5.08.2008

NLD Special Statement 9-5-2008(Burmese and English)


National League for Democracy
No. (97/b) West Shwegondine Street
Bahan Township, Yangon
Special Statement 9/05/08
Date: 7 May 2008
In statement No. 4/2008, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) declared
a State of Emergency in Irrawaddy, Yangon, and Pegu Divisions and Karen and Mon
States as a result of Cyclone Nargis’s devastating destruction on the 2nd and 3rd of
May 2008.
Because of the storm, hundreds of thousand of people have died and remain missing.
The storm caused catastrophic and unprecedented damage of people’s property in
Burma. Victims and their relatives, including ethnic nationalities, are overwhelmed by
their loss. Under these circumstances, people have no desire to vote in the upcoming
referendum. However, in spite of the people’s plight, authorities adamantly plan to
hold the referendum. As authorities neglect people’s basic needs and struggles for
food, shelter, and clothing, they continue to work with supporting organizations to
coerce people to vote “yes” in the referendum in support of their constitution.
On 6 May 2008, the Referendum Convening Commission of the Union of Burma
issued Statement 8/2008 confirming that the referendum will be held on 10 May 2008
in all states and divisions except 40 townships in Yangon division and 7 townships in
Irrawaddy division. It further declared that the referendum for the remaining 47
townships will be held on 24 May 2008. Aid needs and reconstruction work in these
States of Emergency will not be finished by 24 May 2008.
Authorities continue to exploit people's difficulties. The Referendum should be
postponed in all parts of the country, not only in some parts. Convening the
referendum under these dire conditions is deplorable. Therefore, the NLD demands
that the referendum be held simultaneously in all parts of the country once the
conditions in the country have improved.
NLD reprimands authorities for prioritizing approval of their constitution over
people's lives and basic survival needs.
At the present time, victims of the storm need immediate international aid, including
aid from the United Nations. On behalf of the people, the NLD denounces the
authorities’ attempt to hold a referendum instead of accepting disaster relief aid for
the suffering victims of this disaster.
As per the decision of Central Executive Committee held on 7 May 2008.
Central Executive Committee
National League for Democracy
Yangon
(Unofficial translation)

You can trust and send your donation to FFSS

Dear All reader and oversea Burmese people

You can trust and send your donation to Free Funeral Service Society for the victims of Cyclone Nargis.Ko Kyaw Thu (Vice Chair Man of FFSS and famous actor) said to VOA Burmese program in an interview.He is sure and try to send this donation and supports to that suffering people from Irrawaddy division.He was actively involved of September Monks and people movement and was arrested for a few days.
He said to VOA ,how some official try to dastard him he will go to Irrawaddy division and will give help for that suffering people.We want to request to oversea people from all over the world .Please try to help your people as you could pass over by FFSS.

With regards

Saffron Toward
ေလေဘးဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕ေပၚ စုၿပဳံေရာက္ရွိ

08 May 2008

ဦးမုိးေဇာ္ - အစီအစဥ္ကုိရယူရန္ (MP3) audio clip
ဦးမုိးေဇာ္ - နားဆင္ရန္ (MP3) audio clip










ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္းက မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ခံရတဲ့ လပြတၱာနဲ႔ ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္ကြ်န္းဘက္က
ေသာင္းနဲ႔ခ်ီတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြဟာ ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕မွာ လာေရာက္ခိုလႈံေနၾကၿပီး
အဲဒီအထဲမွာ မိဘမဲ့ကေလး ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ေလာက္ပါ၀င္တယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။
အခုအခါမွာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးစခန္းေတြ ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားေပမယ့္ ဒုကၡသည္ဦးေရ မ်ား

လြန္းတာေၾကာင့္ ရိကၡာနဲ႔ ေဆး၀ါးေတြ လိုအပ္ေနတယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။
ဒီသတင္းကို ထုိင္းအေျခစိုက္သတင္းေထာက္ ဦးမိုးေဇာ္က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕မွာ ဒီလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔က ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကို စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္
ခဲ့ၿပီး အခုအခါမွာ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းနဲ႔ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးစခန္း
၁၀ ခုေလာက္ ဖြင့္ထားပါတယ္။ ၀င္ေရာက္လာတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြဟာ ေသာင္းနဲ႔ခ်ီ
ရိွႏုိင္တယ္လို႔ ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕နယ္က ျပည္သူ႔လြႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးေအာင္ၾကင္က
ေျပာပါတယ္။

