Burmese Government Urged to Investigate the Enforced Disappearance of Sumlut Roi Ja

By 124 Civil Society Organizations • October 28, 2014

On the third anniversary of the abduction of Sumlut Roi Ja, an ethnic Kachin woman from Burma, we, the undersigned organizations, call on the Burmese government to thoroughly investigate her enforced disappearance and hold the perpetrators accountable.

On 28 October 2011, Burma Army soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 321 abducted 28-year-old Sumlut Roi Ja along with her husband and father-in-law from their family farm near Hkaibang Village, Momauk Township, Kachin State.

Soldiers suspected the three had ties to the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) – an ethnic armed opposition group. The soldiers ordered the three at gunpoint to carry corn to their outpost on Mubum mountain. Sumlut Roi Ja’s husband and father-in-law managed to escape, evading the soldiers’ gunfire, on the way. Witnesses saw Sumlut Roi Ja at the camp several days before she disappeared.

Sumlut Roi Ja’s family members filed numerous petitions asking authorities to disclose her fate or whereabouts. However, both military and civilian authorities have consistently refused to investigate Sumlut Roi Ja’s disappearance and prosecute the soldiers who abducted her. In March 2012, Burma’s Supreme Court rejected a writ of habeas corpus submitted by Sumlut Roi Ja’s husband two months earlier. The Supreme Court claimed there was no evidence that the army had detained Sumlut Roi Ja before her disappearance. Burma Army officials even denied having detained her. Sumlut Roi Ja is still missing and presumed dead.

The case of Sumlut Roi Ja underscores the ongoing serious human rights violations perpetrated by the Burma Army in Kachin State, including the deliberate targeting of civilians in conflict, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, and violence against women. More than 70 cases of sexual violence by Burma Army soldiers against women and young girls in Kachin State and Northern Shan State have been recorded between the resumption of conflict between the Burma Army and the KIA in June 2011 and June 2014. At least 20 of the victims were killed.

As 2014 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Chair, Burma has a particular responsibility to uphold the principles of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), which stipulates that all individuals have a right to life and to personal liberty and security and that no person shall be subject to arbitrary arrest, search, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty. The AHRD also recognizes the right of every person to an effective and enforceable remedy for violations of rights granted by the constitution or by law.

We, the undersigned organizations, urge the Burmese government to:

Establish an independent and impartial parliamentary commission with a mandate to investigate the disappearance of Sumlut Roi Ja and identify the perpetrators.
Ensure that perpetrators in this case are brought to justice, regardless of rank or position.
Sign and ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) and incorporate its provisions into national law as a matter of priority.
Immediately cease violations of international humanitarian and human rights law against ethnic minority civilians in conflict and ceasefire areas, including violence against women.

