ND Burma
ND-Burma formed in 2004 in order to provide a way for Burma human rights organizations to collaborate on the human rights documentation process. The 13 ND-Burma member organizations seek to collectively use the truth of what communities in Burma have endured to advocate for justice for victims. ND-Burma trains local organizations in human rights documentation; coordinates members’ input into a common database using Martus, a secure open-source software; and engages in joint-advocacy campaigns.
Recent Posts
- Nearly 500 cases of sexual assault against women in Myanmar’s conflict
- Two women killed in airstrike on Oakkan village, Kawlin Township in northwest Myanmar
- Political prisoner dies due to lack of adequate medical care in Myanmar’s Dawei Prison
- Patterns of Military Oppression In 2023-2024
- Sexual abuse and violence worsens in Myanmar factories: activists
The United States is Quitting the UN Human Rights Council. Here’s Why That’s a Bad Idea
/in NewsBy: Mark Leon Goldberg on June 19, 2018
One day after being criticized by the top UN human rights official for its policy of separating children from their parents at the border, the United States announced that it is withdrawing from the main UN human rights organ, the Human Rights Council.
The timing is eyebrow raising, but this was not an entirely surprising decision. One year ago, Nikki Haley visited the Human Rights Council in Geneva and issued an ultimatum: unless the Council reformed to her liking, the United States would pull out.
Haley’s criticisms of the council center around two indisputable facts: that the Council frequently focuses Israel and that some members of the Council are countries with poor human rights records. But rather than remain on the Council to defend Israel and try and prevent countries with poor human rights records from influencing the work of the Council, the United States is calling it quits.
By withdrawing from the Human Rights Council, the United States is ceding yet another tool of American global leadership
Haley’s criticisms of the Human Rights Council are as old as the Council itself. When the Council was created in 2005, then UN ambassador John Bolton lobbied successfully against the Bush administration joining it. After the 2008 elections, the United States opted to join, concluding that it could better steer the work of the Council from the inside, including defending Israel, rather than from the sidelines.
Evidence suggests that this approach tangibly advanced American interests at the Council.
A report last year by the Council on Foreign Relations examined the work of the Council in years in which the United States served as a member and the years in which it did not. It found that Israel-specific resolutions decreased by more than half once the US joined the Council.
The CFR report also shows how country-specific mandates were added to the Council’s to-do list when the US was on the council, compared to the years in which it was not.
In other words, when the United States was an active participant at the Council, the Council reduced its focus on Israel and expanded its focus on other countries with problematic human rights records. This suggests that the stated reasons for the US withdrawal from the Council will become something of a fulfilling prophecy: with the US indifferent to the Council, the Council is more likely to adopt resolutions and measures that the United States finds contrary to its interests.
This move by the US is intended to discredit the UN Human Rights Council. In fact, the Council has a decent record of upholding human rights around the world.
Israel and Palestine are not the sum of the work of the Human Rights Council. Rather, in its 12 years of existence, the Council has amassed a decent track record, both of investigating specific human rights abuses and global norm setting.
In 2011, with strong support from the United States, the Human Rights Council passed an historic resolution that equated LGBT rights with human rights. This had the effect of mainstreaming LGBT rights into the broader UN human rights portfolio. This included giving then-secretary general Ban Ki Moon the breathing room he needed to more robustly engage in LGBT rights issues, even though some more conservative UN member states remained adamantly opposed. (In 2015, he was awarded the Harvey Milk award for his work on behalf of LGBT rights).
Just last year, the Human Rights Council approved the creation of a new special human rights “rapporteur” whose work focuses on rights issues around sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Human Rights Council has also been a platform for constructive engagement on issues that are otherwise paralyzed by big power rivalries at the Security Council. Syria is a good example here. With the Security Council unable to take any action, the Human Rights Council approved creating a commission of inquiry to document human rights abuses committed in the context of the Syria conflict. Every six months, the Commission of Inquiry releases a new report detailing abuses and identifying perpetrators. This obviously has not stopped the slaughter in Syria–but it has created robust documentary evidence of crimes committed in Syria that could be used in future war crimes proceedings. It is also a demonstration that, despite inaction at the Security Council, the United Nations can still be a player on these key global issues.
