Four DKBA soldiers defect to KNU Brigade No.6

Wed 12 Nov 2008,
HURFOM, Duplayar District
Four soldiers from the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) have defected to the Karen National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU). The soldiers are reported to be upset about discrimination within DKBA ranks, as well as human rights abuses committed by the DKBA during an ongoing conflict with the KNU/KNLA. The soldiers, who are from DKBA Battalion No. 907, surrendered to KNLA Brigade No. 6 at 10 am on November 10th. “As soon as we received their request, we picked them up and brought them to our headquarters,” said a HURFOM source in the KNU. “We have already confirmed that they all are DKBA soldiers, and they also brought weapons and equipment along with them.” The four defectors include an ethnic Karen company sergeant and three privates, who are ethnic Burman. According to the KNU source, the soldiers defected with six guns, over 250 rounds of ammunition, a radio and Thai registered mobile phone According to the company sergeant, DKBA ranks are beset by discrimination. “We decided to defect because the officers treated us very bad. Foods supports are not even enough to survive,” said the soldier. “For soldiers who have family, they only received 20 kilograms of rice and 10,000 kyat per month as stipend. At the same time, high-level officers have good living standards much higher than ours.” The sergeant also lamented Karen-on-Karen human rights abuses perpetuated by the DKBA. “The real terrible thing that made me to leave the Company is the recent clash between two Karen groups in the Karen territories. I still feel pain that the war between us caused people to leave from their native places, some were seriously abused and some killed with no trial. I don't want to be a member of such a terrible group any more. I decided to desert.” The DKBA began preparing to launch an offensive on KNU controlled territory in August, and clashes between the two forces are consistently being reported. According to the Karen Human Rights group, the DKBA has been forcibly conscripting villagers as soldiers, as well as porters and human mine sweepers. All the soldiers said they are tired of fighting, and would like to simply find jobs working in a peaceful place. “Currently they all are doing well in our Bridge No. 6. We are planning to send them to a secure place and let them find jobs there,” said a KNLA official from Brigade No. 6. Desertions from the DKBA and the Burmese army, which became unofficial allies when the DKBA split from the KNU in 1994, are frequently reported by exile news agencies like the Thailand-based Irrawaddy and India-based Mizzima News. KNU officials agree, and say that the recent defections are not isolated incidents. “From July to October of this year, five soldiers from DKBA battalion No. 907 defected to us,” said the Brigade No. 6 official. “This is the third times we received deserters from Battalion No. 907 in the last five months.”

