SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Burmese Freedom and Democracy
Act of 2003’’.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress makes the following findings:
(1) The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has
failed to transfer power to the National League for Democracy
(NLD) whose parliamentarians won an overwhelming victory
in the 1990 elections in Burma.
(2) The SPDC has failed to enter into meaningful, political
dialogue with the NLD and ethnic minorities and has dismissed
the efforts of United Nations Special Envoy Razali bin Ismail
to further such dialogue.
(3) According to the State Department’s ‘‘Report to the
Congress Regarding Conditions in Burma and U.S. Policy
Toward Burma’’ dated March 28, 2003, the SPDC has become
‘‘more confrontational’’ in its exchanges with the NLD.
(4) On May 30, 2003, the SPDC, threatened by continued
support for the NLD throughout Burma, brutally attacked NLD
supporters, killed and injured scores of civilians, and arrested
democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi and other activists.
(5) The SPDC continues egregious human rights violations
against Burmese citizens, uses rape as a weapon of intimidation
and torture against women, and forcibly conscripts child-sol-
diers for the use in fighting indigenous ethnic groups.
(6) The SPDC is engaged in ethnic cleansing against
minorities within Burma, including the Karen, Karenni, and
Shan people, which constitutes a crime against humanity and
has directly led to more than 600,000 internally displaced
people living within Burma and more than 130,000 people
from Burma living in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma
border.
(7) The ethnic cleansing campaign of the SPDC is in sharp
contrast to the traditional peaceful coexistence in Burma of
Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and people of traditional
beliefs.
(8) The SPDC has demonstrably failed to cooperate with
the United States in stopping the flood of heroin and
methamphetamines being grown, refined, manufactured, and
transported in areas under the control of the SPDC serving
to flood the region and much of the world with these illicit
drugs.
(9) The SPDC provides safety, security, and engages in
business dealings with narcotics traffickers under indictment
by United States authorities, and other producers and traf-
fickers of narcotics.
(10) The International Labor Organization (ILO), for the
first time in its 82-year history, adopted in 2000, a resolution
recommending that governments, employers, and workers
organizations take appropriate measures to ensure that their
relations with the SPDC do not abet the government-sponsored
system of forced, compulsory, or slave labor in Burma, and
that other international bodies reconsider any cooperation they
may be engaged in with Burma and, if appropriate, cease
as soon as possible any activity that could abet the practice
of forced, compulsory, or slave labor.
(11) The SPDC has integrated the Burmese military and
its surrogates into all facets of the economy effectively
destroying any free enterprise system.
(12) Investment in Burmese companies and purchases from
them serve to provide the SPDC with currency that is used
to finance its instruments of terror and repression against
the Burmese people.
(13) On April 15, 2003, the American Apparel and Footwear
Association expressed its ‘‘strong support for a full and imme-
diate ban on U.S. textiles, apparel and footwear imports from
Burma’’ and called upon the United States Government to
‘‘impose an outright ban on U.S. imports’’ of these items until
Burma demonstrates respect for basic human and labor rights
of its citizens.
(14) The policy of the United States, as articulated by
the President on April 24, 2003, is to officially recognize the
NLD as the legitimate representative of the Burmese people
as determined by the 1990 election.
(15) The United States must work closely with other
nations, including Thailand, a close ally of the United States,
to highlight attention to the SPDC’s systematic abuses of
human rights in Burma, to ensure that nongovernmental
organizations promoting human rights and political freedom
in Burma are allowed to operate freely and without harassment,
and to craft a multilateral sanctions regime against Burma
in order to pressure the SPDC to meet the conditions identified
in section 3(a)(3) of this Act.
မည္သည့္အခ်က္မ်ားျပည့္စံုလွ်င္ Sanction ဖြင့္ေပးမည္ကိုပါ ေအာက္ပါလင့္တြင္အျပည့္အစံု ေလ့လာႏုိင္ၾကပါသည္။
0 comments:
Post a Comment