CSW Returns from Kachin State with Evidence of Continuing Grave Human Rights Violations

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) returned this week from a three-week fact-finding visit to Rangoon and Kachin State on the China-Burma border, where the CSW team recorded evidence of grave human rights violations […]

Ceasefire and Political Dialogue, Highest Hurdles Ahead for Thein Sein’s Government

Thein Sein’s government has been applauded for some recent reforms, including last week’s release of 299 political prisoners. However, one of the biggest hurdles remaining for the regime will be dealing with the ongoing armed conflict in Eastern Burma and the political concerns of the country’s ethnic nationalities.

President Thein Sein has issued two separate orders to halt offensives against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the most recent of the two coming the day before the regime’s delegation led by Aung Thaung was set to meet with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO). According to Minister of Immigration and Population, Khin Yi, this most recent order covered the entire country. However, the Burma Army continued launching attacks against the KIA, including on the second day of the ceasefire talks between the regime and the KIO, resulting in a premature end of the negotiations. The Burma Army’s ongoing attacks continue to raise serious questions about Thein Sein’s decision-making power within the regime […]

An End to the Burma Army’s Offensive in Kachin State? More Empty Words and No Action

Many have hailed the recent announcement that President Thein Sein has ordered the Burma Army to cease offensive attacks on the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), instructing the Army to engage only in self-defense. Indeed, were the Burma Army to put an end to the offensive that it began in June, breaking a seventeen year ceasefire, this would be a positive development. However, as of yet, this appears to be only one more instance of the regime making promises designed to satisfy the calls for change from the international community without taking real action to improve the situation for the people of Burma. Multiple credible reports indicate that Burma Army attacks on KIA positions have continued over the course of the past week, despite President’s order.

Refugees fleeing the fighting and attendant human rights abuses are in increasing danger as the weather turns colder and the makeshift camps become more crowded, increasing the risk of disease. In one positive development, the regime permitted the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees, along with other UN bodies based in Burma, to visit refugees in KIA controlled areas for the first time. However, one visit from the UN cannot solve this crisis and refugees continue to be in desperate need of further assistance. The regime must grant the UN and international organizations continued access to these areas and permit them to continue to provide relief to civilians in need […]

Statement by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission

A four-member team of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission headed by its Secretary visited Kachin State from 8 to 10 December 2011 in order to observe at first hand the civil population […]

The Burmans’ Big Brother Complex

By Khin Ohmar

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Burma’s leaders this week, she was undoubtedly told that the government was negotiating with armed ethnic groups in the country’s conflict areas as the latest step in Burma’s political transformation. Leaders will try to construe these preliminary discussions as significant steps toward peace agreements.

While such negotiations are welcome, it is important to realize that the issues relating to ethnic minorities in Burma are very complex and cannot be solved overnight, even if new ceasefire agreements are eventually reached. Because of decades of conflict, time and effort will be required to build trust […]

Rally in Chiang Mai draws several prominent ethnic activists, international media

The rally at the U.S. Consulate in Chiang Mai this morning attracted a large crowd, including international media and several prominent ethnic activists.

Organized by The Best Friend and We Are Burma to coincide with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Burma, the highest-level diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Burma in 55 years, the purpose of the rally was to propel ethnic and political prisoner issues to the top of the agenda for all nations increasing engagement with the new regime in Burma […]

CSW Urges International Community to Highlight Plight of Ethnic Nationalities in Engagement with Burmese Regime

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today expressed concern that the plight of Burma’s ethnic nationalities is being neglected in the process of engagement with Burma’s regime. CSW particularly highlights continuing severe violations of human rights, including the use of rape […]

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ (၃/၂၀၁၁) – ဓါးမိုး၍ ညႊတ္ကြင္းမသြင္းသင့္သည့္ ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇန္နဝါရီလ (၄) ရက္ေန႕တြင္ ျဗိတိသွ်နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ကိုလိုနီလက္ေအာက္မွ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ရရွိခဲ့သည္။ ထိုလြတ္လပ္ေရးႏွင့္အတူ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္မီး စတင္ေလာင္ကၽြမ္းလာခဲ့သည္။ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္မီး စတင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ရသည့္ အေၾကာင္းရင္းကို ေလ့လာၾကည့္မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ဝါဒေရးရာ အားျပိဳင္မႈ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားတန္းတူေရးႏွင့္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ျပ႒န္းခြင့္ မရွိျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း […]

Discrimination, Conflict and Corruption: The Ethnic States of Burma

Since achieving independence in January 1948, successive Burmese governments, elected and military dictatorships, have sought to address the complex issues involving the country’s many ethnic groups. They have sought to do this primarily through confronting […]

Opium Cultivation Surging in Constituency of Burma’s New Ruling Party

A new briefing paper by the Palaung Women’s Organization (PWO) exposes a dramatic increase in opium cultivation in Burma’s northern Shan State in the constituency of a drug lord elected into the new military-backed parliament […]