A Sad, Sad Celebration

Twenty-five years of challenges and achievements for the Thailand Burma Border Consortium—and no end in sight

When 10,000 Karen refugees fled a widening conflict along Burma’s eastern border into neighboring Thailand in early 1984, it was generally expected that they would return home in a few months with the onset of the rains and the withdrawal of Burmese government troops from the jungle.

The anticipated withdrawal never came, however. Government army units established supply lines, maintaining and consolidating their positions. The uprooted refugees stayed in Thailand.

Nine refugee camps are now home to more than 140,000 refugees who have fed war and terror in Burma. (Photo : TBBC)

Every dry season that followed brought fresh offensives by the Burma regime forces and new waves of refugees into Thailand. The fighting and regime abuses only grew in intensity—and 25 years later there are more than 140,000 Burmese refugees in nine camps along Thailand’s border with Burma. The number is steadily growing—despite an ambitious program of resettlement in the US and other Western countries.

In 1984, Thailand already had its hands full with a refugee crisis on its eastern borders. Foreign aid workers helping to care for Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian refugees interrupted their relief efforts there and moved to the far west of the country to assist Thai authorities tackle what they were told would be only a temporary problem on the Thai-Burmese border.

An Englishman, Jack Dunford, was among that vanguard of relief workers. He helped set up a consortium of nongovernmental agencies to provide food to the refugees on a short-term basis. Dunford soon found himself dealing with a long-term task, and the fledgling organization, the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), took over his life.

As TBBC’s executive director, Dunford has seen the organization grow from a one-man refugee relief operation into a US $35 million a year charity supporting an ever-increasing number Burmese refugees—the majority of them Karen, but also including Mon, Karenni, Shan and others—who have fled the fighting and regime abuses in their devastated homeland.

“When I first began my work on Thailand’s border with Burma I never would have dreamt that we’d still be there 25 years later,” Dunford said at his modest office in central Bangkok. “At first, we hoped for change in Burma and that the refugees could soon return home. But, after 25 years, there is still no end in sight.”

The Bangkok-based operation, grouping 12 nongovernmental organizations from 10 countries, also carries out in-depth research into refugee-related and migrant issues, working with national governments, international organizations and the Thai authorities.

The responsibility of ensuring shelter and food on an ever tightening budget weighs heavily on Dunford’s shoulders. In its anniversary year, with regime-backed offensives sending new waves of Karen refugees into Thailand, the TBBC is fighting its own battles to survive.

Dunford’s latest executive report tells the organization’s many donors that the TBBC’s 25th anniversary in October is a “cause more for sadness than celebration, but also a triumph for hope and perseverance.

“Twenty-five years has been a long time for TBBC to maintain interest and support, and a long time to test the patience and goodwill of Thailand, the reluctant host,” he said. “But it has been an eternity for the refugees who have lost their homes and loved ones, continue to live in exile and yearn to go home.”

The refugees are housed in nine camps strung out along Thailand’s borders with Burma’s Karen, Karenni, Shan and Mon States and Tennasserim Division. Most of them are in remote, rugged mountain territory—the most accessible, Mae La, is more than 60 km from the nearest town, Mae Sot, which sits on the Thai-Burmese border in Thailand’s Tak Province.

The camps are run by the refugees, who organize everything from food distribution and house-building to schools and health care. “We provide what is needed but the residents do the work,” said Dunford. “It’s remarkable how well the system works.”

With the chances of refugees being able one day to return to Burma becoming ever dimmer and their numbers growing ever higher, the Thai government agreed in 2005 to an international resettlement program.