the crooked line

There is always the risk in such large scale events that the smaller things go by the wayside.

Last week there were reports that the Burmese military’s 22nd Battallion has been recalled from Karen State to the Rangoon. Indeed a Karen friend along the border has confirmed this is the case.

The 22nd Battallion is one of those notorious groups that instills fear just by mentioning its name. It owes its reputation of course to the 1988 uprising, when it was responsible for firing into unarmed crowds, killing thousands of civilians. Continue reading ‘Burma’s 22nd Battallion’

You’d be forgiven for thinking history is repeating itself. Only this time there is at least one significant difference. Access to immediate information.

You Tube, blogs, email, video taken from mobile phones - this time its less about the mainstream media on the ground and more about where they are getting their information from. Photos are catapaulted out via email, sometimes shaky footage taken on the run, but an immediate documentation of what is going on right now! Check our here and here to see the footage. Mainstream media is calling for footage and eyewitness accounts of those inside Burma. Continue reading ‘Blogging the Burma conflict’

Burma is at a crossroads right now.
I sit here contemplating the biggest mass movement Burma has seen in contemporary times. A mass movement of people standing before the military’s guns…at this time they do so peacefully. It is inevitable that comparisons are drawn with 1988. Only the world is a different place, media coverage for one, and we can only hope that this time the outcome will be different. Continue reading ‘Burma: how long do they have to stand peacefully?’

The young Karen boy watches his grandmother pound the husks from the rice. She tells him the story of an old hta.

“We can only dream this,” she says. “But in your time I think it will happen. A centipede will swallow all the human beings on the earth.”

The Karen hta fascinates me. It is a form of oral poetry, only it is much more than this. For many generations it was the way in which the Karen communicated; an educational medium in fact. A way in which the older generation passed on knowledge to the younger generation. Given that contemporary Karen written communication only occurred in the 1800s you can see the importance or oral communication to Karen history. Continue reading ‘When the centipede swallows the human’

It’s been a while. I hope you all haven’t given up. At least I hope there was enough of interest here to sustain you during these few months of silence.

I’ve just come back from the border area. Much is the same as it has been for the past twenty years, but much is changed.

I’ve talked of resettlement here before, and generally it gets the most impassioned responses, especially from the Karen community themselves. Resettlement was all people talked about on this trip. Resettlement has been on the agenda for years now but this time the talk is most certainly replaced by action. Refugee registration through UNHCR has proliferated and people are being moved to third countries in the hundreds. Continue reading ‘Resettlement update’