Burmese Child Refugee Focus Group in Kuala Lumpur: 4 Boys’ Tales of the hidden refugee trail from Burma to Malaysia

Burmese Refugee Boys playing soccer in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur,
outside their projects apartments

Takraw game, like volleyball but with your feet and head

Focus Group with 4 Chin Burmese Refugee Boys
Their Chin Refugee Head Teacher and translator was on the left

June 25, 2011

How do refugees get from their homeland of Burma to Malaysia? That question was posed to me by the US Embassy Political Officer in Thailand. Even though the embassy in Thailand is living thick in Burmese refugee politics, they don’t have an answer to that question. Clearly, the escape route from Burma to Malaysia is hidden for a reason. None of the countries allow the Burmese to come and go. In fact, the threat of detention hangs over your head if you are discovered sneaking into Thailand and Malaysia, and worse hangs over your head in Burma if you attempt to flee.

So, the Burmese refugees need a secret route. I spoke with Burmese refugee boys living hidden in Kuala Lumpur. They were from the Chin state in Burma. Many of the Chin, especially the Christian Chin and Buddhist communities, are seen as a threat by the Burmese military junta, because they want separate states. The junta has resorted to severe, and often violent, oppression of the Chin, as a result. So, many Chin attempt to flee Burma.

It’s not an easy hop, skip, and jump across the border to Thailand. They have to cross all of Burma, from west to east, without being seen by the authorities. And, they have to cross Thailand and most of Malaysia to get to Kuala Lumpur. Some bypass the traditional Thailand route that targets Bangkok through western Burma. Instead, they go from west to east Burma, to south, then cross the Burma/Thai border river and Thai jungle. Or they choose the more dangerous, but quicker ocean route, bypassing Thailand altogether.

The Chin refugees cannot take the easier route right across the Thai border to the Burmese refugee camps in Thailand. However, the Karen Burmese can, although at some serious risk from Burmese military soldiers. The Chin School head teacher, who acted as my translator, explained that Chin are not welcome in the Karen Burmese ethnic group-dominated camps in Thailand. This is a well-known secret among the refugee community but it’s a politically sensitive issue that US embassy officials only comment on with me, with the caveat of “off the record.” So, the Chin Burmese take the hazardous, long route through three countries, instead. Their long trek is rewarded by the welcome of a large Chin refugee community in Kuala Lumpur. In fact, the Chin Burmese are the largest ethnic Burmese refugee group in Kuala Lumpur, having attracted other Chin like a magnet.

Here are the common themes of the approximately 13 year-old boys’ odyssey from Burma to Malaysia, back when they were 11 or 12 years of age:

Across Burma:

Why did the boys leave Burma? Only one of the four boys knew why and I’ll tell his story below. The other boys could not tell me anything about the difficult political or economic conditions in Burma that led them to flee. They just said they either escaped with their parents or their parents went first to KL, earned some money to pay the agent for their escape, and then sent money for one child, if not all their children, to join the in KL.

The boys’ route from Burma to Malaysia came at a cost -- physical, emotional, and monetary. Every Chin Burmese refugee was guided across the secret route by an agent who demanded great sums of money, relative to the living made by Burmese minority ethnic groups.

The agents took all the boys from the west to the southeast of Burma, via Yangon, in a closed-back pickup truck. This trip took days. The truck would usually stuff 24 refugees in back, in 4 piles of 6 each. Each refugee was laid flat in a pile of 5 or 6 people, from youngest to oldest, from top to bottom. So, the oldest, strongest men were at the bottom of a pile of 5 people, feeling crushed for hours by the weight. The boys were young enough that they only had one or two “babies” (in Asia, “baby” means aged 5 or younger) piled on top of them.

All the boys explained that the problem was that the truck would not stop for bathroom breaks, so the “babies” would just pee and poop, with the excrement dripping down right on top of the boys below. And, the contained, nasty smells and twisty roads led the babies to vomit on the boys too. Then, the refugees would be told to get out of the truck before a Burmese military checkpoint and hike through the jungle for a few hours until they’d meet the truck on the other side of the checkpoint, so that they would not be discovered by the military.

Once they reached Yangon, the boys would often hide for a few days, which was pretty easy among the multi-ethnic Yangon alleyways. Then, the boys would get in another truck, pile on top of each other, until they reached the Southern border of Burma with Thailand. Most would choose the less treacherous river through jungle trek into Malaysia, and say no to the ocean route.

How did the refugees make the choice between one dangerous route over another? The boys had no idea. We could only speculate that an informal, word-of-mouth accident risk-appraisal system had been put in place among ethnic Burmese groups. Or else, their decision was simply informed by their inability to swim and maybe they had also heard horror stories of other fleeing refugees drowning in overturned ocean boats. Perhaps, that’s why they said no to the quicker ocean boat route.

