Endangering the Next Kim Dae-jung
Washington sends confusing signals to the people who could bring change from within.
By MICHAEL J. GREEN
Since taking office President Barack Obama has used strong words to describe the importance he places on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. In July, he told China's high-powered delegation to the first U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue that "support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America" and that the "religion and culture of all peoples must be respected and protected, and that all people should be free to speak their minds." In his September 24 address to the United Nations General Assembly, he promised "that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights." As the president prepares to travel to Asia this month, should anyone in the region doubt the United States' commitment to these values?
Unfortunately, there is doubt. Despite Mr. Obama's statements, the administration' s specific actions on issues ranging from Burma to Tibet are creating the impression that Washington has a growing list of concerns that trump human rights and democracy. The president and his team deserve support for attempting new approaches to intractable problems. It makes sense to talk directly to the junta in Burma and to broaden the agenda for cooperation with China. The problem is that the administration' s emphasis on engagement is leading the region's autocrats and dictators to see an opening for further repression at home.
The most obvious case is Tibet. The Dalai Lama has met with the American president at the White House during every visit to Washington since 1991. Initially, the Obama administration signaled it would continue this tradition during the Tibetan spiritual leader's planned visit in October, but later changed its mind. The White House may have hoped a subtler approach to the Tibet problem would pave the way for a successful presidential visit to China and yield quiet results for Tibet. Fair enough—but the opposite is happening. The Chinese are raising the ante on the Tibetans, demanding that the Dalai Lama cease all foreign travel and meetings with other international leaders as a precondition for resuming stalled Sino-Tibetan talks. Beijing is also putting pressure on other nations to follow the U.S. example, including India, which politely gave Beijing a firm "no" to its demand that Delhi stop the Dalai Lama from visiting his followers in disputed Arunachal Pradesh.
Rather than viewing gestures on Tibet as evidence of goodwill to be rewarded, the Chinese reaction has been to pocket the concessions and demand more—steadily asserting its position that regime behavior and internal affairs are not the business of the international community. In the long run, this will only complicate efforts to encourage China to use its increasing power as a responsible stakeholder.
There are also confusing signals on Burma. After a "Burma policy review," the administration reasonably concluded that neither sanctions nor engagement alone were likely to change the behavior of the regime and announced that the U.S. was going to try a new approach that employed both. In September Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell testified to the Senate that the U.S. would not ease sanctions without meaningful steps by the junta and reserved the right to strengthen sanctions if there is not progress. This was the right basis for beginning the dialogue. But the administration has also stated that engagement will be a sustained and long-term process, implying it would not necessarily hinge on the regime's short-term behavior.
In response, Burma's prime minister, General Thein Sein, announced in late October that the U.S. had "softened its approach." The junta also symbolically allowed international diplomats to have access to Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. However, the junta has concurrently increased its internal suppression of ethnic minorities and democracy activists since the administration' s policy review and engagement strategy began. In June the Burmese military drove 5,000 members of the Karen minority across the border into Thailand, the largest exodus of Karen in a decade. In August the junta sentenced Ms. Suu Kyi to an additional 18 months of house imprisonment. In August and September the junta began a major military offensive against the Kokang people in northern Burma, driving over 30,000 refugees into China. Just last week the regime arrested 50 students, journalists and political activists, even as the U.S. prepared to send its first senior-level delegation to Burma this week for high-level talks with the junta.
Tibet and Burma illustrate the administration' s serious dilemma: how to prevent its commitment to engagement from being perceived as a sign of shifting U.S. priorities and a greater tolerance for repression. It is damaging enough that Beijing and Naypyidaw are receiving this signal, but even minor adjustments in U.S. policy have a major ripple effect among friendly states also grappling with how to encourage greater democracy and human rights in the region. The European Union was poised to activate stronger sanctions against Burma but is now hesitating. Members of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations were engaging in a painful but important internal debate about how to implement the human-rights and democracy principles in their new charter with respect to Burma, but at their most recent summit in Thailand the focus was entirely on what the U.S. would do to help solve the problem.
The president should use his visit to Asia to correct the confusing signals Washington is sending about the U.S. commitment to human rights and democracy. The administration does not need to abandon its aim of seeking results through direct dialogue with Burma's leadership nor curtail its ambitious agenda for cooperation with China. But the administration should not be afraid that a clear stand on human rights and democracy will jeopardize those goals.
President Obama can begin by announcing his clear intention to meet with the Dalai Lama early next year and pressing Chinese President Hu Jintao to resume dialogue with the Dalai Lama's representatives without preconditions. Mr. Obama can use the trip to clarify, in his meetings with Southeast Asian leaders on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, that the U.S. will increase targeted financial sanctions on Burma if repression continues to escalate. The U.S. should also re-engage Burma's neighbors to pressure the regime for change by stating that the U.S. will continue its new approach only if Ms. Suu Kyi is released and there are real opportunities for the democratic opposition and ethnic minorities to participate in a fair political process.
Finally, he should use his public addresses to single out and demonstrate support for those dissidents and prisoners of conscience who will someday emerge as the future Kim Dae-jungs and Vaclav Havels of Asia. For it is they who face the greatest uncertainty if America's intentions remain unclear.
Mr. Green is senior advisor and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and associate professor at Georgetown University. This is the first article in an occasional series on the Obama administration' s human-rights record. http://online. wsj.com/article/ SB10001424052748 7039329045745101 92259822258. html?mod= googlenews_ wsj
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Endangering the Next Kim Dae-jung
Free Trade AND Human Rights
http://blog.labour.org.nz/
Free Trade AND Human Rights
Posted by Maryan Street on November 1st, 2009
Last week I was in Kuala Lumpur for the signing of the Malaysia-NZ Free Trade Agreement (see previous blog on that subject). I had arranged before I left NZ to use some of my time there to visit the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) compound in KL. I had been there once before and wanted to know how things had improved - or not. Malaysia had had an appalling record of dumping people, especially Burmese refugees whom it didn’t want, into the arms of traffickers, until an enquiry by the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee exposed it and got the Malaysians to improve their practices. I met with a senior staffer in the office of Senator Dick Luger who worked on this committee recently in Washington and got an update on Malaysia from him.
The UNHCR Rep in KL is Alan Vernon. He told me that things have improved in Malaysia and the UNHCR is no longer getting the reports they had been getting of the trafficking on the Thai-Malaysia border. Burmese refugees used to be rounded up by the Malaysian police and deposited on the Thai border where traffickers would take the women and children for prostitution and domestic service, and the men for labouring work who knows where. They are only hearing of about 100 such cases a year now, compared with 1000-2000 a year previously.
91% of the 300-400 people being processed per day at the compound are Burmese refugees. They end up in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, among other countries. Some of them end up in my town, Nelson, as well as Auckland, Palmerston North, Hamilton and Wellington. These are people with desperate stories of human suffering inflicted by the most evil regime on the planet. Some have become good friends now and they appreciate everything NZ has given them, while they are not blind to our faults. They retain their ardent politics and live for the day Burma returns to democratic rule, preferably under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, their most recently democractically-elected leader (1990), who has been living under house arrest for 14 of the last 19 years.
In Malaysia, there are no laws protecting refugees. Children of refugees are not allowed to go to school; refugees are arrested and detained without charge for prolonged periods of time; they are harassed in their workplace by police. They have exchanged one kind of fear in Burma for another kind of fear in Malaysia.
The day I visited the UNHCR compound, I met families and individuals who were trying to get in to the US. They are processed in the UNHCR facility, treated well by interpreters, medical staff and teams of interviewers from the soon-to-be host country. They want to be somewhere else. They want to be someone else. They want their children to be educated and have a greater chance of a full and rewarding life than they had.
Win Myin Htut - Chin Burmese refugee at UNHCR compound, KL
People wait all day in the heat for their chance at freedom.
These people are in the final stages of processing. Next stop - the US!
People present at the compound with a range of health problems - most frequently anxiety disorders, as well as the illnesses of poverty, malnutrition, some with HIV/AIDS. Parents must go crazy with worry for their children. Here is a family who have been in Malaysia for 4 years and who are hoping to move on soon. He is a farmer - although the difference in the meaning of that word in Burma and the US is striking.
Chin family at UNHCR in KL - UN interpreter front left
Malaysia has a Human Rights Commission and I met one of its Commissioners. But they are kept on a tight leash and their Annual Report has never been presented to, or debated in, Parliament. The national Human Rights Day is boycotted by the human rights NGOs. Sometimes people say “how can we trade with countries which have such appalling human rights records?” The truth is, trade happens. We can make some gains through the labour clauses we negotiate alongside the FTAs. But even more importantly, a country gets opened up by trade and exposed to other ways of doing things. Trade becomes the vehicle for other conversations.
