Friday, July 12, 2013

Democratic Voice of Burma

Democratic Voice of Burma

Migrant schools face closure amid funding cuts

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 04:54 AM PDT

More than two dozen migrant schools in western Thailand face closure as international donors continue to slash funding for groups on the Thai-Burma border, a local NGO has warned.

Twenty-five schools, teaching as many as 5,000 students in Thailand's Tak province, have been left without financial assistance for the year 2013-2014, raising concerns that they will be forced to shut down, according to a local migrant group.

"Funding for migrant organisations this year has decreased as most of the donors have moved inside Burma," Naw Paw Ray, chairperson from the Burmese Migrant Workers’ Education Committee, told DVB.

"About 25 of 74 migrant schools in Tak are yet to receive any assistance and they are unable to pay the teachers, their rent, electricity and water bills. Some of the schools have lost students as they could not provide transportation for them."

Funding for border groups, including schools and health care facilities, has seen a significant decline since the start of last year. In late June, The Border Consortium (TBC) – which coordinates humanitarian assistance for Burmese refugees living on the border — announced that it would cut food rations to some 128,000 people across nine camps under its care.

Dozens of other groups, including the renowned Mae Tao clinic, which offers free medical care to Burmese migrants and refugees, have also been forced to cut back crucial services.

Burma, which is slowly emerging from nearly five decades of military rule, has become a new hotspot for aid groups and has attracted a massive influx of humanitarian funding. But NGOs working on the border say they have been short-changed in the process.

Naw Paw Ray said the Burmese government had previously pledged to donate textbooks for the underfunded migrant schools, but their offer had yet to materialise. She added that nearly 200 teachers still needed to be paid.

"If they can't pay the teachers decently, then the teachers will go and find other jobs. This makes us concerned about the schools' survival."

According to the International Labour Organization, over 200,000 Burmese children under the age of 17 live in Thailand. Less than 20 percent are estimated to attend school, mostly through specialist programmes set up by local NGOs.

Although Thai law stipulates that all children, regardless of their immigration status, are allowed to attend school, migrant children are often excluded for practical reasons, such as financial or language barriers, and forced to start working instead.

There are 74 Burmese migrant schools providing free education to some 10,000 students in Tak province in western Burma.

As monsoon hits, relief workers struggle to provide IDPs with shelter, aid

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 04:26 AM PDT

Villagers taking refuge in displacement camps in war-torn Kachin and Shan states are in desperate need of reliable shelter as the monsoon season commences in northern Burma.

According to Mary Twan, the co-founder of the relief group Wunpawng Ninghtwe, makeshift shelters at the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Kachin state’s Mansi and Momauk townships no longer protect the camps' residents from the seasonal rains. Camps located on inclines were also struggling to deal with soil erosion caused by the heavy downpours.

"Namhkonpar camp in Mansi was affected by erosion after a week of constant rain so we had to relocate two families to safety," said Mary Tawn, adding that the harsh weather conditions had made transportation to and from the facility difficult and seasonal flu and dengue fever was spreading in the area.

"The camps have been standing for more than two years now and, as the huts were built of plywood, they are now pretty much weathered and unable to protect inhabitants from the rain."

At a Taaung (Palaung) IDP camp in northern Shan state's Kutkai township, aid workers were struggling to provide the facility’s more than 400 inhabitants with adequate amounts of aid.

"The IDPs are in need of food and medicine, and the huts they were living in were not in a decent enough condition to protect them from the wind and rain," said an aid worker who spoke with DVB on the condition of anonymity.

Approximately 100,000 villagers in northern Burma's Kachin and Shan states have been driven out of their homes into displacement camps after a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and government collapsed in June 2011.

While the KIA and government-backed peace negotiators agreed to "reduce fighting" between the two sides during a historic meeting in the Kachin state capital of Myitkyina in May, the rebel group has refused to sign another ceasefire deal with Naypyidaw until Burma's ethnic minorities are granted greater political autonomy.

In June, a ten-truck UN convoy with humanitarian assistance for more than 5,000 people reached IDP camps behind rebel lines in Kachin state for the first time in more than a year. However, the government continues to deny international agencies regular access to displacement camps located in rebel-held territory.

