'Hidden Darfur': A 60-year-old war swells camps with refugees as Myanmar junta gains ground
...The world's attention to Myanmar has focused largely on pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her struggle with the junta that has held her under house arrest for 18 years in Yangon, formerly Rangoon.
Mentioned mostly parenthetically is the relentless war to eradicate a 60-year-old insurgency among the Karen, the country's second largest ethnic minority, by cutting it off from the general population. Although the regime denies it, the U.N. and international human rights groups have documented executions, gang rape, torture, forced labor and mass relocations of civilians after their communities are torched.
Families are financially ruined, many refugees say, because the military demands "taxes" — sometimes nearly half a villager's already minuscule income — for avoiding the draft or forced labor, or for no reason at all.
Farmers are kept from their fields doing long stretches of unpaid labor, hauling supplies, building military bases and repairing roads. Khwe Say Hto says in his village of Palodu, men and sometimes women also served as human minesweepers. Two were killed and others wounded in the most recent incident, a few months back.
The Karen insurgency, dating back to 1949, is considered the world's oldest, and the adage that "old soldiers never die" seems true enough in the figure of Lt. Col. Saw Doo, at 82 possibly the world's oldest recruit still on active duty in an army with no pensions or retirement age....
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Mentioned mostly parenthetically is the relentless war to eradicate a 60-year-old insurgency among the Karen, the country's second largest ethnic minority, by cutting it off from the general population. Although the regime denies it, the U.N. and international human rights groups have documented executions, gang rape, torture, forced labor and mass relocations of civilians after their communities are torched.
Families are financially ruined, many refugees say, because the military demands "taxes" — sometimes nearly half a villager's already minuscule income — for avoiding the draft or forced labor, or for no reason at all.
Farmers are kept from their fields doing long stretches of unpaid labor, hauling supplies, building military bases and repairing roads. Khwe Say Hto says in his village of Palodu, men and sometimes women also served as human minesweepers. Two were killed and others wounded in the most recent incident, a few months back.
The Karen insurgency, dating back to 1949, is considered the world's oldest, and the adage that "old soldiers never die" seems true enough in the figure of Lt. Col. Saw Doo, at 82 possibly the world's oldest recruit still on active duty in an army with no pensions or retirement age....