International pressure can actually accomplish something in Burma

Ottawa: There is good news out of Burma. It may not sound like it, but trust me: It’s good news.
A young woman with a heart condition only had to serve nine months in prison for refusing to work for no pay.

Su Su Nway is just one of many ordinary people fighting one of the world’s worst regimes. Sometimes, the ordinary people win.

The ruling junta in Burma (officially, Myanmar) demands many things of its citizens: their food, their freedom, their bodies, their acquiescence. One of the most constant and harmful demands is for forced labour.

Villages must supply workers — including children and old people — whenever the government decides it needs a road, or a military camp, or a pointless fence in the middle of nowhere. The army can also force villagers to act as porters.

These people are temporary slaves. They don’t get paid. If they need to bargain their way out of a job, they pay what little they have. If they don’t bargain their way out of it, they lose the ability, for days at a time, to earn a living or tend crops.

Su Su Nway decided she wasn’t going to repair a road for no pay. She went to court. Forced labour is technically illegal in Burma, thanks to a campaign by the International Labour Organization that pushed the junta to declare it so.

Somehow, Su Su Nway got a judge to side with her and sentence two of the junta’s local officials to eight months in jail.

But Su Su Nway was then charged with defaming the local administration and sentenced to 18 months. After nine months, she was released; Su Su Nway told me, in written answers to my questions, that she owes that release to international pressure. She also said the two officials didn’t serve their eight-month sentences, and the judge was moved to another township.

Rights and Democracy, an independent advocacy group created by Canada’s Parliament, gave its annual John Humphrey Freedom Award to Su Su Nway on Dec. 6.

She couldn’t travel here to accept the award, but Burma’s prime minister in exile and other dignitaries and activists were in Ottawa to celebrate her achievement, participate in a seminar on forced labour and see the launch of Canada’s Parliamentary Friends of Burma, a group of MPs and senators working to improve human rights in that country.

At the seminar, I spoke with Kevin Heppner, a Canadian who has lived on or near the border between Thailand and Burma for 15 years. He described Su Su Nway’s achievement as “a crack in the impunity.”

His organization, the Karen Human Rights Group, has started encouraging villagers to stand up in small ways, because people like Su Su Nway show that non-co-operation can work.

“In Burma you have this regime that on the surface appears to have absolute power, but very few people co-operate with it, and because of that it’s actually very weak in a lot of ways,” he said.

“They can’t get their roads built, they can’t get their military infrastructure that they’d like because people aren’t doing everything they’re told. Someone like Su Su Nway is just one particular example of that.”

Something exactly like Su Su Nway’s victory is unlikely to happen again, Heppner told me, but there are other methods of non-co-operation that can work.

Village heads stall and resist when they get the orders to supply workers. Many villages are appointing old women as village heads, because old women are held in high regard in Burma’s culture. The young soldiers who are supposed to force the village heads to comply at gunpoint take one look at these old “mothers” and, in Heppner’s words, “turn to Jell-O.”

Every person who gets away with refusing to work undermines the regime just a little.

“In Burma, word spreads like wildfire,” Heppner says.

Burma often seems like a permanent blot on the political map of the world. Change, though, is possible.

In the story I’ve just told, the junta bent to international pressure twice: once to ban forced labour, once to free Su Su Nway.

“You can see that there’s a lot of things you can accomplish without having to change the regime,” said Heppner. He added: “Of course, changing the regime is the objective.”

Canada can help create both incremental and radical change.

“I really feel we need to think about Burma as we did about South Africa,” said Gerry Barr of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation at the seminar. “There needs to be a no-go zone there for Canadian companies.”

If Su Su Nway can refuse to co-operate with the junta, so can Canadian business and Canadian politicians.