Myanmar: Comprehensive Solutions Needed for Recent and Long-term IDPs Alike

Executive summary

IDMC estimates that there are up to 642,600 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Myanmar, forced to flee their homes by armed conflict and inter-communal violence. The figure includes up to 400,000 people living in protracted displacement as a result of conflict in the south-east of the country – in southern Shan, Kayah, Kayin and Mon states and Bago and Tanintharyi regions – and 98,000 displaced by conflict in Kachin and northern Shan states since 2011. It also includes around 140,000 people displaced by inter-communal violence in Rakhine state since 2012, and more than 5,000 who fled their homes in Mandalay region in 2013. Disasters brought on by natural hazards and forced evictions linked to land grabs and the exploitation of natural resources have caused further displacement, including in areas where people have already fled conflict and violence.

Landmines and unexploded ordnance constitute a significant obstacle to IDPs’ return in Kachin, northern Shan and the south-east. Internally displaced women and girls in Kachin and northern Shan face the threat of sexual violence. Muslim IDPs in Rakhine are confined to camps, where they have little or no access to health care, education or livelihoods, and shelters are in need of maintenance in Rakhine, Kachin and northern Shan […]

Thai Oversea Investment on Coal Mining in Myanmar: The Private Business Violating Human Rights and Causing Environmental Impact on Ethnic Communities along Tenasserim Border

Tanintharyi Hills or Tanintharyi Range is the geographical name of a roughly 1,700 km long mountain chain, part of the Indo-­‐Malayan mountain system in Southeast Asia. The Tanintharyi Range covered with lush green forest and is a natural border line between Thailand and Myanmar. Across the hills in Myanmar side is Tanintharryi Region. The capital of this administrative region is Dawei which consists of diverse of ethnicity such as Dawei or Tavoy, Karen or Khayin and Mon. The local languages spoken by majority of the population are Tavoyan and Karen. In the past, the areain which bordering near Kanchanaburi province of Thailand was a former war zone between Karen ethnic group and Burmese junta government. It was intense conflict war zone during 1996 -­‐ 1997 until cease fire agreement between the Burmese junta and the Karen National Union (KNU) was signed in 2012 […]

European Karen Network Special Tribute to General Saw Tamla Baw, Former President of the KNU

European Karen Network sends its condolences to the Karen National Union, and the family and friends of General Saw Tamla Baw, who passed away on 26 June 2014, age 94.

The passing of General Saw Tamla Baw is a great loss for the Karen people and the whole of Burma. He was a strong and fearless leader who dedicated his life to the struggle for self-determination, democracy and freedom, not just for the Karen, but all the people in Burma. He believed in unity for all ethnic nationalities, under the principles of freedom and equality, within a federal democratic Burma. He was a practical leader who lived by example, and won the love and respect of the Karen and democracy loving people in Burma […]

(၁၀)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသား စည္းလံုးညီၫႊတ္ေရး ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲ၏ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

(၁၀)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားစည္းလံုးညီၫႊတ္ေရး ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲကို ၂၀၁၄ခုႏွစ္၊ ေမလ ၂၈ရက္မွ ၃၁ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ကရင့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး နယ္ေျမေလး၀ါး(ေခၚ)ေလာ္ခီးလာတြင္ ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ထိုႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပြဲသို႔ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပရွိ ကရင္လူထုအေျချပဳအဖဲြ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊ ကရင္ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ကရင္လူငယ္ႏွင့္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ား၊ ကရင့္ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ား၊ ကရင္လက္နက္ကုိင္အဖဲြ႔အစည္းမ်ား စသည့္ကရင္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္း (၆၆)ဖဲြ႔ႏွင့္ တသီးပုဂၢလ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား၊ ေလ့လာသူမ်ား အပါအ၀င္ စုစုေပါင္း (၂၄၆)ဦး တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္ […]

ကရင္လူငယ္အစည္းအရုံး၏ (၂၅)ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ေငြရတုပြဲေတာ္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳအထိမ္းအမွတ္ ကရင္လူငယ္မ်ား ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္

ကရင္လူငယ္အစည္းအရုံး၏ (၂၅) ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ေငြရတုပြဲေတာ္ဂုဏ္ျပဳအထိမ္းအမွတ္ အခမ္းအနားကို ေမလ (၂၀)ရက္ ေန႔မွ (၂၃)ရက္ ေန႔အထိ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ဖားအံ ခရုိင္၊ ေလာ္ခီးလာ တြင္ ေအာင္ျမင္စြာက်င္းပ ျပဳလုပ္ ၍ ဧည့္ပရိတ္သတ္ (၅၆၉) ဦး တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ကရင္လူငယ္အစည္းအရုံး၏ (၂၅) ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ေငြရတုပြဲေတာ္ ဂုဏ္ျပဳအထိမ္းအမွတ္ ႏွင့္ အတူ ကရင္လူငယ္ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတစ္ရပ္ကို ေမလ (၂၀) ရက္ေန႔မွ (၂၃) ရက္ေန႔ အထိ ၃ ရက္တာ က်င္းပခဲ့ပါသည္ […]

Truce or Transition? Trends in Human Rights Abuse and Local Response in Southeast Myanmar Since the 2012 Ceasefire

Introduction

In January 2012, the Myanmar government and the Karen National Union (KNU) signed a preliminary ceasefire agreement, bringing to a halt what is often referred to as the world’s longest-running civil war. This conflict engendered severe human rights abuse of civilians at the hands of a range of armed actors, primarily at those of the Myanmar Armed Forces (Tatmadaw). The ceasefire and other recent political developments in Myanmar have altered the ways in which human rights abuse is experienced by Karen people in the Southeast, and transformed the context within which these abuses can be addressed. This report aims to demonstrate how trends in human rights abuse have changed during the post-ceasefire period […]

May 14, 2014  •  By Karen Human Rights Group  •  Tags: Border Guard Force, Burma Army, Ceasefire, Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, Government of Myanmar, Human Rights Violations, Karen Human Rights Group, Karen National Union, Land Confiscation, Peace Process  •  Read more ➤