Hunting the Junta

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Burma's military rulers are notorious for using brute force. Now a human-rights report accuses them of using that force against the country's ethnic-minority populations. Released last week, "Dying Alive: A Legal Assessment of Human Rights in Burma" is 600 pages long and was three years in the making. The author is British human-rights researcher Guy Horton, who was inspired to do the study by his friend, British academic Michael Aris, the late husband of pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Produced with funds from the Dutch government and non profit organizations, the report draws on material collected from Horton's own trips to Burma plus a wide range of documents, photographs and maps sourced from different Burma-interest groups. It's the first time that alleged abuses by the junta—among them systematic rape and forced labor—have been so comprehensively documented and analyzed. Taken as a whole, claims Horton, the litany of atrocities may add up to ethnic cleansing of Burma's minorities like the Karen, the Karrenni and the Shan. "What's taking place in Burma is not mass killing like in Rwanda," he told TIME. "It's a slow, indirect form of destruction."

Burma's failure to improve its human-rights record is testing the world's patience. The Bush Administration has announced it will renew sanctions against the junta, citing the government's suppression of the country's democratic opposition. And with Burma set to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) next year, its neighbors are trying to persuade the country's military dictators to "voluntarily" give up their turn, so as to avoid the embarrassing prospect of the U.S. and E.U. boycotting the forum's meetings. On that, at least, Rangoon appears to be listening: Sihasak Phuangketkeow, Thailand's Foreign Ministry spokesman, told TIME the generals had agreed to "bear in mind the larger interests of ASEAN." But that's unlikely to include the interests of Burma's people.