Statement of PWO and TSYO on Current Palaung Situation: English | Burmese

Analysis on Current situation at Palaung areas: English | Burmese

The Burmese government must immediately end human rights violations, including violence against women, in Palaung areas

During the past four months, the Burmese Army has been carrying out fierce military offensives in Palaung areas against the Shan State Army-North (SSA-N), Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA). The Palaung Women’s Organization and Ta’ang Students and Youth Organization (TSYO) are gravely concerned at the impacts of the fighting on local communities, who have suffered widespread abuses by the Burmese military.

Women have been raped, and young girls forced at gunpoint to guide and porter for Burmese troops. Villagers have been killed by landmines while tied up and forced to work as porters.

Thousands of people in Palaung areas have fled their homes due to attacks and human rights abuses since the renewed fighting against the KIA, TNLA and SSA-N in 2011. Over 2,000 in Mantong and Namkham, and 2,000 in Kutkhai have become internally displaced person in Mantong, Namkham and Kutkhai, and over 1,500 have been displaced in Tangyan.

Most recently, two women from Yay Pone village, Mantong Township, Northern Shan State, were raped by Burmese soldiers from LIB 502 on April 19th and 20th, 2013.

A villager from Yay Pone said: “It is very difficult for the victims to speak out about rape. They were threatened by the soldiers not to tell anyone, so the rest of the community is scared. It is very dangerous for us to speak out.”

Even though the Burmese government led by Thein Sein has been holding peace negotiations and signed ceasefire agreements with various ethnic armed groups, their troops are still carrying out military offensives, and committing widespread human rights violations in ethnic areas. The government’s peace initiatives thus appear to be just a public relations exercise in preparation for the chairmanship of ASEAN in 2014, and the upcoming 2015 elections. They are not sincere about seeking a political solution to the conflict.

PWO is very concerned for the security and lives of Palaung women, who are being threatened by the ongoing violence and military build-up in their areas. PWO strongly urges the Thein Sein government to stop all kinds of violence against women, stop all military offensives, and put an end to Burma Army impunity for crimes in ethnic areas.

PWO urges the Burmese government:

1. To stop increasing the number of Burma Army troops in ethnic areas, withdraw all troops from these areas, and stop all military offensives.

2. To immediately stop rape, torture, all kinds of violence against women and other serious human right violations by Burma Army troops.

3. To authorize the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission to investigate the human rights violations, including sexual violence, by Burma Army troops.

4. To take responsibility to ensure that Burma Army troops who have committed sexual violence and other serious crimes in ethnic areas are brought to justice.

5. To allow humanitarian agencies to freely access and assist the IDPs until it is safe for them to return home voluntarily.

Palaung Women’s Organization (PWO) and Ta’ang Student and Youth Organization (TSYO)

Ta’ang (Palaung ) Working Group

Contact persons:

(+66) 863 9520 87

(+66) 813 9702 74

(+66) 821 6481 15

Download PDF: http://bit.ly/13QN68b

“If women are not involved in the ceasefire process, and I mean at every step, every level of the process,if women are not participating, the consequences might be a longer conflict in Burma, and the fighting will not stop.” –Moon Nay Li, Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT)

The Assault of a Child

On Jan. 24^th 2013, the young girl was abducted after an evening class by the perpetrator, who pretended to know her sister and offered her a snack. After convincing the girl that her sister sent him to pick her up, he took her to a distant cemetery and held a knife to her, threatening to kill her as he raped her throughout the night.

That evening when the girl’s parents realized she had gone missing, they searched houses nearby and went to see the friend their daughter had been playing with earlier that day. Her friend told them she had gone off with a man she did not recognize and had not heard from her since.

Around noon the following day, the girl was discovered by three motorcyclists on a highway road leading to Loikaw. They witnessed the rapist trying to leave her body in an empty car and immediately contacted the police. Once taken into custody at the police station, the girl was able to identify and describe how he had abused her. The girl’s friend whom she had been with when she was abducted also came to the station and identified him as the perpetrator.

At the time when the young girl was discovered she appeared wounded on her back and face, as if beaten and cut with a knife, and was immediately sent to the hospital for evaluation. The doctor’s report stated that she was terrified and unable to walk when she arrived, and had suffered bruising to the cervix and vaginal tearing from the rape. She remained in the hospital for three days and required medical treatment for a month following the attack.

Since the attack the girl has been staying at the WLB center and was provided with a trip to see a gynecologist in the first week of March, as well as ongoing counseling sessions. Recently she requested to leave the shelter but is afraid to return home or go anywhere near Hpruso. She is still traumatized, but wishes to be placed in another town where she can attend school once again.

The perpetrator of this heinous sexual assault was kept in jail after the incident until being transferred to city court to be tried for the rape case. On March 15^th he was determined guilty and convicted of child abduction, battery, and rape. He now faces a lifetime sentence in Loikaw prison.

The Town’s Response

Rape and sexual assault cases are not uncommon in Hpruso, mainly due to the proximity of an army base nearby. The military camp has faced many issues from the lack of care and support they offer soldiers, who then take out their aggression on townspeople. Protestors are now demanding the army take responsibility for their negligence and either move the camp farther out of town or pay compensation funds of 5 million kyat.

The rape of this young girl is precedent-setting because it is the first time that the issue of the military camp’s neglect and violence against women has been taken to court. The village as a whole supports measures being taken against the camp, and the Women Against Violence (WAV) program is going to provide the money to apply for a court order against them.

In order to legally protest in Burma, an approval permit is required. After speaking with the police and being denied the permit after three attempts, demonstrators decided to go ahead without permission. Protesting in Hpruso against the army camp has been ongoing, although so far there has been no response from the military.

]]> http://womenofburma.org/rape-of-10-year-old-girl-causes-outrage/feed/ 0 http://womenofburma.org/wlb-new-year-appeal-letter-thein-sein-government-and-all-parties-to-work-towards-genuine-peace/ http://womenofburma.org/wlb-new-year-appeal-letter-thein-sein-government-and-all-parties-to-work-towards-genuine-peace/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 06:55:52 +0000 wlb-idr http://womenofburma.org/?p=2804 PDF: English

PDF: Burmese

Women’s League of Burma (WLB) wishes for the people of Burma to be free from danger and violations of their rights and their dignity, and to gain eternal peace, commencing from this Burmese New Year of 1375.

Today, Burma is transitioning from a dictatorship to a system of parliamentary democracy. Undoubtedly, some positive changes have occurred but they have not gone far enough in achieving the development of a true democratic state. Therefore, all parties, including President Thein Sein’s government, other political and democratic forces and all citizens of Burma need to be aware of and pay attention to this.

