Statement of Civil Society Organizations on the Union Peace Convention to Be Held on 12th January 2016

Statement by 126 civil society organisations | January 5, 2016

1. Adoption of the framework for political dialogue on 16th December 2015 and announcement of the convening date for Union Peace Convention on 12th January 2016 is an act of negligence and disregard of the ongoing armed conflicts occurring in Northern Shan State and Kachin State.

2. We are seriously concerned that trying to hold political dialogue while a just, genuine and sustainable nationwide ceasefire has not been implemented and in the absence of all ethnic armed forces will bring more harm than benefit.

3. Ceasefire agreements which were revived and signed at various levels since 2011 have, in effect, been hollow and insincere; a failure which has generated tens of thousands of innocent people driven into the status of internally displaced persons and refugees.

4. Moreover, while all ethnic armed revolutionary organizations had initially agreed to and jointly participated in the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement process(es), it is imperative to identify as well as analyze the factors and conditions that prevented their final signing on to the text.

5. Only by striving to tackle the said conditions can mutual respect and trust be raised, and lead to political negotiations without misgivings. In addition, only then will the conduct of political dialogue become truly supportive towards the establishment of democratic federal union.

6.Furthermore, we are of the position that changing the concept of political dialogue based on a tripartite representation as outlined in the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement into that of a pentagonal representation has the potential to weaken the focus on developing a federal union based on democracy and ethnic equality, which are central to Burma’s political problem.

7. Therefore, at a time when a sustained ceasefire that is inclusive of all ethnic armed revolutionary forces is yet to materialize, we, the below-signed civil society organizations, call for the postponement of political dialogues, serious reconsideration of the representation quotas and voting quorums for political negotiations, and the inclusion of suggestions and views of those ethnic armed organizations which have not yet signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement.

Signed by:

