09/24/2003

Paw Wah (a pseudonym) wears a white scarf bundled on top of her head. Her teeth and lips are stained red with betel nut juice and she looks much older than her 29 years. She is holding a two-week old baby, wrapped tightly in a white flannel cloth. Her baby seems suspiciously still, staring persistently at the ceiling of the bamboo hut where we are interviewing her. "I had malaria during my pregnancy," Paw Wah tells us. She shuffles her weight uncomfortably as she crosses her legs on the bamboo floor and rests her baby’s head carefully on her knee.

Paw Wah belongs to the Karen ethnic minority group. The Karen are one of the largest ethnic groups in Burma and have been systematically persecuted by the Burmese Government. For more than 50 years, there has been fighting between the Karen ethnic army (the Karen National Union (KNU)) and the Burmese government army. Approximately 100,000 Karen refugees live in Thailand in refugee camps.

Paw Wah arrived in a Karen refugee camp near the Thai-Burmese border in March 2002. She came with her husband and three children after fighting between the KNU and the Burmese State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) started near her village. While the fighting was the immediate cause of her flight, Paw Wah had wanted to leave Burma for a long time. Paw Wah and her husband suffered abuse and forced labor by the Burmese army while living in their small village near Moulmein. Soldiers from the army battalion stationed near her village would come twice a month and recruit her husband for forced labor. They also recruited women to carry their supplies. Soldiers beat both men and women while on forced labor duty. When Paw Wah was four months pregnant, the soldiers asked all villagers, including her, to carry supplies. Although Paw Wah had done forced labor often, she refused this time because of her pregnancy. As a result, the soldiers beat her.

According to Paw Wah, the soldiers were very cruel. One time they asked a 13-year-old girl in her village to be their guide. Once they were in the woods outside the village, the soldiers raped her. When she tried to run away, they shot her. Although Paw Wah did not see this, a soldier later reported this to the villagers. It was not uncommon for the soldiers to mistreat women, Paw Wah explained. One time after a landmine exploded near their village, the soldiers, in retaliation, called the villagers and beat and slapped the men and the women.

But the incident that was most disturbing to Paw Wah was the time they tortured her husband. As a result of this beating and torture, her husband not only suffered a back injury; he also became mentally unstable. Constantly terrified that the soldiers would come to torture him again, he was never at peace. In fear that she would be tortured next, Paw Wah decided that they should make plans to leave the village and come to Thailand.

When Paw Wah and her family arrived in Thailand, she and her family were not allowed to officially enter the refugee camp. The Thai admissions boards had stopped interviewing refugees after January, so there was no system in place for new arrivals to become registered and receive humanitarian assistance. She is one of 10,000 people waiting to be officially registered into the refugee camps. Paw Wah, however, had a sister in the camp. Now Paw Wah’s six-person family and her sister’s eight-person family share one small bamboo hut. None of Paw Wah’s family members receive rations or other items such as blankets and mosquito nets. Her sister shares her family’s rations with them and some family members try to find work in Thailand to help support their extended family. There is not enough food for Paw Wah’s family, but she is grateful to have a clinic where she can get medical help and a school for her children to attend. Most of all, she is relieved that she and her family are no longer subject to beatings, forced labor and the abuse of Burmese soldiers. Now they have to worry about being discovered by Thai soldiers as illegal refugees in the camp. They also worry about getting enough food for the family without risking arrest by leaving the confines of the camp to seek work.

Like most refugees from Burma in Thailand, Paw Wah did not want to come to Thailand. She knew that she would not be welcome and that entry into Thailand at the border could be denied or even dangerous. But given the alternative—a life of fear and terror—and her husband’s worsening mental state, she felt she had no choice.