Yes, that's the double side of the constitution again. The double side of the constitution says you have a right to land, you have a right to own, but the other side of the constitutions says that the government has the right to take it way from you at any time for the betterment of the whole country. That's how they sort of get around this.
When they want to build a power dam, as they did up north of Myitkyina, they just said they were building the power dam. It's the fifteenth largest power dam in the world, and they just started moving out the Kachin by the thousands. The commitments and the things that they said they would do, such as giving them a new farm or new property, they never did. They just took it. Then they brought in about 10,000 migrant workers from China—I was living there at that time. So they don't even get the benefit of helping to make money by building these things. They bring in the Chinese to build the dams and to do all the hauling of the dirt and all this stuff, even though the Kachin really don't want the dam in the first place.
So you have all these things that are being built, like the pipeline and everything that's going from the bay up through the middle of Myanmar, across Shan state, again into China. All of these lands are being confiscated. I've given a map to the clerk that shows the number of regiments along that pipeline, who are going to make sure that pipeline is implemented and put in place.
Then, the third one will start. They're going to rebuild the railway from Thailand to Myanmar. We know the famous movie Bridge on the River Kwai . The railway that was built during the war is now going to be rebuilt. Again, they will take all those lands away from the Karen people.
It's well documented that they do that, but the people have no recourse. There's no justice. There's no way that you can say, “This is unjust, so now I will stand up and take it to court”, go through, and fight. There is none of that. You just lose it; it's gone. And if you complain too much, you're gone.