Who Killed Ja Seng Ing?

On 13 September 2012, Shayam Ja Seng Ing, a 14 year old Kachin girl, was fatally
injured in Sut Ngai Yang village, Hpakant Township, Kachin State. Her father,
Shayam Brang Shawng, and multiple eyewitnesses allege that she was shot and
killed by Myanmar Army soldiers during a period of indiscriminate gunfire. The
Myanmar Army alleges that she was killed by a mine detonated by the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA) […]

Myanmar Military Allegedly Killed 14-Year-Old School Girl

(Yangon, 6 December 2014) The Government of Myanmar should initiate an investigation into the death of Ja Seng Ing, a 14-year-old school girl from Kachin State, said the Ja Seng Ing Truth Finding Committee (the Committee) in a report released today. According to eyewitnesses, Ja Seng Ing was shot and killed by Myanmar Army soldiers in Sut Ngai Yang village, Hpakant Township, Kachin State on 13 September 2012 […]

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. […]

Govt Neglecting Student Demands, Mandalay Protestors Say

MANDALAY — Student activists here said authorities are neglecting the desires of students and teachers despite a sustained campaign of public protests against the controversial National Education Law.

About 50 students from student unions of Mandalay, Sagaing, Monywa and Myingyan took to the streets of Burma’s second biggest city again on Thursday and set up camp in front of City Hall, where they held an unauthorized demonstration against the education legislation. […]

The FCO’s Human Rights Work 2013

Summary

In this report, we examine the 2013 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Report on Human Rights and Democracy (2013 Report), and highlight some areas of particular concern. Promoting human rights should be a foreign policy priority, but for this to be meaningful, we believe that the Department would benefit from the establishment of clearly defined objectives and benchmarks to measure the outcomes of all of its human rights policies, and further prominence being given to these in the Report.

Countries of concern

The FCO designated 28 countries of concern in its 2013 report, where it judged the gravity of the human rights abuses to be so severe that a particular focus should be applied. We have concentrated our attention on three of these countries: Sri Lanka, Burma, and Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Favourable trade concessions to the EU market should be removed from Sri Lanka if the Government of Sri Lanka continues to deny the OHCHR investigation team access into the country. The Government should advocate re-imposition of sanctions by the EU if there is no improvement in the human rights situation in Burma. The human rights of Israeli, Palestinian and Bedouin citizens living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories continue to be of serious concern to the UK. […]

ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to President Thein Sein

စီးပြားေရးဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသား အားလံုးအတြက္ အဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေသာ က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရးႏွင့္ ေကာင္း မြန္ေသာ အနာဂတ္မ်ားရရွိႏုိင္ရန္ ျပည္တြင္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးသည္ မျဖစ္မေနလုိအပ္ခ်က္ တစ္ခုျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတ ကုိယ္တုိင္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားစြာတြင္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာၾကား ခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။ […]

KIA ဗိုလ္ေလာင္း သင္တန္းေက်ာင္း တိုက္ခိုက္ခံရမႈအေပၚ SYCB ၏ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏုိဝင္ဘာလ၊ (၁၉)ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္၊ ခယာဘြမ္အေျခစုိက္ ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္ ေျချမန္တပ္ရင္း (၃၈၉)တပ္ဖြဲ႕မွ ဝုိင္က်ဳိင္ဘြမ္၌ တည္ရွိေနေသာ ကခ်င္လြတ္လပ္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ KIA ၏ အရာရွိ ဗိုလ္ေလာင္းသင္တန္း ေက်ာင္းအား (၁၀၅)မမျဖင့္ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ရွိရွိ ႀကံရြယ္ ပစ္ခတ္တုိက္ခုိက္မႈေၾကာင့္ သင္တန္းသား(၂၃)ဦးက်ဆုံးခဲ့ၿပီး (၂၀)ဦး ထိခိုက္ဒဏ္ရာ ရရိွသြာ ခ့ဲသည့္ […]

‘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. […]

ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံ ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ား ကြန္ဂရက္၏ အ႒မအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ညီလာခံ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၁။ ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံေက်ာင္းသား လူငယ္မ်ား ကြန္ဂရက္၏ အ႒မႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ညီလာခံကို ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ(၂၀) ရက္မွ (၂၂)ရက္ထိ (၃)ရက္တာ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ တေနရာတြင္ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ ခ့ဲသည္။ ညီလာခံသို႔ ကြန္ဂရက္အဖဲြ႕၀င္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္း(၁၁)ဖြဲ႕မွ ညီလာခံ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ မ်ားႏွင့္ ေလ့လာသူ အပါအ၀င္ စုစုေပါင္း(၃၉)ဦး တက္ေရာက္ ခ့ဲၾကပါသည္။ […]

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 […]