အပ္“““ခ်ေလာင္း.... ၂

  ၂၀၀၃ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၉။ ကင္ညာၿမိဳ႕မွာ သူမ်ားသားမယားနဲ႕ ေဖါက္ျပန္ေနတဲ့ ေယာက္်ားတစ္ေယာက္ဟာ ဆက္ဆံေနရင္းက သူ႕တန္ဆာကို ျပန္ထုတ္မရေတာ့တဲ့ အျဖစ္နဲ႕ ရင္ဆိုင္ရလို႕ ရပ္ကြက္ထဲကလူေတြသိကုန္ပီး အႀကီးအက်ယ္ အရွက္ကြဲခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

တညလံုး သူ႕ဟ၀ွာကို ထုတ္မရဘဲ မိုးလင္းလို႕ လူသိရွင္ၾကားျဖစ္ကာ ရဲေတြ ေဆး၀န္ထမ္းေတြ တနာရီေလာက္  ၾကာတဲ့ထိေအာင္ မကူႏိုင္ မကယ္တင္ႏိုင္ပဲ ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့ ဒီမိန္းမရဲ႕ ကာမပိုင္ေယာက္်ားကို နစ္နာေၾကးအျဖစ္ကင္ညာသံုးေငြ ႏွစ္ေသာင္း (၂၀ ၀၀၀) ေပးပီး ေတာင္းပန္ေတာ့မွ သူ႔မိန္းမ ေဖာက္ျပန္ေနတယ္ဆုိတာကုိ သံသယရွိလို႔ ေအာက္လမ္း ဆရာမတစ္ေယာက္ကုိ ေအာက္လမ္းနဲ႔ လုပ္ခိုင္းထားတာမို႕  အပ္ခ်ေလာင္း ကြ်တ္ေစဆိုပီး ျပန္ေျဖလိုက္မွပဲ ထုတ္လို႔မရတဲ့ဟာက အလြယ္တကူပဲ ထြက္သြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

 

အာဖရိကတိုက္မွာ စိတ္နယ္လြန္ယံုၾကည္မႈေတြ ပညာရပ္ေတြ ျဖစ္ရပ္ဆန္းေတြ အလြန္မ်ားပါတယ္

  အဲဒီျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ိဳးတခုကို အပ္“““ခ်ေလာင္း.... 

ဆိုပီး ၂၀၀၉ေလာက္က ပို႕စ္တင္ဖူးတာ လင့္ခ္ျပန္ေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္။

 

http://kabarmakyay.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog-post.html

Burma: The Despots and the Laughter

Jonathan Mirsky 
Courtesy of Wendy Law-Yone

The Law-Yone family, 1951.

It’s hard to get a handle on Burma. When Aung San Suu Kyi was recently here in London, feted on every hand, she was asked about the persecution of the Rohingya, the Burmese Muslims. She replied, “I’m not sure they’re Burmese.” The Dalai Lama, who has declared that Burma’s Buddhist monks must stop beating up Muslims, was here at the same time and wished to meet her. She agreed, but only if there was no publicity. She had been advised about this by the office of Prime Minister David Cameron, who had earlier been denied contact with Beijing for having met with the Dalai Lama for forty minutes. I know about the meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi only because the Dalai Lama told me during his London visit.

Suu Kyi was interviewed for the long-running BBC program Desert Island Discs, during which she said, “I love the army” — the same army that had enforced her house arrest in Rangoon on and off for years. She now sits in Burma’s parliament with the generals who led that army. In the interview she also spoke of her father, General Aung San, as the founder of Burma’s Liberation Army, without mentioning that he had collaborated with the Japanese.

In Golden Parasol, her memoir of Burma during the years in which the country went from a British colony to a military dictatorship, Wendy Law-Yone suggests why the country’s ruling class may be so difficult to understand. Law-Yone makes plain that she, like Aung San Suu Kyi, is a member of a top Burmese family. A resident of London for many years, Law-Yone has returned to Rangoon twice, very briefly, after Aung San Suu Kyi’s release in 2010. She made no effort to see Suu Kyi and mentions her exactly three times in passing, noticing Suu Kyi’s picture on key chains and in recent photographs with Hilary Clinton. 

The central figure in Law-Yone’s memoir is her father, Edward Michael Law-Yone (1911–1980), the courageous and independent editor of The Nation, Burma’s most important English-language newspaper from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. No one else felt it was safe to write and publish what he did. Dr. Ba Maw, Burma’s first prime minister, described the pervasive nature of his country’s corruption: “Power means private armies, and guns, and subsidies, and the whole state treasury, and rules and decisions of your own making…and so the great democratic foolery goes round in a circle.” Soon after he established his paper, Ed Law-Yone wrote:  If our corrupt politicians, in spite of being corrupt, were building museums, correcting infant mortality, cleaning Rangoon, or tackling any one of the other thousand things that need to be done, the whole community would be behind them. But since they do none of these things they are merely dissipating energy and getting in the way of those who really do want to do a constructive job.

Speaking in such general terms was acceptable, “but when The Nation began leveling corruption charges at senior ministers, using words like ‘thief’ and ‘crook,’ the cabinet as a whole decided it was time the arrogant editor’s guns were spiked.” He was subjected to a three-month trial for defamation and criminal libel. (Law-Yone gives no date for this trial.) He was ordered to pay damages and sentenced to a month in prison. On appeal the fine was reduced to next to nothing and the jail sentence struck out. Ed Law-Yone was on bantering terms with General Ne Win, who would go on to be one of Burma’s brutal military rulers (1962–1981); he was a frequent guest at Ne Win’s house and very friendly with the general’s wife, Katie. After seizing power in 1962, however, Ne Win closed the newspaper and put Law-Yone in jail. Ms. Law-Yone initially accounts for this by relating that the general’s rackety wife confided in Ed that she had “acquired a lover.” When Ne Win discovered that Ed knew about this scandal, Law-Yone contends, the general imprisoned him for five years.

I doubt this was why her father was locked up, and perhaps Law-Yone’s imputation is as light-hearted as the language she prefers. She recently told a BBC interviewer that her way of dealing with a sad story is to “make people laugh.” I believe that General Ne Win imprisoned Law-Yone’s father not because he knew too much about the general’s wife but because he stood for the democratic values that Ne Win opposed. And yet Ed spoke well of “the man who had robbed him of his newspaper, his profession, his rightful home”:  I certainly do not know all that can be known of Ne Win, but I know sufficiently about the state of his mind to absolve him of whatever harm he has done to me and my own. What the rest of my countrymen feel about Ne Win, especially those who have suffered more severely and more unjustly at his hands, is something they themselves will have to put into expression when the time comes.

