North-west of Bangkok near the Thai–Burma border lies the seemingly quiet town of Mae Sot. Below the surface, Mae Sot pulsates with the presence of illegal immigrants from Burma, gem traders from India and NGO workers. For the past 20 years, indigenous Karen people fleeing into Thailand from Burma have used Mae Sot as a congregation point and have established refugee camps nearby.
Many in the camps remember entering Thailand in the late 1980s after fleeing the Burmese military. Some of the children born in the camp to those new arrivals are now in their late teens.
For many years life seemed to stand still in the camps. One day drifted listlessly and hopelessly into the next. People in the camps got no support from the United Nations unless they were registered persons (eligible for resettlement in the West), but at least there was the security of food, shelter, some schooling and some hospital facilities, making their plight a little less desperate than that of the other half million displaced Karen people living illegally inside Thailand.
International commentators coined the term ‘warehousing’ to describe their situation. It might be jarring, but it is nevertheless an accurate description of the conditions of incarceration that many Karen face, as do refugees elsewhere in the world.
Now the refugees’ situation is changing. Western countries are raising hopes of resettlement so that families can start new lives. Several temporary aid organisations have set up in Mae Sot hoping to ease the human problems brought on by Burma’s civil war. During this period the Karen have fought to keep their land, Karen State, ravaged by the government’s Burmanisation policy that aimed to eradicate the communal life of the country’s ethnic nationalities (40 per cent of the population). Villages were desecrated, and thousands of IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) either escaped into the jungle or were herded into relocation camps.
The story is one that has to be heard. My own frequent visits to the Thai–Burma border focus largely on supporting Anglican communities in and outside the camps. It’s not enough to read occasionally in the press that Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest. So much more needs to be said, especially about the plight of the ethnic people. The work of the artist Maung Maung Tinn illustrates much about the situation. He lives at Dr Cynthia’s Clinic just outside Mae Sot, where Karen victims