Myanmar troops reportedly attacking minority villages

BANGKOK(AFP): Myanmar's regime has stepped up a bloody military offensive against ethnic minority villagers to secure areas around its new capital, rebel and non-governmental groups say.

Troops have killed over 100 Karen people, displaced thousands more and burned down villages and crops in an ongoing crackdown that intensified last month, said Karen National Union (KNU) spokesman Colonel Nerdah Mya.

"They moved their troops from Rangoon (Yangon) to the new capital Pyinmana, which is close to the Karen Second Brigade, in order to secure the area," Nerdah Mya told AFP, referring to a brigade of Karen guerrilla fighters.

"They are using thousands of troops to clean up the area," he said. "They kill, they rape, they loot, they burn, everything, so people have to flee. If you are Karen, they will attack you. They are pushing the Karen out of Burma."

The KNU is the largest group still battling Yangon, in one of the world's longest-running insurgencies. Nerdah Mya says the Karen have more than 10,000 resistance fighters. The junta has ceasefires with 17 ethnic armed groups.

The secretive pariah regime of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has been widely condemned for its human rights abuses.

In November it surprised the world by suddenly shifting its capital into a mountainous area 320 kilometres (200 miles) north of Yangon.

Observers speculated that the inland move reflected the isolated generals' fears of an impending US attack after criticism from Washington, or that it followed the ancient Burmese tradition of moving capitals on auspicious dates.

"The Burmese military try to plan for the security of Pyinmana," said a spokesman for the Backpack Health Workers, a volunteer group who offer medical services in the Karen area.

"They have extended their troops in the surrounding area. They have done more forced relocations. They shoot people."

The Free Burma Rangers, a volunteer group supporting the Karen, has published online reports and photographs in recent weeks of what it says has been an increased military sweep southeast of the new capital.

"Villagers have been captured, shot, killed and beheaded in Western Karen State, Toungoo district, resulting in over 2,000 in hiding and 1,000 who have already fled to the Thailand border in March and April," they said.

In one of dozens of alleged attacks it documented, a man called Saw Po De, 40, of a village called Ker Der Gah "was captured, then later found with his head cut off in a nearby river."

On April 5 the group reported "the Burma army is still conducting operations against civilians."

Myanmar's Information Minister Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan at a rare press conference in Yangon Sunday confirmed there had been fighting but said this was in response to Karen "saboteurs" committing "atrocities".

"We have kept open the door for peace," he said.

The regime also presented five people it said had confessed to working with anti-government groups, including the opposition National League for Democracy, headed by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest in Yangon.

"Things that they do to the Karen people, they will say the Karen are doing," said the KNU's Nerdah Mya. "They control the media."

Sally Thompson, deputy head of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium group, said 1,300 Karen had arrived in northwestern Thailand's Maeramaluang refugee camp since the dry-season offensive started late last year.

The refugees, who had walked through the jungle for weeks, reported Myanmar troops had burnt their villages, destroyed their crops, taken their livestock and tried to push some into forced labour, Thompson said.

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 Myanmar's eastern mountainous region in the 1980s.