Zoya Phan

Kaowao Newsgroup recently interviewed a young Karen activist named Zoya Phan. Zoya is an International Coordinator for the Burma Campaign UK and co-founder of the Phan Foundation.  She is also a Coordinator for the European Karen Network, a board member of the Austria Burma Center and Secretary of the Karen Community Association UK.  Her autobiography, “Little Daughter,” was published by Simon and Schuster in April 2009.

Both Zoya Phan’s mother and father were involved in the Karen resistance movement. Her father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan was Secretary General of Karen National Union. He was assassinated by agents of the Burmese military dictatorship in February 2008 at his home in Maesot, Thailand.

KW:      How you characterize the situation in Burma? Is it a constitutional crisis, militarization or dictatorship?

ZP:       The problem in Burma is a combination of a dictatorship and a constitutional crisis. We need to have a civilian government that is elected by the people, and accountable to the people. We also have to remember that we have been under a democratic government since Burma gained independence in 1948, yet ethnic people were still persecuted and discriminated against and did not enjoy equal rights. Therefore we need to have a written federal constitution that guarantees freedom and human rights for all, regardless of our race, ethnicity, gender, or religion, so that everyone is treated equally.

KW:      How can ethnic nationalities and democratic forces become integrated?

ZP:       Regardless of our ethnicity we are one people, and we are engaged in one struggle for our country to be free. I dream of a Burma where we celebrate our cultures, different but equal. If every one of us takes action, no matter how small or big we are, then together we will be an unstoppable force, and we will win our freedom. United, our will and determination are stronger than guns and bullets. And all the people in Burma will be free.

KW:      Do the Burmese and ethnic nationalities in exile have a strategy?

ZP:       The National Council of the Union of Burma (NCUB) was set up to bring democratic and ethnic forces together to fight against the dictatorship, and to struggle for peace and Democracy through the establishment of a genuine Federal Union of Burma.

KW:      What are your views on public dialogue and national reconciliation?

ZP:       I am for dialogue and national reconciliation. I believe in a peaceful solution to the political problems in Burma through a dialogue process involving the dictatorship, the National League of Democracy (NLD) led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and genuine representatives from ethnic nationalities based on the 1994 resolution of the UN General Assembly.

The NLD and ethnic nationalities are ready to enter into dialogue and solve the county’s problems in meaningful way. However, the SPDC refuses to talk, and completely ignores calls from the international community. At the same time, they carry on with their own way of strengthening military power and continuing their attack on ethnic civilians.

KW:      Do you think that increased international pressure will be fruitful?

ZP:       I think the UN and the international community should put more pressure on the military regime to force them into tripartite dialogue. The generals are vulnerable to international pressure, but we don’t yet have the kind of pressure we want.

Sometimes I think the international community doesn’t really understand the nature of the dictatorship in Burma. I am ethnic Karen and our people have been under attack for 60 years. I have twice had to flee my village because of attacks by the Burmese army. I do not believe the generals will willingly hand over power. They will have to be forced by strong economic, political and judicial pressure. The UN still treats the generals as if they are reasonable people. They are not – they are brutal killers, rapists and torturers, and they should be tried in criminal court.

KW:      What is your opinion regarding sanctions against Burma?

ZP:       The Burma Campaign UK is calling for carefully targeted sanctions that hit the generals and their business cronies. These sanctions must be linked with political initiatives, such as visits to Burma by UN envoys, so they can be used to apply political as well as economic pressure.

Current European Union measures against Burma include: an arms embargo, a visa ban for senior regime officials and their families, a freeze of assets held in Europe by people on the visa ban list and a limited investment ban.

The point of sanctions is to stop revenue going to the regime, much of which will be spent on the military. Sanctions can be placed on financial transactions, banking, insurance industries and investment in key sectors of the economy that earn the regime money, such as oil, gas, gems, timber and mining.

Although the EU has not introduced the kind of strong-targeted sanctions that Burma’s democracy movement has been calling for, Burma’s generals regularly complain about the sanctions that do exist, demonstrating that they are having an impact. The first sanctions that might have a significant impact stopping revenue going to Burma’s generals and their cronies were only introduced in March of 2008. These sanctions included an import ban on gems and timber.

KW:      What challenges does Burma still face regarding the transition?

ZP:       The question we must ask is if a period of transition is possible at all. For years we have called on the regime to enter into dialogue, leading to a transition to democracy. That is what we want. But the generals still refuse to sit down and talk, and they are going ahead with a new constitution that keeps them in power, granting not one of the demands of the democratic movement. The new constitution and elections in 2010 are a loud and clear message that the generals will not compromise in any way. They will not agree to a transition. Therefore, we need to rethink our strategy. They will have to be forced to give up power. At the moment, our movement is not strong enough, internally or externally, to achieve this.

KW:      Do the exile communities have a strong enough voice?

ZP:       I get very fed up that so-called exiles are seen as being different from internal activists somehow. We are all one together. Exiles are working with those internally in many different ways, though obviously we can’t be public about who we are working with and how we are doing it.

KW:      Are there many Karen refugees being uprooted by the Burmese Army? Can you estimate how many Karen in exile?  How do they help the Karen back home?

ZP:       At least a quarter million Karen are in exile, including around 100,000 living in refugee camps along Thailand-Burma border and around 40,000 living in third countries through the UN resettlement program. Many of the rest are working as immigrant workers in neighboring countries.

We set up Karen communities in respective countries worldwide to raise awareness about the situation in our homeland, get governments and international communities to take action on Burma, and raise funds for our people back home in Burma and in refugee camps in Thailand.

In the UK, we have set up the Karen Community Association-UK to represent Karen people in the UK and work on Karen and Burma related issues. We have also set up the European Karen Network of Karen communities across Europe working together with other organizations related to Burma.

