Ongoing Sexual Violence Highlights Urgent Need for Burma Army to Stop Offensives and Pull Back Troops from Kachin Areas

By Women's League of Burma • January 22, 2015

The rape and murder of two female teachers in Northern Shan State early on January 20th is evidence of the Burma Army’s continued use of sexual violence against ethnic civilians. The Kachin Baptist Convention volunteers – Maran Lu Ra and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin – were gang-raped and killed in their church compound in Kawng Hka Shabuk village, Muse District. The day after, a woman in Hku Maw village, Northern Shan State suffered severe injuries during an incident of attempted sexual violence by a Burma Army soldier stationed there. The government of Burma must immediately stop its military offensives in ethnic areas, pull back its troops, and start political dialogue with all the ethnic armed groups.

The killings of the two teachers were committed by Burma Army troops carrying out a military operation against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Northern Shan State. The troops were stationed on guard around the teachers’ village on the night of the incident, making it impossible for anyone else to have committed these crimes.

Recent weeks have seen intensified attacks by the Buma Army across Kachin areas, displacing thousands and leading to the targeting of civilians. Sexual violence by the Burma Army has increased since the renewed conflict against the KIA in June 2011. Since that time, the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT) have documented over 70 cases of gang-rape, rape and attempted sexual violence by Burma Army troops. In only two of these cases were the perpetrators punished.

‘The latest murders show that, for all the rhetoric about reform, Burmese government troops continue to rape, torture, and kill women and girls with impunity’, said Moon Nay Li of KWAT. ‘The international community must establish an independent international investigation into crimes of sexual violence by the Burma Army.’ As the Women’s League of Burma noted in our report, ‘If they had hope, they would speak’, abuses by the Burma Army which we have documented since the elections of 2010 may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity under international criminal law. Despite the acclaim won for the Burmese government following last year’s signing of the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence, the rape and murder of our Kachin sisters is clear evidence that sexual violence is still used as a weapon of war against the country’s ethnic communities. Today we reiterate our calls for an immediate end to sexual violence against the women of Burma, and the establishment of an independent international investigation into crimes of sexual violence in conflict.
The brutality inflicted on our Kachin sisters is a reminder that, despite the optimism of the international community for our country’s future, Burma remains plagued by violence of the most horrific kind. If the Burmese government is sincere about establishing peace, it should not be launching offensives in the ethnic areas, and allowing its troops to commit abuses with impunity. The government must start political dialogue immediately to begin a process of federal reform that will bring genuine peace, which is the only way to protect women from sexual violence at the hands of the Burma Army.

For more information, please contact:
Tin Tin Nyo (Thailand) – (+66) (0) 81 0322 882
Moon Nay Li (Thailand) – (+66) (0) 85 5233 791

Details of the rape and murder of two Kachin teachers in Panghsai township, Muse district, Northern Shan State
by Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand

Background:

Maran Lu Ra (age 20) from Myikyina, and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin (age 21) from Waingmaw, were working as volunteer teachers in the village of Kawng Kha Shabuk village, about 20 miles east of Muse town, in Northern Shan State. They had been sent there by the Kachin Baptist Convention about eight months ago. They taught at the village school, and stayed in a small bamboo house in the village church compound. No one else stayed in the compound, which was at the edge of the village. There are about 40 households in the village, with a population of about 160 people. There is no Burma Army base in the village, which lies in a government controlled area. There are no resistance forces operating in or around the village.

Monday January 19th 2015

At about 7am, about 30 Burma Army troops from LIB 503, based in Kyaukme, led by Major Aung Soe Myint, arrived on foot at Kawng Kha Shabuk village, about 20 miles east of Muse town. They had come from the direction of Mong Ko, where there had been a military operation against the Kachin Independence Army in early January. The soldiers based themselves in four houses in different parts of the village, posting guards around the village within eyesight of each other. They maintained close guard of the entire village to ensure their security.
In the evening there was a birthday party for the child of the village headman at his house, so the two teachers went to the party. They returned back to their house at about 10pm at night.

Tuesday January 20th 2015

At about 1am, three villagers staying near the church compound heard screams and sounds of beating coming from the church compound. They went to the house in the compound where the two teachers were staying, and called out to them, but there was no answer. There was no light on in the house, only in the toilet nearby. They could hear some groaning from inside, and they tried to push open the door, but they couldn’t. The villagers thought the women may just be sleeping deeply, and perhaps the screaming had been from some quarrelling neighbours nearby. They therefore went back to their homes.
Early in the morning, before 7am, a truck left the village with some of the Burma Army soldiers, but some soldiers were still left in the village.
At about 7am, a neighbor was surprised when the teachers were not seen around their house preparing breakfast, so asked a child to go and call the teachers. The child went and called out the teachers’ names outside their house, but there was no reply, so the child came back. Then the neighbor went to see, and also called out the teachers’ names, but there was no answer. The neighbor then pushed open the door, which opened easily. Inside, the neighbor saw the teachers lying down covered with a blanket. The neighbor thought they must still be sleeping, and went to lift the blanket, and found they were dead. Their bodies were half naked, and there were knife wounds on their bodies, and their heads had been severely beaten. By the bodies there was a big stick with bloodstains on it. The neighbor called out, and other villagers came immediately. They noticed there were marks of boots in the dirt in front of the house.
The village headman called the police by phone, and at 2pm the police arrived from Panghsai, together with an ambulance. The ambulance took the bodies to Muse Hospital.

