RI Guest Blogger: Eileen Shields-West on News from Burma

Refugees International Board Vice-Chair Eileen Shields-West just finished a mission in Thailand focusing on the situation for Burmese refugees and how the impact of the ongoing conflict inside Burma affects the stability of neighboring countries.

It is a picture of a solitary young monk behind bars. A boy of five or six years old, he is looking away, hands gripping the iron bars with an extremely sad look in his eyes. The picture ran in The Economist in late September, during the week of the major protests and fearsome crackdown in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. It was captioned: “No Way Out?"

Many of us, as we took the plane over here and looked through our briefing papers, were moved by this provocative and compelling picture. The picture told a thousand words and symbolized the cruelty of this latest round of suppression that even swept up young monks, or novices, as they are called, along with thousands of others, into detention centers.

At every opportunity, and this was especially the concern of fellow Board member Carol Ann Haake, we would ask for any information at all about the picture, about the boy and about the fate of all the children and adults who may have been swept up in the crackdown. It became an interest of all of us.

In most cases, we got disappointing but not unsurprising answers. The people we asked just did not know enough to fill in the blanks. We needed to know: What had happened to this young novice? How many other children had been rounded up and how many were still being detained?

Finally, we met John Glenn, head of the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners (AAPP), and former political prisoner himself who fled Burma for fear of arrest in 1988. He is now giving cash and encouragement to political activists still in the country. We sat with him outside, interviewing him in front of a bulletin board of pictures titled “Saffron Revolution.” And there it was -- a color photo of our novice behind bars.

So we asked: What do you know of this boy? Is he still being held? How many others, young like him, were rounded up? Glenn did not know. He turned to a colleague who also was not aware of how the organization had gotten the picture.

It was frustrating, but we did learn some things that we could work with. According to the AAPP list, there are 20 novices who were detained, the youngest is about five. (Novices can range in age from five years to eighteen. After that, when you put on the russet robes, you are called a monk.) Glenn added that the ICRC or the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been allowed to go into the detention centers to confirm numbers held and the conditions of detention.

Glenn believes that during the crackdown the regime rounded up about 3,000 to 4,000 people. (The Burmese government has publicly said that about 3,000 were taken into custody.) His organization has only been able to confirm 150 releases, but says the regime is claiming to have let go 2,000. Also, according to Glenn, there are still 660 political prisoners in prison, while the regime is saying that 190 remain in jail.

Glenn told us that the September uprising was different from the one in 1988 when many activists quickly fled across the border. To his knowledge only thirteen have come into Thailand, explaining “Now they still survive in Burma and still want to continue their activities. Maybe they are still in hiding. It is difficult to know. We don’t know where they are – thousands of people.”

When we left the interview with Glenn, we felt we knew a bit more about the present situation inside Burma. But journalists and others we met registered a degree of healthy skepticism.

They say it is really hard to gauge what is happening within the country at this time. They’ve heard stories, too, about children being held and many people still behind bars, but they cannot corroborate most of them. For one thing, internet access was cut again this week when a small group of monks in Pakokku came out to protest once again, demanding lower fuel prices and the release of political prisoners. It has been down for three days now. They add that you have to question the picture itself – its origin and its reality. It could have been, for example, a novice monk looking through a gate instead of jail bars as feared.

This is Burma, they say. It is looking though a glass darkly. The secrecy, the suppression and the silence are all unbearable, but it is the condition under which people live there, making it more than difficult to tell the real story. It is a country which has shut itself off from the rest of the world (a “hermit kingdom,” a US official says) and only international pressure, especially from Burma’s fellow ASEAN countries, will make a difference.

In the meantime, though, the picture has done its job. It has helped to rivet attention on the victims -- young as well as old -- of the Burmese’ government’s latest actions and that is a good thing.