April 27, 2007	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 09, 1428

BANGKOK: A regional UN body that claims to care about Asia’s economically weak and marginalised is being taken to task for helping pave the way to achieve the opposite — strengthening a military dictatorship with development projects on the back of people under its oppressive grip.

The accusation levelled at the Bangkok-based Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) adds another feature to the on-going debate about the implications of international development and humanitarian assistance to Myanmar. At the heart of this dispute is the Asian Highway, a flagship initiative of ESCAP that aims to link 32 countries across Asia through a network of roads. “ESCAP is helping the (Myanmar regime) get funds” for building a roadway that has involved “forced labour and land confiscation,” Kevin Heppner, founder of the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG), charged this week. “You cannot achieve sustainable development through forced labour. You only create more poverty.”

A section of the road that cuts through eastern Myanmar, home to the country’s Karen ethnic community, has been built over rice fields for which no compensation was given to the farmers whose lands were appropriated by the junta, reveals a 121-page report released by KHRG. “Local villagers were forced to construct both the road and the drainage ditches running alongside.”

The revelations in the report, ‘Development by Decree: the politics of poverty and control in Karen State,’ is only the latest charge of forced labour that the Myanmar’s junta is being hit with. Such brutal measures to build other roads, construct buildings for the military and farm confiscated lands across this South-east Asian country have been regularly highlighted and condemned by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Victims of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the Myanmar’s junta calls itself, are largely villagers from Myanmar’s ethnic minorities living along the country’s borders. The Karens have been particularly targeted because the Myanmar’s military is locked in a decades-long ethnic conflict with Karen rebels.

“We have not received any reports or even claims that forced labour is being used anywhere in the development of the Asian Highway,” Barry Cable, director of ESCAP’s transport and tourism division, told reporters. “In the development of highways around the region, confiscation of land is not used by the governments.”

The debate on aid and financial assistance to Myanmar has become increasingly polarised, with a continuing flow of reports fuelling more heat.

For its part, though, the SPDC appears unfazed, as it continues to spread aid and development assistance according to the only model it is familiar with. “The military follows a top-down development approach across the country,” says Win Min, a Myanmar researcher.—Dawn/The IPS News Service