In the Water

Mae Sot

I've written a few posts recently about Thailand lately, focusing on the ever-increasing authoritarianism of the Thaksin government as it becomes an ever-more important US ally, politically, economically, and militarily.

This short post sort of adds a personal angle to the story, I guess. Over the past couple of weeks I've been reading stories about how a friend of mine, Aye Salam, has been facing increasing harassment from the authorities, death threats, and even an attempt on his life. Aye is an 18 year old volunteer translator supporting Burmese migrant workers with legal cases in the town of Mae Sot, near the Thai-Burmese border.

Born and raised in Thailand to Indian parents, Aye has nonetheless been arrested and charged with working without a permit and taking a job restricted to Thai nationals (the question of why he is not a Thai national perhaps gives us an insight into the racist immigration practices of the Thai government towards migrants).

Looking at Aye's work, his harassment is no doubt directly related to his work, and to the lives and condition of factory workers in Mae Sot. That town is more or less universally infamous among labor and migrant activists in Asia, known for its factories that produce garments and footwear for Asian and Western multinationals at cut-rate pries through the violent exploitation of undoumented Burmese migrant workers. As Dan Beeton wrote in a good article for Z Magazine back in 2003:

"...the Burmese human rights atrocities and the endemic poverty ensured that people of various ethnic backgrounds would continue to seek greater freedom and opportunities on the Thai side of the border, a situation that has continued ever since. Migrants cross over seeking both to escape aggression in Burma and to send money back home.

Instead, Burmese migrants in Mae Sot are in constant danger from the Thai police. Harassment is so constant and routine that some migrants almost seem used to it, accepting it as an aspect of daily life. For an outsider, however, the oppression in Mae Sot is unmistakable. Moe Swe tells me that two of his BLSO colleagues have just been jailed. He and other BLSO members try to round up the couple of thousand Baht they will need to bail them out. The bail prices are also arbitrary—seemingly set on a case- by-case basis by the cops in charge that night. 

Burmese in Mae Sot are under constant threat of persecution. Burmese migrants face the hostility of local Thais who, informed by an often-xenophobic media, see them as dirty, disease-carrying job-stealers. Burmese are occasionally the random targets of severe beatings and shootings. The police devote little effort to investigating such incidents or bringing the perpetrators to justice, which is hardly surprising since the Thai police themselves treat the Burmese community in the manner of an occupation force. The authorities periodically conduct street-sweeps—literally blocking off entire blocks in areas like Mae Sot’s busy Burmese market, arresting everyone. They demand identification documents from the arrested, but, of course, many are unable to provide them. Undocumented migrants can expect deportation or time in jail where they are subject to rape, beatings, and other humiliation at the hands of their guards. Immigration officials sometimes also sexually assault Burmese women during the deportation process, and often rob the workers of hard-earned wages and precious belongings just prior to deporting them.  Police frequently raid factories. On July 5, 2000, for example, 7 of Mae Sot’s largest factories were raided and about 10,000 Burmese arrested. Some were deported to Burma, some sent to Thai Immigration detention cells, and others had to go into hiding—including pregnant women and children, who went without food, shelter, or clean water for days. The BLSO came to their aid by providing them with medicine, rice, and temporary shelter."

Constant harassment, of course, keeps the workers afraid, and keeps their labor cheap. But Mae Sot is also known as a site of often-inspiring organizing and action against such violence and exploitation on the part of workers, as well as their supporters such as Aye. So far, the ruling class tactic in the face of such organizing seems to have been to increase the level and variety of their violence...

Anyway, I hear that Aye's OK at the moment, and has friends around him looking out for his safety... still, his case is an indication of the violence that employers, with the collusion of the state apparatus, wield daily against workers in the factories of Mae Sot, and the people who work in solidarity with them.

Below I reprint a surprisingly decent commentary from the Assistant Editor of the Bangkok Post, from late December.

COMMENTARY
A helping hand receives a nasty smack

Sanitsuda Ekachai
When people risk their safety to help the weak and poor, they deserve our admiration and thanks. Don't they? Our labour officials don't think so.

Although Buddhism considers giving one's time and energy to help others of great merit, labour officials in Tak raided a human rights office last week and arrested a young man named Aye Salam for helping migrant workers fight for a better life.

The arrest poses the question of what moral code our officials have to guide their work- if they have one at all.

The border town of Mae Sot in Tak province is a paradise for garment factories seeking cheap labour from repressive Burma. But the workers there suffer hellish lives under severe exploitation and unjust labour laws. Theirs is a life of slavery, deprived of the hope of fair wages, decent working conditions or health services because they do not speak Thai or do not know the Thai labour laws.

The workers' weaknesses empowered the employers so that they preyed on the submissiveness of their labour until such time as human rights groups like the Migrant Assistance Programme and Yaung Chi Oo Burmese Workers' Organisation started up in Mae Sot to help migrant workers enjoy their legal rights.

Their work from a legal perspective is straightforward. They take up the workers' grievances and help them with legal proceedings so they can receive their due wages and compensation in court.

To do this, they need the help of volunteers who can speak to migrant workers in their native Burmese. Aye Salam, 18, is among the very few who has had enough courage to offer this translation help.

