ၾကယ္ေတြ ေႂကြေနတဲ့ တိုင္းျပည္ (A Country of Fallen Stars)

Friday, 18 September 2009 15:34 ခင္ၿငိမ္းသစ္
ByHIN NYEIN THIT

ၾကယ္ဆိုတာ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ အလင္းေရာင္ရွိတယ္။ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ေနရာဟာ ျမင့္မားတဲ့ ေကာင္းကင္ၾကီးပဲ။ ရာသီဥတု ၾကည္လင္တဲ့ ညေတြဆိုရင္ အေရာင္လက္ေနတဲ့ ၾကယ္ေတြဟာ စိန္ေတြလိုပဲ တဖ်ပ္ဖ်ပ္ လက္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာ လူတိုင္း သိၾကသလို၊ ျမင္လည္း ျမင္ဖူးၾကပါတယ္။


[စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းခဲ့သည့္ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၁၈ ရက္ေန႔က ေသနတ္မွန္ထားေသာ ေက်ာင္းသူေလးကို သယ္ယူေျပးလႊားေနသည့္ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ႏွင့္ ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္း]
က်မတို႔တိုင္းျပည္မွာ ရွိတဲ့လူငယ္မ်ားစြာဟာလည္း ၾကယ္ေတြလိုပါပဲ။ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အရည္အခ်င္း အထင္အရွားရွိၾကတယ္။ ဉာဏ္ပညာ ထက္ျမက္တယ္။ စိတ္ဓာတ္ျမင့္မားၾကတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ၀မ္းနည္းဖို႔ ေကာင္းတာက အဲ့ဒီၾကယ္ ေတြဟာ တျဖဳတ္ျဖဳတ္နဲ႔ ေၾကြေနတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ က်မက ၾကယ္ေတြ ေၾကြေနတဲ့ တိုင္းျပည္လို႔ နာမည္ေပးထားတယ္။

၁၉၈၈ ခု စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၈ ရက္ ေန႔က အျဖစ္အပ်က္ေတြကို ေျပာလိုက္တာနဲ႔ လူတိုင္းျမင္ဖူးျပီးသား ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဓာတ္ပံု တပံု အေၾကာင္း ေျပာျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။
အဲဒီ ဓာတ္ပုံက ေသနတ္မွန္ျပီး ဒဏ္ရာရေနတဲ့ အက်ႌအျဖဴ လံုခ်ည္အစိမ္းနဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းသူေလးကို ဂ်ဴတီကုတ္အျဖဴ၀တ္ ထားတဲ့ ဆရာ၀န္ႏွစ္ဦးက ဆြဲေျပးေနတဲ့ပံုပါ။ ဒီဓာတ္ပံုကိုမျမင္ဘူးတဲ့လူမရွိပါဘူး။ ျမင္တဲ့လူတိုင္း ခံျပင္းေဒါသ ျဖစ္ၾက ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီဓာတ္ပံုထဲက ဆရာ၀န္ႏွစ္ဦး ဘယ္ကိုေရာက္သြားတယ္ဆိုတာ သိတဲ့လူနည္းမယ္လို႔လည္း က်မထင္ပါ တယ္။
ေရွ႕ကေနေက်ာင္းသူေလးရဲ႕ ေျခေထာက္ကို ဆြဲမထားတဲ့ဆရာ၀န္ရဲ႕ နာမည္က ေဒါက္တာေစာလြင္၊ ေခါင္းကိုမထား တဲ့ ဆရာ၀န္က ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ႏွစ္ဦးစလံုးဟာ ပညာခြ်န္သူေတြျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္။

ေဒါက္တာေစာလြင္ဟာ ဆယ္တန္းစာေမးပြဲေအာင္တုန္းက သဃၤန္ကြ်န္းတျမိဳ႕နယ္လံုးမွာ ပထမ ရခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔အစ္မ ကလည္း ဆရာ၀န္ပါပဲ။
ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းကလည္း ေဆးေက်ာင္းမွာ ထိပ္တန္းကေက်ာင္းသားပါ၊ သူ႔ညီ ကုိဝင္းသိန္းလည္း ဆရာ၀န္ တေယာက္ ပါပဲ၊ သူတို႔ရဲ႕ဖခင္ကလည္း ဌာနတခုကညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴး အဆင့္ရွိတဲ့သူပါ။
ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းဟာ စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္မွာ ေတာခိုသြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံလုံးဆိုင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသား မ်ား ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ တပ္ဦး(ABSDF) မွာေဆးမွဴးတာ၀န္ ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ျပီး တာ၀န္နဲ႔ ျပည္တြင္းကို ျပန္ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါ တယ္။

