Daniel Pedersen

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

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot, Thailand

April 23, 2009

Unknown offenders poisoned the water supply of Mae La refugee camp with weed killer on April 11.

The camp, on the Thai-Burma border and home to more than 30,000 people, was without water for four days, as pumps and water treatment plants were sent to Bangkok for analysis and scrubbing down.

There were no deaths reported, although a spate of people claimed to have fallen ill with vomiting and diarrhea.

The water that supplies the camp is pumped from underneath the Mae Yuam River, which runs through the camp.

It is then pumped to a high point near the camp’s northern end and gravity fed to tap stations and wells throughout the sprawling bamboo shanty-town.

Empty broad-spectrum herbicide containers were discovered near the pumping station on the morning of April 11 and camp residents were quickly warned not to drink any water drawn from wells throughout the camp.

One camp resident, who asked not to be named, said there was great dismay when the initial discovery was made.

But more sinister rumours spread throughout the settlement when old, faded and empty poison canisters were found nearby, suggesting that feeding the weed killer into the camp’s water supply might have been a long-term project.

Some people in the camp are convinced they will be dead within six months.

An official head count at Mae La in 2005 put the population at 52,000.

Since then 18,000 people have been relocated to third countries, but camp residents said the population really remained static, because there were more people arriving all the time.

The Mae Yuam River runs north through Mae La camp and then feeds into the Moei River to the west, passing through the Karen National Liberation Army’s Seventh Brigade region.

This month’s poisoning scare is not the first.

About five years ago a Burmese national was caught at the main elevated holding tanks with containers of poison, but was caught before he could carry out his plan to pollute the water.

The Thai camps, considered temporary havens for people displaced by fighting in Burma, have long been a touchy bilateral issue between Thailand and Burma on the international stage.

The ruling Burmese military regime claims they serve dual roles, as a breeding ground for insurgents and a place for KNLA soldiers to hide and be fed when not active.

An investigation is underway, but as yet there have been no arrests.

Asked who he thought could have been responsible, one senior camp administrator said it was anyone’s guess.

ENDS

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot, Thailand

April 20, 2009

Increased military activity by a combined force of the Burma Army and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army has more than 2000 villagers struggling to feed themselves.

The Karen villages – to the south of the Thai-Burma border town of Mae Sot – Kaw Ser, Klaw Gaw, Kaw Poe Pee and Paw Buh Hla Ta are each being forced to provide five porters a day to DKBA and State Peace and Development troops.

The villages are clustered between Umpheim Mai refugee camp and the Thai town of Umphang, famous for trekking and its natural beauty.

These four villages are home to 2,111 people, all of whom are short of food, living only on rice, deprived of fish paste to mix through the rice, a Karen staple.

This region is rich in minerals and used extensively for contract farming.

Much of the native forest has been clear felled, leaving behind rich, red-clay soils.

Huge limestone outcrops dot the landscape.

These soils produce huge crops of corn and peanuts. Some areas are also planted in sugar cane and rubber trees.

Thai investors generally carry the cost of seed for contract farming and in turn, at harvest, provide rice for the village inhabitants who work the farms.

This year the region has become a war zone, hindering the cropping of corn.

The corn that has been cropped has then been taxed by the DKBA/SPDC and the Karen National Liberation Army to the point that it has not been commercially viable, particularly with the depressed corn price this season being taken into account.

As a result, Thai investors have not seen returns deemed adequate enough to pay the farmers their rice, which would generally carry them through the year.

DKBA units 333, 999, 907 and 906 and SPDC units 404, 283 and 284 are active in the area.

At any given time there are about 350 active troops.

There are regular patrols, with each village being asked to provide five porters a day to carry water for soldiers. Any rice discovered in the village is generally seized.

The porters are not paid and are expected to take their own rice.

The DKBA/SPDC force has established a base camp at Paw Buh Hla Ta.

The camp is built of bamboo and hardwood, probably at least a semi-permanent settlement, so the villagers expect a presence throughout the rainy season and beyond to be maintained.

KNLA Brigade 201 and Special Battalion 103 remnant forces, numbering in all about 300 soldiers, are attempting to provide security to the villages and generally harass the DKBA/SPDC troops.

Asked about supplementary foods to go with the rice, for example fish paste, chillies and cooking oil, a committee of three established to assess needs said there was none available in the region and the only rice available were emergency rations recently donated by a foreign NGO.

Health conditions in the four Karen villages are tenuous at best, but most people do have access to boiled water.

In Kaw Ser there is a gravity-fed, piped water supply. In Klaw Gaw, Kaw Poe Kee and Paw Bu Hla Ta water is drawn from wells.

Mobile units of medics and nurses accessing the area say the greatest medical need at the moment is rehydration packages and Buprofen, although some of these are being provided by Help Without Frontiers (HWF).

Villagers said the biggest health risks they were facing at the moment were diarrhoea, dysentery and malaria. Dengue did not rate among their concerns.

There are some malaria control programs operating, depending on security.

The villagers this morning said they were desperate for more rice and fish paste.

These four villages had been receiving medical aid from Special Battalion 103’s base camp, which was lost last year and apparently HWF clinics in the region that were burned down about the same time.

Now they depend on mobile medical units and don’t have enough to eat.

