ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအတြက္ အာဏာရွင္ကို ျပတ္သားဖို႔ လိုၿပီ

စိုးလြင္

အမွန္တရားကို ေရးခ်ျပခ်င္ေပမယ့္ ရန္သူအားရတဲ့လုပ္ရပ္ ျဖစ္မွာစိုးလို႔ ေစာင့္ထိန္းခဲ့ရတာေတြဟာ တကယ္ ေတာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို လမ္းေၾကာင္းမွားေပၚေရာက္ေအာင္ ဆဲြခ်ေနတာမွန္း သိလ်က္ႏွင့္ အားေပး ေနတာမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ ႀကိဳက္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ မႀကိဳက္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္၊ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ားျဖင့္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို ေစတနာမွန္မွန္ျဖင့္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္သြားၾကဖို႔ အသိေပးေရးသား လိုက္ပါတယ္။

၁၉ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ အင္နဲ႔အားနဲ႔ စစ္အုပ္စုကို ေတာ္လွန္ေနရင္း ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္အုပ္စု ယေန႔အထိ မက်ဆံုး ေသးတာကို ဆန္းစစ္ၾကည့္ရင္ ‘အာဏာရွင္ကို အသက္ဆက္ေပးေနၿပီး အာဏာရွင္ အလိုက် လုပ္ေပးေနသူေတြ ရွိေနတာရယ္’၊ ‘အာဏာရွင္ကို ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား ဆက္ဆံဖို႔ ကိုယ္ပိုင္မူ မရွိတာရယ္ဆိုတဲ့ (၂)ခ်က္ကို အထင္အရွား ေတြ႕လာရတယ္။ အဲဒီအထဲမွာ မိမိတို႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီတိုက္ပဲြတြင္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဟု ဆိုသူမ်ား၊ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ကြၽမ္းက်င္သူဟု ဆိုသူမ်ားႏွင့္၊ ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းမွ ကိုယ္က်ဳိးအတၱႀကီးသူ အခ်ဳိ႕တို႔ လည္း ပါ၀င္ေနတာေတြ႕ရတယ္။

ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြဟာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေန၀င္း ေခတ္ကတည္းက အဖိႏွိပ္ခံ၊ အညႇင္းပန္းခံဘ၀နဲ႔ ေနခဲ့ရာက ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္မွာ တျပည္လုံး အတိုင္းအတာအားျဖင့္ အံုႂကြခဲ့ၾကတာဟာ ျမန္မာ့သမိုင္းမွာ အျပင္းထန္ဆံုးနဲ႔ အထိေရာက္ ဆံုး အာဏာရွင္နဲ႔ အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ကို ဆန္႔က်င္မႈ လုပ္ခဲ့ျခင္းပဲ။ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ၂၀၀၇ခုႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာ၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတြ ဦးေဆာင္ခဲ့တဲ့ ဆႏၵျပပဲြဟာ ဒုတိယေျမာက္ အင္အားအေကာင္းဆံုး ဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုမႈျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတြဟာ အဲဒီလိုလုပ္ရင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရမယ္၊ ပစ္သတ္ခံရမယ္ဆိုတာကို သိေပမယ့္လည္း ျပည္သူေတြ၏ စား၀တ္ေနေရး ေဘးဒုကၡေတြ အတြက္ တာ၀န္သိတတ္စြာျဖင့္ ေရွ႕ကေန အနစ္နာခံ အသက္ေပး၊ ဘ၀ေတြေပး ေဆာင္႐ြက္သြားခဲ့ၾကတယ္။

ဒီလိုျဖစ္လာတဲ့အေပၚမွာ မိမိတို႔က တာ၀န္သိသိျဖင့္ ေထာက္ပံ့အားေပးရမွာ၊ အျပည့္အ၀ ကိုယ္ခ်င္းစာ နားလည္ေပးရမွာ၊ ဒါက မိမိတို႔ဘက္က လုပ္ရမယ့္ တာ၀န္နဲ႔အလုပ္ပဲ။ အေရးအႀကီးဆံုးက မိမိတို႔ဘက္က ျပည္သူေတြကို ေျမႇာက္ပင့္ေပးၿပီး၊ မိမိနာမည္ရဖို႔ မိမိေငြရဖို႔အတြက္ အခြင့္အေရး၀င္ယူတာမ်ိဳး လံုး၀မလုပ္သင့္ဘူး။ အဲဒါ လိုက္နာရမယ့္ စည္းကမ္း၊ အဲဒီစည္းကို မထိန္းဘဲ ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ရင္ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို သစၥာမဲ့တာပဲ။

