HRW slams Myanmar use of convict porters

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday condemned Myanmar's "brutal" use of convicts as "human pack mules" in conflicts against ethnic rebels, calling for a UN-led inquiry into alleged war crimes. The military was forcibly recruiting prisoners to serve on the frontlines of battle as porters, where they face abuses including torture, summary execution and use as "human shields", the rights watchdog said. "The convict porters are basically the human pack mules for the Burmese army. They have to lug this very heavy equipment through heavily mined areas," Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director of HRW, told reporters in Bangkok. Speaking at the release of a report on the abuses in eastern Myanmar, entitled "Dead Men Walking", Pearson said she hoped such evidence of war crimes "really reinforces that there's an urgent need" for an international inquiry. "The brutal mistreatment of convict porters on the frontlines is just one of many ongoing war crimes," she said. "Others include deliberately attacking civilian villages and towns, extrajudicial killings, forced relocations, torture, rape and the use of child soldiers." Myanmar -- where power was handed to a nominally civilian government in March after almost 50 years of military rule -- has been plagued by decades of civil war with armed ethnic minority rebels since independence in 1948. The new report was based on 58 interviews with escaped convict porters used in army operations from 2010 to 2011 in the country's east, scene of one of the world's longest-running civil wars. While Myanmar's army has a long history of using civilians as porters, so many have fled across the border to Thailand and other safe areas that the military has had to bring in the prisoners instead, Pearson explained. The report also found the use of convict porters was "systematic practice", with orders coming from "a high level" and inmates taken from a number of prisons across the country, added David Mathieson, HRW's Myanmar specialist. The United States said in late June that it was prepared to support a UN-backed human rights probe in Myanmar, after the country's pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi called for such an investigation. Pearson urged the international community to push harder for a UN-led commission of inquiry, saying fighting had intensified in parts of Myanmar since November's election, despite hopes it would bring gradual improvement.