On a visit to Karenni refugees in 2004, the poignancy of the situation was highlighted by orphans singing. Translated, the words of their song were:
My home, my home,
When shall I see my home again?
My home, my home,
I never forget my home.
I don’t know about tomorrow
It may bring poverty and hunger
But the one who feeds the sparrows
Will not forget me.
My home, my home,
When shall I see my home again?
My home, my home,
I never forget my home.
Their suffering is underlined in many children’s drawings over the years, depicting the scenes they have witnessed. It is almost impossible, and cruel, for children to speak about their experiences, but they are often willing to draw. In 2006, for example, my sister, a violinist, visited and played the theme tune to the movie Schindler’s List, the story of Oskar Schindler, who rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. She did not tell the children the story behind the music, but asked them to draw whatever images came to mind as she played. The images were graphic and horrifying: soldiers killing, torturing, raping and burning.
The Shan, ethnically related to the Thais, are the largest non-Burman ethnic nationality in Burma, and played a leading role in the Panglong Agreement. In 1957, the Shan princes, dissatisfied with the constitutional arrangements and concerned that the central government was intruding too much in Shan territory, decided they wanted to exercise their right to secede from the Union of Burma, a right granted to them in the Panglong Agreement and the constitution. U Nu, however, had other ideas, and General Ne Win was implacably opposed to any form of federalism or autonomy for the ethnic nationalities, let alone secession. Ne Win banned the teaching of the Shan language in schools, and although peace talks were held in 1963, no deal was reached. Sao Shwe Thaike’s wife Sao Hearn Kham, an elected MP herself, escaped through the jungle to the Thailand–Burma border, where she was appointed head of the Shan State War Council. She formed the Shan State Army (SSA), drawing together all the Shan groups and, as her son Harn Yawnghwe says, ‘dropping the word “independence”’. The uprising began.
Over the course of four decades, the Shan people have endured horrific abuse from the Burma Army. According to Dr Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Shan State is perhaps ‘the most profoundly affected region’, more than Karen and Karenni, because the Shans are a larger, better resourced and more disciplined fighting force and a more prevalent ethnic group in Burma. They occupy a fifth of the country. ‘There is a particular animosity between the Burmans and the Shan, and much more widespread use of rape,’ he explains. In the past, the Shan have been involved with the drugs trade, which has not helped their image. ‘Their link to narcotics has meant they have had much less support from the international community.’
Harn Yawnghwe agrees. ‘The Burmans see the Shans as more of a threat than other ethnic groups,’ he argues. ‘To be a Buddhist, in their eyes, is to be “civilized”, and so the Shans are seen as more “civilized”, while the other ethnic groups are seen as “uncivilized”. The Shans had a set of rulers, as did the Burmans, so they were seen as competitors. The Burmans felt more threatened by the Shans than they did by others. It wasn’t hatred, it was competition.’ The mother of King Thibaw, the last Burmese king, was a Shan from Hsipaw, and Sao Shwe Thaike’s uncle was raised by King Mindon. These relations soon turned into rivalries.
At the beginning of the struggle, according to Harn Yawnghwe, the Shan armed forces were ‘really cohesive and coherent’. The movement was led by university graduates who were idealistic and educated. However, after those leaders died, the movement began to fragment. Factions emerged with deep involvement in the drugs trade, led by the warlord Khun Sa, or attached to communism. Over the years, several factions split and signed ceasefire deals with the regime. Today, the largest remaining fighting force is the Shan State Army (South), led by Colonel Yawd Serk, who had served in Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army. ‘It has some legitimacy and is seen as a beacon of Shan nationalism,’ says Harn Yawnghwe. ‘Yawd Serk is the only one continuing the struggle.’
