Rebels fighting Burma's military regime find safety in New Zealand

By TIM WATKIN

Down a treeless suburban street in Glen Innes, in a state house much the same as all the others, eight men drink tea and talk about their time as revolutionary soldiers in the border jungles of Burma.

Infomercials parade across an old TV that crouches mute in the corner as the men recall battle, hunger and, all too often, defeat.

There are memories too of Maneeloy, the notorious Thai refugee camp where they all lived for months or years; the place that became their protection - and their prison - until last year, when New Zealand accepted them among 207 Burmese nationals as part of our annual refugee quota.

Their stories are unique - they are from different towns, had different jobs and lifestyles - but come together in protest and paramilitary action against the murderous regime ruling Burma, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. Known, like a group of villains from a James Bond film, as Slorc, it is the latest incarnation of the military dictatorship that has ruled Burma for nearly 40 years.

One of the group, Aung Win Thaung, was a goldsmith in southern Burma who led demonstrations when the people rose up against dictator Ne Win and his cronies in 1988. When the military coup was announced on September 19 of that year "to rescue Burma from disintegration and chaos," he hurriedly left his home town for the Thai border to join the rag-tag legions of freedom-fighters taking up arms against the regime.

On the couch opposite sits Aye Zaw Han, a history student at a college 80km from the capital Rangoon who recruited new members for the democracy movement. After twice being arrested, he too fled for the border and joined the Karen National Union (KNU) in its armed struggle.

"When we went fighting," he says as a lawn-mower buzzes somewhere outside, "everybody slept in the jungle, some times for six months. Some times we fight face to face, some times they shoot the big gun with 120mm shells. We had many times of failure."

The insurgents have been able to fight only a guerrilla war of ambushes and skirmishes against the regime. Ethnic divisions have split opposition forces into numerous fragmented armies that have increasingly struggled to get enough guns and ammunition, leaving some soldiers unarmed.

Disillusion and defeat have taken their toll and many such as Thaung, who fought for 10 years, have headed across the border to Thailand and safety.

Safety, but no security - Thailand has not signed the United Nations convention on refugees and considers Burmese political refugees as illegal immigrants, subject to arrest and deportation.

Min Maung Thin, now living in Northcote, was fleeing the advancing Burmese army with his family when they tried to cross into Thailand in 1997. But when he became separated from his family, his wife and children were arrested by Thai police and sent back to Burma.

Formerly a lawyer in Rangoon and a member of the KNU supreme court, he made his way to Bangkok. There, he applied to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for status as a refugee, or "person of concern," as Thais call them.

At first rejected, he was then arrested with 13 other members of the judiciary and MPs in exile and deported back to Burma. Pressure from human rights groups meant he was reunited with his family and returned to Thailand, but he was designated "a border case" and had to go to the camps little more than a stone's throw from Burma.

Burmese refugees have long been herded into border camps where they live in limbo, unable to leave these political purgatories.

The Thai Government's treatment of persons of concern has hardened as it has tried to improve relations with the Burmese regime and as Thai public sympathy for refugees has waned.

The country has been inundated with refugees from all sides - Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam - since the 1970s. Since May 1999 alone, the UNHCR says 19,000 Burmese have crossed into Thailand. As one UN camp worker says, "It's difficult. If it was New Zealand and you got 1 million people suddenly, you'd feel it."

Janvier de Riedmatten, the Swiss-born UNHCR deputy representative in Bangkok, accepts that more should be done for the refugees, but says at least they are safe in the Thai camps.

"If they are able to enter into the camps at the border they are protected against arrest and deportation. It may not be the best option, but it is the only option available."

There is some protection from the other miseries of that border region too - the disease, prostitution and drug trafficking.

The rebels are not convinced. Through an interpreter Thin says, "I could not bear to return to the border, I would have been arrested. So I had to find a place to hide [in Bangkok] with my family, and while I was hiding I appealed my case with the UNHCR."