1.         88 Generation (Peace & Open Society)
2.         Action Committee for Democracy Development
3.         Action for Dignity and Development
4.         All Arakan Students’ & Youths’ Congress
5.         ALTSEAN-Burma
6.         Arakan Youth Network and Development Organization
7.         Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances
8.         Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition
9.         Bago EITI
10.       Bago Youth Network
11.       Bridge – Kachin
12.       Burma Campaign UK
13.       Burma Partnership
14.       Center for Youth and Social Harmony
15.       Chin Youth Network
16.       Civil Authorize Negotiate Organization
17.       Community Response Group
18.       Community Youth Center – Karenni
19.       Cordillera Peoples Alliance (The Philippines)
20.       Danu Youth Network
21.       Democratic Party for New Society
22.       Denmark Kachin Community
23.       Equality Myanmar
24.       Ethnic Youth Network
25.       Farmer Rights and Development Organization
26.       Farmers Union- Magwe
27.       FIDH – International Federation for Human Rights
28.       Focus on the Global South
29.       Fortify Rights
30.       Forum for Democracy in Burma
31.       Free Burma Campaign (South Africa)
32.       Free Burma Coalition-Philippines
33.       Genuine People’s Servants
34.       Green Network Sustainable Environment Group
35.       Grow Back for Posterity
36.       Hands in Unity
37.       Highlander Associations (Cambodia)
38.       Humanity Institute
39.       Human Rights Defenders and Promoters Network
40.       IFI Watch Myanmar
41.       Info Birmanie
42.       Institute for Asian Democracy
43.       Jinghpaw Laili Laika hte Htunghking Hpung
44.       Justice and Peace Commission – Catholic Bishop Conference Myanmar
45.       Justice for Peace Foundation (Thailand)
46.       Kachin Alliance
47.       Kachin Association Japan
48.       Kachin Association Norway
49.       Kachin Association of Australia
50.       Kachin Canadian Association
51.       Kachin Community in Europe
52.       Kachin Communities Netherlands
53.       Kachin Development Networking Group
54.       Kachin Farmers Network
55.       Kachin National Organization
56.       Kachin Peace Network
57.       Kachin State Urban Rural Mission
58.       Kachin Women Association Japan
59.       Kachin Women Peace Network
60.       Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand
61.       Kachin Women Union
62.       Kachin Youth Central –Ginjaw Ramma
63.       Kachin Youth Organization
64.       Kaladan Development Foundation
65.       Kapaeeng Foundation (Bangladesh)
66.       Karen Development Committee
67.       Karen Environmental and Social Action Network
68.       Karenni National Women’s Organization
69.       Karenni Network of Women Organizations
70.       Karenni State Youth Network
71.       Karenni Youth and Women Organization
72.       Karen Women Empowerment Group
73.       Karen Women’s Union
74.       Karen Youth Network
75.       Karuna Myanmar Social Services
76.       Kham Ho Center
77.       Lachid Literature and Culture Association
78.       Lawyers’ Association for Human Rights of Nepalese Indigenous Peoples (Nepal)
79.       Magwe EITI Watch Group
80.       Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability
81.       Myit Makha Watch Group
82.       Naga Youth Network
83.       National Alliance of Indigenous Peoples Organizations in the Philippines
84.       National Network for Education Reform
85.       National Youth Forum
86.       Nau Shawng Education Network
87.       ND-Burma
88.       Network for Democracy and Development
89.       New Zealand Kachin Community
90.       NGO Federation of Nepalese Indigenous Nationalities (Nepal)
91.       NGO Gender Group
92.       Paoh Youth Organization
93.       Partners Relief & Development
94.       Paung Ku
95.       Public Network Bago
96.       Pyo Khin Thit Foundation – Maubin
97.       Rainfall Gender Study Group
98.       Research and Translation Consultancy Cluster
99.       Sha-it Social Development Foundation
100.     Shan Youth Network
101.     Shwe Gas Movement
102.     Social, Economic and Gender Research Institute
103.     Spectrum
104.     Students and Youth Congress of Burma
105.     Taang Students and Youth Organization
106.     Taang Women Organization
107.     Taang Youth Network
108.     Tavoyan Women’s Union
109.     Tavoyan Youth Network
110.     The Seagull-Mandalay
111.     Thuriya Sandar Environmental Protection
112.     Triangle Women Support Group
113.     Union Lahu Youth Organizations
114.     Voice of Women
115.     We For All (Japan)
116.     Women Initiative Network for Peace
117.     Women Peace and Security Initiative
118.     Women Peace Network – Arakan
119.     Women Political Action 2015 – Myanmar
120.     Women’s Organizations Network Myanmar
121.     Won-Lark Foundation
122.     Wunpawng Ning Htoi
123.     Yangon School of Political Science
124.     Zomi Youth Network

ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၈၊ ၂၀၁၄

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ အတင္းအက်ပ္ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ခံရေသာ ဆြန္လြတ္ ရြယ္ဂ်ာ အမႈကို စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရန္ တိုက္တြန္းျခင္း။

