ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး။

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး။

22 May 2018
သမိုင္းကိုျပန္ေကာက္ေၾကာင္းေကာက္ျပီးၾကည့္တတ္ထို႕လိုတယ္။
ဥပမာဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ၾကီးအျပီး…ဆိုပါစို႕၁၉၄၅ ေမလ။ေလာက္မွာ
ဗမာျပည္ကိုအဂၤလိပ္ျပန္သိမ္းတယ္။
အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာဗမာျပည္ျပည္သူေတြေရာ၊စီးပြားေရး၊က်န္းမာေရး၊လူမႈေရး..
အရာရာမွာျခြတ္ျခံဳက်ေနျပီ။ယဲ့ယဲ့သာက်န္ေတာ့တယ္။ဲ
အင္ဒုိနီးရွားတို႕၊ဗီယက္နမ္တို႕နဲ႕ေတာင္မတူူဘူး။အဲသည္ႏိုင္ငံေတြက
ဂ်ပန္ဝင္ခ်ိန္တခါတည္းသာစစ္ဒဏ္ခံခဲ့ရတယ္။
ဗမာကဂ်ပန္အဝင္တၾကိမ္၊အထြက္မွာတၾကိမ္စစ္ပြဲေတြရဲ႕ဒဏ္ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္တိတိ
ခံခဲ့ရတယ္။
ဒါေပမဲ့လြတ္လပ္ေရးကမရေသးဘူး။ပြဲကမျပီးေသးဘူး။
ေရြးစရာလမ္းကႏွစ္ခုဘဲ။
ေသခါနီးက်န္တဲ့အားကေလးကိုျဖစ္ညွစ္ျပီးအဂၤလိပ္နဲ႕စစ္ပြဲႏႊဲမလား။

နယ္ခ်ဲ႕လဲစစ္ပမ္းေနျပီျဖစ္လို႕ေပၚလာတဲ့ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ
ရရွိေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းေပၚတက္ျပီးလြတ္လပ္ေရးကုိရယူမလား။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း၊သခင္ျမ၊ဦးႏု၊ဦးေက်ာ္ျငိမ္း၊ဗိုလ္လက်္ာ၊ဦးဗေဆြတို႕က
ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာရႏိုင္ရင္လြတ္လပ္ေရးကိုျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေသာနည္းနဲ႕ရရွိေရးကိုေရြးတယ္။

သခင္စိုး၊သခင္သန္းထြန္း၊သခင္ဂိုရွယ္တို႕ကလက္နက္ကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးနဲ႕ရတဲ့
လြတ္လပ္ေရးသာအစစ္အမွန္၊က်န္တာကေရႊရည္စိမ္ခ်ည္းဘဲလို႕စြဲယူၾကတယ္။
အေျပာေကာင္းၾကတယ္။အေဟာေကာင္းၾကတယ္။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳ႔ပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းလုပ္ၾကံခံရေတာ့အဂၤလိပ္အၾကံဘဲဆိုျပီးလူေတြေသြးဆူေနၾကတယ္။
ဦးႏုေခါင္းေဆာင္တဲ့ဖဆပလအစိုးရကေသြးထြက္သံယို၊မျဖစ္ဘဲတဖက္ကမ္းဆီျမင္ေနရတ့ဲ
လြတ္လပ္ေရးေသာင္ကမ္းဆီခလုတ္မထိဆူးမညွိဘဲအေရာက္ပို႕ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကတယ္။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္တို႕လူတသိုက္လည္းမတ္ေတြလီနင္ေတြစတာလင္ေတြဖတ္ျပီးအိႏၵိယေလာက္၊စစ္
အတြင္းဂ်ပန္ေလာက္ေ၇ၾက္ဖူးၾကတာ။
ေအာင္ဆန္းအက္တလီကိစၥၾကမွအဂၤလန္ကိုဘင္သံနဲ႕ေရာက္သြားၾကတာ။ဟိုေရာက္ေတာ့
ေလဘာအစိုးရကလက္်ာဆိုရွယ္လစ္လို႕ခုထိတိုင္ခလုတ္တိုက္ေနၾကေသးတဲ့
ဒီမိုကေရစီဆိုရွယ္လစ္ကိုစတင္ထူေထာင္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္။Labor ဝန္ၾကီးBevinက
National Health Systemကိုထူေထာင္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္။

ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ရယ္၊ဦးေက်ာ္ျငိမ္းရယ္အရင္ေရာက္တယ္။ဦးႏုကဇြန္လမွလန္ဒန္ေရာက္ျပီးအားၾကလာတယ္။

သတ္ၾက၊ျဖတ္ၾက၊စစ္ခင္းနဲ႕စစ္ခင္းရေတာ့မဲ့အခ်ိန္မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး။
သူမ်ားႏိုင္ငံေတြန္ိႈ္င္ငံေတြုျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ေနၾကသလိုကုိယ္ေတြလဲတည္
ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ခ်င္ေနၾကျပီ။

ဗိုလခ်ုဳပ္ကို္ယ္တိုင္
ဆိုရင္တိုဗီလာ(Sorento Villa)စီမံကိန္းေရးဆြဲေနျပီ။
တည္ေဆာက္ေရးဖက္အားသန္္ေနၾကျပီ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္သာမဟုတ္ပါဘူးကမၻာနဲ႕အဝွမ္းပါ။
ကမာၻၾကီးလဲစစ္ပမ္းေနျပီ။ကုန္းရုန္းထရင္းနဲ႕တည္ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ေနၾကျပီ။

လူေတြဟာဆင္းရဲေနတယ္။ေကာင္းရာဆီပို႕ေပးမဲ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကိုေျမွာ္တယ္။
အားကိုးရွာၾကတယ္။မီးစထိုးးလိုက္တာနဲ႕ေတာက္ေတာ့မဲ့ထင္းပုံလိုဘဲ။
ဒီထင္းကိုရထားေမာင္းရာမွာ(အျပဳသေဘာတည္ေဆာက္ေရးconstructive projects)
မွာလဲသံုးႏုိင္တယ္။
ရြာလယ္ပံုျပီးရြာလံုးကႊ်တ္ျပာၾကေအာင္လဲရွႈိ႕ႏိုင္တယ္။

ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္တို႕၊ဦးႏုတို႕ဦးေက်ာ္ျငိမ္းတို႕၊ဦးဗေဆြတို႕က
ဆိုရင္တို(ွSorento Villa)စီမံကိန္းတို႕၊ျပည္ေတာ္သာစီမံကိန္းတို႕
စက္မႈႏိုင္ငံထူေထာင္ေရးတို႔၊ေလာပီတဓါတ္အားေပးစီမံကိန္းတို႕
ဆိုျပီးတည္ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ၾကတယ္။

သခင္စိးုတုိ႕၊သခင္သန္းထြန္းတို႕ဂိုရွယ္တို႕က
ေရႊရည္စိမ္လြတ္လပ္ေရးတို႕၊
ေက်းရြာကုိအေျခခံ၊ျမိဳ႕ကိုဝိုင္းတို႕
ဗားဂရာေခ်ာက္ကိုဆိုရွယ္လစ္အရိုးနဲ႕ဖို႕ပစ္မယ္
ဆုိတဲ့ေၾကြးေၾကာ္သံေတြနဲ႕
လက္နက္ကိုင္စစ္ခင္းတယ္။ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေအာ္ျပီး
ေျမေပၚတရားဝင္လႈပ္ရွားေရးျဖစ္တဲ့’၅၅လမ္းစဥ္ကိုခုထိခါးခါးသီးသီး
ဂိုရွယ္တို႕၊ရဲေဘာ္ေဌးတို႕ဆုိ’၅၅သမားဆိုျပီးအခ်င္းခ်င္းရက္ရက္စက္စက္
အလုပ္ခံၾကရတယ္။
ပဲခူးရိုးမအေျချပဳျပီးရန္ကုန္မႏၱေလးရထားကုိတပတ္တခါမိုင္းေထာင္တယ္။
ဖါသာမႏိုင္ေတာ့တရုတ္ကိုေခၚလာတယ္။
ဝတို႕အခါတို႕လိုလူမ်ိ်ဳးစုေတြကိုုစည္းရံုးျပီးျပည္တြင္းစစ္ထဲဆြဲသြင္းတယ္။
ဝတို႕၊အခါတို႕ကအထာေပါက္ျပီးတရုတ္ေပးစာကိုေခါင္းပံုျဖတ္
အျမတ္ၾကီးစားေနတဲ့လူလယ္ၾကီးေတြကို
“သင္တို႕သြားလိုရာသြားႏိုင္ျပီ”ဆိုျပီးအမိန္႕စာျပန္လိုက္ေတာ့
ရြာျပန္၊ျမိဳ႕ျပန္ျပီးေကာင္းေရာင္းေကာင္းဝယ္လုပ္ဖို႕မၾကိဳးစားၾကဘူး။
ဘိန္းကုန္ကူးတယ္။
ခုေတာ့ internet ေခတ္မွာဆိုရွယ္မီဒယာေပၚက
ဗကပနဲ႕အရန္အင္အားတို႕၊လုိလားသူတို႕ပါဝင္တဲ့
“ေလတပ္”ကေတာ့ ”တိုက္အား”
ေကာင္းဆဲ။ပိုက္ဆံေပးရတဲ့Face Book ေပၚရင္ေတာ့
အသံေတြေလ်ာ့သြားမယ္ထင္ရဲ႕။
ရံခါစိတ္ေတြမထိမ္းႏိုငၾ္ကေတာ့တဲ့အခါ…
“စကမ” ၾကီးတို႕ဘာတို႕ဆိုတဲ့
“ဖရုႆ”ဗံုးက်ည္ေပါက္ကြဲသံေတြေတာင္ၾကားလာရတယ္။

