RIGHTS-THAILAND: Karens Worry as Deportation Deadline Nears

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

HUAY NAM NAK, Thailand, May 17 2002 (IPS) - The purr of a vehicle climbing the hilly terrain here sends the Karens living in small wooden shacks fleeing into the nearby dense, green tropical forests.

Fear is at the root of the flight of the nearly 490 Karens eking out an existence on the outskirts of this rural village of Thai farmers, which is along the Thai-Burmese border some 230 kilometers south-west of Bangkok.

The Karens, an ethnic minority from Burma, fear being nabbed by the Thai police and being hauled into a detention centre for illegal immigrants. Often, such arrests lead to prompt deportation to Burma.

And now, these Karens who illegally slipped across the very porous Burmese-Thai border three years ago have more reasons to worry about being sent back to their country because the police sweeps have become more frequent.

“They are afraid of the police. They live uncertain lives, always on the watch for vehicles coming this way,” says Mary Robert, a Catholic nun from the United States who has been living in this area for the past six years.

Putting pressure on these “illegal migrants” is part of Bangkok’s push to repatriate some 150,000 “stateless people” living in Thailand back to Burma by August.

This would come on the heels of Bangkok’s repatriation of more than 2,000 Burmese who were working illegally in Thailand early this year. They were handed over to Rangoon authorities at Myawaddy, an eastern border town, and included more than 1,000 men, about 900 women and close to 100 infants.

The Thai government views this effort as a necessary step to crack down on the hundreds of thousands of foreigners working illegally in this South-east Asian nation. Last year, it succeeded in getting some 560,000 Burmese workers to register with authorities to address illegal migration.

Most of the illegal workers are employed in the agriculture sector and in some factories, where they accept lower pay than locals.

Bangkok also has plans to close about 10 camps that dot the Thai-Burmese border where more than 100,000 people from the Karen and Kareni ethnic group live.

Also affected by this expulsion policy are some 3,000 ethnic Karens who have lived since 1975 in Suan Pueng, a rural district 45 kilometres west of this village. Some of them who arrived in Suan Pueng as children are married and have children of their own, none of whom are Thai citizens, however, due to Thai law on citizenship.

Critics, ranging from Thai academics, rights activists and senators, are concerned about Thailand’s move to expel the “stateless,” particularly those with Karen ethnicity.

“It is wrong to classify the Karens as economic migrants,” says Pantip Sayunthon, a law lecturer at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. “There are people who are economic migrants, but the Karens are here as refugees. They have fled the war in Burma.”

Thai senator Tuenjai Deetes adds efforts to expel the Karens who have escaped the ethnic conflict in their country will go against the hospitality Thailand is known for. “We always say we are open to people fleeing wars, but this is not so,” she says. “We have to protect them (the Karens).”

Since 1975, Thailand has opened its doors to over 1.5 million people fleeing conflicts from neighbouring countries such as Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma. During this period, though, Bangkok has insisted on calling the visitors “displaced people” than “refugees,” yet it has permitted the U.N.’s refugee agency to care for them in many camps across the country.

This gives the Thai government the power to determine who among such people can remain within the country’s borders and for how long — a measure made possible by the fact that Bangkok is not a signatory to the U.N. Refugee Convention. In other words, it has no commitments other than its own humanitarian concerns.

Had it been a signatory of the convention, it would have had to classify the 1.5 million people as refugees and meet the obligations expected of countries hosting people fleeing from war. These obligations include avoiding the repatriation of refugees to their home countries if there are threats to their lives and security due to ongoing conflict.

Human rights activists affirm that such threats are very much a reality for any Karen forced back to their towns and villages in Burma. “The Karens repatriated could be subject to abuse by the Burmese military. It is so in other ethnic minority areas too,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, a regional human rights watchdog, told IPS in a telephone interview.

“The conditions are bad; we cannot push them back to their villages,” adds Jaran Ditapichai, a commissioner on Thailand’s premier human rights body, the National Human Rights Commission.

Among the threats the Karens would face in their villages are “forced labour, detention and torture,” Stothard stressed. “It is dangerous for non-combatants. Government troops can go after them as part of their ‘three cuts’ campaign against the Karen rebels – cut off information, cut of logistics and support and cut off recruitment.”

Such abuses, in addition to the burning of their villages, were the primary reasons that forced the Karens to flee their homes for safe refuge in Thailand, says Sakon Kuapu, a Karen community leader in Suan Pueng. “There is little safety now, and some are saying they would be killed if they go back.”

The civil war between Burma’s ruling military junta and Karen separatist rebels goes back many decades, and is one of the ethnic conflicts in that country that has given rise to some 30 rebel organisations. The Karen separatists are fighting to drive out Rangoon’s military from the Karen state.

This month has seen more violence in the Karen region, after Burmese troops attacked strongholds of the Karen National Union. Government forces were reported to have burnt homes and forced Karen villagers to work for them. This also resulted in some 500 Karen civilians fleeing to Thailand.

Burma has been dogged by ethnic strife after independence in 1948. Some 68 percent of the country’s 48 million people belong to the majority Burman community. The Shans are the largest ethnic minority, with nine percent of the population, followed by the Karens, six percent. The country’s political and military elite is Burman.

“The Burmese sent back from Thailand will have no problem, but not so the Karens,” says Kuapu. “That is why the people here are desperate.”