One might say that this is an expression of Buddhist forgiveness, but it is less than that. It’s an inability to weigh up even political reality other than as personal.

General Aung San who, as Law-Yone writes, “supported” the Japanese during the war, switched sides only when it was clear that the Japanese would lose. The general was rewarded for this just-in-time conversion with British withdrawal from Burma in 1948, which left behind a jumble of military despots and crooks—along with democrats like Edward Law-Yone. Wendy Law-Yone has written to me recently that what Aung San did was not collaboration, but was “in the interests of the Burmese people.” (This was the usual explanation, from Petain in France to Wang Jingwei in China.)

“From my father,” writes Law-Yone, “I inherited anger, from my mother, repression.” The anger is invisible in her book. What she really got from her father was her relentlessly jokey narrative style: As children we had all learned that the only way to our father’s ear was through an entertaining anecdote or performance. So I told him only about the comic aspects of my time in jail — not about the nightly interrogations. Her father’s account of his own five years in prison, she writes, was “offhand.”

Law-Yone writes over-long accounts of her father’s messy eating habits, of the family cook, who would “flounder about the kitchen, managing in his agitation to grab neither his head nor his arse, as the saying went,” and, in detail, how her schoolmates wiped their noses. But there is a moving chapter in which she describes how in 1965, when she was eighteen, she met for twenty minutes at a concert her American first husband-to-be, Sterling Seagrave, the son of the famous “Burma surgeon” and missionary Gordon Seagrave. She describes their long epistolary romance, her attempt to escape from Burma to meet him, her arrest by the secret police who were suspicious of her reasons for leaving the country, her brief but painful jailing, and the couple’s eventual reunion. (Later in the book she barely mentions that they divorced and he kept their children, and that she became engaged again and finally married her present British husband.)

Law-Yone, too, sees Burmese politics—occasional assassinations, detentions, even rebellions — largely in familial terms. I’m sure she knows they were far bigger than that, as she shows by returning repeatedly to the courage of her father and Burmans like him, who sacrificed themselves for liberty and clean government. In Burma, she appears to have learned from her heroic father, dissidents cloaked their rage, fear, and — ultimately — helplessness with mordant laughter. During their life in Rangoon, that was apparently the only way to survive.

Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma by Wendy Law-Yone is published in the UK by Chatto and Windus.

July 24, 2013, 3:51 p.m.

The reviewer mentioned Suu Kyi's arrogant cryptic remark about the Rohingyas. It would be interesting to find out what Wendy Law-Yone thinks about the present political situation in Burma: anti-Muslim riots, income inequity, Chinese style corruption, Chinese exploitative invasion of Burma, etc.

By the way, I am old enough to remember reading her dad's paper "The Nation" in the 50's and the early 60's although I had no idea about who Ne Win was sleeping around with, since I don't belong to the posh upper ruling class oligarchy of Burma like Wendy or Suu Kyi or the drug war lord Lo Hsinghan, who recently died!

A courageous journalist, Ed was a Kachin – not Burman. His English-language daily Nation acted as *the Opposition* when none existed in parliament. It was enough for government supporters of the day to wreck his press. This shameful act impelled the first democratically-elected Prime Minister U Nu to apologise in parliament, blaming the politicians, and exonerated the newspaper. The Nation’s motto on its front page was defiant: *Let me make the newspaper of the land and I don’t care who makes its laws.*

Ed was anti-communist and a strong critic of the Marxists in the government. His paper slammed the *Red Socialists* and *crypto-communists*, incurring the wrath of a Communist leader who threatened *we will hang you when we come to power*.

Following the military coup in March 1962, ultranationalist Gen Ne Win shared power with the communists, including the once-threatening Thakin Thein Pe Myint – Burma’s first Marxist -- who became the regime’s ideologue.

Soon thousands of *anti-communist elements*, including journalists and *capitalists*, were rounded up. Ed Law Yone’s personal ties with dictator Ne Win may have saved him from execution.

With the entire economy nationalised -- more like confiscation -- tens of thousands of Burmese would flee the *cold killing fields* over the years. The private sector ceased to exist and the management of the economy resembled that of communist countries. Under the stifling Soviet-style economic system, tens of thousands of ordinary Burmese were jailed trying to eke out a living in the black-market, which entirely replaced the private sector. The infamous Insein jail on the outskirts of Rangoon was derisively termed “Moscow" by the struggling masses. The national-socialist leaders so mismanaged the nation, especially the economy that it eventually imploded in 1988 in a nationwide uprising permanently discrediting Marxism in Burma as a plausible alternative to liberal democracy and capitalism. Demonised for decades a new generation, including the military, has embraced capitalism – oops, market economy – and democracy with a vengeance. Burma today no longer looks at the Western world through Marxist eyes. There’s hope and promise for Burma.

-- Burmese-born journalist  richm009@bgmail.com

တို႕ေဆး

၇ - ၈ - ၂၀၁၃ ရက္ စေန႕ေန႕ ေန႕လည္ ၁ နာရီ နဲ႕ ၂ နာရီၾကားမွာ စက္ရံုလမ္း ေပၚရွိ မဂၤလာေစ်း ကားမွတ္တိုင္ မွာ အနီ/အစိမ္း နဲ႕ ေလာင္းကစား၀ိုင္း လုပ္ၿပီး လိမ္လည္ေနတဲ့ လူတစ္စု ပံုပါ။

