေျမလိုက်င့္တဲ့ ဧည့္သည္ႀကီး
ေနျခဴး
ဇန္န၀ါရီ ၂၃၊ ၂၀၀၉
၂ဝဝ၇၊ ဇန္နဝါရီ ၂၂ ၊ ညေန ၄ နာရီ၊ အေမရိကန္၊ ေလာ့အိန္ဂ်လိစ္မွာ ဆရာႀကီးဆံုးၿပီတဲ့။ က်င္စက္နဲ႔ တို႔ခံလိုက္ရသလို တကိုယ္လံုး ေတာင့္ေတာင့္ႀကီးျဖစ္သြားရတဲ့အထိ။ ကိုယ့္နားေတာင္ ကိုယ္မယံုခ်င္ဘူး။ "မဟုတ္ပါေစနဲ႔ … မဟုတ္ပါေစနဲ႔ …" လို႔ တကုိယ္တည္း နတ္ပူးသလို ေရ႐ြတ္ေနမိတယ္။ အျမင္၊ အၾကားအာ႐ံုေတြ ဆြံ႕အသြားသလို ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္တခုလံုး လင္းလိုက္ ေမွာင္လိုက္နဲ႔။ ေဆာင္း ေခါင္ေခါင္ႀကီး မိုးၿခိမ္းသံေတြ တဂ်ဳန္းဂ်ဳန္း၊ တဂ်ိမ္းဂ်ိမ္း။ ဘုရား ... ဘုရား ... အိပ္မက္ မဟုတ္ဘူးပဲ။ တကယ္ ဆရာႀကီး ဆံုးၿပီတဲ့..။
တမာနံ႕သင္းသင္း၊ ေနျပင္းျပင္း အညာေဒသမွာ ေမြးဖြားခဲ့တဲ့ အညာသားစစ္စစ္ႀကီး ဦးဘဂ်မ္း
ျမန္မာ့ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ေက်းလက္စ႐ိုက္ကို ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ကာကာ ခ်စ္ျမတ္ႏိုးတဲ့ မ်ိဳးခ်စ္ကဗ်ာစာဆိုႀကီး တင္မိုး
'ဖန္မီးအိမ္' 'ဧည့္သည္ႀကီး' ကဗ်ာေတြနဲ႔ ကဗ်ာတေခတ္ ေမာ္ကြန္းထိုးခဲ့တဲ့ ကဗ်ာသူရဲေကာင္းႀကီး
ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးနဲ႔ လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ကို ခ်စ္ျမတ္ႏိုးလြန္းလို႔ ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းက်ခံရတဲ့ ျပည္သူ႕ဘက္ေတာ္သားႀကီး
အမ်ားက ''သခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မိုး''လို႔ မွည့္ေခၚရေလာက္ေအာင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးစိတ္ ျပင္းျပလြန္းတဲ့ တိုင္းခ်စ္ျပည္ခ်စ္ ဆရာႀကီး …
ခုေတာ့ သူသိပ္ခ်စ္တဲ့ သူ႕ေမြးရပ္တုိင္းျပည္မွာ ေခါင္းခ်ခြင့္ မရ႐ွာတာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ေၾကကြဲ ထိခိုက္ဖို႔ ေကာင္းလိုက္သလဲလို႔ …
သူ႕ကို က်ေနာ္ စေတြ႕ခဲ့တာ … ဟိုး လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၅ ႏွစ္ ေလာက္က ခုလို ႏွစ္တႏွစ္ရဲ႕ ႏွစ္ဦးကာလ ႏွင္းေတြေဝေနတဲ့ မနက္ခင္းေလး။ အင္းစိန္ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ႀကီးရဲ႕ အမွတ္ ၁ အိပ္ေဆာင္မွာပါ။
က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္က အမႈတြဲ၊ အေပၚ (၁ - ခ) မွာ အတူတူေန ေနရတဲ့အခ်ိန္။ ၁၉၉၁၊ ဇြန္လ ထဲက ႐ံုးထြက္ ႐ံုးျပန္နဲ႔ ဒီအေဆာင္မွာ ေန ေနရတာ။ ၁၉၉၂ ဇန္နဝါရီ လကုန္ပိုင္းေလာက္ တညေနခင္းမွာ ႐ံုးျပန္တစ္ေယာက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဆီေရာက္လာၿပီး ''ကဗ်ာဆရာတင္မိုး'' ဆိုတာ ဒီေန႔ အခ်ဳပ္သစ္နဲ႔ ပါလာတယ္လို႔ သတင္းလာေပးတယ္။
က်ေနာ္က ''ကဗ်ာဆရာတင္မိုး''ဆိုတာကို မသိဘူး။ မသိဆို ၾကားေတာင္ မၾကား ဖူးဘူး။ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္က လူကိုသာ မသိတာ။ သူ႕နာမည္ ၾကားဖူးတယ္။ ထင္႐ွားတဲ့ ကဗ်ာဆရာႀကီးဆိုတာ သိေနတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔က အရင္ေရာက္ႏွင့္ေနတဲ့ လူေဟာင္းေတြဆိုေတာ့ လိုအပ္တာေတြကူညီဖို႔ ႏွစ္ေယာက္သား တိုင္ပင္ျဖစ္ၾကတယ္။
သူက ဒီေန႔မွ စေရာက္တာဆိုေတာ့ ပံုစံခန္းဝင္ရဦးမယ္။ ပံုစံခန္းဆိုတာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ေနတဲ့ အခန္းရဲ႕ ေအာက္တည့္တည့္ အခန္းနံပါတ္ (၁-က)။ ေရာက္လာခဲ့သူမွန္သမွ် ဒီအခန္းကိုဝင္ၾကရတာ ထံုးစံပဲ။
ပံုစံခန္း ဆိုတဲ့အတိုင္း ေရာက္လာတဲ့အခ်ဳပ္သစ္ေတြကို သံမံတလင္းမွာ ဖင္ခ်ထိုင္ခိုင္းထားၿပီး ပံုစံျပ တစ္ေယာက္က ေ႐ွ႕မွာ ပံုစံျပမယ္။ ''စည္းကမ္းထိန္း'' ဆိုတဲ့သူေတြက တုတ္ေတြ၊ သားေရပတ္ေတြကိုင္ထားၿပီး ေတြ႕ကရာလူကို ေလွ်ာက္႐ိုက္မယ္။ "ပံုစံ" လို႔ ေအာ္လိုက္ရင္ လက္မကို လက္ဖဝါးထဲ ထည့္ဆုတ္ၿပီး တင္ပလႅင္ခ်ိတ္ ထိုင္ထားတဲ့ ဒူးႏွစ္ဖက္ေပၚ တင္တား၊ ခါးဆန္႔ၿပီး ေခါင္းငံု႔ထားရတယ္။ ''ေအးေစ'' လို႔ ေအာ္မွ ေခါင္းေမာ့ရတယ္။ ''ပံုစံရပ္''နဲ႔ ''အေရးေပၚပံုစံ''ဆိုတာ ႐ွိေသးတယ္။ ကိုလိုနီစ႐ိုက္နဲ႔ အာဏာ႐ွင္ဝါဒ သားစပ္က်ထားတဲ့ "ေမာ္ဖူးေစ" ပံုစံ တခုပါပဲ။
ပံုစံ ျပေနတုန္း အေယာင္ေယာင္အမွားမွားျဖစ္တဲ့သူကို စည္းကမ္းထိန္းေတြက တအံုးအံုး၊ တဒိုင္းဒိုင္းနဲ႔ ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ ကန္ေက်ာက္ၾကေတာ့တာပဲ။ ပံုစံခန္း ဆိုတာ ငရဲခန္း အေသးစားေလးဆိုရင္ မမွားဘူး။ အခ်ဳပ္သစ္နဲ႔ ေရာက္လာသူမွန္သမွ် ဒီအခန္းထဲကို ဝင္ရတယ္။ ၂ ရက္ေလာက္ေနၿပီးမွ တျခားအခန္းကို ခြဲပို႔တယ္။
က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္လည္း ဒီအခန္းမွာ ၂ ရက္ေလာက္ေနၿပီးမွ အခုေနတဲ့ ( အခန္း ၁-ခ ) ကို ေရာက္ေနၾကရတာ။
ညေနဖက္ သူ ေရာက္တယ္ၾကားၿပီး ေနာက္တေန႔မနက္ တန္း ဖြင့္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္တို႔ ပံုစံ ခန္းသြားၿပီး သူ႕ကို႐ွာၾကတယ္။ အခုမွ ေရာက္တာဆိုေတာ့ သူမွာ ဘာမွ ပါမွာ မဟုတ္ဘူးဆိုတာ အေတြ႕အႀကံဳအရ သိႏွင့္ၿပီးသား။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သြားတိုက္တံအသစ္ တစ္ေခ်ာင္း႐ွာၿပီး သြားတိုက္ေဆးပါ ယူသြားၾကတယ္။ သူ႔ကို လူမျမင္ဖူးေတာ့ ''ဦးတင္မိုး'' ဘယ္သူလဲဆိုတာ လိုက္ေမးၾကရတာ။ အခန္းဝရပ္ေနတဲ့ လူ တစ္ေယာက္က လက္ၫႇိဳးထိုးျပလို႔ ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ - အသက္ႀကီးႀကီး ဝဝဖိုင့္ဖိုင့္ အဖိုးႀကီးတစ္ေယာက္ကို ေတြ႕လိုက္ရတယ္။ ေခါင္းရင္းဘက္ျပတင္းေပါက္ သံတိုင္ေတြကိုကိုင္ၿပီး အျပင္ကို ေငးၾကည့္ေနတယ္။
က်ေနာ္တို႔ႏွစ္ေယာက္ သူ႕ဆီသြားၿပီး
''အဘက ဦးတင္မိုးလား''
လို႔ ေမးလိုက္ေတာ့ သူက ေက်ာခိုင္းလ်က္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဘက္ လွည့္ၿပီး
''ဟုတ္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တင္မိုးပါ''
လို႔ ျပန္ေျဖတယ္။
မ်က္လံုးကဝိုင္းဝိုင္း၊ ပါးက ေဖာင္းေဖာင္းႀကီးနဲ႔ အံ့ၾသတဲ့ အမူအရာနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ကို တစ္လွည့္စီ ၾကည့္ေနတယ္။
