Humanitarian aid to IDPs in Burma: activities and debates

Abstract

There is a need for greater understanding and coordination between groups working inside Burma and those operating cross-border.

The majority of assistance and advocacy – and most research - regarding forced migration in Burma has focused on the situation in armed-conflict-affected areas along the Thailand border. As international agencies do not have direct access to conflict-affected parts of eastern Burma, they provide aid in partnership with local agencies.

Assistance for displaced people inside Burma, sent from Thailand or other neighbouring countries is by definition illegal, as it challenges the sovereignty of the Burmese government (which most cross-border actors in fact consider illegitimate). Some crossborder activities are carried out from Bangladesh and India (very limited amounts of relief and documentation on human rights) and also from China (including low-profile medical assistance). Most Thailand-based cross-border groups work in Karen areas but also in Mon and Karenni States; security and local capacity constraints mean that much less work is undertaken in Shan State.

Cross-border programmes provide aid which may be characterised as impartial – inasmuch as it is distributed according to need – but it is far from neutral. Cross-border aid networks are closely associated with armed opposition groups, on which they rely for security and logistical arrangements. In fact, most cross-border personnel are members (or affiliates) of insurgent organisations. A number of local NGOs and CBOs are also engaged in human rights documentation and advocacy work, and capacity building with a range of opposition groups.

As Burma’s ethnic insurgency groups lost control of their remaining ‘liberated zones’ in the early/mid-1990s, civilians displaced by armed conflict could no longer settle behind the front-lines of conflict, and IDP numbers increased substantially. With the help of international NGOs and donors who had been supporting refugees in Thailand for decades, Karen and Mon IDP assistance programmes were established. By April 2002, the annual cross-border aid budget had grown to $1m, distributed through local Karen and, to a lesser extent, Karenni and Shan groups. ¶ Short-term humanitarian aid was intended to supplement villagers’ rice-sharing and other coping mechanisms, offering them a chance to reconstruct their communities once the immediate crisis had passed. In 2005 several cross-border groups began to implement a range of community-based development initiatives, stimulated by the injection of significant new US Governmnet funds for cross-border work in 2006. Several of these organisations also implemented sometimes quite extensive health and education programmes in partnership with local communities.