By The Associated Press
Lu Khu Paw, center, and other Karenni orphans gather at a church along the Thai-Burma border on Feb. 6 near Mae Sot, Thailand. Human-rights workers say a “slow genocide” is ongoing in eastern Burma, also known as Myanmar, as people from the Karen, Karenni and Shan are being targeted by the Myanmar military. Hidden from the outside world, the violence has spawned about a million internal refugees.

Thai soldiers man a jungle checkpoint as Karenni refugees from a nearby refugee camp return from work along the Thai-Myanmar border.

NA SOI, Thailand — Lu Khu Paw says soldiers shot her father as he gathered bamboo in the forest, laid waste to the rice fields and burned down their home three different times. The 16-year-old orphan vividly remembers her native village in flames, survivors fleeing and her mother dying of disease in a jungle hide-out.

Nang Poung, a 33-year-old farmer, recounts how troops dragged 30 males, three of them relatives, to an execution ground and herded everyone else out of her village. What finally impelled her to escape from Burma just days ago, she says, was working as a conscripted laborer six days a week, and then having to hand over half the harvest, plus taxes, from family fields.

Such stories are commonplace among refugees fleeing a decades-long campaign by Burma’s ruling military to suppress rebellious ethnic minorities. Under the present junta, which has aborted an opposition election victory, gunned down demonstrators and kept opposition leader and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, the campaign against the rebels appears to be escalating in scope and ferocity.

The violence has spawned an estimated 1 million internal refugees, many cowering in bleak hovels deep inside malarial jungles or on bitterly cold mountainsides. It has also sparked an accelerating exodus to neighboring countries, including more than 400,000 to Thailand, where thousands arrive each month, according to the Burma Border Consortium, the main refugee-aid group.

It says the conflict wracking eastern Burma has destroyed some 3,000 villages and displaced 80,000 people a year in most recent times.

Occasional international protests have failed to stop what dozens of refugees describe in interviews: mass relocations of civilians, girls as young as 5 raped, people forced into acting as human mine detectors.

Such charges are described by the junta as fabrications by Westerners and “internal destructive elements” plotting to dismember the country it has renamed Myanmar. Like previous governments, the generals believe they have a sacred obligation to hold the nation of 43 million together and stamp out separatist rebellions among its 135 officially recognized groups.

“I have suffered for many years, and it’s only getting more desperate now,” says Sai Teng, who fled recently from Burma’s Shan State, fearing yet more forced labor and a worse fate for his wife. Late last year, he says, a patrol near his village tied a 35-year-old woman to a tree and gang-raped her to death after catching her “illegally” feeding her cows and buffaloes.

The conflict
In the latest military operations, at least four government battalions since Dec. 23 have been shelling and attacking villages and internal refugee hide-outs in southern Karenni State and areas of neighboring Karen State, forcing some 3,000 people to flee their homes, according to reports from the Free Burma Rangers — ethnic and Western relief workers who trek into the war zones to aid the homeless.

Under international sanctions and faced with a bankrupt economy, the generals are also expanding road networks into once remote ethnic areas to exploit forests, minerals and farmland. Those fleeing marauding troops, refugee workers say, will soon be hemmed in.

‘Life is unsustainable’
All hope for change seems dead, and “almost all new refugees tell us that life is unsustainable in Burma,” said Jack Dunford, the British head of the Burma Border Consortium. “They either live under junta control where they are subjected to incessant forced labor and other human rights abuses, or they have to be constantly on the move, trying to avoid the Burmese Army. But in the end there is no place left for them to run.”

“It’s like meeting a tiger in the jungle: you never know if it will attack you or not… Every unit does what it likes. Living with Burmese soldiers is like a never-ending nightmare,” said Sai Teng, the Shan farmer who fled with his wife and 4-year-old son.

Source: FortWayne.com