Wednesday, May 29, 2013

လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ ဆူပူမႈ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြ ဖမ္းဆီးအေရးယူ

Mosque, orphanage burned in new Myanmar violence

By TODD PITMAN | Associated Press

LASHIO, Myanmar (AP) — Hundreds of Buddhist men on motorcycles waved iron rods and bamboo poles and threw rocks in a northeastern Myanmar town on Wednesday, a day after a mosque and a Muslim orphanage were torched in a new wave of violence targeting the religious minority. Residents said a movie theater was burned as the mob sped around the town.

Many Buddhists and Muslims stayed locked inside their homes and shops were shuttered after Tuesday's violence in Lashio town, near the border with China, the latest region to fall prey to the country's spreading sectarian violence. The rioting in Lashio was sparked by reports that a Muslim man had set fire to a Buddhist woman.

Deadly violence between Buddhists and Muslims has occurred since last year in other parts of Myanmar, first in a western region and then in central towns. The new flare-up will reinforce doubts that President Thein Sein's government can or will act to contain the violence and crack down on racial and religious intolerance.

Wednesday morning was quiet, but by afternoon several hundred young men, screaming and waving sticks, roamed the downtown area on motorcycles near City Hall. A Buddhist monk was seated on the back of one of the motorcycles, waving a stick.

On another street, the crowd threw rocks at buildings. Many people were too afraid to step outside. Smoke could be seen over at least one area of town, and local politician Sai Myint Maung said a movie theater had been burned and that there were rumors that more troublemakers were gathered on the outskirts of the town.

"The situation has changed 180 degrees. It was quiet the whole day and all of a sudden there is a fire and the situation has changed," he said.

An officer from the No. 1 Lashio police station said police had been dispatched by truck to try to quell the new violence. The officer, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to release information, said at least four people were hurt.

"My family is staying inside. We are afraid of being attacked," said one Muslim resident, Ko Maung Gyi, who spoke by telephone earlier from inside his locked home in Lashio's main Muslim neighborhood.

"I never expected that such racial violence would erupt in Lashio," he said. "Our small town is multiethnic and we have lived in peace for a long time."

There were no reported fatalities after Tuesday night's violence in the remote mountain town.

Order was initially restored after authorities banned gatherings of more than five people. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed and many shops and streets were empty, Sai Myint Maung said.

The government appealed for calm.

"Damaging religious buildings and creating religious riots is inappropriate for the democratic society we are trying to create," presidential spokesman Ye Htut said on his Facebook page. The message noted that "two religious buildings and some shops" in Lashio were burned, without specifying whether they were Muslim or Buddhist.

"Any criminal act will be dealt with according to the law," Ye Htut said.

A 48-year-old man accused of setting fire to a 24-year-old Buddhist woman was arrested, state television reported. It said the man, identified as an Indian Muslim, threw gasoline on the woman. The report appeared to put to rest earlier questions over the man's religion.

The man was charged with causing grievous injuries and arson, as well as drug possession due to stimulants found in his pocket, the TV report said. The woman was being treated for burns to her chest, back and hands.

The report did not mention whether any members of Tuesday night's Buddhist mob were arrested, an omission likely to fuel more questions over whether minority Muslims can find justice in overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar.

Minority Muslims have been the main victims of the deadly violence, but so far there have been no criminal trials against members of the country's Buddhist majority.

After Tuesday's alleged immolation, an irate crowd of more than 100 people, including Buddhist monks, gathered outside a police station demanding that the alleged attacker be handed over, state TV reported.

The crowd then rampaged through the town, setting fire to Lashio's largest mosque and several shops, the television report said.

The mob also set fire to a Muslim school and orphanage that was so badly charred that only two walls remained, said Min Thein, a resident contacted by telephone. Police and other witnesses confirmed the school burning.

Myanmar's sectarian violence first flared in western Rakhine state last year, when hundreds of people died in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims that drove about 140,000 others, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

The clashes seemed confined to that region, but in late March, similar Buddhist-led violence swept the town of Meikthila in central Myanmar, killing at least 43 people. Earlier this month, a court sentenced seven Muslims from Meikthila to prison terms for their role in the violence.

Several other towns in central Myanmar experienced less deadly violence, mostly involving the torching of Muslim businesses and mosques.

