Myanmar's military reform
gap By David Scott Mathieson
CHIANG MAI - Myanmar President Thein Sein
and his close advisers have reaped widespread
kudos for their brokering of preliminary ceasefire
talks with more than a dozen ethnic armed groups
over the past several months. In early April, the
government reached an agreement with the Karen
National Union (KNU) to end a secessionist
conflict that has alternatively simmered and
boiled since 1949, following on from similar
agreements with 11 other insurgent groups.
The enthusiasm for ceasefires has been
tempered by ongoing fighting in Myanmar's northern
Kachin State between the Myanmar government and
the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) after the
breakdown of a 17-year ceasefire in June 2011.
As in all insurgencies, the political,
economic and social motivations for ongoing
conflict are complex, but the US Central
Intelligence Agency
(CIA) identifies a core grievance that has fueled
recruitment to the KIA: "Ruthless and poorly
focused GUB [Burmese government] suppression
operations such as the burning of an entire
village ... the forced transfer of the entire
population of Kachin villagers from insurgent
infested areas ... enough instances of rape,
knifing and chicken-stealing to foster bitter
resentment among the Kachin."
Recent
reporting on the ground by Human Rights Watch and
others uncovered many such abuses against the
civilian population and the displacement of more
than 75,000 people. The violations documented in
Kachin state are the product of similar tactics
employed against ethnic Karen, Karenni, Shan and
Mon communities in eastern Myanmar for years.
The CIA's declassified intelligence report
was actually produced in April 1970, several years
into the earlier Kachin insurrection. Its eerie
verisimilitude to abuses such as sexual violence,
attacks on villages, forced displacement, forced
labor, torture, and rampant plundering of private
property experienced in recent months demonstrates
a core factor in Myanmar's long-running civil
conflicts: the enduring culture of abuse and
impunity within the Myanmar military against
ethnic civilian populations.
The pace of
change in Myanmar over the past year has been
dramatic, with the government promising sweeping
economic and political reforms and long oppressed
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi winning a seat
in parliament on April 1. Censorship has been
loosened, hundreds of political prisoners have
been allowed to return to their families,
preliminary ceasefire talks with armed groups have
begun, and even official rhetoric on human rights
has changed, from hitherto blanket denials of
rights violations to grudging official
acknowledgement.
The ceasefire talks have
broached a litany of difficult issues to resolve:
return of refugees and internally displaced
persons, clearing of landmine infested conflict
zones, humanitarian access, land rights, and
long-standing political and cultural issues.
In his state of the union address to
parliament on March 1, President Thein Sein
outlined the government's three-step approach to
attaining "eternal peace" in Myanmar. The first
step is to conduct preliminary dialogue at the
state level, the second aims at the national level
to address issues such as development,
constitutional amendments, and working towards "a
single armed force," while step three will be a
political process to achieve "mutual
understanding, equality and development."
But one institution that has not changed
is the defense services, or Tatmadaw, the crucial
absent variable in the reform process. Reaping the
benefits of a constitution that they largely
drafted, military officers hold 25% of the
unelected seats in all national and regional
parliaments, have one of the vice-presidential
slots, three key ministries, defense, home affairs
and border affairs reserved for generals, total
control over the military budget estimated at 20%
of gross domestic product, and immunity for all
service personnel from civilian prosecution.
Ongoing violations against ethnic
communities have barely been mentioned in the
optimistic accounts of reform. The Myanmar
military in ethnic areas is poorly resourced,
under-supplied, and predisposed to punish
civilians for their perceived support for
rebellion. Local ethnic populations widely view
them as an army of occupation, dangerously
pursuing counter-insurgency on the cheap. This
punitive approach hasn't stamped out resistance,
it has fueled it.
At the same time, many
ethnic armed groups have also been implicated in
serious human rights abuses against their own
communities and the Myanmar army. These have
included use of child soldiers, widespread use of
anti-personnel landmines and the execution of
prisoners.
