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Crunch time for UN envoy to
Myanmar
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - The United Nations human-rights envoy
to Myanmar will have to come up with more than
diplomatic niceties during his current visit to the
military-ruled Southeast Asian country if his mission is
to be viewed as a success.
The visit by Paulo
Pinheiro, UN special rapporteur on human rights for
Myanmar, "will serve as an important test case for the
credibility of his mission and of the UN's ability to
improve the human-rights situation in Burma", said Sunai
Phasuk of Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional
human-rights watchdog, using the name the country went
by before the military junta changed it to Myanmar.
"It is about time that the Burmese regime is
pushed to indicate in practical terms how it intends
improving the human rights situation," added Debbie
Stothard, coordinator of ALTSEAN Burma, a regional
network of rights groups. "He [Pinheiro] has to get the
regime to act," Stothard said.
The task before
Pinheiro - getting Yangon's military junta to loosen its
stranglehold over the country after developments like
the May release from house arrest of opposition leader
Aung San Suu Kyi - will not be an easy one. A spate of
recent reports on a range of rights abuses reveals the
daunting challenge before the UN envoy, who is on an
11-day visit to Myanmar that ends next Monday.
On Monday this week, the Brussels-based
International Confederation for Free Trade Unions
(ICFTU) issued a report saying that forced labor in
Myanmar was on the rise. "Massive forced labor is
actually on the increase", including people forced into
"opium production", states the ICFTU's 350-page report.
"Civilians in at least 16 villages in Burma's Southern
Tenasserim Division were forced to construct a highway
between Knabauk and Maung Ma Gan. Families were often
forced to work for 20 days or more per month, each
having to build a 20-meter-long, four-meter-wide stretch
of road in April 2002," the report stated.
Not
lost on the ICFTU is the implication of such violations,
which occurred between October 2001 to September 2002.
Yangon's ruling generals have failed to uphold their
promise to the international community to end forced
labor. The military government assured the International
Labor Organization (ILO) that it would take steps to
eradicate forced labor after the UN agency began
pressing for such measures in 2001.
The US
Department of Labor concluded early this year that
"millions" of people had been driven into forced labor
in Myanmar.
Preceding the ICFTU's report was an
expose by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based
rights lobby, which accused Myanmar of having the
world's highest number of child soldiers. "It appears
that the vast majority of new recruits [for Myanmar's
army] are forcibly conscripted, and there may be as many
as 70,000 soldiers under the age of 18," states the HRW
220-page study, "My Gun Was as Tall as Me", released on
October 15.
These children, some of whom are as
young as 11 years old, "are subject to beatings and
systematic humiliation during training" under the
Tatmadaw Kyi, as the Myanmese national army is known.
"Once deployed, they must engage in combat, participate
in human rights abuses against civilians, and are
frequently beaten and abused by their commanders," the
report stated.
Earlier, two minority-rights
groups accused the Myanmese army of raping close to 625
women and girls between 1996 and 2001 in the country's
eastern Shan state. Released in mid-June, the report
titled "License to Rape" triggered Pinheiro's current
visit, his second for the year and fourth since being
appointed to this post. Yangon said last week that it
had invited the UN envoy to investigate the rape
charges, which the junta dismissed soon after the
report's release.
The State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), as the military government
is officially known, has also forcefully relocated
villagers in the rape-affected areas, stated Hseng
Noung, spokeswoman for the Thai-based Shan Women's
Action Network, one of the rights groups that brought
out the report. "We have requested him [Pinheiro] to
come to the border areas to meet people who have been
victims," she said, referring to areas on the Thai side
of the border across Myanmar.
Pinheiro had
already informed his Yangon hosts that he does not plan
to visit the Shan state to investigate cases of alleged
rape of Shan women. This is welcomed by rights
activists, who say the government-arranged visit would
not have allowed rape victims to speak openly to
Pinheiro anyway.
The UN envoy, however, did
visit political prisoners in the notorious Insein prison
in the Myanmese capital. There are more than 1,200
political activists behind bars, despite the SPDC's
periodic release of political prisoners since early last
year.
Suu Kyi's release in May after 19 months
of house arrest was the most prominent one. Pinheiro met
with Suu Kyi on Tuesday but declined to comment on their
discussion.
Freedom for Suu Kyi and other
activists was more of a public relations exercise by the
SPDC, said Teddy Buri, president of a group of Myanmese
parliamentarians in exile. The release of political
dissidents was done "to please the international
community" and is not "an indicator of the SPDC's
commitment to human rights", Buri said.
"There
has been time since his [Pinheiro's] appointment for the
SPDC to change, but it has not. The situation is coming
down to the crunch," said Stothard.
(Inter Press
Service)
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