Muslims account for about 4 percent of Myanmar's roughly 60 million people. Anti-Muslim sentiment is closely tied to nationalism and the dominant Buddhist religion, so leaders have been reluctant to speak up for the unpopular minority.

Thein Sein's administration, which came to power in 2011 after half a century of military rule, has been heavily criticized for not doing enough to protect Muslims. He vowed last week during a trip to the U.S. that all perpetrators of the sectarian violence would be brought to justice.

___

Associated Press writers Aye Aye Win in Yangon and Jocelyn Gecker and Grant Peck in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Re-post By ACM 29-5-2013

ေမလ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔ အဂၤါေန႔က ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕မွာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ ဆူပူမႈေတြေၾကာင့္ ပုဒ္မ ၁၄၄ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ရသလို ဒီကေန႔မွာလည္း လံုၿခံဳေရးေတြ တိုးျမႇင့္ခ်ထားတယ္လို႔ ေဒသခံ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဆူပူမႈ စတင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ရတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းရင္းျဖစ္တဲ့ အမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ဦးကို မီး႐ိႈ႕ခဲ့တဲ့ တရားခံကိုလည္း ဖမ္းဆီးထားသလို၊ ဗလီနဲ႔ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြကို မီး႐ိႈ႕ခဲ့တဲ့ တရားခံေတြကိုလည္း ထိန္းသိမ္းထားၿပီးေတာ့ အမႈဖြင့္ထားတယ္လို႔ လား႐ိႈ႕ၿမိဳ႕က ရဲမႉးတစ္ဦး က ေျပာပါတယ္။ သတင္းအျပည့္အစံုကိုေတာ့ ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းထားတဲ့ ကိုေအာင္ရဲေမာင္ေမာင္ က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

မေန႔က ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ နယ္ေျမ ၇၊ အမွတ္ ၈ ရပ္ကြက္ သႏီၵလမ္းေပၚမွာ မူဆလင္ဘာသာ၀င္ တစ္ဦးက ရွမ္းအမ်ိဳးသမီး တစ္ဦးကို ဓာတ္ဆီေလာင္းၿပီး မီး႐ိႈ႕တဲ့ ျဖစ္စဥ္ကို မေက်နပ္တာကေန အစျပဳၿပီး ညေနပိုင္းတပိုင္းလံုး ဆူပူမႈေတြ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တာပါ။

ဒီလို ပဋိပကၡေတြ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ နယ္ေျမက ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္ေတြဟာ ဒီကေန႔မွာလည္း စစ္တပ္နဲ႔အတူ ပူးေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈေတြ ထပ္မျဖစ္ေအာင္ လံုၿခံဳေရးေတြ တိုးျမႇင့္ထားရတယ္လို႔လည္း လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ေပၚမွာ အဓိက လံုၿခံဳေရးတာ၀န္ ယူေပးေနရတဲ့ ရဲမႉး မိုးေဇာ္လင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ေပၚ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ မေန႔က ျဖစ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၃ ရပ္ကြက္၊ ၄ ရပ္ကြက္ ေနာက္တခါ ၇ ရပ္ကြက္၊ ၉၊ ၁၂ အဲ့ဒီရပ္ကြက္ေတြမွာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က လံုၿခံဳေရး လိုက္ၿပီး ခ်ထားတာေပါ့ေနာ္။ လံုၿခံဳေရးေတြ ခ်ထားတယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ က်န္တဲ့ေနရာေတြကိုလည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကို တပ္ကလည္း ကူေပးပါတယ္။ မေန႔ကေလာက္ေတာ့ ဆုိးဆုိးရြားရြားေတာ့ မရွိပါဘူး အခုအခ်ိန္ထိေတာ့။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ထိန္းသိမ္းႏုိင္လိုက္ပါတယ္။”

လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ခံ အမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ဦးကို ဓာတ္ဆီေလာင္း မီး႐ိႈ႕တဲ့ တရားခံကို ေဒသခံေတြက ထုတ္ေပးဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆိုရင္းကေန မူဆလင္ေတြရဲ႕ ဗလီနဲ႔ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းေတြကိုပါ မီး႐ိႈ႕ခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ မေန႔က ညေနပိုင္းမွာပဲ အေရးေပၚ အေျခအေန ပုဒ္မ ၁၄၄ ထုတ္ျပန္ၿပီး လံုၿခံဳေရးကို အဓိက တိုးျမႇင့္ခဲ့ရတယ္လို႔လည္း ရဲမႉး မိုးေဇာ္လင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဆူပူမႈေတြ ျဖစ္ပြားေအာင္ လုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ တရားခံ ကိုေန၀င္းကိုလည္း သူ က်ဴးလြန္ထားတဲ့ ပုဒ္မေတြအလိုက္ အမႈဖြင့္ ဖမ္းထားၿပီးေတာ့ ဗလီတစ္လံုးနဲ႔ ဘာသာေရး စာသင္ေက်ာင္းကို မီး႐ိႈ႕ဖ်က္စီးတဲ့ တရားခံေတြကိုလည္း အမႈဖြင့္ ဖမ္းဆီးၿပီး က်ဴးလြန္သူေတြကို ဆက္လက္ ဖမ္းဆီးမိေအာင္လည္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနတယ္လို႔ ရဲမႉး မိုးေဇာ္လင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ဒီကိစၥကို စစဦးဆံုး ျဖစ္ေစတဲ့ မူဆလင္ေပါ့ေနာ္ ေကာင္မေလးကို မီး႐ိႈ႕တဲ့ေကာင္ကိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က အမႈဖြင့္ထားတယ္။ မီး႐ိႈ႕တာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ ပုဒ္မ တတ္ထားတာ တစ္ခု ရွိပါတယ္။ သူဟာ မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးနဲ႔ စိတ္ႂကြေဆးျပား ႏွစ္ျပား သူ႔မွာ ေတြ႔ရွိၿပီးေတာ့ သူက ေဆးသံုးစြဲတဲ့ လကၡဏာေတြ ေတြ႔ရတဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ သူ႔ကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က မူးယစ္မႈနဲ႔လည္း ဖြင့္ထားတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ အဲ့ဒါ တစ္ခုပါ။ ေနာက္ မေန႔က က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီဘက္ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ျမန္မာလူငယ္ေလးေတြ အုပ္စုထဲကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ဗလီတစ္ခုကို ဖ်က္တယ္။ အစၥလာမ္ မိဘမဲ့ ေဂဟာတစ္ခုကို ဖ်က္တယ္။ မီး႐ိႈ႕တယ္။ အဲ့ဒါေတြနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့လည္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ႏွစ္မႈ။ ေနာက္တခါ အရပ္ေစ်းထဲက ေမာ္လ၀ီစာသင္ေက်ာင္းႀကီးကို ဖ်က္တဲ့လူကိုလည္း တစ္မႈ။ စုစုေပါင္းေတာ့ ၃ မႈ ဖြင့္ထားတာ ရွိပါတယ္။”

ဒီကေန႔ မနက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ဆူပူအၾကမ္းဖက္မႈေတြ မရွိဘဲ တည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ ရွိခဲ့ေပမဲ့ ေန႔ခင္းပိုင္းကေန ညေနပိုင္းေလာက္အထိ လူငယ္အခ်ိဳ႕က ဆူပူေအာင္ လံႈ႕ေဆာ္ေအာ္ဟစ္တဲ့ လုပ္ရပ္ေတြ ရွိခဲ့တယ္လို႔လည္း လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕မွာ ေနထုိင္တဲ့ ရွမ္းတုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ား ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီက အမ်ိဳးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ ဦးစိုင္းစံမင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ဒီေန႔ အေနအထားကေတာ့ မနက္ပိုင္းကေတာ့ သိပ္မဆိုးဘူးဗ်။ ညေနခင္းကေတာ့ နည္းနည္းေလး လမ္းေပၚမွာ ထြက္ၿပီးေတာ့ လူေတြ နည္းနည္းမ်ားလာတယ္။ နည္းနည္း ဒုစ႐ိုက္ဆန္ဆန္ အဲ့လိုမ်ိဳး ထြက္လာတာ မ်ားတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာေတာ့ မရွိပါဘူး။ လမ္းေပၚ ေလွ်ာက္ေအာ္တာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ကမၻာမေၾက ဘာမေၾက ဒုတ္ေတြ၊ ဓားေတြ အဲ့လိုမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္လာတယ္ ညေနခင္းေလးေပါ့။”

