AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
BANGKOK: Hundreds of villagers are fleeing to the jungles of eastern Myanmar as the military intensifies its bloody crackdown on ethnic minorities, rights groups said Friday.
Karen people sought refuge in the jungle after the military burnt down their homes and crops as part of its decades-long offensive, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said.
“We think women and children have also been killed,” said the group's Myanmar consultant Sunai Phasuk.
The Karen National Union (KNU) has been battling Yangon in one of the world's longest-running insurgencies, and claims to have 10,000 resistance fighters. Myanmar's junta has reached ceasefires with 17 ethnic armed groups.
Sunai said the military had stepped up its attacks during the dry season because it was easier and quicker to move troops around the country. The wet season starts in June.
He said reports from Myanmar indicated that Karen villagers were being uprooted and targeted for human rights abuses even if they had no connection to the resistance.
“They are targeting the ethnic resistance groups and ethnic minorities living in the villages. The Burmese military has no differentiation between the two,” he said.
Myanmar, formally known as Burma, has been widely condemned for its human rights abuses.
While many Karen were sheltering in the jungles, others were fleeing to refugee camps on the Thai border, he said.
Jack Dunford, executive director of the aid agency Thailand Burma Border Consortium, this week confirmed the influx, saying the refugees from Karen areas had arrived with “stories of increased troop activity, widespread destruction of villages and crops, and human rights abuses.”
Similar concerns have been reported by the Free Burma Rangers, who said up to 11,000 people have been displaced since November. The volunteer group, which supports the Karen, said the crackdown included torture and killings.
The KNU has attributed the military's increased action to attempts to secure areas around the new capital Pyinmana, which is near a brigade of Karen guerrilla fighters.
Myanmar surprised the world in November by shifting its capital 320 kilometres (200 miles) north of Yangon.
The military-run government has denied human rights abuses against ethnic minorities, including the Karen, which it blames for recent bombings.
More than 140,000 refugees live in nine refugee camps on the Thai side of the border, set up since Myanmar troops overran most traditional ethnic minority lands in the country's eastern mountainous region in the 1980s.
