Life Gets Harder on Thai-Myanmar Border

Refugees on the border face increased hardship as funds dry up ahead of their expected repatriation

With once-isolated Myanmar opening up since 2010 elections installed a civilian government, more international aid has poured into the country and NGOs from the West have rushed to set up headquarters there.

However, around 130,000 refugees – mostly members of the Karen ethnic group who fled a bloody conflict in their homeland in eastern Myanmar – still live in camps on the Thai side of the border.

Both governments, along with refugee groups and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, have been negotiating their return, although no timeframe has been set. Yet with the funding drying up, aid workers on the border say the situation is become increasingly desperate.

“The funding available for humanitarian support is decreasing,” says Sally Thompson, head of The Border Consortium (TBC), a group of 10 international NGOs working in the field. “In 2014 we will still find ways to support refugees, but we have got to do it more efficiently. There are no spare funds.”

Many refugees will see their rice rations for December cut as households are categorized according to need. Although the most needy households will receive more rice – alongside meager rations of split peas, vegetable oil, flour and fishpaste – the cuts are driven by reductions in funding for food aid.

Thompson says the protracted nature of the situation on the border, the opening up of Myanmar – formerly known as Burma – and talk of the refugees returning within the next few years make it increasingly difficult to attract funding.

Many have no wish to return anyway. The first camps opened in 1984, and now more than half the population is aged under 19. “Most of the youth in the camps don’t know what a life is like in Burma, they don’t relate to a life in Burma,” says Thompson. “Their formative years have all been here in Thailand.”

In the camps, they have had access to basic healthcare and education provided by international NGOs, as well as vocational training in subjects such as mechanics, hairdressing, baking and tailoring. If they are sent back to Karen state, which lacks even the most basic infrastructure, they can look forward to little more than a life based on subsistence farming.

For decades following Myanmar’s independence in 1948, the Karen fought a bloody war for independence or greater autonomy. A ceasefire was signed early last year, but the Myanmar army still maintains a strong presence in the area, prompting fear and suspicion among those who fled the atrocities it carried out.

Although Thai authorities bar residents from leaving the camps, many do find work locally, leaving themselves open to arrest and exploitation. They usually receive less than the minimum wage, and unscrupulous employers often refuse to pay them at all. Young women are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by employers and authority figures such as policemen and government officials.

Some refugees with an entrepreneurial spirit have found ways to make a living in the camps by selling everything from food to clothing and mobile phones. But to make its limited funds go further, the TBC says it now needs to focus its efforts on those it considers most vulnerable, and is encouraging those who can to take more responsibility for themselves.

“They do a lot for themselves now, they always have done,” says a clearly frustrated Thompson at her office in downtown Bangkok. “They haven’t been lying around indolently and doing nothing, but on the other hand their choices have been very restricted, so they have been very dependent on what the international humanitarian community has provided.”

Admitting that the level of assistance now provided is “extremely marginal,” she adds: “We are asking them to take more risks because we don’t have the funds. It’s not good to have to do that. We are asking people to look at what the risks are and how to protect themselves.”

The TBC – formerly known as the Thai-Burma Border Consortium – opened an office in Yangon in August, in preparation for the return of the refugees. Many think this could take place after elections due in Myanmar in 2015, if they go ahead peacefully and are deemed free and fair.
Among the organizations that are feeling the pinch as the funding dries up is the renowned Mae Tao Clinic in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. It was set up in 1989 by Dr. Cynthia Maung, an ethnic Karen who fled the fighting in her home country and has since won many awards for her humanitarian work.

The clinic now treats around 100,000 patients a year. Nearly half of these travel from Myanmar to receive treatment, and the rest are migrant workers living in Thailand.

In July, the Australian overseas aid agency AusAID announced that it was cutting its funding to the clinic, and Dr. Maung says many donors have yet to commit beyond 2015, when 40 per cent of the current funding runs out.

The clinic’s budget is around 100 to 120 million baht ($3.1 – $3.7 million) a year, including 10-12 million baht annually from the British government.