Importantly, all parties and stakeholders in Burma must pay heed to challenges and the actions of nondemocratic forces that threatens to obstruct these sensitive transitional political reforms and the ongoing peace process.

We believe that all parties and stakeholders, including the Thein Sein government, political parties, the ethnic armed groups and citizens of Burma, need to join hands to work together towards the achievement of truth reforms and genuine, lasting, peace. All parties must overcome their differences so that Burma’s political challenges will be solved with political, and not violent, means.

Although some positive changes have occurred in the country, there are concerns with regards to the continued imprisonment of political prisoners, the detentions of activists in violation of the rule of law, the commencement of development projects in violation of human rights and the continuation of other human rights abuses, such as forced displacement and illegal land confiscations, and sexual violence against women and girls.

We are very concerned about the failure of President Thein Sein’s government’s peace negotiations to reach nation-wide ceasefire, and about the rumors regarding the forced reparation of refugees and Internationally Displaced Persons. Also, people are frustrated with the current government and the ruling party for its failures to bring the perpetrators of recent racial and religious riots in Burma to justice.

When the people of Burma continue to suffer from these abuses of their human rights and as victims of the ongoing civil war, President Thein Sein’s government and other stakeholders such as the Burma army, the ethnic armed groups, political activists and the people of Burma must build trust in order to achieve a lasting, genuine peace and true democratic development. It is imperative that President Thein Sein’s government adheres to democratic principles in order to enable all stakeholders to work towards sustainable peace and prosperity in Burma.

The WLB therefore urges the President Thein Sein government and the Burma army, the ethnic armed groups, all political parties, activists and citizens of Burma to work peacefully together to leverage the momentum for peace and democracy. We also urge all stakeholders in Burma to include women from all ethnic groups at all levels of the peace process in order to achieve a genuine and lasting peace.

By Women’s League of Burma (WLB) Member organizations:

Burmese Women’s Union (BWU)

Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT)

Karen Women’s Organization (KWO)

Karenni National Women’s Organization (KNOW)

Kayan Women’s Organization (KyWO)

Kuki Women Human Rights Organization (KWHRO)

Lahu Women’s Organization (LWO)

Palaung Women’s Organization (PWO)

Pa-O Women’s Union (PWO)

Rakhiang Women’s Union (RWU)

Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN)

Tayoy Women’s Union (TWU)

Women’s Rights & Welfare Association of Burma (WRWAB)

ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးပန္ၾကားခ်က္

ရက္စြဲ။   ။ ၁၀ရက္၊  ဧၿပီလ၊ ၂၀၁၃ခုႏွစ္

PDF: Burmese

PDF: English

ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၃၇၅ ခုႏွစ္မွသည္ ေနာင္ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ကမၻာတည္သည့္ကာလတေလွ်ာက္လံုးျမန္မာျပည္သူအေပါင္း  ေဘး အႏၱရာယ္ခပ္သိမ္းကင္းၿငိမ္း၍  ထာ၀ရၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းႏိုင္ၾကပါေစေၾကာင္းႏွစ္ေဟာင္းကုန္ဆံုး၍ ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးမည့္ ယခုအခါသမယ တြင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) မွဆုေတာင္းေမတၱာပို႔သအပ္ပါသည္။

ယေန႔ အခ်ိန္ကာလ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ား တိုက္ရိုက္ဖိႏွိပ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သည့္အေျခအေနမွဒီမိုကေရစီ အသြင္ေဆာင္ ေသာ ပါလီမန္စနစ္ျဖင့္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သည့္သ႑န္သို႔ကူးေျပာင္းလာေနၿပီျဖစ္သည္ကို မလြဲမေသြ လက္ခံေနၾကရေပသည္။ ထိုသို႔ လက္ခံေနရေသာ္လည္း ဘက္ေပါင္းစံုမွေသခ်ာစြာသံုးသပ္ၾကည့္ရလွ်င္ စစ္မွန္သည့္ တိုးတက္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈအဆင့္သို႔ မတက္ လွမ္းႏိုင္ေသးသည္ကို လက္ရွိအစိုးရအပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအင္အားစုမ်ား၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီအင္အားစုမ်ားႏွင့္ ျပည္သူတရပ္လံုးမွ အထူး အေလးထား သတိမူရန္ လိုအပ္ေပသည္။

တဖက္တြင္ မိမိတို႔ႏိုင္ငံသည္ ယခုအေျပာင္းအလဲႏွင့္အတူ အတိမ္းအေစာင္း အပြန္းအပဲ႔မခံႏိုင္ေသာ အေနအထားမ်ားကို ထည့္ သြင္းစဥ္းစား၍ အႏွစ္သာရရွိေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္ေပၚတိုးတက္မႈႏွင့္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးျဖစ္စဥ္အတြက္ အဟန္႔အတားျဖစ္ေစမည့္ မည္ သည့္ ပေယာဂ၊ မည္သည့္အခက္အခဲႏွင့္အႏၱရာယ္တို႔ကိုမဆို သတိႀကီးစြာထားရန္ လိုအပ္ေနသည္ကို မိမိတို႔ နားလည္သည္။ လက္ရွိ ဦးသိန္းစိန္အစိုးရအပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္ အဖဲြ႕အစည္းမ်ားႏွင့္ အျခား ေသာ နယ္ပယ္က႑အသီးသီးရွိ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလိုလားသူ ျပည္သူလူထုတရပ္လံုးမွ အတူတကြလက္တြဲ၍ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြး ေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းမွ မေသြဖီသြားေစရန္လည္း ႀကိဳးစားၾကရမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းကိုလည္း လက္ခံယံုၾကည္သည္။ သက္ဆိုင္သူမ်ား အားလံုးမွ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးလမ္းေၾကာင္းတြင္ ပိတ္ဆို႔ေနေသာ အၾကပ္အတည္းမ်ားကို ေက်ာ္လႊားႏိုင္ရန္ အတူတကြ ၀ိုင္း၀န္း ပူးေပါင္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္မွသာႏိုင္ငံေရးျပႆနာကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ ေျဖရွင္းႏိုင္မည့္ ျဖစ္စဥ္အထိ တက္လွမ္းႏိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

ႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း လြတ္လပ္မႈရွိေနသေယာင္ ယူဆရေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအားအကန္႔အသတ္ျဖင့္သာ လႊတ္ေပး ေနျခင္း၊ တက္ၾကြလႈပ္ရွားသူတခ်ိဳ႕အား ဥပေဒမဲ႔ ဖမ္းဆီးေနမႈမ်ား ရွိေနေသးျခင္း၊ လူထုသေဘာထားမပါေသာ ဖြ႔ံၿဖိဳးေရးစီမံကိန္း

