ASEAN Peoples’ Forum 2014 Representatives Meet with ASEAN Affairs Department of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar to Prepare for an Interface Meeting with ASEAN Leaders

Members of Steering Committee of ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ ASEAN Peoples’ Forum (ACSC/APF) 2014, yesterday, met with ASEAN Affairs Department of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar at Naypyidaw to hold an initial discussion on interface meeting between ASEAN Civil Society representatives and leaders of ASEAN countries […]

Why donors should insist the census be postponed

The upcoming national census, scheduled to start on March 30, is proving to be one of the most divisive issues on Myanmar’s agenda. Representatives of the country’s many ethnic nationalities, as well as smaller ethnic sub-groups, are raising vociferous objections. Many feel that it violates their right to identity. Such objections generally work in two […]

Myanmar’s Chance to Set a Positive Benchmark for ASEAN Civil Society

On 21-23 March, the 2014 ASEAN Civil Society Conference (ACSC), otherwise known as the ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), will take place in Yangon, Myanmar. The ACSC/APF is held annually by the ASEAN Chair country – currently Myanmar – in advance of and parallel to the official ASEAN Summit, which will be held in May and […]

It’s “All Systems Go” for Largest ASEAN Civil Society Conference in Myanmar

It’s “all systems go” for the ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN Peoples’ Forum (ACSC/APF) 2014, which will be held in Yangon on March 21-23. The conference, expected to attract 1,200 participants from diverse grassroots, national and regional organizations, could be the largest regional civil society conference held in Myanmar in recent years. This week, members of […]

ASEAN Civil Society Organizations Reaffirms Commitment for Independent Peoples’ Forum at 4th Regional Consultation Meeting

Participants of the 4th Regional Consultation Meeting reinforced their commitment to maintain inclusiveness and independence of the ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN Peoples’ Forum (ACSC/APF) 2014. The ACSC/APF, which will be held in Yangon on March 21-23, could be the largest regional civil society conference held in Myanmar in contemporary history.

Statement No. (2/2014) Investigation of the Incident at the Ducheeratan Village

1. A team from the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) comprising the Secretary and three members visited Sittwe and Maung Taw Township and made a tour of the Ducheeratan village tract from 30 January to 3 February 2014, in order to investigate the news reports on the incident that had occurred at Ducheeratan middle village […]

The Burma Army and Its Language of Aggression

Mixed messages on the peace process came out this week as the government proposed for the first time to commit a substantial amount of money into the peace process. Yet the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s inflammatory comments on the indestructibility of the Burma Army and blaming the conflict on the country’s ethnic armed groups expose the attitudes of the country’s most powerful institution. Meanwhile, a second round of formal talks between ethnic armed groups and the government’s Union Peace Working Committee on the nationwide ceasefire accord have been postponed until February as ethnic representatives further discuss the accord.

A local newspaper, True News, published comments made by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing at a briefing to officers in Naypyidaw in November 2013. The language of peace and reconciliation was conspicuously absent in his address, “We made peace agreements, but that doesn’t mean we are afraid to fight. We are afraid of no one. There is no insurgent group we cannot fight or dare not to fight.” The Burma Army chief also states that he intends to follow the path laid down by Senior General Than Shwe, the former head of the military junta that suffocated and terrorized Burma from 1988 to 2011. Burma’s underdevelopment, he adds, is “because of internal insurgents who caused conflict in the country.” […]

ထားဝယ္ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားမ်ား ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ျခင္းအေပၚ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ပုဂၢလိက ကုမၸဏီတစ္ခုခုမွျဖစ္ေစ ျပည္သူမ်ားပိုင္ဆိုင္ေသာ လယ္ယာေျမမ်ားေပၚတြင္ ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရး စီမံကိန္းမ်ား ေဖာ္ေဆာင္မည္ဆိုပါက ထိုက္တန္ေသာ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပးျခင္း၊ လယ္ယာေျမအစားထိုးေပးျခင္း၊ ျပည္သူမ်ား ေဒသခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်လည္ေအာင္ ညွိႏႈိင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ျပီး သေဘာတူညီမႈရရွိမွသာ […]

Rohingya Women and Children Raped and Killed

On 13th January 2014, in the early morning at around 3 am, a group of police, security forces, military and Rakhine entered Kiladaung village, south of Maungdaw, Arakan State. They entered a house and demanded valuables, gold and money from the Rohingya woman living there. Her husband had hidden when they saw the security forces approaching. When the woman refused to give them her jewellery, the security forces raped and killed her. When her children began shouting, many villagers came and violence started […]

Systematic Sexual Violence in Burma’s Ethnic Areas: New Report

Today marks the launch of an important new report documenting ongoing crimes of sexual violence-over 100 cases documented since 2010, including 47 gang rapes–perpetrated by the Burmese military in ethnic regions of Burma.

The Women’s League of Burma (WLB), consisting of thirteen women’s organizations representing different ethnic areas in Burma, released the report, “Same Impunity, Same Pattern: Sexual abuses by the Burma army will not stop until there is a genuine civilian government, “and is urging an immediate end to these atrocities […]