State of Terror, a report launched today by the Karen Women's Organization, provides graphic evidence of the widespread terror tactics being employed by the military regime's troops against women across Burma's Karen State.

As the atrocities continue, the KWO appeals for concerted international pressure on the regime to bring about an immediate nationwide ceasefire and withdrawal of Burmese Army troops from the ethnic states.

"We deeply regret the veto by China and Russia and South Africa’s vote against the UN Security Council Resolution on Burma last month," said KWO Secretary Naw Zipporah Sein. "It is equivalent to endorsing the regime’s terror campaign in Karen State. They are giving us a death sentence."

The report documents over 4,000 cases of abuse, including rape, murder, torture and forced labour, mainly over the past few years, in over 190 villages by troops from over 40 Burmese Army battalions.

Repeated incidents of gang-rape in 2006 reveal that the patterns of systematic sexual violence exposed by the KWO in their 2004 report Shattering Silences are still continuing.

Harrowing testimony in the report describes women seeing their children killed before their eyes, women used as human minesweepers, and pregnant women suffering miscarriages while carrying heavy loads for the army.

Many of the abuses took place during the ongoing military offensives by the regime in eastern Burma, which have displaced over 25,000 villagers during 2006.

Blooming Night Zan, who collected information for the report emphasized that the military offensive was still going on. “It was heart-breaking to hear the personal tragedies from the hundreds of people I interviewed. It is unbearable to know this hell still going on right now, even as people are doing their best to survive. The situation is past critical. The international community must act now to stop it.”

BANGKOK, Thailand - Myanmar’s military is subjecting Karen women to brutal rapes, torture, murder and forced labor for the army as part of its ongoing offensive against the ethnic minority group, according to a report released Monday.

The report by the activist Karen Women’s Organization cites in often gruesome detail the cases of 959 women and girls in Karen State, from 1981 until 2006. Thousands of other lesser cases of abuse involving women are also noted.

Similar allegations, denied by Myanmar’s ruling junta, have been made in recent years including a report of widespread sexual assaults against women of the Shan ethnic group which sparked an international outcry.

Rape has been and continues to be used as a method of torture to intimidate and humiliate the civilian population, particularly in the ethnic states. Women and children are subjected to forced labor and are displaced from their homes,’ says the State of Terror’ report.

The authors are members of an exiles’ organization working along the Thai-Myanmar border.

Myanmar’s Ministry of Defence did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the report, women were frequently gang raped, sometimes killed afterward, and in every case the assailants _ both soldiers and officers _ escaped punishment.

They went to her farm and all four of them raped her in her hut. Since there were four of them she couldn’t defend herself,’ said one case history, that of 20-year-old Naw Moo. After raping her, they killed her by shooting into her vagina. No action was taken.’

Thirty-eight-year-old Naw May was brutally raped by soldiers of the 101 Infantry Battalion, who then killed her and cut off her ears to get her earrings, the report said.

Some of the assaults are directed against families believed to be supporting rebels of the Karen National Union who have for decades been fighting for autonomy from the central government. A major offensive against the insurgents began in late 2005 and is continuing.

The Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the main aid agency caring for tens of thousands of refugees along the Thai-Myanmar frontier, estimates that in 2006 alone the violence forced 82,000 people to leave their homes.

Since 1996, more than 3,000 villages have been destroyed or abandoned in eastern Myanmar and more than 1 million people displaced, according to its most recent report. Major uprooting and abuses have also occurred in other ethnic minority areas such as Shan State.

Defenceless women are often assaulted for the pleasure of the troops. Naw Htwee Kha, 17, was shot with a 9-millimeter pistol by a drunken Lt. Col. Aung Kyaw Soe at her village of Meh Ka Dee after she refused to sleep with him, the report said.

Large numbers of Karen women _ some of them pregnant or carrying their newborn babies _ are also forced to work as porters and laborers for the Myanmar army, which has been expanding its camps and other installations in Karen State, located in eastern Myanmar.

If we were tired and could not continue, the soldiers kicked us in the back. They struck us with their guns all the time so that we could not count how many times,’ said Naw Mu Thoo, a 33-year-old woman who suffered three miscarriages after being forced to carry heavy loads.

The report called on Myanmar’s government to stop all forms of sexual violence and other abuses and urged the UN Security Council to pass a binding resolution which demands the junta implement a nationwide cease-fire and withdraw its troops from ethnic minority areas.

But similar calls in the past have led to little or no action.

There isn’t a government in Asia or Europe that could honestly claim they have done all they could to prevent these abuses,’ Mark Farmaner, of The Burma Campaign UK lobbying group, in an e-mail interview. Every day more women are raped, forced into slave labour, tortured and killed, yet the United Nations and most governments have no sense of urgency that something needs to be done.’