Behind the facade
Burma's military rulers try to build a tourist haven using forced labour and repression
source :The Toronto Star
Martin Regg Cohn -ASIAN BUREAU
HSIPAW, Burma - THEY CAME in search of young men,making an offer no one could refuse:
Work for the army as an unpaid porter, carrying ammunition and guns in the hills. Or face the consequences.
Peering into the darkness, the old man says his family had no choice but to give up the son to the soldiers. In Burma, such sacrifices are part of the daily rhythm of life, and sometimes death.
In this dusty frontier town on the road to the Chinese border, disobeying the army can be dangerous - and talking about it deadly. But, weary of the oppression in this picture-postcard police state, the old man wants to talk about what no one dares discuss.
``Words can kill,'' he whispers, stooping as he moves from his straw mat to light a candle in the ramshackle hut. ``They might send killers to come after us.''
Burma's military government has more than doubled its army to 450,000 soldiers in the decade since it disallowed democratic elections. Yet it relies on ``volunteer labour'' from ordinary citizens to perform the work of human mules on the mountain passes and jungle paths of Shan state, where ethnic insurgencies still flare.
`Words can kill. They might send killers to come after us'
- father of youth recruited for forced labour
Similar tactics have been used to build infrastructure projects to support tourism. When the generals designated 1996 as Visit Myanmar Year, they ordered thousands of Mandalay's residents to perform ``volunteer labour,''dredging the massive moat surrounding the historic fort in the city centre.
Today, admiring tourists can read the billboard the army erected next to the site: ``Tatmadaw (the armed forces) and the people co-operate and crush all those harming the union,'' it proclaims.
But the regime's reliance on slave labour has caught the attention of the outside world. Citing incontrovertible evidence, the International Labour Organization decided two months ago to rebuke Burma and recommend sanctions. Facing the unprecedented resolution from the ILO, a United Nations body, Burma belatedly decreed forced labour illegal.
In the hinterland, beyond the gaze of visitors, it's a different story.
Documenting the abuses is difficult, because foreign media are rarely granted press visas and must rely on tourist visas (as did The Toronto Star). Interview subjects risk interrogation by military intelligence if found out; film and notebooks are frequently confiscated by customs inspectors upon departure.
Still, two sources described how four villages near the Chinese border - Pong Leng, Man Shaio, Man Naung and Mong La - were recently ordered to produce porters. They were also required to offer up so-called ``volunteer labour'' for roadwork in the hinterland, so drug lords could pocket the money they received from the government for the paving projects.
Those who survive porter duty and forced labour are frequently lured to the poppy fields that flourish near the Chinese border, where they toil for a pittance and often return home as addicts.
The old man shakes his head as he confesses to allowing another son to take the job. But the family is desperate for money.
``It is a sacrifice we must make,'' he says in a low voice, after asking that he not be identified for fear of reprisals. In a country where informers are ubiquitous, many people feel safer speaking to a foreigner than to their fellow Burmese.
Enticed by a daily wage of up to $3, the young men help meet the insatiable demand for labourers as poppy production surges. Drug lords,working in league with military officers, produce two crops a year. Production has doubled over the past decade, placing Burma in the front ranks of heroin producers alongside Afghanistan. But there is a high price to be paid for the drug trade. With hundreds of thousands of intravenous drug users, combined with a burgeoning sex industry, Burma has spawned Southeast Asia's deadliest epidemic of HIV/AIDS, according to the U.N.
Starved of funds by a military that prefers to plow money into pet projects, the country's health-care system is rated the second-worst on Earth, after Sierra Leone, by the World Health Organization. Malaria is rampant,leprosy and tuberculosis persist and ringworm is widespread - often plainly visible on the shaved heads of young boys serving in Buddhist monasteries.The picture in ordinary Burmese homes is depressing. Poverty and disease are constant companions to the military's misrule.
A World Bank economic and social assessment found 13 million people living below subsistence levels, with four out of 10 children suffering from malnutrition. Barely 40 per cent of children finish primary school.
Burma's spending on health (3 per cent of the budget) and education (10 per cent) are among the lowest in the world and a fraction of the military budget.
Last year, soldiers received a 400 per cent pay hike, while a typical teacher's salary remained unchanged at about $225 a year.
Burma wasn't always such a backwater. It once boasted of being the rice bowl of Asia, blessed with the best-educated people. But growth has been stunted since 1962, when a military coup sealed it off from the world.General Ne Win launched the country on the ``Burmese Way to Socialism,'' which quickly became an economic dead end.
The army backed off after bloody student riots in 1988 and allowed elections in 1990. But when the National League for Democracy - led by the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's founding president - won in a landslide, the military cancelled the vote and mounted a harsh crackdown. (It renamed the country Myanmar, though most people still refer to it as Burma. Rangoon, the historic capital, was dubbed Yangon.)Languishing under house arrest in the early 1990s, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and won international attention. Since her release in 1995, the state-controlled media has incessantly branded her a whore and a witch, a maggot and an ogress, a stooge and a ``demon with fangs.''
