By recent reports from the Free Burma Rangers, nearly 11,000 people have been displaced in the recent SPDC attacks in Karen State. It's not been big in the mainstream press, but there are certian Christian publications which tend to follow the events in eastern Burma, and as one would expect, have been following this most recent tragedy. It typically gets portrayed in the press that the Karen are Christian - a not untrue representation, but also not entirely accurate. I'm not personally fond of human rights issues such as this being given an overtly religious slant, as it tends to marginalize the stories of those who are not of the religion being representated. Christians are being persecuted in Burma, but so is everyone else. There are a lot of missionaries working with the Karen, and some of these media organizatios are evangelical, both of which I think kind of gives the impression that the Christianity found among Burmese ethnic minorities like the Karen is of the 'born-again', evangelical type. But as Christianity has been in Burma for over 100 years now, I think it's more likely that the religious attitudes there are not unlike that in the US - there are of course going to be very religious types, but there are also just as likely to be secular or non-religious Christians as well.
Anyway, that was little bit of a tangent, but my point is that if one follows the media, they may be unaware that the Karen, and other 'Christian' ethnic groups are still only about 60% Christian. Which leaves a pretty sizeable number of people who aren't, and who are also being impacted by the oppression and displacement occurring there. Many Karen are Buddhist or animist, which I was previously aware of. I was not, however, previously familiar with the fact that some Karen are Muslim, which is why I found this article interesting. I've been trying to find more information on the subject, but haven't yet. I will share more as I find it.
The second article is by Supara Janchitfah, about ethnic Thais in Burma who have been left stateless since part of the Thai-Burma border in the South was (re)drawn about 60 years ago. Again, this was something I'd not heard of before and found it quite intriguing. It's a classic example of the arbitrary way in which political borders are drawn and the ambiguities and negative impacts they create in the lives of people who happened to be in the way.
I did turn up an older message from 1997 at the Burma Library when I googled "ethnic Thais in Burma", but not much else.
As for Janchitfah's article, it was written for the Bangkok Post, but anyone who's ever tried to search their archives or clicked through to a linked article knows it doesn't work. They have the most poorly organized webpage of any major newspaper I know, and on top of it, they charge over one US dollar per article to read online archives over 7 days old. Notwithstanding, I'd still post a portion of the article with a link to the original - if I had the link. But even after a reasonable effort to search the Bangkok Post's archives and recent news, I wasn't able to find it. So I've posted the full text as I received it via a group email - but if anyone has a link to the original please let me know. If the writer or publisher happens across this post, I'll happily remove the text if they have a problem with it. As I said, I couldn't find any other info on this topic, and I think it's a shame for the Post to be hiding it in the bowels of the labyrinth they call a website. So read, enjoy, and learn. Keep an eye out on the Bangkok Post for the next articles in the series.
[Ed. Guess I didn't look as hard as I thought! The article is here. At least, it may be for the next few days. I've cut part of the article below, but I'm still saving it for later]
Cartographic Displacement
When Suthin Kingkaew crossed over the Thai border some years ago, Thai Patrol Police at the Three Pagodas Pass in Kanchanaburi expressed their surprise. "Oh! you are Burmese but you speak Thai." He told the police that he was not in fact Burmese but a Thai who had been living and was born in Burma. That made the police even more confused. "If you were born in Burma, why do you say that you are Thai," the police asked. Although Suthin felt uneasy, he tried to explain. He told them that there were more than 20,000 people like him who speak a southern dialect of the Thai language who live in the Burmese states of Mergui (Marid in Thai) and Tenasserim State (Tanaosri in Thai), displaced from their motherland by a re-drawing of the map.
"I don't have Burmese citizenship and don't know how to speak Burmese. I cannot speak Burmese because there was no Burmese school in my village and we didn't want to study Burmese anyway. Normally we learn how to read and write Thai at a temple in our village," said Suthin. He added that it was a tradition for all Thais who live in that area to learn how to read and write Thai, practised for many generations since the time of their great-grandparents. However, he said, there was no other formal education provided at the temple.
Suthin is one of more than 47,735 displaced Thais who are now living in both urban and rural areas of Tak, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Chumphon, Ranong and Phangnga provinces without any documentation of either Thai or Burmese nationality. They come from Mergui, Tenasserim, Theinkun and so on (see map), all of which were historically part of Thailand, to seek a safe and peaceful life on Thai soil. Most of those interviewed by Perspective said living in Burma was not bad before the arrival of the present military dictatorship. Most had a little land to grow enough rice and other crops to sustain themselves, even if they had no certificates of land ownership. Tenasserim and Mergui are quite a distance from the central administration in Rangoon. In a country plagued with so many civil wars, ethnic Thais and some other small minority groups were left intact. Before 1988, few Burmese officials came to their villages. Those who came tended to show respect to the ethnic Thais and allowed them to live as they wanted.
After 1988, the year of the student uprising and subsequent crackdown in Rangoon, the situation took a turn for the worse. Around 1988 or 1989, said Suthin, the Burmese government sent three battalions to Bokpyin village where he lived, which was home to about 300 ethnic Thai families. "The army came and forced us to do so many things, such as construction work and to be porters," he said. He worked as a porter serving Burmese army battalions for more than six months. "I walked from my hometown to somewhere close to the Thai border. All of those who were forced to go with the Burmese troops knew they would have little chance of ever coming home, not even our remains," he said. So when he learned that the Thai border was not far from where the troops were stationed he took his chances and made his escape.
It was not the first time he had seen Thailand. Suthin's great grandparents were from Takua Pa (presently a district in Phangnga) and Talang (presently a district in Phuket). He first entered his ancestral land as a Buddhist monk in 1984 when he was 21 years old. It is a tradition that all Thai men on the other side of the ridges of the Tenasserim Mountains be ordained. It was also normal practise at that time for Thais from both sides of the present border to walk across the national boundary line to see their relatives. "I came to Thailand by walking four days and nights, staying overnight in the forest. It was my dream to come to Thailand to study the teaching of Dharma more intensively," he said. But after studying Dharma in Thailand, he knew that he had to return to Burma. "I had seen my forefathers' land, but I knew that I had to go back home. I had nothing in Thailand," he said. He went home and continued farming and living peacefully in Burma until 1988, when he said most of the people in his village felt that they could no longer live in Burma. "Even though we had land and could farm and earn enough to live, we had no freedom," said Suthin.
Noi Jitpakdi, 40, is another who came to Thailand at the end of the 1980s. "We were forced to pay many taxes in the form of the agricultural goods that we produced," Noi said. They were also forced to provide their bodies for labour or as human shields for the army. She added that some people in her village had paid somebody else to go war for them, as they knew that "joining the troops is a high risk".
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