Seeds of
Destruction
By Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan
The decades-long conflict between Burma's central government and its ethnic minorities over the control of ethnic states has resulted in landmine pollution that now ravages the country and its borders. A weapon that maims indiscriminately and whose vigilance never slackens, the landmine has become the source of prolonged suffering for the Burmese people. The number of landmine casualties in Burma is now believed to surpass even that of Cambodia, while at the same time, the manufacture of anti-personnel landmines is on the rise.
Since Burmese independence in 1948, fighting between the Burmese Army, the Tatmadaw, and armed insurgent groups or ethnic armies has involved a continued use of anti-personnel landmines. Landmine Monitor, a civil-society-based reporting network, has confirmed that the Tatmadaw and ten different ethnic armed organizations have used anti-personnel landmines within the country, despite the fact that the International Campaign to Ban Landmines defines these weapons as illegal under existing humanitarian law. Landmine pollution is now believed to affect 10 out of 14 of the states or divisions of Burma, in areas near its borders with Bangladesh, India and Thailand, where continuing conflicts have made the landmine a weapon of choice by both ethnic militias and the Burmese Army.
The Burmese military regime, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has neither signed the Mine Ban Treaty nor participated in the Ottawa Process, an international effort instituted in 1997 to create a legally binding ban on the production, transfer and stockpiling of anti-personnel mines. According to the Landmine Monitor Report 2000, the government abstained from the 1999 UN General Assembly vote in support of the Mine Ban Treaty describing the measure as "unnecessary and unjustified," and declaring that "the problem is the indiscriminate use of mines, as well as the transfer of them." The government maintains that, while it uses mines, it does not do so in an unregulated fashion.
Reports from other Burmese governmental agencies, however, contradict this contention. The Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) and the Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence (DDSI), the two governmental intelligence agencies, both deny that the army uses landmines, maintaining that the Tatmadaw no longer has need to do so. These agencies state the demise of the Communist Party of Burma in 1989, the surrender of drug lord Khun Sa's army in 1996, and the numerous cease-fires that have been negotiated with ethnic insurgent groups as reasons why landmines are no longer being used. According to the Landmine Monitor Report, the Myanmar Red Cross states that it has no plans to launch landmine awareness campaigns or direct research towards the assessment of mine victim needs. "The problem is going away," the Myanmar Red Cross has stated, implying that scarce resources should not be "wasted" on the problem. Regardless of these differences in official policy, not only has the government failed to eliminate or curb its manufacture and use of anti-personnel landmines, confirmed sources report an increase in both. Myanmar Defense Industries currently is believed to manufacture at least five types of landmines - though only the MM-1 and MM-2 have been positively identified - that are highly explosive and are more likely to kill than to maim.
The indiscriminate use of anti-personnel landmines by all parties makes it impossible to ascertain the total number that has been laid in Burma during the last 50 years of conflict. While there is also no accurate method of determining how many victims landmines have claimed, the Landmine Monitor Report 2000 estimates that conflict in Burma resulted in approximately 1500 mine victims in 1999 alone. A calculation based on a 1998 compilation of statistics suggests that Karen State alone produced nearly one civilian landmine amputee per day.
The report also estimates a ratio of one civilian death for every two military casualties. It documents allegations that "the SPDC lays mines on KNLA [Karen National Liberation Army] supply lines, escape routes to the Thai border used by refugees, and around villages and fields that Karen people have fled or been forcibly [removed from]." While the Burmese government denies that the Tatmadaw has directed mining against civilians, the mining of cleared villages is a popular way to enforce the relocation of local populations. This strategy, called area denial, enables the Tatmadaw to obstruct access to food, supplies, and intelligence.
The Tatmadaw has been known to use the particularly gruesome practice of "human minesweeping." When the Burmese Army operates in areas that are suspected to contain mines, they sometimes require villagers of the local ethnic group to walk or drive their bullock carts in front of the soldiers in order to detonate mines. How many victims this practice has produced is unknown, but a Danish medical group, in a survey of refugees along the Thai/Burma border, claimed that either military portering or forced minesweeping was responsible for half of the landmine casualties. The SPDC maintains that the Tatmadaw does not engage in human minesweeping.
The toll that landmine use has taken on the ethnic civilian populations is increasingly visible among the ethnic communities on the border. According to the Landmine Monitor Report, "in December of 1999, the Shan State Army (SSA) said that they have a military policy of 'no offensive mine use,' stating that it is 'dangerous for [Shan] villagers.' " When asked how many Shan people have been killed by their own mines, one ethnic military commander stated, "Half kill the enemy." After reflection on the matter, he went on to say, "The other half kill soldiers, kill our people and kill our animals. For us, mine warfare really doesn't make much sense."
The fallout of Burma's landmine pollution affects Bangladesh and Thailand, both of whom are party to the Mine Ban Treaty and have abolished the use or possession of anti-personnel landmines. The frontier Burma shares with Bangladesh hosts the longest minefield in the country. The junta laid the majority of these mines in 1991 after the mass exodus of Rohingya people [Burma's Muslim minority] from Rakhine State. In retaliation to reproach from the international community, the Burmese border patrols placed anti-personnel landmines along the length of its border with Bangladesh.
While the stated goal of this minefield is to prevent insurgent infiltration, most observers feel its main purpose is to halt the migration of Rohingya people by passing a de facto death sentence on asylum seekers. The Bangladesh Rifles have documented over 100 Bangladeshi citizens killed or injured by mines placed by the Burmese border force.
The government of Bangladesh has often voiced its rancor towards Burma's apathetic stance on the removal of the border minefield, most recently when an SPDC Foreign Minister visited Dhaka. Although the reply from Rangoon over the years has always been conciliatory, no action has been taken. On the contrary, the Na Ka Sa division of the Tatmadaw assigned to the Bangladesh border actively maintains the minefield. Minefield pollution extends northward to Burma's borders with the southeastern Indian states, where the warfare between the Tatmadaw and the Chin National Army continues.
Thailand has also suffered casualties from mines laid along the border with Burma, with a record of nearly 1,000 victims over the past 20 years. Thai authorities informed Landmine Monitor researchers that the Tatmadaw actively mines within the Thai border, charges that the SPDC denies. The report also states that mines laid by the government forces in 1999 and early 2000 resulted in Thai border officer casualties.
Not only are humans the victims of anti-personnel landmines, but more than 25 elephants on both the Bangladesh and Thai borders have also died or been maimed in recent years. Last year, Thai newsmedia championed the recovery of a female elephant landmine victim named Motala, inspiring donations for her care from across the nation. As of November 2000, Motala has survived and has been fit with a specially-built prosthetic leg.
The plight of landmine victims in Burma's border regions has been compounded by the severe state of disrepair of the government healthcare efforts, as well as the nation's fiscal problems. Care for landmine victims places yet another long-term economic strain on Burma's devastated social system. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that over the lifetime of an amputee, costs for rehabilitation, prosthetic fitting and replacement costs over US$1,000 in a country like Burma. For a national healthcare system that has been ranked by the World Health Organization just above Sierra Leone's as the world's most underresourced and that faces a rapidly intensifying battle with AIDS, the prospects for survivor assistance remain ominous. The SPDC currently spends about US$.50 per person, per year on healthcare.
Add to this bleak picture the border regions' shortage of healthcare resources and continual security problems, and the situation takes on an even grimmer tone. "I remember taking in an SPDC porter who stepped on a landmine. We could not contain his bleeding. He died," a surgeon working on the Burmese/Thai border reported. The Landmine Monitor has recorded cases of mine victims en route to hospitals intercepted by Tatmadaw soldiers and instructed to turn back and not to disclose the cause of their wounds to others. According to the report, medical practitioners estimate that 50% of all landmine victims die before receiving medical care. An account from the Landmine Monitor Report tells of the efforts of an itinerant, ethnic-based medical organization called Back Pack Health Worker Team, whose medics are all trained in emergency amputation, often performed on plastic sheets inside huts. When encountered by Landmine Monitor researchers, they asked for bone saws, as theirs had long since grown dull.
The continued indiscriminate use of landmines augurs the protraction of the bloodshed and violence that has plagued Burma for decades. Furthermore, the growing production of munitions promises to fan the flames of the indiscriminate mine warfare in Burma. To combat these trends, the SPDC and all armed groups should be consistently pressed to cease mine use. Neighboring states who are party to the Mine Ban Treaty are being asked by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines to take a more pro-active diplomatic stance toward Burma's use of mines. UN Agencies and other humanitarian aid groups should also call for an immediate halt to mine use by all ethnic combatants and the Burmese military. As long as the government and ethnic armies fail to heed these recommendations, they sow seeds of a destruction that will remain long after the fighting ends.
This article is drawn from the Landmine Monitor Report 2000, for which the author was the primary researcher on Burma. Landmine Monitor was established by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines to systematically monitor and document nations' compliance with the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and the humanitarian response to the global landmine crisis. Landmine Monitor, which is made up of civil-based organizations, complements the existing state-based reporting and compliance mechanisms established by the Mine Ban Treaty. The Landmine Monitor Report 2000 is the network's third annual report and was released just prior to the Second Meeting of States Parties in mid-September 2000.