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INTRODUCTION
This document presents the findings,
conclusions and recommendations of the People's Tribunal on
Food Scarcity and Militarization in Burma. The
Tribunal’s work will appeal to all readers interested in
human rights and social justice, as well as anyone with a
particular interest in Burma. The Asian Human Rights
Commission presents this report in order to stimulate
discourse on human rights and democratization in Burma and
around the world. Following are a few words about the
Tribunal, its background and intentions.
 What is the
People’s Tribunal? 
The People’s Tribunal is a public
exercise in discovering and assessing evidence of human
rights abuse. It belongs to the people, as opposed to the
state, because victims of injustice reveal their plight
regardless of the government’s willingness to
acknowledge a complaint. Others who are not victims use their
knowledge of human rights to organize this process, helping
victims find recourse, raise their voice, and work towards
justice.
While the People’s
Tribunal belongs to common folk, it also belongs to the
modern human rights movement. This legacy of post-Nuremberg
tribunals and public hearings embodies two twentieth century
realizations: international law and crimes against humanity.
International law has yet to reach a mandate powerful enough
to deal with government criminality, especially in domestic
conflict. Yet some horrors of war denigrate all human beings,
not just the immediate victims. The sobering, powerful
reality of injustice on a superhuman scale has prompted
global efforts to apply international law concepts in new and
creative ways. Despite their origins, People’s Tribunals
are best described as quasi-legal. They are "tribunals
of conscience" which don’t pretend to legal
authority, but seek to highlight the need for public
accountability. Jurors include public figures from various
backgrounds who share the exceptional ability to grasp,
articulate and interpret the meaning of human rights. Recent
tribunals have investigated corporate responsibility for the
industrial disaster at Bhopal in 1984, the United
States’ invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf War, and
World Bank/IMF structural adjustment policies.
To convene a Tribunal is to propose how
human rights should be perceived, discussed, and ultimately
achieved. This proposal responds to a basic contradiction:
people own their rights, but government is supposed to look
after them. This condominium-like division between popular
entitlement and state responsibility inevitably means that
when the state itself transgresses, people must either wait
for government to correct itself or forge their own tools to
reveal truth and condemn injustice. Where the state
completely fails to respect human rights, as in Burma, the
waiting is insufferable and people must act.
Thus, the Tribunal articulates
society’s claim to human rights and highlights the
state’s failure to pursue justice. It calls for a more
vigorous commitment to protecting human dignity. However, its
salient contribution is not decrying abuse, but investigating
and explaining which human rights are denied, how and why.
Therefore the Tribunal must be orderly and credible.
Credibility derives from its adherence to those legal
principles which are ethically binding in a democratic
society: independence of judiciary, due process, neutrality,
and transparency. Like any proper court, its duties are to
consider charges and evidence, to hear all parties and to
deliver a verdict. The Tribunal is neutral regarding
conventional politics, preferring no leaders or factions;
though admittedly its findings have political implications.
The Inquiry
International eyes have scrutinized human
rights in Burma for over a decade. Throughout these years
NGOs, foreign governments and the UN have copiously
documented acts of abuse, everything from killing innocent
civilians in the countryside to harassing opposition leaders
in the capital city. This nationwide violence and repression
is a matter of public record. Now, the question facing people
in and out of Burma is how to redress the country’s
climate of chronic abuse. The Tribunal’s modest
contribution is to highlight two social trends which,
although alluded to frequently, have generally received less
concentration than they deserve. Each seriously affects the
health and freedom of millions throughout the country. Both
are staple issues in the search for human rights and
democracy. Furthermore, food scarcity and militarization
pervade at the local, regional and national levels,
powerfully influencing politics, economy and culture.
Food is the most basic economic right.