“က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ၾကားတာက ေျမာင္းျမခ႐ုိင္တြင္းက ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ လက္ခံမယ္ဆုိတဲ့ မူရွိပုံ
ရတယ္။ ေျမာင္းျမခ႐ုိင္ထဲမွာေတာ့ လပြတၱာနဲ႔ ေမာ္ကၽြန္းက အထိနာသြားတယ္။ အခု

ေလာေလာဆယ္ ေရာက္ေနၾကတဲ့အုပ္စုေတြကေတာ့ လပြတၱာၿမိဳ႕နယ္ထဲက ေက်းရြာ
ေတြကလူေတြမ်ားတယ္။ လက္ခံတဲ့အတုိင္းအတာက အခု တဖြဲဖြဲနဲ႔၀င္လာတယ္။
၀င္လာတာလည္း တခ်ဳ႕ိ ေမာ္ေတာ္ေတြနဲ႔ ရသမွ် ေခါင္မုိးေတြေပၚတက္ၿပီး ျပည့္က်ပ္
စုၿပဳံၿပီး ေရာက္လာတဲ့အုပ္စုရွိသလုိ ကားေတြနဲ႔ေရာက္လာတဲ့လူေတြလည္း ရွိတယ္။

တခ်ဳိ႕က်ေတာ့လည္း ေျခလ်င္၀င္လာတဲ့အုပ္စုေတြရွိတယ္။ အစားစားေပါ့။ အခု
က်ေနာ့္စိတ္ထင္ တေသာင္းခြဲ၊ ႏွစ္ေသာင္းေလာက္ေတာ့ ေရာက္ေနၿပီထင္တယ္၊
ေျမာင္းျမမွာ။”

ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးစခန္းေတြမွာ ေရာက္လာတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ မ်ားတာေၾကာင့္ ရိကၡာနဲ႔
ေဆး၀ါးေတြ လိုအပ္ေနတယ္လို႔ ဦးေအာင္ၾကင္က ဆက္ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းက စခန္းဖြင့္ထားတယ္၊ ေလာေလာဆယ္ တာ၀န္ရွိတဲ့ လူႀကီး
ေတြလည္း လုပ္ေနတယ္။ လုပ္ေနတယ္ဆုိတာ ေလာေလာဆယ္ တုိင္းမႉးေတြဘာေတြ

လာတယ္ၾကားတယ္။ ေရာက္လာတဲ့လူဦးေရ အတုိင္းအတာနဲ႔ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးအတုိင္း
အတာကေတာ့ က်ေနာ့္အျမင္ မလုံေလာက္ဘူး။ လူဦးေရကမ်ားတယ္၊ ကယ္ဆယ္ဖို႔
ေဆာင္ရြက္တဲ့ အေနအထားက နည္းေနတဲ့အတြက္ အစားအေသာက္ေတြ အဓိက
လုိတယ္၊ ေဆး၀ါးေတြ အဓိကလုိတယ္။”

ဒီလို၀င္ေရာက္လာတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို ေဒသခံျပည္သူေတြက အလႉေငြေတြ
ေကာက္ခံၿပီး ကူညီေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးေနတယ္လို႔ ေဒသခံအမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးက ေျပာပါ
တယ္။

“လာတဲ့ဒုကၡသည္ေတြအတြက္ က်မတို႔ ဒီကေန အလႉခံတယ္။ အလႉခံ ေတာ္ေတာ္
မ်ားမ်ား ထည့္ၾကပါတယ္။ တေယာက္ကို ၁၀ သိန္း၊ ၁ သိန္း၊ ၂ သိန္းနဲ႔။ ပထမေန႔က
အလႉခံဆုိ ၃၅ သိန္းရတယ္။ ဒုတိယေန႔က အလႉခံဆုိ သိန္း ၃၀ ရတယ္။”

အဲဒီလို ေသာင္းနဲ႔ခ်ီရိွမယ့္ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြထဲမွာ မိဘမဲ့ကေလးငယ္ ၃၀၀ ေလာက္ ပါ၀င္
ႏုိင္တယ္လို႔ ဦးေအာင္ၾကင္က ေျပာပါတယ္။

“မိဘမဲ့ကေလးေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ အမွတ္ ၄၊ အထက
စခန္းမွာ၊ အဲဒီမွာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးစခန္းဖြင့္ထားေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျဖတ္သြားရင္း
ၾကည့္လုိက္ေတာ့ ကေလးေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားတာ ေတြ႕တယ္။ က်ေနာ္ သြားေတြ႕
ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက မိဘမရွိၾကေတာ့ဘူး။ တခ်ဳိ႕ မိသားစုနဲ႔ ပါလာ

တာလည္းရွိတယ္။ က်ေနာ္သိရသေလာက္ေတာ့ ၃၀၀ ေလာက္ရွိတယ္လို႔ၾကား
တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ထပ္လည္း အမ်ားႀကီးထပ္၀င္လာတုန္းပဲ။”

မိဘမဲ့ကေလးေတြကို အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ဘယ္လို ဆက္လက္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သြားမယ္
ဆိုတာ မေသခ်ာေသးေပမယ့္ တခ်ဳိ႕ေဒသခံေတြက ေခၚယူေစာင့္ေရွာက္ဖို႔ ျပင္ဆင္
ေနတယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။

“က်မတုိ႔ၾကားရတဲ့အထဲမွာ မိသားစု ၉ ေယာက္ရွိရင္ ၁ ေယာက္တည္းရွင္လာတာတုိ႔၊
အခု က်မတုိ႔လည္း ၁ ဦးၾကားလို႔ သြားေခၚဖုိ႔ စီစဥ္ထားတယ္။ မိသားစု ၅ ေယာက္မွာ
အေမေရာ၊ အေဖေရာ၊ ေမာင္ေတြေရာ အကုန္ေသတယ္။ မိန္းကေလးတေယာက္
တည္း ရွင္လာလုိ႔။ အဲဒါေတာင္ ေကာက္႐ုိးပုံေပၚမွာ တရက္ေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ ေမ့ေျမာေန
တာ။ ေနာက္ေတာ့မွ သြားေတြ႕လို႔ ရွင္တာတုိ႔ ဘာတုိ႔ အဲလုိမ်ဳိးေတြရွိတယ္။ အဲဒါ
ဘယ္အရြယ္ေလာက္ရွိမလဲလို႔ က်မေမးေတာ့ ၁၃ ႏွစ္ေလာက္ရွိမယ္လို႔ ေျပာတယ္။ အဲဒီေကာင္မေလးတေယာက္က။”

ဒီလို ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကို ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕ေပၚမွာသာမကဘဲ အနီးအနားက
ေက်းရြာေတြကပါ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကိုလက္ခံၿပီး ႏုိင္သေလာက္ ကူညီေပးေနၾကတယ္လို႔
ဆိုပါတယ္။

ေျမာင္းျမၿမိဳ႕လိုပဲ မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ကို ဆုိးဆိုး၀ါး၀ါးမခံရတဲ့ ပုသိမ္ၿမိဳ႕မွာလည္း ကယ္ဆယ္
ေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပါတယ္။ အဓိကကေတာ့ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ပုသိမ္
ခန္းမမွာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးပစၥည္းေတြကို စုေဆာင္းၿပီး ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို ဆန္၊ ဆီ၊ ဆား၊
အာလူး၊ ၾကက္သြန္ စတာေတြကို ျဖန္႔ေ၀ေပးေနပါတယ္။ ပုသိမ္မွာေတာ့ ဒုကၡသည္
စခန္း ၄ ခုေလာက္ရိွၿပီး စုစုေပါင္း ဒုကၡသည္ဦးေရ ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ေလာက္သာရိွႏုိင္တယ္၊
ပုသိမ္ဘက္ကို လာေရာက္ၾကတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြက ဟုိင္းႀကီးကၽြန္း၊ သဃၤန္းကုန္းနဲ႔ ဇီးျဖဴကုန္းဘက္ကလူေတြ မ်ားတယ္လို႔ ေဒသခံတေယာက္က ေျပာပါတယ္။


Eighty Thousand People Dead’; Cholera Cases Reported


By AUNG THET WINE / BOGALAY Thursday, May 8, 2008

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(An Irrawaddy correspondent has returned from the delta area after interviewing military officers, government officials, medical personnel and survivors of Cyclone Nargis.)

