ဧရာဝတီ      း SHAN သတင္းစာမွာေဖာ္ျပထားတဲ႔ေဆာင္းပါးမွာ ျမန္မာျပည္ရဲ႕ေျပာင္းလဲမူေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ျပီး ျပည္တြင္းက ခင္ဗ်ားအဆက္အသြယ္ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက အေကာင္းျမင္လြန္းအားၾကီးတယ္လုိ႔ ေရးထားတယ္။ ျပီးေတာ႔ေဆာင္းပါးမွာ ညႊန္းထားတဲ႔ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕ လုပ္ေဖာ္ကုိင္ဖက္ကလည္း သမၼတ(ဦး)သိန္းစိန္ရဲ႕ ကတိက၀တ္(Intentions)ေတြကုိ သံသယျဖစ္မိတယ္လုိ႔ ဆုိတယ္။ ခင္ဗ်ားအေနနဲ႔ အဒီလုိ ျမန္မာျပည္ေျပာင္းလဲလာမူအေပၚ သကၤာမကင္း ျဖစ္မိတဲ႔ သူေတြနဲ႔ မ်ားဆုံျဖစ္ေသးလား။ 

ဦဟန္ေညာင္ေဝ   း  အဒီေဆာင္းပါက အေျခအေနမွန္ကုိသေဘာမေပါက္ပဲနဲ႔ မွားယြင္းစြာ သုံးသပ္ထားတယ္လုိ႔ထင္တယ္။ အစေတာ႔ ေဆာင္းပါးထဲကပုဂၢိဳလ္က  သူလည္းအလုိသံသယရွိတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္နဲ႔ ေတြတဲ႔အခ်ိန္မွာ အေကာင္းျမင္ေနျပီ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္နဲ႔ ေတြခဲဲ႔သမွ်သူေတြ ကေတာ႔ သမၼတ(ဦး)သိန္းစိန္ရဲ႕ ကတိက၀တ္ေတြ အေပၚ  သံသယမရွိၾကပါဘူး။ သူတုိ႔တကယ္ စုိးရိမ္ေနတာက အစုိးရရဲ႕ ေျပာင္းလြယ္ျပင္လြယ္ရခက္တဲ႔ ဗ်ဴရုိကေရစီစနစ္ကုိ ေျပာင္းလဲဖုိ႔ ဦးသိန္းစိန္အစုိးရအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္လုိကုိင္တြယ္မလဲဆုိတာပဲ။အေျပာင္းအလဲကုိလုိလားတဲ႔ထိပ္ပုိင္းကအာဏာရွင္လူတစ္စုက(The upper echelons) အေျပာင္းအလဲကုိလုပ္ခ်င္ေနခ်ိန္မွာ စစ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးယႏၱာယားက(Old machinery) စစ္ဥပေဒေတြနဲ႔ ေနသားၾကေနဆဲဆုိေတာ႔။ ဥပမာဗ်ာ၊ သမၼတက ျပည္ပေရာက္ျမန္မာေတြကုိ ျပန္လာဖုိ႔ ေၾကျငာခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္ထားတာေတာင္မွ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ၾကီးဌာနက ျပန္လာခ်င္တဲ႔သူေတြကုိ  ျပန္လာခ်င္  ျပန္လာလုိ႔ရေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ရမယ္႔တရား၀င္လုပ္ထုံးလုပ္နည္း (Standard Operating Procedure) ေတြကုိ သက္ဆုိင္ရာသံရုံးေတြကေနတဆင႔္ ထုတ္ျပန္ထားတာမ်ဴိးမရွိေသးဘူး။ အစုိးရဘက္ကဦးေဆာင္ဦးရြက္ျပဳျပီး လုပ္တဲ႔ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ျပီးေတာ႔လည္း ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ျဖစ္ပ်က္ေနတဲ႔တုိက္ပြဲေတြကအရွိန္ျမွင္႔ေနေတာ႔ တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြဘက္က ယုံရခက္တယ္ဆုိတဲ႔ ေျပာသံဆုိသံေတြလဲထြက္ေနတာေပါ႔။ ဒီထက္ပုိျပီးေတာ႔ေတာ႔ မေတြမိပါဘူး။

