Grab for White Gold: Platinum Mining in Eastern Shan State

Since 2007, destructive platinum mining has been taking place in the hills north of Tachilek, eastern Shan State, impacting about 2,000 people from eight Lahu, Akha and Shan villages. The platinum is being extracted by Burmese mining companies [...]

Lessons from the Kachin “Development” Experience

Burma’s government is using the promise of development as a key component in its current peace negotiations with armed ethnic organizations, proposing ceasefire first, then development, and finally a national political agreement. This process has been tried before in Kachin State with disastrous consequences

Not Open for Business: Despite Elections, Investor Risk Remains High in Burma

The April 1 Burmese by-elections are being heralded as a great success both for the people of Burma and for the international community after more than a decade of sanctions. While there is cause to celebrate in the wake of initial reforms by President Thein Sein and the electoral victory of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, high levels of risk for investors – and the people of Burma – remain [...]

Burma in the Balance: The Role of Foreign Assistance in Supporting Burma’s Democratic Transition

The historic constraints on donor interventions in Burma—whether self-imposed sanctions or regime-imposed barriers—are increasingly giving way to a sense of heightened optimism about the possibilities of working on issues across the development spectrum. But while the terrain appears to be improving, there remain substantial barriers to effective programming beyond the overall pace and scope of political reform [...]

Burma’s Resource Curse: The Case for Revenue Transparency in the Oil and Gas Sector

Burma is rich in natural resources, particularly natural gas and oil. Yet instead of using these resources for the country’s development through industry and job growth, military leaders have been exporting them for over a decade [...]

Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuses and Forced Displacement in Kachin State

In his March 2011 inauguration speech, Burmese President Thein Sein emphasized the importance of ending Burma’s several ethnic armed conflicts, declaring that more than 60 years of ethnic warfare in Burma were due to “dogmatism, sectarian strife, and racism.” Burma’s ethnic minorities had, he said [...]

Investors’ Haste to Build Big Dams is Undermining Fragile Peace Process in Karen State

The push by investors to proceed with large dams in Karen areas of Burma is threatening to undermine ongoing ceasefire negotiations between the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Burmese government.

Increased Burma Army security around dam sites and blatant disregard for concerns of impacted communities are heightening tensions, and throwing into doubt the government’s sincerity in conducting ceasefire talks [...]

The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma’s Ethnic Areas

With a population of over 50 million people, Burma is comprised of eight major ethnic nationalities: Burman, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan. Burma’s ethnic groups demand equality, autonomy [...]

Progress Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

The recent wave of reforms has had a positive impact on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. The upcoming by-elections on 1 April 2012 will be a key test of how far the Government has progressed in its reform process. There is, however, a risk of backtracking on the progress achieved to date. At this crucial moment in the country’s history, remaining human rights concerns and challenges should be addressed, and justice and accountability measures, as well as measures to ensure access to the truth, should be taken [...]

လယ္ယာေျမ အဓၶမသိမ္းယူမႈ မ်ားႏွင့္ေအာင္ပြဲအပိုင္းအစမ်ား

A Burma-based rights group has released a new publication documenting and recounting the courageous fight against land expropriation, intimidation and false prosecution of a group of rural villagers …

ဤအစီရင္ခံစာသည္ မေကြးတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး၊ သရက္ခရိုင္၊ ကံမျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ စစၥရံေက်းရြာရွိ ရိုးသားစြာ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ေသာ လယ္သမားမ်ား မတရားမႈမ်ားကို မိမိတို႕၏ စုစည္းမႈအားျဖင့္ တြန္းလွန္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈကို ရွာေဖြတိုက္ပြဲဝင္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုအား [...]