Mission: Burma.

In the Mae Sot day market some of thee culinary delicacies include live frogs and thrashing fish, dried grasshoppers, and maeng da, a pickled, 3-inch-long water bug whose strong family resemblance to the common cockroach is guaranteed to thwart even the most daring of farang (foreigner) appetites. The market is a lively mix of the many Thai, Burmese, and other Southeast Asian cultures that converge in this small border city: Karen, Mon, and Shan tribespeople; Indian and Bangladeshi merchants; Thai businessmen; and Burmese gem dealers. In northwest Thailand's Tak Province, Mae Sot is just a few kilometers from Burma--or Myanmar, as it is called by its current rulers. A classic border-town, Mae Sot is a rowdy, if congenial riot of the region's varied ethnicities and nationalities.

Just about anything is for sale in Mae Sot if you know where to look for it: gold, jade, rubies, medicinal herbs, motorbikes, even people. Sex traffickers ply their trade among more legitimate merchants following well-worn trade routes through Mae Sot. Littering the outskirts of town, factory compounds little better than Dickens' workhouses churn out low-cost clothing for American and European markets as they churn through low-paid Burmese.

But perhaps the town's most thriving industry centers around the Burmese refugee population located in three camps a short drive away. Platoons of Western humanitarian workers from the camps blow offsteam on beer-soaked weekends in Mae Sot bars and restaurants. Other farang live in Mae Sot proper: legal advocates, teachers, and medical service workers; U.N. and nongovernmental organization (NGO) staff.

Like the harassed refugees and migrant workers they serve, the town's Westerners are cagey around new visitors. People are careful who they talk to in Mae Sot. Rumors of spies from the notorious Burmese military intelligence and Royal Thai Government (RTG) discourage many from describing, except in the most general terms, their work with refugees. Migrant workers who said the wrong things to the wrong people have been known to have decidedly unpleasant encounters after they returned to Burma across the Moei River's "Friendship Bridge."

A Burmese journey

Human rights agencies from around the world deploy teams of volunteers and professionals among the many Burmese political exiles who, barred from the camps, have found dubious shelters in lean-tos and huts hidden behind modest homes along Intharakhiri Road and Mae Sot's other main drags. These are the lucky ones, struggling through the often frustrating labyrinth of U.N. paperwork to the perceived security of some kind of recognized asylum status.

Many other Burmese with little chance of ever achieving refugee status could tell stories much like the one that "Moses" shares one afternoon in the apartment of a Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) worker. Moses came from a Chin community near the Bangladesh border. His village had the bad luck to be located in the path of a highway construction project. His family and neighbors were quickly impressed into helping to build the road that was destroying their way of life.

"If you say, 'No,' the first time, they would give you harder work to do. If you say, 'No,' again, they throw you in prison," he says. Moses did not stick around to discover what happened the third time Burmese authorities were defied. While some of his fellow villagers escaped into India or Bangladesh and some joined the Chin opposition, Moses and his brother journeyed by bus for two weeks to cross the border at Mae Sot.

Now he looks for day work and some kind of official status. He hopes to find a refugee placement in Europe or America. Although he someday wishes to recover the village life he knew, Moses can't imagine conditions in Burma improving anytime soon. Like a good percentage of Burma's tribal people, Moses is doubly persecuted because he is also Christian. "My identification papers say, 'Ethnicity: Chin; Religion: Christian," he notes matter-of-factly. "I have no hope of ever finding a job. In Burma I have no future."

After decades of ethnic and political conflict, there are now between 600,000 and 1 million internally displaced persons inside Burma. More than 145,000 people have found what is looking more like a permanent shelter from Burma's storms, warehoused in nine refugee camps tracing the Thai-Burma border. Many of these refugees first left Burma after the savage suppression of a student-led democracy campaign in 1988. Now, 16 years later, they remain trapped along the border, unable to return to Burma, unable also to leave Thailand--unable even to leave the camps themselves.

Whether Burman student rebels, wounded Karen National Union (KNU) resistance fighters, Muslim and Christian community leaders in exile, or just Karen, Shan, or other tribal people fleeing liquidation, exploitation, or poverty, what Mae Sot's Burmese have in common is a desperation to escape one of the planet's most repressive regimes, Burma's SPDC, the "State Peace and Development Council." That's the slightly less awkward moniker--brainstormed by a U.S. public relations firm--adopted by Burma's ruling junta in 1997. The junta's previous incarnation as the "State Law and Order Restoration Council"--SLORC--was an acronym out of hell or Ian Fleming and well lived up to its noxious resonance.

The awful and the really, really awful

"There have been two factions in that government," says Michael Forhan of the Burma Border Project, "the awful and the really, really awful." Just now the "really, really awful" faction is back in charge, having in October deposed and arrested Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, the SPDC's lone moderate--if that word can even be applied to any member of Burma's ruling junta--and purged his supporters from the ranks of military intelligence.

Typical totalitarian regimes can at least be expected to act in their own self-interest, however rotten the results may be for their citizenry, but the Burmese ruling junta is less predictable and often seems to act out simply to demonstrate a malevolent indifference to world opinion. "You never know what they will do," Forhan says.

As the region struggles to respond to the devastation of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami and with the war on terror and the meltdown in Iraq otherwise dominating world headlines, Forhan worries that the continued outrages of the Burmese junta against Burma's ethnic and religious minorities and the Kafkaesque diplomatic trap endured by Burmese in camps and border towns like Mae Sot may become completely overlooked by the world community.

While thousands of Mae Sot's Burmese have achieved the increasingly dubious protection offered by official recognition as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), approximately 700,000 other Burmese in Thailand scrape by as registered workers. Perhaps as many as 800,000 more subsist here without any documentation, officially stateless, vulnerable to all the abuses that precarious status implies.

