The dispossessed

Leaning on a worn wooden crutch, Saw Pa Pwe, 48, a short, muscular man, hobbles on one leg from his brother's exposed platform to the raised hut he now calls home. The makeshift bamboo and plastic shelter sits a metre from the ground on the low point of a wet, sloping hill where 1,300 displaced villagers are starting from scratch in the Ei Tu Hta refugee camp.

His wife sits silently in the stifling mid-morning heat in the rolling hills of eastern Myanmar - she hasn't spoken since the trauma of a landmine maimed her farmer husband as he walked to his fields in 2002.

Saw Pa Pwe is now one of the tens of thousands of displaced villagers who spend their life on the run, choosing to live a nomadic life in the jungle rather than under the repressive Myanmar military regime, which is intent on subjugating opposition groups such as those from the Karen ethnic minority of eastern Myanmar.

'Living under their control means forced labour,' said Saw Pa Pwe's sister-in-law, Naw Pi Htoo, 44, who has lost three of her seven children to disease in the malaria-infested hills. 'They use the people to clear landmines and women and children to carry military supplies.'

Their plight and that of millions of other Myanmese is set to gain greater international attention after the UN Security Council last Friday moved to put Myanmar on its permanent agenda - despite sharp objections from Russia and China, the latter being the largest trading partner of Myanmese authorities, constituting a US$1 billion bilateral trade relationship.

The 10-4 Security Council vote was welcomed by US authorities lobbying for international pressure against the military dictatorship. US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, highlighted drug smuggling, a refugee crisis and human rights abuses in Myanmar as ongoing threats to the region.

Myanmar was once one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia, endowed with fertile land, precious teak wood and gems, and blessed with natural gas. Since 1996, the US and European Union have had economic sanctions on the regime, citing the house arrest of democracy advocate and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for 10 of the past 17 years.

Even foreign ministers from the normally deferential regional economic body, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, have issued harsh rebukes against the regime's foot-dragging on promised reforms. In July, the foreign ministers of Malaysia and Indonesia criticised the regime for being slow on reforms.

But this is a regime notoriously unresponsive to outside pressure and, public rhetoric notwithstanding, signs point to it becoming more reclusive, not less. Earlier this year, it suddenly moved its capital upcountry, to a construction site in a jungle town of Pyinmana, 320km north of Yangon, the largest city and former capital. Government employees were given no warning and were expected to relocate with their families immediately.

'It's bizarre,' said a senior western diplomat in Yangon. 'It wasn't designed to be a workable city. It was designed to isolate. This is a country that's trying to close itself in.

'The regime is impervious to outside influence - whether positive or negative - they don't care what the world thinks of them,' said the diplomat.

The government monitors telephone calls, censors websites such as Hotmail and any sites related to Myanmar democracy activism, and asks internet cafe providers to take periodic 'snapshots' of their customers' monitors. Mobile phones are reserved for those in the military or with close ties, or those who can afford the US$3,000 it takes to purchase a new line.

The UN vote last week comes as human rights advocates based along the border in Thailand say the current military offensive under way in eastern Myanmar, against the Karen ethnic minority, is the worst they've seen in 10 years, displacing about 18,000 people since the end of last year, according to the Thai Burma Border Consortium, an advocacy group based in Bangkok.

'This vote is a major step towards getting the UN to accept its responsibility to act on Burma,' said Yvette Mahon, director of the London-based charity Burma Campaign UK. 'This is a case of the US and UK acting on principle, while China and Russia are putting trade and profit before the interests of ordinary Burmese people.'

'The military's strategy for the last 10 years has been to bring the entire civilian population under direct control for forced labour and monitoring,' said Kevin Heppner with the Karen Human Rights Group, another advocacy group based in Thailand. 'And everyone who lives beyond that immediate control has to be relocated or killed. For years they've been trying to do this, but the villagers don't want to live under military control. So they evade the troops, leaving the villages before they arrive. They live with very little or no relief or aid.'

In the past 10 years, the military has often withdrawn or greatly scaled back its offensives during the rainy season, enabling a respite for the refugees to tend to their crops and rebuild whatever was destroyed during the previous season. This year, the army has been ordered to continue fighting in what many suspect is a final bid to gain complete control over the Karen region.

