12,000 Karen refugees flee from fighting in Myawaddy (ျမဝတီတိုက္ပြဲေၾကာင့္ ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၂၀၀၀ ခန္႕ထြက္ေျပး)

UPDATE:
Thai District Authorities have said approximately 12,000 refugees have fled across the border.

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Eyewitnesses report over 15,000 Karen refugees fleeing from violent clashes in the border town of Myawaddy into Thailand. Refugees reported that they had heard that Myawaddy would soon be burned; others received orders to leave within the hour. The DKBA and the SPDC began fighting the day after the elections. Reports also indicate dozens of Karen villagers injured and hospitalized, with approximately 6 civilian deaths, from two sources (unconfirmed). The UN has confirmed 1000 refugees have crossed the border.

အၾကမ္းဖက္ ပစ္ခတ္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ဒုကၡသည္ေပါင္း ခန္႕မွန္းေျခ ၁၂၀၀၀ ဝန္းက်င္ နယ္စစ္ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ ထြက္ေျပးလာခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ထိုင္းေဒသ အာဏာပို္င္မ်ားမွဆိုသည္။

မ်က္ျမင္သက္ေသမ်ား၏ ေျပာျပခ်က္မ်ားအရ ျမ၀တီ အၾကမ္းဖက္ပစ္ခတ္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၅၀၀၀ ခန္႕ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံဘက္သို႕ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္လာခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားက ျမဝတီကို မၾကာခင္မီးရႈိ႕ေတာ့မည္ဟု ၾကားေၾကာင္း၊ အခ်ဳိ႕မွာလည္း မိမိတို႕ကို တစ္နာရီအတြင္း ျမိဳ႕တြင္းမွထြက္ခြာရန္ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ဆိုသည္။ အစီရင္ခံမႈမ်ားအရ ဒါဇင္ႏွင့္ခ်ီေသာ ကရင္ရြာသားမ်ား ထိခိုက္ဒဏ္ရာရမႈမ်ားရွိကာ၊ ေဆးရံုသို႕တင္ပို႕ခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း ခန္႕မွန္းေျခ အနည္းဆံုး ၆ဦးခန္႕ ေသဆံုးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္ (အတည္ျပဳႏိုင္မႈမရွိေသး)။ ကုလသမၼကမွ ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၀၀၀ နယ္စပ္ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ ထြက္ေျပးလာေၾကာင္း အတည္ျပဳ ေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။

BACKGROUND (credit: DVB)

A group of defectors from the pro-junta Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) have taken control of a major border crossing and military and police posts in eastern Burma.

The head of the faction, Brig-Gen Na Kham Mwe, told DVB that the group had seized the Thai-Burma Friendship Bridge entrance in Karen state’s Myawaddy, as well as police, army and intelligence offices.

“They [Burmese army] announced that they will shoot people who don’t vote [in today’s elections]. So people called on us to seize the town,” he said.

“In order to win votes in the elections, [the junta] is bullying and forcing people to vote. But the people want to boycott [the vote], so the soldiers are holding them at gunpoint and our troops had to intervene and take sides with the people.”

The breakaway DKBA group, comprised of former junta loyalists who refused to transform into a Border Guard Force, has some 1000 troops in Myawaddy, Na Kham Mwe said.

The DKBA now “has control of every location” and police and Burmese troops have withdrawn from the town, he added. Myawaddy acts as a major crossing point for trade between Thailand and Burma, but the checkpoint has been closed since July following a dispute between the two governments.

http://www.dvb.no/elections/dkba-renegades-seize-border-town/12665