The Burmese military dictatorship terrorizes its people to
such an extent that men who witness Burmese military officers rape and murder
their wives are afraid to report the atrocities. What kind of actions can a government take to instill such a fear
in people? In a Senate committee
meeting on June 18, 2003, many organizations disclosed the violent acts that
the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) uses to terrorize their people. A representative from the American Humanist
Association (AHA) was fortunate enough to attend this meeting. The following is a summary of the
information that various organizations, such as Refugees International and the
Council on Foreign Affairs, disseminated at the Senate meeting.
Recent Developments
Recent developments in Burma have been detrimental to the
efforts of the Burmese people seeking democracy and freedom. On May 30, 2003, the SPDC attacked and
kidnapped Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi is
a Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the National League for Democracy (NLD),
the main opposition group to the SPDC.
In 1990, the Burmese people overwhelmingly elected the NLD as the ruling
party of the state, giving it 82 percent of the votes. However, the SPDC never recognized the
results from this election.
On June 19, 2003, the SPDC, which
claimed it was holding Suu Kyi in “protective custody,” moved her into the
notorious Insein prison. This move “completely discredits the regime's claim
that she is being held in 'protective custody,’" says Britain’s foreign
office minister Mike O’Brien. Under
section 10a of Burma’s 1975 State Protection Law, the SPDC can hold Suu Kyi
without access to family or lawyers for up to five years with no prospect of
appeal.
Recurring Abuses and Atrocities
Forced Relocation
According
to Refugees International, one mechanism the SPDC uses to keep its people from
organizing revolts is forced relocation, which entails moving Burmese from
established communities to barren areas with no infrastructure. In relocation sites, forced labor is a part
of everyday life. The camps are rife
with starvation, malnutrition, beatings, rapes, and murders. The SPDC gives its military the authority to
shoot anyone who tries to resist relocation and designates the evacuated areas
as “free fire zones,” where the military has the authority to shoot any
trespassers. In more than 175 forced
relocations since 1996, over 350,000 men, women, and children have
involuntarily left their homes for the camps, while over 300,000 people opted
for chance survival in Burma’s hinterland.
The majority of relocations occur on the borders of Burma— areas where
the population is primarily ethnic. The
United Nations currently does nothing to curtail forced relocation in Burma, as
they recognize the illegitimate SPDC as the rightful government of Burma, and
refuse to intervene in this nation’s sovereign affairs.
Rape as tool of warfare
Refugees
International’s No Safe Place: Burma’s Army and the Rape of Ethnic Women
asserts that the SPDC uses rape to wage warfare on the Burmese. In an interview conducted by Refugee
International, 75 percent of women said that they knew someone who had been
raped. In 25 percent of these cases,
the victim was subsequently murdered.
Military officers perpetrated over one-third of the rapes, and close to
one-third occurred on military property.
Women live in constant fear of rape, which occurs by intrusion into
private homes, as well as during incarceration, forced labor, foraging, and
farming. The military commits rape with
virtual impunity because the family is often too scared to report the
incident. If they do report the rape,
the crime is either ignored; the punishment is meaningless; or the family
reporting it is punished, beaten, or murdered by military personnel. In one example, Refugee International tells
of a lady named Aye Myint who was raped while harvesting rubber. Myint’s friends later found her lying in a
pool of her own blood, mortally wounded.
Next to Myint was a note left by the rapist soldier, which listed his
name, battalion, township, and the inscription, “If you want to charge me, come
to that township to find me.” Myint’s
family and friends were too afraid to report the atrocity.
Political Prisoners
The Council
on Foreign Affairs reports that the SPDC has and continues to take political
activists as prisoners in efforts to squash its political opposition. Currently, the SPDC holds over 1,600
political prisoners in its facilities of incarceration, where the prison guards
routinely commit acts such as rape and torture. One of the speakers at the Senate committee meeting, Aung Din,
was a former political prisoner in Burma. Din’s account of his experience shows
blatant disregard for human rights by the SPDC: “If there is a hell on earth,
it must be Burma’s Insein prison where I was jailed.” (Insein is also where the
SPDC is holding Suu Kyi). “For
political prisoners such as myself, each day centered on interrogations,
beatings, and mental torture…. When I
forgot to stand at attention, I was forced to crawl on sharp, pointed stones
for one hundred yards while the prison guards beat me with sticks and belts….
Often, when I tried to sleep, I could hear the screams of those being
tortured. Those screams haunt me to
this day.” Aung Din was lucky enough to
escape the prison, but others, such as Din’s friend Min Ko Naing, have been
tortured in solitary confinement for well over a decade.
