Daniel Pedersen

The Courier Mail
Daniel Pedersen
Mae Sot
Sporadic heavy shelling by the Burma Army to the west, north and south of Mae Sot, on the Thai-Burma border has tens of thousands of people on the run, displaced from their homes.
Intense fighting broke out between ethnic armies and the Burma Army on November 7, the day of an election that entrenched the military junta in the governing process.
The ongoing mortar attacks close to Mae Sot mark the latest onslaught against ethnic Karen soldiers who have been fighting Burma’s ruling military regime since 1949.
But casualties among ethnic fighters have been light and civilians are suffering most.
Since the ruling military junta’s November 7 poll, widely regarded as a sham by the West and by the Burmese people themselves, there has been fighting somewhere within 100km of the Thai border town of Mae Sot every day.
Fighting has also spread into Shan State in the north and refugees are spilling into Thailand from Three Pagodas Pass to Fang, north of Mae Hong Son, a stretch of border more than 1,000km.
People are also slipping over the Chinese border.
The Burma Army generally takes high ground as far as 5km away from its target and fires its opening mortar salvoes at about dawn.
On election day, ethnic Karen fighters seized strategic targets in the town of Myawaddy, across the Moei River and 4km from Mae Sot.
On that day 20,000 people spilled across the river into Thailand, with local Thais handing out food and water to the refugees bought with money from their own pockets.
Since then the fighting has moved about 40km south to the villages of Phallu and Wah Lay, and to the north of Mae La refugee camp, about 70km from Mae Sot.
The southern fighting has produced another 3,000 refugees, in the north several hundred have fled but more are expected to arrive within days.
The Thai Army has been “encouraging” people to return as soon as fighting subsides, but often the refugees find themselves back in Thailand within 24 hours.
But it is getting harder for them to convince Thai authorities to allow them to cross.
Exact numbers of people who have returned safely are difficult to ascertain, even for agencies charged with helping refugees, because after they have been evicted from Thailand once, people on the run mostly cross the border out of sight of Thai authorities so they are not sent back again.
An aid worker on the border said there was no doubt everyone would have preferred to stay at home had there been no fighting, but left because they feared for their lives.
Those with homes close to the border have an easier choice than those deep inside Burma.
Critically, it is rice harvest time and often people with farms close to the border are sneaking back into Burma during the day to harvest as much rice as possible then lugging it back to their Thai dislocation sites before nightfall.
There are no certainties for refugees fleeing fighting deep in the jungle.
Do they lose their crops intended to sustain them for the next 12 months, or do they possibly lose their lives staying nearby in the hope the fighting will pass them by and they can harvest their food?
Across Burma all of the ethnic armies are readying themselves for battle.
The Shan State Army, thought to be about 10,000 strong, is taking on new recruits and the Burma Army has responded by moving 50 truckloads of weapons into their area.
Troops and truckloads of equipment are also being moved into a position near the border with China to the north of the largest and most-heavily armed ethnic army, the United Wa State Army.
Also on the China border, a Burma Army ceasefire more than 15 years old has broken down with the Kachin Independence Organisation and the KIO says it expects attacks to begin soon.
All of the ethnics groups have pledged to back each other up in the face of Burma Army offensives.
Combined they constitute an army of at least 50,000.
ENDS