In 2002, I hiked through the jungle for six hours, up and down mountains and across rivers, to reach Yawd Serk’s base in Shan State. We deliberately avoided paths, because we wished to go undetected along the border. So we hacked our way through the undergrowth, regularly slipping and sliding because the soil was loose and muddy. It gave me just a glimpse of life as an internally displaced person on the run. Although I experienced those conditions for only a few hours, and other people helped carry my baggage, I could empathise more easily with the internally displaced peoples after that journey than I could before. As I struggled up and down the mountains, frequently losing my footing, I imagined doing that day after day, with little food, struggling children and stumbling, frail elderly relatives in tow, with your life’s possessions on your back, and with soldiers hunting you down. The words from a Shan student spoken to his foreign teacher, Bernice Koehler Johnson, and quoted in her book The Shan: Refugees Without a Camp, highlight this image: ‘In Burma, we must be afraid all the time, Teacher. We must run, run, run until our legs break.’16
The SSA-South base protected a camp for internally displaced peoples who had fled their villages. There I heard stories which were eerily familiar to me from my visits to the Karen and Karenni. One boy, aged fourteen when I met him, had walked for one and a half months to reach the comparative safety of the camp. He had been taken as a porter at the age of twelve, and forced to carry a 25-kilogram sack of rice for two days. He witnessed soldiers shoot a man from his village, beat five other porters with sticks and rifles, and burn down his village. His parents had been killed by the Tatmadaw.
In April 1998, the Shan Human Rights Foundation published a report called ‘Dispossessed’, which claimed that 80,000 Shans had fled into Thailand in the previous two years. During that period, from 1996 to 1998, over 1,400 villages in central Shan State had been forcibly relocated, and over 300,000 people driven at gunpoint out of their homes. In one township alone, over 300 people were killed. In one relocation site, 664 villagers were executed.17
Rape is widespread and systematic in Shan State, and the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN) has been pioneering in its documentation of the abuses. In 2001, its report ‘License to Rape’, detailing 173 incidents involving 625 girls and women, between 1996 and 2001, brought the issue to world attention for the first time, prompting an investigation by the US State Department. According to the report, at least 83 per cent of rapes were carried out by officers, usually in front of their soldiers; 61 per cent were gang rapes; and in 25 per cent of the cases, the victims were killed. Some of the cases involved little children. A ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old were raped and killed. Most shockingly, a five-year-old girl was raped, after her ‘arms and legs had been tied spread-eagled to a bed’.18 Local military officers threatened to ‘cut out the tongues and slit the throats’ of villagers who dared to speak out to the Red Cross when they visited Shan State in 2003.19
These are not simply stories in a report. On that first visit to Shan State, I met twelve women who had been raped, and others who knew of rape cases. One woman told me that one of her friends had been raped by Burma Army soldiers, and then stabbed to death with bamboo spikes. Another woman claimed that she and her two daughters had been gang-raped by over fifty soldiers. After their unimaginable ordeal, she found the bodies of her two daughters, aged fifteen and eighteen at the time, both with their dresses pulled up over them. The elder daughter had been gagged and suffocated, while the younger one had been shot in the waist and forehead. ‘I still have a vivid image of the bodies of my daughters wrapped in plastic sheets,’ she said.
