Recent progress within Myanmar is coming at the expense of ethnic villagers in the country's impoverished southeast, who who are seeing their land expropriated as development steamrollls in. That was the conclusion of ''Losing Ground'', a report released last week in Bangkok by the Karen Human Rights Group featuring the results of field studies undertaken from January, 2011 to November, 2012.
CONTROVERSIAL CONSTRUCTION: The site of the Toh Boh dam in Tanpabin township.
Saw Albert, the KHRG's field director, sat in the shade of a large green umbrella in a quiet restaurant on the Thai-Myanmar border and added detail to the catalogue of hurts, abuses, destruction of property, pollution of rivers, loss of plantations and the confiscation of land in the report.
Saw Albert opened the KHRG report and pointed to the testimony of a female villager, named only as Naw L, aged 54, from T'Nay Hsah Township.
''Since army Battalion No549 came here, my property is gone and no one has pity on me. One thing starts to belong to the battalion, then two things belong to the battalion. You go back to your plantation and they ask, 'What kind of paper [title deed] do you have? This is military land. It all belongs to the military.'''
Saw Albert had just returned from a gruelling two-month fact finding trip to Karen State, and explained that the KHRG is an independent organisation that has been documenting human rights abuses in eastern Myanmar for more than 20 years.
Fifty field and community workers, under the supervision of the KHRG, collected 2,534 pieces of information, including 1,270 oral testimonies, 523 recorded interviews, 111 sets of photographs and video that totalled 12,517 images and 207 written orders issued by civilian and military officials _ 809 of these documents were translated into English and analysed for the report.
The KHRG report found that land confiscation and forced displacement were carried out without ''consultation, compensation, or, often, notification''. Displacement occurred mainly around the extraction of natural resources and development projects that included ''hydropower dam construction, infrastructure development, logging, mining and plantation agriculture projects that are undertaken or facilitated by various civil and military state authorities, foreign and domestic companies and armed ethnic groups''.
A KHRG interview in June, 2012, with an Hpa-an District villager, identified only as Saw N, shows the powerful forces lined up against villagers to stop them securing ownership of their land.
Saw Albert.
''This year the Tatmadaw [Myanmar army] will completely confiscate the land and ask us to sign it away ... They typed the words as if they are the landowner. They asked us to sign but we didn't sign. We discussed this and we think we will never sign. Now, they pressure us and they said, if we don't sign, they would report us to the police, DKBA [Democratic Karen Buddhist Army] and Karen Peace Council [an ethnic armed militia] who will arrest the villagers. Some of the women said if they want to arrest us, they could arrest us. 'We have nothing.'''
Saw Albert explains that during the KHRG's reporting period, villagers in all its seven geographic research areas had land confiscated as a result of ''natural resource extraction''. Villagers received ''explicit information provided by the military or civilian officials that land will be confiscated or that they could no longer use it as it is presently used''.
The KHRG report found that natural resource extraction and development projects expose villagers to threats of physical violence, forced labour and land confiscation, and are linked to flooding, deforestation and soil erosion.
Villagers usually find out that their land is to be forcibly taken from them when they receive ''explicit information provided by military or civilian officials that land will be confiscated or that they can no longer use it''.
DEVELOPMENT MEANS DISPLACEMENT
Despite the huge odds stacked against them, ethnic villagers in southeast Myanmar are starting to fight back against powerful interests, unfair legislation, unscrupulous officials, international companies, forced relocations and military coercion in an effort to keep their land.
In the past year, villagers have marched in protest, demonstrated on riverbanks and formed alliances with civic groups to protest against the theft of their land, the pollution of waterways and mega-development projects.
Zaw Myo is an indigenous person from the Dawei area in southern Myanmar that is targeted for a US$60 billion (1.78 trillion baht) mega-project that includes dams, industrial estates, highways, refineries and rail links.
Fear of losing his ancestral land to development projects has turned Zaw Myo, 26, from a farmer into a land rights activist. Zaw Myo is worried that his family will be forced off their 1.6 hectares of farmland, their house and a half-hectare garden that has been in their family for generations if he does not start to fight.
''We're losing all our land. The company made an unfair offer to our families for our land. We have been told we have no choice but to accept. My great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were on this land since our village was settled.''