Wednesday January 21st 2015

In the afternoon, about 200 more Burma Army troops arrived in the village from Kyaukme, and about 100 of these troops began staying in villagers’ houses, while another 100 patrolled around the village. Major Aung Soe Myint and some troops from LIB 503 were also still staying in the village.

Analysis:

There is strong circumstantial evidence that the rape and killing was carried out by the Burma Army troops which had arrived on January 19. These troops were stationed on guard around the village, and no one else would have dared carry out these crimes with the soldiers present.

(ခ်င္းမိုင္။ ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ဇန္ႏၷ၀ါရီ ၂၂ ရက္) ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္း တနလၤာေန႔က ဆရာမႏွစ္ဦး မုဒိန္းျပဳက်င့္ၿပီး သတ္ျဖတ္ခံရျခင္းသည္ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ အေနျဖင့္ အရပ္သား ျပည္သူလူထုအား ထိတ္လန္႔ေၾကာက္ရြံ႕ေစရန္ လိင္ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈကို ဆက္လက္ က်င့္သံုးေနဆဲျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အေထာက္အထား တရပ္ပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ကခ်င္ႏွစ္ျခင္း အသင္းေတာ္ ေစတနာ့၀န္ထမ္း ဆရာမမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ အသက္ ၂၀ အရြယ္ မရမ္လုရာႏွင့္ တန္ေဘာလ္ေခါန္နန္စင္ တို႔ ႏွစ္ဦးသည္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေကာင္ခါရွဘုတ္ရြာရွိ သူတို႔၏ ဘုရားေက်ာင္း ၀င္း အတြင္းတြင္ အုပ္စုလိုက္ မုဒိန္းျပဳက်င့္ၿပီး သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္းကို ခံခဲ့ၾကရသည္။ ယင္းသို႔ ျဖစ္ပြားၿပီး ေနာက္ တစ္ရက္တြင္လည္း ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ခူးေမာ္ ေက်းရြာမွ အမ်ဳိးသမီးတစ္ဦးသည္ ယင္းေက်းရြာတြင္ အေျချပဳေသာ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္မွ စစ္သားတစ္ဦးက မုဒိန္း ျပဳက်င့္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းခဲ့ရာမွ ျပင္းထန္ေသာ ဒဏ္ရာမ်ား ရရွိခဲ့သည္။ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား နယ္ေျမမ်ားအတြင္း ထိုးစစ္မ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ႏွင့္ တပ္မ်ားကို ျပန္လည္ဆုတ္ခြာၿပီး တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ားကို စတင္ရန္ လိုအပ္ေနသည္။

ဆရာမႏွစ္ဦးအား သတ္ျဖတ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့သူမွာ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ကခ်င္ျပည္လြတ္လပ္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ (ေကအိုင္ေအ) ကို ထိုးစစ္ဆင္ေနေသာ တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားျဖစ္သည္။ တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားသည္ ဆရာမမ်ား ၏ ေက်းရြာအနီးတြင္ အခင္း ျဖစ္ပြားသည့္ညက တပ္စြဲထားျခင္သည္ ၄င္းက်ဴးလြန္းမႈကို ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ႏိုင္သည့္ အေျခအေနျဖစ္သည္။

လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ရက္သတၱပတ္မ်ားအတြင္း ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္း ပဋိပကၡမ်ား ျပန္လည္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ရာ ေထာင္ႏွင့္ ခ်ီေသာ အရပ္သားမ်ား အိုးအိမ္မဲ့ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ရၿပီး အရပ္သားမ်ားမွာ ပစ္မွတ္မ်ားျဖစ္လာ ခဲ့ရသည္။ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ေကအိုင္ေအႏွင့္ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား ျပန္လည္ စတင္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာခ်ိန္မွ စတင္၍ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ လိင္အၾကမ္း ဖက္မႈမ်ား တိုးမ်ားလာခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသမီး အစည္းအရံုး (ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ) က ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္က က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ေသာ အုပ္စု လိုက္ မုဒိန္းျပဳက်င့္မႈ၊ မုဒိန္းမႈႏွင့္ လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းမႈ အျဖစ္ အပ်က္ေပါင္း ၇၀ ေက်ာ္ကို မွတ္တမ္း တင္ခဲ့သည္။ ယင္းအမႈမ်ားအတြင္း က်ဴးလြန္သူ ႏွစ္ဦးသာ အျပစ္ေပးခံခဲ့ရ သည္။

