Chinese PM Wen to visit Japan
by Kyoko Hasegawa – Tue May 18, 8:44 am ET
TOKYO (AFP) – China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will visit Japan for three days from May 30 for the highest-level official visit from Beijing since 2008, Japan's foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
Wen will arrive the day after a summit with Japan, China and South Korea on the South Korean island of Jeju. He is to meet his counterpart Yukio Hatoyama in Tokyo on May 31, and Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko on June 1.
President Hu Jintao last went to Tokyo in May 2008, and Wen joined a three-way summit with South Korea in Fukuoka in December that year. Hatoyama visited Beijing in October and plans to visit the Shanghai World Expo in June.
Kyodo News agency has reported that Wen will also visit Mongolia and Myanmar on what would be a four-nation tour until June 3.
China's foreign ministry refused to comment on Wen's travel plans.
Relations between Asian giants Japan and China, the world's number two and three economies respectively, have warmed but are still often strained by their wartime history and ongoing disputes over territory and resources.
Hatoyama, a centre-left leader who took power last September, has promoted closer bonds between Japan and its East Asian neighbours as well as the long-term goal of forming a European Union-style Asian community of nations.
Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada announced Tuesday that Japan will relax visa requirements for Chinese tourists starting this summer in a bid to boost the number of visitors to the country.
"We expect tourists from China to increase to up to 10 times the current level" as a result of the changes, including lowering the income threshold for Chinese eligible for tourist visas, Okada said.
But ties between Tokyo and Beijing have suffered again in recent weeks because of incidents on the seas, where both countries have long disputed island chains and territorial waters rich in resources.
In recent weeks Chinese helicopters from naval flotillas have twice staged close fly-bys of Japanese navy ships keeping watch on them, and a Chinese marine survey ship pursued a Japanese coastguard vessel in the East China Sea.
The three incidents prompted diplomatic protests from Japan, which has long eyed China's military build-up nervously.
In another recent quarrel, Okada last weekend told his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi that Beijing should cut its nuclear arsenal or at least stop stockpiling more atomic weapons.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Yang had "refuted the irresponsible remarks by Japan on the spot" and had "pointed out that China's nuclear strategy and nuclear policy is transparent".
Okada, asked about the naval incidents, said Tuesday: "Relations between Japan and China are in good condition in general, and my stance is that we will resolve specific issues step by step so as to further deepen Japan-China ties."
by Kyoko Hasegawa – Tue May 18, 8:44 am ET
TOKYO (AFP) – China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will visit Japan for three days from May 30 for the highest-level official visit from Beijing since 2008, Japan's foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
Wen will arrive the day after a summit with Japan, China and South Korea on the South Korean island of Jeju. He is to meet his counterpart Yukio Hatoyama in Tokyo on May 31, and Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko on June 1.
President Hu Jintao last went to Tokyo in May 2008, and Wen joined a three-way summit with South Korea in Fukuoka in December that year. Hatoyama visited Beijing in October and plans to visit the Shanghai World Expo in June.
Kyodo News agency has reported that Wen will also visit Mongolia and Myanmar on what would be a four-nation tour until June 3.
China's foreign ministry refused to comment on Wen's travel plans.
Relations between Asian giants Japan and China, the world's number two and three economies respectively, have warmed but are still often strained by their wartime history and ongoing disputes over territory and resources.
Hatoyama, a centre-left leader who took power last September, has promoted closer bonds between Japan and its East Asian neighbours as well as the long-term goal of forming a European Union-style Asian community of nations.
Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada announced Tuesday that Japan will relax visa requirements for Chinese tourists starting this summer in a bid to boost the number of visitors to the country.
"We expect tourists from China to increase to up to 10 times the current level" as a result of the changes, including lowering the income threshold for Chinese eligible for tourist visas, Okada said.
But ties between Tokyo and Beijing have suffered again in recent weeks because of incidents on the seas, where both countries have long disputed island chains and territorial waters rich in resources.
In recent weeks Chinese helicopters from naval flotillas have twice staged close fly-bys of Japanese navy ships keeping watch on them, and a Chinese marine survey ship pursued a Japanese coastguard vessel in the East China Sea.
The three incidents prompted diplomatic protests from Japan, which has long eyed China's military build-up nervously.
In another recent quarrel, Okada last weekend told his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi that Beijing should cut its nuclear arsenal or at least stop stockpiling more atomic weapons.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Yang had "refuted the irresponsible remarks by Japan on the spot" and had "pointed out that China's nuclear strategy and nuclear policy is transparent".
Okada, asked about the naval incidents, said Tuesday: "Relations between Japan and China are in good condition in general, and my stance is that we will resolve specific issues step by step so as to further deepen Japan-China ties."
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MYANMAR: Funding crucial to battle malaria
YANGON, 18 May 2010 (IRIN) - Myanmar needs an estimated US$20 million to scale up malaria prevention measures, especially the distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, early diagnosis and proper treatment, Osamu Kunii, chief of health and nutrition at the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Myanmar, told IRIN.
"Some key challenges are insufficient funding available for malaria prevention and control activities, and [the] emergence of drug-resistant malaria," Kunii said.
Evidence of tolerance to Artemisinin - the most effective drug used to treat malaria - has been found in the southeast, along the border with Thailand, and in southern Mon State.
"It is very important to react aggressively to this threat," said Frank Smithuis, the former director of Médecins sans Frontières in Myanmar and now head of Medical Action Myanmar.
"In Cambodia, where resistance to Artemisinin was first detected, an enormous effort is being made to contain the spread of resistance. This is all financed by the first-world countries," he said.
"Surely there is no reason whatsoever not to give similar support to control malaria in Myanmar. It is urgent for the first world to increase humanitarian and development aid to control malaria in Myanmar."
There are also significant access restrictions and logistical challenges, especially during and after the rainy season, when local malaria transmission is most intense, one aid worker from an international NGO said, on condition of anonymity.
"It would be good to increase the number of facilities to diagnose and treat malaria. In addition, it is essential to make effective malaria treatment affordable for everybody," Smithuis said.
He said estimates of annual malaria cases range from 4.2 million to 8.5 million. The official reported number of deaths is about 9,000 a year, but he said the actual figure is likely much higher.
According to Myanmar's National Malaria Control Programme, 76 percent of the country's estimated 50 million inhabitants live in malaria-prone areas.
Populations most vulnerable to malaria are migrant workers and marginalized ethnic groups, experts say.
Malaria, a vector-borne disease, affects 300 million people in 90 countries around the world, and kills one million people annually - 90 percent of them in Africa, and 9 percent in Southeast Asia, say health experts.
Symptoms include fever, headache and vomiting, and usually appear 10-15 days after the mosquito bite. Left untreated, malaria can become life-threatening.
YANGON, 18 May 2010 (IRIN) - Myanmar needs an estimated US$20 million to scale up malaria prevention measures, especially the distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, early diagnosis and proper treatment, Osamu Kunii, chief of health and nutrition at the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Myanmar, told IRIN.
"Some key challenges are insufficient funding available for malaria prevention and control activities, and [the] emergence of drug-resistant malaria," Kunii said.
Evidence of tolerance to Artemisinin - the most effective drug used to treat malaria - has been found in the southeast, along the border with Thailand, and in southern Mon State.
"It is very important to react aggressively to this threat," said Frank Smithuis, the former director of Médecins sans Frontières in Myanmar and now head of Medical Action Myanmar.
"In Cambodia, where resistance to Artemisinin was first detected, an enormous effort is being made to contain the spread of resistance. This is all financed by the first-world countries," he said.
"Surely there is no reason whatsoever not to give similar support to control malaria in Myanmar. It is urgent for the first world to increase humanitarian and development aid to control malaria in Myanmar."
There are also significant access restrictions and logistical challenges, especially during and after the rainy season, when local malaria transmission is most intense, one aid worker from an international NGO said, on condition of anonymity.
"It would be good to increase the number of facilities to diagnose and treat malaria. In addition, it is essential to make effective malaria treatment affordable for everybody," Smithuis said.
He said estimates of annual malaria cases range from 4.2 million to 8.5 million. The official reported number of deaths is about 9,000 a year, but he said the actual figure is likely much higher.
According to Myanmar's National Malaria Control Programme, 76 percent of the country's estimated 50 million inhabitants live in malaria-prone areas.
Populations most vulnerable to malaria are migrant workers and marginalized ethnic groups, experts say.
Malaria, a vector-borne disease, affects 300 million people in 90 countries around the world, and kills one million people annually - 90 percent of them in Africa, and 9 percent in Southeast Asia, say health experts.
Symptoms include fever, headache and vomiting, and usually appear 10-15 days after the mosquito bite. Left untreated, malaria can become life-threatening.
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GLOBAL: IDP numbers peak at 27 million, says new report
LONDON, 18 May 2010 (IRIN) - At least 6.8 million people were displaced last year, mainly by long-running conflicts, pushing the number of those forced to live away from home to 27 million - the highest since the mid-1990s, a new report states.
“The massive population movements and shocking violence are a sad reminder of the price that civilians pay in armed conflict,” Elisabeth Rasmusson, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said while launching the 2009 annual report on displacement at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. “Millions of people were newly displaced by conflicts in which combatants did not meet their obligations to protect civilians.”
The report, published by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (part of the NRC), said that while the number of refugees in the world remained fairly static, that of IDPs was rising steadily.
The distinction between a refugee and an IDP is clear in international law, but for the people who packed up their families and a few possessions and fled their homes to escape conflict it was often a matter of chance whether or not they crossed an international border.
The biggest single group of newly displaced people was in Pakistan, where some three million people fled army offensives against the Taliban and other armed groups. Most of the displacement was, however, temporary and they have now been able to go home. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, one million were newly displaced in 2009, as were over half a million in Sudan, and 400,000 each in Somalia and Colombia.
The IDPs, Rasmusson said, were often poorer and more vulnerable than refugees, and unable to travel as far from the conflict zone. The responsibility for their security and welfare should lie with their own governments, but some were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of displaced people within their borders. “They prefer to call them dislocated, or mobile or vulnerable populations,” she said.
The report cites Algeria, Myanmar, Indonesia and Zimbabwe as denying internal displacement. “This is arguably an attempt to deny the displaced access to the assistance they are entitled to by international law,” she said.
AU convention
Rasmusson and John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, paid tribute to the African Union for its adoption last October of a Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa. Holmes called the convention “very significant” and “a major step forward”.
“It recognises that states have a duty to prevent displacement and a responsibility towards those displaced,” he said at the report launch. “But the test will be whether the number of displaced is now reduced.”
Asked whether the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, should take responsibility for the welfare of IDPs, or whether a new international body was needed, Holmes said: “I think it is right for the UNHCR to take on more of this role.” However, he recognised that there was some resistance within the organization and among donors to a dilution of its mandate.
“We don’t want the UNHCR to be confined to the static problem of refugees, while IDPs are a massively expanding problem,” he added.
On the implications of displacement, he said: “Displacement creates an unacceptable burden on the communities that host IDPs, many of whom are themselves in need of humanitarian or development assistance...
“Furthermore, protracted displacement, and the marginalization that results, can have serious political, security and financial implications for national governments. As we have seen around the world, failure to resolve displacement inevitably undermines national efforts aimed at long-term peace and stability in post-crisis countries.”
LONDON, 18 May 2010 (IRIN) - At least 6.8 million people were displaced last year, mainly by long-running conflicts, pushing the number of those forced to live away from home to 27 million - the highest since the mid-1990s, a new report states.
“The massive population movements and shocking violence are a sad reminder of the price that civilians pay in armed conflict,” Elisabeth Rasmusson, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said while launching the 2009 annual report on displacement at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. “Millions of people were newly displaced by conflicts in which combatants did not meet their obligations to protect civilians.”
The report, published by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (part of the NRC), said that while the number of refugees in the world remained fairly static, that of IDPs was rising steadily.
The distinction between a refugee and an IDP is clear in international law, but for the people who packed up their families and a few possessions and fled their homes to escape conflict it was often a matter of chance whether or not they crossed an international border.
The biggest single group of newly displaced people was in Pakistan, where some three million people fled army offensives against the Taliban and other armed groups. Most of the displacement was, however, temporary and they have now been able to go home. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, one million were newly displaced in 2009, as were over half a million in Sudan, and 400,000 each in Somalia and Colombia.
The IDPs, Rasmusson said, were often poorer and more vulnerable than refugees, and unable to travel as far from the conflict zone. The responsibility for their security and welfare should lie with their own governments, but some were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of displaced people within their borders. “They prefer to call them dislocated, or mobile or vulnerable populations,” she said.
The report cites Algeria, Myanmar, Indonesia and Zimbabwe as denying internal displacement. “This is arguably an attempt to deny the displaced access to the assistance they are entitled to by international law,” she said.
AU convention
Rasmusson and John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, paid tribute to the African Union for its adoption last October of a Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa. Holmes called the convention “very significant” and “a major step forward”.
“It recognises that states have a duty to prevent displacement and a responsibility towards those displaced,” he said at the report launch. “But the test will be whether the number of displaced is now reduced.”
Asked whether the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, should take responsibility for the welfare of IDPs, or whether a new international body was needed, Holmes said: “I think it is right for the UNHCR to take on more of this role.” However, he recognised that there was some resistance within the organization and among donors to a dilution of its mandate.
“We don’t want the UNHCR to be confined to the static problem of refugees, while IDPs are a massively expanding problem,” he added.
On the implications of displacement, he said: “Displacement creates an unacceptable burden on the communities that host IDPs, many of whom are themselves in need of humanitarian or development assistance...
“Furthermore, protracted displacement, and the marginalization that results, can have serious political, security and financial implications for national governments. As we have seen around the world, failure to resolve displacement inevitably undermines national efforts aimed at long-term peace and stability in post-crisis countries.”
***************************************************
EarthTimes - Myanmar gets respite from record heat wave
Posted : Tue, 18 May 2010 11:54:32 GMT
Yangon - The first pre-monsoon rains fell in Yangon early this week, breaking a heat wave that has caused the death of at least nine people and set record temperatures throughout the country, media reports said Tuesday.
More than 40 days of maximum temperatures of 38 Celsius plus in Yangon have resulted in several heat-related deaths, the Myanmar Times quoted officials as saying.
Deaths have also been reported in upper Myanmar, where maximum temperatures have regularly topped 45 degrees over the past week.
In Taungdwingyi, Magway Division, seven people hospitalised due to high temperatures died between May 3 and May 10, while doctors managed to stabilise four more people admitted to hospital, state media reported.
Another 14 people were hospitalised at Nyaung U in Mandalay Division but so far no deaths have been recorded, the state-run New Light of Myanmar said.
Local media reported last week that two people had died in Yangon from heatstroke.
A total of 18 heat records were broken throughout the country in the first half of May, the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology said.
In Yangon on May 12 the Kaba Aye station recorded a maximum of 42.5 degrees Celsius, the highest May temperature recorded in the city in 42 years.
Mandalay recorded 45.5 Celsius on the same day, the highest in 64 years.
Posted : Tue, 18 May 2010 11:54:32 GMT
Yangon - The first pre-monsoon rains fell in Yangon early this week, breaking a heat wave that has caused the death of at least nine people and set record temperatures throughout the country, media reports said Tuesday.
More than 40 days of maximum temperatures of 38 Celsius plus in Yangon have resulted in several heat-related deaths, the Myanmar Times quoted officials as saying.
Deaths have also been reported in upper Myanmar, where maximum temperatures have regularly topped 45 degrees over the past week.
In Taungdwingyi, Magway Division, seven people hospitalised due to high temperatures died between May 3 and May 10, while doctors managed to stabilise four more people admitted to hospital, state media reported.
Another 14 people were hospitalised at Nyaung U in Mandalay Division but so far no deaths have been recorded, the state-run New Light of Myanmar said.
Local media reported last week that two people had died in Yangon from heatstroke.
A total of 18 heat records were broken throughout the country in the first half of May, the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology said.
In Yangon on May 12 the Kaba Aye station recorded a maximum of 42.5 degrees Celsius, the highest May temperature recorded in the city in 42 years.
Mandalay recorded 45.5 Celsius on the same day, the highest in 64 years.
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DefenceWeb (press release) - Parliamentary Question: DIRCO: Myanmar
Written by Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation Monday, 17 May 2010 15:31
QUESTION NO: 1009
PUBLISHED IN INTERNAL QUESTION PAPER NO: 9 OF 30 MARCH 2010
Mr S Mokgalapa (DA) to ask the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation:
What is the Government’s position with regard to the election ban of Aung San Suu Kyi in the upcoming Burma elections?
Response
The South African Government has consistently deplored the human rights situation in Myanmar and specifically the ongoing house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The South African Government has taken note of the electoral laws that have been passed in Myanmar in preparation for the upcoming elections later in 2010, and is deeply concerned that their provisions do not seem to be conducive to all inclusive, democratic elections. In particular, it is concerned that all persons who have been imprisoned for political activism against the Military Government are deemed to have “criminal records” and are excluded from joining any political party. In the case of Aung San Suu Kyi as leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), her party would have had to expel her in order to take part in the elections.
The South African Government recalls its statements issued in May 2009 and in August 2009 following the arrest, trial and conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi on a charge of subversion after an uninvited intrusion by an American man into the compound where she was being held under house arrest. At the time, the South African Government expressed its regret and sadness at these developments and called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi as well as other political prisoners in order to allow them to participate in the electoral process.
The South African Government remains of the opinion that the challenges relating to nation building and inclusive government in Myanmar could only be overcome through a negotiated settlement based on dialogue in which all parties and interest groups participate. Aung San Suu Kyi, as leader of the National League for Democracy, has an important part to play in this process and her exclusion from the elections as well as all others who have been imprisoned for advocating a more equitable political dispensation, could only result in elections which would not be viewed as free and fair. South Africa continues to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Myanmar, but believes that an opportunity for progress towards democratisation, nation building and reconciliation has been lost.
*************************************************** Written by Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation Monday, 17 May 2010 15:31
QUESTION NO: 1009
PUBLISHED IN INTERNAL QUESTION PAPER NO: 9 OF 30 MARCH 2010
Mr S Mokgalapa (DA) to ask the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation:
What is the Government’s position with regard to the election ban of Aung San Suu Kyi in the upcoming Burma elections?
Response
The South African Government has consistently deplored the human rights situation in Myanmar and specifically the ongoing house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The South African Government has taken note of the electoral laws that have been passed in Myanmar in preparation for the upcoming elections later in 2010, and is deeply concerned that their provisions do not seem to be conducive to all inclusive, democratic elections. In particular, it is concerned that all persons who have been imprisoned for political activism against the Military Government are deemed to have “criminal records” and are excluded from joining any political party. In the case of Aung San Suu Kyi as leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), her party would have had to expel her in order to take part in the elections.
The South African Government recalls its statements issued in May 2009 and in August 2009 following the arrest, trial and conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi on a charge of subversion after an uninvited intrusion by an American man into the compound where she was being held under house arrest. At the time, the South African Government expressed its regret and sadness at these developments and called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi as well as other political prisoners in order to allow them to participate in the electoral process.
