Convicts in Myanmar are used as disposable pack-horses by the military, facing terror and death on jungle battlefields

Yezaw’s journey to hell began with an unpaid restaurant bill. Last May, after the end of his university exams, the 21-year-old met a group of friends for dinner in the city of Mandalay in central Myanmar. Celebrating and drinking freely, they quickly ran up a tab they couldn’t pay. After his girlfriend’s father – a lawyer – accused him of stealing her motorbike to cover the debt, Yezaw was charged, taken to court and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Yezaw – who gave a pseudonym to conceal his identity – was transferred early this year to eastern Karen State near the Thai border. For three months, along with dozens of other prisoners, he was forced to carry supplies for Myanmar’s military, enduring infernal jungle terrain, meagre rations and regular beatings for the smallest of infractions.

The skinny student from Mandalay was just one of hundreds of garden-variety prisoners who were press-ganged into porter duty after last November’s national election, when Karen rebels seized the border town of Myawaddy and launched offensives across Karen State. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) estimated that at least 700 prisoners from 12 prisons and labour camps across the country were subject to such treatment during the recent offensives.

The 70-page report, entitled Dead Men Walking: Convict Porters on the Front Lines in Eastern Burma, documents how civilian prison authorities, in collusion with the military, selected prisoners for porter duty “without any clearly stated criteria” and sent them to conflict areas in a series of coordinated sweeps.

“The men were a mix of serious and petty offenders, but their crimes or willingness to serve were not taken into consideration: only their ability to carry heavy loads of ammunition, food and supplies for more than 17 Tatmadaw [Myanmar army] battalions engaged in operations against ethnic Karen armed groups,” it stated.

Convict porters in blue prison uniforms carry supplies for the Burmese army in northern Karen state, 2011. (Photo: Free Burma Rangers)

The report, based on interviews with 58 convict porters who escaped to Thailand, claims that porters used during offensives between 2009 and 2011 endured “horrific abuses” at the hands of the Tatmadaw, including summary executions, beatings, torture and the practice known as “atrocity demining”, where porters were forced to search for landmines with inadequate equipment and next to no training. HRW and KHRG describe the practice as a “wilful deferment of military obligation onto a vulnerable civilian population” – and a possible war crime.

In a recent interview on the Thai border, Yezaw, a dark-skinned youth in blue jeans and a t-shirt, recalled the day when the authorities at Meiktila prison, some 127 kilometres from Mandalay, included his name in a roll-call of around 70 fellow prisoners. “I thought that we were being sent to a labour camp,” he recalled thinking as the prisoners were loaded into covered trucks and driven away. After three days on the road, Yezaw joined a group of about 30 porters attached to a military unit fighting Karen rebels in rugged country near the Thai border.

Yezaw said mistreatment was the norm. On some days, porters had to re-supply a mountain outpost, marching at breakneck pace for four hours and then digging holes to store the ammunition before returning in the evening. The group was given a small meal of rice twice a day; on special days they received a chunk or two of papaya.

“They didn’t give us water, so we were thirsty but we couldn’t drink. When some people couldn’t carry any more, when they didn’t have energy, the SPDC [government] soldiers beat them and even hit them with their guns,” he said. On one occasion, he says, all the porters were beaten after two of their comrades successfully escaped, on the grounds that they failed to report the escape plan. “We were beaten every day. There was no day where they didn’t beat the porters.”

Dead Men Walking claims that regulations, including one 1999 law banning the use of forced labour by the military, are simply ignored in conflict zones. “Matthew,” an ethnic Chin porter quoted in the report, described how other porters were shot, had their throats cut, or were thrown over steep cliffs by soldiers.

Unique among the horrors, Yezaw said, was being forced to detect the many landmines strewn in conflict areas. Using a long bamboo stick with an attached fork, porters would sweep the ground looking for concealed mines. “If we knew where a landmine was, the prisoners had to take it out,” he said. Given the amateurish tools at their disposal, accidents were common. “I saw two men die because of landmines. With one there was an explosion, and I couldn’t even see the body.”

One night in March, Yezaw and a group of fellow porters escaped to Thailand while the troops in his unit were drinking to celebrate a minor battlefield victory. But for the young man whose youthful overindulgence in far-off Mandalay led into hell and back again, the future remains uncertain. “I dare not to go back to Myanmar,” he said, “so I will just stay here.”

Rights groups say the Burmese military’s use of forced civilian labour has been established policy for at least two decades, as the Tatmadaw has sought to quell a range of revolts along the country’s unstable ethnic periphery. According to the Dead Men Walking report, the 1990s saw civilians taken from cities, towns, and villages to be used as porters on “combat operations or by local officials for development and infrastructure projects”. The use of convict porters dates to as early as 1992, though recent years have seen a sharp increase in the proportion of prisoners being forced into military duty, as locals have fled conflict zones.

“In 2006, the number increased very quickly, because they didn’t have the chance to use villagers like before,” said Poe Shan, KHRG’s programme director. During field trips in northern Karen State in 2007, Poe Shan says he came across the remains of porters who had been executed and abandoned in the jungle.

HRW’s Myanmar researcher David Mathieson described the use of convict porters as a “tried and true method” of supplying remote units under a tight budget. “They’re disposable,” he said of the country’s large prison population. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but if you have a large common criminal population and you have a logistical need in the military for human porters, that’s how they solve that problem.”

Rights groups also say the continuing practice shows how little has changed since last November’s election ushered in a new “civilian” government in Naypyidaw. “Some people thought that the election would be an opportunity for the people in Burma…but in the area where we work it is quite difficult to say that the situation is changing,” said Poe Shan of KHRG. “Instead, the situation is getting worse.”

Earlier this year, Burmese officials admitted to the UN Human Rights Council that inmates are used as army porters, but insisted they are volunteers and face no combat. But the report describes the treatment of porters as a war crime, and calls for a UN investigation. Mathieson said abuses against convict porters would be a crucial part of any potential probe, providing evidence not only of the depth, extent and longevity of abuses in Karen State, but of their continuation beyond last November’s elections.

The use of convict porters showed an element of pre-planning and high-level collusion that he described as “chilling”. “This isn’t something isolated to the borderlands,” Mathieson said. “Someone fairly high up made the decision to clear these prisons.”

[Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, September 2011]