No Shans among freed prisoners

တုိင္းရင္းသားအသံ

အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ၉၀၀၂ ေယာက္လႊတ္ေပးသည့္အထဲမွာ ရွမ္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြတစ္ေယာက္မွပါမလာတာကုိျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ ရွိ ရွမ္းအမ်ဳိးသားမ်ား စိတ္ပ်က္ျပီးဗမာစစ္အစုိးရေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကုိသတ္ခ်င္ေနၾကပါျပီ၊

ဦးဝင္တင္လႊတ္ေျမာက္လာတာကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ.ပီတိေျမာက္ျပီး က်ေနာ္တုိ.ေခါင္းေဆာင္ပါမလာတာကုိ စိတ္ပ်က္မိေၾကာင္း ရွမ္း အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအဖြဲ.ခ်ဳပ္မွ ဆုိင္းလိတ္ကေျပာပါသည္၊

၂၀၀၅ ခုႏွစ္ကတည္က ဖမ္းဆီးထားေသာရွမ္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ (၈)ေယာက္တုိ.ကုိ လူသက္တမ္းထက္ရွည္ေသာ ေထာင္သက္တမ္းကုိ စီရင္ခ်က္ခ်ထားပါသည္၊

ဒီကိစၥနဲ.ပတ္သက္၍ ျပည္ပမွာေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ ရွမ္းလူမ်ဳိးမ်ားက စစ္အစုိးရကုိ ရွတ္ခ်ထားတဲ့ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္တစ္ေဆာင္ထုတ္ထားပါသည္၊

စစ္အစုိးရအေနနဲ.အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရးအခြင့္တစ္ရပ္ကုိ လက္လြတ္ဆုံးရွံးသြားျပန္ျပီ ဟု ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံအေျခစုိက္ရွမ္းဒီမုိအဖြဲ.ဝင္တစ္ဦးကေျပာၾကားသည့္အေၾကာင္းကုိ သွ်မ္းသံေတာ္ဆင့္သတင္းမွာေရးသားပါသည္၊

အလာတူပင္၊ အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားလြႊတ္ေပးတဲ့အထဲမွာ မြန္ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားႏွစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ေသာ ႏုိင္ယကၡနဲ.ႏုိင္ခ်ိမ္ဂကူးတုိ.ပါမလာတာကုိ မြန္လူထုမ်ားစိတ္ပ်က္ေနၾကျပီး ဗမာစစ္အစုိးရ၏ေစတနာမရုိသားတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကုိေျပာဆုိေနၾကပါသည္၊ ဟုကာအုိဝါအုိမြန္သတင္းဌာနမွာေရးသားပါသည္၊

ထုိ.အျပင္၊အဓိကျပည္သူအခ်စ္ေတာ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ာျဖစ္ၾကေသာေဒၚစုၾကည္၊မင္းကုိႏုိင္၊ကုိကုိၾကီး၊မင္းေဇယ်၊
ကုိေဌးၾကြယ္စေသာ၈၈ေက်ာင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကုိလည္လြႊတ္မေပးတဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ စစ္အစုိးရ၏ေစတနာမရုိသားတဲ့အေၾကာင္းကုိျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပရွိအတုိက္အခံအဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားကေျပာဆုိေနၾကပါ
သည္၊ဗုိလ္ဝင္ထိန္းကုိ မေန.ကဘဲ လြႊတ္ထားျပီးေတာ့ ဒီေန.ဖမ္းသြားျပန္ျပီ၊ ဒီအေၾကာင္းစုံကုိေထာက္ရွဴၾကည့္ရင္စစ္အစုိးရဟာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ကုိ ယုတ္မာတဲ့စရုိက္ကပ္သြားျပီလုိ.ေျပာရမွာေပါ့၊

္္
No.11-9/2008

24 September 2008

Politics

No Shans among freed prisoners

Finding none of their leaders among the 9,002 prisoners released by junta authorities on Tuesday, Shans both inside and outside Burma have settled down to a period of depression.

“We are delighted U Win Tin (one of the co-founders of the National League for Democracy leader who had been imprisoned since 1989) and others are finally out,” said Sai Lake, spokesperson for the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD). “But we also find it extremely disappointing that none of our leaders are among them.

He was referring to the surviving 8 Shan activists who were arrested and sentenced to long-term jail sentences in 2005, from 13-106 years.

Shans in exile also issued a statement denouncing the regime’s mass prisoner release as “a publicity stunt.” Amnesty International meanwhile argues that 2,100 political prisoners still remain behind bars.

“The junta has missed another opportunity to bring about national reconciliation,” remarked a former SNLD member who has been making a living in Thailand for a number of years.

The Special Bureau officials had during the past few months visited at least Khun Tun Oo, leader of the SNLD and elected Member of Parliament in 1990, and Sai Nyunt Lwin, the party’s general secretary 4 times, according to a senior SNLD member. “Both were asked whether they were ready to quit politics,” he said. “But both had declined to take up the offer.”

Khun Tun Oo aka Hkun Htoon Oo, who is serving 93 years in Putao, Burma’s northernmost town, is said to be highly respected by the inmates, among whom are former followers of the deposed prime minister Gen Khin Nyunt. Sai Nood aka Sai Nyunt Lwin, sentenced to 85 years, in the meanwhile, is said to be sharing a prison cell in Kalemyo with two former brigadier generals: Than Tun and Tin Hla.

Others are:
Maj-Gen Hso Ten, 106 years, in Khamti
Sai Hla Aung, 79 years, in Kyaukphyu
Tun Nyo, 79 years, in Buthidaung
Nyi Nyi Moe, 79 years, in Pakokku
Myo Win Tun, 79 years, in Myingyan
and Sao Oo Kya, 13 years, in Mandalay.

One of their colleagues “Math” Myint Than died on 2 May 2006 in Sandoway while serving 79 years.

“The only one who got off scot-free was Sao Tha Oo,” according to a senior SNLD member. “He agreed to become a witness for the prosecution and gave false statements as dictated by the junta authorities. Being Judas, he’s no more seen around Shan circles nowadays.”