She Escaped Strife, but Embraced Those Scarred by It

Nora Boustany
Burmese-Born Charm Tong Is Among Activists Honored for Contributions to Women's Causes
Charm Tong was born in Burma's conflict-lacerated countryside 26 years ago. She was 6 when her parents stuffed her into a straw basket strapped onto a donkey and sent her to join a caravan of villagers snaking its way through lush jungles to an orphanage inside the Thai border. Their desperate choice seemed a better option as the country's repressive military regime moved through some 1,400 farming villages, removing ethnic Burmese from their lands and forcing them into labor, often after torturing them.

In that orphanage, Tong learned to read and study English. By the time she was 16, she was working with refugees and migrant workers who crossed the 2,000-kilometer border between Burma and Thailand. She listened to their heartbreaking stories, soothing them, counseling them and organizing women's networks along border villages.

For her leadership, she was one of six honored last night at the Kennedy Center by Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit group dedicated to the empowerment and advancement of women around the world. First lady Laura Bush, who has embraced the cause of Burma's oppressed as the defining mission of her East Wing legacy, introduced her. Mrs. Bush has become the point person in this administration on the Burmese crisis, picking up the phone to express her outrage to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, hosting Burmese democracy activists at the White House, giving dozens of interviews on the subject and writing her own op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal marking dissident and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday.

In addition to Mrs. Bush, presenters at the star-studded evening included Sally Field and Renée Zellweger, designer Diane von Furstenberg and CNN's State Department correspondent Zain Verjee.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Kay Bailey Hutchison addressed the guests, as they do annually. Vital Voices grew out of the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative, created in 1997 by Clinton and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright to promote women as a U.S. foreign policy goal.

Also honored were Kakenya Ntaiya, an education advocate from Kenya; Sheikha Lubna al-Qasimi, economics minister of the United Arab Emirates; political corruption activist Laura Alonso of Argentina; journalist and human rights proponent Mariane Pearl of France, widow of slain reporter Daniel Pearl; and human-rights advocate Khin Ohmar of Burma.

After she fled her home, Tong saw her parents briefly, every two or three years; to get to her, they had to trek for a week or longer along the same tortured and dangerous routes she took as a child. "I thought they did not love me," she said in an interview Friday. She described the brief encounters with her parents as "happy, tearful and heartbreaking."

"You arrive from school one day and they are there. The next day you hurry back from school and they are gone. They would tell me what was happening and say, 'We cannot give you anything except this opportunity.' "

All she can remember are blurred patches of her childhood, scurrying from village to village for safety. Her parents bundled her and her younger sister along with rags, pots and pans as the children fled from the soldiers, who ransacked huts, killing and sexually assaulting those who resisted.

"With time I began to understand. Fresh out of junior high I began hearing about and seeing the scars from all the atrocities," she noted. By the time some women shuffled across the northern Thai border, they had been raped six to eight times. "They arrive with nothing," Tong said. "You never forget their faces. So many women believe it was their fault and ask us if they had done anything wrong. We were traumatized just listening to them relive their horrors," she added.

One case that tore up Tong's soul was that of Nag Hla, who was only 17 and six months pregnant when she escaped from her village of Laikha in 2002. She had been gang-raped from 10 in the morning until 4 that afternoon, Tong said, "her husband blindfolded and tied to a tree, close enough so he could hear" his wife's screams. Hla set off on foot and delivered her premature infant alone.

Thai government officials estimate that 3 million Burmese have taken up residence in Thailand over the years. Many who cross from Shan province, where Tong was born, find there are no refugee camps for them when they arrive, she said. Instead, they settle together or with Thai families as stateless, undocumented farmhands. Tong is active in organizing other women stationed along border passages to teach refugees about reproductive health.

Tong became a global advocate at 17, when she went to Geneva in a delegation of seven Burmese to address the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 1999. Before an audience that included members of the military regime, Tong shook as she spoke and broke down tearfully as she testified about the women she had met along the border.

"I was lucky. I went to school," she says now with measured gratitude. She began reading a newsletter on human rights violations from Shan province at an early age. "It game me more answers than I found in school and it inspired me to do something to help."