ထပ္ဆင့္ေျပာရရင္ မိမိကိုယ္တိုင္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတိုက္ပြဲမွာ ၀င္ပါခဲ့ဖူး႐ုံကေလး၊ အနစ္နာခံခ်င္တဲ ့ စိတ္ကေလး နည္းနည္းနဲ႔ေတာ့ ပညာရွိေယာင္ေယာင္ ေလလိႈင္းမွာ၀င္ၿပီး ေအာင္ၾကည္ဟာ လူေကာင္း၊ အလုပ္ကို တကယ္လုပ္တဲ့ လူေတာ္ဆိုၿပီး သန္းေ႐ႊကို ဖားၿပီးေျပာတာမ်ိဳးဟာ ရန္သူအႀကိဳက္လုပ္ရပ္ ျဖစ္တဲ့အျပင္၊ ျပည္သူေတြကို ယံုမွားေတြေ၀ေအာင္ လဲြမွားတဲ့ လမ္းၫႊန္မႈ (misleading) လုပ္တာနဲ႔ အတူတူပဲ။ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြဟာ စစ္တပ္ကို ရင္ထဲ၊ ႏွလံုးသားေတြထဲက မုန္းေနၾကၿပီ၊ သန္းေ႐ႊရဲ႕ စစ္တပ္ဟာ လသားအ႐ြယ္ ကေလးကေန အသက္(၉၀)အ႐ြယ္ အဖိုးႀကီး အဖြားႀကီး၊ တိပိဋက အဂၢမဟာပ႑ိတ သံဃာေတာ္ေတြအထိ အျပစ္မရွိဘဲ ဖမ္းတယ္ ေထာင္ခ်တယ္၊ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြကို သတ္တယ္၊ ျပည္သူေတြကို သတ္တယ္၊ မုဒိမ္းက်င့္တယ္၊ ေနာက္ဆံုး ဘုန္းႀကီးရဟန္းေတြကိုပါ သတ္တယ္။ သူတို ့ အာဏာတည္ျမဲေရးအတြက္ဆုိရင္ အကုန္သတ္တယ္။ အဲဒီစစ္တပ္မွာ အမႈထမ္း အခစား လုပ္စားေနတဲ့သူ ေတြဟာ အာဏာရွင္ရဲ႕ ျပည္သူကို ဖိႏွိပ္သတ္ျဖတ္တဲ့ ယႏၱရားေတြပဲ။

စစ္တပ္က တိုင္းျပည္နဲ႔ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားေတြရဲ႕ အသက္အိုးအိမ္ စည္းစိမ္ကို ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ ရမည့္အစား ဖ်က္ဆီးသတ္ျဖတ္ေနျခင္းဟာ လူစိတ္ကင္းမဲ့ေနတဲ့ လုပ္ရပ္ဆိုတာ ထင္ထင္ရွားရွား ေတြ႕ေနရတယ္။ သန္းေ႐ႊဟာ လူသတ္စစ္တပ္နဲ႔ တိုင္းျပည္ကို ဖ်က္ဆီးေနတာ။ အဲဒီေတာ့ သန္းေ႐ႊစစ္တပ္ကို အေကာင္းျမင္ေနစရာ မလိုေတာ့ဘူး။ ျပည္သူေတြဘက္က ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား ရပ္တည္ၿပီး ျပည္သူေတြနဲ႔အတူ လက္တြဲတိုက္ဖို႔ပဲ လိုေတာ့တယ္။ ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသား မတိုက္ခဲ့လို႔လည္း ေတာ္လွန္ေရးနယ္ေျမကေန ထြက္ေျပးၿပီးၿပီ၊ အခုေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအစိုးရေတြ အားကိုးနဲ႔ အသံကေလးနဲ႔ပဲ တိုက္ေနရတဲ့အဆင့္ ေရာက္ေနရတာ မိမိတို႔ကိုယ္ မိမိတို႔ သိဖို႔ေကာင္းတယ္။

