Oct 31, 2007 (DVB)–Around 200 monks from several monasteries in Pakokku staged a walking protest at 8.30 this morning, according to a monk who participated in the march.
The monk said that the protest was a continuation of last month’s demonstrations as he said the monks’ demands have still not been met.
"Our demands are for lower commodity prices, national reconciliation and the immediate release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners," the monk explained.
The monks came from monasteries around Pakokku, including the West and Central monasteries, and chanted metta as they marched three in a row, with monks in the first row holding Sasana flags.
They started walking along Bogyoke road towards Thida road, then turned into Pauk road before ending the march at Shwe Ku pagoda.
The monk said the group was not afraid of the response of the authorities.
"We are not afraid of getting arrested or being tortured. We are doing this for Sasana," he said.
The protest began about one hour after a pro-government rally in the same town ended, and authorities did not intervene to stop the monks’ march.
The monks reportedly notified the authorities in advance, telling them that if a pro-government demonstration was taking place then the monks should also be allowed to hold their protest.
The monk said there would be more and larger demonstrations in the future.
"We did not have much time to organise the protest as we did not actually plan for it, so there weren't a lot of monks. But there will be bigger and more organized protests soon," he said.
The monk said that civilian bystanders supported the protest but were afraid to express this openly.
"We would like to urge people not to be afraid since we are doing this for good future of our country," he said.
Reporting by Aye Nai
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Pakokku Monks March on the Streets Again
Irrawaddy
October 31, 2007—More than 100 monks in Pakokku Township in Magwe Division marched in a peaceful demonstration, starting about 8 am on Wednesday. The monks marched through the town's streets chanting the “Metta Sutta” (the Buddha’s words on loving kindness). Many residents bowed before the protesting monks and the march ended peacefully about one hour later, sources said. Military authorities are now investigating which monasteries were involved in the march, said local residents. Pakokku was the site of the first violent crackdown on monks engaged in peaceful demonstrations in early September, which escalated into a nationwide anti-junta uprising in Rangoon and other cities.
October 31, 2007—More than 100 monks in Pakokku Township in Magwe Division marched in a peaceful demonstration, starting about 8 am on Wednesday. The monks marched through the town's streets chanting the “Metta Sutta” (the Buddha’s words on loving kindness). Many residents bowed before the protesting monks and the march ended peacefully about one hour later, sources said. Military authorities are now investigating which monasteries were involved in the march, said local residents. Pakokku was the site of the first violent crackdown on monks engaged in peaceful demonstrations in early September, which escalated into a nationwide anti-junta uprising in Rangoon and other cities.
Monks peacefully protest in Pakokku
Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)
October 31, 2007 - More than 70 Buddhist monks in Pakokku town in central Burma today once again took to the streets in a peaceful protest march, a local monk said.
73 monks from the Sasana Wihmula Monastery, popularly known as the west monastery, began marching the streets at about 8:30 a.m. (local time) and headed east, chanting and reciting the Metta Sutta as they marched, said a monk who witnessed the procession.
"The monks are mainly from the Bodhi Mandaing and Mya Monasteries. They headed to Shwegu Pagoda and chanted the Metta Sutta at the pagoda," said the monk, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The peaceful march, which is the first since the junta brutally cracked down on monk-led protests last month, comes amidst the Burmese junta's continued crackdown on activists and protestors.
Pakokku, a town in Magwe Division, was the turning point of the recent protests in Burma, which began on August 19th after authorities suddenly hiked fuel prices.
October 31, 2007 - More than 70 Buddhist monks in Pakokku town in central Burma today once again took to the streets in a peaceful protest march, a local monk said.
73 monks from the Sasana Wihmula Monastery, popularly known as the west monastery, began marching the streets at about 8:30 a.m. (local time) and headed east, chanting and reciting the Metta Sutta as they marched, said a monk who witnessed the procession.
"The monks are mainly from the Bodhi Mandaing and Mya Monasteries. They headed to Shwegu Pagoda and chanted the Metta Sutta at the pagoda," said the monk, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The peaceful march, which is the first since the junta brutally cracked down on monk-led protests last month, comes amidst the Burmese junta's continued crackdown on activists and protestors.
Pakokku, a town in Magwe Division, was the turning point of the recent protests in Burma, which began on August 19th after authorities suddenly hiked fuel prices.
Monks return to streets of Burma
BBC
31 Oct 2007
More than 100 monks have marched in central Burma, the first time they have returned to the streets since last month's bloody crackdown on protests.
The monks chanted and prayed as they marched through Pakokku, the site of an incident last month that triggered pro-democracy protests nationwide.
The government said 10 people died during the crackdown, but diplomats believe the toll was much higher.
Thousands more - many of them monks - were thought to have been detained.
Separately, the Human Rights Watch organisation has accused the Burmese army of forcibly recruiting children to cover gaps left by a lack of adult recruits.
Envoy's return
Pakokku is a centre of Buddhist learning about 630km (390 miles) north-west of Rangoon.
Reports that soldiers had beaten up monks there on 6 September gave nationwide momentum to protests that had begun on 19 August as demonstrations against fuel price rises.
Witnesses at Tuesday's march said the monks did not make any overt political statements but that the rally was clearly in defiance of the junta.
All public gatherings of monks in Burma have been banned and many monasteries remain deserted.
One monk who was on the march told the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based radio station run by dissident journalists: "We are continuing our protest from last month as we have not yet achieved any of the demands we asked for.
"Our demands are for lower commodity prices, national reconciliation and immediate release of [pro-democracy leader] Aung San Suu Kyi and all the political prisoners."
Aung Nyo Min, the Thai-based director of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, said of the rally: "This is very significant... we are very encouraged to see the monks are taking up action and taking up peaceful demonstrations in Burma."
There are hundreds of thousands of monks in Burma. They are highly revered and the clergy has historically been prominent in political protests.
The crackdown on protests sparked international action, with the US and EU imposing sanctions and embargoes.
'Systemic abuse'
United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari is expected to return to Burma shortly for talks with the military government in the wake of the crackdown.
I do think this sort of economic and political frustration that is within the population will manifest itself again in the coming months
Mark Canning,
UK ambassador to Burma
A Western diplomat told Agence France-Presse news agency Mr Gambari would be in Burma from 3-8 November.
Mr Gambari last visited on 29 September, just three days after the bloody crackdown began, and met junta chief Gen Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi.
He has been on a six-nation Asian tour to try to increase pressure on the generals.
British ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, told the BBC he expected further unrest in the country.
"I do think this sort of economic and political frustration that is within the population will manifest itself again in the coming months."
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report says children as young as 10 are beaten or threatened with arrest to make them enlist.
Both the army and ethnic rebels have been accused of using children before.
The military insists it is opposed to the use of child soldiers, but HRW says the abuses were extensive and systemic.
31 Oct 2007
More than 100 monks have marched in central Burma, the first time they have returned to the streets since last month's bloody crackdown on protests.
The monks chanted and prayed as they marched through Pakokku, the site of an incident last month that triggered pro-democracy protests nationwide.
The government said 10 people died during the crackdown, but diplomats believe the toll was much higher.
Thousands more - many of them monks - were thought to have been detained.
Separately, the Human Rights Watch organisation has accused the Burmese army of forcibly recruiting children to cover gaps left by a lack of adult recruits.
Envoy's return
Pakokku is a centre of Buddhist learning about 630km (390 miles) north-west of Rangoon.
Reports that soldiers had beaten up monks there on 6 September gave nationwide momentum to protests that had begun on 19 August as demonstrations against fuel price rises.
Witnesses at Tuesday's march said the monks did not make any overt political statements but that the rally was clearly in defiance of the junta.
All public gatherings of monks in Burma have been banned and many monasteries remain deserted.
One monk who was on the march told the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based radio station run by dissident journalists: "We are continuing our protest from last month as we have not yet achieved any of the demands we asked for.
"Our demands are for lower commodity prices, national reconciliation and immediate release of [pro-democracy leader] Aung San Suu Kyi and all the political prisoners."
Aung Nyo Min, the Thai-based director of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, said of the rally: "This is very significant... we are very encouraged to see the monks are taking up action and taking up peaceful demonstrations in Burma."
There are hundreds of thousands of monks in Burma. They are highly revered and the clergy has historically been prominent in political protests.
The crackdown on protests sparked international action, with the US and EU imposing sanctions and embargoes.
'Systemic abuse'
United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari is expected to return to Burma shortly for talks with the military government in the wake of the crackdown.
I do think this sort of economic and political frustration that is within the population will manifest itself again in the coming months
Mark Canning,
UK ambassador to Burma
A Western diplomat told Agence France-Presse news agency Mr Gambari would be in Burma from 3-8 November.
Mr Gambari last visited on 29 September, just three days after the bloody crackdown began, and met junta chief Gen Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi.
He has been on a six-nation Asian tour to try to increase pressure on the generals.
British ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, told the BBC he expected further unrest in the country.
"I do think this sort of economic and political frustration that is within the population will manifest itself again in the coming months."
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report says children as young as 10 are beaten or threatened with arrest to make them enlist.
Both the army and ethnic rebels have been accused of using children before.
The military insists it is opposed to the use of child soldiers, but HRW says the abuses were extensive and systemic.
ပခုကၠဴ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား လမ္းေပၚျပန္ထြက္
ဧရာ၀တီ | ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၃၁၊ ၂၀၀၇
မေကြးတိုင္း ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕ရွိ သံဃာေတာ္ အပါး ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္က ယေန႔ နံနက္ ၈ နာရီေက်ာ္မွစတင္၍ ေမတၱာသုတ္႐ြတ္ဆုိ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ ဆႏၵျပေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
အဆိုပါ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားသည္ မဟာ၀ိဇယာရာမ (အေရွ႕တိုက္) ဘက္မွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ လမ္းအတိုင္း ၿမိဳ႕ကိုပတ္၍ ၁ နာရီခန္႔ၾကာသည္အထိ ေမတၱာသုတ္႐ြတ္ဆို၍ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့သည္ဟု ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕မွ သံဃာေတာ္တပါးက
ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ ေျပာသည္။
“ေပါက္လမ္းကေန အေနာက္ဘက္မွာရွိတဲ့ သီဟုိ၌ ရွင္ဘုရားကို သြားၿပီး၀တ္ျပဳ ဆုေတာင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ေက်ာင္း ကိုယ္ျပန္သြားၾကတယ္၊ အဓိကက ကံေဆာင္ တာပဲ”ဟု အထက္ပါ သံဃာေတာ္က ေျပာသည္။
ၿမိဳ႕လူထုက ေမတၱာသုတ္ရြတ္ဆို ႂကြခ်ီလာေသာ ယင္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို လမ္းေဘး၀ဲယာမွေန၍ ထိုင္ကန္ေတာ့ျခင္း၊ ၾကည္ညိဳအားေပးျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ ၾကသည္ဟု ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕မွ မ်က္ျမင္တဦးကလည္း ေျပာျပသည္။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ႂကြခ်ီရာလမ္းတေလွ်ာက္တြင္ ယူနီေဖာင္း၀တ္ စစ္သားမ်ား၊ ရဲမ်ားကို မျမင္ေတြ႔ရဘဲ အရပ္၀တ္ရဲဟု ထင္ရသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႕တခ်ိဳ႕ကိုသာ ေတြ႕ျမင္ရၿပီး ေအးခ်မ္းစြာၿပီးဆုံးခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။
လတ္တေလာတြင္ အဖမ္းအဆီးမ်ား မရွိေသာ္လည္း ပါ၀င္ဆႏၵျပသည့္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္မ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက လိုက္လံ စုံစမ္းေနေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရသည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၆ ရက္္ေန႔ ေန႔လယ္က ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕ရွိ သံဃာအပါး ၅၀၀ ခန္႔ ေမတၱာပို႔ ႐ြတ္ဆိုရင္း လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ ဆႏၵျပၾကရာ စစ္တပ္က ေသနတ္ ၁၀ ခ်က္ခန္႔ပစ္ေဖာက္ၿပီး အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႕၊ စြမ္းအားရွင္မ်ားက ယင္း ဆႏၵျပ သံဃာမ်ားအား ႐ုိက္ႏွက္ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည္။ ထုိသို႔ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ရုိက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးမႈေၾကာင့္ သံဃာ ၁၀ ပါးခန္႔ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရၿပီး သံဃာတခ်ိဳ႕ ျပင္းထန္စြာ ဒဏ္ရာရကာ သံဃာေတာ္ တပါး ရိုက္ႏွက္ခံရသည့္ ဒဏ္ရာျဖင့္ ေဆး႐ုံတင္ခဲ့ရသည္။
မေကြးတိုင္း ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕ရွိ သံဃာေတာ္ အပါး ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္က ယေန႔ နံနက္ ၈ နာရီေက်ာ္မွစတင္၍ ေမတၱာသုတ္႐ြတ္ဆုိ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ ဆႏၵျပေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
အဆိုပါ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားသည္ မဟာ၀ိဇယာရာမ (အေရွ႕တိုက္) ဘက္မွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ လမ္းအတိုင္း ၿမိဳ႕ကိုပတ္၍ ၁ နာရီခန္႔ၾကာသည္အထိ ေမတၱာသုတ္႐ြတ္ဆို၍ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့သည္ဟု ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕မွ သံဃာေတာ္တပါးက
ဧရာ၀တီသို႔ ေျပာသည္။
“ေပါက္လမ္းကေန အေနာက္ဘက္မွာရွိတဲ့ သီဟုိ၌ ရွင္ဘုရားကို သြားၿပီး၀တ္ျပဳ ဆုေတာင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ေက်ာင္း ကိုယ္ျပန္သြားၾကတယ္၊ အဓိကက ကံေဆာင္ တာပဲ”ဟု အထက္ပါ သံဃာေတာ္က ေျပာသည္။
ၿမိဳ႕လူထုက ေမတၱာသုတ္ရြတ္ဆို ႂကြခ်ီလာေသာ ယင္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို လမ္းေဘး၀ဲယာမွေန၍ ထိုင္ကန္ေတာ့ျခင္း၊ ၾကည္ညိဳအားေပးျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ ၾကသည္ဟု ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕မွ မ်က္ျမင္တဦးကလည္း ေျပာျပသည္။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ႂကြခ်ီရာလမ္းတေလွ်ာက္တြင္ ယူနီေဖာင္း၀တ္ စစ္သားမ်ား၊ ရဲမ်ားကို မျမင္ေတြ႔ရဘဲ အရပ္၀တ္ရဲဟု ထင္ရသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႕တခ်ိဳ႕ကိုသာ ေတြ႕ျမင္ရၿပီး ေအးခ်မ္းစြာၿပီးဆုံးခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။
လတ္တေလာတြင္ အဖမ္းအဆီးမ်ား မရွိေသာ္လည္း ပါ၀င္ဆႏၵျပသည့္ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္မ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက လိုက္လံ စုံစမ္းေနေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရသည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၆ ရက္္ေန႔ ေန႔လယ္က ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕ရွိ သံဃာအပါး ၅၀၀ ခန္႔ ေမတၱာပို႔ ႐ြတ္ဆိုရင္း လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ ဆႏၵျပၾကရာ စစ္တပ္က ေသနတ္ ၁၀ ခ်က္ခန္႔ပစ္ေဖာက္ၿပီး အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႕၊ စြမ္းအားရွင္မ်ားက ယင္း ဆႏၵျပ သံဃာမ်ားအား ႐ုိက္ႏွက္ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့သည္။ ထုိသို႔ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ရုိက္ႏွက္ ဖမ္းဆီးမႈေၾကာင့္ သံဃာ ၁၀ ပါးခန္႔ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရၿပီး သံဃာတခ်ိဳ႕ ျပင္းထန္စြာ ဒဏ္ရာရကာ သံဃာေတာ္ တပါး ရိုက္ႏွက္ခံရသည့္ ဒဏ္ရာျဖင့္ ေဆး႐ုံတင္ခဲ့ရသည္။
Fewer monks join festival in Kyaikhami
Wed 31 Oct 2007
IMNA
Fewer monks joined the monk festival in Kyaikhami, southern Mon State this month because of the brutal crackdown on monks who joined last months protests.
People in Mon state and southern Burma celebrated the Kyaikhami pagoda festival after the end of Buddhist lent.
"Very few monks joined the festival. But people are still going to the festival," a Thanpyuzayart township resident said.
The monks' festival started from the last full moon day and people in southern Mon state are joining in.
Following the crackdown on protesters, people are afraid of joining the festival but there are fewer people compared to last year.
IMNA
Fewer monks joined the monk festival in Kyaikhami, southern Mon State this month because of the brutal crackdown on monks who joined last months protests.
People in Mon state and southern Burma celebrated the Kyaikhami pagoda festival after the end of Buddhist lent.
"Very few monks joined the festival. But people are still going to the festival," a Thanpyuzayart township resident said.
The monks' festival started from the last full moon day and people in southern Mon state are joining in.
Following the crackdown on protesters, people are afraid of joining the festival but there are fewer people compared to last year.
Burma is in danger: Famous monk-astrologer
Wed 31 Oct 2007
IMNA
Win Sein Sayadaw Nai Kaysara, the famous Mon monk who is also an astrologer, has said Burma (Myanmar) is both in difficulty and in danger. He built the largest reclining image of Lord Buddha in Mon state.
Nai Kaysara was respected by former Burmese junta Prime Minster Gen Khin Nyunt and other Burmese military general and Mon leaders.
"He told us Burma is in difficulty and in danger," said a senior New Mon State Party leader who went to meet him on his birthday in his native Naing Hlone village, Mudon Township on October 29.
The abbot Nai Kaysara who built the 80-feet high cross legged image was talking to the New Mon State Party Vice Chairman Nai Rotsa and his party colleagues.
He told the party leader to take something from the plenty tree, where offered commodities were hung, to protect him from danger.
In recent weeks, the abbot travelled around the township and attended the traditional offering of commodities from the people although the Township Peace and Development Council stopped him because of the monk-led protests in Rangoon.
The abbot never talks about serious issues although he likes to talk and joke with people. Many people believe he says the right thing when he speaks seriously.
The abbot is famous for his astrology and gives the right number of Thai lotteries to the people. He is known as the monk who did not offer food to Nat or spirits during the building of the Buddha image while others monk still offer food to spirits.
IMNA
Win Sein Sayadaw Nai Kaysara, the famous Mon monk who is also an astrologer, has said Burma (Myanmar) is both in difficulty and in danger. He built the largest reclining image of Lord Buddha in Mon state.
Nai Kaysara was respected by former Burmese junta Prime Minster Gen Khin Nyunt and other Burmese military general and Mon leaders.
"He told us Burma is in difficulty and in danger," said a senior New Mon State Party leader who went to meet him on his birthday in his native Naing Hlone village, Mudon Township on October 29.
The abbot Nai Kaysara who built the 80-feet high cross legged image was talking to the New Mon State Party Vice Chairman Nai Rotsa and his party colleagues.
He told the party leader to take something from the plenty tree, where offered commodities were hung, to protect him from danger.
In recent weeks, the abbot travelled around the township and attended the traditional offering of commodities from the people although the Township Peace and Development Council stopped him because of the monk-led protests in Rangoon.
The abbot never talks about serious issues although he likes to talk and joke with people. Many people believe he says the right thing when he speaks seriously.
The abbot is famous for his astrology and gives the right number of Thai lotteries to the people. He is known as the monk who did not offer food to Nat or spirits during the building of the Buddha image while others monk still offer food to spirits.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
International monks’ organisation established
Oct 30, 2007 (DVB)–Burmese monks living in exile around the world have formed an organisation to raise international awareness of Burma’s situation and lobby international governments.
The International Burmese Monks Organisation was formed in Los Angeles, California, on 28 October at a gathering of 49 monks from North America, Asia and Europe.
The director of the new group is U Kaweida, a monk lecturer from Masoeyein monastery in Mandalay who was detained by the Burmese government after the 1988 uprising and now lives in New York.
Another high-profile monk, U Pyinya Wuntha, is the chairperson of the organisation.
The monks had originally planned to meet on Sunday to celebrate U Pyinya Wuntha’s 80th birthday and 50 years of his work promoting Buddhism around the world.
But in light of the demonstrations in Burma led by monks and the crackdown on protesting monks and civilians the focus of the gathering was changed.
U Pyinya Wuntha said that the organisation was formed as a response to the harassment, detention and ill-treatment of monks in Burma by the regime.
Many people inside Burma had asked monks to get together to bring this issue to the attention of international governments and Buddhist groups from all over the world.
“We are going to raise awareness about the issues inside Burma with the relevant governments,” U Pyinya Wuntha said.
“We will pass this message not only to Buddhist groups, but also to Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths to give help to the monks inside Burma,” he said.
Burmese monks in Sri Lanka released a statement yesterday offering their enthusiastic cooperation to the new group and expressing their belief that it will be able to help find a solution to the political and social issues inside Burma.
They were joined in their support by monks in Rangoon, Mandalay, Myin Chan, and Pakokku.
Four Burmese artists living in exile also expressed their support for the newly formed organisation.
The four were Kyemon U Thaung, a Bangkok-based journalist and head of the New Era journal, poet Maung Swan Ye, US-based director, writer and painter Win Pe and Mar Mar Aye, a singer and former head of the state Music Association, also now based in the US.
“We vow to follow the monk’s orders and accept whatever duties are given to us by the monks,” the artists’ group said.
Reporting by DVB
The International Burmese Monks Organisation was formed in Los Angeles, California, on 28 October at a gathering of 49 monks from North America, Asia and Europe.
The director of the new group is U Kaweida, a monk lecturer from Masoeyein monastery in Mandalay who was detained by the Burmese government after the 1988 uprising and now lives in New York.
Another high-profile monk, U Pyinya Wuntha, is the chairperson of the organisation.
The monks had originally planned to meet on Sunday to celebrate U Pyinya Wuntha’s 80th birthday and 50 years of his work promoting Buddhism around the world.
But in light of the demonstrations in Burma led by monks and the crackdown on protesting monks and civilians the focus of the gathering was changed.
U Pyinya Wuntha said that the organisation was formed as a response to the harassment, detention and ill-treatment of monks in Burma by the regime.
Many people inside Burma had asked monks to get together to bring this issue to the attention of international governments and Buddhist groups from all over the world.
“We are going to raise awareness about the issues inside Burma with the relevant governments,” U Pyinya Wuntha said.
“We will pass this message not only to Buddhist groups, but also to Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths to give help to the monks inside Burma,” he said.
Burmese monks in Sri Lanka released a statement yesterday offering their enthusiastic cooperation to the new group and expressing their belief that it will be able to help find a solution to the political and social issues inside Burma.
They were joined in their support by monks in Rangoon, Mandalay, Myin Chan, and Pakokku.
Four Burmese artists living in exile also expressed their support for the newly formed organisation.
The four were Kyemon U Thaung, a Bangkok-based journalist and head of the New Era journal, poet Maung Swan Ye, US-based director, writer and painter Win Pe and Mar Mar Aye, a singer and former head of the state Music Association, also now based in the US.
“We vow to follow the monk’s orders and accept whatever duties are given to us by the monks,” the artists’ group said.
Reporting by DVB
Monday, October 29, 2007
Women pressured to denounce monks
Oct 29, 2007 (DVB)–Two women held in Insein prison were pressured to testify against monks, according to a National League for Democracy member who was detained with the women.
Ma Ohmar, an NLD member from Dagon Myothit township, spoke to DVB in an interview on 26 October, the day after her release.
She was arrested on 25 September and held first in a reserved holding area in Insein prison, then interrogated by the 8th Regiment at Mingaladon for four days before being sent to Insein prison on 29 September and held there until here release.
Ma Ohmar told DVB that a woman who was held in the cell next to her, Ma Ei, was pressured to testify as a government witness, and claimed she was given an earlier release because of her cooperation.
“Ma Ei was under tremendous pressure and she had to give testimony as a government witness…and she was released about two weeks earlier than us,” Ma Ohmar said.
Ma Ohmar also claimed that Hnin Hnin from Ngwekyaryan monastery, another woman who is still in detention, was instructed to say that she had had illicit relations with monks.
“They recited what she should say and she repeated after them. They documented it on videotape. They intend to use her as a prosecution witness also,” Ma Ohmar said.
“They are making up stories and videotaping it to prove that the monks in question are fake monks.”
When asked about her own treatment in detention, Ma Ohmar said that she was not physically abused, but that food, water and medication were withheld from the detainees and they were deprived of sleep.
“They woke us up at awkward hours when we were sound asleep. Even the water they gave us was dirty. One day I was interrogated the whole day without water,” she said.
She was refused medical attention and medicine for urinary problems, but was finally given some water to drink.
“I was very thirsty so I slowly drank the water like it was my medicine. When the water was almost gone, I found hairs, dead ants, and some deposits in the container,” she said.
Many of those arrested during the demonstrations in September who have now been released have reported ill-treatment in detention.
Reporting by Moe Aye
Ma Ohmar, an NLD member from Dagon Myothit township, spoke to DVB in an interview on 26 October, the day after her release.
She was arrested on 25 September and held first in a reserved holding area in Insein prison, then interrogated by the 8th Regiment at Mingaladon for four days before being sent to Insein prison on 29 September and held there until here release.
Ma Ohmar told DVB that a woman who was held in the cell next to her, Ma Ei, was pressured to testify as a government witness, and claimed she was given an earlier release because of her cooperation.
“Ma Ei was under tremendous pressure and she had to give testimony as a government witness…and she was released about two weeks earlier than us,” Ma Ohmar said.
Ma Ohmar also claimed that Hnin Hnin from Ngwekyaryan monastery, another woman who is still in detention, was instructed to say that she had had illicit relations with monks.
“They recited what she should say and she repeated after them. They documented it on videotape. They intend to use her as a prosecution witness also,” Ma Ohmar said.
“They are making up stories and videotaping it to prove that the monks in question are fake monks.”
When asked about her own treatment in detention, Ma Ohmar said that she was not physically abused, but that food, water and medication were withheld from the detainees and they were deprived of sleep.
“They woke us up at awkward hours when we were sound asleep. Even the water they gave us was dirty. One day I was interrogated the whole day without water,” she said.
She was refused medical attention and medicine for urinary problems, but was finally given some water to drink.
“I was very thirsty so I slowly drank the water like it was my medicine. When the water was almost gone, I found hairs, dead ants, and some deposits in the container,” she said.
Many of those arrested during the demonstrations in September who have now been released have reported ill-treatment in detention.
