Daniel Pedersen

Prologue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T his is a book about longing. About people longing for their homes, longing for their friends, longing for a sense of possession. About people being deprived of their very basic right to life.

I can’t begin to explain how many good people have helped in this text’s preparation.

And all of them long for something better – just a chance that their good and righteous ways will be rewarded with simple decency and respect.

I am sitting in a hotel room wondering what next?

Almost eight years of my life have been invested into what I am about to tell you and, for better or worse, what I have learned in that time.

Do you take sides?

Yes you do, you don’t have a choice.

One side is accessible, the other is not.

Even in Iraq or Afghanistan both sides of the conflict are accessible.

What are the chances of being embedded with State Peace and Development Council troops in Burma as they burn villages, kill porters and rape women?

What are the chances of interviewing the dictator Than Shwe?

If you want to present a true picture of what is happening in Burma journalistic impartiality and the constant weighing and presentation of the other side’s viewpoint becomes increasingly difficult and sometimes even seems a futile exercise.

There are only so many stories of horror you can listen to before you get angry and want to do something about it, to stop it, to do anything you humanly can to alter the conditions in which people are forced to live.

On and off for the past eight years I have watched babies with no shoes and snotty noses dispossessed with crippled parents in refugee camps.

And no-one seems to care.

Foreign editors yawn when you call and you are in the middle of a war that is ravaging a decent people.

It is time someone cared.

This is a war that has ripped families apart.

Refugees have ended up on the other side of the world trying to make a fresh start in countries they don’t understand and don’t particularly want to be in.

They are simply relieved to be elsewhere.

And yet they long for home and their own people.

Who should have the right to separate families?

Certainly not me, who would be prepared to carry that responsibility?

There are men who make that choice.

They are the ruling generals of Burma’s State Peace and Development Council.

And it is time they were stopped.

This journey began in 2000, less than two years after I had been ordered out of Los Palos, East Timor, by the police at five o’clock in the morning.

I was woken from a deep sleep and escorted groggy to a bus by the local police chief and told never to return.

At that stage I had seen the militias building up on the border and knew what was going to happen in East Timor and thought it wise to leave.

A colleague and I filed from back in Dili that militia forces were building up on the border and some were wearing burgundy special forces berets but no uniforms.

Newspapers weren’t prepared to run the piece.

Then the militias ran rampant over the country on a killing spree.

So what to do?

Sensing something had to change in Burma I moved to Bangkok so I could access the refugee camps along the Thai border.

Having had a message relayed from David Wimhurst of the United Nations that Burma would be next on the UN agenda helped my resolve to tackle the project.

How do you instrument change in Burma?

How do you deal with the intransigence of a military government that has been hidden from the world?

It was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, when he was secretary-general of the United Nations, who first proposed the concept of ‘orphaned wars’.

Orphaned and misunderstood by the ‘international community’.

Never was there a more fitting label for this conflict.

Life as a war journalist never seems to work out how you planned.

Here I am eight years later going grey with a broken arm and another damned eye infection.

And the United Nations has been repeatedly felled by its own Security Council when it comes to taking action in Burma.

But I have had word that my friend John Martinkus, who was with me that morning in Los Palos as we were ordered out of town, has returned safely to Singapore from Kabul in Afghanistan, so that is a load off my mind.

You learn how to fight in this trade, how to survive.

We look out for one another, because no-one else will.

But the sense of longing never leaves you.

It is a constant companion, always nagging at you, like a tired wife.

How do we create a more just and equitable world?

I believe the only answer is that we common people must band together and demand it.

We must unite and say ‘every human being deserves a fair chance to achieve their potential, whatever their desire’.

Now I shall tell you about a people disregarded, who have been denied that basic right.

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot, Thailand

Secret Genocide by publisher Maverick House. Soon to be published.

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