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HEADLINES
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NEWS ON MIGRANTS
Myanmar, Thailand sign MoU against human trafficking
Malaysia To Probe Abuse Claims
Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca without jobs
CHRO: UNHCR To Take Immediate Action Against Abuses In Malaysia
Concern for migrant workers
Phuket Plan Will 'Legalise' 100,000 Burmese
Thailand, Malaysia to act on trafficking of Burmese migrants
No refuge on the southern border
NEWS ON REFUGEES
Karen Refugee Testifies to Junta Crimes
Poison found in refugee camp water supply
Film opens door to refugees' realities
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ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသတင္း
မေလးရွားမွ ျမန္မာလုပ္သားတစ္ဦး လုပ္ငန္းခြင္၌ ေသဆံုး
လူကုန္ကူးသည့္ မေလးရွား အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြမည္
ျမန္မာေတြ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရမႈ မေလးအရာရွိမ်ား ပါ၀င္
နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မည္
ျမန္မာမ်ားလူကုန္ကူး ခံရမႈ စံုစမ္းမည္ဟု မေလးရွားဝန္ၾကီးဂတိျပဳ
ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားသတင္း
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္
ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား "ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ ေရာင္းစားခံရ"
အစုိးရ၏ရာဇဝတ္မႈ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ဖြင့္ခ်
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NEWS ON MIGRANTS
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Myanmar, Thailand sign MoU against human trafficking
BANGKOK, April 25 (TNA)
Myanmar and Thailand have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to fight against human trafficking, especially of women and children, between the two neighbouring countries.
Thailand’s Minister of Social Development and Human Security Issara Somchai said he had signed the agreement with Myanmar Home Affairs Minister Gen. Maung Oo in Myanmar’s administrative capital of Naypyidaw on Friday.
Under the terms of the pact, the two countries will tackle and prevent cross-border trafficking.
A statement issued in Myanmar after the signing of the pact said it covers areas such as prevention, protection, recovery and reintegration of victims, law enforcement and criminal justice, “as well as developing and implementing joint actions between the two countries.”
Mr. Issara said there are now 192 Myanmar currently identified women and children victims of human trafficking in Thailand who will be sent back to their home country as soon as possible.
He said more checkpoints would be set up in the Thai-Myanmar border province of Kanchanaburi to prevent illegal entry of Myanmar nationals as well as to interdict drug smuggling.
According to Mr. Issara, Friday’s agreement will complement a MoU signed in 2003 between the two countries which help prevent human trafficking in the form of labour. (TNA)
http://enews.mcot.net/view.php?id=9646
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Malaysia To Probe Abuse Claims
2009-04-24
A new report prompts Malaysia to investigate persistent allegations that Burmese migrants have suffered gravely, while traffickers act with impunity.
KUALA LUMPUR—Malaysia’s prime minister says his government will investigate a blistering report by a U.S. Senate panel that says thousands of Burmese migrants have been handed over to human traffickers and sent to work in the Thai sex industry.
"We will take appropriate action," Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters. "We do not want Malaysia to be used as a point for human trafficking ... but we need to know more facts."
In Washington, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations issued a report—based on a year-long review—saying illegal Burmese migrants have been deported from Malaysia, handed to human traffickers, and forced to work in brothels, fishing boats, and restaurants in Thailand if they didn’t have enough money to buy their own release.
According to the Senate committee report, "a few thousand" Burmese migrants in recent years might have become victims of extortion and trafficking once they were deported across Malaysia's northern border with Thailand.
"Upon arrival at the Malaysia-Thailand border, human traffickers reportedly take possession of the migrants," the report said.
One unnamed migrant is quoted as saying that women "are sold at a brothel if they look good. If they are not beautiful, they might sell them at a restaurant or housekeeping job."
The report called on Malaysia to investigate and prosecute "the trafficking, selling and slavery of Burmese and other migrants… The prospect that Burmese migrants, having fled the heavy hand of the Burmese junta, only to find themselves in harm’s way in Malaysia seemed beyond belief."
Malaysia’s former home minister, Syed Hamid Albar, earlier dismissed these claims as "wild allegations." But national police chief Musa Hassan said earlier this month that Malaysian and Thai police and immigration officials were investigating the claims.
In a statement, New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Malaysia to "act on this U.S. Senate report to protect the rights of refugees and victims of human trafficking."
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cites the presence of more than 42,300 Burmese refugees in Malaysia as of late March.
Victim describes impunity
Wunna, a 27-year-old Burmese trafficking victim from Rangoon who worked for his traffickers for four months, said his captors appeared to have no fear of the authorities.
"The traffickers maintain bases in Alor Setar, Jitra, and Chunglum," he said in an interview in April, referring to three districts in Malaysia’s Kedah state.
"They said their boss was highly connected to police in these regions. They said they could do whatever they wished," Wunna said.
"When we were handed over to them [by immigration officials], they said they could kill us anytime. One of them said he wouldn’t be charged, arrested, or imprisoned for killing me. He said someone would just come and collect my body, and clean up, and he would stay and work."
Abuses alleged
As RFA's Burmese service reported in January 2008, Burmese migrant workers in Malaysia live at the mercy of international human-trafficking gangs who sell them back and forth as slave labor with the full knowledge of Malaysian and Thai immigration officials.
Thousands of Burmese migrant laborers find themselves stuck in a human rights no-man's-land after losing their legal status, often because employers withhold passports or refuse to pay their return airfare.
Reports of mistreatment and substandard living conditions within Malaysia's little-known immigration prisons are rife, as undocumented migrants are detained for indefinite periods.
Conditions in the detention centers have sparked protests, complaints to Malaysia's human rights body, riots, and breakouts.
Immigration officers often stage raids on suspected illegal immigrants using volunteer security forces, the People's Volunteer Corps (RELA), who have wide-ranging powers, the right to bear arms, and little professional training.
Rights groups say children, pregnant women, and United Nations refugees awaiting resettlement to a third country have all been recently detained in such raids.
Human rights lawyers say that Malaysia's legal system lacks clear distinctions among illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and that immigration officers can imprison anyone without papers.
New tactics?
Irene Fernandez, the founder of Malaysia’s human rights group Tenaganita, said her organization has seen some recent tactical changes.
"Trafficking is continuing," she said, but added:
"In raids [by RELA or immigration police], not all family members are arrested. They leave one or two. So they can go back to them to ask for money to release their relatives. That’s another strategy. They are also already negotiating deals while in detention."
Latifah Koya, a lawyer working with Malaysia Bar Council’s legal aid program, said it was impossible to confirm a reported reduction in trafficking "because the border is tightly controlled—no one is there."
"What we can say is that those who were arrested are still paying to come back,” she added.
U.S. $200 per person
In its most recent report on human rights around the world, the U.S. State Department said reported abuses by RELA "included rape, beatings, extortion, theft, pilfering homes, destroying UN High Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR) and other status documents, and pillaging refugee settlements."
It also cited "credible allegations of immigration officials' involvement in the trafficking of Burmese refugees … along the Malaysia-Thai border."
"Immigration officials allegedly received [about U.S. $200] per person. Several local NGOs estimated immigration officials handed over a significant number of Burmese refugees transported to the border to traffickers," it said.
Informed sources said 20 percent of the victims were unable to pay the ransom and were sold for the purposes of labor or sexual exploitation, it said.
Original reporting by Kyaw Min Htun for RFA's Burmese service. Additional reporting by the Associated Press. RFA Burmese service director: Nancy Shwe. Executive producer: Susan Lavery. Written and produced in English by Sarah Jackson-Han.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/abuse-04242009141550.html
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Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca without jobs
by Mizzima News Friday, 24 April 2009 23:19
New Delhi (Mizzima) – After their agent left them without work in a factory and without any proper legal papers, at least 60 Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca of Malaysia.
Hla Myat Thu, a Burmese woman who is among the 60 people said, they were in a severe situation with no income and restrictions to move out in search of work.
“I want to go back [to Burma], but it is impossible. They [agent] ask for large sums of money and I have no idea, how I can repay all my debts,” she said.
Their tribulations began in November last year, when they were approached by agents, who promised them work at Japanese Konica Company in Malacca, about 150 kms from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur.
However, after arriving in Malaysia and working at the Konica Company for one month in December, they were told there were no more jobs as the company was laying-off employees and possibly would shut-down later.
But, with their passports seized by their agent, who brought them to the company, they were unable to move out of the factory.
Hla Myat Thu said, they were all together 132 people, but the 60 of them had been living without jobs, for nearly four months.
“Under our contract, the company is to give us 500 Ringgit [approximately 140 USD] per month, but it is given through our agent. So, we are given only about 20 to 30 Ringgits per month,” she said.
For the past three months, they have been feeding themselves on a poor diet and frequently they have had to look out for fruits and vegetables in the nearby neighbourhood.
She said, the agent had agreed to take them to Malaysia for Kyat 1 million [USD 833] per person. However, the agent had earlier agreed to take them with only half the amount and agreed to cut the rest from their salary once they begun work.
“So, since the company continues to give money, the agent does not allow us to go out of the company, even though we do not have any more work,” she added.
Hla Myat Thu, who is a resident of Myingyan Town in Mandalay Division of Burma, said she and her cousin had to ask her relatives back home to send them money for their livelihood.
“Whenever, we ask the agents to let us go, they say we would need to give them 3500 Ringgits [approximately USD 1,000] to allow us to leave,” she said.
Meanwhile, the company and the agents were unreachable for comment. Such incidents where agents betray or use Burmese workers are not uncommon, according to Zaw Myint, in-charge of Malaysia branch of the National League for Democracy – Liberated Area (NLD-LA).
Zaw Myint said, such cases were frequent in Malaysia, where there was an estimated 500,000 Burmese workers.
“Many agents trick their clients and sometimes even sell them off if they fail to pay their fees to bring them to Malaysia,” he said.
Despite the difficulties and precarious conditions, Burmese workers continue to find Malaysia a good destination to look for jobs.
“Due to our country’s situation, more people are still coming here despite the many struggles that they face,” said Zaw Myint.
But, United States’ Ranking Minority Member, Richard Lugar, in a report he submitted to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 3, said the hostile treatment of Malaysian authorities towards Burmese migrants, made them vulnerable to human traffickers.
The report entitled ‘Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand’ reveals that Burmese migrants in Malaysia were victims of extortion and human trafficking in Malaysia and Southern Thailand.
The report said, Malaysian authorities often arrest Burmese migrants and reportedly deport them to the Malaysia-Thailand border, where they are taken possession of by human traffickers and issued ransom demands on an individual basis.
Freedom for these migrants is only possible by handing over the money demanded, the report said. And those failing to meet the demands were turned over to human peddlers in Thailand, representing a variety of business interests, ranging from fishing boats to brothels.
Reporting by Solomon, writing and additional information by Mungpi
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2014-burmese-migrants-remain-trapped-in-malacca-without-jobs.html
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CHRO: UNHCR To Take Immediate Action Against Abuses In Malaysia
Van Biak Thang
Chinland Guardian
26 April, 2009
Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) has urged Kuala Lumpur-based UNHCR to take immediate action on behalf of detained Chin refugees and asylum seekers against the ongoing mistreatment and abuses inflicted upon migrants from Burma by the Malaysian authorities.
The Malaysian authorities have been criticised for its continuation of conducting raids and ‘bad treatment’ on refugees in Malaysia despite a recent report Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand by the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, documenting and disclosing the 'ill-treatment and rough handling' against the migrants.
CHRO’s report last Friday said: "The report findings include the involvement of Malaysian officials in the arrest, detention, and extortion of Burmese migrants and refugees; mistreatment of detainees in detention facilities, including whippings and torture; and the transfer of Burmese migrants and refugees to traffickers for payment. Burmese migrants and refugees in the hands of traffickers are subject to further extortion and mistreatment and are at risk of being sold into the fishing or sex industry."
The report is based on a one-year investigation by the Senate Committee and includes information provided by NGOs, including CHRO, as well as first-hand testimony from trafficking victims.
Salai Bawi Lian Mang, Executive Director of CHRO, said: “Chin refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia have long been subject to abuse and exploitation by Malaysian officials and their operatives. We appreciate this initiative by the U.S. government and hope it will put pressure on the Malaysian government to act responsibly towards migrants and refugees living within its borders.”
The Malaysian authorities rounded up and detained some 300 migrants, including small children, during raids in the Imbi neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur late Wednesday night. Over 100 Chin refugees and asylum seekers are among those arrested, including 14 children and two pregnant women. The authorities have been conducting similar raids throughout the city with increasing frequency during this past month.
The 106 Chin refugees and asylum seekers caught up in the raids earlier this week are currently being held in Bukit Jali police station. Kennedy Lal Ram Lian, coordinator of the Chin Refugee Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia said: “No one has been released, not even UNHCR card holders.” More than 10 Chin detainees are UNHCR-recognized refugees awaiting resettlement to a third country. If they are deported to the border, they are at risk of being sold to traffickers.
The Chin community represents one of the largest refugee communities from Burma living in Malaysia. For more than ten years, the Chin people have fled to Malaysia to escape persecution, torture, and severe oppression in Burma. In Malaysia they are they are the constant target of harassment, arrest, detention, and deportation by the Malaysian authorities. They are unable to work, receive an education, access healthcare services, or find acceptable living accommodations.
http://www.chinlandguardian.com/index.php/Home/433
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Concern for migrant workers
26/04/2009 at 12:00 AM
Governments, labour representatives and academics yesterday urged that more attention be paid to migrant workers as concern was growing about their fate in the face of the economic crisis.
They urged closer consultation before any action is taken on contract termination, especially when it involved women.
The group should not be ignored by the stimulus and recovery packages being introduced to help people affected by the financial downturn, the participants of the 10 countries, including Thailand, said in a statement issued at the end of their meeting organised by the UN Development Fund for Women (Unifem) and the International Labour Organisation yesterday.
Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region rely heavily on foreign workers, especially women. Unifem has expressed concern that migrant female workers could be a prime target when the economic slump forces factories and business firms to cut the workforce.
"The loss of women's income has long-term negative implications, on poor families in particular, because of the stable contribution women make to the current household income," Unifem quoted Jean D'Cunha, regional programme director of the East and Southeast Asian regional office, as saying.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/15682/concern-for-migrant-workers
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Phuket Plan Will 'Legalise' 100,000 Burmese
By Chutima Sidasathian and Alan Morison
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A SO-CALLED ''working visa'' is to be established for up to 100,000 illegal and legal Burmese under a plan to control labor numbers on Phuket.
The idea, already being termed the ''Phuket model,'' will enable Burmese to register and be given an ID from local administrators at Provincial Hall.
Employers will be responsible for making sure their workers go to be fingerprinted and photographed as part of the ID process.
The decision to introduce the new system appears to be a breakthrough that could reduce the need for illicit labor on Phuket, and possibly also minimise human trafficking.
The Burmese workers will have to have health checks, and make social security and health contributions at a higher rate than Thais.
Burmese illegals have always been seen as a drain on the Thai system. On Phuket, Burmese workers are obliged to obey an 8pm curfew and forbidden from using mobile telephones or motorcycles.
Construction company bosses have been urging the change because their needs have not been diminished by the world economic downturn.
Phuket Governor Wichai Praisa-Nob has given his approval to the ''working visa'' idea and says the problem had been a big one for Phuket.
The process was a kind of ''pardon'' for the construction and fishing industries, and it could bring huge change, he said.
Once the national government approves the ''working visa'' Phuket model in a Cabinet meeting, it will become the first of its kind in Thailand.
Last week a 25-member investigating Labor Commission, headed by Phuket MP Laywat Areerob, heard about the problems of Phuket in meetings at Provincial Hall.
A decision to rapidly implement the concept to meet the island's needs quickly emerged.
At present, 29,000 registered Burmese work on the island under a quota system that has been criticised for years as inadequate.
Construction companies have made the point that they keep illegal Burmese workers in small camps of up to 30 families, so that if discovered, their labor losses and fines are minimised.
It would be more effective for administration and health to have the workers in larger camps, the official inquiry was told last week.
A form of temporary work-based ID for Burmese has been in use in the northern border town of Ranong, capital of the province of the same name.
There, the Burmese population is of such a size that local supermarkets have signage in Thai, English and Burmese. Burmese even run their own underground schools.
At this stage, the ''working visa'' concept will only apply to the construction and fishing industries, and a date for its introduction depends on a Cabinet decision.
The plight of illegal Burmese and Rohingya boat people has received attention since the suffocation of 54 Burmese in a container truck in April last year and reports in January of brutal ''push-backs'' from Thailand in which hundreds died.
http://phuketwan.com/property/phuket-plan-legalise-100000-burmese-11038/
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Thailand, Malaysia to act on trafficking of Burmese migrants
by Usa Pichai Sunday, 26 April 2009 23:30
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The government of Thailand signed an anti-human trafficking understanding with the Burmese junta on Friday even as the Malaysian Prime Minister vowed to act against human trafficking of Burmese migrants.
Issara Somchai, Thailand’s Minister of Social Development and Social Security signed a memorandum of understanding with his Burmese counterpart Major General Maung Oo, Minister of Interior in Naypyidaw, Burma’s capital on anti-human trafficking, particularly women and children.
The agreement is to be used as a framework to protect and help the victims of human traffickers from both countries, according to reports from Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security on Friday.
Issara Somchai said that the current economic crisis would increase mass migration in the region which would encourage human traffickers to benefit from the migrants.
“The agreement focused on cooperation, on protection and support to the victims of traffickers which include repatriation to their homeland,” he said.
In addition the MOU is also linked to the previous agreement in 2004 between the two countries on protection of human trafficking of migrant labourers, which attempt organized a migrant labour management to solve the illegal migration problem.
The human trafficking of Burmese migrants also sparked the issue between the Malaysian government and US lawmakers. However, the details of the managements attempt have not been revealed yet.
On Friday, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak vowed to investigate a scathing report by U.S. lawmakers saying thousands of Burmese refugees were handed over to human traffickers and ended up working in brothels, fishing boats and restaurants across the border in Thailand if they had no money to purchase their freedom.
The report was based on a yearlong review by committee staff who spoke to migrants from Burma and human rights activists.
"We will take appropriate action," Najib said. "We do not want Malaysia to be used as a point for human trafficking ... but we need to know more facts," according to a report by Associated Press on Saturday.
According to the Senate committee report, "a few thousand" Burmese migrants in recent years might have become victims of extortion and trafficking once they were deported across Malaysia's northern border with Thailand.
Earlier this year, former Malaysian Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar dismissed claims of human trafficking at the border as "wild allegations." But national police chief Musa Hassan said earlier this month that Malaysian and Thai police and immigration officials were investigating the claims.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Malaysia's government should act on this U.S. Senate report to protect the rights of refugees and victims of human trafficking.
The U.N. refugee agency has registered 47,600 refugees living in Malaysia as of the end of March of whom 42,300 are from Burma.
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2019-thailand-malaysia-to-act-on-trafficking-of-burmese-migrants.html
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No refuge on the southern border
By: Erika Fry
Published: 26/04/2009 at 12:00 AM
Reports of organised human trafficking and extortion by Malaysian immigration officials, while Thailand turns a blind eye, are too credible to ignore.
