Myanmar Holiday

What a great place for a holiday! Fun!!


SPIEGEL ONLINE - September 6, 2007, 05:06 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...504286,00.html

'BURMESE DARFUR'
The Silent Genocide of Myanmar
By Jürgen Kremb in Mae La Refugee Camp, Thailand

It's a conflict that has been going on for decades. The military junta of
Myanmar continues to wage war on the country's ethnic minorities. The
refugee crisis continues to worsen as horrific violence spreads through
the jungle.

Tha Lei Paw, 32, doesn't respond at first when asked if she would return
to her village when peace returns to Myanmar. She just smiles.

Is it an awkward smile? Or is she smiling out of fear or shame? She
remains silent for a while, and then she says: "I have never seen peace.
My life was an unending disaster, a life of torture and hunger. We were
just slaves. Do you understand? We are damned."

Paw smiles again, as if she had not recently escaped a hell on earth --
the constant terror at the hands of government soldiers that shaped her
day-to-day life in eastern Myanmar's Karen State. A seemingly unending war
has been raging in the state for decades, one that the rest of the world
has long forgotten.

Paw, who is a farmer, escaped across the border into northwestern
Thailand. It's a region of unreal beauty, of mountains and jungles
practically devoid of people, a place where mangoes and orchids grow wild.
Working elephants and their mahouts occasionally cross the travelers'
path.

Tattered Rags

Every few kilometers, Thai border guards carrying M-16 assault rifles
checks travellers' papers. Clusters of simple huts suddenly appear around
a bend in the road, clinging like swallows' nests to a steep hillside. The
settlement is huge, stretching to the horizon and surrounded by barbed
wire.

Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your
publication. Mae La is Thailand's largest camp for refugees from Myanmar,
also knows as Burma. Originally planned to accommodate 60,000 people, the
camp now holds a much larger population that continues to grow every day.
According to the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium, a non-governmental
organization that works with the United Nations High Commission for
Refugees (UNHCR), there are at least 200,000 Burmese refugees living in 10
camps in Thailand. Another 2 million Burmese are in the Southeast Asian
kingdom illegally.

Those who have managed to make it behind Mae La's barbed-wire fence are
handed a refugee card -- a form of official recognition. They are given
enough food to eat, their children receive free education and some of the
huts even have television. But the refugees are only permitted to leave
the camp once a year.

Paw crouches apathetically on a straw mat in the hut of her
brother-in-law, who has been stranded in Mae La for 10 years now. Her
wine-red sarong and pink blouse were a gift from the camp administration.
Paw arrived here a few weeks ago with nothing but the clothes on her back
-- the tattered rags she wore during her escape from Myanmar.

Promises Quickly Forgotten

There are about 50 million people living in Myanmar today. The Buddhist
Burman, who gave the country its name, make up a majority of about 70
percent of the population. Paw and her family, though, are Karen, a
minority of 7 million people, most of them Christians.

The Myanmar military junta is waging genocide against minorities.
When the Union of Burma, a former British colony, gained its independence
in 1948 it was Southeast Asia's wealthiest country. The government in the
capital Rangoon awarded the country's dozens of minorities -- like the
Shan, Kachin, Rohanis and Karen -- autonomous status. Some were even given
the right to leave the federation after 10 years, a promise that was
quickly forgotten.

Burma's democratic institutions quickly crumbled, leaving a group of
kleptomaniac generals in charge. They plundered the country's natural
resources, including teakwood, precious stones, oil and natural gas. Their
opponents, dozens of small guerilla armies, soon began waging a losing war
to gain self-determination for their ethnic groups.

The army of the Shan State in the northeast Myanmar's Golden Triangle
region was led by Khun Sa, a drug baron sought by international
authorities. The Wa Army of former headhunters was under the command of
the Pao brothers, two former Red Guards who had fled China after the
1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. As far back as 1950, the Karen rebels went
into hiding in the jungle in response to countrywide massacres perpetrated
against their ethnic minority. Human rights organizations estimate that
Myanmar's ethnic conflicts have claimed more than 600,000 human lives
since independence.

Ethnic Cleansing in the Jungle

The world heard little about the conflict. Military dictator General Ne
Win long isolated this country of golden pagodas from the outside world,
forcing it to pursue an ideology he called the "Burmese Way to Socialism."
The international outcry did not come until Ne Win's successors massacred
thousands of demonstrators in the streets of the then-capital Rangoon in
August 1988, because they had dared to demand democracy. It helped that
Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of national hero Aung San who had returned
home from Oxford, was the leader of the pro-democracy movement. She was an
ideal hero, a woman of great courage and beauty.

The "Lady," as her supporters call her with deep respect, was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and has spent much of the time since then under
house arrest in Rangoon. Meanwhile, the government's ethnic cleansing
operations in the jungles along the Thai border have continued largely
unnoticed by the world public, producing victims like Paw and her family.

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Paw grew up in Zi Phyu Gon, a small village in the heart of Karen State.
She and her husband lived in a ramshackle hut next to their fields, where
they grew vegetables and rice. She brought three children into the world,
two boys and a girl; a few cooking pots and a robe embroidered with silver
coins were her only possessions. The remote village was only accessible by
jungle paths, but once or twice a year government soldiers would arrive
along those paths to attack and then occupy the village. Zi Phyu Gon,
though, was under the protection of Karen guerillas who would strike back
at the government troops from their jungle hideouts, driving the troops
out again.

Weapons from China

This deadly tit-for-tat continued until the fall of 2005, when it became
clear that the soldiers had gained a clear upper hand. Armed with new
weapons and fighter jets from China, the junta's troops embarked on a
broad offensive into the highland regions. The military established a base
in Zi Phyu Gon in November 2005.

From then on the soldiers ruled the village with a heavy hand. They burned
the church to the ground shortly after their arrival and later roamed
through the streets, firing at the small school with their AK-47s. "We ran
from our fields in a panic to take our children to safety," says Paw.

The soldiers repeatedly attacked the villagers, turning them into forced
laborers. From sunrise until late into the night, they had to cut down
trees and build roads out of forest paths so that the military could bring
in reinforcements.

"When a man was taken to work as a porter," says Paw, a delicately built
woman, "it was like a death sentence." Fearing that they would reveal the
soldiers' plans to the guerillas, the laborers were often beaten to death
in the jungle as soon as they had finished their work.

By early this year Paw and her family decided that they had had enough. It
was the day the soldiers attacked the house of her uncle. Five farmers
were sitting in the hut drinking tea. The junta thugs, assuming the men
were a group of insurgents, dragged them off. The men's screams echoed
through the village the entire night, and Paw and her family fled in a
panic. After an exhausting two-week trek along jungle paths -- where they
often stumbled across the bodies of murdered Karen -- they finally reached
the Mae La camp.

"We hear these kinds of horror stories every day," says Simon Saw, 58.
Before moving to Thailand 17 years ago, Saw was a professor of protestant
theology at the University of Rangoon. As a member of Aung San Suu Kyi's
pro-democracy movement against the military regime, fleeing the country
was his only option other than prison.

'Burmese Darfur'

Saw now heads the camp's Bible school. He chooses his words carefully.
"Large-scale ethnic cleansing is taking place in the mountains over
there," he says. "In truth, it's a Burmese Darfur."

UN inspectors have determined that 540,000 people who have fled government
forces in eastern Myanmar have become internally displaced, refugees in
their own country. But what is taking place in the Burmese jungle is
something far more sinister -- genocide in installments.

The Myanmar military junta is waging genocide against minorities.
The war has turned this part of the country into a poorhouse and the
healthcare system has almost completely collapsed. "Seventy percent of all
deaths are attributable to preventable diseases. Men rarely live past 50,"
says Cynthia Maung, a doctor who runs a private free clinic for refugees.
"Burma is still Asia's leader when it comes to malaria deaths, the
incidence of tuberculosis and AIDS and the number of mine victims," she
adds. However, there are no reliable statistics for Myanmar, partly
because the junta has just expelled all International Red Cross teams from
the country.

David Eubank, 42, a former GI who founded the organization Free Burma
Rangers in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, supplies the few reliable
reports about Myanmar's forgotten war. The Rangers are a group of
volunteers of various religions and ethnicities who penetrate deep into
the Burmese jungle to treat the wounded and help them escape. They are
armed like guerilla fighters.

