Indeed, few foreigners, if any, will be aware that a thousand people were recently thrown out of the village they occupied for generations near Lashio in Shan State, so that the army could extend the golf-course for tourists. Dumped at gun-point on land that is dry stubble, where it is not possible even to sink a well, they can a only watch helplessly as their precious water sprays the greens of a new gold course. This is not unusual. Last year, in order to bring Rangoon’s main golf course up to standard for rich foreigners – mostly Japanese investors – the army seized adjacent land where a community lived for 40 years. When an army blockade failed to make them move, one member of each family was arrested and taken to prison. The rest were driven in trucks to a ‘satellite town’ 15 miles away.
The full force of these events struck me in the deep south of Burma, in Mon State, where David Munro and I found what has been described as the ‘second death railway’. Connecting the towns of Ye and Tavoy, it is an extension of the notorious line built by the Japanese with the lives of more than 100,000 Asians and Allied prisoners of war. We came upon it in dense jungle beyond a village where emaciated young girls held out silver urns for contributions to the welfare of their community, a Buddhist tradition. Their face masks of thanaka – a yellow paste from treebark that protects and nourishes the skin gave the appearance of small ghosts emerging from the undergrowth. They were fortunate compared with the gangs of children at work half a mile away.
While adult slave workers toiled on 20-foot embankments, the children were engaged in a crude brickworks, most of them exposed to the pre-monsoon glare and heat. Their ages ranged from teens down to nine years old. A ten-year-old boy was employed in a hole beneath a clay-mixer, turned by two yoked buffalo. His size was crucial; an adult would not be able to do his job, which was to catch the cement-like clay as it oozed out of the grinder, in time to be collected in a barrow. There was an urgent rhythm about his movements: there had to be; if he faltered the clay would bury him. As we approached him a barrow-load fell sideways onto him and I had to intervene to free him.
One estimate is that, out of 200,000 adults and children forced to build the railway, up to 300 have died from exhaustion and disease or have been killed. This seems conservative. We counted some 20 bridges in the area and children appeared to be working on all of them. ‘No one can escape [forced labour],’ one villager told me.
‘SLORC officials or the army go from village to village. They take a child, as long as he is strong enough, without asking permissions of the parent.’
In one of its recent annual reports on human-rights abuse throughout the word, the US State Department says the SLORC ‘routinely’ uses slave labour and ‘will use the new railways to transport soldiers and construction supplies into the pipeline area’. The oil companies deny the railway is linked to the pipeline project, and although most supplies are likely to arrive by sea, there can be no doubt that the railway will allow the generals to protect the companies’ investment and their own cut from it. In 1993 Total was contacted by officials of the Burmese Government in exile, representing Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy. They provided the company with extensive evidence of slave labour along the route of the pipeline. They also demonstrated how the profits from the project would invariably buy the arms and military equipment to which about half of the SLORC’s budgetary spending is devoted, thus helping to underwrite the repression of the population. Total’s response was it would ‘continue’. UNOCAL has described reports of slave labour as ‘fabrications’.
None of this would be possible without the collaboration of the Thai Government, especially the Thai military whose Petroleum Authority will be the only importer and consumer of the gas. The deal is little different from the logging, mining and fishing concessions which Thai interests have negotiated with Rangoon since ‘development’ in their own country has all but destroyed its principal natural resources. Part of the unspoken deal appears to be that the Thai military sends back Burmese refugees. In April 1993 Thai troops burned down two refugee camps in an operation, reported the Bangkok Nation, ‘probably related to the gas pipeline’. Thousands of ethnic Mon refugees have since been forced back into Burma, many straight into the hands of the SLORC military. On the border, where the pipeline will enter Thailand, SLORC troops display Total pens in their uniforms. ‘Total is coming,’ said one of them, with a broad smile.
Desmond Tutu – like Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace Laureate – has said: ‘International pressure can change the situation in Burma. Tough sanctions, not ‘constructive engagement’ finally brought about a new South Africa. This is the language that must be spoken with tyrants, for it is the only language they understand.’ What is hopeful is that there is the promise of sanctions, coming not initially from governments but from a remarkable grassroots disinvestment movement in the United States. Modelled on the campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa, selective purchasing laws have been enacted by several American cities, including San Francisco.
