Podcast appearances and mentions of karen national union

Episode #305: Paul Sein Twa is a Karen environmentalist whose life and work embody the intersection of conservation, indigenous rights, and the pursuit of peace. He shares his journey growing up along the Burma-Thailand border, where he witnessed the massive deforestation caused by unchecked logging, and how it motivated him to dedicate his life to preserving Myanmar's natural landscapes and empowering indigenous communities.The conversation delves into Paul's work with the Salween Peace Park, an initiative that combines ecological conservation with cultural preservation and fostering community resilience. Paul passionately describes the relationship his people hold with the land, where nature is not merely a resource but a sacred heritage that sustains both body and spirit. The Peace Park represents a vision of governance driven by the principles of stewardship and indigenous wisdom, showing how conservation can also be a form of resistance against military exploitation and political oppression.Paul describes the challenges and triumphs of maintaining environmental integrity in a conflict-ridden region. He talks about working with the Karen National Union to create policies that support sustainable development while resisting exploitative military-backed projects. He highlights the importance of building resilience from the grassroots level and engaging local communities as key actors in managing their territories.“We cannot just talk about environmental conservation without recognizing the human rights of the people who are living in that territory. We have to first recognize the rights of the indigenous people and local communities, and that's where we talk about human rights-based approach to conservation. This is exactly what we the Peace Park is doing! And then, by recognizing our rights, and then by holding hand with other communities, we can… can achieve more, right?” With these words, Paul Sein Twa offers a powerful reminder: the fight for the environment is not merely about preserving nature—it is about safeguarding the soul of a people.

Episode #301: “I want to invite everybody to see the Karen people not just as victims, but to experience the real beauty in the culture, the uniqueness, the simplicity.” These are the words of Saw Sha Kerpaw Wah, a humanitarian from Karen State, Myanmar, who shares his story of displacement, identity, and commitment to his people. Born in 1995 during the fall of Manerplaw, the headquarters of the Karen National Union, his family fled through the jungle, marking the start of their journey as refugees. Sha Kerpaw Wah spent his early childhood in a refugee camp in Thailand, before his family resettled in Norway. There they found safety, but engendered a sense of cultural dissonance. Although warmly welcomed in Norway, and living there for 20 years, Wah always felt a deep spiritual connection to Kawthoolei, the Karen homeland, feeling that it was his "duty" to return and serve his people.A major turning point in Wah's life came during his final year of college when he watched a video of Karen indigenous leader, Saw O Moo, inspiring him to leave his studies and fully dedicate himself to humanitarian work. He began making frequent trips back to Kawthoolei, working to support those displaced by Myanmar's ongoing civil war.Today, Sha Kerpaw Wah continues to serve the Karen people, advocating for education, self-reliance, and a united leadership among Karen leaders. His ultimate dream is to see a peaceful, independent Kawthoolei where future generations can grow up free from the violence and trauma that have shaped his life.

Episode #286: “Some people during the so-called transition, people in Yangon, were like, 'The military is changing!' Like, no, they're not; they're changing the way they talk to you, to elites, but they're not changing on the ground. And if you spent as much time speaking to survivors of military violence, you'll notice that they torture and kill basically for sport. There's no logic behind it, other than, ‘We can get away with this.'”David Mathieson, a longtime advocate, activist, and scholar focused on human rights in Myanmar, addresses the military's entrenched behavior and the country's complex socio-political landscape. He discusses the regime's arrogance, sense of entitlement, and institutional cruelty, which he describes as a “culture of recreational sadism.” He emphasizes that while the generals attempted to appear reformist to elites in previous years, its actions on the ground have always remained brutal and unchanged. Mathieson delves into Myanmar's cycles of oppression, resistance, and the military's failure to innovate in governance or counterinsurgency. He cites the 2017 Rohingya crisis as an example of brutal tactics leading to increased international condemnation and isolation. He also critiques oversimplified international narratives, urging the importance of local perspectives and understanding the complexities of both the military and ethnic armed groups like the Karen National Union and Arakan Army. Mathieson highlights the failure of peace processes such as the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, attributing it to the military's refusal to engage meaningfully with ethnic minorities, and with the added the complicity of international supporters who endorsed the agreement, thereby legitimizing a flawed peace process.Ultimately, Mathieson paints Myanmar as a country trapped under an irrational military enforcing fear while insisting on its own necessity. He concludes with a stark view of the military's strategy: a deliberate use of overwhelming violence to enforce submission, reflecting a “deplorable, disgusting” policy that has persisted for decades.

