Burma: Saving animals, killing people
By Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy
Outside a spartan Burmese government office, military intelligence officers were interrogating two visitors who said they were environmental research fellows from a "famous" British university.
The environmentalists were really journalists from the British Observer, investigating claims that international conservation groups were working with the SLORC to create nature parks where thousands had been killed and many more evicted from their homes and used as forced labour.
After a short delay, the foreigners were ushered into the minister's office.
Ye Myint introduced himself as the adviser to the forestry minister. Eager to impress, he enthused over the council's plan to establish a 1 million hectare "biosphere" called the Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve in the Tenasserim Division in the south.
The park would be "unique", "the largest of its kind in the world". It would, he hoped, win World Heritage status.
Ye Myint said that the reserve would even encompass a section of the gas pipeline being constructed by TOTAL and Unocal, the French and US petrochemical companies, which had signed deals with the Burmese to pump gas from the Andaman Sea in the west to Thailand in the east.
Next, Ye Myint unveiled the Lampi Island Marine National Park. He talked of an "exciting project" to transform islands, bounded by coral and "inhabited by a plethora of rare flora and fauna", into an eco-tourism venture.
It would be one of the first moves by the SLORC to open up the entire Mergui Archipelago, also in the south, to mass tourism and scientific study.
Assistance
Aung Din, his colleague and a senior policy adviser, ordered a fresh pot of green tea before describing how international environmentalists were lending the SLORC their expertise and reputations.
"We are working with the Wildlife Conservation Society [WCS] and the Smithsonian Institution. Both are helping us run these projects", he said. Others, he added, were also involved, though at a less formal level.
"We have a very close relationship with the World Wildlife Fund [WWF]", said Aung Din, producing a program from a wildlife conference staged by the WWF in Rangoon the week before. Delegates at the Asian Elephants Specialist Group's seven-day conference, which started on February 12, had included WWF representatives and the curator of Chester Zoo.
As the British visitors left, Dr Alan Rabinowitz, a senior scientist from the WCS, arrived to meet the same officials. Rabinowitz had already established a management committee for the Lampi island project and, along with Dr George Schaller and others from the Smithsonian, was also running training programs and conducting wildlife surveys.
Rabinowitz was meeting the officials to update them and finalise plans for a forthcoming expedition to upper Burma. His projects in Burma were part of a worldwide research and conservation program.
In Burma, the WCS publicised its partnership with the SLORC by writing research papers for the Ministry of Forestry's magazine and posted details of its projects on the internet. The Smithsonian, too, featured regularly on the pages of the ministry magazine, where it was praised by the SLORC for conducting training and wildlife surveys.
They were the first non-governmental groups to work with the SLORC since the Rangoon massacres of 1988.
Later that day, the British "scientists" talked to other members of the ministry, including Aung Than, director of forestry for the Tenasserim Division.
"If you really want to get involved, you should come and meet Dr Alan from WCS and the Smithsonian — they are here at the moment. We also have an open channel of communication with the WWF", he said.
The WWF, it emerged, had begun a dialogue with the SLORC to encourage Burma to become a member of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species. The WWF had discussed the new nature reserves with the SLORC; the "biosphere" would protect tigers, elephants and the rare Sumatran rhinoceros.
However, when asked if a visit to the new sites could be arranged, to conduct an audit of the rare and endangered species, Aung Than declined: "You must be aware that we have problems in this area. There is a large security operation going on. Mopping up must finish before anything else can begin."
Lands seized
At the launch ceremony for the Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve, held in Rangoon in September 1996, Dr Kyaw Tint, director general of forestry, assured invited guests that the welfare of local inhabitants would be paramount.
Three months later, Saw Lyi was ordered off his paddy field by the Tatmadaw, the SLORC's military wing. 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.
Saw Lyi had become a victim of the "mopping up" operation. Overnight he lost his home and his livelihood.
When the Observer interviewed Lyi, he was hiding in the jungle. His story typified the fate of thousands whose homes lay in the path of the offensive. "I was tied to a bamboo post with Saw Kri, my son, and hit twice in the face with a rifle butt. The soldiers punched and kicked him for about 30 minutes until he passed out. Then they killed him with a bayonet", he said.
Insurgent groups fighting the SLORC smuggled Observer journalists into the Tenasserim Division, an area to which access is restricted to military personnel and invited guests of the government.
An isolated Asian frontier-land, the Tenasserim is already protected by wildlife sanctuaries established by the indigenous groups who live there. However, it is the focus of a brutal offensive by the SLORC's 10,000-strong Coastal Military Command.
According to human rights monitors who have interviewed refugees fleeing from the area and visited the region themselves, more than 2000 have died, 30,000 have been evicted from their homes and as many forced to work for the SLORC in the past 18 months.
In the same period, dozens of international human rights reports have been issued, documenting torture, extrajudicial killings, forced relocations and slave labour.
Nai 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.
After 17 people died from malaria, three of his friends tried to escape. They were caught, forced to dig their own graves and then executed. "The soldiers buried the dead bodies but left the legs and 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 head men, commandeering men and women for work. One stated: "If you do not come this time you will be attacked with artillery".
Saw Bobo recounted his experience. The people in his village, in the southern zone of the proposed biosphere, were so exhausted by the army's constant demands for labour that they tried to run away. "The SLORC arrived in the village as people were gathering their things. They started firing as we ran into the woods. I saw at least 10 people die, women and children among them", he said.
According to a report compiled by international aid workers in February for Amnesty International, almost every village in a 65-kilometre 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.
"Several thousand villagers are being used every day as forced labour. Children as young as twelve, people over sixty and women still breast feeding are forced to haul dirt, build embankments, break rocks and dig ditches", the report states.
We encountered 2000 people hiding in the jungle who had fled labour projects and orders to relocate. Many were sick and bore the scars 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 friend, 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. "The SLORC came to our village in December and I was taken, had my hands tied, and was made to walk in front of the soldiers when they launched attacks on the Karen. Children were used too", she said.
Stories also began to emerge of widespread killings and disappearances on Lampi 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 Lampi Island, we were told that many had died."
A second village headman said: "The locals on the islands were given a deadline to move, which they refused to meet. The army and the coastal navy guard came in and massacred them. Also killed were many villagers from Bobyin, on the mainland."
The Burmese government is promoting the archipelago as a "re-emerging lost island paradise".
A Thai journalist reported in a travel article that the area was a fantastic destination for tourists because it was "virtually uninhabited". The SLORC's own population estimates state that, until recently, 100,000 people lived there.
Condemnation
Human rights organisations and environmentalists have condemned the conservation groups working with the SLORC and demanded their immediate withdrawal. Faith Doherty, from the South Asian Information Network (SAIN), said that the flagship projects were going ahead at the expense of the Burmese people.
"Environmentalists should be concerned about people as well as the flora and fauna. In the areas where SLORC is establishing its reserves, SAIN has documented wholesale human rights abuse", she said.
Kevin Heppner, of the Karen Human Rights Group, said it was impossible for any group to work with the SLORC and not be involved in the politics of Burma. "It is impossible to justify helping the SLORC save its heritage while it is killing its people."
The Karen have never been approached by the international conservationists involved, despite having established their own reserves more than 20 years ago.
"The Karen National Union does not recognise the imposition of biospheres by the SLORC and foreign organisations whose intentions are questionable, dishonest and only face saving, and whose actions are oppressive against the Karen people", said a spokesman for the KNU in January.
One village elder, camped in the river valley after his home was burned down, said: "There is only one endangered species in this great biosphere, and that's the people".
[FRom a report for the Observer (London).]