BurmaNet News February 24, 2005

[Editor]

February 24, 2005 Issue # 2662

INSIDE BURMA
AFP: Despite boycott call, more tourists are coming to Myanmar
Mizzima: Shan ethnic Member of Parliment passes away
Myanmar Times: Officials stress funds, goals link

DRUGS
AP: China, US to step up drug enforcement cooperation

BUSINESS / MONEY
Hindustan Times: IOC, OIL plan to bid for two blocks in Myanmar

REGIONAL
Xinhua News Agency: Rohingya refugees to be taken home

INTERNATIONAL
AFP: UN Security Council looks at monitoring child soldiers
Legal Affairs: A crime with a name

STATEMENT
ILO: Statement by the ILO very High-Level Team at the close of its visit
to Myanmar

______________________________________
INSIDE BURMA

February 24, Agence France Presse
Despite boycott call, more tourists are coming to Myanmar

Maria Ruiz knew pro-democracy campaigners were urging tourists to stay
away from Myanmar, but the lure of a country that promises a glimpse into
a time gone by in Asia proved too great.

"Bagan, it's a really magical place. There's something in the air," the
Peruvian tourist said of the region that hosts a world famous collection
of thousands of 11th and 12th century Buddhist stupas, pagodas and
shrines.

"I think the boycott is mainly for the tour agents, because all the money
goes to the government," Ruiz said after two weeks touring the
military-ruled country.

"We organized everything ourselves," taking private transport and using
private hotels to avoid giving money to government-affiliated businesses,
she told AFP.

Ruiz is among the segment of independent travelers that surged 64 percent
last year to comprise nearly half of all air arrivals, in part due to the
increasing use of the Internet to book reservations, the junta said
recently.

Pro-democracy campaigners are urging tourists like Ruiz to stay away from
Myanmar, but growing numbers are ignoring that call.

They fuel one of the only growth areas in an economy decimated by years of
neglect, mismanagement and international sanctions.

Similar to the boycotts which put pressure on South Africa's former
apartheid regime, the Burma Campaign UK -- which refers to the country by
its former name -- has lined up politicians and celebrities to back the
"I'm Not Going" campaign.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair this month joined stars like US actress
Susan Sarandon and British actor Sir Ian McKellen in backing the campaign,
pledging not to take holidays in Myanmar and urging others to do the same.

Myanmar's ruling junta, however, is eager to attract more tourists to the
country, whose isolation gives it an appeal that other countries in
Southeast Asia are losing fast.

Nearly 657,000 foreigners visited the country last year, up from nearly
600,000 in 2003, according to tourism authorities.

Their goal is to raise that number to 750,000 this year, and are in the
midst of a Yangon airport expansion that could see the facility handle
Boeing 747s and up to 2.7 million passengers per year by 2006.

Unlike in neighboring Thailand, which receives more than 10 million
tourists annually, people in Myanmar have relatively little contact with
the outside world, and traditional ways of life still hold great sway.

Women and children wear sandlewood makeup, and traditional dress is still
widely worn instead of western clothing.

The nation has yet to modernize, so Yangon's streets are still lined with
colonial buildings and solemn Buddhist temples. Fewer than one million
cars are registered in the entire country, so traffic and pollution so
common in other Asian cities has yet to clog the roads and air.

But the isolation that leaves Myanmar with a flavor of days gone by in the
rest of the world is born of a military regime that stands accused of
flagrant human rights abuses including forced labor, recruitment of child
soldiers, and the detention of thousands of political prisoners -- most
notably Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Because the military keeps tight tabs on the struggling economy, the junta
takes a hefty slice from official foreign currency exchanges and many
businesses, including hotels and restaurants.

That is why pro-democracy campaigners like Aung San Suu Kyi have urged
travellers to wait to visit a free Myanmar.

But that hasn't kept tourists from coming.

French, Germans and Italians on package tours stroll the streets of
Yangon, and farther north groups hike through the Bagan plains. Most of
the foreign visitors come from other Asian countries.

Cindy Tsang, a 35-year-old tourist from Hong Kong, said she had worried
about Myanmar's notoriously oppressive military rulers before she and her
husband came here on holiday.

"My friends didn't want to come with us," Tsang said as she shopped for
last-minute souvenirs.

"They were scared about the government and about the level of development."

