ဇုိရာဖန္းရဲ႕ေဆာင္းပါး

Saturday, January 28, 2012

photo: http://stephenclark.mycouncillor.org.uk

ဂြာနီကာ မဂၢဇင္း အြန္လုိင္းစာမ်က္ႏွာမွာ ဇုိရာဖန္းက မေန႔ကရက္စဲြနဲ႔ ေဆာင္းပါးတပုဒ္ ေရးထားပါတယ္။

နုိင္ငံတကာဖိအားေတြဟာ အလုပ္ျဖစ္တယ္၊ ျမန္မာအစုိးရအဆက္ဆက္က သူတုိ႔လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈေတြကုိ အားေပးတ့ဲအေနနဲ႔ ဒဏ္ခတ္ပိတ္ဆုိ႔မႈမ်ား ရုပ္သိမ္းဖုိ႔ မၾကာမၾကာ ေတာင္းဆုိတတ္ပါတယ္ တ့ဲ။

ကခ်င္ေဒသ ထုိးစစ္ေတြ၊ မတရားမႈေတြကုိလည္း ေထာက္ျပထားပါတယ္။

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3461/zoya_phan_we_need_real_peace_n/ မွာပါ။

Zoya Phan: Burma Needs Real Peace, Not Just A Pause in Conflict
January 27, 2012

What’s the benchmark for real change in Burma?

By Zoya Phan

With the recent release of high profile political prisoners, and the agreement in principle of a ceasefire with the Karen National Union (KNU), there is no doubt that major developments are happening in Burma.

The question is how genuine are these steps, and how far is the military-backed government willing to go forward for peace?

International pressure does work. Burmese governments frequently raise the relaxation of sanctions as a reward for steps they are taking. When it became clear that the international community would not relax sanctions while conflict in ethnic areas was increasing, the government started talking about ceasefires.

As an ethnic Karen woman forced to flee my home at just 14 when the Burmese Army attacked our village, many people expect me to be very excited about a potential ceasefire agreement with the KNU. The agreement does give me some hope, but I am also feeling very cautious.

There are good reasons for this. The recent negotiations were the sixth time the KNU had met with the central governments in the past sixty-three years, sometimes they were democratic governments, sometimes dictatorships. Always though, the demands were the same. The KNU had to surrender, or as the government called it, return to the legal fold. Everything had to be on their terms, there was no compromise.

Having a ceasefire doesn’t solve the political problem that caused the conflict.

The KNU is accountable to the Karen people, leaders could not be bought off with promises of gifts and business ventures. They were willing to compromise for the sake of peace, but insisted that there also be dialogue for solving political problems that are the root cause of the conflict. So far, no government in Burma—civilian, military, or the current mixed civilian/military government—have been willing to seriously discuss these political problems. They just see ethnic groups as a conflict problem, so if there is a ceasefire the problem is solved. The danger is, that seems to be how many governments around the world also look at the problem.

If the ceasefire with the Karen is successful, it could be a positive step towards nationwide ceasefire and national reconciliation. But will the Burmese Army respect the ceasefire, when they have broken others in the past? Will they stop soldiers committing human rights abuses—raping, looting and killing, as they do in other places where there are ceasefires?

We must also not forget that while the government is in talks about ceasefires with the Karen, Chin, and the Shan, the Burmese Army is launching offensives against the Kachin and targeting civilians in those attacks, committing horrific human rights abuses.

A ceasefire without a political solution is like a pressing pause button, not a stop button. It doesn’t stop the human rights abuses committed by the Burmese Army, or grant rights and autonomy for the Karen and other ethnic nationalities in Burma.

The international community is in danger of making a big mistake in Burma. They talk about certain benchmarks needing to be met before sanctions are lifted—an end to conflict, for example. But just having a ceasefire doesn’t solve the political problem that caused the conflict. The problem remains. The same mistake is made with political prisoners. There is pressure to release all political prisoners, but even if this happens— it is possible around a thousand remain in jail—the unjust laws under which they were all jailed will still be in place.

Human rights abuses in Burma are a symptom of an undemocratic political system. That political system remains unchanged. The military and military-backed government haven’t given up any powers.

