Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads

by Benedict Rogers

  Charm Tong, a recipient of numerous international awards including the Reebok Human Rights Award, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, named one of Time magazine’s Asian Heroes and listed by Marie Claire magazine as a ‘Woman of the World’. She continues travelling around the world to brief politicians, travelling to London in 2006 to testify at a hearing in the House of Commons and meet the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the Leader of the Opposition at the time, now Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague. But despite – or perhaps because of – her international profile, she continues to be harassed by the regime. However, she is dismissive of their tactics. ‘It’s very common for them to burden any groups that speak out about the crimes against humanity that they have committed. For us, it is very important that we continue to speak the truth.’ She points to the development of pro-democracy and ethnic civil society groups operating along Burma’s borders, working on women’s rights, environmental concerns, media and broader human rights issues, and campaigning against the regime’s dam projects, oil and gas pipelines and military offensives. In addition, they are not only campaigning against the regime, but offering positive alternative development ideas. ‘They are more organised, they are providing services for the community, and they are working together … These have been built up over the past twenty years. You could see there were none before,’ she points out. ‘We are empowering our people, so that in the future when there is change in Burma it doesn’t mean that any democratic government can just go and build the dams or take all the natural resources, without consultation.’ Charm Tong is also adamant that those who dismiss the border-based organisations as ‘exiled’ groups do not understand the situation properly. ‘We are working inside Burma. There’s no inside or outside Burma, everyone is working for change in Burma. We may be physically based outside, but we have our networks and people who work inside.’ The border-based groups, she adds, serve as a vital channel for information and documentation of the situation inside Burma.

  Karen activists like Ka Hsaw Wa have also helped motivate people and draw the suffering of eastern Burma to the world’s attention. Ka Hsaw Wa was born in Rangoon, and became involved in the student uprising in 1988. He was arrested and tortured, and that experience, he says, was the origin of his work today. ‘After I was tortured, I was angry and wanted to do something against the authorities who wrongfully tortured me,’ he recalls. Aware that he could easily be arrested again, he fled from Rangoon to the Karen jungles. ‘My first intention was to join the KNU, or KNLA, but when I visited many villages and talked to many people, I saw many horrible things and talked to villagers about the human rights violations. It made me think that I should expose these violations to the international community.’ Teaming up with a Canadian activist called Kevin Heppner, he helped establish the Karen Human Rights Group, and began documenting the destruction of villages, the suffering of the Karen people and the environmental degradation. In the course of his work he met and married an American human rights lawyer, Katie Redford, and the couple then founded a new organisation, EarthRights International, in 1995, to focus on areas ‘where protection of human rights and the environment is intrinsically connected’, marshalling – as their slogan puts it – ‘the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment’. Today the organisation documents human rights and environmental abuses, conducts international advocacy campaigns, trains and mobilises ethnic peoples to be involved in documentation and campaigning, and litigates in US courts on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. EarthRights established a remarkable school in Thailand in 1999, to train people from different ethnic nationalities, equipping them with the skills to document human rights abuses and provide leadership to their communities.

  EarthRights is perhaps best known for its involvement in the groundbreaking case against the US oil company Unocal. A group of villagers from Karen State, with the advice and support of EarthRights lawyers, particularly Katie Redford, sued Unocal for complicity in forced labour, rape and murder committed by the Burma Army in the area surrounding the Yadana gas pipeline built by a consortium led by Unocal, and the French oil company Total. The lawyers used the US Alien Torts Act, and built the case around the fact that Unocal had hired the Burma Army to provide security for the pipeline. Most lawyers believed the case would not succeed, but in 2005, after a ten-year legal battle, Unocal settled out of court, the first time in history that a company has settled this kind of case. The story is told in a film, Total Denial.

  Zoya Phan has similarly brought hope to her people. The daughter of Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, the KNU General Secretary assassinated in 2008, Zoya was born in Manerplaw, the Karen headquarters, in 1980. Both her parents were involved in the Karen resistance, but Zoya recalls her life until 1995 as ‘relatively peaceful’. When he was not engaged in political activities, her father tended his flower garden, and her mother looked after their chickens. Zoya, her sister Bwa Bwa and her brothers Slone and Say Say played on the riverbanks. Her life changed, however, when the Burma Army attacked Manerplaw and she and her family had to flee. ‘The Burma Army attacked our area with mortar bombs and air strikes,’ she recalls. ‘When the bombs dropped, the ground would shake and as children we were so scared.’ The family escaped to the jungle, where they survived with little food, shelter or medical care. ‘We could only carry a few things on our backs. We walked through the jungle for weeks until we arrived in Thailand.’

  For five years, Zoya lived in various refugee camps along the Thailand– Burma border, where she studied English and gained some education. Although refugees were better off than many inside Burma, as they received food, rations, shelter and schooling, the restrictions they faced were frustrating. ‘Life in the refugee camp was very difficult,’ she told me. ‘Thousands of people were put together in a small land, behind barbed wire, where we were not allowed to go out from the camp. It was like a prison camp.’