Independent politician U Win Naing said the junta had not taken much
notice of the calls for a tourism boycott.

"A tourism boycott doesn't affect them much. It just denies them some
revenues," he said.

______________________________________

February 23, Mizzima News
Shan ethnic Member of Parliment passes away

Sai Tha Aye, an elected Member of Parliament of NamKham township of Shan
State, early yesterday, succumbed to his prolonged illness and passed
away.

Vice Chairman of the Shan National League for Democracy or SNLD, Sai Tha
Aye, 70, passed away at his home in NamKham and the body will be taken for
burial tomorrow.

" The NamKham SNLD as well as the SNLD central will read an honorary
statement and we will crack fire crackers as memorial. We, family members
as well as Party members will give our last homage and we will bury him",
said one of his sons.

A couple of days ago, authorities arrested some top leaders of the Shan
ethnic group, including Hkun Htun Oo, the chairman of the SNLD. This party
won the second most seats in the 1990 election, and is presently
boycotting the junta's National Convention like the main opposition party,
National League for Democracy (NLD).

Sai Thar Aye was born on 13 May 1935 in Thibaw township of Shan State. He
served as police officer for over ten years in Lashio and in NamKham. He
was later elected as the Chairman of NamKham Township People's Council in
1974. In 1988 he became a member of the Shan National League for Democracy
and was elected as a Member of Parliament of NamKham township in 1990. He
is survived by 3 sons and 3 daughters.

_____________________________________

February 21-27, Myanmar Times
Officials stress funds, goals link - Nwe Nwe Aye and Sandar Linn

Health Ministry officials emphasised the importance of financial resources
management in helping to achieve the United Nations’ millennium
development goals at a symposium on January 17 held as part of the Myanmar
Health Research Congress.

The director of the Socio-Medical Research Division at the Department of
Medical Research (Lower Myanmar), Dr Than Tun Sein, said it was important
to ensure that limited financial resources were used efficiently and
effectively to achieve the goals by the target of 2015.

Dr Than Tun Sein, who chaired the symposium, said health spending needed
to rise despite increased allocations from the government in recent years.

Ministry figures show that the government spent more than K20 billion on
health care in 2003-2004, an increase of K500 million over the previous
year.

Dr Than Tun Sein said it was important to strengthen and promote research
activities to gain an accurate understanding of the nation’s health
status.

The millennium development goals seek to reduce maternal and child deaths,
combat HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases and improve nutrition and
access to clean water and sanitation facilities.

Health ministry figures for 2000 show that 2.24 per cent of the population
suffers from malaria and the death rate from the disease was about 23
people in every 100,000.

A deputy director of the Department of Health Planning, U Htay Win, told
the symposium that the proportion of the population living below minimum
nutrition levels had fallen to six per cent in 1998, from 10 per cent in
1991.

He said the number of children orphaned by HIV-AIDS had reached 43,000 at
the end of 2001, up from 14,000 in 1999.

A director of the Department of Health Planning, Dr Phone Myint, said it
would finalise a national health accounting system in the middle of this
year which would identify trends in health spending. Dr Phone Myint said
the system would help health officials to make correct decisions on
allocating financial resources.

It can also make financial projections of health system needs, he said.

_____________________________________
DRUGS

February 24, Associated Press
China, US to step up drug enforcement cooperation

The United States and China plan to boost cooperation in drug enforcement
amid concerns that traffickers are using Chinese routes to haul heroin and
other drugs from neighboring Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

U.S. and Chinese officials planned to sign a cooperation pact Thursday to
allow the two sides to exchange information on enforcement methods, drug
trends, money laundering techniques, and trafficking organizations,
according to a statement from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

The pact will "begin a new era of intelligence sharing that will allow us
jointly to target, investigate, and dismantle international drug
trafficking organizations," DEA Administrator Karen Tandy was quoted as
saying.

Tandy was to sign the memorandum of understanding with her Chinese
counterpart, Yang Feng Rui, the statement said.

China's close proximity to Southeast Asia's heroin-producing "Golden
Triangle" and its large, modern port facilities make it an "attractive
transit center" for traffickers, the DEA said in an intelligence report on
China put out last year and posted on the organization's Web site.

Authorities say more than 95 percent of the heroin sold in China comes
from the Golden Triangle an area where the borders of Laos, Thailand and
Myanmar meet.

