YANGON: Several Kachin campaign groups called on Monday for an immediate end to clashes between Myanmar troops and ethnic rebels, which have trapped hundreds of people including schoolchildren with limited food and shelter in a remote area of the state.
Skirmishes have affected at least 2,300 people in the Bhamo-Mansi area, among them many who had already been displaced by previous fighting, the non-government groups said in a statement distributed by the UN in Yangon on Monday. The groups expressed particular concern for some 700 pupils after their boarding school was surrounded Saturday by Myanmar troops.
“These students and their teachers... were surrounded and blockaded inside the school compound but an appeal by the Catholic Church led to their release,” later that evening, the statement said.
“The latest battle has also affected internally displaced persons (IDPs) located around the area... these IDPs have been displaced by earlier skirmishes,” it said, calling for an “immediate cessation of hostilities” to allow humanitarian access.
A spokesman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yangon yesterday said they released the statement by mistake, but the agency “echoes the concern the NGOs put forth.”
The Kachin conflict -- along with religious unrest elsewhere in the country -- has overshadowed widely praised political changes as Myanmar emerges from decades of military rule. President Thein Sein’s reformist government has reached tentative peace deals with most major ethnic minority rebel groups in the country, which has been racked by civil wars since independence from Britain in 1948.
Despite talks, peace in Kachin has so far remained elusive, thwarting government efforts to cement a nationwide ceasefire which would burnish its reform credentials.
Speaking in Yangon, the Kachin Independence Army’s second in command confirmed the clashes around the school in Nam Lim Pa village near the Chinese border.
General Gum Maw said Myanmar troops entered the area with a relief convoy and “fighting broke out.”
AFP
