Interviews with Cheery Zahau

Inside Burma the Internet is allowed to use in the late 2000s, I think information flow has been a lot easier than before. In a big city like Mandalay, Rangoon, and other cities, they could send us information.

There were several bloggers in around 2002, 2003. One particular guy is now in jail for having. very good blogs where thousands of young people visit, but was in Burmese. Yes, the Burmese regime is very concerned about the bloggers. So now there are some bloggers – and I have some them – in every blog, people are trying to express what´s happening.

At the same time the Burmese regime is using another tactic. That they use their own people to attack those who are writing about the situations in a particular community. So if someone talks about Aung San Suu Kyi and the other guy will attack them for talking about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. So within the bloggers, writers, SPDC has got their people to attack those who tell the truth.

But a larger part of Burma does not have Internet access yet. But wherever this Internet access is, information flow is a lot easier and faster than before. But in terms of the mobile phone, the cost is so expensive at the moment, so ordinary people cannot afford to buy it.

Or the security is involved. For example, the telephone now, the mobile phone that they’re using, they can text message each other within the country, but they cannot receive text messages from outside, which is deliberately done because the regime is worried that we will send message to the people inside Burma. We use multiple ways of getting information from collecting that data. What we do is, sometimes we use MP3 recorder. Sometimes photo camera. Sometimes video camera. Or in a remote place like Chin State, we use secret code. So the people write something and they send us to the border office. So there are different ways.

And the way that we send the information in is through radio programs, like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, BBC Burmese Service, Democratic Voice of Burma. So any message that we want to convey to the people in Burma, we speak through radio, which is very effective. Or we train people. We collect certain people and turn them along the border on particular issues. And they go back and they share the information with their communities.

Cheery Zahau is a human rights activist from Chin State, Burma, and is now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As a high school student, she was advised by her teachers that her independence and intellectual curiosity would get her into serious trouble if she remained in Burma. She sought refuge in India, where she became an advocate for thousands of ethnic Chin faced with forcible return to Burma.

Zahau also became a leader of the Women’s League of Chinland, an organization that works to call international attention to the situation inside Chin State, including the use of rape as an instrument of conflict by the Burmese military regime. She has spoken at the United Nations and in other venues around the world.

When Zahau relocated to Thailand, she began working as an advocacy officer at the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, focusing on the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the ASEAN human rights process. She is also a management board member of the Network for Human Rights Documentation in Burma and is pursuing an advanced degree in international relations.

Burma, a Southeast Asian country with about 57 million people, is ruled by a military regime that seized power in 1962. Although the reformist National League for Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly in a 1990 election, the country’s military rulers ignored the results and arrested NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.” The military government held a referendum on a new constitution in 2008 and a parliamentary election in 2010, neither of which was regarded by international observers as free or fair, and both of which resulted in overwhelming majorities for pro-government positions and candidates. The military regime has committed widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, and denial of freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion.

Throughout its existence, the regime has been at war with a number of Burma’s ethnic minority groups. Ethnic minority voters overwhelmingly supported the NLD in the 1990 election, and after the suppression of the democracy movement several of these groups continued or resumed armed resistance to the de facto government. Although the government signed cease-fire agreements with several of these groups ostensibly granting them autonomy within their respective regions, the Burmese military has used a range of brutal techniques, including the killing of civilians, forced labor, rape, and the destruction of homes, crops, and villages, in cease-fire zones as well as in areas where there is still armed resistance.

In 2007, as on several previous occasions, there were mass demonstrations throughout the country demanding freedom and democracy. The 2007 demonstrations were led by Buddhist monks and eventually became known as the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the monks’ robes. The armed forces brutally suppressed these demonstrations—estimates of the number of protestors killed range from 31 to several thousand—and intensified popular dissatisfaction with the government by the killing, beating, and public humiliation of monks.

The nominally civilian government resulting from the 2010 election has been widely regarded as a façade for continuing military rule. However, in October 2011, the government released 206 of Burma’s estimated 2,000 prisoners of conscience. The next month, the government announced that it would soon release all remaining political prisoners. The NLD, which had declined to participate in the 2010 election, registered to participate in the next election and announced that Aung San Suu Kyi would be among the NLD candidates.

Although the military regime announced in 1989 that it had changed the English name of the country from Burma to “Myanmar,” the United States government and other international supporters of democracy in Burma have generally continued to call the country Burma because this is the name preferred by Aung San Suu Kyi and other democracy advocates who won the 1990 election.