Child Labor and Education
The SPDC routinely subjects
children to as much hardship as it does to Burmese adults. According to the Council on Foreign Affairs,
the military junta forces one-quarter of children aged 10-14 to work. Many children do not receive a substantial
education. Only one third of Burmese
children get five years of education, while many children get none
whatsoever.
Likewise, most Burmese students
don’t receive a higher education. Even
those that receive a college degree in Burma do not truly have a college
education, as a university diploma often equates to four months of schooling.
It is necessary for Burmese universities to have extremely short enrollment
periods because there are a huge number of young adults waiting to receive
college educations. This long waiting
list is a result of the SPDC shutting down universities for much of the past
ten years in attempts to crush student uprisings. The lack of well-educated people in Burma could cause great
difficulties in instituting democracy and self-governance, should the SPDC relinquish
control.
Child Soldiers and Trafficking in Persons
Not only
are children in Burma forced to work, but according to the Council on Foreign
Affairs, they are also enlisted into the military. With close to 70,000 child soldiers, Burma currently has more
children in the military than any other army in the world. The SPDC’s army forcibly recruited most of
these children into service.
Burma
obtained many of their child soldiers through trafficking. Burma has no laws governing the trafficking
of people, and the SPDC never enforces its laws governing kidnapping and
prostitution. As a result, there is a
huge person trafficking business in Burma, which provides much of Southeast
Asia with prostitutes and factory workers.
Economic Status and Government Spending and Health Care
Once a fairly wealthy nation, Burma
has spiraled into economic chaos since its post WWII era of military
dictatorships. With a per capita Gross
Domestic Product of $300, Burma can barely feed itself, even though the environment
is excellent for growing crops. The
lack of food is a direct result of the SPDC’s agriculture and taxation
policies, which requires all farmers to give the SPDC a fixed quota in rice or
other crops, regardless of the growing conditions for that particular
year. If the farmers do not have enough
crops to meet the quota, they must buy crops on the open market and sell them
to the SPDC well below market value, thus incurring a loss. As a result, many would-be farmers do not
till their fertile soils.
According
to the Council on Foreign Affairs, the SPDC shows great disregard for the
welfare of its people by spending miniscule amounts of its budget on social
projects, and instead spending large amounts of money on military
expenditures. The SPDC spends
approximately 40 percent of its annual budget on the military, well above the
amount it allocates for education and health care combined. This huge amount of military spending has
enabled the army to double its size since 1988, and purchase extremely expensive
military equipment, such as ten Russian MIG fighter planes from China and a
nuclear reactor, which it is building for “research purposes” with help from
Russia.
All of this costly military
spending comes at the cost of the Burmese, who suffer from many diseases that
the SPDC could curtail if they allocated more funds for health care and disease
prevention. Ailments such as malaria,
tuberculosis’ and leprosy run rampant in an environment that fosters such
maladies. The number of HIV/AIDS cases
is also skyrocketing in Burma, crossing Burma’s borders and spreading to other
nations.
Recommendations
United States Sanctions
Implore the
United States House of Representatives to act quickly in passing the Burma
Freedom Act (HR2330), as the Senate has already done with S1182. In this way, the United States will begin to
show the international community that it supports democracy and human rights in
all regions of the world, whether or not there is oil or other resources to
extract in a particular area. Contact
information for your Representatives is available at http://www.house.gov/.
U.N. Security Council
Support the
Free Burma Coalition’s request that the UN Security Council pass a resolution
pertaining the situation in Burma.
World condemnation of the SPDC’s actions is the best hope for a peaceful
solution to the Burma crisis. Likewise,
united condemnation of the SPDC’s actions, with subsequent action aimed at
weakening the SPDC, will help deter other would-be dictators from acting in a
similar manner to the SPDC. Contacting
the UN is possible through email: inquiries@un.org.
Recognition of
refugees as such
Ask the
nations surrounding Burma to accept all refugees into their countries, and stop
the practice of labeling refugees as “illegal migrants.” Nations bordering Burma don’t accept
refugees primarily because they cannot afford to house refugees. Therefore, there is a need for increased
funding to areas accepting refugees.
Consider expressing a desire for the United States and/or the World Bank
to allocate funds towards this end.
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The organization to contact regarding nations surrounding
Burma accepting refugees is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN). To contact ASEAN, go to http://www.aseansec.org/6620.htm.
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To contact your Representatives regarding increasing funding
for Burmese refugees, go to http://www.house.gov/.
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To contact your Senators regarding increasing funding for
Burmese refugees, go to http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.
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To contact the Executive Branch regarding increasing funding
for Burmese refugees, go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
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To request that the World Bank increase funding for Burmese
refugees, contact: Ms. Melissa
Fossberg— The World Bank Resident Mission in Thailand— email: Mfossberg@worldbank.org
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