အဲဒီ့ လူတစ္စုရဲ႕ ေလာင္းကစားဝိုင္း လုပ္ပံုကို တစ္ခ်ဳိ႕လည္း သိၿပီးသား ျဖစ္မွာပါ။ ေလာင္းကစား လုပ္ပံုက ဒီလိုပါ။ အနီေရာင္ အကြက္ နဲ႕ အစိမ္းေရာင္ အကြက္ ႏွစ္ခု ထားထားပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ့မွာ ေဖါ့လံုးေလး တစ္ခုကို ခြက္ႏွစ္ခုနဲ႕ အုပ္ၿပီး ကစားတာပါ။ ခြက္ႏွစ္ခုထဲက ဘယ္ခြက္ထဲမွာ အဲဒီ့ ေဖါ့လံုးေလး ရွိလဲ ဆိုၿပီး ပိုက္ဆံ ထိုးတာပါ။ ေဘးမွာ ဝိုင္းအံုထိုးေနတဲ့ လူ ငါးေယာက္ ေျခာက္ေယာက္ေလာက္ ရွိပါလိမ့္မယ္ အဲဒါေတြလည္း သူတို႕လူေတြပါပဲ။ (ပံုမွာ ၾကည့္ရင္ အဲဒီ့ အမ်ဳိးသမီးႀကီးက လြဲၿပီး က်န္တာအကုန္ သူတို႕လူေတြပါ)။ သူတို႕ ဝိုင္းနားကို ျဖတ္သြားမိတဲ့ မိန္းမႀကီးေတြ ဆိုရင္ လက္ကို ဆြဲၿပီး ဝင္ထိုးဖို႕ ေျပာပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အဲဒီ့ အခ်ိန္မွာ တို႕ေဆး လို႕ ေခၚေနၾကတဲ့ မူးရစ္ေစတဲ့ ေဆးတစ္မ်ဳိးမ်ဳိး စိတ္ေျပာင္းေစတဲ့ ေဆးတစ္မ်ဳိးမ်ဳိး သံုးလိုက္ပံု ရပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ့မိန္းမက ပံုမွန္ အေနအထား မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး။

ကိုယ္တိုင္ၾကံဳဖူးတဲ့ မိန္းကေလး တစ္ေယာက္ ျပန္ေျပာတာကေတာ့ အဲဒီ့နားကို ျဖတ္သြားတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာ ထိုးသား အေယာင္ေဆာင္ ထားတဲ့ တစ္ေယာက္က လက္ကို လွမ္းဆြဲၿပီး ဝင္ထိုးလို႕ ေျပာေတာ့ သူက မထိုးဘူး မထိုးဘူး လို႕ ျငင္းေနရဲ႕ ၾကားကေန သူ႕ပိုက္ဆံအိတ္ထဲက ပိုက္ဆံ အထပ္လိုက္ကို အဲဒီ့လူက ဆြဲထုတ္ေနတာကို ဘာမွ မလုပ္ႏိုင္ မတားႏိုင္ဘူး ျဖစ္ေနတယ္တဲ့။ အိပ္မက္ မက္ေနသလိုလို ကိုယ့္ကိုကိုယ္ ထိန္းသိမ္းရ ခက္ေနတယ္တဲ့။ ငါ့ပိုက္ဆံ ျပန္ေပး မထုိးဘူး ဆိုၿပီး ပါးစပ္က ေျပာေနေပမယ့္ အသံက က်ယ္က်ယ္ မထြက္ႏိုင္ဘူးတဲ့။ အဲဒီ့မွာ အတင္း စိတ္ကို စုစည္းၿပီး ပိုက္ဆံ အတင္းေတာင္းၿပီး ေတြ႕တဲ့ ဘက္စ္ကားေပၚ ဇြတ္တက္လိုက္တယ္။ ဘက္စ္ကားေပၚ ေရာက္လို႕ အသိစိတ္ နည္းနည္းဝင္လာၿပီး ပိုက္ဆံေရေတာ့ ပိုက္ဆံ တစ္ေသာင္း ေလ်ာ့ေနတယ္။ ဘက္စကားေပၚက လူတစ္ေယာက္က နင္ေတာ္ေတာ္ ည့ံတာပဲ ႏွစ္ဆ ေတာင္ရမယ့္ဟာ ဘာလို႕ မထိုးတာလဲ ဆိုၿပီး ေျပာေတာ့ သူက ဘာလို႕ ထိုးရမွာလဲ က်မ ပိုက္ဆံေတြ ကုန္သြားမွာေပါ့ လို႕ ျပန္ေျပာလိုက္တယ္။ ေရွ႕မွတ္တိုင္လည္းေရာက္ေရာ အဲဒီ့လူ ျပန္ဆင္းသြားေရာ တစ္ကယ္ေတာ့ ဘက္စ္ကားေပၚထိ ပါလာတဲ့ အဲဒီ့လူလည္း သူတို႕ထဲက တစ္ေယာက္ပါပဲ။
အဲဒီ့လို ဝိုင္းမ်ဳိးကို အရင္က ခနခန ေတြ႕ဖူးပါတယ္။ ဝတ္လာတဲ့ ေရႊေတြပါ ထိုးခိုင္းလို႕ ေနာက္ဆံုး ေရႊဆိုင္ကို ကားငွားသြားၿပီး ေရာင္းၿပီး ပိုက္ဆံေတာင္းတဲ့အထိ ျဖစ္ကုန္တာေတြ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ မ်က္ျမင္ပါ။ အဲဒီ့တုန္းက အဲဒီ့မိန္းမႀကီးေတြ ေလာဘႀကီးလို႕ ျဖစ္ကုန္တာ လို႕ ထင္ေနခဲ့တာ ဒါေပမယ့္ တစ္ကယ္ေတာ့ မူးရစ္ေဆးေတြ စိတ္ကိုေျပာင္းလဲေစတဲ့ ေဆးေတြ သံုးထားမွန္း အခုေနာက္ပိုင္းမွ သိလာရတာပါ။

 သူတို႕ရဲ႕ သားေကာင္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရတဲ့ မိန္းမႀကီးေတြ မိန္းကေလးေတြက ကြမ္းေတာင္မွ မစားၾကတာ ဆိုေတာ့ မူးရစ္ေဆးေတြရဲ႕ ဒဏ္ကို ခံႏိုင္ရည္ မရွိလို႕ လြယ္လြယ္ေလးနဲ႕ ခံလိုက္ရတာပါပဲ။ ဒီ ဓါတ္ပံုထဲက မိန္းမႀကီး ဆို၇င္ မဂၤလာေစ်းမွာ ေစ်းလာ၀ယ္တဲ့ ပံုပဲ။ သူထုတ္ေနတဲ့ ပိုက္ဆံေတြက ငါးေထာင္တန္ေတြ ဆိုေတာ့ ကုန္ေရာင္း ကုန္ဝယ္လုပ္တဲ့ ေစ်းသည္တစ္ေယာက္လို႕ ထင္ရတယ္။ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး သနားဖို႕ ေကာင္းပါတယ္ သူ႕ခဗ်ာ ပါသမွ် ကုန္ေတာ့မွာ။

