Observer, London 23.3.97

[Tim.Nunn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

[please excuse any errors.  I have not had time to properly proof read
this.  Tim Nunn]

Observer, London
Sunday 23rd March 1997

by David Harrison, London
Cathy Scott-Clark, Adrian Levy, Rangoon

cover
Wildlife groups collude with Burma's slaughtering Junta

WORLD-renowned wildlife organisations are working with Burma's military
regime on huge conservation projects on sites being cleared by the
systematic slaughter of the Karen ethnic minority.  Human rights groups
yesterday condemned the conservationists collaboration in Burma's 'killing
fields' and demanded their immediate withdrawal.

The Burmese army has murdered 2,000 people and driven 30,000 from their
homes to prepare for the nature reserves.  Thousands of others are being
used as forced labour on the projects, according to eyewitness accounts
obtained by the Observer.

Two of the world's most prestigious conservation bodies are involved: the
Smithnian Iinstitution in Washington and the New York based Wildlife
Conservation Society which has projects in 52 countries.  They are the
first charities, to work with the Burmese State Law and Order Restoration
Council (SLORC) since it massacred 3,000 demonstrators in 1988.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature also has links with Buma.  Last month it held
an elephant conference in the capital, Rangoon, and it plans to do research
on Burmese tigers.

The ruling Burmese junta is delighted to have support from such prestigious
organisations.  They hope the reserves - one of which will be the biggest
in the world - will attract millons of tourists and improve Burma's
appalling international image, shaped by one of the worst human-rights
records in the world.  Josh Ginsberg, the Wildlife Conservation Society's
science director, said: 'We do ont sanction forced relocation or killings
but we have no control over the government. We are in Burma because it is
one of the highest biodiversity countries.'

The Smithsonian siad: 'We are there to do important conservation work.  We
may disagree with a regime but it is not our place to challenge it.'

Robin Pellew, WWF-UK director, said WWF International had discussed one of
the nature reserves projects, on Lambi island, with the Burmese authorities
but had decided not to get involved.

Faith Doherty of the South Asian Information Network, said:
'Environmentalists should not be involved with Burma at an level.'

page 9
Burma's Junta Goes Green
Save the Rhino, Kill the People
Rangoon wants a nature reserve. So do conservationists. But first they have
to get rid of villagers.
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark in Burma and David Harrison report

WE FOUND them deep in the Burmese jungle, east of the Tenasserim river.
About 2,000 of them, hungry, exhausted and fearing for their lives.  They
have no money, no change of clothes, and they eat what food they find.
They sleep under palm leaves propped teepee-style against the trees.  A
sickly child is crying.  An old woman sobs endlessly, Saw Lyi, 56, holds
out his hands: 'We do not know what to do.  We do not know what will happen
to us.'
Saw Lyi knows he will not be going home.  He, and thousands of the Karen
ethnic group, a gentle, cultured and religious people, have been driven out
of their homes by the Burmese army.  He also knows that in a strange way he
is lucky, because he made it to the jungle, starving and homeless but
alive.
Hundreds of people, including Saw's son, a father of six, have been
murdered in the two months since the army launched its offensive to crush
the Karen, according to human rights groups which base their evidence on
independent research, including hundreds of eyewitness accounts.  Tens of
thousands have been forced to work, unpaid and unfed, building roads and
railways, and 30,000 have fled into the jungle or across the border to
Thailand.

Why? Because the Burmese army is clearing the Karen area, razing entire
villages, killing, raping, enslaving, to make way for the biggest nature
reserve of its kind in the world.  Dwarfing' the Masai Mara and the
Serengeti, it is home to rare flora and fauna, tigers, elephants and the
Sumatran rhinoceros. It will attract millions of tourists. Most
importantly. it will be a sign to the world that Burma, shunned because of
its appalling human, rights record cares about endangered wildlife and the
environment.


ALL the Rangoon govemment needed was a few major international conservation
organizations to turn a blind eye to atrocities committed against an
irksome ethnic minority.  It got them from the top drawer of wildlife
protection: the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  It also claimed to have 'an open.
channel of communication' with the Worldwide Fund for Nature International,
whose patron is Prince Philip.
The junta running Burma was thrilled - as we discovered when, after our
dispiriting trek into the jungle, we made for Rangoon to see if a Minister
would talk about the project and the role of those conservation giants.
The two-storey Forestry Ministry squats at the end of a long tree-lined
road in the

Burmese capital.  It is part of a complex of Ministries run by the State
Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) and a stone's throw fom the home
of Burma's most famous dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under virtual
house arrest.

