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Burma

asked Her Majesty’s Government whether they will raise in the United Nations Security Council the issues of the alleged genocide committed against the Karen, Karenni and Shan of Burma; and the imposition of an arms and investment embargo on Burma. The noble Lord said: I am most grateful to all noble Lords who are contributing to this important debate. The topicality and immediacy of the debate is underlined by an e-mail I received concerning events at 9 o’clock local time today, when in Hee Daw Hgaw, village, at least 30 houses were burnt. The e-mail also says that just two days ago in Taungoo district, 10 shells were launched on Htaw Hta Htoo township. At the outset, I should mention that many noble Lords have great knowledge about Burma. My noble friend Lady Cox, who will be contributing, was recently close to the areas I have just mentioned. I should also mention that I am a patron of Karenaid and have travelled with the Jubilee campaign to the refugee camps on the Burma border and into the Karen state. To support my case, I shall be referring to three important recent reports. The first is entitled Threat to Peace; it is compiled by an international law firm and commissioned by the Nobel Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the former Czech president, Vaclav Havel. The report analyses in painstaking detail past precedents and concludes that Burma meets all the major criteria for referring what is taking place there to the Security Council. Significantly, it concludes that the arguments for debating the atrocities committed in Burma even exceed those which led to the referral of countries such as Haiti, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia and Liberia. The House will want to know whether Her Majesty’s Government support Desmond Tutu, Vaclav Havel, and those countries calling for such a referral. The major criteria—genocide against ethnic minorities, the overthrow of a democratically elected government, armed conflict, human rights violations, refugee outflows, drugs trafficking and the HIV/AIDS crisis—are all met in abundance in Burma. The case, therefore, for the issue to be discussed by the Security Council is incontrovertible. It has received the strong endorsement of the United States, at least seven other governments, Burma’s National League for Democracy, all major ethnic groups in Burma, the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus, a resolution of the European Parliament and an Early-Day Motion in another place signed by more than 100 Members of Parliament. Given this groundswell of opinion, I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what plans Her Majesty’s Government have to use their presidency of the UN Security Council and their final month as president of the European Union to make urgent progress on this matter. We need a binding resolution, and we need to lobby China and Russia not to veto that resolution. If Her Majesty’s Government do not intend to join with those I have mentioned, perhaps the Minister can explain why not. The international legal definition of genocide is found in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Burma has in fact ratified this convention, which reads:"““In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:""(a) Killing members of the group;""(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;""(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;""(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;""(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." There are some points which the Grand Committee should note with regard to the legal definition of genocide. First, genocide need not be an attempt to destroy an entire ethnic group. Just attempting to destroy part of an ethnic group suffices. That is very important since a very common myth about the genocide definition is that it must target the entire group. There is also no requirement in international law of a minimum number of fatalities for a situation to be defined as genocide. The Burmese military have for years been conducting widespread and systematic atrocities against Karen, Karenni and Shan civilians including rape, summary executions, torture, disappearances, extortion, forced labour and the systematic destruction of villages, crops, livestock and food stores deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe. The names of Burmese military commanders and units engaged in such atrocities are often reported yet disturbingly Her Majesty’s Government have so far failed to acknowledge that genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are being perpetrated against those ethnic groups. Under Article 1 of the convention we have a legal duty to prevent genocide and to punish its perpetrators. When I ask why we do not act on that, the standard FCO response is to deny that genocide is occurring and then to claim that genocide has a particular definition without actually giving details about what this definition is and why exactly the department does not think that it fits the situation in Burma. Perhaps today the Minister will rectify that ambiguity. Last year I was in Rwanda, where western governments failed to name genocide for what it was. After Rwanda, the international community once again declared ““Never again””, but in Burma it is never again, all over again. I said that there were three reports to which I wanted to refer. I now turn to the second of those. In June, Guy Horton, a human rights researcher funded by, among others, the Government of the Netherlands, released his substantial publication, Dying Alive: A Legal Assessment of Human Rights Violations in Burma. I had the privilege