Word: shan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When soldiers marched into her village in Shan state and took away her mother and father, Nang Nang was 4 years old?too young to understand that her parents had been dragooned as military porters, who are routinely worked to death or executed by their captors. But later, when the locals retrieved her parents' bodies from the forest, she was old enough to realize they were dead, and that Burmese soldiers had killed them. Nang Nang is 6 now. "She's still heartbroken," says her teacher, Hku Hseng Lu. "She cries a lot. Sometimes she gets angry and talks about...
...Today, Nang Nang lives on the rugged Thailand-Burma border in the hamlet of Loi Tai Leng, the headquarters of the Shan State Army (S.S.A.) and the refuge for hundreds of families fleeing the Burmese army's long-running campaign of terror against ethnic minorities such as the Shan. They include more than 200 orphans: Nang Nang, a shyly smiling girl in a grubby tracksuit, shares a tin-roofed dormitory with dozens of other girls who sleep on a wooden platform over a mud floor. For many, this has been home for five years, but not for much longer...
...Shan orphans are among the most vulnerable victims of policies hatched in faraway Bangkok and Rangoon. The Shan are the largest of Burma's eight main ethnic minorities, which form a third of the country's 43 million population. Many of the groups are fighting for independence from the rule of the military junta. In recent months, the Burmese army and its proxies have stepped up efforts against ethnic insurgents such as the Shan and the Karen, driving thousands of refugees into Thailand. There, they receive cold comfort. The Thai government does not grant official refugee status to the Shan...
...narrow and dishonorable, says Sunai Phasuk, a Thai academic and consultant for Human Rights Watch (HRW). "These people are not just fleeing war, but also forced labor, executions, mass relocations and systematic rape," he says. HRW accuses Thailand of "violating international law" for denying basic humanitarian assistance to the Shan. A recent report by the New York-based NGO also documents the murder, rape, enslavement and brutal displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Burmese army's long-running assault on Karen insurgents; some 650,000 people, says HRW, have been made homeless in eastern Burma alone...
...unable to get the love of a girl or how much it hurt to lose her), and the boy band disappeared before I could figure it all out. But the days accompanied by their songs, which now seem totally cheesy to me, are just as fresh as yesterday. Chi-shan Lee Taipei...