ေစာပီ ရဲ႕ ေရြးခ်ယ္မႈ႕

ဆန္မႈန္႕နဲ႕ သၾကား အရည္ေဖ်ာ္ျပီး တိုက္ေကၽြးခဲ့ရတဲ့ ေစာပီရဲ႕ သားအငယ္ဆံုးေလးပံုျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အခ်စ္နဲ႕ စစ္မွာ မတရားတာမရွိဘူး လို႕ လူေတြေျပာၾကတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ နအဖ စစ္တပ္နဲ႕ ကရင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး ရဲေဘာ္ေတြ ျဖစ္တဲ့ စစ္ပြဲမွာ ေတာ့ ကုလားမႏိုင္ ရခိုင္မဲ ဆိုသလိုမ်ဳိး နအဖ စစ္တပ္ရဲ႕ ျပည္သူေတြကို မဲျပီး ဒုကၡေပးလို႕ ေတာထဲမွာ ေရွာင္ပုန္းေနရတဲ့ ကရင္ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ေတာ့ စစ္မွာ မတရားတာမရွိဘူး လို႕ ေျပာဖို႕ခက္လိမ့္မယ္။

မၾကာေသးခင္ကမွ ဖာပြန္မွ ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္မွာရွိတဲ့ ဒုကၡသယ္စခန္းကို ထြက္ေျပး ေရာက္လာတဲ့ ေစာပီ မိသားစုေလး ရဲ႕အေၾကာင္းကေတာ့ တကယ့္ကို ရင္နစ္ဖြယ္ ေကာင္းလွပါတယ္။ ၂ဝ၁ဝ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၁၃ ရက္ေန႕မွာေတာ့ ေစာပီတစ္ေယာက္ ကိုယ္ဝန္အရင့္အမာ ၾကီးျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အသက္ ၂၄ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ဇနီး အတြက္ေတာ့ ဘယ္လို မီးဖြားရမလဲ ဆိုတာ စဥ္းစားေနပါျပီ။ ပါတ္ဝန္းက်င္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းေတြကို အကူအညီေတာင္းဖို႕ကလည္း စစ္ေခြးေတြ လာျပီးဆိုတဲ့ သတင္းေၾကာင့္ ဘယ္သူမွမရွိေတာ့ဘဲ အကုန္ထြက္ေျပးပုန္းေရွာင္ သြားၾကျပီးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့ ေစာပီရဲ႕ ဇနီးဟာ သူတို႕ ရဲ႕ တတိယေျမာက္ ကေလးျဖစ္တဲ့ ေယာက္်ားေလးကို ဖြားျမင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မိခင္ဟာ သားကို ေပြ႕ခ်ီျပီး နာမည္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါကေတာ့ သူမ ေသနတ္က်ည္ မွန္ျပီးအသက္ အဆံုးခင္ေလးမွာေပါ့။



မၾကာပါဘူး သူမွ မီးဖြားျပီး ၄၅ မိနစ္ ေလာက္အၾကာမွာေတာ့ ေခြးရမ္းကား စစ္ေခြးေတြ ရြာထဲဝင္ျပီး က်ည္ေဖာက္ပါေတာ့တယ္ လို႕ ေစာပီက ကရင္လူ႕အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႕ကို ေျပာျပပါတယ္။ စစ္ေခြးမ်ားဟာ ေသနတ္နဲ႕ အိမ္ေတြကို ဒရဆက္ ရမ္းကား ပစ္ခတ္မႈ႕ေၾကာင့္ မီးဖြားျပီးခါစ ေစာပီရဲ႕ ဇနီးကို လည္ပင္းတစ္ခ်က္ ေပါက္တစ္ခ်က္ က်ည္မွန္ခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ ထိုေနရာမွာဘဲ ေစာပီရဲ႕ ဇနီးဟာ အသက္ဆံုးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ဝင္ေငြမရွိတဲ့ ေစာပီတစ္ေယာက္ ေမြးကင္းစ သားေလးကို ေရ၊ ဆန္မႈန္႕ နဲ႕ သၾကား ေရာျပီး ေကၽြးေမြးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့ ခေလး ၃ ေယာက္ကို ျပဳစုပ်ဳိးေထာင္ဖို႕ အတြက္ ေစာပီတစ္ေယာက္ စစ္ေခြးရန္နဲ႕ ကင္းေဝးတဲ့ တစ္ေနရာကို ထြက္ဖို႕ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မတတ္သာတဲ့အဆံုး အၾကီးဆံုးခေလးကို ေရႊမ်ဳိးနီးစပ္ ေတြလက္ထဲကို ရင္နာနာနဲ႕ အပ္ခဲ့ျပီး က်န္တဲ့ ခေလးႏွစ္ေယာက္ကို ေတာ့ သူနဲ႕ အတူ ေခၚလာျပီး ထိုင္းနယ္စပ္ ဒုကၡသယ္ စခန္းကို ၆ရက္ၾကာ ေျခလ်င္ျဖင့္ ခက္ခက္ခဲခဲထြက္ေျပးေရာက္ရွိလာတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းေလးပါ။ အျပည့္အစံု ကိုေတာ့ ေအာက္ မွာ ဆက္ဖတ္ၾကည့္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။