က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြပါ။ နာမည္ ဘယ္သူ ဘယ္ဝါပါ ဆိုၿပီး က်ေနာ္တို႔အေၾကာင္း အက်ဥ္းခ်ဳံး မိတ္ဆက္လိုက္ေတာ့ သူ႕မ်က္ႏွာဝင္းသြားၿပီး ဖက္လွဲတကင္း ျပန္ႏႈတ္ဆက္ပါတယ္။ သူ႕ျဖစ္စဥ္အေၾကာင္းလည္း အက်ဥ္းခ်ဳံး ေျပာျပပါတယ္။
က်ေနာ္တို႔က
"အဘ … မ်က္ႏွာမသစ္ရေသးဘူး မဟုတ္လား။ လာ..ေရကန္သြားမယ္"
ဆိုၿပီး ေခၚသြားပါတယ္။ ေရကန္ေရာက္ေတာ့ သြားတိုက္တံေပၚ သြားတိုက္ေဆးၫႇစ္ထည့္ၿပီး သူ႔ကိုေပးလိုက္ေတာ့ သူက သြားတိုက္တံေပၚက သြားတိုက္ေဆးကို လက္ၫႇိဳးေလးနဲ႔ေကာ္ၿပီး သြားတိုက္တံကို ျပန္ေပးတယ္။
က်ေနာ္က
''အဘ ႐ြံတတ္လို႔လား။ ဒါ သြားတိုက္တံအသစ္ပါ …"
လို႔ ေျပာလိုက္ေတာ့ သူက
''ဟာ … မဟုတ္ဘူး။ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ကိုယ္ မ႐ြံတတ္ပါဘူး။ သြားတိုက္တံနဲ႔ တိုက္လို႔ မရလို႔ပါ''
လို႔ ပ်ာပ်ာသလဲ ျပန္ေျဖၿပီး သူ႕ပါးစပ္ကို ''ဟ'' ျပပါတယ္။ ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ ပါးစပ္ကေဟာင္းေလာင္းႀကီး၊ သြားေတြ တေခ်ာင္းမွ မ႐ွိဘူး။ ဟုတ္တာေပါ့။ သြားဖံုးခ်ည္း သက္သက္ကို သြားတိုက္တံနဲ႔ တိုက္လို႔ ဘယ္ရပါ့မလဲ။
က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္ တစ္ေယာက္ မ်က္ႏွာ တစ္ေယာက္ၾကည့္ၿပီး ၿပံဳးစိစိေလးျဖစ္သြားေတာ့ သူက အားရပါးရ ရယ္ေမာလိုက္ပါေတာ့တယ္။
အဲဒါ သူနဲ႔က်ေနာ္ ပထမဆံုး စေတြ႔ေတြ႔ခ်င္း အမွတ္ရစရာ ေလးပါ။
၁၉၉၂ ႏွစ္ဦးပိုင္း ႏွင္းေတြေဝေနတဲ့ ေဆာင္းနံနက္ခင္းေလးက အစျပဳလို႔ ေအးျမတဲ့ ေႏြးေထြးတဲ့ ေမတၱာရိပ္ေတြ က်ေနာ့္ႏွလံုးသားကို သိုင္းၿခံဳ ရစ္ပတ္ေတာ့မယ္ဆုိတာ က်ေနာ္မသိခဲ့ဘူးေလ။
သူ ပံုစံခန္းက ထြက္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ေနတဲ့ အေပၚ (၁-ခ) မွာ လာေနရတယ္။ က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ ေဘးခ်င္းယွဥ္ အိပ္ရတာပါ။ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္က ကပ္လ်က္အခန္းက အေပၚ (၁-က) မွာ။
အဲဒီတုန္းက က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္က အသက္ ၁၉ ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္၊ ၉ တန္း ေက်ာင္းသားေလးေတြ၊ သူက ေက်ာင္းဆရာ၊ ကဗ်ာဆရာ ၊ ပညာနဲ႔ ေမြ႕ေလ်ာ္သူဆိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၂ ေယာက္ကို ၉ တန္း ျပန္ေျဖၿပီး ဘြဲ႕ရေအာင္ယူဖို႔ တိုက္တြန္းတယ္။ ကတိလည္း ေတာင္းတယ္။ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္က ျပန္ေျဖဖို႔ ကတိေပးလိုက္ေပမဲ့ က်ေနာ္က မေပးဘူး။ မေသခ်ာဘဲနဲ႔ ဘာ ကတိမွ မေပးခ်င္ဘူး လို႔ ျပန္ေျပာလိုက္ေတာ့ သူ က်ေနာ့္ကို စိုက္ၾကည့္ေနတယ္။ ဘာမွေတာ့ မေျပာဘူး။ ဒါေပမဲ့ သူ႕မ်က္ႏွာမွာ ခပ္မႈိင္းမႈိင္း အရိပ္ေလးေတြ ေတြ႕လိုက္ရတယ္။
အဲဒီတုန္းက က်ေနာ္က ခပ္ထန္ထန္၊ ခပ္႐ိုင္း႐ိုင္း။ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ေတာေတာင္ေတြထဲ ၂ ႏွစ္ခြဲေလာက္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တိုက္ခိုက္ေနရာကေန၊ ေလာေလာလတ္လတ္ အခ်ဳပ္က်ေနတဲ့ ကာလ။ ေျပာရရင္ အ႐ွင္လတ္လတ္ ေလွာင္ခ်ိဳင့္ထဲ ထည့္ပိတ္ခံထားရလို႔ ႐ွဴး႐ွဴး႐ွား႐ွားျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ေတာ႐ိုင္းတိရိစၧာန္ တေကာင္လိုမ်ိဳး။ အစြယ္ တျပျပ၊ လက္သည္း တျပင္ျပင္နဲ႔။ ပိုဆိုးတာက ဘာ ဘာသာေရးမွ မ႐ွိတာ။ အ႐ိုင္းတံုးႀကီး။ အေဖက ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳး၊ အေမက ခရစ္ယာန္ ကရင္လူမ်ိဳးဆိုေတာ့ ဘာသာက ဖက္စပ္၊ လူမ်ိဳးက ကျပား။ ၾသကာသ မသိ၊ သခင္ေယ႐ႈ မသိ၊ ကိုယ္ထင္ရာ ကိုယ္ စိုင္းေနတဲ့ စိတ္အခံမ်ိဳး။
အဲဒီလို ဘာသာမဲ့၊ ေတာျပန္၊ အခ်ဳပ္က်၊ ႐ိုင္းခ်င္တိုင္း ႐ိုင္းေနတဲ့ က်ေနာ့္ကို သူက က်ေနာ္ႀကံဳရေလ့႐ွိတဲ့ တျခားလူႀကီးေတြလိုမ်ိဳး ေ႐ွာင္ဖယ္ဖယ္ ေနတာမ်ိဳး မလုပ္ဘူး။ ေဖးေဖးမမနဲ႔ တရင္းတႏွီး ဆက္ဆံတယ္။ က်ေနာ့္ေနာက္ခံ ဘဝဇာတ္ေၾကာင္းကို ခေရေစ့တြင္းက် ေမးတယ္။ အေဖအေၾကာင္း၊ အေမအေၾကာင္း၊ မိသားစုေနထိုင္မႈပံုေတြ အေၾကာင္း၊ က်ေနာ္တက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေက်ာင္းက အစ၊ ေတာထဲ ေနခဲ့ရတဲ့ တိုက္ပြဲေတြအဆံုး အကုန္ေမးတယ္။ တိုက္ဆိုင္ခ်င္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ရဲ႕အတန္းေဖာ္ ခိုင္ဝတ္မႈန္ဆိုတာ သူ႕ရဲ႕ ရဲေဘာ္ႀကီး ဦးတင္ေမာင္ဝင္းရဲ႕ သမီး၊ သူ႕တပည့္မ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုေလွ်ာက္ေမးေနေတာ့ က်ေနာ္က ေျပာျပရတယ္။
အံ့ၾသဖို႔ေကာင္းတာက က်ေနာ္ေျပာသမွ်ကို သူက ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာကို အာ႐ံုစိုက္ၿပီး နားေထာင္တာ။ တစ္ခါတစ္ခါေတာ့ သူေမးတာကို က်ေနာ္က ''ဘု'' ျပန္ေတာမိတာလည္း ႐ွိတယ္။ အဲဒီလုိအခါမ်ိဳးမွာ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ စိတ္ဆိုးဟန္ မျပဘူး။
''ေအး … ေအး … ခု မေျပာခ်င္လည္း ေန၊ ေနာက္မွ ေျပာေပါ့။ လာ … အခု လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ၾကရေအာင္''
ဆိုၿပီး က်ေနာ္႔လက္ကို ဆြဲၿပီး ထ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ေတာ့တာပဲ။
ဒီအေၾကာင္း အခု ျပန္ေတြးေတာ့ သူ႕မ်က္ႏွာ ျမင္ေယာင္ၿပီး ရင္ထဲ ဆစ္ကနဲ နာက်င္မိတာ အမွန္ပဲ။
အဲဒီလို တရင္းတႏွီးေနၾကရင္း က်ေနာ္ သူ႔ကို ''အဘ'' လို႔ ေခၚရာကေန ''ဆရာႀကီး''လို႔ ေျပာင္းေခၚမိတယ္။ ဘယ္လို ဘယ္လို အဲဒီလို ေခၚမိတယ္မသိဘူး။ စာသင္တဲ့ ဆရာ၊ အသက္ႀကီးလို႔ ေခၚမိတာလား၊ ကဗ်ာဆရာႀကီးမို႔လို႔ ေခၚမိတာလားလည္း မသိဘူး။ ေနာက္ပိုင္း က်ေနာ္ေရာ၊ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္ေရာ ဆရာႀကီးလို႔ ေခၚျဖစ္ၾကေတာ့တယ္။
သူက ပထမ သူ႕ကိုယ္သူ 'က်ေနာ္' လို႔ ေျပာတယ္။ ေနာက္ေတာ့ 'ကိုယ္' 'ေမာင္ရင္' လို႔ ေျပာရာကေန 'မင္း' 'ငါ' ဆိုၿပီး တရင္းတႏွီး ျဖစ္လာတယ္။ တခါတေလ
"ေဟ့ေကာင္၊ ေခြးေကာင္ ... ေခြးမသား ... လာ ..."