အခု ပံုမွာ ျမင္ရတဲ့ ဝိုင္းကို ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေတြ႕ေတာ့ ေဒါသလည္းထြက္ အဲဒီ့မိန္းမႀကီးကိုလည္း သနားနဲ႕ ဘာလုပ္ရမွန္းလည္း မသိ ျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ အဲဒါနဲ႕ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ဖုနး္နဲ႕ ဓါတ္ပံုရိုက္လိုက္တယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ လည္း ဓါတ္ပံုရိုက္ေရာ ေဘးနားက ကားေစာင့္ေနသလိုလို ရပ္ေနတဲ့ ခပ္ဝဝ ကုလားတစ္ေယာက္ (လူပံုစံကို ေျပာျပျခင္းသာ ျဖစ္သည္) က ဘာလို႕ ရိုက္တာလဲ မရိုက္ပါနဲ႕တဲ့။ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္က ဒီလူေတြ ယုတ္မာေနတာမို႕လို႕ ရိုက္တာေလ ရိုက္ေတာ့ ဘာျဖစ္လို႕လဲ လို႕ ျပန္ေမးလိုက္တယ္။ အဲဒီ့ေတာ့ အဲဒီ့ လူက ဒါ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ဝိုင္း မို႕လို႕ပါ မရိုက္ပါနဲ႕ အင္တာနက္ေပၚတင္မလို႕လား ပိုဆိုးကုန္လိမ့္မယ္ လို႕ ေျပာတယ္။ (ဒီလူ အင္တာနက္ဆိုတာေတာ့ သိသားပဲ အင္တာနက္ေပၚ ေရာက္တဲ့သတင္းဆို လူတိုင္းသိကုန္လို႕ လူႀကီးေတြ အမိန္႕ေၾကာင့္ ရဲေတြက မျဖစ္မေန ဖမ္းရေတာ့တာေလ) ကၽြန္ေတာ္က ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း ခံရဖူးလို႕ ဓါတ္ပံုရိုက္တာ မဂၤလာေတာင္ညြန္႕မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ အမႈဖြင့္ထားတယ္ လို႕ ေျပာလိုက္ေတာ့ အဲဒီ့လူက ဒီ မဂၤလာေတာင္ညႊန္႕ ရဲစခန္းမွာလား တဲ့ ျပန္ေမးတယ္ ရဲစခန္းရွိတဲ့ဘက္ကိုေတာင္ ေမးေငါ့ျပလိုက္ေသးတယ္။ (ရဲနဲ႕ ေတာ္ေတာ္ပိုင္ပံုပဲ၊ သူတို႕ ေလာင္းကစားလုပ္တဲ့ ေနရာနဲ႕ မဂၤလာေတာင္ညႊန္႕ ရဲစခန္းကလည္း နီးနီးေလးပါ တစ္မွတ္တိုင္ ေလာက္ပဲ ေဝးတာ)။ လူေတြက တစ္ဖြဲ႕နဲ႕ တစ္ဖြဲ႕ မတူဘူးေလ အကိုေတြ႕ခဲ့တာ တစ္ျခားအဖြဲ႕ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္မွာေပါ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕က အလွည့္နဲ႕ လုပ္ရတာ လို႕ ျပန္ေျပာတယ္။ အဲဒီ့တုန္းက အကိုေျပာရင္ ပိုက္ဆံျပန္ေပးမွာေပါ့ တဲ့။ (အလွည့္နဲ႕ လုပ္ရတာ ဆိုတာ ဘာလဲ) ကၽြန္ေတာ္ အဲဒီ့လူကို ဓါတ္ပံုရိုက္မလို စဥ္းစားေသးေပမယ့္ သူနဲ႕ကၽြန္ေတာ္မ်က္ႏွာခ်င္းဆိုင္ ေျပာေနတာရယ္ သူ႕ေဘးက လူေတြရွိေနတာေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ကို ျပႆနာ ထပ္ရွာမွာ စိုးလို႕ ရိုက္ဖို႕ အဆင္မေျပေတာ့ဘူး။ သူနဲ႕ စကားေျပာတာေတြကိုလည္း အသံမဖမ္းျဖစ္လိုက္မိဘူး။

အေျခအေနက မေကာင္းေတာ့ဘူး သူ႕ေဘးနားက မိန္းမ တစ္ေယာက္က ကစားဝိုင္းထဲက လူတစ္ေယာက္ကို လက္တို႕လိုက္လို႕ ဝိုင္းထဲက လူတစ္ခ်ဳိ႕ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ နားကို ကပ္လာတယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ကို ဝိုင္းထားသလို ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ အဲဒါနဲ႕ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း လွည့္ထြက္လာခဲ့တာ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ေနာက္ကို လူႏွစ္ေယာက္ လုိက္လာတယ္။ မဂၤလာေစ်း နား ဆိုေတာ့ လူေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ ကိုယ့္လံုျခံဳေရးကို ကိုယ္ စိတ္မခ်ရေတာ့ဘူး။ ၁၉၉ ကို ဖုန္းေခၚတယ္ ဖုန္းမအားဘူး တီတီတီတီ ပဲ ျမည္ေနတယ္။ ထပ္ေခၚတယ္ ဒီတိုင္ပဲ ငါးခါေလာက္ ေခၚၿပီးေတာ့ ၁၉၉ ကို ဆက္မေခၚပဲ ေလ်ာက္လာခဲ့တယ္။ ယုဇန ပလာဇာနားေရာက္ေတာ့ ၁၉၉ ကို ဆက္ၿပီး ဆက္တိုက္ ေခၚေနေပမယ့္ ဘာမွ မထူးဘူး။ တစ္ကယ္လို႕သာ အေရးေပၚ အေျခအေနဆို ဘယ္လိုလုပ္မလ ၁၉၉ က ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ ဖုန္းအားမွာလဲ။ ႏိုင္ငံျခား ရုပ္ရွင္ေတြထဲကလို အေရးေပၚနံပါတ္ကို ဖုန္းဆက္လိုက္တာနဲ႕ ရဲကားတစ္စီးနဲ႕ ရဲအရာရွိႏွစ္ေယာက္ေလာက္ ေရာက္လာတဲ့ အေျခအေနမ်ဳိး ဘယ္ေတာ့မ်ားမွာ ရပါ့မလဲလို႕ ေတြးေနမိတယ္။

