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 […]

UN Secretary General Calls For Investigation Into Sexual Violence in Burma

As the United Nations Security Council prepares to hold a debate on sexual violence in conflict on Friday 25th April, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on the government of Burma to fully investigate crimes of sexual violence, and work with the United Nations […]

The Burma Army and Its Language of Aggression

Mixed messages on the peace process came out this week as the government proposed for the first time to commit a substantial amount of money into the peace process. Yet the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s inflammatory comments on the indestructibility of the Burma Army and blaming the conflict on the country’s ethnic armed groups expose the attitudes of the country’s most powerful institution. Meanwhile, a second round of formal talks between ethnic armed groups and the government’s Union Peace Working Committee on the nationwide ceasefire accord have been postponed until February as ethnic representatives further discuss the accord.

A local newspaper, True News, published comments made by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing at a briefing to officers in Naypyidaw in November 2013. The language of peace and reconciliation was conspicuously absent in his address, “We made peace agreements, but that doesn’t mean we are afraid to fight. We are afraid of no one. There is no insurgent group we cannot fight or dare not to fight.” The Burma Army chief also states that he intends to follow the path laid down by Senior General Than Shwe, the former head of the military junta that suffocated and terrorized Burma from 1988 to 2011. Burma’s underdevelopment, he adds, is “because of internal insurgents who caused conflict in the country.” […]

13-19 January: The Burma Army and Its Language of Aggression

The full text of this week’s issue of Weekly Highlights, including an analysis of current events and news highlights from inside Burma, the region and internationally, as well opinion pieces, actions, statements, press releases and reports from Burma groups and relevant actors.

Same Impunity, Same Pattern: Sexual Abuses by the Burma Army Will Not Stop Until There is a Genuine Civilian Government

Almost a decade ago, the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) denounced systematic patterns of sexual crimes committed by the Burma Army against ethnic women and demanded an end to the prevailing system of impunity. Today WLB is renewing these calls. Three years after a nominally civilian government came to power; state-sponsored sexual violence continues to threaten the lives of women in Burma.

Women of Burma endure a broad range of violations; this report focuses on sexual violence, as the most gendered crime. WLB and its member organizations have gathered documentation showing that over 100 women have been raped by the Burma Army since the elections of 2010. Due to restrictions on human rights documentation, WLB believes these are only a fraction of the actual abuses taking place […]

ဒုတိယအၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ ကခ်င္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားဖိုရမ္မွ စစ္ေျပးဒုကၡသည္မ်ားႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္

ကခ်င္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ား၏ယံုၾကည္ခ်က္သည ္ႏုိင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲႏွင့္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရာတြင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားႏွင့္ျပည္သူလူထု အသံပါ၀င္မွ သာလွ်င္စစ္မွန္သည့္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဖာ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္မည္ဟု ခုိုင္မာစြာလက္ခံထားပါသည္ […]

Cooperation Needed to End Violence Against Women of Burma

To mark 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 27 civil society organizations have come together to launch 16 days of action that will end on 10 December, International Human Rights Day. The campaign began with a public ceremony in Rangoon on 24 November that included games, music and other performances. Women’s groups called for cooperation from all people of Burma to help end all forms of violence against women by participating in a “white campaign”, wearing white shirts or accessories during the 16 days to raise awareness about the problem of violence against women.

In a Burmese-language statement, the Women’s League of Burma called for the people of Burma to work together to reduce the role of the military in the governance of the country and achieve sustainable peace. The statement outlined the many different forms of violence that women face on a daily basis: physical, mental, sexual, domestic and community violence, as well as violence carried out by the Burma Army, especially in ethnic nationality areas […]

Message for International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

On this day, 25th November 2013, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, KWO is launching a 16-Day Campaign calling for the elimination of violence against women. The awareness raising campaign will take place in the 7 Karen refugee camps and 5 districts inside Karen State. Participants will gain knowledge on how to prevent and stop violence against women, compete in speeches and debates, and participate in community activities aimed at advocating for the protection of women […]

ႏုိင္ငံတကာအမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ရပ္တန္႔ေရးေန႔ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ အေပၚတအာင္းအမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖဲြ ့အစည္း၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

A Burmese-language statement on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, highlighting the problems faced by Ta’ang women.

ႏိုုင္ငံတကာအမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈပေပ်ာက္ေရးေန ့ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

A Burmese-language statement about the importance of ending militarism and all forms of violence against women, especially those from Burma’s ethnic nationalities.