PEACE Info (May 3, 2018) − Mon national-level political dialogue to strive for emergence of healthy federal principle − Peace Commission led by U Thein Zaw meets SSPP/SSA leaders − SSPP Likely to Sign Nationwide Ceasefire, Peace Broker Says − Government says it freed 200 villagers trapped in Kachin − More than 3,000 People Now Trapped by Fighting in Kachin State − မြန္ျပည္သစ္ပါတီနိုင္ငံေရးလွုပ္ရွားမွု ပိုစိပ္လာ − NCA လက္မွတ္ထုိးၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ပါ၀င္ရန္ SSPP ကို အစိုးရကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖြဲ႕ တိုက္တြန္း − SSPP အဖြဲ႕ NCA ထိုးရန္ အလားအလာရွိေၾကာင္း SNDP ဥကၠ႒ ေျပာ − ဖာပြန္ခ႐ိုင္အတြင္း စစ္ေရးအေျခအေနစိုးရိမ္ရဆဲဟု KNU အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ေျပာ − စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္မ်ားအားကူညီရန္ႏွင့္ စစ္ပြဲမ်ားရပ္တန္႔ရန္ ရန္ကုန္တြင္ ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ − ပိတ္မိေနတဲ့ျပည္သူေတြကို အျမန္ဆံုးကယ္ထုတ္ခြင့္ရဖို႔ ဆႏၵျပ − ပိတ္မိစစ္ေရွာင္မ်ားအေရး ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆံုခြင့္ရရန္ ကခ်င္လူငယ္မ်ား ေတာင္းဆို − ဆႏၵျပေတာင္းဆိုသူေတြ ကခ်င္ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆံုမည္ − တပ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ KIA တိုက္ပြဲအၾကား ပိတ္မိေနသည့္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ ၃ ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ ရွိေန − ဝိုင္းေမာ္ၿမိဳ႕စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္စခန္းသို႔ ေျပးလာေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ဦးေရ အသစ္တိုး − ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားေနေသာ စစ္ပြဲမ်ားရပ္တန္႔ေပးရန္ႏွင့္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ျပည္သူမ်ားအတြက္ အလွဴေငြေကာက္ခံျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ − ပိတ္မိေနသည့္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္မ်ား ကယ္ထုတ္ရန္ စိစစ္ေနေၾကာင္း အစိုးရတုံ႔ျပန္ − ကခ်င္ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ေဘးလြတ္ရာေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းေရး အစိုးရစီစဥ္ေန --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 1 of 24 Mon national-level political dialogue to strive for emergence of healthy federal principle Thursday, May 03, 2018 | Mon News Agency | by - Min Thuta Coordination meeting for the national-level political dialogue for ethnic Mon (Photo – Min Aung Htoo) The national-level political dialogue for ethnic Mon will strive for the emergence of a strong federal principle, according to Nai Aung Ma Nge from the Mon State National-Level Political Dialogue Supervisory Committee. “Our supervisory committee will provide guidance in setting down a firm federal principle in the four major sectors of politics, economic, social, and land and [natural] resources,” Nai Aung Ma Nge, who is also spokesperson of the New Mon State Party (NMSP), told the Mon News Agency. The opening and closing ceremonies of the national-level political dialogue for ethnic Mon will be held at the gymnasium in Ye on May 5-7 and discussions on the four major sectors will be held separately in the surrounding areas – No 1 Basic Education High School (B.E.H.S 1), Tit Palin Hnit Su Community Hall and Mon Community Hall, according to him. “Five hundred delegates have been invited to discuss the four major sectors. Union Ministers, officials from the NRPC (National Reconciliation and Peace Center), PC (Peace Commission), and JMC (Joint Monitoring Committee), which are groups involved in the peace process, the union-level supervisory committee, ethnic armed organizations, and political parties will participate in the opening ceremony. We expect between 800 and 900 people to attend the opening ceremony,” said Min Aung Htoo, also known as Banyar Mon, secretary of the Mon National-Level Political Dialogue Coordination Committee. He added that national-level political dialogue will also discuss the issues that will be submitted to the third session of the Union Peace Conference, also known as the 21st Century Panglong, and principles that must be based on for the entire peace process. “I believe more women will be invited to this political dialogue, but I can’t say how many [women] will actually attend it even though they have been invited. Women’s participation was low when a briefing on the NCA (nationwide ceasefire agreement) was held at Nyi-Sar camp but it was high in Wal-Zin Camp. So, I hope women’s participation will be high in this dialogue,” said Mi Rot Chan, chair of the Mon Youth Progressive Organization. Although 30 percent of women’s participation has been targeted in Myanmar’s peace process and work programs, women’s participation was low in the previous sessions of the Union Peace Conference – 21st Century Panglong. Page 2 of 24 The third session of the Union Peace Conference – 21st Century Panglong is expected to start on the last week of May after the national-level political dialogue for ethnic Mon has been held, but it has not been confirmed yet. Among ten ethnic armed organizations that have signed the NCA since October 15, 2015, only three ethnic groups – Kayin (Karen), Chin, and Pa-O – have held ethnic-based political