Unity Must Prevail

After its organizational conference held on a Thailand-Burma border area, disagreements between the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) and the Karen National Union (KNU) has led to the KNU suspending its’ membership of the UNFC, a setback for the peace process. While this strikes a blow into the government engineered narrative that the peace process is making substantial progress, it is particularly worrying for the ethnic communities that have been suffering from this conflict for decades.

Ostensibly, disagreements over organizational structure have caused this rift, although there are also disagreements within the KNU leadership itself over its position in the UNFC, leading to fears of a split within what has traditionally been the most prominent ethnic armed group. Previous Burma regimes have used divide and rule tactics to weaken armed resistance and to sabotage ethnic unity and it is imperative that this does not happen now. As ethnic leaders squabble over leadership structures, surely much to the delight of the leaders of the Burma Army, it is the most vulnerable populations who feel the pressures, while the government manages to convince elements of the international community that a peace settlement is just around the corner. It is crucial that whatever reason for the KNU’s withdrawal from the UNFC, they must put the ethnic communities at the forefront of their decision making […]

Rights Groups Call for an End to Enforced Disappearances in ASEAN

Today, on the occasion of International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, we, the undersigned organizations, urge ASEAN member states to end acts of enforced disappearances in Southeast Asia.
Cases of enforced disappearances continue to occur in the region. Victims include human rights defenders as well as ordinary citizens. Enforced disappearances also continue to target vulnerable groups, such as children. Three new cases of enforced disappearance that took place over the past year clearly illustrate this worrying pattern […]

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 […]

Karen Worldwide Call for Burma’s Census to be Postponed

28 Karen community organisations from 11 countries are writing to the United Nations Population Fund and their respective governments, expressing deep concern over Burma’s upcoming census, and calling for it to be postponed […]

Message of KNU President, Gen. Mutu Say Po, on Occasion of 63rd Anniversary of Karen People Martyrs’ Day

Dear Karen Nationals, Patriotic Comrades in Resistance, Today is the 63rd Anniversary of Karen people Martyrs’ Day. This date has been designated as Karen people Martyrs’ Day, for commemorating President Saw Ba U Gyi, together with other Karen leaders, comrades and Karen civilians, who have sacrificed their lives for the liberation of the Karen people. At the same […]

Statement of the 9th Karen National Unity Seminar

The 9th Karen National Unity Seminar was successfully held from May 27 to 31, 2013 at a certain location in Karen resistance area. More than 150 representatives and observers from 40 Karen organizations, domestic as well as overseas, participated in the five-day seminar. The seminar participants deliberately discuss ways to strengthen unity among the Karen […]

KRC Position on Repatriation

Due to the ongoing civil war, ethnic armed struggle, political conflicts and military coup that took power from the civilian government and refused to give democratic rights to the citizens and carried out oppressive policies, the influx of Burma refugee to Thailand started taking place […]