Join our mailing list for latest news and information about Burma.

Burma Army Soldiers who Opened Fire on Villagers at eastern Shan State Gold Mine Must be Prosecuted

By Shan Farmers' Network and Shan Human Rights Foundation  •  October 14, 2015

We, the Shan Farmers’ Network and Shan Human Rights Foundation, demand the prosecution of the Burma Army troops who opened fire yesterday on villagers at a gold mine in eastern Shan State, killing one man and injuring five others.

On October 13, 2015, twenty villagers of Na Hai Long village, in Mong Len tract of Tachilek township, went up to the Loi Kham hills, to monitor whether gold mining companies had stopped their operations, as agreed between government officials, mining companies and local villagers since July 2014. Toxic waste from these gold mines has been destroying farmlands and harming the health of local villagers for several years.

After arriving at a mine operated by Loi Kham Long Company, the villagers tried to talk to the manager, but he became angry and went to fetch soldiers of Burma Army Battalion 330, who were stationed nearby. When the villagers saw about 20 armed soldiers coming, they began leaving the area, but as they were walking away, the soldiers started firing their guns at them. The villagers were terrified and ran in different directions. One 50-year-old man called loong Sarm was shot and badly injured. He was taken to Mong Phyak Hospital, where he died. Five other men – Loong Pat, Sai La, Sai Sam, Sai Noi and Loong Inn – were injured from falling down the hillside as they tried to run away. Loong Inn is being treated in Tachileik Hospital.

We are appalled at this use of firearms against villagers who were simply trying to protect their community and natural environment. We demand that the government authorities take immediate action to punish those responsible for this attack.

We also urge the authorities to effectively implement the order to the companies to stop their damaging mining operations and pay proper compensation as demanded and promised by the companies last year.

Media Contact persons:

Nang Hlar                  (+95) 094-925-7194                        Shan            Burmese

Sai Noom                   (+95) 092-508-41617                      Shan          Burmese

Sai Hor Hseng           (+66) 062-941-9600                        Shan               English

Sai Kheun Mai           (+66) 094-638-6759                        Burmese          English

Download this statement in English here.

သေဘာထားေၾကညာခ်က္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကို ဤေနရာတြင္ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ရယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။

သေဘာထားေၾကညာခ်က္ ရွမ္းဘာသာကို ဤေနရာတြင္ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ရယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Tags: Crimes against humanity, Human Rights, Human Rights Violations, Shan Farmers' Network, Shan Human Rights Foundation, Shan State

This post is in: Press Release

Related Posts
လားရွဴိးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ မိုင္းေယာ္ေဒသခံမ်ားအား သတ္ျဖတ္ခဲ့သည့္ ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္၏အၾကမ္းဖက္လုပ္ရပ္ကို ကန္႕ကြက္ရႈတ္ခ်သည့္ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္
2016 Trafficking in Persons Report – BURMA: Tier 3
TRAINED TO TORTURE: Systematic war crimes by the Burma Army in Ta’ang areas of northern Shan State (March 2011 – March 2016)
တကၠသိုလ္ေက်ာင္းသား ဂြမ္ဆိုင္းေအာင္အား၊ အစိုးရစစ္တပ္၏ တပ္သားတစ္ဦးမွ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ျမစ္ၾကီးနားျမိဳ႕တြင္း၌ ပစ္ခတ္သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္းအေပၚ ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္ထုႏွင့္ အရပ္ဘက္လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၏ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္
ေအာင္ေဇယ်ာတပ္ခဲြတြင္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနေသာ ဗုိလ္ၾကီးတဦးမွ အမ်ိဳးသမီးတဦး၏ ရင္ဘတ္ႏွင့္ နားထင္ကုိ ေသနတ္ျဖင့္ ေၾကိမ္းၾကိမ္ေထာက္ခါ ပစ္ခတ္ရန္ခ်ိန္းေျခာက္မႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ကူကီအမ်ိဳးသမီးစင္တာမွ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္