ဧရာဝတီ      း မႏွစ္က ျမန္မာျပည္ကုိေရာက္ခဲ႔တဲ႔ သူေတြကႏုိင္ငံေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းေျပာင္းလဲလာမူနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအေပၚမွာ အယုံအၾကည္ လုံးလုံးမရွိၾကဘူးလုိ႔ ၾကားသိရတယ္။ အဒီေနာက္ပုိင္းမွာေတာ႔ အဒီလူေတြရဲ႕ အသံေတြ လုံးလုံးၾကီးၾကီး ေျပာင္းသြားျပန္တယ္။အဒီအေပၚခင္ဗ်ားအေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္လုိျမင္မိလဲ။ “လမ္းေပၚမွာသြားေနတဲ႔သာမာန္ လူတစ္ေယာက္က“ တကယ႔္ကုိ အဒီလုိအေျပာင္းအလဲ မ်ဳိးျဖစ္ေနျပီလုိ႔ ယူဆတယ္လုိ႔မ်ား ထင္မိလား။

ဦဟန္ေညာင္ေဝ   း  ဒီႏွစ္ဂ်ဴလုိင္လကုန္ပုိင္းထိကုိ  အစုိးရသစ္အေပၚမွာေရာ၊ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအေပၚမွာေရာ သိပ္အယုံအၾကည္ မရွိၾကပါဘူး။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း ထုိနည္းလည္းေကာင္းပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ မတ္လမွာ သမၼတရဲ႕ အဖြင္႔မိန္႔ခြန္းက ကၽြန္ေတာ္ကုိ အံ႔အားသင္႔သြားေစတယ္။ယူရုိျမန္မာရုံးကေတာင္အဒီမိန္႔ခြန္းကုိေလ႔လာသုံးသပ္ခ်က္(analysis)ေတြလုပ္ျပီး ထုတ္ျပန္ရတဲ႔ထိျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ အဒီကေနစျပီး မထင္မွတ္ထားတဲ႔ အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြစတင္လာတယ္။ ေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ (ဦး)သိန္းစိန္နဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးတာေတြ၊ေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္ဘက္ကအေကာင္းျမင္ျပီး တုန္႔ျပန္တာေတြ၊ျပည္ပေရာက္ျမန္မာေတြကုိျပန္လာဖုိ႔ဖိတ္ေခၚတာေတြ၊

တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔ေတြနဲ႔ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြေႏြးပြဲလုပ္ဖုိ႔ေၾကျငာခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္တာေတြ၊

ျမစ္ဆုံေရကာတာကိစၥရပ္တန္႔လုိက္တာေတြ၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္မွာျငင္းၾကခုံၾကတာေတြကုိထုတ္ျပန္တာေတြ စသျဖင္႔ အေၾကာင္းအရာမ်ိဳးစုံကုိ အျမင္က်ယ္က်ယ္နဲ႔ေဆြေႏြးၾကပါတယ္။အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြကလည္းတကယ္႔ေလးနက္တဲ႔ကိစၥေတြျဖစ္တဲ႔

ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲလုိကိစၥ၊အမ်ိဳးသားရင္ၾကားေစ႔ေရးလုိကိစၥ၊အက်ဥ္းသားေတြကုိလြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင္႔ေပးတဲ႔ကိစၥ

နဲ႔ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္သားေတြလႊတ္ေပးတဲ႔ကိစၥ၊ႏ်ဴးကလီးယားအစီအစဥ္လုိစတဲ႔အ            ေၾကာင္းအရာေပါင္းစုံကုိအျမင္က်ယ္က်ယ္နဲ႔ေဆြးေႏြးမူေတြလုပ္သြားပါတယ္။ဒ႔ီျပင္လူအခြင္႔အေရး

ေကာ္မရွင္ဖြဲ႔တာ၊အလုပ္သမားအဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြဖြဲ႔စည္းတည္ေထာင္ႏုိင္တဲ႔အလုပ္သမားဥပေဒသစ္တစ္ခုကုိ

ေရးဆြဲအတည္ျပဳတာ၊ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားေတြကုိလႊတ္ေပးတာေတြအပါအဝင္ေပါ႔။

ဒါေတြကုိ“လမ္းေပၚမွာသြားေနတဲ႔သာမာန္လူတစ္ေယာက္က

“အေျပာင္းအလဲျဖစ္ေနျပီလုိ႔ယူဆတာမ်ဳိးေျပာလုိ႔မရေတာ႔ပါဘူး။ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေတြ႔သမွ်လူေတြကုိယ္၌ကုိက

