Desmond Tutu for demanding United Nations intervention into "absurd" allegations of forced labor, torture, opium production, child soldiers and mass rape, BosNewsLife established Friday, September 30.
Children and women of especially the predominantly Christian Karen community are among those being killed, tortured and raped, human rights watchers allege.
The country’s unelected military regime also criticized U.S.-based DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, a legal services company, for helping Havel, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tutu, publish their 70-page document titled, "Threat to the Peace: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in Burma."
"There is no basis whatsoever to its claims," the foreign ministry said in a 1,270-word statement in the government-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper. Burma is mainland Southeast Asia’s biggest country and is also known as Myanmar.
"Myanmar has on several occasions officially denounced those allegations that it engages in rape, forced labor, child soldiers, refugees’ outflow, forced relocation, etc.," the foreign ministry said. "The truth is that the government does not condone human rights violations, and is in fact the guarantor of human rights in the country. The accusations are at times absurd."
CHILDREN SOLDIERS
Burma blamed an unidentified non-governmental organization (NGO) for wrongly alleging "that
as many as 70,000 children have been forcibly recruited into the army."
The allegations come amid reports from a leading human rights group about a fresh offensive by forces of the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) against Burma’s mainly Christian Karens. (Pictured Christian Karen Children receiving food aid in jungle village amid concern about their future. Agnes R. Bos for BosNewsLife in Burma).
This month at least one civilian was killed and hundreds were forces to flee, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW said, after a BosNewsLife team in Burma established earlier that another ceasefire agreement was broken when forces shelled a village near the border of Thailand. 1.5 million people, most of them Karen and other Christian minorities, are believed to be displaced by years of fighting in the region.
In statements monitored by the BosNewsLife South East Asia Bureau in Bangkok, the Burmese foreign minister also denied the government tolerates opium and heroin production, saying Burma was able to "declare opium-free zones in the country."
REPORT IS "MISINFORMATION"
Tutu and Havel’s report and other allegations from human rights watchers were "based on misinformation by a few remaining insurgents, and foreign-funded expatriates," the ministry said, seen as a veiled dig at the United States, Britain and other countries financially aiding dissidents who have fled Burma.
Havel and Tutu have urged the United Nations Security Council "to intervene immediately" in Burma to allow a democratically elected government take power.
Their September 19 report compares Burma’s human rights record with seven other nations where the Security Council intervened, including Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Haiti, and said Burma’s case "was much worse."
Washington also wants the UN Security Council to pressure Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi and more than 1,000 other political prisoners struggling for democracy. Suu Kyi, 60, is the world’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate in detention, and she has spent much of the past 16 years under house arrest.
LANDSLIDE VICTORY
In 1990, her National League for Democracy party won a landslide election victory, scoring more than 80 percent of parliament’s seats. But the military barred them from taking power, and shredded the ballots.
Burma has never been on the Security Council’s agenda. It was uncertain whether America could muster enough support to place it in the dock. China is Burma’s closest ally and was expected to block any UN intervention. Russia would probably do likewise, BosNewsLife established.
Burma also enjoys lucrative commercial relations with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India and other nations, which allow the regime to survive international economic sanctions imposed by America and the European Union.
The country. ruled by the military since 1962, is among the world’s worst abusers of human rights, according to London-based Amnesty International, the US State Department and other monitors. In January, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice named Burma as one of the "outposts of tyranny" which must be challenged, along with Cuba, Belarus and Zimbabwe.
(Award-winning reporter, photojournalist and author Richard S. Ehrlich has covered the world’s hotspots and Asia for 27 years for a variety of media, including as staff correspondent for United Press International from 1978 to 1984, based in Hong Kong and New Delhi. He also co-authored the non-fiction best seller "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" — Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews. The book, reviewed by Time magazine and other leading publications, looks beyond the red light of Thailand’s nightlife, and gives a rare insight in the often tragic and difficult relationships between prostitutes and their clients. Ehrlich, who was born in the US and is currently based in Bangkok, received the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Foreign Correspondent’s Award in 1978. He speaks some Mandarin, Hindustani, Urdu, Thai, Spanish and French. Ehrlich can be reached for assignments and/or more information via website: http://www.geocities.com/asia_correspondent/news.html )
