Daniel Pedersen

Joel Whitney interviews Morten Pedersen, June 2010

Geurnica

The Burma expert defends aid, diplomacy, and “understanding” Burma’s dictators in order to improve human rights, sway softliners, and save lives.

Early last month, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell met with Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi and offered a battery of human rights demands to her wardens in the military government. The dictators have been gearing up for elections later this year. Yet, unfazed by Campbell’s demands, they yawned and pressed on with elections from which Suu Kyi, who won in 1990, and her opposition party, the National League for Democracy, are banned. International election monitors? Also banned. And don’t expect election-day scoops from a country where a foreign journalist was shot point-blank for covering monks’ protests in 2007. “I think they learned their lesson from 1990 when they actually allowed for a free and fair election and lost in a landslide,” said Jared Genser, Suu Kyi’s international counsel.

Days after his visit, Campbell admitted “profound disappointment” that more had not come from the talks. Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK, noted judiciously: “… Clearly after two visits [by Campbell] since last September, engagement with the regime has produced no results at all.” [Emphasis added] On May 15, the president renewed economic sanctions against the regime. But members of Congress sought to make those sanctions even tougher. “In a further sign of fraying American patience,” the Guardian reported, “a bipartisan coalition in the U.S. House of Representatives called this week for a ‘tougher and more robust application of sanctions on Burma’ and urged the Obama administration to back an international war crimes inquiry.”

President Obama’s policy on Burma has something for everyone. It’s a hodgepodge of baby-step diplomacy, self-righteous threats, and crippling economic sanctions. The sanctions condemn the dictators for rights violations by blocking U.S. investments (except for Chevron, which is somehow allowed to stay), including all non-humanitarian aid. Morten Pedersen, a Burma scholar lurking in the bibliography of a lot of Burma policy books, insists that the sanctions, especially the ban on aid, are undermining the president’s diplomacy. Oh, and starving the Burmese.

During his six-year stay in Burma, where he was able to use his conversant Burmese to interview experts and ordinary people, Pedersen says the most dire rights violation he found was crushing poverty. Alongside political rights, he argues that socioeconomic rights must be seen as part of the array of human rights. But such an approach would seem anathema to a Congress that prioritizes condemnation and punishment of the generals over the well being of the people of Burma.

Advocating an approach he calls principle engagement, Pedersen writes in an op-ed in the Canberra Times, “pressure can be exercised without mindlessly ratcheting up sanctions, which have little practical impact other than limiting our ability to influence broader social, political and economic processes. Quiet, but persistent, pressure and support for incremental gains is likely over time to shape the political behaviour of the military more effectively than public condemnation and sanctions.”

Calling the generals’ outlook Hobbesian, Pedersen argues in Promoting Human Rights in Burma, “We may feel that the military leaders hold socially deviant values, or that their fears regarding political reform are unjustified. Yet, like many leaders who believe they have a higher purpose, they are largely impervious to criticism, and do not expect nonbelievers—foreigners in particular—to understand.” So what’s the point of talking to them? Well, like all regimes, Burma’s has hardliners and softliners. As distasteful as it may sound, can “understanding” the generals, even speaking in their terms, bring about human rights improvements, bolster military softliners, and save lives? And if so, is it politically viable?

Pedersen is a research fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre for International Governance and Justice. Burmese historian Thant Myint-U calls him “one of the foremost students and scholars of Burmese politics anywhere outside the country.” Pedersen previously worked as senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Burma and consultant on Burmese politics and development affairs with the UN, the World Bank, and the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum. I spoke with him at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City in late March, while he was in town for a conference. We sat amidst a throng of tourists who drank high-priced martinis and ate complimentary nuts.

—Joel Whitney for Guernica

Guernica: You lived in Burma for six years. The generals are killing and imprisoning and torturing a lot of their people. Some say they are committing genocide against groups like the Karen. Liberals and conservatives in the U.S. and Europe seem to have converged on this idea that if there is ‘evil’ there, we certainly shouldn’t fund it. It’s not moral for us to deal with them. Do you disagree?

Morten Pedersen: There’s two ways of looking at morality. One would be when you look at the act itself, [asking] is that moral or immoral? Many people would define it as immoral, because it funds a bad regime. To me, morality is better looked at in terms of its consequences. I look at how our acts impact the Burmese people. If there is a net benefit from our acts for the Burmese people, I see it as moral. You often are accused of being immoral when you argue for engagement. I think it’s important to make that point up front that that’s not the issue. We can disagree on things, but it’s not about morality. And of course it all depends on what type of engagement we’re talking about.

People especially in the U.S., are quick to say, “If you’re not sanctioning then you are doing ASEAN-style engagement, which is commercial engagement.” The kind of engagement I’m talking about is what I term “principle engagement,” whose up-front objective is to bring improvements in human rights for the Burmese people. By that I mean the entire range of human rights, not just political and civil rights, but also socioeconomic rights, which, as far as I’m concerned, are of equal value. That’s certainly something that [was clear from] my six years in Burma, that socioeconomic issues are uppermost in people’s minds.

Guernica: So just to define principle engagement…

Morten Pedersen: So if there’s a net benefit flowing from the engagement in human rights terms, then I see it as being the way to go. And that then gets into these rather difficult calculations of what is the relative benefit of one approach versus the other. A lot of the discussion is about aid, because that really is where the door is in Burma. The reality is that there wouldn’t be a lot of trade and investment flowing into Burma even if sanctions were lifted, because of the economic environment. (You would get more of it than now, but not a lot.) So I’ve spent a lot of my time looking at aid as a way of having a dialog or a conversation both with the regime but also with society. Of course [that means] a financial relationship that can improve living conditions of people on the ground.

Guernica: Because right now the U.S., for one, doesn’t give significant amounts of aid?

Morten Pedersen: The U.S., as part of this new diplomatic engagement policy has also for the first time committed to openly giving aid inside the country. For many years, it was all outside. But that has kind of been shifting over the last seven years. They have begun to do little things inside.

Guernica: And the E.U.?

Morten Pedersen: The E.U. made a decisive shift seven or eight years ago where they said we’re going to separate politics and humanitarian issues. My argument is that you’re dealing with a long-term crisis. Humanitarian aid by definition is aid that saves lives in a crisis. Burma is an extended crisis; therefore going in and saving lives of course has value. But it doesn’t make sense to only do that. Because you save a life today but then tomorrow the crisis will come back and threaten it again. There has to be more ambition than that.

I think to address Cheney’s point, there are definitely people who cannot be reformed. But accepting that is not to accept that you can’t make a difference.

Guernica: How?

Morten Pedersen: Principle engagement is changing governance to the extent that you can so that human rights improve. But [you’re] also helping people cope with whatever situation exists. So in the short term, it’s about helping people cope. And in the medium term, I think it is also a strategy for beginning to effect changes that over time can lead to bigger things. But it will be domestically driven change and you [see] at best international aid or engagement, or whatever it is, as possibly being a catalyst for that.

The idea that aid props up the regime is ludicrous. In power terms, it is irrelevant. If you stick to the concept of morality where we shouldn’t be doing anything that benefits a corrupt regime, yes, then you’ve got a problem. But if you look at morality in utilitarian terms, I don’t believe that you do, because there’s not significant power consequences of the aid going in. Or at least you can make sure that there isn’t. Of course, I am assuming here that aid agencies are being principled themselves and that they look after their money and that there is proper monitoring and so forth. There’s been an easy argument out there for years, you know, ‘Aid won’t make a difference, you’re not allowed to do anything that’s meaningful and they will steal all of it.’ But it has been proven by the agencies that have engaged that this is not the case.

Guernica: So in its limited way, aid works?

Morten Pedersen: Aid works to the extent that aid works in any country. Usually it doesn’t change a country, right? But it can do things at the individual level.

