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Per Ler, a 13-year-old child recruited by the God’s Army, a Karen militia.
Sizing up youngsters enlisted in the Mong Tai Army, run by former druglord Khun Sa.
Myanmar
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Myanmar:
Key data
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Population (millions):
45
Surface area (thousand sq. km.): 677
Gross national income
per capita ($): 1,027
Life expectancy at birth (years): 56
Adult literacy rate (%): 84
Population below 15 years of age (% of total): 33
All
data 1999. Sources: World Bank, UNDP. |
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Myanmar’s
protracted civil and ethnic wars have forced one of the highest number of children
in the world onto the battlefield, bringing them face to face with beatings, murder
and a blossoming drugs trade
Brang Ja (not his real
name) was only 16 when he was enlisted in the Myanmar army in 1997. But the decision
wasn’t his. He was on his way to visit his mother in the far north of Myanmar when
the police arrested him in the city of Mandalay because he wasn’t carrying any identification
papers.
Two months later, military policemen visited him in jail and offered him a way out
by joining the army. He agreed, fearing that he would otherwise remain in jail for
years. One of the officers remarked that he was “at the best age to begin military
training.” But when he and other released prisoners arrived at a military training
camp in the northern town of Shwebo, they found that some recruits were as young
as nine. A few of them had tried to escape from the camp, but no one had succeeded.
After serving in one of Myanmar’s numerous civil wars between its myriad ethnic groups,
Brang Ja managed to flee through the jungle to Thailand, where he related his experiences.
Since 1988, when the military brutally suppressed a nation-wide uprising for democracy,
the strength of Myanmar’s armed forces has more than doubled, from about 185,000
men to 450,000 today. The officially stated goal is to build a 500,000-strong army
to crush the widespread ethnic unrest and stifle any popular dissent.
Myanmar (formerly Burma) is the only country in East Asia that is expanding its military
instead of reducing it. This rapid growth has been possible because children are
routinely recruited. The total number of child soldiers here is difficult to estimate.
But observers guess that at least 50,000 children are engaged in military activity.
Many of these boys are kidnapped or forcibly conscripted into the Tatmadaw (the Burmese
name for the armed forces), and about half this number serve in the private armies
of various ethnic groups. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (see interview
p. 40) believes that Myanmar “rivals parts of Africa as one of the largest recruiters
of child soldiers” in the world.
A 1992 document from Unicef states that 14-year-olds are officially conscripted.
Placed in military camps for training, they are called “Ye Nyunt Lunge,” or “Brave
Sprout Youth.”
These recruits are often expected to perform the same duties as adult soldiers, and
may be beaten or killed if they are not able to do so. Children are sometimes used
in frontline combat or in dangerous human-wave attacks, in which hundreds have been
killed. Others are used to dig trenches, cook or serve as porters carrying ammunition
and supplies. According to a report entitled “No Childhood at All?” by Images Asia,
an NGO based in Chiang Mai (Thailand), most child soldiers have never attended school
or were pulled out after just a few years.
A
“mother and father” army
“Many
of us were only 14 or 15 years old,” says an unnamed child soldier, quoted in the
report. “There were three or four soldiers who were only 12…they couldn’t carry their
rifles properly, they were so small, but they had to do the same training as regular
soldiers. Chiko, a 12-year-old, served as an attendant to a corporal. One day, he
was beaten up really badly by him and sent to hospital. He ended up blind and half-paralyzed
from it… I actually saw this beating.”
Street children and orphans are particularly vulnerable and are taught that the army
is their only “mother and father.” The Unicef report identified at least one military
camp near Kengtung in eastern Shan state. It noted that children as young as seven
were being trained and used as “porters, human shields or human mine-sweepers.”
The Images Asia report is replete with examples of atrocities against Myanmar’s child
soldiers. Aung Tay, 14, talks about a drunk battalion commander who shot three boys
while they slept because they did not obey his command to wake up. “They couldn’t
wake up because they had been making bricks all night and were exhausted,” Aung Tay
says.
The report says most child soldiers have either witnessed murders or been forced
to kill and plunder. During an offensive in Mawchi, Kayah state, Aye Myint and a
band of boy soldiers “entered a village and shot all the villagers, because we thought
of them as our enemies. We took all their pigs and chickens, all usable goods…then
we burnt the village. We took all the women and raped them, and finally we murdered
them.”
Some child soldiers join the army willingly to protect their families from the army
or to provide a much-needed income. These perceived “benefits” are rarely realized,
especially when child soldiers are stationed far from their own villages. Child recruits
are underpaid or not paid at all due to rampant corruption in the military. “They
are forced to grow up too quickly,” says Ma Mi Suu Pwint, a female soldier in a resistance
militia (All-Burma Students’ Democratic Front), quoted in the report.
“I joined the military in 1993, when I was 16,” says Tai Ling Aung, a fisherman’s
son, quoted in the report. “My family was very poor and I had to join the Tatmadaw
to support them.”
The plight of Myanmar’s children has been highlighted in recent reports by the World
Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The lack of educational opportunities for young
recruits only compounds the grave economic and social problems affecting the country.
Since Myanmar’s independence from Britain in 1948, several of the country’s ethnic
minorities, who make up an estimated 40 percent of the population, have been fighting
for autonomy or outright separation. This tragedy is seen as the main reason why
Myanmar, a country with no real external enemies, began to build up a strong army
as early as the 1950s. In 1962, the army seized direct power over the state in a
coup d’état and began to rule by decree, abolishing Myanmar’s fragile parliamentary
system. The military also introduced a disastrous policy called “The Burmese Way
to Socialism,” which turned what had once been one of Asia’s most prosperous countries
into a political and economic wreck.
A
narcotics militia
Annual
resolutions by the United Nations urging the military to open a dialogue with the
opposition have produced few tangible results, despite recent efforts by the UN’s
special envoy to Myanmar, Razali Ismail.
Since the 1988 uprising, the military authorities have signed ceasefire agreements
with more than 20 ethnic rebel armies, which have thus been “brought into the legal
fold.” The level of fighting and military recruitment of children should have fallen.
Yet many of the armies continue to recruit them after a ceasefire.
The worst of these offenders is the drug-running United Wa State Army (UWSA), which
controls a large swathe of territory adjacent to the Chinese border. The group stopped
fighting with the government after a peace agreement in 1989. Now, leaders of the
group are frequent visitors to the capital, Rangoon, as well as Mandalay and other
cities, where they have substantial investments in real estate, the hotel business
and manufacturing. But they still seem to need an army to protect the many heroin
and methamphetamine laboratories that have been established inside UWSA’s territory.
According to international anti-narcotics agencies, the UWSA is the most heavily
armed drug-trafficking organization in the world. More than half of this 20,000-strong
army consists of children, many of them 10- or 12-years-old.
Among the ethnic armies still rebelling against the government, the Karen National
Union (KNU) is known to recruit very young children and use them in combat. In early
2000, another much smaller Karen militia called “God’s Army” attracted worldwide
attention after they attacked a hospital in Ratchaburi, a town across Myanmar’s border
with Thailand.
The guerrilla force was led by two 12-year-old twin boys, Johnny and Luther Htoo,
and most of their troops were other Karen children who had been orphaned in the civil
war. These children have known nothing but violence since they were born. And this
tragic state of affairs is likely to continue as long as Myanmar remains a war zone. |