of joining Mr. Horton, John Bercow MP and the International President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Dr. Martin Panter, at a press conference in the Jubilee Room arranged jointly by CSW and the Jubilee Campaign. Mr. Horton has spent five years living on the Thai-Burmese border, travelling inside the conflict zones of eastern Burma. He details the systematic and widespread use of rape, forced labour, the forced relocation of villages, the destruction of villages, crops and livestock, the widespread use of torture, human minesweepers, the forced conscription of child soldiers, religious persecution and extrajudicial selective and mass killings. He argues that there is a strong case to be made for charging Burma’s regime, the State Peace and Development Council with genocide or at least attempted genocide. In his view, the violations go well beyond a counter-insurgency campaign and cannot be understated as ““ethnic cleansing””. Just one of numerous examples of these war crimes is a massacre which took place on 27 July 1999. On that date, at least 22 internally displaced Karen civilians including a baby and two children were massacred by Burmese soldiers in Mergui District, Tenasserim Division. The victims were all beaten to death or stabbed. Some had their arms and legs broken first and were killed later. Others were placed inside empty rice sacks and pounded with a rice husker until they died. One 19 year-old girl was gang raped before she was killed. Surely Her Majesty’s Government would want to raise this truly shocking situation at the Security Council and explore with other governments the possibility of taking a case to the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. What has to happen before we are willing to take such reasonable and limited steps? I know that many find it hard to understand why we have failed thus far to investigate in detail the claims of genocide and crimes against humanity, but we remain hopeful that in the coming months we will be able to rectify that. The third significant report this year was the release of strong circumstantial evidence by CSW indicating the possible use of chemical or biological weapons by the SPDC against Karenni resistance forces in an attack that took place on 15 February this year. Dr. Martin Panter detailed the symptoms of the victims and I know that the FCO is aware of his findings. Several victims of this attack have now been examined by three separate medical practitioners independently of each other. Another examination using a matrix from Jane’s Chem-Bio Handbook for military use, suggests that a cocktail of blister agents, nerve agents and pulmonary agents was used in this attack. This is not the first time that Burma’s junta has been accused of using chemical weapons. Allegations were made in 1982, 1984, 1992, and 1995. These allegations, like the others to which I referred earlier, should be taken extremely seriously. If they prove to be true, it illustrates again the regime’s complete lack of regard towards international norms and treaties. The use of mustard gas, blister agents and other chemicals is in blatant contravention of the chemical weapons convention of 1992, which Burma ratified in January 1993. I would like to hear from the Government how they are holding the Burmese to account for these apparent violations of the convention. In particular, I hope that the Government will also use a Security Council debate to raise the possibility of an international arms embargo on Burma. Perhaps they will also tell us where they stand on the issue of investment. Surely, at a very minimum, Her Majesty’s Government must agree that it is wholly unacceptable that Burma can feed its genocidal war machine with arms when the Security Council has the power to impose an arms embargo. Evidence continues to emerge of gross violations of human rights in Burma. This year, an estimated 87,000 people were displaced and 68 villages destroyed, relocated or abandoned. The total number of internally displaced people in eastern Burma alone is at least 540,000, perhaps as many as 1 million. Since 1996, over 2,500 villages in eastern Burma have been destroyed. Just six weeks ago in Toungoo and Nyaunglebein districts of the Karen State some 400 people were driven into hiding and three major roads were closed in a deliberate attempt to cut off food supplies. It is abundantly clear that a new and tougher approach towards Burma by the international community is urgently needed. The old approach of focusing most international attention on Burma’s pro-democracy movement while giving much less focus to the plight of the ethnic minorities and keeping the UN engaged only on the level of the General Assembly and UN Human Rights Commission, simply is not working. We must take a cold hard look at what results the old approach has borne. Sadly, as Aung San Suu Kyi’s decade of house arrest testifies, Burma is no closer to democracy today than it was 10 years ago. The genocide meanwhile continues unabated. For the ethnic groups, in particular the Karen, Karenni and Shan, this situation has continued for too long. Britain owes these people a huge debt for the loyalty and bravery they showed to the Allies during the Second World War. At the time of independence Winston Churchill condemned what he called the betrayal of the Karen people and Lady Mountbatten of Burma has described the Karen as ““our forgotten allies””. Will we continue to close our ears to their pleas for help and continue to forget them, or will we finally listen and bring these issues to the agenda of the Security Council of the United Nations? I am grateful to the Grand Committee for listening so attentively to these arguments.