It's hard to know when a nightmare truly begins, and while caught in its grim unreality, when it will ever end.
Lian (not his real name) is a 25-year old ethnic Chin man who fled his home in Burma out of fear of the military in September, 2006. He had been a truck driver, but often encountered Burmese soldiers who demanded - regardless of his duty to deliver the day's haul - that he drive them places. One day, he was taking some soldiers to a village when he ran out of petrol. The soldiers believed he had done so on purpose and they broke his windscreen and beat him, leaving a scar still plain to see above his left eye.
Lian's story was made available to Spectrum by Amy Alexander, an advocacy officer with the Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) who interviewed him. According to the case study, Lian was taken to an army camp and his ID was confiscated. When he was released, the soldiers' goods had been stolen from his truck and they blamed him for the loss.
Lian fled and came to Thailand, where he couldn't find a job and where an agent told him he should go to Malaysia to claim refugee status with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Thai refugee camps do not register ethnic Chin, and have not officially processed new refugees for several years.
He went to Malaysia and sought out the UNHCR office, but a security guard there turned him away for lack of documents. Despite visiting the premises every day for two weeks, he never figured out how to get access to a UNHCR officer.
He was arrested a year or so later in a 3am immigration raid, put barefoot on a lorry and sent to a detention centre where detainees were not given fresh clothes and told they could only drink the bath water.
One night a month later he was taken with a busload of 73 other refugees and migrants to the Thai-Malaysia border. Immigration officials took them to a jungle area where a handful of brokering agents who spoke Malay and Thai were waiting in cars.
The group was told these agents had already bought them from the immigration officials and they were packed under blankets, 15 to a car, and driven 15 minutes to another jungle area, this time in Thailand.
Here there was a big tent with more agents, patrolled by several guards with guns. They were told, "If you can get money sent to us, then we can get you where you need to go. If not, you'll have problems."
Lian could not immediately get the money (the agents call relatives or contacts of the refugees and migrants and arrange a transfer), and so he spent six days in the camp in which he was beaten, underfed and kept in the tent.
He eventually reached a friend in Kuala Lumpur who was able to transfer the necessary 2,000 RM (19,600 baht) to the agents' account that night. With that, he was free to leave, and an agent led him and a group of 13 others back into Malaysia on foot. They were climbing over the border fence into the country when they were intercepted and drew fire from Malaysian border guards. They scattered in the jungle and regrouped the next morning. The agent had left them and the group was soon picked up by a vehicle that took them to a police station inside Malaysia.
They were put back in detention, this time in a facility that held 300 people per cell. Lian was shuffled to a few other detention centres before he was again deported to Thailand three months later. This time the immigration bus took 93 people to the border in the dark of night.
"When the immigration bus stopped, four agents came out from the jungle and met the bus. The authorities opened our handcuffs and told us to follow the agents," said Lian.
The agents walked them through the jungle until they reached a large river, where a boat was waiting. They were ferried across the river to yet more agents, who separated them into groups of those that could pay, and those that couldn't.
Lian called the same friend, who promised to pay the 1,900 RM and in the same way he had come to the camp, he was shuttled back by agents to Kuala Lumpur.
Lian now lives in fear in the jungle on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. He has a Chin refugee card, but as yet no documentation from the UNHCR, which has temporarily closed its registration for refugees, and no immediate hopes for resettlement.
THE REVOLVING DOOR As exhausting, costly and unfortunate as the story of Lian's asylum-seeking journey is, his experience of being bounced around borders and cycled through prisons and detention centres is by no means atypical among the many refugees and migrants from Burma that seek better lives in Thailand and Malaysia.
And also apparently common, though not well publicised, are cases in which migrants and refugees in the hands of Malaysian immigration officials experience extortion and trafficking at the Thai-Malaysia border. In most cases the refugees and migrants buy their way back to Malaysia by arranging the payment of the agent's 1,200 to 2,000 RM (11,800 to 19,600 baht) ransom fee. When they can't find the money or the friend to make this payment, they are reportedly sold to Thai fishing boats, brothels, and factories.
While human rights and ethnic Burmese community-based organisations, as well as a handful of media outlets in Malaysia have documented these cases for years (they refer to the Thai-Malaysian border as "the revolving door"), the allegations have never prompted more than staunch denials by Malaysian authorities and complete disregard from their Thai counterparts. Some analysts say the issue has never received significant attention in Thailand because of the turbulent environment in the nation's South.
Monitors of the situation are hopeful that this will soon change, thanks in part to the release of a report prepared for the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations - Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand - earlier this month.
The report, which is based on a year-long investigation and which involved a number of personal interviews similar to Lian's case study, alleges that Malaysian officials have been complicit in the extortion and human trafficking of a few thousand Burmese refugees at the Thai-Malaysian border. Investigators also found many cases in which migrants had been sexually assaulted or had their rights abused during the arrest/detention/deportation cycle.
While the report does not directly implicate the involvement of Thai officials, it does suggest a sizeable, well-established network of human traffickers operates rather unabashedly, and in cooperation with Malaysian officials, along Thailand's southern border. Activities documented in the report centre around the Thai border city of Sungai Golok and Malaysia's Kelantan state, as well as Padang Besar in Malaysia's Peris state.
Those familiar with the report say it focuses mainly on Malaysia, because the information that prompted the investigation came from Burmese populations and human rights organisations in Malaysia.
Phil Robertson, a researcher on migration in Southeast Asia who has studied the issue, said, "What this is pointing out is something that has evidently been going on for a long time."
He adds, "I was told two years ago by UNHCR staff in Malaysia that there were persons of concern [refugees] that had files and they disappeared for three or four years. They'd come back and tell these stories. I've met fishermen in Mahachai that speak of jungle camps ringed in barbed wired and men with guns, and being sold to fishermen.
"This is not something new. It's only new that the international community is finally turning attention to this longtime lawless border."
He says it is now the obligation of the Malaysian and Thai governments to act on the report.
"Malaysian immigration officials and RELA [Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia, Malaysia's 500,000-strong civilian immigration corps, which has the power to investigate and arrest all suspected illegal immigrants] are directly implicated in selling people. This is criminal behavior and it warrants being investigated and prosecuted.
"While the Thai side gets less focus in this report, it takes two to tango. At minimum, the Thai government must mount an impartial investigation into the holding of these vast numbers of people. To not do so would be complicit in trafficking."
He adds that "both countries have good, clear anti-trafficking laws. The culture of impugnity must come to an end."
Information collected by investigators, and which has been forwarded on to law enforcement agencies, paints an absurdly complete picture of the criminal network. Details provided to the committee during interviews, previously published in media and NGO documents, and includes names of persons to whom the ransom payments were allegedly made; payment locations in Malaysia and Thailand; bank account numbers to which extortion payments are deposited; locations along the Thailand-Malaysia border where migrants are reportedly take by Malaysian officials; and the identification of people allegedly involved in the trafficking of migrants and refugees.
The agents are believed to be Thai, Malay and Burmese of a variety of ethnicities. In some reports, refugees at the border were sorted according to ethnicity.
Victims include Burmese refugees and migrants of numerous ethnicities including Chin, Rohingya, Shan and Mon who come to Malaysia to seek work or UNHCR documentation for third-country resettlement. Most are arrested in large-scale, late night raids conducted by the RELA. The organisation has been described as fascist and in the past members reportedly received a bounty for each arrest they made. In many cases, refugees have had their UNHCR documentation discarded and personal property confiscated or lost completely.
LIVING IN FEAR Malaysia does not recognise refugees, but it does allow the UNHCR to operate in the country to process and resettle them. Accordingly, many refugees from Burma take the risk of travelling to Malaysia in the hopes of reaching the UNHCR before immigration officials reach them. As of January 2009, there were 27,000 "persons of concern" from Burma registered with the UNHCR in Malaysia; it is believed there are at least 30,000 more waiting to be processed.
"It still happens that people with documents, and within weeks of resettlement, will be rounded up and deported. What's ironic is that Malaysia is hostile to refugees that are trying to get out of Malaysia," said Ms Alexander of the CHRO, who in addition to Lian interviewed a number of Chin refugees that have experienced the arrest/detention/deportation cycle. She noted that it is also common for employers to hire migrants and then call in RELA for a raid a few days before their scheduled payment.
Once arrested by RELA, the migrants and refugees (children too) are generally detained in facilities with overcrowded and generally poor conditions. Deportation to a "jungle camp" at the Thai-Malaysia border usually follows several months later.
As for the policy logic behind the deportation of Burmese refugees to the Thai border, Mr Robertson said, "these structures and systems are only as sophisticated as they need to be. The fundamental issue was that someone wanted to get these people out, and somewhere along the way, people figured out how to make money off of it."
Unsurprisingly, these activities have only exacerbated the economic hardship and considerable level of fear migrants and refugees face.
When migrants cannot pay their ransom fees, families are split apart and sold to different industries. Little is known about the fate of the children at the border.
Another woman Ms Alexander interviewed who had been deported with her young daughter was told by agents: "Do you want to die here or do you want to be sold to a Thai night club? If you want to stay here, you will be the only woman and there is no guaranteeing what can happen to you."
Because of these ordeals, migrants and refugees in Malaysia live in fear - often hiding in the jungle or barely leaving their of homes - because of the country's peculiar immigration policy.
To help cope with these problems, Ms Alexander says migrants and refugees living in Malaysia have formed highly organised communities and networks of support that can be mobilised and try to scrape together sufficient funds to free a community member who gets caught up at the border.
She is hopeful the US Senate committee's report will provide an impetus for a sustainable solution to their problems.
"Right now, Malaysia is still issuing denials and insisting these are just the lies of international governments. But the accounts are credible - there are just so many. This is so systematic, it has happened so many times, to so many people."
While Malaysian officials responded defensively to the US investigation and denied all allegations, there has recently been a turnover in Malaysia's immigration ranks and a police investigation into the matter was reportedly launched on April 1.
Even so, the raids continue. Ms Alexander received word earlier this week that another 300 refugees and migrants had been arrested and detained earlier this week. Among the group are pregnant women, a number of children, and UNHCR documented asylum-seekers.
The Royal Thai Police did not respond to requests for information pertaining to this article in time for publication.
This is the first part in a series about human trafficking of Burmese refugees and migrants at the Thai-Malaysia borde
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/15714/no-refuge-on-the-southern-border
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NEWS ON REFUGEES
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Karen Refugee Testifies to Junta Crimes
By LALIT K JHA Friday, April 24, 2009
WASHINGTON—A Karen woman based in the United States on Thursday called on the US Congress and the Obama administration to push the UN Security Council to establish an international inquiry into crimes against humanity committed by Burma’s military junta against its own people.
Giving graphic details of the some of the human rights violations the junta has perpetrated, particularly against ethnic communities and in this case against her and her family, Karen refugee Myra Dahgaypaw told a Congressional committee that the Burmese regime must be held accountable for all the crimes it has committed.
A member of the Karen Women’s Organization and a board member of the Karen American Communities Foundation, Dahgaypaw testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which had convened a Congressional hearing on human rights abuses in Burma.
“I urge members of Congress and the new US administration to support and push for a UN Security Council Commission of Inquiry into the regime’s crimes against humanity and system of impunity,” she said.
Demanding that the military regime be held accountable for the crimes it commits against the people of Burma, Dahgaypaw urged the international community to continue to pressure the junta into ceasing all human rights abuses and violence against civilians.
She said the Burmese army often uproots an entire village in just a few minutes, and sends the villagers running with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Then the Burmese troops place landmines around the area to ensure villagers remain on the run and do not return to their homes, she said. Today, Eastern Burma is one of the world’s most heavily mined areas.
“After villagers are forced from their villages, they live minute by minute, like nomads. They eat what they find in the jungle, and often go to bed hungry. They are always on the move, children in tow. They live in constant fear of the military,” she said.
“According to my personal experience, my family and I had nothing. We didn’t have food to eat, places to sleep or enough clothes [to wear], a situation made more difficult when it was cold or raining. We were constantly running from regime troops and we hid in the caves, bushes and jungle. The places we called ‘homes’ were burnt down many times a year. I will never forget sleeping with half of my body in the rain and the other half under a plastic tarp,” an emotionally choked Dahgaypaw said.
As humanitarian organizations could not get past the military regime to reach such people, Dahgaypaw said there was not enough food or medicine.
“I suffered from malaria, flu and other diseases many times a year. Many of my cousins died from malaria and other diseases,” she said.
“There were many times we had no food to eat. Sometimes, we had only one can of rice to feed seven family members. The older people didn’t eat. Instead they gave the rice to my sister and I because we were the youngest. We survived by eating bamboo shoots from the jungle. Sometimes we had to go to bed without any food in our stomachs,” Dahgaypaw said.
She emphasized to the committee that her story was neither unique nor exclusive to her ethnic community alone.
“There are several other ethnic groups besides the Karen. Each one of them also faces oppression and displacement at the hands of the Burmese military regime that will force them to live as IDPs [internally displaced persons] or to flee to the borders and other countries,” she said.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=15526
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Poison found in refugee camp water supply
by Daniel Pedersen Friday, 24 April 2009 12:17
Mae Sot (Mizzima) - Unidentified offenders used weed killers to poison the water supply of the Mae La refugee camp on April 11.
The camp, on the Thai-Burma border, home to more than 30,000 people, was bereft of water for four days, as pumps and water treatment plants were sent to Bangkok for analysis and scrubbing.
No deaths were reported, although a number of people were said to have fallen ill with vomiting and diarrhea.
The water supplied to the camp is pumped from underneath the Mae Yuam River, which runs through the camp.
It is then pumped to a high point near the camp’s northern end and gravity fed to tap stations and wells throughout the sprawling bamboo shanty-town.
Empty broad-spectrum herbicide containers were discovered near the pumping station on the morning of April 11. Camp residents were immediately warned not to drink any water drawn from wells throughout the camp.
One camp resident, who asked not to be named, said there was great dismay when the discovery was made.
But more sinister rumours spread throughout the settlement when old, faded and empty poison canisters were found nearby, suggesting that dumping the weed killer into the camp’s water supply might have been a long-term project.
Some people in the camp are convinced they will be dead within six months.
An official head count at Mae La in 2005 put the population at 52,000.
Since then 18,000 people have been relocated to third countries, but camp residents said the population really remained static, because there were more people arriving all the time.
The Mae Yuam River runs north through Mae La camp and then feeds the Moei River to the west, passing through the Karen National Liberation Army’s Seventh Brigade region.
This month’s poisoning scare is not the first. About five years ago a Burmese national was caught at the main elevated holding tanks with containers of poison. He was nabbed before he could carry out his plan to poison the water.
The Thai camps, considered temporary havens for people displaced by fighting in Burma, have long been a touchy bilateral issue between Thailand and Burma on the international stage.
The ruling Burmese military junta claims they serve dual roles, as a breeding ground for insurgents and a place for KNLA soldiers to hide and be fed when not active.
An investigation is underway, but as yet there have been no arrests.
Asked who he thought could have been responsible, a senior camp administrator said it was anybody’s guess.
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2011-poison-found-in-refugee-camp-water-supply.html
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Film opens door to refugees' realities
By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer
First published in print: Monday, April 27, 2009
Have you heard of the Kunama? Don't be embarrassed if you haven't. The Kunama are a tiny ethnic group from Eritrea, which is a country many people haven't heard of, either.
A war between their Eritrea and neighboring Ethiopia, about 60,000 of the Kunama ended up spending years in vast and oppressive refugee camps. The Kunama have traditionally farmed their fertile homeland in northeastern Africa.
The new film "Home Across Lands" follows the struggles and successes of one extended Kunama family that finally resettled in Rhode Island.
On Wednesday, the Albany office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees & Immigrants will screen the movie at the University at Albany's Page Hall on Western Avenue.
"We hope to raise awareness about refugees and their process of resettling," said Zoeann Murphy, director of the Albany office of USCRI. "Refugees bring to Albany incredible stories and experiences and an incredible work ethic."
A refugee is a person who leaves his or her home country to avoid danger or persecution based on religion, ethnicity or political affiliation. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 31 million people worldwide are classified as refugees and in need of services.
Most of the recently resettled refugees in the Capital Region have come from Burma, Iraq or Bhutan, but many also come from the Congo, Afghanistan and Sudan.
Once the State Department approves a refugee's move to the United States, he or she is processed through one of the 35 USCRI field and satellite offices nationwide.
"We accept refugees based on our capacity, the languages we have on staff and the communities that already exist," said Murphy. "There is already a large and strong Burmese community in Albany, so it makes sense for them to come here."
In 2005, the Albany USCRI field office processed 50 refugees. In 2008, it handled 350 and is on track to do so again this year, Murphy said.
Once the refugees arrive, the government will help them for a limited time. Refugees are expected to pay back their plane tickets to the United States, so they look for work and a place to live immediately, as well as enroll their children in school, learn their way around the public transportation system and figure out where to get food. If you think you're stressed out running daily errands, try doing it in a strange land where you don't speak the language.
Zaw Min arrived in Albany from Burma in 2000, after spending years on the run from his government for political activism.
"It was democracy for a couple years and then back to a military dictatorship, so I got to run away, because they looked for whoever was in that movement," said Min, 35.
When Min arrived, there were few services for refugees. Now, he's a case manager at USCRI and specializes in helping Burmese families.
"If this agency no exist, the refugees don't know what they're going to do with themselves," he said.
USCRI is always in need of volunteers who can help guide refugee families through some of these struggles.
"Mentors help them practice English, use the bus, take care of their mail," said Jen Barkan, resource manager at USCRI. "They need to be shown simple things, like not to leave their thermostat at 85, or what mail is junk and what's important."
In addition to drawing mentors and volunteers, Barkan hopes that the film will make for a friendlier community.
"You might see them at the grocery store," said Barkan. "We want to let people know that they need friends and unstructured support."
In making "Home Across Lands," director John Lavall aimed to show the universality of issues that affect refugees.
"They were farmers who didn't have anything to do with the war other than they were originally from that area," said Lavall, who is based in Providence, R.I, where the family resettled. "People in refugee camps are just like you and me. They want to go home. But they can't, because they will be killed."
The screening of the film is meant as a promotion of World Refugee Day. The local celebration will be at 5 p.m. June 20 at Emma Willard in Troy. Tickets are $95 for an individual or $175 per couple.
"The U.N. encourages people from all over the world to celebrate this event, so we want a lot of people to come," said Murphy. "We're hoping to raise money for utilities and rent for refugees. The more direct support we can give them, the better."
Danielle Furfaro can be reached at 454-5097 or by e-mail at dfurfaro@timesunion.com.
Screening
"Home Across Lands"
Where: Page Hall, 135 Western Ave., Albany
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 29
Cost: $10 suggested donation
Note: World Refugee Day will be held on June 20 at Emma Willard in Troy.
