KIO Chairman’s Letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

The KIO Central Committee of the Kachin People in Burma, would like to express its deep appreciation to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for the historic steps taken during his visit to Burma, April, 29, 2012 to May, 1, 2012. During that time, the Secretary General met with […]

New Peace Committee Offers Little Hope to Ethnic People

Last week, the Thein Sein government formed its new union-level peace committee comprised of a central committee and a working committee. Although the formation of the committee looks very encouraging to investors and gives another reason for Western countries to further lift sanctions, it gives little hope to the people of Kachin State who have lost both their homes and their faith in the President after he unsuccessfully and repeatedly ordered the Burma Army to halt offensives in Kachin State.

As with most of the reforms announced, much secrecy surrounds the new peace committee. There is little transparency regarding the process of its establishment and mandate. Apart from names of the central committee members, disclosed by an unofficial source, there is no other official information available about the central and working committees. The central committee headed by President Thein Sein and the 52-member working committee includes the Vice-Presidents, heads of States and Divisions, Members of Parliament, Ministers and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces […]

CSW Urges British Prime Minister to Press for Peace Process and Political Dialogue with Ethnic Nationalities During Visit to Burma

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today welcomed the announcement that British Prime Minister David Cameron will make a historic visit to Burma later this week, to meet Burma’s President Thein Sein and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi […]

Burma’s By-Elections Results ‘A Step Forward, But There Is Still a Long Way to Go’

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), a UK-based human rights group, has told the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net) that it welcomes the results of yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections in Burma, as preliminary reports indicated that Nobel Peace Prize […]

The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma’s Ethnic Areas

With a population of over 50 million people, Burma is comprised of eight major ethnic nationalities: Burman, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan. Burma’s ethnic groups demand equality, autonomy […]

Report on the Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma

On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, the Burma support groups Info Birmanie (France) and the Swedish Burma Committee (Sweden) release a report on the Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma […]

ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ ျမစ္ၾကီးနား ပဲ့တင္သံ

ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႕ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးစုေပါင္းစံု ေနထိုင္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ စစ္ေဘးဒဏ္သင့္တိုင္းရင္းသား ညီအစ္ကိုေမာင္ႏွမမ်ားအတြက္ လိုအပ္ေသာ ေထာက္ပံ့ကူညီမႈမ်ား […]

Ceasefires Are Not Peace: KNU Lays Out Crucial Steps to Achieve Lasting Peace in Burma

In a press conference today, the Karen National Union laid out a four-step roadmap of essential stages that will be required to achieve genuine and sustainable peace in Burma […]

International Acclaim for Burma’s Reforms is Cause for Deep Concern for Ethnic National Peoples

The ethnic national peoples of Burma who comprise 40% of the population and occupy 60% of the land are deeply worried by the international community’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Burmese government’s recent reforms […]

Union Day Highlights the Fundamental Need to Address the Political Aspirations of the Ethnic Nationalities

On 12 February 2012, Burma celebrated the 65th Union Day, a holiday that commemorates the signing of the Panglong agreement by Aung San, the leader of Burma’s independence movement, and representatives of the Chin, Shan and Kachin people. The agreement, which was never implemented, provided for the creation of a Federal Union, called for power sharing between the majority Burman and non-Burman ethnic nationalities, and granted the non-Burman ethnic nationalities autonomy in the administration of their territories.

On this historic occasion it is particularly important to ensure that political reforms in Burma live up to the aspirations of the non-Burman ethnic nationalities, including their desire to participate equally in public life. The Nationalities Brotherhood Forum, a five-party ethnic alliance which includes Chin, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan representatives, noted in their Union Day statement that “[w]e are saddened by the continuing lack of equality and national democratic rights for the ethnic nationalities, despite the fact that Independence was collectively achieved for the Union of Burma through the spirit of Panglong.” […]