ဒီကေန႔မနက္ အေစာပိုင္းမွာလည္း သာဘာေပါင္းစံု ပူးေပါင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ သာသနာ့ဗိမာန္မွာ အစည္းအေ၀း တစ္ရပ္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲ့ဒီ အစည္းအေ၀းမွာ သာသနာေရး ျပည္ေထာင္စု၀န္ႀကီး ဦးဆန္းဆင့္ ကိုယ္တိုင္ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ၿပီးေတာ့ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အစိုးရအဖြဲ႔၀င္ေတြလည္း တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဦးစိုင္းစံမင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

လာ႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕မွာ ေနထိ္ုင္တဲ့ မူဆလင္ လူနည္းစုေတြရဲ႕ ေနထိုင္ေရးဟာ လက္ရွိအခ်ိန္မွာ စိုးရိမ္စရာ အေနအထားမွာ ရွိေနၿပီးေတာ့ အခ်ိဳ႕ဆိုရင္ သူတို႔ေနထိုင္တဲ့ ေနအိမ္ေတြကိုေတာင္ စြန္႔ခြာ ထြက္ေျပးေနရတယ္လို႔ လာ႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕ ေနထိုင္သူ မူဆလင္လူမိ်ဳး ဆရာ၀န္တစ္ဦးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ရဲေတြ စစ္တပ္ေတြ ရွိတယ္။ ေသနတ္တစ္ခ်က္ မေဖာက္ဘူး။ ဒီလူေတြ ေသနတ္တစ္ခ်က္ ေဖာက္ရင္ အကုန္ ေျပးလႊားႏုိင္တဲ့လူေတြ။ သူတို႔ေရွ႕မွာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ မီး႐ိႈ႕ခံေနရတာ။ ဒီမွာ ေတာ္ေတာ္ ၿငိမ္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းခ်မ္း ေနၾကတာပါ။ ေဒသခံေတြနဲ႔ ျပႆနာ တစံုတရာ မရွိပါဘူး။ အားလံုးက ခ်စ္ခ်စ္ခင္ခင္နဲ႔ ဘာသာေရး၊ လူမ်ိဳးေရး အတူတူ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေနၾကတာပဲ။ အင္မတန္မွ တစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔တစ္ေယာက္ ခ်စ္ၾကပါတယ္။ အခုျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပႆနာသည္ ဒီေဒသခံ မဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ ယူဆတယ္။ ကားေတြနဲ႔၊ ဒုတ္ေတြ၊ ဓားေတြနဲ႔ စီတန္းၿပီးေတာ့မွ စစ္တပ္ခ်ီတက္သလိုမ်ိဳး ခ်ီတက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေရာက္လာပါတယ္။ ၿမိဳ႕ေပၚမွာ ဒုတ္ေတြ၊ ဓားေတြနဲ႔ သြားေနတဲ့ ကားေတြကိုေတာ့ ဖမ္းဆီးပါတယ္။ ဒါအမွန္အတိုင္းပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဟိုဘက္မွာ ဖ်က္စီးေနတဲ့ ေနရာမွာ တားဆီးတဲ့သူ မရွိပါဘူး။ ဟိုင္းလတ္ကားေတြပါတယ္။ မ်က္ႏွာမွာလည္း နဖူးစည္းေတြ ပါတယ္။ အဲ့လိုမ်ိဳးေတြ လုပ္ေနတယ္။”

အခု လား႐ိႈးၿမိဳ႕မွာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ဘာသာေရး အသြင္ေဆာင္တဲ့ ပဋိပကၡဟာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ပဲခူးတိုင္းေဒသႀကီး အေနာက္ျခမ္းနဲ႔ မိတၳီလာၿမိဳ႕ေတြအၿပီးမွာ ထပ္ၿပီး ျဖစ္ပြားလာခဲ့တာပါ။ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ကေတာ့ ဘာသာေရးနဲ႔ ဆူပူေအာင္ ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့သူေတြကို ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ အေရးယူတာေတြ ေဆာင္ရြက္မယ္လို႔ ေျပာခဲ့သလို အရင္ ဆူပူမႈေတြမွာ ပါ၀င္က်ဴးလြန္သူေတြကိုလည္း အျပစ္ေပး အေရးယူမႈေတြ ျပဳလုပ္ေနပါတယ္။
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