UN expert blames civil society groups for Burma's census trouble

UN census expert Paul Cheung blames civil society for census problems (UN photo)

Dr Paul Cheung, who serves as the chair of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) committee advising Burma's government on the recent census believes that civil society and rights groups are to blame for the numerous controversies that arose while Burma's census was being conducted, the first such census in over three decades.

“The so-called ‘civil society groups’ have their own agenda. Personally I think they inflamed the situation,” said Cheung during an interview with the Myanmar Times published this week.

“I have advised many countries with complicated ethnicity issues … [In Myanmar] it is complicated. But there are some ‘human rights’ groups in Myanmar which make ‘quiet diplomacy’ not possible,” claimed Cheung who previously served as the head of the UN Statistics Division. Prior to his taking on the job with the UN Cheung served as a senior bureaucrat in Singapore where he continues to work as professor.

Predictably Cheung's comments were blasted by the very same groups he was blaming. “It is absolutely shocking for a UN official advising the national census to so bluntly dismiss the concerns and aspirations of the peoples of Myanmar,” the Myanmar Times quoted Tom Kramer of the Transnational Institute (TNI).

In the lead up to the census Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group (ICG), TNI and numerous Burma based civil society groups warned that the census which compelled respondents to identify their ethnicity using a widely discredited list developed during the Ne Win era could worsen long-standing ethnic tensions in the country.

The UNFPA led by country director Janet Jackson, who apparently was acting on the advice of Dr. Cheung chose to ignore the warnings of rights groups and went ahead and provided funding for the census as well as other technical assistance.

Whilst the census was being carried out, anti-Muslim riots erupted out in Rakhine state where members of the stateless Rohingya minority were barred from listing themselves by their term of choice in contravention of long-standing international norms.

Also while the census was being conducted, fighting erupted between the KIO and Burma's army in Mansi (also Manje in Kachin) township. At the time the fighting took place Burma's state owned New Light of Myanmar claimed in an April 6 article that “As part of the nationwide census-taking process, the census enumerators are carrying out their tasks with the help of the armed forces in some regions that face some difficulties in Kachin and northern Shan states”.

The fact that the census was used as a pretext to deploy more soldiers to a heavily militarized zone removed what little if any credibility the census had amongst many Kachin.

The UN also insisted on carrying out the census despite repeated warnings that the census was seriously flawed, because it prevented respondents from identifying themselves with more than one ethnicity, posing a serious problem for many people in Burma who are from families of mixed ethnicity.

Other problems identified with the census included the list of ethnic groups that the census used. The list included 12 Kachin subgroups although most Kachin recognize that there are only 6 or 7 such distinct groups. The list instead included a number of the same Kachin subgroups using different names.

As the Economist magazine reported the census ethnic list was equally problematic for Chin state. “There are 53 Chin subgroups on the list, for instance, many of which the Chin themselves do not acknowledge, raising old suspicions that the census results will be used by the Burmans to keep the Chin politically divided and thus weaker.”

In addition to funding the census UNFPA itself the UN arranged for several European countries including Norway, the UK and Switzerland to contribute funding for the census. UNFPA and foreign donors in fact provided the majority of the census funding though the Burmese government also contributed US$15 million of the total US$74 million price tag.