Reporting by Moe Aye
Saturday, October 27, 2007
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ အင္အား
Irrawaddy
ေအာင္ေဇာ္ | ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၆၊ ၂၀၀၇
ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာ ရွင္ေတာ္ဘုရားက ေလာကီေရးကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ ကင္းကင္းရွင္းရွင္း ေနခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း သူ၏ သြန္သင္ေဟာၾကားခ်က္ မ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရးက်င့္စဥ္တြင္ ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အစိုးရစနစ္ႏွင့္ ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူမ်ား လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္း အေလးေပး ေဟာၾကားထားခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶကေဟာၾကားခဲ့ရာတြင္ “တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ မင္းလုပ္သူမ်ားက တရားမွ်တ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သည့္အေျခအေနတြင္ ၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားသည္လည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏။ ၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားသည္လည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခအေန၌ အရာရွိမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကေလ၏။ အရာရွိမ်ား တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခအေနတြင္ လက္ေအာက္ငယ္သားမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏။ လက္ေအာက္ငယ္သားမ်ား တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခ အေနတြင္ ျပည္သူမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏” ဟု ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို လူမ်ားစုကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သံဃာအမ်ားက ဤေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားကို လိုက္နာအေလး အနက္ထားၾကသည့္အေျခအေန၌ တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနသူ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားအၾကား ေမတၱာ ပ်က္ယြင္း အေစးမကပ္ႏိုင္ ျဖစ္ေနၾကရသည့္ အေနအထားမွာ အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ေပ။
လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ ၂ ခုတာ ကာလအတြင္း တရား၀င္စာရင္းမ်ားအရ အေရအတြက္ ၄ သိန္းခန္႔ရွိမည့္ သံဃာထုမ်ားႏွင့္ တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားအၾကား ဆက္ဆံေရးမွာ အဆင္မေခ်ာဘဲ ရွိေနခ့ဲပါသည္။ စစ္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံေရး အရ တက္ႂကြေသာ၊ ထင္ရွားေသာ သံဃာအမ်ားကို ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်မႈမ်ားလည္း ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ စစ္အစိုးရ အာဏာရလာခ်ိန္မွဆိုလွ်င္ သံဃာအပါး ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲေစခဲ့ၿပီး ႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္ဒဏ္မ်ား ခ်မွတ္ အျပစ္ေပးခဲ့ပါသည္။
သံဃာမ်ားကို “ဘုရားသားေတာ္မ်ား”ဟု ျမန္မာ့လူမႈအသိုင္းအ၀န္းက သတ္မွတ္ထားၾကၿပီး စစ္သားႏွင့္ရဲ အေရအတြက္ ၄ သိန္း ခန္႔ရွိသည့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္မေတာ္မွလြဲလွ်င္ သံဃာ့အဖြဲ႔အစည္းသည္ အႀကီးမားအခိုင္မာဆံုး က်န္ရွိေနသည့္ လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
လူထုႏွင့္ နီးကပ္စြာ ေနထိုင္ၾကသူမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ အားေလွ်ာ္စြာ၊ ေန႔စဥ္ ရပ္ရြာအတြင္း ဆြမ္းခံေနစဥ္ အခ်ိန္အတြင္း၌ သာမန္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူအမ်ားစု၏ ဆင္းရဲက်ပ္တည္းလာမႈကို ကိုယ္တိုင္မ်က္ျမင္ၾကံဳေတြ႔ေနၾကရသူမ်ားလည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ ယုတ္ေလ်ာ့က်ဆင္းလာေနေသာ အေနအထားကို သူတို႔က မ်က္ျမင္ကိုယ္ေတြ႔ သိျမင္ခံစားႏိုင္ၾကပါသည္။
ပို၍ အေရးႀကီးေသာအခ်က္မွာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား၌ ပို၍ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ ကြန္ရက္ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈ၊ လူမႈအဆက္အသြယ္ႏွင့္ ၾသဇာလႊမ္းမိုးႏိုင္မႈ ရွိၾကပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားထက္ပင္ ပို၍ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈ ေကာင္းေသးသည္ဟု ဆိုႏိုင္ပါ လိမ့္မည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားမွာ အစဥ္သျဖင့္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္မႈေအာက္တြင္ ရွိေနၿပီး ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္း ခ်ခံရျခင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံရပ္ျခားသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္ေစျခင္းတို႔ျဖင့္ အစဥ္ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ခံေနၾကရေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ပုရ၀ုဏ္အတြင္း သီတင္းသံုး ေနထိုင္ေနၾကေသာ၊ တရားဓမၼေလ့လာအားထုတ္ေနၾကေသာ သံဃာ ေတာ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ဤသို႔ စစ္အစိုးရကို ပုန္ကန္ရန္အတြက္ ၾကံစည္အားထုတ္ေနၾကလိမ့္မည္ဟု မည္သူက ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထား ပါလိမ့္မည္နည္း။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမိုင္းတြင္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက အဓိကက်ေသာအခန္းက႑က ပါ၀င္ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သူတို႔က ဤသို႔ႀကီးက်ယ္ ေျပာင္ေျမာက္လွေသာ၊ အႏၱရာယ္ႀကီးမားလွေသာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ဳိးလုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အတြက္လည္း ရဲ၀ံ့ခဲ့ၾကသူမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ဤသို႔ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကိုယ္တိုင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတြင္ ပါ၀င္သင့္ မသင့္ဆိုသည္မွာ ေဆြးေႏြးအျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ကိစၥျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးဘုန္းႀကီးမ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနၾကသည့္ အခန္းက႑မွာ မ်ားစြာ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ အုပ္စိုးေနေသာ စစ္အစိုးရ အတြက္လည္း ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈတရပ္ ျဖစ္ေနပါေတာ့သည္။
ယခင္ကာလ ပုန္ကန္မႈမ်ား
ယခင္ၿဗိတိသွ်ကိုလိုနီ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား ကာလကပင္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက ပါ၀င္လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သီေပါမင္း နန္းခ်ခံရ၍ ျပည္ပသို႔ပို႔ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း လက္နက္ကိုင္ခုခံဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားတြင္လည္း သံဃာမ်ားက အရပ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းကာ ေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။
သံဃာမ်ားအၾကားတြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဥတၱမက သံဃာ့အာဇာနည္အျဖစ္ စံထားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သူက စလင္းေဒသတြင္ ေတာ္လွန္ပုန္ကန္သူ ၃,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို ဦးေဆာင္၍ မႏၲေလးနန္းေတာ္ ထီးက်ဳိးစည္ေပါက္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္းကာလ မ်ားတြင္ ဦးေဆာင္ သူပုန္ထခဲ့သူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဗိုလ္ဥတၱမဟု ထင္ရွားေသာ ရဟန္းတျဖစ္လဲ သူပုန္ဗိုလ္ကို ၁၈၈၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔က ဖမ္းမိကာ ႀကိဳးေပးကြပ္မ်က္ခဲ့သည္။
စိတ္၀င္စားဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာအခ်က္မွာ သမိုင္းမွတ္တမ္းမ်ားအရ မိမိဆႏၵအေလ်ာက္ လက္နက္စြဲကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့ၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားသည္ ပထမဦးစြာ မိမိကိုယ္တိုင္သိကၡာခ် သကၤန္းစြန္႔ၾကၿပီးမွ ခုခံေတာ္လွန္ေရးစစ္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္လာခဲ့ ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူတို႔က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ သူ႔အသက္ မသတ္ရဟူေသာ တားျမစ္ထားသည့္ သီလသိကၡာပုဒ္ စည္းမ်ဥ္းမ်ားကို လိုက္နာေသာအားျဖင့္ ဤသို႔ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
အျခားသူပုန္ အာဇာနည္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ဆရာစံမွာလည္း ရဟန္းျပဳခဲ့ဖူးသူ ဘုန္းႀကီးလူထြက္တဦး ျဖစ္သည္။ သူက ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔ ၏ အခြန္စည္းၾကပ္မႈကို ဆန္႔က်င္၍ သာယာ၀တီခရိုင္တြင္ လယ္သမားတို႔ကို ဦးေဆာင္ကာ သူပုန္ထခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ ကိုလိုနီ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူ ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔က ဤပုန္ကန္မႈကို လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္အင္အား ၁၀, ၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ေစလႊတ္၍ ေခ်မႈန္းခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ ဆရာစံကို ဖမ္းဆီးရမိၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္လည္း ေသဒဏ္ေပး ကြပ္မ်က္ခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။
ဆရာစံဘက္မွ ေရွ႕ေနလိုက္ခဲ့သူ ထိပ္တန္းျမန္မာေရွ႕ေနတဦးမွာ ေဒါက္တာဘေမာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ဂ်ပန္ေခတ္ အစိုးရတြင္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ အဓိပတိျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ရဟန္းသံဃာအားလံုးက လက္နက္ကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအတြက္ စည္းရံုးေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ ျမန္မာရဟန္းေတာ္ ၂ ပါးကမူ အၾကမ္းမဖက္သည့္ အဟိႆနည္းကို တိုက္တြန္းအားေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဦး၀ိစာရႏွင့္ တျခား ဦးဥတၱမအမည္ရသည့္ ရဟန္းတပါးတို႔ကမူ ကိုလိုနီဆန္႔က်င္ေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားအတြက္ ေထာင္တြင္း ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ သူတို႔ကိုလည္း ျမန္မာ့သမိုင္းတြင္ သူရဲေကာင္းမ်ားအျဖစ္ ကဗ်ည္းတင္ထားခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ကမၻာ အႏွံ႔ ခရီးဆန္႔လာခဲ့ေသာ ဦးဥတၱမမွာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွ လူအမ်ားေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳၾကေသာ ရဟန္းေတာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ အေဟာ အေျပာေကာင္းသူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူ၏ လြတ္လပ္ေရးေတာင္းဆိုသည့္ ေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားကို သူရိယသတင္း စာတြင္ ရဲရဲေတာက္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သူက တႀကိမ္တြင္ ၿဗိတိသွ်ဘုရင္ခံ ဆာရယ္ဂ်ီနယ္ ကရက္ေဒါက္ကို အဂၤလန္ျပန္သြားရန္ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ မိန္႔ၾကားခ်က္မွာလည္း သမိုင္းတင္ ထင္ရွားက်န္ရစ္ခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ဤသို႔ ကိုလိုနီအရွင္မ်ားကို ဆန္႔က်င္ ေဟာေျပာခ်က္ေၾကာင့္လည္း ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရသူ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးဥတၱမကဲ့သို႔ပင္ ဆရာေတာ္ဦး၀ိစာရမွာလည္း ရဲရဲေတာက္ေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားေၾကာင့္ အႀကိမ္မ်ားစြာ ေထာင္သြင္း အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရၿပီး ရက္ေပါင္း ၁၆၆ ရက္ၾကာ အစာအငတ္ခံဆႏၵျပၿပီးေနာက္ ၁၉၂၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေထာင္တြင္း၌ပင္ ပ်ံလြန္ ေတာ္မူခဲ့ရသည္။ သူ႔ကိုအက်ဥ္းခ်ခဲ့ရာ၌ အလုပ္ၾကမ္းႏွင့္ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အျပစ္ေပးခံခဲ့ရျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ၿဗိတိသွ်အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲ ခံခဲ့ရသည္။
ဤသို႔ေသာ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ ေျပာင္ေျမာက္သည့္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားသည္ လြတ္လပ္ေရးတိုက္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္လာခဲ့ၾကသည့္ လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအတြက္ စံျပဳအားက်ဖြယ္ ျဖစ္ေစခဲ့သည္။
ပညာရွင္တဦးျဖစ္သူ မိုက္ကယ္ မင္ဒဲလ္ဆင္ (Michael Mendelson) က သူ၏ “သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေတာ္” (Sangha and State in Burma) ဟု အမည္ရေသာ စာအုပ္တြင္ ကိုလိုနီအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူမ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို “အ၀ါေရာင္သကၤန္း၀တ္ ဆူပူလႈံ႔ေဆာ္သူမ်ား”ဟု ေခၚေ၀ၚသမုတ္ခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ေရးသားထားၿပီး အလားတူပင္ လက္ရွိ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကလည္း ဆႏၵျပေနၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ေဖာ္ျပေခၚဆိုခဲ့ေနပံုမွာလည္း စိတ္၀င္စားဖြယ္ ျဖစ္သည္။
အထက္ေဖာ္ျပပါ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္က ေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ ၿဗိတိသွ်အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူတို႔က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား၏ လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းအတြင္း ၾသဇာႀကီးမားမႈကို အံ့အားသင့္ခဲ့ၾကရသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ ဤသို႔ုျဖင့္ ၁၈၈၅ ခုႏွစ္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို က်ဴးေက်ာ္သိမ္းပိုက္ၿပီး မၾကာမီမွာပင္ “သာသနာပိုင္”ဟူေသာ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုကို ပယ္ဖ်က္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
အတိတ္ကာလမ်ားက ျမန္မာဘုရင္မ်ားက သံဃာမ်ားကို ႀကီးၾကပ္ထိန္းကြပ္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သာသနာပိုင္ရာထူးကို ခန္႔အပ္ ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး၊ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား ၀ိနည္းႏွင့္အညီ က်င့္ၾကံေစေရး၊ ဓမၼစာေပ ပို႔ခ်သင္ၾကားေရးအတြက္ တာ၀န္ေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဤတာ၀န္ရွိသူကို ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားအားလံုးက လက္ခံခဲ့ၾကသည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ တိုးတက္သည့္ အယူရွိသည္ဟု ယူဆရသည့္ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းက ဆန္႔က်င္ခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ သံဃာဂိုဏ္းကြဲမ်ားအၾကားတြင္လည္း အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ကိစၥမ်ား၊ အယူအဆေရးရာကြဲျပားမႈမ်ား ရွိေနခဲ့ၿပီး သံဃာမ်ား အခ်င္းခ်င္းအၾကားတြင္လည္း ဂိုဏ္းအလိုက္ အားၿပိဳင္မႈ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၈ ရာစု ကုန္းေဘာင္မင္းစိုးစံစဥ္ကာလတြင္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား သကၤန္းမည္သို႔ မည္ပံုစည္းရမည္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ သံဃာ မ်ားအၾကား အခ်င္းမ်ားခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။ ဤသို႔အျငင္းပြားခဲ့ၾကေသာ သံဃာဂိုဏ္း ၂ ခုအၾကား တုံဂိုဏ္းႏွင့္ ႐ံုဂိုဏ္းဟူ၍လည္း ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့ဖူးသည္။
ျမန္မာပညာရွင္ ဦးတင္ေမာင္ေမာင္သန္း၏ မွတ္တမ္းမ်ားအရ ေတာင္ငူမင္းဆက္ႏွင့္ ကုန္းေဘာင္မင္းဆက္ ကာလမ်ားတြင္ သံဃာဂိုဏ္းတခုခုအေပၚ ဆည္းကပ္ကိုးကြယ္မႈအေပၚ အေျခခံ၍လည္းသံဃာထုအၾကား အားၿပိဳင္မႈမ်ား ႀကီးထြားခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ၁၇၈၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားက ဤအျငင္းပြားေနမႈမ်ားအၾကား ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ရန္ ျဖစ္လာေစခဲ့ၿပီး တုံဂိုဏ္း ဘက္မွ ရပ္တည္ေပးခဲ့ေတာ့သည္။
ၿဗိတိသွ်ကိုလိုနီအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးကာလတြင္ ၀ါရင့္အရာရွိတဦးျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီး အက္ဒ္၀ပ္ ဆေလဒင္ (Col. Edward Sladen) က သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ စြမ္းပကားကို နားလည္သေဘာေပါက္သူျဖစ္ၿပီး ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို လူမ်ားစုက ကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္စဥ္ကာလအတြင္း ၿဗိတိသွ်အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ ထိပ္တိုက္ေတြ႔ရမႈကို ေရွာင္လြႊဲႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သာသနာပိုင္စနစ္ကို ျပန္လည္ထားရွိရန္ အၾကံျပဳခဲ့ဖူးေသးသည္။
သာသနာပိုင္အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ရသည့္ သံဃာ့အခ်ဳပ္ အႀကီးအမွဴး၏ အခန္းက႑မွာ ရႈပ္ေထြးၿပီး တာ၀န္မ်ားေျမာင္ လွသည္။ သူက ဘုရင္စနစ္ႏွင့္ သံဃာထုအၾကား ဆက္သြယ္ထားသူ ေပါင္းကူးလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သာသနာပိုင္ အေနျဖင့္ ၾသဇာတိကၠမႀကီးမားလွၿပီး ရံဖန္ရံခါ တိုင္းေရးျပည္ေရးမ်ားတြင္ပင္ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ခြင့္ ရွိသည္။ လူအမ်ား ေလးစား ၾကည္ညိဳၾကသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္တပါးက မင္းတုန္းမင္းကို ၎၏ဆည္ေျမာင္းမ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္ လူအမ်ားကို ဆင့္ဆိုခိုင္းေစေနျခင္း ရပ္တန္႔ေစရန္ တိုက္တြန္းႏိုင္ခဲ့သည့္ အစဥ္အလာလည္း ရွိခဲ့သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း လက္ရွိ စစ္အစိုးရက အဓမၼလုပ္အားေပးရန္ ေစခိုင္းေနမႈသည္ ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာအစဥ္အလာျဖစ္သည္၊ လူအမ်ားအတြက္ ေကာင္းက်ဳိးကုသိုလ္ျဖစ္ေစသည္ဟု ဆင္ေျခေပးေျပာဆိုေနျခင္းမွာ အထူးကြဲလြဲေနၿပီး ပ်က္ရယ္ျပဳဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာ ကိစၥလည္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
လြတ္လပ္ေရးရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ကာကာ ယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္သူ ယခင္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဦးႏု အုပ္စိုးစဥ္ ကာလမ်ားမွလြဲ၍ ဗုဒၶဘာသာႏွင့္ သံဃာအမ်ား၏ ၾသဇာသက္ေရာက္ႏိုင္မႈမွာ က်ဆင္းသြားခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုႏိုင္သည္။
ဦးႏုကိုယ္ႏႈိက္က အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္သကၤန္းစည္း ရဟန္းခံခဲ့ဖူးသူျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ ၎၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္အတြက္ ဗုဒၶ ဘာသာကို ေကာင္းစြာ အသံုးခ်ႏိုင္ခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ သူ၏အစိုးရလက္ထက္တြင္ ဆဌမသံဃာရတနာတင္ပြဲကို ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စီစဥ္ က်င္းပႏိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး သူက ဗုဒၶသာသနာ့ေကာင္စီကို ဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးခဲ့သူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးတင္ေမာင္ေမာင္သန္းက သူ၏ “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သံဃာထုအတြင္း ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားႏွင့္ သာသနာျပန္လည္ထြန္း သစ္ေစမႈ။ သမိုင္းအစဥ္အလာႏွင့္ လက္ေတြ႔က်င့္သံုးေနမႈမ်ား” (Sangha Reforms and Renewal of Sasana in Myanmar: Historical Trends and Comtemporary Practice) ဟူေသာ စာအုပ္တြင္ ေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ “ဂိုဏ္းကြဲမ်ား အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးတည္ရွိေနမႈေၾကာင့္ ဦးႏုအေနျဖင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အထက္အေဆာက္အဦ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုတြင္ စနစ္တက် ထည့္သြင္းဖြဲ႔စည္းႏိုင္ရန္ႏွင့္ ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဆဌမသံဃာရတနာတင္ပြဲကို က်င္းပႀကိဳးစားခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ထိေရာက္ေသာ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား မလုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ” ဟု သံုးသပ္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည္။
ထို႔အျပင္ ဦးႏုက ၁၉၆၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ဘာသာအျဖစ္ ျပဌာန္းရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ဤႀကိဳးပမ္း မႈကို လြဲမွားေသာႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ေနာက္တႏွစ္တြင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေန၀င္းက စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းကာ ဦးႏုကိုဖယ္ရွားခဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္ လက္ေတြ႔ ဆက္လက္၍ အေကာင္အထည္မေဖာ္ႏိုင္ဘဲ ရွိခဲ့ပါေတာ့သည္။
ဦးေန၀င္းက ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ၎၏အတိုက္အခံျဖစ္လာႏိုင္သူမ်ားဟု သတ္မွတ္ထားခဲ့ၿပီး ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားႏိုင္ရန္ မတူကြဲျပားေသာနည္းဗ်ဴဟာမ်ား ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၆၀ ခုႏွစ္မ်ားအလယ္ပိုင္းကာလတြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက သံဃာ့စံုညီ ညီလာခံကို ေခၚယူက်င္းပေပးခဲ့ၿပီး ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို သံဃာ့မွတ္ပံုတင္ကတ္ျပားမ်ား ထုတ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက ဤအစည္းအေ၀းႏွင့္ ခပ္ကြာကြာေနခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
၁၉၈၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃာ့ မဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းမၿပီးစီးမီကာလအထိ ဦးေန၀င္းက သံဃာမ်ားကို ေကာင္းစြာ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားႏိုင္သည္ဟု မဆိုႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ။ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ သံဃာမ်ားကို သိကၡာခ် ၾသဇာက်ဆင္းေစရန္အတြက္ စနစ္တက် စီမံေဆာင္ရြက္ထားေသာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ေဆာင္ရြက္လာခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဤစီမံကိန္းမ်ားအနက္မွတခုမွာ ၾသဇာတိကၠမ ႀကီးမားေသာ ဆရာေတာ္သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို သိကၡာက်ဆင္းေစရန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး သိမ္ျဖဴဆရာေတာ္ကို အမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးႏွင့္ ၿငိစြန္းသည္ဟု စြပ္စြဲကာ သိကၡာခ်လူ၀တ္လဲေစခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဤစီမံခ်က္ မေဆာင္ရြက္မီကာလအတြင္းတြင္ အစိုးရ၏ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအရာရွိမ်ား၊ သတင္းေပးမ်ားက ရဟန္းမ်ားအျဖစ္ အေယာင္ေဆာင္၍ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားအတြင္း ထိုးေဖာက္၀င္ေရာက္ကာ ရဟန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္မ်ား၏ သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကို စုေဆာင္းရယူေစခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဦးႏုက ၁၉၄၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၀ိပႆနာတရားက်င့္စဥ္မ်ား သင္ၾကားေပးပါရန္ ဖိတ္ၾကားခံခဲ့ရေသာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအလယ္တြင္ ထင္ရွားေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ မဟာစည္ဆရာေတာ္ အပါအ၀င္ အျခားထင္ရွားသည့္ သံဃာမ်ားကိုလည္း ဤစီမံခ်က္တြင္ ပစ္မွတ္ထားေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
မႏုႆေဗဒပညာရွင္ ဂုစတပ္ ေဟာက္တ္မင္း (Gustaaf Houtmann) က သူ၏ “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ပဋိပကၡႏိုင္ငံေရးတြင္းရွိ စိတ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ” (Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics) ဆိုေသာ စာတမ္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ “မဟာစည္ဆရာေတာ္ကို သိကၡာခ်ရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ျဖန္႔ခ်ိေသာ စာရြက္စာတမ္းမ်ား၌ ဆရာေတာ္က နတ္ကိုးကြယ္ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲထားၿပီး၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ ဗုဒၶစာေပက်မ္းဂန္၌ တဖက္ကမ္းတတ္ကၽြမ္းသူ ႀတိပိဋက မင္းကြန္း ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရားႀကီးကိုလည္း ရဟန္းျပဳၿပီး ၂ ႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ မေလွ်ာ္ကန္ေသာျဖစ္ရပ္ က်ဴးလြန္ပတ္သက္မႈရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲ အပုတ္ခ်ခဲ့သည္” ဟု ေရးသားထားခဲ့သည္။ အမွန္မွာ ဤဆရာေတာ္ ၂-ပါးလံုးက စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့မႈေၾကာင့္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ စြပ္စြဲခံခဲ့ရျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ပညာရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္အမ်ားစုက ဆိုခဲ့ၾကရာတြင္ အစိုးရက စြပ္စြဲအေရးယူခံခဲ့ၾကရေသာ ရဟန္းမ်ားမွာ အမွန္ပင္ မေကာင္းေက်ာ္ေစာမႈမ်ားတြင္ ပတ္သက္ခဲ့မႈရွိေၾကာင္း၊ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား၊ သီလရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၿငိစြန္း ပတ္သက္ခဲ့မႈရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း မွတ္တမ္းျပဳေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
အစုိးရက ေဆာင္ရြက္ေသာစီမံခ်က္မ်ားသည္ တခါတရံတြင္ ထူးထူးဆန္းဆန္း ႏိုင္လွပါသည္။ ေကာလာဟလကို အရင္ ထုတ္လႊင့္ၿပီးမွ အေရးယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေလ့ရွိသည္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ ရန္ကုန္ရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးတပါးျဖစ္သူ ဦးလာဘဆိုလွ်င္ လူသားစားသူဟူ၍လည္း ထုတ္လႊင့္ ေက်ာ္ေစာေစခဲ့ပါသည္။ အျခားေသာ ေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားမွာလည္း ဤသို႔မေကာင္းသတင္း ထုတ္လႊင့္ေက်ာ္ေစာခံၾကရၿပီး လူ၀တ္လဲ သိကၡာခ်ခံရျခင္း၊ သို႔မဟုတ္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးၾကရျခင္းမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဦးေန၀င္းက “သံဃာထုအတြင္း ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး”စီမံခ်က္ကို ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး “သံဃာ့သန္႔စင္ေရးစီမံကိန္း” ဟု လူသိမ်ားခဲ့ပါသည္။
သံဃာ့နာယကအဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ အစိုးရက သက္ႀကီး၀ါႀကီးဆရာေတာ္တခ်ဳိ႕၏ ေထာက္ခံမႈ ရရွိလာေအာင္ စည္းရံုးႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဦးေန၀င္းက ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ေလးေလးနက္နက္ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္သူဟူ၍ ဟန္ေဆာင္ ေနခဲ့ျခင္း မရွိပါ။ သူအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့စဥ္ ၂၆ ႏွစ္တာ ကာလအတြင္းတြင္ သံဃာ့အစည္းအေ၀းမ်ား၌ ပါ၀င္တက္ေရာက္သည္ကို ေတြ႔ျမင္ရခဲပါသည္။ လက္ရွိ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ မတူေသာအခ်က္မွာ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ အတူယွဥ္တြဲ၍ ေဖာ္ျပျခင္းမ်ဳိး ေတြ႔ျမင္ရခဲလွပါသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ လူထုအံုႂကြမႈကာလအတြင္းတြင္ သူဦးေဆာင္သည့္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းတရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး ႏွင့္ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈျပန္လည္ရရွိေစေရးအတြက္ သံဃာ့မဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို အကူအညီေတာင္းခံခဲ့ဖူးၿပီး သက္ႀကီး၀ါႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားေရွ႕ထြက္ကာ တိုင္းျပည္ျပန္လည္ေအးခ်မ္းေစေရးအတြက္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္း ပစ္ခတ္ေခ်မႈန္းသတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ား ၿပီးသည့္အခါ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက အသက္မ်ား ဆံုးရႈံးေသေၾကၾကရသည့္အတြက္ ၀မ္းနည္းေၾကာင္းေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကၿပီး စစ္အစိုးရကိုလည္း မင္းက်င့္တရား ၁၀ ပါးႏွင့္အညီ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပါရန္ ပန္ၾကားခဲ့ၾကရာ ျမင္ရသူအမ်ားက အံ့အားသင့္ခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ ဤ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ ေမတၱာ ရပ္ခံမႈက လူထုအတြင္းဆူပြက္ေနေသာ စိတ္ကို မၿငိမ္းေအးေစခဲ့ပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဤဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးမ်ား ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾက သည့္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ “မင္းက်င့္တရား ၁၀ ပါး” ကို လူအမ်ား ျပန္လည္အမွတ္ရေစခဲ့ၿပီး ဦးေန၀င္းကိုလည္း မင္းေကာင္းမင္းျမတ္တဦးသဖြယ္ က်င့္ၾကံရန္ သတိေပးသည့္ႏွယ္ ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။
ၾသဂုတ္လ ၃၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ လုပ္သားျပည္သူ႔ေန႔စဥ္သတင္းစာက ေဖာ္ျပရာ၌ “ရဟန္းသံဃာ အပါး ၁,၅၀၀ ခန္႔က ရန္ကုန္ ၿမိဳ႕တြင္း စီတန္းလမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ျပည္သူ႔ေဆးရံုႀကီး အေရးေပၚလူနာဌာနေရွ႕တြင္ စုရံုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း က်ဆံုးသြားရသူ ရဟန္း၊ အလုပ္သမား၊ ေက်ာင္းသား ျပည္သူမ်ားအတြက္ ေမတၱာသုတ္ရြတ္ဆို ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္”ဟု ေရးသားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ားအတြင္းတြင္ အသက္အရြယ္အားျဖင့္ ငယ္ရြယ္ေသာရဟန္းပ်ဳိ အမ်ားအျပားလည္း ပါ၀င္လႈပ္ရွား ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ျမန္မာျပည္သူ အမ်ားစုအတြက္မူ ဒီမိုကေရစီေတာ္လွန္ေရးမွာ မၿပီးဆံုးေသးေသာ တိုက္ပြဲျဖစ္သည္ဟု ယူဆထားၾကသည့္ အျပင္ သံဃာထုအၾကားႏွင့္ စစ္အစိုးရတြင္လည္း တင္းမာမႈမ်ား ႀကီးထြားရွင္သန္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးေန၀င္း၊ ဦးႏုတို႔ႏွင့္ မတူေသာအခ်က္မွာ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အာဏာရယူခဲ့ၾကေသာ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက သံဃာထုကို ဆြဲေဆာင္သိမ္းသြင္းႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ေျပာင္ေျပာင္တင္းတင္းပင္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူတို႔က သံဃာထုကိုကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သည့္သူမ်ားသဖြယ္ ဟန္ေဆာင္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း အမွန္ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မွာ သံဃာထု၏ ေထာက္ခံခ်က္ ျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတရား၀င္မႈ တည္ေဆာက္လိုျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။
စစ္အစိုးရက အလွဴအတန္းျပဳသည့္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားကို အႀကီးအက်ယ္ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သံဃာမ်ားကို ဆြမ္းႏွင့္ အျခား တန္ဖိုးႀကီးပစၥည္းမ်ား လွဴဒါန္းဆက္ကပ္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက တိုင္းျပည္အတြင္း ျပန္လည္ တည္ေဆာက္မြမ္းမံေရး စီမံခ်က္မ်ားကိုလည္း ျပဳလုပ္၍ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ၀ါဒျဖန္႔ခ်ိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ မည္သို႔ပင္ျဖစ္ေစ မေက်နပ္ အံုႂကြလိုေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားအၾကား ပဋိပကၡမ်ား၊ ထိပ္တိုက္ရင္ဆိုင္မႈမ်ားက ဆက္လက္ရွိေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မႏၲေလး၌ စစ္တပ္က လူအုပ္စုအတြင္းသို႔ ပစ္ခတ္ႏွိမ္နင္းခဲ့ျပန္ၿပီး ရဟန္းေတာ္တခ်ဳိ႕ အပါအ၀င္ လူတခ်ဳိ႕ လည္း ေသဆံုးခဲ့ရသည္။ စစ္တပ္၏ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္မႈကို ေဒါသအမ်က္ထြက္ၾကၿပီး မႏၲေလးရွိ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ စစ္တပ္အတြင္းရွိ တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔၏မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ား လက္ခံရန္ ျငင္းပယ္ျခင္းျဖင့္ ဆႏၵျပၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခုတႀကိမ္တြင္လည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေျမလတ္ပိုင္းရွိ ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေဒသအႏွံ႔တြင္ သံဃာမ်ားက အလားတူကံေဆာင္ပြဲမ်ားကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္ရန္ အေၾကာင္း (၈) ခ်က္ရွိသည္။ ရဟန္းေတာ္တို႔အား ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ျဖစ္ေစရန္၊ မတိုးပြားေစရန္ လုံ႔လျပဳျခင္း၊ သံဃာအခ်င္းခ်င္း စိတ္၀မ္းကြဲျပားေအာင္လုပ္ျခင္း၊ ဘုရား၊ တရားေတာ္ႏွင့္ သံဃာမ်ား၏ ဂုဏ္ကိုေသးသိမ္ေအာင္ ေစာ္ကားျခင္းတို႔ပါ၀င္ၿပီး ဤျပစ္မႈမ်ား က်ဴးလြန္ပါက သံဃာမ်ားက ကံေဆာင္၍ တုံ႔ျပန္ေဆာင္ရြက္ ခြင့္ရွိသည္။
ဤသို႔ က်ဴးလြန္ေစာ္ကားခံရေသာ ရဟန္းက က်ဴးလြန္သူ သို႔မဟုတ္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံမွ သံဃာမ်ားအေပၚ ေစာ္ကား က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့မႈအတြက္ လံုေလာက္ေသာ ေက်ေအးႏိုင္ဖြယ္ ေတာင္းပန္မႈရွိလာပါက သံဃာမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ “ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံ” ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းကို ျပန္လည္ ႐ုပ္သိမ္းႏိုင္ပါသည္။ ဤသို႔ ကံေဆာင္မႈ ျပန္လည္ရုပ္သိမ္းရန္အတြက္ လုပ္ထံုးလုပ္နည္းမွာ အနည္းဆံုး သံဃာ ၄ ပါးစံုညီ သိမ္၀င္၍ ကမၼ၀ါစာဖတ္ကာ ျပန္လည္႐ုပ္သိမ္းႏိုင္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ အခ်ဳိ႕ေသာရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္က ေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္မႈသည္ ဆက္လက္ သက္၀င္ေနေသးေၾကာင္း ယံုၾကည္ထားၾကၿပီး ထိုအခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ယခုတိုင္ သင့္ေလ်ာ္ေသာ ေက်ေအးဖြယ္ ေတာင္းပန္မႈ ျပန္လည္ရရွိခဲ့ျခင္း မရွိေသးပါ။ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈႏွင့္သာ ၾကံဳခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက စစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔မိသားစုမ်ား က်င္းပသည့္ ဘာသာေရးအခမ္းအနားမ်ားသို႔ ႂကြရန္ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုတြင္ ေနာက္ပိုင္း ကုန္သြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီးျဖစ္လာသူ၊ ထိုအခ်ိန္က မႏၱေလးတိုင္း စစ္တိုင္းမွဴး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ထြန္းၾကည္က ၀ါေတာ္ရဆရာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သံဃာမ်ားကို ဘာသာေရးအခမ္းအနားတခုသို႔ ဖိတ္ၾကားခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း၊ သံဃာအမ်ားက ျငင္းဆန္၍ မတက္ေရာက္ဘဲ ေနခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထိုအခါမွ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက သံဃာမ်ား၏ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ ကံေဆာင္မႈကို အေလးအနက္ထားလာၾကၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း တုံ႔ျပန္ၿဖိဳခြဲႏိုင္ရန္ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
မႏၲေလးတၿမိဳ႕တည္းတြင္ပင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း (၁၃၀) ကို ၀င္ေရာက္စီးနင္းခဲ့ၿပီး သံဃာမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး၊ လူ၀တ္လဲ ေထာင္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။ တႏုိင္ငံလံုး အတိုင္းအတာအရ သံဃာအပါး (၃၀၀) ေက်ာ္မွာ လူ၀တ္လဲခံရကာ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံခဲ့ ရသည္။
ထိုသံဃာမ်ားက လူ၀တ္လဲခံရ၍ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္၀တ္စံုျဖင့္ ရွိေနေစကာမူ၊ သံဃာအျဖစ္ တရား၀င္သတ္မွတ္မခံရဘဲ ပယ္ဖ်က္ခဲ့ေစကာမူ၊ ၎ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံရသူ သံဃာမ်ားက ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ အက်င့္သိကၡာအတိုင္း ဆက္လက္ က်င့္သံုး၍ ေထာင္တြင္း၌ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾကပံုကိုလည္း အတူေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾကရသူ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းမ်ားက ျပန္ေျပာင္း ေျပာျပ ၾကပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶစာေပက်မ္းဂန္ ႏွံ႔စပ္တတ္ကၽြမ္းသည့္ ဦးသုမဂၤလကဲ့သို႔ေသာ လူအမ်ားေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳခံရသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ၈ ပါး အပါအ၀င္ အျခားသံဃာမ်ားလည္း ဤသံဃာ့သပိတ္ ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ဦးသုမဂၤလကိုမူ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၈ ႏွစ္ အျပစ္ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားကို အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲေစ႐ံုမွ် မကဘဲ အျဖဴေရာင္ေထာင္၀တ္စံုမ်ားကို ၀တ္ေစကာ ၎သံဃာမ်ား ၏ အမည္ရင္း ဘြဲ႔အမည္မ်ားအစား အက်ဥ္းေထာင္အတြင္း လူအမည္မ်ားေပး၍ ေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္း သားေဟာင္းမ်ားက ျပန္လည္ေျပာျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၉၉၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ သံဃာ့သပိတ္ကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ၿဖိဳခြဲၿပီး တႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ ထိုအခ်ိန္က စစ္အစိုးရအႀကီးအကဲျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ မွဴးႀကီး ေစာေမာင္လည္း အာ႐ံုေၾကာခ်ဳိ႕ယြင္းကာ က်န္းမာေရးအေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္ အနားယူခဲ့ရသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဗုဒၶဘာသာ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာအမ်ားစုကမူ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားကို ေစာ္ကားျပဳမူသည့္အတြက္ ကံထိုက္သည္၊ ျပစ္ဒဏ္သင့္ခံရသည္ဟု ယခုတိုင္ ယံုၾကည္ေနၾကဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္ သံဃာ့သပိတ္ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ သံဃာထုအတြင္းလည္း အကြဲအၿပဲမ်ား ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ကြယ္လြန္ၿပီျဖစ္သူ မင္းကြန္းဆရာေတာ္က ထိုအခ်ိန္က ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃာ့မဟာ နာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးဆရာေတာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး သူတို႔၏ သံဃာ့ကံေဆာင္မႈကို ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးက မေထာက္ခံသည့္အတြက္ ေလွာင္ေျပာင္သေရာ္မႈမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ မင္းကြန္း ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကို “ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးႀကီး မင္းကြန္းဆရာေတာ္” ဟု ေလွာင္ေျပာင္ေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ၾကၿပီး မႏၲေလးရွိ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီး ေက်ာင္းတခုသို႔ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးႂကြလာစဥ္ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားက စစ္ပံုစံျဖင့္ အေလးျပဳခဲ့ၾကသည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။
