In a burgeoning encampment here on Burma's eastern frontier, Hay Nay Tha, a 30-year-old mother of three, awakens in the darkness most nights to the sound of her children's screams.
"They keep having nightmares about our journey here," she said.
That journey, Hay recalled, began when she was four months pregnant and government soldiers torched her village and forced local farmers off their land. It ended four weeks later, after her husband died of malaria en route to this camp. She and her children arrived here this summer dehydrated and exhausted. Hay soon went into early labor with a stillborn son.
"To be honest," the copper-skinned woman said, shyly gazing down at her hands, "I am having nightmares, too."
Nightmares of all kinds are rife in this camp, where new clusters of villagers arrive almost daily, a consequence of Burma's largest military offensive against its own people in more than a decade, according to aid groups and Western diplomats. The offensive has targeted minorities such as Hay, a member of the restive Karen ethnic group, which has long maintained a measure of autonomy.
'Crimes against humanity'
According to estimates by relief groups, Burmese forces have burned down more than 200 civilian villages here in Karen state, destroyed crops and placed land mines along key jungle passages to prevent refugees from returning to their home villages. Dozens of people have died, and at least 20,000 civilians have been displaced over the past eight to 10 months.
"What is now going on in Burma are crimes against humanity," said Sunai Phasuk, head Burma consultant for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "The military government has significantly stepped up their systemic policy of violence against the ethnic Karen with this offensive. We're talking about a mounting disaster."
Burma's military leaders have historically been secretive about their actions. But observers say they are attempting to build a broad security cordon around their new capital near the inland city of Pyinmana, located only a few miles from the border of Karen state. The result has been an extraordinary use of force to clear out existing villages in the area.
Since seizing control of the country in 1988, Burma's military junta has taken a series of harsh measures to secure its grip on power, and over the past several months, it has appeared to step up its arrests of opposition figures. Win Ko, a leading member of the National League for Democracy, was arrested last month and sentenced to three years in prison after staging a petition drive to free political prisoners. The party's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, remains under house arrest.
Observers say the junta has reserved its most brutal treatment for Burma's eastern ethnic groups, including the Karenni, the Shan and the Mon, as well as the Karen, the largest minority in the region.
A fiercely independent group of approximately 3 million people, the Karen speak a separate language from most Burmese, use their own ancient writing system and have traditionally opposed the military junta. Two decades of sporadic government campaigns have already driven hundreds of thousands of Karen and other refugees into neighboring Thailand, where at least 150,000 now live in official camps and an estimated 1.5 million dwell illegally.
Although the military has long fought the Karen National Liberation Army -- a seasoned militia of about 10,000, armed with aging assault rifles -- it has mostly seemed content to stage small, periodic sieges against mountain strongholds in Karen state's northwest. These sieges have typically taken place only during Southeast Asia's dry seasons.
But this year, the government's campaign has extended through the rainy season and assumed far larger dimensions, appearing to be a final assault aimed at smashing the resistance. Over the past 10 months, sources familiar with Burmese military actions say, its forces have pushed into major Karen strongholds, building 12 new permanent army bases.
New capital, dam projects spur violence
Burmese government officials did not return phone calls seeking comment from their embassy in Washington. But observers say the campaign is almost certainly tied to a desire to extend security around the new capital, which is meant to serve as a protective jungle fortress for the junta. The Burmese have already begun moving government offices there from Rangoon, the old capital, and are finishing work on a sprawling military bunker.
Economic development appears to be another motivation for the offensive, according to observers. Burma, a country that was once one of Southeast Asia's richest nations and is now among its poorest, has sought to create revenue by signing a deal with Thailand to build multiple dams on the picturesque Salween River, which runs through Karen state. As the Burmese military attempts to exert its control over the river, it has moved into other Karen strongholds.
"The new capital and the dam projects have become an incredibly destructive pretext for the Burmese military to take control of Karen state using indiscriminate force," said Jack Dunford, executive director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), a U.S.-funded relief group based in Bangkok. "I fear this may be the beginning of the end there."
An increasing number of Karen civilians fleeing the violence have made their way here to Eituta, an emergency camp perched on a muddy hilltop overlooking Burma's border with Thailand. The rows of primitive bamboo huts are protected by a battalion of armed Karen soldiers.
With Eituta's population topping 1,500, and growing at a rate of about 10 percent a month, Karen authorities here are making plans for a second camp nearby.
Although the Thai government has adopted a more lenient policy on Burmese refugees in recent years, aid groups say the bureaucratic process of admitting new arrivals has been slowed by the sudden uptick in the number of Karen seeking asylum. With the new military offensive, the number of arrivals at the already over-crowded official Karen refugee camps in Thailand has jumped 60 percent, to almost 900 a month, according to the TBBC.
The situation has effectively created a precarious limbo for the displaced people at Eituta, located only two hours by foot from the nearest Burmese military outpost. Almost two-thirds of the refugees here are children younger than 12, many of whom are sick with malaria and dysentery.
Relief organizations have cut out a section of the dense jungle canopy to build a small medical clinic. But the wounds of many children here run deeper than any medicine can cure.
'Nowhere else to go'
On a recent day at the camp, a foreign journalist with a video camera approached an ethnic Karen man and a smiling 2-year-old girl sitting on straw mats in their hut. Suddenly, the girl began screaming uncontrollably. "She thinks it's a gun," said her father, Saw Say Nay, pointing to the video camera.
Saw, a farmer, fled here with his family of four last month. Like many displaced Karen, they had been living in hiding in the jungle since the summer, when Burmese troops began constructing a base near their village of Sayztaing Gyi, about 40 miles from the new capital.
"They were going village by village, forcing men and women into labor," he said. "Then they started burning villages, so we packed what we could and escaped into the jungle. From the trees, we saw them set our homes on fire. They burned our crops. They left us with nothing."
Thin and languid from malaria, Saw said he found out there was no going back after one villager tried to return, only to lose his leg when he stepped on a freshly laid land mine.
"We don't know what to do," he said. "My heart wants to go back, but I know it is not safe for my family. I don't know if we can go to Thailand. I don't know if they will accept us. So we are here. We have nowhere else to go."
Travis Fox of washingtonpost.com contributed to this report.
