THE WORLD’S 26 million displaced people are the focus of this year’s Lenten campaign by Trócaire, the overseas development agency for the Catholic Church in Ireland. It hopes to raise some €11 million between now and Easter, to be spent on organisations helping refugees and internally displaced people in Colombia, Somalia, Darfur and elsewhere.
As readers will learn from the moving account of Burmese refugees in Thailand published in today’s newspaper, this is valuable and necessary work with people who otherwise are often abandoned and forgotten by the rest of the world. They have fled from horrifyingly oppressive conditions in Burma to the relative safety of a border camp. But once there they have very little to do, are not allowed work and cannot farm or grow their own food. It is boring, but far better than being continually harassed by the Burmese army in their home villages. Only educational programmes and the possibility that some of them will be selected for international resettlement give them grounds for hope. Last month 78 members of the Muslim minority Rohingya community in a camp on the Bangladesh-Burma border were selected to come to Ireland under a United Nations programme.
Thailand has recently been condemned for its treatment of Rohingya boat refugees. Instead of offering care members of the Thai military put them on barges with minimal food and water and abandoned them at sea, with some of them ending up in Indonesia. This callous crime has been disowned by the Thai government but no one has yet been brought to account for it. The subject will be raised at this weekend’s summit of the Asean regional organisation in Bangkok to be attended by Burmese government leaders.
Unfortunately Asean has proved unable to intercede effectively with the Burmese rulers on relaxing their military regime. Nor have UN mediators appointed after the popular revolt there in August-September 2007. The regime is going ahead with its highly disputed plans to hold controlled elections next year which will exclude the National League for Democracy led from detention by Aung San Suu Kyi. It has been urged this week by UN secretary general Ban ki-moon to release her and some 2,200 other political prisoners, promote national reconciliation, and ensure that elections in 2010 will include all opposition and minority groups. Only such a programme would help alleviate the conditions of the refugees helped by this Trócaire campaign.