Contact: For more information, please visit http://www.Refugees Albany.org.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=794240&TextPage=2
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ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသတင္း
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မေလးရွားမွ ျမန္မာလုပ္သားတစ္ဦး လုပ္ငန္းခြင္၌ ေသဆံုး
ခြန္ေအာင္ျမတ္။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
ထုိင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ေရာဂါျဖစ္ပြားမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္သျဖင့္ စခန္း ထဲတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ဒုကၡသည္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးက အမိန္႕ထုတ္လုိက္သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၁ ရက္ေန႕က ထုိင္းက်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနသည္ မယ္ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းသို႕ လာေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီး ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးေရာဂါ ျဖစ္ပြားမည့္ အလားအလာရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုသျဖင့္ ယေန႕မွစ၍ စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မွဴးက ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္ သည္ဟု ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး အခရဖန္ ဖြန္စီက ေျပာသည္။
“ၾကက္ႏွစ္ေကာင္ေသတယ္။ အဲဒါ က်န္းမာေရးဌာနကို ပို႕ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးေတာ့ ဘာမွမျဖစ္ဘူး တဲ့။ အခုစခန္းထဲမွာ ၾကက္ေတြ ေပးမေမြးေတာ့ဘူး။ ၾကက္ေမြးတဲ့သူေတြကို သတိေပးထားတယ္။ မေမြးၾကဖို႕စခန္းထဲမွာ။ စစ္ေဆးလို႕ ေတြ႕တယ္ဆိုရင္ အကုန္ရွင္းပစ္မွာပဲ။ ၾကက္ေတြကိုလည္း ရွင္းမယ္ အေရးလည္းယူမယ္။ ေသတဲ့ၾကက္က သံသယရွိလို႕ပါ။”
ယေန႕နံနက္တြင္ စခန္းအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စခန္းတြင္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးသူမ်ား စခန္္းျပင္သို႕ သြားေမြးရန္ ေလာ္စပီ ကာျဖင့္ သတိေပးေၾကညာသည္ဟု စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးမွဴးက ေျပာသည္။
“အခု လက္ရွိ ၾကက္ေမြးေနတဲ့လူေတြကေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရးအေျခအေနကေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံက ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ဆရာ၀န္တေယာက္က လာၿပီးေတာ့ အဲသလို ဒီေနရာ လူေနမႈ ထူထပ္တယ္။ ဒီေနရာ စိုးရိမ္စရာ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ အစည္းအေ၀းထဲမွာ သူပိတ္သြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ ပလပ္(စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး)ကို သူအေၾကာင္းၾကားတယ္။ ပလပ္မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။ ဒီေန႕မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။”
ယေန႕နံနက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ႏွင့္စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးတို႕ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈမ်ားကို လုိက္လံ စစ္ေဆးေနသည္ဟု ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးပညာေပးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဒုကၡသည္တဦးက “ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားေတာ့ သိၾကတယ္။ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးနဲ႕ပတ္သက္လို႕ရွိရင္ေလ။ ဒါေပမယ္ ပထမအရင္ တေခါက္ကေတာ့ မေမြးဖို႕ ေျပာၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ၾကာေတာ့ ၾကာေနၿပီေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခု သူတို႕ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း လူနည္းစုပဲ။ အခု အဲဒီဟာကို အားလံုးကို ျပန္ေဖ်ာက္ခိုင္းတာပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ စားတာ ကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ စားေနၾကတာပဲ။ ၾကက္သားေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ ေရာင္းတယ္။ ထိုင္းၾကက္ေတြေလ ထုိင္း ေတြ သူတို႕လာေရာင္းတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီေမြးတာကိုက်ေတာ့ သူတို႕ပိတ္တယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၂ ႏွစ္ကတည္းက စခန္းတြင္း ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈ ပိတ္ပင္ထားခဲ့သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕ကလည္း မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္မွ ထုတ္ေ၀သည့္ ခဲဆိပ္ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ လူသံုးကုန္ပစၥည္းႏွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းေဆးအပါအ၀င္ ပစၥည္း ၉ မ်ဳိးကို သံုးစြဲျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ပိတ္ပင္ ထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news240409.html
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လူကုန္ကူးသည့္ မေလးရွား အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြမည္
ကိုဝုိင္း စေနေန႔၊ ဧၿပီလ 25 2009 22:47 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ခ်င္းမုိင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ)။ ။ မေလးရွားတြင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံ ေရာင္းစားေနေသာ မေလး အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို ဥပေဒေၾကာင္းအရ တရားစြဲဆိုႏိုင္ရန္ အန္ဂ်ီအို ေခၚ အစိုးရ မဟုတ္ေသာ အဖဲြ႔မ်ားက စီစဥ္ေနသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ အေျမာက္အျမားရွိေနေၾကာင္း အေထာက္အထားမ်ား အခုိင္အမာ ရွိေနကာ သက္ဆုိင္ရာ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြဆိုေရးအတြက္ မိမိတို႔ အပါအဝင္ အန္ဂ်ီအို ၄ ဖြဲ႔က မေလး-ထိုင္း နယ္စပ္၌ လူကုန္ကူးမႈ တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ အစိုးရက မည္သို႔ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည္ကို ေလ့လာၿပီး အေသးစိတ္ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ား စုေဆာင္းေနေၾကာင္း မေလးရွား ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားေကာင္စီ လက္ေအာက္ရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မတီက ေျပာဆိုျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
“အစိုးရက ဖြဲ႔ထားတဲ့ The Council for Anti-Trafficking (လူကုန္ကူးမႈ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး ေကာင္စီ) ကို ေရွ႕ေနေကာင္စီက သြားေတြ႔ၿပီးေတာ့ က်မတို႔ရဲ႕ အေထာက္အထားေတြ မၾကာမီ တင္မွာပါ။ သူတို႔ ဘာေတြ လုပ္ေပးႏိုင္မလဲဆိုတာ ေမးျမန္း ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရပါမယ္။ သူတို႔က ဘာမွ ေဆာင္ရြက္မေပးဘူးဆိုရင္ က်မတို႔က လႊတ္ေတာ္ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ အစိုးရထဲမွာ လံႈ႔ေဆာ္မႈေတြ လုပ္သြားပါမယ္” ဟု ေကာ္မတီ အတြင္းေရးမႉး Ms. Renoka က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွားရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမား အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC) မွ တြဲဖက္အတြင္းေရးမႉး ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က “က်ေနာ္တို႔နဲ႔ အန္ဂ်ီအို ၄ ဖြဲ႔ တြဲဖက္လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔လက္ထဲမွာ သက္ေသေတြ ရွိေနၿပီ။ ဒီမွာက က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလုပ္သမားအဖြဲ႔ဟာ တရားမဝင္အေနနဲ႔ ရပ္တည္ထားတာပါ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အဖြဲ႔အေနနဲ႔ တရားစြဲလို႔ မရဘူး။ ဒီႏိုင္ငံမွာရွိတဲ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးတို႔၊ migrant workers (ေရႊ႔ေျပာင္းလုပ္သား) အခြင့္အေရးတို႔ လိုက္လုပ္ေပးေနတဲ့၊ မွတ္ပံုတင္ထားတဲ့ မေလးရွား အန္ဂ်ီအိုေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီး တရားစြဲဖို႔ လုပ္ေနတယ္” ဟု မဇၥ်ိမကုိ ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွား ရဲႏွင့္ လူဝင္မႈၾကီးၾကပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔မွ အက်င့္ပ်က္ဝန္ထမ္းမ်ားက ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး၍ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံ တဦးလွ်င္ မေလးရွား ရင္းဂစ္ေငြ ၂,၅ဝဝ-၂,၈ဝဝ ျဖင့္ မေလးရွား ပိုင္နက္အတြင္း၌ ျပန္ေရာင္းေနေၾကာင္း BWRPC က ထုတ္ျပန္ေျပာဆိုထားသည္။
မေလးရွားအစိုးရက ၂ဝဝ၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည့္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတိုက္ဖ်က္ေရး ဥပေဒ ACT 670 ျဖင့္ တရားစြဲဆိုမည္ ျဖစ္ကာ၊ ဥပေဒအရ - တိုက္႐ိုက္ အျပစ္က်ဴးလြန္သူသည္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အနည္းဆံုး ၅ ႏွစ္၊ အမ်ားဆံုး ၁ဝ ႏွစ္ က်ခံရမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတြင္ သြယ္ဝုိက္၍ ပတ္သက္ေနသူလည္း ျပစ္ဒဏ္အျဖစ္ မေလးရွားရင္းဂစ္ေငြ ၅ဝဝ,ဝဝဝ ေပးေဆာင္ရမည္ဟု သိရသည္။
မေလးရွားတြင္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား၊ နီေပါ၊ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္မွ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား အလုပ္သမားမ်ား ရွိေသာ္လည္း ၎တို႔၏ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အစိုးရမ်ားက တာဝန္ယူေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးၿပီး ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရကမူ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို လ်စ္လွ်ဴ႐ႈထားသျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားသာ လူကုန္ကူးခံေနရေၾကာင္း ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ေျပာသည္။
ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္သို႔ ျပန္ပို႔ခံရေသာ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ တရားမဝင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသည္ ေငြမေပးႏိုင္ပါက ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံရွိ ငါးဖမ္းေလွမ်ား၊ ျပည့္တန္ဆာ႐ံုမ်ားတြင္ အဓမၼခိုင္းေစခံေနရေၾကာင္း အေမရိကန္အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရး ေကာ္မတီကလည္း ‘Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand’ အမည္ျဖင့္ မၾကာေသးမီက အစီရင္ခံစာတေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည္။
မေလးရွားရွိ အန္ဂ်ီအိုမ်ား၊ လူထုအေျချပဳအဖြဲ႔မ်ားက မေလးရွားအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈျပႆနာကို တစံုတခု ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ရဲဌာနက စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးမႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေသာ္လည္း နယ္စပ္တြင္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈမ်ားမွာ ၾကီးထြားေနဆဲပင္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
http://www.mizzimaburmese.com/news/regional/2821-2009-04-25-16-30-28.html
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ျမန္မာေတြ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရမႈ မေလးအရာရွိမ်ား ပါ၀င္
25 April 2009
ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စီးပြားေရးက်ပ္တည္းတာေၾကာင့္မိုလို႔ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံကို စြန္႔စြန္႔စားစား ထြက္အလုပ္လုပ္ၾကတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားတခ်ိဳ႕ဟာ မေလးရွားအာဏာပိုင္တခ်ိဳ႕ရဲ႕ ဖမ္းဆီးတာကို ခံရၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွားနဲ႔ ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္ေတြမွာ လူေမွာင္ခိုပြဲစားေတြရဲ႕ လက္ထဲကို ေရာင္းစားတာ ခံေနရပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ေတြဟာ ဘယ္လိုပံုစံေတြနဲ႔ ဘယ္လိုေနရာေတြမွာ ေရာင္းစားခံေနၾကရတယ္ ဆိုတာကို စံုစမ္းထားတဲ့ မေအးေအးမာ က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။
မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံမွာ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရတဲ့ျမန္မာေတြဟာ ေန႔စဥ္ရာဂဏန္းနဲ႔ ရွိေနၿပီး မေလးရွားလူ၀င္မႈႀကီးၾကပ္ေရး၀န္ထမ္း ေတြက လူပြဲစားေတြထံကို ေရာင္းစားေနေၾကာင္း အလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ေကာ္မတီရဲ႕ တြဲဖက္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က အခုလို ေျပာပါတယ္။
“လ၀က က ထိန္းသိမ္းၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ကို နယ္စပ္ေခၚသြားတယ္။ နယ္စပ္ေရာက္လုိ႔ရွိရင္ အဲဒီေခၚသြားတဲ့ လ၀က ေတြကပဲ လူေမွာင္ခိုကူးတဲ့သူေတြ လက္ထဲကို ဒီ ျပန္ပို႔ခံရတဲ့သူေတြကို လႊဲေပးလိုက္တယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံေငြေရးေၾကးေရးကအစ သူတို႔ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္မွာ လူဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္လာပို႔မယ္ ဆိုတာကအစ သူတို႔ ေနာက္ကြယ္မွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ ေနာက္ကြယ္ကေန သူတို႔ အဆက္အသြယ္ လုပ္ထားၿပီးေတာ့မွာ သူတို႔ သြားပို႔တယ္။ သြားပို႔ၿပီးေတာ့ လႊဲေပးၿပီးေတာ့မွ ျပန္လာတယ္။ ျပန္လာၿပီးတဲ့ ေနာက္ အဲဒီေနာက္ပိုင္း ျပန္၀င္လာတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာလည္း ဒီႏိုင္ငံက အစိုးရ၀န္ထမ္းေတြ ပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္မႈ ရွိေနတယ္။ အဲဒါကို လည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔က သက္ေသအေထာက္အထားေတြ ဘာေတြ ရထားၿပီးၿပီ။ ဒီမွာရွိတဲ့ အစိုးရကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ကိုယ္တိုင္က ေတာ့ ေျပာလို႔မရဘူးေပါ့။ ဒီမွာရွိတဲ့ အဲန္ဂ်ီအိုေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ကို ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေျပာမယ္။”
ထိုင္း-မေလး နယ္စပ္မွာ ျမန္မာေတြ လူပြဲစားေတြလက္ထဲ ေရာက္သြားခဲ့ရတဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြကို ေျပာျပခဲ့ရာမွာေတာ့ -
“သူတို႔ကို လ၀က ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ လူေမွာင္ခိုကူးတဲ့သူေတြ လက္ထဲကို လႊဲေပးလုိက္ၿပီဆိုရင္ သူတို႔က သံုးခုကို သူတို႔ ေျပာျပ တယ္ေပါ့။ တစ္နည္းက ဒီမေလးရွားထဲကို ျပန္၀င္မလား၊ ေနာက္တစ္နည္းက ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ျပန္သြားမလား၊ ေနာက္ တနည္း က ပိုက္ဆံမေပးႏုိင္လို႔ရွိရင္ ေလွမွာ အေရာင္းစားခံမလား။ အမ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ ေရာင္းစားတာက ေယာက္်ား ေလးေတြဆိုရင္ ငါးဖမ္းေလွကို ေရာင္းတယ္။ မိန္းကေလးေတြဆိုရင္ ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းေတြဘက္မွာ သူတို႔ ေရာင္းပစ္ လိုက္တယ္ေပါ့။ ဒီ ထိုင္းဘက္က။ အကုန္လံုးက ျပန္၀င္လာတဲ့သူေတြပဲ မ်ားတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ကိုလည္း သူတို႔ မျပန္ဘူး။ ပိုက္ဆံမရွိလို႔ရွိရင္ေတာ့ ေလွမွာ အေရာင္းစားခံရတယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံရွိတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ ဒီမွာ သူငယ္ခ်င္း အဆက္အသြယ္၊ ေဆြမ်ိဳးမိဘ အဆက္အသြယ္ေတြကေနတဆင့္ အကူအညီေတာင္းၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွားထဲကို ျပန္၀င္လာၾကတယ္။”
ေငြေၾကးမေပးႏိုင္တဲ့သူေတြဟာ ရိုက္ႏွက္ျခင္းကိုပါ ခံရတယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။
“ပိုက္ဆံမေပးႏုိင္တဲ့သူေတြဆိုတာေတာင္မွ အဲဒီလို မေပးႏိုင္တဲ့သူေတြထဲမွာ သူတို႔သတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့ ရက္ျပည့္လို႔မွ သူတို႔ ဖုန္းဆက္လို႔ ပိုက္ဆံေပးဖို႔မေသခ်ာဘူး ဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္ အရိုက္ခံရတာေတြ ရွိတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုမ်ိဳးလူေတြလည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ဆီမွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ အရိုက္ခံရတာတို႔ အထိုးခံရတာတို႔၊ သူတို႔ ပိုက္ဆံရဖို႔ ရက္နည္းနည္းၾကာသြားလို႔ရွိရင္ ဒီလူေတြကို ထမင္းေတြ ဘာေတြ မေကၽြးေတာ့ဘဲ အငတ္ထားတဲ့ဟာမ်ိဳးေတြပါ ရွိပါတယ္။”
တျခားႏုိင္ငံသားေတြကို ဖမ္းမိတဲ့အခါမွာ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ သက္ဆုိင္ရာႏိုင္ငံေတြက တာ၀န္ယူၿပီး ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ လက္ခံတာေတြ ရွိေနေပမဲ့ ျမန္မာကေတာ့ လက္ခံတာေတြ မရွိတဲ့အတြက္ ေရာင္းစားတာကိုပဲ ခံေနရေၾကာင္းေတြကုိလည္း ေျပာျပသြား ပါတယ္။
http://www.voanews.com/burmese/2009-04-25-voa5.cfm
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နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မည္
ေဇာ္ႀကီး။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
မေလးရွားနယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈတြင္ ေဒသခံအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္မႈကို တရားဥပေဒေဘာင္ အတြင္းမွ ေဖာ္ထုတ္ မည္ဟု မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေပးေရးေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC)က ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေပးေရးေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC) ႏွင့္ မေလးရွား NGO အဖဲြ႕အစည္း (၄) ဖဲြ႕တုိ႔ပူးေပါင္း၍ နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ လုပ္ငန္းတြင္ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္ မ်ားပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္သြားမည္ဟု ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ထုတ္ ေၾကျငာခ်က္၌ေဖာ္ျပသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးမႈလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္အဖဲြ႕ အစည္းမ်ားမွ ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္ျခင္း မရွိဟု အစုိးရ၏ ျငင္းဆုိခ်က္အေပၚ BWRPC တဲြဖက္အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ကုိေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ယခုလုိ ေျပာသည္။
“အခုက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဆီမွာ သက္ေသေတြရွိေနၿပီ။ ရွိေနတဲ့ ဒီသက္ေသေတြကေနၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွား အစုိးရအာဏာပုိင္ေတြ ပါတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီအစုိးရကုိ တင္မယ္။ တင္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီလူေတြဒီလူေတြပါတယ္၊ ဒီလူေတြ ဒီလူေတြကေနတဆင့္ မေလးရွားအစုိးရအတြင္းမွာ ရွိေနၿပီဆုိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မယ္။ အဲဒီလုိအခ်ိန္က်ေတာ့မွ အစုိးရ ဖက္ကေန ၿပီးေတာ့ ဘယ္လုိျပန္လုပ္ေပးမလဲဆုိတာ တခ်က္ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရမွာေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခုလတ္တေလာ ကေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က မပါဘူးလုိ႔ ျငင္းထားတယ္ဗ်ာ။ ျငင္းထားေတာ့ အဲဒီ ျငင္းထားတဲ့ အခ်က္ကုိ က်ေနာ္ တုိ႔က သူတုိ႔ကုိျပန္တုိက္ရမယ္။ လက္ဆုတ္လက္ကုိင္ျပႏုိင္တဲ့အထိ သက္ေသေတြဘာေတြနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္ တုိ႔ကုိ ျငင္းလုိ႔မရေအာင္ျပန္လုပ္ရမယ္။”
