NAYPYIDAW: Fresh fighting between ethnic minority rebels and Myanmar’s military is overshadowing an upcoming peace conference led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s new civilian government, people involved in the talks said on Tuesday.

The five-day gathering, which officially opens on Wednesday, is Suu Kyi’s first big drive to end multiple insurgencies that have raged in Myanmar’s borderlands since independence in 1948. Organisers have been pushing for a unilateral ceasefire before the UN-backed talks.

But those hopes have been shattered by renewed outbreaks of fighting, negotiators from both the rebels and the government.

Several rebel groups have failed to down their weapons — a precondition demanded by the military for them to attend — and troops remain locked in combat with ethnic fighters.

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon described the conference as “an important first step” toward peace at a press conference on the eve of the talks.

“The steps you have taken towards national reconciliation need to be further strengthened, broadened and consolidated,” he told reporters.

Representatives from the insurgents said the military had launched new attacks on rebel positions in the northern states of Shan and Kachin on Tuesday morning.

They warned the move threatened to scupper progress at the peace talks.

“For the moment it is hard for any group to believe or trust the army,” said one negotiator for the armed rebels, who asked not to be named as the talks are sensitive.

“Here (in the national capital Naypyidaw) they are talking about peace, there they are fighting,” the negotiator added.

Rebels from some of the worst-hit states want the military to declare a unilateral ceasefire and appoint an international figure to oversee its observance on the ground, the negotiator said.

Some 220,000 people are currently displaced by ongoing fighting in Kachin and Shan states and by sectarian tensions in the western state of Rakhine, according to UN figures released this week.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2016