The Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge is a key economic link between the Thai city of Mae Sot and Myawaddy in Myanmar.James Griffiths/The Globe and Mail
Officially, there are two border crossings between the Thai town of Mae Sot and Myawaddy in Myanmar: one for goods and cargo, and another for people, both staffed by customs and immigrations officers from the two countries.
Unofficially, there are dozens, if not hundreds of places to cross the Moei River, which separates Thailand and Myanmar – from well-built wooden bridges that can support a motorbike, to rickety bamboo structures spanning a bend where the river narrows, or pontoon boats hauled across each way by overhead cable.
Mae Sot has historically been a hub for trade and migration across the Moei. For decades, the porousness of the border has also made it an ideal sanctuary for refugees, aid groups and resistance organizations fighting against military rule in Myanmar. Since a February, 2021, coup plunged the country into civil war, Mae Sot’s population has swollen by tens of thousands, as people have fled the fighting and the military junta’s recent conscription law.
“Mae Sot is basically a Burmese town now, you can see it walking the streets, can hear Burmese everywhere,” said Saw Taw Nee, a senior official with the Karen National Union. “That’s why I can live here for 20 years and never learn Thai.”
The KNU has been fighting successive Myanmar governments for decades, seeking autonomy for the Karen people, an ethnic group whose homeland straddles the Thailand-Myanmar border. Since the coup, the KNU has seized control of much of the Myanmar side, and maintains strong connections with the local authorities in Mae Sot.
This has enabled the KNU to operate in the town and slip people and weapons across the border, even as Bangkok maintains a delicate neutrality in the Myanmar conflict – hosting refugees and resistance groups, while maintaining official ties with the junta in Naypyidaw.
“We can stay here, but they always tell us to keep a low profile,” Nay Phone Latt, a Mae Sot-based representative of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, said of the Thai authorities. “They keep one eye closed.”
Nay Phone Latt is a Mae Sot-based representative of Myanmar’s National Unity Government.James Griffiths/The Globe and Mail
No country officially recognizes the NUG – a parallel government set up by resistance groups after the 2021 coup – but Mae Sot provides a place for foreign officials to meet informally with the people that might one day be running Myanmar. (U.S. state department counsellor Derek Chollet did so during a public visit in 2022, and many more have quietly over the years, according to interviews with multiple resistance figures.)
Like Vienna during the Cold War, Mae Sot is a hub not only for diplomacy, but also espionage. Thai, Chinese and Myanmar intelligence services are said to operate in the town, with the latter believed to be running informants who keep them abreast of resistance operations.
“They know who and where we are,” Mr. Phone Latt said. “Compared with inside Myanmar, it’s definitely safer, but we have to be very careful.”
Both he and Mr. Taw Nee agreed that the junta would be wary of carrying out an attack on Thai soil, but said they nevertheless were cautious in whom they spoke to and how they travel. Both operate out of unmarked villas in the Mae Sot suburbs, to which The Globe and Mail was escorted after being given a vague address nearby.
“The number of Burmese in Mae Sot is very high, we cannot identify who might be an agent for the SAC,” said Mr. Taw Nee, referring to the State Administration Council, the junta’s official name.
In 2008, Padoh Mahn Sha, secretary-general of the KNU, was killed by gunmen while sitting outside his home in Mae Sot, an assassination widely blamed on Myanmar’s military government of the time.
During a previous period of junta rule, the military recruited hundreds of thousands of informers across the country, setting up a system of mass surveillance that both provided intelligence and sowed paranoia among resistance forces, according to Andrew Selth, a professor at Griffith University in Australia and expert on Myanmar.
“Since the 2021 military coup, the level of surveillance in Myanmar has greatly increased,” Prof. Selth wrote this month for the Lowy Institute. “The country is thick with spies and informers, both paid and unpaid. The junta places a high priority on the identification, location and removal of anyone deemed a threat to the regime, a definition with a very wide meaning.
“The regime now has greater technical means to monitor the population, but it still relies heavily on human intelligence.”
Kyaw Soe Win, a veteran human-rights activist in Myanmar and co-founder of the Mae Sot-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, said his group is careful about whom it deals with, even as it seeks not to let paranoia undermine the remarkable solidarity seen among diverse resistance groups since the 2021 coup.
“I’m a former political prisoner, I have a lot of experience, I know what to look out for,” he said.
The AAPP works to lobby on behalf of those imprisoned in Myanmar, and support refugees in Thailand, providing counselling and mental-health support for victims of torture, detention and human trafficking.
There is no shortage of those in need of help. The junta has responded to battlefield setbacks with characteristic brutality, bombing civilian areas and torching villages and towns occupied by resistance forces, while pro-government militias have been documented committing horrific war crimes.
In April, as fighting escalated along the border, Thailand said it was preparing to welcome an additional 100,000 refugees, on top of the around 1.5 million Burmese who already live in the country, both legally – on work or study visas, and in UN refugee camps – and through other means.
There are limits, however, to the famous Thai hospitality. Bangkok has begun pressing local governments to crack down on illegal migration, which has driven up the cost of bribes in border areas such as Mae Sot, where multiple Myanmar migrants said they paid brokers around $15 to $20 a month to handle paying off the local police.
Those who cannot afford to do so often live just across the border, in refugee camps. The Globe visited one such camp, south of Myawaddy.
“The Thais tolerate us being close to the border,” said Naw Eh War, head of a committee that runs the camp. “We can hear the fighting nearby. We have a contingency plan for if it comes near, we can run across the border.”
In the camp’s clinic, set up by the Karen Department of Health and Welfare, a division of the KNU, everything was ready to be dismantled and packed up at a moment’s notice.
“I wanted to keep everything portable, because when the fighting happens, we need to be able to take it with us,” Naw Eh War said.
Like those in Mae Sot, the refugees depend greatly on assistance from the Thai side, with aid groups providing water filters and solar panels, which enable camp residents to charge their phones and keep in touch with relatives and friends scattered by the war.
“Some people get money from relatives in Thailand, others can find some work here and there,” Naw Eh War said, adding this mainly involves hard labour in farms across the border, often for less than $5 a day.
From a hill near the village of Ban Mae Kon, The Globe saw residents of a different Myanmar refugee camp wading through the river, joining others already at work tilling fields on the Thai side. Soldiers at a small guard post nearby ignored the illegal border crossing taking place in front of them – one of hundreds that happen every day up and down the 2,400-kilometre-long frontier, keeping alive the resistance against Myanmar’s military rulers.
With a report from Aung Myo Myat