Along the Thai-Burma border there is no justice; there is only money, the military and the oppressed.

For years now I have watched as the Karen civilians of Burma suffer at the hands of that country’s military regime. The Karen people, a Burmese ethnic minority, consist of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. These are people who are just trying to make a go of it, like you and I, and want only to be able to raise their families well.

Conservative estimates put the number of the Karen people in Burma at over seven million. In Karen State they are forced to run for their lives on a daily basis. They often find themselves just over the border in Thailand, homeless and removed from their gardens where they grow their food.

There is little doubt the Burmese military junta wants to eliminate the Karen bloodline, and it is grinding away at it on many fronts. As a Burma Army commander once commented before going into battle, ‘If you want to see the Karen in the future, you’ll have to go to a museum.’

Many of the people who call Karen State home are now displaced, and as you read this, they are looking for somewhere safe to begin building new shelters. Their houses go up fast, particularly if it’s raining, and grow bigger depending on how long they are allowed to stay in one place.

But their homes, their schools, their churches and their poorly-stocked medical clinics all come down quicker than they can ever be built. Burma Army units, or militia troops allied to it, regularly torch whole communities in just minutes.

For all of the talk and endless sparring at international forums, and despite the international community’s collective wringing of hands, the Burmese conflict is not a complicated one and is not the seemingly intractable situation it is made out to be. The country’s ethnic minorities are not savages intent on tearing each other apart should the military regime fall.

Civil war is not the only option.

The military junta holds all the power and oppresses the ethnically-diverse masses, plundering the country’s natural resources and keeping the profits for itself. The junta looks on the people as nothing more than a free labour force born to serve the Burmese master race. It is a feudal system rooted in racism and the generals lord over it. They become filthy rich as the people are forced to push their carts along dusty roads trying to eke out a living.

Education and religions other than Buddhism are viewed as unwanted outside influences and are considered threats to the status quo. Those who dare to challenge the junta are considered enemies of the state. Even the monks, supposedly revered by the generals, are thrown in jail if they step out of line.


In neighbouring Thailand the government builds schools – in Burma the ‘government’ orders schools burned down. In Thailand the Karen language is taught in Karen village schools – in Burma using the language is illegal.

Yet the majority of the Karen people live in Burma. The generals, who have had the run of the country since General Ne Win led a coup in 1962 that toppled the civilian government, insist their army employs a scorched-earth policy against the entire Karen population. They burn the staple food, rice, in the paddies and sow them with landmines instead. Thousands of people in parts of the country are starving and, in recent weeks, have run out of water at the end of a long dry season.

And yet to the outside world, the economic reports which are presented suggest Burma is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In reality, however, the junta has taken South East Asia’s most promising economy and ruined it. Burma is now officially one of the world’s least-developed countries. The world has watched as it regressed from being the world’s largest exporter of rice before military rule in 1962, to a country crippled by decrepit infrastructure and a lawless financial system charted by whim and fancy.

In spite of all this, the privileged world has not lifted a finger to help the stricken country.

The West might bay about China’s growing Burmese investments and influence, but for decades China has been the only country of consequence that has engaged with the pariah state. The rest of the world appears to have stuck its head in the sand. Throughout the decades of indecision and apathy that have dogged Burma, the Karen people have lived their entire lives at war - generations have come and gone.
Now their children are forced to fight on.

No matter how long you study the war here you will ultimately remain an outsider, but sometimes that can be an advantage. In journalism you are often considered an ‘insider’ among the people you travel with, and struggle to maintain your outside perspective, that most noble and reasoned of detachments. But there is no way to argue that what is happening in Burma today is for the best. So you report what is happening, atrocity after atrocity, attack after attack, and hope someone who can make a difference might read your story.

Daniel Pedersen, author of Secret Genocide: The Karen of Burma

Genocide in slow-motion

Genocide is unique among ‘crimes against humanity’ or ‘mass atrocity crimes’ because it targets, in whole or in part, a specific racial, religious, national, or ethnic group
for extinction. According to the international convention, genocide can include any of the following five criteria targeted at the groups listed above:

• killing
• causing serious bodily or mental harm
• deliberately inflicting ‘conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part’
• imposing measures to prevent births
• forcibly transferring children from a targeted
group.

The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda took 100 days to exterminate 800,000 lives. This was the fastest rate of targeted mass killing in human history, three times faster
than that of the Holocaust.