The South African Government remains of the opinion that the challenges relating to nation building and inclusive government in Myanmar could only be overcome through a negotiated settlement based on dialogue in which all parties and interest groups participate. Aung San Suu Kyi, as leader of the National League for Democracy, has an important part to play in this process and her exclusion from the elections as well as all others who have been imprisoned for advocating a more equitable political dispensation, could only result in elections which would not be viewed as free and fair. South Africa continues to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Myanmar, but believes that an opportunity for progress towards democratisation, nation building and reconciliation has been lost.
OfficialWire - Myanmar Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010 - New Market Report Published
New report provides detailed analysis of the Energy and Utilities market
Published on May 18, 2010
by Press Office
(Companiesandmarkets.com and OfficialWire)
LONDON, ENGLAND
Myanmar Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010
Myanmar upstream oil and gas fiscal regime report is an essential source for information related to the upstream fiscal system enacted in Myanmar's oil and gas industry. This report contains information related to various types of payments that are to be made by any oil and gas producing company to the host government. The report provides the most recent laws and tax policies in the country. Each fiscal report is supported by a fully editable and interactive Excel model, where all the fiscal terms are applied on a hypothetical base asset. This interactive Excel model, with the latest fiscal term information, is the most appropriate tool to evaluate the profitability of operating oil and gas fields under the country's fiscal environment.
Scope
- The report provides detailed information on governing laws, licensing authorities, type of contracts and licensing information in country's upstream oil and gas industry.
- The report provides information on the latest fiscal terms applicable in the country's upstream industry. These range from exploration obligations, relinquishments to royalties and taxes.
- Deductions, depreciation and amortization related information is also covered in the report.
- Covers sample cash flows and the methodology to apply a fiscal system on an oil and gas field in the country.
- Base asset valuation with government take, contractor take, gross revenue split is provided in the report.
- Sample asset NPV sensitivities to discount rates are also provided in the report.
- Interactive Excel models can be used to derive valuations, sensitivities and cash flows based on the custom inputs by the user in the model. These custom inputs vary from field production data, cost information, price information and fiscal terms information.
Reasons to buy
- The report provides a detailed scenario of upstream oil and gas laws and their impact on the cash flows.
- The report will allow you to value a prospective investment target through a comprehensive and real-time fiscal analysis and focused methodologies.
- The report with interactive model will enhance your decision making capability in a more rapid and time sensitive manner
- Decide on market entry strategies in specific markets and understand the impact a country's fiscal policies on your future assets.
Myanmar Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010: http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/r.ashx?id=3667516F8271481&prk=9319dad0f2e0a1f2e2abf3bc5faa3c35
New report provides detailed analysis of the Energy and Utilities market
Published on May 18, 2010
by Press Office
(Companiesandmarkets.com and OfficialWire)
LONDON, ENGLAND
Myanmar Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010
Myanmar upstream oil and gas fiscal regime report is an essential source for information related to the upstream fiscal system enacted in Myanmar's oil and gas industry. This report contains information related to various types of payments that are to be made by any oil and gas producing company to the host government. The report provides the most recent laws and tax policies in the country. Each fiscal report is supported by a fully editable and interactive Excel model, where all the fiscal terms are applied on a hypothetical base asset. This interactive Excel model, with the latest fiscal term information, is the most appropriate tool to evaluate the profitability of operating oil and gas fields under the country's fiscal environment.
Scope
- The report provides detailed information on governing laws, licensing authorities, type of contracts and licensing information in country's upstream oil and gas industry.
- The report provides information on the latest fiscal terms applicable in the country's upstream industry. These range from exploration obligations, relinquishments to royalties and taxes.
- Deductions, depreciation and amortization related information is also covered in the report.
- Covers sample cash flows and the methodology to apply a fiscal system on an oil and gas field in the country.
- Base asset valuation with government take, contractor take, gross revenue split is provided in the report.
- Sample asset NPV sensitivities to discount rates are also provided in the report.
- Interactive Excel models can be used to derive valuations, sensitivities and cash flows based on the custom inputs by the user in the model. These custom inputs vary from field production data, cost information, price information and fiscal terms information.
Reasons to buy
- The report provides a detailed scenario of upstream oil and gas laws and their impact on the cash flows.
- The report will allow you to value a prospective investment target through a comprehensive and real-time fiscal analysis and focused methodologies.
- The report with interactive model will enhance your decision making capability in a more rapid and time sensitive manner
- Decide on market entry strategies in specific markets and understand the impact a country's fiscal policies on your future assets.
Myanmar Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010: http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/r.ashx?id=3667516F8271481&prk=9319dad0f2e0a1f2e2abf3bc5faa3c35
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Foreign Relations - Failing State
Author: Joshua Kurlantzick, Fellow for Southeast Asia
May/June 2010
Washington Monthly
Normally, the Kokang region of northern Burma, home to ethnic Kokang, doesn't exactly hum with activity. Small traders sell apples from China out of carts on the side of the road; the area's capital, Laogai, is a seedy town with open-air markets and several shabby casinos catering to local tourists. But last August, the region suddenly came alive.
The Burmese military launched a wave of attacks against a Kokang insurgent group, and the Kokang fought back, joined by other ethnic armies in the region. Terrified, as many as 30,000 people fled the lawless area, with many crossing the border into China. And Beijing clearly wasn't happy. "We warned [the Burmese government] not to push the Kokang too hard," says one Chinese official. "They just didn't listen to us."
The fighting in Kokang country was hardly unique. Across northern and eastern Burma, where the military junta exercises minimal control and insurgents run wild, tenuous ceasefires between the regime and ethnic-minority militias are breaking down. The resulting clashes are aggravating the nation's already grave humanitarian crisis, spawned by a mix of vicious army repression of civilians and constant fighting between the military and ethnic insurgents. The Thailand-based Burma Border Coalition estimates that there are already more than 450,000 internally displaced people in one eastern region of Burma alone, and many of them are literally starving to death. Overall, more than a million Burmese have been uprooted—one of the largest groups of internally displaced people in the world. Many refugees spend their time constantly on the run, fleeing one army offensive after the next and struggling to keep their children alive as they forage through the jungle, searching for edible plants. With virtually no medical care in much of the country, children and even healthy adults die of diseases easily curable just across the border in Thailand, while rampant prostitution and widespread rape by soldiers spread virulent strains of HIV among the refugees. And if fighting picks up again, hundreds of thousands more will likely be forced into itinerant misery.
Author: Joshua Kurlantzick, Fellow for Southeast Asia
May/June 2010
Washington Monthly
Normally, the Kokang region of northern Burma, home to ethnic Kokang, doesn't exactly hum with activity. Small traders sell apples from China out of carts on the side of the road; the area's capital, Laogai, is a seedy town with open-air markets and several shabby casinos catering to local tourists. But last August, the region suddenly came alive.
The Burmese military launched a wave of attacks against a Kokang insurgent group, and the Kokang fought back, joined by other ethnic armies in the region. Terrified, as many as 30,000 people fled the lawless area, with many crossing the border into China. And Beijing clearly wasn't happy. "We warned [the Burmese government] not to push the Kokang too hard," says one Chinese official. "They just didn't listen to us."
The fighting in Kokang country was hardly unique. Across northern and eastern Burma, where the military junta exercises minimal control and insurgents run wild, tenuous ceasefires between the regime and ethnic-minority militias are breaking down. The resulting clashes are aggravating the nation's already grave humanitarian crisis, spawned by a mix of vicious army repression of civilians and constant fighting between the military and ethnic insurgents. The Thailand-based Burma Border Coalition estimates that there are already more than 450,000 internally displaced people in one eastern region of Burma alone, and many of them are literally starving to death. Overall, more than a million Burmese have been uprooted—one of the largest groups of internally displaced people in the world. Many refugees spend their time constantly on the run, fleeing one army offensive after the next and struggling to keep their children alive as they forage through the jungle, searching for edible plants. With virtually no medical care in much of the country, children and even healthy adults die of diseases easily curable just across the border in Thailand, while rampant prostitution and widespread rape by soldiers spread virulent strains of HIV among the refugees. And if fighting picks up again, hundreds of thousands more will likely be forced into itinerant misery.
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Moderate storm to deviate from moving towards Myanmar
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 12:00:49
YANGON, May 18 (Xinhua) -- A moderate storm has been forecast to deviate from moving towards Myanmar, the official daily New Light of Myanmar quoted the Meteorology and Hydrology Department as reporting Tuesday.
The storm, created by low pressure area in the southern part of the Bay of Bengal with its center in the sea, about 880 kilometers southeast of Chennai in India, was first forecast to be moving northwestwards.
According to the department, the storm is "just at the yellow level and is not moving towards Myanmar".
Meanwhile, the first heavy rainfall formally poured onto Myanmar's Yangon on Monday night following a 15-minute slight one in the morning after experiencing two month-long red-hot summer, initially bringing down the city's temperature from as high as over 42 degrees Celsius.
The two rainfalls on the same day with lightning marked the beginning of the rainy season this year which Yangon residents are long expecting amid extreme hot summer.
The excessively hot weather temperature over the past two months broke the highest in the history.
From late April through to the mid-May, the day temperatures in central Myanmar were reaching a record high in over four decades, peaking at between 43 and 47 degrees Celsius in such regions as Minbu, Magway, Mandalay, Monywa, Nyaung Oo, Chauk and Mingyan as well as in Yangon and Bago over the past week, which are 5 to 8 degrees Celsius above April average temperature.
Since late April also, strong wind had swept Magway division's Aunglan, Myaing, Minhla and Hsinhaung townships, Bago division's Nyaunglebin and Mon state's Kyaikto as well as Nay Pyi Taw region, Chin state, Kachin state and Shan state causing loss and damage to the areas to certain extent.
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 12:00:49
YANGON, May 18 (Xinhua) -- A moderate storm has been forecast to deviate from moving towards Myanmar, the official daily New Light of Myanmar quoted the Meteorology and Hydrology Department as reporting Tuesday.
The storm, created by low pressure area in the southern part of the Bay of Bengal with its center in the sea, about 880 kilometers southeast of Chennai in India, was first forecast to be moving northwestwards.
According to the department, the storm is "just at the yellow level and is not moving towards Myanmar".
Meanwhile, the first heavy rainfall formally poured onto Myanmar's Yangon on Monday night following a 15-minute slight one in the morning after experiencing two month-long red-hot summer, initially bringing down the city's temperature from as high as over 42 degrees Celsius.
The two rainfalls on the same day with lightning marked the beginning of the rainy season this year which Yangon residents are long expecting amid extreme hot summer.
The excessively hot weather temperature over the past two months broke the highest in the history.
From late April through to the mid-May, the day temperatures in central Myanmar were reaching a record high in over four decades, peaking at between 43 and 47 degrees Celsius in such regions as Minbu, Magway, Mandalay, Monywa, Nyaung Oo, Chauk and Mingyan as well as in Yangon and Bago over the past week, which are 5 to 8 degrees Celsius above April average temperature.
Since late April also, strong wind had swept Magway division's Aunglan, Myaing, Minhla and Hsinhaung townships, Bago division's Nyaunglebin and Mon state's Kyaikto as well as Nay Pyi Taw region, Chin state, Kachin state and Shan state causing loss and damage to the areas to certain extent.
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Myanmar-female journalist attacked by Thai anti-gov't protesters
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 16:11:52
BANGKOK, May 18 (Xinhua) -- A Myanmar-female journalist was attacked by a group of the anti-government protesters on Tuesday afternoon, a witness said.
The journalist was attacked as she was interviewing some anti- government supporters, who have taken refuge in the Pathumwanaram Temple, nearby the anti-government main rally site, Thailand's INN news agency reported.
The anti-government protesters were angry at the journalist, who was interviewing for information to produce a news feature.
Over 100 women and children on Monday morning shifted from the rally site Rajprasong Intersection in central Bangkok to take refuge in the temple.
Hence, the temple, which is located next to the Rajprasong Intersection, has became crowded with the presence of the anti- government protesters.
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 16:11:52
BANGKOK, May 18 (Xinhua) -- A Myanmar-female journalist was attacked by a group of the anti-government protesters on Tuesday afternoon, a witness said.
The journalist was attacked as she was interviewing some anti- government supporters, who have taken refuge in the Pathumwanaram Temple, nearby the anti-government main rally site, Thailand's INN news agency reported.
The anti-government protesters were angry at the journalist, who was interviewing for information to produce a news feature.
Over 100 women and children on Monday morning shifted from the rally site Rajprasong Intersection in central Bangkok to take refuge in the temple.
Hence, the temple, which is located next to the Rajprasong Intersection, has became crowded with the presence of the anti- government protesters.
***************************************************
China, Myanmar sign cooperation accords on building road, wharf
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 21:46:44
NAY PYI TAW, Myanmar, May 18 (Xinhua) -- China and Myanmar reached a memorandum of understanding in Nay Pyi Taw Tuesday on cooperation in development of Ruili-Kyaukphyu China-Myanmar platform road project.
The MoU was signed by visiting Chinese Transport Minister Li Seng Lin and Myanmar Construction Minister U Khin Maung Myint.
Another contract was also signed on Hteedan Wharf construction project in Yangon, the report said.
Before the signing, First Secretary of the State Peace and Development Council General Thiha Thura Tin Aung Myint Oo met with the Chinese transport minister.
English.news.cn 2010-05-18 21:46:44
NAY PYI TAW, Myanmar, May 18 (Xinhua) -- China and Myanmar reached a memorandum of understanding in Nay Pyi Taw Tuesday on cooperation in development of Ruili-Kyaukphyu China-Myanmar platform road project.
The MoU was signed by visiting Chinese Transport Minister Li Seng Lin and Myanmar Construction Minister U Khin Maung Myint.
Another contract was also signed on Hteedan Wharf construction project in Yangon, the report said.
Before the signing, First Secretary of the State Peace and Development Council General Thiha Thura Tin Aung Myint Oo met with the Chinese transport minister.
***************************************************
The Malay Mail - Myanmar worker found murdered in Kepong
Submitted by pekwan on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
ALFIAN TAHIR
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 14:05:00
KEPONG: A 23-year-old Myanmar worker was killed last night after allegedly being involved in a fight at Fortune Avenue, a restaurant near here.
Pyae Phyo Naung, a waiter, was attacked by three men armed with knives in front of the Chinese restaurant at 10.30pm.
Pyae was stabbed in the chest and suffered several slash wounds on his arm and thigh. He died on the spot.
The Malay Mail was informed that several customers were having supper and some of them immediately left the restaurant when the fight started.
The restaurant owner said he was not around during the incident as he was meeting a friend. He was informed later about it by one of his workers who saw the brawl.
The owner, who declined to be named, added that the victim had just started working as a waiter at a nearby restaurant a few months ago.
"He was new. If I am not mistaken, he started work in March. I did not know him that well. It was maybe a misunderstanding," he said.
Meanwhile, the victim's ex-colleague said the deceased was a good friend. The ex-colleague, identified as Kenny Chan, told The Paper That Cares that he had not met Pyae for quite some time now.
"Earlier, we usually hung around together with some other friends. We used to either go for tea or dinner together. After he started his new job, we rarely saw each other," Chan said.
When contacted, Sentul district police chief, ACP Zakaria Pagan said the fight might have been initiated due to a misunderstanding between the victim and the three suspects.
He added that police did not find the murder weapon but have received footage of the altercation from a surveillance camera placed in front of the premise.
"At the moment we are investigating the case as well as pursuing the suspects," he said. A source from the police department at the scene added that the motive of the incident is still under investigation.
He said the victim was not robbed as none of his belongings were taken, and it is believed that Pyae was under the influence of alcohol during the attack
***************************************************
Submitted by pekwan on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
ALFIAN TAHIR
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 14:05:00
KEPONG: A 23-year-old Myanmar worker was killed last night after allegedly being involved in a fight at Fortune Avenue, a restaurant near here.
Pyae Phyo Naung, a waiter, was attacked by three men armed with knives in front of the Chinese restaurant at 10.30pm.
Pyae was stabbed in the chest and suffered several slash wounds on his arm and thigh. He died on the spot.
The Malay Mail was informed that several customers were having supper and some of them immediately left the restaurant when the fight started.
The restaurant owner said he was not around during the incident as he was meeting a friend. He was informed later about it by one of his workers who saw the brawl.
The owner, who declined to be named, added that the victim had just started working as a waiter at a nearby restaurant a few months ago.
"He was new. If I am not mistaken, he started work in March. I did not know him that well. It was maybe a misunderstanding," he said.
Meanwhile, the victim's ex-colleague said the deceased was a good friend. The ex-colleague, identified as Kenny Chan, told The Paper That Cares that he had not met Pyae for quite some time now.
"Earlier, we usually hung around together with some other friends. We used to either go for tea or dinner together. After he started his new job, we rarely saw each other," Chan said.
When contacted, Sentul district police chief, ACP Zakaria Pagan said the fight might have been initiated due to a misunderstanding between the victim and the three suspects.
He added that police did not find the murder weapon but have received footage of the altercation from a surveillance camera placed in front of the premise.
"At the moment we are investigating the case as well as pursuing the suspects," he said. A source from the police department at the scene added that the motive of the incident is still under investigation.
He said the victim was not robbed as none of his belongings were taken, and it is believed that Pyae was under the influence of alcohol during the attack
***************************************************
May 18, 2010
Jakarta Globe - Burma-North Korea Ties Worry the World
Andrew Selth
For the past 10 years, Burma has been accused of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. A number of developments during this period — notably Burma’s growing relationship with North Korea — have raised international concerns. Yet, to date, no hard evidence of such a plan has been produced.
Claims of a secret nuclear weapons program date back to 2000, when Burma’s military government announced that it was going to purchase a small research reactor from Russia. These accusations were repeated in 2003, when it was suggested by a respected news magazine that North Korea had taken over from Russia as the source of Burma’s nuclear technology. In the years that followed, the issue resurfaced periodically on activist Web sites, but in August 2009 it attracted global attention when a story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald citing Australia National University professor Des Ball and the Thai-based journalist Phil Thornton.
The SMH claimed that there were in fact two nuclear projects running in Burma. The first was the Russian research center, which was to be operated under international safeguards. (Contrary to the SMH story, construction of this reactor has not yet begun). The second was said to be a secret project to build a reactor and associated nuclear fuel processing plants with North Korean help. According to the SMH, if all went according to plan Burma would have a nuclear weapon by 2014 and “a handful” of such devices by 2020. The main sources for these claims were two Burmese “defectors” and commercial satellite imagery of suspect facilities in Burma.
Needless to say, such claims have been the subject of close scrutiny by the United States and other governments. There have also been comprehensive studies of the issue by think tanks like the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
The US government has expressed its concern about the defense ties that appear to have developed between Burma and North Korea over the past decade. These links reportedly include the sale of conventional arms to Burma, North Korean help with the development of Burma’s defense infrastructure (including the construction of various underground facilities), assistance to Burma’s arms industries and training in fields like air defense. In 2004, the US blocked the sale of North Korean short-range ballistic missiles to Burma.
The Obama administration has also stated its wish to discuss a number of proliferation issues with Burma, including the possible transfer of nuclear technology from North Korea. Significantly, however, at no time has the US government stated that Burma is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, with or without North Korean help. Indeed, despite considerable pressure from members of Congress, activists and journalists, Washington has refused to be drawn on the subject. Its position seems to reflect either a belief that Burma does not have a secret nuclear weapons program, or a lack of hard evidence to support such a claim.
