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RIGHTS-BURMA: Villagers Are Innocent Victims of Government's Paranoia

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Sep 6 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of Burmese villagers have been systematically evicted from their homes and resettled in inhospitable places by the military in order to cut off support for ethnic minorities battling Rangoon for decades, a report documenting such displacement says.

Thus, the people of Burma have been treated like captives in the war games of the military dictatorships that have ruled this country for the last four decades. Entire populations have been moved around, shuffled and reshuffled depending on the whims of the ruling regime.

But never has the scale of displacement, and the human suffering it has caused been as huge and as alarming as in recent times, says the Chiang Mai-based Burma Ethnic Research Group (BERG).

Its report documenting the displacement in the Karenni state in eastern Burma has brought to light the desperate lives of those innocent victims.

Not since 1962, when the military seized power, has the strategy of displacing large populations and ''resettling'' them been exercised with such force and fanaticism, it says.

Today, as then, the goal is the same: to quell all opposition by cutting off possible support to armed insurgency groups by local populations, including food, funds, intelligence and potential recruits.

''The on-going conflict between State and non-State armed groups,'' says the report on conflict and displacement, ''has led to the large- scale displacement of civilians.''

''The State's response has been a military one in which policies are implemented without consultation, participation or even within the civil-legal frame-work,'' it added.

While in Karenni state there could be up to 70,000 internally displaced persons or IDPs, according to the U.S. Special Rapporteur for Burma, Rajsoomer Lallah, there are over half a million IDPs, living in ethnic Mon, Karen, Shan and Karenni states alone.

All together there could be up to a million internally displaced people in Burma, if one includes those in Chin and Arakan states and the Naga Hills to the west of the country, where resistance forces continue to work actively against the regime.

Many of the larger displacments have taken place in the nineties, the BERG report says. Large numbers of villagers in the Karenni state suspected of supporting the resistance armies were displaced, and ''their houses were burnt down and destroyed''.

In 1992 and 1996 alone over 40,000 people were forcibly taken from their homes, ''on a scale not previously experienced in Karenni''.

''Most people relocated can take along with them a few belongings not only because they are given little time to move, like from a few hours to a few days, but also because they must travel by foot,'' says an activist working with Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burma border.

Because the conditions in these sites are so poor many run away, according to a number of other studies on the situation of the internally displaced in Burma. They either return to their original villages, hide in forests, or escape across the border into Thailand.

There is an ''inability or unwilingness to consider issues such as the availability of water, food supplies, cultivable land and employment'' in relocation sites, says the BERG report.

Similarly in central Shan state, which borders Thailand, Laos and China, since 1996 over 300,000 people have been ordered to move at gunpoint into strategic relocation sites, according to the Shan Human Rights Foundation.

This was in order to quell opposition from armed groups who refused to surrender to the ruling State Peace and Development Council, along with the drug warlord Khun Sa and his Mong Tai Army in early 1996.

Here, like in other ethnic minority states, the villagers not only had to leave behind their livestock and their crops, they were made to live in most primitive conditions.

Pushed into empty sites along roads, they had to build their own make-shift huts, and ended up as day labourers or begging as they had no other source of income, or food. Many were also used as forced labour on road building projects or at military camps.

With earlier village sites declared ''free-fire'' zones, anyone attempting to return is shot on site. There is substantial documentation of villagers returning to their old homes to harvest their crops or find some food to eat, being shot at.

Women and girls have been particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse.

''Interviews with refugees'' says the BERG report, ''have shown that there have been attacks on both men and women including rapes, both in relocation sites, and just outside.''

''There appears to have been little or no provision of safe sleeping quarters for unmarried women, female-headed households and unaccompanied children,'' it adds.

''The biggest problem with the situation of IDPs today is firstly, denial of refuge, and secondly, problems with cross-border assistance,'' says Steve Thompson, a Thailand-based activist working on Burma- related issues.

Not only have refugee camps across the border in Thailand been refusing to allow new refugees to come in to register, none of the NGOs based in Thailand are legally allowed to work across the border in Burma.

Recent conflicts with Burmese dissident groups, including the Karen God's Army, which seized a hospital in Ratchaburi west of Bangkok in January this year, are seen to have contributed to this.

With the nutritional and health situation of IDPs already at a precarious level, according to research reports, and no avenues of escape, the situation is nothing but desperate.

''IDP's live without security, regular food, or access to medical services, and many are in heavily land-mined areas,'' said Dr Chris Beyrer from John Hopkins University's School of Hygeine and Public Health in the U.S who has worked extensively on health issues in the region.

''These are arguably the neediest and most difficult-to-access populations in the current Burmese Diaspora,'' he adds.

''As a result, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has a mandate to protect refugees across the world, has recently also been lobbying for the right to protect, assist and advocate on behalf of the internally displaced.''

But activists say that the UNHCR will first have to get authorisation not only from the Secretary General of the United Nations or a competent principal organ of the UN, but also have to get the consent of the state involved.

''The UNHCR doesn't have a good track record in assisting refugees, including the Rohingyas from western Burma,'' argues an NGO activist in Chiang Mai.

''They need to clean up their act before they start asking for their mandate to cover IDPs as well,'' he says. (END/IPS/ap-hd- dv/tag/ral/00)

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