I hope John Key is having those other conversations, as Helen Clark used to do on a regular basis in the context of free trade negotiations and settlements.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Foreign Affairs, ethnic, human rights, international. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Lesson Learnt from ABTUC-TUCB"ဖဆပလအတြင္း အတူရွိခဲ့ၾကစဥ္က ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ႏွင့္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္တို႔၏ အလံလုပြဲတခု"
"ဖဆပလအတြင္း အတူရွိခဲ့ၾကစဥ္က ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ႏွင့္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္တို႔၏ အလံလုပြဲတခု"
ကိုသန္း (ၾကည့္ျမင္တိုင္)
လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၆ဝ ေက်ာ္ ၁၉၄၆ ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏွစ္ကုန္ပိုင္းေလာက္အထိ ဖဆပလ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး အမ်ိဳးသားလြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္ေပါင္းစုႀကီးထဲတြင္ ဗမာျပည္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီႏွင့္ ဗမာျပည္ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီတို႔ အတူရွိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဘုရင္ခံ ဆာေဒၚမန္စမစ္ႏွင့္ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ေသြးစုပ္ေရး စီမံကိန္းျဖစ္ေသာ စကၠဴျဖဴစီမံကိန္းကို ဦးတည္ တိုက္ေနၾကသည့္ အခ်ိန္ကာလျဖစ္သည္။ ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အလံေတာ္ေအာက္ရွိ လူထုလူတန္းစား အင္အားစုအသီးသီးတို႔သည္ လူထုဆႏၵျပပြဲမ်ားျဖင့္ အင္အားျပ တိုက္ခိုက္လ်က္ ရွိၾကသည္။ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဘုရင္ခံ ကြဲသည့္ပြဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ႏွင့္ ဆက္သြယ္ထားေသာ ဗမာျပည္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီ၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းထားသည့္ ဗမာျပည္လံုးဆိုင္ရာ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢ - ABTUC (All Burma Trade Union Congress)၊ ဗမာျပည္ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းထားသည့္ အလုပ္သမားမ်ား အစည္းအ႐ံုးအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (ဗမာႏိုင္ငံ) - TUCB (Trade Union Congress – Burma) တို႔က ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အလံေတာ္ေအာက္ရွိ အလုပ္သမားအင္အားစုမ်ားအျဖစ္ အင္အားျပရန္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္က ေဆာ္ၾသလ်က္ ရွိသည္။
တေန႔တြင္ သခင္လွေကၽြက က်ေနာ့္ကို ABTUC တြင္ အစည္းအေဝး သြားတတ္ရန္ ႀကိဳေျပာထားသည္။ တတ္ေရာက္မည့္ အစည္းအေဝးက ဗမာျပည္လံုးဆိုင္ရာ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢ ဌာနခ်ဳပ္တြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ 'ဖဆပလ အလုပ္သမား အင္အားစုမ်ား အင္အားျပေရး အစည္းအေဝး' ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုစဥ္ ဗမာျပည္လံုးဆိုင္ရာ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢတြင္ ဥကၠ႒ သခင္ဗဟိန္း၊ ကိုေအာင္သိန္း (စာေရးဆရာ ျမေဒါင္းညိဳ)၊ ဒုတိယ ဥကၠ႒ သခင္ဗတင္ (လက္သီးပုန္း)၊ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ေက်ာ္ၿငိမ္း (မင္းဘူးကိုခ်မ္းသာ) တြဲဖက္အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး၊ အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္မ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ မစၥတာရာဂ်န္ (ဆရာေအာင္ႏိုင္)၊ သခင္လွၿမိဳင္ (ဗိုလ္မွဴးရန္ေအာင္ - ရဲေဘာ္သံုးက်ိပ္)၊ သခင္ခ်စ္ (ဇင္ခ်စ္)၊ မစၥတာမူကာဂ်ီ၊ ေဒါက္တာနက္(သ္)၊ သခင္စိုး၊ ဦးကိုကိုႀကီး (ေနာင္ဗမာျပည္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ ဥကၠ႒)တို႔ ျဖစ္သည္။
က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလုပ္သမားအစည္းအ႐ံုးမ်ားအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (ဗမာႏိုင္ငံ)တြင္ သခင္လြင္ ဥကၠ႒၊ သခင္လွေကၽြ၊ သခင္လူေအး ဒုတိယ ဥကၠ႒မ်ား၊ ကိုတင္ၫြန္႔ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး၊ ကိုဟုတ္ၾကည္ (ေငြထိန္း)၊ ဗဟိုအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္မ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ ရဲေဘာ္ေသာင္းစိန္ (ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္) [ခ်စ္တီယား သတ္မႈျဖင့္ ႀကိဳးမိန္႔မွ လႊတ္လာသူ]တို႔သာ မွတ္မိသည္။ ကိုမ်ိဳးျမင့္ႏွင့္ ကိုသန္းေငြ (ဘီေအအိုဒီ) တို႔က ေနာက္မွ အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ ျဖစ္လာၾကသည္။
အစည္းအေဝး တတ္ရန္ ဒုတိယဥကၠ႒ သခင္လွေကၽြက က်ေနာ့္ကို ေခၚျခင္းမွာ က်ေနာ္သည္ ရန္ကုန္ခ႐ိုင္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီ အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ ျဖစ္ေနျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္သည္။ သခင္လွေကၽြသည္ ဝါရင့္ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားႀကီး ျဖစ္သည္။ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ၊ အာရွလူငယ္၊ ျပည္သူ႔အေရးေတာ္ပံုပါတီဝင္မွ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီဝင္ ျဖစ္လာသူ၊ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အေတြ႕အၾကံဳ နည္းေသာသူ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီထဲတြင္ အမည္ထြက္စ ျပဳေနသည့္ သေဘာတရား သင္တန္းဆရာ ေပါက္စ၊ အသက္ ၂ဝ ပင္ မရွိေသး၊ ဂုိဏ္းဂဏစိတ္ မကင္းေသး။
ABTUC ဘက္မွ သခင္ဗတင္ႏွင့္ မစၥတာမူကာဂ်ီတို႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ရန္ကုန္ခ႐ိုင္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္တီပါတီမွ ရဲေဘာ္ေအာင္ဝင္းလား၊ မမွတ္မိေတာ့။ TUCB ဘက္မွ သခင္လွေကၽြ၊ ရဲေဘာ္ေသာင္းၾကည္တို႔ ျဖစ္ၾကသည္။ ရန္ကုန္ခ႐ိုင္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ပါတီမွ က်ေနာ္။
အစည္းအေဝး စေတာ့ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢႀကီး ႏွစ္ခုတို႔မွ အလုပ္သမားအင္အားကို အမ်ားဆံုး ထုတ္ျပဖို႔လည္း သေဘာတူၾကသည္။ အလုပ္သမားထု အစည္းအေဝး အခမ္းအနားတြင္ ဘယ္အလံထားမလဲ ေဆြးေႏြးၾကသည္။ အသီးသီးေသာ အစည္းအ႐ံုးမ်ားႏွင့္ သမဂၢမ်ား မိမိတို႔ဆိုင္ရာ အလံမ်ားကို လႊင့္ထူလာႏိုင္ရန္လည္း သေဘာတူသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အလံတခုတည္းကို စင္ျမင့္ေနာက္ခံ လုပ္မွာလား။ ဖဆပလ အလံကို အလုပ္သမား အစည္းအ႐ံုးႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢ အလံမ်ားက ဝိုင္းရံမလား၊ ေဆြးေႏြးရာတြင္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ မရၾက။ ေဆြးေႏြးရင္း အလံကို ထိပါးသည့္ စကားမ်ား တစြန္းတစ ထြက္လာသည္။ ABTUC အလံက တူႏွင့္တံစဥ္အလံ ျဖစ္သည္။ လက္ဝဲေထာင့္တြင္ ၾကယ္ျဖဴက လမ္းၫႊန္ၾကယ္၊ တူႏွင့္တံစဥ္က အလုပ္သမား၊ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳသည္။ ဟုတ္လို႔၊ ဘာမွ ေျပာစရာမရွိ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ TUCB အလံက်ေတာ့ေရာ၊ လက္ဝဲေထာင့္ လမ္းၫႊန္ၾကယ္ျဖဴႏွင့္ ဗမာ့ကာကြယ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ ဦးထုပ္တံဆိပ္ ေဒါင္းကို ေဖာက္ထည့္ထားၿပီး တံစဥ္ မပါဘဲ တူႏွစ္ေခ်ာင္းသာ ပါသည္။ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားအစည္းအ႐ံုး အလံက်ေတာ့ ဗမာ့ကာကြယ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ ေဒါင္းတံဆိပ္ အလယ္မွ ေဖာက္ထားသည့္ လမ္းၫႊန္ၾကယ္ႏွင့္တံစဥ္ တေခ်ာင္းတည္း။ တူ မပါ။ က်ေနာ္ အၾကည့္ရကပ္သည္။ အလံမ်ား သတ္မွတ္စဥ္က က်ေနာ္ ပါတီ အေရးပါသည့္ အေနအထားသို႔ မေရာက္ေသး။ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အဆင့္မွာသာ ရွိအုန္းမည္။ ထို႔အျပင္ တူတံစဥ္ အမွတ္အသားသည္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ ကိုယ္စားျပဳေလ့ရွိ၍ အလံ စတင္ေ႐ြးခ်ယ္စဥ္က ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ႏွင့္ မတူေအာင္ တူတံစဥ္ကို မေ႐ြးတာ ပါခ်င္ ပါပါလိမ့္မည္။ က်ေနာ့္အေတြး ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ၾကယ္ႏွင့္တူ၊ ၾကယ္ႏွင့္တံစဥ္ သက္သက္က မ်က္စိထဲမွာ ၾကည့္မေကာင္းတာကေတာ့ အမွန္ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒါက က်ေနာ့္အေတြးႏွင့္ က်ေနာ့္အျမင္။
အစည္းအေဝးမွာ ေျပာၾကဆိုၾကေတာ့ တူတံစဥ္က အလုပ္သမားကို အမွတ္အသားျပဳသည့္ အလံဟု ABTUC မွ သခင္ဗတင္ ေျပာတာက မွန္ေနသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ က်ေနာ္တို႔အလံကို ထိပါးရိကပါး ေျပာေတာ့လည္း မခံခ်င္၊ သည္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ဆိုသည့္ ေထာင့္မက်ိဳးသည့္ လူက "ခင္ဗ်ားတို႔ အလံက တံစဥ္ႀကီး ပါေနေတာ့ အလုပ္သမားအလံ စစ္စစ္မဟုတ္ဘူး။ အလုပ္သမား လယ္သမားအလံ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ အခု ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္က ျပဳလုပ္မယ့္ အင္အားျပပြဲဟာ အလုပ္သမားအင္အားျပပြဲ႔၊ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမား မပါဘူး" ဟု ကပ္ေျပာသည္။ က်ေနာ္ ကပ္ေျပာသည့္ စကားသည္လည္း ဟုတ္ေနေတာ့ သခင္ဗတင္ ေဒါပြသြားသည္။
"ခင္ဗ်ားေျပာတဲ့ မူသေဘာအရဆိုလွ်င္ ခင္ဗ်ားတို႔ ဖြဲ႕မယ့္ ေဗဒင္ဆရာမ်ား အစည္းအ႐ံုးမွာ ၾကယ္တလံုးနဲ႔ ေက်ာက္သင္ပုန္း တခ်ပ္၊ ျမဴနီစီပါယ္ အလုပ္သမား အစည္းအ႐ံုးမွာ ၾကယ္တလံုးႏွင့္ တံျမက္စည္း တေခ်ာင္းထည့္" စသည္ျဖင့္ ေျပာပါေလေတာ့သည္။ က်ေနာ္ကလည္း ကပ္ေျပာမည့္သာ ေျပာသည္။ ကိုယ္ဟာက အဟုတ္ မဟုတ္သည္ကို သိသည္။ က်ေနာ္ကိုယ္တိုင္ သခင္ဗတင္ အေျပာကို သေဘာက်ၿပီး တဟားဟား ရယ္သည္။ သည္ေတာ့ သခင္ဗတင္ စိတ္ေျပသြားဟန္ တူသည္။ သခင္လွေကၽြကေတာ့ က်ေနာ့္ သက္သက္႐ြဲ႕ေျပာေနတာကို သိၿပီး "ေတာ္ပါေတာ့ဗ်ာ" ဟု ေျပာသည္။ မစၥတာမူကာဂ်ီကေတာ့ နားေထာင္ေနသည္။ ဘာမွ ဝင္မေျပာ။
က်ေနာ္လည္း ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီက ရဲေဘာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ယခု တႀကိမ္သာ အျငင္းခံု ျဖစ္ဖူးသည္။ အမ်ားအားျဖင့္ က်ေနာ္ႏွင့္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီက ရဲေဘာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ သင့္ျမတ္သည္က မ်ားသည္။ ရန္ကုန္ခ႐ိုင္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီမွ ရဲေဘာ္သာၫြန္႔၊ ရဲေဘာ္တင္ေစာတို႔ႏွင့္ သိကၽြမ္းသည္။ ေနာင္တြင္ ပထမ အေရွ႕ေျမာက္စစ္ေဒသမွဴး ျဖစ္လာသူ ကိုစိုးသိမ္းႏွင့္လည္း စစ္ၿပီးခါစတုန္းက ၾကည့္ျမင္တိုင္တြင္ သိခဲ့ဖူးသည္။
သခင္ဗတင္ ဆိုလွ်င္ က်ေနာ့္ထက္ ဝါရင့္သမာၻရင့္ ပုဂိၢဳလ္ ျဖစ္သည္။ သခင္ဘဝတြင္ေရာ ဗမာ့ လြတ္လပ္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ - ဘီအိုင္ေအ ဘဝတြင္ပါ အဆင့္ျမင့္တာဝန္မ်ား ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ရသူ ျဖစ္သည္။ က်ေနာ္ကလည္း အရွင္ေမြး ေန႔ခ်င္းႀကီးသူ ျဖစ္သည္။ သခင္ဗတင္ မ်က္စိထဲတြင္ က်ေနာ့္ကို မေလာက္ေလး မေလာက္စားဟု ထင္ျမင္မည္။ ေနာက္ေတာ့မွ သူတို႔ကို မခန္႔ေလးစား ေျပာသည့္ ဆိုရွယ္လစ္ေပါက္စ က်ေနာ့္အေၾကာင္း ေမးယူရလိမ့္မည္။ လက္ေဝွ႔ စကားျဖင့္ ေျပာရလွ်င္ က်ေနာ္က ဘင္တန္ဝိတ္တန္းမွ ဟဲဗီးဝိတ္တန္းသို႔ တတ္ထိုးသူဟု ျမင္ေကာင္း ျမင္ပါလိမ့္မည္။ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးမႈ မညီညာေသာ အေျခအေနတြင္ ဒါမ်ိဳးေတြ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္။
သခင္ဗတင္ႏွင့္ ဗမာျပည္ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီတို႔ႏွင့္ ဆက္ႏြယ္မႈကိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ သိပ္ထဲထဲဝင္ဝင္ မသိ။ ရင္းရင္းႏွီးႏွီးလည္း မဆက္ဆံဘူး။ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ပါတီ လက္နက္ကိုင္ေတာ့ ပါသြား မသြားပင္ က်ေနာ္မသိ။ သခင္ဗတင္ႏွင္ ဗိုလ္မွဴးႀကီးလက်္ာတို႔ အလြန္ရင္းႏွီးေၾကာင္းေတာ့ က်ေနာ္ သိသည္။ ဗိုလ္လက်္ာပိုင္ မုတၲမ ကုမၸဏီတြင္လည္း သခင္ဗတင္ အဆင့္ျမင့္တာဝန္ ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သည္ကို ဦးသိန္းေဖျမင့္က က်ေနာ့္ကို ေျပာျပခဲ့ဖူးသည္။ ဦးသိန္ေဖျမင့္သည္ "ေခတ္မီသူတိုင္း ပင္လယ္ငါး စားသည္" ဆိုေသာ ေက်ာ္ၾကားသည့္ မုတၲမ ပင္လယ္ငါးဖမ္း ကုမၸဏီ၏ ေၾကာ္ျငာေဆာင္ပုဒ္ကို ေရးသားခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။
က်ေနာ္ အထက္တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည့္ အလံလု၊ အလံၿပိဳင္ပြဲ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ေသာ ဖဆပလ အလံေတာ္ေအာက္ အလုပ္သမားအားျပပြဲအၿပီးတြင္ ဘာရလဒ္မွ မရရွိခဲ့။ ေနာက္ထပ္ အစည္းအေဝး ေခၚျဖစ္သလား က်ေနာ္ မမွတ္မိေတာ့။
တခု ေသခ်ာတာကေတာ့ ဖဆပလ အလံေတာ္ေအာက္ အလုပ္သမား အားျပပြဲကို ABTUC ႏွင့္ TUCB တို႔ ပူးတြဲ မလုပ္ျဖစ္ေတာ့ဘဲ သီးျခားစီခြဲ၍ လုပ္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
