More than 200 Burmese civilians fleeing Burmese army operations have arrived at a refugee camp near the Thai border after a gruelling17-day march and a further 3,000 are on their way, the New York-based Human Rights Watch reported on Wednesday.

The refugees are enduring hunger and severe hardship to reach the safety of Ei Tu Hta camp on the Burmese side of the Salween River, according to the organization’s Asia director, Brad Adams. “The Burmese military attacks villages, uses civilians for forced labor and steals their food and money, forcing people to flee,” he said.

The military was acting in the ethnic region “like an occupying army, using the population as expendable pawns,” Adams said. The military operations in the region prevented villagers from “eking out even the meanest existence.”

The regime’s Information Minister, Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan, has described the current military offensive in Karen State as “clearing-up operations in areas where hardcore KNU [Karen National Union] members are believed to be hiding.”

Reports from the region, however, say regime troops are willfully destroying villages, blockading whole communities and commandeering rice fields. HRW says at least 45 civilians have so far been killed and 27,000 forced to flee. In the latest military action, seven Mon inhabitants of Nyaunglebin township, in Pegu Division, died and 1,450 fled their homes.

In Htantapin township, also in Pegu division, troops had ordered villagers to transport military supplies in their bullock carts. Each of more than 20 villages in the township had been ordered to make up to 25 bullock carts available. Two villagers had been killed in the military action.

In the past two months, said KNU General-Secretary Mahn Sha, more than 700 farms had been destroyed in Htantapin township, 500 in Thandaung township and more than 280 in the Papun areas. Troops of the 66th division were blockading villages in Thandaung township, preventing inhabitants from leaving to buy food.

A Free Burma Rangers relief team reported that troops were patrolling rice fields and threatening to shoot villagers who wanted to harvest their crop. In Taungoo district, the FBR reported, people from 12 villages had been forced to act as human mine-sweepers by walking ahead of advancing soldiers.

“Rice is now becoming harder to buy, education in many places is on hold and it is very dangerous to move anywhere near where the Burma army is operating,” a FBR report said.

The UN’s special envoy to Burma, Under Secretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari told reporters in New York earlier this week that during his recent talks in Naypyidaw with Burmese regime leaders he had urged a “cessation of hostilities against the ethnic minorities.” Political observers believe Gambari returned from his four-day visit to Burma with empty hands.