BURMA: For Shan Women, Revealing Rights Abuses Come at a Price

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Mar 31 2004 (IPS) - For over a year, a woman belonging to Burma’s Shan ethnic community has treaded a path of caution in this city surrounded by the hills of northern Thailand.

The same vigilance is also pursued by other women like her who are members of the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN), a group determined to expose human rights violations endured by women in the Shan State along Burma’s eastern border.

This concern for safety meant that SWAN, which was formed by 40 Shan women who had escaped to Thailand due to the conflict in their state, opted to mark its fifth anniversary, which fell on Mar. 28, in a muted way.

”We have to protect ourselves. We cannot be as open as we were at the beginning,” says Hseng Noung, a leading member of SWAN. ”It is better that we are not identified.”

Even when she agrees to meet journalists, this 42-year-old prefers the security of a quiet house set behind mango and banana trees on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. The interior of this house that has been converted into an office also conveys a spirit of caution by the absence of politically-charged posters on the walls with messages critical of Burma’s military regime.

It is a life, however, that neither Hseng Noung nor her peers at SWAN expected following the release of a chilling report in May 2002. It documented a disturbing number of times the Burmese army had systematically raped Shan women as they sought to control the Shan State.

But the female activists from SWAN also did not anticipate how their 127-page report, ‘Licence to Rape,’ would take off as a much quoted document by a range of political and human rights actors from across the world.

”It was a surprise, the way it was received,” says Hseng Noung of the soft-covered book that has become a byword for the scale of abuse that the Burmese military subjects people from the country’s minority communities to.

”This report details 173 incidents of rape and other forms of sexual violence, involving 625 girls and women, committed by Burmese army troops in Shan state, mostly between 1996 and 2001,” is how the report begins.

” ‘Licence to Rape’ has created a huge impact both within the human rights community and governments,” Srirak Plipat, who heads the Thai office of Amnesty International, said in an interview. ”The U.S. government and the U.S. Congress have referred to it in their criticism of the Burmese regime.”

”Its success was due to the details contained in the report,” adds Sunai Phasuk, the Thai representative of Human Rights Watch. ”It was groundbreaking in the way it documented one of the worst forms of human rights abuse, systematic rape as a weapon of war.”

Among the stories narrated in the report is the one of a 12-year-old girl who was taking hay to feed cattle in a field near the Laikha township when she was raped and shot dead by Burmese troops.

Burma has been under the grip of a military regime for over 40 years, during which time Rangoon’s troops have been involved in battles with rebel movements from the country’s ethnic communities, including the Shan.

For another rights activist, the report symbolised the triumph of a small grassroots organisation over a strong, ruthless regime. ”The report caused outrage and created a critical mass in the international community that put pressure on Rangoon,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), a regional human rights lobby, tells IPS.

The junta was forced to clean up its image, she added. ”Were it not for the report, the Burmese government may have succeeded in fooling the international community that it was committed to improving the political conditions within the country.”

‘Licence to Rape’ was released in Chiang Mai a few weeks after Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from 19 months of house arrest. Suu Kyi’s freedom was interpreted by some Burma watchers at the time as a sign that junta was ready to ease its iron grip on that South-east Asian nation.

Since then, this flagship project by SWAN has spread its reach beyond its first English-language edition, of which over 4,500 copies have been printed. The report has been translated into Shan, Burmese, French and German.

Currently, plans are underway to have the report available in Hindi, Chinese and Japanese.

Since its release, ‘License to Rape’ has also served as a basis for scrutiny of the Burmese regime by U.N. human rights experts and also featured in discussions about Burma in countries such as Australia, Ireland, Japan, India, Norway and the Philippines.

Yet as Hseng Noung and her colleagues were to learn, there was a price they had to pay for such exposure – warnings directed toward members of SWAN.

”We did not expect these threats to our members,” she says. ”There was information we received that some of our members were under a security threat. We were told to move out of the office we occupied then.”

Thereafter, ”we just disappeared,” she says with a touch of irony.

”I am not surprised by that, because human rights defenders are put under such pressure by the authorities here,” says Amnesty’s Srirak. ”Some do not like the truth being made so public.”

Such threats, however, have not deterred the women from SWAN. They are sticking to their mission, which, human rights observers say, is very dangerous given the risks and the distance researchers have to go to collect the narratives of rape victims.

As SWAN begins its sixth year, activists like Hseng Noung are determined ”to show through our reports what the reality is like for women in Burma”.

To date, SWAN’s researchers have documented over 130 cases of systematic rape since ‘License to Rape’ was brought out. The victims, women and girls, had been abused by the Burmese troops in the Shan state.

Of the cases, they reveal, ”Seventeen were girls under 18 (years). Two of these girls, aged 10 and 13, were gangraped so brutally that they died shortly afterwards of their injuries.”