BURMA: Two Sharply Contrasting Reports on the Struggle for Land at Letpadaung

The Asian Human Rights Commission has since mid-2012 closely followed, documented and reported on the struggle of farmers in the Letpadaung Hills of central Burma against the expansion of a copper mining operation under a military-owned holding company and a partner company from China […]

Letpadaung Report Does Not Address Concerns, Places Security Forces Above the Law

This week the much anticipated report of the Letpadaung investigation commission, appointed by President Thein Sein and chaired by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was finally released. The report acknowledges that the mine lacks strong environmental protection measures and would not create more jobs for local people. It also recognizes that farmers were forcibly evicted from their land to make way for the project. However the report says the copper mine project “should not be unilaterally stopped.” This recommendation deeply disappointed local farmers and activists who angrily rejected the commission’s report while the Wanbao Company welcomed it.

After the release of the report, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited the villages affected by the project to explain the findings of the commission. She called for the communities to stop opposing the project and accept compensation for their lost land. “We have asked the company to first give jobs to our people and second to maintain a healthy environment, according to international standards, and third to provide education and health care for the people,” Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said in a speech in Salingyi Township. But she was confronted by protesters who feel that the report does not acknowledge their demands […]

စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး မံုရြာခရိုင္၊ ဆားလင္းၾကီးျမိဳ႕နယ္ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္း စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္၏ အျပီးသတ္အစီရင္ခံစာ

၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၂၃ ရက္တြင္ က်င္းပေသာ ျပည္သူ႕လႊတ္ေတာ္ အစည္းအေဝး၌တင္သြင္းခဲ့သည့္ အေရးၾကီးအဆိုတြင္ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္းေဒ သၾကီး မံုရြာခရိုင္ ဆားလင္းၾကီးျမိဳ႕နယ္ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္းႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ေၾကးနီမိုင္းလုပ္ငန္း ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခြင့္ျပဳရန္ သင့္မသင့္ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကို ဟ…“