Who Killed Ja Seng Ing?

On 13 September 2012, Shayam Ja Seng Ing, a 14 year old Kachin girl, was fatally
injured in Sut Ngai Yang village, Hpakant Township, Kachin State. Her father,
Shayam Brang Shawng, and multiple eyewitnesses allege that she was shot and
killed by Myanmar Army soldiers during a period of indiscriminate gunfire. The
Myanmar Army alleges that she was killed by a mine detonated by the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA) […]

Myanmar Military Allegedly Killed 14-Year-Old School Girl

(Yangon, 6 December 2014) The Government of Myanmar should initiate an investigation into the death of Ja Seng Ing, a 14-year-old school girl from Kachin State, said the Ja Seng Ing Truth Finding Committee (the Committee) in a report released today. According to eyewitnesses, Ja Seng Ing was shot and killed by Myanmar Army soldiers in Sut Ngai Yang village, Hpakant Township, Kachin State on 13 September 2012 […]

How Many More Lives? Burma Army Must Immediately Halt its Offensives in Kachin State

Despite repeated calls from the international community, governments and civil society for an immediate halt to hostilities in Kachin and northern Shan State, on 19 November, 2014 the Burma Army fired several artillery missiles as “warning shots” onto the Kachin Independent Army’s (KIA) training academy in Laiza, Kachin State, killing 23 cadets and seriously injuring 20 others. Laiza is not only the KIA’s strong-hold. It is a city with over 20,000 civilians and a host to over 17,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Just days after the killing in Laiza, the Burma Army began firing shells near IDP camps. Some of the shells landed near a boarding school housing about 1,000 IDP children. These subsequent attacks near the camps threatened the lives of over 10,000 IDPs and raised much anxiety among the most vulnerable communities who have continuously fled the conflict. Fortunately, no one was hurt in these attacks, but many of the IDPs were forced to flee again in terror to the nearby jungle.

The narrative of “reform” and the sweeping political changes that have been praised and funded by the international community is quickly coming apart at the seams. While the Burma Government continues to use its rhetoric of change and democracy to encourage international governments, donors and investors to continue funding the peace process and development projects, they made one of the most deadly targeted attacks in Kachin State since the ceasefire broke down in 2011. This attack raised serious doubts among the ethnic groups who have threatened to abandon talks aimed at achieving a nationwide ceasefire accord. These talks, ongoing for nearly two years, have proved to be thus far redundant, as the Burma Army obviously has no other goal than the elimination of all ethnic armed groups without committing to any genuine, structural reforms. […]

KWAT Condemns Repeated Burma Army Shelling along Kachin-China Border, Threatening Tens of Thousands of Civilians

The Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT) strongly condemns the repeated Burma Army shelling in the Laiza and Maijayang areas during November 19 to 23, 2014, which not only killed 23 cadets, but also endangered the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. KWAT is calling urgently for the Burma Army to end its offensives and begin troop withdrawal. […]

ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to President Thein Sein

စီးပြားေရးဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသား အားလံုးအတြက္ အဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေသာ က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရးႏွင့္ ေကာင္း မြန္ေသာ အနာဂတ္မ်ားရရွိႏုိင္ရန္ ျပည္တြင္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးသည္ မျဖစ္မေနလုိအပ္ခ်က္ တစ္ခုျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတ ကုိယ္တုိင္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားစြာတြင္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာၾကား ခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။ […]

ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးႀကီး မင္းေအာင္လႈိင္၊ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing

တပ္မေတာ္၏ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ားႏွင့္ အသစ္တစ္ဖန္ျဖစ္ပြားလ်က္ရွိေသာ ျပင္းထန္သည့္ တုိက္ခုိက္မႈမ်ားအေပၚ အမ်ားျပည္သူ အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ပူပန္မႈႀကီးစြာ ျဖစ္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ထုိအေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ တပ္မေတာ္၏ အကူအညီျဖင့္ ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရွိေသာ လက္ရွိအစုိးရ၏ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲ ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအေပၚ ယံုၾကည္မႈကုိ မ်ားစြာ ပ်က္ျပားေစႏုိင္ပါသည္။ […]

Urgent Release: The Humanitarian Crisis Update and Key Messages for Kachin State and Northern Shan State

The Joint Strategy Team for Humanitarian Response in Kahcin and Northern Shan State would like to raise concerns over the recent increases of clashes and military actions near Laiza where over 17,000 IDPs are taking shelters in 4 camps. JST would like to request your urgent action and support for the safety and protection of the IDPs as well as ensuring unhindered and continuing humanitarian assistance for the IDPs in the KIO control area. […]

Mandalay Protestors Call for End to Ethnic Conflict

MANDALAY — Political parties in Mandalay called on the government on Wednesday to end its armed conflicts in Burma’s ethnic regions and put more of an effort into the country’s peace process.

At a demonstration led by nine political parties including the National Democratic Force (NDF), National Unity Party (NUP) and local civil society groups, protestors spoke out against a recent Burma Army attack in Kachin State that killed 23 ethnic rebel cadets and injured 20 others, saying the incident indicated a lack of resolve in the government’s purported desire to reach a sustainable peace with Burma’s numerous ethnic rebel groups. […]

KNO’s Condemation Statement on Unprovoked Attacked at KIA’s Military Academy by the Burma Army

1. Kachin National Organization strongly condemn the Burma Army’s intentional, unprovoked, barbaric attack at the KIA’s military academy on 19th November 2014 at 12:36pm, which killed 23 cadets and seriously injured 20 others. […]

Constitutional Stalemate Sinks Hopes of Genuine Democracy and National Reconciliation

On Tuesday 18 November, Parliamentary Speaker of the lower house of the Burma Parliament Thura Shwe Mann boldly announced – to everyone’s great frustration but no one’s great surprise – that there would be no amendments made to the controversial 2008 Constitution before the 2015 national elections. So, what are the implications of this announcement, and why is the timing significant?
The implications for democracy in Burma are threefold. First, unless Article 59(f) is amended, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will not be able to lead her NLD party and run for President in the 2015 elections. Although many have long feared the worst, thus far hope has persisted, especially in light of the NLD’s highly successful campaign in favor of constitutional amendment, which attracted five million signatories in support. However, Thura Shwe Mann now seems to be calling time on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s political career – and the dreams of so many long-suffering and long-hopeful Burmese – smoothly but ruthlessly side-lining her until such time as she can safely be labeled a political irrelevance, and dumped for good. At the same time, his comments can be interpreted as an oblique, discreet and wily announcement of his own ambitions for a tilt at the presidency next year.

Second, without a significant overhaul of the 2008 Constitution to ensure that the rights, autonomy and self-determination of ethnic minority nationalities are respected and enshrined in law, the peace process does not stand a chance. Fighting rages on in Kachin State – not to mention in northern Shan and Karen State – with no sign of abating. The day after Thura Shwe Mann made his announcement, 23 Kachin and other ethnic nationality soldiers were killed and as many as 15 wounded when Burma Army troops fired on a military training base in Laiza, the strategic headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army. […]