က်ေနာ္ ဤေဆာင္းပါကို ေရးသည္မွာ အဓိပၸာယ္မရွိ ေညာင္ျမစ္တူး ပုတ္သင္ဥ ေဖာ္ျခင္းမဟုတ္။ သမိုင္းသင္ခန္းစာ ယူေစလို၍ ျဖစ္သည္။ က်ေနာ့္လို အထအန ေကာက္ၿပီး ျငင္းခံုမည့္အစား ညီၫြတ္စြာ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္မည့္ အေျခအေနမ်ိဳး ဖန္တီးယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။
ဥပမာအားျဖင့္၊ ဖဆပလ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၏ ဦးေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ က်င္းပမည့္ အစည္းအေဝးျဖစ္၍ ဖဆပလ အလံေတာ္ကို အလယ္ဗဟို ခပ္ျမင့္ျမင့္ထားၿပီး ABTUC ႏွင့္ TUCB အလံမ်ားကို ေဘးမွ ခပ္ေစာင္းေစာင္းရံၿပီး ထားရွိႏိုင္သည္။ ယင္းေနာက္ အလုပ္သမားအင္အားျပ အစည္းအေဝး တတ္ေရာက္လာၾကသည့္ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢမ်ားႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမားအစည္းအ႐ံုးမ်ားက မိမိတို႔ အလံမ်ားကို ကိုင္ေဆာင္လာႏိုင္ၾကသည္ဟု ေဆြးေႏြးၾကမည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ၿပီးသည္။ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း အလိုဆႏၵအတိုင္းလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ခုေတာ့ အလံၿပိဳင္ပြဲကို ဂိုဏ္းဂဏ အစြဲအလမ္းျဖင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကသျဖင့္ နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ဘုရင္ခံႏွင့္ စကၠဴျဖဴအစိုးရကို အလုပ္သမားမ်ားက ညီၫြတ္စည္း႐ံုးၿပီး တခဲနက္ အင္အားျပ ထိုးႏွက္ျခင္း မျပဳႏိုင္ၾက။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အလံလု အစည္းအေဝးအေၾကာင္းကို ၾကားသိရလွ်င္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာ္ခ် ဆလံတုိက္သြားခ်င္ သြားပါလိမ့္မည္။
အမွတ္တိုင္း ဝန္ခံရလွ်င္ ယင္းအစည္းအေဝး မေအာင္ျမင္ျဖစ္ရျခင္းမွာ မိမိတို႔အားနည္းခ်က္ကို သိလ်က္ျဖင့္ ရန္စကား ေျပာမိခဲ့သည့္ က်ေနာ္ တာဝန္မကင္းပါ။
ဤသည္ကေတာ့ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ေျခာက္ဆယ္ေက်ာ္က အမွားျပဳလုပ္မိခဲ့သည့္ ေနာင္မွရခဲ့ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေနာင္တ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဤေဆာင္းပါး ေရးခ်ိန္တြင္ သခင္ဗတင္၊ သခင္လွေကၽြ၊ ရဲေဘာ္ေသာင္းစိန္၊ မစၥတာမူကာဂ်ီတို႔ မရွိၾကေတာ့။ ။
(ရနံ႔သစ္ မဂၢဇင္း၊ အမွတ္ ၉၊ စက္တဘၤာ ၂ဝဝ၉ ထုတ္မွေန ျပန္လည္ကူးယူ ေဖာ္ျပလိုက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္)
Harming the Young: Sexually Abused Children in Burma and the Migrant Communities of Thailand
Harming the Young: Sexually Abused Children in Burma and the Migrant Communities of Thailand
October 3, 2009
WCRP:
Introduction
Burma’s military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) is notorious for its oppression of the democratic opposition led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and for human rights violations against ethnic nationalities who participate in liberation movements. In response to these violations and constant suppression, citizens are continually fleeing Burma.
There are over 1 million Burmese migrants working illegally and unsafely in Thailand1. Nearly 140,0002 refugees from assorted Burmese ethnic groups are seeking shelter in Thailand’s refugee camps and over 500,0003 people are displaced on Burma’s eastern border.
The following report details the many ways in which children, living in Burma or in migrant communities, are sexually harassed and abused due to the unstable environment created by the SPDC.
Background (Conflict and migration)
In Burma, armed conflict has occurred throughout Shan State, Kayeh (Karenni State), Karen State, Mon State and Tenasserism Division, where millions of members of ethnic minorities are living. The SPDC has named these conflict zones ‘Black Areas’, denoting their “unsecured” nature. The SPDC subsequently uses this to justify the numerous human rights violations it commits in the areas.
Your browser may not support display of this image. In Mon State since 2000, the SPDC has deployed over 20 military battalions. Additionally, they have implemented a population transfer project under which Burman workers are relocated Mon areas to replace Mon workers who have migrated to Thailand. Many retired SPDC personnel have been allowed to stay in Mon villages, and have been given ‘authority’ by local Burmese army commanders. In many cases, these retired Burmese soldiers and Burman migrant workers sexually harass and beat children.rmese migrant workers at a seafood production factory in Mahachai
Burmese migrant workers at a seafood production factory in MahachaiFacing widespread human rights violations, conflict, economic hardship and taxation, many Mon and other ethnic minorities decide to flee illegally to Thailand for better incomes and new jobs. In order to avoid police, they travel through jungles, rivers, and mountains.
Regularly children are withdrawn from school and the entire family migrates in search of new jobs. Of the thousands of migrant workers that move daily into Thailand, an uncountable number are children. Since the general population in Burma is unaware of any laws condemning ‘child labor’ or that the Burmese government has signed the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC), children also migrate to Thailand for work.
It is very difficult for migrants to obtain legal status, and the majority work illegally in unsafe conditions in Thailand. Female migrants face additional difficulties, as they cannot always find work and many of them have to rely on their husbands, fathers and male friends for survival. Most female migrants stay in narrow rooms, in rented houses that are not secure. Because of these unsafe conditions, females living in the migrant communities of Thailand are often raped or sexually harassed by neighbors, Thai police or gangs.
Some Thai and international NGOs have helped workers in Thai migrant communities prevent sexual violence and abuse. However, because the migrant communities are so large, it is difficult to prevent harassment in every location.
Children are particularly vulnerable in Southern Burma
Conflict Zones or ‘Black Areas’
Armed conflict is fairly constant in Southern Burma. The New Mon State Party (NMSP), the largest Mon ethnic political group, agreed to a ceasefire with the SPDC in 1995, although several Mon splinter groups continue to fight with the SPDC creating conflict zones with in Mon State. Similarly, the SPDC, by collaborating with Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Karen ceasefire group, has launched a military offensive against the main Karen rebel group, Karen National Union (KNU). The offensive has created several conflict zones within Karen state. ‘Black areas’ also litter parts of Tenesserim division, within which the SPDC regularly fights with Mon and other ethnic minority groups.
The SPDC is constantly active in Ye Township in Mon State and in Yebyu Township in Tenesserim Division. When the SPDC launches military offensives in these conflict zones, the villagers endure various violations. Children are often sexually assaulted and or beaten, while men and women are taken as porters, or accused of being rebel supporters and killed.
Your browser may not support display of this image. An example, taken from a report made by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM), is detailed below:
Burmese Army troops in northern Tenesserim Division forced all residents of Amae village (Mae Taw village in Burmese) to abandon their homes and plantations in November. On the same day, the troops raped a 17-year-old girl and severely beat a young man.
Captain Pan Zar and 80 troops from Infantry Battalion (IB) No.107 entered the village on November 11, 2008. After accusing the residents of supporting an armed Mon rebel group in the area, the troops ordered the villagers to relocate. Each household was also ordered to pay the soldiers 50,000 kyat, and the residents were prohibited from visiting farms and plantations in the area.
The villagers were given virtually no time to prepare for their departure. sources said they left the next day, bringing only what they could carry and leaving behind the majority of their belongings, as well the timber and other valuable construction materials in their homes.
The soldiers assaulted at least one villager as they ordered the villagers to relocate. “One young man from the village asked the captain, ‘if you do like this, where will we go to live?’ said an eyewitness from Amae. “The captain replied, ‘you can go and live anywhere, but not in this area. After that he grabbed the young man and hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. Once the young man had fallen down, the captain hit the young man’s leg and it broke.”
According to another source, soldiers also raped a 17-year-old girl as she worked on a betel-nut plantation nearby. The resident, who spoke with the victim’s mother and then quoted her to HURFOM, said that she was crying as time she told the story. “My daughter is only 17-years-old. She was raped by 7 soldiers,” the source quoted the mother. “Those soldiers are not humans. They are like animals. They are the same as evil, both the captain and his soldiers. My daughter nearly died, and now she has tried to kill herself many times.”
The 60 households found themselves in extra-ordinarily difficult circumstances. “Now we are in a very bad situation because we could not take much food or household things. And we have not much money. We also have to find land to live on and all new materials for building a home. It is so expensive we cannot afford it,” said a former resident. “Now I am staying at my friend’s house, but I cannot stay there for a long time. I have to find a way to solve the roblem – I want to migrate to Thailand to find a job, but I have no money even for transportation. My wife, my two sons and I have no idea where we will go.”
This is only one of many stories from Tenasserim Division, although many Mon families have suffered. Mon and Karen human rights workers cannot travel freely to several parts of Southern Burma, and as a result the majority of sexual assaults remain largely undocumented.
Non-Conflict Zones in Mon State
An increasing number of children in Mon areas have been sexually harassed, following the increased deployment of Burmese Army battalions in Mon State, part of the Army’s implementation of the ‘population transfer project’.
Your browser may not support display of this image. Hundreds of Burmans from Central Burma, (Pegu and Rangoon Divisions) have migrated to Mon State seeking jobs, as workers in Mon state are paid better than workers in other parts of Burma. A day can earn 1,500 kyat per day in Central Burma, while they could earn 3,000 to 3,500 kyat per day in a non-conflict zone in Mon state.
