WAR : Face-off continues between Wa, Burma Army

THURSDAY, 04 JULY 2013 15:55 S.H.A.N.

Military confrontation between the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the Burma Army (BA) that began in May has yet to show any signs of let-up and is slowly building up to showdown, according to local and Thai border sources.

“Wa villagers (who had moved down to the Thai Burmese border since 1999) are no longer arrogant toward their Shan and Lahu neighbors as before,” said a respected local. “They are selling their livestock cheap and saying they’ll take refuge on the Thai side of the border once the shooting begins.”

shih-kuo-neng.

According to sources, the Burma Army has issued a series of demands to the UWSA’s 171st Military Region that is holding several areas along the border in two townships: Mongton in the west and Monghsat in the east, opposite Maehongson, Chiangmai and Chiangrai provinces:

• No expansion of rubber plantations and founding of new towns without permission
• Not to travel through BA controlled areas bearing arms and wearing UWSA uniforms
• To present a list of the UWSA outposts and bases together with the names of the commanders and strengths.
• To pull out from outposts in 4 locations: Kiulom in Mongjawd; and Namzarm, Hsarm Hsoom and an unidentified location in Monghsat by Sunday, 7 July 2013

“The Wa have instead beefed up their positions along the border,” said a Thai border watcher. “Wei Xuegang (commander of the 171st) reportedly ordered his brigade commanders, ‘if they shoot, we shoot.’”

There are 5 UWSA brigades in the 171st Military Region: 778th, 772nd, 775th, 248th and 518th, totaling 7,000 strong together with their own militias, according to a Wa source.

The tension which was no more than an annoyance after the Wa called for a separate state of their own in March and refusal to allow Naypyitaw’s administrative personnel into Wa-controlled territories came to a head after reports of the UWSA launch of a rubber plantation-cum-new town project in Mong Khid, Mongton township in May. This was followed in June by the killing of a Tachilek resident by a Wa gunman believed to be a follower of Xi Guoneng, an official in the Wa’s Hong Pang Company (new renamed Thawda Win).

The victim was said to have opened a case with the police after Hong Pang had forcibly taken land and bulldozed the buildings inside the land.

Xi Guoneng, also written Shi Kuo Neng, is one of the 26 individuals named by the US Treasury Department on 13 November 2008 as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers pursuant to Kingpin Act.

“The Burma Army is also unhappy about reports that the UWSA is giving material support to the Kachin Independence Army (KIA),” said a Thai security source.

Naypyitaw, according to some reports, had dispatched an envoy to negotiate with the Wa last week, but nothing has been disclosed about the meeting, which took place at Kunma, north of the Wa capital Panghsang. Wa leader Wei Xiegang is said to have established close business and personal relationship with U Aung Thaung, the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)’s special adviser.

CREDIT PANGLONG ORG

POLITICAL AND MILITARY SITUATION BETWEEN UWSA AND MYANMAR GOVT.VIDEO

KAYAN TIMES 4.JUNE  POLITICAL AND MILITARY SITUATION BETWEEN UWSA AND MYANMAR GOVT.ကိုယ္ပိုင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ရ ျပည္နယ္ “အသိအမွတ္ျပဳ”ရန္ UWSA ေတာင္းဆို
“ဝျပည္နယ္ ေတာင္းတယ္ဆုိတာ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္က ခြဲထြက္ဖုိ႔ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဘယ္လူမ်ဳိးမဆုိ ကုိယ္ပုိင္ ျပ႒ာန္းခြင့္ကုိ လုိလားၾကတာပဲ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ျပသာနာ မရွာပါဘူး။ လက္နက္ကုိင္ၿပီး အစုိးရကုိ ေတာ္လွန္ဖုိ႔ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ က်ေနာ္ တုိ႔ ဝ က အစုိးရ ယႏၲယားမ်ား အားလုံး ရွိထားၿပီးသားပါ။ ဝ ကုိယ္ပုိင္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး ျပည္နယ္ အသိအမွတ္ျပဳဖုိ႔ကုိပဲ
ေတာင္းဆုိတာပါ” ဟု ဝျပည္နယ္ ျပင္ပဆက္ဆံေရး ဌာနႀကီး၊ ဒုတိယ ဌာနႀကီးမွဴး ဦးဆမ္ခြန္း က မဇၥ်ိမကို
ေျပာသည္။

 

Wa will not budge from Thai border areas

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the people it had brought down from the Sino-Burmese border will not move house back from the Thai-Burmese border areas where it has been allowed to reside since the 1990s, according to well known analyst Aung Kyaw Zaw, who is reportedly close to the Wa.