Security is tight, more so since a bomb exploded in Rangoon three months
ago.  The Ministry was surrounded by barbed wire. and bouganvillaea., A
dozen soldiers, bayonets glinting in the sun, stopped us at the first
roadblock.. We had dresed in khaki and boots to add plausibility to our
guise as environimental researchers from a British university, but we had
no appointment, no letter of introdution.  The soldiers were suspicious but
sent us on to the next roadblock to put our case to the military
intelligence officers, sinister figures in pale blue uniforms and reflector
sunglasses.  But they seemed to buy our story and we were ushered into a
spartan office where two senior Ministrytry figures received us with a
mixture of scepticism and delight that respectable British scientists were
interested in their 'big idea'.

One introduced himself as Ye Myint, advisor to the Forestry Minister. Eager
to impress, he boasted of Slorc's plans to establish a unique
million-hectare, biosphere', the Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve, in the Karen
area, one of the semi-independent regions set up just before Britain pulled
out of Burma in 1948. We hope the reserve will win world heritage status,'
he enthused.

The reserve would also encompass a section of a gas pipeline 'being
constructed by Total and Unocal, the French and American oil companies,
which signed deals with the Burmese to pump gas from the Andaman Sea in the
west to Thailand in the east. Huma rights groups say forced Tabour is being
used on the project.
Ye Myint told us of 'exciting project, the Lanbi Island Marine National
Park, off the southern Burmese coast.  Coral islands would be transformed
into an 'eco-tourism venture' in the first stage of a grand plan to open
the entire 200-mile Mergui archipelago to mass tourism and scientific
study.

His colleague Aung Din, a senior policy adviser, described how
international environmentalists were lending the Slorc their expertise and
reputations.  The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Smithsonian
Institution were helping to run both projects, he said.  Other
organisations were also involved.  'We have a very close relationship with
Worldwide Fund International,' said Aung Din.

He showed us a programme from a WWF conference in Rangoon last month.
Delegates at the Asian Elephants Specialist Group seven-day conference
included WWF-UK representatives and the curator of Chester Zoo. WWF-UK, the
organisation's British section, contributed £2,000 towards the cost.

As we left, Dr Alan Rabinowitz, a senior scientist from the WCS, arrived to
meet the same officials.  We were told Rabinowitz had established a
management committee for the Lanbi Island project and, along with other
scientists from the Smithsonian, was also running training programmes and
conducting wildlife surveys. Rabinowitz was there to update officials and
finalise plans for an expedition to upper Burma last week, part of a
worldwide research and conservation programme which has taken the New
York-based WCS to 52 countries.

The WCS and the Smithsonian are the first non-governmental groups to have
worked with the Slorc since the Rangoon masacres of 1988, when 3,000
demonstrators were killed by police and troops during riots which led to
the ousting of President Sein Lwin.

Later that day we talked to other officials.  Aung Than, director of
forestry for the Tenasserim Division, spoke of the Ministry's 'open channel
of communication with the WWF'.  He said the WWF had discussed the new
nature reserves with the Slorc, encouraged Burma to become a member of the
Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, and made an
'exploratory mission' to Burma.

When we asked if we could visit the new sites to conduct an audit of the
rare and endangered species, we were told: 'I'm afraid that will not be
possible at the moment.  You must be aware we have problems in this area.
There is a large security operation going on. Mopping up must finish before
anything else can begin.

Mopping up.  That phrase appears frequently in Burma's state-controlled
press. It refers to the forced removal of 'troublesome elements'.  That
includes members of the Karen ethnic minonty who object to their homes
being torched and their families killed or forced to flee to the jungle.

THIS contempt for human life was not evident last Septembr at the launch
ceremony for the Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve, held in Rangoon. Dr Kyaw
Tint, Director-General of Forestry, assured guests that the welfare of
local inhabitants would be paramount.  Not only would rare species be
protected but the lives of the rural poor would be improved.

Three months later soldiers of the Tatmadaw, the Slorc's military wing,
arrived at Saw Lyi's paddy fields at his village north of Mergui.  The 56
year-old grandfather was marched to a makeshift football field with the
other villagers and told to leave within 24 hours or be shot.

Overnight he lost his home and his livelihood.  The Slorc needed his land
for the nature reserve.