ယေန႔ကာလတြင္ အံုႂကြဆူပူလိုၾကေသာ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားက သူတို႔ကိုယ္သူတို႔ ေထာင္အက်ခံရန္ စဥ္းစားပိုင္းျဖတ္ထားသည့္ အခ်ိန္၌ သက္ေတာ္ရ၀ါေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားထံမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ား လက္ခံယူေနၾကရင္း အစိုးရ၏ အသံုးခ်ခံမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနၾကရပါသည္။ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနသည့္ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားထံမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကို လက္ခံ၍ ဤသက္ေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္၊ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ၎တို႔ကို ခ်ီးေျမႇာက္ေနၾကသည့္အခ်ိန္၌ ျပည္သူလူထု၏ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ ခံစားေနရေသာ ဒုကၡမ်ားကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳေျပာဆိုရန္ မဆိုထားႏွင့္ သံဃာထု၏ အက်ဳိးအတြက္ ကိုယ္စားျပဳ မေျပာဆို ၾကေတာ့ဘဲ ေရွာင္ဖယ္ေနၾကပါေတာ့သည္။ ဤသို႔ျဖင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္၊ သက္ေတာ္၀ါေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးမ်ား ႏွင့္ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိတို႔၏အၾကား မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာ ကြာဟခ်က္ႀကီးမား၍ လာပါေတာ့သည္။
မည္သို႔ျဖစ္ေစ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ လြယ္လြယ္ႏွင့္ အေလွ်ာ့ေပးၾကလိမ့္မည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ တခ်ိန္က လူထုကို စည္းရံုး သိမ္းသြင္းႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ ဗုဒၶစြယ္ေတာ္ကို ငွားရမ္း၍ ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း လွည့္လည္ႂကြခ်ီေစခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ ကမၻာ့ဗုဒၶဘာသာညီလာခံကိုလည္း ကမကထျပဳ က်င္းပေပးခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားထီးေတာ္ကို ျပန္လည္ျပဳျပင္မြမ္းမံခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသအတြင္း ငလွ်င္ငယ္မ်ား လႈပ္ေနစဥ္ကာလတြင္ပင္ ထီးေတာ္ကို ျဖဳတ္ခ်ျပဳျပင္ခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ေဒသခံမ်ား၏ အဆိုအရ ဤသို႔ထီးေတာ္ျဖဳတ္ခ်ခဲ့သည့္ အေပၚ ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားေစာင့္နတ္မ်ားက မႏွစ္သက္ၾက၍ ငလွ်င္လႈပ္သည္ဟုလည္း ဆိုၾကပါေသးသည္။ သို႔ ေသာ္လည္း ဤသို႔ထီးေတာ္ျဖဳတ္ခ်၍ ျပဳျပင္မြမ္းမံခဲ့ျခင္းျဖင့္ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေပၚ ျပည္သူလူထုေထာက္ခံမႈ ထူးျခား တိုးတက္ ရရွိမလာေစခဲ့ပါ။
စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားက သံဃာထုႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္လည္းေကာင္း၊ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္လည္းေကာင္း ေသြးခြဲ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မူ၀ါဒကို ခ်မွတ္က်င့္သံုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၉၉၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က သံဃာထုအၾကားသို႔ စိမ့္၀င္ထိုးေဖာက္၍ အဖ်က္အေမွာင့္လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ ႀကံစည္ေနေၾကာင္း စစ္အစိုးရက စြပ္စြဲေနပါေသးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ဒီမိုကေရစီအတိုက္အခံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား တပူးတြဲတြဲ ျမင္ေတြ႔ရျခင္းကို မႏွစ္ၿမိဳ႕ႏိုင္ဘဲ ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးၾသဇာႀကီးထြားေနမႈကို ေခ်ဖ်က္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက လန္ဒန္ ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ သီတင္းသံုးေနသည့္ နာမည္ႀကီးဆရာေတာ္ ေဒါက္တာ ေရ၀တဓမၼကို အတိုက္အခံေခါင္းေဆာင္ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံေန ရစဥ္ အတြင္း လာေရာက္ေတြ႔ဆံုခြင့္ ျပဳခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ ေရ၀တဓမၼက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား အၾကား ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကိုယ္စားလွယ္အျဖစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးမည္ဟု ေၾကျငာခဲ့ၿပီး ဆရာေတာ္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ထိပ္ပိုင္း စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအၾကား ကူးလူးဆက္ဆံ၍ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း သူ၏ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈမ်ား ေအာင္ျမင္မႈ မရႏိုင္ဘဲ ေနာက္ဆံုး လန္ဒန္ၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ျပန္ႂကြခဲ့ရပါေတာ့သည္။ ေလ့လာေ၀ဖန္ေနသူမ်ားက သံုးသပ္ၾကသည္မွာ စစ္အစိုးရက ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တကို အသံုးခ်၍ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးစြန္႔လႊတ္သြားေစရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့သည္ ဟု ျမင္ၾကပါသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ ရယ္ဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာကိစၥမွာ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ဟု စြပ္စြဲခဲ့ၿပီး ဘာသာတရားအေပၚ ေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳမႈမရွိသူဟုလည္း လူသိရွင္ၾကားစြပ္စြဲခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ အေၾကာင္းက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္က တရားပြဲတခုတြင္ “လူသားအားလံုးလည္း ႀကိဳးစားလွ်င္ ယခုဘ၀အတြင္း၌ပင္ ဘုရားျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္” ဟု ေျပာဆိုခဲ့မႈ အေပၚ ရည္ၫႊန္းစြပ္စြဲျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ပထမအႀကိမ္ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သည့္ေနာက္ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္သို႔ ခရီးထြက္ခဲ့ရာ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအရာရွိမ်ား အမ်က္ထြက္ခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က တန္ခိုးၾသဇာႀကီးလွသည့္ သာမညဆရာေတာ္ကို ဆည္းကပ္ကုသိုလ္ျပဳႏိုင္ရန္ ခရီးထြက္ခဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
အစဥ္အလာအရဆိုလွ်င္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရး တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအတြက္ ခိုလႈံပုန္းေအာင္းရာေနရာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္လည္း ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး မ်ား၏ရန္မွ ေရွာင္တိမ္းေျပးလႊားေနၾကရသူမ်ားအတြက္ ခိုလႈံခြင့္ ျပဳခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
တႀကိမ္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက အတိုက္အခံမ်ားကို ရဟန္းခံရွင္ျပဳခြင့္ မျပဳရန္ တားဆီးကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္ပင္ ျပဳခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ေက်ာင္းသား အမ်ားစုရွိရာ တကၠသိုလ္ႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းမ်ားကို တင္းတင္းက်ပ္က်ပ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့သကဲ့သို႔ပင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ေသာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားကိုလည္း စစ္အစိုးရက အနီးကပ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
သာမညေတာင္ေပၚတြင္ သီတင္းသံုးသည့္အတြက္ “သာမည ဆရာေတာ္”ဟု လူအမ်ားက ေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳၾကသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲ ၀ိနိယက ေဒသအတြင္းရွိ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို ကူညီေပးႏိုင္ရန္ အတြက္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးစီမံခ်က္မ်ား ႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ ရြက္ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားက မရႈစိမ့္ဘဲ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ေပး ဟန္႔တားခဲ့ၾက ပါေသးသည္။
လူအမ်ားက ဆရာေတာ္ကို တန္ခိုးသိဒၶိေပါက္သည္ဟု လက္ခံယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္နည္းတူ စစ္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံ ဒူးမေထာက္ မရိုက်ဳိးေသာ ဆရာေတာ္၏ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္လည္း ပို၍ၾကည္ညိဳၾကပါသည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္က တန္ခိုးထြားခဲ့ သည့္ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးခင္ၫြန္႔က ဆရာေတာ္ထံသို႔ တန္ဖိုးႀကီးကားတစီးလွဴသည္ကိုလည္း ဆရာေတာ္က လက္မခံ ျငင္းပယ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔သည္လည္း သာမညဆရာေတာ္ကို ၀ယ္ယူစည္း႐ံုးရန္ မစြမ္းႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ။
ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကို ဗုဒၶဘာသာ စြဲစြဲျမဲျမဲ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္သူမ်ားဟု ယူဆလွ်င္ အမွားႀကီးမွားပါလိမ့္မည္။ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔၏ မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားက ဗုဒၶဘာသာက်င့္စဥ္မ်ားထက္စာလွ်င္ ေဗဒင္ကိန္းခန္း၊ ယၾတာမ်ား၌သာ ပိုမိုအားကိုး ယံုၾကည္ၾကပါသည္။ သူတို႔က တန္ခိုးၾသဇာတက္ေစေသာ အေဆာင္လက္ဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ဆင္ျဖဴေတာ္ စသျဖင့္ ကိုသာ ပိုမိုတန္ဖိုးထားေနၾကၿပီး ေဗဒင္ဆရာမ်ားထံမွ အၾကံရယူေဆာင္ရြက္ေနခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
သူေတာ္ခ်င္းခ်င္း သတင္းေလြ႔ေလြ႔ဆိုသကဲ့သို႔ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သူတို႔၏ ေဗဒင္အခါေပးဆရာမ်ားက တပူးတြဲတြဲရွိၾကၿပီး က်သည့္အခါတြင္လည္း အတူက်ရႈံးရသည္ကိုလည္း ေတြ႔ၾကရပါသည္။ အာဏာရွင္ေဟာင္း ဦးေန၀င္း၏မိသားစုကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သစၥာေဖာက္မႈျဖင့္ စြပ္စြဲအျပစ္ေပးခဲ့ၿပီးသည့္ေနာက္ပိုင္း ၎တို႔၏ အခါေပးေဗဒင္ဆရာ ေအာင္ပြင့္ေခါင္ကိုလည္း ၂၀၀၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးေထာင္ခ်ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္။
ယခင္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းႏွင့္ စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး အႀကီးအကဲျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္တြယ္ ဖယ္ရွားျဖဳတ္ခ် ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ၎၏အခါေပးဆရာ ဘိုးေတာ္သန္းလွသည္လည္း ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရပါေတာ့သည္။
ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ထြန္းကားေစရန္ ျမႇင့္တင္ႀကိဳးပမ္းေနၾကသည္ဟု ဆိုလွ်င္ျဖင့္ ယံုၾကည္ရန္ အေတာ္ခက္ခဲပါလိမ့္မည္။ သူတို႔က ဘုရားတည္ၾကသည့္အခ်ိန္၊ ဗုဒၶရုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ၾကည္ညိဳ ၾကသည့္ အခ်ိန္၌ပင္ သူတို႔၏အလွဴက ေဗဒင္ကိန္းခန္းမ်ားအရ ယၾတာေခ်ျခင္း ျဖစ္ေနတတ္ၾကပါသည္။
ေလယာဥ္ပ်ံေပၚတြင္ သစ္သားျမင္းရုပ္ကို စီး၍ ေမြးရပ္ဇာတိၿမိဳ႕ကို ၉ ႀကိမ္ပတ္ရန္အတြက္ ယခင္အာဏာရွင္ေဟာင္း ဦးေန၀င္းကို မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ ၄၅ က်ပ္တန္၊ ၉၀ က်ပ္တန္ ေငြစကၠဴမ်ား ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထုတ္ေ၀ရန္ ဦးေန၀င္းကို မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ သာဓကမ်ားစြာ ရွိေနပါသည္။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔ကို အမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးသဖြယ္၀တ္ဆင္၍ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ မူပိုင္ဟန္ျဖစ္သည့္ ပန္းမ်ားပန္၍ ၎ “အမ်ဳိးသမီး”၏ ၾသဇာအာဏာကို ခိုးယူရန္ မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ရန္အတြက္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ သန္းေရႊကို မည္သူက တိုက္တြန္းခဲ့ပါသနည္း။
ေသခ်ာသည္မွာ ဤအျပဳအမူမ်ားက ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္မ်ား က်င့္ၾကံျပဳမူၾကသည့္ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ား မဟုတ္ပါ။ အလားတူပင္ ဗုဒၶ ဘာသာအရ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ရိုက္ႏွက္္ညႇဥ္းပန္းးရန္၊ အဓမၼ လူ၀တ္လဲရန္၊ ေထာင္ခ်ရန္၊ သတ္ျဖတ္ရန္အတြက္ ခြင့္ျပဳ ေပးထားျခင္း မရွိပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဗုဒၶသာသနာ ဆုတ္ယုတ္က်ဆင္းလာရျခင္းႏွင့္ စစ္၀ါဒ ေခါင္းေထာင္ထလာျခင္းအေပၚ လူအမ်ားက အထူး စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္ေနၾကပါသည္။ ဤသို႔ျဖစ္သည့္ အေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္လည္း လူမႈေရးက႑ကို ေထာက္ျပေ၀ဖန္ၾကသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ၾကေသာ ဘုန္းႀကီးမ်ားက ယေန႔စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားသည္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ သာသနာႏွင့္ဗုဒၶတရား ေတာ္မ်ားအတြက္ အဓိကၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ ဗုဒၶရုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားေရွ႕တြင္ ပုဆစ္တုပ္၀တ္ခ်ေနၾကေသာ္လည္း သာသနာအက်ဳိးကို ဖ်က္ၾကမည့္သူမ်ားျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာဆိုေနၾကျခင္းမွာလည္း အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာမဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါ။ [Top]
၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ ေအာက္တိုဘာလထုတ္ ဧရာ၀တီ မဂၢဇင္းမွ ေအာင္ေဇာ္ေရးသားသည့္ The Power Behind the Robe ကို ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ျပန္ဆိုေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။
ေအာင္ေဇာ္ | ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၆၊ ၂၀၀၇
ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာ ရွင္ေတာ္ဘုရားက ေလာကီေရးကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ ကင္းကင္းရွင္းရွင္း ေနခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း သူ၏ သြန္သင္ေဟာၾကားခ်က္ မ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရးက်င့္စဥ္တြင္ ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အစိုးရစနစ္ႏွင့္ ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူမ်ား လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္း အေလးေပး ေဟာၾကားထားခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶကေဟာၾကားခဲ့ရာတြင္ “တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ မင္းလုပ္သူမ်ားက တရားမွ်တ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သည့္အေျခအေနတြင္ ၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားသည္လည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏။ ၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားသည္လည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခအေန၌ အရာရွိမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကေလ၏။ အရာရွိမ်ား တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခအေနတြင္ လက္ေအာက္ငယ္သားမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏။ လက္ေအာက္ငယ္သားမ်ား တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾကသည့္ အေျခ အေနတြင္ ျပည္သူမ်ားလည္း တရားမွ်တ၊ ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ ျပဳမူက်င့္ၾကံၾက၏” ဟု ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို လူမ်ားစုကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သံဃာအမ်ားက ဤေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားကို လိုက္နာအေလး အနက္ထားၾကသည့္အေျခအေန၌ တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနသူ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားအၾကား ေမတၱာ ပ်က္ယြင္း အေစးမကပ္ႏိုင္ ျဖစ္ေနၾကရသည့္ အေနအထားမွာ အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ေပ။
လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ ၂ ခုတာ ကာလအတြင္း တရား၀င္စာရင္းမ်ားအရ အေရအတြက္ ၄ သိန္းခန္႔ရွိမည့္ သံဃာထုမ်ားႏွင့္ တိုင္းျပည္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားအၾကား ဆက္ဆံေရးမွာ အဆင္မေခ်ာဘဲ ရွိေနခ့ဲပါသည္။ စစ္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံေရး အရ တက္ႂကြေသာ၊ ထင္ရွားေသာ သံဃာအမ်ားကို ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်မႈမ်ားလည္း ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ စစ္အစိုးရ အာဏာရလာခ်ိန္မွဆိုလွ်င္ သံဃာအပါး ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲေစခဲ့ၿပီး ႏွစ္ရွည္ေထာင္ဒဏ္မ်ား ခ်မွတ္ အျပစ္ေပးခဲ့ပါသည္။
သံဃာမ်ားကို “ဘုရားသားေတာ္မ်ား”ဟု ျမန္မာ့လူမႈအသိုင္းအ၀န္းက သတ္မွတ္ထားၾကၿပီး စစ္သားႏွင့္ရဲ အေရအတြက္ ၄ သိန္း ခန္႔ရွိသည့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္မေတာ္မွလြဲလွ်င္ သံဃာ့အဖြဲ႔အစည္းသည္ အႀကီးမားအခိုင္မာဆံုး က်န္ရွိေနသည့္ လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
လူထုႏွင့္ နီးကပ္စြာ ေနထိုင္ၾကသူမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ အားေလွ်ာ္စြာ၊ ေန႔စဥ္ ရပ္ရြာအတြင္း ဆြမ္းခံေနစဥ္ အခ်ိန္အတြင္း၌ သာမန္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူအမ်ားစု၏ ဆင္းရဲက်ပ္တည္းလာမႈကို ကိုယ္တိုင္မ်က္ျမင္ၾကံဳေတြ႔ေနၾကရသူမ်ားလည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ ယုတ္ေလ်ာ့က်ဆင္းလာေနေသာ အေနအထားကို သူတို႔က မ်က္ျမင္ကိုယ္ေတြ႔ သိျမင္ခံစားႏိုင္ၾကပါသည္။
ပို၍ အေရးႀကီးေသာအခ်က္မွာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား၌ ပို၍ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ ကြန္ရက္ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈ၊ လူမႈအဆက္အသြယ္ႏွင့္ ၾသဇာလႊမ္းမိုးႏိုင္မႈ ရွိၾကပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားထက္ပင္ ပို၍ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈ ေကာင္းေသးသည္ဟု ဆိုႏိုင္ပါ လိမ့္မည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားမွာ အစဥ္သျဖင့္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္မႈေအာက္တြင္ ရွိေနၿပီး ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္း ခ်ခံရျခင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံရပ္ျခားသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္ေစျခင္းတို႔ျဖင့္ အစဥ္ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ခံေနၾကရေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ပုရ၀ုဏ္အတြင္း သီတင္းသံုး ေနထိုင္ေနၾကေသာ၊ တရားဓမၼေလ့လာအားထုတ္ေနၾကေသာ သံဃာ ေတာ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ဤသို႔ စစ္အစိုးရကို ပုန္ကန္ရန္အတြက္ ၾကံစည္အားထုတ္ေနၾကလိမ့္မည္ဟု မည္သူက ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထား ပါလိမ့္မည္နည္း။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာ့ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမိုင္းတြင္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက အဓိကက်ေသာအခန္းက႑က ပါ၀င္ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သူတို႔က ဤသို႔ႀကီးက်ယ္ ေျပာင္ေျမာက္လွေသာ၊ အႏၱရာယ္ႀကီးမားလွေသာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ဳိးလုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ အတြက္လည္း ရဲ၀ံ့ခဲ့ၾကသူမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ဤသို႔ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကိုယ္တိုင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတြင္ ပါ၀င္သင့္ မသင့္ဆိုသည္မွာ ေဆြးေႏြးအျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ကိစၥျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးဘုန္းႀကီးမ်ား ပါ၀င္ေနၾကသည့္ အခန္းက႑မွာ မ်ားစြာ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ အုပ္စိုးေနေသာ စစ္အစိုးရ အတြက္လည္း ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈတရပ္ ျဖစ္ေနပါေတာ့သည္။
ယခင္ကာလ ပုန္ကန္မႈမ်ား
ယခင္ၿဗိတိသွ်ကိုလိုနီ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား ကာလကပင္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက ပါ၀င္လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သီေပါမင္း နန္းခ်ခံရ၍ ျပည္ပသို႔ပို႔ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း လက္နက္ကိုင္ခုခံဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားတြင္လည္း သံဃာမ်ားက အရပ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းကာ ေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။
သံဃာမ်ားအၾကားတြင္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဥတၱမက သံဃာ့အာဇာနည္အျဖစ္ စံထားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သူက စလင္းေဒသတြင္ ေတာ္လွန္ပုန္ကန္သူ ၃,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို ဦးေဆာင္၍ မႏၲေလးနန္းေတာ္ ထီးက်ဳိးစည္ေပါက္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္းကာလ မ်ားတြင္ ဦးေဆာင္ သူပုန္ထခဲ့သူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဗိုလ္ဥတၱမဟု ထင္ရွားေသာ ရဟန္းတျဖစ္လဲ သူပုန္ဗိုလ္ကို ၁၈၈၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔က ဖမ္းမိကာ ႀကိဳးေပးကြပ္မ်က္ခဲ့သည္။
စိတ္၀င္စားဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာအခ်က္မွာ သမိုင္းမွတ္တမ္းမ်ားအရ မိမိဆႏၵအေလ်ာက္ လက္နက္စြဲကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ခဲ့ၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားသည္ ပထမဦးစြာ မိမိကိုယ္တိုင္သိကၡာခ် သကၤန္းစြန္႔ၾကၿပီးမွ ခုခံေတာ္လွန္ေရးစစ္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္လာခဲ့ ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူတို႔က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ သူ႔အသက္ မသတ္ရဟူေသာ တားျမစ္ထားသည့္ သီလသိကၡာပုဒ္ စည္းမ်ဥ္းမ်ားကို လိုက္နာေသာအားျဖင့္ ဤသို႔ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
အျခားသူပုန္ အာဇာနည္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ဆရာစံမွာလည္း ရဟန္းျပဳခဲ့ဖူးသူ ဘုန္းႀကီးလူထြက္တဦး ျဖစ္သည္။ သူက ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔ ၏ အခြန္စည္းၾကပ္မႈကို ဆန္႔က်င္၍ သာယာ၀တီခရိုင္တြင္ လယ္သမားတို႔ကို ဦးေဆာင္ကာ သူပုန္ထခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ ကိုလိုနီ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူ ၿဗိတိသွ်တို႔က ဤပုန္ကန္မႈကို လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္အင္အား ၁၀, ၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ေစလႊတ္၍ ေခ်မႈန္းခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ ဆရာစံကို ဖမ္းဆီးရမိၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္လည္း ေသဒဏ္ေပး ကြပ္မ်က္ခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။
ဆရာစံဘက္မွ ေရွ႕ေနလိုက္ခဲ့သူ ထိပ္တန္းျမန္မာေရွ႕ေနတဦးမွာ ေဒါက္တာဘေမာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ဂ်ပန္ေခတ္ အစိုးရတြင္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ အဓိပတိျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ရဟန္းသံဃာအားလံုးက လက္နက္ကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအတြက္ စည္းရံုးေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ ျမန္မာရဟန္းေတာ္ ၂ ပါးကမူ အၾကမ္းမဖက္သည့္ အဟိႆနည္းကို တိုက္တြန္းအားေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဦး၀ိစာရႏွင့္ တျခား ဦးဥတၱမအမည္ရသည့္ ရဟန္းတပါးတို႔ကမူ ကိုလိုနီဆန္႔က်င္ေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားအတြက္ ေထာင္တြင္း ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ သူတို႔ကိုလည္း ျမန္မာ့သမိုင္းတြင္ သူရဲေကာင္းမ်ားအျဖစ္ ကဗ်ည္းတင္ထားခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ကမၻာ အႏွံ႔ ခရီးဆန္႔လာခဲ့ေသာ ဦးဥတၱမမွာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွ လူအမ်ားေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳၾကေသာ ရဟန္းေတာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ အေဟာ အေျပာေကာင္းသူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူ၏ လြတ္လပ္ေရးေတာင္းဆိုသည့္ ေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားကို သူရိယသတင္း စာတြင္ ရဲရဲေတာက္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သူက တႀကိမ္တြင္ ၿဗိတိသွ်ဘုရင္ခံ ဆာရယ္ဂ်ီနယ္ ကရက္ေဒါက္ကို အဂၤလန္ျပန္သြားရန္ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ မိန္႔ၾကားခ်က္မွာလည္း သမိုင္းတင္ ထင္ရွားက်န္ရစ္ခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ဤသို႔ ကိုလိုနီအရွင္မ်ားကို ဆန္႔က်င္ ေဟာေျပာခ်က္ေၾကာင့္လည္း ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရသူ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးဥတၱမကဲ့သို႔ပင္ ဆရာေတာ္ဦး၀ိစာရမွာလည္း ရဲရဲေတာက္ေဟာၾကားခ်က္မ်ားေၾကာင့္ အႀကိမ္မ်ားစြာ ေထာင္သြင္း အက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရၿပီး ရက္ေပါင္း ၁၆၆ ရက္ၾကာ အစာအငတ္ခံဆႏၵျပၿပီးေနာက္ ၁၉၂၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေထာင္တြင္း၌ပင္ ပ်ံလြန္ ေတာ္မူခဲ့ရသည္။ သူ႔ကိုအက်ဥ္းခ်ခဲ့ရာ၌ အလုပ္ၾကမ္းႏွင့္ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အျပစ္ေပးခံခဲ့ရျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ၿဗိတိသွ်အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲ ခံခဲ့ရသည္။
ဤသို႔ေသာ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ ေျပာင္ေျမာက္သည့္ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားသည္ လြတ္လပ္ေရးတိုက္ပြဲတြင္ ပါ၀င္လာခဲ့ၾကသည့္ လႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအတြက္ စံျပဳအားက်ဖြယ္ ျဖစ္ေစခဲ့သည္။
ပညာရွင္တဦးျဖစ္သူ မိုက္ကယ္ မင္ဒဲလ္ဆင္ (Michael Mendelson) က သူ၏ “သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေတာ္” (Sangha and State in Burma) ဟု အမည္ရေသာ စာအုပ္တြင္ ကိုလိုနီအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူမ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို “အ၀ါေရာင္သကၤန္း၀တ္ ဆူပူလႈံ႔ေဆာ္သူမ်ား”ဟု ေခၚေ၀ၚသမုတ္ခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ေရးသားထားၿပီး အလားတူပင္ လက္ရွိ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကလည္း ဆႏၵျပေနၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ေဖာ္ျပေခၚဆိုခဲ့ေနပံုမွာလည္း စိတ္၀င္စားဖြယ္ ျဖစ္သည္။
အထက္ေဖာ္ျပပါ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္က ေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ ၿဗိတိသွ်အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူတို႔က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား၏ လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းအတြင္း ၾသဇာႀကီးမားမႈကို အံ့အားသင့္ခဲ့ၾကရသည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ ဤသို႔ုျဖင့္ ၁၈၈၅ ခုႏွစ္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို က်ဴးေက်ာ္သိမ္းပိုက္ၿပီး မၾကာမီမွာပင္ “သာသနာပိုင္”ဟူေသာ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုကို ပယ္ဖ်က္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
အတိတ္ကာလမ်ားက ျမန္မာဘုရင္မ်ားက သံဃာမ်ားကို ႀကီးၾကပ္ထိန္းကြပ္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သာသနာပိုင္ရာထူးကို ခန္႔အပ္ ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး၊ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား ၀ိနည္းႏွင့္အညီ က်င့္ၾကံေစေရး၊ ဓမၼစာေပ ပို႔ခ်သင္ၾကားေရးအတြက္ တာ၀န္ေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဤတာ၀န္ရွိသူကို ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားအားလံုးက လက္ခံခဲ့ၾကသည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ တိုးတက္သည့္ အယူရွိသည္ဟု ယူဆရသည့္ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းက ဆန္႔က်င္ခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ သံဃာဂိုဏ္းကြဲမ်ားအၾကားတြင္လည္း အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ကိစၥမ်ား၊ အယူအဆေရးရာကြဲျပားမႈမ်ား ရွိေနခဲ့ၿပီး သံဃာမ်ား အခ်င္းခ်င္းအၾကားတြင္လည္း ဂိုဏ္းအလိုက္ အားၿပိဳင္မႈ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၈ ရာစု ကုန္းေဘာင္မင္းစိုးစံစဥ္ကာလတြင္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ား သကၤန္းမည္သို႔ မည္ပံုစည္းရမည္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ သံဃာ မ်ားအၾကား အခ်င္းမ်ားခဲ့ၾကဖူးသည္။ ဤသို႔အျငင္းပြားခဲ့ၾကေသာ သံဃာဂိုဏ္း ၂ ခုအၾကား တုံဂိုဏ္းႏွင့္ ႐ံုဂိုဏ္းဟူ၍လည္း ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့ဖူးသည္။
ျမန္မာပညာရွင္ ဦးတင္ေမာင္ေမာင္သန္း၏ မွတ္တမ္းမ်ားအရ ေတာင္ငူမင္းဆက္ႏွင့္ ကုန္းေဘာင္မင္းဆက္ ကာလမ်ားတြင္ သံဃာဂိုဏ္းတခုခုအေပၚ ဆည္းကပ္ကိုးကြယ္မႈအေပၚ အေျခခံ၍လည္းသံဃာထုအၾကား အားၿပိဳင္မႈမ်ား ႀကီးထြားခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ၁၇၈၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားက ဤအျငင္းပြားေနမႈမ်ားအၾကား ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ရန္ ျဖစ္လာေစခဲ့ၿပီး တုံဂိုဏ္း ဘက္မွ ရပ္တည္ေပးခဲ့ေတာ့သည္။
ၿဗိတိသွ်ကိုလိုနီအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးကာလတြင္ ၀ါရင့္အရာရွိတဦးျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီး အက္ဒ္၀ပ္ ဆေလဒင္ (Col. Edward Sladen) က သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ စြမ္းပကားကို နားလည္သေဘာေပါက္သူျဖစ္ၿပီး ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို လူမ်ားစုက ကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္စဥ္ကာလအတြင္း ၿဗိတိသွ်အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ သံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ ထိပ္တိုက္ေတြ႔ရမႈကို ေရွာင္လြႊဲႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ သာသနာပိုင္စနစ္ကို ျပန္လည္ထားရွိရန္ အၾကံျပဳခဲ့ဖူးေသးသည္။
သာသနာပိုင္အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ရသည့္ သံဃာ့အခ်ဳပ္ အႀကီးအမွဴး၏ အခန္းက႑မွာ ရႈပ္ေထြးၿပီး တာ၀န္မ်ားေျမာင္ လွသည္။ သူက ဘုရင္စနစ္ႏွင့္ သံဃာထုအၾကား ဆက္သြယ္ထားသူ ေပါင္းကူးလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သာသနာပိုင္ အေနျဖင့္ ၾသဇာတိကၠမႀကီးမားလွၿပီး ရံဖန္ရံခါ တိုင္းေရးျပည္ေရးမ်ားတြင္ပင္ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ခြင့္ ရွိသည္။ လူအမ်ား ေလးစား ၾကည္ညိဳၾကသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္တပါးက မင္းတုန္းမင္းကို ၎၏ဆည္ေျမာင္းမ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္ လူအမ်ားကို ဆင့္ဆိုခိုင္းေစေနျခင္း ရပ္တန္႔ေစရန္ တိုက္တြန္းႏိုင္ခဲ့သည့္ အစဥ္အလာလည္း ရွိခဲ့သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း လက္ရွိ စစ္အစိုးရက အဓမၼလုပ္အားေပးရန္ ေစခိုင္းေနမႈသည္ ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာအစဥ္အလာျဖစ္သည္၊ လူအမ်ားအတြက္ ေကာင္းက်ဳိးကုသိုလ္ျဖစ္ေစသည္ဟု ဆင္ေျခေပးေျပာဆိုေနျခင္းမွာ အထူးကြဲလြဲေနၿပီး ပ်က္ရယ္ျပဳဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာ ကိစၥလည္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
လြတ္လပ္ေရးရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ကာကာ ယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္သူ ယခင္၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဦးႏု အုပ္စိုးစဥ္ ကာလမ်ားမွလြဲ၍ ဗုဒၶဘာသာႏွင့္ သံဃာအမ်ား၏ ၾသဇာသက္ေရာက္ႏိုင္မႈမွာ က်ဆင္းသြားခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုႏိုင္သည္။
ဦးႏုကိုယ္ႏႈိက္က အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္သကၤန္းစည္း ရဟန္းခံခဲ့ဖူးသူျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔ ၎၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္အတြက္ ဗုဒၶ ဘာသာကို ေကာင္းစြာ အသံုးခ်ႏိုင္ခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ သူ၏အစိုးရလက္ထက္တြင္ ဆဌမသံဃာရတနာတင္ပြဲကို ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စီစဥ္ က်င္းပႏိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး သူက ဗုဒၶသာသနာ့ေကာင္စီကို ဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးခဲ့သူလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးတင္ေမာင္ေမာင္သန္းက သူ၏ “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သံဃာထုအတြင္း ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားႏွင့္ သာသနာျပန္လည္ထြန္း သစ္ေစမႈ။ သမိုင္းအစဥ္အလာႏွင့္ လက္ေတြ႔က်င့္သံုးေနမႈမ်ား” (Sangha Reforms and Renewal of Sasana in Myanmar: Historical Trends and Comtemporary Practice) ဟူေသာ စာအုပ္တြင္ ေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ “ဂိုဏ္းကြဲမ်ား အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးတည္ရွိေနမႈေၾကာင့္ ဦးႏုအေနျဖင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အထက္အေဆာက္အဦ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုတြင္ စနစ္တက် ထည့္သြင္းဖြဲ႔စည္းႏိုင္ရန္ႏွင့္ ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဆဌမသံဃာရတနာတင္ပြဲကို က်င္းပႀကိဳးစားခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ထိေရာက္ေသာ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား မလုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ” ဟု သံုးသပ္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည္။
ထို႔အျပင္ ဦးႏုက ၁၉၆၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ဘာသာအျဖစ္ ျပဌာန္းရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ဤႀကိဳးပမ္း မႈကို လြဲမွားေသာႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ေနာက္တႏွစ္တြင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေန၀င္းက စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းကာ ဦးႏုကိုဖယ္ရွားခဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္ လက္ေတြ႔ ဆက္လက္၍ အေကာင္အထည္မေဖာ္ႏိုင္ဘဲ ရွိခဲ့ပါေတာ့သည္။
ဦးေန၀င္းက ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ၎၏အတိုက္အခံျဖစ္လာႏိုင္သူမ်ားဟု သတ္မွတ္ထားခဲ့ၿပီး ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားႏိုင္ရန္ မတူကြဲျပားေသာနည္းဗ်ဴဟာမ်ား ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၆၀ ခုႏွစ္မ်ားအလယ္ပိုင္းကာလတြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက သံဃာ့စံုညီ ညီလာခံကို ေခၚယူက်င္းပေပးခဲ့ၿပီး ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို သံဃာ့မွတ္ပံုတင္ကတ္ျပားမ်ား ထုတ္ေပးခဲ့သည္။ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက ဤအစည္းအေ၀းႏွင့္ ခပ္ကြာကြာေနခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
၁၉၈၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃာ့ မဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းမၿပီးစီးမီကာလအထိ ဦးေန၀င္းက သံဃာမ်ားကို ေကာင္းစြာ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားႏိုင္သည္ဟု မဆိုႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ။ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ သံဃာမ်ားကို သိကၡာခ် ၾသဇာက်ဆင္းေစရန္အတြက္ စနစ္တက် စီမံေဆာင္ရြက္ထားေသာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ေဆာင္ရြက္လာခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဤစီမံကိန္းမ်ားအနက္မွတခုမွာ ၾသဇာတိကၠမ ႀကီးမားေသာ ဆရာေတာ္သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို သိကၡာက်ဆင္းေစရန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး သိမ္ျဖဴဆရာေတာ္ကို အမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးႏွင့္ ၿငိစြန္းသည္ဟု စြပ္စြဲကာ သိကၡာခ်လူ၀တ္လဲေစခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဤစီမံခ်က္ မေဆာင္ရြက္မီကာလအတြင္းတြင္ အစိုးရ၏ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအရာရွိမ်ား၊ သတင္းေပးမ်ားက ရဟန္းမ်ားအျဖစ္ အေယာင္ေဆာင္၍ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားအတြင္း ထိုးေဖာက္၀င္ေရာက္ကာ ရဟန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္မ်ား၏ သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကို စုေဆာင္းရယူေစခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဦးႏုက ၁၉၄၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၀ိပႆနာတရားက်င့္စဥ္မ်ား သင္ၾကားေပးပါရန္ ဖိတ္ၾကားခံခဲ့ရေသာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအလယ္တြင္ ထင္ရွားေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ မဟာစည္ဆရာေတာ္ အပါအ၀င္ အျခားထင္ရွားသည့္ သံဃာမ်ားကိုလည္း ဤစီမံခ်က္တြင္ ပစ္မွတ္ထားေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
မႏုႆေဗဒပညာရွင္ ဂုစတပ္ ေဟာက္တ္မင္း (Gustaaf Houtmann) က သူ၏ “ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ပဋိပကၡႏိုင္ငံေရးတြင္းရွိ စိတ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ” (Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics) ဆိုေသာ စာတမ္းတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပေရးသားခဲ့ရာ၌ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ “မဟာစည္ဆရာေတာ္ကို သိကၡာခ်ရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ျဖန္႔ခ်ိေသာ စာရြက္စာတမ္းမ်ား၌ ဆရာေတာ္က နတ္ကိုးကြယ္ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲထားၿပီး၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ ဗုဒၶစာေပက်မ္းဂန္၌ တဖက္ကမ္းတတ္ကၽြမ္းသူ ႀတိပိဋက မင္းကြန္း ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရားႀကီးကိုလည္း ရဟန္းျပဳၿပီး ၂ ႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ မေလွ်ာ္ကန္ေသာျဖစ္ရပ္ က်ဴးလြန္ပတ္သက္မႈရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲ အပုတ္ခ်ခဲ့သည္” ဟု ေရးသားထားခဲ့သည္။ အမွန္မွာ ဤဆရာေတာ္ ၂-ပါးလံုးက စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့မႈေၾကာင့္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ စြပ္စြဲခံခဲ့ရျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ပညာရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္အမ်ားစုက ဆိုခဲ့ၾကရာတြင္ အစိုးရက စြပ္စြဲအေရးယူခံခဲ့ၾကရေသာ ရဟန္းမ်ားမွာ အမွန္ပင္ မေကာင္းေက်ာ္ေစာမႈမ်ားတြင္ ပတ္သက္ခဲ့မႈရွိေၾကာင္း၊ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား၊ သီလရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၿငိစြန္း ပတ္သက္ခဲ့မႈရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း မွတ္တမ္းျပဳေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
