Karen get Thai "human zoo" treatment

[chuckwoww]

And very little for the women...

 

I imagine they aren't doing too badly by Karen standards. But I'd like to know the financial details if anybody has them. No doubt there's a middleman or two and probably some tribal elders looking after the business side.

 

[Torneyboy]

I think you are spot on there..

[bust]

Most of these woman are very proud of their tradition. The Paduang have some fantastic stories about creation well worth reading. A lot of the elders tell these stories to the young to replace reality with fantasy. Many of these woman earn around 1,500 baht a month. I think currently tourists are charged 250 baht to enter these villages for photo opportunities. Again about the same wage as a Burmese factory worker in Mae Sot. You can guarantee they are Thais running the show as it is all done on Thai soil. Incidently a little know fact about the Paduang is they are majority Christians not Budhhists

 

 

[sayjann]

Khun Hunter.

thanks for your comments.

i have had a keen interest in the American for many Years.

my Uncle lives in South Dakota and as you might know the scene of much bloodshed of the Lakota Sioux in the 1850-80's.

i have travelled to the Black Hills and know how touristy the place is but i have also seen local Indians in Sioux Falls just pissing it up and making no useful contribution to local society.

but i do not blame theme them as i imagine the benefits are not the same everywhere?.

 

last time i was there i wanted to visit Wounded Knee and Sand Creek but i was warned off by my Uncle (30 Year resident in SD) and one of his best Friends (a US Marshall).

it seemed that a little White boy like me would not be welcome on the reservations.

 

will be back in the area in March/April next Year and hopefully try to see if i can visit.

[Old Hippie]

In 1987, I went alone to wounded knee, no problems, I was pretty much ignored. No ideas now a days. I am fairly certain they are used to people going to see the monument, so not a big deal.

[soiarrai]

Further to the post article i found this article today which might be of interest to some.

 

Scotsman.com, Sunday, 24th September 2006

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1410192006

World wakes up to Burma catastrophe

 

LEANING on a worn wooden crutch, Saw Pa Pwe, 48, a short, muscular man, hobbles in on one rubber flip-flop from his brother's exposed bamboo platform to the raised shack he now calls home. The makeshift shelter sits one metre from the ground on the low point of a wet, sloping hill where hundreds of displaced villagers are starting from scratch, fleeing their government's latest attempt to wipe them out.

 

His wife sits silently in the stifling mid-morning heat - she has not spoken since a landmine maimed her husband in 2002, when his brother and four others carried him for a day and a night to the nearest clinic. Of his life on the run, Saw Pa Twe is blunt: "They want to torture us and destabilise the area," he says. "I have no idea of where else to go. I have no hope for the future."

 

 

His sister-in-law, Naw Pi Htoo, 44, who has lost three of her seven children to disease in the malaria-infested hills close to the border with Thailand, explains why they move relentlessly through the jungle instead of choosing life under the control of the Burmese military regime. "Living under their control means forced labour," she says. "They use the people to clear landmines and women and children to carry the military's goods."

 

The humanitarian crisis in Burma (also known as Myanmar) is gaining long-overdue international attention. Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council put Burma on its permanent agenda, despite sharp objections from Russia and China.

 

Energy-hungry China, Burma's strongest backer and largest trading partner, recently signed agreements with the regime that will eventually lead to large natural gas exports.

 

"This vote is a major step forward towards getting the UN to accept its responsibility to act on Burma," said Yvette Mahon, director of the Burma Campaign UK. "This is a case of the USA and the UK acting on principle, while China and Russia are putting trade and profit before the interests of ordinary Burmese people."

 

But few of the former farmers now living in the new refugee camp are tuned in to geopolitical wrangling at the UN. "We are refugees," says Saw Peter, a camp leader. "We don't have politics, we just want to eat."

 

Many of the aid workers based in Thailand say that the current military offensive under way in eastern Burma, against the Karen ethnic minority, is the worst they have seen in 10 years, displacing around 18,000, according to the Thai Burma Border Coalition, an advocacy group based in Bangkok.

 

"The military's strategy for the last 10 years has been to bring the entire civilian population under direct control for forced labour and monitoring," says Kevin Heppner, of the Karen Human Rights Group, also based in Thailand. "And everyone who lives beyond that immediate control has to be relocated or killed. For years they've been trying to do this, but the villagers don't want to live under military control. So they evade the troops, leaving the villages before they arrive. They live with very little or no relief or aid."

 

The military usually withdraws during the rainy season, but this year they have been ordered to fight through it, which can be difficult in the hills of eastern Burma. In many cases the military has set up camp in the villages, preventing the residents from returning to retrieve their belongings.

 

A lack of food was the reason many cited for finally fleeing to the camp. The military, they say, had prevented them from farming by placing landmines around their fields. The most recent arrivals came after a 12-day trek, surviving on an occasional handout of boiled rice and by foraging for bamboo shoots and vegetables. They joined 1,236 others already there.

 

Peter says there is a "gentleman's agreement" between the Thais and Burmese, allowing the refugees to congregate close to the border, with Thai-based aid groups being allowed to deliver limited amounts of food and medicine to the camp.