လူကုန္ကူးမႈႏွင့္ပါတ္သက္သည့္ အခ်က္အလက္စုေဆာင္းမႈကုိ BWRPC ကတာ၀န္ယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ၿပီး ဥပေဒ ပုိင္းဆုိင္ရာကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ အစုိးရထံတင္ျပမႈတုိ႔ကုိ မေလးရွား NGO အဖဲြ႕ ၄ ဖဲြ႕ကတာ၀န္ယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ မည္ျဖစ္သည္။
လူကုန္ကူးသည့္လုပ္ငန္းအား တုိက္ဖ်က္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ႀကံဳေတြ႕ႏုိင္သည့္ အခက္အခဲမ်ား အား ၎တုိ႔အေနႏွင့္ ရင္ဆုိင္ေျဖရွင္းသြားမည္ဟု ကုိေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
“ျဖစ္ျဖစ္္ေျမာက္ေျမာက္ျဖစ္သြားေအာင္လည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔လုပ္မယ္ဗ်ာ။ ဘယ္လုိလူမ်ဳိးကပဲ ဘယ္လုိပဲ တုန္႔ျပန္လာ တုန္႔ျပန္လာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အေနနဲ႔က ဒီကိစၥကုိ လုပ္ကုိလုပ္သြားမယ္။ ဘာကုိမွက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ သိပ္ၿပီးဂရုမစုိက္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ႔လဲဆုိေတာ့ ဒီလူေမွာင္ခုိကူးတဲ့ ကိစၥဟာ အခုဒီမွာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလးကုိဆုိးေနၿပီ။ ဆုိးေနတယ္ဆုိတာေတာင္မွ ဘယ္လူမ်ဳိးမွ မခံရဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဗမာလူမ်ဳိးတမ်ဳိးပဲ ခံရတယ္ဗ်ာ။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥကုိက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ျဖစ္ ေအာင္လုပ္မယ္။”
လက္ရွိ လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ တေယာက္၏ ေစ်းႏႈန္းမွာ မေလးရွားေငြ ၂၅၀၀ မွ ၂၈၀၀ ၾကားတြင္ရွိၿပီး BWRPC အဖဲြ႕မွေကာက္ယူရရွိသည့္ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံတြင္ လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ ျမန္မာႏိုိင္ငံသား ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ခန္႔ရွိသည္ဟု ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ ပါရွိသည္။
မေလးရွားအစုိးရမွ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးဥပေဒကုိ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ေအာက္တုိဘာလက အတည္ျပဳ ျပဌာန္းခဲ့သည္။
လူကုန္ကူးမႈမ်ား၌ မေလးရွားအစုိးရအရာရွိမ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္ေနသည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ အထက္ လြတ္ေတာ္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးေကာ္မတီ၏ အစီရင္ခံစာအသစ္၌ ေဖာ္ျပထားေၾကာင္း ယေန႔ထုတ္ ဗြီအုိေအ သတင္းတပုဒ္၌ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news250409.html
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ျမန္မာမ်ား လူကုန္ကူးခံရမႈ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးမည္ဟု မေလးရွားဝန္ၾကီး ဂတိျပဳ
http://burmese.dvb.no/news.php?id=7384
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ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား သတင္း
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မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္
ခြန္ေအာင္ျမတ္။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
ထုိင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ေရာဂါျဖစ္ပြားမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္သျဖင့္ စခန္း ထဲတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ဒုကၡသည္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးက အမိန္႕ထုတ္လုိက္သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၁ ရက္ေန႕က ထုိင္းက်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနသည္ မယ္ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းသို႕ လာေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီး ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးေရာဂါ ျဖစ္ပြားမည့္ အလားအလာရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုသျဖင့္ ယေန႕မွစ၍ စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မွဴးက ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္ သည္ဟု ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး အခရဖန္ ဖြန္စီက ေျပာသည္။
“ၾကက္ႏွစ္ေကာင္ေသတယ္။ အဲဒါ က်န္းမာေရးဌာနကို ပို႕ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးေတာ့ ဘာမွမျဖစ္ဘူး တဲ့။ အခုစခန္းထဲမွာ ၾကက္ေတြ ေပးမေမြးေတာ့ဘူး။ ၾကက္ေမြးတဲ့သူေတြကို သတိေပးထားတယ္။ မေမြးၾကဖို႕စခန္းထဲမွာ။ စစ္ေဆးလို႕ ေတြ႕တယ္ဆိုရင္ အကုန္ရွင္းပစ္မွာပဲ။ ၾကက္ေတြကိုလည္း ရွင္းမယ္ အေရးလည္းယူမယ္။ ေသတဲ့ၾကက္က သံသယရွိလို႕ပါ။”
ယေန႕နံနက္တြင္ စခန္းအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စခန္းတြင္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးသူမ်ား စခန္္းျပင္သို႕ သြားေမြးရန္ ေလာ္စပီ ကာျဖင့္ သတိေပးေၾကညာသည္ဟု စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးမွဴးက ေျပာသည္။
“အခု လက္ရွိ ၾကက္ေမြးေနတဲ့လူေတြကေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရးအေျခအေနကေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံက ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ဆရာ၀န္တေယာက္က လာၿပီးေတာ့ အဲသလို ဒီေနရာ လူေနမႈ ထူထပ္တယ္။ ဒီေနရာ စိုးရိမ္စရာ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ အစည္းအေ၀းထဲမွာ သူပိတ္သြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ ပလပ္(စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး)ကို သူအေၾကာင္းၾကားတယ္။ ပလပ္မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။ ဒီေန႕မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။”
ယေန႕နံနက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ႏွင့္စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးတို႕ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈမ်ားကို လုိက္လံ စစ္ေဆးေနသည္ဟု ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးပညာေပးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဒုကၡသည္တဦးက “ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားေတာ့ သိၾကတယ္။ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးနဲ႕ပတ္သက္လို႕ရွိရင္ေလ။ ဒါေပမယ္ ပထမအရင္ တေခါက္ကေတာ့ မေမြးဖို႕ ေျပာၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ၾကာေတာ့ ၾကာေနၿပီေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခု သူတို႕ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း လူနည္းစုပဲ။ အခု အဲဒီဟာကို အားလံုးကို ျပန္ေဖ်ာက္ခိုင္းတာပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ စားတာ ကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ စားေနၾကတာပဲ။ ၾကက္သားေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ ေရာင္းတယ္။ ထိုင္းၾကက္ေတြေလ ထုိင္း ေတြ သူတို႕လာေရာင္းတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီေမြးတာကိုက်ေတာ့ သူတို႕ပိတ္တယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၂ ႏွစ္ကတည္းက စခန္းတြင္း ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈ ပိတ္ပင္ထားခဲ့သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕ကလည္း မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္မွ ထုတ္ေ၀သည့္ ခဲဆိပ္ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ လူသံုးကုန္ပစၥည္းႏွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းေဆးအပါအ၀င္ ပစၥည္း ၉ မ်ဳိးကို သံုးစြဲျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ပိတ္ပင္ ထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news240409.html
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ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား "ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ ေရာင္းစားခံရ"
Finacial Times
ဧၿပီ ၂၅၊ ၂၀၀၉
ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းသုိ႔ ေရာင္းစားခံရသည့္ ကိစၥတြင္ မေလးရွား အစုိးရ အရာရိွမ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနသည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ တဦးက စြပ္စဲြလုိက္သည္။
ထုိင္း မေလးရွား နယ္စပ္ေဒသတြင္ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား၏ လက္အတြင္းသုိ႔ လဲြေျပာင္းခံရသည့္ ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ျပီး တႏွစ္ၾကာ အခ်ိန္ယူ စုံစမ္း ေရးသားထားေသာ အ စီရင္ခံစာကုိ
ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးေကာ္မတီတြင္ တာ၀န္ရိွေသာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္ Richard Lugarက မေလးရွား အစုိးရကုိ အဂၤါေန႔က ေပးအပ္လုိက္သည္။
အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ တတိယႏုိင္ငံတခုကုိ သြားေရာက္ေရးအတြက္ မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရိွ ကုလသမဂၢရုံးသုိ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ ႀကိဳးစားေသာ ျမန္မာျပည္သားမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကုိ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
စုံစမ္းမႈမ်ားအရ မေလး အရာရိွမ်ားက ထုိျမန္မာျပည္သားမ်ားကုိ ဖမ္းဆီးျပီး နယ္စပ္သုိ႔ ျပန္လည္ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ခ့ဲေၾကာင္း၊ ျပန္ပုိ႔ခံရသူမ်ားထဲတြင္ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳခံထားရသူမ်ားလည္း ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္း၊ ထုိအခ်ိန္တြင္ ေငြမေပးႏုိင္သူမ်ားမွာ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံသုိ႔ လဲြေျပာင္းခံရေၾကာင္း ေရးထားသည္။
"ေငြမေပးႏုိင္သူမ်ားသည္ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံရိွ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား လက္သုိ႔ ေရာက္သြားသည္၊ ငါးဖမ္းေလွ၊ ျပည့္တန္ဆာအိမ္ စသည့္ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ဳိးစုံသုိ႔ ေရာက္သြားရသည္" ဟု အစီရင္ခံစာက ဆုိသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား၏ ေစာ္ကားျခင္း ခံရသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကုိလည္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ တခ်ဳိ႕မွာ ၎တုိ႔၏ ခင္ပြန္းသည္မ်ားေရွ႕တြင္ပင္ ေစာ္ကားခံရသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။ "ဘယ္သူမွ ၀င္ျပီး မေျပာရဲဘူး၊ ေျပာရင္ ေသနတ္နဲ႔ အပစ္ခံရမယ္၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ဓားနဲ႔ အခုတ္ခံရမယ္" ဟူေသာ အကူအညီေပးေရး အဖဲြ႔တခုမွ ၀န္ထမ္းတဦး၏ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္ကုိလည္း ကုိးကားထားသည္။
ဒုကၡသည္တဦးကလည္း "(အမ်ဳိးသမီးေတြက) ၾကည့္ေပ်ာ္ရွဳေပ်ာ္ ရိွတယ္ ဆုိရင္ ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းကုိ အေရာင္းခံရတယ္။ ရုပ္မေခ်ာတ့ဲသူေတြဆုိရင္ေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က (လူကုန္ကူးသူေတြက) စားေသာက္ဆုိင္တခုမွာ ေရာင္းလုိက္ႏုိင္တယ္" ဟု ေျပာသည္။
အဆုိပါ စြပ္စဲြခ်က္မ်ားကုိ မေလးရွား ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႔က စုံစမ္းမည္ ဟူေသာ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ကုိ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္ Richard Lugarက ႀကိဳဆုိလုိက္သည္။
ဤကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး တစုံတရာ တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာဆုိရန္ ဆက္သြယ္သည့္အခါ မေလးရွား ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ရုံးက အေၾကာင္းျပန္ျခင္း မရိွေပ။
http://moemaka.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3669&Itemid=1
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အစုိးရ၏ရာဇဝတ္မႈ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ဖြင့္ခ်
Friday, 24 April 2009 18:49 ဧရာဝတီ
ျမန္မာအစုိးရ က်ဴးလြန္ခ့ဲေသာ ရာဇဝတ္မႈမ်ားကုိ ကုလသမဂၢ လုံၿခဳံေရးေကာင္စီက စုံစမ္းႏုိင္ေရးအတြက္ တုိက္တြန္းေပးပါဟု အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေရာက္ ကရင္ တုိင္းရင္းသူ တဦးက ကြန္ဂရက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏွင့္ အုိဘားမား အစုိးရကုိ ယေန႔ တုိက္တြန္းလုိက္သည္။
တုိင္းရင္းသား ေဒသမ်ားတြင္ စစ္အစုိးရ က်ဴးလြန္ခ့ဲသည္ဟု ဆုိေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ တခ်ဳိ႕ကုိ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ျဖစ္သူ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသမီး မုိင္းရာဒါးေဂေဖာက လႊတ္ေတာ္ ၾကားနာပြဲတခုသုိ႔ တက္ေရာက္ၿပီး အေသးစိတ္ ရွင္းျပခ့ဲသည္။ ထုိရာဇဝတ္မႈမ်ား အတြက္ စစ္အစုိးရတြင္ တာဝန္ရိွသည္ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။ စစ္အစုိးရ၏ အႏုိင္က်င့္ ႏွိပ္စက္မႈမ်ားကုိ ခံရသူမ်ားတြင္ သူ၏ မိသားစုဝင္မ်ားလည္း ပါဝင္ခ့ဲသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ အေျခအေနမ်ားကုိ ၾကားနာ စစ္ေဆးေသာ Tom Lantos လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ ေရွ႕ေမွာက္တြင္ ယင္းသုိ႔ ထြက္ဆုိခ့ဲျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ မုိင္းရာဒါးေဂေဖာသည္ ထုိင္း - ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တြင္ အဓိက လႈပ္ရွားလ်က္ရိွေသာ ကရင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး အစည္းအရုံး ၏ အသင္းဝင္တဦးလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ျမန္မာအစုိးရဲ႕ လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္ တခုလံုး အေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တ့ဲ ရာဇဝတ္မႈေတြကုိ ကုလသမဂၢ လုံၿခဳံေရးေကာင္စီက စုံစမ္းႏုိင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ တုိက္တြန္းေပးပါလုိ႔ ကြန္ဂရက္ အဖဲြ႔ဝင္ေတြ နဲ႔ အစုိးရ အဖဲြ႔သစ္ကုိ က်မ ေမတၱာ ရပ္ခံပါတယ္” ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။
စစ္အစုိးရက အရပ္သားမ်ားအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ေနျခင္းမ်ား ရပ္ဆုိင္းသြားေရးအတြက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အသုိင္းအဝန္းကလည္း ဆက္လက္ ဖိအားေပးရန္ သူက တုိက္တြန္းလုိက္သည္။
ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ လက္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ရြာလုံးကြ်တ္ ထြက္ေျပးရမႈမ်ား ရိွေနေၾကာင္း၊ အဝတ္တထည္ ကုိယ္တခုျဖင့္ ေျပးရျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သူက ရွင္းျပသည္။
ရြာသားမ်ား ေနရပ္ရင္းသုိ႔ မျပန္ႏုိင္ရန္ တပ္မေတာ္ စစ္ေၾကာင္းမ်ားက ရြာႏွင့္ အနီးတဝုိက္တြင္ ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းမ်ား ေထာင္ေလ့ရိွသည္ဟု မုိင္းရာက ေျပာသည္။
“ရြာကေန ထြက္ရၿပီ ဆုိရင္ တေနရာကေန တျခား တေနရာကုိ ေျပးေနရတယ္။ ေတာထဲမွာ ေတြ႔တ့ဲဟာကုိ စား၊ အိပ္တ့ဲအခါလည္း ဗုိက္ဆာဆာနဲ႔ အိပ္။ ကေလးေတြကုိ လက္ဆဲြၿပီး အၿမဲတမ္း ေျပးေနရတယ္။ စစ္တပ္ကုိ ေၾကာက္ေနရတာပဲ” ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။
“က်မတုိ႔ ေျပးရတုန္းကလည္း က်မတုိ႔ မိသားစု တခုလုံး ဘာဆုိ ဘာမွ မရိွဘူး။ စားစရာလည္း မရိွ၊ အိပ္စရာ မရိွ၊ အဝတ္အစားလည္း အပုိမရိွ၊ မုိးရာသီ ေဆာင္းရာသီဆုိရင္ ပုိၿပီး ဒုကၡေရာက္ရတယ္၊ စစ္ေၾကာင္းေတြနဲ႔ လြတ္ေအာင္ အၿမဲ ေရွာင္ရတယ္။ ေတာထဲမွာ၊ ၿခဳံထဲမွာ၊ ဂူထဲမွာ ပုန္းရတ့ဲအခါ ရိွတယ္။ မုိးရြာထဲမွာ ပလတ္စတစ္ကုိ ကုိယ္တဝက္ပဲ ၿခဳံၿပီး အိပ္ခ့ဲရတ့ဲ ညကုိ က်မ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေမ့ဘူး” ဟု မုိင္းရာက အနည္းငယ္ ငိုရိွဳက္ရင္း ေျပာျပသည္။
အကူအညီေပးေရး အဖဲြ႔မ်ားက ေျပးလႊားေနရသည့္ ရြာပုန္းရြာေရွာင္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားထံသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ႏုိင္ျခင္း မရိွသျဖင့္ ေဆးဝါး ႏွင့္ အစားအစာ အတြက္ အခက္အခဲမ်ား ႀကဳံရသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။
“က်မ ငွက္ဖ်ားတက္တယ္၊ တုပ္ေကြးေရာ တျခားဟာေတြေရာ ျဖစ္တယ္ ခဏခဏပဲ။ က်မရဲ႕ ေမာင္ႏွမဝမ္းကြဲေတြလည္း ဖ်ားနာၿပီး ဆုံးသြားၾကတယ္” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။
“ဘာ စားစရာမွ မရိွတာကုိလည္း ခဏခဏ ႀကဳံရတယ္။ တခါတေလ မိသားစု ၇ ေယာက္ စားဖုိ႔ ဆန္ တဘူးပဲ ရိွတတ္တယ္။ လူႀကီးေတြက မစားၾကဘူး။ ထမင္းကုိ က်မတုိ႔ ညီအစ္မေတြကုိ ေပးတယ္၊ က်မတုိ႔က အငယ္ေတြ ဆုိေတာ့။ ေတာထဲမွာ မွ်စ္ေတြ လုိက္ရွာၿပီး စားရတယ္” ဟု မုိင္းရာက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကုိ ေျပာျပသည္။
“ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ကရင္ေတြအျပင္ တျခား တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြလည္း ရိွတယ္၊ သူတုိ႔လည္း ျမန္မာ စစ္အစုိးရက ရန္ျပဳတာကုိ ခံေနရတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ရပ္ ကုိယ့္ရြာမွာ ေနလုိ႔မရတ့ဲအတြက္ ျပည္တြင္း ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္း ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ျဖစ္သြားၾကတယ္၊ တျခား ႏုိင္ငံကုိ ေျပးရတယ္” ဟု မုိင္းရာက ေျပာသည္။
http://www.irrawaddy.org/bur/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=990:2009-04-24-11-51-50&catid=1:news&Itemid=2
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HEADLINES
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NEWS ON MIGRANTS
Myanmar, Thailand sign MoU against human trafficking
Malaysia To Probe Abuse Claims
Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca without jobs
CHRO: UNHCR To Take Immediate Action Against Abuses In Malaysia
Concern for migrant workers
Phuket Plan Will 'Legalise' 100,000 Burmese
Thailand, Malaysia to act on trafficking of Burmese migrants
No refuge on the southern border
NEWS ON REFUGEES
Karen Refugee Testifies to Junta Crimes
Poison found in refugee camp water supply
Film opens door to refugees' realities
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ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသတင္း
မေလးရွားမွ ျမန္မာလုပ္သားတစ္ဦး လုပ္ငန္းခြင္၌ ေသဆံုး
လူကုန္ကူးသည့္ မေလးရွား အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြမည္
ျမန္မာေတြ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရမႈ မေလးအရာရွိမ်ား ပါ၀င္
နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မည္
ျမန္မာမ်ားလူကုန္ကူး ခံရမႈ စံုစမ္းမည္ဟု မေလးရွားဝန္ၾကီးဂတိျပဳ
ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားသတင္း
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္
ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား "ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ ေရာင္းစားခံရ"
အစုိးရ၏ရာဇဝတ္မႈ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ဖြင့္ခ်
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NEWS ON MIGRANTS
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Myanmar, Thailand sign MoU against human trafficking
BANGKOK, April 25 (TNA)
Myanmar and Thailand have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to fight against human trafficking, especially of women and children, between the two neighbouring countries.
