Karen National Defence Organisation

The Karen National Defence Organisation (Burmese: ကရင်အမျိုးသား ကာကွယ်ရေး အဖွဲ့အစည်း; KNDO) is one of two military branches of the Karen National Union (KNU), the other being the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). The original KNDO fought against the government of Myanmar from 1947 until 1949 as the armed wing of the KNU, until the KNLA was made the official armed wing.[3][1]

Karen National Defence Organisation
ကရင်အမျိုးသား ကာကွယ်ရေး အဖွဲ့အစည်း
Dates of operation	1947–present
Active regions	Kayah State Kayin State
Ideology	Karen nationalism Federalism[1]
Part of	Karen National Union
Allies	Karen National Liberation Army DKBA-5 Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (until 2010)[2]
Opponents	Myanmar Tatmadaw Union of Myanmar (until 2011) Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (until 1988) Union of Burma (until 1962)
Battles and wars	Internal conflict in Myanmar Karen conflict

The KNDO closely followed the peace process instigated by the government, starting with the call for a nationwide ceasefire by the Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) in 2011. On 11 October 2015, the KNDO released a statement on the recently signed Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement.[4]

References

1. Pike, John. "Karen National Union (KNU), Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO), Democratic Karen Burmese Army (DKBA)". GlobalSecurity.org. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
2. "Karen Armed Forces Statement on Reunification (ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ား ျပန္လည္ေပါင္းစည္းျခင္း သေဘာတူညီခ်က္)".
3. "Burma's War and ethnic cleansing of the Karen people".
4. "Karen National Defense Organization Statement on Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement".