Update on Burma Army Activity in Kachin State and Northern Shan State

Clashes between the Burma Army and ethnic resistance groups continue, despite ongoing peace talks and the presence of United Nations humanitarian aid workers in Kachin State.  Burma Army activity in Kachin State and northern Shan State shows frequent troop movements and increasing use of reconnaissance aircraft.  There are claims that civilians are being conscripted into Burma militia training; Burma Army troops make a regular practice of establishing checkpoints to monitor civilian movements, especially along rivers, railroads and bridges and the Burma Army frequently pressures civilians into paying bribes at these check points. Hundreds of Burma Army soldiers have been stationed in northern Shan State, which has seen some of the heaviest concentration of military clashes in 2014 […]

ႏိုင္ငံသားတစ္ဦးျဖစ္သူ ကိုပါႀကီး(ခ)ကိုေအာင္ေက်ာ္ႏိုင္ ေသဆံုးခဲ့ရျခင္းအတြက္ ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ အင္အားစုမ်ား၏ စုေပါင္း သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ (၂၃) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစာနယ္ဇင္းေကာင္စီ (ယာယီ)သို႔ တစ္လၾကာ အဖမ္းခံထားရေသာ ကိုပါႀကီး (ခ) ကိုေအာင္ေက်ာ္ႏိုင္ သည္ (၄၊၁ဝ၊၂ဝ၁၄) ရက္ေန႔ ညေန၌ ပစ္ခတ္ခံရ၍
ေသဆံုး သြားေၾကာင္း ကာကြယ္ေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အေၾကာင္းၾကားလာျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ အင္အားစုမ်ား စုေပါင္း၍ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္း ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာ လုိက္ပါသည္။ […]

ကုိပါၾကီး ေသဆုံးမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ၈၈မ်ဳိးဆက္ (ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ ပြင့္လင္း လူ႔အဖြဲ႕အစည္း)၏ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

Burmese Government Troops again shell Civilian Area, Commit other Human Rights Abuses in Ke See Township

During October 12-18, 2014, the Burmese government troops continued to commit abuses against civilians during their ongoing offensive against the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army (a.k.a Shan State Army-North or SSA-N) in Ke See Township, central Shan State. SHRF has documented the arrest and torture of five villagers, as well as “house arrest” of seven women and girls, including a heavily pregnant woman. On October 13, shells were again fired into a civilian area, damaging housing and killing livestock, and causing over 180 villagers to seek shelter in a local temple […]

Over 650 Myanmar/Burma Civil Society Actors Speak Out on the Reality of the Transition

The forum titled, “Civil Societies’ Review on Myanmar/Burma’s Transition Process: Prospects for 2015 and Beyond”, held on 15 – 17 October 2014 at the Myanmar Christian Fellowship of the Blind Center in Rangoon, brought together over 650 representatives from 257 organizations and networks from across the country and border areas to discuss and strategize a wide range of key issues currently facing Burma in the context of the recent economic and political reforms since 2011. This is the first forum of this scale to assess the reform and the wide range of problems currently facing Burma.

Despite the hailed “transition to democracy,” exalted particularly by the international community, civil society organizations (CSOs) spoke of the decades old challenges that remain unresolved, the stagnation of the reform process, and new emerging issues, in addition to the need for meaningful inclusion of the voices of civil society, democratic opposition forces, ethnic peoples, women and youth in the reform process.

The forum addressed six core issues; (1) law reform, (2) peace and conflict, (3) media, hate speech and communal violence, (4) Parliament, Government and accountability, (5) economic reform and foreign direct investment, and (6) the international community’s role and involvement, which were discussed under six panel discussions and six workshops. The forum produced a statement that gave concrete recommendations from civil society groups to the Burma Government, United Nations, international governments and international non-governmental organizations (lNGOs) […]

Joint Statement of Karen Women’s Groups in Support of the Reunification of the Kawthoolei Armed Forces (KAF)

The Karen Women’s Organization (KWO), Karen Women’s Empowerment Group (KWEG) and Karen Women’s Union (KWU) welcome the announcement, on October 13th, 2014, of the Karen armed resistance groups coming together under the name of “Kawthoolei Armed Forces (KAF)”. The alliance of 4 Karen armed forces meets the long held desire of Karen people everywhere, especially of Karen women. We believe this is an opportunity for both peace building, and improved co-operation which can help reduce violence against women […]

ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္၀ျမိဳ႕နယ္မွ ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ခံရျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ပူးတြဲသေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္ဝျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ကုန္ျပင္ေက်းရြာေန ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသား မ်ားျဖစ္ၾက သည့္ ဦးေက်ာ္ေအာင္၊ ဦးေအးလွ၊ ဦးေမာင္စိန္၊ ဦးေက်ာ္ျမင့္ဦး၊ ဦးေအာင္ေက်ာ္လွႏွင့္ ဦးေအာင္ဆိုတို႔ ၆ ဦးအား အေနာက္ပိုင္းတိုင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ လက္ေအာက္ခံ၊ အမွတ္ ၃၄၄ ေျခလ်င္တပ္ရင္းမွ ဗုိလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးပါ ၁၃ ဦးအဖြဲ႔မွ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၈ မွ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ခ်င္းအမ်ိဳးသားတပ္ဦး (CNF) ႏွင့္ အဆက္ အသြယ္ ျပဳလုပ္သည္ဟူေသာ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ျဖင့္ မတရားခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ရိုက္နက္ခဲ့သည့္ အျပင္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၄ ရက္ ေန႔တြင္ ဗိုလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးမွ ၄င္းတို႔အား ၾကိဳတင္ ေရးထား သည့္ ဝန္ခံဂတိျပဳစာရြက္ေပၚတြင္ အတင္းအၾကပ္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိး ေစခိုင္းျခင္း မ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရိွရသည္။ […]

Statement: Civil Societies’ Review on Myanmar’s Transition Process: Prospects for 2015 and Beyond

We, more than 650 representatives from 257 organizations and networks in Myanmar, came together in Yangon for 3 days from 14-16 October 2014 to exchange opinions, debate and to assess a wide range of issues currently confronting Myanmar in the context of recent political developments and the transition process that started in 2011 […]

Dispatches: A Scathing Verdict on Burma’s Stalled Reforms

A remarkable set of meetings took place this week in Rangoon, with more than 650 representatives from Burmese civil society groups gathering to discuss the status of the country’s reform process […]

Burma Army Continues to Use the Drugs Trade as a Weapon of War

A new report by Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand (KWAT), “Silent Offensive: How Burma Army Strategies are Fuelling the Kachin Drug Crisis” outlines the severity of the drug problem in northern Burma as well as the complicity of the government in the trade. The report shows how the government is using opium-growing militia forces in its operations against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) as part of a deal in which these militias are given free rein to produce and sell heroin and other narcotics.

Thus, as the report points out, it is members of either Burma Army controlled Border Guard Forces (BGF) such as the New Democratic Army – Kachin (NDAK), a splinter group of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) that became a BGF in 2009, or People’s Militia Forces (PMF) that are heavily involved in offensives against the KIO. Land that is taken by the Burma Army and its proxy forces is then allocated to BGFs/PMFs to utilize however they like. This is often opium cultivation, heroin production and methamphetamine production. To make matters worse these are areas under which the KIO had previously been involved in anti-drug activities but since BGFs or PMFs have taken over, opium cultivation has increased greatly in areas such as Nampaka in northern Shan State and Chipwi in Kachin State […]