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Burma Rebels Tell Sky Vote Won't Bring Change
12:59pm Thursday November 04, 2010
Holly Williams, in Burma
A group of rebel soldiers has given Sky News rare access to Burma ahead of the country's first parliamentary elections in 20 years.
Critics say the polls, which are due to be held on Sunday, are a facade as the country's military junta tightens its grip on power. A US internet security firm says Burma's internet has been taken down in a cyber attack ahead of the poll, raising fears the regime is attempting to control information going into and out of the country.
Tens of thousands of Burmese live in squalid refugee camps in the town of Mae Sot in Thailand. Surrounded by barbed wire fences, conditions are prison-like but residents say anything is better than returning home. Zabuda fled across the border to Thailand three years ago with her four children after government troops destroyed their village.
"They told us we had to get out to make way for a new military camp," she said. "I was still thinking about how I would pack all our belongings when they set fire to our home. We lost everything." On a nearby rubbish tip several Burmese refugee families live among the filth collecting waste for 50 pence a day.
When they come to the Karen villages, they will rape, they will burn and then they will destroy all the crops and animals. Then they leave behind land mines.
<cite> KNLA leader Colonel Nerdah Mya on Burmese government troops
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It is a measure of their desperation that they consider it a better life than the one they left behind. "The army came and kidnapped my husband," said Thwe Aye, who has worked on the dump for two years. "They took him away and forced him to carry their equipment for no pay." Other refugees complain of beatings and rapes carried out by government soldiers. After years of international condemnation over human rights abuses, the group of generals who rule Burma have decided to go ahead with the country's first parliamentary elections since 1990. But pro-democracy activists, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, are not optimistic.
Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi pictured in 2002
The last time Burma went to the polls the people voted overwhelmingly for Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). The military junta responded by ignoring the result and jailing party members. This time around the NLD is boycotting the election, convinced it is a sham. Under Burma's new constitution a quarter of all seats are reserved for military officers while the two main parties are widely viewed as proxies for the current military rulers. Foreign journalists have been denied entry to Burma to report on the polling but Sky News was given rare access to the country by a group of rebel soldiers.
Karen refugees from Burma in Mae La refugee camp near Mae Sot in Thailand
From bases hidden in the jungles of eastern Burma, the Karen National Liberation Army is fighting for the survival of the Karen, one of several ethnic groups at war with the regime. Their American-educated commander is Colonel Nerdah Mya. With weapons dating back to the Second World War, his men are massively outgunned but they are determined to fight to the end against a government that Colonel Nerdah accuses of ethnic cleansing.
"When they come to the Karen villages, they will rape, they will burn and then they will destroy all the crops and animals," he said. "Then they leave behind land mines." The village of Oo Kray Kee was burned to the ground by government troops two years ago.
Karen soldiers helped rebuild it, and now guard it against fresh attacks. Like millions of other Burmese the villagers will not be casting any votes in the election. "They don't believe it will bring any real change," said Colonel Mya. "Many of them don't even know that they're holding an election at all."
The graph shows how the attack intensified this week
Meanwhile, Burma's internet has been hit by a major cyber attack.
The disruption started last monthand has intensified in the last few days, US IT security firm Arbor Networks said. The Burmese government cracked down on internet provision during the 2007 pro-democracy protests, preventing demonstrators blogging and posting pictures of the unrest and the response by the army.
It is not known who is behind the current outage. But it is being caused by the country's state-owned internet provider, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication, being flooded by data, known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Arbor Networks chief scientist Craig Labovitz wrote in a blog posting: "Yesterday, Myanmar once again fell off the Internet.
"While DDoS against e-commerce and commercial sites are common (hundreds per day), large-scale geo-politically motivated attacks - especially ones targeting an entire country - remain rare with a few." Mr Labovitz said the attack was "several hundred times" more than enough to overwhelm the country's terrestrial and satellite links.