Through Thailand:

The non-ocean route held its own perils and stresses. In fact, there was a consensus among the boys that the jungle route was the hardest part of their trip to Kuala Lumpur, even harder than being piled on top of each other for hours in Burma. This jungle route took them across the Thai/Burmese river border into the Thai jungle. They often had to wait for days at various points during their escape. First, they had to wait for hours hidden in the jungle, waiting to see when the border police boats were out of sight, allowing them to cross the river into Thailand.

The hardest part they all described was waiting in the jungle after they entered Thailand. Once they entered Thailand, they are considered “Externally Displaced Persons,” an acronym easily tossed around on the Thai border as EDP’s, since EDP’s are such a pernicious, relentless phenomenon for the Thai soldiers tasked with rounding up EDP’s.

Usually the EDP’s are rounded up, put in detention, or sent back and dumped across the border or, worse, into Burmese military punishing hands. Sometimes the EDP’s are ignored by Thai border soldiers, but the soldiers are given clear orders not to allow any humanitarian groups to feed or give them medical assistance. Some Karen Burmese nurses I met on the Thai/Burma border had valid visas from Singapore, and they came to the Thai border to give the huge recent wave of Burmese EDP refugees medical assistance. There had been such nasty fighting from Burmese military against Karen villages and the resistance force of the Karen National Union (KNU) that the EDP’s were flowing across the border, often without food, ill, or seriously wounded, but they were unable to get treated or get access to food because they had to stay in hiding, or didn’t have enough money anyway. These Karen nurses from Singapore were loaded with medical supplies that ended up unused. When I first met the nurses, they had just returned from a search for EDP’s along the border. The nurses looked beleaguered and helpless after the Thai soldiers had hauled them into Thai army border headquarters to scare them away from the nearly starving and medically vulnerable EDP’s. The soldiers claimed the nurses hadn’t received prior approval, which the nurses said they actually had done. They sent them home, but as they left the army office, a soldier pulled them aside and said that he felt bad for the EDP’s and that it was hard for him to watch them suffer every day, without offering any help. So, he told them to just go and offer medical and food assistance to the EDP’s, and that the Thai soldiers would look the other way.

Each of the boys waited in the jungle for a long time, for days. They were waiting for the agent to see if there was a safe opportunity to move through Thailand without the Thai border patrol seeing them. The waiting in the jungle was hardest because they inevitably had run out of food. I asked why they hadn’t carried food with them. They said the agent had asked them to travel light then they’d had to throw out almost everything they’d carried, along the way, to be able to escape without detection, and travel even lighter.

So, they felt like they were starving, didn’t have clean water, or much water at all, for that matter, and were exhausted due to lack of sleep from being bitten by mosquitos. They also couldn’t cook the little food they initially had since the border patrol keeps an eye out for campfires in the jungle. They were drained and feeling hopeless by the time they were able to move after 3 to 5 days hidden in the jungle.

Finally, they moved, then stopped, then moved again through the jungle, until they reached the Malaysian border.

Through Malaysia:

The quickest part of their trip was getting into Malaysia. They all took a taxi from the border down to KL. The easiest trips were just sitting in the back seat with their family. The roughest trips described were when they were stuffed into the taxi trunk with other people. In the trunk, the boys described feeling trapped and having trouble breathing. Sometimes they’d bang on the inside of the trunk hatch to get a break and more air, but it’d be rare that they’d get a response. So, they’d breathe slowly, making each breath count. Often, the smell of exhaust was overpowering too.

Life in Malaysia for the Chin refugee boys:

I’ll describe the life in Malaysia for 3 of the 4 boys then I’ll describe the details of one boy’s odyssey from Burma to Malaysia and his life in Malaysia.

One boy’s easier life, compared to the rest, was a pretty simple childhood, often yearning for more food and material goods but involving a typical childhood with half-day community learning centre for refugees. Not a real school but a hidden, refugee learning centre that was the next-best approximation. He did not have to work, since his parents could work. He could play in the early evenings out on an old parking lot next door to their high rise projects in the poor part of KL called Cheras.

The other two boys lived in the same poor projects, with different lives. One boy took care of his younger sibling all the time, when not in morning classes. His mother was back in Burma and his father was in the Cameron Highlands working as a migrant crop-picker for 4 months at a time. The boy and his sibling would end up in the head teacher’s apartment for meals often, but he had to be the main caregiver for his younger sibling, cleaning, dressing, and feeding them, including shopping.

The other boys’ family story was more sad. The boy’s father would wait outside the projects, with other refugee men for a truck to come pick them up daily for work. One job involved using sharp objects, that fell on his foot and cut off his toes. He could no longer work and the boss refused to pay for any of his medical care or to reimburse him for the lost family income. So, this boy of 14 had to stop going to school for weeks at a time and work all night at a pool parlor (they called it a snookers game). He would get paid the equivalent of $2 for a night’s work. He’d come home exhausted but could help put food on the table.