Guernica: Your book strongly argues for more understanding not just of Burmese history but of the specific perspective of this murderous military junta. Many would criticize this argument that we need to understand bad guys. Dick Cheney offered extreme contempt for American liberals by saying something like, “Liberals want to put terrorists on the couch and psychoanalyze them.” In a way, you take a step in that direction. Tell me what the benefits of understanding the generals are.

Morten Pedersen: I think to address Cheney’s point, there are definitely people who cannot be reformed. But accepting that is not to accept that you can’t make a difference. Of course, if there are people who can’t be reformed then the difference that you can make is with other people, including other people in the regime. Some people say hardliners and softliners; it’s a useful way of distinguishing [how] the Burmese regime has softliners just as any other regime. And to the extent that engagement can change minds, can change policies, those are the people we’re looking at. So engagement at best can reinforce or empower people within the regime who are interested in [change].

Guernica: Of course now the Obama administration is engaging “pragmatically” with the regime. To make this engagement more productive, you argue that Burmese history ought to be better understood. What does that history look like?

Morten Pedersen: I think we have to accept that this is a military that genuinely believes that Burma without its military in control (not necessarily as rulers, but certainly in a key role) would not have survived and even today would not survive.

If you take sanctions too far, as we have in Burma, you start blocking other things that would be more effective in helping the Burmese people and bringing about improvements in their human rights.

Guernica: Besides the Buddhist clergy, the military is the only viable institution with any longevity in Burma. And that goes back to just after World War II when independence came; Aung San Suu Kyi’s dad, feeling angry and humiliated by decades and decades of colonial rule, impatiently but understandably told the British to beat it before the Brits could rebuild the country. With the chaos that ensued, the military was the only feasible institution. This was the view that developed, in part as a justification for the generals’ curtailing democracy. Many have argued, including Burmese historian Thant Myint-U, that the military remains the only viable institution in Burma.

Morten Pedersen: Yeah, I mean I’m not personally prepared to accept the argument that a depoliticized military would be the end of Burma.

Guernica: Which is what military hardliners argue.

Morten Pedersen: My point is that I do accept that there are a lot of people in the military who believe that. So we’re not dealing with a regime that is solely interested in personal power and privilege, although that is obviously an element, as it is everywhere. It is a regime that also has a founding ideology, a self-image as having a critical national role, and which does, in fact, act on that. Not just running the country as their own kind of bank or business, although some of them seem to; there are others who are concerned with much more. But I should clarify that the distinction between aid and diplomatic engagement is actually not that big. A lot of the most effective conversations with the regime are conversations that are being had on the ground by agencies that are engaged there on practical projects.

So it’s not Kurt Campbell flying into the capital, talking about how they should conduct the elections. I don’t think that’s gonna lead anywhere. I don’t think that conversation is wrong. But the idea that you can negotiate significant changes at the political level in a short timespan, I don’t believe that’s gonna work. But we do know that conversations about economic policy, for example, do from time to time have an impact and lead to changes in governance. When engaging in these conversations, a good place to start in a country like Burma is to accept that we’re not gonna be able to change Burma. We simply don’t have the means, the leverage, to change a country like that in the dramatic ways that we tend to focus on.

Guernica: China’s stance seems to further undermine any influence that sanctions could once have had.

Morten Pedersen: I think pressure is important. But where I want the sanctions to stop is… you need just enough to have that possible effect. But if you take them too far, as I believe we have done in Burma, then you start blocking other things that I think would be more effective in helping the Burmese people and bringing about improvements in their human rights.

Guernica: Specifically, what parts of sanctions should be kept?

Morten Pedersen: If you’re gonna use sanctions on Burma they have to be strictly targeted. It should be the kind of sanctions that don’t really have an impact on the broader economy or the broader population. Things like the visa ban and freezing the generals’ accounts. None of this really bites that much. And I’m not saying it’s gonna usher in change. But it sends the message that we are unhappy with the way you are doing things, and says this is not according to international standards.

Guernica: But it isn’t counterproductive, in your view?

Morten Pedersen: In comparing the different types of sanctions, those are at the end of the continuum where it’s something we can look at. But there may be counterproductive effects. When you move into broader economic sanctions, then we’re in the middle now. Then it starts to become problematic. It is not possible to target sanctions; because if you target them to hurt the generals, they can pass it on. They can deflect it.

Guernica: It could even end up increasing their corruption over things like aid.

Morten Pedersen: It could, yeah. So once you move into economic sanctions, we’re already beyond what I think is strategically smart to do. But where it becomes really problematic is where you have aid sanctions. Because aid is the wench in the door that we have. You get people in there on the ground who have conversations, build capacity, change minds all across the state and society. No, they don’t engage with Senior General Than Shwe. But they engage at the ministerial level and then all the way down to people living in the villages. And with the amount of aid, we aren’t talking about dramatic changes. But we are talking about positive changes, both in terms of immediate outcomes and I believe also in terms of beginning to create conditions for bigger change, which will have to be primarily domestically driven. But if you can get the people in the regime to loosen up a little bit. I mean they are so paranoid; they have been paranoid for many years. Well, paranoid, but it started out not being paranoia. I mean, it was real.

Guernica: You mean in the period around 1950?

Morten Pedersen: The whole country was at war in the early nineteen fifties. Back then it wasn’t paranoid to believe you needed to control things.

Guernica: Everything was fragmenting.

Morten Pedersen: Yeah.

Guernica: There were something like a dozen ethnic groups that rebelled. There was a communist faction. The U.S. had supported Chinese nationalists within Burmese borders, arming them to the teeth. So the country was total chaos, falling apart…

Morten Pedersen: Yeah. You had other countries in the region, Vietnam, Korea, at different times or a bit later, that were split in two. This is the nightmare scenario.

The Burmese generals have no affinity at all with the people who are sanctioning them.

Guernica: Some of the U.S. and Europe’s policy is a result of a fixation on Aung San Suu Kyi as the main entry point into Burmese history, which is certainly compelling. It hooked me. As did conversations with Karen and other Burmese exiles. But you seem to argue that we don’t see Burma enough through the filter of the history of the people we have to deal with.

Morten Pedersen: What I would say is [these Burma watchers] see Burma through the last twenty years, which is equivalent to the Suu Kyi period. The reason it’s twenty years is because that period has not changed. That’s exactly the point. It’s exactly the same issues we’re dealing with now that were the issues in 1988. And this of course is why everybody should start having a look at existing policies. When, twenty years down the road, absolutely nothing has changed [in what] you have stated as your goals, then certainly you have a very good reason for a revision of what you’re doing.

Guernica: Critics of sanctions equate them with sanctions on Cuba, Iran, or Iraq, where they have failed to change governments, except perhaps to entrench them, in ways that seem counterproductive and certainly hurt the public. Yet proponents of sanctions cite South Africa, where sanctions helped bring down a regime built around institutionalized racism. Which scenario is more pertinent to Burma?

Morten Pedersen: South Africa was actually a partial democracy. Blacks were not involved in that democracy. But there was a white constituency that had influence on government decisions. In Burma, there is no such constituency. There’s no one outside the army that has influence on policy decisions. There’s a close business community. But while they’re close to the generals, they have no political influence. In South Africa, there was a large business community that had direct influence through electoral processes and beyond that. And South Africa was also heavily integrated into the global economy, and the global cultural community. The whites were really hurt by being shunned by what was in fact their peer group in Europe. So they were hurt, culturally they felt isolated, the shaming worked, and the economic pressure worked. And they then put pressure on the government. That may not have changed otherwise.

Guernica: In Burma, those elements are not there?

Morten Pedersen: The Burmese generals have no affinity at all with the people who are sanctioning them. Culturally, there’s no link whatsoever.

Guernica: In fact, there’s still resentment against the U.S. for backing Chinese nationalists, Great Britain for backing the…

Morten Pedersen: And for what the Americans have been doing for the last twenty years. And economically they just aren’t integrated. So the economic pain that you can impose is very limited. And even if you could impose pain on the cronies, they don’t have the political influence to change anything. So the generals, as far as I’m concerned, are isolated in terms of political effects of sanctions. If you do something and the Burmese generals gain a little from it but the Burmese people gain a lot, then by my calculation that’s the moral thing to do.