ျပည္သူကေတာ့ပမ္းေနျပီ။
တည္ေဆာက္မဲ့၊ေခါင္းေဆာင္
ေကာင္းရာကိုလမ္းျပေခၚေဆာင္
မဲ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္ကိုအားကိုးတယ္။
ခ်က္ခ်င္းမေကာင္းစားႏိုင္ေသးသည့္တိုင္
ေဆာ္ၾကဟ၊ခ်ၾကပါဟဆို႕တဲ့ေနရာကုိျပန္မသြားခ်င္
ၾကေတာ့ဘူး။
ခက္တာက…
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေရးမွာ…
သမိုင္းအရေရာ
လက္ငင္းမွာပါ….
ေဆာက္လုပ္တည္ေထာင္ေရး
ဖက္မွာလူနည္းေနျပီး
ေဆာ္ပါေတာ့လားဟ
ခ်ပါေတာ့လားဟ
ဆိုတဲ့ဖက္မွာဘဲအံုေနတဲ့
ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားေတြမ်ားလွတယ္။

အဲဒါျမန္မာ့အခက္ဘဲ။

Ignorance and Arrogance

Tun Kyaw Nyein

Yangon,

23 September, 2018

This past week UK’s foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt visited Myanmar and delivered a lecture on accountability and justice. Coming from a representative of the nation that has refused to assume accountability for genocides committed on peoples of every continent on this planet for over three centuries, that’s  rich.

Led up the garden path by the “Rohingya lobby” some well-meaning but thoroughly misguided elements among the British academia and civic entities have lately engaged in callow actions such as withdrawal of past honors bestowed on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi followed by vitriolic attacks on her in particular and the Myanmar people in general. Of late, the verbal volleys are coming from the UK top elites with escalating intensity, frequency and rancor. Given the historical context of UK-Myanmar relations, this jarring experience strikes many in Myanmar as eerily familiar. “It is like, déjà vu all over again,” as the American baseball icon Yogi Berra would say.

Dorothy Woodman, Labor MP and author described in her book “The Making of Burma” a duplicitous behavior that the British displayed on the eve of the Annexation of Burma in 1885. In other words, it was the making of an excuse to invade Burma. On 11 October of that year, (835) citizens were invited to a meeting at the Rangoon City Hall. A vast number of the invitees were European with a smattering of Indians, Chinese and Burmese. The following Resolutions were then passed:

1) that the misgovernment in Upper Burma under KingThibaw culminating in the recent massacres, entailed misery and distress on inhabitants of the country

2) that the immediate interference of H.M.G. was absolutely necessary as tranquility and prosperity of British Burma intimately bound up with that of Upper Burma and

3) thus Upper Burma should be annexed or a protectorate established.

That was in 1884 and Britain was a global power at the height of its colonial expansion.

