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.

BANGKOK, Thailand - It was one of the more bizarre episodes in her extraordinary life, but Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi must have thought she was seeing things when she saw a wet-bedraggled American emerging exhausted onto her veranda.

Myanmar citizens living in Japan hold portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi as they shout slogans during a rally.

John Yettaw had swum across Inya Lake – a picturesque body of water that the military Junta thought was also part of an impenetrable ring of defences around Aung San Suu Kyi’s mansion. Her crumbling, but grand colonial-era house has has been her prison cell for much of the last two decades, and everyone assumed the lake it borders was also heavily patrolled and monitored. Not so apparently.

But now Yettaw, a reportedly troubled former Vietnam War veteran, has inadvertently given the military authorities just the excuse they need to further isolate and marginalise Aung San Suu Kyi -– who after so many years, still remains a potent icon for democratic struggle in Myanmar.

The trial is patently ridiculous. Aung San Suu Kyi has been effectively put on trial for having her house broken into. Her lawyers will try and argue that she knew nothing about the American planned to visit her (how could she, she is in utter isolation with no phone, email and few visitors) and moreover she tried in vain to encourage him to leave.

In fact, they will try and turn the charges on their head, arguing instead it is the State who has failed in it duty to protect her. It’s a neat idea, but it’s almost certain to fail.

The regime was looking for an excuse to yet again extend her house arrest, which was due to expire at the end of the month. In its warped way, it likes to do things by the book –- the problem is the generals wrote the book and continue to twist the penal code to their own advantage. John Yettaw’s little night-time swim provides the perfect reason to extend her house-arrest or worse still, actually jail her in the notorious and sinisterly named Insein Prison.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers say the prosecution plans to call 22 witnesses ... 21 of them government employees. Diplomatic sources think the junta's tactic might be to drag the legal proceedings out for several weeks or even months until the media has lost interest and then quietly extend her detention well beyond next year’s planned elections.

The elections will be the result of an interminable process run by the junta, to supposedly re-introduce democracy in Myanmar. It’s involved years of discussions, and a wholesale rewriting of the constitution.

What the generals don’t like to highlight is that their so called “Roadmap to Democracy” also included a clause which forbids citizens who’ve had children with foreigners, from running for office.

That conveniently means Aung San Suu Kyi will be ineligible to run, because she was married to a British man Michael Aris and had two sons with him. But analysts say there is fear among the Junta, led by Senior General Than Shwe, that even under house arrest Aung San Suu Kyi still poses a threat to their attempt to hold a sham vote and proclaim democracy, while continuing to run the country with Stalinist-style brutality.

Just the mere act of holding a ballot may remind many of the 1990 elections that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won by a landslide and that the military then ignored. That could then provide the trigger for more demonstrations, similar to the Saffron Revolution in 2007 which saw Buddhist monks being mercilessly beaten and arrested, after they tried to lead a people’s uprising against the regime.

So perhaps Than Shwe is acting early – getting Suu Kyi even more securely locked up, and they hope, discredited by a trial, even if the charges are spurious at best.

Then perhaps the plan is to go ahead and ask the people to vote for them next year. The only problem is the press isn’t going to forget about Aung San Suu Kyi and neither is the international community. The EU is also talking about extending sanctions against the regime and the trial, if it achieves anything, will only further entrench the contempt with which most Burmese regard the military, which has ruled them with such brutality since 1962.

So what will be the result of Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial?

Well I’d wager it’ll be a continuation of the status quo. The military will carry on ruling Myanmar, regardless of the result of next year’s election result. Aung San Suu Kyi will continue to be locked up at home or in prison, depending on whether she’s found innocent or guilty.

The sanctions will continue to fail to bring the regime to its knees, regardless of whether they are extended or maintained and the people of Myanmar will continue to suffer, regardless of whether we all lose interest or remain transfixed in horrified indignation.

BANGKOK, Thailand - It's one of those ironies of journalism, that we strive to be impartial and independent in our reporting, to stay aloft, watching, counting, calibrating, but not acting or interfering.

Rohingya refugees get treated in Idi, Indonesia.

As journalists, we strive to be impartial and independent in our reporting, to stay aloft, watching, counting, calibrating, but not acting or interfering.

Yet on occasion, by simply telling people what's happening in this complex, grey-shaded world of ours, sometimes we journalists do change the status quo. The very act of drawing attention to an issue does sometimes have an impact.

We decided to call my special report into the Rohingya "A Forgotten People," but of course after all the reporting we've done on the issue, it feels like now the Rohingya are front and center of the political stage here and hardly forgotten at all.

Here in Thailand, the issue is going to be one of the main discussion points at next week's ASEAN meeting – a summit of south-east Asian countries.

The Thai prime minister has stressed the need for regional cooperation – and ASEAN will certainly be the forum in which that talk of cooperation could be galvanised into action.

Since the pictures of Thai soldiers towing out boatloads of Rohingya and cutting them adrift on the high seas were broadcast on CNN, the practice appears to have stopped.
Drawing attention to this story has changed it.

That's not to say that we haven't been meticulous in our attempts to show both sides of the story – to highlight that some Thai people feel the Rohingya are economic migrants looking for work and that the Thai government feels unable to accommodate them during this fierce economic downturn.

But we have also focused on what the Rohingya go through in trying to escape terrible persecution and privation in Myanmar, formerly Burma. The reports of horrendous abuse, statelessness, land-confiscation and torture give context as to why these people are willing to gamble with their lives, take to rickety unseaworthy boats and cross the ocean.

Their allegations of mistreatment in Thailand at the hands of the military has prompted a government inquiry. The prime minister himself is closely watching its findings and has promised to bring those responsible to account.

I'm not sure any of this would have happened if it weren't for a few journalists doggedly pursuing this story. The South China Morning Post first reported the story. We followed up with more testimonies and other news organizations such as Reuters, the BBC and The Associated Press have also devoted extensive coverage to the issue.

In making "A Forgotten People" we have never felt we were on a mission to discredit this government or show Thailand in a bad light. We simply wanted to find out the truth and tell the story from every angle. That very vital act of disclosure is why I got into this profession in the first place.

And I'm proud to say this story is one of the rare occasions where simply reporting what we found has made a difference.