ေနာက္ေတာ့ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ တစ္ခု အေသအခ်ာ ခ်လိုက္တာကေတာ့ Taxi တစ္စီး ငွားၿပီး တက္လိုက္တာပဲ။ အဲဒါက ေလာေလာဆယ္ ကိုယ့္အတြက္ အေသခ်ာဆံုး ထြက္ေပါက္ပါပဲ။ တစ္ကယ္လို႕သာ သူတို႕အဖြဲ႕ေတြက ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ကို ခါးပိုက္ႏႈိက္ပါ ဆိုၿပီး ဝိုင္းေအာ္ၿပီး ထိုးၾကရင္ေရာ။ ေဘးပတ္ဝန္းက်င္က လူေတြကိုေရာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ အားကိုးရမွာတဲ့လဲဗ်ာ။

မဂ္လာေစ်း လို လူေတြ စည္ကားေနတဲ့ ေနရာက ဘက္စ္ကားမွတ္တိုင္တစ္ခုမွာ ခုလို ေလာင္းကစားလုပ္ၿပီး ေဆးေတြသံုးၿပီး ပိုက္ဆံ အကုန္ကုန္တဲ့အထိ လိမ္ယူေနတာကို ရဲေတြ မသိဘူး ဆိုတာ ဘယ္လိုယံုၾကည္ရမွာလဲဗ်ာ။ ဒါ ခ်ဲေရာင္းတာ ခိုးကူး သီခ်င္းေခြ ေရာင္းတာထက္ အမ်ားႀကီး ဆိုးတဲ့ ဒုစရိုက္မႈကို လူလည္ေခါင္မွာ က်ဴးလြန္လိုက္တာပါပဲ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ သနားလိုက္တာ ဆိုတာထက္ ပိုၿပီး ဘယ္သူကမွ ဘာမွ မကူညီၾကပါဘူး။ သူတို႕ရဲ႕ သားေကာင္ ျဖစ္သြားတဲ့ မိန္းမႀကီးေတြက ေလာဘတက္ၿပီး ဝင္ထိုးတာ မဟုတ္သလို သူတို႕သေဘာနဲ႕ သူတို႕ ထိုးေနတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ေျမြတစ္ေကာင္ အျမိဳခံရတဲ့ သားေကာင္ တစ္ေကာင္လိုမ်ဳိး ခံေနရတာပါ။
တစ္ကယ္လို႕မ်ား အဲဒီ့ မိန္းမႀကီးက ေစ်းဝယ္ဖို႕ အိမ္ကထြက္သြားတဲ့ ကိုယ့္ရဲ႕ အေမ ဆိုရင္ ခု စာဖတ္ေနတဲ့သူေတြ ဘယ္လို ခံစားရမလဲဗ်ာ။ ပါသမွ် ပိုက္ဆံတင္ မဟုတ္ဘဲ ေခၽြးနည္းစာ စုေစာင္းထားတဲ့ ေရႊေတြပါ အကုန္ကုန္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ဘယ္လိုခံစားရမလဲ။ ဆင္းရဲခ်ဳိ႕တဲ့တဲ့ မိသားစုတစ္ခုက ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ေလးအတြက္ ပစၥည္းလာဝယ္တာ ဆိုရင္ အဲဒီ့လို ျဖစ္လို႕ စိတ္ထိခိုက္ၿပီး သတ္ေသသြားရင္ေရာ။ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ဘူးလို႕ ေျပာလို႕မရပါဘူး။

အဲဒီ့လို ျဖစ္ေနတာ ျမင္ရင္ ေက်းဇူးျပဳၿပီး လစ္လ်ဴရႈ မထားပါနဲ႕။ နီးစပ္ရာ ရယက နဲ႕ တစ္ျခား လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းေတြကို အကူအညီ ေတာင္းလိုက္ပါ။ သူတို႕အဖြဲ႕မွာ အနည္းဆံုး လူ ဆယ္ေယာက္ေလာက္ ပါတာမို႕လို႕ လူအင္အား စုၿပီးမွ တားပါ။ ဖမ္းႏိုင္ေအာင္ လုပ္ပါ။ သူတို႕ရဲ႕ သားေကာင္ ျဖစ္သြားတဲ့ သနားစရာေကာင္းတဲ့ မိန္းမႀကီးေတြ မိန္းကေလးေတြကို တတ္ႏိုင္သေလာက္ ကယ္တင္ဖို႕ ႀကိဳးစားေပးၾကပါ။ ဒီစာကိုလည္း ခရက္ဒစ္ေတြ ဘာေတြ မလိုပါဘူး လူတိုင္း သိေအာင္ Share လုပ္ေပးၾကပါခင္ဗ်ာ။ သတင္း ဂ်ာနယ္ေတြမွာ အသိမိတ္ေဆြေတြရွိရင္ ဒီသတင္းမ်ဳိး ပါေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးၾကပါ။

မင္းသန္႕ေအာင္ —
 Ye Yint Nge shared Cruel Vine's on 'fb'.

ဂ်ိမ္းစ္ဘြန္း စတန္႕မင္း မေတာ္တဆမႈျဖစ္ပီး အသက္ဆံုး

၂၀၁၂ လန္ဒန္အိုလန္ပစ္ အားကစားပြဲ၏ ဖြင့္ပြဲအခန္းအနားတြင္ ဂ်ိမ္းစ္ဘြန္းဇတ္ေကာင္ကိုယ္စားျပဳပီး ဟယ္လီေကာ္ပတာေပၚမွ ေလထီးခုန္သရုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့သူ stuntman တဦးျဖစ္သည့္ Mark Sutton သည္

၂၀၁၃ခု ၾသဂုတ္လ ၁၄ရက္ေန႕က ဆြစ္ဇာလန္ႏိုင္ငံ အယ္လ္ပ္ (Swiss Alps) ေတာင္တန္းတြင္ မေတာ္တဆ ထိခိုက္မႈျဖစ္သကာ ေသဆံုးခဲ့ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။

Mark Suttonသည္ အထူးပ်ံသန္းေရး၀တ္စံု (special wing suit)ျဖင့္ အျခား wing suit pilot ၂၀ႏွင့္အတူ ရဟတ္ယဥ္ေပၚမွ ခုန္ခ်စဥ္ Valais region ေဒသ Trient အနီးတြင္ မေတာ္တဆမႈျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္ဟု Online extreme sports broadcaster Epic TV ကေျပာသည္။

