Burma Briefing No. 15: Events in Burma – New or Recycled?

This briefing analyses recent events in Burma, many of which have been hailed as ‘new’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘progress’. It finds that most of what has taken place in recent months is not new at all, and that Thein Sein is borrowing ideas from his predecessors, Than Shwe and Ne Win […]

China Speeds Ahead with Myitsone Dam Despite Civil War in Northern Burma

Seven hundred Chinese laborers are working day and night shearing off hilltops, laying tunnels, and building embankments at the Myitsone, the source of Burma’s Irrawaddy River, in a race to complete the country’s largest dam on schedule despite ongoing […]

Situation Update: Conflict and Displacement in Burma’s Border Areas

Armed conflict in Burma’s Karen, Shan and Kachin States continues to fuel large‐scale displacement of civilians both internally and into neighbouring countries. Between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians remain in temporary […]

Situation Update: The UN Must Establish a Commission of Inquiry in Burma

Despite the expectations of the international community, there has been no genuine progress towards democracy and peace since the November 2010 elections.

This briefer outlines the regime’s manipulative program of window dressing and it’s failure to take concrete steps towards meaningful democratic reforms. It concludes with recommendations to the United Nations, including the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into serious human rights violations in Burma […]

Growing Numbers of Displaced Kachin Suffer from Burmese Regime’s Blockage of Aid

The refusal of Burma’s military regime to allow international aid to the growing numbers of war-affected Kachin is causing critical hardship for these displaced communities […]

Statement on the Accusation of RCSS/SSA by Burmese Government Press Conference

With reference to the erroneous accusation of the Restoration Council of the Shan State (RCSS), the Shan State Army (SSA) by the government press conference mentioned in the state run newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar on August 13, 2011 […]

Joint Rally of Indonesian People To Commemorate The 23rd Anniversary of 8888 People Uprising, mass killings and detention: it is time for ASEAN to act

Twenty years ago in 8 August 1988 people uprising in Burma has toppled the military dictator, General Ne Win. Military in response has brutally suppressed the uprising leading to the killings of around 10.000 people, disappearances and another thousand detained until today. Some them has yet found dead mysteriously in the most severe prisons in the country. Another thousand has fled the country living stateless until today […]

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Ethnic Nationalities: Nationwide Ceasefire and Genuine Dialogue Necessary for National Reconciliation

On 25 July, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi met with the military regime’s representative, Aung Kyi at a state-run guesthouse. This was the tenth meeting between Daw Suu and the regime’s Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister, appointed as liaison to the democracy leader. After the 70-minute meeting, Aung Kyi read a statement that failed to give any details about what was discussed, but declared that both sides were happy about the meeting. However, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s serious demeanor and body language suggested otherwise.

Khin Ohmar, Coordinator of Burma Partnership and Chairperson of the Network for Democracy and Development, told the Irrawaddy, “I don’t think the government is honest about this meeting. It is just window dressing. They want the international community to know that they have started a dialogue toward national reconciliation. They are using Aung San Suu Kyi.” This meeting was nothing more than an attempt by the regime to convince ASEAN that they are deserving of the bloc’s chairmanship in 2014. When ASEAN makes its decision, likely to be at the Summit in Bali in November, the bloc must not consider this meeting as a sign of serious dialogue and must certainly not reward the regime for such empty actions […]

ကရင္နီ အမ်ဳိးသား တိုးတက္ေရးပါတီ ဗဟို ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္ အမွတ္- ၀၃/ ၂၀၁၁

ဗမာျပည္တြင္း စစ္မွန္ေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသား ေသြးစည္းညီညြတ္မွဳႏွင့္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေျပလည္မွဳတို႕ အတြက္ အမ်ဳိးသားရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးနည္းလမ္းမွ တဆင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးၫိွႏွဳိင္း အေျဖရွာျခင္းႏွင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚေနေသာ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တိုက္ပြဲမ်ားအတြက္ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲသြားေရးတုိ႕အတြက္ ကိုယ္တိုင္ပါ၀င္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇူလွဳိင္လ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႕စြဲျဖင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္မွ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးကာ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ အစိုးရ၊ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားသို႕ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာေပးပို႕သည့္အေပၚ မိမိတို႕ ကရင္နီအမ်ဳိးသားတိုးတက္ေရးပါတီမွ အေလးအနက္ ၾကိဳဆိုေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္း အသိေပးထုတ္ျပန္အပ္ပါသည္။ […]

Support Now! Enough of “Wait and See”

For more than six decades, successive juntas have waged military and political war in many manners within Burma. In their latest military attacks, fighter jets from Russia and helicopters from India bought with funds received from offshore oil and gas ventures are being used against ethnic nationalities […]