ကခ်င္အမ်ိဳးသမီး ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ခံရမႈကို ေသခ်ာစြာ စံုစမ္းေပးရန္ႏွင့္ ျပစ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္သူမ်ားကို လက္ရဖမ္းဆီးေပးရန္ ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာကို အတင္းအဓမၼေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့ၿပီး သံုးႏွစ္ျပည့္သည့္အခ်ိန္တြင္၊ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး၍ ျမန္မာအစိုးရကို ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္သည္။

၂၀၁၁ ခု ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၈ ရက္က မိုးေမာက္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ခိုင္ဘန္ ေက်းရြာအနီးရွိ ေတာင္ယာခင္းတြင္ ရွိေနေသာ အသက္ ၂၈ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ ဆြန္လြတ္ ရြယ္ဂ်ာႏွင့္ ခင္ပြန္း၊ ေယာကၡမတို႔ သံုးဦးကို ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ အမွတ္ ၃၂၁ ေျခလ်င္တပ္ရင္းမွ တပ္သားမ်ားက အတင္းအဓမၼေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့သည္။

သူတို႔ သံုးေယာက္သည္ ကခ်င္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္ အဆက္အသြယ္ရွိသည္ဟု ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္ တပ္သားမ်ားက သံသယရွိေနခဲ့သည္။ ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္၏ေရွ႔တန္း တပ္စခန္းရွိရာ မူဘြန္ ေတာင္ေပၚသို႔ ေျပာင္းဖူးမ်ား သယ္ပို႔ေပးရန္ သူတို႔ ၃ ေယာက္ကို တပ္သားမ်ားက ေသနတ္ျဖင့္ ခ်ိန္၍ ခိုင္းေစခဲ့သည္။ သူမ၏ ခင္ပြန္းႏွင့္ ေယာကၡမတို႔က ထြက္ေျပးလြတ္ေျမာက္ရန္ ႀကိဳးစားႀကံစည္ခဲ့ၾကၿပီး တပ္သားမ်ားမွ ေသနတ္ႏွင့္ ပစ္ခတ္ခ်ိန္တြင္ ေရွာင္တိမ္း ေျပးလႊားခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာကို ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ မခံရမီအခ်ိန္အထိ ထိုေရွ႔တန္းစခန္းတြင္ ရက္ေပါင္းအေတာ္ၾကာေအာင္ေတြ႔ျမင္ခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း မ်က္ျမင္သက္ေသမ်ားက ဆိုသည္။

ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာ၏ မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားသည္ သူမေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ခံရမႈကို စံုစမ္းေပးရန္ႏွင့္ အတင္းအဓမၼ ေခၚေဆာင္ သြားခဲ့သည့္ စစ္သားမ်ားကို အမႈဖြင့္ေပးရန္ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားကို အႀကိမ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အသနားခံခဲ့ ေသာ္လည္း အစိုးရတပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္တကြ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားက စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရန္ တညီတညြတ္ထဲ ျငင္းဆိုခဲ့ ၾကသည္။ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လတြင္မူ ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာ၏ ခင္ပြန္းက ၂ လ ခန္႔တင္ႀကိဳ တင္သြင္းထားသည့္ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရန္ ဆင့္ေခၚစာကို ျမန္မာ တရားရံုးေတာ္က ပယ္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။ ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာမေပ်ာက္ဆံုးခင္က သူမကို တပ္မေတာ္မွ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ဖမ္းဆီးထားသည္ ဆိုျခင္းမွာ သက္ေသမရွိေၾကာင္း တရားရံုးက ေျပာဆိုသည္။ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ တာ၀န္ရွိသူကလည္း သူမကို ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ထားျခင္းမရွိေၾကာင္း ျငင္းဆိုသည္။ ဆြန္လြတ္ ရြယ္ဂ်ာသည္ ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးေနဆဲျဖစ္ကာ ေသဆံုးၿပီဟု ယူဆခဲ့ၾကသည္။

ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာ ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးမႈသည္ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ ပဋိပကၡအတြင္း အရပ္သားမ်ား ကို ပစ္မွတ္ထားေနျခင္း၊ ဥပေဒမဲ့ သတ္ျဖတ္ေနျခင္း၊ အာဏာရွင္ဆန္ဆန္ ဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ား အေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္ျခင္းတို႔ အပါအ၀င္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး က်ဴးလြန္ ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကို သိသာထင္ရွားေစသည္။ ၂၀၁၁ ဇြန္လမွ စတင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ပဋိပကၡမ်ားအတြင္း ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ေျမာက္ပိုင္းရွိ အမ်ိဳးသမီးႏွင့္ ကေလးသူငယ္ေပါင္း ၇၀ ေက်ာ္သည္ ျမန္မာ အစိုးရတပ္မေတာ္၏ လိင္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ က်ဴးလြန္မႈမ်ားအတြက္ သားေကာင္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ၎တို႔ထဲမွ အနည္းဆံုး ၂၀ ခန္႔သည္ သတ္ျဖတ္ခံခဲ့ၾကရသည္။

၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ အာဆီယံဥကၠဌအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ အာဆီယံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေၾကညာစာတမ္းက သတ္မွတ္ထားေသာ လူတိုင္းသည္ အသက္ရွင္ခြင့္၊ အခ်ဳပ္အေႏွာင္ ကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္၊ အကာအကြယ္ရွိခြင့္ ရွိရမည္။ အာဏာရွင္ဆန္ေသာ ဖမ္းဆီးမႈ၊ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္မႈ၊ အဓမၼေခၚေဆာင္မႈ (သို႔မဟုတ္) အျခားေသာ လြပ္လပ္ခြင့္ကို ဖယ္ရွားေစသည့္ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ိဳးကို မည္သူမွ် ခံယူရျခင္းမရွိေစရ ဆိုေသာ သေဘာတရားမ်ားကို ျမႇင့္တင္ရန္ တာ၀န္ရွိသည္။ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခံရပါက အေျခခံဥပေဒ သို႔မဟုတ္ ဥပေဒ အရ ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ အေျဖရွာေပးႏိုင္ရန္ လူတိုင္းတြင္ အခြင့္အေရး ရွိေၾကာင္း အာဆီယံလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေၾကညာစာတမ္းက အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳထားသည္။

ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရကို တိုက္တြန္းလိုသည္မွာ-

ဆြန္လြတ္ရြယ္ဂ်ာ ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးမႈကို စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရန္အတြက္ လြတ္လပ္၍ တရားမွ်တေသာ လြတ္ေတာ္ ေကာ္မရွင္တစ္ရပ္ကိုဖြဲ႔စည္းေပးရန္၊
ျပစ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္သူမ်ားကို ရွာေဖြ၍ ရာထူး၊ အဆင့္အတန္းမေရြးဘဲ တရားဥပေဒအရ ရင္ဆိုင္ေျဖရွင္းေစရန္။
အတင္းအက်ပ္ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ျခင္းခံရသူမ်ားအား ကာကြယ္ေရး အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာ ပဋိဥာဥ္ (ICPPED) ကို လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး အတည္ျပဳ၍၊ (ICPPED) ပါ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကို စုစည္းၿပီး အမ်ိဳးသား ဥပေဒအျဖစ္ ျပဌာန္းေရးကို ပထမဦးစားေပး ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္
လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပဋိပကၡေဒသမ်ားႏွင့္ အပစ္ရပ္ေဒသမ်ားရွိ အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားကို အၾကမ္းဖက္ျခင္း အပါ အ၀င္ တိုင္းရင္းသား လူနည္းစုမ်ားအေပၚ လူသားျခင္းဆိုင္ရာ စာနာေထာက္ထားမႈ ကင္းမဲ့ေသာ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဥပေဒခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကို ခ်က္ျခင္း ရပ္တန္႔ရန္။

Tags: Arbitrary Detention, ASEAN, ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, Burma Army, Extrajudicial Killing, Human Rights Violations, Kachin Independence Army, Sexual Violence, Sumlut Roi Ja, Violence Against Women

This post is in: Human Rights

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