Armed conflict in Shan State - economic factors associated with the conflict

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Individual Documents

Title: Lway Chee Sangar: Reclaiming Rights After a Childhood of Labor, Hardship, and Conflict
Description: "?We had never heard about human rights in the village,” Lway Chee Sangar tells me at the Palaung Women?s Organization (PWO) office in Mae Sot, Thailand. Sangar is 23 years old. The ethnic nationality group to which she belongs, called the Palaung or Ta?ang, has been caught in an armed struggle for self-determination against the brutal Burmese regime for the better part of the past five decades. Sangar began working with the PWO about three years ago when her parents, desperate to give her an opportunity to improve her life, sent her from their tiny, remote village in the northern Shan State of Burma to the PWO?s former training center in China. It took her a combined six months of training at the PWO to begin to grasp the idea that all humans have rights. Sangar?s story is speckled with brushes with conflict, starting from her birth. She was born on the run, when her parents had to flee their village due to an outbreak of fighting nearby. Today, the Ta?ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the armed wing of the Palaung State Liberation Front, is fighting off Burmese offensives and combatting opium cultivation in Palaung areas, according to their statement. Civilians are often caught in the cross-fire. Burmese forces have been known to use brutal tactics against civilians in conflict areas, including deadly forced portering and forced labor, torture, killing, and extortion of money, supplies, and drugs."
Source/publisher: Burma Link
Date of entry/update: 2016-03-18
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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