Living Silence in Burma (28 page)

There were people in the community who tried to help Khin Khin Yi’s
family, but many others, worried about endangering their own families, stayed away. For those who are attempting to break through the lies, it is not the repression by the authorities which is so painful, for that is expected; it is the lack of support from neighbours, friends and sometimes even family members which makes it so difficult for activists to maintain their morale.

Min Zin, a student activist who spent several years in hiding in the 1990s, talked about the strain of living in other people’s houses, where inevitably some members of the household felt that the family was taking an undue risk by sheltering him. He wanted to stay in Rangoon to continue to network with other activists, but, he said, ‘politics is not twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours is social relations.’ The stress was constant.

Unable to go out, he would spend almost all his time upstairs, listening to foreign radio broadcasts, reading and writing. To get exercise, he would walk diagonally back and forth in his cramped room. When relatives or other guests came to stay, as they often did, Min Zin had to be especially careful. Family members would secretly bring him his food, and they would leave him with a chamber pot, since he could not go to the bathroom.

During the rare occasions when Min Zin’s friends took him out, he said he would stay out almost the whole night, sitting on a bench by Inya Lake and sometimes crying. He said that judging from the government TV broadcasts, people seemed to be happy to go to SLORC-sponsored merit-making ceremonies, boat races and trade fairs. He said he believed that people only appeared to be happy with the SLORC, but that he couldn’t bear it.

Sometimes a friend would come in the middle of the night, saying that someone who knew where Min Zin was had been arrested. He would have to move immediately. ‘I couldn’t expect anything,’ Min Zin said. ‘Life felt so meaningless.’

Later, Min Zin spent periods of time in meditation centres, where no one knew his identity. Moreover, he could find peace in his religious practice. Finally, in 1997, a friend of his was arrested and admitted his whereabouts, and the intelligence agents were close on his heels. He decided that his only choice was to leave the country.

Amazingly, there continue to be committed individuals like Min Zin who refuse to give up their political activities despite their fear and the lack of full support from the community. Most eventually end up either in prison or in exile. They realize that they cannot make a change happen
unless there is widespread participation. Likewise, the regime recognizes that it can forestall broader engagement by isolating those who dare to act from the rest of the community.

The impact of forced labour on communities

Soldiers appear on the streets in cities only during periods of political tension, but in many towns and rural areas in the ethnic states, they are a constant presence. Wherever there are soldiers in rural areas, there are always demands for forced labour, with adverse impacts for families and communities.

The
tatmadaw
sends orders to the village headman stating how many people are required for what kind of work, when and where. Types of work include road, bridge, railway and dam construction, the construction and maintenance of army camps, cooking and cleaning at army camps, and work for military-owned commercial businesses.
³
Villagers may be asked to work for a day or several days at a time, they must bring their own food and tools, and they are not paid. Sometimes they must sleep on the worksite without proper shelter. There is no medicine if they contract malaria or dysentery or if they are hurt. Moreover, for families barely making ends meet, to lose a labourer for a week at a time has a huge impact on their incomes. For this reason, wives often go, or parents may send older children.

The authorities’ use of forced labour increased significantly under the SLORC and SPDC. The generals sought to upgrade the country’s infrastructure and expand the military’s access throughout the ethnic states, but often did not provide sufficient funding for the projects.

In 1997, some colleagues and I interviewed a number of Burmese about the situation in Chin State and Sagaing Division, where the use of forced labour was common. Zaw Htun told us about his experience working on the Thazi dam in north-western Burma.
⁴
He and his brother took turns doing forced labour on the dam over a period of four or five months in early 1995. Zaw Htun said,

    Soldiers were guarding us. They scolded the people and even beat them. On the worksite, the soldiers were always drunk. They always tried to fool around with the girls. The people were so angry with the soldiers but they couldn’t do anything. There were also several work accidents on the construction site, but no compensation was paid.

Another form of forced labour is portering. Whenever soldiers are travelling through the jungle, they use local villagers, people they have
rounded up in other locations or criminal prisoners to carry their ammunition and supplies. Porters tend to be poorly fed and often beaten. Some are killed or left to die if they cannot keep up with the troops.

The exact number of people who engage in forced labour each year is difficult to pinpoint, but the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions estimated it at 800,000 in 1999, out of a population of just under fifty million.
⁵
A commission of inquiry working for the International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that the regime was inflicting ‘a contemporary form of slavery’ on its citizens.
⁶
As a result, the ILO took the unprecedented step of banning the military regime from attending its meetings or receiving funding until it stopped using forced labour. Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt reacted angrily, insisting that in Burma villagers were happy to work for the military or to speed up development projects.
⁷
While some of the development projects have had benefits for the local people, rural communities are treated as a free labour pool to be exploited by the military as needed.

In response to growing international pressure, the regime issued orders in 1999 and 2000 which banned most forms of forced labour and imposed criminal penalties on those who requisitioned forced labour. The ILO was finally permitted to open an office in Burma in 2002 to monitor the use of forced labour and to work with the regime to end the practice. Since then, less forced labour has been used in central Burma, where companies may be contracted to carry out the work, machinery is used, and labourers are paid, but according to numerous human rights groups,
tatmadaw
units have continued to routinely use forced labour in the ethnic states.
⁸

Many communities have disintegrated, because of onerous demands for forced labour combined with the weak domestic economy. In numerous villages and towns within striking distance of the Thai and Indian borders, only old people and small children remain. As one young Chin migrant worker sadly told us, ‘Our village [in Chin State] used to have twenty-eight houses, but now only five houses remain. All the youth fled to [India] because we could not work in our fields due to portering and heavy forced labour.’