ဆိုၿပီး အာလုတ္သံႀကီးနဲ႔ တလံုးတခဲ ေျပာၿပီး က်ေနာ္ေခါင္းကို သူ႔ရင္ဘတ္မွာ ဖိထားတာမ်ိဳး လုပ္တတ္တယ္။ ပထမေတာ့ အဲဒီလိုေခၚတာကို က်ေနာ္မႀကိဳက္ဘူး။ စိတ္ဆိုးမိတယ္။
"ဆရာႀကီး က်ေနာ့္ကို ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ ေခြးေကာင္လို႔ ေခၚတာလဲ"
လို႔ ျပန္ေမးေတာ့ သူ စိတ္မေကာင္း ျဖစ္သြားပံုရတယ္။
''မဟုတ္ပါဘူးကြာ၊ ငါ ဘယ္သူ႔ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ငယ္ငယ္ 'မင္း' 'ငါ' ဆိုတာမ်ိဳးေတာင္ မသံုးပါဘူး။ မင္းကိုေတာ့ ငါ ခ်စ္လို႔ ဒီလို ရင္းရင္းႏွီးႏွီး ေျပာတာပါ။ စိတ္မဆိုးပါနဲ႔ကြာ။ ဆရာႀကီး သခင္ကိုယ္ေတာ္မႈိင္းဆိုရင္လည္း သခင္ႏုတို႔၊ သခင္ေအာင္ဆန္းတို႔ကို အဲဒီလို ရင္းရင္းႏီွးႏွီး ေျပာဆိုတာပဲ''
လို႔ ျပန္ေျပာတယ္။
အဲဒီက စလို႔ သူနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္ၾကား ဘယ္အခါ ေတြ႕ေတြ႕
''ေဟ့ေကာင္ ... ေခြးေကာင္ ... ေခြးမသား ... လာ''
ဆိုၿပီး က်ေနာ့္ ေခါင္းကို အတင္းဆြဲ သူ႕ရင္ဘက္နဲ႔ အတင္း ဖိကပ္ထားေတာ့တာပဲ။ အဲဒီ သူ က်ေနာ္႔ကို ႏႈတ္ဆက္ေနက် ပံုရိပ္ေလး တခုအျဖစ္ က်ေနာ့္ရင္ထဲ စြဲက်န္ေနမိတယ္။
အဲဒီလို သူနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၄ လေလာက္ အတူေနရာကေန တေန႔ သူ႕ကို စစ္ခံု႐ံုးကေနေခၚၿပီး အမိန္႔ခ်မွတ္လိုက္တယ္။ ၄ ႏွစ္ တဲ့။
စစ္ခံု႐ံုး အမိန္႔ခ်ၿပီးတာနဲ႔ "အက်"ေဆာင္ ၅ ကို တန္း ပို႔လိုက္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ခ်င္း မေတြ႕ၾကရေတာ့ဘူး။ ေနာင္ သူနဲ႔ အက်ေဆာင္မွာ ျပန္ေတြ႕ေတာ့မွ စစ္ခံု႐ံုးအေတြ႕အႀကံဳကို ဖလွယ္ရင္း သူ႕ကို ဘယ္လို စီရင္ခ်က္ စြဲတယ္ဆိုတာ သူ ျပန္ေျပာလို႔သိရတယ္။
စစ္ခံု႐ံုးက သူ႕ကဗ်ာေလး ဖတ္ျပၿပီး စီရင္ခ်က္ခ်လိုက္တာ … တဲ့။
ခုံ႐ံုး တရားသူႀကီးက သူ႔ ကဗ်ာကို ဖတ္ေတာ့ ယူနီေဖာင္းအျပည့္အစံုနဲ႔တဲ့။
''လမ္းေဘး ေသြးအိုင္ထဲ လဲေနတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေလး ... သား ျပန္အလာကို ေမွ်ာ္ေနတဲ့ အေမ တေယာက္ရဲ႕ အျဖစ္ ...'' စတဲ့ ကဗ်ာေလးပါ။
''ဒီ တခုနဲ႔တင္ တန္ သြားၿပီကြာ'' တဲ့။
ဆရာႀကီး အမိန္႔ခ်ခံရၿပီး တလေလာက္ ထပ္ေနၿပီးေတာ့ သက္ဝင္းေအာင္ အခ်ဳပ္ဘဝကေန လြတ္ေျမာက္ သြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ထပ္ တစ္လေလာက္ ထပ္ေနၿပီးေတာ့ က်ေနာ့္ကို စစ္ခံု႐ံုးက ၇ ႏွစ္ အမိန္႔ခ်လိုက္တယ္။ ဒီေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီး ႐ွိတဲ့ ၅ ေဆာင္ကို ေရာက္ၿပီး သူနဲ႔ ျပန္ဆံုရတယ္။
က်ေနာ့္ကို စစ္ခုံ႐ံုး အမိန္႔ခ်လုိက္တာ မွတ္မွတ္ရရ ၁၉၉၂၊ ဇူလိုင္ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႔။
ထံုးစံအတိုင္း အက်ေဆာင္ေရာက္ေတာ့ အခ်ဳပ္ေဆာင္တုန္းကလိုပဲ ပံုစံခန္းဆိုတာ ဝင္ရေသးတယ္။ က်ေနာ္ အမိန္႔က်ၿပီး ၅ ေဆာင္ ေရာက္တယ္ ဆိုတာ ညတြင္းခ်င္း ဆရာႀကီး သိတယ္။ ေနာက္တစ္ေန႔ တန္းဖြင့္ဖြင့္ခ်င္း သူ က်ေနာ့္ဆီ ေရာက္လာတယ္။
မ်က္ႏွာသုတ္ပုဝါ ပုခံုးေပၚ တင္၊ ဆပ္ျပာခြက္၊ သြားတိုက္ေဆး၊ သြားတိုက္တံ လက္ထဲ ကိုင္လို႔။ က်ေနာ့္ဆီ လာေတြ႕မယ္ဆိုတာ သိေနရက္နဲ႔ ျဗဳန္းကနဲ အျဖဴေရာင္ ထက္ေအာက္ 'ေထာင္ဝတ္စံု'နဲ႔ ေတြ႕လိုက္ရေတာ့ ရင္ထဲ တစ္မ်ိဳးႀကီး ျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ အခ်ဳပ္ေဆာင္တုန္းက အရပ္ဝတ္ အရပ္စားနဲ႔ ေတြ႕ေနၾကေလ။ ခုေတာ့ ေထာင္ဝတ္စံုႀကီးနဲ႔ ေခါင္းကလည္း ေဖြးေဖြးျဖဴလို႔။ ေတြ႕ရတာ တစ္မ်ိဳးႀကီးပဲ။
ေတြ႕ေတြ႕ခ်င္း သူကေတာ့ ထံုးစံအတိုင္း
''ေဟ့ … ေခြးေကာင္ ... လာ''
ဆိုၿပီး က်ေနာ့္ ေခါင္းကိုဆြဲၿပီး သူ႔ရင္ဘတ္နဲ႔ ထိထားတယ္။ ၿပီးမွ မ်က္ႏွာ သြားသစ္ရေအာင္လို႔ ေျပာတယ္။ က်ေနာ္က သူ႕လက္ထဲက သြားတိုက္ေဆး၊ သြားတိုက္တံကို တလွည့္၊ သူ႕ကို တလွည့္ ၾကည့္ေနေတာ့၊ သူက …
"ဘာလဲ၊ မင္း ႐ြံ႕တတ္လို႔လား။ သြားတိုက္တံက အသစ္ပါ ကြ။ သြားတိုက္ေဆးကို လက္ၫႇိဳးနဲ႔ေကာ္ၿပီး တိုက္စရာ မလိုပါဘူး။ မင္းသြားေတြက အေကာင္းေတြခ်ည္းပဲ'' တဲ့။
က်ေနာ္တို႔ အခ်ဳပ္ေဆာင္မွာ ပထမဆံုးေတြ႕ခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ ျမင္ကြင္းေလးကို အမွတ္ရလို႔ ျပန္ေျပာတာနဲ႔ တူပါရဲ႕။
က်ေနာ္လည္း စေတြ႕ၾကတုန္းက သူေျပာခဲ့တဲ့ပံုကို ျပန္ေျပာၿပီး ႏွစ္ေယာက္သား အားပါးတရ ရယ္ေမာမိၾကတယ္။ အခ်ဳပ္ေဆာင္မွာတုန္းက က်ေနာ္က သြားတိုက္ေဆး လာေပးသူ၊ ဒီအက်ေဆာင္မွာေတာ့ သူက လာေပးရတဲ့သူ။ ဟိုမွာတုန္းက သူက လူသစ္၊ က်ေနာ္က လူေဟာင္း။ ဒီက်ေတာ့ သူက လူေဟာင္း၊ က်ေနာ္က လူသစ္။ အဲဒီတုန္းက ဇန္နဝါရ နံနက္ခင္း၊ ႏွင္းေတြ ေဝလို႔။ ခုေတာ့ ဇူလိုင္ နံနက္ခင္း မိုးေတြ ႐ြာ လို႔။
ဒီလိုနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ၅ ေဆာင္မွာ အတူ ေနၾကရျပန္တယ္။ အခန္းကေတာ့ မတူဘူး။ သူက ၃၊ က်ေနာ္က ၄။ မနက္ခင္းေတြမွာ က်ေနာ္က ေတာင္ယာထဲ ဆင္း၊ သူက လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ေပါ့။ ညေနခင္းေတြဆို က်ေနာ္တို႔ႏွစ္ေယာက္ အတူတူ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ၾက၊ စကားေတြ ေျပာၾကနဲ႔။ ေန႔ခင္းေတြဆို သူက ထံုးစံ အတိုင္း ေမးခြန္းေတြ ေမး၊ က်ေနာ္က ေျဖေပါ့ေလ။ သူက စာေတြ၊ ကဗ်ာေတြအေၾကာင္း ေျပာျပတယ္။ ႀကံဳရင္ ႀကံဳသလို ကဗ်ာေလးေတြ ၫႇပ္ၿပီး ႐ြတ္ျပေသးတယ္။ ထူးဆန္းတာက သူ႐ြတ္တဲ့ကဗ်ာေတြထဲ သူ႕ ကဗ်ာတစ္ပုဒ္မွ မပါတာဘဲ။
''ဧည့္သည္ႀကီး'' ကဗ်ာအေၾကာင္းေတာ့ တခုတ္တရ ေျပာျပတယ္။ မႏၲေလးမွာ သူနဲ႔ ေမာင္စြမ္းရည္၊ ေမာင္ၾကည္ေအာင္တို႔ ကဗ်ာေတြ စုေရးၾကပံုေတြလည္း ပါတယ္။ မ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ သူ ႐ြတ္ျပတဲ့ကဗ်ာေတြဟာ ဆရာႀကီးမင္းသုဝဏ္နဲ႕ ဆရာႀကီးေဇာ္ဂ်ီ ကဗ်ာေတြပါပဲ။
သူ ေျပာျပတဲ့အထဲမွာ ဆရာႀကီးေဖေမာင္တင္အေၾကာင္း ၊ ဆရာႀကီးဒဂုန္တာရာ၊ ေဒါက္တာသန္းထြန္း၊ လူထုဦးလွ နဲ႔ အေမမာအေၾကာင္း၊ ေမာင္သာႏိုး၊ ေမာင္စြမ္းရည္၊ ေမာင္ၾကည္ေအာင္စတဲ့ သူနဲ႔ ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္ ကဗ်ာဆရာႀကီးေတြအေၾကာင္း ... အစံုပါပဲ။
ခက္တာက သူ ေျပာတဲ့ လူေတြအေၾကာင္း တေယာက္မွ က်ေနာ္ မသိတာပဲ။ နာမည္ေတာင္ ၾကားဖူးတာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ကဗ်ာဆိုတာ ဘာမွန္းလည္း မသိ။ ခံစားရေကာင္းမွန္း၊ ဖတ္ရေကာင္းမွန္းေတာင္ သိတာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ အားနာလို႔သာ နားေထာင္ေနရတာ၊ ပ်င္းလည္းပ်င္း၊ စိတ္ကလည္းညစ္ေပါ့။ ဒါကို သူ ရိပ္မိတယ္နဲ႔ တူပါတယ္။ တေန႔ က်ေနာ့္ကို ကဗ်ာနဲ႔ ပတ္သတ္ၿပီး ဘယ္လို သေဘာထားလဲ ဆိုၿပီး ေမးခြန္း ေမးလာတယ္။
က်ေနာ္ကလည္း သိတဲ့အတိုင္း ဘုဆတ္ဆတ္၊ ဂ်စ္ကန္ကန္နဲ႔ ဆိုေတာ့
''ဟာ ... ကဗ်ာဆိုတာ လူေဘာ္ေၾကာ့ေတြ၊ အလုပ္အကိုင္မ႐ွိ၊ လူပ်င္းေတြ လုပ္တဲ့ အလုပ္ပါ။ ဘာမွန္းလည္း မသိဘူး။ ခံစားလို႔လည္း မရဘူး …"
လို႔ ျပန္ေျပာလိုက္ေတာ့ သူ ခဏ ေတြသြားတယ္။ ၿပီးမွ က်ေနာ့္ပခံုးေပၚ လက္တင္ၿပီး
"အဲလို မဟုတ္ပါဘူးကြာ။ ကဗ်ာဆိုတာ အင္မတန္ သိမ္ေမြ႕ႏူးညံ့တဲ့ ပစၥည္းပါ။ လူ႔ႏွလံုးသား ႏူးညံ့ေပ်ာ့ေပ်ာင္းဖို႔ ကဗ်ာဖတ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္။ ႏွလံုးသားၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့သူေတြဟာ ေလာကကို အပ်က္ ျမင္တတ္ၾကတယ္ …"
ဆိုၿပီး ကဗ်ာနဲ႔ပတ္သတ္တဲ့ သေဘာ သဘာဝေတြ တသီတတန္းႀကီး ေျပာေနပါေတာ့တယ္။
ဥပမာေတြလည္း အမ်ားႀကီးပဲ။ က်ေနာ္ အေသးစိတ္ မမွတ္မိေတာ့ဘူး။ အဲဒီတုန္းက က်ေနာ္ ေျပာခဲ့တဲ့စကားေတြအတြက္ အခု ဆရာႀကီးကို လက္အုပ္ခ်ီေတာင္းပန္မိတယ္။
