Hamilton Walters views the people he has done humanitarian work with as living life with one foot in the grave, he said.

Walters, a graduate student studying with the Center for Burmese Studies, has worked with Karen refugees on the Thailand-Myanmar border from 1996 to 2003.

The Karen are an ethnic minority group in Myanmar, a nation governed by a military dictatorship. Walters said that out of an estimated population of six million in Myanmar, 100,000 to 200,000 Karens are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who have been driven from their homes.

Walters first became aware of the plight of the Karen while teaching English as a second language in China. After seeing an interview with Karen guerillas on the BBC news, he went to a refugee camp on the Thai border during his vacation from teaching in China.

“They are civilians who are having to flee Burmese controlled areas because of fear of persecution,” Walters said. “They have to live their lives constantly on the run.”

Walters said the abuses occurring on a mass scale include rape, summary execution, torture, forced labor, forced relocation, forced conscription of young boys into the army and seizure of property without compensation.

The Karen people in the refugee camps were open about what they had suffered, Walters said.

“What I saw happening was wrong, and I felt like fighting against it in some kind of way. It’s difficult to walk away from,” he said.

Walters said he walked into a refugee camp and started working as a teacher. He has returned five times, working with the Karen and as a human rights activist for six to eight months at a time. His humanitarian work has consisted of traveling in the jungle between IDP camps with Karen guerillas, finding people in need and documenting the lives of the Karen people and the persecution they have undergone.

Walters said his goal was to target people who were not receiving aid, as well as groups that no one had known existed in the hopes of bringing aid from relief agencies.

“It is an insult to injury when you are living in those conditions and then suffering in obscurity,” he said.

In regard to the documenting of the lives and the pains of the Karen people, Walters said he thinks the people deserve a record of their abuses.

Walters said he has submitted reports to international human rights organizations and said the reports sometimes have brought protection, provisions like clothing and food and other aid. He said he is able to continue his activism from home by spreading awareness through his reports.

Walters said he fears the Karen IDPs have reached a point where they don’t feel as if they are human anymore because they have no control over their destiny and have lost their dignity.

“They believe they are powerless and that what happens to them does not matter because they are worthless,” he said.

Of his work for the Karen people, Walters said, “This is a form of resistance and expression, my own form of resistance and expression.”