For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (25 page)

“The Burmese,” wrote colonialist James George Scott in 1886, “were little inclined to yield to threats.” He would know. Not thirty years prior to the first British invasion, in 1824, with thousands of refugees fleeing into British territory from Burma’s expansionist rampage, and with concerns about the worst possible future for Burma—that it would become a part or ally of France—the British sent a series of envoys to the country. The first one was stood up by the king, then made to wait, rudely, for two and a half months for an appointment; the second went home in a huff; and the third mission won exactly zero concessions from the Burmese court, leading the diplomat to conclude that the British might just have to go to war. Ultimately, that time, the British didn’t do shit, which was part of the reason the Burmese later pushed their borders right up against them in the first place. Another reason was that by then, the Burmese fancied themselves the all-conquering warlords of the universe. They’d subjugated the Thais, the Chinese, and the Mon, among others, sacking kingdoms abroad even while fighting rival ones at home. In 1768, of the more than ten thousand troops that had invaded Burma from Manchu, one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, just a few made it home alive. The Portuguese had tried their hand at conquering Burma, and lost in 1613. When Kublai Khan himself had demanded tribute in 1271, the Burmese started a war with the Mongols that lasted more than a decade, so King Bagyidaw, Emperor of Emperors, Against Whose Imperial Majesty if Any Shall Be So Foolish as to Imagine Anything, It Shall Be Happy for Them to Die and Be Consumed; the Lord of Great Charity and Help of All Nations; the Lord Esteemed for Happiness; the Lord of All Riches, of Elephants and Horses, and All Good Blessings; the Lord of High-Built Palaces of Gold; the Great and Most Powerful Emperor in This Life, the Soles of Whose Feet Are Gilt and Set upon the Heads of All People, would be damned if he was going to just roll over for England, whether it had an arsenal of native scouts and spies and rocket fire or not. Even King Thibaw, even after his country had
been licked by the British twice, refused to accept their terms for avoiding the third war. Rather, in response, he went ahead and made his own declaration of war, and furthermore stipulated that if the British didn’t step off, he was going to sail over to England with an army of elephants and annex
them
.
⁴⁹

This time, though, with no relationship or leverage to speak of, we’re sure that we’re going to give a country—that country—a stern and united “Knock it off,” and with nary a significant “or else,” and it’s just going to come out with its hands up. Like even if the nations of the world abandoned all that trade—which they won’t; even we haven’t—and pushed Burma into total economic collapse; like even if desperation nudged tensions among paranoid generals and a giant underpaid army to run uncontrollably high, the leaders of Burma would just stop fighting their own people, rather than fight them as well as each other to the last bloodied man standing, the welfare of the populace, always, be damned. As it is, Burma’s leaders have let the country devolve into chaos. As it is, for anyone outside the upper echelons of the military/opium/industrial complex, the country is already in total economic collapse; the regime works not so much for as in spite of its people, selling off all its resources as if its civilians weren’t starving and in the dark and right there, while the generals stow billions in Singaporean shelter accounts.

Some say we can’t lift the sanctions because that’s the same as admitting that the regime has won, but it’s kind of hard to argue, really, that it hasn’t. Already, the military’s the last institution standing. No other forms of national government even exist in the country. Master creator of the military machine Ne Win stepped down in 1988, but you wouldn’t have noticed it; other tyrants just took his place, and he was rumored to have been running the show regardless. He died in 2002, but his dynasty has lived, his same dictatorial song and dance, for decades, the world’s longest-standing military dictatorship. Western powers have only helped entrench the regime and its violence against our former ethnic-minority allies there with covert and overt post-independence war efforts and the same sanctioning that didn’t work in Iraq and didn’t work in Cuba and certainly isn’t working in Burma now.

The solution, instead, lies in the United Nations. The Security Council has plenty of critics, sure, who charge and joke that the body is impotent, unable to play a meaningful role in international crises. Sadly, the Security Council has agreed. The UN itself admitted that its policy during the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina was devastatingly fatal. So at the 2005 UN World Summit, it was resolved that if a nation is host to any of four “atrocity crimes”—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, genocide—that nation comes under a responsibility to protect, or R2P, and the Security Council has committed to take “timely and decisive” action to protect the nation’s people. The principle even overrides national sovereignty.

When in 2007 a draft resolution on Burma was brought before the Security Council, some activists and legal advisers felt that there was a strong case for it to include charges of genocide. The UN 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines
genocide
as an attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” with at least one of five methods. One of them the SPDC isn’t guilty of: “Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.” But “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”? If you count gang-raping and murdering pregnant women, yes. “Killing members of the group”? Check. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”? Check. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”? Clearly. Since the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, systematic rape has also been recognized as a defining feature of genocide, and in Burma, it’s systematic, institutionalized, indoctrinated into soldiers. It is, according to defectors, explicitly ordered, and in the name of diluting ethnic blood: “Your blood must be left in the village.” Burmese soldiers also force minority women into marriage with them as a means of enslavement. Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre corroborates that there was a special Karen-killing terror squad of the Tatmadaw. They went around beheading and detesticling people. Once, they took a kid who was playing volleyball, cut his head off, and displayed it in the jungle, sticking a cheroot in its mouth, which they probably thought was pretty funny. Villagers knew these guys when they arrived because they started stabbing people instead of just shooting them.

