Zarganar Arrested, Cyclone Relief Money Seized

ေလေဘးကယ္ဆယ္ေရး ေစတနာ၀န္ထမ္း ဇာဂနာ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရ


နာဂစ္ဆိုင္ကလုန္းမုန္တိုင္းေဘး ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ လူရႊင္္ေတာ္ ဇာဂနာေခၚ ကိုသူရကို ယမန္ေန႔ည၌ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ ေျမနီကုန္းရွိ ရွမ္းကုန္းလမ္း ေနအိမ္မွ ဖမ္းဆီးေခၚေဆာင္သြားသည္ဟု မိသားစု၀င္တဦးက ေျပာသည္။

၎က “ညက (၇) နာရီ (၄၅) ေလာက္မွာ အက္စ္ဘီရယ္၊ စရဖ ေခၚလားမသိဘူး၊ ခ႐ိုင္မႉး ဦးေဆာင္ၿပီး လာတာပဲ။ လာၿပီးေတာ့ ရွာမယ္တဲ့၊ နာဂစ္ကို လုပ္တာနဲ႔ မပတ္သက္ပါဘူးတဲ့၊ အဲဒီအတြက္လည္း ဂုဏ္ယူပါတယ္တဲ့။ အဲဒါဆို ရွာပါလို႔ ကိုသူရက ေျပာေတာ့ ကိုသူရ အခန္းထဲရွာတယ္။ ေနာက္ သူတို႔ဖုန္းေတြ ၀င္၀င္လာတယ္၊ အဘဆိုတာနဲ႔ သူတို႔ စကား ေျပာၿပီးေတာ့မွ ည (၁၀) နာရီေလာက္မွာ ေခၚသြားရမယ္တဲ့၊ (၂) ရက္ ေလာက္ပါပဲတဲ့၊
အ၀တ္အစား ထည့္ေပးပါလို႔ေျပာတယ္၊ ဘယ္ေခၚသြားမလဲ မေျပာဘူး” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ဇာဂနာ၏ ေနအိမ္မွ စိန္စီေသာည၊ ရမ္ဘို အပိုင္း (၄)၊ နာဂစ္ဘ၀ဆိုးညမ်ား၊ နာဂစ္သီခ်င္း စီဒီမ်ားႏွင့္ စာရင္း စာအုပ္ (၂) အုပ္၊ တယ္လီဖုန္းဖိုးအတြက္ ျပင္ဆင္ထားသည့္ အက္ဖ္အီးစီ (၃၀)၊ ေဒၚလာ (၁၀၀၀) ႏွင့္ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာ system box တခု တို႔ကို သိမ္းယူသြား သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

လူရႊင္ေတာ္ ဇာဂနာသည္ ဦးေအာင္လြင္၊ ငွက္ေပ်ာေက်ာ္၊ အ႐ိုင္း၊ ေညႇာင္ေညႇာင္ စသည့္ အႏုပညာရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းကာ မုန္တိုင္းေဘးသင့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားထံ အစားအစာႏွင့္ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးပစၥည္မ်ား ကုိယ္တိုင္သြားေရာက္ အကူအညီေပးေနသူျဖစ္ၿပီး လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ရက္ပိုင္းကမွ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ဖ်ာပံုၿမိဳ႕နယ္ မိန္းမလွကၽြန္းဘက္ရွိ ေခ်ာင္း႐ိုးတေလွ်ာက္ရွိ အကူ အညီမရဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနသည့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို အကူအညီေပးၿပီး ျပန္ေရာက္လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ဇာဂနာသည္ ရန္ကုန္သိိုု႔ ျပန္ေရာက္လာၿပီးေနာက္ ၎ျမင္ေတြ႕ခဲ့ရေသာ ေလေဘးဒဏ္ခံေနရ သည့္ ျပည္သူမ်ား ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရသည့္ ဒုကၡအခက္အခဲမ်ား အပါအ၀င္ စစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အကူအညီမ်ား လူထုထံ မေရာက္ရွိပံုတို႔ကို ျပည္ပမီဒီယာမ်ားမွ ပြင့္ပြင့္လင္းလင္း ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ သူျဖစ္သည္။

