Update

BANGKOK, February 23, 2012 (AFP) - A huge fire swept through a crowded Thai border camp home to thousands of refugees from neighbouring Myanmar on Thursday, destroying hundreds of homes, the authorities said.

The blaze started at about midday (0500 GMT) and quickly spread around the Umpiem Mai refugee camp, Poth Ruwaranan, head of Phop Phra district in western Tak province, told AFP by telephone.

He said there were no reports of casualties, but Sally Thompson of the Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), which provides food and shelter at the border camps, said she had heard of children suffering burns.

"It's still raging. It's still not under control," she told AFP. "Patients in the clinic have been evacuated and are staying in the food warehouse."

Thompson said more than 1,000 houses, three mosques and two nursery schools were destroyed -- "about a third of the camp" -- while Poth put the figure at 300 homes.

"We believe that the fire started when they cooked. As the houses are made of bamboo and leaves, it spread too fast, especially with the hot and dry weather and strong wind," the district chief said.

The camp residents "cannot leave the camp as the regulations do not allow them, so those who lost their houses must stay with their relatives or friends inside the camp," he added.

According to the TBBC, a group of international non-governmental organisations operating along the border, as of December the Umpiem Mai camp held more than 17,000 displaced people from Myanmar, also known as Burma.

The 10 camps along the border held a total of about 136,000 people, who first began arriving in the 1980s. Many of the refugees have fled conflict zones in ethnic areas of Myanmar.

About 88,000 camp residents have been registered with the UN as refugees, but while an ongoing resettlement programme has allowed tens of thousands to move to third countries, they have been replaced by new arrivals trickling across the Moei river.

Many others live illegally outside the camps, where families live cheek-by-jowl in simple bamboo-and-thatch dwellings.

After a new quasi-civilian government replaced the long-ruling junta in Myanmar last year, Thailand announced that it wanted to shut the border camps when it was safe to do so, raising concern among their residents.

Many of the refugees are from Myanmar's eastern Karen state, where a major rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU) signed a ceasefire deal with the new regime in January after decades of civil war.

But deep distrust about the authorities' sincerity lingers in ethnic conflict zones, and the KNU has described the peace deal as "fragile".

jf-rob/dr/jah