An army major with the Irrawaddy Division military headquarters who asked not to be identified said on Wednesday more than 600 villages are submerged in the Irrawaddy delta along Cyclone Nargis’ deadly path.

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The worst-hit areas are Bogalay, Laputta, Mawlamyaing Gyun and Pyapon townships where, he said, more than 80,000 people have died and more than 700,000 people are homeless.

Local medical personnel said some survivors from Kyein Kyi Chaung village in Bogalay have died of cholera. Cholera has also occurred among some survivors from Laputta. The government has been transferring Laputta refugees to Myang Mya Township daily, according to an army officer.

“The cholera outbreak has begun,” said one medical worker. “People have nothing to drink so they drink water from the creeks and rivers. So that is how the outbreak began.

“These waterways are dirty because they are littered with bodies and animals. The survivors know the water is dirty, but they have no other choice and have had to drink the dirty water. That’s how they contracted cholera.

“This is the time for us to stock up on cholera medicine for the possibility of an outbreak in the near future. However, we do not have enough medicine.”

Bogalay was the hardest-hit township with the highest death toll, believed to be around 50,000 people. The military officer said the second largest death toll was in Laputta, with Pyapon third in the number of fatalities.

“Laputta had nearly 20,000 deaths,” he said.

An army officer with Light Infantry 66 who has been involved in relief efforts said:
“A total of 142 villages went under water in Bogalay Township. The majority of the people in these villages have died. Only a few survived. For instance, Khaing Shwe Wa village in Kyun Thaya Dai Nel (village tract) had about 400 people before the cyclone; now they have only four people left. So you can say that the whole village was wiped out.”

All 50 villages in Kyun Thaya Dai Nel located between Meinmahla Kyun and Kadonkana islands southwest of Boglay are submerged. (The villages include Mi Laung Gwin, Kapanan, Yei Kyaw Gyi, Chaung Phye, Gway Chaung, Khaing Shwe Wa, Danyinphyu, inner and outer parts of Khaung Gyi Island, Buyakyaung, Hmon Tine Gyi, Hmon Tine Lay, Tayaw Chaung, Pulonetaing, Ashe-mae, Kantmalar, Chachee Island village, Thakinma Gyi, Thitpoke village, Letwel Gyi, Kyat Pyay and Thamadi).

Thirty-three villages located in the Kyein Chaung Gyi village tract about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Bogalay were wiped out, including Shwe Htoo, Lamu Oat Gyi, Lamu Oat Lay, Ma Kyin Myaing, Hlay Lone Kwe, Arr-makhan, Japan Island and Lay Gwa.

The officer from Light Infantry 66 said thousands of people were rescued in recent days from villages where the water level has gone down.

Local residents said many people have seen no relief supplies during the past six days following the disaster. People do not know where to go to seek help, and they are in desperate need of safe drinking water, food and medicine.

A government officer with the Maternal and Child Care Association serving Laputta and Pyapon said there is widespread fear of diseases such as malaria, diarrhea and cholera because of dead bodies that litter the area and unsanitary living conditions.

A resident in the Kadon village tract who has been involved in the relief effort, said: “We are using May Kha, a double-deck boat; Thuria, a long-tale boat; and local fishing boats known as jote (30-35 feet long) in our efforts to find survivors.”

Another soldier with Light Infantry 66 said, “There is not even a trace of a village left after the water has receded; they are just open, empty places now. There are thousands of decaying corpses around islands, villages and along the waterfronts. There is no one to cremate the bodies.”

