Thousands in Mandalay Suffer Forced Labor

by Richard S. Ehrlich

MANDALAY, Burma -- Thousands of men, women and children, moving in dense clusters like fearful ants here in the heart of Burma, are ordered each day to descend into warm, mosquito-infested mud under the stern eyes of soldiers.

In one of the world's biggest examples of mass forced labor, every family in Mandalay -- Burma's second-largest city -- has been commanded to work without pay, from morning to night, repeatedly, under the blistering tropical sun.

They are dredging silt and filth from the bottom of the Royal Palace's five-mile-long (8.3-km) moat, and hammering rocks into its banks, so that it will look prettier for foreign tourists.

No one is sure how long the renovation of the moat will take to finish, and each family has been told to contribute one person nearly each week.

The project began in mid-1994 in Burma, a nation also known as Myanmar.

Discreetly pointing at the mass of people heaving stones and mud up and down the nearby moat, an artist said in an interview, "I worked there seven times already.

"Even my wife had to work. We have to stand up to our knees in the mud and keep digging.

"We are like prisoners. Prisoners without chains.

"We start at 6 a.m. and work in groups of 15 people," the artist said.

"If our group works fast, we can go home maybe at 4 p.m.

"If we work slow, we have to stay later.

"Everyone in Mandalay has a depression because of this, but we cannot refuse because then we must go to jail.

"Please tell the BBC, tell Voice of America. No one knows about us."

A hotel receptionist near the palace, eyeing the workers and the army overseers, said in an interview, "If you don't want to work, you can pay somebody 150 to 200 kyats," equal to about 1.50 to two US dollars at the popular, albeit illegal rate.

"I paid three times already. He also paid," the man said, pointing to another receptionist.

"She also paid," he added, pointing to a nearby woman.

"We pay somebody who has come from the villages to do hard work.

"We get a list of their names from our neighborhood headman."

A teacher, standing in a street near the palace moat, said in an interview, "I paid five times already. It is half my monthly salary.

"It is terrible. It is our oppression.

"But we can't do that hard work. We are white-collar workers. Intellectuals can't work like that in the hot sun."

Some of Mandalay's exquisite Buddhist temples are crammed with impoverished village workers who have come to town to work in the moat, but have nowhere else to stay.

In a surprising display of disregard for traditionally pristine Buddhist temples, they cook their meals on campfires inside ornate shrines, and hang their laundry in front of bigger-than-life statues of Buddha, where they have been allowed to sleep on the floor each night.

According to Western diplomats, the US State Department, London-based Amnesty International and other human rights observers, Mandalay's forced labor is mild compared with other work camps which dot this traumatized Southeast Asian nation.

These include people ordered to build a southern railway line, various road crews, plus the ubiquitous involuntary porters for the military during its seemingly endless offensives against jungle-based minority ethnic guerrillas.

The Royal Palace, also known as Mandalay Fort, is a giant square, protected by a wall and a rectangular moat one-and-a-third miles (2.16 kms) long on each of its four sides, totaling five miles (8.3 kms) of wall and moat.

It takes a full minute merely to stroll across one of the bridges spanning the width of the moat, over water graced by lilies.

The palace, built in the 1850s, was destroyed in World War Two when the British bombarded Japanese and Burmese soldiers who were inside.

All that remains is the outer wall -- pierced by 12 ornate gates symbolizing the 12 signs of the zodiac -- plus the moat, which almost reaches the base of pagoda-studded Mandalay Hill.

To supply the forced laborers, a narrow-gauge train brings large, rough-cut boulders from an outlying quarry to the foot of Mandalay Hill.

There, the big stones are unloaded from the trains under the watchful eyes of soldiers, armed with assault rifles, who have hurriedly set up a base to supervise the forced labor.

The troops sleep nearby on the dusty floors of 16 tall, teakwood royal pavilions.

The soldiers erected flimsy rattan screens for privacy, and cook on campfires, while their laundry hangs from the pavilions' thick teak beams.

Large, old, battered trucks, in the worst possible condition, then transport the big rocks from the base of Mandalay Hill to the opposite side of the Royal Palace, and right up to the crowds swarming the moat.

The boulders are unloaded into piles next to the moat, hammered into smaller chunks, and set into the moat's sloping banks.

The trucks also take away the moat's silt-rich mud to an unknown destination.

Troops do not display weapons while overseeing the busy residents working directly on the moat, who number about 5,000 people on any given day.

The huge cluster of unsmiling, sweating Burmese pass rocks and mud from person to person, similar to people battling floodwaters.

A senior Western diplomat said in an interview that the huge Mandalay moat project is illegal "slave labor."

Another senior Western diplomat based in Burma's capital, Rangoon, said in an interview, "Mandalay is the most obvious example of the problem.

"The worst atrocities happen in other places, where you can't go.

"We're very concerned about Burma's forced labor, or corvee labor," he added, comparing it to the unpaid work which past feudal European peasants owed their so-called lords.

"The majority of Burmese living in areas under government control will have done forced labor, unpaid, for the government at some time," the diplomat said. "It is done all over the country.

"It might be once, every five to six years, to improve a road.

"Around Mandalay or Rangoon, where there are many big projects, it is more often.

"They are also extending the railway from Ye to Tavoy, hacking through virgin forest and malaria-infested swamps," the diplomat added, pointing to those towns on a large map of Burma hanging on a wall inside his embassy.

"No one can see those camps.

"People there can't bribe themselves out of working there. And there is no medical care," the diplomat said.

The railway line, which begins in Rangoon, runs south along the Andaman Sea and -- for now -- ends in Ye.

A 90-mile (150-km) extension will eventually bring it to Tavoy's sheltered harbor, and increase the military's hold on Burma's southern leg.

"Down in Ye and Tavoy, people have been dying" from forced labor, the diplomat said.

"The Burmese government doesn't even care."

The military government routinely denies all reports of such human rights abuses, despite repeated documentation by Western governments and organizations.

"Around Taunggyi town there is a lot of porterage going on," the diplomat added, referring to the military's tradition of forcing men to act as human mules to carry ammunition, food and other supplies for troops during marches into the jungle.

Taunggyi is the capital of mountainous, northeastern Shan state where opium warlord Khun Sa has been fighting against the government, on and off, for the past few decades.

Asked about frequent reports of porters being worked, or beaten, to death by the military, the envoy said, "It varies from command to command, and depends on how sadistic the commander is."

Many residents of Mandalay, populated by 460,000 people, said in interviews that the moat project is to improve the city's appearance for an upcoming, official, "Visit Myanmar Year 1996" campaign, aimed at attracting foreign tourists.

All four roads along the moat were widened during 1994, in another unpopular project, which forced hundreds of residents to suddenly lose their homes because their buildings were in the way.

Hundreds of others had to chop off the front of their buildings, because they overlapped into the new street.

A glum restaurant owner said in an interview, "They want to make Mandalay like a big city for tourists and foreign investors.

"They force people to work because the government doesn't have any money, and can't pay the people to work.

"Everybody hates this government, but cannot refuse them anything because the government has the gun."

According to an official announcement in the government's New Light of Myanmar newspaper, military officers recently "inspected dredging of Mandalay moat," and "expressed satisfaction for the active public participation in the work."

The regime's officials were shown, in uniform, standing atop neatly laid stones, and gazing down into newly dredged mud.

Copyright by Richard S. Ehrlich

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