No place to go: Burmese refugees can't find a home.

• Author: Larsen, Jensine

A man from Burma's Karen ethnic group sits cross-legged on the floor of the small thatched hut he shares with eight others in the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand. His eyes look tired as he tells his story.

"When they came to my village, there was no warning," he says. "They just started shooting. We ran into the fields, but we could hear them killing and torturing our animals. They poked out the animals' eyes and let them walk around before they killed them. But the saddest thing is, one old women was not strong enough to carry her two orphaned grandchildren when we ran. She had to leave them behind. The soldiers tied them up--they were three and four years old--and threw them into the huts they had set on fire."

The man says he believes that thousands of Karen refugees are now scattered and hiding in the rainforest. "Many are sick with malaria, and food is hard to find," he says. "The people know the Burmese army is advancing, but they are afraid to cross over to Thailand--they have heard Thailand won't take them. Some have tried to cross the river but the Thai army started shooting at them. They had to go back."

Recently, Thai security forces along the border have started arbitrarily denying sanctuary to new asylum seekers from Burma.

For the refugees who have made it safely to Thailand and are now residing in the twenty camps to the north and south of Mae La, life is not good. Thai authorities often mistreat the refugees, move them around, and occasionally send them back to Burma against their will.

Almost all ethnic minorities in Burma are on the run from Burma's military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which used to be known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). In the past few years, the junta has stepped up military offensives in Burma's ethnic regions in an effort to crush longstanding armed ethnic resistance.

According to human-rights groups, at least 50,000 Burmese peasants fled their villages for neighboring countries in 1997.

Unfortunately, they're running at the wrong time. Burma's neighbors are no longer interested in taking in the refugees They want to do business with the Burmese government.

In July, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the regional economic club, accepted the Burmese government as a member. Thailand and the Burmese government are working together--along with multinational oil companies, such as the French giant Total and the U.S.-based Unocal--to extract oil and natural gas in the region. (Last spring, the Clinton Administration imposed economic sanctions on Burma, but those sanctions did not apply to existing investments such as Unocal's.)

A worker for a nongovernmental organization examines a crinkled diagram of Thailand's refugee camps. She jabs at two tiny dots on the map. "It's ridiculous how much worse they are treated. It's obvious it's because of the pipeline!" She is talking about the two Karen refugee camps in Kanchanaburi that suffer the worst conditions--Tam Hin and Don Yang, camps of 7,400 and 1,500 refugees, respectively. These camps are located in the vicinity of a billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline, the project of Total, Unocal, and Thailand's state energy company, PTT. This consortium is trying to meet Thailand's energy needs by funneling natural gas from an offshore drilling site in Burma's waters. Ultimately, Thailand will consume the gas, but the pipeline crosses territory inhabited by ethnic Karen and Mon in Burma. In order to secure the pipeline and ensure a piece of the profits, the Burmese government is keeping a tight hold on this region and using...