A Myanmar girl, displaced by war, sells cigarettes through the razor-wired border with Thailand near the frontier town of Mae Sot. Thailand is bracing for another influx of refugees. Credit: William Webb/lPS

By William Webb
MAE SOT, Thailand, Mar 13 2024 (IPS)

The Maung family is rebuilding their lives in a foreign land. A freshly painted signboard with a play on the word Revolution declares their small restaurant is open for business, and breakfast features traditional Myanmar mohinga—rice noodles and fish soup.

Three years ago, the family of four was prospering in the central Myanmar city of Mandalay but suddenly everything changed. The military seized back power from the newly elected government, and thousands of people took to the streets in protest, including the Maungs. A brutal crackdown ensued across Myanmar, the father was arrested and their two restaurants seized.

Since the 2021 coup, the UN estimates some 2.4 million more people have been displaced by conflict across Myanmar, while 78,000 civilian properties, including homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship, have been burnt or destroyed by the military.

The Maung family was wise to leave Myanmar when they could, and fortunate to survive the hazardous journey eastwards towards the border with Thailand. After spending a year in a border camp for IDPs run by the military wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) in eastern Kayin State, the family managed to cross into the Thai frontier town of Mae Sot to start afresh, even if they exist in a grey zone of legality alongside tens of thousands of others.

More waves of refugees are following in their footsteps.

“We have 750,000 IDPs in our territory,” said a senior official of the KNU, which has been waging the world’s longest civil war against successive Myanmar regimes since 1949. “A year ago, there were 500,000 to 600,000. Numbers are rising because the military is deliberately targeting civilians,” he told IPS in Mae Sot, asking not to be named.

Myanmar refugees in Thailand pick out clothes piled in the street that have been donated in the border town of Mae Sot. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Against this background and wanting to preempt an influx, Thailand’s new coalition government announced its intention last month to open up a ‘humanitarian corridor’ into Myanmar to funnel aid to IDPs and keep them well away from the border.

Thailand’s military—the real arbiter of power in these border regions and holding sway over two parties in the coalition—is haunted by the spectre of past and present examples of chaos through conflict. In the 1980s, Thailand reluctantly hosted several hundred thousand Cambodian refugees, including remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, on its eastern borders. Today it looks west and sees Bangladesh struggling to contain in camps some one million Rohingya refugees forced out of Myanmar in what the UN special rapporteur on human rights called a genocidal campaign by the Myanmar military.

But beyond the ‘humanitarian’ aspect, what has caused anger within the various groups fighting the Myanmar military as well as rights activists, is Thailand’s own admission that its humanitarian corridor proposal is aimed at drawing the regime’s State Administration Council (SAC) into a dialogue that would lead to a negotiated settlement with Myanmar’s diverse resistance forces.

Neither the KNU nor the parallel National Unity Government set up by ousted Myanmar lawmakers after the coup were consulted by Thailand, which received a green light from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Under Thailand’s initiative, aid would be delivered initially to 20,000 IDPs by the Thai Red Cross and the Myanmar Red Cross (whose senior administrators are former military officers) and monitored by ASEAN’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management, where the Myanmar junta also has a presence.

“Aid is used everywhere in the world as a political entry point,” the KNU official commented. “This is not a pure humanitarian issue. They want to bring the SAC out of isolation. This is very problematic for us.”

A senior NUG official, also based in Thailand, was similarly concerned by the political intentions behind the proposal.  “It’s a desperate measure by ASEAN seeking a semblance of negotiated peace and dialogue,” he told IPS.

The official doubted it would get off the ground in its present form without the support of the Karen forces that control large areas of Kayin State, nor without the full backing of the US.

The US values its long-held strategic ties with Thailand and its military, and Thai Foreign Minister Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara returned from Washington last month, declaring that he had secured complete US support for the initiative, although the US public statement appeared more cautious.

Human rights activists and humanitarian workers on the Thai-Myanmar border remain highly sceptical of the initiative, denouncing it as a “weaponization of aid”.

Thailand, they note, has never officially recognized the refugee status of nearly 100,000 people living in nine UNHCR camps along the Thai-Myanmar border since the 1990s.

