While the world watches the crackdown on urban protesters, the country's minority groups are being wiped out on the eastern border. The secret weapon: malaria.

On assignment for Men's Health, Adam Skolnick spent 2 months on both sides of the Thai-Burma border interviewing doctors, medics, and survivors of military attacks on ethnic minorities. He found that the government's most insidious weapon is malaria. And it will not do anything to stop it.

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EI HTU HTA CAMP, Karen State, Burma -- This beautiful land hides a hideous reality.

Filtered sunlight splashes through the teak forest, illuminating a network of stilted bamboo-hut subdivisions scattered with thin, scavenging chickens and packs of children dressed in rags. It is a desperate place. The sour tinge of rotting rubbish and raw sewage blows downwind through the jungle village.

Welcome to Ei Htu Hta (ee-tu-ta), a camp for displaced people in Karen State in eastern Burma, or Myanmar, as military rulers renamed the country 19 years ago. These "Internally Displaced People" camps are administered by the local people known as the Karen.The nearly 4,000 people who live here were run off their land by the notorious government, a.k.a. the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), beginning in spring 2006. The world's attention is understandably on cities where thousands of protesters were beaten, arrested, or killed. But in remote eastern Burma, along the Thai border, a virtually unseen genocide is taking place.

Human Rights Watch and the Karen Human Rights Group have documented the genocide for a decade. I have read numerous first-hand accounts of the atrocities and, in four illegal trips across the border, interviewed dozens of survivors. Typically, government troops invade villages, seize and slaughter livestock, destroy rice stores, poison wells, plant landmines in the rice fields, torch homes, and send villagers scattering into the night. Young girls are often raped, village leaders are summarily executed, and others are interned in relocation camps. According to the Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), at least 3,077 villages have been destroyed in eastern Burma over the last 10 years, displacing at least half a million people.

If you are shocked by the willingness of SPDC troops to beat monks to death in Rangoon's streets and fire upon peaceful protestors, then imagine eastern Burma, where the SPDC are far more than brutal thugs. In Burma's remote ethnic provinces, they are genocidal. The most recent atrocities have taken place in the Taungoo District in northeast Karen State. Saw Peter, the chief administrator of Ei Htu Hta, calls it "the worst offensive since 1997." It started in 2006 and intensified last spring.

On my second trip inside the country I met a 48-year old man whose village was torched four times. When he returned after hiding in the jungle for days, he found a note. "It said, 'If we see you Karen, we will kill you all,'" he told me through a translator. "They don't want another generation," he said.

On another visit to a displacement camp, a hysterical 6-year-old girl jumped into her aunt's arms, hyperventilating. "Her father was murdered by the SPDC," said her aunt. "They took him and two others and killed them in front of our whole village." Bullets, landmines and fire do the most visible damage. But that's not what has been killing the Karen people in large numbers.

In the unforgiving jungles of eastern Burma, malaria is the most serious threat. Four years ago, 46 percent of all deaths in Karen state were malaria related.