Finally, because his wife had become seriously ill with a throat disease she picked up when she was sent back to Burma, he and his family were sent to Thailand's only non-border camp, at Maneeloy, in November, 1999. Run by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), the Thais call the camp "The safe area for Burmese students."

About the same time, Han was reluctantly heading for Maneeloy. "The safe area is not a safe area. It's like a jail." He sighs. "There are many difficulties."

fxdrop,3,100 T UCKED away off the main roads in Ratchaburi province, Maneeloy is about an hour and a half's drive from Bangkok. As we turn off the main highway, stubble from the rice crops stands burned or dead in paddy fields left fallow until the rains come again.

A woman is hanging out her washing in the thick, beige heat and across the road children are pulling a toy truck alongside four strings of rusted barbed wire. The top strand is about a metre off the ground. We follow the wire to the entrance, where a spindly barrier arm, tied down by a piece of string, blocks our way.

In a small, dark office camp commander Pinij Kaewjitkongthong explains through an interpreter that the camp's inhabitants aren't just students, but any democracy activist in danger from the Burmese regime or factions in the border camps.

"They are the leaders of the anti-government groups, so the Government will have a blacklist of them. The refugees sent back to the border areas, they are just the local people."

The refugees pay a high price for their security by coming here. They give up any foreseeable chance of going home, their right to political activity of any kind, and their liberty. But they come because Maneeloy is the one camp from which the UNHCR helps to arrange resettlement to third countries. This prison, paradoxically, is also the only way out.

The camp was set up in 1992 and has been home for 4000 people since then, says commander Pinij.

"At that time there were many Burmese students in Thailand in many areas, so the Thai Government wanted to put them in the same area ...

"If they live [at large] in Thailand they can do underground work and the Thai Government cannot control them. If they do political activity in Thailand the relationship between the Thai and Burmese Governments would not be so good."

So as expedience for the Thais and an escape for the Burmese, Maneeloy became the shore on which the most at-risk and desperate rebels washed up.

As the liberated territories along Burma's eastern borders fell to Slorc, the numbers seeking refugee status grew, especially after the fall of the KNU headquarters at Manerplaw in 1995.

Most refugees have since resettled in the US, but others have gone to Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

Then in October 1999, shortly before Thin and Han arrived at the camp, the rules changed. Burmese protesters stormed the Burmese embassy in Bangkok and the Thai Government responded by clamping down on the Burmese operating covertly in Thailand, giving them a now-or-never order to enter the camp or forever lose their chance of resettlement.

At a desk in Maneeloy's long, open-plan administration building, 40-year-old Naw Hser Htoo tells me she had been a teacher at a KNU stronghold before it fell to government forces in 1997.

The petite, demure woman in a pink cardigan explains how she absconded to Thailand with her husband and five children and how they tried to keep their freedom. But life as illegal citizens was too hard, she says, and the family entered Maneeloy in December 1999.

But she is angry - even those Burmese who have been given refugee status by the UNHCR can be arrested in Thailand and imprisoned for three months. What's more, everyone entering the camp is charged retrospectively and fined between 800 and 3000 baht ($41 to $155) as punishment.

"There is no way at all to be happy here, because the fundamental freedom is controlled by the authorities," Naw Hser says, through Thet Thet Lwin, another refugee at the camp and formerly an engineering student and prominent politician in the All Burma Student Democratic Front.

After nearly 18 months in the camp, Naw Hser hopes New Zealand will accept her family for resettlement. She and her husband carefully chose this country - and were two of nearly 150 applicants interviewed when New Zealand immigration officers visited the camp this year - because they believe it offers the best education opportunities for their children.

Those chosen are expected to arrive next month, spending six weeks at a Mangere reception centre before they are free to rebuild their lives out of the shadow of Maneeloy and its harsh conditions.

Thin says when he and his family of six were there they lived and slept in a section of a long barrack about 4.5m long by 1.5m wide divided from other refugees by cardboard boxes.

