Burma continues to be peripheral to Westerners’ vision

While the war in Iraq captured everyone’s energy and indignation, right on our doorstep exhausted, terrified Burmese and ethnic peoples face an age old conflict which roars and screams unabated. This war had its roots in British Colonial authorities forming alliances to divide and rule Burma. For some 60 years the people of Burma have witnessed and experienced conflict.

As an NGO worker stationed in Phnom Penh told me, “The people just walk around dehumanised. I have never been so shaken by a visit. They are so terrified they have forgotten who they are. To be safe, they chant mantras about the Burmese army being great: the same bastards who are killing their relatives.”

And that is the great irony. Saddam Hussein and his co leaders were recently hanged for crimes against their own people. Yet Burma’s generals go on killing, raping, torturing and maiming.

The only thing to fear is the occasional international equivalent of a smack on the hand. It helps having powerful friends. China has many listening posts in Burma to keep an eye on US activities in the region, while Russia assists Burma’s nuclear program by training and providing hardware capability and trading in Burmese uranium. All benefit from Burma's narco-economy that provides revenue and patronage.

North Korea and Iran have been repeatedly exposed to US and increasingly Australian approbation.

Most recently Australia announced that it would waste money on unsuccessful technology called a missile shield to assure safety from North Korea. All of this while eyes remain averted from the knowledge that Burma is a source of possibly enriched uranium to both North Korea and Iran.

Defence analyst Des Ball, and Asia-based reporters have commented that Burma’s role in dealing uranium is one more worthy of interest than it currently gets. The Burmese watchdog www.dictatorwatch.com recently released aerial photographs of installations thought to be uranium refineries, comparing them with the photos taken over Ranger in northern Australia.

In mid May this year, Russia’s federal atomic energy agency Rosatom announced it would “help Burma build a long proposed nuclear facility”. The agency says the 10-megawatt nuclear reactor, fueled by less than 20 per cent uranium-235, will contribute to Burma’s “research in nuclear physics, bio-technology, material science as well as … produce a big variety of medicines.”

The first round of talks is well under way having been on the table for at least five years. Further discussions are scheduled for the second half of this year. The US came up with a predictable condemnation, but without follow up. Thailand was nonchalant, because they said, the facility will be closely supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

This nonchalance might also have something to do with Thailand’s energy needs, which are being met by numerous hydropower developments in some of Burma and Lao’s most ecologically and socially sensitive areas. The Salween dams are slated to destroy the little area left of Karen and Mon people’s livelihoods and will effectively block supply lines to rebel forces. The Karen, left behind the inland sea, will be unable to escape to Thailand.

The dams thus solve two problems for the Thais: the annual influx of refugees and the need to power Thai industry and the increasing number of extravagant Hi-So lifestyles.

More than half a million city residents, farmers, and fisher folk living at the mouth of the Salween River in Burma stand to lose their major source of drinking water, agricultural productivity, and fish stocks if the dams go ahead.

Despite this, the military dictatorship ruling Burma has moved ahead with Thai and Chinese investors to build the dams without even informing communities downstream, let alone asking for their consent.

Rape and pillage

A visit to the Riverside Center in Bangkok will open your eyes to the treasures that once were part of Burma’s cultural history. The exquisite textiles, marble figures, ornate lacquered baskets and temple carvings are now for sale to any one who wants to buy a bit of Burma and take it home. Stolen temple Buddhas are on sale. I wonder what karmic debt that entails.

It is known that rape and sexual crimes are used against Burmese women and those of the many ethnic minorities. These crimes are meant to terrorise and to subjugate. For many years these crimes have been known, but not spoken about. For the women themselves, rape results in such shame, that it is hard for Western women, used to a reasonably responsive judiciary and supportive community, to understand. The shame is carried collectively by the community, so it is not spoken about and the women are often shunned.

In the case of the recent report by the Karen women Shattering Silences, many of the cases of rape occurred in synchrony with forced labour and theft of food, livestock and goods. Women were ordered on pain of death to carry munitions up steep mountain sides through jungle in the intense heat and then raped repeatedly in the evenings when the soldiers set up camp.

The report makes for terrifying reading and comes on the heels of the previous year’s report by the Shan women. It was also the first time the Shan women had spoken out and provided impetus for the Karen women to tell their story. It is said that the “rebels, traitors and terrorists” as they are labeled by the junta, will do anything to attract attention to their cause. But it seems that Burma continues to be peripheral to Westerners’ vision.

He just kept threatening that he’d give me to his men who would rape me until I died. He thrust his knife in my face demanding sex. I kept fighting but he tied my other hand and pushed me down and raped me. When he was finished he asked me “Are you satisfied?” All I could tell him that my life was now nothing but darkness. He just said “If you’re so troubled, go and hang yourself”.

