During 2006, Burma continued to be characterised by wanton criminality of state officers at all levels and the absence of the rule of law and rational government. The growing numbers of bloody assaults, rapes and killings of ordinary people by police and other state officers in the cities and towns of Burma are exposing the myth of “state stability” that the military government uses to justify its prolonged existence. Most of the victims of such crimes are innocent people accused of ordinary crimes’ if anything’often due to personal grievances or out of favour to others. The officials responsible usually completely ignore ordinary criminal and judicial procedures, have no interest in genuine investigation methods and present no avenues for anyone to make a complaint. Those who attempt to complain are usually made the target of countercomplaints, such as farmer U Tin Kyi who was imprisoned for having allegedly resisted efforts to turn adjacent land into a plantation under a government scheme. Although a few people linked to similar cases involving the International Labour Organisation (ILO) were released from detention, their cases and the circumstances under which they were freed were exceptional. Unfortunately, none of the people remaining in detention can be visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as the group has been blocked from visiting prisoners since December 2005. In October, the government also ordered five ICRC field offices to close without apparently any explanation.
Internally displaced people, refugees and others in remote areas and border regions of the country continue to be subject to some of the worst human rights abuses in Asia, mostly at the hands of the military. In October, the Bangkok-based Thailand Burma Border Consortium reported that more than a million people are now displaced in eastern Burma alone with 82,000 forced from their homes in the last year through the systematic destruction or forced abandonment of more than 200 villages. Out of this population, more than half are believed to be living in the jungles and hills due to “systematic human rights abuses and humanitarian atrocities.”
