PEACE MAKER UNDER DEPORTED

ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး စတစ္ကာကပ္သူ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံသား ခရီးသည္တစ္ဦး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ႏွင္ထုတ္ခံရ။

အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံသား Garrett Kostin ဆိုသူသည္ ယေန႔ ေမလ ၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ႏွင္ထုတ္ခံခဲ့ရ သည္ဟု သိရသည္။ သူ၏ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း လွည့္လည္သြားလာႏိုင္ေသာ ဗီဇာသက္တမ္းမွာ ေမလ ၁၀ ရက္ေန႔မွ ျပည့္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။

သတင္းအရ ယေန႔နံနက္ပိုင္းတြင္ သူ႔ကို သူတည္းခိုရာ ဟိုတယ္မွ ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးရဲႏွင့္လူ၀င္မႈႀကီးၾကပ္ေရး တာ၀န္ရွိသူမ်ား မႏၱေလးေလဆိပ္သို႔ေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့ၿပီး ထိုမွေနျပည္ေတာ္(ၾကပ္ေျပး)၊ ထိုမွ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္၊ ထိုမွ ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ပို႔ေဆာင္ခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

သူ႔မိတ္ေဆြတစ္ဦး၏ ေျပာျပခ်က္အရ သူသည္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးခ်ိဳးငွက္အမွတ္တံဆိပ္(Peace in Burma Now) စတစ္ကာမ်ားကို သူလွည့္ပတ္ခဲ့ရာ ေနရာမ်ား(ဘားအံ၊ သီေပါ၊ မႏၱေလး၊ ျပင္ဦးလြင္ ….. စသည့္) ေနရာအႏွံ႔ တြင္ လိုက္လံကပ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ မႏၱေလးေလဆိပ္တြင္ပင္ ေနရာ ၃ ေနရာထက္မနည္းကပ္ခဲ့ေသး ေၾကာင္းသိရွိရသည္။

သူ႔ကို ျမန္မာအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားကို ႏွိပ္စက္သလို ညွင္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ ေမးျမန္းခဲ့ျခင္းမရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ သူသည္ ဧၿပီလကတည္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းသို႔ ခရီးသြားဗီဇာျဖင့္ ၀င္ေရာက္ လည္ပတ္ခဲ့သူျဖစ္ သည္။

သူ႔အေနျဖင့္ ေမ ၁၁ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ၊ ခ်င္းမိုင္ၿမိဳ႕၌ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလွဳပ္ရွားမႈကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသူ အရွင္ ေသာပါက ႏွင့္တြဲဘက္၍ “ Burma VJ ” မွတ္တမ္း႐ုပ္ရွင္ကို ရွင္းလင္းျပသမည္ဟုလည္း သိရသည္။

လာမယ့္ ဇြန္ ၁၉ ရက္တြငလည္း္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေမြးေန႔ကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳေသာအားျဖင့္ သူတည္ေထာင္ထားေသာ ခ်င္းမိုင္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ The Best Friend Library (မိတ္ေဆြေကာင္းစာၾကည့္တိုက္) တြင္ သူႏွင့္ Andrea ဆိုသူတို႔ ပူးတြဲၿပီး “ Responsible Tourism in Burma ” အေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္၍ ႏွီးေႏွာ ဖလွယ္ပြဲက်င္းပသြားမည္ဟုလည္း သိရွိရပါသည္။

ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ ဘန္ေကာက္ျမဳိ ့ကို ေရာက္ရွိလာခ်ိန္မွာ မစၥတာ ဂရက္စ္ ေကာ္စတင္ ေရးသားေပးပို ့လာေသာ စာအား ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္း ဖတ္ရွဴႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Hello to all,

I'm writing to you now from Bangkok.

'Why is that?', you may ask. 'You weren't due back in Thailand until around 10 May!'

Well, you see, I was deported this morning from Burma. The kind staff of the guesthouse I was staying at in Mandalay was nice enough to wake me up to let me know that there were several police officers and an immigration official waiting for me in the lobby. I appreciated the forewarning. I was taken to the airport in Mandalay, flown to Naypyidaw, then Rangoon, and finally to Bangkok. At least I didn't have to pay for any of the airport taxi fares!

I am still under a bit of shock, but the short story is that I was deported for spreading a message of peace and freedom in Burma. The military dictatorship there doesn't like that. Unfortunately, they know that if the people of Burma were free, the regime would no longer be in power. However, without freedom, there will also be no peace.

I was not tortured or hurt in any way, and I don't think I was ever under threat of being incarcerated. It was easiest for them to just get me out of the country. They had known about my spreading of the Peace Dove stickers since Maymyo (if not earlier). I had unnerving encounters with police officers, immigration officials, and plain-clothes 'spies' in Hsipaw and Kyaukme (I was never allowed to travel to Namsan), but I guess it took them awhile to decide exactly what to do with me.

I am happy that I took Aung San Suu Kyi's advice and NEVER showed any respect for, nor fear of, the authorities I had to encounter. This was actually not difficult, as I had none of either. I even got a couple of really well-placed 'Peace in Burma Now' stickers up while I was in custody! On the back of a seat in the Mandalay airport, in the bathroom on a Myanma Airways flight, and even on the desk of one immigration official while no one was looking.

I am now safely in Bangkok and will be heading up to Mae Sot by bus in two days. I will be in Chiang Mai around 10 May to get ready for the next screening of "Burma VJ" with Ashin Sopaka on 11 May.

I hope soon I will be able to tell the story of my adventures in greater detail. Andrea and I are putting together a seminar about 'Responsible Tourism in Burma' as a part of the "Arrest Yourself" event to be held 19 June in honor of Suu Kyi's birthday at the library in Chiang Mai, so perhaps that will be a good forum. For now I need to decompress and breathe with a sense of safety and security again!

Thank you all for following along with me on my adventures! Thanks for all of your well wishes, advice, and prayers.

See you all soon!

Garrett

(သတင္းေပးပို ့လာသူ အလင္းဆက္အား ေက်းဇူးတင္ရွိပါသည္)။