PEACE Info (January 17, 2019) − Negotiations conducted to call PPST meeting − Tatmadaw to meet RCSS in February − The New Year Starts With Armed Conflict Between Karen and Burma Armies in Northern Karen State − Shan Forces Clash in Hsipaw Township − Hsipaw Locals Alarmed by Gunshots Near Village − IDPs sheltering at Narmakhaw monastery can't go back homes yet − Arakan Army Chief Promises Myanmar Military, Govt Eye For an Eye − Renewed fighting between AA and Myanmar military injures two youths − Clash breaks out between Tatmadaw and AA near borderline − Border Guard Police Wounded in Rakhine Rebel Ambush: Myanmar Army − Brothers Injured by Artillery Shell in Northern Rakhine − Myanmar seizes illegal drugs in northeastern state − KIO ဥကၠ႒ႏွင့္ ကခ်င္မ်ိဳးႏြယ္စု ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား လိုင္ဇာ၌ေတြ႕ဆံု၍ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆုိင္ရာမ်ား ေဆြးေႏြး − ကခ်င္ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ထူေထာင္ဖို႔ ျပည္ပေရာက္ ကခ်င္ညီလာခံ ဆံုးျဖတ္ − လြတ္လပ္ေသာ ကခ်င္ႏုိင္ငံတည္ေထာင္ရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္သည့္ ခ်င္းမိုင္ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ား ညီလာခံသို႔ KIO မတက္ − ရွမ္းတပ္မ်ားအၾကား သီေပါၿမိဳ႔နယ္အတြင္း တိုုက္ပြဲမ်ား ဆက္လက္ျဖစ္ပြား − ရထားလမ္းစီမံကိန္း TNLA က တ႐ုတ္ႏွင့္ေဆြးေႏြးလို − AA ရကၡိဳင့္တပ္မေတာ္ေတာင္းဆုိထားတဲ့ Confederate မူအေပၚသုံးသပ္ခ်က္ − ေအေအအဖဲြ႔၏ ယာယီစခန္းတခု သိမ္းပုိက္ရရွိဟု တပ္မေတာ္ထုတ္ျပန္ − ယာယီစခန္းတစ္ခုကိုသိမ္းပိုက္ရရွိေၾကာင္း တပ္မေတာ္၏သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အေပၚ AA တုန႔္ျပန္ − AA စခန္းသိမ္းခံရမႈ တပ္မေတာ္ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ AA ျငင္းဆန္ − ေမာင္ေတာပစ္ခတ္မႈတြင္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕ဝင္ ၆ ဦး ဒဏ္ရာရ − ရခိုင္က စစ္ေဘးဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို အကူအညီေပးခြင့္ျပဳဖို႔ MSF အဖြဲ႕ ေတာင္းဆို − ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္မ်ားအား ေဆးကုသမွုဆိုင္ရာ အကူအညီေပးရန္ နယ္စည္းမထား ဆရာဝန္မ်ားအဖြဲ႕ (MSF) က က်န္းမာေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနထံ ကမ္းလွမ္း − စစ္ေဘးဒုကၡသည္ စခန္းအတြင္းကို က်ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ လက္နက္ႀကီး က်ည္ဆံတစ္ခုကို ရွင္းလင္းေပးေစလို − ကိုးကန္႔အဖြဲ႕လူသစ္စုေဆာင္းမည္စိုး၍ ထြက္ေျပးလာသူအားလံုးနီးပါး ေနရပ္ျပန္ − ကခ်င္အဖြဲ႔မ်ား ျမစ္ဆံု အလိုမရွိ − ျမစ္ဆံုစီမံကိန္း ဆက္ရပ္ဆိုင္းထားဖို႔ ျပည္ပ ကခ်င္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြ ေတာင္းဆို − ျမစ္ဆံုစီမံကိန္း စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးေကာ္မရွင္ အစီရင္ခံစာအတိုင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္မည္ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 1 of 38 Negotiations conducted to call PPST meeting Published 17 January 2019 | EMG reporter Negotiations are being conducted with organizations concerned to call a meeting of Peace Process Steering Team (PPST) formed with eight NCA signatories, said General Secretary Phado Saw Tardo Hmu of the Karen National Union (KNU). The PPST meeting was arranged to be held during November in 2018, but the KNU substituted General Saw Mutu Say Poe, the KNU representative to the PPST, with General Secretary Phado Saw Tardo Hmu. NCA signatories sent a letter to General Saw Mutu Say Poe who is chairing the PPST at the end of November in 2018, demanding that the PPST meeting would be called to focus on changes in the PPST and leadership role as well as peace process. Remaining eight ethnic armed organizations agreed ceasefire with the government demanded again on January 10 in 2019 to call a meeting of the PPST. The KNU has started negotiations to call the meeting of the PPST, General Secretary Phado Saw Tardo Hmu told the Daily Eleven newspaper. “We have a plan to hold a meeting. It must be held. We will have to do it. We still negotiate. We are negotiating with the organizations concerned,” said Phado Saw Tardo Hmu. The PPST formed with top leaders of ethnic armed organizations is to lead policy affairs in the peace process. The PPST was formed with the KNU, the RCSS, the DKBA, the KNU/KNLA-PC, the CNF, the ABSDF, the PNLO and the ALP in October in 2015. On February 13 in 2018, the NMSP and the LDU joined the PPST to be a part. The third summit of NCA signatories was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand from 8 September to 11 in 2018. The leader of the PPST is General Saw Mutu Say Poe and second leader is General Ywet Sit, Chairman of the RCSS. Translated and Edited by Win Htut https://elevenmyanmar.com/news/negotiations-conducted-to-call-ppst-meeting -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tatmadaw to meet RCSS in February Published 17 January 2019 | Min Naing Soe Tatmadaw negotiators are going to meet with the representatives of the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) and adjust wrong war affairs during February, said Colonel Sai Ngin, secretary-3 of the RCSS. The government peace negotiators met with the representatives of the RCSS in Chiang Mai, Thailand on January 14 and held an informal meeting. During the meeting both sides focused on the meeting between Tatmadaw and the RCSS, said Colonel