“This is not about providing humanitarian aid to the people of Myanmar. It is about giving a new lifeline to the junta to re-engage with ASEAN and everybody else,” commented Paul Greening, a former UN senior staff officer and now independent consultant in Mae Sot.

“Neighbours and other international actors, including the US and China, do not want the junta to fall. They do not want the junta to win but they do not want it to fall either. This is why they all want a ‘negotiated settlement’,” he said.

Igor Blazevic, a senior adviser at the Prague Civil Society Centre who previously worked in Myanmar, said a “carrot” was being held out to the Myanmar regime at a time when it was “seriously weakened and shaken” after losing large areas of territory to resistance forces both in Rakhine State in the west and in Shan State close to China.

“A political aim behind the ‘humanitarian initiative’ is the intention to treat genocidal power-usurpers in uniform as the inevitable and unavoidable key factor in Myanmar’s ‘stability’ and with combination of soft pressure and humanitarian incentives, try to force everybody else to surrender, in a soft way, to ongoing military dominance in politics and the economy,” Blazevic wrote in a commentary.

With the UN warning that nearly two million people in Myanmar are expected to fall into the “highest category of needs severity (catastrophic)” this year, the resistance is aware that they will come under intense international pressure not to reject the Thai initiative.

Recent developments indicate Thailand may rethink its proposal, however. It has opened channels with the KNU and the NUG to discuss their involvement in facilitating aid deliveries through Myanmar civil society organisations independent of the regime. Word has it that the Myanmar Red Cross is not that keen to be directly involved, knowing it is too close to the regime to be able to safely deliver aid to those who have suffered atrocities at its hands.

For the Maung family and their small eatery in Mae Sot, a dream would be to return to Mandalay and Myanmar in peace. But they have little hope of such an outcome, nor do they really want to remain in Thailand, along with over two million other Myanmar workers, classified as migrants, not refugees.

For the moment, life revolves around navigating Thailand’s complex and often corrupt system to secure papers that would give them a degree of legitimacy and enable them to move beyond Mae Sot and surrounding Tak Province. A possible lifeline is an ethnic Chinese branch of their family with members in Taiwan.

“Taiwan could be our future,” says the elder of two daughters, who still dreams of going to university. “I can learn Chinese,” she says, in excellent English.

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A selection of mostly simple food items put together in Myanmar in parcels for political prisoners, using funds raised by activists and the Burmese diaspora. Credit: Supplied to William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
CHIANGMAI, Thailand, Feb 26 2024 (IPS)

Rangoon Nights is rocking. The bar is on its feet and the cocktail shaker is shaking in abandon as the band Born In Burma starts pumping out its beat.

Except we’re not in Rangoon or Burma (officially called Myanmar), but in the northern Thai town of Chiangmai which has evolved into a hub for activists, fugitives, and those taking a break from the war tearing their country apart.

Dancing among them with a wraith-like grace is Sakura—her nom de guerre—who, like others in the bar popular with Myanmar exiles, is there both to let her hair down and to raise funds for the revolutionary movement fighting the military junta that seized power three years ago.

Sakura’s personal operation—run by a small, close-knit team—is to deliver food parcels to a few dozen political prisoners held by the regime in appalling conditions across Myanmar. More than 1,500 are documented to have died in detention by force or by neglect since the coup. Over 20,000 are known to be behind bars.

“The parcels are a message for them—that we still support you and don’t forget you,” says Sakura.

Her project evolved by accident. Sakura was in Yangon in early 2021, joining vast crowds of anti-coup protesters, when her cousin was arrested and disappeared into the prison system. Suspecting she was held in Yangon’s notorious Insein jail (built by British colonisers in the 1800s), lawyers told Sakura that if she delivered a food parcel with her cousin’s name and it was accepted at the prison, then it would signal she was indeed inside.

It worked. Sakura shared this piece of useful information on Facebook, the social media outlet favoured by the resistance, while the junta uses Telegram. Soon, she started receiving pleas for help from families of other prisoners.

