LABOUR-THAILAND: Burmese Workers Move between Hope, Despair

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 19 2003 (IPS) - A town along Thailand’s north-western border is becoming the testing ground for the fate of the Burmese who pour into this country for work – even if it comes at the cost having to live in fear, or face death.

It is in Mae Sot that events of hope and despair have been unfolding within the space of a month, forcing the Thai government to re-examine its policy toward the hundreds of thousands of Burmese migrants in the country.

This week, Thai human rights activists and lawyers ended a seminar in the immigrant-rich town by resolving to pressure the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to be more expansive and sensitive in dealing with the Burmese.

”The government is not interested in the migrant workers, but we want that to change. We need action to strengthen their rights,” Jaran Ditapichai of the National Human Rights Commission, Thailand’s premier rights body, says in an interview.

Included in this agenda for change are measures to create a mechanism to protect migrant workers from human rights abuses and to ensure that their rights to decent working conditions, to stay, to education and to health care are guaranteed.

By contrast, Bangkok currently has only a two-fold policy toward migrant workers – a mechanism to legalise their right to work and to provide health care for these workers.

This latest offering of hope to Burmese migrants in Mae Sot or other towns comes in the wake of the violent incident in late May where six Burmese construction workers were beaten, killed and then burnt in Mae Sot.

According to eyewitness accounts published in the local media, the six male victims, who ranged from 19 to 33 years of age, had been attacked by an armed group with links to local officials. The attackers had threatened to expose the migrants to the police if they refused to pay them money.

”This was the result of the Thai government not treating abused migrants as victims but as criminals,” says Sunai Phasuk of Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby. ”It exposed the government for not doing enough.”

Rights activists here also blame the government for creating conditions that gave licence for some Thais to abuse vulnerable Burmese migrants. That stems from a push by Bangkok since early May to launch a ”war” on undocumented migrant workers.

It comes on top of the regular practice of undocumented migrant workers being arrested everyday, with some reports estimating that in Mae Sot alone close to 100 illegal Burmese migrants are nabbed by the authorities.

The impact of this ”war” was ”felt immediately,” says a Burmese activists, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”There was one day in early May when close to a thousand Burmese were arrested in Bangkok by the police.”

”We have noticed an increase in the arrests and deportations of Burmese without documents,” he says.

Normally, by contrast, the Immigration Detention Centre, the Thai body that handles the arrest and deportation of Burmese illegal migrants, handles about 200 cases per week in the Thai capital.

This process got underway early last year following an agreement reached by the Thaksin administration and Burma’s military government to send home undocumented Burmese workers in Thailand.

Over an estimated 10,000 Burmese have been sent back since early last year through this exercise, says Jackie Pollock of the Migrant Assistance Programme, a non-governmental organisation based in the northern city of Chiang Mai. ”But the unofficial deportation is higher than the official numbers.”

As it is, Burmese make up the bulk of Thailand’s undocumented migrant workers – an estimated 1.1 million. The rest are from Cambodia, some 88,000, and Laos, 110,000.

The 2,400 kilometre-long border that Thailand shares with Burma is porous and enables the migrants who belong to Burma’s ethnic communities such as Shan, Karen, Mon and Burman to cross easily in search of work, seeking escape from the dismal state of the Burmese economy and the military oppression.

But in 2001, Bangkok initiated a registration programme for migrant workers, with the hope of making them legal. Close to 568,000 undocumented workers registered with the authorities on that occasion, with nearly 460,000 of them coming from Burma.

In 2002, some 409,000 migrant workers registered. But the promised cards granting them permission to employment was not available, making them vulnerable to abusive employers.

”This was a problem and it led to their (workers’) rights being violated,” adds Pollock. ”The government is due to give the workers the cards soon, thus fulfilling an obligation.”

These efforts to make migrant worker breath easier comes at a time when research reveals how increasingly dependent sections of the Thai economy are on the migrant labour force.

For instance, officials at the International Organisation of Migration, an inter-governmental body, admit that the agriculture sector along some border provinces in Thailand is kept alive by the sweat of migrant workers, while the fisheries sector would have had to close down had it not been for these workers.

Such jobs, often described as the ”three Ds” for dirty, dangerous and difficult, are often done even when the migrant workers are aware that they earn less per day than what their Thai counterparts get.

”The Thai government is interested in conducting populist policies, which do not help migrant workers,” says Jaran, the human rights commissioner. ”Change is important in places like Mae Sot to ensure that these migrant get their rights.”