WAR: Fierce battles continued in KIA’s 5th Brigade territory

Fighting between Kachin Independent Army (KIA) and Burmese Government Army has escalated in the past week in KIA’s 5^th Brigade areas.  Kachinnet reported that KIA soldiers under 5^th Brigade fought against Burmese Army soldiers under 29^th LIB on Feb 25, 2012 for an hour starting from 8:00am near Namsam Hka bridge. No casualties have been reported from either side.

On Feb 24, KIA soldiers of 253^rd Battalions have fiercely fought against Magwe-based Burmese Army soldiers under 88^th LID for seven hours starting from 6:30am in the morning. The fighting took place between Sama and Htaura Hkyet. At least 8 Burmese soldiers were reportedly killed in the battle, said front line source.

On Feb 23, a fierce battle between KIA soldiers under 5^th brigade and Burmese Army’s 88^th LID took place at about 4:45 pm at Bak Nan (Sama crossroad). 7 Burmese Army soldiers were killed in this battle, said source. Another fierce fighting that began at 8:15 am on Feb 23^rd near Nam Ngau Hka killed at least 2 Burmese soldiers, a front line source said.

Burmese Army is largely unsuccessful in its campaign to annihilate KIA with more than 200 battalions and Light Infantry Divisions that were established to fight against foreign invasion. Though President Thein Sein ordered to halt military offences in Kachin areas, Burmese army repeatedly ignored the order and continued its offenses against KIA and Kachin civilians. There are more than 70,000 internally displaced persons currently living in perilous conditions along Sino-Burma border due to increased human right abuses in war zones.

KIO and Burmese government met for six times since renewed fighting began in last June. KIA’s Chief of Staff General Gunhtang Gam Shawng recently said there were fundamental differences in views between KIO and Burmese government. While KIO expresses its willingness to engage with Burmese government for political talks based on Panglong Agreement for political solutions, Burmese government says any political settlement should be based on 2008 constitution. Because of bitter experiences suffered during 17 years of ceasefire, General Gam Shawng says they will not seek ceasefire agreement until a lasting political settlement for equal rights and self-determination is achieved.

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Mon Arm Group signs peace agreement with the burmese regime-mov

DKBA ႏွင့္ အစိုးရတို႔၏ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပ႗ိပကၡ မျဖစ္ေရး သေဘာ တူညီခ်က္

အစိုးရ၏ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ေဖၚေဆာင္ေရး အဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ တိုးတက္ေသာ ကရင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ တပ္မေတာ္ (DKBA) တို႔ ဒုတိယေန႔ အျဖစ္ ေဖေဖၚ၀ါရီ (၂၆) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ ဖါးအံျမိဳ႔ အမွတ္ (၂၂) တပ္မဌာနခ်ဳပ္၌ ဆက္လက္ေဆြးေႏြး ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဤ ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမွ ႏွစ္ဖက္တပ္မ်ား၊ ေနရာ ခ်ထားေရးႏွင့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပ႗ိပကၡ မျဖစ္ေရးကို ေအာက္ပါ အတိုင္း သေဘာတူညီ ခဲ့ပါ
သည္။

ေဖေဖၚ၀ါရီ (၂၅၊၂၆) ရက္ေန႔၌ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ ဖါးအံၿမိဳ႔ အမွတ္ (၂၂) ေျချမန္တပ္မ ဌာနခ်ဳပ္တြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဖၚေဆင္ေရး အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားႏွင့္ ကလို႔ထူးေဘာမွ ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ေစာမိုေရွးႏွင့္ ေစာသန္းေရႊ (ေခၚ) ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ဘိုဘိ တို႔က ျမိဳင္ႀကီးငူေဒသတြင္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပ႗ိပကၡမျဖစ္ေစေရး၊ လံုၿခံဳေရးကိစၥ ညွိႏွဳိင္းျပီး ႏွစ္ဖက္ သေဘာတူ လက္မွတ္ေရး ထိုးခဲ့ပါသည္။