Padoh Saw David Tharckabaw has been an active member of the Karen National Union (KNU) since joining the organisation full time as a young teenager in 1949; only two years after the KNU was established in 1947.   David has spent the rest of his long life supporting the key aims of the KNU which include the establishment of a Karen State with the right to self determination and the setting up of a genuine Federal Union in Myanmar with each State having equal rights.David rose through the ranks from a raw recruit to being an officer in the KNU armed resistance before moving to the political headquarters where he was firstly assistant to the General Secretary and then, as his final role from which he retired at the age of 79, Vice President from 2010 to 2014.    David is now 87 living in Mae Sot in Thailand but continues to be a passionate supporter of the Karen.  In this interview David provides a Karen perspective of the history of the relationship between the Bamar and Karen peoples and how and why mistrust developed between many Karen and the  Tatmadaw (military).With thanks to the Karen Information Center and to Daw Tin Htar Swe OBE for introducing me to Padoh Saw David Tharckabaw .

Today on The Leaders' Brief - The USA, which remains the worst affected country due to the 2019 coronavirus, but continues to lead one of the most effective vaccination programmes in the world, is seeing a slow but steady dip in the number of weekly infections. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention revealed last Monday that as of April 24, the seven-day average was 57,123 cases, a dip of almost 15% in comparison to the previous week. Most experts believe that, unlike previous dips, the slow down in the rate of infection will be permanent this time as the USA continues to immunise its population.  Myanmar witnessed its largest violence since February after the military clashed with the Karen National Union at its eastern border with Thailand days after Southeast Asian leaders said they had reached a consensus with the Junta on ending violence. Following reports of gunfire and smoke from a Tatmadaw camp at the Thailand-Myanmar border, the region's ethnic army the KNA said that they had captured the outpost. According to local media, over 240,000 people have been displaced by the conflict and the region has witnessed military airstrikes.  Apple's new software update is likely to hurt smaller firms dependent on digital advertising while providing its users with more privacy protection. The decision to allow iPhone and iPad users to choose how much information they wish to share with any third party application has reignited a tiff between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The privacy option could lead companies like Facebook to lose billions of dollars if a majority of users block the company from tracking them on iPhones.  About egomonk: Website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedInegomonk is a global intelligence platform delivering asymmetric outcomes by bringing organizations closer to the communities they want to serve and the leaders they wish to influence. If you wish to collaborate with us then email us at contact@egomonk.com.

Witnesses continue to testify in George Floyd’s murder trial and Oscars plan Europe venues for nominees over pandemic fears This is TRT World’s Daily News Brief for Wednesday, March 31st. *) 'It wasn't right', witness to Floyd death tells court The teenager who captured the viral video of George Floyd's death said that she knew at the time "it wasn't right". Darnella Frazier, 18, was among the witnesses who gave emotional testimony at the high-profile trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin who had killed Floyd. Chauvin, 45, was charged with murder and manslaughter for his role in Floyd's May 25, 2020 death, which had triggered global protests against racism and police brutality. *) Myanmar junta deepens violence with new air attacks in east The military launched more air strikes in eastern Myanmar after earlier attacks forced thousands of ethnic Karen to flee into Thailand amid further escalating violence two months after the junta seized power. The Karen National Union, the main political body representing the Karen minority, said the air strikes were the latest case of Myanmar's military breaking a ceasefire agreement and that it would have to respond. *) Hundreds of migrants set out from Honduras, dreaming of US A few hundred Honduran migrants set out for the Guatemalan border before dawn in hopes of eventually reaching the United States. But relatively few arrived at the official border crossing and likely decided to cross at the numerous blind points along the border to avoid detection. Other recent caravans have been broken up by Guatemalan authorities and this relatively small one appeared to dissolve before reaching the Guatemala border. *) Macron, Merkel discuss vaccine cooperation with Putin French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed possible cooperation on vaccines with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Macron and Merkel also told Putin to respect political opponent Alexey Navalny's rights and preserve his health, the French presidency said in a statement. The three leaders in a joint video conference, also discussed the situation in Ukraine, Belarus, Libya, Syria and agreed to coordinate efforts on returning Iran to its nuclear deal that was breached by the US. And finally … *) Oscars plan UK, France venues for nominees over pandemic travel fears Next month's pandemic-affected Oscars ceremony will include venues in the United Kingdom and France for international nominees unable to travel to Los Angeles. Oscars presenters will remain at the previously announced main location in downtown Los Angeles' Union Station, just a short drive from Hollywood. The Academy Awards had faced growing criticism after producers earlier this month said no video calls would be allowed for those unwilling or unable to attend in person. OUTRO: And that’s your daily news brief from TRT World. For more, head to trtworld.com.