Why is courage necessary? Because like his older colleagues who help migrant workers, Aye Salam has been beaten up by well-connected thugs who never get caught. Like his colleagues, he also has received death threats and must live each day with the threat of danger, not knowing when his life might be snatched away.

The raid on Yaung Chi Oo's office and Aye Salam's arrest was clearly a warning to his senior colleagues to close shop. Ironically, the arrest took place at the same time the organisation received an international award in South Korea for protecting the rights of migrant workers.

It is clear who will benefit if the human rights groups leave Mae Sot.

Strikes by workers were unimaginable in the past. No longer. Ditching workers without paying them was also common. To avoid paying wages, the employers just summoned immigration officers to arrest their unregistered workers and deport them post-haste.

Thanks to legal assistance from rights organisations and favourable court decisions, now even unregistered workers are entitled to get wage compensation. For many employers, this is like the sky falling on their heads. This must stop - by hook or by crook.

After being assaulted, Aye Salam was arrested for not having a work permit, a charge that might lead to three months in jail. When blasted by human rights activists, enraged labour officials slapped another charge on him, one carrying five years in prison if proven - for taking a job restricted to Thai nationals.

These charges expose the injustice ethnic immigrants face every day.

Yet, like some 400,000 ethnic immigrants in Thailand, most of whom are hillpeople, Aye Salam is legally entitled to seek Thai nationality. But prejudice keeps these citizenship applications trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

The law does not allow people like Aye Salam even to farm. Since most ethnic immigrants are poor and cannot afford to pay the annual fee of 10,000 baht for a work permit, they are subject to arrest at any time. They survive only by paying extortion money. Instead of amending this inhumane law, labour officials keep it alive to silence ethnic immigrants.

Is this just to punish those who want to right wrongs?

Is it right to kowtow to money and power?

When our labour authorities do not bother to ask these questions, there is little hope for the oppressed- and their defenders.

Sanitsuda Ekachai is Assistant Editor, Bangkok Post. Bangkok Post 23 December 2004

Tourists preferred

Some critical and political reporting on the tsunami and its after effects is starting to trickle out. This is just a quick post to reference this recent article from The Observer... it cites people in Thailand complaining that foreign tourists are being privileged with aid and assistance that is denied to locals:

They are given donations of food, water and clothes, but Surin is still waiting for an operation to remove the debris that has been lodged in his chest since his boat broke apart under the wave. He says that the doctors - like the government - are too busy looking after the 'farang' (foreigners) to care for him.

'I cannot stand on my own two feet. I feel so sad and helpless waiting for the government to assist me. Not one official has come to see me.'

It is an increasingly common complaint in this part of the country, where sympathy for the foreign victims is mixed with resentment at the priority treatment they are given. Although the tsunami hit rich and poor alike, its aftermath has highlighted the sharp divisions between affluent foreign tourists and poor local villagers.

Real cowboys pick on civilians, migrant workers, pregnant women...

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra recently described George Bush as a "good friend and a Texan."

"We're both Texas cowboys," Thaksin added.

Though Thailand hasn't invaded and occupied any countries lately, it is certainly not one for subtleties when it comes to state violence domestically- having killed 3,000 people in its 2002-2003 'drug war' and most recently responsible for the killing of 80 demonstrators in the south of the country.

But even by its own (appalling) standards, it was still a shock to me when Thaksin's government decided this week decided to deport 9,300 pregnant women from Thailand.

The women, orignally from other parts of the Mekong region, were singled out for deportation after attending a medical check-up along with some 60,000 other migrants, mostly from Laos, Cambodia, and Burma.

As Sanitsuda Ekachai writes in the Bangkok Post:

"[W]e are not talking here about a handful of women, but nearly 10,000... If this policy is enforced, many babies' lives will be cut short because their poor mothers cannot afford to lose their jobs... [m]any women migrant workers may also die from blood loss and severe complications caused by unsafe abortions. Our society likes to condemn women for seeking abortions. But who are the real killers here?
As for the women migrant workers who decide to keep their babies, their families will be shattered by forced repatriation, not knowing when they will be together again."

The logic presented by the government in support of this move is a great example of doublespeak. Thai law does not grant citizenship to children born to migrants. Therefore, these children technically end up becoming stateless if they are born in Thailand. So, to save these poor children from statelessness and its disadvantages, the benevolent state is embarking on a mass deportation of their mothers back to their 'home countries.'

How humanitarian of them.

Adding to the deplorable nature of this crime-- and it is a crime under international accords-- the majority of the women are originally from Burma, which of course is under the rule of the brutal SPDC regime. So, though Thailand and its close ally the US are oft to criticize the human rights record of the SPDC, pregnant women who have escaped the ravages of its economic, political, and social policies can apparently still be sent back there... in order to protect their children, no less!

Though on a totally different scale, this case is reminiscent of one which involved another in the league of cowboys- the UK government, through Home Secretary Jack Straw, when it sent an Iraqi refugee back to Saddam Hussein's regime in 2000 because he could be assured a fair trial there. Not long afterwards, the brutality of the same regime was used as political capital in support of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq...

'Time to stop mad cowboy disease', as the anti-war slogan goes.

(For more info on the Thai government and Burmese refugees, specifically, this Human Rights Watch report (.pdf file) is quite good and fairly extensive)