‘ဒီေနာက္ဆံုး သတ္ျဖတ္မႈေတြက ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈေတြရဲ႔ အေျခအေနကို ထင္ရွားေစပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္ ဟာ မုဒိန္းမႈ၊ ႏွိပ္စက္ညွင္းပမ္းမႈနဲ႔ အမ်ဳိးသမီးနဲ႔ မိန္းကေလးငယ္ေတြ အေပၚ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈေတြကို အျပစ္ေပး အေရးယူမႈ မခံရပဲ ဆက္လက္က်ဴးလြန္ေနတယ္” ဟု ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသမီး အစည္းအရံုး(ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ) မွ မြန္းေနလီ က ေျပာသည္။ ‘ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းအေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ရဲ႔ လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ၊ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈေတြ အေပၚ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးမႈေတြကို လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ လိုအပ္ေနပါတယ္။’

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ)၏ အစီရင္ခံစာျဖစ္ေသာ “ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္သာ ရွိခဲ့ရင္ သူတို႔ ထုတ္ေျပာၾကမွာ ပါ” တြင္ မိမိတို႔ မွတ္တမ္းတင္ ထားခဲ့မႈမ်ားအရ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ကာလမွစ၍ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ က်ဴးလြန္မႈမ်ားသည္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ရာဇ၀တ္ ဥပေဒေအာက္တြင္ စစ္ရာဇ၀တ္မႈႏွင့္ လူသားျဖစ္တည္မႈကို ဆန္႔က်င္ေသာ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈမ်ား ေျမာက္ေနေပသည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ယခင္ႏွစ္က လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ အဆံုး သတ္ေရး ပဋိဥာဥ္စာတမ္း ကို လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း မိမိတို႔ ကခ်င္ညီအမမ်ားအေပၚ မုဒိန္းျပဳက်င့္ သတ္ျဖတ္ လိုက္ျခင္းသည္ ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္အေနႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသား လူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား အေပၚတြင္ လိင္အၾကမ္း ဖက္မႈကို စစ္လက္နက္ ကိရိယာအျဖစ္ ဆက္လက္အသံုးျပဳေနဆဲျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သက္ေသ အေထာက္အထား ပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ယေန႔တြင္ မိမိတို႔သည္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံရွိ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ႏွင့္ ပဋိပကၡအတြင္း လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ရာဇ၀တ္မႈမ်ားအေပၚ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးရန္ လြတ္လပ္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံ တကာ စံုစမ္း စစ္ေဆးေရးေကာ္မရွင္တရပ္ တည္ ေဆာက္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းရန္ ထပ္မံ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္သည္။

မိမိတို႔ ကခ်င္ညီအမမ်ား ႀကံဳေတြ႔ရေသာ ၾကမ္းတမ္းခက္ထန္မႈသည္ မိမိတို႔ ႏိုင္ငံ၏ အနာဂတ္အေပၚ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအ၀ုိင္း၏ အေကာင္းျမင္မႈမ်ား ရွိေနေသာ္လည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈသည္ အဆိုး၀ါးဆံုးေသာ ပံုစံ ျဖင့္ အျမစ္တြယ္လ်က္ ရွိေနဆဲျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ျပယုဂ္ျဖစ္သည္။ ျမန္မာ အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး တည္ေဆာက္ ရာတြင္ ရိုးသားေျဖာင့္မတ္မႈ ရွိမည္ဆိုပါက တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားတြင္ ထိုးစစ္မ်ား မဆင္သင့္ ပဲ ျပစ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္ေသာ တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားကိုလည္း အျပစ္ေပးအေရးယူခံရမႈမွ ကင္းလြတ္ထားခြင့္ မေပးသင့္ေပ။ အစိုးရ အေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ လက္တြင္းတြင္ လိင္အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ခံေနရေသာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအား ကာကြယ္ရန္ တခုတည္းေသာ နည္းလမ္းျဖစ္သည့္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္မည့္ ဖက္ဒရယ္ ျပဳျပင္မႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား စတင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေဆြးေႏြးမႈမ်ားကို ခ်က္ခ်င္း စတင္ရန္ လိုအပ္ေပသည္။

ဆက္သြယ္ရန္-
ေဒၚတင္တင္ညိဳ (ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ)– (+၆၆) (၀) ၈၁ ၀၃၂၂ ၈၈၂
ဂ်န္မြန္းေနလီ (ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ)– (+၆၆) (၀) ၈၅ ၅၂၃၃ ၇၉၁

သေဘာထားေၾကညာခ်က္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကို ဤေနရာတြင္ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ ရယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Tags: Burma Army, Burma Government, Human Rights Violations, Kachin, Kachin Women's Association – Thailand, Sexual Violence, Women's League of Burma

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