It has been 4 years since the Myanmar government and Karen National Union signed Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA). - ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားအစည္းအရံုုး(KNU)ဟာ တစ္နိုင္ငံလုံး အပစ္ခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးစာခ်ဳပ္ NCA မွာ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုုးခဲ့တာ ေလးႏွစ္ျပည့္လုုနီးပါးျဖစ္လာပါၿပီ။

ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအစည္းအရံုးနဲ႔ အစုိးရတုိ႔အၾကား တစ္နုိင္ငံလံုးအပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးစာခ်ဳပ္ကို ၂၀၁၅ခုနွစ္ ေအာက္တုိဘာလကတည္းက လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိးခဲ့ေပမယ့္လည္း ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့နွစ္ေတြအတြင္းတပ္မေတာ္နဲ႔ ပစ္ခတ္မႈေတြ ဆက္လက္ျဖစ္ပြားေနပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ တပ္မေတာ္နဲ႔ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္းမွာရွိတဲ့ အျခားေသာကရင္လက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔ ငယ္မ်ားနဲ႔လည္း တုိက္ခုိက္မႈေတြလည္းျဖစ္ပြားေနဆဲပါ။ ဒီတစ္ပတ္မွာေတာ့ မိတ္ဖက္မီဒီယာျဖစ္တဲ့ KIC ကရင္သတင္းဌာန နဲ႔ ဒုိ႔အသံတုိ႔ဟာ တုိက္ပြဲေတြေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္ေးရွာင္ေနရတဲ့ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ေတြကုိ ေတြဆံုဖုိ႔အတြက္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္စခန္းကိုသြားေရာက္ခဲ့ၿပီး သူတုိ႔မွာရွိတဲ့ စိုးရိမ္ေၾကာင့္ၾကမႈေတြကို နားေထာင္ခဲဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီေဆာင္းပါးအျပည့္အစံုကို မနက္ျဖန္မွာထုတ္လႊင့္ေပးမွာျဖစ္လုိ႔ ဒုိ႔အသံ အစီအစဥ္ကို ေစာင့္ေမွ်ာ္နားဆင္ၾကဖုိ႔ ဖိတ္ေခၚလုိက္ပါတယ္ရွင္။ Although the Karen National Union signed the government’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement in October 2015, in recent years fighting has continued between the group and the Tatmadaw, as well as other smaller armed groups operating in Kayin State. This week, in partnership with the Karen Information Center, Doh Athan visits a camp to meet those who continue to be displaced by the conflict, and hears about some of the concerns they have.

ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအစည္းအရံုးနဲ႔ အစုိးရတုိ႔အၾကား တစ္နုိင္ငံလံုးအပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရးစာခ်ဳပ္ကို ၂၀၁၅ခုနွစ္ ေအာက္တုိဘာလကတည္းက လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိးခဲ့ေပမယ့္လည္း ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့နွစ္ေတြအတြင္းတပ္မေတာ္နဲ႔ ပစ္ခတ္မႈေတြ ဆက္လက္ျဖစ္ပြားေနပါတယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ တပ္မေတာ္နဲ႔ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္းမွာရွိတဲ့ အျခားေသာကရင္လက္နက္ကုိင္အဖြဲ႔ ငယ္မ်ားနဲ႔လည္း တုိက္ခုိက္မႈေတြလည္းျဖစ္ပြားေနဆဲပါ။ ဒီတစ္ပတ္မွာေတာ့ မိတ္ဖက္မီဒီယာျဖစ္တဲ့ KIC ကရင္သတင္းဌာန နဲ႔ ဒုိ႔အသံတုိ႔ဟာ တုိက္ပြဲေတြေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္ေးရွာင္ေနရတဲ့ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္ေတြကုိ ေတြဆံုဖုိ႔အတြက္ စစ္ေဘးေရွာင္စခန္းကိုသြားေရာက္ခဲ့ၿပီး သူတုိ႔မွာရွိတဲ့ စိုးရိမ္ေၾကာင့္ၾကမႈေတြကို နားေထာင္ခဲဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီေဆာင္းပါးအျပည့္အစံုကို မနက္ျဖန္မွာထုတ္လႊင့္ေပးမွာျဖစ္လုိ႔ ဒုိ႔အသံ အစီအစဥ္ကို ေစာင့္ေမွ်ာ္နားဆင္ၾကဖုိ႔ ဖိတ္ေခၚလုိက္ပါတယ္ရွင္။ Although the Karen National Union signed the government’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement in October 2015, in recent years fighting has continued between the group and the Tatmadaw, as well as other smaller armed groups operating in Kayin State. This week, in partnership with the Karen Information Center, Doh Athan visits a camp to meet those who continue to be displaced by the conflict, and hears about some of the concerns they have.

On January 31, thousands of people in Kayin State gathered for the 70th Karen Revolution Day, which commemorates the start of the decades-long between the Karen National Union and the Myanmar Army, known as the Tatmadaw. This week, Doh Athan speaks to KNU leaders and the Karen people about what hopes they have for peace in their home state.

Along the Thai-Burma border, we meet the women peace activists working in the midst of the world’s longest running civil war. In the Karen language, Kawthoolei is the name of a mythical homeland in eastern Burma (Myanmar). The Karen people have been struggling for control of this land for nearly 60 years. This conflict between the Burmese military regime and the Karen National Union is now considered the world’s longest running civil war. There are numerous reports of ethnic cleansing, and hundreds of thousands of Burmese and ethnic refugees have flooded western Thailand, yet this conflict is often overlooked by the western media.