Paulo Sergio Pinheiro will end his mission if Burmese Military doesn't act together with him

Pinheiro Says He’ll End Visit If Junta Doesn’t Cooperate
By Lalit K Jha/United Nations
October 25, 2007


UN human rights envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro says that unless the Burmese junta cooperates fully with him when he visits Burma in November he will immediately leave the country.

The junta is allowing Pinheiro to visit Burma after refusing his repeated requests for a visa over the past four years. Burma’s ambassador at the UN, U Thaung Tun, has given an assurance that Pinheiro will be accorded full co-operation.

Pinheiro, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special rapporteur on human rights, said that if he didn’t get full cooperation “I go to the plane and I go out [of the country],”

Speaking after a meeting with a UN General Assembly committee on Wednesday,
Pinheiro said he planned to visit Burma for five days. The visit will probably come immediately after one planned by Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy on Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, in the first week of November.

It is hoped that both envoys will be able to complete their visits before the start of an Asean summit meeting on November 17. Pinheiro said he planned to submit his report to the Human Rights Council on December 11.

Pinheiro’s visit was mandated by the Human Rights Council, which asked the envoy to assess the current human rights situation in Burma. It will be Pinheiro’s seventh visit to Burma as UN special rapporteur but his first for four years.

Pinheiro said he would gather information, collect testimonies and data and investigate allegations of ongoing human rights. “I will be particularly concerned to verify the numbers, whereabouts and conditions of those currently detained, as well as an accounting for the numbers killed during the protests,” he said.

“My task is to offer honest, complex and objective picture of the crisis, the origin of the crisis, the crisis itself, the excessive use of force and then what is happening in terms of detainees, deaths of people, those who are injured.”

Pinheiro said he wanted to visit prisons to meet detainees and monasteries for meetings with monks.

Referring to a statement by the Burmese Ambassador to the UN, U Thaung Tun ,that as many as 2,677 detainees have been freed and more releases would follow, Pinheiro said: “I think that the situation of fear prevails. I do not think that the repression has ceased.

“What annoys me that repression has not stopped even for a single moment, despite all this universal appeal by the Human Rights Council [and] the unanimous statement from the President of the Security Council,” he said.

Pinheiro told the UN committee: “I have continuously received worrying reports of death in custody, torture, disappearances, ill-treatment, and lack of access to food, water or medical treatment in overcrowded unsanitary detention facilities across the country.

“Reports are being received regarding night raids during curfew hours with the army and the militia going home by home searching for people and detaining participants in the demonstrations. Relatives of people in hiding have reportedly been taken hostage as a way of pressure.

“I have received reports that from September 26 to October 6, fifty two monasteries had been raided by security forces. I have also received reports of people who have already been charged and sentenced by special courts.”

Pinheiro said he has also received reports “that there have been selective killings aimed at decapitating the incipient movement.”

Asked later about a recent interview in which he was reported as saying the chances of the demonstrations succeeding in their aim were minimal, Pinheiro said he had meant that the situation in Burma could not be compared to the uprisings that overthrew regimes in Eastern Germany and the Ukraine.

“It is not the case here. I said that please do not have any illusion that the protest would have any regime change.

“There are several layers of the protest. The first was against the increase of oil prices. Then joined the common citizens and leaders of the 88 Generation. Then the monks just entered the protest when one of the monasteries was attacked and one of the monks was hurt.

“The first request of the monks was asking the government to apologize. The march of monks was not political. I refused to read the march of the monks as prelude to a revolution in Myanmar [Burma]. I think I was right.”

“Of course the government of Myanmar [Burma] made the terrible mistake by attacking the monks, because as you know the Burmese society, unlike any other society, is very much organized. Buddhism is something that organizes the entire life of people. Monks are interdependent on the society. They do not do anything. They are completely dependent on donations from the society