Mark Sutton (၄၂)ႏွစ္သည္ July 27, 2012 တြင္ ဖြင့္ပြဲ က်င္းပသည့္ လန္ဒန္အိုလန္ပစ္ အားကစားပြဲတြင္ ၿဗိတိသွ် ဘုရင္မႀကီး Queen Elizabeth IIႏွင့္ ဂ်ိမ္းစ္ဘြန္းတို႕ အိုလန္ပစ္ အားကစားကြင္းအတြင္းသို ေလထီးျဖင့္ခုန္ဆင္းေသာ အခန္းကို ဂ်ိမ္းစ္ဘြန္းကိုယ္စား ခုန္ခဲ႕သူ ျဖစ္သည္

Thai authorities implicated in Rohingya Muslim smuggling network

Special Report::

By Jason Szep and Stuart Grudgings

 - The beatings were accompanied by threats: If his family didn't produce the money, Myanmar refugee Abdul Sabur would be sold into slavery on a fishing boat, his captors shouted, lashing him with bamboo sticks.
It had been more than two months since Sabur and his wife set sail from Myanmar with 118 other Rohingya Muslims to escape violence and persecution. Twelve died on the disastrous voyage. The survivors were imprisoned in India and then handed over to people smugglers in southern Thailand.
As the smugglers beat Sabur in their jungle hide-out, they kept a phone line open so that his relatives could hear his screams and speed up payment of $1,800 to secure his release.
"Every time there was a delay or problem with the payment they would hurt us again," said Sabur, a tall fisherman from Myanmar's western Rakhine state.
He was part of the swelling flood of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar by sea this past year, in one of the biggest movements of boat people since the Vietnam War ended.
Their fast-growing exodus is a sign of Muslim desperation in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, also known as Burma. Ethnic and religious tensions simmered during 49 years of military rule. But under the reformist government that took power in March 2011, Myanmar has endured its worst communal bloodshed in generations.
A Reuters investigation, based on interviews with people smugglers and more than two dozen survivors of boat voyages, reveals how some Thai naval security forces work systematically with smugglers to profit from the surge in fleeing Rohingya. The lucrative smuggling network transports the Rohingya mainly into neighboring Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country they view as a haven from persecution.
Once in the smugglers' hands, Rohingya men are often beaten until they come up with the money for their passage. Those who can't pay are handed over to traffickers, who sometimes sell the men as indentured servants on farms or into slavery on Thai fishing boats. There, they become part of the country's $8 billion seafood-export business, which supplies consumers in the United States, Japan and Europe.
Some Rohingya women are sold as brides, Reuters found. Other Rohingya languish in overcrowded Thai and Malaysian immigration detention centers.
Reuters reconstructed one deadly journey by 120 Rohingya, tracing their dealings with smugglers through interviews with the passengers and their families. They included Sabur and his 46-year-old mother-in-law Sabmeraz; Rahim, a 22-year-old rice farmer, and his friend Abdul Hamid, 27; and Abdul Rahim, 27, a shopkeeper.
While the death toll on their boat was unusually high, the accounts of mistreatment by authorities and smugglers were similar to those of survivors from other boats interviewed by Reuters.
The Rohingya exodus, and the state measures that fuel it, undermine Myanmar's carefully crafted image of ethnic reconciliation and stability that helped persuade the United States and Europe to suspend most sanctions.
At least 800 people, mostly Rohingya, have died at sea after their boats broke down or capsized in the past year, says the Arakan Project, an advocacy group that has studied Rohingya migration since 2006. The escalating death toll prompted the United Nations this year to call that part of the Indian Ocean one of world's "deadliest stretches of water."
EXTENDED FAMILIES
For more than a decade, Rohingya men have set sail in search of work in neighboring countries. A one-way voyage typically costs about 200,000 kyat, or $205, a small fortune by local standards. The extended Rohingya families who raise the sum regard it as an investment; many survive off money sent from relatives overseas.
The number boarding boats from Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh reached 34,626 people from June 2012 to May of this year - more than four times the previous year, says the Arakan Project. Almost all are Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. Unprecedented numbers of women and children are making these dangerous voyages.
A sophisticated smuggling industry is developing around them, drawing in other refugees across South Asia. Ramshackle fishing boats are being replaced by cargo ships crewed by smugglers and teeming with passengers. In June alone, six such ships disgorged hundreds of Rohingya and other refugees on remote Thai islands controlled by smugglers, the Arakan Project said.
Sabur and the others who sailed on the doomed 35-foot fishing boat came from Rakhine, a rugged coastal state where Rohingya claim a centuries-old lineage. The government calls them illegal "Bengali" migrants from Bangladesh who arrived during British rule in the 19th century. Most of the 1.1 million Rohingya of Rakhine state are denied citizenship and refused passports.
Machete-wielding Rakhine Buddhists destroyed Sabur's village last October, forcing him to abandon his home south of Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state. Last year's communal unrest in Rakhine made 140,000 homeless, most of them Rohingya. Myanmar's government says 192 people died; Rohingya activists put the toll as high as 748.
Before the violence, the Rohingya were the poorest people in the second-poorest state of Southeast Asia's poorest country. Today, despite Myanmar's historic reforms, they are worse off.
Tens of thousands live in squalid, disease-ridden displacement camps on the outskirts of Sittwe. Armed checkpoints prevent them from returning to the paddy fields and markets on which their livelihoods depend. Rohingya families in some areas have been banned from having more than two children.
Sabur's 33-member extended family spent several months wandering between camps before the family patriarch, an Islamic teacher in Malaysia named Arif Ali, helped them buy a fishing boat. They planned to sail straight to Malaysia to avoid Thailand's notorious smugglers.
Dozens of other paying passengers signed up for the voyage, along with an inexperienced captain who steered them to disaster.
"DYING, ONE BY ONE"
The small fishing boat set off from Myengu Island near Sittwe on February 15. The first two days went smoothly. Passengers huddled in groups, eating rice, dried fish and potatoes cooked in small pots over firewood. Space was so tight no one could stretch their legs while sleeping, said Rahim, the rice farmer, who like many Rohingya Muslims goes by one name.
Rahim's last few months had been horrific. A Rakhine mob killed his older brother in October and burned his family's rice farm to the ground. He spent two months in jail and was never told why. "The charge seemed to be that I was a young man," he said. Rakhine state authorities have acknowledged arresting Rohingya men deemed a threat to security.
High seas and gusting winds nearly swamped the boat on the third day. The captain seemed to panic, survivors said. Fearing the ship would capsize, he dumped five bags of rice and two water tanks overboard — half their supplies.
It steadied, but it was soon clear they had another problem - the captain admitted he was lost. By February 24, after more than a week at sea, supplies of water, food and fuel were gone.
"People started dying, one by one," said Sabmeraz, the grandmother.
The Islamic janaza funeral prayer was whispered over the washed and shrouded corpses of four women and two children who died first. Among them: Sabmeraz's daughter and two young grandchildren.
"We thought we would all die," Sabmeraz recalled.
