76,000 members of minorities were expelled in the past year

At least 76,000 members of ethnic minorities fled from their villages in the east of Burma in the face of severe violations of human rights. This was announced in their annual report, published yesterday by an association of human rights organisations working in the border area between Burma and Thailand. "Those worst hit by violence and persecution are the Christian Karen”, said the GfbV Burma expert, Ulrich Delius. In the Karen area 43,000 villagers have had to flee from the attacks of the army. At least 167 villages in the east of Burma have been destroyed or have had to be abandoned by their residents as they have been compulsorily moved by the army. "For the ethnic minorities in the multi-ethnic state of Burma it is not just since the rising of the monks that expulsion and persecution have become an everyday affair”, said Delius.

About 109,000 members of ethnic minorities have been forcibly evicted by the military junta in the east of the country. The military have taken over land, carried out forcible resettlement, imposed arbitrary taxation, forced labour and extortion and so the people have become impoverished. There is often no guarantee that there will be enough to eat because the international aid agencies have not been able to reach the starving people in the areas in which these minorities are cut off from the world. "Some 99,000 members of the minorities are hiding from the soldiers of the junta in the areas inhabited by various nationalities, which are the scenes of battle between the resistance groups and the army”, said Delius.

Members of the Mon tribe have been pressed into forced labour along the track of a natural gas pipeline to Thailand. Along the Salween River, where the junta intends to build several hydro-electric dams, there has been an increase in military presence with the object of frightening and expelling the local people.

An increasing threat to the minorities is the extension of cultivation for palm-oil and caster oil. In the Tenasserim Division (one of the 14 administrative districts of Burma) the Shan, the Karen, the Mon and other small tribes are suffering from the confiscation of arable land on which palm-oil plantations have been set up.

A similar dramatic confiscation of farmers’ land is reported by Shan in the south of the Shan state. There too agricultural land has against the will of the local people been taken for the industrial production of useful plants on an industrial scale for export purposes. "So it is not surprising that in the areas inhabited by the various nationalities tens of thousands of people are starving and that the number increases year by year”, said Delius.

In the north of the state of Karenni arable land has been confiscated by the government - land nearly twice the size of the English county of Devon (12,000 sq km) and set to use for industrial projects. "With these industrial projects the junta is not only kowtowing to foreign investors, who make enormous profits from the mining of minerals, but also strengthen the military with their stranglehold over the minorities”, said Delius. The means of existence are systematically being withdrawn from these nationalities.

The ethnic minorities make up some 30 percent of the 50 million people living in Burma. They live mainly in the mountainous regions on the borders with the neighbouring countries. They have been struggling for more self-determination and human rights since 1948.