  In Mae La refugee camp, the school motto, as Zoya recounts in her book Little Daughter, was ‘to learn, to live, to serve’.28 In 2000, she gained a rare opportunity to continue her studies in Bangkok, but as a refugee she had to travel to the Thai capital without any identification. ‘I had to be smuggled out of the camp,’ she writes.29 Sponsored by the Open Society Institute, Zoya pursued her studies at the St Theresa Institute of Technology, an international school linked to Bradford University in the United Kingdom. There, Zoya learned how to use a computer, how ASEAN works, and how to dodge the Thai police. Studying business administration and adjusting to city life, however, was demanding. She writes in her book: ‘It was so alien to me. I didn’t understand many of the most basic concepts. I had no idea about the practices of international business. As to the relative benefits of Kimberly-Clark’s logo versus that of Toyota or Tesco – I was completely lost. What was a logo? What was a superstore? Who were Tesco, Toyota and the rest?’30

  During her studies in Bangkok, Zoya did an internship at a Thai telecommunications company, Telecomasia, and was on the verge of being offered a corporate career. Three things, however, happened which changed the course of her life for ever. Her mother, whose health had been poor for some time, became seriously ill, with liver failure and a heart condition. She returned to the border, to look after her mother, and then decided to make a visit inside Karen State. She wanted, she recalls, ‘to get into those areas that the media and human rights workers were seldom able to visit’.31 She went with her father’s blessing, and his hammock and mosquito net. On that visit, she met people who were terrified of imminent attack, suffering from cholera, chronic diarrhoea and malaria, and who had no opportunities for health care or education at all. ‘They were so poor and destitute that even the clothes they stood up in were in shreds,’ she recalls. ‘They had nothing; nothing. No pots and pans; no blankets; precious little to eat.’ It was this situation, she explains, that began to turn her away from ‘a soft, moneyed and easy future’ and back to her p
eople and their struggle.32

  Her mother died in 2004, and Zoya accepted a place at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom to study for a Masters in Development and Politics. Ten months after starting her course, she attended a demonstration in London, and her activist’s life was born. ‘All my life I had been a victim,’ she writes, ‘but today I had felt what it was like to fight back.’33 Within a few weeks she was doing interviews on the BBC, leading protests outside the Burmese embassy and 10 Downing Street, and addressing audiences around the country. Recruited to the staff of Burma Campaign UK, she became one of the most prominent faces of the movement in exile.

  In 2006, I was in Kunming, returning from a visit to the China–Burma border. I opened my emails, and found a note from someone working for the Conservative Party, saying that they wanted to invite a Burmese speaker to address the party conference that year. They said the person needed to be based in the United Kingdom, or nearby. In my mind, there was only one candidate: Zoya. A few months later, dressed in a traditional Karen outfit, and speaking immediately before the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, she stood on the platform of the conference hall in Bournemouth and brought the audience of several thousand to their feet. With extraordinary poise and charm, she told her story.

  When I was just fourteen years old, the soldiers came to my village. They opened fire. There was no warning. The mortar bombs exploded. We fled for our lives, but many people were killed. My family ran, carrying what we could on our backs. We left everything, and our home, behind. I still remember the smell of the black smoke as our village was destroyed. At the same time, and as we hid in the jungle, homeless and afraid, a British trade delegation dined in Rangoon, making business deals with the military dictatorship that had just slaughtered my people.

  But it was her challenge to Britain that drew the strongest applause, and that caused eyes to water and minds to ponder. ‘How many more generations will have to suffer while the world looks the other way?’ she asked.

  As a democracy activist from Burma, I am confused by the response of the international community. How can any government’s foreign policy not make human rights a priority. What is more important than the basic rights for all of us to live in peace without fear? How can governments stand by while in Burma innocent children are shot, girls as young as five years old are raped by the soldiers, and while a thousand political prisoners are tortured and facing cruelty every day …? Why has it taken sixteen years for the United Nations Security Council to even discuss Burma?

  She concluded with these words: ‘Promoting human rights and democracy is not imperialist, it is not a cultural issue, it is everyone’s business. I believe it should be a priority for every country. The opportunity to speak to you today has given me hope. I hope that your party will help my people in their struggle for human rights, democracy and freedom in Burma.’

  There was barely a dry eye in the hall, and Zoya was surrounded by delegates at the end offering help and extending goodwill. So powerful was her address that she was invited back the following year, to speak just before the President of Rwanda, and she gave an equally moving speech. But seeing how gracious, articulate and yet defiant she was, few would have known what had happened the evening prior to that first conference address in Bournemouth. Thousands of conference delegates’ passes had not been processed, and there was a backlog awaiting police security approval. When Zoya arrived the previous evening, I took her to collect her conference pass. Hers was one of the many that had not been approved, but worse – she was an asylum seeker at the time. Despite being a guest speaker at the Conservative Party Conference, due to address the hall the next day, she was subjected to a frustrating and humiliating interrogation by the British police. They were just doing their job, and they were not unkind, but it brought home to me the struggles Zoya herself was fighting on many levels. She was becoming an international voice for her people, she was adjusting to life in an entirely foreign land, she was still grieving the loss of her mother and concerned for her father’s safety, and she was stateless. Those factors made her performance at the conference the next day all the more extraordinary. She admits herself that life at that time, for ‘a person from the jungle’, was ‘very challenging’.

