The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is having trouble finding violent crime in Burma. This is strange, given its mandate; stranger still given that police and local officials there assault and kill people with impunity, and often over the most trivial things.
This March a man in suburban Rangoon was beaten to death by local council officials for having a row with his wife. Naing Oo was picked up after an in-laws complaint, brutally assaulted and dumped in the council office for the night. The next morning when his brother saw the mauled body and asked what had happened, he was told that the young man had “caught a cold.” The authorities worked fast to cover up his death.
Similar reports of senseless killings by security officers are commonplace. In January, a man in the delta region was taken from his house after eloping with his new wife. The police, apparently again acting as a favor to the woman’s family, took him on the pretext that he hadn’t registered on the overnight visitor list. When relatives found his bloodied corpse in a local hospital the next day they were told that the cause of death was malaria; they have since been intimidated and silenced.
Last year a young man was beaten to death by municipal officers in a city marketplace after a dispute over where he had urinated. When his mother persisted in making complaints, some trishaw drivers were charged instead of the real perpetrators. Elsewhere, a young lady died in police custody after being casually stopped on her way home from shopping. Police also beat a washerwoman to within an inch of her life after a client accused her of petty theft.
This is a handful of the total number of incidents. What they reveal is not a society where the “stability of the state” prevails, as trumpeted by its military government, but where random violence and criminality are the norm, and where institutions hang on the verge of barbarism.
Why doesn’t the UNODC seem to know anything about this?
Rule of Lords 