Telling the world about Myanmar’s era of tyranny

His Royal Highness Prince Hso Khan Pha of Yawnghwe flipped through a sheaf of papers with a calmness that belied their harrowing contents. The papers purported to document countless rapes, murders, village burnings, forced displacements and other atrocities allegedly perpetrated in his Shan state, an ethnic minority region in northwestern Myanmar.

While the world has focused on the recent turmoil in Yangon, also known as Rangoon, he said, those killings and mass arrests pale in comparison to the decades-long slaughter in Shan.

“What you are seeing now is just an example of atrocities that have been going on for 50 years in the Shan state,” he said Thursday in an interview in Los Angeles.

The prince, in Los Angeles for an international peace conference, urged the United States to take a more active role in speaking out against the government in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Since last week, the government has reportedly arrested thousands of people, including hundreds of monks, and killed as many as 200, quelling protests with gunfire, tear gas and truncheons. The protests, Hso Khan Pha and others said, were triggered by an abrupt 500% increase in fuel prices.

But worse atrocities have occurred in Shan, Myanmar’s largest state with an estimated population of 10 million, since General Ne Win took power in a military coup in March 1962, he said.

During the interview at an airport hotel, the prince produced satellite photos that he said showed vanished villages, and printouts of bloodied corpses with details of the victims’ names, towns, occupation and violence suffered. They include gang rapes and villagers suffocated, beaten, sprayed with gunfire and slashed with bayonets.

Human rights groups confirm his stories, and the United Nations has issued several reports of widespread abuses.

“There is significant ethnic cleansing in the Shan state -- hundreds of thousands of people displaced, campaigns of mass rape, extrajudicial executions, child soldiers, burnt villages, just everything imaginable,” said Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director.

“It’s a hidden tragedy of untold proportions.”

Prince Hso Khan Pha, who traces his royal lineage back hundreds of years, has been intimately connected to the tragedy. His father, Sao Shwe Thaike, was the first president of an independent Union of Burma in 1948. The union was formed in agreement with the Burmese leader, Aung San -- the father of current opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi -- after Britain gave up control of the territories.

For years, the prince said, he lived a “normal life” of childhood games -- playing hide-and-seek, climbing the palace roof -- amid a landscape of verdant forests and rice fields in Yawnghwe, a town in Shan. Old family pictures show the prince with his siblings, clothed in white silk robes and turbans.

But in March 1962, the prince said, his family life abruptly changed. As unrest gripped the country, military units surrounded his family home in Yangon. When his 15-year-old brother opened the door, Hso Khan Pha said, he was shot dead. As his family hid behind a wall of Buddhist books stacked in one room, the soldiers blasted his home with automatic fire until they found his father and arrested him. His father died in prison, the prince said.

Hso Khan Pha, who at the time was studying at a British university, never returned to his homeland. After graduating with a degree in geology, he moved to Canada in 1966. There, he began working for different mining companies and the government of Alberta.

His siblings have also scattered across the globe and now live in New York, Arizona, England and Canada.

Despite the distance, Hso Khan Pha said he always stayed connected with his people and their aspiration for autonomy. Although Myanmar’s 1948 constitution provided the Shan people the right to vote for secession after 10 years, he said Ne Win’s coup ended hopes of independence. But between 2004 and 2006, he said, 62 counties in Shan state conducted a secret ballot and, by an 87% vote, overwhelmingly supported independence. The prince was elected president, he said.

Hso Khan Pha, who refuses to refer to the country as Myanmar, as it was renamed by the military, and his cabinet in exile has issued a unilateral declaration of independence.

One of his first priorities, he said, would be to destroy the poppy fields that have made Myanmar the world’s second-leading opium producer after Afghanistan.

Malinowski, of Human Rights Watch, said he could not confirm the election and questioned whether one could actually occur in a police state such as Myanmar.

But he said Hso Khan Pha’s crusade to bring global attention to the abuses in Shan and other minority states was urgently needed.

“While everyone is focused on the cities, the people in ethnic minority areas have endured worse for years,” Malinowski said.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com