မိမိတို႔က မသိခ်င္ေယာင္ေဆာင္ေနေပမယ့္ သန္းေ႐ႊနဲ ့ သူ႔အေပါင္းအပါေတြ သိတယ္၊ နုိင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအ၀ုိင္းက သိတယ္၊ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ကို အၿပီးသတ္ ေခ်မႈန္းဖို႔အတြက္ ျပည္တြင္းမွာ အျပင္းထန္ဆံုး လူထုအံုႂကြမႈျဖင့္သာ အဆံုးသတ္ရမွာ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြရဲ႕ အားနည္းခ်က္ကို သိေနတဲ့ စစ္အုပ္စုဟာ လူထုကို လုပ္ေနၾကအတိုင္း လွည့္ကြက္တခုသံုးၿပီး၊ သံဃာ့အေရးအခင္း တခုလံုးကို ၿဖိခြင္းလိုက္ ျပန္တယ္။ အဲဒါကေတာ့ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ပစ္သတ္တယ္၊ ကိုရင္ငယ္ေတြနဲ႔ ဘုန္းႀကီးေတြကို အားလံုးေရွ႕မွာ အေသ႐ိုက္သတ္ျပလိုက္တယ္။

ၿပီးေတာ့မွ ေဒၚစုကို ဂမ္ဘာရီနဲ႔ ေပးေတြ႕၊၊ ေအာင္ၾကည္ကို တာ၀န္ေပးလိုက္တယ္ ဆိုတာနဲ ့ ပဲြသိမ္းလိုက္တယ္။ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးေရးလုပ္ဖို႔ ဆႏၵမရွိတဲ့ သန္းေ႐ႊစစ္အုပ္စုဟာ ၿပီးတာနဲ႔ ဆက္တိုက္ဆိုသလို ရဟန္းသံဃာေတြကို ဖမ္း၊ ေထာင္ခ် ၊ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းေတြကို ၀င္ေရာက္ဖ်က္ဆီးပစ္တာပဲ။ အဓိပၸါယ္က ျပည္သူျပည္သားေတြကို ေၾကာက္ေအာင္လုပ္ျပတာ။ က်ဳပ္တို ့ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြဟာ သတၱိရွိၾကပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ တရားမဲ့ ပညာနည္းၿပီး ယုတ္ညံ့တဲ့ ျမန္မာျပည္က စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေတြကို အျပဳတ္တိုက္ဖို႔အတြက္ဆိုရင္ မိမိတို႔ ျပင္ပကေန ယံုမွားသံသယရွိၿပီး ေတြေ၀ေစတဲ့ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ဳိးေတြ မေျပာမွသာ ျပည္သူေတြ ဒီ့ထက္ သတၱိပိုရွိလာမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အျပင္မွာရွိေနတဲ့ မိမိတို႔က ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းက ျပည္သူေတြ သတိၱေတြ ပိုရွိလာေအာင္ ပံ့ပိုးေပးရမွာ၊ ျပည္သူေတြ ယံုၾကည္အားကိုး ႏုိင္ေအာင္လည္း အျပင္ကေန မွန္ကန္တဲ့ ပ့ံပိုးမႈေတြ၊ ေထာက္ခံအားေပးမႈေတြ လုပ္ေပးရမွာပါ။ (ႏုိင္ငံတကာကို မဆိုလိုပါဘူး)။ အဲဒီလို ယံုၾကည္အားကိုးႏုိင္ေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးနုိင္တာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ရွိေနရရဲ႕သားနဲ ့ နုိင္ငံတကာမွာ ေငြလိုက္ေတာင္း၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေတာ္လွန္ေရး အဓြန္႔ရွည္ပါေစဆိုၿပီး ကိုယ္က်ဳိးလုပ္စားေနၾကတာ အားမရႏိုင္ေသးပဲ အခြင့္အေရးသမားပီပီ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္လို႔ အမည္ခံထားတဲ့ FTUB ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေမာင္ေမာင္ရဲ႕ ဒီဇဘၤာလ ၄ ရက္ေန ့ ၀ါရွင္တန္ပို႔စ္ သတင္းစာမွာပါတဲ့ ေျပာဆိုခ်က္ဟာ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားရဲ႕ ႐ိုးသားတဲ့ ဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုမႈကို နအဖအလိုက်အတိုင္း ေစာ္ကားေပးလုိက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္တယ္။ စစ္တပ္၏ မတရားဖိႏွိပ္မႈေအာက္မွ အရဲစြန္႔ၿပီး လမ္းေပၚထြက္ ဆႏၵျပမႈမ်ိဴးဟာ ေငြေပးၿပီးခိုင္းလို႔ ရတာမ်ိဴး မဟုတ္ဘူး၊ အမွန္တရားကို တန္ဖိုးထားတတ္တဲ ့ စိတ္ရွိမွ လုပ္ရဲတာမ်ိဴး၊ အဆိုး၀ါးဆံုးက ဒီမိုကေရစီိလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား၊ အာဏာရွင္ကို ဆန္႔က်င္မည့္ ျပည္သူမ်ား ေနာက္ထပ္ မေပၚေပါက္ လာေအာင္ ပိတ္ဆို႔ တားဆီးလုိုက္ျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ (သူေျပာတဲ့ စကားအခ်ဳိ႕ကို ေဖာ္ျပလိုက္တယ္)