JOHN:
In mid-2004, one year into the fighting and six months before the trip Don and I took to Chad/Darfur, I went with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Samantha Power to the rebel areas in Darfur. Samantha was a journalist in Bosnia during the horrors of that war, and her frustration with the failure of the United States to lead a strong international response to the atrocities being committed compelled her to research and write a book about America’s response to genocides throughout the 20th century. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), won the Pulitzer Prize. Samantha showed that time and again US leaders were aware that crimes against humanity were occurring but failed to take action. After she and I travelled to Darfur in 2004, Samantha wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine that won the National Magazine Award for reporting in 2005. At the same time, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting government-held areas in the region. But unlike Secretary Powell, Samantha and I went to the part of Sudan that the regime didn’t want anyone to see, and for very good reason.
Before the genocide, Darfur was one of the poorest regions of Sudan, and the Saharan climate made eking out a living an extreme challenge. But these difficulties only made Darfurians hardier and more self-reliant, mixing farming and livestock rearing in a complex strategy of survival that involved migration, inter-communal trade, and resource sharing.
It had been over a year since the genocide began, so Samantha and I expected certain evidence of mass destruction. And we were indeed witness to burned villages where livestock, homes, and grain stocks had been utterly destroyed, confirming stories we had heard from Darfurians at refugee camps in Chad.
Yet no amount of time in Sudan or work on genocide ever prepares anyone sufficiently for
what Samantha and I saw in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert—bodies of nearly two dozen youngn men lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by the 130-degree desert heat. One month before, they had been civilians, forced to walk up a hill to be executed by Sudanese government forces. Harrowingly, this scene was repeated throughout the targeted areas of Darfur.We heard more refugees in Chad describe family and friends being stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed in a twisted and successful attempt to poison the water supply. When we searched for these wells in Darfur, we found them in the exact locations described. The only difference was now these wells were covered in sand in an effort to cover the perpetrators’ bloody tracks. With each subsequent trip to Darfur, I have found the sands of the Saharan Desert slowly swallowing more of the evidence of the 21st century’s first genocide.

To us, Darfur has been Rwanda in slow motion. Perhaps 400,000 have died during three and a half years of slaughter, over 2.25 million have been rendered homeless, and, in a particularly gruesome subplot, thousands of women have been systematically raped. During 2006, the genocide began to metastasise, spreading across the border into Chad, where Chadian
villagers (and Darfurian refugees) have been butchered and even more women raped by marauding militias supported by the Sudanese government. Sadly, the international response has also unfolded in slow motion. With crimes against humanity like the genocide in Darfur, the caring world is inevitably in a deadly race with time to save and protect as many lives as possible.

In autumn 2004, after his visit to Sudan, Secretary Powell officially invoked the term ‘genocide’. He was followed shortly thereafter by President Bush.5 This represented the
first time an ongoing genocide was called its rightful name by a sitting US president. And yet in Darfur, as in most of these crises, the international community, including the United States, responded principally by calling for ceasefires and sending humanitarian aid. These are important gestures to be sure, but they do not stop the killing. We believe it is our collective responsibility to resanctify the sacred post-Holocaust phrase ‘Never Again’— to make it something meaningful and vital. Not just for the genocide that is unfolding today in Darfur, but also for the next attempted genocide or cases of mass atrocities. And there are other cases, to be sure. Right now, we need to do all we can for the people of northern Uganda, of Somalia, and of Congo. Though genocide is not being perpetrated in these countries, horrible abuses of human rights are occurring, in some ways comparable to those in Darfur. Militias are targeting civilians, rape is used as a tool of war, and life-saving aid is obstructed or stolen by warring parties. Furthermore, by the time you pick up this book, another part of the world could have caught on fire, and crimes against humanity may be being perpetrated. We need to do all we can to
organise ourselves to uphold international human rights law and to prevent these most heinous crimes from ever occurring.

That is our challenge!

John Prendergast & Don Cheadle

Authors of Not on Our Watch

Renowned actor Don Cheadle talks about his forthcoming book

Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond is the critically acclaimed book by American actor Don Cheadle and renown human-rights activist John Prendergast.

Cheadle first became aware of the conflict in Darfur while filming Hotel Rwanda. Shocked and energized by the scale of the emerging crisis, he set about raising awareness of the Darfur conflict with John Prendergast, a former advisor to Bill Clinton.

The authors have travelled to the refugee camps of Sudan and Chad to pay witness to the unfolding tragedy which has claimed the lives of 250,000 people and displaced a further 2 million. In this heartfelt and moving book, Cheadle and Prendergast challenge readers to become politically active and help prevent the genocide from continuing.

Not on our Watch will be published by Maverick House in the UK and Ireland in July 2007 and in Australia and South Africa in September 2007. Pre-order your copy here.