Free Burma

Slide 1: 3,000 Villages Destroyed By Military Junta In Eastern Burma And the Shameful Silence of the UN Security Council

Slide 2: End the Attacks Now.

Slide 4: • 1,000,000 Refugees • 500,000 Internal Refugees • Health Crises Comparable to Worst Conflict Zones in Africa • Thousands of Women Raped

Slide 5: • Military regime has more child soldiers than any other country in the world, 70,000

Slide 6: • The World’s Only Imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi

Slide 7: “The SPDC troops came to our village. They looted our villages and took our money. The next morning they burned our village before they left.” --Woman who fled eastern Burma in 2006

Slide 10: How Did This Start? • Historically, ethnic minorities had autonomy in eastern Burma, military junta never controlled this region • 1988 Uprising and General Than Shwe • 1995, Attacks Really Began in Earnest • Natural Resources

Slide 15: General Than Shwe

Slide 16: Hta Ko To Baw village burned April 27, 2006 Northern Karen State

Slide 17: What is Happening Now? • Destruction of 3,000 villages • Destruction of food Supplies, both rice barns and rice pots • Rape on a massive scale • Forced labor and forced portering, modern form of slave labor • Executions • Disease

Slide 18: Military Terrorism

Slide 20: Destruction of Food Supplies

Slide 21: Rape as a Weapon of War

Slide 22: • Column Commander Captain Ye Htut said to his soldiers: “You all must rape that woman, those who refuse to rape will be shot and killed…” • “The Burmese soldiers caught me and pushed me down into the bush. I fell down. I was struggling while they held me down and raped me.“ – Karen Woman, 2005

Slide 23: • Naw Cho Myint’s Story “…After raping her, he slashed her to death and threw her three year old daughter into Pi Stream…” Both Naw Cho Myint and her 3 year old daughter were murdered. She was also three months pregnant.

Slide 24: • “Forced labor and modern slave-like practices are an epidemic in Burma.” --Harvard Human Rights Program

Slide 26: Executions Karen men tortured and killed by Army of military junta, Karen State

Slide 28: Disease \"The mortality rates are more like Angola, Rwanda, Somalia and other disaster zones.” -- Voravit Suwanvanichkij, Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health

Slide 29: Given these horrible conditions, what has the UN Security Council done?

Slide 30: NOTHING.

Slide 31: Passed 28 Consecutive Resolutions by the UN General Assembly and UN Commission on Human Rights The most recent UN General Assembly resolution calls on the Burmese junta to “end widespread rape and other forms of sexual violence persistently carried out by members of the armed forces, in particular against women belonging to ethnic nationalities, and to investigate and bring to justice any perpetrators in order to end impunity for these acts.” “To end the systematic enforced displacement of persons and other causes of refugee flows to neighbouring countries.”

Slide 32: If we do not press the UN Security Council to act NOW, there will be more:

Slide 36: \"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.\" --Chinese Proverb

Slide 37: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” --Albert Einstein \"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” -- Martin Luther King Jr.

Slide 38: “Quiet, closed-door meetings among countries in New York are no longer enough. It is time for the UN Security Council to act.\" – Desmond Tutu

Slide 39: What You Can Do • Visit www.uscampaignforburma.org to lean more • Help send 3,000 postcards to Kofi Annan demanding that he call for immediate UN Security Council action. One postcard for each village destroyed. • Hold a film screening, or show this presentation to as many people as possible • Offer donations to people getting aid to internally displaced in eastern Burma, like World Aid www.worldaid.org

Slide 40: 3,000 Villages. UN Security Council Must ACT NOW Before Another Village is Burned