Refugees with no place to flee

Tue 12 Jan 2010, Chan Mon

Early in the morning of January 14, 2009, most residents of Ban Don Yang Camp at Three Pagoda’s Pass border took shelter from the cold winter air inside their huts. I woke up at 5:00 am to wait for the truck that would take me from the camp to Sangkhlaburi Town, in Thailand’s Kanchanaburi Province, where I would catch a bus to Bangkok and begin my journey towards resettlement in the United States of America. My friend Zi Thu and I sat in my home and listened to the noise of the truck arriving. I was very exited, even though I’d already been abroad, because this time I was leaving behind the challenges and frustrations of the refugee camp community, a place that was only a holding pen for Burmese refugees in the process of being resettled in parts of the European Union, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia.

I was among the first group of refugees that had registered in Ban Don Yang Camp as refugees under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2004; I’d been living in the camp, waiting to be resettled, since September of 2006. Ban Don Yang Camp is the same camp that currently shelters Luther Htoo, who lead the Karen rebel group “God’s Army” along with his twin brother Johnny Htoo until their surrender in 2001. We were registered in the camp as political asylum seekers, and the majority of us were members and supporters of various armed rebel groups throughout Burma. I was registered as a journalist, but some of our number were only pretending to be rebel group members, as a means of being resettled abroad and finding well-paying jobs.

Ban Don Yang camp was founded by the Thai government in 1997, when it moved two small Karen camps, known as Thu Ka and Hti Ta Ba respectively, away from violence in Tenasserim Division and Dooplaya district. The two camps were combined and relocated to the Three Pagoda Pass borderline, near the New Mon State Party-run (NMSP) refugee camp known call as Hlockhani. Over 4,000 refugees from different areas of Burma currently live under the protection of the UNHCR and the Thai government in Ban Don Yang camp. The Mon National Relief Committee (MNRC) provided rations for Ban Don Yang between 1997-2002; the Thai-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) has handled the job for the last 7 years. The UNHCR started recognizing the camp’s residents as refugees in 2004.

Ban Dong Yang, due to its location in Thailand, is officially known as a “refugee camp”.  Just across the border in Burma are the three main Mon resettlement sites called Hlockhani, Bee Ree, and Tavoy; over 10,000 people live at the sites. The largest of these, Halockhani was founded in 1994, when the strongest Mon armed political party, the New Mon State Party (NMSP), was still at arms with Burmese military government; the camp was created to shelter the thousands of Mon refugees who had fled from civil war and suffering inside Burma. The lives of Mon refugees in Halockhani changed for the worse following the cease-fire agreement reached by the NMSP and the Burmese government in 1995. NMSP leader Nai Shwe Kyin made a public statement that Mon refugees could return home; he claimed that there were no civil wars and human rights violations in Mon territories, and that no help would be needed from the UN and International NGOs.

Nai Shwe Kyin’s statement backfired.  NGOs began decreasing the aid they sent to Mon resettlement sites within Burma, but human rights violations and civil wars persisted within Mon territory. Mon refugees living on the Thailand-Burma border found themselves unable to return home, due to infighting between various Mon splinter groups; many were unable to return home when their land was seized by the Burmese government a few years later in 1998, as part of the Burmese military operation known as the “ self-reliance” program. More than 20,000 acres of fruit and rubber plantations were confiscated, and the newly destitute Mon farmers fled to refugee camps. Meanwhile, forced labor, portering, rapes, killings, and other human rights violations continued to be inflicted by the government’s troops in southern Mon State, where Mon splinter groups were active. When the NMSP demanded that the military regime order an end to the oppression, the group was ignored. The cease-fire achieved the opposite of what the NMSP had hoped for.

Victims of the violence tried to flee to Mon resettlement sites, but NGOs had already reduced their support of Mon refugees after the ceasefire. Mon refugees already in the sites found it increasingly difficult to survive, and new arrivals struggled even more. At the same time, the Thai government also set up a policy discouraging NGOs from giving aid across the Thai-Burma border. Instead, donors encouraged Mon refugees to be more self-sufficient.

In the name of “self-sufficiency”, the MNRC, which changed its name to the Mon Relief and Development Committee (MRDC) lent a small amount of its funds to Mon refugee families to produce traditional handicraft products, and to grow rice paddies and plantations; such efforts failed due to the small amount of land and poor security at the sites. Despite the fact that the project failed, NGOs continued reducing their support of Mon refugees. Survival has become a major challenge, and many refugees have snuck inside Thailand to find jobs, to be able to send back money to family members in their resettlement site. At the same time, many refugees have moved out from the sites to some villages close to Three Pagodas Pass to get jobs, as they are afraid of having trouble with Burmese authorities.