Most enters over a 2,000-kilometer- (1,200-mile-) border shared by China
and Myanmar, transiting east through the country to the coastal areas and
then on to international markets, the DEA report said.

The report also said drug traffickers in China have increasingly armed
themselves with automatic weapons and grenades to protect themselves from
rival organizations and to avoid capture by police.

China executes hundreds of people every year on drug charges.

_____________________________________
BUSINESS / MONEY

February 24, Hindustan Times
IOC, OIL plan to bid for two blocks in Myanmar

State-owned refiner Indian Oil Corp and its exploration partner Oil India
Ltd plan to bid for two onshore oil and gas exploration blocks in Myanmar.

IOC-OIL combine had late last month bagged an oil block in Libya, the
first ever overseas block won by an Indian firm through the competitive
bidding route.

IOC-OIL combine, who may possibly also be joined by state-owned gas
utility GAIL (India) Ltd, are planning to bid for Blocks RS-5 and RS-9,
west of the Irawaddy River, a top official said.

"We were originally looking at 5 blocks but have now narrowed down to two.
We are studying the geological data and will firm up our bid by the next
month," he said.

India's flagship ONGC Videsh Ltd, the foreign arm of Oil and Natural Gas
Corp and GAIL together hold 30 per cent interest in offshore A-1 and A-3
blocks.

A Petroleum Ministry official said it has been decided that OVL would
scout for opportunities in offshore Myanmar while IOC-OIL combine have
been mandated to access the onland blocks being offered.

"OIL believes the geology of Myanmar onshore blocks is very similar to
that of areas in India's northeast where it is working," the official
said.

OVL, which owns stakes in oil and gas blocks/fields in 10 countries across
the globe, is looking at data for the eight Myanmar offshore blocks still
available. MORE

However, once OVL had decided on the blocks it wished to submit bids for,
IOC along with OIL were free to examine and assess the remaining blocks on
their own commercial considerations.

"Rather than all companies trying to crowd each other out in the same
country, we decided OVL be given exclusive jurisdiction over the offshore
area and IOC-OIL combine over the onshore," an official said.

OVL holds 20 per cent stake each in Blocks A-1 and A-3. Four to six
trillion cubic feet gas reserves have already been discovered in Korean
firm Daewoo-operated Block A-1. GAIL has 10 per cent a piece in the two
blocks.

Besides Myanmar, OVL has till date acquired stakes in oil and gas
blocks/fields in Australia, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia and
Sudan, all of which were either awarded to it on nomination basis or the
company bought out an existing partner.

IOC-OIL combine on January 30 won India's first ever block on competitive
basis. The two won the onshore Block-086 in the Sirte region of Libya in a
global auction where global oil majors like Occidental and ChevronTexaco
from US, European firms like Repson of Spain, Italy's Eni, OMV of Austria,
British Petroleum and Royal Dutch/Shell also participated. OVL also bid
for a block, but was unlucky.

_____________________________________
REGIONAL

February 24, Xinhua News Agency
Rohingya refugees to be taken home

The remaining Rohinga refugees in Bangladesh will be taken back to Myanmar
with the cooperation of the United Nations High Commission for Refugee
(UNHCR).

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia was assured of this here by
visiting Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win when he called on Zia on
Thursday afternoon, reported the official Bangladesh News Agency.

Nyan Win arrived here Thursday on a three-day official visit at the
invitation of his Bangladesh counterpart M Morshed Khan.

The Myanmar foreign minister expressed the sentiment of his government
when Zia referred to the 20,000 Rohinga refugees still living in different
camps in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh's southernmost area bordering Myanmar.

According to the UNHCR, over 250,000 Bengali-speaking Myanmar Muslim
ethnic minorities, popularly known as Rohingyas, took shelter in
Bangladesh in 1991-1992 to escape from the reported oppression by the
military rulers of Myanmar.

Most of the refugees have been repatriated to Myanmar since then, but
there are still over 20,000 refugees living in camps of Cox's Bazar. The
repatriation process is still underway, as the Myanmar authorities
recently cleared a list of about 6,500 Rohingyas for their repatriation to
their country.

Various bilateral issues including promotion of trade and commerce came up
for discussion during the meeting.

