Opinion - News Analysis   

Fear and repression in Myanmar

John Aglionby

16,000 forced from homes as generals try to annihilate resistance.

AS SOON as Sayc Pler Paw saw her brother's body, she knew that everyone in her village would have to abandon their homes and flee to the relative safety of the surrounding jungle-covered hills. "I found him in the family's vegetable plot," she said. "He had been shot in the bottom, the navel, badly beaten in the back of the neck and forehead and then shot in the face."

Ms. Sayc Pler Paw, an ethnic Karen, has no doubt that the perpetrators were the Myanmarese army. And she knew the meaning of her brother's brutal death.

"Only the [army] could have done this and the fact that he had been killed meant they were coming to attack us," she said, clutching her three-year-old daughter, Snowda Sayc.After years of barely noticed and largely piecemeal operations against the Karen National Union (KNU), the ethnic minority's resistance movement, Myanmar's junta has launched its biggest offensive in Karen state since 1997. The army's operations are seen as a bid to annihilate the largest of the half-dozen ethnic minority fighting forces ranged against it.

Since seizing power in 1962, the military has turned Myanmar into one of the most repressed countries on earth. The only time the generals allowed an election, in 1990, they were soundly defeated by the National League for Democracy, led by Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

She was never allowed to take office and since then the repression has increased dramatically. Forced labour is common, Ms. Suu Kyi is among the estimated 1,300 political prisoners and all democratic institutions have been emasculated.

As the economy has collapsed and international demands for change have mounted, the junta's paranoia has risen markedly. Last year it moved the capital from Yangon to a heavily fortified city near Pyinmana, deep in the jungle.

The junta's Information Minister, Brigadier Kyaw Hsan, admitted last week that the army is attempting to "clear up" the last of the KNU "terrorist" resistance, and recent media reports have labelled events in remote eastern Burma as a war or conflict.

Resistance

But in fact the under-equipped, poorly trained forces of the Myanmarese army are refusing to take on the several thousand-strong Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), which has perfected its guerrilla tactics over 57 years of resistance. The forces are instead trying to eliminate the KNLA by starving it of money, food and recruits through the systematic razing of all Karen villages in the predominantly highland areas they do not control.

Fewer than 100 civilians have been killed since the offensive began in November because as soon as villagers are tipped off about an attack, they flee. This year the operation has spread, and recently the number of destroyed villages has climbed to more than 60, with more than 16,000 people on the run, according to reports from advocacy groups such as the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG).

Aid groups say tens of thousands of civilians are under imminent threat because the junta appears to be forgoing its usual withdrawal for the monsoon season, which has just begun.

The Guardian met Ms. Sayc Pler Paw in Ei Tu Hta, a camp by the Thai border where more than 800 Karen civilians have sought refuge. The terrain surrounding the camp is thick forest covering steep-sided hills. Paths through the vegetation are rare; the fact that all relief supplies are carried in by people wading up a stream from the Salween river that divides Myanmar and Thailand is indicative of the arduous conditions the villagers have had to endure to reach the camp.

The suffering the Karen have endured is etched on the refugees' faces, particularly the children. Many wonder around aimlessly or just pass the time in their huts with their few belongings neatly stacked so as to be ready to be grabbed if an attack seems imminent. Most wear donated clothes, with the preponderance of T-shirts from foreign towns and organisations testament to the Karen's global support network.

Virtually everyone has similar tales of flight and a fear-filled journey, sometimes lasting weeks, through the jungle. The camp has an air of developing permanence. More than 150 five-by-four-metre bamboo and thatch huts have been built, complete with ceramic squat lavatories nearby; makeshift water purification centres have been established, a clinic has been built and the camp authorities are distributing seeds.

"We have to act like this to give the people some hope," said camp secretary Saw Bee. "But the reality is we cannot guarantee the security despite having some KNLA fighters here as guards. We have nowhere else to go. This is the end of the line for us if we want to stay in our homeland."

International pressure against the generals is mounting. The U.N. Security Council discussed Myanmar for the first time last December, and seems likely to do so again soon, and parliamentarians from around the world — including Britain — have demanded that their governments take a firmer line against Yangon. Last week the Myanmarese allowed the first visit by a U.N. envoy in two years, although many believe it was intended as a diversion from its repression of opposition groups.

Pado Manh Sha, the KNU general secretary, believes the junta will only respond to pressure from its biggest trading partners, China and India. "We've sent delegates to China and India to lobby,'' he said. ``We've been told to expect a policy review but nothing has happened."

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, the waiting and praying goes on as the population at Ei Tu Hta swells every day. "So many people are out in the jungle but they can't survive there for long," Mr. Saw Bee said.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

The big crash and the rally
Disturbing questions on demolitions law
Agriculture cannot wait
Round table, and the road home?
Fear and repression in Myanmar
Corrections and clarifications
Record fall
Reasonable proposal
Act tough
Erudite scholar
"The platform approach to product development is important to Intel"

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu