Myanmar Military’s Rule by Repression : Slave labor: About 400,000 have fled the country. Brutality, opium are blamed.

Seven disheveled, emaciated men squat wearily on their heels. Their eyes, sunken in drawn faces, stare at the ground. Intent upon forgetting their ordeals, they offer as few subdued words as possible to the man who is questioning them.

Yes, they know exactly how long they served the soldiers of Myanmar’s State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). One month and 13 days.

Yes, they were abducted from their village in the Shan state, far to the north, against their will. One, while he was harvesting rice. Another, aroused from sleep at night in his home. Their ages range from 21 to 45 years old. One left behind six children.

All were tied up and trucked off to join about 600 others snatched from their villages to labor as human packhorses for a 200-strong Myanmar army unit. They were told they would only be away for five days. Instead, they labored from sunup to sundown for 44 days. One hauled shells for a rocket launcher. Another lugged heavy bags of rice.

They saw several men walking in front of the column of soldiers. They were human minesweepers. Three or four stepped on land mines, which blew their legs or arms into shreds. They were abandoned by the side of the path to die.

The porters were given one handful of boiled rice twice a day. No water. They dipped their shirts into streams they passed and wrung them out in their mouths.

The soldiers beat them, kicked them. They saw three fellow porters shot to death because they tried to escape. They saw others collapse from the cramps of dysentery or the fevers of malaria.

The sick, too, were left to die in the jungle. While these men were with the soldiers, they saw 100 of their own die. They saw 200 escape. Each time there was an escape, they were beaten, whether they were involved or not.

But they, too, eventually escaped. They were discovered wandering in the jungled mountains of northeast Myanmar and rescued by members of the Karen (Ka-REN) rebel army, one of the ethnic groups fighting Myanmar’s military government. They were brought to Manerplaw to recover.

Once they have regained their strength, they will go home, a jungle trek that will take 20 days. If they ever hear the Myanmar army approaching again, they say they will flee.

The questioner, U Kyaw Win, a 59-year-old Burmese-American Orange Coast College counselor and activist, is on the latest of six fact-finding missions to his native country. He points to one of the men. “Recognize that jacket?” he asks a friend. “That’s mine. Now it will go with him back to the Shan state.” He shakes his head, in sadness, in frustration. He wants to see an end to the fighting that has racked his homeland for 45 years, ever since Britain granted independence to the country, then known as Burma. But all he can do today is give a man a jacket.

The Myanmar army calls the seven men porters. Strangely enough, so do the minority ethnic groups battling with the country’s military regime. It is a euphemism so extreme it is laughable. “They were slaves,” says Win.

Since the 1960s, the army of Myanmar has pressed people from villages throughout the country into forced labor without pay and without enough food to sustain them. “The porter grabbing began in 1964 in Kachin state” but has escalated recently, says Brang Seng, a former high school principal who is chairman of the Kachin Independence Organization.

During the last four years, as SLORC has stepped up its campaign to subdue the country’s 12 million ethnic minority members, tens of thousands of villagers have been abducted.

Last year, the Karen rescued 29 men and women who escaped from the Myanmar army’s control. Because the Myanmar army has no pack animals, and since few roads penetrate the rugged terrain of northeast Myanmar, the porters are used to carry army supplies and ammunition over endless waves of jungled mountains.

According to the stories the porters tell, the pattern seems invariably the same. The government soldiers move into a village and confiscate rice as tax. They arrest and spirit away those they believe to be rebel sympathizers. They take items from shops and refuse to pay. They rape the women. And finally they conscript villagers as porters and assign them to units moving to the front lines. Men, women and some children have been taken.

The treatment of the porters varies. Several said they had seen soldiers bury the extremely sick, those who had lost consciousness, in leaves, then set fire to the leaves. The soldiers waited until the victims awoke screaming, then left the victims behind to suffer an agonizingly painful death. Some units released their porters after a few days or weeks, when they became too weak to work. Other porters were never heard from again.

Women porters undergo the worst treatment. They report being raped by one or more soldiers nearly every night and still being forced to carry supplies or ammunition every day.

The seven porters Win questions today may find only burned-out homes when they return to their villages.

After it came into power in 1988, SLORC announced that it would subdue the ethnic populations by enforcing a policy of “Four Cuts,” Win says, severing their supplies of “food, finances and communications, and the heads of the ethnic leaders.” Because it fears that ethnic villagers are providing the rebel forces with food, SLORC began a campaign of resettling thousands of villagers into relocation camps. Anyone found in a village after a relocation order goes into effect is subject to being shot.

According to people who have escaped from the relocation camps, they are run harshly.

According to Karenni leaders, SLORC in March, 1992 ordered 20,000 people to move from 76 villages in the Karenni area of Myanmar to camps outside the towns of Pruso and Deemawso.

One woman, who escaped from a camp outside Deemawso, said 7,000 people were herded into cramped shelters surrounded by a fence patrolled by guards. They took their water from a small pond inside the camp. Many became ill and died. There were no medical clinics, no schools. They had to live on rice they brought with them from their villages. When that ran out, they had to work to get more. Only one family member at a time was allowed to leave the camp, and then only with permission and a pass, to farm the rice fields or work in the nearby town.

About 1,000 men were taken from the relocation camp to work without pay on the Loikaw-Aung Ban railway, a United Nations Development Program project, said the Karenni. SLORC and UNDP officials deny that railway laborers are coerced into working or work without pay, but SLORC will not allow outside observers to gauge the truth of its or U.N. statements. The Karenni say they will continue to believe the tales of those who have escaped, until unbiased observers persuade them otherwise.

