Burma: Forced labour their only prospect
ICFTU-4/9/2001
by Jean-Baptiste Evreux
Refugees in a camp on the Thai border, young Burmese talk of their childhood in a country where the army has deprived them of all their rights, including the most basic right to learn.
In his village, Tin Oo was considered one of the lucky ones. He was one of a handful of teenagers whose families were able to send their children to school. Tin Oo studied until the tenth standard. A vibrant young man, Tin Oo fled to Thailand a few months ago. He now attends school in one of the refugee camps situated along the Burmese border. Although he is not the brightest of the students, he is definitely the loudest. He sings at the top of his lungs all day long. The female students find him cheeky and an amusing distraction from their lessons and collective chores.
Tin Oo has been in a high spirits since he enrolled, and with reason: he has fled oppression. Contrary to what happens on the other side of the border, there is no forced labour in this school.
"When we had to work for the army, all of the students were requisitioned and we had to interrupt our classes," Tin Oo recalls. "The first time this happened, the army made us dig up turf to lay on a golf course Most of the time though we had to build roads and grow bean plants. If we didn't do our work properly, we were punished."
"Punished", as Tin Oo explains, meant that the children were ordered to load military trucks with rocks. The Burmese army regularly ordered boys and girls out of classes to work on infrastructure projects or on farms growing food for soldiers, with complete disregard for the student's learning or safety. The children worked eight-hour shifts and provided their own food.
December, a shy 17-year-old girl, is one of Tin Oo's classmates.She fled the same village in Burma in order to continue her studies in a refugee camp. She left her family because they did not have enough to eat. December's father quit his job as a middle school teacher because his monthly salary was only 1500 kyats (about 4 dollars) and his family needed twice that amount to buy enough rice to last them a month. It became impossible for him to earn a living because he too was forced to work without pay on railway tracks and a teak plantation.
Today, in the refugee camp, those teenagers who continue their studies beyond the tenth standard are called "shining stars" by their generation. They proudly wear the T-shirts that show their status. Under normal circumstances, many of them –like December and Tin Oo- would have tried to get into a university to gain access to respectable professions. However, times are anything but normal in Burma. December and Tin Oo will never be given the chance to walk the hallowed corridors of Burma's once brilliant universities. It is not because they are unable to pay tuition fees or because most of the university professors have fled the country. It is simply because all Burmese universities were shut down in 1988 after the army murdered thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators on the streets.Since then, the military regime has unscrupulously ruined the lives of countless frustrated Burmese youths.
Such aspirations are a world away from Burma's impoverished millions, who are more concerned with staying alive than being able to obtain a decent education. Recently, the Asian Human Rights Committee published a report on the lack of food and the military buildup in Burma. This report concluded "for a single household, the only way to survive is to combine the income of all of the family members." Within this context, no one raises an eyebrow on the banks of the river Irrawaddy at the sight of children unloading sandbags from their father's boat. These sandbags will be used on construction sites and the children paid 200 kyats per day (less than 1 dollar) for their labour. This amount is barely enough to pay for one-day's supply of food, but never enough to pay for schooling, which remains inaccessible for one out of every three Burmese children. Many people have gone from eating two to one meal a day or a meal every two days.
"More and more people, especially children, turn up to monasteries to beg for food," explains a monk from a prosperous monastery in the centre of Burma. Sitting along a small wall behind the monastery dining area, two hundred children wait patiently for a few women dressed in rags to bring them the leftovers of the meals eaten by the monks. This patience, however, is mixed with gnawing hunger. Most of the children are undernourished. They will only receive a miserable portion of rice with a bit of oily curry sauce or leftovers of soup in used plastic bags. The monastery dogs prowl the area with a menacing air, ready to grab food from the weakest or most careless children.
Only an hour earlier, dozens of European tourists had crowded into the entrance of the dining area to witness the hundreds of barefooted monks resplendent in their saffron-yellow robes eating their meals in the cool, shaded interior of the ornate hall. Shepherded back to the detached comfort of their air-conditioned buses by tour guides, the tourists brushed aside the hungry beggar children pestering them for "presents" along the way. The tourists had sites to see and an itinerary to keep – they were not saying around to witness the children eating their meagre lunch.
The situation is every bit as catastrophic in the rural communities where families find it increasingly difficult to grow enough rice to survive because they are repeatedly forced to work for the Burmese army. Burmese peasants must also provide rice to the army at prices far below their market value, if not for free. In some communities, the entire harvests are seized. All of this, without taking into account the various so-called taxes that they are required to pay. Despite years of overwhelming evidence, the military dictatorship still denies any accusation of forced labour.
And yet, these examples of state-sponsored servitude pale in comparison with the brutality that Burmese citizens have had to endure on the war-torn Burmese border. For more than 50 years, Rangoon has been conducting bloody pacification campaigns against ethnic groups and their rebel forces. Civilians are required to carry supplies and munitions through the jungle and mountainous regions. This is the only way that the Burmese army is able to continue its campaign in the disputed border region.
Ruth, a friend and classmate of December, comes from a town hard fought over by the Burmese army and its fiercest adversary, the Karen National Liberation Army. A young, well-behaved religious girl, Ruth was 13 when the army took her as a porter for the first time. The first execution that Ruth witnessed occurred during the rainy season, near the summit of some unnamed mountain. "The soldier made a man sit on the ground. His name was Shan and he had simply come to our town to work. The army claimed that he was one of the rebels. After the soldiers interrogated and tortured him, they ripped out his eyes and killed him. On ten different occasions, Ruth was forced to carry rations, rice, munitions, mortars and heavy weapons on expeditions that lasted anywhere from two to 20 days. The soldiers made the porters walk in front of them as human mine detectors. Those porters who stepped on a mine were either killed on the spot or suffered slow painful deaths. Porters who did not know their guards were tied to one another 24 hours a day.
On three occasions, Ruth was caught in the midst of battle. Shells exploded everywhere and trees split into pieces. Every time this happened, Ruth was convinced that she was going to die and almost wished that it would happen in order to escape from so much suffering.