In real life guns don’t sound like they do in Hollywood movies. They are more like firecrackers. Bombs being dropped by planes don’t sound the same either. I learnt first-hand how they really sound when I was 14 years old and the Burmese army attacked my village in Karen State, Burma. It was 1995.
The government of Burma had been attacking my people, the Karen, for almost 50 years, but in the 1990s the attacks escalated. More soldiers came, and they had new guns and equipment. Following the failed democracy uprising in 1988 a new dictatorship took over the country. They opened up the country to trade and investment, and ploughed up to 80 per cent of their annual budget into the military. My people pay the price with their blood.
It was only when I was forced to flee my country that I realised other countries were funding and arming the soldiers that destroyed my village and were slaughtering my people. How could countries sell them guns when they knew they were being used for ethnic cleansing?
For the most part our appeals for help from the international community have fallen on deaf ears. The targeted economic sanctions we asked for haven’t been imposed, the United Nations Security Council hasn’t passed a resolution calling for the restoration of democracy, and my people still die from preventable and treatable diseases by the thousand because we don’t get enough aid. If the international community won’t proactively intervene to help us, the very least it could do is stop arming the regime that is killing us.
So my heart leapt with hope when Meg Munn MP, Foreign Office minister responsible for Burma, announced this month that the UK would support a UN arms embargo. While the European Union and United States have arms embargoes, they have not so far made any effort to secure a global embargo. And until March the European Union in particular had taken no significant action to stop trade and investment in Burma. In effect, the EU was saying ‘we won’t sell you arms, but we will give you the money so you can buy them from someone else’.
The case for a global arms embargo is obvious. On our TV screens last September we saw soldiers open fire on monks peacefully protesting in Rangoon. Out of sight in the jungles of Eastern Burma the regime is engaged in ethnic cleansing, destroying more than 3,000 villages in the past 12 years. The UN itself has accused the regime of breaking the Geneva Convention by deliberately targeting civilians.
However, while UK support for an arms embargo is welcome, support alone is not enough. We need to see the British government actively working to secure an embargo. They should build an international consensus for an embargo, securing EU support, and talking to Burma’s Asian neighbours. While economic sanctions might be controversial in some Asian countries, it is hard to see how they can defend arms sales to the regime.
Let’s start lobbying MPs and the government now to persuade them to turn words into action, and cut off arms sales to one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world.