Some 3,000 Burmese fleeing army attacks - report
Source: Reuters
By Evelyn Leopold NEW YORK, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Some 3,000 Burmese are trekking through Myanmar's Karen state to flee army attacks and search for food, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday. The New York-based group said it had received reports that more than 200 civilians had arrived at camps close to the Thai border after walking for 17 days while 3,000 others were moving toward border settlements in Myanmar, formerly Burma. "The Burmese military attacks villages, uses civilians for forced labor and steals their food and money, forcing people to flee," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. The Karen National Liberation Army, a ragtag ethnic militia, has conducted intermittent guerrilla warfare for some 58 years in an unsuccessful quest for an independent homeland. In the past year, a campaign conducted by the ruling military junta has displaced 27,000 villagers, with at least 45 civilians killed by government forces in Karen alone, Human Rights Watch said. Across the country this year, more than 82,000 people have been forced to flee warfare and 232 villages have been destroyed, the group said. In September, the army moved light infantry divisions into northern Karen state, apparently to prevent civilians from harvesting their crops, Human Rights Watch said. Since 1996, an estimated 3,077 villages have been destroyed by the army and more than 1 million people uprooted from their homes, some 500,000 of them living along the Thai border. But that figure probably underestimates the true numbers since some areas are too dangerous to survey, the rights group said. At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton wants to introduce a U.N. Security Council resolution in the coming weeks demanding Myanmar's junta to stop flooding the region with refugees escaping its repressive policies. Russia and China have already objected to the measure. According to the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium, a humanitarian group based in Thailand, some 95,000 people are hiding out in conflict zones, with limited access to food, health and education. About 287,000 civilians are said to be sheltering in dozens of locations in areas where the army and insurgents have called a cease-fire, TBBC said. A third group, estimated at 118,000 people, were forcibly removed from villages destroyed by government forces and are living in government-controlled relocation camps where they are often used for forced labor for the army, TBBC said.
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