He told his story, typical of the fate of thousands, at his jungle hideout,
surrounded by his dead son's children and widow and other despairing
relatives.  'I was tied to a bamboo post with Saw Kri, my son, and hit
twice in the face with arifle butt.  The soldiers punched and kicked him
for about 30 minutes until he passed out.  Then they killed him with a
bayonet,' he said.

We had been smuggled into the Tenasserim Division area by members of the
Karen National Liberation Army who are resisting the Slorc slaughter.  An
isolated Asian frontier-land, cut through with verdant river valleys and
wrapped in dense jungle, the Tenasserim already has wildlife sanctuaries
established by indigenous groups.

The brutal offensive began in February after troops of the newly formed
Coastal Military Command, led by Brigadier-General Thura Thihathura Sit
Maung, had massed at both ends of the Division. Human rights monitors, who
have interviewed refugees fleeing from the area and visited the region
themselves, say more than 2,000 have been killed, 30,000 have been evicted
from their homes and as many forced to work for the Slorc in the past 18
months.

Other victims told us their stories.  Mai Thein Win was taken from his
village near the coastal town of Tavoy and sent to a Labour camp where
conscripts were forced to build a railway running north to the town of Ye.

After 17 people died from malaria, three of his friends tried to escape.
They were caught, forced to dig thir own graves and then executed. 'The
soldiers buried the dead bodies but left the legs hands exposed; nobody
tried to escape after that,' he said.

In a village south of the Total pipeline, Mi Aye, 34, a mother of seven,
told how women were raped by soldiers guarding forced labour projects:
'They raped many women, but Mi Thein, one of the girls, was raped so many
times she died.  She was just 15 years old.'

As well as gathering scores of first-hand accounts, the Observer was shown
orders issued by the Tatmadaw to village leaders, commandeering men and
women for work. One stated: 'If you do not come this time you will be
attacked with artillery.  If you do not come it will be your fault, and
don't think the army is bullying you.'

Saw Bobo told how the army fired at villagers in the southern zone of the
proposed 'biosphere' as they tried to escape from forced labour. 'I saw at
least 10 people die, women and children among them.' Almost every village
in a 40-mile stretch between the towns of Tavoy and Mergui, the western
perimeter of the biosphere has been ordered to move one or more times since
September 1996.

One NGO report said: 'Several thousand villagers are being used every day
as forced labour.  Children as young as 12, people over 60 and women still
breast-feeding are forced to haul dirt, build embankments, break rocks and
dig ditches.

Many of the people the Observer saw in the jungle were sick and bore the
scares of recent beatings.  Some told how they had been pressed into
helping the army as it attacked Karen villages.  Aung Thien, 27, said: 'The
soldiers made me go to the scene of fighting to pick up dead bodies.

'My best frind, Thon We, was killed when he refused. They tied him to a
post, knocked his teeth out with a gun butt and shot him.'

Others like Peu May, 32, were used as human shields in attacks on insurgents.

Stories have also begun to emerge of killings and disappearances on Lanbi
and other islands in the Mergui archipelago.  One elder from a village near
Mergui said: 'We received reports of 140 deaths between October and
December.  On Lanbi Island, we were told that many had died.' Western
diplomats in Rangoon and human rights organisations are investigating the
reports.


A second village leader said the islandrs were given a deadline to move.
They refused and were massacred. Also killed were many villagers from
Bobyin, n the mainland.

However, while inquiries into the killings and disappearances continue, the
Burmese government is selling the archipelagoas a 're-emerging lost island
paradise'.

THE slaughter of the innocents goes on but the conservation groups are
winning the battle with their conscience.

Josh Ginsberg, science director at the Wildlife ConservationSociety in New
York, said: 'We do not sanction forced relocation, torture or killings. But
we have control over the government.

'We are in Burma because it is one of the highest biodiversity countries in
Asia.  We can walk away from it, but that wouldn't do any good for anybody.
We are focussed on biodiversity and conservation.'

A spokesman for the Smithsonian Institution said: 'We are there to do
important conservation work.  We may disagree with a regime but it is not
our place to challenge it.'

Robin Pellew, director of WWF-UK, said WWF had done an elephant survey in
Burma in 1992, a wildlife survey last year and planned to do a 'quick and
dirty' tiger survey in the future.

It had discussed the Lanbi nature reserve with Burmese officials, but had
decided not to get involved.  The WWF currently had no projects in Burma
and no formal relationship with the Burmese authorities.

'Sometimes we have to deal with repulsive regimes,' he said.  'We have to
weigh up whether the conservation benefit is worth the risk of being seen,
directly or indirectly, to be supporting those regimes.'


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