လုပ္ငန္းႀကီးမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အရပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ား၏ အသက္အိုးအိမ္စည္းစိမ္မ်ားကို ထိပါးေနသည့္လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ မႈႀကီးမ်ား၊ ျပည္သူတို႔၏ဘ၀ကို အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ထိုးႏွက္ေနသည့္ ေျမသိမ္းယာသိမ္းလုပ္ရပ္မ်ားအျပင္ အျခားေသာ လြတ္လပ္ ခြင့္မ်ားအတြက္  ကန္႔သတ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈမ်ားမ်ားစြာရွိေနဆဲျဖစ္သည္။

ျပည္တြင္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ လက္ရွိအစိုးရမွ ႀကိဳးစားလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနေသာ္ျငားလည္း တျပည္လံုးအတိုင္းအတာေဆာင္သည့္ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး ျဖစ္စဥ္အဆင့္ ေရာက္ရွိရန္ပင္ ေရရာေသခ်ာမႈမ်ား မေတြ႔ရွိရျခင္းသည္ စစ္မွန္ေသာျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး လမ္း ေၾကာင္းေပၚေရာက္ႏိုင္ရန္ အလားအလာအတြက္ ေမးခြန္းမ်ားစြာရွိေနေပေသးသည္။ အျခားတဖက္တြင္လည္း နယ္စပ္ဒုကၡ သည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္းဌာေနမဲ႔ ေျပာင္းေရြ႕ေနထိုင္သူမ်ားအတြက္ စနစ္တက် စီစဥ္ျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ား မရွိေသးဘဲ ၄င္းတို႔ ဆႏၵမပါ ေသာ အတင္းအဓမၼ ျပန္လည္ေနရာခ်ထားေရးတို႔ကို စတင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ရန္ႀကိဳတင္ျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းက သံသယအသစ္မ်ားကို ျဖစ္ေပၚေစပါသည္။

တအံုေႏြးေႏြးျဖစ္ေနေသာ ထိုအေနအထားမ်ားၾကားမွ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း ဘာသာေရးႏွင့္လူမ်ိဳးေရးပဋိပကၡအျဖစ္ ထင္ေယာင္ ထင္မွားျဖစ္ေစမည့္ ေသြးထိုးလႈံ႕ေဆာ္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာသည့္လူအုပ္စုမ်ားအၾကား မီးရႈိ႕တိုက္ခိုက္မႈမ်ား၊ အၾကမ္းဖက္ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ား အရွိန္ျပင္းစြာျဖစ္ေပၚလာရျခင္း၊အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ား၏ ျဖစ္စဥ္တေလွ်ာက္ တားဆီးကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္းမႈ လြန္စြာ အားနည္းျခင္း၊ က်ဴးလြန္သူမ်ားအား ေသခ်ာစြာ မေဖာ္ထုတ္ႏိုင္ျခင္းတို႕ေၾကာင့္ လက္ရွိအစိုးရအေပၚ အားမလိုအားမရ ျဖစ္မႈႏွင့္ တရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးမႈအတြက္လည္း ေမးခြန္းမ်ားစြာ ျဖစ္ေပၚလ်က္ရွိသည္။

ထိုသို႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီ၏ အႏွစ္သာရမွ ေသြဖီေသာ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မႈမ်ား၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖါက္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ ဆက္ လက္ျဖစ္ပြါးေနျခင္း၊ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး တည္ေဆာက္မႈအတြက္ သံသယျဖစ္ဖြယ္ရာ အေနအထားမ်ားတို႔ေၾကာင့္ အဓိက သက္ဆိုင္ သူမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကသည့္ လက္ရွိအစိုးရႏွင့္ တပ္မေတာ္၊တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ အင္အားစုမ်ားအပါအ၀င္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ အရပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ားအၾကားတြင္ အျပည့္အ၀ ယံုၾကည္မႈတည္ေဆာက္ႏိုင္ဦးမည္ မဟုတ္ေပ။ သက္ဆိုင္သူမ်ားအၾကား အျပန္အလွန္ ယံုၾကည္မႈ မရွိႏိုင္ပါကမွန္ကန္ေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးတို႔အတြက္ ေရွ႕တိုးေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္မ်ားစြာခက္ခဲၾကန္႔ၾကာေနဦးမည္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု မိမိတို႔အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္မွ သံုးသပ္သည္။

သို႔ျဖစ္၍ လက္ရွိအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အႏွစ္သာရမွ ေသြဖီေသာ လုပ္ရပ္မ်ားကိုလံုး၀ေရွာင္ရွားသင့္ေနၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာဆိုလိုသည္။ သို႔မွသာ သက္ဆိုင္သူမ်ားအၾကားအျပည့့္အ၀ ယံုၾကည္မႈရွိၿပီး စစ္မွန္ေသာ ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ ေရရွည္ တည္တ့ံခိုင္ၿမဲသည့္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးတို႔အတြက္ ထိေရာက္စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားႏိုင္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။ 

ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ လက္ရွိအစိုးရႏွင့္ တပ္မေတာ္၊ လက္နက္ကိုင္အင္အားစုမ်ားအပါအ၀င္ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၊ တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ ရွားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ အရပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ားအားလံုးမွ ဘက္ေပါင္းစံုျပည္သူတရပ္လံုး၏ ဘ၀လံုၿခံဳမႈႏွင့္ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာယာမႈရရွိေစရန္ အတြက္ ယခု ထက္ပိုေသာအရွိန္အဟုန္ႏွင့္ အေကာင္အထည္ေပၚလာေစေရးအတြက္ အတူတကြ ၀ိုင္း၀န္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ၾကပါရန္တိုက္တြန္းပန္ၾကားအပ္ပါသည္။

နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္အေနျဖင့္ - ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလူဦးေရ၏ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္း တ၀က္ေက်ာ္ရွိေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးေပါင္းစံုအမ်ိဳးသမီးထုအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္အဆင့္တိုင္းတြင္ပိုမိုပါ၀င္လာႏိုင္ေစေရးကို တိုးျမႇင့္လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားၾကရန္လည္း မဂၤလာရွိေသာ ဤႏွစ္သစ္အခါသမယတြင္ဆႏၵျပဳတိုက္တြန္း ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ)

အဖြဲ႔၀င္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား

ျမန္မာ့အမ်ဳိးသမီးသမဂၢ

ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး (ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ)

ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ကရင္နီအမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ကယန္းအမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ကူကီးအမ်ဳိးသမီးဆိုင္ရာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအစည္းအရုံး

လားဟူအမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ပေလာင္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ပအို၀္းအမ်ဳိးသမီးသမဂၢ

ရခိုင္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး

ရွမ္းအမ်ဳိးသမီးေရးရာ ဆက္သြယ္လႈပ္ရွားေဆာင္ရြက္ေရး အသင္း

ထား၀ယ္အမ်ဳိးသမီးသမဂၢ

ျမန္မာ့အမ်ဳိးသမီးေရးရာႏွင့္ အခြင္းအေရးမ်ားဆိုင္ရာ ဆက္သြယ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေရး အဖဲြ႔

Download Press Release PDF: Burmese or English

A seaside fishing village of over 15 houses was ordered to move out last week to make way for the planned Dawei Deep Sea Port.

