Completed translation of Daw Si Si Thwe (Mrs. Sein Win)'s letter to Burmese authorities about a visitation visa--

စီစီသြယ္ (S/OKA – 089818) – က၀ိအုုိရဲ့ အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္  Si Si Thwe(S/OKA--089818
Return of One Old Man to Burma
(မိုုးမခ) ဇူလိုုင္ ၂၃၊ ၂၀၁၆  Moe Makha July 23-2016

ေပါင္မုုန္႔ဆိုုင္မွာ အလုုပ္လုုပ္ရင္း ေခါင္းထဲ၀င္လာတဲ့ စာလုုံးက “က၀ိ”။ “က၀ိအိုုရဲ့ အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္” ။

As I was working in the bread shop, one word that came into my head was Kawii--Old Kawii's time to return home.

(Translator's note:  Kawii can be translated as Wise Man, National Treasure. Pundit.  Sensei (Japanese) guru. Sage.



 ဇူလိုုင္ ၈၊ ၉ ၊ ၁၀၊ ၁၁ ရက္ (၂၀၁၆) တြင္ ခံစားရမႈမ်ား

Journal for July 8, 9. 10. 11, 2016

တိုုင္းျပည္အက်ဳိးေမွ်ာ္ကိုုး၍ က်မ စီစီသြယ္ (S/OKA 089818) မွာ ျဖစ္ရပ္မွန္ စာတဖြဲ႕၊ “က၀ိအုုိ၏ အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္” ကိုု ေလးစားစြာ တင္ျပအပ္ပါသည္။

For the good of the country I beg to present my own true experiences--The Return Home of Old Kawii--Si Si Thwe (S/OKA 089818)


အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ျပီး က၀ိအုုိလည္း အိမ္ေရာက္ခ်င္ျပီေပါ့။ 
It is time to go home.  Old Kawii must also be anxious to return home.


ထိုုအခါ အိမ္ေရာက္ခ်င္သူတိုုင္းရဲ့ ဆုုလာဘ္ က်လာတယ္။ 
At that time, everyone gets a "gift".


 အဲဒီဆုုလာဘ္က “ခံ၀န္ခ်က္ထိုုး၊ အသနားခံစာ တင္၊ ဘယ္ထဲမွ ၀င္ပါနဲ႔” တဲ့။

 That gift is, "Sign an affidavit.  Beg for leniency.  Don't do any politics (join any groups)."

က်မ အေတြး၀င္လာတယ္။  I thought about it.


က၀ိအိုုရဲ့ အႏွစ္ ၂၀ ေက်ာ္ၾကာခဲ့တဲ့ ႏိုုင္ငံေရးအေတြ႔အၾကဳံေတြ၊ ကမာၻ႔ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သံတမန္မ်ားရဲ့ အေတြးအေခၚ အယူအဆ ဆက္ဆံေရးေတြ ျပန္မမွ်ေ၀ရဘူးလား။

Must I not relate the 20 year journey of Old Kawii's international experience, his interactions with world leaders, diplomats, his opinions, ideals and values?


ႏိုင္ငံေရး အေတြ႔အၾကဳံေတြ မမွ်ေ၀ရရင္ေတာင္ ဆယ္စုုႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ဖတ္လာခဲ့တဲ့ စာအုုပ္ေတြရဲ့ တစိတ္တေဒသ၊ အိမ္နားက စာၾကည့္တိုုက္မွာ ဖတ္စရာမက်န္ေတာ့ေလာက္ေအာင္ အပတ္တိုုင္း ေက်ာပိုုးအိတ္နဲ႔ သယ္ျပီး ဖတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ စာအုုပ္ေတြထဲက အေၾကာင္းေတြ၊ 

Even if I were not to relate his political experiences and share them with others, how about the contents of the books, or even some part of the contents of the books, carried back every week in a back pack from the local library, to such an extent that there are no more books left in the library that he has not read?


 (Translator's note:  To my knowledge, Dr. and Mrs Sein Win have lived a very frugal, even a life of marginal poverty, in rental housing for decades, no car, a family of 4, often/always using public transport, walking.  In my opinion, they have been badly treated by the international "democracy" community, used and then dumped.  But that is my opinion.  All they asked for was an English translation.  I am adding the notes by myself).


