Dear the Honourable Minister Lawrence Cannon,
We would like to extend our sincere appreciation to the Government of Canada for enacting the toughest sanctions against the military regime in Burma and providing much needed humanitarian assistance to the people of Burma.
We also very much appreciate your August 14, 2010 statement providing a strong and specific response to the announcement from the military regime of Burma setting November 7, 2010 as the date for national elections.
A growing group of politicians, legal experts, human rights leaders, human rights organizations and governments are asking for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma. The governments of Britain, Australia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and recently the United States, 80 Canadian Parliamentarians, a former senior legal adviser to the ICC, former and current UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, the Burma Lawyers Council, and the Christian Solidarity Network are among the governments, organizations and individuals who have deplored the situation in Burma and called on the international community to act.
On June 2, 2009, Geoffrey Nice, the principal prosecution trial attorney in the case against Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Pedro Nikken, executive committee member of the International Commission of Jurists and former President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, wrote in the Washington Post and urged the UN Security Council to authorize a Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma.
In March 2010, the International Tribunal in New York, organized by the Nobel Women Initiatives, called for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Burmese regime.
Also in March 2010, at the UN Human Rights Council session, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Situation in Burma, Tomas Ojea Quintana, formally urged the UN to consider the possibility of establishing a Commission of Inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the regime.
In his report, Quintana said: “Given the gross and systematic nature of human rights violations in Myanmar [Burma] over a period of many years, and the lack of accountability, there is an indication that those human rights violations are the result of a state policy that involves authorities in the executive, military, and judiciary at all levels.”
As mentioned in the Washington Post on August 20, 2010, the evidence against Burma's junta has been piling up for many years. Thousands upon thousands of girls and women have been raped by the Burmese army as a tactic of war; children have been press-ganged to serve as porters; civilians have been used as human minesweepers in operations against armed ethnic groups; 3,500 villages have burned to the ground in recent years; millions of people have been forced from their homes. These are some of the many crimes against humanity sponsored by the generals who rule their Southeast Asian nation of 50 million people.
The Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) and the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN) compiled data illustrating that, since July 27, 2009, the regime's troops have burned down over 500 houses, scores of granaries, and forcibly relocated almost 40 villages, mostly in Laikha township in Shan State. This is the largest forced relocation since 1996-1998, when over 300,000 villagers were uprooted in southern and central Shan State, most of whom have since fled to Thailand.
Furthermore, at least 75,000 people in Eastern Burma Karen State were forced to leave their homes during the past year, meaning the number of IDPs in the area now exceeds half a million and is comparable to the scale of displacement in Darfur, according to a recent press release from the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC).
The decision of the US to begin consultations with key international and regional partners to support the establishment of a UN Commission of Inquiry into the Burmese junta's alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes is a critical move but needs support from other leading democratic countries such as Canada.
On April 16, 2010, we sent you a joint letter and urged you to support a Commission of Inquiry into war crimes and crimes against humanity on Burma. The letter was jointly issued by Burma Ethnic Nationalities Network – Canada, Burmese Muslim Association (Canada), Burmese Students Democratic Organization Canada, Canadian Campaign for Free Burma, Free Burma Federation, International Burmese Monks Organization (Canada) and the National League for Democracy LA Canada Branch.
The junta’s crimes are the concern of the international community, which has a duty to take care of an oppressed Burmese public unable to make its own international appeal for justice. An Inquiry can signal to the most offensive dictators around the world that they cannot escape justice by selling off their nations' timber and natural gas, or by scheduling, as has been done by Sr. General Than Shwe, fraudulent elections aimed at civilizing their authoritarian regimes.
Therefore, we would like to repeat our appeal to the Government of Canada to support an establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the regime; and play a leading role in coordinating the necessary actions with allies in the United Nations.
Yours truly,
Zaw Kyaw
Spokesperson, Canadian Campaign for Free Burma
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