Residents of Charkhin Beach village, which has been declared an “illegal” settlement, received an official order on March 20 to move out within three days or face prosecution. However, most of the villagers are refusing to move, as they rely on fishing in the sea as their main livelihood.

Charkhin Beach village is the first to be forcibly relocated for the Dawei Deep Sea Port and Industrial Zone project, which will displace over 30,000 people. The Charkhin Beach residents are being forced out without compensation. They are extremely poor, and fish in the dry season, but migrate elsewhere to do wage labour during the rainy season.

The written order from the Htein Gyi village tract authorities cited existing laws as a basis for the eviction, on the grounds that the Charkhin Beach residents are not “permanent” residents, even though they have lived there for over 20 years.

“It’s shocking that this multi-billion dollar project is starting by forcing out the poorest villagers without any consideration for their future,” said Su Su Swe of the Tavoyan Women’s Union. “This is a clear warning of how the project will proceed. It is completely unfair, without free consent of local people, and in violation of indigenous rights.”

The Dawei Special Economic Zone is being developed under an agreement between the Thai and Burmese governments. Italian-Thai Development Plc (ITD) has been granted a 75-year land lease to develop a deep sea port, industrial estate and transborder corridor link.

Contact persons:

Su Su Swe ( General Secretary)

+ 668 2742 3045

Lwin Lwin Hlaing (Joint General Secretary 1)

+ 959 45099 4980

For the full text of the eviction order, see:

Tavoyan Voice (English translation or original order letter in Burmese)

The Myanmar central government has consistently denied its soldiers have systematically used rape as a weapon of war against ethnic minorities. But according to numerous reports, despite recent political reforms, Myanmar’s army has continued to rape, torture and kill civilians of the ethnic minorities.

In 2011, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi said: ”Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.”

President Thein Sein has denied the allegations, instead stating in October 2012 that, ”our military is very disciplined, there is no reason for the military to commit acts of rape or murder”. As long as the central government does not acknowledge the gross human rights violations systematically committed by its military, there will be no genuine peace between the Myanmar people and the ethnic minorities.

There have been countless reports of the Myanmar army’s systematic use of rape against ethnic women. These reports, including from the Karen Women’s Organsation (KWO), Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN), and the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT), as well as the United Nations and international non-government organisations, clearly indicate that rape is being systematically used as an instrument of war against all ethnic minorities, and has at least the tacit approval of higher authorities in the Myanmar government.

A more recent report documenting systematic rape came out in September last year. ”State Terror in the Kachin Hills”, written by the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT), details the experiences of 26 civilians, including women and children, who suffered from abuse by the Myanmar military since last September. KWAT has also reported at least 64 cases of rape and sexual assault in Kachin State. However, the organisation has said that there could be many more cases, but that NGOs were unable to make contact with many rural areas and villages under government control.

Previous reports of rape being used as a tool of war include ”Walking amongst sharp knives”, ”State of terror”, and ”Shattering silences” by the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO) in 2010, 2007 and 2004 respectively.

One of the more famous reports, ”Licence to rape”, published by the Shan Women’s Action Network in 2002 clearly demonstrated that the Myanmar military is systematically using rape as an instrument of war and for ethnic purification.

The reports show that these crimes are being committed by senior military officers, and even though Myanmar is a signatory to the 1949 Geneva Convention, there are no indications the government has taken any initiatives to enforce international humanitarian laws amongst its army.

Indeed there are very few known cases of military personnel being punished for such acts.

The fact that rape is occurring in Myanmar military bases is evidence that this horrific crime has become widespread practice. The numerous reports make clear that rape is used by the Myanmar army to terrorise, intimidate and break the will of ethnic peoples.

This issue goes beyond the issue of conflict between the armed groups and the Myanmar military, and treating the issue through such a narrow lens will not help bring an end to the suffering of hundreds of women living in conflict-affected areas.

For example, a report in 2005 completed by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland and the Woman and Child Rights Foundation Project documented the use of rape by the Myanmar army against ethnic women in Mon state, despite a 10-year ceasefire agreement in that area. Rape is also widespread because there are no enforcement mechanisms in place, village women are vulnerable, and according to documentary evidence, it’s because of a government policy of ethnic purification.

In mid-2012 the National Human Rights Commission reported claims of abuses against civilians in Kachin state, including the systematic use of rape by the army. However, the commission has been severely criticised by numerous local and international organisations for failing to challenge the government on such sensitive issues, its lack of transparency and reporting, and the lack of substantive action it has taken. Its most recent ”report” on human rights violations by the military stated that, ”The commission does not wish to make any comment on the interrogation of the suspects by security forces for security reasons and on their prosecution in accordance with the law”.

Special Rapporteur to the UN, Tomas Ojea Quintana, noted the seriousness of the situation in ethnic areas in his special report of March 2013, highlighting ongoing abuses such as attacks against civilian populations, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence. The report also noted the large gap between reform at the top and implementation on the ground.

So what can be done to end sexual violence in conflict-affected zones? Several steps can be taken. According to Blooming Night Zan, a member of the KWO Central Committee, the KNU has drafted a code of conduct for the proper treatment of women. In an interview, she said that both sides need to understand what the code of conduct is, and what constitutes violence and abuse against women specifically. The next step after the ceasefire will be to work with the NGOs to educate both sides about the proper conduct of soldiers, and make sure there is a system of accountability by NGOs and the Myanmar government itself.

Thein Sein’s government cannot credibly claim that Myanmar is becoming more democratic whilst such abuses against ethnic groups continue unchecked and unpunished.

True, fundamental change in civilian control of the military, and Myanmar military culture will take time, but action needs to be taken as soon as possible. If not, foreign governments with their business and development projects in Myanmar will only be approving and rewarding the suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Christine Leah is a research analyst on military and strategic issues in Asia; Nan Paw Gay is a founding member of www.karennews.org

Read the letter sent to member states participating in negotiations at the Commission below or download a PDF version.

March 13, 2013

RE: Uphold Women’s Rights at 57th Commission on the Status of Women

Dear Delegate,

We, the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, call on you as a member state taking part in the 57th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, to uphold international obligations towards women’s rights and conclude the session with a strong communiqué that will pave the way for accelerated action to end gender violence.

