Word: shan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Burma share a centuries-old enmity, and a porous, ill-defined border. Even in recent years there have been clashes between the Thai army and its Burmese and Wa counterparts, usually over drug smuggling. Today, Bangkok is pursuing a policy of closer ties with Rangoon. Besides sending back the Shan, the Thai authorities have cracked down on illegal Burmese workers, and moved Burmese exiles living in Thailand to overcrowded border refugee camps. Thai officials say better relations with the pariah regime will not only help solve cross-border problems, such as the trafficking of narcotics, but also encourage democratic change...
...ASEAN in mid-2006. The purge of Prime Minister and intelligence chief Khin Nyunt last October on corruption charges has caused hairline cracks to appear in a seemingly monolithic military, and the cease-fires he brokered with more than a dozen ethnic rebel organizations could crumble. Last month the Shan State National Army announced it was joining forces with the S.S.A., the first time in a decade that a group that had signed a cease-fire had broken with the junta...
...Getting to the S.S.A.'s headquarters involves a four-hour trek through fields of maize and forests of dripping bamboo, led by Shan guides who stop only to flick leeches from their boots. They sneak past Thai army border posts in darkness while thunder booms off the mountains, then begin the long final ascent of the cloud-raked ridge to which the S.S.A. headquarters clings. More than 2,000 people live here, mostly in bamboo shacks with thatched roofs. A tenth of Loi Tai Leng's population are soldiers at arms, claims the S.S.A., while the rest are dependents...
...Some of the children watched Burmese soldiers kill their parents," says Hku Hseng Lu, a fragile beauty with an indomitable air on which her young charges depend. Others died as porters, like Nang Nang's parents, or simply perished from disease. Medical treatment is either primitive or nonexistent in Shan state, which is also hardest-hit by the country's unchecked AIDS epidemic. Chris Beyrer, a leading AIDS expert at Johns Hopkins University, estimates that a staggering 9% of Shan men are HIV positive. "This is among the highest rates reported in Asia," he notes...
...Thai army has given the school and orphanage until the end of June to move. The other displaced Shan families are already building new homes on a denuded hillside, which is nearer to fortified enemy positions. "I'm very scared because now we're closer to the fighting," says Nang La, 40. "But where else can we go?" Armed with a hoe and a machete, she and her husband, Ka Ling, 38, are leveling a patch of earth on which to build their third house, mostly from materials salvaged from their second, which they dismantled when they had to leave...