On Monday June 19, 2006, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democratically elected party National League for Democracy (NLD) who has spent, more than 10 of the past eighteen years in detention, will be celebrating her 61st birthday under house arrest in Burma-Myanmar. She is the living illustration of the repressive and dictatorial nature of the Burmese government, led by the military junta known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
For this symbolic day, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) stresses the reasons why action by the Security Council on the situation in Burma-Myanmar is essential and urgent. In response to the concerns expressed by some members of the Security Council that a resolution on Burma does not fall within the Council’s mandate FIDH sets out the reasons why it does so. FIDH, along with numerous other international human rights organizations and movements, strongly believe that it is vital for the Security Council to acknowledge that the current situation in Burma poses a threat to international peace and security, and to adopt a binding, non-punitive resolution.
The increasingly dire humanitarian crisis and the strengthening of a military dictatorship
Since December 2005, the military junta has significantly intensified its attacks on civilians, mostly on the Karen minority in East Burma. The burning down of hundreds of villages, killings, acts of torture and systematic rape, has forced more that 16,000 men, women and children to flee their homes and take refuge in the jungle, enduring extremely precarious living conditions. Thousands have sought refuge in neighboring Thailand, adding to the million that had already been forced to flee their own country as a result of the military’s systematic assaults on them and their families. (See The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees news reports on Burma-Myanmar) This has resulted in an increasingly dire humanitarian crisis, worsened by the fact that the Burmese regime has imposed stricter conditions, or denied access entirely, to humanitarian organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and other international Non-Governmental Organizations, so that they are unable to reach the displaced facing the greatest needs.
In addition, the SPDC has increased political repression, especially towards the NLD party members, threatening them with being further outlawed and forbidding them from assembling or giving press conferences. The Burmese junta has detained 1156 political prisoners over the past eighteen years, including 392 representatives of the NLD party. 10 political prisoners have died in custody within the last year. While the regime was supposed to release Aung San Suu Kyi less than a month ago, it decided, again arbitrarily, to postpone her release to another year in spite of the hopes triggered by the visit of U.N. Under-Secretary for Political Affairs Mr. Ibrahim Gambari last month, who was allowed to briefly meet with her.
These blatant violations of human rights contravene the very universally-accepted cornerstones of international treaties and customary international law which the United Nations endeavors to defend and implement, yet nothing today can make us believe that these crimes will ever stop, unless international action is taken.
International pressure from the Security Council is not only justified, but crucial
In spite of the more than 29 resolutions which have been adopted by the U.N. General Assembly and Commission on Human Rights, calling for national reconciliation and democratization, the SPDC’s unlawful methods of political and ethnical repression have been intensified and consolidated, with complete impunity and indifference from the outside world.
Only international pressure from the highest body of the United Nations can now provide hope for peaceful and transitional change in Burma. While some Security Council members have expressed their concern that a resolution on Burma does not fall within the Council’s mandate there are at least 3 ways to demonstrate that it does so.