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From Our Correspondent: Those Rowdy Neighbors The problems of having Myanmar next door By DOMINIC FAULDER Wednesday, March 14, 2001 AsiaWeek Web posted at 12:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12:30 a.m. GMT My friend could scarcely contain his amusement at the perfect crime, Thai style. He lives in a pleasant middle-class housing estate in the eastern suburbs of Bangkok. His neighbor, like many Thais, has an illegal-immigrant Burmese maid. She seldom ventures out in case the local police harass her and challenge her to sing the Thai national anthem. At night, she and other illegal servants emerge like moths to play badminton beneath the estate`s fluorescent street lamps. One day, with only the maid at home, three "electricians" turned up unexpectedly. They told the maid to stand by the fuse box with her finger poised over the master switch ready to throw it in an emergency. As the electricians moved around the house checking the wiring in every room, they kept calling down to ensure she was in place and alert. After 15 minutes, the job was done. The trio bade the maid a cheery farewell and marched off. The house had, of course, been comprehensively burgled. And the owner knew full well that this was where the matter ended. He could hardly ask his illegal maid to make a statement at the local police station. Burmese maids in Thailand are a phenomenon of the 1990s. They started to come in when young Thai women from the provinces began to shun appallingly paid jobs in domestic service in favor of shift work in the factories, offices and hotels that sprouted during the bubble-economy years. By some estimates, as many as 700,000 Burmese have worked as domestics, builders, fishermen, sex workers - indeed in any underpaid (or unpaid) job that Thais prefer to avoid. Labor regulations have often been relaxed or openly flouted to accommodate this cheap and exploitable influx. They don`t just come from Myanmar. Child beggars from Bangladesh occasionally surprise tourists with their impressive English. In Cambodia, I once met a former Khmer Rouge who had been building Bangkok skyscrapers until the economy collapsed in 1997. In one luxury Bangkok housing estate, the only non-Cambodian security guard stands at the front entrance. But it is the Burmese who are by far the most numerous. Apart from "economic migrants," over 120,000 Karen, Mon, Shan and Karenni refugees shelter in crude camps along the porous 2,000-km border Thailand shares uncomfortably with Myanmar. These people have fled not for economic gain but in fear of their lives before brutal dry-season military pacification campaigns that are often a prelude to forced resettlement. The junta in Yangon calls these displaced people "alleged refugees" who support ethnic insurgency. Unfortunately for this claim, the junta also insists it has signed ceasefire agreements with most of the same ethnic minorities. Who to believe? A recent Burmese military push against Shan insurgents spilled into Thailand. A key border town, Mae Sai, had to be evacuated after two civilians were killed in shelling. Tachilek, on the Myanmar side, was also shelled, but most of the casualties there appear to have been military. It was probably the most serious incident involving the armies of two ASEAN member states in the regional groupings three-decade-old history. What did ASEAN have to say? Not a word. Tensions have yet to be defused. It isn`t only the minorities on the Myanmar-Thai border who are deeply unhappy and mistrustful. In 1991, a quarter of a million Muslims in Myanmar`s Arakan state fled into Bangladesh in a similar state of terror. (An almost identical exodus occurred in the late 1970s.) It took the UNHCR until mid-1997 to repatriate the Rohingyas, as they are called, though about 20,000 still shelter in Cox`s Bazaar in Bangladesh. India, which was deeply critical of the military repression in Myanmar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has normalized relations as far as possible. It decided it simply could not afford to close dialogue channels with an immediate neighbor. The flood of Burmese maids is of no concern to most Thais. What does worry them is the fact that their country is awash with methamphetamine tablets produced by syndicates protected by the allegedly pro-Yangon United Wa State Army. The factories in the Mong Yawn area (newly established as a kind of methamphetamine enterprise zone) are so close to the Thai border they can be seen from it. Thai authorities estimate that over 800 million of these speed tablets flow each year into Thailand to be used by everyone from the lowliest stevedores to the children of cabinet ministers. It is often said that methamphetamine addiction is the single most serious social problem facing the country. Certainly it has become far more serious than traditional narcotic abuse. Even so, Myanmar is still the second-largest opium-producing country in the world, after the so-called Golden Crescent in West Asia/Afghanistan, generating 80% of Southeast Asia`s deadly harvest. "On balance, the United State`s government remains concerned that Burma`s efforts are not commensurate with the extent of the illicit drug problem within its borders," was the dry assessment of a recent U.S. State Department report. Money laundering and harboring internationally recognized criminals were two other gripes about Myanmar that the Americans repeated. Where there`s drugs, there`s usually another misery-seeking missile: AIDS. China today has an estimated 500,000 HIV-positive citizens. The lethal contagion spread in large part through Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar. The AIDS crisis is a worldwide phenomenon in which apportioning blame is a pretty pointless endeavor. But both Myanmar and China have suppressed AIDS information and education in the past, living in a fool`s paradise of denial. Had the situation in northeastern Myanmar been handled differently, it`s a fair bet that China today would have less of an AIDS crisis on its hands. The New Light of Myanmar newspaper has plenty to say about neighborly relations. The state organ has been sermonizing endlessly on the "Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence" that purportedly govern official Burmese foreign policy. They are: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-aggression; non-interference in one another`s affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful co-existence. "Though Myanmar lives in accord with these principles, Thailand among the neighbors has failed to follow the code of conduct of a good neighbor," journalist Chit Kyiyay Kyi Nyunt wrote in the New Light. If Myanmar seriously imagines its present regional conduct is that of a good neighbor, try to imagine what it might get up to if it decided to be a "bad" one. A chilling thought. |
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| aus der Diskussion: | Waste or make money in Thailand |
| Autor (Datum des Eintrages): | BodyG (14.03.01 18:58:37) |
| Beitrag: | 527 von 611 (ID:3101190) |
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