This is now the 21st century and Britain is a spent force arguably in a state of accelerating entropy. The global governance fever has also subsided. Yet the tone and tenor of the British elite and their recent behaviors toward Myanmar bear the same arrogance and ignorance displayed by British colonists a century and a half ago. The justifications then for meddling, colonization and war-making was Kipling’s “white men’s burden” or the “the civilizing mission” used by the French. Today, it is the protection of human rights or the presumed prevention of genocide, a term now creatively expanded to include “slow burning” or “impending” varieties.

Deprecations informed by distorted narratives are deceiving the public, and once enough momentum is achieved, it is possible to push for sanctions and worse that will invariably lead to disasters as in Iraq or Libya.

Now with Donald Trump as President of the United States, the global political landscape has changed.

Today, with the decline of global governance idea, R2P or humanitarian intervention i.e. humanitarian war-making options has become a globalists’ pipe dream. Even ICC itself faces retaliatory action from the US should it make any move against USG personnel.

Yet Jeremy Hunt had the cheek to hurl that empty threat of an ICC referral at Myanmar’s State Councillor. Why? Perhaps Mr. Hunt was grandstanding for the benefit of those to whom he is beholden without contributing anything toward solving the Rakhine problem.

But that is not all. The arrogance of the partisan British, and in particular, their willful ignorance toward the complexity of the Rakhine problem is appalling. After all, it is an issue that their country as former colonial power had helped to create and allowed to fester. Yet the culpability of the British empire with regard to lasting problems in former colonies has been wilfully overlooked or downplayed by British politicians. This seems to be even truer in the times of Brexit when the colonial past gets ever more glorified and Kipling’s colonial prose newly appreciated.

It is obvious that the British representatives had no interest in reading up on the history of Rakhine, about the migration policy of the British raj or the colonial political economy, which benefitted great landowners from Bengal whose demand for cheap labor encouraged mass migration from Chittagong. If they would have read up, they would have been aware that colonial interference had changed the demographic dynamics in Northern Rakhine and set the stage for a perpetual economic, cultural and political conflict between the local Rakhine population and Muslim migrants from Bengal.

If they would be truly interested in lasting political solutions they would also take into account the tragic history of Rakhine during the Second World War and the anything but heroic role of British colonial troops in that saga. After the Japanese occupied the country and Burmese nationalists hoped to gain independence, Rakhine Buddhists massacred Muslims and Muslims massacred Rakhine Buddhists. We know from the witness report of a colonial civil servant with the name Zainuddin that British troops took sides and mistreated Rakhine Buddhists suspected to support the Japanese. In fact, the historian Christopher Bayly recounts in his book “Forgotten Armies” how the commander-in-chief in India, Wavell, began to worry hearing stories about British troops shooting “out of hand” Buddhist Rakhine headmen. Bayly notes laconically that this was reversing the stereotype of “Japanese brutality and British solicitude towards the civilian population.” Toward the end of war, British V-forces armed the Muslims in Northern Rakhine and thus cemented the rift. When the latter began a Mujahid uprising after independence and demanded a separate state, no more trust was left between Buddhist and Muslim communities.

In the last seventy years, different civilian and military governments in Myanmar have tried to solve the problems in Rakhine albeit unsuccessfully. In recent years, the problems, complex as they are, have been compounded by intervening variables such as transnational advocacy groups and religion-based organizations such as OIC attempting to conflate and convert a secular immigration issue into one of sectarian strife.

In any event, given Myanmar’s colonial past, British interlocutors, be they parliamentarians or cabinet officers, are not really in the best position to patronize and display arrogance toward the country and its democratically elected government.

If the British hold a genuine interest in helping refugees who fled to Bangladesh and in assisting Myanmar’s government to improve the economic and human rights situation in Rakhine, it might be a good idea to start with an open mind that wants to learn about the issue from all sides and get to the bottom of its complexity.

Alas, that is not the case.

Seemingly seized by a presumptuous sense of divine right, the leading British media from the Guardian to BBC are bombarding its audience with erroneous and one-sided narratives of the Rakhine problem. Its narrative is plainly put received wisdom and propaganda concocted by an international “Rohingya lobby”, which is funded by oil-soaked members of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC).

The sad truth is that today, the British nation is misrepresented not only by its leading media-outlets, but also by a class of ignorant and arrogant British politicians and MPs, as well as academics and donor-seeking activists. Ironically, they are more often than not beholden to donors with very deep pockets who are dispensing money in pursuit of objectives that have very little to do with human rights or humanitarian causes.