Opinion

When Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha announced on July 11 that the Thai refugee camps on the Thai-Myanmar border would be emptied, many wondered if there really is new resolve by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) to repatriate the 130,000 Myanmar refugees who have been living in Thailand for many years. Gen Prayuth cited national security as the reason…

Duwa Jee, a Kachin freelance writer, outlines in his commentary why the current peace process has to take into account the past 60 years of civil war that ravaged the ethnic people of Burma. The ethnic nationalities of Burma/Myanmar is of the view that the ethnic armed resistance forces are desirous of ending the more than 60-year long civil war…

A wide and diverse range of women groups and civil society organisations have released the following statement on the government’s draft Interfaith Marriage Law. Karen News have taken the decision to run the full statement to generate debate and understanding in the community of the issues involved. *Statement of Women’s Groups and CSOs on preparation of draft Interfaith Marriage Law…

Censuses are a starting point to order society. Benedict Anderson writes in his iconic essay Census, Map, Museum, that British colonial census-makers were known to ‘agglomerate, disaggregate, recombine and intermix identity categories’, and that ‘the politically powerful identity categories always lead the list’. The real innovation was ‘not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification’.…

General Baw Kyaw Heh, the Karen National Liberation Army’s vice-chief-of-staff, in an exclusive question and answer interview with Karen News discussed the consequences of mega- development projects, hydro-dams, armed conflict, corruption, the current ceasefire, peace talks and the militarization of Burma. Why are you opposed to a dam? Many reasons – too many dams bring too many problems, costs and…

The Karen refugees in Thailand could be facing a new situation before we even know of it! Over the past years foreign donors and NGOs have chosen to abandon the border area and direct their support and aid through Rangoon via government-controlled agencies. The thinking is that when they have chosen to “engage” with President Thein Sein´s government they agree…

In a show of unity and strength, representatives from 17-armed resistance groups met in Karen State in January for five days to discuss a nationwide ceasefire agreement for Burma. The ethnic armed groups met at Law Khee Lar in Karen State and hailed the conference as a success. The ethnic armed group, under its working title, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination…

Despite ceasefires between armed ethnic groups and the government’s military, many people from Burma are continuing to cross the border into Thailand in order to seek health care that is inaccessible or unaffordable in their own country. This has created a population of ‘medical refugees’, a phenomenon that has largely been ignored in the course of current discussions regarding Burma’s…

More than one hundred leaders from Burma’s ethnic armed resistance organizations gathered at Law Khee Lar, Karen State from January 20 to 24, 2014 to work out a plan for a proposed nationwide ceasefire agreement with the Burma government. The ethnic leaders met and discussed the future of Burma, including how to set up a federal army in the country.…

Dr Timothy Laklem calls for Karen unity and self-determination and for all ethnic people to be treated equally within a democratic and federal union of Burma. It is not my intention in this ‘opinion piece’ to blame, but rather to give a strong reminder to those negotiating for peace, that whatever we do now can turn the tide of history…