Scholar

Scholar: IDPs not humanitarian crisis

Human Rights

Commenting on the ongoing problem of people being displaced in Burma, top Shan scholar and activist Chao Tzang Yawnghwe had recently categorically denied it was a humanitarian crisis as portrayed by several international aid agencies eager to go into Burma. 

"(It is) a deliberate war waged against the people by a brutal and desperate regime," declared the 65-year old advisor to the Ethnic Nationalities Council, formed last month, by non-Burman dissidents. "It is a danger to its people, an anti-humanitarian, barbaric regime. It is more than atrocities, more than counter-insurgency operations -- the notorious Four-cuts (cutting food, funds, intelligence and recruits to the resistance armies)." 

According to Thai-based Burma Border Consortium, established in 1984 to provide basic food and relief supplies to refugees from Burma along the Thai-Burma border, an estimated 1 million people have been displaced in the border states since 1996. A report in February by the Norwegian Refugee Council for the UN also placed Burma among the top ten in 52-known IDP countries. 

Others question whether Rangoon authorities can ever become democratic. "Many diplomats and journalists have even gone so far as to call recent developments in the country: "progress", disputed Roland Watson of Dictator Watch on 18 February. "Perhaps if each such diplomat and journalist had IDP relatives who had seen their homes burned down and lives destroyed, or a family member being tortured in one of Burma's prisons, they would realize just how ludicrous their position is." 

Nai Kasauh of Mon Relief and Development Committee, in a recent meeting with S.H.A.N., named confiscation of cultivated lands, development projects, forced labor, exorbitant taxes, forced military trainings and the gas line project as among the main causes for displacement. "As a result of these excesses, Mon fighters who chose to retire after the ceasefire pact was concluded in 1994 between Rangoon and the New Mon State Party, rose up to take up arms again against the Burma Army," he said. 

Courtesy: KHRG

"No state is allowed to wage wholesale war against its citizens," said Chao Tzang. "The IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) problem, the dispossession and killing of thousands of helpless farmers, formerly productive and peaceful cultivators, must be taken out from the humanitarian crisis category, which it certainly is not, and call a spade a spade: a war waged against the people". 

He however did not spell out how the problem should be re-focused. Dictator Watch, on the other hand, is more specific. "At least peace-keepers have been sent to the conflict in the Eastern Congo. Why not Burma?" he suggested. 

Chao Tzang Yawnghwe is a son of the late Sao Shwe Thaike, Prince of Yawnghwe and the first president of independent Burma, and the late Sao Hearn Hkam, who became Chairwoman of the Shan State War Council. His younger brother, Harn Yawnghwe, 56, is also most active in the movement.