Amat-Amati

Saya tertarik dengan apa yang dinukilkan oleh Sdr Farish Noor berkenaan Demonstrasi AMAN di Myanmar yang diketuai oleh sami-sami Buddha di bawah. Nampaknya para agamawan dan golongan terhormat di dalam strata masyarakat sudah mula mempercayai bahawa Demonstrasi AMAN adalah suatu bentuk ekspresi paling akhir atau awla untuk menyedar dan menegur adikuasa tentang cara tindak tanduk pemerintahan. BERSIH yang juga ingin menganjurkan Demonstrasi AMAN 10 Nov ini bagi menuntut pilihnraya yang adil dan bersih. Bagaimanakah pula sambutannya …mungkin keadaan disini tidaklah sejelek di Myanmar tetapi  bagaimana pula dengan sambutan para agamawan disini dan tokoh tokoh besar disini . Macammana ada berani?

“By now the international community is fully aware of the recent developments in Burma, a country that has been under military rule and isolated from the rest of the globe since 1963. The images of Burmese Buddhist monks taking to the streets and defying the armed might of the Burmese junta and its security apparatus reminds us of familiar scenes dating back to the 1980s, and echo the democratic revolutions we have seen elsewhere in Asia, including China, since then.

While the fate of Burma and her people hang in the balance, the protest of the monks – many of whom happen to come from ordinary Burmese families with scant political protection themselves – teaches us a vital lesson and is a model for many progressive theologians and religious activists to follow. It is sometimes said that in the post-Enlightenment age we live in there is little concern for religion and that religion has no place in society. Worst still, the political instrumentalisation of religion for clearly divisive and sectarian ends has further added scepticism for many who believe that religion is best kept out of politics and the public domain, where it has often been abused. (A view that many would concur with). Unfortunately today any talk of religious ethics is often met with images of Bible-thumping evangelists talking of holy wars and moral crusades, angry bearded fanatics burning books and nosey neighbours spying on what the people next door are doing. Are religion and ethics destined to remain forever trapped in the nonsensical and pointless debate over who is holier and who wears his or her religion on the sleeves? Has religion nothing to say on pressing issues of the day such as fundamental political rights and liberties, democracy and rule of law?

The problem faced by many progressive theologians today is having to translate ethics and morality into modern public life without falling into the numerous pitfalls that lie before it: More often than not when morality makes an appearance in the public political domain it is at the behest of right-wing conservatives who merely wish to use ethics and morality as yet another means of domesticating society and controlling the masses. Then there are the political elites who have turned religious ethics into a mere ideology, fit only for vote-winning and the demonisation of other communities deemed ‘deviant’, ‘infidels’ and ‘Others’. What is needed now is a new vocabulary of religious ethics that takes ethics into the public domain of the present, addressing issues of today and speaking the language of ordinary people living in the 21st century.

Religion, if it is to be real and relevant, cannot be trapped in the myth of some pristine golden age of the past. The morality of religion is not to be found in temples, mosques or churches; or in books and tomes that have been left to rot in libraries of monasteries. One does not find God’s ethics in outdated rituals and empty religious praxis, any more than in the length of beards, the size of turbans and the cut of one’s holy robes…

As the South African theologian Prof. Farid Esack once wrote, the real mission of religion and faith today is to be a living, dynamic force of social change and transformation, with the capacity of making the world a better, safer and more equal place for all. This is what he refers to as the ‘Prophetic mission’ of all divine ideas, and it has to be remembered that Prophets were seldom Kings or Presidents, but themselves marginal figures who stood on the margins to represent the downtrodden, disempowered and voiceless. Religious ethics, Prof Esack argues, does not and should not be an appendage to power, but must rather speak up to power and its abuses. By speaking up for the people of Burma who have suffered so much under military rule for so long, the monks of Burma are doing precisely that: living up to the Prophetic mission of Buddhism and showing that ethics and morals are out there in the streets and in demonstrations.

For all who profess to be progressive theologians, the events in Burma are of common concern and importance. What is happening in Burma right now is not just important for the country, but it is also important for Buddhism, and all other religions by extension. It proves that religion can have a meaningful impact when its ethics are translated into a real-life context and ethics is something acted out in the public domain, rather than discussed in an abstract manner. One is not good simply because one thinks so, but to be good, to be moral and ethical, requires moral and ethical action as well. The  monks of Burma are not prepared to kill for anything or anyone, but they seem willing to die at least for a cause that resonates with the people of the country as a whole. The simple gesture of taking to the streets and standing their ground before the bayonets and tanks of the military junta sends out a clear message to the regime installed in Burma today: Namely that while the army has the guns and tanks it is the people who now command the moral high ground.

With little save the threat of violence to stand on, the army in Burma must realise that it has lost all credibility not only in the eyes of the world but more crucially for their own people as well. And by taking the stand that they have and keeping to it, the monks of Burma have shown us that religion can also be a living dynamic force that has relevance in the here-and-now, and that ethics is not something to be confined to books and locked in the sacred precinct of temples.”

