Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | R | Refuge

A survival story from the Thai-Burmese border: the struggle for education in the Burmese community in Thailand.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The Burmese refugee/migrant community on the Thai-Burmese border figures prominently among "refugee diasporas" in the world today. This article describes efforts of Burmese people within this community to provide basic education to their youth in extra-legal migrant schools in the midst of the unwelcoming environment created by the Thai government's refugee policy. It argues that this community needs greater support than it is currently receiving in order to achieve recognition and security given the impossibility of safe and voluntary repatriation to Myanmar in the foreseeable future. The article closes with a number of specific proposals for facilitating the delivery of education to Burmese "migrant" youth in the Burmese community in Thailand through intervention by both state and nonstate actors.

Resume

La communaute birmane de refugies/migrants a la frontiere birmano-thailandaise est actuellement l'une des composantes importantes des > dans le monde. L'article decrit les efforts du peuple birman de cette communaute, visant a offrir une education de base aux jeunes dans des ecoles de migrants extrajudiclaires, dans le contexte d'un environnement importun cree par la politique en matiere de refugies du gouvernement thailandais. Il affirme que cette communaute a besoin d'un pius grand soutien que celui qu'elle recoit actuellement pour atteindre la reconnaissance et la securite, etant donne l'impossibilite d'un rapatriement securitaire et spontane au Myanmar dans un futur rapproche. L'article offre en conclusion bon nombre de propositions specifiques en vue de faciliter la dispense de l'education a la jeunesse > de la communaute birmane de Thailande, grace a l'apport d'intervenants des spheres publiques et privees.

Everywhere in the world, people are on the move, most not because they want to be. They have picked up what few belongings they could carry and set off, usually because the places they nostalgically call home have become intolerable sites of exploitation or violence. Or worse yet, they may have disappeared altogether as armed gangs, paramilitaries, or state armies sweep through their villages burning their houses, killing their animals, destroying their fields, making life insupportable. Such is the case in much of eastern Myanmar, and there, as in other places, the fleeing populace takes with it a whole generation of children as they cross the border into Thailand in search of security. Sometimes, when these people cannot make it themselves, they send their children on alone. In either case, once across, the children face not only the same hardships as their parents but in addition the deprivation of that so-fundamental right that the United Nations, virtually every state in the world, and people far and wide hold dear: the right to an education.

Among those concerned about the displacement of people by conflict, the town of Mae Sot, Thailand, has become well known as an enclave of Burmese refugees and economic migrants. The distinction between these two groups is murky at best since the persecution that people face in Myanmar is both political and economic. The failure of the Thai government to ratify the United Nations Convention on Refugees means that the illegal migrant community bears all the burdens of refugees without any of the benefits (such as the education provided in refugee camps) or even the legitimacy that comes with recognition as refugees. The abuses of rights and humanitarian problems displaced Burmese people face trying to survive along both sides of the Thai-Burmese border have been well documented by the many NGOs that work there, by Human Rights Watch and by the United Nations. So have the causes of their displacement. See, for example, the "Statement on 'Abuse of Migrant Workers in...