PEACE Info (January 19, 2018) − Myanmar celebrates the first Forum on Ethnic Sustainable Development − Kachin bishops meet Min Aung Hlaing − War and misery a fact of life for civilians in Myanmar's northeast − Three Years On, Still No Progress in Rape and Murder of 2 Kachin Teachers − IDPs in Kyaukme refugee camps worry about war resuming − Kachin IDPs fear land grabs in the villages they once called home − Reshuffle could backfire on NLD − The Fall and Rise of Dr. Aye Maung − K500,000 given to families of seven killed in police crackdown on Mrauk-U protest − ၂၀၁၈ ကလည္း ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွစ္ ျဖစ္နိုင္မွာလား − တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ား ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းျဖင့္ အမ်ိဳးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး တည္ေဆာက္ႏိုင္ဟု ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ေျပာ − တိုင္းရင္းသားအေရးႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသားေဒသမ်ားဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး ဦးစားေပးေဆာင္ရြက္မွသာ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ၿပီး ျပည္ေထာင္စုညီညႊတ္ေရးကို တည္ေဆာက္ႏုိင္မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အတိုင္ပင္ခံပုဂၢိဳလ္ သ၀ဏ္လႊာေပးပို႔ − ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး မရရွိျခင္းေၾကာင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား အဆိုးသံသရာ လည္ေနရဟု ဆို − တပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္ NCA လက္မွတ္ထိုး တိုင္ရင္းသားလက္နက္ကိုင္မ်ားအၾကား ယံုၾကည္မႈ မလံုေလာက္၍ မိုင္းမရွင္းႏိုင္ေသး − CSSU ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္အစည္းအေဝး လြယ္တိုင္းလ်န္းဌာနခ်ဳပ္တြင္က်င္းပမည္ − သၽွမ္းျပည္တပ္မေတာ္ RCSS/SSA ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ဆက္ႏြယ္မွုျဖင့္ ရ လ ေက်ာ္ဖမ္းခံထားရသည့္ ဟိုပုံးေက်းလက္ရြာသား ၉ ဦး အမွု ၁၃ မွု ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရ − KNPP ရဲေဘာ္မ်ား ေသဆုံးမႈ ဆႏၵျပျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ လူ ၃ ဦး ထပ္မံတရားစြဲဆိုခံရ − တရားမၽွတမွုရတဲ့အထိ ကယန္းလူငယ္ ဆက္ေတာင္းဆိုမယ္ − နမ့္ဆန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ၾကက္ေသရြာအနီး၌ RCSS ႏွင့္ TNLA တို႔ တိုက္ပြဲမ်ားျဖစ္ပြားေန − ေဒါက္တာ ဦးေအးေမာင္ကုိ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အျဖစ္မွ မ႐ုတ္သိမ္းေသး − ေျမာက္ဦးျဖစ္စဥ္ကို ေကာ္မရွင္ဖြဲ႕ၿပီး စစ္ေဆးဖို႔ ေတာင္းဆို − ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ကို အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ အစိုးရက ကိုလိုနီစနစ္ျဖင့္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနဟု ရခိုင္အမ်ဳိးသားပါတီအမတ္ ေဝဖန္ − ရခိုင္ႏွင့္ ကယားျပည္နယ္ အေရးကိစၥ ယူအန္ေအ တုိင္းရင္းသားမဟာမိတ္ပါတီမ်ား စိုးရိမ္ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 1 of 44 Myanmar celebrates the first Forum on Ethnic Sustainable Development Friday, January 19, 2018 | Mizzima The first Ethnic Sustainable Development Forum was opened yesterday at the Mingalar Thiri Hotel in Nay Pyi Taw, according to a statement. Hosted by the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs, the two-day forum is being attended by stakeholders from across the country, as well as local and international organisations. A number of topics will be discussed at the forum, including the development of ethnic media, the economy and the peace process. The Minister for Pa-O Ethnic Affairs, Nan San Wint Khine delivered a message on behalf of State Counsellor Her Excellency Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the occasion of the Ethnic Sustainable Development Forum. Speaking at the opening ceremony of the forum on Thursday's morning, His Excellency, Vice President U Henry Van Thio affirmed the government's commitment to critical infrastructure projects which will improve the lives of Myanmar's ethnic nationals, including in the transportation and electricity sectors. The Union Minister for Ethnic Affairs, Nai Thet Lwin also delivered opening remarks. In his address, he emphasised the importance of ensuring that the fundamental needs of all ethnic national farmers, workers, women and children are fulfilled. The Ministry of Ethnic Affairs was established as a new ministry under the current government with the aim of promoting national unity amongst the ethnic races in Myanmar. New Ministers for Ethnic Affairs were also appointed in each of the States and Regions in order to facilitate greater cooperation between the Union government and the ethnic nationals. The Forum on Ethnic Sustainable Development is one way in which the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs is working to promote the socio-economic development of all of Myanmar’s ethnic nationalities, the statement said. Speaking at a Peace Talk with Youths held in Kayah State last month, Her Excellency Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also emphasised the important role of the government in maintaining the literature and culture of the ethnic nationalities for future generations. https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/myanmar-celebrates-first-forum-ethnic-sustainable- development --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 of 44 Kachin bishops meet Min Aung Hlaing By Mizzima | On Friday, 19 January 2018 Photo: Senior General Min Aung Hlaing/Facebook Four Kachin bishops have met Myanmar's