The Council has also routinely shined a spotlight on neglected human rights issues, such as regime abuses against its citizens in Eritrea and Belarus. It is the only UN entity that consistently maintains focus on human rights abuses by regimes that are not on the radar of the news media or are of particular interest to powerful forces at the UN. In these situations it does its job–and does its job well. Again, to quote the CFR report:
To the extent that US withdrawal from the council serves to undermine the council itself, the people who will suffer will end up being Eritreans and Belarusians who are being oppressed by their government.
US and International Human Rights Groups Do Not Support this Move
The American decision to leave the Human Rights Council is being criticized by human rights and humanitarian groups that have long standing commitments to upholding human dignity around the world.
That statement was signed by The Better World Campaign, CARE, Council for Global Equality, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), Freedom House, Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights First, Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, PEN America, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Save the Children and United Nations Association – USA.
These groups work day in, day out to promote human rights around the world and they argue that the US withdrawal is harmful to their cause.
That is because this decision is antithetical to US interests and serves to undermine an already fragile global human rights regime. The United States doesn’t stand to gain much from leaving the Human Rights Council and the Trump administration is committing yet another unforced error by ceding this platform for upholding human rights around the world.
www.undispatch.com
Human rights are not a luxury
/in NewsZeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
Four years as the U.N. high commissioner for human rights have brought me many luminous encounters and desperate struggles, much painful and shocking information, and some profound lessons that may take many years to fully assimilate.
I have constantly circled back to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rightsin 1948, where this story truly began. It was a time of slaughter and terrible suffering, with broken economies and nations emerging from the ashes of two global wars, an immense genocide, atomic destruction and the Great Depression. Finding solutions that could ensure global — and national — peace was a matter of the starkest kind of survival. Committing to the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was crucial. They were not philosophical goals: This was life or death.
There could be no peace without justice. There could be no durable development without promotion of broad social progress and better standards of life, for all, in larger freedom. The men and women who survived the two world wars understood this utterly. It was in their bones.
Treaty by treaty, world leaders built a great body of laws and covenants and committed to upholding them. Today there is a great cynicism about the global order they constructed — never fully global, never very orderly — but although it may have been partial, the progress they ensured was immense.
But that generation is departing quickly, and with them the living memory of the lessons that were so painfully clear to them. Now, rather than advancing toward greater freedom, justice and peace, the world is going backward — to a landscape of increasingly strident, zero-sum nationalism, where the jealously guarded, short-term interests of individual leaders supplant and destroy efforts to find common solutions.
We are moving backward to an era of contempt for the rights of people who have been forced to flee their homes, because the threats they face there are more dangerous even than the perils of their voyage. Backward to a time when military operations could deliberately target civilians and civilian sites such as hospitals, and chemical gases were openly used for military purposes and against innocent families.
We are moving backward to an era when racists and xenophobes deliberately inflamed hatred and discrimination among the public, while carefully cloaking themselves in the guise of democracy and the rule of law. Backward to an era when women were not permitted to control their own choices and their own bodies — when criticism was criminalized and human rights activism brought jail, or worse.
This is the way that wars are made: with the snarl of belligerence and the smirk of dehumanization; the lash of injustice and the incremental erosion of old and seemingly wearisome checks. The path of violence is made up of the unreckoned consequences of banal, incidental brutality seeping into the political landscape.