Saw P's Choice


They say, “All is fair in love and war.”

But for Karen civilians trapped in the jungle between Burmese government forces and Karen rebels, there is very little sense of fairness in either matter.

Take “Saw P,” a 37-year-old villager who recently arrived at a temporary refugee camp in Thailand after leaving his home in Papun District in northern Karen State, which has turned into a war zones in the last few months.

On the night of Oct. 13, Saw P was tending to his wife who was nine months pregnant with their third child. He tended the fireplace inside the family's humble wooden house while a neighbor acted as midwife.

No other neighbors or friends were around. Almost the entire village had fled in the preceding days when they heard that the Tatmadaw, or Burmese army troops, had set up a camp nearby.

Saw P's 24-year-old wife gave birth to a baby boy. She had the chance to hold her child and name him before she was shot dead.

About 45 minutes after she gave birth, the troops entered the village and opened fire, Saw P said in an interview with Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) in Thailand. He said a spray of bullets penetrated the house. One hit her in the neck and one in the thigh. She died almost instantly.

“She had already lost a lot of blood giving birth,” he told KHRG. “At first, we didn't realize she had been killed.”

In the two months after his young wife's death, Saw P fed the newborn with rice water mixed with sugar. Like other villagers, he had no money, and decided he would have to leave the village to seek support.

Neighbors and relatives offered to adopt his children. After much deliberation, he made the painful decision to hand his his elder child to relatives, but to carry the newborn baby and his other child with him to Thailand.


It was a six-day walk through inhospitable jungle to the border, during which time he had to camp on the ground while holding onto his son.

The shocking thing about Saw P's story is that it is not unusual in the refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border where more than 140,000 refugees, mostly ethnic Karen, currently shelter.

Civilians, most of who are simple rice farmers, have suffered for generations caught in the crossfire of a six-decade-long civil war.

Last year, the attempted implementation of the regime's plan to transform armed ethnic armies into border guard force units under Burmese army command pushed uneasy cease-fires to boiling point. When a renegade faction of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) broke ranks, the situation quickly turned bloody.

The renegade group, Brigade 5, is led by Brig-Gen Saw Lah Pwe, also known as Na Kham Mwe.

On Wednesday, his unit confronted a Tatmadaw battalion at one of the many makeshift front lines in Karen State. Fighting was reported in Kyauk Khet in Myawaddy Township. Some 200 local villagers had little option than to flee to the Thai border.

Col. Kyaw Thet of DKBA Brigade 5 told The Irrawaddy that fighting started at 7 am and continued into the evening. He said his unit had killed 14 government soldiers and injured nine. He also accused the Tatmadaw of crossing the border onto Thai soil in order to a launch an attack, and said the Thai authorities were complicit in the tactic.

But between the front lines, the army bases, the patrols and the landmines, hundreds of Karen villagers like Saw P are tortured, killed or forced to work as porters or landmine sweepers, while many women are raped.

“I couldn't stay in the village, because I was constantly reminded of my wife and what happened to her,” Saw P told KHRG. “Whenever my baby cries, I see my wife's face.”