တကယ္ေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီးဟာ စိတ္ႏွလံုး ႏူးညံ့ေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္းသူပါ။ မေတာင္းပန္ခင္က ခြင့္လႊတ္ၿပီးသား ဆိုတာ က်ေနာ္ အေသအခ်ာ ယံုတယ္။ ကဗ်ာကို ႐ႈတ္႐ႈတ္ခ်ခ်ေျပာခဲ့တဲ့ က်ေနာ္၊ ခုေတာ့ ကဗ်ာကို ခံစား ဖတ္႐ႈႏိုင္႐ံုမက ကိုယ္တိုင္ ကဗ်ာဖန္တီးသူတစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရၿပီ ။ ဒီအေၾကာင္းေတြ ဆရာႀကီး သိမွသိသြားပါေလစ။
က်ေနာ့္စိတ္ကူးထဲ ေထာင္ကလြတ္လို႔ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ျပန္ဆံုရင္ ေျပာမယ့္စကားေတြ ရင္ထဲအျပည့္။ ရင္ဘတ္ႀကီးထဲ အကန္႔လိုက္ ခြဲခြဲ သိမ္းထားခဲ့ရတာေတြ။ ခုေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီး ဆံုးၿပီတဲ့။
ဆရာပြင့္ကို က်ေနာ္ တခါက ဒီလို ေျပာဖူးတယ္။
"ဆရာပြင့္ထက္ အရင္ က်ေနာ္ ေစာလြတ္ရင္ ဘာလုပ္ေပးရမလဲ" လို႔။
ဆရာပြင့္ကလည္း က်ေနာ့္ကို ဒီလို ျပန္ေမးတယ္။
''ခင္ဗ်ားထက္ က်ေနာ္ ေစာလြတ္ရင္ေကာ'' တဲ့။
ဒီေတာ့ က်ေနာ္က
"ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ထိေတြ႔ခဲ့ၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ က်ေနာ့္ႏွလံုးသားထဲ ဆိုက္ဆိုက္ၿမိဳက္ၿမိဳက္ ဝင္လာသူဟာ ဆရာပြင့္ပါပဲ လို႔။ အခု က်ေနာ္ အထဲမွာ ဘာေတြ လုပ္ေနတယ္၊ ဘယ္လို က်င့္ႀကံေနတယ္ ဆိုတာေတြ ဆရာပြင့္ အသိဆံုးပါပဲ။ က်ေနာ့္စိတ္ကူး၊ က်ေနာ့္အိပ္မက္ေတြ၊ ခံစားမႈေတြကို ေကာင္းေကာင္း သိတဲ့သူဟာလည္း ဆရာပြင့္ပါပဲ။ က်ေနာ္ ဆရာႀကီးအေပၚ ဘယ္လို သေဘာထားတယ္ ဆိုတာလည္း အသိဆံုးပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဆရာပြင့္ က်ေနာ့္ထက္ ေစာလြတ္ရင္ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ၿပီး အဲဒါေတြ ေျပာျပေပးပါ"
လို႔ ဆရာပြင့္ကို က်ေနာ္ ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာ မွာခဲ့ဖူးတယ္။
ဒါေတြသာ သိရင္ ဆရာႀကီး ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ား ဝမ္းသာပီတိ ျဖစ္ေနလိုက္မလဲ ဆိုတာ စိတ္ကူးနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္ ျမင္ေယာင္မိပါေသးေတာ့တယ္။
အခုေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီးမ႐ွိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ က်ေနာ္ သိေစခ်င္တဲ့ က်ေနာ့္ရင္ထဲက စကားေတြ သိမွ သိသြားပါ့မလား။ ဆရာႀကီး မဆံုးခင္ တႏွစ္ခြဲေလာက္ ႀကိဳ ၿပီး ဆရာပြင့္ လြတ္သြားပါရဲ႕။
ဒါေပမယ့္ သူ ေျပာမွ ေျပာျဖစ္ပါ့မလား...။ ေျပာခ်င္အံုးေတာ့ ေျပာခြင့္မွ သာရဲ႕လား။ က်ေနာ့္ ရင္ဘတ္ထဲ တဆစ္ဆစ္ ကိုက္ေနလိုက္တာ။
ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္ ၅ ေဆာင္မွာ ၅ လေလာက္ပဲ အတူေနရေသးတယ္။ ၁၉၉၂၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၇ ရက္ ညမွာ ေထာင္ဝန္ထမ္းေတြ အံုလိုက္က်င္းလိုက္ဝင္လာၿပီး က်ေနာ္အပါအဝင္ ၁၅ ေယာက္ေလာက္ကို နာမည္ေခၚ၊ ေခါင္းစြပ္ စြပ္ၿပီး သီးသန္႔ေထာင္ကို ပို႔လိုက္တယ္။ မၾကာခင္ က်င္းပေတာ့မယ့္ အမ်ိဳးသားညီလာခံနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး အထဲမွာ လႈပ္လႈပ္႐ြ႐ြျဖစ္ေနတယ္လို႔ ယူဆတယ္နဲ႔ တူပါရဲ႕။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို လူစု ခြဲလိုက္တဲ့သေဘာပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ တခါ ထပ္ခြဲရျပန္တယ္။ သူက ၅ ေဆာင္မွာပဲ က်န္ခဲ့တာ။
သီးသန္႔ေရာက္လို႔ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ေဝးရေတာ့မွ က်ေနာ္ ဆရာႀကီးကို သတိရ ရေကာင္းမွန္း သိလာတယ္။ ညေနခင္း လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့ပံုေတြ၊ က်ေနာ့္ကို ေမးခြန္းေတြ ေမးခဲ့ပံုေတြ၊ ... အစံုပါပဲ။ ဆရာႀကီးကို က်ေနာ္ လြမ္းေနၿပီေလ။
၅ ေဆာင္ကေန က်ေနာ္နဲ႔အတူ ေျပာင္းေ႐ႊ႕ခဲရတဲ့ သူေတြထဲမွာ ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းလည္း ပါတယ္။ သူက ပညာကို ခ်စ္ျမတ္ႏိုးသူ။ ေအးေအးေဆးေဆး ေနတတ္ၿပီး ကဗ်ာဖြဲ႕ဖို႔ ႀကိဳးစား အားထုတ္ေနတဲ့သူ။ သီးသန္႔မွာ ေနၾကတုန္း သူဖြဲ႕ျဖစ္တဲ့ ကဗ်ာေလးေတြ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ရင္း က်ေနာ့္ကို ႐ြတ္ျပေလ့႐ွိ တယ္။ ဘယ္လုိ သေဘာလဲ မသိပါဘူး။ အဲဒီ ကဗ်ာဆိုတာႀကီးနဲ႔ က်ေနာ့္ကို လာ လာ ပတ္သတ္ေနတာ ေျပာပါတယ္။ ကဗ်ာဆရာႀကီးရဲ႕ ကဗ်ာေဗဒ ကြန္ယက္ကေန လြတ္ၿပီ၊ ကြၽတ္ၿပီ မွတ္တယ္။ ခု ကဗ်ာဆရာ ေလးရဲ႕ေထာင္ေခ်ာက္မွာ ယက္ကန္၊ ယက္ကန္နဲ႔ လာၿငိေနျပန္ေရာ။
ဒီလိုနဲ႔ေနၾကရင္း တေန႔မွာ က်ေနာ္နဲ႔ ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္း လမး္ေလွ်ာက္ေနၾကတုန္း ေလအေဝွ႕မွာ လြင့္လာတဲ့ စာ႐ြက္တ႐ြက္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေ႐ွ႕တည့္တည့္ လာက်တယ္။ ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းက လွမ္းေကာက္ၿပီး ဖတ္ၾကည့္ကာ ဖတ္ရင္း သူ အံ့ၾသသြားပံုက ပါးစပ္ကေတာင္ အသံထြက္လာတယ္။
"ေဟ့လူ၊ ဒီမွာ ၾကည့္စမ္း။ ဆရာႀကီးရဲ႕ ကဗ်ာေလးဗ်" တဲ့။
က်ေနာ္လည္း ဆြဲယူ ဖတ္ၾကည့္ေတာ့ … အဟုတ္ပဲ ကဗ်ာေခါင္းစဥ္ အပိုင္းေတာ့ စုတ္ၿပဲေနလို႔ မပါေတာ့ဘူး။ ကဗ်ာေအာက္ေျခမွာေတာ့ 'တင္မိုး' ဆိုၿပီး ထင္ထင္႐ွား႐ွား ပါေနေသးတယ္။
'ဆရာႀကီးမႈိင္းကို ဖြဲ႕ထားတဲ့ ျပ႒ာန္းစာအုပ္မွာပါတဲ့ ကဗ်ာေလးပါ။ 'ကြမ္းအစ္ တလံုး၊ ေယာင္တထံုးနဲ႔ အစခ်ီၿပီး ... ေသာင္းျမန္ျပည္တန္ခိုး ေဒါင္းအလံ လႊင့္ထိုး' … ဆိုၿပီး အဆံုးသတ္ထားတဲ့ ကဗ်ာေလး။
ဘာေျပာေျပာ က်ေနာ္ေရာ၊ ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းပါ ဝမ္းသာသြားၾကတယ္။
"ဒါ ဆရာႀကီး က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို ပို႔လိုက္တဲ့ ေမတၱာလက္ေဆာင္ေလးပဲ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ မၾကာခင္ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ျပန္ဆုံရမယ့္သေဘာပဲ"
လုိ႔ ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းက ေျပာတယ္။
က်ေနာ္လည္း ဒီအတိုင္းခံစားရတယ္ေလ။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ဒီကဗ်ာေလးကို အလြတ္က်က္ထားၿပီး ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ျပန္ဆံုရင္ ႐ြတ္ျပရေအာင္လို႔ သေဘာတူၿပီး က်က္ထားလိုက္ၾကတယ္။
ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းကေတာ့ အထဲမွာ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ျပန္မဆံုျဖစ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ဘာေၾကာင့္ဆို အဲဒီစာ႐ြက္ရၿပီး မၾကာခင္မွာပဲ လြတ္ရက္ေစ့လို႔ သူ လြတ္ေျမာက္သြားတယ္ေလ။
သူ႔ကို လႊတ္ဖို႔ လာေခၚတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ က်ေနာ့္အခန္းေ႐ွ႕ ေျပးလာၿပီး
"ခင္ဗ်ား ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ ျပန္ဆံုရင္ ဒီကဗ်ာေလးရပံု ေျပာၿပီး အလြတ္ ႐ြတ္ျပလိုက္ဗ်ာ။ က်ေနာ့္ကိုယ္စားပါ ၂ ေခါက္ ႐ြက္ျပလိုက္''
လို႔ အမွတ္တရ လာ ေျပာသြားပါေသးတယ္။
သီးသန္႔မွာ ၈ လ ေလာက္ ေနရၿပီး က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို ေထာင္မႀကီးထဲ ျပန္ေျပာင္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။
