Sitting inside an open-air shack along Thailand's porous border with Myanmar, Koko Chit couldn't believe that he was still alive. Desperate for money, he had left his wife and three children in July and travelled back to northern Myanmar to scavenge for jade at Hpakant's notorious mines.

The work was deadly, but it was the civil war that almost killed him.

"There's no security there. When you go to work, there's fighting," says Chit, 31, who didn't give his real name because he feared for his life. "The State Administration Council (Myanmar's military) conscripts workers. They fire their guns to threaten people for no reason. And the resistance forces fire back."

Caught between soldiers and an array of ethnic and civilian militias, Chit is one of 3.3 million people in Myanmar who have

See Full Page