The progress of the implementation of different agreements and memorandums
of understanding (MoUs) signed between the two neighboring countries for
cooperation in trade, road link, agriculture and coastal shipping were
discussed in the meeting.

The Bangladeshi prime minister urged the Myanmar authorities to import
more goods from Bangladesh to enhance bilateral trade.

The Myanmar foreign minister apprised Zia of the national goals of his
country, including the democratization process.

Nyan Win also explained Myanmar's domestic political situation during his
meetings with Bangladesh leaders.

_____________________________________
INTERNATIONAL

February 24, Agence France Presse
UN Security Council looks at monitoring child soldiers

United Nations: The Security Council on Wednesday said it had begun
looking at UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's proposal to monitor the use
of child soldiers and other violations of children's rights in conflict.

A draft resolution by current council president Benin would try to set up
a mechanism by September in a bid to ending the recruitment or use of
child soldiers, of whom there are currently an estimated 300,000
worldwide.

In a statement read by Benin's Foreign Minister Rogatien Biaou, who
chaired Wednesday's council meeting, the council said it was determined to
"put an end to impunity" for those that use children as fighters.

Olara Otunnu, UN under secretary general for children and armed conflict,
said the council should consider targeted sanctions against those parties
that recruit or use children in combat -- whether government or rebel
forces.

"At political and practical levels, there are levers of influence ... In
today's world, parties in conflict do not operate as islands unto
themselves," Otunnu said in a briefing to the council.

"The viability and success of their political and military projects
depends crucially on networks of cooperation and goodwill that link them
to the outside world," he said.

A UN report this month said child fighters are used or recruited in 11
different nations, often by rebels: Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines,
Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Uganda.

Otunnu cited improvement on the issue in post-conflict areas including
Afghanistan, Angola, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia and Sierra
Leone, but insisted that more had to be done worldwide.

The report laid out an "action plan" for monitoring the question --
focusing on the killing or maiming of children, child soldiers, attacks on
schools, rape and sexual violence against children, abduction and the
denial of aid.

It was not immediately clear how much support Otunnu's call for sanctions
could win on the council.

"Some of these groups are already subject to a regime of sanctions," said
Pierre-Andre Wiltzer, a government minister who spoke for France during
the council meeting.

"The decision to impose targeted sanctions raises many questions," he said.

The use of children has become a sensitive issue for the United Nations
itself after revelations that UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo had had sex wil local girls as young as 13.

"We must move without any compromise or complacency to punish the
offenders and to root out this practise," Otunnu said.

_____________________________________

February 2005, Legal Affairs
A crime with a name - Nicholas Thompson

Most people think the atrocities in Burma should not be called genocide.
Guy Horton is on a quest to prove them wrong.

Guy Horton has seen people doing forced labor in Burma's jungle, smelled
the rotting corpses of villagers killed by bayonets, and heard the cries
of a small child being tossed by government troops into a burning hut. But
it was something seemingly trivial that convinced the 53-year-old British
human rights researcher that he was witnessing genocide.

In 2000, Horton was trekking on a fact-finding tour through Karen state,
in the Texas-sized country of Burma. He came upon a village of bamboo huts
that government troops had torched. While picking through the ashes of the
village, he found a metal cooking pot, upside down, with its bottom
smashed in. Until that point, Horton had assumed that he was witnessing
the spasms of a 50-year-old war between the ethnic minorities in the
jungle and the ethnic majority that controls Burma's government. But the
pot led him to a new theory- that the State Peace and Development Council,
the junta that runs the country, had come up with a calculated strategy to
wipe out the minorities and empty the land. While the villagers who had
escaped into the jungle might return and rebuild their homes, they would
no longer have the means to cook and sustain themselves.

Horton became interested in Burma in 1998 when he rekindled a childhood
friendship with the now-deceased husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, who had won
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her efforts to bring democracy to Burma.
Interest turned to obsession, and Horton has spent the past seven years
documenting the junta's crimes, recently on behalf of the Netherlands
government and a British nonprofit group.

Horton is coy about what he has been doing in this period, and why a
former radio reporter based in Eastern Europe turned into a crusader for
human rights. He has fought his way through Burma's jungles, which are
largely forbidden to Westerners, interviewing victims and taking videos of
razed villages. But having been beaten once by soldiers of the junta,
Horton worries that additional revelations could place him at greater
risk. More importantly, he doesn't want the story of a Westerner to
detract from the Asian realities he is determined to expose.