Sakura’s food parcel project was born. It moved with her to Thailand in 2022 after she fled police raids on her Yangon home. “I can’t go back,” she says.

Her small but effective operation speaks volumes about the war in Myanmar—largely forgotten beyond its borders; ineffectual international institutions and humanitarian organisations; little outside aid. But juxtaposed with domestic and vibrant civil society organisations like Sakura’s that strive to make a difference, work efficiently, and give a chance for a better future.

Sakura’s parcels—assembled inside Myanmar—contain soup powder to flavour bland prison mush, instant noodles, cookies, ingredients for much-loved tea-leaf salad, anti-bacterial soap for skin diseases, soap powder for clothes, shampoo, and toothbrush and paste. Plus the all-important Premier brand of coffee mix, which acts as a form of currency among prisoners.

The team presently delivers to about 35 prisoners a month, a tiny fraction of the growing numbers that the junta is incarcerating in a prison construction boom, one of the few sectors of the economy benefiting from the civil war.

Faces of the dead. Myanmar’s non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners has a museum in the Thai border town of Mae Sot documenting the identities of over 3,000 civilians killed by the military since it seized power in 2021, as well as those killed since the first post-independence coup in 1962.

Working with a total monthly budget of some 3.0 million kyat (about USD 850 at the street rate), Sakura also sends money to sustain poor families whose main breadwinners are now behind bars. One is the mother of a Yangon hotel receptionist in her 20s who was sentenced to 15 years.

“Her crime was to have donated about USD 10 to the resistance. Police seized her phone and found the payment on the app. Her mother is ill and cannot work,” explains Sakura, who learned English in a Buddhist monastery and comes from a family of farmers.

Delivering the parcels is not a typical Deliveroo operation. Funds are sent from Thailand by various means to her small team in Myanmar, who, at the risk of arrest for ‘supporting terrorism’, buy the items and pack the parcels. They are then discreetly passed to lawyers representing the prisoners, who pass them on to family members who take them on their prison visits.

Sanitary products are included for some female detainees. “Sometimes we also get special requests for clothes and underwear. My budget doesn’t always stretch,“ she says.

On the other side of Chiangmai, Sonny Swe, a well-known Myanmar entrepreneur and publisher formerly based in Yangon, reflects on the trauma of over eight years of solitary confinement in prison, from 2004 to 2013, and the importance then of family visits bringing food parcels.

“Meditation, exercise, reading” were the bedrock of his survival, he says over a hearty Burmese breakfast of mohinga fish soup in his café, Gatone’s (Baldy’s). He was held in five different prisons and the long distances from home prevented regular family visits.

“I kept telling myself, ‘I am strong, strong. I will survive. They will not break me. I will defeat them.’ But once you come out of prison, you understand the toll, the trauma. You think you are fine and strong but you are not.”

Bo Kyi, Joint Secretary of the non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), was a political prisoner for seven years and knows well the succour provided by family and friends to those incarcerated.

“Family support is very important for a political prisoner,” he says. Now 59, he was jailed from 1990–93 for demonstrating and calling for release of all political prisoners, and arrested again in 1994 for four more years. He says military intelligence tried to recruit him as an informer but he refused and, in turn, demanded freedom for all political prisoners and for the regime to enter into dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi who was then under house arrest. Leader of the elected government overthrown in the coup, she is back in prison.

Bo Kyi co-founded AAPP in the Thai border town of Mae Sot in March 2000. The organisation meticulously documents identities of political prisoners and tracks their fate, as well as civilians killed by the regime. AAPP, deemed an illegal organisation by the regime, also offers training in dealing with trauma and counselling services, assisted by Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.

As of late February, AAPP has documented the names and identities of 20,147 people it defines as political prisoners, including over 4,000 women and 300 children. Sentenced to death, so far, are 15 women and 136 men. Four were executed on July 23, 2022, including well known activist Ko Jimmy.

As of January 31 this year, it had documented 1,588 people who were “killed through force or neglect” during detention by the regime and its supporters since the coup. The actual number may be much higher. “Torture is endemic,” AAPP says. A large number of those killed in detention are in Sagaing Region, “where resistance by the people is fiercest,”  says AAPP.

