By Kirsty Sangster
and Lia Kent
"Before I came in to Thailand, I sat on the River Moi bank, on the borderline, very close to Thailand. In 1984, Burmese troops came and attacked Maesot ... I set out on foot looking for a safe place, and went into the forest and found a small river, and stayed there for about three weeks. The water dried up and we could not stay there any longer. We had to move and look for a larger place with a larger creek and found Bawnaw Klo. It is a better place and we all live there. That is how I got into Thailand. I have stayed in Bawnaw for nine years."
Puu (Grandfather) Edwin, 72 years old, teacher and friend, has lived through civil war in Burma for the last 40 years. His Oxford-educated father was a leader of the early Burmese independence movement.
Yet Puu Edwin remains remarkably optimistic. "I never think negative", he explains. "I think positive physically as well as spiritually ... Maybe a saviour will come."
From July 1992 to January 1993 we lived on the Thai-Burma border with Karen refugees, teaching English to students, medics and nurses, and learning about life under SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), the Burmese military regime.
In 1988 a severe economic and political crisis triggered a nationwide uprising against the military regime, which had ruled Burma since 1962, was brutally suppressed by the army.
Elections were held in 1990, and the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory. Three years later there has still been no transfer of power, and Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since 1989.
Currently hundreds of thousands of Karen, Karenni and Mon people, as well as Burmese students, are living in refugee camps across the Thai border in an attempt to escape military persecution. SLORC continues to wage its brutal "frontier war", moving its army closer every day. More than 12,000 political prisoners are being held without trial.
Back in Australia, we have had many comments about how "depressing" it must have been, but living in the refugee camp was for us to learn about courage, love and freedom. We feel privileged to have lived and formed friendships with such people.
5 a.m. and the Muslim prayers begin over the river, cutting through the mist and silence and marking the beginning of a new day. Soon there are other sounds: roosters crowing, babies crying, the "whack" of women beating their wet washing against the rocks.
6 a.m. and there is the pungent smell of cooking fishpaste. Children carry water from the well; men take guns out into the forest to hunt. It is a peaceful yet busy scene. But it does not take long for this peaceful image of village life to dissolve. This is Bawnaw Klo, a refugee camp, one of eight such camps along the Thai-Burmese border.
Living here are the Karen, the largest ethnic minority in Burma. They have been fighting for their self-determination for the last 40 years. Burma is barely a stone's throw away, across the River Moi. Amidst this incredible beauty it is hard to believe the horrors occurring on the other side of the mountains.
Villagers in Burma are forced to become porters for the SLORC army, carrying guns, rice, ammunition.
"Porters are drawn especially from surrounding areas as they are closest to the army camps", says Puu Edwin.
"They drag people including children from crowded areas like eating places. They park their trucks and pull people away. The ages range from 13 to 50 years. Sometimes women are also taken to be porters or sent to the front lines as mine sweepers. The women are also raped. ... Porters have to carry very heavy loads. If they cannot carry them, they are slapped and kicked. Some are killed because they are weak, old or ill. Some of them are just pushed down the hills."
There is a woman porter who has not spoken since she was brought from Burma five days ago. Karen, small, slight, she has been gang raped every night by the SLORC. She recovers, along with other war casualties, in a clinic run by Burmese students.
Just down the road from the Thai guest house in the border town of Maesot, the clinic was our first contact with the reality of war. Inside a crowded tin shed, medics treat malaria, dysentery and amputees with a bare minimum of medicines. The medics are themselves refugees, students from Rangoon who have been forced to flee.
Thousands of students were killed in pro-democracy demonstrations against the military. The rest fled to the jungle along the Thai border, taking up arms with the Karen and other ethnic groups.
Waiting for the next military offensive, most live in refugee camps which are within shelling distance of the front line. During fighting season people turn up their radios to drown out the noise of warfare.
"In summer, the army comes to the hills to fight the resistance, and at the same time kill us, people who committed no crimes", says Saw Hsay Plo, a young Karen teacher. "They shoot many of them like buffaloes, cows, goats and chickens. When some of the men who run are caught, they are tortured. That is why the Karen have no safety for their lives. That is why many of us ran to the refugee camps."
While we lived in Bawnaw, fences were built around the camp's wells for fear of Burmese soldiers coming in the night and poisoning them. There is a 9 o'clock curfew every night, and night watchmen guard the camp. There is always the fear that the SLORC will come from over the mountains and slit people's throats while the camp is sleeping.