Guernica: For instance, regarding aid.

Morten Pedersen: Diplomacy too. If you go and talk to the generals, then maybe they feel a little good that the ‘Americans come and talk to us, we’re somebody.’ You can make the argument at any level, really. And, ideally, I would not want them to feel good. But if that conversation can help open space for something that benefits the people, or can begin to change their mind so they do govern in a way that is less abusive, then to me it’s the right thing to do.

Guernica: Reading your book is confusing to me. I have read many others that make the story of the Karen, for instance, very compelling. But your book seems to point back at the generals to remind us of their story, in order to better engage them. Aren’t these two arguments contradictory, or can they be complimentary?

Morten Pedersen: That’s a tricky one to answer. Because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the narrative we’re being told about the suffering [of groups like the Karen] in the border areas. I don’t have any doubt that it is extreme and has been ongoing for a very long time. There’s nothing good to say about what is going on out there. I think the implicit argument in the book is that there is more to Burma than the eastern border areas. So that doesn’t mean less attention to the eastern border areas, but it means more attention to the rest of Burma.

Guernica: The argument of these books, books like Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question, and Edith Mirante’s books, is that the eastern and other border areas have been most neglected, because these people live far out on the border and have marginal influence inside Burma, let alone in the broader world of international policy. If we want to understand the morality of this regime, look to the eastern border area where we have something tantamount to genocide. You say, essentially, it’s the generals we should be looking at. Why?

Morten Pedersen: Well, I guess because I’m coming at it from a policy angle. In order to analyze the impact of sanctions policy, the key thing that we need to understand is why the generals do what they do, so that we can have a more effective conversation.

If the purpose is changing their mind, then coming and saying, ‘You are evil, you need to go away,’ will get you nowhere.

Guernica: In a way, I keep trying to ask you this: why do the generals do what they do?

Morten Pedersen: You need to accept that national security, as the generals define it, is their key concern; you can argue about whether that’s the right way of defining it. And I would disagree with that way [as well]. But that is how they define it. That is a significant objective and a significant motivating factor in everything they do. So when you engage with them you need to recognize and acknowledge that. And you need maybe even to go a bit further and frame your conversations in a way that kind of accepts that there are security concerns that are legitimate. But maybe there are other ways of addressing those security concerns. I mean other countries in Southeast Asia have also faced risks of their country, if not splitting apart, then fragmenting in some significant way. Rather than addressing that problem militarily like the Burmese have done, they have addressed it economically by pushing economic growth and spreading it to provinces.

Guernica: So to get the Burmese generals to think of a new story about how to hold the country together, it’s productive and helpful for those dealing with them to understand how the generals see the country’s national security problems now, and show some acknowledgment of that in dealing with them?

Morten Pedersen: If the purpose is changing their mind, which is hard anyway, then coming in and saying, ‘You are evil, you need to go away,’ will get you nowhere. But if you come in and you recognize some of what I believe are real concerns of the military, however misunderstood they may be, then you have the start of a conversation which can possibly lead to suggesting [policies] that are more acceptable to the international community, but, more importantly, are better for the Burmese people.

Guernica: Zoya Phan suggests an arms embargo. What’s your take on that?

Morten Pedersen: I think that looking at an arms embargo is where we should have started. But an arms embargo wouldn’t be very effective because you probably wouldn’t get cooperation of the neighboring countries and even if you did we all know how the arms trade works. I mean the arms trade breaks through sanctions everywhere. You can make it more expensive but you can’t stop it. So it would be a symbolic sanction more than an instrumental or effective one but that is definitely on the side that I would call good, or better sanctions.

Guernica: There’s a reasonable debate on that?

Morten Pedersen: Yeah, reasonable sanctions. But one that would be very hard to get.

Guernica

ENDS

MIZZIMA

Don Talenywun

October 20, 2009

The State Peace and Development Council also has warships in a standoff with Bangladesh, the result of more than half a century’s of the neighbours’ failure to demarcate a common border.

Warships and Bangladesh braces for war

It also stands accused of trying to acquire nuclear arms technology from North Korea and Russia.

In the most southeastern areas of Burma and stretching into the north abutting Karenni State, the junta is at war with the Karen – as it has been since 1949.

The Karenni live in misery, with much of their territory to be flooded by dams along the Salween River and its tributaries from which they will reap no benefit.

In the massive territory that constitutes Shan State and includes the ethnic Chinese enclaves of the Wa, Kokang and Mongla people, the SPDC is buildings its military presence, an ominous sign it intends to purge the region of dissidents before its election.

In an editorial this week (week of Oct 11-17), Burma’s state newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar, appealed to the United States for assistance in its anti-narcotics efforts, naming the United Wa State Army as its nemesis.

In fact the Kokang people, clustered to the north of the Wa region and the Mongla, to the Wa’s south, have been tarred with the same brush.

The junta is currently positioning artillery in those regions.

Along the Indian border the Naga people maintain a campaign of resistance to centralised governance as they watch India strike deals on dams that will change he face of the Chindwin River forever.

Ironically the electricity generated by the planned massive hydropower schemes will be taken by high voltage lines to Uttar Pradesh, or Indian Kashmir, in a bid for peace through development inevitably at6 Burma’s expense.

Near the border with Bangladesh the Muslim Rohingya people still pay astronomical fees to be thrown into unseaworthy vessels to make a break for Malaysia.

In short, the SPDC is at war with its own people.

Neighbouring Thailand is expecting clashes with the Burmese military as it forces people out of the country and will operate on high alert for the next few months along its more than 2000km.

Burma border clashes likely as poll nears

Regularly during the dry season mortar fire is exchanged between Thailand and forces within Burma’s boundaries, if not the SPDC then one of its allies.

Every country surrounding Burma has it share of refugees.

One of the big gripes of the opposition is the new constitution of 2008, according to which next year’s election will be contested.

The constitution was supposedly ratified by referendum just eight days after Cyclone Nargis wiped out the mouths of the Irrawaddy River in April last year in Burma’s greatest natural disaster of modern times.

Cyclone Nargis

People were washed away in their tens of thousands and the true death toll will never be known, the generals initially rejected foreign assistance and the military was hopelessly ill-prepared to help the population.

The foreign aid that did get in was sold on the black market or some was re-packaged with individual generals’ names plastered on the wrapping with the aim of generating good will for those commanders.

The constitution enshrines the military in the political process, along the lines of Indonesia’s Suharto-era dwifungsi model.

The Indonesian military: DWI Fungsi and territorial operations

It reserves 25 per cent of parliamentary seats for junta appointment and a 75 per cent majority is required for major amendments to standing laws or the constitution itself.

The first signs the junta had plans to neutralise the ethnic minorities before the 2010 election, a date for which has not been announced, came in June last year.

Troops of the SPDC and an allied militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, launched major and sustained offensives against base camps of the Karen National Liberation Army.

During last year’s rainy season the SPDC took two major KNLA base camps, that of 103 Special Battalion and Sixth Brigade’s 201 Battalion based at Wah Kay Kee, both to Mae Sot’s South.

During this rainy season, which is only now ending, a wide offensive swept from Karen State’s capital Pa-an to the Moei River, which forms the border with Thailand.

Thai authorities struggled with a sudden influx of refugees from Seventh Brigade, about 6,000 people.

KNLA 7th Brigade loses a quarter of its territory

Many of them are still dependent on international handouts of food and live under thin plastic sheeting in pitiful conditions without even mosquito nets in this malaria-ridden part of the world.

They are mostly Karen, their homes, schools and churches have been burned down and it has been made clear they are considered enemies of the state, unwelcome in the country of their birth.