A rescue worker said: “There’s a pile of dead bodies amounting to hundreds in and around Mein Ma Hla Island. The waterfront along this area is littered with bodies, carcasses of live stock, buffaloes, cupboards, furniture and other household materials.

မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ေတြ ႀကဳံေနရ

08 May 2008

ဦးသားၫြန္႔ဦး - အစီအစဥ္ကုိရယူရန္ (MP3) audio clip
ဦးသားၫြန္႔ဦး - နားဆင္ရန္ (MP3) audio clip












မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအကူအညီေပးေရးမွာ

အေႏွာင့္အတားေတြ ျဖစ္ေန႐ံုတင္မကပါဘူး၊ အခုဆိုရင္ ျပည္တြင္းမွာပဲ တတ္ႏိုင္
တဲ့သူေတြစုၿပီး ဒုကၡေရာက္သူေတြကို သြားေရာက္ကူညီတာ၊ ပစၥည္းလႉဒါန္းတာ
ေတြပါ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္ျဖစ္ေနတယ္လို႕ေဒသခံေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အေၾကာင္းစံု ေမးျမန္းထားသမွ် ကိုသားၫြန္႔ဦးက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

အခုဆိုရင္ ရန္ကုန္ဆင္ေျခဖံုးအရပ္ေတြမွာ မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ ဒုကၡေရာက္သူေတြ
အဖို႕ ေသာက္ေရသန္႕၊ အစားအစာ၊ အ၀တ္အထည္၊ ေနစရာ အားလံုး ဆင္းရဲခ်ဳိ႕တဲ့ေန
တာေၾကာင့္ တတ္ႏိုင္သူေတြအဖို႕ သူတို႕ႏိုင္သေလာက္ အလႉေငြေတြ၊ အလႉပစၥည္းေတြ

ေကာက္ခံစုေဆာင္းၿပီး တႏိုင္တပိုင္ ကူညီမႈေတြ လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ အစိုးရအာဏာပိုင္
ေတြဘက္က အကူအညီေတြ ေပးတာရိွေပမယ့္ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားမွာပါဖို႕ကို ပိုၿပီး အေလး

ေပးေနတယ္လို႕ ေဒသခံေတြက ေ၀ဖန္ပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ ဒီလို တပိုင္တႏိုင္ ကူညီေနသူ
ေတြကိုလည္း သက္ဆိုင္ရာ ေဒသအာဏာပိုင္ေတြဘက္က ေမးတာျမန္းတာ၊ ေႏွာင့္ယွက္

တာမ်ဳိးေတြရိွတယ္လို႕ ေလေဘးဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို သြားေရာက္ကူညီေနသူ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ခံ

တဦးက အခုလိုေျပာပါတယ္။

“အစ္မတုိ႔ မေန႔က သြားေ၀တယ္။ ေ၀တဲ့အခါ ရ၀တကို ဆက္သြယ္ပါလို႔ေျပာတယ္။

ဘာေၾကာင့္ဆက္သြယ္ရမွာလဲ။ က်မတို႔ ျပည္သူေတြအကုန္လုံးက ေ၀ခ်င္တယ္။
သို႔ေသာ္ ၾကားထဲက ျဖတ္စားမွာေၾကာက္တဲ့အတြက္ ျပည္သူေတြမွာ မေ၀ႏုိင္ဘူး။

ယုံၾကည္စိတ္ခ်ရတဲ့ လူေတြကတဆင့္ ျပည္သူျပည္သူခ်င္း၊ ဒုကၡေရာက္သူခ်င္း တလုံး
တစည္းတည္း မွ်ေ၀ဖုိ႔ အားလုံးမွာ အဆင္သင့္ရွိတယ္။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ သူတုိ႔ကိုမယံုတဲ့
အတြက္ ဘယ္ျပည္သူကမွ မထြက္ရဲဘူး။ မေန႔က အစ္မတို႔ မိန္းကေလး ၆ ေယာက္
သြားတယ္။ လမ္းမွာလည္း အစ္မတို႔ အဲလုိ သြားလႉတယ္ဆုိရင္ ရ၀တကို ဆက္သြယ္ပါ။
ရ၀တေတြက ထြက္လာတယ္၊ တားတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အစ္မတုိ႔ကေျပာတယ္၊ က်မတုိ႔

