MAUNG TAN, Thailand -- Until five years ago, the Burmese "giraffe" women were dying out. Few modern women of the Padaung tribe were interested in wearing 10 to 20 pounds of 6- to 12-inch brass coils that seem to elongate their necks grotesquely. It wasn't beautiful anymore, just uncomfortable.
Then the 44-year-old civil war among the Burmese heated up. Now a tradition as disfiguring as bound feet is being revived for the sake of tourism. Padaung women in exile in Thailand are donning neck coils again not because they've changed their minds about their unattractiveness, but because being tourist attractions is the only way they can feed their families.
Having fled one of the most repressive military governments in the world, the Padaung are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Afraid to return to their country, now called Myanmar, they live in Thailand, a country that doesn't want them and won't help them. And they're being taken advantage of by enterprising business people who are misleading tourists about the refugees' predicament.
The Padaung's problems began several years ago when the Burmese army, on a stepped-up campaign to subdue and control minority ethnic areas, grabbed villagers to become porters, a euphemism for slaves, or moved them into harsh relocation camps and burned their villages.
Men, women and children captured for porter duty must haul the army's equipment over jungle trails. They are fed only two handfuls of rice a day. Some do duty as human minesweepers. Women who have escaped report they were raped every night. Untold numbers have died.
Thousands of people, including many belonging to the 30,000-member Padaung tribe, fled to Thailand, where they live in limbo. Thailand, which has lucrative logging and natural gas contracts with the Myanmar government, doesn't want to disturb business, and so it won't recognize the 50,000 Burmese currently on its borders as refugees. That means the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, stymied by a rule that it must be invited by a country that says it has refugees, can't help them.
Most of the refugees from Myanmar live in crude villages they built in the jungle. Their ethnic governments-in-exile and nongovernmental relief organizations provide minimal food, clothing and medical care.
"We left our village in Burma suddenly seven years ago," said Motay, a Padaung woman whose neck coils keep her as immobile as someone in a rigid cast. "We brought nothing when we left."
