Burma’s Minorities Fear USDP Election Victory
During nearly seven decades the villages of the Karen have been torched, their men summarily executed and their women raped as the ethnic minority battled Burma’s military regime in the world’s longest-running insurgency. Their homeland has been called the “hidden Darfur,” where some 350,000 people have been driven from their homes into the jungles or refugee camps in neighboring Thailand. Now, many of the survivors are pinning their hopes on a historic election on 8 November, pitting the military-backed ruling party against one helmed by pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and numerous ethnic parties. They fear victory by the military’s United Solidarity and Development Party would plunge Karen state and its 1.5 million people back into a hellhole.
