This Field Report describes events occurring in Toungoo District between December 2013 and December 2014. During this period, KHRG mainly received reports from Thandaunggyi Township and surrounding areas. The report includes information submitted by KHRG community members on a range of human rights abuses and issues of importance to local communities including land confiscation, militarisation, fighting between armed groups, commercial activity carried out by military actors, violent abuse, access to education, access to healthcare, and development projects.
• There have been ongoing cases of land confiscation at the hands of the Tatmadaw, for the purpose of building Burma/Myanmar government offices, establishing military target practice areas and increasingly, for plantations, commercial projects, and sale to private companies.
• Militarisation in Toungoo District has continued, despite the 2012 preliminary ceasefire between the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Burma/Myanmar government, with the Tatmadaw rotating troops and replenishing their rations and ammunitions at camps in remote areas.
• A local militia, the Thandaung Special Region Peace Group, have been engaged in several commercial activities, including running gambling areas, logging, and stone mining, in order to raise funds to support their operations. All of these activities have had a disruptive effect on villagers, in particular the school students.
• The Burma/Myanmar government has invested in providing financial support for school students in standards one to four in Toungoo District, however this has not always been effective as in some cases the money does not reach the students.
• There continues to be a lack of access to adequate healthcare in Toungoo District; the Burma/Myanmar government has only built clinics in the village tracts close to main roads, there is a shortage of properly trained healthcare workers and in the case of villagers with lower incomes, treatment is often too expensive.
• Between April and June 2014 there was a meeting that was headed by the Mya Sein Yaung company, with representatives from ten villages, on the subject of the company’s Reducing Poverty project being implemented in Thandaunggyi Township.
Autores y editores
Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG)
KHRG is an independent local organisation committed to improving the human rights situation in Burma by projecting the voices of villagers and supporting their strategies to claim human rights. We aim to increase villagers’ capability and opportunity to claim their human rights, and ensure that their voices, priorities and perspectives influence decision makers. We encourage other local and international groups and institutions to support villagers’ self-protection strategies.
Vision
Proveedor de datos
The Online Burma/Myanmar Library (OBL) is a non-profit online research library mainly in English and Burmese serving academics, activists, diplomats, NGOs, CSOs, CBOs and other Burmese and international actors. It is also, of course, open to the general public.