To
U Win Myint
President
Republic of the Union of Myanmar
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
State Counsellor
Chairperson of the National Reconciliation and Peace Centre
Republic of the Union of Myanmar
20 January 2021
Subject: Open letter from civil society organizations concerning the current tensions and conflicts and the situation of local people affected by war in ceasefire area in Karen State in Southeastern Myanmar
Dear President U Win Myint, and State Counsellor and Chairperson of the National Reconciliation and Peace Centre Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
In relation to the above mentioned matter, we, the undersigned (172) civil society organizations and networks, are gravely concerned and would like to sincerely request you to immediately take action and resolve the tensions and conflicts between the Myanmar Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) under the control of the Karen National Union (KNU). The increasing armed engagements between the two armed actors have displaced almost 4,000 people who have been forced to flee their homes and taking shelter in adjacent areas in Hpapun, Thaton and Nyaunglaypin Districts during this challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In December 2020, we learned that the Myanmar Tatmadaw ignored the provisions contained within the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) and began to expand the presence of its troops in Hpapun District and other areas designated under the KNU’s control, creating tension between the Myanmar Tatmadaw and the KNU, resulting in armed clashes breaking out between the Mae Wei based Myanmar Tatmadaw troops and a battalion of KNLA troops (under KNU control), since 1 December. Over 3,000 civilians have had to flee to avoid the fighting in Hpapun District as the Myanmar Tatmadaw troops shelled in areas where villagers were working for their livelihoods, including inside and outside villages. In addition, on 12 January 2021, the Infantry Battalion 404 of the Myanmar Tatmadaw shelled Mae Cho Village Tract in Hpapun District killing a 35-year-old village chief. Furthermore, on 15 January, an 11-year-old boy was seriously injured as the Light Infantry Battalion 339 of the Myanmar Tatmadaw intentionally continued its artillery shelling of Mae Wei Village in Hpapun District. The boy is now receiving medical treatment. We call on the government to bring justice for those who have suffered casualties and to ensure that such incidents do not take place again.
At present, we have learned that the tensions between the two groups are rising, leading to deterioration of trust. We believe that an end to tensions and fighting between the two sides is difficult, particularly if the Myanmar Tatmadaw continues its military movements in KNU designated areas in contravention of the NCA.
In addition, 790 villagers from four villages in Nyaunglaypin District have had to flee to avoid the ongoing fighting between the KNU troops and the Myanmar Tatmadaw since 28 December 2020, as the Myanmar Tatmadaw entered into KNU designated territories. On 19 January, a 41-year-old man was injured by the artillery shelling of the Light Infantry Battalion 603 of the Myanmar Tatmadaw in Pae Kaw Hkee Village in Kyaukkyi Township. We have learned that villagers are especially concerned that this will lead to the expansion of armed clashes in the region as the Myanmar Tatmadaw have reinforced their troops in KNU controlled areas in Hpapun and Nyaunglaypin Districts since December 2020. We are particularly concerned of the continued displacement of ethnic people at a time when the country is striving for national reconciliation and long-lasting peace in the pursuit of a genuine federal democratic country.
Upon observing the catalyst for such conflict and tensions between the NCA signatories – an ethnic armed organization, the KNU, and the Myanmar Tatmadaw – we have found that the Myanmar Tatmadaw broke the NCA as they have taken positions and expanded deployment, giving different excuses, including in the name of development projects. Therefore, we call on the government, elected by the people, to look towards national reconciliation and genuine sustainable peace, and to immediately implement the calls made by more than 10,000 villagers from 12 villages in Luthaw Township who protested on 30 December 2020, to stop the Myanmar Tatmadaw from invading the KNU controlled territories and expanding its forces in contravention of the NCA’s agreements, among other calls.
In our country, civil war has been raging for more than 70 years and it is still far from the genuine peace that our people aspire to today. Furthermore, we believe that the Myanmar Tatmadaw’s use of state funds to continue using military force across Myanmar, particularly in ethnic areas is inappropriate and leads us further astray from peace.
In the time of conflict, women and children are the most vulnerable to human rights violations, including sexual violence, and their rights to education and healthcare can be impacted. As Myanmar is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Myanmar is obligated to protect the rights of women and children in line with these conventions.