Sai Ngin. Page 2 of 38 The first informal meeting of the government peace negotiators and the representatives of the RCSS discussed to hold a separate meeting between Tatmadaw and RCSS, but it was not successful. Now we met with Myanmar peace commission and it could pave the way for us to meet with the NRPC and Tatmadaw during February, said Colonel Sai Ngin. “We planned to a meeting between the RCSS and Tatmadaw during the first informal meeting, but in vain. The yesterday’s meeting could pave the way a little. The RCSS will meet with the NRPC first and then with Tatmadaw,” said said Colonel Sai Ngin. The meeting of the NRPC and the RCSS will place emphasis on political affairs and development matters. It will be held in Nay Pyi Taw or in Yangon, said Colonel Sai Ngin. “The meeting will come at an opportune time. Both sides are negotiating to fix the date. I think it may be in February at the earliest,” said Colonel Sai Ngin. “We will discuss matters relating to the warfare with Tatmadaw. We will have to adjust misunderstanding between RCSS and Tatmadaw. The matters relating to the JMC will have to be discussed between us,” said Colonel Sai Ngin. Translated and Edited by Win Htut https://elevenmyanmar.com/news/tatmadaw-to-meet-rcss-in-february ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The New Year Starts With Armed Conflict Between Karen and Burma Armies in Northern Karen State Published January 16, 2019 | Author - Nan Way Phyo Zar Armed clashes in January 2019 between troops from the Karen National Liberation Army and Burma Army soldiers in Northern Papun District of Karen State. KNLA sources reported that two armed skirmishes happened on January 5 and 13 in the Karen National Union’s controlled Papun (Mutraw) area between the KNLA Brigade 5 and Burma Army units operating in the area. Major Saw Kler Doh from KNLA Brigade 5 told Karen News that the tensions that led to the armed clashes were because of Burma Army violating agreements not to enter restricted areas. “Our position is that we protect our defined territory,” Major Saw Kler Doh said. “The provocations began in early January. They [Burma army] crossed into our controlled areas – there has been already two clashes within this month. The tensions happened because they failed to respect our territory.” Page 3 of 38 The fighting this month happened in the Ler Doh Htee area in Lu Thaw Township between Ler Mu Plaw and Saw Mu Plaw village tracks. This is the same region where armed clashes broke out last year when the government reinforced its troops to build a contentious road despite not having a agreement with the Karen. In 2018 armed conflict displaced over 2,400 Karen villagers, with many until recently unable to return to their villages. The government’s Office of the Ministry of Defence issued a statement on January 8th stating that despite informing the local KNU of road repair works on January 1st, KNU troops attacked their soldiers building and securing the road on January 4, 2019. The MoD’s statement accused the KNU of destroying government road building vehicles. The Free Burma Rangers – a frontline humanitarian group pointed out in a recent report that the rationale behind the Burma Army’s road network in Luthaw is not regional development but is “to resupply and reinforce [it’s army] bases, strengthen military communications, and launch more rapid offensives and patrols.” The FBR report concluded that the Burma Army protected roads have a more sinister function. “The roads act as barriers restricting people’s movements, such as villagers accessing their farms, medics delivering health care, aid workers bringing food, and children going to school.” The Burma Army, despite claims it wants to make peace with ethnic armed groups, continues to wage conflict in Rakhine, Kachin, Shan and Karen States. http://karennews.org/2019/01/the-new-year-starts-with-armed-conflict-between-karen- and-burma-armies-in-northern-karen-state/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shan Forces Clash in Hsipaw Township ‘I am not clear whether it’s one-sided shooting or two sides exchanging fire with one another,’ a local said of the fighting between the RCSS and SSPP. By NETWORK MEDIA GROUP (NMG) | Thursday, January 17, 2019 Troops belonging to the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army (RCSS/SSA) and the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army (SSPP/SSA) clashed along the Hsipaw-Nam Lan road in northern Shan State on Tuesday, local sources said. A villager from Nawng Kaw Gyi in Hsipaw Township said that the fighting occurred near the neighboring community of Lon Waing on the morning of January 16. “Clashes occur almost everyday. I am not clear whether it’s one-sided shooting or two sides exchanging fire with one another,” the individual told NMG. “We heard sound of guns Page 4 of 38 shooting this morning, coming from Kong Sawt and Lon Waing villages located between Hsipaw and Nam Lan.” A worker with the Hsipaw-based organization Volunteers Without Borders, Ko Myo, said that the shooting began at around 7:00 a.m.