Thailand’s Minister of Social Development and Human Security Issara Somchai said he had signed the agreement with Myanmar Home Affairs Minister Gen. Maung Oo in Myanmar’s administrative capital of Naypyidaw on Friday.
Under the terms of the pact, the two countries will tackle and prevent cross-border trafficking.
A statement issued in Myanmar after the signing of the pact said it covers areas such as prevention, protection, recovery and reintegration of victims, law enforcement and criminal justice, “as well as developing and implementing joint actions between the two countries.”
Mr. Issara said there are now 192 Myanmar currently identified women and children victims of human trafficking in Thailand who will be sent back to their home country as soon as possible.
He said more checkpoints would be set up in the Thai-Myanmar border province of Kanchanaburi to prevent illegal entry of Myanmar nationals as well as to interdict drug smuggling.
According to Mr. Issara, Friday’s agreement will complement a MoU signed in 2003 between the two countries which help prevent human trafficking in the form of labour. (TNA)
http://enews.mcot.net/view.php?id=9646
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Malaysia To Probe Abuse Claims
2009-04-24
A new report prompts Malaysia to investigate persistent allegations that Burmese migrants have suffered gravely, while traffickers act with impunity.
KUALA LUMPUR—Malaysia’s prime minister says his government will investigate a blistering report by a U.S. Senate panel that says thousands of Burmese migrants have been handed over to human traffickers and sent to work in the Thai sex industry.
"We will take appropriate action," Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters. "We do not want Malaysia to be used as a point for human trafficking ... but we need to know more facts."
In Washington, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations issued a report—based on a year-long review—saying illegal Burmese migrants have been deported from Malaysia, handed to human traffickers, and forced to work in brothels, fishing boats, and restaurants in Thailand if they didn’t have enough money to buy their own release.
According to the Senate committee report, "a few thousand" Burmese migrants in recent years might have become victims of extortion and trafficking once they were deported across Malaysia's northern border with Thailand.
"Upon arrival at the Malaysia-Thailand border, human traffickers reportedly take possession of the migrants," the report said.
One unnamed migrant is quoted as saying that women "are sold at a brothel if they look good. If they are not beautiful, they might sell them at a restaurant or housekeeping job."
The report called on Malaysia to investigate and prosecute "the trafficking, selling and slavery of Burmese and other migrants… The prospect that Burmese migrants, having fled the heavy hand of the Burmese junta, only to find themselves in harm’s way in Malaysia seemed beyond belief."
Malaysia’s former home minister, Syed Hamid Albar, earlier dismissed these claims as "wild allegations." But national police chief Musa Hassan said earlier this month that Malaysian and Thai police and immigration officials were investigating the claims.
In a statement, New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Malaysia to "act on this U.S. Senate report to protect the rights of refugees and victims of human trafficking."
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cites the presence of more than 42,300 Burmese refugees in Malaysia as of late March.
Victim describes impunity
Wunna, a 27-year-old Burmese trafficking victim from Rangoon who worked for his traffickers for four months, said his captors appeared to have no fear of the authorities.
"The traffickers maintain bases in Alor Setar, Jitra, and Chunglum," he said in an interview in April, referring to three districts in Malaysia’s Kedah state.
"They said their boss was highly connected to police in these regions. They said they could do whatever they wished," Wunna said.
"When we were handed over to them [by immigration officials], they said they could kill us anytime. One of them said he wouldn’t be charged, arrested, or imprisoned for killing me. He said someone would just come and collect my body, and clean up, and he would stay and work."
Abuses alleged
As RFA's Burmese service reported in January 2008, Burmese migrant workers in Malaysia live at the mercy of international human-trafficking gangs who sell them back and forth as slave labor with the full knowledge of Malaysian and Thai immigration officials.
Thousands of Burmese migrant laborers find themselves stuck in a human rights no-man's-land after losing their legal status, often because employers withhold passports or refuse to pay their return airfare.
Reports of mistreatment and substandard living conditions within Malaysia's little-known immigration prisons are rife, as undocumented migrants are detained for indefinite periods.
Conditions in the detention centers have sparked protests, complaints to Malaysia's human rights body, riots, and breakouts.
Immigration officers often stage raids on suspected illegal immigrants using volunteer security forces, the People's Volunteer Corps (RELA), who have wide-ranging powers, the right to bear arms, and little professional training.
Rights groups say children, pregnant women, and United Nations refugees awaiting resettlement to a third country have all been recently detained in such raids.
Human rights lawyers say that Malaysia's legal system lacks clear distinctions among illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and that immigration officers can imprison anyone without papers.
New tactics?
Irene Fernandez, the founder of Malaysia’s human rights group Tenaganita, said her organization has seen some recent tactical changes.
"Trafficking is continuing," she said, but added:
"In raids [by RELA or immigration police], not all family members are arrested. They leave one or two. So they can go back to them to ask for money to release their relatives. That’s another strategy. They are also already negotiating deals while in detention."
Latifah Koya, a lawyer working with Malaysia Bar Council’s legal aid program, said it was impossible to confirm a reported reduction in trafficking "because the border is tightly controlled—no one is there."
"What we can say is that those who were arrested are still paying to come back,” she added.
U.S. $200 per person
In its most recent report on human rights around the world, the U.S. State Department said reported abuses by RELA "included rape, beatings, extortion, theft, pilfering homes, destroying UN High Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR) and other status documents, and pillaging refugee settlements."
It also cited "credible allegations of immigration officials' involvement in the trafficking of Burmese refugees … along the Malaysia-Thai border."
"Immigration officials allegedly received [about U.S. $200] per person. Several local NGOs estimated immigration officials handed over a significant number of Burmese refugees transported to the border to traffickers," it said.
Informed sources said 20 percent of the victims were unable to pay the ransom and were sold for the purposes of labor or sexual exploitation, it said.
Original reporting by Kyaw Min Htun for RFA's Burmese service. Additional reporting by the Associated Press. RFA Burmese service director: Nancy Shwe. Executive producer: Susan Lavery. Written and produced in English by Sarah Jackson-Han.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/abuse-04242009141550.html
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Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca without jobs
by Mizzima News Friday, 24 April 2009 23:19
New Delhi (Mizzima) – After their agent left them without work in a factory and without any proper legal papers, at least 60 Burmese migrants remain trapped in Malacca of Malaysia.
Hla Myat Thu, a Burmese woman who is among the 60 people said, they were in a severe situation with no income and restrictions to move out in search of work.
“I want to go back [to Burma], but it is impossible. They [agent] ask for large sums of money and I have no idea, how I can repay all my debts,” she said.
Their tribulations began in November last year, when they were approached by agents, who promised them work at Japanese Konica Company in Malacca, about 150 kms from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur.
However, after arriving in Malaysia and working at the Konica Company for one month in December, they were told there were no more jobs as the company was laying-off employees and possibly would shut-down later.
But, with their passports seized by their agent, who brought them to the company, they were unable to move out of the factory.
Hla Myat Thu said, they were all together 132 people, but the 60 of them had been living without jobs, for nearly four months.
“Under our contract, the company is to give us 500 Ringgit [approximately 140 USD] per month, but it is given through our agent. So, we are given only about 20 to 30 Ringgits per month,” she said.
For the past three months, they have been feeding themselves on a poor diet and frequently they have had to look out for fruits and vegetables in the nearby neighbourhood.
She said, the agent had agreed to take them to Malaysia for Kyat 1 million [USD 833] per person. However, the agent had earlier agreed to take them with only half the amount and agreed to cut the rest from their salary once they begun work.
“So, since the company continues to give money, the agent does not allow us to go out of the company, even though we do not have any more work,” she added.
Hla Myat Thu, who is a resident of Myingyan Town in Mandalay Division of Burma, said she and her cousin had to ask her relatives back home to send them money for their livelihood.
“Whenever, we ask the agents to let us go, they say we would need to give them 3500 Ringgits [approximately USD 1,000] to allow us to leave,” she said.
Meanwhile, the company and the agents were unreachable for comment. Such incidents where agents betray or use Burmese workers are not uncommon, according to Zaw Myint, in-charge of Malaysia branch of the National League for Democracy – Liberated Area (NLD-LA).
Zaw Myint said, such cases were frequent in Malaysia, where there was an estimated 500,000 Burmese workers.
“Many agents trick their clients and sometimes even sell them off if they fail to pay their fees to bring them to Malaysia,” he said.
Despite the difficulties and precarious conditions, Burmese workers continue to find Malaysia a good destination to look for jobs.
“Due to our country’s situation, more people are still coming here despite the many struggles that they face,” said Zaw Myint.
But, United States’ Ranking Minority Member, Richard Lugar, in a report he submitted to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 3, said the hostile treatment of Malaysian authorities towards Burmese migrants, made them vulnerable to human traffickers.
The report entitled ‘Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand’ reveals that Burmese migrants in Malaysia were victims of extortion and human trafficking in Malaysia and Southern Thailand.
The report said, Malaysian authorities often arrest Burmese migrants and reportedly deport them to the Malaysia-Thailand border, where they are taken possession of by human traffickers and issued ransom demands on an individual basis.
Freedom for these migrants is only possible by handing over the money demanded, the report said. And those failing to meet the demands were turned over to human peddlers in Thailand, representing a variety of business interests, ranging from fishing boats to brothels.
Reporting by Solomon, writing and additional information by Mungpi
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2014-burmese-migrants-remain-trapped-in-malacca-without-jobs.html
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CHRO: UNHCR To Take Immediate Action Against Abuses In Malaysia
Van Biak Thang
Chinland Guardian
26 April, 2009
Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) has urged Kuala Lumpur-based UNHCR to take immediate action on behalf of detained Chin refugees and asylum seekers against the ongoing mistreatment and abuses inflicted upon migrants from Burma by the Malaysian authorities.
The Malaysian authorities have been criticised for its continuation of conducting raids and ‘bad treatment’ on refugees in Malaysia despite a recent report Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand by the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, documenting and disclosing the 'ill-treatment and rough handling' against the migrants.
CHRO’s report last Friday said: "The report findings include the involvement of Malaysian officials in the arrest, detention, and extortion of Burmese migrants and refugees; mistreatment of detainees in detention facilities, including whippings and torture; and the transfer of Burmese migrants and refugees to traffickers for payment. Burmese migrants and refugees in the hands of traffickers are subject to further extortion and mistreatment and are at risk of being sold into the fishing or sex industry."
The report is based on a one-year investigation by the Senate Committee and includes information provided by NGOs, including CHRO, as well as first-hand testimony from trafficking victims.
Salai Bawi Lian Mang, Executive Director of CHRO, said: “Chin refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia have long been subject to abuse and exploitation by Malaysian officials and their operatives. We appreciate this initiative by the U.S. government and hope it will put pressure on the Malaysian government to act responsibly towards migrants and refugees living within its borders.”
The Malaysian authorities rounded up and detained some 300 migrants, including small children, during raids in the Imbi neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur late Wednesday night. Over 100 Chin refugees and asylum seekers are among those arrested, including 14 children and two pregnant women. The authorities have been conducting similar raids throughout the city with increasing frequency during this past month.
The 106 Chin refugees and asylum seekers caught up in the raids earlier this week are currently being held in Bukit Jali police station. Kennedy Lal Ram Lian, coordinator of the Chin Refugee Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia said: “No one has been released, not even UNHCR card holders.” More than 10 Chin detainees are UNHCR-recognized refugees awaiting resettlement to a third country. If they are deported to the border, they are at risk of being sold to traffickers.
The Chin community represents one of the largest refugee communities from Burma living in Malaysia. For more than ten years, the Chin people have fled to Malaysia to escape persecution, torture, and severe oppression in Burma. In Malaysia they are they are the constant target of harassment, arrest, detention, and deportation by the Malaysian authorities. They are unable to work, receive an education, access healthcare services, or find acceptable living accommodations.
http://www.chinlandguardian.com/index.php/Home/433
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Concern for migrant workers
26/04/2009 at 12:00 AM
Governments, labour representatives and academics yesterday urged that more attention be paid to migrant workers as concern was growing about their fate in the face of the economic crisis.
They urged closer consultation before any action is taken on contract termination, especially when it involved women.
The group should not be ignored by the stimulus and recovery packages being introduced to help people affected by the financial downturn, the participants of the 10 countries, including Thailand, said in a statement issued at the end of their meeting organised by the UN Development Fund for Women (Unifem) and the International Labour Organisation yesterday.
Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region rely heavily on foreign workers, especially women. Unifem has expressed concern that migrant female workers could be a prime target when the economic slump forces factories and business firms to cut the workforce.
"The loss of women's income has long-term negative implications, on poor families in particular, because of the stable contribution women make to the current household income," Unifem quoted Jean D'Cunha, regional programme director of the East and Southeast Asian regional office, as saying.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/15682/concern-for-migrant-workers
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Phuket Plan Will 'Legalise' 100,000 Burmese
By Chutima Sidasathian and Alan Morison
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A SO-CALLED ''working visa'' is to be established for up to 100,000 illegal and legal Burmese under a plan to control labor numbers on Phuket.
The idea, already being termed the ''Phuket model,'' will enable Burmese to register and be given an ID from local administrators at Provincial Hall.
Employers will be responsible for making sure their workers go to be fingerprinted and photographed as part of the ID process.
The decision to introduce the new system appears to be a breakthrough that could reduce the need for illicit labor on Phuket, and possibly also minimise human trafficking.
The Burmese workers will have to have health checks, and make social security and health contributions at a higher rate than Thais.
Burmese illegals have always been seen as a drain on the Thai system. On Phuket, Burmese workers are obliged to obey an 8pm curfew and forbidden from using mobile telephones or motorcycles.
Construction company bosses have been urging the change because their needs have not been diminished by the world economic downturn.
Phuket Governor Wichai Praisa-Nob has given his approval to the ''working visa'' idea and says the problem had been a big one for Phuket.
The process was a kind of ''pardon'' for the construction and fishing industries, and it could bring huge change, he said.
Once the national government approves the ''working visa'' Phuket model in a Cabinet meeting, it will become the first of its kind in Thailand.
Last week a 25-member investigating Labor Commission, headed by Phuket MP Laywat Areerob, heard about the problems of Phuket in meetings at Provincial Hall.
A decision to rapidly implement the concept to meet the island's needs quickly emerged.
At present, 29,000 registered Burmese work on the island under a quota system that has been criticised for years as inadequate.
Construction companies have made the point that they keep illegal Burmese workers in small camps of up to 30 families, so that if discovered, their labor losses and fines are minimised.
It would be more effective for administration and health to have the workers in larger camps, the official inquiry was told last week.
A form of temporary work-based ID for Burmese has been in use in the northern border town of Ranong, capital of the province of the same name.
There, the Burmese population is of such a size that local supermarkets have signage in Thai, English and Burmese. Burmese even run their own underground schools.
At this stage, the ''working visa'' concept will only apply to the construction and fishing industries, and a date for its introduction depends on a Cabinet decision.
The plight of illegal Burmese and Rohingya boat people has received attention since the suffocation of 54 Burmese in a container truck in April last year and reports in January of brutal ''push-backs'' from Thailand in which hundreds died.
http://phuketwan.com/property/phuket-plan-legalise-100000-burmese-11038/
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Thailand, Malaysia to act on trafficking of Burmese migrants
by Usa Pichai Sunday, 26 April 2009 23:30
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The government of Thailand signed an anti-human trafficking understanding with the Burmese junta on Friday even as the Malaysian Prime Minister vowed to act against human trafficking of Burmese migrants.
Issara Somchai, Thailand’s Minister of Social Development and Social Security signed a memorandum of understanding with his Burmese counterpart Major General Maung Oo, Minister of Interior in Naypyidaw, Burma’s capital on anti-human trafficking, particularly women and children.
The agreement is to be used as a framework to protect and help the victims of human traffickers from both countries, according to reports from Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security on Friday.
Issara Somchai said that the current economic crisis would increase mass migration in the region which would encourage human traffickers to benefit from the migrants.
“The agreement focused on cooperation, on protection and support to the victims of traffickers which include repatriation to their homeland,” he said.
In addition the MOU is also linked to the previous agreement in 2004 between the two countries on protection of human trafficking of migrant labourers, which attempt organized a migrant labour management to solve the illegal migration problem.
The human trafficking of Burmese migrants also sparked the issue between the Malaysian government and US lawmakers. However, the details of the managements attempt have not been revealed yet.
On Friday, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak vowed to investigate a scathing report by U.S. lawmakers saying thousands of Burmese refugees were handed over to human traffickers and ended up working in brothels, fishing boats and restaurants across the border in Thailand if they had no money to purchase their freedom.
The report was based on a yearlong review by committee staff who spoke to migrants from Burma and human rights activists.
"We will take appropriate action," Najib said. "We do not want Malaysia to be used as a point for human trafficking ... but we need to know more facts," according to a report by Associated Press on Saturday.
According to the Senate committee report, "a few thousand" Burmese migrants in recent years might have become victims of extortion and trafficking once they were deported across Malaysia's northern border with Thailand.
Earlier this year, former Malaysian Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar dismissed claims of human trafficking at the border as "wild allegations." But national police chief Musa Hassan said earlier this month that Malaysian and Thai police and immigration officials were investigating the claims.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Malaysia's government should act on this U.S. Senate report to protect the rights of refugees and victims of human trafficking.
The U.N. refugee agency has registered 47,600 refugees living in Malaysia as of the end of March of whom 42,300 are from Burma.
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2019-thailand-malaysia-to-act-on-trafficking-of-burmese-migrants.html
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No refuge on the southern border
By: Erika Fry
Published: 26/04/2009 at 12:00 AM
Reports of organised human trafficking and extortion by Malaysian immigration officials, while Thailand turns a blind eye, are too credible to ignore.
It's hard to know when a nightmare truly begins, and while caught in its grim unreality, when it will ever end.
Lian (not his real name) is a 25-year old ethnic Chin man who fled his home in Burma out of fear of the military in September, 2006. He had been a truck driver, but often encountered Burmese soldiers who demanded - regardless of his duty to deliver the day's haul - that he drive them places. One day, he was taking some soldiers to a village when he ran out of petrol. The soldiers believed he had done so on purpose and they broke his windscreen and beat him, leaving a scar still plain to see above his left eye.
Lian's story was made available to Spectrum by Amy Alexander, an advocacy officer with the Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) who interviewed him. According to the case study, Lian was taken to an army camp and his ID was confiscated. When he was released, the soldiers' goods had been stolen from his truck and they blamed him for the loss.
Lian fled and came to Thailand, where he couldn't find a job and where an agent told him he should go to Malaysia to claim refugee status with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Thai refugee camps do not register ethnic Chin, and have not officially processed new refugees for several years.
