WHILE THE WORLD focuses its attention on the political tension escalating in Rangoon, little is known about the ongoing violence against women of ethnic minorities in more remote areas. There is increasing evidence that the Burmese army is using rape as a tool of war against minority populations.  

In the decade since they seized power and renamed the country Myanmar, Burma's military rulers have become increasingly dependent on the use of forced labor and torture to maintain their hold on that country, build its infrastructure, and carry out their war against stubborn resistance by ethnic minorities.  

The military's 1988 takeover was marked by massacres of thousands of peaceful protesters calling for democracy. Two years later, when Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a national election that it them control of the country, the military nullified the results. Since then the regime has routinely imprisoned, tortured, and killed anyone expressing opposition. Just last week the junta detained 350 members of the NLD and locked the gates of universities where students have been protesting.  

The U.S. State Department reported this year that Burmese troops "continued to impress women for military porterage duties, and there were many reports of rape of ethnic minority women by soldiers." According to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, government troops have been abducting "increasing numbers of women, including young girls and the elderly" and subjecting them to rape and other abuses. The Burmese Women's Union alleges that "women have been raped in an organized and systematic way" by the army. A civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Burmese citizens in a U.S. federal court in 1996 targeted the Burmese military junta and two oil companies -- Unocal Corp., then based in Los Angeles, and Total, of France -- for abuses allegedly committed during construction of a natural gas pipeline in Burma, charging that "girls and women have been raped in the presence of family members."  

The court -- which ruled last year that Unocal and Total could be held liable for rapes committed by members of the military, their financial partner -- will hear the case next year; the junta was dropped as a defendant because the court said it had no jurisdiction over a foreign government.  

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights says women most likely to be raped are refugees, internally displaced women, and women belonging to ethnic minorities or the political opposition. Rapes by the military typically occur during raids on villages; when women are abducted for forced labor; during encounters with victims of forced relocations in the jungle; and in coerced marriages.  

Rape is systematically being used by Burma's military as part of a policy of ethnic cleansing, according to interviews with human rights workers and exiled prodemocracy officials. Bolstering those contentions is a new report by EarthRights International, a legal rights group based in Washington, D.C., and Thailand that accuses Burma's military of "the savage domination of women outside the scope of acceptable wartime conduct."  

The report also states that "the violent sexual abuse of ethnic Burmese women at the hands of the military occurs in epidemic proportions."  

Activists are urging that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women investigate the claims of systematic rape.  

Thaung Tun, deputy chief of mission at Myanmar's embassy in Washington, denies there is anything to investigate. "It is hardly possible for rape to occur in Myanmar on a policy basis," he told the Bay Guardian. "Maybe on an individual basis. But if it happens, there are laws in place and people would be punished."  

Many of Burma's soldiers are teenagers who were abducted by the army. According to EarthRights, they are given little food, forbidden contact with their families, and forced to beat one another for punishment.  

Abused physically and humiliated every day, the young recruits are then set loose among the ethnic minorities they have been indoctrinated to believe are "the people's enemy" and "internal destructionists."  

Many ethnic leaders and prodemocracy activists claim that the violence against women is directly related to the military's goal of wiping out all ethnic resistance, even if it means the genocide of a particular minority.  

One widely circulated document -- whose origin remains unverified -- appears to lend credence to the claims that rape is being consciously used as a tool of war in Burma. Marked "top secret" and dated only a few weeks after the military takeover in 1988, the document is addressed to "All Great Ruling Burmans" and outlines a policy of "blood mixing" and "Burmanization" of ethnic minorities -- references to the process by which Burmans could become more dominant. (The Burmans are the majority ethnic group, representing two-thirds of the population.)  

The document says "the easiest way to implement these ideas is to occupy [marry or impregnate] women who are not Burman," an action for which it offers a financial reward. "We must deviously attack those who are not Burman in economic as well as social ways," the document states.  

In Burma children are considered to bear the ethnicity of the father only.  

Burmese opposition leader Sein Win -- an elected member of parliament who now heads the country's government in exile -- believes the document originated in the Burmese defense ministry's department of psychological warfare. "Regardless of the source or intent of this document, it accurately represents an ethnic cleansing policy of the Burmese military," he told the Bay Guardian. "There is no doubt that the widespread rapes by troops are fueled by the policies expressed in this document."  

U Bo Hla Tint, a minister of the government in exile, told the Bay Guardian he was present in Burma when officials in the state of Karen heard the text of the document during routine monitoring of radio communications between two Burman military commanders. Ka Hsaw Wa, a veteran Karen human rights investigator who organizes fact-finding missions for Human Rights Watch, told the Bay Guardian he encountered the "Burmanization" document in the Shan, Karen, and Karenni areas, where his sources retrieved it from Burman soldiers and outposts.  

Although human rights workers say geographical, military, and cultural barriers make it impossible to gather precise statistics about the incidence of rape as a tool of the Burmese military, anecdotal evidence continues to mount.  

In April Amnesty International reported that a 30-year-old woman, Nang Ing, was raped by three soldiers who accused her of giving rice to the insurgents. After the assault they poured boiling water over her. She died three days later.  

In another village a woman named Naing Mai was raped repeatedly over the course of five days by the military personnel. She was then burned to death, according to the account given to Amnesty International by local farmers, who watched from hiding places.  

According to a report last month from the Shan Human Rights Foundation, Aye Nang, a young mother of three, was raped by troops March 5 in the village of Wan Pek. She was then stabbed four times in the chest and buried in a shallow grave, uncovered by villagers three days later.  

Jennifer Green, staff lawyer with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, is convinced that the Burmese military is guilty of crimes against humanity as defined by the U.N. war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. The tribunal, set up in response to the brutality of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has declared rape a war crime. "The facts presented in [the EarthRights report] indicate that these acts of violence against women are both widespread and systematic, that there is a pattern of rape, and that civilians are targeted for political reasons or because they are part of a certain ethnic group," said Green, who is a cocounsel in the lawsuit against Unocal and Total. "There is a growing acceptance that rape is not just a form of humiliating treatment but is an extreme form of violence and should be regarded as torture."  

Dennis Bernstein, associate editor at Pacific News Service, is the producer of KPFA radio's Flashpoints. Leslie Kean is director of the Burma Project USA in San Rafael. For more information call Jane Jerome of the Burma Roundtable, at (408) 995-0403, or activist Ko Ko Lay, at (415) 487-0640