Gender Specific Human Rights

One day, representatives from the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN) came to Loi Kaw Wan on a regular visit. SWAN oversees various projects in Loi Kaw Wan, such as a sewing program for village women to earn money making clothes, and a kindergarten. SWAN works hard to help women on both sides of the northern Thai-Burma border. The women need it. Life is very difficult and abuse is common, whether women are still living in Burma or have moved to work (usually illegally) in Thailand.

As part of its visit to Loi Kaw Wan SWAN planned to hold a meeting for all interested women in the village. There, they could get news from Shan state, hear about the latest atrocities, discuss issues of work, family, sexual health, pregnancy, rape and women's rights. Two visiting female Canadian doctors were invited to participate. Reps were especially interested in sharing information about legislation in Burma that granted soldiers a “license to rape” women from specific ethnic groups.

The women who came varied. Old and young, some were shy, some apathetic, others outspoken, some keen to find out how to make their husbands happy without having anymore children and some clearly just happy to be doing something different.

Loi Kaw Wan's men grumbled. “What about men's rights?” asked Hsur, the school vice principal. “We have no club, no one comes to talk about our rights. Our life is hard too.” The answer was, as it usually is to that question, that men get every other club. In matters of “human rights,” men seem to collect on them first, while women continue to suffer. And internally, not always internally, we believe that they are only complaining because they fear uppity women; or simply fear the repercussions of women obtaining equality.

But even if women suffer more, admitting or addressing it does little to alleviate the men's suffering. Hsur was right. There is no similar club, no venue to unashamedly check the normalcy of their marriage, determine if there are particular rights that, for them, are disproportionately violated or escape even for two hours the drudgery of their lives.

While the women in the sewing project rightly complained that the town commander had forced them to sew army uniforms for 50 cents apiece, the men were compelled to wear them, and tour through the jungle in search of Burmese soldiers, or risk being run out of the village. This is a serious threat, since the village is an IDP camp. It was founded by refugees fleeing Burmese pogroms. To leave the safety of the rebel-held town could mean punishment, even death in Burma, or a life of wage slavery and racism in Thailand.

Rather than offer statistics-laden arguments about which gender suffers more, the men deserve to be acknowledged. Brushing them off for possibly suffering less will create resentment and frustration on top of the problems they already face. I agree with Hsur. The men should have something too. Something that can be used to explain the women's specific problems, why they have advocacy groups, and most importantly can be used to help the men address their problem with the same methods women are given. Surely they too would benefit from the chance to share their troubles with a group of peers. It would likely save the women from many men's suspicion that their wives and sisters are getting undeserved benefits and gossip sessions.

Burma's Thai Babies

The families in Loi Kaw Wan know there are advantages in their children having Thai citizenship. Citizenship isn't something countries just hand out, and in Thailand even the newborns have to work for it.

When we arrived in Loi Kaw Wan early Sunday morning, Homm Noon was waiting to greet us. She was at the end of her pregnancy, her face had become fat and freckled. The greeting was brief, because she was holding out just long enough to see us and then with her mom climbed into the tinny pick-up truck that dropped us off at the border post, and was driven away to the nearest Thai hospital to give birth.

Since she and her mother are the only trained midwives in the village, it made sense that she wouldn't want to deliver her first child alone in Loi Kaw Wan. The other benefits were realized later on. If Homm Noon's children are born in Thailand, they're Thais. In an area where you're either a Thai or an illegal refugee, the choice seems obvious.

It isn't a simple matter of being born in Thailand though – the babies need a Thai parent. There are men in Thailand, usually old men, who each take money to claim he is the father of a woman's baby. Homm Noon and her husband found such a man to do this for them, as did every other family in Loi Kaw Wan who's children are Thai citizens.

It must be a terrible choice for these families, for the father to give up any official connection he has to his own children, replacing his name with some grasping stranger's. Surely it isn't a secret either. The doctors who register the births can't believe for very long that the old men who come in with young Burmese women are really the fathers of all those children. The Thai government must be aware of the trick as well, still it continues. After the birth the women return home with a newborn, probably hoping never to meet the official father of their child again.

At the end of our time in Loi Kaw Wan we returned to Thailand and paid a visit to Homm Noon. She had delivered a baby boy and was resting in a safe house in Thailand until the baby could get some vaccinations. The safe house is used for Burmese patients sent to the Thai hospital. It's a small warehouse among a line of other warehouses and loading docks.

Homm Noon, her husbadn and the baby had blankets laid out on the floor of the empty storage unit, with some clothes hung up in the corner. She introduced her healthy little baby. We asked his name, and she gave one but said it's only his Thai name, for the birth certificate. He doesn't have a real name yet.