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Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, when freedom and democracy are threatened, we have a responsibility in this body of the U.S. Senate to speak up and speak out. It doesn't matter if it is a challenge here at home or if it is happening somewhere else around the globe; we cannot remain silent.

For the past year, Burma has been descending into chaos, violence, and authoritarian military rule. So I have come to the floor here tonight, the anniversary of the Burmese military's illegal coup overthrowing the nation's democratically elected government, to call on all of my colleagues to join me in passing S. Res. 35, a resolution condemning this desecration of democracy in Burma and a year of atrocities that have followed, and urging our allies around the world to join us in doing so.

I also urge this body to pass the BURMA Act, which will give President Biden the tools he needs to apply pressure to try to reverse this coup and help restore democracy.

For those who are not aware of the situation in Burma, a year ago, the people of Burma took to the streets. They engaged in general strikes to peacefully protest the military's overthrow of their fledgling democracy. One woman who was part of the General Strike Committee--one of the main groups behind the protests--said she was participating because ``I have a little girl. She's one . . . I don't want her to grow up under a dictatorship like I did.''

Before taking to the streets, she told her husband: ``Take care of our baby and move on with life if I get arrested or die in this movement.''

And she finished by saying: ``We will finish this revolution on our own and not hand it over to our children.''

Early last year, the country's Parliament was expected to sign off on the recent national elections in which the leading civilian party, the National League for Democracy, and its head, Aung San Suu Kyi, had won more than 80 percent of the seats that were available.

The Burmese military was never under civilian control, and it wasn't happy with these overwhelming results--these results for the National League for Democracy. They had been deluded into thinking and believing that the people of Burma supported their military policies, and so they would support a strong military role in Parliament, which the people of Burma did not.

Thus, the military leaders refused to recognize the outcome of the election. They tried to have the country's supreme court throw out the results as fraudulent. And when that didn't work, they declared a national emergency and surrounded Parliament with soldiers.

Aung San Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders were arrested, the nation's infrastructure was seized by the military, and, almost overnight, Burma's decade-long experiment with democracy, as imperfect as it was, was thrown out the window, and the kind of brutal military rule that had governed the country for roughly half a century was reinstated.

The initial reaction from the new military junta seemed restrained. The protests were allowed to go on peacefully, but only for a little while. The restraint didn't last long.

The military leaders who had been leading a brutal, yearlong genocide against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority turned to violence. They turned to violence, as they had done in 1988 and as they had done in 2007, to crush the protests.

One local filmmaker in Yangon, who took it upon himself to document the protests, said that at one protest in late February, ``about 100 people marched towards us quickly. I don't know if they were police or they were soldiers. Without warning, they started shooting at us with sound bombs, [with] bullets and [with] gas bombs.''

Since then, the military's violence has escalated. They have fired rocket launchers, burned down homes, launched airstrikes, cut off food supplies to starve entire communities, and shot at unarmed civilians as they fled.

Just last week, there was a report that members of the military went to one village looking for two specific individuals, one of whom was disabled. After shooting and killing these two individuals, they set fire to the entire village.

According to one organization monitoring the situation, nearly 1,500 Burmese citizens have been killed since this coup began a year ago; another 12,000 arrested; with warrants issued--often death warrants issued in absentia--for another 2,000 or so. Those are just the numbers that can be verified, and who knows what the total amount is.

For the Rohingya people, a Muslim population in a largely Buddhist country, the situation has only grown worse. They have been the target of military oppression and genocide. Hundreds of thousands have fled across the border. But the military has continued to crack down even more on the Rohingya population in Rakhine State--a state I visited a few years ago, leading a delegation of Senators and House Members, after the horrific genocide, when some 700,000 people fled, villages were fire-bombed from the air, and helicopters carrying soldiers shot from the air. On the ground, babies were killed in front of their parents, wives were killed in front of their husbands, husbands were killed in front of their wives, and women were raped. It was one of the most horrific genocides in hundreds of villages that occurred at that moment.

But the military now, in spite of all that happened then, is enacting new draconian restrictions on freedom of movement of the Rohingya that remain in Rakhine State. They have engaged in continuous intimidation efforts. They have warned of the dangers of collaborating with rogue groups resisting the military's authority.

Colleagues, the Senate cannot stay quiet in the denial of freedom and the presence of massive human rights violations in Burma. America cannot stay silent in the face of such atrocities. The world must not stay silent in the face of genocide being carried out against any group of human beings.

We must make it undeniably clear to any government around the world that when you systematically persecute your people; when you deny their human rights; when you murder innocent men, women, and children; when you burn down their homes and their communities; when you starve them of food, deny them the opportunity to earn a living or even travel to the next community to see a doctor, there are consequences; that a community of nations will not stand by idly as you commit these horrendous acts; and that we in the Senate will not sit by and fail to give voice about these atrocities.

So for the sake of all the Burmese people who have lost their lives in this coup, for the sake of all those striving to restore democracy, let us pass S. Res. 35, and let us do it this week--``A resolution condemning the military coup that took place on February 1, 2021, in Burma and the Burmese military's detention of civilian leaders, calling for an immediate and unconditional release of all those detained and for those elected to serve in parliament to resume their duties without impediment.''

Let's pass that resolution, and let's do it this week, the 1-year anniversary of the coup. And let us work with our allies around the globe to restore freedom in Burma and hold the perpetrators of these atrocities accountable for the crimes that they have committed.

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