As a teacher and activist, Charm Tong is on a mission to educate people about human rights abuses in Burma – starting with the world’s most powerful man.
“I told him about the forced labour and mass relocations, about extra-judicial executions and rape,” recalls Charm Tong of her hour-long meeting with George W. Bush at the White House last year. “He asked many questions. He was very interested and concerned. He also asked what else the US could do to promote change in Burma.”
Charm Tong, herself a refugee from Burma’s long-running military dictatorship, is still only 25 years old. But as her meeting with the US president shows, her dedication to her country’s brutalised ethnic minorities has already won her an authority beyond her years. She is a founding member of a small but vocal
group called the Shan Women’s Action Network, whose infl uential reports have documented the rape of hundreds of women
and girls by Burmese soldiers. She also runs a unique school in northern Thailand that is training a new generation of human rights activists for Burma. “It is promoting young people to promote other people’s needs,” she explains. Most of the school’s 100 or so graduates now work for youth or women’s organisations as teachers, rights defenders, health workers and community radio broadcasters. “Some are now risking their lives doing cross-border work,” adds Charm Tong.
OPPRESSED MINORITIES
Charm Tong belongs to Burma’s largest ethnic minority, the Shan. Ethnic minorities help make Burma a land of dazzling human diversity, with groups such as the Naga, Akha, Kachin, Karenni, and Pa-O making up a third of the 50 million population.Tourist brochures depict Burma as a Southeast Asian paradise where these hill-dwelling people live peacefully alongside the majority Burmans. The reality is complex, shocking and ill-reported. The Burmese junta is waging a campaign of calculated savagery against these ethnic minorities. More than a million people have been driven from their homes.Hundreds of thousands have spilled into neighbouring countries, where they are stalked by poverty and disease and trafficked into the sex trade.
Thanks to her parents, and to a woman she still reveres as “Teacher Mary”, Charm Tong’s own education began early
and soon dominated her life. She was born in Shan State, and as the Burmese army stepped up its murderous campaign, her parents sent her to the relative safety of a Catholic orphanage on the Thai-Burma border. She travelled there in a basket strapped on the back of a horse. At the orphanage, a Shan nun called Mary brought her up with 30 other children.She was five years old, and from then on only saw her parents once a year. “I cried a lot,” she remembers. “I was young and did not understand why my parents had sent me away. Now I appreciate it. They thought I would be safe and get an education.”She did. Teacher Mary “gave me such a big opportunity”, says Charm Tong, who was determined not to waste it. She started with English lessons at dawn, spent the day at a Thai high school, and then took evening classes in Chinese. At weekends she studied her mother tongue, Shan. (This is why, today, she speaks out for Burma in not one, but four separate languages.) And through the years, as she watched refugees fleeing poverty and persecution in Burma pour across the border into Thailand, she learned to see her heart-breaking separation from her parents against a much greater backdrop of human misery. “Many children suffered more than me,”she says.
LECTURING THE ENEMY
At age 16, Charm Tong began working with human rights groups in Chiang Mai, the capital of northern Thailand and home to many exiles from Burma. She interviewed sex workers and illegal migrants, HIV-sufferers and rape victims. At age 17, she travelled to Geneva to address the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She described the Burmese junta’s savage campaign in her homeland to a 200-strong audience which included junta members. “My voice was shaking,” she admits. “But I thought,‘You have to do this. You don’t get so many opportunities to tell the world.’” In the end, the presence of Burmese officials only emboldened her. “They were forced to listen to what I had to say,” says Charm Tong. “We are the voice of people whose suffering is not heard. If we do not speak out, who will? We have to continue to break the silence.”
Charm Tong considers herself “very lucky” to have received nine years of education. Many of her compatriots are less fortunate.With mass relocations and forced labour common, survival is the first priority for many people in Shan State. “Staying alive comes first,” says Charm Tong. “Education is not a priority.” Especially for young women, who are often obliged to cross the border into Thailand to seek work to support their impoverished families. Unlike some other ethnic minorities from Burma, the Shan have no refugee status in Thailand, and therefore no official protection or support.
Many risk arrest and ill-treatment as illegal manual labourers,and desperate young women and men are lured into the sex trade. Even outside conflict areas, Burma’s education system is collapsing. Teachers at state-run schools supplement their meagre salaries by private tutoring, often leaving their day students teacher-less, or by exacting bribes from parents. The state of university education is equally dire. Students played a key role in nationwide pro-democracy protests in 1988, which the military crushed with the loss of thousands of lives. Since then, the junta has closed universities for long periods and ordered undergraduates to complete their studies through distance-learning courses. Such cynical measures have successfully kept students from organising democracy protests on campus. They have also helped to destroy the educational prospects of a whole generation of young people in Burma.
