Homesick

The resettlement program relieved some pressure on the camps, but new problems arose as the prospect of embarking on new lives in the West drew many applicants who could not be regarded as true refugees.

The departure of approved candidates for resettlement also failed to keep pace with the number of new arrivals in the camps,

“Although increasing numbers of refugees are being resettled in third countries, camp populations are going up,” says Jack Dunford, executive director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), the foremost alliance of NGOs working for humanitarian relief to Burmese refugees.

“We do believe that certain refugees should be resettled—vulnerable people and particularly those who underwent traumatic experiences in Burma and for whom return to their homeland would be too painful,” he said.

Registering the refugees is an increasingly burdensome task, and the camps currently hold 42,000 unregistered residents. In a move to speed up registration and better identify genuine refugees, the MOI recently introduced a “pre-screening” process, launching it as a pilot project in four border camps—Tham Hin, Ban Don Yang, Nu Po and Site 1.

The pilot project was due to be completed in September. If successful, the scheme will be extended to all nine refugee camps.

At the same time, the TBBC also established its own database of camp residents in an attempt to determine as accurately as possible the number of people it has to feed. It’s a mathematical challenge—at the end of June, for instance, the combined population of the camps calculated by the UNHCR was 112,755, while the TBBC’s housekeeping records showed it was supporting 134,401 residents.

Ration books have now been introduced in the camps, ensuring that all registered refugees receive their daily quota, meager though it is. When the global economic crisis hit last year, rations were cut—and even soap was struck from the list of allotted necessities.

In the face of such stringencies, camp morale dropped to new lows. Cases of camp violence, particularly domestic abuse, rose. So did suicides.

Many new arrivals risked death by venturing back into Burma to check on property and livestock they had left behind.

“If Burmese soldiers or DKBA troops see them they’ll shoot,” said Chaklo, a member of the Karen Youth Organization, one of the community-based organizations helping new arrivals. “They think maybe they are KNLA men burying landmines. We hear the sound of gunfire every day.”

The black mood that has increasingly crept over the camps spread to the donor organizations, and a new term came into being—“donor fatigue.” Despite the encouraging results of the resettlement program, there seemed to be no end to the refugee problem and some sources of funding began to seek alternative ways of dealing with it.

Bangkok-based European diplomats confirmed that there is a desire within the European Commission (EC) to devote proportionately more humanitarian aid to groups and projects inside Burma than to refugee camps in Thailand. Approaches were made to the Thai government to create employment possibilities for the refugees and integrate them in Thailand’s education and health systems. “Self-reliance” was the catchword.

In 2006, a small breakthrough was achieved when Thailand’s Interior Ministry gave the green light to NGOs to expand vocational and skills training programs in the camps designed to create opportunities for generating income.

The military coup that year brought progress to a near halt, however, and only a handful of income-producing projects have so far been started, including agricultural schemes outside Mae La and Tham Hin camps. A small number of refugees are being considered for entry to Thai universities.

Thailand’s new Democrat-led government is proving to be more receptive to the TBBC proposals, and there’s now a mood of cautious optimism in the camps that the talks between the TBBC and Thai government departments could bring results.

During one official Thai government visit to the site of a new refugee camp in July, Tassana Vichaithanapat, director of the Interior Ministry’s foreign affairs division of the operations center for displaced persons from MOI, said Bangkok was trying to find a durable solution and urged international agencies to maintain their support for refugees from Burma.

For the TBBC’s Jack Dunford there is only one durable solution—a change of government in Rangoon and an end to the present regime’s attempt to control Burma’s eastern border regions by armed conquest.

“The Burma Army wants total control and it doesn’t care how long that takes,” Dunford said. “It’s like a foreign army of occupation.

“We are now at a very, very crucial stage, with the armed ethnic groups resisting the regime’s demand to become border guards under the control of the Burma Army and the DKBA. We could be seeing an influx of 5,000 to 10,000 new refugees.”

Outside Dunford’s central Bangkok office, rain was pelting down.