Zipporah Sein is the Karen National Union’s general secretary, elected in October of last year at the KNU’s 14th Congress since 1948.

She replaced Pado Mahn Sha who was assassinated at his home on February 14 last year by Karen assassins working for the DKBA, and in turn the SPDC Zipporah says the new constitution is a “death sentence” for recognition of the ethnic minorities.

Burma’s New Constitution: A Death Sentence for Ethnic Diversity

The KNLA is now preparing itself for another sustained offensive throughout the dry season, which is beginning now and will probably last until April.

Its Fifth Brigade region, with terrain too difficult to fight in during the wet, will now be targeted as vehicular access becomes possible in some areas.

And deep within Sixth Brigade, around Dooplaya district, another SPDC push is underway that Zipporah predicts will create huge numbers of refugees, dwarfing the 6,000 from Seventh Brigade in June and July.

The Institute for Political Analysis and Documentation, an independent body described the junta’s constitutional referendum as “a complete sham” and predicted much the same for the coming election.

Burma: voting in vain of democracy

Burma’s Buddhist monks, who hold the most sway in Burmese society among the common people of any individual or institution have been banned from voting in the coming election, as they were during the constitutional referendum.

Referendum law excludes monks and bans dissent

In the lead up to the two year anniversary of 2007’s so-called “Saffron Revolution”

(Burmese monks do not wear saffron robes), the ruling Buddhist authority, the Sangha, demanded Burma’s generals apologise for their treatment of monks and release the hundreds that remained behind bars.

The Sangha said if its demands were not met the junta, its soldiers and their families would face Pattanikkujana, the refusal by monks to accept alms from those considered to have violated Buddhist principles.

The junta did not apologise nor release the jailed monks, but rather began a campaign of harassment, jailed more monks and posted military intelligence officers to keep a close watch on monasteries considered liable to begin any insurrection.

At least 30 monks were arrested in Burma in September and October, the two-year anniversary of the Saffron Revolution

These are not encouraging signs of an upcoming free and fair election.

As the Burma Army’s troops mass in the country’s north and, far from cowering, Burmese citizens prepare to do battle against their own “government’s” soldiers in the window of opportunity when torrential rains do not pummel the jungles, some countries talk of engagement.

Gentle persuasion will not work with a military regime that has taken Burma in little more than 50 years from the world’s largest exporter of rice to what Macquarie University’s Professor Sean Turnell now describes as an “undeveloping nation”.

The generals have ruined the economy while enriching themselves without taking a moment to ponder whether they might have got their economic model wrong.

Engagement would generally assume some modicum of trust among the interacting parties.

Either that or parties looking to engage have assumed that things can only get worse without some form of intervention.

In the next few months in Burma, things are going to get worse.

And Burmese citizens who have organised themselves into opposition blocs, employing tactics from outright violence to insistent diplomacy, and forged alliances despite their differences have sent their messages to the world.

The world stands warned.

ENDS

Restrictions fueling frustration, anger and violence

MIZZIMA

Don Talenywun

September 28, 2009

Trouble is brewing among the refugees of Burma’s war.

Stranded in northern Thailand, fed on rations donated by international community, unable to travel freely and not allowed to work, the populations of the camps strung out along Burma’s border are ready to blow.

Umpheim Mai refugee camp is on tenterhooks, with violence threatening to break out among residents at any time.

A football game on Saturday afternoon descended into crowd violence at game’s end, with gangs of young men attacking each other.

Some camp residents described it as a mini riot.

The current trouble started earlier this month, with a murder of a Burmese resident when he allegedly failed to pay for a cow he had already taken possession of.

When it became obvious he could not pay, the owner is said to have sought his money back, only to find the potential buyer had already slaughtered the beast.

A dispute escalated rapidly from a verbal stoush among two groups of men into physical violence.

Whatever ensued, the alleged “buyer” is now dead.

The camp, situated in Thailand’s in Tak province to the south of Mae Sot and officially home to about 15,000 people, spent months earlier this year on high alert and these latest events have done nothing to ease ethnic tensions.

Residents for months waited in anticipation of an attack by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, a militia allied with the Burma Army, the armed wing of Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council.

Rumours ran wild that the remote camp would be destroyed, with much of the population packed up and ready to flee at a moment’s notice.

It only takes a rumour for a large group of isolated, traumatised people to react unpredictably to minor events.

Law and order in the camps has long been a taboo subject with Thai authorities, lumbered with policing communities that would not exist but for a grinding war of attrition in Burma’s ethnic minority-dominated north.

Thai authorities maintain stringent guidelines for allowing Burmese citizens to become part of the camps, requiring them to be fleeing fighting orchestrated by soldiers of the state.

Thai authorities do not recognise soldiers of the DKBA as soldiers of the Burmese state, creating a propensity by the Burma Army to use allied ethnic militias where it can, and paint the conflict as an ethno-centric struggle for power among rival warlords.

Economic migrants or those fleeing human rights abuses or forced labour do not qualify as refugees, inadvertently creating a vast pool of people who have quietly slipped over Burma’s borders and become part of an illegal workforce.

This workforce, satisfied to work for as little as half the wage of a Thai worker, is estimated by some organisations to number as many as two million.

But for those who do qualify as people who have literally run for their lives, containment in a refugee camp and the inability to achieve anything for themselves results in a frustrated existence.

In Umpheim Mai refugee camp on Saturday that frustration bubbled over into mob violence.

“Football is banned now,” said one refugee.

“And rumour from on high is that the Palat [Thai camp commander] may close the gates [put the camp into total lockdown].

“Things are not good, I’ve never seen it like this before, there is a definite vibe in the air,” said the refugee resident.

“Thai patrols through the camp are random now and the soldiers are clipped up and ready to go [carrying live ammunition in the event they have to quash a riot or mob violence],” he said.

ENDS

Another Saffron Revolution could erupt if demands not met

People’s Partner for Democracy and Development

Anna Malindog

September 30, 2009

A week from now, Burmese monks will again challenge the repressive regime in Burma and again demand from the Burmese military junta the following:

• A public apology for the atrocities the junta has committed against the monks
• The release of all monks now imprisoned

The Sangha has given the military regime an ultimatum: That by October 2, it must have delivered, granting these demands, or face the probability of a repeat of the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests on October 3.

Should the junta fail to meet the demands the monks will once again march and dominate the streets of Burma.

The lack of expectation on behalf of the monks has already led to preparations being made for the protests.

The monks have little doubt the junta will deny the people of Burma peace, freedom and democracy for as long as it can.

This is a battle of wills. The determination of the monks remains steadfast and they will act on behalf of Burma’s people.

The people’s dissatisfaction with decades of oppression will come to a head this week. The monks say they are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the people of Burma and intend to occupy streets in urban areas across the territory.

The monks ask for support for their aspirations and solidarity.

This is a conscious effort by the Sangha to facilitate changes in the country, It is a sacred mission and the deepest desire of the Burmese monks to free their country from the yoke of atrocities, brutality, and the bondage of a military regime.

The demand remains the same – peace and freedom for Burma.

The question for the international community is: How can it support the monks on October 3 and during the days following.

Rather than statements – mere words – it is time for action.

The monks face a hostile opponent in Burma’s generals.

It is now up to the world’s common people to demand peace, freedom and justice for Burma.

Anna Malindog is executive director of the non-governmental organisation, Peoples Partner for Democracy and Development.

ENDS

Remnant population of KNU Seventh Brigade struggle on

MIZZIMA

Don Talenywun

September 16, 2009

Individual donors are starting to assist new refugees at Safe Haven Orphanage.

About 200 people have gathered on the grounds of Safe Haven, many of whom are children.

They fled Karen State, finally giving up their shaky hold on homes constantly in danger of attack, during an offensive by the Burma Army and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army.

The DKBA and Burma Army troops seemed determined to displace the majority of people living in the Seventh Brigade region, suspecting them of supporting Karen National Liberation Army soldiers somehow.

