Khine Thein
Sittwe: Arakanese fishermen said they want Burmese navy to step up
security in the sea off the Arakan coast as the situation in the sea is
still unstable due to the communal violence that took place last June
and October in the region.
They however worry that the increase of naval vessels will cost them more atrocities and forcible taxation in the sea.
“We want the Burmese navy to step up its security in the sea
because it is still unreliable to fish in the sea. But we fear that we
will suffer from more atrocities and forcible taxation if it deploys
more ships in the sea. We are now in great trouble to earn our
livelihood because of both the security situation and security forces in
the sea”, said a fisherman from regional capital Sittwe on condition of
anonymity.
The naval ships being deployed for maintaining security in the sea
off Arakan State are said to have been forcibly collecting whatever they
want that include fuel, fish, food and alcoholic drinks besides regular
toll taxes from the fishing boats.
“The forces of the naval ship being deployed at the mouth of Kaladan
River collected 1 lakh kyat from a boat for each fishing trip to the sea
during the reign of the former military government. Now during the
reign of the U Thein Sein-led government, it has increased their
toll-tax to 2 lakh kyat. They also take three big fish and fuel oil from
the boat returning from the sea and order the fishermen to bring food,
beer and rum for them on their next trip. If the fishermen refuse or
forget to pay whatever they ask for, they will beat them or disturb
their fishing trips”, said the fisherman.
He said a fishing boat from Sittwe can set out to sea to fish once or
twice a month depending on the weather and availability of fish in the
sea and the fishermen are now unable to make any profit because they
cannot go far in the sea due to their security concerns and because of
the heavy tolls being collected by the naval ships.
A fisherman from Pauktaw also said they are suffering from similar
atrocities and toll-taxes being perpetrated by the naval ships deployed
along the coast off their township.
“The naval ships here collected 50,000 kyat from a fishing-boat
before. They have now doubled their tolls and also collected fishes from
our boats. We don’t like to pay them, but we have to. We are just
people earning our livelihood by small fishing boats in the broad sea
and are now facing the ruin of our livelihood”, said the fisherman.
According to local residents, the Burmese naval ships being deployed
on the coast and riverine routes in Arakan State have been operating
like toll-gates rather than undertaking security in the region. They
have been collecting forcible toll-taxes not only from the
fishing-boats, but also from the passenger and cargo-boats sailing on
the riverine itineraries across the region.
They said they expected that such unlawful activities being
perpetrated by the forces in their region would disappear with the
coming of the new civilian government, but they have to pay more
forcible toll-taxes to the forces under the reign of the civilian
government than the former military government.
They also said they have reported the matter of forcible taxation by
the forces to the regional government as well as to the central
government themselves and through their elected lawmakers, but the
forces seem to be unruly and both governments are still unable to stop
the forcible taxation in their region.
Most of the Arakanese people have seen such perpetrations by the
Burmese forces as oppression and racial discrimination against them.
An Arakanese politician from Sittwe criticized the Government,
claiming it is apparent the Burmese government and its forces still
regard Arakan State as one of their imperial regions rather than a state
in the Union of Burma. narinjara
ျမန္မာ
အစိုးရႏွင့္ အပစ္ အခတ္ ရပ္စဲေရး ရ႐ွိ ထားသည့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္
အဖဲြ႕ အစည္းတို႕ လ်ာထားသည့္ ယခု ႏွစ္ကုန္၌ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေတြ႕ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြး
ႏိုင္ရန္မွာ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ အဖြဲ႕ အစည္းမ်ား အခ်ိဳ႕မွ အဆင္သင့္
မျဖစ္ ေသး၍ လ်ာထားသည့္ ကာလထက္ ေနာက္က် မွသာ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ဖြယ္ ႐ွိေၾကာင္း
မြန္အမ်ိဳးသား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ ဒု - စစ္ဦး စီးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္မႉးခ်ဳပ္
ႏိုင္လယီ ဂေကာင္းက ေျပာသည္။
