Toll rises in Burma's hidden war
source :The Age
By CRAIG SKEHAN
SOUTH-EAST ASIA CORRESPONDENT
MAE SOT, THAILAND
Tuesday 14 November 2000
A Karen National Liberation Army soldier patrols at a camp in Burma. Picture: SANDY SCHELTEMA
Ten-year-old Klay is small for his age. Sometimes he cannot manage to talk at all and he cries a lot.But the story of this boy, one of more than 100,000 people from Burma who have fled to refugee camps in Thailand, speaks powerfully of the continuing misery in the far-flung regions of a country under harsh military rule.
Wearing a T-shirt bearing pictures of Bam Bam and Pebbles from The Flintstones, Klay tells of how seven members of his family were lined up in their village and shot.
First, there were whistles and gunfire. Then Burmese Government soldiers dragged out his mother, grandmother and cousins from their thatch house. Klay watched from under the ladder to the front door. His four-year-old brother, in a sling on his mother's back, died with the others.
"After the killing, I went back into the house and waited," the traumatised boy told The Age at a refugee camp near the Thai border town of Mae Hong Son.
His father, who was wounded while escaping, returned two days later and buried the dead.
"Before, it was a happy village," Klay said. "My mother grew corn and fruit and we had a stream where she would catch fish and frogs to eat."
That village is now deserted - having been fiercely punished for allegedly giving food to secessionist insurgents.Members of the more than 20 families who lived there are refugees in Thailand or among Burma's hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people.
They hail mostly from the Karen, Karenni and Mon ethnic groups in border areas, where conflict over autonomy or independence demands has fluctuated for more than 50 years.Only a small percentage of the very ill inside Burma are reached by brave "barefoot medics" based in Thailand, who use elephants or carry heavy loads of supplies on their backs along jungle tracks.
They tell stories of scores of villages burnt by government soldiers in order to deny sanctuary to the rag-tag ethnic armies. The insurgents cannot win clear military victories, but they ambush government patrols.In the past fortnight, hundreds of civilians have fled into Thailand because of clashes.Humanitarian aid groups say Thai troops have in several areas pushed would-be refugees back across the border or kept them at temporary holding sites pending repatriation.
New refugee arrivals in Thailand have given detailed accounts of the military's continuing use of forced labor - notwithstanding a United Nations ultimatum for the abuses to stop.A report compiled by Burma's Federation of Trade Unions includes photographs of young men who were taken by force from villages and prisons in recent months and put to work doing heavy laboring or portering.
The report includes stories of beatings and murders and accounts of hardship caused by the disruption of work on family farms.
A 55-year-old mother of eight testified that on September25, Burmese troops raided her village. "They started arresting male folks, accusing the village of having connections with the Mon insurgents," she said. "Many were beaten and taken as porters."Not all Burmese soldiers are monsters; insurgent groups have also been guilty of rights violations, including the summary execution of prisoners. Often the ordinary government foot soldiers themselves are roughly treated and given insufficient rations.
Their poor circumstances, combined with anger over rebel attacks, contribute to an ethos in which gross human rights abuses go unpunished.As well as violence, there is a growing toll from illness. In the town of Mae Sot, in Thailand's Tak Province, Dr Cynthia Maung has for more than 10 years run a medical clinic treating refugees and illegal migrant workers and their families.
"The situation in Burma is getting worse," says Dr Maung. "The patients we are seeing are on the whole sicker than before. In the past, we mainly saw children with malnutrition, but now we see it in adults."More are crossing the border with malaria and tuberculosis and there is a growing prevalence of hepatitis B. Work at the clinic is unrelenting and resources are being stretched by a rising tide of HIV/AIDS.
Many poverty-stricken members of Burma's ethnic minorities sacrifice themselves to the sex trade to support their families. In other cases, girls and boys as young as 12 are duped or sold into prostitution in Thailand.Studies have put the rate of HIV infection among Burmese sex workers in Thailand at 26 per cent. Sometimes we contact families in Burma and ask them to come to pick AIDS patients up and sometimes they die here," Dr Maung said.
In the trauma ward, medic Htun Htun Oo treats a Karen National Liberation Army soldier, 28-year-old Sein, who was wounded mid-last month when he tried to neutralise a landmine.Sein, now blind in one eye and with only limited sight in the other, said the independence movement has to lay landmines because Burmese Government forces do. Most of the estimated 1500 people killed or seriously injured by mines each year in Burma are civilians.
As well as treating victims of the conflict, Htun Htun Oo has to deal with the results of industrial accidents at sweatshops that mainly employ women and girls from Burma. There are an estimated 40,000 illegal Burmese factory workers in the Mae Sot area alone.In crowded slum barracks, used to house illegal workers, drugs and alcohol contribute to violence, including stabbings. A lack of educational facilities for the children of migrant workers acts as an incumbator for social problems down the track.
On another level, instability in the border region is reflected in the massive trafficking of methamphetamine and heroin by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which cut a peace deal with Burma's military junta. Wa gangsters supply the bulk of the heroin sold in Australia.The drug traffickers of the UWSA are able to ply their trade with virtual impunity because of their cosy security deal with the military regime and corrupt links with regional army officers and civilian officials.
Already, methamphetamine is a problem among men and boys in the refugee camps as well as among young Mon, Karenni and Karen soldiers.At 13 refugee camps dotted along the Thai side of the border, makeshift thatched huts dot hillsides and valleys.The large-scale refugee flow grew from late 1988 when thousands were killed in Burma in the bloody suppression of a student-led popular revolt against military rule. High birth rates have created a new class of stateless children.
The Thai Government, stung by United Nations criticism last month of overcrowding and a lack of basic facilities in some camps, has vowed to press ahead with mass repatriations within three years.The inmates of the camps widely state that they want to return to their homeland, but will resist doing so until there is democracy and peace.
However, a clampdown since the middle of this year on the democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, including the reimposition of her house arrest, has deepened pessimism about prospects for an end to military rule.Mon, Karen and Karenni ethnic leaders vow to continue with their resistance despite the high humanitarian cost, arguing that only freedom can bring a better life.
At a Karen National Liberation Army camp on the Burmese side of the border, local commander Thu Hai, 38, said his troops had been involved in three clashes in the past month. In one episode, they had ambushed a Burmese Government patrol on the banks of a creek, killing three and wounding four others.
The KNLA claims to have about 12,000 soldiers, but independent analysts say the real figure would be closer to 4000. And since major Karen rebel bases fell at the end of 1994, the insurgents have been unable to engage in standing battles.
Karen independence leader Mahn Sha complains: "It has not been easy to get weapons and ammunition since the end of the Cold War. The international community is no longer willing to support armed struggles, so it is very difficult."
He criticised the Australian Government for a new policy of greater diplomatic engagement with the Burmese military regime, including the conducting of a recent series of human rights seminars for officials in the capital, Rangoon.He said Burma's rulers had no intention of improving human rights, but rather saw the seminars as a propaganda exercise.
The Karen are seeking to widen cooperation with the broader democracy movement, despite fears that Suu Kyi might backtrack on promises of full autonomy if she was to come to power.In the Thai border province of Mae Hong Son, rather than drawing grand strategic plans, 33-year-old Dwee spends his days in a modest workshop making artificial limbs for landmine victims.
Dwee, himself an amputee, says government troops last year tortured one of his brothers to death with a knife and dumped his body on the outskirts of their village.His elderly parents had both been imprisoned for four years, apparently in retribution for the pro-independence stand of their children.
At the artificial limb workshop there are albums filled with photographs of landmine victims, many of them children. Rows of moulded plastic legs are in various stages of production. Many more will be needed.