forced labor

A citzen from Rangoon who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described the fear many people felt surrounding the elections, as well as USDP vote buying.

"I voted in Hmaw Bi and voted equally for NUP, KPP, and USDP party. I considered casting vote as a duty. I worried that I would be arrested if I made a mistake while casting vote. Stresses went away and I felt secured after casting vote. USDP party was offering loans to villagers as inducement. People were asked for Loke Ar Pay (Forced labor) on the 6th of November."

The cost spent by the villages which had to take responsibility for the refreshment in Tantyan township, Northen Shan state were 200,000 Kyats from Lonmone village group, 40,000 from Hwaykyain village group, 180,000 from winemai village group, 200,000 from Homain village group, 170,000 from Naungkhan village group and 150,000 deom Narrlong village gorup.

A voter form Arakan State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "We were forced not only to vote for USDP but to serve as security at the polling booth."

အာဏာပုိင္မ်ားမွ USDPအားမဲေပးခိုင္းသျဖင့္ေပးခဲ့ရပါသည္။မဲရံုလဲေစာင့္ေပးခဲ့ရပါသည္။

Reports of intimidation and arrests in ethnic areas during Burma’s elections

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) has received reports of harassment, intimidation, violence and arrests in several of Burma’s ethnic states, during and immediately following the sham elections three days ago.

Khin Maung Swe, leader of the National Democratic Force party, said Friday that many voters were being forced to take part in advance voting, which allows authorities to gauge voter sentiment ahead of the actual polls and manipulate the vote if so inclined.

He gave the example of a village in Mandalay division where the ward council chairman asked at least one member of each household to cast an advance vote. He said one man voted for the NDF and was told to bring 10 cart loads of sand and repair a local road as punishment.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19966

A local USDP leader and a group of members from a local village group in Shan State came to four neighboring villages and ordered at least one from each family to work as a member of USDP. They had forced 80 villagers from the first village, over 100 villagers from the second village, 20 from the third, and 60 from the fourth village register under USDP. They gave them USDP membership cards and told them it was not necessary to go to the polling station to vote on election day now that they had membership cards.

The leaders of four villages in Shan state were ordered to build the building for the government officials and to build a building for the regional government official as well as the local polling station for the 2010 election. In order to build the building and polling station, the commander has ordered the collection of 5000 baht from each household starting from June, 2010 till the end of June.