A former close associate of Ne Win who served as a minister in his government claims Ne Win had ‘an unwritten policy’ to get rid of Muslims, Christians, Karens and other ethnic peoples, in that order. His hatred for Muslims was especially intense, this source told me.
In 1978, Ne Win launched a brutal campaign known as ‘Operation King Dragon’ or ‘Naga Min’. Although targeted at armed Rohingya insurgents, thousands of ordinary Rohingya civilians were driven out of Burma. In the course of three months, an estimated 200,000 fled into Bangladesh.19
Three years later, he began to introduce plans to strip the Rohingyas of their citizenship, as mentioned earlier. A commission of inquiry was established by the regime, headed by a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, which identified eight main ethnic nationalities as traditionally indigenous – the Burmans, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Chin, Mon, Arakan and Shan – and 135 different ethnic groups altogether. As Errol da Silva reported in the Bangkok Post, ‘Rohingyas are complaining that the failure to classify them as an entity separate from the general category of Arakanese would render them liable to reduce themselves to either “statelessness” or “alien” status.’ The Rohingya Patriotic Front (RFP) spearheaded a campaign against this decision, arguing, according to da Silva, that ‘Arakan Muslims would be permanently placed in a position of insecurity because of the absence of a guarantee of Burmese citizenship … The revocation of citizenship from such people would make them liable to “deportation to the country of their origin”.’20 Their pleas were ignored, and the following year the 1982 Citizenship Act came into force. Over subsequent years the Rohingyas’ status was downgraded to that of ‘temporary resident’ and they were issued with white ‘Temporary Registration Cards’. For the privilege of even temporary residency identification, Rohingyas had to pay 2,500 kyats. As one Rohingya told me, ‘the regime claims we are mere residents, not citizens’.21
For many years, the plight of the Rohingyas was virtually unknown to the outside world. However, in January 2009, international headlines were dominated by stories of hundreds of Rohingya ‘boat people’ fleeing persecution and starvation in Burma for Thailand and Malaysia. Although this phenomenon had been going on for several years, assisted by human traffickers, it gained the world’s attention when Thai authorities began arresting them when they reached Thai shores, and sending them back to sea. According to the Nation, the Thai authorities ‘set them adrift on boats without engines or sufficient food and water supplies’, and reports suggest that as many as 500 may have drowned.22 CNN’s reporter Dan Rivers conducted an investigation in which he obtained evidence of Rohingyas detained on a Thai beach north of Phuket. They were forced to lie in the scorching sun, and were whipped if they sat up.23 Even more significantly, the news channel reported that ‘extraordinary photos obtained by CNN from someone directly involved in the Thai operation show refugees on their rickety boats being towed out to sea, cut loose and abandoned.’24
One young Rohingya who was arrested by the Thai authorities told journalist John Carlin that he was kept on an island for a month, along with 200 others, and then loaded into a barge and towed out to sea. They were provided with food and water, but their engine was removed. ‘We drifted for fourteen days. Many of us got sick, many lost consciousness. I had no doubts I would die. There was no hope of land or rescue. We had no energy even to talk any more,’ he said. On the sixteenth day, Carlin reports, they saw land, and awoke the next day surrounded by fishing boats. They had reached Indonesia.25
Chris Lewa, who runs an NGO called the Arakan Project, estimates that between October 2006 and March 2008, 9,000 Rohingyas left by boat from Bangladesh.26 The exodus continues to this day. Many never reach Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia. Travelling in dangerously overcrowded boats with faulty engines through troubled waters, hundreds die at sea, drowning as their boats sink.