“Many children left the school to help their parents with their daily survival. Many of the refugees secretly left the camps and move to some small villages near Three Pagoda Pass Town so that they could find jobs and get income. Many wanted to move into Son Yon camp but the Thai authorities would not allow it,” said Nai Kao Chan, former Headmaster of the Mon National Middle School in Halockhani. Nai Kao Chan claimed that in the last 10 years, more than 30 percent of students have dropped out of school early, in order to help their parents earn money. The main jobs available to Hlockhani residents are bamboo shoot harvesting and working in sweatshops, both jobs earn a salary of 50-100 baht per day. The jobs are considered to be seasonal, and refugees have trouble making enough money to survive.

“I sent my son and daughter to central Thailand as migrant workers to seek jobs. This is the only one way for us to have enough income. If they get good jobs, they can send us money. If they can’t, it is our bad luck,” Mi Shwe [not her real name] told me. Many teenagers from Halockhani camp have moved to Thailand, with the idea of sending home their earning to their families in the camp; such arrangements are the main source of income for Mon refugees in the three sites along the Thai-Burma border.

“The refugees are crying, because donors have only given 25% of the rations for their daily needs in 2009. We can do nothing,” Hlockhani camp Chairman Nai Chit Thaw told me. The donors have also restricted their distribution of other supplies to Mon refugees, and they also stopped giving extra rations to NMSP troops and NMSP officers who have taken on the responsibility of acting as security guards, a responsibility they have taken on for over 13 years.  This development not only endangers the survival of Mon refugees living in the sites on the Thai-Burma border, it also prevents new Mon refugees fleeing from civil strife in Burma from seeking shelter at the sites.

Currently most Mon refugees in the three sites of Hlochkani, Bee Ree, and Tavoy in Burma are from Ye Township, Yebyu Township, and Tavoy Division. Many have left the sites and are taking shelter inside Thailand, in order to find ways to support their families. Many of these people have opted to move in with relatives already in Thailand, in order to get sufficient aid to start a new life.

There also is no space for the new Mon refugees to access shelter in the Thai camps across the border that do have sufficient NGO funding for Mon refugees; Ban Dong Yang is one such camp, and it has the added benefit of being recognized by the UNHCR. Unfortunately, Mon refugees from Hlockhani camp, who want cross the border to move to Ban Dong Yang Camp to be recognized as refugees under the UNHCR, are being barred from the camp by Thai authorities. This is happening while hundreds of Karen Refugees access shelter at Mae Lae camp, despite the fact that Mae Lae also has been under-funded by donors.

However, a chance remains for Mon refugees to seek refugee status under the UNHCR if they register as political asylum seekers, or if they have relatives already living camps. These people have to request that the UNHCR recognize them as refugees, and they have to enroll into a camp. This option is open to only a small number of refugees.

During my final months in Ban Dong Yang, I met a Mon refugee family who was seeking shelter in the camp. Their 10 year-old and 14 year-old sons had been tortured in mid-2008 by local Burmese battalion IB No.31 in their home of Khawzar town, in Ye township, Mon State. The children were stabbed with knives and slapped several time by the battalion’s troops, after the troops accused the children of knowing the location of Mon splinter groups near the town. Luckily, the family was not kicked out of the camp by Thai authorities, as the father of the family has a brother-in-law already recognized by UNHCR.

Since taking shelter in Ban Don Yang camp, the family is now free from life-threatening danger, even though they have had to sacrifice their freedom, and are facing the same difficulties faced by myself, my friends and my fellow refugees. The family is not allowed to leave the camp, it has no income to cover daily life, no electricity, and a small water supply; living in a hut in the middle surrounded by the jungle restricts contact with the outside world. The whole experience is, from my experience, similar to living in prison.

One day, the father of the family took his two sons fishing at nearby Blaed Hnoat dam. “I caught about three kilos of small fish and frogs for our meal,” the father told me. “But now I can’t catch as much as before. Less fish, frog and prawns.”  This man, who only receives rice, salt, oil, fish paste, beans, chili and some fish for rations, claimed that lowered water levels due to the summer season was endangering his family’s survival. The family future remains uncertain; they do not know whether when they can return home or be resettled in a third country because they are not yet recognized as refugees by UNHCR and Thai government.

To be recognized as a refugee by the UNHCR and Thai government, the family must go through the five-step interviewing process about the reasons that they cannot return to Burma. Currently, the family is registered with the UNHCR, the first step in the resettlement process that I’ve recently completed. Unfortunately, the family has to be patient with slow rate of the resettlement process. They must have another interview with the authorities for the second step of the process, and they must be registered as a family in Ban Dong Yang camp for the third step. They must apply yet again to the UNHCR to gain resettlement abroad as for the fourth step, and finally they must have an interview with embassy officers to gain resettlement from a specific third country. All the steps must be passed before the family can be resettled, and the process takes many years to complete; this means the family must survive for many years. The father of the family told me what he hoped future resettlement in the US might bring:

“I want to live a peaceful life. I don’t want to meet Burmese troops anymore, we are scared enough.”