Home on the Run

The Jakarta Post - WEEKENDER   |  Sat, 08/23/2008 4:06 PM  |  Life

Members of Myanmar’s minorities and those who have stood up to the military junta find refuge across the border in Thailand. There is health care, food and a chance at life, writes Ati Nurbaiti.

 
I don't know the name of this baby. Maybe the parents don't know yet either. But this is his, or her, very first document, officially recording that this new human exists, even if the parents may be stateless.

The infant was born in early May at the clinic in Mae Tao, a town in Thailand on the border with Myanmar. Most of the patients come from Myanmar, staff members say. Not only are services largely free, but most importantly the large clinic compound in Mae Sot is safe for Myanmarese. Patients in army gear are from the militia of the Karen ethnic group, who make up the majority across the border and within the refugee camps an hour's drive away.

Safety is crucial here. When you've made a lengthy journey to the clinic with a gaping wound to your foot or a baby on the way, the last thing you need is getting caught without documents at the checkpoints and sent back, maybe right to jail.

Many foreign medics volunteer at the famed clinic of Dr. Cynthia Maung, recipient of the Philippine government’s Magsaysay Award for humanitarian work. They treat a wide range of ailments, from those caused by lack of sanitation to wounds from the land mines placed in forests. But most of the victims are simple peasants looking for food after being driven off their land by military troops, people here say.

Tha Yote is the proud father of another infant, still unnamed, his second born. The family will be back for the baby's vaccinations – and hopefully he will live well beyond infancy, even if the latest national figures show one in 105 Myanmarese infants die before their fifth birthday. With 40 U.S. cents per person allotted for health care by the Myanmar government, you can't expect much.

Sani, 25, lies in another ward, weakened by HIV but still fortunate to be able to cross into the clinic. He said he would not have had the chance back home.

Our two guides around Mae Sot are the "Burma boys" – both former political prisoners, awaiting emigration to the United States. Now and then you find such people around town, with stories of many more who left their land. The lucky ones are those who have managed to cross. More citizens, we're told, keep moving, not only because troops took their land, but because they're minorities.

"I'm hunted down for the crime of being human," says one man in a Thai NGO-produced documentary on human rights and the migrants.

The long list of minorities – the non-Burmese who make up 40 percent of the population of 52 million – mostly have their own armies, and villagers have been caught in the middle for almost the entire period of Myanmar's 60 years of independence. It's futile now to blame the British colonists, who researchers say failed to live up to their promise to give autonomy to the minorities.

So, both villagers and individual rebels keep on running and moving. Though they live always on the lookout, the dissidents will tell you they have no regrets. "I had to do it," is the common response when asked why they joined street rallies despite the clear threat of jail and torture.

Janita, a monk, says studying for his degree in English was meaningless compared to what people were subjected to, the last straw being the beating of fellow monks during the uprising of September and October last year. Anyway, a degree from Myanmar "is no use outside Burma", he said. Other former students said you just memorize your way through school and college and you're fine, as long as you don't get involved in “suspicious” activities.

Once you do get involved, then it's a constant life on the run. The monks in a safe house here say the main thing on their minds is when and where to move.

These are fugitives from the "saffron revolution", though it seems not all have romantic illusions about the event. "I was just helping somebody who fell, he was beaten by the military" during a protest, one of them says.

Were their actions for nothing? Supreme leader Gen. Than Shwe still thinks he is a heaven-appointed king.

"He can say anything he wants," says Janita. "But then people question the quality of that king."

Elsewhere, monks gather at a monastery at the foot of a mountain wall -- home is just on the other side in a picturesque hamlet.

But one cannot just go hiking up to meet family. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, or sooner if there's regime change -- maybe not in their lifetime.

The hamlet is the largest refugee camp outside Mae Sot, where thousands of families have lived in their "temporary” shelter for 20 years.

On the surface it's a happy scene. Neighbors working together, building a house with bamboo poles. Teachers having a hard time with rowdy classes; women busy at their looms with bright red, blue and indigo threads. A packed, bustling teashop with many Indian faces, traces of the minority Indians that earlier military ruler Gen. Ne Win wanted to get rid of (the story goes that he lost a business deal to a Burmese Indian).

But the listlessness in some of the men's stares is disturbing. A few are introduced to us as former militia members of the Karen, the dominant group here. These are the people of the famed "God's army", a label many here cringe at. That was reportedly a splinter group led by teenage twins, who gave the Karen a bad name when they held hostages in a Bangkok hospital. We didn't get to the army camp of the Karen; Thai authorities were being strict, our guide said, around the time of the controversial constitutional referendum and the cyclone.

In late May, a revered figure of the Karen, Saw Ba Thin Sein, died, never realizing his dream of seeing all Karen unite. The existence of a splinter militia, the Democratic Buddhist Karen Army, whether government-sponsored or not, has exposed the hazardous possibilities of the regime splitting loyalties along ethnic and religious lines.

In this refugee camp, called Mae La, a community leader, Thi La, says with conviction that all ethnic minorities are united. Though they may have problems here and there, he said, all that is needed is a real leader.

Invisible boundaries are the cause of many an idle figure here. Refugees are not legally allowed to work; they're a "wasted resource", one activist says, becoming dangerously dependent on aid. One could easily slip through a barbed wire, but there are the checkpoints.

And so the camp becomes a stopping point for those waiting for news of their applications to resettle in Australia, the United States, or other countries.

Those who slip out of Myanmar or out of these camps join the league of the illegal migrants, estimated to be the majority of the two million Myanmarese working in Thailand.

Back in Mae Sot, the visitor doesn't know who is Thai, who's from Myanmar, who is legal and who is not.

Hotels can't afford to risk hiring illegal workers, I am told when I ask about the cook in her lovely “longyi”, the Burmese sarong. Then what about migrants in the alleys and the gem market in the little town, reportedly the transit area for some of the smuggling business, profiting both Myanmar and Thai authorities. Humans, timber, gems and drugs are all valuable commodities.

Every once in a while the problem grabs the world’s attention -- dozens of migrants found suffocated in a sealed truck, striving to pay their way to a better future outside Myanmar. Then, after the uproar, it's business as usual.

Thailand lets things be -- why be fussy when the migrant labor saves costs and contributes to huge profits, and when it is dependent on its neighbor for energy? Just consider – hotel laundry in Mae Sot is 10 baht per T-shirt compared to 100 baht in downtown Bangkok.

And why would anyone else want to be prim about human rights under the junta? It's the "resource curse", researchers say: when a country is rich with resources, it can do anything it likes.

In Mae Sot, the flower sellers are still at work. Garlands must be prepared for those praying at the temples, for grace and good fortune.

Those like the flower sellers, who have a job and some security, however little, have found a home, for now.

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