They are not just statistics. Speaking of the bravery of those inside Myanmar who try to alleviate the plight of prisoners, Sakura shares the latest shocking news.

Noble Aye, a prominent human rights activist, was reportedly killed in detention along with a companion, apparently after a court hearing on February 8 in Bago Region. They had been detained at a checkpoint in Waw Township on January 20, allegedly carrying weapons and ammunition, charges that the resistance say were false.

She had been jailed twice before as a political prisoner and shared a cell with Zin Mar Aung, the current foreign affairs minister in the shadow National Unity Government set up after the coup.

As it does regularly, the regime was reported to have blamed her death in detention on an escape attempt. The family says they received information that her body was secretly cremated. Noble Aye was 49 and in bad health.

William Webb is an independent travel writer

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A Buddhist pagoda towers above a teeming thoroughfare in Mae Sot, a Thai town dense with tens of thousands of people fleeing conflict in nearby Myanmar. Credit: William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
MAE SOT, Thailand, Feb 15 2024 (IPS)

The news travelled like wildfire. In the teashops, bars, and market stalls that make Thailand’s border town of Mae Sot feel far more Burmese than Thai, the feared rumours circulating at the weekend were suddenly confirmed.

Military conscription would be imposed on young men and women for two to five years, regime-controlled broadcasters in Myanmar announced on the Saturday night airwaves. Details were sparse.

Panic scrolling through social media suddenly replaced conversation in one popular Mae Sot hangout run by a Burmese activist-entrepreneur for his clientele of exiles, fugitives, and migrants. Pool players stopped mid-break. “What the ***!” exclaimed the member of a rock band. 

Myanmar’s junta has been at war with much of the country since staging a coup three years ago, but still, it has come as a serious shock that for the first time in modern history, the military will impose on young people the choice of two uniforms—army or prison.

Analysts—Burmese and foreign—interpreted the developments in various ways. For some, it was a clear sign that the military was losing this patchwork civil war and could not sustain itself. For decades, it had thrived on recruiting youngsters from poor areas of the Bamar-majority heartlands of Sagaing and Magwe. But now those same arid regions are hotbeds of resistance against the regime, its forces stretched across the length and breadth of almost the entire country, depending mostly on air power to bomb civilian areas into submission.

A Burmese woman wearing thanaka to protect her face from the sun walks through a market in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. The stall is selling the wood bark that is ground into the cosmetic paste so popular in Myanmar. Credit: William Webb/IPS

“An act of desperation,” Igor Blazevic said of the junta’s move, which follows sizeable territorial losses and a meltdown of its forces in northern Shan State late last year. Blazevic, a Myanmar expert at the Prague Civil Society Centre, predicted on Facebook that the measure would backfire because the regime was too “weakened and broken” to be able to administer recruitment on a large scale.

But on Monday night, more news was breaking that indicated the junta had got its ducks in a row—airports were suddenly requiring military authorisation stamped on tickets for even internal domestic flights. According to unconfirmed reports, some junta-controlled border posts were closing or imposing similar restrictions, and young men had been picked up on the streets of the commercial capital Yangon.

“It’s another way of terrorising the population,” was the view of one young Burmese who did not want to be named for obvious reasons.

In the Myanmar capital, Nay Pyi Taw, junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun simply said conscription was essential because of the “situation”.

“The duty to safeguard and defend the nation extends beyond just the soldiers but to all citizens. So I want to tell everyone to proudly follow this people’s military service law,” he intoned.

No way, retorted May, a young refugee whose dream of becoming a doctor was shattered by the 2021 coup and the arrest of her father.

She said compulsory military service would simply drive more young people to join the People’s Defence Forces of the resistance— despite the heavy losses they are incurring and the military’s barbaric treatment of prisoners subjected to torture, summary executions, and, most recently, strung up and torched.

May slipped across the nearby border into Mae Sot with her family after spending two years as a refugee in a camp run by a section of the Karen National Liberation Army fighting what is known as the world’s longest-running civil war dating back to 1949.