He went to Malaysia and sought out the UNHCR office, but a security guard there turned him away for lack of documents. Despite visiting the premises every day for two weeks, he never figured out how to get access to a UNHCR officer.
He was arrested a year or so later in a 3am immigration raid, put barefoot on a lorry and sent to a detention centre where detainees were not given fresh clothes and told they could only drink the bath water.
One night a month later he was taken with a busload of 73 other refugees and migrants to the Thai-Malaysia border. Immigration officials took them to a jungle area where a handful of brokering agents who spoke Malay and Thai were waiting in cars.
The group was told these agents had already bought them from the immigration officials and they were packed under blankets, 15 to a car, and driven 15 minutes to another jungle area, this time in Thailand.
Here there was a big tent with more agents, patrolled by several guards with guns. They were told, "If you can get money sent to us, then we can get you where you need to go. If not, you'll have problems."
Lian could not immediately get the money (the agents call relatives or contacts of the refugees and migrants and arrange a transfer), and so he spent six days in the camp in which he was beaten, underfed and kept in the tent.
He eventually reached a friend in Kuala Lumpur who was able to transfer the necessary 2,000 RM (19,600 baht) to the agents' account that night. With that, he was free to leave, and an agent led him and a group of 13 others back into Malaysia on foot. They were climbing over the border fence into the country when they were intercepted and drew fire from Malaysian border guards. They scattered in the jungle and regrouped the next morning. The agent had left them and the group was soon picked up by a vehicle that took them to a police station inside Malaysia.
They were put back in detention, this time in a facility that held 300 people per cell. Lian was shuffled to a few other detention centres before he was again deported to Thailand three months later. This time the immigration bus took 93 people to the border in the dark of night.
"When the immigration bus stopped, four agents came out from the jungle and met the bus. The authorities opened our handcuffs and told us to follow the agents," said Lian.
The agents walked them through the jungle until they reached a large river, where a boat was waiting. They were ferried across the river to yet more agents, who separated them into groups of those that could pay, and those that couldn't.
Lian called the same friend, who promised to pay the 1,900 RM and in the same way he had come to the camp, he was shuttled back by agents to Kuala Lumpur.
Lian now lives in fear in the jungle on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. He has a Chin refugee card, but as yet no documentation from the UNHCR, which has temporarily closed its registration for refugees, and no immediate hopes for resettlement.
THE REVOLVING DOOR As exhausting, costly and unfortunate as the story of Lian's asylum-seeking journey is, his experience of being bounced around borders and cycled through prisons and detention centres is by no means atypical among the many refugees and migrants from Burma that seek better lives in Thailand and Malaysia.
And also apparently common, though not well publicised, are cases in which migrants and refugees in the hands of Malaysian immigration officials experience extortion and trafficking at the Thai-Malaysia border. In most cases the refugees and migrants buy their way back to Malaysia by arranging the payment of the agent's 1,200 to 2,000 RM (11,800 to 19,600 baht) ransom fee. When they can't find the money or the friend to make this payment, they are reportedly sold to Thai fishing boats, brothels, and factories.
While human rights and ethnic Burmese community-based organisations, as well as a handful of media outlets in Malaysia have documented these cases for years (they refer to the Thai-Malaysian border as "the revolving door"), the allegations have never prompted more than staunch denials by Malaysian authorities and complete disregard from their Thai counterparts. Some analysts say the issue has never received significant attention in Thailand because of the turbulent environment in the nation's South.
Monitors of the situation are hopeful that this will soon change, thanks in part to the release of a report prepared for the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations - Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand - earlier this month.
The report, which is based on a year-long investigation and which involved a number of personal interviews similar to Lian's case study, alleges that Malaysian officials have been complicit in the extortion and human trafficking of a few thousand Burmese refugees at the Thai-Malaysian border. Investigators also found many cases in which migrants had been sexually assaulted or had their rights abused during the arrest/detention/deportation cycle.
While the report does not directly implicate the involvement of Thai officials, it does suggest a sizeable, well-established network of human traffickers operates rather unabashedly, and in cooperation with Malaysian officials, along Thailand's southern border. Activities documented in the report centre around the Thai border city of Sungai Golok and Malaysia's Kelantan state, as well as Padang Besar in Malaysia's Peris state.
Those familiar with the report say it focuses mainly on Malaysia, because the information that prompted the investigation came from Burmese populations and human rights organisations in Malaysia.
Phil Robertson, a researcher on migration in Southeast Asia who has studied the issue, said, "What this is pointing out is something that has evidently been going on for a long time."
He adds, "I was told two years ago by UNHCR staff in Malaysia that there were persons of concern [refugees] that had files and they disappeared for three or four years. They'd come back and tell these stories. I've met fishermen in Mahachai that speak of jungle camps ringed in barbed wired and men with guns, and being sold to fishermen.
"This is not something new. It's only new that the international community is finally turning attention to this longtime lawless border."
He says it is now the obligation of the Malaysian and Thai governments to act on the report.
"Malaysian immigration officials and RELA [Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia, Malaysia's 500,000-strong civilian immigration corps, which has the power to investigate and arrest all suspected illegal immigrants] are directly implicated in selling people. This is criminal behavior and it warrants being investigated and prosecuted.
"While the Thai side gets less focus in this report, it takes two to tango. At minimum, the Thai government must mount an impartial investigation into the holding of these vast numbers of people. To not do so would be complicit in trafficking."
He adds that "both countries have good, clear anti-trafficking laws. The culture of impugnity must come to an end."
Information collected by investigators, and which has been forwarded on to law enforcement agencies, paints an absurdly complete picture of the criminal network. Details provided to the committee during interviews, previously published in media and NGO documents, and includes names of persons to whom the ransom payments were allegedly made; payment locations in Malaysia and Thailand; bank account numbers to which extortion payments are deposited; locations along the Thailand-Malaysia border where migrants are reportedly take by Malaysian officials; and the identification of people allegedly involved in the trafficking of migrants and refugees.
The agents are believed to be Thai, Malay and Burmese of a variety of ethnicities. In some reports, refugees at the border were sorted according to ethnicity.
Victims include Burmese refugees and migrants of numerous ethnicities including Chin, Rohingya, Shan and Mon who come to Malaysia to seek work or UNHCR documentation for third-country resettlement. Most are arrested in large-scale, late night raids conducted by the RELA. The organisation has been described as fascist and in the past members reportedly received a bounty for each arrest they made. In many cases, refugees have had their UNHCR documentation discarded and personal property confiscated or lost completely.
LIVING IN FEAR Malaysia does not recognise refugees, but it does allow the UNHCR to operate in the country to process and resettle them. Accordingly, many refugees from Burma take the risk of travelling to Malaysia in the hopes of reaching the UNHCR before immigration officials reach them. As of January 2009, there were 27,000 "persons of concern" from Burma registered with the UNHCR in Malaysia; it is believed there are at least 30,000 more waiting to be processed.
"It still happens that people with documents, and within weeks of resettlement, will be rounded up and deported. What's ironic is that Malaysia is hostile to refugees that are trying to get out of Malaysia," said Ms Alexander of the CHRO, who in addition to Lian interviewed a number of Chin refugees that have experienced the arrest/detention/deportation cycle. She noted that it is also common for employers to hire migrants and then call in RELA for a raid a few days before their scheduled payment.
Once arrested by RELA, the migrants and refugees (children too) are generally detained in facilities with overcrowded and generally poor conditions. Deportation to a "jungle camp" at the Thai-Malaysia border usually follows several months later.
As for the policy logic behind the deportation of Burmese refugees to the Thai border, Mr Robertson said, "these structures and systems are only as sophisticated as they need to be. The fundamental issue was that someone wanted to get these people out, and somewhere along the way, people figured out how to make money off of it."
Unsurprisingly, these activities have only exacerbated the economic hardship and considerable level of fear migrants and refugees face.
When migrants cannot pay their ransom fees, families are split apart and sold to different industries. Little is known about the fate of the children at the border.
Another woman Ms Alexander interviewed who had been deported with her young daughter was told by agents: "Do you want to die here or do you want to be sold to a Thai night club? If you want to stay here, you will be the only woman and there is no guaranteeing what can happen to you."
Because of these ordeals, migrants and refugees in Malaysia live in fear - often hiding in the jungle or barely leaving their of homes - because of the country's peculiar immigration policy.
To help cope with these problems, Ms Alexander says migrants and refugees living in Malaysia have formed highly organised communities and networks of support that can be mobilised and try to scrape together sufficient funds to free a community member who gets caught up at the border.
She is hopeful the US Senate committee's report will provide an impetus for a sustainable solution to their problems.
"Right now, Malaysia is still issuing denials and insisting these are just the lies of international governments. But the accounts are credible - there are just so many. This is so systematic, it has happened so many times, to so many people."
While Malaysian officials responded defensively to the US investigation and denied all allegations, there has recently been a turnover in Malaysia's immigration ranks and a police investigation into the matter was reportedly launched on April 1.
Even so, the raids continue. Ms Alexander received word earlier this week that another 300 refugees and migrants had been arrested and detained earlier this week. Among the group are pregnant women, a number of children, and UNHCR documented asylum-seekers.
The Royal Thai Police did not respond to requests for information pertaining to this article in time for publication.
This is the first part in a series about human trafficking of Burmese refugees and migrants at the Thai-Malaysia borde
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/15714/no-refuge-on-the-southern-border
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NEWS ON REFUGEES
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Karen Refugee Testifies to Junta Crimes
By LALIT K JHA Friday, April 24, 2009
WASHINGTON—A Karen woman based in the United States on Thursday called on the US Congress and the Obama administration to push the UN Security Council to establish an international inquiry into crimes against humanity committed by Burma’s military junta against its own people.
Giving graphic details of the some of the human rights violations the junta has perpetrated, particularly against ethnic communities and in this case against her and her family, Karen refugee Myra Dahgaypaw told a Congressional committee that the Burmese regime must be held accountable for all the crimes it has committed.
A member of the Karen Women’s Organization and a board member of the Karen American Communities Foundation, Dahgaypaw testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which had convened a Congressional hearing on human rights abuses in Burma.
“I urge members of Congress and the new US administration to support and push for a UN Security Council Commission of Inquiry into the regime’s crimes against humanity and system of impunity,” she said.
Demanding that the military regime be held accountable for the crimes it commits against the people of Burma, Dahgaypaw urged the international community to continue to pressure the junta into ceasing all human rights abuses and violence against civilians.
She said the Burmese army often uproots an entire village in just a few minutes, and sends the villagers running with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Then the Burmese troops place landmines around the area to ensure villagers remain on the run and do not return to their homes, she said. Today, Eastern Burma is one of the world’s most heavily mined areas.
“After villagers are forced from their villages, they live minute by minute, like nomads. They eat what they find in the jungle, and often go to bed hungry. They are always on the move, children in tow. They live in constant fear of the military,” she said.
“According to my personal experience, my family and I had nothing. We didn’t have food to eat, places to sleep or enough clothes [to wear], a situation made more difficult when it was cold or raining. We were constantly running from regime troops and we hid in the caves, bushes and jungle. The places we called ‘homes’ were burnt down many times a year. I will never forget sleeping with half of my body in the rain and the other half under a plastic tarp,” an emotionally choked Dahgaypaw said.
As humanitarian organizations could not get past the military regime to reach such people, Dahgaypaw said there was not enough food or medicine.
“I suffered from malaria, flu and other diseases many times a year. Many of my cousins died from malaria and other diseases,” she said.
“There were many times we had no food to eat. Sometimes, we had only one can of rice to feed seven family members. The older people didn’t eat. Instead they gave the rice to my sister and I because we were the youngest. We survived by eating bamboo shoots from the jungle. Sometimes we had to go to bed without any food in our stomachs,” Dahgaypaw said.
She emphasized to the committee that her story was neither unique nor exclusive to her ethnic community alone.
“There are several other ethnic groups besides the Karen. Each one of them also faces oppression and displacement at the hands of the Burmese military regime that will force them to live as IDPs [internally displaced persons] or to flee to the borders and other countries,” she said.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=15526
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Poison found in refugee camp water supply
by Daniel Pedersen Friday, 24 April 2009 12:17
Mae Sot (Mizzima) - Unidentified offenders used weed killers to poison the water supply of the Mae La refugee camp on April 11.
The camp, on the Thai-Burma border, home to more than 30,000 people, was bereft of water for four days, as pumps and water treatment plants were sent to Bangkok for analysis and scrubbing.
No deaths were reported, although a number of people were said to have fallen ill with vomiting and diarrhea.
The water supplied to the camp is pumped from underneath the Mae Yuam River, which runs through the camp.
It is then pumped to a high point near the camp’s northern end and gravity fed to tap stations and wells throughout the sprawling bamboo shanty-town.
Empty broad-spectrum herbicide containers were discovered near the pumping station on the morning of April 11. Camp residents were immediately warned not to drink any water drawn from wells throughout the camp.
One camp resident, who asked not to be named, said there was great dismay when the discovery was made.
But more sinister rumours spread throughout the settlement when old, faded and empty poison canisters were found nearby, suggesting that dumping the weed killer into the camp’s water supply might have been a long-term project.
Some people in the camp are convinced they will be dead within six months.
An official head count at Mae La in 2005 put the population at 52,000.
Since then 18,000 people have been relocated to third countries, but camp residents said the population really remained static, because there were more people arriving all the time.
The Mae Yuam River runs north through Mae La camp and then feeds the Moei River to the west, passing through the Karen National Liberation Army’s Seventh Brigade region.
This month’s poisoning scare is not the first. About five years ago a Burmese national was caught at the main elevated holding tanks with containers of poison. He was nabbed before he could carry out his plan to poison the water.
The Thai camps, considered temporary havens for people displaced by fighting in Burma, have long been a touchy bilateral issue between Thailand and Burma on the international stage.
The ruling Burmese military junta claims they serve dual roles, as a breeding ground for insurgents and a place for KNLA soldiers to hide and be fed when not active.
An investigation is underway, but as yet there have been no arrests.
Asked who he thought could have been responsible, a senior camp administrator said it was anybody’s guess.
http://mizzima.com/news/regional/2011-poison-found-in-refugee-camp-water-supply.html
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Film opens door to refugees' realities
By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer
First published in print: Monday, April 27, 2009
Have you heard of the Kunama? Don't be embarrassed if you haven't. The Kunama are a tiny ethnic group from Eritrea, which is a country many people haven't heard of, either.
A war between their Eritrea and neighboring Ethiopia, about 60,000 of the Kunama ended up spending years in vast and oppressive refugee camps. The Kunama have traditionally farmed their fertile homeland in northeastern Africa.
The new film "Home Across Lands" follows the struggles and successes of one extended Kunama family that finally resettled in Rhode Island.
On Wednesday, the Albany office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees & Immigrants will screen the movie at the University at Albany's Page Hall on Western Avenue.
"We hope to raise awareness about refugees and their process of resettling," said Zoeann Murphy, director of the Albany office of USCRI. "Refugees bring to Albany incredible stories and experiences and an incredible work ethic."
A refugee is a person who leaves his or her home country to avoid danger or persecution based on religion, ethnicity or political affiliation. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 31 million people worldwide are classified as refugees and in need of services.
Most of the recently resettled refugees in the Capital Region have come from Burma, Iraq or Bhutan, but many also come from the Congo, Afghanistan and Sudan.
Once the State Department approves a refugee's move to the United States, he or she is processed through one of the 35 USCRI field and satellite offices nationwide.
"We accept refugees based on our capacity, the languages we have on staff and the communities that already exist," said Murphy. "There is already a large and strong Burmese community in Albany, so it makes sense for them to come here."
In 2005, the Albany USCRI field office processed 50 refugees. In 2008, it handled 350 and is on track to do so again this year, Murphy said.
Once the refugees arrive, the government will help them for a limited time. Refugees are expected to pay back their plane tickets to the United States, so they look for work and a place to live immediately, as well as enroll their children in school, learn their way around the public transportation system and figure out where to get food. If you think you're stressed out running daily errands, try doing it in a strange land where you don't speak the language.
Zaw Min arrived in Albany from Burma in 2000, after spending years on the run from his government for political activism.
"It was democracy for a couple years and then back to a military dictatorship, so I got to run away, because they looked for whoever was in that movement," said Min, 35.
When Min arrived, there were few services for refugees. Now, he's a case manager at USCRI and specializes in helping Burmese families.
"If this agency no exist, the refugees don't know what they're going to do with themselves," he said.
USCRI is always in need of volunteers who can help guide refugee families through some of these struggles.
"Mentors help them practice English, use the bus, take care of their mail," said Jen Barkan, resource manager at USCRI. "They need to be shown simple things, like not to leave their thermostat at 85, or what mail is junk and what's important."
In addition to drawing mentors and volunteers, Barkan hopes that the film will make for a friendlier community.
"You might see them at the grocery store," said Barkan. "We want to let people know that they need friends and unstructured support."
In making "Home Across Lands," director John Lavall aimed to show the universality of issues that affect refugees.
"They were farmers who didn't have anything to do with the war other than they were originally from that area," said Lavall, who is based in Providence, R.I, where the family resettled. "People in refugee camps are just like you and me. They want to go home. But they can't, because they will be killed."
The screening of the film is meant as a promotion of World Refugee Day. The local celebration will be at 5 p.m. June 20 at Emma Willard in Troy. Tickets are $95 for an individual or $175 per couple.
"The U.N. encourages people from all over the world to celebrate this event, so we want a lot of people to come," said Murphy. "We're hoping to raise money for utilities and rent for refugees. The more direct support we can give them, the better."
Danielle Furfaro can be reached at 454-5097 or by e-mail at dfurfaro@timesunion.com.
Screening
"Home Across Lands"
Where: Page Hall, 135 Western Ave., Albany
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 29
Cost: $10 suggested donation
Note: World Refugee Day will be held on June 20 at Emma Willard in Troy.
