Daniel Pedersen

Northern Thailand

August 2000

THE remnants of a people cling to a mountainside near Mae Sot in Thailand’s northern Tak province.

At Umpheim Mai refugee camp, the Karen people subsist in a camp carved from clay, an endless series of steps which they ply daily in a hopeless search for normality.

Across the border the KNLA is fighting to liberate their homeland and at the same time protect those who have not yet fled.

The people are paying dearly for the relentless quest for an independent state.

The camp’s most senior monk, Na Ware, shakes his head he disapproves of the peace deals signed by other ethnic minorities.

“Look at the Mon, they have made an agreement with the SPDC and what good has it done them?

“All they have done is surrender their right to negotiate, they have totally surrendered their rights.

“And it is not the people’s will for such agreements, the people have no say in such agreements.”

The peace deals in other frontiers have also freed many of the junta’s troops which means greater attention is paid to destroying the Karen resistance movement.

Na Ware believes Aung San Suu Kyi has no hope of negotiating peace alone.

“There must be intense pressure from the international community, otherwise all attempts at a negotiated settlement will fail.”

“While some ethnic groups have entered negotiations with the junta, it will do them no good – refugees still keep spilling over the border,” he said.

“The junta it is always at the ready, always on the alert.”

In Umpheim Mai refugee camp, home to more than 16,000 people, conditions are harsh.

For the Karen however, there is one aspect to the camp that means people will walk for more than a month through heavily mined jungles to reach it.

And that is that life may go on . . . in whatever degraded form it might take.

For in this camp, separated by just one peak from the Karen homeland, there is a greater chance of survival.

The Karen people are the victims of an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing the likes of which caused horror in former Yugoslavia and Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.

In camps spread along the border anaemia and malnutrition are widespread, malaria endemic.

Inside Burma the Karen people are forced to construct roads for no wages, used as porters to carry munitions and armaments for months at a time, and sometimes just simply murdered.

There is no attempt to hide murders from the general populace, it is simply another tactic to force submission, or to create such fear that people take flight to Thailand, say the Karens.

It works.

At Umpheim camp as many as 20 new families arrive monthly, but at times of intense military activity, such as in January 2000, when SPDC troops attacked two villages in the Myeik and Dawei areas, 1100 people fled across the border in just a couple of days.

Those who remain in Karen state, on the “inside”, must battle an epidemic plaguing their community amphetamines.

The Thai government knows there are between 40 and 50 amphetamine factories along the Burmese border.

The military estimates 600 million amphetamine pills were last year brought into the country from Burma.

The drugs are predominantly produced in Shan state, further north, once ruled by the Mong Tai army, under the command of the notorious opium lord Khun Sa.

Khun Sa surrendered to the junta in 1996 and now lives under house arrest in Rangoon.

The factories are now widespread along Thailand’s northern border and smuggling routes have spread along its length. And drug production has increased.

Many of the pills are destined for Thailand, but around the factories inside Burma extremely cheap drugs are made available to the local populace.

The future for the refugees is at best bleak, many say they are quite content to simply stay in the camp.

They cannot imagine a time of peace in the Karen state; they have never known such.

LEY Thaw, 34, was a student at the time of the 1988 uprising, during which thousands of students were slaughtered in Rangoon.

At the time he fled to the capital of Karen state, Pa-an, then onto the border to play a co-ordinating role for students taking refuge in Thailand.

He helped many young people flee and then began teaching at Huay Kalok refugee camp.

Teaching with a gun at his side, he instructed his students to stick together should the camp be attacked, he would guide them to a safe place.

Ley Thaw eventually abandoned his role as a teacher, deciding a more direct involvement in the war was necessary, began fighting with the KNLA, headed by General Bo Mya.

In 1993, however, he was wounded by troops from the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC, renamed the State Peace and Development Council in 1997 with cosmetic hierarchical rearrangements).