Horton plans to present to the United Nations this spring the results of
his investigation-a 600-page indictment of the Burmese regime, now known
as the State Peace and Development Council, or SPDC, along with hours of
video footage edited by Images Asia, a respected documentary film company.
Based on guidance from a key legal adviser in the case against Slobodan
Milosevic, Horton will argue that the violence in the Southeast Asian
nation now amounts to genocide, defined in the 1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the U.N. as any
attempt, whether successful or not, "to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."

Genocide is the most potent term in international law, evoking images of
Nazi gas chambers and Rwandan machetes. Burma's adversity is less dramatic
than those catastrophes, and Horton may well be rebuffed. But then again,
at first so was Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor whose multi-volume
catalogue of genocides throughout history and relentless lobbying helped
inspire the genocide convention.

COLONIZED BY THE BRITISH IN THE 19TH CENTURY, Burma was governed as a
province of the Indian Empire until 1937. It gained independence in 1948.
Bordered primarily by China, India, and Thailand, Burma has recently been
defined by its struggle for democracy against the military dictators who
have run the country since 1962.

The best hope for democracy came in 1988 when government
mismanagement-including a move based on astrological signs to make the
country's currency divisible by the number nine-led to mass street
demonstrations. The junta nearly collapsed, but retained control by
slaughtering several thousand students who were protesting in Rangoon,
Burma's capital. Two years later, the government held elections,
apparently to curry international favor. Aung San Suu Kyi became leader of
the newfound National League for Democracy, which won more than 80 percent
of the vote. She was soon put under house arrest, where she has remained,
with a few breaks, ever since. Not long after jailing Suu Kyi, the junta
renamed the country "Myanmar," the historical name for the pre-colonial
kingdom controlled by the Burmans. But most of the world's nations,
acknowledging the wishes of the duly elected government, continue to call
the country Burma.

The leaders of the current government are ethnically Burman, a group that
comprises somewhere around three-fifths of the country's population of 40
million. That number is a loose estimate, however, since Burma hasn't had
a thorough census since 1941. The rest of the country is an ethnic
mélange, cramped within haphazard borders drawn by Britain in the late
19th century. Of the country's 14 political regions, seven are "divisions"
populated largely by Burmans and the other seven are "states" named after
the ethnic groups that predominate inside them.

Horton is making his case on behalf of three ethnic groups. The Karen and
Shan each compose just under 10 percent of the population, and the Karenni
make up about 1 percent. All three groups cluster in the east and have
languages and cultural traditions distinct from the Burmans. There are
crucial religious differences too. The Burmans are Buddhists, while many
Karen and Karenni are Christian. Other groups in Burma have faced
oppression, including the Rohingyas, a Muslim group in the west that the
junta has twice tried to drive out of the country. But the discrimination
against the Rohingyas is likely not genocidal, because the government's
main goal is apparently not to wipe them out.

The three groups in Horton's brief sided with the British during World War
II, when the Burmans joined forces with the Japanese. Tensions simmered
when Britain granted Burma its independence after the war, and finally
exploded in December 1948, when the Karen attacked Rangoon and tried to
secede. There were similar uprisings in Shan state and also in Karenni
state, where rebel leaders claimed that the British had granted them
national sovereignty. The battles between the government and insurgent
armies continued intermittently for decades, worsening in 1988 after
hardliners took over the weakened junta. By 1995, the SPDC had conquered
much of the east and had driven many of the ethnic minorities into refugee
camps on the Thai side of the border.

According to the 1948 convention, in order to prove the junta guilty,
Horton must demonstrate that it has committed genocide in one of five
ways. The first is "killing members of the group." Most experts estimate
that several thousand ethnic minorities have been killed annually for the
past 50 years. In a rare moment of candor in 1989, the chairman of the
junta acknowledged that the death toll "would reach as high as millions."
He was discussing total deaths in the long-running battle, including
Burman soldiers, but a high percentage of the dead are ethnic minorities.

The junta doesn't widely practice two of the other methods of
genocide-sterilization and kidnapping children-but it regularly carries
out the remaining two: "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group" and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction."

