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Wa children and the undocumented story
Saeng Tham and Ko We Kyaw
04 July 2008

20 June 2008
I received word from the villagers living in a village on the Thai-Burma border with Shan State. They found five boys and girls crossing from one side into Thai territory.

It looked like they were running from something.

The villagers who found this group of children discovered that they were ethnic Wa.


This should be no surprise as there are many Wa villages and bases of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) starting to be built on the Thai-Burma border with Shan State.

“Forced migration: forced displacement of Wa in the East of Shan State in 1999-2001” reported that during 1999-2001 the Burmese military government started a programme of forced migration for at least 126,000 Wa from Panghsang, a city next to the Chinese border. They were moved to South Shan State where a new city was built on the northern Thai border called Muang Yon.[1]

Bao You-Xiang is the commander-in-chief of the UWSA headquarters in Panghsang, while Wei Hsueh-Kang is the head of the UWSA’s 171 division in Muang Yon.

The migration happened, according to both the Burmese military government and the UWSA, in order to counter opium growing by the villagers and to support the growing of other crops on land allocated to them on South Shan State.

However after the migration it was found that opium poppies are being grown in South Shan State with the support of the Burmese and Wa military. The Wa people suffer forced labour, starvation, and human rights violations.

Disease, especially malaria, and the hardships of the two month march from north to south resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 Wa people during the migration.


There were three boys and two girls in the group. They were only 12-13 years old. They walked around asking for food and asking the villagers if they wanted any workers, offering to do anything in exchange for a place to sleep, food, and few clothes to wear.

They had no belongings apart from the clothes that they were wearing, torn shoes, and hunger.

The children were brought to the village.

Villagers at the market helped the children. They were given food and water, while the villagers could only listen. One villager cried right away when the children explained the reason for their flight to Thailand.

The children explained that they have no father, or mother, or home any more.

They had been used by Wa soldiers, their own countrymen, to work in the military camp on various kinds of jobs. Some were taken by the soldiers to work in the fields. The owners worked them without any rest. In some months, if they were lucky, they would get paid what was called a ‘labour fee’ of 60 baht from the owners of the fields.

The villagers asked them if they had ever been abused. One of them said he had been abused in numerous ways that he did not want to talk about it.

One of the children pointed to a knife-mark on the toes of his right foot.

Another showed a knife-mark on the chin and started crying.

When they were abused and could not bear it any more, they ran for their lives, leaving behind their few belongings. They fled and kept going, sometimes running, sometimes walking. Some ran so fast, they lost their sandals in the middle of the jungle.

The villagers took pity on the children, gave them a meal and took them to the temple, which in a border village is the only place to stay for vagrant children whose future is unknown.

The next morning, the villagers didn’t have chance to ask them how many other children there were in the Wa military camp in the same situation, what the Wa soldiers had done to them, and how the villagers could help.
Civil Defence Volunteers in the village found the children and insisted on returning them to the Wa soldiers.

This seemed to be a ‘request’ from the Wa army.

The children were loaded onto a pick up truck.

Of the five children, none ate or touched the food once they knew that they would be taken back. They all cried that they did not want to go back. Some tried to jump off the pick up truck, but the Defence Volunteers held them tight. The sound of the children’s sobs had no effect on the conscience of the two or three adults holding them, who ignored their fear of being returned to the Wa army.

The truck disappeared, the cries of the children disappeared, and their short freedom also vanished.




I do not understand. Thailand claims that it is a democracy, so why did the local officials not stand by this principle and help those children?

Why did they rush to return the children without asking what happened on the other side, or whether they were abused by the Wa soldiers? Why did they have to stay with the Wa army? Why did the Wa army steal children from the arms of their parents? Why?

They were not helped. Instead, the Defence Volunteers destroyed their hopes of running away, and destroyed their small chance of running away from oppression.

If the local authorities claimed that they do not have the jurisdiction to ask about the human rights in Burma, how come they have the arbitrary power to return the Wa children across the border?

Are there orders by high-ranking officials?

Or is it that human security, human dignity, and the lives of these children are less important than national security, the security of the Wa army, and the massive level of security of the Burmese military government?