အစုိးရက ေဆာင္ရြက္ေသာစီမံခ်က္မ်ားသည္ တခါတရံတြင္ ထူးထူးဆန္းဆန္း ႏိုင္လွပါသည္။ ေကာလာဟလကို အရင္ ထုတ္လႊင့္ၿပီးမွ အေရးယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေလ့ရွိသည္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ ရန္ကုန္ရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးတပါးျဖစ္သူ ဦးလာဘဆိုလွ်င္ လူသားစားသူဟူ၍လည္း ထုတ္လႊင့္ ေက်ာ္ေစာေစခဲ့ပါသည္။ အျခားေသာ ေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားမွာလည္း ဤသို႔မေကာင္းသတင္း ထုတ္လႊင့္ေက်ာ္ေစာခံၾကရၿပီး လူ၀တ္လဲ သိကၡာခ်ခံရျခင္း၊ သို႔မဟုတ္ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးၾကရျခင္းမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဦးေန၀င္းက “သံဃာထုအတြင္း ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး”စီမံခ်က္ကို ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၿပီး “သံဃာ့သန္႔စင္ေရးစီမံကိန္း” ဟု လူသိမ်ားခဲ့ပါသည္။
သံဃာ့နာယကအဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ အစိုးရက သက္ႀကီး၀ါႀကီးဆရာေတာ္တခ်ဳိ႕၏ ေထာက္ခံမႈ ရရွိလာေအာင္ စည္းရံုးႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဦးေန၀င္းက ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ေလးေလးနက္နက္ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္သူဟူ၍ ဟန္ေဆာင္ ေနခဲ့ျခင္း မရွိပါ။ သူအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့စဥ္ ၂၆ ႏွစ္တာ ကာလအတြင္းတြင္ သံဃာ့အစည္းအေ၀းမ်ား၌ ပါ၀င္တက္ေရာက္သည္ကို ေတြ႔ျမင္ရခဲပါသည္။ လက္ရွိ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ မတူေသာအခ်က္မွာ ရဟန္းသံဃာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ အတူယွဥ္တြဲ၍ ေဖာ္ျပျခင္းမ်ဳိး ေတြ႔ျမင္ရခဲလွပါသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ လူထုအံုႂကြမႈကာလအတြင္းတြင္ သူဦးေဆာင္သည့္အစိုးရက ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းတရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး ႏွင့္ တည္ၿငိမ္မႈျပန္လည္ရရွိေစေရးအတြက္ သံဃာ့မဟာနာယကအဖြဲ႔ကို အကူအညီေတာင္းခံခဲ့ဖူးၿပီး သက္ႀကီး၀ါႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားေရွ႕ထြက္ကာ တိုင္းျပည္ျပန္လည္ေအးခ်မ္းေစေရးအတြက္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္း ပစ္ခတ္ေခ်မႈန္းသတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ား ၿပီးသည့္အခါ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက အသက္မ်ား ဆံုးရႈံးေသေၾကၾကရသည့္အတြက္ ၀မ္းနည္းေၾကာင္းေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကၿပီး စစ္အစိုးရကိုလည္း မင္းက်င့္တရား ၁၀ ပါးႏွင့္အညီ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပါရန္ ပန္ၾကားခဲ့ၾကရာ ျမင္ရသူအမ်ားက အံ့အားသင့္ခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ ဤ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ ေမတၱာ ရပ္ခံမႈက လူထုအတြင္းဆူပြက္ေနေသာ စိတ္ကို မၿငိမ္းေအးေစခဲ့ပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဤဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးမ်ား ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾက သည့္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ “မင္းက်င့္တရား ၁၀ ပါး” ကို လူအမ်ား ျပန္လည္အမွတ္ရေစခဲ့ၿပီး ဦးေန၀င္းကိုလည္း မင္းေကာင္းမင္းျမတ္တဦးသဖြယ္ က်င့္ၾကံရန္ သတိေပးသည့္ႏွယ္ ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။
ၾသဂုတ္လ ၃၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ လုပ္သားျပည္သူ႔ေန႔စဥ္သတင္းစာက ေဖာ္ျပရာ၌ “ရဟန္းသံဃာ အပါး ၁,၅၀၀ ခန္႔က ရန္ကုန္ ၿမိဳ႕တြင္း စီတန္းလမ္းေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ျပည္သူ႔ေဆးရံုႀကီး အေရးေပၚလူနာဌာနေရွ႕တြင္ စုရံုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈအတြင္း က်ဆံုးသြားရသူ ရဟန္း၊ အလုပ္သမား၊ ေက်ာင္းသား ျပည္သူမ်ားအတြက္ ေမတၱာသုတ္ရြတ္ဆို ဆုေတာင္းေပးခဲ့ၾကသည္”ဟု ေရးသားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ားအတြင္းတြင္ အသက္အရြယ္အားျဖင့္ ငယ္ရြယ္ေသာရဟန္းပ်ဳိ အမ်ားအျပားလည္း ပါ၀င္လႈပ္ရွား ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ျမန္မာျပည္သူ အမ်ားစုအတြက္မူ ဒီမိုကေရစီေတာ္လွန္ေရးမွာ မၿပီးဆံုးေသးေသာ တိုက္ပြဲျဖစ္သည္ဟု ယူဆထားၾကသည့္ အျပင္ သံဃာထုအၾကားႏွင့္ စစ္အစိုးရတြင္လည္း တင္းမာမႈမ်ား ႀကီးထြားရွင္သန္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဦးေန၀င္း၊ ဦးႏုတို႔ႏွင့္ မတူေသာအခ်က္မွာ ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အာဏာရယူခဲ့ၾကေသာ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက သံဃာထုကို ဆြဲေဆာင္သိမ္းသြင္းႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ေျပာင္ေျပာင္တင္းတင္းပင္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ သူတို႔က သံဃာထုကိုကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သည့္သူမ်ားသဖြယ္ ဟန္ေဆာင္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း အမွန္ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မွာ သံဃာထု၏ ေထာက္ခံခ်က္ ျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတရား၀င္မႈ တည္ေဆာက္လိုျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။
စစ္အစိုးရက အလွဴအတန္းျပဳသည့္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားကို အႀကီးအက်ယ္ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး သံဃာမ်ားကို ဆြမ္းႏွင့္ အျခား တန္ဖိုးႀကီးပစၥည္းမ်ား လွဴဒါန္းဆက္ကပ္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက တိုင္းျပည္အတြင္း ျပန္လည္ တည္ေဆာက္မြမ္းမံေရး စီမံခ်က္မ်ားကိုလည္း ျပဳလုပ္၍ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ၀ါဒျဖန္႔ခ်ိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ မည္သို႔ပင္ျဖစ္ေစ မေက်နပ္ အံုႂကြလိုေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားႏွင့္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားအၾကား ပဋိပကၡမ်ား၊ ထိပ္တိုက္ရင္ဆိုင္မႈမ်ားက ဆက္လက္ရွိေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မႏၲေလး၌ စစ္တပ္က လူအုပ္စုအတြင္းသို႔ ပစ္ခတ္ႏွိမ္နင္းခဲ့ျပန္ၿပီး ရဟန္းေတာ္တခ်ဳိ႕ အပါအ၀င္ လူတခ်ဳိ႕ လည္း ေသဆံုးခဲ့ရသည္။ စစ္တပ္၏ ရက္စက္ၾကမ္းၾကဳတ္မႈကို ေဒါသအမ်က္ထြက္ၾကၿပီး မႏၲေလးရွိ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ စစ္တပ္အတြင္းရွိ တပ္မေတာ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔၏မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ား လက္ခံရန္ ျငင္းပယ္ျခင္းျဖင့္ ဆႏၵျပၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ယခုတႀကိမ္တြင္လည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေျမလတ္ပိုင္းရွိ ပခုကၠဴၿမိဳ႕တြင္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပၾကေသာ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ႐ိုက္ႏွက္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေဒသအႏွံ႔တြင္ သံဃာမ်ားက အလားတူကံေဆာင္ပြဲမ်ားကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ၾကျပန္သည္။
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္ရန္ အေၾကာင္း (၈) ခ်က္ရွိသည္။ ရဟန္းေတာ္တို႔အား ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ျဖစ္ေစရန္၊ မတိုးပြားေစရန္ လုံ႔လျပဳျခင္း၊ သံဃာအခ်င္းခ်င္း စိတ္၀မ္းကြဲျပားေအာင္လုပ္ျခင္း၊ ဘုရား၊ တရားေတာ္ႏွင့္ သံဃာမ်ား၏ ဂုဏ္ကိုေသးသိမ္ေအာင္ ေစာ္ကားျခင္းတို႔ပါ၀င္ၿပီး ဤျပစ္မႈမ်ား က်ဴးလြန္ပါက သံဃာမ်ားက ကံေဆာင္၍ တုံ႔ျပန္ေဆာင္ရြက္ ခြင့္ရွိသည္။
ဤသို႔ က်ဴးလြန္ေစာ္ကားခံရေသာ ရဟန္းက က်ဴးလြန္သူ သို႔မဟုတ္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံမွ သံဃာမ်ားအေပၚ ေစာ္ကား က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့မႈအတြက္ လံုေလာက္ေသာ ေက်ေအးႏိုင္ဖြယ္ ေတာင္းပန္မႈရွိလာပါက သံဃာမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ “ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံ” ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းကို ျပန္လည္ ႐ုပ္သိမ္းႏိုင္ပါသည္။ ဤသို႔ ကံေဆာင္မႈ ျပန္လည္ရုပ္သိမ္းရန္အတြက္ လုပ္ထံုးလုပ္နည္းမွာ အနည္းဆံုး သံဃာ ၄ ပါးစံုညီ သိမ္၀င္၍ ကမၼ၀ါစာဖတ္ကာ ျပန္လည္႐ုပ္သိမ္းႏိုင္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ အခ်ဳိ႕ေသာရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္က ေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ ပတၱနိကၠဳဇၨနကံေဆာင္မႈသည္ ဆက္လက္ သက္၀င္ေနေသးေၾကာင္း ယံုၾကည္ထားၾကၿပီး ထိုအခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ယခုတိုင္ သင့္ေလ်ာ္ေသာ ေက်ေအးဖြယ္ ေတာင္းပန္မႈ ျပန္လည္ရရွိခဲ့ျခင္း မရွိေသးပါ။ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈႏွင့္သာ ၾကံဳခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္က ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက စစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔မိသားစုမ်ား က်င္းပသည့္ ဘာသာေရးအခမ္းအနားမ်ားသို႔ ႂကြရန္ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုတြင္ ေနာက္ပိုင္း ကုန္သြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီးျဖစ္လာသူ၊ ထိုအခ်ိန္က မႏၱေလးတိုင္း စစ္တိုင္းမွဴး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ထြန္းၾကည္က ၀ါေတာ္ရဆရာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သံဃာမ်ားကို ဘာသာေရးအခမ္းအနားတခုသို႔ ဖိတ္ၾကားခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း၊ သံဃာအမ်ားက ျငင္းဆန္၍ မတက္ေရာက္ဘဲ ေနခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထိုအခါမွ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက သံဃာမ်ား၏ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ ကံေဆာင္မႈကို အေလးအနက္ထားလာၾကၿပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း တုံ႔ျပန္ၿဖိဳခြဲႏိုင္ရန္ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
မႏၲေလးတၿမိဳ႕တည္းတြင္ပင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း (၁၃၀) ကို ၀င္ေရာက္စီးနင္းခဲ့ၿပီး သံဃာမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး၊ လူ၀တ္လဲ ေထာင္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။ တႏုိင္ငံလံုး အတိုင္းအတာအရ သံဃာအပါး (၃၀၀) ေက်ာ္မွာ လူ၀တ္လဲခံရကာ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံခဲ့ ရသည္။
ထိုသံဃာမ်ားက လူ၀တ္လဲခံရ၍ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္၀တ္စံုျဖင့္ ရွိေနေစကာမူ၊ သံဃာအျဖစ္ တရား၀င္သတ္မွတ္မခံရဘဲ ပယ္ဖ်က္ခဲ့ေစကာမူ၊ ၎ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခံရသူ သံဃာမ်ားက ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား၏ အက်င့္သိကၡာအတိုင္း ဆက္လက္ က်င့္သံုး၍ ေထာင္တြင္း၌ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾကပံုကိုလည္း အတူေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾကရသူ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းမ်ားက ျပန္ေျပာင္း ေျပာျပ ၾကပါသည္။
ဗုဒၶစာေပက်မ္းဂန္ ႏွံ႔စပ္တတ္ကၽြမ္းသည့္ ဦးသုမဂၤလကဲ့သို႔ေသာ လူအမ်ားေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳခံရသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီး ၈ ပါး အပါအ၀င္ အျခားသံဃာမ်ားလည္း ဤသံဃာ့သပိတ္ ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ဦးသုမဂၤလကိုမူ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၈ ႏွစ္ အျပစ္ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။
ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားကို အတင္းအက်ပ္ လူ၀တ္လဲေစ႐ံုမွ် မကဘဲ အျဖဴေရာင္ေထာင္၀တ္စံုမ်ားကို ၀တ္ေစကာ ၎သံဃာမ်ား ၏ အမည္ရင္း ဘြဲ႔အမည္မ်ားအစား အက်ဥ္းေထာင္အတြင္း လူအမည္မ်ားေပး၍ ေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္း သားေဟာင္းမ်ားက ျပန္လည္ေျပာျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၉၉၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ သံဃာ့သပိတ္ကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ၿဖိဳခြဲၿပီး တႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ ထိုအခ်ိန္က စစ္အစိုးရအႀကီးအကဲျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ မွဴးႀကီး ေစာေမာင္လည္း အာ႐ံုေၾကာခ်ဳိ႕ယြင္းကာ က်န္းမာေရးအေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္ အနားယူခဲ့ရသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း ဗုဒၶဘာသာ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာအမ်ားစုကမူ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားကို ေစာ္ကားျပဳမူသည့္အတြက္ ကံထိုက္သည္၊ ျပစ္ဒဏ္သင့္ခံရသည္ဟု ယခုတိုင္ ယံုၾကည္ေနၾကဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
၁၉၉၀ ခုႏွစ္ သံဃာ့သပိတ္ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ သံဃာထုအတြင္းလည္း အကြဲအၿပဲမ်ား ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ကြယ္လြန္ၿပီျဖစ္သူ မင္းကြန္းဆရာေတာ္က ထိုအခ်ိန္က ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သံဃာ့မဟာ နာယကအဖြဲ႔၏ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးဆရာေတာ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး သူတို႔၏ သံဃာ့ကံေဆာင္မႈကို ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးက မေထာက္ခံသည့္အတြက္ ေလွာင္ေျပာင္သေရာ္မႈမ်ား ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ မင္းကြန္း ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးကို “ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးႀကီး မင္းကြန္းဆရာေတာ္” ဟု ေလွာင္ေျပာင္ေခၚေ၀ၚခဲ့ၾကၿပီး မႏၲေလးရွိ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီး ေက်ာင္းတခုသို႔ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးႂကြလာစဥ္ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားက စစ္ပံုစံျဖင့္ အေလးျပဳခဲ့ၾကသည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။
ယေန႔ကာလတြင္ အံုႂကြဆူပူလိုၾကေသာ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ားက သူတို႔ကိုယ္သူတို႔ ေထာင္အက်ခံရန္ စဥ္းစားပိုင္းျဖတ္ထားသည့္ အခ်ိန္၌ သက္ေတာ္ရ၀ါေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားက စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားထံမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ား လက္ခံယူေနၾကရင္း အစိုးရ၏ အသံုးခ်ခံမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနၾကရပါသည္။ တိုင္းျပည္ကို အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနသည့္ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားထံမွ လွဴဖြယ္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကို လက္ခံ၍ ဤသက္ေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္၊ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားက ၎တို႔ကို ခ်ီးေျမႇာက္ေနၾကသည့္အခ်ိန္၌ ျပည္သူလူထု၏ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ ခံစားေနရေသာ ဒုကၡမ်ားကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳေျပာဆိုရန္ မဆိုထားႏွင့္ သံဃာထု၏ အက်ဳိးအတြက္ ကိုယ္စားျပဳ မေျပာဆို ၾကေတာ့ဘဲ ေရွာင္ဖယ္ေနၾကပါေတာ့သည္။ ဤသို႔ျဖင့္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ဆရာေတာ္၊ သက္ေတာ္၀ါေတာ္ရ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးမ်ား ႏွင့္ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိတို႔၏အၾကား မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာ ကြာဟခ်က္ႀကီးမား၍ လာပါေတာ့သည္။
မည္သို႔ျဖစ္ေစ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ လြယ္လြယ္ႏွင့္ အေလွ်ာ့ေပးၾကလိမ့္မည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ တခ်ိန္က လူထုကို စည္းရံုး သိမ္းသြင္းႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ ဗုဒၶစြယ္ေတာ္ကို ငွားရမ္း၍ ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း လွည့္လည္ႂကြခ်ီေစခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ ကမၻာ့ဗုဒၶဘာသာညီလာခံကိုလည္း ကမကထျပဳ က်င္းပေပးခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားထီးေတာ္ကို ျပန္လည္ျပဳျပင္မြမ္းမံခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသအတြင္း ငလွ်င္ငယ္မ်ား လႈပ္ေနစဥ္ကာလတြင္ပင္ ထီးေတာ္ကို ျဖဳတ္ခ်ျပဳျပင္ခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ေဒသခံမ်ား၏ အဆိုအရ ဤသို႔ထီးေတာ္ျဖဳတ္ခ်ခဲ့သည့္ အေပၚ ေရႊတိဂံုဘုရားေစာင့္နတ္မ်ားက မႏွစ္သက္ၾက၍ ငလွ်င္လႈပ္သည္ဟုလည္း ဆိုၾကပါေသးသည္။ သို႔ ေသာ္လည္း ဤသို႔ထီးေတာ္ျဖဳတ္ခ်၍ ျပဳျပင္မြမ္းမံခဲ့ျခင္းျဖင့္ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေပၚ ျပည္သူလူထုေထာက္ခံမႈ ထူးျခား တိုးတက္ ရရွိမလာေစခဲ့ပါ။
စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားက သံဃာထုႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္လည္းေကာင္း၊ အတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံရာတြင္လည္းေကာင္း ေသြးခြဲ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး မူ၀ါဒကို ခ်မွတ္က်င့္သံုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။
၁၉၉၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္က သံဃာထုအၾကားသို႔ စိမ့္၀င္ထိုးေဖာက္၍ အဖ်က္အေမွာင့္လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ရန္ ႀကံစည္ေနေၾကာင္း စစ္အစိုးရက စြပ္စြဲေနပါေသးသည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ဒီမိုကေရစီအတိုက္အခံ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား တပူးတြဲတြဲ ျမင္ေတြ႔ရျခင္းကို မႏွစ္ၿမိဳ႕ႏိုင္ဘဲ ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးၾသဇာႀကီးထြားေနမႈကို ေခ်ဖ်က္ႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက လန္ဒန္ ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ သီတင္းသံုးေနသည့္ နာမည္ႀကီးဆရာေတာ္ ေဒါက္တာ ေရ၀တဓမၼကို အတိုက္အခံေခါင္းေဆာင္ ထိန္းသိမ္းခံေန ရစဥ္ အတြင္း လာေရာက္ေတြ႔ဆံုခြင့္ ျပဳခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ ေရ၀တဓမၼက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား အၾကား ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကိုယ္စားလွယ္အျဖစ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးမည္ဟု ေၾကျငာခဲ့ၿပီး ဆရာေတာ္က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ထိပ္ပိုင္း စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအၾကား ကူးလူးဆက္ဆံ၍ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း သူ၏ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈမ်ား ေအာင္ျမင္မႈ မရႏိုင္ဘဲ ေနာက္ဆံုး လန္ဒန္ၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ျပန္ႂကြခဲ့ရပါေတာ့သည္။ ေလ့လာေ၀ဖန္ေနသူမ်ားက သံုးသပ္ၾကသည္မွာ စစ္အစိုးရက ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးေရ၀တကို အသံုးခ်၍ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးစြန္႔လႊတ္သြားေစရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့သည္ ဟု ျမင္ၾကပါသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ ရယ္ဖြယ္ေကာင္းေသာကိစၥမွာ စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ဟု စြပ္စြဲခဲ့ၿပီး ဘာသာတရားအေပၚ ေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳမႈမရွိသူဟုလည္း လူသိရွင္ၾကားစြပ္စြဲခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ အေၾကာင္းက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္က တရားပြဲတခုတြင္ “လူသားအားလံုးလည္း ႀကိဳးစားလွ်င္ ယခုဘ၀အတြင္း၌ပင္ ဘုရားျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္” ဟု ေျပာဆိုခဲ့မႈ အေပၚ ရည္ၫႊန္းစြပ္စြဲျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ပထမအႀကိမ္ ေနအိမ္အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့သည့္ေနာက္ ၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္သို႔ ခရီးထြက္ခဲ့ရာ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအရာရွိမ်ား အမ်က္ထြက္ခဲ့ၾကရပါသည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က တန္ခိုးၾသဇာႀကီးလွသည့္ သာမညဆရာေတာ္ကို ဆည္းကပ္ကုသိုလ္ျပဳႏိုင္ရန္ ခရီးထြက္ခဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။
အစဥ္အလာအရဆိုလွ်င္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားက ႏိုင္ငံေရး တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအတြက္ ခိုလႈံပုန္းေအာင္းရာေနရာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီး ၁၉၈၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္လည္း ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားက စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး မ်ား၏ရန္မွ ေရွာင္တိမ္းေျပးလႊားေနၾကရသူမ်ားအတြက္ ခိုလႈံခြင့္ ျပဳခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
တႀကိမ္တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက အတိုက္အခံမ်ားကို ရဟန္းခံရွင္ျပဳခြင့္ မျပဳရန္ တားဆီးကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္ပင္ ျပဳခဲ့ပါေသးသည္။ ေက်ာင္းသား အမ်ားစုရွိရာ တကၠသိုလ္ႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းမ်ားကို တင္းတင္းက်ပ္က်ပ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့သကဲ့သို႔ပင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ေသာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားကိုလည္း စစ္အစိုးရက အနီးကပ္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
သာမညေတာင္ေပၚတြင္ သီတင္းသံုးသည့္အတြက္ “သာမည ဆရာေတာ္”ဟု လူအမ်ားက ေလးစားၾကည္ညိဳၾကသည့္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲ ၀ိနိယက ေဒသအတြင္းရွိ ျပည္သူမ်ားကို ကူညီေပးႏိုင္ရန္ အတြက္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးစီမံခ်က္မ်ား ႀကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ ရြက္ေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားက မရႈစိမ့္ဘဲ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ေပး ဟန္႔တားခဲ့ၾက ပါေသးသည္။
လူအမ်ားက ဆရာေတာ္ကို တန္ခိုးသိဒၶိေပါက္သည္ဟု လက္ခံယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္ၾကသည့္နည္းတူ စစ္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံ ဒူးမေထာက္ မရိုက်ဳိးေသာ ဆရာေတာ္၏ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္လည္း ပို၍ၾကည္ညိဳၾကပါသည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္က တန္ခိုးထြားခဲ့ သည့္ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးခင္ၫြန္႔က ဆရာေတာ္ထံသို႔ တန္ဖိုးႀကီးကားတစီးလွဴသည္ကိုလည္း ဆရာေတာ္က လက္မခံ ျငင္းပယ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔သည္လည္း သာမညဆရာေတာ္ကို ၀ယ္ယူစည္း႐ံုးရန္ မစြမ္းႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ။
ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားကို ဗုဒၶဘာသာ စြဲစြဲျမဲျမဲ သက္၀င္ယံုၾကည္သူမ်ားဟု ယူဆလွ်င္ အမွားႀကီးမွားပါလိမ့္မည္။ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ၎တို႔၏ မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားက ဗုဒၶဘာသာက်င့္စဥ္မ်ားထက္စာလွ်င္ ေဗဒင္ကိန္းခန္း၊ ယၾတာမ်ား၌သာ ပိုမိုအားကိုး ယံုၾကည္ၾကပါသည္။ သူတို႔က တန္ခိုးၾသဇာတက္ေစေသာ အေဆာင္လက္ဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ဆင္ျဖဴေတာ္ စသျဖင့္ ကိုသာ ပိုမိုတန္ဖိုးထားေနၾကၿပီး ေဗဒင္ဆရာမ်ားထံမွ အၾကံရယူေဆာင္ရြက္ေနခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
သူေတာ္ခ်င္းခ်င္း သတင္းေလြ႔ေလြ႔ဆိုသကဲ့သို႔ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သူတို႔၏ ေဗဒင္အခါေပးဆရာမ်ားက တပူးတြဲတြဲရွိၾကၿပီး က်သည့္အခါတြင္လည္း အတူက်ရႈံးရသည္ကိုလည္း ေတြ႔ၾကရပါသည္။ အာဏာရွင္ေဟာင္း ဦးေန၀င္း၏မိသားစုကို ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သစၥာေဖာက္မႈျဖင့္ စြပ္စြဲအျပစ္ေပးခဲ့ၿပီးသည့္ေနာက္ပိုင္း ၎တို႔၏ အခါေပးေဗဒင္ဆရာ ေအာင္ပြင့္ေခါင္ကိုလည္း ၂၀၀၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးေထာင္ခ်ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္။
ယခင္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းႏွင့္ စစ္ေထာက္လွမ္းေရး အႀကီးအကဲျဖစ္သူ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္တြယ္ ဖယ္ရွားျဖဳတ္ခ် ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ၎၏အခါေပးဆရာ ဘိုးေတာ္သန္းလွသည္လည္း ေထာင္သြင္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ခံခဲ့ရပါေတာ့သည္။
ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ထြန္းကားေစရန္ ျမႇင့္တင္ႀကိဳးပမ္းေနၾကသည္ဟု ဆိုလွ်င္ျဖင့္ ယံုၾကည္ရန္ အေတာ္ခက္ခဲပါလိမ့္မည္။ သူတို႔က ဘုရားတည္ၾကသည့္အခ်ိန္၊ ဗုဒၶရုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ား တည္ေဆာက္ၾကည္ညိဳ ၾကသည့္ အခ်ိန္၌ပင္ သူတို႔၏အလွဴက ေဗဒင္ကိန္းခန္းမ်ားအရ ယၾတာေခ်ျခင္း ျဖစ္ေနတတ္ၾကပါသည္။
ေလယာဥ္ပ်ံေပၚတြင္ သစ္သားျမင္းရုပ္ကို စီး၍ ေမြးရပ္ဇာတိၿမိဳ႕ကို ၉ ႀကိမ္ပတ္ရန္အတြက္ ယခင္အာဏာရွင္ေဟာင္း ဦးေန၀င္းကို မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ ၄၅ က်ပ္တန္၊ ၉၀ က်ပ္တန္ ေငြစကၠဴမ်ား ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထုတ္ေ၀ရန္ ဦးေန၀င္းကို မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ သာဓကမ်ားစြာ ရွိေနပါသည္။
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ခင္ၫြန္႔ကို အမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးသဖြယ္၀တ္ဆင္၍ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ မူပိုင္ဟန္ျဖစ္သည့္ ပန္းမ်ားပန္၍ ၎ “အမ်ဳိးသမီး”၏ ၾသဇာအာဏာကို ခိုးယူရန္ မည္သူက အၾကံေပးခဲ့ပါသနည္း။ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ရန္အတြက္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ သန္းေရႊကို မည္သူက တိုက္တြန္းခဲ့ပါသနည္း။
ေသခ်ာသည္မွာ ဤအျပဳအမူမ်ားက ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္မ်ား က်င့္ၾကံျပဳမူၾကသည့္ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ား မဟုတ္ပါ။ အလားတူပင္ ဗုဒၶ ဘာသာအရ ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကို ရိုက္ႏွက္္ညႇဥ္းပန္းးရန္၊ အဓမၼ လူ၀တ္လဲရန္၊ ေထာင္ခ်ရန္၊ သတ္ျဖတ္ရန္အတြက္ ခြင့္ျပဳ ေပးထားျခင္း မရွိပါ။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဗုဒၶသာသနာ ဆုတ္ယုတ္က်ဆင္းလာရျခင္းႏွင့္ စစ္၀ါဒ ေခါင္းေထာင္ထလာျခင္းအေပၚ လူအမ်ားက အထူး စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္ေနၾကပါသည္။ ဤသို႔ျဖစ္သည့္ အေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္လည္း လူမႈေရးက႑ကို ေထာက္ျပေ၀ဖန္ၾကသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ တက္ႂကြထက္သန္ၾကေသာ ဘုန္းႀကီးမ်ားက ယေန႔စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားသည္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ သာသနာႏွင့္ဗုဒၶတရား ေတာ္မ်ားအတြက္ အဓိကၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ ဗုဒၶရုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားေရွ႕တြင္ ပုဆစ္တုပ္၀တ္ခ်ေနၾကေသာ္လည္း သာသနာအက်ဳိးကို ဖ်က္ၾကမည့္သူမ်ားျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာဆိုေနၾကျခင္းမွာလည္း အံ့ၾသဖြယ္ရာမဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါ။ [Top]
၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ ေအာက္တိုဘာလထုတ္ ဧရာ၀တီ မဂၢဇင္းမွ ေအာင္ေဇာ္ေရးသားသည့္ The Power Behind the Robe ကို ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ျပန္ဆိုေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။
Gloomy Start to Burma’s Festival of Lights
Irrawaddy
by Yeni
October 26, 2007
Friday’s full moon over Burma signals the advent of the country’s Festival of Lights and the end of Buddhist Lent.
Houses, public buildings, pagodas and monasteries throughout Burma are festooned with lights, creating a colorful evening landscape. This year, however, the festive mood is dampened by the reappearance on the streets of Rangoon of hundreds of riot police armed with assault rifles and tear gas.
The ominous turnout, coming one week after the regime lifted the nighttime curfew on Rangoon, appears to be a security precaution on the one month’s anniversary of the start of the bloody crackdown on peaceful demonstrations led by Buddhist monks.
Rangoon residents said the eastern gate of Burma's landmark Shwedagon Pagoda and Sule pagodas—the city's top religious shrines and the focus of the recent protests—and some leading monasteries were tightly guarded by police and pro-government groups.
"We need to show up ID cards to the authorities even when we go into the monastery's compound," a businessman told The Irrawaddy.
Observers suggested the reappearance of heavy security in Rangoon is a sign that tension remains high between the people of Burma’s former capital and the country’s military rulers. Some sources say anti-regime posters and graffiti are appearing on buildings in downtown Rangoon. “Killer Than Shwe” and "Killer Tatmadaw (Armed Forces)" are two of the most popular slogans.
Constrained by these circumstances, Burmese monks have been prevented from carrying out their traditional practices, including their single-file walks beyond the monasteries to collect alms from crowds of devotees.
"We are still holding patam nikkujjana kamma (a boycott of alms from members of the military regime),” a Pakokku monk told The Irrawaddy. “We won't accept the alms they offer until they apologize for their treatment to the Sangha [the community of Buddhist monks].
"Sometime the authorities offer alms indirectly, but we send them back or we donate them to poor people who hunger."
Burmese monks began their patam nikkujjana kamma in protest at the violent way in which protesting monks were dispersed by the authorities and pro-junta thugs in Pakokku, Upper Burma, in early September. The monks called for a government apology, but received only violence in reply.
Asked by The Irrawaddy how the monks were surviving, one replied: "We can survive with the alms offered by local residents."
Burma's military regime claimed this week that "bogus" monks had connived with political activists they had previously met in prison in staging last month's mass anti-government protests.
The allegation was made by Religious Affairs Minister Brig-Gen Thura Myint Aung during a meeting with senior monks in Rangoon, and reported by state-run radio and television. The state-run New Light of Myanmar also claimed that 48 blocks of TNT were found two weeks ago after investigations that led to the arrest of U Kovida, a 23-year-old monk at Rangoon's Nan Oo monastery.
“They accuse us of being destructive elements,” said a Burmese monk, “In fact, they destroy our traditional religious practice through the use of military might.”
A senior Rangoon monk said: “We Buddhist monks make no overnight journeys except for an important reason until October full moon day. Now they force young monks who came from the rural areas to study Buddhist literature in the cities to go back home. This also is an insult to the community of monks.”
According to the Buddhist decree, monks must remain in their monasteries for the three months between the full moons of July and October. During this period, known as Buddhist Lent, they devote themselves to their religious duties.
by Yeni
October 26, 2007
Friday’s full moon over Burma signals the advent of the country’s Festival of Lights and the end of Buddhist Lent.
Houses, public buildings, pagodas and monasteries throughout Burma are festooned with lights, creating a colorful evening landscape. This year, however, the festive mood is dampened by the reappearance on the streets of Rangoon of hundreds of riot police armed with assault rifles and tear gas.
The ominous turnout, coming one week after the regime lifted the nighttime curfew on Rangoon, appears to be a security precaution on the one month’s anniversary of the start of the bloody crackdown on peaceful demonstrations led by Buddhist monks.
Rangoon residents said the eastern gate of Burma's landmark Shwedagon Pagoda and Sule pagodas—the city's top religious shrines and the focus of the recent protests—and some leading monasteries were tightly guarded by police and pro-government groups.
"We need to show up ID cards to the authorities even when we go into the monastery's compound," a businessman told The Irrawaddy.
Observers suggested the reappearance of heavy security in Rangoon is a sign that tension remains high between the people of Burma’s former capital and the country’s military rulers. Some sources say anti-regime posters and graffiti are appearing on buildings in downtown Rangoon. “Killer Than Shwe” and "Killer Tatmadaw (Armed Forces)" are two of the most popular slogans.
Constrained by these circumstances, Burmese monks have been prevented from carrying out their traditional practices, including their single-file walks beyond the monasteries to collect alms from crowds of devotees.
"We are still holding patam nikkujjana kamma (a boycott of alms from members of the military regime),” a Pakokku monk told The Irrawaddy. “We won't accept the alms they offer until they apologize for their treatment to the Sangha [the community of Buddhist monks].
"Sometime the authorities offer alms indirectly, but we send them back or we donate them to poor people who hunger."
Burmese monks began their patam nikkujjana kamma in protest at the violent way in which protesting monks were dispersed by the authorities and pro-junta thugs in Pakokku, Upper Burma, in early September. The monks called for a government apology, but received only violence in reply.
Asked by The Irrawaddy how the monks were surviving, one replied: "We can survive with the alms offered by local residents."
Burma's military regime claimed this week that "bogus" monks had connived with political activists they had previously met in prison in staging last month's mass anti-government protests.
The allegation was made by Religious Affairs Minister Brig-Gen Thura Myint Aung during a meeting with senior monks in Rangoon, and reported by state-run radio and television. The state-run New Light of Myanmar also claimed that 48 blocks of TNT were found two weeks ago after investigations that led to the arrest of U Kovida, a 23-year-old monk at Rangoon's Nan Oo monastery.
“They accuse us of being destructive elements,” said a Burmese monk, “In fact, they destroy our traditional religious practice through the use of military might.”
A senior Rangoon monk said: “We Buddhist monks make no overnight journeys except for an important reason until October full moon day. Now they force young monks who came from the rural areas to study Buddhist literature in the cities to go back home. This also is an insult to the community of monks.”
According to the Buddhist decree, monks must remain in their monasteries for the three months between the full moons of July and October. During this period, known as Buddhist Lent, they devote themselves to their religious duties.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Burma: the history behind the protests
New Statesman
Michael Charney
Published 26 September 2007
Burma specialist Dr Michael W Charney, author of the History of Modern Burma, gives his analysis of the current crisis in the south east Asian country
Burma (officially named Myanmar) has been under de facto military rule, in one guise or another, since 1962. In 1987, Burma received least developed nation status, inflation was out of control, and demonetization of Burmese bank notes had impoverished the middle class.
A spark was provided by a fight between students and locals at a teashop in 1988, but like the present demonstrations, which were initiated by increases in fuel prices, protests quickly coalesced around the issue of Democracy, whose introduction, it was widely believed, would invite effective government and sound economic policies.
Instead, the military reacted swiftly and harshly. In general appearance, the present demonstrations appear eerily reminiscent of those in July and August 1988.
