Not just a place in the sun
Travelling on a slow overnight train up through the fields into the north of Thailand, a tall, rubbish heap of a man with straggled hair tied scruffily into plaits, NHS glasses, shorts that looked as if they were once white, but were now khaki and inappropriately large boots sat down opposite. He offered me a word of travel advice. “Don’t go to Burma. Every penny you spend there is killing people. The roads that you travel on are built with the dead bodies of the Karen people.
Another told me of how he had seen a Karenni Buddhist beaten by soldiers, tied up and stabbed with a bayonet. “He was held captive and tortured for ten days. One day, soldiers rolled a log up and down his legs, sometimes stamping on the log with their boots, from 11am until 6pm. As a result, he was unable to walk for five months. That night, he was forced to lie down and soldiers poured large quantities of water into his mouth until his stomach swelled.
Then they stamped on his stomach, causing him to vomit.” If I had been at all sceptical of the horror stories told to me by travellers on the Northern Thai railway, these words of Benedict Rogers, author of A Land Without Evil: Stopping the genocide of Burma’s Karen people, put any doubt from my mind. “Since 1996 over 2,500 villages in eastern Burma alone have been destroyed by the Burma Army; over a million people have been internally displaced.
This is the country with the highest number of forcibly conscripted child soldiers in the world • over 70,000, making up at least 20% of the army. Over 1,300 political prisoners remain in jail.” “We also have the widespread, systematic use of rape as a weapon of war by the Burma Army that has been documented in many reports by organisations such as Christian Solidarity Worldwide.
Mr Rogers told me of the sickening stories he has himself heard, that are so desolate perhaps because they are not extraordinary in this country. “I have travelled to Burma’s border areas eight times, and have interviewed former child soldiers who have escaped, women who have been raped, boys who have been used for forced labour and men who have been used as human minesweepers and lost their limbs in the process.
I have visited villages which have been burned down, and met people who are on the run, in fear for their lives, having lost their loved ones.” “There is the 15 year-old Shan boy, who told me that he had witnessed the Burma Army shoot his parents dead, destroy his village and kill most of the villagers. He was then taken as a porter and forced to walk long distances with very heavy loads for three days, without food or water.
When he collapsed from exhaustion, the soldiers beat him unconscious.” Rogers was uncompromising in his assessment of the Burma Army’s eventual aim. On 18th August 2005 he was heard on BosNewsLife to say, “These acts appear to be a deliberate effort to eliminate, at least in part, ethnic groups through starvation, cultural and biological dilution, and physical destruction.
Manner, a 37-year old Burmese man, echoes this sentiment: “We everyday live in fear, they even burned down the hospital,” he says, referring to recent attack by Burma’s governing State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) troops on his village. His view is shared by Guy Horton, a British human rights researcher, who said on The Democratic Voice of Burma: “The violations inflicted on the Burmese people in general are undoubtedly crimes against humanity.
But the destruction of the homes, medicines and food of hundreds of thousands of ethnic people may amount to an attempt to commit genocide.” This is the ‘Golden Land’, the ‘Land Without Evil’. It is the world’s largest exporter of teak, with vast supplies of jade, pearls, rubies, sapphires, oil, gas; a country that by all logic should be flourishing. Yet for a country with so much, Burma is starving, not only for food but for freedom and basic human rights.
Burma is the 3rd worst violator of human rights, ahead of Zimbabwe and North Korea. The Burmese ambassador to the outside world, Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has been stifled under house arrest since 1990, forced to entertain herself with playing Bach on the piano and teaching herself French. If you hear anything other than government propaganda about Burma, it is about Suu Kyi. Her history has been intertwined with her country’s for the last century.
Her father, General Aung San, led Burma to independence after the Second World War, but was murdered when Suu Kyi was two. Suu Kyi studied PPE at St Hugh’s college from 1964. From afar she saw her country descend into turmoil. As with many other post-imperial nations, self-governance proved to be littered with danger. The powerful generals had lost their power once before; they weren’t going to do it again and in 1962 staged a military coup making Burma a one-party state.
Political opposition was shut down, over 1,300 political prisoners still remain. Martin Morland, British Ambassador to Burma from 1986 to 1990, told me that during this time, “Burma had become an Army with a country in tow, after 25 years of General Ne Win’s absolute dictatorship.
On The Democratic Voice of Burma in July he described how, “Its soldiers are still committing rapes on ethnic national women of non-Burman regions of Burma including Shan and Karen States… The victims were as young as twelve when they were raped.” During this time, Suu Kyi was settling in Oxford. It was here that she met Michael Avis, whom she later married when she went to New York to campaign against genocide for the UN. In 1988 Suu Kyi was compelled to return home.
Following Ne Win’s resignation she was at the heart of a non-violent popular revolt, rallying for free elections. For a while there was freedom of expression. The promise did not last long. Just six weeks later, martial law was imposed. Morland is blunt: “The army shot their way back into power. Journalists who had experienced both compared the coup to the Prague Spring.
Aung San Suu Kyi emerged to take over leadership of the movement for democracy, and her party the NLD won the elections of 1990 hands down.” In fact, such was her popularity and such was the people’s keenness for democracy, that the NLD won an astonishing 80 per cent of the vote. The Junta’s response was swift. The election winners were arrested and their prominent supporters eliminated. Suu Kyi was put under house arrest where she has remained since.
As Morland says, the “shutters have come down.” Burma was once reputed for having one of the least restrictive presses in the world. But things have changed beyond recognition. Recent laws have been enforced enabling the authorities to order a newspaper to publish any article they care to provide. However, the government forbade these laws from being published in any newspapers. Offenders can be given life imprisonment, death, or a minimum of three years hard labour.
The plight of Burmese students is similarly dire. Many are still in prison for doing what we at Oxford consider basic student activities; the equivalent of any occupation of exam schools there will lead to a life sentence. As recently as 13th August, three university students were arrested for possessing educational CDs on human rights drugs. Students have been seen as a threat in Myanmar, a threat which the government is trying to eradicate.
Prospective students and their parents are forced to sign official guarantees that they will not be involved in any political activities. Colleges are located close to military and riot-police bases. They have insufficient accommodation, teaching equipment and trained teachers. Oxford’s connection to Burma extends further than Suu Kyi’s studies at St. Hughs (although the JCR still sends her a birthday card each year).
OUSU has boycotted The Lonely Planet guidebook for publishing a guide to Burma. Morland supports this position, arguing that it is certainly not a good idea for a Gap Year. “Our disapproval of tourists applies to those who go there for just a holiday in the sun, who are hoodwinked by the absence of soldiers at the end of every street into believing it is a free country, in the face of glaring evidence of the contrary.
Rogers agrees: “It spends over 40 per cent of its $100 million tourist income on the military, and less than 2 per cent on health and education. “People who travel to Burma for the purely selfish purpose of tourism should wait until the country is free. Burma’s natural beauty will still be there when the regime falls. People who travel in order to help make the country free, with their eyes and hearts open to the situation, and are prepared to join the struggle, should do so.
The reason for students in Oxford to be watching Burma is perhaps best summed up by The Myanmar Digest. “The full right to practice party politics is not high up on our agenda because the nation needs all her strength for nation-rebuilding and national unity at the moment… The overwhelming majority of the people in Myanmar are not obsessed with politics. They do not see freedom in terms of the right to vote periodically and demonstrate and express political views publicly.”
5th Oct 2005