United Nationalities Federal Council Annual Meeting Statement

The United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) herewith issue a statement on resolution adopted by the following member and affiliate organizations in the annual meeting held from the 7th to 10th of January 2013 in a place on Thai-Burma border […]

New Peace Committee Offers Little Hope to Ethnic People

Last week, the Thein Sein government formed its new union-level peace committee comprised of a central committee and a working committee. Although the formation of the committee looks very encouraging to investors and gives another reason for Western countries to further lift sanctions, it gives little hope to the people of Kachin State who have lost both their homes and their faith in the President after he unsuccessfully and repeatedly ordered the Burma Army to halt offensives in Kachin State.

As with most of the reforms announced, much secrecy surrounds the new peace committee. There is little transparency regarding the process of its establishment and mandate. Apart from names of the central committee members, disclosed by an unofficial source, there is no other official information available about the central and working committees. The central committee headed by President Thein Sein and the 52-member working committee includes the Vice-Presidents, heads of States and Divisions, Members of Parliament, Ministers and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces […]

Statement of Extraordinary Meeting of the UNFC

The extraordinary meeting of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) attended by the UNFC central executive committee members and top leaders of the member organizations was held from May 8 to 9, 2012, at a certain place on the Thai-Burma border […]

Ceasefires Are Not Peace: KNU Lays Out Crucial Steps to Achieve Lasting Peace in Burma

In a press conference today, the Karen National Union laid out a four-step roadmap of essential stages that will be required to achieve genuine and sustainable peace in Burma […]

The Position Statement of United Nationalities Federal Council on Peace in the Country

The armed conflict, which has been going on between the non-Burman nationalities and successive regimes in power in the Union of Burma, is due to denial of equality to the non-Burman nationalities. This lack of equality is the crucial political problem underlying the politics of Burma […]

KNU Statement on Peace Talks

Recent media reports that the Karen National Union (KNU) had agreed to a ceasefire with the Burmese regime, along with several other ethnic organizations, was false. The KNU team of 3 representatives had had just an informal meeting with the regime’s Railway […]

Appeal of UNFC to the People and International Community

At the oath taking ceremony for assuming presidential duties, President U Thein Sein said that he would endeavor for national unity and the growth of the union spirit, which was true nationalism. On August 18, the government made overture for peace talk with the Union Government […]

BURMA: Third Party Mediation Crucial to Burma’s Peace Talks

By Sai Wansai, General Secretary of the exiled Shan Democratic Union

It has been a few weeks now, since the 18th August announcement by Naypyitaw inviting “national race armed groups wishing to make peace” to peace talks. So far, Naypyidaw has used its concerned state governments to contact various armed ethnic groups to make its peace overture known, through letters and also verbal communication. The positions of the non-Burman ethnic armed groups and the Naypyidaw seem incompatible or one would say “not communicating on the same wave length” […]

Potential Exists for Dialogue Towards Nationwide Ceasefire but Concrete Action Needed

On 31 August Burma’s parliament approved the creation of a peace committee aimed at ending the conflict that has been going on for decades in Burma’s ethnic states. The committee has been named the “Committee for Eternal Stability and Peace in the Union of Burma” and will have a mission to mediate between the regime and ethnic armed groups currently engaged in conflict with the regime. The committee members have not yet been identified but Dr. Aye Maung, chairman of Rakhine Nationalities Development Party and a member of parliament, suggested that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi should serve on the committee. However, at this point “it was not clear whether Suu Kyi will be allowed to participate in the committee or even whether Suu Kyi herself wanted to join or not.” […]

ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ဖိတ္ေခၚျခင္းအေပၚ အေၾကာင္းျပန္ၾကားျခင္း

ျပည္ေထာင္စု သမၼတ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၊ ျပည္ေတာင္စုအစိုးရ၏ ေၾကညာခ်က္အမွတ္ ၁။၂၀၁၁ ျဖင့္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးရန္ ဖိတ္ေခၚခ်က္ကို မိမိတို႕ ညီညႊတ္ေသာတိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးမ်ားဖက္ဒရယ္ေကာင္စီ […]