For years, there have been reports that Burmese soldiers were sexually abusing women from minority groups such as the Shan and Karn. More recently, evidence has surfaced that these rapes were an integral part of a campaign by Rangoon to terrorise its opponents, speed ethnic cleansing and demonstrate its “superiority”.
In a remote village of Chiang Mai, a 17-year-old girl sits in a small makeshift shelter, bowing her head in an attempt to avoid making eye contact with visitors. The girl, identified in the report Licence to Rape by the pseudonym Naang Hla, was gang-raped by Burmese soldiers last August when she was seven-months pregnant.
The Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) and the Shan Women’s Action Network (Swan) first encountered Naang Hla six months ago after she fled to a small village on the border between Burma and Chiang Mai province.
In Licence to Rape, the SHRF and Swan chronicle the Burmese military’s use of sexual violence as a weapon against Shan girls and women in the war in Shan State.
The report, released last June, has drawn immense attention from the international community and the media. Immediately after its launch, the BBC sent a crew to the Thai-Burmese border to investigate the cases. The issue was raised at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ ministerial meeting in Brunei last month.
Naang Hla is one of 625 Shan girls and women recorded as being victims of sexual violence by the Burmese military during the conflict.From a global perspective, the 625 Shan girls and women are just a small fraction of the women all around the world who, over the centuries, have experienced rape as a weapon of war during international and internal armed conflicts.
The first mass rape was recorded as part of the legend of the origin of Rome. During his reign, Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, was tainted with the story of the rape of the Sabine women during the battle with the Latins. The Sabine was one of two tribes under the leadership of Titus Tatius, who co-reigned with Romulus.
From the legend of the rape of the Sabine women to the documented stories of violence against women during World War II, in Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burma and countless other conflicts, armies have actively sought out women to use them in this form of warfare. The rape of women is as much a part of war as the killing of soldiers.
In her report submitted to the UN’s commission on Human Rights in 1997, Radhika Coomaraswamy, a UN special rapporteur on violence against women, said rape is used as an instrument of war for many reasons including to terrorise populations and to induce civilians to flee their homes and villages.During armed conflict, rape is used by both sides as a symbolic act, she said in the paper, to, among other things, “demonstrate victory over the men of the other group who have failed to protect their women”.
For Nang Hseng Noung, a Shan woman who was born in Thailand and works for Swan, sexual violence against Shan women is committed under the same philosophy. She said rape is used by the Burmese military as a means of eradicating all people from different races who oppose its military regime.
“They use rape as a weapon and women’s bodies as targets of war,” she said.
Her opinion was echoed by Betsy Apple, an American woman who stayed in Shan State and Burma for about a decade, who said that rape is an integral part of conflict.In her book, School for Rape: The Burmese Military and Sexual Violence, Apple said that since independence in 1948, Burma has been “the scene of thousands of incidents of rape”.
Burmese soldiers received systematic training in rape as a tool for conducting ethnic cleansing, said Apple in the book, published in 1998.According to School for Rape, Burmese soldiers are convinced of their superiority. Under the former Slorc (the State Law and Order Restoration Council) and now the State Peace and Development Council, Burma has waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against minorities.
“[The regime] convinces them [newly recruited soldiers] that their enemies are ethnic minorities – [be they] students, women, anyone who disagrees with the government – and that these millions of people are traitors or infidels,” said the book.
Naang Hla and the other Shan women’s physical experience of war is just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous reports show that Burma’s military leaders are using rape on a wide scale as a weapon of war against the civilian population. However, the exact scale of the atrocities is unknown.
The examples presented in School for Rape include reports by the Karen Human Rights Group from 1994-1997, which details numerous incidents of rape against ethnic Karen women during forced-labour campaigns and military occupations of villages.
A report by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland in 1996 showed that women continued to be raped by Burmese soldiers even after the cease-fire agreement between the New Mon State Party and Slorc signed on June 29, 1995.
Licence to Rape, however, is the first recorded evidence of the long tradition of raping Shan women during wartime. It shines a light on atrocities previously hidden by the dark clouds of the dictatorship.
Based on interviews with girls and women seeking asylum along the border, the report says, an astounding 83 per cent of the documented rapes of Shan women were committed by military officers from 52 different battalions, usually in front of their own troops. The youngest victim was a five-year-old girl and the oldest was 62.
The rapes were extremely brutal and often involved torture such as beating, mutilation and suffocation. Twenty-five per cent of the rapes resulted in death. Many rapes took place in relocation sites, which are supposed to be safe havens for the villagers.
Asked why she thought the Burmese military inflicted such brutality on her family and other Shan, Naang Hla, who now lives in peace with her eight-month-old boy and a new husband in Thai territory, thought for a minute before giving her answer.
“I have heard that there was a fight between the Shan army and the Burmese military many years ago. At that time the Shan military killed six Burmese soldiers and the Burmese wanted to take revenge,” said the 17-year-old, who is illiterate.However, she was at a loss to explain why an ordinary woman such as herself should be caught in the armed conflict, which is supposed to be a fight among soldiers.
Nobody knows when the brutality against civilians in Burma will end. The only thing the world can be sure of is that the 625 Shan girls and women will not be the last group of civilian women to become victims of war. As long as Burma’s State Peace and Development Council maintains its military might through brutality, rape will continue.