ဘယ္သူ႕အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမွလည္း မဟုတ္ဘူး၊ ေဘးဖယ္ဆုိၿပီး ဆက္သြားတယ္။ ျဖစ္လာရင္
အစ္မတုိ႔ကို ကားေပၚ အတင္းဆြဲတင္ရင္ တေနရာရာကို တုိင္မွာပဲဆုိၿပီး ဖုန္းေတြ အဆင္သင့္

ဖြင့္ထားတယ္။ ရ၀တ တေယာက္ကုိ အစ္မတုိ႔ ကန္လုိက္တယ္။”

အစ္မတုိ႔ ဘယ္ေနရာမွာလႉတာပါလဲ။

“ေတာင္ဒဂုံ၊ ၁၀၂ ရပ္ကြက္၊ ေရႊ၀ါထြန္းလမ္းမွာ အစ္မတို႔ေရာက္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီ
ေနရာမွာ ဘာကယ္ဆယ္ေရးမွ မလာေသးဘူး။ လူေတြက အကုန္ငတ္ေနတယ္။ အစ္မ
တုိ႔ ေငြ ၁၂ သိန္းေက်ာ္ေ၀တယ္။ အကုန္လုံး ကုန္သြားတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘယ္သူမွ
မွ်မသြားႏုိင္ဘူး။ အ၀တ္အစား တစမက်န္ ေ၀တာလည္း မမွ်သြားႏုိင္ဘူး။ အဲလုိ
ငတ္ေနတဲ့လူေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိတယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ႔ သူတုိ႔ အခမ္းအနားေတြနဲ႔ တုိက္ပုံ
ေတြနဲ႔ ဆန္ေတြ ဆီေတြ ေ၀ေနလဲ။ ဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ လုိအပ္တာ အခမ္းအနားမဟုတ္ဘူး။
အဲဒါေတြကို ျပည္သူေတြရင္ထဲမွာ ရွိေနတယ္ဆုိတာ သိေစခ်င္တယ္။

“အစ္မတုိ႔ ထမင္း တပန္းကန္စာရွိရင္ တ၀က္ခြဲလႉမွာပဲ။ လူတုိင္းရဲ႕စိတ္ထဲမွာရွိတယ္။
အားလုံး ခံစားရတာ။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕မွာ တုိက္နဲ႔တာနဲ႔ေနလို႔လည္း ခံစားရတာပဲ၊ တဲနဲ႔ေနလုိ႔
လည္း ခံစားရတာပဲ။ အကုန္လုံးခံစားေနရတဲ့အတြက္ ကိုယ္ခ်င္းစာၾကတယ္။ ဗုဒၶ
ဘာသာပီပီ အကုန္လုံး လႉခ်င္တန္းခ်င္ေနၾကတာပဲ။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ အဲလုိ
အေႏွာင့္အယွက္၊ အဟန္႔အတားေတြ ပိတ္ေနတာလဲ။ ဒီလုိအလႉမ်ဳိးကိုပိတ္တာ
ဘယ္ဘ၀ကိုေရာက္မယ္ဆုိတာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာတုိင္း သိသင့္ပါတယ္။”

အလားတူ တႏိုင္တပိုင္ ကူညီေနတာေတြထဲမွာေတာ့ ႐ုပ္ရွင္မင္းသား ေက်ာ္သူ၊
႐ုပ္ရွင္မင္းသား ေ၀ဠဳေက်ာ္ စတဲ့ အႏုပညာရွင္အခ်ဳိ႕လည္း ပါပါတယ္။ ဒီကေန႕ေတာ့
သူတို႕ တညင္ဘက္ကိုသြားၿပီး အကူအညီေတြေပးႏိုင္ဖို႕ ႀကိဳးစားခဲ့တယ္လို႕ သိရပါတယ္။