Migrant workers are employed at a variety of locations in Mon State; rice paddy fields, rubber and orchard plantations, transportation jobs, brick-making factories, etc. They also live on the rice paddy fields, plantations and in the forests near the villages. Several reports have been made about migrant workers stealing from or harming local Mon State villagers. Because of such activities, children are not safe in their homes, while traveling to the rice paddy fields, while working or living on the plantations, or at the factories.
Below is an example from Kya Inn Seikyi Township in Karen State:
In November 2008, a 15-year-old girl was raped and savagely murdered by a Burman man. A 47-year-old eyewitness from Innk Gwa village, Kyar Inn Seik Kyi Township explained the event.
The girl was from Pakapaw village, Kyar Inn Seik Kyi Township, also known as Moulmein district in the New Mon State Party Controlled Area. The girl worked as a beef seller, and on the day she was killed, had gone to her uncle’s village to sell beef. At 4:00 pm after the shop was closed, her uncle sent her back to her village before returning home himself.
On the return trip she was raped by a 33-year-old Burman man. After raping her, he killed her by striking her on the head with a machete. According to the eyewitness, “I saw him throw her dead body into a field at a farm which is very close to the village. I think it happened around 5 or 6 pm. I ran and collected some farmers who were working around there and we arrested him and brought him to the New Mon State Party (NMSP) Moulmein district headquarters.” The crime of rape and murder will most likely result in an extended jail sentence, though the length of a possible sentence could not be confirmed.
“We feel sorry for the Burman people and offer them jobs and allow them to live in our village. Sadly, a girl in our village was raped and brutally killed by a Burman man. Before, our village was a very peaceful place. But now as more Burman people have moved in, we have been cheated, had our motorbikes stolen, faced outright hostility, and now one of us has been killed” a source reported, who had recently spoken to a villager from the area.
He added, “Most of the migrant workers are from upper Burma and are working here or in other villages in the area.” He surmised, “There are approximately 1,000 Burman people in our village, and have increased in population this year”.
The source also reported a villager saying “Most of our villagers migrated to Thailand and left their farms and homes. We have a shortage of workers and therefore we must use the migrant workers who arrive from upper Burma looking for work.
In some cases, even though the village headmen inform the commanders of local military battalions of criminal conduct and abuses, their complaints are not taken seriously, and detained culprits are not arrested or prosecuted.
In some areas, Burmese battalion commanders appoint Burman migrant workers as village headmen, or as heads of local militia forces. Community leaders then lose their authority and control of the villagers.
Sexual harassment in Mon migrant workers’ communities
Domestic Violence
In Thailand, migrant workers have very restricted accommodations and of them live in fear because they do not have work-permit cards. When an entire family migrates to Thailand, they usually live in very narrow houses or rooms. There is no separate space or private areas in these living situations. Father, mother and children all share the same space. In such circumstances, girls often face sexual harassment from male relatives.
In the example below a father repeatedly attempts to rape his 14-year-old daughter:
On December 28th 2008, a 14-year-old girl, Ma K—T—W—, was raped by her father in Mahachai, Samut Sakhon Province, Thailand.
Your browser may not support display of this image.
The girl, a Burmese migrant teenager, was raped in December while her mother was in the hospital. According to a neighbor, “Her father tried to rape her many times until he succeeded while his wife was in the hospital. After she had been raped, she dared not to tell her mother and was also afraid of being raped again; she ran away from home with the help of a Thai man.”
The girl’s mother called her and asked her to return home. She also asked why she ran away with the Thai man. The girl told her mother the reasons and explained that she was afraid to be home alone. Her mother then sent her to a village in Mon State.
A few months later she returned to Thailand to help her sick mother. One day, her mother went to a celebration with relatives and left her in the house. At around 3:00 p.m., after the girl had finished taking a bath, her drunken father tried again to rape her.
The girl escaped and immediately phoned her aunt and asked for her mother to come back home. Her mother knew the reason and though she wanted to complain to her husband, she was afraid of being beaten and dared not to inform Thai police.
Your browser may not support display of this image. Her concerned neighbors, however, informed the Labor Right Promotion Network (LPN) and asked to have him arrested.
According to a source close to the victim, “Her mother doesn’t want to put her husband in jail because she is sick and relies on him. She couldn’t survive without his help, though he committed rape many times and needs to be punished. Therefore, LPN board members are not permitted to set him free.”
In some situations, because of financial and tradition circumstances wives do not challenge their husbands actions.
Gang rape
Migrant communities in Thailand are not properly protected and many families fear the local authorities. To avoid precarious situations, migrants usually stay in their rented rooms until leaving for work. Local gangs are aware that the migrant communities are not properly protected, and their members often exploit defenseless migrant families.
In the instance below, gang members in Bangkok pretended to be Thai police officers and raped a young girl:
A 12-year-old Burmese migrant child was gang raped by 5 Thai men posing as police in Minburi Sub-district, Bangkok.
Early in the morning, at around 2 a.m. on May 2nd, a group of 5 men came to the apartment where a Burmese migrant family was living. Pretending they were Thai policemen coming to check their work permit cards, they ordered the workers to open the door. Upon entering they half-heartedly checked work permit cards, ignoring some of the residents, and proceeded to search each room.
According to the aunt who was living with the child, “They captured the two children by showing us their guns and they stole a mobile phone which cost around 5,000baht as well as another 25,000baht in cash.” The girl who is from Ye township, works with her aunt at a construction site in Minburi, while her mother works farther away in Bangkok.
The men then drove away with the two children and after a few minutes stopped their car near a banana farm. One man held the 18-year-old boy at gunpoint while the others took the girl out beside the road. According to the 18-year-old boy, each of the men then raped the young girl.
“During the rape she nearly lost consciousness because of the pain. After they raped her, they left both children on the side of the road with 100baht to get a ride back home. The girl was so terrified she couldn’t speak,” said the victim’s aunt.
Lost and unable to get back home, the children proceeded to walk along the road. Back home the aunt had prepared a search party to sweep the neighborhood, and luckily found the two children at about 6am.
The 5 men were not immediately followed for fear an encounter would bring additional violence. The Burmese workers were also worried about being arrested as some of them did not posses a work permit card.
Additionally the victim’s mother didn’t want to contact the police about the case because, as a migrant worker, if the police needed to question her about the incident, she would have to go to the police station. Leaving work and missing that time could result in the loss of her job.
The migrant family did inform their employer about the incident, but he took no action other than to send the child to the hospital for a medical check. The employer never contacted the police for fear the 5 men might have actually been police officers. He was concerned that if they were real police the men would make problems for him and his business, as well as the potential loss of face over the incident.
However the doctor who preformed the medical examination informed the employer that in fact the rape of the 12-year-old was not a small issue, and because of its significance the police should be contacted
When workers from Burma migrate to Thailand, they do not want to leave their children alone with other villagers. In some cases parents have withdrawn their kids from schools so that the families can migrate together. When they arrive in Thailand, the children are not able to attend school and are too young to work in factories. Therefore, children have to stay alone in the apartments, rental houses or play grounds. Children in these situations are extremely vulnerable to attacks, sexual harassment, or exploitation by traffickers.
Sexual assaults by employers
In Thailand, many migrant women are sexually abused or raped by their employers. They rarely report the abuses, and as a result sexual harassment is on the rise among female Burmese migrants in Thailand.
In some cases, when the Thai wives are absent from their homes, the domestic workers are repeatedly raped and harassed by the Thai husbands. In some instances wives allow their husbands to harass the domestic worker; some Thai wives believe that it is normal for a Thai man to have a minor wife.
It is dangerous for under-aged girls to be domestic workers. Below is an instance of a Thai man sexually assaulting a young girl:
On July 7th, 2008, a 16-year-old Mon woman working in Zin Song Bun village, Om Noi Su-district, Krathum Bean district, Samut Sakhon Province, Thailand was abused and sexual harassed by her employer, during a routine massage.
Mi Win, worked as a house keeper and was also in charge of taking care of a 60-year-old patient. The patient suffered from a number of ailments and could no longer walk. Part of her duty included daily massages, and moving him from his bed to his wheelchair. She was required to follow him should he need assistance.
According to Mi Win, “He had touched my breasts and hugged me three or four times before. This was the fourth time he tried to sexually abuse me during 10 months of working there. I was so afraid I quit my job.”
She went on, “I am not only taking care of the patient, I also have to work from 6 am until well after dark. I have to do a lot of house work including sweeping, washing clothes, and I have to bathe their dogs three times a week. It is a lot of work for 3,000 baht and I was exhausted every day. However, I had to deal with it to support my poor family in Burma.”
Mi Win comes from Karen State, Ha-An Township and has been working as a house keeper in Thailand for about a year and a half.
Many female migrants are stuck in domestic work and encounter sexual harassment. Often times they have little to no contact with their friends and do not know how to flee. Additionally, many of them do not leave their employers houses, do not have work-permits, and are afraid of losing their jobs or being arrested by the police.
Childhood sexual abuse on the Thai-Burma border and in Burma’s rural communities
Instances of sexual abuse with in Burma are hard to document because of the controlled press, the limited number of organizations specializing on children’s rights and cultural boundaries that frequently restrict and confuse abused children. In interviews with NGOs on the border, WCRP gathered important information about ongoing childhood abuse and victims’ recovery processes.
The approach and abuse
In most refugee camps and border villages, refugees and villagers’ shelters are narrow and provide little or no safety for the female population. Commonly, while parents head to work children are left at home alone, or with relatives. Because of the lack of safety and parental supervision, social and relief workers in border areas have noticed an increase of sexually abused children.
A Mon woman community leader, from Three Pagodas Pass explained:
Your browser may not support display of this image. “I often heard about the sexual harassment toward girls in the villages. Most of the girls are parentless. Their parents left to go to Thailand and they stay with relatives, sometimes with elderly grandpas and grandmas. The men who tried to rape them firstly bought some food or came to the door and pretended to be the child’s parent. Then, they have an opportunity, and they rape them.
“Many children never… speak out about what has happened to them after being sexually harassed. Like the new leaves on a tree are destroyed, the children seriously suffer ‘mental stresses’. They are afraid to meet with people or to stay alone and the avoid staying near men.”
Sexual abuse is not always blatant; often in border communities neighbors or family members are the predators.
In the following example a little girl is raped by her neighbor:
In January 2008, on the Burmese side of the Thai-Burma border town, Three Pagodas Pass, a 4-year-old Burman girl was raped by her neighbor, a 30-year-old Burman.
The victim lived with her mother in a small rented house. Everyday the girl biked home from nursery school and waited for her mother to return from the factory. While waiting, the child would often play at the neighbor man’s house.
By promising a toy, the neighbor man lured the waiting girl to a secluded shaded area behind his house. There he held the child on his lap and raped her. After the man released the girl, she returned home to wait for her mother.
The mother was completely unaware of the assault.
2 days later the mother overheard her child crying during urination. She immediately examined her daughter’s vagina and noticed severe injuries. The girl then explained that the neighbor man “put his stick” inside her.
They immediately went to the free hospital in Paline Japan where a medic contacted Stop Violence Against Women Program (VAW).
VAW took the child and mother to Kwai River Christian Hospital in Sangkhlaburi and paid for their transportation, food and medical cost. There a doctor confirmed that a man had penetrated the young girl and tested for dieses.
Burmese township authority arrested the man and he was tried at a court in Three Pagodas Pass Town. It has not been confirmed whether or not he was sentenced to jail time.
Abused children need to learn how to identify perpetrators. If girls are harassed by their fathers, step-fathers or a man from the neighboring house, they have few opportunities to relate their stories or receive help.
Because it is difficult for migrants and people living in border communities to collect evidence and prove a rape, offenders often go free and continue to abuse children.
While rape is a common form of child abuse, sexual assault can have many forms which parents and community members should be aware of. The child rights coordinator from Human Rights Education Institute of Burma gave WCRP a few examples of sexual abuses they have documented:
· Children are threatened or lured away from the community and raped.
· Inappropriate but non-violent touching
· Photographing naked children.
