While Burma's ruling military fails its people suffering after a devastating cyclone, it is committing crimes against humanity in a brutal campaign against ethnic Karen civilians, an international human rights group said Wednesday.
The London-based Amnesty International said the Karen in eastern Burma are being killed, tortured and forced to work for the military while their villages are burned and their crops destroyed.
An estimated 147,800 Karen people remain refugees in their own land because the junta forcibly relocated them from their villages to camps, in efforts to stamp out a decades-old rebellion by a segment of the Karen community seeking autonomy from the central government.
"These violations constitute crimes against humanity ... involving a widespread and systematic violation of international human rights and humanitarian law," an Amnesty report said.
The government has repeatedly denied similar allegations in the past, saying it was only engaged in security operations in Karen State aimed at wiping out "terrorists."
Amnesty said the continuing campaign is the fourth turbulent episode in the country's recent history.
The others include a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests last September, a recent referendum on a constitution designed to perpetuate military rule and "a humanitarian and human rights disaster in the wake of Cyclone Nargis," it said.
The international community has sharply criticized the junta for barring foreign aid workers from areas worst hit by the cyclone and itself providing little help to survivors.
Amnesty said that unlike in earlier campaigns against the Karen National Union, the key rebel group, the current one that began 2 1/2 years ago has "civilians as the primary targets."
The group said it documented cases of more than 25 Karen civilians killed by the military in Karen State in the two years since July 2005.
One farmer working in his field in a township KNU controlled was beaten and shot by soldiers after he told them the location of a rebel camp. Another farmer told of a civilian detainee being stabbed in the chest and then dropped down a mountain slope "just like an animal."
"If they found us they would kill us, because for the Burmese army the Karen and the Karen National Union are one," a 35-year-old villager in Thandaung township told Amnesty.
Arbitrary arrests, sudden disappearances, forced labor and portering for the military continue to be widespread, Amnesty said. A woman from Tantabin township said she and other porters were forced to act as human minesweepers, and that some stepped on mines.
To purportedly separate civilians from the armed rebels, villagers have been forcibly relocated from their homes into camps where men, women and children are also forced to work for the military. Often the villages they left behind were torched.
