Aung San Suu Kyi's Land Grab

Last September, local administration in Myanmar's southern Tanintharyi region put up a sign at the edge of his 5.7-hectare farm that read "Under Management Ownership - Do Not Trespass". They felled the trees and started building a drug rehabilitation facility and an agriculture training school on opposite ends of his plot. Han Win Naung is besieged on his own land. He has been unable to tend to the mango, banana and cashew trees that have sustained his family since his father set up the farm 28 years ago.

He was eventually informed that the administrators were challenging his claim to the land and had filed charges against him under a controversial law that could see him jailed for three years.

"I didn't know what this law was," the 37-year-old farmer told Al Jazeera. "I didn't understand what was happening to us. They also asked us to move. We don't have anywhere else to go." 

Han Win Naung is accused of violating the Vacant, Fellow and Virgin (VFV) Lands Management Law which requires anyone living on land categorised as "vacant, fallow, and virgin" to apply for a permit to continue using it for the next 30 years. This category totals more than 20 million hectares or 30 percent of Myanmar's land area. Three-quarters of it territory that is home to the country's ethnic minorities. The VFV law is modelled on a British colonial policy in which land occupied by indigenous people was labelled "wasteland" in order to justify seizing it and extracting its revenue. After independence, Myanmar's military rulers adopted the strategy as a way to ensure they could feed their ranks. In 2012, the nominally civilian government under former general Thein Sein enshrined the strategy into law, referring to the targeted land as "vacant, fallow, and virgin" instead of "wasteland".

Land-rights activists say it criminalises millions of farmers who do not have permits and lays the ground for unchecked land seizures by the government, the military and private companies. In November, 300 civil society organisations signed an open letter denouncing the law as "an effort to grab the land of ethnic peoples across the country", especially land belonging to hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people who have no ability to apply for permits. In December, the Karen National Union (KNU), a powerful ethnic armed organisation that had recently withdrawn from the national peace process, called for the VFV law to be "torn up", raising the spectre of future conflict.

Ye Lin Myint, national coordinator for the Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability (MATA), said enforcement of the VFV law actually calls the rule of law into question because it contradicts several earlier government commitments, including the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) between the government and eight ethnic armed organizations.

"The NCA clearly states that during the peace process, there should be no land seizures," he said. "This law will start a domino effect of ethnic conflict."

Last year, despite coming to power on a platform of protecting the land rights of smallholder farmers and promising to reverse all military land grabs within a single year, the government of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) made the VFV law stricter. With the NLD's endorsement, arrests and evictions of farmers like Han Win Naung are accelerating.

In September 2018, Myanmar's parliament, which is controlled by the NLD, passed an amendment that imposed a two-year prison sentence on anyone found living on "vacant, fallow, and virgin land" without a permit after March 11. This gave millions of farmers, many of them illiterate or unable to speak Burmese, just six months to complete a Kafkaesque process of claiming land they already consider their own. According to a survey conducted by the Mekong Region Land Governance Project, in the month before the deadline, 95 percent of people living on so-called VFV land had no knowledge of the law. The deadline has now expired and millions of people, many of whose families had been on the same land for generations, have now become trespassers on their own land.

Saw Alex Htoo, deputy director of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), blames the NLD's pursuit of foreign investment for the policy.

"The NLD is pushing for investment to come into the country without really looking at what's happening on the ground," he said. "That's the only way they could support this VFV law, which is inviting conflict and will displace millions of farmers across the country."

 Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, explained, "This will be a human rights disaster that goes to the doorstep of millions of farmers across the nation."

One time sweetheart of Western democracies, Aung San Suu Kyi lost the affection of the liberals with her support for the military ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. But this policy of her government demonstrates that there are many more reasons to accuse her of being hand in glove with dictatorship.

"People like us have been suffering since this government came to power," Han Win Naung said. "We don't think we will be voting for the NLD in 2020."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/myanmar-farmers-siege-land-law-190328003658355.html