Travels in Thailand - Helping the Karen peoples of Burma

[AgentK]

Hi all!

After meeting Lugh on Mark Thomas Info I have decided to update my travels here as well.

The following posts will be those that have appeared there and I hope you all find them interesting.

K

[AgentK]

I'm currently just on this side of the Thai-Burmese border in Mae Sot trying to get together a protest against the proposed dams in Burma. Anyone know anyone here or any news/freelance reporters to come along and help? Currently it's my wife, grandmother and cousin here with a camcorder trying to get any footage of the corrupt regime etc. etc. as well as helping out the displaced Karen peoples (140,000 of them in the refugee camps currently). This was all started by my grandfather before he passed away 10 years ago as he was one of the British officers that stayed here (against orders!) after the withdrawl and helped the minorities fight for their Independence. As such he had very close contact with the KNU command structure and was a close friend of Bo Mya (President-General of the KNU) who was poisoned by the Burmese Junta at his Birthday Party and passed away last year. (Ok he accepted a cake from his 60 year enemy as a sign of good faith DOH!). Currently the survivors from the British Empire years is rapidly dwindling and so is the infomation that they carried around from that time so this Fortnight here is spent mainly gathering information about what the hell has been going on here for the last 67 years!

Ok a bit long winded for an intro and plea but as you can see time is short! The protest that is planned for the 28th of Feb. is a worldwide one that is to take place outside your local Thai embassy so please support it! Essentially the Thai's and Burmese are planning to build several dams accross the rivers here flooding land on which ethnic peoples currently have their homes and none of them have been consulted or even told that it is going to happen! ( Hmmmm where have we heard this before?)

Our family have been coming here for the last 25 years bringing clothing/books and MP's to try and sort this one out cause lets face it, it was our mess to start with and we dealt with it in the same way we dealt with every other post-colonial problem.... 'Oh sorry, not our problem any more old bean'

To compound the issue even further the Thai and Burmese have reached an 'agreement' as to what to do with the refugees after next year. SOME will be allowed to emmigrate to other countries (about a thousand already resettled worldwide), SOME will be allowed to stay in Thailand subject to 5 year reviews, and the majority will be booted back over the Thai-Burmese border and i'm sure you can guess what that means! (for those of you who don't know or need a hand with that imagination the Burmese military is currently using MOST of the ethnic peoples of Burma as SLAVES! Yes thats right Slavery is alive and doing quite nicely in Asia and they have the backing of China, Russia and N.Korea to boot!)

Any help and support that anyone can give us now and in the future would be so very very welcome right now so please post or as the ABC Warriors have been know to say occasionally 'SPREAD THE WORD!'

K. N. Humphrey-Taylor
History Student (for obvious reasons!) and son of one of the Karen emassadors to the UK.

[AgentK]

Here's also a couple of links to relevant sites:

www.burmacampaign.org.uk
www.karen.org/knu/knu.htm
www.photosbybjorn.com/burma_karen_guerillas.htm
www.dassk.org/index.php

These should give you a brief overview of the current situation and history and they have links to other sites that can flesh out any questions.

[AgentK]

The Karen tribes already have their own 'Karen River Watch' to keep an eye on things and keep the info flooding (ohh that was bad) in. This is an intro website but typing in the above to google will bring up a few more!

http://www.freewebs.com/ka_rw2003/

As you can all probably tell this will be the first protest that we have actually organised ourselves although we do have the usual CV of 'Stop the War' as well as contact with the houses to keep these issues current.

[AgentK]

Just met a guy called Eric from Seattle and lo and behold they are supporting the free clinic run by Dr Cynthia (think she's up for an award for her selfless running of the clinic for children of Burma) AND are visiting the camps! Unfortunately he didn't bother finding out that a) the camps were closing down next year or b) the Burmese-Thai plans for refugees. ( c) Dams! ). If you are reading this please click on one of the above links and find out what's going on!

Things are starting to look up for a change and i'm hoping that we are actually making a difference here!

Lynn (the missus) just found these:
www.burmanet.org/news
www.bicusa.org//en/Article.3144.aspx

And sign the petition being sent to the Thai Prime Minister by following the links from here:

http://www.salweenwatch.org/