Word: ethnicity
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...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...
...increasingly dependent on Burma's resources, and most of the country's natural wealth - from jade and timber to hydropower and natural gas - is concentrated in the tribal regions. The planned route for a Chinese-financed project of dual natural-gas and oil pipelines, for instance, begins in an ethnically troubled part of western Burma's Arakan state and runs past the part of Shan state where fighting raged last month in Kokang. Construction of the Shwe pipeline project, the biggest ever foreign investment commitment to Burma, was supposed to begin this month, but ethnic skirmishes may imperil that schedule...
...watched the KIA academy cadets run through their drills, disturbed the easy image of a militia conscripting hungry boys in return for a fistful of rice. Armed with a university degree in international relations, Felix speaks fluent English and expresses himself eloquently on political philosophy. But as an ethnic Kachin - an ethnicity more than 1 million strong, famed for its fortitude while serving on the Allied side in World War II - Felix knows his chances of succeeding in junta-controlled Burma are as slender as the jungle vines KIA soldiers sometimes eat to survive. So he has joined other disillusioned...
...Ethnic Tinderbox Although the Burmese majority faces plenty of repression, there's no question that the junta reserves its worst brutality for ethnic groups. International human-rights organizations have documented a wide array of abuses against minorities, ranging from forced labor and army conscription to mass rape and village relocations that have displaced 500,000 people in eastern Burma alone. Complicating matters, some ethnic groups are not Buddhist in a country where the junta celebrates that faith and often persecutes those who do not. (The Kachin, Chin and many Karen, for example, are Christian.) Career trajectories for many ethnic minorities...
...recent months, the decades of persistent discrimination have spawned an unusual alliance between four armed ethnic groups: the KIA, the United Wa State Army, the Eastern Shan State Army (also known as the Mongla army) and the Kokang Army. The junta's lightning strike on the Kokang capital Laogai, which is estimated to have caused some 200 civilian casualties, left the other alliance members ill-equipped to respond immediately. But exile groups in China and Thailand are reporting that the Wa - which, with some 25,000 foot soldiers and an arsenal of heavy artillery, is the strongest of the rebel...