But much of the KNLA guerilla force left the area before the enemy arrived.

They left landmines behind them however, and many of the DKBA dead and wounded, which both numbered in the hundreds according to the KNU, fell foul of these booby traps.

But left in limbo were the civilians who lost their homes.

With no shelter at the height of the rainy season they trod up and down mountains, finally crossing the Moei River to relative safety in Thailand.

For now they are allowed to stay where they are, but the chances of establishing a new camp for between 5,000 and 6,000 people displaced is almost nil, because nowhere is secure along the border.

DKBA are camped not far from Safe Haven, just over the other side of the river in view of anyone from the Thai side.

For now they have not attacked the camp and donors are providing the necessities of life, but mostly things that can be carried so all is not lost in the event of an attack.

More help is needed, mosquito nets and sleeping mats are most important.

ENDS

Dear All

Greetings from Maesot!

You are all invited to participate and join the Peace Walk for Burma. This will be on the 21st of September, 2009.

Please read the following information:

Purpose: To commemorate the International Peace Day. And pray for peace in Burma, Thailand and the world while commemorating the 18th of September 2007 peaceful monks protest in Burma.

Activities:

• 9:00am to 9:30am, 30 minutes of prayer (inter-faith payers led various spiritual and religious leaders).
• 9:30am to 11am, Walk from pagoda outside of Maesot check point to the City Park for some lunch and media interviews and other activities in connection to the Peace Walk.
• 1pm to 4pm, Walk around Maesot and to the border (Myawaddy Bridge). At the bridge the monks will lead the recitation of Metta Sutta and prayer for Peace by other religious leaders from various faiths.

The Calls for the Peace Walk:

• Peace in Burma: no to civil war
• No to nuclear enrichment in Burma

The Slogan of the Peace Walk:

“May all beings not fight each other… may all beings be happy and peaceful”.

If you need directions on how to get to the venue of the meeting, place call Raul at +66 (0) 847532671, he can help you get to the place and give you the right direction.

Please share this information to all.

Everyone is welcome to attend and to walk with monks. I am indeed encouraging everyone to be in solidarity with the Burmese Buddhist monks in their quest for the promotion of peace, justice and freedom for Burma, and we can all show this through our participation in the Peace Walk.

Hopefully, we will see you in the Peace Walk. Thank you.

If you have questions then you can directly contact Ashin Sopaka at +66 (0) 846683556 or email him at mettamail@gmail.com.

“May all beings not fight each other… may all beings be happy and peaceful”.

If you are not in Thailand or in Maesot, you can stage or organize a similar event in the place where you are to show solidarity and concern about the situation in Burma.

You can also issue statement that states solidarity to the said event and the cause by which the Peace Walk for Burma is based on.

you need further information, publicity materials, please let us know and we are more than happy to provide you with electronic copies of the poster, post cards, t-shirt designs etc. Thank you!

Let us promote the cause of the Burmese People: Peace, justice and freedom for Burma.

 

In Solidarity,

 

Peoples Partner for Development and Democracy (PPDD)

Mobile: +66 (0) 84 330 8550

ENDS

 

Shan Herald Agency News

August 26 2009

Laogai, the capital of Kokang, just 5 months after celebrating the 20th anniversary of peace with the country’s military rulers, is under Burma Army control since Monday night, 24 August, according to sources.

“I haven’t seen any Kokang fighters all day,” said one of the few remaining residents told SHAN yesterday. “Everywhere it’s the Burmese the soldiers.”

Another source said he had gone past what was until yesterday the mansion of Peng Jiasheng, the Kokang supreme leader and saw only Burmese policemen both inside and outside the wall.

Peng and three others, which included his younger brother Jiafu and two sons, were said to have escaped to the north with his troops.

According to the latest information, Peng and troops loyal to him are still holding positions northeast of Laogai and at Qingsuihe (Chinshwehaw) aka Nampha on the southern border with Wa.

As the new base at Kunghsa is just 4km from Laogai, the Burma Army could have mounted an attack if it chose to.

“But they have yet to do it, probably because it is too uncomfortably near the Chinese border,” said a source from the border.

“The Burma Army has instead brought in other Kokang rivals of Peng to deal with him. Apart from Bai Souqian (his former deputy), there are now Kokang militias loyal to the Burma Army from Kunlong, Hopang and even his archenemy Yang Mouliang.

If there is going to be any shooting, the Burma Army can now tell the Chinese it’s a fight among the Kokangs, the Burma Army has nothing to do with it.”

On the other side of the border, China has set up a temporary holding center for the refugees from Burma, according to the same source. “They are giving them a blanket and a mat each, besides food,” he said.

Meanwhile, the United Wa State Army (UWSA) is reportedly holding an emergency meeting with its Kokang ally this morning at Namteuk, south of Qingshihe.

The two town are separated by the Namting and connected by a bridge over it. “The fall of Qingsuihe,” admitted a Wa source, “could greatly threaten the safety of Namteuk and restrict our movements.”

Namteuk is the headquarters of the UWSA’s 318th Division, commanded by Bao Ai Roong, the Wa supreme leader’s nephew.

The fall of Laogai without a shot being fired has brought into question the practicality of the “Not Shooting First” policy of the Peace and Democracy Front (PDF), whose members include Kokang, Wa and Mongla.

“We should also have spelled out what movements by the Burma Army would be deemed as hostile acts,” said a Shan ceasefire officer.

“Now, because we have said that we won’t shoot first, the Burma Army is being allowed to beef up its forces around us.”

The Kokang debacle could be repeated elsewhere, he warned, if the alliance continued to hold on the policy.

Kokang, since 1989, had been under the control of Peng Jiasheng. The Burmese authorities, now that an arrest warrant for him has been issued, is reportedly encouraging Peng’s rival groups to set up a new leadership.

Shan Herald Agency News

ENDS

Promise of profit benefits few over the needy

Don Talenywun

Mizzima

August 18, 2009

As the sun sets through the branches of a kokko tree on the banks of the River Moei, one of the last commutes of the day – from Thailand to Burma – takes place.

The pilot of a longboat points his vessel upstream, revs its diesel engine and in 10 minutes has sidled to the opposite bank.

It’s a semi-official international border crossing, a sideways struggle against the current, where no-one on the Burmese side is waiting to check your papers.

On the Thai side a lone soldier with an M-16 casts a disinterested glance at the locals as they pass under or around the boom gate on a road to nowhere.

A few bulbs light the two Thai restaurants perched on stilts offering a view over the river to the small temple on the Burmese side.

One of the cooks arrives, stops for a chat and shakes his head at the columns of smoke rising from houses on the other side as Burmese Karen stoke charcoal fires on which they will cook their dinners.

Welcome to Kokko, a Thai hamlet of farms, farmers, itinerant workers and one of the “tax gates” that mark this region as an international trade frontier.

Kokko is part of Ban Mae Pa district, a few minutes’ drive from Mae Sot.

Across the river, the Burmese border town of Shwe Kokko is controlled by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army – in particular it’s notorious Brigade 999.

Once the region was Karen National Union heartland but as the KNU has ceded more and more territory, the DKBA have seized this place, ensuring a revenue stream from arbitrary taxation of anything crossing the river.

They have erected a small Buddhist temple right on the bank, thumbing their noses at the largely Christian-led KNU.

The land that surrounds Kokko is dedicated to farming.

Vast fields of corn are just beginning to flower, baby cobs are forming on healthy stalks.

Eventually the cobs will be as thick as a forearm, for corn grows lush here.

Beyond the corn, sugar cane is at the height of its growth cycle, soaking up the wet season’s rains.

Come cool, dry conditions later in the year the sugar content of the stalks will soar, but for now the plants are not worth cropping, the deluges of these months diluting their harvest potential.

Even in a good year, the returns on these crops are marginal.

Last year the bottom fell out of the corn market and investors and small-scale farmers alike lost out.

