Time for Honesty Around Peace and Conflict

Peace talks resumed after a six month hiatus between the Burma Governments’ Union Peace-making Work Committee (UPWC) and the alliance of ethnic armed groups, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT). Yet in an extraordinary display of hypocrisy, the Burma Army began airstrikes again against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), just as the talks paused for a week-long break. This is to complement the airstrikes currently targeting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in northern Shan State.

The Burma Government, through its proxies the UPWC and the Myanmar Peace Center, consistently attempts to dominate the discourse surrounding the peace talks, eschewing positive conclusions whenever talks happen. Time and time again the media is told that the signing of a nationwide ceasefire accord (NCA) is ‘just round the corner,’ or in this case, ‘within days.’ How can the signing of the NCA be within days if the Burma Army has opened two fronts on its war against ethnic armed groups? Furthermore, although the MNDAA is part of the NCCT, they have been excluded from the most recent peace talks, with the Government and the Burma Army steadfastly refusing to consider any method of engagement with them apart from through military means. There needs to be honesty from the government on the realities of the prospects for peace so that parties concerned, including the donors and civil society, are able to contribute and help steer the process instead of losing trust in it […]

New report by Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma Details Continuing Human Rights Violations by Burmese Military against its Citizens

ND-Burma has published its periodic report covering the second-mid period of 2014 and focuses on 107 documented cases of human rights violations in Burma from July to December 2014. The violations documented during these six months occurred in areas of armed conflict but also in areas covered by ceasefires.

ND-Burma’s findings demonstrate that, despite progress in reaching ceasefire agreements with non-state armed groups, the government has made little progress protecting the human rights of its citizens. Furthermore, continued arrests of human rights defenders demonstrate that the government is not serious about working with civil society to protect human rights […]

The Significance of Signing the Deed of Commitment to Peace and National Reconciliation

On Union Day, February 12, 2015, the President, senior Tatmadaw officers, both speakers of the Hluttaws, political parties, and four Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs)—the Restoration Council of Shan State, Karen National Union, Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, and KNU/KNLA Peace Council—signed the Deed of Commitment to Peace and National Reconciliation (the “Deed”) at Naypyidaw. By signing the Deed, the President is able to demonstrate a positive image to the country and the international community that Burma’s peace process is moving forward in advance of the election later this year […]

KWAT Condemns Repeated Burma Army Shelling along Kachin-China Border, Threatening Tens of Thousands of Civilians

The Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT) strongly condemns the repeated Burma Army shelling in the Laiza and Maijayang areas during November 19 to 23, 2014, which not only killed 23 cadets, but also endangered the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. KWAT is calling urgently for the Burma Army to end its offensives and begin troop withdrawal. […]

Mandalay Protestors Call for End to Ethnic Conflict

MANDALAY — Political parties in Mandalay called on the government on Wednesday to end its armed conflicts in Burma’s ethnic regions and put more of an effort into the country’s peace process.

At a demonstration led by nine political parties including the National Democratic Force (NDF), National Unity Party (NUP) and local civil society groups, protestors spoke out against a recent Burma Army attack in Kachin State that killed 23 ethnic rebel cadets and injured 20 others, saying the incident indicated a lack of resolve in the government’s purported desire to reach a sustainable peace with Burma’s numerous ethnic rebel groups. […]

ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ မူေဘာင္ ေရးဆြဲေရးဆိုင္ရာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီမ်ား စံုညီအစည္းအေဝး သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

ခ်င္းအမ်ိဳးသားညီလာခံ ဘံုသေဘာတူညီခ်က္မ်ား အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚေရး ေပါင္းစပ္ညွိႏိႈင္းမႈေကာ္မတီ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ ၁၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေျမာက္ပိုင္းတိုင္းစစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ ကြပ္ကဲမႈေအာက္ရွိ၊ ခမရ ၃၈၉ လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားက ကခ်င္လြတ္လပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႔၊ ဗိုလ္ေလာင္း သင္တန္းေက်ာင္းအား အေျမာက္ျဖင့္ ပစ္ခတ္တိုက္ခိုက္မႈေၾကာင့္ ခ်င္း အမ်ိဳးသားတပ္ဦးမွ အရာရွိေလာင္းႏွစ္ဦးအပါအ၀င္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းအသီးသီးမွ အရာရွိေလာင္း ၂၃ ဦးက်ဆံုးခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ၂၀ ဦး ထိခိုက္ ဒါဏ္ရာ ရရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသျဖင့္ မိမိတို႔အေနျဖင့္ အထူးတုန္လႈပ္ေျခာက္ျခားကာ ၀မ္းနည္းေၾကကြဲမိပါသည္။ […]

KNU Position Statement on Tatmadaw’s Bombardment with Heavy Weapons on KIO Military Officer Academy

1. We were much saddened on receiving the news that 23 young cadet officers were killed and 20 others wounded, who were attending the KIO Military Academy, due to Myanmar Tatmadaw’s bombardment with heavy weapons on November 19, 2014 […]

Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

We are writing on behalf of Kachin Society from Myanmar and abroad, composed of (27) organizations and networks.

We would like to welcome your administration’s courageous step in engaging with the Myanmar government, including your visit in 2012 and your delivery of the important speech at the University of Yangon. It resonates with us to this day. […]

ညီေနာင္တိုင္းရင္းသားပါတီမ်ား ဖက္ဒေရးရွင္း၏ (၂၀)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ပုံမွန္အစည္းအေ၀း သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္