Rights Abuses Fuel Deaths

In military-ruled Burma, a new survey shows human rights violations causing increasing child deaths.

BANGKOK—Human rights abuses by Burma's military junta are causing massive health problems and increasing deaths among children, according to a new medical study.

The survey, conducted in eastern Burma by community health groups including the Backpack Health Workers' Team and the Burma Medical Association, revealed that households suffering rights violations had "worse health outcomes," according to their report aptly titled "Diagnosis: Critical."

"In areas where there are human rights violations, malnutrition among the children is found to be three times higher," Cynthia Maung, the head of the Backpack Health Workers Team, told a press conference.

"In those areas, the child mortality rate is two times higher. Therefore, healthcare and social workers feel that human rights violations are causing these health problems," she said, calling for an immediate halt to the violations.

Survey questions

The population-based health and human rights survey covered 5,754 households in 21 townships in eastern Burma burdened by decades of civil conflict and human rights abuses against the indigenous people, the report said.

It identifies high birth and mortality rates in the conflict-affected area as "more comparable to recent war zones such as Sierra Leone than to Burma's national demographics."

Naing Aye Lwin, also from the Backpack Health group, said several questions were posed to the people in the surveyed areas to draw any links between health and human rights.

"For example, when interviewing displaced people, we asked whether any children had died in their families during the past six months or year, who had died, how many children under five had died," Naing said.

"Since they are displaced people, there's human rights violations. The death rate of these people is three or four times higher than ordinary people. Therefore, the health data is very much related to human rights violations."

Displaced people

Currently, there are at least 446,000 internally displaced people in the rural areas of eastern Burma.

Burma’s health indicators for child, infant, and maternal mortality rank amongst the worst in Asia.

Burma’s infant mortality rate was estimated by UNICEF at 54 per 1,000 live births in 2009, with an under-five-year-old mortality rate of 71 in the same year.

The eastern Burmese states have been saddled with high levels of displacement and little to no access to state health care systems, leaving some people in conflict zones with levels of maternal mortality at 1,000–1,200 deaths per 100,000 live births, the report said.

Asked to predict the situation after the Nov. 7 elections conducted by the junta, which many observers have called a sham, Cynthia Maung said, "If we look at the areas where the survey was conducted, we saw that they didn't have household registrations, population records, birth and death records for many years."

"So, they can be displaced any time, and these human rights violations can continue any time. Specifically, the military government can expand its military units in the ethnic areas, saying they are doing development work, and they can increase forced relocations," she said.

"We are concerned about that."