Children as young as 11 are being forcibly recruited into the Myanmar army, where they are coerced into human rights abuses including mass executions, an in-depth report showed on Tuesday.
The 220-page study from Human Rights Watch estimated that more than 20% of the soldiers currently serving in the Myanmar national army could be children under the age of 18.
”Myanmar has a poor human rights record, but its record on child soldiers is the worst in the world,” said Jo Becker, advocacy director of the New York-based watchdog’s Children’s Rights Division.
The overwhelming majority of Myanmar’s child soldiers are found in the national army, although armed opposition groups use them, as well.
”Myanmar’s army preys on children, using threats, intimidation and often violence to force young boys to become soldiers,” said Becker.
”To be a boy in Myanmar today means facing the constant risk of being picked up off the street, forced to commit atrocities against villagers, and never seeing family again.”
The Human Rights Watch report, ”My Gun was as Tall as Me: Child Soldiers in Burma,” claims to be the most comprehensive study of its kind and drew on interviews with more than three dozen current and former child soldiers.
According to the report, army recruiters focus on boys at train and bus stations and markets, threatening them with jail if they fail to join.
The boys are given no opportunity to contact their families, and are sent to camps where they undergo weapons training and are routinely beaten and brutally punished if they try to escape. Salaing Toe Aung, recruited when he was 16, recalled a recaptured escapee who was beaten about the head and back with sticks for 30 minutes before being placed, unconscious, in leg stocks for a week.
”He couldn’t eat anything and they sent him to the hospital. He died in the hospital,” Aung said.
Khin Maunh Than was 13 when his army unit captured 15 women and children, including three babies, and were ordered by their headquarters to shoot them all. ”Six of the corporals loaded their guns and shot them. They fired on auto,” Than said. ”After the mothers were killed, they killed the babies. They swung them by their legs and smashed them against a rock. I saw it.”
Myanmar’s army has doubled in size since 1988, and with an estimated 350 000 soldiers, it is now one of the largest in Southeast Asia. Human Rights Watch said estimates put the number of conscripts under the age of 18 at more than 70 000.
”The international community has increasingly recognised the use of child soldiers as unacceptable,”
said Becker. ”Myanmar’s armed forces and groups must immediately stop recruiting children and demobilise all children in their ranks.” – Sapa-AFP