[Author’s note: This paper is based on author’s speech at the PENN HUMAN RIGHTS FORUM on “The Rohingyas of Burma and Bangladesh” on Friday, March 31, 2006 in the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

The material in this paper came from author’s personal contacts with the Rohingya Diaspora community and information that is available in the reports of various human rights groups, notably the Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and the Karen Human Rights Group.]

Part 1: Nightmare, fiction or a living reality?]

Imagine this. You are living in a country that does not recognize you as a citizen in spite of the fact that your forefathers lived there for centuries. If that were not enough of a traumatic experience, consider that other ethnic groups who are fighting the regime for self-determination and human rights consider you as outsiders. It must be your worst kind of nightmare when you realize that half of your people have been forced to take asylum or refuge outside, and you may be the next in line to seek a way out of this living hell.

Your country is run by a military regime that is the most brutal, savage and guilty of committing the worst form of ethnic cleansing of this century. Those of you who dared to still reside in the country face daily intimidation, extortion, abuse and repression. You are forced to such a destitute condition that you dare neither to complain against its innate savagery nor oppose its deep brutality by supporting opposition. That is, the regime follows the textbook case of undermining opposition by directly attacking the civilians who support them, which is more like draining the pond until the fish cannot swim.

One of the tactics of this ruthless regime includes military offensives where hundreds of villages are destroyed and burned so that people are forced to flee to the jungle or cross the border; they cannot return to their homes. [If they do, they face arrest and torture being accused of aiding or joining the rebels during their period of hiding.] The territory is conveniently called ‘cleaned’ of the rebel forces.

Another tactic involves evicting people from their homes. For this, the victims don’t even need to belong to a hostile group or camp that is in armed conflict with the military. They are given an order to vacate their homes within the next few days. No reason is given why and where they will relocate. No compensation is paid either to the victims for such eviction notices.

A similar tactic involves confiscation of land of farmers. Farmers must now work for free as forced or modern-day slave labors to grow paddy for the military. They must bear all expenses for the production. Often times such actions create forced starvation and internal refugee problem. A prosperous farmer, businessman or trader overnight becomes a beggar.

If this be the situation when there is no insurgency against the brutal military thugs, imagine the situation in places where some form of hostility does exist. In those territories, an often-practiced tactic involves forcing military ceasefires that do not tackle any political or human rights issue. Such ceasefires often bring about large-scale forced relocations. Locals are evicted from their homes and forced to hand over their entire rice harvest to the Army and relocate to Army-controlled ‘centers’ (touted as “model villages”) or face being shot on sight. The locals are usually given no more than a week to move, after which they are told that their homes and belongings will be destroyed and they will be shot on sight if seen around their homes.

After the relocation deadline the Army usually sends out patrols to destroy the villages, and particularly to hunt out and destroy any food supplies. The villagers are forced to stay away from their fields, and are only allowed to leave the village between dawn and dusk under threat of being shot if they are out after curfew. This disrupts the entire crop cycle, because villagers find that they can no longer produce their own food.

So the country that was once famous for its bumper crops is now famine-stricken with farmers now dying of starvation. They simply cannot afford buying food at the soaring price. Landmines have become an extra threat to villagers, particularly over the past few years replacing the country as the worst landmine hotspot after Afghanistan.


The junta’s strategy includes consolidating control by forcing all villagers and township residents to Army-controlled sites, then using them as forced/slave labor to build access roads into their resettled home areas, then establishing Army camps along the roads, and then re-introducing villagers into what are essentially ‘forced labor villages’ along the roads where they can be easily controlled and are always available to serve the soldiers. No one is allowed to live outside the reach of the Army any longer. They have to bring their own food and building supplies because nothing is given to them. In many cases they even have to hand over their rice to the Army.

Once in the relocation site, people have no opportunity to return to their fields and must survive by working as local day-labor. At the same time, the Army uses them as a convenient source of unpaid forced/slave labor at local Army camps and along the roads, making it almost impossible for them to support themselves. After a few months, many people find that they have little option but to starve or flee.

Out of desperation to earn a livelihood, many villagers are now forced to cut wood in deep jungle. But there, too, they are not safe from ‘target’ shooting practices of the ruthless border security foces. Many die or sustain injury from gunshots.

Villagers and township residents face daily or weekly demands from all of the Army camps and mobile patrols in their area. At any given time, a village has to provide an average of one person per household for a whole range of forced labor: forced porters, guides and human minesweepers for military columns, messengers and sentries for Army camps, building and maintaining Army camp fences, trenches, booby-traps, and barracks, cutting and hauling firewood, cooking and carrying water to soldiers, building and rebuilding military supply roads, clearing shrub along roadsides to minimize the possibility of ambush, standing sentry along military supply roads, growing crops for the Army on confiscated land, and engaging in profit-making activities for the officers such as brick-baking, rubber planting or digging fishponds, let alone drug-trafficking. Every Army unit demands most of these things from the surrounding villages, and every village is surrounded by three, four or five Army units.

