TALES OF TERROR EMERGE FROM VICTIMS

Rape, torture murder are its instruments

Bangkok

"The Burmese military ... know there's no way people will like them, so they
rule by fear."

- - CHRISTOPHER BRUTON, Economic consultant in Bangkok

As riot troops man strategic positions in tense Rangoon for today's 10th
anniversary of the Burmese military's fierce suppression of a pro-democracy
uprising, human rights groups say that the army is committing fresh
atrocities at an alarming rate.

Villagers in eastern Burmese states bordering Thailand are being killed,
tortured and raped as the ruling military junta seeks to consolidate its
control throughout the country, according to numerous eyewitness reports.

A full decade after the army shot thousands of protesters in Rangoon and
around the country and later refused to recognize a landslide election
victory by pro democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the regime's reliance on
terror shows no signs of a letup.

Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is recovering from dehydration
and fever after recently spending six days marooned in her car on a country
road when the ruling State Peace and Development Council prevented her from
visiting supporters.

Appalling Cruelty

A few hundred miles north of the capital in lush, jungled Shan and Kayah
states, traumatized villagers are fleeing from the army to the Thai border
bearing stories of appalling cruelty.

They come from towns and villages as close as 20 miles from the Shan capital
of Taunggi, which the government promotes as a tourist center, along with
the nearby, picturesque Inle Lake.

The Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF), a nongovernmental organization
formed in the early '90s and based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai,
has issued a number of detailed reports documenting the atrocities and
forced relocations.

Witnesses recently gave these accounts to SHRF workers:

0 On June 27, soldiers from the Burmese army's Light Infantry Battalion 246
shot dead 13 villagers in Kaeng Tawn; seven children and two women were
among the victims.

0 Twenty-six farmers were gunned down on June 2 near Murng-Kerng.

In One refugee brought a photograph of Nang Zar Hawn, a 14 year-old girl who
was allegedly raped, killed and burned by an army major near Lai-Kha.

0 Nang Nan, the wife of farmer Sai Phim, found her husband buried at the
steps of their home near Kaeng Tun with his head above the ground, after
being shot by troops.

Pippa Curwen, & British researcher for the SHRF who has taken some of the
refugees' testimony, said, "Yesterday I interviewed a 19-year-old man who
had rope marks across his arms."

Electric Shocks

"He said he had been captured and tortured by troops; he was beaten, a green
plastic sheet was tied around his head and water poured in so he couldn't
breathe, and he was given electric shocks on his cheeks."

Hundreds of extrajudicial killings, many of them preceded by torture, have
been documented by the SHRF.

The reports come on the heels of a warning in April by Amnesty~
International that hundreds of thousands of farming families&. from more
than 1,400 villages in Shan state were in grave danger after being forced to
relocate t( miserable camps without adequate( food or medicine. The dire
conditions tions in the camps force people t( forage in the f orests or to
try t( return to their abandoned villages where they are vulnerable to be
ing shot on sight by soldiers.

Escapees from the camps say that men, women and children alike are routinely
forced to construct army buildings, build roads and carry supplies for
soldiers. They add that diseases causing diarrhea are rife.

"I decided that if I died, everything would be over and that would be better
than going back to the camp, because life is very bad there," said Klaw Reh,
50, a Shan farmer who escaped and fled to Thailand with three children in
April after his wife died in the Shadaw relocation camp.

Lucrative Narcotics Trade

The military's campaigns in Shan, Kayah and Karen states have increased in
intensity since 1996. Burma experts say that the goal has been twofold: To
undermine any lingering support for the region's depleted ethnic resistance
groups and, from the Junta's perspective, to bring "peace and development"
to the border areas.

Increasingly, the regime's concept of "development" is being extended to
grabbing control of the lucrative narcotics trade, analysts say. Burma is
one of the world's largest suppliers of heroin.

Large parts of resource-rich Shan state were outside Rangoon's reach before
it cut a deal with top opium warlord Khun Sa in 1996. Khun Sa, whose
extradition was fervently sought by the United States, reportedly agreed to
disband his private army, give up the drug trade and submit to a form of
house arrest. In turn, the junta guaranteed his safety and apparently
allowed him to use his billions to pursue legitimate business opportunities
- - sometimes in Partnership with the regime.

Christopher Bruton, chief of Dataconsult, a consulting company in Bangkok
with extensive experience in Burma, said: "The Burmese economy is continuing
to deteriorate, and the narcotics business is about all the government has
left to get money, To control harvesting and processing of opium does
require more continuous control in rural areas."

Rape as a Tool of Terror

The junta vehemently denies involvement in the drug trade. But farmers who
fled to Thailand re. Port that troops around Ho Murng, Khun Sa's former
stronghold, are )ordering villagers to grow opium. The refugees add that
soldiers control factories that make "Ya Ma," a type of amphetamine that has
flooded Thailand.

One of the most disturbing of lie military's practices is the systematic use
of rape as a tool of terror, the human rights groups say.

In a March report issued by Earthrights International, an in ternational
organization based in Thailand and Washington, D.C lawyer Betsy Apple wrote:

"Women are raped in their villages and during flight. They are subjected to
rape and other sexual abuse as they engage in forced labor ... for the
Burmese army. They are coerced into marrying. soldiers and forced to provide
sexual services under the cloak of so-called legitimate marriage."

Fear of sexual attack as well torture or killing helps ensure the army's
control of the civilian pop lation, the report adds.

Earthrights suggests that the brutalized culture within th 400,000-strong
army, where so ldiers, many of them conscripts, are often underage,
underpaid, illiterate and ill-treated by superiors, helps create the
conditions for widespread rape.

The attacks are often of uncom monbarbarity.

The Amnesty report on condi tions in Shan state documented a attack on Nang
Ing, 30, from Lai ha township. She was trying to re turn to her village to
fetch rice when soldiers raped her and the poured boiling water over he
body. She died a few days later.

Burned to Death

Nang Mai from Kunting town ship was raped over a series of days in a
deserted village, then "covered with wood and burned to death," according to
testimony given to Amnesty.

Villagers interviewed by the SHRF said that 9-year-old Pweh K Tall MU was
raped by soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 423 at Ku Baw Deh village in
April.

The ethnic groups believe that forced marriages and sexual liaisons are part
of an attempt by the junta to "Burmanize" them.

"We have seen documents circulated a few years ago indicating that soldiers
would get extra money for marrying ethnic women," said Mon activist Kasaw Mon.

Asked to speculate on what the military hoped to gain from such repression,
consultant Bruton said: "Their reactions are not what you might expect. In
some places, if you are unpopular, you try to get people to like you.

"The Burmese military sees no point in that; they know there's no way people
will like them, so they rule by fear. That's been the case for a very long
time."

For their part, military spokesmen routinely deny the atrocities and accuse
ethnic groups of spreading disinformation. "There are no human rights
abuses," Brigadier General Maung Mating, a top junta official, said earlier
this year. The regime called Amnesty's April report "a fabrication."

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett