As the new year begins, the team at AMS are getting out and into the field to visit some of our supported development projects throughout Asia and the Pacific.
Over the weekend I flew to the northwest of Thailand to the border town of Mae Sot. Over the next two days I was going to learn about, and visit, a different category of Burmese in Thailand, refugees. The Karen people of Myanmar are one of seven minority groups living in the country and have long faced persecution by the majority group, the ethnic Burmese. During British rule and especially around WWII, tensions between the Karen and ethnic Burmese intensified as the Karen aligned themselves with the British, and the ethnic Burmese with the Japanese. Invasion and continued persecution followed after the arrival of the Japanese and upon the creation of Burma in 1948 (later to be named Myanmar) the Karen weren’t granted their wish of independence. This background was the catalyst for suppression and pillaging of the Karen State and its people, and has continued for almost 70 years. The Karen are not alone in their struggles, ethnic minorities across the country face military abuse and live in fear, with the Rohingya people (Mulsims who migrated from modern-day Bangaldesh hundreds of years ago) often found on boats drifting towards Australia to escape attack by the Burmese military. A haunting report was published just yesterday by the United Nations: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142&LangID=E
It is estimated that 150,000 Karen people currently live in twelve refugee camps in Thailand on the border of Karen State. Many people call this mass of displaced people the forgotten refugee crisis of the 21st century. I was here because Marist Mission Centre have a long partnership with a Karen man named William who overseas four student hostels in four different camps. William had made arrangements for me to visit St Mary’s Hostel in the Mae La refugee camp, home to over 20,000 Karen men, women and children. Foreigners are rarely allowed into these camps which are heavily guarded by the Thai army, but William is an influential man in the Karen National Union and the peace process but pulled some strings and I was granted entry.
In my mind a refugee camp was an enclosed rectangular area of space that has one entry and exit and is far from prying eyes. Mae La camp was established in 1984 for just 1,000 people and has grown to hold 40,000 people at one stage. As a result it is an unplanned sprawling mass of people that runs for kilometres along the side of the highway. Before we even arrived at our designated entry gate we were driving past shanty houses and perimeter fencing with armed military personnel stationed along the road. The camp itself spreads out up the side of a mountain and is located in dense jungle. There is barely a tin roof or cement in sight with most houses being made from bamboo, wood, leaves and bark. It is a challenging existence in a wet climate.
We parked the vehicle and started the walk up the steep embankment to St Mary’s Hostel. All around me the ground was compressed dry dirt (being the dry season), and I could only imagine what it must be like in the wet season – streams flowing down the mountain through the camp and through people’s houses, mud seeping through people’s meagre belongings, disease carrying mosquito’s flying around in swarms.
Mae La refugee camp acts as a functioning village. There are provision stores, schools and medical clinics, and just recently, electricity was provided. However all is not as it seems. People survive on rations that they collect every day, schools and clinics are run by NGO’s, and water is piped from mountain runoff which dries up in the dry season. They have no income so can’t afford to buy anything, and (homemade) alcohol abuse, as well as domestic violence, is not uncommon. These people live in limbo, and have done for many years, and they have no sense of the future, just day-by-day.
We arrived at St Mary’s Hostel and sat down on the floor for introductions by the students. With many learning English, it was an opportunity for them to speak to a native English speaker for the first time. Timidly they introduced themselves but I had to interrupt and ask William for an explanation. When they introduced themselves it went something like this: “My name is Maw, I am 16 years old, I am in grade 6, first battalion”. I had no idea what they meant. Were they soldiers back home? William explained that Karen are very patriotic people after generations of persecution, and the battalion represents the battalion number of the Karen National Union that control and protect the area of Karen state that they come from. Many of the students wore nationalistic Karen t-shirts and the hostel football team is named ‘1949’, representing the year the Karen revolution began.
There are 28 students living at St Mary’s Hostel. The oldest is 23 and the youngest just 10. There are equal numbers of boys and girls and some have been living in Mae La camp for ten years. None of the children have parents in the camp which is why the hostel is so important. Some have siblings in the camps, such as the youngest boy of ten who just arrived at Mae La last month to join his 23-year-old Uncle who is one of the students at St Mary’s as well. All these students attend various levels of school and education centres in Mae La and study a curriculum that is provided and certified by the Karen Education Department. It is a strange situation that the education in Mae La is far better than what the children receive back home in Myanmar and is one of many reasons why the children are here. Their parents would rather their children gain an education in a camp hundreds of kilometres from them, than live a precarious existence in Myanmar which could erupt again at any moment. Even though there has been little fighting since 2013, having lived through the burning of their villages, the murder of family and community members, it is a risk not worth taking.
I spoke to a few of the older students who could converse well enough in English and asked them about their life in Mae La camp. They all said they are happy here but miss their parents dearly. They all spoke about wanting to become someone and go back to Myanmar and help the future generation of children. Their smiling faces hid deep sorrow within them knowing that the future can look bleak. However, there are opportunities available to them. Many ex-students of the hostel have gone on to become teachers in the camps or work for other NGO’s. Australian Catholic University also run an online Diploma similar to what is offered in Ranong and many students have studied that course which has led to employment and escape from the camps. Quietly spoken William is also a success story. He fled Karen State in 1998 and lived in a refugee camp and now he is a key figure in the 2013 ceasefire agreement and ongoing peace process.
Refugees living the camps are not allowed to leave unless they have a camp pass which allows them to travel to Mae Sot (the closest town an hour away) for a period of three days. The pass costs 200 Baht ($8 AUD) which puts it beyond the reach of a group of people who have no income. The only money these people may personally receive is from relatives who have been resettled overseas. One student in the hostel told me how he tried to go back to Myanmar to see his family as he hadn’t seen them in four years. He didn’t have a camp pass when he was picked up in Mae Sot less than a kilometre away from the border. The Thai police arrested him and he spent 24 hours in a holding cell until he was bailed out my an NGO. What little money he was carrying mysteriously disappeared.
This was one of many stories the students told me so bidding them farewell was a moving moment. I could sense such genuine happiness at my visit. I don’t know whether it was an opportunity to speak English, or just a new face to break the monotony, or the realisation that there are people out there, beyond myself, that care and are invested in their plight. Some 40,000 people from Mae La camp have been resettled abroad since 2004 and many hope that their number is called next. Throughout the day I couldn’t get the nagging scepticism out of my mind that the world has forgotten about these people. What chance do they have with Trump’s policies and Australia’s criminal treatment of asylum seekers and declining resettlement quotas? Europe is flooded with millions of refugees from Africa and Syria and nobody knows what to do with them. So what do a hundred thousand living in the jungles of Asia matter?
Written by: Ashley Bulgarelli, AMS Projects Coordinator
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