Excerpts from Burma Issues, Vol. 7

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Subject: Excerpts from Burma Issues, Vol. 7 No 5, May 1997

NOTES FROM THE BARREN GROUND
The following reports indicate typical rural conditions in Pa'an District,
central Karen State, between January and March 1997. Most of the villagers
in this area continue to experience the usual array of hardships served up
by the long running civil war. see also associated article, "Cycles of
Futilitv". in this edition.

FORCED RELOCATION: Loo Pleh Township (West Dawna Range)
In November 1996, the Commander of the Burma Army Infantry Battalion (IB) 28
accused villagers of Noh Law Bler, T'ku Kraw and Kwee Phat Htaw of
supporting the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and demanded they
relocate to the vicinity of Naw Deb village, in Kawt Thay Forest. The
designated relocation site has no water supplies, so the villagers fled to
other locations. After all of the villagers had left, the soldiers entered
the village. They torched some houses but dismantled the best ones as well
as the village school, taking the wood to reuse at their own camp. They also
announced, "If we see anybody who has fled come back to the village, we will
shoot them."

The villagers fled and constructed temporary shelters for themselves. But
this year, the soldiers came in search of people who had fled, so most of
them had to flee a second time. The villagers used land in a number of
village tracts throughout Ta Kreh township:  have all been forced to scatter
to other villages and are now living in poverty. The children are ill with
diarrhea and fevers but have no medicines to be cured with. These villagers,
who have lost all of their farm
land, cannot begin to think about how they will survive in the future.
Nobody is attempting to return to their villages.

FORCED LABOR: Nat Kysung fields (West of Hlaing Bwe River) A young woman
related the following: We had to construct a road 6 yards wide through the
fields. Each village tract (a group of 3 to 5 villages) was allocated 100
feet of road to construct. The villagers could work quickly or slowly, but
they had to finish their part of the road. We had to excavate the earth with
hoes, and it was stony, so we had to use hoes with metal handles (brought
from their villages) because wooden handles would bend and break. The males
excavated the earth and the females carted it to the road site. The people
there included the elderly, who couldn't work the earth, so they had to boil
water and cook rice.

"We had to get up at 2:30 a.m. If we didn't get up on time, another 10 feet
of road was added to our work as punishment. We took a break at 8 am and we
ate rice. We worked all day in the heat, until 6 p.m., After which we bathed
and ate again. We had to sleep in the wet fields, as the soldiers didn't
like us to sleep under cover. Some people were sick, and village groups had
to bring medics to take care of the ill. Not only did they not give us food,
but furthermore the soldiers providing security (watching over the progress
of the work) even came and ate our rice (that the villagers had to bring for
themselves).

LAND DEGRADATION Ta Kreh (a.k.a. Paing Kyone) Township (West Dawna Range)

An increasing amount of agricultural land is lying fallow because of
deteriorating conditions for farmers, including lack of security, high
taxation. Forced labor, etc. The following are reliable estimates of
dis-used land in a number of village tracts throughout Ta Kreh township:

Village Tract  	Disused Land	Estd Paddy Grain Yield Lost

Nob Kwee 			250 acres 	1000 na*
Taung Saun 		200 acres 	800 na
Pee T'khat 		50 acres** 	600 na

*1 na = 2 standard vegetable oil tins 
**The differentiation in paddy yield per land area can be accounted for in
terms of land quality.

If land is left lying fallow for a one to two year period it will remain
vegetated (grasses, etc.), however, if left for a longer period it will
steadily deteriorate and become totally degraded, essentially useless. Much
of the above land is now entering this latter stage of deterioration

COMMUNITIES COLLAPSING

As a result of the increasingly difficult social and economic conditions
there is a continued breakdown of traditional inter- and intra-community
relationships throughout these areas. There is a serious loss of trust among
community members, with the result that people very rarely openly talk about
the issues and competing forces that are having such a detrimental effect
upon their lives. That people are clearly too afraid to openly reflect on
such serious conditions in their own traditional social context is evidence
of the significant, albeit invisible, damage suffered by communities
throughout the civil war zones on a day to day basis. It is the inherent
power of this very kind of psychological manipulation that allows a small
military elite to control an entire national population.


 - - - - - - - - - - - -

CYCLES OF FUTILITY

Hypothesis: Cycles of violence are made up of series of interconnected events.

If we recognize that the various manifestations of violence in Burma do not
occur at random, then it follows that those 'watching' these events should
not conduct their observations randomly. In particular, it is critical to
the pursuit of human rights abuse documentation to understand the context in
which specific events take place. Simply reporting the superficial details
amounts to mere journalism. Genuine compassionate understanding e v o I v e
s through adequate appreciation of the muIti- dimensionality of all human
interactions, good, bad or otherwise.

I want to share the following with you. I feel it is a vivid example of how
tragic outcomes may be understood not as hiccups in some kind of social
vacuum but rather as the products of self-replicating cycles of violence.