This approach has been shared by other countries, including Britain and Australia, both of which have referred only to “unconfirmed” reports of a secret nuclear program. For their part, the IISS and ISIS have both stated that there is insufficient evidence to support the claims. The IISS, for example, said in late 2009 that Burma “has no known capabilities that would lend themselves to a nuclear weapons program.”
Even so, both governments and think tanks remain suspicious of Burma’s intentions, and point to a number of factors which they believe warrant continuing close attention.
Of all Southeast Asian countries, Burma has the strongest strategic rationale for a nuclear weapons program. Since the abortive pro-democracy uprising in 1988, the military government has feared armed intervention by the United States and its allies. The regime has also suffered from economic sanctions and other punitive measures. Burma’s generals envy North Korea’s ability to resist such pressures and still win concessions from the international community. They reportedly believe that this influence derives from Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons.
In addition, Burma has for some years been working closely with two North Korean trading entities that have a record of proliferating sensitive nuclear and missile technologies. Also, Burma has imported a number of sophisticated machines and items of dual-use equipment from Europe and Japan that could conceivably be used in a nuclear program. The number of Burmese sent to Russia for nuclear-related training seems to be more than that required for a peaceful research program. Furthermore, some of the claims made by the “defectors” are plausible.
None of these factors in themselves prove that Burma has embarked on a nuclear weapons program. After the mistakes of the Iraq war, no government wants to rush to judgment based on incomplete or unverified intelligence. Having been caught napping a few years ago, however, when it was discovered that Syria was building a reactor with North Korean help, the international community is now looking carefully for hard evidence of a secret Burmese nuclear program.
East Asia Forum
Andrew Selth is a research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Queensland.
Andrew Selth
For the past 10 years, Burma has been accused of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. A number of developments during this period — notably Burma’s growing relationship with North Korea — have raised international concerns. Yet, to date, no hard evidence of such a plan has been produced.
Claims of a secret nuclear weapons program date back to 2000, when Burma’s military government announced that it was going to purchase a small research reactor from Russia. These accusations were repeated in 2003, when it was suggested by a respected news magazine that North Korea had taken over from Russia as the source of Burma’s nuclear technology. In the years that followed, the issue resurfaced periodically on activist Web sites, but in August 2009 it attracted global attention when a story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald citing Australia National University professor Des Ball and the Thai-based journalist Phil Thornton.
The SMH claimed that there were in fact two nuclear projects running in Burma. The first was the Russian research center, which was to be operated under international safeguards. (Contrary to the SMH story, construction of this reactor has not yet begun). The second was said to be a secret project to build a reactor and associated nuclear fuel processing plants with North Korean help. According to the SMH, if all went according to plan Burma would have a nuclear weapon by 2014 and “a handful” of such devices by 2020. The main sources for these claims were two Burmese “defectors” and commercial satellite imagery of suspect facilities in Burma.
Needless to say, such claims have been the subject of close scrutiny by the United States and other governments. There have also been comprehensive studies of the issue by think tanks like the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
The US government has expressed its concern about the defense ties that appear to have developed between Burma and North Korea over the past decade. These links reportedly include the sale of conventional arms to Burma, North Korean help with the development of Burma’s defense infrastructure (including the construction of various underground facilities), assistance to Burma’s arms industries and training in fields like air defense. In 2004, the US blocked the sale of North Korean short-range ballistic missiles to Burma.
The Obama administration has also stated its wish to discuss a number of proliferation issues with Burma, including the possible transfer of nuclear technology from North Korea. Significantly, however, at no time has the US government stated that Burma is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, with or without North Korean help. Indeed, despite considerable pressure from members of Congress, activists and journalists, Washington has refused to be drawn on the subject. Its position seems to reflect either a belief that Burma does not have a secret nuclear weapons program, or a lack of hard evidence to support such a claim.
This approach has been shared by other countries, including Britain and Australia, both of which have referred only to “unconfirmed” reports of a secret nuclear program. For their part, the IISS and ISIS have both stated that there is insufficient evidence to support the claims. The IISS, for example, said in late 2009 that Burma “has no known capabilities that would lend themselves to a nuclear weapons program.”
Even so, both governments and think tanks remain suspicious of Burma’s intentions, and point to a number of factors which they believe warrant continuing close attention.
Of all Southeast Asian countries, Burma has the strongest strategic rationale for a nuclear weapons program. Since the abortive pro-democracy uprising in 1988, the military government has feared armed intervention by the United States and its allies. The regime has also suffered from economic sanctions and other punitive measures. Burma’s generals envy North Korea’s ability to resist such pressures and still win concessions from the international community. They reportedly believe that this influence derives from Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons.
In addition, Burma has for some years been working closely with two North Korean trading entities that have a record of proliferating sensitive nuclear and missile technologies. Also, Burma has imported a number of sophisticated machines and items of dual-use equipment from Europe and Japan that could conceivably be used in a nuclear program. The number of Burmese sent to Russia for nuclear-related training seems to be more than that required for a peaceful research program. Furthermore, some of the claims made by the “defectors” are plausible.
None of these factors in themselves prove that Burma has embarked on a nuclear weapons program. After the mistakes of the Iraq war, no government wants to rush to judgment based on incomplete or unverified intelligence. Having been caught napping a few years ago, however, when it was discovered that Syria was building a reactor with North Korean help, the international community is now looking carefully for hard evidence of a secret Burmese nuclear program.
East Asia Forum
Andrew Selth is a research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Queensland.
***************************************************
Mother Jones - For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question
Meet the crazy, fearless young men who risk life and limb to document Burma's genocide.
By Mac McClelland | March/April 2010 Issue
"DO YOU WANT A CIGARETTE?" I ask Htan Dah, holding up a pack of Thai-issue Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover.
The men are all in their 20s. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky; their faces shine because they're drunk, and it's July. They could be mistaken for former frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday.
Except that they're stateless. They are penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody yesterday, again, because they're on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own. Htan Dah's silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros are adorned with a legally mandated photographic deterrent, a guy blowing smoke in a baby's face, but it doesn't deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn't smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he's still alive. He takes a cigarette. "Never say no," he says, and winks at me.
I'D ARRIVED AT Mae Sot a few weeks before. This city in western central Thailand is a major hub for people, teak, gems, and other goods that enter the country illegally from Burma. The place is rife with smugglers, dealers, undocumented immigrants, and slaves. My bus arrived in the late afternoon. I wasn't connected to any aid or charity organization—I'd just happened on a website of a group that said it was promoting democracy in the Texas-size military dictatorship of Burma, and eventually volunteered, via email, to help its activists living in Thailand learn English. (As I was to discover, the particulars of their mission were far more dangerous, and illegal, so I'll refer to them as Burma Action.)
At the station, I was met by The Guy, whose name wasn't The Guy, but whose actual name I didn't catch when he mumbled it twice and then just shook his head and laughed
when I asked him to repeat it one more time. After a brief ride in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, we arrived at a gold-detailed black gate that stood heavy sentry at the road. Behind it stood Burma Action's local HQ, a big but run-down house, two stories of worn wood and dirty concrete with a balcony on the left, cement garage on the right. The Guy gave me a quick tour. The "kitchen" had a sink and some dishes; cooking took place out in the dining room/garage. He took a few steps farther. "Bathroom." He gestured into a cement-walled room through an oversize wooden door. There was a squat toilet set into the floor, and in lieu of toilet paper a shallow well with a little plastic bowl floating on top. There was also, running the length of the left wall, a giant waist-high cement trough filled with water and dead mosquitoes.
"What's that?" I asked.
"A bath."
I looked at it, jet-lagged. "How does it work?" I asked.
He exhaled hard through his nose, a whispery snort. "Like this," he said, pantomiming filling a bowl with water and dumping it over his head. "Are you hungry?"
I asked The Guy what was in the soup he offered me.
"I don't know the word in English," he said. "Leaves?"
Close. Twigs, actually. The Guy pulled a stump of wood up next to me at the table, and watched me chew through the sautéed woody stems.
"So, where are you from?" I asked.
"Me?"
I nodded.
"I am kuh-REN. Everybody here, we are all kuh-REN."
Oh, man. It was starting to come together now.
When I'd landed in Bangkok, a Burma Action employee had picked me up at the airport to make sure I found the bus station and the right eight-hour bus north. She was tiny and Thai and heavily accented, and repeatedly told me during our cab ride that everyone I was about to be working with was Korean. It seemed sort of weird that a bunch of Koreans would move to Thailand together to work for peace in Burma, but I thought that was nice, I guessed, and even wrote in my journal, relievedly, "Koreans tend to have excellent English skills."
When I'd arrived at the Mae Sot bus station, The Guy had asked if I was his new volunteer.
"Yes," I'd said. "You're not Korean."
I'd done my homework before leaving the States. I had read about the Karen. But I'd only seen the word written down, and had assumed that it sounded like the name of my parents' blond divorced friend. I didn't know how it was pronounced any more than most Westerners would've been certain how to say "Darfur" 10 years ago.
WHEN I TURNED the corner from the kitchen into the large living room, four pairs of dark eyes looked up from a small TV screen. I smiled, but The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn't make any introductions, so I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet amid the rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. Mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless windows, possible hosts to malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. I'd no natural resistance to the latter two, and I'd opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to be the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn't know anyone. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I got bit. I scratched. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. Finally, I stood up.
"I'm going to bed," I told The Guy.
He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was 7:30. "Are you okay?" he asked. I'd just taken 27 hours of planes and automobiles. I'd glanced at the phrases "Forced marriage" and "Human trafficking" on a piece of paper taped to the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room. I said that I was fine and headed upstairs. I dropped my air mattress under the big blue mosquito net and lay down. I had no real idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was supposed to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy (real name: The Blay) seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks. Lying there, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, I comforted myself with the thought that these Karen seemed nice. I couldn't have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.
IMAGINE, FOR A moment, that Texas had managed to secede from the union, and that you live there, in the sovereign Republic of Texas. Imagine that shortly after
independence, a cadre of old, paranoid, greedy men who believed in a superior military caste took over your newly autonomous nation in a coup. Your beloved president, who had big dreams of prosperity and Texan unity, whom you believed in, was shot, and now the army runs your country. It has direct or indirect control over all the businesses. It spends 0.3 percent of GDP on health care, and uses your oil and natural gas money to buy weapons that Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have been happy to provide. It sends your rice and beans to India and China, while your countrymen starve. There is no free press, and gatherings of more than five people are illegal. If you are arrested, a trial, much less legal representation, is not guaranteed. In the event of interrogation, be prepared to crouch like you're riding a motorbike for hours or be hung from the ceiling and spun around and around and around, or burned with cigarettes, or beaten with a rubber rod. They might put you in a ditch with a dead body for six days, lock you in a room with wild, sharp-beaked birds, or make you stand to your neck in a cesspool full of maggots that climb into your nose and ears and mouth. If you do manage to stay out of the prisons, where activists and dissidents have been rotting for decades, you will be broke and starving. Your children have a 10 percent chance of dying before they reach their fifth birthday, and a 32 percent chance they'll be devastatingly malnourished if they're still alive. What's more, you and 50 million countrymen are trapped inside your 268,000-square-mile Orwellian nightmare with some 350,000 soldiers. They can snatch people—maybe your kid—off the street and make them join the army. They can grab you as you're going out to buy eggs and make you work construction on a new government building or road—long, hard hours under the grueling sun for days or weeks without pay—during which you'll have to scavenge for food. You'll do all this at gunpoint, and any break will be rewarded with a pistol-whipping. Your life is roughly equivalent to a modern-day Burmese person's.
Now imagine that you belong to a distinct group, Dallasites, or something, that never wanted to be part of the Republic in the first place, that wanted to either remain part of the United States, which had treated you just fine, or, failing that, become your own free state within the Republic of Texas, since you already had your own infrastructure and culture. Some Dallasites have, wisely or unwisely, taken up arms to battle the Texas military government, and in retaliation whole squads of that huge army have, for decades, been dedicated to terrorizing your city. You and your fellow Dallasites are regularly conscripted into slavery, made to walk in front of the army to set off land mines that they—and your own insurgents—have planted, or carry 100-pound loads of weaponry while being severely beaten until you're crippled or die. If you're so enslaved, you might accompany the soldiers as they march into your friends' neighborhoods and set them on fire, watch them shoot at fleeing inhabitants as they run, capturing any stragglers. If you're one of those stragglers, and you're a woman, or a girl five or older, prepare to be raped, most likely gang-raped, and there's easily a one-in-four chance you'll then be killed, possibly by being shot, possibly through your vagina, possibly after having your breasts hacked off. If you're a man, maybe you'll be hung by your wrists and burned alive. Maybe a soldier will drown you by filling a plastic bag with water and tying it over your head, or stretch you between two trees and use you as a hammock, or cut off your nose, pull out your eyes, and then stab you in both ears before killing you, or string you up by your shoulders and club you now and again for two weeks, or heat up slivers of bamboo and push them into your urethra, or tie a tight rope between your dick and your neck for a while before setting your genitals on fire, or whatever else hateful, armed men and underage boys might dream up when they have orders to torment, and nothing else to do. And though you've been sure for decades that the United States can't possibly let this continue, it has invested in your country's oil and will not under any circumstances cross China, which is your country's staunch UN defender and economic ally, so you really need to accept that America is decidedly not coming to save you. Nobody is.
Now your life is pretty much equivalent to a modern-day Burmese Karen's.
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, someone dropped a pile of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves with the skins still on into a wok of hot soybean oil. As the smell wafted up, I climbed out from under my mosquito net and walked softly out of my room.
Htan Dah—whose name was pronounced, to my unceasing delight, the same as the self-satisfied English interjection "ta-da!"—stood at the gas range, which spat oil at his baggy long-sleeved shirt. He tilted the wok, concentrating harder than he needed to on the swirling oil. Htan Dah was worried about me. As the office manager of Burma Action for the past two years, he'd heard the nighttime weeping of plenty of self-pitying philanthropists, who tended to arrive tired and instantly homesick. The last girl, a Canadian with a lot of luggage, had started sobbing almost as soon as he'd picked her up, and couldn't be calmed even by the hours she spent taking calls from her boyfriend back home. She'd cried for days.
Indeed, I'd had a very sad moment the night before when, after my air mattress deflated and my angles pressed into hard floor, and I realized that the ants patrolling the grounds were trekking right through my hair, I actually hoped that I had contracted malaria or Japanese encephalitis from the mosquito bites raging hot and itchy so I would have a legitimate excuse to bail back to the States. That way I wouldn't have to be mad at myself for being too chickenshit to hack it through loneliness and less-than-ideal bathing arrangements. I'd even considered taking the bus back to Bangkok. If there wasn't an immediate flight out, I could just hang out on Khao San Road and read books. I hated Khao San Road, with its hennaed European backpackers and incessant techno and beer specials, but at least it was familiar. I'd realized then that I might start crying, but I was determined not to. Instead, I saved the tearing up for when Htan Dah put another bowl of stick soup in front of me now and asked, "How long are you staying?"
"Six weeks," I said.
"Six weeks!" he hollered. "Why not four months? Or six months?"
"Six weeks is a long time to go out of the country in America," I said. "Besides, I was in Thailand for a month two years ago."
"How many times have you been here?"
"Twice."
"Wow," he said. Then, more softly, "You have traveled a lot. That's nice."
He had no idea, even. "Have you traveled?"
"No, I cannot."
"Why not?"
"Because! I am Karen!"
"So what?"
"So, I cannot go anywhere." He dumped chunks of raw, pink meat into the oil, which sputtered furiously. "If I go outside, I can be arrested."
"Really?"
"Yes! I am refugee!"
Htan Dah's exclamations suggested that none of this should have been news to me—though I soon realized that this was also just how he talked. But my books hadn't said much about refugees, or mentioned that most of the Burmese refugees in Thailand were Karen, and Burma Action hadn't told me that my housemates were refugees, and certainly not refugees who'd run away from camp to live and work illegally in that house. I, after all, was the one who'd just figured out that no one here was Korean.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Why would you be arrested because you're a refugee?"
"Because! I don't have Thai ID. I am not Thai citizen, so, I cannot go outside refugee camp."
"Really?"
"Yes! I can be fined, maybe 3,000 baht"—nearly $100 in a country where the average annual income was about $3,000—"I can go to jail, or maybe, be deported..." We looked at each other, and he nodded in my silence, emphasizing his point with a sharp dip of his chin. "You have a lot of experience. You have been to a lot of places."
"Did you live in a refugee camp before?"
"Yes. Before I came to BA."
"How long have you lived here?"
"In Thailand?" Htan Dah asked. "I was born in Thailand."
TO BE A KAREN refugee in Thailand is to be unwelcome. The Royal Thai Government [3], already sanctuary to evacuees from other Southeast Asian wars by the time the Karen showed up in the '80s, was hardly in a hurry to recognize and protect them as refugees—and, not having signed the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees [4], it didn't have to. This is only the latest misfortune in the Karen's long history of troubles. They were massively oppressed and enslaved before Burma became a British colony in 1886, but their relations with the Burmese were nothing so nasty as after they played colonialists' pet and then joined the Allies in World War II. British officers promised the Karen independence for helping us fight the Burmese and Japan. They lied. The Karen resistance started, and the Karen National Union [5] formed, about as soon as the ink was dry on Burma's postwar independence agreement. Their oath had four parts: (1) For us surrender is out of the question. (2) Recognition of Karen State must be completed. (3) We shall retain our arms. (4) We shall decide our own political destiny. The Karen had been well trained and well armed by Westerners. They nearly took the capital in 1949, and when they were pushed back to the eastern hills, they built the largest insurrection (among many) against the Burmese junta. By the '80s, the KNU claimed that its annual income, from taxing smuggled products flowing through the porous Thai border, was in the tens of millions of dollars a year.
The junta responded with Four Cuts. You've never heard of Four Cuts, but it's a Burmese army strategy that every Karen child knows very well: cutting off the enemy's sources of food, finance, intelligence, and recruits (and, some say, their heads). Unfortunately for villagers, these sources of support include the villagers themselves, in addition to their rice and livestock. It's the same strategy the British used to extinguish uprisings back in their day: "We simply wiped out the village and shot everyone we saw," wrote Sir James George Scott, an intrepid administrator who, in addition to killing Burmese, introduced soccer to them. "Burned all their crops and houses." Htan Dah's parents were among the first wave of Karen to flee the wrath of the Burmese army. Today the Burmese camp population in Thailand is 150,000, and the No. 1 answer people give when asked why they left Burma is "running away from soldiers."
I ASKED HTAN DAH, on my third day, how many people lived in our office/house. I'd been working on lesson plans all day for the soon-to-start English classes. Men had been working alongside me at the other computers, keeping to themselves.
"Maybe 10," he said.
A lot more dudes than that had been milling around. Many of them were dudes in Che Guevara T-shirts. Htan Dah said that in addition to present staff, there were visitors from other offices and NGOs, plus staff currently "inside"—in Burma.
"Doing what?" I asked.
"Doing interviewww, taking videooo, taking picturrre..." he said, drawing out the final syllables. "They go to the village, and they tell about what is going on in Burma, and about how to unite for democracy. Also, they ask, 'Have you seen Burma army? Have they raped you, or shot you, or burned your village?'" This explained the "Human Rights Vocabulary" translation cheat sheet I'd noticed on my first night. I'd since gotten a better look at it, studying the 15 most-used phrases. One side listed words in Karen script, a train of round characters, with loops that extended lines or swirls above and below the baseline. The other side was in English: (1) Killings (2) Disappearances (3) Torture/inhumane treatments (4) Forced labor (5) Use of child soldiers (6) Forced relocation (7) Confiscation/destruction of property (8) Rape (9) Other sexual violence (10) Forced prostitution (11) Forced marriage (12) Arbitrary/illegal arrest/detention (13) Human trafficking (14) Obstruction of freedom of movement (15) Obstruction of freedom/expression/assembly. These were going to be English classes like no other I'd taken or taught.
"Then what?"
"Then they enter information into Martus."
"Into...what?"
"Human rights violation database."
"Then what happens to the information?"
"We can share, with other HRD."
"With other..."
"Human rights documenter."
"So you guys collect it all..."
Htan Dah stared at me.
"And then what? Then it just sits there?"
Htan Dah shrugged.
"How do the guys get to the villages?"
"They walk."
This explained the physique of Htoo Moo, he of the silent h and the constant smiling and the never talking to me and the stupefyingly round and hard-looking ass. "How long are they gone?"
"Depends. Maybe three months."
"Do they just hide around the jungle that whole time?"
"Yes!" Htan Dah said. "If they are caught, they could die."
HERE'S HOW IT worked: Somebody had to document what was going on in Burma—and stealthily. One activist who gave an interview [6] to a foreign reporter served seven years in prison. Another was sentenced to 25 years for giving an interview critical of the regime to the BBC in 1997. Of the 173 nations in the Reporters Without Borders [7] Press Freedom Index 2008, Burma ranked 170th, behind every other country except the "unchanging hells" of Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. Burma has the third most journalists in jail. As for coverage of eastern Burma, ground zero of the Karen war...forget about it.
So a couple of times a year, Htoo Moo, one of Burma Action's human rights documenters, shouldered a bag carrying what he wasn't wearing of nine shirts, three pairs of pants, two pairs of shorts, four pairs of underwear, and two pairs of socks—plus a tape recorder, six tapes, a notebook, three pens, a digital camera, a battery charger, a kilo of sugar, cold, sinus, and stomach medicines, a bottle of water, and 150 bucks' worth of Thai currency—and trekked clandestinely into his homeland.
His most recent trip had started with a six-hour drive, five hours in a long-tail boat watching the banks of the Salween River and a darkening sky, and two days of walking over mountains and jungle trade paths subsisting on just sugar and found water until he reached a village. Even by Karen standards, this settlement was pretty remote; a fish-paste purchase was a day's walk away. At night, he slept outside on the ground, and during the day he stood thigh-deep in a river, trying—though he couldn't get the hang of the procedure, however effortless the villagers made it look—to net fish while chatting up villagers about abuses by the State Peace and Development Council [8] (SPDC), which is what the government of Burma calls itself.
After a month, Htoo Moo walked two days to interview escaped porters. He took pictures of lesions the straps left in their shoulders—raw, pink holes infested with flies and maggots. The porters told of being starved and dehydrated and repeatedly beaten with fists, kicks, and bamboo, of how prisoners who still fail to get up are shot or left to die, of doing double duty as minesweepers. SPDC offenses can be partially charted by the trail of porters' corpses.
Dodging land mines, Htoo Moo walked to the next small village. He entered it to find that some sort of plague had landed on all 10 houses, and most of the people were dying. One house contained a dead boy whose father, the only family member left, was too sick to bury him. The villagers encouraged Htoo Moo to look, to bear witness, and he did, but left after a few days, because there was nothing else to be done.
By the time he walked two days to another village, listened to and documented the story of a boy who was shot along with his father and brother by Burmese soldiers while cultivating rice, by the time he'd looked at the fresh bullet holes in the boy's shoulder and ass, and at the bloody track another round had grazed into the side of his head, by the time the boy had explained how he'd sent other villagers back to the field to get his brother and father as soon as he'd staggered home but it was too late, they were already dead, by the time he took pictures of the boy's wounds, which had been treated with only boiled water and cotton dressing, Htoo Moo was ready for a rest.
"The SPDC is coming," the chief told him.
So this is the drill: You flee, carrying everything you can—big heavy loads, as much rice as you can stand on your back in giant baskets, any clothes or anything else you want to own for maybe the rest of your life, your baby. Htoo Moo helped the villagers hide rice, salt, fish paste, and some extra sets of clothing among the surrounding trees before they all took off together in the early evening. He followed the 80 villagers along a path hidden beneath tall grass. Figuring a six-hour walk put them far enough out of harm's way, they stopped at midnight and Htoo Moo slept, finally, on the forest floor.
But the next morning, a scout told them the SPDC was coming; everyone needed to leave. Htoo Moo had slept through breakfast, and there wasn't time to make more.
Neighboring villages had evidently joined the flight; there were 200 people in the makeshift camp now. They had with them one KNU soldier. Not wanting to further strain the villagers' rations, Htoo Moo stalked an enormous rat he'd spied lumbering around and killed it with one strike of a piece of bamboo. When he smiled, pleased with his efficiency, an old man next to him laughed. "Before you woke up," he said, "I tried to kill that. I think it was already tired."
The villagers fled until noon. Some of the children with no shoes lost flesh and bled as their feet pounded the ground, and some of them cried silently as they ran. Htoo Moo carried his bag on his back, the dead rat in one hand, his digital camera in the other, occasionally snapping pictures of the exodus. When they stopped, he dug his fingers into the rat's skin and ripped it off. He tore the meat into pieces and went in on lunch with another man, who provided a pot, chilies, and salt. Five minutes later, his belly was full of seared rat meat. He closed his eyes as sleep slowly started to overtake him, and then—gunshots.
Gunshots. He clutched his bag and jumped to his feet. Nobody screamed. The boy with the bullet holes started running, new blood rushing from the wound in his ass. Htoo Moo took off, ahead of even the village chief, reaching a flat-out run, crashing shoulder-first through tall croppings of bamboo in his path, before realizing he had no idea where he should be going. He stopped, turned around a couple of times, and considered ditching his camera. What if the SPDC caught him? What if they saw that he'd been taking pictures of gun-shot farmers, prisoner-porters with skin disease, cigarette burns, knife wounds, raw and infected shoulders that bore the permanent scars of carrying over mountains for days or weeks at a time? Though he felt like a coward, he fell back into the middle of the throng. By the time they stopped at nightfall, news had spread through the crowd that one man in the rear had been shot dead.
Htoo Moo listened to the men next to him talking. Of the 200 people, four had guns, four or five rounds apiece. One admitted that he had only three bullets left. "No problem," another told him. "You will just aim very well."
After three days of squatting and swatting bugs in the jungle, Htoo Moo told the chief that he wanted to leave. Sometimes, villagers hide out for weeks because they don't know if it's safe to go back yet. Sometimes, it never is. Htoo Moo needed to get back to work.
"I will take you myself," the chief said. "I am ready." He was in no hurry now. He'd heard over the radio that the soldiers had killed the pigs and the chickens, and then burned the village to the ground. There was nothing to go back to.
To slow down the SPDC advance, the KNU had set up scores of new land mines, and the way in was no longer a safe way out. Htoo Moo and the chief trudged through the jungle for three days to a KNU headquarters, where they shook hands and parted, and Htoo Moo asked a KNU insurgent to guide him the rest of the way. Shortly after they started off, the parasites that had been multiplying in his liver since entering his body via mosquito burst through the cells that hosted them and flooded Htoo Moo's bloodstream. He trekked slowly, through his fever, stopping when the retching brought him to his knees. "Don't rest there!" his guide screamed when he moved toward a smooth patch of soil just to the side of the path. He'd nearly knelt on a land mine. It took another two days to reach the riverbank, where he bought antimalarial tablets with his last few baht and boarded the boat toward Thailand—which had, by default, become home.
"DO YOU HAVE PICTURE?" Htan Dah asked one evening. "Of your friends?"
"Let's go to the computer room," I replied. Thus were several Karen refugee activists of Mae Sot, Thailand, bestowed with one of democracy's greatest gifts: that of wasting exorbitant amounts of time on social networking websites. I logged in to MySpace, and clicked through some of my pals' profiles, talking about who they were, or where they were, or what they were doing in the pictures. Htoo Moo, working diligently at the next computer, glanced over as nonchalantly as possible. Htan Dah said very little. Once, he asked me to clarify the gender of the girl I was pointing to on the screen. "Are you sure?" he asked. "She looks like a boy." I laughed and told him that she was a lesbian, my ex-girlfriend, actually, which seemed to clear it up for him. Other than that, he mostly just stared at the monitor in stunned silence, for so long that it started to weird me out.
"What do you think?" I asked him when I'd finished the tour.
"Wow," he said quietly.
"So, those are my friends," I said. He made no move to get up or take his eyes off the page.
I asked him if he wanted to see how the website worked. I showed him the browse feature, dropping down the long list of countries whose citizens we could gawk at. "How about Myanmar?" he asked, spying the junta's official name for Burma among the options.
I was surprised it was there, and even more surprised that our first search turned up 3,000 profiles. The junta has some awesome restrictions on owning electronics, especially computers. In 1996, Leo Nichols [9], former honorary consul for Scandinavian countries and friend of Burmese activists, was sentenced to three years for the illegal possession of fax machines and phones. (Taken into custody, he was tortured and died.) There are Internet cafés, but café workers are required to capture customers' screenshots every five minutes and submit their Web histories, along with home addresses and phone numbers, to the state. Humanitarian geeks in other countries, though, work full time to give Burma's citizens Internet access, with proxy servers that they update when the government figures out how to block them. From the look of it, they were doing their job.
On MySpace, ink-haired Burmese teens and twentysomethings stared at us: the chin-down-sexy-eyes-up shot, the haughty chin up/eyes half-closed look, the profile with eyes askance. Their faces were surrounded by HTML-coded sparkles, animated hearts and stars, slaughtered English colloquialisms. Htan Dah paused long and hard at each picture that came up.
"I don't know them," he said finally.
This conclusion struck me as pretty foregone, since he'd never lived in Burma. "Did you think you would?"
He looked at me, realizing his mistake. "I don't know," he said softly. We made Htan Dah his own profile, and he stayed logged in long after I'd gone to bed.
At dinner the next day, Htan Dah, Htoo Moo, and another refugee, Ta Mla, spent a fair amount of time watching me and muttering to each other in Karen.
"Something on your mind, tiger?" I asked Htan Dah.
"We are talking about your girlfriend," he said.
Yeah, I'd thought that conversation had ended a little too easily. "All right. You can talk about it with me."
"Do you ever have boyfriend?"
"Yes. I've had boyfriends and girlfriends."
This produced a moment of confused silence, which I filled with a lame description of the sexuality continuum, along with an explanation of the somewhat loose sexual mores of modern American gals like myself. Htan Dah responded by telling me that they had heard of gay people, since a visitor to the house had informed them of their existence—last year.
"Last year!" I hollered.
"Yes!" he yelled back. "In Karen culture, we do not have."
"There's never been a gay person in a Karen village in the history of Karen society." All three men shook their heads. "Come on."
"If there was a gay person, they would leave," Htan Dah said. "It is not our culture."
"Let's just say there was a gay person," I said. "Couldn't they stay in the village?"
"No," Htan Dah said. "I would not allow gay people in my village."
"Are you kidding me?!"
Htan Dah held my gaze, though his seemed more uncertain the longer it went on.
"Are you going to make me leave?"
"No! For you, in your culture, it is okay," he said. "You are not Karen. But in our culture, it does not belong." Htoo Moo and Ta Mla were nodding, and I scowled at them.
"You're a refugee," I said. "And it sucks. It's ruining your life. But you would force another villager to become a refugee because they were gay?"
Nobody said no. I turned on Htan Dah; I was maddest at him, and he was probably the only one who could follow my fast, heated English. "If there was peace in Burma and you lived in a village and there was a gay Karen person," I asked again, "you would want to make that person another Karen refugee by making them leave?"
That, or my anger, shut him up. "I am interested in your ideas," he said, evenly, after a minute. "I think it is important to keep an open mind."
I shut up, too, and focused on eating rice for a few awkward moments.
"So," I said eventually. "Do you guys have sex?"
Htoo Moo and Ta Mla shook their heads while Htan Dah said, "Sometimes."
"Ever?" I asked Htoo Moo.
"No," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because, I am not married."
"What about you?" I asked Htan Dah.
"Yes," he said, nodding hard once. "I am married."
"You're married?"
Htan Dah laughed. "Yes! I am married."
"I didn't know that. Where is your wife?"
"She is in camp. With my kid."
"You have a kid?"
Other things I didn't know: that everyone currently in the house—save The Blay and Htan Dah, who were married, apparently—was a virgin. This extended even to kissing.
They hailed from the parts of Burma that had been heavily influenced by Christian missionaries, and premarital sex was taboo. Htoo Moo volunteered that he wasn't actively looking for a girlfriend, and that he wouldn't know what do with her even if he found one.
Htan Dah told me I had to show them MySpace again. We crowded around a computer, our cheeks flushed with satiety and humidity and new camaraderie. Htoo Moo interjected burning questions about American life as they came to him.
"Do you eat rice in America?"
"Yes. Usually I eat brown rice."
"Brown rice?"
"It's rice with the hull still on it. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"No. I don't believe that...Have you ever eat tiger?"
"Eaten tiger. No."
"Have you ever eat...monkey?
"'Have you ever eaten monkey,' you mean. No."
"Are there black lady in America?"
"Ladies. Yes..."
"What language do they speak?" Htan Dah chimed in.
"English."
"Really?"
I gaped at him, disbelieving, but before I could formulate a response, Htoo Moo said, "In America, you have cream to grow hair." He ran his hand over his baby-smooth jawline.
"Yeah. I think that's true. I think it's generally for people who are bald, though."
"Do you have that?"
"Hair-growing cream? Oh, yeah. I use it on my ass."
The sarcasm seemed to translate, since they laughed for minutes.
We made Ta Mla a MySpace profile, and he and Htan Dah started giving the other guys tutorials as they wandered in. My work here was done.
A few days earlier, when I'd asked my students what they did for fun, I'd had to explain the concept of "fun" for about five minutes before anyone could answer me, and then the answers were "Nothing," "Nothing," "Watch TV," and three "Talk"s. By the time I went upstairs, every computer screen was lit, the guys scrolling through the faces of Burma, a window into a world they considered home but where some had never been and probably none would ever live again.
HTAN DAH DILIGENTLY kept me company during meals. "You are so slow," he said one morning, watching me chew every bit of rice into oblivion. "Why don't you eat fast?"
"Why should I?" I asked. "I'm not in a hurry."
"But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?"
I scoffed at him. "I'm from Ohio."
"Yes, but I am refugee! We are taught to eat fast."
Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, and even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps getting burned down on the very first day of class, I'd kind of dismissed it.
So boy did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro the next day:
Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children's screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops' ammunitions without grabbing any facility.
For a while, Htan Dah's family and all those other asylum-seekers in Thailand were safe, relative to the Karen still in Burma. If they ventured out of the squalid camps, they were subject to harassment and arrest from one of the world's most corrupt police forces, but at least Burmese soldiers were less likely to march into a sovereign country to attack them.
What the Burmese army could do, though, was help a rival Karen faction to do so. They called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA. There had been discontent within the Christian-led KNU for years, complaints of abuses of power, religious discrimination, and grueling jungle-warfare conditions. In 1994, by which point there were 80,000 Karen living in the Thai camps, a government-allied monk persuaded several hundred Buddhist KNU soldiers to defect. The junta was only too happy to support their cause—which included attacking refugee camps filled with Christian Karen.
The huts at Htan Dah's settlement of Huay Kaloke were cloaked in thick, warm Thai darkness as DKBA soldiers moved in on the 7,000 refugees living there in January 1997.
Residents generally went to bed early; there was no electricity, and flammable materials cost money nobody had. But Htan Dah's mother sometimes hired herself out as a laborer, plowing fields for about a dollar a day. That was far less than what the legal Thai workers alongside her made, but she needed money to buy nails—her scavenged-bamboo-and-thatch hut wasn't going to hold itself together—and candles, since she wasn't wild about her kids using homemade lamps, essentially tin cans filled with gasoline.
The small encampment had become overpopulated, so that there wasn't even enough space to play soccer, and Htan Dah barely ever left it. But a Christian organization had donated some books, and NGOs were running a full school system now. Htan Dah had exams the next day; he had stayed up past sundown studying and had been asleep for hours by the time the sound of gunshots reached his family's shelter. Some children somewhere screamed as they leapt out of the elevated hut. They ran, backs and knees bent, low to the dirt, for the surrounding woods as DKBA troops set fire to the camp. The huts burned hot and fast. Htan Dah kept his head down, so that he hardly registered the other people running alongside, not even noticing that some were in their underwear. "Please, God," he prayed. "Oh my God. Save me. Save my life," over and over again. It was a few days before his 16th birthday. He prayed and ran until he reached the forest, where, like everyone else, he stopped, turned around, and stood silently watching the camp—bedrooms, books, photos, shoes, a shirt woven by a grandmother—burn to the ground.
The next day, the refugees returned to the smoldering plot and made beds in the ash. They began slowly rebuilding, though none could have any illusions that the Thai security posted at the front gate would protect them. They had long ago noted that the function of the guards was not so much keeping danger out as keeping the refugees in, collecting bribes from those who wanted to leave the camp to work or collect firewood or make a trip to the market. Their attackers met no resistance on their way into Huay Kaloke that night. And less than 14 months later, when vehicles full of DKBA soldiers drove in again, no one stopped them. Again.
"How do you know the Thai soldiers just let them drive right in through the front gate?" I interrupted Htan Dah as he told me this story on the reading bench in my room. That an army would allow raiding foreign troops unfettered access to 7,000 sleeping civilians—twice—seemed frankly a little far-fetched. "Maybe the soldiers were trying to protect the gate, but the DKBA just went around or something."
Htan Dah had told this story before, and to several foreigners, but never to one rude enough to suggest that he was a liar. He cocked his head. "Because," he said, "There is only one road. The only way into the camp is through the front gate!"
For a second time, Htan Dah awoke in the middle of the night to gunfire and shouting; for a second time, he fled with his family and the clothes he was wearing for the safety of the surrounding trees. But this time, the soldiers also shelled the camp. This time, a pregnant woman was shot dead and two girls from Htan Dah's school who hid in a well suffered burns that killed them. This time a seven-year-old died of shrapnel wounds and dozens were injured—and nearly the whole damn camp was burned down again.
"We accept that we were inactive," the secretary general of Thailand's National Security Council conceded [10] later. Thai authorities decided to close the camp. Htan Dah's family set up a temporary shelter made of sticks and a raincoat, under which they lived while they were waiting to be moved elsewhere.
The trucks didn't arrive for almost a year and a half. When they did, Htan Dah and his family were shipped to a camp in the mountains, where the population in exile eventually became 20,000 strong, where Htan Dah eventually grew up and got married and had a baby of his own, where the cold, wet winds cut through the shacks stacked high in the hills of central Thailand, far away enough to be safer from the DKBA.
