Response Letter to the Irrawaddy News from Coalition of Burma Ethnics, Malaysia.

တုိင္းရင္းသားအသံ

Response Letter to the Irrawaddy News from Coalition of Burma Ethnics, Malaysia.

The Irrawaddy website accused of many Malaysia based- Burma ethnic refugees' organizations as corrupted deals between ethnic refugees and UNHCR officials in dealing with Refugees registration and Resettlement to third country. The Irrawaddy also reported that the UNHCR officials discriminate against other ethnicities by quoting Yan Naing Tun, the editor of Thuriya, a bi-monthly journal based in Kuala Lumpur said. Ethnic Nationalities Voice is investigating the news to learn what is the real problem behind the news.

To read the full news in Irrawaddy website, please visit this link. http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19615.

In response to the above -mentioned accusation story, the Coalition of Burma Ethnics, Malaysia issued an open letter to the Irrawaddy News as following official translation from Burma to English;

Open letter to the Irrawaddy from the Coalition of Burma Ethnics Malaysia

Over the past ten years, community-based organizations representing different ethnic nationalities from Burma have formed to organize, assist, and protect their respective communities. In recognition that community-based operations in Malaysia would benefit from increased cooperation, the Coalition of Burma Ethnics Malaysia (COBEM) was formed in 2007 to respond to the needs of the ethnic refugee and migrant community from Burma living in Malaysia.

COBEM now represents the Chin, Kachin, Arakan, Shan, Karen, Mon and Karenni ethnic communities. Membership of this coalition includes the following community-based organizations: Chin Refugee Committee (CRC), Alliance for Chin Refugees (ACR), Kachin Refugee Committee (KRC), Malaysia Karen Organization (MKO), Organization of Karenni Development (OKD), Mon Refugee Organization (MRO), Shan Refugee Organization (SRO) and Arakan Refugee Relief Committee (ARRC).

As COBEM, we are writing to express our serious concerns over the factual inaccuracies and unfounded accusations in the article, “UNHCR Affiliates Accused of Refugee Corruption”, published by the Irrawaddy on 2 October.

Firstly, COBEM organizations are not ‘brokers’ as described in the Irrawaddy article. We are independent community-based organizations working for the benefit of our respective communities. Unfortunately the context in Malaysia is very challenging, as arrest, prolonged detention in appalling conditions, caning, and exploitation are a daily reality for our communities.

Secondly, UNHCR has not delegated “the authority for issuing resettlement registration documents to Burmese groups based in Malaysia.” Such groups have no control over the resettlement process from Malaysia. In fact, resettlement to third countries from Malaysia is by no means guaranteed for people from Burma.

Thirdly, community-based organizations like the COBEM groups collect biographical data about newly-arrived members from their communities in Burma living all over Malaysia. This information is then passed to the UNHCR, and added to UNHCR waiting lists for their registration and refugee status determination process, which assesses each individual’s claim for refugee status.

Each COBEM organization has a different system for collecting membership fees from their community members. These nominal fees are used to provide a range of services to the ethnic communities. Registered members are issued with a community card. In the event of arrest, members can call on their community organizations to assist with negotiating their release wherever possible. With the registration fees, COBEM organizations also provide a range of services to their communities, such as interpreters and assistance with medical fees in the event of hospitalization; support with finding employment; and education programs for children.

While a UNHCR card offers some protection for registered refugees, unfortunately it doesn’t prevent arrest or detention. COBEM organizations compile lists of community and UNHCR-card holders held in detention camps, and send these to UNHCR. UNHCR works to secure their release from detention facilities.

Refugee life in Malaysia is stressful and frustrating, as there can be a long wait for registration and refugee status determination by UNHCR, and not everyone’s claim is accepted by the agency. As the first point of contact for those who wish to claim refugee status, community-based organizations often bear the brunt of this frustration. The unfounded accusations and inaccuracies contained in the Irrawaddy article undermine the important work that community-based organizations do to assist their community members.

The Irrawaddy has a strong reputation as an accurate, unbiased, independent news agency to protect. We therefore remind the Irrawaddy editorial team to carefully check the facts before publishing articles on the refugee situation in Malaysia. We also kindly request the Irrawaddy to print this letter in response to the article, in the interests of balanced reporting.

Kennedy Lalram Lian
Coordinator
Coalition of Burma Ethnics, Malaysia (COBEM)
Kuala Lumpur

မေလးရွားေရာက္ျမန္မာတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအဖြဲ.အစည္းမွဧရာ၀တီသတင္းဌါနသို.ေပးပို.လိုက္ေသာ အိပ္ဖြင္.ေပးစာ

