RIGHTS: Crunch Time for U.N. Envoy in Burma, Say Activists

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 22 2002 (IPS) - The U.N. human rights envoy to Burma will have to come up with more than diplomatic niceties during his current visit to the military-ruled South-east Asian country, if his mission is to be a success.

The visit by Paulo Pinheiro, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights for Burma, ”will serve as an important test case for the credibility of his mission and of the U.N.’s ability to improve the human rights situation in Burma,” says Sunai Phasuk of Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog.

”It is about time that the Burmese regime is pushed to indicate in practical terms how it intends improving the human rights situation,” adds Debbie Stothard, coordinator of ALTSEAN Burma, a regional network of rights groups. ”He (Pinheiro) has to get the regime to act,” Stothard said.

But few admit that the task before Pinheiro – getting Rangoon’s military junta to loosen its stranglehold over the country after developments like the May release from house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi – will be an easy one.

A spate of recent reports on a range of rights abuses reveals the daunting challenge before the U.N. envoy, who is on an 11-day visit to Burma that ends on Oct. 28.

On Monday, the Brussels-based International Confederation for Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) issued a report on saying that forced labour in Burma was on the rise. ”Massive forced labour is actually on the increase,” including people forced into ”opium production,” states the ICFTU’s 350-page report.

”Civilians in at least 16 villages in Burma’s Southern Tenasserim Division were forced to construct a highway between Knabauk and Maung Ma Gan,” the report points out in one of its many examples.

”Families were often forced to work for 20 days or more per month, each having to build a 20-metre long, 4-metre wide stretch of road in April 2002,” it added.

Not lost on the ICFTU is the implication of such violations, which occurred between October 2001 to September 2002. These show that Rangoon’s ruling generals have failed to uphold their promise to the international community to end forced labour.

The military government assured the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that it would take steps to eradicate forced labour after the U.N. agency began pressing for such measures in 2001.

The U.S. department of labour concluded early this year that ”millions” of people had been driven into forced labour in Burma.

Preceding the ICFTU’s report was an expose by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based rights lobby, which accused Burma of having the world’s highest number of child soldiers.

”It appears that the vast majority of new recruits (for Burma’s army) are forcibly conscripted, and there may be as many as 70,000 soldiers under the age of 18,” states the HRW study, ‘My Gun Was as Tall as Me’, released Tuesday last week.

These children, some of whom are as young as 11 years old, ”are subject to beatings and systematic humiliation during training” under the ‘Tatmadaw Kyi’ as the Burmese national army is known, adds the 220-page study.

”Once deployed, they must engage in combat, participate in human rights abuses against civilians, and are frequently beaten and abused by their commanders,” the report declares.

Earlier, two minority rights groups accused the Burmese army of raping close to 625 women and girls between 1996 and 2001 in the country’s eastern Shan State.

Released in mid-June, the report titled ‘Licence to Rape’, triggered Pinheiro’s current visit, his second for the year and fourth since being appointed to this post.

Rangoon said last week that it had invited the U.N. envoy to investigate the rape charges, which the junta dismissed soon after the report’s release.

The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the military government is officially known, has also forcefully relocated villagers in the rape-affected areas, says Hseng Noung, spokeswoman for the Thai-based Shan Women’s Action Network, one of the rights groups that brought out the report.

”We have requested him (Pinheiro) to come to the border areas to meet people who have been victims,” she says, referring to areas on the Thai side of the border across Burma.

Pinheiro has already informed his Rangoon hosts that he does not plan to visit the Shan state to investigate cases of alleged rape of Shan women. This is welcomed by rights activists, who say the government-arranged visit would not have allowed rape victims to speak openly to Pinheiro anyway.

But the U.N. envoy is expected to visit political prisoners in the notorious Insein prison in the Burmese capital. There are over 1,200 political activists behind bars, despite the SPDC’s periodic release of political prisoners since early last year.

Suu Kyi’s release in May after 19 months of house arrest was the most prominent one.

Yet as the months since have shown, freedom for Suu Kyi and other activists was more of a public relations exercise by the SPDC, says Teddy Buri, president of a group of Burmese parliamentarians in exile.

The release of political dissidents was done ”to please the international community” and is not ”an indicator of the SPDC’s commitment to human rights,” Buri said.

Said Stothard: ”There has been time since his (Pinheiro’s) appointment for the SPDC to change, but it has not. The situation is coming down to the crunch.”

RIGHTS: Crunch Time for U.N. Envoy in Burma, Say Activists

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 22 2002 (IPS) - The U.N. human rights envoy to Burma will have to come up with more than diplomatic niceties during his current visit to the military-ruled South-east Asian country, if his mission is to be a success.
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