Here is one lesson: Intolerance is an insatiable machine. Its wheels, once they begin to function at a certain amplitude, become uncontrollable — grinding deeper, more cruelly and widely. First one group of people is singled out for hatred; next it will be more, and then more, as the machine for exclusion accelerates into violence, and into civil or international warfare — feeding always on its own rage, a growing frenzy of grievance and blaming. As that tension begins to peak, no obvious mechanism exists that is capable of decompressing and controlling its intensity, because the machine functions on an emotional level that has very little contact with reason. Release may come only after tremendous violence. This is something those of us who work for human rights have witnessed time and again.
We are at a pivotal moment in history, now, as contempt for human rights spreads. Xenophobes and racists have emerged from the shadows. A backlash is growing against advances made in women’s rights and many others. The space for civic activism is shrinking. The legitimacy of human rights principles is attacked, and the practice of human rights norms is in retreat.
What we are destroying is, quite simply, the structures that ensure our safety.
The destruction of Syria is a murderous parable, written in blood, that brings home yet again that horrific spiraling of incremental human rights violations into absolute destruction.
The organized campaigns of violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar – Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy in 2016 — yet again reminds us that economic growth will never maintain peace and security in the face of biting discrimination. In 2017 — 2017! — we once again saw the specter of genocide, and once again, we did very, very little to stop it from happening.
So, in a sentence, what is the one core lesson that has been brought home to me by this extraordinary, privileged, crushing mandate as high commissioner?
It is that in every circumstance, the safety of humanity will be secured only through vision, energy and generosity of spirit; through activism; through the struggle for greater freedom, in equality; and through justice.
Sources
Kachin Aid Group Halts Humanitarian Work After Threat by Myanmar Army
/in NewsAn evangelical Christian organization based in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state has stopped its humanitarian work in areas controlled by an ethnic militia in the conflict-ridden region after the Myanmar military warned that it would take action against the group for associating with an illegal entity, an official from the NGO said Friday.
The Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), headquartered in the state capital Myitkyina, has helped civilians displaced by fighting between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Myanmar forces since hostilities resumed in June 2011 following the breakdown of a 17-year bilateral peace accord.
A surge in the clashes this year in the long-running civil war between the KIA and Myanmar army has displaced more than 7,400 civilians in Hpakant, Tanaing, and Injangyang townships since early April, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The fighting forced more IDPs into camps between Myanmar-China border posts Nos. 6 and 8 in Waingmaw township in Myitkyina district, joining some 5,000 others already living there, according to the KBC.
The Myanmar army said KBC members delivered food supplies to the newly arrived IDPs in the area in early May.
“The refugees are in danger during this rainy season,” Rev. Hkalam Samson, the KBC’s general secretary, told RFA’s Myanmar Service. “That’s why we have been helping them.”
Colonel Thura Myo Tin, Kachin state’s security and border affairs minister, sent the KBC a letter dated May 21, telling the organization to stop going to the border camps to help the IDPs or risk being charged under Article 17(1) of the colonial-era Unlawful Association Act because the camps are in KIA-controlled territory, he said.
“Actually, every border area in Kachin state is KIA-controlled territory,” Hkalam Samson added.
‘Not helping the KIA’
The Unlawful Association Act was used during Myanmar’s decades of military junta rule to detain those linked to rebel groups, and it continues to be used to jail people in Kachin state for allegedly being in contact with the KIA.
It sets out prison terms of two to three years and a possible fine for being a member of an “unlawful association,” making contributions to one, or assisting its operations.
The KBC — the main domestic aid organization in Kachin state — has been helping IDPs for seven years, along with United Nations agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, Hkalam Samson said.
“We all are helping all IDPs,” he said. “We are not helping the KIA.”
The KBC is planning to send a response to the ministry, he added.
Intensified clashes between the KIA and Myanmar forces this year have raised questions about the military’s possible role in hindering the government’s efforts to end the country’s civil wars and forge lasting peace.
Since 2011, more than 100,000 civilians have been displaced in Kachin state, many of whom have been unable to return to their homes as the conflict continues.
