KTO-USA

Photo: Greg Constantine/WFP
Aid workers say a proper assessment is needed
BANGKOK, 19 August 2011 (IRIN) - Aid workers in Myanmar's northern Kachin State have expressed concern over prospects for food security after recent fighting between government forces and the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

"Even if the fighting stops, we will face a food crisis for one or two years," Mai Ja, a spokeswoman for the Kachin Women's Association Thailand (KWAT), told IRIN.

Since fighting resumed two months ago after a breakdown in a 17-year ceasefire in June - much of it due to a proposed government plan to incorporate Myanmar's numerous armed ethnic groups into a single border guard force - thousands of people have fled to urban areas such as Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, and Waimaw, as well as other areas under the control of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the KIA.

In addition, some people have crossed the border into China.

Up to 25,000 people are now believed to have been displaced, including 15,000 along the 2,185km Burmese-Chinese border, now living in makeshift camps set up by local aid groups.

Another 10,000 people are believed to be in Myitkyina, Waimaw, Moe Mauk and Bamaw townships.

Thousands of farmers abandoned their crops and livestock at a critical time of year, say aid groups. Farmers in Kachin's highlands traditionally grow their paddy, a staple part of the Burmese diet, in June, while farmers in the lower areas grow theirs in July and August.

And while a small number of farmers have remained behind to work their fields, the vast majority have not.

In Ban Sau Yang, a village on the road between Myitkyina and Bamaw, just seven of 170 families have stayed behind, only to struggle to hire additional labour to assist them.

"If they cannot harvest their farms and paddy fields this season, how will they cover their family's food needs next year?" Mai Ja asked.

Aid groups now worry that lack of local paddy production will have a serious impact on all of Kachin State, as people from areas such as Myitkyina, Waimaw and Laiza rely on the rice produced in the conflict-affected areas.

"People from the villages which are close to Myanmar forces will suffer seriously," said La Rip, coordinator of Laiza-based Kachin Relief Action Network for IDP [internally displaced person] and Refugee (RANIR), while residents along the road between Myitkyina and Bamaw will suffer the most.

Food assistance

At present, the displaced are receiving help from local aid groups and those in the community, but there are doubts over how long that can continue.

"We won't be able to support [this] for the long run," La Rip said, reiterating a call for international assistance.

"WFP [the UN World Food Programme] on Thursday [18 August] started distribution to the displaced in Kachin, providing rice rations to about 3,100 displaced people in Myitkyina and [the] neighbouring town, Waimaw," Marcus Prior, regional spokesman for WFP, said on 19 August.

"Rice supplies for an additional 3,000 displaced people around Bamaw are planned for distribution in the coming days and we are hopeful that these distributions to the displaced will be significantly expanded in the weeks ahead."

sk/ds/mw

Theme (s): Conflict, Food Security, Refugees/IDPs,
By:http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93539

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Photo: Contributor/IRIN
Fighting in Kachin State displaces thousands to makeshift camps
LAIZA, 23 August 2011 (IRIN) - A group of villagers travels along a muddy mountain path in northern Myanmar with food, clothing and any belongings they can carry in bamboo baskets on their backs; babies are strapped to young children's chests as they try to keep up with their parents.

"We are afraid the Burmese soldiers will be attacking our village at any time," says Lum Hong, leading the group of 15 families from the village of Ng Eng, in central Kachin state. "We had to leave everything behind. Our cows, our oxen, our farmland. Everything. We don't know when it will be safe to go back."

The group was en route to a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in central Kachin's Dam Bung District after hearing of a government troop build-up near their village on the edge of territory controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

The latest fighting between the two groups erupted on 9 June, when government forces broke a 17-year ceasefire agreement with the KIO near the Taping River.

The total number of IDPs who have arrived in the Kachin capital of Laiza is estimated at 10,000, according to the Kachin Relief Development Committee (KRDC), a Laiza-based organization. The KRDC was formed by the KIO following Myanmar's demand that all ethnic groups lay down their arms and form a Border Guard Force in 2010. The KIA, along with several other ethnic groups, refused and a government build-up of forces began.

The number of IDPs in Laiza now matches the usual population of the city, home to KIO headquarters. Four temporary camps house the IDPs, but a permanent government-funded camp is near completion, just outside Laiza.