Like Thompson, Dr. Maung is concerned that health and education services currently provided by civic organizations on the border will suffer from the cuts, noting that it will take years to build up decent infrastructure in Myanmar.

“We are a big organization so we have more access to funding than other, smaller organizations, but we are struggling and trying to readjust our programs,” she said. “The big problem is smaller organizations and schools… We worry about the child labor issue, if the schools aren’t open and there is no access to education.”

Dr. Maung hasn’t been back to Myanmar since she fled in the aftermath of the 1988 student uprising that led to a brutal crackdown by the ruling military, but she says there is a need to build stronger civil society organizations there. She hopes to go back one day, but in the meantime wants to continue her work treating migrant workers and refugees.

“The border is very unique,” she says. “We belong to both countries.”

Mark Fenn is a journalist based in Bangkok. He has written for many publications including The Times, The Independent, South China Morning Post, and the Far East Economic Review.

Sri Lanka: Tamil Struggle Continues

With the Rajapaksa regime intransigent, Tamils hope that foreign pressure can provide the impetus for change

Just over two months ago, the Tamils went to the polls for Sri Lanka’s Northern Provincial Council elections with defiance, yet with a cautious sense of festivity. Military harassment of voters and party candidates had been thorough and brutally innovative throughout the campaigning; in addition to the typical battering of election monitors, cash-for-votes and widespread intimidation, government supporters had even printed a fake newspaper.

The night of Election Day, one retired man from Jaffna would not dare predict the polling results. If the Tamil National Alliance won, there might be retribution, he said; destroyed cars, people beaten up and houses set on fire. Yet, if they lost, the military violence already in place might never end. For now, the elections themselves – the first in 25 years – were reason enough to celebrate, he said cheerfully, showing a small bottle of arrack – local coconut spirit – in his pocket.

Then, against all the odds, the TNA won a landslide victory, with 30 out of 38 seats on an unexpectedly high voter turnout.

The dream of an independent Tamil Eelam may be dead, but for many northern Tamils the provincial elections in the northeast had opened another narrow window of opportunity to claim the equal rights they have struggled to win for so long. Though primarily a symbolic defeat for the central government, the TNA’s success had also reignited hope that now – finally – the Tamils might have a chance at the reconciliation that, four years after the end of the Eelam IV war, has failed to materialize.

If expectations are now dashed by the Rajapaksa regime, a return to violence might be inevitable. “If it continues to close off avenues of peaceful change, the risks of violent reaction will grow,” concluded a November report by the International Crisis Group, titled Sri Lanka’s Potemkin Peace: Democracy Under Fire, ominously. After a visit to the country during the run up to the elections, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay Navi Pillay warned that Sri Lanka seemed to be heading in “increasingly authoritarian direction,” and that it must be remembered that “although the fighting is over, the suffering is not.”

While demanding federalism and not secession (“something like Quebec,” one TNA MP explained), the TNA have continuously reiterated that they will fight for it without violence. The stakes are high; the costs of a political breakdown risk falling somewhere between cultural genocide of the Tamils and a return to civil war.

While the war is over and the Tamil Tigers have been jubilantly crushed by the government forces, the north remains heavily militarized and for many residents, the violence isn’t over. In the villages, widows sleep in groups at night to escape nightly army harassment. White vans continue to pick up designated state enemies and journalists for unknown destinations. In Jaffna alone, over 2000 court cases alleging land grabs by the government are pending. Buddhist shrines have mushroomed in the region in an alleged gradual Sinhalization of the northeast. And while the government has finally admitted that its shelling operations during the final stage of the war caused some “collateral damage,” its estimates of civilian deaths come nowhere near the United Nations’ 40,000.

“How could the peace last, when none of the root causes of the conflict have been removed?” wondered a member of the diaspora. In the Vanni too, many residents expressed doubt the peace would be sustainable – if it could indeed be called peace at all.

