In my last post on Burma, I reported the second meeting in as many months between Senator Jim Webb and Nyan Win, the foreign minister for the Burmese junta. This time the meeting was in Washington, which required that Win be granted a visa waiver (he, like the rest of the junta’s senior figures, is on a prohibited list). The ostensible reason for his trip was to visit the Burmese embassy to check on needed repairs. But that excuse is absurd on its face, and no sooner had Nyan Win arrived then Senator Jim Webb appeared at the embassy to discuss steps to improve U.S.-junta relations. Nyan Win then took off for a special tour of the White House and Washington monuments — because what war criminal wouldn’t want to thumb his nose at the international community by getting the red carpet treatment at the White House. Webb denies that he facilitated the State Department waiver needed for Win’s trip to Washington, but I stand by my reporting — and in any event, Webb’s eagerness to meet with his new friend is not in dispute. Which is why it’s worth taking a closer look at just who Nyan Win really is. Foreign Minister Nyan Win is actually Major General Nyan Win in the Burmese Army. Before heading up the Foreign Ministry where he became the point man for explaining away the butchery his regime visits on the Burmese people, he was deputy chief of military training for the country’s military. According to Human Rights Watch in their definitive report “My Gun Was As Tall as Me” detailing the role of child soldiers in the Burmese Army, they estimated there could be as many as 70,000 in a force of roughly 300,000-400,000. Training for these child soldiers is brutal. They are beaten, starved, and, because they are conscripted (as in swept up from schools, walking down the street, or pryed from their homes) cut off from all contact with their families. These child soldiers are then deployed as cannon fodder in the regime’s wars against ethnic groups in the country. One child soldier — a 13-year-old — told his debriefer after defecting to the Thai-Burma border that he “was stolen at a bus stop by men in a miltiary truck…We were trained to hate ethnic groups and they must be killed. They said our families no longer exist and the military is our new family.” He also stated that he met a child as young as nine who had also been conscripted. A 9-year-old. Nyan Win supervised — as in planed, ordered, and directed — the taking of children off Burma’s streets, stripping them of their family, and essentially brainwashing and dehumanizing them into doing the regime’s killing. In the junta’s ongoing wars against various ethnic groups, thousands of these children have been killed. They have also committed henious human rights abuses in the name of their new masters — raping and killing come as second nature once all values other than loyalty to the regime are stripped away. “If we killed, we were given food” the child told the debriefer. The HRW report documents testimony from a child soldier (page 93) who witnessed others in his unit massacre women and children. “After the mothers were killed they killed the babies . . . they swung them by their legs and smashed them against a rock.” A follow-up 2007 report titled “Sold to Be Soldiers: The Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers in Burma,” stated “The government’s senior generals tolerate the blatant recruitment of children and fail to punish perpetrators . . . In this environment, army recruiters traffic children at will.” Such are the soldiers in Nyan Win’s army. As foreing minister, Nyan Win sits on a “Central Board” of senior officials. Let me quote from two Articles that serve as the junta’s operating charter:
The junta detains political opponents under Article 7 — a catchall provision — and Nyan Win sits on the Central Board that order’s the arrests. For example, U Tin Oo is held under the state protection act. He is one of the father’s of Burma’s democracy movement and a member of the National League for Democracy’s senior leadership. He is in his 80s and sits in solitary confinement for the crime of believing in freedom and democracy. Many others have been charged under the state protection act as well. Most know what happens in a Burmese prison but for those that need a refresher, this is drawn from the State Department Human Rights Report issued in February:
Nyan Win was a central player involved in rejecting international humanitarian assistance in the months following 2008’s Cyclone Nargis that killed more than 150,000 Burmese and created more than a million refugees. As American, French, and English ships floated offshore with water, medicine, and food, tens of thousands of Burmese died. Why? Because the regime believed saving lives might weaken their rule. It was nothing less than organized murder on a mass scale. Nyan Win is not simply an official of the Burmese regime — he has blood on his hands. So why was the red carpet rolled out for this butcher at the White House? And Senator Webb, was it a good handshake?