 

Wood and bamboo footbridges connect the different sections of the camp, which expands up along a tributary of the Salween River, the mighty waterway that borders Thailand, cutting into the dense vegetation.

 

The hacking sounds of the recently arrived foraging for bamboo construction material in the surrounding hills puncture the long afternoon tedium.

 

A report released by a Thai-based medical relief group this month substantiated what many relief workers had been saying for years - that eastern Burma is one of the worst humanitarian crisis zones in the world.

 

It showed that the endemic lack of health care combined with systemic human rights abuses result in mortality rates on a par with Angola, the Congo and Sierra Leone.

 

"Sometimes people don't want to talk about politics, but we are health care providers, so must look at the big picture," says Dr Cynthia Maung, one of the report's authors who runs a clinic along the border that helped 45,000 individuals last year. Maung works with teams of backpackers who carry medical supplies through military-controlled areas. She estimates they reach 150,000 of the half a million people who are displaced within eastern Burma.

 

"The lack of rule of law, collapse of public health, and extensive corruption have resulted in widespread availability of medicines without control, which often means medications are adulterated or taken inappropriately," says Voravit Suwanvanichkij, a physician and researcher with the Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University, who worked with Maung on the report.

 

"The end result of which is, for entities such as malaria and TB, increasing drug resistance rates, already documented along the Thai-Burma border. Similar things may also be occurring for HIV."

 

Even in parts of Burma controlled by the government, patients have to pay for their own medical supplies. The government spends about 40% of its budget on the military and little on health and education. A recently constructed hospital in the western Burma has no electricity.

 

Burma was once one of the richest countries in South-east Asia, endowed with fertile land, precious teak wood and gems, and blessed - or cursed - with natural gas.

 

The US and the European Union have sanctions against the regime, citing the house arrest of democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for 10 of the past 17 years.

 

But the argument used for convincing other members of the Security Council to put Burma on the agenda was that the country constitutes a regional threat, through the unchecked spread of HIV, narcotics and the constant flow of refugees into neighbouring countries. Even foreign ministers from the normally deferential regional economic body, the Association of South-east Asian Nations, have issued harsh rebukes against the regime's foot-dragging on promised reforms.

 

President George W Bush tightened the ban on doing business with Burma in 2003 and the US has largely taken the lead on dealing with Burma at the UN. President Bush's wife, Laura, is taking a personal interest in Burma, holding round-table discussions on putting pressure on the country's political prisoners, access to aid workers and ethnic violence.

 

Yet India and China, each of which borders Burma, are poised to benefit from untapped natural gas fields off Burma's west coast, currently being developed by South Korea's Daewoo, which could bring the regime between $12bn and $17bn over the next 20 years.

 

So far, advocacy groups from Thailand, the US, South Korea and India have condemned the venture as providing direct support for a regime with an atrocious human rights record.

 

"The only way to conduct business in Burma is by gaining the trust and favour of the junta, which is a notoriously difficult business partner," says Matthew Smith, of Earth Rights International, an environmental and human rights organisation with offices in Thailand and the US. "The elite are deeply superstitious and make important decisions based on those obscure superstitions. Politics and human rights aside, this is simply not a model business partner."

 

The groups point to the experience of the Yadana gas pipeline, constructed in the 1990s in eastern Burma, in which thousands of villagers were forcibly displaced amid acts of rape and murder.

 

A UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions could change the course of the gas deal, but with the economies of China and India growing at a furious pace, and the need for matching energy supplies, many doubt that a binding resolution is likely.

 

"Why do human rights abuses happen in Burma?" asks David Mathieson of Human Rights Watch in New York. "You just allowed business from three countries to finance repression in Burma for another 20 years. Where do you think that the money is going to go? It's not going to education or health programmes - it's going to the military to build a better command and control centre to repress the population as the regime sells off the wealth of the nation."

 

Reclusive regime bolting its doors

THE Burmese regime is notoriously unresponsive to outside pressure and all the signs point to it becoming more reclusive. This year it moved its capital to a construction site in the jungle town of Pyinmana, 320km north of Yangon, the largest city and former capital. Government employees were given no warning and were expected to relocate with their families immediately.

 

"This is a country that's trying to close itself in," said a senior western diplomat in Yangon. "This is a regime impervious to outside influence. They don't care what the world thinks of them."

 

The government monitors phone calls, censors websites such as hotmail, gmail and sites related to Burmese democracy activists, and asks internet café providers to take periodic 'snapshots' of their customers' monitors. Mobile phones are reserved for those in the military or with close ties, or those who can afford the £1,500 it takes to purchase a new line.

 

Hard-to-obtain economic reports contain blank pages where data on the quantity of currency in circulation should be. The government exchange rate is about 6 Kyat to $1. The black-market rate is closer to 1,350 to $1.

[bust]

Thanks for that soiarrai. We hear so much abouth the middle east yet this is happening right on Thailands border and very little is done internationally. Dr Cythia is an absolute inspiration. The world need more of her. I was at her clinic in July.