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Posts Tagged ‘Letpadaung Copper Mine’
Hundreds Demand Probe of Burmese Mine Crackdown Five Months On
Hundreds of villagers held a protest Monday to back their persistent calls for a government probe into a harsh crackdown on protesters against a controversial China-backed copper mine in northern Burma’s Sagaing division that left more than 100 injured and was strongly condemned by rights groups.
More than 500 people marched from Ton village in Sagaing to the office of the Letpadaung mine developer, demanding an end to the project and calling on authorities to prosecute those responsible for a Nov. 29 pre-dawn raid [...]
BURMA: Criminalization of Rights Defenders and Impunity for Police
The Asian Human Rights Commission condemns in the strongest terms the announcement of the commander of the Sagaing Region Police Force, Myanmar, that the police will arrest and charge eight human rights defenders whom it blames for inciting protests against the army-backed copper mine project at the Letpadaung Hills, in Monywa. The commission also condemns the latest round of needless police violence against demonstrators there [...]
| |BURMA: Two Sharply Contrasting Reports on the Struggle for Land at Letpadaung
The Asian Human Rights Commission has since mid-2012 closely followed, documented and reported on the struggle of farmers in the Letpadaung Hills of central Burma against the expansion of a copper mining operation under a military-owned holding company and a partner company from China [...]
| |Hundreds Resume Letpadaung Mine Protest
More than 300 farmers in northern Burma’s Sagaing Division have resumed their protests against a controversial Chinese-backed copper mine, saying they will refuse compensation and continue to push for the mine’s complete closure.
“No matter how much compensation they give, we won’t accept it, because all we want is for the mine to be shut down completely,” said one of the farmers from the Letpadaung area near Monywa [...]
| |Letpadaung Report Does Not Address Concerns, Places Security Forces Above the Law
This week the much anticipated report of the Letpadaung investigation commission, appointed by President Thein Sein and chaired by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was finally released. The report acknowledges that the mine lacks strong environmental protection measures and would not create more jobs for local people. It also recognizes that farmers were forcibly evicted from their land to make way for the project. However the report says the copper mine project “should not be unilaterally stopped.” This recommendation deeply disappointed local farmers and activists who angrily rejected the commission’s report while the Wanbao Company welcomed it.
After the release of the report, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited the villages affected by the project to explain the findings of the commission. She called for the communities to stop opposing the project and accept compensation for their lost land. “We have asked the company to first give jobs to our people and second to maintain a healthy environment, according to international standards, and third to provide education and health care for the people,” Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said in a speech in Salingyi Township. But she was confronted by protesters who feel that the report does not acknowledge their demands [...]
| |The Kachin Crisis : Peace Must Prevail
The recent political unrest and military violence in the Kachin and northern Shan states has been on an unprecedented scale, raising serious questions over the goals of the quasi-civilian government of President Thein Sein and its ability to control the national armed forces (Tatmadaw). Since assuming office in March 2011, Thein Sein has received praise from around the world for a “reformist” agenda that has seen many political prisoners released, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) win seats to parliament, ceasefires with the majority of armed ethnic opposition groups, and a gradual liberalisation of media, business and other aspects of national life. These are trends that the international community has been keen to encourage, with UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon and US President Barack Obama among world leaders visiting Burma/Myanmar [...]
Rampant Land Confiscation Requires Further Attention and Action from Parliamentary Committee
This past week the parliamentary Farmland Investigation Commission submitted its report on land confiscation to the parliament. The report finds that the military have taken almost 250,000 acres of land from villagers. The commission stated that they had spoken to military leaders about the confiscation, “Vice Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing […] confirmed to me that the army will return seized farmlands that are away from its bases, and they are also thinking about providing farmers with compensation.”
The investigation is a step in the right direction but there still exist very large problems the commission has not addressed, the first being that the commission only addressed land confiscated by the military. Although the military has been involved in land confiscations they are not the only perpetrators.
An example of the shortcomings of the commission’s report is the fact that the Letpadaung copper mine is not mentioned by the commission because the land was not confiscated outright by the military, although it is a joint venture with the military owned Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEH). Additionally the Letpadaung Inquiry Commission headed by Aung San Suu Kyi charged with investigating the abuses that took place has delayed releasing its findings for a third straight time [...]
စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး မံုရြာခရိုင္၊ ဆားလင္းၾကီးျမိဳ႕နယ္ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္း စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္၏ အျပီးသတ္အစီရင္ခံစာ
၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၂၃ ရက္တြင္ က်င္းပေသာ ျပည္သူ႕လႊတ္ေတာ္ အစည္းအေဝး၌တင္သြင္းခဲ့သည့္ အေရးၾကီးအဆိုတြင္ စစ္ကိုင္းတိုင္းေဒ သၾကီး မံုရြာခရိုင္ ဆားလင္းၾကီးျမိဳ႕နယ္ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္းႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ေၾကးနီမိုင္းလုပ္ငန္း ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခြင့္ျပဳရန္ သင့္မသင့္ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကို ဟ…“
| |Burmese Mine Activists Hold Hunger Strike
More than two dozen villagers staged a hunger strike in northern Burma Thursday over the lack of progress in an official investigation into the feasibility of a controversial Chinese-backed copper mine they say has occupied their land and is polluting the area.
The 26 representatives of 26 villages situated around the site of the Letpadaung copper mine project at Sarlingyi township in Burma’s Sagaing division said the fast was also to protest inaction against police who launched a brutal crackdown on protesters at the site exactly three months ago [...]
| |Protests Against Controversial Chinese Copper Mine Resume
Local villagers and activists resumed their demonstrations against a Chinese-backed copper mine in central Burma on Wednesday, as anger continues to grow over the government’s failure to address community grievances over the project.
Hundreds of villagers gathered near Sagaing division’s Monywa copper mining project yesterday to demand a complete halt to the project, which locals say has caused irreparable damage to the local environment and communities. There is growing anger over the government’s failure to address their concerns, despite the formation of an official investigative body [...]
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