People such as myself who have been forced to flee from our homeland because of attacks by the Burmese Army won’t be able to return home safely until there is a political settlement. That political settlement is a real benchmark for judging if there is real change in my country.
________________________________________________________________________

Zoya Phan is Campaigns Manager at Burma Campaign UK. Her autobiography is published under the title Undaunted in the USA, and Little Daughter in the rest of the world.

5 comments :

  1. Anonymous said... :

    Yes,The pressure need to change in Burma about 23 years.

  1. Anonymous said... :

    သူ႔စာေလးကို ဘာသာျပန္ေပးမယ့္ လူေတြမ်ား ရိွေလမလားလို႔ ေမွ်ာ္ေနရတယ္။ ဘာေတြေရးထားမွန္းမသိပါဘူး။

  1. Anonymous said... :

    ဟုတ္တယ္။ ဘာသာျပန္ေပးပါလား။

  1. Anonymous said... :

    Had you not been displaced by the oppressive power holders at the age of 14 you would not have the knowledge or the opportunity to write this article full of mistrusts, suspicions, prejudices and phobias.

    This is not to degrade nor discourage your efforts doing something you believe is good for your own people. Nor it is to obliterate the facts of decades- old suffering of any ethnic minority of Burma. It is just a shed of light how you can look in a more positive way in the sensitive issues of the country, where your were born and fed to some extent to grow you up to this stage of unending grimaces.

    Now your siblings perhaps, uncles and grand uncles are trying to do something in history to end those sufferings once and for all of which they have been through as severely as you had, may be more and even longer since they are older and staying inside.

    Why can't you try to cheer up them by penning a few lines of recognition and constructive comments rather than stereotyping such never-believe-whatever-and-whenever-the-enemy-says-or- does attitude?

    (Ng Tay)

  1. Anonymous said... :

    ဟုတ္ပါသည္...ဒါေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ေျကာင္းကို ျကည့္ရင္ ေရွ႕ကို သြားရတာ မေျဖာင့္ပါဘူး.....ေရွ႕သြားေျဖာင့္ခ်င္ရင္ ဘယ္လိုမ်ိဳး တိုးတက္ေအာင္ ေအာင္ ျမင္ေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမလဲဆိုတာ အျကံေလးေနာက္တစ္ခါေရးရင္ ေပးသြားပါခင္ဗ်ား...ဒီလိုမ်ိဳးစာေတြ ဖတ္ရတာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလးမ်ားခဲ့ပါတယ္....လူေတြ သူငယ္ခ်င္း ကရင္ေလးေတြ ေျပာခဲ့တာလည္း အမ်ားျကီးနားေထာင္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္...တခ်ိဳ႕လူေတြကို မ်က္ရည္က်ေအာင္ ေျပာခဲ့တဲ့သူေတြလည္းရွိပါတယ္...တကယ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္လို့လည္း ယူဆခဲ့ပါတယ္...ဒါေပမယ့္ ျပႆနာက အဲဒီလူေတြက အဲဒီအေျခအေနေတြကို အေျကာင္းျပျပီး အေမရိက ေအာ္ဇီနဲ့ တစ္ျခား တစ္ျခားေသာ ႏုိင္ငံေတြမွာပဲ ေနထိုင္ဖို့ ဆံုးျဖတ္ျကတယ္....ကိုယ့္လူမ်ိဳး တိုးတက္ဖို့ ဆႏၵရွိတယ္ဆိုရင္ အျကံေလးေပးခ်င္တာက ဒီလိုမ်ိဳး စာေရးသူလုိမ်ိဳး ကရင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ အျမင္မရွိတဲ့သူေတြ အမ်ားျကီးရွိမယ္လို့ ထင္ပါတယ္...ဒီေတာ့ ဒီစာဟာလည္း ကရင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ လူဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ ဖတ္ႏုိင္မလဲ...ဒီေတာ့ တကယ္လုပ္ခ်င္ရင္ ျပန္ဝင္လာခဲ့ဖို့ ဖိတ္ေခၚပါတယ္.....တစ္ခုလိုခ်င္ရင္ေတာ့ တစ္ခုကိုိ ေပးဆပ္ရစျမဲပါ...မေပးဆပ္ပဲနဲ့လုိခ်င္ရင္ အေခ်ာင္သမားလို့ သူမ်ားတကာေတြ ေျပာေလ့ရွိပါတယ္.... အခုလို ဖတ္ေပးတဲ့အတြက္လည္း ေက်းဇဴးတင္ပါတယ္..

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