International Community Neglects to Take a Stand as Humanitarian Crisis Deepens in Kachin State

In a week where the US has significantly eased sanctions against Burma, the plight of the Kachin people remains perilous as the humanitarian situation caused by Burma Army attacks worsens.

The Chairman of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, urging him to do more to help the tens of thousands of Kachin refugees who are suffering from the conflict. The letter speaks of “ethnic cleansing” by the Burma Army and appeals to take action to prevent the situation becoming more “complex.” The Chairman encourages Ban Ki-moon to “facilitate visits by UN personnel to conflict zones and IDP camps in Kachin State, so that appropriate assistance can be arranged and provided to the IDPs.”

With this appeal it is apparent the people of Kachin State are in a dire situation. Human rights abuses such as torture, forced labour and abductions are commonplace while the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT) issued a press release documenting an example of such atrocities whereby an ethnic Kachin woman, a 48 year old mother of twelve, was gang-raped by Burma Army soldiers earlier this month. According to KWAT, “About ten troops beat her with rifle butts, stabbed her with knives, stripped her naked and gang-raped her over a period of three days in the church.” As hundreds of cases have been well documented and reported by women organizations from Burma, the Burma Army uses rape as a weapon of war in its offensives against various ethnic resistance groups over the years. Over 60 cases have been documented since the conflict started in Kachin State nearly one year ago […]

United States Government Ignores the Cries of Burma’s Oppressed Ethnic Nationalities, Rewards Burmese Regime with U.S. Dollars and Investment

Today the U.S. Campaign for Burma (USCB) expresses its concern over the US Administration’s announcement that the U.S. is lifting the financial transactions and investment ban on Burma through a presidential waiver. Lifting these major economic measures, just one week after the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), the alliance of nearly all ethnic resistance groups that have engaged in negotiations with the Burmese government to end the world’s longest civil war and reach a peaceful political settlement, called on foreign governments “to oppose and pressure Bamah Tatmadaw (The Burmese military) for its wrong actions. Accordingly, we would like to request the international community not to suspend or lift the remaining political, military, financial and economic sanctions” is effectively undermining their pursuit for an end to the Burmese military’s human rights abuses and genuine national reconciliation […]

Removal of U.S. Sanctions on Burma is Premature and Dangerous

Warning about the dangers of removing the ban on investments in Burma, United to End Genocide’s president, Tom Andrews, expressed concern that the Obama administration is rewarding a government that continues to commit human rights atrocities.

“Burmese democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has urged the United States to be cautious as it considers the removal of sanctions on Burma. Daw Suu recognized that ‘people are too optimistic about the scene in Burma’ and I agree” […]

AIPMC Calls on US to Maintain Sanctions on Myanmar, For Now

The ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC) today urged the US government to maintain sanctions on business activities in Myanmar, warning that a gold rush in the Southeast Asian nation could fuel further human rights abuses, risk fragile ceasefires and arrest ongoing democratic reforms rather than bolster them […]

KIO Chairman’s Letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

The KIO Central Committee of the Kachin People in Burma, would like to express its deep appreciation to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for the historic steps taken during his visit to Burma, April, 29, 2012 to May, 1, 2012. During that time, the Secretary General met with […]

Artists Launch Peace Movement and Fundraising Campaign for IDPs in Kachin State

A group of artist led by U Ye Lwin has launched an awareness raising and fundraising movement in Rangoon. The group performed in public areas such teashops and restaurants in Rangoon and collect donation for war-fled displaced people Kachin State […]

ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္မွ ကခ်င္ႏွင့္ ပေလာင္ပူးေပါင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား ထုိးစစ္ဆင္ခဲ့

ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပုိင္း၊ ေက်ာက္မဲခရုိင္၊ နမ္ဆန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ဟုိနမ္းရြာအနီးတ၀ုိက္တြင္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ေမလ ၁၅ရက္ေန႔ ညေန၃ နာရီခြဲအခ်ိန္၌ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ ခလရ တပ္ရင္း (၅၀၂)သည္ ကခ်င္လြတ္လပ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္(KIA) တပ္ရင္း(၃၄)ႏွင့္ တပ္ရင္းမွဴး မုိင္းဟို၀္ပႅါင္ ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ပေလာင္အမ်ဳိးသား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ […]

International Community’s Premature Rewards Fail to Address Armed Conflict and Human Rights Violations in Burma

This briefer looks at the April by-elections, new laws that fail to protect the people, ongoing armed conflict, problematic development, sanctions, and offers recommendations to the international community and guidelines for investment in Burma […]

New Peace Committee Offers Little Hope to Ethnic People

Last week, the Thein Sein government formed its new union-level peace committee comprised of a central committee and a working committee. Although the formation of the committee looks very encouraging to investors and gives another reason for Western countries to further lift sanctions, it gives little hope to the people of Kachin State who have lost both their homes and their faith in the President after he unsuccessfully and repeatedly ordered the Burma Army to halt offensives in Kachin State.

As with most of the reforms announced, much secrecy surrounds the new peace committee. There is little transparency regarding the process of its establishment and mandate. Apart from names of the central committee members, disclosed by an unofficial source, there is no other official information available about the central and working committees. The central committee headed by President Thein Sein and the 52-member working committee includes the Vice-Presidents, heads of States and Divisions, Members of Parliament, Ministers and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces […]

Statement of Extraordinary Meeting of the UNFC

The extraordinary meeting of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) attended by the UNFC central executive committee members and top leaders of the member organizations was held from May 8 to 9, 2012, at a certain place on the Thai-Burma border […]