ကမာၻေက်ာ္ သခ်ာၤဂ်ာနယ္မွ “အယ္ဒီတာ” လုုပ္ရန္ အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ေခၚျခင္း ခံရေလာက္ေအာင္ ဆည္းပူးခဲ့တဲ့ သခ်ာၤပညာေတြ၊  အခ်ိန္လုုျပီး ဖတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ သခ်ာၤစာအုုပ္ေတြထဲက အေၾကာင္းေတြကိုု ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ၊ လူငယ္ေတြ၊ စိတ္၀င္စားတဲ့သူေတြကိုု ျပန္ ေ၀မွ်ခြင့္ မရေတာ့ဘူးလား။

So, is he  not to share his knowledge of mathematics (in which he has a Ph.D. from Germany) with students and other young people and interested persons?

His knowledge in higher mathematics is so great he has been repeatedly asked to edit well known international mathematical articles.


(Translator's note:  Like many others, including me, Dr. Sein Win essentially gave up his chosen career, mathematics in an academic setting, to " do politics" for the good of Burma.  For those of you who do not know, he was elected in his constituency in the 1990 elections in Burma, and then had to flee to the Thai Border, where the NCGUB National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, was first set up.  It is also known colloquially as The Exile Government, but was disbanded in 2012, mainly due to loss of funding from international donors, especially Norway.  Like long time NLD National League for Democracy strategist U Win Tin, whose memoir I am translating, at the time, I felt that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi should not "tango with the junta" but as U WT said, "As we are on the same side, even if I do not agree, I must support her."

Now, Daw Suu also has been badly used.

Dr. Sein Win's father was U Ba Win, brother of Bogyoke Aung San, the Father of the Burmese Nation, and who died on the same day, at the same moment, 19th July 1947, of assassins' bullets.

See BBC Who Killed Aung San? documentary on Aung San on Youtube, as well as news clips of the time, for images of the 2 brothers together, at the talks in London with Clement Atlee.

U Ba Win looked remarkably like his son Dr. Sein Win.  He is the one with glasses smiling widely, happy at the success of the talks in which Atlee promised that Burma would be granted Independence.)



ဒဲဒါေတြဟာ ႏိုုင္ငံေကာင္းေအာင္ တစိတ္တပိုုင္းက ပါခဲ့တဲ့ ႏိုုင္ငံေရးအဖိုုးအိုုတေယာက္အတြက္ ဆုုလာဘ္ေတြလား။ 

Is signing an affidavit and pledging not to do politics a just reward for an old sage who has given his life for democracy in Burma?


 သူျမတ္ႏိုုးတဲ့ သခ်ာၤသမားဘ၀ကိုု စြန္႔လႊတ္၊ မိသားစုုအေရးကိုု ပယ္ျပီး တိုုင္းျပည္အေရးကိုု သယ္၊ (၁၀၁) ႏွစ္အထိ ေနသြားခဲ့တဲ့ အေမအိုုခင္မ်ာ သားအတြက္ ဆုုေတာင္းျခင္းမွလြဲ၍ စာတေၾကာင္း၊ ဖုုန္းတေခၚမွ် မရရွသြားခဲ့ဘူး။

He had to abandon the mathematical career he loved, live far from his family of origin and work for the greater good of Burma. His dear mother who lived to be 101 was never allowed by the regime to even write one line to him, or enjoy one phone conversation, and could do nothing but pray for her son.

(Translator's note--I went to the yet lair soon or seven day feast for monks at the home of Daw Si Si Thwe and Dr. Sein Win when she passed away.  The rental unit had only one chair, on which I sat, since the monk had left already, and there was a lot of food, though no complete set of cutlery.)


 ႏိုုင္ငံအတြက္ လုုပ္သက္တေလ်ာက္လုုံးမွာ ျခိဳးျခိဳးျခံျခံ ေနခဲ့တဲ့ (သမိုုင္းပစၥည္းနဲ႔ သမိုုင္း၀င္ပစၥည္းဟုု ျငင္းရေလာက္ေအာင္၊ တိုုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားက မွတ္ခ်က္ ခ်ရေလာက္ေအာင္၊ ႏိုုင္ငံျခားသားမ်ားက integrityဟုု အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ေျပာရေလာက္ေအာင္) ႏိုုင္ငံေရးအဘိုုးအိုုတေယာက္ရဲ့ အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္မွာ ရတဲ့ ဆုုလာဘ္က “ခံ၀န္ခ်က္ လက္မွတ္ထိုုး၊ အသနားခံစာ တင္၊ ဘယ္ထဲမွ ၀င္မပါနဲ႔၊ ေဆြမ်ဳိးေတြနဲ႔ဘဲ ေတြ႔” တဲ့လား။

Is the only reward of an old sage who has given his life for his country, lived frugally all his life, has been called a Living National Treasure by ethnic leaders, and a model of integrity by foreingers who come in touch with him, to have this sole reward of "Sign and affidavit. write a letter pleading for leniency, don't join any groups, just go see your relatives?"