In the camp

Craftsmen are building another 500 bamboo huts on the banks of the Chayan river.

A makeshift school has been built to accommodate the growing number of displaced children, but reading material is scarce and a handful of teachers make do with a chalk board.

At the food supply tent, KRDC chief Doi Pi Sa La Bang oversees the latest distribution of rations to the new arrivals. Food and medicine have been largely donated by churches and individuals.

"In terms of food, we are giving one tin of rice for every two people per day," the former KIA captain explains. Doi Pi Sa La Bang is hoping for international mediators to help solve the problem and bring back peace.

At the medical tent, one of the biggest problems facing the new arrivals is the unsanitary water supply.

Torrential rains during the monsoon season have created dirty living conditions for IDPs who have been sleeping in the jungle.

"Right now we are trying to prevent disease from spreading, but it doesn't help when there are so many people crammed into small shelters," says Naw Sang La Sang, a young doctor.

KIO spokesperson Lah Nan said in the short term, the IDPs should be able to survive - but with many farmers unable to work their fields and donations running short, the future looks grim.

"We need medication, more shelters, and ultimately - we must have a long-term solution for the IDPs," Lah Nan said. A renewed ceasefire seems a long way off.

Elsewhere in the KIO-controlled areas, approximately 10,000 IDPs are in temporary camps scattered along the China border. The KRDC estimates 6,000 have crossed into China seeking safety with relatives. The figures do not include IDPs in Myitkyina, an area of Kachin controlled by the government.

contributor/nb/mw

Theme (s): Conflict, Refugees/IDPs,

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ပါေမာကၡစတမ္ Dr.Stan BH Tan ပို႔ခ်ေသာသင္တန္း ပထမပို႔ခ်က္ခ်က္ကို ေဒါက္တာကြမ္ဂ်ာ (Research Fellow, NUS) နွင့္ ကခ်င္စာေပယဥ္ေက်းမႈေကာ္မတီမွ ဖိတ္ၾကားစီမံမႈျဖင့္ National University of Singapore မွ 23-Oct-2010 (Sat) ညေန ၆နာရီခြဲတြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့ပါသည္။ အပတ္စဥ္ စေနေန႔ညေနတိုင္း ပို႔ခ်မည္ျဖစ္ျပီး ၆ပတ္အျပီးတြင္ တက္ေရာက္ေသာကခ်င္လူငယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပါေမကၡတို႔ အျပန္အလွန္ေဆြးေႏြးခ်က္၊ အင္တာဗ်ဴးမ်ားကို မူတည္ျပီး ကခ်င္လက္ရွိသမိုင္းကို လက္ေတြ႔ျပဳစုျပမည္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ mkumja@gmail.com Mobile: 91824886

ပါေမာကၡ ေဒါက္တာစတမ္သည္ ၾသစေၾတးလ်ားႏိုင္ငံ National Australian University မွ Ph.D ရရွိခဲ့ျပီးေနာက္ ဗီယက္နမ္ႏိုင္ငံ ျမိဳ႔ရြာ၊ေတာေတာင္မ်ားတြင္ သြားလာ၊အင္တာဗ်ဴးက ဗီယက္နမ္ဆိုင္ရာ စာတမ္းမ်ားစြာ ျပဳစုခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။ အသက္ ၃၇ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိျပီး စင္ကာပူတကၠသိုလ္ NUS တြင္ ေဒါက္တာဘြဲ႔ ၄ႏွစ္ ဆည္းပူးခဲ့ျပီး Research Fellow , USA အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနေသာ ေဒါက္တာကြမ္ဂ်ာ ႏွင့္ရင္းႏွီးေသာမိတ္ေဆြျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ေဒါက္တာကြမ္ဂ်ာသည္ ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးျဖစ္ျပီး သူႏွင့္ဇနီးသည္တို႔မွာ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာဘြဲ႔ရရွိျပီး M.I.T မႏၱေလးစက္မႈတကၠသိုလ္ဆရာတြင္ ေက်ာင္းဆရာအျဖစ္ ႏွစ္အတန္ၾကာ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သူျဖစ္ျပီး စင္ကာပူတြင္ ေနထိုင္ၾကပါသည္။ သူ႔မိတ္ေဆြ Professor Stan သည္ ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ားကို စိတ္၀င္စားကာ သုေတသနျပဳလုပ္ရန္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ သင္တန္းငယ္တစ္ခုကို ကခ်င္စာေပႏွင့္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈေကာ္မတီ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္ျဖင့္ စတင္က်င္းပျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။