In 2009, another offensive against Shan civilians began. On 29 July, Tatmadaw soldiers burned 62 houses in Ho Lom village, and more than 100 in Tard Mawk. At least 10,000 civilia
ns were forced from their homes. According to Chris Beyrer and Richard Sollom in the Washington Post, more than a quarter of all Shan families had been forcibly relocated in 2005, in 24 per cent of families at least one person had been taken for forced labour, and in 9 per cent of households at least one person had been injured by a landmine. These, the authors argue, are some ‘of the highest rates ever documented’.20 A statement from the Shan Human Rights Foundation confirmed these attacks, and claimed that ‘over one hundred villagers, both men and women, have been arrested and tortured. At least three villagers have been killed. One woman was shot while trying to retrieve her possessions from her burning house, and her body thrown into a pit latrine. Another woman was gang-raped in front of her husband by an officer and three of his troops.’21
In addition to these shocking stories, the regime is engaged in a more subtle campaign to eradicate Shan history and culture. Some of the Shan princes’ palaces have been allowed to fall into decay, or have been destroyed altogether. On 9 November 1991 the palace at Kengtung, described as ‘the grandest of the Shan palaces’ and built in 1903 by Prince Kawn Kiao Intalang, was demolished, following a direct order from the regime. In its place, the regime built a modern hotel. While Shan State includes the famous Inle Lake and hill towns such as Maymyo and Lashio, popular with tourists, it is worth noting that ‘the vast majority of Shan State is off limits to foreigners’, according to SWAN.22
Colonel Yawd Serk has described his homeland as ‘under Burmese occupation’. According to SWAN, over 150 Tatmadaw infantry battalions are deployed in Shan State – almost one-third of the Burma Army.23 Yawd Serk fought an armed struggle because ‘we have no other choice – it is just for survival’. The Shan, he told me, want peace, but for decades the regime was unwilling to negotiate. ‘In recent years, whenever the ethnic groups have proposed talks, the junta has responded with force,’ he said. As for him and his troops, ‘though we are in military uniform, we are civilians and we long to live in peace’. He called for international pressure on the regime to allow international observers and reporters complete, un-hindered access to all parts of Burma. ‘If the junta forbids reporters to enter, to investigate drugs, rape and human rights violations, then it is clear that they are involved,’ he concluded.24
On 2 December 2011, years of fighting came to an end, at least for now, when Yawd Serk and the SSA-South signed a ceasefire with the regime. Preliminary talks were also held with the KNU and other ethnic groups in a possible effort by President Thein Sein to establish, even if initially piecemeal, a peace throughout the country. On 1 March 2012, in a speech to parliament, Thein Sein made a clear pledge to make ending the conflict in the ethnic areas his priority, and to recognise equal rights for the ethnic people. In a rare and significant shift in rhetoric, Thein Sein appeared to abandon the regime’s traditional description of the ethnic groups as ‘insurgents’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘rebels’ and instead declared: ‘We all have to work so our ethnic youths who held guns stand tall holding laptops … The expectation of ethnic groups is to get equal rights for all. Equal standards are also the wish of our government.’25 Such a change of language, and a recognition of the ethnic people’s desire for equal rights, is very welcome. The real test of peace, however, will be whether the military’s abuses of civilians cease, because hitherto even an absence of war in some parts of the country has not meant a genuine freedom from fear, as the experience of the other major ethnic group along the Thailand–Burma border, the Mon, has shown.
The Mon are generally recognised, according to Martin Smith, as ‘the earliest inhabitants of modern Burma’.26 Although a minority in Burma today, the Mon were once the dominant ethnic group in what is now Burma. The Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon, the most important Buddhist symbol in the country, was built by the Mons, and Burmese culture is heavily influenced by Mon culture. Lower Burma was ruled by Mon kings from 1287 until 1539, but their influence extended beyond Burma to much of mainland South East Asia during the first millenium, for more than a thousand years.
The Mon took up arms at the same time as the Karen, in 1948, but a decade later the Mon People’s Front (MPF) surrendered to Rangoon. The very next day, however, Nai Shwe Kyin, sometimes known as Ba Lwin, established the New Mon State Party (NMSP) to continue the struggle for autonomy and self-determination. In 1995, after almost fifty years of fighting, the NMSP signed a ceasefire agreement with the SPDC, and agreed to attend the regime’s constitution-drafting National Convention.
