Thailand returns refugees despite threat of violence
Indonesia — The young woman from Myanmar and her family now live amid the tall grasses of a riverbank on the Thai border, trapped between a country that does not want them and a country whose military could kill them.
Like thousands of others fleeing mounting violence after a military takeover in Myanmar last February, Hay left her village for neighboring Thailand in search of a safe haven that does not exist. Returning to Myanmar would place her and her family at risk of death. And yet that is precisely what Thai authorities — wary of jeopardizing their relationship with Myanmar’s ruling military — tell them to do at least once a week, she says.
“When they told us to go back, we cried and explained why we can’t go back home,” said Hay, who lives in a flimsy tent on the Moei River, which divides the two countries. The Associated Press is withholding Hay’s full name, along with the full names of other refugees in this story, to protect them from retaliation by authorities. “Sometimes we cross back to the Myanmar side of the river. But I have not returned to the village at all.”
Though international refugee laws forbid the return of people to countries where their lives may be in danger, Thailand has nonetheless sent thousands of people who fled violence by Myanmar’s military back home, according to interviews with refugees, aid groups and Thai authorities themselves. That has left Hay and other Myanmar refugees ricocheting between both sides of the river as the fighting in their home villages rages and briefly recedes.
“It is this game of pingpong,” says Sally Thomp-son, executive director of The Border Consortium, which provides aid to Myanmar refugees in Thailand. “You can’t keep going back and forth across the border. You’ve got to be somewhere where it’s stable. And there is absolutely no stability in Myanmar at the moment.”
Since its takeover last year, Myanmar’s military has killed more than 1,700 people, arrested over 13,000 and systematically tortured children, women and men.
Thailand, which is not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, insists Myanmar’s refugees return home voluntarily. Thailand also insists it has complied with international laws, which dictate that people must not be returned to a country where they would face torture, punishment or harm.
More than half a million people have been displaced inside Myanmar and 48,000 have fled to neighboring countries since the military’s takeover, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR says Thai government sources estimate around 17,000 Myanmar refugees have sought safety in Thailand since the takeover. But only around 2,000 are currently living on the Thai side of the border, according to the Thai-Myanmar Border Command Center.