In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the Past and Hopes for the Future of Burma

A. INTRODUCTION

Since 2011, Burma has begun to emerge from 50 dark years of dictatorship. Now, under President Thein Sein’s nominally civilian government the possibility has arisen for Burma to begin rebuilding and reconciling divided segments of the nation, and to provide justice to victims for decades of human rights abuses.

Burma’s minority ethnic communities have experienced grave human rights abuse at the hands of the SPDC regime and its strong arm of the Burmese military, or Tatmadaw. In order to transition successfully towards true democracy and national reconciliation, the Burmese government must address, and act upon, the specific needs expressed by victims of past abuse, documented and expounded herein, in order to move away from the abusive culture of the past towards a united future.

Within this report you will find a detailed history of Burma’ ethnic conflict, how that conflict has been sewn into the very fabric of the SPDC regime’s ideology and governing strategy, and ways in which the Tatmadaw has implemented the regime’s strategy by crippling livelihoods, physically and mentally abusing, and destroying the security of Burma’s minority ethnic communities […]

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ စစ္တပ္က လိင္မႈဆုိင္ရာ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ဆန္႔က်င္လႈပ္ရွားမႈအား အာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ႏွိပ္ကြက္ျခင္းကုိ ရပ္တန္႔ေပးေရး ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ဇြန္လ (၁၀) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အသက္ (၅၄)ႏွစ္ရွိ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးတစ္ဦးအား ခလရ ၂၆၉ မွ တပ္မေတာ္သား တစ္ဦးက မုဒိမ္းက်င့္ ရန္ႀကိဳးစားရာ မိမိကုိယ္ကုိ ခုခံရာ တြင္ ျပင္းထန္စြာ ဒဏ္ရာရရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ေရဇြာ ျပည္သူ႔ေဆးရုံတြင္ ေဆးရုံတင္ကုသမႈ ခံလွ်က္ရွိပါသည္။ တပ္မေတာ္သားအား ဖမ္းဆီးထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ခါတုိင္း ကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ အေရးယူမႈ တကယ္မလုပ္ပဲ လြတ္သြားမည္ကုိ ေဒသခံမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ေနၾကပါသည္။ ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔သည္ ဇြန္လ (၁၅၊ ၁၆)ရက္ေန႔ တြင္ ေရဇြာ ရဲစခန္းသုိ႔ စခန္းျပခြင့္ ေတာင္းယူခဲ့ၾကရာ အပယ္ခ် ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္ […]

One Month On From Signing Sexual Violence Declaration – No Action Taken

One month on from signing the Declaration Of Commitment To End Sexual Violence In Conflict, the government of Burma appear to have taken no steps at all to implement the declaration.

Burma Campaign UK published a new briefing paper today looking at the 12 commitments the government has made to end sexual violence, and the progress made so far on each of these. Each was rated zero progress […]

HURFOM Releases the Report of “In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the Past and Hopes for the Future of Burma”

In order for Burma to successfully transition towards genuine democracy and national reconciliation, the Burmese government must address, and act upon, the specific needs expressed by victims of past human rights abuse, says the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) in a report released this morning. The 90-page report, titled In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the past and hopes for the future of Burma, details the history of human rights violations perpetrated in Burma’s ethnic minority areas, and analyzes how to repair the relationship between the government and citizens to rebuild trust and move through a peaceful transition towards a united future Burma […]

Now is the Time to Act, Sexual Violence Must End in Burma

On 10 June 2014, the Burma government prepared to sign the ‘Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict’ at the end of a three-day global summit, which aimed to “shatter the culture of impunity for sexual violence in conflict.” On the same day, a woman was brutally beaten by a Burma Army soldier during an attempted rape in Rezua, Chin State. The eyewitnesses who spoke to the Chin Human Rights Organization said that the women was held down by the soldier, while he repeatedly beat her. She was rushed to the hospital and is fortunately now in recovery.

However, this brutal event has lead to a series of demonstrations in Rezua and Matupi, Chin State this week, calling for an end to sexual violence. According to The Irrawaddy, protesters held placards that stated: “Stop raping; We are humans, not animals. We are humans, not property.” Though the organizers requested to hold the rally, the local police denied their applications and they have been arrested for staging a peaceful demonstration without permission, ironically under the Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Law.

This recent case of attempted rape is not a one-off incident of a rogue Burma Army soldier. A report produced by Women’s League of Burma (WLB) ‘Same Patterns, Same Impunity’ demonstrates how the sexual violence inflicted by the Burma Army soldiers are systematic in nature and a part of a wider structural system of politicizing women’s bodies and abusing them as instruments of war and oppression. The data collected by WLB and its members found that since the 2010 elections, over 100 cases of rape has been documented, of which 47 were brutal gang rapes and victims were as young as eight years old. Most of the documented cases were linked to Kachin and Northern Shan State where military offensives have been taking place since 2011, indicating that rape and sexual violence is in fact, used as a weapon in an attempt to demoralize the ethnic communities and to assert dominance over them […]

Women From Burma Delegation Speaks In British Parliament

A delegation of women from Burma will speak at a meeting in the British Parliament today. They will be speaking about the ongoing use of rape and sexual violence by the Burmese Army, as well as the situation in Kachin State highlighting the ongoing military offensive and humanitarian assistance for IDPs, Karen and Shan State, refugees return, the peace process and new laws restricting freedom of autonomy to choose the religion and women’s rights […]

Women Delegates at Global Summit Use Social Media Campaign To Raise Awareness

Women delegates from Burma are attending the Global Summit To End Sexual Violence In Conflict. The Summit is being held in London this week, hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Angelina Jolie.

To coincide with the summit, the Women’s League of Burma has launched a social media campaign to raise awareness of ongoing sexual violence by the Burmese Army […]

Women of Burma Attend Global Summit To End Sexual Violence In Conflict

A delegation of women from Burma have joined the Global Summit To End Sexual Violence In Conflict. The Summit is being held in London this week, hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Angelina Jolie.

The summit is part of a new initiative on preventing sexual violence being led by the British government. The summit has four main goals […]

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 […]

The Pressure is Working

Dear friend

There has just been a success in our campaign to help end rape and sexual violence by the Burmese Army.

The Burmese government has just become the 150th country to sign the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. The declaration contains practical and political commitments to end impunity, promote accountability, and provide justice and safety for victims of sexual violence in conflicts […]