The Star pagi ini melaporkan tindakan pendakwaan akan diambil ke atas beberapa pegawai kanan Kementerian Belia dan Sukan  dan Kementerian Wanita yang terlibat dalam penyelewangan wang rakyat seperti yang dilaporkan dalam Auditor’s General Report. Saya mengucapkan tahniah kepada BPR kerana ini lah pertama kali hasil laporan A-G Report diambil tindakan sewajarnya oleh Kerajaan. Diharapkan semua penyelewengan yang dilaporkan disiasat oleh Kerajaan supaya laporan tersebut lebih bernilai dan dipandang tinggi oleh masyarakat jika sebelum ini ianya hanya dibakulsampahkan tanpa mendapat tindakan lanjut dari Kerajaan.

Saya ada sedikit keyakinan dengan tindakan ini tapi jgnlah hanya hangat-hangat tahi ayam patut diteruskan lagi selepas ini membanteras rasuah ke akar umbi. Tahniah sekali lagi, sedikit sebanyak saya rasa sedikit gumbira kerana sudah bersedih sekian lama.

 Tuntutan puak Kurds di Turkey memohon autonomi dari Kerajaan Turkey sudah tentu menuntut penyelesaian terbaik dari Kerajaan Turkey sekarang yang diterajui oleh PM Abdullah Gul. Selepas kerajaan neo-islamic ini menerajui pundak pemerintahan Turkey ini adalah cabaran pertama yang dihadapi Gul iaitu menyelesaikan tuntutan puak Kurdish. Siapakah mereka? Perlukah Gul melayan tuntutan autonomi mereka. Mungkin artikel di bawah membantu untuk kita tahu serba sedikit mengenai puak Kurdish di Turkey.

“About half of all Kurds live in Turkey. According to the CIA Factbook they account for 20 percent of the 70 million people of Turkey, thus numbering about 15 million people.^[52] Other estimates vary between 12 to 15 million. They are predominantly distributed in the southeastern corner of the country.

The best available estimate of the number of persons in Turkey speaking a Kurdish-related language is about five million (1980). There are about one million speakers of Dimli (Southern Zaza), and about 140,000 speakers of Kirmanjki (Northern Zaza), which has about 70 percent lexical similarity with Dimli. These estimates are from 1999 in the case of Dimli and 1972 in the case of Kirmanjki. About 3,950,000 others speak Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) (1980).^[54] While population increase suggests that the number of speakers has grown, it is also true that use of the language has been discouraged in Turkish cities, and that many fewer ethnic Kurds live in the countryside where the language has traditionally been used. The number of speakers is clearly less than the 15 million or so persons who identify themselves as ethnic Kurds.

From 1915 to 1918, Kurds struggled to end Ottoman rule over their region. They were encouraged by Woodrow Wilson’s support for non-Turkish nationalities of the empire and submitted their claim for independence to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Treaty of Sèvres stipulated creation of an autonomous Kurdish state in 1920, but the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 failed to mention Kurds. In 1925 and 1930 Kurdish revolts were forcibly suppressed.

Kurdish mother and baby near Lake Van, 1973

Following these events, the existence of distinct ethnic groups like Kurds in Turkey was officially denied and any expression by the Kurds of their ethnic identity was harshly repressed. Until 1991, the use of the Kurdish language – although widespread – was illegal. As a result of reforms inspired by the EU, music, radio and television broadcasts in Kurdish are now allowed albeit with severe time restrictions (for example, radio broadcasts can be no longer than sixty minutes per day nor constitute more than five hours per week while television broadcasts are subject to even greater restrictions). Additionally, education in Kurdish is now permitted though only in private institutions.

As late as 1994, however, Leyla Zana, the first female Kurdish representative in Turkey’s Parliament, was charged for making “separatist speeches” and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. At her inauguration as an MP, she reportedly identified herself as a Kurd. Amnesty International reported that “[s]he took the oath of loyalty in Turkish, as required by law, then added in Kurdish, ‘I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish peoples may live together in a democratic framework.’ Parliament erupted with shouts of ‘Separatist!’, ‘Terrorist!’, and ‘Arrest her!’”.

The Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), also known as KADEK and Kongra-Gel, is considered by the US and EU to be a terrorist organization dedicated to creating an independent Kurdish state in a territory (traditionally referred to as Kurdistan) consisting of parts of southeastern Turkey, northeastern Iraq, northeastern Syria and northwestern Iran. It is an ethnic secessionist organization using force and threat of force against both civilian and military targets for the purpose of achieving its political goal.

Between 1984 and 1999, the PKK and the Turkish military engaged in open war, and much of the countryside in the southeast was depopulated, with Kurdish civilians moving to local defensible centers such as Diyarbakır, Van, and Şırnak, as well as to the cities of western Turkey and even to western Europe. The causes of the depopulation included PKK atrocities against Kurdish clans they could not control, the poverty of the southeast, and the Turkish state’s military operations.Human Rights Watch has documented many instances where the Turkish military forcibly evacuated villages, destroying houses and equipment to prevent the return of the inhabitants. An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Turkey were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people.

Nelson Mandela refused to accept the Ataturk Peace Award in 1992 because of the oppression of the Kurds. After the rejection, Turkish press called him An Ugly African and Terrorist Mandela.”