Burma's military government is at the head of the pack of Asian regimes perpetuating the use of forced labour, a new global report reveals.

The victims of Rangoon's junta range from villagers forced to work on agricultural land confiscated by the military to those compelled to ''provide compulsory cash contributions, in addition to their labour,'' the report released Wednesday by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) states.

''Forty-five persons from each village (in the western Rakhine State) had to work on gravel provision or bridge construction projects each day,'' adds the report, A global alliance against forced labour.

The forms of forced labour that prevails mostly in the rural parts of that Southeast Asian country also include men, women, children and the elderly being compelled by the army to porter for them, perform sentry duty and build and repair roads, according to the report. ''If villagers refuse to comply with orders, they can be subject to threats, imprisonment and violence.''

Such record of abuse by the junta is unparalleled in the world, officials from the Geneva-based UN labour agency said during the launch of the 87-page report, the second of its kind in four years.

''This widespread use of forced labour is not only tolerated by the legislation but also organised by the military in areas populated by the country's ethnic minorities,'' Tim De Meyer, a specialist of international labour standards at the South-east Asia office of ILO, told IPS.

Towards reform

By contrast, two other Asian countries where there is state involvement in forced labour - China and Vietnam - are displaying interest towards reform, De Meyer said, pointing to shifts in Beijing's attitude towards the country's notorious Reeducation through Labour (RETL) system.

''We do see progress on the reeducation camps. (The issue) is on the country's national agenda,'' added De Meyer. ''Vietnam is also another example (of change), shifting from saying there were no forced labour camps to trying to understand the problem.''

The ILO report estimated that close to 260,000 people were forced into China's RETL system in 2004, of which half were there due to drug addiction problems and the rest for offences ranging from theft to prostitution.

These labour camps in communist-ruled China and Vietnam were created by their respective regimes to detain citizens who were perceived as those in need of political indoctrination.

''The people detained would spend from one to three years in them, but they were forced into labour activity that was problematic,'' said De Meyer.

However, such state-sanctioned forced labour, which affects about 1.9 million people, is only part of a more worrying picture of this form of abuse pervasive across Asia.

The ILO's report sheds light on other violations that stem from bonded labour, victims trafficked into the region's sex industry and those forced into domestic work.

In all, there are an estimated 9.5 million victims of forced labour in the Asia-Pacific region, which equals to three-fourths of the global total of 12.3 million people, the report states.

The majority of the abusers, nearly 80 percent, are private individuals seeking to profit from the large slice of the coerced men, women and children forced to work in agricultural sectors of the region.

Those living off the sweat of trafficked victims, for instance, rake in an annual profit of nearly US$9.7 billion, according to the ILO.

The majority of the victims are women and girls, largely due to the estimated 1.4 million people in Asia and the Pacific who are victims of trafficking. They include the estimated 600,000 people forced into the sex trade in the region.

''In the Mekong region (in Southeast Asia), we have seen trafficking (that goes beyond) physical constraints to the use of subtle means,'' Thetis Mangahas, a migration and human trafficking expert at the ILO's Southeast Asia office, told reporters. ''Migrant workers are the most vulnerable.''

Bonded labour

In South Asia, on the other hand, the report drew attention to the prevalence of bonded labour in the agriculture sector, brick kilns and mines, among others.

''(In Nepal) the number of persons affected by bonded labour in agriculture alone has been estimated by independent analysts at some 200,000,'' added the ILO report.

India's carpet-weaving industry is, likewise, guilty, since it has a ''high proportion of children working in conditions of severe bondage.''

The ILO deems any work derived from force or fraud instead of choices or incentive as forced labour. Yet as it realised four years after releasing its first forced labour global report, greater awareness about this scourge in the region has not translated to concrete action.

''There have been very few prosecutions of exploiters of forced labour anywhere,'' the report asserts. ''The offence of forced labour is often not identified as such in existing criminal laws.''

The case of Burma, in fact, reflects this situation. It is among the countries that have ratified the two international conventions to stamp out forced labour, yet it remains a major violator of this illegal form of work.