The plight
of the veterans 16.05.11
A dwindling band of 137 veterans, Britain's
most loyal allies in the war against Japan 1942-45 http://www.bbc.co.uk/
A disproportionate number
of the veterans, all from the Karen and Karenni peoples, served in the
British Army's legendary Force 136.
Yet none has a right
to a pension, from Britain or anyone else, nor even to rudimentary welfare
or medical services. Help 4 Forgotten Allies was founded to show them
they are not forgotten after all.
For almost a decade,
the Burma Forces Welfare Association (BFWA) was paying annual £40 grants
to veterans and widows. When it discontinued these two years ago, H4FA
stepped in, raising enough to increase the grants to £43 in the first
year, and £60 in 2010.
We are delighted to report that following friendly discussions with Viscount Slim, President of the Burma Star Association and the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League we now have pledges of regular support, amounting initially to over 30% of the total we need. The Special Forces Benevolent Fund too has been very generous, and several Churches and individuals continue to ensure an annual grant.
In March Dame Vera Lynn very kindly agreed to become patron of Help 4 Forgotten Allies, during WW2 she bravely traveled to war torn Burma to sing to the Allied troops, and knows first hand the ferocity of the Forgotten War.
This year our target is to pay £80 each, which means raising £11,560, including distribution costs. At the time of writing we have funds and pledges amounting to £7,000.
Britain's forotten allies in the camps
A PSRB trip report from the early days - 1998 - recounts: "We were visiting the Kwai River Hospital in December '98, near the World War II Death Railway.
"Living among the dying and demented at the hospital - a rather grand term for what is little more than a large hut - was Saw Yoshoo (Joshua), an old soldier who turned out to have been a pupil of my grandfather, headmaster of Government High School, Maymyo, Burma, who had to flee the Japanese advance.
"Aged 87, Saw Yoshoo was recruited into the Burma Rifles in 1934. Still perfectly lucid, he reeled off his name, rank, number and the name of his commanding officer: he had been Company Captain 4802, and his senior officer had been General Twist.
"His two sons had been killed in the vicious conflict which has continued unabated since the British left, and the pro-Japanese Rangoon government began reprisals against their British allies. His hope and joy was his grandchildren, particularly a boy of 14. Tears came into his eyes as he explained that now he didn't have the bus fare to go and see them: the sum of 46 Baht, roughly one euro.
"When I asked him what he would like me to do for him, he replied that I should 'inform my officers'. His own poverty - one pair of trousers, no medication for his asthma - was clearly secondary. Above all he wanted to help his grandchildren with the books and clothes they needed for school. That was all he really cared about."
I wrote at the time, and still feel, that we have a particular moral obligation to these old soldiers. Many Karen have confirmed what has often been described in print and on television: the promises made by British Army officers to their Karen allies that their independence would be restored after the Japanese had been defeated, and that they would come back to help them.
The "displaced persons" with no right to support from the UNHCR are completely dependent on the TBBC, an estimable organisation initially set up in 1975 in response to the influx of refugees from Indochina after the Vietnam War.
An alliance of 13 NGOs from nine countries,
it provides food, supplies, shelter, and capacity-building support,
with a budget averaging 30p per person per day. The TBBC is well-run
and energetic, but its efforts have been hit by the vagaries of the
world economy, such as rising food prices, by donor fatigue, and by
political pressure not to encourage more refugees.
A sense of honour
Sally Thompson, awarded
an MBE in 2010 for her tireless work with refugees in Thailand and a
remarkable interview to Christian Aidwrote this to us about her experience of the
veterans: "I remember the pride with which the soldiers used to
greet me, putting on their berets, pinning on their medals, and saluting
as they entered the simple camp office.
“They were not looking
for a hand-out. It was rather the sense of honour about what they did
over 60 years ago…It is never too late to acknowledge this. Most of
them have very few years left to go now. They fought for our freedom
and yet here they are confined to a camp, cut off from their homeland."
The small amount that
they receive is, she wrote, "sufficient to lift the monotony of
daily life in a refugee camp”, something they had endured, often,
for more than 20 years.
The TBBC has offered
to distribute gifts of clothes, solar lights, radios, and umbrellas
to the veterans if H4FA can raise funds to buy these - which we are
now in process of doing.
The reality of life in the camps, and over the border
The old people are far
from the only victims of the decades of conflict in Burma. The unluckiest
are the about 500,000 “internally-displaced persons” (IDPs) in eastern
Burma, where some 3,300 villages have been burned down by the Burma
Army. About a quarter of the veterans we want to help are also the hardest
to reach - living in war zone, and according to some sources even now
hunted down by the Burma Army for their role in siding with the Western
Allies against Japan all those years ago.
The nine border camps,
in effect human warehouses, contain some 150,000 refugees; another 200,000
are illegally living outside the camps in the Thai countryside. All
are officially just "displaced persons", with no right to
support from the UNHCR because Thailand - in a vain attempt to discourage
the exodus from Burma - has refused to sign the UN Convention on Refugees.
Everyone who has to do
with the Karen and Karenni is struck by the dignity and patience which
even the very old maintain in the face of tedium, deprivation, and little
or no prospect of change. Even if they are reluctant to complain, their
lives are very tough, especially if they have no family to help them.
And despite the best efforts of the TBBC, that is also true of life
in the camps, where the refugees live on a 30p-a-day diet of rice and
beans.
Those who arrived in the camps before 2005 are the only refugees eligible for resettlement in the US or Australia, posing a terrible dilemma to old people who, if they do not uproot themselves, risk being left alone in the camps, whose future is anyway uncertain.
As for dreams of going
home, they remain just that, with little change since the 2010 Human
Rights report for the US Department of State.
“In ethnic minority
regions,” it noted, “military personnel reportedly killed and raped
civilians, shelled villages and burned homes, destroyed food and seized
possessions, confiscated land, forced villagers to work on infrastructure
projects, and demanded villagers provide food and construction materials
for military camps.”
Incredible as it sounds,
this ethnic war of attrition is official policy. Or in the careful wording
of the UN Special Rapporteur for Burma in another report in 2010, there
were “indications” that the many years of “gross and systematic
human rights violations [are] the result of a State policy that involves
authorities in the executive, military and judiciary at all levels.”