On 24 Aug, the United States officially confirmed that it is “exploring how best to proceed” on the initiative to push for “a properly structured international commission of inquiry that would examine allegations of serious violations of international law in Burma”.<\/p>\n
My old college mate from Mandalay University would not welcome this move.\u00a0 In the 1980s, he confessed to me that he had raped a young Shan village woman at gun point as she was preparing to bathe in the Salween river.\u00a0 He was at that time a young private on patrol in Eastern Shan State.<\/p>\n
In a matter-of-fact manner, he told me he was encouraged to rape the woman by his immediate superior, a battle-seasoned sergeant in his company who, I presume, had himself committed such crimes in ethnic minority territories where he had served.<\/p>\n
Only rapists encourage and condone other rapists.<\/p>\n
My former friend later deserted the Tatmadaw<\/em> or Burma\u2019s armed forces. He would have been court-martialed and punished not for the rape but for desertion, if it weren\u2019t for the fact that his uncle was one of Ne Win\u2019s top deputies.<\/p>\n The Obama Administration\u2019s bold move now to help bring rapists and others guilty of severe human rights abuses to justice has been widely hailed by leading dissidents from Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s National League for Democracy to political exiles.<\/p>\n The news is also highly welcome among the bulk of the Burmese population, who seethe with anger and hatred of a military regime that\u2014in the words of long-time political prisoner Win Tin, a veteran leader of the NLD\u2014has created a \u201chell on earth\u201d in Burma.<\/p>\n In fact, hardly ever has a Burmese government policy decision been greeted with such widespread approval by the targeted beneficiaries. Contrastingly, prolonged economic sanctions and the US engagement policy have not enjoyed universal appeal among the Burmese. Here, even people with shared visions and normative ideas differ while moralizing their own policy preferences and antagonizing those who disagree.<\/p>\n The opposition and the public in Burma are fully aware of the apparent hypocrisy inherent in Washington\u2019s decision to make the Burmese military junta answerable to the international system of justice, a system which the United States itself has not agreed to abide by or observe.<\/p>\n Living amongst predatory Asian neighbors, Burmese peoples know the world however, doesn\u2019t exist in a state of moral purity.\u00a0 Pragmatism must include coming to terms with the flawed international relations and trying to make the best of a difficult situation.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the Burmese public and the opposition have solid reasons to overlook US double standards and welcome Washington\u2019s decision to inject the idea of justice into its Burma policy, a move which the silent majority in Burma view as long-overdue.<\/p>\n There will, of course, be a category of Burmese who oppose the US decision to move its Burma policy towards a prosecutorial path\u2014those who committed war crimes and the leaders who tacitly condone them.<\/p>\n I know my former college friend\u2019s unsettled feeling would have been shared by my late uncle, then a young infantry officer, whose liberal use of torture during interrogation killed an ethnic minority rebel captured during a military operation which he led.<\/p>\n It is only human that these men\u2014a former friend and a close relative\u2014who had horribly wronged their fellow country-people while on active duty would find even the abstract idea unpalatable, not to mention being scared of the reality of being held accountable for their violations of the Geneva conventions.<\/p>\n When armed men find themselves in the service of a military leadership that more or less encourages all manner of abuses against those deemed \u201cdestructive elements\u201d, \u201cenemies of the State\u201d or \u201cinsurgents\u201d (and, by extension, their communities) all hell breaks loose.\u00a0 And that is what has been going on in our country since the start of military rule in 1962.\u00a0 A move towards ending these war crimes must be made. It must start somewhere.<\/p>\n The military\u2019s top leadership not only condones these heinous crimes against humanity but in many crucial instances they issue direct orders.\u00a0 Ex-Major Aung Lynn Htut, former acting Chief of Mission to the US, disclosed that Than Shwe had direct involvement in the massacre of about 80 villagers on Christie Island off the southern coast of Burma, including children and women, as well as Thai fishermen who strayed into Burma\u2019s territorial waters (\u201cThan Shwe ‘ordered troops to execute villagers,\u201d The Times<\/em>, 7 June 2008 at http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/world\/asia\/article4083370.ece<\/a> ).<\/p>\n Some of the field commanders immediately responsible for the massacre\u2014 Col Thein Zaw, for instance\u2014have since been rewarded with ministerial and other influential posts (for instance, Minister for Electric Power I and Joint General Secretary of the junta\u2019s Union Solidarity and Development Party, the USDP).<\/p>\n A regime contact once told me that the senior military leadership actively shields military officers whose names appear in the opposition media as \u201chuman rights abusers.\u201d<\/p>\n The impunity offered by the highest level of authorities and their issuance of direct verbal orders have created an institutional culture within the Tatmadaw<\/em> where both the officer corps and the rank and file feel they can do no wrong; they justify crimes against humanity in operational terms.<\/p>\n More than enough ink has been spilled on the subject of the junta\u2019s war crimes and crimes against humanity, alleged or real.\u00a0 Over the past 10 years, numerous instances of killings, torture, rape and pillage have been exposed by a wide range of sources, including UN Human Rights Special Rapporteurs on Burma, who have no ax to grind against the Burmese generals, a Harvard Law School\u2019s objective report entitled \u201cCrimes in Burma\u201d (http:\/\/www.law.harvard.edu\/programs\/hrp\/documents\/Crimes-in-Burma.pdf<\/a>), ethnic women’s organizations (for instance, the Shan Women Action Network and the Karen Women Organization), human rights documentation units of the Burmese opposition and countless Burmese Army defectors.<\/p>\n