So enraged were farmers that for a time they implemented wildcat blockages of the Tak-Mae Sot arterial road, in a bid to bring attention to their plight and demanding better prices.

Another reason for agri-business losses were the exorbitant “tax” rates being charged by the Burmese military-aligned DKBA, to ensure safe passage to Thailand’s markets.

In some areas, assumed loyal to the KNU, the DKBA demanded as much as Bt20 per 16kg tin of harvested cobs.

For now the land will continue to be used for farming, making a little cash from relatively low-maintenance crops.

But for owners of the properties, like those in the nearby light industrial/residential zones that cluster along Route 105 on Thailand’s national roadway grid, the real money is yet to be made.

Ban Mae Pa is experiencing a real estate boom, with prices doubling in the past decade and a Bt1 million price tag for an old elevated timber home not off the radar, depending on its location.

The old real estate adage, location, location, location rings true in Ban Mae Pa.

One landholder who bought a nice house on a nice block in the area seven years ago for 750,000 baht has since been offered Bt2.7 million.

He is at a loss to explain exactly why, except that his land is right on the highway between Mae Sot and Mae Ramat, a region bordering Mae Pa further to the north.

He is realistic about property prices, bought what he could afford and, unlike many others, isn’t looking to cash in on an overly-inflated return as soon as possible.

“Look, Mae Sot is a false economy, a totally false economy, without over there [Burma] and over here the place would be just another little Thai town,” he says.

The highway that tracks through Ban Mae Pa eventually ends at Mae Sariang.

But by the time the weary driver arrives in Mae Sariang they have experienced all manner of road conditions, from washed out gravel to multi-lane thoroughfares.

Ban Mae Pa is home to hot springs, waterfalls and caves.

Even the most casual of tourists can see a little of everything in a day and still have time for a leisurely lunch by the river.

It’s about seven kilometres from Mae Sot Airport, 97km from Pa-an airport in Burma and about halfway between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, an hour-and-a-half off the main highway between the two.

The region experiences three distinct seasons, hot and dry, hot and wet and cold and dry.

While not cold by some standards, early-morning temperatures might drop to five or six degrees Celsius during the cold season, which includes Christmas and a month either side.

Early this year the Tak Chamber of Commerce proposed a new bridge be built across the Moei River to further facilitate already-booming trade.

The current friendship bridge opened in August 1997, dark days for the Thai Kingdom’s corporate elite.
It was a time of bankruptcy and suicides, with the “Asian Tigers” in the grip of a meltdown that shook South East Asia to its very core.

Thailand precipitated the region-wide disaster when it floated the baht in the face of runaway foreign debt.

The former peg to the greenback was abandoned and the baht went into freefall taking others, such as Indonesia’s rupiah, with it.

The danger signs presented themselves in early 1997.

But by early August, just days before the opening of the Mae Sot’s Friendship Bridge, the government had formally shut down 58 Thai finance companies and accepted a US$16.7 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In Mae Sot the effects weren’t sorely felt in the local business community.

At an informal gathering over coffee of prominent businessmen in Mae Sot one Sunday afternoon the consensus on 1997 in Mae Sot was “sabai, sabai” (all’s well, or no problems).

They are wealthy men in a wealthy town, and they know they owe much of their good fortune to the bridge, and in turn Burma.

The talk then turns to just how much money is being made via the Friendship Bridge.

One mentions that Birdy, the popular chilled-milk coffee brand, sends Bt35 million worth of product over the bridge in Mae Sot annually – with a Bt2 mark-up on each can at wholesale rates.

A 180-millilitre can of pre-mixed, sweetened milk coffee sells for Bt13-Bt14 in Mae Sot, just five kilometres away, over the bridge, it can sell for as much as Bt20 or more from a local retailer.

Birdy is produced in Ayuddhya, an hour or north of Bangkok and 450km from Mae Sot.

In the final five kilometers from Mae Sot to Myawaddy on the Burmese side of the Moei, the product increases in value by more than 10 per cent.

Business has always pioneered river crossings in this part of the world, whether by boat or bridge, legal or illegal.

The Tak Chamber of Commerce estimates Thailand earns Bt1 billion each month from cross-border trade via the Friendship Bridge.

That figure can be doubled with a second bridge, says Chamber President Ampol Chatchaiyareuk
“If they [the Burmese government] agree to it, we will build it,” he said earlier this year.

The DKBA is ready, the road on the Thai side is a potholed mess, on the Burmese bank a semi-trailer could U-turn comfortably.

The first vehicular crossing of the existing bridge, other than trucks involved in its construction, was a convoy of 20 vehicles carrying 51 Thai businessmen and led by then Chamber of Commerce Vice President Panti Tangphati.

Greeting them in Myawaddy was Lieutenant Colonel Khin Maung Win.

The military runs business in Burma, and only a strange blend of patronage and submission enables civilians to open a business.

As evening’s twilight settles on a Saturday night at Kokko two high-sided, dual-trailer trucks are loaded with sawdust destined for Bangkok.

The sawdust will be used as fuel to fire a furnace for dyeing textiles.

The trucks are perched on an earthen ramp that leads to the water’s edge and their trailers chocked in place with rocks and coarse gravel.

Loading them is labour intensive.

On the Burmese side the sawdust is packed into 50kg rice sacks then transported by longboat across the river, unloaded, then manhandled into the trailers.

The truck drivers’ family members either slumber under a rough bamboo shelter at the ramp’s edge, or tend a huge pot of rice soup, awaiting departure time.

As night closes in it seems the day has defeated them, the trailers are not yet fully loaded and the five longboat owners have gone to their homes on the Thai side to eat.

There is no lighting at the ramp.

At dawn the slow shuffle of bags will begin again.

On Sunday, probably by mid-morning, the load will leave for Bangkok.

This is the slow pace of the transportation industry in Kokko, and workloads of the men working here, clad in ragged T-shirts, cut-off jeans and flip flops, would make a stevedore in the West shudder.

But even with loading mired in such inefficiency, there is still obviously money to be made.

A new bridge would undoubtedly hasten progress, but the greatest share of profits would remain Thailand.

The key to this inequitable arrangement is the fact Thailand at least has some economic legal infrastructure, such as property laws, a working banking system and credit lines open to most people if they can pay it back.

Rubbery as Thailand’s laws might be in reality, the gateway from Burma to Thailand is overseen by men with guns, illegitimate power and privilege.

Kokko bridge

Wangpha casino & resort,
Shwe Kokko

ENDS

Junta bleeding Burma dry with electricity projects for neighbours

Mizzima

August 14, 2009

The dislocation of between 5,000 and 6,000 people from Burma to Thailand in the past two months has so far been reported as a military thrust against the Karen National Union by Burma’s Army.

Coverage has largely focused on refugees, people fleeing forced conscription, forced labour, murder and rape.

Video footage of militia armies torching people’s modest bamboo homes and the schools and churches the inhabitants relied upon for their sense of community are widely available on the internet.

Free Burma Ranger medical teams shot close footage as community centres and schools built by villagers with material cropped from the surrounding jungle were razed to the ground.

Now, sent packing to Thailand, the people eat from communal kitchens on donated rice rations and sleep under plastic sheets.

On the surface this offensive, which involved a force of 1,700 junta-aligned soldiers, could be interpreted as a State Peace and Development Council (the ruling junta) bid to wipe out dissent before controversial elections planned for next year.

For 60 years the KNU has fought to defend human rights, people’s land rights and to establish its say in how its people are governed.

The Karen people have a population conservatively estimated to be about seven million, their own flag, their own songs, their own culture.

Since Burma’s independence in 1948, shortly after which military offensives began against the Karen people, soldiers of the KNU have stood as a symbol of rejection of centralised rule by the majority Burman race.

Without the KNU, the oldest representative body of the ethnic nationalities defying successive illegitimate military regimes, other people’s bids for recognition would be dealt a severe psychological blow.

