By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
THAILAND
(ANS) -- More than 70 Burmese children, mostly Christians, who fled to the Thai side of the border following fresh attacks by a Buddhist militia in June, are being pressured to return to their highly unsafe country.
International Christian Concern (ICC) logo
According to International Christian Concern (ICC) — www.persecution.org -- on Friday morning, Thailand’s border police stormed the Shekinah (Glory to God) orphanage in Mae Hong Son Province near the Burma border, put the names of all the residents on a register and asked them to prepare for deportation, said a worried caretaker.
“If the children go back, they will be killed. This should never happen,” she cried out, adding that she had informed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) about the possible move by the Thai government.
ICC reports that just a week earlier the 76 children between the ages of six and 16 were moved to the new location, around 100 miles from Mai Sariang town in northern Thailand. They live in thatched structures built on a privately owned patch of land on a hill covered with dense forest.
According to ICC, after their arrival in Thailand in June, the children were temporarily moved to another orphanage close-by. However, due to the spread of Malaria in that orphanage, they were quickly shifted to the new location, which was under construction.
“Last week, I attended the funeral of an eight-year-old girl, Poh Poh, a resident of our orphanage, who died of Malaria,” said the caretaker, adding that following her death, the volunteers and the residents stepped up the work at the new site and made temporary stairs leading downhill from the main road.
Though newly built, the Shekinah orphanage, which was initially established on the Burma side of the border, has dormitories, a meeting hall and open-air kitchen and mess, ICC said.
ICC went on to say that the land belongs to a Christian couple who serve as the principals of the school at the orphanage. “We have six teachers, but we are yet to build classrooms. We are currently teaching under the tree,” said the female principal.
ICC also states the children at the Shekinah orphanage are young, but they are grateful to the volunteers and the caretakers and see them as their role models. When asked what their dreams in life were, most of them said they wanted to become missionaries to the Burmese refugees.
“I would not like to be resettled in the West; I want to serve God in the border area,” said a 13-year-old girl, Persaw Paw. Then she broke down and cried narrating how both her parents died of sickness six years ago.
While many of the children are orphans — whose parents have either been killed by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) or died of sickness — the others do not even know whether their parents are alive or dead.
“According to the news reaching us, these children may not see their parents again,” said a volunteer of the orphanage with tears in her eyes.
“Though at tender ages, when the children gather in one of the huts made of bamboo sticks and wooden planks for prayer every morning, they raise hands to heaven or fold them in front of their chests, asking God to save the lives of their friends and family in Burma,” ICC says in a web posting.
ICC explains the residents are among the over 4,000 Karen people, mostly Christians, who crossed the river Moei in boats after DKBA soldiers fired mortars on and captured their villages in Burma’s Karen State in early June. Moei forms natural border between the two Buddhist-majority countries.
It adds that the Karen ethnic people, both Buddhist and Christians, have been involved in a struggle against the repression and brutality by Burma’s military junta since 1949. They want a federal Burma as opposed to the central military rule, and are sympathetic to the pro-democracy movement in the country.
Initially, the Karen people led their struggle under the one banner of Karen National Union (KNU). However, in 1994, some Buddhists from KNU’s Christian-majority resistance force, the Karen National Liberation Army, splintered and formed the DKBA.
It is believed that the DKBA is now a proxy force of the military junta and carries out its “ethnic cleansing” policy.
ICC says that around 90 percent of the population of Burma is Buddhist. The four-percent Christian minority faces persecution on a regular basis.
ICC also states the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has designated Burma, officially known as Myanmar, as a “Country of Particular Concern” since 1999.
“The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the military junta governing Burma, has one of the world’s worst human rights records,” notes the USCIRF annual report of 2009.
“In the past year,” it adds, “religious freedom conditions deteriorated in Burma… and Burma’s military regime continued its policy of severely restricting religious practice, monitoring the activity of all religious organizations, and perpetuating or tolerating violence against religious leaders and their communities.”
Thailand has over 140,000 Karen refugees, many of them Christians, along the 300-mile Burma border. Since the government of Thailand does not officially recognize them as refugees, they are confined to the border areas with no job opportunities.
ICC goes on to say there are seven Karen refugee camps in Thailand, overseen by the country’s interior ministry and jointly funded by non-profit groups. However, due to the overcrowding of these camps — thanks to the regular influx of refugees — thousands of migrants have made their homes deep in the jungles.
According to the law of the land, the “illegal migrants” are subject to arrest, detention and deportation.
“But a basic humanitarian response by Thai authorities is what we are asking and praying for,” said a concerned volunteer.
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