လြန္ခဲ.ေသာဆယ္ႏွစ္တာကာလတြင္ လူ.ေဘာင္အဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားကို အေျခခံၿပီး လူမ်ိးႏြယ္စုမ်ားအလိုက္ မိမိတို.၏လူမ်ိဳးႏြယ္စုမ်ားကို စုစည္းရန္၊ ကူညီရန္ႏွင္. ကာကြယ္ေစာင္.ေရွာက္ရန္ တည္ေထာင္ခဲ.ၾကပါသည္။ ထိုအဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားတို.၏ အက်ိဳးအလိႈ.ငါွ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မေလးရွားရွိ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား၏ လိုအပ္ခ်က္အေလ်ာက္ မေလးရွား ေရာက္ျမန္မာတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား အဖြဲ.အစည္း COBEM စတင္တည္ေထာင္ခဲ.ပါသည္။ COBEM အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ ယခုအခါတြင္ ကခ်င္၊ ကယား၊ ကရင္ ၊ ခ်င္း၊ မြန္၊ ရခိုင္ႏွင္. ရွမ္းအဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားျဖင္. ဖြဲ.စည္းထားပါသည္။

Kachin Refugee Community (KRC), Organization of Karenni Development (OKD), Malaysia Karen Organization (MKO), Chin Refugee Committee (CRC), Alliance of Chin Refugees (ACR), Mon Refugee Organization (MRO), Arakan Refugee Relief Committee (ARRC) ႏွင္. Shan Refugee Organization (SRO) ျဖင္.ဖြဲ.စည္းထားပါသည္။

COBEM အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန.တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ.ေသာ ဧရာ၀တီသတင္း ဌါန၏ UNHCR အေနျဖင္. ဒုကၡသည ္မ်ားၾကား အကတိလိုက္စားမႈကိစၥမ်ားကို စံုစမ္းလ်က္ရ ေၾကာင္း ထုတ္ျပန္ ခ်က္ အေပၚတြင္ မဟုတ္မမွန္ပဲေရးသားေဖၚျပျခင္းအတြက္ အထူးပင္ ကန္.ကြက္ ေၾကာင္း ထပ္မံၿပီး ထုတ ္ ေဖၚျပလိုပါသည္။

ပထမဦးစြာ COBEM အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ ဧရာ၀တီသတင္းဌါထုတ္ျပန္သကဲသို. ၾကားပြဲစား အသင္းအဖြဲ.မ်ိဳးမဟုတ္ပါ။ ကၽႊႏ္ႈပ္တို.အဖြဲ.အ စည္းအသီးသီး၏ အက်ိဳးအလိႈ.ငွါ လႈပ္ရွားေသာ သီးျခားလြတ္လပ္ ေသာ အဖြဲ.အစည္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သို.ေသာ္လည္း မေလးရွားနိဳင္ငံတြင္ ေတြ.ႀကံဳရင္ ဆိုင္ေနရေသာ အဖမ္းအဆီး ကိစၥ၊ အခ်ိန္ကာလတာၾကည္စြာ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားမႈ၊ ႀကိမ္ဒဏ္ေပးခံရျခင္း ႏွင္. ေခါင္းပံုျဖတ္ခံရျခင္းကိစၥ မ်ားကို ေန.စဥ္ႏွင္.အမွ် ရင္ဆိုင္ေတြ.ႀကံဳေနရပါသည္။

ဒုတိယအေနျဖင္. UNHCR သည္ မေလးရွားရွိ ဒုကၡသည္အဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားအေပၚတြင္ တရား၀င္ အေျခခ်ေနထိုင္ခြင္. အေထာက္အထားမ်ားကို ထုတ္ေပးျခင္းမရွိပါ။ ထို.ေၾကာင္. အဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားအေနျဖင္. မေလးရွားနိဳင္ငံရွိ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား၏ အေျခခ်ေနထိုင္ျခင္း အေပၚမည္သို.မွ် ျပဳလုပ္ေပးပိုင္ခြင္.မရွိပါ။ အကယ္စင္ စစ္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအတြက္ မေလးရွားနိဳင္ငံမွ တတိယနိဳင္ငံသို.ေျပာင္းေရႊ. အေျခခ်ေနထိုင္ ခြင္.အေပၚ လံုး၀အာမခံေပး၍မရပါ။

တတိယအေနျဖင္. လူမ်ိဳးႏြယ္စုအလိုက္အဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ COBEM သည္ မိမိအဖြဲ.အစည္း အသီးသီးသို. အသစ္ထပ္မံ ေရာက္ရွိလာၾကေသာ အဖြဲ.၀င္သစ္မ်ား၏ ကိုယ္ေရးရာဇ၀င္မ်ားကို စုစည္းေပးရပါ သည္။ ထိုမွတဆင္. UNHCR ရံုးသို. အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားႏွင္.တကြ တင္ျပၿပီး တစ္ဦးခ်င္းအလိုက္ ဒုကၡသည္ အျဖစ္ေလွ်ာက္ထားမႈအေပၚ စဥ္းစားဆံုး ျဖတ္ေပးနိဳင္ရန္ လူေတြ.စစ္ေဆးေမးျမန္းျခင္းစာရင္းတြင္ စာရင္း ထည္.ထားရပါသည္။

