THAILAND-MYANMAR BORDER - The Shan State Army has been fighting for more than 50 years. Their battle, both victories and losses, no longer make the news.

Their struggle against the hard-line military dictatorship of Myanmar is committed,­ but the border of Thailand and Myanmar is hardly a strategically significant area for the West. So the long, guerrilla conflict continues out of the spotlight of the world.

Shan State Army warlord Colonel Yawd Serk.

Every day men, women and children are forced from their homes by the fighting. The SSA claims 10,000 have been displaced in recent months.

When I got a call from the assistant to their commander, on a crackling phone from the distant jungles of Myanmar, it was clear they had a message that they wanted to get out.

We traveled to a remote and secret rendezvous promising not to reveal where Colonel Yawd Serk was planning to brief us.

I wasn't sure what to expect,­ but we found a slightly comical scene at the end of a rough dirt track in the middle of the steaming, lush jungle. The warlord of the Shan State Army was waiting patiently besides two dirty white plastic chairs with a presentation of photos and information carefully displayed on pieces of cardboard, nailed to two teak trees.

He was quiet, patient and exuding a polite, earnest concern for his people and their untold plight. But what he told me was anything but amusing.

He spoke about raped women, destroyed villages, massacres, forced labor and summary executions. A litany of abuse that has gone on for decades without the kind of moral indignation that features in other trouble spots around the world.

It¹s perhaps partly because the SSA and the other ethnic groups that make up the patchwork of fiefdoms along the Thai-Myanmar border have in the past funded their armies through drug production. In the 1970s and 80s, the golden triangle was an infamous opium production centre.

Now the SSA tells me it's turned its back on drug production, even giving us footage of its soldiers ambushing drug dealers and raiding methamphetamine factories.

It wants to focus world attention on the ethnic cleansing it claims is going on every day. Yawd Serk says next year's planned elections in Myanmar are meaningless, a crude attempt by the junta to improve their image and reduce the considerable international pressure on the regime.

The resounding message from my half hour chat with this softly spoken warlord was simple: our fight goes on, irrespective of elections.

I left him as I found him ­ a camouflaged figure, who's devoted his life to a war that few know about, that could easily be waged for another 50 years far from the gaze of the world's media.

We shook hands and he disappeared back to the jungles where he's fought for most of his life.