In Mae Sot alone thousands of these migrant workers crowd the oppressive barracks conditions behind walled factory compounds. Those Burmese lucky enough to have official work registration are still paid as little as half the already depressed official minimum wage in Thailand. Many earn as little as 60 or 70 baht a day, about $1.50.

Those without work permits can anticipate a 19th-century style level of exploitation and thievery from some Thai employers, many of whom deduct excessive living and food expenses from their workers' salaries. Some simply evaporate when a contract has been completed with a big-name clothing retailer without paying workers anything at all, and physical and sexual assaults on Burmese migrant workers are common.

Burmese workers daring enough to complain about such treatment invite a quick drive to the nearby border and a nerve-wracking chat with Burmese military at the border detention facility. In some instances, advocates for the undocumented Burmese allege, migrant workers have been summarily executed by Thai authorities after complaining or demonstrating against unscrupulous managers.

Refugee fatigue

After enduring waves of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees during previous eras of regional insecurity and violence, the Thais have grown weary of serving as the region's shelter of first preference for the displaced and desperate. The Royal Thai Government is not a signatory to U.N. conventions and protocols on the status and treatment of refugees. Officially there are no refugees in Thailand, just "people fleeing conflict."

Thai authorities have made occasional attempts to round up Burmese working illegally in Thailand's urban centers and relocate them to the border camps, or worse, directly deport them to Burma. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands have been deported through the Mae Sot crossing. Certainly a great number of the deported simply return to Thailand as soon as the next opportunity arises, but the fate of those who for whatever reason fall into the SPDC's hands remains unknown.

While they don't want the Burmese to remain in Thailand indefinitely, Thai officials are at the same time uneasy about cooperating in placing Burmese refugees elsewhere. According to Cynthia Buiza, the information and advocacy officer for the Jesuit Refugee Service in Bangkok, Thai authorities fear that news of resettlements in America or Europe after nearly two decades of oppression and economic stagnation in Burma would only mean a new flood of refugees into Thailand.

Mae Sot's refugees are caught in the middle of this bureaucratic and political Catch-22. Many "surrender hope for security," as one NGO staffer put it, resigning themselves to the wretched limbo of Mae Sot because the alternative, returning to the tender mercies of the Burmese junta, is simply unthinkable. Burmese refugees have waited for years in Mae Sot or the camps near it--their lives completely on hold--for the day that seems to never come, when it will be safe to return to Burma. New refugee generations are being born in Mae Sot and will grow up here with little appreciation of the traditional life their parents left behind in Burma's tribal states.

The desperation to leave is almost palpable. At the sight of each fresh Western face in Mae Sot, many reach into shirts or sidepacks or rummage around among their few possessions to pull out plastic envelopes full of yellowing UNHCR documentation, each refugee apparently entertaining the same flickering hope that maybe this newcomer has some idea how to translate all this blotted paperwork and carefully preserved testimonies and applications and appeals into a real place to call home.

Hlarat Htun bashfully produces his UNHCR packet after just a few minutes of conversation with a Western visitor at his home, pointing out letters from his commander attesting to his service and the wounds he has received. His wife and three children share a 6-by-10 foot shack by a fetid swamp, harassed by mosquitoes, living hand to mouth, without regular work, but glad to at least be out of Burma. Htun was a member of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF), an armed resistance group that began as a peaceful student organization before the 1988 suppression. For the last 16 years he and his fellow ABSDF members lived and fought with the Karen National Union resistance in the jungles of Burma against the governing junta.

Wounded twice in combat and tired of the fighting, he has escaped to Mae Sot now because a recent informal ceasefire between the Burmese military and the Karen resistance left Htun wondering what an actual negotiated settlement between the SPDC and KNU might mean for him and other members of the student opposition. He decided in February 2004 to take his chances across the border.

Without official status in Thailand, his children cannot go to school and his security remains uncertain. He could be deported at any time. If that happens, "Only two things can occur," he says. "I will be sent to jail or death by execution."

Htun sees little chance for change in Burma's near future, and he doesn't want to stay in Thailand. A third country is his only hope, he says, for "my children's education, to be free, to have the right to study, to have some kind of security."

The enduring junta

But even Burmese with UNHCR recognition have become alarmed by the increasingly cozy relationship between the Thai and Burmese political leaderships. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra personally has made a series of conciliatory gestures to the Burmese junta, even describing the house arrest of democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as "reasonable." The Thai prime minister's personal business entanglements with the SPDC have only grown deeper over the last few years.

In 1998 Burma joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and is scheduled to assume ASEAN's presidency in 2006. It is this encroaching acceptance of the status quo that fills Burmese in Thailand with growing apprehension. Now they no longer fear never being able to return to their homeland but precisely that: being returned to Burma--abruptly and involuntarily--while a preoccupied world stands by and does nothing to protect them.

JRS's Buiza wryly notes that over the years the SPDC seems to have become completely indifferent to pressure from the U.S. and Europe on human rights and democratic reforms. The junta's focus these days remains fixed only on shoring up its standing among its regional partners. She thinks pressuring ASEAN members such as Thailand to insist on improving human rights standards in Burma before complete political and economic normalization could have some impact. But overall Buiza remains skeptical that the junta will respond to any external pressure.

Some intermediate step must be taken, she argues, to formalize the status of Burmese in Thailand and the other Southeast Asian nations where they have taken refuge. Their lives must somehow become diplomatically unstuck, their freedom to move about, to find work and seek education and build a future for themselves somehow established.

"Many of them have no recollection of Burma," Buiza says. "This is their country now."

"We are searching for a place where we can support ourselves," Moses says about his fellow Chin refugees. "Maybe that place is here."