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UN's Myanmar envoy calls for
probes
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - The United Nations human-rights envoy
to Myanmar, Paulo Pinheiro, has asked the country's
military government to permit independent investigations
into rights violations, in the face of recent reports
that sexual violence, rape and conscription of child
soldiers are commonplace there.
Human-rights
allegations "are not to be denied; allegations are to be
investigated", Pinheiro, the UN special rapporteur on
human rights for Myanmar, said at a news conference here
on Wednesday. "There is a need to have credible,
independent investigations. That is the case in any part
of the world, where you have to have credible
assessments," said Pinheiro, who finished his 11-day
fact-finding mission in Myanmar on Monday. This mission,
his third since being appointed to the UN post last
year, began on October 17.
"I have expressed to
them [the military government] that it is necessary to
put in place independent investigations. I am convinced
that there are very serious human-rights violations that
need to be investigated, because in some of them there
is a pattern of repetition of these allegations in the
last 15 years," he said.
The Brazilian
diplomat's call will serve as a crucial indicator as to
how far Yangon's rulers are willing to change their
practice of dismissing allegations of human-rights
violations as fabrications. That was the stance Yangon
maintained after a report released earlier this month by
the New York-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch
(HRW), which charged that Myanmar had the highest number
of child soldiers - as many as 70,000 - in the world.
The majority of these children had been "forcibly
conscripted", according to the report titled "My Gun Was
as Tall as Me". But Yangon denied the charge and accused
HRW of attempting to tarnish Myanmar's image.
The junta was as dismissive of another report
released in mid-June by two minority-rights groups,
which accused the Myanmese army of raping close to 625
women and girls between 1996 and 2001 in the country's
eastern state of Shan. The military government forced
village elders in Shan state to sign petitions that the
rapes did not occur, says Hseng Noung, spokeswoman for
the Thai-based Shan Women's Action Network, one of the
rights groups that contributed to the report. The
pressure that Pinheiro is applying on the Myanmese
government is necessary, she says, because "right now,
inside the Shan state, no team can investigate freely".
"Pinheiro's call is unprecedented and it is a
slap in the face of the Burmese government," added Sunai
Phasuk of Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional
human-rights watchdog. "It means he has been convinced
that there have been serious violations, such as sexual
violence and rape."
The UN envoy's position also
challenges a common practice of the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), as the military government
is officially known, of appointing government teams to
investigate rights violations, Sunai points out. "After
the report on the rapes, the SPDC appointed its own
investigation teams, including a military one, that said
no systematic rapes took place," Sunai said.
However, as another UN agency revealed on
Wednesday, securing space for independent human-rights
investigation in Myanmar is a daunting task.
Yangon bluntly refused to permit the United
Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to conduct a study of
child soldiers conscripted by the government and ethnic
rebel groups in Myanmar. "We did make a request to
conduct interviews inside Myanmar, but could not do so,"
said Bo Viktor Nylund of the East Asia and Pacific
division of UNICEF at a press conference. "So we had to
conduct the interviews along the [Thailand-Myanmar]
border."
"We need to engage the Myanmar
government in greater depth on this issue," added Carol
Bellamy, UNICEF's executive director, during the news
conference to launch a study on the shattered lives of
child combatants in six countries across the region.
Among the Myanmese child soldiers interviewed
for the report "Adult Wars, Child Soldiers", was a boy
who was 12 when he was conscripted. "I still want to
take revenge because I am separated from my family. I
want to give them [the government soldiers] the same
suffering I have had," he told UNICEF researchers. "I
feel I was coerced," added another child from Myanmar,
who was conscripted into the army when he was 13. "I
knew nothing. I regret it now. I am not satisfied with
my situation."
One in four of the world's
300,000 child soldiers is found in the East Asian and
Pacific region, states the UNICEF report. The six
countries it surveyed are Cambodia, East Timor,
Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and
Myanmar.
Apart from charges of child
conscription and the military's rapes of girls and
women, Myanmar has also been taken to task for forced
labor, suppressing press freedom and jailing political
opponents.
Pinheiro will present his findings of
his visit to Myanmar to the UN General Assembly in New
York next Wednesday. "The cycle of human-rights
violations needs to be broken, and there is a need for
policies and mechanisms in place to prevent the
repetition of these violations," he said.
He
conceded, however, that his recent trip provided some
evidence that Yangon has been willing to address
criticism about its political prisoners by making
periodic releases of detainees, and by not disputing the
number of the prisoners it holds - estimated at more
than 1,200.
"The SPDC has not contested these
numbers. What is positive is a serious concern [by the
government] to discuss the issue without denial,"
Pinheiro said.
(Inter Press Service)
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