The Washington Post, on December 4, “We had about 200 people inside the country trained to take pictures with digital and video cameras. We also trained them transmit using satellite phones and internet cafes. They were on the front lines when the demonstrations started”
“We want money for sat phones, for digital cameras, for typewriters for the monks, for bicycles. We need it now” he told the post.

ရဟန္းေတြဟာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးကိစၥမွာ ၀င္ပါခ်င္လြန္းလို႔မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ေန ့စဥ္ေတြ႕ၾကံဳေနရတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြရဲ႕ စား၀တ္ေနေရး ေဘးဒုကၡ ဆင္းရဲကို ရင္ႏွင့္မမွ် ခံစားရလြန္းေတာ့ အဆင္ေျပမလားဆိုတဲ့ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ကေလး တခုတည္းနဲ ့ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ေတာင္းဆိုေပးခဲ့ၾကတာကို သန္းေ႐ႊစစ္တပ္က မညႇာမတာ၊ ပစ္သတ္တဲ ့ အေပၚမွာ ေမာင္ေမာင္ FTUB ( ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢမ်ား အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဴပ္ )က သူေငြေပးၿပီး လုပ္ခိုင္းလို႔ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားရဲ႕ လႈပ္ရွားမႈ ေပၚေပါက္လာတဲ့သေဘာ ေျပာဆိုၿပီး နအဖအလိုက် သံေယာင္လိုက္ကာ သံဃာအေရးအခင္းႀကီး တခုလံုးကို ခုတံုးလုပ္လိုက္ၿပီး သူေငြရဖို႔လုပ္တဲ့အျပင္ နအဖအတြက္ပါ သံဃာအေရးအခင္းႀကီးကို စြပ္စြဲေျပာဆိုခြင့္ရဖို ့အတြက္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို ခုတံုး လုပ္ျပီး ကိုယ္က်ိဴးစီးပြားရွာေနသူေတြ ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ေနရာမွာ ရွိေနသမွ် စစ္အာဏာရွင္အုပ္စု အသက္ရွင္ေနဦးမွာပဲဆိုတာ အသိေပးလိုက္ပါရေစ။