Zaw Myo explains that his family, like other villagers, are in the dark about their future. ''I was born here, but now I'll be relocated. I don't when, I don't know where.''
Zaw Myo admits some villagers have been paid for their land without understanding the consequence of their actions.
''They take the money without getting a contract, they don't think of the future consequences for their families. For 1.6 hectares we'd get around 300,000 kyat [10,500 baht] with no contract. People here don't understand that they've sold all their plantation the old trees that took years to grow _ it's a lot of work for the price of a second-hand motorbike.''
Zaw Myo describes what the villagers stand to lose by selling their land.
''We grow cashews, coconuts, durian, betel nuts, chillies, mangos, rice, corn and a wide range of vegetables. We fish and catch crabs. It's satisfying ... we can live off our land. In our community there are 150 houses, two temples and a pagoda. Most of us are related, if something happens we help each other. We have our ghosts and our stories. We don't want to lose them.''
Zaw Myo explains that he does not have the education to fight company lawyers. ''I'm a farmer, I went to the temple school. Now I'm learning how to fight for our land and our future.''
The KHRG's Saw Albert, explained that villagers need land protection and respect for their rights.
''Current development projects do not bring benefits for villagers. They need schools, roads and bridges _ development that improves their living standards. Development now is only about quick profits for a few.''
Saw Albert pointed out that ethnic villagers are the losers in the development race in Myanmar.
''Mining pollutes the rivers they depend on for irrigation, drinking water and fishing. We're not against development, but it has to be of benefit to the local communities.''
Like Zaw Myo, Nay Min is from the Dawei area, and together they are attending a workshop to learn how to fight for their land rights.
A story on the Karen News website described the Dawei area that will be the site of one of the mega-projects. ''Hsa Keh village is in the Na Bu Le area, west of Dawei. There is a beach as long as the eye can see. The land down to the beach is flat with green mountains rising behind.'' The story estimated that 17 villages and as many as 23,000 people will be relocated to make way for the Dawei deep sea port.
DOWNSTREAM CONSEQUENCES: Flooding along the Paw Baw Law River in Papun district is directly related to deforestation and erosion from gold mining.
The Dawei industrial zone will cover a 204 square kilometre area and comprise a petrochemical complex, oil and gas refineries, a steel mill, fertiliser plant and a coal-fired power station.
Nay Min claimed a foreign company dammed the river that provided water to his family's land, and is devastated that his land is now polluted.
''They flooded our land with salt water and we couldn't grow rice _ we have 4.8 hectares. We talked to the company and the local authorities, they said they would compensate us, but in reality, we were ignored and got nothing. We don't want to move, but if we can't grow rice we will have to.''
Zaw Myo chips in and adds weight to Nay Min's words. ''I don't want to move, this is my home. We've been here for generation after generation. We can't grow in the area they [the government] want us to relocate to. The water is salty, useless for growing. Money will never be enough to compensate for the loss of my home, I love it.''
WORSE FOR ETHNIC PEOPLE
Professor Desmond Ball of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, said that while the current democratic reform process in Myanmar is encouraging, he fears that in the short-term, the situation in some of the country's ethnic areas will get worse.
Mr Ball is a long-time Myanmar watcher and an outspoken critic of successive Myanmar military regimes, and points out that as the country opens up to foreign investment the military will grab land from ethnic communities.
''Local companies, often owned by army personnel and backed up by army units, will unquestionably move to displace ethnic peoples from land that might hold valuable minerals, or farmland that can be used for commercial rice, rubber and corn plantations, or areas usable for important and profitable infrastructures projects.''
Mr Ball explained that what is happening in Myanmar is to be expected as the country moves from a military regime to a fledgling form of democracy.
''It's typical. As all countries emerge from civil war, one of the features of early democratisation is to get rid of ethnic minorities and take over their land and property. Myanmar is still a military country and all ethnic people know about the abuses, including land expropriation and forced displacement of villagers, committed during major investment projects.''
DOUBLE STANDARDS
Based in the Netherlands, the Transnational Institute (TNI) is an independent research and policy think-tank that has written several reports on Myanmar. Last month it released a report titled ''Developing Disparity _ Regional Investment in Burma's [Myanmar's] Borderlands''. It raises concerns that as Myanmar attracts increased investment from development it lacks the institutional and governance capacity to manage the impact on local communities.