ေဒၚစုႏွင့္ ေဒါက္တာ စင္သီယာေမာင္ကို စပိန္ႏိုင္ငံက ဆုခ်ီးျမႇင့္

ေဒၚစုႏွင့္ ေဒါက္တာ စင္သီယာေမာင္ကို စပိန္ႏိုင္ငံက ဆုခ်ီးျမႇင့္ေအးလဲ့ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၁၁၊ ၂၀၀၈
ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ထိုင္းျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ရွိ မယ္ေတာ္ေဆးခန္း တည္ေထာင္သူ ေဒါက္တာစင္သီယာေမာင္တို႔အား စပိန္ႏိုင္ငံရွိ ကတ္တာလိုနီးယားျပည္နယ္အစုိးရက ၎ၿမိဳ႕၏ အျမင့္ဆံုးဂုဏ္ထူးေဆာင္ ႏိုုင္ငံတကာ ဆုခ်ီးျမႇင့္ပြဲကို ယေန႔က်င္းပမည္ျဖစ္သည္။
ကတ္တာလိုနီးယားဆု ေက်ာက္ဆစ္႐ုပ္ပံု
အဆိုပါဆုခ်ီးျမႇင့္ပြဲကို စပိန္ႏိုင္ငံၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ျဖစ္သည့္ ဘာစီလိုနားၿမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပမည္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး လက္ရွိေနအိမ္ အက်ယ္ခ်ဴပ္ခံထားရသည့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကိုယ္စား ၿဗိတိန္ႏိုင္ငံျမန္မာ့အေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖြဲ႔ Burma Campaign UK မွ တာဝန္ခံတဦး ျဖစ္သူ ဇိုယာဖန္းက လက္ခံရယူမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း လည္းသိရသည္။
ဇိုယာဖန္းက “ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အတြက္ ဒီဆုကိုသြားေရာက္ယူခြင့္ရတဲ့ အတြက္ က်မဝမ္းသာမိပါတယ္။ က်မစိတ္မေကာင္းမိတာက သူကိုယ္တိုင္သြားေရာက္ယူခြင့္ မရတာကိုေတာ့ စိတ္မေကာင္းပါဘူး။ ခုလိုဆုေပးတာဟာ ကတ္တာလိုနီးယား ျပည္သူ လူထုေတြေရာ ကတ္တာလိုနီးယား အစိုးရကပါ ျမန္မာျပည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူျပည္သားေတြနဲ႔ အတူရပ္တည္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာကို သိရတဲ့အတြက္ အားတက္မိပါတယ္” ဟုေျပာသည္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အား ယခုႏွစ္ ဧၿပီလအတြင္းကလည္း အေမရိကန္ အထက္လႊတ္ေတာ္က အရပ္သား မ်ားကို ခ်ီးျမႇင့္သည့္ဆုမ်ားထဲမွအျမင့္ဆံုး ေရႊတံဆိပ္ဆုကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳခ်ီးျမႇင့္ခဲ့သည္။ ၎သည္ ၁၉၉၀ခုႏွစ္က ေနာ္ေဝး ႏိုင္ငံက ခ်ီးျမႇင့္သည့္ ႏိုဘဲလ္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆု အပါအဝင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဆုေပါင္းမ်ားစြားကို ရရွိ ထား သူ ျဖစ္သည္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္သည္ ၂၀၀၃ ခုႏွစ္ ေမလတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ဒီပဲယင္း အၾကမ္းဖက္တိုက္ခိုက္မႈ အၿပီးမွစတင္၍ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ျဖင့္ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံေနရသည္မွာ ၅ ႏွစ္ျပည့္ၿပီျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း စစ္အစိုးရက ေမလတြင္ အက်ယ္ခ်ဴပ္ သက္တမ္းတႏွစ္ ထပ္မံတိုးခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၈၉ ခုႏွစ္မွစ၍ ယေန႔အထိ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ ခ်ဳပ္ ဘဝျဖင့္ ေနရခ်ိန္စုစုေပါင္းမွာ ၁၃ ႏွစ္ရွိၿပီျဖစ္သည္။
ယမန္ေန႔တြင္ ေဒါက္တာစင္သီယာေမာင္ႏွင့္ ဇိုယာဖန္းတို႔သည္ ကတ္တာလိုနီးယားျပည္နယ္ အစိုးရ အႀကီး အကဲ José Montill ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့စဥ္တြင္ လက္ရွိျမန္ာႏိုင္ငံေရးအေျခအေနမ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အေျခအေန၊ နယ္စပ္ေဒသ တြင္ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ပိုမိုတိုးမ်ားလာသည့္အေျခအေန စသည့္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ ၏ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ေနမႈမ်ားအေပၚ စပိန္အစိုးရအေနႏွင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္အေရးကိုပိုမို ဖိအားေပးေျပာဆို ရန္ တိုက္တြန္းႏိုးေဆာ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္းလည္း ဇိုယာဖန္းက ေျပာသည္။
ေဒါက္တာစင္သီယာေမာင္တည္ေထာင္သည့္ မယ္ေတာ္ေဆးခန္းသည္ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းႏွင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံရွိ ျမန္မာ ျပည္္သား မ်ားအား မည္သည့္ေရာဂါမဆို အခမဲ့ေဆး ကုသေပး ေနသည့္ တခုတည္းေသာ ေဆးခန္း ျဖစ္ၿပီး ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္က စတင္ တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ေဒါက္တာစင္သီယာေမာင္သည္ ယခုဆု အပါအဝင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာဆုေပါင္း ၁၃ခု ကိုရရွိထား သူျဖစ္သည္။ ကတ္တာလိုနီးယားျပည္နယ္သည္ စပိန္ႏိုင္ငံေျမာက္ပိုင္းတြင္တည္ရွိၿပီး ၎ျပည္နယ္၏ ဂုဏ္ထူးေဆာင္ဆုကို ကမၻာေပၚရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး၊ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ၊ သိပၸံပညာရပ္မ်ား ဆိုင္ရာတုိ႔တြင္ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ရန္ ေဆာင္ ရြက္သူမ်ားအား ခ်ီးျမႇင့္ေၾကာင္း လည္းသိရသည္။ ၎ဆုတြင္ ခရုိနာေငြ ၁သိန္း အပါအ၀င္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ ေသာ့ ေက်ာက္ဆစ္ရုပ္ကိုပါ လက္ခံရရွိမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ [Top]