All the boys were actually positive, spritely, and hopeful, despite such challenging lives. They were also incredibly polite and patient with my questions. These 3 wanted to be football players on either the Manchester United or Chelsea Clubs. They practiced soccer as much as possible, on an abandoned parking lot next door to the projects where they lived. Sometimes the police would randomly drop by, making the parking lot filled with playing refugee kids, be filled instead with fleeing refugee kids, running away for safety, into the projects. The head teacher said that he’d been telling all the refugee families not to run away, that the police hadn’t been rounding up anyone in the parking lot for a long time, and he liked to teasingly flash his UNHCR ID card at the policemen, in defiance, to model for others how to be brave to intimidating Malaysian authorities who’d had a history of rounding refugees up and putting them in detention. But, as of late, there had been less mass roundups of refugees, so the children played with more freedom than they had in the past.

Click HERE for a video of the refugee kids playing out in their Cheras parking lot, next to the projects they live in.

The boys loudly recited each of their soccer positions to me, all offensive players, with their head teacher as coach. They had won a trophy at the previous year’s Faisal Cup, a soccer tournament for refugee kids in KL, and they proudly took at picture in front of it. They were in training for the next year’s Faisal Cup already.

When asked about how their life is in Malaysia, the boy who worked at the snooker parlor all night said, with intense emotion, “Very hard.” And, the other boys agreed. I asked about their hopes of resettlement to another safe, more welcoming, country, and the Head Teacher explained that none of the three boys’ families would get resettled in the next 2 or 3 years. They had either just started the process of resettlement or, in one family, they had been rejected by one country and were starting from scratch in their UNHCR application for resettlement to another country. It might take another couple years for their family to be resettled.

One Chin refugee boy’s story:

Let’s call this 12 year old Chin refugee Jamie. Jamie’s a wide-eyed, eager-to-please, slightly shy and wary, orphan who lives in the Cheras KL housing project with the head teacher, his wife, and their 2-year-old child, along with another Chin orphan. He seemed very happy and secure during the focus group, probably because he felt well-loved by his teacher and the teacher’s wife. The teacher is also a Chin refugee, speaking the same unique dialect as Jamie, and the teacher’s wife is Australian.

Like most Head Teachers of these hidden, unofficial refugee schools, they saw their teachers’ and students’ lives at their worst. Some of their refugee teachers are taken into detention for weeks and the head teacher has to bribe the authorities to get them out. Some of their teachers have to quit in order to pay off the agent who helped them flee Burma into Malaysia. This Head Teacher had just lost 3 of his refugee teachers to their having to work to pay off their agents. Now, the head teacher only had 3 teachers left to cover 140 students, 70 students in the morning and 70 at night.

Across all the Head Teachers I’d met, in both Malaysia and Thailand, they had all taken orphans into their homes to live with them. So, they’d teach all day then care for their own family and orphans at night. Their homes were unofficial foster homes. The official foster homes were not an option for refugee orphans because the government did not recognize refugees or give them rights to any services, including support if a child has lost his parents. At least in Thailand, they were able to legally adopt the refugee children because the head teachers had a certain legal status, with some limited freedom of movement for refugees, and their adopted children would gain the some restricted freedom of movement too.

In Kuala Lumpur, the head teachers could not legally adopt the orphans, but they did their best to approximate adoption. This head teacher and his Australian wife had made more than the sacrifice of bringing orphans into their homes. They had also made a very real sacrifice for their blood family – the sacrifice of a timely resettlement. Truth is, no refugee in KL gets a timely resettlement – resettlement to a safer country had take years. While the Australian woman could also not legally marry the Chin Head Teacher because refugees are not legally recognized or protected in Malaysia, she threw her lot in with his life anyway. She lived in poverty in a project in one of the most poor parts of Malaysia. She supported his vision of running a Chin refugee school. And, she took in Chin orphan refugee children.

The Chin Head Teacher made the sacrifice of not being able to get resettled into another country like Australia, with his wife, or at least facing years more of delays in resettlement. Why? Because he complicated his resettlement processing with UNHCR by having non-legally adopted Chin orphans. Usually, a blood family is processed as a unit and resettled as a unit. The Head Teacher has the impression that UNHCR was having trouble mentally processing his motley family’s placement as a unit, hence, leading to delays in the official bureaucratic processing of their resettlement. But, the Australian woman explained to me, with such passionate conviction, that despite the extra resettlement delays, she was determined to keep her blood and non-blood family together, even as a motley unit.

