Along Thailand’s long and rugged western border, some 90,000 refugees from next-door Myanmar will mark Tuesday’s passing of World Refugee Day in a string of tightly sealed camps that some of them have called home for nearly 40 years.
A resettlement program announced last month by the Thai government, the United States and United Nations, though, could offer most of them a new way out, refugees and aid groups say. To date, only the U.S. has signed up to take them.
Decades of intermittent fighting between the Myanmar military and local rebel groups, only made worse by a 2021 coup, have kept most of the refugees from returning home. Thailand, meanwhile, by and large refuses to let them leave the camps to live, work or study in the rest of the country, while years of funding cuts by international donors strain basic services inside.
“And so, we really had a population of refugees without a clear or official pathway out of the camps. So, now that resettlement has reopened, it is absolutely a major milestone,” said Tim Moore, acting executive director of The Border Consortium, one of a dozen nongovernment groups that coordinate aid to the nine camps, which rely entirely on international donations.
Durable solutions
The camps started taking shape after the first major influx of some 10,000 refugees to flee the fighting in Myanmar in 1984. Their population peaked at about 150,000 in 2005, the consortium says, when a U.N. registration drive and approval from the Thai government set off the first wave of resettlements, mostly to the United States.
But the pool of refugees eligible for, and interested in, that first resettlement program dried up four years ago, said Moore, and the 2021 coup, which saw Myanmar’s generals take back full control of the country from a semi-elected government, has made returning home all but impossible.
The new resettlement program covers all refugees in the camps who were counted either by the U.N.’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, in 2015 or by Thailand’s Ministry of Interior in 2019, and any children born to them since, according to a May 19 joint statement sent to community groups inside the camps who shared it with VOA.
UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said the two counts “verified” more than 90,000 refugees, making the vast majority of those now living in the camps eligible for the new resettlement drive.
“This program marks a significant shift in offering durable solutions for refugees and offers a chance for refugees to rebuild their lives,” he told VOA by email.
The UNHCR gave no timeline for the new program. Moore, however, said follow-up verification checks for possible resettlement started in one of the nine camps last week and that the first group of refugees could start moving to the United States early next year.
In an email to VOA, the U.S. embassy in Thailand said the new program was “continuing our long-standing leadership on refugee resettlement in the face of an unprecedented global displacement crisis as record numbers of people around the globe have been forced to flee their homes.”
More than four in five of the refugees in the Thai camps are, hailing mostly from eastern Myanmar’s Karen state, just across the border. The Karen Refugee Committee, made up of past and present refugees, is one of the main community groups helping coordinate and deliver services inside.
No promising future
Committee Joint-Secretary Hayso Thako said the announcement of the new resettlement drive was stirring much enthusiastic talk in the camps. While some refugees, especially those who arrived decades ago as youngsters, still harbor hopes of returning home, he said, most are ready to settle abroad.
“Even before the announcement of this new opportunity ... many of them [were] actually hoping for this to happen someday,” he said.
“There is no promising future living in the camps, especially for the young people who have grown up in the camps,” he noted.
Hayso Thako and others describe an increasingly bleak life inside the camps, beset by falling donations and dwindling basic services.
The Border Consortium is the main provider of food aid to the refugees. Moore said the group lost significant donor support in the early 2010s, but it did manage to boost subsidies recently to help families cope with COVID lockdown-related disruptions and inflation.
Families receive monthly top-ups on cards they can spend on food at local shops. Amounts vary based on need. But with the recent boost, Moore said the average refugee now receives just under $9 for food per month.
“At a population level, food security is very strong, but it’s still very basic,” he said. “There are still those who really are struggling.”
Donor cuts in recent years also have hit housing, education and health care.
Moore said international funding for housing took a “major hit” in 2018, making it harder to maintain and repair refugees’ homes. Families live in basic huts made of bamboo and eucalyptus poles with thatched roofs. Even after decades, few have running water or electricity.
Hayso Thako said camp schools, which have had to ask parents who mostly do not have jobs to help make up for shortfalls with small donations, cannot pay dozens of teachers as it is and have had to scale back nursery programs. Funding cuts are also making it harder to refer the sickest refugees to hospitals outside the camps for critical care, he added.
Better than here
The refugees say they appreciate the shelter Thailand has given them from the violence next door, said Wahkushee Tenner, who fled Myanmar as a child. She now helps run the Karen Women’s Organization, another community group working in the camps. But she and others say signs of despair are on the rise.
“When we were in the camp, we didn’t see much gang fights or suicide or domestic violence, but there has been [an] increase of these things and also drugs as well. This is because people are in confinement and have no future, so the situation is really changing,” said Wahkushee.
Aid and advocacy groups would like to see Thailand let the refugees study, work and live outside the camps and give them a reliable path to legal residence, but they do not expect that to happen. With no end in sight to Myanmar’s bloody civil war, they see settling abroad as maybe their best available option, at least for now.
That goes for Poe, who fled to the camps as a child more than two decades ago and asked that his full name not be used.
He said he had to cut short his own schooling in the camps for a lack of money and opportunity, and he plans to apply for the new resettlement program in hopes of pursuing a career in health care or engineering.
“I really heard many people want to apply to go to America,” he said. “If I can get some education from there ... it is better than here, I think. I just only think of my future.”