dialogues. https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/mon-national-level-political-dialogue-strive- emergence-healthy-federal-principle ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peace Commission led by U Thein Zaw meets SSPP/SSA leaders Thursday, May 03, 2018 | Shan Herald Agency for News | by - Hom Hurng The Peace Commission delegation led by its vice- chair U Thein Zaw and Lt-Gen Khin Zaw Oo (Rtd) arrived in Wan Hai headquarters and met with the leaders of the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army – North (SSPP/SSA-N). The SSPP/SSA-N’s vice-chair Lt-Gen Khur Tai and patron Gen Hsur Hten welcomed the Peace Commission delegation at Nam Long Bridge at the entrance of Mongyai Township on May 1 morning. The delegation arrived at the SSPP/SSA-N headquarters in the afternoon and held the meeting, according to an official from the headquarters. “The White Tiger (Shan Nationalities Democratic Party – SNDP)’s chair U Sai Ai Pao acted as an advocate. We will discuss about peace and development today and tomorrow. I don’t know the details,” the official told the Shan Herald. Before he left for Wan Hai, U Sai Ai Pao told the Shan Herald that he is acting as an advocate make the peace process successful. U Sai Ai Pao was accompanied by the SNDP’s vice-chair (1) U Sai Saung Si and vice-chair (2) U Sai Hla Kyaw. The SSPP/SSA-N is a member of the Committee for Shan State Unity (CSSU). It is also a member of the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC) led by the United Wa State Army (UWSA). The FPNCC refuses the nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) path and it wishes to go directly to the political dialogue with all stakeholders. https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/peace-commission-led-u-thein-zaw-meets-ssppssa- leaders --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 3 of 24 SSPP Likely to Sign Nationwide Ceasefire, Peace Broker Says By Chit Min Htun 3 May 2018 SSPP soldiers based in northern Shan State. / Kyaw Kha / The Irrawaddy YANGON — The Shan State Progressive Party/Shan State Army-North (SSPP/SSA-N) is likely to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), according to a peace broker between the government and the SSPP. The government’s Peace Commission and the SSPP met at the party’s Wan Hai headquarters in northern Shan State’s Kehsi Township for two days on May 1-2. The government delegation was led by Peace Commission vice chairman U Thein Zaw, accompanied by its secretary, former Lieutenant-General Khin Zaw Oo. The SSPP was represented by vice chairman Lieutenant-General Khay Tai, the party’s patron General Sae Htin, Major-General Sai Htoo and Sao Khun Seng. Shan Nationalities Development Party chairman Sai Aik Pao, who was present at the negotiations as a peace broker, told The Irrawaddy, “They [the SSPP] do not oppose the NCA, and they accept it. They said they would take the NCA path. So it is expected that they will sign the NCA. They will meet again, and plan to discuss the date.” He said the level of trust between the two sides improved during the meeting, adding that the SSPP would consider joining the upcoming third session of the 21st-Century Panglong Peace Conference if the government invited it. U Hla Maung Shwe, an adviser to the Peace Commission, said he had heard that “the talks were optimistic. The SSPP was invited to take part in political dialogue. And the talks indicate some development” in the peace process. SSPP leaders could not be reached for comment on the talks. The party entered bilateral ceasefire agreements at the state and union levels in 2012. It was one of the ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) that contributed to the process of drafting the NCA and was a member of the United Nationalities Federal Council ethnic bloc, which is no longer an active alliance. It resigned from the bloc last year, but has stopped short of fully disavowing it. The SSPP currently belongs to the seven-member Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee, a northeast-based armed alliance. The FPNCC, which rejected the NCA and has demanded an alternative path to it, has a policy of insisting on holding collective talks with the government. Despite the policy, however, two of its members — Page 4 of 24 the Kachin Independence Army and the United Wa State Army — have met government delegations separately on previous occasions at the behest of Chinese officials. https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/sspp-likely-to-sign-nationwide-ceasefire-peace- broker-says.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Government says it freed 200 villagers trapped in Kachin Chan Thar 03 May 2018 Students join in a demonstration against Kachin State fighting, in Kamaryut township of Yangon on Wednesday. Phoe Wa/The Myanmar Times The government has rescued 200 citizens who were trapped due to the fighting between the Tatmadaw (military) and Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Kachin State, and preparations are under way to rescue the remaining people, said President’s Office spokesperson U Zaw Htay.