Analysis: Confidence-building key to Kachin ceasefire

31st December 2013

Confidence-building is key to a genuine ceasefire in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State, where more than 100,000 people are still displaced, experts and analysts say.

“There is a total lack of trust within the Kachin community,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, a member of the Myanmar Peace Committee (MPC), attributing much of this to the history of a previous ceasefire, signed in 1994 by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political arm of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which has been fighting for greater autonomy from the central government since Burma, now Myanmar, gained independence from Great Britain in 1948. (Read full analysis here) [source: IRIN]