This is life along the Thai-Burmese border for tens of thousands of registered refugees and countless migrant workers, the result of 50 years of civil war and economic ruin in what was once Southeast Asia's richest country. Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal and oppressive military dictatorships on earth. The current incarnation of the ruling regime in Burma goes by the unlikely name of "State Peace and Development Council" or SPDC, a name chosen in a thinly veiled attempt by the government to clean up it's image. The regime was previously known as the "State Law and Order Restoration Council," which was naturally shortened to the nefarious sounding "SLORC", and then in 1997 after consulting with American public relations firms the junta reinvented itself as the SPDC.
On the outside, Mae Sot is much like any bustling, prosperous Asian border town. The streets are chaos, shops spill out onto the sidewalks so that you can walk only a few paces in any one direction before you are forced to share the road with gleaming Mercedes', trucks of all sorts, scooters by the dozen, pushcarts, bicycles, buffalo, cattle, and the occasional elephant. The back streets and markets teem with Burmese people, some of whom have come across the border on day passes to shop or visit relatives, and many who have come to work on the Thai side in factories, or in the homes of the town's many wealthy merchants. Main Street is lined on both sides with gem shops, and buyers come from all over the world to bargain for Burmese sapphires and rubies.
Beneath the surface is a thriving underworld, business is conducted in mafia fashion and facilitated by a particularly elastic interpretation of the law on behalf of the local police. I was at a New Years Eve party a few years ago, thrown by one of the town's biggest gem dealers, when at the stroke of midnight the men produced hand guns and began enthusiastically shooting them into the air. If you ever spend New Year's eve in Mae Sot I recommend celebrating it in a venue with a good solid concrete roof.
To both the north and south of Mae Sot there are refugee camps populated mostly by Karens people, but there are Burmese Muslims and other minority groups there as well. These camps have existed in one form or another for over 15 years and refugees continue to trickle across the border every time the fighting heats up in Burma.
In 1997, the camps became the target of attacks by the Burmese military who launched a series of nighttime raids into Thailand, burning the homes and meager belongings of several thousand helpless refugees and killing many.
About three days before my arrival in Mae Sot, Burmese government troops had burned down the Karen village of Mae La Puta, which was right on the border but on the Burmese side. They came at night spraying the bamboo houses with machine gun fire and herding the frightened villagers, mostly women, children and the elderly out of their homes. It was the dry season and the thatched roofs of the huts were as dry as tinder, within minutes the whole village was ablaze and by morning there was nothing left but piles of smoldering ashes. Several people were killed and the whole area was mined so that the villagers could not return. Somewhere between 7000 and 10 000 people fled to Thailand with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. There they squatted in farmers fields and in the few school buildings at Mae Usu, which is a Karen village located on the Thai side. Attacking helpless refugees and burning their homes is a technique used often by Burmese government troops in order to intimidate and harass their enemies, and this was by no means an isolated event.
