23rd December, 2004

DAVID ADAMS

“LS” was just 12-years-old when soldiers came to the village in Karen State in eastern Burma* where he lived with his family and shot their pigs and livestock.

“Everyone ran away and my family went and hid in caves,” he told representatives of human rights advocacy organisation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), and British-based aid agency Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), when they visited camps along the Thai-Burmese border recently.

“LS” related how two villagers were killed and two were wounded when they stepped on landmines the Burmese Army had laid to block their escape before burning the village.

“We hid in the jungle with no place to stay,” he said. “Finally we walked for three days to the Thai border where we settled in the refugee camp. Our family was living in fear.”

The Karen boy’s story is one of many collected by the group from Australia, Britain and New Zealand when they spent two weeks speaking with people living in Burma and in Thai refugee camps - including leaders of the Shan, Karen and Karenni resistance forces - during late November and early December.

They claim to have found evidence of genocide perpetrated by Burma’s ruling junta - the State Peace and Development Council - and, in a report on their trip, outline numerous human rights violations against the Karen, Karenni and Shan peoples including forced relocation and forced labour, torture, beatings, rape and civilian killings as well as the destruction of villages, crops and livestock.

“These amount to crimes against humanity and, for the Karen, Karenni and Shan, genocide,” the report says.

It is estimated that there are a million internally displaced people living in Burma today as a result of the policies of the Burmese government. Around half of those believed to be in the Shan, Karen, Karenni and Mon areas of the country’s east living in relocation camps under control of the government, in temporary shelters in the jungle, or simply on the run without adequate access to food, health care, shelter or education.

Since 2002, it has been claimed that at least 240 villages in eastern Burma have been completely destroyed, relocated or abandoned with as many as 2,500 villages destroyed since 1996.

Dr Martin Panter, the current Australian and international present of CSW and one of those who took part in the recent trip, says the purpose of the recent trip was three-fold: to stand in solidarity with their Christian “brothers and sisters” and encourage the leaders; to gain an up-to-date picture of what was happening in the area; and, to help practically where they could.

“I think that where such human rights atrocities exist, it’s a responsibility of the Christian community to do what they can,” he says. “Now God doesn’t call everyone to go to the frontline (but by doing so) we gain first-hand evidence.”

As well as collecting case histories from some of the refugees they encountered, Dr Panter says that on this trip they were also able to have collect some 200 drawings children had made illustrating their experiences which they hope to exhibit in Cairns in the near future.

“Sometimes art can be very therapeutic and cathartic...” he says. “One (drawing) just had a red box and a wire and a little boy told us with tears coming down his cheeks that he remembers that Burmese soldiers would kill Karen people and put their blood in a box and put the box on a wire and dance around celebrating at all the dead Karen. And that’s the overwhelming memory that stuck in his mind.”

“Another was of a group of nine people, each one with a soldier standing in front. This was at a Karenni orphanage and a little boy - he was 14 - and his 12-year-old sister told us how they remembered the Burmese shooting and coming into their village shouting, ‘Nobody move’. And their father jumped out of the back window - I guess out of terror - and as he jumped he was shot in the arm and escaped.

“But they saw him running and they said ‘Right, everyone stand outside’ and this couple - these two little kids - they hid under the window and all the others - the grandparents, the parents and brothers and sisters - traipsed outside. There were nine of them including the young girl’s twin brother who was on her mother’s back and was only five at the time. They got a soldier opposite each one of the family and they just shot each one including the little girl’s mother and her little twin brother - they were both killed by the same bullet. These are the kind of traumas that they are faced with.”

Dr Panter, who has visited Burma on three occasions since coming into contact with CSW in 1987, said that with no counselling available to help family members who have survived such horrors, the people were “saturated with the Word of God, from dawn to dusk”.

“The Karenni kids...they get up at 4.30 in the morning and they pray for an hour, then they read scriptures for an hour - in English, in Karen, in Burmese and also in Thai,” he says.

“When we go there, they will recite not just verses but whole psalms. They recited the whole of Psalm 91 to us in English and the whole of Psalm 139. They’re saturated and immersed in the Word of God and this washes through their souls and spirits and I think has an efficacy that I think probably nothing else can.”

CSW and HART are calling on the international community to investigate the claims of genocide and crimes against humanity and to increase pressure on Burma’s ruling junta.

“Everytime we visit the Karen, Karenni and Shan, we find mounting evidence of gross violations of human rights which we believe may amount to genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions,” says Baroness Cox, chief executive of HART and honorary president of CSW-UK.

Baroness Cox, who was also among those on the recent trip, has urged organisations including the European Union and United Nations to take action in recognition of the “severity” of the situation and called on the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to suspend Burma’s membership until “significant progress is made towards a transition to a federal democracy and an improvement in human rights”.

Dr Panter says that what was happening along the border could only be described as genocide. “It is a deliberate policy of annihilation."

He says while he was often asked when visiting the people along the border whether the world cared about what was happening there, he believes the world has forgotten about what is happening in Burma.

“Unfortunately while Iraq has been on the front pages, it’s a great temptation...for dictatorial and totalitarian regimes to hugely increase their human rights abuses because they know they’re not going to get called to task for it. They know that while Iraq is continually on the front page and on CNN...most of the world’s media are going to be concentrating there. So there is not a lot of interest in what goes on in Burma, to be honest.”

* Burma was renamed the Union of Myanmar in 1989. While the name change has been recognised by the United Nations, some national governments including the United States and United Kingdom and much of the Burmese population do not recognise it. CSW and HART refer to the country as Burma in their report, a practise which Sight has adopted in this story for ease of quotation.

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