စစ္တပ္ထဲတြင္ ဆယ္ေက်ာ္သက္ဘဝကို ကုန္ဆံုးၿပီးေနာက္ ထူေထာင္ခဲ့သည့္ ဘဝသစ္

မာရီယာနာပါလာဗရာ ေရးသားသည္

ျမစ္ႀကီးနား၊ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္၊ ၂၀၁၆ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ - ဇြဲခ်စ္ (အမည္လႊဲ) မွာ သတၱမတန္းႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းထြက္ခဲ့သည္။ အဲဒီအခ်ိိန္တြင္ ၎ထက္အသက္ႀကီးေသာ သူငယ္ခ်င္းမ်ားႏွင့္ တြဲခဲ့သည္။ ၎တို႔ အားလံုးမွာ စစ္တပ္ထဲသို႔ ဝင္လိုၾကၿပီး ဇြဲခ်စ္ကိုလည္း အတူဝင္ရန္ တုိက္တြန္းၾကသည္။ ဇြဲခ်စ္မွာ အသက္ ၁၆ ႏွစ္ႏွင့္ တပ္ထဲ ဝင္ခဲ့သည္။ “စစ္တပ္ထဲ ဝင္မယ္လို႔ တစ္ခါမွ အိပ္မက္မမက္ခဲ့ဘူး။ အဲဒီရည္မွန္းခ်က္လည္း မရွိခဲ့ဘူး။ ဘာလုပ္ရမယ္မွန္း မသိလုိ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ လုပ္တဲ့အတုိင္း လိုက္လုပ္လိုက္တာပါ” ဟု ၎က ျပန္ေျပာျပသည္။ 

ကေလးတပ္သားစုေဆာင္းျခင္းကို ကာကြယ္သည့္ ေၾကျငာဘုတ္ကို ဇြဲခ်စ္ႏွင့္ ၎၏မိခင္က ၾကည့္႐ႈေနစဥ္ ဇြဲခ်စ္က ဖုန္းနံပါတ္အား လက္ညႇဳိးထိုးျပေနစဥ္။ 
ယူနီဆက္ဖ္ျမန္မာ/၂၀၁၆/ခိုင္ဇာမြန္

A new life after spending teen years in the army

By Mariana Palavra 

Myitkyina, Kachin State, November 2016 - Zwe Chit (fake name) left school when he was in grade eight. He started hanging out with four older friends. They all wanted to join the army and pushed him to do the same. He was 16 years old when he was recruited. “I never dreamed about being in the army. I didn’t have that ambition. I just followed my friends as I didn’t know what else to do with my life”, he recalls.  

Zwe Chit and his mother look at the child recruitment prevention billboard and point at the hotline number

©UNICEF Myanmar/2016/Khine Zar Mon

Myanmar Armed Forces release a further 80 children

Transit Centre No. 1, Yangon: 24 November:

Wearing traditional Myanmar checkered lungyis and starched white shirts with rounded collars, the young people sit down in rows of chairs and wait for further instruction. Most of them sit quietly but some fidget nervously and shift in their seats, craning their necks forward to see how the ceremony is progressing. 

They are 80 children and young people, all once recruited and used in the Tatmadaw. It is their final roll call as they prepare to leave the armed forces, discharged on the grounds that they should never have been enlisted in the first place.