  Since then, Zoya has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom, and travels throughout Europe raising awareness. Her father’s assassination in 2008 came as a shock, but not a surprise. ‘He knew that the regime had a plan. He was on a hit list. We knew for many years that the regime was trying to destroy the Karen leaders,’ she told me. Zoya herself has survived three attempts on her own life. After her father’s death, Zoya, her two brothers and her sister established The Phan Foundation in their parents’ memory. ‘We wanted to carry on what they were doing – fighting poverty, promoting Karen culture and helping Karen activists and organisations to develop.’ Her motivation to continue comes from a combination of factors. ‘Seeing the suffering, hearing the stories makes us want to do more,’ she explains. ‘In addition, the encouragement of friends around the world, giving support, political activism and solidarity with our struggle, helps us keep going. There is no way we would give up – we know we have many friends who support us.’

  Dr Cynthia Maung is another light in the darkness of eastern Burma. A Karen doctor who fled Rangoon in 1988, she established an emergency clinic in Mae Sot on the Thailand–Burma border to treat the students who fled the crackdown, expecting it all to be over within a few months. More than twenty years on, she has established the Mae Tao Clinic and the Back Pack Health Worker training programme.

  Dr Chris Beyrer has worked closely with her for some years, and describes her work as ‘extraordinary’. Although the project ‘started as emergency care for the students in 1988’ the woman who is now internationally known as ‘Dr Cynthia’ recognised very quickly that ‘what people needed was more than an emergency stop-gap,’ says Dr Beyrer. The clinic now provides a range of services, including reproductive health, dental care, malaria treatment, eye surgery, prosthetics and rehabilitation for victims of landmine injuries, an immunisation programme and a variety of public health and primary care education and training initiatives. ‘The need just keeps growing,’ says Dr Beyrer. ‘People come from all over Burma for treatment, because the Burmese health system is privatised, in a country where people have been divested of income and cannot afford care.’ The clinic now provides health care to a population of approximately 150,000, including refugees and migrant workers in Thailand, internally displaced people from Karen State, and people from deeper inside Burma who travel for days to her clinic.

  In addition to the clinic, Dr Cynthia has established at least seventy-five Back Pack Health Worker teams, working in the conflict zones of eastern Burma. The teams are given a year’s intensive training, and then travel back to their communities to provide basic medical care for their people. They do vital work. ‘There is a lot of loss of life among the internally displaced peoples, from completely treatable diseases,’ says Dr Beyrer. ‘So we are training people from ethnic groups because no one else can get in and out of there.’ They estimate that at least 170,000 people inside Burma are reached by the teams – people who would otherwise receive no help at all. But the teams operate at great personal risk. Since 2001, seven of her back-pack medics have died, mostly as a result of stepping on landmines. One medic was beaten to death by the regime’s border guards.

  As well as providing basic health care in the jungle, the Back Pack Health Workers have also documented crucial data on health issues in eastern Burma. Published in a report called ‘Chronic Emergency: Health and Human Rights in Eastern Burma’, the Back Pack Health Worker teams argue that Burma’s health indicators are among the worst in the region, and in eastern Burma the situation is comparable to the humanitarian crises in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cambodia soon after Pol Pot’s demise. A new report published in 2010, called ‘Diagnosis Critical’, claims that over 40 per cent of children und
er the age of five are acutely malnourished, and that 60 per cent of deaths of children under five are from preventable and treatable diseases. One in fourteen women is infected with malaria, one of the highest rates in the world. The maternal mortality rate in eastern Burma is three times the national average. In 2007, a report published by the University of California and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health added further evidence of a desperate crisis. ‘The Gathering Storm: Infectious Diseases and Human Rights in Burma’ documented the spread of malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, concluding that they are at their highest along Burma’s frontiers.

  Dr Cynthia’s work has been widely recognised – she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay prize. Yet, as Dr Beyrer points out, she is herself a refugee. ‘She is illegal in Thailand,’ he says. The challenges this causes her are constant. In recent years, due to the United Nations resettlement programme, emigration has been added to the list of challenges she faces. ‘Close to half her best people have gone abroad,’ says Dr Beyrer. ‘She is having to train new people. But she has shown tremendous capacity.’

  Her staff are mostly Karen, but some come from other parts of Burma. Many are, like Dr Cynthia, refugees. One doctor previously worked in Myitkyina, capital of Kachin State. He had to flee, after a foreigner made an unannounced visit to the city hospital, and found it in dire conditions. According to Dr Beyrer, ‘there were patients sharing beds, no bandages, no antibiotics, disposable gloves for one-off use used multiple times.’ The doctor had shown him around – but was later charged with sedition for doing so.

  Dr Cynthia is one of the regime’s most hated opponents. Describing her as an ‘absconder, an insurgent and an opium-smuggling terrorist’, the regime said that any attempt to deny this is ‘as futile as covering the rotting carcass of an elephant with a goat hide’.34 For hundreds of thousands of people, inside Burma and on the border, she is a ray of hope.