Burma

Burma (Myanmar) is a Southeast Asian country of approximately forty-seven million people consisting of eight major ethnic nationalities. Burma has been ruled by a brutal and repressive military dictatorship for more than five decades. This has resulted in widespread, systemic violations of basic human rights and high levels of political and economic insecurity. The country has been ravaged by military confrontations since World War II, with distinct conflicts between the military junta and the pro-democracy movement the National League for Democracy (NLD); between the military junta and the minority ethnic nationalities; and between various minority ethnic groups. The military’s Burmanization campaign has attempted to eradicate minority ethnic culture through forced marriage and pregnancy, prohibition of teaching minority ethnic languages and history, and state violence and systematic murder against minority peoples.

Armed with a spy camera, Lea Rekow secretly crossed the border of Thailand into Burma to document the startling resilience of the Burmese people who live under the rule of this corrupt ruling junta. Surviving inside unchartered jungle territory laced with landmines, on the run to survive the government's use of forced labor, torture, rape, and other heinous crimes perpetrated on the various ethnic minorities in the South East region of Burma, Rekow has collected the accounts of the Internally Displaced Peoples and refugees who are rarely be able to tell their stories to the outside world. This is her story of going inside.