Without food there is no life; and from this truism comes a
human rights tenet: without sufficient food, people can
not attain the health, happiness and dignity which are their
birthright. Food is universal, transcending class, race
and creed. Similarly, freedom from hunger is a universal wish
native to human experience. The Tribunal notes that this
right is not achieved by apportioning "a morsel of food
for every hungry mouth," but by guaranteeing food
security, a cornerstone of human life which ensures health
and vitality for all. By choosing to investigate the right to
food, the Tribunal affirms this universality. and argues that
basic economic rights should supersede politics, underscoring
food as a right permitting no compromise and no derogation.
Emphasizing food also clarifies the
difference between campaigning for human rights and
campaigning for political change, two related but separate
agenda. One easily loses this distinction because
Burma’s odious government seems to embody everything a
state should not be at the close of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, by putting all blame on the current government
we conflate fact with fiction. While government culpability
in violating human rights is fact, the inference that mere
change in government will undo systemic human rights abuse is
fiction. Burma’s military government has incorporated
denial of food into the policies, structure and routine
operations of state. Ethnic conflict is entrenched in
cultural life. Corruption and exploitation are social
realities.
Studying hunger’s political structure,
the Tribunal confirms a trend towards militarization
throughout Burmese society. Militarization does not simply
implicate the Burma army (its part in creating food scarcity
is obvious), but more importantly, suggests that
authoritarianism, oppression and violence have become
ingrained in routine government business. Propaganda
superimposes military values—unquestioning conformity,
harsh discipline, and centralized power—onto Burmese
culture until the two fuse together. Militarization orients
public policy toward military purposes in opposition to the
general population’s best interests. In managing the
rural economy, the government consistently prefers military
needs above farmers’ food security. Examples of this
preference abound in practices, policies and programs of
national administration: arbitrary taxation, paddy
procurement, agricultural development, forced labor.
Participants
The Tribunal was made possible by dozens of
people, some named by this report and many others remaining
anonymous. In preparing its submission to the Tribunal, AHRC
worked closely with the human rights organization Burma
Issues, which began in 1997 to develop a network of
grassroots information collectors. These researchers
investigated hunger throughout the country. At times this
work involved great personal risk, as when studying war zones
or the closely watched Irrawaddy
Delta. The researchers’ courage and commitment are
impressive.
Two directives guided their work: approach
the right to food as a people’s issue, and build
solidarity with informants.
The first principle guided practice and
theory alike. Hunger lives in every vernacular, requiring no
technical definitions or foreign vocabulary. Farmers talk
about their crops and parents discuss their children’s
health without much prompting. Such mundane topics threw a
valuable cloak of discretion over potentially risky work.
Theoretical benefits complement this practical advantage. A
colloquial approach confirms that the lofty speech of human
rights indeed reflects a common will to live a secure and
dignified life. Many informants had probably never heard the
formal term "human rights," but each knew the
justice in having enough food, benefiting from one’s
labor, enjoying good health, and being treated fairly.
Experience with human rights documentation
in remote, war-torn areas teaches the importance of
solidarity. A researcher who approaches a traumatized
community, digs for facts, snaps photos then never returns
again contributes little to that community’s ongoing
struggle for dignity. This struggle may be expressed by the
community’s cohesion, its sense of humor or simply its
tenacity—all strategies for sharing the emotional burden
of violence. Whatever the form, it is the community’s
internal human rights movement. Even a visiting researcher
with his own agenda should recognize this movement and
participate in it. For the Tribunal research, solidarity
meant field workers explaining the Tribunal and what it hopes
to achieve. When possible, field workers distributed popular
human rights education materials. In some cases, illiterate
informants were taught to read.
Because much had already been written on
Burma, original research for the Tribunal sought quality
rather than mass. Existing literature became important
secondary source material. Eventually, work concentrated on a
set of case studies and testimonies presenting the
experiences of ordinary people across the country. Along with
several short numerous secondary sources, these were then
assembled into a single volume and submitted to the Tribunal
panel, a trio of respected figures in Asia’s human
rights movement selected by AHRC. Each member contributed
expertise in a distinct area of human rights:
- Justice H. Suresh of the Bombay High
Court (retired), provided his knowledge of law to
assure that the Tribunal conformed to fair and
transparent legal standards. Justice Suresh has been
a leader of India’s People’s Tribunal
movement, especially in the field of environmental
protection.