MY DAYS FELL INTO a strange routine. I taught two classes of English a day, beginner and intermediate. After and between classes, and before the evening of drinking began in earnest, I snacked on coconut-fried cashews I bought at the 7-Eleven while helping the guys translate their HRD interviews or fill out applications for asylum. They kept filling out the applications, even though they had little chance of success—certainly no chance of resettling in the United States, which, under the Patriot Act, had effectively declared all Karen from the contested highlands terrorists for providing "material support" to the "terrorist" KNU.
After class one day, one of the guys wanted to show me a word he saw all the time so I could explain its meaning: marginalized. (He grasped the concept pretty quickly.) He also wanted to know what the thing used to bind people's feet together was called. I told him I didn't think we had a word for that in English. (I was wrong. Though archaic in noun form, the word exists: "fetters.") When Htoo Moo asked me later for the word for systematically slicing open the skin on someone's forearm, I told him I didn't think we had a word for that, either.
Another day, I sat outside holding an impromptu pronunciation lesson on some of the words in an HRD's report.
"Repeat after me," I was saying. "Rape."
"Rop."
"Try again. Rrraaape."
Another day, a Burma Action staffer I'll call Lah Lah Htoo asked if I wanted to see a video. He loaded a DVD of some footage taken in eastern Burma by aid workers, mostly Karen, some of whom are also medics, called the Free Burma Rangers [11]. (See "Operation Rescue" [12].)
It starts with war footage, guys shooting guns in tall jungle bush, and loud rocket fire, and a village burning down and screaming women running for their lives, before moving briefly to photo stills: a picture of villagers standing over a group of dead bodies, a picture of a dead woman with her shirt torn open, a picture of murdered children lined up in a row. Then the camera centers on the face of a 17-year-old boy with lifeless, unfocused eyes, a longyi (sarong) held up below his neck so he can't see his completely exposed lower leg bone, a bloody white stick still hung with a few slick and glistening black-purple sinews, protruding from a bloody knee—a land-mine wound swarmed by flies. Then he's in a thin hammock, with a man in cheap plastic flip-flops at each end of the bamboo pole from which it swings, and another walking alongside holding an IV drip dangling from another piece of wood, being carried through the mountainous terrain. For four days. Which is how long it takes the Ranger team to get him to a clinic on the border, where a proper amputation can be done.
By that point I'd twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn't get any easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other while he explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops. Local Karen leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but they haven't seen the girl since. "We want her back," the woman says, smiling sadly, before dropping her face to her knees, covering it with her pink sweater, and starting to sob. There are people getting ready to run from an attack, little girls running around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and sacks they strap to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments into the bloody stump below his knee. Skulls and bones on the ground and a Ranger telling how he brought a bunch of children's presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers. Rangers cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid's leg as the child stands still, calm, pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the camera's night mode, on the jungle floor. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering breathlessly to each other. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby; his wife died in childbirth during their flight through the jungle. He worries he has no idea how to take care of this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely old enough to stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs and feet. A Ranger team leaves a group of internally displaced persons and the IDPs call out please don't leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face contorted with sorrow as he sobs convulsively, "I don't understand why they killed my children. They didn't even know their right hand from their left hand," while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don't lose heart.
"What do you think?" Lah Lah Htoo asked me when it ended.
I thought I might like to close myself in the bathroom so I could punch myself in the chest, just a little, to try to release some of the tightness and weight there.
"Good video?" he asked, because I was taking so long to answer.
"Yeah, it's a good video."
He nodded and waited politely for me to continue, but I just sat quietly, awkwardly, before simply nodding back at him. Eventually, I asked him what they did with the videos they made.
"We send them. To human rights organizations, UN, news."
"Do they ever use them?"
Lah Lah Htoo shrugged.
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Though most Americans are woefully uninformed about the shit going down in Burma, your federal lawmakers are on it. In 1997, President Bill Clinton barred new US investment [14] in the country. In 2003, Congress introduced the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act [15], which banned any Burmese imports, opposed loans to the regime, froze any of its US assets, and denied its leaders entry visas. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice awarded Burma a special designation as an "outpost of tyranny."
Bush 43 gave it shout-outs in several State of the Union [16] addresses. ("We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma.")
There's a US Senate Women's Caucus on Burma, and Obama just extended sanctions again and said this at his Nobel Peace Prize [17] acceptance: "When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma—there must be consequences...And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression." Also blacklisting Burma: Australia, which won't sell the regime weapons and has financial sanctions against 463 members of the junta. And the EU has stripped Burma of trading privileges and put an arms embargo in place.
The trouble isn't so much a lack of measures as their total ineffectiveness. Though US investors have had to pull their money out of, say, the garment industry, they can still deal in Burma's oil and gas, which is where the junta's big money comes from. When Congress passed that 1997 law restricting new investment, Unocal got its gas fields grandfathered in. After Chevron absorbed [18] Unocal in 2005, its lobbyists worked tirelessly to ensure that no sanctions would force it to divest. It appeared as though the 2008 Block Burmese JADE [19] (Junta's Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act would finally force Chevron to give up its Burmese holdings, until the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Joe Biden (whose former chief of staff was one Alan Hoffman, once a Unocal lobbyist [20]), stripped out the provision and replaced it with a suggestion that the company "consider voluntary divestment over time."
Okay, but if we only fashioned better—and better-targeted—sanctions, advocates say, Burma's economy would collapse and the government might just get packing. But whether or not you believe that sanctions were the straw that broke South Africa's back, you cannot believe that they would have worked in that country if half the world's governments had said, "We're not going to give you money for your stuff anymore" while the other half had said, "Awesome. More for us."
Operation Rescue
One American's mission to treat Burma's displaced
"MORDOR IS THE SPDC [Burmese government], and guys like us are hobbits," Tha U Wa A Pa says by way of explaining why he built a training base for medics in a land-mine-infested war zone in Burma, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Tha U Wa A Pa and his Free Burma Rangers document the atrocities of the Burmese army and provide medical and tactical help to those fleeing from it. It's a quest requiring almost inconceivable bravery and, in Tha U Wa A Pa's case, a conviction that God has chosen him for this task. Though he uses a Karen nom de guerre (meaning "Father of the White Monkey"—a.k.a. his daughter), he's the son of prominent American missionaries in Thailand, an alum of Texas A&M (BA, poli-sci) and a former US Army Ranger.
After graduating from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Tha U Wa A Pa became a missionary in Thailand himself. Which is where he was in 1997, when a major SPDC offensive sent a flood of Karen refugees across the border. Tha U Wa A Pa loaded up a backpack full of supplies and, together with a KNU soldier he met along the way, rushed into Burma as if it were a house on fire. The two men treated as many wounded as they could, carrying a guy who'd stepped on a land mine to a hospital to have his leg amputated. Over the next three weeks, they ferried supplies and patients back and forth over the border.
Since then, the Rangers have trained more than 110 roving teams who provide medical assistance to (and document the plight of) the more than half a million internally displaced persons in the eastern Burmese jungle. Rangers have treated some 400,000 people for malaria, AIDS, dysentery, diarrhea, malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, and infections. They pull teeth and deliver babies. Six have lost their lives on the job. As the junta's violence escalates, so do their efforts; the Rangers' budget is up to $1.3 million a year, all donations, mostly from churches and their parishioners. "We're just little guys trying to do some good," Tha U Wa A Pa says. "On the surface it seems like Mordor has all the strength and power and might. But if our fellowship of hobbits stays united, good will defeat evil in the end."
That's the reality in Burma, where China is building an oil pipeline so as to avoid the long trip around the Strait of Malacca. Thailand has the rights to 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one concession alone. One Indian firm has signed up for 5 trillion cubic feet. Russia has several firms drilling. A single pipeline operated by France, Thailand, and, yes, Chevron earned the junta more than $1 billion in 2008. The South Korean company Daewoo [21] International plans to earn more than $10 billion over 25 years from its drilling project in Burma's immense Shwe gas reserve; handling Daewoo's exploratory Burma drilling was the American firm Transocean [22]. As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [23], Burma is included in a free-trade agreement with India that eliminates tariffs on thousands of products; India plans to invest billions of dollars in two Burmese hydroelectric dams. The EU is discussing a free-trade agreement with ASEAN nations as well, although the UK swears it won't make a deal that would benefit Burma—it's worth noting the UK already has oil and gas dealings there. In 2008 Burma saw a 165 percent increase in the number of Chinese multinational companies involved in Burmese mining, oil and gas, and hydropower development. The regime ran a $2.5 billion trade surplus in 2009, with $5 billion in currency reserves.
The United States can better target its sanctions all it wants, but already they've pushed tens of thousands of Burmese textile workers out of factory jobs—and, as even the State Department has admitted, into sex work. And as Chevron has pointed out, if we pull out our remaining investments, someone else—perhaps someone less conscientious—will gladly fill the gap. The international community can't even agree to stop giving the regime weapons. Even if it could get China to play ball on that front, not so much North Korea. As long as there's money to be made in Burma, a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement—from an energy-rich country neighbored by the world's two most populous, energy-desperate countries—is never going to happen.
You know a situation is dire when its best chance of a good outcome depends on action by the United Nations Security Council. At the 2005 UN World Summit [24], member nations resolved that if a government perpetuates or allows any of four "atrocity crimes"—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide—the world body is responsible for taking "timely and decisive" action to protect that nation's people. When in 2007 a draft resolution on Burma was brought before the Security Council, some activists felt that there was a strong case for it to include charges of genocide against the Karen. The UN 1948 Convention [25] on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines "genocide" as an attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" with at least one of five methods. One of them the SPDC isn't guilty of: "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." But "killing members of the group"? Check. "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group"? Check. "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"? Clearly.
"Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group"? If you count gang-raping and murdering pregnant women, yes. Since the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, systematic rape has been recognized as a key feature of genocide. In Burma, it's systematic, institutionalized, and indoctrinated into soldiers, who are explicitly ordered, "Your blood must be left in the village."
But not one government has officially leveled the charge at Burma, and some academics and even activists argue that these genocidal actions aren't genocide-like enough to count. We can't just be throwing the word around to describe any old horror. Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of my BA housemates' situation, "But how does it compare to Sudan?"
If Sudan is the bar against which we're measuring genocide, okay: Burma was alongside Sudan on the list of the world's worst displacement situations for four years running. Sudan's mortality rate for children under five, a common measure of conflict epidemiology, is 109 per 1,000 live births. In eastern Burma, it's 221. In the Darfur genocide, 400,000 civilians have been killed. A junta chairman once estimated that the body count of Burma's civil war—the Karen are only one of seven major minorities that have been involved in dozens of armed insurgencies—"would reach as high as millions."
It comes down to this: A draft resolution that compellingly charges genocide against a country is a draft resolution that's likely to get passed—because no one wants to be the nation that vetoes that. But the 2007 Security Council [26] draft resolution to declare Burma a threat to international peace and security didn't contain charges of genocide. Nor ethnic cleansing, nor crimes against humanity, nor war crimes. China and Russia vetoed it.
SINCE I FIRST ARRIVED at Burma Action's Mae Sot offices, four years ago, some 50,000 Burmese refugees have left Thailand for UN-orchestrated resettlement in Western countries. In 2007, the United States waived its material support prohibition for refugees who'd assisted the KNU, and the next year allowed in more than 14,000 refugees, including several BA staff members. In America, they try to make rent with welfare or factory wages, and talk, weirdly, about struggling to survive. I apologized to one, after he was moved to a suburb outside cold, gray Cleveland, for his crushing poverty and loneliness and the weather. "It's okay," he replied. "You can never find a good place to live in the world. Only in heaven."
Though some of the documentary activists have emigrated, their footage and reports gather dust in Thailand, awaiting, the human rights community hopes, the day when they might be used at a trial of the junta or in a truth and reconciliation process. Some Burma Action footage made it out and into the opener for Rambo part four, whose producers paid—after some hard haggling—about two grand for it.
Lah Lah Htoo is one of those activists who's stayed behind. At a going-away party my last weekend, he sat with a guitar in his lap. On a previous night he'd played a hard-twanging, pentatonic melody on a stringed Karen instrument while he sang, in flowing minor notes, a traditional song about a river, so haunting that I had nearly drunkenly wept. But now the guitar he held was idle, and he tipped his head back and looked at me through half-closed eyes.
"Do you think that we will see each other again?" he asked, one arm dangling over the body of the guitar.
"Of course we'll see each other again," I said. I looked at Htan Dah. "I'll come back to Thailand soon."
"When?" several voices asked.
"Probably next summer. I have to figure it out with work, and money."
"So," one of the guys said, "we will see each other again maybe next year."
"I hope," I said. "Hopefully next year."
"When we see each other again," Lah Lah Htoo said, "it will be in Burma." The other guys cheered. "When we see each other again, you will come to Burma. And you will not need a visa to enter. And I will pick you up at the airport." His face was barely wide enough for his smile, and he was hollering a bit, over the approving shouts of the other guys. "In a car. In my car!" Lah Lah Htoo had left his village when he was a teenager, when he'd run away with the rest of his family and neighbors, and hadn't been back since. A silence settled over his coworkers in the wake of his fantastic predictions, and they all smiled softly and looked off or at the floor or at the wall as they considered cars and airports, and I thought about doomed POWs in movies who know their fate is sealed but talk anyway about how they're going to eat a big cheeseburger when they get back to America, and I kept quiet as long as the guys were quiet, bowing my head as if in reverence of something that had died.
Reporting for this story was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute [1] and the Fund for Investigative Journalism [2].
Mac McClelland is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here [http://motherjones.com/authors/mac-mcclelland]. Follow her on Twitter [https://twitter.com/MacMcClelland] here.
Meet the crazy, fearless young men who risk life and limb to document Burma's genocide.
By Mac McClelland | March/April 2010 Issue
"DO YOU WANT A CIGARETTE?" I ask Htan Dah, holding up a pack of Thai-issue Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover.
The men are all in their 20s. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky; their faces shine because they're drunk, and it's July. They could be mistaken for former frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday.
Except that they're stateless. They are penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody yesterday, again, because they're on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own. Htan Dah's silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros are adorned with a legally mandated photographic deterrent, a guy blowing smoke in a baby's face, but it doesn't deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn't smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he's still alive. He takes a cigarette. "Never say no," he says, and winks at me.
I'D ARRIVED AT Mae Sot a few weeks before. This city in western central Thailand is a major hub for people, teak, gems, and other goods that enter the country illegally from Burma. The place is rife with smugglers, dealers, undocumented immigrants, and slaves. My bus arrived in the late afternoon. I wasn't connected to any aid or charity organization—I'd just happened on a website of a group that said it was promoting democracy in the Texas-size military dictatorship of Burma, and eventually volunteered, via email, to help its activists living in Thailand learn English. (As I was to discover, the particulars of their mission were far more dangerous, and illegal, so I'll refer to them as Burma Action.)
At the station, I was met by The Guy, whose name wasn't The Guy, but whose actual name I didn't catch when he mumbled it twice and then just shook his head and laughed
when I asked him to repeat it one more time. After a brief ride in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, we arrived at a gold-detailed black gate that stood heavy sentry at the road. Behind it stood Burma Action's local HQ, a big but run-down house, two stories of worn wood and dirty concrete with a balcony on the left, cement garage on the right. The Guy gave me a quick tour. The "kitchen" had a sink and some dishes; cooking took place out in the dining room/garage. He took a few steps farther. "Bathroom." He gestured into a cement-walled room through an oversize wooden door. There was a squat toilet set into the floor, and in lieu of toilet paper a shallow well with a little plastic bowl floating on top. There was also, running the length of the left wall, a giant waist-high cement trough filled with water and dead mosquitoes.
"What's that?" I asked.
"A bath."
I looked at it, jet-lagged. "How does it work?" I asked.
He exhaled hard through his nose, a whispery snort. "Like this," he said, pantomiming filling a bowl with water and dumping it over his head. "Are you hungry?"
I asked The Guy what was in the soup he offered me.
"I don't know the word in English," he said. "Leaves?"
Close. Twigs, actually. The Guy pulled a stump of wood up next to me at the table, and watched me chew through the sautéed woody stems.
"So, where are you from?" I asked.
"Me?"
I nodded.
"I am kuh-REN. Everybody here, we are all kuh-REN."
Oh, man. It was starting to come together now.
When I'd landed in Bangkok, a Burma Action employee had picked me up at the airport to make sure I found the bus station and the right eight-hour bus north. She was tiny and Thai and heavily accented, and repeatedly told me during our cab ride that everyone I was about to be working with was Korean. It seemed sort of weird that a bunch of Koreans would move to Thailand together to work for peace in Burma, but I thought that was nice, I guessed, and even wrote in my journal, relievedly, "Koreans tend to have excellent English skills."
When I'd arrived at the Mae Sot bus station, The Guy had asked if I was his new volunteer.
"Yes," I'd said. "You're not Korean."
I'd done my homework before leaving the States. I had read about the Karen. But I'd only seen the word written down, and had assumed that it sounded like the name of my parents' blond divorced friend. I didn't know how it was pronounced any more than most Westerners would've been certain how to say "Darfur" 10 years ago.
WHEN I TURNED the corner from the kitchen into the large living room, four pairs of dark eyes looked up from a small TV screen. I smiled, but The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn't make any introductions, so I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet amid the rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. Mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless windows, possible hosts to malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. I'd no natural resistance to the latter two, and I'd opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to be the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn't know anyone. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I got bit. I scratched. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. Finally, I stood up.
"I'm going to bed," I told The Guy.
He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was 7:30. "Are you okay?" he asked. I'd just taken 27 hours of planes and automobiles. I'd glanced at the phrases "Forced marriage" and "Human trafficking" on a piece of paper taped to the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room. I said that I was fine and headed upstairs. I dropped my air mattress under the big blue mosquito net and lay down. I had no real idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was supposed to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy (real name: The Blay) seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks. Lying there, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, I comforted myself with the thought that these Karen seemed nice. I couldn't have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.
IMAGINE, FOR A moment, that Texas had managed to secede from the union, and that you live there, in the sovereign Republic of Texas. Imagine that shortly after
independence, a cadre of old, paranoid, greedy men who believed in a superior military caste took over your newly autonomous nation in a coup. Your beloved president, who had big dreams of prosperity and Texan unity, whom you believed in, was shot, and now the army runs your country. It has direct or indirect control over all the businesses. It spends 0.3 percent of GDP on health care, and uses your oil and natural gas money to buy weapons that Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have been happy to provide. It sends your rice and beans to India and China, while your countrymen starve. There is no free press, and gatherings of more than five people are illegal. If you are arrested, a trial, much less legal representation, is not guaranteed. In the event of interrogation, be prepared to crouch like you're riding a motorbike for hours or be hung from the ceiling and spun around and around and around, or burned with cigarettes, or beaten with a rubber rod. They might put you in a ditch with a dead body for six days, lock you in a room with wild, sharp-beaked birds, or make you stand to your neck in a cesspool full of maggots that climb into your nose and ears and mouth. If you do manage to stay out of the prisons, where activists and dissidents have been rotting for decades, you will be broke and starving. Your children have a 10 percent chance of dying before they reach their fifth birthday, and a 32 percent chance they'll be devastatingly malnourished if they're still alive. What's more, you and 50 million countrymen are trapped inside your 268,000-square-mile Orwellian nightmare with some 350,000 soldiers. They can snatch people—maybe your kid—off the street and make them join the army. They can grab you as you're going out to buy eggs and make you work construction on a new government building or road—long, hard hours under the grueling sun for days or weeks without pay—during which you'll have to scavenge for food. You'll do all this at gunpoint, and any break will be rewarded with a pistol-whipping. Your life is roughly equivalent to a modern-day Burmese person's.
