Featured Story
regime; we need real action to
protect the people."
Up the Mountains and Down the Hills
by Hseng Noung Lintner
"My classmates from the surrounding townships told me of the tangerine and pineapple plantations and the waterfalls and hot springs in their villages. But they also told me of the military operations—how Burma's army soldiers burned their villages; how they forced the people to carry heavy loads; how they tortured and killed; how they raped the village women."
I was born in 1961, a year before General Ne Win seized power in Burma. My life has always been affected by dictatorship. Since I was a young girl I have traveled across my homeland from my birthplace in the small town of Hsipaw in Northern Shan State to Southern Shan State where my aunt and uncle lived.
When I was not even five years old I started my education far from home at a boarding school in the capital city Rangoon. I studied there for six years and I learned Burmese, the language of the ethnic Burman majority. There was no chance for me to learn my mother language, as the government did not allow ethnic languages to be taught in government schools.
Every summer holiday, I left the boarding school to visit my aunt and uncle who supported my schooling in Rangoon. I journeyed up the mountains and down the hills, crossing rivers and along the way learning so much about my beautiful country and its people.
I often rode through the mountains for days on the backs of trucks carrying salt, sugar, rice, kerosene, and other goods headed for the government shops. It was on one of these journeys that I learned the term "black market" for the first time. In the government shops there was never enough consumer goods for the public, so the truck drivers and the soldiers who guarded the convoys stole goods and sold them for higher prices to the people.
I remember asking inquisitively why there were so many soldiers and the answer I got was that there might be fighting and that Shan rebels didn't like Shan people who don't speak the Shan language. "They don't scare me," I said. "It's not my fault that I don't speak Shan!"
A War at Home
with her child in a Shan State
internally displaced person's
camp. Governments and NGOs
must continue to work to
support Burmese refugees.
After finishing middle school in 1974 I returned to live with my family in Hsipaw. My classmates from the surrounding villages told me of the tangerine and pineapple plantations and the waterfalls and hot springs in their villages. But they also told me of the military operations—how army soldiers burned their villages; how they forced the people to carry heavy loads; how they tortured and killed; how they raped the village women. By then, the civil war in Burma had spread over the ethnic states.
Demoralized by the political situation in Burma, my friends and I joined the Shan Underground Movement. I was sixteen years old. I learned how to speak, read, and write Shan. I worked with radio operators as a cipher clerk, and later on I worked as a teacher for the children of the nearby villages where we camped. I spent six years with the Shan political movement before I met my husband, who has been working as a journalist and a writer in Thailand.
Uprising Across the Land
Not long after meeting my husband in 1985 we journeyed from northeastern India through Burma's resistance-held areas and into China. On our 18-month overland journey, we traveled by foot, jeep, bicycle, and elephant. Our daughter was born in Kohima, Nagaland, in a northeastern state of India.
But in 1988, Burma erupted. During the democracy uprising, which was primarily led by students in the urban areas, thousands fled to the border areas and my husband and I interviewed and came to know many of them. They told us how shocked they were that the Burmese army was shooting to kill and abusing female students. I remember telling them how shocked I had been long ago when I first heard about this happening to the villagers in Shan State. This was the first chance I had had to share the stories of what I had seen in Hsipaw with students from Rangoon and central Burma.
Women Coming Together
Throughout the upheaval I have collaborated with journalists, filmmakers, and human rights monitors. I have attended global conferences and worked as a translator and a photographer.
nursery class. We must
continue to fight for change to
create opportunities for this
next generation.
But in 1999, I teamed up with 39 other Shan women and founded the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN). We began to heavily advocate for the women of Burma. Later that year SWAN went on to become a founding member organization of the Women's League of Burma (WLB), comprised of twelve women's organizations from various ethnic communities. Through the dialogue and consultation among us, we were able to work out a common vision and mission of our umbrella organization.
The challenge for us women of Burma is how can we end the cycle of suffering under this regime. I believe that the contribution of women will have a great impact and participation in the reconciliation process is a must.
Women's organizations are working hard but more support is needed. To a certain extent we have been able to increase the number of women in the democracy movement and improve their skills and capacity, but now we need to design different levels of empowerment programs. We especially need to design an action plan to increase the number of women integrated into the policy and decision-making level of politics within the movement.
Although the men in our democracy movement have begun to realize the vital role of women's participation in politics, we need more positive responses from our male counterparts. Many still think that women's organizations are not political.
I also believe that further dialogue with women's groups throughout Asia will allow us to strategically reach governments who are supporting the junta. Although we continue to link and network with women's movements in the Asia Pacific region, we are not yet able to get their governments to push strong actions toward positive change in Burma.
Determined and persistent action toward these changes must be a collective, collaborative effort. By working together, we hope to build trust, solidarity, and mutual understanding among the women of Burma.
What the World Must Do Now
The world must find ways to deal with the regime, not only because of the military regime's refusal to allow international relief assistance to millions of cyclone survivors, but also because of the ongoing atrocities within this country. We need real action to protect the people.
The following actions are essential:
- The UN Security Council must support comprehensive peace and reconciliation processes toward sustainable dialogue in Burma.
- Governments and NGOs must continue to provide support and resources to local organizations addressing gender issues in order to ensure women's full participation in Burma's peace and reconciliation process.
- Governments and NGOs must reevaluate existing humanitarian efforts to reach all the people in the Nargis-affected zones, and must provide support for refugees, internally displaced persons, and migrants, and supply humanitarian aid across borders.
- We must call upon Thailand, India, and Bangladesh to implement supportive policies and educational opportunities for refugees and migrant workers. According to an unofficial estimation, in Thailand alone there are from three to five million refugees and refugees-turned-migrant-workers. Among them there are thousands of young men and women hungry for education to rebuild our country.
- I urge legislators to raise the issue of sexual violence committed by the regime's troops in Burma in any and all forums.
- And, I urge you to call on your governments to coordinate with other governments for action to put the maximum possible pressure on the regime.
Let us stand in solidarity with our sisters and friends around the world to deter these crimes against humanity. We will learn from each other as we work to improve our struggle toward a peaceful and just society, a society where equal opportunities for both genders encourage life, a society where living is a joy.
Hseng Noung Lintner is an activist and photographer of Shan origin. She is a women's human rights defender who, in 1999, helped to establish Shan Women Action Network and the Women's League of Burma on the Thai-Burma border. She served in the Steering Committee for the Women's League of Burma and later on as the General Secretary. Her photographs have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and books across the world, including Land of Jade: A Journey Across Insurgent Burma, in which she and her husband traveled across Burma documenting the realities of the political situation under the regime. Currently, Hseng Noung serves as a presidium board member of the WLB, and is an advocate at SWAN.