Recently in Karen State, scores of villages have been abandoned and their inhabitants forced to flee into jungles. Some 11,000 people have fled their homes due to the onslaught bu SPDC regime troops, the Free Burma Rangers said.

About 1,500 refugees have fled across the border to Thailand, and aid officials fear others will follow in coming months to swell the more than 140,000 already in Thai refugee camps.

And Karen National Union reported that the SPDC troops ban civilian populations from traveling, trips for buying food and going to work in their agricultural fields. They are shelling the villages with heavy weapons, force the villages to relocate, burn down the villages, orchards, forests, farms and rice barns, loot properties of the villagers, including Karen bronze drums which are cultural objects of the Karen people, plant landmines, subject the people, including women, children and old people, to forced labor, arrest, torture and kill suspects, commit rape of women etc. openly without restraint.