Many gulped sea water, making them even weaker. Some drank their own urine. The sick relieved themselves where they lay. Floorboards became slick with vomit and feces. Some people appeared wild-eyed before losing consciousness "like they had gone mad," said Abdul Hamid.
On the morning of the 12th day, the shopkeeper Abdul Rahim wrapped his two-year-old daughter, Mozia, in cloth, performed funeral rites and slipped her tiny body into the sea. The next morning he did the same for his wife, Muju.
His father, Furkan, had warned Abdul Rahim not to take the two children - Mozia and her five-year-old sister, Morja. The family had been better off than most Rohingya. They owned a popular hardware store in Sittwe district. After it was reduced to rubble in the June violence, they moved into a camp.
On the night Abdul Rahim was leaving, Furkan recalls pleading with him on the jetty: "If you want to go, you can go. But leave our grandchildren with us."
Abdul Rahim refused. "I've lost everything, my house, my job," he recalls replying. "What else can I do?"
On February 28, hours after Abdul Rahim's wife died, the refugees spotted a Singapore-owned tugboat, the Star Jakarta. It was pulling an empty Indian-owned barge, the Ganpati, en route to Mumbai from Myanmar. The refugee men shouted but the slow-moving barge didn't stop.
But as the Ganpati moved by, a dozen Rohingya men jumped into the sea with a rope. They swam to the barge, fixed the rope and towed their boat close behind so people could board. By evening, 108 of them were on the barge.
Mohammed Salim, a soccer-loving grocery clerk, and a young woman, both in their 20s, were too weak to move. Close to death, they were cut adrift; the boat took on water and submerged in the rough seas.
"He was our hope," said Salim's father, Mohammad Kassim, 71, who emptied his savings to pay the 500,000 kyat ($515) cost of the journey.
Of the 12 who died on the boat, 11 were women and children.
MISTAKEN FOR PIRATES
What happened next shows how the problems of reform-era Myanmar are rapidly becoming Asia's.
The tugboat captain mistook the Rohingya for pirates and radioed for help, said Bhavna Dayal, a spokeswoman for Punj Lloyd Group, the Indian company that owns the barge. Within hours, an Indian Coast Guard ship arrived. Officers fired into the air and ordered the Rohingya to the floor.
Rahim, the rice farmer, said he and five others were beaten with a rubber baton. With the help of some Hindi picked up from Bollywood films, they explained they were fleeing the strife in Rakhine state. After that, everyone received food, water and first aid, he said.
Another Indian Coast Guard ship, the Aruna Asaf Ali, arrived. It took the women and children to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian archipelago a short voyage to the south, before returning for the men.
In Diglipur, the largest town in North Andaman Island, immigration authorities separated the men from women and children, putting them all in cells. Guards beat them at will, Rahim said, and rummaged through their belongings for money. He lost 60,000 kyat ($62) and hid his remaining 60,000 kyat in a crack in a wall.
Rupinder Singh, the police superintendent in Diglipur, denied anyone was beaten or robbed.
After about a month, the Rohingya were moved to a bigger detention center near the state capital Port Blair. They joined about 300 other Muslims, mostly Rohingya from Myanmar, who had been rescued at sea. The men went on a one-day hunger strike, demanding to be sent to Malaysia.
The protest seemed to work. Indian authorities brought all 420 of them into international waters and transferred them to a double-decker ferry, said the Rohingya passengers.
"They told us this ship would take us straight to Malaysia," said Sabur.
It was run, however, by Thailand-based smugglers, he said.
Commander P.V.S. Satish, speaking for the Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard, said there was "absolutely no truth" to the allegation that the Navy handed the Rohingya to smugglers.
After four days at sea, the Rohingya approached Thailand's southern Satun province around April 18. They were split into smaller boats. Some were taken to small islands, others to the mainland. The smugglers explained they needed to recoup the 10 million kyat ($10,300) they had paid for renting the ferry.
ECONOMICS OF TRAFFICKING
Thailand portrays itself as an accidental destination for Malaysia-bound Rohingya: They wash ashore and then flee or get detained.
In truth, Thailand is a smuggler's paradise, and the stateless Rohingya are big business. Smugglers seek them out, aware their relatives will pay to move them on. This can blur the lines between smuggling and trafficking.
Smuggling, done with the consent of those involved, differs from trafficking, the business of trapping people by force or deception into labor or prostitution. The distinction is critical.
An annual U.S. State Department report, monitoring global efforts to combat modern slavery, has for the last four years kept Thailand on a so-called Tier 2 Watch List, a notch above the worst offenders, such as North Korea. A drop to Tier 3 can trigger sanctions, including the blocking of World Bank aid.
A veteran smuggler in Thailand described the economics of the trade in a rare interview. Each adult Rohingya is valued at up to $2,000, yielding smugglers a net profit of 10,000 baht ($320) after bribes and other costs, the smuggler said. In addition to the Royal Thai Navy, the seas are patrolled by the Thai Marine Police and by local militias under the control of military commanders.
"Ten years ago, the money went directly to the brokers. Now it goes to all these officials as well," said the smuggler, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A broker in Myanmar typically sends a passenger list with a departure date to a counterpart in Thailand, the smuggler said. Thai navy or militia commanders are then notified to intercept boats and sometimes guide them to pre-arranged spots, said the smuggler.
The Thai naval forces usually earn about 2,000 baht ($65) per Rohingya for spotting a boat or turning a blind eye, said the smuggler, who works in the southern Thai region of Phang Nga and deals directly with the navy and police.
Police receive 5,000 baht ($160) per Rohingya, or about 500,000 baht ($16,100) for a boat of 100, the smuggler said.
Another smuggler, himself a Rohingya based in Kuala Lumpur, said Thai naval forces help guide boatloads to arranged spots. He said his group maintains close phone contact with local commanders. He estimated his group has smuggled up to 4,000 people into Malaysia in the past six months.
Relatives in Malaysia must make an initial deposit of 3,000 ringgit ($950) into Malaysian bank accounts, he said, followed by a second payment for the same amount once the refugees reach the country.
Naval ships do not always work with the smugglers. Some follow Thailand's official "help on" policy, whereby Rohingya boats are supplied with fuel and provisions on condition they sail onward.
The Thai navy and police denied any involvement in Rohingya smuggling. Manasvi Srisodapol, a Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that there has been no evidence of the navy trafficking or abusing Rohingya for several years.
CAGES AND THREATS
Anti-trafficking campaigners have produced mounting evidence of the widespread use of slave labor from countries such as Myanmar on Thai fishing boats, which face an acute labor shortage.
Fishing companies buy Rohingya men for between 10,000 baht ($320) and 20,000 baht ($640), depending on age and strength, said the smuggler in Phang Nga. He recounted sales of Rohingya in the past year to Indonesian and Singapore fishing firms.
This has made the industry a major source of U.S. concern over Thailand's record on human trafficking. About 8 percent of Thai seafood exports go to supermarkets and restaurants in the United States, the second biggest export market after Japan.