(၁) မယ္တေ၀ါေဒသတြင္ လွဳပ္ရွားေနေသာ၊ ေစာသန္းေရႊေခၚ ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဘိုဘိတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား၊ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေစာလားဘြယ္ဦး ေဆာင္ေသာ ကလို႔ထူးေဘာ လက္ေအာက္ခံ တပ္ဖြဲ႔ျဖစ္ေၾ႕ာင္း သေဘာတူသည္။ ေစာသန္းေရႊေခၚ ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဘိုဘိတို႔ တပ္ဖြဲ႔ လက္နက္ အျပည့္အစံု ကိုင္ေဆာင္၍ ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူသို႔လည္းေကာင္း၊ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ေဒသသို႔ လည္းေကာင္း၊ လံုး၀၀င္ ထြက္သြား လာခြင့္ မရွိေၾကာင္း သေဘာတူသည္။

(၂) အျခားမည္သည့္ ပုဂၢဳိလ္တဦးဦးမွ ေခါင္းေဆာင္၍ လည္းေကာင္း၊ လိုက္ပါ၍ လည္းေကာင္း၊ ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ေဒသသို႔ လက္နက္ခဲယမ္း အျပည့္အစံု ကိုင္ေဆာင္၍ လိုက္ပါလာျပီး အေျခခ်ျခင္း မျပဳရန္ သေဘာတူသည္။

(၃) ကလို႔ထူးေဘာ တပ္ဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားသည္၊ ၿမိဳင္ႀကီးငူေဒသ၀န္းက်င္တြင္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပ႗ိပကၡမျဖစ္ေစေရးအတြက္ အစိုးရ တပ္မေတာ္ႏွင့္လည္းေကာင္း၊ တပ္မေတာ္ ကြပ္ကဲမွဳေအာက္ တပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ားႏွင့္ လည္းေကာင္း၊

Minister of Union, U Khin Yi:Political exiles can request to attain Myanmar citizenship

19.febr.2012

Myanmar people, who are in different countries for various reasons, can apply to receive citizenship from the Ministry of Immigration and Population if they have the necessary proof, said a Chief official officer from the Ministry of Immigration, on the 5^th February 2012 at a media meeting.

“The applicants can only request citizenship after they recant alliance from other countries. They have to send their request to a Myanmar embassy in a foreign country. We announce that Burmese people living in foreign countries can now accept Burmese citizenship” said Minister of Union, U Khin Yi.

People who want citizenship have to provide their personal information to the Myanmar Embassy in their respective countries. The embassy asks for written proof which will be checked.

If the applicant is Myanmar they can apply for citizenship and also if one’s parents are native to Myanmar citizenship applications will be considered. If the personal information provided is incomplete, applicants will be given a temporary ID card.

People who want to attain citizenship can apply to the Citizens Analysis Centre. Applicants with complete proof provided can become lawful citizens the Minister of Union said.

The opposition party analyst said they find it hard to believe the government will truly accept political exiles because they did not give amnesty to all currently imprisoned political prisoners.

Thousands of Myanmar people live abroad as refugees as well as citizens of other countries. Due to the 1988 uprising many people had to leave Myanmar to seek exile in other countries.

http://www.phophtaw.org/english/

Freedom fighter Min Thar Tun, Landfall Island prisoner dies

New Delhi (Mizzima) – Min Thar Tun, 37, who was released from an Indian prison in May 2011, died of heart attack on Thursday in New Delhi.

Min Thar Tun is in the blue circle. Thirty-one Arakanese and Karen freedom fighters posed for a photograph on May 19, 2011, just before they were released from detention in India. Photo: Mizzima

Min Thar Tun was a 2nd Lieutenant in the National Unity Party of Arakan (NUPA) when he was arrested by the Indian Army in 1998 at Landfall Island in the Andaman Islands along with 35 NUP and Karen National Union (KNU) colleagues

After being held in Kolkata prison for 13 years, he was released in May 2011 along with his colleagues. He had been living in New Delhi as a refugee recognized by the UNHCR.

Friends said that he had been accepted by the Netherlands in its refugee resettlement programme for departure in June.