ေထာင္မႀကီး ေရာက္လို႔ မိန္းေဂ်လ္းမွာ ထိုင္ခိုင္းထားၿပီး အေဆာင္ခြဲပို႔ဖို႔ လူစစ္ၾကတယ္။ ထံုးစံအရ ကိုယ္ ထြက္သြားတဲ့ အေဆာင္ကို ျပန္ပို႔ေလ့မ႐ွိဘူး။ က်ေနာ္က ၅ ေဆာင္က ထြက္သြားရတာဆိုေတာ့ ၃ နဲ႔ ၄ ေဆာင္ တခုခုေရာက္ရမယ္။ ျဖစ္ခ်င္ေတာ့ ဘယ္က ဘယ္လိုခြဲလိုက္တယ္မသိဘူး။ က်ေနာ္က ၅ ေဆာင္ ျပန္ေရာက္မယ့္ စာရင္းထဲပါေနတယ္။ ေနာင္မွ ျပန္သိရတာက က်ေနာ္ ထြက္သြားခဲ့တဲ့ အေဆာင္စာရင္းမွာ ၅ ေဆာင္အစား ၃ ေဆာင္လို႔ ေရးထားတယ္လို႔ဆိုတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ၃ ေဆာင္ကို မေရာက္ေတာ့ဘဲ ဆရာႀကီး ႐ွိရာ ၅ ေဆာင္ကို ဆိုက္ဆိုက္ၿမိဳက္ၿမိဳက္ ျပန္ေရာက္ပါေလေရာ။
က်ေနာ္တို႔အေဆာင္ထဲကို ဝင္တဲ့အခ်ိန္က ေန႔ခင္းႀကီး ဆိုေတာ့ က်န္တဲ့ ရဲေဘာ္ေတြက ထြက္ၿပီး ႀကိဳေနၾကတယ္။ က်ေနာ္လည္း အိပ္ယာလိပ္က တစ္ဖက္၊ က်န္တဲ့ပစၥည္းေတြက တစ္ဖက္နဲ႔ ၅ ေဆာင္ထဲ ဝင္႐ံု႐ွိ ေသးတယ္။ လူအုပ္ၾကားထဲက ဆရာႀကီး ထြက္လာၿပီး
''ေဟ့ေကာင္ ... ေခြးေကာင္ ... လာ''
ဆိုၿပီး က်ေနာ့္ေခါင္းကို ဆြဲ၊ သူ႕ရင္ဘတ္ထဲ ဖိထားေတာ့တာပဲ။
က်ေနာ္လည္း အိပ္ယာလိပ္နဲ႔ ပစၥည္းေတြ ပစ္ခ်လိုက္ၿပီး ဆရာႀကီးကို ဖက္ထားလိုက္တယ္။
တေအာင့္ေနလို႔ လူခ်င္းခြာၿပီး ဆရာႀကီးမ်က္ႏွာ ေမာ့ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ သူ႕မ်က္ဝန္းမွာ မ်က္ရည္ၾကည္ေတြ ရစ္ဝိုင္းေနတာ ေတြ႕လိုက္ရတယ္။ ႐ုတ္တရက္ က်ေနာ္ ေၾကာင္အမ္းအမ္းျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ ဟုတ္မွာပါ။ ဆရာႀကီးက ''ေဟ့ … ေခြးေကာင္ … လာ'' ဆိုၿပီး ရင္ခြင္ထဲ အတင္းဖိကပ္ထားတဲ့အခ်ိန္တိုင္း က်ေနာ္ သူ႕ကို ျပန္ဖက္ေလ့ မ႐ွိခဲ့ဘူးေလ။ သူ က်ေနာ့္ေခါင္းကို အတင္း ဖိကပ္ထားလို႔1သာ ဒီအတိုင္း ေန ေနရတာပဲ ႐ွိတယ္။ ခုမွ က်ေနာ္က ပထမဆံုးအႀကိမ္ ျပန္ ဖက္ထားလိုက္မိတာကိုး။ ဖက္ထားတာမွ တအားကို ဖက္ထားတာ။ နဲနဲလည္း ၾကာသြားတယ္ထင္ပါရဲ႕။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဆရာႀကီး မ်က္ရည္ဝဲ သြားတာျဖစ္မွာ။
ဒါနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္က
"ဆရာႀကီး … ခဏေလး။ ဒီ အိပ္ရာလိပ္ေတြ သြား ထားလိုက္ဦးမယ္။ ၿပီးရင္ ခ်က္ျခင္း ျပန္လာခဲ့မယ္။ ေျပာစရာ ႐ွိတယ္ …"
လို႔ ေျပာၿပီး ပစၥည္းေတြ သြားထားလိုက္တယ္။ ၿပီးတာနဲ႔ ခ်က္ျခင္း ျပန္လာၿပီး ဆရာႀကီးေနတဲ့ ၃ ခန္းမွာ ႏွစ္ေယာက္သား ထိုင္လိုက္ၾကတယ္။ က်ေနာ္လည္း လႈပ္လႈပ္ ႐ွား႐ွားသြားလာခဲ့ရေတာ့ နဲနဲ ေမာေနတာနဲ႔ အေမာေျဖ ထိုင္ေနတုန္း ဆရာႀကီးက
"ကဲ၊ ေျပာစရာ႐ွိတယ္ဆို ... ေျပာ ... ဘာေျပာမွာလဲ''
ဆိုတဲ့သေဘာနဲ႔ က်ေနာ့္ကို ၿပံဳးၿပီး ၾကည့္ေနတယ္။
က်ေနာ္က …
''တျခားမဟုတ္ဘူး ဆရာႀကီး။ ကဗ်ာ တပုဒ္ ႐ြတ္ျပမလို႔"
လို႔ ေျပာၿပီး ''ကြမ္းအစ္တလံုး ေယာင္တထံုးနဲ႔ …" အစခ်ီၿပီး ေတာက္ေလွ်ာက္ ႐ြတ္ျပလိုက္တယ္။ ႐ြတ္ရင္း သူ႕မ်က္ႏွာကို ၾကည့္ေနေတာ့ သူ အေတာ္ အံ့ၾသ သြားပံုရတယ္။ ကဗ်ာအေၾကာင္းေျပာရင္ အၿမဲဲ ညစ္ေနတတ္တဲ့ က်ေနာ္က အခု သူ႕ကဗ်ာကို အလြတ္္႐ြတ္ ျပေနေတာ့ သူ မအ့ံၾသဘဲ ဘယ္ေနပါ့မလဲ။
" မင္း … ဒီ ကဗ်ာ ဘယ္လို ရေနတာလဲ။ အရင္က မရပါဘူး …"
လို႔ တအံ့တၾသ ေမးပါတယ္။
က်ေနာ္က
"ဆရာႀကီးပဲ က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို ေမတၱာလက္ေဆာင္ ပို႔ေပးလိုက္တာေလ။ အဲဒီက ရတာေပါ့ …"
လို႔ အတည္ေပါက္ ဟဲ လိုက္ေတာ့ သူ မ်က္ေမွာက္ၾကဳတ္သြားတယ္။ သူလည္း မေပးရပါလား၊ ဘယ္လိုပါလိမ့္ ဆိုတဲ့ သေဘာေပါ့။ အဲဒီေတာ့မွ က်ေနာ္က ကဗ်ာ ရပံု ထူးထူးဆန္းဆန္းအေၾကာင္းေလး ေျပာၿပီး ကိုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္းမွာတဲ့အတုိင္း ေနာက္တႀကိမ္ေတာင္ ႐ြတ္ျပလိုက္ပါေသးတယ္။
ဆရာႀကီး အဲဒီအခ်ိန္တုန္းက က်ေနာ့္ကို ၾကည့္တဲ့ အၾကည့္က တမ်ိဳးေလးပဲ။ က်ေနာ္ပါးစပ္က ကဗ်ာ ႐ြတ္ေနတာကို သူ အေတာ္ ပီတိ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ပံုပါ။
ၿပီးေတာ့မွ က်ေနာ့္ကို သူ႔ထံုးစံအတိုုင္း ျဖည္းျဖည္း တိုးတိုးေလး ေျပာပါေတာ့တယ္။
''မင္းတို႔ ကဗ်ာရပံုေလး ဆန္းတယ္။ ေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္း လြတ္သြားတာ ဝမ္းသာတယ္။ မင္း ကဗ်ာ႐ြတ္တာ ပိုလို႔ေတာင္ ဝမ္းသာေသးတယ္။ ငါလည္း မင္းကို သတိရေနတာ။ ကဗ်ာ ဆိုတာ ႏွလံုးသားနဲ႔ ထိေတြ႕ရတဲ့ အရာပါ။ မင္း ႏွလံုးသားက ခက္ထန္ မာေၾကာလြန္းတယ္ကြာ။ မင္းမွာ ေျဖာင့္မတ္မႈ၊ သစၥာ႐ွိမႈေတြ ႐ွိတယ္။ သတၱိလည္း အရမ္းေကာင္းတဲ့ ေကာင္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ မင္း ႏွလံုးသား ေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္းဖို႔ လိုေနတယ္။ အဲဒီလို ေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္းလာတာနဲ႔ မင္းဟာ အရမ္းကို ျပည့္စံုသြားမယ့္သူပဲ။ တိုင္းျပည္အတြက္ အားကိုးရမယ္။ ငါတို႔က အသက္ႀကီးလာၿပီ ဆိုေတာ့ ေနာင္အနာဂတ္အတြက္ မင္းတို႔လို လူငယ္ေတြကိုပဲ အားကိုးရမွာ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ မင္းကဗ်ာဖတ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္။ စာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ဖတ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္။ ငါက ေက်ာင္းဆရာဆိုေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသူ၊ ေက်ာင္းသားေပါင္း မ်ားစြာကို စာသင္ေပးခဲ့ရတယ္။ မင္းက ထူးဆန္းတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ မင္းကို သားတစ္ေယာက္လို ခ်စ္တာပါကြာ..''
လို႔ တသီတတန္းႀကီး ေျပာလိုက္ပါတယ္။
က်ေနာ္ သူ႕စကားနားေထာင္းရင္း ၾကက္သီးေမႊးညင္း ထ သြားတယ္။ ေဖာ္ျပလို႔မရတဲ့ ထူးဆန္းတဲ့ ခံစားမႈေလး ခံစားလိုက္ရတာ။ ဘာမွ မေျပာမိဘဲ သူ႕ေ႐ွ႕ ဒီအတိုင္း ငူငူႀကီး ထိုင္ေနမိတယ္။ က်ေနာ့္ရင္ထဲ အသည္းထဲကေန သိလိုက္ပါၿပီ။ က်ေနာ့္ကို ခ်ည္ေႏွာင္ထားတဲ့ သူရဲ႕ေမတၱာႀကိဳးဟာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ခိုင္မာ သလဲဆိုတာေလ..။
(ဆက္ပါအုံးမည္..)
(မိုးခ်ဳိသင္း ဘေလာ့က ယူပါတယ္)
Myanmar junta congratulates Obama: state media
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009%5C01%5C24%5Cstory_24-1-2009_pg20_7
YANGON: Myanmar’s top junta leader has congratulated new US President Barack Obama on his inauguration, state media reported on Friday in the first official reaction to him assuming office.
The official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said Senior General Than Shwe “has sent a message of congratulations to the Honourable Barack Hussein Obama, on the occasion of his inauguration” as president.
The front page message comes after a senior Myanmar official told AFP that Myanmar hopes Obama will change Washington’s tough policy toward its military regime and end the “misunderstandings” of the past.
Former US president George W Bush’s administration strengthened decade-old sanctions against Myanmar while his wife Laura was an outspoken critic of its ruling junta.
The New Light also carried congratulations from the junta’s deputy leader General Maung Aye and foreign minister Nyan Win to US Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The messages, three days after the inauguration, are a rare communication between the two countries.