Now imagine that you belong to a distinct group, Dallasites, or something, that never wanted to be part of the Republic in the first place, that wanted to either remain part of the United States, which had treated you just fine, or, failing that, become your own free state within the Republic of Texas, since you already had your own infrastructure and culture. Some Dallasites have, wisely or unwisely, taken up arms to battle the Texas military government, and in retaliation whole squads of that huge army have, for decades, been dedicated to terrorizing your city. You and your fellow Dallasites are regularly conscripted into slavery, made to walk in front of the army to set off land mines that they—and your own insurgents—have planted, or carry 100-pound loads of weaponry while being severely beaten until you're crippled or die. If you're so enslaved, you might accompany the soldiers as they march into your friends' neighborhoods and set them on fire, watch them shoot at fleeing inhabitants as they run, capturing any stragglers. If you're one of those stragglers, and you're a woman, or a girl five or older, prepare to be raped, most likely gang-raped, and there's easily a one-in-four chance you'll then be killed, possibly by being shot, possibly through your vagina, possibly after having your breasts hacked off. If you're a man, maybe you'll be hung by your wrists and burned alive. Maybe a soldier will drown you by filling a plastic bag with water and tying it over your head, or stretch you between two trees and use you as a hammock, or cut off your nose, pull out your eyes, and then stab you in both ears before killing you, or string you up by your shoulders and club you now and again for two weeks, or heat up slivers of bamboo and push them into your urethra, or tie a tight rope between your dick and your neck for a while before setting your genitals on fire, or whatever else hateful, armed men and underage boys might dream up when they have orders to torment, and nothing else to do. And though you've been sure for decades that the United States can't possibly let this continue, it has invested in your country's oil and will not under any circumstances cross China, which is your country's staunch UN defender and economic ally, so you really need to accept that America is decidedly not coming to save you. Nobody is.
Now your life is pretty much equivalent to a modern-day Burmese Karen's.
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, someone dropped a pile of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves with the skins still on into a wok of hot soybean oil. As the smell wafted up, I climbed out from under my mosquito net and walked softly out of my room.
Htan Dah—whose name was pronounced, to my unceasing delight, the same as the self-satisfied English interjection "ta-da!"—stood at the gas range, which spat oil at his baggy long-sleeved shirt. He tilted the wok, concentrating harder than he needed to on the swirling oil. Htan Dah was worried about me. As the office manager of Burma Action for the past two years, he'd heard the nighttime weeping of plenty of self-pitying philanthropists, who tended to arrive tired and instantly homesick. The last girl, a Canadian with a lot of luggage, had started sobbing almost as soon as he'd picked her up, and couldn't be calmed even by the hours she spent taking calls from her boyfriend back home. She'd cried for days.
Indeed, I'd had a very sad moment the night before when, after my air mattress deflated and my angles pressed into hard floor, and I realized that the ants patrolling the grounds were trekking right through my hair, I actually hoped that I had contracted malaria or Japanese encephalitis from the mosquito bites raging hot and itchy so I would have a legitimate excuse to bail back to the States. That way I wouldn't have to be mad at myself for being too chickenshit to hack it through loneliness and less-than-ideal bathing arrangements. I'd even considered taking the bus back to Bangkok. If there wasn't an immediate flight out, I could just hang out on Khao San Road and read books. I hated Khao San Road, with its hennaed European backpackers and incessant techno and beer specials, but at least it was familiar. I'd realized then that I might start crying, but I was determined not to. Instead, I saved the tearing up for when Htan Dah put another bowl of stick soup in front of me now and asked, "How long are you staying?"
"Six weeks," I said.
"Six weeks!" he hollered. "Why not four months? Or six months?"
"Six weeks is a long time to go out of the country in America," I said. "Besides, I was in Thailand for a month two years ago."
"How many times have you been here?"
"Twice."
"Wow," he said. Then, more softly, "You have traveled a lot. That's nice."
He had no idea, even. "Have you traveled?"
"No, I cannot."
"Why not?"
"Because! I am Karen!"
"So what?"
"So, I cannot go anywhere." He dumped chunks of raw, pink meat into the oil, which sputtered furiously. "If I go outside, I can be arrested."
"Really?"
"Yes! I am refugee!"
Htan Dah's exclamations suggested that none of this should have been news to me—though I soon realized that this was also just how he talked. But my books hadn't said much about refugees, or mentioned that most of the Burmese refugees in Thailand were Karen, and Burma Action hadn't told me that my housemates were refugees, and certainly not refugees who'd run away from camp to live and work illegally in that house. I, after all, was the one who'd just figured out that no one here was Korean.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Why would you be arrested because you're a refugee?"
"Because! I don't have Thai ID. I am not Thai citizen, so, I cannot go outside refugee camp."
"Really?"
"Yes! I can be fined, maybe 3,000 baht"—nearly $100 in a country where the average annual income was about $3,000—"I can go to jail, or maybe, be deported..." We looked at each other, and he nodded in my silence, emphasizing his point with a sharp dip of his chin. "You have a lot of experience. You have been to a lot of places."
"Did you live in a refugee camp before?"
"Yes. Before I came to BA."
"How long have you lived here?"
"In Thailand?" Htan Dah asked. "I was born in Thailand."
TO BE A KAREN refugee in Thailand is to be unwelcome. The Royal Thai Government [3], already sanctuary to evacuees from other Southeast Asian wars by the time the Karen showed up in the '80s, was hardly in a hurry to recognize and protect them as refugees—and, not having signed the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees [4], it didn't have to. This is only the latest misfortune in the Karen's long history of troubles. They were massively oppressed and enslaved before Burma became a British colony in 1886, but their relations with the Burmese were nothing so nasty as after they played colonialists' pet and then joined the Allies in World War II. British officers promised the Karen independence for helping us fight the Burmese and Japan. They lied. The Karen resistance started, and the Karen National Union [5] formed, about as soon as the ink was dry on Burma's postwar independence agreement. Their oath had four parts: (1) For us surrender is out of the question. (2) Recognition of Karen State must be completed. (3) We shall retain our arms. (4) We shall decide our own political destiny. The Karen had been well trained and well armed by Westerners. They nearly took the capital in 1949, and when they were pushed back to the eastern hills, they built the largest insurrection (among many) against the Burmese junta. By the '80s, the KNU claimed that its annual income, from taxing smuggled products flowing through the porous Thai border, was in the tens of millions of dollars a year.
The junta responded with Four Cuts. You've never heard of Four Cuts, but it's a Burmese army strategy that every Karen child knows very well: cutting off the enemy's sources of food, finance, intelligence, and recruits (and, some say, their heads). Unfortunately for villagers, these sources of support include the villagers themselves, in addition to their rice and livestock. It's the same strategy the British used to extinguish uprisings back in their day: "We simply wiped out the village and shot everyone we saw," wrote Sir James George Scott, an intrepid administrator who, in addition to killing Burmese, introduced soccer to them. "Burned all their crops and houses." Htan Dah's parents were among the first wave of Karen to flee the wrath of the Burmese army. Today the Burmese camp population in Thailand is 150,000, and the No. 1 answer people give when asked why they left Burma is "running away from soldiers."
I ASKED HTAN DAH, on my third day, how many people lived in our office/house. I'd been working on lesson plans all day for the soon-to-start English classes. Men had been working alongside me at the other computers, keeping to themselves.
"Maybe 10," he said.
A lot more dudes than that had been milling around. Many of them were dudes in Che Guevara T-shirts. Htan Dah said that in addition to present staff, there were visitors from other offices and NGOs, plus staff currently "inside"—in Burma.
"Doing what?" I asked.
"Doing interviewww, taking videooo, taking picturrre..." he said, drawing out the final syllables. "They go to the village, and they tell about what is going on in Burma, and about how to unite for democracy. Also, they ask, 'Have you seen Burma army? Have they raped you, or shot you, or burned your village?'" This explained the "Human Rights Vocabulary" translation cheat sheet I'd noticed on my first night. I'd since gotten a better look at it, studying the 15 most-used phrases. One side listed words in Karen script, a train of round characters, with loops that extended lines or swirls above and below the baseline. The other side was in English: (1) Killings (2) Disappearances (3) Torture/inhumane treatments (4) Forced labor (5) Use of child soldiers (6) Forced relocation (7) Confiscation/destruction of property (8) Rape (9) Other sexual violence (10) Forced prostitution (11) Forced marriage (12) Arbitrary/illegal arrest/detention (13) Human trafficking (14) Obstruction of freedom of movement (15) Obstruction of freedom/expression/assembly. These were going to be English classes like no other I'd taken or taught.
"Then what?"
"Then they enter information into Martus."
"Into...what?"
"Human rights violation database."
"Then what happens to the information?"
"We can share, with other HRD."
"With other..."
"Human rights documenter."
"So you guys collect it all..."
Htan Dah stared at me.
"And then what? Then it just sits there?"
Htan Dah shrugged.
"How do the guys get to the villages?"
"They walk."
This explained the physique of Htoo Moo, he of the silent h and the constant smiling and the never talking to me and the stupefyingly round and hard-looking ass. "How long are they gone?"
"Depends. Maybe three months."
"Do they just hide around the jungle that whole time?"
"Yes!" Htan Dah said. "If they are caught, they could die."
HERE'S HOW IT worked: Somebody had to document what was going on in Burma—and stealthily. One activist who gave an interview [6] to a foreign reporter served seven years in prison. Another was sentenced to 25 years for giving an interview critical of the regime to the BBC in 1997. Of the 173 nations in the Reporters Without Borders [7] Press Freedom Index 2008, Burma ranked 170th, behind every other country except the "unchanging hells" of Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. Burma has the third most journalists in jail. As for coverage of eastern Burma, ground zero of the Karen war...forget about it.
So a couple of times a year, Htoo Moo, one of Burma Action's human rights documenters, shouldered a bag carrying what he wasn't wearing of nine shirts, three pairs of pants, two pairs of shorts, four pairs of underwear, and two pairs of socks—plus a tape recorder, six tapes, a notebook, three pens, a digital camera, a battery charger, a kilo of sugar, cold, sinus, and stomach medicines, a bottle of water, and 150 bucks' worth of Thai currency—and trekked clandestinely into his homeland.
His most recent trip had started with a six-hour drive, five hours in a long-tail boat watching the banks of the Salween River and a darkening sky, and two days of walking over mountains and jungle trade paths subsisting on just sugar and found water until he reached a village. Even by Karen standards, this settlement was pretty remote; a fish-paste purchase was a day's walk away. At night, he slept outside on the ground, and during the day he stood thigh-deep in a river, trying—though he couldn't get the hang of the procedure, however effortless the villagers made it look—to net fish while chatting up villagers about abuses by the State Peace and Development Council [8] (SPDC), which is what the government of Burma calls itself.
After a month, Htoo Moo walked two days to interview escaped porters. He took pictures of lesions the straps left in their shoulders—raw, pink holes infested with flies and maggots. The porters told of being starved and dehydrated and repeatedly beaten with fists, kicks, and bamboo, of how prisoners who still fail to get up are shot or left to die, of doing double duty as minesweepers. SPDC offenses can be partially charted by the trail of porters' corpses.
Dodging land mines, Htoo Moo walked to the next small village. He entered it to find that some sort of plague had landed on all 10 houses, and most of the people were dying. One house contained a dead boy whose father, the only family member left, was too sick to bury him. The villagers encouraged Htoo Moo to look, to bear witness, and he did, but left after a few days, because there was nothing else to be done.
By the time he walked two days to another village, listened to and documented the story of a boy who was shot along with his father and brother by Burmese soldiers while cultivating rice, by the time he'd looked at the fresh bullet holes in the boy's shoulder and ass, and at the bloody track another round had grazed into the side of his head, by the time the boy had explained how he'd sent other villagers back to the field to get his brother and father as soon as he'd staggered home but it was too late, they were already dead, by the time he took pictures of the boy's wounds, which had been treated with only boiled water and cotton dressing, Htoo Moo was ready for a rest.
"The SPDC is coming," the chief told him.
So this is the drill: You flee, carrying everything you can—big heavy loads, as much rice as you can stand on your back in giant baskets, any clothes or anything else you want to own for maybe the rest of your life, your baby. Htoo Moo helped the villagers hide rice, salt, fish paste, and some extra sets of clothing among the surrounding trees before they all took off together in the early evening. He followed the 80 villagers along a path hidden beneath tall grass. Figuring a six-hour walk put them far enough out of harm's way, they stopped at midnight and Htoo Moo slept, finally, on the forest floor.
But the next morning, a scout told them the SPDC was coming; everyone needed to leave. Htoo Moo had slept through breakfast, and there wasn't time to make more.
Neighboring villages had evidently joined the flight; there were 200 people in the makeshift camp now. They had with them one KNU soldier. Not wanting to further strain the villagers' rations, Htoo Moo stalked an enormous rat he'd spied lumbering around and killed it with one strike of a piece of bamboo. When he smiled, pleased with his efficiency, an old man next to him laughed. "Before you woke up," he said, "I tried to kill that. I think it was already tired."
The villagers fled until noon. Some of the children with no shoes lost flesh and bled as their feet pounded the ground, and some of them cried silently as they ran. Htoo Moo carried his bag on his back, the dead rat in one hand, his digital camera in the other, occasionally snapping pictures of the exodus. When they stopped, he dug his fingers into the rat's skin and ripped it off. He tore the meat into pieces and went in on lunch with another man, who provided a pot, chilies, and salt. Five minutes later, his belly was full of seared rat meat. He closed his eyes as sleep slowly started to overtake him, and then—gunshots.
Gunshots. He clutched his bag and jumped to his feet. Nobody screamed. The boy with the bullet holes started running, new blood rushing from the wound in his ass. Htoo Moo took off, ahead of even the village chief, reaching a flat-out run, crashing shoulder-first through tall croppings of bamboo in his path, before realizing he had no idea where he should be going. He stopped, turned around a couple of times, and considered ditching his camera. What if the SPDC caught him? What if they saw that he'd been taking pictures of gun-shot farmers, prisoner-porters with skin disease, cigarette burns, knife wounds, raw and infected shoulders that bore the permanent scars of carrying over mountains for days or weeks at a time? Though he felt like a coward, he fell back into the middle of the throng. By the time they stopped at nightfall, news had spread through the crowd that one man in the rear had been shot dead.
Htoo Moo listened to the men next to him talking. Of the 200 people, four had guns, four or five rounds apiece. One admitted that he had only three bullets left. "No problem," another told him. "You will just aim very well."
After three days of squatting and swatting bugs in the jungle, Htoo Moo told the chief that he wanted to leave. Sometimes, villagers hide out for weeks because they don't know if it's safe to go back yet. Sometimes, it never is. Htoo Moo needed to get back to work.
"I will take you myself," the chief said. "I am ready." He was in no hurry now. He'd heard over the radio that the soldiers had killed the pigs and the chickens, and then burned the village to the ground. There was nothing to go back to.
To slow down the SPDC advance, the KNU had set up scores of new land mines, and the way in was no longer a safe way out. Htoo Moo and the chief trudged through the jungle for three days to a KNU headquarters, where they shook hands and parted, and Htoo Moo asked a KNU insurgent to guide him the rest of the way. Shortly after they started off, the parasites that had been multiplying in his liver since entering his body via mosquito burst through the cells that hosted them and flooded Htoo Moo's bloodstream. He trekked slowly, through his fever, stopping when the retching brought him to his knees. "Don't rest there!" his guide screamed when he moved toward a smooth patch of soil just to the side of the path. He'd nearly knelt on a land mine. It took another two days to reach the riverbank, where he bought antimalarial tablets with his last few baht and boarded the boat toward Thailand—which had, by default, become home.
"DO YOU HAVE PICTURE?" Htan Dah asked one evening. "Of your friends?"
"Let's go to the computer room," I replied. Thus were several Karen refugee activists of Mae Sot, Thailand, bestowed with one of democracy's greatest gifts: that of wasting exorbitant amounts of time on social networking websites. I logged in to MySpace, and clicked through some of my pals' profiles, talking about who they were, or where they were, or what they were doing in the pictures. Htoo Moo, working diligently at the next computer, glanced over as nonchalantly as possible. Htan Dah said very little. Once, he asked me to clarify the gender of the girl I was pointing to on the screen. "Are you sure?" he asked. "She looks like a boy." I laughed and told him that she was a lesbian, my ex-girlfriend, actually, which seemed to clear it up for him. Other than that, he mostly just stared at the monitor in stunned silence, for so long that it started to weird me out.
"What do you think?" I asked him when I'd finished the tour.
"Wow," he said quietly.
"So, those are my friends," I said. He made no move to get up or take his eyes off the page.
I asked him if he wanted to see how the website worked. I showed him the browse feature, dropping down the long list of countries whose citizens we could gawk at. "How about Myanmar?" he asked, spying the junta's official name for Burma among the options.
I was surprised it was there, and even more surprised that our first search turned up 3,000 profiles. The junta has some awesome restrictions on owning electronics, especially computers. In 1996, Leo Nichols [9], former honorary consul for Scandinavian countries and friend of Burmese activists, was sentenced to three years for the illegal possession of fax machines and phones. (Taken into custody, he was tortured and died.) There are Internet cafés, but café workers are required to capture customers' screenshots every five minutes and submit their Web histories, along with home addresses and phone numbers, to the state. Humanitarian geeks in other countries, though, work full time to give Burma's citizens Internet access, with proxy servers that they update when the government figures out how to block them. From the look of it, they were doing their job.
On MySpace, ink-haired Burmese teens and twentysomethings stared at us: the chin-down-sexy-eyes-up shot, the haughty chin up/eyes half-closed look, the profile with eyes askance. Their faces were surrounded by HTML-coded sparkles, animated hearts and stars, slaughtered English colloquialisms. Htan Dah paused long and hard at each picture that came up.
"I don't know them," he said finally.
This conclusion struck me as pretty foregone, since he'd never lived in Burma. "Did you think you would?"
He looked at me, realizing his mistake. "I don't know," he said softly. We made Htan Dah his own profile, and he stayed logged in long after I'd gone to bed.
At dinner the next day, Htan Dah, Htoo Moo, and another refugee, Ta Mla, spent a fair amount of time watching me and muttering to each other in Karen.
"Something on your mind, tiger?" I asked Htan Dah.
"We are talking about your girlfriend," he said.
Yeah, I'd thought that conversation had ended a little too easily. "All right. You can talk about it with me."
"Do you ever have boyfriend?"
"Yes. I've had boyfriends and girlfriends."
This produced a moment of confused silence, which I filled with a lame description of the sexuality continuum, along with an explanation of the somewhat loose sexual mores of modern American gals like myself. Htan Dah responded by telling me that they had heard of gay people, since a visitor to the house had informed them of their existence—last year.