အဲဒီ အခ်ိန္အတြင္းမွာပဲ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဴပ္ခင္ညြန္႔က ေတာတြင္းက ျပန္ေရာက္လာသူေတြအေနနဲ႔ န၀တ ကို သတင္းပို႔ဖို႔ လိုေၾကာင္း၊ သတင္းပို႔လာခဲ့လ်ွင္ အေရးမယူပါေၾကာင္း သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲကေန ေျပာတာေၾကာင့္စိုးရိမ္တတ္တဲ့ ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းရဲ႕ အေဖက သူကိုယ္တိုင္စစ္ေဒသကို အေၾကာင္းၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ စစ္ေဆးဖို႔ မေခၚခင္မွာ ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္း က ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ကို သူတာ၀န္နဲ႔ ျပန္လာေၾကာင္းကို ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္တေန႔မွာ ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းကိုေမးျမန္း စရာရွိတယ္ဆိုျပီး ေခၚသြားပါေတာ့တယ္။

တပတ္ေလာက္ၾကာေတာ့ ေဒါက္တာမင္းသိန္းကို ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးစခန္းကေန ျပန္လာပို႔ေပးပါတယ္၊ မိဘေတြဆီ ေသခ်ာအပ္ႏွံသြားခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းတေယာက္ ေျခလက္ေတြေဖာေယာင္ျပီး ဆီးမသြား ႏုိင္ေတာ့ပါ၊ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကို၀င္းသိန္း (ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းရဲ့ညီ)က ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္တို႔ ေမာင္ႏွမကို အေၾကာင္း ၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ေရာက္လာေတာ့ ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းက ေျပာျပပါတယ္။
သူ႔ကို ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး က ေဆးတလံုး ထိုးေပးလိုက္တယ္တဲ့၊ ဘာေဆးလဲဆိုတာေတာ့ မေျပာဘူးတဲ့၊ သူအခုျဖစ္ေနတာေတြက အဲဒီ ေဆးေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္မယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။ အခုသူ ဗိုက္ၾကီးတင္းေနျပီး အသက္႐ႈရတာ ၾကပ္ေနတယ္လို႔ ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ေဒါက္တာေစာလြင္နဲ႔ ကို၀င္းသိန္းကေဆးရုံတင္ဖို႔ စီစဥ္ေနစဥ္မွာပဲ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးက ေဆရုံတင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ စစ္ေဆးရုံကိုပဲ တင္ခြင့္ရွိေၾကာင္း၊ စစ္ေဆးရုံမွာကုသဖို႔ စီစဥ္ထားေၾကာင္း အေၾကာင္းၾကားလာပါတယ္။ ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းက စစ္ေဆးရုံမွာဆိုရင္ ေဆးကုမခံႏုိင္ဘူးလို႔ဆိုျပီး အိမ္မွာပဲေနမယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္၊ အဲဒါနဲ႔ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္နဲ႔ ကို၀င္းသိန္းတို႔ကပဲ ကုသေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းဟာ ဘယ္ေဆး႐ုံကိုမွ တက္ေရာက္ကုသျခင္း မရွိခဲ့ဘဲ
ေနာက္တေန႔မွာ ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ေဒါက္တာ မင္းသိန္းဆံုးလွ်င္ဆံုးျခင္း ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္နဲ႔ ကို၀င္းသိန္းတို႔က သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ဆရာ ဆရာဝန္ႀကီး တဦးကို အေၾကာင္းၾကားၿပီး အဲဒီ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔အတူ ရင္ခြဲစစ္ေဆးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္၊ အေျဖကေတာ့ ေက်ာက္ကပ္ အရမ္းႀကံဳ႕သြား တာတဲ့။ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္တို႔က မ်က္ျမင္သက္ေသ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ဒါကို သိသြားတဲ့ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးက ရင္ခြဲ စစ္ေဆးတဲ့ ဆရာ၀န္ၾကီးကိုမေပါက္ ၾကားေစရပါဘူးဆိုျပီး လက္မွတ္ထိုးခိုင္းခဲ့လို႔ ထိုးခဲ့ရျပီး ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္က ေတာ့ ထြက္ေျပးခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ထြက္ေျပးရတဲ့အတြက္ သူ႔ကို အားထားေနရတဲ့ ဆင္းရဲသားလူနာေတြ ဒုကၡေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကရတာ က်မမ်က္ျမင္ပါ၊ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က ေဒါက္တာေစာလြင္ေဆးခန္းမွာ က်မကူလုပ္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ ဆင္းရဲတဲ့လူနာေတြကို ပိုက္ဆံမယူတဲ့အျပင္ သူ႔ရဲ႕ေဆးဝါးေတြကိုပါ ေပးလိုက္ပါေသးတယ္။ ကင္ဆာ ေ၀ဒနာရွင္ တဦးကိုလည္း ေဆးဖိုး၀ါးခ အကုန္ခံျပီး ေဆးကုသ ေပးခဲ့တာက်မေရွ႕တင္ပါ။

၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္ထဲမွာ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ေၾကာင့္ ပင္စင္ေပးခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕အေဖႏွလုံးေရာဂါနဲ႔ ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ တိမ္းေရွာင္ေနတဲ့ ေဒါက္တာေစာလြင္ျပန္ေရာက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ ဘာမွထူးျခားမႈမရွိတဲ့အတြက္ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး ေမ့ေနေလာက္ျပီဆိုျပီး အစိုးရေဆးရုံမွာ အလုပ္ေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ဘိုကေလးျမိဳ႕နယ္ အတြင္းက တိုက္နယ္ေဆးရုံတ႐ုံမွာ တာ၀န္က်ခဲ့ပါတယ္၊ အစပိုင္းမွာ ဘာမွမျဖစ္ခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး က မၾကာခဏ စစ္ေဆး ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။

၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္ထဲမွာ စစ္ေမးတာ ပိုစိပ္လာျပီး စိတ္အေႏွာင့္အယွက္လည္း ပိုျဖစ္လာပါတယ္၊ မခံႏုိင္တဲ့အဆံုးမွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေခတၱ လြတ္ေျမာက္စဥ္မွာ ေတြ႔ရေအာင္ ခြင့္ယူျပီးရန္ကုန္တက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သို႔ေသာ္ အန္တီနဲ႔ မေတြ႕ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဘိုကေလးကို ျပန္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘိုကေလးကုိ ေရာက္ေရာက္ခ်င္း မ၀တ အတြင္း ေရးမွဴးက ေခၚလို႔သြားတဲ့အခါမွာ မ၀တ ရုံးခန္းတြင္း စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး ၃ ေယာက္နဲ႔ အခ်ိန္အေတာ္ၾကာ ေတြ႕ဆံုခဲ့ ရပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္တေယာက္ ညွဳိးညႇဳိးငယ္ငယ္နဲ႔အိမ္ျပန္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အတူေနသူေတြရဲ့ ေျပာျပခ်က္အရ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ဟာ စိတ္ဒုကၡေရာက္စရာရွိေနပံု ရပါတယ္၊ သိသိသာသာ စကားနည္းသြားတယ္လို႔လည္း ဆိုပါတယ္။ ေမးရင္လည္း စကားလႊဲသြားျပီး ဘာမွေသခ်ာမေျပာခဲ့ပါဘူး။ အဲဒီလို မေျပာတာကလဲဘယ္သူ႔ကိုမွ သူလိုမျဖစ္ေစခ်င္လို႔ မေျပာတာလို႔ ယူဆရပါတယ္။

အဲဒီေနာက္ ခြင့္ဆက္ယူျပီး ပစၥည္းေတြသိမ္းဆည္းေနပါတယ္၊ ဒါေပမယ့္ ေနာက္၂ ရက္အၾကာမွာ ဆရာ ေဒါက္တာ ေစာလြင္ အခန္းက တိတ္ဆိတ္ေနျပီး လႈပ္ရွားသံမၾကားရလို႔ အတူေနသူေတြက စိုးရိမ္ျပီး တခါးဖ်က္၀င္ခဲ့ရာ
သ႔ူကိုယ္သူ ဆြဲၾကိဳးခ် သတ္ေသေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဆရာ ေသဆံုးရျခင္း အတြက္ က်မတကယ္ ႏွေျမာ၀မ္းနည္းမိပါတယ္။ ဆရာဟာ လူေတာ္လူေကာင္းတဦးပါ။
က်မတို႔ ဗမာျပည္မွာၾကယ္ေတြေၾကြေနပါတယ္၊ ဘယ္သူ႔မွာတာ၀န္ရွိပါသလဲ၊ အဖိုးတန္ သားေတြဆံုးရႈံးရတဲ့ မိဘ ေတြရဲ႕ခံစားခ်က္က ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ားနာက်င္ေနမလဲ၊ က်မတို႔ရဲ႕အဖိုးတန္ လူငယ္ေတြ ဘယ္ေလာက္အထိမ်ား ဆံုး႐ႈံးေနရဦးမွာလဲ……။

ဒီေဆာင္းပါးနဲ႔ အညၾတ သူရဲေကာင္းမ်ားကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳအပ္ပါတယ္။
ခင္ျငိမ္းသစ္သည္ မၾကာေသးခင္က ထိုင္း -ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္သို႔ ေရာက္ရွိလာေသာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း တဦးျဖစ္သည္။

ဧရာ၀တီ - မွ....


Stars shine by their own light and occupy the highest position in the sky. On clear, unclouded nights, you can look up and see them sparkling as bright as diamonds.

Some of the young people in my country are like those stars. They are brilliantly gifted and elevated by their high moral standards. But one by one, these stars are falling from the skies. That is why I call Burma "the country of fallen stars."

