Word: china
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...active duty last month, when tensions reached fever pitch between Burma's ruling junta and various armed ethnic groups in the country's northern borderlands. In late August, the military regime unexpectedly overran the army of the nearby Kokang minority, sending some 30,000 refugees spilling into neighboring China. Now other ethnic militias who control various jigsaw-puzzle pieces of northeastern Burma - the Kachin, the Wa, the Eastern Shan - are reinforcing their ragged armies and playing a terrifying guessing game: Who's next on the junta's hit list? (Read "A Closer Look at Burma's Ethnic Minorities...
...were defeated presumably buoyed the junta, many of whose members gained their battlefield experience against ethnic militias. "Everyone in the West talks about democracy and [Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Aung San Suu Kyi," says Aung Kyaw Zaw, a Burmese military expert and former communist rebel living in exile in China's Yunnan province. "But the junta's biggest enemy is not her. It is the ethnics." (Read "Burma Court Finds Aung San Suu Kyi Guilty...
...renewed threat of civil war in Burma isn't just an internal problem. The country's minorities are concentrated in its borderlands, and in recent weeks, as the junta has surged into rebel territory, tens of thousands of ethnic refugees have poured into Thailand and China...
...Jungle To get to the KIA's mountainous stronghold of Laiza, I first traveled deep into China's southwestern Yunnan province, to a small trading settlement called Nabang. Even though the border town is in China, many of its residents wore Burmese longyis, or sarongs, and women's faces were painted beige with the thanaka paste used in Burma as a skin salve. Despite the occasional truck rumbling past overloaded with teak logs from Burma, Nabang felt like it was just emerging from an opium-induced...
...jeep climbed up a mountain path, I passed teenagers with the hardened gazes of men trudging toward a military-recruiting office. The number of youth who have volunteered to enlist has skyrocketed, as the drumbeat of war with Burma's junta escalates. (Read "Why Violence Erupted on the China-Burma Border...