Contact: For more information, please visit http://www.Refugees Albany.org.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=794240&TextPage=2
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ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသတင္း
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မေလးရွားမွ ျမန္မာလုပ္သားတစ္ဦး လုပ္ငန္းခြင္၌ ေသဆံုး
ခြန္ေအာင္ျမတ္။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
ထုိင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ေရာဂါျဖစ္ပြားမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္သျဖင့္ စခန္း ထဲတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ဒုကၡသည္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးက အမိန္႕ထုတ္လုိက္သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၁ ရက္ေန႕က ထုိင္းက်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနသည္ မယ္ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းသို႕ လာေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီး ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးေရာဂါ ျဖစ္ပြားမည့္ အလားအလာရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုသျဖင့္ ယေန႕မွစ၍ စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မွဴးက ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္ သည္ဟု ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး အခရဖန္ ဖြန္စီက ေျပာသည္။
“ၾကက္ႏွစ္ေကာင္ေသတယ္။ အဲဒါ က်န္းမာေရးဌာနကို ပို႕ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးေတာ့ ဘာမွမျဖစ္ဘူး တဲ့။ အခုစခန္းထဲမွာ ၾကက္ေတြ ေပးမေမြးေတာ့ဘူး။ ၾကက္ေမြးတဲ့သူေတြကို သတိေပးထားတယ္။ မေမြးၾကဖို႕စခန္းထဲမွာ။ စစ္ေဆးလို႕ ေတြ႕တယ္ဆိုရင္ အကုန္ရွင္းပစ္မွာပဲ။ ၾကက္ေတြကိုလည္း ရွင္းမယ္ အေရးလည္းယူမယ္။ ေသတဲ့ၾကက္က သံသယရွိလို႕ပါ။”
ယေန႕နံနက္တြင္ စခန္းအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စခန္းတြင္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးသူမ်ား စခန္္းျပင္သို႕ သြားေမြးရန္ ေလာ္စပီ ကာျဖင့္ သတိေပးေၾကညာသည္ဟု စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးမွဴးက ေျပာသည္။
“အခု လက္ရွိ ၾကက္ေမြးေနတဲ့လူေတြကေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရးအေျခအေနကေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံက ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ဆရာ၀န္တေယာက္က လာၿပီးေတာ့ အဲသလို ဒီေနရာ လူေနမႈ ထူထပ္တယ္။ ဒီေနရာ စိုးရိမ္စရာ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ အစည္းအေ၀းထဲမွာ သူပိတ္သြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ ပလပ္(စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး)ကို သူအေၾကာင္းၾကားတယ္။ ပလပ္မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။ ဒီေန႕မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။”
ယေန႕နံနက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ႏွင့္စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးတို႕ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈမ်ားကို လုိက္လံ စစ္ေဆးေနသည္ဟု ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးပညာေပးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဒုကၡသည္တဦးက “ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားေတာ့ သိၾကတယ္။ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးနဲ႕ပတ္သက္လို႕ရွိရင္ေလ။ ဒါေပမယ္ ပထမအရင္ တေခါက္ကေတာ့ မေမြးဖို႕ ေျပာၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ၾကာေတာ့ ၾကာေနၿပီေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခု သူတို႕ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း လူနည္းစုပဲ။ အခု အဲဒီဟာကို အားလံုးကို ျပန္ေဖ်ာက္ခိုင္းတာပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ စားတာ ကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ စားေနၾကတာပဲ။ ၾကက္သားေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ ေရာင္းတယ္။ ထိုင္းၾကက္ေတြေလ ထုိင္း ေတြ သူတို႕လာေရာင္းတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီေမြးတာကိုက်ေတာ့ သူတို႕ပိတ္တယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၂ ႏွစ္ကတည္းက စခန္းတြင္း ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈ ပိတ္ပင္ထားခဲ့သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕ကလည္း မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္မွ ထုတ္ေ၀သည့္ ခဲဆိပ္ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ လူသံုးကုန္ပစၥည္းႏွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းေဆးအပါအ၀င္ ပစၥည္း ၉ မ်ဳိးကို သံုးစြဲျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ပိတ္ပင္ ထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news240409.html
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လူကုန္ကူးသည့္ မေလးရွား အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြမည္
ကိုဝုိင္း စေနေန႔၊ ဧၿပီလ 25 2009 22:47 - ျမန္မာစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္
ခ်င္းမုိင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ)။ ။ မေလးရွားတြင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံ ေရာင္းစားေနေသာ မေလး အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို ဥပေဒေၾကာင္းအရ တရားစြဲဆိုႏိုင္ရန္ အန္ဂ်ီအို ေခၚ အစိုးရ မဟုတ္ေသာ အဖဲြ႔မ်ားက စီစဥ္ေနသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ အေျမာက္အျမားရွိေနေၾကာင္း အေထာက္အထားမ်ား အခုိင္အမာ ရွိေနကာ သက္ဆုိင္ရာ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို တရားစဲြဆိုေရးအတြက္ မိမိတို႔ အပါအဝင္ အန္ဂ်ီအို ၄ ဖြဲ႔က မေလး-ထိုင္း နယ္စပ္၌ လူကုန္ကူးမႈ တိုက္ဖ်က္ေရးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ အစိုးရက မည္သို႔ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည္ကို ေလ့လာၿပီး အေသးစိတ္ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ား စုေဆာင္းေနေၾကာင္း မေလးရွား ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားေကာင္စီ လက္ေအာက္ရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မတီက ေျပာဆိုျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
“အစိုးရက ဖြဲ႔ထားတဲ့ The Council for Anti-Trafficking (လူကုန္ကူးမႈ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး ေကာင္စီ) ကို ေရွ႕ေနေကာင္စီက သြားေတြ႔ၿပီးေတာ့ က်မတို႔ရဲ႕ အေထာက္အထားေတြ မၾကာမီ တင္မွာပါ။ သူတို႔ ဘာေတြ လုပ္ေပးႏိုင္မလဲဆိုတာ ေမးျမန္း ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရပါမယ္။ သူတို႔က ဘာမွ ေဆာင္ရြက္မေပးဘူးဆိုရင္ က်မတို႔က လႊတ္ေတာ္ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ အစိုးရထဲမွာ လံႈ႔ေဆာ္မႈေတြ လုပ္သြားပါမယ္” ဟု ေကာ္မတီ အတြင္းေရးမႉး Ms. Renoka က မဇၥ်ိမကို ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွားရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမား အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC) မွ တြဲဖက္အတြင္းေရးမႉး ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က “က်ေနာ္တို႔နဲ႔ အန္ဂ်ီအို ၄ ဖြဲ႔ တြဲဖက္လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔လက္ထဲမွာ သက္ေသေတြ ရွိေနၿပီ။ ဒီမွာက က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလုပ္သမားအဖြဲ႔ဟာ တရားမဝင္အေနနဲ႔ ရပ္တည္ထားတာပါ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အဖြဲ႔အေနနဲ႔ တရားစြဲလို႔ မရဘူး။ ဒီႏိုင္ငံမွာရွိတဲ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးတို႔၊ migrant workers (ေရႊ႔ေျပာင္းလုပ္သား) အခြင့္အေရးတို႔ လိုက္လုပ္ေပးေနတဲ့၊ မွတ္ပံုတင္ထားတဲ့ မေလးရွား အန္ဂ်ီအိုေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီး တရားစြဲဖို႔ လုပ္ေနတယ္” ဟု မဇၥ်ိမကုိ ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွား ရဲႏွင့္ လူဝင္မႈၾကီးၾကပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔မွ အက်င့္ပ်က္ဝန္ထမ္းမ်ားက ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး၍ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံ တဦးလွ်င္ မေလးရွား ရင္းဂစ္ေငြ ၂,၅ဝဝ-၂,၈ဝဝ ျဖင့္ မေလးရွား ပိုင္နက္အတြင္း၌ ျပန္ေရာင္းေနေၾကာင္း BWRPC က ထုတ္ျပန္ေျပာဆိုထားသည္။
မေလးရွားအစိုးရက ၂ဝဝ၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည့္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတိုက္ဖ်က္ေရး ဥပေဒ ACT 670 ျဖင့္ တရားစြဲဆိုမည္ ျဖစ္ကာ၊ ဥပေဒအရ - တိုက္႐ိုက္ အျပစ္က်ဴးလြန္သူသည္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အနည္းဆံုး ၅ ႏွစ္၊ အမ်ားဆံုး ၁ဝ ႏွစ္ က်ခံရမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတြင္ သြယ္ဝုိက္၍ ပတ္သက္ေနသူလည္း ျပစ္ဒဏ္အျဖစ္ မေလးရွားရင္းဂစ္ေငြ ၅ဝဝ,ဝဝဝ ေပးေဆာင္ရမည္ဟု သိရသည္။
မေလးရွားတြင္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား၊ နီေပါ၊ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္မွ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား အလုပ္သမားမ်ား ရွိေသာ္လည္း ၎တို႔၏ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အစိုးရမ်ားက တာဝန္ယူေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးၿပီး ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရကမူ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားကို လ်စ္လွ်ဴ႐ႈထားသျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားသာ လူကုန္ကူးခံေနရေၾကာင္း ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ေျပာသည္။
ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္သို႔ ျပန္ပို႔ခံရေသာ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံရွိ တရားမဝင္ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ားသည္ ေငြမေပးႏိုင္ပါက ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံရွိ ငါးဖမ္းေလွမ်ား၊ ျပည့္တန္ဆာ႐ံုမ်ားတြင္ အဓမၼခိုင္းေစခံေနရေၾကာင္း အေမရိကန္အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရး ေကာ္မတီကလည္း ‘Trafficking and Extortion of Burmese Migrants in Malaysia and Southern Thailand’ အမည္ျဖင့္ မၾကာေသးမီက အစီရင္ခံစာတေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည္။
မေလးရွားရွိ အန္ဂ်ီအိုမ်ား၊ လူထုအေျချပဳအဖြဲ႔မ်ားက မေလးရွားအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈျပႆနာကို တစံုတခု ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ရဲဌာနက စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးမႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေသာ္လည္း နယ္စပ္တြင္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈမ်ားမွာ ၾကီးထြားေနဆဲပင္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
http://www.mizzimaburmese.com/news/regional/2821-2009-04-25-16-30-28.html
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ျမန္မာေတြ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရမႈ မေလးအရာရွိမ်ား ပါ၀င္
25 April 2009
ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စီးပြားေရးက်ပ္တည္းတာေၾကာင့္မိုလို႔ မေလးရွားႏိုင္ငံကို စြန္႔စြန္႔စားစား ထြက္အလုပ္လုပ္ၾကတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားတခ်ိဳ႕ဟာ မေလးရွားအာဏာပိုင္တခ်ိဳ႕ရဲ႕ ဖမ္းဆီးတာကို ခံရၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွားနဲ႔ ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္ေတြမွာ လူေမွာင္ခိုပြဲစားေတြရဲ႕ လက္ထဲကို ေရာင္းစားတာ ခံေနရပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ေတြဟာ ဘယ္လိုပံုစံေတြနဲ႔ ဘယ္လိုေနရာေတြမွာ ေရာင္းစားခံေနၾကရတယ္ ဆိုတာကို စံုစမ္းထားတဲ့ မေအးေအးမာ က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။
မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံမွာ ေရာင္းစားခံေနရတဲ့ျမန္မာေတြဟာ ေန႔စဥ္ရာဂဏန္းနဲ႔ ရွိေနၿပီး မေလးရွားလူ၀င္မႈႀကီးၾကပ္ေရး၀န္ထမ္း ေတြက လူပြဲစားေတြထံကို ေရာင္းစားေနေၾကာင္း အလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ေကာ္မတီရဲ႕ တြဲဖက္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ကိုေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က အခုလို ေျပာပါတယ္။
“လ၀က က ထိန္းသိမ္းၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ကို နယ္စပ္ေခၚသြားတယ္။ နယ္စပ္ေရာက္လုိ႔ရွိရင္ အဲဒီေခၚသြားတဲ့ လ၀က ေတြကပဲ လူေမွာင္ခိုကူးတဲ့သူေတြ လက္ထဲကို ဒီ ျပန္ပို႔ခံရတဲ့သူေတြကို လႊဲေပးလိုက္တယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံေငြေရးေၾကးေရးကအစ သူတို႔ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္မွာ လူဘယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္လာပို႔မယ္ ဆိုတာကအစ သူတို႔ ေနာက္ကြယ္မွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ ေနာက္ကြယ္ကေန သူတို႔ အဆက္အသြယ္ လုပ္ထားၿပီးေတာ့မွာ သူတို႔ သြားပို႔တယ္။ သြားပို႔ၿပီးေတာ့ လႊဲေပးၿပီးေတာ့မွ ျပန္လာတယ္။ ျပန္လာၿပီးတဲ့ ေနာက္ အဲဒီေနာက္ပိုင္း ျပန္၀င္လာတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာလည္း ဒီႏိုင္ငံက အစိုးရ၀န္ထမ္းေတြ ပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္မႈ ရွိေနတယ္။ အဲဒါကို လည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔က သက္ေသအေထာက္အထားေတြ ဘာေတြ ရထားၿပီးၿပီ။ ဒီမွာရွိတဲ့ အစိုးရကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ကိုယ္တိုင္က ေတာ့ ေျပာလို႔မရဘူးေပါ့။ ဒီမွာရွိတဲ့ အဲန္ဂ်ီအိုေတြနဲ႔ ေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ သူတို႔ကို ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေျပာမယ္။”
ထိုင္း-မေလး နယ္စပ္မွာ ျမန္မာေတြ လူပြဲစားေတြလက္ထဲ ေရာက္သြားခဲ့ရတဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြကို ေျပာျပခဲ့ရာမွာေတာ့ -
“သူတို႔ကို လ၀က ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ လူေမွာင္ခိုကူးတဲ့သူေတြ လက္ထဲကို လႊဲေပးလုိက္ၿပီဆိုရင္ သူတို႔က သံုးခုကို သူတို႔ ေျပာျပ တယ္ေပါ့။ တစ္နည္းက ဒီမေလးရွားထဲကို ျပန္၀င္မလား၊ ေနာက္တစ္နည္းက ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ျပန္သြားမလား၊ ေနာက္ တနည္း က ပိုက္ဆံမေပးႏုိင္လို႔ရွိရင္ ေလွမွာ အေရာင္းစားခံမလား။ အမ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ ေရာင္းစားတာက ေယာက္်ား ေလးေတြဆိုရင္ ငါးဖမ္းေလွကို ေရာင္းတယ္။ မိန္းကေလးေတြဆိုရင္ ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းေတြဘက္မွာ သူတို႔ ေရာင္းပစ္ လိုက္တယ္ေပါ့။ ဒီ ထိုင္းဘက္က။ အကုန္လံုးက ျပန္၀င္လာတဲ့သူေတြပဲ မ်ားတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ကိုလည္း သူတို႔ မျပန္ဘူး။ ပိုက္ဆံမရွိလို႔ရွိရင္ေတာ့ ေလွမွာ အေရာင္းစားခံရတယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံရွိတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ ဒီမွာ သူငယ္ခ်င္း အဆက္အသြယ္၊ ေဆြမ်ိဳးမိဘ အဆက္အသြယ္ေတြကေနတဆင့္ အကူအညီေတာင္းၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွားထဲကို ျပန္၀င္လာၾကတယ္။”
ေငြေၾကးမေပးႏိုင္တဲ့သူေတြဟာ ရိုက္ႏွက္ျခင္းကိုပါ ခံရတယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။
“ပိုက္ဆံမေပးႏုိင္တဲ့သူေတြဆိုတာေတာင္မွ အဲဒီလို မေပးႏိုင္တဲ့သူေတြထဲမွာ သူတို႔သတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့ ရက္ျပည့္လို႔မွ သူတို႔ ဖုန္းဆက္လို႔ ပိုက္ဆံေပးဖို႔မေသခ်ာဘူး ဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္ အရိုက္ခံရတာေတြ ရွိတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုမ်ိဳးလူေတြလည္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ဆီမွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ အရိုက္ခံရတာတို႔ အထိုးခံရတာတို႔၊ သူတို႔ ပိုက္ဆံရဖို႔ ရက္နည္းနည္းၾကာသြားလို႔ရွိရင္ ဒီလူေတြကို ထမင္းေတြ ဘာေတြ မေကၽြးေတာ့ဘဲ အငတ္ထားတဲ့ဟာမ်ိဳးေတြပါ ရွိပါတယ္။”
တျခားႏုိင္ငံသားေတြကို ဖမ္းမိတဲ့အခါမွာ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ သက္ဆုိင္ရာႏိုင္ငံေတြက တာ၀န္ယူၿပီး ျပန္ၿပီးေတာ့ လက္ခံတာေတြ ရွိေနေပမဲ့ ျမန္မာကေတာ့ လက္ခံတာေတြ မရွိတဲ့အတြက္ ေရာင္းစားတာကိုပဲ ခံေနရေၾကာင္းေတြကုိလည္း ေျပာျပသြား ပါတယ္။
http://www.voanews.com/burmese/2009-04-25-voa5.cfm
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နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မည္
ေဇာ္ႀကီး။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
မေလးရွားနယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈတြင္ ေဒသခံအာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ပါ၀င္မႈကို တရားဥပေဒေဘာင္ အတြင္းမွ ေဖာ္ထုတ္ မည္ဟု မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေပးေရးေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC)က ေျပာသည္။
မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေပးေရးေကာ္မတီ (BWRPC) ႏွင့္ မေလးရွား NGO အဖဲြ႕အစည္း (၄) ဖဲြ႕တုိ႔ပူးေပါင္း၍ နယ္စပ္လူကုန္ကူးမႈ လုပ္ငန္းတြင္ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္ မ်ားပါ၀င္ေနမႈကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္သြားမည္ဟု ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ထုတ္ ေၾကျငာခ်က္၌ေဖာ္ျပသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးမႈလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား၌ မေလးရွားအာဏာပုိင္အဖဲြ႕ အစည္းမ်ားမွ ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္ျခင္း မရွိဟု အစုိးရ၏ ျငင္းဆုိခ်က္အေပၚ BWRPC တဲြဖက္အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ကုိေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ယခုလုိ ေျပာသည္။
