BURMA: Rangoon Fails to Get Charges of Forced Labour Off Its Back

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 17 2003 (IPS) - In villages across eastern Burma, a popular childhood game – hide-and-seek – is being given a new twist by that country’s military government.

For one, the players are mostly adults, and for another, it is an exercise aimed to enhance suppression – in this case, conceal the widely practised abuse of forced labour from the prying eyes of visiting investigators.

Among the victims roped into this act of deception are villagers who have been compelled to build roads and bridges, construct the barracks of soldiers and the police and serve as porters to carry the army’s equipment.

Initially, some people were perplexed by the military regime’s version of hide-and-seek with investigators. ”Sometimes when we worked clearing the road, if some official came we were told to stop or hide from the work place,” says a 40-year-old mother. ”I don’t understand why.”

In other villagers, people march to the soldiers’ tune by feigning ignorance when questioned about the regularity of forced labour. To do otherwise is to invite retaliation from the military, they say.

”Sometimes foreigners come and check the village. But we cannot say anything,” says a villager who lives close to the controversial Yadana and Yetagun gas pipeline in southern Burma.

In drawing attention to these cases in a report released this month, the Washington D.C.-based environment lobby Earthrights International reveals that Rangoon’s rulers continue to commit human rights abuses they have been long condemned for.

Earthrights’ exposure comes on the heels of a decision by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to launch a new programme on Jul. 1 aimed at ridding Burma of its regimen of forced labour.

This adds to the already heavy pressure on Burma, which is now coming from the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN). In a break from its usual silence about its member countries’ rights records, it called Tuesday for the release of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from ‘protective custody’ in Rangoon.

The Geneva-based ILO is now also challenging the efforts by Rangoon’s junta to stonewall such pressure for change.

That includes a comprehensive awareness campaign across that South-east Asian country to inform people in villages and townships that forced labour is illegal. An ILO law – Order No 1/99 – forbids compulsory labour and military personnel from forcing villages to give false testimony.

Further, the U.N. labour agency will also send its own officials to establish a mechanism that enables victims to seek redress if they are forced by the military into compulsory work.

The campaign aims at reaching out to the ethnic communities, who are among the worst affected by forced labour. Information will be written and made available in the Mon, Kayin, Chin Kayah, Kachin and Shan languages, which are six of the nine languages spoken by Burma’s ethnic minorities.

The ILO’s presence in Rangoon is an achievement, but it ”needs better investigative mechanisms in the country for the action plan to work,” Masao Imamura, campaign coordinator for Earthrights, says in an interview.

Conducting impartial investigations are also difficult, because of the culture of fear that prevails there, he adds. ”The military government has still not got the message that they have to improve their human rights record.”

Accounts gathered by Earthrights for its report, ‘Entrenched: an Investigative Report on the Systematic Use of Forced Labour’, show that villagers who were aware of the ILO’s law could do little when pressed into labour by gun-wielding soldiers.

”I have seen the paper written about no more forced labour, but nothing has changed even though the paper came out,” a 48-year-old woman was quoted as saying in the Earthrights report. ”Some villages are hanging those papers in front of their houses, and the soldiers order them to take it down.”

The ILO’s current pressure on Rangoon is the latest in a stream of actions it has pursued since 1998, when it called on the Burmese junta to stop forced labour. That arose after reports of the military’s systemic use of civilians in labour that ranged from portering to building construction.

But Rangoon’s reluctance resulted in the U.N. agency pushing through sterner measures, including imposition of sanctions against Burma, after its investigative team found little evidence of improvement in the country’s record in child labour.

In September 2001, Rangoon gave another display of stubbornness over forced labour, when the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the military regime is officially known, denied the ILO’s reports that such abuses were still prevailing.

That was followed in March 2002 by the junta refusing to permit the ILO to set up a permanent office in Rangoon to monitor the practice of forced labour – a decision that the junta subsequently changed, enabling an ILO officer to begin investigations.

In March this year, the SPDC tried once again to win the ILO’s nod of approval but was rebuffed. The ILO’s representative in Burma had not been impressed by Rangoon’s commitment for change, according to media reports.

For Burmese living in exile, the military government’s attitude is hardly a surprise. ”Forced labour cannot be eliminated in isolation. We need political change, for without that I don’t think you can end forced labour,” says Zaw Moe Kyaw of the National Council of the Union of Burma, an umbrella group of Burmese exiles in Thailand.

As it is, he adds, the Burmese military cannot do without forced labour ”because of their incompetence. They use people as tools, rather than spend money to buy machinery.”