KW:      If the junta handed over power tomorrow, what would be the first thing on your wish list for the country?

ZP:       All Burmese soldiers would leave ethnic areas and return to their barracks, so we can live in peace without fear. Then the hard work starts, harder even than the struggle for democracy and freedom. We need to rebuild our country, fight poverty, provide education, and learn to live in peace and harmony with all other ethnic people.

>> Part One

COMMENTS Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:44:10 -0400 Name of sender: ဥကၠာ Email of sender: ougkar@gmail.com Comments: အေရဝ္မှိဟ္လတူေတံဟုီဒး၊ ဝါဒမဟာဂွ္ အပႜဲကေရင္ေလဝ္ႏြံ၊ အပႜဲကုႝစဿတ္တၛဲ ၁၆ ဂိတု ၂ -၂၀၀၈ ဂွ္ မန္ႏြံေမဝ္လ မှိဟ္ပိတၜ နာဲညာဏ္သုိက္၊ နာဲက်ဝ္ငၛဳ႙၊ နာဲဥတၲမ ေကာ္(စုိးေအာင္) ကေရင္ၐုင္ေထာံၾကပ္ခ်ဳိတ္၊ တုဲပၜန္မန္စုိပ္ ခါမ္အုမ္ဖါန္ ကေရင္ပၜဳီေထာံမြဲ အယုက္ ၁၄ သှာံ၊ တုဲပၜန္ကိစၥနာဲလွိင္တံလုပ္ခါမ္ ဒးဒုင္ပခက္ ကၜဳင္လဝ္နာနာသာ္ဂွ္ ထၞးသက္သ႘မူေရာေတွ္ မန္ဒးဒုင္မံင္သဿဝ္တဲ ကေရင္ပုဟ္ဂွ္ ဟြံသာပုဟ္၊ လေဆာဝ္မန္ႏြံရုင္စက္ ေအာန္ ကေရင္ဂၜဳိင္ပႜဲမာဆံက္ဏံဂွ္ေလဝ္ ေဍံဘပလတုဲ ပု႙ဒးအာဗက္ေသာင္တံဂွ္ေလဝ္ ႏြံဗြဲမဂၜဳိင္၊ ဆဂးေဍံဂြံေစဝ္လတူေတွ္ေဍံေကၜာန္မူပဟြံဂြံ၊ ဗုီဇဝ္ရာဖါန္ဂွ္ မန္ဍဳိဟ္ဟ္တံဟြံမြဲဟာ၊ ဟုီဟြံဒွ္ဟာ၊ ဟြံဂံင္လုပ္ဝုိင္ဟာဂွ္ မန္တံရဒးဂၜာဲသြဟ္၊ ဗုီကေရင္ဒွ္ဒုိက္ဂွ္ မန္တံေလဝ္ဍာ္စုိပ္မံင္ကအ္ဟြံေအာန္၊ ဗဿာဂွ္ဒုင္သၨိဳင္ကုႝဒ႘မဝ္ ကေရၿဇ႘၊ ကေရင္ဂွ္ဒုင္သၨဳိင္ကုႝ ရ႘ဖ်ဴဂ်႘ (Refugees)တုဲ ဂြံေစဝ္လတူညးတှဟ္ေတွ္ မန္ပု႙ေရာ ယဝ္ပမံင္သၠအ္ကုႝဂှ႘ရေတွ္ ဍဳင္မန္လုီပိဝါဂွ္ ဂၜာဲဆုႝညိဏီဟာ Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:07:19 -0400 Name of sender: Chan mon Email of sender: : minyarzar01@gmail.com Don't waste the time interview with her,karen problem is first importance to them. we know about life in jungle the same like her and then everytime when she met members of European she always talked about karen, not Mon.Her idea the same like Mon under Karen contro Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:52:26 -0400 Name of sender: Andy Sandilands Email of sender: andy.sand@hotmail.co.uk Zoya. Having just read your book, I would like to say well done. I did not know anything about The Karen until I was asked to visit one of the orphanages in the Thai/Burma Border 140km from Mae sot. I fell in love with the people and now I spend as much time there as possible. My son also lives in the orphanage a great part of his time and teaches the kids sports, particularly Muay Thai boxing. I plan to put all my experiences together and get some kind of output to the world, through media friends. It is a struggle for all the Karen, but people like you can help the world to recognise the genocide that is being portrayed on the Karen People. May God help us show the world what is happening and stop the killing. Keep up the good work ..., Andy Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:12:59 -0400 Name of sender: Hayley Forsey Email of sender: hayleyforsey@yahoo.com Looking firward to reading your book Zoya. Much love, Hayley xx Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:22:37 -0400 Name of sender: Nai Ought -PaMangKOhWarn Email of sender: oughtland@yahoo.com Thanks for your kindling news.i am mon from mon state.i would like to have some news paper from you.can i get it? now i still in phuket thailand. my adress is IED -HONGTHONG 28, SOI KARON 2, KARON BEACH MUANG, PHUKET,THAILAND 83100 MOBILE;081-691 0178 (NAI OUGHT) MANY MON NATIONAL IN PHUKET NEED TO READ THE NEWS PAPER FROM KAOWAO.WHOEVER PLEASE SEND TO ME ABOUT TWENTY OF NEWS PAPER AND I WILL RETURN BACK THE MONEY TO YOUR ACCOUNT. HAVE A GOOD LUCK TO ALL. BEST REGARDS NAI OUGHT-PAMANGKOHWARN COMMENT ခ်ဴပလံင္လိခ္ နကုႝ မန္ ဝွန္ (mon font) ဂြံမာန္ရ အႀကံျပဳရန္ ေဇာ္ဂ်ီေဖာင့္ျဖင့္ ေရးသားႏုိင္ပါသည္ Name: Email address: Comments