Reported by Kyaw Thu for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
RFA News
The 7th Anniversary of the Renewed Kachin War: An Update
/in NewsToday is the 7th anniversary of renewed war in the Kachin region. On June 9, 2011, the war between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Burma Army (BA) was reignited after a combined force of the BA’s 437th Light Infantry Regiment and 348th Light Infantry Regiment troops launched an attack on the KIA 15th Battalion’s Bumsan post in Sanggang, located near Taping hydropower plant in Momauk Township. It effectively ended the 17-year ceasefire that had been in place since 1994.
Lance Corporal Gawmo Chang Ying, a KIO liason officer in Sanggang was arrested, tortured and killed by BA troops. At the request of the KIO’s Central Committee, Chang Ying’s body was returned to KIA troops on June 10, 2011, and it was found that he had suffered multiple bruises, stab wounds, and bayonet wounds. Chang Ying had reportedly been shot three times even after death.
The KIO requested the BA to stop sending troops and transporting military hardware to the Kachin frontlines following the Sanggang incident, but the BA ignored the KIO’s request. On June 12, 2011, the KIO Central Committee gave orders for KIA forces to open fire on BA troops as a defensive measure.
Conflict Update
According to KIO official sources and local frontline updates, there have been 3862 clashes between the two sides, which involvedsoldier on soldier combat, artillery and landmine attacks, from June 11, 2011 to May 31, 2018.
There were 663 clashes between the KIA and the BA in 2011, 879 clashesin 2012, 224 clashes in 2013, and 155 clashes in 2014.
Fighting between the KIA and the BA escalated after the NLD was elected as government in 2015. In 2015, there were 634 clashes, 740 clashes in 2016, 361 clashes in 2017, 206 clashes from January to May in 2018.
BA troops from at least 108 Infantry battalions from Myitkyina-based Northern Command, Mandalay-based Central Command, Monywa-based Northwestern Command, Pathein-based Southwestern Command, Danai-based Regional Operations Command, Mogaung-based 3rd Military Operations Command, Bhamo-based 21st Military Operations Command, Hpegon-based 7th Military Operations Command, Sagaing-based 33rdLight Infantry Division, Pegu-based 77th Light Infantry Division, Magway-based 88th Light Infantry Division, Meiktila-based 99th Light Infantry Division, and Tennesserim-based 101st Light Infantry Division currently deployed in Kachin State.
In northern Shan State, thousands of BA troops from at least 90 Infantry battalions from Lashio-based North Eastern Command, Kyaukme-based 1st Military Operations Command, Hpugyi-based 4th Military Operations Command, Kyigone-based 10th Military Operations Command,Theinni-based 16th Military Operations Command, Lau Kai-based Regional Operations Command, Hlegu-based 11th Light Infantry Division, Aungban-based 55th Light Infantry Division, Pyay-based 66th Light Infantry Division, Pegu-based 77th Light Infantry Division, and Magway-based 88th Light Infantry Division are currently being deployed.
Human rights abuses and arbitrary killings (2011 – 2018)
1. An estimated 124 innocent civilians have been tortured, killed by BA forces.
2. 34 Kachin women have been raped.
3. About 300 innocent civilians have been rounded up and imprisoned.
4. 78 received permanent injuries, as a result of suffering torture at the hand of BA troops.
It is likely that there are many more unreported cases of torture, rape and imprisonment.
Destruction and occupation of churches, monasteries, childcare centers, schools, clinics (2011 – 2018)
The following are the numbers KLN obtained from KIO official sources, and local aid organizations:
311 churches damaged or destroyed
24 Buddhist monasteries occupied or left damaged by BA troops
134 childcare centers damaged or destroyed
122 schools damaged or destroyed
264 clinics damaged or destroyed
IDP Situation
Kachin local faith-based and aid organizations report that about 130,000 villagers and residents have been displaced since the renewed war began in June 2011. They are living in 165 camps in areas controlled by both the Burmese government and the KIO.
