SHAN STATEMENT ON 4TH JANUARY, 2000

[TheTruth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

STATEMENT ON 4TH JANUARY, 2000 
 
This day, in 1948, our leaders and the people believed that the Shan
people won independence jointly with our brethrens, the Burman, Rakhine,
Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Karen, and Mon nations.  
 
The bright hope of our leaders who signed the Panglong Accord in 1947,
the basis of independence and the founding document of the Union of
Burma, has however been negated by history, by our bitter experience.  
 
Today, the Shan people have become beggars in their own land. Burman-
chauvinist in uniform have, since the mid-1950s, waged a war of
extermination against the Shan people, perpetrating atrocities against
the people of Shan State in order to traumatize, disorient, terrify, and
destroy the spirit and dignity of the people as a free nation.  In 1962,
the Burman military chauvinists destroyed the political cohesion of the
Shan States by detaining, wholesale, all our princes and leaders.  
 
The current, post-1988, military junta has stepped up its war against
the people of Shan State.  More than 300,000 (and still counting)
productive villagers have been forcibly evicted from their villages,
farms, and fields, and they have been turned into beggars, living in
squalor in various "relocation centers. Some have fled into Thailand to
be exploited as cheap labor, or as products in the booming sex industry
of Thailand.  A third of the displaced have gone into hiding, living as
fugitives in forests and running the risk, everyday, of being found by
Burman military patrols and shot on the spot, the women raped and killed
afterwards.   
 
Shan State has become a killing ground in that ordinary people now stand
naked, without any protection whatsoever, in the face of brutal, lawless
power exercised by a very brutal, merciless Burman chauvinist-military
regime. 
 
Shan State today is a country where there is no law, and hence no
government. The current self-claimed "government" is a rogue regime. The
only law it knows and exercise systematically is the "law of terror".
This rogue regime does not rule. It preys on the people, and kills the
cultures and identities of ethnic nations . 
 
It is particularly fearful of the Shans because we are a nation,
recognized as a full-fledged nation by U (Bogyoke) Aung San, no less.
Hence, the rogue regime is determined not so much to "pacify" the Shans,
but to exterminate it by destroying everything that holds the people of
Shan State together as a nation.     
 
Although we, the Shan Democratic Union (SDU), favor a peaceful
settlement via a Tripartite Dialogue as recommended by the United
Nations General Assembly, we must also raise this question:  In the face
of governments that specialize in waging a war of terror and ethnocide
against a people, has that nation, thus victimized, the Right to
Self-Defence?  
 
We call upon the United Nations and its agencies, international
organizations, humanitarian bodies, national governments, and
non-Governmental Organizations, and all decent people everywhere to
ponder the question of the Right of Self-Defence of peoples threatened
with extermination or subject to systemic state terror.   
 
We believe that owing to the failure of the international community to
act in time to prevent so-called governments from engaging in massacres,
ethnic-cleansing actions (or ethnocide), exterminating the
national-identities of the oppressed and destroying their
political-cultural structures and infrastructures,  and so on, it is
only right that the Right to Self-Defence of the victims of state-terror
and state-led extermination actions, be recognized and firmly upheld.  
 
We believe that the recognition by the international community and
governments of the Right of the people to Self-Defence , will go a long
way toward restraining the bloody-minded and brutal impulse of
governments, especially the genocidal rogue regime in Burma (and
elsewhere in the lawless "developing" regions of the world).  
 
We firmly believe that international recognition of the Right of
threatened and victimized people to Self-Denfence will constitute an
important step in bringing about the acceptance by rulers and
power-holders of the standards of civilization, and with it, the
emergence of the Rule of Law in the areas of the world that are still
without law and without civilized governance.  
 
Kham Zam
General Secretary
SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION
January 4, 1999.