အေျပာင္းအလဲ ျဖစ္ေနျပီလုိ႔ ယူဆေနၾကတာပါ။

ဧရာဝတီ      း   ခင္ဗ်ားနဲ႔ ဆုိင္္ရွင္တစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔ စကားေျပာျဖစ္တယ္လုိ႔ၾကားတယ္။ သူက ႏွစ္ေပါင္း၅၀ေက်ာ္ခင္ဗ်ားရဲ႕တည္ရွိ္ေနမူကျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕အေျခအေနေတြတုိးတက္                                          ေကာင္းမြန္လာတယ္ဆုိတဲ႔လကၡဏာတစ္ရပ္လုိ႔လည္းဆုိတယ္။အဒီအခ်က္ကခင္ဗ်ားကုိဖိတ္ေခၚရတဲ႔အခ်က္လား။ အဒီလုိခင္ဗ်ားကုိဖိတ္ေခၚတာက ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြတကယ္ျဖစ္ေနပါျပီလုိ႔ လူေတြကုိထင္ေစခ်င္တယ္လုိ႔မထင္မိဘူးလား။

ဦဟန္ေညာင္ေဝ   း  အဒီလုိလဲ ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ ဒီလုိသြားႏုိင္လာႏုိင္တာကုိက တကယ္႔အေျပာင္းအလဲကုိကုိယ္စားျပဳတယ္။ ၁၉၉၉တုန္းကကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ေတြလုပ္ခဲ႔ၾကတဲ႔ ႏုိင္ငံတကာဖိအားသုံးျပီးလုပ္တဲ႔ကိစၥကအေျပာင္းအလဲကုိမေဆာင္ၾကဥ္းႏိုင္ဘူးဆုိတာရွင္းတယ္ေလ။

အဒီတုန္းကေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္ရဲ႕သေဘာတူညီခ်က္နဲ႔ကၽြန္ေတာ္နဲ႔ေဒၚက္တာေက်ာ္ဝင္းနဲ႔ဆုံျဖစ္တယ္။

သူကအဒီတုန္းကကေနဒါသံအမတ္။ေနာက္ေတာ႔ျဗိတိသွ်ဆုိင္ရာသံအမတ္ျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႕ေဆြးေႏြးျဖစ္တာက  အဒီတုန္းကေရပန္းစားေနၾကတဲ႔ျပႆနာေတြ(common concerns)။ သူက ေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ အစုိးရကုိ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးေတြလုပ္ဖုိ႔ အၾကံျပဳတယ္။ဒါဟာ အေထာက္အကူလဲျဖစ္တယ္ေပါ႔။ အဒါနဲ႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ကုိ နယူးေရာ႔(ခ္)မွာရွိတဲ႔ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ၾကီး ဦးဝင္းေအာင္နဲ႔ ကုလသမဂၢရုံးမွာ ေတြဆုံဖုိ႔စီစဥ္ေပးတယ္။ ဦးဝင္းေအာင္ကလည္း ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ကုိ ျမန္မာျပည္ျပန္ျပီး ေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ အစုိးရနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးေတြလုပ္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ တုိက္တြန္းေပးဖုိ႔ အစီအစဥ္ကုိလညး္  သေဘာတူတယ္။ဒါေပမယ္႔ ဘန္ေကာက္က ျမန္မာသံရုံးကုိ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြလည္း ဝင္သိမ္းေရာ အစီအစဥ္ေတြအကုန္ပ်က္သြားတယ္။၂၀၀၀၊၂၀၀၃ၾကျပန္ေတာ႔ ကုလသမဂၢ အထူး ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ရာဇာလီအစ္စေမး(လ္) RazaliIsmailကေဒၚေအာင္းဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ အစုိးရနဲ႔ေတြ႔ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးေရးေတြလုပ္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ဝင္ေရာက္

ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနခ်ိန္မွာကၽြန္ေတာ္ကသူ႔ကုိလုိအပ္တဲ႔အခ်က္အလက္ေတြေပးတယ္။ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲျဖစ္ျပီးလုိ႔၊၂၀၀၄အေရာက္မွာ  ဦးခင္ညႊန္႔အဖမ္းခံရတယ္။အဒီေတာ႔BBCကကၽြန္ေတာ႔ကုိျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအေျခအေနကုိဘယ္လုိေျပာင္းရင္ရႏိုင္မလဲလုိ႔ေမးတယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္က စစ္တပ္က ဦးစီးဦးေဆာင္လုပ္ျပီးေျပာင္းရမယ္လုိ႔ေျဖတယ္။ အဒီေတာ႔ ကာကြယ္ေရးဝန္ၾကီးဌာနက ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔အေနအထားကုိရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္းသိခ်င္လုိ႔ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္တစ္ဦးေစလႊတ္လုိက္တယ္။

စစ္တပ္ကစျပီးအေျပာင္းအလဲကုိအေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ရမွာလုိ႔သူတုိ႔အာဏာရလာကတညး္ကကၽြန္ေတာ္ေျပာျပီးသား။