A simple conclusion to draw is that what happened during June and July opposite northern Thailand’s Tha Song Yang district is just another incident, albeit severe, in the world’s longest-running conflict.

Dam the consequences

Yet there are untold benefits to be shared between Thailand and Burma.

The planned 33m-high Hat Gyi Dam will span a river the World Wildlife Fund describes as supporting “possibly the world’s most-diverse temperate ecosystem”.

It will produce 1,200 megawatts of power per hour, or 7,335 giga-watts (Gwh) annually, a giga-watt being the production of one million kilo watts for the period of an hour.

Burmese, Thai and Chinese interests will all play roles in funding and construction of the dam.

The Hat Gyi Dam is the smallest of five planned for the Salween River, but the first of which construction is proposed.

The Karen National Union has personally asked Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to halt construction.

And representatives of 19 villages that will be flooded on the Thai side have asked that the project be halted.

The dam will be built just to the north of where thousands of Karen people lost their homes to the Burma Army in June and July.

Po Luang Nu Chamnankhiripai, the local leader of the Thai group in Mae Hong Song province protesting the dam’s construction, told the government last month that the dam would mean more armed conflict on the Burmese side of the border.

And that, he predicted in a written plea to stop the dam project, would mean more refugees in Thailand.

“The construction of the Hat Gyi Dam will exacerbate human rights abuses against the Karen people and Thailand is bracing herself for more refugees and enormous burden,” he wrote.

Access justifies excess

The access road to the dam on the Burmese side runs straight through the Karen National Liberation Army’s (the KNU’s army) Seventh Brigade region.

At the moment it is a fair-weather road, meaning for about six months of the year it can barely be traversed in a four-wheel drive, let alone trucks moving heavy machinery.

And so the process of sealing the road must begin, raising once again the spectre of forced labour, a crime Burma has been accused of so often that the junta’s continual denials of such practices ring hollow, to say the least.

In the real world, people forced to abandon their homes and their ancestral lands to make way for major state infrastructure projects would be compensated.

But in Burma they have been pushed out of the KNLA Seventh Brigade area by a major military thrust and ended up in Thailand as refugees with nothing.

Back at home their houses have been burned to the ground.

Their farms now go unattended, barring some cross-border sorties by desperate villagers to harvest produce from their subsistence farms so their family can eat.

But even the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, which since 1994 has sided with the military junta and needs to supply workers to help build the road, has warned farmers not to go back.

The DKBA has suffered massive casualties to landmines and surgeons at Thai hospitals have been busy amputating the limbs of foreign soldiers.

But the job of clearing the area of civilians and the guerilla armies they help nourish is getting done and the population forced from their homes.

For now the KNLA has no base camps in Seventh Brigade, has lost its general headquarters and is waging a guerilla war with soldiers sleeping rough in the jungle, sometimes with not even a pair of boots to their name.

Refuge no haven

It was a surprise to international aid workers stationed along the border when Thai authorities agreed in principle to bringing all of the Seventh Brigade refugees together at one site.

The argument put forward was that they would be far easier to care for and supply logistics simplified if everyone was in the same place.

So the hunt for a place where refugees could be housed began.

It wasn’t long before the deserted Eden Valley Academy School was proposed and all non-governmental organisations based out of the bustling town of Mae Sot agreed that 2,300 people could be housed there.

The site had buildings, most with walls and some with roofs. Of the buildings in structural disarray, at least bare concrete slabs and footings remained.

It was by no means perfect, prone to some flooding, needing a footbridge to link it to another area of flat land, some construction and general maintenance.

But it was a beginning, an opportunity to get everyone to a single location.

But when the NGOs raised the most-pressing issue – security – they drew a blank.

DKBA patrols were known to pass through the area regularly, despite the site being well inside Thailand.

Thai authorities said they were unable to provide security.

Too many of their soldiers, they said, had been sent to the south, where a Muslim insurgency grinds away against the Malaysian border.

Eventually plans to inhabit the Eden Valley Academy School were abandoned – the refugees were granted permission to stay where they were, or return home.

But Thai authorities insisted that anyone returning to Burma would have to declare it was their own decision and sign a form to that effect.

They did not want media allegations they were forcing people back across the border into a war zone.

Who’s in power?

Thailand and Burma signed a memorandum of understanding to build the Hat Gyi Dam in 2006 and mutual benefits are assured.

But on the Burmese side the benefits seem mostly financial and therefore destined for the junta, which is widely estimated to spend 40 per cent of its national budget on its formidable military force.

Thai government officials told a July gathering representing the 1,800 people who will be officially relocated that Thailand would receive 90 per cent of the power generated by the dam, but were quick to add the project could yet be cancelled.

Much of Burma’s population relies on diesel-powered generators for electricity, one of the reasons escalating fuel prices acted as a catalyst for the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”, in which Burmese citizens were executed, beaten and jailed by their own army.

For Burma to “receive” just 10 per cent of the new dam’s power load suggests there is not much benefit pending for inhabitants of Karen State – a land kept isolated – and certainly none for those who will lose their homes and livelihoods.

Thailand’s current National Energy and Development Plan, which pledges to both diversify energy supply by buying from foreign countries and to reduce national dependence on energy imports, was implemented in late 2006.

Even at this stage, almost two years after construction had been planned to begin, Thai officials are publicly hedging their bets on whether the project will go ahead.

The Salween is Southeast Asia’s longest river that has not yet been dammed.

It was declared a World Heritage Site in 2003 and is home to 80 endangered animal species.

Eventually, after wending its way through 2,815 kilometres from the mountains of Tibet to Moulmien in Burma, the river spills into the Andaman Sea.

It is a wild river – just 89km of its course, through a series of gorges as much as a kilometre deep, is navigable.

Power partners

On July 30, at the 27th Association of South East Asian Energy Ministers’ meeting, representatives of the 10-member bloc agreed on a plan drafted by Thailand.

The plan, to be known as the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation 2010-2015, includes development of the Hat Gyi Dam.

Sometime this month a committee established by the Thai government, at the behest of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, is to recommend whether or not to go ahead with the dam.

ASEAN ministers are backing the project as an integral part of the region’s power grid.

Burma’s ruling generals are hungry for more foreign revenue and looking to cement their place as Burma’s legitimate rulers, while ingratiating themselves with their ASEAN partners.

Abhisit, in forming a committee to recommend to the government whether or not to go ahead, has distanced himself and his shaky coalition government from the decision.

There will be a maelstrom of international criticism if the Thai government goes ahead with damming the only major river in South East Asia that remarkably still follows its natural course.

But it is no secret that “development” and securing future energy reserves take precedence over protecting the environment in most of the world.

But what of human rights? Will the Hat Gyi Dam form the Salween’s first loch, and will there be more to follow?
And what of the proposed benefits for Burma?

Only the Thai government at this stage can answer these questions and it is due to do so this month.

In the aftermath of ASEAN’s salute to Thailand and Burma’s plans, environmental and Burma’s ethnic groups, not to mention Thai residents who will lose their homes and communities reliant on the river for their existence, issued statements condemning the project.

But Ethnic Community Development Forum representative Sai Khur Seng summed it up best: “Energy projects in Burma should be for the benefit of the Burmese people and not at their expense.”

ENDS

The misery of an unfortunate birthplace

Dan Pedersen

July 30, 2009

More than 200 people are living in pitiful conditions at the Safe Haven Orphanage on the Thai-Burma border.

About three quarters of them are newly-arrived refugees forced across the border by a rapacious campaign of forced recruitment into the armed forces of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, allies of Burma’s ruling military junta.

Most of them are children.

They live under thin plastic sheeting suspended over festering mud puddles alive with mosquitoes and larvae.

Until recently many of the children were suffering from malaria, but the Thai Public Health Ministry treated them.
But that does not stop new infections.

Water for the settlement is drawn from the Moei River, just below its confluence with the Salween River.