Why do Wa children have no prospect of being free, free from oppression, from fear, from human rights violations, and violations to human dignity?

The children disappeared in the pick up truck heading to the border to be handed back to the Wa army. At the same time, deep down inside, I still hear the crying and every minute I can see the pictures of them being forced up onto the truck.

What happened to them once their feet touched the other side of the border? How they are living now?

No one knows.

I asked myself.

However, the answers are blowing in the wind.

- - - - -

Note:
[1] See the report on Wa refugees of the Lahu National Development Organisation, “UNSETTLING MOVES: The Wa resettlement program in Eastern Shan State (1999-2001).” at UNSETTLING MOVES — Shan Herald Agency for News (S.H.A.N.)

Translated by Pokpong Lawansiri

Source: เด็กชาวว้ากับเรื่องที่ไม่ถูกบันทึก

__________________
"Keeping quiet while monks and other peaceful protesters are murdered and jailed is not evidence of constructive engagement." - Arvind Ganesan, Human Rights Watch.

"I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check" - M.C. Escher

November Rain

Poor, poor kids. Just pawns, whose lives don't matter to those slightly higher up the ladder. In Thailand or Burma. And we all think we have problems...

jandajoy

It's gross.
It makes one feel so inadequate.
If we had been there.....?
If we could have called some one?

It's "shit" of the highest priority.

I can't talk about this.

Mid

Child sweatshop across the border
25 July 2008

Many children are being forced to work under unduly harsh conditions in Mongton township, opposite Chiangmai, according to a report coming from the border.

Five of them had fled across the border into Thailand last month only to be sent back by local authorities, according to Schools of Hope, a humanitarian organization that has been planning to set up a boarding school at the border village of Arunothai in Chiangmai’s Chiangdao district.

The five, two girls and three boys, none of them looking over 14, were directed to the Shan monastery just outside the village by a kindly ethnic Chinese woman upon arrival on 21 June, “looking famished and worn out,” according to the abbot Phra Virote.

After treating them to dinner, the children told the monks that they had been working in their neighbors’ houses and farms since their parents died. All of them were ethnic Wa and two of them were orphans of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) fighters.

“We had to wake up early in the morning and cook,” said one. “After that we had to go to work in the farm all day. Neighbors took pity on us and gave us shoes and clothes, but the families we were with didn’t like it and punished us.”

These children met at a village festival and became friends. They later decided to come to Thailand and “seek for better lives,” according to them.

“They were pleasantly surprised when we told them we would take care of them and send them to school to study,” said a member of the Schools of Hope, “because previous experience had taught them that in order to live, they had to eat. And in order to eat, they had to work. They therefore happily accepted our offer.”

However, the next morning, the village aw saw (militia) came by truck and took them away to be sent back across the border. “The temple prepared a meal for them before they left,” said the source who wished to be unidentified. “But the children were so distraught, they had lost their appetite.”

The Schools of Hope believe there are many children like them across the border. During the joint Burma Army-UWSA offensive in 2005 against the Shan State Army, there were more than 700 casualties on the UWSA side, half of them killed in action, according to UWSA sources.

Also, unused to the new surroundings, an estimated 4,000 people died of malaria and other diseases, in the year 2000 alone, during the 1999-2001 forced relocations of Wa villagers from the Sino-Burma border in the north to the Thai-Burma border in the south, according to border-based Lahu National Development Organization (LNDO).

For more information, please contact Schools of Hope: Email<noom164[at]gmail.com>,<taihope[at]gmail.com>

The children




Ah Ming, 14




Ae Beuk, -(She doesn’t even know her age, her parents having died when she was a toddler)




Ai Hsang, 15?
(He says so, but nobody believe it)



Ai Tun, 17?




Ai Ga, 17?



Back to hell


shanland.org

good2bhappy

They must be suffering from chronic malnutrition if those are their real ages!

paulsmithson

I would gladly adopt one of these kids if that is possible for a farang with a thai wife.Pm me if you know how

ItsRobsLife

My thoughts exactly. It's such a sadenning story both in the anguish of the children and the injustice served upon them by those that should protect them.