Fighting can be difficult in the mountains of eastern Myanmar, bordering Thailand. In many cases the military has set up camp in the temporary villages, preventing the residents from returning.

The vast majority of the Ei Tu Hta refugee camp's inhabitants are from the Karen ethnic minority, long accustomed to living free of foreign rule. Zaw Thein Win, 43, and his family come from the country's dominant Myanmese tribe. He was imprisoned for three years in 2002 when the authorities accused him of collaborating with the Karen National Union (KNU), a resistance group. It's a claim he denies. He was beaten mercilessly by a group of soldiers when caught in his village in the east and lost his left eye; once imprisoned the guards tattooed statements of Myanmese military conquest on his arms and chest.

'The Burmese soldiers should be attacking their enemy - the KNU soldiers,' he said. 'But instead they attack the villagers.'

Fourteen new families arrived in Ei Tu Hta on August 24 after a 12-day trek, surviving on an occasional handout of boiled rice and by foraging for bamboo shoots and vegetables.

Saw Pa Pwe says that since Thailand closed its border camps in March to refugees, there is a 'gentleman's agreement' between the Thai and Myanmar authorities allowing them to congregate in camps near the border, with Thai-based aid groups allowed to deliver limited amounts of food and medicine to the camps.

Bringing a rare statistical basis to the health crisis in eastern Myanmar, a report released this month by the Back Pack Health Worker Team, a mostly Myanmese cross-border medical relief group based in Thailand, painted a picture of a humanitarian crisis as bad as any in an African war zone.

Based on several surveys since 2000, it found that, at any given time, 12 per cent of the population is infected with drug-resistant malaria, the most common cause of death, and that more than 15 per cent of children are malnourished. HIV is also a problem. Importantly, the report links high rates of death and disease to life under military rule, where forced labour and displacements are common.

'Sometimes, people don't want to talk about politics, but we're health-care providers, so must look at the big picture,' said last year's Nobel Peace Prize nominee Cynthia Maung, who chairs the Back Pack Health Worker Team. She also runs the Mae Tao clinic along the border, which gave medical aid to 45,000 individuals last year, the majority of them Myanmese refugees. Dr Maung works with teams of backpackers that carry medical supplies through military-controlled areas. She estimates they have access to about 150,000 of the half a million who are displaced within eastern Myanmar.

Voravit Suwanvanichkij, a physician and researcher with the Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University, who worked with Dr Maung on the report, said the medical crisis was vast.

'The lack of rule of law, collapse of public health, and extensive corruption have resulted in widespread availability of medicines without control, which often means medications are adulterated or taken inappropriately,' he said. 'The end result of which is, for entities such as malaria and TB, increasing drug resistance rates, already documented along the Thai-Burma border. Similar things may also be occurring for HIV.'

India and China have come in for sharp criticism over links to the Myanmar regime, with the countries poised to benefit from natural gas fields being developed off Myanmar's west coast. The fields are being opened by South Korea's Daewoo corporation, which could earn the regime between US$12 billion and US$17 billion over the next 20 years, according to figures released in June by Thai-based NGO Shwe Gas Movement. So far, advocacy groups from Thailand, the US, South Korea and India have condemned the venture as providing direct support for a regime with an atrocious human rights record.

As the world's second largest energy consumer, China this year signed a memorandum of understanding with Myanmar for the sale of large off-shore natural gas imports, worth an estimated US$37 billion to US$52 billion.

'The only way to conduct business in Burma is by gaining the trust and favour of the junta, which is a notoriously difficult business partner,' said Matthew Smith, with Earth Rights International, an environmental and human rights organisation.

Aid groups point to the experience of the Yadana pipeline, a gas supply line built in the 1990s across a short span of eastern Myanmar, where thousands of villagers were forcibly displaced, raped and murdered. Lawsuits ensued, resulting in out-of-court settlements in the US and France over the past few years, indicating that the western businesses invested in the project - the French company Total and the American Unocal (now controlled by Chevron) - were guilty of complicity as the abuses took place.

'Why do human rights abuses happen in Burma?' asked David Mathieson, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch in Thailand. 'You just allow business from three countries to finance repression in Burma for another 20 years. Where do you think that the money is going to go? It's not going to education or health programmes - it's going to the military to build a better command centre to repress the population as the regime sells off the wealth of the nation.'