USCB Press Release:

From July 6-13th, 2004 Ani DiFranco, along with fellow musician/artist Damien Rice, traveled to Thailand and Burma where they visited refugee camps and met with dissidents struggling for freedom and democracy in Burma.
Burma is ruled by one of the world's most brutal military regimes, which has locked up 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. The regime uses torture, murder, and a modern form of slavery to maintain its iron grip on power.
Over one million Burmese have fled the country as refugees. The refugee camp that Ani visited holds at least 35,000 refugees. Ani met with orphans of parents killed by the regime and spoke with refugees who have recently fled from the military regime.
Outside of the refugee camp, she met with political prisoners and other activists who recently escaped the grips of the military regime. The Burmese activists asked Ani to help tell the world that there must be increased pressure on the military regime.
Ani also took the unusual step of traveling inside Burma into an area of the country not controlled by the military regime, where she met with internally displaced men, women, and children who fled from Burma's regime. In this region, between 600,000 and 1,000,000 Burmese people, including the Karen ethnic group, have fled after the Burmese military regime carried out a brutal military campaign which forced them from their homes. The situation for these internally displaced people is one of the world's most severe and unacknowledged humanitarian crises. Living on the run in the jungles, most receive absolutely no help from the international community.
Ani is the first American musician to visit the refugee camps and meet with pro-democracy activists.
The trip was organized by the United States Campaign for Burma, a membership-based organization working to promote freedom, democracy, and human rights in Burma. Ani has donated a track to a benefit CD organized by USCB that will raise awareness of Aung San Suu Kyi and the struggle for freedom in Burma.