Waubonsee Community College

Season of fear, internally displaced people in Burma call for international action, produced by Burma Issues in co-operation with WITNESS

bur

videorecording

Season of fear

electronic resource

893212857

produced by Burma Issues in co-operation with WITNESS

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Human rights cases online video

internally displaced people in Burma call for international action

Season of Fear was filmed in October/November 2005 in communities of internally displaced people in northern Karen State, Burma who had fled the Burma military offensive that swept through the area. Troops burned villages and food stores, and tortured and killed villagers. This offensive has only escalated since the video was filmed, with up to 20,000 soldiers sweeping across swathes of eastern Burma. Between February and the end of November 2006 over 27,000 people have been freshly displaced from their homes and 5000 have fled to refugee camps to Thailand, following a series of offensives by the Burma military. Week by week the numbers grow, and there is an urgent need for international action by the UN Security Council to address the situation. Burma has the worst crisis of internal displacement in Asia. There are already over 500,000 other people who were already internally displaced in eastern Burma, on the run from the brutal military of Burmese leader Than Shwe, or living in forced relocation sites. In the past decade over 3000 villages have been destroyed or relocated in eastern Burma. These ethnic minority civilians have suffered through thirty years of a brutal military campaign to assert absolute control over ethnic minority border areas, and to systematically destroy the capacity of rural civilians to live independently. Attacks on these rural civilians continue on a daily basis

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