The report notes that despite the government updating laws and regulations it ''does not have the capacity or political will to ensure that such foreign investment is properly regulated''.
The TNI cites that Myanmar is ranked 180 out of 183 countries on Transparency International's annual Corruption Perception Index, ahead of only Somalia and North Korea.
The report warns that, ''the government's regulatory policies and practices, particularly in the lucrative extraction industries, do not meet international standards.''
The TNI points out that many projects paid for by foreign investment ''do not meet their own domestic legal standards'', and highlights that both ''Thai and Chinese companies began logging along Burma's border after these countries had banned domestic logging on environmental grounds.''
The report echoes the KHRG's findings, that infrastructure development and the extraction of natural resources both involve large numbers of land grabs.
Headlines on the Karen News website in recent months detail a long list of stories that tell of displacement, land grabs, villagers demanding that companies return land, forced relocation, complaints of lack of proper compensation, mining pollution, homes bulldozed to make way for development, the lack of laws to protect farmers, and so on.
The TNI states that, ''media reports, corroborated by NGO studies, indicate that land acquisitions for development projects are causing widespread social, economic and political instability''.
Besides getting media coverage for their land rights grievances, farmers are taking their complaints to the country's politicians. The TNI reports that the newly formed Land Acquisition Investigative Commission had received more than 2,000 land-conflict cases. The TNI also reports that individual members of parliament had received hundreds of complaints.
''MPs from ethnic political parties as well as Burman-majority National Democratic Force and National Unity parties have repeatedly stressed in parliament the threats posed to farmers by land confiscation.''
The KHRG's report calls attention to the fact that Myanmar's laws give the government all the authority it needs to seize land.
Chapter 1, Article 37 of Myanmar's 2008 constitution leaves no doubt who owns the country's land. It states that, ''the State is the ultimate owner of all the land, and natural resources above and below the ground, above and beneath the water and within the atmosphere within its territorial boundary''.
Saw Albert said that two new laws, the Vacant Fallow and Virgin Lands Management Law and the Farmland Law, passed by Myanmar's parliament in March of last year, do not benefit ethnic villagers, and he added that farmers now worry that land they leave fallow could be grabbed.
The KHRG report say the new laws allow the government to transfer ''wasteland'' to companies for the ''purpose of agriculture production, livestock farming and aquaculture, mining and other purposes deemed to be in the long term national interest of the State or the public without any requirement to consult the local communities in the project area''.
The TNI points out that many ethnic communities do not have ''legal paper'' or official deeds to prove ownership of land and rely on ''customary laws [to] govern the right to use land''. The TNI says the authorities rarely ''respect customary rights. The conflict between state and customary laws and practices in land management creates the conditions for the farmers to be dispossessed of their lands in upland ethnic regions.''
In the KHRG report, a situation update written in June, 2012, by a member of the community in Thanton Township, gives an example of how unscrupulous companies and corrupt government officials use the law to steal villagers' land.
''They came and made rubber plantations. The company owner cooperated with the [Myanmar army] general. They came to the villages and looked for places where villagers have not done [anything with the land], and then they said it is uncultivated land. Then they started [planting rubber trees]. Later, step by step, they started buying peoples' land. There are some villagers who lack knowledge, so they sold their land. It causes problems for villagers, even to find firewood.''
Myanmar's reforms have created a form of double-think among the international community _ as indicated by a comment from a Washington-based government official who told Spectrum, ''the narrative on Burma has to be positive _ our bad news stories are Iraq and Afghanistan''.
Mr Ball agrees to the double-think on Myanmar and points to the country's current status as the world's No1 drug producer and to the ongoing militarisation in ethnic regions.
''The government is still oppressive, but it won't last forever. It is vitally important all forms of pressure on it from international and local organisations.''
The TNI concluded that, ''The politics of agrarian reform will determine whether the country's political and economic changes will benefit the population overall, or only the urban elite.''
MISSING MOUNTAIN: Above, a gold mining project owned by Myanmar, Thai and Chinese investors in Thatom township in the Kwingalay area.
GRASS-ROOTS MOVEMENT: Left, villagers affected by the Toh Boh dam project mount a protest against it.