Outcome Statement of senior officials Workshop on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and Related Resolutions

The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) and UN Women, Myanmar organized a Workshop on UN Security Council Resolution, 1325 ( UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security, and related Resolutions in Nay Pyi Taw on 27-28 April 2015. The meeting brought together 41 participants – parliamentarians, senior government officials from ministries addressing women, peace and security issues, commissioners and staff of MNHRC and academics […]

Statement from the Open Government Partnership Awareness Workshop for Civil Society

Over 193 representatives from 80 Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and networks in Myanmar participated in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) awareness-raising workshop in Yangon from 19-20 January 2015. The objective of this workshop was to raise awareness and understand the potential benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and concerns regarding Myanmar’s participation in the OGP in the context of the recent transition process and the political developments in Myanmar since 2011 […]

How Many More Lives? Burma Army Must Immediately Halt its Offensives in Kachin State

Despite repeated calls from the international community, governments and civil society for an immediate halt to hostilities in Kachin and northern Shan State, on 19 November, 2014 the Burma Army fired several artillery missiles as “warning shots” onto the Kachin Independent Army’s (KIA) training academy in Laiza, Kachin State, killing 23 cadets and seriously injuring 20 others. Laiza is not only the KIA’s strong-hold. It is a city with over 20,000 civilians and a host to over 17,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Just days after the killing in Laiza, the Burma Army began firing shells near IDP camps. Some of the shells landed near a boarding school housing about 1,000 IDP children. These subsequent attacks near the camps threatened the lives of over 10,000 IDPs and raised much anxiety among the most vulnerable communities who have continuously fled the conflict. Fortunately, no one was hurt in these attacks, but many of the IDPs were forced to flee again in terror to the nearby jungle.

The narrative of “reform” and the sweeping political changes that have been praised and funded by the international community is quickly coming apart at the seams. While the Burma Government continues to use its rhetoric of change and democracy to encourage international governments, donors and investors to continue funding the peace process and development projects, they made one of the most deadly targeted attacks in Kachin State since the ceasefire broke down in 2011. This attack raised serious doubts among the ethnic groups who have threatened to abandon talks aimed at achieving a nationwide ceasefire accord. These talks, ongoing for nearly two years, have proved to be thus far redundant, as the Burma Army obviously has no other goal than the elimination of all ethnic armed groups without committing to any genuine, structural reforms. […]

ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးႀကီး မင္းေအာင္လႈိင္၊ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing

တပ္မေတာ္၏ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ားႏွင့္ အသစ္တစ္ဖန္ျဖစ္ပြားလ်က္ရွိေသာ ျပင္းထန္သည့္ တုိက္ခုိက္မႈမ်ားအေပၚ အမ်ားျပည္သူ အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ပူပန္မႈႀကီးစြာ ျဖစ္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ထုိအေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ တပ္မေတာ္၏ အကူအညီျဖင့္ ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရွိေသာ လက္ရွိအစုိးရ၏ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲ ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအေပၚ ယံုၾကည္မႈကုိ မ်ားစြာ ပ်က္ျပားေစႏုိင္ပါသည္။ […]

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. […]

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။ […]

Statement on Consultation Organized by Border-based Civil Society Organisations with the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT)

On November 22-23, 2014, 42 representatives of 25 border-based civil society organisations (CSOs), working on education, health, media, migrant workers’ rights, refugees, the environment, women’s issues and human rights, held a consultation meeting with the NCCT. This was the first such meeting with the NCCT held formally by a broad grouping of border-based CSOs. […]

‘If they had hope, they would speak’: The Ongoing Use of State-Sponsored Sexual Violence in Burma’s Ethnic Communities

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In January 2014, the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) published a report which demonstrated the systematic use of rape by the Burma Army as a strategy to subjugate communities across the country. We documented over a hundred cases of sexual violence in the years since President Thein Sein took office – a number which we believe grossly underestimates the true scale of the problem. Drawing on evidence gathered by our member organisations across Burma, we argued that there are clear links between militarisation, investment and human rights abuses. We also proposed a number of steps to uproot the culture of impunity which surrounds sexual violence, and prevents survivors from obtaining justice. Whilst recent months have seen positive action taken in several areas, the pillars which provide impunity for perpetrators of human rights abuses remain in place. In January, we called for constitutional reform to place the military under civilian control; the establishment of effective judicial and non-judicial mechanisms to investigate human rights abuses, particularly those relating to sexual violence, and; greater participation of women in the peace process dialogue. […]

ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္မွ ပစ္ခတ္မႈေၾကာင့္ ကခ်င္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ (KIA) မွ အရာရွိမ်ား ထိခိုက္က်ဆုံးရျခင္းအေပၚ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ျပင္ဆင္ေရး ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ (ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ ပြင့္လင္းလူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္း) ၏ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္