In addition, Horton must establish that there is an attempt to destroy an
ethnic group at least "in part," a hazily defined threshold that the
atrocities in Burma would seem to meet. According to a recent report by
the Thailand/Burma Border Consortium, of the 250,000 surviving Karenni,
88,000 are living on the run in Burma's jungles. Another 25,000 are stuck
in Thai refugee camps. In the estimate of the Karen Human Rights Group, an
organization based in Thailand, the number of Karen villagers able to live
free of massive government oppression in their native state is zero.

THE BURMESE JUNTA DIVIDES THE TERRITORY in the Karen, Shan, and Karenni
states into three classifications: black zones, where the insurgents
maintain nominal control and mobile villages; brown zones, where land is
contested; and white zones, where the SPDC troops, known as the Tatmadaw,
control everything. The black zones, which make up about 10 percent of the
regions in which the Shan, Karenni, and Karen live, are rapidly shrinking.
The brown zones and the white zones each compose 45 percent of the ethnic
regions.

In the black zones, the Tatmadaw harasses the minorities to the extent
that it can. Soldiers block medical supplies from reaching these areas,
and they try to kill the people who bring them from Thailand. Nai Aye
Lwin, a 33-year-old doctor based at a Thai clinic, slips across the border
unarmed a few times every year with medical supplies in a backpack,
bringing antimalarial quinine to villagers and making bamboo splints for
people maimed by land mines. Though he doesn't carry a gun, he has been
shot at and believes that, if captured, he would be killed. The Tatmadaw
has also targeted medical clinics in the refugee camps in Thailand. In
1996, the SPDC tried to kill an esteemed malaria researcher working in
Burmese refugee camps in Thailand. The researcher escaped by hiding
underground.

Attacks and raids are the Tatmadaw's preferred approach in the brown
zones. Because the terrain is often impassable by vehicle, the soldiers
typically approach on foot. The villagers, on constant lookout, usually
spot them and flee into the jungle. An empty village is vulnerable,
however. The soldiers often burn entire communities, even though the
villagers build their huts far apart to make it harder for them to catch
fire. Before leaving, the soldiers often kill the livestock they don't eat
and plant land mines around the village to harm those who return.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Karen, Karenni, and Shan have been
pushed into nearby jungles where they live as what the U.N. classifies as
Internally Displaced People. Families in these impoverished regions are
barely able to survive even when they are left alone. On the run, it's
much harder. The lucky subsist on a diet of leaves and jungle animals like
snakes. The rest starve. Kwa Say, an IDP who spent 10 years living in the
forest, said that all of his peers "were killed by the [SPDC] or by
malaria."

The Tatmadaw wreak the most damage where their control is greatest-in the
white zones. Executions are common, forced labor is ubiquitous, and rape
is pervasive.

Daw Aye Tum, a 50-year-old woman in the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand
near the Burmese border, was unable to sit still in an interview last fall
as she described what she'd been through. She picked her nose, scratched
her eyes, coughed, spat on the floor, and smoked. Her village in Karen
state was occupied by government soldiers from the time she was a young
woman to when she fled five years ago. She was forced to do road work and
carry loads for soldiers until she became head of the village. Then, she
had to assign villagers to forced labor in order to meet the government's
quotas. Workers whom the soldiers deemed too slow or too weak were beaten.
Aye Tum remembers one neighbor dying of exhaustion.

The brutality could be more direct as well. Aye Tum recalled when SPDC
soldiers buried four of her fellow villagers up to their necks in the
middle of the village and beat them to death with shovels, claiming the
villagers had aided insurgents.

Dozens of refugees interviewed in Thailand echoed Aye Tum's experience
with forced labor. Naw Mumu, a 19-year-old Karen who lives in the Umphiur
refugee camp, said that she began clearing and building roads for the SPDC
when she was 10. "Whoever could handle a shovel would go," she said. Naw
Bobo Sweet, a 51-year-old mother of six in the same camp, said that she
performed forced labor "every week, and every month" of her life after
Burmese troops arrived in her village in 1991 and forced her to relocate
to a new, tightly controlled village. Bobo Sweet fled that village with
her family six years ago.

The tasks forced on villagers go beyond road work and basic portering. Naw
Mumu, a Christian, said that SPDC troops forced her and her fellow
villagers to knock down their church. Saw Tamla Wah, who lives in the Mae
La camp, had to raze a neighboring village's rice paddies.

