"The 21st Century Panglong conference is a symbolic step toward peace and national reconciliation, but huge challenges remain....It?s been a long time since the guns of war were silent in Myanmar. Fighting erupted within months of independence in 1948, when the Communist Party of Burma launched an armed rebellion against the government. Since then, numerous armed groups have formed, allied and splintered, leading to one of the world?s most complex and long-running civil wars. The military coup in 1988 ushered in a period of respite. The following year, the head of Military Intelligence, Lieutenant-General Khin Nyunt, began negotiating a series of ceasefire agreements. In reality most were ?gentlemen?s agreements”; one of the only formal ceasefires was signed with the Kachin Independence Organisation in February 1994. Many of the groups that signed the agreements were allowed to keep their arms and maintain some form of territorial control. But the lack of a substantive political settlement left the process vulnerable to backsliding into conflict. The arrival of the Thein Sein-led government in 2011 marked a new and more ambitious phase, in which a multilateral ceasefire and political negotiations were introduced. Despite facing substantial obstacles, it has achieved some success, most notably the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement signed last October by eight ethnic armed groups. While its legitimacy has been brought into question by the refusal of most leading armed groups to sign, the NCA has been retained by the National League for Democracy government as the foundation of the peace process. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been a driving force behind the 21st Century Panglong Union Peace Conference, which opened in Nay Pyi Taw on August 31. She said in January that the peace process would be a major priority for her National League for Democracy government after it took office, and it would strive for an all-inclusive agreement. At the time of going to print, most ethnic armed groups involved in the process, including signatories and non-signatories of the NCA, were expected to attend the Panglong conference. This broad participation ? particularly the re-engagement of NCA non-signatories with the political dialogue process ? is likely to be the most substantive outcome of the conference, according to observers..."