STATEMENT: RAPE AS A WEAPON OF ETHNIC WAR

SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION (SDU)

STATEMENT: RAPE AS A WEAPON OF ETHNIC WAR

The Shan Democratic Union holds that the current military regime and past juntas in Burma have waged a very brutal and crude ethnic war against the Shan, Karenni, and Karen population and other ethnic nationalities of Burma. 

The war waged by the military in Burma -- in the Shan, Karenni, and Karenni states in particular -- is marked by forced dislocation of industrious, relatively prosperous villagers from their village, homes, fields, and land, and designating large tract of hitherto productive land as free-fire zones. Anyone found in these designated free-fire zones are shot, killed on the spot, and women raped and, most often, murdered afterward. 

More than that, military columns are dispatched into the countryside with the objective of hunting and killing villagers -- the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) -- who fled into the jungle and have been forced to live lives of hunted animals. These hunters-killers team are apparently under orders to destroy any huts or any cultivated patch of land found, and to kill any displaced villagers, wherever found. 

In addition, soldiers and officers of the Burma Army are given license to rape Shan women. No women is safe, no matter whether they live in "white, grey, or black" areas, or in towns. 

Women have been taken away at gunpoint as porters -- a body of civilians impressed as free labor to accompany army columns or patrols -- and gang raped every night. Many women, some very young, are summoned by officers to army camps and outposts on various pretexts, and raped -- forced to serve the officers and soldiers as captive "comfort women" for many days. 

It is clear that Shan women have been specifically targeted for rape -- an act which, in the lexicon of ethno-racist warfare expresses the conquest and humbling of an ethnic enemy population, their unwilling, but humiliating submission to a "superior" power. This ethno-racist mind-set of the ethnic Burmese officers is not much different from the mind-set of those who perpetrated the infamous Rape of Nanking and their abusive treatment of Korean women. 

The SDU maintains that the junta is not fighting an anti-insurgency war but an ethnic war, under the guise of fighting rebels and purporting to prevent the break up of the country, to safeguard national solidarity, and other such claims. Hunting down already displaced persons in their homeland in order to kill them and to rape their wives, mothers, sisters, aunties, loved ones, and so on, because they are Shan, of a different ethnic group, is waging ethnic warfare. 

If the junta is seriously concerned about the national solidarity and in safeguarding the integrity of the country -- the Union of Burma -- it should recognize that waging an ethnic war against what it terms "the national races" of Burma, is extremely counter-productive. 

By waging ethnic warfare against the Shan population (and the Karen, Karenni and other non-Burman population segments), the junta is ensuring the break up of the country. It is encouraging ethnic hatred and ethnic nationalism, and as well fostering hatred for the Burmans. 

A nation-state that is "kept together" by the subjugation and humiliation of other cultures and ethnic population groups, and by crude and brutal ethnic warfare will never be united, stable, peaceful or prosperous. It is a fact that armed resistance of the ethnic nationalities came about as a result of widespread atrocities -- a central element of ethnic warfare -- perpetrated by the military. 

The SDU therefore calls upon the military junta to stop destroying the Union Spirit jointly forged at Panglong in 1947 by U Aung San, Shan princes, Kachin and Chin leaders. 

The SDU also calls upon the international community, the United Nations and its agencies, and decent people everywhere to send the Burmese military junta a very clear and firm message: that crude and brutal ethnic warfare, and the targeting of women, the use of rape as a weapon of ethnic war will not, and cannot be tolerated. 

SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION
Dated: July 2, 2002