The forced labor is usually demanded on a rotating basis; a specified number of locals must go for a day or a week with all their own food and tools, and they are not released until their replacements arrive for the next shift. Nothing is provided for them, and they often have to work under guard.

Conditions for porters are especially brutal; forced to carry loads of rations or ammunition weighing 30 kg or more, they are marched in front of soldiers to detonate mines and kicked or beaten if they are too slow. If they become ill or cannot continue they are killed or left behind, and many porters die either during portering or afterwards, from disease complicated by physical exhaustion and malnutrition.

To avoid forced labor, the village men leave the village to stay in hiding in their field huts or in the forest while the women, children and the elderly remain behind in the village to protect the house from looting by soldiers and to carry on some semblance of family life. The men only sneak back into the village for food and to visit when Army patrols are not around.

This system makes the women particularly vulnerable, because Army patrols arriving at the village often rape them on seeing that the men are not around. Truly, rape is used as a weapon of war to ethnically cleanse the territory. In the absence of men, they often take the women as porters, or accuse them of being married to ‘rebel soldiers’ and hold them hostage pending the return of their husbands. The crimes similar to Abu Ghraib are routinely practiced on these prisoners.

Nowadays most people know what to expect at the relocation sites, so when they are ordered to move they simply flee into hiding in the forests surrounding their paddy fields. They then try to survive from hidden rice supplies around their villages, planting small patches of crops in several different places and fleeing from place to place whenever Army patrols come around. Tens of thousands of people are presently living this way. They have little food and many are starving, there is no access to medicines and many die of treatable diseases.

They live under the constant risk of being captured or shot by passing Army patrols that also seek out and destroy their food supplies and crops in the fields. Many of them have been living this way for two to three years already. Eventually, finding that they can no longer survive this way, many of them try to make their way to the border to become refugees.

In some localities, out of desperation, villagers have tried to appease the government forces by making their own ‘peace’ agreements. They promise to abide by all demands of the military. These villages are subsequently labeled ‘peace’ villages. But even in these villages the demands for forced labor, money, food and materials usually become so intense that the village elders cannot keep up with them. They are then arrested and tortured for failure to comply, houses are sometimes burned and many villagers flee just as though there had never been any agreement.

With the rapid expansion of the Army in recent years to its current strength of over 400,000 troops, villagers who have never seen fighting now find their villages surrounded by 3 or 4 Army camps within walking distance. The officers in these camps see the civilian population as little more than a convenient pool of forced laborers and a source of profit. Villages receive a constant stream of written and spoken orders demanding their forced labor as Army camp servants, messengers and sentries, cutting and hauling building materials for camp construction, building and maintaining the camp. They are also taken as porters, because Army needs people to haul rations and supplies to Army camps, or from the Battalion bases to faraway outposts.

The regime also uses villagers as forced labor to construct a new or improve the existing road networks and build infrastructure such as railways and hydro dams. Conditions on such projects can be brutal, with one person per family demanded on rotating one or two week shifts.

For Army officers, a posting in the countryside is an opportunity to make a great deal of personal profit in a short time. Officers order villagers to cut logs and bamboo, claiming it is for the Army camp but then selling it on the market for personal profit. Other such schemes include forcing villagers as well as rank and file soldiers to bake bricks or dig and maintain fish ponds.

All profit goes to the officers, who also confiscate most of the rations intended for their soldiers and approximately half of the soldiers’ pay in the name of various ‘fees’ and ‘contributions’, then sell the rations on the market and tell the soldiers to get their food from the villages. This situation has become even worse since 1998, when the Junta cut back severely on rations to units in the field and ordered them to produce more of their own food or take it from the farmers. The result has been the systematic confiscation of much of the best farmland by Army units.

The farmers are not paid any compensation. Worse yet, they are called out for forced labor farming their confiscated land, from planting to harvesting, and the officers then take the entire harvest. Some villages report that they even have to provide the seed for planting these fields.

In addition to forced labor, villagers face constant demands for cash, food and materials from every Army unit in their area. On average, a family must hand over anywhere from large sums of money to the Army in cash as extortion which masquerades under the names of ‘porter fees’, ‘servants’ fees’, ‘development fees’, ‘pagoda fees’, and so on. In theory, this money is supposed to be used to hire people for forced labor or to support projects in the area, but in reality it is pocketed by the officers, and forced laborers are not paid.

Villagers must also pay to avoid forced labor when they are ill or cannot go, at exuberant rates for days of labor missed. Cash is very hard to come by for most subsistence farmers in rural areas because they do not operate in a cash-based economy, but if they do not pay these fees they are arrested. Every farmer must also hand over a quota of every crop to the authorities for next to nothing. Usually this quota amounts to approximately 30% of the entire crop, but after the farmer deducts the portion of his harvest required for seed stocks, payments in rice for previous loans, use of other villagers’ buffaloes to plough, etc., the quota amounts to 50% or more of what is left.