In 2018 alone, over 6,000 persons were internally displaced and forced to move to IDP camps. KLN has obtained some updates on the latest IDP situation. The following are the IDPs and camps added in 2017-18 due to BA offensives in central Kachin state.
Myitkyina
(1) Jaw Masat IDP Camp Numbers of IDPs (489)
(2) Trinity IDP Camp Numbers of IDPs (724)
(3) Tanghpre IDP Camp Numbers of IDPs (1223)
Waimaw
(1) Qtr.2 Lhaovo Baptist Church Numbers of IDPs (49)
(2) Maina AG Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (52)
(3) Shangaw/ Hka Wan Dabang Numbers of IDPs (194)
(4) Maina KBC Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (89)
Chi-hpwi
(1) Lhaovo Baptist Church (LBC) Numbers of IDPs (215)
(2) Chi-hpwi KBC Camp Numbers of IDPs (198)
Danai
(1) Tanai Dabang Nnan Numbers of IDPs (268)
(2) Kamai Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (142)
Hpa-kant
(1) Lawa Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (145)
Moegawng
(1) Namti, Lambraw Yang KBC IDP Camp Numbers of IDPs (308)
(2) Zup Mai Yang IDP Camp Numbers of IDPs (219)
(3) Namti AG Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (83)
(4) Namti RC Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (104)
(5) Myo Oo RC Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (174)
Njang Yang
(1) Tayang Zup Hpyen Yen Dabang Numbers of IDPs (114)
Momauk
(1) Momauk Numbers of IDPs (82)
Destroyed and Abandoned Villages
To date, 405 villages have been damaged in the Kachin region since the renewed war began in June 2011. From Jan to May 2018, about 50 villages were abandoned and the villagers forced to live in IDPs camps and relatives’ houses. The following is the latest list of abandoned villages in Danai, Sumprabum, Kamaing, Mogaung and Hpakant townships in 2018.
(01) Hpala
(02) Zang Nawng
(03) Yin Chyin
(04) Lawk Gam
(05) Myaw Maw Pa
(06) Na Law
(07) Lawng Hpam
(08) Man Dong
(09) Ja Wa
(10) Aura
(11) Jubali
(12) Wulawng Yang
(13) Nai Tsing
(14) Gwi Htau
(15) Tang Bau Yang
(16) Nlawt Yang
(17) Zup Mai Yang
(18) Ja Htu Yang
(19) Sut Ngai Yang
(20) Patsip Zup
(21) Bum Nen Yang
(22) Sani Tu Yang
(23) Gum San Yang
(24) Bum Se Zup
(25) Kumtsai Taw Yang
(26) Pung Swi Yang
(27) Htara Zup
(28) Hkridaw Ga
(29) Jingma Yang
(30) Dubau Kawng Ra
(31) Tingsau Yang
(32) Hpawlam Hpya
(33) Ulawk
(34) Ndung Yang
(35) Tsa Tsing Pa
(36) Awng Lawt
(37) Zup Mai Yang
(38) Nawng Nyeng
(39) Nam Hkam
(40) N-ga Ga
(41) Nam Gawn
(42) Pawk Wa
(43) Awng Ba
(44) Ja Awng Pa
(45) Awng Len
Deaths and Injuries from landmines in 2018
From January to May 2018, 13 civilians were killed and 39 civilians were injured by landmines.
The following is a list of civilians killed or injured in 2018.
Myanmar’s military accused of violence against Kachin people
/in NewsIn Myanmar the country’s military is facing fresh accusations that it’s launched deadly attacks against civilians.
This time, not against the Rohingya’s, but against the Kachin people in the north.
The BBC’s Myanmar correspondent Nick Beake met people fleeing their homes.
Fighting continues in Kachin State as youth form anti-war movement and protesters arrested
/in Justice NewslettersSeeking justice in Burma
May 2018
Intense fighting continues in Kachin State trapping civilians in conflict zones and spawning anti-war movement across the country; Read more