နိဂုံးခ်ဴပ္အေနျဖင့္ မိမိတို႔ တစိုက္မတ္မတ္လုပ္ရမယ့္ အလုပ္ဟာ သန္းေ႐ႊရဲ႕စစ္အုပ္စုကို အျပတ္ရွင္းၿပီး ဒီမိုကေရစီစနစ္ကို အေျခခံတဲ့ ျပည္သူအစိုးရတရပ္ကို ေဖၚေဆာင္ေပးဖို ့ တာ၀န္သာလွ်င္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ အကယ္၍ မိမိကဦးေဆာင္ၿပးီ သန္းေ႐ႊစစ္အုပ္စုကို အျပတ္မရွင္းရဲလွ်င္လည္း လူတတ္ႀကီးလုပ္ၿပီး မေျပာဖို႔ေတာ့ လိုပါတယ္၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို သစၥာရွိရွိ၊ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္လုပ္လုိ႔ ေငြေထာက္ပံ့မႈ ရတာမ်ိဴး မဟုတ္ဘဲ၊ ေငြရဖို႔အတြက္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို ဟန္ျပလုပ္ေနရတဲ့ ဘ၀မ်ဳိးနဲ႔ေတာ့ သန္းေ႐ႊစစ္အုပ္စုကို ဖယ္ရွားဖို႔လုပ္ေနတာ မဟုတ္ဘူးဆိုတာ ထင္ရွားတယ္။

စစ္မွန္ေသာ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္း ေပၚေပါက္ေစေရးႏွင့္ အခြင့္အေရးသမား ဦးေဆာင္သူမ်ားမဟုတ္ဘဲ၊ သတိၱရွိၿပီး ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို ရဲရဲရင့္ရင့္ သစၥာရွိရွိ ဦးေဆာင္ႏုိင္ေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္မ်ား ေပၚေပါက္ေစရန္ ရည္႐ြယ္သည္။

ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္အုပ္စု က်ဆံုးေစလိုေသာ ဆႏၵျဖင့္ …

စိုးလြင္
Sydney, Australia
7th January 2008

A decisive course of action to challenge the military dictators for a democratic cause
Soe Lwin

Whether one likes it or not, truth has to be told. In the past I have restrained myself from doing this.Turning against our own will be like feeding fodder to the military regime’s cannon giving them a boost in their morale. However, I have no other choice but to ‘call a spade, a spade’ (ashi-ko ashiataing). Some of us in the movement for democratic change in Burma have strayed away from our chosen path.

We do not have to look very far. Our relentless struggles to dislodge the military dictatorship in Burma within the past nineteen years have yield very little. In my view, there are two factors that are working against us: 1) those, particularly outside Burma, not only prolonging but appeasing the dictatorship and 2) a lack of decisive policy in dealing with it. Among them are those who proclaim themselves ‘Burma experts’ and self-appointed leaders of the democratic movement.

The people in Burma have not only lived through the repressive policies of the current military dictatorship but they have also lived through the oppression under the military dictatorship of the late Ne Win. The social upheaval that the world has witnessed in 1988 was the most intense, the most extensive and the most effective in our political history.

The so-called ‘Saffron Revolution’ demonstrations led by the Buddhist monks (the Sangha) during September-October 2007 was the second time that such a social uprising have occurred in Burma under the military dictatorship. Knowingly that their defiance will be met by brutal crack down from the military dictators the monks were undeterred in putting the interest of the people ahead of their fate of being either shot and killed or getting disrobed and jailed.

Not only that we have to empathies with the Buddhist monks for what they have done for the people, we must also show our unswerving support for what they did. It is indeed our duty to support the monks. It will be against our principles and betraying our cause for democratic change in Burma to use the people for our political exploits.

I would like to reiterate that just because one has participated in our struggle for democratic revolution in Burma in the past or even one is ready and willing to make sacrifices for the cause does not give one the privilege to comment on air through various radio programs with ‘how good and hard-working that the military regime appointed minister for liaison between the regime and the Burmese people is.’ Commentary like that will not only be in some way’ sucking up’ the military dictator Than Shwe but also misled the people who have been denied access to the truth in the first place.