As government troops pressed the resettlement campaigns, many villagers fled to territory still controlled by the ethnic minorities, or across the border into Thailand. Today, nearly 5,000 Karenni have sought refuge near Mae Hong Son, a popular tourist destination in Thailand. About 12,000 Mon have set up refugee villages near the Thai town of Sanglabhuri.

Nearly 50,000 Karen refugees have fled to Thailand in the last 10 years. “We are expecting 2,000 more soon,” said Robert Htwe, chairman of the Karen Refugee Committee, since several thousand more Karens were recently given orders to evacuate their villages.

Bearing a box of clothes and medical supplies on his shoulder, Win strides into a Karenni village of 1,679 refugees near Mae Hong Son. A group of young men play volleyball in the dust. Children gather around local musicians warming up for a performance.

Three patients lie on thin bamboo mats on wooden platforms in an open-air clinic covered by a plastic tarp. One has dysentery. Two have malaria. A few medical supplies are stacked neatly in a corner. The village looks abnormally bare, even for a refugee village. There are no small vegetable gardens, no small bamboo fences, no trellises for squash vines.

Win greets the village chief, a man he has seen on previous visits. “What’s the name of this place?” asks Win.

“It has no name,” says the chief. “We moved here three months ago when we were shelled by the army. We usually take our village name with us. But not this time. The Thai officials are making us move again.”

The residents of this village fled their village in 1989 after learning they were being sent to a relocation camp. They walked deep into the Karenni “liberated” zone, close to the Thai border, and built a new village. The Myanmar army shelled it, and they crossed into Thailand to this place five miles from Burma. Now Thai government officials want them to move back to Burma.

Win and his wife, Ghandasari Win, begin to hand out clothes. The word spreads. Women, children and a few men come running. One young woman holding a baby is handed a bright flowered skirt, and, then grinning, she clutches it to her chest and strides away.

In this and other villages that Win visits, he gives toys to children who look as if they’re getting enough to eat but are strikingly subdued. He blows up balloons. Once they begin playing with tiny cars, little plastic monsters and balloons, they turn into normal small human engines bubbling with energy and vitality. He drops off a few medical supplies at their makeshift clinics. He draws clothes from a seemingly bottomless cardboard box that he carts from village to village.

“It’s the least I can do,” he says. “I want to give them a glimmer of hope that some people out there are thinking about them.”

Since 1984, about 400,000 people have fled Burma to the neighboring countries of Bangladesh and Thailand. The largest group was made up of 300,000 Arakans, who crossed into Bangladesh last year in advance of the Myanmar army, which was resettling ethnic Burmese in areas traditionally occupied by the Arakans. The United Nations became involved in caring for the displaced Arakans and helping Bangladesh and Myanmar resolve the problem.

The Arakan exodus made headlines around the world, but the refugees in Thailand have not attracted similar attention, primarily for two reasons.

The first is that the Karen, Karenni, Mon, Kachin and Shan are very self-sufficient. They have financed their fledgling army and fed their people by imposing tariffs on the black market trade, by taxing villagers who live in their “liberated” zones, by operating gem mines, selling logging concessions and some by trading opium.

By some estimates, half the world’s opium supply comes from the white and pink poppies grown in the Karenni and Shan states of Myanmar, near the borders of Thailand and Laos, in an area known as the “Golden Triangle.” According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, opium production in the area more than quadrupled in the late 1980s, and a single heroin shipment from there, seized in Oakland two years ago, was valued at $1.5 billion.

Although the Karenni and the Shans derive some income from the sale of opium, the bulk of the trade is thought to be controlled by Khun Sa, a notorious Shan drug lord only peripherally involved in the civil war, and by a group of Burmese Communists insurgents. Both are said to have arrangements with various Myanmar army commanders, who take a hefty cut from the trade.

“Before 1988, the Karen were very rich,” says Em Marta, a physician who is director of foreign affairs for the Karen National Union, which denies any involvement in the opium trade. They took in millions of dollars from a 5% tax on black market goods crossing the border from Thailand.

But in 1988, as part of its “Four Cuts” program, SLORC legalized trade with Thailand and eliminated the need for the black market. The Karen’s income was reduced to a trickle. They now support their government in exile, their army and their refugees with money from logging concessions sold to Thai companies.

The second reason these refugees live in obscurity is that Thailand does not recognize the people fleeing Myanmar as refugees. Until it does, the refugees can obtain no help from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Thailand doesn’t want to strain relations with the Myanmar government, which also has granted lucrative logging concessions to Thai logging companies. The two countries are also jointly developing a major project with a French pipeline company that will transport natural gas from Myanmar to energy-starved Thailand.

How does SLORC justify the policies that have generated so many refugees? “There are no refugees in the border areas; only insurgents in the disguise of refugees,” a SLORC leader said last February in a speech about the Arakans who fled into Bangladesh. SLORC sees itself as merely taking the necessary measures to control an unruly and uncooperative populace.

SLORC might have a short leg to stand on if the majority of the people supported its goals. But what SLORC seems to have conveniently forgotten is that it lost a national election by an overwhelming majority only three short years ago. About 100 of the 400,000 refugees from Myanmar are opposition Burmese politicians, duly elected to parliament, who fled to Manerplaw to work with the minority ethnic groups for a democratic government.

The problem, says Win, is that much of the world seems to have forgotten it, too.

TUESDAY: The pleas of two generations of students go out to the world.