 

“This land has been won by blood, sweat and tears of the Wa people and its fighters,” he said. “They refuse to forsake it under any pressure.”

The UWSA for 7 long years waged an all-out war against the Mong Tai Army (MTA) led by the late Khun Sa (1926-2007) until a mutiny broke the backbone of his forces and forced him to make peace with Rangoon in 1996.

Founding of Wa State can spark confusion

 

CREDIT EMG 15.MAY 2013

Shaung Milyan, vice-chairperson of United Wa State Army (UWSA), demanded that the Wa self-administered division be upgraded into a state during a meeting with the government’s union level peace working committee in Panhsang of Wa Special Region (2), Shan State, on May 10.

UWSA, the largest of the armed ethnic groups in Myanmar, has reiterated the demand, which it has made since 2012.

Regarding the Wa’s demand, one Lower House MP said granting it without thorough analysis could make the country’s situation more confusing.

“In my opinion, it is too early to satisfy their demand. This issue must be discussed in a close-door meeting in Parliament. Are those living in the Wa region are genuine Wa nationals? It is necessary to monitor whether there are manipulators behind the demand. If it is granted without analysis, there will be confusion,” MP Kyi Myint said.

Some fear that the upgrading of the Wa self-administered division to a state might change the union pattern of Myanmar as the administrative board of the Wa region uses Chinese as an official language and only 30% of the population use Bamar language and other ethnic dialects.

Sao Aung Myint from Shan Descendent Force said: “The issue is not possible yet although they have the right to demand. Our country is multi-national. Various ethnic groups live in Shan State. If the Wa is allowed to form an autonomous state, the whole union will be in a state of fragility.”

ELEVEN MEDIA RESPONDS TO CHINA,S ACCUSATIONS OVER ARMS DEAL TO UWSA

 

1. The Chinese embassy in Myanmar has issued a press release dated May 7, expressing deep dissatisfaction over the news about ‘the Wa’s objection to China’s selling armed helicopters to the United Wa State Army’ featured in the sample newspaper of the Daily Eleven on May 1.

2. The points included in the press release are a one-sided accusation against our newspaper without thorough reading. Our news was written based on multiple sources and the Wa side also denied it. Our newspaper did not mention any hints or opinions to prove that the news was correct. The Chinese embassy’s accusation that the news could mislead the readers from Myanmar and abroad is totally wrong.

3. It comes as a great surprise to learn that the Chinese embassy issued its press release only a week after our trial-run newspaper was published on May 1.
4. The fact that China’s complete control over the Kunming-Kyaukphyu railroad project or Kyaukphyu port can harm state sovereignty as mentioned in today’s issue of our newspaper is the real opinion of the Daily Eleven. We welcome the Chinese government’s policy of respecting Myanmar’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

5. The Chinese government should respect the rights and freedom of the Myanmar people if it respects state sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Chinese embassy’s press release showing deep dissatisfaction over the news is tantamount to disturbing the Myanmar people’s rights and freedom.

6. The Daily Eleven therefore strongly objects to the Chinese embassy’s press release saying words of disturbing freedom of press, which is the right of the Myanmar people.

Editorial Team
The Daily Eleven

BURMESE    https://democracyforburma.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/press-release-embassy-of-china-reports-of-weapon-transfer-unfounded-and-misleading/

PRESS RELEASE : EMBASSY OF CHINA: REPORTS OF WEAPON TRANSFER UNFOUNDED AND MISLEADING

ေမလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အစမ္း ထုတ္ေ၀ခဲ့ေသာ The Daily Eleven သတင္းစာတြင္ “၀”သို႔ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ စစ္ရ ဟတ္ ယာဥ္ ေပးပို႔ခဲ့ျခင္းအား “၀”ဘက္မွ ျငင္းဆို သတင္းကို ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့သည့္ အတြက္ Eleven Media Gorup ကို ျပင္းျပင္း ထန္ထန္ မေက်နပ္ေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ တရုတ္သံရံုးမွ ေမလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ေၾကညာခ်က္ အျပည့္အစံုမွာ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ေၾကညာခ်က္ (အဂၤလိပ္မူ)

