October 13th, 2009 Posted in Article | 16 Comments »
BY SAW RICHARD
Burma is a multiethnic country of about 54 million people which borders India to its west, China to its north, and Thailand lies on its eastern side. Although Burma has different kinds of natural resources such as, natural gas, oil, abundant fertile farming and fishing areas, and hardwood forests, decades of ruthless military rule transformed the country from being one of the richest in the region during the 1950s and early 1960s, into one of the poorest in the world. Thus, ironic as it may seem, that a land endowed with much natural wealth, is also a land of abject poverty, appalling health, atrocious human rights abuses, fear, quiet despair, and silent suffering. And the suffering increases every year with more people afflicted with contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS virus, malnutrition and stunting in children, and yet the military has managed to stay in power for the last 46 years despite its atrocious reputation as being one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
While much of the world’s media attention was on the opening ceremony of the Olympics in China this 8 August 2008 which took centre stage in global affairs, the people of Burma, apart from the military junta and their followers, remembered 8 August as the date of the massacre of unarmed students and civilians in Rangoon, Burma, in 1988, who were calling for an end to military rule and the restoration of democracy in the country. During this intense and critical period of unrest, the military was caught unawares and desperately sought China’s help to crush the uprising of a whole nation that was against it. China obliged with massive arms supplies to the military junta, and one month later, in September 1988, the generals unleashed a reign of terror. Although Burma has been under military rule since 1962, after the brutal crushing of the spontaneous uprising of the people in 1988, the oppression of the peoples of Burma by the military junta intensified with ferocity resulting in atrocities committed by soldiers against their own country-men, women, and even children. It is well known that the military pressgangs children to serve in the army, and these child soldiers, brutalized by senior commanders, more than often turn to violence to vent their own grief of loss, which is their own childhood. Thus, child soldiers who are victims of the state also create more victims when acts of atrocities are committed by them as a service to the very state that abuses them. For example, according to Earth Rights International, in the summer of 2005, young soldiers [more than likely child soldiers] from pipeline battalion 409 came across a young girl and her older sister bathing in a stream. They captured the girl as her sister ran away to find help; the girl, only six or seven years old, was raped so violently that she required medical attention for a torn vagina. Hence, this vicious cycle of victims of victims in the form of children abusing other children leaves a scar on the individual psyche of each child. This then is the measure of what the junta is willing to do at any given time or period, and at any cost, in order to stay in power. And as such, it is in particular, the predicament of children in Burma, who are suffering under military rule.
Space, place, and displacement under military rule
The junta has since 1988, displaced over a million citizens internally who have fled into remote dense jungle areas to avoid the cruelties of the junta: forced labour, being used as human mine sweepers and as porters for soldiers in conflict zones, rape, torture, and summary executions. And as a result of continued military offences launched in areas where ethnic nationalities are the majority, thousands of ethnic peoples have had to flee to refugee camps mainly along the Thai-Burma border regions.
In other areas of the country, ethnic Burman people are also suffering; dispossessed of their homelands forcibly by the junta to make way for the junta’s economic projects such as, holiday resorts in the ancient city of Pagan in central Burma, and for a natural gas pipeline in southern Burma that was constructed and financed, and still continues to be operated by oil companies: Total of France, and Chevron of USA, which are so called western democratic countries. During the early preparatory stages for the pipeline construction, the military conducted offences and forcibly relocated villages to ensure that the anticipated pipeline route was secured. Consequently, thousands of villagers were sent to locations without any existing facilities such as, clean water supply, access to medical care, and education needs for the children. These villagers were ordered to re-establish themselves without any assistance from the authorities nor were they given any building materials for rebuilding livable places.
The displacement of such large number of people from their normal and natural way of life has serious ramifications. It is in effect, the total opposite to what Robert Sack in his A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good writes: “We should create places that expand our awareness of reality…create places that increase…variety and complexity of reality…in doing so,…creating better places and a better world, and would be moving in a moral direction. Instead, the junta has decreed that the “State” which is the military junta, is the owner of all the land, and natural resources… and the State shall enact necessary law… for extraction and utilisation of State owned natural resources. Hence, citizens have no legal status for ownership of neither property nor land rights for livelihood in many respects in Burma under military dictatorship. The junta can arbitrarily confiscate any property and/or, conscript any person in order to sustain its stranglehold on and to remain in power indefinitely. Not only has the military taken large areas of people’s living places and forcibly displaced these people, the military also wants to control that which is known as the space within the individual or inner self of a human being through unrelenting psychological and physical abuses committed on the vast majority of the people including a large proportion of its own soldiers. Low rank soldiers are cajoled, coerced, and encouraged to commit all kinds of human rights abuses on civilians especially in rural or country areas where ethnic peoples are the majority.
