Burmese Migrants Fend for Themselves as Flooding Continues

As floods continue to wreak havoc throughout much of central Thailand, Burmese migrants living in the country have been left largely to fend for themselves, according to volunteers working in some of the worst-hit areas.

“In Pathum Thani, many migrant workers live in remote areas, so it's difficult for people to bring them food, and if they try to reach relief centers on their own, it can take up to five hours,” said Thet Thet Oo, a member of a volunteer group formed to help stranded Burmese workers.

Many of Thailand's estimated two to four million Burmese migrant workers live in the country's industrial heartland, where flooding has been most most severe. Among the most affected areas are Ayutthaya, Thailand's ancient capital, and the provinces of Prathum Thani and Nonthaburi, just north of Bangkok.

According to labor rights groups, lack of relief assistance is not the only problem Burmese migrants are facing. In some cases, workers also have problems with employers and police due to their immigration status (only around 1.3 million Burmese migrants in Thailand are legally registered).

“We have heard of cases where employers cannot provide work but are not allowing migrants to have their documents, employers telling workers to resign or go home, and also cases when police are arresting migrants who travel across provincial boundaries to escape flooding,” said Andy Hall, a foreign expert at Bangkok's Mahidol University and a consultant to the Human Rights and Development Foundation (HRDF), a migrant rights group.

Hall advised migrants who cannot access emergency assistance or are denied it or discriminated against to urgently report their case to NGOs, labor unions or officials they can trust so these people can demand action from the government.

But as thousands of Burmese attempt to make their way back to their home country to escape the disaster in Thailand, the most important advice, according to Thet Thet Oo, is to resist the temptation to make the difficult journey to the border.

“Some migrants who are struggling to cope with the floods want to go back to Burma, but some have been arrested trying to make the trip,” she said. “That's why I would like to urge them not to go anywhere without documents and just stay at a relief center for a while.”

Meanwhile, in Mahachai, an area on the southwestern outskirts of Bangkok with a high concentration of Burmese migrants working in the fish-processing industry, many workers are taking their own precautions as the Thai capital braces for a deluge of floodwaters from the north.

“People here are worried, so some are stocking up on instant noodles and moving their belongings to the apartments of friends living in tall buildings,” said Aie Lawi Mon, a worker living in Mahachai.

As Burmese migrants do whatever it takes to ride out the floods, however, they shouldn't forget that there is another potential source of assistance available to them: the Burmese embassy in Bangkok.

According to Hall, the embassy has offered to help both those who need a place to stay in Thailand, and those who want to go back home to Burma. Although the embassy doesn't have much of a system in place for dealing with these situations, Burmese shouldn't hesitate to contact the embassy for help, he said. 

“The Myanmar [Burmese] embassy has been showing increased interest in migrant issues lately, and we hope this flooding will be another opportunity for the Myanmar government to show it is genuine about protecting migrant workers in Thailand,” said Hall.

ကေလးဆုေတာင္းျခင္းႏွင့္အေတြးမ်ား

သမီးငယ္ေလး သူ႔မွာ ဘာဘီကေလးအရုပ္မ်ားရွိပါတယ္။ ဒူးေထာက္ျပီး အရုပ္ေတြနဲ႔အတူဆုေတာင္းၾကတယ္။

*****

အေမနဲ႔သားငယ္ေလး ညတိုင္း ဒူးေထာက္ဆုေတာင္းေလ့ရွိၾကပါတယ္။ တစ္ညမွာ သားငယ္ေလးကေမးပါတယ္။ "ေမေမ .. သား၊ဒူးမေထာက္ပဲ အိပ္ျပီး ဆုေတာင္းခ်င္တယ္။ သား မေသပဲ ..မနက္ႏိုးလာရင္ ေမေမနဲ႔ အတူတူ မုန္႔စားရဦးမွာလား" .. တဲ့။

*****

တရားေဟာဆရာ ေဟာတာၾကာလြန္းလာေတာ့ အေမနဲ႔အတူထိုင္ေနတဲ့ကေလးက အေမ့ကိုတိုးတိုးေလးေျပာလိုက္တယ္ "သူ႔ကို အခုပဲ အလႈေငြသြားေပးလိုက္ရင္၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ ျပန္လို႔ရမလား ..ဟင္"