Finally, it is our belief that the armed conflicts in ethnic areas in Myanmar and its root causes are political in nature and must be solved by political means. To solve this political issue via political means, we, the undersigned civil society organizations, would like to respectfully call on the President and State Counsellor to develop political opportunities and means of solution, as well as to withdraw and stop the expanding deployment and occupation of the Myanmar Tatmadaw in ethnic areas.
Respectfully,
Signed by:
- ဒို့မြေကွန်ရက်
- စစ်တောင်းသံစဉ်လူမှုကွန်ယက်
- မေတ္တာရှေ့ဆောင်လူမှုအဖွဲ့ (သံတောင်ကြီ:)
- သင့်မြတ်လိုသူများ ငြိမ်းချမ်းရေးပရဟိတအဖွဲ့
- အားသစ်ရောင်ခြည်အဖွဲ့
- ရွှေပန်းပျိုးလက် (ကလေးသူငယ်များယဉ်ကျေးလိမ္မာရေးနှင့် အကြမ်းဖက်မှုပပျောက်ရေးအဖွဲ့)
- လူမှုရေးရာသုတေသနအဖွဲ့
- ကျေးဇူးတော်နှလုံးသားဖောင်ဒေးရှင်း
- ဂီတရပ်ဝန်း
- အစ္စလာမ့်တံခွန်လူမှုကူညီရေးအဖွဲ့
- ရှစ်လေးလုံးမျိုးဆက်သစ် (မိုးညှင်း)
- သံဖြူဇရပ်မြို့နယ်လုံးဆိုင်ရာမွန်လူငယ်အဖွဲ့အစည်း
- ရွှေခြင်္သေ့တောင်သူကွန်ယက်
- ကမ်းခြေအလှဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်ရေးကွန်ယက်
- ကမ်းခြေအားမာန် ရေလုပ်သားငယ်များဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်ရေးအဖွဲ့
- ပန်းတိုင်ရှင် အမျိုးသမီးဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်ရေးအဖွဲ့
- ရောင်နီဦးလူမှုဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- စာဖြူလယ်သမားဦးဆောင်အဖွဲ့
- အနာဂတ်အလင်းသစ်လူငယ်ဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- ပုံရိပ်စစ် လူမှုဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- ပွင့်ဖြူဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်ရေးအဖွဲ့
- မင်းဘူးတောင်သူအစုအဖွဲ့
- မင်းလှတောင်သူအစုအဖွဲ့
- ဂန့်ဂေါဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်ရေးအဖွဲ့
- ပုံတောင်ပုံညာတွဲလက်များ
- ငြိမ်းချမ်းရေးကွန်ယက်
- လွတ်လပ်သောအရှိုချင်းအမျိုးသားများအင်အားစု
- ဝံလက်ဖောင်ဒေးရှင်း
- မြန်မာနိုင်ငံမသန်စွမ်းသူများရှေ့ဆောင်အဖွဲ့
- ဗေဓါ လူမှုဖွံဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- တွံတေးကွန်ရက်
- မျိုးဆက်သစ် (ရှမ်းပြည်)
- အလင်းသစ် ကျေးလက်ဒေသဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- အားမာန်သစ် ကျေးလက်ဒေသဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးအဖွဲ့
- 3 Dimension Community Development Group
- Accountable Actions for Arakan
- Action Committee for Democracy Development
- Action Group for Farmer Affair
- Active Women Development Initiative
- AISANA
- Ann New Generation
- Ann Women Generation Network
- Arakan CSO Network
- Arakan Students’ Union
- Assistance Association for Political Prisoners
- Association of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters
- Athan – Freedom of Expression Activist Organization
- Ayayarwaddy Youth Network
- Ayeyarwaddy Transparency and Accountability Association
- Ayeyarwaddy West Development Organization (Ngaphae)
- BEE House
- Bilin CSO Network
- Burma Monitor
- Burmese Women’s Union
- CAN-Myanmar
- Center for Social Integrity
- Charity Youth Organization
- Child Protection Network
- Chin Human Rights Organization
- Chin MATA Working Group
- Citizens Action for Transparency
- Colorful Girls Organization
- Community Response Group (ComReG)
- Crown School of Capacity Building and Leadership
- CSO Thaton
- Democracy, Peace and Women’s Organization
- Democratic Education Corner
- Equality Myanmar
- Farmers and Land Workers Union (Myanmar)
- Farmers Development and Environmental Watch Group
- Freedom and Labor Action Group
- Future Light Center
- Future Young Pioneer Organization
