1,800,000 Burmese.
With 200,000 being refugees currently in camps, 1.5 million being internally displaced, and roughly100,000 illegal migrants, this is the raw estimate that is made of the number of people who have had to flee their homes for the following reasons:
a. You are born an ethnicity that the government is targeting, poorly masked as attempt to halt “opposition for the security of the country.”
b. You are rumored to be in association with an ethnicity the government is targeting.
c. You have either participated (or expressed desire to) in any activity or discussion that involved political or social change.
d. You are associated (whether it be family, friend, or neighbor) with someone who has or is rumored to be politically involved.
e. You have refused to either provide extreme taxation—with no social benefits—or forced labor imposed upon your community by the government.

3,000+ villages.
This is the under-estimated number of villages that have been raided and destroyed beyond livelihood in a campaign to squash anything on the scale of armed opposition to expression of discontent.

99,000 patients.
The number the Mae Tao Clinic cares for, treating everything from rape injuries, lacerations, gun-shot wounds, and burns from villages attacks to landmine injuries to the diseases that accompany life in the jungle as internally displace people.

18 years.
The amount of time that has passed since the open-fire killing spree by the SPDC on the democracy demonstrators on August 8th, 1988. In this timeframe, an number of lives that have been lost, incidents of rights stripped, and citizens that have deliberately gone without the basic means for living are beyond calculation Yet, 18 years has passed and the hopes for democracy and an end to the ethnic attacks in Burma still cannot be crushed.

I’m normally not a numbers-person; but, it is hard to get these out of my head.

With so much discussion on the actual activity that BBP partners with, there’s simply not enough space to discuss in detail the human rights disaster that is Burma. But, I did want to provide a few of the numerous sources that does-- so, please visit the following sites if you are interested in learning more:
Amnesty International Country Report: Myanmar/Burma
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/myanmar_burma/document.do?id=ar&yr=2006
Myanmar (Burma) - Leaving Home
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/myanmar_burma/document.do?id=ENGASA160232005
Human Rights Watch: Asia: Burma
http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=burma
Karen Human Rights Group 2006 Report
http://www.khrg.org/khrg2006/index.html

Take care,
Danielle

PS:
21 years.
This is the time I would face in inhumane prison conditions, had I written this entry to you as a Burmese citizen. Seven for unregistered use of internet, seven for discussing the Burmese political situation, seven for creating a medium intended for “distribution.”