Veteran film director shows support for Burmese human rights defender

Charm Tong and John Boorman

2 November 2005

The film director John Boorman, attended the opening session of the 3rd Dublin Platform for Human Rights Defenders from 13 – 15 October, in order to meet Burmese human rights defender Charm Tong.

The 73-year-old director of “Deliverance” and “The General” is the Honorary President of Burma Action Ireland, an association that campaigns to raise awareness of the repressive nature of the ruling military regime in Burma.

Charm Tong, is a founding member if the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN) which works along the Burmese/Thai border. It was formed in 1999 by a group of young women in response to human rights atrocities, such as sexual violence and forced relocation, committed by the Burmese military regime. Their groundbreaking report “License to rape” brought the systematic sexual abuse of Shan women (an ethnic minority in Burma from the Shan province near the Thai border)) to the attention of the world.

After the release of the report, the Thai government closed down the SWAN offices, but the young women of SWAN continue to do their work moving from place to place for their own safety. SWAN works with Shan women and their children, many who are trafficked into Thailand and are extremely vulnerable to violence, disease, exploitation and forced labour. Thailand refuses to recognize the Shan people as refugees and this only heightens their vulnerability. This year SWAN won the prestigious international Peter Gruber award for the extraordinary accomplishments of its young leaders.

Charm Tong is the 2005 winner of the 2005 Reebok Human rights award for young human rights defenders. At only 24, she has been exposing the brutal exploitation and violence perpetrated against the suppressed minority Shan people, for eight years.

At the age of six, Charm’s parents left her at the Thai border in order for her to escape the war between the Shan ethnic minority and the Burmese military regime. She grew up and was educated in an orphanage but unlike many of her friends escaped a life of enforced prostitution. She watched the Shan people become evicted from their farms and forced into labour by the Burmese military and when they crossed the Thai border looking for refuge, she watched the women become trafficked into the sex trade and the children abandoned by a state who does not recognize their refugee status. She realized that nobody was going to protect her people so she decided to do it herself At only 16, she was involved in the foundation of SWAN along with other young Shan women. She has taken enormous risks interviewing victims along the border and relentlessly advocates for refugees’ rights in both Burma and Thailand.

In 1995, Boorman made “Beyond Rangoon” a film about the Burmese military regime crushing the pro- democracy movement in Burma in the late eighties, resulting in thousands of deaths and over 600,000 fleeing the country. Members of the Burmese government in exile accompanied him when he attended Front Line’s 3rd Dublin Platform for Human rights Defenders.

To read White house press release of Charm Tong's meeting with George Bush click here