In response to growing international concern about the plight of the Rohingyas, the regime intensified its vitriol towards them. Revealing the regime’s views, Ye Myint Aung, Burmese Consul General in Hong Kong, wrote a letter to all diplomatic heads of mission in Hong Kong and the editor of the South China Morning Post in 2009. Sparing no diplomatic niceties, he observed that:
In reality, Rohingya are neither ‘Myanmar People’ nor Myanmar’s ethnic group. 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. (My complexion is a typical genuine one of a Myanmar gentleman and you will accept that how handsome your colleague Mr Ye is.) It is quite different from what you have seen and read in the papers. (They are as ugly as ogres.)27
In addition to racist language such as this, and religious hostility, there is a third factor in the regime’s attitude to the Rohingyas, which the regime has used to considerable effect: the charge of extremism. While generally this is overdone, and deployed simply as a propaganda tool by the regime, there are indications that there may be some legitimate cause for concern. A small minority of Rohingyas have had contacts with extremist groups, particularly in Bangladesh. According to Bertil Lintner, the RSO, which broke away from the RPF in the early 1980s, has become ‘the main and most militant faction’, and in the 1990s there were allegations that Islamist organisations such as Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh and Pakistan and Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan were recruiting Rohingyas. ‘Afghan instructors were seen in some of the RSO camps along the Bangladesh– Burma border, while nearly one hundred RSO rebels were reported to be undergoing training in the Afghan province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen,’ Lintner writes.28 A videotape labelled ‘Burma’ was found in al-Qaeda’s archives in Afghanistan.29 It is important to emphasise, however, that there have been no recent reports of such activity.
Sitting in an apartment in East London, I spent five hours with a community of Rohingya refugees. They told me their stories, which were similar to so many I had already heard. ‘We are stateless people in our own country,’ one man said. ‘Even animals have the right to move from one place to another, but we don’t. And without access to education, we become living dead.’
With tears in his eyes, one young man gently described some of his experiences in Burma. ‘Every day of our lives we face harassment and humiliation,’ he said. Stories abounded of small but grinding incidents. A seventy-year-old man with tuberculosis denied a seat on a boat because he was a Rohingya. A group of Rohingya students stopped at a police checkpoint on their way to prayers, and ordered to take off their skullcaps. A student with all his papers in order stopped at a checkpoint and turned back – when he asked the police what the problem was, he was told: ‘Your religion is the problem.’
As I sat and listened to these stories, it was impossible not to be filled with compassion and anger at the blatant injustice. When I asked them how they felt about radical Islamism and the spread of teachings of hatred in the name of Islam, they smiled. One said: ‘Can’t you see in our faces what we believe?’ I could – their faces were gentle, kind, peaceful, beautiful. Another said: ‘Our people don’t have time for [Islamism]. Our people think only of the problems they face – our suffering in Burma, and how to put food on the table for their families.’
But then I asked whether there was any danger that the Rohingya could be radicalised – and whether the small number who had links with jihadist groups could become more influential. Nurul Islam, a wise, thoughtful man who had a book about Martin Luther King with him, nodded gravely: ‘If the situation does not change, there is a possibility that they could be driven into extremism. If they think they have no friends in this world, no one to stand up for them – and if the Islamists offer them such help – there is a possibility in the future that they could be radicalised.’
This is the crux of it. The rest of the democracy movement need to recognise that unless they embrace the Rohingyas as allies in the struggle against the regime, and include them in discussions about the future of the country, they will be left with a very serious challenge in th
e future. The Euro-Burma Office knows this, and concludes in its briefing: ‘A way must be found to engage them in Burma’s nation-building process. Ignoring them or excluding them will not solve the problem. In fact, it will exacerbate and create additional problems.’30
Some Rakhine know this too. ‘We have to reach out to moderate Rohingyas, and work with them, because if we don’t, they will have nowhere else to go but radical Islamism,’ one Rakhine leader told me. And the Rakhine are suffering at the hands of the regime too. In schools, teachers use Burmese and the Rakhine language is banned. They have common cause with the Rohingyas, and share a common goal to remove the regime and restore democracy. As one Rakhine leader told me in regard to the Rohingyas, ‘when a people have been living this long through history, why should they be deprived of their citizenship rights?’31
Currently, the Rohingyas are surviving, but stateless. Refugees on the Bangladesh–Burma border told me repeatedly that it is this statelessness that makes them question their very survival. In Bangladesh, they are told they are Burmese and should go back to Burma. In Burma, they are met with hostility and told they are Bengali and should return to Bangladesh. ‘We are trapped between a crocodile and a snake,’ said one refugee. ‘We are treated as foreigners in Burma. But if we are foreigners, please show us which country we belong to, and we will go there,’ said another in a tone of desperation.32
7
Defectors, Deserters and Child Soldiers
‘I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon’
John Newton
‘AUNG SAN SUU Kyi is a very great leader, but our government does not like her very much.’ These words caught me by surprise – not because of the words themselves or the sentiment they expressed, but because of who they were spoken by: a serving military officer in Burma. ‘She is in a very difficult situation,’ he continued. ‘But I pray for her.’
