Myanmar Violence Traps Ethnic Minorities

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, including three of her relatives, to an execution ground and herded everyone else out of the village. What finally impelled her to escape from Myanmar just days ago, she says, was working as a conscripted laborer six days a week, then having to hand over half the harvest from family fields, plus taxes.

Such stories are commonplace among refugees fleeing a decades-long campaign by Myanmar’s ruling military to suppress rebellious ethnic minorities. Under the junta, which has aborted an opposition election victory, gunned down demonstrators and kept opposition leader 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 also has 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 racking eastern Myanmar, also known as Burma, has destroyed about 3,000 villages and displaced 80,000 people a year of late.

Occasional international protests have failed to stop what dozens of refugees describe in interviews: mass relocation of civilians; rape of girls as young as 5; people shanghaied into acting as human mine detectors; villagers nailed to doors or burned inside their houses.

The junta calls such charges fabrications by Westerners and “internal destructive elements” plotting to dismember Myanmar. The generals believe they have a sacred obligation to keep the nation of 43 million together and stamp out separatist rebellions among its 135 officially recognized races.

“I have suffered for many years and it’s only getting more desperate now,” says Sai Teng, who fled recently from Myanmar’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 caught a 35-year-old woman “illegally” feeding her cows and buffaloes. He says the patrol tied her to a tree and gang-raped her until she died.

Fears of worsening conditions are echoed by outside advocates.

The 2004 ouster of Gen. Khin Nyunt, who negotiated cease-fires with 17 insurgent groups, reinforced hard-liners within the junta and “resulted in increasing hostility directed at ethnic minority groups,” Human Rights Watch says in its 2006 report.

Some cease-fire agreements, notably with the Shan State National Army, have broken down and others are expected to fracture, inevitably leading to an upsurge in fighting and reprisals against civilians suspected of sympathizing with the rebels.

The conflict is waged in the rugged mountains ringing the populous plain. 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, 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 expanding roads into once-remote ethnic areas to exploit forests, minerals and farmland. People fleeing troops, refugee workers say, will soon be hemmed in.

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.”

Debates over human rights abuses are lost on the victims, many of them illiterate farmers who have never heard of Suu Kyi and who say the military never explains its actions to them.

“It’s like meeting a tiger in the jungle: You never know if it will attack you or not. Having some official permit is no guarantee of safety. 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.

The conflict dates from 1948, when Britain gave the country independence and promised a degree of autonomy to the ethnic groups that make up about a third of the population. When the new government failed to deliver, some groups rose up in arms, fighting to preserve their culture and way of life, not to mention their smuggling routes and drug crops.

The insurgents include the Karen, Karenni and Shan groups in eastern Burma and others along the borders with India and Bangladesh.

In more recent times, the demand for autonomy has been modified to seeking a federal democratic system. But the 500,000-strong army continues to seek victory through what it calls a “Four Cuts” campaign -- cutting off guerrillas from the civilian population which provides them with recruits, information, funds and supplies.

Knowledgeable sources such as the Free Burma Rangers say many civilians are clearly sympathetic to the rebels’ cause and sometimes support it. However, a number of the refugees interviewed insisted that they took no sides, but were still accused of wrongdoing and beaten, or worse.

Charm Tong, a young Shan human rights worker, says the military uses rape “to control, humiliate and demoralize the community” -- an allegation she relayed to President Bush when they met at the White House last year.

Colleagues at the Shan Relief and Development Committee say that harsh policies have slashed rice production in Mong Nai township, the rice bowl of Shan State, by 56% since 1994 and sparked the flight of a third of the population to Thailand.

They say more than half the cultivated area has been abandoned as the regime relocates villages, conscripts farmers for state agricultural projects and confiscates land. It then rents the acreage back to farmers and forces them to sell a percentage of their rice harvest to the military at one-quarter of the market price.

Human rights groups call it “agro-cide.” Nang Poung, who says she was forced to work on a vast fruit plantation until she fled in desperation to Thailand, defines it tersely: “They’re destroying the very agriculture on which our lives depend.”