WE CROSSED the Thai border into Burma at the river port of Mae Sam Laeb, posing as missionaries. We then cruised for an hour up the Salween river in a long-tail boat with Thailand’s flag prominently displayed to deter Burmese snipers. Finally we scrambled up a muddy path through the jungle to reach a camp that was called E Tu Hta.
There we found 700 refugees — men, women and children — living in a makeshift village of bamboo huts that they erected after staggering exhausted from the jungle three weeks ago.
Humanitarian organisations say that more than 15,000 Karen hill people have been forced to flee their homes since last year by the Burma Army’s most brutal offensive since 1997. Their villages have been burnt and they have been shot, raped and tortured.
The survivors fled, but Burmese army patrols have orders to hunt them down.
This group spent weeks fleeing across some of the toughest terrain on earth to reach a malarial wilderness on the banks of the Salween river, tenuously held by guerrillas from the Karen National Union. They hope that in an emergency they can escape across the fast-flowing river into Thailand in two boats kept on the river’s sandbanks.
A cross-party group of British MPs called on the Government last week to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the refugees and to seek a binding UN resolution demanding that the Burmese Government stop the violence.
The Burmese offensive began when the country’s increasingly paranoid military regime quixotically relocated north to a new capital at Pyinmana and moved to eliminate nearby Karen villages.
The brutal methods that the Army has employed have become frighteningly familiar to Burma’s ethnic hill peoples during more than five decades of conflict; men are killed, women raped, homes burnt. Survivors are enslaved or escape into the forest.
Helen Hto, 47, told The Times that she ran from Saw Tay Der village on February 7 when the dreaded Tatmadaw, the Burmese army, arrived.
She said: “The Government says we are in a black area where Karen fighters are operating, so anybody can be killed. Four families have made it here to this camp. I don’t know what happened to the rest.
“Soldiers killed at least one of my neighbours – Saw Tat Tut Tu. They cut off his hands and feet and he then bled to death. He had five children but I don’t know what has happened to them.
“The village has been burnt down many times before but usually everybody escaped. This time they caught us by surprise. I heard that two other men were later killed when they were foraging for food in the forest.” She spent nearly a month dodging army patrols with five of her children aged between 7 and 18.
She said: “It was bad when we had to cross roads. You feared running into soldiers.”
Like nearly all the refugees, Mrs Hto had never seen a foreigner before. Only the oldest could remember the British soldiers who fought the Japanese during the Second World War when the Karen were one of Britain’s staunchest allies. In 1949 Karen separatists launched a rebellion against the Burmese Government that has now lasted for more than 50 years.
Boe Relley, 68, first had to flee with his parents from Japanese troops and their ethnic Burmese allies. A wiry man with a mouthful of rotten teeth, one good eye and a nervous giggle, Mr Relley says that he has fled almost every year since, this time running through the jungle with his grandchildren.
