Myanmar sends UN a clear message
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - When a United Nations human-rights investigator for Myanmar called
for an international inquiry to look into possible war crimes by the country's
military regime, he added significant weight to similar calls that had been
made in other quarters.
But that call in March by Tomas Ojea Quintana, as part of a scathing 30-page
report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, has come back to
haunt the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar. Quintana has been
denied a visa by the junta to return to the Southeast Asian nation for his
fourth visit, according to diplomatic and UN sources.
Pro-democracy activists in exile are hardly surprised by the treatment given to
the Argentine lawyer, who is currently on a visit to Thailand and Indonesia
ahead of preparing another report on Myanmar to be presented to the UN General
Assembly in October.
His predecessor, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, was also shut out from the country by
the junta following critical reports tabled before the world body.
"It was very clear that Quintana touched on a very sensitive issue for the
Burmese [Myanmar] regime when he called for the setting up of an international
committee to look into war crimes," said Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Burma
Partnership, an Asia-Pacific network of civil society groups championing
democracy and human rights in Myanmar. "The regime cannot tolerate such
criticism."
In fact, Quintana broke new diplomatic ground with the strong words he said in
March, added the political exile. "It was the first time that a crime[s]
against humanity inquiry was called for by a UN human-rights rapporteur."
Despite being denied a visa, "he [Quintana] is still committed to pushing the
inquiry forward", revealed David Scott Matheison, Myanmar consultant for Human
Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights watchdog. "He is not giving up; he
wants to go back inside and engage with as many actors."
The UN established a mandate to look into human-rights violations in Myanmar in
1992. That year also saw the start of resolutions critical of the junta being
tabled during the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly.
But it was only in 2002 that the reports on war crimes allegations leveled at
the junta began to emerge, confirming a worsening climate of oppression and
abuse in a country that already had a growing list of gross human-rights
violations. The most damning report was "License to Rape", published by the
Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN), a group from Myanmar's Shan ethnic
minority.
This disturbing report documented the military's rape of Shan women as part of
their war effort against Shan ethnic rebels.
Following that 2002 report, the UN General Assembly approved for the first time
a resolution calling for an independent inquiry to investigate cases of rape
and other crimes committed by the Myanmar regime in the border areas that are
home to ethnic minorities where separatist battles were being waged.
Yet the disclosures in the SWAN report changed little, as reflected in other
reports that followed. Some were published by women belonging to the Karen
minority living along Myanmar's eastern borders, where a six-decade separatist
conflict continues.
The Karen and Shan victims are among those in the north and eastern corner of
Myanmar, close to the country's borders with Thailand and China, where some
500,000 internally displaced people live in dire conditions after fleeing
conflict situations in their villages.
The impacts of these conflicts on the ethnic civilian population were exposed
in a 2009 report authored by five international jurists. Over 3,000 ethnic
nationality villages have been burnt to the ground by the military regime,
revealed the report produced by the International Human Rights Clinic at the
law school of the US-based Harvard University. "This is comparable to the
number of villages estimated to have been destroyed or damaged in Darfur
[Sudan]."
"The world cannot wait while the military regime continues its atrocities
against the people of Burma [Myanmar]," added the jurists from Britain,
Mongolia, South Africa, the United States and Venezuela in the report "Crimes
in Burma". "We call on the UN Security Council urgently to establish a
commission of inquiry to investigate and report on crimes against humanity and
war crimes in Burma."
Quintana echoed similar sentiments in his March report: "The UN institutions
may consider the possibility to establish a commission of inquiry with a
specific fact-finding mandate to address the question of international crimes."
Quintana's report, which followed his third trip to Myanmar in February
following his appointment in May 2008, highlighted a litany of violations that
included deaths and torture of detainees, forced labor, arrest of dissidents
and the lack of freedom of expression and assembly.
"This report was the highest from a UN official and confirmed what ethnic
communities living in the war zones have been saying during the past years,"
said Charm Tong, a ranking member of SWAN. "The victims are still under attack
and have to flee the Burmese army."
For this suffering to end, Quintana's concerns and his call for a war crimes
inquiry should "break the silence at the UN Security Council", the Shan
activist told Inter Press Service. "We want Burma to be discussed at the
Security Council."
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