One year ago, the travails of Rohingya from Burma shocked people around the world. Boat after boat of refugees, fleeing abuse and oppression in Burma, were intercepted at sea by the Thai army, who then proceeded to detain them without trial. After days in outdoor detention, the Rohingya refugees were loaded back on to their boats, and the Thai army proceeded to tow them out to sea where they were abandoned with little food or water and no motors to power their boats.

The dialogue is changing. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and his deputy Scot Marceil visited Burma and held talks with Burmese officials and Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. It is the highest-level visit to Burma in more than a decade, and follows the State Department’s September announcement of its Burma Policy Review, which began shortly after President Obama took office. 

Earlier today the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific held a hearing on US policy towards Burma. The hearing was held in the interest of exploring options for dialogue and engagement with the government of Burma, and was long-overdue in a Washington policy context that has been dominated by debate over sanctions. Today’s hearing will be followed up next week by a similar hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and also echoes the recently-released State Department Burma policy review which makes engagement the policy of the day. 

In the first days of June, a new Burmese government offensive began in the eastern parts of Karen State, which borders Thailand, against the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).  The offensive, which is being conducted by proxy through the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), has since displaced over 4,000 people to Thailand. The Thai government has generously given refuge to these new waves of displaced people, and new refugee settlements have sprung up overnight alongside rice paddies and cornfields that overlook the river border with Burma. Despite the familiarity of this situation --Thailand already hosts over 150,000 Burmese refugees -- many questions remain as to the long-term safety of these new refugees.

This past weekend, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon visited Burma for a second time. During his first trip there in May of 2008, he was highly successful in paving the way for humanitarian assistance to flow into the cylone-ravaged delta region. This second visit was less successful, and the only big “ask” made by Mr. Ban – to speak with imprisoned democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi – was denied. I believe that the key reason for his failure lies in his straying from a growing international consensus the best way to engage the Burmese government is to discuss to a broad range of issues, including humanitarian ones,instead of focusing solely on human rights.

We are often quick to chastise a country when it fails to meet its obligations under international law, but how often do we applaud and support them when they do take these laws seriously?  One such case that comes to mind is Ecuador. The country is making an impressive attempt to meet its obligations to Colombian refugees, but so far, no one seems to care enough to make sure their program succeeds.

Word is just getting out that for the past month, the government of Thailand has been engaging in reckless behavior towards Burmese Rohingya refugees.  While the Thai government has never acknowledged the Rohingya as asylum seekers, they are now taking the extreme step of intentionally abandoning hundreds of them at a time in boats that they tow out to sea.  Already, over 300 Rohingya are missing, with new reports coming out every few days of new groups that have been pushed out by the Thai government. 

In late November, just before Thanksgiving, we visited a group of 30 Rohingya men in Penang, Malaysia.  We were anxious to visit areas outside of Kuala Lumpur, where civil society is slowly improving services for Burmese refugees.  We wanted to see whether refugees nationwide were receiving more attention.

President Bush is wrong to state that free trade will miraculously bring peace and democracy to Colombia as he urges Congress to approve a new free trade agreement with the country. In Monday night’s State of the Union speech, the President said, “The first agreement that will come before you is with Colombia, a friend of America that is confronting violence and terror, and fighting drug traffickers. If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere.

Tumaco is an island off the coast of southern Colombia, just north of the border with Ecuador, and just about one degree north of the equator. It’s a humid, tropical zone and today, while we were visiting a community of displaced people known as Bajo Tuma, the heavens opened up and soaked us to the bone. The community was built around a mangrove swamp and all the sand around us quickly turned to mud. It was amazing how fast the entire town flooded — the sea just rushed into the town.