Members from the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, including Nobel Peace Laureate and Campaign Co-Chair Jody Williams, joined allies in New York last week to call on member states for strong action to stop rape in conflict.

As negotiations towards a final outcome enter the second and final week, we are alarmed that a number of states are using the Commission to reverse hard-won progress the global community has made in the past couple of decades to eliminate violence against women.

At a very minimum, the Commission on the Status of Women must uphold the universally agreed-upon language on women’s rights including CEDAW, the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).

The Campaign is deeply concerned about efforts to remove reference to language specific to these international agreements on women’s rights from the Commission’s final documents. In particular, certain states adamantly claim that religious or cultural traditions should take precedent over ending violence against women. As an international Campaign with members in more than 125 countries, we stress that religion or culture must never be used as an excuse to perpetuate gender violence.

Furthermore, we are concerned that some states are again making sexual and reproductive rights a point of contention, and equally disturbing, are objecting to language that will define rape to include forced sexual acts with a partner.

Gender violence is a global epidemic, ranging from domestic violence to systematic rape in conflict. To end a UN Commission intended to address gaps in current responses to gender violence with weakened global cooperation to end violence against women, sends a message to perpetrators that they can continue their crimes with impunity. Survivors deserve more from the international community.

It is imperative that the international community reaffirm its commitment to women’s rights. We remind you that current discussion of new targets for when the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015 is ongoing, and the statement from the Commission will impact this process.

We urgently call on member states of the Commission to show strong leadership to prevent violence against women and rape in conflict, to protect women and girls from violence, including through provision of needed psychosocial and medical services, and to provide survivors with access to comprehensive justice mechanisms including prosecution of perpetrators.

In order to advance both national and international justice mechanisms to address serious crimes of gender violence, we call on you to support the adoption of an amendment proposed by Liechtenstein that would further justice for survivors by supporting the complementary and necessary work of the International Criminal Court.

As thousands of women and survivors of gender violence have gathered in New York for this historic moment as the United Nations prioritizes ending violence against women, and millions more around the globe watch intently, we hope you will listen to our collective call for action and emerge with a final statement that provides a clear path of action to end the epidemic.

Sincerely,

Jody Williams
Nobel Peace Prize, 1997
Co-Chair, International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict
Chair, Nobel Women’s Initiative

Autonomous Women’s Center, Serbia
Association for Women’s Rights in Development
Catholics for Choice
Fonds pour les Femmes Congolaises, Democratic Republic of Congo
Global Fund for Women, United States
Human Rights Watch, United States
Infoteka, Bosnia & Herzegovina
JASS Just Associates
Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas, Colombia
Observatorio Genero Democracia y Derechos Humanos, Colombia
Physicians for Human Rights, United States
Solidarité Féminine pour la Paix et le Développement Intégral, Democratic Republic of Congo
Sonke Gender Justice, South Africa
V-Day
Women’s League of Burma
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege Project
Women’s Network Croatia
World Pulse

Working outside Burma for positive changes inside is a fundamental and imperative aspect of effective documentation and campaigning. But now, many members of the exile community — including staff of Women’s League of Burma and other women’s organizations — are feeling the pressure to return. Zi Wo reports on how these activists are confronting the push…

Saw San Nyreim Thu’s office is in an ordinary double-storey house in Chiang Mai. An overgrown mango tree towers over the metal gate, a cat slinks in between the bars. The house is furnished with some computers and furniture — just enough for the dozen or so staff members to organize peace-building talks between non-state armed groups and the Burmese government, to run political education programs for hundreds of women, and to produce campaign films about crimes against humanity.

Working outside Burma for changes inside is a concept confusing to many, but not so for active members of the exile/diaspora community, such as the staff of Women’s League of Burma (WLB).

“We can be more vocal. We can organize trainings on sensitive topics like constitutional processes and federalism,” explains Saw San Nyreim Thu. Having worked on human rights for 12 years, the 34-year-old joint-general secretary of WLB knows that equitable development and sustainable peace can be achieved only through structural changes using a rights-based approach. She herself has witnessed that the small expansion of advocacy space is still far from sufficient.

Like other WLB staff, mostly refugees who have fled from civil war, political persecution, and economic deprivation, Saw San Nyreim Thu wishes to do her work in her country. She wants to be part of the changes as they happen, and to take care of her ailing 90-year-old father. But to work effectively against human rights abuses, she believes she must stay in border areas.

“Unless there is more political freedom and better infrastructure, I can’t return home.”

Donors also want work to be done in Burma – and they want it now. All the workers from women community-based organizations (CBOs) in Thailand told me that donors have directly or indirectly asked them to relocate to Burma, and to register for legal status. An observer commented that “sympathetic” donors have allowed “one to two years” for this to happen.

Based on recent legislative and political changes, it seems that cross-border groups like WLB and its 13 member organizations (including Karen, Kachin, Lahu, Shan, and other women’s groups) should no longer need to secretly work ‘underground’ inside Burma, but their caution has served them well.

Burma, deprived of international contact for nearly half a century, is severely handicapped by the lack of transparent and just mechanisms. Repeal of censorship laws and the establishment of a Rule of Law committee do not equate a stable, functioning democratic system that prizes equality.

May Htet Aung, an activist based in Rangoon, noted increased activities related to political and human rights issues. However, the government’s arbitrary treatment of CBOs engaging with such issues has led to self-censorship, and groups that desire to toe the line create yet more amiguity.

Groups that choose to register — if they can afford the prohibitive fees — are conscious of this game. Some humanitarian and development INGOs and donors working in Burma take a “non-confrontational” approach to advocacy in order to operate in the country without difficulties. For example, Nant Thanda Aung’s Karen Women’s Action Group may finally be able to register now that it has changed its name to “Kayin Women’s Empowerment Group”, explaining that Burmans prefer to use ‘Kayin’ over ‘Karen’, and “‘action’ sounded as if the group is ready to fight”.

May Htet Aung added wryly, “Myanmar Egress did a workshop on the constitution — but it was only about how to accept it!” The repressive 2008 constitution remains rejected by most civil society groups. Saw San Nyreim Thu observed that federalism, the top demand of ethnic groups, is also conspicuously missing from discussions and activities in Rangoon.

“‘Don’t come back first’,” Khin Ohmar, a leader of Burmese Women’s Union and current coordinator of Burma Partnership, quoted what in-country CBOs are telling her. “They say, ‘We don’t trust these guys [the government] yet. Until the next elections [in 2015], you guys should stay on the border. Keep on being vocal, because we can’t.’” Knowing their constraints, they dislike and are fearful of being showcased as Burma’s progress, and of being co-opted.

