By Htoo Chit, Director of the Foundation for Education and Development (FED), formerly Grassroots HRE

As a Burmese community leader and long-time human rights activist, I was invited to visit a Thai government Child Care Center in Bangkok. More than 300 hundred young girls were living there under the protection of the Thai government. Some of them were Burmese. Though from many different backgrounds and having endured many different kinds of abuse, the girls shared a common history of having faced horrific and often sexually abusive human rights violations. A Thai human rights activist had invited me to visit the Center because he wanted me to meet the young women there who were Burmese. His invitation was both thoughtful and kind. The Burmese victims were feeling terribly isolated and alone. They needed to tell their stories. They needed to be heard, in their own language.

“Are you Burmese?” one of the girls, Mu Naw, asks me in Burmese, in a Karen ethnic accent. She looks to be younger than sixteen and is eager to share her experience. “Yes,” I answer, and soon realize that this girl, who should be in high school, not working as a domestic, has been brutally tortured.

“I worked as house maid at a Thai family’s house in Bangkok for eight months where I was often tortured by my employer,” she begins. “I was beaten or kicked when I made any small mistake because I didn’t understand the Thai language. I began to think my employer had mental problems because she was always angry with me. She always beat me and threw things at me-- like knifes, plates, spoons and even a pestle for pounding chilies,” Mu Naw explains, in tears.

She shows me her head, arms and legs. I am horrified to see scars on her head and more than 30 stitches. There are bruise marks and lacerations on her whole body. It was impossible not to be furious with the perpetrator of these violent crimes.

My anger has no time to subside. The next victim at the Center, Kon Wot, a young Mon girl, was gang raped by a group of Thais in Koh Kow Khaung island in Phang-Nga province in 2006. “I was raped by four people. I was terribly afraid and ashamed and I tried to escape, but they threatened me with knives and beat me,” she says. “Fortunately, some Thai people helped me and sent me to a monastery.”

We wanted to prosecute this savage crime, and began by sending Kon Wot to the local hospital in order to get a medical report from a doctor. The hospital concurred that she had been raped by more than one man. We felt relieved to have such official evidence for a case, and advised the family to initiate a lawsuit, but Kon Wot’s father refused.

“My daughter is still young and is going to marry one day. She will face problems in the future if she gets involved in a lawsuit around having been raped,” her father pleaded. “Our society is very traditional and most of the men do not want to marry a girl who has been raped. We have to move to another province and keep this quiet,” said her father. There was no changing his mind.

In 2006, a young girl attending one of the Grassroots Learning Centers was raped by a Thai man on her way home from school. I went to meet with her at the hospital and she told me, “My house is five minutes from the main road. While I was walking there, a Thai guy pulled up next to me and told me to get into his car. I couldn’t run away because he had a gun and I was scared he’d shoot me. He then drove away and soon parked somewhere more isolated and raped me in his car. After that, he dropped me back near the road,” said Mee Kan, a little Tavoy girl.

“Can you can imagine how I am feeling?  My daughter is only 12 years old,” the mother of this young victim tells me with tears in her eyes. She’s quite right. I actually can imagine because I too am a parent. What I feel most of all is rage and the imperative of doing something to stop this brutality.

Though the Burmese military ratified the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women CEDAW in 1997, Burmese women and girls still face these kinds of human rights violations in Burma and in Thailand. They also endure domestic violations in their own homes, a common phenomenon police too often see as “family business” in which they are reluctant to interfere. Something must be done, starting with more awareness of the severity of the problem.

To all my sisters of all ages and backgrounds, I am committed to working for your rights, as women, as human beings.  I believe wholeheartedly that the human rights situation will not improve, and might even deteriorate further, if we allow the current brutal military regime to govern Burma. We cannot sit silently and watch our people’s rights being abused. We must act.

We must fight for the human rights of our people!