Myanmar cracks down on ethnic minorities

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MAE SARIANG, (Thailand) Jan 3 (Agencies): Myanmar's army has moved reinforcements into ethnic minority areas for the probable renewal of an offensive whose past human rights violations have been far greater than those against urban protesters that riveted world attention last fall, aid and rebel groups say. The groups provide continuing reports of killings of civilians, rapes, forced labor, burning of crops and mass relocations as Myanmar troops attempt to wipe out die-hard guerrillas of the Karen National Union and other ethnic rebel forces.
While urban tensions may have eased since the crackdown on September's pro-democracy demonstrations in Yangon, "nothing has changed" regarding the conflict in the east of the country also known as Burma, says Htoo Kli, who helps Karen refugees along the Thai-Myanmar border.
The Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the key aid agency along the frontier for
more than two decades, says that in 2007 another 76,000 Karen were forced to flee their homes and at least 167 villages were destroyed.
Corroborated by high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, more the 3,000 villages have been laid waste to by the army in recent years while those displaced in eastern Myanmar number at least half a million, the agency says.
"People around the world were horrified when they saw soldiers beating some people in Yangon, but far worse happens in the countryside every day, hidden from the world," said the consortium's Executive Director, Jack Dunford.