PEACE Info (March 16, 2018) − Myanmar’s Karen Cease-Fire in Jeopardy − New Mon State Party faces birthing pains after signing ceasefire pact − Negotiation, not coercion, offers best hope of peace in Kachin − Press briefings to be held to reduce local concerns over fighting between NMSP and KNU − Tatmadaw Offensive Forces KIA Battalion to Abandon Base in Tanai − Two civilians killed as RCSS-TNLA fighting flares again − Confiscated land returned to farmers − Myanmar returns confiscated land to farmers in eastern state − ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးျမန္ဆန္သြက္လက္ရန္ အစိုးရႏွင့္တပ္မေတာ္ညႇိႏွိုင္းမွုမ်ားလိုအပ္ဟု ဦးခြန္ဥကၠာသုံးသပ္ − အမ်ဳိးသားအဆင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ား မက်င္းပႏုိင္ျခင္းက ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ အခက္အခဲျဖစ္ဟု ေကအင္န္ယူ ဒုဥကၠ႒ေျပာ − မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီႏွင့္ KNU ပဋိပကၡထပ္မံမျဖစ္ပြားေရး နည္းလမ္းႏွစ္ခုျဖင့္ ေဆာင္ရြက္မည္ − စစ္ေရးအေျခအေနေၾကာင့္ တႏုိင္းေဒသအေျခစိုက္ ေကအိုင္ေအတပ္ရင္း (၁၄) ေနရာေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ − လမ္းေဖါက္ေနတဲ့တပ္ေတြ ဆုတ္ေပးဖို႔ KNU ေတာင္းဆို − ေကအန္ယူ ထိပ္ပိုင္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ အေရးေပၚအစည္းအေဝးလုပ္ − အစုိးရတပ္မ်ား ဖာပြန္ခ႐ုိင္တြင္းမွ ျပန္႐ုပ္သိမ္းရန္ ေကအန္ယူ ေတာင္းဆုိ − ဖာပြန္ခရိုင္အတြင္းရိွ အစိုးရတပ္မ်ား ျပန္လည္ဆုတ္ခြာေပးရန္ KNU ေတာင္းဆို − တပ္မေတာ္အေနျဖင့္ နယ္ေျမအတြင္း စစ္ေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားကုိ ရပ္ဆုိင္းရန္ KNU ေျပာ − ဖာပြန္ခရိုင္မွာ တပ္မေတာ္က KNU စစ္ေဆးေရးဂိတ္ကို မီးရိႈ႕ − တပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္ ေကအန္အယ္လ္ေအ တုိက္ပြဲျဖစ္၊ ေကအန္အယ္လ္ေအတပ္စခန္း ဖ်က္ဆီးခံရ − RCSS ႏွင့္ TNLA တိုက္ပြဲၾကားက ေဒသခံမ်ား မိုင္းအႏၲရာယ္ေၾကာင့္ ကယ္မထုတ္နိုင္ေသး − တိုက္ပြဲအတြင္းပိတ္မိေနေသာ အရပ္သားမ်ားကို ကယ္ထုတ္ႏိုင္ေရး အရပ္ဘက္အဖြဲ႕မ်ား ႀကိဳးစားမႈ မေအာင္ျမင္ − RCSS ႏွင့္ TNLA တိုက္ပြဲဆက္လက္ျဖစ္ပြားေနျပီး ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးရန္ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေသးဟု ဆို − ေက်ာက္မဲတြင္ တိုက္ပြဲေၾကာင့္ ရြာသား ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္ − ေက်ာက္မဲၿမိဳ႕ေပၚကို စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ ဒုကၡသည္ ၂၀၀ ခန္႔ေရာက္ရွိလာ − RCSS ႏွင့္ TNLA တိုက္ပြဲေၾကာင့္ ရြာသားႏွစ္ဦးေသဆံုး၊ လူ တစ္ေထာင္ခန္႔ ေက်ာက္မဲသို႔ထြက္ေျပး − ဖာပြန္မွာ စစ္ေရးတင္းမာ၊ ဒုကၡသည္ ၂ ေထာင္ စစ္ေရွာင္ − မုိင္းေခါင္စစ္ေရွာင္ ၂ ဦး အသတ္ခံရမႈ တရားစြဲဆုိႏုိင္ရန္ မ်က္ျမင္သက္ေသ ၅ ဦး၏ ထြက္ဆုိခ်က္မ်ား လက္ခံ − စစ္ေတြႏွင့္ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴရွိ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းမ်ားကို ယခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ဖ်က္သိမ္းမည္ − စစ္မွန္တဲ့ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆိုရင္ စီမံကိန္းေတြ မပါလာဖို႔ အေရးႀကီးတယ္ − မူးယစ္ေဆးထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေရး စိန္ေခၚမႈမ်ားရွိေန၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအကူ အေရးႀကီးဟု ျပည္ထဲေရးေျပာ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 1 of 41 Myanmar’s Karen Cease-Fire in Jeopardy March 16, 2018 | Ben Dunant FILE - Soldiers of the Karen National Union (KNU) stand guard in Hpa-an district, Karen State, Myanmar. YANGON, MYANMAR — Clashes and mass displacement in Myanmar’s southeastern Kayin State have deepened doubts that the world’s longest-running civil war, involving the Karen ethnic minority, can be resolved under a peace process led by Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the Karen Peace Support Network, a network of community-based organizations, on March 4 more than 600 Myanmar army soldiers descended from their bases to civilian areas claimed by the Karen National Union (KNU), which has been in rebellion against the central government since 1949 but signed a cease-fire in 2012. Myanmar's Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi, right, and Mutu Say Po, chairman of Karen National Union (KNU) pose for photos during their meeting at a hotel in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, Aug. 24, 2016. The Myanmar army, on a mission to repair a dilapidated road in Hpapun district in northeastern Kayin State, near the border with Thailand, exchanged fire with KNU soldiers and local militia. This prompted more than 1,500 villagers to flee to areas of surrounding forest, where they remain with dwindling food and few medical supplies, according to Saw Way Lay, a spokesperson for the peace support network. Saw Tender, a spokesperson for KNU’s Brigade 5, which holds sway in the area, told VOA that clashes lasted from March 4-9, without casualties. Both sides are now “waiting and seeing,” he said. The Myanmar army, dug in by the road, has not advanced farther. “Tension is still high,” Way Lay said, claiming that Myanmar troop numbers have since swelled to more than 800. On March 15, the Myanmar army clashed briefly with KNU Brigade 5 soldiers elsewhere in the district, with no apparent casualties, the Yangon-based news outlet The Irrawaddy reported. Repeated calls by VOA to the military’s official Information Team, and to state government officials, went unanswered. Senior