Chris Sidoti – Australian Cardijn Institute

ACI and Young People for Development (YPD) Australia are partnering to present our April webinar entitled “Conflict in Karen State” with Zoya Phan, Chris Sidoti and Kwi Kwith on Tuesday 17 May at 7.00pm AEST.

With the world’s attention focused on the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine, little media attention has been paid to the situation of the Karen ethnic community in Myanmar, particularly since the February 2021 military coup.

The military seized control on 1 February 2021 after a general election which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide.

Since then, the Myanmar military have intensified military operations in regions of Karen State controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU) causing more than 150,000 people to flee their homes.

These people are in urgent need of food and other aid, a rights group has said, as fighting that has raged in the area for months becomes even more intense.

“You could say this is an emergency situation for the IDPs,” Naw Htoo Htoo, spokesperson for the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) told Myanmar News last week, using a term that stands for internally displaced people.

Our webinar will address the present situation and the challenge of building peace with justice in the South East Asian nation.

Speakers

Zoya Phan

Our keynote speaker will be Zoya Phan, author of “Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West,” which tells the story of her teen years fleeing the military as a displaced person in the Burmese jungle and later as a refugee on the Thai-Myanmar border.

Zoya currently works for the Burma Campaign UK. In this role, she has become one of Europe’s leading democracy activists for Burma. She also helped create the European Karen Network.

Following the assassination of her father, Padoh Mahn Sha Young, in 2008, she and other family members set up the Phan Foundation charity.

Chris Sidoti

A former national secretary of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, Chris Sidoti is an Australian expert on international human rights law, a lawyer and advocate.

He has served as Australian Human Rights Commissioner (1995-2000), Australian Law Reform Commissioner (1992-1995) and Foundation Director of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1987-1992). From 2003-07, he was director of the International Service for Human Rights, based in Geneva, Switzerland,

More recently, he was a commissioner on the UN Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar 2017-19 and is currently a member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. Chris is also an adjunct professor at the Australian Catholic University.

Kwi Kwith