Still, the activists are quick to seize any opportunity they can. Saw San Nyreim Thu led a delegation to Rangoon last December, the first official visit since the group was founded in 1999. They discussed their aim to have a fairer representation of women in the Parliament, peace talks, and civil society.

Pouring funds into a unitary government structure lacking democratic and transparent mechanisms is playing with fire, as experiences in countries such as Cambodia have shown. There is also the danger of legitimizing and strengthening a regime dominated by Burman elites from the former military junta.

United Nations agencies, which have always worked with the consent of the Burmese government, illustrate the downfall of working with formal institutions in Burma. Coordinator at Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT) Moon Nay Li recalls a program in Kachin State that was implemented by Burmans from Rangoon and conducted in Burmese, a second language to the local population. She pointed out that there is a wide availability of skilled Kachin people capable of conducting such programs, but local hires were limited to low-level tasks.

Officially working inside comes with many limitations and difficulties that cross-border groups do not experience. For years, the cross-border women’s groups have been able to document human rights abuses in the country, and have been successful in raising awareness of, and solidifying support for, Burma.

Until last year, KWAT was the only group with fulltime field workers documenting rape, torture, and other abuses in Kachin State. Moon Nay Li explained that in-country groups lack experience and knowledge about human rights documentation.

“We initially wanted to focus on women-related abuses only, like sexual violence, but when we found there were no other groups, we knew we had to document everything we saw on the ground.”

The outside groups ensure that their access to wider resources and freedoms benefits those inside by bringing women from disparate areas of Burma together in border areas to participate in empowerment and capacity-building workshops, thereby increasing the political participation of women throughout the country.

Khin Ohmar, surprised by an observer’s wonder at the dynamic civil society now seen in Rangoon, pointed out that the perseverance of the cross-border movement helped create the current space in Burma.

“This is not magic! Not that the border groups can take full credit, but they have been working on capacity-building for a long time.”

The cross-border groups also provide assistance for refugees from Burma, a burden that has increased since aid has been slashed dramatically by major donors such as the Norwegian government since as early as 2012. Even if the groups wanted to, they are unable to ignore the border’s needs to pull out of Thailand. For now, many have decided on having both in-country and cross-border activities.

However, their dedication and prudence has surprisingly been met with aggression. An observer commented that cross-border groups are being called names (“peace spoilers”, “aren’t able to see anything good in what’s happening”) and are being “totally vilified”. Several groups have been accused of trying to ensure their legitimacy and survival by overlooking the positive reforms of President Thein Sein’s nominally-civilian government.

The reality is that staff members of cross-border groups do not enjoy easy lifestyles or bountiful perks. The majority lack legal documentation and risk being harrassed, arrested, or even deported by Thai police at any time. Most have not seen their families in many years. They have no insurance, and similar work in Rangoon reportedly receives twice to thrice the salary compared to that in border areas.

“Nobody intends to keep struggling in neighboring countries for good,” says co-founder of Burmese Women’s Union Mi Sue Pwint. “Most people in exile are undocumented and nobody wants to settle down in such unstable places.”

Khin Ohmar can see why donors wish to work in-country, saying, “I think I can understand. They want to be more effective in their support. But for organizations working on democracy, we have to be strategic and look at the long-term.”

The desires are clear: CBOs within and without need outspoken advocacy against human rights abuses in the country. To continue building a strong civic society, the authenticity and independence of the CBOs must not be threatened, and the real value of being located on the border must not be overlooked over in search of other pastures.

As activists in Burma explained to Khin Ohmar, “We don’t want to be trapped at a dead end.”

Report by Zi Wo exclusively for The Best Friend. Zi, a Singaporean national, has been volunteering with Burmese women’s groups in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai since 2012. Her photos and stories documenting women’s lives in Burma will be exhibited at Borderline Gallery in Mae Sot in the near future.

Download Press Release PDF: English

ရက္စဲြ။ ။၂၀၁၃ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလ (၂၇)ရက္
အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအဖဲြ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) သည္ ၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္၊ ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလ (၂၂) ရက္မွ (၂၅) ရက္ေန႕အထိ အဖဲြ႕၀င္အဖဲြ႕အစည္းမ်ားမွ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား၊ အၾကံေပးအဖဲြ႕၀င္မ်ား၊ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးအဖြဲ ့ႏွင့္ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္တာ၀န္ခံမ်ား စုစုေပါင္း (၅၄) ဦးပါ၀င္ေသာ သတၱမအႀကိမ္ညီလာခံကို ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။

ညီလာခံတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္အစီရင္ခံစာမ်ားႏွင့္ လုပ္ငန္းအစီရင္ခံစာမ်ားကို တင္ျပခဲ့ၾကၿပီး ေရွ႕ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားကို ေဆြးေႏြးၾကကာ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္တဦးစီပါ၀င္ေသာ သဘာပတိအဖဲြ႕ ဖဲြ႕စည္းျခင္းႏွင့္ သတၱမအႀကိမ္ညီလာခံသက္တမ္း အတြက္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးအဖဲြ႔ကို ေရြးခ်ယ္တင္ေျမာက္ျခင္း တို႔ကို ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအဖဲြ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) သည္ လက္ရွိဦးသိန္းစိန္အစိုးရမွ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအရ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ား စတင္လုပ္ ေဆာင္ေနသည္ကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳသည္။ ဤႏိုင္ငံေရးျဖစ္ထြန္းမႈေအာက္တြင္ ယာယီ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာတူ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ေနသည္ႏွင့္ တၿပိဳင္နက္တည္းတြင္ စစ္လက္နက္အင္အားမ်ား တိုးခ်ဲ႕ေနျခင္း၊ စစ္စခန္းမ်ား အခိုင္အမာတည္ေဆာက္ေနျခင္း စသည္တို႔က တႏိုင္ငံလံုးအတိုင္းအတာေဆာင္သည့္ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးအဆင့္သို႕ တက္လွမ္းႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ အတားအဆီးမ်ားျဖစ္ေနသည္ကိုေတြ႕ရွိရၿပီး ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကိုဦးတည္သည့္ အႏွစ္သာရ ျပည့္၀ ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမ်ား စတင္ႏိုင္မည့္ အလားအလာေကာင္းမ်ားလည္း လြန္စြာလိုအပ္လွ်က္ရွိေနသည္။

တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားလ်က္ရွိေနေသာ ျပင္းထန္သည့္ စစ္ပဲြမ်ား၊ လ်င္ျမန္စြာ အေကာင္ အထည္ေဖာ္လ်က္ ရွိေသာ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး စီမံကိန္းမ်ား၊ မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးစိုက္ပ်ဳိးထုတ္လုပ္ျဖန္႕ခ်ိသံုးစဲြမႈမ်ား၊ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ လိင္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ားအပါအ၀င္ လူသားျဖစ္မႈကို ဆန္႔က်င္သည့္ စစ္ရာဇ၀တ္မႈမ်ား ကာလၾကာရွည္စြာျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့မႈမ်ား၏ ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲျပႆနာမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္လက္ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္ခြင့္ျပဳေနမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ လူထုအေျခအေနသည္ ဆိုး၀ါးေနဆဲျဖစ္ သည္ဟု သံုးသပ္ပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအား တျဖည္းျဖည္း လႊတ္ေပးလ်က္ရွိေသာ္လည္း အားလံုးလႊတ္ ေျမာက္ျခင္းမရွိေသးဘဲ ေျမသိမ္းယာသိမ္း ျပႆနာမ်ားႏွင့္ ယေန႔အထိျဖစ္ေပၚလ်က္ရွိေသာ အၾကမ္းဖက္ၿဖိဳခြဲမႈမ်ား၊ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကို ဥပေဒအရ အကာအကြယ္ ေပးႏိုင္မႈမ်ား၊ ထိေရာက္ ေသာ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးႏိုင္မႈ အခြင့္ အလမ္းမ်ား လြန္စြာနည္းပါးလ်က္ရွိေနေသးသည္။

ထိုသို႕ေသာ အေျခအေနမ်ားေအာက္တြင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအဖဲြ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) အေနျဖင့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါ၀င္မႈ တိုးျမွင့္ႏိုင္မည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးစြမ္းရည္ျမွင့္တင္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားကို ေနရာေဒသအသီးသီးတြင္ ဆက္လက္လုပ္ေဆာင္ သြားမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး တၿပိဳင္နက္တည္းတြင္ လက္ရွိၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ား အရွိန္ျမွင့္ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ညိွႏိႈင္း ေဆြးေႏြးျခင္း၊ အဆိုျပဳျခင္း၊ တိုက္တြန္းျခင္း၊ စည္းရံုးလႈ႕ံေဆာ္ျခင္း စသည့္လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ဆက္လက္လုပ္ေဆာင္ သြားမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

စီးပြားေရးရင္းႏွီးျမွဳပ္ႏွံမႈႏွင့္ ဖြ႔ံၿဖိဳးေရးစီမံကိန္းမူသေဘာထားရပ္တည္ခ်က္၊ နယ္စပ္ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာသည့္ အကူအညီမ်ားအေပၚ သေဘာထားရပ္တည္ခ်က္၊ လံုၿခံဳေရးအခန္းက႑ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲျခင္း၊ လူမႈကယ္ဆယ္ေရး၊ ျပန္ လည္ေနရာခ်ထားေရး၊ ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ေရး ျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ားအတြင္း ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္းဌာေနမဲ့ ေရႊ႔ေျပာင္း ေနထိုင္သူမ်ားအတြက္ စီစဥ္ျပင္ဆင္မႈဆိုင္ရာ ရပ္တည္ ခ်က္၊ မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးျပႆနာေၾကာင့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ ဆိုးက်ဳိးမ်ားသက္ေရာက္ေနမႈ မူသေဘာ ထားမ်ားကို အမ်ဳိးသမီးေရးရႈေထာင့္မွ အႀကံျပဳတင္ျပသြားမည့္ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္ စာတမ္းမ်ား ေရးသားသြားမည္ဟုဆံုးျဖတ္သည္။

ထို႕ျပင္ ျပည္တြင္း၊ ျပည္ပ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစုအဖဲြ႕မ်ားအားလံုး ပါ၀င္ႏိုင္မည့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား ႏွီးေႏွာ ဖလွယ္ပဲြမ်ားမွတဆင့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးညီလာခံတရပ္ကိုျပဳလုပ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ စစ္မွန္ေသာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ အမ်ဳိးသမီးထုႀကီး တရပ္လံုးဧ။္ သေဘာထားရပ္တည္ခ်က္မ်ားကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ကာ လက္ရွိၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ားကို အေထာက္အကူျပဳ ေစမည့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈ မ်ားေပၚေပါက္လာေစေရး ဆက္လက္ႀကိဳးပမ္းသြားမည္ျဖစ္သည္။

ထိုသေဘာထားရပ္တည္ခ်က္မ်ားအေပၚအေျခခံကာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး၊ ဒီမိုက ေရစီေရးႏွင့္ ဖက္ဒရယ္ျပည္ေထာင္စု တည္ေဆာက္ေရးတို႕အတြက္ ဆက္လက္အား ထုတ္လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ ေၾကာင္း အသိေပးထုတ္ျပန္အပ္ပါသည္။

သတၱမအႀကိမ္ညီလာခံမွေရြးခ်ယ္တင္ေျမာက္ျခင္းခံရေသာ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးအဖဲြ႕၀င္မ်ားမွာ…
၁။ ေဒၚတင္တင္ညိဳ – အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး
၂။ ေနာ္၀ါးခုရွီး – တဲြဖက္အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး (၁)
၃။ သွ်ရီဂ်ဴလီယာမရစ္ (ပ္) – တဲြဖက္အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး (၂)
တို႕ျဖစ္ၾကပါသည္။

ဆက္သြယ္ရန္။
ေဒၚတင္တင္ညိဳ (အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး) – + ၆၆ ၀၈၁ ၀၃၂၂ ၈၈၂
ေစာစံၿငိမ္းသူ (သဘာပတိအဖဲြ႕၀င္) – + ၆၆ ၀၈၀ ၇၉၂၀ ၄၄၅

Sixty-six Christian churches have been burnt down in Kachin state since the conflict erupted in June 2011, according to the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT), a figure that is backed by Myitkyina-based Kachin Baptist Convention.

Speaking at a seminar at Chiang Mai University on Friday, Julia Marip of KWAT said that the burning of churches by Myanmar government forces amounts to religious persecution.

Also on Friday, a group of Roman Catholic bishops in Kachin State called for peace.

According to website CatholicCulture, spokesman Bishop Francis Daw Tang of Myitkyina said, “As a church, we walk with our displaced people, watch their lives being destroyed by war, their families fragmented by the depressing life in the displaced camps.”

He accused government forces were waging “unequal warfare” on Christian holy days.

Kwat’s Marip said there are now 100,000 people displaced by the conflict in Kachin State, 60,000 of whom are sheltered at the Sino-Myanmar border or other areas under Kachin rebel control, and 40,000 in areas under government control.

Marip said her organization had continuing evidence of systematic rape by Myanmar troops against Kachin and other ethnic women. She said KWAT had recorded 30 incidents where 64 women or girls had been sexually assaulted in Kachin State since the conflict began.

“But there could be many more cases that we have not been able to document,” she said, explaining that NGOs were unable to make contact with many rural areas and villages under government control.

