But that’s not fair

KHUN Bedu, Khun Kawrio and Khun Dee De are three young men arrested in Myanmar on May 10, 2008. They were taken by the authorities and tortured for 15 days. They were beaten, forced to kneel on stones and made to lie in the sun for hours at a time. The temperatures they were enduring rose to over 30 degrees at times. At the end of this abuse, the men were sentenced before a military court to jail terms ranging from 35 to 37 years. There was no judge present and the men were not represented legally.

The crime committed by the three to deserve such treatment was to campaign peacefully against the ruling military junta in the 2008 constitutional referendum. The vote in that year was, in the words of the junta, to “create a disciplined flourishing democracy”. In fact, it merely included measures to ensure that the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi could never run for president of the nation and that a quarter of seats in the parliament would be reserved for military officers along with a number of other measures to increase the power of the junta.
In their peaceful campaign for a no vote in the referendum, the young men mentioned above released balloons, handed out pamphlets and spray painted the words “No” and “Vote No” on signposts. For these simple and peaceful political actions, these young men were tortured and imprisoned.
The reason I write about them this week is because I spent last weekend campaigning with Amnesty International at a music festival in Fife on their behalf. Along with a handful of other volunteers, I told their story to the hundreds of people attending the festival who stopped at our stall in what was mostly beautiful weather.
Telling the story of the young men to those who were not aware of their plight often had a most peculiar effect. People listen with interest to how the young men peacefully campaigned but when they hear about the sentences they received and the torture they endured, they turn and look at you with genuine horror and disbelief. A number of people simply said, “But that’s not fair”. I believe it is this inherent sense of justice and fair play that led people over the weekend to be so open to the idea of signing our appeal letters, which will be sent to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Myanmar in the near future. In all, 500 signatures were gathered.
Amnesty International has a long record of success with its letter-writing campaigns but in this case, another dimension has been added in the form of a photo campaign. Over the course of the weekend, almost 400 people agreed to be photographed by us standing in solidarity with the three young men. One person per photograph stood with a sticker bearing the name of one of the prisoners on their right palm which was raised and facing the camera. The effect is both powerful and moving. This is a nationwide campaign so photographs of this kind will number in the thousands and will be presented to a representative of the regime in Myanmar in the coming months. The power of the image cannot be underestimated. It is a clear, physical statement of people’s desire to see justice done and human rights respected.
From time to time, I feel very disheartened with what feels like people’s indifference to the various ills of the world but I feel like my batteries have been recharged by last weekend’s experience. People do care about human rights and justice but they are not aware of the issues in many cases. This is understandable when they lead such busy lives but also because of the media. Most people I spoke to were vaguely aware that Myanmar or Burma was a bad place and that there were problems there but only as aware as one could be when the place is only mentioned in passing on nightly news bulletins. Certainly, the country hit the headlines when the riots took place but in general it, like so many other nations, remains on the periphery of the news agenda.
There was little or no coverage given in the mainstream media of a recent report by the group Earthrights which accused the French oil company, Total, and its American partner, Chevron, of being complicit in human rights violations in Myanmar in their pursuit of resources there. The operations of both companies are reported to have swelled the coffers of the junta by a staggering $9 billion between 1998 and the end of 2009. Even if none of the accusations of the use of forced labour, which the companies deny, are true, the very fact that this much money has been effectively paid to a regime of this kind is unjustifiable and following my experiences of last weekend not what most ordinary people would want to see happen or condone in any way.
Life has become difficult for many people in the developed west in recent years thanks to the same economic system, which allows such operations to take place and when people are struggling hard to make ends meet at home, it is difficult to judge them for not standing up for human rights in places around the world they may not be aware even exist.
Capitalism is organised crime and we are all its victims. Whether it is those in Ireland and Britain who are pushed to the pin of their collar by mortgage repayments on homes in negative equity or those in Myanmar brutalised, tortured and imprisoned by a regime kept afloat by the revenues paid to them by oil companies, the winners and losers in this rigged game are the same. The ordinary men and women of planet Earth are the fuel in this raging conflagration of avarice and it is only through solidarity and clarity of purpose that an end to the relentless abuse of people can be engineered.