Major Thawng Za Lian, a Christian former soldier in the SPDC's army who
defected after being told that converting to Buddhism was his only chance
at promotion, said that he has witnessed many of these offenses. Lian said
that in 1995 he worked in the southern regions of Karen state, protecting
a pipeline being built into Thailand to transport natural gas for the
French company Total and the American company Unocal. He knew that the
region had once had many villages, but when he arrived, "There were no
villages. The houses were all collapsed, and the people had all been
chased out by the army."

Lian added that forced labor was frequently used, and he admitted that he
had drafted Karen villagers to move the army's munitions. Lacking
sufficient trucks or helicopters, the army needed people to carry its
supplies. Almost none of them were paid.

Rape is often the vehicle for the savagery of the SPDC. A 2002 report by
the Shan Women's Action Network, which was also substantiated by the U.S.
State Department, notes that "rape is officially condoned as a weapon of
war." Burma defines ethnicity through the father, so a child born as a
result of rape means one less minority and one more Burman. But the
soldiers have other purposes besides diluting bloodlines. According to the
same 2002 report, 10 soldiers in Shan state tied a man to a tree and
proceeded to take turns raping his 7-months-pregnant wife close enough for
him to hear what was happening. "This is about humiliating the local
population and saying 'We are destroying your community and your women,' "
said Charm Tong, who contributed to the report.

To Horton, all of this adds up to genocide. "Forced labor isn't genocide;
relocation isn't genocide; taking food isn't genocide; torture isn't
genocide," he said. "But all of them combined mean that you can't
survive."

HORTON CAN DEMONSTRATE A LONGSTANDING GOVERNMENT POLICY of
"Burmanization," the effort to make all of the ethnic minorities adapt to
the norms, values, and culture of the majority. The government bans
schools from teaching in the native languages of their students and
prohibits cultural festivals as well. According to Charm Tong, traditional
dance is often forbidden in Shan state and villagers are made to watch
Burman dance ceremonies. "What is the SPDC's intention? It's not to kill
every Karen. Even the Nazis did not succeed in killing every Jew," said
May Oo, a Karen teacher. "What they want to do is to kill the literature,
kill the roots, kill anything that we could point to."

But Burmanization is a far cry from genocide, and the convention requires
proof of intent of destruction. Horton has documents showing that dozens
of commanders ordered specific massacres, and he can point to a 1992
speech by Ket Sein, the junta's health minister, who reportedly declared
in front of a large group in Rangoon: "In 10 years, all Karen will be
dead. If you want to see a Karen, you will have to go to a museum in
Rangoon."

But not surprisingly, few official documents lay out a deliberate campaign
of genocide commissioned at the highest levels. According to Major Lian,
soldiers were taught about the international rules of war and then warned
not to write anything down if they violated them. "If there is something
that is not in accordance with the law, that would be given by oral
orders," he said. "For example, in the battlefield, if the village has to
be burned, that order would be given orally."

The crux of Horton's case is that abuses this prolonged and widespread
couldn't have happened because of a few rogue commanders. In 1998, a
special rapporteur for human rights in Burma observed at the U.N. that
violations this systemic are "the result of policy at the highest level
entailing political and legal responsibility."

THE JUNTA, ON THE OTHER HAND, characterizes the Karen, Karenni, and Shan
as losers in a series of civil wars who prefer battle to compromise and
who could end the violence by submitting. "Only when all the national
races cherish and love their motherland will they be able to live together
with unity and solidarity," said Than Shwe, the leader of the junta, in
2003. In support of this view, oppression has abated in some areas where
rebel groups have laid down their weapons. Supporters of the junta also
point out that many ethnic minorities prosper in the country. The only
neurosurgeon in Burma, for example, is Karen.

As the junta also insists, the insurgents have committed their share of
sins. Simon Po, a former soldier for the Karen insurgency who now lives in
Thailand, said that when they captured a soldier of the junta, they'd
sometimes torture him, but "usually, we'd just kill him with a knife."

Horton can't dismiss these arguments, particularly when they are voiced by
activists who genuinely want to reform and would seem to be his natural
allies. The president of the U.S.-based Free Burma Coalition, Zarni (many
Burmese have just one name), believes Horton's analysis is distorted, and
that the ethnic groups and the junta are engaged in a deep-rooted battle
over resources and political power. The minorities want sovereignty,
whereas the junta wants to keep the country whole. "The conflict is deeply
political with ethnic dimensions, not the other way around, as in Bosnia
or Rwanda," Zarni said.