Telenor talks to DVB

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 04:19 AM PDT

Norwegian company Telenor and Qatari-based company Ooreedo have been awarded highly anticipated telecommunications licenses in Burma.

Both companies say they will invest billions of dollars to roll out mobile phone, SMS and Internet networks across the impoverished country.

The companies are set to change Burma's telecoms landscape – where less than 10 percent of the population have access to a phone.

At a press conference in Rangoon on Wednesday both companies presented their plans.

DVB's Khin Maung Win spoke to Telenor's vice president of communications about the challenges and rewards that come with the tender.

Burma jails more than 20 Buddhists over religious violence

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 03:10 AM PDT

Burma has sentenced more than 20 Buddhists to prison for their roles in religious riots in March, including a deadly attack on a Muslim boarding school, lawyers and police said Friday.

The convictions follow earlier concerns among rights groups that Muslims were bearing the brunt of the legal crackdown on suspects involved in the unrest, which shook the central town of Meikhtila.

The Buddhists were sentenced on Wednesday and Thursday on charges including murder, assault, theft, arson and inciting unrest, said a police official who did not want to be named.

According to state media, which did not specify the suspects’ religion, the sentences ranged from two years for minor offences such as theft to 10 years for murder, with some defendants handed several terms to be served separately.

Some of the charges related to the deaths of students at an Islamic school on the outskirts of Meikhtila, according to Ba San, a lawyer who was at the court.

“We have to say that both Buddhists and Muslims have been sentenced if found guilty,” he told AFP.

More than a dozen Muslims have been convicted in relation to the violence, with a number receiving life imprisonment for murder.

In May, seven Muslims were sentenced to between two and 28 years for their parts in the killing of a Buddhist monk during the unrest, which was apparently triggered by a quarrel in a Muslim-owned gold shop.

Before the latest convictions, only two Buddhists were known to have been sentenced for serious offences during the riots, which drove thousands of Muslims from their homes.

Officially 44 people were killed in the two days of bloodshed in Meikhtila, although some fear the toll was much higher.

According to eyewitnesses interviewed by the rights group Physicians for Human Rights, a Buddhist mob hunted down and killed some 20 students and four teachers at the Islamic school.

Witnesses recounted seeing one pupil being decapitated and several being burned alive, according to a May report by the US-based group.

Attacks against Muslims – who make up an estimated four percent of Burma’s population – have exposed deep fractures in the Buddhist-majority nation and cast a shadow over its emergence from army rule.

Buddhist-Muslim clashes in Arakan state last year left about 200 people dead, mostly Rohingya Muslims who are denied citizenship by the Burmese government.

Thai police raid brothel freeing 10 Burmese victims

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 02:57 AM PDT

During a raid conducted by Thai police accompanied by Burmese labour activists, 10 Burmese women were freed, including underage teenagers, from a brothel in southern Thailand where they had been forced to work as prostitutes.

Officials from the Royal Thai Police's Department of Special Investigation along with representatives from the Myanmar Association Thailand (MAT) and Foundation for Education and Development (FED) raided the five brothels disguised as hostels in Thailand's Ranong province on 10 July.

"We accompanied the local police's raid on the hostels around 8pm on [Wednesday]. They shut down immediately upon our arrival and told all the girls to go hide in the woods nearby, so when we surrounded the premises, but we couldn't find any of them [initially]," said MAT's director Kyaw Thaung.

The police and activists proceeded to search the surrounding area, where they found of the 10 women hiding.

"One of us found two of the girls. One was from [Tenasserim's] Tavoy and was around 22 years old and the other one was 17. We whispered to them that we weren't there to arrest them but to bring them back to their parents," said Kyaw Thaung.

"They started crying 'We are free!' and danced. We continued to search for the rest for about an hour and managed to rescue 10 women in total."

The MAT director said he estimated that around 50 women fled into the woods after the raid commenced, but the police and NGO workers were only able to find a fraction of individuals who they believed worked at the brothel.

According to an account provided during an interview after the raid, one of the victims said she arrived in Thailand after a 'job agent' had promised to find her a position at a clothing store, but was later sold to the brothel.

