As 2014 Comes to an End, Students Hold Key to New Chapter in Burma Politics

As we count down the remaining days of 2014, Burma Partnership takes a look back at what 2014 has offered. It has been nearly four years since President Thein Sein’s administration took office, and now is the time to digest all the developments during his presidency, to assess what the so-called reform process has really meant for the people of Burma thus far. And now is the time to properly examine this new political landscape and to determine who is who.

By the time the reforms were announced, everything was already set in motion to ensure that the reform process was controlled and manipulated by members of the old military regime. Looking at the notorious 2008 Constitution, the institutionalized prescription of 25 per cent of the seats in Parliament for military representatives, the dominance of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the excessive power of the Burma Army and the National Defense and Security Council, and the growing investment of the State and affiliated business cronies in the media sector, it is not hard to conclude that a new system of repressive governance has been installed – by the same people who were once considered one of the most brutal and authoritarian regimes in the world.

However, it is important to remain hopeful. Although the new political landscape has contributed to the sophistication of old problems and the development of new problems, it has also offered Burma people new opportunities. One of the most inspiring aspects of the political developments in 2014 has been the reinstatement of the role of student unions in the country’s political affairs. Burma’s students were always at the center of major democracy movements throughout history – most notably in 1988 – and have now made a comeback. […]

Statement by Karen Community Based Organizations Welcoming the Release By The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School of, “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Eastern Myanmar” It’s Time For Justice

The Karen people have suffered decades of abuse at the hands of the various forms of the Burmese dictatorship and Burmese military. We have grown up witnessing rape, murder, forced labor, destruction of villages, bombing of civilians and a wide variety of other human rights abuses. We know there are those who ordered those abuses who continue to serve in the highest levels of the Government of Burma and in the Burmese military. We live this experience. We continue to seek a full investigation and the prosecution of those responsible.

Michaungkan Protesters Light Candles in Front of Rangoon City Hall

Villagers from the eastern Rangoon suburb of Michaungkan staged a peaceful candlelit vigil outside Rangoon City Hall on December 12, in protest of the government’s controversial land grabs.

The protestors claim they lost their land under government redevelopment plans and have been occupying a protest camp near Maha Bandoola Park in the city centre for more than 260 days. […]

Two Injured as Latpadaung Protestors Clash with Police

A confrontation between protestors and police left two villagers injured near the Latpadaung copper mine project in Sagaing Division on Saturday.

One villager was injured by rubber bullets while another was injured by a slingshot after protests broke out on Laikkhun Hill. Police were attempting to fence-off the land when they were confronted by locals who have refused compensation as part of government land seizures. […]

“အစိုးရသစ္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခအေန” အစီရင္ခံစာ

၂၀၁၀ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ (၇) ရက္ေန႔ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲၾကီး အၿပီး ေပၚထြက္ လာသည့္ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံ အစိုးရသစ္ လက္ထက္ တြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊ စီးပြားေရးဆိုင္ရာ အေျပာင္းအလဲ အခ်ိဳ႕ရွိခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ယခင္ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္သူမ်ားအား လံုး၀ကင္းလြတ္ ခြင့္ျပဳထားပါသည္။ ထို႔ျပင္ ယခင္လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ ခံရသူမ်ားအား ျပန္လည္ ကုစားေပးမႈ လံုး၀မရွိေပ။

အစ္ိုးရသစ္ လက္ထက္တြင္ ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း လႊတ္ေတာ္မ်ား၊ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈ ပံုစံမ်ား အသစ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသား လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးေကာ္ မရွင္တို႔ ေပၚေပါက္ လာခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း လူထု၏ အေျခခံ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ထိေရာက္သည့္ ကာကြယ္မႈေပးရန္ ပ်က္ကြက္ဆဲျဖစ္သည္။ လႊတ္ေတာ္ မ်ားမွ ဥပေဒမ်ားေရးဆြဲျပဌာန္း မႈတြင္လည္း လူထု၏ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို အေလးထား ထည့္သြင္းေရးဆြဲျခင္း မျပဳေပ။ ယခင္အစိုးရ အဆက္ဆက္ လူထုအားခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္သည့္ ဥပေဒမ်ားအား ဖ်က္သိမ္းျခင္း၊ ျပင္ဆင္ျခင္း၊ အသစ္ေရးဆြဲျခင္းမ်ား မရွိသေလာက္ နည္းပါးလွ်က္ ရွိပါသည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ တစ္ရပ္ေပၚေပါက္ လာ ေသာ္လည္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားအေပၚ ထိေရာက္သည့္ ကာကြယ္မႈမ်ား မေပးႏိုင္ျခင္း၊ ၄င္းေကာ္မရွင္၏ လုပ္ပိုင္ ခြင့္မ်ားအား ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ ကန္႔သတ္္မႈ မ်ား ခံေနရၿပီး လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးျမွင့္တင္ရန္ ကိစၥရပ္မ်ားကိုလည္း ေဆာင္ ရြက္ႏိုင္ျခင္း မရွိေပ။ […]

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. […]

Parliament Committee: Re-impose Burma Sanctions If No Improvement In Human Rights

The influential Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament has published a report today which calls on the British government to support the re-imposition of European Union sanctions on Burma in 12 months’ time if there is no improvement in the situation of the Rohingya, and if all political prisoners are not unconditionally released. […]

ႏုိ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။ […]