Burma continues to be peripheral to Westerners’ vision

Despite this, the military dictatorship ruling Burma has moved ahead with Thai and Chinese investors to build the dams without even informing communities downstream, let alone asking for their consent.

Rape and pillage

A visit to the Riverside Center in Bangkok will open your eyes to the treasures that once were part of Burma’s cultural history. The exquisite textiles, marble figures, ornate lacquered baskets and temple carvings are now for sale to any one who wants to buy a bit of Burma and take it home. Stolen temple Buddhas are on sale. I wonder what karmic debt that entails.

It is known that rape and sexual crimes are used against Burmese women and those of the many ethnic minorities. These crimes are meant to terrorise and to subjugate. For many years these crimes have been known, but not spoken about. For the women themselves, rape results in such shame, that it is hard for Western women, used to a reasonably responsive judiciary and supportive community, to understand. The shame is carried collectively by the community, so it is not spoken about and the women are often shunned.

In the case of the recent report by the Karen women Shattering Silences, many of the cases of rape occurred in synchrony with forced labour and theft of food, livestock and goods. Women were ordered on pain of death to carry munitions up steep mountain sides through jungle in the intense heat and then raped repeatedly in the evenings when the soldiers set up camp.

The report makes for terrifying reading and comes on the heels of the previous year’s report by the Shan women. It was also the first time the Shan women had spoken out and provided impetus for the Karen women to tell their story. It is said that the “rebels, traitors and terrorists” as they are labeled by the junta, will do anything to attract attention to their cause. But it seems that Burma continues to be peripheral to Westerners’ vision.

He just kept threatening that he’d give me to his men who would rape me until I died. He thrust his knife in my face demanding sex. I kept fighting but he tied my other hand and pushed me down and raped me. When he was finished he asked me “Are you satisfied?” All I could tell him that my life was now nothing but darkness. He just said “If you’re so troubled, go and hang yourself”.

Mention Burma and most Australians would immediately think of The Lady, Aug Sung Suu Kyi, who in international eyes, has become the symbol of Burma’s suffering.

But the situation in Burma is much more complex than it appears and heroes and heroines have names that reflect the ethnic group for whom they fight. And there are many ethnic groups with proud traditions, who are fighting for traditional lands and the autonomy promised by the British, but not granted after they had fled.

Few have heard for instance of another woman Sao Hearn Hkam who is the symbol of Shan resistance, or know that Dr Cynthia Maung an ethnic Karen who runs the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot on the Thai Burmese border, was one of three Burmese women nominated for the people’s Nobel Peace prize.

It is often to Dr Cynthia’s clinic that Karen women go, with damaged and infected genitals after botched abortions. Most of these women have become pregnant as a result of rape. The SPDC/SLORC (the Myanmar military junta) use rape and pregnancy as a method of cultural dilution, knowing that raped women face ostracism and divorce.

The vivid descriptions given by the women from a wide variety of locations describe the same pattern. Soldiers arriving in the village late at night, seizing women and forcing them at gunpoint to their camp. There they carry heavy ordnance up hillsides to where the soldiers are waging war on members of their ethnic group. At night as the women try to rest, they are taken and raped. Some not even allowed to urinate for fear that they run away. Women reported having to pee where they lie.

Some have fled only to be hacked or shot. Others are simply stabled or bayoneted if they are too weak to work.