Daniel Pedersen

Burma

November 2000

THE refugees do not want to be in Thailand, but on the “inside” conditions are far worse.

When I first visited an Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) late last year the people were nothing short of terrified.

Landmines surrounded the camp, an attempt by the KNLA to stop marauding SPDC troops from entering.

The camp’s leader, 37-year-old Ta Su Nya, animated and speaking rapid Karen, thrust a rocket propelled grenade into my face.

“Look this one didn’t explode, it came down over near the clinic,” he said.

The clinic was a makeshift thing with a dirt floor and drafty walls – inside a baby less than a year old howled with pain in the throes of a malarial bout.

At Ta Su Nya’s behest I gripped the RPG in both hands, then tried to hand it back to him expressing my concern that it hadn’t exploded – yet.

“Don’t worry, we think we’ve disarmed it,” he said, taking it from me.

Then he dropped it.

The camp first sprang up in May 2000, and at the time of my visit in November 2000 was home to 2247 people; numbers were steadily increasing.

The people were first dislocated when SPDC troops walked into Mae Le Poe Ta village and razed it to the ground.

Some of the villagers fled to Mae La refugee camp, home to 36,000 people and the largest in Thailand, but others remained behind.

It was a tough decision with mighty ramifications.

By the New Year the refugees hoped to relocate the 350 dwellings in which they were living because they were then within mortar range of an SPDC encampment.

In September 2000 the Burmese troops walked into the camp and burned down the school.

In October the camp was shelled with 160mm mortars.

And in the first few days of November, troops passing on a nearby ridgeline fired rocket-propelled grenades into the camp.

Ta Su Nya said villagers were forced to flee to the jungle, while others made it across the river to Thailand.

“We’re going to have to move again, there’s nothing else to do, this will be our third move, but we are very worried we could be killed,” he says.

At the camp’s clinic medic Soe Moe Aunt, 34, is caring for the malaria stricken baby.

The young medic believes the baby will live, because he is there to treat it.

He volunteered to come back to the camp from where he was working in Thailand.

That forced labour will end under this military regime is a difficult concept for the local populace to grasp.

They consider it more a culture of behaviour and a necessity of life for the SPDC troops to survive in this rugged land whose people despise them.

That Karen villagers would choose to willingly work for the junta to “build the nation”, as has been so often claimed by the junta, is ridiculed by the camp leader.

“They kill people who refuse to donate food to them, they take the young men to carry their munitions and their wounded and they rape the women,” he said.

An agitated and nervous Ta Su Nya intervened as a long line of refugees waited to relay their horror stories of how they eventually arrived at the camp.

“The SPDC are about three miles from here, we have just received word, they are carrying heavy artillery and we think they are going to attack the camp.”

Some people immediately began making preparations to flee into the surrounding jungle.

Others intended to make for the Thai side to spend the night in a foreign, yet friendly, country.

And so began another offensive in an ongoing conflict in which members of the Karen ethnic minority are considered enemies of the Burmese state.

ENDS