ဒီေတာ႔သူတုိ႔ကအေျပာင္းအလဲကုိဘယ္လုိလုပ္ရင္ရႏုိင္မယ္ဆုိတာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ျပီး ကြၽန္ေတာ္႔ကုိ ျမန္မာျပန္လာျပီး

ေျဖရွင္းခ်က္ေပးဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိတယ္။ အသြင္ကူုးေျပာင္းေရးမွာလည္းကူညီေပးဖုိ႔ေပါ႔။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း

သေဘာတူလုိက္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ (သူတုိ႔ဆီက) ဘာအစီစဥ္မွမေရာက္လာဘူး။ ေနာက္ဆုံး ဗုိလ္ခ်ပ္ၾကီးေတြဆီက မီးစိမ္းေတာင္ျပမလာပါဘူး။ဒီေတာ႔ ဒီတစ္ၾကိမ္မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ကုိဝင္ခြင္႔ျပဳတာဟာ

တကယ္အေျပာင္းအလဲရွိေနျပီလုိ႔ဆုိခ်င္တယ္ဆုိတာပါ။

ဆက္လက္ေဖာ္ျပပါမည္။

Q: The SHAN article gives the impression that almost all of your contacts in Burma were overwhelmingly positive about recent developments. Only one person cited in the article, an associate of Aung San SuuSuuKyi, seemed to express any real skepticism about President TheinSein’s intentions. Did you meet anyone else who seemed to have doubts?

A: The article inadvertently gave the wrong impression. The person referred to was initially doubtful but he was also positive when I met him. People I met did not doubt President TheinSein’s intentions. What they were concerned about was the government’s ability to deliver given the inertia and the lack of initiative by the bureaucracy. The old machinery is still functioning under old rules, while the upper echelons seem to want to change. For example, while the president announced that exiles could return, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still has not issued a Standard Operating Procedure for embassies on how to deal with exiles wanting to return. Doubt was expressed by some ethnic people about the government’s peace initiative since the fighting was intensifying in Kachin State. Other than that, I did not meet anyone who had doubts.

Q: Anyone visiting Burma a little more than a year ago would have heard a great deal of skepticism about the election and the country’s political direction. Why do you think the tone has changed so decisively since then? Do you think the average “man in the street” really feels that things have changed that much?

A: There was a lot of skepticism about the elections and the new government up until the end of July this year. I was skeptical too and surprised by the President’s inaugural speech [in March]. The Euro-Burma Office even published an analysis of it. But things seemed to be on hold. Then suddenly in August everything started to move forward—the president met with Aung San SuuKyi; she responded positively; he said exiles could come back; the government announced peace talks with the ethnic armed groups; the president reversed the decision about the Myitsone dam; proceedings of parliamentary debates were published and the range of topics discussed was very broad and included sensitive topics like peace talks, national reconciliation, amnesty, release of political prisoners, censorship, and even the nuclear program—topics that would have been out of bounds under previous regimes; a Human Rights Commission was formed;  a new labor law allowing trade unions was passed and political prisoners were released. I cannot speak for the average “man on the street.” But the people I met did feel that things have changed.

Q: one shopkeeper you spoke to suggested that your presence in the country after so many years was itself a sign that the situation in Burma is improving. Do you think that that might have been the point of inviting you—to make people think that things are really changing?

A: It may have been. But the fact that I was able to visit does represent a real change. When it was clear by 1999 that we could not bring about change by depending on pressure from the international community, I met with Dr Kyaw Win (Burma’s former ambassador to Canada and later the UK) with the agreement of Aung San SuuKyi and Dr Sein Win, to discuss common concerns and proposed that a dialogue between the government and Aung San SuuKyi would be useful. He arranged for me to meet with Foreign Minister U Win Aung in New York at the UN, who agreed to arrange for me to visit Burma and persuade  Aung San SuuKyi to enter into a dialogue with the government. All arrangements were derailed when Burmese students seized the embassy in Bangkok. From 2000 to 2003, I briefed UN Special Envoy Razali Ismail, while he tried to mediate the dialogue between Aung San SuuKyi and the government. After the talks broke down and Gen KhinNyunt was arrested in 2004, I was interviewed by the BBC Burmese Service on how we could change the situation in Burma. I replied that the Tatmadaw had to lead the change. The Defense Ministry sent an emissary to ask me to clarify my position.

I said that since they held the power, they had to implement the change. I was asked whether I would return to explain how and help with a transition. I agreed but nothing came of the arrangement. The final green light from the top did not come. So the fact that I was allowed in this time does indicate that things are really changing.

irrawaddy: exile return