Human Rights violations by SLORC and DKBA in Karen areas "...Everyone in the world who is interested in Burma, and even many people who aren't, are now talking about the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. But for most of the 40 million rural villagers in Burma, that is all very far away and there are more immediate and important issues to think about - like survival until next week. In Burman areas villagers are starving under the weight of SLORC demands for extortion money. Shan villagers are under increasingly heavy attack by a huge SLORC military force which is burning their villages and taking them as porters (with the tacit consent of the international community, which seems to consider all men, women and children in Shan State villages to be heroin-trafficking fiends). SLORC has broken its ceasefire with the Karenni National Progressive Party by taking thousands of villagers as porters and sending several Battalions to invade areas ceded to the Karenni in the ceasefire deal just 2 months ago. Several battalions of SLORC troops have resumed their attacks on Karen areas in Mergui-Tavoy District's Kaser Doh Township, forcing entire villages to flee. Further north in Papun District, SLORC troops have been marauding villages together with DKBA (Democratic Karen Buddhist Army) units, looting, burning, and terrorizing villagers into relocation camps. Refugees spill across the border into Thailand, several thousand from Karenni, several thousand more try from Shan State but are blocked by Thai weaponry, and close to a thousand from Papun District, saying that there are a few thousand more trying to come, hiding and starving in the jungle, blockaded by walls of SLORC troops. In Rangoon, one woman walks out of her house into the street. Which is the true reality of Burma?.."