"Last year!" I hollered.
"Yes!" he yelled back. "In Karen culture, we do not have."
"There's never been a gay person in a Karen village in the history of Karen society." All three men shook their heads. "Come on."
"If there was a gay person, they would leave," Htan Dah said. "It is not our culture."
"Let's just say there was a gay person," I said. "Couldn't they stay in the village?"
"No," Htan Dah said. "I would not allow gay people in my village."
"Are you kidding me?!"
Htan Dah held my gaze, though his seemed more uncertain the longer it went on.
"Are you going to make me leave?"
"No! For you, in your culture, it is okay," he said. "You are not Karen. But in our culture, it does not belong." Htoo Moo and Ta Mla were nodding, and I scowled at them.
"You're a refugee," I said. "And it sucks. It's ruining your life. But you would force another villager to become a refugee because they were gay?"
Nobody said no. I turned on Htan Dah; I was maddest at him, and he was probably the only one who could follow my fast, heated English. "If there was peace in Burma and you lived in a village and there was a gay Karen person," I asked again, "you would want to make that person another Karen refugee by making them leave?"
That, or my anger, shut him up. "I am interested in your ideas," he said, evenly, after a minute. "I think it is important to keep an open mind."
I shut up, too, and focused on eating rice for a few awkward moments.
"So," I said eventually. "Do you guys have sex?"
Htoo Moo and Ta Mla shook their heads while Htan Dah said, "Sometimes."
"Ever?" I asked Htoo Moo.
"No," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because, I am not married."
"What about you?" I asked Htan Dah.
"Yes," he said, nodding hard once. "I am married."
"You're married?"
Htan Dah laughed. "Yes! I am married."
"I didn't know that. Where is your wife?"
"She is in camp. With my kid."
"You have a kid?"
Other things I didn't know: that everyone currently in the house—save The Blay and Htan Dah, who were married, apparently—was a virgin. This extended even to kissing.
They hailed from the parts of Burma that had been heavily influenced by Christian missionaries, and premarital sex was taboo. Htoo Moo volunteered that he wasn't actively looking for a girlfriend, and that he wouldn't know what do with her even if he found one.
Htan Dah told me I had to show them MySpace again. We crowded around a computer, our cheeks flushed with satiety and humidity and new camaraderie. Htoo Moo interjected burning questions about American life as they came to him.
"Do you eat rice in America?"
"Yes. Usually I eat brown rice."
"Brown rice?"
"It's rice with the hull still on it. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"No. I don't believe that...Have you ever eat tiger?"
"Eaten tiger. No."
"Have you ever eat...monkey?
"'Have you ever eaten monkey,' you mean. No."
"Are there black lady in America?"
"Ladies. Yes..."
"What language do they speak?" Htan Dah chimed in.
"English."
"Really?"
I gaped at him, disbelieving, but before I could formulate a response, Htoo Moo said, "In America, you have cream to grow hair." He ran his hand over his baby-smooth jawline.
"Yeah. I think that's true. I think it's generally for people who are bald, though."
"Do you have that?"
"Hair-growing cream? Oh, yeah. I use it on my ass."
The sarcasm seemed to translate, since they laughed for minutes.
We made Ta Mla a MySpace profile, and he and Htan Dah started giving the other guys tutorials as they wandered in. My work here was done.
A few days earlier, when I'd asked my students what they did for fun, I'd had to explain the concept of "fun" for about five minutes before anyone could answer me, and then the answers were "Nothing," "Nothing," "Watch TV," and three "Talk"s. By the time I went upstairs, every computer screen was lit, the guys scrolling through the faces of Burma, a window into a world they considered home but where some had never been and probably none would ever live again.
HTAN DAH DILIGENTLY kept me company during meals. "You are so slow," he said one morning, watching me chew every bit of rice into oblivion. "Why don't you eat fast?"
"Why should I?" I asked. "I'm not in a hurry."
"But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?"
I scoffed at him. "I'm from Ohio."
"Yes, but I am refugee! We are taught to eat fast."
Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, and even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps getting burned down on the very first day of class, I'd kind of dismissed it.
So boy did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro the next day:
Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children's screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops' ammunitions without grabbing any facility.
For a while, Htan Dah's family and all those other asylum-seekers in Thailand were safe, relative to the Karen still in Burma. If they ventured out of the squalid camps, they were subject to harassment and arrest from one of the world's most corrupt police forces, but at least Burmese soldiers were less likely to march into a sovereign country to attack them.
What the Burmese army could do, though, was help a rival Karen faction to do so. They called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA. There had been discontent within the Christian-led KNU for years, complaints of abuses of power, religious discrimination, and grueling jungle-warfare conditions. In 1994, by which point there were 80,000 Karen living in the Thai camps, a government-allied monk persuaded several hundred Buddhist KNU soldiers to defect. The junta was only too happy to support their cause—which included attacking refugee camps filled with Christian Karen.
The huts at Htan Dah's settlement of Huay Kaloke were cloaked in thick, warm Thai darkness as DKBA soldiers moved in on the 7,000 refugees living there in January 1997.
Residents generally went to bed early; there was no electricity, and flammable materials cost money nobody had. But Htan Dah's mother sometimes hired herself out as a laborer, plowing fields for about a dollar a day. That was far less than what the legal Thai workers alongside her made, but she needed money to buy nails—her scavenged-bamboo-and-thatch hut wasn't going to hold itself together—and candles, since she wasn't wild about her kids using homemade lamps, essentially tin cans filled with gasoline.
The small encampment had become overpopulated, so that there wasn't even enough space to play soccer, and Htan Dah barely ever left it. But a Christian organization had donated some books, and NGOs were running a full school system now. Htan Dah had exams the next day; he had stayed up past sundown studying and had been asleep for hours by the time the sound of gunshots reached his family's shelter. Some children somewhere screamed as they leapt out of the elevated hut. They ran, backs and knees bent, low to the dirt, for the surrounding woods as DKBA troops set fire to the camp. The huts burned hot and fast. Htan Dah kept his head down, so that he hardly registered the other people running alongside, not even noticing that some were in their underwear. "Please, God," he prayed. "Oh my God. Save me. Save my life," over and over again. It was a few days before his 16th birthday. He prayed and ran until he reached the forest, where, like everyone else, he stopped, turned around, and stood silently watching the camp—bedrooms, books, photos, shoes, a shirt woven by a grandmother—burn to the ground.
The next day, the refugees returned to the smoldering plot and made beds in the ash. They began slowly rebuilding, though none could have any illusions that the Thai security posted at the front gate would protect them. They had long ago noted that the function of the guards was not so much keeping danger out as keeping the refugees in, collecting bribes from those who wanted to leave the camp to work or collect firewood or make a trip to the market. Their attackers met no resistance on their way into Huay Kaloke that night. And less than 14 months later, when vehicles full of DKBA soldiers drove in again, no one stopped them. Again.
"How do you know the Thai soldiers just let them drive right in through the front gate?" I interrupted Htan Dah as he told me this story on the reading bench in my room. That an army would allow raiding foreign troops unfettered access to 7,000 sleeping civilians—twice—seemed frankly a little far-fetched. "Maybe the soldiers were trying to protect the gate, but the DKBA just went around or something."
Htan Dah had told this story before, and to several foreigners, but never to one rude enough to suggest that he was a liar. He cocked his head. "Because," he said, "There is only one road. The only way into the camp is through the front gate!"
For a second time, Htan Dah awoke in the middle of the night to gunfire and shouting; for a second time, he fled with his family and the clothes he was wearing for the safety of the surrounding trees. But this time, the soldiers also shelled the camp. This time, a pregnant woman was shot dead and two girls from Htan Dah's school who hid in a well suffered burns that killed them. This time a seven-year-old died of shrapnel wounds and dozens were injured—and nearly the whole damn camp was burned down again.
"We accept that we were inactive," the secretary general of Thailand's National Security Council conceded [10] later. Thai authorities decided to close the camp. Htan Dah's family set up a temporary shelter made of sticks and a raincoat, under which they lived while they were waiting to be moved elsewhere.
The trucks didn't arrive for almost a year and a half. When they did, Htan Dah and his family were shipped to a camp in the mountains, where the population in exile eventually became 20,000 strong, where Htan Dah eventually grew up and got married and had a baby of his own, where the cold, wet winds cut through the shacks stacked high in the hills of central Thailand, far away enough to be safer from the DKBA.
MY DAYS FELL INTO a strange routine. I taught two classes of English a day, beginner and intermediate. After and between classes, and before the evening of drinking began in earnest, I snacked on coconut-fried cashews I bought at the 7-Eleven while helping the guys translate their HRD interviews or fill out applications for asylum. They kept filling out the applications, even though they had little chance of success—certainly no chance of resettling in the United States, which, under the Patriot Act, had effectively declared all Karen from the contested highlands terrorists for providing "material support" to the "terrorist" KNU.
After class one day, one of the guys wanted to show me a word he saw all the time so I could explain its meaning: marginalized. (He grasped the concept pretty quickly.) He also wanted to know what the thing used to bind people's feet together was called. I told him I didn't think we had a word for that in English. (I was wrong. Though archaic in noun form, the word exists: "fetters.") When Htoo Moo asked me later for the word for systematically slicing open the skin on someone's forearm, I told him I didn't think we had a word for that, either.
Another day, I sat outside holding an impromptu pronunciation lesson on some of the words in an HRD's report.
"Repeat after me," I was saying. "Rape."
"Rop."
"Try again. Rrraaape."
Another day, a Burma Action staffer I'll call Lah Lah Htoo asked if I wanted to see a video. He loaded a DVD of some footage taken in eastern Burma by aid workers, mostly Karen, some of whom are also medics, called the Free Burma Rangers [11]. (See "Operation Rescue" [12].)
It starts with war footage, guys shooting guns in tall jungle bush, and loud rocket fire, and a village burning down and screaming women running for their lives, before moving briefly to photo stills: a picture of villagers standing over a group of dead bodies, a picture of a dead woman with her shirt torn open, a picture of murdered children lined up in a row. Then the camera centers on the face of a 17-year-old boy with lifeless, unfocused eyes, a longyi (sarong) held up below his neck so he can't see his completely exposed lower leg bone, a bloody white stick still hung with a few slick and glistening black-purple sinews, protruding from a bloody knee—a land-mine wound swarmed by flies. Then he's in a thin hammock, with a man in cheap plastic flip-flops at each end of the bamboo pole from which it swings, and another walking alongside holding an IV drip dangling from another piece of wood, being carried through the mountainous terrain. For four days. Which is how long it takes the Ranger team to get him to a clinic on the border, where a proper amputation can be done.
By that point I'd twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn't get any easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other while he explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops. Local Karen leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but they haven't seen the girl since. "We want her back," the woman says, smiling sadly, before dropping her face to her knees, covering it with her pink sweater, and starting to sob. There are people getting ready to run from an attack, little girls running around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and sacks they strap to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments into the bloody stump below his knee. Skulls and bones on the ground and a Ranger telling how he brought a bunch of children's presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers. Rangers cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid's leg as the child stands still, calm, pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the camera's night mode, on the jungle floor. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering breathlessly to each other. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby; his wife died in childbirth during their flight through the jungle. He worries he has no idea how to take care of this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely old enough to stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs and feet. A Ranger team leaves a group of internally displaced persons and the IDPs call out please don't leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face contorted with sorrow as he sobs convulsively, "I don't understand why they killed my children. They didn't even know their right hand from their left hand," while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don't lose heart.
"What do you think?" Lah Lah Htoo asked me when it ended.
I thought I might like to close myself in the bathroom so I could punch myself in the chest, just a little, to try to release some of the tightness and weight there.
"Good video?" he asked, because I was taking so long to answer.
"Yeah, it's a good video."
He nodded and waited politely for me to continue, but I just sat quietly, awkwardly, before simply nodding back at him. Eventually, I asked him what they did with the videos they made.
"We send them. To human rights organizations, UN, news."
"Do they ever use them?"
Lah Lah Htoo shrugged.
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Though most Americans are woefully uninformed about the shit going down in Burma, your federal lawmakers are on it. In 1997, President Bill Clinton barred new US investment [14] in the country. In 2003, Congress introduced the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act [15], which banned any Burmese imports, opposed loans to the regime, froze any of its US assets, and denied its leaders entry visas. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice awarded Burma a special designation as an "outpost of tyranny."
Bush 43 gave it shout-outs in several State of the Union [16] addresses. ("We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma.")
There's a US Senate Women's Caucus on Burma, and Obama just extended sanctions again and said this at his Nobel Peace Prize [17] acceptance: "When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma—there must be consequences...And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression." Also blacklisting Burma: Australia, which won't sell the regime weapons and has financial sanctions against 463 members of the junta. And the EU has stripped Burma of trading privileges and put an arms embargo in place.
The trouble isn't so much a lack of measures as their total ineffectiveness. Though US investors have had to pull their money out of, say, the garment industry, they can still deal in Burma's oil and gas, which is where the junta's big money comes from. When Congress passed that 1997 law restricting new investment, Unocal got its gas fields grandfathered in. After Chevron absorbed [18] Unocal in 2005, its lobbyists worked tirelessly to ensure that no sanctions would force it to divest. It appeared as though the 2008 Block Burmese JADE [19] (Junta's Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act would finally force Chevron to give up its Burmese holdings, until the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Joe Biden (whose former chief of staff was one Alan Hoffman, once a Unocal lobbyist [20]), stripped out the provision and replaced it with a suggestion that the company "consider voluntary divestment over time."
Okay, but if we only fashioned better—and better-targeted—sanctions, advocates say, Burma's economy would collapse and the government might just get packing. But whether or not you believe that sanctions were the straw that broke South Africa's back, you cannot believe that they would have worked in that country if half the world's governments had said, "We're not going to give you money for your stuff anymore" while the other half had said, "Awesome. More for us."
Operation Rescue
One American's mission to treat Burma's displaced
"MORDOR IS THE SPDC [Burmese government], and guys like us are hobbits," Tha U Wa A Pa says by way of explaining why he built a training base for medics in a land-mine-infested war zone in Burma, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Tha U Wa A Pa and his Free Burma Rangers document the atrocities of the Burmese army and provide medical and tactical help to those fleeing from it. It's a quest requiring almost inconceivable bravery and, in Tha U Wa A Pa's case, a conviction that God has chosen him for this task. Though he uses a Karen nom de guerre (meaning "Father of the White Monkey"—a.k.a. his daughter), he's the son of prominent American missionaries in Thailand, an alum of Texas A&M (BA, poli-sci) and a former US Army Ranger.
After graduating from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Tha U Wa A Pa became a missionary in Thailand himself. Which is where he was in 1997, when a major SPDC offensive sent a flood of Karen refugees across the border. Tha U Wa A Pa loaded up a backpack full of supplies and, together with a KNU soldier he met along the way, rushed into Burma as if it were a house on fire. The two men treated as many wounded as they could, carrying a guy who'd stepped on a land mine to a hospital to have his leg amputated. Over the next three weeks, they ferried supplies and patients back and forth over the border.
Since then, the Rangers have trained more than 110 roving teams who provide medical assistance to (and document the plight of) the more than half a million internally displaced persons in the eastern Burmese jungle. Rangers have treated some 400,000 people for malaria, AIDS, dysentery, diarrhea, malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, and infections. They pull teeth and deliver babies. Six have lost their lives on the job. As the junta's violence escalates, so do their efforts; the Rangers' budget is up to $1.3 million a year, all donations, mostly from churches and their parishioners. "We're just little guys trying to do some good," Tha U Wa A Pa says. "On the surface it seems like Mordor has all the strength and power and might. But if our fellowship of hobbits stays united, good will defeat evil in the end."
That's the reality in Burma, where China is building an oil pipeline so as to avoid the long trip around the Strait of Malacca. Thailand has the rights to 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one concession alone. One Indian firm has signed up for 5 trillion cubic feet. Russia has several firms drilling. A single pipeline operated by France, Thailand, and, yes, Chevron earned the junta more than $1 billion in 2008. The South Korean company Daewoo [21] International plans to earn more than $10 billion over 25 years from its drilling project in Burma's immense Shwe gas reserve; handling Daewoo's exploratory Burma drilling was the American firm Transocean [22]. As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [23], Burma is included in a free-trade agreement with India that eliminates tariffs on thousands of products; India plans to invest billions of dollars in two Burmese hydroelectric dams. The EU is discussing a free-trade agreement with ASEAN nations as well, although the UK swears it won't make a deal that would benefit Burma—it's worth noting the UK already has oil and gas dealings there. In 2008 Burma saw a 165 percent increase in the number of Chinese multinational companies involved in Burmese mining, oil and gas, and hydropower development. The regime ran a $2.5 billion trade surplus in 2009, with $5 billion in currency reserves.
The United States can better target its sanctions all it wants, but already they've pushed tens of thousands of Burmese textile workers out of factory jobs—and, as even the State Department has admitted, into sex work. And as Chevron has pointed out, if we pull out our remaining investments, someone else—perhaps someone less conscientious—will gladly fill the gap. The international community can't even agree to stop giving the regime weapons. Even if it could get China to play ball on that front, not so much North Korea. As long as there's money to be made in Burma, a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement—from an energy-rich country neighbored by the world's two most populous, energy-desperate countries—is never going to happen.
You know a situation is dire when its best chance of a good outcome depends on action by the United Nations Security Council. At the 2005 UN World Summit [24], member nations resolved that if a government perpetuates or allows any of four "atrocity crimes"—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide—the world body is responsible for taking "timely and decisive" action to protect that nation's people. When in 2007 a draft resolution on Burma was brought before the Security Council, some activists felt that there was a strong case for it to include charges of genocide against the Karen. The UN 1948 Convention [25] on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines "genocide" as an attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" with at least one of five methods. One of them the SPDC isn't guilty of: "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." But "killing members of the group"? Check. "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group"? Check. "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"? Clearly.
"Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group"? If you count gang-raping and murdering pregnant women, yes. Since the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, systematic rape has been recognized as a key feature of genocide. In Burma, it's systematic, institutionalized, and indoctrinated into soldiers, who are explicitly ordered, "Your blood must be left in the village."
But not one government has officially leveled the charge at Burma, and some academics and even activists argue that these genocidal actions aren't genocide-like enough to count. We can't just be throwing the word around to describe any old horror. Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of my BA housemates' situation, "But how does it compare to Sudan?"
If Sudan is the bar against which we're measuring genocide, okay: Burma was alongside Sudan on the list of the world's worst displacement situations for four years running. Sudan's mortality rate for children under five, a common measure of conflict epidemiology, is 109 per 1,000 live births. In eastern Burma, it's 221. In the Darfur genocide, 400,000 civilians have been killed. A junta chairman once estimated that the body count of Burma's civil war—the Karen are only one of seven major minorities that have been involved in dozens of armed insurgencies—"would reach as high as millions."
It comes down to this: A draft resolution that compellingly charges genocide against a country is a draft resolution that's likely to get passed—because no one wants to be the nation that vetoes that. But the 2007 Security Council [26] draft resolution to declare Burma a threat to international peace and security didn't contain charges of genocide. Nor ethnic cleansing, nor crimes against humanity, nor war crimes. China and Russia vetoed it.