Discontent with the current regime, and a desire for change in Burma is not limited to students, monks and political activists. In the junior ranks of the military, morale is believed to be so low that rates of desertion and defection have reached worrying proportions for the regime. A confidential report allegedly from the regime claims that desertion rates have reached 1,600 a month, and that between May and August 2006 alone, a total of 9,467 desertions were reported,1 while 7,761 desertions were reported between January and April 2000.2 In early August 2009, seventy soldiers deserted from just one battalion, Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) 324,3 in Kachin State, and a month later twenty officers stationed near Gangdau Yang and Nam San Yang villages on the Myitkyina–Bhamo highway in Kachin State defected to the KIA.4 Narinjara News reported in 2007 that desertions in Arakan State were increasing ‘by the day’, with sixty-nine soldiers deserting and twenty-seven retiring in one month alone.5
Most of those who desert do so because of the poor working conditions: low pay, few rations and ill treatment. Some, however, defect, joining the democracy movement or ethnic resistance organisations, literally switching sides. I have met dozens of Burma Army deserters and defectors who have fled to Burma’s borders, some of whom were child soldiers. All of them knew the risk they were taking when they fled their units – if they had been caught, they would almost certainly have been executed. Those fighting in the ethnic areas were also fed dire warnings by their senior officers about what the ethnic resistance groups would do to them if they were caught.
Kyaw Zeya was taken from a bus stop in Rangoon when he was eleven years old. A truckload of Tatmadaw soldiers pulled up alongside him as he waited for a bus to go to visit his aunt. They grabbed him, and told him if he did not join the army, he would go to jail. ‘I had no choice,’ he told me when I met him three years after his abduction.
Taken to Ta Kyin Koe First Battalion Camp in Danyigone district, he was prohibited from contacting his parents. He was one of at least thirty other children of a similar age at this camp, where he was held for eight months before being sent to a training facility for regular soldiers in the Fifth Battalion. There, he went through five months of basic training, which included running five or six miles every morning. He was then transferred to Light Infantry Battalion 341 in Papun District, Karen State, and then sent to the front line. In a unit of thirty soldiers, he said, at least fifteen were children his age.
Subjected to cruel treatment, including regular beatings for failure to carry out basic tasks, Kyaw Zeya said that life in the Burma Army ‘was like hell’. He witnessed attacks on Karen villages, civilians being rounded up and forced to work as porters for the military, and claimed that troops were under orders to burn, rape and kill when they entered a Karen village. ‘There was no law,’ he explained. He was repeatedly warned that if he ever escaped and was captured by the Karens, they would kill him. He believed them, but life became so intolerable that he decided to flee.6 ‘I did believe that the Karen were very bad, and I knew that if I escaped, I might face the Karen,’ he admitted. ‘But I did not want to live.’7
The reality was diametrically opposed to the Tatmadaw propaganda. Almost as soon as he escaped, Kyaw Zeya was captured by the Karen, but instead of killing him, they provided him sanctuary. With the Karen, he told me, he felt ‘safe and free and loved’.8
Other children tell similar stories. One fourteen-year-old boy was abducted on his way home from watching a film, and forced to fight on the front line against the Karen, where his duties included digging trenches and foxholes. He was fed rice and bananas and paid just six kyat a month – even though at the time military salaries were supposed to range from 3,000 to 100,000 kyats a month.9 Another boy was taken from a railway station in Mandalay when he was fourteen, arrested because he did not have identity papers, and taken to a police training centre. ‘When I arrived at the training centre, all the boys were aged between eleven and fifteen. Nearly three hundred boys had been arrested,’ he recalls. ‘I lost my childhood. I only had fear and force to drive me.’
