Who we are
Projects to Support Refugees from Burma does what it says, for the last 15 years backing and seeing through projects from schoolbuilding to self-help weaving groups among refugees from Burma.
Based in Cambridge and registered as a charity, PSRB is deliberately small-scale and practical, making sure every penny you donate – at the moment it adds up to about £20,000 a year - is spent directly on those we are trying to help. All PSRB expenses are covered privately. Most of our work is focused on the roughly 140,000 refugees, mainly from the Karen and Karenni ethnic groups, living in the nine overcrowded camps strung out along the Thai-Burma border. These sprawling green prisons are in effect human warehouses. Anxious not to encourage any more refugees, the Thai government has always refused to recognize them as such under the UN convention. So they are merely “displaced persons”, with none of the rights of refugees proper. Some refugees in their 30s have never lived anywhere but a camp. The Thai-Burma Border Consortium [ http://www.tbbc.org ] of non-governmental organisations provides basic food and essentials. PSRB tries to supply another essential to hope and self-respect, “luxuries” such as soap and candles, and regular supplies of reading glasses, books, and music.
Many people are puzzled about what the conflict in Burma is about. In brief: most of the refugees in Thailand, and of the roughly 1m “internally displaced persons” in Burma proper, come from the Karen ethnic group, and the smaller, related Karenni people. Both have been the subject of a merciless campaign, by the majority Burmans. Often called the “father to son war”, its origins lie in the Second World War. The Karen, Burma’s second-largest ethnic minority in Burma, sided with Britain and its allies against Japan, which at the time presented itself as a liberator from Britain’s colonial oppression. The Karen have been persecuted ever since for what is still seen by the Burmans as a betrayal. For their part, the Karen remain, even now, extraordinarily loyal to Britain. Burma’s army is dominated by ethnic Burmans, and human rights abuses of unimaginable cruelty are inflicted on civilians to try to break their support for the Karen ethnic army. It is an army which routinely burns down villages (over 3,000 so far ), and forces their occupants - sometimes children as young as six - to do forced labour. Livestock and crops are confiscated or destroyed, and the fields mined. Villagers who have not escaped into the jungles – about 1m live hand-to-mouth as “internally displaced persons” - or across the border, are forced to accept a bleak, state-controlled existence in "relocation centres" without rights or land.
Some of the international pressure on the military junta in Burma was lifted by elections in November 2010, not because they were free or fair, but because of subsequent events, notably the tusanmi in Japan, and upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, which dominated the headlines. The fact remains that the elections were universally considered a charade. The generals remain in tight control, as before. And Burma continues to suffer both violence and extreme poverty. One in ten of children under five suffers from malnutrition, this in a country which was once considered “the rice bowl of Asia”. PSRB is not and cannot aspire to be political. Our aim is limited to bringing relief to people who are suffering and to help prepare for a time when Burma’s people can go home and rebuild their country. For many, that will never happen. Six years ago the United Nations High Commisson for Refugees started to organize the resettlement of people in the camps, mostly in the US and Australia; over 60,000 have gone.
Those who stayed hoped to be allowed to work in Thailand, and the plan was for the camps to be closed down. But while the situation in Karen and Karenni States remains an ongoing civil war, people continue to cross the border in large numbers.
And PSRB will go on playing its small part in helping them.