Both rivers are churning after two weeks of almost continuous rain and with no chemical treatment or filtering process for drinking water, the children are falling foul of all manner of ailments.

“One little girl has worms in her brain,” said an exasperated 25-year-old Brazilian woman who volunteered to teach English when she saw the already-poor conditions the children were enduring.

And that was before more than 150 more turned up.

Natcha Kehapeerasit, the displaced former principal of a school in Burma’s Karen State, is heavily pregnant but continues teaching her pupils who have come with her across the river.

“We have made a new school,” she says rubbing her belly as rain streams off the thatch roof of her tiny new home and gesturing to some bamboo poles holding up sheets of blue and white striped plastic.

Natcha says the children will likely call this place home until March 2010, when another school year ends.

Asked what is needed she replies simply: “Food, something to write with and notebooks.”

There is no mention of qualified teachers or extra clothing and the food requirements she reels off are simply rice, fish paste, salt and dried chillies, “because Karen people, they love chillies very much”.

What about sugar?

“No we don’t need sugar,” says Natcha firmly, “we have no need for it”.

There is no spare ground at the orphanage – rocks that jut from the earth and are too big to dig up take up the only space not occupied by people.

There is a narrow access track that winds through the rock outcrops.

It is in surprisingly good condition, but only because the myriad non-governmental organisations operating out of the nearest major town, Mae Sot, don’t come here.

“The Thailand-Burma Border Consortium gave us some of the plastic sheets,” said the Brazilian teacher, who washes in the river along with everyone else.

“But we haven’t seen UNHCR or anyone else like that, they just don’t come.”

About 45 minutes’ drive south, NGO 4WD vehicles adorned with logos from agencies the world over buzz in and out of Mae La refugee camp, delivering supplies and tending their particular projects.

Many refuse to cooperate with others when it comes to coordinating delivery of aid, insisting on delivering it personally.

The end result of such recalcitrance is duplication in some instances, while the children at Safe Haven Orphanage sleep with the mosquitoes, don’t have enough to eat and drink muddy water.

Money is urgently needed to buy food and essential items for basic living.
This is an open appeal to anyone who can afford to help these people, victims of an ongoing campaign of genocide to force them from their home country.

ENDS

 

VOA News

July 21, 2009

A South African group has presented one of its highest honors – the Mahatma Gandhi prize – to a representative of Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The prize is awarded by the Gandhi Development Trust in honor of India’s political and spiritual leader during that country’s movement for independence from Britain >>> Indonesia says Burma must release democracy leader for elections to be credible

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VOA News

Indonesia’s foreign minister has said Burma must release democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi if its 2010 elections are to be credible. Indonesia has been pushing for tougher action against human rights violators during meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this week in Thailand reports Daniel Schearf >>> Indonesia says Burma must release democracy leader for elections to be credible

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Ler Per Her abandoned when SPDC, DKBA bombard village

Free Burma Rangers

Karen State, Burma

June 6, 2009

Some 3,295 people have fled Ler Per Her camp as Burma Army and Democratic Karen Buddhist Army soldiers started the bombardment of the camp at 11.30am on June 6.

Hundreds of soldiers surrounded the camp which is on the Thai-Burma border, north of Mae Sot, and refugees are crossing the border into Tha Song Yang district in Tak province, Thailand, to escape the attack.

Those in the camp had already fled attacks from the Burma Army in eastern Karen State numerous times and had established homes there, which now have to be abandoned.

Since October 2008 over 60 families have arrived in Ler Per Her, 40 of those from within the last week from Htee Per village. They fled because of Burma Army/DKBA activity and because the Burma Army was looking to recruit over 800 soldiers from the area.

Soldiers have already arrested and forced villagers from Pa-an District and Myawaddi Township to porter supplies for this campaign.

The attack is being led by Light Infantry Battalions 81, 201, 202 and 205, supported by some 300 soldiers from DKBA 999.

Those who have fled across the border are in Mae U Su, Noh Bo and Mae Salik and are in urgent need of shelter, medical assistance, food and clothing. An FBR team in association with Partners Relief and Development are bringing desperately needed supplies.

So far PRAD has delivered 30 pots, 25 large tarps, mosquito repellant, food, rolls of plastic sheeting, two trucks of clothing and medicines for 200 cases of each of the following illnesses: malaria, diarrheal diseases, respiratory illnesses, wound care and painkillers.

The leader of the camp confirmed that women and children had left the camp by June 5 leaving the older people and men. He asked for prayer for his people.

 

The Free Burma Ranger’s (FBR) mission is to provide hope, help and love to internally displaced people inside Burma, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Using a network of indigenous field teams, FBR reports on human rights abuses, casualties and the humanitarian needs of people who are under the oppression of the Burma Army. FBR provides medical, spiritual and educational resources for IDP communities as they struggle to survive Burmese military attacks.

For more information, please visit www.freeburmarangers.org

ENDS

Relief supply mission May 19, 2009

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot, Thailand

May 19, 2009

Destination:

Umpheim Mai Refugee Camp, Tak province, Thai-Burma border, northern Thailand.

Team:

Damien Smee, Tommy Rogers, Methinet and Dan Pedersen, Warrant Officer Captain Eh Soe (KNLA Sixth Brigade, 201st battalion)

Cargo:

Food

20kg dried chillies, 20kg chilli powder, 20kg dried fish, 10kg palm sugar, 10kg salt, 60 cans of tinned fish, four cartons baby cereal, five 500gm boxes baby milk powder, carton Mama instant noodles, 10kg fish paste.

Durables

18 woolen blankets, eight four-person mosquito nets, eight sleeping mats, two 3m by 4m tarpaulins, 20 Karen language bibles.

Non-food consumables

100 candles, 12 toothbrushes , 12 tubes toothpaste, 24 bars of soap, 144 individual shampoo packets, two packets of cheroots.

Special budget

Widow Bo Pah received 3000 baht for six orphans for miscellaneous expenses related to caring for the children.

Donors:

Heather Innes, Jacynth Hamill, Markku Vesikko, Tommy Rogers (teacher Umpheim Mai) and Htaw Htoo (Chrestos Mission, Mae Sariang).

Brief:

After the fall of the Karen National Liberation Army’s Sixth Brigade 201st battalion base camp of Wah Lay Kee on April 28, families who had endured almost 12 months of intermittent but determined offensives against their homes finally evacuated.

They landed in Umpheim Mai refugee camp’s Section 14.

They had virtually nothing, photographs taken by medics of the evacuation showed people squatting next to plastic bags stuffed with a few clothes and the odd cooking pot. Tommy Rogers contacted Dan Pedersen on May 14 alerting him of the families’ precarious existence and work began on raising funds to alleviate their situation.

We scrambled together about 20,000 baht. Because of a lack of funds we had to prioritise funds dispersal to families most in need.

The first delivery of aid occurred on May 19, helping 12 of the 34 families in need.

KNLA Colonel Nerdah Mya described these people, who had lived under siege for months, desperately trying to farm land and eke out a subsistence living in their home country, as the “true heroes of the Karen revolution”.

Money is still urgently needed, there are a total of 34 families in desperate need of food and essential items for basic living.

This is an open appeal to anyone who can afford to help these people, victims of an ongoing campaign of genocide to force them from their home country.

 

By clicking on the donate button you can help.

ENDS

Don Talenywun

Moei River, Mae Sot, Thailand

Thai military and police photographed participants a peaceful march to protest charges laid against Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi by Burma’s ruling military junta on Sunday afternoon.

The small, vocal gathering marched perhaps 200m on Thai soil from the Moei River past the Immigration office alongside the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge.

In front of rows of songtaews awaiting passengers, a short speech was delivered and then the cluster of protesters dispersed.

Thai soldiers hung back from the main group, photographing them from a distance of 60-70m.

Thai police were closer, some blatantly photographing the marchers, many of whom were foreigners.

There were about 75 people marching, a few carried signs.

ENDS