| Home > South-East Asia >> Burma | |
Burma holds landmark political talks with Karen rebels
Reuters - April 6, 2012
The talks with the Karen National Union (KNU) were the beginning of the second stage of a three-phase plan outlined by the year-old government towards "everlasting peace" with all of its ethnic minority rebel groups. The first phase was to establish ceasefires, at regional then national level. Two government negotiating groups have struck agreements with about a dozen armies or ethnic-based political groups that responded to President Thein Sein's call for dialogue last August.
"We now have six points on our agenda at the present talks at the union (national) level," Tu Tu Lay, a member of the KNU team, told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting in the commercial capital, Yangon.
The KNU and its military wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), have fought successive governments for greater autonomy since 1949, a year after Burma gained independence from Britain. The KNU is optimistic a political deal can be struck with the reform-minded civilian government that came to office in March 2011 when the military ceded power after 49 years of rule.
Analysts and diplomats say the peace process is one of the biggest challenges facing the government, which has embarked on an astonishing wave of economic, social and political reforms.
The second stage could be tricky: it will focus on how the Karen can be brought into the national political fold while retaining some element of self-governance. The process is likely to have been boosted by last week's by-election landslide by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party in a ballot widely seen as free and fair, helping the credibility of a government comprised of the same generals who brutally crushed dissidents and ethnic minorities.
The talks with the Karen were led by Minister of Rail Transport Aung Min, a moderate of the former junta, who heads one of the two negotiating teams. He has won the confidence of many groups, despite decades of mistrust and bad blood. The army was accused of committing a litany of human rights abuses against the Karen and other minorities, from rape and forced labor to torture and murder, violations that convinced the West to impose sanctions, some of which could be lifted later this month.
Among the KNU's demands are ensuring the truce holds, confidence-building measures, an ending of forced labor and extortion, the immediate release of political prisoners, rehabilitation of affected people and redistribution of land. The government reached its latest ceasefire on Thursday when it agreed a truce with the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP) to end a three-decade conflict in the country's Western Rakhine state, a senior local government official told Reuters.
See also:
 |