Myanmar’s opposition National League of Democracy party has also cautiously welcomed Obama’s presidency, but said time would tell if he could help open up the military-run country. afp
H
Soaring Kyat Slows Remittances from Abroad
http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=14986
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Friday, January 23, 2009
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The black market value of Burma's currency, the kyat, hit a three-year high of nearly 1,000 to the US dollar on Friday, putting a brake on the unofficial cash transfers from abroad known as hundi.
The kyat had been skyrocketing all week, reaching new highs against not only the dollar but also, on Wednesday, the Thai baht (25 kyat), Singapore dollar (714 kyat) and the Chinese yuan (1,639.34), according to hundi services in Bangkok, Singapore and at the Sino-Burmese border.
"We are surprised and shocked,” said one businessman running a hundi service in Bangkok. “Now our service has been halted, and we can’t say when we will restart it. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The hundi is an underground banking system that uses a network of unofficial currency exchangers and money transmitters in Burma.
The lack of an active and efficient money transaction service run by international and local private financial institutions and untrustworthy government exchange rates cause Burmese expatriates and migrant workers to use the informal services.
Burmese expatriates contacted by The Irrawaddy said they didn’t want to transfer money home at the current rate. Experts said that a fall in remittances from abroad, together with rising unemployment among migrant workers, could have a dire effect on Burma’s rural economy, in which millions of people rely on hundi transfers.
Black market currency dealers, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the illicit nature of their work, said the soaring value of the kyat could not be ascribed to any single reason. The black market rate is linked not only to China's yuan, the US dollar and the price of gold, but also to the volume of border trade.
One observer in Rangoon said the global recession could be a factor because it had resulted in a halt to cross-border trade.
The price of gold in the country is meanwhile falling because of declining demand, according to gold shops in Rangoon. So far this month, the price for a tical of 24 carat gold has dropped from 525,000 kyat to 468,000 kyat. One tical is equal to 0.525 troy ounces.
"Consumers are not buying like before,” said one gold shop owner. “There are more sellers than buyers.”
Copyright © 2008 Irrawaddy Publishing Group | www.irrawaddy.org
UN envoy to test waters in Burma's political quagmire
http://www.mizzima.com/edop/anslysis/1591-un-envoy-to-test-waters-in-burmas-political-quagmire.html
by Larry Jagan
Friday, 23 January 2009 14:58
Bangkok (Mizzima) - The United Nation's special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari will make another visit to Burma at the end of the month on what may be his final effort to broker talks between the military regime and the detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The trip to Burma will start on January 31 and is scheduled to end on the February 3, Mr. Gambari told Mizzma.
But he declined to give any further details. "We are still working on the modalities of the visit," he said.
During this trip he expects to meet senior members of the military government, opposition leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi's who is currently under house-arrest in Rangoon, and representatives of the country's ethnic minorities, according to senior UN officials who declined to be identified.
"Although it's only a four-day working trip, he will extend his stay if it seems progress can be made on his top priorities," a UN official close to Mr. Gambari said.
"Meeting Aung San Suu Kyi and hearing her views is obviously a crucial part of this visit," he added. On his last trip, the envoy made two unsuccessful attempts to see the pro-democracy leader.
The Nigerian envoy will tour the region after his talks with the Burmese military leaders, according to UN sources in New York. While all the stops have yet to be finalised, he is certainly expected to visit Bangkok, Beijing, Jakarta, Singapore and Tokyo for discussions on how best to proceed. But he is expected to return to New York to brief the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
This visit signals the UN's renewed efforts to directly engage the hard-line Burmese military government after months of debate about how best to encourage the junta to introduce genuine democratic reforms and include all the country's political players, especially detained Aung San Suu Kyi. A planned visit by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon in late December was cancelled because the UN boss felt his visit would not produce any concrete results.
Some countries, notably the United Kingdom, pressed hard for the visit go ahead, even though it was not likely to achieve any real break-through in Burma's political deadlock. The UN chief though has been very active behind the scenes since, holding a series of senior level meetings with the countries most concerned about Burma and the five permanent members of the Security Council.
Mr. Gambari's latest visit – his first in five months, and his seventh since he took up the job in early 2006 – is something of a stock-taking mission, according to diplomats based in Rangoon. The regime has been sending mixed messages about their attitude to international mediation. Whereas they eventually welcomed international cooperation to tackle the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Nargis, they persist on resisting international pressure in the political arena.
"Mr. Gambari will be testing the waters – seeing where the regime might be willing to, at least tolerate, international support and assistance, while at the same time reiterating the international community's message: national reconciliation must be genuine and truly inclusive," said a western Rangoon-based diplomat. But most analysts remain pessimistic that Mr. Gambari will be able to achieve much.
The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi is hopeful that the visit will at least break the ice, and may lead to renewed contact between them and the junta, and the possible start of tentative talks – at least at a lower level within the regime.
"I believe the special envoy's visit this time will be beneficial as the envoy and the NLD share the same principles on achieving political reform in the country," the NLD spokesman Nyan Win, told Mizzima.
But many analysts are cautious about raising expectations for this visit – as this has led to massive resentment inside Burma when Mr. Gambari's efforts failed miserably to produce results. "Don't expect anything," a western diplomat who has been close to the international mediation efforts told Mizzima. "The visit has very low objectives and expectations," he said.
The envoy is expected to meet the opposition leader on this trip, although she refused to see him last time even though she had on his previous visits.
The real test of whether the envoy's forthcoming trip is going to be more successful than usual will be whether he is able to meet the junta supremo, Than Shwe. The Senior General had refused to meet him on his last few visits.
"He is likely only to be allowed to meet the largely ceremonial Prime Minister Thein Sein," said Win Min, a Burmese academic, based at Chiang Mai in Thailand. "The top general obviously has no regard for him and believes it isn't necessary to talk directly to him."
The UN visit also comes in the wake of a massive crackdown on dissidents. In the past few months the government has handed down harsh prison sentences to more than a hundred pro-democracy activists.
The NLD told Mizzima they would be discussing the arrests and sentencing of more than 300 NLD members and other political prisoners with Mr. Gambari during his stay in Rangoon.
While the UN envoy will certainly repeat the international community's main concern – the immediate release of Aung San Suu Kyi, there is very little likelihood that the regime will budge. The opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate has been under house arrest for more than 13 of the last 20 years. Her detention order runs out in late May. But it is expected to be renewed for a further year at that time.
The junta for its part is anxious to show that it is not them who are blocking the visit of the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon. Some diplomats believe that Mr. Gambari's top objective, is to sound out the situation in readiness for a rescheduled visit by the UN boss.
Ban Ki-moon maybe planning visit Burma in the first part of this year, either after the ASEAN Summit next month, or more likely the ASEAN-UN summit scheduled to be held in Thailand in April.
China says teens freed from Myanmar kidnap
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=1207553
Reuters
Published: Thursday, January 22, 2009
BEIJING - Chinese police said 18 nationals kidnapped in Myanmar have been freed after families paid ransoms to captors who forced the mostly teenage victims to gamble themselves into deep debt, official media reported.
The Xinhua News Agency reported late on Thursday that at least 19 people from Yuncheng, a small coal city in north Shanxi province, were lured to southwest China's Yunnan province in search of work. They were then taken to neighbouring Myanmar and forced to gamble.
China's long border with Myanmar is porous, and there are many casinos on the Myanmar side that cater to visiting Chinese.
"The kidnappers forced them to call home asking for ransom money," the report said, citing Yuncheng police.
One of the captives, 16-year-old Wang Jian, told police they "were all starving, thirsty and frequently beaten". And Wang "was even forced to eat excrement and threatened with being thrown into a cage with a bear".
In most of the cases, families or police paid ransoms from 20,000 yuan ($6,800) to 100,000 yuan ($14,600), the report said. One of the 19 people confirmed kidnapped was still being held.
Zhou Xin, a police officer in Yuncheng, said there had been a spate of abductions of young people there since August last year, but he said there were unlikely to be many more than the 19 already reported.
China is one of the few nations that stands by the military junta running Myanmar, also called by its former name Burma. But Chinese officials have also been worried by the gambling, drug-running and crime that spills over from hilly and isolated northern Myanmar.
The report did not explain why locals of Yuncheng were targeted by kidnappers. But the Shanxi province's abundant coal has brought wealth to families there.
Police arrested two men from Shanxi on suspicion of involvement in the case, Xinhua reported. Other suspects are being pursued.
"Most of the suspects were friends or schoolmates of the victims," Xinhua said.
© Reuters 2009
Myanmar builds more fertilizer plant to meet domestic demand
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/6579919.html
Myanmar is building one more fertilizer plant in Pathein, Ayeyawaddy division, in a bid to meet its domestic demand, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation Thursday.
The plant, which will become the fifth state-owned one, will produce 500 tons of fertilizer a day as the four existing ones do on completion, the sources said.
According to earlier report, Myanmar imported 400,000 tons of fertilizer in the fiscal year 2007-08 for cultivation of 44 million acres (17.82 million hectares) of agricultural crops.
Myanmar also imported 125,000 tons of fertilizer through border trade in the first half (April-September) of the fiscal year 2008-09.
The increased fertilizer import was attributed to the pressing demand for resumption of agriculture work in cyclone-hit regions.
Fertilizer is among major import goods of Myanmar. The others are machinery, medicines and consumers goods.
According to official statistics, Myanmar's fertilizer import was registered 9.8 million dollars in 2007-08.
Fertilizer plants in Myanmar are scattered in Salay, Kyunchaungand Kyaw Swa, producing annually a total of 100,000 tons of urea and meeting only 6.6 percent of the total demand of about 1.5 million tons normally.
To promote the development of agriculture, Myanmar has in one way exempted the import duty of fertilizer along with agricultural machinery, pesticide and improved variety.
Source:Xinhua
Myanmar, Thailand cooperate in weather forecasting
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/6580163.html
Myanmar and Thailand are cooperating technically in promoting Myanmar's weather forecasting and rehabilitation work in cyclone-hit areas, the official newspaper New Light of Myanmar reported on Friday.
The cooperation is being carried out between Myanmar's Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) and Thailand's International Development Cooperation Agency, National Institute of Emergency Medicine Service System and Weather Forecast Bureau.
Promotion of capacity building of Myanmar's DMH, national multi-hazard early warning system and the rehabilitation work on cyclone-affected areas related to agriculture, health, social and education sectors, disaster preparedness plan and joint work procedure are covered by the cooperation project, the report said.
In July last year, two months after cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, Thailand started to seek ways of establishing in Myanmar an early warning network system against cyclone.
A Thai delegation, led by Minister of Information, Communication and Technology Mun Patanotai, visited the country then, meeting with its Myanmar counterpart and the ASEAN-Myanmar-United Nations Tripartite Core Group.
Meanwhile, the United Nations has set up an emergency telecommunication center (ETC) in Yangon to help for quick communication access in disaster relief and restoration works.
Deadly cyclone Nargis hit five divisions and states -- Ayeyawaddy, Yangon, Bago, Mon and Kayin on May 2 and 3 last year, of which Ayeyawaddy and Yangon inflicted the heaviest casualties and massive infrastructure damage.
The storm has killed 84,537 people and left 53,836 missing and 19,359 injured according to the official announcement.
Source:Xinhua
Myanmar media call for extensive extraction of bio-gas for electricity supply
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/6580205.html
January 23, 2009
Myanmar official media Friday called on rural people to extensively extract bio-gas from animal waste to get sufficient electricity supply at low cost, replacing firewood.
