Over 650 Myanmar/Burma Civil Society Actors Speak Out on the Reality of the Transition

The forum titled, “Civil Societies’ Review on Myanmar/Burma’s Transition Process: Prospects for 2015 and Beyond”, held on 15 – 17 October 2014 at the Myanmar Christian Fellowship of the Blind Center in Rangoon, brought together over 650 representatives from 257 organizations and networks from across the country and border areas to discuss and strategize a wide range of key issues currently facing Burma in the context of the recent economic and political reforms since 2011. This is the first forum of this scale to assess the reform and the wide range of problems currently facing Burma.

Despite the hailed “transition to democracy,” exalted particularly by the international community, civil society organizations (CSOs) spoke of the decades old challenges that remain unresolved, the stagnation of the reform process, and new emerging issues, in addition to the need for meaningful inclusion of the voices of civil society, democratic opposition forces, ethnic peoples, women and youth in the reform process.

The forum addressed six core issues; (1) law reform, (2) peace and conflict, (3) media, hate speech and communal violence, (4) Parliament, Government and accountability, (5) economic reform and foreign direct investment, and (6) the international community’s role and involvement, which were discussed under six panel discussions and six workshops. The forum produced a statement that gave concrete recommendations from civil society groups to the Burma Government, United Nations, international governments and international non-governmental organizations (lNGOs) […]

Canadian Burma Ethnic Nationalities Organization Founded at the 2nd Burma Ethnic Nationalities Conference Canada

The second Burma Ethnic Nationalities Conference Canada was successfully held on 11-12 October 2014 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference was attended by representatives and members of Burma ethnic communities from across Canada […]

Myanmar: UN Chief Urges Country to Move beyond ‘Narrow Agendas’ and towards Cooperation

Myanmar has shown progress in areas of socio-economic development, national reconciliation and democratization, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon confirmed today, while also warning that the Asian country still faced “critical hurdles” as it approached its impending elections […]

Critique of Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Blueprint for Development in Southeastern Burma/Myanmar

Executive Summary

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has recently issued a blueprint that proposes industrial development in Southeast Burma/Myanmar, purportedly to aid in the return and settlement of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Karen and Mon States. However, the Karen Peace Support Network (KPSN), a network of nearly 30 ethnic Karen organizations, cautions JICA that its blueprint for infrastructure development such as roads and industrial estates in the war-torn southeast is premature and flawed, potentially exacerbating conflict in the region.

The KPSN (formerly KCBPSN) is the largest network of Karen civil society organizations in Burma/Myanmar. These organizations have been providing support for vulnerable people in this conflict-torn region for decades, striving to empower local communities, build transparent and accountable institutions, and help create a sustainable peace in Burma/Myanmar. KPSN and its member organizations are important stakeholders which must be included in any development planning process in the Karen areas of the southeast […]

Namkham Farmers’ Protest Highlights Urgent Need for Moratorium on Resource Extraction during Peace Process

The anti-mining protest by over 3,000 villagers in Namkham, northern Shan State, on September 5, 2014, highlights the lack of protection against damaging mining, and the urgent need for a moratorium on resource extraction in ethnic areas until there is genuine political reform and peace in Burma […]

ACSC/APF 2014 Post Conference Report

Preface

As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Myanmar accepted the gavel that symbolizes the ASEAN presidency. This was a historic moment since this is the first time Myanmar has taken the Chair since it became a member of ASEAN. As Chair, Myanmar is responsible for hosting many important regional forums and events during 2014.

The ASEAN Civil Society Conference (ACSC), also known as the ASEAN Peoples’ Forum (APF), is held independently by the ASEAN Chair country in advance of, and parallel to, the official ASEAN Summit, which is attended by ASEAN and regional leaders. The first ACSC/APF took place in Malaysia in 2005. Since then it has taken place in the Philippines (2006), Singapore (2007), Thailand (2009), Vietnam (2010), Indonesia (2011), Cambodia (2012), Brunei (2013) and this year in Myanmar (2014). The 10th ACSC/APF took place on 21 – 23 March 2014 at the Myanmar Convention Center in Yangon, Myanmar.

New Special Rapporteur, Familiar Human Rights Abuses

The new Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma, Ms. Yang Hee Lee, concluded her first visit to the country on 27 November, and unsurprisingly, found the human rights situation troubling, warning of the potential of backtracking on initial reforms, an analysis that resonates with many Burma followers. She outlined her initial findings at Rangoon airport in a statement just as she finished her mission, highlighting the shrinking of democratic space, the ongoing religious violence and discrimination, the deteriorating humanitarian conditions for internally displaced persons (IDPs) – especially Muslims – in Arakan State, the severe human rights abuses in Kachin State, the urgent necessity for legislative reform and the rule of law, the lack of involvement of women in both the peace process and governance, the exclusion of local people in large scale development projects and the impact of such projects on vulnerable communities, and the continuing incarceration of political activists, among other issues.

We welcome Ms. Lee’s open and honest discussion of the term “Rohingya” and her pledge to be guided by international human rights law as regards the use of this term. This was despite the insistence of government officials not to use the word “Rohingya” throughout her trip to Arakan State. On the basis of this principled stance, we are reassured that Ms. Lee will not flinch from using the term when appropriate in the future. After visiting two camps for IDPs, one for Arakan Buddhists and one for Rohingya Muslims, Ms. Lee was troubled by both the terrible conditions in the camps and the lack of humanitarian access that is resulting in people dying due to insufficient medical assistance. She also acknowledged that this situation is “undeniably worse” in the camp for Rohingya. While she did not explicitly state that this is a situation engineered and maintained by the authorities, it is obvious that the unequal treatment of Buddhist and Muslim IDPs is a deliberate policy by the government that further punishes the Rohingya simply due to their ethnicity.

55 Organisations Worldwide Call for Action for Peace on Kachin Anniversary

Three years ago today, the Burma Army broke a 17-year ceasefire with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and unleashed a major new military offensive against the Kachin people. Since 9 June 2011, over 120,000 Kachin people have been displaced, forced to flee their homes. At least 200 villages have been destroyed. A humanitarian emergency unfolded, with a desperate need for shelter, food and medical care. As the Kachin Peace Talk Creation Group has said, “the impact of the war this time has been enormous. Many have lost land, plantations […]

Statement by the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand on the Third Anniversary of the Renewed Conflict in Kachin State

KWAT is very concerned at the recent escalation of attacks by the Burma Army in southern Kachin and northern Shan State, which have caused fresh displacement and suffering. These systematic operations to seize control of key trade routes and economic zones along the China-Burma border throw strong doubt on the government’s sincerity towards the peace process […]

(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 […]