1. All Arakan Students and Youth Congress
2. Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma
3. All Kachin Youth Union
4. Backpack Health Workers Team
5. Burma Medical Association
6. Burma Partnership
7. Burmese Women’s Union
8. Human Rights Foundation of Monland
9. Karen Human Rights Group
10. Karen Students Network Group
11. Karen Women’s Organization
12. Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN)
13. Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand
14. Lahu Women’s Organization
15. Mae Tao Clinic
16. Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma
17. Network for Democracy and Development
18. Palaung Women’s Organization
19. Students and Youth Congress of Burma
20. Tavoyan Women’s Union
21. Tavoyan Youth Organization
22. Women’s League of Burma
23. Yaung Chi Oo Migrnat Workers’ Association
24. Action Committee for Democracy and Development
25. Women’s Organization Network (WON)
26. Union of Karenni State Youth
27. Kachin Peace Network
28. Kachin Women’s Peace Network
29. Civil Authorize Negotiate Organization (C.A.N –Org)
30. Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays – Myanmar (PFLAG- Myanmar)
31. Kuki Women’s Human Rights Organization
32. Youth for Peace Makers
33. Co-exist
34. Shan Youth Yangon (SYY)
35. N” Centre for Education and Research Development (NCERD)
36. Kachin Canadian Association
37. BRIDGE
38. Generation Tree
39. Civil Society Network for Peace – Kachin
40. Green Network Sustainable Environment Group
41. Hands of Unity Group
42. Magway EITI Watch Group
43. ME – Community Development Center
44. Organic Agro and Farmer Affair Development Group
45. Green Future
46. Farmer Union (Magway Region)
47. Shwe Yae Nanthar Labour Union
48. Chinland Natural Resources Watch Group
49. Mwetaung Area Development Group
50. Our Future Initiative
51. Ayeyawady West Development Organization
52. Kun Gyan Gone Network
53. Community Response Group
54. Kachin State Women Network – KSWN
55. Htoi Gender and Development Foundation
56. Kachin State Women Peace Group
57. Shwe Chan Myay Network
58. Myanmar China Pipeline Watch Committee
59. Myanmar Alliance for Transparence and Accountability (Mandalay Working Group)
60. Eain Da (Green Rights Organization) Shan State
61. Khu Po Kapaw
62. Kachin Refugee Committee – Malaysia
63. Shan Women Development Network (SWDN – Waimaw)
64. Kachin Women Association – KWA
65. Kanbawza Health Kindness Association (Mogaung)
66. Loiyang Bum Development Group
67. Myusha Social Development Network (Kamaing)
68. Community Work for Kachin
69. Young Kachin Writers’ Club (USA)
70. Kachin Youth Organization
71. Kachin National Youth Organization
72. Ethnic Youth Network
73. Free Thinkers
74. Upper Myanmar Lawyers Network
75. Mandalay Peacekeeping Committee
76. ABCD
77. 88 – Rakine Generation Students Democratic Organization
78. 88 Generation Peace and Open Society (Myeik)
79. Diverse Youth Art Platform
80. Kachin Development Group (KDG)
81. The Seagull: Human Rights, Peace and Development
82. All Burma Federation of Student Unions
83. Genuine People’s Servants (GPS)
84. Pa-O Youth Organization
85. Metta Development Foundation
86. National Network for Education Reform – NNER
87. Youth Development Network
88. Pace on Peaceful Pluralism
89. Network for Social Development and Peace (Paung)
90. Mon Young Monks Network (MYMN)
91. Shan Youth Organization Pinlaung
92. Shan Youth Organization Taunggyi
93. Southern Shan State Youth Network
94. Shwe Gas Movement
95. Social Program Aid for Civil Education (SPACE) အဖဲြ႔
96. Ta’ang Students and Youth Organization (TSYO)
97. DEMO အဖဲြ႔
98. Equality Myanmar
99. Human Rights Educators Network
100. National Youth Congress
101. Youth Initiative Human Rights
102. Myanmar Lawyers Network
103. အလင္းေစတမာန္စာၾကည့္တုိက္
104. အလင္းပ်ိဳးခင္းစာၾကည့္တုိက္
105. လြတ္လပ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းပန္းရဲ႕လမ္း လူမႈကြန္ရက္
106. ျပည္သူ႔လႈပ္ရွားမႈျမွင့္တင္ေရးကြန္ရက္ (MMAN)
107. စစ္ေတာင္းသံစဥ္လူမႈကြန္ယက္
108. လြတ္လပ္ေသာအရႈိခ်င္းမ်ားအင္အားစု (မေကြးတုိင္း ၊ ငဖဲ)
109. ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ ပြင့္လင္းလူ႔အဖဲြ႔အစည္း (ေက်ာက္ဆည္)
110. တြံေတးလူငယ္ကြန္ယက္
111. စိမ္းေရာင္စုိ (တံတားဦး)
112. လူငယ္ဆရာ၀န္မ်ားကြန္ယက္ (ၿမိတ္ခရုိင္)
113. ဘာသာေပါင္းစုံညီညြတ္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ (ျပင္ဦးလြင္)
114. စိမ္းလန္းျပင္ဦးလြင္
115. ဟူးဖုိးကေပၚအဖဲြ႔အစည္း
116. ယုံၾကည္ရာ အသိပညာျပန္႔ပြားေရးအသင္း
117. ကေလးခ်စ္သူမ်ားကြန္ယက္
118. ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္လုံးဆုိင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ
119. ၀ံလက္ ေဒသဖြ႔ံျဖိဳးေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း (ရခုိင္ျပည္)
120. All Arakan Civil Society Organizations Partnership
121. Paung Ku
122. Yaung Chi Thit
123. ေရႊ ၿခံ ေျမ ကြန္ယက္
124. ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္းကြန္ယက္
125. AWDO ျမစ္အေနာက္ဘက္အရပ္ဘက္အဖဲြ႔အစည္း (မေကြးတိုင္း၊ မင္းဘူး)
126. Myanmar People’s Alliance

Individual Activists:

1. May Thet Kyaw
2. Thinzar Tun
3. Eait Htoo
4. Theik Soe Aung
5. Kyaw Zin Ko Ko
6. Win Htut Win
7. Aung Myo Myint Myat
8. Aung Naing Aye
9. Ko Moe Lwin (Middle Shan)
10. ဆလုိင္းဟာလင္းကီး – မင္းတပ္
11. နန္႔ေအးျမတ္မြန္

Media Contact Persons:

1. Soe Soe Nwe (Women League of Burma),+95 94500 29082
2. Thwin Lin Aung (Genuine People’s Servants GPS),+95 92507 95915
3. Ko Moe (Myanmar People’s Alliance) ,+95 95228446
4. Khin Ohmar (Burma Partnership),+66 818840772
5. Kyaw Htin Aung (Union of Karenni State Youth),+95 925 089080