“အခုက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဆီမွာ သက္ေသေတြရွိေနၿပီ။ ရွိေနတဲ့ ဒီသက္ေသေတြကေနၿပီးေတာ့ မေလးရွား အစုိးရအာဏာပုိင္ေတြ ပါတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီအစုိးရကုိ တင္မယ္။ တင္ၿပီးေတာ့ ဒီလူေတြဒီလူေတြပါတယ္၊ ဒီလူေတြ ဒီလူေတြကေနတဆင့္ မေလးရွားအစုိးရအတြင္းမွာ ရွိေနၿပီဆုိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မယ္။ အဲဒီလုိအခ်ိန္က်ေတာ့မွ အစုိးရ ဖက္ကေန ၿပီးေတာ့ ဘယ္လုိျပန္လုပ္ေပးမလဲဆုိတာ တခ်က္ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ရမွာေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခုလတ္တေလာ ကေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က မပါဘူးလုိ႔ ျငင္းထားတယ္ဗ်ာ။ ျငင္းထားေတာ့ အဲဒီ ျငင္းထားတဲ့ အခ်က္ကုိ က်ေနာ္ တုိ႔က သူတုိ႔ကုိျပန္တုိက္ရမယ္။ လက္ဆုတ္လက္ကုိင္ျပႏုိင္တဲ့အထိ သက္ေသေတြဘာေတြနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္ တုိ႔ကုိ ျငင္းလုိ႔မရေအာင္ျပန္လုပ္ရမယ္။”
လူကုန္ကူးမႈႏွင့္ပါတ္သက္သည့္ အခ်က္အလက္စုေဆာင္းမႈကုိ BWRPC ကတာ၀န္ယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ၿပီး ဥပေဒ ပုိင္းဆုိင္ရာကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ အစုိးရထံတင္ျပမႈတုိ႔ကုိ မေလးရွား NGO အဖဲြ႕ ၄ ဖဲြ႕ကတာ၀န္ယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ မည္ျဖစ္သည္။
လူကုန္ကူးသည့္လုပ္ငန္းအား တုိက္ဖ်က္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ႀကံဳေတြ႕ႏုိင္သည့္ အခက္အခဲမ်ား အား ၎တုိ႔အေနႏွင့္ ရင္ဆုိင္ေျဖရွင္းသြားမည္ဟု ကုိေက်ာ္ထူးေအာင္က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
“ျဖစ္ျဖစ္္ေျမာက္ေျမာက္ျဖစ္သြားေအာင္လည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔လုပ္မယ္ဗ်ာ။ ဘယ္လုိလူမ်ဳိးကပဲ ဘယ္လုိပဲ တုန္႔ျပန္လာ တုန္႔ျပန္လာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အေနနဲ႔က ဒီကိစၥကုိ လုပ္ကုိလုပ္သြားမယ္။ ဘာကုိမွက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ သိပ္ၿပီးဂရုမစုိက္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ႔လဲဆုိေတာ့ ဒီလူေမွာင္ခုိကူးတဲ့ ကိစၥဟာ အခုဒီမွာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလးကုိဆုိးေနၿပီ။ ဆုိးေနတယ္ဆုိတာေတာင္မွ ဘယ္လူမ်ဳိးမွ မခံရဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဗမာလူမ်ဳိးတမ်ဳိးပဲ ခံရတယ္ဗ်ာ။ အဲဒီေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥကုိက်ေနာ္တုိ႔ျဖစ္ ေအာင္လုပ္မယ္။”
လက္ရွိ လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ တေယာက္၏ ေစ်းႏႈန္းမွာ မေလးရွားေငြ ၂၅၀၀ မွ ၂၈၀၀ ၾကားတြင္ရွိၿပီး BWRPC အဖဲြ႕မွေကာက္ယူရရွိသည့္ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံတြင္ လူကုန္ကူးခံရသူ ျမန္မာႏိုိင္ငံသား ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ခန္႔ရွိသည္ဟု ေၾကညာခ်က္တြင္ ပါရွိသည္။
မေလးရွားအစုိးရမွ လူကုန္ကူးမႈတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးဥပေဒကုိ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ေအာက္တုိဘာလက အတည္ျပဳ ျပဌာန္းခဲ့သည္။
လူကုန္ကူးမႈမ်ား၌ မေလးရွားအစုိးရအရာရွိမ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္ေနသည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ အထက္ လြတ္ေတာ္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးေကာ္မတီ၏ အစီရင္ခံစာအသစ္၌ ေဖာ္ျပထားေၾကာင္း ယေန႔ထုတ္ ဗြီအုိေအ သတင္းတပုဒ္၌ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news250409.html
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ျမန္မာမ်ား လူကုန္ကူးခံရမႈ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေပးမည္ဟု မေလးရွားဝန္ၾကီး ဂတိျပဳ
http://burmese.dvb.no/news.php?id=7384
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ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား သတင္း
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မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္
ခြန္ေအာင္ျမတ္။
ဧၿပီလ ၂၄ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္။
ထုိင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ေရာဂါျဖစ္ပြားမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္သျဖင့္ စခန္း ထဲတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ဒုကၡသည္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးက အမိန္႕ထုတ္လုိက္သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၁ ရက္ေန႕က ထုိင္းက်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနသည္ မယ္ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းသို႕ လာေရာက္ စစ္ေဆးၿပီး ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးေရာဂါ ျဖစ္ပြားမည့္ အလားအလာရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆိုသျဖင့္ ယေန႕မွစ၍ စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မွဴးက ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴျခင္းကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္ သည္ဟု ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး အခရဖန္ ဖြန္စီက ေျပာသည္။
“ၾကက္ႏွစ္ေကာင္ေသတယ္။ အဲဒါ က်န္းမာေရးဌာနကို ပို႕ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးေတာ့ ဘာမွမျဖစ္ဘူး တဲ့။ အခုစခန္းထဲမွာ ၾကက္ေတြ ေပးမေမြးေတာ့ဘူး။ ၾကက္ေမြးတဲ့သူေတြကို သတိေပးထားတယ္။ မေမြးၾကဖို႕စခန္းထဲမွာ။ စစ္ေဆးလို႕ ေတြ႕တယ္ဆိုရင္ အကုန္ရွင္းပစ္မွာပဲ။ ၾကက္ေတြကိုလည္း ရွင္းမယ္ အေရးလည္းယူမယ္။ ေသတဲ့ၾကက္က သံသယရွိလို႕ပါ။”
ယေန႕နံနက္တြင္ စခန္းအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စခန္းတြင္းတြင္ ၾကက္ေမြးသူမ်ား စခန္္းျပင္သို႕ သြားေမြးရန္ ေလာ္စပီ ကာျဖင့္ သတိေပးေၾကညာသည္ဟု စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးမွဴးက ေျပာသည္။
“အခု လက္ရွိ ၾကက္ေမြးေနတဲ့လူေတြကေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရးအေျခအေနကေတာ့ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံက ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြး ဆရာ၀န္တေယာက္က လာၿပီးေတာ့ အဲသလို ဒီေနရာ လူေနမႈ ထူထပ္တယ္။ ဒီေနရာ စိုးရိမ္စရာ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ အစည္းအေ၀းထဲမွာ သူပိတ္သြားတယ္။ ေနာက္ ပလပ္(စခန္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး)ကို သူအေၾကာင္းၾကားတယ္။ ပလပ္မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။ ဒီေန႕မွာ ျပန္ညႊန္ၾကားတယ္။”
ယေန႕နံနက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ ထုိင္းအာဏာပိုင္ႏွင့္စခန္းလံုၿခံဳေရးတို႕ ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈမ်ားကို လုိက္လံ စစ္ေဆးေနသည္ဟု ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။
ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးပညာေပးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဒုကၡသည္တဦးက “ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားေတာ့ သိၾကတယ္။ ၾကက္ငွက္တုတ္ေကြးနဲ႕ပတ္သက္လို႕ရွိရင္ေလ။ ဒါေပမယ္ ပထမအရင္ တေခါက္ကေတာ့ မေမြးဖို႕ ေျပာၿပီးသြားၿပီ။ ၾကာေတာ့ ၾကာေနၿပီေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခု သူတို႕ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ျပန္ေမြးတယ္ ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း လူနည္းစုပဲ။ အခု အဲဒီဟာကို အားလံုးကို ျပန္ေဖ်ာက္ခိုင္းတာပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ စားတာ ကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ စားေနၾကတာပဲ။ ၾကက္သားေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ပဲ ေရာင္းတယ္။ ထိုင္းၾကက္ေတြေလ ထုိင္း ေတြ သူတို႕လာေရာင္းတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီေမြးတာကိုက်ေတာ့ သူတို႕ပိတ္တယ္။” ဟု ေျပာသည္။
မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ၂ ႏွစ္ကတည္းက စခန္းတြင္း ၾကက္ေမြးျမဴမႈ ပိတ္ပင္ထားခဲ့သည္။
ယခုလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕ကလည္း မယ္လဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္မွ ထုတ္ေ၀သည့္ ခဲဆိပ္ပါ၀င္သည္ဟု ယူဆရေသာ လူသံုးကုန္ပစၥည္းႏွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းေဆးအပါအ၀င္ ပစၥည္း ၉ မ်ဳိးကို သံုးစြဲျခင္းမျပဳရန္ ပိတ္ပင္ ထားသည္။
http://www.nmg-news.com/nmg/news240409.html
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ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား "ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ ေရာင္းစားခံရ"
Finacial Times
ဧၿပီ ၂၅၊ ၂၀၀၉
ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းသုိ႔ ေရာင္းစားခံရသည့္ ကိစၥတြင္ မေလးရွား အစုိးရ အရာရိွမ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနသည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ တဦးက စြပ္စဲြလုိက္သည္။
ထုိင္း မေလးရွား နယ္စပ္ေဒသတြင္ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား၏ လက္အတြင္းသုိ႔ လဲြေျပာင္းခံရသည့္ ျမန္မာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ျပီး တႏွစ္ၾကာ အခ်ိန္ယူ စုံစမ္း ေရးသားထားေသာ အ စီရင္ခံစာကုိ
ႏိုင္ငံျခားဆက္ဆံေရးေကာ္မတီတြင္ တာ၀န္ရိွေသာ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္ Richard Lugarက မေလးရွား အစုိးရကုိ အဂၤါေန႔က ေပးအပ္လုိက္သည္။
အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ တတိယႏုိင္ငံတခုကုိ သြားေရာက္ေရးအတြက္ မေလးရွားႏုိင္ငံရိွ ကုလသမဂၢရုံးသုိ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ ႀကိဳးစားေသာ ျမန္မာျပည္သားမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကုိ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
စုံစမ္းမႈမ်ားအရ မေလး အရာရိွမ်ားက ထုိျမန္မာျပည္သားမ်ားကုိ ဖမ္းဆီးျပီး နယ္စပ္သုိ႔ ျပန္လည္ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ခ့ဲေၾကာင္း၊ ျပန္ပုိ႔ခံရသူမ်ားထဲတြင္ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳခံထားရသူမ်ားလည္း ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္း၊ ထုိအခ်ိန္တြင္ ေငြမေပးႏုိင္သူမ်ားမွာ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားထံသုိ႔ လဲြေျပာင္းခံရေၾကာင္း ေရးထားသည္။
"ေငြမေပးႏုိင္သူမ်ားသည္ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံရိွ လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား လက္သုိ႔ ေရာက္သြားသည္၊ ငါးဖမ္းေလွ၊ ျပည့္တန္ဆာအိမ္ စသည့္ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ဳိးစုံသုိ႔ ေရာက္သြားရသည္" ဟု အစီရင္ခံစာက ဆုိသည္။
လူကုန္ကူးသူမ်ား၏ ေစာ္ကားျခင္း ခံရသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကုိလည္ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ တခ်ဳိ႕မွာ ၎တုိ႔၏ ခင္ပြန္းသည္မ်ားေရွ႕တြင္ပင္ ေစာ္ကားခံရသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။ "ဘယ္သူမွ ၀င္ျပီး မေျပာရဲဘူး၊ ေျပာရင္ ေသနတ္နဲ႔ အပစ္ခံရမယ္၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ဓားနဲ႔ အခုတ္ခံရမယ္" ဟူေသာ အကူအညီေပးေရး အဖဲြ႔တခုမွ ၀န္ထမ္းတဦး၏ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္ကုိလည္း ကုိးကားထားသည္။
ဒုကၡသည္တဦးကလည္း "(အမ်ဳိးသမီးေတြက) ၾကည့္ေပ်ာ္ရွဳေပ်ာ္ ရိွတယ္ ဆုိရင္ ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္ငန္းကုိ အေရာင္းခံရတယ္။ ရုပ္မေခ်ာတ့ဲသူေတြဆုိရင္ေတာ့ သူတုိ႔က (လူကုန္ကူးသူေတြက) စားေသာက္ဆုိင္တခုမွာ ေရာင္းလုိက္ႏုိင္တယ္" ဟု ေျပာသည္။
အဆုိပါ စြပ္စဲြခ်က္မ်ားကုိ မေလးရွား ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႔က စုံစမ္းမည္ ဟူေသာ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ကုိ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္ Richard Lugarက ႀကိဳဆုိလုိက္သည္။
ဤကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး တစုံတရာ တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာဆုိရန္ ဆက္သြယ္သည့္အခါ မေလးရွား ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ရုံးက အေၾကာင္းျပန္ျခင္း မရိွေပ။
http://moemaka.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3669&Itemid=1
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အစုိးရ၏ရာဇဝတ္မႈ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ဖြင့္ခ်
Friday, 24 April 2009 18:49 ဧရာဝတီ
ျမန္မာအစုိးရ က်ဴးလြန္ခ့ဲေသာ ရာဇဝတ္မႈမ်ားကုိ ကုလသမဂၢ လုံၿခဳံေရးေကာင္စီက စုံစမ္းႏုိင္ေရးအတြက္ တုိက္တြန္းေပးပါဟု အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေရာက္ ကရင္ တုိင္းရင္းသူ တဦးက ကြန္ဂရက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏွင့္ အုိဘားမား အစုိးရကုိ ယေန႔ တုိက္တြန္းလုိက္သည္။
တုိင္းရင္းသား ေဒသမ်ားတြင္ စစ္အစုိးရ က်ဴးလြန္ခ့ဲသည္ဟု ဆုိေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ တခ်ဳိ႕ကုိ ဒုကၡသည္တဦး ျဖစ္သူ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသမီး မုိင္းရာဒါးေဂေဖာက လႊတ္ေတာ္ ၾကားနာပြဲတခုသုိ႔ တက္ေရာက္ၿပီး အေသးစိတ္ ရွင္းျပခ့ဲသည္။ ထုိရာဇဝတ္မႈမ်ား အတြက္ စစ္အစုိးရတြင္ တာဝန္ရိွသည္ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။ စစ္အစုိးရ၏ အႏုိင္က်င့္ ႏွိပ္စက္မႈမ်ားကုိ ခံရသူမ်ားတြင္ သူ၏ မိသားစုဝင္မ်ားလည္း ပါဝင္ခ့ဲသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈ အေျခအေနမ်ားကုိ ၾကားနာ စစ္ေဆးေသာ Tom Lantos လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ ေရွ႕ေမွာက္တြင္ ယင္းသုိ႔ ထြက္ဆုိခ့ဲျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ မုိင္းရာဒါးေဂေဖာသည္ ထုိင္း - ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တြင္ အဓိက လႈပ္ရွားလ်က္ရိွေသာ ကရင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး အစည္းအရုံး ၏ အသင္းဝင္တဦးလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ျမန္မာအစုိးရဲ႕ လူသားမ်ဳိးႏြယ္ တခုလံုး အေပၚ က်ဴးလြန္တ့ဲ ရာဇဝတ္မႈေတြကုိ ကုလသမဂၢ လုံၿခဳံေရးေကာင္စီက စုံစမ္းႏုိင္ဖုိ႔အတြက္ တုိက္တြန္းေပးပါလုိ႔ ကြန္ဂရက္ အဖဲြ႔ဝင္ေတြ နဲ႔ အစုိးရ အဖဲြ႔သစ္ကုိ က်မ ေမတၱာ ရပ္ခံပါတယ္” ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။
စစ္အစုိးရက အရပ္သားမ်ားအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ေနျခင္းမ်ား ရပ္ဆုိင္းသြားေရးအတြက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အသုိင္းအဝန္းကလည္း ဆက္လက္ ဖိအားေပးရန္ သူက တုိက္တြန္းလုိက္သည္။
ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ လက္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ရြာလုံးကြ်တ္ ထြက္ေျပးရမႈမ်ား ရိွေနေၾကာင္း၊ အဝတ္တထည္ ကုိယ္တခုျဖင့္ ေျပးရျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သူက ရွင္းျပသည္။
ရြာသားမ်ား ေနရပ္ရင္းသုိ႔ မျပန္ႏုိင္ရန္ တပ္မေတာ္ စစ္ေၾကာင္းမ်ားက ရြာႏွင့္ အနီးတဝုိက္တြင္ ေျမျမွဳပ္မုိင္းမ်ား ေထာင္ေလ့ရိွသည္ဟု မုိင္းရာက ေျပာသည္။
“ရြာကေန ထြက္ရၿပီ ဆုိရင္ တေနရာကေန တျခား တေနရာကုိ ေျပးေနရတယ္။ ေတာထဲမွာ ေတြ႔တ့ဲဟာကုိ စား၊ အိပ္တ့ဲအခါလည္း ဗုိက္ဆာဆာနဲ႔ အိပ္။ ကေလးေတြကုိ လက္ဆဲြၿပီး အၿမဲတမ္း ေျပးေနရတယ္။ စစ္တပ္ကုိ ေၾကာက္ေနရတာပဲ” ဟု သူက ဆုိသည္။
“က်မတုိ႔ ေျပးရတုန္းကလည္း က်မတုိ႔ မိသားစု တခုလုံး ဘာဆုိ ဘာမွ မရိွဘူး။ စားစရာလည္း မရိွ၊ အိပ္စရာ မရိွ၊ အဝတ္အစားလည္း အပုိမရိွ၊ မုိးရာသီ ေဆာင္းရာသီဆုိရင္ ပုိၿပီး ဒုကၡေရာက္ရတယ္၊ စစ္ေၾကာင္းေတြနဲ႔ လြတ္ေအာင္ အၿမဲ ေရွာင္ရတယ္။ ေတာထဲမွာ၊ ၿခဳံထဲမွာ၊ ဂူထဲမွာ ပုန္းရတ့ဲအခါ ရိွတယ္။ မုိးရြာထဲမွာ ပလတ္စတစ္ကုိ ကုိယ္တဝက္ပဲ ၿခဳံၿပီး အိပ္ခ့ဲရတ့ဲ ညကုိ က်မ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေမ့ဘူး” ဟု မုိင္းရာက အနည္းငယ္ ငိုရိွဳက္ရင္း ေျပာျပသည္။
အကူအညီေပးေရး အဖဲြ႔မ်ားက ေျပးလႊားေနရသည့္ ရြာပုန္းရြာေရွာင္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားထံသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ႏုိင္ျခင္း မရိွသျဖင့္ ေဆးဝါး ႏွင့္ အစားအစာ အတြက္ အခက္အခဲမ်ား ႀကဳံရသည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။
“က်မ ငွက္ဖ်ားတက္တယ္၊ တုပ္ေကြးေရာ တျခားဟာေတြေရာ ျဖစ္တယ္ ခဏခဏပဲ။ က်မရဲ႕ ေမာင္ႏွမဝမ္းကြဲေတြလည္း ဖ်ားနာၿပီး ဆုံးသြားၾကတယ္” ဟု သူက ေျပာသည္။
“ဘာ စားစရာမွ မရိွတာကုိလည္း ခဏခဏ ႀကဳံရတယ္။ တခါတေလ မိသားစု ၇ ေယာက္ စားဖုိ႔ ဆန္ တဘူးပဲ ရိွတတ္တယ္။ လူႀကီးေတြက မစားၾကဘူး။ ထမင္းကုိ က်မတုိ႔ ညီအစ္မေတြကုိ ေပးတယ္၊ က်မတုိ႔က အငယ္ေတြ ဆုိေတာ့။ ေတာထဲမွာ မွ်စ္ေတြ လုိက္ရွာၿပီး စားရတယ္” ဟု မုိင္းရာက လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကုိ ေျပာျပသည္။
“ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ကရင္ေတြအျပင္ တျခား တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြလည္း ရိွတယ္၊ သူတုိ႔လည္း ျမန္မာ စစ္အစုိးရက ရန္ျပဳတာကုိ ခံေနရတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ရပ္ ကုိယ့္ရြာမွာ ေနလုိ႔မရတ့ဲအတြက္ ျပည္တြင္း ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္း ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ျဖစ္သြားၾကတယ္၊ တျခား ႏုိင္ငံကုိ ေျပးရတယ္” ဟု မုိင္းရာက ေျပာသည္။
http://www.irrawaddy.org/bur/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=990:2009-04-24-11-51-50&catid=1:news&Itemid=2
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