ဇာဂနာ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရသျဖင့္ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ထိခိုက္ရပံုကို မိသားစု၀င္တဦးက “ကိုသူရရဲ႕ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး အလုပ္ေတြအားလံုး အေနွာင့္အယွက္ျဖစ္ကုန္တယ္။ သူ႔ကို လာလႉမယ့္လူေတြက ေစာင့္ေန၊ သူလာလႉမယ္ဆိုလို႔ ေစာင့္ေနတဲ့လူေတြက ေစာင့္ေနနဲ႔ က်မတို႔လည္း ဘာလုပ္လို႔လုပ္ရမွန္း မသိဘူးျဖစ္ေနတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။

ယမန္ႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာအေရးအခင္းကာလကလည္း သပိတ္ေမွာက္သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားကို ဆြမ္းကပ္ လႉဒါန္းခဲ့ သျဖင့္ ဇာဂနာကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက ဖမ္းဆီးအက်ဥ္းခ်ထားခဲ့သည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္း သားေဟာင္း ဇာဂနာသည္ ႐ုပ္ရွင္၊ သဘင္၊ ဂီတ၊ စာေပတို႔တြင္ ဘက္စံုထူးခၽြန္သည့္ စြယ္စံုရ အႏုပညာရွင္တဦးျဖစ္ၿပီး စစ္အစိုးရက ၎အား အႏုပညာလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား လုပ္ကိုင္ခြင့္ ပိတ္ပင္ ထားသည္။ ။
Zarganar Arrested, Cyclone Relief Money Seized
Burma’s best-known comedian, Zarganar, who threw his energies into helping victims of Cyclone Nargis, was arrested at his Rangoon home on Wednesday night, according to a close friend.

Zarganar (second left) hands over a cash donation to residents of a cyclone-hit community in the Irrawaddy delta. His team of volunteers also brought several sacks of rice to feed hungry survivors. (Photo: Moemaka)
Nine officials—the chief of the SPDC Sanchaung Township Ward, officers of the military affairs security department and members of the Special Bureau—took him into custody at about 10.30 p.m., the friend said, requesting anonymity.

The officials searched Zarganar’s home and seized his computer and about US $1,000 (1,140,000 Kyat) in cash, which he had collected in donations for cyclone survivors.

Zarganar’s friend said the search team also confiscated three CDs, one of which contained film footage of the devastation caused by the cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon Division.

The other CDs showed the opulent wedding of junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe’s youngest daughter Thandar Shwe and the “Rambo 4” movie, in which Hollywood star Sylvester Stallone battles Burmese government soldiers to rescue kidnapped westerners.

The authorities reportedly said Zarganar would be held for two or three days for questioning about the sources of the money he collected for cyclone victims.

Friends said he also faced prosecution for mocking an article in the state-run newspaper The New Light of Myanmar, which said cyclone survivors could exist on what they could scavenge in the countryside rather than on “chocolate bars” from western air groups.

Zarganar organized relief missions into the cyclone-hit areas and returned with personal accounts of the terrible hardship he had encountered there.

He recruited more than 400 volunteers and divided them into groups of helpers, who took aid to 42 villages, some of which had until then received no help at all after the cyclone.

He ignored official instructions not to talk to the foreign press, who valued him as a reliable source of information about the situation in the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon Division.

In a recent interview with The Irrawaddy, Zarganar said the authorities had tried to interfere with his relief missions.

“At the beginning, we took risks, and we had to move forward on our own. Sometimes we had confrontations with the authorities,” he said. “For example, they asked us why we were going on our own without consulting them and wanted us to negotiate with them. They said they couldn't guarantee our lives.”

One of Zarganar’s supporters said: “The regime is trying to disrupt the aid process.” By arresting Zarganar, the authorities hoped to intimidate other helpers and donors, he said.