BANGKOK—In a field cut off from the rest of Thailand by a muddy mountain pass, 1,000 people have been living under thin tarps for the past six weeks, having fled landmines and shelling in their native Myanmar. The tarps and wood platforms do not protect them from monsoon rains or the mosquitoes that spread malaria around their makeshift villages.
Factions of the Karen people have fought for greater autonomy from the country formerly known as Burma for 60 years, but the Karen villagers I spoke with just seem to be caught in the crossfire.
In the last few months, the world has turned its focus to the secretive, military-ruled state.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced concern over Myanmar-North Korea military links at the July Asean Regional Forum. The state show trial of pro-democracy leader Aung Sun Suu Kyi attracted international media coverage, brought UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to Burma and garnered a new release of the U2 song dedicated to the world’s best known prisoner of conscience. In an apparent gesture to this global clamor, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the Burmese opposition was given what for the junta was a slap on the wrist—another 18 months of detention where she has already spent half of her adult life under house arrest.
Still, though the world has mobilized for the cause of Aung Sun Suu Kyi, the decades old humanitarian disaster occurring in rural Burma remains under the international radar, and the situation is deteriorating.
The Karen villagers I spoke with on the Thai-Burma border said they face forced recruitment by the regime’s army and its ally, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. Villagers are made to serve as porters or told to walk in front of army patrols, literally serving as human shields. Their stories confirm accounts from exiled media and aid groups that the regime is forcibly recruiting civilians to build up a border guard force.
Myanmar last held elections in 1990. Rather than handing over power to the clear winner, the military junta kept Suu Kyi under house arrest and announced the generals would oversee a state plan they called a “roadmap to democracy.” The road they chose is now 20 years long and has yielded few of the civil liberties associated with democratic reform, but elections are slated for July 2010.
If elections occur, Suu Kyi will still be out of the way since her new sentence does not carry the prospect of freedom until at least six months after the balloting ends. Scores of political activists are jailed in Yangon. Nor does the paranoid junta suggest the remote willingness to focus on the ethnic minorities in the country’s rural states. Some activists on the Thai border are even calling the latest rainy season offensive against the Karen National Union a final solution to the Karen problem. Union fighters abandoned several bases in June, and 4,000 villagers streamed into Thailand, where they remain.
The Karen are not the only people in multi-ethnic Burma suffering abuse. Ten established camps in Thailand house Karenni, Shan, Mon, Kachin and Rohingya people.
The junta has said all ethnic resistance groups must put down their arms and become political parties before elections can occur. Some groups have tentatively aligned with the regime and are now called cease fire groups. Others fear that without arms they will lose any negotiating power they have left and will not be able to protect their people from the regime’s army.
The regime has been militarizing the Thai-Burma border for years. China and Thailand have signed on to invest in dams in Karen State, and demand that the area be secure before construction can begin. In the unruly, heavily mined jungles of Myanmar, enhanced militarization inevitably means more violence.
A recent Harvard Law School report calls Burma the largest recruiter of child soldiers in the world. What is considered the longest civil war in Asia has spawned 500,000 internally displaced people in eastern Myanmar. Entire villages are forcibly relocated. More than 100,000 people have fled to refugee camps in neighboring Thailand in the past several decades and countless numbers of people originating in Burma hide in Thailand with unclear legal status.
One 50-year-old Karen woman I spoke with knew nothing about refugee camps or elections. She did say she was tired. After traveling across the Thai-Myanmar border three times in her life, she just wanted somewhere to stay put.
More abuses will occur in the coming months as the rains stop, elections approach and the critical gaze of the international community focuses on the aftermath of the trial in Yangon—or yet again abandons the country entirely.
Caroline Stauffer is a former intern at the World Policy Institute and is currently in Bangkok working with the Associated Press.