Burma has perhaps the highest number of child soldiers in the world proportionate to its population. A 2002 report by Human Rights Watch, called ‘My Gun Was as Tall as Me’, estimated that the Tatmadaw has at least 70,000 child soldiers, possibly amounting to 20 per cent of the army. A further report by the organisation in 2007, ‘Sold to be Soldiers’, provides fresh evidence, along with the Watch List on Children and Armed Conflict’s report ‘No More Denial’ in 2009. Other organisations, such as the Karen Human Rights Group, have also provided extensive documentation of the use of child soldiers. A former major in the Burma Army who defected to the KIO told me that he observed many former child soldiers, recruited primarily by battalions trying to meet recruitment targets. Each month, battalions are required to recruit at least five new soldiers, and if they fail they are fined. So soldiers go to railway stations, bus stations, street corners and other public locations and grab whoever they can find. ‘Sometimes the children are so young that they still pee in the night,’ he said. ‘That gives you an idea of the age of the youngest child soldiers.’10
In 2006, I walked through the Thai jungle for several hours, to meet two former child soldiers who had escaped from Burma. Defectors, including child soldiers, are not able to obtain refugee status in Thailand and the Thais have an agreement with the junta to hand over any defectors found in Thailand. So, accompanied by the European Parliament’s rapporteur for human rights at the time, an Irish politician called Simon Coveney, we trekked through the jungle to a secret location.
The two boys had escaped from their units just nine months earlier. One of them said that he had never been interested in joining the army, but had been captured on his way home from a Buddhist festival. He was detained for four or five days on the pretext that he did not have his identity card, and then given a choice: join the army or remain in jail. From there, he was taken to Shwe Bo military recruiting centre, where he worked for two months doing basic chores, cooking and looking after the livestock. Transferred to Sagaing Division Military Training C
amp No. 10, he went through military training for four-and-a-half months, learning to use guns and hand grenades, and was beaten many times. ‘I was beaten, especially when I showed no interest in the training,’ he said. ‘I was beaten with steel rods and bamboo sticks, and once with a bar from the frame of a bicycle.’11 Of the 250 trainees, most, he claims, were aged around fourteen or fifteen.
After completing his basic training he was sent to Infantry Battalion 112, in Shan State, and from there to Karenni State. Beaten and kicked whenever he stumbled, slowed down or grew tired walking up mountains, he was forced to carry 250 rounds of ammunition, a landmine and a hand grenade. He was ordered to shoot strangers on sight, as they could be ‘rebels’.12
The testimony of some deserters and defectors is very revealing about the attitudes, conduct and policies of the Tatmadaw. One young man, aged twenty-two, told me that while serving in the military as a forced conscript, he heard his fellow soldiers regularly describing the ethnic nationalities as ‘Ngapwe’, meaning ‘a dirty skin disease’. He escaped specifically because he did not want to carry out the human rights violations that he was ordered to. When fifty soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 590, where he was stationed, were ordered to go to Rangoon to help in the crackdown on protests in September 2007, he made his decision to run away. He did not want to shoot civilians and monks. ‘I want to tell other soldiers who have been forced to join the army to flee if they have the chance,’ he said when I met him on the Thailand–Burma border just two months after his escape. ‘Don’t obey orders any more,’ was his message to his fellow soldiers.13
Some have heard that message. The Rangoon commander in 2007 was ‘permitted to retire’ after reportedly refusing to give orders to fire on protestors.14 Five other generals and 400 soldiers were detained for similarly refusing to follow orders.15 A major defected, escaping to Thailand, telling the BBC that: ‘[The demonstrators] were very peaceful. Later when I heard they were shot and killed and the armed forces used tear gas, I was really upset and I thought the army should stand for their own people.’ He added: ‘I knew the plan to beat and shoot the monks and if I stayed on I would have to follow these orders. Because I’m a Buddhist, I did not want to kill the monks.’16 A diplomat in the Burmese embassy in London, Ye Min Tun, resigned from his position in protest at the ‘horrible’ treatment of the monks. He said: ‘I have never seen such a scenario in the whole of my life. The government is arresting and beating the peaceful Buddhist monks. This revolution, this incident seemed to be the decisive factor that could persuade the government to go to the negotiation table. But actually the government ignored the reality.’ 17
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