Thais cancel plan to repatriate Kar

[RANGOONP@xxxxxxx]

Thais cancel plan to repatriate Karen refugees

By Sutin Wannabovorn 

BANGKOK, Feb 22 (Reuters) - The Thai army said on Sunday it had cancelled next
week's repatriation of 12,000 Karen refugees to Myanmar after the refugees
agreed to relocate to new camps deeper inside Thailand. 

Last week, the army attempted to move the refugees, followers and sympathisers
of the rebel Karen Nation Union (KNU) from the Salween National Park on the
bank of the Salween river that marks the border between western Thailand and
eastern Myanmar. 

Thailand has begun to dismantle scattered camps and relocate refugees into a
few major well-established centres. It hopes to send them back once what it
calls peace and stability are established in the Karen state. 

When the refugees protested against the move away from the border, the Thai
army contacted Myanmar frontier authorities and arranged for them to be
repatriated instead, an army spokesman told Reuters. 

The refugees would have been repatriated in the week beginning on March 1. 

``The Karen Refugees Committee (KRC), NGOs and the refugees themselves have
now agreed to have these displaced persons relocated to the Mae Lah Ma Luang
camp,'' the spokesman, based in northwestern Mae Hong Son province, said by
telephone. 

``So when they agreed to move out from the national park we cancelled the plan
to send them back,'' he added. 

A 10-day operation to relocate the Karen from their current location at
Thailand's Mae Sarieng district in Mae Hong Son province would begin from
Monday, he said. 

``The new camp is located about 8 km (5 miles) deeper inside Thailand,'' he
added. 

The refugees had fled from the Myanmar side of the Salween River to Thailand
in 1995 after Myanmar troops overran Manerplaw, the jungle headquarters of the
KNU. 

The KNU, formed in 1947, has been fighting for autonomy for the Karen state
since 1949, right after Myanmar (Burma) gained independence from Britain in
1948. 

It is one of the world's oldest guerrilla groups still operating. 

The splintered KNU's membership has now been reduced to about 10,000
guerrillas from 25,000 in its heyday, but the smaller group continues to wage
low-level guerrilla warfare against Myanmar troops. 

The batch of refugees spared repatriation are part of a group of 100,000 Karen
refugees who fled fighting in Myanmar since 1984 to live in many camps along
the Thai border with Myanmar. 

Some 70,000 of them live in sprawling camps in northwestern Tak province while
another 30,000 are in Mae Hong Son. ^REUTERS@