For those who lived through it, the scars of the 26-year war have not healed. The night after the election, children flinched at the distant blasts from celebratory firecrackers. Now and then, leftover shells still detonate in the fields around the villages, and when one does, they fling themselves instinctively to the ground. Navi Pillay had noted the desperate need for “psychosocial“ support and expressed concern that counseling remained illegal. One man, who counsels in secret, described how parents, unable to express their grief, fainted at the mere mention of their dead children. Local NGOs report growing drinking problems and high suicide rates.

“Restorative, not retributive justice” has been the regime’s official line since the end of the war, but that catchphrase might make far more sense for those on the winning side. According to a recent poll by the Jaffna-based Centre for Policy Alternatives, 26.5 percent of respondents from Tamil communities thought that the government had done “nothing” to address the underlying causes of the conflict while 50 percent said efforts were insufficient.

“The government is building all of these tarmac roads to cover up the war,” said one TNA voter. “But that’s not what the people need. They want justice.”

To the extent it has even tried, the Rajapaksa regime has taken a peculiar approach to reconciliation. While the leadership insists that the process needs to happen without outside interference, even many of the recommendations of its own widely criticized Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission have not been implemented. Far from demilitarizing, the army has doubled in size since the end of the war. The military’s heavy involvement in the development sector has been hailed as a new peace-building model, even as locals say the army has hijacked the role from civil society. Last week, the regime demonstrated its own understanding of peaceful coexistence when it arrested award-winning Tamil Poet Shanmugampillai Jayapalan on the grounds of “disrupting ethnic harmony” as he returned from exile in Norway to visit his mother’s grave.

Rather than the six-lane highways and a nascent tourism sector offered by the government, the Northern electorate voted for the TNA’s manifesto promises on land rights, an end to the military occupation and demands for an independent, international investigation of the final stages of the war. The success of the TNA in addressing these concerns may in part be what makes or breaks Sri Lanka’s delicate post-war stability.

Now, two months after those provincial elections, it seems unlikely that the government will allow the TNA victory to be the game changer the Tamil communities had sought. Under the constitution’s contentious 13th Amendment, introduced through the 1987 Indo-Lankan Accords, the provincial councils have limited powers – notably over land and police – which the TNA had hoped to use as a starting point for meaningful federalism. Yet, despite initial promises to go “beyond” the 13th Amendment, the Rajapaksa regime quickly tried to scale back the council’s influence. Adding to its difficulties, the TNA is also at the mercy of a center-appointed provincial governor and the central government’s discretion as to funding. ‘The Diplomat’

How China Plans to Use the Su-35

Acquisition of the advanced Su-35 fighter would give China some significant new capabilities

A senior executive at Russia’s state arms export company, Rosoboronexport, has said that Russia will sign a contract to sell the advanced Su-35 jet to China in 2014, while confirming that the deal is not on track to be finished in 2013. This is unlikely to be the last word on the matter – the negotiations have dragged on since 2010, and have been the subject of premature and contradictory announcements before – but it is a strong indication that Russia remains interested in the sale. For the time being, China’s interest in the new-generation fighter is worth examining for what it reveals about the progress of homegrown military technology and China’s strategy for managing territorial disputes in the South China Sea. If successful, the acquisition could have an immediate impact on these disputes. In addition to strengthening China’s hand in a hypothetical conflict, the Su-35’s range and fuel capacity would allow the People’s Liberation Army Naval Air Force (PLANAF) to undertake extended patrols of the disputed areas, following the model it has used to pressure Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.

The Su-35 is not the first Sukoi to pique the interest of the Chinese military. As previously reported in The Diplomat, the Sukoi-30MKK, and the Chinese version, the J-16, have been touted by the Chinese military as allowing it to project power into the South China Sea.
Previous reports in Chinese and Russian media in June of this year pointed toward a deal having been reached over a sale of Su-35 multi-role jets, but were not viewed as official, given more than a year’s worth of contradictory reports in Chinese and Russian media. At one point, Russian sources claimed that the sale had gone through, only to be categorically refuted by the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Nevertheless, in January both governments paved the way for an eventual sale by signing an agreement in principle that Russia would provide the Su-35 to China.