military chief Min Aung Hlaing to talk prospects for peace in the country's north, where fighting between the military and armed ethnic groups has intensified, ucanews reported on 18 January. Retired Archbishop Paul Zinghtung Grawng of Mandalay and Bishops Philip Lasap Za Hawng of Lashio, Francis Daw Tang of Myitkyina and Raymond Sumlut Gam of Banmaw attended a meeting at Bayintnaung Parlor in Naypyidaw on Jan. 16. "We conveyed the message on the Catholic Church's stance of getting a durable peace through dialogue instead of arms, and the church stands ready to take part in nation building in collaboration with all stakeholders," he told ucanews.com. Bishop Gam said the military chief reaffirmed its commitment to ending civil wars in Myanmar while opening the door to all armed ethnic groups to negotiate, the report said. http://www.mizzima.com/news-domestic/kachin-bishops-meet-min-aung-hlaing ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ War and misery a fact of life for civilians in Myanmar's northeast Friday, January 19, 2018 The peace process launched in 2011 has brought only escalating conflict in northern Shan State, where the situation is complicated by the number of ethnic armed groups. By KYAW LIN HTOON | FRONTIER Photos THEINT MON SOE AKA J IN DECEMBER 2016, savage fighting erupted in the Pan Lon village tract in northern Shan State between two ethnic armed groups, forcing hundreds of residents to flee to safety at Lashio, about 48 kilometres (30 miles) to the east. Among those displaced by the week of clashes between the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Shan State Army-South, the armed Page 3 of 44 wing of the Restoration Council of Shan State, was U Yi Lar Tha, 77, and his wife, Daw Swe Mya, 61. After the fighting subsided, the elderly couple returned to their village. But their hopes of resuming their former lives were shattered in late December of that year, when Yi Lar Tha went with two other farmers to check their land in a nearby field. An estimated 100,000 people have displaced by conflict in Kachin and northern Shan states since 2011. (Theint Mon Soe aka J | Frontier) Soon after Yi Lar Tha left home, Swe Mya heard an explosion and rushed outside to investigate. She was greeted by her husband’s two friends, bringing the grim news that he had stepped on a landmine, shattering his right leg. “There was blood everywhere; I could hardly bear to look at him,” recalled Swe Mya. Yi Lar Tha was deafened by the explosion, and after spending nearly a year in hospital, including a stint at a military hospital in Yangon, he returned to his home in northern Shan State where he suffers depression from the incident. Other victims of the skirmishes between the TNLA and the SSA-S included an 18-year-old woman. Witnesses said she was trying with two other civilians to rescue a disabled boy from a house during a firefight when she was killed by a bullet fired by the TNLA. Pan Lon is one of many village tracts affected by fighting in northern Shan that has escalated since the peace process was re-launched under the Union Solidarity and Development Party government after it took office in 2011. A child at an camp for internally displaced persons in Namtu Township, northern Shan State in late November. (Theint Mon Soe aka J | Frontier) The fighting has created anxiety and hardship for thousands of villagers in territory west of the Mandalay-Muse highway and stretching north to the border with China. Landmines have long been a scourge of conflict areas in Myanmar and they are continuing to wreak havoc in northern Shan. In its latest annual Landmine Monitor report released last month, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines said at least 8,605 people were killed or injured by the devices throughout the world in 2016, up from 6,967 casualties the previous year. Page 4 of 44 The report said Afghanistan, Libya, Myanmar, Ukraine and Yemen accounted for 85 percent of the increase in casualties over 2015. Halo Trust, a Britain-based NGO that focuses on mine-risk education and de-mining in 26 countries, says the threat of death or injury from landmines is higher in northern Shan than anywhere else in Myanmar. Of the 155 landmine incidents reported throughout the country in 2015 and 2016, half were in Shan, according to Halo Trust data. Children outside a home built for IDPs in Namtu. (Theint Mon Soe aka J | Frontier) In 2017, 56 people were killed in 80 reported landmine blasts in Shan, most of which occurred in the state’s northern conflict areas. "Although the world has aimed to be free of landmines in 2025, that could not be possible for Myanmar,” said Lway Ai Aww, manager of Halo Trust’s office in Lashio. “Halo started de-mining operations in Cambodia more than two decades ago and the work there is yet to be completed; in our country, we have not yet been able to launch de-mining operations nationwide,” she told Frontier. Difficulties accessing conflict areas create challenges for Halo Trust’s mine-risk awareness activities. Villagers are sometimes wary of attending Mine Risk Education events and those who want to attend can face issues, sometimes being scared off by the presence of ethnic armed groups or the Tatmadaw.