By Francis Wade Nov 26, 2012 1:09PM UTC
High up in the mountainous border region where Burma meets
China, more than 70,000 displaced Kachin are bracing themselves for cold
season. The plywood shelters in refugee camps, likely still recovering
from the monsoon season, are no match for the end-of-year weather when
temperatures dip to single figures.
It’s all depressingly familiar – the
same warnings were
issued a year ago, and today refugee numbers have not diminished, nor
has the government’s reluctance to allow international aid groups
unfettered access to victims of the conflict. They, and millions of
others in the country, know little of the heady developments of the past
12 months in Burma.
An issue often overlooked in coverage of Burma’s various conflicts is
the psychological toll that those forced to flee their homes carry, but
IRIN last week spoke with local aid worker May Li Awng who spelled out the situation.
A child holds a bowl of rice at a refugee camps in Laiza, northern Burma. Pic: AP.
“Some students have no interest in schooling and are refusing to go
to school. They are listless – gazing somewhere. At night, they cry and
sleep-walk.” May Li Awng directs the WPN umbrella group of Kachin NGOs
who, given the woeful lack of outside assistance getting to the
refugees, have essentially spearheaded the aid effort. They deserve
great respect for their work.
Some estimate that around 50 percent of displaced Kachin are
suffering from trauma. “We don’t have the human resources to heal such
traumatized cases,” May Li Awng told IRIN. “All of the groups [donors]
are just interested in giving material assistance. Few are interested in
such issues.”
Other aid workers told me of similar concerns when I was there in
June this year. La Rip, coordinator of the Relief Action Network for
Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees (RANIR), based in Laiza, said
that reductions in outside funding had forced them to concentrate on the
primary concerns of physical health and food supplies. This means that
for many, young children especially, their trauma is left to fester.
He said that local aid workers were either too overrun or unequipped
to tackle the psychological problems emerging among the displaced. A
year ago
he warned: “We
are at our wit’s end. If we don’t get support within the next couple of
weeks, there could be serious problems with food and shelter shortages
and worsening weather.” Now, with no UN convoy having reached eastern
Kachin state since July, the same situation presents itself.
Aside from the fighting itself, the treatment of civilians by Burmese
troops will have left deep scars. When the conflict first erupted in
June 2011, various reports told of gang rapes and mutilation of Kachin
women by soldiers, torture of males considered collaborators with the
Kachin Independence Army, and so on. This has
not stopped -
a mother of four was reportedly gang raped near the town of Mogaung in
Kachin state on 1 November by Burmese soldiers. (See here for a
past blog post on the Burma army’s use of rape as a weapon of war).
Moreover, children were often forced to flee their homes amid gunfire
and walk days to reach safer ground, many getting ill along the way.
They remain confined to refugee camps in a
tormenting state of limbo.
Funding clearly needs to be ramped up. President Obama touched on the
conflict during his speech at Rangoon University last week, but one
hopes he pressed for greater international access and an end to attacks
by the Burmese army when he met privately with President Thein Sein. The
ethno-religious violence in Arakan state will have distracted from
Kachin state, but both situations require urgent attention.
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