COBEM အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ အဖြဲ.အစည္းအလိုက္ အသင္း၀င္ေၾကးအျဖစ္ ေကာက္ခံျခင္း မတူညီၾကပါ။ အေျခခံအားျဖင္. ထိုသို.ေကာက္ခံျခင္းသည္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အဖြဲ.အစည္း၏ ၀န္ေဆာင္မႈလုပ္ငန္းအတြက္ ေကာက္ခံျခင္းသာျဖစ္သည္။ အသင္း၀င္အျဖစ္ ေလွ်ာက္ထား သူသည္ အသင္း၀င္ကဒ္ျပား ထုတ္ေပးပါသည္။ အကယ္၍ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ား၏ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ျခင္းကို ခံရပါက သက္ဆိုင္ရာအဖြဲ.အစည္းအား အေၾကာင္းၾကား ၿပီး လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေစရန္အတြက္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားႏွင္. ညွိနိဳင္းေဆြးေႏြးျခင္းကို ျပဳလုပ္ေပးရပါသည္။ ထိုအသင္း၀င္ေၾကးအျဖစ္ ေကာက္ခံရရွိေသာေငြအားျဖင္. အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ အသင္း၀င္မ်ား၏အက်ိဳးအလိႈ.ငွါ စကားျပန္မ်ားႏွင္. အျခား၀န္ေဆာင္မႈမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ ေဆးရံုေဆး ခန္း၌ ပို.ေဆာင္ျခင္း၊ အလုပ္အကိုင္ လိုအပ္ေန သူမ်ားအတြက္ အလုပ္အကိုင္ရွာေဖြေပးျခင္း၊ ကေလးသူငယ္မ်ား အတြက္ ပညာေရးဆိုင္ရာ ကိစၥမ်ားတို.၌ အသံုးျပဳပါသည္။ အကယ္၍ UNHCR ကဒ္ျပားရရွိထား ေသာသူအေနျဖင္. လံႈၿခံဳေရးအရ အနည္းငယ္မွ် စိတ္ခ်မႈရေသာ္လည္း အာဏာပိုင္မ်ား၏ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းျခင္းကိုကား မရပ္တန္.နိဳင္ပါ။ COBEM အဖြဲ.အစည္းသည္ UNHCR ကဒ္ျပားကိုင္ ေဆာင္မ်ား အကယ္၍ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံရပါက အမည္စာရင္းမ်ားကို UNHCR ရံုးသို. တင္ျပကာ UNHCR အေနျဖင္. ထိုဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံရသူမ်ားလြတ္ေျမာက္လာ ေစရန္အတြက္ ထပ္မံလုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးပါသည္။

မေလးရွားနိဳင္ငံတြင္ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ေလွ်ာက္ထားသူတိုင္းအား UNHCR သည္ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ အသိမွတ္မျပဳျခင္း၊ မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းႏွင္. ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ စဥ္းစားဆံုးျဖတ္ေပးမႈ စသည္တို.တြင္ အခ်ိန္ကာလၾကာရွည္စြာ ေစာင္.ဆိုင္းရျခင္း ျပဳရေသာေၾကာင္. မေလးရွားနိဳင္ငံတြင္ ေရာက္ရွိေနၾကေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ဘ၀သည္ အလြန္ပင္ စိတ္ညစ္စရာ ေကာင္းသည္.အျပင္ စိတ္ပ်က္မႈေပါင္းစံုႏွင္.လည္း ရင္ဆိုင္ေတြ.ႀကံဳေနရပါသည္။ ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ေလွ်ာက္ထားသူမ်ားအား ဆက္သြယ္၍ ၀န္ေဆာင္ေပးမႈ ကိစၥတြင္ အဖြဲ. အစည္းအသီးသီး၏ မျဖစ္မေနမ်ားစြာ ရင္ဆိုင္ရေသာ စိတ္ပ်က္မႈကိစၥပင္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဧရာ၀တီ သတင္းငွါနတြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္တြင္ အဖြဲ.အစည္းမ်ားႏွင္.ပတ္သက္၍ အသင္း၀င္မ်ားအား ၀န္ေဆာင္မႈ ေပးရာတြင္ တိက်မွန္ကန္မႈမရွိ၊ မဟုတ္မမွန္ဘဲ စြပ္စြဲၿပီး ေရးသား ထားေၾကာင္းသိရပါသည္။

ဧရာ၀တီသတင္းငွါနသည္ တိက်မွန္ကန္မႈ၊ ဘက္မလိုက္ဘဲ၊ သီးျခားလြတ္္လပ္ေသာ သတင္းငွါနျဖစ္ ေၾကာင္း သိရွိပါသည္။ ထို.ေၾကင္. ဧရာ၀တီ သတင္းငွါန အယ္ဒီတာအဖြဲ.အား မေလးရွားဒုကၡသည္ မ်ားအေၾကာင္းကို မထုတ္ျပန္ၿပီ ေသခ်ာစြာ စစ္ေဆးသင္.ပါသည္။ ဧရာ၀တီသတင္း ငွါနအေနျဖင္. ဤစာအား ထပ္မံၿပီး ထိုသတင္းေဆာင္းပါးအား ေထာက္ျပေသာစာအျဖစ္ အသံုးျပဳသင္.ပါသည္။

ကေနဒီလာရ္မ္းလ်န္း

အမႈေဆာင္

Coalition of Burma Ethnics, Malaysia (COBEM)

Kuala Lumpur