It’s taken me a while to follow up on a brief but intriguing item published in the Irrawaddy on March 11, and subsequently reported in the Myanmar Times on March 17. I wasn’t able immediately to track down the information behind it, and am thus posting about it only now. Run under the headline “45 NGOs warn UN on lack of human right progress in Burma”, this is the Irrawaddy story in full:

“Forty five Burmese civil society organizations have written an open letter to the UN Human Rights Council ahead of its session in Geneva on March 17. The groups caution the council on the lack of progress in respecting human rights in Burma, particularly where it concerns the Rohingya minority, and warn of backsliding on reforms. They urge the council to maintain the comprehensive mandate of Special Rapporteur on human rights in Burma after the current rapporteur, Tomás Ojea Quintana, leaves this month. The groups also advocate establishing a permanent UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights presence in the country.”

Sure enough, there is an open letter making these arguments and carrying endorsements from 45 civil society organizations – in fact 46, because the Burma Partnership, which is the actual signatory, is not counted in the 45. I found a full copy on the Facebook page of the Burma Campaign Australia. The header given to it is “Open letter from Myanmar/Burma civil society to the member states of the United Nations Human Rights Council”. However, to hold that the 46 organizations are from Myanmar, as do both the letter and the story, is a bit of a stretch.

In the list appended to the statement, there are five groups that I cannot place, though my guess in each case is that their main office is not inside Myanmar. Of the remaining 41, 28 are based in other parts of Southeast Asia (often Chiang Mai or Mae Sot, Thailand), and 13 operate from much more distant corners of the world. As far as I can therefore tell, while all of the organizations have strong links to Myanmar, and some are deeply engaged in important cross-border work, none is currently headquartered inside the country.

This strikes me as odd. Ever since Cyclone Nargis struck in May 2008, there has been a major revival of the non-profit sector initially in affected areas of the Ayeyarwady Delta, and later in other parts of Myanmar. Isn’t it time, then, for external bodies (particularly the likes of Burma Action Ireland, the Burma Campaign Australia and the Burma Campaign UK) to stop passing themselves off as “Myanmar/Burma civil society”?