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Hunger spreading in Myanmar due to



Hunger spreading in Myanmar due to junta: tribunal 

Kyodo, Hong Kong, 20 October 1999.  Starvation is spreading in Myanmar 
as the nation becomes systematically militarized, a people's tribunal
said Wednesday after investigating the issue for three years. 

People in Myanmar, particularly peasants and communities in areas of armed 
conflict, are facing serious food shortages caused by the ruling junta's paddy 
procurement and public works projects, the People's Tribunal on Food Scarcity 
and Militarization in Burma added. 

The military regime is denying sufficient rice to farmers as it imposes a
nationwide 
program of buying a percentage of all paddy fields from peasants, usually
at less 
than half the market price, for redistribution, the people's tribunal said. 

The army is also destroying crops, displacing civilians, relocating
villages and 
extracting cash and materials from people on the pretext of counterinsurgency 
measures, as well as enforcing compulsory, uncompensated labor for public
works 
projects, according to the 170-page findings of the people's tribunal.  

'Very often the army decides where to grow what,' one of the tribunal members, 
Justice Hosbet Suresh, said at a press conference. 

Land is confiscated from people if they fail to obey the army, added
Suresh, a retired 
judge of the High Court in Mumbai, India. 

The three-member tribunal began its investigation in April 1997 after it
was initiated 
by the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to assess the 
evidence of human rights abuse. 

In releasing its findings, the tribunal and AHRC urged all state
governments, the United 
Nations and international agencies to put pressure on the military regime
in Myanmar 
to rebuild the economy and guarantee the basic rights of its people. 

As food scarcity was one of the reasons why the international community
became involved 
in East Timor, so the gross violations of human rights in Myanmar also call
for immediate 
overseas assistance, AHRC Executive Director Basil Fernando said. 

The problems of hunger, dislocation, forced labor and migration of refugees
in Myanmar 
have been growing ever since the junta refused to transfer power in 1988 to
the 
democratically elected opposition party, led by Nobel peace laureate Aung
San Suu Kyi. 

One witness who testified to the tribunal, Saw Htoo K'baw, said his village
was destroyed i
n 1997 by the army without any warning and sometimes he had to forgo food
so his five 
children could eat. 

'They (the army) just came in, patrolled up and down, shot at random and
killed people 
sometimes...We hid our rice stocks in the forest, but if the army saw them
then they burned 
everything,' he said, according to the tribunal's report. 

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