(Daw Si Si Thwe told me on the phone that they just wanted a visa to go back to visit the old country for a short time, but were denied.  Moemakha Online, in which her article first appeared, wrote that the consul at the DC Myanmar Embassy was asked to explain his action.  Poet Tin Moe's daughter Moe Choe Thinn has also written an article.  I feel it is the right, human right, God-given right or any person to return safely to the country in which they were born.   MCT wrote that Dr SW/Daw Si Si said that, they signed as a sign of respect towards an elected government.  Since Spring of this year, Burma has had a nominally "democratic government" with the military still holding the real power.  I consider it merely a facade to get West to lift sanctions.)


ျပည္၀င္ခြင့္ေလ်ာက္ျပီး ျပန္လာတဲ့သူေတြရဲ့ နာက်င္တဲ့ မ်က္ႏွာနဲ႔ အသံေတြကိုု အခုုအခ်ိန္မွာ နားလည္ ခံစားလာရတယ္။ 

I understand now the (crestfallen) faces and vices of those who applied for entry visas and came back (to their countries of refuge and exile).

“သိကၡာရွိစြာ အိမ္ျပန္ႏိုုင္ေရး” ဆိုုတဲ့ စကားလုုံးကိုု စကားလုုံးရဲ့ အဓိပၺါယ္နဲ႔ မဟုုတ္ဘဲ ရင္ထဲက ခံစားခ်က္နဲ႔ သိလာတယ္။

I understand now, not just the meaning of the words, "Return home with dignity" but also at the deepest level of feeling, almost as a physical pain.


ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ သိကၡာရွိရွိ အိမ္ျပန္ရပါ့မလဲ။ 
 When will we be allowed to return with our full human dignity intact?

ကမာၻအႏွံ႔ ျပန္႔က်ဲေနတဲ့ က၀ိအုုိေတြ၊ တိုုင္းျပည္အတြက္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ “ေတာ ျဖတ္၊ ေထာင္ ျဖတ္” ခဲ့ရသူေတြ၊ ေရာက္ရာေနရာေတြမွာ အေတြးေရာ အလုုပ္ေရာ ျမန္မာျပည္အတြက္ ေပးဆပ္ေနသူေတြ ဘယ္ေတာ့ “ခံ၀န္ခ်က္ ထုုိးရတဲ့ဘ၀” က လြတ္မလဲ။ 

When will other kawii sages, male and female, flung all over the globe,  who have given many years for freedom, crossing mountains and forests (to get to the borders), who are giving so much for Burma daily in both word and deed, be ever free of this "sign an affidavit" pseudo political culture?

(Translator's note:  People are being asked to sign before they have done anything, as a condition of "entering Burma.") 

“အကူအညီလိုုပါတယ္ ဆိုုတဲ့ တုုိင္းျပည္” ကိုု ၀င္လာတဲ့ တိုုင္းတပါးသားေတြေရာ ဘယ္ေတာ့ ခံ၀န္ခ်က္ ထိုုးရတဲ့ ဘ၀က လြတ္မလဲ။ က်မအေတြးထဲမွာ ေမးခြန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာနဲ႔ပါ။

I have many questions in my head.  What about those foreigners who come into a country which says it needs foreign aid?


အိမ္ျပန္သင့္ျပီ။ အထူးဆုု မလိုုခ်င္ပါ။ “အားလုုံးအတြက္ ဂုုဏ္သိကၡာ ရွိျခင္း အျမန္ဆုုံးရခဲ့ရင္” က၀ိအိုုတေယာက္ က်န္းမာေရး ခ်ဳိ႔တဲ့ေနျပီျဖစ္တဲ့ သူ႔အကိုု (ႏိုုင္ငံအတြက္ ၅ ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ ေထာင္ျဖတ္ခဲ့ရေသာ) ႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရမွာပါ။

It is time to return home to Burma.  If all can be treated with dignity, he will be able to see his brother who spent 5 years in jail as a political prisoner and is in poor health.

