Amnesty International says witnesses tell it Burmese troops have killed and tortured rice farmers and other Shan tribespeople in suppressing an insurgency among Burma's largest ethnic minority.
Their political wing, the United People's Party, charges that some tribespeople have been forcibly converted to Islam and that Moslem settlers are encouraged to marry Buddhist girls.
Some of the insurgent groups are described as mere traffickers in opium, which is grown in great quantity in Shan State, but the tribespeople also have a long tradition of seeking cultural and political independence from the more powerful Burmans.
The Oromo Liberation Front, a loosely grouped insurgency that draws its strength from the Oromo tribespeople across western, central and southern Ethiopia, claims to have taken the town of Asosa in fighting Tuesday.
In 1987 Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, said it had received "increasing reports of arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial executions" of tribespeople in the Chittagong Hill Tracts by Bangladeshi troops.
Government officials say at least 5,000 tribespeople have fled to neighboring India in the past two weeks to escape violence they fear will break out during the election.
These strange tombs were built by local tribespeople who believed the dead souls would return to the Earth's core.
His party is the only one in India that speaks for the Harijans. He said they and and tribespeople, who also are outside the caste system, make up 25 percent of the population and the lower castes are another 50 percent.
That is added to an existing 22.5 percent quota for the lowest of the Indian social system - the untouchables and the tribespeople.
The environmentalists say nearly 170,000 people, most of them tribespeople in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, would be displaced if the Sardar Sarovar Project on the river Narmada were completed.
But the new generation have been to school and have not been taught the old ways.' However, many tribespeople say they have not been consulted about Bakun or given any project details.
The hymns of monks are silenced as terror flashes through the refugee camps filled with Chakma tribespeople on this side of the border.
Twenty-two percent already are reserved for tribespeople and outcasts, or "untouchables," who are at the very bottom of Indian society.
An additional 22 percent already are set aside for the lowest strata in the rigid hierarchy of Indian society, tribespeople and the so-called untouchables.