S2E86: Nine-year-olds on drugs: Has the world abandoned Myanmar?

Ted, you have actually run a company inside Myanmar, and then you worked in an NGO that helps Burmese refugees.

What drew you to work with people affected by Myanmar's conflict, and what keeps you there?

Well, I'm married to a Burmese journalist, and so...

It certainly made sense for us to be based in Northern Thailand, where a lot of Burmese journalists continue to report on the situation in Myanmar.

And to speak personally, after leaving Yangon after the military coup in 2021, It was really a question of asking, how can I make myself useful in this situation? And that's what took me to the border and to work at the NGO that you just mentioned here.

Now, it's been more than five years since Aung San Suu Kyi was ousted in Myanmar and the refugee flood started pouring out of the country.

Could you give us a sense of the refugee situation today?

Yeah, I mean, it's a situation also that's been in existence for decades at the time Myanmar border.

But as you say, since the coup has got a lot worse, I would say there are two tails to it.

There's the one which is on the Thai side, which would be about 100,000 refugees in refugee camps.

and then millions of migrants in Thailand.

But just to take Thailand, the Thai-Myanmar border as an example, on the other side of the border, you would have five times as many, half a million IDPs in camps of a far inferior quality to those that you'd find on the Thai side.

An IDP being an internally displaced person.

But give us a sense of their plight.

What is life like for them?

Well, it's a life in some sense of increased security.

Most of them have fled a situation where their villages have been bombed by the Myanmar junta, which has a policy of bombing, for example, schools and hospitals in areas that it doesn't control to try and make life unlivable.

And in a sense, that is exactly what happens.

It does make life unlivable.

Some of those people will also have witnessed ground incursions into their areas, arson, rape, torture, very normal forms of violence from the Myanmar military.

So they fled that.

So in a sense, they're now more secure, but they're now confined.

um they don't have any freedom of movement and um i think probably what is particularly difficult to deal with is that there's not really any sense um of a future and what to live for and i think that's particularly challenging and so it's in that kind of circumstance that you start to get um drug addiction and whatnot

I see.

You mentioned people in Thailand.