The UN has expressed serious concern for hundreds of Myanmar civilians, many of them children, trapped in a conflict zone in northern Kachin state amid renewed clashes between the army and rebels.
It said that more than a thousand displaced people are thought to be running short of food after being caught in a new bout of fighting between troops and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Mansi Township in recent days, despite ongoing ceasefire negotiations.
“I am seriously concerned about the civilians being caught in any crossfire, especially children and the elderly,” UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Myanmar Ashok Nigam said in a statement released late on Friday.
Conflict in Kachin, near the northern border with China, broke out in June 2011, when a 17-year ceasefire crumbled. It has displaced about 100,000 people.
“Hostilities must cease,” Nigam said, adding that aid agencies should be allowed access to civilians in the area, who are deemed “in urgent need of assistance.”
The UN said local aid groups were now unable to reach the displaced there and have reported that they “have only food for a few days.”
Bloodshed in Kachin — along with religious unrest elsewhere in the country — has overshadowed widely praised political changes as Myanmar emerges from decades of military rule.
Burmese 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.
Earlier this month, Myanmar hailed a fresh peace deal in ongoing talks to end the Kachin fighting — the nation’s last major active civil war.
The agreement, which followed three days of negotiations that were observed by representatives from the UN and China among others, was aimed at laying the “foundation for political dialogue” and working towards peace, government mediators said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS