Refugees face uncertain future as Myanmar opens

In this photo taken April 12, 2013, a Karen girl peers out from her bamboo hut at Mae La refugee camp in Ta Song Yang district of Tak province, northern Thailand. Karen refugees are now facing a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world's largest refugee populations, some 1 million in camps and hideouts spread across five countries. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

In this photo taken April 12, 2013, two Karen brothers take a stroll at Mae La refugee camp in Ta Song Yang district of Tak province, northern Thailand. Karen refugees are now facing a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world's largest refugee populations, some 1 million in camps and hideouts spread across five countries. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

In this photo taken April 12, 2013, Naw Lawnadoo, a 20-year-old Karen refugee, speaks during an interview at Mae La refugee camp in Ta Song Yang district of Tak province, northern Thailand. Karen refugees are now facing a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world's largest refugee populations, some 1 million in camps and hideouts spread across five countries. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

In this photo taken April 12, 2013, Saw Pa Taw, left, a former Karen fighter who lost both his eyes and hands, during fighting with Myanmar soldiers talks as and son Ta Ye Thu, 13, listens during an interview at Mae La refugee camp in Ta Song Yang district of Tak province, northern Thailand. Karen refugees are now facin a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world's largest refugee populations, some 1 million in camps and hideouts spread across five countries. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

MAE LA REFUGEE CAMP, Thailand (AP) — Since the day she was born, 20-year-old Naw Lawnadoo has known almost nothing of the world beyond the fence and guard posts that hem her in with 45,000 others — ethnic minorities from Myanmar and those like her who were born and raised in the Mae La refugee camp in neighboring Thailand.

School, family, friends, shopping and churchgoing — many of the refugees are Christian — have all been confined to a valley of densely packed bamboo-and-thatch huts huddled under soaring limestone cliffs.

Now, she and other camp residents face a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world's largest refugee populations — some 1 million people in camps and hideouts spread across five countries.

For thousands like Naw Lawnadoo, it is "repatriation" to a country they have never known, where their parents suffered under a military regime that suppressed ethnic insurgencies with brutal tactics, and where ethnic tensions continue to erupt in bloodshed despite some democratic reforms. More than half the population of the camps in Thailand is under 19.

"We are prepared to go back, but we don't know what the real situation there is like," says Naw Lawnadoo of the country previously known as Burma. "We can't speak Burmese. We have no identification cards. And I don't know what kind of a job I could get."

Just when they will have to leave remains uncertain, but Thailand, which hosts many of the camps, is eager to close them.

"We're coming to the endgame," says Sally Thompson, executive director of The Border Consortium, the main agency providing aid to a string of Thailand camps, where you can find four generations living under one roof.

Some may melt into Thailand, joining the 2.5 million migrant workers from Myanmar. A few may be resettled in third countries, though the United States is ending a program under which it has taken 80 percent of the 105,000 settled so far. With shrinking options, most will likely have no choice but to return.

While camp life is hardly cosmopolitan, some of the young can meet foreigners, have access to the Internet and occasionally slip out to a nearby town, or even the shopping malls and bright lights of Bangkok, Thailand's capital. For them, the prospect of planting rice in isolated villages to which they would probably go holds little attraction.

Naw Lawnadoo for one is seemingly confused. The young woman, dressed in neat slacks and a blouse embossed with a teddy bear, has heard the stories of how her parents fled Pea Ta Ka village in Karen state as Myanmar soldiers moved in to pillage, burn houses and kill.

At one moment she says she would like to go to Australia, where her father's three sisters and mother are settled, after finishing her studies at a Baptist college in the camp.

Later, she talks about returning to her mother's village in Myanmar as a medic or Christian missionary, thinking that perhaps she could adjust to life there. "If our neighbors could live like that, we could too," she says.

She and her parents had an opportunity to go to Australia earlier, but decided against it because her maternal grandmother still lives in Myanmar. "My mother didn't want to go. She said we would be even farther from her mother than we are now, and my father gave in to her," Naw Lawnadoo says with a distinct note of regret.

"I've never ridden a train or an airplane," she says. Her longest trip and only one to a city was to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

The majority of the refugees, including Naw Lawnadoo, belong to the Karen ethnic group. Others include the Karenni and Pa-o. Many of the older ones, who fled fighting in their homelands, hope to return one day but say the time is not yet right.

Myanmar remains a nightmare for Mu Pro, a 42-year-old woman. She still dreams about running, running, trying to flee the grasp of her pursuers who finally catch and torture her.

"No more Burma army. No more torture. No more killing. No more suffering," she says. "I don't want to go home. Since I was young, I have always been running away from Burmese soldiers."

Her aging father, like many in the war-torn regions, was forced to be a porter for the army and shot when he could not carry his load. When her husband, also shanghaied, never returned she fled her mountain village. She sent two of her sons to Thailand, while she and three younger children became internal refugees — like some half a million others in eastern Myanmar — for 11 years. Always on the move, they hired themselves out to feed pigs and plant rice.

When they finally arrived in Mae La, the deadline set by Thailand for refugees to register for possible resettlement to third countries had passed, though her two sons left for Australia with a friend a year ago.

"I don't trust the SPDC and I fear armed conflict will erupt again," she says, still using the acronym for the now defunct military junta, some of whose former leaders continue to wield influence. The government has signed a series of fragile cease-fires with many of the insurgent groups, but some have already frayed, with clashes having recently erupted in Shan state and the Kachin still fighting the government. Soldiers are likely to remain in Karen state for the foreseeable future.

The Karen Refugees Committee, a leading refugee organization, recently said the reforms inMyanmar "signal a ray of hope for many refugees to be able to return to their homeland," but laid down 10 conditions for repatriation ranging from a solid nationwide cease-fire to clearing the vast mine fields along the border.

Thompson cites a host of problems in Karen state and other ethnic regions, ranging from rehabilitating communities shattered by conflict to mounting land grabs that have turned the homes and fields of farmers into plantations, factories and dam sites. Some refugees who go back to check their old properties say they no longer exist, and they have no documents to reclaim them.

But she also says that "suddenly something will be triggered and they're off so we have to be prepared for that moment."

Thompson, who has worked with border refugees for more than two decades, says forced displacement of villagers has dropped dramatically and there are fewer military checkpoints, allowing people to move around more freely. Refugees crossing into Thailand have slowed to a trickle.

To prepare for an eventual return, aid groups are boosting refugee skills, from building sturdy houses to creating business plans for small enterprises to monitoring cease-fire and human rights violations. This, along with the uncertain timetable for repatriation, has also stoked unease.

"We have shifted our thinking from taking care of refugees to their return," she says. "There is hope now for the first time in decades."

Prison for ex-dictator soothes Guatemala

The relatives of people who were killed in the country's civil embrace after the judge's guilty verdict for Guatemala's former dictator Jose Efrain Rios Montt after his trial for genocide in Guatemala City, Friday, May 10, 2013. The Guatemalan court convicted Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 80 years in prison. The 86-year-old former general is the first former Latin American leader ever found guilty of such a charge. The war between the government and leftist rebels cost more than 200,000 lives and ended in peace accords in 1996. (AP Photo/Luis Soto)

Ixil Indian women and men whose family members were killed in the country's civil war celebrate the judge's guilty verdict for Guatemala's former dictator Jose Efrain Rios Montt after his genocide trial in Guatemala City, Friday, May 10, 2013. The Guatemalan court convicted Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 80 years in prison. The 86-year-old former general is the first former Latin American leader ever found guilty of such a charge. The war between the government and leftist rebels cost more than 200,000 lives and ended in peace accords in 1996. (AP Photo/Luis Soto)

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt spent his first full day as a convict Saturday in a 16-by-13 foot cell with a small bed, bathroom and window, after receiving a landmark 80-year sentence for genocide and crime against humanity.

It was a steep fall for the now-86-year-old former strongman who ruled Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983, during the height of a brutal civil war that killed 200,000 people, mainly Indians.

A tribunal on Friday ruled that Rios Montt knew about the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Maya in Guatemala's western highlands and didn't stop it, handing down the first genocide conviction ever given to a Latin American strongman in his own country.

The former general was transferred to prison later that evening.

"He is not comfortable, but as a good soldier he is used to this," said Rios Montt's lawyer, Francisco Palomo, who is expected to seek to have the ex-general transferred to a hospital or to have his sentence be served under house arrest.

Matamoros prison, where Rios Montt is now behind bars, is located on a military base in Guatemala City where the former general spent time as a young cadet. It was built to house high-profile inmates who could be unsafe in normal prisons.

Authorities there say he has the right to spend two hours outside his cell each day, but guarded by officers. He has the right to three daily meals, though family members can also bring him food.

Most in Guatemala feel the sentence prison represents a triumph after a long struggle in a country still recovering from a 36-year-civil war that ended with peace accords in 1996.

"It's very valuable to us, totally refreshing. We deserved it," said human rights activist Helen Mack.

Genocidal massacres occurred before and after Rios Montt, "but the bulk of the killing took place under Rios Montt," said Victoria Sanford an anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York who has spent about 50 months in Guatemala and participated in excavations in at least eight massacre sites.

The long sentence was a message, activists said, that the previously untouchable and brutal military structures need to be held accountable. Guatemala's maximum sentence is 50 years making the 80 years symbolic.

The three-judge panel also ordered prosecutors to continue investigating to bring all those responsible for abuses to justice. Until now, only low or middle-level officials have been prosecuted for war atrocities.

On Monday, the same court will meet to discuss the compensation for the victims.

Indians and activists applauded and some wept after hearing Friday's ruling. But some are wondering if Rios Montt can successfully appeal.

Adding to their worries is the fact that Guatemala's current president, Otto Perez Molina, still refuses to acknowledge that genocide took place.

"It is painful to hear that some are in a state of denial, but admitting it is the first step for the country to heal," Mack said. "It is not over."

Perez Molina's name was brought up during the trial when a former soldier accused him of ordering executions while serving in the military in the Rios Montt regime.

He called the testimony "lies."

In a late Friday interview, Perez Molina told CNN's Spanish-language channel that there was no genocide, despite the ruling being seen as the country's first official acknowledgement that one took place.

"When I said that Guatemala has seen no genocide, I repeat it now after this ruling," Perez Molina said. "Today's ruling is not final ... the decision will not be final until the moment they run out of appeals."

Defense lawyer Francisco Palomo vowed to appeal the ruling, saying it was unjust.

Rios Montt has insisted he never knew of or ordered massacres while in power.

He began his career in the Guatemalan army in 1946 as a cadet. He seized power in March of 1982 through a military coup, and held it for 18 months until he was overthrown.

Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, a Guatemala businessman and son of a military officer, called the trial biased.

"We have found out the Ixiles' side of the story, not the whole truth," he said. "We want to rise up to show the world that this decision is not hailed by everyone in Guatemala."

In Rios Montt's trial, dozens of Ixil Mayas stood up and testified of atrocities, such as mass rapes and killing of children by the military.

Perez Molina said the army was not at fault.

"It was an armed conflict that was internal. The army did not cause this armed confrontation. The army did not declare war on the places where the Ixiles lived. The guerrilla did it," he said.

Military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based. A U.N. truth commission said both state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the killings and human rights violations that it documented.

Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu says Guatemala's moment strengthens the world's powerless. Ixil Mayas, she said, can teach other oppressed groups around the world to stand by their rights and not to rest until tyrants are punished by law.

"This could mean that everyone, all indigenous people all over the planet who have been treated with hatred, who have been branded as liars, could hopefully start living in harmony," Menchu said.

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Associated Press writer Olga R. Rodriguez and John Rice contributed to this report from Mexico City.

Syrian rebels, government fight over key highways

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian rebels on Saturday cut a newly built bypass road linking the capital Damascuswith the northern city of Aleppo, an activist group said, while state media reported that government troops have secured a strategic highway between the capital and the southern city of Daraa.

The reported fighting came as an activist group said U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who left the country last year, met with a rebel commander at a border crossing point with Turkey.

The Aleppo Media Center said Ford met on Thursday with Col. Abdul-Jabbar al-Akidi, head of Aleppo province's rebel military council at the Bab al-Salama border crossing point. It posted a picture and a video of the two men standing on a road just a few meters (yards) outside a fence that appeared to be the border between Turkey and Syria.

The AMC quoted al-Akidi as calling on the U.S. to lift an arms embargo imposed on rebels.

The U.S. so far has balked at sending weapons to the rebels, fearing the arms could end up in the hands of al-Qaida-linked groups or other extremists in the opposition ranks.

Ford was in Turkey to get the opposition to commit to a proposal presented last year at an international conference in Geneva that involves talks with the regime of President Bashar Assad.

The visit follows a decision by Russia and the U.S. this week to convene an international conference to bring representatives of the Assad regime and the opposition to the negotiating table. Such talks would aim at setting up a transitional government. No date has been set.

The plan, similar to the one set out last year in Geneva, calls for talks on a transitional government and an open-ended cease-fire.

Such efforts have run aground in the past, but U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said there was a chance it might work this time.

"If the political willpower is there and shared, and if people are prepared to compromise reasonably, there is a path forward to be able to have a peaceful solution in Syria," he said late Friday.

The regime and the Syrian opposition have welcomed the idea, but with conditions. The opposition says talks can only begin once Assad and his aides have left. The regime says it will keep fighting the rebels, without saying at which stage it would be willing to halt its fire.

In another border crossing on the Turkish side, two car bombs killed 43 people and wounded 140 others in the town of Reyhanli. Turkish officials blamed the attack on a group linked to Syria, and one called the neighboring country's intelligence service and military "the usual suspects."

If a Syrian hand is confirmed in the attacks, it would be by far the biggest death toll in Turkey related to its neighbor's civil war. Syria shares a more than 500-mile (800-kilometer) border with Turkey, which has been a crucial supporter of the Syrian rebel cause.

In Israel, meanwhile, an official confirmed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will soon meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, an Assad ally.

Israel has expressed concern over what Israeli officials say is an imminent sale of advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Syria. Israel is worried that advanced Russian weapons could reach militant groups hostile to the Jewish state, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel has asked Russia to stop supplying "game-changing" weapons to Assad. The Israeli official would not say if the weapons would be discussed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the Netanyahu-Putin meeting has not yet been announced officially.

In northern Syria, rebels took over two army posts on a desert road that serves as an alternate route into the city of Aleppo after days of fighting, said Rami-Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Britain-basedSyrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The regime built the desert road to bypass contested areas after rebels captured the town of Maaret al-Numan in October, cutting the main highway between Aleppo and Damascus.

Meanwhile, state TV said government troops were able to secure the highway linking Damascus with the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising against Assad's regime began more than two years ago.

The TV said troops killed "a large number of terrorists," the term it uses to refer to opposition fighters, in the town of Khirbet Ghazaleh south of Damascus.

The Observatory also reported clashes in the town of Qusair, near the border with Lebanon, between rebels and troops and pro-government gunmen backed by Lebanon's Hezbollah group. It said rebels attacked the village of Abel, near Qusair, and captured it after clashes left seven soldiers dead.

Lebanon's state-run news agency said five rockets fired from Syria struck near another Lebanese border town, Hermel, without causing casualties. Hermel and nearby villages have been targeted by shelling from the Syrian side.

The fighting in the town came a day after U.N. commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay expressed alarm over Qusair, which has been besieged by Syrian troops for several weeks.

On Friday, the Syrian military dropped leaflets over Qusair, urging rebel fighters to surrender, but did not set a deadline for them to do so, according to the office of the Homs governor.

A Syrian provincial official in Homs said the rebels were given 24 hours to surrender, starting 8 a.m. Saturday. He called upon residents who want to leave the city to exit by its southern entrance. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The conflict started with largely peaceful protests against Assad's regime in March 2011 but eventually turned into a civil war. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

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DNA test shows Ohio kidnap suspect fathered girl

CLEVELAND (AP) — As relatives of the Cleveland kidnapping and rape suspect recounted claims of his unnerving paranoia andviolent outbursts, DNA testing confirmed the man accused of holding three women captive for nearly a decade is the father of a 6-year-old girl who also escaped from the house.

Ariel Castro, charged with rape and kidnapping, remained jailed Friday under a suicide watch on $8 million bond while prosecutors weighed more charges, including some that might carry the death penalty. Public defender Kathleen Demetz, who said she is acting as Castro's adviser while he awaits a full-time attorney, said Friday she can't speak to his guilt or innocence and said only that she advised him not to talk to reporters.

But those who know the 52-year-old Castro are speaking up, saying he was often angry, paranoid and prone to violent outbursts against the now-dead mother of his adult children. He frequently beat her, played bizarre psychological games and locked her indoors, they said.

The stories, repeated in separate interviews with The Associated Press by members of Castro's extended family, have surprised people who knew him as a musician who played bass in several bands around Cleveland the last two decades.

Miguel Quinones, manager of a group Castro played with twice as a backup bass player about five years ago, said he had nothing bad to say about Castro based on his own experiences.

But in the interviews, some of Castro's ex-relatives said he frequently flashed his compulsions for secrecy and terrifying rage that often led him to beat his common-law wife, Grimilda Figueroa.

Figueroa left Castro years ago and died in 2012 after a long illness. Their early years together were happy, but something inside Castro snapped after the birth of their first child, they said.

Castro pushed her down the stairs, fractured her ribs, broke her nose several times, cracked a tooth and dislocated both shoulders, they said. In one incident, he shoved Figueroa into a cardboard box and closed the flaps over her head, they said. He kept her and children imprisoned, cut off from friends and family, and Figueroa couldn't even unlock her own front door, they said.

Figueroa filed domestic-violence complaints, accusing Castro of threatening many times to kill her and her daughters. She charged that he frequently abducted the children and kept them from her, even though she had full custody, with no visitation rights for Castro.

"When I go over there to visit her, and I ask her, 'Nilda, I'm here, open the door,' she's like, 'I can't. Ariel has the key,'" Figueroa's sister, Elida Caraballo, recalled.

Two of the women freed from Castro's home, including the one who gave birth to the girl, returned to relatives' houses earlier this week. The third woman, Michelle Knight, was released from a hospital Friday with a request that her privacy be respected.

"Michelle Knight is in good spirits and would like the community to know that she is extremely grateful for the outpouring of flowers and gifts," the statement said.

On Friday, Knight's grandmother, Deborah King, visited the home of one of the captives, Gina DeJesus, to meet the DeJesus family.

She said she loved and missed Knight, "and if I get to, she's going to get the biggest hug and kiss from me that she ever did have."

A police report alleged that Castro impregnated one of his captives at least five times and made her miscarry by starving her and punching her in the stomach. The report also said another one of the women, Amanda Berry, was forced to give birth in a plastic kiddie pool.

Tests by the state attorney general's office on a sample of Castro's DNA confirmed he fathered Berry's 6-year-old daughter, who was rescued from his house, the office said Friday. After her release, the girl returned home with the 27-year-old Berry. Officials also were entering the DNA profile into a national database to see if it links him to other crimes.

The three women said Castro chained them up in the basement but eventually let them live on the home's second floor. Each woman told a similar story about being abducted after accepting a ride from him.

The FBI has not recovered human remains in its search of the house, spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said Friday. Agents removed more than 200 pieces of evidence, she added, declining to say what was found.

Berry and former captive Gina DeJesus, 22, went home with relatives Wednesday.

The AP does not usually name people alleging sexual assault without their consent, but the names of the three women were widely circulated by their families, the media and law enforcement for years.

The women have begun hiring lawyers to deal with the expected large amount of donations to a charitable fund set up for their recovery. City Councilman Brian Cummins said the lawyers will become a primary point of contact for the victims as money comes in so the focus can remain on their needs and the integrity of the donation process is ensured.

The women are entitled to up to $50,000 from the state crime victim compensation fund, which covers a variety of medical, rehabilitation and transportation costs associated with their recovery, Lisa Peterson Hackley, spokeswoman for the Ohio Attorney General's Office, said Saturday.

The office also has an attorney working with people setting up charitable funds for the women and child to ensure they're created properly, Hackley said.

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