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AFP-Myanmar junta's programs causin



Subject: AFP-Myanmar junta's programs causing widespread hunger: rights group

Myanmar junta's programs causing widespread hunger: rights group

HONG KONG, Sept 1 (AFP) - Myanmar is suffering from a serious food shortage
partly due to the displacement of millions of rural people on the orders of
the military junta, a rights group here claimed Wednesday.
"Food scarcity is a general phenomenon in Burma due to the displacement of
people under the government's militarisation measures," said Sanjeewa
Liyanage, executive officer of the Asian Human Rights Commission.

Under the scheme, millions of villagers have been driven from their
farmlands and sent to areas where they are forced to grow crops they have no
experience with, Liyanage said.

He said forced labour and crop procurements for the army were also causing
hardship.

"The scheme requires farmers to give 80 percent of their crops for the
military to feed the army," he said.

Full details of the food shortage situation will be made public in a report
to be released next month by the rights group, based on testimony gathered
by a tribunal it held this year, he said.

"We want all governments, political parties, non-government organisations
and international groups to look into the matter," Liyanage said.

The tribunal, which convened in April, heard testimony from a cross-section
of Myanmar society, including farmers, refugees, landless workers and former
civil servants, testifying to food scarcity as a nationwide trend.

It recorded depositions from 26 witnesses both in Bangkok and along the
Thailand-Myanmar border.

The commission outlined its findings in a letter to the Myanmar government
but has so far received no reply, Liyanage said.

The tribunal was headed by retired Indian High Court judge H.Suresh,
director of the center for philosophy and public policy at Thailand's
Chulalongkorn University Mark Tamthai and Lao Mong Hay, executive director
of the Khmer Insitute of Democracy in Phnom Penh.

The Myanmar junta routinely denies it uses forced labour, but its membership
of the International Labour Organisation was suspended in June on the
grounds the practice was widespread.

The regime also dismisses allegations it carries out mass relocations or
that there is a food shortage, saying the country is self-sufficient.

Myanmar's military junta has been widely condemned by the international
community for allegedly keeping political prisoners, abusing human rights
and trafficking drugs from the infamous Golden Triangle region in its
northeast.