*****

၃ႏွစ္သမီးေလးကို ဘုရားေက်ာင္းဆန္းေဒးစကူး ပထမဆံုးေန႔ အေတြ႔အၾကံဳကို ေမးၾကည့္တယ္။  သမီးေရ .. ဆန္းေဒးစကူးမွာ ဘာေတြလုပ္ရသလဲ .. ဆိုေတာ့၊ သမီးေလးက "သီခ်င္းေတြ ဆိုရတယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ ငိုၾကရတယ္"  တဲ့။   (သီခ်င္းဆိုျခင္းႏွင့္က်မ္းပိုဒ္ရြတ္ျခင္း)

*****

ဆန္းေဒစကူးဆရာမက ကေလးေတြဘုရားေက်ာင္းေခၚလာျခင္းေကာင္းၾကီးမဂၤလာကို ေျပာျပခ်င္လို႔ ေမးတယ္။ "ေယာသပ္နဲ႔မာရိတို႔ ေယရႈငယ္စဥ္က ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ ေယရုဆလင္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းကို ေခၚလာရသလဲ" ..  ကေလးတစ္ေယာက္က ေျဖတယ္  "ကေလးထိန္းမရွိလို႔ပါ" ...။

*****

ကေလးမေလးကို အေဖျဖစ္သူက ျငိမ္သက္ျခင္းအေၾကာင္းေျပာဖို႔ ေမးတယ္။ "သမီး၊ ဘာေၾကာင့္ ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာ လူေတြ ျငိမ္ျငိမ္ေလးေနၾကသလဲ"  ဆိုေတာ့ သမီးက  "ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာလူေတြ ထိုင္ရင္းအိပ္ေနၾကလို႔ပါ" ..။

Where China and India merge

Where China and India merge

Reshma Patil, Hindustan Times

One night in 2001, a 24-year-old Chinese citizen hailing from a remote border town on the southern Silk Road muttered a prayer and darted into Mizoram when the sentry at the Indo-Myanmar border let down his guard. “I told Indians that I’m from Nagaland. They never checked,” the bespectacled middle-school dropout revealed to the Hindustan Times in a mountainous frontier Chinatown called Ruili which is rimmed on three sides by Myanmar.The man introduced himself with two identities, a Chinese name and a Myanmarese name, spoke fluently in both languages, and marked the time in both nations. In India, he invented a third identity.
Tan (full name withheld) stayed undetected without a visa in India, passing himself off as a 21-year-old to study in Bangalore. He regularly traversed back and forth from India to China through Myanmar — for six years until 2007. He complained about the cost of the weeklong journey by bus, train and on foot: Rs 5,000 one-way.
It’s a journey no Indian dares attempt in reverse: from Mizoram to Mandalay to Ruili. This rural outpost has transformed from an underworld den of heroin and arms dealers into China’s strategic gateway to India and the Bay of Bengal with new cross-border highways, railroad and ports connecting it Myanmar.
India’s defence ministry this year warned that China has completed roads to all passes on the disputed border. In Tibet, the last dirt track in a county bordering India is being paved, helping meet a goal of extending roads in the Himalayan region from 58,000 km to 70,000 km by 2015.
Tan, a devotee of a state-backed church in his Chinese hometown, prayed to Jesus as he crept into the northeast state. He was not alone. They were a group of eight people from China and Myanmar who vanished inside India through the porous northeast. The crumbling roads may have impeded an advancing army but not the bands of infiltrators or dealers peddling arms to insurgents.
Rebuilding the northeastern roads may in fact make India’s borders more secure while bringing the economic opportunities denied to the region.
On the Stilwell Road
“The mountains on this side belong to Miandian (Chinese name for Myanmar) and the mountains on that side are Chinese,” explained my driver on the final lap of the restored World War-II China-Burma highway. The nearest Chinese airport to the Myanmar border is at Mangshi city, a two-hour drive on two black-topped lanes hugging a misty mountainside and paddy fields.
The landscape, bisected by a line of motorcycles and overloaded three-wheelers rumbling alongside villages and ramshackle huts, looks like a postcard from northeast Assam. But the Indian stretch of the 1,739-km road built by General Joseph Stilwell and Allied forces from Ledo in Assam to boost Chinese resistance against Japanese invaders is still a jungle trail even though the Indo-Myanmar side of the road has been rebuilt.
The border police sitting on stools at an unmarked checkpost near the Stilwell Road Wetland Park flagged down the taxi and peered in from the windows. Unlike Tan’s unchecked passage to India, my passport was photographed as they quizzed me.
“We have a saying that if you want to get rich, first build roads,” said Ren Jia, president of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming, the capital of southwest Yunnan province. “We understand why India is not willing to open this road. Stilwell Road is a symbol of cooperation between China, India and Myanmar. We hope it can again link us. When there is a road there is trade.”
Yunnan, a hinterland of 26 ethnic minorities, is now being linked by trans-Asian rail and highways to its neighbours Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam through Kunming and Ruili.
To drive on China’s side of the Stilwell Road, take the flight from Beijing to Kunming, where the Ledo road ended. The three-hour flight from Beijing to Kunming traverses almost the same distance as Beijing to Urumqi, capital of northwest Xinjiang. Kunming and Urumqi are closer to Myanmar and Pakistan than to most Chinese provinces.
“Chinese writings reveal that Pakistan and Myanmar have now acquired the same place in China’s grand strategy in the 21st century that was occupied by Xinjiang (New Territory) and Xizang (Western Treasure House, that is, Tibet),” said Mohan Malik, professor of Asian security at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii. “Pakistan is perceived as China’s new Xinjiang and Myanmar as China’s Xizang in economic, military, and strategic terms.”
Border boomtown
The two-lane highway expands to six yawning lanes as it enters China’s final frontier on the Myanmar border.
The paddy fields in Ruili where locals grew their own rice have given way to a port and markets selling Myanmarese timber and jade. A railroad from Ruili is snaking toward Myanmar’s western port city Kyaukphyu. Chinese engineers are also building a 200-km road on the Myanmar side of the border, besides ports, highways and bridges. A railway from Kunming through Laos and Myanmar to Thailand and a China-Myanmar-Bangladesh road network are in the works.
“We’re going to build international highways, railways, water routes, oil and gas channels and make Ruili a pilot city in opening-up,” announced the Yunnan governor in June. Authorities brag that their port will be as busy as Shenzhen.
Strategists like Malik point out that the north-south transport corridor along the Irrawaddy River will give Beijing entry into the Indian Ocean and serve military objectives in the event of a conflict with India or the Taiwan Straits, or if a naval blockade is imposed through the Malacca Straits. “Historically, whenever there was conflict between Chinese and Indian interests,” he said, “Rangoon gave greater importance to Chinese interests. The Myanmarese dare not antagonise China and they don’t fear India.”
In Ruili, the Chinese exporters and Myanmarese increasingly depend on each other. Despite the massive infrastructure for a place with under 300.000 residents, the only economic movement is trade in raw materials sourced from Ruili’s Myanmar ghettos and marked-up products exported to the world. The town has no university. This reporter never saw a foreign tourist even in the biggest hotel. Residents go to Kunming or Mandalay to graduate. The Chinese in Ruili speak Myanmarese, but not English, and cross their border with special permits. They also trade parcels and messages over the side barricades or simply squeeze through the gaps from one regime to another.