Despite signing a ceasefire, however, there is no real peace in Mon State. The Tatmadaw continues to perpetrate human rights violations. The Human Rights Foundation of Monland regularly reports incidents of forced labour, particularly for road and bridge construction projects. Many villages are required to provide three weeks’ forced labour every month, disrupting crop production cycles. In some places villagers are prohibited from tending their crops, in case they support the resistance. Land confiscation is common, and sexual violence is widespread. A report shockingly titled ‘Catwalk to the Barracks’, by the Women and Child Rights Project in southern Burma and the Human Rights Foundation of Monland, documents sexual violence by Tatmadaw soldiers against fifty women and girls aged between fourteen and fifty. Young women are forcibly conscripted to serve local battalions as ‘comfort women’ or, more accurately, as ‘sex slaves’, and schoolgirls are forced to parade on a catwalk for the entertainment of soldiers. ‘Nowhere Else to Go’, a subsequent report by the same organisation, documented the trafficking of women and children from nineteen townships across Burma, including Mon State, into the sex trade. The report detailed forty separate incidents, involving seventy-one victims.
As a result of the continuing violations and the regime’s failure to provide a satisfactory political solution, the NMSP has become one of the most outspoken of the ceasefire groups. In 2005, the NMSP downgraded its status at the National Convention from full participant to observer, out of frustration at the lack of meaningful dialogue in the constitution-drafting process. Tensions with the regime were heightened further when the NMSP refused to sign a statement criticising the United States for proposing a resolution on Burma at the UN Security Council. Trading privileges provided to the NMSP as part of the ceasefire deal were withdrawn. One Mon leader told me when I visited their office in Sangkhlaburi that most Mons have no trust in the new constitution. The NMSP, he added, retains its arms ‘not because we want to fight, but because we have to be ready to defend our lives. If the NMSP gives up its arms, it should only do so to the United Nations, not to the SPDC.’27
In the face of this horrific suffering in eastern Burma stand an extraordinary number of people with truly remarkable courage and initiative. Charm Tong is one of the most prominent. Born in the conflict areas of Shan State, she was sent to Thailand by her parents at the age of six, to be raised in an orphanage run by nuns. ‘The villages were attacked all the time and we had to move all the time, and so my parents decided to send me to the border so that I could go to school and be safe,’ she says.
At the age of sixteen, Charm Tong began her activism, as an intern at the Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF). She saw a newsletter, published by the Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN), and decided to learn more about human rights documentation. She completed an internship at the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), and then co-founded the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN), to work on education, health care, income generation, women’s empowerment as well as international advocacy. Her motivation came from her own experiences. ‘I became an activist because of what I witnessed in the war in Burma, the attacks by the Burma Army, being separated from my family and growing up on the border,’ she says. ‘Every day you witness and see how people suffer. It is not new to hear about rape and forced labour. I always consider myself a very lucky person, because at least I am safe and could get basic education. Many young people today don’t receive any basic education.’
Within a year of beginning her activist work, she wa
s thrown onto the international stage when she testified at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights – in front of the regime’s ambassador. Undaunted, she presented evidence of the regime’s crimes. ‘It is good that the regime was there,’ she says. ‘They should know that the world actually knows what is happening, and that we are trying to bring the voices of the people to the international community.’
Two years later, at the age of twenty, Charm Tong decided to try to give other young people the opportunity for education. She founded the School for Shan State Nationalities Youth, and since 2001 at least 260 young people from Shan State have been trained and sent back to work in or for their communities, as teachers, medics, journalists, women’s activists and cross-border relief workers. Every year, the school receives at least one hundred applicants, and accepts thirty.
In 2005, Charm Tong went to Washington, DC where she met President George W. Bush in the Oval Office of the White House. Those who had initiated the meeting expected it to last no longer than ten minutes – a brief exchange of views, an opportunity for Charm Tong to impress on the President the urgency of the crisis in Burma, and a photograph which would help raise headlines. Instead, the President spent almost an hour with Charm Tong. ‘The meeting with President Bush was an encouraging sign,’ she says with typical modesty and understatement. ‘He was very concerned and asked many questions about the situation of the people in Burma, and about what the United States and the international community could do. It was a message of solidarity with the people of Burma, a sign that the world has not forgotten.’
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 11