The ordeal that thousands of ethnic Karen people suffer due to the longest lasting armed conflict in the world between the Burmese military and the Karen people was featured in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on 12 September 2011. Illustrated through one boy, the newspaper draws attention to the war that seldom makes headlines anywhere than in neighbouring Thailand.
On the Thai side of the border, a string of refugee villages absorb the stream of refugees coming over to Thailand when the army goes on the offensive – only to be pushed back when the army retreats. The war has gone on ever since the British handed their former colony to the Burmese after the second world war although they had previously promised the Karen an independent state for helping to combat the Japanese.
