One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [48]
In Thailand, regardless of ethnicity, it is not safe to be Burmese. Many of the children at the school near the border were born in the refugee camps on the border. Kyaw Win, another eleven-year-old boy, was one of those children. The Burmese army attacked his village, and his family sought safety in Thailand. They were placed in a refugee camp from which the KNU was rumored to operate. The camps were fertile ground for new recruits. In the schools, the teachers could expound Karen history or political thought. Ethnic nationalism developed easily, though the KNU has abandoned calls for independence and now seeks only regional autonomy in Burma. Sitting near the border, the camps acted as a convenient base of operations for attacks against Burma. Threatened by these camps, the Burmese military burnt them to the ground, forcing the inhabitants to flee into the Thai countryside, where they were often unwelcome. Thailand fears the buildup a huge refugee industry and does not want to make any of the refugees terribly comfortable.
Residents of the camps have little access to health care. An American girl I met who was teaching English in one of these camps told me the story of a student she had recently lost. He grew ill very suddenly. There were no medical facilities in the camp. It was an arduous journey through dangerous jungle roads to get to the hospital. He was not legally allowed to leave the camp, and permission took time. When he eventually did get to the hospital, it was too late. The boy died at age sixteen. When I spoke with his teacher, the family was fighting with the hospital to release his body. The hospital wanted several thousand baht, hundreds of dollars, to return his body to the family. The family, living off a meager amount of aid, and stuck in the camp, could not afford it. They were raising money, but having trouble getting enough. Even the dead Burmese had no rights in Thailand.
A spy sat outside the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. He was watching the activities of foreigners. He wore a white dress shirt, slacks, and dark sunglasses. In the morning he would watch the guests coming and going. I had been warned that there were many people watching in Mae Sot, that it was a good idea to be discreet.
My guide was late one morning and I sat nearby writing in a small journal. The man in dark glasses came to me and looked over my shoulder. I closed the book and walked away. That afternoon, when I returned from my interviews, he took a great interest in my day, asking many questions in decent English. I told him I had been sightseeing, that I was backpacking through Thailand, but he continued to pry.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“I explored the market.”
“Careful,” he said. “There is much crime in the market. You should not go without an escort. I can go with you. What do you do in Mae Sot?”
“I’ll be all right,” I said, ignoring his question and excusing myself. The man was still lingering the next morning. He watched my guide very closely when she picked me up. Foreigners had been banned from the refugee camps a few hours away, and all arrangements to go in had to be kept extremely quiet. The man in dark glasses wanted, I assume, to make sure I was not violating the ban or meeting with political groups whose activities caused trouble for the Thais. Every child I spoke with was put at risk if I was followed. I would not come to harm, except maybe by losing my visa, but the risks for the Burmese in speaking to me were very great.
Back at the offices of the youth organization that had taken me to the school, we spoke with the doors and windows closed, despite the stifling tropical heat. They had “officially” suspended activities for the time being because of the police crackdown and were trying to present the appearance that the office was closed. A poster proclaiming the rights of all people to self-determination hung on the wall above my head.
“The Thais do not want our programs to operate,”