Take Action to Free Brang Yung and Lanpai Gam! No Political Prisoners must be Left Behind in Burma’s Jails!

Brang Yung and Lanpai Gam are two Kachin farmers who have been detained illegally and tortured brutally by the military-backed government in Burma. They were arrested in June 2012 and charged under Article 17/1 of the Unlawful Association Act. Their trials are still continuing at Myitkyina court in Kachin State.

Statement of Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on Its Trip to the Kachin State (5/2012)

The Secretary of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission and two members of the Commission visited Myitkyina and Waingmaw of the Kachin State from 23 to 27 July 2012 and carried out the following tasks of the Commission […]

International Community Neglects to Take a Stand as Humanitarian Crisis Deepens in Kachin State

In a week where the US has significantly eased sanctions against Burma, the plight of the Kachin people remains perilous as the humanitarian situation caused by Burma Army attacks worsens.

The Chairman of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, urging him to do more to help the tens of thousands of Kachin refugees who are suffering from the conflict. The letter speaks of “ethnic cleansing” by the Burma Army and appeals to take action to prevent the situation becoming more “complex.” The Chairman encourages Ban Ki-moon to “facilitate visits by UN personnel to conflict zones and IDP camps in Kachin State, so that appropriate assistance can be arranged and provided to the IDPs.”

With this appeal it is apparent the people of Kachin State are in a dire situation. Human rights abuses such as torture, forced labour and abductions are commonplace while the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT) issued a press release documenting an example of such atrocities whereby an ethnic Kachin woman, a 48 year old mother of twelve, was gang-raped by Burma Army soldiers earlier this month. According to KWAT, “About ten troops beat her with rifle butts, stabbed her with knives, stripped her naked and gang-raped her over a period of three days in the church.” As hundreds of cases have been well documented and reported by women organizations from Burma, the Burma Army uses rape as a weapon of war in its offensives against various ethnic resistance groups over the years. Over 60 cases have been documented since the conflict started in Kachin State nearly one year ago […]

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 […]

ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္မွ ကခ်င္ႏွင့္ ပေလာင္ပူးေပါင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား ထုိးစစ္ဆင္ခဲ့

ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပုိင္း၊ ေက်ာက္မဲခရုိင္၊ နမ္ဆန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ဟုိနမ္းရြာအနီးတ၀ုိက္တြင္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ေမလ ၁၅ရက္ေန႔ ညေန၃ နာရီခြဲအခ်ိန္၌ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္ ခလရ တပ္ရင္း (၅၀၂)သည္ ကခ်င္လြတ္လပ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္(KIA) တပ္ရင္း(၃၄)ႏွင့္ တပ္ရင္းမွဴး မုိင္းဟို၀္ပႅါင္ ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ပေလာင္အမ်ဳိးသား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ […]

Statement of Extraordinary Meeting of the UNFC

The extraordinary meeting of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) attended by the UNFC central executive committee members and top leaders of the member organizations was held from May 8 to 9, 2012, at a certain place on the Thai-Burma border […]

Burma Army Ransacks Church in Bhamo District

On 13 March the Burma Army ransacked Sin Lum Pang Mu Baptist Church in Pang Mu village, located in Bhamo district. According to Reverend Jangmaw Gam Maw, pastor of Pang Mu Church, soldiers from the 33rd battalion of the Burma Army’s 88th Infantry Division […]

Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuses and Forced Displacement in Kachin State

In his March 2011 inauguration speech, Burmese President Thein Sein emphasized the importance of ending Burma’s several ethnic armed conflicts, declaring that more than 60 years of ethnic warfare in Burma were due to “dogmatism, sectarian strife, and racism.” Burma’s ethnic minorities had, he said […]

Burma: Reforms Yet to Reach Kachin State

The Burmese government has committed serious abuses and blocked humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of displaced civilians since June 2011, in fighting in Burma’s northern Kachin State, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today […]

Statement on Dialogue Between KIO/KIA and Thein Sein’s Government

… The undersigned Kachin organizations call for an immediate end to offensives in Kachin State and all ethnic areas, and the initiation of politically meaningful dialogue between ethnic nationalities and Thein Sein’s government to achieve ethnic equality and self-determination. We would like to make the following calls regarding the ceasefire negotiations and political dialogue process […]