About Burma
Burma has been ruled by a kleptocratic military regime since the early 1960s. Its current incarnation is the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) headed by General Than Shwe. Every few years Burma makes international news headlines when sectors of its beleaguered population – students in 1988, monks in 2007 – attempt to express their discontent with the situation. The military’s reaction has inevitably been to brutally suppress such expression, with substantial loss of life.
The regime is also known for its disdain for international human rights norms, economic ineptitude, unbridled corruption, negligible health and education spending and more than two thousand political prisoners, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy. Many of Burma’s ethnic minorities – most famously the Karen and Shan – have been engaged in a long-running civil war on Burma’s mountainous borderlands. These adverse living conditions have resulted in millions of Burmese leaving Burma as political asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants.
Upwards of four million Burmese are living in neighbouring countries: Thailand, India, China, Malaysia and Bangladesh. In Thailand these communities have variously established a government in exile, a number of ethnic-based de facto government departments, refugee camps, a thriving NGO scene, international lobbying mechanisms, networks of schools, clinics and welfare services and a range of cross-border humanitarian support programmes. The Thai government tacitly tolerates most of these most of the time.