The Killing Fields of Shan State
Victims of War
We are invited to the camp chairman's house for tea and we sit on the floor and talk. The camp is home to 2,100 people. New refugees arrive on a daily basis, the chairman says, and more would come if it were not so difficult to travel here. The houses are made of bamboo and grass thatch. There are several primary school classrooms and a new nursery school is under construction. The road that cuts along the side of the ridge was built by hand, each family contributing an equal share of the labour.
The chairman has arranged for us to speak to some newly-arrived refugees and a young girl and several men are brought in. We are told the girl is 13 years old. She and her three-year old brother once lived with their grandmother on a farm in the valley. A year ago, an unknown woman approached the girl and said that relatives in Thailand would like her and her brother to visit them. Without telling their grandmother, the children left with the woman who brought them across the border into Thailand. The woman sold the girl to a village headman for Baht 4000 (about US$100). The headman used her as a domestic and beat her, she tells us. A year later, a Shan woman happened to see the girl and asked her who she was. When the girl recounted her story the woman arranged for her to go to the refugee camp, although the headman insisted on being repaid his investment. The girl has no idea what happened to her brother but assumes that he has been sold to another family in Thailand.
We interview a man who arrived in the camp two weeks ago with his wife and children. Burmese soldiers forced him off his farm to a re-location site, he says. But they couldn't survive there. The men in the relocation site were required to act as unpaid porters, carrying ammunition and supplies for army patrols into the mountains, sometimes for weeks at a time. He and some other men sneaked away from the relocation site to plant rice in the hills. But their rice was discovered by Burmese soldiers, who burned it. When eight men went to the area to check on the rice, the soldiers were waiting in ambush. Two of the men were killed in a hail of bullets and the rest ran. Later in the evening the men went back to bury the bodies.
| Reviewed July 31, 2009 |  |
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