GRAPE VINE
Will it sink in why Burma is a pariah?
Source : Postbag, Bangkok Post
While your editorial (April 3) on the ILO and Burma comes out with a worthwhile recommendation-that Burma should allow the UN rapporteur and the ILO to conduct investigations inside Burma-you are simply not correct to say that "there has been little real evidence" from inside Burma about the SPDC junta's wholesale abuse of forced labour.
The evidence is contained in literally hundreds of orders requiring forced labour from villagers that have been issued by SPDC military commanders, village and tract "Law and Order Restoration Councils" and other appendages of the Burmese military junta. These orders are typically sent to village chiefs and villages with such warnings that porters or labourers shall be sent without fail or "we will not be responsible for the consequences", which in Burma is a clear threat to kill, torture and destroy.
Provided at great risk by villages to human rights organisations involved with Burma, these orders bear the signatures and seals of various military commands and government offices. They are the clearest sort of evidence that one could get.
It is these orders, issued after the SPDC military junta claimed that it issued a regulation to stop forced labour, that is the most damning indictment of the SPDC's duplicity in its dealings with the ILO.
And it is precisely these orders for forced labour that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), working with Burmese labour organisations and ethnic-based human rights groups, provided to the ILO as evidence. The evidence of forced labour in Burma is as clear cut a case as one could find at the ILO, and this practice continues today in clear contravention of Burma's obligations as a state that has ratified ILO Convention 29 on forced labour.
On the issue of the special rapporteur, Rajsoomer Lallah, he is appointed by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, not by the ILO as you indicate. During his service in this post (he has now left), he repeatedly sought permission to conduct inquiries in Burma but the SPDC junta refused every time.
For it to then claim that he cannot know the real situation because he did not go to Burma is disingenuous in the extreme. It is simply more of the Orwellian 1984 logic that the SPDC spouts when anyone attempts to challenge its rather warped sense of reality.
The ILO should proceed with its article 33 case, full speed ahead. Rangoon has had its chance to come clean, and instead it prefers to play word games. Porters and forced labourers are dying every day in Burma and it is time for the international community to act forcefully to end these abuses of international law.
One timely initiative could be for the UN to ban all meetings by UN specialised agencies in Rangoon. Then we would all be spared the photos of grinning SPDC generals standing next to hapless bureaucrats from the FAO or other UN agencies that have held meetings in Burma recently.
And more importantly, maybe it would finally sink into the SPDC that it is and will continue to be an international pariah until it agrees to a transition to a democratic regime which respects the human rights of all of Burma's people.