“I cannot go back to Myanmar,” she said. At 19 years old, she fits the age range of 18 to 27 for single women to be conscripted. For men, it is 18 to 35 years, rising to 45 for specialists like doctors and IT workers who quit their state sector posts in droves after the coup, joining the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of non-violent resistance.

On Sunday night in Mae Sot, large crowds of this latest wave of the Myanmar diaspora gathered for an outdoor CDM fund-raising concert, featuring dancing and music performed by several of the country’s ethnic minorities, including Karen and Chin. The concert was sponsored by an online bank set up by the resistance. Stalls sold knick-knacks and garments, and beer and hot food were swiftly ferried about by teams of neatly dressed waiters.

May and her entrepreneurial family had their properties and businesses seized and sealed by the military near Mandalay and are now rebuilding their lives, running a small restaurant among the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Burmese living in and around Mae Sot, setting up businesses, social services, and accommodation safe from predatory Thai officials and regime spies.

May remains determined to study medicine somewhere somehow, representative of a young, capable, and innovative generation of Burmese plugged into a digital world while moving in and out of the shadows of war.

Bo Kyi, a veteran activist and former prisoner who co-founded the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners in Mae Sot 24 years ago, saw the military’s conscription order as a “huge challenge” for young people, especially those who had tried to keep out of politics and war. It would become very hard to leave the country legally now, he said.

“Millions will suffer and Burma will lose its human resources,” he said.

William Webb is a travel writer who started out in Asia nearly 50 years ago

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Myanmar’s resistance called a ‘silent strike’ on February 1, the third anniversary of the military coup. This main street leading to Sule Pagoda in central Yangon was relatively quiet, but residents said fewer people heeded the strike call this year. Credit: William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
YANGON, Myanmar, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

Landing in Rangoon nearly 100 years ago, a young Chilean poet described “a city of blood, dreams, and gold” with “leprous streets”. The flourishing capital of then British-ruled Burma and its major port were a must-see staging post on an Asian tour.

Pablo Neruda’s poem from 1927 rings true today. The city, now called Yangon, with well over five million inhabitants, is bursting with life—part hedonistic and part dystopian—and both fuelled and choked by the grip of the junta that seized power three years ago.

Empty rail tracks in central Yangon. Fewer trains are running in Myanmar because rail workers quit in protest at the 2021 coup, and resistance fighters are targeting lines and trains used by the military up and down the country. Credit: William Webb/IPS

The military regime organised a rally in central Yangon on February 1 to counter the resistance’s strike call. People were transported there under heavy security and given flags and a free lunch. Credit: William Webb/IPS

The reality is that Myanmar no longer exists as a coherent country, except on maps. Three years of extremely brutal conflict between a complex patchwork of pro- and anti-military forces has left Yangon—still a vital commercial hub—a relatively calm yet deeply troubled bubble amidst a stop-start process of nationwide fragmentation.

The military that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s twice-elected government in February 2021 is losing control over large chunks of Myanmar. Armed mainly by China and Russia, the junta uses aerial supremacy and artillery to terrorise a population that, for the first time in modern history, has seen the Bamar majority turn overwhelmingly against the generals in Myanmar’s heartland.

But the war is not quite knocking at Yangon’s door yet, and the military has been emboldened to issue tourist and business visas to foreigners, no doubt welcoming their US dollars.

Yangon’s other “reality” is that despite being ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries, it is actually awash in money—the blood and gold described by Neruda. Billions of dollars flow from the expanding production and trade of narcotics, particularly methamphetamines, ketamine, and opium/heroin, and from vast casinos, brothels, and scam centres along the border with China and Thailand, populated by victims of trafficking.

Street markets in Yangon are brimming with food, but people complain vociferously about soaring prices and low wages. Despite the conflict, food is in plentiful supply in Myanmar’s biggest city. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was overthrown after a second landslide election victory, is jailed in the capital, Nay Pyi Taw. She remains popular, and her image can be occasionally spotted in the street, here with other icons. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Chinatown in Yangon is packed with people preparing Chinese New Year celebrations on February 10. Tense relations between China and the Myanmar junta have made the community nervous. Credit: William Webb/IPS

A woman with two toddlers and a baby on her lap begs outside a temple in Yangon. People say more children can be seen begging these days as the economy struggles and migrants move into the city from conflict areas. Credit: William Webb/IP

The junta does not directly control all these operations, but it takes a large slice, as do allied militias, criminal gangs, and some ethnic armed groups.

