Nearly 4,000 ethnic Karen have abandoned a camp and villages in eastern Myanmar to seek refuge in Thailand following attacks on Karen guerrillas by government troops, a spokesman said yesterday.
Myanmar troops were shelling and attempting to advance on five encampments of Karen insurgents while small groups of villagers continued to flee in one of the largest movements of refugees across the border in a decade, Karen spokesman David Thaw said.
Thai troops have been deployed along the frontier in recent days to prevent a spillover of the fighting.
The ethnic group’s Karen National Union (KNU) has been fighting for more than 60 years for greater autonomy from Myanmar’s military government, but its strength has dwindled over the past decade because of army offensives and divisions within its ranks.
Some 100,000 mostly ethnic Karen refugees already shelter in camps in Thailand after fleeing counterinsurgency operations, while aid agencies say nearly half a million others are internally displaced inside eastern Myanmar.
David Thaw said Ler Per Her camp in Myanmar, which had sheltered internal refugees, had been abandoned and government troops along with those of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) were trying to overrun five Karen positions in the area of the camp.
The DKBA split off from the largely Christian KNU in 1995, joining the government side.
“When there is [battlefield] contact they withdraw and start shelling again,” he said.
About 25 opposing troops have been killed or wounded since the fighting began over the weekend, the spokesman said. He said he had no information about Karen casualties.
A Myanmar government spokesman has not responded to requests for comment.
The refugees were taking shelter about 100km north of Mae Sot, a border town 380km northwest of Bangkok.
The Thai government does not allow them to enter established refugee camps in the country and so were seeking shelter at Buddhist monasteries, David Thaw said.
Tension along the border has heightened in recent days, and the aid group Free Burma Rangers said DKBA troops have threatened to shell Thai villagers across the border if they do not supply them with food for their campaign.
The Rangers conduct humanitarian missions inside Myanmar and have been providing food, clothes, mosquito repellant and other aid items to the Ler Per Her refugees.
Human rights groups as well as the UN have long accused the Myanmar government of torture, killings and rape of Karen civilians in their attempts to stamp out the insurgency. But this appears to have had no effect and the military regime has denied the charges.
“Once again the international community is looking the other way while my people are attacked and forced to run for their lives,” said Zoya Phan, a Karen with the Burma Campaign UK.
“Why hasn’t a single government called for an end to these attacks?” she said in a statement from the activist group.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
RSS