- Gaia Organization
- Gender Equality Network
- Generation Wave
- Genuine People’s Servants
- Golden Future Social Development Organization
- Gracious Heart Foundation
- Green Rights Organization
- Halcyon
- Harmony Youth Association
- Htoi Gender and Development Foundation
- Htum Thit Sa Rural Development Organization
- Human Rights Educators Network
- Human Rights Foundation of Monland
- Humanity Institute
- IFI Watch Myanmar
- iSchool Myanmar
- Justice Movement for Community (Innlay)
- Kachin National Youth Network
- Kachin Women’s Association Thailand
- Karen Affairs Committee
- Karen Environmental and Social Action Network
- Karen Human Rights Group
- Karen Institute of Strategic Studies
- Karen Organization for Relief and Development
- Karen Peace Support Network
- Karen Refugee Committee
- Karen Rivers Watch
- Karen Student Network Group
- Karen Teachers Working Group
- Karen Women’s Organization
- Karen Youth – Rangoon
- Karen Youth Network
- Karenni Human Rights Group
- Karenni State Farmer Union
- Kayah Earthrights Action Network
- Keng Tung Land Group
- Kyaukkyi Development Watch
- Kyaukpyu Rural Development Association
- Let’s Help Each Other
- Light Social Development Organization
- Lighthouse Social Development Organization
- Literature Garden Organization
- Maramagri Youth Network
- Maye Bon Youth Association
- Metta Development Foundation
- Min Bra Youth Association
- Mrauk-U Youths Association
- Mro Youth Association
- Myanmar Cultural Research Society
- Myanmar People Alliance (Shan State)
- National Indigenous Women Resource Center
- National Network for Education Reform
- Nyan Lynn Thit Analytica
- Olive Organization
- Open Development Foundation
- Oway Institute
- Pa-O Women’s Union
- Pa-O Youth Organization
- Pauktaw Public Center
- Paung Ku
- Paungsee Myittar Organization
- Peace Working Committee
- Progressive Voice
- Rakhine Youth New Generation – Network
- Rambree Youth Network
- Rathedaung Youth Network
- Regional Development Organization
- Reliable Organization
- Saytanashaesoung CSO
- Shan MATA
- Shan State Peace Task Force
- Shan Women Development Network
- Southern Youth Development Organization
- Swamsutyi CSO
- Synergy – Social Harmony Organization
- Ta’ang Legal Aid
- Ta’ang Women’s Organization
- Takapaw Group
- Taungoke Youth Network
- Thandar Rontwee Youth Network
- The Seagull:Human Rights, Peace & Development
- Thet Youth Organization
- True Friends
- Union of Karenni State Youth
- Waingmaw CSOs Network
- Women Empowerment and Development Organization (WE DO)
- Women Generation
- Women’s League of Burma
- Burmese Women’s Union
- Kachin Women’s Association Thailand
- Karen Women’s Organization
- Karenni National Women’s Organization
- Kayan Women’s Organization
- Kuki Women’s Human Rights Organization
- Lahu Women’s Organization
- Pa-O Women’s Union
- Shan Women’s Action Network
- Ta’ang Women’s Organization
- Tavoy Women’s Union
- Women’s for Justice
162. Women’s Organizations Network
163. Yangon Watch
164. Zinlum Committee (Tanphaye)
165. Zomi Students and Youth Organization
166. Summer Shelter Library
167. Kanbawza youth library
168. Enlightened Myanmar Research Foundation
169. Kayah Baptist Association – Christian Social Service and Development Department
170. Women for Women Foundation
171. YOUNITY
172. Kawyaw National Youth Organization
MARUAH Singapore 
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