Ask any civilian in the
conflict areas of eastern Myanmar what they want
for the future, as I have done on a regular basis
for more than a decade, and it is peace and
justice, and an end to violent opportunism by all
men with guns: government soldiers, ethnic
insurgents, pro-government militias, and drug
bandits.
Any peace negotiations should
include putting into place mechanisms that would
ensure the protection of human rights. To this
end, negotiations between the Myanmar government
and the Karen National Union have included
drafting codes of conduct for both sides' forces:
towards each other and how they treat civilians.
Belated admissions In mid-May,
high ranking Myanmar military officers joined the
peace talks, when Lieutenant General Soe Win, the
deputy commander in chief of the defense services,
and three generals commanding the regional
military command zones in Eastern Myanmar met with
leaders of the rebel Shan State Army (SSA) in
Kengtung in Shan State, the first time such senior
commanders have met with their long-time opponents
in such negotiations. The military 'buying-in' to
the peace process will potentially provide a
unique opportunity to raise impunity for human
rights abuses.
In his inaugural speech to
parliament in March 2011, Thein Sein admitted that
people living in conflict areas had been enduring
a "hell of untold miseries." One of his close
advisers, Ko Ko Hlaing, like the president a
former military officer, admitted to Western
reporters in November that the military had
perpetrated abuses: "As you know there are no
clean hands in conducting all sorts of war. There
may be some sort of crimes committed by government
troops similar to other armed forces of the rest
of the world."
Many senior government
officials are former Tatmadaw commanders: they
know better than most how the army conducts
operations. The main peace negotiator for the
government, Railways Minister U Aung Min, has
gained widespread plaudits for his skillful
negotiating efforts, avuncular manner and honesty.
He is also a former commander of the 66 Light
Infantry Division, a reputedly ruthless unit that
operates in eastern Myanmar, particularly Karen
State.
Transforming the army's abusive
counter-insurgency strategy is key to durable
peace and long-term development, yet few
international observers are even broaching the
subject. Officials have assured foreign diplomats
that human rights training is part of the
curriculum of the prestigious Defense Services
Academy that trains Myanmar military officers, and
that the Geneva Conventions of 1949, to which
Myanmar is a party, are in Burmese language
translation.
But training means little so
long as commanders do not demonstrate a
willingness to abide by the laws of war, enforce
discipline in their troops, and appropriately
punish perpetrators of war crimes. As
international engagement with the Myanmar
government scales up to support the nascent
reforms, so too should progressive rapport with
the military. It will ultimately be up to the
Tatmadaw to show its commitment to reform through
its actions on the battlefield and willingness to
tackle violations of the laws of war.
The
Tatmadaw is not completely obtuse to international
legal norms. Since 2007 it has cooperated with the
International Labor Organization on demobilizing
child soldiers, as part of an agreement on forced
labor. The use of child soldiers is prohibited in
Myanmar military regulations and international
conventions to which the country is a party. The
ILO's activities pushed the authorities to punish
166 military personnel - 27 officers and 139
enlisted men - for breaches of the forced labor
and under-age recruitment laws over the past five
years.
The military and police also
cooperate with the United Nations Children's Fund
(UNICEF) and other UN bodies in training to stamp
out child soldier recruitment. These efforts may
pale when the breadth of abuses and the culture of
impunity within the military are still pervasive,
but they demonstrate that engagement on serious
human rights concerns can work. They need to be
expanded to encompass a range of other violations,
and push the army to punish perpetrators.
The Myanmar government's recent changes
have been enough to sideline calls from a dozen
countries for an international commission of
inquiry into serious violations of the laws of
war. But this doesn't mean such violations have
been reduced, that future abuses aren't likely, or
that accountability for crimes should be
postponed. Only when the pervasive culture of
abuse within the army is seriously addressed will
Myanmar's hopeful changes become genuine reforms.
David Scott Mathieson is Senior
Asia Researcher at Human Rights Watch.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