Copping shrapnel from a blast from an M-79 grenade launcher, Ley Thaw was hospitalised in Mae La camp, the largest camp near Mae Sot, now home to more than 36,000 people.

Would he again take up the fight against the junta?

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” he said.

“But if the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) asks the refugees to return without adequate security arrangements I will not go, I will again take up a gun.”

For people such as Ley Thaw, life is tough, but Karen subsistence farmers that remain in Burma are facing increased difficulty just simply surviving as they have for hundreds of years.

The junta’s troops, once content with simply stealing farmers’ rice at harvest, have begun burning rice paddies before harvest.

The field is then generally sown with landmines to prevent a new crop being planted.

GE RA and his family began walking out of Karen state on July 12, 2000, they arrived at Umpheim Mai camp on September 8 later that year.

The rice farmer had had enough, he didn’t want to end up like his father Kin Ma, who had been killed 10 years earlier while working as a porter for Burmese troops.

He’d seen what a landmine had done to his father, both his legs were torn off by the blast and he died a slow agonising death.

For three years Ge Ra had lived under the constant stare of Burmese military intelligence officers.

In 1997 each SPDC battalion handpicked five of its most militant number to shed uniforms and become the eyes and ears of the military in the regional villages.

These groups, said Ge Ra, have more power than the military, albeit localised.

If they dislike a particular villager, or they know people have relatives in Thai refugee camps, they are at liberty to kill them.

There is nothing clandestine about their activities.

“The military comes into the villages and takes people at random to act as porters, we are forced to carry munitions and communications gear, but then there is no-one to look after our farms.

“Sometimes we are forced to work for the soldiers for three months at a time, and if you become too exhausted to keep moving they just kill you and walk on.”

And so Ge Ra left, he walked through the forest with his wife and two children, guided by local villagers.

He has made a small bamboo shack, parts of which have a flattened bamboo floor suspended above the ground, and now spends his days with his family “at home”.

MA CHO is a 31-year-old refugee who arrived at Umpheim Mai on September 13, 2000.

She stayed in her beloved Pa-an as long as she could.

She had been paying the military 200 Kyat often (about US 45 cents at the ever-changing unofficial market rate which rules in Burma), so she was not forced to act as a porter.

But daily her family could earn only 150 Kyat, selling fried fish from a small cart.

Then the military began to come more often.

“They always took at least five people from each village per battalion, but then some batallions demand more money than others, some ask for 200 Kyat, others for 300.

Ma Cho lost her brother to a landmine while he was working as a porter.

She has two children, one who is nine she has brought to the camp.

Another, just seven, she left in Pa-an.

She is staying with people she knows until she can somehow begin to build her own life in the camp.

A moment’s silence follows her story and she begins to weep.

One of the camp’s senior men, in his 60s, offers her some comfort and a Karen language book.

It is titled “We Cannot Forget”.

To be discovered with a copy of the volume inside Burma is punished by death.

Ma Cho may be able to get work in Thailand, the economies of scale in Thailand certainly demand cheap labour.

And the Karen are certainly a cheap source of labour.

A Karen labourer will work for Bt70 daily, as opposed to the minimum wage for Thais of Bt162.

Thai authorities estimate there are more than one million illegal Burmese workers currently in Thailand.

But regular crackdowns by the Thai military and police force hundreds of people back into Burma at a time.

People are loaded into trucks and shunted back along “special” routes inside Burma.

They are prodded like cattle with long poles into the trucks because they lack appropriate identification.

For them the future is uncertain, but SPDC authorities will be waiting to greet them when they arrive home.

Late at night, sipping weak black tea in a shelter-cum-cafe a refugee in his mid-twenties succumbs to his frustration at life as a refugee since he was just eight years old.

There is a cold wind blowing through the makeshift walls and he is braced against it.

“They chose this place, because one thing the refugee knows, they want us to go home, that is why they chose this site.”

He hates the camp, he hates the Thais, he hates the junta.

He is Karen and his people are dying.

ENDS