concerns over a lack of humanitarian aid in regions where predominantly Christian Karens and other groups are fleeing a military offensive.
The ICRC said it was forced to close in the regions of Mon state and Shan state. Thierry Ribaux, who is the deputy head of the Red Cross mission in Burma, which is also called Myanmar, said his group had "dramatically scaled down" operations.
"[But] we remain committed to a mandate, we remain determined to stay in Yangon (Rangoon) but now we need a very clear positive signal from the authorities – otherwise we will have to decide on further reductions," the Voice Of America (VOA) network quoted him as saying.
It came shortly after British Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, returned last week from the Thailand-Burma border, where he accompanied Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) to hear the testimonies of Karen Internally Displaced People (IDPs) just inside the Burma border, BosNewsLife learned.
RULING JUNTA
Mitchell also met representatives of what his delegation called "Burma’s ruling junta" in Rangoon, the first time they have met with a senior British politician in a decade, CSW said in a statement. He reportedly told U Kyaw Thu, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister and a former brigadier general, that the regime running Burma is "wicked and illegitimate".
Over 25,000 civilians, many of them Christian Karens, were forced to flee their villages in the past year, following "the worst" military crackdown in a decade, CSW and other observers have
said. "Since 1996, over 3,000 villages in eastern Burma have been destroyed [and] there are over one million IDPs in eastern Burma, and over 150,000 refugees in Thailand," CSW said in a statement seen by BosNewsLife.
The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), an outgunned group of mainly ‘born-again’ Christians, has been fighting the Burmese forces to defend their villages and dreams of an autonomous Karen state, a BosNewsLife-team discovered previously in Burma.
However KNLA fighters have been unable to protect civilians. Mitchell’s delegation said it heard stories of several "of the almost 3,000 Karen people who have fled to this camp" on the Salween River in Burma near the Thai border, in the past year.
SON BEHEADED
One woman told how her son was beheaded. Another described how her husband was tortured, tied to a tree, his eyes gouged out and then drowned. A third recalled how her husband was killed – his eyes torn out, his ears and lips cut off, investigators said.
Faith-based human rights and advocacy groups have said that the Burmese government sees
Christianity as a threat to its powerbase and therefore targets especially groups such as the Karen.
Mitchell said in a statement he had encountered a "harrowing place, full of tales of torture and death." He said, "People have been driven from their villages by rampaging soldiers and forced to trek for weeks through the jungle to reach this place of relative sanctuary. Burma’s military regime is carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Karen people, and is committing crimes against humanity which the world should no longer ignore."
CSW’s Advocacy Officer for South Asia, Benedict Rogers, also traveled on to the Mon people, the first time CSW visited them. He said he heard evidence of "the continuing use of forced labor and land confiscation, despite a ceasefire between the main armed resistance, the New Mon State Party (NMSP), and Burma’s military regime since 1995."
CSW has conducted many fact-finding visits to the Karen and Karenni over almost two decades, and has made several visits to the Shan, Chin and Kachin in recent years. (With BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos and Agnes R. Bos).