"I was brought to Thailand via a flight by a woman named Zin Myo – she promised to find me a job at a clothing store with monthly salary of around 100,000 kyat (US$100). I decided to come with her as my family was facing financial challenges," said the woman under the condition of anonymity.

"After being sold here, I wasn't allowed to leave the premises. Another woman who tried to escape with a customer was rumoured to have been killed – she was never found again."

The scheme is an all too familiar scam in Thailand where impoverished migrants arriving in the Kingdom are duped by human traffickers posing as job recruiters who end up selling the individuals to brothels.

According to the NGO workers, the victims, aged between 16 and 24, were primarily from Rangoon and Tenasseim divisions in Burma.  Some of the women said they had been working at the brothels for eight years. According to Kyaw Thaung, a 16-year-old teenager who was rescued said she had been sold to the brothel before reaching puberty.

Most of the women said they were sold into the prostitution ring against their will and had their food allowances cut if they refused a customer. Three of the victims reportedly sustained injuries during their time in captivity and were not allowed to visit a medical facility.

Kra Buri Police Station is seeking to prosecute the brothel's owner who they have been unable to apprehend; however, two of the facilities' managers are currently being held in custody.

The Burmese Embassy in Bangkok pledged to provide the victims with assistance to and is currently collecting donations to cover their expenses. Of the 10 rescued women, one has been reunited with her husband and two have returned to Burma, while the remaining seven are recovering at a women's shelter in Ranong province.

In the US State Department's annual trafficking report published in June, Thailand was listed on the government's tier-2 watch list for the fourth year in a row for not complying with the "minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking".

"The majority of the trafficking victims identified within Thailand are migrants from Thailand's neighboring countries who are forced, coerced, or defrauded into labor or commercial sexual exploitation or children placed in the sex trade," stated the report.

"Conservative estimates put this population numbering in the tens of thousands of victims."

A majority of the Kingdom's estimated three million migrants are believed to be from Burma.

Trading in timber

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 12:35 AM PDT

The Burmese government has announced a policy that will stop the export of raw timber starting next April.

Environmentalists say the decision could save Burma's forests.

Burma is one of the world's major exporters of teak, but over production and illegal logging has reduced the country's forests from nearly 60 percent in the 1960s to below 20 percent today.

The government says it will focus on exporting high-quality finished wood products, but those in the timber business could face losing their livelihoods.

Burma enacts new central bank law

Posted: 11 Jul 2013 11:32 PM PDT

Burma has introduced a new law to overhaul its central bank, the presidential office said Friday, in the latest reform aimed at burnishing the country’s economic credentials.

Details of the new legislation have not yet been published but officials say the central bank will have more autonomy and will no longer operate as part of the finance ministry.

“The significant thing is that the central bank will be an independent body,” a central bank official who did not want to be named told AFP earlier this week.

A presidential office spokesman said that President Thein Sein had signed the law on Thursday following parliamentary approval several days ago but was unable to give more details.

The main role of the Central Bank of Myanmar up to now, experts say, has been to print money to fund the government’s budget deficit.

Burma’s quasi-civilian government has announced a series of political and economic reforms since coming to power in 2011 after the end of nearly half a century of military rule.

Last year it revamped Burma’s complex foreign exchange system in a bid to facilitate trade and investment.

Foreign companies are flocking to the former pariah state following the lifting of most Western sanctions.

The futile and violent search for ‘authenticity’ in Burma

Posted: 11 Jul 2013 11:21 PM PDT

This is the first article in a two-part series examining the relationship between sectarian violence and resource distribution in a changing Burma.

The recent conflagrations of sectarian violence in Burma have shocked the country and the world, having left thousands displaced, scores dead, and millions of kyat of property damaged.

They have also left a series of fragmented analyses, as commentators struggle to make sense of the slaughter. On one hand, some – incapable of seeing beyond a 'big-bad Burma state' paradigm – believe that the state is behind the current violence, and/or that disgruntled generals are orchestrating attacks from behind the scenes to legitimate the military's institutional role. On the opposite end of the spectrum others argue that a deep-seated racism, fomented under the long years of the military regime, is now being ‘unleashed’ as the military relaxes controls.

