Tomorrow Thailand will start its repatriation of more than 3,000 Karen refugees who are staying in Tha Song Yang in Tak Province. The refugees, including many women and children, entered the country last June to seek safety after weeks of heavy fighting between a joint force of Burmese government troops and their local allies, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), and their traditional foe, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), in Karen State.
This is the second largest repatriation of refugees from Thailand ever, and comes just months after the Thai government decided to send thousands of ethnic Hmong asylum-seekers back to Laos despite international objections.
These developments are doing nothing to improve Thailand's already tarnished reputation. According to a survey by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Thailand is one of the world's worst places to be a refugee. This scathing assessment is due in part to reports early last year that the Thai Navy had pushed Rohingya boat people out into the open sea with little food or water to prevent them from coming ashore.
For the Karen, the situation is hardly any better. Under current Thai policy, displaced Karen fleeing from conflict are permitted to stay only temporarily. When the fighting stops, they are expected to go back. According to the Thai authorities, the DKBA and some KNLA leaders have assured them that hostilities have ceased in the area that the 3,000 Karen fled from last year. And so they must return.
However, the refugees themselves are well aware of how precarious any semblance of peace can be in their homeland. This is why they don't want to go back, and why groups such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Thailand Burma Border Consortium and the Karen Women's Organization say they should be allowed to stay. They are all urgently appealing to the Thai government not to forcibly push the refugees across the border into a heavily mined conflict zone.
Thailand should also remember that conflict in eastern Burma is about more than just armed combat. Many of those who fled were seeking to escape forced army recruitment and forced labor by the DKBA, carried out partly in order to reinforce troop levels in preparation for its transformation into a border guard force battalion under Burmese military command.
The offensives in Karen State last year appeared to be part of an effort by the Burmese regime to force ethnic cease-fire groups to accede to its border force plan or face military action. In August, the junta launched an attack against another ethnic army in the Kokang region of Shan State. That fighting sent 37,000 refugees fleeing to China. Thailand should also be concerned about the implications of this new offensive, as many other armed cease-fire groups hold territory bordering Thailand.
Meanwhile, Burmese regime forces are reported to be preparing to take more KNLA territory in the coming months. Border-based sources say that there has been a buildup of Burmese army battalions in the area the refugees will be repatriated to. This will allow the regime's DKBA allies to control more of the border area and trade with Thailand once they become a border guard force—a development that could also result in thousands of new refugees seeking shelter in Thailand.
For the refugees who are already here, there is no desire to return to a life of fleeing conflict and massive human rights violations. All they want is to remain in a country where they are safe. To Thailand's credit, it has already sheltered hundreds of thousands of refugees from Burma over the past 25 years. But this is not the time to start taking a tougher line with refugees. Until Burma is finally free of civil war, Thailand should be prepared to continue helping those who have suffered most in this deadly, decades-old conflict.
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