· Watching pornography with children.
Parents, community leaders, religious leaders, villagers and teachers need to be extensively educated about sexual abuse. Additionally, school teachers must understand the nature of sexual abuse, so they can explain, warn, and protect their students.
Mental and physical suffering
Children, especially girls, that are sexually abused suffer from severe mental and physical problems. Rarely are there organizations within Burma equipped to handle these post-trauma problems. The director of Social Action for Women (SAW), an organization that provides protection for children, explained to WCRP;
“Most sexually abused children suffer mental problems. Soon after the harassment happens, we have found that they suffered from ‘fear’. They felt so afraid of men and would not like to stand in front of a group of people. They felt there is a black spot (unlucky turn) in their lives.”
Children who are sexually harassed are commonly too terrified to tell their parents. They are afraid of their parents’ punishments and accusations of carelessness. In some cases girls are unknowingly pregnant.
According to a field coordinator from the Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN) “after a child is sexually abused they feel helpless, frightened and extremely insecure.” He added “The number of child rape cases are increasing in migrant areas and the assailant is usually a family neighborhood character.”
If NGOs knew a child was being harassed then they could protect the child from the predator. Mental suffering is a long-term issue and communities need to have recovery or rehabilitation centers to treat the children’s mental and physical ailments.
Physically, children can be infected with sexually transmitted diseases, specifically HIV/AIDS, and endure strenuous injuries. Child protection NGOs and healthcare workers examine injuries, test for diseases, provide medical assistance and safe houses in some areas. Most children who are saved by NGOs or other authorities need immediate medical and physical treatment or rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it is difficult for children in the migrant communities of Thailand and almost impossible for children in Southern parts of Burma to contact NGOs, and consequently most sexual assaults go untreated.
Conclusion and suggestions for future protection of children
If abuse from the SPDC continues, and unsafe living conditions persist in the migrant communities of Thailand and Southern Burma, then children will continue to suffer.
Within migrant communities, the Thai authority should be creating a safe environment and an atmosphere of security rather than one of fear. At the same time, the SPDC should be protecting the rights of children, promoting these rights, and adhering to the CRC. Currently the regime constantly violates the convention, and no one holds them accountable.
Until the SPDC changes its actions, or an international force holds them responsible for the uncountable human rights violations it commits, children in Southern parts of Burma will continue to be raped and assaulted.
1 Human Rights Foundation of Monland; Without a Choice: Increased economic migration from Mon State to Thailand, September 2008
2 Thai-Burma Border Consortium
3 Thai-Burma Border Consortium
Written by HURFOM · Filed Under Monthly Report
Child labourers behind many products: Study
Child labourers behind many products: Study
REUTERS, NEW YORK
Sept 11: Children and forced labourers are mining gold, sewing clothing and harvesting coco around the world, and India is the source for the biggest number of products made by these workers, a US government report said on Thursday.
The Department of Labour for the first time released a list of goods produced by child or forced labour in foreign countries after Congress told it to compile one. The department looked at 122 products in 58 countries.
Under international labour standards, child labour is defined as work performed by someone under the age of 15, or under 18 where specific forms of work are deemed harmful, the report said. Forced labour is involuntary or done under threat. In the new U.S. report, India was linked to the highest number of products made with child labour or forced labour including soccer balls and clothing, according to report.
Myanmar was noted the most often for forced labour for other products like rice, sugar cane and rubber. "The purpose for doing this is to shine a spotlight so more activities can take place that target these problems," said Sandra Polaski, deputy undersecretary for International Affairs in the U.S. Department of Labour.
"In our country we think of these at 19th century problems but these are 21st century problems," Polaski said.
Child labour laws vary widely and the practice is banned in many countries. An international convention ratified by 154 countries requires them to set a minimum working age and to work toward eradicating child labour.
According to the US report, Brazil, Bangladesh, China and the Philippines were also in the top six countries linked to individual products that use child or forced labour. The International Labour Organization has found that 69 percent of child labour worldwide is in agriculture, the report said.
The most common agricultural goods produced by child or forced labour are cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice and cocoa. Both forms of labour for cotton production were found in countries including China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. In India, this was the case for cottonseed.
The listing of specific goods and countries, however, does not mean that total production of specific products involve forced or child labour. Instead, the report said it indicates a "significant incidence" of these types of labour.
For cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, countries found using both forms of labour include the world's biggest producer Ivory Coast, as well as Nigeria, the report showed.
The most common mined goods included gold, where Peru and Burkina Faso use both child and forced labour, according to the report.
"Elimination of exploitive child labour or forced labour from a sector or a country requires intensive, sustained commitment by governments, employers, workers, and civil society organisations," the report said.
Suu Kyi to be released?
Suu Kyi to be released?
YANGON- THE party of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said on Tuesday it was hopeful that she would be unconditionally released after a court agreed to hear an appeal against her recent conviction.
Lawyers for the Nobel laureate and the country's ruling junta are due to present legal arguments on September 18, after Suu Kyi challenged last month's guilty verdict for sheltering an American man who swam to her lakeside home.
The regime has ordered her to spend another 18 months under house arrest, softening the original sentence of three years' hard labour. However, the house arrest is still long enough to keep Myanmar's opposition leader away from the political scene during elections scheduled for 2010.
'There could be changes as the court has accepted our appeal,' said Nyan Win, her lawyer and a spokesman for her National League for Democracy (NLD), referring to Yangon divisional court's decision on Friday to hear the case. 'We are hoping for her unconditional release, which is also what we wanted.'
'We will meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi this week after we got permission from the authorities. We need to get last instructions from her for the final arguments,' Nyan Win said. Daw is a term of respect in Burmese.
The appeal would focus on the fact that a 1974 constitution under which the 64-year-old was originally detained had been superseded by a new constitution approved last year, her lawyers have said.
The guilty verdict sparked international outrage and the imposition of further sanctions against Myanmar's powerful generals, who have already kept Suu Kyi locked up for 14 of the past 20 years.
Suu Kyi insisted on her innocence during the trial held at Yangon's notorious Insein Prison, saying that she allowed US military veteran John Yettaw to stay for two nights at her home because he was ill.
Mr Yettaw was sentenced to seven years' hard labour for the stunt in early May, but was freed after a visit by US senator Jim Webb last month on what the regime said were compassionate grounds because of health problems. -- AFP http://www.straitst imes.com/ Breaking% 2BNews/SE% 2BAsia/Story/ STIStory_ 426926.html
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Businessmen keep wary eye on Kachin situation
News - Shan Herald Agency for News
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 08:31
Burmese and Chinese businessmen, who have invested in Laiza town, the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), are keeping a wary eye on the relationship between the Burmese military junta and the KIO.
Relations between the junta and the ethnic ceasefire group in Kachin State have soured and are terribly strained after the junta proposed that it transform its armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army into the Border Guard Force, which the KIO rejected. Instead it told the junta brass that it wants the KIA to change to a Kachin Regional Guard Force (KRGF) and also demanded a stake in the new Kachin State Government to follow the 2010 general elections.
Businessmen in Laiza are closely monitoring the situation because if it deteriorates, they will move their properties. They are especially alert after news leaked out about meetings between the KIO and the junta brass, a local businessman said.
On September 4, senior KIO leaders and the organisation’ s regional administrative officers and campaigners held a meeting in Laiza Hotel in the morning.
"I want to keep watch until October. If the situation worsens we will leave. Some shops are already closed. I do not know where they have moved their goods," a shop owner said.
The investors are mostly Chinese. They have invested in motorcycle companies, construction tool firms, textile shops, and shops dealing in electronic and related items.
Ceasefire groups on the Sino-Burma border, which have opposed transformation to the Border Guard Force, have no plans to extend their business since tension began mounting and clashes occurred between the Burmese Army and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) last month.
Now, some Chinese businessmen have closed their shops in Laiza. Some shops have downed shutters in Laiza market, a local said.
Many people have hired rooms and space on the Chinese side of Laiza. Chinese authorities are therefore compiling a list.
"Locals are also moving their belongings. People from China have lots of investments in Kachin State. Some people have already moved their goods and belongings. While some shops are already closed, gambling dens are still open," he added.
Most businessmen are from China and some are from Myitkyina and Bhamo, who have opened stores in Laiza.
Even though people are apprehensive, the KIO has not made any public announcement on the prevailing situation.
Local sources, said after the Burmese Army and Kokang Army fought gun battles near the Sino-Burma border in northern Shan State, the junta has deployed more troops near Laiza town.
KIO along with other ceasefire armed groups are being pressurized by the junta to transform to the Border Guard Force within October. As such people watching the situation with keen interest and apprehension. http://www.bnionlin e.net/news/ shan/6984- businessmen- keep-wary- eye-on-kachin- situation. html
Burma at a Crossroads-Editorial
The southeast Asian nation of Burma is one of the poorest, sickest, most oppressive places in the world. The military junta that has ruled ruthlessly for two decades has enriched itself with the country’s abundant natural resources, but left most of the population of about 56 million destitute. Burma’s health system is the second worst on earth. HIV/AIDS is rampant, more than a quarter of the population lacks access to clean water, forced labor is widespread, and the nation is home to the world’s largest number of child soldiers.
Even its name has been stolen. The military regime changed it to Myanmar. The United Nations went along with this thievery. Fortunately, the United States did not.
Every so often, the veil is lifted, and the plight of Burma pierces our consciences. It happened when the junta summarily refused to honor the outcome of elections in 1990, after the opposition party garnered 82% of the vote. And again, when the imprisoned head of that party, Aung San Suu Kyi, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. When brave Buddhist monks ignited the “Saffron Revolution” in 2007 until it was brutally quashed. And when the rulers initially refused international aid to help their own people after a deadly cyclone hit in 2008.
Now, again, is one of those times.
Burma may be at a crossroads. Its brutal path is continuing — after a months-long show trial, Suu Kyi, the regal face of the beleaguered pro-democracy movement who has spent 14 of the last 20 years under house arrest, was sentenced to 18 more months on August 11. If her sentence is upheld, it could prevent her from participating in elections that the regime has scheduled for next year.
Free and fair elections cannot take place without her. As Ibrahim Gambari, the United Nation’s special envoy to Burma, told the BBC: She “is absolutely indispensable to the resumption of a political process that can lead to national reconciliation.”
But there may be a more heartening story emerging from Burma, building on the success of the recent mission by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who was able to secure the release of an American detained and sentenced to prison after he intruded on Suu Kyi’s home in May. Even more astonishing, Webb was allowed to meet with her, an honor denied even the U.N. secretary general just last month.
The Obama administration said Webb went to Burma in his role as senator and not as a representative of the White House. But his belief in a new policy of engagement with the ruling generals fits nicely with statements from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who back in February acknowledged that years of economic sanctions had failed to make a dent in Burma’s relentless oppression and signaled her willingness to change diplomatic course.
Engagement is the mantra of this administration. Be it Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Burma — no nation is automatically cut off from the possibility of conversation. This, of course, reflects the personality of a president who believes that he can smooth out deep-rooted tensions by sitting down with anyone over a beer. But it also reflects the reality that in many of these cases, strident political confrontation and economic isolation have only tightened the noose around millions of innocent lives.
How does a nation like ours, intent on promoting democracy and human rights, confront governments so devoted to opposing these values? How do we appeal to a brutal regime without bolstering its oppression? How do we champion the cause of a magnificent public servant like Suu Kyi without prolonging her suffering?
We begin by acknowledging that Burma may, indeed, be at a crossroads, and that it’s our obligation to explore any path that leads to more freedom for its people.
http://www.forward.com/articles/112454/
Aung San Suu Kyi left to pay the price for John Yettaw’s indiscretion
August 17, 2009
The Times online - Aung San Suu Kyi left to pay the price for John Yettaw’s indiscretion
Richard Lloyd Parry: Analysis
First it was Bill Clinton in North Korea, escorting home two scared US journalists from the clutches of Kim Jong Il. Now, Senator Jim Webb returns from Burma with the hapless American eccentric, John Yettaw.