Both of these perspectives draw from evidence that is partially correct – the military-state has spurred internal divisions and likely has orchestrated violence in the past; there is racism in Burma society against dark-skinned people. But neither encompasses the entire story.

The Buddhist-monk-led anti-Muslim campaign that has generated much collective hatred cannot be construed as emerging from a conspiratorial state elite. Likewise, such hatred cannot be imagined outside of the context of state institutions which insist upon eternal racial and religious differences: ID cards demand that babies at birth be given either – but not both – a "Muslim" or a "Burmese" identity; state-enforced birth-limits directed only at certain Muslim communities present them as second-class citizens and demographic threats.

Understanding the spontaneous explosions of violence requires a consideration of the socio-economic context in which these attacks are occurring. Increasing economic stratification can help explain the growth in anxieties generated by concerns over resource distribution. The exclusion of perceived foreigners can be interpreted as an inter-class attempt to construct a community of legitimate claimants to this finally-growing – but unequally distributed – pie.

But this exclusion may not stop with these particular “others”. These intensifying feelings of being left out, combined with the failures of citizens and political leaders to articulate a conception of an inclusive Burmese civil political community, creates opportunities for a violence that may be uncontainable and may continue to attach to others who may seem suddenly or irreconcilably 'foreign'. The risk is that Burma tears itself apart in its search for its 'authentic' core.

The Instability of Scapegoating

When Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims first clashed in western Arakan state last summer, the violence was a regional issue. But it did not remain there. Discourse across Burmese society about the Rohingya soon exploded, with Buddhist monks, political leaders, and even other ethnic minority groups weighing in. They were all in agreement: the Rohingya were threats to the nation, were not part of it, and must be expelled.

A tiny ethnic minority kept in concentration camp conditions for years, periodically targeted for mass abuse and expulsions was suddenly imagined as a threat to the entire polity? How to make sense of this? Could this violence – and the violent discourse surrounding it – be interpreted as a tactic for building a collective 'in-group'? Indeed, as the long years of the military regime gave way to a new, more 'open' society, the violence seemed to work as a way of trying to establish the definitions and limits of that new society.

This was especially true given the long-standing historical animosity between the majority Burmans and Burma's other ethnic minorities. These ethnic minority groups, who scholar Michael Walton has identified as seeming "to enjoy only conditional membership in the national community… always subject to suspicion of disloyalty", were suddenly being hailed as 'indigenous races' connected to the blood and soil of the nation.

These ethnic groups played their part, quickly drawing a distinction between themselves and the Rohingya. The National Democratic Front, a coalition representing eight nationality parties, was unequivocal: "'Rohingya' is not to be recognized as a nationality."

But as “the inside” was apparently being established through the process of eradicating “the outside”, violence overflowed. From its initial scapegoat, violence began to be directed at Burma's other “others”: in the central town of Meikhtila, in environs north of Rangoon, and in the northeastern city of Lashio, respective mobs have turned on Muslim citizens, burning property and murdering scores.

Critically, these Muslim citizens have been integrated into Burma society for generations, and so it is more accurate to say that they are being turned into”others”. Muslims in central Burma — who have no connection to Bangladesh — are now being called “Bengali“. This is also the name Burmese state security agents insist Rohingya call themselves.

Similarly, a Chinese Muslim (Panthay) colleague – whose light skin means she does not 'look' like the Muslims that Burmese often derisively refer to as kalar – told me last month in Rangoon that she is afraid that the violence will spill over to them as well. Days after our conversation, Panthays had their cinema burned to the ground in Lashio.

This progression of violence suggests that scapegoating is potentially uncontainable – from Rohingya to all Muslims, from Rohingya to all dark-skinned people, and potentially beyond.

For instance, a number of propaganda pamphlets in Rangoon urging Buddhists to protect their race and religion. While the covers are adorned by fetuses (invoking Muslim population threat) and prehistoric beasts (invoking the supposed Muslim desire to consume the Burma nation), the texts implore readers to beware "the other races", or the "evil other-race husbands", which are terms eminently re-deployable to any group constructed as “other”.

