BURMA: Rights Record Grim, Says UN Envoy

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Feb 24 2006 (IPS) - As he bade goodbye to Burma, the United Nations envoy appointed to investigate human rights abuses in that military-ruled country evoked an image of a people trapped in a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.

”No improvement; no improvement at all,” Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said Friday during a packed press conference here about the country he was appointed to scrutinise during a six-year term, which began in December 2000. ”The situation has deteriorated.”

Behind those words was a report that catalogues a scale of abuse that has no parallel within South-east Asia. The plight of the country’s 1,144 political prisoners and the reasons for citizens to be thrown into jail for their political activity were among those singled out in this 29-page report, his final one, to be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in April.

Since December, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) has been prevented from visiting the prisoners, who, according to the report, are subject to ”torture and ill-treatment.” Other allegations of prisoner abuse ”include food, water, sleep and light deprivation; harsh beatings; forced squatting for prolonged periods; shackling and solitary confinement.”

”The ICRC made 400 visits, but now they cannot go,” said an exasperated Pinheiro, a Brazilian national, who has been denied entry to Burma, also called Myanmar by the junta, since November 2003. ”When the Myanmar government decided to create problems for the ICRC, I don’t understand what those authorities have in their minds.”

The harsh treatment of the political prisoners, some of whom are over 75 years old, has resulted in over 90 of them dying during a 17-year period. Between May and December last year, four deaths occurred allegedly ”as a consequence of torture, ill-treatment or inadequate medical attention,” the report adds.

Among those jailed for their political convictions are some 17 journalists, editors, writers and poets; parliamentarians; Buddhist monks; political activists belonging to the opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD); and political leaders of Burma’s ethnic communities.

”The condition within the prisons has not changed over the past six years. They remain bad,” Zarny Win of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a group of former Burmese political prisoners living in exile, told IPS. ”Stopping the ICRC going will make things worse, because the prisoners always waited for the ICRC delegation’s visits to talk about the problems over health, food, water and other concerns.”

In December last year, the AAPP brought out a chilling book that contained personal narratives of the suffering prisoners in Burmese jails had endured. ”(They) burned my left arm with a cigarette and dropped hot wax on my knee and thigh. They also placed a gas or candle flame near my genitals,” one male prisoner told the reporters of the report entitled ‘The Darkness We See.”

”I was forced to continuously squat and stand with my arms in the air,” added a female prisoner. ”The pain of squatting and standing was intense, and whenever I had to stop because of the pain, someone would hit me with a cane stick across my hips and nipples. This torture went on for the whole night.”

Besides the lack of a fair trial in the courts for the prisoners, the reasons that people can get arrested also revealed a military regime bent on crushing any space that opens up for political and civil liberties.

In October 2005, for instance, 17 NLD youth members were arrested for violating the ”Courtesy Law,” which, states the report, ”requires the permission of local authorities should a person wish to stay overnight in the house of another.” A human rights defender in Rangoon was arrested for ”attending a training workshop on labour rights,” while a documentary film-maker was convicted for ”illegal possession of a fax machine.”

”Possession of fax machines, video cameras, modems and satellite antennas remain illegal and are ”punishable with prison sentences of up to 15 years,” adds the report. And since October 2004, ”every journal, newspaper and magazine must submit each edition to the censors for approval before publication.”

By 2005, even the announcement of people dying was not spared – censorship was ”extended to cover death notices.”

Pinheiro, who visited Burma six times during his term, also shed critical light on the areas where little has changed or, at times, got worse. That includes the troubling issue of forced labour, attacks on ethnic minorities and violence against women, including rape, all attributed to sections of the Burmese military.

And political reform has remained a non-starter, given that the junta refuses to free from detention the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent over 10 of the last 16 years cut off from the world.

The Burmese military, which came to power following a 1962 coup, has been accused by other U.N. agencies, such as the World Food Programme and the International Labour Organisation, for contributing to the country’s deteriorating humanitarian condition. That includes the charge of preventing food from getting to malnourished children.

Pinheiro’s critical assessment is expected to lend weight to a call being made by a coalition of parliamentarians for the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-member regional bloc of which Burma is a member, for Rangoon’s junta to stop its oppression and pursue political reform.

Other members of the bloc include Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei.

”The time for more waiting is over. ASEAN should apply pressure at all levels for change,” Teresa Kok, a Malaysian parliamentarian belonging to the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus, told IPS. ”If the Burmese government continues to be stubborn and not reform, then ASEAN should expel Burma.”