SDU statement on 4 January 2000

SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION (SDU)

STATEMENT ON 4TH JANUARY, 2000

This day, in 1948, our leaders and the people believed that the Shan people won independence jointly with our brethrens, the Burman, Rakhine, Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Karen, and Mon nations.

The bright hope of our leaders who signed the Panglong Accord in 1947, the basis of independence and the founding document of the Union of Burma, has however been negated by history, by our bitter experience.

Today, the Shan people have become beggars in their own land. Burman- chauvinist in uniform have, since the mid-1950s, waged a war of extermination against the Shan people, perpetrating atrocities against the people of Shan State in order to traumatize, disorient, terrify, and destroy the spirit and dignity of the people as a free nation. In 1962, the Burman military chauvinists destroyed the political cohesion of the Shan States by detaining, wholesale, all our princes and leaders.

The current, post-1988, military junta has stepped up its war against the people of Shan State. More than 300,000 (and still counting) productive villagers have been forcibly evicted from their villages, farms, and fields, and they have been turned into beggars, living in squalor in various "relocation centers. Some have fled into Thailand to be exploited as cheap labor, or as products in the booming sex industry of Thailand. A third of the displaced have gone into hiding, living as fugitives in forests and running the risk, everyday, of being found by Burman military patrols and shot on the spot, the women raped and killed afterwards.

Shan State has become a killing ground in that ordinary people now stand naked, without any protection whatsoever, in the face of brutal, lawless power exercised by a very brutal, merciless Burman chauvinist-military regime.

Shan State today is a country where there is no law, and hence no government. The current self-claimed "government" is a rogue regime. The only law it knows and exercise systematically is the "law of terror". This rogue regime does not rule. It preys on the people, and kills the cultures and identities of ethnic nations .

It is particularly fearful of the Shans because we are a nation, recognized as a full-fledged nation by U (Bogyoke) Aung San, no less. Hence, the rogue regime is determined not so much to "pacify" the Shans, but to exterminate it by destroying everything that holds the people of Shan State together as a nation.

Although we, the Shan Democratic Union (SDU), favor a peaceful settlement via a Tripartite Dialogue as recommended by the United Nations General Assembly, we must also raise this question: In the face of governments that specialize in waging a war of terror and ethnocide against a people, has that nation, thus victimized, the Right to Self-Defence?

We call upon the United Nations and its agencies, international organizations, humanitarian bodies, national governments, and non-Governmental Organizations, and all decent people everywhere to ponder the question of the Right of Self-Defence of peoples threatened with extermination or subject to systemic state terror.

We believe that owing to the failure of the international community to act in time to prevent so-called governments from engaging in massacres, ethnic-cleansing actions (or ethnocide), exterminating the national-identities of the oppressed and destroying their political-cultural structures and infrastructures, and so on, it is only right that the Right to Self-Defence of the victims of state-terror and state-led extermination actions, be recognized and firmly upheld.

We believe that the recognition by the international community and governments of the Right of the people to Self-Defence , will go a long way toward restraining the bloody-minded and brutal impulse of governments, especially the genocidal rogue regime in Burma (and elsewhere in the lawless "developing" regions of the world).

We firmly believe that international recognition of the Right of threatened and victimized people to Self-Denfence will constitute an important step in bringing about the acceptance by rulers and power-holders of the standards of civilization, and with it, the emergence of the Rule of Law in the areas of the world that are still without law and without civilized governance.

Kham Zam
General Secretary
SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION
January 4, 1999.