government spokesman Zaw Htay said he was unable to comment on military matters. Page 2 of 41 On March 16, the KNU released a statement calling for Myanmar army troops to withdraw so villagers can return, for local and international organizations to help provide relief, and for peace talks to be expedited. Crisis talks KNU members have submitted a complaint to the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC), the official body for monitoring and implementing a 2015 nationwide cease-fire pact between the government and eight armed groups, which last month increased to 10. Min Zaw Oo, executive director at the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, told VOA the JMC is now holding crisis talks about the clashes. An official JMC source refused to comment to VOA, citing the sensitivity of the issue, but a public response is expected soon. Among Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, the KNU has been the most active proponent of the 2015 Nationwide Cease-fire Agreement (NCA), sometimes in the face of strong criticism from sections of Karen civil society, who view it as a weak deal. The top leadership retains regular contact with the Myanmar government and military. However, confidence within the KNU and Karen society has been sapped by the repeated deferral of political dialogue toward a federal restructuring of power, to satisfy long-held demands for meaningful autonomy from across Myanmar’s minority ethnic groups. Four cuts The March clashes mark the largest flare-up and community displacement in Hpapun district since the 2012 bilateral cease-fire. The area, which has stayed remote from central government control since before the British colonial era, was ravaged by a conflict that pushed tens of thousands of Karen refugees into Thailand, where many remain or have been resettled in third countries. FILE - Karen civilians flee their villages, seeking refuge in Thailand, during an earlier wave of violence. Saw Tender said the road in question dated from a 2005-6 Myanmar army campaign. According to a 2006 report by the Karen Human Rights Group, this involved village burnings and the forced relocation of villagers to starve Karen insurgents of food, funding, intelligence and recruits — a strategy known as the “four cuts.” Saw Tender and Saw Way Lay both told VOA the road was solely for military purposes, to transport heavy weapons and speed up troop rotations. This seemingly contravenes an informal agreement that the Myanmar army can only resupply their bases on foot or by mule. Page 3 of 41 Way Lay pointed to other military-built roads in the district. “The villagers cannot use them, only the government troops do. Even to cross the road is difficult for [villagers],” he said, adding that the NCA has enabled the Myanmar army to upgrade existing camps and establish new ones, making local Karen perpetually fearful and insecure. Demarcation In its March 9 statement, the Karen Peace Support Network accused the Myanmar army of violating the NCA by entering KNU territory without permission, and demanded an independent probe into the clashes. However, Min Zaw Oo cited a lack of clear demarcation of territory in bilateral cease-fires with the KNU and with other ethnic armed groups. During NCA negotiations in 2015, the issue was deferred to the JMC. But, at the JMC, he said, the issue has been deadlocked. “If demarcation is clearly settled, we can avoid these kind of cases,” he said. The clashes also dampen prospects of any large-scale return of the more than 100,000 refugees remaining in the Thai border camps. So far, only 71 have returned under a formal, United Nations-supported process, with more returning informally. In an email to VOA, the U.N. refugee agency said they do not assess “the current situation in South-East Myanmar to be fully conducive to large-scale promoted voluntary repatriation.” However, UNHCR said they would aid individual repatriations if voluntariness could be confirmed, the return location verified as safe, and the agency’s continued access to it for monitoring and support guaranteed by the Myanmar government. With additional reporting by Aung Naing Soe https://www.voanews.com/a/myanmar-karen-cease-fire-in-jeopardy/4301339.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Mon State Party faces birthing pains after signing ceasefire pact Lun Min Mang 16 Mar 2018 The New Mon State Party (NMSP) became one of the first groups to join the peace process under the NLD administration when it decided to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement last month. But being a signer of the pact has not favoured the group, which is now facing challenges. A military challenge for the NMSP is to maintain a peaceful situation in areas it controls and have a good relationship with the KNU, one of the strongest groups in the NCA. Page 4 of 41 Earlier this month, tension arose when KNU tried to talk about the release of Karen residents who allegedly felled trees illegally in Yephyu township in Tanintharyi Region and were detained by NMSP troops.