Without Respite: Renewed Attacks on Villages and Internal Displacement in Toungoo District
Implications for Health and Education
 |
| Crude shelters erected in the forests of southeastern Tantabin township by villagers after their village was shelled. On December 11th and again on December 12th 2005, SPDC Army troops fired a volley of mortars into Hsaw Wah Der and nearby Yaw Tho Pler villages. The villagers fled and set up simple shelters such as the one shown in this photo where they remained in hiding for the following week. [Photo: KHRG] |
Many of the villagers hiding in the forest were forced to flee their villages with little or no warning, leaving them no time to collect any of their belongings. Many villagers therefore took to the forest with little more than the clothes that they were wearing. They had no time to take any food, blankets, mosquito nets, or tarpaulins with them. Without adequate shelter, many displaced villagers are likely to fall ill, especially now during the wet season. Malaria, dengue fever, and scrub typhus are endemic to the region, dysentery, skin diseases and infections are rife, and cases of villagers dying of diarrhoea are not uncommon. The terrain of eastern Toungoo District is mountainous where altitudes can reach as high as 2,400 metres (8,000 feet) above sea level, and even during the hot season, temperatures can drop rapidly once the sun goes down. Exacerbating this have been the unseasonal rains that began in December 2005 shortly after the first attacks, and have continued intermittently throughout the remainder of the dry season (also see Recent Attacks on Villages in Southeastern Toungoo District Send Thousands Fleeing into the Forests and to Thailand, KHRG #2006-B3, 16/3/06). Now that the rains have begun in earnest, the situation can only be expected to further deteriorate. Apart from disease, many villagers have been shot and wounded by SPDC troops, and the sharp increase in landmine deployment across the district by all groups is also leading to serious injuries and deaths (see "Increased Isolation of Villages in the Region" below).
Medical clinics, like the villagers that they serve, have also become displaced. Clinics operated by KNLA medics or Karen relief organizations have been forced to close, their staff having to flee deeper into the forest along with the thousands of villagers now in hiding. Many of the villagers who would generally seek treatment from these clinics must now hide in the forest without any access to modern medicines. In the absence of conventional medicines, villagers must resort to utilizing traditional herbal medicines concocted from roots and herbs collected in the forests or enlist the services of an animist village shaman. Sadly, many of these traditional remedies do not adequately address the problem and many villagers die from easily preventable and otherwise readily curable diseases.
"Many people got sick when we had to run away from the SPDC and were hiding in the forest. We didn't have enough medicine to treat them, but we tried our best and gave them treatment with the little medicine that we had."
Naw B--- (Female), southeastern Tantabin township (February 2006)
"We have no clinic here. If people get sick, some of them will go to the [KNLA] battalion clinic, while others will be treated by other villagers here in the village."
Naw G--- (F, 45), Tantabin township (February 2006)
The regular SPDC Army patrols sweeping through the hills, who have declared that they will shoot anyone on sight, have made it both difficult and dangerous for villagers to seek medical care. Many displaced villagers, fearful of encountering the SPDC, choose not to risk travelling to a clinic. Furthermore, the increased SPDC Army activity makes it difficult for the handful of Karen relief organizations that provide food and primary healthcare to the displaced villagers to gain access to the areas where there is the greatest need.
Many villages now destroyed boasted their own primary schools, some even middle schools. Many of these were built and operated by the villagers themselves. Now, however, quite a number of schools in the district have been forced to close as entire villages have been abandoned. According to a KHRG field researcher, on February 9 th 2006, the students from one of the middle schools in Tantabin township were denied the chance to sit for their final exams because they had to flee. In another school nearby, the students were forced to sit for all of their final exams over just two days. On February 13th , the students sat for two different exams, while the following day, those same students then had to sit for five more exams in one day. The next day, they too fled deeper into the forest.
"We had a school before but it was destroyed because of the increased activity of the SPDC. Our school was constructed by the KNU, but later it was burned by the SPDC. The children who are of school age now stay in the forest and a few of them have gone to a refugee camp to study."
Saw F--- (M, 56), southeastern Tantabin township (March 2006)
|