- Professor Mark Tamthai,
Director of the Center for Philosophy and Public
Policy, Faculty of Arts, at Thailand's Chulalongkorn
University. Professor Tamthai’s participation
was critical to defining the scope of inquiry and the
challenge of applying human rights to the realities
of government and society.
- Dr. Lao Mong Hay, Executive Director
of the Khmer Institute for Democracy. Dr. Lao Mong
Hay contributed experience with militarism and
democracy in Cambodia, grassroots human rights
education, refugee repatriation and land use, and
with building civil society in post-conflict
situations. His precise attention to the
Tribunal’s Recommendations was an enormous
asset.
In April 1999 the Tribunal
convened in Thailand, where witnesses gave direct testimony
and answered the panel’s questions. Some were expert
witnesses who deal with hunger and human rights in Burma
professionally. Also appearing were many of the researchers
themselves, who elaborated on the cases they documented so
diligently. The most valuable testimony of all, however, came
from those witnesses who related their personal experience
with hunger, violence, life and death in Burma today. These
were a cross-section of grassroots Burma: small farmers,
hired hands, schoolteachers, and displaced peasants. Most
depositions are partly reproduced in this report.
Findings
After thoroughly reviewing all evidence,
the Tribunal completed its findings and recommendations as
presented in the following pages.
The findings show food scarcity and
militarization as daily obstacles with dire effects. One
witness recorded how he watched three of his neighbor’s
children die of malnutrition within a month. A teacher whose
village was decimated by the government’s
anti-insurgency program relates how he "would forego
food so my children could eat. I went around begging for
rice. Some people took pity and gave me a cup or two."
Together, the case studies show hunger as a silent, insidious
epidemic and militarization as its relentless, ubiquitous
cause.
Picture 1:
Professor Mark Tamthai (center), Justice H. Suresh
(right) and Dr. Lao Mong Hay (not pictured) receive
testimony from expert witnesses.
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The Tribunal also addresses the
scale of food denial, noting that its entire effect
on the nation is greater than the sum of the many
lives it touches. Hunger on such a large scale
exposes a deep vein of injustice running through
society. To document a burned rice field is to allege
a crime; but to show that soldiers confiscated the
remaining food, that landmines pock the countryside,
that going to market means traversing a war zone,
that sons have enlisted and daughters gone abroad,
that simple diseases kill the young while the old can
flee no more, that tomorrow rifles will evict the
village, that throughout the country hungry farmers
grow rice they cannot afford to eat, and that no jury
will hear the truth—is to depict no simple
crime, but a crime against humanity. |
These findings are enlightening, but not
encouraging. In them we read no hint of hunger’s demise
or militarization’s imminent defeat; in fact, the
Tribunal suggests the opposite trends. One sees how the
struggle for political power afflicts society’s most
vulnerable, often most blameless, members. Such strong words
are discouraging, but they should not remove a sense of hope.
The very nature of human rights is hope for a better life in
defiance of extreme oppression. Nowhere is this defiant faith
more apparent than in the perseverance of Burma’s rural
poor. Each season the farmer returns to till a parched field
marks immense patience and fortitude; each smoldering grain
of rice recovered from the ashes of war testifies to the
peasant’s resilience; each humble meal shared among
displaced people hiding in the jungle pronounces their own
declaration of human rights.
While the Tribunal condemns government
transgressions, its true aim is to focus the international
community’s attention on this popular desire to live in
peace and security. The world has immense resources and
goodwill to share with Burma’s rural poor; the first
step is to understand the complex challenges facing
Burma’s people, and the bright future they deserve.
Chris Cusano
Burma Issues
October 1999
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