Jamie clearly benefited and had faith in his adopted Mom’s determination to keep them together, and not abandon Jamie to his vulnerable status in Malaysia. His “Mom” was particularly determined to protect Jamie, keeping him close under her wings, because Jamie had faced the worst a refugee child could face in Malaysia.

Let me first tell you the story of his escape from Burma. His was the worst case of life-threatening oppression by the Burmese military junta that I’d ever heard. Here’s how he told me his story (with some translation and explanation help from his Head Teacher) –

Jamie grew up in a small village in the Chin state of Burma. His family was Christian. A village Christian leader had been going to sick villagers and professing to have the power to heal them. And, as often happens with sick people, they still died, despite the Christian intervention. Now, here’s the shocking part -- The Head Teacher and Jamie said that Buddhist monk in charge of the village Buddhist temple declared that Christians were killing villagers, rather than healing them. He ordered the Buddhist villagers to burn the Christian homes down. And, they did, killing Jamie’s parents in the process, along with many other Christian villagers.

This story may sound completely far-fetched, if not simply hard to believe. What Buddhist monk who is trained in non-violent, pacifist Buddhism would ever call for murder of fellow villagers? The Head Teacher explained that, especially since the Buddhist monk uprising in 2007, the military junta had put military spies as monks in charge of many Buddhist temples. Or, the junta had convinced certain desperate monks to spy on the junta’s behalf. This story may sound far-fetched in Western countries, but given the Burmese junta’s history of rampant spying and the international condemnation of their violent suppression and embarrassment for the junta from the Buddhist monk’s uprising, this story is not far-fetched to me, relative to the junta’s infiltration of any group that threatens them in Burma. People can’t even speak openly to each other in tea houses, late at night, due to the junta’s spy network on the ground. Infiltrating the Buddhist temples was pretty easy to believe. The Head Teacher even said there had been stories of monks with guns under their robes.

But, why would the junta want to kill Chin Christians in the Chin state? There had been a long history of Chin Christian uprisings against the military junta, especially in the Chin state, with hopes of secession from the oppressive military state.

Once Jamie’s village had been burnt and his family killed, he fled deeper into the Chin state. He found a small orphanage with about 20 orphans who took him in. This Christian Burmese orphanage was run by a Chin man and his American wife. After a number of months, the Burmese military came and took over the orphanage, leading Jamie and the orphans to flee yet again.

The Chin orphanage leader was back in the US at the time, so it was up to the American wife to help the orphans escape. And, this time, she was determined to get at least some of the orphans out of Burma for good. She and her husband paid for Jamie’s escape from Burma, which was very costly. And, she went with Jamie and a handful of the orphans on their odyssey from Burma to Malaysia.

Jamie had a typically harrowing trip to KL from Burma. As with the other boys, he had been stuck in a pile of refugees, stuffed into the back of a pickup truck through Burma, trudging through jungle around military checkpoints. Then, he crossed the Thai/Burma river border at night, hid in the Thai jungle for days, and was stuck in a taxi trunk for his ride down through Malaysia.

Once he got to Malaysia, though, he was on his own. He ended up working in a factory with only adult refugee workers. It was a factory that made rubber gloves and it was intense work, way too hard for an 11 year old boy. And, he was paid little (how much?). One day, RELA, or the quasi-governmental immigration police with guns, who are the fear of all refugees in Malaysia, did a raid on the factory. Jamie was taken into immigration detention for months, along with the other adult refugee factory workers. Life in detention was not torturous but boring, and he had enough food to eat. He said UNHCR had visited him, seen him in detention, but not taken him out. Then, one day, he’d been released from detention, without any explanation.

Jamie ended up living with another Chin family until they were resettled then he moved in with the Head Teacher of his school, xx, which honestly, after his series of ordeals, was a very happy ending. He was one of the happiest refugee kids I’d met over my year in Malaysia, and he didn’t seem to care about resettlement now that he’d found a loving home, he seemed confident that he’d be safe no matter where he was, just so he was with his adopted family.

When I left after the focus group, the Head Teacher and his Australian “wife” took me by the parking lot where the Chin children played. The Chin parents sat on the edges of the large asphalt parking lot at sunset, looking comfortable catching up with each other at the end of the day, until they saw my white face, then they tensed up. I asked the Chin Head Teacher if they were scared of me, and he said not if I was with he and his wife, who they trusted, and he said it was okay if I took pictures.

As you can see above, the Chin refugee children really looked like children, despite all the losses and rough odysseys they’ve had getting to that parking lot. They still played, despite the threat of RELA immigrations around the corner anytime. They played hopscotch, volleyball, and a soccer game was started. And, looking like he belonged every bit as the other children, Jamie had run into the parking lot, gave me a friendly wave with one of his friends, as they ran off to take their offensive positions on the asphalt soccer pitch.