Storyteller for Human Rights.

Rangoon, Burma

For eleven years, villagers in Burma braved malaria and military persecution to tell their stories to Ka Hsaw Wa. The man they met secretly in the jungle is an ethnic Karen native who was collecting narratives of forced labor and assault from thousands of victims of the notorious Burmese military regime, the State Peace and Development Council (formerly called the SLORC).

When he was eighteen years old, Ka Hsaw Wa was tortured by SLORC officers. He watched a close friend die as the two fled Rangoon in the wake of student protests in 1988. He found mutilated bodies on the side of the road and heard many mothers describe the deaths of their children. Because of these experiences, Ka Hsaw Wa began to memorize the narratives people told him--those who were mourning loved ones and abandoning the smoking remains of their homes. He recorded important details in the margins of his Burmese-English dictionary.

In 1995, Ka Hsaw Wa and two lawyers founded EarthRights International, a nonprofit organization that focuses on protecting human rights and the environment. Ka Hsaw Wa's interviews have contributed to the organization's Burma Project, which records the actions of the military regime.

As part of the project, Ka Hsaw Wa began doing more interviews in the thin southern strip of Burma where a natural gas pipeline was being constructed, funded in part by the U.S. petroleum company Unocal. The villagers he met described massive relocation, forced labor, and beatings by the military. They said the soldiers who attacked them and forced them to work were associated with the pipeline project. EarthRights International used the testimony in a class action suit filed in 1996 with the Center for Constitutional Rights against Unocal. The suit is still in its early stages.

Barry Lane, a spokesman for Unocal, denies that the company was involved in human rights abuses. "We do not have control over the military and we are not responsible for the military," he says. The pipeline has offered "direct socioeconomic benefits to people along the route," including employment opportunities, medical care, and education.

Telling the outside world about conditions in Burma can be fatal. Ka Hsaw Wa heard a story about a villager the military accused of sending information out of the country. "They tied him up on a tree, and they gathered all the villagers together," says Ka Hsaw Wa. "They said, `If you're against us, you're going to die like this.'" Then the soldiers killed him.

Ka Hsaw Wa has won several awards for his work, including the Goldman Environmental Prize, given to six "environmental heroes" each year to further their causes. At the moment, however, he is taking a break from his field work. "It's dangerous for me," he says. "I don't want to jeopardize the whole situation."

Instead, he plans to visit universities in the United States to seek support for the Free Burma movement. He is also working to pass legislation, called "selective purchasing" laws, that would prevent major public contracts from being given to Burma. Laws in twenty-three U.S. communities already prohibit trade with Burma because of the repressive military government there. Ka Hsaw Wa will also continue teaching at the EarthRights School in Thailand, which trains students from indigenous groups in international law, nonviolence, and the documentation of human rights abuses.

Documentation "is the only way we can hold accountable any violators, especially transnational corporations," says Ka Hsaw Wa.

For more information, contact EarthRights International, 2101 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or phone [phone]. EarthRights International can also be reached at www.earthrights.org.