BURMA: Ethnic Groups Pin Hopes on Visiting UN Official

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 16 2006 (IPS) - While few Burma watchers are expecting any headway when a high U.N. official visits the military-ruled country this week, those who champion the cause of that country’s persecuted minorities are hoping that the plight of the Karens will figure high on the agenda.

Ibrahim Gambari, U.N. under-secretary general for political affairs, flies into Rangoon at a time when the Karen ethnic community, living along the border that Burma shares with Thailand, is reported to be at the receiving end of an intense military onslaught.

Gambari, on a two-day visit, beginning Thursday, will find it hard to ignore a ballooning humanitarian crisis in the Karen areas in the wake of a critical statement, made Tuesday, by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the U.N. human rights envoy for Burma.

”We call on the Government of Myanmar to take urgent measures to end the counter-insurgency military operations targeting civilians in the Northern Karen and Eastern Pegu areas,” stated Pinheiro, using the name Burma’s ruling junta calls the country by. ”(This has) led to the forced eviction and displacement of thousands of ethnic minority villagers.”

Pinheiro catalogued a disturbing list of alleged excesses arising from the attacks by the ‘Tatmadaw’, the Burmese army, on unarmed Karen civilians. They included homes being demolished and ”killings, torture, rape and forced labour.”

Accounts gathered from humanitarian workers helping the Karens along the Thai-Burmese border by IPS echo these concerns, with some of the victims having fresh wounds from the conflict and many looking weak and exhausted after having walked for weeks through rugged terrain and forest to escape Burmese troops.

”Over 1,800 refugees have crossed into Thailand since the beginning of the year,” says a humanitarian worker who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”They are not in good shape.”

Other groups are warning of a humanitarian crisis caused by the rapidly increasing number of displaced Karens in the wake of the current offensive launched by the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as Rangoon’s junta is officially known, in November last year.

Groups like Alternate ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), a regional human rights watchdog, and the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a Washington D.C.-based group championing democracy for Burma, say that between 11,000 to 15,500 Karen villagers have fled their homes.

”Villagers have been shot at point blank range in coordinated attacks, and others shot as the fled,” ALTSEAN said this month. ”Villages have been burnt and the livelihoods of the villagers destroyed. The SPDC army has laid landmines to kill and injure any villager who dares to return.”

”This is a blatant attack on the people and the worst since 1997,” David Taw, head of foreign affairs for the Karen National Union (KNU), said during a telephone interview. ”The people are suffering a lot because of the current operations.”

The KNU is one of Burma’s oldest ethnic rebel groups, waging a separatist campaign against successive Burmese governments for nearly 60 years. In 1995, the KNU lost its headquarters in the eastern area of Maner-plaw to Rangoon’s forces, a defeat that turned the rebel group from functioning as a conventional army that held territory to being a guerrilla group.

This week, Burma’s military, which has been in power since a 1962 coup, offered its own spin to the suffering of the Karens and their flight from villages. ”Rural people had to flee because they were bullied and tortured by the KNU,” states ‘The New Light of Myanmar’, a government-run daily, in an article. ”KNU also forced families of the KNU rank and file to move to border areas to prevent them from meeting with the Tatmadaw.”

Burma’s nearly 51 million population is made up of many ethnic groups, the dominant of them being the Burmans, nearly 70 percent, with the Karens, who number close to seven million, being among the largest minorities.

In January 2004, Rangoon and the KNU struck a gentleman’s agreement to end hostilities. By then the SPDC had signed ceasefire agreements with 17 other ethnic rebel groups. But the attacks since November last year – which many analysts say stems from Rangoon’s efforts to secure the territory around the country’s new administrative capital of Pyinmana- exposes the military regime’s sincerity.

For humanitarian agencies, the fleeing Karens will add to the already high number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Burma due to Rangoon’s oppressive policies. This South-east Asian country has nearly 540,000 IDPs, the largest number in a single country across Asia, states the Norwegian Refugee Council. Of that, some 92,000 IDPs are hiding in forests and exposed to harsh conditions, including lack of food, shelter and medical care.

Karens, moreover, make up a sizeable number of people in the 11 refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border. In all, there are 155,416 refugees from Burma in these camps. Burma’s other neighbours, such as India, Bangladesh and Malaysia are also home to people from Burma’s ethnic minorities who have fled oppression and war. The number of these refugees could be as high as 700,000, according to some estimates.

This dismal picture is familiar to Gambari, the visiting U.N. official. In December, he delivered a report to the U.N. Security Council about political oppression, human rights violations and a humanitarian crisis in Burma. During that encounter – the first time the powerful council had given serious attention to Burma’s deteriorating situation – Gambari singled out the destruction of 2,700 villages and assaults on ”hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities.”

Such insights, however, may not be enough to get the military regime to change. ”The U.N. wants to be seen as trying to help and save face,” Aung Naing Oo, a Burmese political analyst in exile, told IPS. ”In reality nothing much will happen because the military government has China and Russia on its side.”