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Burma a Nightmare for Minorities And for one Karen mother, military abuse resulted in the brutal murder of her daughter. ''When the soldiers shot my thirteen-year-old daughter, her intestines came out,'' said the woman. ''She was in agony, and screaming, but we couldn't do anything to ease her pain. She died after an hour. We hadn't done anything against the government.'' These accounts, which appear in a report released Thursday by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), are the latest in a mounting body of evidence that points to Burma as being the worst abuser of minority communities across South-east Asia. ''The discrimination against minorities is widespread in Burma. And there is no similar systemic abuse in other parts of South-east Asia,'' Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director, said during an interview after the launch here of the 70-page report on the continuing violations perpetrated by the Burmese army. It is a view shared by groups fighting for the rights of ethnic minorities in Burma, such as the Kachin and the Shan. ''Women are the most vulnerable because of this abuse, which is a policy of the military regime,'' Gum Khong, a researcher with the Kachin Women's Association Thailand (KWAT), told IPS. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta is officially known, is stepping on the Kachins' right to religious and cultural freedom, she said. ''We cannot build churches and they discriminate against our literature.'' A report released by KWAT in mid-May shed light on other factors, such as unsustainable development policies and economic neglect in the Kachin region, as impacting this community in predominantly Buddhist Burma. Consequently, Kachin women have become victims of human traffickers, with a number of them being trapped into the sex industry in neighbouring China, stated the report, 'Driven Away: Trafficking of Kachin Women on the China-Burma Border.' ''Militarisation, neglect of social services and unsustainable development policies have caused spiralling poverty,'' it added. ''(Kachin women) are being sold as wives in provinces across China, being forced into the Chinese and Burmese sex industry, or simply disappearing without a trace at the Chinese border.'' Women from the Shan ethnic community have suffered in other ways, including being victims of systemic rape by Burmese troops. ''Raping women has become a policy of the military in its attack on ethnic communities,'' Hseng Noung of the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN), told IPS. Two reports released by her group last year and the year before have documented over 700 cases of women and girls being raped by Burmese troops as they marched through the region home to the Shan in the east of the country. Such severity of state-sanctioned abuse has touched most of the country's ethnic minorities, adds Hseng Noung. ''Of course the SPDC tries to deny it but that is the reality. Minorities are not protected.'' The Karen, Shan, Kachin, Mon, Karenni are among the major ethnic communities who make up almost 35 percent of Burma's population of 52 million. The majority community are the Burmans, who themselves are victims of the junta's oppressive rule. Although abuse on such a scale may not be the case elsewhere in South-east Asia, ethnic minorities in countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos and Thailand lead lives haunted by the spectre of violence and discrimination. In communist-ruled Vietnam, it is the increasingly Christian Montagnard people, from the country's central highlands, who continue to feel the brunt of state abuse. ''This struggle has been going on since 2001. The Montagnards are protesting against the confiscation of their land and religious repression,'' Sara Colm, an HRW researcher, told IPS. In Cambodia, on the other hand, it is the Vietnamese minority that faces the hostility -- in the form of mob violence and killings -- of the Khmer majority. Here, though, discrimination is more the work of the public than of government policies. It is, likewise, in Indonesia, where the Christian minority in the province of Maluku continues to be set upon by Muslim mobs, including attacks on churches. Even the ethnic Acehnese community, who are Muslims in this predominantly Muslim country, suffer from discrimination largely due to having a distinct culture and history from the dominant Javanese community. Elsewhere in the region, namely predominantly Buddhist Thailand and largely Catholic Philippines, Muslim minorities encounter a world that, at times, is stacked against them. For HRW's Adams, it is a disturbing reality, given that both Thailand and the Philippines have made greater advances on the road to democracy than their neighbours. ''I would not want to be a Muslim in southern Thailand today,'' said Adams, referring to the violence that has erupted in that part of the country since January last year, resulting in over 600 deaths. Yet he concedes that such discrimination is dwarfed by the scale of abuse the ethnic minorities in Burma endure. ''In many parts of eastern Burma, there is no military objective of targeting (Karens), but an economic objective,'' he said. ''Houses are destroyed, villages occupied and land is taken over.'' |
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