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The most systematic and burdensome abuse inflicted on villagers by SPDC military units and authorities is forced labour, and the orders included below give some impression of the constant stream of demands for all kinds of labour which villages have to face. They include demands for one person per family to go for forced unpaid road labour, various numbers of villagers to go as porters carrying munitions and supplies for mobile military columns, forced labour building and maintaining Army camps, carrying Army rations and supplies, acting as unarmed sentries, military messengers and general servants at Army camps, and various other forms of labour. We have also included orders which demand bullock carts and boats for use by the Army, because such orders implicitly force the owner to go along and do forced labour driving his/her bullock team or boat. Orders for villagers to do forced labour as sentries and for village elders to ‘report information’ to the Army, which are also forms of forced labour, are included in the next section entitled "Orders to Provide Military Support". Note that many of these orders demanding forced labour were issued well after May 14, 1999, which is when the SPDC leadership claims to have issued a general order to all of their military and administrative units to halt conscription of forced labour under the ‘Villages Act' and the 'Towns Act’. In practice, the military and SPDC authorities almost never even make reference to these Acts when demanding forced labour from villages.
Most of the orders are addressed to the village head, who must then decide which villagers must go to fill the quota demanded by the Army. A rotating system between the families of the village is generally used to do this, in order to spread the burden as evenly as possible. However, with so many different forms of forced labour being constantly demanded by every Army unit and SPDC authority in the area, families find that they must send someone for forced labour at least once every week or two. Some of the demands are on an ad hoc basis, such as orders to spend a week building a road or a day fencing an Army camp, while other orders demand ‘servants’ on a ‘rotating’ basis, which means that the village must provide a certain number of forced labourers on a rotation of a few days to a week. The villagers must take along their own food and stay at the Army camp for their rotation, doing labour as messengers, sentries, building and maintaining buildings, bunkers, trenches and fences, clearing scrub, cutting and hauling firewood, hauling water, short-distance portering and any other duties demanded of them. They are usually not released until their replacements arrive; hence some of the orders below in which Army officers write things such as "Send the replacements for the 5 servants because they have been here for 7 days already." Some orders specifically demand men or that no children be sent (see Orders #59 and #101), but most orders leave this up to the villagers. Women often go because the men do not dare face the soldiers (see for reference Order #35), and children often go so that their parents can continue to work in the fields. Order #106 specifically demands that ‘all those aged above 12 years … including women’ go to the camp the following day for forced labour. Many of the orders demand that the village elders personally accompany the labourers from their village to the camp (using language such as ‘Gentlemen, come yourselves to bring them’); this is so that on arrival the officers can interrogate the elders for intelligence on opposition movements and the activities of villagers, and so that the elders can be put to supervising the forced labour of their villagers.
It is difficult for villagers to go for all of this forced labour, so they are often delinquent in complying with the orders. Usually the Army responds by sending threatening and angry letters, often written in red ink, until after the third letter the village has little option but to comply or face the possibility of very serious punishment which usually includes the arrest and torture of village elders. None of the labour mentioned in the orders below is undertaken voluntarily, but always under the direct or implied threat that the village elders or villagers will face serious punishments for any failure to comply. Some of the orders below warn that any failure to comply will be punished, while others mete out specific punishments to villagers who do not perform, demand fines or replacement labourers from the villages, and demand the names of any villagers who have failed to appear or have run away from forced labour (see for example Orders #28, 29, 32, 107 and 113). Order #118 threatens that the village will be forcibly relocated to an Army-controlled site if it fails to complete the assigned forced labour clearing a roadside, while Order #107 warns that the Army will shell the village if the village head does not bring 5 villagers for forced labour. The military authorities usually refer to the work and the labourers themselves as ‘loh ah pay’, a Burmese term referring to a traditional practice of contributing one’s labour for small village or temple projects in order to earn Buddhist merit; however, the labour referred to in these orders has no connection whatever to the type of work meant by ‘loh ah pay’. Rather than translate this misuse of ‘loh ah pay’, we have left it intact where it occurs in the orders. One type of forced labour is called ‘set tha’, which essentially means forced labour as military messengers, general servants, errand-runners and occasional sentries at Army camps. It is important to note that not only do these orders demand forced labour, but after being written by an Army official they are almost always delivered to the villages by civilians doing ‘set tha’ forced labour as messengers. Many of the orders also refer to forced labourers as ‘servants’ (‘wontan’), ‘loh ah pay servants’, or occasionally ‘operations servants’, which means frontline porters.
Some of the orders included below demand payment of fees in lieu of forced labour. These can take various forms. In the most common form, the villagers simply cannot do all the forced labour demanded of them and still produce a crop to survive, so they hire someone to go in their place or pay a ‘fee’ which is essentially a bribe to the military in lieu of going. This is sometimes disguised under the wording of ‘paying the Army to hire labourers’, but in fact the Army simply pockets the money and demands others to do forced labour instead. In some cases the military demands far more labour than is actually required because they are actually seeking payment rather than labourers. Another form of forced labour fees is shown in Orders #127 and #128. These orders have been issued by the head of a Village Tract Peace & Development Council who is working closely with the military in the area. In this area, the military gives orders to the Village Tract telling them how many forced labourers they want from the villages. The Village Tract authorities know that the villages cannot provide the labour, so they hire itinerant labourers through agents in town to fill the military’s quota. They then divide the burden of forced labourers between the villages in the village tract based on the size (number of households) of each village, and send out an order for each village to reimburse them for the hiring price at a rate of 4,000 Kyat (or in some cases 4,250 Kyat) per forced labourer. Essentially this is the most indirect form of forced labour, where each village must gather money from each family, which is then used to pay the village tract authorities to hire labourers to meet the military’s demands. In most regions the forced labour works on a more direct basis, and even in this particular region this system does not prevent the military from issuing ad hoc demands for forced labour directly to the villages on a regular basis.
The orders below have been divided into 3 categories: general forced
labour, forced labour on infrastructure, and forced labour fees. ‘General Forced Labour’
mainly includes rotating and ad hoc labour at Army camps, portering, forced labour
as messengers, servants, etc. Many of these orders do not specify the exact nature of the
forced labour, so some of these actually relate to infrastructure. Orders under ‘Forced Labour on
Infrastructure’ include those for building and rebuilding roads and
bridges, and several orders forcing villages to clear the scrub along roadsides to create
a ‘killing ground’ which makes it harder for opposition troops to ambush SPDC
columns and convoys, and also makes it harder for opposition troops to move across the
roads. Orders under ‘Forced Labour Fees’
directly relate to the collection of money from villages in lieu of forced labour. Note
that other sections of this report also include orders which either directly or indirectly
entail forced labour, particularly the sections "Orders
to Provide Military Support" and "Extortion
of Food, Money and Materials".
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Regarding the above subjects, [we] already gave orders to the Chairperson, so if
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