Less known are the hundreds of political prisoners from her party still behind bars, many of them aged and held in harsh conditions or subject to torture, according to an Amnesty International report published last month.More than 80 party members were thrown in jail last September after Suu Kyi left her home in Rangoon to visit activists up-country in Mandalay.Suu Kyi was once again confined to her home, with foreign diplomats barred from visiting her.
There has been a bit of a thaw in recent weeks, with a United Nations diplomat urging the regime to ease off its vituperative attacks on Suu Kyi in the wake of secret talks between her and the regime. Last week, her top deputy, Tin Oo, a former army general, was released from detention. On Friday, the 84 prisoners who had been arrested in September, many of them held in Rangoon's infamous Insein Prison, were also released, in anticipation of a visit by a European Union delegation due in Rangoon this week. The visitors are expected to make contact with the National League for Democracy, but Rangoon-based diplomats say the prospects for a breakthrough are dim.
Many believe the latest ILO rebuke has embarrassed the regime, which is wearying of international censure. But it is in no mood to take concrete steps, such as releasing the estimated 1,700 political prisoners or restoring Suu Kyi's freedom of movement around the country.
Rangoon's economy is booming - flush with drug money. The armed forces are equipped with modern weaponry from neighbouring China and foreign investment - Canada ranked second overall last year - seems undeterred by the political backdrop.
The military has made peace with most of the ethnic insurgencies that have raged since Burmese independence a half-century ago. And the army generals carefully cultivated the country's influential Buddhist monks,lavishing funds on monastery and pagoda renovations - while ensuring flattering coverage of their donations on state television.
At a monastery just outside Mandalay, a senior Buddhist monk chuckles as the sound of gunfire from a nearby military base echoes off the walls. ``As long as they're just training, it's okay,'' he says.
At a glittering pagoda atop Mandalay Hill, framed colour pictures of the military intelligence chief, Lt.-Gen. Khin Nyunt - or Secretary-1, as he is called - occupy pride of place.
In the capital's sprawling Defence Services Museum, Buddhist monks stroll barefoot through the marble halls, studying exhibits of the military's might. A display of weaponry proclaims, ``Artillery is the God of war.''
The museum is a testament to the wide reach of the Tatmadaw. It dominates every facet of the economy. There are displays of its dairy farms and golf courses, pharmaceutical labs and munitions factories.Glassed-in exhibits show the output of modern plants that produce tires and tennis balls, tinned fish and Tatmadaw-brand minced mutton.
With so much at stake in revenue and patronage, the military shows no signs of retreating.
For its part, the NLD's uncompromising stance - insisting on full democracy, with the army back in the barracks - has left it out in the cold.Faced with constant punishment, the party's support network has unravelled in recent years.
University professors and their students must sign pledges to refrain from politics or face expulsion, a heavy price to pay for a lost generation of students who have endured three years of university closings. They face waiting lists to get into classes and long commutes to new campuses,which have been relocated from downtown to the suburbs to keep any uprisings out of sight.
Ma Thanegi, a painter and writer, is one of the few Burmese willing to be interviewed on the record. Her views on international sanctions accord with the government's position.
A former close aide to Suu Kyi who was imprisoned for three years, she later broke with the National League for Democracy in a disagreement over tactics.
Now, Thanegi describes the titanic battle between the Nobel laureate and the generals as a ``fairy tale'' that has captured the imagination of Western activists, but is no longer relevant to the daily lives of Burma's impoverished and isolated masses.
``She is an icon,'' says Thanegi, sitting in her Rangoon apartment.
``People are paying too much attention to the generals and the lady. . . .She is beautiful, she is a woman looking frail and they look fat and dark and ugly in their uniforms.''
Today, young people are no longer as interested or involved in politics as they were a decade ago, she says. ``They saw in 1989 their brothers and sisters involved in politics and they see them getting nowhere. The young generation of students just want to get ahead, earn money, be comfortable.''
Others say the democracy movement is lying low, not giving up. ``People are afraid, so they don't speak out,'' says one veteran activist. ``We are tortured every day psychologically.''
Another Burmese who is willing to speak on the record is Tin Maung Than, a prominent medical doctor and journalist. He no longer fears retribution because he is no longer in the country, having fled with his family across the border into Thailand late last year.
In an interview from Bangkok, he describes being interrogated by military intelligence and fretting for his family's safety.
"They put me on the ropes,'' Than recalls. ``You can't expect any reform in Burma.''
Than believes foreign investment provides little benefit to ordinary Burmese because military officers skim off much of the money.
``If you are in business, most of your hard currency goes to the military, so it has no great impact on Burmese life,'' he argues. ``By making the military stronger, you're not making the country stronger.''
Back in Burma, a long-time democracy campaigner describes the daily defiance of switching on shortwave radios to tune in the BBC and sometimes Radio Canada International, in a country where the Internet is strictly regulated and mail is often censored.
`The more oppressed people become, the more they listen to BBC. . . .
Give it a little spark and, once a spark starts, it will spread everywhere,''
he muses. ``It could happen in any town.''
PART II