 

Burma to up Thailand migrant assistance

Burma will greatly increase its assistance to migrants working in Thailand, following three days of talks in Bangkok between a delegation of Burmese officials and Thailand’s labour minister, Phadoemchai Sasomsap.

Speaking to DVB at the close of play yesterday, Burmese Deputy Labour Minister Myint Thein, who led the delegation, said that the two sides discussed a raft of issues related to the rights of up to three million Burmese migrants living in the Kingdom, many of whom struggle with healthcare and legal assistance.

“We are here [in Thailand] to coordinate with [Thai authorities] to go through procedures such as migrants’ national identification and issuing temporary passports inside Thailand, as well as on issues such as their visa fees and job finding.

“For the latest, we have requested the Thai government to provide assistance to our migrants being affected by recent flooding and they’ve pledged to do so.”

Andy Hall, from the Thailand-based Human Rights and Development Foundation (HRDF), said that the meeting also resulted in the addition of a labour attaché at the Burmese embassy in Bangkok, whilst regional centres would be set up to make it easier for migrants to complete the registration process.

Chin Sein, part of the Burmese delegation, said: “We were negotiating to set up five more offices on top of already existing ones in areas including Mahachai-Samut Sakorn, Bangkok metropolitan area, and in north and south Thailand.”

The move was “cautiously welcomed” by HRDF, with Hall adding that many migrants feel that the embassy under the previous junta “didn’t care”.

The meeting also established that Burma would “also send five teams of … delegates to install online shared data system between Myanmar [Burma] and Thailand in order to reduce working procedures and time,” according to a Thai government press statement.

There are between two and three million Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, whose total migrant population accounts for some five percent of the Thai work force, and seven percent of GDP. They invariably occupy the most undesirable and dangerous professions.

The Thai government press statement further noted that the Burmese delegation “also asked the Thai government to permit those accompanying Myanmar workers to legally be in Thailand”, likely referring to the family members who join their relatives working in Thailand. “And after they are nationality verified and legally employed, Thai employers should be responsible for Social Security contribution of Myanmar workers.”

