Free Burma!
This is my contribution to the International Bloggers’ Day for Burma. The military regime there has gotten a heavy dose of bad publicity, long overdue, for its crackdown on protests by Buddhist monks. The regime has the nerve to blame foreigners for the crackdown. The brutality is nothing new for the regime, only the publicity. The Karen Women’s Organization has extensively documented a long history of brutal repression against the Karen people, especially the women, raped and enslaved with impunity. From their State of Terror report in February 2007, on the ongoing rape, murder, torture and forced labor suffered by women living under the Burmese Military Regime in Karen State:
These human rights abuses occur as part of a strategy designed to terrorise and subjugate the Karen people, to completely destroy their culture and communities. This report demonstrates very clearly that it is the women who bear the greatest burden of these systematic attacks, as they are doubly oppressed both on the grounds of their ethnicity and their gender.
Pa-an District
The SPDC and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) authorities continue to exert control of the region through forced labour, mass land confiscation, extortion of money and demands for livestock and material. Rape, arbitrary detention and torture are still committed by local authorities with complete impunity. Villagers are forced to do work for soldiers based in camps, such as “cleaning the camp compounds, carrying water, cutting bamboo and trees to build huts for the soldiers, making fences around the camp compounds, standing as sentries, acting as messengers, and doing whatever else the soldiers and officers request of them”. This results in poverty and food shortages. The Karen people do not have easy access to schools and are subject to the SPDC’s “Burmanisation” campaign, which seeks to weaken non-Burman political identities by eradicating their language and literature.
In other words, genocide is being waged against the Karen people. The United Nations tried to pass a resolution condemning the repression in January, but that was vetoed by China and Russia. China in particular has been arming this regime for nearly two decades. Opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest, which she has been most of the past 17 years, since her party won the 1990 election in a landslide.
There is no shortage of brutal regimes in this world, but the United Nations has some responsibility to act. Again from the State of Terror report:
Two recent and important developments in international law provide further authority for the international protection owed to Karen women and their families. Security Council Resolution 1674 (June 2006) – the protection of civilians in armed conflict – affirms the United Nations commitment to the new international concept “Responsibility to Protect.” This concept (R2P) has replaced the old “right to intervene” discourse that was fraught with insurmountably controversial issues of state sovereignty. Now, via the authority of the Security Council, the United Nations affirms that it is “prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner” when States are “manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” (including rape). The Burmese Military Regime, via the SPDC, has not only failed to protect the women of Karen State, but is routinely and systematically responsible for the gross violations of their rights detailed in this report.
The second development, Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security (October 2000), was reviewed five years after its implementation in an open meeting of the Security Council in October 2005. The resolution has enabled women in conflict zones around the world to become equal participants in areas of peace and security. Ms Rachel Myanja, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Gender Issues and Advancement of
Women, noted that “women at the grassroots level in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Sudan have used this resolution to lobby for their voices to be heard in peace building processes, in post-conflict elections, and in the rebuilding of their societies”. Taken in concert with resolution 1674, these key pieces of international legislation clearly outline the responsibilities of the international community to take action to protect the women and girls of Karen State. The international community must not hesitate to act on this responsibility, and must act now, to stop the atrocities perpetrated against women and their families in Karen State.
This did not exactly fall on deaf ears, but virtually nothing has been done to stop these atrocities. China is feeling some heat, since it is hosting the Olympics soon, but it hardly wants to encourage democracy in its neighbor. That might ignite its own population to protest its own repression.