Rapes and Executions

Eubank's reports read like dispatches from a civil war. Here are a few
samples:


On April 28, the Burmese army attacked and destroyed the village of Kay
Pu. All 400 residents had already fled the approaching troops.


On May 12, Burmese soldiers with Infantry Regiment 542 attacked the
village of Der Ka Lay Ko and took a woman prisoner, who they subsequently
raped and killed.


On May 15, the same unit attacked other village residents. A deaf-mute
farmer who was unable to get away in time was shot at close range.


On June 2, rebels attacked the LIB 540 army unit near the village of Ya
Kaing Taung. The army arrested six villagers, accused them of being in
contact with the rebels and killed them on the spot.

The reports and pictures of the dead fill many Internet pages each week.

Mar Grie Minn, 21, decided that she could no longer be a bystander to the
refugees' suffering and joined the Karen Refugee Committee to help defuse
mines. Minn is a slight young woman and her parents fled from Myanmar two
decades ago. She was born in the Mae La camp, where she grew up and went
to school.

Aid organizations estimate that up to 2 million landmines are buried in
the war zone, with new shipments constantly coming in from China, Russia
and India. The rebels, for their part, protect their hideouts with
homemade mines, which they often hide in bottles. The mines kill and maim
hundreds of people a year.

Minn was only on her third mission on behalf of the refugee organization
when she too became a mine victim. "You could hardly hear the explosion,"
she says, staring at the stump below her knee. "I stepped on a mine put
there by our own people."

For Saw Ba Thin Sein, 80, tragedies like Minn's are not a reason to change
his policies. A man with snow-white hair, known as Ba Tae, he is the
chairman of the Karen National Union and a legendary figure. He was once a
feared guerilla leader who inflicted crushing defeats on the Burmese
generals. He now spends his days lying on a lounge chair, no longer able
to lift himself up with his own strength. He has traded his uniform for a
washed-out, white undershirt and a brown longyi, the traditional sarong
worn by men in Myanmar. He says: "We have lost our human rights, our
prosperity and our culture. We have lost simply everything."

No Interest in Peace Talks

Ba Tae insists that he could still command 10,000 armed guerilla fighters.
After the junta, with the help of Chinese fighter jets, bombed his jungle
headquarters in northern Karen State, he led the resistance movement from
a tiny house on the outskirts of Mae Sot. He has no interest in peace
talks with the junta. "As long as there is no democracy in Myanmar, we are
outlawed," he says.

It is less than 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the front from Mae Sot, where
many illegal refugees live, working at poorly paid jobs in rapidly growing
industrial zones. Mae Sam Laeb, a tiny market town, is tucked into the
dunes along the banks of the Mae Nam Moi, which forms the border here.
Thai troops with automatic weapons are barricaded behind sandbags, while
the men from the resistance movement lurk behind a line of hills on the
other side. More than 3,000 refugees live here in a narrow valley that
feeds into the river. But the border to Thailand, on the other side of the
river, is closed, which places the Karen in a trap.

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The refugees have built rickety bamboo huts into the hillside that at
least provide protection against the rain. But there is no protection
against malaria, which first ravages children and then the elderly.

One of the refugees is a 44-year-old man with the poetic name Starlight.
He is despondent. He says that he was happy not too long ago, growing
sweet potatoes, rice and beetle nut on his small farm in Karen State. He
lived with his wife and their four children in a hut next to their field.
In the summer of 2004, soldiers entered the village and burned it to the
ground.

Starlight's family first fled into the forest behind the village. His wife
soon died of exhaustion, followed by one of his sons. When the soldiers
began shooting into the areas where they saw smoke rising from the
villagers' cooking fires, a group of refugees quickly left and fled to
Thailand.

There were 58 refugees at first. Ten died walking through minefields.
Starlight and his seven-year-old son are the only surviving members of his
family of six. If they don't make it to the border they will either die of
malaria or be shot by the soldiers. What they need now is a lot of luck.

But luck seems to have abandoned the Karen a long time ago.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan




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