Inside Myanmar’s forgotten ‘slave labour’ camps

In the sweltering midday heat, several dozen convicts shackled at the ankles hacked with hoes at shrubs and grass in a field in Myanmar’s northern Shan State.

“One! Two! Three! Four!” one of the men shouts, waving along bamboo cane to the beat of the hoeing. A prison warden looks on with a rifle slung over his shoulder and holding an umbrella for the blazing sun.

Wearing blue shirts and sarongs, the convicts are from Kaung Hmu Labour Camp, here to clear wasteland along the Mandalay-Lashio Road for the expansion of a sugarcane plantation.

The man barking orders – known in Burmese as a “dote-kai”, or stick-holder – is a prisoner appointed to supervise the labour in return for avoiding backbreaking work himself.

Such stick-holders routinely flog prisoners to make them work harder and aren’t afraid to use violence to crush dissent, former prisoners say.

“The stick-holders would beat us at will,” says Zeyar Lin, an ex-convict released from Kaung Hmu Labour Camp in early June.

A months-long investigation by Myanmar Now, an independent website supported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, reveals that brutal beatings are just one of many rights abuses common in Myanmar’s penal system, which activists describe as state-sponsored slavery.

Dozens of interviews with ex-convicts and former prison officials paint a picture of dire working conditions and rampant corruption among guards who force prisoners to pay bribes to escape beatings and heavy labour.

The investigation also showed that prisons profit by selling convict labour to private companies for hefty fees, in violation of international conventions on forced labour that Myanmar has ratified.

The Ministry of Home Affairs said it would look into Myanmar Now’s findings but declined to comment further.

Myanmar has 48 labour camps, holding some 20,000 prisoners, according to the Correctional Department of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The practices at labour camps uncovered by the Myanmar Now investigation continue months after Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power in March, after sweeping 2015 elections.

Many of the ruling party’s members themselves spent years in jail as political prisoners during their decades of struggle against military rule, while Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest for some 15 years.

“Personally, I think the new government should work towards shutting down all these prison labour camps as a political priority,” says Khin Maung Myint, a former chief jailer who retired in 2002 after 25 years at the Correctional Department and is now a legal consultant on Myanmar’s penal system.

“Prisoners at these camps are being punished in a way that violates existing laws,” he said, adding that prisoners receive inadequate food and healthcare while prison authorities “are trying to extract all their labour in all sorts of ways”.

Among the 48 labour camps, 30 are dubbed “agriculture and livestock breeding career training centres” where prisoners work on plantations run by the Correctional Department, or are put to work at private plantations and local farms.

At 18 sites, mostly in Mon States in southeastern Myanmar, thousands of convicts are deployed in rock quarries – officially called “manufacturing centres” – where they break granite and limestone boulders and crush them into gravel with sledgehammers.

The gravel is sold to government agencies or private companies for infrastructure and construction projects, bringing in the equivalent of millions of dollars for prison authorities.

 

‘We were all slaves’

At Kaung Hmu Labour Camp , one of five in the mountains around Naung Cho, around 200 men work six days a week on the 57-hectare sugarcane plantation, or in private fields and rice paddies that dot the green, fertile valleys.

Zeyar Lin, 25, arrived at Kaung Hmu in early 2015. He was a former policeman from Bago Region who was serving a two-year sentence for fighting with his superintendent.

On his way to the camp, wardens put iron shackles on his ankles, he says. Once there, regular beatings and a crushing workload quickly took their toll.

“I was accused of being slow at work, so my back was beaten, my buttocks were beaten  at least 30 strokes every day,” he says.

After a month, he had his mother pay around $500 to the deputy chief jailer to stop the beatings. He was then assigned to boil water and prepare tea or coffee for prison officials, at ask he performed until his release.

Zeyar Lin says the poorest prisoners had no such option, and some resorted to offering sex or other services to wealthy convicts or the stick-holders to seek protection.

“You had no other options – we were all slaves.”

Khin Maung Myint, the former chief jailer, said the prison labour system encouraged abuse and corruption because it gave authorities full power to assign tasks and enforce corporal punishment.

Aung Soe, 51, served 17 years in Myanmar’s prisons and was released from Hokho Labour Camp in Naung Cho in 2014.

“The reason prisoners are beaten is to make everyone fear the prison staff. When prisoners lose all hope, they will bribe officials,” he said, adding that those who pay $1,000 might become clerks while $700 is enough to become a stick-holder.

During a brief visit to a camp in Naung Cho, Myanmar Now exchanged a few sentences with a prisoner convicted for murder. The man, 37, was deeply tanned from daily toil in the fields, which he said he had done for the past year-and-a-half.

“I was beaten just yesterday,” he said, pointing at scars on his legs. “If I could get 300,000 kyats [Bt8,500], I could buy the position of water-boiler [to escape labour], but none of my family members have ever visited me.”

He added: “You can clear the weeds for one acre, then the next day you are asked to do two acres. I can’t stand it anymore. I try to control myself so I don’t I fight back.”

Current and former prison officials say the practice of raising revenues from private companies comes from a Correctional Department directive stating that camps must generate enough funds to cover their running costs.

In August, an NLD lawmaker asked the Ministry of Home Affairs, which remains under military control, whether it would allow lawmakers to investigate prison conditions, including reports of corruption and abuse in labour camps.

Deputy Minister General Kyaw Soe responded that the Correctional Department had effective mechanisms to investigate such complaints, adding that no violations had been reported.

David Mathieson, a Myanmar researcher with Human Rights Watch, said government officials and the commission were turning a blind eye to abuse.

The Home Affairs Ministry should order a review of the prison labour system with the aim of ending it, he said, while the NLD-dominated parliament “should announce an immediate investigation into the Department of Corrections ... that includes a thorough accounting of all the prisoners thought to have disappeared into abusive labour camps.”

 

Camps untouched after return of democracy 

Myanmar Now has obtained hundreds of internal Correctional Department documents that stretch back decades and shed light on junta-era policies for managing prison labour camps.

A document from 1993 refers to a statement by then-Minister of Home Affairs Lt-General Phone Myint, who said prisoners’ labour was “wasted” if they only remained incarcerated. Their free labour should be used instead for state-owned plantations, infrastructure projects and to generate funds that cover running the prisons, it said.

As late as October 2014, junta-era language was still in use by Thein Sein’s government to explain prison labour policies.

Former Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Brig-General Kyaw KyawTun told parliament at the time that the camps “use the prisoners’ labour, which is going to waste in the prisons, for state-level agriculture, livestock breeding and rock quarry projects, and to ensure that the prisoners learn about agriculture and livestock breeding techniques and have attained a vocational profession upon their release.”

After the NLD assumed power in March, it urged all departments and ministries to come up with reform priorities for their first 100 days in office.

The Correctional Department’s reform plans for this period came to a single sentence: “To increase the duration of family visits in prison from 15 minutes to 20 minutes, and allow family members to visit any day of the week.”