For a politician, there are few more glorious moments than jetting home from a despotic regime with imprisoned compatriots in tow. But the liberation of Mr Yettaw was the least important and interesting achievement of Mr Webb’s trip.
Whether you regard Mr Yettaw as a well-meaning buffoon or an arrogant busybody, he hardly deserved such a prompt and high-level intervention.
The ironies of his release this weekend are painful. In setting him free, the Burmese junta manages to project an image of magnanimity for cancelling a sentence out of all proportion to Mr Yettaw’s “crimes”. And, as he flies back to obscurity in Missouri, Aung San Suu Kyi and her two female companions are left to pay the price of his fecklessness.
Mr Webb did at least see Ms Suu Kyi and their conversation must have been an interesting one. For the senator is a firm supporter of an approach very different from her uncompromising idealism. In the absence of any ideal solutions for dealing with the regime, he believes in making the most of a bad lot and in engaging with the junta, dropping sanctions, and also backs participation in the bogus-sounding election promised for next year.
These would be highly risky steps, but the time is long overdue for a serious debate about alternatives to the present policies of Ms Suu Kyi and her Western supporters, which have achieved nothing very obvious other than high-minded isolation.
For encouraging such a conversation, Senator Webb deserves credit.
He would have done much to overcome stereotypes about American parochialism, and made a valuable point to the dictatorship, if he had requested Ms Suu Kyi’s release before that of Mr Yettaw, rather than vice versa.
The Guardian - Desmond Tutu: my tribute to Burma's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi
The Guardian - Desmond Tutu: my tribute to Burma's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi
In the week when Amnesty International awarded Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi its highest accolade, Ambassador of Conscience, a fellow Nobel laureate pays tribute
This article was written in response to a feature about Aung San Suu Kyi by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark which was published on 11 November 2008
Desmond Tutu
The Guardian, Thursday 30 July 2009
I think of my sister Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi every day. Her picture hangs on the wall of my office, reminding me that, thousands of miles away in Asia, a nation is oppressed. Every day I ask myself: have I done everything I can try to end the atrocities being committed in Burma? And I pray that world leaders will ask themselves the same question. For if they did, the answer would be "no", and perhaps their conscience will finally force them to act.
Humankind has the ability to live in freedom and in peace. We have seen that goodness has triumphed over evil; we have witnessed political transitions in South Africa, and elsewhere, evidencing that we live in a moral universe. Our world is sometimes lacking wise and good leadership or, as in the case of Burma, the leadership is forbidden to lead.
Aung San Suu Kyi has now been detained for more than 13 years. She recently passed her 5,000th day in detention. Every one of those days is a tragedy and a lost opportunity. The whole world, not just the people of Burma, suffers from this loss. We desperately need the kind of moral and principled leadership that Aung San Suu Kyi would provide. And when you add the more than 2,100 political prisoners who are also in Burma's jails, and the thousands more jailed in recent decades, the true scale of injustice, but also of lost potential, becomes heartbreakingly clear.
Like many leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi has had to make great personal sacrifices. It is cruel enough to deprive an innocent person of her freedom. Burma's generals are crueller still. They try to use her as leverage to make her submit to their will. They refused to allow her husband to visit one last time when he was dying of cancer. She has grandchildren she has never even met. Yet her will and determination have stayed strong despite her being kept in detention for so many years.
More than anything, the new trial and detention of Aung San Suu Kyi speaks volumes about her effectiveness as a leader. The only reason the generals need to silence her clarion call for freedom is because they fear her and the principles she stands for. She is the greatest threat to their continuing rule.
The universal demand for human freedom cannot be suppressed forever. This is a universal truth that Than Shwe, the dictator of Burma, has failed to understand. How frustrated must he be that no matter how long he keeps Aung San Suu Kyi in detention, no matter how many guns he buys, and no matter how many people he imprisons, Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma will not submit. The demands for the freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners of Burma grow louder and echo around the world, reaching even his new capital hidden in central Burma. Words, however, are not enough. Freedom is never given freely by those who have power; it has to be fought for.
The continuing detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's other political prisoners is a crime and an indictment of an international community that often substitutes the issuance of repeated statements of concern for effective diplomacy. The UN treats the situation in Burma as if it is just a dispute between two sides, and they must mediate to find a middle ground. The reality is that a brutal, criminal and illegal dictatorship is trying, and failing, to crush those who want freedom and justice. The international community cannot be neutral in the face of evil. That evil must be called what it is, and confronted.
Change is overdue to the framework within which the international community approaches Burma. Twenty years of trying to persuade Burma's generals to reform has not secured any improvement. Forty visits by UN envoys have failed to elicit any change. The warm embrace of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) did not improve the behaviour of the regime towards Burma's citizens whether Christian, Buddhist or Muslim. The regime rules with an iron fist and those under its rule have suffered long enough.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters have time and again offered to dialogue with the regime. They offered a path of reconciliation and non-violent transition. Even as Aung San Suu Kyi stood before the regime's sham court, facing five years' imprisonment, we heard her voice loud and strong. She said: "There could be many opportunities for national reconciliation if all parties so wished."
Burma's generals must now face the consequences of their actions. The detention of Aung San Suu Kyi is as clear a signal as we could get that there will be no chance of reform and that the regime's "road map to democracy", including the call for elections, in 2010, is an obstacle to justice.
A new report from Harvard Law School, Crimes in Burma, commissioned by some of the most respected jurists in international law, has used the UN's own reports to highlight how Burma's generals have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Burma's generals are criminals, and must be treated as such. Than Shwe should be held accountable for abominable atrocities: his soldiers rape ethnic women and children, they torture, mutilate and murder at will. In eastern Burma, more than 3,300 ethnic villages have been destroyed, more than in Darfur. Civilians are deliberately targeted and shot on sight.
Than Shwe spurned the compassion of those willing to provide assistance following Cyclone Nargis. Instead, he conducted a referendum and he declared his undemocratic constitution the victor while victims perished from the cyclone's devastation. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity. Than Shwe and the rest of the generals cannot be allowed to go unpunished. The UN must establish a commission of inquiry, with a view to compiling evidence for prosecution. Failure to do so amounts to complicity with these crimes.
An international arms embargo must also be imposed immediately. Those countries supplying arms to Burma are facilitating these atrocities. Countries across the world must declare their support for a global arms embargo, making it impossible for China to resist such a move at the Security Council.
Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma deserve nothing less than our most strenuous efforts to help them secure their freedom. Every day we must ask ourselves: have we done everything that we can? I pledge that I will not rest until Aung San Suu Kyi, and all the people of Burma, are free. Please join me.
Desmond M Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and recipient of the Nobel peace prize
Shut out in Burma
Shut out in Burma
(Jul 13, 2009)
True to form, Burma's military dictator, General Than Shwe, showed only disdain when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited that tortured land (also known as Myanmar) 10 days ago. Than Shwe and the other four generals in the ruling junta denied Ban's requests for a democratic evolution.
To his credit, Ban spoke out afterward, asking, "How much longer can Burma afford to wait for national reconciliation, democratic transition and full respect for human rights?"
Now that he has experienced the junta leader's inflexibility firsthand, Ban must confront the question: What can the world body do to help liberate the people of Burma?
The narco-trafficking regime there has forced people into labour, used systematic rape as a weapon of war, and conducted brutal army offences that uprooted hundreds of thousands of people from minority ethnic groups.
Ban had the right idea. Upon arriving in Burma, he planned to ask for the release of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and 2,100 other political prisoners.
He would call for reconciliation with Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, landslide winners of Burma's last free election in 1990, a mandate the junta never honoured. Ban also wanted to foster humanitarian aid and economic development.
But after Than Shwe refused to cede to any of these requests, Ban got the message.
"Neither peace nor development can thrive without democracy and respect for human rights," he told diplomats and aid agencies.
Ban is mistaken, however, if he thinks that proper monitoring will legitimize an election scheduled for 2010 -- an exercise rigged to perpetuate military rule with a civilian patina. Burmese democratic activist Win Tin has observed that the true barrier to democracy in Burma is not the mechanics of next year's balloting but the junta's "unjust constitution." That document bars Suu Kyi from participating, reserves 25 per cent of seats in parliament for the military, and practically guarantees the generals and their cronies an overwhelming majority
If Ban really wants to help the people of Burma, he should side with the 55 members of the U.S. Congress who recently signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him "to take the lead in establishing a United Nations Security Council Commission of Inquiry into the Burmese military regime's crimes against humanity and war crimes against its civilian population."
Such commissions were instituted for Rwanda and Darfur. Nothing less is needed if the UN, that would-be parliament of nations, is to fulfil its commitment to protect the peoples of the world from criminal rulers.
http://www.thespec.com/Opinions/article/598938
Absence of unions has been a bane for students
by Phanida
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 15:12
(Interview with former student leader)
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Absence of students’ unions in Burma, which can operate freely, have led to many sacrifices by students with no guarantee of education, a former student leader of the 7th July student movement said.
The student leader recalled the 7th July 1962 student movement which protested against lack of students’ rights, democratic rights and the military dictatorship in Rangoon University.
The Revolutionary Council led by former dictator Gen. Ne Win grabbed power in a coup from a democratically elected civilian government on March 2, 1962. The students staged peaceful protests against this coup d’etat. The regime quelled the student demonstration brutally by opening fire on peaceful and unarmed students. This student demonstration and massacre was later dubbed the 7th July incident.
On this ill-fated day, hundreds of students were killed and the junta dynamited the student union building situated in Rangoon University campus the next day, July 8 1962.
Though it has been 47 years now, successive Burmese governments still ignore the rightful demands of students and have suppressed student movements brutally till today.
Mizzima reporter Phanida interviewed a former student leader (who wished not to be named on security grounds) on the background of the 7th July student movement, students’ rights and current Burmese politics. The interview is presented here.
Q: Students have sacrificed their lives for democratic rights and an end to military dictatorships in all ages. Why do you think they have not yet achieved their goal?
A: There are two parts to this question, pre-1962 and post-1962. Our democratic struggle took too much time. It took the whole of post-independence period. We must introspect on it. This is very important for all of us. Naturally the sacrifices and losses are inevitable. But Burma experienced two historical ages in its 60-year long post-independence period. This is the significant point of Burma’s history. Another significant point is the complexity of ideology in our movement; the right, left and centrist lines. The last point is there were many separations in our movement.
Q: Please tell us the main objective of the student uprising in brief.
A: Bakatha (All Burma Federation of Students Unions- ABFSU) struggled for student rights and democratic rights. The first student movement in which a student was killed took place in 1956. After that, the then AFPFL (Anti-fascist People’s Freedom League) government imposed restriction on student union movements. The second point is on education. After 1962, let me frankly say, politics overwhelmed us so much that there were hardly any talk on education.
Q: Should students get into politics?
A: In fact, students and education are a part of the political programme. But student movements are not for political power. We joined the student movement but not for power. There was a student circle at a specific time. We joined this movement to fulfill the demands of a needy political situation. In fact, the students did not strive for political power. They struggled only for the restoration of democratic rights and for peace. And they were into these movements for the reform of the education system too, to be transformed to a democratic education system.
Q: What is the reason for not allowing freedom of association in Burma? Why do you think this is crucial?
A: This should exist. This is a hallmark of democracy. We need freedom of association, freedom of expression and right to demonstration by chanting slogans. If we want to exercise these democratic rights in a legal framework, we must have an organization. But now the students have no such organization. In fact, Ko Paw (Min Ko Naing) is no more a student. They are now working as student activists under the shadow of the 88 uprising. There are no labour rights also. Lack of such freedom and democratic rights create an intense situation. Such a situation reveals the students badly need democratic rights to express their will and desire freely.
Q: To what extent did the students suffer in their right to education due to the absence of a legal student union (ABFSU)?
A: Yes, they have and are suffering a lot in this regard, not only now but since our time. This vicious circle will never end. To the question, to what extent, we have to sacrifice our lives…..the current education has no guarantee for the students.