The Thai government has said it is serious about tackling human trafficking, though no government minister has publicly acknowledged that slavery exists in the fishing industry.
Sabur, his wife Monzurah and more than a dozen Rohingya thought slavery might be their fate. The smugglers held them on the Thai island for five weeks. The captors said they would be sold to fisheries, pig farms or plantations if money didn't arrive soon.
"We were too scared to sleep at night," said Monzurah, 19 years old.
Arif Ali, the family patriarch in Kuala Lumpur, managed to raise about $21,000 to secure the release of 19 of his relatives, including his sister Sabmeraz, Sabur, and Monzurah. They were taken on foot across the border into Malaysia in May. But 10 of the family, all men, remained imprisoned on the island as he struggled to raise more funds.
As Ali was interviewed in early June, his cellphone rang and he had a brief, heated conversation. "They call every day," he said. "They say if we call the police they will kill them."
Some women without money are sold as brides for 50,000 baht ($1,600) each, typically to Rohingya men in Malaysia, the Thai smuggler said. Refugees who are caught and detained by Thai authorities also face the risk of abuse.

At a detention center in Phang Nga in southern Thailand, 269 Rohingya men and boys lived in cage-like cells that stank of sweat and urine when a Reuters journalist visited recently. Most had been there six months. Some used crutches because their muscles had atrophied.
"Every day we ask when we can leave this place, but we have no idea if that will ever happen," said Faizal Haq, 14.
They are among about 2,000 Rohingya held in 24 immigration detention centers across Thailand, according to the Thai government.
"To be honest, we really don't know what to do with them," said one immigration official who declined to be named. Myanmar has rejected a Thai request to repatriate them.
Dozens of Rohingya have escaped detention centers. The Thai smuggler said some immigration officials will free Rohingya for a price. Thailand's Foreign Ministry denied immigration officials take payments from smugglers.

PROMISED LAND
When Rahim, Abdul Hamid and the other Rohingya finally arrived in Thailand, smugglers met them in Satun province, which borders Malaysia.
They were herded into pickup trucks and driven to a farm, where they say they saw the smugglers negotiate with Thai police and immigration officials. The smugglers told them to contact relatives in Malaysia who could pay the roughly 6,000 ringgit ($1,800).
"If you run away, the police and immigration will bring you back to us. We paid them to do that," the most senior smuggler told them, the two men recalled.
After 22 days at the farm, Rahim and Hamid escaped. It was near midnight when they darted across a field, cleared a barbed-wire fence and ran into the jungle. They wandered for a day, hungry and lost, before meeting a Burmese man who found them work on a fruit farm in Padang Besar near the Thai-Malaysia border. They still work there today, hoping to save enough money to leave Thailand.
If the smugglers get paid, they usually take the Rohingya across southern Thailand in pickup trucks, 16 at a time, with just enough space to breathe, the smuggler in Thailand said. They are hidden under containers of fish, shrimp or other food, and sent through police checkpoints at 1,000 baht ($32) apiece, the smuggler said. Once close to Malaysia, the final crossing of the border is usually made by foot.
Abdul Rahim, the shopkeeper who lost his wife and toddler, arranged a quick payment to the smugglers from relatives in Kuala Lumpur. He was soon on a boat to Malaysia with his surviving daughter and his sister-in-law, Ruksana. They were dropped off around April 20 at a remote spot in Malaysia's northern Penang island.
For Abdul Rahim and many other Rohingya, Malaysia was the promised land. For most, that hope fades quickly.
At best, they can register with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and receive a card that gives them minimal legal protection and a chance for a low-paid job such as construction. While Malaysia has won praise for accepting Rohingya refugees, it has not signed the U.N. Refugee Convention that would oblige it to give them fuller rights.
Those picked up by Malaysian authorities face weeks or months in packed detention camps, where several witnesses said beatings and insufficient food were common. The Malaysian government did not comment on conditions in the camps.
The UNHCR has registered 28,000 Rohingya asylum seekers out of nearly 95,000 Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, many of whom have been in the country for years. An estimated 49,000 unregistered asylum seekers can wait months or years for a coveted UNHCR card. The card gives asylum seekers discounted treatment at public hospitals, is recognized by many employers, and gives protection against repatriation.
The vast majority, like Sabur, Abdul Rahim and their families, don't obtain these minimal protections. They evade detention in the camps but live in fear of arrest.
By early July, Sabur had found temporary work in an iron foundry on Kuala Lumpur's outskirts earning about $10 a day. He will likely have to save for years to pay back the money that secured his release.
Abdul Rahim's family now lives in a small, windowless room in a city suburb. His late wife's sister, Ruksana, coughed up blood during one interview, but is afraid to seek medical help without documentation.
By early July, Abdul Rahim had married Ruksana. He was picking up occasional odd jobs through friends but was struggling to pay the $80 a month rent on their shabby room. Despite that, and the loss of his first wife and daughter, he still believes he made the right decision to flee Myanmar.
"I don't regret coming," he said, "but I regret what happened. I think about my wife and daughter all day."
(Stuart Grudgings reported from Kuala Lumpur. Additional reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok and Sruthi Gottipati in New Delhi. Editing by Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams)

(Reuters)