The 70-page report Dead Men Walking: Convict Porters on the Front Lines in Eastern Burma details abuses against convict porters including summary executions, torture, and the use of the convicts as "human shields." The military should stop forcibly recruiting prisoners as porters and mistreating them, and those responsible for ordering or participating in such treatment should be prosecuted, Human Rights Watch and the Karen Human Rights Group said.
"Convict porters are the Burmese army's disposable human pack-mules, lugging supplies through heavily mined battlefields," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Press-ganging prisoners into deadly front-line service raises the Burmese army's cruelty to new levels."
The porters interviewed were men ranging in age from 20 to 57, including both petty and serious offenders. Prison authorities selected prisoners for portering duties in groups of 30 to 150 men per facility seemingly at random from prison facilities throughout Burma, including labor camps and maximum security and local prisons. The prisoners were transported to staging areas with between 500 and 700 prisoners, who were then assigned to individual Burmese army units. Once transferred to the front lines, they remained there indefinitely, working under inhumane and dangerous conditions without payment. None of the prisoners interviewed had volunteered for the service.
"The barbaric practice of using convict porters has been a feature of armed conflict in Burma for at least 20 years, exposing them to the hazards of armed conflict with complete disregard for their safety," said Poe Shan, director of the Karen Human Rights Group. "The army forces other civilians to work as porters as well, but since civilians often flee conflict areas, the use of prisoners continues." Despite commendable work by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in reducing forced labor in central Burma, forced labor by the Burmese army in ethnic conflict areas against civilians and convict porters has not been reduced. The brutal treatment of porters is just one facet of army atrocities against civilians in ethnic conflict areas. The Burmese government has used brutal counterinsurgency practices against ethnic minority populations since independence in 1948.