But this cuts both ways: once one group is identified as "not part of" Burma, or "incompatible" with "our traditions", Burmese citizens or traditions themselves are put into question, are even potentially undermined.

From animosity to violence

All of this animosity still does not explain the move to sporadic, spontaneous violence. Looking at economic indicators as a proximate cause provides helpful insight. Stanley Tambiah, in a study close to the Burmese case, shows how as far back as 1910 Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka were justifying violent attacks against non-Buddhists through the language of economic victimisation.

Tambiah cites a tract written by a Buddhist monk that argues that "the 'merchants from Bombay and peddlers from South India'… trade in Ceylon while the 'sons of the soil' abandon agriculture and 'work like galley slaves' in urban clerical jobs."

A similar phenomenon occurred in Burma and remains relevant today. Many Burmese still reference how Chettiars – money-lenders from Tamil Nadu – expropriated hundreds of thousands of hectares of land when the Great Depression undermined the ability of Burmese borrowers to repay agricultural loans.

"Increasing economic stratification can help explain the growth in anxieties generated by concerns over resource distribution"

While Sean Turnell, author of a book on the period, tells me that these Chettiars were mostly non-Muslims (either Hindus or Christians), their South Asian physiognomy has largely been conflated with Muslim identity, especially given that today, as a 2002 Human Rights Watch report illustrates, "many Muslims are businessmen, shopkeepers and small-scale money changers."

HRW argues that this position in the economy "means that [Muslims] are often targeted during times of economic hardship." The difference now is that while the whole economy is still poor, there are signs that small swathes are improving drastically. As I've argued elsewhere, there is a palpable sense of anxiety in Burma today deriving from the speed of change and the feeling of missing out on the spoils associated with those changes.

And while there is no time-series data tracking increasing inequality in Burma over the past years, rapid growth that is concentrated in extractive industries will often accrue to narrow elites – especially when rampant land-grabs attend it, and when compensation – if given at all – considers only the market price today, not what it will become in a changing Burma.

Given all this, when political leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi tell poor farmers in places like Latpadaung that they have to respect contracts written by the previous military regime and so must hand over their land to Chinese companies in the name of a rule of law that she has always insisted did not exist when those contracts were written, average people may begin to suspect from this utter nonsense that 'democracy' means nothing more than their freedom to continue to be exploited.

Thus abandoned, people take matters into their own hands. This does not mean that sectarian violence is inevitable (it has not occurred in Latpadaung, for instance), but rather that some in these situations lash-out at what they misperceive as their exploiters (and with the potential aim of looting the resources and appropriating the market positions of those one rung above them).

Within this logic, it is not surprising that the city of Meikhtila, long deeply-impoverished but now sporadically-growing by dint of its increasing importance in linking Rangoon with Mandalay, has become a site of sectarian strife. It is no wonder the Rohingya are being displaced and contained in an area where a Special Economic Zone is being built. Most convincing here is that the Buddhist '969 movement' is above all an economic boycott that targets Muslim businesses.

Matt Schissler's exploration of working-class Burmese Buddhist anti-Muslim sentiment shows how economic grievance fuels the legitimacy of that movement: whereas Buddhists can observe how Muslims do not always convert wives or children, that they often respect Buddhism, etc, demagogues and average people alike perceive Muslim wealth. In this context the 786 symbol that adorns Muslims shops signifies to Buddhists not only halal food but also a desire to dominate the economy.

As Maung Zarni, visiting fellow at London School of Economics, puts it, “some militant Buddhist preachers… effectively scapegoat the country's Muslims for the general economic hardships and cultural decay in society, portraying the ethnic Burmese as victims at the hands of organised Muslim commercial leeches and parasites.” Commentator Sai Latt points out that economic exclusion is not a mere pretext for physical violence and exclusion, but rather directly leads to it.

This is particularly relevant now given that the conventional wisdom in Burma today assumes that economic development will act as a panacea for Burma's internecine problems. It may do precisely the opposite.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman is Founding Research Associate Fellow of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights. He is also a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University

-The opinions and views expressed in this piece are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect DVB's editorial policy.
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