Page 1 of 2 PHOTO ESSAY Rangers to the rescue in Myanmar
By Tony Cliff
KAREN STATE, Myanmar - Saw Maw Nam spreads his dental instruments over a
plastic sheet on the spongy ground of a vast but untended durian plantation
cleared from Myanmar's northern Karen State jungle. With the help of a camper
headlamp, he vigorously pulls at a tooth from a puzzled woman.
"Here most of the people get their teeth rotten by the betel nuts they
constantly chew," smiles the 38-year-old Karen, himself a regular chewer.
Besides Saw Maw Nam, who also goes by the nickname of "Superman", a group of
women with their young children and a few elders from a nearby village sit on a
tarpaulin.
Some have lived here since birth, others have come more
recently, forced to leave homes which were burnt down by government soldiers.
Settled amid the small crowd, young medics take blood samples from screaming
babies and test the breathing of their mothers with a stethoscope.
Photos by Tony Cliff
"Malaria is a big killer here," says Saw Hser Doh, a 25-year-old Karen medic.
"Many people suffer from dysentery, anemia and other diseases which can be
easily treated."
A female assistant will then distribute medicine and dutifully write down the
details in a log book. Moving around this little theatre, Sai Khur Harn, a
28-year old Shan, is filming with a compact video camera. Later he will record
the testimony of two villagers, detailing how they were forced to work as
porters on trails infested with landmines by the government army - they all say
"SPDC", the acronym for "State Peace and Development Council", the ruling
military junta's official name since 1997.
Pictures and reports of atrocities perpetrated by soldiers against civilians
will be processed on portable computers and sent with satellite equipment to a
mailing list across the globe, including to international human rights
activists and a handful of United States congressmen.
A short distance from the medical makeshift facilities, squatting near a fire
with their guns within reach, other young men wash cuts of red meat for lunch.
They are Naw Naw La Pang, a 30-year old Kachin, and Kya Bon, a 36-year old
Lahu, both security volunteers.
They are all members of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) relief team who reached
the plantation the day after a tough walk through remote mountainous jungle.
They were accompanied by some 20 porters carrying medical supplies, blankets,
cloth and other emergency items.
The FBR were founded in 1997 by a then 37-year-old former American Special
Forces officer who had grown up in Thailand and a handful of young Karen from a
refugee camp. They were horrified by the displacement, disease and death of a
brutal and large scale offensive along the Thai-Myanmar border launched by the
government army against Karen insurgents.
"Refugees arriving on the border were more or less accommodated in camps in
Thailand but we realized that there were huge needs in the jungle and the
mountain where scores of displaced people were hiding in terror, nobody was
helping them", says a FBR founder, who for security reasons asked not to be
quoted by his real name but rather by pseudonym Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, or "the father
of the white monkey" in the Karen language.
It took a few years before the FBR established itself as a humanitarian force
to reckon with and become the only organization of its kind not directly
affiliated with an ethnic resistance movement to actually work deep inside
Myanmar's vast ethnic territory.
In many ways, the FBR have reactivated in Myanmar what pioneering international
non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as the French Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF) or Aide Medicale Internationale (AMI) were doing in the 1980s
in war-torn countries like Afghanistan before switching to more cautious
strategies.
Then, humanitarian groups frequently worked without governments' authorization
to send medical relief teams in war zones, often by passing through clandestine
border crossings. Today, with the vast network of humanitarian organizations
all over the world, the FBR are one of the few that have maintained this risky,
life-saving approach.
Most FBR missions take place in Myanmar's so-called "black zones", a term used
by the junta to describe ethnic territories with intense underground
activities. They are also where soldiers have a free license to kill suspected
guerrillas as well as civilians. The ongoing offensive in ethnic territories is
not new but rather the continuation of a massive counter-insurgency strategy
launched in the 1960s under a policy known as the "Four Cuts".
The objective then was to push the insurgents from central Myanmar to more
remote mountainous areas and cut their links to food, money, intelligence and
recruits with the local and mostly sympathetic population. That move also had
an economic motive: the exploitation of these lands vast and rich natural
resources. The policy has over the years amounted to an endless and efficient
ethnic cleansing campaign which is still ongoing.
The "black zones" in particular have become a setting for daily tragedies.
Government soldiers, driven by a system that insures total impunity, have
engaged in a myriad of abuses: murder, rape, torture, destruction, looting,
forced labor, child conscription. FBR and other organizations estimate that
there are currently over one million internally displaced people in Myanmar's
ethnic areas. Some are forced to flee fighting and abuses for a few days,
others for months or even years.
FBR volunteers are young people selected by ethnic leaders for their motivation
and aptitude. They are generally trained from a one to two month period in
secret camps set up in ethnic territory. They learn the basic techniques of
medical emergency, psychological counseling, media reporting, map reading,
landmine removal and physical training before signing up for at least four
years with the organization. A new "Ranger" has to make the fundamental
commitment "to be with people under attack and to stand with them if they
cannot flee".
Head
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Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
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Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
