"The following accounts were given in interviews with people from the Irrawaddy Delta region southwest of Rangoon. The area is fertile farmland with a population which is half Karen and half Burman. Out of sight of the rest of the world and with no easy escape for the people who live there, it has seen some of the SLORC?s worst human rights abuses, particularly after a failed attempt by the Karen National Union to start an armed Karen uprising there in 1991. The events of late 1991, now known in the area as the ‘Bogalay Crisis?, led to a retaliation by SLORC in which thousands of Karen villagers, elders and clerics were imprisoned, tried en masse and sentenced to several years in prison, disenfranchised or executed. SLORC declared the entire region a ‘black area?, meaning combat units and tactics and summary military executions, torture and detention are practiced there with complete impunity. (SLORC divides the map into ‘white?, meaning fully SLORC-controlled; ‘brown?, meaning resistance forces operate in the area; and ‘black?, meaning the area is viewed as being resistance-controlled.) Even now, though there has been no armed resistance whatsoever since 1991, parts of the area are still treated as ‘black?. Now the region suffers from extensive forced labour on SLORC road-building projects and tourism-related projects such as Bassein Airport and the Nga Saw beach project, as well as draconian crop confiscation and land confiscation schemes. As one of the farmers in this report testifies, hundreds of farmers in Nyaung Done Township were arrested, detained, and lost their land in May 1996 simply because they couldn?t hand over a rice quota under a new SLORC dry-season paddy scheme..."