“မေန႔က ေတာင္ဒဂုံ က်ည္ဆုနားမွာ သြားလႉတယ္။ ေလေဘးဒုကၡသည္ေတြ၊ အိမ္ေျခ
ေတြမရွိဘဲ ေပ်ာက္သြားတဲ့လူေတြ၊ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို တအိမ္ေထာင္ ဆန္ ၃ ျပည္
သြားလႉၾကတယ္။ အခုလည္း တညင္ဘက္မွာ သြားလႉေနပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔နဲ႔အတူ
႐ုပ္ရွင္ထဲက ေ၀ဠဳေက်ာ္လည္း လုိက္လႉေနပါတယ္။ မနက္ျဖန္ဆုိရင္ လူၾကမ္းအဖြဲ႕ေတြ

က်ေနာ္တုိ႔နဲ႔လိုက္ၿပီး လုပ္အားေပးလိမ့္မယ္။”

ကိုေက်ာ္သူ ျမင္ရသမွ် အေျခအေနေလး ေျပာျပပါလား။ မေန႔ကလည္း ေတာင္ဒဂုံ
ဘက္ သြားလႉတယ္ဆုိေတာ့ အဲဒီမွာ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့အေျခအေနေတြ ဘယ္လုိရွိလဲခင္ဗ်။

“ျမင္ရတာကေတာ့ဗ်ာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔လည္း ဒါမ်ဳိး တခါမွမႀကဳံဖူးဘူး။ အိပ္မက္လိုကုိ
ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ အကုန္လုံး လဲၿပိဳၿပီး စားဖုိ႔ကအစ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနၾကတယ္။ က်ေနာ္
ျမင္တာကေတာ့ ေနာက္ပုိင္း က်န္းမာေရးကိစၥေတြ ၀င္ေတာ့မယ္။ ျပႆနာေတြက
ရွိေတာ့၊ ကေလးေတြေရာ ၀မ္းေရာဂါေတြ ဘာေတြ ျဖစ္ဖို႔မ်ားေနၿပီ။”

အခုလို အကူအညီေတြေပးဖို႔ ႀကိဳးစားတဲ့အထဲမွာ ျပည္ပေရာက္ ျမန္မာေတြလည္း
ပါ၀င္ပါတယ္။ စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာေတြကလည္း သူတို႕ ႏိုင္သေလာက္
ကူညီဖို႕ ႀကိဳးစားေနၾကပါတယ္။

“ဒီမွာရွိတဲ့လူေတြအကုန္လုံးက ကိုယ့္ႏုိင္ငံမွာရွိတဲ့ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနတဲ့လူေတြကို
ေထာက္ပံ့ဖို႔ အားလုံးက စိတ္တူကုိယ္တူ ရွိၾကတယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ စိတ္တူကုိယ္တူရွိတဲ့
လူေတြစုၿပီး သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ အကုန္လုံးက ထည့္ခ်င္ၾကတယ္။ ဘယ္လိုထည့္မလဲ၊
လူေတြ တေနရာမွာစုထည့္ဖို႔အတြက္ ေနရာေလးရွိသင့္တယ္ဆုိၿပီး လမ္းျပၾကယ္
စာၾကည့္တုိက္မွာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကို ေနရာေပးဖုိ႔ေျပာၿပီး လမ္းျပၾကယ္စာၾကည့္တုိက္မွာ

ေနရာေလးတခုေတာင္းၿပီး အလႉခံပုံးေလးဖြင့္ထားတယ္။ လူေတြက လာထည့္ၾက
တယ္။ အဲဒါေတြကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က စုေဆာင္းၿပီး နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္းကို လွမ္းၿပီး
လႉဒါန္းတယ္။ နာေရးကူညီမႈအသင္းကေန ျမန္မာျပည္ထဲမွာ ေ၀ငွတယ္။ ဒီပုံစံပဲ
လုပ္ေနတာပါ။”

ရန္ကုန္ ဆင္ေျခဖံုးအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားမွာေတာ့ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက အကူအညီေပးတာ
ေတြထက္ တတ္ႏုိင္သူေတြက စုၿပီး အစုလိုက္ ဆန္ေ၀တာေတြ ဒီကေန႔လုပ္ေနတယ္
လို႕ သိရပါတယ္။ ၿမိဳ႕ထဲမွာေတာ့ အေပၚဆံုးထပ္ေတြအတြက္ သြပ္ျပား ၁၂ ခ်ပ္စီကို
အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ေစ်းေလွ်ာ့ၿပီး ေရာင္းခ်ေပးေနပါတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ထဲမွာေတာ့ ေနရာ

အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား မရွင္းရေသးဘဲ အမိႈက္ပံုေတြ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္လို႕ သိရပါတယ္။
ဒါ့အျပင္ ဒီကေန႔ေတာ့ ရန္ကုန္ေနရာအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားမွာ စစ္တပ္က လံုၿခံဳေရးယူ

ခ်ထားတာေတြလည္း ေတြ႕ေနရတယ္လို႕ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ခံေတြက ေျပာၾကပါတယ္။

A Cyclone Diary


By KYI WAI / RANGOON Thursday, May 8, 2008

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Sanchaung Township. May 2-3

I first heard that a cyclone was approaching Burma on the 1 p.m. news on May 2. The next day, the cyclone’s approach was reported in the state-published newspapers, but the item was buried amid other news. The constitutional referendum planned for May 10 dominated the headlines. Later I heard that many people had overlooked the news item, believing it was of little importance.

Flooded villages are seen in this aerial view near an airport in Rangoon on May 5. (Photo: Reuters)
At about 2 p.m. On May 3, a friend from Bassein, capital of Irrawaddy Division, called me with the news that the cyclone had hit Haing Gyi island in the Irrawaddy delta. Some villages near Chaung Thar beach had reportedly disappeared. I tried to call Chaung Thar to confirm the news but I couldn't get through.

Journalists from some Rangoon publications set out that day to try and reach Bassein, but I later heard that they hadn’t been able to get there.

Offices and schools in Rangoon closed early, and worried groups of residents gathered at bus stops.

Myanmar TV carried storm warnings on its 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. newscasts, but few viewers took the news seriously—not much credence is given to anything carried by the state media.

It rained later that night, and the wind picked up, growing stronger all the time. At 2 a.m. On May 3, the howling wind woke people up and frightened the children. At around 4 a.m. the residents of one eight-story apartment block left their homes and sought shelter on the ground floor. Zinc roofing was being ripped off the building and the rain was penetrating homes.

May 3

Residents fill water into tanks after water shortage in Rangoon. (Photo:Reuters)
In her dilapidated home in Rangoon’s Wartayar district, Ma Oo, a food vendor, described how she recited Than Buddhe rhymes to her eight year-old son and five year-old daughter to comfort them.

She heard cries of help and ran outside, taking the children—just in time to see their home collapse before their eyes. A neighbor, Ma Kyin Ngwe, called them over to her own ruined home, and they hugged the ground as the wind sent pots, pans and furniture flying around them.

There was no escape from the fury of the storm. Wartayar is a raw, treeless place, accommodating people made homeless by a disastrous fire in Rangoon’s Hlaing Township.

May 3, 11 a.m.

The wind began to slacken. In its wake it left behind a scene of devastation—fallen trees and power lines, roofless buildings, collapsed homes. Shocked residents gathered outside to assess the damage.

May 3, Noon

Cars line up for petrol at a petrol station in Rangoon on Wednesday. (Photo:AP)
People began to tour the streets, looking for shops that would sell them food and other provisions. Many shops were closed, and those shopkeepers who opened their doors demanded inflated prices.

Many prices had doubled virtually overnight. A duck egg now cost 200 kyat (18 US cents). Zinc roofing—now in big demand—had jumped in price from 1,200 kyat ($1) per square foot to as much as 3,000 kyat ($2.7).

Neighbors helped each other. A resident of Rangoon’s Shwepyithar district said, "We had to. Anybody with sufficient rice distributed it to those in need, starting with children and the elderly.”

May 4

The demand for zinc roofing sheets and rice grew still further. Buses were back in service, but fares had risen astronomically. A 50 kyat (4 US cents) ticket now cost 2,000 kyat ($1.60).

Taxi fares also jumped, keeping pace with increases in the price of fuel. Not only fuel was in short supply—clean water, too, was hard to find and cost up to 3,000 kyat ($2.40) for 20 liters.