Loo Pleh Township is a part of Pa'an District, Karen State, an area that
stretches from the Hlaing Bwe River in the west to the Dawna Range in the
east, north of Kawkareik. It is largely flat agricultural land occupied by
traditional farming communities. It has also long been shared militarily by
units on both sides of a prolonged civil war, the rebel Karen National
Liberation Army (KNLA) troops using the Dawna Range from which to launch
their activities. The majority of the villagers throughout this region have
had contact of one form or another with KNLA units over the years, and this
adds a dimension of difficulty to their relationship with the Tatmadaw
(Burma Army) columns who are increasingly coming

In light of this unstable relationship Col. Nyunt Hsaung, Commander of
Infantry Battalion (IB) 28, gave an order on February 1, 1997 to three
villages under his jurisdiction, Pee T'khat, Naw Ter Kee and Kawt P'nweh
Kohl The village leaders were required to give the precise locations of the
KNLA units operating in their vicinity, or all would have to relocate their
villages to new sites, beginning from February 16, to be completed by March
6. Pee T'khat, in particular, is a significant and well-established village,
although its numbers have dwindled in the last year particularly due to
activities of the Democratic Kayin (Karen) Buddhist Army (DKBA), which has
sought to drive a wedge into the village's religiously mixed population.

Needless to say, the villagers were less than enthusiastic about either
alternative presented to them by the IB 28 Commender, and prior to the
specified date, all of the villagers contributed what money they could, and
purchased food for the Tatmadaw officer: oil, beans, pork, chicken,
condensed milk, cake and Sprite. They forwarded this gin to the commander,
requesting permission to stay in their own villages. Regrettably, Nyunt
Hsaung had his cake and ate it too, accepting the sorrowful bribe but
refusing to repeal his order. As the appointed date approached, the people
began to leave their villages, although at least one old woman was heard
filling the silence with traditional epic poems long after most of the
others had left.

Since the so-called "relocation sites", devoid of water supplies and tenable
land, presented an unappealing choice, the majority of villagers who led
their homes did not stick to the letter of the commander's instructions and
scattered to an array of locations. They fled to other villages, the jungled
hillsides, and tennuous refugee camps in Thailand where perhaps for the
youth there exists the future prospect of a marginal income from a Bangkok
sweatshop. Subsequently, about a week after the March 6 deadline, there was
a mobilization of IB 28 troops to regional villages, in an effort to
resecure the cooperation of those who had not yet fled very far.

Among these troops was a unit of about 30 soldiers led by Company Commander
Capt. Win Myint. During daylight hours on February 14, this Tatmadaw unit
had halted in Hteh But village, to the southeast of Pee T'khat. A KNLA unit
launched a surprise attack on the Tatmadaw soldiers while they were inside
the village, immediately killing six soldiers, and a seventh died later in
the day from severe injuries that had prevented him from fleeing with his
comrades. Among the corpses was one that would have been no more than 12
years of age. Whatever cycle of violence (that is, cycle of oppression) that
had led him to become a combatant in this futile misadventure had acquired
the highest price from him, and this child became yet another statistic on
an "enemies killed" list somewhere. He and his almost equally young
associate, who managed to survive, were well known to villagers in the
region; because they were young and their bodies still small, they were
regularly called upon by their superiors to crawl under houses and shoot
poultry with slingshots.

Another of the corpses revealed the following (edited) order:

Currently... be on alert... (The relocated villagers) must not relocate to
their relatives' villages, no exceptions. If anyone fails to relocate (to
the specifed sites) within the specified time frame, there will be shooting
and the village will be burnt down. Therefore all village leaders must agree
to this by signature to show that they will obey and respond.

The villagers of Hteh But had fled the moment fighting erupted; however,
they began to return during the nighttime, and on subsequent days, in order
to collect personal possessions, cooking utensils, food, etc., and then flee
back into the hillsides.

On February 18, a large contingent (200-300) of Tatmadaw soldiers cautiously
reentered the village for the first time since the ambush. Having examined
and buried the now bloated corpses of their former companions they proceeded
to plunder the village of its remaining contents, mostly clothing and basic
household items, taking away nine bullock-cart loads of possessions.
>From both need and habit, people continued to secretly return to Htah But
village, and it was during the daytime of February 20 that Naw Paw Kler Moo,
seven years old, was in the village with her parents when the IB 28 soldiers
arrived. As they fled, she became separated from her parents. No exact
details of what happened are available, as only the soldiers themselves were
witnesses, but the second bullet-pierced corpse of a child was left lying in
Hteh But village that week.

In what way were the lives and deaths of these two children different? Do
the few years between the ages of the two children make a difference? That
one was male, the other female? That we know the name of one, have a
photograph of the other? For me, all these superficial differences fail to
distinguish the utterly futile and irreversible outcome of both short lives.
The application of even the dimmest contextual light does appear to blur the
distinctions between combatant and civilian, perpetrator and victim, right
and wrong. In this atmosphere, rhetoric and diatribe evaporate. We are left
with only these continually revolving cycles of futility, where violence and
injustice accomplish nothing, only adding momentum to a continuing cycle of
violence and injustice.

There is a sadly ironic postscript. Subsequent to these events, IB 28 was
re- deployed to another region. The new Tatmadaw commander in the region has
now announced that people are free to return to their villages, as the
relocation order was not of his doing. Apparently, this is far from the
first time that replacement military officers have immediately countermanded
their predecessors instructions. It is understood that to date most
villagers have been reluctant to return, although at least a few of the
community leaders have done so, and perhaps one old woman never left. At the
time of writing, nothing more is known of the conditions of Hteh But village
and the lives of Hteh But village people.

Excerpts from Burma Issues, Vol. 7 No 5, May 1997

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