Quotas have been increasing in recent years, and no exceptions are made for bad crop years. The farmers often have no option but to buy rice on the market to fulfill the quota in such years, while the family goes hungry. The price paid for quota is less than half of market price, but corrupt officials take out so many ‘deductions’ for themselves that the farmers usually receive no more than 10-20% of market price for quota rice. Even with little or no rice left to feed their families, the farmers still face regular demands for rice and meat to feed the local Army camps, and armed patrols often enter villages to loot rice, livestock and valuables.

In some villages the regime sometimes sanctions the construction of a primary or middle school, but usually it is the villagers who must pay the cost of building it as well as the salary of the state-supplied teacher. More remote villages usually cannot afford to do this, so many have opened their own primary-level schools with their own volunteer teachers. Since the beginning of 1999, the authorities have been ordering the closing of many of these village primary schools, telling the villagers that only state-sanctioned schools are allowed.

Many villagers cannot afford to send their children to state schools, however, and they also complain that in the state schools the teaching of the native language is strictly forbidden, causing children to grow up illiterate in their mother tongue. As a result, fewer and fewer children in the rural areas have any opportunity for education.

Racism is so pervasive in this country that racist teachers (representing state-sponsored religion) have been known to falsely teach that Muslims were brought in by the colonial regime and have only caused problem.

The majority non-Muslim students often exclude Muslim students from sports matches and clubs. Muslim students cannot get to universities and technical colleges because of lack of national identity cards. Many are forced to convert to the religion of the majority if they want to gain access to higher education and better job. Students are expelled from the schools if they refused to learn the religion of the majority people. Muslim elders are arrested for submitting petition requesting that Muslims students be spared from such religious classes. Building of Muslims schools is banned and Muslim religious teachers routinely face torture and execution.

Even where schools are available, many children are pulled out of school as soon as they are big enough to work because of all of the demands for labor and money which their families have to face. Families sell their valuables to pay the fees and pay to avoid forced labor so that they can work in their fields or do day labor to make money. However, there are so many fees that the money does not last long, and many families send small children to do the forced labor so that the adults can still work in the fields.

Eventually they sell all of their belongings and livestock to pay all of the fees, and when they are still ordered to go for forced labor or pay money they have no option but to flee the village or face arrest, torture and possible summary execution. Trials are not held in rural areas; villagers are simply tied up and taken to Army camps where they are held in mediaeval-style leg stocks or pits in the ground, tortured and interrogated until the Army officer decides what to do with them. They are often held for ransom, held for months under torture without charge, or simply executed without any record existing of their arrest. To avoid this, villagers have fled to the towns where they become beggars or cheap labor, to the hills, or to neighboring countries.

The same inhuman rule applies to rural medical clinics. Even in places where the regime has allocated some funds for the establishment of some basic social services, the local military and government authorities use these services as an excuse to extort even more money from the villagers by force, usually amounting to several times the worth of the services being rendered.

Most of these social services are denied to Muslims. They are even barred from collecting food aid that is distributed by an international aid agency, e.g., the World Food Program (WFP). Men often face harassment while woman face rape to collect food package. Because of the discriminatory policy of the junta, they are routinely denied relief that is sent to them (even by other Muslims) during natural disasters. Sometimes the fees associated with permission to move from one location to another makes it prohibitive for them to draw any benefit from relief aid.

In this country, Muslims face religious persecution of the worst kind. Muslim villagers are ordered to worship the god of the majority people. They must also pay obeisance to (worship) monks, failing which they may face torture and death. Villagers are pressured to convert to religion of the majority. They are forced to contribute large chunks of money toward donations to monasteries for the dominant religious group. Muslim places of worship are routinely demolished to make room for altars of the dominant group. Muslim homes and shops are destroyed under all kinds of pretexts. Muslims are also ordered to erect shelf altars in their homes. They are ordered to become vegetarians and not to raise cattle. Eating meat may result in heavy fines, including torture and imprisonment.
How about your involvement in human rights of your people? Forget it.

You will rot in jail for decades unless the regime ends your misery with a quick execution. Tactics currently being used on political prisoners include:
--Severe beatings, often resulting in loss of consciousness and sometimes death
--Electrocution to all parts of the body including genitals
--Rubbing iron rods on shins of prisoners until flesh is ripped off, a tactic known in this country as the "iron road"
--Burning with cigarettes and lighters
--Prolonged restriction of movements, for up to several months, using rope and shackles around the neck and ankles
--Repeatedly striking the same area of a person's body every second for several hours, a tactic known in this country as "tick-tock torture."

Nightmare? Fiction? Tales from a distant past when there was nothing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No, what I am sharing here is no wild imagination but a reality for most of the people living inside Burma. While the situation is simply bleak for all inside Burma except a privileged class within the Burman ethnic group professing Buddhism (who runs the SPDC – State Peace and Development Council - regime), the situation is worse for Muslims and worst yet for the Rohingya Muslims who live in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Burma. Their suffering simply has no parallel in our time because of their Muslim identity and annulment of citizenship rights.( To be continued )
END of Part 1

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Dr. Habib Siddiqui writes from USA , His E mail : saeva@aol.com
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