It is three hours by car to the nearest Thai town, Maesot, which gives a feeling of being cut off and forgotten by the outside world and in a separate time — a waiting, a marking of time, that is both desperate and hopeful. Huddling around an oil lamp and the radio, the latest news on the BBC is listened to intently. There is a vague, unformed dream that the United Nations will come and bring an end to the suffering.
There is so little contact with the world beyond the camp that the few magazines and picture books we brought with us were a constant source of interest. People would come around at all hours to pore over them and ask questions. They would talk, too, about their own lives and experiences.
The camp secretary, Saw Kyaheir: "I remember ... I was working on my farm which is in the middle of the fighting between the insurgents and the army. I was very frightened. After the fight the Karen insurgents retreated back and the army came to us and started shouting and abused us and took us to the camp. There they keep us with no food for two or three days, very little water was given. They burned down the houses, took the food and took a few chickens, ducks and cows we had. I became very disillusioned and took the risk and ran away. That is how I came to be in the refugee camp."
English lessons with the Karen school teachers inevitably evolved into talks about SLORC and "life". Hsay Plo would say, "Talking about the universe makes things that are heavy seem lighter".
Life is hard for the young people. The anger and frustration at not having choice and having no room to move physically or emotionally are rarely expressed. Energy is diverted into daily activities: washing, cooking, bringing up children. But people are aware of how trapped they are.
Hsay Plo would speak in his black humour of the Karen being "dead bodies walking". He had aspirations to study political science in Rangoon but after eight years in a camp his brilliance is given little expression. Many other friends had dreams of studying, of going to university in India or Australia.
Most teenage boys want to join the Karen army and become "commandos". To fight is to escape from the camp. Girls talked of becoming nurses or mothers at an early age.
Carrying out domestic chores, women brought order and purpose to camp life. For us, cooking over the charcoal fire and washing in the river became important parts of the day, helping us cope with our culture shock and giving us a vital sense of stability.
Every two weeks there is a doling out of fishpaste from one of the few aid organisations that works on the border. Rice, fishpaste and chilli is the staple
diet. Some people are lucky enough to have gardens, using every possible bit of space to grow vegetables. Even the sky is covered in bamboo lattice that stretches right across the river, holding up pumpkin and gourd vines.
The rest of the food is scrounged from the little forest remaining around the camp. But 4000 people crowded into this small space means that boys going out to hunt wild pig return with nothing or only squirrel. The killing of a pig is reserved for special occasions, times of great celebration and joyful eating, joking and singing.
But life is not usually so joyful. People die of dysentery and malaria, babies suffer from meningitis. Every night we could hear Pearli singing to her dying daughter. The doctor said he could not do anything, leaving her to sing and desperately feed it milk formula. Singing haunting hill songs to her baby, seven months old and not able to hold up its head.
Sitting in the dusk we would also hear the Muslims praying. They would come down to the river to wash their hands and rinse their mouths before praying. The chanting would rise and fall, giving rhythm to the day.
In the evenings houses would be lit with tiny oil lamps, and young boys would go out walking, playing the mandolin as they went. Other young people would go to the tea shop to watch Burmese videos, slow moving, staid, love stories or violent US war movies. Old men would crouch in their houses and chew betel nut, their teeth stained red.
Every year a day of fasting is held by all faiths to give spiritual strength to everyone suffering under SLORC. Muslim, Buddhist, Christian are all united in their common plight. Puu Edwin compares the resistance and SLORC to David and Goliath; the tiny rebel army in its thongs is no match for SLORC with its modern weapons and helicopters.
"The laws of the present government is guns. They use it on the villagers", says Saw Kyaheir. "Guns is all-powerful authority, especially to the villagers. With the help of arms, citizens can be forced to do what they like.
"If the SLORC government topples according to the wishes of the people, we would like a government who is elected by the people, who will change the situations in Burma and create opportunities for the people to progress. There are many ethnic people in Burma — the Shan, Kachin, Arakanese etc. We want a government who can provide opportunities to all kinds of people. It will be the government for the people."
Earlier this year, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and three other Nobel Peace Prize winners visited the border camps in an effort to raise international awareness on Burma. Yet there has been very little international interest shown towards the plight of the Burmese people.
In the refugee camps, life just goes on.