ENDS

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot, Umphang, Thailand

January 7, 2009

Karen National Liberation Army soldiers are being hunted by Burma’s ruling military junta in a sliver of land opposite northern Thailand.

The KNLA’s Sixth Brigade, one of seven brigades of the armed wing of the Karen National Union, is engaged in a desperate battle for survival near Thailand’s mountainous Umphang region.

Their base camp, a relatively new settlement once equipped with solar power, a clinic, reticulated water and fish holding tanks has been razed to the ground by State Peace and Development Council soldiers.

From a secret location on the Thai-Burma border KNU vice president David Thackrabaw said the SPDC soldiers were maintaining a “scorched earth policy” against not only the KNLA, but also Karen civilians.

While the KNLA steadfastly maintains it has avoided casualties in this latest offensive, its soldiers are now sleeping rough in dense jungle that provides a modicum of security under the cover of darkness.

In the daytime they move.

Working alongside SPDC troops is a slave militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army.

The SPDC and the DKBA work in tandem, using Thailand as a launch pad for attacks because the terrain is more navigable.

And the Thai side is not blanketed with landmines.

On Saturday January 3, in the evening, the latest offensive of more than 200 men wrested control of the KNLA base camp as the hopelessly outnumbered rebels withdrew.

The camp was the only medical facility for more than 800 villagers clustered in two nearby settlements.

More than 300 Burmese nationals of the Karen ethnic minority, their homes reduced to ashes, are now huddled under makeshift shelters, protected from marauding SPDC and DKBA troops by Thai soldiers.

On Sunday and Monday low-flying Thai military helicopters plied the skies between Mae Sot and the Umphang region, delivering reinforcements and materiels to defend both the border and the latest batch of refugees to flee the contested region.

In a nervy interview in Mae Sot on Tuesday night the KNLA’s Colonel Nerdah Mya said his base camp was in cinders and he was heading back into this war’s newest theatre on Wednesday in a bid to “put everything back together again.

“We have to find a new location, we have no location at the moment, we are always on the move.”

Colonel Nerdah said about 20 DKBA and SPDC soldiers had been wounded by landmines and while some were being treated in the field, others had been sent to Umphang and Mae Sot hospitals for amputations.

He insisted the situation was not critical for his men.

“We have been coping with this type of situation for many years now, sometimes they send many soldiers to occupy the entire area, but if we keep moving we can get around them.”

The KNLA’s hold on the area has for years been tenuous at best.

The area, which surrounds an eccentricity of border demarcation between Thailand and Burma known as Phop Phra, is rich in minerals.

There is an antimony mine, a gold mine and there are zinc and tin deposits.

Taiwanese and Thai businessmen are constantly seeking to exploit the resources, but are generally defeated by the fact whichever side they are dealing with, be it DKBA, SPDC or KNLA, cannot provide adequate security.

The battle for control of the region began in earnest this year in late June, when torrential rains still pounded the area almost daily.

Since then Thailand’s sovereignty has been repeatedly compromised by DKBA and SPDC troops.

At times the Thais have resorted to lobbing mortars at SPDC battalions whose stray shells have forced the evacuation of Thai villages.

Phop Phra was once home to one of Thailand’s finest teak stands.

It was logged by the KNU in decades past, when the organisation was Thailand’s sweetheart and a convenient buffer force to Burma.

Now the region’s red clay soils, utterly deforested, grow bumper crops of corn.

But the poor farmers who grow the corn to sell to Thai interests are forced to pay taxes to both the DKBA and the KNLA for safe passage through their respective territories, although the KNLA is far more modest in its demands.

December and early January, regarded as the cold season here, is the best time to reap corn seed, which fetches a higher price than fresh cobs.

Much of the current crop will go to waste as the latest hostilities stretch into their seventh month.
Sergio Carmada, a co-founder of the Italian non-governmental organisation Popoli, which bought seed, ploughshares and motorcycles for the KNLA’s current crop and also helped fund Colonel Nerdah’s destroyed base camp, offered his view of this war that began in 1949.

“In my opinion war for identity is not very popular around the world.

“War for democracy is very popular. You can destroy towns and kill hundreds of thousands of people for that. For democracy you can kill everyone. For identity – it’s not allowed anymore.”

The founder of the Free Burma Rangers, a former US soldier who uses the Karen moniker U Wa A Pa (father of the white monkey) to hide his true identity, disregards the DKBA as uneducated oafs who don’t know what they are fighting for, or why.

He agrees with the KNU’s David Thackrabaw that the SPDC is employing a scorched-earth policy.

U Wa A Pa is currently in western Karen state, about a month’s walk from the Thai border, disseminating information by satellite phone.

He says the situation is worse for inhabitants of western Karen state than those nearer Thailand and villages are constantly burned down and crops torched.

FBR provides medical support for villagers on the run from SPDC troops in remote areas.

“Really, I would say 10 per cent of the DKBA have some dispute with the KNU, 10 per cent are outright criminals [drug runners] and the other 80 per cent are just along for the ride,” he said.

“I think given a realistic option they [the DKBA] would change sides in a day.

“But they need to see that the KNLA can win, they want to be on the winning side.”

Today, a KNLA victory seems the most unlikely of scenarios.

ENDS

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

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