Homesick

Hundreds of kilometers to the south, more Mon communities were fleeing into Thailand’s Kanchanaburi Province through the Three Pagodas Pass.

Through a cruel irony, refugees flowing into Thailand passed trucks traveling the other way to collect Burmese timber. The larger the truck convoys, the more displaced people headed for Thailand.

The border-based groups suffered their biggest psychological blow in 1995 when the Karen rebel headquarters, Manerplaw, fell to government forces after the military regime had succeeded in exploiting resentment between rank and file Buddhist Karen soldiers and their Christian leadership. Later this breakaway group became the infamous Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, which was used by the regime to spearhead its military operations in Karen State.

Further north, Thailand had to contend with a new influx of refugees—Shan, fleeing forced relocation programs in Shan State. Most fail to meet the criteria the Thai government uses to define its description of a refugee—and those who don’t meet the stiff requirements are regarded as economic migrants.

Shan migrants who cross the border to Thailand tend to shun camp life and infiltrate local Thai communities, hoping to find employment. With this freedom, however, comes the risk of manipulation and labor abuses—and the ever-present danger of arrest and deportation as Thailand tightens its restrictions on migrants.

Karen refugees faced a different, deadly threat as their camps came under direct military attack by the DKBA. The Thai authorities attempted to increase the refugees’ security by consolidating the smaller camps into much larger ones—notably Mae La, which is the size of a small Thai town. The UNHCR was also assigned a limited role in protecting the camps.

The DKBA attacks on the camps were overshadowed by two incidents that had a major impact on Thai refugee policy.

On October 1, 1999, five Burmese gunmen calling themselves the Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors (VBSW) seized the Burmese embassy in Bangkok, took hostages and occupied the premises for a day. Thailand’s deputy foreign minister negotiated the release of the hostages and accompanied the gunmen by helicopter to the Burmese border and freed them there.

A few months later, on January 24, 2000, the VBSW and armed Burmese from a Karen splinter group called God’s Army seized the Ratchaburi provincial hospital, holding more than 500 people hostage. They demanded that civilians from a God’s Army base be allowed to cross the border into Thailand and that the Thai army immediately cease shelling the area.

Early in the morning of January 25, Thai commandos stormed the hospital and freed the hostages. Witnesses reported that some of the attackers surrendered and were led away to a separate section of the hospital compound. Shortly afterwards, the bodies of 10 attackers were displayed outside the hospital.

Following these two incidents, the Thai government instituted measures that increasingly placed Burmese refugees at risk. In November 1999, the government announced that by the end of 2000 it planned to close the Maneeloy Student Center, a refugee camp primarily housing Burmese dissident refugees in Ratchaburi Province, and pressed Western countries to accept its residents for resettlement.

The Thai authorities said all Burmese refugees in Bangkok and other urban areas should move to the border, warning that those who failed to do so would be considered illegal immigrants and be deported.

In 1999, the first formal registration of border-based refugees was carried out by the UNHCR and the Interior Ministry’s Provincial Admissions Boards (PABs) were set up to determine the status of future arrivals, who had to meet the same stiff requirements to qualify for acceptance.

Registered refugees were offered temporary asylum in Thailand, receiving food, shelter and medical care. They were confined in camps and subject to repatriation when the situation in their homeland was judged to have returned to normal. There was no third-country resettlement program at that time.

Pressure on the Thai authorities continued to grow as new waves of refugees reached Thailand and as inmates rejected by the PABs continued to live in the camps.

In 2004-5, the Thai Interior Ministry, with UNHCR support, carried out a census of the entire refugee population, re-registering 102,992 persons from the 1999 exercise and identifying 34,061 others who had arrived since that time—a total of 136,053. Since then the PABs have been considering the cases of the 2005 unregistered caseload and between October 2005 and December 2008, they regularized the status of some 35,729 persons, including approximately 2,131 who were screened in 2008.

In 2005, the Thai government agreed to allow resettlement from the camps on the Thai-Burma border to Western countries, mainly the US.