A big question remaining is the number of aircraft that China will purchase. China’s Global Times reported this summer that a group of Chinese representatives were in Moscow evaluating the Su-35, and would begin acquiring a “considerable number” of the advanced jets. Whether that means that China will purchase more than 48, as mentioned in press statements a year ago, is unclear. Evidence of continued negotiation for the jets indicates a strong desire within the Chinese military to acquire the Sukhoi fighters.

Chinese aviation is still reliant in many ways on Russia. Media attention has focused on China’s domestic development programs, including stealth fighter-bombers and helicopters. The advance of Chinese aviation capabilities is by now a common theme, with every month seeming to bring new revelations about its programs. While the ability to manufacture and perform design work on these projects represents significant progress, “under the hood” these aircraft often feature Russian engines. China continues to try to copy or steal Russian engine technology because of a strong preference for building systems itself. In fact, purchasing the Su-35 does not reflect a shift in the preferences of the Chinese military leadership. Buying the Su-35 reflects the delicate position China now finds itself in, as both a large purchaser and producer of primarily Russian-style weapons. Though self-reliance has always been important to China, it has been superseded by the strategic need to acquire cutting-edge weapons systems quickly. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), beginning in 1991, China began purchasing the Su-27 long-range fighter jet (an older relative of the Su-35).

Russia understandably became upset when its star export appeared as an indigenously produced J-11 in China – without a licensing agreement. Russian media was previously reporting that Russia had chosen not to sell the jet over fears that it would be copied in turn and become yet another export item for China, further undercutting Russia’s own economically vital arms business. It appears that now Russia is trying to balance its fear of being undercut by Chinese copying with its desire (or need) to sell weapons.

Viewing the purchase of the Su-35 through the lens of China’s strategic needs and events, like the recent territorial spats with its neighbors, provides a useful perspective on just why China is so eager to acquire the Sukhoi jet.

Simply put, the Su-35 is the best non-stealth fighter in the world today. Though stealth has come to dominate Western aircraft design, in terms of China’s needs, other factors take precedence. Even more surprisingly, superiority in air-to-air combat is not the Su-35’s key selling point. while the Su-35 gives the Chinese military a leg up versus the F-15s and other aircraft fielded by neighbors like Japan, the advanced Russian jet does not add significant new capabilities to conflict areas like the Taiwan Strait. Large numbers of interceptors and multi-role jets like the J-10 could easily be deployed over the Strait, or to areas near Japan like the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. The advantage of the Su-35 rather lies in its speed and ample fuel tanks. Like the Su-27, the Su-35 was created to patrol Russia’s enormous airspace and to be able to meet incoming threats far away from Russia’s main urban areas. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) faces similar problems.

The South China Sea is just such a problem. A vast area of 1.4 million square miles (2.25 million square kilometers), China’s claims, as demarcated by the famous “nine-dashed line,” pose challenges for the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) current fighters. Currently, land-based PLANAF fighters, can conduct limited patrols of the sea’s southern areas, but their fuel capacity severely restricts the time they can spend on patrol. Enforcing claims far from the mainland in times of crisis requires the type of range and speed that the Su-35 possesses. The Su-35 is likely meant to help enforce China’s territorial claims, further deter regional claimants, and provide additional layers of protection in the case of escalation. The key to this is fuel.
‘The Diplomat’

Terrorist Stronghold Re-Emerges in Indonesia

MAKASSAR, Indonesia—Indonesia's terrorism force is refocusing on the southern reaches of Sulawesi island in its fight against terrorism, reflecting a year of rising activity by suspected militants in the region after more than a decade of relative quiet

For several years, the rolling hills at the center of the octopus-shaped island have given shelter to radical Islamic terrorists and their crude training camps in Indonesia, the world's most Muslim-populous country. Now, police say those militants are increasingly moving south from that area—Poso—toward Makassar, the sixth-largest city in Indonesia and historically a transit point for radicals across the region.

In October, police killed one suspected terrorist and arrested two others in South Sulawesi province for alleged involvement in attacks on police and other targets. Before that, in Makassar, police arrested a suspected terrorist in June, and killed two and arrested others in January. Police say at least some of the men came to the south from the training camps.