Intra-community tensions are also exacerbated by the authorities’ demands for forced labour, various taxes and new recruits for the army. Some people can pay off the authorities and escape forced labour while others cannot and must go in their place. When the
tatmadaw
demands army recruits and there are not enough volunteers, the village headman either has to force people to go or he has to tax the villagers to pay
someone to go. In some areas, headmen also have to collect monthly taxes for porter fees. Even if a headman tries to be perfectly fair, inequities are inevitable.

The most terrifying form of forced labour is having to work as a human minesweeper. In areas where the civil war continues, both sides use mines, but the
tatmadaw
tries to protect its own soldiers from stepping on them by having villagers walk in front of the troops. Rather than protecting the people, then, the soldiers use the people to protect themselves.

Cho Zin, who lived near the Thai–Burma border, explained that throughout 1996 people from his village had to ‘clear the route with their legs’. On the day that Cho Zin was forced to go with the
tatmadaw
, he and another villager stepped on mines laid by the KNU. The other villager died on the spot. Cho Zin was lucky. Fellow villagers got him to a hospital in Thailand, his lower leg was amputated, and he survived. The
tatmadaw
offered him no compensation or assistance.

After Cho Zin was well enough to get around on crutches, he staged a one-man protest against the ongoing civil war on the Thai side of the Thai–Burmese ‘Friendship Bridge’, which links the two countries. Thai officials at the bridge, nervous that his actions would upset their Burmese counterparts, said they sympathized with him but he would have to stop his protest.

According to Cho Zin, in the four or five villages near his own, there were over a hundred amputees. ‘If you count those who died,’ he said, ‘there will be about three or four hundred.’ Although KNU troops had laid many of the mines, Cho Zin did not want to lay the blame specifically on either side. He said, ‘We think of this as due to the civil war. If there’s peace, there is no need for the mines to be there any more.’

The dismemberment of communities in conflict areas

The weight of military rule has fallen most heavily on those living in areas of armed resistance. As part of the Four Cuts policy, the
tatmadaw
depopulates its operational areas so that the ethnic nationalist armies have no one to provide them with food, information, new recruits or financial support. The human and social costs are incalculable. Some villagers living in distant hamlets have been forcibly relocated to strategic villages along roads, usually with a battalion of
tatmadaw
soldiers based near by. They are given no compensation and often no new land to farm. In the most extreme cases, they are put into fenced relocation sites, which are more like concentration camps. Food is insufficient, water often unclean, and medicine completely lacking. In the Shadaw relocation
camp in Karenni State in 1996, Amnesty International reported that out of an initial population of 4,000, between 200 and 300 died from disease and malnutrition in the first year.
⁹

Along with conflict-related displacement, the
tatmadaw
has also removed populations from areas in the ethnic states and Tenasserim Division for large-scale development projects such as gas pipelines and hydropower dams. One of the strongest resistance armies in the late 1990s was the Shan State Army (South). Finding it difficult to flush the Shan troops out of the mountainous area where they operated, and eager to construct a large dam in the area, between 1996 and 1998 the
tatmadaw
ordered over 300,000 people from 1,400 villages to leave their homes.
¹⁰
Anyone caught returning to his or her village or field would be assumed to be contacting the Shan resistance and immediately shot. The human population was literally erased from the landscape, with villagers dispersed in all directions. Lacking jobs and food, many villagers hid in the forests or slept on the outskirts of towns, but secretly returned to their land to recover stored rice. On several occasions,
tatmadaw
soldiers massacred groups of villagers found hunting for food near their old homes.
¹¹
As many as 150,000 of the displaced Shan eventually ended up in Thailand with many of the able-bodied adults seeking to support their families as labourers on farms, orange plantations or construction sites.
¹²

The Thailand Burma Border Consortium, which has worked closely with local relief and development groups, found that between 1996 and 2007, more than 3,200 villages in eastern Burma were destroyed, forcibly relocated or abandoned because of threats from the
tatmadaw
.
¹³
While the regime routinely dismisses critical reports as made up or exaggerated, this information has been corroborated by high-resolution commercial satellite imagery.
¹⁴

Since the late 1990s, there have been three armies operating in Karen State: the
tatmadaw
, the Karen National Union’s Liberation Army (KNLA) and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA). The DKBA consists of soldiers who left the KNLA and allied themselves with the
tatmadaw
. For the villagers, managing all the armies’ demands and staying on good terms with them is a nearly impossible task. Cho Zin, who lost his leg as a human minesweeper, explained, ‘If one side comes, we have to be afraid of them. If the other side comes, we have to be afraid of them. We don’t love them or hate them. We are only afraid of them.’

When the
tatmadaw
soldiers suspect someone is giving information to the resistance armies, they often use threats, torture and murder to extract the information and intimidate other villagers. Whole villages
may be punished if one or a few people are believed to have assisted the ethnic resistance armies.
Tatmadaw
officers and soldiers have also raped girls and women in civil war areas with impunity.
¹⁵
Torture and rape cases demoralize families and communities and instil bitterness that will not easily be forgotten. Moreover, for the girls and women who are raped, the trauma of the experience is often compounded by the stigma they face if people know.
¹⁶
As a result, women who have been raped may not inform others about what has happened to them, or if it is known, they may leave their communities.