In particular, everyone in the camp complains about the food ration they receive from UNHCR subcontractors. They used to receive three meals a day, but when the camp was sealed in 1999 the authorities switched to supplying each person with a set weekly ration (see box).

Lwin says that ration lasts only a couple of meals, and refugees have to buy extra food with the 200 baht of "pocket money" the UNHCR gives them each week. And the food quality, she says, is getting worse.

"We're sometimes given rotten vegetables and meat. We had to demonstrate to get fresh food. They didn't like it. Now we get fresh meat, but not fresh vegetables. We don't think we get sufficient nutrition."

The UNHCR says differently. Riedmatten concedes the lack of variety may be unpleasant, but "the rations have been calculated on international World Food Programme standards. They are the standards being applied all over the world and I guess we have to be fair with the amount of money the UNHCR receives for refugees worldwide ...

"In addition they receive pocket money, which we don't do anywhere else in the world."

Non-governmental organisations offer limited English and vocational training and the refugees have set up their own school. The UN is satisfied with the conditions overall, he says.

But the refugees are so miserable, one committed suicide six months ago, says Lwin. Dropping her voice so the MOI staff won't hear, she says the local papers reported that the student who committed suicide was a drug-user - the camp-dwellers know he wasn't using when he died.

He was, Lwin frowns, sick with worry - about the conflict between the ethnic factions in the camp, about resettling in the US and about friends who had not received refugee status and would be left behind.

Others unhappy with the camp will escape, even if only for a brief period. If they're caught, the punishment ranges from three months in a Bangkok detention centre to three months in the wretchedness of a Thai prison.

Asked about how he and his 48 guards handle security at the camp, Pinij laughs and answers in English. "My security is not enough to protect them from escaping from this camp. Every month we arrest them, one, two, three people. Every month. But my security cannot arrest many."

How many escape? "We cannot tell, because they have run away already, you know what I mean?"

As of mid-March, 885 refugees were left in Maneeloy. The Thai Government has made it clear it wants the camp closed and Lwin says the nervous rumour is that that could happen by the middle of the year.

"What we have been told by the Government is that once the refugees who are still there have departed for the third countries, the camp will then be closed," says Riedmatten.

But Maneeloy has played an important role for the past nine years. What will happen to those who, under the current policy, would have gone there for protection? Riedmatten's answer that "we will have to find a solution for them elsewhere, either in this country or another country" is hardly reassuring.

But the Government is reacting to the public perception that Maneeloy is a hive of terrorist activities - something the refugees deny.

"We [the UNHCR] don't think that Maneeloy is such a bad place where people are plotting all the bad things that happen," says Riedmatten, "but it certainly got a very bad reputation and it's very difficult to change that."

A frustrated Lwin says, "We gave up everything once we left the [liberated] territory. Not our beliefs at all, but violent means - we don't do that ... After 12 years' experience in the struggle, I learned that it cannot bring a peaceful solution."

Outside in the heat a dog is barking and a guard shouts it into silence, as Lwin explains her own decision to opt for peace.

"I have two daughters. One is 3 1/2 and one is 2. They were another reason for me to change. I worry about their future, their education, their identity. We cannot go back to Burma, we cannot bring them up in Thailand. They need to get a legal status and only resettlement can solve that."

Lwin has applied to take her family to Australia and hopes that once there, she can do something to help the National League for Democracy. "Our hope is completely in the effort of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. She's the only hope."

And a glimmer seems to be peeking out of Rangoon, where sanctions are hurting even the most powerful. Since October Suu Kyi has been in talks with various members of the dictatorship.

Although held in the utmost secret, there have been reports that a transition to democracy is on the agenda. Western governments have expressed cautious optimism.

Back in Glen Innes the refugees hope, but not too much. Democracy will come only slowly to their homeland, they say, and they are committed to starting again in New Zealand. Their fight now is to learn English and find work as they force their way through the jungle of a new culture.