Bio-gas can be produced from animal waste such as cow dung, pig-dung, chicken and goat dropping, the New Light of Myanmar said in its editorial, adding that the dung of five to seven cattle or pigs, buffaloes and goats is enough to produce electricity through bio-gas for a household.
Apart from small-scale bio-gas digesters for houses, large bio-gas digesters can be built to supply electric power to the whole village, the paper outlined.
According to the paper, innovation has been carried out in Myanmar to build bio-gas digesters for supply of electric power in rural areas.
The paper underlined that such move has proved successful in some of the areas.
Meanwhile, Myanmar has also introduced cultivation of Jatrophaphysic nut plants to produce bio-diesel.
Myanmar has set a target to grow 3.23 million hectares of bio-diesel plants in 2008 in a bid to increase the bio-diesel output in the year to substitute diesel.
Output from Jatropha plantations is being projected as up to 20million tons a year, according to the agriculture authorities.
The Jatropha nuts were initially planted on 648,000 hectares mainly in three dry zones of Mandalay, Sagaing and Magway divisions.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, Myanmar has about 6.41 million hectares of land suitable for growing Jetropha plants.
There are two physic nut species in Myanmar -- Castor and Jatropha.
Source:Xinhua
Jailed Myanmar monk goes on hunger strike
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090123/wl_asia_afp/myanmarpoliticsprisonrights_20090123070007/print
Fri Jan 23, 1:58 am ET
BANGKOK (AFP) – A Buddhist monk imprisoned in Myanmar for leading street protests against the junta has gone on hunger strike to demand access to his family, according to an exiled group of former political prisoners.
Monk Gambira began to refuse food ten days ago, said Bo Kyi of the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma.
Burma is the country's previous name.
"He was at Mandalay prison when his family visited him. He was not allowed to see his family, therefore he demanded a meeting with (them). Then he set on hunger strike," Bo Kyi said.
Gambira was transferred from Mandalay prison to the remote Hkamti prison three or four days later, Bo Kyi told AFP, citing his family members and prison sources.
The reports could not be confirmed by official sources.
Gambira was sentenced to 68 years in prison last November, for his involvement in monk-led protests against the regime in 2007.
The protests began sporadically against fuel-price hikes in the August, but subsequently involved tens of thousands of people, led by the monks.
At least 31 people were killed and 74 went missing in the brutal crackdown that followed the demonstrations, according to the United Nations.
In recent weeks about 270 activists including monks, student leaders and NLD members have been handed long jail terms for their roles in the 2007 protests and for helping victims of Cyclone Nargis last May.
In mid-January a Myanmar court also jailed a student activist for 104 years, while the junta freed six people who had campaigned for the release of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, officials said.
Myanmar's military rulers have kept 63-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in Yangon for most of the past 19 years. She currently has an appeal pending against her detention.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962.
Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed them to take office.
Copyright © 2009 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.
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A Thai Democrat?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123264907613206837.html
Prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva isn't practicing what he preaches.
By COLUM MURPHY | From today's Wall Street Journal Asia
BANGKOK
"If we can get the economy rolling again, if we achieve a more stable environment . . . then I will look for the appropriate time to return power to the people."
It's a hedged pledge from Thailand's third prime minister in four months, Abhisit Vejjajiva. In the wake of the September 2006 military coup, the 44-year-old Eton- and Oxford-educated economist seems the best hope so far for Thailand to finally embrace full democracy. Mr. Abhisit enjoys a reputation as a liberal, clean and reform-minded leader. Yet even he wasn't elected to his current position by the Thai people; he took office in December 2008 after the last government fell amid street protests.
Tim FoleyThat puts the British-born Mr. Abhisit in an awkward position to get Thailand back on the democratic track. It's important to his people, Thailand's neighbors and its biggest ally -- the United States -- that he succeeds. Thailand is one of Southeast Asia's biggest economies and a major gateway to the region. It's an increasingly important strategic ally for the West as China expands its influence and Burma's generals drive that country deeper into chaos. A politically stable Bangkok could also help fight transnational issues such as human trafficking and trade in illegal narcotics.
"Obviously, I would have preferred to come to power under different circumstances," the prime minister tells me in an interview earlier this month at Government House. "But I think what matters to the people now is whether the government can make sure that the country gets through both the economic and political crises."
The two are, in fact, related. Political crises have discouraged one of the country's main sources of income -- tourists -- from coming to the Land of Smiles. Thailand's export-driven economy has slumped in the face of recessions in its big trading partners. The Ministry of Finance estimates that the country will grow between zero and 2% this year. Unemployment, a key concern, is expected to jump to 900,000 this year from the current half a million.
More
Read the complete interview and listen to the podcast at FEER.com.
Mr. Abhisit has reacted fast. He announced an $8 billion "Plan of Action" three weeks ago, which includes low-interest loans to farmers, aid to the elderly and urban poor, job creation and expanded free education. The plan is also a way for an unelected leader to gain popularity among Thailand's poor in the north and northeast provinces -- who historically supported Mr. Abhisit's political rival, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Mr. Abhisit insists that his economic blueprint isn't meant to mimic Mr. Thaksin's spending. While in the past he pledged that any government led by him would not "go down the populist route," today he justifies his actions: "I think it is a standard stimulus package in the Keynesian tradition."
Regardless of the impetus, pouring out cash seems to have been a successful political gambit. Thailand held parliamentary by-elections earlier this month, and Mr. Abhisit's Democrat Party-led coalition came out on top, winning 20 of 29 seats, plus the governorship of the capital, Bangkok. "They say politics is the art of the possible," he says. "We have put together a coalition . . . the country is already seeing a difference."
One big difference, of course, is the lack of political challenge from Mr. Thaksin's now-defunct Thai Rak Thai party, which was disbanded by a tribunal set up in the coup's aftermath. Mr. Thaksin then backed the newly formed People's Power Party from exile abroad. Yet that party, too, was disbanded by judges in the face of street protests late last year. Mr. Abhisit doesn't seem concerned about the fate of Mr. Thaksin and his proxies at the hands of the courts.
"On one side there are people who attach great importance to electoral politics and majority rule -- and rightly so," the prime minister says. "But the other side looks at the other aspect -- the essential aspect -- of democracy, which is accountability, and what has led the country into this situation is that the majority in the past abused power, pretty much broke all the rules."
Certainly, the multibillionaire CEO-turned-politician Mr. Thaksin was no angel. Yet his main "mistake" was to win over the loyalty of the bulk of Thai voters through the one-man-one-vote parliamentary system. His power base threatened the cozy status quo enjoyed by Thailand's army, urban elites and favored entrenched business concerns. Mr. Abhisit, a member of the Bangkok elite, ran against Mr. Thaksin's proxies in December 2007 and lost.
Mr. Abhisit likes to emphasize accountability and the rule of law. But so far he hasn't practiced what he preaches. His government has watched as the angry mobs that felled the last, elected government get off largely scot-free. Mr. Abhisit responds: "I think it is up to the police, the attorney-general and the courts." Mr. Abhisit has appointed one of the protest leaders, Kasit Piromya, as foreign minister. He is also emphasizing his loyalty to the monarchy by cracking down on Web sites suspected of slandering Thailand's king.
Yet the confident Mr. Abhisit thinks he can forge a new kind of democracy for Thailand. "I think that each country could have a unique set of rules, but not contrary to the fundamental principles," he says. "The army should be professional armed forces and they shouldn't be dragged back into politics." Let's hope not, for his sake -- and for Thailand's.
Mr. Murphy is deputy editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
A New Government for Burma-by Sein Win
http://www.feer.com/politics/2009/january/A-New-Government-for-Burma
January 2009
A New Government for Burma
by Sein Win
Posted January 23, 2009
(This commentary first appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, our sister publication, on January 22, 2009.)
DUBLIN—The Burmese junta’s disgraceful nonresponse to Cyclone Nargis last year called international attention to the direct human consequences of repressive rule in the Southeast Asian country. Since then, Burma’s economic plight has only worsened. It is time for the political opposition abroad to present a broader, more coherent alternative for the Burmese people.
To this end, the legitimately elected representatives of the people of Burma—the Members of Parliament from the 1990 elections—are meeting in Dublin over the next few days to elect a new government-in-exile. The convention delegates are motivated by a sense that change in the culture of Burma’s exiled opposition is needed. All are aware that the plight of Burma’s people can no longer be tolerated; the status quo cannot be continued.
This move is a huge step forward for the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Burmese people, who have never enjoyed a government that gave all groups an equal voice. A new government-in-exile should also provide comfort to Burma’s neighbors, who worry about civil unrest when the junta falls.
We sketched out our core beliefs in this month’s edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, a sister publication of this newspaper (see FEER essay here). In Dublin, we call for an inclusive process that will lead to an interim constitution, taking into account the interests of all stakeholders in Burma. We also call for the release of all political prisoners; for the lifting of restrictions on liberties such as free speech and free association; and for an agreement on a realistic timetable for free and fair elections in Burma.
We have a vision of a nation-building process for Burma that will create a federal union with an appropriate relationship between the central government and the states and regions, ensuring, for example, the equitable distribution of revenue from natural resources. We support free trade.
We will also be good regional and global citizens. Our Asian partners need to become involved in solving Burma’s myriad problems by urgently and effectively pushing for increased dialogue and national reconciliation. We look to the United Nations to forge a path by which such a dialogue can take place.
We call on the U.N. Secretary-General to conduct a goals-oriented tour of Burma as soon as the Burmese generals are prepared to compromise. We suggest enacting a regional strategy to democratize Burma perhaps through the Association of South East Asian Nations, overseen by the United Nations.
Burma desperately needs a liberal, open regime. Even before the global economic crisis landed, the Burmese economy was being run into the ground by the current regime’s mismanagement and corruption.
Now, the global financial crisis is making a bad situation even worse. Natural gas revenues—which account for around 40% of Burma’s total export income—fell 28.5% in the first nine months of 2008, compared to the same period last year. Tourism has slowed to a trickle. Unemployment is spiking.
This isn’t just a problem for our country, but for our neighbors, too. Burma is Asia’s second largest opium producer—behind Afghanistan—and a major exporter of synthetic drugs such as amphetamines. Our refugees—who are fleeing in droves—are carrying HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis and malaria abroad. Today, over 3.5 million Burmese are displaced with some 10% of the population currently living overseas, one of the highest proportions in the world.
Our country needs major economic and social reforms that only a government with popular support can deliver. Yet the national elections scheduled for 2010 will be a parody of democracy. The tricks and thuggery of the military were instrumental in the passage of the 2008 constitution that legitimizes military rule in Burma. The same constitution, which mandates that 75% of the parliament will be civilian—with the remainder reserved for the military—will also ensure a rigged outcome of the elections in 2010.
The nominally civilian Union Solidarity and Development Association and the Swan-ah-Shin—pseudo-independent political groups backed by the government—are already working behind the scenes to fill the civilian seats with military lackeys. The resulting government will have little inclination to address the political or economic concerns of the Burmese people.
The Burmese government-in-exile has already initiated steps to enable clusters of Burmese, as well as foreign experts in political, economic, and other fields, to work on a blueprint for a transition to democracy in Burma. This presents better, clearer, options for the Burmese people. The interests of the military are included in this blueprint as well. We do not want the military to be what stands in the way of Burma’s progress.
We look forward to working together in an inclusive new government to show that Burma can have a better future for its people. And when we return home, we’ll show the international community what Burma should be: engaged abroad, prosperous and free.
Sein Win is prime minister of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, based in Washington D.C., and a delegate to the Dublin convention. This commentary first appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, our sister publication, on January 22, 2009.
