Chin National Front’s (CNF) General Secretary No. 1, Pu Paul Smith, and CNF’s Military Affairs Colonel, Pu Solomon, attended the Asian Peace Conference in Siem Reap, Cambodia from August 8-9. The conference was organized by the Asian Centre for Peace and sponsored by the Australian government.
Aside from the CNF, other ceasefire groups from Burma attending the conference included the ABSDF, KNPP, and KNU. Also in attendance were government representatives from the Philippines, Somalia, Nepal, and Malaysia.
“We discussed our experience with the peace process during talks with relevant governments. We learned a lot from the two-day conference on how to advance the peace process in our respective areas,” Pu Paul Smith told Khonumthung.
Pu Paul Smith added that the conference was primarily designed to help ceasefire groups in Southeast Asia figure out how to advance the peace processes with their respective governments, and a plan was put forward to hold further discussions at a later date to assess how the peace process has developed since the conference.
The Chin National Front (CNF) held state-level peace talks with the Chin State government in 2012, after which the CNF attended two Union-level peace talks with central government officials for purposes of discussing self-determination, federalism, and democracy.
