WASHINGTON -- Based in the west but looking eastwards towards Burma, The Burma Youth Project, founded and directed by Maggie Holden in this US capital, recently held a symposium at American University here. The event drew about 60 students, activists, scholars and Burma watchers.

The symposium was co-sponsored by the United States Campaign for Burma, which has been active in Burmese democracy advocacy since it was formed in 2004. The Burma Youth Project has multinational and international members.

Holden is an M.A. candidate in American University’s School of International Service Masters Program. She has traveled extensively and has led three “alternative break” student delegations to the Thai-Burma border to explore human rights issues. Burma Youth Project organized a fact-finding trip to the border regarding education for Burmese refugees and migrant labor recently.

This has been a “silent” on-going problem, and will continue to be so as long as people from all ethnic groups and all walks of life have to flee state sponsored oppression and mass human rights abuses in Burma.

According to statistics published by Refugees International, in 2006 there were an estimated 160,000 Burmese refugees in nine camps in Thailand and a million internally displaced people within Burma itself. 

The refugees in Thai camps are mostly Karen and Karenni. The Shans have been treated differently by the Thai government, despite or because of their ethnic closeness to the Thai people.  They are often hiding out in the jungle in the no-man’s land or “liberated areas” along the border and are not in refugee camps, and so relief workers have a harder time reaching them. 

Refugees arrive in Thailand in the hundreds daily, especially during the times when the Burmese military junta steps up its military campaigns against the ethnic groups on the eastern borders. Unfortunately, the Burmese army now does not “rest” during the monsoon season, and wages a high level war against its own people year round.

The symposium was timely. During the morning session on Burma activism and the media, Min Zin, a broadcaster at Radio Free Asia based here, said many of the dissidents featured in that morning’s video documentary by Frontline reporter Evan Williams, based on footage smuggled out of Burma, were personal friends of his. 

One, Thet Naing Oo, died at the hands of junta-sponsored thugs who used steel balls and catapults during a premeditated attack carried out in downtown Rangoon, witnessed by hundreds of Rangoon residents who did not dare intervene.  The Frontline video showed a mother mourning her son who had a cracked skull crudely stitched together, like the footprints of a monstrous centipede. 

A few days before the April 27 symposium, news came out of Burma that a similar attack was carried out against two other dissidents in a southern town called Henzada. This time, Zin said, the victims were fortunate as some monks who were passing by managed to intervene.  However, there have been continued reports that the survivors have not been given the medical care they need in hospital.

Zin, who has been in the democracy movement since he was 13 years old, said courage is one of the key factors needed to report about Burma, even if one is based, as he is, outside the country. He said whenever he tries to report objectively on a certain issue, other dissidents often ask him why he is trying to confuse the issue, why it is not black and white, and whether he is an activist or a reporter. He deplored the remnants of “authoritarian thinking” which he noted still remain among Burmese who have lived and worked overseas for decades.

1988 Generation

The Burma Youth Project, the US Campaign for Burma and American University are to be commended for arranging the symposium. I have had a ten-year association with Burma activists, and I’m always happy to sit on panels and contribute my two cents. 

Others on the inter-generational education panel with me were: Emily Jacobi, Youth Self-Assessment Coordinator and Project Photographer, Jennifer Quigley, USCB,  and Win May Kyaw, Burmese activist. Megan O’Brien, Peace Education Research Coordinator, Burma Youth Project, was moderator.

Each generation is usually defined as renewing itself every 20 years. I spoke of some famous generations in modern Burmese political history, such as the 1920 Nagarni or Red Dragon generation and the very famous 1988 generation. The year 1988, before the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident in China, was the watershed year of mass nation-wide pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma. Like an earthquake or a natural disaster, 1988 has changed the lives of us Burmese forever. 

Most people I’ve met outside Burma in activist circles belong to the 1988 generation. According to a long time Rangoon resident, who is also in academia, in 1988 there was a “sort of population explosion.”  So when the mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma started countrywide that spring and summer, the number of people peacefully demonstrating on the streets must have struck a chill into the generals’ hearts.  They then followed their “tried and true method” at least from their viewpoint, of “letting a thousand flowers bloom” for a while, and then staging a massive clampdown.

Nineteen years later, dissidents within the country and also overseas are still struggling to effect change in Burma. The Burma Youth Project Symposium was unusual in that it attempted to address the issue of education along the Burma-Thai border.

The fact-finding mission found the short term courses that exist right now are somewhat elitist in their outlook and their reach. Like the Burmese proverb, they are like “attempting to feed an elephant by throwing sesame seeds at its (big) mouth,” in other words, sorely inadequate. 

The panelists said most courses teach how to write successful project proposals to submit to donor agencies. The Burma Border Consortium (BBC), which sees to the relief aid delivered to the camps, is said to be a model in its schools, too. But I understand that as the Burmese refugee and migrant worker issue is so long-standing and overwhelming, long term education which addresses the refugees' daily needs are more essential.