UNIQUE SCHOOL
In 2001, aged 20, Charm Tong set up the School for Shan State Nationalities Youth to rescue this “lost generation”. It serves not just Shan students but also those from other ethnic minorities such as the Palaung, Akha and Pa-O. Most are in their early twenties, and hail from a variety of backgrounds: some are migrant workers or war refugees, others are already teachers or community workers. Charm Tong receives more than 150 applicants every year. This year she can accommodate only 29 students.
Largely funded by private donations, the school is located in a two-storey rented house in northern Thailand. (Due to the school’s ambiguous legal status in Thailand, Charm Tong asked Global Knowledge not to reveal its exact location.)
It is spartan: the tiny classroom has plastic chairs, a whiteboard and walls decorated with inspirational homilies, one of which reads: “Only education can provide a nation.”
Some of the furniture is water-damaged. Last year northern Thailand endured the worst fl oods for four decades, and one of the dormitories was chest-high in dirty water. For a sur- real few days, Charm Tong was obliged to travel to the nearest main road in a borrowed canoe. Students study English and computing, and receive human rights training from Charm Tong and other experienced local activists. Unlike in their distant homelands, they are encouraged to discuss political issues. One student is 22-year-old Hseng (not her real name). She had been attending university in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, but poverty forced her family to flee Burma. Hseng ended up as a housemaid in Bangkok, earning USD 80 a month, a paltry wage but still four times what she might earn at home. Then Hseng successfully applied to studying with Charm Tong. At the time, she spoke no English and had never seen a computer. “When I touched one for the first time, I was so excited I was shaking,” recalls Hseng, in excellent English. She is now training to be a human rights journalist.
When not at the school, the workaholic Charm Tong works with the Shan Women’s Action Network. Their meticulous 2002 report, “License to Rape”, enraged the junta, by establishing that its soldiers used rape as a weapon of war to terrorise communities. The practice is “still widespread and very systematic,” says Charm Tong.
Not surprisingly, a fighting spirit runs in Charm Tong’s family. Her late father was a commander with the Shan State Army (SSA), one of the few ethnic insurgent groups still battling Burmese government troops. The SSA headquarters lies not far away at Loi Taileng, a settlement clinging to a cloud-raked ridge which straddles the rugged Thai-Burma border. It is the refuge for thousands of villagers fleeing the junta’s troops. The SSA’s goal – an independent homeland for the Shan, Burma’s second largest ethnic group – is nearly impossible to achieve: its 2 000 fighters face a 400 000-strong Burmese army. Charm Tong says she and her father “fight for the same goal. We want our people to be free and happy in their own land.”
Charm Tong knows the fight against the Burmese dictatorship is not just a military affair. The Shan and other ethnic minorities must also resist a similarly ferocious assault on their cultures. At a basic school at the SSA’s hilltop headquarters, teachers write in Shan script on blackboards, an act for which they could be arrested in Burma. The junta has banned books and school lessons in the Shan language, destroyed signs bearing village names in Shan, and razed historic Shan buildings. The practical result? Many young Shan in Burma have little knowledge of their culture and cannot speak their mother tongue. Similar government restrictions have pushed other languages in Burma, such as Mon, to the very brink of extinction.
CANDLE IN THE DARKNESS
Charm Tong’s thriving school and high-profi le campaigning have doubtless won her enemies in the Burmese junta. But those enemies are far outnumbered by her admirers among Burma’s ethnic diaspora. May, a 19-year-old student from the northerly Kachin state, marvels at how early Charm Tong gets up each morning, and how hard she works. So what time does her teacher go to bed? “I don’t know,” replies May. “We’re always asleep before her.” Charm Tong is “a candle in the darkness,” continues May. “She never behaves like she’s superior or better. She is like our sister, and the school is our family.”
A family waiting to go home. Ask Charm Tong about her earliest memories, and for the first time during the interview this driven, dry-eyed woman becomes nostalgic. She talks about foraging for honey in the jungle, of eating rice fire-roasted in a length of bamboo. “That was how good a childhood could be,” she says. “You had friends. You were connected to your birthplace, connected to your culture. That’s what the people of Shan State are missing today: the life of normal human beings.” Adapted from Global Knowledge with permission
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