But not everyone agrees that these crimes a genocide make; not one government has officially leveled the charge at Burma, and no tribunals have been called. Some academics, journalists, and even activists argue that these genocidal actions aren’t sufficiently genocide-like to count. We can’t just be throwing the word around to describe any old horror, since then it loses its potency in describing the very specific horror of atrocities we’ve all agreed are genocides. Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation in Burma, “But how does it compare to Sudan?”

If Sudan is the bar against which we’re measuring genocide, okay: The SPDC has destroyed more than three thousand ethnic villages in eastern Burma, comparable to the number that have been destroyed
in Darfur. In Darfur, nearly three million people have been displaced. In the jungle of eastern Burma alone, an absolute minimum of half a million live displaced, and millions have fled the country. The mortality rate of children under five, a common measure of conflict epidemiology, in Sudan is 109 per 1,000 live births. In eastern Burma, it’s 221. In the Darfur genocide, four hundred thousand civilians have been killed. Unfortunately, no one’s come up with a comprehensive, widely agreed-upon tally of Burma’s casualties. Some experts estimate that a few thousand minorities have been slain a year, every year, since independence, sixty years ago. So, three hundred thousand? One expert put the number at four hundred thousand—as of 1990. A junta chairman once estimated that the body count of Burma’s civil war “would reach as high as millions.”

According to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, genocidaires don’t have to act hard and fast; slow and even indirect genocide is genocide nonetheless. Also decided in that tribunal was that prosecutors don’t have to provide actual official, written proof of genocidal intent to successfully charge genocide; the intent can be inferred. Like from the ashes of thousands of burned villages. Like from the disallowing of Karen language instruction. Like from the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Burma having admitted in 1998 that the systematic violence and destruction were clearly “the result of policy at the highest level, entailing political and legal responsibility.” Like from a group of kids in a refugee camp who were given some art supplies and paper and told to make whatever they wanted and drew pictures of people running from a burning village, a woman with some of her clothes torn off by soldiers who are about to rape her, and civilians being murdered while an infant gets tossed into a rice mortar. Like from any Karen IDPs who’ve been violently chased from their villages by soldiers who’ve destroyed all their food and livestock in their wake: If they manage
not
to die, it’s really not for their government’s lack of trying, since it even attempts to, and sometimes does, stop and kill aid workers trying to bring in relief.
Like from the messages SPDC soldiers write on walls or post on trees of villages they attack: “Soon the Karen will no longer exist. Waiting for the day when you will die.”

The Karenni and the Shan suffer similar abuses. Twenty-five thousand Karenni have been exiled to refugee camps in Thailand. More than twice that many are stranded in the jungle on the run, and we know what their odds are like out there. A Thai intelligence officer has found leaflets on the bodies of dead government soldiers that identify the Shan race as the enemy that has to be destroyed. Another intercepted document promises raises to soldiers “who are successful in possessing Shan women” for “the purpose of admixture of blood”:

Any UN resolution that charged genocide—or any other atrocity crime—against a country would bring that country under the responsibility to protect. And a draft resolution that compellingly charges genocide against a country is a draft resolution that’s likely to get passed—no nation wants to be the one that vetoes that. But the 2007 Security Council draft resolution to declare Burma a threat to international peace and security didn’t contain the word—or the evidence for—
genocide
. Nor
ethnic cleansing
, nor
crimes against humanity
, nor
war crimes
. China and Russia vetoed it.

Now a case to again bring a Burma resolution to the Security Council table is gaining momentum. This time, some advocates say, it’s possible they’ll fight for the charge of crimes against humanity, because the phrase is both more inclusive of the abominations than genocide and, because it’s less politicized, easier to prove—the
United Nations Human Rights Commission didn’t adopt an official report acknowledging the Armenian genocide of 1915 until 1985. And there’s more backup this time: In 2009, the Harvard University International Human Rights Clinic issued a report by five leading international jurists that identified the situations in Rwanda and Darfur as precedents for Burma. The authors admonished that “the world cannot wait while the military regime continues its atrocities against the people of Burma” and that “there is a
prima facie
case of international criminal law violations occurring that demands UN Security Council action to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these grave breaches further.” The next month, more than fifty US congresspeople were signatories to a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to lead the establishment of a Security Council Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma.

Possibly further helpful to this cause is the publication of a report from one of the world’s foremost human-rights-law scholars asserting that the junta is perpetrating crimes against humanity targeting the ethnic Rohingya in western Burma’s Arakan State, as well. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have been driven out of Burma by the military, which argues that that race doesn’t belong in its country. “Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar’s ethnic group,” the Burmese consul general has explained. “You will see in the photos that their complexion is ‘dark brown.’ The complexion of Myanmar people is fair and soft, good-looking as well”—not, like the Rohingya, “ugly as ogres.” Among those who do still live there, 25 percent suffer from acute malnutrition. Forced labor and wrongful imprisonment are rife. The Rohingya aren’t recognized as citizens and can’t leave their state. A hundred who were caught trying to get to Rangoon to find work in 2008 were arrested and sentenced to six months in prison. Within their state, they can’t do anything—walk out of their own village, get married—without permission. A couple hundred thousand squat in Bangladesh, about sixty thousand
in squalid camps. Many try to flee to Malaysia. They drown in leaky ships or are arrested when they wash up on the shores of Thailand. The minority made big news recently when the Land of Smiles got caught towing a bunch of them back out to sea. The reason this report could help change the game is that it’s meant to draw the attention of world players outside of the West. The Rohingya are discriminated against for being, aside from darkies, another hateful thing: Muslims. The hope is that some of Burma’s neighbors, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia, will help make some serious racket once it’s out that Muslims are being so fatally oppressed.