Nevertheless, there are key differences. Of course, the current demonstrations are on a smaller scale, even given the recent crowd of 100,000 in Rangoon (also known as Yangon), but this may change over the next few days or weeks if they are not quickly suppressed by Burmese riot police and soldiers.
More importantly, while monks did participate in the 1988 demonstrations, they did not lead them, which is a unique feature of the present protests. Monastic garb provides some protection against soldiers who might easily fire on a civilian, but who would suffer a serious loss of merit in harming or even killing a monk.
Moreover, while government propaganda has for two decades portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi and the opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD) as agents manipulated by the West, hurting their appeal, monks command the respect of most in Burmese society both outside the army and within it.
Although according to the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code, monks are not supposed to involve themselves in mundane politics, in Burmese history monks have played an important role in social activism, especially in the 1920s when they led rural opposition to colonial authorities and urban moneylenders. This is due to colonial heritage.
As the British turned the traditional intermediaries between the throne and the villager, the village headmen, into agents responsible only to the colonial state in the 19th century, Burmese communal identity and cooperation centred on monks. In a society where the two main institutions are the military and the monastic order, it is only natural, when the regime permits no other outlets for dissent, that monks should stand up and play again their historic role in voicing the complaints of Burma’s general population against military rule.
In September 1988, a military coup established the first of two military 'councils' that have ruled the country and whose members and their respective families have pillaged the economy through privatization ever since. At the time, the regime promised to improve the economy, provide peace, and ensure stability to set the right conditions for the transfer of power to an elected government. Although the regime permitted elections in 1990 it refused to recognize the sweeping victory of the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to remain under house arrest.
The Western and Japanese response to the failure of the regime to recognize the NLD’s 1990 electoral victory was too slow and fluctuating to be effective. Sanctions imposed on the country in the last two decades have thus appeared to be ineffective in the short term.
A lifeline was also thrown to the regime by members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) who were more interested in gaining an economic stake in the country than supporting Democracy. As Western sanctions have expanded and ASEAN has begun to reconsider the domestic situation in Burma as a threat to stability in the region, the regime has had time to reorient itself economically to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), which was just as anxious to draw Burma into its economic orbit, gain access to its natural gas and oil reserves, and to gain more direct access to Indian Ocean trade.
However, Western sanctions may have been crucial in an indirect way over the long term. The regime’s dependence on the PRC has made it vulnerable to shifts in the PRC’s international relations. Although the PRC has played a key role in stymieing attempts to bring the Burmese situation up before the UN Security Council, it is also concerned about improving its international profile now that it is sponsoring the 2008 Olympics and is eager to counter the negative press resulting from recent problems with Chinese exports to the US and elsewhere.
Moreover, the PRC is most interested in political stability on its frontiers. Although backing the military regime in Burma has appeared to be a safe bet in pursuit of this goal, widespread domestic opposition in Burma and the promise of rallying at the UN against the regime may change this view.
Indeed, recent reports suggest that the PRC is finally pressuring the military regime in Burma to engage in serious negotiations with the Democratic opposition. Unable to turn to anyone else, the regime is increasingly finding itself stuck in a corner and will either have to fold or more completely isolate itself from the international community.
It is well past the time when the kind of increased US sanctions promised by President George Bush would have had any tangible impact on Burma’s domestic political situation. Currently, the only realistic chances for Western states to encourage a peaceful transfer of power in the country is to exert soft pressure on the PRC to persuade Burma’s military leadership to relinquish control of the state to those elected in 1990.
Michael Charney is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS and is a specialist in Burmese history. His research focuses on Burmese intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) and has recently completed his manuscript for The History of Modern Burma for Cambridge University Press.
Michael Charney
Published 26 September 2007
Burma specialist Dr Michael W Charney, author of the History of Modern Burma, gives his analysis of the current crisis in the south east Asian country
Burma (officially named Myanmar) has been under de facto military rule, in one guise or another, since 1962. In 1987, Burma received least developed nation status, inflation was out of control, and demonetization of Burmese bank notes had impoverished the middle class.
A spark was provided by a fight between students and locals at a teashop in 1988, but like the present demonstrations, which were initiated by increases in fuel prices, protests quickly coalesced around the issue of Democracy, whose introduction, it was widely believed, would invite effective government and sound economic policies.
Instead, the military reacted swiftly and harshly. In general appearance, the present demonstrations appear eerily reminiscent of those in July and August 1988.
Nevertheless, there are key differences. Of course, the current demonstrations are on a smaller scale, even given the recent crowd of 100,000 in Rangoon (also known as Yangon), but this may change over the next few days or weeks if they are not quickly suppressed by Burmese riot police and soldiers.
More importantly, while monks did participate in the 1988 demonstrations, they did not lead them, which is a unique feature of the present protests. Monastic garb provides some protection against soldiers who might easily fire on a civilian, but who would suffer a serious loss of merit in harming or even killing a monk.
Moreover, while government propaganda has for two decades portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi and the opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD) as agents manipulated by the West, hurting their appeal, monks command the respect of most in Burmese society both outside the army and within it.
Although according to the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code, monks are not supposed to involve themselves in mundane politics, in Burmese history monks have played an important role in social activism, especially in the 1920s when they led rural opposition to colonial authorities and urban moneylenders. This is due to colonial heritage.
As the British turned the traditional intermediaries between the throne and the villager, the village headmen, into agents responsible only to the colonial state in the 19th century, Burmese communal identity and cooperation centred on monks. In a society where the two main institutions are the military and the monastic order, it is only natural, when the regime permits no other outlets for dissent, that monks should stand up and play again their historic role in voicing the complaints of Burma’s general population against military rule.
In September 1988, a military coup established the first of two military 'councils' that have ruled the country and whose members and their respective families have pillaged the economy through privatization ever since. At the time, the regime promised to improve the economy, provide peace, and ensure stability to set the right conditions for the transfer of power to an elected government. Although the regime permitted elections in 1990 it refused to recognize the sweeping victory of the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to remain under house arrest.
The Western and Japanese response to the failure of the regime to recognize the NLD’s 1990 electoral victory was too slow and fluctuating to be effective. Sanctions imposed on the country in the last two decades have thus appeared to be ineffective in the short term.
A lifeline was also thrown to the regime by members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) who were more interested in gaining an economic stake in the country than supporting Democracy. As Western sanctions have expanded and ASEAN has begun to reconsider the domestic situation in Burma as a threat to stability in the region, the regime has had time to reorient itself economically to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), which was just as anxious to draw Burma into its economic orbit, gain access to its natural gas and oil reserves, and to gain more direct access to Indian Ocean trade.
However, Western sanctions may have been crucial in an indirect way over the long term. The regime’s dependence on the PRC has made it vulnerable to shifts in the PRC’s international relations. Although the PRC has played a key role in stymieing attempts to bring the Burmese situation up before the UN Security Council, it is also concerned about improving its international profile now that it is sponsoring the 2008 Olympics and is eager to counter the negative press resulting from recent problems with Chinese exports to the US and elsewhere.
Moreover, the PRC is most interested in political stability on its frontiers. Although backing the military regime in Burma has appeared to be a safe bet in pursuit of this goal, widespread domestic opposition in Burma and the promise of rallying at the UN against the regime may change this view.
Indeed, recent reports suggest that the PRC is finally pressuring the military regime in Burma to engage in serious negotiations with the Democratic opposition. Unable to turn to anyone else, the regime is increasingly finding itself stuck in a corner and will either have to fold or more completely isolate itself from the international community.
It is well past the time when the kind of increased US sanctions promised by President George Bush would have had any tangible impact on Burma’s domestic political situation. Currently, the only realistic chances for Western states to encourage a peaceful transfer of power in the country is to exert soft pressure on the PRC to persuade Burma’s military leadership to relinquish control of the state to those elected in 1990.
Michael Charney is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS and is a specialist in Burmese history. His research focuses on Burmese intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) and has recently completed his manuscript for The History of Modern Burma for Cambridge University Press.
ႏိုင္ငံ့ စစ္တပ္သည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ ရလိမ့္မည္ (ေဗဒင္ ေဟာစာတမ္း)
ႏိုင္ငံ့ စစ္တပ္သည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ ရလိမ့္မည္ (ေဗဒင္ ေဟာစာတမ္း)
ဆရာႀကီး ဦးသန္းေရႊ
ေအာက္တုိဘာလ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္။
လာမည့္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ (၂၁) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ မဟာအဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းသည္ သိန္းခ်ီေသာ အရွိန္အဝါျဖင့္ အသံကုန္ ျမည္ဟည္း၍ ကမၻာေျမဆီသို႔ ခ်ည္းကပ္လာရာမွ ျဗဂၢဇာေခၚ ေနာက္ျပန္ ခြဲခြာေတာ့မည္ ျဖစ္ရာ မဟာကာလဇာတာ သည္ကား ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ အတိတ္နမိတ္ မ်ိဳးစံုကို ေဖာ္ျပလွ်က္ ရွိေပေတာ့သည္။
အသံကုန္ျမည္ဟီး၍ မဟာပထဝီ ေျမႀကီးထံ ျပင္းထန္ေသာ အဟုန္ျဖင့္ ခ်ည္းကပ္လာေသာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းသည္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ လဆန္းပိုင္းမွစ၍ ကမၻာေျမႀကီးႏွင့္ အနီးဆံုးဆီသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိ၍ ျဗဂၢဇာ ျပဳရန္ ၄င္း၏အဟုန္ကို ဘရိတ္ဖမ္းခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ရာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း၏ ပါပသတၱိမ်ိဳးစံုကို အစြမ္းကုန္ ျမင္ရမည့္ အခ်ိန္အခါ ျဖစ္ေပေတာ့သည္။
အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း၏ ကိုယ္ပြားဟု ေျပာရမည့္ ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္သည္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ လလယ္ပိုင္းအထိ ေသြးထြက္သံယိုမႈ မ်ိဳးစံု၊ မတရားမႈ မ်ိဳးစံု၊ အမ်ိဳး ဘာသာ၊ သာသနာတို႔အား ေဖာက္ျပန္ ေစာ္ကားမႈ မ်ိဳးစံုကို ျပဳမူလိမ့္မည္ဟု က်မ္းဂန္ အေထာက္အထားမ်ားက ျပဆိုလွ်က္ ရွိေတာ့သည္။ မဟာကာလဇာတာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းကို ျမန္မာ့လြတ္လပ္ေရး ဇာတာ တနဂၤေႏြ ၿဂိဳလ္မင္းက ခုႏွစ္တန္႔ အျမင္ ႏွင့္ ျမင္ယွဥ္တားရာ ျမန္မာမင္း ဧကရာဇ္သည္ စစ္တပ္၏ ေဖာက္ျပန္ေသာ အျပဳအမူမ်ိဳးစံုကို အမိန္႔ေတာ္ မွတ္လိမ့္မည္ဟု ညႊန္ျပသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ အဆိုပါ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း ျဗဂၢတက်င့္ခ်ိန္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ(၂၁) ရက္ေန႔ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ စစ္တပ္သည္ ပံုမွန္ အျပဳအမူတို႔မွ ေဖာက္ျပန္၍ က်င့္ၾကံမည္ ျဖစ္ရာ ျဖစ္႐ိုးျဖစ္စဥ္ နာခံမႈ ႏွင့္ ေသြးထြက္သံယို ျပဳက်င့္မႈတို႔ကို ရပ္တန္႔လွ်က္ ၄င္းအား ခုႏွစ္တန္႔ အျမင္ႏွင့္ ျမင္ယွဥ္ထားသူ တနဂၤေႏြ ၿဂိဳလ္မင္းကို ၿဂိဳလ္စစ္ ထိုးလိမ့္မည္ ျဖစ္ရာ မင္းဧကရာဇ္သည္ ေဆြျပတ္၊ မ်ိဳးျပတ္ သြတ္ခ်ာပါတ ဖမ္း၍ အသက္ခႏၶာ အိုးစားကြဲရမည္ဟု ဆိုလိုေပ၏။ ထိုကာလ၌ စစ္တပ္သည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ကို ရရွိလတၲံ။
လူငယ္ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္တို႔သည္ ေသြးစြန္းထားေသာ စစ္တပ္ကို တေလ်ာ္ ကင္ပြန္းတို႔ႏွင့္ ေဆးေၾကာလိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုင္ငံ့ဝန္ကို ႏြားလား ဥႆဖတို႔လို ထမ္းလိမ့္မည္။ ပညာရွိ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတို႔၏ အၾကံကို နာခံလိမ့္မည္။ လြန္ေလၿပီးေသာ အစိုးရ အဆက္ဆက္/ ကြဲျပားေနေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးကို စုစည္းေပးမည့္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ကို ရရွိလိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ မွ ဧၿပီလ ကာလသည္ ေစ့စပ္ေဆြးေႏြး ညႇိႏွိဳင္းမႈ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး၊ စည္းေဝးပြဲ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး၊ စာခ်ဳပ္ သေဘာတူမႈ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ျပဳလုပ္မည့္ကာလ ျဖစ္လိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမား အေပါင္းသည္ ေရွာင္ဖယ္ေနရာမွ စစ္တပ္၏ လံု႔လကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳကာ ေပါင္းမိၾကခ်ိန္တြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ အထြဋ္အထိတ္သို႔ ေရာက္ရွိခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ရလိမ့္မည္။ သံသယျဖင့္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနေသာ အေမရိကန္၊ အဂၤလိပ္တို႔သည္ ၂ဝဝ၈ခုႏွစ္၊ ျမန္မာ ႏွစ္ဆန္းခ်ိန္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသစ္ကို အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳၾကလတၱံ။ ၂ဝဝ၈ခုႏွစ္၊ ျမန္မာႏွစ္ဆန္းခ်ိန္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသစ္၏ အလံသစ္ ႏွင့္ ထိပ္သီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ကမၻာ့လူထုက ေလးစားခန္႔ညား ၾကလိမ့္မည္။
ဆရာႀကီး ဦးသန္းေရႊ
ေအာက္တုိဘာလ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္။
လာမည့္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ (၂၁) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ မဟာအဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းသည္ သိန္းခ်ီေသာ အရွိန္အဝါျဖင့္ အသံကုန္ ျမည္ဟည္း၍ ကမၻာေျမဆီသို႔ ခ်ည္းကပ္လာရာမွ ျဗဂၢဇာေခၚ ေနာက္ျပန္ ခြဲခြာေတာ့မည္ ျဖစ္ရာ မဟာကာလဇာတာ သည္ကား ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ အတိတ္နမိတ္ မ်ိဳးစံုကို ေဖာ္ျပလွ်က္ ရွိေပေတာ့သည္။
အသံကုန္ျမည္ဟီး၍ မဟာပထဝီ ေျမႀကီးထံ ျပင္းထန္ေသာ အဟုန္ျဖင့္ ခ်ည္းကပ္လာေသာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းသည္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ လဆန္းပိုင္းမွစ၍ ကမၻာေျမႀကီးႏွင့္ အနီးဆံုးဆီသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိ၍ ျဗဂၢဇာ ျပဳရန္ ၄င္း၏အဟုန္ကို ဘရိတ္ဖမ္းခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ရာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း၏ ပါပသတၱိမ်ိဳးစံုကို အစြမ္းကုန္ ျမင္ရမည့္ အခ်ိန္အခါ ျဖစ္ေပေတာ့သည္။
အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း၏ ကိုယ္ပြားဟု ေျပာရမည့္ ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္သည္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ လလယ္ပိုင္းအထိ ေသြးထြက္သံယိုမႈ မ်ိဳးစံု၊ မတရားမႈ မ်ိဳးစံု၊ အမ်ိဳး ဘာသာ၊ သာသနာတို႔အား ေဖာက္ျပန္ ေစာ္ကားမႈ မ်ိဳးစံုကို ျပဳမူလိမ့္မည္ဟု က်မ္းဂန္ အေထာက္အထားမ်ားက ျပဆိုလွ်က္ ရွိေတာ့သည္။ မဟာကာလဇာတာ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္းကို ျမန္မာ့လြတ္လပ္ေရး ဇာတာ တနဂၤေႏြ ၿဂိဳလ္မင္းက ခုႏွစ္တန္႔ အျမင္ ႏွင့္ ျမင္ယွဥ္တားရာ ျမန္မာမင္း ဧကရာဇ္သည္ စစ္တပ္၏ ေဖာက္ျပန္ေသာ အျပဳအမူမ်ိဳးစံုကို အမိန္႔ေတာ္ မွတ္လိမ့္မည္ဟု ညႊန္ျပသည္။
သို႔ေသာ္ အဆိုပါ အဂၤါၿဂိဳလ္မင္း ျဗဂၢတက်င့္ခ်ိန္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ(၂၁) ရက္ေန႔ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ စစ္တပ္သည္ ပံုမွန္ အျပဳအမူတို႔မွ ေဖာက္ျပန္၍ က်င့္ၾကံမည္ ျဖစ္ရာ ျဖစ္႐ိုးျဖစ္စဥ္ နာခံမႈ ႏွင့္ ေသြးထြက္သံယို ျပဳက်င့္မႈတို႔ကို ရပ္တန္႔လွ်က္ ၄င္းအား ခုႏွစ္တန္႔ အျမင္ႏွင့္ ျမင္ယွဥ္ထားသူ တနဂၤေႏြ ၿဂိဳလ္မင္းကို ၿဂိဳလ္စစ္ ထိုးလိမ့္မည္ ျဖစ္ရာ မင္းဧကရာဇ္သည္ ေဆြျပတ္၊ မ်ိဳးျပတ္ သြတ္ခ်ာပါတ ဖမ္း၍ အသက္ခႏၶာ အိုးစားကြဲရမည္ဟု ဆိုလိုေပ၏။ ထိုကာလ၌ စစ္တပ္သည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ကို ရရွိလတၲံ။
လူငယ္ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္တို႔သည္ ေသြးစြန္းထားေသာ စစ္တပ္ကို တေလ်ာ္ ကင္ပြန္းတို႔ႏွင့္ ေဆးေၾကာလိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုင္ငံ့ဝန္ကို ႏြားလား ဥႆဖတို႔လို ထမ္းလိမ့္မည္။ ပညာရွိ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတို႔၏ အၾကံကို နာခံလိမ့္မည္။ လြန္ေလၿပီးေသာ အစိုးရ အဆက္ဆက္/ ကြဲျပားေနေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးကို စုစည္းေပးမည့္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သစ္ကို ရရွိလိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ မွ ဧၿပီလ ကာလသည္ ေစ့စပ္ေဆြးေႏြး ညႇိႏွိဳင္းမႈ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး၊ စည္းေဝးပြဲ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး၊ စာခ်ဳပ္ သေဘာတူမႈ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ျပဳလုပ္မည့္ကာလ ျဖစ္လိမ့္မည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမား အေပါင္းသည္ ေရွာင္ဖယ္ေနရာမွ စစ္တပ္၏ လံု႔လကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳကာ ေပါင္းမိၾကခ်ိန္တြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ အထြဋ္အထိတ္သို႔ ေရာက္ရွိခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္ရလိမ့္မည္။ သံသယျဖင့္ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနေသာ အေမရိကန္၊ အဂၤလိပ္တို႔သည္ ၂ဝဝ၈ခုႏွစ္၊ ျမန္မာ ႏွစ္ဆန္းခ်ိန္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသစ္ကို အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳၾကလတၱံ။ ၂ဝဝ၈ခုႏွစ္၊ ျမန္မာႏွစ္ဆန္းခ်ိန္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသစ္၏ အလံသစ္ ႏွင့္ ထိပ္သီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ကမၻာ့လူထုက ေလးစားခန္႔ညား ၾကလိမ့္မည္။
'Yellow colour' worshippers in Shwedagon
October 26, Mizzima News
A month after the monk-led protests' in September, several people in
yellow clothes gathered today in the Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon,
eyewitnesses said.
Local residents, who visited the shrine, said several people came in the
evening to Shwedagon, which was the central location during last month's
protests, with yellow coloured candles to pray for peace.
"People in yellow clothes with yellow candles came to the pagoda, lighted
candles and prayed. They even placed yellow coloured flowers at the
pagoda," an eyewitness told Mizzima.
While the prayer goers chose yellow clothes, candles and flowers in
commemoration of last month's "Saffron Revolution", ruthlessly crushed by
the junta, eyewitness said, there was no sign of people coming together
for another round of protests.
"They just come in pairs or even singly, they were not in groups," said
the eyewitness.
The eyewitness also said, several security personnel and soldiers, who had
disappeared from the public eye for quite sometime now, were once again
seen at the foothills and areas surrounding Shwedagon.
"There were five to six security personnel in a group and there were
several groups. I think all together there were about 60 at least. They
were all armed and had teargas with them. They conducted searches on
visitors to the shrine," he added.
A small fire engine was also seen parked near the pagoda and passersby
were reportedly searched, though not much interrogation was done, added
the eyewitness.
On September 26, the Burmese military junta opened fire on peaceful
protesters in Rangoon, killing several people including a Japanese
photojournalist Kenji Nagai.
The protests, which began as sporadic agitation over the sudden fuel price
hike in August, took a different turn in September when the Buddhist
clergy took to the streets after the junta failed to comply with their
demand to apologize for ill-treating monks.
However, the junta on September 25 midnight began raiding several
monasteries and residences in Rangoon and arrested monks and activists.
The junta then opened fire on protesters on September 26 and 27.
The junta then began intimidating protestors by continuing the crackdown
in the form of midnight raids, random searches and arrests on streets.
However, the spirit of the protests seems to remain as several people were
seen today in yellow clothes to mark one month of the brutal crackdown on
protesters.
A month after the monk-led protests' in September, several people in
yellow clothes gathered today in the Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon,
eyewitnesses said.
Local residents, who visited the shrine, said several people came in the
evening to Shwedagon, which was the central location during last month's
protests, with yellow coloured candles to pray for peace.
"People in yellow clothes with yellow candles came to the pagoda, lighted
candles and prayed. They even placed yellow coloured flowers at the
pagoda," an eyewitness told Mizzima.
While the prayer goers chose yellow clothes, candles and flowers in
commemoration of last month's "Saffron Revolution", ruthlessly crushed by
the junta, eyewitness said, there was no sign of people coming together
for another round of protests.
"They just come in pairs or even singly, they were not in groups," said
the eyewitness.
The eyewitness also said, several security personnel and soldiers, who had
disappeared from the public eye for quite sometime now, were once again
seen at the foothills and areas surrounding Shwedagon.
"There were five to six security personnel in a group and there were
several groups. I think all together there were about 60 at least. They
were all armed and had teargas with them. They conducted searches on
visitors to the shrine," he added.
A small fire engine was also seen parked near the pagoda and passersby
were reportedly searched, though not much interrogation was done, added
the eyewitness.
On September 26, the Burmese military junta opened fire on peaceful
protesters in Rangoon, killing several people including a Japanese
photojournalist Kenji Nagai.
The protests, which began as sporadic agitation over the sudden fuel price
hike in August, took a different turn in September when the Buddhist
clergy took to the streets after the junta failed to comply with their
demand to apologize for ill-treating monks.
However, the junta on September 25 midnight began raiding several
monasteries and residences in Rangoon and arrested monks and activists.
The junta then opened fire on protesters on September 26 and 27.
The junta then began intimidating protestors by continuing the crackdown
in the form of midnight raids, random searches and arrests on streets.
However, the spirit of the protests seems to remain as several people were
seen today in yellow clothes to mark one month of the brutal crackdown on
protesters.
A monk's tale of protest and escape from Myanmar
October 26, New York Times
A 24-year-old Buddhist monk who says he was one of the leaders of the
recent protests in Myanmar and escaped last week painted a picture on
Thursday of a bare-bones group of young monks planning and organizing what
became a nationwide uprising.
During a six-hour interview in this border town, the monk, Ashin Kovida,
said he had been elected the leader of a group of 15 of his fellows and
led daily protests in Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after
the authorities began raiding monasteries.
He said he was inspired by the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the
government of Slobodan Milosevic, videos of which were circulated by
dissident groups in Myanmar.
Eight members of his organizing committee are ''missing'' and six others
are hiding in Yangon, he said. He described escaping to Thailand by using
a false identification card, dyeing his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.
Many details of Mr. Kovida's account could not be independently confirmed,
but his role as an organizer was well known among nongovernmental
organizations in Myanmar, formerly Burma, and Western human rights groups.
Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a leading organizer of students in the September
demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Mr.
Kovida on Thursday and confirmed his identity.
''He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the
protests,'' Hlaing Moe Than said.
Mr. Kovida's group received financial help from three well-known Burmese
dissidents -- an actor, a comedian and a poet -- but it did not receive
foreign aid during the protests, he said.
One of his main preoccupations, he said, was providing food for the
thousands of monks who came to Yangon, Myanmar's main city, to join the
protests. He said he also worried about what he called ''fake monks,''
whom he suspected the military government had planted.
The spark for the demonstrations came on Sept. 5, when the police fired
warning shots at protesting monks in Pakokku, in central Myanmar, Mr.
Kovida said.
''The first time I heard the information, I was speechless,'' he said.
''It was an unbelievable thing.''
Older monks and abbots urged the monks to protest in the monasteries, but
the younger monks thought protesting in their cloistered world would do no
good, he said.
He reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to
plan marches in Yangon.
''We realized that there was no leadership -- a train must have a
locomotive,'' he said.
He said he helped supervise the printing of hundreds of pamphlets, titled,
''The Monks Will Come Out Onto the Streets.''
''We delivered to all the monasteries.'' in Yangon, he said. ''We tried to
distribute to other regions as much as possible.''
On Sept. 18, he led the first column of monks through the streets in
Yangon, he said.
On Sept. 19, about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, sat on the tiled
floor in Sule Pagoda, a focal point of the protests. ''To continue
demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership,'' Mr. Kovida
said he told them. ''I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front.''
Fifteen monks came forward, he said, to form what they called the Sangga
Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group.
''In this country at present we are facing hardships,'' he said he told
the crowd, after he was elected chairman of the group. ''People are
starving; prices are rising. Under this military government there are so
many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with
us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win. If
there are no human rights, there is no value of a human.''
He said that, for a week, he met with his group of organizers in the
morning and led marches at noon. He said he heard reports on the
Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized
themselves but he had never met them.
Then, on Sept. 26, the government began a violent crackdown. Security
forces clubbed and tear-gassed protesters, blocked their path and arrested
hundreds.
''The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them,'' Mr. Kovida said.
''Nuns were stripped of their sarongs.''
He said he escaped by climbing over a brick wall.
The next day, as the crackdown intensified, he said he changed out of his
robes and fled to a village about 40 miles away where, with the help of
relatives and friends, he hid in an abandoned wooden hut.
He was so afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors that he
suppressed his coughs and never left the dark hut for two weeks, he said.
He relieved himself using a plastic bucket, he said, and friends
occasionally dropped off food.
On Oct. 12, his adoptive mother, whom he called Daw Thin Thin Khaing, was
detained, news that was immediately relayed to him. He fled into the
night, barefoot.
''I ran down a large road,'' he said. ''Whenever a car came I hid in the
bushes.''
He headed back to Yangon, he said, where he dyed his hair blond. He bought
a crucifix in a local market and, several days later, boarded a bus
heading toward the Thai border.
Using a false identity card, he passed about eight checkpoints and reached
Myawadi, a border town, on Oct. 17. The next morning, he said, he crossed
the Moei River to Thailand in a boat, bypassing the official border post.
An Oct. 18 article in The New Light of Myanmar, the state-run newspaper,
accused him of hiding ''48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges'' in
his monastery.
Now, facing almost certain detention in Myanmar, Mr. Kovida said he would
request refugee status in Thailand.
''I have been in the monkhood since I was so young,'' he said. ''My whole
life, I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things.''
A 24-year-old Buddhist monk who says he was one of the leaders of the
recent protests in Myanmar and escaped last week painted a picture on
Thursday of a bare-bones group of young monks planning and organizing what
became a nationwide uprising.
During a six-hour interview in this border town, the monk, Ashin Kovida,
said he had been elected the leader of a group of 15 of his fellows and
led daily protests in Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after
the authorities began raiding monasteries.
He said he was inspired by the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the
government of Slobodan Milosevic, videos of which were circulated by
dissident groups in Myanmar.
Eight members of his organizing committee are ''missing'' and six others
are hiding in Yangon, he said. He described escaping to Thailand by using
a false identification card, dyeing his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.
Many details of Mr. Kovida's account could not be independently confirmed,
but his role as an organizer was well known among nongovernmental
organizations in Myanmar, formerly Burma, and Western human rights groups.
Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a leading organizer of students in the September
demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Mr.
Kovida on Thursday and confirmed his identity.
''He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the
protests,'' Hlaing Moe Than said.
Mr. Kovida's group received financial help from three well-known Burmese
dissidents -- an actor, a comedian and a poet -- but it did not receive
foreign aid during the protests, he said.
One of his main preoccupations, he said, was providing food for the
thousands of monks who came to Yangon, Myanmar's main city, to join the
protests. He said he also worried about what he called ''fake monks,''
whom he suspected the military government had planted.
The spark for the demonstrations came on Sept. 5, when the police fired
warning shots at protesting monks in Pakokku, in central Myanmar, Mr.
Kovida said.
''The first time I heard the information, I was speechless,'' he said.
''It was an unbelievable thing.''
Older monks and abbots urged the monks to protest in the monasteries, but
the younger monks thought protesting in their cloistered world would do no
good, he said.
He reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to
plan marches in Yangon.
''We realized that there was no leadership -- a train must have a
locomotive,'' he said.
He said he helped supervise the printing of hundreds of pamphlets, titled,
''The Monks Will Come Out Onto the Streets.''
''We delivered to all the monasteries.'' in Yangon, he said. ''We tried to
distribute to other regions as much as possible.''
On Sept. 18, he led the first column of monks through the streets in
Yangon, he said.
On Sept. 19, about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, sat on the tiled
floor in Sule Pagoda, a focal point of the protests. ''To continue
demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership,'' Mr. Kovida
said he told them. ''I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front.''
Fifteen monks came forward, he said, to form what they called the Sangga
Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group.
''In this country at present we are facing hardships,'' he said he told
the crowd, after he was elected chairman of the group. ''People are
starving; prices are rising. Under this military government there are so
many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with
us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win. If
there are no human rights, there is no value of a human.''
He said that, for a week, he met with his group of organizers in the
morning and led marches at noon. He said he heard reports on the
Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized
themselves but he had never met them.
Then, on Sept. 26, the government began a violent crackdown. Security
forces clubbed and tear-gassed protesters, blocked their path and arrested
hundreds.
''The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them,'' Mr. Kovida said.
''Nuns were stripped of their sarongs.''
He said he escaped by climbing over a brick wall.
The next day, as the crackdown intensified, he said he changed out of his
robes and fled to a village about 40 miles away where, with the help of
relatives and friends, he hid in an abandoned wooden hut.
He was so afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors that he
suppressed his coughs and never left the dark hut for two weeks, he said.
He relieved himself using a plastic bucket, he said, and friends
occasionally dropped off food.
On Oct. 12, his adoptive mother, whom he called Daw Thin Thin Khaing, was
detained, news that was immediately relayed to him. He fled into the
night, barefoot.
''I ran down a large road,'' he said. ''Whenever a car came I hid in the
bushes.''
He headed back to Yangon, he said, where he dyed his hair blond. He bought
a crucifix in a local market and, several days later, boarded a bus
heading toward the Thai border.
Using a false identity card, he passed about eight checkpoints and reached
Myawadi, a border town, on Oct. 17. The next morning, he said, he crossed
the Moei River to Thailand in a boat, bypassing the official border post.
An Oct. 18 article in The New Light of Myanmar, the state-run newspaper,
accused him of hiding ''48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges'' in
his monastery.
Now, facing almost certain detention in Myanmar, Mr. Kovida said he would
request refugee status in Thailand.
''I have been in the monkhood since I was so young,'' he said. ''My whole
life, I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things.''
A crucifix on his neck, monk escapes Myanmar
IHT
By Thomas Fuller
Thursday, October 25, 2007
MAE SOT, Thailand: One of the main organizers of the September protest marches in Myanmar, Ashin Kovida, a 24-year-old Buddhist monk, escaped to Thailand last week by carrying a false identification card, dying his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.
On Thursday, Ashin Kovida offered details of his harrowing escape and insights into what has remained a central question about the September protests: Who organized the orderly lines of saffron-robed monks who marched through Yangon - and how.
Ashin Kovida crossed the border to Thailand illegally and said Thursday that he was planning to request refugee status. He is wanted by Myanmar's military government, which accuses him of storing explosives in his monastery in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar.
The monk called that accusation absurd.
In a six-hour interview in this border town, he painted a picture of a bare-bones organization, a group of 15 monks in their 20s who organized the September demonstrations. He said he had been elected leader of the group and had been inspired by videos of the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the government of Slobodan Milosevic.
The group received financial help from three well-known Burmese dissidents - an actor, a comedian and a poet - but did not receive any foreign assistance during their protests, Ashin Kovida said.
Eight of the 15 monks in his organizing committee are missing, he said. The other six, he said, are hiding in Yangon.
Known to have been arrested was Thin Thin Khaing, 42, whom he described as his adoptive mother. He said she was taken from her home in the early hours of Oct. 12. Her driver, Phoe Wa, was also detained, and their car impounded, he said.
Thin Thin Khaing has not formally adopted Ashin Kovida but served as his sponsor in the monkhood. Ashin Kovida said he believed that the authorities had detained her to put pressure on him to give himself up.
Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a lead organizer of students in the September demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Ashin Kovida on Thursday and confirmed the more recent refugee's identity.
"He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the protests," Hlaing Moe Than said.
Ashin Kovida led daily protests through Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after the authorities began raiding monasteries.
One of his main preoccupations, he said, was being able to feed the thousands of monks who had come to Yangon from other regions. He also worried about the presence of what he called "fake monks," who he suspected had been planted by the military government.
The spark for the demonstrations was warning shots fired by the police at monks on Sept. 5 in the central Burmese city of Pakokku.
"The first time I heard the information, I was speechless," Ashin Kovida said. "It was an unbelievable thing."
His fellow monks were outraged and looked for ways to respond. They decided to disengage themselves completely from the government, refusing all alms, support and contacts.
Older monks and abbots urged the monks to carry out their protests inside the monasteries, but Ashin Kovida said younger monks had defied those directives thinking that protesting within their cloistered world would not do any good.
Ashin Kovida reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to plan the protest marches through Yangon.
"We realized that there was no leadership," he said. "A train must have a locomotive."
He said he had helped supervise the printing of pamphlets that would be distributed to monasteries, titled: "The monks will come out onto the streets."
"There were students and young people who were on our side," Ashin Kovida said. The students made up the pamphlets on their computers, printed them out and made photocopies.
"We had to do hundreds of them," he said. "We delivered to all the monasteries in Rangoon. We tried to distribute to other regions as much as possible." Yangon is also known as Rangoon.
On Sept. 18, he said, he led the first line of monks through the streets in Yangon.