(Translater's note.  I am not sure if this is Ko Aye Win, who used to work in the Statistics Department of the Institute of Economics, Rangoon.  I spoke to Daw Si Si Thwe on the phone today, and she said she/they had sent word to Saya's brother about not getting a visa.  I personally know so many people who never saw their parents again--and I am one--and also those whose parent was hanging on, and died soon after seeing the child one last time.  The pain and suffering caused by this military government is infinite.)



 မိအိုုမ်ား ဖအိုုမ်ားလည္း ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေ၀းကြာေနတဲ့ သားသမီးမ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႔ခြင့္ရမွာပါ။ 
All mothers and fathers who are growing old wish to see their children, it is only natural.

တိုုင္းတပါးသားမ်ားလည္း ျမန္မာျပည္ရဲ့ ေႏြးေထြးမႈ၊ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈကိုု အျပည့္အ၀ ခံစားခြင့္ ရရွိမွာပါ။

Others born overseas will also wish to experience the legendary warmth and hospitality of Burmese culture to the full.


စီစီသြယ္၊ S/OKA ၀၈၉၈၁၈
Si Si Thwe--S/OKa 889818
ေခတၱ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုု
Temporarily in USA. 

စာၾကြင္း – ျပည္သူတင္ေျမွာက္ထားေသာ ျပည္သူ႔အစိုုးရကိုု ေလးစားရိုုေသေသာအားျဖင့္ တိုုင္းျပည္တာ၀န္ ထမ္းေဆာင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ကူညီျခင္းမွ လြဲ၍ က်န္တာမလုုပ္ပါဟုု ေရးထိုုးခဲ့ျပီးပါျပီ။ 
Postscript.  (We) have already signed that we will not "do anything other than work for our duty to the country to help."  We signed this as a sign of respect for a government elected by the people.  

(Translator's note:   Daw Si Si Thwe is referring to the present NLD or National League for Democracy government--I do not know its official name--but this clearly shows habits of control and oppression die hard.  I do not trust the Burmese embassy personnel.  She sent me attachments of the forms they were asked to sign, but I have not opened them, as I have seen too many of these in my lifetime.)


(၇၊၇၊ ၂၀၁၆ work history form) ။ က်န္တဲ့ ခံ၀န္ခ်က္မ်ား ထပ္မထိုုးသင့္ေတာ့ပါ။ 

There is no need for us to sign  the "work history form."
7-7-2016


အိုုျခင္းကိုုလည္း အသက္အရ သုုံးႏႈံးထားပါသည္။ ဥာဏ္အားတြင္ေတာ့ သတင္းစာတြင္ ဖတ္ရေသာ “ေလ့က်င့္ထားေသာ အသက္ ၇၀ေက်ာ္၏ ဥာဏ္အားသည္ အသက္ ၂၀ ႏွင့္ အတူတူပင္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း” ၏ နမူနာျပယုုဂ္ တခုုျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အျခားျပယုုဂ္မ်ားလည္း အမ်ားၾကီး ေတြ႔ေနရပါသည္။ ေနာက္ထပ္ျပယုုဂ္တခုမွာေတာ့ ရက္ပိုုင္းအတြင္း ေတြ႔ခဲ့ရေသာ အသက္ ၉၈ ႏွစ္အရြယ္တြင္ ဟင္းခ်က္ႏိုုင္တုုန္း ျဖတ္လတ္ေနတုုန္း၊ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေ၀းကြာေနသူမ်ားကိုု နာမည္နဲ႔တကြ ေမးႏိုုင္ေသာ မွတ္ဥာဏ္အား ေကာင္းဆဲျဖစ္ေသာ ဗိုုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ကေတာ္ ဘြားဘြား ေဒၚခင္ၾကည္၏ ညီမ အန္တီ မာ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

( I did not translate this section as it appears a bit unrelated)

အမ်ားသူငါ ခံ၀န္ခ်က္ မထုုိးရမည့္ အခ်ိန္ကိုု ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ ေစာင့္စားရင္း

Awaiting the time when no one will be asked to sign an affadavit.


စီစီသြယ္ (S/OKA 089818)

Si Si Thwe (S/OKA 089818)
ဇူလိုုင္ ၂၀၊ ၂၀၁၆၊ ၉ နာရီ ၅၀ ည

July 20th, 2016, 9.50 PM


Translated by--KMKaung
8-8-2016

True Copy.