SINCE I FIRST ARRIVED at Burma Action's Mae Sot offices, four years ago, some 50,000 Burmese refugees have left Thailand for UN-orchestrated resettlement in Western countries. In 2007, the United States waived its material support prohibition for refugees who'd assisted the KNU, and the next year allowed in more than 14,000 refugees, including several BA staff members. In America, they try to make rent with welfare or factory wages, and talk, weirdly, about struggling to survive. I apologized to one, after he was moved to a suburb outside cold, gray Cleveland, for his crushing poverty and loneliness and the weather. "It's okay," he replied. "You can never find a good place to live in the world. Only in heaven."
Though some of the documentary activists have emigrated, their footage and reports gather dust in Thailand, awaiting, the human rights community hopes, the day when they might be used at a trial of the junta or in a truth and reconciliation process. Some Burma Action footage made it out and into the opener for Rambo part four, whose producers paid—after some hard haggling—about two grand for it.
Lah Lah Htoo is one of those activists who's stayed behind. At a going-away party my last weekend, he sat with a guitar in his lap. On a previous night he'd played a hard-twanging, pentatonic melody on a stringed Karen instrument while he sang, in flowing minor notes, a traditional song about a river, so haunting that I had nearly drunkenly wept. But now the guitar he held was idle, and he tipped his head back and looked at me through half-closed eyes.
"Do you think that we will see each other again?" he asked, one arm dangling over the body of the guitar.
"Of course we'll see each other again," I said. I looked at Htan Dah. "I'll come back to Thailand soon."
"When?" several voices asked.
"Probably next summer. I have to figure it out with work, and money."
"So," one of the guys said, "we will see each other again maybe next year."
"I hope," I said. "Hopefully next year."
"When we see each other again," Lah Lah Htoo said, "it will be in Burma." The other guys cheered. "When we see each other again, you will come to Burma. And you will not need a visa to enter. And I will pick you up at the airport." His face was barely wide enough for his smile, and he was hollering a bit, over the approving shouts of the other guys. "In a car. In my car!" Lah Lah Htoo had left his village when he was a teenager, when he'd run away with the rest of his family and neighbors, and hadn't been back since. A silence settled over his coworkers in the wake of his fantastic predictions, and they all smiled softly and looked off or at the floor or at the wall as they considered cars and airports, and I thought about doomed POWs in movies who know their fate is sealed but talk anyway about how they're going to eat a big cheeseburger when they get back to America, and I kept quiet as long as the guys were quiet, bowing my head as if in reverence of something that had died.
Reporting for this story was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute [1] and the Fund for Investigative Journalism [2].
Mac McClelland is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here [http://motherjones.com/authors/mac-mcclelland]. Follow her on Twitter [https://twitter.com/MacMcClelland] here.
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ReliefWeb- MYANMAR: Singapore Pledges Additional Funding for IOM's Ayeyarwady Delta Shelter Programme
Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM)
Date: 18 May 2010
Singapore has pledged a further US$200,000 to support IOM's shelter programme for the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady delta.
The donation, which follows an earlier Singaporean contribution of US$100,000, will go towards helping the most vulnerable households in rural areas of Pyapone township to repair and weatherproof their homes ahead of the monsoon, which is expected this month.
The money will pay for materials, including nipa palm for roofing materials, bamboo mats for walling, and bamboo for structural support. Each household will also receive a shelter instruction book to help them to build safer homes.
Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in May 2008, killing some 140,000 people and affecting some 2.4 million others in the delta region, much of which is only accessible by water.
"The Singapore Government is committed to helping the survivors of Cyclone Nargis rebuild their lives. Our partnership with the IOM is intended to address the considerable ongoing need for shelter in Nargis-affected areas, and remains guided by the Post-Nargis Recovery and Preparedness Plan (PONREPP) and the Prioritised Action Plan," said Singaporean Ambassador to Myanmar Robert Chua.
IOM has already helped over 68,000 families to repair or rebuild their homes in the delta at a cost of some US$15 million since the cyclone. Other contributors to the IOM post-Nargis shelter programme have included the UK, US, Australia, Japan and ECHO.
But two years after the disaster, thousands of vulnerable families still remain without adequate shelter, according to IOM Myanmar Chief of Mission Mariko Tomiyama. "IOM is currently appealing for a further USD 12.5 million to meet the needs of a further 50,000 vulnerable families," she says.
For more information please contact Nelson Bosch at IOM Myanmar. Email: nbosch@iom.int Copyright © IOM. All rights reserved.
Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM)
Date: 18 May 2010
Singapore has pledged a further US$200,000 to support IOM's shelter programme for the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady delta.
The donation, which follows an earlier Singaporean contribution of US$100,000, will go towards helping the most vulnerable households in rural areas of Pyapone township to repair and weatherproof their homes ahead of the monsoon, which is expected this month.
The money will pay for materials, including nipa palm for roofing materials, bamboo mats for walling, and bamboo for structural support. Each household will also receive a shelter instruction book to help them to build safer homes.
Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in May 2008, killing some 140,000 people and affecting some 2.4 million others in the delta region, much of which is only accessible by water.
"The Singapore Government is committed to helping the survivors of Cyclone Nargis rebuild their lives. Our partnership with the IOM is intended to address the considerable ongoing need for shelter in Nargis-affected areas, and remains guided by the Post-Nargis Recovery and Preparedness Plan (PONREPP) and the Prioritised Action Plan," said Singaporean Ambassador to Myanmar Robert Chua.
IOM has already helped over 68,000 families to repair or rebuild their homes in the delta at a cost of some US$15 million since the cyclone. Other contributors to the IOM post-Nargis shelter programme have included the UK, US, Australia, Japan and ECHO.
But two years after the disaster, thousands of vulnerable families still remain without adequate shelter, according to IOM Myanmar Chief of Mission Mariko Tomiyama. "IOM is currently appealing for a further USD 12.5 million to meet the needs of a further 50,000 vulnerable families," she says.
For more information please contact Nelson Bosch at IOM Myanmar. Email: nbosch@iom.int Copyright © IOM. All rights reserved.
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The Irrawaddy - Post-election Threats to Ethnic Areas
By KATRINA WINTERS - Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The recent bombings at the Myitsone dam project in Burma are an example of the root cause of ethnic armed conflict in Burma. While no one has claimed responsibility for the bombings, a farmer who was arrested is viewed by many as a scapegoat, who most likely lacked the resources and skills to plant such a series of bombs.
One hypothesis is that it was the work of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which took action as a part of their refusal to become a regime-led border guard force.
Another hypothesis is that it could have been an act of the Burmese government to set up the KIA.
Either way, it is evident that the root cause of conflict in ethnic areas in Burma is a conflict over land and resources.
Such conflicts are likely to accelerate and spread in ethnic areas, especially in cease-fire areas where ethnic groups have refused to transform their armies into a border guard force. As each deadline passes, it is clear that the junta’s efforts to transform ethnic armies into border guard forces have largely failed.
The junta's motivation to form border guard forces is not only for political and security reasons but also for economic gain: to increase access to natural resources in ethnic areas that are currently not under their control. In the cease-fire agreements of the early 1990s, the military regime commonly offered co-operative arrangements to ethnic leaders to exploit natural resources, if they agreed to a cease-fire.
In a post-election context, as the Burmese government pursues its plan for economic development through exploiting natural resources in ethnic areas, tensions between ethnic armies both in cease-fire and non-ceasefire areas and the Burmese military are bound to increase.
If cease-fire groups turn their back on the government, civil wars are likely to resume, resulting in more land rights abuses, displacement and refugees. Ethnic armies that either re-engage in a civil war or continue in their armed struggle against the Burmese army also have to finance their efforts. As in the past, they will finance themselves through the exploitation of natural resources and through trade with resource-hungry neighboring countries.
The situation is further compounded by the opening up of the economy. The 2008 Constitution stipulates that the post –election Burmese economy will be market-based. In the article “A State-owned market economy” (Nov 16, 2009), Sean Turnell—a long-time observer of Burma’s economy from Macquarie University, Australia—noted that the 2008 Constitution says that the economy will have “a capitalist heart.” Article (35) states that, “The economic system of the Union is a market economy system.”
Recently, there has been a continuing increase in state militarization, large-scale resource extraction and infrastructure development. These factors are causing widespread displacement in ethnic areas, particularly in eastern Burma where there are plans to build a series of dams on the Salween River.
The dams are part of a systematic plan by the military government to gain control over natural resource-rich ethnic areas to create wealth and to consolidate its political power base.
This is not a new state of affairs. As we know, there is no rule of law in Burma, and the generals do not adhere to legal frameworks. They use the law not to protect people’s rights, but to control the population and to serve the economic interests of the Burmese government primarily through extracting wealth. The country’s major income comes from selling off natural resources, including billions of dollars from gas, and hydropower development.
In a post-election context, we can expect on-going human rights abuses and natural resource exploitation in the pursuit of economic development, as the markets will be increasingly opened up to foreign investment. However, little current foreign investment and state interventions for large-scale development projects (such as dams, gas pipelines, mining and biofuel plantations) actually benefit local communities.
They are purely for the economic benefit of the investors and the state. Instead, they usually lead to disruption of local livelihoods and environmental destruction. There is no transparency, local consultation, appropriate compensation or participation in decision making about the development that affects these local communities.
The fundamental problem lies in the current Constitution which gives the government control of natural resources. Article 37 states: “The Union is the ultimate owner of all lands, and all natural resources above and below the ground, above and beneath the water and in the atmosphere.”
Foreign investors already have their eye on opportunities that might exist after the election this year.
In Burma, individuals are allowed 30-year leases on land, and foreign investors such as Thai property and tourism investors have already expressed interest in taking further advantage of this after the election. Thailand is the largest investor in Burma (47 percent), and it is likely that other countries such as China will increase their investment in the absence of any profound political reform.
As the country opens itself up to further investment without the appropriate policies and mechanisms in place to protect basic human rights, incidents such as the bombings at the Myitsone site dam are likely to increase.
Conflict over land and resources and displacement of communities in ethnic areas will increase. The livelihoods of rural communities in ethnic areas are under serious threat, along with the natural environment and natural resource management systems.
Most significantly, human security will continue to be threatened and stability, peace, national reconciliation and democratization processes undermined.
Katrina Winters is an environmental researcher at the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) in Chiang Mai.
By KATRINA WINTERS - Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The recent bombings at the Myitsone dam project in Burma are an example of the root cause of ethnic armed conflict in Burma. While no one has claimed responsibility for the bombings, a farmer who was arrested is viewed by many as a scapegoat, who most likely lacked the resources and skills to plant such a series of bombs.
One hypothesis is that it was the work of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which took action as a part of their refusal to become a regime-led border guard force.
Another hypothesis is that it could have been an act of the Burmese government to set up the KIA.
Either way, it is evident that the root cause of conflict in ethnic areas in Burma is a conflict over land and resources.
Such conflicts are likely to accelerate and spread in ethnic areas, especially in cease-fire areas where ethnic groups have refused to transform their armies into a border guard force. As each deadline passes, it is clear that the junta’s efforts to transform ethnic armies into border guard forces have largely failed.
The junta's motivation to form border guard forces is not only for political and security reasons but also for economic gain: to increase access to natural resources in ethnic areas that are currently not under their control. In the cease-fire agreements of the early 1990s, the military regime commonly offered co-operative arrangements to ethnic leaders to exploit natural resources, if they agreed to a cease-fire.
In a post-election context, as the Burmese government pursues its plan for economic development through exploiting natural resources in ethnic areas, tensions between ethnic armies both in cease-fire and non-ceasefire areas and the Burmese military are bound to increase.
If cease-fire groups turn their back on the government, civil wars are likely to resume, resulting in more land rights abuses, displacement and refugees. Ethnic armies that either re-engage in a civil war or continue in their armed struggle against the Burmese army also have to finance their efforts. As in the past, they will finance themselves through the exploitation of natural resources and through trade with resource-hungry neighboring countries.
The situation is further compounded by the opening up of the economy. The 2008 Constitution stipulates that the post –election Burmese economy will be market-based. In the article “A State-owned market economy” (Nov 16, 2009), Sean Turnell—a long-time observer of Burma’s economy from Macquarie University, Australia—noted that the 2008 Constitution says that the economy will have “a capitalist heart.” Article (35) states that, “The economic system of the Union is a market economy system.”
Recently, there has been a continuing increase in state militarization, large-scale resource extraction and infrastructure development. These factors are causing widespread displacement in ethnic areas, particularly in eastern Burma where there are plans to build a series of dams on the Salween River.
The dams are part of a systematic plan by the military government to gain control over natural resource-rich ethnic areas to create wealth and to consolidate its political power base.
This is not a new state of affairs. As we know, there is no rule of law in Burma, and the generals do not adhere to legal frameworks. They use the law not to protect people’s rights, but to control the population and to serve the economic interests of the Burmese government primarily through extracting wealth. The country’s major income comes from selling off natural resources, including billions of dollars from gas, and hydropower development.
In a post-election context, we can expect on-going human rights abuses and natural resource exploitation in the pursuit of economic development, as the markets will be increasingly opened up to foreign investment. However, little current foreign investment and state interventions for large-scale development projects (such as dams, gas pipelines, mining and biofuel plantations) actually benefit local communities.
They are purely for the economic benefit of the investors and the state. Instead, they usually lead to disruption of local livelihoods and environmental destruction. There is no transparency, local consultation, appropriate compensation or participation in decision making about the development that affects these local communities.
The fundamental problem lies in the current Constitution which gives the government control of natural resources. Article 37 states: “The Union is the ultimate owner of all lands, and all natural resources above and below the ground, above and beneath the water and in the atmosphere.”
Foreign investors already have their eye on opportunities that might exist after the election this year.
In Burma, individuals are allowed 30-year leases on land, and foreign investors such as Thai property and tourism investors have already expressed interest in taking further advantage of this after the election. Thailand is the largest investor in Burma (47 percent), and it is likely that other countries such as China will increase their investment in the absence of any profound political reform.
As the country opens itself up to further investment without the appropriate policies and mechanisms in place to protect basic human rights, incidents such as the bombings at the Myitsone site dam are likely to increase.
Conflict over land and resources and displacement of communities in ethnic areas will increase. The livelihoods of rural communities in ethnic areas are under serious threat, along with the natural environment and natural resource management systems.
Most significantly, human security will continue to be threatened and stability, peace, national reconciliation and democratization processes undermined.
Katrina Winters is an environmental researcher at the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) in Chiang Mai.
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Mizzima News - Junta’s election cards not above board
Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:08 B.K.SEN
The Burmese military junta has and is playing its election cards the way it wants to, albeit throwing to the winds all electoral norms.
It has taken legislative measures and unfolded step by step the details of its road map to its so called “disciplined democracy.” But the central act, namely the announcement of the date of the election has been conveniently bypassed to suit the regime.
Fixing the deadline for registration of political parties, without having fixed the election date is illegal and therefore untenable. The two dates are collateral. The date of registration, last date for filing of nomination papers, the scrutiny, and the campaign period, are all correlated and time bound. But the pivot is the date of the election. Without having fulfilled that condition, acts prior to it are void. In the eye of the law, the Registration of Political Parties law is not enforceable.
In a recent visit to Burma, Dr. Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State said “the election will lack international legitimacy. We urge the regime to take immediate steps; open the process in the time remaining before election.” The immediate steps would be to restore normalcy in the existing political climate. The release of all political prisoners and amnesty to all, who have been convicted under its law, the exiles, except those who are perpetrators of human rights violations. These are some of the urgent measures to revive confidence that the election may be free and fair. This is a human rights issue, which needs resolution at the outset. Campbell has called for greater respect for human rights and release of political prisoners.
He said, “the regime has detained many of Burma’s brightest and most patriotic citizens, sending them to remote locations throughout the country, where generals hope they will be forgotten. They are not. Burma has historical precedents of amnesty and junta is well aware of them. In Brazil amnesty law was put as the foundation of the new democracy. Amnesty law in Afghanistan is also illuminating. Article 1 states an end to rivalries. Article 2, to all groups and individuals. Article 3, who are still in opposition, if they join the process of reconciliation.
Allowing Campbell to meet Su Kyi and his meeting the junta leaders separately is a positive step. The U.S outlined a proposal for credible dialogue among all stake-holders towards elections planned for this year. The junta must give proper heed to this proposal because it is not merely a US proposal coming from the strongest democracy, but it reflects the unanimity of the international community. Since the date of election has not been fixed Than Swe has time to review the situation and for the larger interest of the country can reset the planned election.
The NLD has been dissolved and it has become easier to enter into talks with Su Kyi as a senior citizen and statesman. The junta has also to enter into talks with ethnic leaders and cease-fire groups so that a political environment is put in place, conducive to free and fair polls.
Lessons can be drawn from recent elections in the U.K and Philippines. Thailand has set an example about what happens when an election is manipulated.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:08 B.K.SEN
The Burmese military junta has and is playing its election cards the way it wants to, albeit throwing to the winds all electoral norms.
It has taken legislative measures and unfolded step by step the details of its road map to its so called “disciplined democracy.” But the central act, namely the announcement of the date of the election has been conveniently bypassed to suit the regime.
Fixing the deadline for registration of political parties, without having fixed the election date is illegal and therefore untenable. The two dates are collateral. The date of registration, last date for filing of nomination papers, the scrutiny, and the campaign period, are all correlated and time bound. But the pivot is the date of the election. Without having fulfilled that condition, acts prior to it are void. In the eye of the law, the Registration of Political Parties law is not enforceable.
In a recent visit to Burma, Dr. Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State said “the election will lack international legitimacy. We urge the regime to take immediate steps; open the process in the time remaining before election.” The immediate steps would be to restore normalcy in the existing political climate. The release of all political prisoners and amnesty to all, who have been convicted under its law, the exiles, except those who are perpetrators of human rights violations. These are some of the urgent measures to revive confidence that the election may be free and fair. This is a human rights issue, which needs resolution at the outset. Campbell has called for greater respect for human rights and release of political prisoners.
He said, “the regime has detained many of Burma’s brightest and most patriotic citizens, sending them to remote locations throughout the country, where generals hope they will be forgotten. They are not. Burma has historical precedents of amnesty and junta is well aware of them. In Brazil amnesty law was put as the foundation of the new democracy. Amnesty law in Afghanistan is also illuminating. Article 1 states an end to rivalries. Article 2, to all groups and individuals. Article 3, who are still in opposition, if they join the process of reconciliation.
Allowing Campbell to meet Su Kyi and his meeting the junta leaders separately is a positive step. The U.S outlined a proposal for credible dialogue among all stake-holders towards elections planned for this year. The junta must give proper heed to this proposal because it is not merely a US proposal coming from the strongest democracy, but it reflects the unanimity of the international community. Since the date of election has not been fixed Than Swe has time to review the situation and for the larger interest of the country can reset the planned election.
The NLD has been dissolved and it has become easier to enter into talks with Su Kyi as a senior citizen and statesman. The junta has also to enter into talks with ethnic leaders and cease-fire groups so that a political environment is put in place, conducive to free and fair polls.
Lessons can be drawn from recent elections in the U.K and Philippines. Thailand has set an example about what happens when an election is manipulated.
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