Q: How important is the role of the UN in Burmese affairs. Can we rely on it to some extent?
A: I’ll tell my own view in this regard. Many people said that our country’s affair is sandwiched in the ‘international platform strategy’ of major countries. I’d like to point out that as long as this situation exists, whatsoever they (international community) talk about our country, these talks will be a far cry from Burma’s practical situation as they are not aware of the in-depth situation in Burma.
Q: Please give a brief account of the 7th July movement for the current student of today.
A: The 1962 student movement originated from the tightening of hostel rules. The students demanded abolishment of tight hostel rules, to give them more freedom, to revoke the curfew order imposed under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code on that day of 7th July. They held meetings in the night and dynamited the student union building in the early morning of the next day at about 3 a.m. The army was deployed in the campus at about 4 p.m.
Almost all political organizations supported the then ‘Revolution Council’ after that incident. Only the students were left in this (anti-military dictatorship) struggle. At that time, there were student organizations namely ABFSU, University Student Union, Rangoon University Federation of Ethnic Student Union etc.
Q: What would you like to say in memory of the 7th July student movement?
A: In fact, in a human society where there is no peace, no democracy, no education policy which can guarantee the future of students, it will be very hard for the society to move forward. For the students, there will be their education on the one hand and the political system on the other.
http://www.mizzima.com/edop/interview/2412-absence-of-unions-has-been-a-bane-for-students.html
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္(၆၄)ေျမာက္ေမြးေန ့အထိန္းအမွတ္ စာစု
၁၈-၀၆-၂၀၀၉
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္(၆၄)ေျမာက္ေမြးေန ့အထိန္းအမွတ္ စာစု
အရင္ဆုံးသတင္းေပးခ်င္တာက ဂီရင္းလို ့ေခၚတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကို
ေထာက္ခံအားေပးေနတဲ့ ဂ်ပန္လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္မ်ားအဖဲြ ့က ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ကို
Democracy and Peace Award ဆုကို နက္ျဖန္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ေမြးေန ့မွာခ်ီး
ျမင့္မွာျဖစ္ျပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ရဲ့ကိုယ္စား အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖဲြ ့ခ်ဳပ္ဒုတိယ
ဥကၠဌ ဦးတင္ဦးရဲ့ သားလဲျဖစ္ အမ်ိဳးုသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖဲြ ့ခ်ဳပ္လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ေျမ
ဂ်ပန္ရဲ့ ဥကၠဌလည္းျဖစ္တဲ့ ကိုသန္ ့စင္ဦးကလက္ခံရယူမွာျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းသတင္းပါးလို
ပါတယ္။
ေနာက္တခုက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္အသက္(၆၄) နွစ္ျပည့္အထိန္းအမွတ္ ဆန္လႉပဲြ
ကိုလဲ ဂ်ပန္ေရာက္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားမ်ားစုေပါင္းျပီး ထိုင္ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မဲေဆာက္ဧရိယာ
မွာျပဳလုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာက်ပ္ေငြသိန္း(၁၁၀) ဖိုးေလာက္အလႉခံရရိွပါတယ္။
အမ်ွေပးေဝပါတယ္။
သာဓုေခၚႀကပါခင္ဗ်ား
အခုက်ႊန္ေတာ္တင္ျပခ်င္တာက - တရားကိုျမင္မွ ဘုရားကိုျမင္မယ္
ဆိုတဲ့ဆိုရိုးစကားဗုဒၶဘာသာမွာရိွပါတယ္။ အခုလဲေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကညရဲ့နိုင္ငံ
ေရးအျမင္ကိုသိမွ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ကိုသိမွာျဖစ္လို ့ ၈၈- အေရးအခင္း
ေနာက္ပိုင္း လူငယ္မ်ိဳးဆက္သစ္ေတြကို ရည္ရြယ္ျပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ရဲ့
အေတြးအေခၚေတြထဲက စာပိုဒ္(၃) ပိုဒ္ကို ေခါင္းစဥ္ခဲြျပီးမွတ္မွတ္ရရတင္ျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာလူထုနဲ ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ
ဒီမိုကေရစီနိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ နိုင္ငံသူနိုင္ငံသားမ်ားရရိွေသာ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားခံစားပိုင္ခြင့္မ်ားကို
ျမန္မာျပည္သားတို ့မခံစားထိုက္ဟူေသာ စကားသည္ ေစာ္ကားရာေရာက္ပါသည္။
တခ်ိန္တည္းတြင္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအစိုးရကမူ ဒီမိုကေရစီနိုင္ငံအစိုးရမ်ားထက္ ပိုမို၍ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား
ခံစားပိုင္ခြင့္ရိွသည္ဟု ယူဆထားျခင္းမွာ ယုတၱိတန္ပါသလားဟု ေမးစရာျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဥပေဒ
ဥပေဒဟူသည္ တရားမွ်တမႈနွင့္ ထပ္တူထပ္မွ်ျဖစ္ျပီး တရားမွ်တမႈရိွျခင္းေႀကာင့္ ျပည္သူ
ျပည္သားမ်ား ေႀကေႀကနပ္နပ္နွင့္ ျငိမ္သက္ေနႀကေသာ ျငိမ္ဝပ္ပိျပားမႈမ်ိဳးသာလွ်င္ မြန္ျမတ္ပါသည္။
ဥပေဒကို အစိုးရ၏ ဖိနိွပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္ေသာကရိယာအျဖစ္ အသုံးျပဳျခင္းသည္ အာဏာ
ရွင္စနစ္၏ အမ်ားသိႀကန္အင္လကၡဏာတရပ္ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။
ဒီမိုကေရစီတိုက္ပဲြ
သစ္ပင္၏အရိပ္သည္ေအးျမ၏
ထို ့ထက္ မိဘ၏အရိပ္သည္ပိုေအးျမ၏
ထို ့ထက္ ဆရာသမား၏အရိပ္သည္ပိုမိုေအးျမ၏
ထို ့ထက္ မင္း ၏အရိပ္သည္ ပိုမို၍ေအးျမ၏
သို ့ေသာ္ အေအးျမဆုံးမွာ ဗုဒၶရွင္ေတာ္ျမတ္၏ အရိပ္ျဖစ္၏
ထို ့ေႀကာင့္ ျပည္သူလူထုကို ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနွင့္ လုံျခံဳေရးဟူသည့္
ေအးျမေသာအရိပ္အာဝါသေပးနိုင္ရန္အတြက္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူတို ့သည္ ဗုဒၶ၏အဆုံးအမ
ႀသဝါဒမ်ားကို လိုက္နာရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ယင္းႀသဝါဒမ်ားထဲတြင္ သစၥာရိွျခင္း ၊
ဂရုဏာထားျခင္း နွင့္ တရားဓမၼေစာင့္စည္းျခင္း တို ့သည္အဓိကျဖစ္သည္။
ဤသို ့ေသာအရည္အခ်င္းမ်ားေပၚတြင္ အေျချပဳေသာ အစိုးရကိုရရန္ရည္ရြယ္၍
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားတို ့က ဒီမိုကေရစီတိုက္ပဲြဝင္ေနႀကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
အထက္ပါ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီတိုက္ပဲြေအာင္ျမင္ဖို ့ဗုဒၶဘာသာဝင္တေယာက္အေနနဲ ့
ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ရဲ့အျမင္ကိုတင္ျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။
ဒီမိုကေရစီတိုက္ပဲြေအာင္ျမင္ဖို ့
၁။ကိုယ့္အားကိုယ္ကိုးရမယ္(ကယ္တင္ရွင္ေတြကိုေစာင့္မေနႀကပါနဲ ့ ဗုဒၶ ကေဟာထားတယ္ ကိုယ့္အား
ကိုယ္ကိုးပါတဲ့-ဟုတ္ပါတယ္ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကိုကိုယ္ ကိုယ့္နိုင္ငံကိုကိုယ္ကယ္တင္ႀကရမွာပါ။ ဘယ္သူ ့ကိုမွ
ဘယ္နိုင္ငံကိုမွ လာကယ္တင္လိမ့္မယ္ဆိုျပီးေမွ်ာ္ေနလို ့မရပါဘူး ဘယ္နိုင္ငံမဆို ကိုယ့္အက်ိဳးစီးပြား
အတြက္အရင္ႀကည့္ျပီးမွလုပ္ႀကတာပါ
၂။စည္းလုံးညီညြတ္ရမယ္(ဦးတည္ခ်က္ကို့အဓိကထားျပီးတေယာက္နဲ ့တေယာက္သေဘာထားႀကီးျပီး
စိတ္ရွည္သည္းခံဖို ့လိုပါတယ္၊ တေယာက္အားနွင့္ယူေသာ္မရ အမ်ားအားနွင့္ယူေသာ္ရ၏တဲ့။)
ျပီးေတာ့ကိုယ္က်င့္တရားေပၚမွာအေျခခံတဲ့
က) ျပင္းျပတဲ့ဆႏၵ
(ခ) ျပင္းျပတဲ့ဝီရိယ
(ဂ) စဲြျမဲတဲ့စိတ္ဓါတ္
(ဃ)စူးစမ္းေလ့လာမႈ တို ့ရိွရပါမယ္။
(ကိုယ့္က်င့္တရားမေကာင္းတဲ့လူေတြမ်ားေနရင္ဒီမိုကေရစီနိုင္ငံထူေထာင္လဲနိုင္ငံေကာင္းလာမွာမဟုတ္
ပါဘူး ျပီးေတာ့ ဗုဒၶကေဟာထားပါတယ္ တရားကိုေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေသာသူကို တရားကျပန္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္၏တဲ့
စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေတြ ကိုယ္က်င့္တရားပ်က္ျပားတာကေတာ့ေျပာစရာကိုမလိုေတာ့ပါဘူး ျပည္သူေတြေရာ
ဘယ္ေလာက္ကိုယ္က်င့္တရားေစာင့္ႀကသလဲဆိုတာကိုယ့္ဘာသာကိုယ္ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ဖို ့လိုပါတယ္။
အဲ့ဒီမွာေျပာခ်င္တာက ၆၂ ခုနွစ္စစ္တပ္ကအာဏာသိမ္းျပီး ဗိုလ္ေနဝင္းက အူမေတာင့္မွသီလေစာင့္
နိင္မယ္ ဆိုတဲ့စကားနဲ ့ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားအမ်ားစုကို ကိုယ္က်င့္တရားပ်က္ေအာင္လုပ္ခဲ့တယ္ အခု
ဗုဒၶရဲ့အဆုံးအမအရ ဘယ္သူတရားပ်က္ပ်က္ကိုယ္မပ်က္နဲ ့ဆိုတဲ့ အဆုံးအမအတိုင္း ကၽြန္ေတာ္
တို ့တေတြ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ကိုယ္က်င့္တရားကို ကိုယ့္ဘာသာထိန္းျပီး ျပဳျပင္ဖို ့အခ်ိန္တန္ေနျပီ ေနာက္ေတာင္
က်ေနပါျပီ)
ေနာက္ဆုံးအေရးအႀကီးဆုံးအခ်က္ကေတာ့ သတိတရား ပါဘဲ
တခြန္းထဲနဲ ့မွန္ေသာစကားကိုေျပာေသာေႀကာင့္ ဗုဒၶ ဟုေခၚ၏(အဲ့ဒါ ဗုဒၶ ရဲ့ဂုဏ္ပုဒ္ေတြထဲကတခုပါ)
အဲ့ဒီ ဗုဒၶရွင္ေတာ္ျမတ္က သတိလက္မလြတ္နဲ ့လို ့အႀကိမ္ေပါင္းရာေက်ာ္ေျပာသြားပါတယ္ ခႏၶာဝန္
ခ်ခါနီးေနာက္ဆုံးအခ်ိန္မွာလဲေနာက္ဆုံးေဟာသြားတာက သတိမလြတ္ေစႀကနဲ ့ေဟ့လို ့မွာသြားရွာပါ
တယ္။ သတိတရားအေရးအႀကီးဆုံးပါ သတိတလုံးလြတ္ျပီဆိုရင္ အေပၚကေျပာထားတာေတြ ကိုယ္
က်င့္တရားေတြအကုန္ကုန္ပါျပီ။
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားအားလုံးကိုယ္စိတ္နွစ္ျဖာက်န္းမာခ်မ္းသာႀကပါေစ။
ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ကိုယ္စိတ္နွစ္ျဖာက်န္းမာခ်မ္းသာပါေစ။
ေလးစားစြာျဖင့္-
(ဘုန္းလိႈင္)
F W U B C
One Nation Under Materialism
http://www.jbs.org/index.php/news-feed-archive/4842
Written by Donald Hank
Thursday, 07 May 2009 01:51
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freemarketprinciplesgovernment policiesstate-private
Whenever I meet someone who identifies himself as a “liberal” or left-winger, I immediately ask them, “What caused the banks to crash?” The answer: “lack of regulation.” When I ask them to elaborate, they say, parroting Tim Geithner, that the problem is “very complex,” implying “you aren’t smart enough to understand.”
