Word: tais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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 or other refugees. Ignore the parade ground of packed mud, over which a Shan flag defiantly flies, and Loi Tai Leng could be just another hardscrabble hilltop community: there is a small clinic, a Buddhist...
...That includes the Shan stronghold at Loi Tai Leng, where almost every resident is a victim of the Burmese military or a witness to its savagery. Wi Ling, 34, stands outside his newly rebuilt shack on one good leg and one bad. Two years ago he was living with his family near Taunggyi, the Shan state capital, when Burmese soldiers dragooned him and 14 other villagers as porters. Three were shot dead, while Wi Ling was forced at gunpoint into a suspected minefield. A month after he was conscripted, he stepped on a mine, which blew most of his left...
...Local people carried him to Loi Tai Leng, where he was nursed back to health and given a rudimentary prosthetic stump. Later, his wife and three children?then aged 9, 7 and 1?trekked for more than two months through malarial jungles to join him. Four women from his home village were raped by Burmese soldiers, claims Wi Ling?credibly, since the systematic rape of women and girls by the junta's troops has been well documented by international rights groups, and many rape victims have sought refuge at Loi Tai Leng. "I'll return to my village," says...
...Tiya eventually escaped to the comparative safety of Loi Tai Leng. His wife is in prison, so his two children are cared for by grandparents. He hasn't seen them for six years, and unless they make the perilous trek to Loi Tai Leng, he never will. He cannot safely return to his own village. "The Burmese soldiers will recognize me. I'll be killed for sure." Now remarried, he has two more children, and his new wife is heavily pregnant with a third...