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Mon Info.



                             PRESS RELEASE
                By Mon Information Service (Bangkok) 
                          Tel & Fax (02) 410 7844

                                 25 March 1998


        Rice farmers in Mon State experience serious abuse

The ruling Burmese military regime, which has recently changed its name
from State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) to State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), has continued inhumanly extorting the yearly
paddy tax from poverty-stricken rice farmers in the country without
considering their actual conditions. Rice farmers in Mon State have
continued to suffer such abuse despite the New Mon State Party's present
cease-fire agreement with the ruling regime.

The SLORC/SPDC military regime's local paddy-buying authorities in Mon
State's Mudon township have forcibly confiscated paddy from those local Mon
rice farmers who have not been able to pay the paddy tax to the full
amounts as required. The authorized local paddy-buying group, led by U Pe
Kyi and U Tin Win, came and forcibly confiscated all the paddy kept at the
homes of three farmers living at a village in the southern part of the
township on 3 February 1998. The group hit and unlocked the respective
paddy granaries' doors with an axe then just took away all the available
paddy there without permission of the three paddy owner farmers - namely
Nai Win Kyi, Nai Phyo and Nai Sein Aung. These three farmers had already
paid some half the paddy tax before the incident. The paddy these farmers
were keeping in their granaries were only allocated for their own families'
consumption to live.  

After experiencing that barbarous, forcible confiscation of their own
paddy, on 7 February 1998 the three farmers reportedly submitted a petition
to Major General Myint Aung, the commander of the Southestern Command,
complaining to him about that barbarous act of abuse of power by the local
paddy-buying authorities and appealing to him to take effective legal
action against them. In the petition, it is also stated that the local
paddy-buying centre's manager, U Ba Yi, has been making personal private
benefits by stealing paddy from the local paddy-buying centre and selling
it at the available market prices. With the help of some NMSP members, a
copy of the petition letter was reportedly also sent to the ruling State
Peace and Development Council's Secretary 1, General Khin Nyunt. As a
result, on the orders of the Southestern Command, the Township Peace and
Development Council in Mudon have reportedly recently arrested the three
petition-signing farmers as a revenge by bringing a charge against them
that they have disturbed the local paddy-buying officials performing their
own duty.

Every rice-cultivating farmer in Burma is required to sell to the
government 12 baskets of paddy per acre of their cultivated land at the
government-set, low price of 70 Kyats per basket on an unconditional basis,
whereas the current market price of paddy is more than 500 Kyats per
basket. During the 1997 rainy season, many rice fields in Mon State, Pegu
Division and Tenasserim Division suffered unprecedented floods resulting in
massive destruction of rice plants and considerable decrease in the
production of rice and other fruits and crops from these regions last
harvest season. In Mon State's Ye township alone, a total of 254 families
(a population of some 2,000) became homeless because of the floods. Out of
these 2,000 floods victims, 38 were dead and 19 were injured, according to
local sources. Like the rest of the populace in the country, rice farmers
have experienced cumulative hardship of living under the constantly rising
prices of basic commodities and ever-increasing cost of existence in the
country and gravely worsened by the consistent forced labour and arbitrary
taxation of portering and multifarious other compulsory fees by the
SLORC/SPDC military and civil authorities.

Since and despite the NMSP-SLORC cease-fire agreement in mid 1995, the
situation of human rights in the Mon region has not improved. Except the
spontaneous, temporary stop of the Burmese military's arbitary arrest,
torture and execution of Mon villagers under accusation of being NMSP
supporters, all the traditional types of human rights abuse have remained
in place in the Mon region. Forced labour and extortion have generally even
increased in the Mon region, as far as the cease-fire agreement has
favoured the SLORC/SPDC military to come and conscript forced labour and
levy taxes in the former NMSP-controlled area or war zone so easily without
the risk of Mon guerrilla attack.   





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