But the ultimate implication is that free market principles killed the banks.
But the free market has an alibi. It left the country years ago. Some say it started to decline with the creation of the Fed and income tax in 1913. Others trace the decline to the 30s and FDR’s Keynesian policies.
At any rate, the Western economy has long been an unsavory mixture of government and business, which some call corporatism and others call fascism. Indeed, it is essentially the economic system introduced by Mussolini, with the difference that Mussolini did not use it to harm banks or businesses.
Big business certainly fits this description of a public-private partnership. In the financial service industry, toxic government policies force banks to make bad loans but tacitly guarantee these loans under the aegis of Fanny and Freddy. Gone are the days of mortgages guaranteed by sound financial practices such as credit checks and 20 percent down payments. Common sense and self preservation have been left out of the equation.
Manufacturers like the auto industry have always been manipulated by big government using the levers of labor unions (and, more recently, green policies), to the extent that labor prices average in the $70s per hour per (unskilled) worker. Obviously, the industry is no longer viable, but never fear, the government will prop it up at all costs – to you.
Green policies force manufacturers to hold to unrealistic clean air and water standards that drive prices even higher. Cap and trade will be a new tax more onerous than any government interference heretofore, making CO2 emitters pay fines for emissions that easily pass muster, for example, in China.
And when we buy from the heavily polluting, labor-exploiting Chinese, at prices that make our over-regulated industries incapable of competition, government cynically calls this “free trade.”
Imagine sending an American boxer into the ring with pillows tied to his hands and with hands and feet bound, to fight an unfettered foreign opponent armed with brass knuckles, and calling this a fair fight!
Most would say that labor unions represent the intrusive government side since without government support, in a truly free economy, the law of supply and demand would not tolerate such overpriced labor even for a day. Likewise, most would say that executives represent the "private" side of industry. Yet, in a truly free economy, these high-ranking leeches would also not be tolerated for a day.
The problem is that if big government intervenes on behalf of labor to grant them exorbitant salaries, then, out of "fairness," it is obliged, in any democratic system, to allow management to gouge likewise. We get two evils for the price of one.
Now conservatives have traditionally defended management's right to excessive remuneration, perceiving themselves as defenders of the “private sector” and the CEOs as their protégés, while the left sees itself as the defender of labor.
But both sides are wrong, in two ways – neither side fully understands that big business has long been a State-private partnership, heavy on State, with the free market being shackled. And neither side understands that the malaise is largely cultural, not political, nor economic.
In a healthy culture of honorable people with common sense (like the Japanese, for example), no labor union would be capable of negotiating terms that would make their business unprofitable to the point of destroying their jobs. Yet union after union has done just that in America, with workers blithely accepting the demise of their jobs, dutifully blaming management and now, in the Obama Age the free market itself, ignoring that free market capitalism has been extinct for years.
No decent CEO would demand an exorbitant salary knowing that in so doing he or she was destroying the business that sustains himself, his family and his workers. They would see the danger to themselves if nothing else. But seeing themselves as defenders of the illusory “free market,” they guiltlessly accept the exorbitant unearned fruits of others' labor and watch passively as their unprofitable industries fail – as though they had no say in the matter.
Nor, in a hypothetical sound and honorable culture based on common sense, would the media neglect to warn the public of the imminent loss of thousands of jobs as a result of reckless labor negotiations. But the media, staffed by far too many eager left-leaning polemicists, would not think of double crossing their comrades in the labor unions.
Further, education and academe would cultivate common sense and honor in workers, journalists, business managers, politicians and future educators, all of whom would join forces to keep America sound. But no such thing has happened in the United States for many, many years.
Japan comes closest to an honor-based, less egocentric culture, with workers at Toyota, for example, all showing up for work in their new Toyotas and management politely declining excessive raises. Accordingly, unemployment there has been running at half (a little over 4 percent) the Western rate (over 8 percent in the United States and EU both).
A half-century of relentless globalist-leftist activism in education, journalism, labor, management, media, education, religion and government has brainwashed Americans into accepting as inevitable – and moral – that more and more jobs go to the Third World and illegal immigrants, knowing that it is a death blow to the economy of their own nation and people, who grimly march unaware of their own destruction, fueled by political slogans disconnected from reality or science. Millions of Americans have succumbed to the spiritual and psychological onslaught.
If there is a unifying idea in the West, it is materialism, with both left and right shot through with its common threads — Engels’ notion on the left and materialist consumerism on the right.
The unifying philosophy of our forefathers has been almost completely surrendered to this self-destructive ideology.
Donald Hank is a former language teacher, currently operating a technical translation agency in Wrightsville, PA. A former language teacher, he holds an undergraduate degree in French and German from Millersville State University (PA), a Master’s degree in Russian language and literature from Kutztown State College (also in PA), has studied Chinese for 3 years in Taiwan at the Mandarin Training Center, and is self-taught in other languages, having logged a total of 8 years abroad in total immersion situations. He is also the founder of Lancaster-York Non-Custodial Parents, a volunteer organization that provides Christian counseling for non-custodial parents.
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Will Workers Be Left Behind in a Green Transition?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090518/uehlein/single?rel=nofollow
By Joe Uehlein
May 5, 2009
As Congress prepares legislation to slow global warming, what kind of jobs will it create?
Unfortunately, "transition assistance" in the past has often meant little more than a funeral for workers and communities threatened by the side effects of globalization, environmental protection and other public policies. Without a clear program to protect workers from the effects of climate protection, the struggle against global warming can all too easily come to be perceived as a struggle against American workers. Workers have often felt threatened by measures to protect the environment. Today such fears are likely to be augmented, especially in a time of soaring unemployment, by the large changes necessary to protect the planet from global warming.
Environmentalists have often addressed this challenge by pointing out that a transition to clean energy would create far more jobs than it would eliminate. While that may be true, it entirely misses the point. The fact that some people get new jobs provides little solace for the people and communities who have lost theirs.
As Carl Wood of the Utility Workers Union of America put it at this year's Good Jobs, Green Jobs national conference, "Workers are used to being ground up and spat out by any change in society. In the United States there is no safety net for the victims." He cited mechanics in a southeastern Ohio coal-fired power plant represented by his union whose jobs would be eliminated by the phasing out of coal as a very real example of how climate protection could threaten specific workers even if it produced more jobs in general.
Coal miners and their communities are particularly at risk. In a September 2008 op-ed, United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts cited a study showing that the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003 would have reduced coal production by 78 percent by 2025, which would have "just about wiped out the coal industry in southern West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia." He added that the more recent Lieberman-McCain bill would have cut Appalachian coal production by 30 percent or more.
The current campaign to reduce the use of coal could easily become a poster child for the threat posed to workers by climate protection. But for that very reason it also provides an opportunity for climate protection advocates to paint a picture of themselves as the advocates and protectors of miners, railroad workers, utility workers and others whose jobs and communities may be threatened by climate protection measures.
Replacing "to be supplied"
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the best ideas for protecting workers and communities hit by the side effects of public policy decisions were embodied in legislation championed a few years ago by Republican Senator John McCain to protect tobacco workers from the effort to reduce tobacco consumption.
McCain's 1997 Universal Tobacco Settlement Act passed out of committee nineteen-to-one but was defeated on the Senate floor. Workers and farmers would have received transition assistance from the fund if "the implementation of the national tobacco settlement contributed importantly to such workers' separation" from their jobs. Looking ahead to the next generation, the bill also provided education benefits to members of a "tobacco farm family."
A similar program should be developed for workers who lose their jobs because of climate protection policies.
Rick Wagoner got a cool $23 million for running GM into the ground. Coal miners, railroad workers, coal-fired generator workers and others displaced by climate protection policies don't expect anything like that. But they should be able to count on a program like the one McCain championed for tobacco workers. And those for whom the program doesn't work should at least be guaranteed decent pensions with healthcare.
Perhaps even more important, the McCain bill provided not just for individuals but for hard-hit communities. It included a $28 billion industry-funded Tobacco Community Revitalization Trust Fund to provide economic development grants over a twenty-five year period to create jobs and business opportunities for former tobacco workers.
The same thing could be done now to jump-start the transition from coal and other carbon-intensive industries. The stimulus package includes an estimated $80 billion for programs that could create green jobs. A portion of these funds can be used to make eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and the rest of the Appalachian coalfield a model of job-positive transition from coal to renewable energy and conservation. Green jobs can be targeted at the communities that will be affected by coal production to create local jobs that will provide an alternative source of employment. The statewide network Kentuckians For The Commonwealth has spelled out some of the clean energy solutions; read the details here.
A green TVA for the green New Deal
But climate protection legislation should go further. During the Great Depression a regional economic development program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, transformed one of America's poorest regions by means of massive energy development. Seventy-five years later, the TVA has lost much of its original vision and become a target of environmental protests. But the principle of regional economic development through investment in a new energy source can be applied to the Appalachian coalfields today.
A small-scale version of such a post-coal economic development program is poised to begin in the Southwest. The closing of a highly polluting generating station has provided the owner, Southern California Edison, with an estimated $30 million annually in pollution allowances, which can be sold under the US Acid Rain Program. The Just Transition Coalition, composed primarily of Hopi, Navajo and environmentalist allies, developed a plan to use the funds for a transition to renewable energy.
The Just Transition plan would direct 30 percent of the pollution credits to local villages to invest in solar, wind and ecotourism; 10 percent to job retraining; 40 percent to alternative energy development and production; and 20 percent to tribal government programs previously supported by coal royalties.
Southern California Edison is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has taken the groundbreaking step of ordering that proceeds from pollution allowance sales be put into a special account. It then requested proposals from the Just Transition Coalition for how the funds should be spent.
The Hunter Region in Australia is also being proposed as a model for a transition from coal to renewable energy. The Greenpeace-funded study, "A Just Transition to a Renewable Energy Economy in the Hunter Region, Australia," details two scenarios for a renewable energy future.
Greenpeace and other environmental organizations have made "just transition" a central part of their program for transforming the region. According to a Greenpeace publication on Hunter:
A just transition from coal to renewables requires that the federal government support and protect coal industry workers as coal-fired power stations are phased out. Government support should include providing investment in new industries and infrastructure, guaranteeing jobs and retraining workers so that they can find employment in new green industries. With the right government action, an energy revolution can provide a way forward for coal communities.
An imaginative program for a transition from coal to green energy might win surprisingly wide support. In September three-quarters of Kentuckians said they would support a five-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants, and 43 percent backed expanding investment in clean renewable energy.
It is a basic principle of fairness that the burden of policies that are necessary for society--like protecting the earth's climate--shouldn't be borne by a small minority who happen to be victimized by their side effects. Unless workers and communities are protected against the unintended effects of climate protection, there is likely to be a backlash that threatens the whole effort to save the planet.
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