“Half of those women raped were killed afterward,” she said.

Interview by Garrett Kostin, The Best Friend Library – Chiang Mai

Seng Zin is a Kachin activist and community organizer living in Chiang Mai. She is originally from Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, and works with the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT). She shares her insights and opinions about the situation in northern Burma, near the border with China, in this exclusive interview with The Best Friend.

Question: What caused the end of the 17-year-long ceasefire and the resumption of conflict between the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and the Burmese Army in June 2011?

Seng Zin: Two main things: the Burmese government’s demand that the Kachin army put itself under the control of the Burmese military, and the government’s plans for destructive development projects in Kachin State.

From 1994 to 2011, the period of the ceasefire, the KIO/KIA never did any offensives against the Burmese government, and we stopped calling for independence. The KIO just stayed in its territories and took care of the people in our area. Our goal was political dialogue for the creation of a federal union with respect for ethnic rights.

However, as laid out in the 2008 constitution, the Burmese government wanted to create one federal army with all of the ethnic armies forced to transform into units under the rule of the national army. This would have meant that ethnic armies need to surrender their arms and give up their authority in their own areas. The KIO and most ethnic groups refused this plan. The Burmese Army was not satisfied about that. Also, they had already planned to build seven dams in Kachin State, including the biggest dam in Burma in the Myitsone area of Kachin State, so they wanted to clear the area to make the dam.

The Burmese government started entering the KIO’s area without explanation or notice. They didn’t want the KIO to have control of the area. So, not only did the KIO decline to give up their arms and autonomy, they also refused to allow the Burmese government to do the dam projects because most of the people opposed the dam — it would destroy the environment, displace local residents, and not benefit local people because the Burmese government planned to sell the electricity to China. The intensive war started because of the Burmese starting to build the dam in the Ta Ping River, near Sang Gang in the KIO-controlled region.

Question: Is the KIO launching offensives against the Burmese military?

Seng Zin: The KIO actually has only acted in self-defense. When the Burmese Army sent more troops and reinforcements into Kachin State, the KIO had to start launching offensives to defend its territory and the Kachin people. The KIO never attacked Burmese civilians in Burmese areas, but the Burmese Army has attacked Kachin civilians in Kachin areas.

Question: The KIO and the Burmese military recently agreed to resume peace talks in Ruili, China. Did pressure from China or the international community play a role? And since the talks have resumed, has fighting lessened?

Seng Zin: Yes, China’s pressure played a role, but the Burmese Army has already captured most of the important posts of the KIO, and after that, then they invited the KIO for talks again. I don’t think the fighting has lessened. The Burmese have not withdrawn their troops. As long as the two armies are close to each other, the fighting can start again at any time.

They will have another meeting at the end of February. If the Burmese would like to do a sincere peace talk, they should withdraw first from the KIO’s important posts close to KIO’s headquarters in Laiza.

Question: How would you evaluate China’s response to the conflict? Have they been helpful to the Kachin?

Seng Zin: The Chinese have not done enough to pressure the Burmese to stop fighting the Kachin. They don’t want fighting between the Burmese government and the KIO. They don’t want a lot of Kachin refugees in southern China. If there is peace, they can do more projects in Kachin State. They always think about their investments in the Kachin areas, but China has not been allowing humanitarian aid into Kachin State from China, or allowing Kachin people living in Yunnan Province to meet with Kachin refugees. It would be very helpful for peace if China would pressure the Burmese government to accept a federal system with respect for ethnic rights and national equality.

Question: Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for refusing to condemn the Burmese military for its continuing attacks in Kachin State after President Thein Sein’s repeated futile calls for a ceasefire. A Kachin community leader, Khon Ja, recently said, ‘Her [ASSK's] focus is only on collecting awards and becoming president, rather than the suffering of our people.’

What role do you think Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy could play to be more helpful in ending the conflict?

Seng Zin: First, the NLD’s role should be to stand by itself as an opposition party, not always agree with and support the military-dominated government. We understand that now she is in the parliament, she needs to negotiate with all the Burmese leaders, but until now she has only done efforts and worked on humanitarian aid for lower Burma. She hasn’t done anything for the ethnic people in ethnic regions. While she was campaigning in Kachin State, she dressed in our traditional clothing and said she supported a federal union, which was the idea of her father. But now that she is in the parliament, she doesn’t talk about that anymore.

It would be helpful if she raised her voice more. Now she just receives peace prizes from many countries. As she has received many prizes, she has the responsibility to work harder for peace and equality for ethnic people. At least she should talk more strongly to tell the Burmese government to stop its offensives and stop attacking not only the KIO, but also Kachin civilians.

Question: What would you say were the results of the 25 January Kachin Peace Rallies in Chiang Mai?

Seng Zin: I think now more people are aware of what we Kachin want. More people are showing their solidarity because they understand our refugees are suffering and dying in camps on the Burma-China border. The Chinese government and Burmese government are neglecting all of the situations that our people face. With the rally, we explained clearly that they need to respect our rights if they would like to come and invest in our state. The rally helped more people become aware of our situation, and has also created more unity and solidarity.

Question: Do you have hope that the situation in Kachin State will improve in this year? How can lasting peace in Kachin State be achieved?

Seng Zin: I think after we have the second meeting of peace talks [in late February 2013], I can give my opinion about whether our situation is getting better or worse. We need to wait for the results of the upcoming meetings between KIO and Burmese government.

I can say that I don’t have too much hope, actually, because the Burmese government is always cheating the ethnic groups. If they had sincerity to work for peace, they could call now for a nationwide political dialogue with all ethnic groups, not only individual “peace talks” with separate groups.

We contact you again now to repeat our request that you clarify your position or at least elaborate upon your understanding of recent events so that we can develop constructive dialogue on these matters with you. Although we the undersigned make this request to you, it is an expectation that many Kachin people have of you and you would be very badly advised if you thought that our request can be dismissed on purely political grounds.

All Kachin people are waiting for your detailed comments on these matters; we are merely better able to articulate our request directly to you than are the many poor, unfortunate people who find themselves spending Independence Day in the confines of a refugee camp. Your failure even to respond to our recent entreaty does little to reassure Kachin people in general that their future will be in any way brighter if a new generation of Burmese politicians cannot deal head on with the difficult matters facing them in the ethnic majority areas any more than could their forebears.

Respectfully, we eagerly anticipate your considered response to this and our previous letter rather than your silence.

1. Gumsan Nsang (USA) +1 443 415 8683

2. Naw San (Thailand) +66 (0) 848119594

3. Moon Nay Li (Thailand) +66 (0) 856251912

4. Hkanhpa Tu Sadan (UK), +44 (0) 7538 258961