SAW NAING GAE is only eight years old. He has already witnessed the brutal death of his mother and father at the hands of Burma’s military regime. But his ordeal didn’t end there. He was then taken across the border and sold to a Thai family. He managed to escape and found his way back to a refugee camp, where he is now staying with 30 other orphans. He doesn’t join in when the other children sing; he doesn’t smile. His innocence has gone. His story is typical of the thousands of Karen people who have fled their homes to escape Burma’s civil war.
Today British Christians of all denominations will gather at St John’s Church, Waterloo, in London, to pray for an end to the conflict. Tomorrow, people will assemble once again in churches up and down the country to mark a global day of prayer for Burma. The initiative, launched in this country three years ago by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), brings together Christians from all Burma’s ethnic groups, including those who belong to the dominant Burman group, whose leaders have carried out a relentless campaign bordering on ethnic cleansing.
Lydia Haines, the CSW’s country officer for Burma, explains: “We’re looking for healing and restoration of peace in Burma and praying for the political process and an end to the atrocities there.” Two million people have been expelled from their homes and villages by the junta since the conflict began more than 50 years ago. Burmese troops are accused of killing 10,000 civilians a year. In the past ten years alone, the military junta has conscripted more than three million people, including women and children, into slave labour. Thousands have fled either their homes or the brutal conditions of relocation sites.
The majority of the displaced population are from ethnic minority areas such as the states of Karen, Karenni and Shan; more than 100,000 people, mainly ethnic Karens, live in camps along the Thai- Burmese border. In the Karen refugee camps are Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and people of all traditional religions. About 40 per cent are Christians, of whom most are Baptists.
James Mawdsley is a British human rights activist who spent more than a year in solitary confinement in a Burmese jail. Mawdsley, a Roman Catholic from Ormskirk, Lancashire, was arrested in August 1999 and sentenced to 17 years in prison for distributing pro-democracy leaflets in the country. He served 411 days before being released after diplomatic pressure. In prison he was beaten by guards but he said that his conditions were better than most other inmates who were 100 to a cell. In 2001, his book on his experiences, The Heart Must Break, was published and he vowed to continue his battle against the junta.
Mawdsley, 30, who has since set up a charity to help provide an education for children along the Thai- Burma border, says: “Along the border areas, rape, destruction of villages and slave labour are all as bad as ever. When people see their culture being destroyed and their land being taken away, this is genocide. Despite the good work that has been done by the United States, the United Nations and the European Union, their main interest is stability rather than justice. It’s an understandable caution. It’s not being done out of malevolence, but unless we start pushing really hard and accept that sometimes situations will be beyond our control we will not extinguish the strength of the SPDC, the State Peace and Development Council, Burma’s military regime.”
The human rights campaigner has been back to Burma four times since his imprisonment to visit schools being helped by his charity, The Metta Trust for Children’s Education.
“Many of us underestimate the effect we can have even by small actions,” he says. “The vast majority of people, when they see suffering, want to help, but when they confront the scale of the problem, they feel helpless. But a letter to an MP, giving money to charity or welcoming Burmese people in this country can make a huge difference. I also feel very strongly that prayer, as well as being an appeal to God, can give us a focus for action and a direction.”
Lord Alton of Liverpool, who has just returned from a fact-finding trip to the Burmese border, says he was shocked by the latest violations of human rights. The independent crossbench peer was collecting evidence on behalf of the Jubilee Campaign, a parliamentary pressure group. He was accompanied by the American congressman, Joseph Pitts.
In a refugee camp near Mae Sot, Lord Alton took evidence from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People. He has now produced a 100-page report which lists three mass killings by the SPDC. “It is a carefully chronicled account of looting, burning, torture, rape and murder,” says Lord Alton.
“The SPDC routinely plant landmines indiscriminately and in areas where landmines have been laid by their opponents the SPDC use people as human landmine sweepers. I saw some of the victims — people whose limbs have been severed from their bodies, whose skin has been peppered with shrapnel, and others who have been left blind. I also talked to families of people whose loved ones had been seized and used as porters and construction workers, and who have never returned. The SPDC kill many of the porters in frontline areas, especially when they are unable to work any longer because of exhaustion or sickness.
“Although the British Government still refuses to categorise these crimes as genocide, there is no doubt in my mind that no other word adequately describes the realities in Burma’s Karen state.”
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, 020-8942 8810; Jubilee Campaign, 01483 894787; The Metta Trust for Children’s Education, www.mtce.org