The region was also home to an early sign that Indonesian terrorists, who run limited operations involving targets on the police and crime like bank robberies, may be altering tactics.

Last year, the Muslim governor of South Sulawesi became the first politician directly targeted in an attack when a man hurtled a Molotov cocktail at him during a political party celebration in Makassar. The bomb failed to explode, but the message resounded: police and foreign targets were no longer the sole targets of terrorists.

The province of South Sulawesi "is a new place of concern," counterterrorism chief Ansyaad Mbai told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview in Makassar. "Poso is still their training ground, but they've been bothered by" security forces there and are moving around more, he said.

In one indication of the province's growing significance, the counterterrorism agency this year set up a new forum for stopping the propagation of radical ideas in Makassar, adding the capital to more than a dozen similar programs across the country created in the past two years.

The Sulawesi activity indicates several things, experts say: old networks die hard, today's terrorists are being forced to move around to find refuge, and the targets themselves are in question.

Makassar, the fast-growing, seaside city of several million, some 1,400 kilometers across the Java sea from Jakarta, last saw overt terrorist activity more than a decade ago. Historically, the region was one of the main bases of Darul Islam, the regionally connected militant group that gave rise to Jemaah Islamiyah—the al Qaeda-linked group behind Indonesia's worst terrorist attacks, including the bombings in Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people. 

Activity is "re-emerging [in South Sulawesi] after terrorists received trainings from Java and Poso-based terrorists," said Muh Taufiqurrohman, an expert on terrorism issues at the Jakarta-based Abdurrahman Wahid Center.

All of this led Mr. Mbai to give Makassar the nod for his first major gathering with the military since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a formal order, earlier this year, to find a bigger role for the military in the fight against terrorism, which is led by the police. Mr. Mbai leads a multiagency counterterrorism force where the police are predominant.

The military, for its part, says wider Sulawesi is an example of how it created a greater role for itself in the fight against terrorism.

"There have been many captures of terrorists, but it seems it hasn't been matched by prevention," given a high degree of recruiting success, Brig. Gen. Jaswandi, the military's chief of staff for territorial operations across Sulawesi, told the Journal on the sidelines of the meeting with Mr. Mbai.

Mr. Jaswandi said the military is building homes for residents of poor villages in the Poso region—where communal conflict between Christians and Muslims displaced tens of thousands in the late 90s—in an effort to reduce the appeal of extreme ideologies.

In prepared remarks at the event, the governor of South Sulawesi—the man attacked last year—acknowledged the threat in his province, tying it to an economy that, like in a handful of regional power centers, has been growing faster than the traditional centers of commerce in Java in recent years.

"If even a single bomb explodes, it's going to scare away investors," he said in a statement read to open the meeting. "We should not let the action of a few people endanger the livelihoods of many."

Economics have long been part of the equation, in Sulawesi and elsewhere.

Religious zealots are found at the top of extremist groups in Indonesia—which is by and large a nation of progressive, tolerant Islam apart from small pockets of radicalism—but the lower reaches are often populated by men frustrated by their lot.

For some, that frustration has built amid an economic boom in recent years that has pushed provinces like Jakarta to raise the minimum wage more than 40% in a single year.

At a court in South Jakarta last week, Achmad Taufiq, a 24-year-old on trial for allegedly attempting to build a crude bomb to attack the Myanmar Embassy earlier this year, fit that picture.

Prosecutors believe Mr. Taufiq was mostly attracted by the Darul Islam movement.

Mr. Mbai doesn't see big changes in store for the country's counterterrorism operations, but he does favor the president-supported bid to bring the military further into the fold.

He says he is currently pursuing 30 terrorist leaders, and that his job would be easier if he were able to gain the support of regional leaders all the way down to the village level.

"People are confused about whether the terrorists are evil or not, especially at the grass-roots level," he said, citing terrorists' effective use of propaganda.

"When they use Islam, people at the grass-roots level get confused. They use Islam as a banner of jihad." ‘The Wall Street Journal’