The sweet contagion of freedom will outlast the bloodshed in Burma

Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. 

Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma’s story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. 

Mae Sot, Thai-Burma borderThe family had come from one of the villages along the border and their story of life and death came from the heart of Burma’s tragedy. They had crossed to Thailand because they did not have the money to buy medicine in Burma. Under the Generals’ rule healthcare in Burma exists only for the rich or the friends of the regime. The country has more malaria deaths than India, whose population is 20 times bigger. The lack of medicine and hospitals is but one of the impositions which helped to spark the popular demonstrations that shook the regime.

By the time the family arrived in the Thai town of Mae Sot the youngest child was already dangerously ill with malaria. Still they hoped that in Dr Cynthia’s clinic there might exist some cure to coax the two-year-old out of his fever. They hadn’t had the money to buy medicine in Burma. The clinic is a simple collection of concrete outbuildings run by Dr Cynthia Maung, a Burmese exile who fled the last big crackdown in 1988. She has become a mother figure to tens of thousands of political exiles and migrant workers who have fled the corrupt dictatorship of the Generals.

But on this occasion there was nothing Cynthia’s doctors or nurses could do. The child died two days after arriving at the clinic. His body now lay wrapped in tarpaulin in a small room at the rear of the building. Two hours after he died the parents were still sitting at the entrance to the children’s ward. The father sat slightly apart from the mother and two little girls.