Whenever I recall the events of September 18, 1988 the day the army declared an end to Burma's long democracy summer and proceeded to launch a bloody crackdown on protesters my mind returns to a famous photograph that captures the horror of that moment in my country's history. In it, two doctors in white coats are carrying a young girl in her school uniform a white shirt and green longyi. But the girl's shirt is red, soaked in blood. She is unconscious, or perhaps already dead, as the two doctors run with her in their arms, desperate to save her life.

This photograph is one of the iconic images of that time, and even now, it fills me with emotion and anger when I look at it. This is, of course, a natural reaction; but unlike most people, I see more than just the senseless murder of an innocent child, as horrible as that is. I also see the tragic loss of two of Burma's best and brightest, whose young lives were snuffed out by the same ruthless forces that killed that girl, and continue to kill good and decent people every day in Burma.

Few people know anything about Dr. Saw Lwin and Dr. Min Thein, the two doctors in this photo. Saw Lwin, the one holding up the girl's head, was a gifted medical student who had graduated from high school with the highest grades in Rangoon's Thingankyun Township. He and his friend Min Thein were both top students in medical school. Saw Lwin's sister was also a doctor, as was Min Thein's brother. Min Thein's father worked as a director in a government department.

After the 1988 coup, Min Thein went to the jungle to become a medic with the All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF), the student army that was formed to resist the newly installed military regime. He later returned to Rangoon on a mission for the ABSDF. At the time, many others also returned, abandoning their struggle. In a press conference, Brig-Gen Khin Nyunt, the junta's secretary one, told these returnees that no action would be taken against them if they reported to the authorities. Not realizing why his son had come back, Min Thein's father informed regional military officials about his return. The next day, military intelligence agents came to their home and took Min Thein to an interrogation center for questioning. A week later, they sent him home.

At first, he seemed fine, but soon after his release, his body became swollen and he couldn't urinate properly. His younger brother, Win Thein, told Saw Lwin and his sister about Min Thein's condition. Min Thein, who had earlier confided to Saw Lwin about his mission for the ABSDF, told his friend and fellow doctor that he suspected his symptoms were caused by an injection he had received while he was in custody. The intelligence agents who questioned him refused to tell him what drug they had injected him with.

Min Thein's health rapidly deteriorated, as his bowels began to swell and he started to have difficulty breathing. While his colleagues were preparing to take him to the hospital, intelligence officers appeared at his home again and told them he could only receive treatment at a military hospital. Min Thein said he would rather die at home than go with them. And so he remained there, treated by Saw Lwin, until he died the next day.

Troubled by the unexplained nature of his friend's death, Saw Lwin asked one of his professors to perform an autopsy. They discovered that Min Thein's kidneys had drastically shrunken in size. When the intelligence officers learned about the autopsy, they warned the coroner not to reveal his findings.
Saw Lwin realized then that he might be in real danger himself and decided to go into hiding.

At that time, I was working at Saw Lwin's private clinic, so I could see how his absence affected his patients, many of whom were poor people who couldn't afford to go anywhere else. They seemed quite helpless without him. He was always reluctant to take money from patients who had very little to give, and sometimes even paid for their medicine out of his own pocket. Once, I saw him treat a seriously ill cancer patient entirely at his own expense.

Saw Lwin's family also suffered because of his involvement in this case. His father was forced to retire early and died of a stroke in 1994. After this, Saw Lwin returned to his home, believing that the intelligence officers had probably forgotten about the incident. He applied for a government job at a hospital and was assigned to a position at a sub-township hospital in Bogalay Township, Irrawaddy Division.

For a while, he was able to go about his business quite freely, but eventually, the authorities caught up with him. Intelligence agents started summoning him for questioning, and continued harassing him in this manner for several months. In 1995, it got even worse, and he was beginning to feel deeply disturbed. He decided to go to Rangoon to speak with Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been released from house arrest in July of that year, but was unable to meet with her. When he returned to Bogalay, he was immediately summoned by the secretary of the local Township Law and Order Restoration Council and spent several hours being interrogated by three intelligence officers.

By the time he returned home, he was completely drained of energy. After this, his neighbors said that he became very withdrawn. He seemed very troubled, but hesitated to burden others with his problems. Finally, he decided to take leave from the hospital and packed his belongings as if to go on a trip. But for the next two days, no one could hear any sound from his room. When his neighbors forced the door open, they found that he had hanged himself.
His death still fills me with immense sadness. He was a very talented and kind-hearted person.

The stars are falling in our country. Who is responsible for this? How do their mothers bear the pain of losing their precious sons and daughters? How many more must we lose in vain? I have no answers to these questions. But I would like to salute these lost heroes and pray that they are never forgotten.

Khin Nyein Thit is a former political prisoner who recently fled to the Thai-Burmese border.

From - http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16810&page=1