LORD HAVE MERCY ON MYANMAR

BY PAUL BARKER
https://www.eternitynews.com.au/world/lord-have-mercy-on-myanmar/
April 7, 2021

Paul Barker, Bishop in the Anglican diocese of Melbourne has shared this distressing first-hand account he received from Myanmar. Barker taught in Myanmar for 15 years and has visited over 40 times.

Some of you may think we, people from Myanmar, are very sensitive and emotional due to Military Coup in Myanmar. But what you may know or hear is just the tip of the iceberg. The followings are some of the shocking facts happening in Myanmar.

1. If someone is arrested alive at night, most likely his or her dead body will be returned the next morning. In some cases, they won’t even return the body of deceased.

2. If you are a medical staff helping injured protesters, then you can be arrested and tortured or get killed. Even if you are working in your own clinic treating the wounded patients, you can still be abducted or tortured.

3. Doesn’t matter if you stay home or go out to protest, you can get killed anytime without any valid reason due to random gunfire.

4. Doesn’t matter if you are a pregnant lady or a 6-year-old child, they will shoot and kill you at their whim without mercy.

5. Even if you are not protesting, you can be detained, beaten, tortured, humiliated, dehumanised anytime and anywhere (day or night), even inside your own home.

6. You can be abducted, assaulted or killed just for going to work or delivering food (foodpanda, grab food delivery).

7. Now, the only internet service available in the country is the fiber internet line. mobile data has been shutdown for almost 20 days. WiFi broadband services have been cut off since yesterday. All the public WiFi services have been cut off. The only remaining internet service, from the fiber line, is not available everyday from 1am to 9am for almost 2 months. Many apps and websites, such as Facebook , Twitter , Instagram, Google etc., are blocked to suppress the spread of information and news.

Myanmar is not in a war. A war in today’s world would indicate that opposing parties have some weapons to fight and ability to defend themselves.

However, in Myanmar, people have no guns nor protective gears to fight a war. Only the brutal junta regime has the arms and trained killers to terrorise the very citizens it has sworn to protect.

People have something that is stronger and more powerful than guns and bullets, they have hope and unwavering belief that righteousness will overcome evil and that karma and justice will prevail in the end.

Barker is organising a prayer vigil service at 4pm on Saturday April 24 at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne to pray, ‘Lord, Have mercy on Myanmar’. Book on TryBooking

Bishop Barker sent this message to his Myanmar friends.

To my Myanmar friends:
တရားမဝင်သော စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းမှုနှင့်အတူ စစ်တပ်အင်အားကိုလည်း ရန်ကုန်မြို့ ရှိ လမ်းများ၌ တိုးချဲ့ ချထားနေပြီ ဖြစ်သည်။
ကျွနုပ်တို့ သည် စစ်တပ်ဘက်မှ အကြမ်းမဖက်ရေး ကို မေတ္တာ ရပ်ခံအပ်ပါသည်။ ထို့အပြင် စစ်အာဏာသိမ်းမှုကို ရုပ်သိမ်းပြီး ဒီမိုကရေစီစနစ်ကို ပြန်လည်ဖော်ဆောင်ရန် ဆန္ဒ ပြု ဆုတောင်းပါသည်။
ကျွနုပ်တို့ သည် ငြိမ်းချမ်းစွာ ဆန္ဒ ဖော်ထုတ်နေသူများနှင့် ၎င်းတို့နှင့်အတူ ရပ်တည်ပေးနေသူများအားလည်း ထောက်ခံအားပေးပါသည်။
ကျွနုပ်တို့သည် အခြားသော တိုင်းနိုင်ငံများအနေဖြင့် လူသားများ၏ အသက်ကို ကာကွယ်ဖို့ရန် အလို့ငှာ ထိုအာဏာသိမ်းမှုကြီးကို ရပ်တံ့သွားဖို့ ၎င်းတို့၏ သြဇာအရှိန်အဝါ သက်ရောက်မှုဖြင့် ကြိုးပမ်းအားထုတ် ပေးဖို့ကိုလည်း တိုက်တွန်းနှိုးဆော်အပ်ပါသည်။
“ဘုရားသခင်သည် မြန်မာပြည်ကို ကောင်းကြီးပေးပါစေ။”

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