Military Dominance
To seize and control ethnic groups’ ancestral lands rich in natural resources, for example, the Burmese military has burned an estimated 3,500 villages in Eastern Burma alone, forcing 470,000 non-Burmese ethnics to flee the country since 1996, according to a 2009 report by the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, a nongovernmental organization based in the United Kingdom. The military often mines the land so villagers can’t return, effectively destroying their culture because rice farming is central to their way of life, the report explains. The military has forced more than 800,000 others to work in so-called “relocation” camps, which offer atrocious living conditions and also serve to destabilize ethnic populations, as the consortium has extensively documented.