These prevent public funds going to companies that trade with or invest in Burma. At the time of writing, New York State is likely to enact similar legislation and one of the biggest investors in Burma, Pepsi Cola, is withdrawing. The threat is not only loss of profits, but bad publicity, especially when applied to a company like Pepsi that says its product is ‘bringing people and nations closer together towards world peace’. Byron Rushing, who has written a selective purchasing law for the state of Massachusetts, told me: ‘In the case of South Africa, we were able to put pressure on a whole range of companies like General Motors, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and eventually most withdrew. And that really added to the pressure on the white South African government. That was a victory. As for Burma, it’s not going to happen overnight, but we have started. The civilized world should follow.’ John Pilger, article June 1996 ‘A Cry for Freedom’
The general’s power is backed by foreign money. One estimate is that since it crushed democracy in 1990 the Burmese regime has drawn 65% of its financial support from oil companies. The main backers are the French company Total and its American partner Unical. The oil pipeline they are building in the south of Burma will allow the generals to sell the country’s natural gas to Thailand. The deal will give them an estimated $400,000,000 a year over 30 years. John Pilger, Inside Burma – Land of Fear
Of course rumour has been impossible to ban, especially when the subject is the dictator himself. Of all the world’s megalomania, perhaps only Ne Win has ruled by astrology and superstition. The best example of this is the day he bankrupted the population. Without warning he cancelled most of Burma’s currency, replacing it with bank notes that added up to or included the figure 9. According to his chief astrologer, 9 was his lucky number. The Burmese weren’t quite so lucky. As most of them keep their savings in cash, most of them were ruined. ibid.
The dramatic story and a country and a heroic leader who might as well have slipped off the face of the Earth ... Burma’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi who in 1990 was placed under house arrest by the military dictators who had seized power. ibid.
It’s the story of Burma, once known as the Golden Land ... It’s a country of extraordinary beauty and gracious people. But Burma is also a secret country. Isolated for the past thirty-four years since a brutal dictatorship seized power. The assault on its people all but forgotten ... What we found was a land of fear. ibid.
The Generals who crushed democracy in Burma have ruled with a regime so harsh, bloody and uncompromising that the parallels with Indonesia and East Timor are striking. More than a million people have been forced from their homes, and according to the United Nations, untold thousands have been massacred, tortured and subjected to a modern form of slavery. Burma, says Amnesty International, is a prison without bars. ibid.
It’s now eight minutes past eight in the morning. The people of Burma chose this time on the eighth day of the eighth month in 1988 to begin one of the most remarkable popular uprisings in modern times. The dockworkers were the first to go on strike then in the days and weeks that followed it seemed that almost everyone in Burma was showing a defiance and courage at least equal to those who stormed the Berlin Wall. ibid.
At the height of their epic struggle in 1988 the people of Burma produced a genuine popular democracy, then legalised it with an overwhelming vote. For this act of principle and courage they have paid a terrible price. They deserve more than our complicity and silence. ibid.
The dispossession was mild by the standards of the dictator Ne Win and the generals who have ruled Burma since a military coup in 1962 crushed the democratically elected government. Last year the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reported that a million people had been forced from their homes in Rangoon alone, in preparation for tourism and foreign investment. Throughout Burma perhaps three million have been brutally swept up and exiled to ‘satellite zones’ where they are compelled silently to serve Burma’s new facade of ‘economic growth’ ...
Then the slaughter began. The army fired point blank at the crowds and bayoneted those who fell. In Thailand and Norway, I have interviewed the exiled witnesses to these epic events, most of them speaking publicly for the first time. ‘One of my friends was shot in the head right there, in front of me,’ said Ko Htun Oo, a former student. ‘Two girls and a monk were shot next to him.’ Another student, Aye Chan, said, ‘A lot of flame was coming out of the crematorium which was surrounded by troops. They weren’t even identifying bodies, so the parents would never know. The dead and wounded were all mixed up. They just burned them alive.’ Another spoke of hearing a wounded schoolboy cry out for his mother as he was buried alive in the cemetery: ‘The caretaker didn’t want to do it,’ he said, ‘but the soldiers had guns pointed at him.’ Now well into his eighties, Ne Win remains the centre of the Slorc’s power. His former aide, the secret police chief, General Khin Nyunt, is ‘Secretary One’. Behind sunglasses Khin Nyunt's pudgy face appears at least five times a day in the New Light of Myanmar. His seminal work goes under the catchy title, The Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions Within the Myanmar Naing-Ngan and Traitorous Cohorts Abroad. One wonders how many of the gallery of faces in its pages are dead. Pol Pot and his gang turned out similar tracts. This is the man whose job is the silencing of ‘heretics’: those like the lawyer Nay Min, serving 14 years for ‘spreading rumours’ to the BBC, and the Unicef researcher Khin Zaw Win, serving 15 years for sending ‘fabricated news’ to the UN, and the writer San San Nwe, sentenced to 10 years for ‘spreading false information injurious to the state’. Last year the general subjected a US senator, John McCain, to an hour-long harangue about how the Slorc were holding back the ‘red tide’, then played him a videotape showing ‘communists’ beheading villagers with machetes: footage so sickening that McCain's wife had to leave the room ...