Child soldiers and gang-rape survivors in Burma give testimonies in new CSW report

February 11 2003

A 14-year-old boy has told CSW of his experiences as one of an estimated 70,000 child soldiers forced to fight for the Burmese regime.

Kyow*, who fled his frontline army unit, told a CSW fact-finding team to the Thai-Burmese border in late November 2002, that he was just 11 when he was abducted by uniformed soldiers while waiting at a bus stop. He was not allowed to contact his parents and has been unable to locate them for the past three years.

Kyow, a Buddhist, has begged the world to tell the Burmese regime not to force children to fight. He said there were many children of a similar age in the military camp, and it is estimated that 20 percent of the total number of Burmese Army soldiers are under 18.

After eight months in the Ta Kyin Koe First Battalion Camp in Danyigorn District, Kyow was sent to a training camp for regular soldiers in the Fifth Battalion, where he underwent five months of military training before being sent to the frontline in Pa-pun district, Karen State.

The boy said 15 soldiers in his unit of 30 were about his age. The children were forced to undertake regular military activities, and were beaten by officers. Over the course of eight months, Kyow witnessed ethnic Karen villages being attacked and the villagers rounded up and forced to work as porters for the army.

Kyow told CSW that Burmese Army soldiers were under orders to burn, rape and kill when they entered a Karen village.

“With the Burmese Army it was like hell,” Kyow said. “It is not good for a child to be a soldier. Tell the international community to speak to the regime, to tell them not to grab children and force them to be soldiers.”

In a report released last week, Christian Solidarity Worldwide revealed further evidence that children are forced to undertake military activities and that women are gang-raped by troops from the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), Burma’s ruling military junta.

The report also provides fresh evidence of the serious human rights abuses perpetrated by the SPDC, chiefly against the non-Burman ethnic civilian populations. These campaigns include mass scale forced labour, the use of humans as mine sweepers, military offensives against civilians, forced relocation programmes, extensive and indiscriminate use of landmines, rape, mass killing, shooting on sight, the destruction of villages and crops, extortion, and generally denying ethnic populations their basic means of subsistence.

In addition to visiting Karen and Karenni areas, CSW also went inside Shan State. The team interviewed 12 Shan women who had recently arrived at an Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) site. All of them recounted how they had been gang-raped by SPDC soldiers on more than one occasion in the past two years. They said women in Shan State are used as army porters by day and gang-raped by SPDC troops by night.

22-year-old Nan* from Southern Shan State told CSW that she was gang-raped by SPDC troops on more than five occasions in the past two years. To escape from the Burmese army, Nan had to flee from village to village but wherever she fled, the same thing happened. “The troops came, they took whatever they wanted, burnt, killed and destroyed whatever they did not want. They captured the women and used us as porters.”

Another woman, Baiyoke*, recalled how she and her two teenage daughters were gang-raped by over 50 SPDC soldiers two years ago. Both her daughters were subsequently murdered by the troops - one suffocated, the other shot in the waist and forehead. “I still have vivid image of the bodies of my daughters wrapped in plastic sheets,” Baiyoke said.

Testimonies given by over 30 individuals who had personally suffered at the hands of the Burmese Army further add to the evidence that these campaigns are systematic and are designed to subdue, integrate and annihilate targeted non-Burmans and to eliminate resistance groups. As such, the SPDC’s policies can be described as genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Referring to these campaigns in a debate in the House of Lords in December, Baroness Caroline Cox, CSW UK’s President, said: “Many Karen and Karenni people regard Britain with respect and affection. They remember with appreciation the dignity that they were afforded by the British administration, and they recall how many of them died fighting alongside British forces and, sometimes, for British soldiers. The international community in general and Britain in particular, have a moral imperative to help to save the lives of thousands of innocent civilians who are suffering and dying in Burma today at the hands of a brutal regime.”

For the full report, further information, a photograph of a group of landmine victims or crayon drawings of the atrocities in Burma by children, contact Christian Solidarity Worldwide on 020 8949 0587.

* To protect the identity of the witnesses, full names are not used