Mention Burma and most Australians would immediately think of The Lady, Aug Sung Suu Kyi, who in international eyes, has become the symbol of Burma’s suffering.

But the situation in Burma is much more complex than it appears and heroes and heroines have names that reflect the ethnic group for whom they fight. And there are many ethnic groups with proud traditions, who are fighting for traditional lands and the autonomy promised by the British, but not granted after they had fled.

Few have heard for instance of another woman Sao Hearn Hkam who is the symbol of Shan resistance, or know that Dr Cynthia Maung an ethnic Karen who runs the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot on the Thai Burmese border, was one of three Burmese women nominated for the people’s Nobel Peace prize.

It is often to Dr Cynthia’s clinic that Karen women go, with damaged and infected genitals after botched abortions. Most of these women have become pregnant as a result of rape. The SPDC/SLORC (the Myanmar military junta) use rape and pregnancy as a method of cultural dilution, knowing that raped women face ostracism and divorce.

The vivid descriptions given by the women from a wide variety of locations describe the same pattern. Soldiers arriving in the village late at night, seizing women and forcing them at gunpoint to their camp. There they carry heavy ordnance up hillsides to where the soldiers are waging war on members of their ethnic group. At night as the women try to rest, they are taken and raped. Some not even allowed to urinate for fear that they run away. Women reported having to pee where they lie.

Some have fled only to be hacked or shot. Others are simply stabled or bayoneted if they are too weak to work.

It’s a list of gruesome horrors that I am ashamed to think still happens in a world of advanced technology, wealth and comfort.

Girl you gotta carry that weight

After international outcry and consistent pressure from the International Labour Organisation over three years of negotiation, the Burmese junta signed the ILO Convention on Forced Labour. The international community, satisfied by this token of obedience, then went about its business.

But a report in CSR Asia (PDF 789KB) indicates that the Karen in particular are still subject to forced labour.

The Karen Human Rights Group, and co authors of the Shattering Silences, have advised that they continue to hear complaints, particularly about a road building project in Pupun. The Junta has denied that slavery still occurs, saying that no one has reported incidents. But this is of no consequence, as to report would be akin to telling Stalin that you didn’t like his dress sense or the company he kept.

This is a case when no news is not good news at all.

In Australia the majority of peace activism has been conflated with and focused on, anti nuclear issues, which neatly sidesteps the reality of war and death in most of the poor nations of the world; places like Burma.

Their focus is a statement of Western fears, not an acceptance of the daily reality of our Asian neighbours, who do not have memories for events long ago in another land. Every day, they simply flee death, cloaked in shells, bullets, bayonets, mines, knives, disease and starvation.

What are the alternatives? The long necked Padaung women fleeing their home Karenni state, are on view in the Chiang Mai zoo, like captive animals. One can pay to photograph them in one of the worst examples of human commodification arising from civil conflict.

The Indo Burmese Rohingya’s who fled to Australia are another group facing the Asian equivalent of ethnic cleansing. Denied citizenship and even the right to marry in Burma, they are Muslim people from the border areas with Bangladesh. Being a Muslim ethnic group they have found no compassion in Australia, instead being bartered like slaves in one of the most cynical deals that I have ever had the bad fortune to witness.

Worse, their identity as Rohingya’s is lost in the media in hype that suggests that they are yet another lot of dark skinned “illegals”, their faces lost in blurred images so they become photographic smudges, their humanity stolen, their fears forbidden.

Burmese ethic minorities continue to flood across the Thai border, many of them men. Some are trafficked into labour rackets and end up on construction sites, orchards, fishing and seafood processing. Recently 39 died on a Thai fishing boat in Indonesian waters.

Investigations found they had not been paid for three years. They simply starved to death, their bodies dumped overboard like rancid water. Anti trafficking regulations do not cover men so the survivors are facing deportation. Some, most notably the handsome Shan men, find work as sex workers, the profits being sent across the border to support families.

Peace activists and others often feel queasy about supporting an armed struggle, particularly in Burma where women bear arms as a matter of necessity, and in continuity of historical lineage.

Those sitting sipping coffee in Western cities talking theoretically about peace and war, have little concept of what it is like to simply get up and face hell each day. But it’s even more disconcerting to know that really no one gives a toss. The war in Burma rates lower in movie star attraction than Tibet. There are no Branjelina’s flying into Rangoon, no Richard Geres kissing Than Shwe. George Soros is a singular example, funding pro Burmese activities, the flagship of which is Irrawaddy magazine.

It seems that Asia is a good place to visit, but not a good place to really care about.