Cruelty - the core of military power in Burma
The recent devastation caused by cyclone Nargis in April 2008, killed more than 100,000 people in the delta regions, and over a million people were made homeless. The military junta’s response was appalling. It did not allow immediate relief aid and aid workers to enter the country, despite the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the hundreds of villages that were wiped out during the cyclone. This callous and uncaring behavior of the junta exacerbated the situation, and caused even more suffering for the survivors of the disaster.
Hence, it further exposed the military junta’s brutal and brazen behavior towards the people of Burma. In this regard, the military has maintained its track record concerning gross human rights abuse. This comes as no surprise since the military junta fears foreign aid workers and journalists because, given the chance to speak with such foreign workers or journalists, the ordinary person on the street would tell about state sanctioned human rights abuses that take place in all parts of the country systematically. This is what the junta fears most, and it deals with dissenters mercilessly. It is symptomatic of a military junta that is increasingly nervous and paranoid about its own illegitimate position. The insecurity of power based on coercion translates into a need to crush all dissent.
A brief socio- politico- historic background (1948-1988)
The causes and contributing factors of Burma’s on going tragedy can be linked to Burma’s unstable political past. Leading up to independence, the nationalist movement known as the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) led by Aung San, sought an end to British colonial rule in 1946. During negotiations, the British government of PM Clement Atlee… insisted that the political status of the peoples in the frontier areas be resolved. This insistence prompted Aung San to negotiate a pre-independence agreement with the Saophas who were the legitimate leaders of the ethnic Shans. After many discussions and political wrangling, the Saophas agreed that the Shans will join Aung San to show strength and unity in order to speed up independence…after independence, unless they [Shans] are satisfied with the administration, the Shans had the right to secede from the Union. Thus, the pre-independence agreement with the Shans and two other ethnic groups (Kachin, and Chin), was to become the Panlong Agreement of 12 February 1947 which met the preconditions as stipulated by the British government.
Five months later, Aung San and his cabinet members were assassinated by a rival politician named U Saw. Nonetheless, the Panlong Agreement paved the way for the Constitution of the Union of Burma which was completed in late 1947, and in which chapter ten reads: Right of Secession states as follows: Save as otherwise expressly provided in this constitution or in any Act of Parliament made under section 199, every State shall have the right to secede from the Union…secession shall not be exercised within ten years from the date on which this Constitution comes into operation.
Burma gained independence on the 4th of January 1948, and two months later in March, the Burma Communist Party (BCP) staged an armed rebellion in the northern parts of the Shan State. The newly formed government sent Burma Army troops to deal with the rebellion. During this period, the Burma Army had to contend with the Chinese troops as well; the anti-communist Koungmintang (KMT) troops fled to northern Burma after Mao Zedong took power in 1949. The presence of KMT troops and the armed rebellion of the BCP were in the northern most parts of the Shan State, but the central government used it as justification for establishing military rule in all parts of the Shan State even though there were neither BCP nor KMT presence in other areas. There were atrocities as Seng points out: Soldiers from the Burma Army started to violate the people of the Shan State… with robbery, rape, and extra judicial killings, people were ruled under martial law and the traditional administration of the Shan State was disregarded. Ethnic Karens were well aware that the newly formed ethnic Burman dominated central government was not about to honour the Constitution which stipulated that the new Union of Burma would be ruled by a democratically elected parliament… and a Karen State was to be established. Armed conflict broke out on the 31st of January 1949, when ethnic Karen sections of Ahlone and Thamaing in Rangoon were attacked by the “Sitwunduns” (militia) who were under the command of Ne Win.The ramifications of the unrest with ethnic Shans and Karens destabilized the central government’s position. Citing these internal problems, the military led by Ne Win took control of the country in 1958 although the PM of the day U Nu announced that the handover had been voluntary, but it became clear later that he [U Nu] had little choice in the matter.
The military control of the country was called the “caretaker” government which was to be for six months but it lasted two years. Elections were held in 1960, and the “Pyidaungsu” or Union Party of PM U Nu won a resounding victory. As a result, many ethnic leaders and senior politicians regarded the new government could bring about very important change concerning ethnic issues, and on the 2nd of March 1962, during a high-level seminar on federal issues attended by PM U Nu, senior politicians, and elected Shan representatives, Ne Win seized power again. Ne Win embarked on imposing his own brand of ideology called ‘the Burmese way to Socialism’ with devastating consequences. (The present junta leader Than Shwe’s “Road map to Disciplined Democracy” which excludes the NLD-National League for Democracy is farcical and Orwellian but terrifying, because many elected members of parliament have been jailed, tortured, or have died of mysterious illnesses). Military officials replaced almost all civillian workers in the nation’s administration, causing the collapse of economic and civic institutions. Civil society also came under military control via the security and administrative councils which were set up by the military. Thus, political, economic, and social institutions were managed by the military and, constantly monitored by its secret agents. Hence, what began as a military dictatorship in 1962, degenerated into a terrifying tyranny. The overwhelming majority of people were fed up with unnecessary “economic hardships…the difficulties of eking out a barely acceptable standard of living… and the humiliation of a way of life disfigured by corruption and fear. Thus, twenty six years later, such unbearable and unnecessary conditions culminated in the mass demonstrations of August 1988, led by students, and supported by the vast majority which was brutally crushed by the military, killing an estimated of between three and ten thousand citizens, mostly in the capital city, Rangoon, on the 8th of August.