On Sept. 19, a crowd of about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, was sitting on the tiled floor inside the Sule Pagoda when Ashin Kovida stood up and addressed them.
"To continue demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership," Ashin Kovida remembered saying. "I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front."
Fifteen monks came forward, he said, the crowd cheering them on.
They formed what they called the Sangga Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group. Ashin Kovida was elected chairman.
Ashin Kovida then addressed the crowd again with a short speech.
"In this country at present we are facing hardships," Ashin Kovida recalled saying. "People are starving, prices are rising. Under this military government there are so many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win. If there are no human rights there is no value of a human."
Ashin Kovida said he had led a week of daily protests, meeting with his group of organizers in the mornings and beginning the marches at noon. He heard reports on the Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized themselves but he never met those groups.
The demonstrations were peaceful and unhindered until Sept. 26, when the riot police blocked the monks' path, charged them and dispersed them.
"The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them," Ashin Kovida remembered. "Nuns were stripped of their sarongs."
Dozens of monks were taken into detention; Ashin Kovida escaped by climbing over a brick wall.
The next day, Sept. 27, as the crackdown intensified, Ashin Kovida said, he changed out of his robes and put on a sarong and short-sleeve shirt. He fled to a small village about 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, outside Yangon and with the help of relatives and friends hid in a small abandoned wooden hut.
He was so afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors that he suppressed his coughs and never left the house, which had no running water. For two weeks he lived in the dark hut, with no way of bathing. He relieved himself using a plastic bucket. Friends occasionally dropped off food.
On Oct. 12, when his adoptive mother was detained, the news was immediately relayed to him. He fled into the night, barefoot.
"I ran down a large road," he said. "Whenever a car came I hid in the bushes."
He reached a friend's house before dawn, borrowed some clothes and headed back to Yangon, wearing a light-blue baseball cap, reading glasses and a sarong.
Friends in Yangon helped him dye his hair, which was growing in, blond. He bought a crucifix in a local market and several days later boarded a bus heading toward the Thai border.
He passed about eight checkpoints - he could not remember exactly how many - on the way to the border. He used a fake identity card, and reached the border town of Myawadi on Oct. 17. The next morning he crossed the Moei River to Thailand in a boat.
Ashin Kovida faces almost certain detention if he returns to Myanmar.
In the Oct. 18 edition of The New Light of Myanmar, the state-run newspaper, he was accused of hiding "48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges" in his monastery.
"They just want to associate the monks with violence and terrorism," Ashin Kovida said.
"I have been in the monkhood since I was so young," he said. "My whole life I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things."
He said his father is a carpenter and his mother runs a small market stall selling onion and chilies. Both live in Rakhine State, in northwest Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh.
Many in Myanmar will not be able to forgive the government for the crackdown on monks, he said.
"It's a stain on the history of Burma," Ashin Kovida said. "Inside Burma now, a lot of students and people are organizing the next step against the SPDC" - the acronym for the military government. "I think it will be the same time as the Olympics in China," he said, referring to the 2008 Games in Beijing. "That is my own opinion."
Pornnapa Wongakanit contributed reporting from Mae Sot.
By Thomas Fuller
Thursday, October 25, 2007
MAE SOT, Thailand: One of the main organizers of the September protest marches in Myanmar, Ashin Kovida, a 24-year-old Buddhist monk, escaped to Thailand last week by carrying a false identification card, dying his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.
On Thursday, Ashin Kovida offered details of his harrowing escape and insights into what has remained a central question about the September protests: Who organized the orderly lines of saffron-robed monks who marched through Yangon - and how.
Ashin Kovida crossed the border to Thailand illegally and said Thursday that he was planning to request refugee status. He is wanted by Myanmar's military government, which accuses him of storing explosives in his monastery in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar.
The monk called that accusation absurd.
In a six-hour interview in this border town, he painted a picture of a bare-bones organization, a group of 15 monks in their 20s who organized the September demonstrations. He said he had been elected leader of the group and had been inspired by videos of the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the government of Slobodan Milosevic.
The group received financial help from three well-known Burmese dissidents - an actor, a comedian and a poet - but did not receive any foreign assistance during their protests, Ashin Kovida said.
Eight of the 15 monks in his organizing committee are missing, he said. The other six, he said, are hiding in Yangon.
Known to have been arrested was Thin Thin Khaing, 42, whom he described as his adoptive mother. He said she was taken from her home in the early hours of Oct. 12. Her driver, Phoe Wa, was also detained, and their car impounded, he said.
Thin Thin Khaing has not formally adopted Ashin Kovida but served as his sponsor in the monkhood. Ashin Kovida said he believed that the authorities had detained her to put pressure on him to give himself up.
Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a lead organizer of students in the September demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Ashin Kovida on Thursday and confirmed the more recent refugee's identity.
"He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the protests," Hlaing Moe Than said.
Ashin Kovida led daily protests through Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after the authorities began raiding monasteries.
One of his main preoccupations, he said, was being able to feed the thousands of monks who had come to Yangon from other regions. He also worried about the presence of what he called "fake monks," who he suspected had been planted by the military government.
The spark for the demonstrations was warning shots fired by the police at monks on Sept. 5 in the central Burmese city of Pakokku.
"The first time I heard the information, I was speechless," Ashin Kovida said. "It was an unbelievable thing."
His fellow monks were outraged and looked for ways to respond. They decided to disengage themselves completely from the government, refusing all alms, support and contacts.
Older monks and abbots urged the monks to carry out their protests inside the monasteries, but Ashin Kovida said younger monks had defied those directives thinking that protesting within their cloistered world would not do any good.
Ashin Kovida reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to plan the protest marches through Yangon.
"We realized that there was no leadership," he said. "A train must have a locomotive."
He said he had helped supervise the printing of pamphlets that would be distributed to monasteries, titled: "The monks will come out onto the streets."
"There were students and young people who were on our side," Ashin Kovida said. The students made up the pamphlets on their computers, printed them out and made photocopies.
"We had to do hundreds of them," he said. "We delivered to all the monasteries in Rangoon. We tried to distribute to other regions as much as possible." Yangon is also known as Rangoon.
On Sept. 18, he said, he led the first line of monks through the streets in Yangon.
On Sept. 19, a crowd of about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, was sitting on the tiled floor inside the Sule Pagoda when Ashin Kovida stood up and addressed them.
"To continue demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership," Ashin Kovida remembered saying. "I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front."
Fifteen monks came forward, he said, the crowd cheering them on.
They formed what they called the Sangga Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group. Ashin Kovida was elected chairman.
Ashin Kovida then addressed the crowd again with a short speech.
"In this country at present we are facing hardships," Ashin Kovida recalled saying. "People are starving, prices are rising. Under this military government there are so many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win. If there are no human rights there is no value of a human."
Ashin Kovida said he had led a week of daily protests, meeting with his group of organizers in the mornings and beginning the marches at noon. He heard reports on the Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized themselves but he never met those groups.
The demonstrations were peaceful and unhindered until Sept. 26, when the riot police blocked the monks' path, charged them and dispersed them.
"The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them," Ashin Kovida remembered. "Nuns were stripped of their sarongs."
Dozens of monks were taken into detention; Ashin Kovida escaped by climbing over a brick wall.
The next day, Sept. 27, as the crackdown intensified, Ashin Kovida said, he changed out of his robes and put on a sarong and short-sleeve shirt. He fled to a small village about 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, outside Yangon and with the help of relatives and friends hid in a small abandoned wooden hut.
He was so afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors that he suppressed his coughs and never left the house, which had no running water. For two weeks he lived in the dark hut, with no way of bathing. He relieved himself using a plastic bucket. Friends occasionally dropped off food.
On Oct. 12, when his adoptive mother was detained, the news was immediately relayed to him. He fled into the night, barefoot.
"I ran down a large road," he said. "Whenever a car came I hid in the bushes."
He reached a friend's house before dawn, borrowed some clothes and headed back to Yangon, wearing a light-blue baseball cap, reading glasses and a sarong.
Friends in Yangon helped him dye his hair, which was growing in, blond. He bought a crucifix in a local market and several days later boarded a bus heading toward the Thai border.
He passed about eight checkpoints - he could not remember exactly how many - on the way to the border. He used a fake identity card, and reached the border town of Myawadi on Oct. 17. The next morning he crossed the Moei River to Thailand in a boat.
Ashin Kovida faces almost certain detention if he returns to Myanmar.
In the Oct. 18 edition of The New Light of Myanmar, the state-run newspaper, he was accused of hiding "48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges" in his monastery.
"They just want to associate the monks with violence and terrorism," Ashin Kovida said.
"I have been in the monkhood since I was so young," he said. "My whole life I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things."
He said his father is a carpenter and his mother runs a small market stall selling onion and chilies. Both live in Rakhine State, in northwest Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh.
Many in Myanmar will not be able to forgive the government for the crackdown on monks, he said.
"It's a stain on the history of Burma," Ashin Kovida said. "Inside Burma now, a lot of students and people are organizing the next step against the SPDC" - the acronym for the military government. "I think it will be the same time as the Olympics in China," he said, referring to the 2008 Games in Beijing. "That is my own opinion."
Pornnapa Wongakanit contributed reporting from Mae Sot.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The Public Face of Buddhism
Sightings
Martin Marty Center
University of Chicago Divinity School
October 25, 2007
John C. Holt
When most of us in North America think about Buddhist monks, the image we are likely to conjure is one of ochre-robed contemplatives engaged in the quietude of meditation. But in fact, there has been a debate within the Buddhist sangha (monastic community) over the past two millennia regarding the question of how the Buddhist monastic vocation might best be realized. This debate has been especially apparent in the Theravada tradition that has been dominant in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. On the one hand, vipassanadhura monks epitomize the Buddhist monastic ideal as a quest for enlightenment or nirvana through the reclusive practice of meditation, usually within remote forest hermitages. These are the monks who seem to have most captured the Western imagination. On the other hand, granthadhura monks, inspired by the Buddha's summons to "wander for the welfare of the many" in order to assuage the existential condition of dukkha ("unsatisfactoriness," "suffering") in this world of samsara, are far more likely to be encountered within the context of South and Southeast Asian Buddhist societies. These monks, involved as they are in a variety of social issues and activities within their communities, are the public face of Buddhism.
Monks of both persuasions continue to be supported by the Buddhist laity, as they have been throughout history. And there are cogent scriptural warrants for each found within Buddhist sutras. But it is the latter model that has gained increasing prominence in the twentieth century, as various members of the sangha have aligned themselves with political movements throughout South and Southeast Asia. Indeed, one of the arresting images I still remember vividly from the 1960s during the years of the Vietnam War, one that originally piqued my own curiosity about Buddhism, was the self-immolation of a protesting Buddhist monk in the streets of Saigon.
In these last few weeks of September and early October, Burmese Theravada monks have dared to express publicly their profound disapproval with the manner in which Myanmar's military junta has been the source of great dukkha for the people of Burma. While the images of violence that reached us here in the West were very disturbing, the actual violence that occurred in Yangon (Rangoon) and in other cities across the country, especially violence against monks, has been even more disturbing to most Burmese; for, while monks are symbols of the Buddha's dhamma (teaching, truth, law), they are also regarded as embodiments of what is valued most in Theravada societies.
In times of great social, economic and political change, monks are often seen as the defenders of the country's indigenous moral and cultural traditions. This is certainly why some Sinhalese voters recently elected nine Buddhist monks to parliament in Sri Lanka. It is also why, during the Second Indo-China War, Pathet Lao leaders in Laos sought to infiltrate the sangha to convince its respected monks of its cause in fighting the Americans. Indeed, enlisting the support of the sangha has become a political sine qua non for all aspiring political players in this region of the world. Before colonialism, the sangha legitimated Buddhist kingship in these countries, as it does still in Thailand today. Contemporary politicos always seek, in one manner or another, to gain a similar legitimacy by winning support from members of the sangha. By attacking peacefully demonstrating members of the sangha violently in public, the Burmese political junta has crossed a threshold, one that has evaporated any modicum of legitimacy that it may have previously enjoyed. Were Burma democratic, then the military junta would have committed political suicide by its dastardly acts.
Aside from the military, the sangha is the only other nation-wide institution in Burma. While it is unlikely that the sangha will join with armed resistance groups representing other ethnic minorities in Burma, it is now clear from these recent events that the Burmese junta is isolated from the rest of Burmese society. It can only hold on to power by means of naked aggression against its own people, and against the moral and cultural values that the sangha embodies. By its actions, the junta has declared that it is now at war with Burmese culture itself.
John C. Holt (Ph.D. 1977) is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. He has been named the Divinity School's 2007 Alumnus of the Year. The Alumnus of the Year Address, in which Dr. Holt will lecture on "The Spirit(s) of the Place: Buddhism and the Religious Culture of Laos," will be held next Thursday, November 1, at 4pm in the Swift Lecture Hall.
Martin Marty Center
University of Chicago Divinity School
October 25, 2007
John C. Holt
When most of us in North America think about Buddhist monks, the image we are likely to conjure is one of ochre-robed contemplatives engaged in the quietude of meditation. But in fact, there has been a debate within the Buddhist sangha (monastic community) over the past two millennia regarding the question of how the Buddhist monastic vocation might best be realized. This debate has been especially apparent in the Theravada tradition that has been dominant in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. On the one hand, vipassanadhura monks epitomize the Buddhist monastic ideal as a quest for enlightenment or nirvana through the reclusive practice of meditation, usually within remote forest hermitages. These are the monks who seem to have most captured the Western imagination. On the other hand, granthadhura monks, inspired by the Buddha's summons to "wander for the welfare of the many" in order to assuage the existential condition of dukkha ("unsatisfactoriness," "suffering") in this world of samsara, are far more likely to be encountered within the context of South and Southeast Asian Buddhist societies. These monks, involved as they are in a variety of social issues and activities within their communities, are the public face of Buddhism.
Monks of both persuasions continue to be supported by the Buddhist laity, as they have been throughout history. And there are cogent scriptural warrants for each found within Buddhist sutras. But it is the latter model that has gained increasing prominence in the twentieth century, as various members of the sangha have aligned themselves with political movements throughout South and Southeast Asia. Indeed, one of the arresting images I still remember vividly from the 1960s during the years of the Vietnam War, one that originally piqued my own curiosity about Buddhism, was the self-immolation of a protesting Buddhist monk in the streets of Saigon.
In these last few weeks of September and early October, Burmese Theravada monks have dared to express publicly their profound disapproval with the manner in which Myanmar's military junta has been the source of great dukkha for the people of Burma. While the images of violence that reached us here in the West were very disturbing, the actual violence that occurred in Yangon (Rangoon) and in other cities across the country, especially violence against monks, has been even more disturbing to most Burmese; for, while monks are symbols of the Buddha's dhamma (teaching, truth, law), they are also regarded as embodiments of what is valued most in Theravada societies.
In times of great social, economic and political change, monks are often seen as the defenders of the country's indigenous moral and cultural traditions. This is certainly why some Sinhalese voters recently elected nine Buddhist monks to parliament in Sri Lanka. It is also why, during the Second Indo-China War, Pathet Lao leaders in Laos sought to infiltrate the sangha to convince its respected monks of its cause in fighting the Americans. Indeed, enlisting the support of the sangha has become a political sine qua non for all aspiring political players in this region of the world. Before colonialism, the sangha legitimated Buddhist kingship in these countries, as it does still in Thailand today. Contemporary politicos always seek, in one manner or another, to gain a similar legitimacy by winning support from members of the sangha. By attacking peacefully demonstrating members of the sangha violently in public, the Burmese political junta has crossed a threshold, one that has evaporated any modicum of legitimacy that it may have previously enjoyed. Were Burma democratic, then the military junta would have committed political suicide by its dastardly acts.
Aside from the military, the sangha is the only other nation-wide institution in Burma. While it is unlikely that the sangha will join with armed resistance groups representing other ethnic minorities in Burma, it is now clear from these recent events that the Burmese junta is isolated from the rest of Burmese society. It can only hold on to power by means of naked aggression against its own people, and against the moral and cultural values that the sangha embodies. By its actions, the junta has declared that it is now at war with Burmese culture itself.
John C. Holt (Ph.D. 1977) is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. He has been named the Divinity School's 2007 Alumnus of the Year. The Alumnus of the Year Address, in which Dr. Holt will lecture on "The Spirit(s) of the Place: Buddhism and the Religious Culture of Laos," will be held next Thursday, November 1, at 4pm in the Swift Lecture Hall.
ေရႊကူဘုရားပြဲေတာ္ က်င္းပခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ခံရ
မဇၩိမသတင္းဌာန
ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂ဝဝ၇ ခုႏွစ္။
မေကြးတိုင္း ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိရွိ နာမည္ႀကီး ေရႊကူဘုရားပြဲကို မနက္ျဖန္ညတြင္ က်င္းပရန္ စီစဥ္ထားေသာ္လည္း ေဒသခံ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက က်င္းပခြင့္ကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္သည္။
သီတင္းကၽြတ္ပြဲေတာ္ အခါသမယတြင္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားမွ စတင္၍ ဆႏၵျပ အံုႂကြခဲ့သည့္ ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိတြင္ အျငိမ့္ပြဲမ်ား ပါဝင္ေသာ ဘုရားပူေဇာ္ပြဲ ျပဳလွည့္လည္ရန္ စီစဥ္ထားေသာ္လည္း အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက လံုျခံဳေရး အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္ ပိတ္လုိက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ေရႊကူဘုရားပြဲ ဆိုတာက သီတင္းကၽြတ္ လျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၁ ရက္ေန႔ (သဘက္ခါ) ညတိုင္း မီးစက္ေတြ ၇ လံုးေလာက္နဲ႔ ၿမ့ဳိတြင္းလွည့္လည္ အပူေဇာ္ခံတယ္။ ကပြဲေတြ၊ အၿငိမ့္ေတြ၊ ေပ်ာ္ပြဲရႊင္ပြဲေတြကို ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တိုင္း အစဥ္အလာမပ်က္ လုပ္ခဲ့တာ။ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ေပ့ါေနာ္။ မနက္ျဖန္လို ညကတည္းက ဘုရားပဲြက စတာ။ ဒီႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက လုပ္ခြင့္မျပဳလို႔ မလုပ္ႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူး” ဟု ေရႊကူဘုရား တာဝန္ရွိသူမ်ားႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူ တဦးက ေျပာသည္။
ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိတြင္ သီဟိုဋ္ရွင္ဘုရား၊ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦးဘုရား၊ ေရႊကူဘုရား ဟူ၍ တန္ခိုးႀကီး ဘုရား ၃ ဆူရွိၿပီး သီဟိုဋ္ရွင္ ဘုရားပြဲေတာ္ကို ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ နယုန္လ (ဇြန္လ) တြင္ စည္ကားစြာ က်င္းပခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။
“အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက မထိန္းႏုိင္မွာ စိုးလို႔။ ဘုရားပြဲ ဆိုေတာ့ လူစုလူေဝး ျဖစ္လာမွာ စိုးတာေၾကာင့္ လုပ္ခြင့္ မေပးတာလို႔ပဲ ထင္ပါတယ္။ သိတဲ့ အတိုင္းပဲေလ၊ သံဃာေတာ္ေတြရဲ့ သပိတ္ ကံေဆာင္မႈကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ခဲ့ေတာ့ လူေတြ စု႐ုန္းမိၿပီး တခုခု ထပ္ျဖစ္မွာကို စိုးရိမ္တဲ့ သေဘာပါပဲ” ဟု ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိခံ တဦးက ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားပြဲကို တန္ေဆာင္မုန္းလ (ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ) တြင္ က်င္းပရန္ ရွိေသာ္လည္း က်င္းပခြင့္ ျပဳမည္၊ မျပဳမည္ကို မေသခ်ာေသးေပ။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈ ေအာက္၌ စတင္ခဲ့ေသာ ပခုက� ဴ ဆႏၵျပပြဲအတြင္း ပါဝင္ ပတ္သက္ခဲ့သူ ေရႊကူဘုရား ေဂါပက ဥက� ဌ ဦးေနလကိုလည္း အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စက္တင္ဘာလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔က ဖမ္းဆီး ေခၚေဆာင္သြားၿပီး သရက္ေထာင္တြင္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ထားသည္ဟုလည္း ၾကားသိရသည္။
ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂ဝဝ၇ ခုႏွစ္။
မေကြးတိုင္း ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိရွိ နာမည္ႀကီး ေရႊကူဘုရားပြဲကို မနက္ျဖန္ညတြင္ က်င္းပရန္ စီစဥ္ထားေသာ္လည္း ေဒသခံ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက က်င္းပခြင့္ကို ပိတ္ပင္လိုက္သည္။
သီတင္းကၽြတ္ပြဲေတာ္ အခါသမယတြင္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားမွ စတင္၍ ဆႏၵျပ အံုႂကြခဲ့သည့္ ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိတြင္ အျငိမ့္ပြဲမ်ား ပါဝင္ေသာ ဘုရားပူေဇာ္ပြဲ ျပဳလွည့္လည္ရန္ စီစဥ္ထားေသာ္လည္း အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက လံုျခံဳေရး အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္ ပိတ္လုိက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
“ေရႊကူဘုရားပြဲ ဆိုတာက သီတင္းကၽြတ္ လျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၁ ရက္ေန႔ (သဘက္ခါ) ညတိုင္း မီးစက္ေတြ ၇ လံုးေလာက္နဲ႔ ၿမ့ဳိတြင္းလွည့္လည္ အပူေဇာ္ခံတယ္။ ကပြဲေတြ၊ အၿငိမ့္ေတြ၊ ေပ်ာ္ပြဲရႊင္ပြဲေတြကို ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တိုင္း အစဥ္အလာမပ်က္ လုပ္ခဲ့တာ။ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ေပ့ါေနာ္။ မနက္ျဖန္လို ညကတည္းက ဘုရားပဲြက စတာ။ ဒီႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက လုပ္ခြင့္မျပဳလို႔ မလုပ္ႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူး” ဟု ေရႊကူဘုရား တာဝန္ရွိသူမ်ားႏွင့္ နီးစပ္သူ တဦးက ေျပာသည္။
ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိတြင္ သီဟိုဋ္ရွင္ဘုရား၊ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦးဘုရား၊ ေရႊကူဘုရား ဟူ၍ တန္ခိုးႀကီး ဘုရား ၃ ဆူရွိၿပီး သီဟိုဋ္ရွင္ ဘုရားပြဲေတာ္ကို ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ နယုန္လ (ဇြန္လ) တြင္ စည္ကားစြာ က်င္းပခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။
“အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက မထိန္းႏုိင္မွာ စိုးလို႔။ ဘုရားပြဲ ဆိုေတာ့ လူစုလူေဝး ျဖစ္လာမွာ စိုးတာေၾကာင့္ လုပ္ခြင့္ မေပးတာလို႔ပဲ ထင္ပါတယ္။ သိတဲ့ အတိုင္းပဲေလ၊ သံဃာေတာ္ေတြရဲ့ သပိတ္ ကံေဆာင္မႈကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ခဲ့ေတာ့ လူေတြ စု႐ုန္းမိၿပီး တခုခု ထပ္ျဖစ္မွာကို စိုးရိမ္တဲ့ သေဘာပါပဲ” ဟု ပခုက� ဴၿမ့ဳိခံ တဦးက ေျပာဆိုသည္။
ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားပြဲကို တန္ေဆာင္မုန္းလ (ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ) တြင္ က်င္းပရန္ ရွိေသာ္လည္း က်င္းပခြင့္ ျပဳမည္၊ မျပဳမည္ကို မေသခ်ာေသးေပ။
သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈ ေအာက္၌ စတင္ခဲ့ေသာ ပခုက� ဴ ဆႏၵျပပြဲအတြင္း ပါဝင္ ပတ္သက္ခဲ့သူ ေရႊကူဘုရား ေဂါပက ဥက� ဌ ဦးေနလကိုလည္း အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စက္တင္ဘာလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔က ဖမ္းဆီး ေခၚေဆာင္သြားၿပီး သရက္ေထာင္တြင္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ထားသည္ဟုလည္း ၾကားသိရသည္။
ေညာင္ေရႊပြဲေတာ္ႏွင့္ ရဟန္းမ်ား မစားခဲ့ရေသာ ဆြမ္းတနပ္
Mizzima
မင္းလြင္ (ရွမ္းျပည္)
ေအာက္တုိဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္
ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တုိင္း သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၁ ရက္ေန႔မွ စတင္၍ အင္းေလး ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားသည္ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေတာ္မူရာ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္မွ ေဒသစာရီ ႂကြခ်ီေတာ္မူရာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊသုိ႔ သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဆုိက္ေရာက္သည္။ ဤသည္ကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳ၍ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ပြဲေတာ္ဟူ၍ ရွမ္းျပည္တလႊား ထင္ရွား ေက်ာ္ၾကားေလသည္။ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ ငါးဆူကို ကရဝိတ္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ တင္ေဆာင္လာၿပီး ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ နမ့္ကပ္ေခ်ာင္းေပၚရွိ ျပႆဒ္ေဆာင္သုိ႔ ပထမဦးစြာ ပင့္ေဆာင္သည္။ ထုိမွတဆင့္ ပန္းရထားလွည္းျဖင့္ ပရိသတ္မ်ားက ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္အထိ ပင့္ေဆာင္ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ၾကသည္။
႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ား ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚသုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိေသာအခါ ဆရာေတာ္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားက လူထု ပရိသတ္မ်ားကို တရား နာၾကားေတာ္မူေလသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္တြင္ အနယ္နယ္ အရပ္ရပ္မွ လာေရာက္ၾကကုန္ေသာ ဘုရားဖူး ျပည္သူမ်ားက ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကုိ ၾကည္ၫိဳသဒၵါ ပြားျခင္း၊ ေရႊသကၤန္း ကပ္လႉျခင္း၊ သစ္သီး၊ ေရခ်မ္း၊ ဆီမီးႏွင့္ ပန္းမ်ားျဖင့္ ပူေဇာ္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ၾကေလသည္။
ယင္းဓေလ့ ထံုးစံ ပြဲေတာ္ကို ပေဒသရာဇ္ ရွမ္းေစာ္ဘြားမ်ားက က်င္းပ ပူေဇာ္ခဲ့ၾကရာ ေညာင္ေရႊေစာ္ဘြား စဝ္ေရႊသုိက္ လက္ထက္အထိ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဘာသာေရးကို ႐ိုေသ ကိုင္း႐ိႈင္းသည့္ အေနျဖင့္ ေစာ္ဘြား မိသားစုမ်ားပင္လွ်င္ သာမန္ ျပည္သူလူထုမ်ားႏွင့္ တန္းတူရည္တူ ပါဝင္ ဆင္ႏႊဲခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း မဆလ လက္ထက္မွစ၍ ယခု နဝတ (ဝါ) နအဖ လက္ထက္ထိ တမူ ထူးျခား ေျပာင္းလဲသြားသည္။ မဆလ လက္ထက္တြင္ ျပည္နယ္ ေကာင္စီလူႀကီးမ်ား ကိုယ္တုိင္ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊပြဲေတာ္သို႔ အခြင့္ထူးခံ လူတန္းစားမ်ားသဖြယ္ ခ်ီတက္လာၿပီး ဘုရားႏွင့္တန္းတူ ဖူးေမွ်ာ္ခံလုိခ်င္စိတ္ ဝင္ခဲ့သည္။
နအဖ ဗိုလ္သန္းေ႐ႊ လက္ထက္တြင္ေတာ့ ဖ်က္မရသည့္ သမိုင္းတရပ္ အေနျဖင့္ အမည္းစက္ တြင္သြားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဘုရားကေတာင္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေ႐ႊအတြက္ ရပ္တန္႔ ေစာင့္ဆိုင္း ေပးခဲ့ရသည္။ တရားနာၾကား ေပးရမည့္ ေ႐ႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးႏွင့္တကြ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ေန႔ဆြမ္း ငတ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္းတို႔ လုိက္နာ ေစာင့္ထိန္းရမည့္ အစဥ္အလာကို ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့သည္။ ဤသည္က အခ်ိန္ကာလမွာ ၁၉၉၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၇ ရက္ျဖစ္သည္။
ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားသည္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဆိပ္မွ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေတာ္မူမည့္ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ဆီသုိ႔ ပန္းရထားလွည္းျဖင့္ ႂကြခ်ီေနသည္။ လူထု ပရိတ္သတ္ႀကီးမွာ မ်ားျပားလွသျဖင့္ လမ္းေဘး ဝဲယာဘက္တုိင္း ျပည့္လွ်ံေနသည္။ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္ ျဖစ္ေသာ ေညာင္ေရႊကန္ႀကီး ေက်ာင္းဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလႏွင့္ ပင့္ဖိတ္ထားေသာ သံဃာေတာ္ အရွင္ျမတ္တုိ႔က တရားေဟာရန္ အဆင္သင့္ ျဖစ္ေနၾကသည္။ အခ်ိန္မွာ နံနက္ ၁ဝ နာရီသာ ရွိေသးတာေၾကာင့္ တရားနာၾကားၿပီးမွ ဆြမ္းဘုန္းေပးၾကမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ထုိစဥ္က အေရွ့ပိုင္းတုိင္း စစ္တုိင္းမႉး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ဘိုမွ ဦးေဆာင္၍ ႂကြခ်ီလာေသာ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ပါ ပန္းရထားသည္ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ ဧရိယာထဲသုိ႔ ဝင္စျပဳေနေလၿပီ။ ထုိအခ်ိန္မွာပင္ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး တပ္မႉးမွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘုိထံ ကပ်ာကယာ သတင္း ေပးပုိ႔ေနသည္။ ဟဲဟုိးေလဆိပ္မွ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ အႀကီးအကဲမ်ား ထြက္ခြာ လာေနေၾကာင္း၊ မိနစ္ပိုင္းအတြင္း ေညာင္ေ႐ႊကို ေရာက္ရွိမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ဘုရား ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကို သူတုိ႔ကိုယ္တိုင္ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚသုိ႔ ပင့္ေဆာင္မည္ ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ေစာင့္ဆိုင္းထားရမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ သတင္း ေပးပို႔လာပါသည္။
ပြဲတုိင္းတြင္ ပါေလရာ ျဖစ္ေသာ အျဖဴ၊ အစိမ္း ဝတ္စံုပိုင္ရွင္ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ဗ်ာမ်ားသြားသည္။ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ဆိုသလို ဘုရားေက်ာင္း တံခါးေပါက္ထိပ္မွ ေန၍ ပန္းရထားလွည္းကို ပိတ္ဆို႔ ထားလုိက္သည္။ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ျဖစ္သူမွာ ျပည္နယ္ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း (ေ႐ႊက်ားပ်ံ - ေဆးလိပ္ခံု) ျဖစ္သည္။ ပံုစံ အေနအထားမွာ ပန္းရထားလွည္း ေရွ့တုိးလာပါက အမဲဖ်က္သလို ဖ်က္သတ္မည့္ သေဘာရွိသည္။ ထုိအခ်ိန္မွာပင္ အေနာက္ေျမာက္ အရပ္ဆီမွ ဖုတ္သြင္းထားေသာ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ႏွစ္စီး ေပၚလာသည္။
ဖုတ္သြင္း ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ား ေဖာ္ေတာ္ဆိပ္တြင္ ဆင္းသက္မည္ ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ႀကိဳဆိုၾကရန္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘို ကိုယ္တုိင္ ေဆာ္ၾသေနသည္။ အင္း႐ုိးရာ ေလွေလွာ္ ယိမ္းအဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ဆြမ္းပို႔ ယိမ္းအက အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ခ်က္ခ်င္း နမ့္ကပ္ေခ်ာင္းထဲ ဆင္း၍ ေနရာ ယူၾကရသည္။ ေလွေပၚတြင္ ဖ်ာမ်ားခင္းေနဆဲ ဆင္းသက္လာေသာ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ အရွိန္ေၾကာင့္ ဖ်ာမ်ား ေလထဲသုိ႔ ပလူပ်ံသြားသည္။ ကရဝိက္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ေပၚရွိ ထီးေတာ္ႏွင့္ သာသနာ့ အလံေတာ္မ်ား လြင့္စင္ ထြက္ကုန္ၾကရသည္။ ျမင္ရေသာ ျမင္ကြင္းမွာ ေအာ့ႏွလံုးနာစရာ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ ဖ႐ုိဖရဲ ႏုိင္လြန္းသည္။ ျပာယာ ခတ္လြန္းသည္။
ပထမဦးဆံုး ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေပၚမွ မ်က္ႏွာ သုန္သုန္မႈန္မႈန္ျဖင့္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊ ဆင္းသက္လာသည္။ သူ႔ေနာက္တြင္မူ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒုတိယ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေပၚမွ ပထမဦးဆံုး ဆင္းသက္လာသူက ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး ျဖစ္သည္။ အရပ္ျမင့္မားၿပီး ႐ုတ္တရက္ေၾကာင့္ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ေဘာင္ႏွင့္ ဦးေခါင္း တုိက္မိသြားၿပီး ဦးထုပ္လည္း ျပဳတ္က်လုဆဲဆဲ ျဖစ္သြားသည္။ သတိဆြဲ အေလးျပဳေနေသာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ဘို ျပန္လည္ အေလးမျပဳဘဲ ရွိေနရာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘိုခမ်ာ ေတာင့္ေတာင့္ႀကီး အေလးျပဳ ေနရရွာသည္။ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒၚျမျမစန္းက အလုိက္သင့္ ေယာဂီပုဝါေလး ထုတ္ေပးေတာ့မွ သင္ခန္းစာ ေပးျခင္းကို အဆံုးသတ္လုိက္သည္။
ဘုရားပန္း ရထားလွည္းကို ပိတ္ဆုိ႔ထားသည့္ ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ဂုိဏ္းခ်ဳပ္ နာယက ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊ ကို ျမင္ေသာအခါ လက္အုပ္ခ်ီ၍ ကပ်ာကယာ ႀကိဳဆိုၾကသည္။ (ဘုရားကို လက္အုပ္ခ်ီျခင္း မရွိခဲ့ပါ)။ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းဝထိပ္မွ ေန၍ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ကိုယ္တုိင္ ပန္းရထားႀကိဳးကို ဆြဲၿပီး ဦးေဆာင္သြားၾကသည္။ ပုခံုးထက္တြင္ ေရႊၾကယ္ပြင့္ႏွင့္အတူ လုိက္ဖက္ျခင္း မရွိေသာ ေယာဂီပုဝါ၊ လက္ကသာ ပန္းရထားႀကိဳးကို ဆြဲေနၾကေသာ္လည္း ခါးတြင္ လူသတ္ ေသနတ္မ်ား ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲထားသည္။ ေရွ့ဆံုး ဝဲဘက္မွ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊႏွင့္ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္၊ ယာဘက္တြင္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း၊ ထုိသူတို႔ ေနာက္တြင္ ဗိုလ္သိန္းဝင္း (ေလ) ႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္စိုးသိန္း (ေရ)၊ ထုိသူတို႔ ေနာက္တြင္မူကား အျခားေသာ တပ္နယ္မႉးမ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ တရားနာၾကားေတာ့ အခ်ိန္ကား ေန႔လည္ ၁၁ နာရီေက်ာ္ေနၿပီ။ ငါးပါးသီလ တရား ေပးၿပီးေသာအခါ ေန႔လည္ မြန္းတည့္ေနၿပီ။ ဆရာေတာ္ သံဃာေတာ္ အားလံုး ေန႔ဆြမ္း ဘုန္းေပးဖုိ႔ရန္ ေနမြန္း တည့္သြားေလၿပီ။ ဆြမ္းပြဲမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္ ေပးေနေသာ အင္းလူငယ္ အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၏ မ်က္ႏွာမွာ ေဒါသ ခက္ထန္ေနသည္။ ပို၍ အက်ည္းတန္ ျမင္ကြင္းမွာ ပလႅင္ထက္တြင္ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေနေသာ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကို ေဂါပက လူႀကီးအခ်ဳိ့က ပင့္ေဆာင္ကာ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ (သထံု - ပအိုဝ့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး) ႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း (နမ့္ခမ္း -ပေလာင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး) တုိ႔ ရွိရာသုိ႔ ယူေဆာင္သြားသည္။ ရာဇဝင္ အဆက္ဆက္၌ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား ဘုရား ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကို ေ႐ႊမခ်ရဟု တားျမစ္ခဲ့ေသာ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္သည္ ယခုေတာ့ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ ခံလုိက္ရသည္။ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကို ေရႊခ်သည္။ ဆံပင္ႏွင့္ ပြတ္သည္။ လက္ျဖင့္ ပြတ္သတ္ကာ အမည္မသိ ဂါထာမ်ား ႐ြတ္ဖတ္ ေနၾကသည္။ ျမင္ေနၾကရသူ အေပါင္း မ်က္ရည္မိုး ရြာသြန္းခဲ့ရရွာသည္။ ၾကားရသူ အေပါင္း ေဒါသမုန္တိုင္း ထန္ခဲ့ၾကရရွာသည္။
(ယင္းအျဖစ္အပ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ကၽြႏု္ပ္ႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးေသာ ရွမ္းျပည္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး သမားေဟာင္း ဆရာ-ဦးခ်စ္ဦး (ရြာႀကီးေတာင္) ႏွင့္ ဆရာ ဦးတင္ဦး (နႏၵဝန္ရပ္-ေညာင္ေရႊ) တုိ႔သည္ ေသလြန္သည္အထိ ေဖာ္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားကို သြားေရာက္၍ ရွိခုိးျခင္း မျပဳၾကေတာ့ေပ။)
ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း လက္ေရးမွ ေမာင္ဘုိလက္သီး သြားတေခ်ာင္း
ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တုိင္း ေတာ္သလင္းလတြင္ ေညာင္ေရႊၿမ့ဳိ၌ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္လံုးဆုိင္ရာ ဝိနယာဒိႏုဂၢဟ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲႀကီးကို က်င္းပလ်က္ ရွိပါသည္။ မူလ ဒါယကာမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမတေဟာင္း စဝ္ေရႊသိုက္ ျဖစ္သည္။ စဝ္ေရႊသုိက္သည္ အင္းစိန္ ေထာင္ထဲ၌ (ေဆးထုိး သတ္ခံရ၍ဟု ေျပာၾကသည္။) ကြယ္လြန္သြားသည့္ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္လည္း က်န္ရွိေသာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ရပ္မိရပ္ဖမ်ားႏွင့္ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းတိုက္ ဆရာေတာ္တုိ႔က လက္ဆင့္ကမ္း ဆက္လက္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ ႏွစ္စဥ္ လာေရာက္ ေျဖဆုိသူ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သာမေဏမ်ား ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ရွိခဲ့ရာ ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္မူ သံုးေထာင္ေက်ာ္ေလၿပီ။ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲ က်င္းပ ၿပီးေသာအခါ တပည့္ ဒါယကာ၊ ဒါယကာမ အေပါင္းတုိ႔က ဆြမ္းေလာင္းလႉပြဲႀကီးကို ၿခိမ့္ၿခိမ့္သဲ က်င္းပသည့္ ဓေလ့ထံုးစံပြဲ ရွိသည္။
လာေရာက္ၾကေသာ လူထု ပရိသတ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ထမင္းရည္ ေခ်ာင္းစီးေလာက္ေအာင္ ဧည့္ခံ ေကၽြးေမြးပါသည္။ ဟင္းလ်ာမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ တဆယ္သားခန္႔ အေလးခ်ိန္ ရွိေသာ ဝက္သားတံုးမ်ားကို လံုးခ်က္ၿပီး၊ ဟင္းရည္အေနျဖင့္ အင္းသား႐ိုးရာ ပဲလံုးေဆးခါးဟင္း၊ င႐ုတ္သီးလံုး ေမႊးေမႊးေၾကာ္ႏွင့္ ငါးမုန္႔ေျခာက္ေၾကာ္တုိ႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဝက္သား၏ ထံုးစံအရ (အီ) ေသာ္လည္း အင္းသားဟင္းရည္ ပဲလံုးေဆးခါးသည္ အီျခင္းကို ေခ်ဖ်က္ေပးသည္။ င႐ုတ္သီးေျခာက္ကို ေမႊးေနေအာင္ ေၾကာ္ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ စပ္ေသာ္လည္း ပါးစပ္ထဲတြင္ေမႊးေမႊးေလးႏွင့္ တမူထူးကဲသည့္ စပ္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ တႀကိမ္ စားဖူး႐ံုျဖင့္ စြဲမက္ သြားေလာက္ေအာင္ လက္စြမ္းထက္ေသာ အင္းေလး႐ိုးရာ စားစရာ ျဖစ္သည္။
ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္ ျဖစ္ေသာ စစ္ကုိင္း ေရႊဟသၤာ ဆရာေတာ္ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူေသာအခါ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းတုိက္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလသည္ ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္အျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ျခင္း ခံရသည္။ ရပခ (အေရွ့ပိုင္းတုိင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္) တိုင္းမႉး ျဖစ္ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ဆရာေတာ္ကို ၾကည္ၫို ကိုးကြယ္သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ တုိင္းမႉးဘဝမွ ရာထူးတက္ၿပီး ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊေအာက္ ေရာက္သြားသည့္တုိင္ ဆရာေတာ္ကို ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ ကူညီေပးရန္ ရပခ တိုင္းမႉးမ်ားကို မွာၾကားေလ့ ရွိသည္။
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္သည္ “နအဖ နိဂံုး - ကိုးေလးလံုး” စကားေၾကာင့္ နအဖ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ေသာက မ်ားေနေသာ ႏွစ္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေသြးေခ်ာင္းစီးမည္ဆိုေသာ နိမိတ္ေၾကာင့္ ေနအိမ္ ေခါင္မိုးမ်ားကို ေဆးအနီ သုတ္ခိုင္းသည္။ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ေျပးကိန္း ရွိသည္ဟူေသာ နိမိတ္ေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားကို မေျပးေစဘဲ ျပည္သူလူထုကို ေျပးခိုင္းသည့္ အေနျဖင့္ “မာရသြန္ ၿပိဳင္ပြဲ” မ်ားက်င္းပကာ လူထုကို ေျပးခိုင္းသည္။ အဘက္ဘက္မွ အၾကပ္႐ိုက္သည့္ႏွစ္မုိ႔ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္ထံ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္ေနရသည္။
ေတာ္သလင္းလတြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ “ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္လံုးဆုိင္ရာ ဝိနယာဒိႏုဂၢဟ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲႀကီး” ကို စည္စည္ကားကား က်င္းပေပးပါ့မည္ဟုလည္း ဂတိျပဳသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ကလည္း ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္ အျဖစ္ တာဝန္ ယူထားတာေၾကာင့္ ေျမျပန္႔မွ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းဝင္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားကုိ စံုစံုလင္လင္ ဖိတ္ၾကားေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုသည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးကလည္း ၿပီးျပည့္စံုရမည္ဟု ေလွ်ာက္တင္ႂကြားဝါသည္။ ဤသုိ႔ျဖင့္ “ေတာ္သလင္းလ စာျပန္ပြဲ” သည္ နီးသည္ထက္ နီးလာပါေတာ့သည္။
ေက်းသီး-မုိင္းကိုင္ ခရီးစဥ္တြင္ ေခ်ာင္းေျမာင္းပစ္ခတ္ လုပ္ႀကံခံရေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ အသက္ေဘးမွ သီသီေလး လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေသာ အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေၾကာက္စိတ္ မေျပေသးမီ ယခုလည္း ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး၏ အမိန္႔ေၾကာင့္ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ စာျပန္ပြဲကို ျပင္ဆင္ ေပးေနရရွာသည္။
စီမံ ခန္႔ခြဲရာတြင္လည္း ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ရဲမႉးႀကီးကို အခမ္းအနား ျပင္ဆင္ေရး၊ ျပည္နယ္ လဝကမႉးကို ႀကိဳဆိုေနရာ ခ်ထားေရး၊ ဒု-တိုင္းမႉးကို ဘ႑ာ ရွာေဖြေရး၊ ဗထူး တပ္နယ္မႉးကို လံုျခံဳေရး၊ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူႏွင့္ သမီးျဖစ္သူ (သခ်ၤာ တတိယႏွစ္ - ေတာင္ႀကီး တက� သိုလ္) ကို စာရင္းစစ္ေဆးေရး စသည္ျဖင့္ တာဝန္မ်ား ခြဲေဝေပးကာ ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီမ်ား ဖြဲ႔စည္းခိုင္းသည္။
ျပည္နယ္ လဝကမႉး၏ ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ အဖြဲ႔သည္ ႀကိဳဆိုေနရာ ခ်ထားေရး တာဝန္ ယူရသျဖင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔အသင္းမွ ေတာင္ႀကီး-ရန္ကုန္ ေျပးဆြဲေနေသာ ကားမ်ားကို သံုးစြဲေလသည္။ ဒီဇယ္ဆီမ်ားကို အလြန္အမင္း ထုတ္ယူၿပီး အခ်ဳိ့ကို ေမွာင္ခုိ ထုတ္ေရာင္းစားသည္။ ကားသမားမ်ားကို ေဝစု မေပးသျဖင့္ ကားဆရာက ပညာျပေတာ့သည္။ စစ္ကုိင္း-မႏၱေလးဘက္မွ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းဝင္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားကို သြားေရာက္ ႀကိဳဆုိေသာအခါ ျပႆနာ တစံုတရာ မျဖစ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စာေရးၿပီး တိုင္ၾကားရာတြင္ လက္သံေျပာင္ေသာ ပဲခူး-ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ဆရာေတာ္ အဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ ျပႆနာ ေပၚေတာ့သည္။
ဗိုလ္မ်က္ေစာင္း အေၾကာင္းမေ႐ြး
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္၊ ေတာ္သလင္းလဆန္း ၁၃ ရက္၊ စာျပန္ပြဲေတာ္ႀကီး ၿပီးဆံုးသည့္ေန႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထမင္းစား ဓမၼာ႐ံုေပၚတြင္ စစ္ယူနီေဖာင္း ဝတ္ဆင္ထားသူမ်ား အိေႁႏၵ မရဘဲ ေအာ္ဟစ္ စားေသာက္ ေနၾကေသာေၾကာင့္ လူထုပရိသတ္ မ်ားစြာမွာ စိတ္အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ ျဖစ္ေနရသည္။ အခ်ဳိ့မွာ ထမင္းပင္ မစားေသာက္ေတာ့ဘဲ ျပင္ပ ထမင္းဆိုင္မွ ထမင္း ဝယ္ယူကာ ေညာင္ေရႊ တုိဟူးသုပ္ျဖင့္ ေရေခ်ာင္းေဘးတြင္ စုေဝး စားေသာက္ ေနၾကသူမ်ားလည္း ရွိသည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ဓမၼာ႐ံုေပၚရွိ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး အဖြဲ႔၊ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို အဖြဲ႔ စစ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ကင္းကင္း ေနလုိေသာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ထမင္းဝုိင္းမွ သမုိင္းတြင္မည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္ႏွစ္ခု ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး အဖြဲ႔မွ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ေက်ာ္ဆန္း (ေနာင္အခါ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး) ဆုိသူသည္ ညစ္ေထးေထး (ဝါက်င္က်င္) လက္ေဆးရည္ခြက္ကို အင္းေလး-ပဲလံုး ေဆးခါးဟင္းရည္ခြက္ ထင္၍ မွားေသာက္မိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထုိျဖစ္စဥ္ကို အနီးရွိ လြိဳင္လင္ တပ္နယ္မႉး၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ျပည့္စံု (ေနာင္အခါ စီးပြား-ကူးသန္း ဝန္ႀကီး) သိရွိသြား၍ မထိန္းႏိုင္ဘဲ ေအာ္ဟစ္ ရယ္ေမာ လုိက္ေသးသည္။
ကြမ္းအလြန္စားေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ ထမင္း စားၿပီးေသာအခါ အားပါးတရ လက္ေဆးရန္ အတြက္ ေရစင္သုိ႔ ေရာက္လာသည္။ လူပရိတ္သတ္ မ်ားလြန္းေသာေၾကာင့္ ေ႐ႊဝါဆပ္ျပာကို အပုိင္းပုိင္း တံုးတစ္ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို တေယာက္ ႏို႔မလိႈင္လံုး ထင္မွတ္ကာ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ပါးစပ္ထဲသုိ႔ ပစ္သြင္းလုိက္သည္။ လက္သုပ္ပုဝါ အသင့္ကုိင္ထားေသာ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္-ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း ေတြ႔ရွိသြား၍ ဆပ္ျပာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ရွင္းျပရာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုက “အၫွီအေဟာက္ေတြ မ်ားလြန္းေတာ့ လက္ေဆး႐ံုတင္ မကဘူး၊ ငါက အူေတြပါ ေဆးတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ ဆပ္ျပာကို မ်ဳိခ်တယ္ကြ” ဟု ေခ်ာ္လဲေရာထုိင္ စကားျဖင့္ အရွက္ေျပ ေျပာလုိက္သည္။
ဓမၼာ႐ံုႀကီးတြင္ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္လည္းျဖစ္ ေ႐ႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္လည္း ျဖစ္ေသာ ဆရာေတာ္သည္ တရားေဟာၾကား၍ ငါးပါးသီလ ေပးေနေလသည္။ ထူးျခားေနသည္မွာ ဓမၼာ႐ံု၏ မွန္စီ ေ႐ႊခ်ထားေသာ တိုင္တိုင္းတြင္ ဒါယကာေဟာင္း စဝ္ေ႐ႊသုိက္၏ ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲ ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး တေယာက္ ဘဝင္မက် ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ တရားနာၾကားၿပီး ေရစက္ခ်ၿပီးေသာ အခါ မ်က္ႏွာရမည္ အထင္ျဖင့္ ဆရာေတာ္ထံ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္ကာ မႈိရသည့္ မ်က္ႏွာျဖင့္ “ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရား ၿပီးျပည့္စံုေတာ္မူၿပီး သေဘာ က်ေတာ္မူပါရဲ့လား” ဟု ေမးျမန္း ေလွ်ာက္တင္ေတာ္မူသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္က “အစစ အရာရာတုိင္း ၿပီးျပည့္စံုေပမယ့္ ဘုန္းႀကီး ေမွ်ာ္ေနရွာတဲ့ ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ကုိယ္ေတာ္ ေရာက္မလာတာေတာ့ စိတ္မေကာင္းဘူး” ဟု ေျဖၾကားလုိက္သည္။ လက္တဖက္မွလည္း ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ကုိယ္ေတာ္၏ အတိုင္အေတာ ထူသည့္စာကို ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးကို လွမ္းေပးလုိက္သည္။ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ ရည္မွန္းထားခ်က္မ်ား ျဖစ္မလာ၍ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး၏ နီရဲေနေသာ မ်က္ေစာင္းသည္ အနီးရွိ ခ်စ္ဇနီးေခ်ာ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း ကုိ ေက်ာ္ကာ တုိင္းမႉး ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို ထံသုိ႔ စူးစုိက္ ေရာက္ရွိ သြားေလေတာ့သည္။
ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ပ်ံတက္ခါနီးခ်ိန္တြင္ ေမာင္ေအး၏ ေဒါသသံ၊ ႀကိမ္းေမာင္းသံတို႔သည္ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ အသံႏွင့္အတူ ဆူညံေနသည္။ ခႏၶာကိုယ္ကို မတ္မတ္ ေကာ့ထားရေသာ တုိင္းမႉးေမာင္ဘို ၾကက္ေသေသကာ မွင္တက္စြာ နာခံေနရသည္။ ဆူပူသူက အရပ္ ကလန္ကလား၊ လက္ညိႇး တကားကားႏွင့္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး နာခံေနရသူက ေၾကာင္ေတာင္ေတာင္ မ်က္ႏွာ၊ ျပဴးက်ယ္က်ယ္ မ်က္လံုးႏွင့္မုိ႔ လြန္စြာ လုိက္ဖက္သင့္လွေသာ ျမင္ကြင္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
ေနာက္ဆံုးရလဒ္
ေညာင္ေ႐ႊမွ တုိင္းမႉး ေမာင္ဘို ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ကားတန္းႀကီးသည္ မုိင္ကုန္ ဖြင့္ေမာင္းကာ ေတာင္ႀကီးသုိ႔ ခ်ီတက္ သြားေလသည္။ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အစည္းအေဝး ခန္းမ႐ံုးတြင္ ကားတန္းသည္ ရပ္တန္႔လိုက္ၿပီး ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ တာဝန္ခံမ်ား တန္းစီရပ္ ေနယူလုိက္သည္။ တုိင္းမႉးကား ဝင္လာေတာ့ အားလံုး သတိဆြဲ၊ အသက္မ႐ွဴ ရဲေလာက္ေအာင္ ၿငိမ္သက္ေနရသည္။ တန္းစီေနရာ ယူထားၾကသူမ်ားထဲတြင္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ေဘာ္လီေဘာ ဥက� ဌလည္းျဖစ္၊ လတ္တေလာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ စာျပန္ပြဲတြင္ ႀကိဳဆို ေနရာခ်ထားေရး ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ တာဝန္ခံလည္း ျဖစ္ေသာ ျပည္နယ္ လ-ဝ-က မႉးသည္ အရပ္ အျမင့္ဆံုး ျဖစ္သည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘုိ တေယာက္ ပါးစပ္မွ အျမဳပ္တစီစီ ထြက္ေနရင္း ကားေပၚမွ ေျပးဆင္းလာကာ ျပည္နယ္ လ-ဝ-က မႉး၏ မ်က္ႏွာတည့္တည့္ကို လွမ္းထုိးလုိက္ေလသည္။ လက္သီးခ်က္သည္ ေတာ္ေတာ္ ျပင္းပံုရသည္။ ေဆာင္းထားေသာ လ-ဝ-က ဦးထုပ္ပင္ ေျမခ က်သြားရွာသည္။
ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ဦးဉာဏ္လင္းက ေကာက္ယူမည္ လုပ္စဥ္ “ဟို ... ေခြးမသားက ဘာလုိ႔ လွမ္းေကာက္တာလဲ။ မင္းပါ အဆစ္နာခ်င္လို႔လား” ေန႔ခင္းက ဆပ္ျပာခဲကို မလိုင္လံုး ထင္၍ ေကာက္ယူ စားမိေသာေၾကာင့္ ဆပ္ျပာ တန္ခိုးျပကာ အျမဳပ္မ်ား ထြက္လာသည္ကို ျမင္ရသူ အေပါင္းက တိုင္းမႉး ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ စိတ္ႀကီးလွ်င္ ဝက္႐ူးပ်ံေရာဂါ ထတတ္သည္ဟု ေျပာစမွတ္ တြင္သြားေလသည္။
မေမ့ႏိုင္ေသာအရာမ်ားမွာ
ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ဆရာေတာ္၏ စာျမင္တုိင္း ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ေဒါသထြက္ကာ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူရွာၿပီ ျဖစ္ေသာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလ၏ သာဓု အႏုေမာဒနာကို သတိရလ်က္ ရွိသည္။ ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး ေမာင္ေအး၏ မ်က္ေစာင္းကို ျမင္ေယာင္မိတိုင္း ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ ေဒါသထြက္ကာ သတိဆြဲ၊ ၿငိမ္သက္စြာ ရပ္တန္႔ေနျခင္းကို သတိရေနသည္။ ပင္စင္ ယူသြားရွာၿပီ ျဖစ္ေသာ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ လူဝင္မႈ ႀကီးၾကပ္ေရး (လ-ဝ-က) မႉးသည္ ေဟာင္းေလာင္း ျဖစ္ေနေသာ သြားႏွင့္ ဒီဇယ္ ပီပါမ်ားကို ျမင္ေယာင္မိတိုင္း ကရင္၊ မြန္၊ တနသၤာရီေဒသ စစ္တုိင္းမႉးႀကီး ေမာင္ဘို ကုိ က်ိန္ဆဲ ေနတတ္ေလသတည္း။
မင္းလြင္ (ရွမ္းျပည္)
မင္းလြင္ (ရွမ္းျပည္)
ေအာက္တုိဘာလ ၂၅ ရက္၊ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္
ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တုိင္း သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၁ ရက္ေန႔မွ စတင္၍ အင္းေလး ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားသည္ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေတာ္မူရာ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္မွ ေဒသစာရီ ႂကြခ်ီေတာ္မူရာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊသုိ႔ သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဆုိက္ေရာက္သည္။ ဤသည္ကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳ၍ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ပြဲေတာ္ဟူ၍ ရွမ္းျပည္တလႊား ထင္ရွား ေက်ာ္ၾကားေလသည္။ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ ငါးဆူကို ကရဝိတ္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ တင္ေဆာင္လာၿပီး ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ နမ့္ကပ္ေခ်ာင္းေပၚရွိ ျပႆဒ္ေဆာင္သုိ႔ ပထမဦးစြာ ပင့္ေဆာင္သည္။ ထုိမွတဆင့္ ပန္းရထားလွည္းျဖင့္ ပရိသတ္မ်ားက ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္အထိ ပင့္ေဆာင္ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ၾကသည္။
႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ား ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚသုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိေသာအခါ ဆရာေတာ္ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားက လူထု ပရိသတ္မ်ားကို တရား နာၾကားေတာ္မူေလသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္တြင္ အနယ္နယ္ အရပ္ရပ္မွ လာေရာက္ၾကကုန္ေသာ ဘုရားဖူး ျပည္သူမ်ားက ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကုိ ၾကည္ၫိဳသဒၵါ ပြားျခင္း၊ ေရႊသကၤန္း ကပ္လႉျခင္း၊ သစ္သီး၊ ေရခ်မ္း၊ ဆီမီးႏွင့္ ပန္းမ်ားျဖင့္ ပူေဇာ္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ၾကေလသည္။
ယင္းဓေလ့ ထံုးစံ ပြဲေတာ္ကို ပေဒသရာဇ္ ရွမ္းေစာ္ဘြားမ်ားက က်င္းပ ပူေဇာ္ခဲ့ၾကရာ ေညာင္ေရႊေစာ္ဘြား စဝ္ေရႊသုိက္ လက္ထက္အထိ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဘာသာေရးကို ႐ိုေသ ကိုင္း႐ိႈင္းသည့္ အေနျဖင့္ ေစာ္ဘြား မိသားစုမ်ားပင္လွ်င္ သာမန္ ျပည္သူလူထုမ်ားႏွင့္ တန္းတူရည္တူ ပါဝင္ ဆင္ႏႊဲခဲ့ၾကေသာ္လည္း မဆလ လက္ထက္မွစ၍ ယခု နဝတ (ဝါ) နအဖ လက္ထက္ထိ တမူ ထူးျခား ေျပာင္းလဲသြားသည္။ မဆလ လက္ထက္တြင္ ျပည္နယ္ ေကာင္စီလူႀကီးမ်ား ကိုယ္တုိင္ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊပြဲေတာ္သို႔ အခြင့္ထူးခံ လူတန္းစားမ်ားသဖြယ္ ခ်ီတက္လာၿပီး ဘုရားႏွင့္တန္းတူ ဖူးေမွ်ာ္ခံလုိခ်င္စိတ္ ဝင္ခဲ့သည္။
နအဖ ဗိုလ္သန္းေ႐ႊ လက္ထက္တြင္ေတာ့ ဖ်က္မရသည့္ သမိုင္းတရပ္ အေနျဖင့္ အမည္းစက္ တြင္သြားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဘုရားကေတာင္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေ႐ႊအတြက္ ရပ္တန္႔ ေစာင့္ဆိုင္း ေပးခဲ့ရသည္။ တရားနာၾကား ေပးရမည့္ ေ႐ႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္ ဆရာေတာ္ႀကီးႏွင့္တကြ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ား ေန႔ဆြမ္း ငတ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္းတို႔ လုိက္နာ ေစာင့္ထိန္းရမည့္ အစဥ္အလာကို ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့သည္။ ဤသည္က အခ်ိန္ကာလမွာ ၁၉၉၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ သီတင္းကၽြတ္လဆန္း ၇ ရက္ျဖစ္သည္။
ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဦး ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားသည္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ဆိပ္မွ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေတာ္မူမည့္ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ဆီသုိ႔ ပန္းရထားလွည္းျဖင့္ ႂကြခ်ီေနသည္။ လူထု ပရိတ္သတ္ႀကီးမွာ မ်ားျပားလွသျဖင့္ လမ္းေဘး ဝဲယာဘက္တုိင္း ျပည့္လွ်ံေနသည္။ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္ ျဖစ္ေသာ ေညာင္ေရႊကန္ႀကီး ေက်ာင္းဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလႏွင့္ ပင့္ဖိတ္ထားေသာ သံဃာေတာ္ အရွင္ျမတ္တုိ႔က တရားေဟာရန္ အဆင္သင့္ ျဖစ္ေနၾကသည္။ အခ်ိန္မွာ နံနက္ ၁ဝ နာရီသာ ရွိေသးတာေၾကာင့္ တရားနာၾကားၿပီးမွ ဆြမ္းဘုန္းေပးၾကမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ထုိစဥ္က အေရွ့ပိုင္းတုိင္း စစ္တုိင္းမႉး ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ဘိုမွ ဦးေဆာင္၍ ႂကြခ်ီလာေသာ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ပါ ပန္းရထားသည္ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ ဧရိယာထဲသုိ႔ ဝင္စျပဳေနေလၿပီ။ ထုိအခ်ိန္မွာပင္ ဆက္သြယ္ေရး တပ္မႉးမွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘုိထံ ကပ်ာကယာ သတင္း ေပးပုိ႔ေနသည္။ ဟဲဟုိးေလဆိပ္မွ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ အႀကီးအကဲမ်ား ထြက္ခြာ လာေနေၾကာင္း၊ မိနစ္ပိုင္းအတြင္း ေညာင္ေ႐ႊကို ေရာက္ရွိမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ဘုရား ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကို သူတုိ႔ကိုယ္တိုင္ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚသုိ႔ ပင့္ေဆာင္မည္ ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ေစာင့္ဆိုင္းထားရမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ သတင္း ေပးပို႔လာပါသည္။
ပြဲတုိင္းတြင္ ပါေလရာ ျဖစ္ေသာ အျဖဴ၊ အစိမ္း ဝတ္စံုပိုင္ရွင္ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ဗ်ာမ်ားသြားသည္။ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ဆိုသလို ဘုရားေက်ာင္း တံခါးေပါက္ထိပ္မွ ေန၍ ပန္းရထားလွည္းကို ပိတ္ဆို႔ ထားလုိက္သည္။ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ျဖစ္သူမွာ ျပည္နယ္ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း (ေ႐ႊက်ားပ်ံ - ေဆးလိပ္ခံု) ျဖစ္သည္။ ပံုစံ အေနအထားမွာ ပန္းရထားလွည္း ေရွ့တုိးလာပါက အမဲဖ်က္သလို ဖ်က္သတ္မည့္ သေဘာရွိသည္။ ထုိအခ်ိန္မွာပင္ အေနာက္ေျမာက္ အရပ္ဆီမွ ဖုတ္သြင္းထားေသာ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ႏွစ္စီး ေပၚလာသည္။
ဖုတ္သြင္း ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ား ေဖာ္ေတာ္ဆိပ္တြင္ ဆင္းသက္မည္ ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ႀကိဳဆိုၾကရန္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘို ကိုယ္တုိင္ ေဆာ္ၾသေနသည္။ အင္း႐ုိးရာ ေလွေလွာ္ ယိမ္းအဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ဆြမ္းပို႔ ယိမ္းအက အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၊ ခ်က္ခ်င္း နမ့္ကပ္ေခ်ာင္းထဲ ဆင္း၍ ေနရာ ယူၾကရသည္။ ေလွေပၚတြင္ ဖ်ာမ်ားခင္းေနဆဲ ဆင္းသက္လာေသာ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ အရွိန္ေၾကာင့္ ဖ်ာမ်ား ေလထဲသုိ႔ ပလူပ်ံသြားသည္။ ကရဝိက္ ေဖာင္ေတာ္ေပၚရွိ ထီးေတာ္ႏွင့္ သာသနာ့ အလံေတာ္မ်ား လြင့္စင္ ထြက္ကုန္ၾကရသည္။ ျမင္ရေသာ ျမင္ကြင္းမွာ ေအာ့ႏွလံုးနာစရာ ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ ဖ႐ုိဖရဲ ႏုိင္လြန္းသည္။ ျပာယာ ခတ္လြန္းသည္။
ပထမဦးဆံုး ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေပၚမွ မ်က္ႏွာ သုန္သုန္မႈန္မႈန္ျဖင့္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊ ဆင္းသက္လာသည္။ သူ႔ေနာက္တြင္မူ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒုတိယ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေပၚမွ ပထမဦးဆံုး ဆင္းသက္လာသူက ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး ျဖစ္သည္။ အရပ္ျမင့္မားၿပီး ႐ုတ္တရက္ေၾကာင့္ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ေဘာင္ႏွင့္ ဦးေခါင္း တုိက္မိသြားၿပီး ဦးထုပ္လည္း ျပဳတ္က်လုဆဲဆဲ ျဖစ္သြားသည္။ သတိဆြဲ အေလးျပဳေနေသာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေမာင္ဘို ျပန္လည္ အေလးမျပဳဘဲ ရွိေနရာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေမာင္ဘိုခမ်ာ ေတာင့္ေတာင့္ႀကီး အေလးျပဳ ေနရရွာသည္။ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒၚျမျမစန္းက အလုိက္သင့္ ေယာဂီပုဝါေလး ထုတ္ေပးေတာ့မွ သင္ခန္းစာ ေပးျခင္းကို အဆံုးသတ္လုိက္သည္။
ဘုရားပန္း ရထားလွည္းကို ပိတ္ဆုိ႔ထားသည့္ ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ဂုိဏ္းခ်ဳပ္ နာယက ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊ ကို ျမင္ေသာအခါ လက္အုပ္ခ်ီ၍ ကပ်ာကယာ ႀကိဳဆိုၾကသည္။ (ဘုရားကို လက္အုပ္ခ်ီျခင္း မရွိခဲ့ပါ)။ ေဒသစာရီ ေက်ာင္းဝထိပ္မွ ေန၍ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ကိုယ္တုိင္ ပန္းရထားႀကိဳးကို ဆြဲၿပီး ဦးေဆာင္သြားၾကသည္။ ပုခံုးထက္တြင္ ေရႊၾကယ္ပြင့္ႏွင့္အတူ လုိက္ဖက္ျခင္း မရွိေသာ ေယာဂီပုဝါ၊ လက္ကသာ ပန္းရထားႀကိဳးကို ဆြဲေနၾကေသာ္လည္း ခါးတြင္ လူသတ္ ေသနတ္မ်ား ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲထားသည္။ ေရွ့ဆံုး ဝဲဘက္မွ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊႏွင့္ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္၊ ယာဘက္တြင္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း၊ ထုိသူတို႔ ေနာက္တြင္ ဗိုလ္သိန္းဝင္း (ေလ) ႏွင့္ ဗိုလ္စိုးသိန္း (ေရ)၊ ထုိသူတို႔ ေနာက္တြင္မူကား အျခားေသာ တပ္နယ္မႉးမ်ားႏွင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္မ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။
ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ တရားနာၾကားေတာ့ အခ်ိန္ကား ေန႔လည္ ၁၁ နာရီေက်ာ္ေနၿပီ။ ငါးပါးသီလ တရား ေပးၿပီးေသာအခါ ေန႔လည္ မြန္းတည့္ေနၿပီ။ ဆရာေတာ္ သံဃာေတာ္ အားလံုး ေန႔ဆြမ္း ဘုန္းေပးဖုိ႔ရန္ ေနမြန္း တည့္သြားေလၿပီ။ ဆြမ္းပြဲမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္ ေပးေနေသာ အင္းလူငယ္ အဖြဲ႔မ်ား၏ မ်က္ႏွာမွာ ေဒါသ ခက္ထန္ေနသည္။ ပို၍ အက်ည္းတန္ ျမင္ကြင္းမွာ ပလႅင္ထက္တြင္ ကိန္းဝပ္ စံပယ္ေနေသာ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္မ်ားကို ေဂါပက လူႀကီးအခ်ဳိ့က ပင့္ေဆာင္ကာ ေဒၚႀကိဳင္ႀကိဳင္ (သထံု - ပအိုဝ့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး) ႏွင့္ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း (နမ့္ခမ္း -ပေလာင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီး) တုိ႔ ရွိရာသုိ႔ ယူေဆာင္သြားသည္။ ရာဇဝင္ အဆက္ဆက္၌ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား ဘုရား ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကို ေ႐ႊမခ်ရဟု တားျမစ္ခဲ့ေသာ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္သည္ ယခုေတာ့ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ ခံလုိက္ရသည္။ ႐ုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကို ေရႊခ်သည္။ ဆံပင္ႏွင့္ ပြတ္သည္။ လက္ျဖင့္ ပြတ္သတ္ကာ အမည္မသိ ဂါထာမ်ား ႐ြတ္ဖတ္ ေနၾကသည္။ ျမင္ေနၾကရသူ အေပါင္း မ်က္ရည္မိုး ရြာသြန္းခဲ့ရရွာသည္။ ၾကားရသူ အေပါင္း ေဒါသမုန္တိုင္း ထန္ခဲ့ၾကရရွာသည္။
(ယင္းအျဖစ္အပ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ကၽြႏု္ပ္ႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးေသာ ရွမ္းျပည္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး သမားေဟာင္း ဆရာ-ဦးခ်စ္ဦး (ရြာႀကီးေတာင္) ႏွင့္ ဆရာ ဦးတင္ဦး (နႏၵဝန္ရပ္-ေညာင္ေရႊ) တုိ႔သည္ ေသလြန္သည္အထိ ေဖာ္ေတာ္ဦး ဘုရားကို သြားေရာက္၍ ရွိခုိးျခင္း မျပဳၾကေတာ့ေပ။)
ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း လက္ေရးမွ ေမာင္ဘုိလက္သီး သြားတေခ်ာင္း
ႏွစ္စဥ္ႏွစ္တုိင္း ေတာ္သလင္းလတြင္ ေညာင္ေရႊၿမ့ဳိ၌ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္လံုးဆုိင္ရာ ဝိနယာဒိႏုဂၢဟ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲႀကီးကို က်င္းပလ်က္ ရွိပါသည္။ မူလ ဒါယကာမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ သမတေဟာင္း စဝ္ေရႊသိုက္ ျဖစ္သည္။ စဝ္ေရႊသုိက္သည္ အင္းစိန္ ေထာင္ထဲ၌ (ေဆးထုိး သတ္ခံရ၍ဟု ေျပာၾကသည္။) ကြယ္လြန္သြားသည့္ ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္လည္း က်န္ရွိေသာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ရပ္မိရပ္ဖမ်ားႏွင့္ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းတိုက္ ဆရာေတာ္တုိ႔က လက္ဆင့္ကမ္း ဆက္လက္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ ႏွစ္စဥ္ လာေရာက္ ေျဖဆုိသူ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သာမေဏမ်ား ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ရွိခဲ့ရာ ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္မူ သံုးေထာင္ေက်ာ္ေလၿပီ။ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲ က်င္းပ ၿပီးေသာအခါ တပည့္ ဒါယကာ၊ ဒါယကာမ အေပါင္းတုိ႔က ဆြမ္းေလာင္းလႉပြဲႀကီးကို ၿခိမ့္ၿခိမ့္သဲ က်င္းပသည့္ ဓေလ့ထံုးစံပြဲ ရွိသည္။
လာေရာက္ၾကေသာ လူထု ပရိသတ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ထမင္းရည္ ေခ်ာင္းစီးေလာက္ေအာင္ ဧည့္ခံ ေကၽြးေမြးပါသည္။ ဟင္းလ်ာမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ တဆယ္သားခန္႔ အေလးခ်ိန္ ရွိေသာ ဝက္သားတံုးမ်ားကို လံုးခ်က္ၿပီး၊ ဟင္းရည္အေနျဖင့္ အင္းသား႐ိုးရာ ပဲလံုးေဆးခါးဟင္း၊ င႐ုတ္သီးလံုး ေမႊးေမႊးေၾကာ္ႏွင့္ ငါးမုန္႔ေျခာက္ေၾကာ္တုိ႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဝက္သား၏ ထံုးစံအရ (အီ) ေသာ္လည္း အင္းသားဟင္းရည္ ပဲလံုးေဆးခါးသည္ အီျခင္းကို ေခ်ဖ်က္ေပးသည္။ င႐ုတ္သီးေျခာက္ကို ေမႊးေနေအာင္ ေၾကာ္ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ စပ္ေသာ္လည္း ပါးစပ္ထဲတြင္ေမႊးေမႊးေလးႏွင့္ တမူထူးကဲသည့္ စပ္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ တႀကိမ္ စားဖူး႐ံုျဖင့္ စြဲမက္ သြားေလာက္ေအာင္ လက္စြမ္းထက္ေသာ အင္းေလး႐ိုးရာ စားစရာ ျဖစ္သည္။
ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္ ျဖစ္ေသာ စစ္ကုိင္း ေရႊဟသၤာ ဆရာေတာ္ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူေသာအခါ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ၊ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းတုိက္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလသည္ ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္အျဖစ္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ျခင္း ခံရသည္။ ရပခ (အေရွ့ပိုင္းတုိင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္) တိုင္းမႉး ျဖစ္ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ကန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္း ဆရာေတာ္ကို ၾကည္ၫို ကိုးကြယ္သူ ျဖစ္သည္။ တုိင္းမႉးဘဝမွ ရာထူးတက္ၿပီး ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊေအာက္ ေရာက္သြားသည့္တုိင္ ဆရာေတာ္ကို ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ ကူညီေပးရန္ ရပခ တိုင္းမႉးမ်ားကို မွာၾကားေလ့ ရွိသည္။
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္သည္ “နအဖ နိဂံုး - ကိုးေလးလံုး” စကားေၾကာင့္ နအဖ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ေသာက မ်ားေနေသာ ႏွစ္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေသြးေခ်ာင္းစီးမည္ဆိုေသာ နိမိတ္ေၾကာင့္ ေနအိမ္ ေခါင္မိုးမ်ားကို ေဆးအနီ သုတ္ခိုင္းသည္။ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ား ေျပးကိန္း ရွိသည္ဟူေသာ နိမိတ္ေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မ်ားကို မေျပးေစဘဲ ျပည္သူလူထုကို ေျပးခိုင္းသည့္ အေနျဖင့္ “မာရသြန္ ၿပိဳင္ပြဲ” မ်ားက်င္းပကာ လူထုကို ေျပးခိုင္းသည္။ အဘက္ဘက္မွ အၾကပ္႐ိုက္သည့္ႏွစ္မုိ႔ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္ထံ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္ေနရသည္။
ေတာ္သလင္းလတြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ “ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္လံုးဆုိင္ရာ ဝိနယာဒိႏုဂၢဟ စာေတာ္ျပန္ပြဲႀကီး” ကို စည္စည္ကားကား က်င္းပေပးပါ့မည္ဟုလည္း ဂတိျပဳသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္ကလည္း ေရႊက်င္ သာသနာပိုင္ အျဖစ္ တာဝန္ ယူထားတာေၾကာင့္ ေျမျပန္႔မွ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းဝင္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားကုိ စံုစံုလင္လင္ ဖိတ္ၾကားေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုသည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးကလည္း ၿပီးျပည့္စံုရမည္ဟု ေလွ်ာက္တင္ႂကြားဝါသည္။ ဤသုိ႔ျဖင့္ “ေတာ္သလင္းလ စာျပန္ပြဲ” သည္ နီးသည္ထက္ နီးလာပါေတာ့သည္။
ေက်းသီး-မုိင္းကိုင္ ခရီးစဥ္တြင္ ေခ်ာင္းေျမာင္းပစ္ခတ္ လုပ္ႀကံခံရေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ အသက္ေဘးမွ သီသီေလး လြတ္ေျမာက္လာေသာ အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေၾကာက္စိတ္ မေျပေသးမီ ယခုလည္း ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး၏ အမိန္႔ေၾကာင့္ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ စာျပန္ပြဲကို ျပင္ဆင္ ေပးေနရရွာသည္။
စီမံ ခန္႔ခြဲရာတြင္လည္း ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ရဲမႉးႀကီးကို အခမ္းအနား ျပင္ဆင္ေရး၊ ျပည္နယ္ လဝကမႉးကို ႀကိဳဆိုေနရာ ခ်ထားေရး၊ ဒု-တိုင္းမႉးကို ဘ႑ာ ရွာေဖြေရး၊ ဗထူး တပ္နယ္မႉးကို လံုျခံဳေရး၊ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူႏွင့္ သမီးျဖစ္သူ (သခ်ၤာ တတိယႏွစ္ - ေတာင္ႀကီး တက� သိုလ္) ကို စာရင္းစစ္ေဆးေရး စသည္ျဖင့္ တာဝန္မ်ား ခြဲေဝေပးကာ ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီမ်ား ဖြဲ႔စည္းခိုင္းသည္။
ျပည္နယ္ လဝကမႉး၏ ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ အဖြဲ႔သည္ ႀကိဳဆိုေနရာ ခ်ထားေရး တာဝန္ ယူရသျဖင့္ ႀကံ့ဖြံ႔အသင္းမွ ေတာင္ႀကီး-ရန္ကုန္ ေျပးဆြဲေနေသာ ကားမ်ားကို သံုးစြဲေလသည္။ ဒီဇယ္ဆီမ်ားကို အလြန္အမင္း ထုတ္ယူၿပီး အခ်ဳိ့ကို ေမွာင္ခုိ ထုတ္ေရာင္းစားသည္။ ကားသမားမ်ားကို ေဝစု မေပးသျဖင့္ ကားဆရာက ပညာျပေတာ့သည္။ စစ္ကုိင္း-မႏၱေလးဘက္မွ ေရႊက်င္ဂိုဏ္းဝင္ ဆရာေတာ္မ်ားကို သြားေရာက္ ႀကိဳဆုိေသာအခါ ျပႆနာ တစံုတရာ မျဖစ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း စာေရးၿပီး တိုင္ၾကားရာတြင္ လက္သံေျပာင္ေသာ ပဲခူး-ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ဆရာေတာ္ အဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ ျပႆနာ ေပၚေတာ့သည္။
ဗိုလ္မ်က္ေစာင္း အေၾကာင္းမေ႐ြး
၁၉၉၉ ခုႏွစ္၊ ေတာ္သလင္းလဆန္း ၁၃ ရက္၊ စာျပန္ပြဲေတာ္ႀကီး ၿပီးဆံုးသည့္ေန႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထမင္းစား ဓမၼာ႐ံုေပၚတြင္ စစ္ယူနီေဖာင္း ဝတ္ဆင္ထားသူမ်ား အိေႁႏၵ မရဘဲ ေအာ္ဟစ္ စားေသာက္ ေနၾကေသာေၾကာင့္ လူထုပရိသတ္ မ်ားစြာမွာ စိတ္အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ ျဖစ္ေနရသည္။ အခ်ဳိ့မွာ ထမင္းပင္ မစားေသာက္ေတာ့ဘဲ ျပင္ပ ထမင္းဆိုင္မွ ထမင္း ဝယ္ယူကာ ေညာင္ေရႊ တုိဟူးသုပ္ျဖင့္ ေရေခ်ာင္းေဘးတြင္ စုေဝး စားေသာက္ ေနၾကသူမ်ားလည္း ရွိသည္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ဓမၼာ႐ံုေပၚရွိ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး အဖြဲ႔၊ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို အဖြဲ႔ စစ္သားမ်ားႏွင့္ ကင္းကင္း ေနလုိေသာေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။
ထမင္းဝုိင္းမွ သမုိင္းတြင္မည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္ႏွစ္ခု ရွိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး အဖြဲ႔မွ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ေက်ာ္ဆန္း (ေနာင္အခါ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ဝန္ႀကီး) ဆုိသူသည္ ညစ္ေထးေထး (ဝါက်င္က်င္) လက္ေဆးရည္ခြက္ကို အင္းေလး-ပဲလံုး ေဆးခါးဟင္းရည္ခြက္ ထင္၍ မွားေသာက္မိခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထုိျဖစ္စဥ္ကို အနီးရွိ လြိဳင္လင္ တပ္နယ္မႉး၊ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္ ျပည့္စံု (ေနာင္အခါ စီးပြား-ကူးသန္း ဝန္ႀကီး) သိရွိသြား၍ မထိန္းႏိုင္ဘဲ ေအာ္ဟစ္ ရယ္ေမာ လုိက္ေသးသည္။
ကြမ္းအလြန္စားေသာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ ထမင္း စားၿပီးေသာအခါ အားပါးတရ လက္ေဆးရန္ အတြက္ ေရစင္သုိ႔ ေရာက္လာသည္။ လူပရိတ္သတ္ မ်ားလြန္းေသာေၾကာင့္ ေ႐ႊဝါဆပ္ျပာကို အပုိင္းပုိင္း တံုးတစ္ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို တေယာက္ ႏို႔မလိႈင္လံုး ထင္မွတ္ကာ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ပါးစပ္ထဲသုိ႔ ပစ္သြင္းလုိက္သည္။ လက္သုပ္ပုဝါ အသင့္ကုိင္ထားေသာ ႀကံ့ဖြတ္-ဦးဉာဏ္လင္း ေတြ႔ရွိသြား၍ ဆပ္ျပာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ရွင္းျပရာ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘိုက “အၫွီအေဟာက္ေတြ မ်ားလြန္းေတာ့ လက္ေဆး႐ံုတင္ မကဘူး၊ ငါက အူေတြပါ ေဆးတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ ဆပ္ျပာကို မ်ဳိခ်တယ္ကြ” ဟု ေခ်ာ္လဲေရာထုိင္ စကားျဖင့္ အရွက္ေျပ ေျပာလုိက္သည္။
ဓမၼာ႐ံုႀကီးတြင္ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္လည္းျဖစ္ ေ႐ႊက်င္ သာသနာပုိင္လည္း ျဖစ္ေသာ ဆရာေတာ္သည္ တရားေဟာၾကား၍ ငါးပါးသီလ ေပးေနေလသည္။ ထူးျခားေနသည္မွာ ဓမၼာ႐ံု၏ မွန္စီ ေ႐ႊခ်ထားေသာ တိုင္တိုင္းတြင္ ဒါယကာေဟာင္း စဝ္ေ႐ႊသုိက္၏ ဓာတ္ပံုမ်ားကို ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲ ထားေသာေၾကာင့္ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး တေယာက္ ဘဝင္မက် ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ တရားနာၾကားၿပီး ေရစက္ခ်ၿပီးေသာ အခါ မ်က္ႏွာရမည္ အထင္ျဖင့္ ဆရာေတာ္ထံ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္ကာ မႈိရသည့္ မ်က္ႏွာျဖင့္ “ဆရာေတာ္ဘုရား ၿပီးျပည့္စံုေတာ္မူၿပီး သေဘာ က်ေတာ္မူပါရဲ့လား” ဟု ေမးျမန္း ေလွ်ာက္တင္ေတာ္မူသည္။ ဆရာေတာ္က “အစစ အရာရာတုိင္း ၿပီးျပည့္စံုေပမယ့္ ဘုန္းႀကီး ေမွ်ာ္ေနရွာတဲ့ ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ကုိယ္ေတာ္ ေရာက္မလာတာေတာ့ စိတ္မေကာင္းဘူး” ဟု ေျဖၾကားလုိက္သည္။ လက္တဖက္မွလည္း ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ကုိယ္ေတာ္၏ အတိုင္အေတာ ထူသည့္စာကို ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးကို လွမ္းေပးလုိက္သည္။ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ ရည္မွန္းထားခ်က္မ်ား ျဖစ္မလာ၍ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအး၏ နီရဲေနေသာ မ်က္ေစာင္းသည္ အနီးရွိ ခ်စ္ဇနီးေခ်ာ ေဒၚျမျမစန္း ကုိ ေက်ာ္ကာ တုိင္းမႉး ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘို ထံသုိ႔ စူးစုိက္ ေရာက္ရွိ သြားေလေတာ့သည္။
ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ပ်ံတက္ခါနီးခ်ိန္တြင္ ေမာင္ေအး၏ ေဒါသသံ၊ ႀကိမ္းေမာင္းသံတို႔သည္ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ အသံႏွင့္အတူ ဆူညံေနသည္။ ခႏၶာကိုယ္ကို မတ္မတ္ ေကာ့ထားရေသာ တုိင္းမႉးေမာင္ဘို ၾကက္ေသေသကာ မွင္တက္စြာ နာခံေနရသည္။ ဆူပူသူက အရပ္ ကလန္ကလား၊ လက္ညိႇး တကားကားႏွင့္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး နာခံေနရသူက ေၾကာင္ေတာင္ေတာင္ မ်က္ႏွာ၊ ျပဴးက်ယ္က်ယ္ မ်က္လံုးႏွင့္မုိ႔ လြန္စြာ လုိက္ဖက္သင့္လွေသာ ျမင္ကြင္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။
ေနာက္ဆံုးရလဒ္
ေညာင္ေ႐ႊမွ တုိင္းမႉး ေမာင္ဘို ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ကားတန္းႀကီးသည္ မုိင္ကုန္ ဖြင့္ေမာင္းကာ ေတာင္ႀကီးသုိ႔ ခ်ီတက္ သြားေလသည္။ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အစည္းအေဝး ခန္းမ႐ံုးတြင္ ကားတန္းသည္ ရပ္တန္႔လိုက္ၿပီး ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ တာဝန္ခံမ်ား တန္းစီရပ္ ေနယူလုိက္သည္။ တုိင္းမႉးကား ဝင္လာေတာ့ အားလံုး သတိဆြဲ၊ အသက္မ႐ွဴ ရဲေလာက္ေအာင္ ၿငိမ္သက္ေနရသည္။ တန္းစီေနရာ ယူထားၾကသူမ်ားထဲတြင္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ေဘာ္လီေဘာ ဥက� ဌလည္းျဖစ္၊ လတ္တေလာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ စာျပန္ပြဲတြင္ ႀကိဳဆို ေနရာခ်ထားေရး ဆပ္ေကာ္မတီ တာဝန္ခံလည္း ျဖစ္ေသာ ျပည္နယ္ လ-ဝ-က မႉးသည္ အရပ္ အျမင့္ဆံုး ျဖစ္သည္။ ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ဘုိ တေယာက္ ပါးစပ္မွ အျမဳပ္တစီစီ ထြက္ေနရင္း ကားေပၚမွ ေျပးဆင္းလာကာ ျပည္နယ္ လ-ဝ-က မႉး၏ မ်က္ႏွာတည့္တည့္ကို လွမ္းထုိးလုိက္ေလသည္။ လက္သီးခ်က္သည္ ေတာ္ေတာ္ ျပင္းပံုရသည္။ ေဆာင္းထားေသာ လ-ဝ-က ဦးထုပ္ပင္ ေျမခ က်သြားရွာသည္။
ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ဦးဉာဏ္လင္းက ေကာက္ယူမည္ လုပ္စဥ္ “ဟို ... ေခြးမသားက ဘာလုိ႔ လွမ္းေကာက္တာလဲ။ မင္းပါ အဆစ္နာခ်င္လို႔လား” ေန႔ခင္းက ဆပ္ျပာခဲကို မလိုင္လံုး ထင္၍ ေကာက္ယူ စားမိေသာေၾကာင့္ ဆပ္ျပာ တန္ခိုးျပကာ အျမဳပ္မ်ား ထြက္လာသည္ကို ျမင္ရသူ အေပါင္းက တိုင္းမႉး ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ စိတ္ႀကီးလွ်င္ ဝက္႐ူးပ်ံေရာဂါ ထတတ္သည္ဟု ေျပာစမွတ္ တြင္သြားေလသည္။
မေမ့ႏိုင္ေသာအရာမ်ားမွာ
ၾကက္ခတ္ဝိုင္း ဆရာေတာ္၏ စာျမင္တုိင္း ဗိုလ္ေမာင္ေအးသည္ ေဒါသထြက္ကာ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူရွာၿပီ ျဖစ္ေသာ ေညာင္ေ႐ႊ ကန္ႀကီး ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲဝိမလ၏ သာဓု အႏုေမာဒနာကို သတိရလ်က္ ရွိသည္။ ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီး ေမာင္ေအး၏ မ်က္ေစာင္းကို ျမင္ေယာင္မိတိုင္း ဒု-ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး ေမာင္ဘိုသည္ ေဒါသထြက္ကာ သတိဆြဲ၊ ၿငိမ္သက္စြာ ရပ္တန္႔ေနျခင္းကို သတိရေနသည္။ ပင္စင္ ယူသြားရွာၿပီ ျဖစ္ေသာ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ လူဝင္မႈ ႀကီးၾကပ္ေရး (လ-ဝ-က) မႉးသည္ ေဟာင္းေလာင္း ျဖစ္ေနေသာ သြားႏွင့္ ဒီဇယ္ ပီပါမ်ားကို ျမင္ေယာင္မိတိုင္း ကရင္၊ မြန္၊ တနသၤာရီေဒသ စစ္တုိင္းမႉးႀကီး ေမာင္ဘို ကုိ က်ိန္ဆဲ ေနတတ္ေလသတည္း။
မင္းလြင္ (ရွမ္းျပည္)
Monks kept away from rice donation
October 25, Democratic Voice of Burma
The annual rice donation ceremony in Magwe division is to go ahead with
some restrictions, despite local authorities’ earlier concerns that monks
would boycott the event.
The rice donation has been held annually for the past five years to mark
the end of Buddhist lent, and has always been a popular event, but local
authorities were worried that this year monks would refuse to accept alms
from government supporters.
The local Peace and Development Council refused to organise the ceremony,
so it will now be planned by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and its
local offices.
Township authorities still appear cautious about the event, which will be
widely publicised, and have issued restrictions on monks attending in an
apparent attempt to prevent large groups of monks assembling.
Only one monk from each monastery will be invited to the ceremony to
receive the donations. The rest of the alms will be taken to the monks at
their monasteries.
The annual rice donation ceremony in Magwe division is to go ahead with
some restrictions, despite local authorities’ earlier concerns that monks
would boycott the event.
The rice donation has been held annually for the past five years to mark
the end of Buddhist lent, and has always been a popular event, but local
authorities were worried that this year monks would refuse to accept alms
from government supporters.
The local Peace and Development Council refused to organise the ceremony,
so it will now be planned by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and its
local offices.
Township authorities still appear cautious about the event, which will be
widely publicised, and have issued restrictions on monks attending in an
apparent attempt to prevent large groups of monks assembling.
Only one monk from each monastery will be invited to the ceremony to
receive the donations. The rest of the alms will be taken to the monks at
their monasteries.
Monks uncertain about examinations
Thu 25 Oct 2007
IMNA
Monks are unsure whether the Burmese military junta would allow them to sit for the annual examination in the wake of the protests against the military regime, said an abbot in a monastery.
"We are not sure whether we will have our examinations or not. We are not even sure that if there are examinations whether we should sit for it," said the abbot who had about 50 student monks before last month's protest.
All his students were ordered to go home when the junta cracked down on monk-led protests in the end of September.
For the next few days monks are going to make a list for sitting for their examinations. "I don't know what to do for the next few days. I believe there will be no examination for the monks," a Pegu monastery abbot said.
"If examinations are allowed there will be a huge drop in the number of monks appearing for it," he added.
Monks are anxious and uncertain about what to do. Some are still scared of being arrested and some believe they should not sit for the examinations.
According to abbots a majority of monks broke their Buddhist lent when they were ordered to go back to their home towns.
Thousands of monk resumed their new lent in their home town. Tomorrow is the day of concluding Buddhist lent.
IMNA
Monks are unsure whether the Burmese military junta would allow them to sit for the annual examination in the wake of the protests against the military regime, said an abbot in a monastery.
"We are not sure whether we will have our examinations or not. We are not even sure that if there are examinations whether we should sit for it," said the abbot who had about 50 student monks before last month's protest.
All his students were ordered to go home when the junta cracked down on monk-led protests in the end of September.
For the next few days monks are going to make a list for sitting for their examinations. "I don't know what to do for the next few days. I believe there will be no examination for the monks," a Pegu monastery abbot said.
"If examinations are allowed there will be a huge drop in the number of monks appearing for it," he added.
Monks are anxious and uncertain about what to do. Some are still scared of being arrested and some believe they should not sit for the examinations.
According to abbots a majority of monks broke their Buddhist lent when they were ordered to go back to their home towns.
Thousands of monk resumed their new lent in their home town. Tomorrow is the day of concluding Buddhist lent.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Uneasy days for monks in Myanmar
October 24, New York Times
- Choe Sang-Hun
Mandalay, Myanmar — As the lunch gong chimed through a tree-shaded
monastery, several hundred monks in burgundy robes lined up on a
mid-October day, all holding alms bowls.
It is a common scene in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where one out of every
100 people, many of them children, are monks. But the lunch line at the
Mahagandhayon Monastery, the country’s largest, used to be much longer.
“We usually have 1,400 monks here,” said a senior monk. “Because of the
situation, parents took 1,000 of them home.”
For decades, two powerful institutions have shaped Burmese life: the
500,000-member Buddhist clergy, which commands a moral authority over the
population, and Senior Gen. Than Shwe’s junta, whose 450,000-strong
military controls the population through intimidation.
Their uneasy coexistence has shattered. After scattered demonstrations
erupted against sharp increases in fuel prices in August, thousands of
monks protested the junta’s economic mismanagement and political
repression. The military responded with batons and bullets.
The guns have prevailed over mantras, at least for now.
As of Oct. 6, the government said it had detained 533 monks, of whom 398
were released after sorting out what it called “real monks” from “bogus
ones.” Monks and dissidents contend that many more were detained.
“They took away truckloads of monks and laypeople,” said the deputy leader
of a monastery in Yangon, the country’s most populous city. “They had the
monks kneel down, with their hands on the back of their heads. Anyone who
raised his head was beaten.”
He said at Ngwe Kyayan, Yangon’s largest monastery, soldiers took food and
donation boxes, and beat the abbot and vandalized images of Buddha, as
some of its 300 monks fought back.
The monks, he said, began demonstrating against the economic deprivation
of the Burmese. “It’s a terrible situation,” he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity, like others interviewed, because he feared
government reprisals. “Monks took to the streets to draw attention to this
problem, pleading for loving kindness. But our government is worse than
Hitler’s Nazis. They have no respect for religion.” When it was over, The
New Light of Myanmar, a state-run English-language newspaper, said, monks
had been “defrocked” during interrogation so that they could be questioned
as laypeople, then “ordained” and sent “back to their monasteries.” Monks
denounced the process.
The junta also used divide-and-rule tactics, by persuading the
state-sanctioned Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which oversees the clergy,
to take its donations and to order monks to stop protesting or face
punishment.
“Some of these senior monks are bribed by the regime,” said an editor at a
Yangon magazine. “They have accepted so many good things in life — cars,
televisions, big houses, telephones and mobile phones — that they simply
have to listen to the regime.”
At the Mahagandhayon Monastery here in Mandalay, soldiers had pulled back
by mid-October after cordoning off the temple for weeks. But their trucks
continued to lurk in alleys nearby, as rumors circulated that, if the
monks rose up again, it would probably be in this city, the nation’s
second most populous. About 20,000 of its million residents are monks, one
of the highest concentrations in the country.
Young men from across the country train here as monks, and they have grown
more passionate about the poverty and injustice their nation has suffered
under the military government.
The fear was still palpable at Mahagandhayon, where monks chanted mantras
over their last meal of the day, a late-morning lunch of vegetable soup,
eggplants, rice and a treat from a donor — instant noodles. But they were
still reluctant to discuss the military’s crushing of the demonstrations
in late September.
“They are afraid of guns!” a senior monk said before vanishing into the
dining hall.
Long before the protests, monks were aware of people’s suffering. When
they went to receive alms, said the senior monk in Yangon, they saw “no
happiness in people’s faces, people whose minds are preoccupied with
finding food and surviving one day at a time.”
But the military’s use of force against the monks has unsettled
fundamental Burmese values.
“To Burmese, monks are like sons of the Buddha,” said Maung Aye, a taxi
driver, as he drove around Yangon’s Sule Pagoda, which is said to enshrine
a hair of the Buddha and was a focal point of the protests.
A shop owner in Yangon said his 5-year-old son, who had been reared with
Buddhist beliefs in karma, had cried out: “I don’t want to become a
soldier. If I have to kill a monk, the worst thing will happen to me in my
next life.”
At a Yangon temple, sitting before a golden Buddha figure, two middle-aged
monks spoke with resignation and anger.
“We learned a lesson from 1988,” one monk said of the large pro-democracy
uprising that the military put down, leaving hundreds, perhaps thousands,
dead. “If it changes nothing and only gets worse, why risk our lives?” The
other monk said: “We would like to love our government. We tried but
couldn’t. We want to like to go out and demonstrate again, but we know
they are out there with their guns.”
During the Buddhist Lent, which lasts three months, into late October,
monks focus on studying scripture and refrain from leaving their
monasteries, except for early outings to collect alms. The fact that monks
ventured out in protest during this period was widely seen here as a sign
of just how angry they were. But by mid-October, many monasteries in
Yangon were deserted, after military raids had driven thousands of monks
to flee.
In towns across Myanmar, monks have traditionally filed down streets at
dawn seeking alms, and laypeople have gained merit by donating rice and
other food. Families take pride in what is often seen as adopting monks,
providing them with food, clothing, books and other goods for a few months
or years.
As poverty has worsened in Myanmar, however, the alms processions have
increasingly turned into a sad exchange of apologies for having to beg and
for being unable to give. Now, with the monks scattered, the alms lines
have dwindled in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay.
For centuries, whoever seized power in this country sought legitimacy by
lavishing money on pagodas and monasteries. When the democracy leader Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi called for a “second struggle for national independence”
in 1988, she chose Yangon’s gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda as the site to
deliver her watershed speech. So when monks marched in September to the
home where she is under house arrest, the act was a moral reproof to the
government.
But the monks are not immune to criticism. Although senior clerics are
elected by monks and revered by laypeople, “they form a small, closed
society which doesn’t know anything about the community at large,” the
magazine editor said. “Some of them do not know how poor people live in a
small village.”
Other laypeople defended the aging clerics who have taken gifts from the
government. Those monks, they said, are under a moral obligation to accept
donations, and fear that confrontation could cost more lives.
Still, witnesses said piles of rice donated by the government were left
uncollected at the gates of some monasteries, a rebuff of the government’s
effort to placate the clergy.
In mid-October at Mahagandhayon, the monks were going about their daily
routine. The senior monk said he hoped that the rest of the students would
return in a month or so. One young monk who had remained said, “Please go
out and tell the world exactly what really has happened in this country.”
He added, “I am scared just talking to you about this.”
- Choe Sang-Hun
Mandalay, Myanmar — As the lunch gong chimed through a tree-shaded
monastery, several hundred monks in burgundy robes lined up on a
mid-October day, all holding alms bowls.
It is a common scene in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where one out of every
100 people, many of them children, are monks. But the lunch line at the
Mahagandhayon Monastery, the country’s largest, used to be much longer.
“We usually have 1,400 monks here,” said a senior monk. “Because of the
situation, parents took 1,000 of them home.”
For decades, two powerful institutions have shaped Burmese life: the
500,000-member Buddhist clergy, which commands a moral authority over the
population, and Senior Gen. Than Shwe’s junta, whose 450,000-strong
military controls the population through intimidation.
Their uneasy coexistence has shattered. After scattered demonstrations
erupted against sharp increases in fuel prices in August, thousands of
monks protested the junta’s economic mismanagement and political
repression. The military responded with batons and bullets.
The guns have prevailed over mantras, at least for now.
As of Oct. 6, the government said it had detained 533 monks, of whom 398
were released after sorting out what it called “real monks” from “bogus
ones.” Monks and dissidents contend that many more were detained.
“They took away truckloads of monks and laypeople,” said the deputy leader
of a monastery in Yangon, the country’s most populous city. “They had the
monks kneel down, with their hands on the back of their heads. Anyone who
raised his head was beaten.”
He said at Ngwe Kyayan, Yangon’s largest monastery, soldiers took food and
donation boxes, and beat the abbot and vandalized images of Buddha, as
some of its 300 monks fought back.
The monks, he said, began demonstrating against the economic deprivation
of the Burmese. “It’s a terrible situation,” he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity, like others interviewed, because he feared
government reprisals. “Monks took to the streets to draw attention to this
problem, pleading for loving kindness. But our government is worse than
Hitler’s Nazis. They have no respect for religion.” When it was over, The
New Light of Myanmar, a state-run English-language newspaper, said, monks
had been “defrocked” during interrogation so that they could be questioned
as laypeople, then “ordained” and sent “back to their monasteries.” Monks
denounced the process.
The junta also used divide-and-rule tactics, by persuading the
state-sanctioned Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which oversees the clergy,
to take its donations and to order monks to stop protesting or face
punishment.
“Some of these senior monks are bribed by the regime,” said an editor at a
Yangon magazine. “They have accepted so many good things in life — cars,
televisions, big houses, telephones and mobile phones — that they simply
have to listen to the regime.”
At the Mahagandhayon Monastery here in Mandalay, soldiers had pulled back
by mid-October after cordoning off the temple for weeks. But their trucks
continued to lurk in alleys nearby, as rumors circulated that, if the
monks rose up again, it would probably be in this city, the nation’s
second most populous. About 20,000 of its million residents are monks, one
of the highest concentrations in the country.
Young men from across the country train here as monks, and they have grown
more passionate about the poverty and injustice their nation has suffered
under the military government.
The fear was still palpable at Mahagandhayon, where monks chanted mantras
over their last meal of the day, a late-morning lunch of vegetable soup,
eggplants, rice and a treat from a donor — instant noodles. But they were
still reluctant to discuss the military’s crushing of the demonstrations
in late September.
“They are afraid of guns!” a senior monk said before vanishing into the
dining hall.
Long before the protests, monks were aware of people’s suffering. When
they went to receive alms, said the senior monk in Yangon, they saw “no
happiness in people’s faces, people whose minds are preoccupied with
finding food and surviving one day at a time.”
But the military’s use of force against the monks has unsettled
fundamental Burmese values.
“To Burmese, monks are like sons of the Buddha,” said Maung Aye, a taxi
driver, as he drove around Yangon’s Sule Pagoda, which is said to enshrine
a hair of the Buddha and was a focal point of the protests.
A shop owner in Yangon said his 5-year-old son, who had been reared with
Buddhist beliefs in karma, had cried out: “I don’t want to become a
soldier. If I have to kill a monk, the worst thing will happen to me in my
next life.”
At a Yangon temple, sitting before a golden Buddha figure, two middle-aged
monks spoke with resignation and anger.
“We learned a lesson from 1988,” one monk said of the large pro-democracy
uprising that the military put down, leaving hundreds, perhaps thousands,
dead. “If it changes nothing and only gets worse, why risk our lives?” The
other monk said: “We would like to love our government. We tried but
couldn’t. We want to like to go out and demonstrate again, but we know
they are out there with their guns.”
During the Buddhist Lent, which lasts three months, into late October,
monks focus on studying scripture and refrain from leaving their
monasteries, except for early outings to collect alms. The fact that monks
ventured out in protest during this period was widely seen here as a sign
of just how angry they were. But by mid-October, many monasteries in
Yangon were deserted, after military raids had driven thousands of monks
to flee.
In towns across Myanmar, monks have traditionally filed down streets at
dawn seeking alms, and laypeople have gained merit by donating rice and
other food. Families take pride in what is often seen as adopting monks,
providing them with food, clothing, books and other goods for a few months
or years.
As poverty has worsened in Myanmar, however, the alms processions have
increasingly turned into a sad exchange of apologies for having to beg and
for being unable to give. Now, with the monks scattered, the alms lines
have dwindled in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay.
For centuries, whoever seized power in this country sought legitimacy by
lavishing money on pagodas and monasteries. When the democracy leader Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi called for a “second struggle for national independence”
in 1988, she chose Yangon’s gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda as the site to
deliver her watershed speech. So when monks marched in September to the
home where she is under house arrest, the act was a moral reproof to the
government.
But the monks are not immune to criticism. Although senior clerics are
elected by monks and revered by laypeople, “they form a small, closed
society which doesn’t know anything about the community at large,” the
magazine editor said. “Some of them do not know how poor people live in a
small village.”
Other laypeople defended the aging clerics who have taken gifts from the
government. Those monks, they said, are under a moral obligation to accept
donations, and fear that confrontation could cost more lives.
Still, witnesses said piles of rice donated by the government were left
uncollected at the gates of some monasteries, a rebuff of the government’s
effort to placate the clergy.
In mid-October at Mahagandhayon, the monks were going about their daily
routine. The senior monk said he hoped that the rest of the students would
return in a month or so. One young monk who had remained said, “Please go
out and tell the world exactly what really has happened in this country.”
He added, “I am scared just talking to you about this.”
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