Thailand’s former Democrat government had sought to exclude foreign workers from a national workers’ compensation fund, which would see migrant workers rely on their employers for insurance in the result of injury in the workplace. But the Abhisit administration’s refusal was deemed by critics to be a contravention ofThailand’s treaty obligations in lieu of discriminating on the basis of nationality.

The Thai government has also been desperately attempting to regularise the large numbers of workers who travel with little or no documentation.

ခ်င္းတုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ား ဘူးသီးပေလြ အသံုးျပဳမႈ ေလ်ာ့နည္းလာ

ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသား လူမ်ဳိးစုမ်ားသည္ ေတာင္တစ္ေတာင္ ေက်ာ္လွ်င္ စကားတစ္မ်ဳိး လူမ်ဳိးတစ္မ်ဳိးဟု ဆုိႏိုင္ၿပီး၊ ခ်င္းေတာင္ေပၚတြင္ ခ်င္းတုိင္းရင္းသား လူမ်ဳိးစုေပါင္း ၅၀ ၀န္းက်င္ရွိသည္ဟု ဆိုေသာ္လည္း ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသားတုိ႔၏ အႏုပညာ၊ ေတးဂီတ၊ အသံုးျပဳသည့္ ကိရိယာမ်ားမွာ အမ်ားအားျဖင့္ တူညီၾကသည္။ ထုိအထဲတြင္ ဗုံတုိ၊ ေမာင္း၊ ကၽြဲခ်ဳိ၊ ဘူးသီးပေလြဟူ၍ ရွိရာ ယခုအခါ ထုိဘူးသီးပေလြ ေခၚ (ျငင္း)ကို အသံုးျပဳမႈ နည္းပါးလာၿပီး၊ ေတးသီခ်င္းအျဖစ္ တီးမႈတ္တတ္သူပင္ နည္းပါးလာၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

“ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ဘူးသီးပေလြက ကုလားႏွဲနဲ႔ ဆင္ဆင္တူတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အသံႏွင့္ အသံုးျပဳ တီးမႈတ္မႈက်ေတာ့ ကြာသြားတယ္။ ဟိုတုန္းကေတာ့ ပဲြလမ္းသဘင္ က်င္းပေတာ့မယ္ဆုိရင္ ဖလမ္း၊ ဟားခါး တီးတိန္၊ လူ႐ိႈင္းမွာ ဘူးသီးပေလြ မပါမၿပီး သံုးၾကတယ္။ အခုေတာ့ အသံုးျပဳမႈ နည္းသြားသလို ဘူးသီးပေလြ ေခၚတဲ့ (ျငင္း)တူရိယာကို အသစ္ထုတ္လုပ္မႈလည္း မေတြ႕ရေတာ့ဘူး။ အေဟာင္းကိုပဲ ငွားရမ္း အသံုးျပဳေနၾကတယ္” ဟု ခ်င္းတုိင္းရင္းသား တစ္ဦးက ေျပာပါသည္။


ယခု ခ်င္းတုိင္းရင္းသားတို႔ အသံုးျပဳ တီးမႈတ္သည့္ ျငင္းေခၚ ဘူးသီးေျခာက္ ပေလြမွာ သံစဥ္ ၇ မ်ဳိး သီဆုိ တီးမႈတ္ႏိုင္သည္။ ခ်င္း႐ိုးရာ တူရိယာတြင္ ကၽြဲခ်ဳိတီးခတ္မႈႏွင့္ ဗံုတုိ၊ ေမာင္းတို႔က စည္းခ်က္၊ ၀ါးခ်က္ညီညီ တီးရသည္။ ဘူးသီးေျခာက္ ပေလြေခၚ (ျငင္း) တူရိယာမွာ ေတးသြားသံစဥ္ အနိမ့္အျမင့္ အတုိင္း တီးမႈတ္ရသည္ျဖစ္၍ ယခင္ ေရွးကာလက ဘူးသီးေျခာက္ ပေလြမွာ မပါမျဖစ္ ပါရသည့္ အဓိက တူရိယာျဖစ္သည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။

ယခုအခါမွာ ဘူးသီးေျခာက္ ပေလြမႈတ္ တတ္သူနည္းပါးလာ၊ အသံုးျပဳမႈလည္း နည္းလာသည္။ အဆုိပါ ဘူးသီးေျခာက္ ပေလြေခၚ ျငင္း တူရိယာကို ခ်င္းေတာင္တြင္ ၅၀၀၀၀ က်ပ္မွ ၁၀၀၀၀၀ က်ပ္ အထိ ေပး၀ယ္ရေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။