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Burma

I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Alton on securing this opportunity to bring once again the tragic situation in Burma to the attention of your Lordships’ House and to give the Minister the opportunity to explain Her Majesty’s Government’s response to the crimes against humanity and attempted genocide being perpetrated by the SPDC regime against ethnic national groups. I also congratulate my noble friend on his persistent endeavours to raise awareness of the dire situation in Burma and to urge the international community to do more to bring an end to the atrocities being perpetrated by the SPDC regime. I know that my noble friend is much loved and appreciated by those whose plight we consider today. I do not use phrases such as ““crimes against humanity”” and ““attempted genocide”” without evidence to justify their appropriateness. My noble friend has powerfully described the background: Burma is ruled by a military junta with that Orwellian name ““State Peace and Development Council””. It seized power from the democratically elected government and oppresses all who oppose it. It has been systematically attacking the ethnic national peoples such as the Karen, Karenni and Shan, and the Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan peoples. Its policies include offences against innocent civilians; compelling civilians to undertake forced labour in conditions so harsh that many perish; the use of civilians as human minesweepers; systematic rape, torture and murder; the destruction of villages and the use of landmines to prevent villagers from returning to collect belongings or harvest their crops; and the abduction of boys for conscription into the army. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been forced to flee across the borders into Thailand to the east or to India in the west in order to survive. Thousands more are hiding in the jungles as internally displaced people with no adequate food, shelter or healthcare. Many die from disease and malnutrition. If found by SPDC troops, they face a fate often worse than death, as we heard from my noble friend, so they exist in a state of constant fear, ready to flee for their lives at a moment’s notice if SPDC troops approach their hiding places. There is now a massive collection of authoritative, accurate evidence documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the SPDC. My noble friend gave some examples, such as Guy Horton’s compelling study. I will refer to a few brief other examples of well documented evidence. Burma has the highest number of child soldiers in the world, 70,000, according to the Human Rights Watch report My Gun Was As Tall As Me. I have interviewed some of them. Some children come from the ethnic national groups whose plight we consider today. I have spoken to some of the young boys who managed to escape and their stories are heartbreaking. These boy soldiers, little more than terrified schoolchildren, describe how they were kidnapped and had no contact with their parents, so their families had no idea where they were. Conditions in the army are harsh and they abhor some of the tasks inflicted on them. One boy who escaped told me that he risked his life escaping because he could not endure being ordered to beat elderly people who had been forced to work as porters by SPDC soldiers and who collapsed having to carry 60 pounds of rice or ammunition from dawn to dusk, with hardly any food or water. The systematic use of rape as a weapon of war has been documented in numerous reports, including the Shan Women’s Action Networks Licence to Rape, the Karen Women’s Organization report Shattering Silences and, as recently as this year, Catwalk to the Barracks: conscription of women for sexual slavery and other practices of sexual violence by troops of the Burmese regime in Mon Areas. The detailed accounts are indescribably heartbreaking. The widespread and systematic use of forced labour continues and has been documented by many organisations, including the International Labour Organisation. The report to which my noble friend has already referred, Guy Horton’s Dying Alive, gives a lot of formidable statistics, which I will not repeat. Those are some of the bases of evidence and they include many compelling statistics. However, I should like to focus on one or two first-hand examples of human stories behind the statistics. They are based on a visit I made only last month to the Karen, Karenni and Shan peoples and on a previous visit to the Chin peoples from north-western Burma and the Kachin peoples. I am aware that the Question focuses on the Karen, Karenni and the Shan peoples, but I hope that I will be forgiven if I also mention the other ethnic national groups, such as the Chin, because they are also suffering at the hands of this regime. Any answer which the Minister can give relating to some of the ethnic groups will have relevance for all. I should like to give one or two human examples. We asked the Karenni children in one of the orphanages we support if they would be willing to draw pictures of their experiences inside Burma which had forced them to flee from their homeland. Graphic images of the children’s memories of seeing the execution of their families bespeak a suffering beyond words. My second example relates to a woman aged 29. I met her just a month ago. She described how she and her four children had to leave Mawchi township in Karenni state because SPDC soldiers repeatedly forced them to serve as porters. Her husband, aged 29, had been used as a human minesweeper. He had been forced to walk ahead of SPDC soldiers as a porter, but he was killed by a mine. She was pregnant, and her younger daughter was born after her husband was killed. Her eldest son was beaten by SPDC soldiers; he now suffers from permanent brain damage. That is a tragedy encapsulated in just one family. We also crossed into Burma and visited IDPs living in conditions of severe deprivation. We were met by a very dedicated school teacher who described how he had run out of food for the children in his school on the day of our arrival. The only other NGO to visit his community that year had come several months earlier. With the money it had given, the community bought rice and baby fish, building a reservoir for the fish to grow to maturity. The previous day, their rice supplies had finished, but the fish were fully grown and they were going to have a ““fish feast””. But that night there had been a tropical storm, and a flash flood had washed away the walls of the little reservoir—and all the fish. The school teacher had been agonising over the problem of finding food for the children—until we arrived. My fourth example is a young mother, whose five children had died of malaria a few weeks before I met her. My final point refers to the issue raised by my noble friend Lord Alton on the allegations of the use of chemical weapons. We had the opportunity to interview three young men, who had been near a shell as it exploded, which had emitted a very unusual gas. Their symptoms then, at the time the shell exploded and now, quite a long time afterwards, are entirely consistent with the possibility of exposure to substances used in chemical weapons. I join my noble friend in urging Her Majesty’s Government to press the international community to initiate appropriate investigations. These five vignettes illustrate the suffering inflicted on the Karen, Karenni and Shan people of Burma. They also illustrate the effects of the regime’s refusal to allow access by humanitarian aid organisations and human rights organisations to those whom it is victimising. So hundreds of thousands are living in fear of being caught and killed, and are dying from exposure, treatable disease and starvation. Before I conclude, I should like to mention the plight of the other ethnic groups, such as the Chin people in north-western Burma. They have also suffered from violations of human rights, such as expropriation of land and subjection to forced labour. As a predominantly Christian people, they have experienced religious persecution, with the systematic destruction of churches and the crosses they build at crossroads and on hilltops. Some have been forced to contribute to the replacement of their churches by pagodas. Many have had to flee into neighbouring India to survive, living in dire conditions in rural areas or urban so-called camps in cities. We found those living in the countryside suffering from lack of food, medicine and any prospects of developing sustainable means for survival, while those in the urban camps were existing 50 to a room with no adequate facilities or provisions of any kind. I echo and endorse my noble friend’s conclusion that incontrovertible evidence proves that the SPDC regime in Burma is guilty of long-standing, systematic crimes against humanity and attempted genocide. In Thailand last month, I was privileged to meet a group of Thai senators who were members of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus, bravely speaking out for democracy in Burma. They have been actively calling for Burma to be on the UN Security Council agenda. I join my noble friend Lord Alton in urging Her Majesty’s Government actively to support such an initiative. Will Her Majesty’s Government and their EU partners press the SPDC regime to prohibit all human rights violations, including murder, torture and rape; the use of forced labour and child soldiers; and, most importantly, to allow human rights and humanitarian organisations free access to all parts of Burma? If not we will, as my noble friend said, be guilty not only of betraying a defenceless people who are suffering and dying while we talk here today, but we will be doubly culpable. These are people who have paid a high price for supporting us in the Second World War. They gave their lives, alongside our soldiers, in the battle for freedom then. Will we leave them to suffer and die without any effective support from us now? They are looking to us for help in this their hour of desperate need. I hope that they will not look in vain this afternoon.