Abuses spawn Myanmar "heart of darkness" - report

BANGKOK, Sept 7 (Reuters) Years of civil war and abuse of ethnic minorities in eastern Myanmar by the ruling military junta have left the region more like the grimmest corners of Africa or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, a new report said today.

Describing the jungle conflict zones abutting the Thai border as the former Burma's ''heart of darkness'', Thai senator Jon Ungphakorn said the findings provided ample evidence to support the junta's referral to the United Nations Security Council.

With diseases such as drug-resistant malaria and tuberculosis rife among the region's estimated 500,000 internal refugees, as well as the 140,000 already in Thailand, the crisis risked becoming a major threat to international public health, he said.

''It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the burdens arising from the tyrannical rule in Burma are no longer borne by the people of Burma alone,'' he said in the foreword to ''Chronic Emergency -- Health and Human Rights in Eastern Burma''.

The report's findings, compiled by mobile medical teams of the Thailand-based Back Pack Health Worker Team, paint a stark picture of a nation considered the ''rice basket of Asia'' when it won independence from Britain in 1948.

Of every 1,000 children born in eastern Karen, Kayah or Mon states, where junta soldiers have battled ethnic rebel militias for decades, 221 will be dead before their fifth birthday, the report said of its latest figures compiled for 2004.

''The mortality rates are not Burma's, which are already the highest in Asia,'' said Voravit Suwanavanichkij, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who helped compile the data. ''They are more like Angola, Rwanda, Somalia.'' The comparable United Nations figure for the whole of Myanmar is 106 per 1,000. In Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa's poorest nations, it is 205.

Maternal mortality rates revealed by the survey, the first systematic health analysis of a region closed to the outside world, are also comparable to Congo, Somalia and Rwanda.

''YOUNG MEN GONE'' Decades of civil war, in which all sides are accused of using child soldiers, have also taken their toll on the population make-up, with only 88 young men to every 100 women -- a ratio similar to Cambodia after Pol Pot and the ''Killing Fields''.

''Where men and women should be equal, many young men are gone,'' Voravit said.

The military, dominated by the ethnic Burman majority, has ruled Myanmar under various guises since 1962, during which time it has battled dozens of ethnic militias fighting for independence or control of the ''Golden Triangle'' opium trade.

The junta ignored the results of a 1990 election it lost by a landslide, and opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has spent nearly 11 of the last 17 years either in jail or under house arrest.

Since a US push to put Myanmar and its troubles before the UN Security Council, a series of reports, including one by former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, have accused the junta of major human rights abuses.

Myanmar's military rulers have denied the charges.

China, Russia and Japan are thought to oppose the US move on grounds the 15-member UN council deals only with threats to international peace and security, not human rights.

The Back Pack health workers, most of them operating on foot in mountainous, jungle terrain, surveyed 2,000 households in the conflict areas covering an estimated 140,000 people.

REUTERS SP MIR RN1559