Report: Refugees fate in the hands of warring armies
by Daniel Pedersen on Jul.29, 2009, under Battles, Burma reportage, Northern Thailand, The Karen
Villagers flee as DKBA attempts to press local population into military service
Mae Sot, ThailandJuly 29, 2009
The sprawling Mae La refugee camp - Photo: Steve Sandford
Whether more than 4,000 displaced villagers from Burma will be able to return home in the near future lies in the hands of the armies locked in battle in Karen State, says the latest situation report from an international agency.
Penned on July 23, the report’s author said another 200 people had fled into Thailand in the 24 hours before the report was written.
Reports from other sources suggested more than 400 people had crossed the Moei River in the 48 hours before that.
Behind this exodus is a push by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, an allied militia of Burma’s ruling military junta, to upsize to become a private border security force for Burma’s State Peace and Development Council.
The DKBA is looking to bolster troop numbers from 3,000 to 6,000 to fulfill its obligations to the SPDC according to a new agreement recently signed.
To gain these numbers a campaign of forced recruitment has begun in the Karen National Liberation Army’s Seventh Brigade region, which the DKBA and SPDC now control.
Villagers want no part of fighting with the DKBA, but many cannot afford to pay the cost of avoiding conscription and so they flee.
The KNLA abandoned significant, long-standing base camps in Seventh Brigade, separating into small bands of guerilla fighters, because its soldiers did not want to fight their own people.
The base camps no doubt would have been taken by the DKBA/SPDC alliance anyway, but more lives would have been lost.
As it stands most injuries, in the hundreds, and deaths, perhaps totaling more than 100 throughout the campaign’s duration, have come as a result of landmines.
All sides in this theatre of war use landmines.
Even the DKBA, which wants to draw on the human resource pool currently languishing in Thailand, has told Thai authorities it is not safe for civilians to make their way home because there are too many landmines.
Most of the newly-arrived refugees are in the Tha Song Yang region, to the north of Mae Sot.
The Tha Song Yang District Committee – consisting of district officials, border police, the military and UNHCR officials – has now decided to leave people where they are, in six relocation sites close to the Moei River, until the end of the wet season.
That makes it harder for non-governmental organisations to properly supply those dislocated people with emergency rations and does not take into account small clusters of people who have not gravitated to those six main sites.
Thai authorities are reticent to allow a new camp to be established – something major NGOs want – because it will add to civil administration duties, the military cannot ensure security and, as a nation, Thailand would have to acknowledge the Burmese junta is waging war against its own people.
ENDS
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"Secret Genocide is a scholarly book on the plight of the Karen of Burma. Author Daniel Pedersen writes about the secret genocide of the Karen people at the hands of the Burmese junta, who use murder, rape, forced labour and torture to quell their enemies. Decades after the Karen took up arms against Rangoon; there is no telling when - or if - their struggle for a secure homeland will finally be accomplished"
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