There is no doubt in my mind the extent of hatred that the people in Burma have for the military. The military under Than Shwe’s leadership has inflicted pain to the people of Burma from the month-old children to a ninety-year old; from novice to Venerable monks. Neither have they restrained from raping women, detaining innocent monks and students and killing whoever they see as a threat to their hold on to power. The civil service as a whole has been turned into a machinery to advance their criminal pursuits. The military under Than Shwe leadership has broken its sacrosanct pledge to protect the people and has lost its humanity.

It is abundantly clear that there is no reason for us to see the military under the leadership of Than Shwe as a good institution. We have to resolve ourselves to stand with the people in their struggle against the military dictatorship. Because we find ourselves wanting in our resolve against the military dictatorship, we have no other choice but to abandon our armed-struggle in the liberated areas. Now we have to realizes the true situation we are in. We have to stretch our necks in eagerness for the support that we might have from this or that country. We have to be content with whatever the pressure the international community can put on to the regime. We can pretend ignorance but within our movement we know ourselves and we know who we are referring to. We need to have a more decisive determination resolve in our struggle to rid ourselves of the military dictatorship.

The military regime is fully aware of our lacking in this determination and it has been using this weakness in us to the fullest of its own advantage. It was clear that the military dictatorship has no intention of solving the country’s crisis through dialogue and negotiations. It has used fake dialogue as an incentive to get the pressure from the international community off its back. It has allowed the United Nations Special Envoy Gambari to meet the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in her detention; appointed U Aung Kyi as liaison minister between the opposition and itself merely as a diversion. It has managed to instill fear among the populace by blatantly shooting and killing the monks in full public view. It is clear that the people in Burma are not lacking in courage but when it comes to dislodging the military dictatorship, we need to have more resolve.

Those of us, who live in freedom within the democratic societies abroad, have to work hard for thepeople in Burma to become much stronger in their determination to rid themselves of the military dictatorship. Towards that end we must be able to do more than just putting all our efforts in seeking for handouts. ‘Working for democratic revolution in Burma’ as a ‘cover’ or a ‘mantra’ some of us within the movement have been caught lining their own pockets.

“..We had about 200 people inside the country trained to take pictures with digital and video cameras. We also trained them to transmit using satellite phones and internet cafes. They were on the frontline when demonstrations started…. We want money for sat phones, for digital cameras, for typewriters for the monks, for bicycles. We need it now.”
(Some comments such as made by Maung Maung, The Federation of Trade Unions - Burma(FTUB), in the Washington Post on December 4, 2007)

It is indeed a disservice to the sacrifices made by the monks. It was not for the money that the monks were demonstrating against the military regime. It was because of their sole conviction and compassion that they can no longer stood by and be indifferent while the people have to suffer under the repressive policies of the military dictatorship. Weasel words such as these from people like this self-appointed trade unionist sow doubt in the political conviction of people who chose to rise up against injustices they were enough to kill off the aspiration of the people in the future.

A monk’s primary role in society has never been in politics. However, with their full knowledge of the hardship that lay people have to go through in their daily lives they have no choice but to put themselves in danger by their efforts to bring the military regime to reason. To imply that it was through his efforts and the money that he provided that the ‘Saffron Revolution’ came into being is not just a fabrication on his side but also a pretext for the military regime to put the blame on the monks. As long as there are those who will not hesitate to use the movement for democratic cause in Burma as their ‘cash cows’ the military dictatorship will be alive and well for much longer. For those who have committed to the struggle against Than Shwe’s military dictatorship there is no other way but to work for the ultimate solution – to get rid of the military dictatorship and install a democratic government in Burma. To those who are lacking in either courage or conviction to defy the military regime they should stop pretending who they really are and refrain from making silly comments.

Political conviction can never be bought. It is through this belief that democratic change in Burma is worth making the sacrifice that we should continue our struggle against Than Shwe’s military dictatorship. It is with the intention that we should direct all our efforts towards bringing in democratic change in Burma and to aspire those who want to become leaders for the cause out of their conviction for truth and justice and not because of cash or glory.

I hope and intend this article will lead to a genuine movement for the democracy cause with new and charismatic leaders to lead, with no self-appointed leaders, opportunists and status seekers.

Wishing down with military dictatorship in Burma.

Soe Lwin
Sydney, Australia
7th January 2008