A gleaming white Bentley is parked outside one newly opened nightspot frequented by the offspring of the Yangon elite—the “cronies” whose businesses prosper in spite of, or often because of, sanctions imposed by the West. Inside the plush bar, youngsters in smart and sometimes scanty attire order expensive western drinks and truffle-flavoured fries.

“Madness prevails,” says a charity worker who describes walking through a compound and seeing a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and “even a Bugatti” parked there. Such ostentatious wealth abounds, but he cannot find a nurse to employ.

Elsewhere, the boom-boom of Burmese techno-rock and the strobe lights of the Levitate nightclub exclude conversation among the heaving dancing mass. There is “the choice of ecstasy, ketamine, or cocaine” instead, as one regular put it.

“FUCK THEM WE SLAY,” a neon sign proclaims ambiguously.

A neon sign illuminates the Levitate nightclub in Yangon, where revellers dance through curfew hours, fuelled by booze and cheap drugs. Credit: William Webb/IPS

A book seller said motivational books were popular these days. This classic by Carnegie was translated into Burmese by U Nu, a former prime minister who was ousted by the military in 1962. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Further down the social scale, Yangon’s familiar open-air “beer stations” are thriving too. Supporters of the resistance take a stand by boycotting the once popular Myanmar Beer brand owned by a military conglomerate, but more expensive alternatives exist.

And then there are the growing numbers of beggars, especially children who dodge traffic to thrust their hands through open car windows or huddle with their mothers in the shade of overpasses.

Rush hour traffic is still chokingly intense and was even quite busy on February 1, the third anniversary of the coup, when the resistance called a ‘silent strike’, urging people to stay off the streets in peaceful protest. Adherence in Yangon was patchy and less than last year.

“People are tired and want to get on with their lives,” comments one long-time observer.

And this is the nub of it. Life goes on, but it does not mean the Burmese are less opposed to the junta, as before when troops crushed street protests in 2021 with mass arrests and live bullets. Aung San Suu Kyi, stuck in prison and turning 80 next year, remains popular.

However, people do seem to be losing faith in the opposition’s declarations of the military’s imminent collapse, even if, as one businessman opined, “There’s a strong sense that things are falling apart now, that the military is overstretched.”

Some Yangon residents are also tired of feeling guilty that they are living relatively well while young resistance fighters in far-flung rural parts are dying in combat and conflict-zone civilians are being bombed in villages, schools, and temples.

A woman selling umbrellas made of waterproofed cotton. She said times are difficult. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Many are leaving the country—legally with passports, risking dangerous routes through the jungle to Thailand, or clandestinely by sea for the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority. Studying Japanese is suddenly popular in Yangon.

The city by day seems normal enough, with little visible military presence in most places, but by night it changes. Plainclothes police demand ID papers and go through mobile phones. Suspicious bank payments, perhaps to the opposition, mean arrest or demands for a bribe.

Ye, whose business collapsed in the post-coup pandemic lockdown, has sent his children back to a public school after taking them out of classes, as many did. They won’t see their mother for a long time. She has gone abroad to earn money as a care worker.

Like everyone you meet, the family frets about the soaring cost of living, especially food.

Daily power cuts, sometimes scheduled but often not, make life almost unbearable in the intense pre-monsoon heat. People are drawn to the air-conditioned cool of shopping malls, powered by giant diesel generators.

Still, Yangon’s vibrancy is irrepressible. Artists are again holding exhibitions (staying clear of controversial themes). Chinatown is a hive of shoppers ahead of the Lunar New Year, ushering in the Dragon, a symbol of good luck and prosperity, but also of power.

• William Webb is a travel writer whose love affair with Asia began 50 years ago

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