Labour

Life with hard labour

Under the glare of the midday sun, several dozen men wearing blue outfits, with shackles around their ankles, stood grouped together in a field of shrubs and tall grass. One man among them, holding a long bamboo cane, started to shout at the thin-looking prisoners and they began to use hoes and spades to clear the thick vegetation. “One, two, three, four!” he yelled rhythmically, setting a quick pace for the work. Nearby, a stocky prison warder was looking on with a rifle slung over his shoulder and an umbrella to shield him from the blazing sun. The convicts were from Kaung Hmu Labour Camp and were seen in June as they cleared a piece of wasteland along the Mandalay-Lashio Road in Shan State for the expansion of a sugarcane plantation. The man barking orders was a prisoner appointed to be a so-called prison management assistant, who acts as an enforcer and by doing so can avoid labour. These men – also called “stick-holders” in Burmese – not only use violence to deal with dissent, former prisoners said, but also flog labourers into working harder. “The stick-holders would beat us at will. We worked at the front and they beat…