Other skeptics worry that Horton's quest could distract from the central
aim of bringing democracy to Burma. May Oo, who studied law in the United
States before going back to the Thailand-Burma border where she teaches at
a school for refugees, said that she has wanted to push a claim of
genocide against the junta since the mid-1990s, but that American
activists have dissuaded her. She said she was told "not to rock the boat
because it would divert attention from the democracy movement." Another
concern is that the junta would be less likely to accept a political
settlement if it feared it would be tried for genocide.

Whether the destruction in Burma meets the legal definition of genocide
strikes many of Horton's critics as beside the point. They see the word as
a political, more than legal, tool whose visceral strength must be
protected from overuse. Applying the term to the situation in Burma now
could dilute the term's power for application in more dramatic cases, like
the slaughter of Black Africans by Arabs in Darfur, Sudan. Matthew Daley,
a State Department official who worked on Asian affairs from the late
1970s to 2004, said, "There is no country that we are more prepared to
criticize than Burma," but he added that no one in the U. S. government
wanted to use the term "genocide" while he was there. David Steinberg, a
professor at Georgetown University and a respected historian of Burma,
said that it "debases the term" to describe the numerous abuses in Burma
as genocide.

THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION, HOWEVER, WAS INTENDED to apply to places where
there's a genus (the Greek word for people) and a cide (the Latin root for
killing). If people want an unadulterated term for what the Nazis did to
the Jews-which Winston Church famously called "a crime without a
name"-there is
one: holocaust. Genocide is also much more than a rhetorical device. It's
the rare crime that the international community has effectively punished.
Rwandans and Serbs now sit in prisons because they violated the
convention.

In April, Horton plans to travel to the United States, Canada, and Holland
to line up allies and explore how best to present his legal arguments. At
the moment, he has little real support beyond two Christian groups in
England called Christian Solidarity Worldwide and the Jubilee Campaign.

His preferred option is to convince one of the nations that has ratified
the genocide convention to bring a case against the junta in the U.N.'s
International Court of Justice. Horton could also ask the U.N. to set up a
commission of inquiry to determine if genocide has occurred in Burma, as a
preliminary step to bringing formal charges. Either of these scenarios
could help provide legal justification for an internationally sanctioned
invasion or a peaceful intervention to remove the junta from power.
Horton's advocacy might also prompt additional sanctions against Burma or
greater assistance for the refugees and IDPs. Right now, almost no
international assistance goes across the Thailand-Burma border.

Horton knows that however he brings the case, his arguments will be judged
based on his answers to a series of questions: Are these ethnic groups
being destroyed at least "in part"? Is the SPDC doing one of the five
things proscribed by the genocide convention? Does the junta have an
intent to commit genocide? While he's sure the answer to each is yes,
Horton bristles at having to meet what he considers a legalistic
challenge. "When the SPDC comes into a village, they burn the houses, rape
the women, and kill the chickens," he said. "They don't worry about these
categories."...

Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at Legal Affairs.

_____________________________________
STATEMENT

February 23, International Labour Organization
Statement by the ILO very High-Level Team at the close of its visit to
Myanmar

The mandate which had been entrusted to the vHLT by the Governing Body of
the ILO at its 291st Session (November 2004) was to evaluate the attitude
of the Myanmar authorities at the highest level to the elimination of
forced labour and assess their determination to continue their cooperation
with the ILO in this regard. Its composition had been established
accordingly. The Myanmar authorities were fully aware of these terms of
reference before the mission departed for Yangon. However, the mission was
informed on its arrival that for various reasons linked to the National
Convention the program did not include the meetings that would have
enabled it to successfully complete its mandate as it understood it.

Under the circumstances, and after having discussions and making its views
known to the Minister for Labour and to the Prime Minister, the mission
decided that there would be no point at this stage to have more in-depth
discussions at the technical level on the concrete steps outlined in those
meetings which in the mission's view could contribute to alleviating
recent concerns expressed in the Governing Body.

The vHLT will submit its report to the next session of the ILO Governing
Body in March.

Sir Ninian Stephen on behalf of the vHLT