Can the ILO Be Saved from Itself?
http://www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/hl1106.cfm
January 22, 2009
by Charlotte M. Ponticelli
Heritage Lecture #1106
For the better part of the past two years, I have had the great privilege of heading the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Affairs. Simply put, it's the agency that carries out the international responsibilities of the Department of Labor.
One of my major responsibilities has been representing the Department of Labor--and, indeed, the United States government--in international organizations that deal with labor and employment issues. And, of course, the major international organization I have worked with is the International Labor Organization.
My bureau works closely with the ILO on a number of projects.
We oversee labor programs funded by the State Department and implemented by the ILO in the Middle East and Latin America.
We oversee numerous projects that are implemented by the ILO's International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC). Over the past decade, the U.S. has funded nearly $370 million worth of programs in over 75 countries. As a result of these programs, we have rescued more than a million children from exploitive child labor.
On a regular, ongoing basis, we also represent the United States government at the ILO's annual conference and at its Governing Body meetings. We do this along with the AFL-CIO, which represents American workers, and the U.S. Council for International Business, which represents U.S. employers. Both of these partners, I should add, have been helpful and dedicated to making the ILO a strong and effective voice for democracy and rights.
I think this is an opportune time, with the current economic challenges, to talk about the ILO itself: to give you my perspective on what it does well, what concerns the U.S. government has had, and what we at my Bureau see as the road ahead.
The Mission of the ILO
When I worked here at The Heritage Foundation, I would look up every day at the words in gold letters on the wall in the foyer that read: "The Heritage Foundation is committed to building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish." Those words certainly have guided my work at the State Department and the Labor Department over these past seven years.
I recall once, shortly before leaving Heritage to move over to State, that I had suggested at a strategy meeting on foreign policy priorities that we needed to change just two words so that the vision would be, "Building a world where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish." So it's appropriate for me to ask: How does the ILO fit into that vision?
The International Labor Organization was created in 1919, in the wake of World War I, with the purpose of creating an international institution that could bring governments, employers, and workers together to improve living and working conditions and help preserve social stability in the new post- World War I order. As the sole remaining component of the League of Nations, and as a member of the present-day U.N. system, the ILO has been a strong voice for worker rights, for helping to build democracy in Poland and South Africa, and building strong, open-market systems in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The ILO continues to be a beacon in promoting freedom in some critical places across the globe. For example:
In Burma, the ILO is the sole U.N. agency that plays a useful role on the ground. It has been directly responsible for enabling victims of forced labor to report on their treatment without fear of reprisal. The ILO's special adviser in Burma has helped people get out of jail, has helped rescue child soldiers, and has actually engaged the military in dialogue on forced labor.
In Belarus, the ILO's Governing Body has been in perfect sync with the Bush Administration's goal of pushing for democracy, both by condemning Belarus for its lack of freedom of association and by at the same time offering to work with the government to move forward.
In Zimbabwe, thanks to the workers and employers--and with no thanks to countries like South Africa or China--the ILO has been in the forefront of criticizing the atrocities of the Mugabe regime. In the labor area, this includes the systematic arrest, detention, and harassment of trade unionists. At its last session, the Governing Body decided to send to Zimbabwe a Commission of Inquiry, one of the highest-level investigatory missions available.
In regard to Iran, the ILO has regularly condemned the Iranian government for arresting and imprisoning independent trade union leaders and for its record on discrimination in the workplace.
And in Colombia, the ILO--largely at the behest of the United States--has established an office on the ground to help address key labor issues, including violence against trade union officials. The Colombian government, the business community, and the labor unions themselves supported the establishment of the office.
In addition to the tremendous work on child labor, forced labor, and trafficking, the ILO also supports U.S. efforts to bring about democratic reform in the Middle East, assisting the Department of Labor with State/Middle East Partnership Initiative-funded projects in Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, and Egypt, and work mandated by Congress that supports the CAFTA-DR[1] trade agreement. And in collaboration with the ILO, we've recently launched new projects in Tanzania and Haiti.
The Other Side of the Story
There's also another side to this story. Go to the ILO Web site or look at the Director-General's speeches over the past few years. You won't find very many references to all of the good work I've just described. What you will find are articles and speeches that deal with the ILO's role in:
Climate change and energy policy,
Reforming the international monetary system,
Changing the rules of the international trade system,
Addressing international investment issues,
Addressing the global food crisis,
Mandating social policy for individual countries, and
Suggesting that the ILO take the lead in addressing global social policy in the current economic crisis.
Here's an example: Speaking at the Vatican on Human Rights Day in December, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said, "We have a multilateral system that is underperforming. It is not delivering the type of policy coherence we need today. There is a profound need...for a new form of global governance...a global community of multiple actors including, but going beyond governments."[2]
Here's another example: In November, the officers of the Governing Body issued a statement calling for six steps to be taken to address the financial crisis. I won't enumerate them, but among them were:
Ensuring the flow of credit to consumption, trade, and investment;
Supporting productive, profitable, and sustainable enterprises, together with a strong social economy and a viable public sector, so as to maximize employment and decent work;
Maintaining development aid as a minimum at current levels and providing additional credit lines and support to enable low-income countries to cushion the crisis.
I would note that in the discussion of the crisis at that Governing Body in Geneva, only one party noted the importance of the ILO working to ensure that basic workers' rights would not be lost in the shuffle: It wasn't the workers' group or the European Union--it was the United States.
In short, the key problem is that the ILO is seeking to become the world's lead institution in addressing the social consequences of globalization. This is not a conspiracy theory; rather, it's a point made regularly by the Director-General. The world of work, a challenging field unto itself, suddenly loses importance and instead becomes a platform for launching all sorts of social projects.
That's why we have been very concerned about a new instrument that was adopted by the organization's conference just this past June, called the ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization.[3] The title alone suggests exactly what is wrong with the ILO at this time. What is worrisome is that it opens the door to efforts to attribute universal applicability to conventions that heretofore would be relevant only if a country formally ratified them. That means, for example, that select conventions on employment and social protection could conceivably take on the status of agreed international principles without our consent.
Now we, of course, would not honor this. Suffice it to say, it would be appalling, both morally and in terms of economic efficiency, if an international organization were to determine the "right" balance between employment and social protection.
Management
How well are these resources managed? In short, not well. The ILO fails to ensure adequate impact analysis of its programs. We receive reports from them on what they did and how they managed programs, but we can't get answers to questions like, "What do we get for the $10 million spent on Project X?"
When our Secretary of Labor raised this with the Director-General, he replied, "You have to realize that it's sometimes very difficult for the ILO to measure the impact of what we do. After all, we don't sell shoes. We hold seminars. We give advice. And how do you measure the impact of advice?"
Perhaps there is something to be said for that question, but for an organization that spends almost one-half billion dollars per year, that's not enough.
Tripartism
The ILO is the only tripartite organization in the U.N. system--that is, the only organization in which each country is represented three ways: by representatives of the government, employers, and workers. In my view, this tripartite nature is both the strength and the weakness of the organization. The good part is that it includes the private sector and civil society. But there are two difficult issues.
First, the ILO is disproportionately run by workers--and, to be exact, by trade unions. Workers see the ILO as their organization, but if its outputs are going to be useful, governments and employers have to see it as their organization too. This drove the International Organization of Employers earlier this year to stand up and demand that the ILO ensure "that employer priorities, objectives and resources are treated on an equal basis with those of the workers." This might not be easy: Just a year ago, during a discussion on "sustainable enterprise," the representatives of workers objected to any inclusion of the word "entrepreneur."
Second, governments are being marginalized. If workers and employers agree on an issue, the views of the governments--the funders of the Organization--become irrelevant because the worker-plus-employer majority is declared to be "consensus." Something must be done to address this issue.
At some point, the ILO's tripartite structure must be evaluated. Is it right that the 10 percent of workers in this country who are unionized should be allowed to speak for the entire American workforce? The same holds true for many other countries.
There are many times when the interests of organized labor and the interests of other employees may differ significantly. Perhaps thought should be given to including other worker groups--maybe professional associations or entrepreneurs or non-governmental organizations--to better represent the real workforce. I don't have an easy answer to this, but it's something we will surely have to deal with in the future.
What Should the ILO Be Doing?
What should the ILO be doing? Here's what I would suggest. It may not be glamorous, but we think the ILO could--and should--focus its activities on helping countries improve their capabilities in these areas:
Labor Law and Implementation. The United States strongly supports the principles underlying the ILO's core conventions in the areas of freedom of association, collective bargaining, forced labor, child labor, and discrimination. These principles are included in our trade laws and are regularly taken into account in making many important foreign policy decisions. I believe that the ILO can and should promote worker rights and democratic labor policies.
But the balance between drafting standards and implementing laws and policies must be redressed on a very large scale. Much attention is given to the adoption of new instruments, but implementation, which is what affects most people, receives much less attention. Syria and Iran have ratified numerous ILO conventions, but it is the United States that is taken to task by the workers for its low record of ratification of ILO conventions. The ILO should shift its focus away from endless legislating toward more real-life implementation.
Building Capacity. Open-market systems work well when there is an infrastructure that supports well-operating workplaces and well-trained workers. The ILO runs quality programs that promote training, skills development, and entrepreneurship development. It helps developing countries build their labor administrations, including their programs for addressing working conditions, inspection systems, and the oversight of occupational safety and health. Unfortunately, none of this is of much interest currently to the leadership in Geneva.
Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Trafficking. The U.S. funds most of the ILO's efforts in these areas. They do a great job. The ILO gave a lot of publicity to these programs when they started but very little now. These are core ILO issues and should receive the appropriate attention.
Fewer International Meetings, More Work in the Field. The ILO tends to view international meetings as the ultimate step in addressing issues. They divert tens of millions of dollars that could be better spent on country programs. Conferences are glamorous and field work is not, but focusing on the delivery of services and programs brings about real results for real people.
Corporate Social Responsibility. One other area the ILO might focus more on is corporate social responsibility (CSR). Public-private partnerships are increasingly becoming the way of the future. The ILO should do more in this area--not by becoming a rule-making operation (i.e., corporate codes of conduct), but by more directly furnishing advice, information, and guidance to enterprises that are genuinely committed to strengthening compliance with appropriate international standards. Many companies already do this, but the ILO could be of great help to those that need assistance.
Conclusion
As we look at the problems and the potential of the ILO, it's worth asking the question, "If the ILO disappeared tomorrow, would we need to replace it?" Or, as I said in the blurb for this meeting, "Can the ILO be saved from itself?"
The short answer is yes; the ILO could be a very useful tool in addressing many of the issues the world faces in the era of globalization. Both the United States worker and employer representatives agree on this.
Unfortunately, the ILO is veering further from, rather than closer to, being in a useful position. I hope that the new Administration, which has given much attention to labor issues, will use its influence to push the ILO to do its real job: to create better opportunities and better workplaces for working people, to promote job creation, to help provide businesses with the skilled workers they need, and to help boost economic development and prosperity around the world.
Charlotte M. Ponticelli, at the time of this lecture, served as Deputy Under Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor. She has also served in the U.S. Department of State as Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues and Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration, and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]The Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement, signed on August 5, 2004; text available at http://www.ustr.gov/Trade_Agreements/Bilateral/CAFTA/CAFTA-
DR_Final_Texts/Section_Index.html.
[2]See International Labor Organization, "ILO Director-General calls on G20 to Address the Social Implications of the Global Economic Crisis," press release, December 10, 2008, at http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_
information/I-News/lang--en/WCMS_101001/index.htm.
[3]Adopted June 10, 2008; text available at http://www.ilo.org/public/e
nglish/bureau/dgo/download/dg_announce_en.pdf.
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