သူ၏ လက္ရွိသင္ၾကားေသာနည္းစနစ္မွာ ယခု သင္တန္းသား ၄၀ ကို တစ္ဦးစီ မိနစ္၂၀ခန္႔ အင္တာဗ်ဴးေျပာဆိုခ်က္မ်ားကို စာျဖင့္ျပန္ေရးပါက စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၄၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ရရွိမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုရရွိေသာ အင္တာဗ်ဴးေျပာဆိုခ်က္မ်ားမွ မလိုသည္ကို ထုတ္ပယ္ကာ ကခ်င္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈသမိုင္းႏွင့္ဆိုင္ေသာ အခ်က္မ်ားကို Excel Format နည္းစနစ္ျဖင့္ စီစစ္၊သီးသန္႔ထုတ္လိုက္ပါက စာမ်က္ႏွာ အနည္းငယ္မွ်ျဖင့္ တိုရင္း၊လိုရွင္း အကယ္ဒမစ္ပံုစံ သုေတသနစာေစာင္တစ္ခုကို ရရွိလာမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုသို႔ သုေတသနနည္းစနစ္ကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ စနစ္တက် မိမိတစ္ဦးတည္းလုပ္ပါက ၁၀ႏွစ္မွ် ၾကာေကာင္းၾကာမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ယခု တက္ေရာက္လာသူ ကခ်င္လူငယ္မ်ား စုေပါင္းျပဳလုပ္ပါက လက္ရွိကခ်င္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈႏွင့္ အတိတ္ျဖစ္ရပ္သမိုင္း စာတမ္းကို ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ားကိုယ္တိုင္ ျပဳစုႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ရည္ရြယ္ပို႔ခ်ေၾကာင္းသိရပါသည္။

သင္တန္း ေနရာ Bethesda Chapel, 27 Lorong Melayu - 3 min walk from Kambagan MRT
Contact: Kum Ja:Kum Ja: mkumja@gmail.com
အခ်ိန္။ Every Saturday ( 6:00 pm, 23,30.oct and 6,13.20,27 Nov 2010) at Bethesda Chapel.

In this seminar Prof. Stan will teach us about the unique method for capturing the real situation (such as environmental issue, political, history, so on .....) from the individual personal life story. This method has been applied by Prof. Stan in Vietnam to study the hill Vietnamese people. He wrote a lot of books a bout the Vietnamese people.

Here are the NUS website about our Kachin People.
http://web.me.com/cecstantankoh/KBHP/SE5294/SE5294.html short postings done by students)
http://web.me.com/cecstantankoh/KBHP/Features/Features.html (excerpts of research pieces or work in progress)
http://burmesebible.com/kachin/ ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ားအေၾကာင္း
http://burmesebible.com/kachin/kcf_singapore.htm ကခ်င္ႏွစ္ျခင္းမိတ္သဟာရ (စင္ကာပူ)


Seminar speaker Prof. Dr. Stan (3rd from left), his wife Sisilia,
Organizer- Dr. Kum Ja (2nd from right)



Kachin Beauties from BBC Photo

မုရန္ (သတင္းေဆာင္းပါး)

Kachin Catholic Women, fund raising for Kachin Refugees the Victims of Civil war....
American mungdan Taxes Forth worth kaw shanu nga ai Myushayi ni a shakut shaja ai lam sumla hkrung hpe youtube kaw nna garan dat ya ga ai .

talks with my father

• 
  
• You and 8 others like this.
• • 

    Thant Ko Ko Maung ရွယ္မယ္ဗ်ာ ... ခုတစ္ေလာလည္း ဒီေခြးျဖစ္ရတဲ႔ အေၾကာင္းပဲ စဥ္းစားမိေနတယ္ ...

    July 12 at 11:48am · Like · 2 people