RIGHTS-BURMA: Military Accused of Crimes Against Humanity

RIGHTS-BURMA: Military Accused of Crimes Against Humanity
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Nov 9 (IPS) - An onslaught by Burmese troops in the eastern part of the military-ruled country, running for three years now, is laying the junta open to charge of ‘crimes against humanity’.
This new charge adds to a growing list of human rights violations that the South-east Asian nation’s ruling military regime is being slammed for, including the use of rape as a weapon of war in military campaigns in areas that are home to the country’s ethnic minorities. The country has been under the grip of successive juntas since a 1962 military coup. Eyewitness accounts from civilians fleeing the territory under attack reveal a grim picture of the ‘tatmadaw’, as the Burmese military is called, targeting unarmed men, women and children in a ‘’widespread and systematic way,’’ say human rights and humanitarian groups. An increasing number of refugees have been crossing over to northern Thailand from among the Karen ethnic community, the second largest ethnic group in Burma, or Myanmar. Many of them live in the mountainous Karen State, the territory where South-east Asia’s longest --and largely ignored -- separatist conflict is being waged between Burmese troops and the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU). ‘’Myanmar’s troops are overtly targeting civilians; they are actively avoiding KNU military installations. That is why we are describing the attacks as ‘crimes against humanity’,’’ says Benjamin Zawacki, South-east Asia researcher for Amnesty International (AI), the global rights lobby. ‘’The violations are widespread and systematic.’’ ‘’This campaign started in November 2005 and has escalated. They did not even stop during the annual monsoon period (from May to October), which was not the case before,’’ he explained during an IPS interview. ‘’There has been a shift in strategy and intensity. It is no more a dry season offensive.’’ The military campaign is the largest and the longest sustained drive in a decade. ‘’The Burmese army is rotating soldiers every six months and they have penetrated areas deep in the Karen area,’’ David Tharckabaw, vice president of the KNU, said in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location. ‘’Nothing is being spared. They are even destroying fruit plantations like mangosteen.’’ The list of abuse document by AI, and corroborated by other humanitarian groups, include villagers being beaten and stabbed to death, being shot by the ‘tatmadaw’ ‘’without any warning’’ and being tortured and subsequently killed. Karen civilians have also reportedly been subjected to forced labour, disappearances and their rice harvest being burned down. ‘’Before the soldiers left the village, they planted landmines, one of them in front of the church. An old man, maybe 70 years-old, stepped on a landmine and was killed,’’ a female rice farmer told an AI researcher of an incident in early 2006, when the ‘tatmadaw’ burned 20 of the 30 houses in her village. ‘’I lost everything -- kitchen, furniture, rice stocks -- not a single piece of paper was left,’’ she added. ‘’The same happened to the other 19 families whose houses were burned.’’ The unrelenting campaign, which has included the Burmese infantry and heavy use of 120 mm and 81mm mortar shells, has shrunk an already limited space for Karen civilians and internally displaced people (IDPs) to escape to. ‘’The more the Burmese military occupies areas in a worsening situation, the less space there is for civilians to escape to,’’ says Duncan McArthur, emergency relief coordinator of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), an alliance of 11 humanitarian groups helping refugees from Burma along the Thai-Burmese border. ‘’Nearly 66,000 people from 38 townships have been forced to flee their homes due to the armed conflict and human rights abuses,’’ he told IPS. ‘’They had to because the violations are being committed in a climate of impunity.’’ Some of the victims have poured into north-west Thailand, where there are already nine camps that house 120,000 refugees who fled intense phases of the conflict going back over a decade. ‘’There are about 20,000 unregistered new arrivals and the natural growth in the camps,’’ added McArthur. ‘’There is no avenue for redress if they were to stay back.’’ That is reflected in Burma’s over half a million IDPs, nearly 451,000 of which live in the rural ethnic areas, according to TBBC. It places Burma in the same league as countries such as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which have internally displaced running into the hundreds of thousands. But what sets Burma apart is the lack of any international agencies to help the victims and serve as neutral observers in the conflict zone. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was helping to provide artificial limbs for landmine victims, was hampered by new restrictions to its operations in 2006. In mid-2007, the Geneva-based humanitarian agency broke its famed silence in an unprecedented attack on the junta to explain why it had to end its operations in Burma, including the Karen areas. The ICRC’s denunciation of major and repeated violations in the conflict zones in eastern Burma confirmed what many analysts had said of a region that is cut away from international scrutiny and media exposure. ‘’The repeated abuses committed against men, women and children living along the Thai-Myanmar border violate many provisions of international humanitarian law,’’ the organisation said. The Karens, who account for nearly seven million of Burma’s 57 million people, have their own distinctive culture and language and have Buddhists, Christians and animists among them. The Burmans, who are the majority, are predominantly Buddhist by faith, speak Burmese, and have a culture and history shaped by kings before being subjugated by British colonisation. The Karen fight for independence began in 1949, a year after Burma got independence. And the KNU has refused to sign peace deals with the Burmese regime unlike some of the other separatist rebels from ethnic groups. The latter settled for ceasefire deals over the past two decades, only to learn, subsequently, that the junta’s promises of more political autonomy were hollow. ‘’The Burmese military’s latest strategy is to keep attacking the KNU and Karen civilians in order to drive them to the Thai-Burma border,’’ says Tharekabaw, of the KNU. ‘’Their goal is to control all the land and all the people, which has never been the case before.’’ ‘’If they cannot control, they have to kill the people or to wipe them out,’’ he added. ‘’The regime is a fascist regime. Their ideology is extremism, racism and militarism.’’ (END/2008)
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