With a call to action punctuated by anecdotes of torture and survival in the jungle, a leading advocate for democracy in Burma denounced egregious human rights violations by his country’s government in the ICC on Wednesday.
Ka Hsaw Wa recounted his experiences as a victim of the Burmese military dictatorship. The Burmese government has recently drawn American criticism and sanctions for alleged human and environmental rights violations.
As a young man, Wa said, he was imprisoned and tortured for information about a friend who openly opposed the government. Later, pursued by the military for his involvement in 1988 student protests, he was forced to escape to the jungle. Over the next 10 years, he shuttled between Thailand and the remote regions of Burma to document the human rights abuses he saw there. “I was so determined to take revenge, but I saw that almost no one was documenting the human rights violations,” he said.
While working within the most isolated parts of the jungle, Wa said he discovered that the Burmese military was systematically murdering and raping civilians and driving villagers from their homes to encourage foreign companies to invest in resource- gathering operations in the rainforest.
Until he came to the United States, Wa said, he lived under the constant threat of being captured or killed by Burmese military. To evade his would-be captors, he has used over six different identities. Ka Hsaw Wa is not his real name.
To carry their equipment, Wa said, soldiers enslaved civilians as “porters” and took them from their homes. “You could see hundreds of men, women and children who are forced to work for the military, forced to grow food,” he said.
A serious ongoing violation is the military’s enslavement of villagers in defense of the Yadana natural gas pipeline project, which is being funded in part by a subsidiary of the American company Unocal, he said.
The alleged human rights abuses that Ka Hsaw Wa documented in the region around the pipeline have become the focus of a major lawsuit filed in 1996 in California by anonymous representatives of victims. The suit alleges that Unocal and its subsidiaries were fully aware of the violations and actively endorsed them by hiring the Burmese military to provide defense.
Wa seemed confident of victory in the suit. “I still believe we are going to win this struggle with corporations because we have the proof,” he said.
While he repeatedly referred to international law when describing the suit, Wa drew laughs from the audience when he joked that he knew little about the intricacies of law. “Of course I don’t know law! I’m not a lawyer, I can barely speak English,” he said.
Wa is co-founder of Earth Rights International, an organization dedicated to using international law to protect human rights and the environment. He has received several awards for his work, including the Reebok Human Rights Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize.
The lecture on Wednesday was part of the on-going Pacem in Terris series. Many in the audience reacted positively to the speech, which Government Professor Anthony Arend characterized as “deeply moving.” Jannyn Jacob (CAS ‘04) thought that the topic of human rights abuses in Burma is under-represented in the American conscious. “It’s pretty amazing that he got out and is one of the few people able to talk about it,” she said.
