Burma: Military junta is back to child recruitments

Bangkok: Till last September, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) office in military-ruled Burma had received few complaints about children being forced to join the army. But that is no longer the case. In a new report, the ILO makes a pointed reference to the shift noticed since last September. Prior to that month, the majority of complaints received about forced labour “concerned public works under local administration with only a few military-related complaints and cases of underage recruitment,” reveals a report submitted to the ILO’s governing body, which is currently meeting at the labour rights agency’s headquarters, in Geneva. “Since September that pattern has been reversed with majority of complaints now being military-related and underage recruitment cases,” adds the report prepared by the ILO’s Rangoon office of the 15 “child soldier/forced recruitment cases” between February 26, 2007 and February 25, 2008. What happened to an ILO account of a 14-year-old Burmese boy in late October may be typical. He had gone to a market in Rangoon, the former capital, to lend a hand at a stall run by his elder brother. But he was stopped by soldiers and taken in a truck to an army recruiting office. Tip of the iceberg In fact, the ILO admits that its record of young boys forced to swell the ranks of the Tatmadaw, the Burmese name for the armed forces, is not an accurate picture. “We believe that the number of complaints we have received does not reflect the size of the problem. It is the tip of the iceberg,” Steve Marshall, the ILO’s liaison officer in Rangoon, said. “We understand there are some people who operate as brokers. They use force or trickery to take children to recruiting officers,” he added. “We have lodged complaints with the government and it has responded quickly, discharging the recruit and disciplining the recruiting officer.” But human rights groups warn the international community not to be fooled by the junta’s claims that it is trying to end the scourge of forced conscription. The London-based Burma Campaign UK has “dismissed as total nonsense” claims by a state-run newspaper that “hundreds of children have been returned to their families in recent years.” Dubious track record A November 2007 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) confirms the failure of the junta’s special committee to save children from the Tatmadaw. “Children as young as 10 are being targeted by Burmese military recruiters and threatened with arrest or beaten if they refuse to join,” revealed the report by HRW. “Child soldiers are sometimes forced to participate in human rights abuses, such as burning villages and using civilians for forced labour,” adds the report. The dismal tone of this report echoed a similar tone of a 2002 report by HRW dealing with the growing number of child soldiers in Burma. That report: My gun was as tall as me, estimated that “70,000 or more of the Burma army’s estimated 350,000 soldiers may be children.” And the hunting ground for the army’s recruiters to grab children has changed little over the last five years. Soldiers and civilians assigned the job target markets, railway stations, bus stations, ferry terminals, streets and festivals. Rhetoric and reality The gap between the junta’s rhetoric and the reality in the South-east Asian country is stark, says David Scott Mathieson, HRW’s Burma consultant. “There is a massive disconnect between the laws and regulations the Burmese regime has made and the reality on the ground.” The junta’s hunger for young Burmese boys to fatten the ranks of the armed forces is rooted in a shift in military policy after 1988. That year saw a pro-democracy uprising, drawing tens of thousands of civilians to the streets, to challenge a military dictatorship that had been in power since a 1962 coup. And the army responded with bullets, killing some 3,000 unarmed demonstrators. Source: IPS

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