Political manoeuvres and machinations by the military post-1988
The present military junta renamed the country Myanmar in 1989 following the massacre of students and civillians in 1988, in order to confuse the world at large about the atrocities it had committed then. It is a chilling and an eerie reminder of the Pol Pot era in Cambodia during the early 1970s, when more than two million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge, and the subsequent re-naming of that country into Kampuchea by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in similar fashion. The junta also prides itself as the protectors of the Union which it claims will disintegrate without the junta. The on-going use of this pretext to justify military rule is not a new idea. It was used as the very pretext in 1962, by the then military coup leader, Ne Win, to justify the military take over of the country. Hence, this recycled idea from the Ne Win years (1962-88), has been used ever since, by successive leaders of the military regime that came after Ne Win. There is another idea from the Ne Win era that has resurfaced with a new façade. The present USDA (Union Solidarity and Development Association) is almost a carbon copy of the BSPP (Burma Socialist Program Party 1974-1988), which was to shore up whatever the military espoused ideologically. Ne Win sought to use the BSPP to cement the allegiance of civil servants and others to his military-backed regime.
Presently, the head of the junta, Than Shwe, is using the USDA for a very similar purpose.
The junta has since 1988, embarked on the Burmanisation of its armed forces with the intention of causing division between ethnic Burman dominated military and other ethnic peoples, and by conducting continual military offences against these peoples. These operations are hatred driven; using rape as a weapon of oppression; and are clearly designed to create conflict between ethnic groups. The fact that neither the ethnic Burmans nor are the other ethnic groups such as the Shans, Karens, Chins, Mons, Kachins, and Arakanese, are not fighting for separate independent statehoods. But rather, unlike other southeast Asian countries that have total separatists wars or movements, Burma’s ethnic peoples want a federated system with equal power-sharing within a Federal Union and, with a Federal Union Army as well. This makes it all the more difficult for the junta to push their burrow of the so called national unity being undermined by ethnic peoples’ demands.
After the elections of 1990, in which the democratic forces won ninety per cent of the votes, the ethnic peoples got together and formed the National Ethnic Council (NEC) to counter the constant bogus claims made by the military since 1962 in regard to national unity. The military claims that there are lurking dangers the “Union” faces, which makes out the military to be some sort of guardian of the “Union” which has been, and is, the very deception used by the military as it manoeuvres and manipulates the nation while it tells the world at large that this junta is engaged in national solidarity, reconciliation, and the protection of the Union. The unrelenting attacks on ethnic peoples are in effect a policy of divide and rule, and therefore a means to an end, which is to cling on to power while it runs the country into the ground. In fact, the military has succeeded in creating a ruined economy; a hunger stricken life for most; a suffering nation because of grinding poverty for the vast majority; fear of the military; and paranoia on the part of the military because it too fears the will of the people. In other words, the military has without doubt engendered a failed state.
Conclusion and theorethetical issues
Much has been discussed in places like the UN and other venues of international significance, and much more has been recorded regarding human rights violations by various international bodies such as, Human Rights Watch/Asia, and the ILO. However, central to the idea of human rights as O’Byrne points out, is the idea of human dignity, and this dignity must be concrete, [and] grounded in material conditions and realities.
While the international community must make a moral effort to take up the issue of, “the Responsibility to Protect” and what it must mean, the vast majority of people in Burma have to rely on their own inner strengths in order to assert their inalienable right as members of the human family…, and must struggle against a totalitarian regime which has deprived the present of meaningfulness and hold out no hope for the future.
Thus, it all points to an intransigent regime/junta bent on holding power for power sake only. It is the worst form of tyranny which has become the tragedy of the nation, and it keeps the people in unending turmoil, not of their own making.
Note: The circumstances and situation in Burma regarding Human Right abuses has not changed since this essay was written.
30 September 2009
Bibliography:
Aung San Suu Kyi. (1995), Freedom From Fear. Penguin Books, London.
EarthRights International (2008), The Human Cost of Energy: Chevron’s Continuing Role in Oppression and Profiting From Human Rights Abuses in Military-Ruled Burma (Myanmar).
Fink, C. (2000), Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule. White Lotus, Bangkok.
Hudson-Rodd, N. & Sein Htay. (2008), Arbitrary Confiscation of Farmers’ Land by the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Military Regime in Burma. The Burma Fund, Bangkok.
O’Byrne, D. (2003), Human Rights: An Introduction. Longman, UK.
Sack, R. (2003), A Geographical Guide to the Good and Real. Routledge, London, New York.
Seng, N. (2000), The Panlong Agreement: Its Origin and Existence. Article, National Ethnic Council, Maeseriang, Thailand.