သတင္းစာ လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္အား ထိပါးသည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုသမၼတ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ တ႐ုတ္ျပည္သူ႔ သမၼတႏိုင္ငံ သံ႐ံုး၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ကို The Daily Eleven သတင္းစာမွ ျပန္ၾကားခ်က္Tuesday, 07 May 2013 18:31၁။ ယေန႔ ေမလ ၇ ရက္ ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ တ႐ုတ္သံ႐ံုးက သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ (Press Release) တစ္ေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ၎ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္တြင္ ေမလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အစမ္းထုတ္ေ၀ေသာ The Daily Eleven သတင္းစာပါ “၀” သို႔ တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ စစ္ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ား ေပးပို႔ခဲ့သည့္သတင္း မဟုတ္မွန္ေၾကာင္း “၀” ျငင္းဆို ဆိုသည့္သတင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ မေက်နပ္ေၾကာင္း ကန္႔ကြက္စာ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ပါသည္။

UWSA denies it acquired armed helicopters from China

credit EMG

Myanmar’s ethnic armed group, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), has dismissed report from Janes Intelligence’s that it acquired five armed helicopters from China.

The news posted on the website, http://www.janes.com, said China delivered several Mil Mi-17 ‘Hip’ medium-transport helicopters armed with TY-90 air-to-air missiles to the Wa aermy in late February and early March. The WA received five helicopters but according to a source of the Myanmar government, only two were confirmed.

MI-17 helicopters armed with TY-90 air-to-air missiles can deter Russia-made Mi-24P Hind jet fighters which the government used in its counter-insurgency operations against the Kachin Independence Organisation, Janes Intelligence website said.

But the news was not true and the Wa did not receive any assistance from China, San Khun from the foreign affairs department of the United Wa State Party told the Eleven Media Group.

He also refused to make any comments on the news about the rearmament of UWSA and China’s assistance.

“I don’t want to say any more as the news was not true, San Khun said.

Although the news sources are unconfirmed, the Wa has already acquired weaponry that any ethnic armed groups in Myanmar cannot expected over the last four years, political analyst living in the China-Myanmar border told the EMG.

“Regarding the recent news on purchasing warhead helicopters from China, the official from the UWSA hasn’t made any comments or confirmed when we asked,” Aung Kyaw Zaw said.

However, they could purchase those helicopters if they wish with the current budget, sources say.

“We don’t know whether military weapons, arms and equipment are being imported from China or Ukraine. They are imported via Maekong River from Laos? Sources said, last year, about two hundred trucks loads of arms and weapons were imported. The UWSA did not confirmed over the information leakage either. But It is confirmed that the UWSA has requested the government to allow for an airport project in Tangyan,” Aung Kyaw Zaw added.

The expanding of military power in UWSA shows the country’s unfinished conflicts between the government and ethnic armed forces.

“The government’s troops are not only battling with Kachin Independence Army (KIA) but also with Shan State Army (SSPP/SSA). Besides the government troops are also sometimes fighting with USWA based on the west of Thanlwin River. This is one of the facts for the USWA to beef up military power,” he added.

The UWSA is one of the armed forced army that did not accept to become a border guard force as demanded by the government. It is the strongest ethnic armed force in the country. It has more than 30,000 soldiers and modern weapons. It was the second secession group from Burma Communist Party (BCP). It confiscated the BCP’s headquarter on April 17, 1989. The BCP’s headquarter was located in Wa Region.

Since its inception, UWSP has declared to live peacefully together with the military, and built bilateral relations. At the time of the State Law and Order Restoration Council, UWSP signed a ceasefire agreement with the government, which later designated the Special Region (2) of Northern Shan State as ‘Wa’ region. Then, the UWSA had nearly 10,000 soldiers.

In 1993, representatives from UWSA attended the National Convention of the country, and they cooperated with other ethnic armed forces.

After General Khin Nyunt was expelled from his post in 2004, the Wa people had some arguments with the government. A year later, UWSA officially claimed they had stopped growing opium, but the international community believed their ‘Wa’ groups were still linked to drugs and opium.

၀ ေဒသကာကြယ္ဖုိ႕ တရုတ္အစုိးရက UWSA ကုိ စစ္ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ား တပ္ဆင္ေ-BUR/ENGLISH

UWSA ၀ျပည္ေသြးစည္းညီညြတ္ေရးတပ္ဟာ ပထမဆုံးအၾကိမ္ အျဖစ္ တရုတ္ႏုိင္ငံမွ ဆုံလည္ ပစ္လုိ႔ရတဲ့ လက္နက္တပ္ဆင္ထားတဲ့ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ားကုိ ရရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ဧျပီ ၂၉ ထုတ္ Janes Intelligence သတင္းမွာ ေဖာ္ျပပါတယ္။

ဒါဟာ UWSA အျမန္လက္နက္ျပန္လည္ တပ္ဆင္ေရးအတြက္ လုပ္ရပ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရပါတယ္။

ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီလကုန္ပုိင္းႏွင့္ မတ္လ အစပုိင္းမွာ လည္း TY-90 လက္နက္ တပ္ဆင္ထားေသာ စစ္သုံး Mi-17 Hip အလတ္စားသယ္ယူပုိ႔ေဆာင္ေရး ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ကုိ ၀တပ္ကုိ ေပးပုိခဲ့ေၾကာင္းကုိ ျမန္မာတုိင္းရင္းသား သတင္းရပ္ကြက္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာအစုိးရ သတင္းရပ္ကြက္အရ သိရေၾကာင္း ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

တရုတ္နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ပုိင္းမွာ ေနရာျဖန္ က်က္ ထားတဲ့ UWSA ဟာ လက္ရွိမွာ ျမန္မာအစုိးရတပ္နဲ႔ မခုိင္ျမဲလွေသာ အပစ္ရပ္ေရးသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ရယူထားပါတယ္။ အခု Mi-17 ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေတြကုိ တရုတ္ႏုိင္ငံကေန တုိက္ရုိက္ မဟုတ္ဘဲ လာအုိဘက္က တဆင့္ မဲေခါင္ျမစ္ ကုိ ျဖတ္ျပီး ၀နယ္ကို ေပးပုိ႔ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔ တဖြဲ႔ကေျပာဆုိျပီး စုစုေပါင္း ရဟတ္ ယာဥ္ ၅ စီးေပးပုိ႔ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း လည္း ေျပာဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာအစုိးရသတင္းရပ္ကြက္ကေတာ့ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ မ်ား UWSA လက္ထဲသုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိေၾကာင္း အတည္ျပဳခဲ့ေပမဲ့ ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ ၂ စီးကုိသာ ေပးပုိ႔သည္ဟု ဆုိပါတယ္။

Mi-17 ရဟတ္ယာဥ္မ်ားကုိ ေ၀ဟင္အခ်င္းခ်င္း ပစ္ႏုိင္သည့္ TY-90 လက္နက္တပ္ဆင္ထားတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ တုိင္းရင္းသားလက္နက္ကုိင္ သတင္းရပ္ကြက္အဆုိ မွန္ကန္ခဲ့မယ္ဆုိရင္ တပ္မေတာ္ရဲ႕ ရုရွက မၾကာေသးခင္ကမွ ၀ယ္ယူထားေသာ Mi-24P Hind စစ္ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ကုိ ဟန္႔တားႏုိင္မွာ ျဖစ္တယ္လုိ႔ Janes Intelligence သတင္းက ဆုိပါတယ္။

——–

IRRAWADDY

China has allegedly sold helicopter gunships to ethnic Wa rebels who occupy areas of Shan State in eastern Burma, intelligence monitor Jane’s Information Group reported on Monday.

The report claimed China “delivered several Mil Mi-17 ‘Hip’ medium- transport helicopters armed with TY-90 air-to-air missiles to the Wa in late February and early March, according to both Myanmar ethnic minority and Myanmar government sources.”

Bertil Lintner, an expert on Burma and author of Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier, confirmed the accuracy of the Jane’s report.

Lintner said the Burmese government was moving to gain control of the Shan State Army-North’s mountainous bases on the western bank of the Salween River, for an eventual offensive against the Wa rebels.

BURMA: United Wa State Army (UWSA) to host KACHIN PEACE TALKS

30.JANUARY 2013  The Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) on Tuesday accepted an offer by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) to host peace talks with the Burmese government’s Union-level Peacemaking Committee, UWSA spokesman Aung Myint said, adding that the Wa group would mediate the negotiations and had suggested holding a meeting in Panghsang in northern Shan State.

He said that in response to the Wa army’s offer on January 24, the KIO had sent a letter saying that it accepts the UWSA proposal to meet with the government delegation and accepts the proposed site of Panghsang, the UWSA headquarters, as a venue.

The KIO, however, could not be contacted for comment.

“The KIO accepted our offer at noon today,” Aung Myint told Mizzima on Tuesday. “They agreed to come to Panghsang to meet [with the government’s delegation]. Similarly, the government has already informed us that they too accept our offer to hold negotiations at our base. We are informing each party of the other’s decision.”

Earlier, the government’s Union-level Peacemaking Committee had informed the UWSA that if KIO accepts the offer, then they too will accept it, Aung Myint said. 

STATEMENT UWSA, NDAA and SSA (North), to Burmese government to halt escalating military offensive against KIA-bur/english

Three ethnic armed groups from Shan State, UWSA, NDAA and SSA (North), demand the Burmese government to halt escalating military offensive against Kachin Independence Army.